Imagine if there had been no Declaration of Independence. We would still be living under a regime that functions like this.
After the success of the movie ‘Citizen Vigilante’ on social media, the Muslim Council of Britain has written to an arm of the British government demanding that action be taken against X for allowing the movie on its platform despite all the ‘Islamophobia’.
“The Muslim Council of Britain has written to Ofcom asking why it has failed to take regulatory action against X for posting the film “Citizen Vigilante.” The movie is replete with Islamophobic tropes and has fuelled a surge in hatred.”
During the 1988 Rushdie affair, the violent fury in Britain unleashed against a work of literature, the Satanic Verses, and its author was chiefly organized by extreme Islamist factions within British Muslim groups, which later formed the core of the Muslim Council of Britain.
No position held by MCB officials has proved too unreasonable for the media to balk at consulting them or instead seek a second opinion from the Muslim community: not when founding MCB secretary general Iqbal Sacranie said of Salman Rushdie that “Death is perhaps too easy for him”; not when eight Glasgow Mosques affiliated with the MCB issued a fatwa in 2001, accusing Scottish publisher and Qu’ran scholar Paigham Mustafa, on headed paper of its affiliate Glasgow Central Mosque, of “satanic thoughts” for questioning traditional Islamic practices such as stoning adulterers and apostates. The fatwa called on Muslims to “terminate these elements and to protect the youth from this temptation.”
The MCB’s influence even survived, in 2009, when the British government stopped engaging with the group after its deputy secretary general, Daud Abdullah, signed the Istanbul Declaration, which, a government minister declared, “supports violence against foreign forces – which could include British naval personnel” and advocates “attacks on Jewish communities all around the world.”
Most of the media did not flinch during the MCB’s six year boycott by the council of Holocaust Memorial Day; nor stop consulting with the MCB when the 2016 BBC Radio 4 documentary “The Deobandis” uncovered active links between leaders of MCB affiliated mosques in Edinburgh and Glasgow and the banned Sunni extremist group Sipah-e-Sahaba (SSP), which is linked to the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.
And there were no consequences for the MCB in 2015 when leaflets were found at one of its affiliates, Stockwell Green Mosque, which incited the murder of Ahmadi Muslims should they refuse to convert to Sunni Islam.
Clearly, Citizen Vigilante and ‘Islamophobia’ are the real problems here.
Shabir Ahmed cannot be removed to Pakistan despite being stripped of British citizenship, owing to a provision in the Immigration Act 1971 that shields Commonwealth arrivals from before 1973.
Residents in Rochdale, northwest England, have begun patrolling the town’s streets after the ringleader of one of Britain’s most notorious grooming gangs was released from prison.
Shabir Ahmed, 73, walked free on July 2 after serving 14 years of a 22-year sentence. He was convicted in 2012 of 30 child rape offences committed against girls as young as 12, who were plied with drink and drugs before being abused by him and eight associates.
Though stripped of his British citizenship after the conviction, Ahmed cannot be deported. A provision in the Immigration Act 1971 protects Commonwealth citizens who were resident in Britain before 1973, and Pakistan has refused to take him back.
Local campaigner Billy Howarth, of the group Parents Against Grooming UK, gathered a group of local men to form a rapid-response patrol, with police on standby. He said several of Ahmed’s victims were too frightened to leave their homes.
“He wasn’t just a child rapist – he is the devil incarnate,” Howarth said, demanding that Ahmed be kept in jail or removed from the country.
Ahmed has been placed in staffed accommodation and fitted with a GPS tag, at a reported cost to taxpayers of £120 (€140) a night. He is barred from Rochdale and neighbouring Oldham, banned from contacting any child and placed on the sex offenders register for life.
One victim, identified only as Ruby, said she feared for her family. “I’m scared for my safety and my kids’ safety,” she said.
The release has renewed calls to change the law. Paul Waugh, Labour MP for Rochdale, said Ahmed should have been deported years ago and criticised Pakistan for refusing to accept him.
Andy Burnham, the frontrunner to succeed Sir Keir Starmer as prime minister, urged ministers to review every option to remove Ahmed, saying nothing was off the table.
Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has pledged to amend the Immigration and Asylum Bill to close the loophole, while shadow home secretary Chris Philp said he would table a separate amendment.
Downing Street said it could not deport a man protected by the 1971 act, though it insisted Ahmed would face stringent conditions and immediate recall to prison if he breached them.
Howarth said the patrols would continue until residents felt safe.
The Government failed to close this gap, which is now being exploited to block his deportation.
However, it sees Pakistan’s refusal as a greater barrier to sending him back than amending the Act.
“There is probably a way of solving the problem over the 1971 Immigration Act. That is more solvable than the Pakistan side of the equation,” a Government source told The Telegraph.
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood is weighing up whether to scrap the section which protects Commonwealth citizens from deportation if they arrived before 1973 and have lived in Britain for over five years.
The Home Office is said to accept that Ahmed genuinely believes he abandoned his Pakistani citizenship.
However, officials maintain he never completed the “full proper process” required.
A Pakistani minister told The Telegraph: “There is discussion in the UK that the law may be changed to deport Shabir Ahmed but to where? He is not our national.
“He is nearly 75 years old. He was born in Pakistan but he has lived all his life in the UK after leaving Pakistan at the age of around 13. He has been in the UK for around 60 years.
“The UK should do whatever it can to him due to his criminality, which is unforgivable – but that’s for the UK to do. We have no stake in it.”
A Pakistani Government official said the country’s records confirm Ahmed renounced his citizenship decades ago.
“As far as Pakistan’s database and official records are concerned, Shabir Ahmed is not a Pakistani national,” the official said.
Britain has not yet provided evidence that the renunciation process was completed in the wrong way.
Chris Philp, the Shadow Home Secretary, said: “This is a disgrace. Britain must take a zero-tolerance approach to foreign criminals and illegal immigrants.
“Every foreign criminal should be deported, including this sick paedophile who is a danger to children in the UK.”
Pakistan has also declined to accept two other prominent members of the Rochdale grooming gang.
Both men have had their British citizenship stripped – but like Ahmed, they have also renounced their Pakistani nationality to try and stop being sent back to their country of birth.
A trans-identified male has been indicted for his role in an apparent child sex trafficking operation in Savannah, Georgia. Devonte Reaquwwan Milton, also known as Zariah McKenny, already had a history of child sex offenses and violent crime when he was arrested.
The case first came to the attention of authorities in September of 2025, when a HOPE Court liaison learned that a minor was believed to be engaging in commercial sex acts. The investigator said the 16-year-old had been advertised on a prostitution website under a false age.
Court records seen by Reduxx suggest that the child victim is a male who also identifies as transgender.
Under Georgia law, anyone under 18 engaging in commercial sex acts is considered a victim of human trafficking. Georgia Code § 16-5-46 classifies the acts as trafficking a person for labor or sexual servitude.
Devonte Reaquwwan Milton
During the investigation, authorities obtained a search warrant for a TextNow app account which revealed approximately 15,000 text messages sent over a two-month period. The texts were primarily related to arranging the child to be sexually abused by clientele, including pricing and locations.
While details on the case are limited at this stage, Milton is believed to have facilitated the trafficking of the child directly. He was originally arrested in March on charges of contributing to the delinquency of a minor after it was learned he had given the victim alcohol, but the Chatham County Sheriff’s Office later upgraded the charges to trafficking a person for sexual servitude and influencing witnesses. According to the indictment seen by Reduxx, Milton contacted the victim in late March in an attempt to deter the minor from testifying against him.
Milton has a lengthy criminal history, including for aggravated assault, cruelty to children, and robbery by intimidation. He is also a registered sex offender, having been convicted of child sexual exploitation and child pornography in 2021. According to the Georgia Department of Corrections, he was supposed to serve 20 years in prison for his child sex offenses but was released after just three months with credit for time served. He was ordered to spend the rest on probation, which wasn’t set to expire until 2041. As a result, he has also been charged with three counts of violating his probation.
According to the Chatham County Sheriff’s Office, Milton is being held in protective custody on the female side of the Chatham County Jail while the case goes through the court system. He is listed as a “male” in the Georgia Department of Corrections database, but some media outlets, such as the Savannah Morning News, referred to him as a “woman” in their reporting of the case.
In addition to Milton, three prospective ‘clients’ – Michael Holsey, Kevin Joyner, and Antonio White – were also arrested in the course of the investigation, all of whom met the minor victim through arrangements for sexual services made on TextNow. All three claimed they believed the victim was of age. A fourth man who was detained in connection to the case, James Sinclair, has since bonded out.
Milton is the second known transgender child sex trafficker in the state of Georgia. The other, Christopher Thomas Lynch, is currently serving a 14-year sentence for trafficking multiple minors.
A drag queen incarcerated for his role in a child sex trafficking ring was given a platform in @thisisinsider to complain about his sentence in a male prison.
Christina Alicia Lynch plied vulnerable teenage boys with cocaine for "sexual servitude."https://t.co/BU0L1W7N2x
Among the charges was an indictment for knowingly harboring a child for the purposes of sexual servitude. He was ultimately convicted on two counts of sexual exploitation of a child, pandering by compulsion, possession of drug-related items, and one count of pimping a minor – which was reduced from human trafficking during a plea deal. He was released on parole in 2018, but quickly rearrested after violating his conditions.
Lynch and his boyfriend, Steven Lemery, had run an exploitation ring in which they used social media to lure gay and transgender teenage boys for the purposes of forcing them into the sex trade. Lemery, who was a go-go dancer at a gay club, was in a polyamorous relationship with Lynch, as well as a woman and her boyfriend. There were multiple small children residing in the home where the abuses took place.
While in prison, Lynch became a vocal trans activist and even had an article published in Insider in which he lamented the conditions for “trans women” in prison.
On June 29, outgoing U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer declared that the British House of Commons is “the gayest Parliament … in the world.”
Starmer, who resigned on June 22, hosted an LGBT event for “pride” month at 10 Downing Street. He was introduced by lesbian Labour MP Olivia Bailey, who joked that her hairstyle was inspired by Starmer’s and introduced him as a “lesbian style icon.”
Starmer, beaming, responded to that introduction with great pleasure. “Lesbian style icon, I like that,” the prime minister said. (To imagine any of his esteemed predecessors uttering such a line stretches the mind to breaking point.)
“I’m really proud that we’ve got the gayest Parliament,” he declared. “I don’t think, just of all time, anywhere in the world, I don’t think there’s any Parliament that is gayer than this Parliament. That is fantastic.” He did not explain why, precisely, having the world’s “gayest Parliament” was “fantastic,” although perhaps that is a small blessing.
Keir Starmer says he is "really proud" Britain has "the gayest Parliament in the world."
The U.K. Parliament has 76 members who identify as LGBT, with 62 MPs from Starmer’s Labour Party, four from the Tories, one from the Green Party, and eight from the Liberal Democrats. Starmer emphasized during his speech that the Labour government will function as the political arm of the LGBT movement in every respect possible.
“I want to be clear that all lesbians, all gay, all bi and trans people – that this government will defend your rights,” he stated. “We have to stand against the politics of division.” He highlighted his “full trans-inclusive ban on abusive conversion practices” that outlaw “a very sinister idea … trying to suggest that identities aren’t legitimate.”
Ironically, Starmer’s “conversion therapy ban” is an extraordinarily totalitarian piece of legislation that defines “abusive conversion practices” as including “controlling or coercive words or behavior” and “psychological or emotional pressure,” which critics warn could make it illegal for parents to affirm their child’s biological sex and criminalize body-affirming therapy for people who struggle with gender dysphoria.
Additionally, the bill could also criminalize pastoral conversations and prayer, as well as exploratory therapy for those who are struggling. Starmer’s divisive bill comes with teeth – up to five years in jail or massive fines, which would immediately trigger a chilling effect on freedom of speech even with regard to personal, private conversations. Even some homosexual critics have stated that the bill appears to be a move to entrench sex change “treatments” as the only response to gender dysphoria.
The ban seems to be an attempt to shore up waning LGBT support for the Labour Party; activists have been livid that the government made permanent the Tory ban on puberty blockers and affirmed the NHS Cass Report. Starmer also announced £21 million ($28 million) in funding to push the LGBT agenda on the international stage, even appointing a U.K. special envoy for that purpose. Ironically, Starmer used the speech to claim – hilariously – that previous prime ministers had damaged Great Britain’s reputation by lagging in enthusiasm for the LGBT agenda.
Starmer is leaving office with rock-bottom approval ratings, having made a mess of virtually every file he touched. But despite all of that, he at least takes comfort from being a “lesbian style icon” and briefly presiding over the world’s “gayest Parliament.” I can’t imagine why Labour does so badly with male voters.
Far-left Antifa radicals descended upon the annual conference of the anti-mass migration Alternative for Germany in Erfurt on Saturday, clashing with police and journalists.
While AfD delegates gathered at the Erfurt Exhibition Centre in the central German state of Thuringia to select party leadership, an estimated 20,000 leftist protesters demonstrated outside of the event, police toldDie Welt.
Leftists, among them black bloc-clad Antifa radicals, staged blockades of the roads leading to the conference, including the A71 motorway near Gottstedt, which they brought to a standstill with a sit-in protest.
Agitators were also seen attacking police, including with fireworks as makeshift missiles, while demonstrators shouted: “Police are murderers and fascists” “Hey, put that camera away.”
Journalists were also targeted during the chaotic scenes, with protesters frequently warning photographers to “put that camera away!”
According to the editor-in-chief of the right-wing online platform Apollo News, Max Mannhart, three of his reporters were “hunted down and beaten up” by Antifa militants. Mannhart published video footage purporting to capture the alleged attacks, and police have confirmed that an incident occurred, but did not confirm any further details.
The protests also drew left-wing politicians, including the government’s Environment Minister, Carsten Schneider of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). The Erfurt native said, “This is a topic that threatens all of Germany. And that’s why it’s good that we stand together here today.”
Meanwhile, Luke Hoß, an MP for the Left Party (Die Linke), the descendant party of the former communist governing party of East Germany, said that the demonstrations were a “huge success” as they had shown that the left “can put a stop to a fascist party.”
AfD leader Alice Weidel, who was re-elected as the party’s co-chair during the meeting on Saturday, said of the protests: “You won’t break us! On the contrary, we will only grow stronger and bigger!”
Weidel claimed that under her leadership, the party has grown from 50,000 paid members at the end of 2024 to 75,000 today. She said that she expects this number to continue to grow and that 100,000 paid members would soon be a reality.
“We are the new people’s party in Germany,” Weidel said in reference to the national polls, which have for months put the AfD as the undisputed largest party in the country at around 29 per cent.
“The AfD is ready to take responsibility because we, because the Germans, because Germany deserves to be well governed.”
In contrast, she said that the supposedly centre-right Christian Democratic Union party of Chancellor Merz was “pursuing policies against the German people, against Germany, against the interests of our country.” While coalition partner Social Democrats previously stood as a “once so proud workers’ party,” they are quicily “disappearing without a trace from German party history” given their betrayals of the working-class, Weidel remarked.
Last night, it came to light that the asylum seekers were given their new lodgings – while even more veterans waited for social housing.
A total of 131 veterans are on Shropshire Council’s social housing register, the Mail revealed.
Seven made homelessness applications to the authority.
The Lib Dem-run council says it is “committed to ensuring veterans and their families are treated fairly” – and explicitly blamed the Home Office and Serco.
“It was the decision of the Home Office – with their partners Serco – to place asylum seekers at Dutton Close, Stoke Heath, not Shropshire Council’s,” it said.
A spokesman insited that officers and cabinet members alike have “strongly opposed” putting up illegal migrants in Stoke Heath, and confirmed they have written to the Home Office to raise concerns while considering further action.
Veterans, Reform UK and the Tories have all piled into the Home Office after the fresh scandal was brought to light.
Former Royal Engineer Stu Mendelson told the Mail: “The debate over Stoke Heath shouldn’t overshadow the veterans already waiting for housing in Shropshire. Armed Forces Day has just passed.
“Now is the time to ask whether we’re doing enough for those who’ve already served.”
Zia Yusuf, Reform UK’s home affairs spokesman, branded it a “national disgrace” how veterans who risked their lives for their country “have been bumped to the back of the queue for housing in favour of asylum seekers”.
And Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp added: “This disgraceful decision is a slap in the face to veterans who served our country and defended our freedoms, yet are pushed aside for illegal immigrants who have no right to even be here.
“Keir Starmer has presided over record small boat crossings and an asylum accommodation bill that keeps climbing.
“Labour do not have the backbone to tackle this issue.”
Locals had led the charge against the homes before the council and local Tory MP Mark Pritchard tabled their fears to the Government.
One, Samantha Waters, said: “I’m absolutely terrified to be absolutely honest.
“I’m scared for myself and the other people on the estate and the children and I feel that we’re going to become prisoners in our own homes.”
Another resident said it was “bang out of order” how migrants were being moved into brand-new, six-figure homes.
“It doesn’t feel fair that these people will be living in shiny new homes free of charge, which hardworking local folk could never afford,” they said.
The migrants who had already been moved in were later relocated, Mr Pritchard confirmed to GB News.
But writing for Britain’s News Channel, he said he feared the Government “would have continued to place asylum seekers into Stoke Heath in the hope nobody would notice” had he not raised the issue in the Commons.
The Home Office now says it has introduced “robust processes” to ensure new-build sites like Stoke Heath can “never be considered again”.
A spokesman said: “New homes should never house asylum seekers.
“The Home Secretary has directly intervened to stop migrants being moved into the Stoke Heath development and no asylum seekers remain on site.
“Earlier this year, the Home Secretary introduced robust processes to ensure new-build sites can never be considered again.”
It is understood the Shropshire development pre-dates new processes introduced by the Home Secretary which guide against housing asylum seekers in new-build properties that could increase “social tensions”.
Slave market in Constantinople. Unknown artist, 19th-century lithograph, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
On June 16, Rupert Lowe’s Rape Gang Inquiry was released. The grotesque details of this 219-page report can only be read in sections. The systematic trafficking of British girls by Muslim slavers who often called them slurs like “kuffar”—infidels—as they were gang-raped and subjected to tortures better left undescribed and the decades-long cover-up are rage-inducing. Right-wing figures from Geert Wilders to Tommy Robinson have highlighted the context for these crimes—the historical hostility of Islam to the Christian West. This vile enmity can be found on almost every page.
“Evidence in grooming gang trials has repeatedly shown…victims [some as young as 11] described as ‘white slags,’ ‘white trash,’ ‘kuffar b**ches,’” the report notes on page 140:
Perpetrators shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ and boasted of racial supremacy. Yet as far as available public records are concerned, racial aggravations have never once been invoked against anti-white rape gangs, either by prosecutors or judges. This is in stark contrast to what tends to happen whenever white criminals are held to account for interracial crimes.
The grooming gang horror may seem like a uniquely modern phenomenon, the screaming bastard child of mass migration and Western self-loathing. It is more than that. It is a continuation in the grim story of the Muslim slave trade of Europeans in general and Christians in particular, a subject that is rarely mentioned in the ongoing self-flagellation about the centuries-old crimes of the Middle Passage, which were banned by the British over two centuries ago by Christian abolitionists. Slavery lasted well into the 20th century in the Muslim world; Mauritania only banned it in 1981.
The Ottomans kidnapped over a million Christian boys from their homes, forcibly converted them to Islam, and trained them as elite shock troops (‘janissaries’) to fight the empire’s battles under the official policy of the ‘Devshirme System,’ or blood tax. This was part of the broader dhimmi system, which relegated non-Muslims like Christians and Jews to second-class subjects. Muslim boys could not be enslaved under Islamic law, so about 20% of Christian boys were seized instead.
Some Christian parents tried to hide their boys in the forests or mountains to prevent the kidnappings; the forced conversion of their children to Islam gave rise to trauma-driven folklore about ‘taken boys.’ Most never saw their sons again. This lasted for over three centuries. At the same time, as historian Leslie Peirce noted in The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (Oxford University Press, 1993), Christian girls were seized from their communities to serve as domestic slaves or concubines.
Ottoman armies and Muslim pirates also kidnapped hundreds of thousands of Christian women and girls from across Europe, selling them in slave markets across the Islamic world. The most beautiful girls were often forced into sex slavery for high-ranking Ottoman officials or imprisoned in the Sultan’s harem; forced conversion to Islam was also routine. In his seminal work Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500–1800, Robert C. Davies estimates that about 1.2 million Europeans were enslaved by Muslims; between a third and a half of those were women.
One of the most chilling accounts of the trafficking in European slaves is Giles Milton’s White Gold, which I highly recommend. He details the auctions of Christian slaves in Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, in which “thousands of captives were put through their paces before being sold to the highest bidder. These wretched men, women, and children came from right across Europe—from as far afield as Iceland and Greece, Sweden and Spain. Many had been seized at sea by the infamous Barbary corsairs. Many more had been snatched from their homes in surprise raids.”
The historical echoes in Lowe’s Rape Gang Inquiry are unavoidably clear. Page 155:
The gangs operated under an honour- and shame-based clan code that treated non-Muslims, especially white working-class girls, as property available for sexual use. They transported victims between towns, shared them among brothers and friends, forced conversions to Islam followed by unregistered religious marriages, and justified the abuse by describing the girls as ‘easy meat,’ ‘white trash; or morally inferior.
The pirates don’t raid European towns now; they live there. Their crimes were covered up for decades by a system filled with people who thought that being called racist or ‘Islamophobic’ was worse than what was happening to thousands of European girls. The press argued strenuously against citing the religion of the ‘Asian’ grooming gangs. As Lowe’s report notes, Dr. Taj Harbey, an imam with the Oxford Islamic Congregation, believes the proportion of gang members who are Muslim to be around 95%. Many felt that the doctrines of Islam condoned their actions. Considering the history of Islamic slavers and European slaves, this should be no surprise.
Another anecdote to highlight this point. In 2016, I attended a speech by Amanda Lindhout at Toronto’s Roy Thomson Hall. Lindhout was kidnapped with her boyfriend in Somalia in 2008 and spent 460 days in captivity by Islamists being raped, starved, tortured, and hogtied. She escaped once, fled to a local mosque, and begged the hundreds of men inside for help; they watched passively as she was dragged out by her ankles. Her captors had said that their sexual abuse of her was sanctioned by Islamic law, as the Qu’ran permitted Muslim men to use “those whom your right hand possesses” as they saw fit.
When she was ransomed and returned to Canada, Lindhout visited two Calgary mosques to ask if that interpretation was correct. “At both mosques, they told me that what had happened to me was unfortunate, but that it was in fact permissible under Islamic law,” she said. The Toronto audience was stunned into total silence. There was no coverage of her comments in the press, despite the fact that Lindhout’s story attracted major attention and her memoir A House in the Sky was a bestseller.
In Europe, a new chapter has been written in the grim history of Islamist abuse of European women—and the story of Europe’s historical enmity with Islam. The establishment has done everything to pretend that this story is not unfolding, despite riots, no-go zones, infidel-free ghettos, and growing civil unrest. Rupert Lowe’s Rape Gang Inquiry has blown that story wide open, and it can no longer be ignored.
As Giorgia Meloni faces a reelection battle in 2027, the centrist opposition is no longer the biggest threat to her political dominance. The danger comes from the nationalist right in the form of General Roberto Vannacci, claims the pro-EU outlet Euractiv.
The paper acknowledges that Meloni campaigned on right-wing values, but once she was in power, she was forced to take a more centrist approach internationally due to economic interests. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen already threatened right before she came to power that the EU had “tools” to make sure Italy took the course that Brussels desired.
Apparently, this threat worked to a large degree, with Meloni mostly toeing the line. However, “that balancing act has created an opening for critics who argue she has compromised too much,” writes Euractiv.
As Meloni seeks to defend her track record, Vannacci argues that she no longer represents Italy’s nationalist right. In an interview with Euractiv, Vannacci portrayed his movement as one of the last uncompromising defenders of national sovereignty.
“We are the only ones who still defend sovereignty without hesitation,” he stated.
Vannacci served in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he led the elite Folgore Parachute Brigade. In 2020, he retired from combat duty and then worked as the defense attaché at the Italian embassy in Moscow. Vannacci is vehemently opposed to the EU, skeptical of military support for Ukraine and openly criticizes what he calls “normalization” among European conservative parties.
Vannacci was previously a member of the League party and a European Parliament representative, but broke away from Matteo Salvini’s party and formed a new movement.
Vannacci presents himself as one of Europe’s last “credible” right-wing politicians and attacks parties that he considers mainstream conservative parties across Europe. Among that list, he includes Meloni and Jordan Bardella, president of the French National Rally. He describes them as the “watered down right-wing.” Notably, besides Meloni, the National Rally has come under fire for its sharp criticism of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the German party’s promotion of remigration.
“The normalization process pushed by the National Rally in France won’t work,” Vannacci said. “I still hope they will win the next French elections, but I have my doubts. Right-wing forces must remain true to their identity, not dilute themselves.”
As for remigration, Vannacci fully backs the concept, which he says has a deeper meaning than mere deportations.
“Remigration is not only about returns,” he told Euractiv. “It is about the right of native peoples to defend their civilization and their culture against exogenous groups.”
“We want Italians to live in Italy, just as we want every country to remain the home of its native people,” he said.
The Futuro Nazionale movement, which he recently launched, currently enjoys over 5 percent support in opinion polls, ahead of the populist League party. The party is inching towards the centrist Forza Italia party in the polling.
This flanking action from the right-wing has become a growing problem for Meloni as elections approach. The Italian MEP has suggested that the future of the prime minister will eventually depend on his political movement.
“Meloni will need Italians who want real change,” he said. “Today we represent this.”
However, when asked if he would join a coalition with Meloni, he said he had “never spoken about pacts.”
After leaving the League party, Vannacci — then a member of the Patriots for Europe — transferred in February to the European Sovereign Nations (ESN) faction at the EU level, a group of right-wing parties that includes the AfD.
This Fourth of July, Americans rightly celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence—the document drafted in Philadelphia, then debated, amended, and approved in the Pennsylvania State House, the building posterity would know as Independence Hall.
We remember Jefferson’s timeless words, which still echo today. We remember the delegates pledging to one another their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. We remember the parchment that proclaimed a new nation and announced to the world the principles upon which it would stand.
But while one declaration was taking shape in Philadelphia, another was issued less than a hundred miles away in New York.
It came not from Congress, but from the commander in chief of the Continental Army. It was not written to justify independence before the nations of the world, but to prepare ordinary men to fight—and perhaps die—for a country that had scarcely begun to exist and for the principle upon which the American experiment would rest: liberty.
On July 2, 1776, Congress adopted Richard Henry Lee’s resolution declaring that the united colonies “are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.” Over the next two days, the delegates turned their attention to the document explaining that momentous decision, revising Jefferson’s carefully wrought prose—much to the chagrin of the young Virginian—before formally adopting the Declaration of Independence on July 4.
And yet, that same July 2, British forces were arriving in New York and coming ashore on Staten Island. A vast armada was gathering in the harbor. British regulars—soon to be joined by thousands of German auxiliaries—were assembling for a campaign intended to crush the rebellion and seize the city whose waterways offered command of the Hudson River and access to the interior of the continent.
General George Washington stood between the combined military might of the British Empire and the American cause.
He could not yet have known that Congress had voted for independence that day. Official word and a copy of the Declaration would reach him later, and on July 9 he would order the document read aloud before his assembled troops. Yet his general orders of July 2 seemed almost to answer the vote in Philadelphia before news of it arrived.
Congress had declared what America was to be.
Washington declared what its survival would require.
His orders began in the ordinary language of military administration. General Mifflin was directed to hasten the construction of the defensive works near Kingsbridge. Militia detachments were shifted among commands. Sentries were instructed not to interfere with country people bringing goods to market, but to remain vigilant against soldiers deserting the army.
Then the voice of command rose to meet the magnitude of the hour:
The time is now near at hand which must probably determine, whether Americans are to be, Freemen, or Slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their Houses, and Farms, are to be pillaged and destroyed, and they consigned to a State of Wretchedness from which no human efforts will probably deliver them.
The fate of unborn Millions will now depend, under God, on the Courage and Conduct of this army—Our cruel and unrelenting Enemy leaves us no choice but a brave resistance, or the most abject submission; this is all we can expect—We have therefore to resolve to conquer or die: Our own Country’s Honor, all call upon us for a vigorous and manly exertion, and if we now shamefully fail, we shall become infamous to the whole world.
Let us therefore rely upon the goodness of the Cause, and the aid of the supreme Being, in whose hands Victory is, to animate and encourage us to great and noble Actions—The Eyes of all our Countrymen are now upon us, and we shall have their blessings, and praises, if happily we are the instruments of saving them from the Tyranny meditated against them.
Let us therefore animate and encourage each other, and shew the whole world, that a Freeman contending for LIBERTY on his own ground is superior to any slavish mercenary on earth.
These were hardly ceremonial words delivered after victory. They were issued on the eve of a campaign in which victory would prove painfully elusive and Washington’s army would endure its darkest hour yet.
Nor did Washington allow this exalted language to become a substitute for the rigor of military discipline. Immediately after invoking unborn millions, the aid of the Supreme Being, and the eyes of his fellow citizens, he returned to the practical requirements of battle.
He urged his officers to remain cool when action came and expected the men beneath them to obey orders and hold firm. Courage would not go unnoticed, he promised, but neither would misconduct or neglect of duty. No one was to wander beyond the sound of the drums without written leave. Before dawn, the whole army was to be at its alarm posts with weapons and equipment ready.
Later that evening, Washington issued one final order. The soldiers were to sleep beside their weapons and be ready to turn out without warning.
The contrast within the orders is telling. Washington had appealed to liberty, posterity, and Providence, but he knew that lofty words would be of little use if the army failed at the ordinary duties of soldiering. The men would need to follow orders, remain near their posts, protect their ammunition, and answer the drums when they sounded. Congress could declare independence in Philadelphia. In New York, Washington’s soldiers would have to keep the army alive long enough to make that declaration real.
The alarm soon came.
In August, the Continental Army suffered a crushing defeat on Long Island. Only a daring nighttime evacuation across the East River saved much of the army from capture or destruction. The British then forced Washington from Manhattan, defeated him at White Plains, captured Fort Washington, and drove his dwindling army across New Jersey. By December, the cause that had seemed so radiant in Philadelphia appeared close to extinction.
In December, Thomas Paine published the first installment of The American Crisis, shortly before Washington crossed the Delaware and attacked Trenton. It began: “These are the times that try men’s souls.”
But Washington had recognized the crisis months before Paine gave it words.
On July 2, while Congress declared independence, Washington warned his soldiers that independence might yet perish. He knew the army before him was inexperienced, imperfectly supplied, and about to confront one of the most formidable military powers in the world. He knew that the months ahead would bring test after test—not merely of the army’s ability to win, but of its ability to endure, remain intact, and fight another day.
Washington was not a literary craftsman in the manner of Jefferson, who could turn political philosophy into imperishable prose, or Adams, whose arguments surged with intellect and ardor. His characteristic language was more restrained—practical, deliberate, governed by duty, and informed by a sure instinct for what the moment required.
That makes the sudden grandeur of this order all the more striking.
Here was the judgment of a commander looking across New York Harbor at the assembled power of the British Empire. Washington understood that the army’s conduct would reach beyond the coming battle, beyond the men then living, and beyond the generation that had chosen independence.
All Americans born since that day—and all yet to come—are counted among those unborn millions.
The freedoms Americans celebrate 250 years later were once entrusted to this untested army awaiting an overwhelming enemy. Those freedoms depended upon men who did not know that Washington would someday become the father of his country, that the retreat through New Jersey would lead to Trenton, or that defeat and privation would ultimately give way to victory at Yorktown. They knew only that the alarm might sound at any hour and that they had been ordered to stand ready.
We rightly return each Independence Day to the parchment created in Philadelphia. It tells us why Americans were entitled to be free—because their Creator endowed them with the rights of a free people.
But Washington’s general order deserves a place beside it in our national memory, for it tells us what preserving that freedom would demand—and may always demand—from those entrusted with its care.
One document proclaimed a nation.
The other summoned Americans to preserve it.
Two hundred and fifty years later, the republic—and the freedom of untold millions of its citizens—still depend upon both.
