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Last week, The Atlantic’s Francis X. Rocca penned a damning indictment of America’s Catholic bishops, although I doubt he intended it as such. “The most urgent political concern for America’s Catholic leaders is no longer abortion; it’s immigration,” Rocca wrote. Noting that immigration concerns are addressed in Catholic teaching, he added, “But now immigration dominates U.S. Catholic leaders’ public messaging.” How shameful. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade nearly four years ago, but the butchering of unborn children in their mother’s wombs continues anyway. According to the abortion industry’s official research center, the Guttmacher Institute, abortions increased across the U.S. between 2024 and 2025, remaining above the one million mark in both cases, while the number of abortions committed via the abortion drug mifepristone increased by 26 percent. In other words, while over one million unborn children are ripped apart with scalpel and forceps or starved and expelled via a drug regimen, and the U.S. bishops are focusing their attention almost exclusively on ensuring that illegal aliens are not arrested and deported. A U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) spokeswoman cited by Rocca stated that “human dignity and national security are not in conflict.” That’s true. Stringent immigration enforcement is in line with the perennial teachings of the Catholic Church and is, in fact, in accord with the virtue of justice. The arrest and detention of those who have violated the law (in this case, federal immigration law) is not a violation of human dignity, nor is returning foreigners who have abused U.S. hospitality and services to their home countries. In fact, it’s something of a merciful move. Shepherds ought to protect their flocks from wolves. Instead, we find them demanding that the wolves share our pastures. Had President Donald Trump and his administration determined to mobilize paramilitary death squads to systematically hunt down and execute those known or suspected to be in the country illegally, then the bishops might have a cause for vocal complaint. Had the administration decided to torture or waterboard detained aliens — for any reason — then the USCCB might not be accused of manufactured hysteria. And had the bishops devoted as much time and energy to combatting the continuing scourge of abortion and protecting the human dignity of the American people as they have to defending illegal aliens and their presence in the U.S., then cries of hypocrisy would fall flat. But they don’t. Sheridan Gorman, an 18-year-old Loyola University Chicago freshman hailed by friends and family as a devout Catholic, was murdered in cold blood last week by an illegal alien from Venezuela. Where is the outrage from the nation’s Catholic bishops? — who are always so quick to signal their virtue and condemn violence, even if all the facts have yet to be ascertained. A young woman, an American, and a Catholic has been slain, and her death can be traced directly to government policy. Yet there is no condemnation of former president Joe Biden (a self-identified Catholic) or his Homeland Security Secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas. No talk of how these two and their deputies violated human dignity and imperiled national security with their open-borders policies. So the slaughter of unborn children is second fiddle. The murder of Catholic college girls is just the price of doing business. The rape and murder of so many women at the hands of foreign invaders is — what? Acceptable? A merely political matter? Not profitable? But the suggestion that hordes of foreign insurgents should perhaps be returned to foreign parts is somehow in violation of human dignity, according to their excellencies. How shameful. Shepherds ought to protect their flocks from wolves. Instead, we find them demanding that the wolves share our pastures. READ MORE from S.A. McCarthy: Faith in the Dock The Emerald Revival: Catholicism Surges in Modern Ireland In Defense of Mass Deportations

Great stories run through Western literature from the start. One of its great and recurring topics is conflict, whether with other humans or internal spiritual conflict or both. Whether in the wars written of and in the Bible, or, to pick up the Greek and Roman strain, in such books as The Iliad and The Aeneid, such stories have brought us to face the nature of our own humanity and how to uplift it or fail to do so. A closer and more direct current feeding into our American heritage is the English narrative tradition, along with the nearby stream of Norse sagas, which intertwined with Anglo-Saxon culture over centuries of conflict, intermarriage, and shared storytelling. The powerful continuity of these various streams was brought to the fore in the post-World War II publishing of a fantasy trilogy written by an Oxford don whose specialty was Middle and Old English literature and the adjacent Norse narrative tradition. The Lord of the Rings captured an enthusiastic and quickly growing audience in the mid-Sixties and opened the door to successors, such as the Harry Potter series and Game of Thrones. Tolkien’s deep scholarship set him apart from other fantasy authors. He wrote seriously about the literary tradition in which he took an active part, and in his lecture/essay “On Fairy Stories,” he set out his critique of various storytellers in the past. What makes such stories good, wrote Tolkien, is something we recognize from our religious tradition. At its best, fantasy’s role is so serious because it has us rising to be who we humans are made to be by God. God did not make us only to be a recipient of His gifts, but to emulate God’s ways. It is our fundamental role granted by God by making us in His image, and so able, in a finite but powerfully real way to be ourselves a creator. In Tolkien’s words, “Fantasy remains a human right: we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made. And not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker.” A profoundly religious man, Tolkien does not presume that anything human will necessarily be good except in at the end of the great arc of salvific history. Humans can and often do misuse this right and infect their creative imaginings with their own unexamined failings. But, quoting the excellent Latin proverb abusus non tollit usum— the existence of abuse does not preclude the possibility and need for proper use — Tolkien refuses to conceive fantasy as being limited to imaginings that obscure or oppose truth. At its best, Tolkien believed, fantasy provides humanity redemptive engagement with the creation of which we are a part. One particular aspect of this is what he calls “recovery” — we lose the vision of the world as compelling and mysterious as we appropriate the world and transform it into things we imagine we fully own. This road leads to triteness and cliché, whose emptiness, in turn, leads on to filling the void with anything that can re-create that sense of thrill or magic that enables a child to find wonder in the most ordinary of things. What distinguishes between good and bad fantasy? Tolkien gives a positive hint: Fantasy is made out of the Primary World, but a good craftsman loves his material, and has a knowledge and feeling for clay, stone, and wood which only the art of making can give. “The Primary World” is the given reality, the world of God’s creation. Within that world, we are given the “human right” to create a secondary world through which the Godliness of who we are and the world we inhabit can be recovered, even after we may have emptied it of wonder by reducing it as to be merely an adjunct of our unordered wants. As Tolkien knew well and as he addressed in his art, the modern West had lost its sense of fantasy and identified it as something necessarily opposed to truth. In acting on this impulse, it wrought immense destruction, something Tolkien witnessed first-hand as a participant in the horrors of the First World War at its ugliest at the Battle of the Somme. Worse was the perversion of mythology and fantasy to fill the gap left by the expulsion of God with the nearest we may ever have come to hell on earth — Nazism. When “Nazism” has become a cliché, and everyone with whom we have a political disagreement is a Nazi, we must engage in a Tolkienesque recovery of the power it had for those sensitive to the mythic void at the heart of civilization. A man of such creative genius as T. S. Eliot befouled his writing with snide caricatures of Jews and the profound Ezra Pound was so besotted with Mussolini’s Fascism that he crossed the line into treason and embraced the Axis cause in radio broadcasts even after Pearl Harbor. A result of that recovery enables to see better what is going on with other people of proven talent and even sensitivity today. The problem is not that Carlson and others of his ilk embrace fantasy in order to lead their listeners towards what in their mind is a better world. It is that they have failed in emulating the Primary World within the Secondary World of their fantasies. They have thrown away the care of the craftsman who reveals wonders through his careful work with the reality of the given world of Creation. Instead, they feel their vision can only be sustained by an imagination unfettered from any accountability to anything outside itself. Thus, the utter disregard of evidence and facts that is rampant in their discourse. In a recent exercise in slipshod fabulism, Carlson tried to further his fantasy of Winston Churchill as the prime criminal behind World War II and adduced as evidence the “fact” that Churchill had imprisoned the elected leader of the Parliamentary Opposition, Sir Oswald Mosely, without a trial under terrible conditions for the entirety of World War II. By this, he hoped to break through cliches that have hindered us from truly understanding that war and all wars. What makes this fantasy of Carlson malignant and perverse, an abuse of this God-given power, is his disrespect for the truth of the Primary World in which we only have a subsidiary authority. By the time World War II had begun, Mosley was not even in Parliament, not alone head of the Opposition. His party was called the British Union of Fascists, sometimes with “and National Socialists” added on, and it never succeeded in all its years to elect even one member to Parliament. Mosley emulated Hitler in every way. When he married at the end of 1937, long after the Nuremberg Laws went into effect and Germany and its intention to achieve military predominance was headline news, Mosley went to Berlin and married in Hitler’s home, with the Fuehrer himself serving as witness. The real British Opposition party, by contrast, supported Churchill and closed ranks across party lines to establish a National Government which against all odds, successfully led the fight to defeat and destroy the Nazis. Mosley was indeed imprisoned in 1940, as a likely Nazi agent seeking to subvert Britain from within as Quisling had done in Norway. British law provides, as does the American Constitution, for the suspension of habeas corpus during times of emergency. And with France fallen and the British Army run off the Continent leaving thousands of prisoners and most of its materiel behind, it was as great an emergency as the country had faced in a thousand years. It was hardly a KGB operation. Mosley was afforded a hearing at which he spoke at length over the course of four days. At the end, the hearing’s record reports him to have said, “I would like to thank you for your very great patience, courtesy, and fairness, which I shall always remember.” When the tides of war had turned, and Mosley’s health had declined, Churchill deemed the emergency abated, and he was released to a kind of house arrest, a leniency that was roundly unpopular with the British public. Let’s embrace Tolkien’s kind of fantasy, with its vision that unites us with each other and with our God. That is an outline of the Primary World in this case, the real world and its history. It is that real world, the Primary World, that the best of fantasy honors and the worst ignores or misrepresents. A similar contempt for the Primary World, for evidence and for facts, infects the rest of Carlson’s fantasies as well as the less talented purveyors of noxious mythology on the Make-America -Hate-Again Right. Tolkien, a deeply committed Catholic all his life, had a sound moral intuition. To use religion and human creativity for hate was fundamental betrayal of God and the gift He gives humans. A story from the same time that Mosley was getting married in Hitler’s house breaks through the ancient and childish cliches of the haters who fancy themselves the redeemers of today’s Right. In 1938, a German publishing house sought the right to publish a translation of Tolkien’s first commercial success, The Hobbit. Its powerful Secondary World of fantasy, with its clear overtones of the Norse, English, and German storytelling traditions, seemed just right for the myth-drunk world of the Nazis. But the project went afoul when the publisher asked Tolkien to document that he had no Jewish lineage. Tolkien took offense. Among the two replies he drafted for his British publisher to send back to the Germans, he called the Nazi race theory “pernicious and unscientific” and since he could not claim Jewish ancestry, he had only regret that he was not descended from those he called “that gifted people.” Rather than go along with that racism, he wrote to his British publisher, he would rather “let a German translation go hang.” And that is what he did — no German Hobbit until after the war. For Tolkien, the true goal of fantasy, of the imagination, is to make real for us that to which all aspire. Tolkien coins a word for what this glimpse sees — eucatastrophe — which he defines as powerfully positive as a catastrophe is negative. In his own words, this is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief. Tolkien gets to the heart of the shared biblical message of God’s transcendent love spurring us to use the gifts He gave us to help create the vision of this deliverance here in this world, the redemption of this world from evil. Tolkien was no Talmudist and may never have heard of the rabbinic teaching that G-d created the human to be a co-creator. Obviously, we cannot create the heavens and earth from scratch. But with our words and actions, we can bring a glimpse of the eucatastrophe. The example the rabbis give is of someone reciting the prayer sanctifying the Sabbath, the day in which God brought His world through time to a day of completion and sanctity. By the act of a blessing invoking that recurring sanctity, in which the peace and bliss of the final redemption can be tasted each week, we rise to be co-creators — in the language of the Zohar, we are making one within One. We have been given the freedom to reject that evil will forever define what God has wrought. In doing so, our own choice makes redemption present already. Working within the divine mandate,  we can see with the rabbis in Bereshit Rabba that even our innate urge to sin is what God calls “very good” — He opens the way for us to transcend ourselves in our sanctified and sanctifying act. Deeply entwined with the truth of God’s creation and constant upholding of created Primary Reality of the world, our Secondary Reality realizes that goal that Tolkien sets for it: “the joy of deliverance… joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.” Let’s embrace Tolkien’s kind of fantasy, with its vision that unites us with each other and with our God. Let the peddlers of perverse fantasy go back to the woodshed. Living in freedom, we are not compelled to buy their cheap and harmful wares. Give them time to better their craft and realign their vision with something more worthy of their great talents and our time. READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin: Sacred Limits and Free Institutions Choose Life, Not Blame When Democracies Grow Up Too Late    

Data centers worldwide rely on affordable energy and community support to function, but all too often, sources of affordable energy also drive community opposition. The United States is home to 1,958 active data centers, with another 714 under construction and nearly 3,200 more in planning stages. National leader Virginia and second-place Texas are both planning to overdouble their data center square footage by 2030, whereas data center expansion in California has come to a near standstill. Across Europe, Germany leads the way with 529 data centers (4.4 percent of the global total), followed by the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands, and Italy. Overall, there are about 3,400 data centers across 45 European nations, but power constraints are forcing operators to look toward Nordic countries that are blessed with hydropower and naturally cold waters. European data center power demand is expected to grow from 96 terawatt-hours in 2024 to 168 TWh by 2030. As in the U.S., data center expansion adds stress to both electric generation capacity and cooling waters — along with other environmental concerns. This rapid growth has, however, led to localized opposition on both continents. In the U.S., $64 billion in data center projects were blocked or delayed by bipartisan local opposition in just the last 2 years. Republican opponents tend to focus on tax incentives and energy grid strain, while Democrats address environmental impacts and resource consumption. In Pennsylvania, while Governor Josh Shapiro was welcoming a $20 billion investment in data centers by Amazon, the advocacy group Lancaster Stands Up complained that data centers will cause “dirty electricity sources … to stay online” to meet increased power needs. In San Marcos, Texas, opponents blocked a $1.5 billion data center on the grounds that it would further stress already insufficient water sources. Local opposition is increasingly effective in Europe as well. Just last month, the city parliament of Groß-Gerau (just outside Frankfurt, Germany) stopped construction of a planned 174-MW, €2.5 billion project by Vantage Data Centers over fears of rising costs, diminished water and environmental resources, ugly aesthetics, and skepticism over job creation. Local opposition is also thwarting data center construction in Hanau and Maintal. As the Russia-Ukraine war drags on and Middle Eastern data centers are casualties of another war, data-hungry European customers today are looking north to the hydropower capital of the world and to Norway-based Viking Digital. Viking is building out a large-scale, neutral digital infrastructure platform in a massive effort to provide 1.8 gigawatts of electricity from clean hydropower and biomass to power data centers across the continent. The electricity is cheap enough to reduce normalized customer costs per GPU-hour by 20 percent from global benchmarks. The Viking facilities also employ advanced natural cooling using cold coastal/fjord waters, not local groundwater. Across the pond, President Trump has mandated that large data centers find their own energy sources. Those are two reasons why Viking’s facilities are welcomed in their communities as job and revenue providers in sync with the local environment. This local support, together with strong grid reliability and high-voltage infrastructure access, and robust fiber routing, enables Viking to support low-latency connectivity into key European hubs. Viking has been thinking — and acting — big, with four facilities in Norway, one in Finland, and plans for additional generation capacity across all three Nordic nations — all to support new hyperscale, AI, and cloud data centers and enable them to operate without draining local water and energy resources. Already, Viking Digital’s campus portfolio includes five sites totaling over a million square meters of land with a combined planned capacity exceeding 1.8 GW. First delivery from the planned 300 MW VDC1 campus is targeted by year-end 2027; it is supported by new 132-kilovolt infrastructure and uses naturally cold fjord water for cooling. The flagship VDC2, which will offer over 950 MW of electricity to customers, is anchored by direct access to a 420-kV transmission corridor, enabling phased hyperscale deployment. It is due to come online later this year. A third, industrial-grade coastal campus is starting small but plans to support 300 MW over the long term. Viking also has a construction-ready data-center-zoned site with an 80 MW application in place that can be upgraded to 100 MW. It has ongoing conduit installation for fiber and power, and is in immediate proximity to major grid infrastructure for accelerated delivery. Viking’s first campus outside Norway (in Finland) is fully zoned and development-ready, with 50 MW secured and a pathway to 200 MW from biomass (sawdust from pulp and paper operations) by early 2028. It, too, is supported by efficient natural cooling from adjacent coastal waters. Viking’s business model also envisions additional cold-water campuses using hydropower and naturally cold water that keep both economic and environmental costs low — major advantages in this emerging industry. Another major advantage is the proximity of Viking’s campuses to key submarine cable routes that link Norway to major hubs in the United Kingdom, Denmark, and continental Europe with low-latency, high-speed connectivity and minimal transmission loss. Viking’s founder and strategic lead, Tor Langøy, says, “What we are doing at Viking is revolutionary — Nordic countries becoming major exporters of tokens and data to Europe.” The timing is right, too, what with Iran blowing up data centers in the Middle East. “We are proud,” he added, “to be enablers of the true power of AI. We are in the business of making sure we are optimizing AI clusters.” Langøy cites Norway’s two-trillion-dollar sovereign wealth fund — built on revenues from its North Sea oil and gas profits — as an additional advantage for building data and AI supporting infrastructure in Nordic lands. These and other advantages, he believes, will make Viking Digital the most efficient player exporting tokens worldwide. While the location, location, location advantages are huge, Viking Digital’s real strength is embedded in its business model. Its integrated tech stack platform enables commercializing high-density accelerated computing as a managed capability rather than as a commodity infrastructure product. The integrated operating model positions Viking to deliver production-grade accelerated computing environments with institutional execution standards. Viking Digital embeds execution, procurement, integration, and operations expertise directly into its campuses to improve speed-to-service, utilization outcomes, and unit economics for enterprise, hyperscale, and sovereign/regulated customers. The level of sophistication is such that Viking can deliver hyper-local, highly secure AI compute environments needed for sensitive public-sector and regulated enterprise workloads. Heading up the company’s tech stack is Venkat Thummisi, former head of core infrastructure at OpenAI, where he led the buildout of large-scale, high-performance computing and data center infrastructure. Thummisi’s teams work to align design, procurement, deployment, and ongoing optimization under a single integrated delivery model to accelerate time-to-service and support consistent performance at scale. Langøy believes the combination of superior technology, affordable renewable energy, and cold-water cooling — plus quality personnel — makes Viking Digital a great choice for both investors and customers and a valuable partner for hyper scaling, micro scaling, AI, and cloud users. Across the pond, President Trump has mandated that large data centers find their own energy sources, driving large firms to consider both natural gas and nuclear energy. Hydro is not an option across much of the United States except in Alaska, which, like much of Canada, has an abundance of naturally cold water and hydropower potential. READ MORE from Duggan Flanakin: Can de Wever Wake Up Europe’s Sleeping Giant? Nigeria Is a Quiet Test of Trump’s ‘America First’ Foreign Policy The US Rediscovers a Valuable Trading Partner — Indonesia Duggan Flanakin is a senior policy analyst at the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow who writes on a wide variety of public policy issues.

In May 1948, immediately after Israel declared independence, Egypt, Iraq, Transjordan, Syria, and Lebanon attacked it from the north, east, and south. The Arab nations had a combined population of over 30 million; warplanes, tanks, armored personnel carriers, artillery, machine guns, and mortars; full supplies of ammunition, oil, and gasoline; the ability to obtain more arms as they desired from Britain and other nations; and local Arab allies already fighting the Jews. Israel had a Jewish population of 630,000-720,000; initially, only small arms, some mortars, and older artillery pieces, and limited supplies of everything. The only additional arms that it could acquire were some covertly obtained World War II surplus, principally from Czechoslovakia, because the United States, Britain, and most of the rest of the world had imposed an arms embargo against it and the local Arabs fighting it. Against these staggering odds, Israel somehow miraculously survived and prevailed against the array of attacking Arab armed forces. Since then, the tiny and initially impoverished nation — continually threatened with total destruction by vastly larger Arab nations, since 1979 by Iran, and more recently also by its Palestinian, Lebanese, and Yemeni terrorist allies — has made itself a regional military powerhouse that has repeatedly defeated its foes. It also has taken in millions of Jews from around the world, including those fleeing persecution by Arab nations and the Soviet Union and extreme poverty in Ethiopia; created legendary intelligence services, such as the Mossad; made itself a global leader in cutting-edge technology, science, medicine, water desalination, and agriculture (it famously “made the desert bloom”); and developed an economy with a per capita income that now rivals those of major Western European nations. A person who has less wealth will exert more effort to achieve the same gain than a person who has more wealth. How has Israel achieved all of this? Some have suggested cultural factors. Others have suggested divine assistance. And those with darker motives have asserted that international Jewish conspiracies manipulate the U.S. government and media, and many of their worldwide counterparts. Golda Meir, Israel’s prime minister in 1969-1974, offered an explanation that provides a key element of the answer: “We Jews have a secret weapon in our struggle with the Arabs — We have no place to go.” An unexpected source appears to provide the most comprehensive and analytical explanation, specifically the work of the late economist Julian Simon (my father), concerning why some exert more effort and advance faster than others. In his 1987 book, Effort, Opportunity, and Wealth, Simon set forth the following formula: Effort and resulting achievement increase (1) with the size of the potential gain, and (2) in inverse proportion to wealth. A person who has less wealth will exert more effort to achieve the same gain than a person who has more wealth, and a person will exert more effort if the potential gain is greater. “The data make especially clear that poorer people will expend more time and effort to increase their economic position than will rich people.” Studies concerning Russian, Indian, Irish, Israeli, and American families, for example, all show “more work by the parents and by individual children” in families with more children and thus less wealth per person. Simon’s subsequent book, The Economic Consequences of Immigration, provides more supporting evidence. While immigrants start out in this country with less wealth than native-born Americans, their children have a higher labor-force participation rate and a “higher propensity to start new businesses.” For many decades, indeed, poor immigrants and their children, particularly East Asian, Indian, and Jewish immigrants and their children, have moved up the economic ladder with dizzying speed. Israel is tiny; it is about the same size as New Jersey. In the early years after independence, Israel was very poor. Much of its population consisted of penniless refugees, Jews from displaced persons camps in Europe who had survived or escaped the Holocaust or persecution by Arab governments. It had a water shortage, no significant wealth-creating natural resources, and, other than agriculture, only a little light industry. Simon’s lower wealth factor, especially in Israel’s early decades of existence, would alone have encouraged outsized Israeli effort. Simon’s greater potential gain factor, however, has always impelled Israel to exert world-leading effort. On every day since Israel declared independence, Arab nations and, more recently, Iran have imperiled Israel’s continued existence. Iran has made it a national priority to literally wipe Israel off the map and kill its Jewish population. Hamas, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and other Palestinian terrorist groups similarly have made this their single highest priority. This continuous maximum-level danger has presented, and for the foreseeable future will continue to present, Israel with the greatest possible gain from unmatched effort: Survive and thrive or suffer national destruction and another Holocaust. In other words, the drive to survive and prevent its annihilation has produced Israel’s amazing effort, ingenuity, and achievements. David M. Simon is a lawyer in Chicago. For more, please see www.dmswritings.com. Image licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.

It appears that the Islamist terrorist group Boko Haram has resurfaced after a relatively quiet period. Last week, three simultaneous bomb blasts shook the northeastern Nigerian city of Maiduguri, killing 27 people and wounding 146 others. While no one claimed responsibility for the attacks, Nigerian authorities quickly attributed them to Boko Haram, unsurprisingly, since the terrorist group originated in Maiduguri. Maiduguri, significantly, has remained the epicenter of a nearly two-decade-long quest to promote the creation of a caliphate in the region. Making this threat all the greater is the affiliation of Boko Haram with an al Qaeda offspring, the Islamic State in West Africa (ISWAP), whose ambitions are explicitly anti-American. Amidst the daily drama of the Iran war, and an ongoing host of domestic conflicts and controversies here in the U.S., it’s been only too easy to lose sight of the continuing — indeed, expanding — crisis in Nigeria and other sub-Saharan states. However, the war against Islamist terrorism across the region is growing, and the U.S. is becoming more involved every day. (RELATED: The New York Times Keeps Getting It Wrong on Nigeria) During the last year, the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) has reported a steady increase in activity, including directed drone strikes, but also — and this is likely, but unconfirmed — through covert special operations activity in the region. All of this comes partly in response to increased terrorist activity, partly because various African nations have increasingly solicited our help, and most importantly, because the Trump administration eased restrictions on targeting, allowing greater flexibility in authorizing strikes when requested by our African partners. (RELATED: Protecting Nigeria’s Christians: Trump’s Strike Against ISIS) Early last year, for example, and at the request of the Somalian government, the U.S. carried out multiple drone strikes around Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia. These were aimed at the local leadership of al-Shabaab, the jihadist group that has terrorized large swaths of Somalia, Ethiopia, and Kenya for the last several years. This provoked a loud outcry from the leftists over at The Intercept, but it has been welcomed throughout the region. Most notably, last Christmas, the U.S. conducted a series of cruise missile strikes against Boko Haram and ISWAP bases in northern Nigeria. The effect has been difficult to measure, but three conclusions could be drawn. One, at least when it comes to Boko Haram and ISWAP, the Nigerian authorities have opened the door — albeit under pressure — to an increased level of U.S. activity, and in fact, have now decided that this is welcome. Second, these groups no longer operate with the sense of impunity that had grown up around their activities. (RELATED: Expert Raises Grave Fears of a ‘Christmas Massacre’ in Nigeria) Finally, the strike sent a signal to the crowd over at The Intercept and our other leftists that Trump meant business. No longer were we going to respond to Islamist terrorism in Africa by clutching our pearls and weeping in the manner of the Biden administration. Nor were we going to confine our African outreach to raining goodies on irresponsible NGOs, to pious pronouncements about climate change, or to the display of rainbow flags at our consulates. In places where the foremost barrier to human development and economic growth is the lack of security, we now seem ready, finally, to take the security problem seriously. Still, much remains to be done, and again, Nigeria illustrates the problem. I’ve written about this problem again and again, as has my American Spectator colleague Ellie Gardey Holmes. What we’ve said remains, sadly, all too true. Not only does Nigeria remain the worst place in the world right now to be a Christian, but our ability to stop the killing is severely limited by the unwillingness of the Nigerian government to address the most active threat. This, of course, is the ongoing war of marauding Fulani terrorists against Christian farmers in Nigeria’s “Middle Belt” region. “War,” in this context, is a misnomer, for the Christians have largely been deprived of any ability to defend themselves against the marauding Fulani gangs… “War,” in this context, is a misnomer, for the Christians have largely been deprived of any ability to defend themselves against the marauding Fulani gangs, who ride into unprotected Christian farming communities motorcycles and pickup trucks, brandishing AK-47s and RPGs, killing and raping very much at will, with Nigerian security forces, to the extent that they might be present, largely standing aside and allowing the horror to happen. Over the last year, some 3,500 of the reported 5,000 religiously-motivated murders of Christians worldwide have taken place in Nigeria, and, overwhelmingly, these have been perpetrated by the Fulani. Worse, several hundred thousand Christian farming families have been driven off their land and into IDPs, Internal Displaced Persons camps, which are also frequently targeted. I’ve written about this again and again, and nothing much has changed over time. Unlike Boko Haram, whose 2014 kidnapping and brutalization of 276 mostly Christian schoolgirls gained worldwide attention and universal condemnation, the Fulani campaign of ethnic cleansing — really, a slow-motion genocide — has been repeatedly either downplayed or “contextualized.” The Nigerian government, the international media, the Biden State Department, even the Vatican all came together around a narrative suggesting that this was a conflict over land use — herders versus farmers — exacerbated by the convenient excuse of “climate change.” This formulation still holds sway, in spite of the Trump administration’s increasing attention to the slaughter in Nigeria. The Christmas cruise missile attacks against Boko Haram and ISWAP targets in the northeast, far from the locus of Fulani attacks, came about because the Nigerian government acknowledges the threat these groups pose. It is at least somewhat willing to invite help in dealing with them, unlike the Fulani massacres of Christians. Boko Haram and ISWAP, after all, pose a direct threat to the authority of the Nigerian government, as well as the governments of neighboring countries. The Fulanis, by and large, accept the authority of the government, at least so long as it doesn’t interfere with their passion for killing their Christian neighbors. Since the Christmas cruise missile strikes, the Nigerian government has accepted a small number of U.S. military “advisors” to help with the threat from Boko Haram and ISWAP. Significantly, however, this assistance, just like the missile strikes, appears to be walled off from protecting those in greatest need, the Christian farmers of the Middle Belt. Still, this is progress, since it demonstrates at least some willingness by the Nigerian authorities to up their game. The U.S. presence also responds to an American strategic concern, since ISWAP has explicitly stated that it wishes to create a safe haven for anti-U.S. strikes, similar to the one al Qaeda once enjoyed in Afghanistan. But while these geo-strategic interests are increasingly served, this is playing the long game. Time, however, is not on the side of the persecuted Christian farming communities, where the dying continues on a daily basis. We’re finally, at long last, responding to the plight of the long-suffering people of Iran. But as the Iran war appears to be reaching a climactic moment, with ever-increasing air strikes and the prospect of troops taking control of the Strait of Hormuz, let’s not forget the Nigerian Christians. READ MORE from James H. McGee: Californicating Virginia: Democrats’ Misleading Appeal to ‘Fairness’ Memes Against America Violence in Mexico: When Cartels and Terrorists Converge James H. McGee retired in 2018 after nearly four decades as a nuclear security and counter-terrorism professional. Since retiring, he’s begun a second career as a thriller writer. His most recent novel, The Zebras from Minsk, was featured among National Review’s favorite books in 2025.  You can find The Zebras from Minsk (and its predecessor, Letter of Reprisal) on Amazon in Kindle and paperback editions.  

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Muslim state representative rails against federal immigration enforcement at anti-Trump rally in Columbus

“They don’t want this to work,” he said. “They want it to fail.” The post The Media “Cannot Have It That Trump and Bibi Are the Ones Defending the West” appeared first on Frontpage Mag.