Following his arrest in France, Telegram founder Pavel Durov has just been charged with 12 criminal counts. The charges include six counts of “complicity” and “providing cryptology services aiming…

In an update to a story we reported on last week, California has just passed bill AB 1840, also known as the “California Dream for All” program. And, in this case, “All” means ILLEGAL ALIENS.…

Yes they do censor us: For many years now conservatives and Christians have been claiming that there is indeed a very real leftist cancel culture out there; there is very real censorship taking place;…

Substances specifically designed to alter brain chemistry.

I’ve got an entire chapter in my book Racism, Revenge and Ruin: It’s All Obama that asks whether Donald Trump was ever really president during what officially was his first term. We had some debate during the production of the book between the publisher, the editor, and me over whether it was a good idea to offer up that topic as part of the book’s argument. It seems like that argument is over, and the answer is “no.” This isn’t intended as an insult to Trump, please understand. Quite the contrary. Within the boundaries of what he was capable of doing, he was a very successful president. (READ MORE: The Democrat Party is a Cult) But those boundaries were tighter than in any presidency of modern times. We have to accept that now. Now It’s Clear That Trump Was Undermined And what ended the argument was something, ironically enough, that Mark Zuckerberg said. The big headline coming out of Zuckerberg’s letter to the House Judiciary Committee was the Biden administration’s pressure on Facebook to suppress content, mostly involving what was considered “misinformation” about COVID-19 treatments, masks, and vaccines. But what flew in under the radar was that he also reaffirmed that the FBI pressured Facebook and other platforms owned by parent company Meta to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story. Let’s remember that polling following the 2020 election showed that some number near 10 percent of the votes Joe Biden garnered in that election would not have been available to him had the laptop story been given its due amount of oxygen. The Hunter Biden laptop reporting paints a clear picture of a corrupt political family trading influence to unsavory foreign actors in contravention of U.S. interests. Furthermore, the laptop was a confirmation of what those of us who were paying attention knew; namely, that one of the Biden family’s corrupt influence-peddling clients was a gang of Ukrainian corruptocrats who exchanged a board seat on a mobbed-up natural gas company to the former vice president’s son for a mountain of foreign-aid swag and some well-placed favors. Like, for example, when a state prosecutor in Ukraine looked into the goings-on at that mobbed-up natural gas company, they asked Biden to get him fired, and voila: In a sane country, the laptop would have blown open the rancid corruption of the Biden crime family and made him utterly unelectable — and the Democrats in Congress who had impeached Trump for having attempted to spur cooperation to get to the bottom of it would have been on the defensive for their votes, at least in swing districts. But this is no longer a sane country. Trump was supposed to be the president in 2020, and the FBI was actively attempting to destroy his presidency by pressuring social media platforms to suppress true information about his opponent’s corruption. Who Was Actually in Control? And then, some 51 intelligence community spooks with security clearances showed up in a letter claiming that the New York Post’s reporting of what was on that laptop was “Russian disinformation” — an abject and obvious lie that has gone unpunished even to date. This was merely a cherry on top of what had been four years of a rolling coup d’etat against a duly elected American president. It began even before Trump took office when the fraudulent Trump-Russia scandal was ginned up by the Hillary Clinton campaign and then weaponized by the outgoing Obama administration. You’ll remember that they took out Mike Flynn, who was to be Trump’s national security adviser, for the blameless action of having conversations with his Russian counterparts and then remembering those conversations differently than the FBI’s surveillance showed. That begat an investigation aimed at proving Trump was colluding with Russia to steal the 2016 election, an absurd, weaponized charge that resulted in nothing other than a hamstrung presidential administration and an electoral wipeout in the 2018 midterms. (READ MORE: New York’s Broken Windows) Not that Trump’s agenda fared all that well in a House and Senate run by Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, respectively. Save for his tax reforms, very little was accomplished through legislative means. Then there was the impeachment, and then there was the sabotage of his administration by the public health bureaucracy’s dictated response to the COVID pandemic — as the Chinese state media organs attacked Trump and other “populist” leaders like Boris Johnson and Jair Bolsonairo as “not up to the challenge” the virus presented: Again — who was actually in control? The Disease No One Wanted to Cure Every time Trump offered some new idea for dealing with the virus he found himself shouted down by a hostile media and abandoned by the members of his administration supposedly helping him to govern. It happened when Trump stated, based on the clear evidence available, that the COVID-19 virus came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and was treated as irresponsible by Anthony Fauci and others. It happened when Trump mentioned that hydroxychloroquine had shown positive properties in helping some COVID patients avoid hospitalization. It happened when Trump mentioned a procedure by which doctors at Cedars Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles were experimenting with ultraviolet radiation to disinfect the lungs of COVID patients on ventilators (this was where the idiotic and false narrative that Trump was suggesting people “inject bleach” to kill the virus). Each time there was silence, if not outright rejection, of Trump’s attempts to find a way past the virus. (READ MORE: The RFK Jr. Bump) I said at the time that COVID-19 was the disease no one in the government wanted to cure. And I was right. They wanted a maximum in negative effects from the virus because it was destroying Trump’s presidency. Deborah Birx all but said as much in her book, which was full of stories about how she lied and obfuscated to thwart the White House’s efforts to make COVID-19 policy. In a very real sense, Trump was barely president. He certainly didn’t wield power in the way we’re accustomed to an American president would. And despite this, he’s running against an unrecognized cabal of people, with Kamala Harris as their new frontman, who concocted and are spraying out a narrative of Trump as a dictator. That’s a level of projection AMC Theaters would be proud of. Perhaps Trump is to blame, at least to an extent, for allowing his first term to be stymied as it was. Or perhaps the American people are to blame for allowing our republic to be so corrupted. But most of all, the blame should chiefly rest on the unrecognized cabal of Deep State elites who robbed the American people of the reckoning that Trump’s 2016 victory was intended to be. That reckoning is yet to be unrealized all these years later. It must come. And it must carry some accrued interest. The post Trump Is Running For A First Term, Not A Second appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

What you see below is a leaflet the British dropped over Germany in 1943, when the tide of war had turned. Kraft durch Freude means “Strength through Joy.” It was a slogan used by the Nazi-run labor organization that extracted mandatory deductions from workers’ pay as well as pushed for various morale-building activities for them, among them, an affordable car, seen in the photo — what would become the Volkswagen. Communist Kamala Harris is Running on Strength Through Joy Including Giving Away Freebies Geez, wonder who else came into power with the same propaganda, Oh right that was the Nazis. ‘Kraft durch Freude!’ (‘Strength through Joy!’) The ‘Kraft durch Freude!’ (KdF) programme was… pic.twitter.com/Z7ix9BpRbB — Andrea Shaffer, Employment/Labor Law (@Andreafreedom76) August 26, 2024 The Brits contrasted the upbeat slogan and the picture of the joyous fuehrer with the grisly reality for German soldiers in Africa, where more than a quarter-million of them were killed or captured as the Brits and Americans together drove them out. Perhaps, the Allies hoped, seeing the hellish reality might spark a flame of resistance against the Nazi horror. (READ MORE: When It Comes to Israel, These People Are Idiots) Strangely, the Dem campaign is now using this slogan of strength through joy — or perhaps predictably, given its commitment to being unburdened by the past. Though the strength has disappeared, the emphasis on joy was everywhere in Chicago and in the Dems’ vast national echo chamber. The Worst of Humanity Wants Us to Take Part in Deviltries But it doesn’t take much reminding to know that the worst of humanity very much wants us to feel joy in being part of their deviltries. The goal that was achieved in 1984 was not that Winston Smith complied with the Party; but that, by the last line of the book, he loved Big Brother. Then the horror was complete. If we need any reminder of horror, the Gollum force of the Hamas Left has been out in the streets in Chicago — though the legacy media are doing a fine job of diverting attention from them. The Dems want the votes of these people and see no point in standing unequivocally against the apocalyptic horror they advocate. Heavens no! Just a tip of the hat to keep most of the country on board, and then a “But on the other hand” about a city that polls show still approves of Hamas orgy of violence. As Ivy League professors might tell you, morality is just a power game, and it’s a game the Dems intend to win. Lip service may be given as a sort of distracting feint, but that’s not where their mind is or what heart they have left. They see little prudential interest in combating the sadistic, perverse evil that is both the goal and the method of Hamas and its fellows in Beirut, Sanaa, and Tehran. A Man on a Mission to Convey the Horrors of Oct. 7 Douglas Murray, bless his soul, has the courage and the moral credibility so lacking in the panorama of pretense unfolding in the United Center. He was talking this week with Jordan Peterson about his upcoming speaking tour in America during which he means to convey the horror of Hamas’ Oct. 7 onslaught of atrocities. Murray went to Israel immediately after that onslaught and remained there for about half a year, following up every aspect of the horror that he could find. He believes we have indulged in a childish and unsustainable unseriousness about the nature of the forces that were unleashed then and which threaten us now. He is ready to risk the anger that comes from showing people the terrifying things they wish to avoid in the hope that if we are spurred to grow up and find courage, we may avoid the greater horrors that are being planned. (READ MORE: The Democrat Party is a Cult) One such horror he shared in this talk. He saw a video that the attackers had made — one of many in which they were proud, happy, and joyful about what they were doing, and wanted to record and celebrate the joy of being unconstrained by what went before. And what were they doing that produced their joy? Murray described a home in the south of Israel in a village that was completely taken over by the Hamas invaders. The father and two of the children, two boys, had taken shelter in the safe room that was built into all the homes there. Hamas had spied the homes out. They knew where these rooms were. They went for it and tossed a hand grenade into it. The father threw himself on the grenade to save his sons and was killed. The boys saw their father blown apart and were themselves badly hurt, the one losing an ear, the other an eye. Murray said: And they were staggering around the main room of their house, weeping and wailing in the most unforgettable, awful, awful way. And one of the terrorists came in and who had just killed their father in front of them, came in and opened the fridge and helped himself to the food. And the youngest of the boys in total trauma said, “that’s my mother’s food.” And the terrorist turned to him and said, where’s your mother? I want her too. It matters a great deal what our joy comes from — a difference as great as that separating heaven from hell. It Matters Where Our Joy Comes From We learned from Obama that what we hoped for and what kind of change made a difference as well. In an administration whose effect was to make America hate again, we learned a lesson about lovely large words that admitted many parsings. It matters what kind of change we hope for. It also matters a great deal where our joy comes from. For the face of evil today — the evil accorded astonishing deference by the self-styled defenders of democracy — is a happy face. It rejoices in the hurt in causes and accepts no boundaries; they will unburden themselves from the least bit of civilized behavior, of the slightest nod to decency and human feeling, in pursuit of the joy of causing the most excruciating pain even to little children. This carries no weight with the weightless. Unburdened by any gravity of any sort, Kamala’s balloon seeks to traverse this country like the balloon sent from Tim Walz’s favorite vacationland that Kamala and Joe watched as it unhurriedly spied out the length of our country unmolested. It’s all about power and to hell with civilization. (Or maybe there was a real estate grift, and the Chi Coms were just scouting out some more farmland near our air bases, and someone would get a nice percentage.) “Who cares?” shrieked the girl who came unhinged at the Watts Acid test in 1965 in LA. California is as crazy as ever, and the Dems think that is what America needs now. They are ready to package it to sell. Perhaps break out the Beethoven’s Tenth again, with Ringo pacifying the tiger. Help! But only the soulless, the monsters, and those joy-riding with them could find joy in where Kamala and Tim would take us, given the chance. Douglas Murray thinks that we still have a soul and that it can be stirred to courage yet. We need to prove him right. The post The Face of Evil Is Masquerading as ‘Joy’ appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Politics is not important. Life is important. Politics is just a supposedly necessary evil. It is not an end. It is just something that is in the way and that we stumble upon. But it pervades everything. The ideological polarization that some denounce is a farce: it is the Left that has drifted to the extreme, and the Right, as historically befits it, limits itself to reaction. The omnipresence of politics has reached such an extreme that in some dating apps, you can read in the profile “I only date antifas” or “I do not tolerate fascists;” it is worth remembering that, for the Left, a fascist is anyone who does not say amen — with apologies to secularists — to all the madness of postmodern progressivism. (READ MORE: American Campuses Threaten Students and the Nation) Polarization also alludes to two distancing extremes, although the word radicalization better defines the ideological displacement of one of them. The consequences are already here. Check out this headline from a Harris Poll and Indeed survey, “40% of Gen Z and Millennial Workers Would Quit a Job Over Political Differences in the Workplace.” When ideology grows too big, the individual declines and ideas take the place of people. We are at that point. You Can’t Debate Emotion in Politics This Harris poll (Kamala has nothing to do with this) means a few things. For one, intolerance of dissent. It reminds me of when I was 15 and would argue with absolutely anything my parents said, no matter how obviously wrong I was. These young people just want to see themselves as part of a large group, loaded to the gills with prejudice. To the extent that the postmodern Left has abandoned ideas to give way to its amalgam of identity causes, its discourse has been reduced to emotions. And emotions cannot be debated. You cannot debate abortion if someone says “There exists a human life with rights” and the other responds “Do you want to condemn a woman to eternal sadness.” (READ MORE: Google Controls the Internet … and Us!) You cannot debate anything when your opponent has only mastered the art of emotional manipulation. It is a kind of immaturity, and the immature one is like an adolescent: They do not tolerate being contradicted because everything seems to affect the deepest part of their heart, every time they question their ideas or those of others seems like a matter of life and death. On the other hand, the data reflects the consequences of the effort made by many corporations to become ideological loudspeakers. The DEI projects and woke cosmos have achieved the impossible: We now identify an ally or an enemy in the flavor of an orange soda. How has this miracle come about? I will gladly remind you: Many companies are backtracking because they know that it is they with their go woke, go broke, with their extreme and absurd ideological positions, who have contributed to bringing political polarization to the forefront — as if it were mandatory to have a clear criterion on everything, from the environment to glass ceilings. It is implied that the consumer must commit. We hear too little “I have no idea about this issue, so I won’t give an opinion;” I admit that I have never said it myself, but I am a columnist, I make a living by voicing my opinion. Man Is Not Merely a Political Animal Let me clarify something. There are ideological reasons that justify the decision of the young people surveyed. I would not have as my boss, an Islamic State terrorist or someone who uses his company’s profits to support the murderous regime in Venezuela. Not out of hatred, but out of principle. But other than that, throughout my career, I’ve worked with conservatives and progressives alike, and I’m lucky to have a wide range of ideological lunatics of all stripes among my friends. Perhaps because I suppose I still consider people to be people, with all their dignity, rather than mere political animals. It is politicians who try to dispossess people of their identity to trap them in the way of living and thinking of their sects. I also clarify that commitment to ideas is not to be criticized, it is praiseworthy. The problem is when that commitment is placed ahead of everything else as if carrying a party card in one’s mouth were a guarantee of some kind, as if there were no more important militancy in life. (READ MORE: Tulsi Gabbard Endorses Donald Trump) The misnamed political polarization has in recent years broken up families, marriages, and friendships, and now it could also dynamite the relationship between co-workers. This is too much responsibility for a handful of ideas and a collection of damn budgets. It’s time for politicians to mind their own business for a while and let us dine in peace with our friends, and love our co-workers, even if we know they exercise their right to vote, not with their hands, but with their asses. The post Politics Is Taking Over Life. The Way Out Is to Vote Wisely. appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

While the U.K. cracks down on citizens for social media posts and praying outside of abortion clinics, Democrats seem hopeful that they can import the same stringent speech policies to the United States. During a recent interview, vice presidential hopeful Tim Walz said that “there’s no guarantee of free speech on misinformation or hate speech, especially around our democracy.” On today’s episode of the Spectator P.M. Podcast, hosts Ellie Gardey Holmes and Aubrey Gulick comment on the Democrat campaign to restrict free speech. They discuss the First Amendment and the importance of protecting speech for a functioning Republic. Join them to hear their analysis! Like and share The Spectator P.M. Podcast, and tune in to our next episode! READ MORE: The Democrat Party is a Cult Read Aubrey and Ellie’s writing here and here. Listen to the Spectator P.M. Podcast with Aubrey Gulick and Ellie Gardey on Spotify. Watch the Spectator P.M. Podcast with Aubrey Gulick and Ellie Gardey on Rumble The post <i>The Spectator P.M. Podcast</i> Ep. 72: Walz Says ‘Misinformation’ and ‘Hate Speech’ Aren’t ‘Protected By the Constitution’ appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Beverly Gage, a professor of history at Yale University and the author of a recent biography of J. Edgar Hoover, recently took to the pages of Foreign Affairs to present her and Jacob Heilbrunn’s version of the history of the far Right in 20th-century America to explain why conservatives embrace foreign tyrants. She accepts Heilbrunn’s idea that modern conservatism is “rooted … in a sincere affinity” and “admiration” for “brutal, often racist authoritarians” dating back to “Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II up to the apartheid government of South Africa.” Gage’s “history” supposedly explains why Donald Trump’s “explicit racism” and “‘America first’ nativism” has captured the Republican Party. Gage’s “history” is left-wing history that maligns conservatism and ignores the allure of autocracy on the Left, which includes what Jean-François Revel called the “totalitarian temptation.” ‘Deeply Catholic’ Americans to Blame for ‘Autocratic Allure’? Gage mentions a few on the Right who, in the 1920s and 1930s, expressed admiration for Mussolini and Hitler. “Some,” she writes, “were deeply Catholic,” while others were racists. Some on the far right saw autocrats as a way to “protect traditional Christianity, or patriarchal families, or even just the idea of hierarchy itself.” You can see where this is going. The allure of autocracy is to be found, according to Gage, in “deeply Catholic” Americans who oppose abortion, cherish the traditional nuclear family, oppose the left’s woke agenda at home and their neoliberal approach to foreign policy. (READ MORE: Trump Is an Extraordinary Manager of Client Nations) Gage traces the right’s “autocratic allure” to William F. Buckley, Jr. and National Review, and expresses surprise that such right-wing admirers of autocracy could emerge from her beloved Yale, Harvard, and Columbia. She calls this group “right-wing” dissidents and “high-born pseudo-intellectuals” — because her cherished Ivy League is supposed to produce only enlightened members of the leftist elite. She includes among the right-wing Ivy League dissidents Buckley, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Sen. Josh Hawley, Sen. J.D. Vance, Vivek Ramaswamy, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and Donald Trump. Buckley and others at National Review, Gage writes, were admirers of Spain’s dictator Francisco Franco whose forces won the Spanish Civil War over the communist-controlled Republican forces in the mid-to-late 1930s. Franco saved Spain from the Stalinist forces and during the war refused to ally with Hitler’s Germany. Perhaps Gage thinks Spain would have been better off if the Stalinists had won — they, after all, were supported by many leftist intellectuals. (READ MORE: Trump, Not Harris, Has ‘Strategic Realism’ in Spades) Indeed, as Paul Hollander has documented, leftist intellectuals spent much of the 20th century supporting the likes of Lenin, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Castro, and other communists. They fell prey to the “totalitarian temptation” that an elite, intellectual cadre could transform mankind into a workers’ paradise. The left, not the right, supported the greatest mass murderers of the 20th century, yet Gage accuses the right of having an autocratic allure. History Teaches Leftist Intellectuals Have Their Own ‘Totalitarian Temptation’ And let us not forget that it was the Democratic Party of the defeated Confederacy that founded the Ku Klux Klan and imposed Jim Crow laws throughout much of the South. And it was powerful Democratic politicians like Richard Russel and Lyndon Johnson who ensured the defeat of anti-lynching laws throughout more than half of the 20th century. Perhaps Gage should read or re-read Robert Caro’s masterful account of this in his multi-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson. Was it the autocratic allure that led the Ivy Leaguer and notorious racist Woodrow Wilson to prosecute and imprison his political opponents who spoke out against America’s entry into the First World War? For that matter, was it the autocratic allure that led Ivy Leaguer Franklin Roosevelt to unjustly remove persons of Japanese ancestry from their homes on the West Coast and transport them to camps further inland? Or that led FDR to use the IRS against his political opponents? Was it the autocratic allure that led Ivy Leaguers John and Robert Kennedy to be complicit in the overthrow and resultant assassination of South Vietnam’s leader Diem or to attempt to assassinate Fidel Castro in Cuba? (READ MORE: The Sun Sets on Britain) As far as embracing dictators, no American president ever courted a foreign leader the way Ivy Leaguer Franklin Roosevelt courted Stalin during the Second World War. Gage should read Robert Nisbet’s Roosevelt and Stalin: The Failed Courtship, which shows FDR repeatedly ridiculing Winston Churchill to gain favor with the murderous Soviet dictator, and conspiring to cover up Stalin’s responsibility for the murder of 15,000 Polish officers in the Katyn Forest. And who could forget the liberal Ivy Leaguer Barack Obama going on an apology tour to seek forgiveness for America’s past sins from Iran’s clerical autocrats? Obama’s apology tour proceeded to Latin America, including communist Cuba. Was Obama also stricken by the autocratic allure? Gage near the end of her essay even gets a dig in at Ronald Reagan for appointing Jeane Kirkpatrick (who received an Ivy League postgraduate degree at Columbia), who “made the case that Washington should cozy-up to right-wing autocrats,” as his U.N. ambassador. Kirkpatrick understood, even if Gage does not, that authoritarian regimes allow more freedoms than totalitarian regimes, and are more likely than totalitarian regimes to evolve into democracies. Reagan, who opposed abortion, supported the traditional nuclear family, had many traditional Catholics in his administration, and lacked an Ivy League degree, somehow liberated half a continent from communist rule without firing a shot. So much for conservatism’s “autocratic allure.” The post Is This the ‘History’ They’re Teaching at Yale? appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Trying to define the Midlands is like trying to define “the underground”, and so it can be appreciated that defining the Midlands underground is extremely difficult. But even the complete geographical idiot would appreciate that Birmingham is in the Midlands and that a club that featured groups such as Ten Years After, Canned Heat, Soft [...] The post Mothers – The heart of the Midlands Underground Scene (1968 – 1971) first appeared on Nostalgia Central.