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Politics Washington Post, RIP They don’t call ’em “good old days” for nothing. Credit: image via Shutterstock Bob Woodward’s birthday falls on the 26th of March. There will be 83 candles on the cake and much to celebrate. Woodward has had a long, productive, and admirable life as a newspaperman and author. For more than half a century, he has worked at the Washington Post, so it is understandable that he is “crushed” by recent developments at the paper. More than 300 journalists employed there have been laid off in recent days, including reporters in India and the Middle East. Its weekly book section is also getting the ol’ heave-ho. These moves under the ownership of Jeff Bezos, who bought the paper in 2013, are getting a great deal of coverage, almost all of it brutal. Bezos has “killed” the Post, it was “murder,” a “bloodletting,” a “bloodbath.” The man has gobs of money, so why should people in his employ, like hundreds of other Washington journalists, end up in the soup line? As an ink-stained wretch myself, I feel for them. But I’m not sure I should mourn more for them than for millions of other Americans trying to meet the mortgage, much less pay their kids’ college tuition. No question, the Post has been a great newspaper, but, like other great newspapers, it has been hemorrhaging money for years, in part because it has been losing subscribers. It’s ironic that a lot of the people now bemoaning decisions made by the Post’s top brass are themselves no longer subscribing. After Bezos decided to pull the editorial board’s endorsement of Kamala Harris (ending a practice of endorsing presidential candidates, which it only began to do about the time Woodward was a Metro desk reporter), 250,000 high-minded subscribers bailed out. They did so no doubt unaware of how their decision might affect the paychecks of reporters about whom they are now expressing such heartfelt concern. Subscriptions typically run about $140 a year, which means, by one calculation, that their cancellations are costing the paper $35 million a year. That’s more than enough, it would seem to me, to pay all 13 of its “climate change” reporters—and the salary of the one whose sole beat was “race disparity.” There might even be a few bucks left over.  In many ways, I am also sorry that the Post is struggling. I have good memories of it myself, and not just as a reader. Back in 1974, when Woodward was still on the Metro desk and the Post’s offices were in a building demolished in 2016, I was there, too, as a college kid on an internship. Those were heady times.  Carl Bernstein’s desk was a few yards from mine, and Woodward’s wasn’t far from his. The editor Ben Bradlee would strut around the newsroom, and every day brought closed-door meetings resulting in new stories about the Watergate break-in. Nixon supporters didn’t like it, and there were picket lines out front.  On August 8, one of the editors—it wasn’t Bradlee—got the attention of the entire newsroom. He told us that President Richard Nixon would be making a major televised address that night, the purpose of which was to announce his decision to resign from office the next day. Contrary to what those same Nixon supporters might have imagined, there was no jubilation in the newsroom. There was, if anything, a reverent hush, borne of a sense that something of historic importance was about to happen, and the Post newsroom had a lot to do with it.  We were then dispatched to different parts of the city, to watch Tricky Dick’s speech, to notice how it was received, and to call in “color” to the Metro desk editors. I was sent to what was then known as the Kennedy Center. The Bolshoi Ballet was performing, and Nixon’s speech was aired during intermission. What struck me was how many members of that well-dressed crowd responded not at all as the people in the Post newsroom did, but with jeers and laughter. I found a pay phone in the lobby and reported as much.  Think about that. You had to carry change so you could use pay phones. That’s how you got in touch with your editors, or if you were on the street, with your sources. Reporters back then used something called typewriters. There was a kind of conveyor belt gizmo in the newsroom, suspended above the desks. Stories were typed on paper that seemed to have at least six other sheets attached to it, and when you finished a story, you tore off one of the sheets, attached it to the conveyor belt, and sent it on its merry way to copy editors and rewrite men. You didn’t fax your stories, much less email them. You sent a “hard copy.” Newsroom veterans—“grizzled,” you might say—could gather around your desk, read what you were writing over your shoulder and make sardonic remarks about it. Nobody back then was instructed to treat younger workers with respect, much less “to learn from” them. This wasn’t the newsroom of the hard drinking, wise-cracking Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau in The Front Page, but it was closer to that world, I’m guessing, than to ours. I remember it fondly, even when it was my prose that was being read aloud to other reporters and ridiculed.   That was a long time ago. The Post’s flush times have come and gone, which is true for all print newspapers. They aren’t being murdered, as the owners’ critics insist. There was a time, as Marshall McLuhan said, when people would “step into [their newspaper] every morning like a hot bath.” Those days are gone. People don’t even take hot baths in the morning. They shower. All that might be regrettable, in some respects, but it does nobody any good to pretend it’s not true. People choose to get their news in different ways today, as McLuhan knew they would, and that’s exciting too.  If you want to get nostalgic about the world of the Post’s heyday, watch All the President’s Men, which was released just two years after Nixon’s downfall. Woodward and Bernstein were played by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, with Jason Robards as Bradlee. I’ve seen the movie countless times, and while it accurately depicts that time and place, not once can an actor playing me be seen anywhere in it. Believe me, I’ve checked and will check again. Other than that, it’s great. The post Washington Post, RIP appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs Who’s Afraid of Another Refugee Crisis? A war in Iran will inevitably bring about the same conditions that have distorted regional and European politics for a generation. Recent reporting suggests that President Donald Trump is considering a wider attack on Iran. There is of course a chance of another bloody nose, akin to the drone strike on General Qassem Soleimani or the bombing of the Fordow nuclear facility. But there is also a chance for a lot more than that—there is in some corners a desire for sustained strikes or possibly even supporting or participating in a ground operation.  Yet if the United States were to opt for something like that, there is the risk of creating refugees – a risk that has been borne out for much of the recent involvement in the Middle East. Syria is just beginning to stabilize after years of domestic civil conflict. This directly led to a refugee crisis that turbocharged the insanity of European politics and has, in the longer term, all but destroyed the postwar political consensus on the continent. Syria is not the only example and is in some sense a happier one than most—that refugee crisis has at least ended. The Libyans were not so lucky; none of the militias at war with the Libyan government have been able to rule the contiguous territory in a way that would avoid continued instability. This, of course, leaves out the biggest example. The 2003 invasion of Iraq not only destroyed some of the oldest Christian communities in the Middle East but also created a refugee crisis numbering in the millions that only started to wind down after the defeat of ISIS. Iran is very different from Syria, Libya, or Iraq, the primary difference being just how much bigger it is. Iran has around 90 million people, more than the other three countries put together. Setting aside everything else, this metric alone suggests that the scale of the potential refugee crisis would be far greater than the one that crested in the 2000s or 2010s. While each of these conflicts displaced different proportions of the target nation’s population, none was cost-free in this department. While one can argue that the worst-case Syria-style scenario isn’t the most likely, it is even less probable that this kind of action would not create any refugees at all.  Beyond sheer numbers, there is another angle to a potential refugee crisis that is equally potent: capacity and desire to house, fund, feed, and effectively subsidize that population. Middle Eastern countries are unlikely to take part in American adventures in Iran and are thus likely to balk at being asked to house millions of refugees from actions they no doubt counseled against. There would be both the risk of Iranian refugees as well as the problem of refugees in Iran from past wars in the Middle East—after all, all of these people have to go somewhere. The more inhospitable and uninhabitable their countries become, the more immigration goes from one option to the only option.  Countries like Pakistan or Turkey are likely to shoulder part of the burden, but, as in past Middle East crises, Europe is all but guaranteed to get a significant portion of this group—far more than the U.S., due to simple geography. In that sense, calling for regime change is far easier for Americans; we have to directly deal with far less of the chaos we’ll enable. At the same time, Europeans tend to play the same game, given that to some degree they’re not gambling with their own money, like their friends across the Pacific. The politics of refugees are also far weaker than they were in the early stages of the Arab Spring. The political landscape has shifted from the days of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s “Wir schaffen das,” and another refugee crisis does not seem like the kind of thing that will shift it back. In European elections this year, immigration is already a hot topic without an Iranian crisis. Politicians should consider what it will become in the public consciousness should they choose to create one. The post Who’s Afraid of Another Refugee Crisis? appeared first on The American Conservative.

UK Special Coverage Britain’s Two-Tier Justice Problem Native-born Brits are at the bottom of the UK’s legal privilege hierarchy. UK Special Coverage One of the most urgent and wounding criticisms of the British regime to emerge in recent years is that the justice system we live under is “two-tier.” Today, it seems increasingly obvious to much of the public that minorities and those on the left are treated far more favorably by the law than those who are white or on the right. Readers may be familiar with the case of Northamptonshire childminder Lucy Connolly, which has emerged as the paradigmatic example of this unfair treatment.  Distraught on the night of the Southport murders in July 2024, when a second-generation Rwandan teenager attacked a children’s dance class near Liverpool, stabbing three of them to death, Connolly responded by sending a tweet. With the authorities keeping quiet about the attacker’s identity, many initially believed the appalling crime must have been the work of an illegal migrant. In anger, Connolly tweeted: “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f**king [migrant] hotels full of the bastards for all I care.” She added, having once lost a young child herself: “I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist so be it.” A few hours later, she deleted the tweet, but not before a screenshot of it was taken. Soon she had been charged with a hate speech offense and remanded in custody, and knowing that she would remain behind bars for months even if she protested her innocence, she pleaded guilty. She ended up with a 31-month prison sentence, during which time she was denied various privileges routinely afforded to far more serious offenders, including to those in her own prison, such as temporary leave to care for her young daughter. The case particularly stings because in our increasingly soft-touch legal system, the perpetrators of violent, sexual, and acquisitive crimes will frequently get off with a more lenient sentence—if they are caught at all. There are still some who would deny there’s any unfairness in Lucy being sentenced to a longer prison term for a tweet than, in one case, the members of a child-rape gang. Last year, when her appeal against the severity of the sentence was rejected, I found myself debating a prominent legal commentator who insisted that Connolly couldn’t have been the victim of two-tier justice, since “this is an offence for which the maximum sentence is seven years in prison” as laid down by Parliament, and her 31-month stretch was thus within the sentencing guidelines. He was wholly missing the point—though it’s hardly unusual in the British elite to be more comfortable in the realm of bloodless legalism than having to consider any genuine moral and political controversy. Still, in one sense he wasn’t wrong. Parliament did create the Race Relations Act 60 years ago, which intentionally criminalized the ill-defined idea of speech that might (as the act states) “stir up” racial hatred, and later raised the maximum penalty attached to that crime to 14 times that of common assault. The act formed the bedrock of the antiracist state. Critics warned from the beginning that this dragnet of a law was both vague and targeted people’s intentions, rather than their actions, and thus would have the effect of outlawing disfavored opinions on race and immigration.  So it has proved. Further speech restrictions have since been added, and as our political culture has also become decidedly more woke and more censorious in recent years, ordinary Brits’ everyday speech is increasingly being policed and punished. This is especially the case with their online speech, which now accounts for an average of more than thirty arrests per day. This is deeply illiberal, of course, but it is justified by pathologizing a dislike of demographic change and its deleterious effects—always a majority view —as pseudo-fascist, therefore meriting speech restrictions and punishment for its holders. Most would view with some sympathy Lucy Connolly, a bereaved mother who had sent a rather ugly tweet in a moment of anguish and then thought better of it. But in the eyes of officialdom—and amid the prime minister’s panicked crackdown on unrest after the awful murders—ordinary women like her became public enemy number one. Indeed, it recently emerged that when the state prosecutor issued an emergency application to Attorney General Richard Hermer to rapidly approve the charge against her (a move that may well have been illegal), it explained that her post was “not a one-off regrettable tweet but part of her dislike for immigrants.” Connolly’s supposed political beliefs ought to have meant nothing at all, legally speaking. But this was an argument the prosecutor knew Hermer, a human-rights lawyer whose activist friends describe as a “dedicated antifascist,” would eagerly accept: she had to be made an example of because of her supposed right-wing views. Meanwhile, not charged with stirring up racial hatred and, crucially, not denied bail over his lesser speech charge, was the Labour councilor Ricky Jones, who, addressing a far-left rally during the same period, said of white right-wing protestors: “They are disgusting Nazi fascists. We need to cut all their throats and get rid of them all.” Just as Britain’s laws around so-called hate speech are applied selectively and punitively—according to the priorities of state “anti-racism” ideology—so are our laws around hate crimes. Tellingly, in the parliamentary debate that introduced this special category of crime under New Labour, no mention was made at any point that aggravated penalties should apply just as much to racist incidents against whites. To diversity-obsessed British officialdom, anti-white racism simply cannot be acknowledged to exist, still less acted upon. Government bodies and antiracist activist charities implicitly understand this and act accordingly. Fusing the two are Hate Crime Scrutiny Panels, in which minority activist groups are invited to meet with police and prosecutors every few months and lobby them to be more attentive to alleged offenses against their group. Needless to say, no one is expected to speak for whites on these panels. Thus is two-tier justice institutionalized. Among the grim results is that the Pakistani Muslim rape gangs—far and away the foulest race-hate crimes Britain has ever seen—have outrageously never been treated as hate crimes by our see-no-evil authorities. Not only were they ignored, downplayed, and at times actively covered up for decades for fear of upsetting “community relations,” but even when some of the men who abused these girls were at last prosecuted, authorities continued to fail the victims. Government data I have obtained show that none of the crimes of 38 defendants across five separate rape gangs, convicted between 2012 and 2025, were ever even flagged as potentially racially or religiously aggravated by officials, let alone prosecuted as such.  In reality, anyone with eyes to see knows these crimes stemmed from deep racial contempt. Fiona Goddard, a survivor who has waived her anonymity in order to speak about her experiences, told me that her abusers  spoke about ‘white girls’ as people they could use, saying they needed to keep Pakistani girls ‘pure’… They also spoke in their own language, using racial slurs to refer to us, like ‘gori’, which means ‘white’ in Urdu. They would pull faces while saying this or spit at you afterwards, so you knew it was meant in a derogatory way. There were even attempts to pressure us into converting to Islam, including being forced to fast or wear Islamic clothing. What Goddard and a second victim experienced over years she now describes as “radicalised racially motivated sexual torture”—and this has happened at a vast scale, with tens if not hundreds of thousands of similar crimes across the United Kingdom, dating back as far as the 1950s. Yet never has a single one of these crimes been treated with the extra seriousness the British state is supposed to reserve for acts of racial hatred.  Equality before the law was once a bedrock of British society. “Judge very evenly,” warned Alfred the Great in the ninth century in the prologue to his Doom Book, setting out laws and legal principles for the nascent polity of England. “Do not give one judgment for the rich and another for the poor, nor for one you love and one you loathe.” But postwar immigration, and the multicultural settlement our elites built around it, have called time on that age-old ideal. Now, in England, how a criminal and a victim are treated depends, to a vast degree, on who they are and what political point the state wants to make about them. And white Brits know they are at the bottom of the pile. The post Britain’s Two-Tier Justice Problem appeared first on The American Conservative.

Other successes. The post What is the highest chart position the Queens of the Stone Age have ever acheived? first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

by Sonja van den Ende, Strategic Culture: The Bureau of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), part of the Council of Europe (not the European Union), established in October 2025 a platform for Russians in exile called the Russian Democratic Forces, which is intended to represent a new Russian government-in-exile in Europe. […]