Yay Brexit!

Gratingly awful global scold Greta Thunberg’s latest stunt is to turn on her own motherland. Sweden has been very good to her, but the former social-democratic paradise’s mugging by the realities of uncontrolled immigration do not sit well with the keffiyeh-clad rabblerouser. “For years, Sweden took more asylum seekers per capita than any other country in Europe,” writes Fredrik Karrholm in The Spectator. “Now asylum numbers have fallen to their lowest level since 1985.”

Those looking forward to America’s collapse in the face of an ascendant China are likely to be disappointed, writes Victor Davis Hanson at The Blade of Perseus. Examining a range of revealing metrics, trends and recent events, Hanson pronounces the U.S. the true “crouching tiger, hidden dragon”. America can be “sluggish” and “naïve,” admits Hanson, “but historically, its innately resilient free people, singular constitutional government, robust federalism, and free-market economy eventually wake up to the next rising threat.”

And rounding out our trio of good-news stories, Hélène de Lauzun reports in The European Conservative that, by one measure at least, Christian religiosity is flourishing. Several recent pilgrimages in France were packed with participants, including the Notre-Dame de Chrétienté journey from Paris to Chartres Cathedral, which drew more than 20,000. De Lauzun was especially struck at how the events moved complete strangers to come to one other’s aid to overcome hunger, thirst or exhaustion.

Allum Bokhari, writing in The American Conservative, illuminates a Colorado state bill claiming to create “a shield against ‘algorithmic discrimination’” that would force AI companies to generate outputs based on government-imposed racial, and other identity-based, quotas. As with past variants of reverse discrimination, asserts Bokhari, Colorado’s AI bill amounts to thinly disguised leftist ideology aimed at institutionalizing the very harm it claims to ameliorate.

In City Journal, Ramon Maislen explains that solving a housing affordability crisis – New York City’s in this case – depends on driving down the costs of bringing new units onto the market. Civic governments can’t control interest rates, but they can cut red tape, local taxes and constraints on construction companies. “If we want lower rents,” Maislen observes, “we need more housing. And if we want more housing, the math needs to add up for the people who build it.”

The descent into moral depravity of what was once the world’s foremost daily newspaper continues with the NYT’s publication of a column by Nicholas Kristof that treats as fact accusations by Hamas supporters that Israeli security personnel are raping Palestinian prisoners using objects and a specially trained “rape dog”. As Adam Kredo points out in The Washington Free Beacon, Kristof’s career features a series of calamitous reality-inversions. His latest appears timed to overshadow a meticulously detailed Israeli report on Hamas’ systematic sexual barbarism against Israeli women, men and children on and after October 7, 2023.

Winston Churchill drank his way to saving the world from Nazism and, according to Alec Marsh in Spiked, the old bulldog would fit right in with certain current Parliamentarians enjoying a tipple to endure late-night sittings in Westminster. “Well, why not?” Marsh asks. “Politicians wouldn’t be human if they didn’t.” This news doesn’t, however, sit well with certain neo-puritan scolds from – you guessed it – the Green Party, which on the other hand does support providing free narcotics to welfare recipients.

It is as irritating as it is false, writes John Daniel Davidson in The Federalist, to hear “corporate media and [the] political establishment calling for calm, for unity, for lowering the temperature,” after the attempted assassination of President Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. It’s not a “both sides” problem, Davidson states. “There is only one side in America today that has a persistent and very real-world problem with political violence.”

The world’s population is likely to crest sooner and lower than previously forecast and, asserts Javier Villamor in The European Conservative, the very population control measures (like abortion and birth control) once aimed at reining in out-of-control growth now are likely contributing to something worse: the “demographic winter”. With birth rates plunging below bare replacement in countries all over the world, a true cataclysm may await.

As it began looking like Javier Milei might actually be elected President of Argentina, more than 100 leading international economists warned that this “far-right” political “wrecking ball” would “cause ‘devastation,’ spike inflation, expand poverty, and unemployment.” But as David Harsanyi relates in the Washington Examiner, Milei has tamed inflation, balanced the budget, shrunk the bureaucracy, deregulated the economy, driven down poverty and repaid billions in U.S. loans. And now, Harsanyi notes, Argentina is starting to boom.

Compounding problems of increasing social isolation, disintegrating family life and declining fertility is a new threat: the fusion of AI with sex dolls to create at-once ultra-realistic and emotionally empty “AI companions” intended to substitute for real human intimacy. It’s a formula that can – and already does – kill, warn Tim Rosenberger and Vilda Westh Blanc in City Journal. Not surprisingly, teen-agers are most vulnerable to the allure of quick and seemingly consequence-free gratification. In fact, warn the authors, it can be a path straight to suicide.

While looking down on Americans never seems to get old, Ben Shapiro in Jewish World Review demolishes that mindset with a survey of stunning successes that only America could have delivered. In a matter of days, “Americans have watched astronauts push farther into space than any human beings in history, while U.S. forces execute military operations so precise and technologically overwhelming that they look like something written for a Hollywood script.” The crazy part is that such feats are so routine “we barely stop to appreciate it.”

Paul Ehrlich, author of the spectacularly incorrect 1968 best-seller The Population Bomb, recently died at 93. Despite his longevity, Ronald Bailey points out in Reason, Ehrlich did not live to see even one of his numerous apocalyptic predictions come true. The world’s population certainly grew, but not merely larger, richer and fatter too. Most famously, Ehrlich once bet economist Julian Simon that the world was approaching economic collapse – but in 1990 had to mail Simon a cheque.

Markos Kounalakis, writing in Washington Monthly, explains that Cuba’s 65-year-old Communist regime – “one of the world’s longest-surviving single-party states and the oldest in the Western Hemisphere” – is on its last legs. Running out of other people’s money is the least of it worries. Says Kounalakis: “President Donald Trump and his team have all but said that they want to topple the government just as soon as he receives Iran’s ‘unconditional surrender.’”

Ixtu Diaz believes recent regional elections in Castile and León, Spain, foretell what could happen throughout the West. Despite past publicized corruption, Diaz points out in The European Conservative, the ruling Socialist Party (PSOE) under Pedro Sánchez was able to keep its 30 percent vote share, which Diaz ascribes to Sánchez’s tight media control, opposition strategies and engagement of far-left voters. Meaning, socialists cling to power despite the people’s somewhat rightward shift.

Following the loss of 5 million U.S. industrial jobs from 2000 through 2017, Joel Kotkin in Spiked writes of the growing consensus – alone among Western countries, and despite the U.S. left’s hatred of Donald Trump – to revive America’s industries by “reshoring” manufacturing. Today, writes Kotkin, even some of the famously globalist “tech bros” are opening new facilities back home to manufacture tangible, advanced products. One sign of success: China is measurably bleeding in its manufacturing output.

About US$16 trillion has been wasted “feeding the climate change industrial complex,” writes Stephen Moore in Real Clear Politics. The “shameful and colossal misallocation of human resources,” Moore writes with disgust, delivered “not a penny of measurable payoff.” As he notes, since climate policies began ramping up “30 years ago, the temperature of the planet has not been altered by one-tenth of a degree.”

In City Journal, Christina Buttons describes the wreckage caused by the precipitous decline in residential treatment beds for mentally ill teens. Where do they end up? Increasingly, in “juvenile detention”, i.e., jail. Buttons’ detailed report offers a cautionary tale for Canada, where provinces are also grappling over whether to force the mentally ill and/or drug-addicted to undergo treatment (as Alberta is now doing) or simply leave them to suffer (and often endanger others) on the street.

City Journal’s Ryan Thorpe and Christopher Rufo investigate the personal destruction wrought by (genuinely) far-right influencer Nicholas Fuentes. The founder of “Groypers” – a cult-like following of angry young men who will do virtually anything for Fuentes – doesn’t just hate Jews, praise Hitler and Stalin, and oppose inter-racial marriage. As Thorpe and Rufo report, Fuentes betrays his own followers, lies about how he uses the money supporters send him, and defends pedophiles.

In a cautionary tale with pointed lessons for Canada’s deepening swoon towards China, James E. Fanell in American Greatness chronicles how the Communist regime shamelessly exploited its invitation to the biennial RIMPAC international naval exercises off Hawaii to both gather intelligence and humiliate its U.S. hosts and their Asian allies – brusquely sailing five armed warships right into Pearl Harbour. Donald Trump uninvited the Chinese in 2018, and Fanell urges the U.S. President not to give in to the current Chinese propaganda effort to relent this year.

Daniel Greenfield cheers UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ recent warning the institution is facing “imminent financial collapse” – while lamenting that the claim is a lie. Why Greenfield’s glee? As he notes in The Jewish Edition, the UN spends an insane 25 percent of its enormous budget on air travel – sometimes more than on AIDS or malaria programs. Greenfield’s suggestion: “Let the UN leave New York and take its headquarters down to whichever Third World hellhole it’s sending money to.”

The 11,000-member American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) – which includes hundreds of Canadian members – “has come out unequivocally against ‘gender-affirming’ surgeries in adolescents under age 19,” writes Leor Sapir in City Journal. The ASPS has also joined a growing number of international organizations in warning about the potential physical and psychological damage to children and teens of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. [Editor’s note: Two days after the ASPS’s announcement, the American Medical Association announces it now agrees that gender-altering “surgical interventions in minors should be generally deferred to adulthood.”]

Laura Hollis at Arcamax knits together U.S. Democrats’ over-the-top terror at modest budget cuts and criminal probes of welfare fraud with Barack Obama’s 2008 promise about “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” Looting public finances to support waves of illegal and semi-legal immigrants from impoverished countries with no history of democracy or economic self-reliance, Harris argues, are foundational phases in “transforming” the U.S. into an anarchic socialist hellhole.

A recent conference on anti-Semitism in Jerusalem was oddly welcoming to members of ultra-conservative European parties. For Dov Maimon of Jewish News Syndicate, it is a “dizzying paradox” that European Jews are feeling safer in “illiberal” democracies such as Hungary, Poland and Czechia, where civic order is imposed firmly and street violence is not tolerated, than in traditional liberal havens like the UK and France.

Writing in Jewish World Review, Frederic Fransen reminds Americans of a key lesson from Revolutionary War-era pamphleteer Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. “The colonies need to declare independence,” Fransen summarizes Paine, “because so long as their goal was seen as reconciliation, foreign governments would consider the Americans as rebels and the conflict an internal affair.” But a unilateral declaration of independence, Fransen notes, instantly converts mere complaints from an aggrieved group into a negotiation between sovereign states.

Steven Hayward at the Civitas Institute charts the remarkable transformation of the U.S. from energy beggar importing 75 percent of its crude oil into the world’s foremost producer and a major exporter of oil and natural gas. Out the window are “Peak Oil” theory, ever-higher energy prices and the green energy obsession. Plentiful affordable energy is now driving an American industrial revival and enabling the U.S. to lead the AI revolution.

Ann Coulter, writing on her own website, compares the current “massive resistance” to federal immigration officers by law-breaking Democratic governors and activists – particularly in Minnesota – to the past illegal attempts by Democrats to sabotage racial integration in the Deep South. Then, two presidents deployed the military to force compliance. Coulter urges the current President to once again invoke the federal Insurrection Act to ensure the laws of the land are followed.

At Blacklisted, Eve Barlow reminds us of the mainstream media’s long shilling for the wrong side in the great saga of Iran. Consumed by hatred for the Shah, the CIA and the U.S. government, leading outlets like the New York Times promoted a murderous totalitarian – the Ayatollah Khomeini – as a reasonable answer to Iran’s problems. Barlow notes how the media have remained trapped in their moral inversion – to the very moment the mullahcracy finally appears set to topple.

At Pundicity, Bostonian Jeff Jacoby compares a city that builds to one that doesn’t. Dallas, Jacoby notes, has unapologetically expanded its road system and, consequently, the average Dallas resident wastes just 44 hours per year stuck in traffic. That’s barely half the average time spent idling in Jacoby’s famously congested hometown whose leaders, he notes pointedly, despise the automobile and halted major roadbuilding 50 years ago.

In The European Conservative, John Rosenthal warns of a broadening European censorship complex that’s attempting not just to muzzle Europeans or control American tech platforms operating in the EU, but is going after the free speech of Americans in the U.S. Rosenthal profiles HateAid, a supposedly “independent” outfit that operates as “trusted flaggers” of suspect content for tech platforms, but is in fact supervised by government, funded by government and staffed by people with deep ties to the EU superstate.