How the Western News Media Came to “Trust Khomeini”

Who produces vastly more energy than it needs right now? The United States. So who needs Venezuela’s oil? Basically, nobody. That cold fact, writes Ben Cahill in Barron’s, is enabling the Trump Administration to further squeeze dictator Nicolas Maduro by blockading the nation’s oil exports. For decades, other countries used oil as a weapon against the U.S. Today the tables are turned and, Cahill notes, Venezuela’s decrepit industry is the one crying out for reinvestment.

Twice before, Western civilization has collapsed utterly, triggering half a millennium of darkness. At The Blade of Perseus, Victor Davis Hanson wonders whether our current iteration, which delivered “constitutional government, rationalism, liberty, freedom of expression, self-critique, and free markets,” is due for its own catastrophic fall. “Salad-bowl tribalism replacing assimilation” is among the issues gripping Hanson, as is that “fertility has dived well below 2.0 in almost every Western country.”

The propensity of politicians to misuse the seasonal Menorah lighting to propound liberal messages greatly irritates Josh Hammer. Writing for Jewish World Review, Hammer reminds readers that Chanukah commemorates a historical triumph: the Jewish Maccabees’ military revolt against their Greek Seleucid overlords, regaining self-rule and reclaiming the Jewish temple in Jerusalem. And that, Hammer writes, carries a universal message: love your people and your country – and fight for them when they’re threatened.

Two decades ago leftists described Mary and Joseph as “homeless”. Now, they’re pushing the narrative that the Holy Family were equivalent to today’s “migrants” and “refugees”. As Maisey Jefferson explains in The Federalist, a church in the Boston suburb of Nedham has defiled its Nativity scene, replacing Baby Jesus with a sign denouncing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). That’s not only offensive and blasphemous, writes Jefferson, but historically illiterate.

It seems a reasonable question: if you love your homeland, fled only because a vicious civil war made you fear for your life, and now the war’s over, why haven’t you booked tickets home? But as Rafael Pinto Borges writes in The European Conservative, more than a year after the toppling of the murderous Assad regime, most of Europe’s 1.4 million Syrian “refugees” are apparently intent on staying put.

Although it’s giving transatlantic elites the vapours, the Trump Administration’s new National Security Strategy has much to commend it, writes The American Conservative’s Eldar Mamedov. “It grounds American foreign policy in the unvarnished realities of power, risk, and strategic focus,” Mamedov writes. In practice, this likely will mean expeditiously ending the war in Ukraine to restore strategic equilibrium with Russia, halting further NATO expansion, and pushing America’s European allies to stand on their own two feet.

What might Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan be driving at during his private “interminable monologues” with Pope Leo XIV, wonders Fiamma Nirenstein in Jewish News Syndicate. The Pope, no doubt, wants to avert a Third World War and sees Turkey as a bridge between West and East. But having embraced Islamism and purged Turkey of nearly all its 4 million Christians, Nirenstein writes, the Turkish tyrant appears ever-less amenable to that role.

Following an “Allahu-Akbar”-yelling Afghan’s shooting of two National Guard troops in Washington, D.C. – one of whom subsequently died – Ammon Blair in UnHerd lauds President Donald Trump’s planned “permanent pause” on immigration from “Third World” countries. Blair notes the move ties into the Administration’s recent declaration that “mass migration poses an existential threat to Western civilization” and that governments “have the right – and obligation – to protect their people.”

Marxists are often chided for prizing theory over reality, but Kevin Schmiesing’s assessment in Law & Liberty of Andrew Hartman’s 550-page Karl Marx in America finds this author largely does the opposite. Hartman’s descriptions of communism’s rancorous currents flowing through America are interesting and largely accurate, writes Schmiesing, but his evaluation of Marxism as philosophy is weak. This in turn blinds Hartman to the key question: why did Communism never really catch on in America?

The EU may have banished the “‘inhuman,’ ‘degrading,’ and ‘irreversible’” death penalty for criminals, writes Frank Haviland in The European Conservative – but its member states’ soft-on-crime, easy-on-illegal-immigrants policies are making violent death an increasingly common fate for innocent Europeans. In a world gripped by barbarian forces, writes Haviland, it’s time for Great Britain to hold a national referendum on restoring an older form of justice.

Gareth Roberts pronounces the 250,000 fellow citizens who’ve fled Britain since Labour’s election “wimps”. The escapees, Roberts notes in Spiked, are missing “a buffet of black comedy gold” – like the current alliance of transgenderism and radical Islam. While Roberts evokes Noël Coward’s advice to “laugh at everything,” in that particular case it might not really be the best medicine.

In the category of “who knew” should be filed the insight by former U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama that millions of black people “run away from water” and “can’t swim” because of their desperation to maintain the straightened hair they feel (racist) whites expect of them. As Larry Elder notes in Jewish World Review, Obama helpfully used much of a recent podcast to “explain” to “white people” that blacks have naturally curly hair.

John R. Grove commemorates the 50th anniversary of the sinking of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald with a moving meditation on Gordon Lightfoot’s song memorializing the disaster and its 29 forever-lost victims. Lightfoot’s poetry and melody in The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald not only hauntingly convey the tragedy’s essential elements but, Grove writes in Law & Liberty, open a window to the sublime.

In The European Conservative, Jonathon Van Maren explores the case of a pink-haired German female pastor marrying four men from three countries and at least two different religions “in the eyes of God” outside Berlin’s St. Paul the Apostle Church. Writes Van Maren with formidable restraint: “It is a snapshot of cultural collapse.” The union is known as a “polycule” and, some suspect, is aimed at gradually normalizing polygamy.

Victor Davis Hanson in The Epoch Times answers his self-posed question whether Americans are better off since Donald Trump’s inauguration in January. In contrast to the litany of defeat and decline under Joe Biden – like the deadly, costly, bungled bug-out from Afghanistan – Hanson lists a veritable avalanche of Trumpian accomplishments, including regaining control over the southern border, surging energy exports, forging multiple peace agreements, presiding over robust economic growth and rolling back DEI/wokism.

Climate catastrophism suffered a Category 5 event with the recent confessional by Ted Nordhaus, among the world’s foremost prophets of doom, that he had it wrong all along. The models that forecast runaway global warming, Nordhaus writes in The Free Press, assumed simultaneously soaring populations, booming economies and flatlining technological improvement which, Nordhaus has belatedly recognized, simply can’t all occur at the same time.

Dan McCarthy sees clever strategic calculation in Donald Trump’s seemingly haphazard bullying of Latin America. In going relentlessly after drug-funded thugocracies like Venezuela while buttering up – and if need be propping up – friendly leaders like Argentina’s Javier Milei, writes McCarthy in Jewish World Review, Trump is attempting to shape a Latin America that isn’t “forever plagued by cartels, communists and Chinese influence.”

Victor Davis Hanson draws parallels between the current left-wing violence aimed at derailing the Trump Administration’s policies and the bitter, deadly struggle over Kansas Territory before the Civil War. Then, as now, writes Hanson at American Greatness, Democrats and their allies used threats and blood to pursue a goal – making Kansas a slave state – that they couldn’t achieve via the ballot box. Then, it led to 600,000 deaths.

Though widely thought of as focused on waterboarding terrorists or poisoning foreign potentates, it was by smuggling paper that the CIA achieved its most monumental triumph. R.M. Gerecht in a book review for The Washington Free Beacon charts how the late Cold War-era operation to flood Poland with Western books, magazines, printing supplies and audio recordings fatally weakened the country’s Communist dictatorship, setting the stage for the downfall of the entire Soviet empire. Total cost: US$2.7 million.

Ben Cohen notes the upcoming 50-year anniversary of United Nations Resolution 3379, which equated the age-old longing of the Jewish people to return to their ancestral homeland – expressed as Zionism – with the institutionalized racism of apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia. Writing in Jewish News Syndicate, Cohen notes that this “anti-Semitic canard” was secretly fomented by the Soviet Union and accompanied by a push to legitimize “Palestinian” statehood – leading ultimately to Hamas.

Though despised in most Western European capitals, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán may be the man who has met the moment, argues Rod Dreher in The European Conservative. Engineering Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin’s upcoming face-to-face meeting in Budapest is “a diplomatic triumph” for Orbán, argues Dreher, one that might provide the catalyst to finally bring an end to Russia’s calamitous war on Ukraine.

The second Trump Administration is succeeding magnificently in driving DEI/wokist policies and ideology out of the U.S. government and any organization receiving federal funds, writes Roger Kimball at American Greatness. From the FBI cutting ties to the extreme-left Southern Poverty Law Center to newly named Secretary of War Pete Hegseth declaring the U.S. military to be no place for “dudes in dresses”, Kimball proclaims – perhaps a tad prematurely – that DEI in government is dead but just doesn’t know it yet.

Millions were deeply moved when Erika Kirk forgave the assassin of her husband Charlie. Reflecting on the profound meanings of the Jewish Day of Atonement, Jeff Jacoby questions the phenomenon of instantly forgiving heinous crimes. While such acts appear selfless and healing, Jacoby notes in Jewish World Review, Jesus himself warned that “you have the right to pardon only the wrongs ‘your brother’ committed against you.” When the victim was someone else, forgiveness may not be yours to give.

The anonymous proprietor of The Brawl Street Journal Substack writes that the recent appointment to Germany’s Constitutional Court of a follower of Communist revolutionary Antonio Gramsci who believes that nature can hold human rights and that protest movements might supersede elected parliaments as agents of change, plus a recent constitutional amendment imposing specific climate policy goals on elected lawmakers, spell trouble for Europe’s supposedly strongest economy and largest democracy.

In the New York Post, Rich Lowry connects seemingly scattered dots including the recent assassination of Charlie Kirk, political protests, attacks on federal buildings, vandalism of Tesla EVs and dealerships, gunfire directed at federal immigration agents, and relentless vilification of conservatives by leftists (including the Democratic Party’s top leadership) to assemble a thesis that the “resistance” to Donald Trump’s second term comprises a dispersed campaign of domestic terrorism.

Ann Coulter skewers the conventional wisdom that social media cause (rather than reflect) social disorder. Whether it’s newfangled television or crazy rock n’ roll lyrics, Coulter writes on her personal website, “Older generations are always alarmed by whatever new thing young people are doing,” adding this likely dates back to “when cavemen hectored their cave children to stop making dolls out of clay.” Those who today blame social media for creating mayhem, Coulter argues, miss the key point that it is the content of the message, not the medium, that matters most.

Writing in Spiked, Tim Black reviews the falsehoods being peddled by Prime Minister Keir Starmer to rationalize the UK government’s latest campaign to impose digital identification throughout the country. Each previous such scheme, Black notes, was presented as solving the most pressing of the day – and proved a costly boondoggle. Starmer’s current pitch is that digital I.D. will cut down on illegal immigration, which is laughable given his government’s inaction on that topic.

Victor Davis Hanson in Jewish World Review condenses his scenario for Western civilization’s imminent demise into 700 words. The West’s fatal arrogance, Hanson argues, has prevented it from repulsing the four horsemen of its own apocalypse: global warming hysterics, sexually liberalized (and largely childless) lifestyles, unrestricted illegal immigration and a descent into tribalism driven by divisive ideologies like DEI. Despite all that, Hanson also offers the outlines of a solution.

The indestructibly garrulous Garrison Keillor reminds us that as tragic as the world has become, we are still light-years ahead of our fathers and grandfathers. Keillor insists there are many reasons to be happy nowadays, including non-invasive surgery and no more pesky telephone cords. Though Gen Zs be downhearted, the 83-year-old proudly notes he has grown ancient enough to see the advance of progress.

Commenting in The European Conservative, Dorina Molnar wonders if recent threats of trade sanctions against Israel by European Commission (EC) President Ursula von der Leyen will do more damage to the European Goliath than the Israeli David. Israel, Molnar notes, quietly supplies European countries with essential weapons systems – particularly state-of-the-art and battle-tested air-defence systems. Not only Europe but embattled Ukraine, Molnar notes, will suffer if the EC insists on putting ideology ahead of practicality.