By Any Means Necessary

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.

Frank Haviland in The European Conservative decries the UK’s grotesque inversion of criminal enforcement. The constabulary now ignore the real bad guys and “generally come down mighty hard on” victims, Haviland notes. In one recent case, Scottish teen-ager Mayah Sommers was arrested and charged with possessing a hatchet and a knife to defend herself and her sister from the attentions of “Bulgarian family man” Fatos Ali Dumana – actually a self-described “Gypsy gangster” who writes of women as “whores”.

How to beat anti-Semitic socialist Muslim Zohran Mamdani in New York’s next mayoral race? It will not be easy, concludes Spencer Neale in The American Conservative, with a nationally disgraced Democratic ex-governor, an (allegedly) corrupt Democratic/Independent incumbent and perennial Republican loser Curtis Sliwa all vying for the anti-Mamdani vote. They’d better get themselves together: this is one municipal election that’s more important than the national elections of many countries.

Also in The American Conservative, Nora Kenney observes further pushback against the wokist inversion-of-everything in the recently released horror movie Weapons. Director Zach Cregger upends the wokist fashion of valorizing “otherness” (which, hence, also normalized criminality while criminalizing normality). Cregger’s straight, white, male, blue-collar protagonist does so convincingly enough to embolden Kenney to call Weapons part of a “post-woke cultural shift”.

In The European Conservative, Gaetano Masciullo unmasks the oxymoronically named European Media Freedom Act, whose implementation this month is turning out to include comprehensive surveillance powers over journalists while they work and the by-now-familiar Orwellian Newspeak that rationalizes censorship targeting conservatives as being all about combating “misinformation”, “xenophobia” and, of course, “racism”. Masciullo poses the question first asked by the Roman Juvenal: “But who watches the watchmen?”

The response on the left to Wednesday’s horrific mass-shooting in Minnesota of children at prayer by what appears to be a deranged trans “woman” has been to mock grieving survivors and supporters who are now praying for the victims’ souls. Elle Purnell at The Federalist offers a lesson in the meaning, purpose and value of prayer, one that elementary-school children can easily grasp but not, it seems, leading American politicians and media personalities.

Crime waves committed across Europe by “migrants” and authorities’ habit of punishing law-abiding citizens for pushing back are just two crises suggesting Europe’s fate hangs in the balance, asserts Victor Davis Hanson in American Greatness. Add to these debt-bloated governments, unsustainable social spending, feckless foreign policy and economy-choking regulations and, Hanson concludes, Europe’s path is increasingly diverging from that of a reinvigorated America.

A deer left to age out in the woods, explains Sebastian Morello in The European Conservative, loses its teeth and dies in excruciating pain from undigested food, parasites or over-eager scavengers. A quick, clean death from hunting – “stalking” as the Scots call it – is far more merciful. But stalking is itself dying a slow, agonizing death in Great Britain due to the rise of “sentimentalism” – a self-righteous but counterfeit emotion driven by narcissism.

Though widely opposed if not despised – including by many Republicans – the Trump Administration’s trade policy is delivering impressive results, writes Henry Olsen at Commonplace. Tariffs will likely haul in US$360 billion this fiscal year – while recession is nowhere in sight. Growth is strong, wages are rising, unemployment is barely 4 percent (vs. Canada’s 7 percent) and stock markets are setting records. Tariffs, Olsen suggests, could become the new orthodoxy.

In more evidence of the growing EV debacle, the editorial board of the Las Vegas Review-Journal notes how an urgent Biden-era program to place charging stations all over the U.S. burned through US$7.5 billion to build precisely 68 of them. Even after the program was overhauled, the cost remained at US$19.5 million per station. The Review-Journal is, consequently, backing the Trump Administration’s policy to dismantle the entire structure of EV subsidies, tax incentives and mandates.

Don’t shed a tear for the (literally) weeping, wailing executives of the now-defunded and soon-to-shut-down U.S. Corporation for Public Broadcasting, writes Beth Brelje in The Federalist. The outfit that shoved the leftist view on every issue down the throats of credulous viewers, writes Brelje, was paying its executives exorbitant amounts – at times upwards of US$500,000 per year – enough to fund entire radio stations. Hmmm, where have we heard that before?

The U.S., writes Victor Davis Hanson in The Blade of Perseus, is in a counter-revolution whose fate will likely be decided by the 2026 midterm elections and state of the American economy. The flagbearer and instigator-in-chief is, of course, President Donald Trump, whose sweeping and fearless approach to illegal immigration, international trade, the Middle East, DEI/wokism, climate/energy, the federal bureaucracy and other areas aims to overcome 70 years of leftist revolution and Republican Party acquiescence.

Karl Marx, notes Robert Bellafiore at Commonplace, once admitted that capitalism had built wonders greater than the Egyptian pyramids. This sheer power to get things done and make life better, writes Bellafiore in his review of John Cassidy’s Capitalism and its Critics: A History: From the Industrial Revolution to AI, helps explain its uncanny ability to shrug off continuous attacks and recover from its recurring crises.

In another blow to the benign theory of Covid-19’s origins, Judith Miller in City Journal reports that a senior U.S. defence official and bioweapons expert, Robert Kadlec, has concluded the virus was deliberately engineered as part of a Chinese government bioweapons program. Kadlec believes release of the newly created bug from the shoddily-run Wuhan institute was probably accidental. (Article is paywalled at City Journal; above link is to Miller’s blog.)

It took just six years for men working with their hands to build the nearly 3,000-km-long first U.S. transcontinental railway in the 1860s, notes Rich Lowry in Jewish World Review. In Democrat-run 21st century California, US$15 billion and 17 years have been consumed without laying a single mile of track for the state’s high-speed rail line from Los Angeles to San Francisco. The latest cost estimate: US$100 billion.

Following a national referendum last year, the tiny former Yugoslavian republic of Slovenia has taken the first giant step on the road to euthanasia by legalizing medical suicide for the terminally ill. Unlike in Canada, notes Jonathon Van Maren in The European Conservative, Slovenia’s new law is highly restrictive, protecting anyone who actually wants to live, as well as the mentally ill – at least for now.

Those prone to attributing Britain’s rising Jew-hatred to Middle East violence involving Israel should think again, writes Brendan O’Neill in Spiked. The latest trigger for – always-lurking – anti-Semitism, O’Neill shows, comes from the vile alliance between Islamism and progressivism, particularly the DEI ideology that has pervaded the UK’s institutions and, increasingly, penetrated regular bourgeois society.

Donald Trump’s opponents are trying to thwart his agenda using the courts – specifically, via nationwide injunctions that negate whole areas of federal policy, like downsizing government departments. The problem for them, explains Byron York in the Jewish World Review, is that the bureaucracy is an extension of the President’s executive authority under Article II of the Constitution – as the Supreme Court recently reaffirmed.

New York City progressives want to import Vienna’s social housing model to fix the Big Apple’s affordability crisis – and Canadian activists would likely feel the same way. The central European capital has certainly promoted its approach as a global success story. But as Tobias Peter demonstrates in City Journal, Vienna’s 100-year-old experiment is expensive, complicated, prejudicial and increasingly unsustainable – not a model but a cautionary tale.

The 1985 “Schengen” agreement was hailed as the gateway to an eternal utopia of open borders throughout a Europe of 29 countries and 450 million people. Noting the rising number of countries defying EU regulations and restoring national border controls, Lauren Smith in The European Conservative wonders whether the whole Schengen experiment is unravelling under the stresses of uncontrolled illegal migration, crime and social decay. 

For decades Detroit was North America’s poster child for brutal crime, urban decay and corruption. But as Aaron Renn reveals in Commonplace, the Michigan municipality has been rebuilding and even beautifying. Detroit’s crawl back towards proud city-hood began after officials declared bankruptcy in 2013, enabling risk-taking business leaders to resolve the financial crisis, demolish 45,000 vacant eyesore houses and begin anew.  

Americans are increasingly fed up with men who pretend to be women muscling into women’s sports. Caving to mounting pressure, the University of Pennsylvania last week annulled the winning results of transgender swimmer Lia Thomas and restored records and titles to biologically female swimmers. As David Sypher Jr. notes in The Spectator World, this not only vindicates female swimmer Riley Gaines but scores a huge win for women’s sports and overall rationality.

The U.S. must not let down its guard during the triumphant afterglow of its flawlessly executed bombing of Iran’s three key nuclear weaponization facilities, warns Dan McCarthy in Jewish World Review. The loose border policies of the Obama and Biden administrations allowed thousands of unvetted Iranians to enter the U.S. illegally, including an unknown number of “sleeper” agents who even now may be plotting assassinations, terrorism and other mayhem.

People increasingly no longer “turn on the TV” or “watch cable”, they “stream” on their “device”. Which makes big-ticket streaming services like Netflix the leading cultural and even political arbiters of our era, writes Itxu Díaz in The European Conservative. And the uniformly woke and relentlessly left-wing torrent gushing forth to Netflix’s hundreds of millions of adherents, warns Díaz, is brainwashing a generation of young viewers with a deranged anti-Western worldview.

With nearly 1 million illegal immigrants having already self-deported from the U.S. since Donald Trump’s election victory, many affluent Americans are apparently wondering who’ll left be around to mow their lawns. Casie Chalk in The Federalist suggests they start doing the job themselves – and stop looking for cheap labour for innumerable other household chores as well. They’ll not only save money but might, Chalk suggests, find it strengthens their family life to boot.

In Law and Liberty, John Bicknell reviews the influence of Edward Abbey, author of The Monkey Wrench Gang, which advocated “active measures” to sabotage the machinery and works of industrial civilization such as major hydroelectric dam. Despite Abbey’s contradictory and even offensive views – he was openly racist and sexist – his influence was profound, and is still producing devastating echoes in bitter conflicts like pipeline sabotage in British Columbia.

Germany’s new Chancellor Friedrich Merz recently extended his wide-ranging record of duplicity by throwing Israel to the wolves, accusing it and not Hamas of killing civilians and endangering children. It’s the latest betrayal of Israel by the political establishment of a country that was founded with a mandate to help safeguard the Jewish state, notes Sabine Beppler-Spahl in The European Conservative.

In The Federalist, Shawn Fleetwood expresses puzzlement that President Donald Trump has seemingly ditched his vow to begin cancelling and refusing visas for Chinese students due to their rampant spying and theft of intellectual property. Fleetwood frets that Trump may not share Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s view that they’re a profound threat to national security, and instead regards student visas as a mere bargaining chip for a trade deal.