Forget Everything I Said, or Backing Slowly out of the Echo-Chamber

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.

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.