Institutional Betrayal

Writing in The European Conservative, Íris Erlingsdóttir explains why Iceland recently rejected an invitation to discuss joining the European Union. “Why not look? Why not listen?” she asks. “Icelanders’ answer was a resounding Nei.” With an 82 percent turnout, the frosty island nation of 400,000 people voted 52.8 percent against even talking about hooking up with the EU’s 450 million. Among the reasons was protecting the country’s hard-won 200-nautical-mile fishing limit for its vital cod fishery. For more on the sanctity of borders, see this C2C article.

John Shjarback, writing in the conservative-minded City Journal, offers a contrarian’s take on Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR). While admitting many legitimate fears about the rise of the surveillance state, he argues that fighting a troublesome rise in car thefts is a valid reason for allowing police access to this technology. “Singling out ALPR as Big Brother makes little sense,” he reports, arguing privacy can be better protected through greater regulation rather than an outright ban. For more on road surveillance, see this C2C article.

The makers of Trix and Lucky Charms recently promised to remove synthetic dyes from their products, notes Kevin Roberts in The American Mind. “Nobody forced them,” he observes. “They read the room.” And the elephant in that room is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a Trump cabinet member and ringmaster of the “Make America Healthy Again” crusade. Kennedy’s Herculean tasks include battling entrenched interests while redirecting a nation that is disproportionately fat, out of shape, chronically ill and drug-dependent.

The movement to restore beauty in public architecture is gaining surprising adherents beyond just conservatives, notes Paul Shakeshaft in City Journal. While deciding whether a new design meets the beauty test is guaranteed to remain contentious, Shakeshaft welcomes the recognition that it should be a key criterion. As he puts it: “We don’t need to arrive at a metaphysical consensus over the definition of beauty to reestablish its place in our public life.”

Although the Palestinian Authority enjoys an array of cultural departments and programs, A.J. Caschetta in Jewish World Review finds that all of it – art, education, literature, poetry, music, education and film – is oriented to two goals: the vilification of Jews and the destruction of Israel. Caschetta notes this is in sharp contrast to Arab and Muslim traditions, which include myriad aesthetically normal cultural works. Palestinianism, Caschetta finds, is “a very sick culture”, driven by resentment and fuelled by hate.

Spiked’s Matt Ridley details Anthony Fauci’s “public-sector version of insider trading.” Subpoenaed by the U.S. Senate to “discuss” the origin of Covid-19, the longest-serving and highest-paid U.S. bureaucrat instead invoked the Fifth Amendment (protecting against self-incrimination) some 111 times. Strange; he’d been pardoned by President Joe Biden. Nevertheless, it’s clear Fauci lied to the American people about nearly everything – starting with Covid’s true origins in the Wuhan lab. Further, his bizarre diary (saved to a government computer) details his “nauseating narcissism and gobsmacking greed,” says Ridley, and shows he cared more about his own fame than about ailing Americans.

The invasion of Spain’s Ceuta enclave by 60,000 “mostly young military-age men” from Morocco is a dire warning for America, warns The Federalist’s John Daniel Davidson. Comparing this instance of “hybrid warfare” to the open-borders policy of the Biden Administration, Davidson finds the latter even worse. Unlike the Moroccan regime, which may simply want more land, the U.S. Democrats in welcoming 12 million illegal immigrants were operating “on behalf of the Global South” and “effectively launched a foreign invasion…to wrest control of the country from its native inhabitants.”

Benjamin Kerstein, writing for Jewish News Syndicate, notes how many anti-Semites “see themselves as hapless victims of Jew[ish] oppression.” Not since Hitler, who blamed them for all Germany’s problems, have we seen such rampantly self-sympathizing Jew-hatred. These “weeping antisemites,” Kerstein notes, have no time to discuss events in Jewish history – the centuries of persecution, the need for a sovereign homeland for protection – but plenty to brag how compassionate and kind they themselves are. Kerstein ain’t buying it.

Íris Erlingsdóttir shines a light on the world’s first wholly feminized state. Women, she writes in The European Conservative, run everything in Iceland: “the presidency, the prime minister’s office…[the] national state church…schools, municipalities, police…newsrooms and [the] ever-expanding public bureaucracy.” As for the men, Erlingsdóttir observes, they describe themselves ruefully as (bad-taste alert) “pussy-whipped.”

In Spiked, James Dixon “correlates” the emptiness of progressivism with Millennials’ and Gen Zs’ gathering quest for something spiritual to defy the nihilism and alleviate the loneliness of tech-driven 21st-century society. And, he finds, they increasingly appear to be filling the void through Christianity. Dixon also observes a correlation in those generations between Christian belief and conservatism.

The formerly-pseudonymous Raw Egg Nationalist (Charles Cornish-Dale) in American Greatness examines the evidence that the accused murderer of former UK Conservative cabinet member, prominent actress/pundit, staunch traditionalist and senior Reform Party member Ann Widdecombe is not a tragically inept burglar but a hardcore leftist – and probably long intent on harming British conservatives. Cornish-Dale also reaches an unsettling (and, to many, no doubt offensive) conclusion: leftist radicals twisted by hatred tend to be plain ugly. Make of that what you will.

Brendan O’Neill in Spiked enthuses that Brexit is superior to just about anything else in the world. “There should be street parties” on the 10th anniversary of the popular vote to withdraw from the EU, he writes. “Let the bells peal for that momentous day when in our millions we said No to globalism.” The continuing surfeit of saboteurs and naysayers among Britain’s “idiot elites”, O’Neill snorts, are gripped by Brexit Derangement Syndrome.

Long a cliché of comprehensive civic failure, New Orleans is emerging as an improbable guiding light for restoring a broken school system and raising kids to nation-leading performance. How? As Paul Vallas explains in City Journal, by emphasizing charter schools and opening the system to parental choice, sending kids flooding to the best schools and forcing the rest to compete. As Vallas quips, “New Orleans demonstrates that children benefit most when adults lose the power to preserve failure.”

Mario Laghos in The European Conservative describes a terrifying phenomenon straight out of sci-fi: the UK government’s “National Risk Unit” that, following violent crimes, terrorist attacks or other atrocities, deploys ready-made “recovery programmes” that channel victims’ responses into formless mourning and stage seemingly spontaneous “inter-faith vigils” – complete with pre-written signs and fake mourners. It’s all aimed at suppressing genuine human feelings like righteous anger and minimizing punishment of actual criminals.

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.”