RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/justin-trudeaus-legacy-a-weakened-canada

Justin Trudeau, possibly the worst prime minister in the history of Canada, has resigned. Sort of. He has stepped down as leader of the Liberal Party and won’t run in the next election but will remain at his post until a new leader is chosen. Meantime, Parliament will be prorogued—or discontinued without being dissolved—to avoid the possibility of a successful no-confidence motion, which would surely topple the Trudeau government. The next election is scheduled for October of this year, but in all likelihood it will take place earlier, at some point this spring. So, Canadians will still have to endure another few months of Trudeau—a ham-fisted resignation if there ever was one.

Trudeau’s Liberal Party also seems bound for electoral destruction. All the polls are dire, but some suggest that the defeat will be so thorough that the Liberals may not even win enough seats to be a recognized party. This is a spectacular decline. What makes it even more striking is that Trudeau almost singlehandedly revived the old Liberal Party in 2015 after about a decade of successive defeats, turning a seemingly moribund third-place party into a government. Now the restorer has become the euthanizer. How did it happen?

Trudeau came to power after years of ever larger and increasingly stable Conservative governments under Prime Minister Stephen Harper (2006–2015). Conservatives had been in power before, if rarely, in the twentieth century, but Harper’s party had taken a more ideological and populist turn after an electoral wipe-out in 1993. The renewed Conservative Party was anchored in western Canada, far from the Liberal strongholds of Toronto and Montreal, whose elites had governed Canada for most of the twentieth century. Western Canada’s concerns—agriculture, oil and gas, and other commodities—rose to prominence as never before, and so did a new governing class.

But the old Liberal elite hated them and never saw the new Conservatives as legitimate. The reaction was often hysterical, with some partisans proclaiming that Harper was a more dangerous threat to Canada than ISIS. Trudeau himself captured the Liberal mood when he mused about the possibility of “making Quebec a country” if Canada were genuinely “Stephen Harper’s Canada,” and he insisted on the need to put Quebeckers rather than western Canadians in charge of our “community and socio-democratic agenda,” whatever that meant.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/trudeaus-reign-of-terror-will-likely-stop-short-of-canadas-total-destruction/

At long last, on Monday Justin Trudeau has announced his pending resignation, although it will be awhile before he is actually gone. In declaring his intention to resign, Trudeau prorogued parliament until March 4, which means it will not be in session, but will not be dissolved. During this period, the Liberal Party will select a new leader, after which Trudeau says he will finally depart from the scene. Thus the misrule of this curious man is likely to come to a definitive end reasonably soon, and we can only hope that he doesn’t do too much more damage between now and then.

Trudeau is the embodiment of David Horowitz’s indelible dictum that “inside every progressive is a totalitarian screaming to get out. He himself has been upfront about this. Back in 2013, before he was prime minister, he was asked what country he admired most. Trudeau answered: “You know, there’s a level of admiration I actually have for China because their basic dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime and say ‘we need to go green fastest … we need to start investing in solar.’ I mean, there is a flexibility that I know Stephen Harper must dream about, of having a dictatorship that he can do everything he wanted, that I find quite interesting.”

Then when Fidel Castro died in 2016, Trudeau’s statement gave no hint of the bloodthirstiness and repression of the Communist regime in Cuba. Instead, the vacant and vapid Canadian prime minister was fairly gushing with praise for “Cuba’s longest-serving President.” He declared that “Fidel Castro was a larger than life leader who served his people for almost half a century. A legendary revolutionary and orator, Mr. Castro made significant improvements to the education and healthcare of his island nation.”

Trudeau admitted that Castro was a “controversial figure,” but insisted that “both Mr. Castro’s supporters and detractors recognized his tremendous dedication and love for the Cuban people, who had a deep and lasting affection for ‘el Comandante.’” He said that his family was joining “the people of Cuba today in mourning the loss of this remarkable leader.”

This was not just an ill-considered outpouring of grief for a man Trudeau obviously loved dearly. His praise for China and for Castro have in common an admiration for the authoritarian’s ability to get things done with no regard for the opposition or the give-and-take of the democratic process. China was able to go green and Castro was able to make significant improvements to education and healthcare (in Trudeau’s view, not in real life) because they didn’t have to deal with all the carping and compromise that working with parliaments and voters entails.

https://www.thefp.com/p/muslim-grooming-gangs-cover-up-keir-starmer-elon-musk?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

The serial rape of thousands of English girls went on for many years. Few in power cared. Then Elon Musk started tweeting.

LONDON — The grooming and serial rape of thousands of English girls by men of mostly Pakistani Muslim background over several decades is the biggest peacetime crime in the history of modern Europe. It went on for many years. It is still going on. And there has been no justice for the vast majority of the victims.

British governments, both Conservative and Labour, hoped that they had buried the story after a few symbolic prosecutions in the 2010s. And it looked like they had succeeded—until Elon Musk read some of the court papers and tweeted his disgust and bafflement on X over the new year.

Britain now stands shamed before the world. The public’s suppressed wrath is bubbling to the surface in petitions, calls for a public inquiry, and demands for accountability.

The scandal is already reshaping British politics. It’s not just about the heinous nature of the crimes. It’s that every level of the British system is implicated in the cover-up.

Social workers were intimidated into silence. Local police ignored, excused, and even abetted pedophile rapists across dozens of cities. Senior police and Home Office officials deliberately avoided action in the name of maintaining what they called “community relations.” Local councilors and Members of Parliament rejected pleas for help from the parents of raped children. Charities, NGOs, and Labour MPs accused those who discussed the scandal of racism and Islamophobia. The media mostly ignored or downplayed the biggest story of their lifetimes. Zealous in their incuriosity, much of Britain’s media elite remained barnacled to the bubble of Westminster politics and its self-serving priorities.

They did this to defend a failed model of multiculturalism, and to avoid asking hard questions about failures of immigration policy and assimilation. They did this because they were afraid of being called racist or Islamophobic. They did this because Britain’s traditional class snobbery had fused with the new snobbery of political correctness.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/germany-populist-afd-party-immigration

Elon Musk calls it the “last spark of hope” for Germany. European elites call it the heir to National Socialism. The debate over Germany’s reviled populist party, the Alternative for Germany (Alternativ für Deutschland, or AfD), is worth paying attention to, since it reveals modern Western society’s most fundamental belief structure. That debate is about to heat up further, when Musk holds a live conversation on X with the AfD’s leader. The elites, Musk says, “will lose their minds.”

The Alternative for Germany is a leper in German political life, due to the party’s opposition to Germany’s lax immigration policies. Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, a domestic intelligence agency, has granted itself authority to surveil the party, which it deems a threat to democracy.

Germany’s other political parties have pledged not to cooperate with the AfD. The resulting “firewall” shuts the party out of governing coalitions, no matter how much popular support it enjoys. The AfD is denied the committee chairmanships in the national parliament in Berlin that its numbers would otherwise entitle it to. German courts have almost uniformly rejected the party’s efforts to remove these legal and extralegal barriers to normal participation in political life. The media keep AfD officials off the airwaves. While other political leaders, including far leftists, are regularly quoted in the press and interviewed, AfD representatives are spectral presences, rarely heard or seen on broadcasts or given space in publications.

The problems motivating the AfD’s rise are not spectral, however. Immigration into Germany increased significantly in 2015, when then-Chancellor Angela Merkel famously announced: “Wir schaffen das! [We can handle this!],” in response to the thousands of Syrians then crossing into the country. Twenty-three percent of the German population in 2021 were first- or second-generation immigrants—and that was before the Ukrainian migration. Over 17 percent of the German population are first-generation immigrants, a higher percentage than in the United States, where less than 14 percent of the population were foreign-born in 2022. The burdens on Germany’s social services, criminal-justice system, and housing stock have been enormous. Fifty-five percent of Syrians with at least eight years of German residency were on welfare in 2023, compared with 5 percent of native Germans. More than 60 percent of the people in Germany who depend on government benefits for income are foreign-born or second-generation migrants, according to the Wall Street Journal. The disruption to social cohesion from an unassimilated alien culture is greater still.

Establishment panic over the AfD reached a boiling point in late summer 2024. On August 23, 2024, an illegal Syrian asylum seeker stabbed to death three people attending a “diversity” festival in the western German town of Solingen. The festival commemorated Solingen’s 650th anniversary; it was a telling marker of modern German ideology that the city honored its medieval roots with a paean to “diversity.” Twenty percent of the Solingen population are now foreign-born. No one in the press observed the irony of a “diverse” Solingen resident trying to kill as many of Solingen’s less diverse inhabitants as possible, on the day celebrating his presence in the city.

Elections for the state parliaments of two eastern German states—Thüringen and Sachsen—were scheduled for September 1. The Solingen knifings threatened to boost the AfD’s vote share. And so, the Nazi comparisons poured out. Bodo Ramelow, the minister president of Thüringen and member of the Left party, told public TV station ZDF that he was fighting the “normalization of fascism.” “That is my battle [das ist mein Kampf],” he said. Election signs in Thüringen read: “Whoever votes for AfD is voting for FASCISM! [Wer AfD wählt, wählt FASCHISMUS!].” A female protesting the AfD on the day of the election told ZDF that she was “demonstrating for democracy.” She didn’t want to live in a “Nazi realm,” she said. A journalist in Berlin wrote that the “specter of Nazism continues to haunt Germany.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/tommy-nigel-and-elon/

In cities all over England, so-called grooming gangs – that is, Muslim rape crews – have been in operation for decades, and news about them has made headlines on and off for years. In the last week or two, however, the issue has risen to the surface as never before. “Britain’s grooming gangs scandal is attracting attention,” wrote Charlie Peters of GB News on January 2. “It’s happened before, but now it seems different.” Indeed, Brendan O’Neill said in a recent interview that “a lot of people” in Britain appear to be hearing about the grooming gangs for the first time. How on earth is this possible?

In any event, one reason why the issue has returned to the front burner is that Jess Phillips, Britain’s Safeguarding Minister, has refused to order a government inquiry into child sexual abuse in Oldham, which is part of Greater Manchester. Another reason is that Elon Musk began tweeting (X-ing?) in condemnation of the government inaction on the rape gangs – and in support of the courageous Tommy Robinson, the Luton lad (now age 42) who’s been a target of the British establishment ever since he began blowing the whistle on them many years ago. On January 2, he posted: “Free Tommy Robinson!” It’s Jess Phillips, not Tommy, opined Elon, who should be behind bars. Elon’s tweets about Tommy and the rape gangs “exploded the political discourse in this country,” said British podcaster Carl Benjamin, a supporter of Tommy.

Tommy, as you may know, has been in prison since October. His crimes are as follows. First, in his documentary Silenced, in violation of a court order, he contradicted the official narrative about a young Syrian immigrant who was, as Tommy showed, not a victim but a thug. Second, also in violation of the same court order, he talked about that young immigrant on Jordan Peterson’s podcast, screened Silenced in Trafalgar Square, and posted it online (where it’s accumulated over 150 million views). Third, In supposed violation of the Terrorism Act, he refused to let the police access the contents of his mobile phone, which contained confidential information about his sources. This isn’t Tommy’s first stretch in the hoosegow. The powers that be recognize him as a threat to their power and are determined to bring him down on any pretext they can. As Lavrentiy Beria said, “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.” In short, Tommy is a political prisoner. And Elon understands that.

Elon’s posts about Tommy prompted a range of reactions. Tommy’s supporters were delighted. But many of Tommy’s critics were outraged at what they described as the attempt by a foreigner to interfere in British politics. Winston Marshall (who left the band Mumson & Sons after his public enthusiasm for Andy Ngo’s book about Antifa caused outrage on the left) shot these critics down tidily:

If it’s acceptable for British politicians to kneel for George Floyd, why is it not acceptable for American citizens to tweet about the victims of British rape gangs?

If it’s acceptable for Labour to send 100 staff to the US to campaign for Kamala, why is it not acceptable for American citizens to opine on British politics?

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21270/germany-attack-cover-up

“He [Christmas market attacker Taleb al-Abdulmohsen] himself claimed to be a Wahhabi. He had open contacts with Hamas people, as well as with supporters of IS. He threatened ex-Muslim and secular associations, as well as women who had fled from Saudi Arabia and renounced Islam. The association and the women legally defended themselves against him. He attacked the Central Council of Ex-Muslims as well as me as a member. All the major critics of Islam blocked Taleb because everyone received confused messages and threats. He never directly criticized Islam or its associations. While we protested in front of mosques, he fought us. He also repeatedly defended Saudi Arabia.” — Ali Utlu, German ex-Muslim, X, December 21, 2024.

The German government, it appears, is covering up an Islamist terror attack at a Christmas market as “Islamophobic.” Perhaps the ruling coalition of Social Democrat and Green parties is seeking new votes in next month’s elections; perhaps it is seeking to pretend away its own massive failure at stopping a terrorist about whom the authorities were warned so many times.

Evidently, the German government does not consider disinformation a problem, so long as it is the German government that is doing it.

The German city of Magdeburg was written into the sad history of terrorist attacks by Muslim migrants, when Saudi Arabian terrorist Taleb al-Abdulmohsen drove 200 meters into a crowded Christmas market on December 20, murdering a nine-year-old boy and four women, while wounding more than 200 people, 40 critically.

It has been a quarter of a century since German authorities first identified an Islamist terrorist cell in the country. In 2000, that cell was preparing a terrorist attack on a Christmas market in Strasbourg, France. Since then, and especially after German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s policy of leaving Germany’s borders wide open to Muslim migrants in 2015, Islamist terrorism has been the major security threat in Western Europe, especially in Germany, where Christmas markets have been an especially coveted target. Author and journalist Douglas Murray calls it, “one of the Continent’s newest traditions: the Christmas market terrorist attack.” In December 2016, an Islamist also rammed a vehicle into a Christmas market in Berlin, murdering 12 people and wounding 50.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21273/defeat-iran-regime

Iran’s mullahs would surely love nothing more than to cut a deal with the incoming Trump administration that would enable them to stay in power, build their nuclear weapons and unleash them at a later date.

Bribing adversaries to stop only provides funding, which finances their military so they can attack us later with bigger weapons. That is how North Korea and Iran built their nuclear weapons programs. China’s was built by direct investment: a gift to kill us from Uncle Sam.

Let us please ensure that Iran’s brutal theocratic tyranny will be gone for good. So long as it holds power, there will never be a peaceful future for the Middle East.

Rarely in history does an opportunity arise to confront a brutal regime that has not only oppressed its own population but also destabilized the world by support for terrorism and terrorist allies.

The Iranian regime is such a dictatorship. For more than four decades, this regime has systematically crushed the rights and freedoms of its citizens, and silenced dissent through violence, imprisonment and execution.

Beyond its borders, Iran’s regime has acted as a malignant force, spreading instability by funding and arming proxy groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis, while forming alliances with regimes hostile to the US and the West in regions as far-flung as China and Latin America. The regime’s actions have sown chaos and bloodshed across the globe, leaving a trail of destruction and despair. Now, for the first time in decades, the Iranian regime is at its weakest point, presenting a rare moment of unity for its adversaries to strike decisively to ensure a long-term future of stability and peace.