RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/02/07/if-you-genuinely-think-trump-is-a-fascist-go-and-have-a-lie-down/

This is an edited version of a speech that was delivered at the Cambridge Union on February 6 opposing the motion, ‘This house believes Donald Trump is a 21st-century fascist’.

Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Donald Trump. Il Duce, der Führer, The Donald. The Roman salute, the Sieg Heil, the YMCA dance. The comparison is so absurd it practically debunks itself.

Anyone who genuinely thinks that Trump’s America – whatever else you might think of the man or his policies – can be mentioned in the same breath as fascist Italy or Nazi Germany needs to get a grip.

Because let’s be clear about what we are talking about here. Fascism, and especially its Nazi incarnation, was an evil the like of which the world had never seen before. Or, thankfully, since.

Totalitarian control. Messianic dictatorship. A cult of racial superiority. Paramilitaries crushing the left at home. A Darwinian military struggle for supremacy abroad. The worship of war and violence. The mechanised attempt to murder all of Europe’s Jews.

If this sounds anything like America in 2025 to you, then I suggest you leave here right now and go and have a nice, long lie down.

Trump is many things. He’s a right-wing populist. He’s a trenchant opponent of illegal and mass migration. He’s a culture warrior. He can also be a thin-skinned, occasionally conspiratorial, blowhard.

But try as I might, I am struggling to find the extermination camps or the goose-stepping gunmen killing with impunity. Perhaps my colleagues on the other side can enlighten me.

I almost feel sorry for the speakers for the proposition. It must be exhausting – petrifying even – to see fascism everywhere. To see everyone who disagrees with you, about immigration or gender or whatever, as literally Hitler. I’m amazed you can sleep at night.

http://Douglas Murrayhttps://thespectator.com/topic/will-britain-follow-americas-lead-on-aid/

The new administration in Washington has somewhat startled its critics by issuing a blizzard of executive orders during its opening weeks in office. So far the reaction from the American left might be summed up by the sentiment: “That’s not fair — it’s only us that are allowed to do things when we are in power.”

The American left are in a particular funk about the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — as though railing against the proposed reduction of federal spending and reduction of the American deficit is a natural vote-winner. But good news does just keep on coming. On Monday, Elon Musk said that President Donald Trump had agreed to shutter USAID — the US government money spigot that sprays money around the world, much of it to people who hate America.

Like Britain’s Department for International Development, the British Council and others, it is one of those entities which might just justify itself if it actually promoted the values of the donor country. But all these organizations were long ago taken over by insane people who hate the taxpayers that give them their money and think the best way for a nation to act in the twenty-first century is as a sort of large NGO.

This week, various White House spokesmen had fun pointing out some recent projects which might not have been the best use of US taxpayer dollars: $1.5 million to “advance diversity, equity and inclusion in Serbia’s workplaces and business communities;” $47,000 to fund a “transgender opera” in Colombia; $2 million for sex changes in Guatemala. And hundreds of millions of dollars to provide better irrigation systems for Afghan poppy-growing projects as well as hundreds of thousands of meals for al Qaeda-related terrorists in Syria. It is one thing to actually feed your enemies, or fund their illegal drugs trade, but it might be even worse to go around the world paying people to display the worst woke excesses which took over America and most of the rest of the West in the past decade.

It reminds me of that classic from some years ago, when American “educators” were paid to introduce Afghan women to conceptual art, including Marcel Duchamp’s famous urinal. The Afghan women in the class (caught on video) giggled as this poor western chump tried to get them up to speed on the twentieth century. You could see on their faces what they were thinking: if this is the crap the West is going to push on us, maybe our husbands were right about the western infidel after all. It was, as many a wag said at the time, literally money down the toilet.

https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/america/farewell-america-hello-victorias-swamp/

“It almost catches in the throat to admit the prospect of life once more in Melbourne is a downer. But here I am, booked in 48 hours to leave a country where the things of which conservatives dreamed but never hoped to see are being fulfilled by a Trump administration committed to refurbishing free speech and property rights, the twin pillars on which Western democracy rests and depends.

Instead, it will be Jew-haters on parade, a politicised police force, courts packed with Labor mates and an opposition more passionate about its intramural party feuds and lawsuits than rescuing Victoria from debt, corruption and incompetence.:

It would be an exaggeration, although only a small one, to say the US bathes right now in the sunny optimism of another ‘morning in America’ like the one Ronald Reagan brought to a country sick half to death of Jimmy Carter, but by several handy measures the Second Age of Trump is certainly off to a spirited start. Republicans are dancing, literally, as are quarterbacks and prize fighters, and from the stunned Left there have been no outbreaks worth noting of the reflex to riot and protest. They’re whipped and they know it, those aggrieved intersectionalists, so unsettled by the loss of House, Senate and Oval Office that the instinct to fill the streets with public nuisances is for the moment in abeyance. But they know what’s coming. Trump’s proposed cabinet of slashers, heretics, critics, crusaders, protectionists, free-market libertarians and assorted silicon smarties is a proclamation of intent to gore the Left’s most sacred cows, a restoration of the First Amendment’s right to free speech high on that to-do list.

All of which makes it very hard to be leaving the United States, especially when the destination is Melbourne, where my US election year ends next week at Tullamarine. It’s a dismal thought. Years ago, my friend Imre Salusinszky warned that the Australia of memory and imagination might not match the fact of a society changed deeply over the decades I had spent in New York. It was hard to believe. Whenever I’d flown home, the holidaying visitor to an overgrown country town by the Yarra, everything was as it should be — the easiness of life under a big blue sky, the footy, great food,  cheap golf, magpies instead of sirens, zinc creme and the Boxing Day Test. But Imre was proven right when I ignored his caution and came home for good. Things had changed and not for the better. A welter of Labor victories, broken only by the limp and hapless Baillieu years, saddled the state with debt and an authoritarian nannyism that grew more assertive and obnoxious year by year. But it was the Covid madness that did it for me, put pay to any last delusion that Victoria, its once lovely capital and the state’s most vital institutions were not in some way rotting before our eyes.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/the-u-s-a/trump-redux-defeating-identity-despots/

Donald Trump’s victory on November 5 was more than just a defeat for his hapless opponent. It was a defeat for the Democrat powerbrokers who foisted Kamala Harris on the American public without the former senator from California attaining a single party delegate during this year’s primary season (or, for that matter, in 2019-20). It was, similarly, a defeat for the mass media, which reconfigured her as “the voice of a new generation” once she became the Democrats’ presidential nominee, despite deriding her performance as vice-president over the previous three and a half years. Finally, and most importantly, November 5 marks the day Americans rejected the despotism of Obama-style identity politics.

Leading Democrats are now arguing over whether to blame Joe Biden or Harris for the Democrats’ worst result in a presidential election since 1988, including the loss of all seven battleground states. The Biden camp points out that Biden won six of those states in 2020 and could have hardly done worse than Harris this time. But that argument does not hold up in the light of Biden’s abysmal performance in his televised debate with Trump. Old Joe was on target to do as badly as Harris did, or worse. More than 75 per cent of American voters believed their country was on the wrong track—inflation, a doubling of the price of petrol, soaring mortgage rates, 10 to 20 million unvetted immigrants pouring across the southern border, foreign wars, boys in girls’ sports, and so on were affecting the national mood. Biden was not the man to turn things around. Not only was his administration responsible for many or all of these problems, but in the June 27 debate, Trump exposed Biden’s serious cognitive decline for all the world to see; not even the Democrat powerbrokers and their allies in the mainstream media could hide it any longer.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/editors-column/the-fight-for-free-speech/

“The taboo against telling the truth is what protects the woke establishment. Trump has been derided as everything from a boor and a buffoon to a fascist. Yet it was he, not his preening critics, who observed, “If we don’t have free speech, then we just don’t have a free country. If this most fundamental right is allowed to perish, then the rest of our rights and liberties will topple just like dominos one by one.” Amen to that. And merry Christmas, happy Hanukah, and happy holidays to all.”

The attack on free speech is one of the most disturbing manifestations of the “woke mind virus” which has captured ruling elites in the West. Donald Trump’s re-election is its most encouraging rebuttal. The historic size of Trump’s victory is evidence that we have, at last, passed “peak woke”. The lamentations and gnashing of teeth of America’s left liberals is, one hopes, its wake.

At the top of the president-elect’s to-do list he says is ending the “censorship cartel … that has arisen under the false guise of tackling so-called ‘mis-’ and ‘dis-information’” driven by a “sinister group of Deep State bureaucrats, Silicon Valley tyrants, left-wing activists, and depraved corporate news media … conspiring to manipulate and silence the American people” by suppressing “vital information on everything from elections to public health”.

The good news is that Trump’s proposed legislation to protect free speech in America will hamper Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s attempts to censor social media in Australia.It follows a pushback on the Starmer Labour government’s attack on freedom of speech in the UK. Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson’s attempt to quietly throttle the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act has been condemned by more than 600 academics, writers, and public intellectuals including Stephen Fry, Ian McEwan, historian Tom Holland, Lady Antonia Fraser, and former Poet Laureate Sir ­Andrew Motion. While they might have their political differences, they were united in condemning the government for not protecting ­“humane and liberal values” or opposing “cancel culture” in British universities.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21156/taiwan-ukraine-survival

[T[he United States has an obligation to defend Ukraine — and it is definitely in its interest to do so.

In the Budapest Memorandum, the three parties [the US, the UK and Russia] made six pledges to the former Soviet republic, the most important of which was “their commitment to Ukraine, in accordance with the principles of the CSCE Final Act, to respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine.”

“[W]hen negotiating the security assurances, U.S. officials told their Ukrainian counterparts that, were Russia to violate them, the United States would take a strong interest and respond.” — Steven Pifer, former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine.

If Russia keeps the territory it has seized — certainly if it grabs even more — countries will believe that American promises to defend them are worthless and will begin building a nuclear deterrent of their own.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, after all, will not stop there, just as he did not stop after breaking apart Georgia in 2008 or after seizing Crimea in 2014. “If Ukraine falls, Poland, the Baltic republics and other NATO member states will face existential threats,” Greg Scarlatoiu, president of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, told this publication. Then, the U.S. and its NATO partners will be even more stretched — and less able to defend Taiwan — than they are now.

When Chinese leaders saw Washington’s failure to act, they soon moved against Second Thomas Shoal and other Philippine reefs in the South China Sea, went after Japan’s islets in the East China Sea, and started reclaiming and militarizing features in the Spratly Island chain. Obama and Biden legitimized the worst elements in the Chinese political system by showing everybody else that aggression worked.

The best way to stop China from attacking Taiwan is to defeat its proxies, especially Russia in Europe.

As Tsai Ing-wen, who stepped down as Taiwan’s president in May, said on November 23, “A Ukrainian victory will serve as the most effective deterrence against future aggression.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-i-c-c-should-be-d-o-a/

The International Court of Justice, one of the many multinational institutions that comprise the “rules-based international order,” issued arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and a Hamas leader who was killed in July.

This geopolitical virtue signaling reminds us once again that the West’s feckless foreign policy idealism is bankrupt morally, intellectually, and practically––the latter except for the enemies of Western principles and interests. Our recent transformational election should usher that failed idealism into the dustbin of history.

First, the ICC exists by dint of a multinational treaty, and has jurisdiction only over those participating states. So how does Hamas, a terrorist gang to whom Israel handed the Gaza Strip in 2005, fall under the ICC’s jurisdiction? And on behalf of what “state” and government did the ICC started this litigation in the first place? One the court invented, a “State of Palestine.” As the Wall Street Journal explains, “It then deems the state’s borders to include Gaza and lets the Palestinian Authority sign for the territory Hamas has controlled since 2007. International ‘law’ is malleable when it targets Israel.

Next, the crimes alleged by the court are blatant lies. Israel is not inflicting a genocide on the Palestinian Arabs, an utterly shameless lie given that Hamas and other terrorists have explicitly called for genocide against Israeli “from the river to the sea.” No more credible is the accusation that Israel is “intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population.” In fact, rather than a wanton disregard for civilian lives, no army in history fighting a guerilla war among civilians has ever shown such concern for the lives of non-combatants that Israel has.

Indeed, as the Journal emphasized in March, “Israel doesn’t need prompting to provide humanitarian aid or to act with caution. According to retired British Col. Richard Kemp, the average combatant-to-civilian death ratio in Gaza is about 1 to 1.5. This is astonishing since, according to the United Nations, the average combatant-to-civilian death ratio in urban warfare has been 1 to 9.”

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/08/05/dont-let-free-speech-be-a-victim-of-these-riots/

Here comes the crackdown. After days of rioting and disorder across England, Sir Keir Starmer has vowed to get tough – and not just on those criminal and far-right elements directly involved in the despicable violence that followed the horrendous murder of three young girls in Southport last Monday. The thuggish and racist behaviour of the few has rapidly become a pretext for constraining the liberties of the many.

The UK prime minister, in two Downing Street press conferences last week, unveiled a suite of proposals to try to quell the rioting. He vowed to impose criminal-behaviour orders on certain agitators. He threatened to roll out facial-recognition software and AI to help track people’s movements. Most striking of all, he damned the supposedly malign influence of ‘large social-media firms and those who run them’, and demanded that they get a firmer grip on the posting of misinformation. He also warned that there would be consequences for those who ‘whip up’ disorder by spreading rumours or speculation online.

The home secretary, Yvette Cooper, went further this morning on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. She declared social-media companies to be responsible for both the ‘shocking misinformation that has escalated’ the riots, as well as ‘the deliberate organisation of violence’ on these platforms.

It is entirely possible to loathe the actions of these rioters, while also being alarmed by the government’s response and its implications for free speech. Any crackdown on so-called misinformation, or even on the ‘whipping up of hatred’, is not going to be confined to those who are directly participating in or inciting violence. It will inevitably be wielded against dissenting views more broadly. This is always what happens.