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April 2025

BOOKS Comments turned off

Treason of the Intellectuals by Julien Benda (Author), David Broder (Translator), Mark Lilla (Foreword)

By on April 22nd, 2025

In an era when intellectual and artistic life is increasingly being distorted by political dogmatism, Julien Benda’s Treason of the Intellectuals is a classic that speaks with a new and extraordinary urgency. Benda’s essay, published by ERIS in a new translation by David Broder, offers an incisive account of interwar Europe that ranges from the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche and Georges Sorel to the activities of Charles Maurras and Benito Mussolini. It also serves, however, as a remarkably timely warning against the seduction of modern intellectuals by tribal loyalties and antipathies.

Rather than detaching themselves from communal ties as their forebears had done, Benda argues that twentieth-century European intellectuals willingly subordinated the disinterested pursuit of truth to the servicing of group interests (particularly the interests of their own nations and social classes). Partisan agendas had a corrosive effect not only on moral and political philosophy, but also on the writing of history and fiction. With its penetrating analyses of nationalism and of the tensions between group identity and intellectual freedom, Treason of the Intellectuals is as necessary a book in the twenty-first century as it was in the twentieth.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, MEDIA Comments turned off

When Pundits go off Half-Cocked Raff Champion

By on April 22nd, 2025

https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/doomed-planet/when-pundits-go-off-half-cocked/

Almost exactly 100 years ago in France, Julian Benda wrote The Treason of the Intellectuals to challenge the intellectuals to cease and desist from stoking the violent political passions that were dividing the Republic. At present public intellectuals in the quality press have the opportunity to set the example for critical thinking about difficult and divisive issues, à la Benda.

Responsible public intellectuals will engage with the signature issues of the time to establish one or more areas of competence where they have well-informed opinions.  They can provide invaluable guidance on those matters because they have access to the best brains in the country to help them to explain and clarify scientific and technical matters to facilitate informed public debate. If they do their homework in their areas of competence they can be taken seriously, although on other topics they can only recycle what they regard as reliable opinions offered by other people.

Paul Kelly is a leading public intellectual on the basis the circulation of The Australian, his books, and the years that he has spent reading, observing and writing about Australian politics. That is his area of competence, as he demonstrated in his appraisal of the prospects for nuclear power. In The Australian (10/11/2021) he described the idea of conservatives winning an election with a promise of nuclear power as “a grand fantasy” because, he argued, it will take years to achieve bipartisan support at the federal and state levels: “It would never be established amid an energy policy war between the Coalition and Labor.”

Contrast that considered opinion with his position on climate change and net zero. He apparently accepts that the science is settled in favour of warming alarmism despite the empirical evidence that the warming in modern times has been unequivocally beneficial and that we are still short of the temperature during the Roman warm period, which was even more favourable for life on earth.

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HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Is the Jihadist Trojan Horse Winning? By Eileen F. Toplansky

By on April 22nd, 2025

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/04/is_the_jihadist_trojan_horse_winning.html

Thirteen years ago, Daniel Greenfield pointed out that

Murfreesboro, a city in the heart of Tennessee, and, Marseille, France’s second-largest city and its largest city on the Mediterranean coast, have few things in common. The two cities are separated by nearly 5,000 miles, and by equally wide divisions of language and culture. And yet Murfreesboro and Marseille are connected by a common challenge. Both cities have struggled against the creeping rise of the mega mosques.

The mega mosque business is booming around the world. The Marseille mega mosque has a proposed capacity of 7,000 seats which would make it the largest mosque in France, overshadowing the Ervy mosque which has a mere 5,000 seats. Both of these French mega mosques would have been dwarfed by a proposed London mega mosque with 12,000 seats and usability targets as high as 40,000. If the London mosque is ever built, it will dominate the Mosque of Rome, currently the most mega of all the mega mosques of Western Europe.

At that time, Eric Allen Bell questioned why it was such a big deal “that a Muslim community [was] simply trying to build a house of worship.”  But Bell did wonder “why … a 53,000 square foot mega mosque” was needed for 250-plus Muslim families living in the area at that time.  And, he asked, “where is all this money coming from?” 

Most puzzling, why is it that after the horrific 9-11 attacks, mosque construction in America has nearly doubled?

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ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Ivory Tower Hypocrite: The University of Pennsylvania Anti-Semites welcome on campus; Professor Amy Wax gets suspended. by Sara Dogan

By on April 22nd, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/ivory-tower-hypocrite-the-university-of-pennsylvania/

When Former University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill was grilled by Congress in the spring of 2024 over pro-Hamas demonstrations and calls for the genocide of the Jews on her campus, she insisted that protecting free speech was a top priority. Magill was blatantly lying. Recent events reveal that the University of Pennsylvania has enforced radically different standards on free expression, depending on who is doing the speaking.

Even before Hamas’s October 7th massacre made pro-Hamas rallies a daily feature of campus life across the nation, Penn demonstrated an extreme tolerance for speech promoting Jew hatred. In September of 2023, the campus played host to the Palestine Writes Literature Festival, an event sponsored by numerous university departments and centers including the Middle East Center, the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, the Department of Cinema & Media Studies, and the Wolf Humanities Center.

Featured speakers at the event included Roger Waters, of the band Pink Floyd, a notorious anti-Semite, who has a penchant for dressing in imitation Nazi garb during performances. Another highlighted speaker was former CNN contributor Marc Lamont Hill, whose Jew hatred proved too much even for the legacy media. Lamont Hill was fired by CNN after he endorsed the genocidal statement “Free Palestine, from the River to the Sea” in a speech at the United Nations.

The festival’s co-chair, Susan Abulhawa, is a blatant Hamas sympathizer. Following a terrorist shooting outside a synagogue in Jerusalem, Abulhawa, rather than condemning the violence against civilians, sought to justify it. “Every Israeli, whether in a synagogue, a checkpoint, a settlement, or shopping mall is a colonizer who came from foreign lands and kicked out the native inhabitants,” she wrote. “They all serve in the racist colonial military. The whole country is one big militarized tumor.”

Given the line-up of pro-Hamas speakers and organizers, the festival unsurprisingly devolved into an open forum of Jew hatred. As the American Jewish Committee reported, “The festival’s inaugural event includes a screening of the film Farha, which includes a number of toxic antisemitic tropes, including a modern retelling of the blood libel trope that casts Jews as vicious, bloodthirsty, and cruel. The film is a distortive piece of fiction, yet it is often treated as evidence of extreme, unprovoked Israeli cruelty towards innocent Palestinians during Israel’s War of Independence.”

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

A Great Replacement – and a Great Disgrace Britain bans another truth-teller. Bruce Bawer

By on April 22nd, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-great-replacement-and-a-great-disgrace/

It’s said that one reason why the British government is so reluctant to address the grooming-gangs horror, so hesitant to cut down on Islamic immigration, and so incapable of expelling even the most dangerous Muslim criminals, is that the government itself has been heavily infiltrated by Muslims. I’m not just talking about the people in high-profile posts, such as Shabana Mahmood, Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice; Humza Yousaf, First Minister of Scotland; Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London; the dozens of Muslims in Parliament; or the Muslim mayors of Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffield, Blackburn, Oxford, Luton, Oldham, and Rochdale, among other cities. I’m also talking about Muslims in the Civil Service and Home Office, in the upper echelons of the police services, Crown Prosecution Services, and other such agencies. And let’s not forget the estimable Sir Hamid Patel, who just last month was named chair of the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (Ofsted).

At first I was reluctant to believe that there are quite so many British Muslims in positions of power as some people maintain. Then something like the following happens, and it seems a hell of a lot easier to believe.

What happened is this: Renaud Camus, the 78-year-old French philosopher, author, and intellectual, was banned from entering the UK. Who, you may ask, is Renaud Camus? Well, back when the world was young, Camus was what the French call a ’68-er – a radical on the barricades, the Gallic equivalent of an American hippie, a bookish lad playing at revolution. He was also a leading figure in France’s gay-rights movement. His 1979 novel Tricks, a chronicle of intimate same-sex liaisons, was a bestseller and a critical sensation. The critic Roland Barthes gave it his imprimatur. Gore Vidal praised it in the New York Review of Books.

But no, Camus isn’t being kept out of Britain because of any of that. Tricks, and the civil unrest of May 1968, are, after all, long ago and far away. Nor is Camus (no relation, by the way, to Albert Camus, the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Stranger and The Plague) being punished for having been an active member of the Socialist Party in the 1970s and 80s. How many French intellectuals, after all, weren’t socialists in the 1970s and 80s? Nor is Camus – a man of wide and deep learning – being banned for having accumulated more diplomas than you can fit on a single wall, including degrees in French literature, philosophy, political science, and the history of law.

No, Camus’s offense is having published the 2011 book Le Grand Remplacement (The Great Replacement), which warned that Europe was undergoing, as the title put it, a great replacement – a massive influx of non-Western immigrants who, owing to early marriages and high reproductive rates, were gradually taking the place of native Europeans who were marrying late, if at all, and, in most cases, having no more than one or two children.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Do Elite Universities Really Wish to Fight the Federal Government? Elite universities push for federal funding while ignoring legal and ethical obligations, fueling public distrust as they prioritize ideology over academic rigor and free speech. By Victor Davis Hanson

By on April 22nd, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/04/21/do-elite-universities-really-wish-to-fight-the-federal-government/

Harvard has refused to accept the orders of a Trump administration commission concerning its chronic problems with anti-Semitism, campus violence, and racial tribalism, bias, and segregation.

Yet, unlike some conservative campuses that distrust an overbearing Washington, Harvard and most elite schools like it want it both ways. They do as they please on their own turf and yet still demand that the taxpayers send them multibillion-dollar checks in addition to their multibillion-dollar private incomes.

Aside from the issues of autonomy and free expression, there are lots of campus practices that higher education would prefer were not widely known to the public.

But soon they will be, and thus will become sources of public anger. Perhaps envision elite private colleges as mossy rocks, which seem outwardly picturesque—until you turn them over and see what crawls beneath.

So, if there are protracted standoffs, our elite campuses will be hard-pressed to defend the indefensible. This effort will be difficult because public confidence in higher education has already plummeted to historic lows in the most recent polls.

In Amerispeak public surveys, those expressing very little confidence or none at all in higher education have soared to about 30 percent of respondents, while those polling only “some” confidence rose to 40%.

Polls show that less than a third of Americans have quite a lot of confidence in our college campuses.

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RELIGION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The tragedy of Pope Francis How this ‘instrument of God’ too often became an instrument of the global elites. Brendan O’Neill

By on April 22nd, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/04/21/the-tragedy-of-pope-francis/

Pope Francis is dead. The 266th Bishop of Rome passed this morning at 7.35am. He was the first Latin American and the first Jesuit to occupy the papacy. It is a testament to his tenacity in the face of illness that he managed to bid Happy Easter to thousands of worshippers in St Peter’s Square yesterday, just hours before he ‘returned to the House of the Father’, as the Vatican described it. Yet for all of Francis’s strength of will, his 12-year-long pontificate was ultimately a tragic one. Rome’s ‘instrument of God’ too often let himself be an instrument of the global elites, and both faith and politics suffered as a consequence.

He was born Jorge Bergoglio in Buenos Aires in 1936, the son of Italian immigrants who had journeyed to Argentina to escape Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship. There’s sweet historical music in the fact that their son later returned to Italy to take up the holiest office in Catholicism: he was elected pope in 2013 following the resignation of Benedict XVI. He sought to bring to the Vatican the virtues he’d embraced as Bishop of Buenos Aires: love for the poor and marginalised. But he was haunted his whole life by accusations that he had abetted the military dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983. He was head of Argentina’s Jesuit Order back then, and the order backed the junta.

This is the tragedy of Francis: having, in part, been an instrument of the mercenary rulers of Argentina, he later let himself be an instrument for the equally mercenary if not quite as tyrannical influencers of the cultural establishment. In the eyes of the Conclave that elected him, Francis’s pontificate would be a ‘corrective’ to that of Benedict XVI. Where Benedict had been a traditionalist, Francis would be a reformer. Where Benedict was fiercely intellectual, Francis would be humble. Where Benedict waged ceaseless war on the ‘dictatorship of relativism’, on that cursed ideological cult that recognises ‘nothing as definitive’, Francis famously said in response to a query about gay men serving as priests: ‘Who am I to judge?’

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MEDIA Comments turned off

Larry David skewers Bill Maher-Trump meeting in satirical Hitler essay Brendan Morrow

By on April 22nd, 2025

https://www.aol.com/larry-david-skewers-bill-maher-185528885.html

Larry David doesn’t sound happy about Bill Maher’s dinner with President Donald Trump.

The “Curb Your Enthusiasm” star, 77, published a satirical essay in The New York Times on April 21 that appeared to be a response to Maher’s recent meeting with the president at the White House.

USA TODAY has reached out to representatives for Maher and David for comment.

The fictional piece was written from the perspective of a person who had dinner with Adolf Hitler in 1939 and came away impressed that the Nazi leader was so personable, despite having been a “vocal critic of his on the radio from the beginning.”

David, who is Jewish, never mentioned Maher or Trump in the article, but the language he used closely mirrored the way the “Real Time” host spoke about his dinner with Trump.

“I found the whole thing quite disarming,” David’s essay read. “I joked that I was surprised to see him in a tan suit because if he wore that out, it would be perceived as un-Führer-like. That amused him to no end, and I realized I’d never seen him laugh before. Suddenly he seemed so human.”

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

No Due Process For Illegal Regulations  Steve Milloy

By on April 22nd, 2025

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/04/21/no-due-process-for-illegal-regulations/

As other opponents of the climate hoax do, I eagerly await the Trump administration’s termination of the Environmental Protection Agency’s so-called endangerment finding (EF). I had imagined that the reversal would be accomplished over the course of at least a year and probably more through the conventional administrative process of notice-and-public-comment. But things may get much more exciting, much more quickly. 

Some brief history is in order. The EF is a December 2009 determination by the Obama EPA that emissions of greenhouse gases harm the public health and welfare. Since that time, the EF has been the factual and scientific foundation of virtually all climate activity undertaken by the federal government.  

The EF was made possible by a combination of scheming by the Clinton EPA, bungling by the Bush EPA, and judicial activism resulting in the 5-4 2007 Supreme Court decision in Massachusetts v. EPA. The Court ruled that EPA may, but was not required to, regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. This decision was and remains controversial because Congress had never authorized EPA to regulate greenhouse gases.  

The legendary late Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., a believer in global warming but a harsh critic of EPA, thought that he and his fellow Clean Air Act co-authors had made it clear that EPA was not authorized to regulate greenhouse gases. Dingell said that they never imagined the Court would be so “stupid” as to imagine otherwise. But it was and so here we are. 

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

A Tale Of Two Presidents’ Deportation Records

By on April 22nd, 2025

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/04/22/a-tale-of-two-presidents-deportation-records/

With their party dragging itself through an existential struggle, Democrats, with of course help from the media, have made the president’s illegal immigrant deportations their raison de etre. They’ve turned to tantrum-laced political theater and seasoned it with a mountain of hypocrisy.

This year’s George Floyd (or Michael Brown) for the Democrats is Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the El Salvadoran and alleged MS-13 gang member who was sent back to his home country. His case, says the Associated Press, is for Democrats “about fundamental American ideals — due process, following court orders, preventing government overreach.”

Democratic Rep. Adriano Espaillat, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, was speaking, even if unofficially, for the party and the media that does the party’s dirty work when he said in regard to the administration’s deportation policy, that “due process and separation of powers are matters of principle” and “without due process for all, we are all in danger.”

It’s blatantly obvious that Democrats “desperately want to neuter the Trump administration’s right to remove those who have come here illegally, including those who belong to foreign gangs, or commit serious felonies.”

Where were the Democrats and the media when Barack Obama was deporting more than 5 million (including both formal removals and returns), many – maybe even a majority – of whom didn’t get their “day in court”? They were around, but not much was said, certainly not to the level of screeching we’re hearing today. There was no rancor, no childish grandstanding, no rallies on behalf of the deported.

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