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How the ‘hate speech’ conceit fuels political violence Charlie Kirk was killed by a left that feels entitled to silence its enemies, by any means necessary. Heather MacDonald

Posted By on October 11th, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/10/11/how-the-hate-speech-conceit-fuels-political-violence/

American conservatives have experienced a range of emotions in recent years, starting with amazement – amazement at the hypocrisy of the left. How many times have we heard that US president Donald Trump’s attempts to reform universities threaten academic freedom? Many of the people making this accusation have run professors out of town for dissenting from campus orthodoxies, whether regarding ‘systemic racism’ or climate change. These new-found free-speech crusaders have required faculty to sign loyalty oaths to the cult of diversity. At best, Trump’s accusers stood by silently while such shunning and conformity enforcement occurred.

When we hear complaints about Trump’s assaults on the press and on the entertainment complex, we recall that the Biden White House pressured social-media companies to censor dissenting views on Covid lockdowns and election integrity. We recall that Disney and NBC fired Gina Carano and Megyn Kelly for their politically incorrect views.

How many times has it been said that President Trump is waging a culture war? Often Trump is only belatedly playing defence in the left’s assault on the norms that humanity has embraced from time immemorial. Someone who seeks to restore the understanding, say, that girl’s bathrooms are for members of the female sex only is not waging a culture war. The cultural warriors are the ones who demanded male access to female bathrooms in the first place.

Someone who seeks to prevent teachers from reading books about queer identity to third graders is not waging a culture war. The cultural warriors are the ones who want to destroy childhood innocence by rubbing children’s noses in the sexual obsessions of adults.

The second emotion of conservatives in recent years has been shock at the depth of the cultural divide and despair at the possibility of bridging it. If liberals and conservatives can’t even agree on one of the great discoveries of Western science: that the genetic code is contained in every cell of the body and that it, not mere opinion, determines biological sex, then what can we agree on? If we disagree on whether men can have babies, what can we agree on?

When we saw college professors, academic bureaucrats, students and school teachers celebrating the massacre of Israeli civilians on 7 October, where do we find common ground? When we saw posters commemorating the Hamas hostages defaced and torn down, when we saw self-described ‘Fags for Falestine’ marching in support of a culture that prefers stoning gays to lionising them, we were puzzled. And when we saw the assassin of healthcare executive Brian Thompson become a progressive pin-up, we were dismayed.

But nothing prepared us for the reaction of the left to the assassination of Charlie Kirk. We face with blank incomprehension the question of how we move forward after what we have learned about our fellow citizens.

We were told after the beatification of Luigi Mangione, Thompson’s assassin, that his groupies constituted just a fringe of American society. We were told after the Hamas hagiography that these were complex geopolitical matters with arguments on either side.

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Jay Jones and the Left’s Ressentiment Jay Jones’s vile texts expose more than personal depravity—they reveal the left’s deeper creed: that pain, not principle, is the true engine of political change. By Stephen Soukup

Posted By on October 11th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/10/11/jay-jones-and-the-lefts-ressentiment/

Over the last week or so, observers—mostly on the right—have made a great deal of noise about the musings of Jay Jones, the Democratic nominee for Attorney General in Virginia. Jones, as I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you, openly and enthusiastically discussed killing a political opponent—the former Speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates—and, more disturbingly, hoped this opponent’s children would die so that he could watch their mother suffer as she held them in her arms.

Understandably, most of the commentary on Jones and his ghoulish desires has focused on his crass exhortation to violence and the ghastly cruelty of his repeatedly expressed desire to watch children die while relishing their mother’s pain. Jones is, almost inarguably, a twisted man with a moral compass that points straight downward. That he remains his party’s nominee and that no high-profile members of that party have withdrawn their endorsement of him tells you all you need to know about the moral condition of the nation’s ruling class.

All of that said, for me, the most interesting part of Jones’s exposed texts is the justification he gives for wanting Todd and Jennifer Gilbert to suffer as they hold their dying children. When confronted about that statement, he replies, “Yes, I’ve told you this before. Only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy.”

Everything else in Jones’s rant can be dismissed as the overheated rhetoric of a disturbed man, the bizarre fantasies of someone unfit to mingle with normal people in civil society, much less serve them as their chief law enforcement official. It is, as I said, twisted.

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Why Iran’s Oil Sales Must Be Stopped by Majid Rafiadeh

Posted By on October 11th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21968/iran-oil-sales

As long as the Iranian regime finds avenues to export oil, it will continue to survive and expand its power.

At the heart of the problem is Iran’s largest oil export market: China. Nearly four-fifths of Iran’s exported oil ends up in China…. Iranian officials have openly admitted that even if UN sanctions are reactivated, oil exports to China would continue.

The key is not only sanctioning Iran, but also enforcing consequences against those who enable its oil exports. That means sanctioning third-party entities, shipping companies, and refineries that knowingly violate sanctions. China, as the largest buyer of Iran’s oil, must face the full weight of international scrutiny and penalties if it continues to bankroll the Iranian regime.

Beijing can import oil from alternative sources such as Saudi Arabia, the US, Iraq and the UAE, among others. Its continued purchase of Iranian oil is a political choice, not an economic necessity.

The United States cannot and should not act alone in this effort. The European Union needs to take a much stronger stance as well.

Finally, the argument comes down to one undeniable fact: as Iran continues to export oil, its regime will continue to survive and expand its power.

If the West is serious about trying to “reform” the Iranian regime, it must focus on cutting off the oil that feeds it. This means coordinated US and EU pressure, real accountability for China, and relentless enforcement of sanctions against buyers and middlemen.

“Reforming” the Iranian regime — enticing them into the Abraham Accords under Trump’s magnificent vision of “peace and prosperity” — may not be possible. Iran’s rulers appear to have an explicit agenda, which, as by now should be clear, does not involve either prosperity or peace for its citizens. If the US is intent on making only Iran’s ruling class rich and prosperous, it is consigning the Iranian people to misery in perpetuity. One hopes that the US would not be as cruel as that.

Only if Iran is seriously weakened will the Iranian people have a real chance to taste the freedom that so many in the West cavalierly take for granted, and only then will the world see genuine peace and security in the Middle East.

The reimposition of UN “snapback” sanctions on Iran is a welcome development, but, alas, insufficient. For years, Tehran has operated with relative impunity, ignoring restrictions and continuing to build its nuclear and ballistic missile programs while funding proxy terrorist groups across the Middle East. The renewal of these sanctions signals a recognition that the Iranian regime remains one of the gravest threats to regional stability and international security.

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Fighting for Peace in the Middle East by Seth Mandel

Posted By on October 10th, 2025

https://www.commentary.org/seth-mandel/fighting-for-peace-in-the-middle-east/?utm_medium=email&_hsenc=p2ANqtz–

The emerging deal between Israel and Hamas, brokered by President Trump and his negotiating team, has the potential to reinvigorate the West thanks to two of its achievements, one tangible and the other ideological.

The tangible achievement is Israeli victory. Militarily, of course, Israel has defeated Hamas. But in chess, the most common stalemates occur when one player has only his king left on the board. It is precisely that stalemate that Hamas and its backers, as well as some European leaders, tried to bring about.

From the beginning, Israel sought the war’s end—not just the end of this round but the end of Hamas’s ongoing decades-long war. The return of the hostages, an agreement that requires Hamas’s own financial and diplomatic patrons to force it out of government, and the demolition of the terror group’s military patrons can plausibly end the war. And that is what has happened: Israel defeated Hamas, wrecked Iran, and Trump convinced Qatar and Turkey of the need for regime change in Gaza.

An Israeli victory is crucial for the free world. In its monstrous acts on October 7, Hamas had either established a cautionary tale or a new model of strategic disruption. A defeat of Hamas means Israel has paid the steep price to inoculate the rest of the West from this virus—so long as they actually want to be inoculated.

One of the clearer indications of this is the silence from Hamas supporters among Western politicians and activists. Gazan civilians are celebrating in the streets; Israelis are celebrating in the streets. “Pro-Palestinian” groups are not celebrating. Al Jazeera isn’t celebrating. Prominent anti-Zionist media figures aren’t celebrating. The end of the war is in sight, and these rancid grifters never wanted the war to end unless it ended in a sea of Jewish blood.

Peace was the furthest thing from their minds. They aren’t celebrating the prospect of peace because they consider peace to be an Israeli victory. And they are not wrong.

The second, and more ideological achievement of the deal is the vindication of a concept that never used to need vindication among the men and women of the free world: that peace requires sacrifice, that it comes at a cost, that it must be earned.

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Netanyahu is the post-Oct. 7 war’s victor, not its scapegoat Jonathan Tobin

Posted By on October 10th, 2025

https://www.jns.org/netanyahu-is-the-post-oct-7-wars-victor-not-its-scapegoat/?utm_campaign=Daily%20Syndicate%20Emails&utm_medium=email&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-

His critics are determined to cast the prime minister as the villain of the war. But only his steadfast focus on denying victory to Hamas forced it to surrender to Trump’s demands.

Barring any last-minute reversals, the post-Oct. 7 war is finally about to come to an end. President Donald Trump’s 20-point plan for ending the war in the Gaza Strip has been agreed to by both Israel and Hamas. That means that the remaining Israeli hostages should be coming home within days. Israel will pull back its forces to positions inside Gaza; however, the last remnants of the terrorist forces will still be isolated and in a position to be, as Trump says, “obliterated” should they not surrender their arms and give up their control of the enclave, as the plan demands.

This makes Trump the hero of the hour as he garners praise from even some of his most determined foes for achieving what everyone hopes will turn out to be peace. Yet accolades for the other person who made this outcome possible—Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—are largely missing from the reactions to the news.

There are many reasons for this. Outside of Israel, it is mostly because Netanyahu is seen as a surrogate for Israel, a country whose actions and existence are the focus of a tsunami of biased coverage and ideological opposition largely rooted in antisemitism.

Slighting the prime minister

Inside Israel, he is, much like Trump in the United States, the focus of a relentless partisan campaign of defamation and delegitimization by his political opponents. They are sick of his long tenure in office and their inability to defeat him by democratic means. As a result, they are willing to blame him for everything that goes wrong in and for their country, including those things for which he does bear some or all of the responsibility, in addition to much that is not his fault.

In the long run, history will be the judge of both men, even if, at this moment, it’s hard to imagine any discussion of their merits not determined by the political positions and prejudices of those speaking. Though he is Israel’s longest-serving prime minister and has been a major figure in Israeli politics for more than three decades before Oct. 7, it’s likely that Netanyahu’s place in history will largely be defined by the war that followed the tragic events of that dark day.

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Towards a Left-Wing Reich in Germany? by Drieu Godefridi

Posted By on October 10th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21967/germany-left-wing-reich

[T]he file justifying [classifying Alternative für Deutschland Party] as a “right-wing extremist” organization] has never been released. There is therefore a complete absence of adversarial proceedings. The AfD was never consulted, and even after the fact, it has no right to know why, on what grounds, on the basis of what evidence and documents, it was excommunicated from the German “democratic” sphere.

How can the AfD effectively contest a classification when the documents remain secret so that it cannot even know what it is contesting? How can it challenge the term “far right” when it is not defined anywhere?

The issue has never been law, but power: the determination of the ruling caste to cling to authority at any cost, even if it means criminalizing a quarter of the German population.

In April 2025, for instance, a Bavarian court sentenced David Bendels, editor-in-chief of Deutschland-Kurier, to seven months’ suspended imprisonment. His “crime”? Publishing a satirical image showing Interior Minister Nancy Faeser holding a placard reading “I hate freedom of opinion.” The court convicted him of “abuse, defamation or slander against persons in political life.”

The Network Enforcement Act reinforces this censorship by forcing internet platforms to delete content under penalty of fines, thereby further eroding the freedom of expression “guaranteed” by Article 5 of the German Constitution.

The quarantining of the AfD ensures that the left will remain in power indefinitely, regardless of election outcomes. This amounts to rule by a single “party” and a single ideology — that of the ruling caste. Democratic change through the ballot box in Germany is no longer possible.

As if this were not enough, government circles are now openly considering banning the AfD altogether, under the fake pretext of “protecting the constitution.”

One cannot but recall Germany’s Reichstag fire on February 27, 1933, set by a Dutch communist, which the Nazi Party instantly used as a pretext to suspend civil liberties and consolidate its domination of the German state.

Germany today offers the world a disturbing spectacle: a state in its death throes which, under the guise of democratic virtue, is sinking into authoritarianism. The erosion of civil liberties is not occurring through a coup d’état, but by the slow accumulation of administrative, legal and police measures that shape the contours of a dictatorship as implacable as it is convinced of its own virtue.

1. The Classification of the AfD by an Administrative Agency

In the spring of 2025, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV, Germany’s domestic intelligence service) classified the political party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) as a “right-wing extremist” organization. This classification granted the authorities the power to place its members and supporters under police surveillance without prior judicial authorization, including measures such as intercepting private communications or the BfV recruiting informants within the party.

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Why Trump’s Remarkable Gaza Peace Plan Is Succeeding Trump’s bold Gaza peace plan achieves a historic first step—cease-fire, hostage release, and Arab-Israeli cooperation few thought possible. By Fred Fleitz

Posted By on October 10th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/10/10/why-trumps-remarkable-gaza-peace-plan-is-succeeding/

Yesterday, at noon Egypt time, Israel and Hamas agreed to implement the first stage of President Trump’s 20-point Gaza peace plan by implementing an immediate cease-fire, a partial withdrawal of Israeli forces, and the release by Hamas of 48 Israeli hostages, 20 of whom are believed to be alive. Israel also agreed to release almost 2,000 Palestinian prisoners, including about 250 who were serving life sentences, primarily for terrorism-related charges.

As I explained in my October 3 American Greatness article, Trump’s peace plan is bold and may not ultimately succeed. There is work to be done to finalize other stages of this agreement. Nevertheless, it is hard to exaggerate the significance of Israel and Hamas agreeing to the critical first stage.

Just a few weeks ago, few believed Hamas would ever release its hostages, never mind all of them at once. It also appeared unlikely that either side would agree to a cease-fire. Moreover, Hamas’s initial answer on October 3 of “yes, but” to the 20-point plan appeared to be the same response that caused previous peace plans to fail.

President Trump and his negotiating team were not deterred by Hamas’s initial ambiguous answer to the 20-point plan. Diplomats from the U.S., Egypt, Qatar, and the UAE instead engaged in intensive negotiations over the last week to get past Hamas’s objections and implement the first stage to quickly free all of the Israeli hostages, a cease-fire, and a partial Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. Releasing all the Israeli hostages is a significant concession for Hamas because it has regarded them as essential bargaining chips.

There will probably be difficult negotiations ahead to convince Hamas to agree to other parts of the deal, such as disarming, barring the terrorist group from any role in post-war Gaza, the international force that will be deployed to Gaza, how reconstruction will be conducted, and other issues. I believe it is likely that Hamas’s agreement to the first stage bodes well for its agreement to the rest of the deal.

The 20-point peace plan is a masterpiece because it gained Arab and Israeli support and provided a way to end the war with or without Hamas’s agreement. If Hamas rejects this deal, it has nowhere to go, and rebuilding of the Gaza Strip and a new administration will occur without it.

This deal was only possible because of President Trump’s dogged determination to end this war by establishing himself as a trusted mediator between Israel and Arab states. Trump started this effort a week after he won the 2024 election when he named Steve Witkoff as his Middle East peace envoy and immediately sent him to meet with Gulf state leaders. Witkoff’s efforts resulted in a cease-fire agreement on January 19, 2025, that lasted three months and the release of 30 hostages.

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The Genocide Libel A new report from the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies separates verifiable facts from politically motivated fiction in Gaza. Andrew Fox

Posted By on October 9th, 2025

https://quillette.com/2025/10/09/the-genocide-libel-besa-report-israel-gaza/

As the Gaza War approaches its second anniversary, the accusation that Israel is pursuing a policy of “genocide” against the Palestinians in the coastal enclave persists. The word has been employed by activists, commentators, human-rights organisations, and even officials of various governments, who characterise Israel’s military campaign and its strategic goals in the most sinister terms. The claim that the Israeli government and military (IDF) seek the destruction of a population is extremely serious, so it deserves careful and fair-minded consideration. With this in mind, a comprehensive new study by the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies (BESA Center) in Tel Aviv examines the factual record in an attempt to distinguish verifiable facts from politically motivated fiction. It concludes that the genocide accusations are unsupported.

The BESA study is written by a team of Israeli military historians and conflict researchers (Danny Orbach, Jonathan Boxman, Yagil Henkin, and Jonathan Braverman), and they approach the issue with academic thoroughness and a clear concern for truth. The authors emphasise that their aim is not to defend every Israeli action, nor to overlook the war’s terrible human cost, but to ensure that any discussion of legality or morality rests on an accurate foundation: “Our focus on factual analysis,” they write, “in no way diminishes or ignores the severe human suffering in Gaza.” By avoiding polemics and focusing on verifiable data, the BESA scholars present a compelling and persuasive counter-narrative to the genocide claim.

The stakes in this debate are high: the accusation of “genocide” is not merely a matter of semantics, it shapes international policy, public perception, and possibly even legal actions. It is therefore important to get the facts right.

I. Starvation

One of the earliest and most emotive accusations made during this conflict was the claim that Israel has imposed a starvation siege on Gaza. Images of emaciated children and warnings of famine spread rapidly in late 2023 and through 2024, as Gaza’s supplies of food, water, and electricity all came under pressure. A number of influential voices argued that Israel was deliberately depriving two million Gazans of basic necessities, effectively using hunger to kill the population or drive it out of the Strip. If true, this would be a heinous crime. However, the BESA study shows that the starvation story was based on incorrect data and an echo chamber of circular reporting, whereby NGOs and media outlets repeated each other’s alarming allegations without investigating the original data.

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The end of the race hustle Trump’s indifference to being called a racist may be having a wider effect Heather Mac Donald

Posted By on October 9th, 2025

https://thespectator.com/topic/race-hustle-is-losing-power/

Decarlos Brown Jr. should never have been on the streets. The man suspected of murdering 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee, in Charlotte, North Carolina, in August had been arrested 14 times in almost as many years, charged with armed robbery, shoplifting and property damage. According to his sister, he is a schizophrenic who suffers from paranoid delusions. But he was free to roam in part because of the race hustle.

Want to fire an employee? Good luck if that employee is black; such a dismissal would be presumptively racist

For decades, pointing out that any action, public or private, had a black target or fell disproportionately on black people was sufficient to discredit that action, regardless of whether it was couched in terms of race or had a racist intent.

Want to fire an employee? Good luck if that employee is black; such a dismissal would be presumptively racist. Tempted to criticize a government official for alleged incompetence or unethical conduct? If that official is black, think twice, since blackness is used as a shield. Try to jail a serial violent offender, such as Brown Jr., who happens to be African-American? That would contribute to racial inequity.

The idea that racial disparities in arrest and incarceration rates reflect discrimination and not disparities in criminal offending has been a staple of Democratic policymaking for years. The “systemic criminal justice bias” conceit has led district attorneys across the US to stop prosecuting and stop seeking jail terms for a host of crimes, simply because penalizing those crimes would have a disparate impact on black criminals.

North Carolina has embraced the disparate impact idea. In 2020, after the George Floyd race riots, then-governor Roy Cooper established the “Task Force for Racial Equity in Criminal Justice,” which pushed to eliminate racial disparities in charging decisions. It demanded racial-equity training for district attourneys, judges and parole officers and sought to educate prosecutors about “unconscious bias.” The Office of Equity and Inclusion in Mecklenburg County (where Charlotte is located) is dedicated to reducing racial disparities in the criminal justice system and has hired equity and inclusion consultants to help.

If white toddlers were gunned down at the rate black toddlers are, there would be a revolution

Charlotte’s police chief, Johnny Jennings, believes law enforcement is “based on racism.” In 2020, he announced an intention to “slow down” on discretionary arrests. It was overdetermined, then, that Zarutska’s future murderer would not be locked up. The system was no longer set up to hold him or anyone else who committed similar crimes.

Today, the race card is being furiously played against several of Donald Trump’s initiatives. On August 11, Trump declared a “liberation day” in Washington, DC: “I’m announcing a historic action to rescue our nation’s capitol from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse. This is liberation day in DC, and we’re going to take our capital back… we’re not going to let it happen anymore. We’re not going to lose our cities over this.” The President ordered a limited deployment of the National Guard to the Capitol and gave the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration oversight authority over the DC police force.

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The shameful silence over the slaughter of Nigeria’s Christians While the media obsesses over Israel, Nigerian Islamists continue their years-long killing spree. Sean Nelson

Posted By on October 9th, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/10/08/the-shameful-silence-over-the-slaughter-of-nigerias-christians/

Towards the end of September, comedian Bill Maher provoked social-media outrage by asking a simple question: why does the coverage of Gaza get so much mainstream-media attention when the persecution of Christians in Nigeria gets almost none?

‘They are systematically killing the Christians in Nigeria’, he said on his talk show, Real Time:

‘They’ve killed over 100,000 since 2009. They’ve burned 18,000 churches… These are the Islamists, Boko Haram. This is so much more of a genocide attempt than what is going on in Gaza. They are literally attempting to wipe out the Christian population of an entire country.’

You wouldn’t think of someone like Maher – a self-described ‘apatheist’ (‘I don’t know what happens when you die, and I don’t care’) – as suddenly becoming the most prominent voice on the persecution of Christians in Nigeria. But he’s absolutely right. They are being slaughtered en masse.

So far this year, over 7,000 Christians have been targeted and killed for their faith. Thousands were also killed the year before, and thousands in the year before that. Sometimes hundreds are murdered at once, as in the town of Yelewat in June, or in the village of Zikke in April. Holy days are preferred for big attacks, as in the Christmas massacre of 2023, when pastors were beheaded and churches burned down in Plateau State, or the attack on St Francis Xavier Church, in the town of Owo on Pentecost Sunday 2022.

Attackers can be terrorist groups like Boko Haram and the West African branch of Islamic State, or more amorphous groups like the Fulani herder militants. Christians are also abducted and forced into marriages throughout the country, but especially in Nigeria’s northern states. The intent is to kill or displace Christians in large numbers and take greater control of their ancestral lands.

Of course, this is not to say that all mass violence in Nigeria is religiously motivated. It isn’t. Many Muslims, especially those who resist the Islamists, are also attacked in horrific episodes, like the mosque attack in Katsina State in August.

But the scale of the deliberate attacks on Christians is impossible to deny. The states with the most violence against Christians are within Nigeria’s so-called Middle Belt, which borders the Sharia states in Nigeria’s north. Every week brings new and terrible stories of death. But the official line is to deny the existence of any religious persecution.

Such denials fly in the face of reality. Christians are only a minority in northern Nigeria, but they are five-to-eight times more likely to be killed by jihadists than Muslims. Many northern states also have Sharia criminal laws that mandate the death penalty for alleged blasphemy, such as Kano state, where Sufi musician Yahaya Sharif-Aminu has been facing death row since 2020. Sharif-Aminu is only still alive because he has been able to appeal this medieval decision, but others, like university student Deborah Yakubu, have been less fortunate. In May 2022, Yakubu was stoned to death in Sokoto state because she was overheard thanking Jesus after an exam. Mob attacks against so-called blasphemers usually go unpunished.