The Justice Department has announced criminal charges against Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and other militants in connection with the Oct. 7 rampage in Israel. In Ukraine, at least 51 people were killed…

The Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) demonstrated again in Sunday’s German state elections that it is more than a protest party.  The AfD came in first in Thuringia and placed second in Saxony,…

The Democrats are entering into the upcoming presidential and vice presidential debates with false bravado. That’s not to say there aren’t optics that favor Vice President Kamala Harris or risks for…

In 2023 I visited what Border Patrol calls the Del Rio sector of the U.S.–Mexico border. What I found was a population under siege, overstretched police, and an American region under de facto control…

Expert tips for mindful eating.

Foreign Affairs Election Results in Thuringia and Saxony Spark More AfD Derangement Syndrome Despite German officialdom’s constant vilification of the AfD, the party’s good ideas are starting to break through. Credit: image via Shutterstock The Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) demonstrated again in Sunday’s German state elections that it is more than a protest party.  The AfD came in first in Thuringia and placed second in Saxony, right on the heels of the Christian Democrats (CDU). Germany’s media and ruling class predictably catastrophized the voting results. “Trump, Le Pen, AfD: our democracy is threatened,” proclaimed the leftwing Der Spiegel.    It is not democracy that is threatened, of course, but the international left’s agenda on issues such as open borders, climate change and wokeism.  From Europe to the United States, national conservatives are mobilizing, and more and more winning elections, as they fight to recover their societies from the onslaught of these fundamentally radical policies. Historians, who see these larger trends better than political commentators, will rightly categorize the AfD as part of this same growing national conservative movement. It is a common-sense response to the failures and ineptness of traditional conservative parties. Be it the CDU in Germany, the Tories in Britain or Bush-McCain Republicans in America, these establishment conservatives either were ineffective or coopted by the globalist agenda. The level of fury unleashed to discredit the AfD is even more apocalyptic than that directed at Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National and likely surpasses Trump Derangement Syndrome in the United States. In Germany, as the response to Sunday’s voting again makes clear, the media and ruling-class propaganda is unrelenting.   The AfD is “undemocratic,” “anti-immigrant,” and “pro-Putin.” The official hullabaloo is designed to avoid a discussion with the AfD on tough issues like why the Berlin governing coalition fails to deport illegal immigrants or seek negotiations to end the Russia–Ukraine war.   A key weapon for German officialdom is deploying the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz or BfV), which has investigated the AfD and officially declared the party “an extremist organization.”  The BfV ruling helps all the major parties, including the CDU, justify their decision to continue to insist on a “firewall” against the AfD. Thus, given the coalition-building nature of German politics, the AfD will likely still be kept in opposition in both state legislatures in Thuringia and Saxony, even though the party garnered more than a third of the votes.  Because this drama is playing out in Germany, the dreaded Nazi past can be effectively instrumentalized against the AfD, both by the CDU for tactical political advantage, and by the establishment left in an attempt to discredit all conservative positions.   Far from being “neo-Nazi,” the AfD political program would comfortably fit in with main-street conservatives everywhere from Australia to Canada, from Nigel Farage to J. D. Vance.  In fact, a reading of the AfD platform reveals fairly vanilla stuff and brings on a few yawns.   When the media falsely claimed the AfD had a plan of “remigration” to deport legal residents and naturalized citizens, the party responded: “The AfD does not differentiate between German citizens with and without a migration background. All Germans are part of our nation, regardless of their origin, ancestry, worldview or religious affiliation.” On nationalism, the party proclaims: “We are open to the world, but we want to be and remain German. We want to permanently preserve human dignity, the family with children, our Western Christian culture, our language and tradition in a peaceful, democratic and sovereign nation state of the German people.” On social policies: “Our country is facing major social challenges. Stabilizing the social systems requires special efforts in the face of a shrinking and ageing population. Our limited resources are therefore not available for an irresponsible immigration policy that no other European country dares to pursue.” On the United Nations, this “far-right” party is outright squishy: “The AfD is committed to the values of the United Nations Charter and international law. We are committed to a foreign policy that is geared to German interests.” Don’t be fooled, the opponents respond; it is what AfD members actually say on the campaign trail and do behind closed doors that matters. But here, too, the alarmists have very little to offer. They mainly scorn Bjorn Höcke, the AfD leader in Thuringia, who was Sunday’s big winner. Höcke has indeed made statements that minimize or buck Germany’s political correctness standard about dealing with the Nazi past. For reasons that are perhaps understandable, but not legally defensible, such talk is verboten in modern Germany’s political discourse. The authorities prosecuted and fined Höcke for using the banned Nazi slogan, “everything for Germany” (alles für Deutschland), calculated to resonate with his voters who believe that such a sentence should not be considered out of bounds. One AfD supporter, a female school teacher in Thuringia, explained to a New York Times reporter: “That was a very normal sentence. We should be allowed to be proud of our country today without immediately being accused of being extremists.” Although he wants the attention, Höcke would be much smarter to stay away from such calculated rhetoric because it helps open the door to federal investigators from the before-mentioned Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz. The BfV exists to investigate threats against the German state, and number one on that list has long been neo-Nazi and rightwing groups. In response, the AfD counters that statistics indicate the BfV spends far more time and resources monitoring rightwing instead of leftwing threats. Just as MAGA conservatives complain that the FBI and DOJ have been instrumentalized against them for political ends, AfD members say the same about BfV. They have a point. For example, Sahra Wagenknecht, the other big winner in the German elections on Sunday, generally escapes such intense scrutiny. German officialdom has deemed Wagenknecht, unlike Höcke, to be salonfähig: she gets invited through the front door and never misses a German TV talk show.   A very popular politician in East Germany, Wagenknecht has impressively built a new leftist populist political party, largely based on her own political persona, called “Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance” (Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht).  In its first elections on Sunday, the BSW performed better than many established parties.    Wagenknecht is a product of the old communist GDR political system; she transitioned into modern Germany’s leftwing politics and has a strong following in the eastern states. Although Wagenknecht has mostly put her radical Marxist youth behind her, key activists in her movement and new party were Stasi members. They do not get anything close to the scrutiny of Höcke and his people. Clearly, a national-interest approach on big issues like Germany’s shrinking economy, open borders, and concern about the Russia–Ukraine war is what motivated the vast majority of AfD voters in Thuringia and Saxony, not vague notions about being “völkisch.”  German officialdom’s response to Sunday’s elections and the AfD voters is shameful. It is more undemocratic than anything the party has ever done. Years ago, I served as a U.S. diplomat in the American consulate in Leipzig and met with political leaders of all stripes in cities and hamlets across Thuringia and Saxony. Germans in the region are no more “extremist” than people anywhere else in Europe.  Staying in touch, I returned this summer and spoke with an immigrant, now a legal resident, who has lived there for years. His comments perfectly captured the moment: “The AfD represents common-sense ideas on energy, borders, and war.  If there are a few cranks in the party, then throw them out, but keep the party’s good ideas.” The post Election Results in Thuringia and Saxony Spark More AfD Derangement Syndrome appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics Does Harris Have a Glass Jaw? The Democrats’ confidence going into the September 10 debate is deceptive. Credit: ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images) The Democrats are entering into the upcoming presidential and vice presidential debates with false bravado. That’s not to say there aren’t optics that favor Vice President Kamala Harris or risks for the former President Donald Trump. But as the two campaigns have publicly negotiated the debate terms, Harris’s team has been eager to revive former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s “Donald Duck” jibe against Trump. “Say it to my face,” Harris said at rallies when responding to Trump criticism before the Republican had agreed to debate her. She also taunted Trump about his eagerness to debate the previous Democratic nominee. “What happened to ‘any time, any place?’” Harris asked on social media.  When Trump wanted to renegotiate the ground rules he had agreed to with President Joe Biden, Harris and company framed this as the Republican ticket backing out of the debates. The media largely went along with this narrative. But the evidence is really that Harris is more of a stickler for the debate terms than is Trump. There was no “any time, any place” at any point in her debating posture. Like Biden before her, Harris has flatly refused to debate Trump on Fox News at all. Her campaign also kept pressing on “hot mics,” asking that the microphones be kept on at all times, after Trump’s team had accepted the debate rules, though it does not appear likely to derail their showdown. This is a reversal from Biden, who did not want to be interrupted. Harris is practically begging to be interrupted, in pursuit of an “I am speaking” moment. It’s also a reaction to the fateful June 27 debate that led to Harris becoming the presidential nominee in the first place. When the Biden team made its debate proposal, there was clearly an attempt to neutralize things Trump had used to his advantage in previous debates. But what happened instead is that the inability to interrupt effectively made Trump more disciplined in his answers and sound more measured in his tone. What Harris wants instead is for Trump to seem unhinged—which is always the former president’s biggest public speaking risk—and, if possible, racist and sexist. In his less effective 2020 debates with Biden, Trump came in much too hot. Where there is common ground between Biden and Harris over how to debate Trump is that both Democrats projected an amount of confidence that they did not genuinely feel. Biden channeled Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry in challenging Trump to the original debates, a swagger belied by the multiple jump cuts on the social media video making this announcement. Biden also called for fewer debates than the presidential debate commission, debates earlier in the election cycle, no networks or moderators deemed too conservative-friendly, and no live audiences in addition to no interruptions.  It’s entirely possible Biden’s aides never expected Trump to agree to these terms in the first place, which would then lead them back to Donald Duck—with the implication that the real fowl in question was chicken. Instead, having a debate before the Democratic National Convention had formally made Biden the party’s nominee proved so disastrous that it is now equally plausible to believe that Democrats engineered this to replace the president at the top of the ticket. (I don’t in fact believe this since Biden loyalists came up with this plan, but I can’t really fault anyone who does because of how spectacularly their maneuver backfired for Biden, if not the Democratic Party.) Biden wasn’t stoked to debate Trump and probably wouldn’t have done so if he wasn’t trailing before the two of them took the stage. And for good reason, as it turned out. Harris doesn’t have Biden’s problem of being old and infirm. She may present quite well on the debate stage, as she has at times done in the past. The contrast between her and Biden is largely to her benefit. But Harris is extremely cautious and calculating. While this has probably helped her over the course of her political career overall, it has made her inconsistent at best as an extemporaneous speaker. This is one of the characteristics that contributed to her low ratings as vice president and it has hurt her in her two previous genuinely competitive races: her first run for California attorney general, where she barely won in a deep-blue state, and her 2020 candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination, which ended in 2019. It’s impossible for Harris to do as badly as Biden in a debate. All she probably needs is a few good moments or an unforced Trump error. But she and her campaign would still clearly prefer to stick to scripted moments until Election Day.  The post Does Harris Have a Glass Jaw? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics The Cartel Takeover in Colorado Is a Dispatch From the Future Cowardice and misplaced good intentions have brought America to the brink of chaos. Credit: image via Getty Images In 2023 I visited what Border Patrol calls the Del Rio sector of the U.S.–Mexico border. What I found was a population under siege, overstretched police, and an American region under de facto control of Mexican cartels. I wrote that, “with untold millions already successfully trafficked into the United States, it is a matter of time before the hell I’ve seen is brought to all of God’s country.” Recent events, each thousands of kilometers from the southwest border, show that chaos previously limited to the border is spreading across the mainland United States.  Last week’s headline reporting that a Venezuelan gang had taken over and terrorized an apartment complex in Aurora, Colorado, stunned observers and pierced through the “boiling frog” syndrome that often prevents U.S. media from accurately conveying the severity of the border crisis. The gang, Tren de Aragua, forcibly seized Aurora’s Aspen Grove Apartments from its landlords and began patrolling the migrant-packed complex with high-powered weaponry, including AR-15s and AK-47s. The brazen nature of the takeover, common in Latin America but unprecedented in the United States, alarmed local citizens. One Aurora resident’s comments to Fox News encapsulate the situation: “This is organized. They patrol the property with guns visibly, like they’re not trying to hide them. There’s no repercussion. These are ghosts.” Citizens, alongside Mayor Mike Coffman, voiced their concerns about the situation. Coffman announced that the city would work to shut down the complex, labeling it a public nuisance and citing numerous code violations. He was supported by Aurora Councilwoman Danielle Jurinsky, who took to Facebook with a blunt message: “And I repeat… A GANG HAS TAKEN OVER entire apartment complexes in Aurora.” The city also issued a statement acknowledging the gang’s presence: “Yes, we are concerned about a small Tren de Aragua (TdA) presence in Aurora, and we are taking it seriously. We have responded. We have made arrests and will continue to do so.” At first glance, this appears to demonstrate American institutional strength, with citizens, city leaders, and law enforcement mobilizing together to combat the kind of organized terrorism that plagues Latin America. Yet a closer examination reveals that institutional infighting and paralysis already undermined the U.S. response to Tren de Aragua before the incident exploded into the national consciousness.  Aurora’s interim police chief, Heather Morris, recently denied there is a gang problem in the town, contradicting video evidence and coordinated city statements by declaring, “Gang members have not taken over.” While Morris assured the community that the police are taking the threat seriously, she seemed more focused on deflecting blame for her department’s failure to prevent the incident. Frustrated citizens, who have voiced their criticisms of Morris and the Aurora Police Department (APD) in the national media, might explain the seemingly delusional response to the gang’s apartment takeover. The Aurora resident Cindy Romero, speaking with CBS, expressed frustration with the a pattern of police inaction: “The police would call me and say they weren’t coming unless it was a severe crime.” Aurora is a suburb of Denver, a notable sanctuary city and liberal stronghold. These cities have experienced instability in their law enforcement agencies since the George Floyd riots and have been among the most welcoming American cities for criminal traffickers and their victims. Morris, a DEI hire if there ever was one, became Aurora’s fifth chief in five years this June. Given this context, it’s not surprising that the Denver metro area would be vulnerable to the emergence of Latin American–style gangsterism, yet it remains shocking to witness nonetheless.  The stark reality unfolding in Aurora may soon spread across the United States. Major American cities, especially those embracing the “sanctuary city” label, have hollowed out their police forces and elected soft-on-crime district attorneys. Just as the most well-funded, well-organized, and well-armed criminal syndicates in the hemisphere’s history descend upon them, these cities are slashing enforcement capabilities. Liberals on both sides of the border talk about demilitarizing the police, but there’s a reason AMLO’s forces still wear kevlar helmets and carry assault rifles.  If the cowardice of Morris and the APD is any indication of what’s to come, we may soon be forced to militarize our cartel response, just as Mexico has been forced to do. Like many quaint Mexican police departments before them, a host of American police departments are simply unequipped or unwilling to protect citizens from the consequences of open-borders. As I wrote in my description of the Del Rio sector of Texas, paralysis is likely to grip law enforcement agencies as narco-terror infrastructure and manpower begin to reach critical mass in the United States. There’s very little these agencies can reasonably do to stop coordinated cartel operations given the increasing scale and robust civil liberty protections afforded to narco-terrorists in the U.S. Aurora’s experience with a rogue Venezuelan gang is not the only evidence of increasing cartel confidence in the United States. A Montana tribal leader was forced to cancel his plans to testify in front of Congress in April, citing death threats from Mexico’s powerful Sinaloa Cartel. I’m not sure what it will take for the Congress to act to secure the border, but evidently successful terrorist activity that threatens to undermine their own legitimacy was not enough to light a fire under them. Our potential next vice president’s state, Minnesota, has developed into a distribution network for the New Generation Cartel, a cartel that is better described as a paramilitary force than a gang. Even New England, which votes for diversity it does not practice, has begun to suffer the consequences of their limousine-liberal attitudes. A cartel, housing trafficked children and 220 pounds of hard drugs, was busted dramatically in Massachusetts in late 2023. Perhaps Yankee bed-and-breakfasts being taken over by hardened Latin American gang members will wake New Englanders up to the plight of their fellow countrymen in the southwest, but I doubt it. The 2022 Martha’s Vineyard airlift was evidence enough that this region marinates in self-righteousness and indifference to suffering. At this stage, I am still hesitant to assert that Latin American-style cartel violence is going to become a feature of American life, but the ingredients that could lead to widespread instability are increasingly being put on the table. Catastrophically low American confidence in institutions, anti-police attitudes, and decades of open borders haven’t fully baked the cake, but they have certainly created a dangerous mix. As American attitudes and political trends increasingly mirror those of Latin America, the type of warfare seen there becomes a more likely consequence. While there is still time to reverse this erosion of confidence, decades of cowardice and inaction provide little evidence that the U.S. is capable of meeting the moment. American leadership still has time to close Pandora’s box, but the clock is ticking as communities across the nation brace for a future akin to Aurora’s. The post The Cartel Takeover in Colorado Is a Dispatch From the Future appeared first on The American Conservative.

UTL COMMENT:- I think that she makes a good point on them tightening restrictions on Social Media and she nailed it. Of course we don't want increased penalties either she's just making a point.... Note French with both Polish and English subtitles.... Source: "STRAIGHT EDGE" https://old.bitchute.com/video/cQUDEKLyfuuq/

Two utter fags dancing. I laugh ? ? ? but I also cry ? ? ?.... What has happened to our civilisation? How can people even allow this?? FFS!!