Benjamin Franklin, an Englishman born in the colonial town of Boston in 1706 but who chose to separate himself from the rule of a tyrannical British government as one of our American Founding Fathers, once wrote that “People willing to trade their freedom for temporary security deserve neither and will lose both.” Franklin understood well the depth of the depravity that the government of his ancestors was capable of. Very little about its current manifestation would surprise him. But the British tyranny of Franklin’s time was at least intended to serve the interests of the British people, however that might be interpreted. It’s far more difficult to make a case that this is still true. We speak here of an atrocity committed by the British government, that of its treatment of activist Tommy Robinson. Robinson was sentenced to 18 months in prison a few days ago for … making and showing a documentary film. Bruce Bawer summarized the facts of the case quite well in Front Page magazine: In the last few days a new chapter has been added to the storied saga of the 41-year-old British activist, author, and citizen journalist Tommy Robinson. On Friday, upon his return to Britain after several weeks abroad, he was taken into police custody – an event he had expected and discussed publicly before flying back home – and charged with several “offenses.” One of the charges, contempt of court, relates to his documentary Silenced, which premiered in July at a screening in Trafalgar Square and has been viewed on X more than 50 million times. In that documentary, Tommy gathered ample witness testimony showing that Jamal Hijazi, a Syrian refugee portrayed in the British media as the victim of bullying at the school he attended in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, in 2018, was not a victim but was, in fact, himself a bully – and a rather horrible one, at that. What, then, was Tommy’s crime? He’d been ordered by a judge not to contradict the official narrative about Hijazi – specifically, not to describe him as “aggressive and bullying” or as “threatening,” even if he was aggressive and bullying and threatening. A second contempt-of-court charge was leveled at Tommy for several related “offenses,” such as discussing the Hijazi case in an interview with Jordan Peterson, holding that July screening in Trafalgar Square, and posting Silenced on X and YouTube. In addition to the contempt charges, Tommy was charged under the Terrorism Act for refusing to provide the police with access to the contents of his mobile phone, which include material that would compromise his sources. On Saturday, supporters of Tommy held a “Unite the Kingdom” rally in London, turning out in such significant numbers that, as the Guardian put it, “the demonstration spilled out from its meeting point around Victoria Station.” The Guardian made sure to point out that the protesters, many of whom were treated to an outdoor screening of his new documentary, Lawfare, were “mostly male, white and middle-aged” (all bad things, of course) and that many of them were waving Union Jacks (that most toxic of items). Meanwhile counter-protesters took part in a rally arranged by a leftist group called Stand Up to Racism. Tommy Robinson must be run through kangaroo court after kangaroo court and reviled as a racist because he is committing the crime of standing up for the English, in England. The discredited Tory Conservative Party and the abominable Labour Party have combined to create a situation where in only 20 years the native British population of Great Britain has declined from 87 percent of that country’s live bodies to only 74 percent. It’s possibly the greatest non-wartime civilizational retreat in modern world history, and it has been supervised and fueled by a bipartisan consensus of the British ruling elite over the direct opposition of the bulk of the British people. They have nowhere to turn, unless it is to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK Party, an upstart the Conservatives are blaming for having split the center-right vote and allowed Labour to take power in the July elections. Farage is no fan of Robinson’s. Certainly, neither is the loathsome tyrant Keir Starmer, who currently heads the Labour government that is plunging that country into despair. But Robinson’s current problems notwithstanding, he wasn’t made a pariah for standing up to jihadists and Muslim rape gangs by the Hard Left in his country. His legal problems, and it’s been more than a decade of his having spent stints as a political prisoner (it’s difficult to characterize his experience any other way), arose chiefly if not solely while the Tories held power from 2010 to this summer. As has the turbocharged mass migration binge that has changed British society in ways that alarm millions and millions of its citizens. Unlike Franklin, modern Americans can’t fully comprehend how contemptuously the British government has treated its own people. Franklin would certainly fail to understand, though, how a government could allow foreign-born individuals in service to a hostile culture to create networks by which English girls — as young as 12! — would be recruited and groomed as sex slaves, hooked on heroin, and turned out for prostitution in open view of the police, without much of any sanction placed on them. Perhaps we’re beginning to understand it here in this country. But this has gone on for two decades in the U.K. Everyone knows about it. The ruling class has denied the public’s right to speak to the issue, as Robinson’s experience attests. Even local police, as in the case of the massively scandalous grooming gang operating for years in Rotherham, with literally thousands of victims, wouldn’t act against the rape gangs for fear of being called “racist.” The ruling class in the U.K. has effectively made “racism” a worse crime than rape. As it rapes the future of its citizens in the name of “climate change.” The last coal-fired power plant in Great Britain was shuttered on Sept. 30. That was the Ratcliffe-on-Soar Power Station in Nottinghamshire. Coal used to power the British economy; now, the U.K. depends on unreliable wind energy for an utterly irresponsible 30 percent of its baseload power, with a common expectation of rolling blackouts shortly to follow. And the day after Ratcliffe-on-Soar was decommissioned, Tata Steel shut down the Port Talbot Steelworks, putting more than 3,000 Welshmen out of work and reducing an entire community to poverty. Electricity in Great Britain costs 77 percent more than it does in the United States. Little wonder, then, that Great Britain is swiftly being deindustrialized. And in the post-industrial hellscape that remains, Starmer is busily eliminating the subsidy the government offers to pensioners to offset the greater heating costs its policies have imposed on them. While at the same time he’s under fire for having partaken greedily from a mountain of swag — clothes, concert tickets, and lots of other goodies — from campaign donors. Corruption and evil such as this can’t be defended in an open forum, so the forum is closed. Just ask Tommy Robinson, who is in prison for attempting to tell the truth about a Syrian migrant who made himself a threat to a community and provoked a response from that community. He’s in jail not as a criminal. He’s in jail as an example. The tyrants who rule Britain want no more Tommy Robinsons, because eventually they will run into critics they can’t dismiss as “racists” or “Islamophobes.” And as Britain suffers under their misrule, the Tommy Robinsons will multiply. They won’t all be “working-class blokes” with an accent to match. Some might be as posh as the tyrants. All will note that the British people are running out of time to throw off the tyrants before they become a minority in their own land at the hands of people who prefer sharia to the Ten Commandments. Somehow it’s “racist” to see that outcome as undesirable. Americans should note what is happening in the U.K. Our ruling class is no less corrupt and no less contemptuous of our people, and its works are no less damaging. They’ve just been at it longer in Britain, and they’re descending more quickly than are we. Free Tommy Robinson. And free Great Britain, before it’s no longer great. Scott McKay is the author of the forthcoming novel From Hellmarsh With Love, which is based around what is happening to the UK. It’s available in eight serialized episodes here at The American Spectator; you can also pre-order a signed copy here which will be delivered ahead of those available at Amazon at publication on Nov. 5. The post Great Britain Is Neither Great Nor Free, and Might Not Even Be Britain for Long appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

“Yes, I do. Yes, I do.” No, this wasn’t a response from the vice president to a “marriage proposal.” Rather, such was the refrain of Kamala Harris who has apparently entered the “Trump is a fascist” phase of her wilting campaign. Asked at a CNN town hall whether she thinks Donald Trump is a fascist, Harris was not content with one “Yes, I do”; it took two. Goldberg argues that fascism shared roots in common with what we call modern liberalism or progressivism. Harris went on to say that while it is true that the American people care about the economy, they “also care about our democracy and not having a president of the United States who admires dictators and is a fascist.” The occasion for Harris’ new line of attack is former Trump chief of staff John Kelly telling the New York Times that Trump meets the definition of a fascist, and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley maintaining, according to Bob Woodward, that Trump is “fascist to the core.” But for scholars who’ve long studied fascism, defining fascism isn’t so simple. “We’re not just debating whether or not Trump fits that definition; we are not agreeing on what that definition is,” Sheri Berman, a political science professor at Barnard College, Columbia University, told ABC News in an interview. There is no scholarly consensus on the term, according to both Berman and Mark Bray, a political scientist from Rutgers University. This is, in part, because fascists historically have not been tied to “rational consistency,” Bray said, pointing to Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and Nazi Germany dictator Adolf Hitler, whose policy positions changed on a variety of occasions. Donald Trump is many things, but inconsistent in his reasoning — what he thinks — is not one of them. To Berman, fascists are totalitarian with the goal of not just controlling politics, but reshaping society and controlling the economy. Donald Trump advocates free markets to grow the economy, not control it. The Progressive Flirtation With Fascism There are other ways of looking at fascism and assessing who might fall under that rubric. Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini have become, for many of us, generic personifications of evil or (in Mussolini’s case) an authoritarian buffoon. Yet, their ideologies were rooted in specific philosophical ideas — ideas which had many respectable adherents in their day. One person who articulates this view is Jonah Goldberg, author of the 2007 book Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. Goldberg argues that fascism shared roots in common with what we call modern liberalism or progressivism. People often argue over whether Hitler and Mussolini were “right-wing” or “left-wing.” More to the point is that, according to Goldberg, both men’s ideologies had roots in the Progressive movement of the turn of the 20th century. The Progressive movement was closely tied to the philosophy of Pragmatism: the belief that thought is a tool for action and change. In contrast to the ancient and medieval philosophers, for whom philosophy was the contemplation of reality, the Progressives were animated by the desire to mold reality and to harness knowledge for social betterment. Many in the vanguard of progressive thought initially were enamored of Mussolini and even Hitler, considering their dictatorships an interesting “social experiment.” H. G. Wells, the popular science fiction writer, was one such progressive. In a number of speeches and books he praised the militaristic social mobilization in the new fascist regimes: an entire society moving as a single unit under the rule of a Nietzschean superman. Complete state control of all aspects of life was seen as highly pragmatic and scientific by many. Nationalism and militarism — elements commonly associated with the Right — were actually key components of the Progressive Era, flourishing in particular under President Woodrow Wilson, as Goldberg documents in his text. Goldberg probably goes too far in his characterizations, but that fact does not diminish the weight of a further point. One does not have to cite progressive thinkers like Wells who considered early 20th century dictatorships a useful “social experiment,” or Democratic fans of eugenics, to underscore the totalitarian threat in America’s history. Moreover, frightening examples are still with us today in the form of woke ideology, Antifa, BLM, and others. Fascism Does Not Accord With Trump History illustrates that 20th-century fascists detested parliamentary democracy. They subscribed to the state as preeminent over the individual, holding bourgeois existence in contempt, promoting a cult of personality idealization. Violence was fundamental to fascist rule, illustrating nihilistic tendencies and the elevation of and reliance on the military to achieve its goal. Trump was presented with the perfect opportunity to use military force in 2020, when post-George Floyd rioters torched American cities in the most sustained and materially damaging riots in U.S. history. Many people called on Trump to do just that. Yet, for better or for worse, Trump refused to call in the National Guard, hardly the tendency of a Hitler or a Mussolini. In fact, the “Fuhrer” held to an existential struggle within our species, a conflict the “Aryan race” would perpetrate toward subjugation or annihilation of any peoples perceived as inferior. No one (including the Democratic candidate for president) provides any compelling evidence to support the idea of Trump deploying a paramilitary wing of the GOP to intimidate and war with his “enemies” on America’s streets. Yes, Trump utters crude and undignified remarks and acted unwisely after the 2020 election. But the notion that there is any meaningful correlation between the former president and the horrific movements or despots of the past is absent of any reasonable merit. Rather than pursuing the classic fascist objective of territorial expansion and self-aggrandizement through conquest, Trump often contends against his own party’s war hawks — frequently getting him into trouble. For years now, Trump has campaigned on his success in keeping the U.S. out of wars, and it is difficult to think of a president who has consistently stood up to and confronted the top military brass. In Trump’s first term in the White House, he appointed strict constitutionalist judges, most of whom have sought to reduce the size and power of the federal government. Trump extolled the virtues of free enterprise, restored due process on college campuses, and proved, like no other president, a profound friend of the Jewish state — recognizing Jerusalem as its capital, the Golan Heights as Israeli sovereign territory, and sponsoring the Abraham Accords. Instead of pursuing a fascist politics of racial purity, his efforts of his campaign for president are directed towards putting together a more multi-racial political coalition, and he is, in fact, demonstrating success in this regard. The accusations against Trump as a fascist rely on misinformation, deceit, innuendo, and frankly just plain ignorance of history. And it comes — especially in the case of disgruntled former generals John Kelly and Mark Milley — from those unable to succeed without diminishing the capabilities of someone they can’t measure up to or, more the point, that they just don’t like — it’s personal. Fascism is not endemic to American soil, but Donald J. Trump, to borrow General Milley’s own phraseology, “is American to his core.” This is precisely the type of American we should want as president of the United States. READ MORE from F. Andrew Wolf Jr.: The Election Prognosticators: Experts vs. the Crowd Tolerance Is Just One of Many Important Virtues The post Fascism Is a Progressive Tendency — Not a Trump One appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Although I am not a betting man, I would wager that the vast majority of American citizens cannot wait for this election cycle to be complete. Those who pay the closest attention to campaign messaging are not snowed by the avalanche of policy half-truths, innuendos, and lies of omission emanating from Vice President Kamala Harris and her acolytes. It is hard for most Americans to conceive of the motivation behind the lack of effective illegal immigration controls. Early in her current electoral quest, Harris put out a statement regarding the hot-button border/immigration issue that read “Congress must act. Unfortunately, we have too often been met with those who sought to play political games instead of participating in solutions.” I do not know if Harris has ever seriously reflected on this border and immigration statement, but should she do so, her own conclusions might be quite alarming. One particular immigration misrepresentation by Harris and her like-minded Senate colleagues is that the Republicans have been AWOL when it comes to advancing serious border initiatives. There is ample evidence to the contrary. Democrat Tricks on Border Bills There were two distinct initiatives by Republicans that ran completely counter to the “playing games instead of participating in solutions” assertion. The first was that Sen. James Lankford did propose legislation, which, after negotiation with the Democrat majority, was very deeply flawed. It allowed up to an additional two million immigrants to enter the U.S per year; that was defeated on a procedural motion in the Senate. The second was a Democrat tactical ploy she also fails to mention. The House passed HR 2, the Secure the Border Act, in May 2023 and was sent to the Senate. So, when the Lankford bill was introduced, the White House and Senate Democrats came up with a scheme to stop a House/Senate border bill conference and at the same time reframe the immigration deliberations. By stopping any border bill in the Senate, the Democrats sought to hang the border crisis around former President Donald Trump’s neck, calculating that this immigration mess could be turned into a winning campaign issue for them. During debate on Lankford’s bill, Democrat senators stated that they and the Biden–Harris administration were, of course, for securing the border, but still very much committed to being pro-immigrant. In stark contrast, they asserted that Trump was only focused on mass deportations and, as a xenophobe, stopping immigration altogether. Consequently, they argued, it was Trump’s behind-the-scenes maneuvering that killed Lankford’s immigration bill. Indeed, a conference on the border legislation could not be scheduled since the Lankford legislation or a substitute was never passed; the bill was then exiled to the Senate “calendar,” where it has been parked ever since. What is never discussed by partisans or the media is that if Lankford’s Senate bill had been passed by the Democrat-controlled Senate, a conference committee would have taken up both the House and Senate versions of the border legislation. In that scenario, it is likely it would have forced a Senate compromise on the Democrat demands of allowing an additional two million unvetted immigrants entry into the U.S. That provision alone killed any chance of Republican votes, much to the delight of the Democrats and to the detriment of most American citizens. What Republicans Wanted for the Border Here are some of the most salient provisions of HR 2 that the Senate Democrats sidestepped by killing the Senate bill. The bill required the Department of Homeland Security to resume and complete construction of the border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. The proposal required detention of those who attempted to enter the U.S. outside of designated ports of entry and it ended the “catch and release” program. It called for an increase in the number of Border Patrol agents to at least 22,000. Their focus would be changed from expediting processing of immigrants for entry to the U.S. to assessing asylum claims. They were to restrict entry to those who were able to prove they were “more likely than not” to qualify for asylum because they were fearing persecution. Thus, Borer Patrol agents would be charged with evaluating well-rehearsed, uniform “fear” declarations that cartel members had immigrants practice prior to approaching the border. Many border personnel have been quoted as saying that, in their experience, an exceedingly minute percentage of immigrants were actually motivated by these fears. (READ MORE: Unchecked Immigration Has Transformed America) Most were focused on the magnet of enhancing their economic well-being, whether through U.S. government support programs or by attaining illegal employment. But under the House provisions, U.S. businesses would have been required to use E-Verify to check the work eligibility of newly arrived immigrants for those seeking employment. Additionally, the House bill would have reinstated the Remain in Mexico policy, which mandated asylum seekers deemed reasonably safe from persecution or violence to be sent back to Mexico to await adjudication of their claim. And it would have granted access to information that ensured Border Patrol access to the criminal history records of the illegals’ home countries prior to entry. It seems evident that the House measures represented a stringent, enforcement-focused approach to border security and immigration control, which is why it was never pushed to a conference by the Senate Democrats. They had no appetite to reconcile the status quo brought about by President Joe Biden’s rescinding of 94 related executive orders, which grew the illegal U.S. population by millions. It is hard for most Americans to conceive of the motivation behind the lack of effective illegal immigration controls. The answer, despite the vehement protestations of the open border crowd, is a lust for political power, which in the U.S. comes by way of the ballot box. But how can noncitizens possibly gain access to the ballot box? Illegals Vote By law, only U.S. citizens are allowed to vote in federal elections. But it has been clearly demonstrated in a number of states that illegals certainly do participate in elections. After all, the vast majority of states do not require any proof of citizenship to vote. None. Thus, a peer-reviewed study in 2014 estimated that about 25 percent of noncitizens were registered to vote in 2008 and 2010. Moreover, they suggest that as many as 2.8 million of them actually voted. (READ MORE: Non-Citizens Have Been Voting Since 2008) What’s more, the states that have enacted “Motor Voter” laws only require an applicant to check a box stating that they are legal citizens in order to be registered; it is based on the honor system and is generally never questioned. If that is not enough, there have already been moves in Democrat-run states and cities to “legally” allow noncitizens to vote in elections. Municipalities in New York, California, the District of Columbia, and Vermont have now granted noncitizens (including illegals) access to voting in state and local elections (though the courts, in some instances, have intervened). Initiatives of this sort will undoubtedly grow unless Congress intercedes. But intercede it must if we hope to retain the bedrock principle of the consent of the governed. Finally, it should be noted that the Democrats under Senate rules certainly had the right to slow-walk border bills to a conference committee for negotiation. But by doing so, they well knew that they were submerging the House border bill deep into amber so it could not emerge to bring about border and immigration solutions on their watch. Marc E. Zimmerman is a former legislative assistant to a member of the U.S. Congress. The post Harris and the Dems Have No Border Credibility appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

from Revolver News: We’re approaching the four-year anniversary of the infamous January 6 pipe bomb case, and still the FBI pretends to be clueless as to the identity of the suspect. In this same span of time, Revolver News is proud to have broken countless stories regarding the pipe bomb case that overwhelmingly point toward […]

by Martin Armstrong, Armstrong Economics: “TRUMP PRAISED HITLER” was projected onto the side of Madison Square Garden during the latest Democratic National Convention. The rhetoric comparing Donald Trump to Nazi madman Adolf Hitler has been overwhelming over the past week. Holocaust survivors are now speaking out against the Democrats for their dangerous and insensitive pomposity. […]