Two worlds met in Paris last week

Two worlds met in Paris last week. By Douglas Murray in The Spectator.

Thanks to the presence of Art Basel, some of the world’s most valuable art that wasn’t already in the city was shipped there. It arrived just in time for Paris to go up in flames. Most of the art fair went ahead as planned at the Grand Palais, but the final weekend was cancelled.

Parisian friends and those who were visiting the city described scenes of Dada-esque absurdity. They navigated streets filled with burning bins and rioting ‘youths’ in balaclavas, before slipping into champagne receptions.

Some who attempted to get out of the city spoke of Mogadishu-like scenes at Gare du Nord, where the country’s newest net-contributors were busily assaulting any available police and stealing the luggage of any tourist they could find.

 

Inside:

 

Outside:

 

Islam rules left wing government in Berlin through fear.

Islam rules left wing government in Berlin through fear. By Karina Mariani.

The winner of the BERLIN elections, from the far-left party Die Linke, accidentally confesses that Hamas controls her party and fears for her life.

 

Elif Eralp, Die Linke’s leading candidate for Berlin governing mayor, openly acknowledged that she and her family live in fear of Hamas supporters within her party. Ynet News.

 

Fearful in private:

The magazine Der Spiegel … has brought to light an internal document proving how Die Linke has been hijacked by Islamism.

Its candidate to govern Berlin, Elif Eralp, accidentally sent the newsroom her private notes from an interview where she confesses to being coerced and terrified by Hamas operatives within her own party.

It turns out that after an interview, the candidate’s team reviewed the transcript. During this process, Eralp made internal comments that were meant to remain in the strictest confidentiality. However, the document with the un-erased annotations was sent back to the journalists.

The content of those notes is dynamite. When Der Spiegel asked her about Ibrahim Ibrahim — a pro-Palestinian Hamas sympathizer who celebrated the October 7 massacre — the public response was going to be evasive. But in the margin of the leaked document, Eralp wrote the truth: “There is a PROBLEM. […] my husband no, and neither do I, want to name specific names, he is afraid of these people and so am I.”

The leak exposes the raw reality of Islamo-leftism in Germany: Eralp even went so far as to compare the threat level of these pro-Palestinian militants to that of Organized Crime and implores to abort the publication: “I can’t put myself and my family in danger for Der SPIEGEL. What do we do now? Do we scrap the whole interview?”

Lying to the public:

The biggest joke of the entire situation, however, was captured in one of the phrases that Eralp did want to publish. In a display of utter disconnection, the candidate states in the interview: “What I can say with total clarity is that, as governing mayor, I will ensure the safety of all Berlin women and all Berlin men.”

A promise that rings utterly ridiculous coming from a leader who, in the same document, secretly admits that she can’t even protect her own family from the rank-and-file of her party. …

Berlin’s radical left believed it could politically capitalize on Islamic extremism; today, the documents prove that it’s the extremism holding them hostage.

The Islam-Left alliance will only end one way. The left are crazy for making this alliance. But like with communism, the left have to be shown over and over that it fails because they refuse to question anything that helps them into power.

Feelings replacing thought in public discussion

Feelings replacing thought in public discussion. By Abstractruth.

There used to be a time … when people began sentences with “I think,” “I submit,” “I propose,” and similar statements. True, I understand that this suggested — however optimistically — that some actual thought went into the statement. Now, with “I feel,” we have reduced modern utterances to the intellectual content of a bowel movement.

There are reasons for presenting statements in this manner.

  • Feelings are perceived to be beyond the reach of judgment.
  • Feelings are “authentic.”
  • If you make a statement with actual content, you can be contradicted, argued with, and presented with evidence against it.
  • But “I feel” now creates a scenario in which your subjective feeling has objective relevance.

And worse still, your perfectly ordinary disagreement with me now becomes an act of aggression — because you are invalidating my feelings. If I feel disrespected, that is enough to convict you of disrespecting me. If I feel that I am a man wearing women’s clothing, then who are you to tell me that I should not bring my 6’7” frame into a high school girls’ basketball game and express my femininity by elbowing a 5’11” female forward in the throat? …

With a majority female electorate, it was bound to happen:

Society has become feminized. There is no patriarchy; that’s ridiculous. The entire vocabulary of daily life has become feminine. All the traditionally feminine qualities — selective empathy, emotional expression, sensitivity — dominate our thinking and have become the required principles of moral judgment. Rational thinking is now hopelessly patriarchal and oppressive. Feelings are now a superior form of knowledge, or gnosis.

It is a tidy little trick wherein, because feelings are authentic, the proposition attached to them is therefore also true and incontrovertible. This view is illogical, annoying, and most of all cowardly. …

 

 

Rationality and smarts are “oppressive” and therefore illegitimate:

Anything that will turn reality on its head is lauded, and anything that reeks of logic or rationality is degraded as oppressive. …

The blue hair, the nose rings, the obesity, the clothes purchased from Goodwill are not intended to express creativity but to provoke a reaction, so that anyone who reacts can be called a colonist and oppressor …

There is no way to build a stable civilization on feeling, and that is precisely the point. Because this absurd impulse comes from that anti-civilizational place. …

Educational farce:

Because a student feels uncomfortable with an argument, however factual, that feeling now becomes the barometer of truth, or even of what can be said. A professor could challenge a cherished falsehood, and now someone demands an apology.

Education was once a place to correct false assumptions, test our limitations, improve logic, and prepare one to live in a civilized society — if not to reach certain conclusions about the nature of existence. Now, rather than challenge students to improve their skills or prepare children to be good citizens, schools ask teachers who would otherwise challenge them to be better to protect them from the inconvenience of correction.

The university was once a place where feelings and raw emotion were developed into disciplined science and logic, where false feelings and prejudices were challenged and interrogated. It has developed into luxury room service for the petulant and clueless.

That’s progress, some say.

A trick leftists use to deceive you

A trick leftists use to deceive you. By William Meijer.

The trick leftists use to deceive you (and, most importantly, themselves) is to focus solely on proximal causes rather than intermediate and distal causes. Leftists do so because proximal causes look plausibly environmental, and the solution to environmental problems is more power to themselves.

Proximal = Closer to the point of attachment or origin of a structure. E.g. institutions are a proximal cause of societal wealth.

Distal = Farther from the point of attachment or origin of a structure. E.g. human capital is a more distal cause of human wealth, and genetics yet more distal.

In truth, the modern environment is strongly influenced by genetics. It is one of the most replicable within-country findings in behavioral genetics. It is also what the between-country economic data show from 500 years of human migration. …

 

 

The truth is that populations with the biopsychological traits conducive to large-scale cooperation, such as honesty toward strangers, cognitive ability, and patience, tend to be better at developing strong institutions and thus richer.

It used to be that we could tell the truth in academia, but leftist capture means we now need to post on X.

Perhaps the leftist strategy is more simply to switch back and forth between proximate, intermediate, and distal causes in order to blame white males, especially if they are successful, straight, and western.

Of course, leftists hate genetic explanations because genetic truths upend their narratives of why they are deserving of more stuff and more power. Genetic explanations are always the most distal.

Western misreading of failure of Israeli election to oust Netanyahu

Western misreading of failure of Israeli election to oust Netanyahu. By Cameron Stewart in The Australian.

Security fears have driven Israelis decisively to the right since October 7 …

You can almost hear the wails of disbelief in Western capitals, ­including in Canberra, that ­Israel’s hard-line leader Benjamin Netanyahu was not swept away in a tsunami-like protest vote.

Why, they ask, would so many Israelis continue to vote for a ­leader whose misjudgements led to October 7 and whose policies since then have killed some 70,000 people in Gaza and promoted perpetual war against ­Israel’s neighbours while ruining its reputation on the inter­national stage?

The reason is simple — Israelis … have much more immediate concerns — like survival against enemies on all sides who, if given half a chance, would kill them. …

Netanyahu’s main opponent, Gadi Eisenkot, was heavily critical of Bibi on character grounds. But on the issues of Gaza, Lebanon, Iran and the unpopular two-state solution there was barely any difference of opinion between the two main leaders and it certainly was not a feature of the election campaign.

Duh. If only the left could see past its own bigotry.

Islamic preacher calls for “preemptive strikes” against “the white man” and white nations

Islamic preacher calls for “preemptive strikes” against “the white man” and white nations. By Jules Gomes and The Electronic Uprising.

Asrar Rashid at the Islamic Centre Nottingham, a registered charity, claims “the white man” commits genocide and tells his audience “Take up arms and defend yourself and do pre-emptive strikes wherever those pre-emptive strikes — which is offensive Jihad — is needed.”

 

Listen to the end (it’s only 1:13).

UK police are refusing to arrest him, despite clearly violating hate speech laws. Meanwhile, a Muslim police officer wants to arrest a British Christian preacher because his preaching caused Muslims anxiety and distress.

 

Imagine if Elon Musk hadn’t bought Twitter

Imagine if Elon Musk hadn’t bought Twitter. By X Freeze.

If Elon Musk hadn’t bought Twitter and fought back against the insanity of the last few years, the West would be much further down a path of self-destruction, self-hatred, and moral corruption:

  • Pronouns treated like sacred scripture
  • State propaganda rebranded as “truth” and “misinformation” used to shut people up
  • Heavy censorship of anyone who disagrees
    Child mutilation and sterilization sold as “gender-affirming care”
  • Birth rates collapsing while governments deliberately import a replacement population that refuses to assimilate and poses a threat to citizens
  • DEI over competence and merit
  • Open borders and cultural self-hatred as policy

​He called the woke mind virus anti-science, anti-merit, and anti-human for a reason. Without the fight he started, the damage would already be irreversible

The woke mind virus is like The Walking Dead… it never stops coming. The fight has to continue or we risk the collapse of entire Western civilization

Nobody is safeguarding our civilization

Nobody is safeguarding our civilization. By Krzysztof Szczawinski.

Western civilization has

  • regulators for finance,
  • watchdogs for governments,
  • frameworks for security,
  • international bodies for everything from fisheries to intellectual property.

It has no institution tasked with safeguarding the civilization itself. This … was an assumption — that what had endured would simply keep enduring. Assumptions are not a strategy.

Every great system eventually requires conscious stewardship. The Romans assumed the Republic would hold. The Venetians assumed the trade routes would always be theirs. Every civilization that ever declined assumed it wouldn’t — right up until the moment the assumption became obviously wrong, at which point it was already too late to do much about it.

 

Sack of Rome, 400 AD

 

What makes this moment different is the paradox: a civilization powerful enough to have shaped the entire world, yet seemingly unable to consciously preserve its own existence.

We have built extraordinary mechanisms for managing parts of the system — the financial regulators, the defense alliances, the legal frameworks.

The deeper foundations — cultural memory, shared values, intellectual honesty, civic responsibility, the willingness to say what is true in public — are left diffuse, unmanaged, and increasingly abandoned. Nobody’s department. Nobody’s budget line. Nobody’s quarterly report.

The result is not collapse. It is drift. Slow, quiet, constant. The kind that shows up not in a single catastrophic event but in the gradual erosion of standards, the slow lowering of expectations, the institutions that stopped reinforcing the civilization’s principles and started undermining them — from the inside, with the best intentions (or not…), in the language of progress.

And into that drift, other civilizations are moving. Not always with armies. Often with patience, money, demographic pressure, and the simple advantage of believing their civilization is worth advancing while ours debates whether it deserves to exist.

A civilization doesn’t need a single authority to watch over it. That would be its own kind of tyranny. But it needs something harder to build and easier to lose: a distributed sense of responsibility among enough of its people, enough institutions that reinforce rather than corrode its principles, and the willingness to examine itself honestly without dissolving into the self-hatred that mistakes destruction for sophistication. …

The answer is not one institution. It is many people, in many places, choosing the same thing: tell the truth. Have the courage it requires.

The barbarians are within the gates, thinking they are more virtuous than us.

In the future there will be fewer smart people

In the future there will be fewer smart people. Via NewsForce.

The peak was in 1990.

 

 

Smart people don’t reproduce so much. Feminism encourages smarter woman to have careers rather than kids, and the only IQ groups above replacement rate in the West are the sub-80s.

In a modern collectivist state, the higher survival rate of smart people counts for little. In contrast, from 1000 AD to 1880 in Europe, average IQ rose and rose because smarter people had more kids who survived to adulthood.

A new 1989 approaches: the fall of the globalist project

A new 1989 approaches: the fall of the globalist project. By Brivael Le Pogam.

Not the fall of the Berlin Wall this time. The fall of the globalist project, and its fundamentally collectivist vision of humanity. …

Their problem is that two forces are now tearing this project apart.

The first is AI. For the first time in history, a single individual can own a lever of production that used to require an army of employees, a bank, and a state. AI doesn’t centralize capital. It hands it to the people who build. That is the exact opposite of “you’ll own nothing.”

The second is reality. Exploding debt, collapsing public services despite record taxes, rising insecurity, schools that no longer teach anything. You can lie about reality for decades. You can’t stop it from arriving.

Their upcoming moves:

First, activate their networks. Soros’s foundations, starting with Open Society, have spent years pouring money into NGOs, activist collectives, and “anti-repression” groups that form the ideological and logistical breeding ground of the crowds we’re seeing today from Paris to Montreal. When the argument no longer works, all that’s left is chaos.

Second, manipulate the youth. This is how communists have always taken power. Mao, speaking to Chinese students in 1957: “The world is yours. You young people are like the sun at eight or nine in the morning.” Nine years later, he unleashed the Red Guards: high schoolers and university students who humiliated their teachers, denounced their parents, and burned books. And once they were no longer useful, he shipped some 17 million of them off to the countryside to be “re-educated.” Youth is always the fuel of the revolution. Never its beneficiary.

Third, the globalist elites will do everything they can to keep the chaos going. Because a country in chaos demands more state, more control, more surveillance, more “governance.” Chaos isn’t a bug in their project. It’s how it runs.

Two possible futures:

But either way, their project has only two possible endings. Neither one goes their way.

Ending one: political Islam. They think they can use it as an ally against the West, against the nation, against the family. They forgot Iran. In 1979, the Iranian left, led by the communists of the Tudeh Party, marched hand in hand with Khomeini to overthrow the Shah. Four years later, the party was banned, its leaders in prison, many of them executed. Islamism never lets itself be used by Marxism. It devours it. Your Marxist project will end up eaten by the very people you thought you were manipulating.

Ending two: economic collapse. Because let’s say it plainly: the elites running this project are, on the whole, economically illiterate. Brilliant at storytelling, hopeless at incentives. Ludwig von Mises proved it back in 1920: without private property there are no prices, without prices there is no economic calculation, and without economic calculation there is only waste and shortage. Hayek drove the point home: no central planner can aggregate the dispersed knowledge of billions of people. Global collectivism can’t work. Not because it’s been badly implemented. Because it is structurally impossible. The USSR learned that in 1989. They’re about to learn it now.

Got gold? Several decades of rising interest rates and falling real asset prices coming up.

The peak of globalism was Obama and Macron

The peak of globalism was Obama and Macron. By Brivael Le Pogam.

Two men, two continents, the same casting.

Young, polished, brilliant speakers. Perfect résumés. Total ease in front of a camera. Able to electrify a rally in Ohio and charm a room full of CEOs in Davos in the same week.

They are excellent actors. I mean that without irony. Public charisma is a real talent, and they have it at a rare level.

Mere salesmen:

But look at what they actually embodied.

Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize nine months into his presidency [actually, nominations closed 11 days into his presidency]. Before he had done anything. They weren’t rewarding a record, they were rewarding an image: a post-national world run by institutions and experts.

Macron is the European version of the same product. A movement founded one year before the election, no historic grassroots base, carried by the economic, media and administrative elites. “Neither left nor right.” Translation: attached to no people and no history. Just the efficient management of globalization.

Their whole software fit in one sentence: the global market, supranational institutions and experts know better than nations what is good for them.

Unlimited free trade. Deindustrialization sold as modernization. Borders treated as an archaism. Sovereignty treated as populism.

They weren’t the architects of this project. They were its faces. The best salesmen it ever had. When you need millions of people to accept that their factory is moving to the other side of the world and that it’s for their own good, you don’t send a gray technocrat. You send someone who knows how to talk.

No one’s buying that shtick any more:

That’s why footage of Obama at a rally rings so hollow today. Same tone, same inflections, same staging. But the audience has changed. They’ve seen the movie. They know how it ends.

And the project they carried is dying everywhere.

The US is back to tariffs and reindustrialization. Europe is finally talking about energy, military and tech sovereignty. Borders are a legitimate topic again. Supply chains are coming home. Covid proved that a country that can’t produce its own masks isn’t modern. It’s vulnerable.

The magic is gone, and cannot be renewed. Look at how poor the US Democrat talent pool is now:

Macron is at 15% approval, his lowest since 2017. Obama is back on the rally circuit, and the magic is gone.

But the most revealing part is what came after them.

The system can no longer produce an Obama or a Macron. Nobody that charismatic, that polished, that smooth.

There are two reasons for that.

The first is arrogance. For fifteen years they won without really fighting. The media was on their side, the elites aligned, the opponent demonized in advance. When you win too easily, you get lazy. You stop caring about the casting. You stop working on the script. And it shows: less polished, less prepared, less credible.

The second runs deeper. Truly brilliant people no longer want to enter this system. They know it has no future. Fifteen years ago, an ambitious young prodigy aimed for the elite schools, Harvard, high civil service, the big international institutions. Today they start a company, they build, they go where things are moving. Nobody signs up for a sinking ship.

So look at the bench.

In the US, they ran Biden. A president whose cognitive decline was obvious to everyone except his inner circle, who spent months hiding it. Then they swapped him out in a panic for Kamala Harris, who couldn’t answer a simple question without drifting into word salad. After Obama, that’s a staggering fall. …

That’s the first sign of a dying system: it no longer attracts the best. All it has left are heirs and imitators.

Charisma isn’t enough when reality contradicts the story.

 

The magic is gone. Makes speeches for 500k a pop. Hasn’t eaten dinner that costs less than $250 in years. Undefeated at condescending to regular folks. Will always be known for a presidency that ushered in the Trump era to begin with.

 

What’s next?

What comes next won’t necessarily be better. But it will be different: leaders judged by what they build, not by how well they tell it.

The age of actors is over. Make way for the builders.

In Australia, Albanese doesn’t rise to anywhere near the charisma level of Obama or Macron. But there are several potential builders in sight on the conservative side.

Support for Nigel Farage’s Reform Party is collapsing

Support for Nigel Farage’s Reform Party is collapsing. Via Basil the Great.

The reasons are pretty simple.

Firstly, on immigration, Reform is indistinguishable from the Uniparty. Many supporters are leaving to Rupert Lowe’s Restore party, which wants to restore Britain’s earlier ethnic mix.

Secondly, Kemi Badenoch is doing a pretty good job of transitioning the Conservatives away from the Uniparty, by adopting a distinctly right-wing, Thatcherite agenda focused on lower taxes, reduced state spending, and opposition to net zero targets, while disavowing the policies of 2010 – 2024.

 

The news today is that Reform apparently just buckled on immigration. They posted about Net Zero immigration, causing an absolute pile on in comments. So, Reform responded by copying Restore Britain’s policy of net negative immigration. Reform have been dragged kicking and screaming to this, trying to recapture voters, so they don’t have a lot of credibility on this issue.

Related: In the UK, even cheese is being put in lock boxes in supermarkets:

Everyone knows why.

Meanwhile, in Japan, the Apple store doesn’t even lock any devices to the table:

It will be interesting to see which way this breaks in the UK.

Democrat’s revenge

Democrat’s revenge. By the Hon. Vickie Paladino.

None of the conversations taking place by Democrats and leftists in anticipation of retaking Congress are about the ways they’re going to make life more affordable for Americans.

The conversations are exclusively about how they’re going to use power to take revenge on their political enemies.

There is no strategy to lower gas prices or grocery prices. No strategy for the budget. No talk about hearings on affordability or inflation or the stock market.

Just revenge. That’s all they’re talking about, two weeks before an election they believe to be sewn up.

“He has a body count like a f*cking war criminal. We start with the US Congress and it ends at The Hague for Elon Musk.” They cannot wait to be back in charge of the “justice” system.

 

Kevin Bass:

If Democrats get power, they will:

  1. Lawfare Trump officials;
  2. Pack SCOTUS;
  3. Go after Elon, SpaceX, and Tesla — then billionaires, then millionaires;
  4. Crush free speech;
  5. Make voter ID illegal;
  6. Flood the country with illegals.

Takers gotta take:

Robert Reich [American professor, author, lawyer, and political commentator, who worked for presidents Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama] calls for the “defunding” of Elon Musk, calls for Democrats to go after Musk’s companies. “Democrats ought to [start] laying the groundwork for nationalizing Starlink & SpaceX… It should be a public corporation.”

 

 

Swan:

5 years ago: Starlink is such a stupid idea. Anyone wasting money investing in this Musk scam deserves to lose everything.

Today: Starlink is essential to the defense of an invaded nation. Access to Starlink is a human right! Nationalize it!

The Democrats don’t talk about their policy positions, because their coalition of voters agree on almost nothing. The trade union people want less competition from immigrants, the feminists and gays are opposed to Sharia law, and so on. Unable to argue policy, the Democrats — like all mainstream leftist parties in the West today — are reduced to demonizing the opposing leader. Hence, the criticism of every non-left political leader in the last two decades rapidly escalates up to full Hitler.

The only policy most of the left can agree on is taking other people’s stuff.