One Nation has not changed; rather, the times have swung in the party’s favour. By Chris Kenny in The Australian.

Hanson is being mobbed in the streets.

I saw it with my own eyes this week, joining her and One Nation state leader Cory Bernardi for a street walk in Adelaide’s Rundle Mall, a CBD location far removed from One Nation’s heartland. Aside from a group of SA Socialists protesters who materialised at the end and one student egged on by friends to timidly tackle Hanson on immigration issues, every person who approached Hanson was friendly and encouraging.

Many lined up for photographs with Hanson and Bernardi, and many said they had voted for One Nation already (pre-poll booths have been open all week) or were intending to do so on Saturday. People of all ages and ethnic backgrounds characterised Hanson and Bernardi as patriots, fighting for mainstream voters.

Now, I have covered campaigning as a reporter for four decades and have been involved from the inside, state and federal, through the years, and this reaction is out of the ordinary. This is a legitimate political phenomenon — a shift is afoot in our political landscape. …

It’s not personalities, so it’s policies — stop mass immigration, end net zero, and, above all, lower the cost of housing.

Asked why he was voting One Nation, a security guard sporting an Australian flag on his vest said, “How they’re standing up for Australia and Australian values.” He urged Hanson and Bernardi to “keep up the good fight” after noting “all the grief” they copped. …

Bernardi basks in the same glory. At a suburban shopping centre recently, security objected to the One Nation candidate mingling with shoppers and called the police. Two officers turned up, confirmed Bernardi was quite within his rights, then requested a photo with him. …

The reaction is more substantial than mere fame. Hanson is seen by many as a warrior and people’s advocate — a saviour. The issues favour her. Record immigration has fuelled a housing crisis and cost-of-living pressures have been driven by escalating electricity prices thanks to governments pursuing UN-inspired net-zero goals.

Hanson has been consistent on these issues for three decades, demanding lower and more selective immigration, and shunning net zero in favour of energy affordability. One Nation has not changed; rather, the times have swung in the party’s favour.

 

 

Hanson has never faltered. In the face of aggressive protests, virulent criticism and even jail time on electoral fraud charges (eventually overturned), this one-person political juggernaut has powered on. …

“Trust,” said Hanson, “people trust me because they know I have never lied to them about what I believe, I stick by it.”

It is a powerful point. In the face of changeable major party politics, shaped more by focus groups than firm policy convictions, Hanson stands apart as the ultimate conviction politician. Love or hate her, we all know where she stands. And that she does not back down.

South Australian state election today. Labor will win, but which party will come second?

Allahu Akbar, Mr Albanese. By Craig Kelly.

The stunned, terrified expression you make when you finally realise Churchill was absolutely right.

• Albanese has repeatedly grovelled and tried to appease radical Islam, desperately chasing their bloc votes.
• He’s funnelled tens of millions of hardworking taxpayers’ dollars into mosques and Islamic schools — effectively subsidising separatist ideologies.
• He opened the floodgates, allowing thousands of unvetted migrants straight from war-torn Gaza to pour into Australia with zero proper screening.
• He’s worked behind the scenes — in secret — to facilitate the return of ISIS brides and their offspring, bringing battle-hardened jihadist sympathisers back to our shores.
• He cheered on senior Labor figures shamelessly marching arm-in-arm with supporters of the fanatical Khomeini regime and Iran’s extremist theocracy.
• He’s shovelled millions more in taxpayer “foreign aid” straight to Hamas-controlled groups — effectively bankrolling terrorists.
• In the midst of the Israel-Gaza war, he cynically rewarded Hamas’s barbaric atrocities by recognising “Palestine” — a blatant signal of weakness and surrender.
• He stonewalled and resisted calls for a Royal Commission into the Bondi jihadist massacre, refusing to confront the rising tide of Islamic extremism while smearing “the far right” as the real villains dividing Australia.
• He’s ignored urgent US requests to help secure the Straits of Hormuz and even ordered Australian navy personnel serving alongside Americans to cower in their bunks — all to avoid offending supporters of Iran’s murderous regime.

And after all that grovelling, all that betrayal of Australian values, all that craven appeasement — they still turned on him. They still wanted to lynch him.

His face said it all: the classic, wide-eyed panic of an appeaser who fed the crocodile… only to discover it’s now lunging for him.

Ruksan Fernando:

Despite all this and more, they still tried to lynch Albanese at the mosque while screaming Allahu Akbar and calling him a dog. There is a lesson in that somewhere about radical Islam but sadly it won’t be learnt.

Elon Musk:

He is a simple man

Bob Hawke (in the 1980s):

(That’s Albanese to Hawke’s left.)

The West’s moral operating system is being overthrown by a woke, Manichaean moral framework. By Claire Lehmann in The Australian.

Earlier this week, … Grace Tame – who was awarded Australian of the Year in 2021 for her advocacy for survivors of sexual abuse – described the sexual violence of October 7 as “debunked propaganda”.  … Tame’s denialism, while abhorrent, is not aberrant.

A Crossroads25/YouGov poll conducted last year found only 48 per cent of Australians agreed it was “broadly true” that Hamas killed about 1200 Israelis on October 7, with 44 per cent saying they were not sure.

Ignorance alone does not explain why people are motivated to deny atrocities. And many of those who minimise or reject what happened that day are not disengaged at all. On the contrary, they believe they are informed, engaged and are certain of their views.

The Manichaean framework:

The more honest explanation is that a moral framework shared by many in our country forecloses the conclusion that those who are “oppressed” can also be guilty. When the world is divided into a binary of the oppressors and the oppressed, guilt and innocence are assigned without any reference to conduct. And these categories remain unchanged even after an atrocity.

The framework is Manichaean. The Manichaean religion of the third-century in Persia divided all existence into dualistic cosmology. The world consisted of the struggle between forces of light and dark. Today, this cosmic struggle is between the oppressors and the oppressed.

“I stand with the oppressed,” Tame repeatedly insisted to the ABC. Within this framework, the women of the Nova festival are, by virtue of being Israeli, classified as oppressors. And oppressors cannot be victims. So the evidence of their suffering — the photographs, the witness testimony, the coroners’ reports — must be denied.

The traditional Western framework:

Most Australians have grown up with a different set of moral instincts entirely. The most familiar is the deontological tradition, rooted in our Judeo-Christian heritage. In this framework, murder is wrong and rape is wrong — regardless of who commits them and regardless of the political identity of the victim. The act itself is what carries the moral weight. From this perspective, October 7 was an atrocity because of what was done to innocent civilians: the elderly, women, children. There is no other interpretation.

The utilitarian framework:

The other framework most of us recognise intuitively is the utilitarian: what is good is what benefits the greatest number; what is bad is what causes suffering and harm. From this perspective, October 7 was a catastrophe — for Palestinians above all. Hamas invaded a country it had no hope of defeating, triggering a war that has killed tens of thousands of Gazans and leaving their own territory in ruins. On purely practical terms, October 7 was the worst strategic miscalculation Hamas has ever made.

The left’s new moral operating system:

The Manichaean framework, however, escapes both verdicts. It is not interested in acts or consequences. It is interested only in identity. In this moral universe, evil is not defined by what you do but by what you are: your skin colour, your ancestry, your position in an economic order. Guilt and innocence are collective, inherited and fixed. Author Adam Kirsch calls it a “political theory of original sin”.

In the contemporary theory of settler colonialism — the framework that has come to define progressive politics across the Western world since 2023 –- any people deemed to have arrived in a land already inhabited are classified as oppressors, guilty by definition, regardless of individual conduct. As one American academic wrote: Palestinians are “a non-white, non-European people struggling for liberation and freedom against a settler colonial oppressor”.

From this perspective, whatever Palestinians do – even if it consists of terrorism, rape and murder – is freedom fighting. Whatever Israelis do is colonial oppression. The rape victims at the Nova festival are conveniently ignored. …

This is not a fringe way of thinking, but a system of thought that has been running in academia for 50 years now and is now being taught to the young:

That moral system now has escaped the academy entirely, travelling through activist culture, non-government organisations and social media until it presents itself not as ideology but the correct way to pursue social justice. Tame did not need to read either book [two core texts, by Fanon and by Friere] to absorb their conclusions. She needed only to inhabit the world those books helped create. …

The backlash to Tame may give some a false sense of security that her views are not tolerated in wider society. But in many places they are; in much of the academy, the arts and our broader literary culture, her views are not only permissible, they are the status quo. The world view that absolves the oppressed of any responsibility for their actions is growing in popularity. Young people are seduced by its simplicity. Older people embrace it — without ever reading its core texts — to appear as if they are keeping up with the times.

The left’s new moral operating system is just an excuse to be anti-white and anti-male. It’s woke (by PyschoMath):

“Woke” has always meant nothing but “anti-white.” …

From the beginning of its middle-class, college-educated popular adoption in the 2010s, the word “woke” has always referred to a discrete set of values. These values are well-known and unambiguous.

Slavery bad. White man do slavery. White man too rich. White man steal from brown man. Man bad. Man steal from woman. Man hurt woman! White man hurt brown man! Borders not real. Everything for free! Paid for by white man! Too rich anyway! Christianity bad! Islam good! Marriage and family bad! Polyamory good!

All of these values without exception are degrading, specifically to White Western civilization. Blame is placed specifically on the categories of straight, white, rich, Christian, high-status, and male.

Woke is a grab for power without merit or hard work.

Australia could end up an unexpected but major victim of the Iran conflict. By Greg Sheridan in The Australian.

A limited war:

Until now, both sides have been fighting within certain limits. The US has not targeted Iran’s energy infrastructure. Trump was furious that Israel attacked Iran’s biggest gas field, leading to Iran attacking Qatar’s gas and other regional energy infrastructure. US and Israeli purpose diverged sharply.

Washington hasn’t hit Iran’s energy infrastructure for three reasons. It wants a post-ayatollah regime to be able to rebuild. It doesn’t want to take energy capacity out of the global system. But most importantly, Iran has desperate, perhaps devastating, things it hasn’t yet done but could do.

If you offer Tehran Armageddon, it might give you Armageddon in return. Closing the Strait of Hormuz is relatively straightforward for Iran but causes huge global disruption. However, if Iran systematically hits Gulf Arab energy infrastructure this could create energy chaos on a far bigger scale. Worse, if it systematically strikes the region’s desalination plants it could cause a fantastic humanitarian crisis.

It has also threatened to set fire to oil reserves. Iraqi forces retreating from Kuwait in 1991 set fire to 600 oil wells. This took months to bring under control. The Iranians could do much, much worse. The Iranians have no incentive to surrender. They don’t mind death through martyrdom, but not through surrender. That makes them particularly dangerous. …

Albanese’s empty promises:

Before he was first elected Prime Minister in 2022, Anthony Albanese promised in speeches (and incidentally in an interview with me) to establish a “strategic fleet” — namely a merchant fleet. But according to Peter Court, an authoritative maritime consultant, there are now zero international trading vessels under an Australian flag.

This is a critical capability gap because a government can requisition in an emergency — for example, to transport oil — only ships that travel under its flag. There are only nine such Australian vessels. These are mainly passenger ships operating between the mainland and Tasmania or odd specialist vessels supplying Antarctic missions and the like.

This is a model for everything else the Albanese government has conspicuously failed to do in national security. It identified the problem, talked big, delivered nothing. Union power means Australian-flagged ships must have entirely Australian crews. That’s uneconomic so there are no such ships. …

Remember Albanese’s earnest pledge before the last election to take back ownership of the Port of Darwin? Zilch. Almost nothing the Albanese government says about national security is believable or consequential.

Australian car industry? It matters now:

Many failures have been bipartisan. It was a catastrophic mistake to get rid of the car industry. We have almost no advanced manufacturing, nor can this be resurrected through a few Dreamtime defence projects alone.

We lazily run a trade surplus on commodities and overspend the revenue. As a nation we’re fat, lazy and dumb.

Opposition industry spokesman Andrew Hastie wants to rebuild advanced manufacturing. He says: “A key input for manufacturing is energy. But Labor’s Future Made in Australia is all about net zero and decarbonisation. As long as we’re bound by the net-zero straitjacket we won’t revive manufacturing. (It) relies on cheap baseload power, advanced robotics, AI and cutting-edge processes.”

Hastie’s right. But his side of politics is also responsible for today’s mess, with 99 per cent of our trade carried by sea, a pitiful few weeks’ fuel reserve, no merchant fleet and a vacuum in most areas of critical capability.

We could end up an unexpected but major victim of the Iran conflict and its fallout.

How to defeat the US Military. By Cynical Publius.

In every hot war the United States has become involved in since the Korean War, we have enjoyed absolute tactical and operational dominance over our enemies. We win every tactical engagement, overwhelmingly. Operationally we can and do dominate any theater of our choosing. No one — and I mean NO ONE — can stand toe to toe with the US military. …

Our military power is unsurpassed. We are masters of diplomacy. We have the world’s strongest economy. …

So how come the US keeps losing wars?

Our military opponents, from Ho Chi Minh to Osama bin Ladin, knew that the only way to defeat the USA is to demoralize the American populace such that it demands withdrawal and throws the then current Commander-in-Chief out of office.

The ONLY way to defeat America militarily is to convince the American people that a war is unwinnable.

Examples:

The slow dribble of IED [Improvised explosive devices, e.g. roadside bombs] deaths in OIF [Iraq War] was not actually targeting soldiers and Marines — it was targeting YOU, the American people. And CNN eagerly complied with death counts running across the bottom of the screen.

The Tet Offensive? It was a decisive US victory that could have ended the Vietnam War in our favor. But Walter Cronkite instead declared the war lost, protests erupted nationwide, and the war was lost.

The Highway of Death in Kuwait? We could have taken out Saddam Hussein in 1991 and never needed to go back in 2003, but international media made the attack on retreating Iraqis look “too cruel,” so we halted just short of the finish line.

It requires the help of the American media:

The strategic imperative of every one of America’s military enemies is to break the will of the American people with skewed information, propaganda, and extreme emphasis on America’s minor losses amidst overwhelming military victory.

But the Ho Chi Minhs and Osama bin Ladins can’t do that by themselves. They need willing partners in the American media and government.

And for Operation Epic Fury, boy oh boy do the Iranian mullahs have an over abundance of American morale killers to draw from in order to defeat America through the informational instrument of national power.

Tucker Carlson. Senator Mark Kelly and the rest of the Seditious Six. CNN. ABC. NBC. CBS. NYT, WaPo. Pakistani bot armies on social media. X “influencers” like Cerno, Candace, MartyrMade and Ian Carroll. Every idiot claiming we are fighting “Israel’s war.”

There is an entire Army of American politicians and media figures who are willingly fighting Iran’s informational war …

America is DECISIVELY WINNING the war on Iran in every measurable respect. Yet there are so many influential Americans who are desperately determined to make you believe otherwise.

The US is winning the Iran war handsomely, points out Military historian Victor Davis Hanson:

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗺𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗿𝘆 𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗻𝗮𝗹. A-10 Warthogs and Apache helicopter gunships are now flying strike missions in Iranian airspace at will. VDH’s point: you only deploy those aircraft when there is effectively no air defense left to threaten them. They are slow, low-flying, close-support platforms. Their presence confirms what the Pentagon has been claiming — Iran has no meaningful air defense remaining. …

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗚𝘂𝗹𝗳 𝗽𝗲𝘁𝗿𝗼-𝗻𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀. The Saudis, the Emiratis, the Qataris — these governments have survived for generations by reading the regional climate with precision. When they expel Iranian military attachés, when they intercept Iranian missiles over their own capitals and say nothing about American strikes, when the UAE reaffirms its $1.4 trillion investment commitment to the United States mid-war — they are not making ideological statements. They are placing bets. And they are betting on the United States.

𝗔𝗹 𝗝𝗮𝘇𝗲𝗲𝗿𝗮. … Al Jazeera — the Qatari state media network, historically critical of American military action, the network Tucker Carlson and the anti-war right love to cite against Israel — is now calling the U.S. bombing campaign brilliant and effective, and saying it has been underestimated. When the media outlet of a nation that hosts both the largest American air base in the Middle East and a Hamas political office starts praising American military effectiveness, the message is unmistakable: 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘬 𝘸𝘦’𝘳𝘦 𝘨𝘰𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘰 𝘸𝘪𝘯.

Iran’s strategy now:

Iran’s strategy now is rope-a-dope. Run out the clock. Wait for American public opinion to shift. Hope the midterms create political pressure on Trump to stop. It is the only play they have left.

District 9 and the Story of “Race”. By the Feral Historian.

Not really news or politics, but interesting if you’ve seen the movie. An insightful commentary on immigration, race, colonization and — above all — tribalism.

The threat of ‘neo-idiocy’. By Henry Ergas in The Australian.

A fundamental conviction of Liberal democracy is that reason and politics could work together. Today, that has crumbled.

What was:

Its core was simple. Democracy does not just need its formal structures; it needs citizens who know how to argue.

Not shout, not posture, but submit their views to the judgment of others and even change their minds. [Jurgen Habermas] … called this “the force of the better argument” and considered it the only legitimate basis of political power.

This was Western modernity’s great achievement: that when it is asked “why?”, authority must answer — with answers that withstand scrutiny. Authority could no longer rest on God or tradition. It could only rest on consent: reasoned, revisable, formed through public argument.

Old media, for all its faults, filtered. Editors decided what mattered. Reporters had to justify claims. Stories passed through people whose credibility depended on not being wrong.

What is:

Then the internet created an enormous space in which those protections were absent.

Anonymity compounded the damage. It gave voice to those the gatekeepers had shut out. But it also dissolved the oldest constraint on public speech: the knowledge that you would be held to account. Mask the speaker’s identity and every inhibition against bad faith, abuse and sheer fantasy goes with it. Even free speech’s staunchest defenders — Milton, Defoe and Mill — feared it rendered freedom of expression unsustainable: but the internet made it ubiquitous. …

The shared world that democratic discourse requires shatters into hermetic fragments. This, Habermas suggested, is not solely, or even mainly, a failure of technology. It is a failure of character. …

Democratic citizenship requires psychological maturity: citizens strong enough in ego to renounce the fantasy of omnipotence, to tolerate uncertainty, to engage with genuine otherness without falling into projection or rage — or turning to violence.

The culture of the 1960s set out to overthrow the disciplines that sustained that maturity ethic. What replaced them was not liberation. … What the 1960s unleashed was a reversion to the permanently adolescent self, craving recognition rather than truth, for whom life is a theatre and to live is to be applauded.

Social media’s echo chamber universalised that condition and gave it political form. Surrounded only by reflections of itself, the self no longer encounters the otherness that alone can discipline its demands, train its impulses and instil what Tocqueville called democracy’s “habits of the heart”. …

The result is what we see on our streets, in universities and cultural institutions: the “neo-idiocy” of the highly instructed but semi-educated…

Legislation doesn’t begin to address the problem:

You cannot pass a law restoring people’s willingness to be wrong. Nor can you fine your way to intellectual seriousness. And regulation cannot recreate what has been lost: the patience to follow a complex argument, the basic trust that the other side is not simply your enemy. …

The greatest curse, Mill warned, is stupid opponents: ones who never force you to sharpen your wits.

Islam and its echo chamber of mosque culture and the Koran are the same anti-democratic phenomenon on steroids. Ironically, our leftists import Muslims for their votes! But the Islamists are incompatible with Western culture, and seek only to destroy it and replace it with their own.

Clueless, spineless Albanese chased out of a mosque by a mob of Muslims calling him a putrid dog and “Alba-tizi” (buttocks), but he says it was “incredibly positive”.  By Mostafa Rachwani at the SMH.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was surrounded by protesters yelling “shame” and “disgrace” during Eid prayers at Lakemba Mosque on Friday morning, forcing him into a rushed escape.

Albanese was attending the prayers, held to mark the end of the month of Ramadan, alongside Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke.

One source of anger was Albanese’s support for Israel, with those in the crowds mentioning the wars in Gaza and Lebanon as key to their frustrations.

Others mentioned the police actions at the protest against Israeli President Isaac Herzog, where Muslims were forcibly removed while they were praying at Town Hall in February.

 

 

While neither the prime minister nor Burke spoke to the incensed crowd, attendees shouted down a speech being made by Gamel Kheir, the secretary of the Lebanese Muslim Association, which owns and runs the mosque.

Kheir was giving one of the speeches traditionally delivered after the prayer, with Albanese and Burke seated just ahead of him. A crowd formed a circle around the official party, shouting Kheir down and demanding to know why the prime minister was invited.

“Why is he here? Get him out of here! It’s a disgrace,” one man shouted, as the mosque event descended in chaos. …

“We have the right to be angry” another shouted as the crowd pushed and shoved to get closer to the Albanese, who was also being called a “putrid dog”. …

A stand-off then ensued, with protesters waiting outside the mosque’s office for Albanese, while organisers attempted to find a way around them.

Eventually, Albanese was able to escape via a back door, but was chased by the crowd. Some yelled “Alba-tizi” after him, a play on his name, combining it with the colloquial Arabic word for buttocks.

James Dowling in The Australian.

The protest against Mr Albanese and Mr Burke was organised by controversial activist cohort Stand4Palestine. …

Stand4Palestine is linked with fundamentalist Islamic group Hizb ut-Tahrir, though denies any formal connection. Hizb ut-Tahrir was listed as a prohibited hate group on March 5 under new legislation passed after the Bondi attack.

Thomas Henry in The Australian:

Anthony Albanese says the response to his visit to a mosque in Sydney’s south-west was “incredibly positive.” …

The Prime Minister said the crowd of 30,000 people who gathered at Lakemba mosque were respectful during his visit and thanked the Lebanese Muslim Association for their invitation.

What a clueless, spineless weakling our leader is! He is literally chased out by a mob of Muslims calling him a putrid dog and “Alba-tizi” (buttocks), and he says it was “incredibly positive”.

Sure, most of the Muslims were well behaved, but the radical Islamists got away with very bad behavior and Albanese was successfully intimidated and made to look like a fool — a beta male, as they say. The radical Islamists are the strong horse here, obviously, and everyone knows it.

 

The Australian PM did loser-face:

The look coming to every leftist, when they wake up and realise that Pauline Hanson might just be right. — Craig Kelly

The Islamists are winning, because our elites are afraid of their violence and aggression. By Michael Deacon in The Telegraph.

On the evening of July 7, 2005, Tony Blair sought to reassure a shattered nation with the following promise. The terrorists, he vowed, would never win. “When they try to intimidate us, we will not be intimidated,” declared the then prime minister. “When they seek to change our country or our way of life by these methods, we will not be changed.”

Stirring words. Sadly, however, they proved to be flatly untrue.

Two decades later, it’s becoming ever clearer that the terrorists are indeed winning, that we are indeed intimidated, and that they have indeed succeeded in changing our country and our way of life. …

Example:

Let me point out that we are about to pass the fifth anniversary of one of the most contemptible episodes in modern British history: the driving from public life of the Batley schoolteacher.

In March 2021, a Religious Studies teacher in West Yorkshire was said to have shown his pupils a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad during a class discussion. After furious protests and death threats, the teacher and his family were forced into hiding — where they remain to this day. Five whole years later.

What the teacher did may have been unwise. But it wasn’t illegal. So why was an innocent man deprived of both his livelihood and his liberty?

The answer is as simple as it is shameful. No, it’s not – or not primarily – to do with political correctness. It’s to do, above all, with fear. Whatever they may claim, the truth is that our elites, from politics to policing, are pursuing a policy of spineless appeasement towards Islamist extremists — because they’re utterly petrified of what will happen if they don’t.

A strong country — like the one Tony Blair tried to depict in his 7/7 statement — would have stood by the Batley teacher from the start. To anyone who so much as protested against what he’d done, let alone threatened him, it would have said: “In Britain, we believe in something called freedom of expression. If you don’t, then this sadly isn’t the country for you. Which is why we’ll be kindly escorting you on to the first plane out of here, to a country that better suits your taste for theocratic barbarity.”

But of course, no one in authority dared say or do anything of the sort. So much for defending our “values” (as Mr Blair proclaimed we would). The lesson, for the people of Britain, is that we must obey the rules of a foreign religion, or else.

Which is why I say the terrorists are winning. The aim of terrorism is not just to kill. It’s to gain and exert power – through fear of further terrorism. And it’s working.

Our elites, it seems, will do almost anything to avoid arousing the ire of Islamist fanatics — because they remember not only 7/7, but also the murder of Lee Rigby, the Manchester Arena bombing, the 2017 Parsons Green train bombing, the 2017 Westminster attack, the London Bridge attacks of both 2017 and 2019, the murder of Sir David Amess, the attack on the Manchester synagogue…

Feminists, Islamists, and several groups on the left, have learned to bully their way to winning. The Islamists are cultural masters at it — there are now 2 billion Muslims.

Can Anthony Albanese stand up to bullying? Not if they might vote against him.

Movies that would be banned from winning an Oscar today, due to DEI rules against white men. By Voice of Reason.

Braveheart
Schindler’s List
Amadeus
Patton
The Sound of Music
Casablanca
Ben-Hur
Gone with the Wind

Oscars prioritize collectivism over storytelling.

End Wokeness:

In order to compete at the Oscars for Best Picture, all films must meet the “diversity inclusion” quota.

Marcela Dunn Ortega:

Literally, what they are asking for is just ONE of these three things:

1. That the protagonists are not all white European or American men.
2. That at least 30% of the cast are not white European or American men. Or
3. That the story revolves around someone who is not a white European or American man. …

They literally classify the rest of the world as an “ethnic group” ➡️Anyone who isn’t European or American!

Try telling the history of the modern world without mentioning white men. The lies by omission would be too numerous to count. And jealousy isn’t going to make it otherwise.

What if the White House has no intention of reopening the Strait of Hormuz, yet? By John Konrad, a merchant ship captain.

Every TV analyst in America is talking about minesweepers and carrier strike groups. They are asking the wrong questions. The binding constraint on Hormuz was never a minefield or insurance. It is the US Navy’s willingness and ability to reopen it.

Every talking point suggests the White House and Navy are working hard to reopen the strait but progress is slow. A new posts on Truth Social suggests we may have to consider a new hypothesis.

 

What if the White House has no intention of reopening the Strait of Hormuz?

When the seven P&I [liability insurance for shipowners covering people, cargo, and third-party damage.] clubs belonging to the International Group issued 72-hour cancellation notices for war risk coverage in the Persian Gulf on March 5, they did not just raise costs. They made transit impossible.

P&I clubs insure roughly 90 percent of the world’s ocean-going tonnage. Without their coverage, ships cannot sail. Port authorities will not let them dock. Banks will not finance the cargo. Charterers will not book the vessel. The entire system, from loading berth to discharge terminal, is underwritten by a chain of contracts that begins with a club in London, Oslo, or Tokyo. When the clubs pulled war risk extensions, that chain broke. Not for a few ships. For the global fleet. …

VLCC [Very Large Crude Carrier, 200,000+ tonnes] charter rates quadrupled to nearly $800,000 per day. Over 1,000 vessels are now trapped in the Persian Gulf, burning charter costs with nowhere to go. By March 3, only four ships crossed the Strait, down from a seven-day average of seventy-seven.

 

Trump’s insurance play:

Then Trump did something that almost nobody in the press understood.

He ordered the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation [DFC] to create a $20 billion maritime reinsurance facility, with Chubb as lead underwriter, making the United States government the insurer of last resort for Gulf shipping. A sovereign nation positioned itself as the backstop for war risk insurance on the world’s most critical maritime chokepoint. The DFC facility, coordinated with US Central Command and Treasury, offers hull, machinery, and cargo coverage on a rolling basis to eligible vessels.

The United States now controls the on/off switch for the Strait of Hormuz. Not through naval firepower. Through insurance.

Read the latest MARAD advisory carefully: U.S.-flagged, owned, or crewed commercial vessels operating in these areas should maintain a minimum standoff of 30 nautical miles from U.S. military vessels.

And read this part of the DFC announcement again… “coordinated with US Central Command.”

They cannot pass without the Navy permission.

The green light has not appeared.

 

Trump’s Maritime Dream That Was:

To understand why this matters, you need to understand what Trump built and what was destroyed.

Trump came into his second term determined to restore American maritime power. He assembled the greatest collection of maritime minds in key government positions since Nixon. He put Mike Waltz, creator of the SHIPS for America Act [a push to rebuild U.S. shipbuilding and grow its commercial fleet for economic and military resilience; hHina currently builds 50% of ships globally but the US less than 1%], as head of the National Security Council. He created a Maritime Office in the White House. He appointed maritime advocates to key positions throughout the administration. He signed a sweeping Maritime Executive Order in April 2025 directing a Maritime Action Plan across Defense, State, Transportation, and Homeland Security.

He started targeting chokepoints: Panama, the Red Sea, Suez, the Greenland-UK Gap. He launched investigations into Gibraltar and Spain. He created USTR [US Trade Representative] actions to tariff Chinese-built and operated ships. …

Trump’s Maritime dream was quashed, mostly by the Europeans:

The ambition was real.

So was the pushback.

Shipowners lined up outside USTR to protest the China shipping tariffs. Nearly every economist on the planet lined up against the maritime tariff proposals. The entire U.S. tech sector asked for China concessions, and what did China want in return? A pause to USTR.

Then Signalgate. The media leaked a private conversation about attacking the Houthis and reopening the Red Sea. The operation was stunned. Signalgate forced a reorganization. Waltz was moved to the UN. The Maritime Office was downsized. The NSC was gutted.

That was the moment every maritime initiative began to stall.

What collapsed: Panama did not follow through on free transits for U.S. ships. CMA CGM’s $20 billion commitment evaporated as the company ordered vessels from China and India instead. Congress stalled on the SHIPS Act. The UK traded the Chagos Islands, including Diego Garcia, to Mauritius for a sweetheart deal, putting a critical naval base at risk. Key Navy appointees were slow-rolled or blocked in the Senate.

Then it came to a head at the International Maritime Organization in London. In April 2025, sixty-three countries voted to approve the Net-Zero Framework, a global carbon pricing mechanism on every ship over 5,000 tons. What did Trump’s negotiators ask for? That America’s tiny fleet of merchant ships be exempt. Europe refused, claiming American maritime interests are “irrelevant” and that we lack the leverage or votes.

The U.S. walked out. In October, at the adoption vote, Trump called it a “Global Green New Scam Tax on Shipping.” Trump played hardball. The State Department threatened sanctions against any country that voted yes. Fifty-seven countries voted to delay.

A pyrrhic victory. The carbon tax was dead in the water, but we did not get exemptions for U.S. ships, and the White House began losing the wider war for chokepoints and maritime trade with the City of London, Europe and China.

Then two body blows in quick succession.

On February 20, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that IEEPA does not authorize the President to impose tariffs, invalidating the “Liberation Day” reciprocal tariffs and the China, Canada, and Mexico trafficking tariffs. An estimated $160 billion in tariff revenue, gone. Trump imposed 15 percent global tariffs under Section 122, but those are capped at 150 days and require Congressional extension.

His most powerful tariff tool was taken away by the courts. If you cannot tariff your way to compliance, you need another form of leverage.

And then the Golden Fleet.

In December, Trump announced a new class of Trump-class battleships at Mar-a-Lago: 30,000 to 40,000 tons, armed with hypersonic missiles, railguns, lasers, and nuclear cruise missiles. Twenty to twenty-five hulls. The most ambitious surface combatant program since World War II.

 

 

Within 72 hours, every national security think tank and academia – which all have close ties and funding with NATO nations – lined up to kill it. … Every defense analyst competed to be quoted saying it was impossible. …

The Leverage Hypothesis:

Now connect the dots. …

The European shipping community and political establishment spent the past year dismissing, undermining, and mocking every Trump maritime initiative. They scoffed at the USTR tariffs. They laughed at the SHIPS Act. They blocked the IMO exemptions. They refused to take American maritime policy seriously.

Now their energy supply runs through an insurance facility controlled by Washington.

“Let their navies figure it out.” Except everyone knows they cannot. European naval forces are too small, too slow, and too poorly equipped for sustained convoy escort operations through a contested strait. All the European navies combined could not send more than three ships at a time to defend the Red Sea. An entire German task force sailed around Africa to avoid it.

Eventually Europe will have to capitulate to get the U.S. Navy, and the U.S. insurance backstop, to fully reopen the Strait.

What does “capitulate” look like? The IMO carbon tax. Greenland. Tariff concessions. The SHIPS Act. Every maritime policy priority that Europe and China have been blocking for the past year.

I had a long discussion with a senior Department of Energy official yesterday on background. I cannot share details but it is clear that the conventional Strait of Hormuz calculus, the one every cable news analyst is running, is wrong. The administration is not thinking about this the way CNN thinks they are.

Precedent:

There is a historical precedent that sharpens this hypothesis.

The last time the U.S. Navy escorted tankers through Hormuz was Operation Earnest Will during the Iran-Iraq Tanker War in 1987-88. Foreign tankers that wanted U.S. Navy protection had to reflag into the U.S. registry. Kuwaiti supertankers flew the American flag to get American escorts.

Trump has already said the Navy will escort ships through Hormuz “if necessary.” If the same reflagging requirement applies, every European and Asian tanker that wants a U.S. escort would need to fly the American flag. …

Hormuz becomes the forcing function for everything Trump’s maritime agenda could not achieve through legislation or diplomacy.

Meanwhile, Iran is selectively letting ships through. Turkish, Indian, Chinese, and some Saudi tankers have been permitted to transit via Iranian territorial waters. About eighteen tankers, mostly Chinese, have done so according to Lloyd’s. Western-allied ships are blocked.

The “closure” is really a sorting mechanism. Iran decides who trades and who does not. Unless the U.S. Navy reopens it for everyone. On America’s terms.

That’s the decision the world has to make, let Iran pull up a tollbooth or stop blocking Trump’s maritime plans.

The Domestic Calculus:

But what about the homeland? Pundits are certain this strike just cost Republicans the midterms and possible the next presidential election.

Maybe. But maybe there is an alternative Hormuz hypothesis.

While TV oil analysts focus on the global price of oil, the real experts in Houston are watching something different: the fracturing of the global energy market.

The real threat is not $200 oil. It’s a fracture of the system. It is cheap energy in export nations and ruinous energy costs in places far from reserves. It’s $2 oil in the Persain Gulf, $20 dollar oil in the Gulf of America and $2,000 oil in the UK.

One global price only works if there is a surplus of tankers to arbitrage differentials. Before the Iran strikes, that surplus was razor-thin. Now, with supertankers stuck in the Gulf, it is gone. …

Domestically, diesel is stabilizing and natural gas prices are falling as LNG that would normally be exported stays trapped at home. Trump issued a 60-day Jones Act waiver and opened Venezuelan oil sales to U.S. companies via a new Treasury license for PDVSA. These are exactly the moves you make if you are trying to drive U.S. prices down while the global market fractures.

Tankers charge by the day, so long-haul routes become comparatively more expensive. Venezuelan crude on short Gulf runs becomes far cheaper for U.S. refiners than Middle Eastern crude routed around the Cape of Good Hope for European or Asian buyers.

Look at who benefits. The three most powerful industry lobbies in the U.S. are tech, Wall Street, and energy. Tech gets cheaper LNG for data centers. Wall Street gets volatility and panic to extract trading profits. Energy companies were just given Venezuela and renewed Gulf access.

Meanwhile, California has been closing refineries and blocking pipelines, forcing gasoline imports from South Korea on ships with dayrates that are skyrocketing. Govenor Newsom, the leading canidate for President in 2028, is irrate. New England imports LNG and diesel by ship. If Hormuz stays closed, prices spike in those states. Deep blue states. Red state energy costs fall. Blue state costs rise. Europe capitulates on major policy disputes between now and the midterms. …

I want to be transparent: this political analysis is speculative. The relationship between energy prices and voting behavior has fragile links. But the directional logic is clear, and I would bet the White House sees it.

What the Navy Is Telling You

Look at what the Navy is doing. Or rather, not doing.

The U.S. Navy is in no rush to solve this problem. They are methodically, deliberately, taking their time. Army battalions are not mobilizing. The Marines called in from Japan are slow-steaming across the Pacific; it could be weeks until they are ready. Minesweepers are still far from the battlespace. Carriers are slowly rotating, not surging.

 

 

Someone at the top told them to take their time. That signal has to be coming from the White House.

Every day, approximately 1,000 trapped vessels are not available for charter. Every day, European energy dependence deepens. Every day, the DFC reinsurance facility becomes more central to the global shipping system. Every day, the case for concessions on tariffs, the IMO, Greenland, and the SHIPS Act becomes harder for Europe to refuse.

And what does the Navy get for playing along? Support for battleships and stronger allies willing to spend money building their own destroyers when it becomes clear to the world how weak their navies have become.

What I Am Arguing, and What I Am Not

I am not arguing that Trump planned this from the beginning — the P&I club withdrawal was a cascading system failure that no central planner could have predicted or orchestrated — but it is possible. What I am arguing is that the administration has, whether by design or adaptation, assembled the tools to exploit this moment. …

The strongest version of this thesis is not “Trump is playing 4D chess.” It is that the administration holds more options than anyone realizes, and the insurance mechanism, not the Navy, is the real lever of power. …

America just does not care about ships or how long it takes to reopen Hormuz or what happens to Europe as a result.…

The Endgame

He has one. But maybe he cannot say it out loud.

Because the endgame is leverage. And you do not announce leverage. You apply it. …

But do not ask “what is the endgame” as if nobody in Washington has an answer. The answer is on the balance sheets of every P&I club in London, in the empty berths of every European naval base, and in the 1,000 ships sitting dead in the water, burning money, waiting for a green light that may not come until the price is right.

An interesting take. Let’s see what happens. Naturally the legacy media ignores this hypothesis, because their narrative is that Trump is merely a buffoon and a fool — even though he keeps outsmarting them.

hat-tip Scott of the Pacific, David Archibald

For roughly five hundred years, the global trading system has been underwritten by Western naval power. By David Hilton at XYZ.

The Portuguese opened the ocean routes in the fifteenth century. The Dutch and the British turned those routes into commercial highways. In the twentieth century, the United States Navy inherited the task of keeping the oceans open.

Global capitalism was never simply a matter of markets and finance. It was also a matter of security.

Merchants will ship goods across oceans only if they believe those goods will arrive safely. That belief depends on naval patrols, international law, and an intricate web of maritime insurance markets centred historically in London.

Trade, in other words, requires both protection and trust. For centuries, the Western maritime powers provided both. …

Periods of open maritime trade have been the exception, not the rule:

Since World War II at least, the Western world has lived inside the illusion that global integration is permanent. Goods flow effortlessly across oceans. Supply chains stretch thousands of kilometres without serious interruption. Distance itself seems to have been conquered.

Cheap energy and secure sea lanes created that illusion.

Yet history offers a more sobering perspective. Large trade networks have collapsed before. The Bronze Age trading system disintegrated around 1200 BC. The Roman Mediterranean fractured in late antiquity. The Silk Road periodically vanished for centuries when political and military conditions made long-distance commerce too dangerous. …

Iran’s attacks on Gulf oil infrastructure and its effective closure of Hormuz represent more than a regional escalation. They mark a signal event in the slow unravelling of the economic order that has shaped the modern world.

 

The Straits of Hormuz (looking NNE into Iran)

 

Collapse is slow at first:

The consequences will not appear overnight. Civilisational systems rarely collapse in a single dramatic moment. Instead, they begin to strain. Prices rise. Supply chains falter. Governments scramble to stabilise markets that were once taken for granted. …

For the past half century, the industrial world has lived within a system built on cheap energy, secure sea lanes, and a financial architecture tied closely to the global oil trade. That system produced extraordinary prosperity, but it also created an illusion of permanence.

Now the foundations are beginning to crack.

Modern civilisation likes to imagine that its problems are primarily political or technological. Yet the deeper structures of history are often logistical. Empires rise when they master the movement of energy and goods across distance. They falter when those flows become uncertain.

The tankers burning in the Persian Gulf are therefore more than images of regional conflict. They’re a planetary blood clot blocking the most important coronal artery of our civilisation.

The Solution To Our Fuel Crisis. By David Archibald, who has over 50 years in and out of the oil industry. His first oil industry role was as a juggie on a seismic crew in the Channel Country of far western Queensland in 1974.

The fuel crisis is another thing that should be blamed on John Howard. As prime minister 25 years ago, he announced that Australia didn’t have to worry about fuel security as long as we were a net exporter of energy, including coal and uranium. That hasn’t worked in practice.

When you are short of diesel, everything comes to a stop until you fix that shortage. Without diesel you can’t do anything at all, so it concentrates the mind on the most important task….

Diesel is the economy. Half of the Country’s diesel consumption is in two states, Queensland and Western Australia, which combined have a quarter of our population. …

 

 

Monthly refinery production of diesel, assuming we can get supply of heavier crude oils, is a third of what it was 15 years ago. The production fall in 2021 was the closure of the Kwinana refinery, an unforced error.

Australia is delinquent with respect to our obligations to store liquid fuels as a signatory to the International Energy Agency. We are the only country to be delinquent. We are also the most diesel-intensive economy in the OECD. …

100% dependent on imported fuel:

Australia’s fuel supply situation is worse than it appears. We produce 21% of the inputs into our liquid fuel supply, but we export the same amount. That is because most of our domestic liquids production is on the west coast, where we don’t have any refineries. And most of that produced on the west coast is condensate, which the remaining refineries on the east coast aren’t configured to process.

So, we are effectively 100% reliant upon imported crude oil and imported refined product. …

There used to be an oil refinery run by BP at Kwinana, but that was closed in 2021. It had a capacity of 140,000 barrels per day. It was running at a profit and didn’t need upgrading. At the time, BP was run by a bloke called Bernard Looney, who “became CEO in February 2020 and served until September 2023, during which time he spearheaded a strategic pivot toward renewable energy and set net-zero ambitions.” In effect, the Kwinana refinery was sacrificed on the altar of global warming. As a modern refinery with the ability to handle a range of crude types it would have a replacement cost approaching $6 billion. The WA and Federal Governments could have stopped the refinery’s closure but they both worship at the same altar of global warming.

The nearest refinery is the Viva refinery in Geelong, 3,300 km to the east. …

Solution:

The first thing to do to fix our fuel problem is to utilise the oil and condensate we are producing but not refining. Onshore and offshore, Western Australia produces 50,000 barrels of oil and 250,000 barrels of condensate per day. The condensate is a byproduct of gas production for the LNG plants 1,300 km north of Perth.

The solution is simple. Install distillation columns to take the diesel, petrol and jet fuel out of the condensate and export the remainder. …

The whole 300,000 barrels per day of oil and condensate would yield 120,000 barrels per day of petrol. West Australian petrol consumption is 23,000 barrels per day so the balance of 100,000 barrels per day could be shipped to the east coast. …

Unnecessary fuel specifications should be relaxed to reduce capital costs. Sulphur specs, for example. Most Australian soils are sulphur-deficient and the more sulphur that falls from the sky, the better. Nothing is achieved by requiring low-sulphur diesel in the middle of nowhere. …

The next thing to do to secure Australia’s fuel security will be to develop the Pavo oilfield, which is located 100km off Port Hedland. This is a 109 million barrel oilfeld discovered in 2022. … Pavo is a simple, uncomplicated development. It is in 88 metres of water and has a low gas to oil ratio. …

For Western Australia, the proposal outlined above totalling $24.4 billion is the best possible near-term outcome. For the three million residents of the State, the per capita cost is only $8,815 (what they spend annually in Bali, on average) and well worth it for things that will operate with a positive cash flow. When the oil and gas fields run out, as they will, liquids production can switch to applying the Bergius liquefaction process to the lignites that exist in a belt from Salmon Gums, north of Ravensthorpe, wrapping around the Yilgarn Craton towards the South Australian border. When the lignites run out, as they will, the feedstock for the Bergius plant will switch to the eucalypts of the high rainfall forests of the southwest. Ideally this conversion from useless wood to precious liquids will be powered by breeder reactors.

Choices are more constrained on the east coast. There is no easy oil and gas left but there are plenty of coalfields from Cape York to the southern margin of the continent, and then around into South Australia. There is also plenty of oil shale …

The solution for the east coast is installing Bergius coal liquefaction plants. There is plenty of coal that is too low grade for export, either due to ash content or water content, which would be ideal because it is next to worthless. There was a Japanese research Bergius plant in the Latrobe Valley that operated until 1991. Victorian brown coal has a high reactivity and thus a low residence time. This Japanese effort determined a price hurdle of US$40 per barrel for development in 1991 dollars (oil was US$24 per barrel at the time). That equates to US$95.20 in 2026 dollars which is less than the current Brent price of US$102 per barrel.

To quote from the movie Aliens: “The readouts are all in the green.”

Yes we can:

There are no impediments to Australia becoming completely autarkic in liquids fuel production, petrochemical precursors and LPG, and ammonium sulphate for fertiliser. Well, no impediments apart from the current State and Federal Governments. But those can be overcome by the will of the People, once the People have suffered enough to get organised.

Record January migration intake. By Kevin You at The IPA.

Records continue to be smashed with this government’s promise to cut migration in absolute tatters, as half a million would-be migrants arrived on a net basis over the twelve months to January — the highest in recorded history …

Recent claims that net overseas arrivals are coming down seek to mislead Australians into thinking that there are fewer migrants in the country than before. This is false. The number of migrants in Australia is still growing to record levels month after month …

The Australian way of life is the envy of people the world over. But Australia’s migration programme must be planned for, have the consent of the community, and be targeted toward areas of economic need. The federal government has been failing on all three counts.”

Why didn’t the legacy media mention it?