Category Archives: Britain

Jihad’s Triumph On Westminster Bridge

Britain, GUNS, Intelligence, Islam, Jihad, libertarianism, The West

“Jihad’s Triumph On Westminster Bridge” is the current column, now on Townhall.com. An excerpt:

… The story of Khalid Masood is certainly festooned with the kind of studied failures you find in the tale of American homeboy Omar Mateen, who murdered 49 gay club-goers in Orlando, Florida, wounding 53 others. Mateen might have been a latent homosexual, but he was loud and proud about his orientation as an aspiring Muslim terrorist.

For his part, Masood was a violent criminal with many faces, in-and-out of the Islamized British prison system for inflicting “grievous bodily harm” on his countrymen. At every turn, Masood’s life of crime was met with soft responses. He slashes the face of a café owner in the village of Sussex but receives only two years in jail. A similar, but more severe, offense nets Masood, then Adrien Elms, a brief jail sentence for “the possession of an offensive weapon.”

A penal system that singles out for criminalization and punishment not the deadly assault and the intent behind it, but the possession of a weapon during the commission of said assault, is inviting escalation. (Oh, and once in jail, how about converting this kind of inmate to Christianity? That’s guaranteed to save lives in the future by giving inmates a higher purpose that precludes killing for rewards in the afterlife.)

So it was that Masood journeys from Sussex to Saudi Arabia, like any ordinary English lad would. (Is this now a rite of passage in Britain? BBC News’ correspondent Dominic Casciani seems to think so.) There, he can be found hard at work at the General Authority of Civil Aviation. (Yeah, right!) Then it’s back to East Sussex. With a nicely fattened, fraudulent CV, Masood goes to work for Aaron Chemicals, in Bodiam, a company which, as it appears, hired him despite his criminal record and predisposition to violence.

Speaking of corporate culture, how dangerously politically correct is it? How likely are corporations to put virtue-signaling and politically correct piety ahead of public and worker safety? You be the judge: British security firm G4S employed Omar Mateen, who was out of the closet about his Jihadi sympathies and aspirations. The Swiss security firm Securitas employed Dahir Adan, the Somali, Minnesota mall stabber. Out of all their St. Cloud applicants, Adan seemed like the best bet. …

… Read the rest. “Jihad’s Triumph On Westminster Bridge” is now on Townhall.com.

Support Steve King. America Is A Western Civilization

America, Britain, History, Nationhood, Political Correctness, The West

It was not the monarchy of Buganda or tsarists Russia that inspired and sired America’s Founding Fathers, to create the freest, most prosperous country on earth. It was England, home of the Magna Carta, John Locke and the British Enlightenment. The American Founders were equipped with a particular faith, Christianity, and a specific set of ideas concerning the nature of human beings, their natural rights, in particular, their inalienable rights to life, liberty, and, yes, PRIVATE PROPERTY. These ideas were unique to Western Europe.

For suggesting as much, Steve King is being labeled and maligned (which Trump Nation should not tolerate). Via Time:

Geert Wilders “understands that culture and demographics are our destiny. We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.”

In an interview Monday on CNN, King said he stood by his remarks. King said, “I meant exactly what I said,” and noted that he delivers the same message to countries in Europe.

“We need to get our birth rates up or Europe will be entirely transformed within a half a century or a little more,” King said.

Paul Ryan:

A President Who Doesn’t Hate Those People Clinging To Guns & God

America, Britain, Donald Trump, Elections, History

“A President Who Doesn’t Hate Those People Clinging To Guns & God” is the current column, now on The Unz Review. An excerpt:

Did Donald Trump unite the American Silent Marjory behind things true and shared?

These are economic prosperity, national pride and unity, recognizable neighborhoods—a yen that demands an end to the transformation of neighborhoods through centrally planned, mass immigration—and an end to gratuitous wars.

Those were the questions asked in “The Trump Revolution The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed” (June 29, 2016), and answered in the affirmative.

Unlike America’s self-anointed cognoscenti, some of us saw this coming. The former recognize truth only once card-carrying members arrive at it independently, grasp and broadcast it, sometimes years too late. Not so America’s marginalized writers. Not in 2012, but in 2002 did we pinpoint the wrongness of the Iraq War. And not in 2016, but in July of 2015 did some of us, not fortuitously, finger Trump as “a candidate to ‘kick the crap out of all the politicians’” and “send the system’s sycophants scattering” (August 14, 2015). His appeal, as this writer has contended since late in 2015, transcended left and right.

Conversely, vaunted statistician Nate Silver “calculated, last November, that Trump’s support was ‘about the same share of people who think the Apollo moon landings were faked.’” (Professor Tyler Cowen of George Mason University properly downgraded wonder boy Silver’s intellectual prowess. His prose, wrote the good teacher, was a sprawl that “evinces a greater affiliation to rigor with data analysis than to rigor with philosophy of science or, for that matter, rigor with rhetoric.”)

Given the disparate groups that rooted for Mr. Trump’s candidacy, it would appear that he did in fact awaken a historic majority. You could say Mr. Trump was an “omnibus candidate,” a concept floated by historian David Hackett Fischer …

… Read the rest. “A President Who Doesn’t Hate Those People Clinging To Guns & God” is now on The Unz Review.

UPDATE: An interesting perspective on “The Trump Revolution” from a betting man: “I thought this was an interesting read last summer,” writes David Taggart at Amazon.com, “now I realize it was a work of genius. Wish I’d paid closer attention and bet when the bookies were offering 7-2.”

‘God Bless Ilana,’ Writes British Libertarian Dr. Sean Gabb

Britain, Donald Trump, Elections, libertarianism, Paleolibertarianism

Dr. Sean Gabb is director of the Libertarian Alliance, based in the United Kingdom. He is a prodigious libertarian writer and scholar. Dr. Gabb writes the following on the popular Libertarian Alliance blog (to which I contribute):

Our own Ilana Mercer was one of Mr Trump’s earliest and most vocal and consistent supporters. When he announced he would run for election, and when she immediately went into drum majorette mode, I thought she had gone a little funny in the head. Here was a businessman and television personality, trying to break into the closed shop of American politics. I thought Ilana was funny in the head, and I thought Mr Trump a bit of a joke.

Then he showed his teeth, and I sat up. I began to read Ilana with more attention. I said nothing to her when she strained our charitable status to the limit. I watched astonished as the crowds began to gather, and as the most unlikely candidate anyone could have imagined began to tell truths I never thought to hear in front rank politics. Until close to the end, I doubted he could win. I thought Ilana would be terribly depressed by his losing, and that she would go away and sulk for a decade.

But he’s now President-elect Trump, and Ilana was right all along.

I think we should be grateful to Ilana for two reasons: …

… “God Bless Ilana” is at the British Libertarian Alliance. Subscribe to the RSS feed.

Still in the Trump context, historian Dr. Clyde N. Wilson has blessed “The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed” (June, 2016) with a review in Chronicles magazine, the flagship publication of principled paleoconservationism. “Sounding The Trump” appeared in the October 2016 issue of Chronicles (subscribe). A short excerpt:

In important ways, a revolutionary process has begun. So argues Ilana Mercer in the best extended analysis yet published of the Trump phenomenon: “Trump is getting an atrophied political system to oscillate” in “an oddly marvelous uprising.” For us revolutionaries there is still a long way to go, but we are entitled to a “modest hope” that “an utterly different political animal, Donald Trump, might actually do some good for the countrymen he genuinely seems to love.”

It is not Trump who is transforming American politics, the author asserts; “it’s the people of America doing the transforming.” Trump is the first politician in a long, long time who has regarded America as a country rather than a “proposition” and has actually spoken to and for “the people.” Far from being “divisive,” his plain speaking has enthusiastically united large numbers of Americans. …

… “White Lives Matter Less” has been, in Mercer’s words, “the creedal pillar” of our public life. Without ungraciousness to any, Trump has shown that it is OK for white Americans to declare that they have had enough of “the pigment burden” that has been piled on their backs. This paleo-libertarian author does not disguise her disgust at the fashionable statism, indistinguishable from the collectivist left and without a clue to what “free trade” really means, that passes for libertarianism today. …

… as Mercer points out with tough realism, … In this post-constitutional time, it may be that “the best liberty lovers can look to is action and counter-action, force and counterforce in the service of liberty.” A president hoping for reform will face 160,000 pages of federal laws and regulations and relentless sabotage by the Banksters, Bombers, Bureaucrats, and Busybodies who now govern us. He cannot be a moderate if he hopes to accomplish anything.

On “Mercer’s Menckenesque ability to coin memorable phrases describing the empowered fools of our time,” Professor Wilson’s asks: “Does any contemporary writer do it better?”

Finally, a reviewer with a sense of fun; someone with the good sense to have a hearty chuckle at this verbal swordplay:

Mercer on the media: “news nitworks,” the “War Street Journal,” “idiot’s lantern,” “unsharpened pencil,” “tele-tarts,” a “circle jerk of power brokers,” “one-trick donkeys,” “celebrated mediocrities,” “another banal bloviation,” the “cable commentariat as a cog in the corpulent D.C. fleshpot.”

Mercer on our rulers and would-be rulers: “parasites in waiting”; “nation-building at the point of the bayonet makes [Hillary] barking happy”; “Banana Republicans”; “dwarf-tossing” (William Kristol’s promotion of nonentities as Trump alternatives); the “quaint expectation that voters, not party operatives, would choose the nominee”; the “silent majority that dare not speak its name”; “what our crypto-leftist conservatives are ramming down our proverbial gullets are dogmas, not values”; the “master-servant relationship between Republicans and the Religious Right”; the “think tanks’ industry for the god of war”; “neoconservatives speaking like Tocqueville but acting like Robespierre”; “neoconservatives standing athwart every valid form of American conservatism yelling stop.”

What a review and what an honor! Subscribe to Chronicles here.