So now we have two-tier grieving. Progressives are allowed to mourn lost colleagues, but populists are not. How else to explain the media mauling of Nigel Farage merely for venting his sorrow over the death of Ann Widdecombe? He’s been branded a pantomime mourner, a death exploiter, a weeper of insincere tears. It’s been obscene, and frankly cruel.

When Farage lays a wreath and voices his fear of violence, he’s tarred as a death-supping opportunist

Even by the standards of the Farage Derangement Syndrome that’s been gathering pace these past few weeks, the attacks on him for lamenting the killing of a colleague have been mad. He’s “exploiting” her death for “political propaganda”, howls the leftish press. The Times rebuked him for turning tragedy into “propaganda” by speculating that her killing may have been politically motivated. But recent developments suggest he may have a point: counter-terrorism cops have taken over the investigation.

Even his laying of flowers at Widdecombe’s home elicited haughty scoffing from the grief police. X was awash with infantile snark about how he was only “doing it for the cameras”. It’s a “performance”, people sneered. Behold the brain rot of Faragephobia, where your mind is so fried by Nige hate you can’t even accept that he might genuinely be cut up over the violent death of a friend and ally.

Then came the accusations of deflection. He’s “weaponising” Widdecombe’s death to distract attention from his financial scandals, say his accusers. A writer for the i paper said the only reason Farage is noisily fretting over the security of Reform politicians is to justify that five million quid he received, supposedly to pay for security. Or maybe he’s genuinely worried for his Reform friends? After all, one was just savagely cut down. Honestly, the lack of heart is staggering.

What a bind Farage finds himself in. If he had stayed schtum and laid no flowers, he’d have been called a heartless narcissist. “Told you Reform was just the Cult of Nigel”, they’d have said. Yet when he lays a wreath and voices his fear of violence, he’s tarred as a death-supping opportunist. He’s damned if he mourns and damned if he doesn’t.

Then there’s the hypocrisy. The people ripping the mick out of Farage’s mourning are the same mawkish middle classes who love a public blub. The minute a celeb pops his clogs they’re all over social media professing their “devastation”. Collective ersatz grief has been the moral glue of the chattering classes pretty much since the death of Princess Diana, yet when a man mourns someone he actually knew they snort and roll their eyes.

And what about the public grieving for Jo Cox? It was absolutely right that people mourned that savage assault on a mum, an MP and on democracy itself. Now, though, some of the same media folk who cried for Cox are mocking Farage for crying for Widdecombe. That’s a little sick-making, if I’m going to be honest.

What’s more, some of us remember that Cox’s death was not only rightly lamented as a vile act of anti-British terrorism – it was also held up as an indictment of Brexit itself, which was right on the horizon at the time. Was that also the “weaponisation” of tragedy? Or is the use of death for political ends okay when decent, non-populist people do it? Do let us know the rules.

We seem to live under a hierarchy of sorrow. Under the doctrine of two-tier grief, if a politician of the right is slain the immediate instinct is to police the reaction of her surviving colleagues. Their grief is treated as a tactical calculation, their sorrow subjected to a moral audit. Yet when someone in closer proximity to progressive opinion is killed, grief is seen as natural, righteous, and the more publicly vented, the better. I’m old-fashioned. I think every theft of a precious life should be mourned, by all of us.

Centrists damn Reform as a wicked outfit that dehumanises its opponents. But that’s far truer of them and their one-eyed loathing for Farage and his “bin men”, as a Labour MP sneeringly referred to Reform politicians.

The Centrist Dad multiverse of pompous podcasts and Bluesky snidery has convinced a vast chunk of the middle class that populism is fascism and Farage is our Mussolini, and it is turning them loopy. Guys, stop, switch off: Ann Widdecombe’s death is sad, The End.

Written by Brendan O’Neill

The Spectator/July 15, 2026

Image from Facebook

Obama wasn’t a peacemaker; he was brainwashed by the same people who poisoned Columbia University into hating America and supporting the IRGC, Palestine, and the Muslim Brotherhood, all funded by Qatar. He was a president who mistook his own narrative for reality, failed to understand the enemy, believed a check and a handshake could talk a revolutionary regime out of forty years of stated doctrine, and was willing to let a terrorist organization with American blood on its hands continue operating at full strength while he cashed in on the applause.

FULL ARTICLE

How the White House Buried America’s Biggest Terror Investigation

When Karl Marx famously declared that “religion is the opium of the people,” he didn’t necessarily get it wrong; he just hadn’t met Barack Obama. For eight years, the Obama administration systematically drugged the Western public with a comforting fairy tale: that radical Islam isn’t that radical, that the Ayatollahs in Tehran are merely “moderates,” our enemies just need a hug, and that if we sign a historic piece of paper, they will lay down their arms and join the family of nations. It was intellectual opium, distilled to perfection. But while Western voters were happily lulled to sleep by this rhetoric, one of the greatest geopolitical betrayals in modern history was unfolding behind the scenes.

This betrayal wasn’t just naive idealism; it was criminal abandonment by a megalomaniac who published his own autobiography in his early thirties and wanted to be remembered as the president who saved the world, yet all he did was sacrifice American lives and safety to feed his grandiose narcissism.

Our story begins where you’d least expect it: deep in the wiretap rooms of a counter-narcotics unit tracking Colombian drug cartels. The DEA intercepted a phone call originating in South America between Colombian cocaine cartel members, but the federal agents listening through their headphones, trained to hear and translate Spanish, heard a completely different language; it was Arabic.

That single, anomalous phone call was just the first thread in something much bigger. Analysts flagged it and moved on, certain it was a fluke, a crossed wire, a mistake. It wasn’t. Another call surfaced, then another. Same accent, same cadence, buried within cartel networks that had no business speaking Arabic.

So they set up surveillance and followed the money trail, agents pulling one thread after another, patiently and quietly. At the end of that thread was something nobody in Washington was prepared to find: the largest, most sophisticated drug-and-terror network the world had ever seen, a billion-dollar drug-cash cartel, led back to a single name: Hezbollah, which had built and was operating the most sophisticated cocaine-and-terror cartel the world had ever seen, hiding in plain sight. The DEA had, for one brief window, the case to bring it all down.

A team of elite American agents had spent years tracing the money, building an airtight case, and tightening the noose around its neck. They had the names, the indictments, and, for a brief window, the green light to take it all down. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to dismantle the terror cartel responsible for the deaths of many Americans.

But then, the White House stepped in and cut the rope.

The Obama administration, supposedly committed to national security, grants absolute impunity to a terrorist organization with American blood on its hands. Grab a drink. We are about to look directly into the West Wing’s darkest blind spot, starting with the operation they desperately tried to bury. Handed Hezbollah’s multi-billion-dollar drug cartel diplomatic immunity, allowing it to flood the world with poison and blood.

Welcome to the insane, suppressed story of Operation Cassandra.

Cassandra

In Greek mythology, Cassandra was a Trojan princess cursed with a brutal gift: she could see the future with perfect clarity, yet no one would ever believe her. She watched the wooden horse roll through Troy’s gates and screamed the truth to a city that had already decided not to listen. In 2008, a group of DEA agents named their most important operation after her, though they didn’t realize how literally the curse would apply.

Hezbollah is a U.S.-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization, backed by Iran, and responsible for some of the deadliest attacks against Americans in modern history. The money that Project Cassandra was built to choke off was funding EFPs that tore through American armor and killed hundreds of U.S. soldiers in Iraq. The threat wasn’t confined to a battlefield overseas. In June 2017, federal agents arrested two Hezbollah operatives who had spent years casing targets inside the United States, including two New York airports, an FBI office, and U.S. military and law enforcement facilities in New York City, laying the groundwork for attacks on American soil.

This is what was at stake: a terror network with American blood already on its hands, actively building capacity for further attacks. In 2008, a small task force set out to do what no one had managed before: dismantle Hezbollah not through airstrikes or sanctions alone, but by targeting the one thing every terror network needs to survive. Money.

An Operation the Size of a War

To understand what it took to get this close to Hezbollah, you have to understand what the task force was actually running: a web of parallel operations spanning three continents, each feeding intelligence into the next.

In Paris, an entire European offshoot of the case, later known as Operation Cedar, began with almost nothing: a single phone number passed along by DEA agents working out of the American embassy in January 2015. French investigators traced it and uncovered a network that moved Hezbollah’s drug money through luxury goods, watches, jewelry, and high-end merchandise bought in bulk at Paris boutiques, shipped abroad, resold, and converted into clean cash that made its way back to Lebanon. It was money laundering dressed up as a shopping trip.

By the time Project Cassandra reached its peak, it had ceased to be an American investigation. It had become a coordinated, multinational operation spanning four continents, and for a brief window, it looked unstoppable. In the United States, over thirty federal agencies operated from a blacked-out facility in Virginia, coordinating wiretaps, informants, and financial forensics on a scale rarely seen outside wartime intelligence work.

The Mossad wasn’t a bystander in this story. It was an active operational partner from the earliest days, running joint counterterrorism-finance operations alongside DEA agents, sharing intelligence on a terror network sitting on Israel’s own northern border. The entire drug-and-terror network Cassandra spent eight years mapping traced back to one architect: Imad Mughniyah, Hezbollah’s chief of external security operations and one of the most wanted terrorists in the world, a man with a hand in the 1983 U.S. Embassy and Marine barracks bombings in Beirut that killed hundreds, years of hostage-takings, and the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires that killed 85 people.

In February 2008, Mughniyah was killed in Damascus during a joint Mossad-CIA operation so precise it required special, direct approval from President George W. Bush: a small bomb smuggled into the headrest of his SUV and detonated by remote control the moment he sat down.

In Belgium, U.S. authorities picked up a chilling signal: Hezbollah wasn’t just fighting to keep its man out of American hands — it was preparing to kill to do so. Intelligence uncovered a plot to assassinate the prosecutors building the case against him and to kidnap a Belgian defense attaché in Beirut as leverage. It was a race against the clock — and Belgian and American authorities won. Before Hezbollah could act, the operative was spirited out of the country and delivered straight into U.S. custody.

Germany was where the real money moved. Roughly one million euros a week flowed through the European laundering network, and most of it passed through a single node: a courier based in Düsseldorf who, by several accounts, wasn’t just another operative — he was Hassan Nasrallah’s own nephew, quietly running one of Hezbollah’s most lucrative pipelines from inside Germany’s borders.

This wasn’t a drug case with a few foreign leads. It was, in effect, a multinational war footing against a single terrorist organization, the kind of coordinated global effort usually reserved for hunting a head of state or dismantling a nuclear program. Agencies that don’t normally share a parking lot were sharing raw intelligence. Governments that don’t usually agree on anything were, for a few years, rowing in the same direction.

The Order From Above

By 2011, the task force had everything it needed. Wiretaps spanning three continents. A paper trail leading directly to Hezbollah’s inner circle. Indictments drafted and ready to file. They had built, agent by agent, year by year, a case strong enough to gut the terror group’s entire financial machine in a single coordinated strike.

But something strange began to happen. Slowly, then all at once, the machinery of Washington turned against its own agents. Requests disappeared into silence, swallowed somewhere between one office and the next. Search warrants sat unsigned on desks, gathering dust while the clock ran out. Wiretap renewals expired before anyone could approve them — as if approval had simply stopped being anyone’s job. Extradition requests were shelved without explanation, filed away in a place no one seemed willing to name. And it wasn’t random. Someone, somewhere, had decided.

The Slow Kill: A Timeline of Betrayal

Killing Cassandra Operation didn’t happen overnight, nor did it happen with a single order. What you’re about to read is betrayal at its highest level: how Obama and his administration slowly strangled and buried this operation, one deniable decision at a time, until one day the patient was dead and nobody could pinpoint the exact moment it happened. Take a breath. Then follow the timeline.

In 2008, Project Cassandra launched. DEA agents begin mapping what will turn out to be the largest, most sophisticated terror-financing network they have ever encountered. Two years later, in May 2010, Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, stands in front of a Washington audience and calls Hezbollah “not purely a terrorist organization,” insisting instead that American policy should help strengthen its “moderate elements.”

Read it again. Hezbollah is the organization behind the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, the same year it also leveled the Marine barracks, killing 241 American servicemen in their sleep, the deadliest single attack on U.S. Marines since Iwo Jima. It has kidnapped, tortured, and murdered American hostages by name. It has American blood on its hands that has never been allowed to dry.

In May 2010, John Brennan, the man Obama trusted to run his counterterrorism policy, stood before a Washington audience and called this organization “not purely a terrorist organization,” arguing that U.S. policy should instead work to strengthen its “moderate elements.” Internally, the message went even further: DEA officials would later acknowledge they were pressured to avoid even using the word “terrorist” when briefing partners on Hezbollah’s criminal networks, softening the label of an organization built on American corpses because the truth had become diplomatically inconvenient. It was the doctrine, stated in public, years before anyone outside the task force understood exactly what it would cost.

In October 2011, task force intelligence helped expose and foil an Iranian-backed plot to assassinate Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States at a Washington, D.C., restaurant. It should have been a career-defining win for the agents involved.

Instead, the White House declines to publicly credit the DEA for its role. That same year, prosecutors indicted Hezbollah-linked operative Ayman Joumaa for smuggling 85 tons of cocaine into the United States and laundering more than $250 million of the $850 million in drug proceeds his network handled. The criminal indictment omits any mention of his ties to Hezbollah, charging him only with narcotics and money laundering offenses. The terror connection, which took years to prove, never became part of the legal case against him.

November 2012. Obama wins re-election. He will never face American voters again, and a deal with Iran becomes the signature project of his remaining years. Within weeks, according to task force veterans, opposition to Cassandra’s work turns systematic.

Early 2013. A new national security team takes over: John Brennan moves to lead the CIA, and John Kerry replaces Hillary Clinton at the State Department. In March 2013, Obama personally authorized a secret channel to Iran, sending a handpicked team to Muscat, Oman, to meet Iranian officials face-to-face, a channel kept hidden even from close allies, including Israel.

That same year, the Justice Department refused to indict Abdallah Safieddine, Hezbollah’s envoy to Tehran, on weapons-smuggling charges, even though task force agents had two eyewitnesses ready to testify that he attempted to buy 1,200 military assault rifles. A frustrated Jack Kelly, the DEA agent handling the Hezbollah cases, wrote in an email that year: “The FBI and other parts of the USG provide little or no assistance during our investigations.“

2013 to 2016. This is the slow strangulation. Search warrants sit unsigned for months. Wiretap renewals expire before they are approved. Extradition requests vanish into the State Department, which Kerry now runs. Task force agents are no longer invited to interagency meetings on transnational crime. Their reports on Hezbollah’s drug empire stop appearing in the president’s daily threat briefing. On paper, Hezbollah itself quietly disappears from the White House’s list of transnational criminal organizations, as if the threat had simply ceased to exist.

Read that timeline from start to finish, and one thing is undeniable: It was a series of specific, deliberate choices made by specific people at the exact moments when making them carried the least political cost. Every unsigned warrant was a choice. Every canceled briefing was a choice. Every eyewitness Washington chose not to put on the stand was a choice. And every one of those choices left a designated terrorist organization, with American blood already on its hands, free to keep building an empire that still stands today.

But why? Why would the Obama administration stop this? After years of patient, dangerous, meticulously built work, with a terrorist organization responsible for American deaths finally within reach of real consequences, who benefits from letting go? The answer isn’t a single villain. It’s a list of them, each with a different reason to want Cassandra dead.

The Poison Reached the Top

Barack Hussein Obama spent his formative years absorbing Edward Said’s framework of Western guilt and the belief that the West simply misunderstands its enemies. He and Rashid Khalidi, the scholar who would later hold Columbia’s Edward Said Chair, were close friends and regular dinner companions in Chicago for years. Obama himself said publicly that their conversations were “consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases.” Said himself dined with Obama in 1998, a year before he published his own memoir, fittingly titled Out of Place.

Obama phoned Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood president, to broker a Gaza ceasefire in 2012 and came away, according to the New York Times, “impressed” with Morsi’s “engineer’s precision,” despite Morsi’s own recorded remarks calling Jews “descendants of apes and pigs.” He invited Morsi to the White House. His administration went further still with CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, an organization named an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2007 Holy Land Foundation terrorism-financing trial. Ties were serious enough that the FBI formally cut off contact with the group. Despite that, CAIR representatives visited the Obama White House at least twenty times starting in 2009, and in 2011, his Justice Department declined to pursue renewed indictments against CAIR.

Barack Hussein Obama wanted to be remembered as the president who solved the Middle East. What he actually built was a deal that handed Iran everything and asked for a signature in return. In January 2016, his administration flew $1.7 billion in cash to Tehran, officially “settling” a decades-old arms dispute, with the delivery timed to land the same day Iran released American prisoners, a sequence the State Department later admitted was deliberately orchestrated for “leverage.”

The nuclear deal itself unfroze more than $100 billion in Iranian assets and included sunset clauses that allowed enrichment restrictions to expire within a decade: not eliminating the program, just delaying it. All the while, a federal task force with an airtight case against Hezbollah’s terror-financing empire watched its own government pull the plug, one denial at a time, so nothing would complicate the agreement that gave Iran everything and got nothing in return, thereby putting American lives at risk.

Obama wasn’t a peacemaker; he was brainwashed by the same people who poisoned Columbia University into hating America and supporting the IRGC, Palestine, and the Muslim Brotherhood, all funded by Qatar. He was a president who mistook his own narrative for reality, failed to understand the enemy, believed a check and a handshake could talk a revolutionary regime out of forty years of stated doctrine, and was willing to let a terrorist organization with American blood on its hands continue operating at full strength while he cashed in on the applause.

Every dollar Project Cassandra failed to seize was a dollar Hezbollah spent on the next EFP, the next assassination, or the next kidnapping used as leverage against an ally. That’s not a foreign policy disagreement. That’s a president who decided his own story mattered more than the lives it cost and called it statecraft.

The Head of The Snake and the love letters

Iran didn’t just want the Cassandra money to keep flowing. It played Obama like an instrument, and the paper trail is almost embarrassing to read.

Starting in June 2009, Obama did something no American president had ever done: he began writing personal, secret letters directly to Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, not through Congress, not through public diplomacy, but through Swiss diplomatic channels and later a covert backchannel in Oman. There were at least four of these letters over five years, each one sent as Obama tried to build trust with a regime whose official chant remains “Death to America.”

While Obama was writing love letters to a man plotting to keep his terror network solvent, his own negotiators were meeting Iranian officials in secret hotel rooms in Oman starting in March 2013, months before the public knew any negotiation existed. When the talks finally became formal, even close U.S. allies who should have been in the room were kept in the dark about how far along the back channel was. Iran got a direct, secret line to the President of the United States. Israel got nothing. America’s own ally, the country Hezbollah’s cocaine money was literally arming attacks against, the country that helped build the Cassandra operation itself with intelligence and technology, wasn’t even informed.

Iran understood exactly what it was holding, because Obama had told them himself. In one of his final letters, sent in October 2014 as the nuclear deadline approached, Obama explicitly wrote that U.S. cooperation with Iran against ISIS depended on Iran reaching a nuclear deal by November 24. He wasn’t responding to Iranian pressure. He was handing Tehran a second bargaining chip for free, telling them exactly how badly Washington wanted both things at once. Iran didn’t have to fight for that leverage. Obama gave it to them in writing. And while all of this played out, Iran kept funding Hezbollah’s drug empire without missing a beat.

Here’s how the courtship ended, and it reads like a joke because it is one: Iran walked away with sanctions relief worth well over a hundred billion dollars, $1.7 billion in cash flown to Tehran, a nuclear program handed an expiration date instead of a grave, and a terror-financing investigation that died quietly so none of it would complicate the signing photo. The United States walked away with a signature, a handshake, and a president who spent five years mailing his hopes to a man whose regime’s official chant is still “Death to America.”

Obama didn’t just fail to get anything for what he gave away. He handed Tehran a second bargaining chip in writing, for free, in a letter, because he wanted to look like a peacemaker so badly he forgot he was supposed to be negotiating. Hezbollah never stopped running the largest drug cartel of its kind on earth through any of this. It just got eight years of American law enforcement conveniently looking the other way while it did. That’s not diplomacy. That’s a man who begged for a deal so badly that Iran didn’t even have to ask for anything. He gave it to them first and thanked them for taking it.

The Verse They Never Read

Long before “Prophet” Muhammad moved against the wealthy, fortified Jewish tribe of Banu Nadir in Medina, he had already formulated his battle plan. He looked at his enemies and saw a structural flaw that rendered their high walls useless. That insight was codified directly into the Quran, in Surah Al-Hashr: “You would think they were united, but their hearts are divided.“ The siege unfolded exactly as predicted. Banu Nadir’s promised reinforcements never came, and the tribe was expelled from Medina, stripped of its land and fortresses. By contrast, a Jewish tribe that fought instead of folding, Banu Qurayza, was besieged months later and met a far darker fate: the men were executed, the women and children enslaved.

This was the foundational doctrine of Islamic expansion: an enemy that seems formidable from a distance but is already defeated by internal betrayal and luxury. You don’t need to match their wealth or their weapons. You just need to exploit their weakness, empathy, and division, strike them piece by piece, and watch them collapse under the weight of their own divisions.

Fourteen centuries later, this remains the lens through which radical Islam views the modern West. When the Ayatollahs in Tehran or the strategists of the Muslim Brotherhood look across the Atlantic, they don’t see a terrifying superpower; they see the fulfillment of the prophecy of Medina. They see a progressive Western elite so consumed by identity politics, tribal factionalism, and civilizational self-loathing that they can no longer agree on what they are defending.

In the Islamist calculus, Western “tolerance” is just a polite word for spiritual exhaustion, and our internal culture wars prove that our hearts are divided. They aren’t afraid of the West’s technology because they know that a society this fractured will never have the stomach to use it.

For two decades, the West has been failing that test on a loop, and every time, the other side has been taking notes.

Barack Obama failed; he mistook a revolutionary regime’s patience for a willingness to change, wrote it secret love letters, and buried the one investigation capable of dismantling its terror-financing network, all so he could sign a piece of paper and bask in internal glory.

Hezbollah didn’t get weaker. It had eight uninterrupted years to mature into exactly what Project Cassandra warned it would become: a cartel with a flag, still moving cocaine through Ireland in 2023 and still pulling roughly sixty million dollars a month from Iran even after a brutal year of war gutted its leadership in 2024. The bill Obama refused to collect in 2013 came due in Israeli and Lebanese blood a decade later.

And Donald Trump, for all his rhetoric about strength, just failed the same test in a different key. On June 17, 2026, after a renewed round of U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran that killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei himself, Trump signed a ceasefire — the Islamabad Memorandum — while the nuclear question remained unresolved. Hundreds of kilograms of enriched uranium, enough for roughly ten weapons, remain in Iran, mostly buried under the sites the U.S. bombed, not gone. Trump himself admitted as much, telling the New York Times he was in no rush to remove it.

Why would a president willing to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites sign a deal that leaves the material intact? Because Iran shut down the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil flows, gas prices at home began to climb. A population that wants cheap fuel today doesn’t want to hear about a stockpile that might matter in five years, and a president who has to face voters listens to the loudest signal, not the most important one. Different party, different man, same failure to read the enemy correctly, the same trade Obama made, just paid for at the pump instead of at the ballot box.

That’s the whole story of this article, really: a portrait of a Western political culture that has grown weak, spoiled, and hopelessly naive, one that has stopped believing in the nation as something worth defending and has instead come to believe in the comfort of its own good intentions. It is so consumed by its own narcissism that it refuses to believe its enemies even when they say, out loud, in their own words, exactly what they intend to do.

From: Behind the Narrative/July 15, 2026

Bash Back, a militant transgender rights group, has singled Les Streeting out in its campaign to ‘smash transphobia’ through ‘direct harm’. The group has produced an online guide urging supporters to identify ‘transphobic’ individuals and then ‘hit them repeatedly until they desist from their activities’. Suitable targets, the chilling booklet suggests, include the ‘offices of transphobic MPs’. This is illustrated, by way of example, with a photograph of Streeting’s constituency office.

Also on Bash Back’s hit list are organisations including Sex Matters, the Equality and Human Rights Commission and the Free Speech Union. Activists are advised to target party conferences and ‘the property of transphobic public intellectuals’. And if there were still any doubt as to what all this is meant to inspire, the leaflet urges people to ‘choose your weapon’ above icons of a hammer, a mask and a fire extinguisher.

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Image by Getty

I knew the evening was in trouble when the hostess described the table as “a safe space for difficult conversations.” Nothing good has ever followed such words.

A safe space for difficult conversations is usually a space in which everyone is free to express precisely the same opinion, provided they do so using slightly different therapeutic vocabulary. Disagreement is welcome in the way vegetarians are welcome at a barbecue: theoretically, warmly, and without any intention of accommodating them.

“But before I go, let us clarify what happened here. You invited one pro-Israel guest into a room of people who share the same politics and called it dialogue. You introduced me by my position, then treated me as morally suspect for holding it. You recited accusations you could not define, cited history you did not know, invoked laws you could not explain and became offended whenever asked for evidence.”

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My editorial opinion: Linda Goudsmit/071326

Brilliant brilliant article!! My favorite exchange is, “’This is why these conversations are impossible. You keep retreating into facts.’ I stared at her. It remains one of the finest accusations ever made against me.” The exchange describes the arrogance of the low-information individuals who substitute their feelings for facts. And the mocking title, “The People who know nothing know everything” distills the entire conflict between those who live in the adult world of facts/objective reality, and those who choose to live in the childish world of feelings/subjective reality. This is no small matter because it is the source of political rupture among families, friendships, colleagues, and even nations. Those who live in objective reality cannot live in peace with those who live in subjective reality. Why? Because a sane society requires consensus on what is real. Feelings are not facts, and when feelings replace facts as the metric for reality, society has been reduced, regressed, weakened to childish psychological functioning and vulnerable to its enemies. Freedom is an adult enterprise and our enemies know it.

“If you can’t live in society without hurt feelings, you might as well become a hermit.”

~ Ann Widdecombe ~

Afc Newsletter July 12, 2026

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IN HER role as editor of TCW, Kathy Gyngell did what British journalism has fought to do since John Wilkes and the North Briton; with leonine grit and courage she upheld freedom.

The closure of TCW as a daily site should shame every politician who claims to care about free speech. It should shame Conservative MPs who cheered or tolerated the Online Safety Act. It should shame ministers who mouthed support for liberty while online dissent was being throttled. It should shame the broadcasters who now expect to be treated as ‘trusted news’ while they helped create the climate in which dissenting outlets were cast as dangerous.

A heroine of free speech has been forced to retreat from a platform she built by steely resolve and courage because Britain’s censorship state has made the cost of dissent too high. TCW was not defeated. It was starved of oxygen by people who could not answer it.

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Oct 7, like Occupy Wall Street or Black Lives Matter, had become a social contagion and a hysterical cause that could be used to recruit a new army of political foot soldiers for the far Left. Riots and clashes blooded them; social media confrontations indoctrinated them and now they’re moving into higher office on behalf of the DSA.

The Democratic Socialists of America is a conclave of rich college kids. Their latest cause, hating Jews and Israel, is just more lipstick on the political pig that the country has been rejecting for well over a century. Socialism didn’t catch on in the late 19th century, despite fears that it would, it didn’t take off during the Cold War, despite some legitimate worries, and it’s not catching on now.

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Our American ancestors did not shed their blood at Concord and Trenton, Gettysburg and Shiloh, Midway and Normandy, just so that a band of thieves, radicals, and lunatics could come in and loot and pillage our nation. Our heroes died to win, build, and to save, and to build truly a great country, the greatest country ever in the world.

For 250 years, the entire world has looked to our country and been inspired by the leaps of progress, feats of strength, and acts of selflessness, faith, and hope that could only have happened right here.

After 250 years, American freedom still rings. The American dream still lives, and the American flag still flies more proudly than ever before. Over the people who will not quit, the nation that will not fail, the country that will not fall, no matter how hard the enemy tries, we cannot be beaten.

Together, we will make America bigger, better, and stronger than ever before. I promise you that. It’s an honor to be your president. Thank you very much and happy Independence Day to all. God bless you all. God bless you all. Thank you.

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My editorial opinion posted 070426:

Linda Goudsmit on Tierney’s Real Newstierneyrealnewsnetwork.substack.com

This speech is the proud, patriotic, unyielding speech of Trump ’45. There is no question that communism is a threat to our great nation, particularly because today the communist menace is represented politically by the radical leftistist Marxist/Muslim Democrat party. What Trump ’47 failed to mention in his speech is that the secular Marxist ideology that has infested our great nation and marched through our institutions has a religious partner in Islam. It is the red/green Marxist/Muslim alliance that is the existential threat to our constitutional republic - not just communism.

Mr. President, you cannot live on both sides of this ideological fence. Communism is doctrinally the secular ideological enemy of American freedom, and Islam is doctrinally the religious enemy of American freedom. Both communism and Islamism are replacement ideologies that fully intend to collapse America from within in their quest to make the whole world communist or Muslim. “Death to America” is an anthem of both communism and Islamism. America needs you to recognize both threats because today they are partners in their common cause to collapse America from within.

But the greatest threat to America is from the globalist elite puppeteers who are funding and fomenting the red/green alliance, the Marxists and Muslims are globalism’s useful idiots! It is the globalist elite who are America’s most lethal enemy. America is being attacked culturally and religiously and no amount of money or business deals will end the megalomaniacal, ideological, doctrinal Muslim/Marxist will to power. Trump ’45 played chess, but Trump ’47 is playing checkers while the globalist elite and their useful idiots are playing chess. The globalist tactical strategy is the waiting game. The globalists and their useful idiots tell POTUS whatever he wants to hear, sign lucrative business deals and bogus peace deals while they simply wait for President Trump’s term to end.

It is painful to watch President Trump be seduced, distracted, and played by the globalist elite whose strategic objective is to impose globalism’s own planetary Unistate. Tactically the globalists must create enough divisiveness and chaos to make America ungovernable during President Trump’s last term, then the globalist elite will step in to “restore the peace” with Vance’s assistance after Trump ‘47 is gone. Globalism is the most powerful, lethal, and menacing replacement ideology of them all. It is the existential enemy of America and the one to fear and defeat - communism and Islamism are just doing globalism’s dirty work - and VP Vance is waiting in the wings.

“I am a Canadian, a free Canadian, free to speak without fear, free to worship God in my own way, free to stand for what I think right, free to oppose what I believe wrong, free to choose those who govern my country. This heritage of freedom I pledge to uphold for myself and all mankind.”

~ John G. Diefenbaker ~

Afc Newsletter July 3, 2026

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We have stumbled. We have fought among ourselves. We have shed blood over the very meaning of the words we wrote in 1776. Yet every time—every single time—we have found our way back to the light. We abolished slavery. We gave women the vote. We tore down segregation. We did not do these things because they were easy. We did them because they were right. Because the promise of America has always

On this Fourth of July, as the sky explodes in red, white, and blue from sea to shining sea, remember what those fireworks truly represent. They are not just pretty lights. They are the echoes of muskets at Concord, the roar of cannons at Gettysburg, the thunder of engines at Kitty Hawk, the silence of the moon, and the cheers of millions who finally tasted freedom. They are the sound of an idea that refuses to die. So stand tall today, America.

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HAPPY 250TH ANNIVERSARY FROM YOUR NEIGHBOURS TO THE NORTH!!

Sir John A. Macdonald created the Northwest Mounted Police (NWMP — later the Royal Canadian Mounted Police — RCMP as we know them today). Macdonald managed to unite the country in the face of knowing that after the US Civil War, the Americans had a standing army of one million men. They could easily have invaded Canada and claimed the whole territory.

Macdonald deserves to be on the ten-dollar bill, not Viola Desmond, nor the Canadian Museum of Human Rights. The Bank of Canada honours a woman who left Canada for greener pastures in New York City and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights that has denied Canada the fundamental human right — the presumption of innocence — on the matter of the alleged “genocide” that took place at Indian Residential Schools.

Retiring Canada’s first prime minister from the $10 bill is more than a currency change — it’s another step in rewriting the nation’s past.

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Portrait of Sir John A. Macdonald (1889): Henry Sandham

Canada is more than a government.

It is more than Parliament, more than politics, more than the latest headline or the latest promise wrapped in a polished slogan.

Canada is the sound of gravel beneath work boots before sunrise. It is coffee in a thermos on a frozen January morning. It is wheat bending beneath a prairie wind, fishing boats returning with the tide, maple trees turning crimson in the fall, and neighbours who still show up when your world falls apart.

That is the Canada I know.

Being Canadian has never meant believing our country is perfect. It has meant believing it is worth protecting.

We are a people who build instead of burn. Who endure instead of surrender. Who argue fiercely, then help each other push a stranger’s car out of a snowbank because some things matter more than politics.

We inherited a nation that was built by people who accepted impossible odds because they believed the next generation deserved something better than they had.

They crossed oceans and they broke the prairie with little more than grit.

They fought wars they hoped their children would never have to fight.

They built communities where there had been nothing, and they did not ask for guarantees, they simply got to work.

That inheritance does not belong to governments.

It belongs to us.

Patriotism is not blind obedience. It is fierce loyalty to the country itself. It is loving Canada enough to celebrate what is good, defend what is worth preserving, and refuse to surrender hope when the road grows difficult.

Canada Day is not a celebration of politicians, nor was it ever meant to be. It belongs to Canadians.

It belongs to the truck driver hauling freight through the night, the farmer watching another storm gather on the horizon, the nurse working a double shift, the teacher staying late, the welder, the logger, the miner, the mechanic, the small business owner wondering how to make payroll, and the parent quietly carrying burdens no one else ever sees.

It belongs to every man and woman who gets up before dawn, puts in an honest day’s work, lends a hand when a neighbour needs one, and asks for little more than the chance to build a better life.

These are the people who have always carried Canada on their shoulders. Our greatest strength has never been found inside the walls of government. It has always lived in ordinary Canadians who refuse to quit.

So today I raise my flag, not because I believe everything is as it should be, but because I believe this country is still worth believing in.

Worth defending.

Worth improving.

Worth passing on.

Canada has weathered wars, depressions, recessions, disasters, and division. We will weather this moment too. Because governments come and go. Political movements rise and fall.

But Canada endures.

As long as there are Canadians willing to stand together, speak freely, work honestly, and refuse to give up on this remarkable country, there is every reason to believe our best chapters have not yet been written.

Happy Canada Day fellow patriots!

The maple leaf belongs to all of us.

Thank you Melanie in Saskatchewan - I couldn’t have said it better!

Article here >

China does not allow this; Muslim countries do not allow this; there is not mass migration into China or the Middle East. They don’t worry about diversity. You can say that makes us better and more moral. Maybe. But when China or the Muslims take over this country, diversity will end. Just like it doesn’t exist in their countries, it will no longer exist in this country when they are running the show. So, allowing this absurdity in the name of diversity in America, will end diversity in America.

This is not about diversity, it is about erasing the white race from this country and this planet. That is what they always mean by diversity – eliminate the white race. And when the white race is eliminated, the world will be a much worse place. How do I know? Where are all the best countries in the world? Europe and North America – the predominantly white countries. Don’t take my word for it, ask the refugees. When there are refugees from any country, where do they go? Europe, the United States or Canada. Refugees don’t go to the Middle East, they don’t go to Africa, they don’t go to China. They come to the predominantly white countries because the predominantly white countries are the best. And when there are no more white people, the world will be filled with dysfunctional countries or totalitarian countries, or both.

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Photo by Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States via Getty Images

Former Israeli hostage Ilana Gritzewsky confronts the UN’s Reem Alsalem, the UN’s special rapporteur for violence against women and girls (Credit: YouTube)

Why must Jewish women beg to be believed? Why does that sacred mantra of the progressive classes – “Believe women” – suddenly expire when the victims are Jews? Consider the extraordinary events at the UN this week. A former Israeli hostage who was savagely brutalised by Hamas told her harrowing tale as a UN special rapporteur just sat there stony-faced, almost scornful, her face etched with haughty cynicism. It was a sickening spectacle.

“Believe women” died on 8 October 2023

The former hostage was Ilana Gritzewsky. The imperious official was Reem Alsalem, the UN’s special rapporteur for violence against women and girls. Well, some women and girls. As Ms Gritzewsky recounted the sexual savagery of Hamas, her voice trembling with quiet, dignified fury, Ms Alsalem looked like she would rather be anywhere else. “Please look at me”, said Gritzewsky at one point. It was a truly shaming moment for the UN.

Ms Gritzewsky survived 55 days in the dank, cruel captivity of Gaza’s Islamofascists. She was seized from Kibbutz Nir Oz, along with her partner, Matan Zangauker. She was sexually assaulted as she was kidnapped. A gun-toting brute put his hand up her shirt and grabbed her breast. Such was the level of violence visited on her that she lost consciousness. When she awoke in the hellscape of Hamas-ruled Gaza, she was on a bare floor with her breasts exposed and her pants pulled down. One of her tormentors later hugged her and said she would never be released because “I want to marry you”.

Her testimony at the UN Security Council in Geneva on Tuesday was chilling and courageous. “They touched me and abused me”, she said of the pogromists who stormed her kibbutz on 7 October. The men were driven by a hellish dream of “murdering, kidnapping and burning” us, she said. She bluntly described the fascist terror she was subjected to: “I was beaten and mutilated before blacking out.” She woke up “half-naked with seven terrorists standing over me”. She still doesn’t know what was done to her in “those lost moments”.

Even following her release in November 2023, she suffered both physically and emotionally. The pogromists left her with “a broken hip, a broken jaw and a scarred soul”.

Then came the salt of denialism rubbed into her wounds of anti-Semitic violence. Many in the West refused to believe her and the other victims of Hamas’s sexual atrocities. This bigoted unbelief went all the way to the top of the UN. Reem Alsalem herself has indicated that, whilst she does not deny or dispute that sexual violence took place on 7 October, it has not been proven that that violence included rape. Indeed, just six months ago, Alsalem claimed that “no independent investigation found that rape took place on the 7th of October”.

Just imagine that: a global spokesperson on violence against women sowing seeds of doubt about violence against women. Ms Alsalem was flat-out wrong, of course. Numerous investigations – including, belatedly, by the UN itself – have found evidence of extreme sexual horrors, including rape, carried out by Hamas during its carnival of anti-Semitic butchery. Israel has released video confessions from some of the perpetrators of that barbarous misogyny.

So how bracing it was – and moving – to see one of the victims of Hamas’s sexual terror confront the arrogant scoffers of the UN.

“Jewish women were raped, abused and humiliated and you, special rapporteur, chose silence and denial”, said Gritzewsky. Alsalem looked irritated. She seemed visibly irked. Her face calcified into a look of exasperated indifference. At one point she looked down at her laptop. “Please look at me”, said Gritzewsky, her voice and body shaking with emotion.

“Please look at me” – that pained plea was aimed not only at one cold, aloof bureaucrat but at the entire Western intelligentsia. Denialism of Israeli women’s suffering is rife among the keffiyeh classes. The same people who said “Believe women” refused to believe the women who were hunted, beaten, mutilated and violated by modern-day pogromists. Clearly the principles of MeToo do not apply to the women of “the Zionist entity”. Well, you know how slippery and deceitful Those People can be.

Will they now, finally, look at Ms Gritzewsky, as she has pleaded?

There was no other way to explain the activist class’s sudden retraction of belief, their brutish exclusion of Israeli Jews from the MeToo universe, other than as rank, blind bigotry. “Believe women” died on 8 October 2023. After that, progressives adopted a new slogan, one they could never quite bring themselves to say out loud: “Believe fascists.” So mind-fried were they by the paranoia of Israelophobia that they preferred to believe the denials of avowed anti-Semitic terrorists over the testimonies of Jews like Ilana Gritzewsky.

Will they now, finally, look at Ms Gritzewsky, as she has pleaded? Will they listen to her story of sexual degradation, and to all the other women who either experienced or witnessed sexual terror on that grim bloody day? I doubt it. They are so lost to the swirling cult of Israel-hate that even this searing testimony is unlikely to stir them back to decency and truth. I’m starting to understand why so many in 1930s Europe scoffed upon hearing tales of anti-Jewish terror from the East.

https://spectator.com/article/why-wont-the-un-believe-all-women-including-jews

Written by Brendan O’Neill

JACK GUEZ/AFP via Getty Images

Apolitical crisis is unfolding in the small Dutch town of Maassluis, a former fishing village which sits between Rotterdam’s vast port and industrial complex, the glasshouses of the agribusiness powerhouse known as the Westland, and the historic fishing town of Vlaardingen.

Despite what some may claim, it is not a far-right insurgency, just a group of local politicians responding to concerns widely shared by their electorate

The natives of Maassluis were once nicknamed ‘snails’. They acquired the name in the 1770s, when the parliament of the Dutch Republic decreed that Psalms should be sung at a faster tempo in church. The citizens of Maassluis and Vlaardingen refused to comply, continuing – like snails – to sing at the slower pace that had been customary for more than two centuries, dating back to the Dutch Revolt against Spanish rule. A minority, reportedly from the local elite, embraced the new rules and began singing more briskly, resulting in chaotic Sunday services in Dutch Reformed churches across the region.

Today, the snails are at it again.

The town’s recently installed municipal executive, comprising the local party Leefbaar Maessluys and the conservative VVD, has produced a coalition programme aimed at ending the town’s role in hosting asylum seekers and reducing the impact of large-scale labour migration.

To curb the number of asylum seekers, the coalition have proposed to not renew the licences of two asylum accommodation sites currently in the town and, beyond that, refusing to host additional asylum seekers under the Spreidingswet, the law designed to distribute asylum seekers awaiting decisions among municipalities across the country.

The executive has found a way of doing so that is both simple and ingenious. More importantly, according to several legal experts, Maassluis would be acting entirely within the law – and in a notably decent manner.

What is the plan? Under the Spreidingswet, every Dutch municipality is required to submit a proposal indicating how many asylum seekers it is prepared to accommodate. Maassluis intends to comply fully with the law and simply propose: zero.

There is, however, a complication. The mayor of Maassluis, a Christian Democrat, has declared that he does not support the plan, calling instead for solidarity with asylum seekers and with other municipalities. Dutch mayors are appointed by central government and have a quasi-state role, particularly in matters of public order and safety. When making his statement, the mayor arranged police protection for his home, although, oddly, no threats have reportedly been made against him.

Since the mayor automatically chairs and represents the municipal executive, the town now finds itself speaking with two voices – or, in keeping with local history, singing two different tunes: one expressing the will of the local electorate, the other reflecting the preferences of the governing coalition in The Hague.

The fortunes of the snails who stubbornly sang their Psalms at the old pace could perhaps tell us how the current standoff will end.

The Psalm Rebellion unfolded against a backdrop of broader decline in the Dutch Republic. The following decade brought mounting instability, not least because of a disastrous Dutch defeat in the Fourth Anglo-Dutch war. The conflict accelerated the retreat of the Republic’s commercial empire while confirming Britain’s emergence as the dominant global maritime and trading power.

Meanwhile – brilliantly chronicled by Simon Schama in his early work Patriots and Liberators: Revolution in the Netherlands, 1780-1813 – the 1780s witnessed the rise of the Patriotten, inspired in part by the American Revolution. They challenged an increasingly detached, incompetent and decadent ruling class, the Regenten. In the end, town after town fell under the control of angry Patriots who, often armed, demanded democratic reform. The revolution was crushed in 1787 by Prussian military intervention. Many leading Patriots fled to Paris, enthusiastically embraced the French Revolution, and returned with the French Revolutionary Army in 1795, establishing the short-lived Batavian Republic under French tutelage. Stadtholder William V and the House of Orange fled to London.

Maassluis and its neighbouring towns, meanwhile, continued to cultivate a habit of resisting authority. While the context is not comparable to current events, towns like Vlaardingen and Maassluis gave birth to the Netherlands’ first organised resistance movement against the German occupation, almost immediately after the Dutch surrender in May 1940. After some modest acts of sabotage, inexperience and loose lips proved fatal to the movement: 15 local resistance members – while singing Psalm 43:4 – were summarily executed by German troops in the dunes near The Hague in 1941. Others perished in German camps.

More recently, in 2005, the wider region voted overwhelmingly – and well above the national average – against further European integration in one of the Netherlands’ rare referendums, this time on the proposed European Constitution. Dutch voters inflicted a humiliating defeat on the country’s pro-European political class. The rejection of the Constitution by Dutch and French voters effectively removed the project from the political agenda in Brussels.

Will the new Maassluis coalition be successful? Maybe. Despite what some may claim, it is not a far-right insurgency, just a group of local politicians responding to concerns widely shared by their electorate. Nor is Maassluis alone. Neighbouring Vlaardingen this week finally welcomed a new local coalition. The town will abandon plans for a new asylum-seeker centre and seek to curb further immigration. Asked about the coalition programme, the mayor wisely refrained from offering an opinion, noting that it is for the elected council, not him, to determine the town’s direction. Municipalities elsewhere are exploring similar approaches. Instead of defying the law, they are seeking to use it to their advantage.

The people of Maassluis know when to disagree with the authorities – and do so confidently. So when the snails begin moving in a different direction, The Hague would do well to pay attention. They may move slowly, but they have a habit of sensing which way the tide is turning.

Written by Arnout Nuijt

Spectator Magazine

Photo: iStock

What are the circumstances in which it is right to smash up a building? When might one justifiably destroy an artwork? And what are the conditions under which one might splinter someone’s spine with a sledgehammer?

Many on the left seem to have satisfied themselves on all these questions. But I wonder if they have even begun to reckon with the consequences.

One can only hope that those who urge on ‘direct action’ have no idea how slippery a slope they are on

Back in 2019 a group of activists from Extinction Rebellion took their views on fossil fuels to Belvedere Road in central London. There, at the site of the Shell building, they smashed windows, spray-painted walls and caused other criminal damage. At their subsequent trial at Southwark Crown Court, the judge instructed the jury that the accused had no defence in law. The jury acquitted them anyway, having apparently decided it is permissible to smash a building up if said building belongs to an oil and gas company.

As the years go on it becomes ever clearer that this country could have done with an energy policy which did not demonise oil and gas. But once it is decided that the headquarters of Shell, BP and any other energy company are fair game, you tilt the balance. Suddenly ‘activists’ become the provisional wing of the net-zero zealots and ‘direct action’ takes a step into acceptability.

Fast-forward a few years to March 2024 and it was a painting by the great Hungarian émigré artist Philip de Laszlo that was attacked. The portrait of Lord Arthur Balfour was hanging on a wall at Trinity College, Cambridge when an activist filmed themselves slashing it and spray-painting it red. So far as I can work out nobody has ever been charged with the attack.

De Laszlo was a Jewish-born painter, but it seems his painting was attacked because his subject was guilty of signing the ‘Balfour declaration’ in 1917, setting out the conditions under which the British government was willing to recognise the recreation of a Jewish state. Neither de Laszlo nor Balfour seem to have many defenders today – certainly not at Cambridge University. And so another precedent was set. If you would like to find an exquisite portrait of a person from the past whose actions you disagree with, then go ahead and destroy it if you like.

And so we come to the question of the sledgehammer. Some figures on the British left appear to have decided that people should be excused from smashing the spines of policewomen with sledgehammers. It is nearly two years now since a group of ‘activists’ – once again from Palestine Action – went into an arms company’s headquarters outside Bristol. Dressed in boilersuits and carrying sledgehammers, they started by smashing up computers; when the police arrived one of the activists took two swings at a female police officer, using a seven-pound sledgehammer, fracturing her spine.

In the days since some of those activists received sentences for their crimes, portions of the left have decided that the issue in question is whether or not the disabling of a female police officer was ‘intentional’ or not. Grievous bodily harm in itself seems not to be a particular problem for them. The question is ‘intent’ and the circumstances in which GBH is now permissible. As with the attack on the de Laszlo portrait the general justification seems to be ‘but genocide’.

As it happens the claim that there has been anything like a genocide in Gaza is a malevolent lie. What has been happening since 7 October 2023 has been a war – one which Hamas started. But the genocide lie – which started around 2005 – is pushed by people who then insist, as one left-wing British journalist put it this week: ‘You have a responsibility to do everything in your power to stop it.’ So the ‘stop the genocide’ lobby whip themselves up into a state of rage over a lie and then make excuses for each other when they start swinging sledgehammers. An action that used to be regarded as the place where political disagreement stopped and political violence began becomes tolerated.

This not-so-subtle erosion of values mirrors something that has lately been happening in the US, where the murder of a healthcare executive on the streets of New York has been turned into a moral argument by the American left. Under what circumstances is it permissible to shoot a married father of two? In the same way there have been those who have decided that the words of someone like Charlie Kirk can best be responded to not with words but with bullets. A conservative activist was assaulted this week on the streets of Britain, doing something similar to Kirk, and we shall see how tolerated that is.

One can only hope that the people who urge on such ‘direct action’ have no idea of how slippery a slope they are on and that they have not worked out yet that political violence need not solely belong to one political side. In the US most weapons are held by people on the political right. It really wouldn’t be in the interests of the political left to embolden the idea of ‘direct action’.

In the UK the stakes are – for now – measurably less severe. But they are there. If buildings can be smashed up for a ‘righteous cause’, works of art can be destroyed for historically illiterate ‘moral’ reasons and police can have their spines smashed for a good cause then I have news for the radicalising left. Which is that – as unrest from Southport to Belfast has shown – the violence might come from surprising places.

Many people think they have a moral cause. Many people are angry about many things. Some of their grievances are justified. Others are imaginary. But the debate does not stop when the sledgehammers come out. It simply becomes something different. For now, ‘direct action’ has been justified by only one political side. The radical left better hope that their opponents don’t notice if the rules of the game are changing.

Written by Douglas Murray

Spectator Magazine/June 20, 2026

A Palestine Action activist GETTY IMAGES

The conviction by a Belgian court of far-right activist Dries Van Langenhove has alarmed both the country’s right and left. Van Langenhove – let there be no doubt – belongs to some of Belgium’s darker far-right movements. He has previously been convicted of racism and Holocaust denial. Yet he has now been fined €4,000, for what the judge described as ‘apparently having the intention’ to incite hatred and violence, rather than for a crime he was clearly proven to have committed.

Bart Eeckhout, chief commentator of Belgium’s left-leaning daily De Morgen – certainly no friend of Van Langenhove – unexpectedly described the conviction for incitement to hatred, violence and racism as an injustice. Eeckhout’s objection to the court’s ruling lies in the absence of clear legal grounds.

Freedom of expression is a fundamental right that exists not so much to protect respectable opinions, but precisely to protect shocking, offensive or reprehensible ones

Van Langenhove’s conviction dates from a lecture delivered to the Flemish-nationalist student fraternity ‘NSV’ at Leuven University in February 2024. According to the judge’s ruling, Van Langenhove’s core message on that occasion was that many of the problems facing Flanders today – including declining educational standards, rising insecurity, the disproportionately high number of people with a migrant background in the country’s prisons, the housing shortage, and the strain on the social security system – stem from ‘multiculturalism’.

Yet although Van Langenhove’s remarks were shocking to Eeckhout, he argues that the 14-page judgment nowhere concretely defines this alleged incitement. Nevertheless, the judge considered the charges of incitement to hatred, violence and racism to be ‘proven’. That, Eeckhout argues, is a dangerous line to take.

It is dangerous, says Eeckhout, because it opens the door to an extremely broad interpretation of hate-speech and anti-racism legislation. That is a slippery slope towards repression and the erosion of liberty. Freedom of expression is a fundamental right that exists not so much to protect respectable opinions, but precisely to protect shocking, offensive or reprehensible ones. The words of Van Langenhove cited in the judgment may be hurtful to some, but they still fall within the scope of that fundamental right, Eeckhout insists.

There is clearly something wrong with the current hate-speech legislation, according to Eeckhout. The scope of these laws should be restricted to explicit and concrete calls for violence against individuals. Otherwise, freedom of expression risks crumbling under the pressure of society’s overprotection against ‘wrong’ opinions. He directs his appeal specifically to today’s progressive politicians, warning them that, in less congenial times, their own opinions may also fall within the sights of ‘hate’ legislation. Furthermore, Dries van Langenhove should not be granted martyrdom, he says, and freedom of expression should be defended for what it is: a progressive, liberal and fundamental value.

We will soon see whether Belgium’s left-wing politicians take heed of Eeckhout’s words. The country’ s centre-right politicians, meanwhile, have already taken note.

Earlier this week, politicians from one of the country’s governing parties – the New Flemish Alliance (N-VA), led by Prime Minister Bart De Wever – called for reform of the country’s hate-speech and anti-racism legislation. Peter De Roover, speaker of Belgium’s Chamber of Representatives, argued in the Belgian weekly Knack that the law ‘overshoots its purpose’. During the previous legislative term, De Roover had already submitted a proposal to remove ‘incitement to hatred’ from criminal law.

He stressed, however, that he was not commenting on the ruling itself in the Van Langenhove case. ‘I am not saying the judge applied the law incorrectly. I am a legislator. And if the legislation allows for these kinds of interpretations, then I question whether the law offers too many opportunities to restrict freedom of expression. My fear is that we are ending up on a downward spiral,’ he told Knack. De Roover particularly objects to the concept of ‘incitement to hatred’. He argues that the law should instead be limited to ‘incitement to violence’. ‘There can be no debate about that: calls for violence must remain punishable,’ he said.

Belgium’s straight talking defence minister Theo Francken (also of the N-VA) entered the fray as well, writing on X that, although he ‘recoils from the biological racism that shapes Van Langenhove’s thinking’, he is nevertheless concerned by the conviction.

Recently, a man in Belgium was not convicted after writing that he wanted to murder every Jew he encountered, Francken noted, while Van Langenhove has been convicted because, during a closed lecture for students, he linked issues such as insecurity, declining educational standards, prison overcrowding, the housing shortage and welfare dependency to non-European immigration. That, according to Francken, is pure arbitrariness, adding that much of the blame lies with the law itself: it is too vaguely worded and therefore grants judges excessive room for interpretation.

In the past, Francken continues, legal restrictions on freedom of expression were formulated far more narrowly. They focused mainly on slander, defamation and concrete calls for violence. Later, this was gradually expanded through the catch-all concept of ‘incitement to hatred’. Belgium, Francken argues, needs to return to basic principles: only calls for violence – or the glorification of violence – should be criminal offences.

Overzealous judges such as the one in the Van Langenhove case are clearly trapped inside a politically correct bubble. But with commentators and mainstream politicians on both left and right – including members of the government – now broadly agreeing that the law is dysfunctional and dangerously open to interpretation, perhaps that bubble may soon be punctured.

Written by Arnout Nuijt

Spectator Magazine/June 28, 2026

Dries Van Langenhove (photo: Getty)

America is to blame for the heatwave that has caused so much misery in France in the last fortnight. Audrey Pulvar, the Socialist deputy mayor of Paris, took to social media at the weekend, addressing a letter to “dear American journalists” who have been making fun of Paris because the city doesn’t have air conditioning. “This is so rich!” exclaimed Pulvar. “You bear a significant amount of responsibility for global warming and the consequences we, in France, are experiencing. Your cities, which are 90 percent air conditioned, are not unrelated to this.”

It sounds like Madame Pulvar is a little hot and bothered, which isn’t surprising given the furnace that France has become. In Chablis, a little south of where I live in Burgundy, the temperature hit 41.6°C (107°F) on Saturday, a regional record for June. The vines, according to one wine-grower, are “starting to show signs of stress.”

“Installing air conditioning everywhere just means making the damage worse,” declared Jean-Luc Mélenchon

It is not just the vines which are distressed. Across France, from the Cote d’Azur in the south to the Côte d’Opale in the north, the Republic has been roasting for two weeks and the people are suffering.

The heatwave officially ended on Sunday – the thermometer in my garden has dropped from 104°F to 82°F – but France’s meteorologists are warning it could return on July 6.

On Sunday, France’s Public Health agency announced that approximately 1,000 more deaths than expected occurred during the heatwave (an estimate it admitted was conservative) and more than 85 percent were people aged 65 and over. The agency said that this figures a reminder of “the need for measures of solidarity toward people who are isolated or experiencing profound loneliness.”

They are also a reminder of how woefully unprepared France remains to deal with extreme heat.

In August 2003, a 16-day heatwave swept across France, causing more than 15,000 deaths. Patrick Pelloux, the president of the French Association of Hospital Emergency Physicians at the time, said that the most vulnerable “are dropping like flies” and he criticized the health authorities for “failing to grasp the seriousness of what is happening.”

The same criticisms are being heard again. How can it be that nearly a quarter of a century later France is still incapable of protecting its people in a heatwave?

This is particularly true in hospitals, where thousands of patients have broiled in wards without air-conditioning.

In one Parisian hospital – typical of many across the country – only three of the 30 wards have air-conditioning. The temperature in those wards soared to 95°F last week. Hospital staff did their best to reduce the stifling heat, draping emergency blankets over windows and installing fans, but they also advised patients to bring their own fans if possible.

The heatwave has also had a terrible effect in schools, none of which are air-conditioned. My wife is a high school teacher and the past fortnight has been an ordeal for staff and pupils. At least in her school they weren’t forced to sit exams in an underground car park to escape the heat, as was the case at one school in Versailles. More than 1,300 schools closed in France last week because the heat was insupportable.

Air conditioning is the exception and not the rule in France. Approximately 25 percent of homes are air-conditioned, half that of households in Italy and Spain.

The problem in France is ideology. The political, cultural and media elite is dominated by the left and a central tenet of their dogma is the belief that air-conditioning is bad for the environment.

“Installing air conditioning everywhere just means making the damage worse,” declared Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the far-left la France Insoumise. “You mustn’t do that under any circumstances.”

This view was echoed by Monique Barbut, the Minister of Ecological Transition in Emmanuel Macron’s center-left government. She said she was “horrified” by those calling for air conditioning in public buildings. “And do you think that’s going to prevent a forest fire?” she snapped. “Do you think that’s going to prevent a crop from being destroyed?… You think it will prevent what? Nothing. Nothing.”

It was an extraordinary outburst, one which totally missed the point but did reveal the extent of the zealotry prevalent within the French left.

This fanaticism has been exploited in recent days by Marine Le Pen and her right-wing National Rally party. She has pledged to implement “a massive air conditioning plan” if they win power in next year’s presidential and parliamentary elections. She rubbished the left’s assertion that air-conditioning is bad for the planet, accusing them of drawing on dodgy data. “Modern air conditioners remove hot air and do not release gases or heat into the atmosphere,” she said.

Le Pen’s economic spokesman, Jean-Philippe Tanguy, said the “plan clim” [air conditioning in France is “climatisation“] would also include government-backed interest-free loans worth €20bn ($22.7bn) in order that 30 to 40 million householders could install air conditioning units.

It should also be extended to businesses because a report at the weekend laid bare the economic damage caused to French industry by the heatwave; many offices and factories closed temporarily last week and workers also called in sick because they were unable to sleep at night.

If heatwaves become an annual occurrence in Europe, the report stated, the cumulative implied GDP losses for 2026-2030 could reach $147 billion for Italy, $131 billion for Germany, $120 billion for Spain, and $240 billion for France.

The Socialist Party responded to the National Rally’s air-con plan with ridicule, describing it as “clownish.”

Perhaps the real clowns are in the anti-air conditioning movement, although there’s nothing funny about allowing hospital patients to swelter and suffer.

Written by Gavin Mortimer

Spectator Magazine/June 29, 2026

Image: Getty

In this article, I am going to show you how this small country, Qatar, bought the world on its way to the throne — and how, today, it rules from the shadows more completely than any empire in modern history. Qatar has the largest sovereign wealth fund per capita on earth and the willingness to spend it with surgical precision. Where Daenerys had dragons, Qatar has dollars — hundreds of billions of them. Where she had fire, Qatar has influence: universities, media empires, sports tournaments, lobbyists, and Islamist networks spanning every continent.

Qatar did not need to corrupt the next generation directly. It funded the professors who taught them, the think tanks that briefed them, and the schools that shaped them. By the time a young American politician arrives in Washington with views on Gaza, Palestine, and political Islam, those views were formed years earlier at institutions Qatar had quietly funded long before he set foot on Capitol Hill.

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Image: Condé Nast Traveller

“If we lose this battle, there will be no second chance, for Islam does not give back what it has conquered.”

~ Oskar Freysinger ~

Afc Newsletter June 26 2026

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