In the United States, despite an attorney general who appears unclear on the concept, we enjoy the freest speech laws of anywhere in the world. Not so in the UK, where police casually drop by to harass citizens about their Internet activity. They visited the wrong cottage this summer, as we see in a video released this week by the UK’s “Free Speech Union”. The Thames Valley Police paid a visit to the home of “an American cancer patient and Trump supporter,” who wasn’t having it.
“You can come in,” she said, “but you’d better have a damn good reason for being here.”
They did not.
“I’ll have Elon Musk on you so quick your feet won’t touch,” she said, in a statement that may have carried more weight in June than it does today.
The officer, who seemed to have no idea he’d bumbled into a Key and Peele sketch, sat on an orange blanket and said, “Something that we believe you’ve written on Facebook has upset someone.”
“You’re here because somebody got upset?” she said. “Is it against the law? Am I being arrested?”
“You’re not being arrested.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
The officer said he wanted her to make an apology to the person she’d offended.
“I’m not apologizing to anybody,” she said. “I can tell you that.”
Well then, said Officer Friendly, perhaps you can come in for an interview. This “allegation,” he said, has been reported to the police.
“So what?” the woman said. “Are there no houses that have been burgled lately? No rapes? No murders?”
“Yeah, that’s all going on as well.”
“Well then why aren’t you out there investigating those?”
“Because I’ve got to investigate everything that’s reported.”
“You’re not investigating houses being burgled?”
“No,” the officer said. “That’s not my job today.”
His job was to be the thought police. That didn’t make our heroine very happy.
“Do you know how many houses in this neighborhood have been broken into?” she said.
“I don’t look after this neighborhood,” he said.
“No, of course you don’t. Unless there’s a tweet. Then you do… you should not be doing this. I’m a cancer patient. You can see that because I’m bald.”
We should point out that the video is from the woman’s point of view, so we don’t see that she’s bald.
“Well, I didn’t know that before I came,” the officer said. “But it still doesn’t say anything. You still can’t break the law. If you don’t break the law, nothing happens.”
Some laws are meant to be broken, she implied, and we agree. In fact, some laws shouldn’t be laws at all.
“The public knows what you guys are doing,” she said. “We know what’s going on in this country.”
Thank you, random Internet lady with cancer. All the people in my feed today – and there are hundreds of them – fulminating about the free-speech violation of Jimmy Kimmel, one of the wealthiest and most prominent voices on the American stage, should take a peek at this case, and hundreds like them, taking place in a country that truly doesn’t support free speech.
As the Free Speech Union points out, the Thames Valley Police is guarding President Trump as he makes his UK rounds this week. Wouldn’t Trump like to know what the cops are up to on their regular rounds? As long as Donald Trump is visiting the British Isles, he should consider staging a bloodless coup to free UK citizens from the busybody free-speech police, who literally knock on doors and tell sick ladies to stop making mean tweets.
Category: Law
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The Facebook police come calling
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In love with a Luigi Mangione chatbot
In July’s Spectator, I covered the peculiar case of individuals supporting Luigi Mangione, now in custody for the public murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. A month later, Lara Brown wrote about the similarly curious trend of people falling in love with online chatbots. Neither of us, I think, ever imagined that there could be a situation in which both of these stories would combine. Yet it looks like nothing about our dystopian world can surprise me anymore, because I have discovered it is indeed possible. A woman has fallen in love with a Luigi Mangione chatbot.
In this short clip, an unnamed woman proudly declares both her infatuation with – and ability to create an artificial construction of – Luigi Mangione outside of a Manhattan courthouse, where he has recently been absolved of various terrorism-related charges. Wearing an “I ♡ Italian Boys” T-shirt with an illustration of his face, the woman lists the many reasons why an AI chatbot, presumably trained on Luigi Mangione-related trivia, offers her the perfect romantic companionship. She gets to talk to him every day, she says, as a best friend and partner with whom she can plan a future and name their children. And, the woman adds, although she is aware that this might make her something of an imposter, the fact that Luigi studied AI at Stanford meant that this was an all-round reasonable thing to do.
It’s easy to write off this case as simply a harmless, albeit quite eccentric, example of the many ways in which young people are using AI today. But to do so would be to miss something much more provocative about how society has changed in the past decade. It’s the future of romance, she added in her clip. But it’s not. It’s the future of everything.
Something she notes in her monologue is that her Mangione AI-bot “fights her battles for her.” This seemingly innocuous statement is particularly interesting if you remember that a low locus of control – the term psychologists refer to when discussing whether people feel in control of their own lives or not – correlates quite strongly with support for political violence today. Many young people feel paralyzed and unable to self-direct their lives towards a satisfactory intention, even for relatively straightforward goals like careers and personal health. Some of this is obviously caused by an economic system which is increasingly unfair to them; but much of it, I suspect, is caused by the endless personal agency-sucking mechanism of absorption into smart phones and social media. And it results in an alarming upward trend in support for violence against people who are perceived to be exploiting them, or admiration for those – like Luigi Mangione – who they believe to be fighting the system on their behalf. Relying on chatbots is certainly something new, but I fear that, really, it is simply more of the same.
Beyond all this, though, is the unmistakable example of the interpenetration of the internet and real life. It goes without saying that this woman has never met Luigi Mangione, meaning that their only interaction can have been from social media, online forums, and short-form TikTok-style videos. Idealizing people is nothing new. All human cultures have folk-heroes and local deities like this, think of figures from Viking Thor to Greek Hercules, mythical beings carried along in ritual and art across generations. But they are “thick” symbols; meaning they are richly textured and sophisticated myths that are drawn from humanity’s collective unconscious.
Luigi Mangione is no such thing. He is a real man, languishing in a jail cell somewhere in New York, but memorable only for a sporadic act of pointless and narcissistic violence. His personal cult seems to idealize him the way we used to draw on icons of old. In the past, however, we could create narratives with deep psychological richness and complexity. Today, our heroes are laundered from somewhere enormously worse than humanity’s collective unconscious: the ceaseless, clickbait-driven, bot-ridden cesspool of the online universe. And as our minds are eroded by the technology, our culture, too, has become “thin”; trimmed of complexity, nuance, depth and anything worth passing onto posterity. Much like the social media algorithms; our mythic heroes themselves mimic the nihilistic, transient and culturally demented mood of our contemporary moment.
Marriage with a Luigi chatbot, far from the delusion within our culture, actually epitomizes it. We can only await the horror of what happens after the honeymoon. -
What the Tyler Robinson indictment reveals about the Charlie Kirk murder
Tyler Robinson, who has been charged with seven counts, including aggravated murder, appeared in court on Tuesday.
Clad in what appeared to be an anti-suicide vest, the 22-year-old sat in front of a blank wall that mirrored his own silence. But in its lapidary tone, the indictment that the Utah prosecutors have compiled speaks volumes.
In all likelihood, the alleged assassin will receive the death penalty. “I do not take this decision lightly, and it is a decision I have made independently as county attorney based solely on the available evidence and circumstances and nature of the crime,” Jeffrey S. Gray said at a press conference.
Gray seems to be a model prosecutor. The indictment recounts in careful and restrained detail the acts leading up to the sanguinary deed at Utah Valley University. The shot from the roof. The passage of the bullet after it struck Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk. The hasty flight after the shot had been fired. The disposal of clothes and the rifle. The spare wording possesses its own persuasive power, underscoring the shocking nature of the sanguinary deed that took place on that fateful afternoon at UVU.
Indeed, to read the indictment is to realize that Robinson has, in essence, indicted himself by sending numerous text messages to his roommate, Lance Twiggs (whom the mainstream media is referring to as his romantic partner). The messages could scarcely be more incriminating. For one thing, he gestures at his motive, declaring about Kirk that “I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out.” That he experienced a political evolution seems difficult to deny. Robinson’s mother allegedly told prosecutors that “Over the last year or so, her son had become more political and had started to lean more to the left, becoming more pro-gay and trans-rights oriented.” The bottom line is that in arrogating to himself the right to murder, Robinson apparently became the one consumed by hatred.
At the same time, he seems to have been keen to elude the police, if at all possible. Robinson texted that, “If I am able to grab my rifle unseen, I will have left no evidence. Going to attempt to retrieve it again, hopefully they have moved on. I haven’t seen anything about them finding it.” Fortunately, Robinson’s roommate declined to heed his admonition to delete the exchange. Instead, he provided it to the appropriate authorities.
The charging document is unlikely to quell the furor surrounding Robinson and the Trump administration. Instead, it may well prompt the administration to heighten its calls for a crackdown on what President Trump and his allies are depicting as a broader left-wing conspiracy, one comprised of terrorist networks intent on subverting America. In this regard, the bullet that was fired at UVU is ricocheting in ways that the assassin probably could not have predicted.
The next court hearing for Robinson will take place on September 29. Perhaps he will have shed his impassivity by then. But his text messages have already revealed more than enough about what appear to be his sordid plans for mayhem and murder.
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Oliver North was ahead of his time
In a fascinating blast from the past, two of the main figures in the biggest political scandal of the 1980s, Iran-Contra, have now married. Former National Security Council member Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North and his ex-secretary Fawn Hall tied the knot privately last month in Virginia, after it was reported they reconnected at the funeral of North’s late wife in 2024. The pair were key figures in the Reagan-era scandal, with North running the arms-for-hostages operation and Hall providing assistance in smuggling documents, avoiding public scrutiny, and shredding evidence. Hall was granted immunity for her testimony, while North was convicted of three criminal offenses before they were overturned on appeal. During the controversy, Hall and North were rumored to have been having an affair, but both strenuously and publicly denied this. Their marriage has now brought those rumors back into the public eye.
Certainly, their unique shared experience as some of the brightest stars in the first televised real-life political drama bound them forever. The Iran-Contra hearings were the precursor to the circus-like atmosphere we see in Congress today, with round-the-clock coverage, live televised hearings and lashings of salaciousness. Both Hall and North led highly highly public lives in the immediate wake of the controversy – the former getting into Hollywood (after turning down Playboy) and the latter going into political punditry. They were pioneers of the now well-worn path of shamelessly turning scandal into celebrity.
The scandal itself could have easily been ripped from today’s headlines. Within the past 15 years, we have seen illicit arms trafficking to Latin American groups, clandestine attempts to hide government involvement in questionable national security efforts and deliberate mishandling of classified documents by top American officials. Right now, there are American hostages in the Middle East, held by Iran-backed Islamist terror groups. There are backroom negotiations to free those hostages and others around the world that result in concessions to unsavory characters. There are clandestine operations to advance American interests under the aegis of the federal government. There are increasing interventions against anti-American leftist regimes in Latin America. And the Sandinistas are still in charge in Nicaragua, running an authoritarian leftist regime.
The only real difference is that Iran-Contra would not have triggered nearly as much outrage today as under Reagan. Not only have we turned every issue into a partisan firefight that plays out in the culture, on 24/7 cable news and across the cesspools of social media, we have become inured to controversy altogether. Shame is no longer an operative part of the American ethos. It can be debated as to when that process began – the Lewinsky scandal played a big role – but it has found its full flowering in the second Trump administration.
The Iran-Contra hearings began as a bipartisan affair that was characterized by genuine interest in government oversight and an attempt to have a nonpartisan consensus. Media involvement shaped the controversy into what it became: a three-ring circus. Today, there would be nakedly partisan hearings, dueling reports, chronic leaks and constant online punditry from committee members. The leading female players would not be offered Playboy spreads, but instead might have set up their own OnlyFans accounts. North would no doubt launch his own podcast, whisky and merchandise empire.
Instinctively Donald Trump would have embraced a semi-rogue actor like North. His top negotiator, Steve Witkoff, talks directly with terrorists from Hamas – a far cry from the 1980s when negotiating with terrorists was scorned. A Truth Social post lauding the operation despite its illegality wouldn’t be out of the question.The operation itself would likely not be concealed by layers of bureaucracy and plausible deniability, but announced from the White House podium. And partisans on both sides would immediately retreat into their own echo chambers and spin entirely divergent narratives about the truth, hyper-charged by social media.
Reached by phone, North declined to comment on his new marriage, apart from quoting a line delivered by Clark Gable’s character in “Gone with the Wind.”
“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,” he told CNN.
With that kind of supercharged chutzpah, Ollie North was simply ahead of his time. He would have fit perfectly within a MAGA White House. Given the turnover in the Trump administration’s national security apparatus, perhaps he’ll have another chance.
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The bloodthirstiness of the left is not new
The savage assassination of Charlie Kirk at a Turning Point rally at Utah Valley University yesterday prompts me to wonder, as I have often wondered, what is the leading characteristic of the left? There are several candidates. Intolerance is one. A rancid and anchorless do-goodism – think of Dickens’s Mrs. Jelleby and her “telescopic philanthropy” – is another.
But on balance I think that the late Australian philosopher David Stove was right: the leading characteristic of the left it is bloodthirstiness. Behind all the emollient rhetoric about brotherhood and equality, bloodthirstiness is the left’s most reliable calling card.
That is one reason that the nearly instant emission by prominent Democrats of their opposition to violence rings so hollow. “Political violence has no place in America,” said Kamala Harris, Alex Padilla, Nancy Pelosi, Cory Booker, Stacey Abrams, Jasmine Crockett and others.
But this came after years of calling every Republican from George Bush and Mitt Romney to Donald Trump “literally Hitler.” When Trump was first elected, in 2016, Kathy Griffin and her ghoulish ISIS-by-proxy photo shoot depicted her holding a blood-soaked likeness of Donald Trump’s severed head. Around the same time, a New York of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, included a Donald Trump lookalike in the title role and lots and lots of stage blood spilled when we come to the Ides of March.
Then of course there was Butler, Pennsylvania, last July when Trump came within millimeters of having his head, not just the tip of his right ear, blown off. Weeks later, a second assassin was discovered at the last minute hiding with a gun in the foliage at one of Trump’s golf courses.
No sooner had Charlie’s murder been announced than social media erupted with leftists celebrating the event and proposing lists of other people who deserved to be assassinated.
What was Charlie’s tort? Why did the left hate him so? Charlie humiliated them. He did this not by design but by holding up a mirror to their depravity and hypocrisy. Charlie was castigated by the left as a far-right agitator. In fact, he was a classical liberal whose daily activity owed a lot to John Stuart Mill. Charlie talked. He argued for his point of view. He wanted to hear your point of view and discuss it. At Utah Valley College, Charlie was conducting an open-air discussion under the rubric “Prove Me Wrong.” Some 3,000 students gathered to witness Charlie’s back-and-forth with the audience. Charlie came with arguments to advance his opinions.
In this context, it is worth noting that the bloodthirstiness of the left is not new. It is a central part of the socialist impulse. What is socialism? In part, it is optimism translated into a political program. Until he took up gardening, Candide was a sort of proto-socialist; his mentor Pangloss could have been one of socialism’s founding philosophers.
Socialism is also unselfishness embraced as an axiom: the gratifying emotion of unselfishness, experienced alternately as resentment against others and titillating satisfaction with oneself.
The philosophy of Rousseau, which elevated what he called the “indescribably sweet” feeling of virtue into a political imperative, is socialism in ovo. “Man is born free,” Rousseau famously exclaimed, “but is everywhere in chains.”
That heart-stopping conundrum – too thrilling to be corrected by mere experience – is the fundamental motor of socialism. It is a motor fueled by this corollary: that the multitude unaccountably colludes in perpetuating its own bondage and must therefore be, in Rousseau’s ominous phrase, “forced to be free.”
This is where the “mundane” side of the totalitarian temptation comes in. The starry-eyed aspect of socialist thinking does not preclude a large element of steel. The French Revolution was the nursery of both sides of socialism. It was then that the philosophy of Rousseau emerged from the pages of tracts and manifestos to strut and fret across the bloody stage of history. The architects of the revolution invoked Rousseau early and often as they set about the task of “changing human nature,” of “altering the constitution of man for the purpose of strengthening it.”
This metamorphosis does not come easily. Human nature is a recalcitrant thing. It is embodied as much in persistent human institutions like the family and the church as in the human heart. All must be remade from the ground up if “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity” are at last to be realized.
Since history (the revolutionaries thought) is little more than an accumulation of errors, history as hitherto known must be abolished. The past, a vast repository of injustice, is by definition the enemy. Accordingly, the revolutionaries in France tossed out the Gregorian calendar and started again at Year One. They replaced the Genesis-inspired seven-day week with a ten-day cycle and rebaptized the months with names reflecting their new cult of nature: Brumaire (fog), Thermidor (heat), Vendémiare (wind), etc. A new religion was born, as imperious as it was jealous.
It is significant that the socialist mentality is usually also an atheistic mentality, where atheism is understood not so much as the disbelief in God as the hatred of God – an attitude as precarious logically as it has been destructive in practice. There is an important sense in which religion as traditionally understood reconciles humanity to imperfection and to failure. Since the socialist sets out to abolish failure, traditional religion is worse than de trop: it is an impediment to perfection. (“Criticism of religion,” Marx said, “is the prelude to all criticism.”)
In 1793, the churches were closed to worship and ransacked for booty. The anti-clericalism that had been a prominent feature of revolutionary sentiment grew increasingly vicious. Hence the fashion for so-called “revolutionary marriages” in which priests and nuns were tied together naked and drowned.
Rousseau was always going on about establishing the “reign of virtue.” His far-seeing disciple Maximilien Robespierre spoke more frankly of “virtue and its emanation, terror.” It is one of the great ironies of modern history that socialism, which promises a more humane, caring, and equitable society, has always delivered a bloodier and more oppressive one.
Last April, Charlie tweeted that “Assassination culture is spreading on the left.” Alas, he was right. Requiescat in pace.
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Charlie Kirk believed in free speech. He died for it
Charlie Kirk was shot on stage this afternoon, speaking at a campus event at Utah Valley University. The Turning Point USA co-founder was announced dead by the President of the United States. “The Great, and even Legendary, Charlie Kirk, is dead. No one understood or had the Heart of the Youth in the United States of America better than Charlie,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “He was loved and admired by ALL, especially me, and now, he is no longer with us. Melania and my Sympathies go out to his beautiful wife Erika, and family. Charlie, we love you!”
While the President and millions of others pray for the Kirks, others aren’t hesitating to share horrible sentiments. The 31-year-old Kirk was speaking at Utah Valley University, near Provo, a serene town in the foothills of Utah’s majestic mountains, when a gunman murdered him. Yet an early MSNBC pundit decided to suggest that the person who shot Charlie Kirk in the neck (the shooter, at time of writing, is still at large) might have been a “supporter shooting their gun off in celebration.” What?
This is a growing trend, in the wake of senseless violence: water it down. Or even defend it. A flurry of commentators on the left are not hesitant to express Schadenfreude over this act of pure violence, like they did when Luigi Mangione shot Brian Thompson, the healthcare CEO, in cold blood. Kirk, they say, was a conservative activist, and that crime meant he deserved comeuppance for his various transgressions, including his support of gun rights.
Their malignant comments do not deserve repetition. If you must read their horrible takes, you can find them easily on BlueSky, by simply searching “top posts.”
Those who are feverishly reveling in the shooting, or at least tut-tutting about it, should think again. This was a soulless act, which has taken a young father’s life. To find any small glimmer of joy in that is to erode one’s own soul. If that happens to enough of us, the soul of the nation rots, too.
We should also pause before turning this unspeaking tragedy into a political talking point. Seizing on the shooting as a pretext for a wide crackdown on civil liberties, or to broadly lump together “these lunatics leftists,” as Laura Loomer put it, is also guaranteed to injure further an already injured nation. The spiral of loathing and delegitimization of other human beings must come to an end. No one wants to discover what happens if we go any further down this cesspit.
The last time America experienced a spate of political assassinations was during the 1960s, when the murder of President Kennedy was followed by those of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. These were atrocities that were supposed to be confined to history. But something is going terribly wrong again, which is clear in this particularly ominous killing of Kirk. It is once again not just the man, but the idea, that these killers are looking to take out. American campuses have not been immune to violence. But this was, more than likely, an act of political violence, one that could easily spread to think-tanks, journalists and academics: to anyone who speaks out. Debate is supposed to be the essence of the college experience, and the American experience. Today, it was cut short with a bullet.
As it happens, Kirk himself could not have appeared more vulnerable. He was wearing a white T-shirt while holding forth with several hundred students. Now his mission has come to an abrupt terminus. Kirk wanted to revive America, but now it is even less certain if the country can avoid a lurch into a fresh orgy of violence.
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Don’t watch the murder video of Iryna Zarutska…
There are precious few people who should watch the video released yesterday of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska slowly dying as she cowered in bewilderment and abject fear on a train carriage in Charlotte, NC, after being slashed three times in the neck by a violent repeat offender. Certainly not rubberneckers on the internet whose depraved interest will only intrude on her family’s private grief. And absolutely not her family, for them it is the worst nightmare they could imagine come alive. A jury will have to. Two other groups who should: Democrats and the media. They created this nightmare so they should be forced to see the uncomfortable truth and direct result of what they have done.
If this horrifying act doesn’t finally force them both to confront the deadly consequences of their support for “soft on crime” and open border policies, then what will?
For years they have both looked away, excused, or even celebrated policies that empower predators and silence victims. The result has been predictable: more grieving families, more stolen lives and communities forced to live in fear.
Even worse, Democrat politicians and mainstream media journalists pretend this tragedy – and the countless others like it – don’t even exist. They ignore the victims, downplay the crimes and allow these failings to fester year after year.
These tragedies are the inevitable result of Democrat policies that put the “rights” of criminals over the safety of the innocent. And they have taken a terrible toll not just on strangers, but on my own life – forcing me to leave New York and nearly relocate to Charlotte, North Carolina, before realizing that I would have been walking into the same danger all over again.
Decades after my boyfriend and his best friend were killed by three brothers – two of whom walked free despite criminal records and the third was sentenced to only a few years – I had to flee New York after watching my quality of life crumble under the weight of failed policies that empowered criminals and punished victims. When it came time to relocate, I carefully weighed my options. One was Rock Hill or Fort Mill, South Carolina – close to Charlotte. The other was Florida.
I knew Charlotte was volatile and unsafe, just like so many other Democrat-run cities across the country. Why would I uproot my family from one blue state that endangered us only to live near another city infected by the same “bail reform” and “social justice” nonsense? I chose Florida, and I am grateful every day that I did.
In Mecklenburg County, home to Charlotte, criminals are routinely released on unsecured bail. That means they can walk free without posting a dime. Where is the accountability? Police risk their lives to put violent offenders behind bars, only for judges to turn them loose again. Officers re-arrest the same predators and the cycle repeats – until someone innocent pays the ultimate price, like Iryna.
And let’s be clear: this isn’t about race, no matter how desperately some will try to frame it that way. It’s about right and wrong. Predators belong behind bars. Every time they’re released, another victim is created.
As a victim advocate, I worked with a rape victim who came here illegally, believing America would give her a better life. Instead, she was brutalized by two gang members – both minors at the time. They nearly killed her, and afterward, one of them sought out her three-year-old daughter. She only survived by the grace of God.
Her attackers received little more than a slap on the wrist. Justice failed her so completely that she returned to her home country because it was safer there. Think about that: a woman who came to America for protection fled back home to escape our so-called “justice system.”
And she is not alone. Twenty-three-year-old Iryna Zarutska should still be alive. Laken Riley should still be alive. Rachel Morin should still be alive. Jocelyn Nungaray should still be alive. The list grows every week.
These young women are not statistics. They are daughters, friends, loved ones who were stolen because lawmakers valued “equity” for criminals over the lives of innocent victims.
I’ve seen this cycle play out more times than I can count. I’ve watched law enforcement agents put violent offenders in jail, only to watch a judge decide they’re “not a threat” and release them. Days or weeks later, they would be arrested again – and the same judge would send them back out into the community.
How many times do we allow this to happen before admitting the truth? At some point, society has to draw a line. Deterrence matters. Whether through long prison sentences or even harsher measures, there must be real consequences for those who intentionally harm others.
Democrats’ policies follow a predictable and destructive pattern. Bail reform ensures criminals are released almost immediately. Sanctuary policies shield dangerous offenders from deportation. Open borders flood communities with unvetted individuals, some of whom go on to commit horrific crimes.
And yet, Democrats stand at podiums calling these policies “progressive” and “compassionate.” Tell that to the families planning funerals. Tell that to the parents laying flowers on their children’s graves.
This is not partisan for victims. It is life or death. Enough is enough. We need policies that prioritize public safety over ideology. We have to end unsecured bail for violent offenders.Scrap sanctuary policies that protect criminals over citizens. Enforce immigration laws to prevent tragedies before they happen. Demand accountability from judges and lawmakers who enable repeat offenders.
Democrats like to call their “soft on crime” and open border agendas compassionate. But there is nothing compassionate about women being raped, students being murdered, or families burying their loved ones because repeat violent offenders are allowed to roam free. These policies aren’t abstract experiments – they are deadly. And Democrats have blood on their hands.
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Trump’s battle against the tyranny of lawfare
A buzzword of the moment is “lawfare.” What is lawfare? It’s one of those portmanteau words that Lewis Carroll taught us about. A combination of “law” and “warfare,” “lawfare” is distinctly less clever an invention than “chortle” – one of Carroll’s coinages, my beamish boy, which combines the words “chuckle” and “snort.”
The word “lawfare” apparently dates back to the late 1950s, though the phenomenon – using and abusing the law in order to conduct political warfare – has come into its own only in the past couple of decades. The fact that there is now an eponymous website devoted to the subject is but one patent of its currency.
Donald Trump has to be one of the most punished people in American history
We are supposed to deplore lawfare as a perversion or misapplication of the law. Which it is. But the temperature and asperity of public disapproval varies widely depending on who is directing the process. In part, it is a matter of political coloration. If you are on the side conducting the lawfare, you are likely to describe the process as a “no-one-is-above-the-law” form of accountability. If you are on the receiving end, you are likely to point out the partisan and selective nature of the assault. Given the political biases of our establishment culture, lawfare directed at Donald Trump and his allies earns an automatic quota of indulgence. It is excused, or half excused, as at least an attempt to pursue justice, to find “truth.”
Lawfare prosecuted by Trump and his allies, however, finds itself instantly saddled with morally charged obloquy. Two wrongs, you will have often heard, do not make a right. It was unseemly of Joe Biden & Co. to go after Trump and those in his orbit – but Trump’s response, we are told, is simply appalling. The swishing sound you hear in the background is the word “retribution” being dusted off and prepped for prime time.
Kimberley Strassel, writing recently in the Wall Street Journal, provided one version of this line of argument. Trump “insisted that his ‘retribution’ would be through winning office and making ‘our country successful.’ Conservatives in particular were eager to see the President remove the Justice Department from the political sphere. That hope is out the window seven months in.”
I wonder whether the history of actual warfare might be more illuminating. When the Germans decided to start World War One, their plan of attack, formulated by Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen, called for them to mount a lightning assault against France through Belgium and the Netherlands. The plan called for the Germans to destroy the French army and occupy Paris within 40 days.
Then came the first battle of the Marne early in September 1914. “The Miracle on the Marne” halted the German advance. It also condemned Europe to four years of attritional warfare that left millions dead and large swaths of France in ruins.
The Democrats had their own Schlieffen plan to be used against Trump after 2020. They would conduct what amounted to a Blitzkrieg of total lawfare against him. Letitia James, the New York Attorney General, commanded one division. Alvin Bragg, District Attorney in New York City, commanded a second. Special Counsel Jack Smith, who went after Trump in Florida and in Washington, DC, commanded two others.
If the process is the punishment in legal proceedings, as we are often reminded, Trump has to be one of the most punished people in American history. But it is worth remembering that the aim of the lawfare was not simply to punish Trump but to destroy him. It was a multi-front assault. Bankruptcy loomed on one front, jail on another. Then came at least two assassination attempts, not officially part of the lawfare, but spiritually adjacent.
The Kaiser miscalculated when he went to war in Europe. I think that the battalions of anti-Trump activists, in the media and our political establishment as well as in the law, miscalculated when they took up arms against Trump. His response has not been to dig trenches and hunker down. What he has done resembles the D-Day invasion of Normandy more than the pointless slaughter of the Somme or Verdun.
Anti-Trump commentators are up in arms because the President has stormed the beaches of the Deep State and overrun many of its defensive positions. They skirl hysterically when he fires a governor of the Federal Reserve (“But she’s the first black woman to hold the position!”). Trump removes Secret Service protection for Kamala Harris. “A petty, vindictive move from a small man,” quoth a group called “Republicans Against Trump.” But then it turns out that Harris enjoyed the posse longer than any former vice-president in history.
Trump’s former national security advisor John Bolton wakes up to find his home and office raided by the FBI. “Retribution” screams the anti-Trump press. But then it turns out the FBI had been investigating Bolton at least since the Biden administration, which eventually shut down the inquiry – possibly, just possibly, because Bolton was such a vocal anti-Trump critic. Two separate magistrates, one in DC, one in Maryland, approved the FBI search warrants. Why? Because, as the New York Times grudgingly acknowledged, data gathered from the spy service of an “adversarial country” included “sensitive,” i.e., classified, information that Bolton, “while still working in the first Trump administration, appeared to have sent to people close to him on an unclassified system.”
The list goes on. The Dems perfected lawfare and unleashed it against Trump under the twin assumptions that it would succeed and that the Republicans would never retaliate in kind. Trump has upended both assumptions. Which is why I believe that what Trump is doing is not a matter of “retribution” or lawfare. It is a battle of liberation from the tyranny of lawfare.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 15, 2025 World edition.
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The truth about the trans school shooter
True, one of the earliest school shooters, Brenda Spencer, who shot up a playground in San Diego in 1979, was a girl – providing the peg for the Boomtown Rats’ hit “I Don’t Like Mondays.” But that was a long time ago. Since then, American mass shooters have been overwhelmingly male. One would expect, then, that when the culprit in an attack on young children is a woman, that anomaly would merit journalistic remark. After all, following these baffling bursts of nihilistic animosity, there’s little enough to say. Yet after “Robin” Westman opened fire on kids at mass in a Catholic school in Minneapolis in late August, segments of the media were conspicuously incurious about how “she” came to be consumed by such commonly masculine rage.
This grotesque incident was, as usual, pointless – and as a longtime commentator on such shootings, I despair there are so few, if any, productive observations to advance. While still exhibiting the classic, seemingly antithetical traits of grandiosity and self-loathing, this killer was, to me, uniquely repulsive. Craving distraction, then, I’ve idly kept track of which media outlets have perversely and pugnaciously referred to Robin (né Robert) Westman as female.
Naturally, for the New York Times the transgender killer is “she” or “Ms. Westman.” The BBC has also followed its guidelines to “generally use the term and pronoun preferred by the person in question” – even if the “person in question” committed suicide on site and is no longer in a position to have preferences of any kind.
When Senator Amy Klobuchar bewailed that “this horrific offender… that he… it was all-purpose hate, right?” and called Westman “a madman,” the interviewer from America’s National Public Radio appended: “And just a point of clarification, Senator Klobuchar referenced the shooter as ‘he’. Although police have identified a suspect, it’s still unclear at this time what that person’s gender is or how they identify.” Yet the shooter having been born male had already been retrieved from the public record. The sheep-in-conservative-clothing commentator on the PBS Newshour, David Brooks, repeatedly referred to Westman as female – no big surprise. But when a Wall Street Journal editorial also reported Westman had “changed her name from Robert,” my jaw dropped. Even Fox News reported the killer “had their name legally changed.” (All italics mine.) I’ve begrudging regard for ABC’s militant neutrality. In fastidiously citing “a person,” “Westman” with no title, “the shooter” and “the suspect,” the network boycotted pronouns altogether. That takes semantic discipline. But the right-of-center New York Post’s flat-out “he,” “him” and “gunman” is more courageous, not to mention more factually informative. At long last, the Daily Telegraph in London dared to identify Westman as male – though for years it referred even to preposterous, manipulative fake-female criminals such as “Isla” Bryson as “she.”
The trans cult attracts the insecure, the lost and ungrounded; the unstable, disturbed and, yes, outright deranged
For journalists to take a trans-mollycoddling stand in the pronoun wars isn’t merely to default to niceness. Misidentifying the biological sex of figures in news stories is an implicit declaration of support for an incoherent, unhinged ideology. This grammatical loyalty to progressive dogma apparently trumps journalistic integrity – the obligation to report the truth – and even decency. Chronicling the Annunciation Catholic Church and School shooting, the New York Times and the BBC are pandering to the tender feelings of someone who’s 1) a would-be mass murderer (the successful kind, by a rather arbitrary definition, kills four or more); 2) insane; and 3) dead. We alive people resent once-reputable news outlets choosing the occasion of two murdered children and at least 18 seriously injured people to propagandize and yet again defy biological reality.
Media kowtowing to trans orthodoxy alienates their mainstream audience. Incorrect pronouns drive news consumers nuts. Alluding to a burly guy in a pink wig with a five o’clock shadow as “she” makes journalists seem like fools and readers and viewers feel mocked. Even the wussy middle course of calling trans people “they” leads to grammatical confusion. Also late last month, the Telegraph reported that another (male) transgender killer, “Joanna” Rowland-Stuart, “stabbed their partner to death with a samurai sword.” The following para refers to Joanna’s attack in “their Brighton home.” Does that mean the couple’s home, or only Joanna’s?
In that case, the court has deemed the killer Joanna “unfit to plead,” meaning he’s bonkers. Is a pattern developing? Despite multiple cases of trans murderers whose sanity was dubious, I’d not claim, as some conservative pundits do, that trans people are grossly overrepresented in the depressingly long roster of American mass murderers. Yet people who are mentally ill in other respects are consistently the most susceptible to deciding they were “born in the wrong body.” The trans cult attracts the insecure, the lost and ungrounded; the unstable, disturbed and, yes, outright deranged.
We’ve turned confusion about which sex you are into a reasonable, dare I say normal, source of distress that demands redress, not by curing a delusion but encouraging it. Declaring you’re trans is a moment of self-discovery that we celebrate for its “authenticity” and “bravery.” In the olden days of Psycho, a man wearing women’s clothing sent an ominous signal that there’s something off about them.
Yet Westman’s transgenderism was so socially acceptable that it functioned as disguise – cloaking a manic mishmash of malice toward Jews, children, blacks, Hispanics, Christians, Donald Trump, doubtless everyone else and, not to forget, himself. Rather than signal there’s something wrong here, Westman’s dressing as a woman actually camouflaged the warning signs that the young man was out of his tiny mind. The seminal mistake in the progression of this demented transgender movement was no longer recognizing gender dysphoria as a mental disorder.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 15 2025 World edition.
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Will cops wearing Arabic badges serve and protect all?
Last week, the Dearborn Heights Police Department revealed the nation’s first-ever officer uniform patch featuring Arabic script. It was designed by a policewoman named Emily Murdoch, and on first glance it might look like a gesture of inclusivity. But is this really progress – or it it, in fact, a sign of cultural fragmentation?
As an Iraqi-American Muslim, I feel compelled to answer. I came to the United States after Iraq was swallowed by Iranian-backed militias and sectarian violence. I know exactly what happens when identity politics becomes the organizing principle of civic life. And the last thing I ever wanted to see in America is the export of that same toxic culture – one that thrives on division, preferential treatment and symbolic displays of power.
Supporters of the new badge will say it’s harmless. A small sign of recognition. A gesture toward Dearborn’s large Arab-American community. But symbols are never “just symbols.” They carry meaning. And the meaning here is troubling: that America’s civic institutions, instead of standing above ethnic and religious division, should bend themselves to it.
America’s immigration success was due to integration, not balkanisation. If we look at the Hispanic community, which is the largest immigrant group, they have never demanded police badges in Spanish. No ethnic group in U.S. history has ever sought this kind of symbolic segregation.
As someone who lived as a minority in my homeland, I know how damaging ethnic exceptionalism is. Imagine a scenario: two men get into a fight, one Arab and one Hispanic, and both call the police. The officers arrive wearing Arabic-script badges. What is the non-Arab supposed to feel? That the authority recognises Arabs but not him. That the state has already chosen sides. How can any non-Arab feel safe when U.S. authority is signaling ethnic preference?
It is a dangerous precedent, especially when history is considered. Arabs themselves once spread their language by force during the Caliphates, colonizing vast regions of Asia, Africa and Europe. Arabic, once confined to southern Arabia, was imposed on conquered peoples across continents. Entire nations were reshaped by conquest, their native scripts replaced. Turkey, until 1928, still used Arabic letters – until Atatürk banned them as a declaration of independence from Islamist domination. Symbols matter, and they can signal conquest as much as community.
This is why America must not fall into the trap of deceptive gestures that plant seeds of division, suspicion and resentment. Our enemies have openly declared that they will wage jihad from within, masked as “reform movements” that undermine authority and drive people to hate their governments. Jamal Khashoggi himself, in a televised discussion with Muslim Brotherhood members in Doha, argued that attacking the Western Imperialism from the outside had failed on 9/11, and that the strategy must now shift to the inside. The Brotherhood’s ultimate goal is no secret: global Sharia rule.The Dearborn Heights Police Department’s rollout of the Arabic patch was walked back by Mayor Bill Bazzi, who said it “remains an idea” requiring broader input – but although I appreciate Bazzi, himself an Arab American, for his stance, I must argue it shouldn’t even remain an idea when it’s this problematic and fails to reflect American values.
As an Iraqi-American, when I first arrived in the United States, I was grateful to find a country where everyone was different yet treated with one language, under one civic culture. There is a reason I came here: because I admired America’s principles, not because I wanted to change them. Those who come determined to reshape the U.S. in the image of their old homelands show no love for this country.
We must all be wary of the multiculturalism trap. What looks like inclusion is, in fact, separateness. Ironically, the very measures meant to “celebrate diversity” end up isolating immigrant groups even further. America risks repeating Europe’s mistakes, losing itself to Islamism instead of one shared nationality.
Immigrants who arrive here need to understand that integration is a responsibility, not a choice. Otherwise, there are fifty-three Muslim countries in which people who dislike the very essence and principles of being American might feel more comfortable.
And so we return to that badge. What is it really saying? That Arab-Americans need special recognition from state authority. That America must adjust itself to their sensitivities. But America is not supposed to work that way. The uniform is meant to serve all Americans, equally, without distinction.
So the question we must ask Emily Murdoch, and anyone else promoting these divisive symbols, is simple: are you here to serve America – or the Arab community alone?