The Social World

Category: Politics

  • Left-wing violence is still being normalized

    Left-wing violence is still being normalized

    Six months before being shot in the neck and murdered, the popular conservative commentator Charlie Kirk retweeted our study on political violence in America. Warning the nation that assassination culture was spreading amongst the left, Kirk highlighted our study showing that 48 percent of politically left-wing respondents in a recent poll said it would be at least somewhat justifiable to murder Elon Musk. He noted, too, that 55 percent of them also believed the same about killing President Trump. And, most acutely, he highlighted that this is the natural outgrowth of a left-wing political culture that has tolerated violence for years. Sadly, tragically and unbelievably, we learn that he has become its latest victim. Left-wing violence is still being normalized. And once more, it is continuing to bear ugly and bitter fruit. 

    The ongoing events around the shooting of Charlie Kirk murder remain in motion. At the time of writing, few details have been squeezed out; yet we cannot imagine that, given his overt political posture, this was anything short of a targeted assassination incubated by the same pathological trends that are expanding online. Charlie Kirk is a well-known right-wing commentator with strong views on a variety of topics that are salient to vast swathes of the Western world. Within hours of his shooting in Utah yesterday, individuals ranging from Donald Trump, Candace Owens and even Benjamin Netanyahu took to X to offer prayers and consolations. Even for a country growing used to calls for corporate executives and conservative politicians to be “luigi’d” (slang for assassinated, named for Luigi Mangione) this act is breathtaking in horror. This assassination occurred while he was surrounded by thousands of idealistic college teenagers. 

    Given the high likelihood of his shooting as politically motivated, there is simply no doubt that this represents another, more serious escalation in the growth of political violence in America. In July’s edition of The Spectator, our research showed that the rise in left-wing violence was both unmistakable and unprecedented. In polling, we discovered a sea change in American life, partly reflected in surveys and partly reflected on meme cultures on social media. And within a few hours of Kirk’s shooting, posts generating hundreds of thousands and even millions of views expressed delight, amusement and pleasure in this unprecedented act of political violence against a cultural commentator. Many of those X handles who did so carried the red triangle of Hamas affiliation with pride. Others accused him of being hateful, demagogic, Zionist fascist. A panelist on MSNBC, meanwhile, suggested that it might merely be the result of an accidental shooting of a gun in celebration.

    The rise in left-wing violence reflects a US society that is tearing apart at the seams. Images, memes, and public glorification of such actions found their folk hero in the rise of Luigi Mangione, after his public killing of Brian Thompson last year sparked a firestorm of public debate on drastic polarization in the US. This murder ricocheted through social-media ecosystems and video-game forums, generating a panoply of bizarre memes that celebrated his act as noble and just response to the evils of corporate America. All of these alarming changes rest on growing psychological distortions, as more and more Americans feel like they lack control over the events of their own life. Civic responsibility increasingly dissolves into utter nihilism, as public revenge against political “enemies” takes center stage for aggressive individuals seeking a moment of glory. They know enough people online will mourn them. Luigi Mangione’s defense fund has already raised a staggering $1 million dollars. 

    Soon we will hear who the shooter was and why he committed this shocking act of extreme political violence. Inevitably, we will learn where his or her political commitments lay. Undoubtedly, too, we will learn that he believed himself to be fighting for a good cause. Tragically, he is unlikely to be the last one to do so.

    Left-wing violence is being normalized. The question remains about whether it can be stopped. Rest in peace, Charlie Kirk.

  • British Ambassador to the US fired over Epstein revelations

    British Ambassador to the US fired over Epstein revelations

    Peter Mandelson has been fired as British Ambassador to the United States after further revelations emerged about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer dismissed Mandelson less than 24 hours after insisting: “I have confidence in him.” Foreign Office minister Stephen Doughty told the House of Commons this morning that Mandelson was dismissed “in light of additional information.”

    It follows two days of controversy after emails between Mandelson and the pedophile financier were published. In one letter, he called Epstein his “best pal.” The messages revealed that the former Business Secretary had maintained contact with Epstein when he was facing charges of procuring a child for prostitution. In those emails, Mandelson cast doubt on the validity of Epstein’s 2008 conviction – something which Doughty told the House was partly responsible for sealing Mandelson’s fate this morning.

    In a statement this morning, the British Embassy in Washington said that “Peter Mandelson’s suggestion that Jeffrey Epstein’s first conviction was wrongful and should be challenged is new information.” The departure of Britain’s most senior man in DC will cause headaches on both sides of the pond, ahead of president Trump’s state visit next week. Some within government had hoped that Mandelson could brave the storm until after the visit. Clearly, that was a misjudgment.

    The context of Labour’s ongoing deputy leadership election and the effective Tory efforts to prosecute a case in parliament will likely mean more awkward questions about Mandelson, including what No. 10 knew and when. Mandelson has now become the first public figure in modern British history to have been forced out office for three different scandals across four different decades.

    Appointing the ultra-networker to the UK’s most senior ambassadorial appointment was to be a “high risk, high reward” approach. Ultimately, the strategic risk was not worth the short-term reward.

  • Charlie Kirk saw himself as holding back a revolution

    Charlie Kirk saw himself as holding back a revolution

    Charlie Kirk was, from an incredibly young age, the sort of person willing to try things that seemed impossible. Last night, in his remembrance of meeting Charlie for the first time, my Fox colleague Guy Benson realized that he was probably one of the first conservative speakers Kirk had invited to share ideas to students in Illinois – at the ripe age of around sixteen. In lieu of a typical trajectory for a person with political ambitions, Kirk took a different path, believing that through engagement, debate and organization, he could achieve a mission many political professionals thought was a fool’s errand: win young people over for conservative ideas

    In the midst of the Tea Party moment, when the American right was synonymous with boomer (and older) voters and Barack Obama was the coolest thing on campus, riding high with millennial voters, this concept was absurd. But Kirk believed it was possible. He invested all his effort in pursuing it, he built a team across the country to make it happen and, most incredibly of all, he actually pulled it off. He was the biggest difference maker in a movement that saw an influx of young activist voters that changed the course of the country. And for that, he was murdered.

    The truth about Charlie Kirk is that he believed in the power of engagement. He would consistently do what the American left refuses to do: walk into the places dominated by opinions from the other side, and take on all comers, welcoming their disagreement and arguing not in an attempt to demonize but in an attempt to evangelize. Despite the left’s active campaign to describe him as a white supremacist, a radical, a reactionary, comparing him to Nazis and the Klan, Kirk was one of the most forthright and emphatic voices against that extreme of the far right. His assassination is so jarring in part because he is such a mainstream figure. He was beloved by millions of young conservatives across America not because he was a frothing at the mouth provocateur, but because he was a clean-cut earnest patriotic inspiration, someone who showed them how to stand up for what they believe on campuses where the number of academics who share their traditional Republican views are practically nil. And along the way, Kirk showed you don’t have to lose your soul in the process – openly embracing faith and family as the most important things in life, calling his young followers to think beyond the political realm.

    Kirk exemplified a belief in the American values of civil debate. His free-speech battle truly was part of a happy war, one that actively seeks out those who disagree not to destroy them but to prove a point. The overwhelming number of people ensconced at networks or as late-night hosts would never be brave enough to do what Kirk did on an active regular basis: to put themselves in a position where they are surrounded, and attempt to win the debater, or more often the audience, to your side. And in their cowardice, they chose to lie regularly about him instead – even in death, as the same ghoulish leftists who regularly hope for Donald Trump’s death and cheered Luigi Mangione rejoiced publicly on social media, as if to say if they can’t get Donald or Elon, they’ll settle for Charlie.

    In the wake of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, there was a brief moment where people of both parties seemed to hope that it would mark a change in direction for the course of the country – an end to the demonization of the other side, a tamping down on the tone of our virulent political debate. That was as fleeting as an election cycle. But now with Kirk’s bloody violent murder while doing exactly the same thing he encouraged so many young people to do – using free-speech rights to stand up for what they believe, publicly and without fear of debate with the other side – the lesson many on the right may take away is that there is no future for such engagement. 

    The consequences of such a move would break from Kirk’s mission, and serve to accept the message the American left, from its most powerful elites to its core electorate, has been sending loud and clear since 2016: that there is no place for Republican views in society, that they are Nazis and fascists and existential threats, people who should be hounded and punched, and whose deepest pain is your path to joy. And why shouldn’t they take that lesson? There is no purpose to debate when at the end, the other side just wants you dead all the more. Can we even share a country with these people who hate us so much?

    The reason not to take that path is because it’s the opposite of what Kirk himself believed and exemplified, as he told us over and over again. In a profile in Deseret published on the eve of his fall campus tour just last week, he vocalized his purpose as calling his fans and fellow young conservatives to something higher than just hating the other side:

    “My job every single day is actively trying to stop a revolution,” Kirk said. “This is where you have to try to point them toward ultimate purposes and toward getting back to the church, getting back to faith, getting married, having children. That is the type of conservatism that I represent, and I’m trying to paint a picture of virtue, of lifting people up, not just staying angry.”

    The worst thing the young American right could do now in this moment is turn Charlie Kirk’s martyrdom into a lesson fundamentally at odds with his mission. Really, after all this, could you blame them? The American left hated Charlie Kirk. They mocked his approach to debate. They smeared him for his conservative beliefs. But they and the country may be about to learn what comes next, and learn it hard.

  • When will we learn the truth about Saudi involvement in 9/11?

    When will we learn the truth about Saudi involvement in 9/11?

    Will Saudi Arabia ever be held to account for the 9/11 terror attacks? For decades, the Kingdom has successfully parried lawsuits in the United States accusing it of providing logistical and financial support to a network of Islamic extremists who launched a global terror campaign, culminating in the September 11 attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.

    Those attacks occurred 24 years ago and since then survivors and victims of the 9/11 hijackings have had to counter not only vigorous Saudi denials mounted by their well-funded American legal team but also repeated attempts by the US government to thwart the lawsuits.

    But there are signs the pendulum has begun to swing the other way. On August 28, US District Judge George B. Daniels, in a little noticed ruling in Manhattan, denied a motion by the Kingdom to dismiss the case, opening the way for a trial. In his decision, Daniels found that a small cadre of Saudi government employees tied to the consulate in Los Angeles had formed a support network for two of the 9/11 hijackers in 2000 and 2001 and probably had advance knowledge of the plot. In his opinion, Daniels raised the prospect of wider involvement by Saudi officials. Daniels ruling is the first judicial finding in the United States that the government of Saudi Arabia may have played a role in the 9/11 attacks.

    A key piece of evidence in the case, what plaintiffs lawyers call an al-Qaeda surveillance video of the US Capitol, came from the United Kingdom’s Metropolitan Police Service. The Met obtained the video during a raid of the Birmingham home of a suspected Saudi intelligence operative, Omar al-Bayoumi, two weeks after 9/11. 

    Daniels said the evidence suggests Bayoumi, employed ostensibly as an accountant for a Saudi aviation firm, and Fahad al-Thumairy, a radical cleric based in the Los Angeles consulate, assisted two of the hijackers in advance of the attacks in their official capacity as Saudi government employees. “Thumairy and Bayoumi were not just acting as an imam and accountant,” Daniels declared. “Their employment with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia likely had some connection with assisting the hijackers.”

    Nineteen al-Qaeda terrorists, 15 of them Saudi nationals, hijacked four commercial airliners in the United States the morning of September 11, 2001, and crashed them into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan and the Pentagon. A fourth plane, which the terrorists apparently intended to use to attack the US Capitol building in Washington, DC, crashed in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after passengers revolted and rushed the cockpit.

    In all, nearly 3,000 people lost their lives, including 657 at the investment firm of Cantor Fitzgerald, who were killed when American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center. Cantor’s former CEO, Howard Lutnick, now US Commerce Secretary, is a plaintiff in one of the lawsuits against the Kingdom.

    Plaintiffs lawyers have been collecting evidence of Saudi involvement almost from the day of the attacks – the first lawsuit against the Kingdom was filed on September 10, 2003 – and those facts have long suggested that the Saudis provided logistical and financial support to al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups. The plaintiffs’ theory rests in part on uncontroverted evidence that the Saudi royal family and Saudi government officials, beginning in the mid-1980s funded Islamist charities that in turn supplied weapons and logistical support to mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan.

    That movement later spread to the vicious Balkans war of the 1990s, which pitted indigenous Muslims and their al-Qaeda allies against local Serbs and Croats. From there, al-Qaeda quickly leapfrogged to attack other western targets including two US embassies in East Africa and the US Navy destroyer, USS Cole, culminating in the 9/11 attacks.

    Regional offices of the charities employed al-Qaeda members in senior positions and these charities supplied money, travel documents, arms, safe houses and other assistance to al-Qaeda cells, the plaintiffs allege. Absent the assistance of Saudi government funded charities, a half dozen of which were designated as terrorism supporters by the US Treasury Department, al-Qaeda and bin Laden never could have mounted the logistically complex 9/11 operation.

    So alarmed were US government officials by the role of the Saudi charities in funding international terror that then-vice president Al Gore met privately in 1999 with then crown prince Abdullah in the White House to ask for assistance in tracking down terror groups based in the Kingdom. Abdullah agreed to put senior US intelligence officials with their Saudi counterparts, but US officials said nothing came of it.

    “We went to the Saudis as a government, showed them what we had, asked them for more information, warned them of what might take place and ultimately nothing happened,” said Jonathan Winer, then deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement. 

    Central to the lawsuits against the Kingdom are reports that emerged within days of the attacks that Bayoumi and Thumairy, the Saudi consular official, assisted Nawaf al-Hamzi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, the first 9/11 hijackers to arrive in the United States, getting settled in southern California in January of 2000.

    Bayoumi’s ostensible employment as an accountant was with a Los Angeles based Saudi aviation company named Dallah Avco, in a government funded position. While Bayoumi drew a salary, fellow employees told investigators he only rarely showed up for work. He did, though, have multiple contacts with the hijackers, along with Thumairy, helping them find an apartment and co-signing a lease for a rental in San Diego, and arranging for them to take flying lessons and learn English. 

    When interviewed by the FBI shortly after 9/11, Bayoumi said he had met the hijackers by chance in a Middle Eastern restaurant in Los Angeles on February 1, 2000, near the Saudi consulate, where he had traveled to clear up a visa problem. He claimed to have taken the initiative to introduce himself to the hijackers when he heard them speaking an Arab dialect common in the Persian Gulf and felt it was his duty as a fellow Muslim to help them get settled.

    This claim was dismissed early on by FBI investigators who concluded that Bayoumi’s luncheon meeting with the hijackers had been planned and that he likely was a Saudi intelligence operative with links to al-Qaeda. “(Bayoumi) acted like a Saudi intelligence officer, in my opinion,” an FBI agent told congressional investigators. “And if he was involved with the hijackers, which it looks like he was, if he signed leases, if provided some kind of financing or payment of some sort, then I would say there might be a clear connection between Saudi intelligence and UBL (Osama bin Laden).”

    Bayoumi moved to England before 9/11, but soon after the attacks FBI agents who had picked up his trail in southern California, alerted British authorities of his potential role and the Met Police searched his Birmingham home. Among the items taken from the house was a video recording Bayoumi made of the US Capitol building in 1999 along with the Washington Monument and other landmarks. Also confiscated was a drawing of an airplane with a calculation that experts for both the FBI and plaintiffs lawyers later concluded was a mathematical formula showing the rate of descent necessary for an airplane to collide with a target on the ground.

    While he made the video, Bayoumi was accompanied by two Saudi embassy officials from the Ministry of Islamic Affairs, a branch of the Saudi government staffed at the time by radical clerics whose role was to propagate a militant form of Wahhabi Islam that vilified the west. In the video, Bayoumi takes pains to note the Capitol’s main entrances and points out locations of the capitol’s security staff.

    Former acting CIA director Michael Morrel, and other former US intelligence officials have described the video as a casing film made in preparation for a terrorist attack. “No doubt in my mind that al-Qaeda tasked him to do this casing video,” Morrel said in an interview with CBS news.

    One of the more salient aspects of the aftermath of 9/11 is the degree to which the United States government has sought to conceal what it knows about the origins of the plot, a tactic that has frustrated efforts by the plaintiffs lawyers to get at the truth while greatly benefiting the Saudis. The stonewalling began with the administration of President George W. Bush, which insisted on classifying and keeping from public view portions of the first congressional investigation, the so-called Joint Inquiry, raising questions about Bayoumi and the potential role of the Saudi government.

    The late Senator Bob Graham, who co-chaired the investigation, then went so far as to accuse Bush of protecting the Kingdom because of Bush family ties to the oil industry and Saudi royals. 

    The equivocations and evasions continued through each succeeding administration. The FBI, for example, has been in possession of the Bayoumi video of the Capitol building since 2001, but failed to turn it over to not only plaintiffs lawyers but also the 9/11 commission. The plaintiffs only were able to access the video when the Met Police agreed to give it to them in 2022.

    Some of the foot dragging at times has resembled theater of the absurd. Early in the case, when plaintiffs lawyers requested the Justice Department make public a copy of the Interpol bin Laden arrest warrant, the answer they got back was the warrant was protected by privacy rules and that department couldn’t release it without bin Laden’s permission.

    At other points, the government obstruction was of far greater import. In 2009, then US Solicitor General Elena Kagan, now a US Supreme Court Justice, filed an amicus brief in the litigation asking the Supreme Court not to hear an appeal of a lower court decision dismissing the case against the Kingdom. Kagan argued there was no persuasive evidence of Saudi government involvement, even as the FBI continued to pursue evidence Bayoumi was a Saudi intelligence operative with possible links to al-Qaeda. The Supreme Court, heeding Kagan’s request, declined to hear the matter.

    Later, in 2016, the Obama administration lobbied heavily against legislation intended to aid the 9/11 victims by expanding the basis for suing foreign governments that foment terrorism. Administration officials warned the Saudis would withdraw upwards of $750 billion in assets from US financial institutions if the bill became law. Obama vetoed the measure after both the House and Senate passed it overwhelmingly. Congress overturned the veto and the bill became law.

    That measure, the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, clarifies the US State Department need not designate a foreign government a terrorism supporter as a condition for being sued in US courts, a requirement that had hampered the 9/11 lawsuits. It also makes clear that not all of the tortious conduct must to take place in the United States.

    The dire scenarios depicted by the Obama administration never came to pass, while the measure gave new life to the plaintiffs’ litigation and set the stage for Daniels’ groundbreaking decision on August 28. 

    Now that the lawsuits seem to be headed for trial, 9/11 victims and their families, along with the nation as a whole, may finally get answers to questions about Saudi Arabia’s involvement that have been swirling around the case since the beginning.

  • I saw the bullet hit Charlie Kirk

    I saw the bullet hit Charlie Kirk

    I saw the bullet hit Charlie Kirk, and I saw him close his eyes and slump. 

    I am a reporter for the Deseret News, based out of Salt Lake City. I was sent down to Utah Valley University yesterday morning to cover Charlie Kirk’s Prove Me Wrong tour. 

    At around 11a.m., my friend and fellow reporter Emma Pitts and I walked from the campus library to the outdoor amphitheater with tickets in hand, but there was no need. There was no one scanning tickets; there were no bag-checkers – we just walked in with the other 3,000 people who attended. We were later informed that only six officers total had been assigned to the event. 

    The atmosphere was rowdy. We walked down the grass and cement steps to the center, where the stage was, and we talked to several UVU students proudly holding a cardboard cutout of Trump. One freshman girl told us she was at the debate because she felt Kirk had brought on the dawn of the new conservative generation. Another older couple near us was there with their granddaughter.

    When Kirk finally arrived, we could see him talking to the university’s Turning Point USA chapter in the parking lot behind the stage. After a couple of minutes with them, Kirk emerged and started throwing hats into the crowd.

    He made no introductory speech; he went straight into the debate. The first debater came and went without a hitch.  The second participant asked him how many mass shooters in American history had been transgender. Kirk responded, “Too many.” Then the questioner spoke for a moment more and followed up, “Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last ten years?”

    Before Kirk could answer, what sounded like a firecracker popped in the air. I watched him fall from his chair, and for a second, everyone stopped. Emma and I dropped to the ground, and she told me we needed to pray. She asked God to bless Charlie Kirk and protect us. 

    Then people started to run, so we did too. At this point, I believed there was a real possibility I would be shot in the back as I ran, but as footage now shows, the killer was running too – just on the roof.

    We sprinted and ducked – and ironically, the first door I flung open was the university’s mental-health office. Under the receptionist’s desk in the corner we went, and we both cried.

    Then I looked at my phone. The first thing I noticed was that I was still recording audio. It had only been two minutes and 50 seconds since the beginning of the second debater’s question. 

    Charlie Kirk has two children: a three-year-old daughter and a one-year-old son. 

    His killer has neither been identified nor found.

  • Flight 93 heroes deserve the Presidential Medal of Freedom

    Flight 93 heroes deserve the Presidential Medal of Freedom

    Twenty-four years ago, Muslim terrorists murdered nearly 3,000 innocent civilians – the vast majority of them Americans – by hijacking three passenger aircraft and ramming them the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in suburban Washington, DC.

    But a fourth, United Airlines Flight 93, failed to reach its target thanks to the bravery of the passengers and flight attendants, who sacrificed themselves to save who-knows-how many.

    Twenty-four years later, those heroes have yet to receive their country’s highest civilian award.

    The Presidential Medal of Freedom, instituted by President John F. Kennedy in 1963, can be given to anyone “who has made an especially meritorious contribution to (1) the security or national interests of the United States, or (2) world peace or (3) cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.” The medal can be awarded posthumously; such recipients include Kennedy, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and Babe Ruth.

    Given that the award can be given posthumously for “an especially meritorious contribution” to national security, the 40 passengers and crew members of Flight 93 obviously qualify – especially given the details of their heroism.

    On September 11, 2001, Flight 93 left Newark, New Jersey for San Francisco at 8:42 a.m. At 9:28 a.m., four al-Qaeda terrorists commandeered the Boeing 757. Wielding knives, they claimed to have a bomb, forced passengers to the back of the aircraft and breached the cockpit. In the process, the hijackers stabbed pilot Jason Dahl, co-pilot Leroy Homer Jr., flight attendant Deborah Walsh and passenger Mark Rothenberg. Walsh and Rothenberg immediately died from their wounds.

    “Uh, is the captain,” Ziad Jarrah, the terrorist flying the plane, said over the intercom. “Would like you all to remain seated. There is a bomb on board and (we) are going back to the airport and to have our demands… Please remain quiet.”

    Flight 93 was traveling over Ohio when it turned east toward the Capitol, the intended target. Meanwhile, passengers were calling their loved ones to explain what was happening. Through those calls, they learned about the World Trade Center.

    “It’s Lynn,” passenger Linda Gronlund told her sister. “I’m on United 93 and it’s been hijacked… Apparently, they’ve flown a couple of planes into the World Trade Center already and it looks like they’re going to take this one down as well.

    “Mostly, I just wanted to say I love you… and… I’m going to miss you… and… and please give my love to Mom and Dad, and (sigh) mostly, I just love you and I just wanted to tell you that. I don’t know if I’m going to get the chance to tell you that again or not. (sigh),” Gronlund continued before giving her sister the combination to her safe.

    Passenger Todd Beamer surreptitiously called Lisa Jefferson, an operator for an airline telephone service, and in the midst of tears, asked her to call his wife.

    “You have the same name as my wife,” he said. “We’ve been married for ten years. She’s pregnant with our third child. Tell her that I love her… (choking up)… I’ll always love her… (clearing throat). We have two boys… David, he’s three and Andrew, he’s one… Tell them… (choking) tell them that their daddy loves them and that he is so proud of them. (clearing throat again) Our baby is due January 12… I saw an ultrasound… It was great… We still don’t know if it’s a girl or a boy.”

    But the passengers refused to submit to the inevitable. They chose to act.

    “We have decided we would not be pawns in these hijackers’ suicidal plot,” Beamer told Jefferson. “We’ve hatched a plan. Four of us are going to rush the hijacker with the bomb. After we take him out, we’ll break into the cockpit. A stewardess is getting some boiling water to throw on the hijackers at the controls. We’ll get them… and we’ll take them out.”

    Beamer then asked Jefferson to pray the Lord’s Prayer and Psalm 25 before turning to his fellow passengers.

    “Are you guys ready?” he asked. “Let’s roll.”

    Jefferson, who described Beamer as “a soft-spoken, calm gentleman,” believes he “played a great role because when he told the guys ‘Are you ready?’ I assume that they were waiting on his cue,” she said.

    Alice Hoagland, the mother of passenger Mark Bingham, described what happened next.

    “They ran up the length of the 757 with all their improvised weapons,” Hoagland said while listening to a recording of the flight’s final moments. “You could hear them coming. It became louder and louder, people yelling, ‘Get ’em!’

    “They rattled the heck out of those guys in the front. They were terrified.”

    Deena Burnett Bailey, widow of passenger Tom Burnett, elaborated.

    “You could hear the scuffling,” Bailey said. “There were several people working together. You could hear a hijacker being hit with some type of object and you could hear the pain that he felt when he was hit. It was a cry, a wail as if he had been fatally struck. They were realizing that the passengers and crew members were coming to get them.

    “Then we all heard Tom’s voice. All of us just jolted. Tom said, ‘I’m injured.’ It was in a way that you had the sense that he was saying, ‘Don’t wait for me. Keep going.’ “

    The frightened terrorists responded by violently steering the 757 up, down and sideways to try to throw the passengers off balance. When the passengers remained undaunted, the hijackers – amid cries of “Allahu akbar” – chose to crash the plane in a Pennsylvania field.

    At 10:03 a.m., frenetic activity turned into morbid silence.

    In recent years, the Presidential Medal of Freedom has become just another token of political patronage, with recipients reflecting a sitting president’s political agenda. Such recipients include Anna Wintour, Vogue’s editorial director and a fundraiser for President Barack Obama’s two presidential campaigns; Sister Simone Campbell, a Catholic activist nun who helped get “Obamacare” passed, George Soros, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, who received it “with distinction.”

    But President Donald Trump can help restore the award’s original luster by bestowing individual medals to 40 ordinary men and women who performed an extraordinary act that must never be forgotten.

  • Charlie Kirk believed in free speech. He died for it

    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.

  • The ‘recklessness’ of Joe Biden, according to Kamala Harris

    The ‘recklessness’ of Joe Biden, according to Kamala Harris

    The Atlantic published the first excerpt of Kamala Harris’s expensive memoir “107 Days” this morning, leading with a lickspittle editor’s note from Jeffrey Goldberg. According to Goldberg, the Harris we read in this book is:

    “blunt, knowing, fervent, occasionally profane, slyly funny. As you will see in the following excerpt – and throughout this newsworthy book – she no longer seems particularly interested in holding back.”

    In this short excerpt we learn that Vice-President Harris repaired our supposedly broken relationship with France, mais oui, and also did a good job as “border czar.” She says so herself, and we have only her to thank. But the most newsworthy portion of the excerpt comes earlier, when she discusses Joe Biden’s unwillingness to drop out of the 2024 race.

    “It’s Joe and Jill’s decision. We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized. Was it grace, or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness. The stakes were simply too high. This wasn’t a choice that should have been left to an individual’s ego, an individual’s ambition. It should have been more than a personal decision.”

    “Recklessness.” “Ego.” The remaining 12 loyalists in Bidenworld are going to be mad. Harris adds:

    “Joe Biden was a smart guy with long experience and deep conviction, able to discharge the duties of president. On his worst day, he was more deeply knowledgeable, more capable of exercising judgment, and far more compassionate than Donald Trump on his best. But at 81, Joe got tired.”

    Harris claims that she was more “loyal to my country” than she was to Joe Biden, but she held her tongue until the Party anointed her as successor and gave her free reign to completely botch her campaign against Trump. Anyone who read Fight, the excellent chronicle of the 2024 campaign that came out earlier this year, or even cursorily followed the narrative as it unfolded in real time, knows the contours of the story. Harris, handled an impossible task, managed to make a series of disastrous decisions, emboldened by her senior campaign staff imported from Barack Obama loyalists, who were both out of touch with reality and also didn’t like Harris much.

    I don’t see any of that “bluntness” in this excerpt, which is also not slyly funny or occasionally profane. Unlike Fight, which was no Lost Illusions but still read like it had been written by actual humans with actual personalities, this excerpt of 107 Days reads very “as told to,” either to Harris’s extremely well-paid ghostwriter or to an AI chatbot, or to a ghostwriter who uses an AI chatbot. It may be unapologetic, but it’s also unapologetic sludge.

    Harris, as the first female vice president, is an important historical figure, and she’s hardly the demon as painted by her opponents on the right. She’s also no great shakes. What we see in the memoir excerpt is what we saw of her in real life: marginal competence, extreme self-absorption, performative liberalism and laugh lines that fall dead to everyone but the most extreme paid loyalists. Let’s also keep in mind that it’s been less than a year since she’s lost, and even less time than that since she left office. This is a rehabilitation tour planned from the outset, and the whole thing feels fake, silly and manipulative.

    Now we can sit back and wait for the recrimination cycle that may or may not come. There may be some ruffled feathers in Bidenworld. And Harris is, like it or not, going to be on our screens and in our feeds a lot in the next month or so. But there might also be less controversy than hoped for by people who love political gossip. Jeffrey Goldberg, invoking “my friend Kamala” just like Obama used to, may care about what’s in 107 Days, but the rest of the world has moved along.

  • The ghost of Epstein will haunt Trump’s UK visit

    The ghost of Epstein will haunt Trump’s UK visit

    When King Charles hosts Donald Trump for the state banquet at Windsor Castle next week, the dignitaries should know better than to mention Jeffrey Epstein. Inevitably, however, Epstein’s ghost will hang over proceedings, the pedo-Banquo at the feast.

    The royal family will entertain the President, though the Duke of York will (surely?) stay away. He no longer works for the crown and everyone knows why. Trump, meanwhile, will still be batting away suggestions that in 2003 he contributed a puerile drawing to Epstein’s 50th “birthday book” – a strange compilation of messages for the sex criminal, lovingly assembled by Ghislaine Maxwell.

    Then there’s Lord Mandelson, His Majesty’s Ambassador to the United States, who is supposed to accompany Trump for some of the trip. The Prince of Darkness apparently features prominently in the soppy-yet-pervy birthday book, which Democrats on the House Oversight Committee have cunningly released online. “Wherever he is in the world, he remains my best pal!” Mandelson allegedly scribbled, alongside an image of himself in a bathrobe sitting opposite the fully dressed rapist.

    “Petie,” as Epstein called him, has long said he regrets ever having met the financier. “It’s an albatross around my neck,” he said this week, referring to the fact that he apparently continued the friendship after Epstein was imprisoned for a child-sex offense in 2008. But expressions of regret won’t stop the attacks coming.

    On Tuesday night, in the wake of the birthday book bombshell, the Telegraph reported that, in 2010, Epstein helped Mandelson broker a £1 billion ($1.35 billion) deal for the sale of a UK-taxpayer owned business, Sempra Commodities, to JP Morgan. “Something is really wrong here,” says Sarah Ransome, one of Epstein’s British accusers. “Peter Mandelson should not be ambassador. He needs to be fired.” Sensing opportunity, the Tory leader Kemi Badendoch used Prime Minister’s Questions to attack Keir Starmer for Mandelson’s Epstein association. “That is a disgrace,” she said.

    How long can Britain’s ambassador last? In the coming days, the details of Mandelson’s bond with Epstein may end up overshadowing all talk of the special relationship between Britain and America, as the wars rage on in the Middle East and Ukraine.

    Trump has turned on a British ambassador before. In 2019, Sir Kim Darroch was pushed out of his Washington post after diplomatic cables – in which he called Trump “inept” and “insecure” – were leaked. What might save Mandelson is that he has done nothing but praise the US commander-in-chief. Sure enough, whereas Trump loathed Darroch, he seems to have warmed to Mandy. Now both men would rather the world move on from Epstein.

    It’s all so awkward. There’s another photograph of Epstein with Joel Pashcow, a longtime member of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, and an anonymous young woman holding up a large fake cheque from “DJ Trump” for $22,500. Clearly, in the time before 21st-century populism and the #MeToo movement, the global elite used to enjoy their risqué japes. But what does it all mean now?

    Trump is adamant that Epstein, Epstein, Epstein is the new Russia, Russia, Russia: a hoax designed to distract the world from his revolutionary achievements. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, claims: “It’s very clear President Trump did not draw this picture, and he did not sign [the birthday book].” But it isn’t clear at all, unless Team Trump can prove that some of those other epistles have been faked.

    It’s also baffling to ponder why, when Joe Biden was in the White House, the now-viral Epstein files did not find their way into the public eye. The Democrat-led Department of Justice and the FBI, along with their allies in the media, spent years hounding Trump as a Russian patsy, a fraudster, an insurrectionist and an abuser of women. Yet somehow, it seems, the anti-Trump deep state sat on eye-popping evidence appearing to tie Trump to Epstein. Was it simply because Bill Clinton, that philanderer par excellence, also appeared in the birthday bundle? A note purporting to be from the ex-president praises Epstein’s “childlike curiosity.”

    The Epstein story now appears to involve the Democratic elite, the British establishment and Trump. It thus becomes an ever more mysterious meta-conspiracy – a kaleidoscopic scandal that takes on a different complexion depending on who looks into it. Republican figures, including Vice-President J.D. Vance, enjoyed fanning anti-elitist paranoia when the Epstein muck was on the opposition. They are strangely mute now.

    For Vance and MAGA-supporting Atlanticists such as Nigel Farage, the hope for next week’s visit is that Trump, accompanied by various tech tycoons, will launch a broadside against Keir Starmer’s government for suppressing free speech online. Now, however, the whole world is gossiping about who did what with Epstein. Behind closed doors, Trump, the royal family and the Labour leadership will perhaps agree that sometimes it’s better for the people just to shut up.

  • Why is Putin probing Poland with drones?

    Provocation, mistake, or something in between? Either Putin sent Russian drones into Poland’s airspace on Tuesday night to test Nato’s reaction, or Ukrainian electronic jamming scrambled the targeting systems on Russian drones and sent them haywire. Or perhaps the Kremlin is playing a grey-zone game, launching an accidentally-on-purpose attack to push Europe’s boundaries. 

    Whatever Putin’s intent, the shooting down of several drones marks the first time ever that Nato warplanes have engaged and destroyed Russian weapons in European airspace. Though Polish prime minister Donald Tusk noted that “there is no reason to claim that we are in a state of war” he did call the incursion “significantly more dangerous than all previous ones” and warned that a military conflict with Russia is “closer than at any time since the second world war.”

    The problem with the Kremlin testing the boundaries theory is that it doesn’t make much political or military sense. Poland’s relations with Ukraine are already souring, which is exactly how the Kremlin wants it. Just days ago Polish President Karol Nawrocki said that he believed that Ukraine’s accession to Nato should be “postponed” because of the risk of automatically involving allies in a conflict with Russia. He added that discussions about Ukraine’s EU membership were “premature,” stressing that such processes “require time and the consideration of economic factors.” Decoded, Nawrocki fears that Poland’s agricultural sector will be undercut by cheap Ukrainian produce, and Kyiv will receive all the EU subsidies that currently go to Warsaw. Poland also recently ended most benefits payments to Ukrainian refugees settled in its territory. 

    Why, when relations between Poland and Ukraine are heading into choppy waters, would Putin wish to rekindle their solidarity by attacking Polish territory directly? 

    Militarily, too, it’s not clear what the purpose of a deliberate Russian “probing attack” might be. The drones seem to have flown in different directions, one ending up 275 kilometres into Polish territory toward Warsaw while the others were shot down around Rzesow in the south-east of the country. A true test of Poland’s air defense would presumably involve a concentrated attack on a specific target. And Shahed drones – and their Russian-made clones, known as Geran – are a strange way to test defenses as they are notoriously slow and heavy, unlike Russian cruise missiles or indeed hypersonic rockets like the nuclear-capable Kinzhal. The military utility of Shahed attacks is to overwhelm air defense batteries by sheer force of numbers, relying on just 10 or 20 percent of the drone swarm getting through. 

    The problem with the Kremlin testing the boundaries theory is that it doesn’t make much political or military sense

    Another piece of evidence that the incursion may not have been deliberate are reports indicating that after the drones went Awol into Polish airspace some Russian strategic bombers aborted their missions, returning to base without launching their cruise missiles against Ukrainian targets. If true, it could suggest that Russian commanders were wary of escalating the war beyond Ukrainian territory.

    This week Russia and Belarus are about to commence scheduled joint military exercise dubbed Zapad-2025, designed to test their response to a western attack on Russia. For decades, the annual ritual of the Zapad war-games have been a moment of heightened tension for Poland and the Baltic states. To deliberately stage a serious provocation against Nato on the eve of the exercise would be a reckless and foolish move by the Kremlin. But then again the whole full-scale invasion of Ukraine was in itself a massive act of recklessness and folly. 

    What is clear is that Putin is very serious about smashing Ukraine’s energy and transport infrastructure before winter sets in. The massive swarms of missiles and drones that Russia has been sending almost nightly set new records for their scale. A major target seems to be military supply hubs for Nato materiel around Lviv, Lutsk and Rivne – all close to Ukraine’s border with Poland. 

    In the wake of the drone incursion Tusk invoked Nato’s Article Four for only the seventh time since the alliance was founded, calling on allies to “consult” in case of a threat. That will be an important test of Donald Trump’s attitude to Nato. Last week Trump had said that “we are with Poland all the way and we will help Poland protect itself.” Blasting Nato’s European members as free riders has been a long-time Trump talking point. But in July EU leaders pledged to up their contributions to 5 percent of GDP – and Nato’s secretary general Mark Rutte called Trump “Daddy.” Whether this has fundamentally changed Trump’s attitude to Nato remains to be seen.  

    European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen in her State of the Union address vowed that Europe would apply “more pressure on Russia to come to the negotiating table. We need more sanctions.” France’s Emmanuel Macron called the airspace violation “simply unacceptable… We will not compromise on the safety of our allies.” But so far nothing that Nato, or Europe, has done so far has succeeded in deterring Putin or swerving him from his systematic campaign to crush Ukraine.