The Social World

Tag: Editorial

  • Trump’s border policy is beginning to bear fruit

    Trump’s border policy is beginning to bear fruit

    The second Trump administration tends to characterize those who have illegally crossed the southern US border as drug dealers, criminals and rapists. That is, of course, exaggeration, but it is no more a fiction than is the alternative belief, common among liberals, that all migrants are desperate people fleeing for their lives, who cannot possibly be expected to live in their home countries and are utterly dependent on making it to America in order to survive.

    If that were true, illegal migration would be little to worry about and good for the soul – and indeed the economic well-being – of America. If illegal migrants’ lives seem a little messy now, and it is expensive to look after them, in time they will all settle down to become good citizens who boost the economy and make us all happier and more diverse.

    The folly of this belief has been exposed by the revelation that Mexican criminal gangs have been offering bounties for the heads of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers. Kill an ICE officer in Chicago, apparently, and you will be due a reward of $10,000. Kidnap one and it is $2,000. This follows last month’s shooting at an ICE facility in Dallas, in which two detainees were killed by a gunman who had scrawled “anti-ICE” on his ammunition.

    Why the desperation to be rid of ICE officials? Because they have succeeded in disrupting illegal activities. It is no longer so easy for the cartels to bring personnel, drugs and weapons across the border. Criminal business models which relied upon easy transit between Mexico and the US are no longer viable.

    The gangs are not Dickensian petty criminals, they are highly complex, organized and lethal fighting forces

    Liberals used to like to say that it was unfeasible to close the border. It stretched too far. There wasn’t enough concrete in America to build the wall which Donald Trump proposed. People would just come in another way. Trump did not prove them wrong in his first term, but he has in his second. He has done so by designating large areas close to the border as military zones, which can then legitimately be defended by soldiers and military vehicles rather than just customs officials. Trump has been called a fascist for deploying the military in civilian situations. Crime had been falling in Washington, it is argued, so why the need to send in the National Guard? This month, the President has been the target of similar condemnation when the Department for Homeland Security sent 300 National Guard troops to Illinois. No sooner had they arrived than a district judge, in a case brought by state and city authorities, placed a temporary injunction on their deployment.

    Of course, the National Guard is being deployed to tackle not just illegal-migrant and international-gang activity but inner-city crime more broadly. Yet the depth and breadth of the cartels’ depravity is hard to exaggerate, as Katarina Szulc’s feature on baby-smuggling shows.

    When you have criminal gangs trafficking infants and offering bounties to contract killers to eliminate state officials, what are you supposed to do? The gangs operating in Chicago and many other cities are not Dickensian petty criminals. They are highly complex, organized and lethal fighting forces.

    Parts of America have ended up in the hands of gangs because their criminal activities have been tolerated for far too long. A rose-tinted view of migration failed to take into account that among the many plain economic migrants who have been crossing the US border illegally are criminals and terrorists who are capable of seriously undermining honest Americans’ quality of life.

    It is not just the US that has been naive about this. Sweden was once one of the world’s most peaceful nations, yet a soft migration policy which was practiced for several years failed to ask who was gaining entry. The result has been a surge of violence using grenades and other weapons which appear to have been sourced from the leftovers of the Balkans wars, three decades ago.

    Germany, Britain, France – all have suffered crime waves involving illegal migrants whose stories about seeking sanctuary from persecution were too easily swallowed.  Importing people from violent parts of the world always brings with it the risk that they will bring some of that with them, yet the asylum policies of developed nations have largely ignored the risk, tending to place far too much trust in the arrivals.

    Not everything ICE is doing is to be welcomed. There are too many tales of harmless tourists who have been speared by overzealous policing of visa rules. Cases such as that of Donna Hughes-Brown, an Irish woman detained by ICE officials in Chicago in July, do not do the department much credit. She is married to a US citizen, a military veteran, and had been living perfectly legally in the US for many years, but was taken into custody when her record revealed a minor misdemeanor involving a bad check a decade ago. It shouldn’t be too much of an effort to distinguish between a slightly wayward foreigner and a member of a vicious cartel. To subject them to similar treatment undermines otherwise necessary work in strengthening borders.

    That aside, there are many signs that enhanced measures against illegal migration in the US are beginning to bear fruit. The country will not become safer overnight, of course, because there are many criminals who are already active here. But the cartels’ threats of violence against ICE officials are a sign that the policy is beginning to work. The danger now is that the cartels will succeed in terrorizing those officials and deterring them from doing their jobs, as well as recruiting new members of staff.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 27, 2025 World edition.

  • Make Peace Great Again

    Make Peace Great Again

    With typical assertiveness, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave his marching orders to the US military at the end of September. No more “fat troops” or “fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon.” No more woke. Make War Great Again.

    At the same time, with typical modesty, Donald Trump said of his proposed peace deal between Israel and Gaza, “This is a big, big day, a beautiful day, potentially one of the greatest days ever in civilization.” No more starvation, no more senseless death. Make Peace Great Again.

    In Trumpworld, these two agendas are not contradictory. A strong army at home guarentees peace abroad – or that’s the hope, anyway. But what happens when America’s enemies don’t play ball?

    Hamas – or what remains of it – has yet to respond to the President’s announcements. If Trump really can end the killing and return Gaza to some sort of peace, it will be an achievement of which he can be proud – and which everyone else can welcome with relief.

    But there is a very big “if” there. It is not obvious why a terror organization which has been waging war against the very existence of Israel for years, and which has shown its zealotry over and over again, should want to accede to a deal which does not appear to offer it very much. Hamas fighters and officials would be allowed to leave Gaza or even to continue to live there, providing they do so peacefully, with some degree of immunity. A thousand Palestinian prisoners would be released by Israel in return for the remaining living Israeli hostages held in Gaza.

    But there is no offer of Palestinian statehood, however much that would please Britain, France and other countries which have recently made a show of recognizing it as a nation. Trump has not talked of the deal’s leading to a Palestinian state, and Benjamin Netanyahu has been adamant that it is not part of the deal and will never happen.

    Trump’s claim to greatness is built onthe pretext that he can cut deals which no other US president could

    The best that can be said about it from Hamas’s perspective is that, in contrast to an earlier proposal from the President, the deal would not require Palestianians to leave the Gaza Strip for ten years before – supposedly – being allowed back to a land which would by then have been transformed by western property developers. Neither, as per the video reposted by the President, would Gaza be transformed into a ghastly Trump resort. But Trump would be the ultimate governor of the place, aided by other figures including Jared Kushner and former British prime minister Tony Blair. Only at some point in the future would Gaza be entrusted to the Palestinian Authority, whose current territory is restricted to the West Bank.

    If Hamas does accept the deal, it will be because the Israel Defense Forces have degraded the group to the point at which the zealots are no longer quite so much in charge. Then again, even those who remain may well choose death over what would amount to surrender. If the deal is rejected and the war recommences it would be a tragedy for the Gazans. But that’s the all-too-likely scenario.

    Trump’s claim to greatness is built on the pretext that he can cut deals which no other US president could. His methods might be unconventional, alarming even. But at the end of the process he can shake hands and achieve things which would have eluded more earnest and straightforward leaders. In his first term, he lived up to this image. In contrast to Barack Obama, Trump realized that the way to deal with Kim Jong-un was to flatter him. Where other presidents would have shunned the North Korean leader, Trump went to meet him and appeared to succeed in containing his expansionist ambitions, at least for a while.

    There was success, too, in persuading Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates to recognize Israel. It promised a new era of relations between Israel and the Arab nations, which no other president had achieved – and few saw coming under Trump.

    In Trump’s second term, however, his foreign-policy magic seems to have deserted him, even if he does boast about “ending seven un-endable wars.” He misjudged his ability to talk Vladimir Putin into a ceasefire in Ukraine, with the fundamentally untrustworthy Russian President treating his overtures with contempt. Trump, who famously told President Volodymyr Zelensky that he had “no cards to play,” has since performed a backflip and told Ukraine to keep fighting.

    If Trump were to fail in Gaza, too, he could well retreat from the global stage and immerse himself entirely in domestic politics. His fantasy of winning the Nobel Peace Prize would be over – if it was ever a remote possibility given its long history as an award given by the liberal establishment to the liberal establishment. Success, on the other hand, would vindicate Trump’s way of doing things while showing the error of formally recognizing a Palestinian state. What has that achieved? Nothing, other than to give Hamas an opportunity to claim success.

    The world is a messy place. Trump realizes that if you want to do a deal to end a war you have to appeal to both sides. That seems to have been lost on other world leaders.

    Whatever Hamas’s response to Trump’s peace deal, there remain intractable problems. Many in Israel, such as Netanyahu, are dead set against there ever being a Palestinian state. Israeli settlement of the West Bank over many decades and under many governments has brazenly attempted to render this impossible by pockmarking it with areas occupied by Israelis. Tensions and grievances will remain.

    But if Hamas accepts the deal, at least the brutality of the past couple of years will be over. On this, even Trump’s many enemies should want him to succeed.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 13, 2025 World edition.

  • Go to church

    Go to church

    It’s often noted that American society is becoming ever more politicized and polarized. Those who once imagined themselves uninterested in politics find themselves dragged into America’s culture wars. Small children now carry placards and attend political marches. Max Horder and Danit Sara Finkelstein explain the extent to which social media has played a part in this growing radicalism, not just because of the ideological echo chambers we now inhabit, but due to the mindset online algorithms create: rewarding outrage, encouraging extremism. Nuance and balance are anathema; shock and division set each day’s tone.

    Now, however, we have become so used to seeing events through the prism of politics that, when news of an atrocity breaks, Americans of every stripe scour the internet for evidence that the other side is responsible. There are still those on the left who insist Tyler Robinson, who allegedly murdered Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University, was far right – a “groyper” or follower of the alt-right commentator Nick Fuentes. After every shooting, Democrats blame the guns. Republicans blame the DEI insanity.

    The good news, perhaps, is that times are changing

    But as Katherine Dee explains in our cover story, there’s another conflict playing out across America, more significant than MAGA versus antifa or the progressive left versus the GOP. The culture war has become a spiritual war. A nation built on faith in God has become nihilistic and lost its way.

    In The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis conjures a young devil, Wormwood, sent from Hell to secure the damnation of a man known as “the patient.” His uncle, Screwtape, a senior devil, sends him a letter of advice. “Dear Wormwood,” he writes. “Be sure that the patient remains completely fixated on politics. Arguments, political gossip and obsessing on the faults of people they have never met serves as an excellent distraction from advancing in personal virtue, character and the things the patient can control. Make sure to keep the patient in a constant state of angst, frustration and general disdain towards the rest of the human race in order to avoid any kind of charity or inner peace from further developing.”

    If America is particularly in the Devil’s sights right now, the signs of his progress are, in the first place, this fixation on politics and in the second, the terrible absence of inner peace, particularly in our children. Consider the trans shooter Robert Westman. A few days before his attack on Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, he reportedly put a gun to the head of his girlfriend, (who was said to identify as a “furry”), and felt an icy revulsion, no pity or remorse at the thought of murdering her.

    Lionel Shriver presents the reasonable view, that we should not obsess on the motives of young shooters; that they’re simply psychotic anomalies. But these were once normal children, raised by loving families. In a letter to family and friends, Westman says: “I feel I was raised to be a good person… I was corrupted by this world and have learned to hate what life is.”

    What American children are being corrupted by is not just progressive ideology, but exposure to diabolical horrors via the internet. By his own mother’s account, Tyler Robinson was chronically online from an early age and what he experienced there may have been what eventually led him to kill.

    Offline, the culture that surrounds young Americans offers little alternative. The institutions which should affirm the value of Christian civilization instead pump out neo-Marxist ideas and glorify violence.

    But the good news, perhaps, is that times are changing. Increasingly, people who aren’t ideologically opposed to religion understand that it’s the language of faith, not politics, that best explains what is happening in the hearts and minds of young people such as Robinson and Westman. Until very recently, it would have seemed strange, even in America, the West’s most explicitly Christian nation, for public figures to talk in metaphysical terms of Good and Evil; Christ and Satan. But in Silicon Valley, among the people who create the spaces of the online universe, it’s become normal for the most powerful men on the planet to discuss the reality of demons and of actual evil. Luke Lyman explains how and why Peter Thiel, one of the richest and most influential men in the world, has become obsessed with the idea of the Antichrist.

    Earlier this month, protesters actually dressed as demons gathered on the steps of the Embarcadero building in San Francisco to protest a series of lectures given by Thiel on the subject of the Antichrist. He will comment on “theology, history, literature, and politics of the Antichrist… drawing on René Girard, Francis Bacon, Jonathan Swift, Carl Schmitt and John Henry Newman,” says the advertisement for the lectures.

    But the remedy for America’s spiritual decline isn’t more discussion or engagement online. Screwtape ends his letter to his nephew like this: “Ensure that the patient continues to believe that the problem is ‘out there’ in the ‘broken system’ rather than recognizing there is a problem with himself.”

    The right answer, is to actually practice, not just preach, Christianity. Charlie Kirk, a devout young man, understood this well. The Trump administration should encourage not a fiery MAGA response but a return to church.