The Social World

Tag: Immigration

  • Meet the e-girls selling European decline to America

    Meet the e-girls selling European decline to America

    Earlier this year, a striking 28-year-old woman, dressed head to toe in a vivid shade of crimson, stepped up to the podium at a conference in Hungary. “Ladies and gentlemen: hello Budapest. I’m so thrilled to be here again,” she began, adjusting the twin microphones and gently swiping a strand of long blonde hair from her forehead. “As some of you might remember, last year I gave here a speech as well, about the ‘great replacement,’” she continued, confidently glancing around the assembled audience. “I wanted the whole world to know that the ‘great replacement theory’ was, in fact, not a theory, but reality. White people are becoming a minority in their own homelands at an exceptionally fast rate.”

    Everything about this woman – her honeyed tresses, the impeccably tailored suit, the precisely arched brows accentuating a dewy, youthful glow and, of course, the words she was actually saying – might have situated her squarely within the heart of the MAGA playbook. Everything, that is, except the lilting accent and occasional grammatical flub betraying her European origins.

    Far from being the latest addition to Donald Trump’s inner circle, Eva Vlaardingerbroek – who was speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference, known as CPAC – is a Dutch political commentator who has harnessed social media to broadcast her warnings about the “astronomical cost of mass migration” and the “demise of democracy.”

    She has fashioned herself into a warrior against what she sees as the scourge of the left – particularly across her home continent – and in doing so, she has cultivated celebrity status and more than 900,000 followers on Instagram. She has also emerged as something of a figurehead of a new cohort of young, digitally native women denouncing, or at least criticizing, their homelands and exalting the US as a beacon of hope in a world they believe to be broken.

    Their rise is more than cultural curiosity. It may well signal a subtle but real shift in the center of gravity within American conservatism itself. A political movement once dominated by homegrown men – self-styled patriots steeped in the mythology of the heartland – is evolving to become a stage for young women who arrive not from red-state strongholds, but from overseas.

    These telegenic expat firebrands, fluent in the art of digital influence and polished by the cosmopolitan milieus some of them now shun, have begun to redefine the contours of the right. In their eyes, American conservatism – underpinned by an awesome bureaucracy and a canonical constitution – is a refuge: a battlement against the forces they believe have overtaken their own homes.

    Each woman who belongs to this new class of conservative Americophiles shares a fundamental admiration for the principles and values upon which this country is built – or at least their interpretation of those principles and values. Each also has her own reason for doing so, her own story of what brought her here.

    Jade Warwick, a 28-year-old woman who grew up in Wales, in the United Kingdom, started modeling when she was a teenager – a career that took her to Los Angeles, where she fell in love with the US. Today she lives in Washington, DC and has a more than 300,000-strong – and rapidly growing – Instagram following, to whom she broadcasts her thoughts on immigration and her admiration for the First and Second Amendments of the US Constitution. Her content is delivered with a balanced blend of snark, sarcasm, humor and provocation – a mix that makes it exquisitely shareable.

    In late September, Warwick, a self-described “culture warrior” who counts Florida Representative Anna Paulina Luna among her friends, posted a picture of herself on Instagram, from her American citizenship ceremony. “I am proud to be an American, in the home of the brave,” she wrote in the comments. A month later, at a Halloween party, she appeared dressed as Kristi Noem, replete with ICE baseball cap. She chose the outfit, she wrote in a post accompanying a photograph, because “it upsets the libtards,” who she says were dressing up as the assassinated Charlie Kirk.

    When I ask Warwick what she loves about America, she doesn’t hesitate. “Americans are courageous because they are descended from fearless immigrants who worked hard for their families. They were disappointed with their governments [and they were] yearning for freedom,” she says. “They had the guts to leave at a time when you couldn’t just get on a flight. These people are built differently.”

    But her favorite thing about America “is the American spirit.” And she also really admires the Second Amendment – the right to keep and bear arms – and Americans’ determination to defend it. “They don’t want the government to become so powerful that they can’t defend themselves. That’s incredible,” she says. “And as a Brit who did not grow up with guns whatsoever, I love that.”

    In Europe there’s a lot that needs to be fixed, Warwick says. “Treading water is as good as drowning,” she says. “And in the UK we have been complacent and lived in the past. At some point you have to speak up and take action.” Specifically what she means is that Europe needs to take a tougher stance against illegal immigrants.

    “I’m saying, let’s be proud of where we came from and let’s protect our homeland, protect our women and protect our children. I don’t want Middle Eastern and North African people coming over and – I’m sorry – raping and murdering,” she says. “That’s unacceptable. Men used to go to war over that. And now we sit by and allow the police to protect them and allow the governments to pardon them [the immigrants].” Or said differently, yes, Warwick wants to “make Britain great again.”

    Vlaardingerbroek – who in October posted a picture on Instagram of her and her family in front of the White House, captioned “so glad to be back in the land of the free and home of the brave with my boys” – did not respond to my requests to speak to her. Neither did Naomi Seibt, a 25-year-old German right-wing activist who recently applied for political asylum in the US, citing fears for her safety in her home country.

    Seibt, who has more than 460,000 followers on Twitter and has been dubbed the “Anti-Greta” on climate discourse (perhaps for her slight resemblance to the Swedish eco-warrior), is a supporter of the Alternative for Germany party – the AfD – which German authorities have labeled extremist. In October, she met with Luna, the Republican Representative and Warwick’s friend. Luna posted a picture of her and Seibt on her Twitter account. In the caption she wrote that she is “personally assisting” Seibt’s asylum application. “The very same German government that claims to fight Nazism,” she wrote, “is acting like the secret police.” In one of her own Twitter posts, meanwhile, Seibt is seen at what looks to be a Trump rally. Her caption: “I came all the way from Germany and get to witness American patriotism in action. Supporters of Donald Trump, you give me hope for western civilization. Thank you.”

    However successful each of these individual young women is in her pursuit of justice, liberty or perhaps personal fame and recognition, it’s undeniable that they, as a group, have tapped in to something. Their followings are growing by the day. They’re getting through and resonating. What their ascendance ultimately signals is perhaps still unclear. Are they a fleeting social-media phenomenon? Or are they early ambassadors of a deeper realignment?

    When I ask Warwick whether she thinks she’s starting a movement, she hesitates for a few seconds. Then she admits: “Weirdly, I do think I am.” Friends have called her, she says, and told her she should go into government. She can, she says, imagine running for Senate. “There are a lot of people backing me [and] they want to see me save the West. I’m one person so I don’t know how I’m gonna be doing that,” she says. “But teaming up with other aligned women? I do think that would be a very smart idea.”

  • The strange death of England

    The strange death of England

    Whatever happened to Britain, or the UK, or England, or whatever they’re calling it? We can’t even agree on what it’s called. But what happened to England, the England that, if you’re over 50, you grew up learning about, the England that controlled the world, the England that ran the largest empire in human history at the end of World War One? 

    Britain, which is an island in a pretty inhospitable climate, controlled literally a quarter of the Earth’s surface – and not controlled in the way the United States controls the rest of the world with an implied threat or with economic ties through trade, but with administrators and people sitting at desks with eyeshades, counting things. Way more than Rome, way more than the Mongols, way more than anybody, ever, or maybe in the future, ever. 

    Britain was the most powerful country in the history of the world. And then 25 years later, it was this kind of sad, soggy welfare state, which is, to some extent, what it still is, except maybe even a little bit worse. What happened? 

    There are a couple of levels on which to think about this. First is just geopolitical, and I guess they spent a lot of money in these wars and the ruling class, half the class at Eton in 1910 was killed in the trenches. You can think of a lot of different ways to explain what happened to Britain. The fact remains, however, the British won the two biggest wars in human history. They won and yet they’re still greatly diminished and to some extent humiliated. What is that? 

    So again, the first explanation can be described in economic terms. The United States took over. The British Empire just moved west to its child, the US. They just transferred the power and a lot of the gold to this new country, which had its systems and some of its customs. 

    But there’s something deeper. If that were the whole story, then Britain would still be recognizably Britain. The English people would still be recognizably English. They would just be not in charge anymore. They would have less money and less power. But the country would be, by any conventional measurement, thriving, just not running the Bahamas and Hong Kong and Pakistan. 

    But that’s not what’s happened. After winning the two biggest wars in human history, Britain has shrunken not just physically, but in some way that’s hard to describe. Its culture has changed, some might say has been destroyed, and it’s become something completely different. And what is that? And why does it matter what it is? 

    Well, it matters because what’s happened to Britain, to England, is also happening to many countries in the West, certainly its heirs, the Anglosphere: Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Canada, Ireland. It’s happening to those countries. It’s also happening to the rest of western Europe all at the same time. 

    A bunch of different profound, never seen before phenomena are happening to all of those countries, and again, including ours here in the United States. So it’s worth understanding what has happened to Britain. So maybe the best image that describes it is the one that we’re about to show you.

    In case there’s no context in the tape, what you’re watching is a woman being arrested outside an abortion clinic. And keep in mind, as you watch this, she’s not being arrested for throwing a firebomb, a petrol bomb, through the window of this abortion clinic in the UK, or even for obstructing access to this abortion clinic. No – she is being arrested and taken to jail for praying outside the abortion clinic.

    Watch this. 

    So what is that? It’s hard to argue that if your government is arresting people for praying that you’re watching a political phenomenon. Because, of course, praying is not simply a non-violent act. It’s not even a physical act. It can’t possibly, at least in secular terms, affect outcomes or harm anyone. Praying for people can never be a crime. But it is a crime in Great Britain, literally a crime. And the woman you saw is not the only person who’s been arrested for doing it. So clearly we’re watching a spiritual phenomenon here. There’s sort of no arguing it once you see things like that. 

    But what is that spiritual phenomenon and what are its effects on the people of this country? Before we go further, we should just say that if you visit the “Yookay” as it’s now called, or London, its capital and completely dominant city, the first thing you’ll notice is it’s actually pretty nice. The nice parts of London are as nice or maybe even nicer than any city in the United States. Certainly nicer than any city in Canada or Australia. It’s a great city, filled with lots of happy people. 

    But broadly speaking, this country has changed dramatically, and it’s changed in ways that are recognizable. Here’s what you recognize. The people of Great Britain are going through a series of crises, and they’re all internal. Drug use, alcohol use. Their appearance has changed. People are no longer as well kept, the streets, the landscape is not tidy anymore. It’s got lots of litter and graffiti in some places. To technocrats, these are not meaningful measures of anything. Who cares if you’ve got graffiti? Does that affect GDP? Well, maybe. Maybe not, but it’s definitely a reflection of how people feel about themselves. 

    People with self-respect do not tolerate public displays of disorder or filth or graffiti or litter because they care about themselves and their family and they understand intuitively, as every human being does, that once you allow chaos and filth in your immediate environment, you are diminished. So you just don’t allow that. No healthy society does. 

    But all through the West, these are not just features, they’re defining features. All western cities are filled with litter and graffiti, and people who look like they didn’t bother to get dressed this morning, but are instead wearing their pajamas in Walmart. It’s not just in your town, it’s everywhere in what we refer to as the West. 

    The point that underlies all of this is a really obvious one, that too few people say. This is the behavior of a defeated people. This is what it looks like when you lose. This is what it looks like when you’re on your way out to be replaced by somebody else. This is what it looks like to be an American Indian. 

    Now, one thing nobody in the United States ever says about the American Indians, except in a kind of pro-forma white guilt way, is these weren’t just impressive people – and no, they didn’t write the Constitution before we did – these were some of the most impressive people, most self-reliant, most dignified. Read any account of early American settlers, people who were pushing west, who came into contact with Indians and yes, were often scalped and forced to eat their own genitals and roasted over open fires. I mean, these were cruel people. But even the people who were in danger of being murdered by them respected them. Because the Indigenous Americans had a great deal of self-respect. They had what we call dignity. And now, hundreds of years later, the opposite is true. The poorest people in the United States are American Indians. Why? Because the federal government hasn’t given them enough. The federal government is completely in charge of the indigenous economy in the United States, and has been for over a hundred years, and it hasn’t worked. American Indians are still the poorest. 

    Why? Because the Iroquois and the Navajo weren’t impressive? No, they were the most impressive. Again, read the account of anyone who dealt with them. Even people who were dodging their arrows thought they were amazing people, because they were. And now they are by many measures, the saddest people in the United States. Why is that? Some inherent genetic predisposition to patheticness? They couldn’t deal with modernity? Well, they probably could. They were defeated. They were defeated. And in some deep, the deepest way, they wound up destroying themselves, and it’s not unique to them. That’s the point.

    And just to be completely clear, all of this is observed with a great deal of sympathy, not scorn. No one’s mocking the American Indians. Everyone should feel bad about it. For real. Again, not in a silly white girl guilty way, but in a real way. These are amazing people. Greatly diminished. And the reason it’s worth remembering is the same thing is happening to the West.

    And it makes you realize, especially if you travel a lot, that the problem is not necessarily the immigrants. The problem is what mass migration does to the people who already live there. They’re the victims of it in a way that, again, is hard to measure and sometimes hard to notice, but totally real. 

    So you walk through this city, London, and it’s been completely transformed by immigration. Completely. And the numbers are really, really clear. One hundred years ago it was 100 percent European white. Now it’s less than 40 percent. OK, that’s massive, unprecedented demographic change. The immigrant areas are absolutely poorer than the traditionally white English areas. There’s just no question about it. But wealth as measured by the government is not the only measurement. Actually, and this is true in the United States, too, lots of immigrants who have a lot less money than the native population seem a lot more balanced and happy, both because this is a huge upgrade for them just in terms of annual income and standard of living. But it’s more than that. They’re not defeated. They don’t hate themselves. 

    And if you have traditional nationalist opinions in the United States, I can confirm this personally, you’re never going to be stopped on the street and screamed at by some Guatemalan who’s like, you are racist for having your views on immigration. No, they’ll probably agree with you. The only people who ever get mad at you are the people who already hate themselves, and it’s always, famously, some private equity wife or somebody who should be happy about how things are going because they’re in the portion of the population that’s benefiting from it. But they’re not happy. They’re angry.

    What is that? That exact same thing is going on in this country. Exact. And it’s part of a very recognizable syndrome, and it’s the most destructive of all. History is just filled with examples of people who get invaded and clubbed to death and have their women stolen from them, and they’re fine. They’re fine. It’s the people who feel defeated inside who no longer exist. And that is happening to the West. And it’s measurable. 

    What other society hates its own national symbols? It’s only happening in the West, only in Great Britain. This is coming to be true in the United States. It’s already true in Canada and Australia. What other country finds it embarrassing to fly their national flag? What are you saying if that embarrasses you? You don’t hate the flag. You hate yourself. 

    And it’s obvious because people who have dignity, self-respect, who believe in their own civilization want to continue it. How do you do that? By talking about it a lot? No. By continuing it through reproduction. No one is preventing the West from reproducing. And people who come up with these conspiracy theories, like, oh, they’re doing it. No, we’re doing it to ourselves. What else is abortion? It’s not empowering for women. Of course not. That’s absurd. Anyone who believes that is an idiot. Abortion is the way to stop people from reproducing. So is birth control, by the way, of course. So is convincing people that their dumb job is more important than having kids. It’s not. It never will be. Any person who can get clarity for a second will recognize that. It’s only about stopping you from having more of you. 

    And is there anything that’s a clearer representation of how you feel about yourself than how you feel about having kids? And by the way, it’s not just because these people are selfish and they want to go on vacation and don’t want to pay for children, or they’re worried about how much it might cost. Notice that none of these impoverished immigrants living on Snap and housing subsidies, they don’t seem worried about it at all because they know it’ll be fine. Most of the time it will be fine. They’re having kids when much more affluent natives are not, because they believe in themselves and their culture, their civilization. They’d like to see it continue. It’s the most basic of all human desires. 

    So here in Great Britain, which has about a 30 percent abortion rate, 30 percent of all conceived children are killed. Who’s doing that? It’s not the immigrants because they don’t hate themselves. They’re not defeated. They’re ascendant. And so they can see the future. They know that they may not live to experience it, but they’re still fully human. And they know you plant the tree not because you can bask in its shade, but because your grandchildren will. This is the most obvious of all human instincts and the most basic. 

    But the native population in Britain is not debating abortion because it’s not even a debate here. Everyone agrees it’s just an affirmative good, of course, to eliminate your own people. Absolutely. But again, no one’s making them do this. They’ve decided to do it themselves. But now their most enthusiastic campaign is for state sponsored suicide. They’ve already done this in Canada. It’ll come to the United States. What is that? That’s an entire people saying we should exit the stage. Our time is done. It’s over. Let’s go. Someone else will take our place. Not the first time that’s ever happened.

    This is what defeated people do. This is what happens when you break people inside. And maybe it’ll just reach its terminus. Maybe there’s no way to stop it.

    So in Great Britain, if you were to say, wait, what the hell is this? This looks nothing like the country I grew up in – guess who’s going to arrest you? Your fellow Britons. The ones whose great-grandparents lived here. The whites. They’re the ones enforcing this. They’re the ones determined to eliminate themselves. 

  • Trump blames Biden for shooting of National Guardsmen

    Trump blames Biden for shooting of National Guardsmen

    In response to the attack on Thanksgiving eve by a suspected Afghan national upon two West Virginia National Guardsmen, President Trump demanded a renewed effort to expel illegal immigrants. During a brief and uncompromising address from West Palm Beach that bore the rhetorical fingerprints of White House advisor Stephen Miller, Trump ripped into illegal immigration and former president Joe Biden.

    The President deemed the influx of refugees from Afghanistan and elsewhere the “single greatest national-security threats” facing America. Biden was a “disastrous president.” Trump reserved special scorn for his detractors who he said purport to protect constitutional liberties but are leaving America exposed to rampant criminality. One big problem for Trump, however, is that although the suspected shooter was “mass paroled” into the country and immigrated here in 2021, he was apparently approved for asylum in April 2025 – by the Trump administration.

    It was Biden, Trump implied, who, more than anyone else, was culpable for the descent of American cities into criminality. To listen to Trump it might have seemed as though Biden had flown in Afghans expressly for the purpose of targeting innocent Americans. Indeed, Trump averred that not only Afghans but also Somalis are pillaging America. He declared, “We must now reexamine every single alien who has entered our country from Afghanistan under Biden, and we must take all necessary measures to ensure the removal of any alien from any country who does not belong here, or add benefit to our country.” Trump has already called for the termination of special status for Somalis living in Minnesota, a stance that he is likely to double down on.

    Throughout his speech, Trump’s rhetoric was sweeping. But Trump’s actual response – an additional 500 National Guardsmen to be deployed to the nation’s capital – was not. Trump, for example, could have declared that he intends to terminate Washington’s Home Rule and return to the days of yore when the federal government ran the district. Perhaps he envisions such a prospect.

    Trump’s critics are arguing that the same measures he took to impose law and order are creating the very havoc he decries. New Yorker writer Jane Mayer stated that the Guardsmen should “never have been” in Washington in the first place. The White House responded by calling her a “disgusting ghoul.” But others are voicing their disquiet with the stationing of federal troops in Washington as well.

    Their cautions will surely be portrayed by Trump and his advisers as an exercise in pusillanimity. The shooting took place near Farragut Square. In the center of the square is a prominent statue dedicated to the legendary Admiral David Farragut. Inscribed on the plinth of the statue is his credo, “Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!” Will Trump follow suit?

  • Britain’s reverse imperialism

    Britain’s reverse imperialism

    Britain’s post colonial reckoning can be summed up in a single sentence delivered last June at the Glastonbury music festival when rapper duo Bob Vylan shouted “You want your country back? You’re not getting it back!” to an overwhelmingly white, middle-class audience roaring its approval. The message was unmistakable: Britain has been colonized – and its dominant culture not only accepts, but celebrates, it.

    Britain’s transformation has been driven not by invasion, but by invitation. The country’s population, political culture and national cohesion has been radically reshaped by immigration – one wave in the 1950s, driven by post-World War Two labor shortages, and another following Brexit. They brought an estimated 10-15 million immigrants, primarily from Africa and South Asia.

    And the more recent surge of what the British euphemistically call “irregular migration,” that is in fact illegal immigration, has only deepened the challenges.

    But the immigration debate is no longer simply about “uncontrolled” migration. The deeper threat lies in what legal immigration from certain regions has produced: reverse imperialism.

    After World War Two, Western colonial empires were dismantled, and their histories of economic exploitation, cultural dominance and political control were broadly condemned. It was hoped that the post-colonial world would look very different. But history is ironic. The racial superiority of the British raj has been replaced by the moral and religious supremacism of its Muslim population.

    The flow of migrants today, particularly from former colonies to their former colonizers, has initiated not a new chapter in diversity, but a quiet conquest by demographic, cultural and political means while Britain’s elites, paralyzed by guilt and progressive dogma, have permitted the erosion of core values in the name of multiculturalism.

    Legal immigration during both postwar periods has significantly increased the UK’s Muslim population – from negligible levels in 1950 to almost seven percent of the population today. But numbers alone don’t tell the whole story. In urban centers like Bradford and Tower Hamlets, their numbers are concentrated, climbing to over 35-40 percent in some neighborhoods.

    These are not merely demographic shifts but cultural. Increased levels of welfare dependency and low levels of female workforce participation in these enclaves – often influenced by cultural and religious values – have raised concerns about an extraction of state resources without corresponding integration. To some critics, this dynamic resembles a kind of “reverse imperialism.”

    Muslim concentration in cities also translates into political power – from “sharia councils” as well as power reshaping local elections, influencing national policy and asserting itself most clearly within the Labour party.

    Let us clarify: Not all Muslims are Islamists. But those who are do not merely reject integration; they actively seek the transformation of their host society. Dawah (religious outreach) funded by zakat (charity), as well as political organizations are used to embed Islamist ideals within public institutions – from schools to local governments and even Parliament itself. This is reverse imperialism – not by armies, but by slow, deliberate cultural and institutional conquest.

    Britain’s robust protections for freedom of speech and religion have been turned into shields for anti-assimilationist movements. Public displays of Islamic religiosity – mass prayers staged in Whitehall and along Tower Bridge, for instance – are not mere cultural expressions. They are demonstrations of societal power.

    Similarly, protests purportedly against the war in Gaza increasingly reveal themselves as anti-Israel, even anti-Semitic. The normalized antisemitism in parts of the Islamic world has quietly embedded itself in Britain’s urban centers and beyond. Consider the British-Palestinian NHS doctor in bucolic Gloucestershire, genuinely stunned to be arrested in October 2025 for hate speech and pro-Hamas posts – as if her deeply held belief in Islamist moral superiority should have granted her immunity. Its presence is most visible in double standards: pro-Palestinian marches in London receive full police protection, while pro-Israel rallies often proceed with minimal security – or none at all.

    And while violence is the most visible symptom, the intellectual and political conquest is quieter but no less potent. Even the once-iconic Oxford Union has become a stage for extremist voices. Far from challenging Islamist ideology, elite British institutions are increasingly complicit in legitimizing it.

    Underlying this societal vulnerability are two postwar developments that have hollowed out British resilience.

    First, Britain has become a post-Christian society. In 1950, 85 percent identified as Christian. In 2025, that number has collapsed to 46 percent. Second, pacifism has replaced patriotism. British youth, increasingly disconnected from national history or pride, express little willingness to defend their country. An Ipsos poll in April 2025 reported that 48 percent said they would not fight for Britain “under any circumstance.” A society that no longer believes in itself is easy to replace.

    Britain’s leaders have offered not resistance, but accommodation – and in doing so, they’ve allowed the institutions of state and society to be gradually reshaped in the image of their most assertive minority factions. These factors are not, as yet, visible in America.

    Many Americans assume that Britain’s postcolonial dilemmas don’t apply here. After all, the US never had colonies in the same sense. Our national reckoning has focused on slavery and civil rights – not empire. But this is a dangerous misconception.

    The United States has long defined itself not by “blood”, but by allegiance to a common set of civic values. But Arthur Schlesinger’s The Disuniting of America, emphasized that unity depended on assimilation – on the willingness to become Americans.

    Today, that process is under threat. Consider Dearborn, Michigan, where the Muslim mayor unapologetically declared a Christian pastor “unwelcome” after he objected to renaming a road after a known Hamas supporter. This is not an isolated event but reflects a broader trend: the emergence of parallel societies with different values and civic loyalties.

    America’s constitutional protections – especially of religion and speech – may ironically be accelerating this process. Foreign flags now fly at US protests. Demonstrators chant for causes antithetical to the American creed. These aren’t just calls for global solidarity – they signal a growing rejection of national unity itself.

    Britain is a cautionary tale, not just about immigration policy, but about “cultural surrender.” The postcolonial legacy has produced fragmentation, the rise of groups with a supremacist agenda resisting integration and a populist backlash. But even populism may come too late if a nation’s sense of self has already withered.

    Trump understands this. His administration’s efforts to redefine immigration, restore assimilation and reassert national identity mark a sharp contrast with Britain’s passivity.

    But a course correction requires more than political leadership. It requires that Americans confront what the British have already endured: that legal immigration absent assimilation can be a mechanism not of enrichment but of replacement, even subjugation.

    Britain’s reversal of empire and identity is well underway. It’s time we learned from those who failed to prevent it.

  • Enoch Powell understated Britain’s problems

    Enoch Powell understated Britain’s problems

    The great John O’Sullivan has a story about Enoch Powell which he keeps promising to put into print. Since he still hasn’t done so, I will risk repeating it here. It occurred during a conversation some years after the Rivers of Blood speech. A group of conservatives were talking, and Powell was among them. At some point one of those present referred to the 1968 speech and asked Powell: “Why did you do it?”

    Powell’s reply started something like this: “When the lark sings in the morning they do not say – ‘Oh lark why dost thou sing?’ When the nightingale gives forth her song…” and so on. After Powell had gone through an array of the bird kingdom metaphors, he came to his clincher: “And so it was with me that day in Birmingham.”

    I was thinking about Birmingham, Britain’s second-biggest city, and Powell this week for a number of reasons. Firstly, because he was the MP for nearby Wolverhampton; secondly, because it is where he gave his famous speech; and finally because it is where the latest outbreak of sectarian politicking in England has occurred.

    The bad news on immigration and integration in this country floods in so fast these days that it is hard to keep up with. But even in the mêlée that is modern Britain, the news that Israeli football fans have been told not to go to Birmingham because they will not be safe there is striking.

    Nowadays the area has local politicians of a lesser intellectual caliber than Powell. Ayoub Khan was last year elected as the MP for Birmingham Perry Barr. Khan is one of a number of MPs voted in at the last election solely because of their appeal to the sectarian Muslim vote and specifically its obsession with Israel and Gaza. So of course Khan applauded the idea of Israeli football fans being kept out of the city he represents. Indeed he issued a statement “welcoming” the news and thanking the police for listening to “our community’s concerns”. And what “community” might that be?

    Elsewhere, there has been some outrage at the ban on Maccabi Tel Aviv fans turning up in Birmingham. Even Prime Minister Keir Starmer has expressed concern at the idea that a British city should be deemed literally unsafe for visible Jews to be in. But I can’t see why he or any other MP should be surprised. Birmingham is one of those places where “multiculturalism’ is approaching its natural endpoint.

    Conservative MP Robert Jenrick was recently raked over the media coals for comments he made about the lack of white faces in Birmingham. As has been the British way for almost 60 years now, opportunistic MPs and others rallied around, to attack not the vast demographic change that has got us here but the person who committed the crime of noticing. Because the only thing anyone is meant to say when going to a city like Birmingham today is how wonderfully diverse it is.

    Yet many of us do not think this is a blessing, and cannot help noticing that parts of the city are not diverse at all. They are simply ethnically homogenous in a different way – in the same manner as it would be if a city the size of Birmingham had moved to Mirpur in the past few decades, rather than the other way around.

    Today, Birmingham is one of a number of British cities in which people who identify on the census as “white British” are in a minority. To which we are again meant to say only “Hooray – our country was built on diversity.” That is the sort of mantra still spilling out of the empty heads of people like the leader of the Green party, Zack Polanski. This week Polanski spewed this far-past-its-sell-by-date cliché in a debate with the admirable Conservative MP Katie Lam. A visibly disdainful Robert Peston joined Polanski in pouring scorn on Lam’s point that our country wasn’t actually built on diversity. Of course it is, was Polanski and Peston’s message, and surely only a racist, backwards Powellite would dare to claim otherwise.

    This, for the time being, remains where the debate is. Which is roughly where it was in 1968: don’t say what you see with your eyes or we will tell you that your eyes are racist and lying.

    The problem is that this argument is even harder to defend in 2025 than in any previous year, as the results of legal and illegal migration are felt across the country. In the past I have summarized the “diversity is our greatest strength” argument as going something like this: the immigration isn’t happening; it is happening but it is good for you; it may not be good for you but you deserve it; it’s happened and there’s nothing you can do about it.

    If you want to find one of the principal causes of the enervation of British society, it can be found there. And yet what people would put up with a process like this forever? And what are we going to do about it?

    To understand just how bad things are, it is worth going back to 1968. Pretend that Powell used his speech not to say what he said, but to say what is now true. Pretend for a moment that he had used his speech to say that within the lifespan of many of his constituents, white British people would be a minority in the whole of Birmingham. Pretend he had predicted that by the 2020s, significant numbers of Birmingham voters would vote in a Pakistani-born Muslim on specifically sectarian, racial, religious lines. And pretend he had predicted that as a result of this change, visibly Jewish people would be barred from attending a soccer match because the local Muslim community would not tolerate it. If Powell had said even a portion of this, he would have been derided even more than he was. In fact he would most likely have been deemed certifiable.

    The question today is not why the lark sang, nor why his song was ignored. The question is why the facts now prove that he understated our current problems so much.

  • 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.

  • Why is Stephen Miller so divisive?

    Why is Stephen Miller so divisive?

    One of the most striking things about Trump 2: The Trumpening is how few characters are still on board from the Donald’s first term. Other than the President himself, it’s almost a completely different cast. Even the First Lady only rarely appears, as though she’s contractually obliged as a guest star for the occasional episode.

    But there’s one very important exception: White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller. And while Trump Derangement Syndrome afflicts millions of Americans, Miller Derangement Syndrome is, as they used to say during Covid, a comorbidity.

    MDS may have reached its peak earlier this month when Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez referred to Miller as a “clown.” “I’ve never seen that guy in real life,” she said in an intimate Instagram Live video for her followers, “but he looks like he’s like 4’10”. And he looks like he is angry about the fact that he’s 4’10”. And he looks like he is so mad that he is 4’10” that he has taken that anger out on any other population possible.”

    The only problem with the insult is that Miller is, in fact, 5’10”, the average height for an American man. Appearing with Laura Ingraham on Fox News that week, Miller called AOC a “walking nightmare” whose eyes and brain “don’t work.” AOC had to go back on to Instagram Live to say she didn’t believe in “body-shaming.” “I want to express my love for the short king community,” she said. “I am talking about how big or small someone is on the inside.”

    ‘We are the storm,’ Miller said during Kirk’s memorial – and that storm is playing out as we watch

    Whatever his size, it’s no stretch to say that, other than Trump himself, Miller is the most important figure steering American politics today. You can trace many of the administration’s key priorities – a closed border, hardline illegal immigration enforcement, an unbending support for Israel and the utter dismantling and humiliation of the Obama-era woke social order – to Miller and his ideas. He’s divisive, dogged and nearly omnipresent. Appearing in October on the final episode of the WTF podcast with Marc Maron, which late in its existence turned into a lodestar for the permanently traumatized liberal establishment, Barack Obama excoriated American institutions for “bending the knee” to Miller’s policies. “We’re not going to be bullied into saying that we can only hire people or promote people based on some criteria that’s been cooked up by Steve Miller,” he said. This, coming from a man who Miller referred to as “one of the worst presidents, if not the worst president, in US history,” felt extremely personal.

    But what exactly is this ideology that has Democrats shrieking in terror? Miller doesn’t like illegal immigration or DEI policies in the workplace or academia, but these days, that places him smack in the American mainstream. He’s certainly not a “white nationalist,” as many of his detractors claim: observant Jews tend to shy away from white nationalism as a rule.

    Miller grew up well-to-do in Santa Monica, California. His parents were conservatives, but they lived in one of the most liberal enclaves in America, which presented the illusion to him that he was a permanently oppressed underdog. As a high-school student, Miller called in to the conservative Larry Elder Show and brought Elder and conservative writer David Horowitz to speak at his school. Miller railed against fellow students and speakers who spoke Spanish and waged a successful campaign to get his school to institute a daily recital of the pledge of allegiance.

    At Duke University, Miller wrote a column for the conservative newspaper called “Miller Time” and introduced himself to his fellow students by saying “I’m from Santa Monica, California – and I like guns.” In many ways, he resembles the late Charlie Kirk, though he lacks Kirk’s easygoing charm and charisma. Both were white millennial men who came of age in Obama’s America, were shocked by the absence of patriotism, religion, and traditional values and brought about a change in that culture by sheer force of will.

    Miller’s speech at Charlie Kirk’s memorial was one of the most divisive (to liberals) and welcome (to conservatives) pieces of rhetoric in recent memory. “To our enemies,” he said, “you have nothing to give, you have nothing to offer, you have nothing to share but bitterness. We have beauty, we have light, we have goodness, we have determination, we have vision, we have strength. We built the world that we inhabit now.” It was the rhetoric of an angry man grieving the loss of his friend, and of someone who was determined to press forward.

    Speaking on Kirk’s podcast with guest host and Vice-President J.D. Vance the week after Kirk’s assassination, Miller said he was going to use all his power to dismantle nongovernmental organizations that he says created the climate that led to Kirk’s murder. “The organized doxxing campaigns, the organized riots, the organized street violence, the organized campaigns of dehumanization, vilification, posting people’s addresses, combining that with messaging that is designed to trigger [or] incite violence and the actual organized cells that carry out and facilitate the violence,” Miller explained. “It is a vast domestic terror.”

    He’s certainly not wrong about that. The fact is that every single one of Miller’s policy priorities have come to fruition since January. From media to academia to entertainment, the liberal establishment is on the defensive, with a diminishing toolset with which to battle Miller’s tactics. The ongoing street fights over ICE, the attempts to root out antifa, even the rhetoric about restoring religion to American life, are thoroughly Miller’s doing, and the administration isn’t backing down. “We are the storm,” Miller said during Kirk’s memorial – and that storm is playing out as we watch. This is Trump’s America, and the Short King’s world. Good luck to anyone who tries to get in his way.

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

  • Legal immigration is a nightmare

    Legal immigration is a nightmare

    A personal note as October 15, 2025, marks an occasion of sorts: when my husband’s and my Portuguese residency permits expire. Isn’t that a bit sloppy, you might ask, allowing your permission to remain in a country where you live to lapse? On one party’s part, very sloppy, but not ours.

    At least a dozen people must have exclaimed to me: “Oh, I’ve thought about moving to Portugal!” After emigrating from London in 2023, I’m not issuing a warning, exactly. We don’t regret the move. Landscape gorgeous, food great, people nice, wine cheap. But this country is notoriously bureaucratic, and the paperwork side of playing Mother, May I? with Portuguese immigration was and remains a nightmare. More generally, there seems to be a perversely inverse relationship between the ease with which foreigners can gatecrash western countries by breaking the law and the diabolical complexity, expense, effort and time required to immigrate to these same countries by following the rules.

    Let’s revisit an era subject to very little nostalgia on my end. Our original visa application required: a Portuguese bank account with at least €18,000. A Número de Identificação Fiscal, or NIF. Travel health insurance and private in-country health insurance (along with Medicare, Britain’s National Health Service and emergency evacuation insurance for a lit fest at sea, that year I was covered by five health insurance entities simultaneously; my, didn’t I feel safe). A criminal records check from London’s Metropolitan Police (lo, a summons for running a light on my bicycle in the city at 3 a.m. – with no traffic in sight – is actually lodged in my UK criminal record. That’ll teach me). Formal permission for a Portuguese criminal records check. Certified copies of both the deed and the land registry certificate for our new house outside Lisbon (of that agonizing purchase another time). Copies of the last three months’ statements of all our bank accounts in the UK, US and Portugal. Notarized copies of our passports. Proof of our permanent leave to remain in the UK. Copies of our London council tax bills going back several years, and two passport photographs each.

    The process required two in-person appointments, the first in London with an overwhelmed embassy; pouncing on an available slot online demanded the same vigilance and uncanny good luck currently required to get a GP appointment in Britain. Its date delivered from on high with no warning, the Portuguese appointment required a larcenous, jam-packed round trip from New York to Lisbon during tourist season. Residency finally approved, the attempted delivery of our permits failed because we were abroad, so we had to grant our immigration lawyer power of attorney, then pay her to retrieve and FedEx the cards. Naturally, the legal fees for dotting every I throughout this rigmarole were substantial.

    Legal immigration is a colossal headache for the very people the West should be welcoming

    But! Residency must be renewed after two years (which fly by) and again three years after that; only thereafter can one apply for permanent settlement. But Portugal has made itself too popular for its own good, and last I read it had either 400,000 or 900,000 unaddressed immigration cases – how many hundreds of thousands hardly matters, given that the country’s entire population is only 11 million.

    Originally expiring in July, our residency was extended to mid-October by a sweep of Portugal’s bureaucratic wand. Yet the rest of the EU won’t necessarily recognize this edict, of which we’ve no documentary evidence. We’re US passport holders, who like Britons may not spend more than 90 days out of 180 as tourists in the EU. Without proof of valid residency, my traveling to countries such as France, where I’ve a hefty fiction readership and translations coming out, risks being banned for five years from a continent where we live and own a house. Afraid to leave Portugal for exactly this reason, an American musician friend of ours had to decline multiple continental gigs for five months while waiting for his renewed residency card to arrive in the post.

    The state of play now? After getting NIFs, SNS numbers ( = NHS) and 12-digit tax portal passwords, we must still acquire “NISS” numbers, apparently for no other reason than to prevent the residency renewal process from snagging; getting social security numbers entails waiting in an office in Lisbon for hours and possibly all day. 

    Scuttlebutt has it that because Portuguese immigration has hired a batch of inexperienced employees to clear the case backlog, many newbies are turning down residency renewal applications even from well-off foreigners with local property due to niggling paperwork infractions.

    That’s hardly in Portugal’s interest, after for years deliberately enticing foreigners with assets to invest here. Imagine, after all this blindingly tedious crap, we could be kicked out after two years.

    Put off yet? And permanent residency will involve amassing the notarized passports, the three months’ worth of all our most recent bank statements, etc – oh, how much bother and boredom lurks in that tiny abbreviation – three more times. Portugal may be worse than some countries, but I bet it’s no worse than the United States, whose green card shenanigans are infamous. Legal immigration is a colossal headache for the very people the West should be welcoming – well-educated, law-abiding, unlikely to become dependent on the state and apt to be net cultural and economic contributors.

    I’ve written repeatedly that we need to make immigration easier for qualified, credentialed and solvent applicants and vastly harder for less desirable immigrants hoping to sneak through the back door. Given the costly, byzantine horror show of the legit route to Portugal, we might have been better off spending £699: the price of an inflatable dinghy.

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

  • Why does Pope Leo think immigration is a pro-life issue?

    Why does Pope Leo think immigration is a pro-life issue?

    On Tuesday evening, the Illinois pope weighed in on Illinois politics. A reporter from the Catholic news outlet EWTN asked Pope Leo XIV about the Archdiocese of Chicago’s decision to award Senator Dick Durbin with a “lifetime achievement award” for his work advocating for immigrants coming to America. “Some people of faith are having a hard time with understanding this because [Durbin] is for legalized abortion,” the reporter said. How should Catholics feel about that?

    “I am not terribly familiar with the particular case,” the Pope conceded, speaking in English. Then he spoke more broadly, and vaguely, about what it means to be “pro-life”. “Someone who says ‘I am against abortion’ but says ‘I am in favor of the death penalty’ is not really pro-life,” he said. “Someone who says ‘I am against abortion, but I am in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States,’ – I don’t know if that’s pro-life.”

    The new Pope is proving he’s consistent. From the Catholic Church’s perspective, being pro-life means standing up for the dignity of human life from conception until natural death. And there are growing examples of undeniably disturbing, gleeful responses to deportations and family separations (one only needs to look at the Department of Homeland Security’s X account). But to characterize support for a strong border and stricter enforcement of immigration law as “[agreeing] with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States” is a caricature of the complex feelings many Americans, particularly Catholic Americans (of which there are many in the Trump administration), have about the issue.

    After the Pope’s comments (though not clearly because of them) Senator Durbin declined to accept the award for his immigration advocacy, according to a letter issued last night by Cardinal Blase Cupich, who named him the recipient of the “Keep Hope Alive” award. Last month, Cupich defended his decision by saying that he was acting in accordance with Church instructions “advising bishops to ‘reach out to and engage in dialogue with Catholic politicians within their jurisdictions… as a means of understanding the nature of their positions and their comprehension of Catholic teaching’.”

    Cupich’s interpretation of “dialogue” misses the very clear point of those instructions given in 2021 by the Vatican’s Prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Luis Ladaria. They ask US bishops to attempt to change the minds of pro-abortion politicians through civil debate, and to dispel the characterization that pro-life teaching is only about abortion and euthanasia, rather than a set of teachings about respecting human dignity throughout a person’s full life.

    The decision to interpret those instructions as a directive to give politicians awards seems bizarre, even deliberately ignorant. But it’s not surprising. Many US bishops and cardinals have been vocal in their criticisms of immigration policy under the Trump administration (more vocal than they were over, say, the last administration’s stance on gender ideology or the church closures during Covid). Some have written letters to Congress to reject bills funding immigration enforcement, or have turned up at ICE hearings to show solidarity with immigrants.

    The tension between Rome and the Trump administration on immigration came to a head during the previous papacy, and it is not going to disappear anytime soon. Pope Francis criticised Trump’s mass deportations, and in a letter to US bishops made a pointed reference to J.D. Vance’s interpretation of ordo amoris – that the “hierarchy of love” gives one a moral obligation to family and community first, and then the rest of the world. It’s an argument not dissimilar from the more secular one for America First. Francis wrote in that letter that the true ordo amoris is something we discover by “meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”

    Francis’s approach to America’s border crisis struck many Americans as distant and hectoring, ignoring the realities of illegal migration – gang violence, murder, drug and sex trafficking – and choosing to remind us of what we learned in Sunday school: that Jesus, Mary and Joseph were immigrants. Pope Leo has tried to avoid that tone so far. “They are very complex issues,” he told the EWTN reporter. “I don’t know if anyone has all the truth on them.” It’s a most honest interpretation on Christianity’s offerings: not to say that Church teaching is muddled on these issues, but that there are no precise instructions from a universal Christian faith on how, for example, to deal with a specifically American border crisis.

    The Pope ended his answer by stating that “the Church teaching on each one of those issues is very clear”. In the eyes of the Catholic Church, all human beings must be treated with dignity and respect, the state should not have the power to end a life, and abortion is a moral evil. Even if immigration is considered the most urgent pro-life issue at the moment, that should have no bearing for American bishops and cardinals on the Church’s unnegotiable stance on the right to life.

  • Was Dr. Roberts the school board’s ‘Magical Negro’?

    Was Dr. Roberts the school board’s ‘Magical Negro’?

    When news broke that the head of Iowa’s largest school district was in ICE custody as an alleged illegal alien, the response from all quarters was disbelief. A school superintendent undergoes intense vetting, and every rung on the career ladder requires background checks. How could such a man possibly have slipped through?

    Anyone hoping the full story might provide a sensible explanation was quickly disappointed. The more you dig, the more absurd it becomes. Although we don’t yet know the full truth about his immigration status, there is already plenty in his record that raises red flags about the biographies he’s offered. Ian Andre Roberts’ life reads less like a CV than a pitch for a Hollywood script in the classic tradition of the charming conman.

    Roberts worked hard at his presentation. He cultivated a flamboyant look – tight suits in loud colors and patterns, topped with his signature cloth flower in the lapel and flashy sneakers. His social media feeds feature professional portraits, sometimes shirtless, sometimes in trousers so tight they left little to the imagination. He spoke in smooth clichés, delivered with a Caribbean accent that lent a whiff of exoticism to Iowan ears.

    And then there is his “life story” – or rather, his competing life stories. All reliable evidence points to Guyana as his birthplace, where he was schooled until the early 1990s. Yet in interviews he sometimes claimed to have been born and raised in Brooklyn, the child of a single mother. That contradicts his own statement that she immigrated only in the 2000s, by which time he was already in his 30s. Even his age shifts – legal records say 1970, while Roberts himself has variously given 1973 or 1978.

    Ironically, the most colorful elements of his tale appear to be true. A retired police commissioner in Guyana confirmed that Roberts graduated from officer training and joined the country’s police force. He was a standout runner in college in the United States and even represented Guyana in the 2000 Sydney Olympics. But once you reach other aspects of his life – degrees, awards, academic achievements – the truth grows hazier.

    On LinkedIn he lists seven universities, but curiously omits mention of any degrees. Elsewhere, he claimed several master’s degrees and a doctorate in education from Morgan State University in 2007. He began styling himself “Dr.” as early as 2012, yet records show he did not actually receive an Ed.D. until 2021, from an online institution widely regarded as a diploma mill. His official Des Moines biography boasted of being named “Principal of the Year” by George Washington University – an award the university says it has never given. And this is only a sampling of the inconsistencies.

    Why did no one bother to check before offering him a $300,000-a-year post? Why did no one even question the contradictions? The honest answer is race and ideology. In the current climate, pressing a man with a Caribbean lilt about where he was born is deemed a “microaggression.” Anyone schooled in the catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion knows better than to question the “lived experience” of someone like Roberts.

    And Roberts, to his credit as a conman, gave them exactly what they craved. He embodied the DEI narrative: a black immigrant who rose from poverty to academic brilliance, to Olympic heights, to leadership in education. In Iowa – one of the whitest states in America – the all-female school board glowed with pride when they announced his appointment in 2023.

    Spike Lee coined the phrase “Magical Negro” to mock Hollywood’s fondness for the saintly black character who redeems white protagonists. Roberts filled that role in real life. He promised not only to raise test scores but to cleanse Des Moines of its original sin of racism. He was their redemption, offered with a winning smile and a résumé that, if partially fictional, was at least inspirational.

    And now, exposed, he is still defended. Rather than express outrage at being deceived, his supporters rally. Some protests bear the fingerprints of unions and activists, but much of the outcry looks organic. People insist he was kind, inspiring, a role model. But the essence of a successful con is that people fall for the charismatic conman and cling to the illusion. Mark Twain’s old adage still holds true – it is easier to fool people than to convince them they’ve been fooled.

    The broader lesson is not merely that one smooth talker tricked his way into a prestigious office. It is that our institutions have made themselves especially easy prey. DEI ideology discourages skepticism, instructs people to rank themselves by race, and warns the “privileged” against questioning the “oppressed.” That ideology creates a golden opportunity for a resourceful grifter.

    The officials who hired Roberts failed in their basic duty to fact-check his résumé. They failed because their ideology told them not to ask questions. They preferred the fairy tale. But in the real world, when you believe in fairy tales, no wand appears at the end to make the story come true. You are left with failing schools, squandered money and the humiliation of realizing that the man hired to redeem you was simply playing the oldest role in the book – the conman who knew exactly what his audience wanted to hear.