While Donald Trump says he d take the Chinese President to McDonald s, it s clear that the Obama s pulled out all the stops for the Chinese leader at the State Dinner last night. The night was heavy on the Silicon Valley and Hollywood moguls like Mark Zuckerberg. Perhaps they were getting tips on how to employee more cheap labor. PROM NIGHT AT THE WHITE HOUSE!The striking difference in the attire of Mooch and the Chinese First Lady. Did anyone else get the feeling it was Prom Night at the White House with the dress and hair Mooch was sporting?I know, I know, it s just that something s not quite right here maybe it s the hair and cleavage. Maybe Mooch is channeling her inner Beyonce. But that hair!President Barack Obama s lavish state dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping was supposed to be the social release after a long day of business. The head table told a different tale bulging with the top brass from Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Disney, DreamWorks and more.The 200-plus guest list for the Friday s soiree was a business-heavy mashup of Hollywood, diplomacy and corporate chieftains, with ballerina Misty Copeland s presence offering it a bit of a lilt.DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg, part of the East Room s high-octane head table, was asked as he arrived whether the evening was all about business or pleasure. Fun, he declared, but he added: I hope. For more than a few guests, the dinner was a chance to build up some serious chits with Mom or other family members who arrived as dates. Empire creator Lee Daniels and R&B singer Ne-Yo, who was performing later in the night, both brought their mothers.Clara Daniels, glowing in a coral gown, declared her date my No. 1 son but didn t specify if that was because he s the oldest of her two sons or because he came up with the dinner invitation. I am the most proud mom, enthused Harriett Loraine Burts, mom to Ne-Yo. Then Burts looked for a way to escape the cameras, confessing, I m not good at this red carpet thing. As for how he scored the invitation to perform at such a high-powered event, Ne-Yo theorized it s because he s got some Chinese in my heritage somewhere. First through the guest entry hall for dinner were former Labor Secretary Elaine Chao and her dad. Faced with the fashion-forward question What are you wearing? Chao seemed momentarily stumped. Oh my gosh, she stammered. It s something very inexpensive. Copeland, who breezed through in a strapless metallic gown, had a similar response to the same query. I have no idea, she confessed.There was no question about first lady Michelle Obama s fashion statement.She wore a black, off-the-shoulder mermaid gown created by Chinese-American designer Vera Wang.Xi s wife, Peng Liyuan, also a fashion-savvy first lady, selected an embellished silk gown in rich aquamarine.The wow factor was lower-key among seasoned state dinner attendees but still there nonetheless.Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said she d been to many state dinners, but added, They re always fabulous. Chris Dodd, the former senator and current chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, was asked if it ever gets old. Never, he said.Ninety-two-year-old Henry Kissinger, the shrewd diplomat who served under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, hustled through without stopping to comment, moving pretty quickly even with a cane. The decor in the big East Room included a 16-foot silk scroll depicting two roses that the White House said was meant to symbolize a complete meeting of the minds. That may have been somewhat aspirational, given the sharp differences between the U.S. and China on a range of issues.But all of that was largely glossed over in the dinner toasts. Obama said that while some differences were inevitable, he wished that the American and Chinese people may work together like fingers on the same hand in friendship and in peace. Xi, for his part, called the state visit an unforgettable journey and praised the good will he felt from West Coast to East.Asian influences were everywhere in the dinner plan, down to the Meyer lemons in the kurd lychee sorbet. (The citrus fruit is thought to have originated in China.)Guest chef Anita Lo, owner of Annisa in New York and a past Top Chef competitor, is a first-generation Chinese-American from Birmingham, Michigan. The culinary team created a menu that highlighted American cuisine with nuances of Chinese flavor, according to the White House. Guests dined on wild mushroom soup, poached Maine lobster, grilled cannon of Colorado lamb and poppyseed bread and butter pudding.


A convoy of around 30 Civil Guard police vans, unmarked vans and a truck filled with police officers left Barcelona port early on Sunday morning, a Reuters witness said, as lines of voters began forming at polling stations to vote on independence from Spain. Thousands of police have been shipped in from all over Spain to prevent the banned referendum taking place.


Barack Obama will make a long-awaited trip to Kenya later this year, visiting his father's homeland for the first time since becoming US president six years ago, the White House said Monday. During the long-promised visit this July, Obama will attend a Global Entrepreneurship Summit in the east African nation, a statement said. Obama has visited Africa four times since becoming president, but has not visited the country where he still has relatives. For much of Obama's presidency, Kenya's leaders have been under a cloud of prosecution by the International Criminal Court. Kenyatta was indicted over the country's 2007-08 post-election violence, the worst since it won independence from Britain in 1963. Kenyatta has always protested his innocence. The case was dropped in December, with prosecutors complaining that they had been undermined by a lack of cooperation by the Kenyan government, as well as the bribing or intimidation of witnesses. "President Obama will meet him in Kenya," a White House official told AFP, confirming a meeting that is likely to court controversy. The official, who asked not to be named, said the United States regularly raises "concerns with the Kenyan government about restrictions on human rights and fundamental freedoms." "The president's trip will create another opportunity for dialogue with the government and civil society on these issues." Obama had visited Kenya before as a senator and before entering politics, visiting his father's home village and taking a very public HIV test. The president's origins have spurred domestic controversy, with some hardline political foes claiming he was not born in the United States and so was ineligible to become president. Obama allies say this is thinly veiled racism. The president has often made light of the controversy. "If I did not love America, I wouldn't have moved here from Kenya," he recently joked. On this visit, Obama expected to take part in the Global Entrepreneurship Summit (GES), which is being held in sub-Saharan Africa for the first time. "Hosting the GES is an opportunity for Kenya to showcase its economic progress," said the White House official. "Kenya maintains enormous potential for economic growth, thanks to the creativity and entrepreneurial spirit of the Kenyan people."


Guest Posts The Saker  by Oleg Maslov  The time has come for the country with the largest economy and military in the world will soon go to the polls to choose a new leader for itself. Americans will elect a new president on November 8, 2016. However, the two main candidates running for the office of president in the general election have never been more different from each other. Hillary Clinton has lived in the White House as First Lady for 8 years, served as a senator, ran for president in 2008, and served as Secretary of State during Barack Obama's first term, during which she oversaw the NATO intervention in Libya and the Benghazi crisis – in other words, a career politician. On the other hand, Donald Trump has never served in public office, instead dedicating his life to many different business ventures, some of which became runaway successes and others short-lived failures.  Both candidates boast considerable strengths and face off against damaging scandals. Clinton has been touted as the 'most qualified candidate for the job' and has decades of experience in and around the center of power in Washington. However, she is currently under investigation by the FBI for potentially mishandling classified information after using a private email server to send and receive emails while Secretary of State, faced allegations of corruption relating to donations from foreign entities to the Clinton Foundation in return for political favors, responded to leaked email suggested that the Democratic National Convention colluded with major media companies against Democratic primary rival Bernie Sanders, and dealt with ongoing accusations of husband Bill Clinton's sexual relations and infidelities. On the other hand, Trump has pointed to his wealth to promote himself as a self-made billionaire capable of hard negotiations and used his status as a political outsider status to make his promise to change to the establishment believable. He has also been the target of sexual harassment allegations, responded to claims that some of his failed businesses may have been scams, battled accusations of involvement with white supremacy groups, and is the only candidate for president from a major party not to release tax information since Gerald Ford.  Comparing the individual factors and history of both candidates gives us considerable information for analysis, but what effect will the policies of the candidates bring to the world once they enter office? In the following sections, we pit Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in a head-to-head comparison, analyzing the likely outcomes of their policies on global conflicts, the world economy, American social and business conditions, the future of Europe, and US relations with Russia and China.  Global Conflicts  Hillary Clinton  The former Secretary of State has been labeled by some analysts as a representative of the 'hawks' in Washington, or the group of influencers who are pro-war and closely connected with the American military industrial complex. Hillary Clinton voted for the American interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan as a Senator and spearheaded the American push for the NATO-imposed 'no-fly zone' in Libya as well as the US support for 'moderate rebels' in Syria as Secretary of State in the Obama administration.  A vote for Hillary is a vote for continuing the foreign policies of the Obama administration, including the expansion of NATO activities in Eastern Europe, intensifying American actions against the government of Bashar al-Assad, ramping up US naval might in the South China Sea, and arming and supporting Saudi Arabia in its military operation against Yemen.  One policy favored by Hillary Clinton adequately sums up the potential effects of a Clinton administration on global security: Hillary Clinton has publicly advocated for the implementation of a 'no-fly zone' and 'safe zones' within Syria. Joseph Dunford, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of State, succinctly outlined the consequences of such a policy last month when he explained to the US Senate that carrying out this policy would require the United States to "go to war against Syria and Russia", something unequivocally negative for both regional and global security and something which will certainly exacerbate tensions in Syria rather than relieve them.  Trump expresses the greatest fear that such a policy may bring when he says that such proposals may start World War III.  Much can be written on the other conflicts mentioned, but the general trend is relatively apparent – a Clinton presidency would continue aggressive American policies which only increase tensions and create the possibility for a spark to light the powder keg of conflict.  Donald Trump  If a Clinton administration would be predictably aggressive, a Trump administration would be an unpredictable wild card for global security. Many point to Trump's open call for good relations between the US and Russia, even for cooperation between the two countries in tackling the Islamic State, as a sign of a period of peace and stabilization of the global security climate under a Trump administration. However, others react with alarm when they hear Trump criticize the usefulness of NATO or seemingly advocate for the proliferation of nuclear weapons, although these apparent Trump policies are often taken out of context.  Trump has consistently called for an increased 'sharing of the burden' from NATO partners and other American partners, notably Japan and South Korea. His campaign claims that the remarks that Trump made about the usefulness NATO and the proliferation of nuclear weapons was an extreme example meant to show the necessity of convincing American partners to pay more for the US military umbrella and that Trump has no intention of disbanding NATO or allowing states like Saudi Arabia or Japan to get nuclear weapons.  However, if Trump's drive to push more of the financial burden of US military protection onto allies were to fail, he may be forced to carry out his promises, at least to some degree, if only to save face. Trump's public intentions to mend ties with Russia and pursue cooperation in Syria combined with the potential for a weaker US presence in Europe may in fact encourage Russia to act more aggressively in pursuing their own interests in Europe and the Middle East.  One country has been disproportionately targeted by Trump – China. Trump has campaigned on the idea that China has been playing the United States for a sucker and that the US-Chinese relationship has been beneficial mostly for one side. His promises to renegotiate trade deals with China (which could be potentially quite harmful for China) could well have to be enforced by naval power projection, and Trump may end up following many of the same naval policies in the South China Sea as the Obama administration. This would, of course, raise tensions between the United States and China.  Trump's proposals and policies have not been thoroughly tested and their success at stabilizing the world situation are far from assured. Although Trump tends to appear more interested in fostering peace and cooling down global conflict, the tensions created by his policies, especially with respect to China, may in fact increase the possibility of conflict, showing just how unpredictable a Trump administration may be.  World Economy  Donald Trump  Trump has positioned himself as a pro-business candidate that will stimulate the US economy, and many of his proposed policies could potentially have positive effects. However, Trump's heavy criticism of global trade agreements, including the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Trans-Pacific-Partnership (TPP), as well as Trump's intention to force American companies to bring their business operations back from other countries in an attempt to reverse the process of 'offshorization' may well benefit the American economy, but may in fact deal some heavy damage to the global economy.  Policies that benefit the United States directly, such as encouraging auto manufacturers to return production to American soil by raising tariffs on autos made by American companies in other countries, will have a negative effect on other countries. Agreements such as the TTIP would certainly raise global economic activity, despite the fact that they benefit one side over the other, and would raise the level of global economic activity. It follows that delaying or disrupting negotiations on these agreements may lead to more negative consequences for the world economy as a whole.  Trump's public call for better relations with Russia may have the effect of reducing or even removing sanctions thereby restoring former business between Russia and Europe as well as creating new business relationships which compensate for negative effects of other policies on the world economy. Further, if Trump's promises for peace and stabilization of global conflicts is carried out, economic activity and innovation would continue without any obstacle.  Hillary Clinton  A Clinton administration would continue to develop the economic strategy initiated by the Obama administration, including liberal policies toward corporate offshoring and advancement of global trade deals such as TTIP and TPP. In essence, these policies would produce slow but stable growth for the world economy. Maintaing the sanctions on Russia would restrict global growth but if negotiations on either TTIP or TPP would result in an agreement, the resulting economic activity would more than make up for that lost business.  The Clinton administration may appear to offer better opportunities for the global economy, but one major factor still needs consideration. Clinton's preference for resolution of conflicts by military means, seen most acutely in her proposals for resolving the Syrian situation, have a high potential to lead to a wider conflict with Russia and Iran, and ultimately may lead to a third global war, a war in which the main adversaries have a vast amount of deliverable nuclear weapons as well as a protocol for using them, should the need arise.  Needless to say, any conflict in which nuclear weapons are used is unequivocally negative for the global economy in the short term, if a global economy even remains after the dust has settled. If a global war remains conventional or if nuclear weapons are used in limited capacity, the prospect for global economic growth in the medium term is quite positive given the need to rebuild the affected countries, but the loss of life, destruction of productive infrastructure and buildings, and long term psychological and social effects far outweigh the economic growth related to rebuilding what was lost.  US Social and Business Conditions  Hillary Clinton  As the status quo candidate, Hillary Clinton represents a future similar to the present conditions with small but noticeable changes. Although controversial, Obama's healthcare plan, commonly referred to as 'Obamacare', did bring healthcare insurance to more Americans. Clinton will most certainly continue developing Obamacare, which may improve the lives of many people. Hillary has also proposed a plan to finance higher education for students whose household earns a combined income of less than $125,000 per year, something seen as positive for standard of living and development of future business conditions.  Clinton's willingness to accept more refugees from the war torn Middle East may increase already palpable social tensions by increasing competition for low-wage jobs and undermining social cohesion. The liberal policies of allowing companies to seek lower cost labor in other countries will continue to send jobs out of the United States, leaving university graduates, already suffering from low employment rates, with even fewer work opportunities.  Despite meeting with mothers of black teens killed by police, Hillary has no practical solution for addressing the growing issue of perceived racial prejudice by police officers. Neither does Donald Trump for that matter.  Donald Trump  Trump's strongest potential option for improving the social and business conditions in the US is his promise to force American companies to bring production back to the United States. Fulfilling this promise would create many jobs in the US and alleviate the millennial unemployment problem, all the while raising wages and the overall standard of living. Although xenophobic and perhaps even racially charged in nature, Trump's intention to limit immigration may also create more low-wage opportunities for American citizens.  Trump has called for an increase in paid maternity leave, something which may quality of life for average people. One of his main campaign promises is to revise and simplify the tax system. If done properly, this policy will make filing taxes easier for normal citizens and businesses as well, improving business conditions and potentially creating more jobs and economic activity.  On the other hand, Trump is widely seen as a candidate who represents white male superiority and the mere fact of a Trump administration may cause an increase in already palpable social tensions, potentially even leading to open protest from Muslim or Hispanic groups among others at his presidency. The Clinton campaign has worked to paint Trump as a white supremacist and misogynist, and often successfully so. Despite the potential economic benefits of a Trump presidency, the potential explosion of social tensions may cause an overall negative social and business situation in the United States. Of course, a Trump administration will recognize this danger and will make every attempt to prevent it.  The Future of Europe  Donald Trump  A Trump presidency would entail a major reversal of policies for many Eastern European countries, including the Baltic States, Poland, and Ukraine, when it comes to European relations with Russia. Trump has not only publicly questioned the utility of NATO, but has also called for better relations with Russia, both concepts which are anathema to many Eastern European nations. If Trump were to decrease the American footprint in Europe and to attempt to build better relations with Russia, many European nations would be forced to rethink some of their main strategic objectives at the very least. The current government of Ukraine would be one of the biggest losers in Europe should Trump become president and may even be pushed out of power, either peacefully or forcefully, should Trump choose to sacrifice American support for Ukraine in exchange for better relations with Russia, including recognition of Crimea as Russian territory.  A decrease in US forces on mainland Europe as well as American engineered political obstacles to cooperation between Europe and Russia would naturally lead to a blossoming of relations between Europe and Russia. Under a Trump presidency, one may expect a significant rollback of European sanctions on Russia and significant growth in Russia-Europe trade and relations. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and the Parliamentary Assembly for the Council of Europe (PACE) would regain influence in regulating Europe-Russia relations. European-Chinese relations would also grow dynamically as 'Silk Road' projects through Russia would take on new relevance.  Many so-called 'Euroskeptic' movements and otherwise 'right of center' political groups would gain influence and perhaps even become part of the mainstream political configuration. Parties like Marine Le Pen's Front National, Alternative fuer Deutschland, Austria's Freedom Party, and Golden Dawn in Greece could make a grand entrance into mainstream politics while ruling parties in Hungary and Italy could become even more entrenched. Pushed forward by Brexit, this trend would bring considerable momentum behind the a drive for the dissolution of the European Union, at least for the monetary union, but this remains unlikely.  A Trump presidency may even allow for the start of negotiations between Europe and Russia on a comprehensive trade and political agreement to regulate relations. Numerous politicians, including Francois Mitterand and Vladimir Putin, have spoken about a free trade zone stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostock, but if China has any say in the matter, the zone will extend to Singapore and cover the entire supercontinent of Eurasia. If this concept were to ever become reality, European nations would gain influence over developing nations and receive access to valuable and profitable investment opportunities.  Further, any major agreement between the United States and Russia on Middle Eastern policy would entail a significant slowdown of the current migration crisis as well as a noticeable reduction in terrorist related activity. Europe may even join a coalition of the US and Russia to fight terrorism. Lastly, US missile defense systems in Poland and Romania are likely to be dismantled.  Hillary Clinton  A Hillary Clinton presidency would entail business as usual with Europe and a continuation of the current trends and policies initiated by the Obama administration. The major features of a Clinton presidency would include continued military build-up in Baltic states, continuation of European sanctions against Russia, increased support for the Ukrainian government, increased media hype about the Russian military threat, and a further break-down in the systems that govern Europe-Russia relations, such as the OSCE and PACE.  A Clinton presidency would entail an increase in the number of American troops in mainland Europe as well as an increase in joint US-European defense projects, including expansions of the missile defense project. More US-led NATO troops, groupings, and exercises would take place in the Baltic countries and a Clinton administration would push for Sweden and Finland closer to NATO, with the ultimate purpose to convince the Scandinavian countries to join the military block. Expect increased media reports about air force interceptions and Russian submarine scandals.  Any European Union political party that has a neutral or favorable position to Russia will come under increased scrutiny and will face attacks on multiple fronts, mostly through the media. The EU will work to make examples of governments such as Hungary, Greece, and Italy that actively resist sanctions against Russia and attempt to circumvent sanctions by making their own economic arrangements with Russia.  Europe will be pressured to sign TTIP and will most likely become more and more dependent on the United States for economic and political policy. More LNG terminals will be built on the European mainland so that European countries can import natural gas from America and Qatar so that dependence on Russia is decreased. China will place less of an effort on the Silk Road overland trade route and will have to make a different trade arrangement with Europe.  Middle East migration numbers will continue in full force as US policy in the Middle East will continue to favor interventionist hawks, forcing reluctant European nations to accept more and more refugees from Middle Eastern nations. The threat of terrorism will remain high and terrorist attacks are likely to occur again on European soil.  US Relations with Russia and China  Hillary Clinton  A Clinton administration will continue to play a double game with China, continuing the liberal policies of offshoring production to Chinese companies and maintaining a strong trade relationship on the one hand, but encircling China militarily with naval hardware and trade partnerships with local Chinese rivals. China will have a difficult time trying to push its goods to Europe through the Eurasian continent as the US will actively block attempts to create a Silk Road structure leading either through Russia or through Iran. However, on the surface, the US will continue to maintain a careful policy of wary respect toward China, never making overt insults or provocations and maintaining an air of pretentious respect.  Relations with Russia will be characterized by increased support to Russia's enemies in Ukraine and Syria, as well as attempts to undermine the governments in Belarus and Central Asian countries. President Clinton will push European allies to increase economic pressure on Russia and media coverage of Russia from all ideological sides of American media will turn increasingly negative. All of this will take place while the United States will continue to do business with Russia as usual, buying rocket engines, space transport services, grain, and even certain types of weapons as if there was no issue in bilateral relations.  Donald Trump  The strategic economic goals of a Trump presidency would almost immediately begin to cause problems for Chinese-American relations. If Trump acts on his promises to raise tariffs for American companies producing goods in foreign countries and then shipping them to the US, many businesses with manufacturing operations in China will be forced to shut down their Chinese subsidiaries, causing significant losses for China. China would potentially experience a major economic downturn as many of its factories and industrial centers would be forced out of business. China would not leave such an unkind gesture unanswered and would most likely sell a significant portion of its US Treasury bills and bonds on the market, or simply demand early payment, leading to a period of financial troubles for the US.  American-Russian relations would potentially enter into a new and unprecedented period of mutual understanding and cooperation. President Trump would work to open Russia's massive market even further to American companies and would deepen partnerships between the US and Russia in areas like space exploration and development, energy distribution and marketing, and perhaps even reopen programs focusing on purchase and delivery of Russian military hardware to groups supported by the Pentagon, including the program to arm and train the Afghan military with Russian helicopters.  In all, both candidates offer substantially different visions of the future, and it is up to individual voters to decide which vision appears more rational and beneficial for both the United States and the world at large. The Essential Saker: from the trenches of the emerging multipolar world $27.95


By Gordon Duff, Senior Editor on November 4, 2016  Moscow's decision to send a fleet of warships, led by the Admiral Kuznetsov aircraft carrier, to the eastern Mediterranean may have saved the Syrian military from getting bombed by the US, according to military expert Vladimir Evseev. Speaking at a press conference at the Rossiya Segodnya news agency press center in Moscow, Evseev, the deputy director of Russia's CIS Institute, pointed out that Washington had only recently considered the possibility of attacking Syrian government forces, using the pretext of a UN report which alleged that Damascus had used chemical weapons.  "We recently lived through a very important milestone which many people did not even notice," the analyst suggested. "Why was the question raised of the Syrian Army's alleged use of chemical weapons? The stage was being set for [US] ship-based cruise missile strikes. According to some reports, such a decision was in play…[Western] public opinion was actively being prepared for it."  As Russian Ships Complete Passage to Med, Moscow is 'Surprised' by Western Buzz But the entry of a major Russian flotilla, led by the Admiral Kuznetsov aircraft carrier, into the Mediterranean may been the essential element needed to cool the Pentagon's appetites, Evseev added.  "The presence of our ships [between Algeria and Italy] excludes the possible deployment of a similar NATO naval group in the area. Factually, our ships have closed Syria off. The Russian ships did not appear where they are by accident, and eliminated the possibility of launching cruise missiles from that direction."  The analyst also recalled that earlier, S-300 systems "were deployed in Tartus" with similar goals in mind, given that they are "capable of addressing not only air-based threats, but ballistic targets as well." Last week, the contents of a leaked report submitted to the UN Security Council blamed the Syrian government for a chemical attack in Idlib in 2015. Damascus vehemently denied the charges, citing the terrorists' own regular use of poison gas.  Moscow, meanwhile, stressed that more serious evidence would need to be presented before such serious accusations could be leveled. Why Does Media Cover Up War Crimes of 'Rebels' in Aleppo? The US and NATO allies, already engaged in a campaign to demonize Syria and Russia over the fight for Aleppo, used the report to pile on to other charges that Damascus and Moscow were responsible for 'war crimes' in their operation to liberate Syria from armed militants and jihadists.  Commenting on the military situation in Syria, Evseev suggested that together with the liberation of Aleppo, the Syrian military and their Russian allies must make it a priority to surround Nusra Front terrorists in Idlib. "The terrorists must be destroyed, but most likely a process of squeezing them out will take place," he admitted. If forced to leave Idlib, "the only place for them to go will be Turkey. And here, I would recommend that our Western partners, who currently advise us how to fight in Aleppo, take a moment to think about what will happen to the Idlib militants who end up in Turkey," the expert noted.  "From here, it's likely that they can then be expected to pay a visit to Europe. This is what Western nations should be thinking about, instead of putting a spoke in the wheel and doing everything possible to interfere in the operation to liberate Aleppo and other Syrian territories." As far as the situation in the city of Aleppo is concerned, Evseev stressed that "if we continue to wait and prolong humanitarian pauses, there will be no people left in Aleppo. Without air support, losses are too high. It's necessary to free the city quickly, and to think less about the West thinks about it." Related Posts: No Related Posts The views expressed herein are the views of the author exclusively and not necessarily the views of VT, VT authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, technicians, or the Veterans Today Network and its assigns. LEGAL NOTICE - COMMENT POLICY Posted by Gordon Duff, Senior Editor on November 4, 2016, With 51 Reads Filed under Investigations . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 . You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. FaceBook Comments  You must be logged in to post a comment Login WHAT'S HOT


Finally, the media is giving Donald Trump the critical eye they should. The stories about the Trump University lawsuits and his refusal to release his tax returns are proving to be troublesome to the GOP frontrunner s campaign, but one of the most damaging might be the missing money that was supposedly pegged for veterans.Things are about to get a whole lot worse on the veteran front. The Huffington Post reported that Trump actually discriminates against veterans because they spend too much time serving their country.In at least three cases, Trump s companies have either fired, or refused to hire, military reservists because of the time commitments demanded of them by their service in the armed forces. The veterans involved have sued Trump for violating the laws meant to protect them from precisely these types of penalties. And in all three cases, Trump and his companies have settled the suits.The Huffington Post already reported on the first two of these cases one involving an Air Force senior master sergeant fired from the Trump Institute in 2007, and one an Army staff sergeant fired from her job at Trump University that same year.These two cases, however, have a predecessor. On May 27, 1988, United States Air Force Col. Charles Beattie submitted orders to his bosses at Eastern Airlines, where he worked as a pilot.For Trump, it seems, it s cheaper to pay fines for this clear violation of the law than to follow the law. Trump is an egomaniac. The fact that he doesn t like to employ people whose priority is our country should be all the proof we need that Trump has no desire to serve our country. He never has, beginning with the fact that Trump avoided the draft.It s doubtful that Trump actively dislikes veterans, but it s clear he doesn t care about them. He would happily and haphazardly send them into war zones, perhaps because a world leader hurt his feelings.The fact that he doesn t like vets working for him is only the tip of the iceberg. For a man who has planned on running for president for at least a few years, he s done little to beef up his image as a patriot. The Republican party is supposedly the party of veterans (of course, we wouldn t know it by how they vote, but they think they love the veterans), but Trump gave zero of his personal money to veterans groups, and his foundation donated a paltry $57,000. As Forbes Magazine notes, Trump once demanded that CNN give veterans $5 million for Trump to appear at a debate. They didn t, but that would be $494,000,000 than his foundation has given.As I said, the media is finally beginning to look critically at Trump, but it s time they start calling these things what they are: scandals. They might even qualify for a gate.


Republicans cheered after the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday thwarted President Barack Obama's plan to offer millions of undocumented immigrants relief from deportation, but any sense of triumph might last only until the November presidential election. If recent history is a guide, the stalled cause of immigration reform could energize Hispanic voters in support of likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, hurting Republican Donald Trump's chances of reaching the White House. Four years ago, Obama, seeking reelection to a second term, made Republican opposition to reform a central theme of his campaign. He ended up swamping his opponent, Mitt Romney, by almost a 3 to 1 margin among Latino voters, who now make up around 12 percent of the U.S. electorate. Republican hopes for securing a larger share of that vote this election already seemed grim given Trump's vow to deport the estimated 11 million immigrants in the country illegally and to build a wall along the southern U.S. border. Democrats were quick to assail the ruling and voice concern about the fate of the 4 million or so immigrants who were to be shielded from deportation by Obama's executive action. But it was also clear that they believe the high court has handed them a potent weapon to spur Latinos — the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. electorate — to vote in greater numbers. The Latino voting bloc is expected to swell to 27.3 million in 2016, up 4 million from 4 years ago. The prospect of Clinton filling the current vacancy on the top court with a liberal-leading justice who could, potentially, protect immigration-reform programs, may galvanize those voters as well. Republicans in Congress have refused to accept Obama's pick for the top court to fill the vacancy left by the death of conservative justice Antonin Scalia in February. The justices' ruling on Thursday sent the question of the legality of Obama's program back to a Texas federal court for trial, leaving open the possibility that the matter could return to the high court on appeal at a later date. The court's decision "just adds fuel to the fire that's already raging," said Brad Bannon, a Democratic strategist. "Each of these events raises the intensity and the Latino turnout even more." In the wake of the ruling, immigration activists vowed payback in November's election and staged protests on Thursday. A recent survey by Latino Decisions, a polling firm, showed that about half of the U.S. Hispanic electorate showed greater enthusiasm to vote in 2016 as compared to 2012, with support for Obama's pro-immigrant executive orders running high. "We should expect similar dynamics this fall, perhaps even more so given the election is likely to determine the ideological direction of the Supreme Court," said David Damore, an analyst for the firm. Given Trump's unpopularity with Latino voters, the question for many Democrats both in and outside the Clinton campaign has been less about attracting the bloc's support and more about making sure it votes in large enough numbers to help offset Trump's expected advantage among white voters. The court's decision may also help make traditionally Republican states with increasing Hispanic populations such as Arizona more competitive this election, strategists in both parties said. Reed Galen, a Republican strategist in California, said the ruling could boost Democratic hopes in Latino-heavy battleground states such as Nevada, Colorado, and Florida. "The issue isn't getting [Latino voters] fired up," Galen said. "It's getting them to show up." Galen believes there is little his party can do now to mitigate the damage he believes Trump has done to its appeal among Hispanics. A Republican National Committee "autopsy" report after Romney's defeat said it was essential for the party to broaden its appeal to Hispanic voters by embracing immigration reform. "Trump has pushed the envelope on immigration so far for Republicans, I don't know this [decision] is going to be any more damaging," he said. "The barn's already been blown up." But Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, the president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, a conservative advocacy group, disagreed. He said Republicans in Congress could still enact reform this year, which would ward off Trump's deportation threat while building stronger ties with Latino voters. "This is the quintessential green light for Republicans to put their money where their mouth is," Rodriguez said. Many Republicans were careful on Thursday to applaud the court's ruling on the grounds that it curtailed what they viewed as an abuse of executive authority by Obama, without delving into the underlying immigration issues. "The Constitution is clear: The president is not permitted to write laws — only Congress is," said Paul Ryan, the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. Ryan supports comprehensive immigration reform. Trump, however, went further, praising the ruling and saying the election now held the key to blocking further illegal immigration. "The election, and the Supreme Court appointments that come with it will decide whether or not we have a border and, hence, a country," he said in a statement. He has vowed to reverse Obama's executive actions on immigration as president.


For weeks, Hillary Clinton has looked for the knockout blow that finally forces Bernie Sanders out of the Democratic primary. She may have gotten it tonight in Kentucky. Sanders has to start winning every state by a landslide victory to have even a mathematical chance of catching Clinton's nearly 300-delegate lead. Kentucky was called for Clinton as an "apparent winner" at around 9:30 pm by NBC and after 10 pm by Kentucky's secretary of state, who called her the "unofficial winner." Sanders has maintained that he'll stay in the race until the end of voting, and we don't have any new reason to believe he'll fly the white flag after Clinton's victory tonight. And his hard-line response to the Democratic Party over this weekend's events in Nevada certainly doesn't suggest he's ready to call it quits. But Sanders needed to win Kentucky to maintain an increasingly far-fetched path to the Democratic nomination. The fact that he lost tonight — albeit by what appears to have been a very small margin — will only dramatically increase the calls for him to exit the race. The loss is particularly tough for Sanders's campaign given that Kentucky was one of the more favorable states for him remaining in the race. "Given the West Virginia results, I think Sanders is probably favored," said Kyle Kondik of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics in an interview Tuesday morning, before voting began. "Sanders has a very good chance in Kentucky." Sanders will probably face steeper odds in the upcoming contests in California and New Jersey, where have polls have Clinton leading by as much as double digits. Polling from Kentucky was scarce, but the state's largely white and rural voters were widely expected to break for Sanders — as they have throughout the country. Kentucky has a large number of registered Democrats who are much more conservative than the rest of the party, a group that has in other states backed Sanders in part as a "protest vote" against the party's establishment, according to Kondik. "More than half of Kentucky's registered voters are signed up with the Democratic Party, even though the state's election results have hewed decidedly Republican in recent years," wrote the polling firm Morning Consult in a preview of tonight's contest "That's an indication of the rightward shift of downscale whites, especially in once union-heavy Coal Country; those are voters who used to call themselves Yellow Dog Democrats." These voters broke for Sanders by a big margin in West Virginia, and they very well may have in Kentucky as well. But even if they did, it does not appear to have been enough to offset the big difference between Kentucky and West Virginia: diversity. African-American voters are far more numerous in Kentucky — in part because of its cities, like Louisville and Lexington. (Kentucky's 2008 primary electorate was 9 percent black, compared to just 3 percent in West Virginia.) Black voters have rescued Clinton's campaign since her first big win in South Carolina in February. And, tonight, they may have helped push her opponent out of the race. Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly said Kyle Kondik works for the Center for Responsive Politics, rather than the University of Virginia's Center for Politics.


The Ruthlessly Effective Rebranding of Europe's New Far Right Sasha Polakow-Suransky, Guardian, November 1, 2016  In April 2002, Jean-Marie Le Pen stunned all of Europe by defeating the socialist candidate, Lionel Jospin, in the first round of the French presidential election, and advancing to the final round between the top two candidates. Terrified by the prospect of a far-right victory, the French left–including communists, Greens and the Socialist party–threw their support behind the incumbent president, Jacques Chirac , a pillar of the centre-right establishment who had served as mayor of Paris for 18 years before becoming president in 1995. This electoral strategy effectively isolated Le Pen's Front National (FN), depicting it as a cancerous force in the French body politic.  Two weeks later, on 5 May, Chirac won the election with an astronomical 82% of the vote, trouncing Le Pen by the biggest margin in a French presidential election since 1848. Raucous celebrations spilled into the streets of Paris. "We have gone through a time of serious anxiety for the country–but tonight France has reaffirmed its attachment to the values of the republic," Chirac declared in his victory speech . Then, speaking to the joyous crowds in the Place de la République, he lauded them for rejecting "intolerance and demagoguery".  But May 2002 was not, in fact, a moment of triumph. Rather it was the dying gasp of an old order, in which the fate of European nations was controlled by large establishment parties.  Jean-Marie Le Pen was an easy target for the left, and for establishment figures such as Chirac. He was a political provocateur who appealed as much to antisemites and homophobes as to voters upset about immigration, drawing his support largely from the most reactionary elements of the old Catholic right. In other words, he was a familiar villain–and his ideology represented an archaic France, a defeated past. Moreover, he did not seriously aim for power, and never really came close to acquiring it; his role was to be a rabble-rouser and to inject his ideas into the national debate.  Europe's new far right is different. From Denmark to the Netherlands to Germany, a new wave of rightwing parties has emerged over the past decade-and-a-half, and they are casting a much wider net than Jean-Marie Le Pen ever attempted to. And by deftly appealing to fear, nostalgia and resentment of elites, they are rapidly broadening their base.  Le Pen's own daughter is a prime example of the new ambitions of the right: unlike her incendiary father, Marine Le Pen is running a disciplined political operation and has already proven that her party can win upwards of 40% of the vote in regions from Calais in the north to the Côte d'Azur in the south. She and her Danish and Dutch counterparts are not–as some on the left would like to believe–neo-Nazis or inconsequential extremists with fringe ideas lacking popular appeal.  These parties have built a coherent ideology and steadily chipped away at the establishment parties' hold on power by pursuing a new and devastatingly effective electoral strategy. They have made a very public break with the symbols of the old right's past, distancing themselves from skinheads, neo-Nazis and homophobes. They have also deftly co-opted the causes, policies and rhetoric of their opponents. They have sought to outflank the left when it comes to defending a strong welfare state and protecting social benefits that they claim are threatened by an influx of freeloading migrants.  They have effectively claimed the progressive causes of the left–from gay rights to women's equality and protecting Jews from antisemitism–as their own, by depicting Muslim immigrants as the primary threat to all three groups. As fear of Islam has spread, with their encouragement, they have presented themselves as the only true defenders of western identity and western liberties–the last bulwark protecting a besieged Judeo-Christian civilisation from the barbarians at the gates.  These parties have steadily filled an electoral vacuum left open by social democratic and centre-right parties, who ignored voters' growing anger over immigration–some of it legitimate, some of it bigoted–or simply waited too long to address it.  They have shed some of the right's most unsavoury baggage while responding to both economic anxiety and fear of terrorism by blending a nativist economic policy–more welfare, but only for us –and tough anti-immigration and border security measures. Their message is beginning to resonate widely with a fearful population that believes the liberal governing elite no longer listens to them.  Brexit was just the start. Europe's new far right is poised to transform the continent's political landscape–either by winning elections or simply by pulling a besieged political centre so far in its direction that its ideas become the new normal. And when that happens, groups that would never have contemplated voting for a far-right party 10 years ago–the young, gay people, Jews, feminists–may join the working-class voters who have already abandoned parties of the left to become the new backbone of the populist right.  On 6 May 2002, one day after revellers filled the streets of Paris to celebrate Chirac's historic victory, the flamboyant and iconoclastic leader of the Dutch far right, Pim Fortuyn, was gunned down by a radical animal rights activist as he emerged from a radio interview. His assassin later claimed that he had killed Fortuyn to stop him from using Muslims as "scapegoats". In national elections nine days later, Fortuyn's eponymous party–the Pim Fortuyn List– became the second largest in the Netherlands with 17% of the vote.  Fortuyn, a former communist and openly gay man who boasted of sleeping with Muslim immigrants while calling for a ban on Muslim immigration, was an electrifying figure in a country known for its staid politics. His time in the limelight was short but transformative.  It was Fortuyn who blazed the trail for the new generation of far-right leaders across Europe. He may not have intended to be a pioneer, but his brand of plain-spoken political incorrectness and his depiction of Islamic culture as a "backwards" and reactionary threat to the hard-won progressive values of western Europe would provide a potent template for a modernised far right. His ideological inheritors in Dutch politics, as well as the revamped Front National in France, the Danish People's Party and Germany's Alternative für Deutschland have all emulated Fortuyn in their own ways.  Fortuyn proved that the winning argument for the European far right was not a US-style appeal to conservative religious values, but rather to claim it was "defending secular, progressive culture from the threat of immigration," argues Merijn Oudenampsen of Tilburg University. The Netherlands was a perfect laboratory for this new strategy because, unlike France, it did not have a strong contingent of religious traditionalists opposed to women's liberation and gay rights.  Before founding his own party in 2002, Fortuyn had tried to join an establishment centre-right party, the People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), in the late 1990s. The party's then-leader, Frits Bolkestein, who had been one of the first figures to speak critically about immigration in the early 1990s, remembers Fortuyn as a talented but inflammatory politician. "He had a thoroughly theatrical personality, and that played in his favour," said Bolkestein, now in his 80s, from his office overlooking the canals of Amsterdam. "I didn't want him to be in my parliamentary group, so I cold-shouldered him . . . He would have acted as a fragmentation bomb."  Fortuyn took his explosive rhetoric elsewhere and, by creating a new type of far-right politics in progressive garb–"a form of xenophobia ideally suited to a nation that prides itself on its tolerance," as a New Yorker profile once described it–he redirected the entire national debate in a way that has endured long after his death.  Two years after Fortuyn was killed, the Netherlands was traumatised by another political assassination. Early one morning in November 2004, the filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered by a young Dutch-Moroccan, Mohammed Bouyeri, who shot van Gogh eight times, slashed his throat and then pinned a letter to his chest with a knife. The letter was a death threat aimed at the Somali-born Dutch parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali –a vocal critic of Islam who was soon placed under the protection of the Dutch security services.  The two assassinations shook the Netherlands to its core and catapulted a little-known and theatrically coiffed politician, Geert Wilders , to popularity as an ideological successor to Fortuyn. Wilders had also flirted with Bolkestein's VVD, beginning his political career as a staffer in the party office. In late 2004, he split off and formed his own. With Hirsi Ali in hiding, he quickly became the most prominent anti-immigration voice in the country–and has remained so ever since.  For those who cared to look, the political ground had already begun to shift. Six months before Chirac's trouncing of Le Pen and Fortuyn's assassination, Denmark had an election. On its surface the result was not a historical watershed; the centre-right Venstre party ousted the Social Democrats, handing power from one establishment party to the other. What had changed was that the Danish People's Party, which had campaigned on an overtly anti-immigrant platform, took 12% of the vote–transforming it into a kingmaker in parliament.  Unlike France, which revelled in its triumph over the FN, or the Netherlands, where the remains of Fortuyn's party failed to become a real parliamentary force, the DPP immediately became a serious player with real influence over policy. And it was not only taking votes from the right; it was also attracting disgruntled social democratic voters who felt that their leaders had abandoned them.  The DPP had crafted a social and economic policy that was in many ways more socialist than that of the Social Democrats–promising better health care, better care for the elderly, and more subsidised housing. As the outgoing Social Democratic prime minister Poul Nyrup Rasmussen told me in 2002, a few months after his defeat: "They took a part of our rhetoric and tried to sell it as a new package to the people, and with some success, one may say." Back then, Naser Khader, a Danish member of parliament who immigrated from Syria as a child, argued that "the best way to weaken the DPP is to give them influence". He was wrong.  The headquarters of the Front National sits on a quiet street in the unassuming Paris suburb of Nanterre, near a car repair shop and a Portuguese restaurant. Only when you approach the grey building with its mostly closed blue shutters do the armed guards come into view. In her modest second-floor office, surrounded by books and a cloud of vape smoke, Marine Le Pen explained earlier this year how she transformed a party previously known for calling the Holocaust a " detail of history " into a genuine contender for the presidency.  "Voluntarily or not, he gave ammunition to our adversaries," Le Pen said of her father. But she insisted that she has now cleaned house. "I fired them all . . . all those people who expressed an ideology or held views that I found unacceptable."  Julien Rochedy, a 28-year-old who headed the FN's youth wing but has since left the party, told me that he believes the changes are real. Whereas the party's former leader used to pepper his speeches with lines that made Jews' hair stand on end, today, if someone tells a racist joke within the party, "you will be attacked straight away," Rochedy said. "There is such self-discipline these days. They are so afraid they'll be accused once again of being antisemitic or racist."  Still, the party's detractors continue to level the same charges at the FN, which outrages Marine Le Pen . "Today our adversaries no longer have that ammunition, and they repeat on loop" old tropes about fascists and racists. "At a certain point this argument loses its force," she continued, "because voters see clearly that there's absolutely nothing in our platform that remotely resembles fascism or racism."  Le Pen has done more than kick out the most blatant racists and antisemites. She has consciously crafted a campaign designed to appeal to voters of the centre and left–and other constituencies–who could never have imagined voting for her father's Front National.  As Le Monde's Olivier Faye has written , she is "trying to erase another image that has stuck to the skin of the FN–that of homophobia". And it is working: a survey showed that her share of the vote among married gay couples in the 2015 regional elections was over 32%–up from just 19% in a similar poll from 2012.  As Le Pen has filled her inner circle with more and more openly gay advisers and party leaders, she has also made her pitch to Jewish voters more explicit: "For a lot of French Jews, the FN appears to be the only movement that can defend them from this new antisemitism nourished in the banlieues ," Le Pen told me. "In a very natural way they have turned toward the FN, because the FN is capable, I think, of protecting them from that."  Among French voters threatened by the country's new diversity, rejection of a multicultural society increasingly takes the form of longing for a bygone era. And peddling nostalgia is the centrepiece of many new far-right parties across Europe . In France, Marine Le Pen has promised a return to a time when the French had their own currency and monetary policy, when there were fewer mosques and less halal meat, when no one complained about nativity scenes in public buildings, and when French schools promoted a republican ethos of assimilation.  "A growing number of French people feel uncomfortable in their own country," the prominent philosopher, Alain Finkielkraut , declared in January during a debate with the centre-right presidential candidate Alain Juppé–who has taken a less strident line on Islam and migration than his rival Nicolas Sarkozy. Finkielkraut depicted contemporary France as a country of halal butchers and tea shops filled only with men, pleading that "the public good isn't in the clouds, it's made from tangible things–the French of Proust and Montaigne . . . the Jardin du Luxembourg and the cows of Normandy".  Finkielkraut, a 67-year-old Jewish liberal, is not an admirer of the Front National, but Marine Le Pen's deliberate appeals to Jews and gay people have given political expression to an argument that he first made more than a decade ago–that the left, with its indulgence of Islam, poses a greater threat to France than the far right. After Chirac "saved" the republic from Jean-Marie Le Pen in 2002, Finkielkraut watched the celebrations in the streets and warned that the victors were the real danger: "The future of hate is in their camp and not in the camp of those nostalgic for Vichy," he wrote, " . . . in the camp of the multicultural society and not that of the ethnic nation–in the camp of respect, not that of rejection."  Fourteen years later, after the terrorist attacks on Charlie Hebdo, the Bataclan and Nice, Finkielkraut is even more certain he was correct. "Anti-racism today frequently serves as a pretext for not seeing the true danger that threatens us," he told me when we met in his Paris apartment this summer. While he is still no fan of the FN, he believes it has changed and argues that it "should be resisted, but for what it is today and not what it was in the past, and not in the name of anti-fascism". The French must, he insisted, "avoid simplistic analogies with the 1930s. We must not mistake what era we live in. Europe doesn't only have demons; it also has enemies, and it needs to know how to fight those enemies."  He worries that integration has been such a failure that France will have to "reconquer" its "lost territories"–by which he means the suburbs surrounding Paris. "Integrating people is not telling them 'You are how you are and we are how we are' . . . Integration means making them an integral part of our civilisation." And if that doesn't happen, he warned darkly, "at best we'll have secession and at worst civil war". Continued immigration from Muslim countries, he argues, is nothing less than the "planned demise of Europe".  Across the country, nostalgia for an older, whiter France has become a potent political force. In the southern city of Béziers, Mayor Robert Ménard, a former Trotskyist who cofounded the press freedom group Reporters Without Borders , is seeking to place a moratorium on the opening of kebab shops and has renamed a street after one of the French officers who joined a failed coup against De Gaulle in 1961 to prevent Algerian independence . Ménard comes from a family of pieds-noirs , French settlers in Algeria. He regards the Evian accords that ended the Algerian war as a "capitulation", and those who tried to preserve French Algeria as heroes.  This nostalgia has an unmistakable appeal, but not necessarily for the sort of voters one might expect. Whereas young Britons overwhelmingly voted to remain in the EU and the elderly voted to leave, in France it is the opposite. According to Julian Rochedy, the former FN youth leader, appeals to nostalgia work better with the young in France–who dream of an era they never witnessed–than with the old, who lived through the era Marine Le Pen promises to restore. It is older voters, Rochedy argues, who are the greatest obstacle to Le Pen's victory. "They are afraid of leaving the euro," he says. "They are afraid of huge changes." Rochedy is convinced that the FN will never win simply by fetishising the past. "They just want to go back 30 years," he said of his erstwhile colleagues. "It's a discourse that doesn't at all take into account the world as it is and what France has become."  Even if Le Pen cannot win over enough older voters for her to become president, there is one ageing constituency that has already moved significantly to the right–the former members of what used to be the largest communist party in western Europe.  As the French Communist party collapsed, its supporters were left rudderless. According to Andrew Hussey, a Liverpool-born academic who teaches in Paris, the technocratic leaders of the Socialist party– many of them graduates of the ultra-elite Ecole Nationale d'Administration–"are so disconnected from ordinary people" that even former Marxists won't consider voting for them. Distrustful of the establishment and searching for a state that protects them, many have turned to the FN. "I think you've got a big political question here about who looks after you," Hussey said. "This is a very communist way of thinking."  Le Pen knows that she is attracting these people. Many of her supporters "used to be socialists, but they aren't any more", she told me. Although she prefers to avoid the phrase welfare state–"That's a socialist concept," she insisted–Le Pen has appealed directly to this yearning for a large and nurturing state that fights for the common man and not the rich.  "I defend fraternity–the idea that a developed country should be able to be able to provide the poorest with the minimum needed to live with dignity as a human being. The French state no longer does that," she told me. "We're in a world today in which you either defend the interests of the people or the interests of the banks." And she has seen results. She points to the northern Pas-de-Calais region. "It was socialist-communist for 80 years," she says. "I won 45%."  At the same time as Marine Le Pen was working to "de-demonise" the FN, the leaders of the Dutch far right successfully seized the mantle of radicalism by positioning itself as the only force that dares to challenge an out-of-touch political establishment, and the only party willing to speak out about what many voters fear: extremist Islam.  Geert Wilders and his Party for Freedom (PVV) have surpassed the Dutch Labour party to take up a close second place in polls ahead of the March 2017 election. Last September, Wilders declared that Europe was facing an " Islamic invasion "–the sort of comments that landed him in court this week on charges of inciting racial hatred , which he dismisses as an attack on freedom of expression.  The presence of "masses of young men in their 20s with beards singing 'Allahu Akbar' across Europe", Wilders warned at the peak of last year's refugee crisis, posed a dire threat to "our prosperity, our security, our culture and identity". Across the country, grassroots groups responded to Wilders's warning, attempting to block the resettlement of asylum seekers in their towns. Last October, Klaas Dijkhoff, the deputy minister responsible for refugee resettlement, arrived for a visit to the tiny north-eastern village of Oranje, where the Dutch government had decided to place 700 refugees. Outraged locals blocked the road leading to town, kicked Dijkhoff's car and tore off its rearview mirrors. A few days later, near Utrecht, an asylum centre was attacked by masked men with smoke bombs and fireworks.  In the decade following the assassinations of Fortuyn and Van Gogh, the integration of Muslim immigrants became the most divisive issue in Dutch politics. Suddenly, Turkish and Moroccan-born Dutch citizens became "Muslims". And as the public debate over Islam and migration grew even more hostile, even the most basic forms of visible religious observance–wearing the hijab, buying halal meat, fasting during Ramadan–became politically loaded.  The Dutch Labour MP Ahmed Marcouch, who came to the Netherlands from rural Morocco when he was 10, recounted how controversies have erupted everywhere from supermarkets to classrooms. It is a jolt to the traditionally liberal Netherlands when teenage girls tell their male teachers they can't shake hands, or that they fast and pray while many other Dutch kids are out drinking and having sex. As Marcouch remarked, it runs against everything that Dutch youth culture promotes.  Wilders's PVV has capitalised on this cultural angst by using simple and deliberately brash slogans about immigration, crime, and refugees–one of his latest memes is simply "De-Islamise"–to win over voters who feel that everything familiar to them is slipping away.  By framing its anti-migrant politics as a battle against imperious elites and political correctness, the PVV has been able to capitalise on a panoply of grievances, from anger over asylum seekers to Euroscepticism. Meanwhile, many causes of the radical left–including anti-racism and anti-colonialism–have now become establishment thinking in the Netherlands. "Idealism has been bureaucratised," argues the journalist Bas Heijne, who writes a column in the liberal daily newspaper NRC Handelsblad. "And when the establishment enforces universalism, you react against it." That's why there is such a strong anti-PC tone to the Dutch right: do not tell us what to say, what to celebrate and who we must live next to.  Just as Marine Le Pen's FN has become a huge presence on social media in France, the right is in the midst of colonising the Dutch media. Geen Stijl ("No Style"), a popular Breitbart-style news site featuring abrasive articles and videos, encourages its best and angriest commenters to visit mainstream news sites and go on the attack. "It is massively important," says Tilburg University's Merijn Oudenampsen, "like a social movement". The site began as a blog dedicated to those who felt politically homeless after Fortuyn's murder, and has since become a ubiquitous presence in Dutch public debate, with an army of "reactors" on Twitter. According to Oudenampsen, some politicians have told him that Geen Stijl is the first site they check in the morning.  The right's newfound media clout has also helped shape what the journalist Kustaw Bessems, from the leftwing Volkskrant newspaper, sees as a new, inverted, form of political correctness. In the old days, he says, there were taboos enforced by the left: badmouth immigrants and "you were immediately called a racist and extreme right and basically pressured to shut up". Now, it's the other way around. "As soon as you say anything other than 'immigration is a problem' or 'Islam is the cause of terrorism' . . . the thought police immediately jump on your neck to correct you."  A Dutch government official who focuses on security issues complained that even as the integration of Muslim immigrants and the threat of radical Islam had become the most heated and polarising issues in the Netherlands, almost none of the feverish public debate was informed by knowledge of Islamism or terrorism. While politicians fan the flames of fear, the official said, "the economists look for the economic roots of the problem, sociologists look for social causes and the anthropologists try to explain jihadi culture–but none of them have any idea about theology". Even scholars of radicalisation tend to study today's extremists through the historical lens of the European radical left–which does little to explain what leads a small number of young Muslim men such as Van Gogh's killer, Mohamed Bouyeri, to devote themselves to the cause of jihad. "It's easy to be a Marxist," the security official quipped. "It's fucking hard to be a salafi."  As the perception that the state is helpless to prevent the radicalisation of Muslim teenagers deepens and the fear of terrorism increases, so does the share of voters who are newly receptive to the far right's tirades about "Islamisation". These days it is not only anti-migration activists pushing back against the bureaucratised consensus. There are also many disappointed progressives–the people who saw the cultural victories of the 1960s and 1970s as major battles that had long since been won, making sexual freedom, feminism and gay rights an unquestioned part of Dutch society. Suddenly those old victories seem tenuous. "There is a sense that, 'We are welcoming and then they do this,' says Bas Heijne. "They have been terribly let down in their good intentions." And in such an environment, traditionally leftist constituencies such as gay people and Jews feel threatened–and some have become reflexively suspicious of Muslims.  The stereotype that observant Muslims hate gay men and lesbians has become so entrenched in the Netherlands that neither side can fathom evidence to the contrary. When the Moroccan-born Labour MP Ahmed Marcouch first joined in Amsterdam's legendary gay pride parade , he was, as he puts it, the "first hetero-active Muslim" to participate. The gay community feared violence from extremists; conservative Muslims were baffled and angry. Both groups concluded, "Oh, maybe Marcouch is homosexual too," he says with a laugh. Neither group could imagine a straight Muslim doing what he did.  But public displays of solidarity such as Marcouch's are rare. Among openly gay couples and religious Jews alike, there is a palpable fear of being targeted by homophobic or antisemitic young Muslim men. Much as in France, this fraught atmosphere has made far-right parties seem a palatable option for groups who would never previously have considered voting for them.  In Amsterdam earlier this year, I had several meetings with a staunch Jewish supporter of Wilders's PVV, who insisted on remaining anonymous. He described his own backing for the far right in terms that echoed Alain Finkielkraut. "It's an outdated reflex for Jews to always say the problem is the extreme right," he told me. "We have new enemies and we need new ideas."  The experience of his own family during the second world war has convinced him that Europe's capacity for murderous violence is always lurking beneath the surface. "Anne Frank wasn't betrayed by the Germans," he argued. "But by Dutch people. Regular Dutch." Jews need to find new allies in a new war, he argues, because they will never be safe. "The trains for the Jews will always come," he added, ominously. "I'd rather be wrong than be too calm and end up on the trains."  He is not unsympathetic to the plight of European Muslims, and told me that he even sees parallels with the persecution his own family faced. "If I were a Muslim in Europe at this moment I'd be very uneasy," he admitted. "If Europeans regain their manhood, it could be bad. It's the history of Europe to treat foreigners terribly. We Jews know that."  For that reason, he argues, Muslims should regard Wilders as a lesser evil. "Every Muslim should be happy Geert Wilders exists. If someone else channelled these hateful feelings it would be much worse," he told me menacingly. "Wilders is civil. He is a democrat. He is not the new Hitler."  To Frits Bolkestein, who led the Netherlands' centre-right VVD in the 1990s–and was briefly Wilders' boss when he was a young aide in the party office–the rise of the far right is as much about class as it is about Islam. The Dutch Labour party, he argues, gave up on its working-class base: "They made a major mistake," he says of his old rivals, with a tinge of satisfaction. Faced with "the choice between the foreign-born and the labour classes, they chose the foreign-born … and they've paid for it dearly". Current polls project that the party will drop from the 36 seats it now holds (out of 150) to just 10.  Marcouch concedes that, like the old leftists in France, many former Labour voters now back Wilders. Moreover, he says, they still live in the very neighbourhoods that families such as his own moved into in the 1980s, as many white Dutch families were moving out. "Their message to the Labour party," he said, "is: 'You ignored us. You let it happen.'"  The Danish People's Party has been seeking out such voters for years, and they have masterfully leveraged anti-immigrant sentiment to siphon away the Social Democrats' traditional base–people who fear that the "bread will be buttered more thinly", as the Danish journalist Lars Trier Mogensen puts it.  The DPP has effectively combined anti-immigrant rhetoric with a strong pro-welfare message that stresses quality health benefits and good care for the elderly. Søren Espersen, the DPP's deputy leader, doesn't think that former Social Democrats will ever go back. "When one of those takes the step to vote for us, it is a very, very huge step he is taking," he says of voters who supported the Social Democrats all their lives. "And why should he go back? I mean, to come over this first hurdle of voting for us, then he's done it."  The Social Democrats first began to lose their dominance in and around the major cities in the 1990s, with many of their votes going to the DPP. One of those places is the small satellite town of Herlev, about 10 miles west of Copenhagen. The 41-year-old Social Democratic mayor, Thomas Gyldal Petersen, has lived there all his life, and he is adamant that controlling immigration numbers is the only way to reverse his party's political misfortunes.  For Gyldal Petersen, the key to successful integration is a demographic balance. As soon as a school or housing estate becomes majority immigrant–or majority unemployed–he says, problems start to arise. He blames his own party's leaders: "Mayors in the 80s, they were warning, something is going wrong, you have to change." But the party leadership "shut their eyes", he says.  Then came the Muhammad cartoons . In 2005, the editors at Jyllands-Posten, Denmark's largest newspaper, invited a group of well-known cartoonists to draw the prophet. The initial response was underwhelming, but within a few months–through a combination of diplomatic pressure, a dismissive response from the Danish government, and a concerted campaign by local imams–the cartoons became a full-blown crisis, with boycotts of Danish products and violent protests occurring throughout the Middle East. Danes who had never contemplated voting for the DPP now saw their embassies on fire and death threats against some of their best-known journalists. Suddenly, the DPP's platform was making sense. They had warned that Muslims were extremists in waiting, and now those warnings seemed to come true. Politicians such as Naser Khader, who once warned that giving the DPP influence would weaken them, found themselves moving steadily to the right of the political spectrum. When Khader founded a new organisation called "Democratic Muslims" in the wake of the cartoon controversy, he received death threats.  Those at the top of the Social Democrats are now taking a tough stance, too. Earlier this year the party leader, Mette Frederiksen, went to Stockholm to meet with fellow Scandinavian social democrats. There she gave a speech that rattled her colleagues. "We social democrats must accept that there is a clash," she declared. "It is a very strong part of our identity that we help when people need help . . . but just as strong is our value that we must have a well-functioning welfare state." Frederiksen continued: "My position is that a universally funded Scandinavian welfare state with free and equal access to healthcare, education and social subsidies is not compatible with an open immigration policy."  But in its zeal to get tough on migration, Denmark has damaged its international reputation as a bastion of progressivism–the sort of place that Bernie Sanders liked to mention at campaign rallies. In January, just three months after the refugee crisis peaked, Denmark passed what became known as the " jewellery law ", which stipulated that any refugees carrying valuables worth more than 10,000 kroner (£1,200) would have them confiscated to fund the cost of accommodating asylum-seekers. Editorial pages and columnists across the world lined up to condemn the law. According to Kenneth Kristensen Berth, a babyfaced MP for the DPP, it was about deterrence. "The goal was, of course, that we should try to tell people that they should not seek asylum in Denmark," he said. The jewellery provision was a minor part. "More important is the fact that many people will be waiting longer for family reunification, like waiting three years," he added. And it wasn't just the DPP and government who supported it–the Social Democrats voted for it, too.  Bent Melchior, Denmark's 87-year-old former chief rabbi, was outraged. He bristled at the suggestion that refugees are rich because they flee with some money in their pockets. He would know: although Denmark is always hailed for saving its Jews during the second world war, it is often forgotten that Danish Jews paid fishermen huge sums to ferry them across to Sweden. Melchior's family paid the equivalent of "almost a year's rent of a six-room flat" just for his own passage. "Denmark is not a poor country, for God's sake," Melchior says. "There's food for everybody here, and even if we get a few tens of thousands more people, there will still be food for everybody."  The road that led a centre-left party to support such a law has been long and tortuous, but the trajectory has been clear. The Scandinavian welfare system has always been premised on solidarity, with everyone paying their fair share and receiving what they deserve. As the country has become more diverse, some of the trust sustaining it has broken down. There has been abuse of the system by immigrants, and there has been even more tabloid fearmongering depicting immigrants as cheats and leeches sucking the system dry. But the larger issue, as the Oxford economist Paul Collier has argued, is the growing unwillingness of natives to subsidise those seen as the foreign poor.  Herlev's mayor does not oppose asylum, but he insists that the numbers have to be capped. "We have to help refugees, and we have to take refugees to Denmark in a number that we can help. If the balance tips, the welfare society cannot hold together," Petersen warns.  But such balance may only help so much. Aydin Soei, a Danish sociologist and the son of immigrants from Iran, believes there is a larger blind spot in the thinking of the Danish government–one that native Danes who have never been on the receiving end of the state's integration policy have failed to see. "A lot of refugees were just parked on social welfare instead of [the state] recognising their education and their skills," Soei told me, citing the case of his own mother, who arrived in Denmark with a physics degree that was regarded as worthless. "If your motivation is to create a liberal society where the individual can create a good life for him or herself, then you would have solved this problem years ago," he argues.  Instead the state has effectively provided newcomers with an allowance and keys to an apartment, and ignored them–assuming that its work was done. The problem, Soei claims, is that there is no political incentive to integrate asylum seekers into the job market. "It doesn't have consequences for the politicians . . . because they don't have the right to vote." Either way, it plays into the DPP's argument. "Immigrants can't do right," said Gyldal Petersen. "When they're unemployed they're a burden to society. When they're in a job, they just stole the job from a Dane."  Whether or not Marine Le Pen wins next year's French election or Wilders' PVV becomes the largest party in the Netherlands, the new far right is not going away. The reflex among many establishment parties–and media institutions–has been to dismiss them, sideline them or mock them. Others, however, have begun to mimic them in an effort to win their old voters back.  Rhetoric might, in the long run, matter more than election results. When I spoke again recently with the Jewish Wilders supporter from Amsterdam, he was convinced that the battle has in some ways already been won–regardless of the outcome of next year's elections. "The PVV has shifted the whole political discussion to the right. The Labour party is saying almost exactly the same thing Wilders said five years ago," he told me. "You can have a lot of influence in politics by steering the debate."  If traditional political parties want to win, they must first abandon the old strategy of marginalising populist movements and instead engage them on the merits–and flaws–of their policies and counter their messages of fear.  Not least among the lessons of Brexit was that, for millions of disaffected voters, immigration is just one more thing nobody asked them about . This is what makes the issue an especially potent weapon: it combines the resentful energies of nativism, economic instability, and hatred of a remote and unaccountable political elite. And the leaders of the new far right have learned to wield it effectively. They know better than to let themselves be dismissed, as Jean-Marie Le Pen was, as antisemites or racists.  In France, the new majority Marine Le Pen hopes to build is strikingly similar to the coalition that brought the Brexit campaign victory. In a park near Calais' castle-like town hall in May, Samuel and Pascal, activists from a group named Retake Calais, railed against the town's centre-right mayor. They blamed her for the growth of the sprawling, trash-strewn tent city known as the Jungle, which sat three miles east of the town until it was dismantled this month . "Those who govern us are completely against us. The illegals, who aren't French, can do whatever they want," they told me. For them, even Marine Le Pen is "too soft".  If resettlement programmes take refugees away from Calais to other parts of France, as dozens of buses have in the past week since the destruction of the camp, they would not be any happier. "They're sending them to all the little villages in France," says Samuel. After they start to open businesses and bring family members, "in two years the village will be dead".  About a mile down the road, the Calais ferry terminal lies behind layers of tall steel fences and coiled barbed wire. I met Rudy Vercucque and Yohann Faviere, the local FN leaders, on a blustery morning in June outside the terminal, where they were anxiously awaiting a visiting EU dignitary. Giant seagulls circled and squawked above as they denounced the mayor, Natacha Bouchart, a member of Sarkozy's Republicans party.  "It's she who has permitted this," Vercucque, a portly 35-year-old, fumed. And it was Sarkozy, he reminded me, who negotiated the notorious Le Touquet accords , effectively moving the British border to where we were standing. Calais depends on British tourism and revenues are down sharply. The result is crippling economic and social malaise: "Find a doctor who wants to move to Calais. Find a surgeon who wants to move to Calais," Vercucque exclaimed. "You work your whole life, you pay off your house and you lose money. It's intolerable." Their support locally may have once been a protest vote, said Faviere, but no longer. "Today we really have people who adhere to our ideas."  Vercucque was more blunt: "We say out loud what people think deep down."


2016 was a great year for most of us — but just because we've gained the beachhead doesn't mean we're going to win the war. [With Brexit and Donald Trump, we've done the equivalent of capturing everywhere from Pointe Du Hoc to Pegasus Bridge. But just like with the worst of the fighting is yet to come. Our enemy is fanatical, determined, well organised. Plus, they still hold most of the key positions: the big banks, the corporations, the top law firms, the civil service, local government, the universities, the schools, the mainstream media, Hollywood … Give those bastards half the chance and they'll drive us back into the sea — which, in contemporary terms, means nixing Brexit (or giving us "soft Brexit" which is basically the same thing) and frustrating all the things President Trump will try to do to Make America Great Again. I use the war analogy first because World War II analogies never fail, but second because this really is a war that we're fighting. The bad news is that wars are hard, costly and ugly. The good news is that we're on the right side and we're going to win. Here's how: We will never underestimate the wickedness of the enemy, The loves to portray us as the bad guys. But that's just projection. From Mao's China to Stalin's Soviet Union, from Cuba to North Korea, history is littered with the wreckage of failed left wing schemes to make the world a better, fairer place. As the great, now Thomas Sowell says, "Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it. " Its malign influence is still with us today. Innocent boys being accused of rape on college campuses genuine rapes committed by gangs of Muslim taxi drivers in northern England and by gangs of Muslim immigrants in German cities like Cologne hundreds of thousands driven into fuel poverty, landscapes ravaged, avian fauna sliced and diced as a result of crazy renewable energy policies a scientist driven out of his job because a feminist loser misreported something he said about women at a conference generations of kids denied a rigorous, disciplined, useful education the needless violence and tension engendered by #blacklivesmatter: we should never concede the moral high ground to the kind of people who make all this sort of stuff possible, no matter how many times they tell us how evil and selfish and uncaring we are. We will always remember that we are better than them, I'll give you an example: the dumbass lecturer at Drexel who tweeted that what he wanted for Christmas was "white genocide". Should we be demanding that the university authorities sack him at once? Of course we shouldn't. The man has performed an invaluable public service: he has provided the perfect example of how ingrained the values of the left are in academe he has shown prospective applicants to the Politics and Global Studies course at Drexel University in Philadelphia that unless they want to be indoctrinated with lunacy they might want to reconsider he has further shown alumni of Drexel University who believe in old fashioned stuff like free markets that maybe they shouldn't include their alma mater in their million dollar bequests, after all. Sure, we should jeer and crow when we catch idiots like this man expressing reprehensible opinions. But the idea that someone should actually lose their job for something they said on Twitter ought to be anathema to those of us on the right side of the argument. One of the most thoroughly hateful things about the left is the way it tries to constrain free expression. If we play the same game, we are no better than they are. And face it: we just are. We will take the fight to the enemy, not cower in No Man's Land, One of the best things about 2016 for me was the way it gave the lie to the weaselish and wet aphorism — so often repeated by so many of our impeccably reasonable, sensible and balanced TV and newspaper pundits — that elections are "won in the centre ground. " This was the Belial philosophy that gave us, in the U. S. that hideous continuum from the Bushes and the Clintons to Obama and in Britain, the grotesque and malign Third Way squishery that took us from Tony Blair through to his ( heir) David Cameron and beyond. (It's also the mindset which invented the disgraceful, concept of "soft Brexit".) No wonder so many of us had become so fed up with politics: no matter which party you voted for, whether the notionally one or the notionally one you still seemed to end up up with the same old vested interests, the same old liberal Establishment elite. Of course we should always despise the because their philosophy is morally bankrupt, dangerous and wrong. But I sometimes think that the people we should despise most of all are the squishes who pretend to be on our side of the argument but forever betray our cause. Sometimes they do this by throwing the more outspoken among us to the wolves in order to signal how tolerant and virtuous they are sometimes they do this by endorsing some fatuous liberal position in order to show their willingness to compromise. I call the latter approach the "dogshit yogurt fallacy. " If conservatives like fruit or honey in their yogurt and liberals prefer to eat it with dogshit, it is NOT a sensible accommodation — much as our centrist conservative columnists might wish it so — to say: "All right. How about we eat our yogurt with a little bit of both?" We need to understand, very clearly, that there are such things as right and wrong and that, furthermore, it is always worth fighting to the bitter end for the right thing rather than accepting second best because a bunch of lawyers and politicians and hairdressers from Brazil and squishy newspaper columnists and other members of the liberal elite have told us that second best is the best we can hope for. On Brexit, for example, I'm with Her Majesty the Queen: "'I don't see why we can't just get out? What's the problem?' We will never apologise, never explain, never surrender, See those scalped corpses, littering the plains? These are the guys — and it is, invariably, men — who thought that if only they showed contrition for their confected crimes the enemy would leave them alone. Sir Tim Hunt apologised, the guy from Saatchi apologised, the guy on the Rosetta space programme who wore the "sexist" shirt apologised. A fat lot of good it did them. The vengeful doesn't just want humiliation — it wants total annihilation. Giving even an inch of ground to an enemy so implacable and vile is not only futile — but it also badly lets the side down by granting them a power that they do not deserve. The most recent sorry example of this was Steve Martin who actually deleted a tweet praising his late friend Carrie Fisher as a "beautiful creature" because a bunch of feminazis on Twitter complained that this was sexist objectification. Look, I know it's a scary thing when the SJW mob turns on you. But read Vox Day's SJW Attack Survival Guide, follow the example of Nigel Farage and fight these people to the very last bullet (keeping the final round for yourself). Do not surrender! (And if you need reminding why not, read this piece I wrote the other day, of which I am very proud) We will laugh in the face of death, Something I've noticed about the : they don't have a sense of humour. This is odd, given that 99. 99 per cent of professional comedians are liberals. But it's also unfailingly true. Go on social media and see for yourself: all the wittiest banter, all the funniest memes, all the snarkiest jibes — they all come from the right side of the argument, not the left. And this is as it should be for not only is humour a sign of intellectual superiority but it's also entirely the right attitude for a team that wants to win. Humour requires a degree of an ability to recognise your own weaknesses (vital if you are to triumph over them) and not to take yourself too seriously. Also, it's a sign that you are a happy warrior — in the manner of heroes like Andrew Breitbart. I always try to keep this in mind when I'm engaged in a vicious tussle with the : that witty barbs hurt them much more than anger. When your enemy takes himself so seriously, no weapon is more effective than a cutting quip. Sometimes it's hard not be to angry because the left has given us so much to be angry about. But we must resist the temptation if we can because it just plays into the left's caricature of us as angry, blustering conservatives. We should remember at all times that in the culture wars, we are the Greek city states and the enemy are the Persians. If you want to know the significance of this, I recommend you read Victor Davis Hanson's Carnage and Culture. Basically, free men will always fight better than serfs because they have more to lose … We will mercilessly expose their weaknesses, People on the are just like us, really, only slightly less evolved. Their brains are stuck in that stage of evolution just before ours — the stage when we were all roaming the plains and were programmed to respond in the most basic way to our most primal instincts. This is why so much of the 'argument' has to do with raw emotion rather than logic it's why they'll almost never engage with us on detail, preferring simply to use what Vox Day calls "point and shriek" tactics, or to try to belittle and demean us with emotive (but meaningless) pejoratives like "racist" "homophobe" "misogynist" "Islamophobe" "climate change denier. " They have been using these techniques very successfully for years and in my experience there is only one effective way of dealing with this: you have to show their workings. You have to notice what they are doing and then you have to explain to other people what they are doing. This is hard: it requires patience, courage and persistence — the equivalent of maintaining discipline under fire. Again, I refer you to this piece I wrote recently because it embodies the kind of attitude and techniques required. Essentially it was a response to a mass assault by SJWs using Twitter to brand those of us on the right as heartless, uncaring, ruthless, evil people who would use a man's recently widowed status against him. The attacks came in 140 character bursts. The response took almost 3000 words. But that's the way it is: logic and rational argument take much longer to develop than emotive cheap shots. If we don't use logic and rational argument though, we concede the field to the pointers and shriekers. Leave no man behind, Diversity is our strength. This is the kind shit leftists, say, I know, but hear me out. At a conservative political meeting I attended in DC, recently, a woman stood up to address the assembled members of the Vast Right Wing conspiracy. Black and dressed a bit like the lovable, wise sassy, prostitute character from a 1970s Blaxploitation movie, she did not look obviously like a Republican. But she was and she had come from California with a message: "Don't abandon us! We know everyone in the conservative movement thinks that California is a joke. But 40 per cent of us voted for Donald Trump and we need your help!" She's right. Unlike the left — which sees ethnic, sexual and religious minorities mainly as client victim groups to patronise and exploit for identity politics purposes — we on the right "celebrate diversity" by not giving a damn about diversity. The reason Sowell's great and Milo's great and Krauthammer's great is not because they're black and gay and disabled and therefore "helpful" to our cause, but simply because they think clearly and sensibly and have come to the right conclusions about the world. We support our own through thick and thin. We are all equal and we all have equal rights, just like the 14th amendment says. (Which means, by the way, that we don't believe in positive discrimination — which is just another form of discrimination, as practised by the disgusting left not the sensible and just right). Always attack, This, pretty much, was the tactic of the Royal Navy throughout the Napoleonic Wars — even when outnumbered and outgunned by the French and the Spanish. Today we are similarly outgunned and outnumbered by the loathsome edifice of the liberal establishment — and if we are going to reduce it to rubble, as of course we must, then we shall have to fight as aggressively as Nelson and Cochrane did. For far, far too long, conservatives have been fighting a defensive war — spending more time apologising for being conservatives than actually taking on the enemy. But at last, in the U. S. at least, we have a leader who is not afraid of a fight. What does "always attack" mean in practice, though? Well here's a perfect example: a recent New York Times story headed "Wielding Claims of 'Fake News' Conservatives take aim at mainstream media". The author of the story appears slightly taken back that conservatives are behaving in this way. Surely we should be feeling guilty for all those fake news stories spread by evil people on the internet in order to deceive the by acting against their interests by voting for Brexit and Donald Trump? But no, far from apologising it seems that we on the right have been on the attack. If anyone is responsible for pumping out fake news these last few decades its the liberal elite and their mouthpieces in the MSM, not us. OK. We're done. Unleash hell.