NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Is America Heading Toward a New Civil War? The Left’s love for violence suggests that it is. by Robert Spencer 1 Co

Posted By on September 12th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/is-america-heading-toward-a-new-civil-war/

Is America heading toward a civil war? The assassination of Charlie Kirk shows yet again that the chasm between patriotic Americans and the left is certainly growing all the time and shows no signs of healing. One telling indication that the nation might be heading toward a new civil conflict is the fact that political tensions have not been this high since the run-up to secession and the attack on Fort Sumter, and that numerous leftists are increasingly open about their lust for violence, cheering.on Kirk’s death with unalloyed joy.

The murder of Charlie Kirk didn’t happen in a vacuum. Leftist leaders have been calling for violence, and now their calls have been heeded.

“Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption — but I am now,” said far-left Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker back in April. “These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace.” That was after Rep. Kweisi Mfume (D-Victimhood) said in February: “This will be a congressional fight, a constitutional fight, a legal fight, and on days like this a street fight, yes we will stand.” And that was not long after House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-Hey, I’m a Victim Too) said this of the “extreme MAGA Republican agenda”: “We are going to fight it legislatively. We are going to fight it in the courts. We’re going to fight it in the streets.”

Before them, it was Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, and Kamala Harris inciting leftist violence. And let’s not forget Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-Grillmaster) saying in 2020, when condemning the pro-life leanings of Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh: “I want to tell you, Gorsuch; I want to tell you, Kavanaugh: You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price.”

Leftists outside of politics joined in the fun as well: remember, to take just a few of many available examples, Kathy Griffin holding Trump’s bloody severed head, or Madonna saying she wanted to blow up the White House, or Robert DeNiro bellowing that he wanted to punch Trump in the face.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

How the EU Pays Mainstream Media to Promote Its Narratives by Robert Williams

Posted By on September 11th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21870/eu-pays-media

The report also shows that the EU runs a highly sophisticated “EU media complex” through which it gets to shape media narratives about itself and its agendas.

The European Commission has, it seems, has literally paid off almost everything and everyone in the media world — meaning that everyone, from news agencies to media outlets, public broadcasters and other media organizations, sits in the pocket of the European Commission to greater or smaller degrees.

These abundant examples of media and news organizations are just those within the EU. The EU, however, is also operating a large-scale influence operation outside of the EU….

There is nothing transparent about any of this funding. According to the report, it is opaque and difficult to uncover.

“The EU’s ever-expanding system of media financing…creates financial dependencies, incentivises narrative conformity and fosters an ecosystem in which dissenting voices are marginalised – all under the virtuous banners of ‘fighting disinformation’, ‘promoting European values’ and ‘building a European public sphere'” — Thomas Fazi, “Brussels’s media machine: European media funding and the shaping of public discourse,” June 2025.

The EU sadly appears to be a deeply corrupt and undemocratic regime, which desperately clings to power through influence-peddling and the imposition of heavy-handed censorship. Hundreds of millions of Europeans continue to put up with these tactics. When will they please wake up?

The unelected leadership of the evidently corrupt European Union (EU) is now paying mainstream media to promote the agendas of its EU “elites.” The EU appears to have spent as much as 1 billion euros during the past decade alone in the process, according to a recent report, “Brussels’s media machine: European media funding and the shaping of public discourse,” by Thomas Fazi, from the European think tank MCC Brussels.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Four Horsemen of the Western Apocalypse Europe faces four self-inflicted crises—radical green mandates, collapsing families, unchecked immigration, and rising tribalism—that now threaten Western civilization itself. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on September 11th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/09/11/the-four-horsemen-of-the-western-apocalypse/

Europe is plagued by a number of existential crises. Yet they are all self-inflicted—and by a dominant, therapeutic culture that embraced utopian but lethal bromides.

These suicidal wounds are now nearing the end-stage. Indeed, they are destroying the very civilization that was soon envisioned to be heaven on earth.

The global warming hysterics could not just entertain gradual transformations away from dependencies on traditional fuels and power generation.

Instead, elites have demanded catastrophic and near-instant “net zero” mandates. That radicalism entailed transitioning to unreliable and costly solar and wind energy. Fuel and electricity prices then soared.

The green socialist elite cared little that shutdowns of nuclear, coal, natural gas, and oil power generation would cripple industry, reduce living standards, and impoverish Europe.

Germany, the once economic powerhouse of Europe, became a shell of its former self. The same efforts accelerated under the Obama and Biden administrations in the U.S.

Both administrations sought to slash new fossil fuel production and use, without regard to the costs, dangers to the economy, or deleterious effects on the middle class and poor.

Second, for the last half-century, affluent Westerners embraced the idea that there were no normative lifestyles. Often, they claimed nuclear families with 2-3 children were parochial and passé.

Children supposedly inhibited the lifestyles and aspirations of women. Larger families, we were told, unfairly burdened upscale professionals with unneeded costs and offered biased and injurious models to gays, the transgendered, and single, childless men and women.

The result is that the fertility rate plummeted in the West, particularly in Europe (1.4) and the United States (1.6), to unsustainable levels.

Academia, the media, government, and foundations promoted these ideas of “empowerment”—despite the historical evidence that societies that cannot reproduce themselves age, ossify, and finally implode.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Up-Close Killers, Then and Now by Rafael Medoff

Posted By on September 11th, 2025

https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/opinion/383639/up-close-killers-then-and-now/

    What kind of human being is capable of walking up to another person—an innocent, defenseless, unarmed civilian—and, at close range, shooting him or her?

    That question must be on the minds of many who are reading about the Palestinian Arab terrorist attack on bus passengers in Jerusalem this week. The killers were within a few feet of their victims.

    Prof. Daniel Goldhagen considered this question in his famous book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners. There are those who dislike comparisons between contemporary terrorists and the Nazis. Let’s take a closer look at Goldhagen’s analysis and consider whether it’s valid to compare up-close killers, then and now.

    Goldhagen focused on a particular German police unit, Reserve Police Battalion 101, which carried out up-close shootings. That segment of the genocide, which historians today call “the Holocaust by bullets,” took place before gas chambers became the Germans’ primary means of mass murder.

    In June 1942, five hundred battalion members were assigned to the town of Jozefow, in German-­occupied southern Poland. They were instructed to force local Jews out of their homes, take them to a nearby forest, and shoot them point-­blank.

    When a truck unloaded its Jewish prisoners at the edge of the Józefów forest, each of the waiting policemen selected a victim. The two then walked together to the nearby execution site. Many of the captives were children. The walk “afforded each perpetrator an opportunity for reflection,” Goldhagen noted. “It is highly likely that, back in Germany, these men had previously walked through woods with their own children by their sides. . . . In these moments, each killer had a personalized, face-­to-face relationship to his victims.”

    Goldhagen wondered if the typical killer ever “asked himself why he was about to kill this little, delicate human being who, if seen as a little girl by him, would normally have received his compassion, protection, and nurturing.” Or perhaps it was that the killer could only “see a Jew, a young one, but a Jew nonetheless,” and therefore accepted “the reasonableness of the order, the necessity of nipping the believed-­in Jewish blight in the bud.”

MEDIA, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Trump Trap If you make everything about Donald Trump, as the press has for ten years, the simplest headlines quickly become tortured Matt Taibbi

Posted By on September 11th, 2025

https://www.racket.news/p/the-trump-trap

A brief note on headlines inspired by the Charlotte murder of 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska: “A Gruesome Murder in North Carolina Ignites a Firestorm on the Right” by the New York Times, and “How the lives of a Ukrainian refugee and a Charlotte man with a criminal history converged in a fatal stabbing,” by CNN:

When you cover everything in the world through the lens of Donald Trump, and Trump must not only always be wrong but the avatar of ultimate evil, outlets like the Times and CNN are forced forever to find opposing angles to anything he criticizes. A horrific murder can’t just be that, but an “accelerant for conservative arguments about the perceived failings of Democratic policies.” CNN’s account was like the screenplay to Crash, about how “the paths of two people fatally converged,” culminating in an act “decried by the Trump administration and conservative politicians as an example of the violent crime they say plagues many Democrat-led cities.”

Forget about attacker Decarlos Brown’s mental health, these stories (and others, like the Axios report “Stabbing Fuels MAGA’s crime message” and Brian Stelter’s bizarre outburst about the reaction being “baldly racist”) show the press is in the grip of severe monomania and madness. Nothing exists outside of Trump, the subject of every line of every story. Incredible, and unsettling, to watch.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Southern Surge in Education By Frederick M. Hess

Posted By on September 11th, 2025

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2025/10/the-southern-surge-in-education/

These four states have a lot to teach the country about teaching

It’s been a grim stretch for America’s schools. Reading and math achievement are in a decade-long swoon. This year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) yielded the worst fourth-grade reading outcomes in 20 years, with 40 percent of students scoring below basic proficiency. For eighth-graders, reading scores hit a historic low — with 33 percent below basic. Meanwhile, chronic absenteeism is way up, as are grade inflation and misbehavior.

At this point, the nation’s most popular K–12 reform is the push to let families opt out and choose new schools. There is, however, one notable good-news story when it comes to school performance that hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves: A handful of red states are making notable gains — and putting their big-spending peers to shame. Their success has come to be called the Southern surge.

On the new NAEP (better known as the Nation’s Report Card), just two states, Alabama and Louisiana, had math or reading scores higher than what they were in 2019, pre-Covid. When researchers at the left-leaning Urban Institute adjusted 2025 NAEP results based on state demographics, Mississippi fourth-graders topped the country in math and reading. Louisiana’s fourth-graders led the nation in reading growth for the past two NAEP cycles and rank fifth nationwide for math growth. In fact, the two states were in the top four in every category. These accomplishments have taken many by surprise, perhaps because of a habit of imagining the South as a cultural backwater.

The Education Recovery Scorecard, a Harvard-Stanford research collaboration, tracks how well states are making up academic ground lost after 2019. The most recent results offer an eye-popping portrait of the Southern surge: Alabama was first in math recovery and third in reading recovery; Louisiana was second and first, Mississippi sixth and fourth, and Tennessee third and ninth. Chad Aldeman, a respected education analyst and old Obama hand, makes clear the extent of the “Mississippi miracle,” noting that Mississippi’s black students “rank third nationally, and its low-income kids outperform those in every other state.” Mississippi is the “only state to see gains across all performance levels over the last decade. Its average went up, but so did the scores of its highest and lowest performers.”

What’s driving these results? A commitment to basic skills, especially through phonics-based early-literacy instruction, and rigorous classroom materials.

MEDIA, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

MSNBC Apologizes for Pundit’s ‘Inappropriate, Insensitive’ Remarks About Charlie Kirk By Haley Strack

Posted By on September 11th, 2025

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/msnbc-apologizes-for-pundits-inappropriate-insensitive-remarks-about-charlie-kirk/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=hero&utm_content=related&utm_term=first

MSNBC has apologized for “inappropriate, insensitive” comments made on air about Charlie Kirk in the immediate aftermath of his assassination.

During a segment with Katy Tur, guest Matthew Dowd called Kirk one of the most “divisive” figures who “is constantly pushing hate speech.”

“Hateful thoughts lead to hateful words which then lead to hateful actions,” Dowd said. (He also said, before Kirk’s death was confirmed, “We don’t know any of the full details of this yet — we don’t know if this was a supporter shooting their gun off in celebration.”)

On Wednesday evening, MSNBC president Rebecca Kutler issued a statement condemning his comments:

During our breaking news coverage of the shooting of Charlie Kirk, Matthew Dowd made comments that were inappropriate, insensitive and unacceptable. We apologize for his statements, as has he. There is no place for violence in America, political or otherwise.

Dowd’s statement, though, was hardly the only troublesome treatment of the Charlie Kirk shooting in the media. Even Tur’s comments were out of place: She worried on air that the Trump administration would use Kirk’s assassination as “justification” for further crackdowns on crime. “After one of the DOGE employees was allegedly attacked in Washington, D.C., that’s what Donald Trump used as justification to send federal troops into Washington, D.C., to get things under control — the carjacking situation, he used that. And I know it’s hard to predict the future, but you can imagine the administration using this as a justification for something,” she said.

Charlie Kirk was at Utah Valley University on Wednesday as part of his American Comeback campus tour. Kirk set up a table, as he does at his campus events, and invited students to come forward, ask questions, and prove his opinions wrong. The hellish tragedy that then unfolded was caught on video: Kirk was asked a question about transgender shooters, and when he began to answer, he was shot in the neck.

Democrats, Republicans, media pundits, and the hundreds of thousands of Kirk’s followers who watched the scene have, for the most part, been unified in condemning the attack. But some directed their ire at the wrong target.

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker said in response to Kirk’s murder that Donald Trump’s rhetoric has “fomented” political violence and that January 6 “tripped a new era” of political violence.

A New York Times obituary (“Charlie Kirk Right-Wing Force and a Close Trump Ally, Dies at 31”) of Kirk called him “a fixture in the Trumpian media sphere” who “tweeted relentlessly with a brash right-wing spin, including inflammatory comments about Jewish, gay and Black people. Even some conservatives found his approach distasteful.”

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The pathological chutzpah of Israel’s critics Israel’s strike on Doha has exposed the cant and hypocrisy of its haters in the West. Brendan O’Neill

Posted By on September 11th, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/09/10/the-pathological-chutzpah-of-israels-critics/

Israel’s in trouble now. For none other than Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart, the two cheeks of the bony arse of British centrism, have done an ‘emergency podcast’ on its bombing of Hamas leaders in Qatar yesterday. I bet the Jewish nation is quaking. It might have faced off against the neo-fascists of Hamas and Hezbollah but now it faces a far more formidable foe: an army of turbo-smug centrist dads in Next cardigans nodding vigorously as the two perfumed ponces of The Rest is Politics give it what-for on an impromptu pod. It’s curtains for you now, Israel!

Have you ever, in your life, heard of anything as hubristic and ridiculous as an ‘emergency podcast’? These are hitherto untapped depths of human vanity, as if the world and its dog are just sitting around waiting to hear what a cranky old spin doctor and failed Tory have to say about Israel’s wars. It was Campbell who announced it. ‘We will be doing an emergency podcast [at] 4.15pm’, he said, ‘on the catastrophic events in Qatar’. It’s hard to know what’s more batshit: telling us the weirdly specific time at which they’ll be recording their prattle, or thinking it’s ‘catastrophic’ that some Hamas cunts got blown up.

Actually, here’s what’s most batshit: the idea that Alastair Campbell has the moral authority to wag a finger at a nation at war. The Qatar strike proves we live in a world where ‘strongman leaders think they can do what they want where they want with impunity’, he said. That sound you can hear is a hundred thousand Iraqis rolling in their graves. This is the man whose bollocks and bluster when he was Tony Blair’s spin doctor helped to justify a truly ‘catastrophic’ war against a nation that hadn’t even attacked us. And he thinks he can hold forth on Israel’s targeting of the anti-Semitic freaks who raped and murdered more than a thousand of its citizens? These are industrial-strength levels of brass neck.

The Campbell / Stewart wang-fest on Israel’s ‘catastrophic’ bombing of Islamofascists really does sum up the imperious conceit of Israelophobia. Here we have a propagandist for one of the bloodiest wars of modern times (Campbell), and the man who served as a colonial-style governor in Iraq once it had been violently subdued by the West (Stewart), badgering Israel for firing a few missiles at the terror army that invaded its territory and murdered its people. It’s like being lectured about misogyny by Fred West.

Israel’s strike on the Hamas leaders holed up in Doha really has exposed the pathological chutzpah, the cavernous gall, of its preening critics in the West. No sooner had it fired its missiles at the assembled militants than a chorus of condemnation was ringing out in the West’s corridors of power and our haughty media. This was a ‘flagrant violation of Qatar’s sovereignty’, yelped useless Keir Starmer. Oh, so Mr Second Referendum, that implacable old foe of Brexit, suddenly gives a shit about sovereignty? Good to know.

To be clear, Israel’s whack on Doha is a striking development. This is the first time Israel has fired at a Western-backed Gulf state. Qatar had long considered itself immune to the Middle East’s waves of violence, not least because it is close to mighty America and home to Al Udeid, the largest US airbase in the Middle East. It seems Britain had no advance warning of Israel’s attack but America did, and apparently America is not best pleased. Trump reportedly feels ‘very badly’ about it. And it’s unclear if the strike was a success: Hamas says five of its members were killed but its leaders survived.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Charlie Kirk Assassinated Where the Left’s rhetoric inevitably leads. by Mark Tapson

Posted By on September 11th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/charlie-kirk-targeted-for-assassination/

Turning Point USA founder and conservative commentator Charlie Kirk was the target of an assassin on Wednesday afternoon as he fielded questions from a large audience during an event at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah.

Amid a student Q&A session, a shot rang out, reportedly from a building about 200 yards from the stage, and witnesses attest that Charlie was shot in the neck. Video captures show him flinching from a neck wound. Kirk’s security team whisked him away. The event erupted into chaos as attendees fled, but in short order social media circulated claims that a suspect was in custody. Those claims unsurprisingly turned out to be false.

Initial reports were that Kirk’s condition was serious but not life-threatening, but shortly after the shooting Kirk’s broadcast platform, Real America’s Voice, posted, “Charlie Kirk Has Passed.” And then the eulogies began pouring in.

President Trump himself posted on X, “The Great, and even Legendary, Charlie Kirk is dead. No one understood or had the Heart of the Youth in the United States of America better than Charlie.”

JD Vance weighed in online as well: “Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord.”

Ron DeSantis mourned, “Rest in Peace, Charlie Kirk. Casey and I are praying for his family. Charlie was a warrior for liberty, and his murder is a tragedy for our nation.”

A poster called FischerKing wrote, “They killed a 31 year old father of two whose only crime was to go to university campuses and engage in good faith with people who disagreed with him. If this isn’t a wake up call then we’re never going to wake up.”

Brace yourself for the usual deflections from the Left-wing media as they try to justify the killing with such excuses as “Kirk was a polarizing figure,” as well as the predictable, outright gleeful gloating on Left-wing social media outlets like Bluesky. Such hateful rhetoric, including the Left’s vicious and routine demonization of their political opponents as Nazis and fascists, is precisely what leads to everyone from Catholic schoolchildren to the President of the United States – and now Charlie Kirk – being targeted for murder.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Dangerous Wages of Oikophobia The decline of patriotism displayed by Democrats after 9/11 has metastasized. by Bruce Thornton

Posted By on September 11th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-dangerous-wages-of-oikophobia/

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 were the most momentous and vicious assaults on our homeland in its history. The primary targets––the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon–– were chosen in order to inflict the maximum spectacular carnage on innocent people, and to achieve the greatest symbolic resonance of hatred against our global power.

The People’s immediate reactions were an outpouring of righteous anger and patriotic passion––from flying flags to enlisting in the military services. But it wasn’t enough to prevent in a few years the widespread return of oikophobia, the hatred of our country, its political order, history, mores, and fellow citizens; or restore our traditional oikophilia, the patriotic pride and love for all those defining goods of America that had been brutally attacked by terrorists.

Despite the various rationalizations promulgated by Osama bin Laden and his Islamic jihadist propagandists, America was attacked not for our alleged geopolitical sins, but for what we are: a multiethnic, self-governing, liberal democracy that maximizes freedom and autonomy under law for the greatest number of people––a way of life and a suite of ideals whose obvious global success and power, symbolized by the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, incite the envy and hatred of all those cultures that subordinate individual freedom and worth, to the power and privilege of economic, political, or religious elites, and so ensure their own societies’ dysfunctions and tyranny.

On 9/11, many patriotic Americans, including even liberals, displayed their grief and patriotism at a level we hadn’t seen since the brief celebrations of Ronald Reagan’s dismantling of the Soviet Union, and kicking communism’s biggest power into the rubbish-bin of history.