The hysterical entitlement of the Stop Trump protests A handful of plummy professional activists think their voices count for more than millions of American voters. Fraser Myers

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/09/16/the-hysterical-entitlement-of-the-stop-trump-protests/

Are Britain’s bourgeois activists doing okay? Donald Trump’s second state visit to the UK is set to take place this week, and I am starting to seriously worry about the mental well being of the middle-class rent-a-mob.

Those planning to protest against the Great Orange Menace seem to have genuinely mistaken the US president’s two-day jaunt in Windsor for Mussolini’s march on Rome or the Nazis rolling into Paris. A viral video by the Stop Trump Coalition, fronted by professional activist Zoe Gardner, warns that fascism is about to take over Britain, pretty much as soon as The Donald touches down on UK soil.

‘How our nation reacts [to his visit] decides everything about our future’, intones Gardner gloomily. Apparently, unless we all show up to Wednesday’s ‘Trump Not Welcome’ protest in Parliament Square, then a dystopian, Trumpian century awaits. Miss the demo, then you’d better start practising your best Sieg Heil and hiding migrants in your attic.

The alleged indignities of a ‘Trump Britain’ are spelled out in the video through a series of mock news reports. These include a ‘literal genocide’ and a state-run paramilitary ‘British Defence League’, whose officers would disappear migrants ‘without a trace’. And, horror of horrors, large England flags being draped from Tower Bridge. Worse still, no one has taken the flags down, even though ‘complaints have been lodged’ with the authorities. Hell on Earth, indeed.

Let’s be honest, it is not ‘fascism’ the plummy anti-Trump protesters are really objecting to. Because Trump is not a fascist, nor anything remotely close. It is democracy – the will of the American people, who have now installed him in the White House twice – that most disturbs the activist set.

Jeffrey H. Anderson Trump Is Right to Fight Wokeness at the Smithsonian As mostly federally funded institutions, the museums owe Americans a faithful account of their history.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/trump-smithsonian-review-woke-america

The White House announced plans last month to conduct an “internal review” of Smithsonian museums to determine whether they “reflect the unity, progress, and enduring values that define the American story.” A chorus of left-wing critics claimed that the Trump administration was trying to stifle free speech and whitewash history. New York Times culture reporter Robin Pogrebin, for example, characterized the efforts as part of “a wholesale attack on the arts” that could have “lasting, chilling effects,” as Trump attempts to “impose his vision of American history.”

In truth, it is the Left that has imposed its idiosyncratic vision of American history on the Smithsonian museums. Rather than a misguided attempt to control these museums, the Trump administration’s review is a necessary step to reclaim for the American people institutions that have long been controlled by the Left.

Consider, for example, one of the Smithsonian’s recent depictions of “American history.” In 2020, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History opened an exhibit called Girlhood (It’s Complicated). Per its chief curator, this 5,000-square-foot display partially reflects the curatorial team’s thoughts “about how intersex and transgender stories illuminate and complicate ideas about girlhood and what it means to grow up female in the United States.”

This is the kind of “history” Smithsonian visitors have come to expect. But according to Pogrebin, it is Trump who wants “a simplified version of America, a story with kind of less nuance and complexity.” In fact, however, the Left has pressured these museums to present a one-dimensional story of oppression, denying the splendor of a nation whose creation British author Paul Johnson describes as “the greatest of all human adventures.”

The Latest NAEP Disgrace U.S. students continue to perform poorly on standardized tests. By Larry Sand

https://amgreatness.com/2025/09/17/the-latest-naep-disgrace/

Every time National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores are released, it’s bad news for American students. Headlines in newspapers and websites repeat the same sad story, and the results for the “nation’s report card” released on September 9 were typical. A Wall Street Journal headline stated, “Twelfth-Grade Math and Reading Scores in U.S. Hit New Low.” The online K-12 Dive reported, “5 takeaways from another round of disappointing NAEP results,” and the NH Journal noted, “Worst-Ever NAEP Test Results a Five Alarm Fire for Public Schools.”

Indeed, the results of the latest tests conducted in spring 2024 were dismal, showing that only 22% of high school seniors are proficient or higher in math, a decrease from 24% in 2019. Additionally, only 35% of high school seniors are proficient in reading—the lowest score since NAEP began in 1969—down from 37% in 2019. Also, a record-high percentage scored at “below basic” levels in both math and reading compared to all previous assessments.

And just for good measure, the eighth-grade science test results were also released, and they were no better. The percentage of students scoring at the proficient level fell to 29%, down from 33%, and the average score returned to levels last seen in 2009, when a new version of the test was introduced.

Performance declined in all three science categories—physical, life, and earth and space sciences. Fewer than half of students can identify the main component of living cells, compared to 55% in 2019, and the percentage of students who can identify a characteristic of mammals dropped from 72% to 68%.

It’s not just the decline in skills that is concerning. The percentage of students who say they enjoy science activities fell from 52% to 42%.

Not surprisingly, students’ confidence in the subject has also worsened, with 28% saying they “definitely can do various science-related activities,” down from 34%.

The poor outcome aligns with the 4th- and 8th-grade reading and math scores, which were reported earlier this year. The results from those tests, administered in 2024, were announced in January and showed that 4th-graders continue to fall behind, with reading scores slightly lower, on average, than in 2022 and significantly lower than in 2019. Currently, only about a third of 4th- and 8th-grade students are proficient in reading and math.

No Lives Matter (Unless Democrats Can Exploit Them) We need a new accountability in America. by Derek Hunter

https://www.frontpagemag.com/no-lives-matter-unless-democrats-can-exploit-them/

George Floyd was a saint, probably better than you could ever even imagine being, a wonderful father, and was murdered by police because he was black. OK, none of that is true. George Floyd was a junkie criminal who died of a drug overdose in police custody, and the best thing he ever did for his daughter was live far away from her so she didn’t have to see her addict, criminal father steal her toys to sell for drugs. Which version do you believe says everything about your politics? If it’s the latter, you’re likely a conservative; if it’s the former, you’re probably an idiot.

On whichever side you fall, the reality is that Floyd’s death was a political opportunity of a generation for the Democrats. If you cut out the drugs and the passing off of counterfeit money, the violence, and all the other crimes, you have a wonderful man there. Of course, George was not a wonderful man; he was a bad one who died because he took too many drugs and didn’t tell the police who were arresting him that he had ingested them. It’s pretty simple.

Now he’s a mural, an abstract idea where Democrats project only good thoughts and ideals onto, ignoring the reality that they’d call the police themselves if they’d seen him walking down the street in their neighborhood. For all the “Black Lives Matter” talk, if any of those people raising money or virtue signaling off his memory had given a single damn about him while he had a life to matter, he likely wouldn’t have died of an overdose.

Hell, if any of those liberals cared beyond Floyd being a weapon, he may well have been a productive member of society who could live with, or at least near, his daughter.

Iryna Zarutska was a productive member of society, as much as any 23-year-old can be. If a junkie’s life, after decades of bad, deliberate choices, mattered, Iryna’s life mattered too. Even more.

But you aren’t allowed to say that. Left-wing media outlets lined up staff to tattoo George Floyd’s likeness on their lower backs, but couldn’t bring themselves to mention Zarutska because of her skin color.

Generation Remigration The Reclamation of Western Civilization by Linda Goudsmit

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/28821/generation-remigration

 goudsmit.pundicity.com  and website: lindagoudsmit.com 

In an extraordinary moment in the history of Western civilization, two defining events happened––the assassination of Charlie Kirk in the United States on September 10, 2025, and Tommy Robinson’s Unite the Kingdom rally in England on September 13, 2025. These two momentous events bookended the 24th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, Islamic attack on the United States of America killing 3,000 innocents.

These seemingly unrelated events are, in fact, intimately connected.

Consider the fact that before the United States of America, political power was shared between religion and state in every nation in the world. The United States of America is the greatest experiment in individual freedom the world has ever known because it separated church (religion) and state (government), specifically limited government power, and formalized the inalienable individual rights of its citizens. The United States of America broke the historical binary mold of rulers and ruled when our founding fathers created a nation of the people, by the people, and for the people––and created an upwardly mobile middle class.

American patriots have fought for our national sovereignty and individual freedom since our founding, and American patriots continue to fight to preserve our constitutional republic, while the enemies of freedom continue to try to restrict our most basic freedom––freedom of speech. Without freedom of speech there are no other freedoms. Today we are a world at war: Globalism vs Nationalism.

In a familiar divide-and-conquer strategy, the globalist elite social engineers are fomenting divisiveness in America because a house divided cannot stand. The globalist elite fund and foment the anti-American policies of the radical leftist Democrats including destruction of the family; destruction of children’s innocence; destruction of the middle-class; open borders; DEI; and Marxist collectivist indoctrination in American schools. The political objective is to create divisiveness that weaken America from within. Conflict between black/white, gay/straight, rich/poor, male/female, old/young, capitalism/socialism, individualism/collectivism, Judeo-Christian/Muslim, and Jew/Christian divisiveness are all intentionally exacerbated and exploited to weaken America.

Honoring our Founders A new book foregrounds our duty as America’s heirs. Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/honoring-our-founders/

Trent Staggs’s Heirs of the Revolution is a smart, snappy, and supremely timely jeremiad about the legacy of America’s founders, about the ways in which that legacy has been betrayed over the course of American history, and about our duty as Americans to (as the subtitle puts it) “restore our Republic.” It’s a short book, comparable to the pamphlets – most famously, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense – that, in the days of the founders, played a significant role in shaping the political ideas of the British colonists who would soon become citizens of the United States of America. And, like the best of those pamphlets, it packs a punch.

Staggs, a businessman who serves as mayor of the Utah town of Riverton (pop. 45,000) and who lost last November’s Senate election despite enthusiastic endorsements by the likes Donald Trump, Charlie Kirk, and Kash Patel, has boiled his message down to six points, each of which is given its own chapter. First, we need to restore citizenship, which, Staggs argues, “was once seen as a privilege and an honor” but “has been eroded by apathy, ignorance, and disengagement.” One aspect of serious American citizenship, he proposes, is a belief in American exceptionalism, which, he points out, can be traced back to John Winthrop, who in his 1630 sermon “A Model of Christian Charity” envisioned the New World as “a city upon a hill” that, in Staggs’s words, “had a divinely ordained responsibility to serve as an example of moral leadership and governance for the rest of the world.”

Staggs places a great deal of emphasis on dual citizenship, which he considers anathema because it “presents a direct challenge to the concept of undivided national loyalty.” I would agree that holding a US passport along with one from Iran or Qatar or North Korea is problematic, but I would contend that being (as I am) a national of two longstanding NATO allies is a somewhat different thing. Granted, the political and media establishments in Norway, where I live, can be nothing short of appalling – but then so can their counterparts in the U.S. But most of the Norwegian people are very America-friendly.

Two cases in point. The other day, when the USS Gerald Ford, the world’s largest warship, docked in Oslo harbor, crowds gathered excitedly to welcome it. A few days earlier, there was an airshow in the town where I live, and people came from all over to watch F-16s, Spitfires, and older planes do their thing. (The roar of the F-16s shook our apartment windows and scared the cats.) All that being said, I most certainly appreciate Staggs’s point about divided loyalties, which is a problem that I’ve been writing about for years, mostly in connection with the influx into the West of so-called “refugees” who retain the passports from their homelands (and often have second homes – and second wives – there) and return regularly to the places from which they supposedly fled.

Luigi’s Leftists Cheer As Judge Throws Out Terror Charges Judge rules health care CEO killer not a “terrorist” because he said he wasn’t. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/luigis-leftists-cheer-as-judge-throws-out-terror-charges/

A mob of leftists wearing green ‘Luigi’ caps and waving banners about ‘fascism’ celebrated, danced and hugged each other on a Manhattan street after terrorism and first-degree murder charges were thrown out against the leftist killer of a health care CEO.

Judge Gregory Carro argued that Luigi Mangione was wrongly being charged as a terrorist since the radical terrorist’s objective “was not to threaten, intimidate or coerce, but rather to draw attention to what he perceived as the greed of the insurance industry.”

Luigi’s means of drawing “attention” was murder which is the definition of terrorism.

The dozens of leftists crowding the narrow sidewalk outside the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse less than a dozen blocks from Ground Zero testified to the fact that Luigi Mangione was a political terrorist, part of a radical movement, killing on behalf of a larger cause. Why else was a mob wearing ‘Free Luigi’ t-shirts and caps associated with a Nintendo video game character hanging around an unappealing stretch of Center Street that not even a feeble attempt to stick a mostly unused park between the courthouses and government buildings could make livable.

It also brought home the ongoing leftist support for the “assassination culture” highlighted by Charlie Kirk before his murder and by the leftists cheering his killing across social media.

Luigi’s leftists had gathered early Tuesday morning, bringing sleeping bags, along with books about Communism and “Mansplaining’, and bottled water and Gatorade brought from nearby businesses in Chinatown run by elderly men and women who had fled Communist China.

Britain is now treating Israel as an enemy state Stephen Pollard

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/britain-now-treating-israel-enemy-173126243.htm

Speaking at a press conference last week in which he announced sanctions against Israel, Pedro Sánchez, the Spanish prime minister, bemoaned not having any nuclear weapons – because it meant he couldn’t use them to threaten Israel.

It’s certainly true that neither Sir Keir Starmer nor any member of the British Government has yet threatened the Israelis with nuclear apocalypse.

But every week brings another example of how, under Labour, Israel is now being treated as an enemy state. Today we learn that the Royal College of Defence Studies will no longer accept students from Israel, the first time it has barred Israelis since that nation’s creation in 1948.

As Amir Baram, the director general of Israel’s defence ministry (who studied at the college) put it in a letter to the  Ministry of Defence, the ban on Israelis is “a profoundly dishonourable act of disloyalty to an ally at war” and a “disgraceful break with Britain’s proud tradition of tolerance – and plain decency”.

For decades Israel has been a key ally of the UK and vice versa. Our military cooperation has been intense, to the huge benefit of both nations, and Israeli intelligence has been pivotal in preventing terror attacks here. But while no formal announcement has been made, it is clear that the Government has decided from day one that those decades as allies are now over. 

From the very beginning of its time in office it has treated Israel not as an ally fighting a proxy war on behalf of the West to defeat Islamist terror, but as a rogue state to be punished. Within weeks it restored UK taxpayer funding to Unrwa, the UN aid body some of whose employees were reportedly found to have taken part in the October 7 2023 Hamas massacre; it blocked the export of some arms to Israel; and it backed the ICC’s arrest warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, the former Israeli defence minister.

And, most perniciously, in July Sir Keir Starmer pledged to recognise a Palestinian state if there was no ceasefire in Gaza – in effect rewarding the terror group for its massacre, and explicitly refusing to make this conditional on the release of the remaining hostages.

The murder of Charlie Kirk: cancel culture turns lethal The shooting of the conservative firebrand is the grim capstone to a decade of campus intolerance. Tom Slater

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/09/11/the-murder-of-charlie-kirk-cancel-culture-turns-lethal/

Charlie Kirk is dead, aged just 31, gunned down at Utah Valley University doing what the conservative firebrand had been doing for more than a decade. Arguing, debating, talking in public. For that, he’s gone.

A manhunt is still underway, to find the scumbag who put a bullet through Kirk’s neck and deprived his wife and two children of their husband and father. We don’t yet know the motive. But it is impossible to ignore the climate in which this senseless killing has taken place.

Kirk was wearing a white t-shirt, with the word ‘Freedom’ emblazoned on it, when he was slain. It’s been the cause of his career. Bounding on to the scene in 2012, a co-founder of student group Turning Point USA, he was a seminal figure in the young-conservative pushback against the blue-haired intolerance of the campus left.

He dropped out of university himself, but cut his debating teeth touring campuses and taking on all-comers. He built an enormous following doing that most shocking of things in America in the 2010s: taking right-of-centre views to college campuses, arguing his case unapologetically, taking no prisoners but also treating those he disagreed with seriously.

Minds have turned to the rising temperature in America. To the bleak rise in political violence. To the bullet that ripped through Donald Trump’s ear last year. To Luigi Mangione shooting Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, in the back with a 3D-printed pistol.

I dare say the college campus is where this rot took hold. When Kirk was coming to prominence, students were rioting at Berkeley because Milo Yiannopoulos had dared to show up, or were manhandling academics at Middlebury for interviewing Charles Murray. Now, campus cancel culture has turned deadly.

Speech is violence. Words wound. These are the toxic fictions that have infected the West’s universities, media and cultural elites. Now we are confronted with the bloody consequences of it. For if speech is violence then surely violence is a legitimate response to speech?

Jennifer Weber The Nation’s Report Card Shows How Education Policy Has Failed After a decade of low standards, student performance is slipping.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/nations-report-card-education-students-math-reading

The 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress—also known as the “Nation’s Report Card”—is now out. It shows 12th-graders’ performance slipping to a record low.

According to the report, one-third of seniors are reading at a below-basic level, and only 35 percent are proficient or above. In math, 45 percent are below basic, with just 22 percent meeting proficiency. The proportion of students at the 10th and 25th percentiles has fallen to historic lows, widening the gap between the highest-and lowest-achieving students and leaving many unprepared for life after high school.

The declines reflect the failures of more than a decade of educational policy—specifically, a retreat from expectations that began under the Common Core Standards and continued under the Every Student Succeeds Act.

Declines have not always been so predictable. Under the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, passed in 2002, results were more stable. Reading scores remained 25 percent below-basic and 37 percent proficient, while math scores remained 33 percent below-basic and about 25 percent proficient. As Roberta Rubel Schaefer recently explained for City Journal, NCLB established rigorous, content-rich curriculum standards and tracked schools and students’ performance through regular testing, encouraging a culture of educational excellence.

After 2013, as states adopted the Common Core Standards and later, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) took effect in 2016, progress declined. Proficiency remained stagnant, while the number of students reading and doing basic math below the basic level increased.