While it seems like every major story on the planet involves the Trump administration, things have actually been rather interesting in the rest of the world. Under the leadership of former ski bum Justin Trudeau, our neighbor to the north seems to be embracing some of the values that have made Europe so inhospitable to its indigenous population.

As Barbara Kay has explained both in print and other media, the proposed law by a Muslim MP targeting Islamophobia is simply a pretext to police inconvenient thought which happens to offend the political class. Keep in mind, the country was no bastion of free speech before discussion of this non-binding resolution discussed in the House of Commons of Canada. The long prosecution of Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant for dissident speech, as well as the demise of Free Dominion at the hands of inquisitor Richard Warman, attest to that.

The idea that this is simply a noble effort to protect Canada’s ruthlessly persecuted Muslim minority is belied by the robust effort that community has made to make acceptance of Islam by Canadian natives mandatory. Contrary to popular belief among the ruling class and its eager supplicants, Islamophobia is not a real issue. The terms itself is an ad hominem meant to distract from the disturbing frequency with which the adherents to Islam murder/intimidate those who are not.

If you want to experience what real fear looks like, I suggest you take a trip to Europe, where the paragons of virtue that run that continent have turned a glorious civilization into what increasingly looks like a garrison state. From the bullet-proof glass wall built around the base of the Eiffel Tower, announced in the wake of a respectful Egyptian’s jihadist machete attack at the Louvre and several thwarted Islamic terror attacks, to the fence being constructed between Latvia and Russia, to the Catholic pensioners being murdered by Saudi migrants, there are signs everywhere that Europe is under siege.

The fact that European governments are persecuting those who speak the truth about the wave of migrant crime merely serves to illustrate how warped the values which animate Europe’s ruling class are. That they continue to entrust with power, however ceremonial it may be, the same people who brought their continent to the brink of the abyss demonstrates how disconnected they are from the anger and discontent animating Europeans in France, Denmark, the Netherlands and throughout a continent being ravaged by undiluted multiculturalism, moral relativism, and perpetual open borders.

The fact that the vast majority of Europeans vehemently oppose further Muslim immigration is deemed irrelevant by those who want to transform the continent of Europe. Those who rule have made the replacement of Western peoples with Islamic settlers a priority, despite the intense suffering of the Middle East’s persecuted Christian minority, and woe to anyone who opposes this grand project. 2016 was not the end of the fight against this mentality-which has governed the West for over half a century-it was just the beginning.

This is what multiculturalism, wedded to corporate groupthink, has given us.  How long before some vibrantly diverse municipalities decide to ban Halloween in the name of preserving the tender sensibilities of their Muslim citizens? The current year isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

I took the image you see above in my old stomping grounds of Bay Ridge, which has earned the moniker Beirut in recent years, for obvious reasons. Aside from the Alpine Theater-which was in danger of being added to the adjacent mosque at one point-and Galaxy Comics, you would be hard-pressed to find a building along Bay Ridge or 5th Avenue whose awning was not covered in Arabic script. Judging by the number of hookah bars, halal restaurants and food carts, not to mention demure apparel shops for the fashion forward 7th century Muslima, a tourist would be forgiven for thinking he’d landed somewhere in the Maghreb rather than southwest Brooklyn.

Lest you think the Islamic Leadership Of New York is merely a benign group of patriotic citizens, here is the website mobilizing this New York’s civic-minded Muslims. Although seemingly under construction, you will notice a few things which belie the red, white and blue messaging of the banner seen in my photograph. Leaving aside the fact that every member of this group’s executive committee is a man-I’m sure there’s absolutely no Koranic basis for that anomaly-you’ll also notice a few other oddities, including the prominent place of unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombings and former Louis Farrakhan acolyte  Siraj Wahhaj. After all, what could be more quintessentially American, more mom and apple pie, than working with the leader of a mosque which invites 9/11 truthers to expatiate on topics of public interest and believes this country serves no greater purpose than to enlarge upon the Caliphate?

Perhaps North American offshoots of the Muslim Brotherhood, several of which are members of Majlis Ashura, including the Islamic Circle of North America, Mohammed Morsi’s old pals. It almost makes you wonder if those Americans who oppose resettling tens of thousands of Syrian Muslim refugees in the United States might be on to something after all. Is it possible that the adulatory praise Muslims receive from the American press corps, and the self-serving dawah Muslims themselves churn out for public consumption, is simply a load of manipulative crap? These are questions begging to be asked, especially since the leading presidential candidate’s closest aide is a woman intimately linked to radical Islamists.

That’s right, in addition to being an unofficial political liaison for rich donors to the elaborate money-laundering scheme known as the Clinton Foundation, Huma Abedin is also the daughter of a woman who-like most Pakistanis-doesn’t believe in quaint Western customs like women’s emancipation. Saleha Abedin does believe that Muslims in the diaspora-men, at the very least-are entitled to the full panoply of rights and privileges, including, presumably, the right not to have their religious beliefs critically examined by non-Muslims. In fairness, her parents were recruited to Saudi Arabia for the express purpose of proselytizing for the Muslim World League, an anti-Semitic, anti-Christian, Wahhabist NGO bankrolled by the Saudi government, so these beliefs shouldn’t come as much of a surprise.

Whether these beliefs influenced their daughter is an open to question, but the fact that no mainstream media outlet has deigned to ask that question tells you how thoroughly corrupt the fourth estate has become. While European nations are having their national identities effaced under a flood of migration, America is undergoing its own radical transformation which is being cheered on by the ruling class. The lives our our fellow citizens are under attack, both literally and figuratively, by invaders it has welcomed into this country and their instinctive reaction is to condemn the victims of these assaults. If the Majlis Ashura gets its way, expect more attempts to squelch the speech of its perceived enemies. Their preferred candidate has already promised as much in private. After all, what difference does it make?

If you’re a Democratic nominee with no charisma, a closet filled with potentially embarrassing skeletons, and a constituency which is largely fictive, having open borders shills in charge of the 3rd most popular website on the planet, which hundreds of millions people use as their daily news feed, doesn’t exactly hurt your cause. Especially when they suppress problematic news leaks.

Are you still feeling the Bern?

h/t The Rebel.

Update: The jihadist truck driver, Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, was known to police, naturally. 

English language updates from Michael Horowitz. 

What we know. 

A timeline of the attack. 

The Nice attack: a firsthand account. 

What pathological altruism looks like. 

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. 

Flashback. 

A reasonable solution. 

A column written by Pat Buchanan in the wake of the Pulse night club massacre. 

Let’s not forget the real victims of this horrific event. Muslims who might briefly feel guilty about the massacres of innocent human beings which their co-religionists routinely commit. 

State of emergency. 

More coverage of the ongoing terror attack in Nice. 

A minimum of 60 fatalities. 

What will it take?!

Unconfirmed local reports that the driver has died.

Yet another attempted mass murder in the streets of France. Follow live coverage on Sky News. More photos and video coverage, courtesy of Heavy.

It’s difficult to keep track of developments on the Brexit front, as news seems to be breaking nearly every minute. However, I’d like to provide you with some of the more useful observations about what has occurred in the UK and across the globe since Thursday. One of the most important questions, of course, is what happens next. As others have pointed out, this was a non-binding referendum and there is theoretically nothing preventing a Europhile political class from simply ignoring the will of the people. In fact, that is precisely the course some Labour MPs are suggesting Westminster take. Although these sentiments won’t be voiced publicly by many, the contempt the Labour Party’s political representatives  have for the people they purportedly represent is unmistakable. Nothing illustrates this more vividly than the campaign to sack Jeremy Corbyn for being insufficiently supportive of an institution that over 17 million Britons detest.

And while Hillary comforts herself by repeating the mantra that America is not the United Kingdom, the truth is that political fallout from Brexit will be felt throughout the globe, which includes the United States. What occurred in Great Britain is a stunning, remarkable defeat of the global left-one which everyone on the right, wherever you live, should rejoice in-but it’s even more significant than that. It’s a defeat for the political philosophy of globalism, the insidious idea that we would all be better off as deracinated cosmopolites stripped of our cultural patrimony-including our God-given right to speak our minds, even if it offends the religion of grievance.

Those who’ve profited from this philosophy are rightly terrified, and their hysteria will only increase as they realize that they are completely unequipped to roll back this revolution. A revolution that, as both Peter Hitchens and Daniel Greenfield have pointed out, was led by a new coalition that consists of disenfranchised Old Labour and Conservative voters. Individuals whose will has been, and continues to be, ignored by their representatives, but who have finally found their voice. Perhaps that voice is unsettling to toffs like Owen Jones because it sounds like Tommy Robinson-or a close approximation thereof-but it’s the voice of Great Britain and it needs to be respected.

This is a country which has just accomplished something extraordinary. It has begun to crack the foundation of soft totalitarianism which has governed Europe for nearly half a century. It started the restoration of freedom and self-government which has been the hallmark of the United Kingdom for nearly 8 centuries. Even those who left the UK when the European Project appeared invincible can take pride in what their countrymen have accomplished. This is an historic moment, and it cannot be wasted. The British have reaffirmed their heritage, it’s time for the rest of the world to follow.

To paraphrase the late Joe Sobran, hate speech is any speech liberals hate. Now that leading Web giants and the EU superstate have cemented a pact to target this pernicious threat to civilization, we’ll all have a better understanding of what exactly the egalitarian left considers to be hateful. The question remains, what do we to in order to make our voices heard in the face of an open conspiracy to silence them? The first step is refusing to be cowed into submission. A perfect response, which utilizes Twitter’s platform in order to expose the cowardice and hypocrisy of this campaign, is the I Stand With Hate Speech hashtag.

Aside from leveraging media attention to highlight our perspective, it also rejects the central premise of our ideological opponents. Namely, that we can be shamed into not expressing opinions which dissent from the culturally Marxist weltanschauung. One of the most powerful tools in the regressive left’s arsenal is its willingness to declare widely held, factually based beliefs off-limits. To delegitimize perfectly acceptable thoughts through a campaign of intellectual intimidation-a campaign aided by the cowardice and lack of will displayed by its opponents. We can’t defeat the left without disarming social progressives of one of their chief weapons, and the only way to do that is by refusing to be shamed.

Per Gavin McInnes, these people feed upon admissions of guilt from their enemies. They refuse to debate the actual issues because their arguments are meritless, which is why they focus upon extracting confessions from those who hold heretical opinions, a la the medieval Roman Catholic Church. Truckling to their demands does not make them more conciliatory or open to dialogue. To the contrary, it only emboldens them, as liberal college professors and presidents throughout the country have discovered through their encounters with the Black Lives Matter mob. These people do not want to entertain a rational discussion, they want a pound-or several pounds-of flesh from their enemies.

The only proper response to this jihad against free thought and expression is…fuck you. We won’t apologize for or minimize our beliefs because they are correct-and held by one of the most enlightened human beings on the planet, BTW. Imbecilic buzzwords like “xenophobe” and “racist” should have no impact on someone who realizes their intent, which is simply to bully you into submission. We all need to shed our fear of ostracism, like Pax Dickinson, which is paralyzing and inimical to the preservation of Western civilization. Regardless of one’s feelings about Donald Trump, and I’m the first to concede that he’s a deeply flawed candidate, he must be praised for being the first national conservative to confront the social justice warriors and their media enablers on their own terms.

The specter of a man who simply refuses to be shamed into obeisance, who rejects the cultural shibboleths of the institutional left, has sent the media into a tailspin and forced social progressives to reexamine their entire political strategy. After all, what do you do when the only weapon in your rhetorical arsenal, i.e. condemning your opponents for their non-bien pensant views, is a dud?

There are a number of strategies the right can and should implement as its ability to broadcast its political philosophy becomes increasingly circumscribed. Leveraging new media against one another is one such possibility. Creating our own platforms, professional and compelling ones, to disseminate our views is essential. But so is using existing platforms which are committed to the free exchange of ideas, even those ideas which challenge the prevailing kultursmog. One of the most heartening recent developments is the proliferation of Bitcoin, which gives ordinary individuals a decentralized alternative to the existing government-created and administered fiscal institutions.

Even so, I think what we need to keep in mind while pursuing all of these paths is the need to internalize a rejection of the left in its entirety. Not simply the principles of the left, but its primary mode of discourse, which includes a refusal to accede to any of its premises-including their demand that you apologize or modify what you believe because it’s “racist,” “sexist,” or “xenophobic.” We need to follow the lead of the late Andrew Breitbart, as well as men like Mark Steyn, Gavin McInnes, and Ezra Levant, and tell our enemies that they don’t get to dictate the terms of debate. They don’t get to force us to voluntarily give them our scalps as a sign of contrition for having transgressed leftist norms.

Our enemies need to be crushed, and the first step to doing so is refusing to bend the knee to their soul-enervating, culturally destructive, idiotic beliefs. Just as the soldiers of Allah gain strength through the cowardice of their enemies, the left is likewise empowered by any sign of weakness or contrition. The only solution to this problem is to be bold and proudly declare your beliefs, regardless of the consequences. It’s not only a risk dispersal strategy but a sound philosophy of life. Don’t allow your enemies to choose the field of battle, it’s a sure-fire way to be defeated, which is something we cannot afford as a civilization. It’s time we stopped being penitents and started being aggressors.

I think we’ve established that those who control new media, our primary means of collective communication and social interaction, share neither our beliefs nor goals. The decision by Internet behemoths to enforce draconian abrogations of speech at the behest of the European Union merely crystallizes what we’ve known for some time, i.e. Mark Zuckerberg and his colleagues are not our allies, or even politically disinterested capitalists seeking to maximize their profit margins. They are ideological enemies, although posing as neutral parties, who want to see our ideas, insofar as they  militate against egalitarianism, social democracy, open borders, multiculturalism, progressivism, feminism,  dawa, and social justice,  quarantined. If not eliminated altogether. 

We have an inkling of what the future of this cloistered Web will look like, and it’s not something I look forward to. It’s a place where a drawing of Mohammed potentially garnering thousands of dollars can be removed, albeit temporarily, from eBay, along with CSA flags-at the behest of journalists-yet paeans to the greatest mass murderer of the 20th century remain widely available. A place where peaceful critics of the mass importation of rapists and criminals from the third world have their Facebook accounts suspended, even as calls for the killing of the presumptive Republican presidential nominee remain in place.

The Internet has broken the stranglehold exercised by old media over the flow of information. It’s allowed free citizens to access and disseminate facts, even as traditional gatekeepers try to embargo information which intellectually destroys their narratives and reveals unpleasant truths. It’s leveled the playing field between us and them, which is why they repeatedly and openly attempt to seize control of this invaluable tool for global communication. While the Overton window shifts in our favor, we need to recognize and respond to this unprecedented challenge. This threat is so palpable that it’s even seeped into our popular culture, forming the basis of a plot-line to an episode of the popular Netflix series House of Cards. Naturally, reality was inverted, as it was a Republican candidate collaborating with an enormously influential website in order to acquire and retain limitless executive power.

This prompts the question, how should we respond? How do we fight NGOs, bureaucratic institutions, multinational corporations and Internet monopolies that have seemingly endless resources at their disposal, and which control the medium through which we hope to communicate? There are many proposals, but one of the more intriguing ones involves holding these new media giants to their word.  A pro-life musician sued Youtube after her incredibly popular video was removed without explanation. On a much broader scale, Professor Stephen Bainbridge has suggested that wealthy philanthropists bankroll a lawsuit against Twitter in order to put conservative proposals on its annual proxy statement. Although this tactic sounds rather innovative, it actually bears a striking resemblance to a suggestion made by Senator Jesse Helms during the mid-80s which entailed a hostile takeover of the habitually biased CBS by conservative shareholders of the network.

Another legal proposal floated by some right wing analysts concerned about this growing problem is to force the government to classify these social media giants as public utilities, thus affording access for dissenting, anti-leftist thought. There are a number of reasons why I think this path-like the shareholder revolt-would be an ultimately futile effort. Although I welcome the entrance of affluent right wingers into the cultural war-and have been heartened by the courageous actions of Peter Thiel, the right’s real-life version of Batman-I don’t believe that conservatives will be able to engineer a coup, in the best sense of the word, against Twitter. Similarly, I doubt the efficacy of any effort to compel these corporations to enforce access and equitable treatment through the judiciary.

This isn’t because I believe it would allow the left to squelch some of the few remaining outlets of public conservatism outside of the Internet-although I’m certain liberals will continue to cheerlead for the introduction of any measure that mutes non-leftist opinion. I’m of the opinion that the utility of talk radio and the Fox News Channel to the right has waned and will continue to decline in the years ahead-this election being merely  foretaste of things to come. No, I oppose this route because it relies upon a thoroughly misguided view of how our courts currently operate. Beyond the merits of this controversial idea, the notion  that jurists steeped in progressivism will rescue conservatives is absurd on its face. It’s the same misguided thinking which led many to believe that the Roberts Supreme Court would unilaterally abolish Obamacare, i.e. that an instrument of the state would begin to curtail the excesses of another branch of the state.

Another option is to create right wing analogs to existing Web-based resources. The dreary results of this experiment can be seen in QubeTV and Conservapedia, the latter a Christian fundamentalist response to Wikipedia’s perceived biases. Beyond the self-consciously limiting aspect of these projects, their creators are marginalizing a political philosophy which they  hope to spread to the widest possible audience-in effect, doing the very job of the websites they stand in opposition to. Creating a less professional, derivative, albeit conservative, version of a pre-existing Web platform is not the solution to the problems we’re facing. We’re not going to win the battle of ideas by diving into an ideological cul-de-sac. In my next essay, I’ll explore some strategies which might actually work.

I distinctly remember taking part in an online discussion several years ago where one of the interlocutors warned me what would happen if Google ever became an evil monopoly. I couldn’t help but think to myself, have you not been paying attention? Leaving aside its extensive invasions of privacy, its intense cooperation with the largest dictatorship on the planet, as well as its agreements with more benighted countries which might or might not censor blasphemous search results, there is the pervasive ideological bias which infects this corporation and periodically makes itself known through heavy-handed editorial and advertising decisions.

However,  a corporation which finds itself even more powerful than Google in terms of shaping the public debate is Facebook. Thanks to Gizmodo, we now know that the militant opposition to Donald Trump among Mark Zuckerberg and his minions was simply the tip of the iceberg, and that Facebook employees had purposefully manipulated their site’s Trending Topics feature in order to suppress conservative views.  Discrimination against non-bien pensant views-including opposition to open borders, multiculturalism, firearms abolition, and using the Constitution as a leftist version of Mad Libs-is encoded in Facebook’s DNA.

In order to grasp just how pervasive this sort of viewpoint discrimination is, one need only look at the case of Lauren Southern, who was banned from Facebook for critiquing Facebook’s tendency to delete outspoken, non-leftist accounts. It’s interesting how liberals lament epistemic closure while simultaneously overlooking the stranglehold not only old but new media exercise over acceptable public debate, restricting the Overton Window to a range of issues that appeal to a small class of opinion-makers, even as forces that are transforming Western civilization are studiously ignored by the gatekeepers of permissible discourse.

Those on the left willing to admit that this is a problem are few and far between, which shouldn’t surprise you considering the fact that even ostensible conservatives can’t wait to grovel before power. Milo, as usual, has a great write-up of the Potemkin conservatives meeting with Zuck, which I recommend reading in its entirety. This is a multi-front war, where we face enemies both internally and externally, and the only way we’re going to begin to make progress is through relentless honesty, regardless of how limited our options for dissemination of the truth might be.