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Among The ‘White Slags’

Shocking GBNews documentary on Pakistani Muslim grooming gangs preying on white British girls raises questions about why UK institutions turned away
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Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban is famously blunt, but even I was surprised in the meeting with him a couple of weeks ago when he said that the question western European governments have to answer is, "How can we live with a large, unassimilable Muslim minority?", and that he sees his job as making sure Hungary never has to think about that question.

That would be the kind of thing that would horrify the liberal media and all the Right-Thinking People. Hungary, however, can be grateful that it has a prime minister who is looking out for its best interests by allowing no migration from the Islamic world. It's not that Muslims are bad people, heaven knows; it's that for whatever reason or reasons, the actual lived experience (heh) of European countries is that Muslim populations, in general, are very difficult to integrate. Why that is can and should be discussed, but that it is cannot be denied. Well, actually it can be denied, and usually is, but can't be denied by anyone with the courage to see what's in front of their noses.

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Take what has happened to the good multicultural liberals of Sweden. From the Daily Mail:

Yet even those on the liberal Left now grudgingly agree that they are rooted in the country’s disastrously failed immigration policy — which in recent years opened Sweden’s borders. Some 2 million immigrants (20 per cent of the entire population), now live in Sweden, often from the most troubled parts of Asia and Africa — and the country failed to plan for the immense difficulties of integrating them into society.

Many of the offspring of these migrants have morphed dangerously into a lost generation who are effectively stateless.

Though they were born here, many don’t feel remotely Swedish, yet have no allegiance to their parents’ homelands, either. Their alienation and discontentment smouldered for several years.

But in recent weeks it has erupted with a terrifying upsurge in ultra-violent gang crime and, with its hand-wringing justice system, which many feel prioritises young offender’s rights over those of their victims, Sweden evidently has no fix.

Twenty years ago, gun crime was almost non-existent here. Today, the grisly murders we see in Scandi-Noir TV series are no longer fictional. Sweden is awash with real-life crime podcasts, documentaries and books.

Coming soon to Sweden’s cinemas (after special screenings for police chiefs, politicians and criminologists) is Bullets, a docu-drama about a 12-year-old Egyptian boy who lobs a grenade at a police car after being lured into a gang.

In Stockholm alone, 52 gangs are vying for control of the burgeoning drugs trade, according to a recent police report, and they are becoming ever more ruthless.

Last year, the country saw 63 fatal shootings. In the UK, whose population is six times the size of Sweden’s, there were 35 in 2021. This cradle of liberalism is, along with Croatia, the most trigger-happy nation in Europe.

Since Christmas, the spree has reached epidemic proportions in the capital, with 30 shootings and bombings, four of them fatal. Half the suspects are aged under 18.

Elegant Stockholm, hitherto known for its Scandinavian splendour and gentility, is now redolent of Al Capone’s Chicago.

The crisis is so serious that, this week, scores of extra police officers were drafted in from other cities and billeted in hotels. I have watched them blitzing the most notorious crime areas and raiding buildings for weapons and drugs.

Last night, three more people were shot in Fittja, south of Stockholm, an area with high levels of immigration and crime.

And as buildings are randomly sprayed with machine gun fire — a new gangland tactic designed to scare rivals and show strength — it seems only a matter of time before more people are killed.

This is one cost of the unwillingness of the Swedes to understand that culture matters. Their liberal pieties have cost them plenty. Now they will never be rid of these malefactors. Never. The Swedes did it to themselves.

Or take the grooming gangs of England. Tonight in Britain, GB News is going to air Charlie Peters's much-anticipated documentary on the Muslim gangs who raped and prostituted thousands of girls -- and the more or less official indifference of Britain's institutions, including the police, to the indescribably evil facts made public years ago. It's airing on the GBNews website and YouTube channel at 8pm British time, which is 3pm Eastern, 2pm Central; the film will remain on the site and the YouTube channel afterward, so don't miss it. I'll be watching tonight from Budapest.

Here is what Ed West writes about the film, and its subject matter. West talks about how most of this was uncovered a decade or so ago, but virtually nobody in authority did anything even after the truth came out, and few people in institutional authority paid a price for their indifference to this evil visited upon innocent girls. Here's West:

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All of which makes tonight’s long-awaited GB News documentary Grooming Gangs: Britain’s Shame, so necessary. Presented by journalist Charlie Peters, who travelled across the country speaking to victims, whistle-blowers and campaigners in Rotherham, Rochdale and Telford (where I met him last October), the documentary is both harrowing and frustrating in the sheer sense of powerlessness it projects. Repeatedly the authorities knew what was happening, were passed the details of the abusers and evidence, gave reassurances that something would be done and then… nothing. 

Although grooming gangs have been uncovered in 60 towns and cities, the case of Rotherham remains the most shocking, not just for the scale of the abuse but the institutional response. 

Here Norfolk was able to access a number of reports on the council’s handling of abuse, one written by solicitor Adele Weir. Sent by the Home Office to study child prostitution, Weir found an abuse ring centred around a man called Arshid Hussain, discovering 270 victims with no fewer than 18 naming Arshid as their supposed ‘boyfriend’.

The police failed to act — even though the rapists involved were also dealing drugs.

West details some of the things Charlie Peters was able to expose in the film. More:

It gets more and more bleak. A girl called Emily in Telford tells how she was raped a thousand times. In this midlands new town built in the optimistic post-war era, children were sold for sex in a house, where local men would visit and note their names on a piece of paper; what the documentary makers describe as a ‘paedophile honesty box’. The girls were frightened because of what happened to Lucy Lowe, a 15-year-old girl who had been burned to death with her mother, sister, and unborn child — murdered by an abuser.

In Telford a group of teachers complained that ‘there was a problem in this authority with Pakistani youths’ abusing girls; a council worker accused them of being racist.  One council worker failed to share reports because it was fearful it would ‘start a race riot’. 

Watching this, the inability of people to weigh up the seriousness of different social evils, I wonder to what extent this scandal was made worse by the Macpherson Report of 1999, and the terror public servants had of being accused of racism, or their department being accused of ‘institutional racism’. That is a career ending allegation in Britain, while in contrast allowing your town to become the scene of the worst mass rape in British history seems to make little dent.

The bitter aftertaste to this story comes from the fact that, after lengthy reports criticising councils and police forces, very few people have been disciplined; a handful of police were told off, but most of the people who knew about it have happily progressed in their careers — including one who, incredibly, now thrives in the equality and diversity industry. The Labour Party, the soul of which feels tarnished by the terrible moral compromises it has made with multiculturalism, even tried to make one of the Rotherham councillors an MP until GB News forced him to stand down. Fresh revelations about the council have emerged just in the past few days.

One more clip:

But we also need to ask about the role of the media, and the arts world, and the cultural powers who decide whether something is worth caring about. It’s significant that this has been left to GB News, a small and still fringe television channel, to tell the story. It should be on BBC1; this should be regularly discussed on the Today programme. My local arts cinema should be telling me about a new film portraying the scandal.

The obvious answer is that Britain's mainstream media and cultural organizations decided that sacrificing the lives of these girls -- white working class girls -- was a price worth paying to avoid facing facts that might lead to "Islamophobia," a term that seems to mean, to the Great and the Good, drawing any negative conclusion whatsoever about a Muslim person, whatever he or she believes or does. It's the same way that progressives have decided that compromising the safety of women in locker rooms and women's prisons is a price worth paying to allow transgendered males who present as female to live out their delusion.

This is a savage thing I learned about human nature in covering the Catholic abuse scandal. For me, half the pain and the outrage I experienced was down to the shocking fact that so many people in authority knew what was happening, but did little or nothing about it. And not just bishops and others in authority, but many laypeople did not want to know, because to know meant that they had to ask themselves uncomfortable questions about the Church, and even their understanding of reality. When I went into my own investigations, it honestly had not crossed my mind that decent people, either in the clergy or in the laity (but especially in the laity) would not want to know what was happening. I was wrong. But this phenomenon is universal, because it's in human nature. In the New Testament, it is recorded that Caiaphas, the high priest, advised his colleagues on the Sanhedrin that it would be better to sacrifice the innocent life of Jesus of Nazareth than to live with the consequences of sparing him: "You do not realize that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish."

See, this is why so many in the Catholic Church -- clergy and laity alike -- were willing to suppress knowledge of the evil within the clergy, even at the expense of victims and families. This is why so many in institutional power in Britain, especially liberals, have been willing to turn a blind eye to the cruel exploitation of these girls by Islamic grooming gangs: it was and is better that they suffer than that the progressive multiculti narrative be subverted. And look, reader, don't think that you and I are immune to this phenomenon. I guarantee you that there are matters in which we would just as soon a story of hideous abuse or injustice go away, rather than us having to face down our own preferred narratives. I have seen too many good people over the course of my career lie to themselves about reality, just to protect their sense of normality, to think it can't happen to me. We should all be warned.

Ben Sixsmith reviews the Peters film for The Critic. Excerpts:

What was the problem? It was not just rape or even child rape (crimes which are depressingly timeless and universal). It was large-scale organised collective child rape, occurring across the UK, in RotherhamRochdaleTelfordOxford and other towns and cities.

Adult men would convince vulnerable girls that they were their “boyfriends” — offering the promise of love, care and attention before trapping them in nightmares of sexual abuse. Sometimes, it appears, the means by which girls were groomed was even more devious. A female cohort of the Rotherham rapists, Peters tells us, seems to have set up a fake rape crisis centre.

It’s a shame that the film did not explore the tragic backgrounds of these girls, but to expect a short documentary to cover all of the important aspects of such a widespread and horrifying phenomenon would be like expecting a shot glass to contain a bottle of vodka. Many had fallen through the cracks of the care system. The police were often shockingly unsympathetic because they saw them as low-class troublemakers — ignoring or outright insulting them.

Most if not all the criminals in many of the gangs had Pakistani heritage. A survivor Peters interviews remembers her abusers calling her and fellow victims “white slags” — not a unique experience — which reflects an ugly, open seam of racial contempt. Margaret Oliver alleges that concern about social cohesion encouraged local authorities to avoid the issue — an allegation substantiated by elements of the Jay Report (pages 2, 92 and 93) and the Crowther Report (page 113). The latter, for example, which investigated abuse in Telford, found, “It is impossible, sadly, not to wonder how history might have been different had the culture in the 1990s and early 2000s within the Council and [West Midlands Police] not been overly concerned with questions of race and placed a greater focus on child protection.”

Sixsmith talks about why it happened, and nothing was done about it. More:

Heavily related was a pathological aversion to accountability — one that has survived to 2023. No one who ignored or enabled the problem has faced serious consequences. Indeed, elsewhere Peters has reported for GB News on Rotherham councillors who have somehow failed upwards in politics and the public sector. His reporting convinced one of them to step down as a Labour parliamentary candidate.

Again, this is a universal problem. For all the good that the US media did in exposing the Catholic sex abuse scandal, it deliberately closed its eyes to one key aspect: the role of a secretive homosexual subculture in the American clergy. Back in 2003, a year or so into the scandal, I spoke with a friend who is a well-known liberal Catholic commentator and journalist. We were talking about what each side (I was then a somewhat well known conservative Catholic commentator) in the Church preferred to ignore. He said from his side, it was 100 percent a refusal to face the role played by abusive gay networks in perpetuating the abuse. This, out of fear that it would play into stereotypes about gay people.

The late liberal churchman and sociologist Richard Sipe told me back then that gay men should not enter seminary. It certainly wasn't because he had anything against gay men. As he explained to me, many gay men who had risen to positions of power within seminaries and within the clergy network used their power to exploit and control other gay men. If a young gay man enters seminary (this was twenty years ago) with the full intention of being celibate, he will face an unrelenting barrage of sexual harassment by other gays in the clergy, attempting to seduce him. If he falls even once, this will become known by the network, and they will use it to blackmail him into silence in the future, should he become aware of abuse by others in the network. This, Sipe told me, is why some gay priests who had nothing at all to do with sexually abusing minors, but who knew about it, remained silent: the blackmailers were in charge.

All of this is very interesting to know, and necessary to painting a fuller picture of what actually happened. But the media wanted nothing to do with it. I saw this play out from the inside. There wasn't much media interest in going after Ted McCarrick, because even media folks who believed he was a sexually active gay man as cardinal convinced themselves that his partners were not minors, so it wasn't really a story, and besides, it might make people think bad thoughts about gay men. I'm not just speculating here; I know.

And it was even at the top level of Fox News in the Ailes era. I've said before how, when I arrived in Dallas in the summer of 2002 for the bishops' meeting, I was asked to brief a Fox freelance correspondent brought in to cover the story, but who was new to it. When I laid it all out for her -- who the players were, what the issues were -- I finally got the the gay networks part. She cut me off, and said that she was under orders from headquarters in New York to ignore that part of the story. I was shocked. I told her that you couldn't understand the whole story if you didn't look into the role of gay clerical networks. Maybe so, she said, but orders came "from the top" to ignore it.

Why? Who knows for sure. But it's not hard to imagine. That meeting in Dallas with the journalist turned out to be part of my own stripping of illusions about the scandal. I really did think at first that it was mostly a matter of bad Catholic liberal bishops and priests. Nope. That part of my personal narrative had to die so that I could see the truth.

I am unaware that we Americans have anything like Pakistani grooming gangs in our country, but the reason I am eager to watch the Peters film is because we very much have a chronic problem with being unable to talk about certain matters in public, for the same reasons the grooming gangs issue was swept under the rug in Britain. It is impossible to have an honest, searching public dialogue about anything to do with race or sexual identity. We live by lies all the time. The fear that somebody, somewhere might arrive at a Wrong Thought about a sacred minority is enough to cause those in cultural and institutional power to shut down all inquiry and discussion, and to make sure that those who would raise questions understand that by so doing, they are putting their careers and reputations on the line.

Richard Hanania writes about this, sort of, in his latest Substack newsletter. In it, he comments on a recent Thomas Chatterton Williams piece about race in France, where Williams lives. TCW is an anti-woke black writer, but in his piece, found himself surprisingly on the side of a woke black French activist. Hanania says that even the anti-woke can end up accepting the woke arguments while denying that they're doing so. Hanania:

Point out a disparity, ignore obvious but unpleasant explanations, and jump to the conclusion that discrimination must be the cause. In the area of public policy, this is pretty much all wokeness is! Police arrest more black people, so police are the problem. Blacks score lower on all written tests, the tests are the problem. Blacks have less money, which means that capitalism….you get the point. The fact that one can claim to be a woke skeptic in the same article where one pulls this exact trick raises the question of what the debate is even about.

Of course, it’s possible for two things to be true at once. French blacks might have a higher crime rate, and police might be racist against them. Maybe if you collected the data, you would find blacks are 10 times more likely to commit a serious crime than white Frenchmen in major cities, but cops stop them 20 times as often. If we were going to be as charitable as possible to the views of Williams, we might say that he wants a society that is honest about both differences in crime rates and shortcomings in the criminal justice system.

More:

I think this view falls apart though if you try to imagine what such a political culture would look like in practice. Once you’ve acknowledged a higher crime rate among one group, worrying about such disparities seems kind of dumb. Everyone accepts that men commit more crimes than women, and young people commit more crimes than the elderly. We therefore implicitly accept the fact that a police officer might naturally treat a situation where he has to approach a car full of young men differently than one where he approaches a car full of old women. A young man doesn’t get pulled over and say “if I was a little old lady, you would’ve let me go. Sure, statistics say I’m 30x more likely to be carrying a weapon, but you acted in a way consistent with believing that my demographic was 40x more likely to do so. You are therefore a sexist and an ageist.”

Why does this sound so ridiculous to us? Probably because we consider it an impossible standard for a criminal justice system, or any system, to perfectly calibrate its level of disparate treatment or disparate impact between groups that actually do behave differently. If Group A commits more crime than Group B, we naturally just accept the implications of that. People will be more afraid of members of Group A and more likely to suspect them of being up to no good. Police are people too, and it would be ridiculous to demand they not take statistical realities into account. Such a course not only asks them to do what is psychologically impossible, but also endangers public safety. Of course, if a group was only twice as criminal and 100 times more likely to be arrested, that might be an indication we’re doing something wrong. But in the real world, differences in how groups are treated tend to roughly correspond to how they behave, indicating that the woke (and Thomas Chatterton Williams) are almost always wrong to even see a problem in the first place. In some cases, the data may imply discrimination against whites, as in the numbers on police shootings.

When I was in Paris in October 2012, I met with an old friend, a white French woman, who was married to a secular Muslim corporate executive. They told me that the racism he experiences in France is frequent. I believed them. On that same trip, my wife and I met a New York couple in the park who were leaving early from their holiday in Paris. Her husband was a neurosurgeon of Puerto Rican descent, but cab drivers kept mistaking him as Muslim, and treating him rudely. He knew this was true because when he would tell the drivers that he was actually Hispanic, they apologized and treated him decently. There can be no question that bigotry against Muslims exists in France.

At the same time, there can also be no question that criminality is disproportionately found among Islamic immigrant populations. The same dynamic is in play in the US, regarding blacks, especially black men under the age of 30. Once in New York City, a black cab driver admitted to me that he tried to avoid picking up black fares when they involved young men, or black people not dressed like business professionals. He told me that it was too dangerous. He knew other cab drivers who had had guns pulled on them by young black men. He said that he understood that this is not fair to good and decent black folks -- remember, he too was black -- but that he considered it a matter of his own survival.

Was that man wrong? How can middle-class people who don't face what he faces every day judge him?

Similarly, a white friend who works for a government agency (I'm being deliberately obscure) in a crime-ridden city told me during the Summer of Floyd that he has observed a significant amount of police brutality -- and that the most brutal cops of all were black ones. I drew him out on the subject, and he gave me context. He described situations in which police officers and firefighters had to go into very dangerous places, not knowing what they would be facing, or whether there would be shots fired at them. He talked about the jaw-dropping chaos in the poor black ghettos of his city, and how simply to police that part of town requires being on hair-trigger all the time, because guns are everywhere, and there is so much confusion and instability that it is hard to know what's what. He told me a story of watching some black cops beat the hell out of a black man who had beaten his female partner, but by the time the cops got there, he had intimidated her into refusing to press charges. When the cops tried to convince the woman, who was a bloody mess, to file charges against her abuser, the abuser got mouthy and confrontational with the cops. The cops, who were all black men, beat the shit out of him. My friend, who watched it, said the creep deserved it. He speculated that the cops were so rough with the wife-beater because they knew that he would never have to answer in court for what he had done to that woman.

To be clear, my friend said that police abuse was and is wrong. But he did not report it, because he saw what happened in that case to be street justice. The law could not help that poor beaten woman, because she, in her fear, would not permit it to do so. The black cops did what they felt was right to make sure that the wife-beater paid a price for his cruelty, and used the excuse of his provocation of them to do so.

Is it right? Of course it's not right! Had those cops been reported, they should have been forced to answer for what they did, even though the wife-beater no doubt deserved every bit of what he received from them. But see, these are the contextual facts that we can't discuss in these matters. To talk honestly about police brutality in black neighborhoods requires discussing the broader context of violence and social breakdown there, and what the phenomenon of law enforcement requires under such circumstances.

A firefighter in my former city, Baton Rouge, whom I met through my brother in law (a firefighter himself) told me once that middle class people have no idea at all how different life is in the poor black parts of the city, where he works. He described things -- ways of life that the firefighters of all races observe -- that sounded like something from another country. His point was not even to criticize it, as much as to say that the gap between what middle class people think they know, and what actually exists, is vast.

Ten years ago, when my book about my late sister came out, I was invited by a teachers' group to give a talk about it, as my sister had been a public school teacher. The group served a school that was on the edge of a poor black neighborhood, though as I recall, all the teachers were white. As we talked before my speech, one of them said that they related to the compassion and active charity my sister had for impoverished kids in her classroom. That set them all to talking about what they were seeing in their classrooms. It was a revelation to me to hear the kinds of suffering those teachers were witness to, in the lives of the little kids in their classroom. Public school teachers in Louisiana aren't paid much, but I heard these white women talking about buying clothes for some of these elementary school black kids, because otherwise they wouldn't have anything that fit them. There was anger among these women, because they knew that these kids' mothers were spending all their money on drugs and booze, totally neglecting the kids.

I didn't write about that because I wasn't there as a journalist, and if I had asked to write about it, they would have said no, and they ought to have said no. Why? Because even though those poorly paid public schoolteachers were digging money out of their own pockets to provide the basics for other people's neglected kids, the story would have been racialized as "white saviorism," and those well-meaning teachers would have been demonized by blacks and white liberals -- and anybody who would have stood up for the teachers would have been accused of being an apologist for racism. Listening to the details those teachers offered about the lives of these innocent black kids, and how neglected and abused they were by their caretakers, and by the broader culture of cruelty and indifference that the kids came out of, I realized how nobody wants to hear any of this. It doesn't fit the preferred narrative. It is better for these innocent black children to suffer than that we have an honest discussion about moral and social failures in the black community there, and try to figure out ways to remedy what is broken.

You regular readers know my familiar story about how the mainstream media campaigned relentlessly for same-sex marriage, and suppressed discussion of any negative potential aspects. I will never forget having a newsroom conversation with a young journalists who likened the anti-SSM side to the KKK during the Civil Rights years -- this to justify the paper's conscious neglect to report fairly, if at all, on those who opposed SSM. That was the Narrative then, and the media existed to enforce it. Same thing happened with transgenderism, and still does happen, though maybe this is starting to end. Back in 2015, when this was just getting started, a woman I met in Baltimore told me that the trans cult was taking root in her daughter's school, and that any parent who as much as questioned it was set upon by other parents, who were the enforcers of the Narrative. On and on it goes.

See, this is why I am up in arms now about US involvement in the Ukraine war. I remember my own unwillingness to accept facts and analysis that contradicted my preferred 2002 narrative about 9/11 and Iraq. That led me to support the disastrous war there -- a war that we should never, ever have fought. Fast-forward to today, and people who question America's strategy for Ukraine are routinely targeted as Putin simps in the same way that anti-Iraq War voices were slimed as Saddam's butt-boys. Having a full and detailed discussion of issues like this does not guarantee that we will do the right thing, but it is hugely important that we talk about facts, including painful ones, and inconvenient truths, because as the grooming gangs stories show, living by lies exacts a hideous cost.

This is what Rotherham and the other English cities -- Peters says they've found grooming gangs in up to 50 British cities and towns -- has to do with life in America. I hope you will join me in tuning in online tonight to watch Charlie Peters's film. It'll be on the GBNews website at 3pm Eastern/2pm Central in the US, and simulcast on the GBNews YouTube channel. If you can't watch it in real time, it will remain for later viewing.

UPDATE: A reader writes:

Reading your essay, I realized that we still practice a form of human sacrifice, and understood more deeply why humility is the mother of all virtues. 

Human sacrifice - we allow children/vulnerable people to be abused because society needs a narrative to be organized around, and seeing the abuse (a prerequisite to stopping it) would entail destroying the narrative. When we allow an abuser to continue for fear of retaliation, we are effectively saying "This child/victim is a necessary sacrifice to allow the overall system, and everything good in it, to continue;" we are also saying "I don't want to be sacrificed instead." 

I teach public employees how to comply with certain civil rights laws in the public sphere. It entails teaching them to make difficult decisions.  One concern that comes up is "But what if someone calls me a bigot?"  The answer, of course, is to grow a pair, though I don't say it quite like that.  A person has to decide wherein lies his allegiance: to the whims of the people around him, or to what is correct (I can't bring up God in my training sessions as a public employee). Galileo wasn't met with applause; prophets and their ilk never are.  I taught my daughter early on, if you want to be a proper lady when you grow up, you need to get comfortable with being called a bitch, because when you try to protect people who are weaker than you, those with more power will hate you.  With humility, you can learn not to care, to remember all the truth-tellers before you who suffered for their honesty and care for others, and realize that you are no better than they, and can't possibly deserve better. You can say to your detractors, "I am indeed a terrible person in many ways, I might not use the term bigot/racist/sexist to describe myself, but perhaps you are right. I am not in a position to defend myself in any event; however, let's focus on the-girls-being-raped-by-gangs/the-women-prisoners-being-raped-by-transwomen/the-black-children-being-shot-in-their-neighborhoods-by-criminals-because-the-police-are-afraid/unable-to-do-their-jobs/etc."  You don't allow ego to redirect the conversation.

Forgiveness, too, is so important, because in a milieu of forgiveness, being called a bigot is not such a bad thing, as you can be forgiven. Where forgiveness is in short supply, confession will be in shorter supply. And humility is what allows us to forgive others.  

Humility defangs a certain kind of aggression, ego acts as a disruptive boulder in the creek of human kindness. 

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Fran Macadam
Fran Macadam
Invade the world, invite the world. They couldn't assimilate western occupation forces either, anymore than the West cab comfortably cohabit with those raised feral. What goes around, comes around.
schedule 1 year ago
    JON FRAZIER
    JON FRAZIER
    I don't think Sweden did a lot of "invading the world". At least not since the 18th century when it was mainly a matter of making war on their immediate neighbors.
    schedule 1 year ago
      Fran Macadam
      Fran Macadam
      Things sure have changed recently, haven't they. Why they even took US orders to take Assange out on a pretext.
      schedule 1 year ago
Theodore Iacobuzio
Theodore Iacobuzio
"Fast-forward to today, and people who question America's strategy for Ukraine are routinely targeted as Putin simps in the same way that anti-Iraq War voices were slimed as Saddam's butt-boys."

Take a look at this:

https://nypost.com/2023/02/10/even-where-ukraine-peace-now-lobby-has-a-point-its-wrong-about-how-to-get-there/

Now, don't get me wrong, Lowry was the titular editor of NR when it published "Unpatriotic Conservatives" (that Buckley would have signed off on such slavering nonsense puts paid to most of his reputation in my view), but taking an "on-the-one-hand" position on this on his part is an event of some importance. The piece itself is miserable sophistry, but there may be a queasy feeling out there that we're playing with fire. To suggest that smart foreign policy would include cutting off Ukraine AS A GAMBIT is just throwing dust in his readers' eyes. There may be some hope.
schedule 1 year ago
    Fran Macadam
    Fran Macadam
    Buckley was defenestrated from the publication he founded. They wouldn't even publish his column. His loyal board members all got the heave-ho. Another neocon coup.
    schedule 1 year ago
      Theodore Iacobuzio
      Theodore Iacobuzio
      I read NR pretty steadily up to Buckley's death, in fact until Lowry fired Mark Steyn for being readable and funny, and I don't remember them not running his, Buckley's, column. As to the board, I don't know about that. "Defenestrated": My private information, which is just that, take it for what it's worth, is that Buckley crawled out onto the ledge himself in order to save his life's work. I'm sure he could have spiked that poisonous screed, or had it toned down (maybe he did; not enough, if so), or gotten somebody besides that bottom-feeder to write it. As it is his life's work's legacy (militarization of containment and our foreign policy in general, the metastasizing of the military industrial complex, deficit spending, a continual need to look over the left shoulder) is on balance malign. I understand he was a nice man, and that people I respect (the great literary critic Hugh Kenner, Joe Sobran himself) loved him. Sobran, who died in misery, forgave him at the end, but Sobran was much nicer than your correspondent will ever be.
      schedule 1 year ago
        Peter Kurilecz
        Peter Kurilecz
        let us not forget what NR did to John Derbyshire
        schedule 1 year ago
          Theodore Iacobuzio
          Theodore Iacobuzio
          I shed no tears over that. Derbyshire, with considerable polemical skill, went after the Catholic Church pretty viciously, and while Buckley was alive. And nothing happened to him. Nor should it have really, he wasn't really offensive so much as dismissive ("Science" says). Then he opens his trap about the Sacred Race and bang, out into the outer darkness. Good on him and good on Lowry for being revealed as the time server he is.
          schedule 1 year ago
Daniel Hochberg
Daniel Hochberg
This is a fantastic article and I am only partway through it, but I must say something. The cops who beat the guy that abused his wife were absolutely in the right. That is justice, the guy deserved it, and if it came to the attention of authorities the correct thing to do would be sweep it under the carpet.
schedule 1 year ago
    JON FRAZIER
    JON FRAZIER
    It's satisfying. But it isn't justice. Justice is something administered by a court of law according to the laws of the state. The police should no more be in the business of administering justice than they should be performing open heart surgery.
    Courts not doing a good job? Then we need to reform them. It really is that simple.
    schedule 1 year ago
Peter Kurilecz
Peter Kurilecz
"I am unaware that we Americans have anything like Pakistani grooming gangs in our country"
I suspect it is due to the fact that here in America we dont have the solid enclaves like one sees in the UK or in other EU countries. I remember visiting Birminham in the UK several years ago. everywhere I turned one could see Muslim women wearing the black robes and niquabs. Muslim men walking around in their thobe-like clothes. I suspect you might see that in Dearbornistan, but not likely in the rest of the US.
Several years ago the left said there were no problems with Muslim enclaves or that Muslim men harassed non-Muslim women. and yet EU women were forced to wear the hijab to avoid harassment by Muslim men. the left does not want to admit or accept that Muslim men for the most part see Western women as wh*res and are to be treated as such. the vast majority of Muslim enclaves were no-go zones, a concept that the left challenged. they turned a blind eye and still do to what occurs in those enclaves
schedule 1 year ago