Alternative History

A little history

Posted on September 28, 2026 by Mike Leave a comment

tLakeside Joe provides the Cliff’s Notes version of the Muslim Brotherhood’s origins.

Islam’s Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna, a 22 year old Muslim who admired Hitler’s hatred of the Jews and persistently wrote to Hitler to express his admiration and his desire for Hitler’s Nazi Party to collaborate with Islam.

When Hitler rose to power, his Nazis supported al-Banna, a school teacher, to grow the Muslim Brotherhood into its ally in the Middle East; by 1938, the membership of Muslim Brotherhood topped 200,000.

During World War II, members of the Muslim Brotherhood spied for Hitler’s Nazis in the Middle East and fought for Hitler as Nazi troops in two specially formed Muslim Waffen-SS Handschar Divisions (see Religion of Peace). ‘Handschar’ is German for scimitar, the curved saber used by the Islamic troops of the Ottoman empire.

Above is Hitler with Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and a close ally of al-Banna, in Berlin, where he lived as Hitler’s VIP guest from 1941 to 1945 before joining al-Banna in Egypt in 1946.

Funny, innit, how interwoven all Earthly evil seems to be?

Western delusion

Posted on September 17, 2026September 17, 2026 by Mike Leave a comment

The New Religious War, same as the Old Religious War. Except that this time, we’ve lost.

Today, it’s easy to see just how naive and shallow Ambrose’s analysis was. The idea that there would be no more major ideological conflicts, or that Western civilization had nothing to fear from competing cultures and peoples, was positively delusional.

But it was a delusion enabled and strengthened by a fundamentally secular worldview that refused to take the claims of religion seriously — claims that precede and give coherence to political claims and ideologies. It was a delusion, in other words, enabled by an Enlightenment philosophy that looked on religion as a quaint relic of a bygone era. The religious conflicts of earlier epochs had naturally given way to the ideological contests of the 20th century, and now those contests were settled. At the dawn of the 21st century, no one could possibly take religion seriously, or think that medieval religious disputes had any relevance in the post-Cold War world that was taking shape.

Then 9/11 happened. But instead of shattering this delusion, great efforts were made to shore it up. This proved difficult (but not impossible) because the leaders of al-Qaida were obviously motivated by religious beliefs, and said so repeatedly. In his November 2002 Letter to America, Osama bin Laden explained his motivations and aims in great detail. Organized as a series of questions and answers, the letter laid out al-Qaida’s reasons for attacking on 9/11 and also stated what al-Qaida wanted from us.

“The first thing that we are calling you to is Islam,” bin Laden wrote. It’s a striking admission. The terrorists’ first priority was not for the U.S. to leave Muslim lands, or halt support for Israel, or stop propping up authoritarian regimes in the Middle East. All of those demands come after what bin Laden says is the first thing he wants for America, which is conversion to Islam: “The religion of the Unification of God … of complete submission to His Laws; and of the discarding of all the opinions, orders, theories and religions which contradict with the religion He sent down to His Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him).”

Despite such an explicit statement from bin Laden, and others like it from jihadist Muslims around the world, almost no one in the West wanted to acknowledge this reality and its implications, because doing so would undermine the animating idea of the post-Cold War project. If sincere religious convictions could inspire Muslims in the 21st century to carry out attacks like 9/11, then it wasn’t really true that all religions are the same. And if that’s the case, then all peoples and cultures are also not the same, and neither is all labor, and suddenly the entire agenda of creating a borderless world of global free markets is called into question.

So almost immediately after 9/11 our political leaders and most major media outlets scrambled to declare that Islam had nothing to do with the attacks, that there was nothing to fear from Muslims, and that anyone who suggested otherwise was a bad American.

Less than a week after 9/11, as the rubble of the Twin Towers was still smoldering, President George W. Bush gave his now infamous “Islam is peace” speech after meeting with Muslim leaders at the Islamic Center of Washington. “The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam,” he said. “That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don’t represent peace. They represent evil and war.” The terrorist attacks, he said, “violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith. And it’s important for my fellow Americans to understand that.”

It was an absurd thing for an American president to say (as if Bush knew the first thing about the fundamental tenets of Islam), but it was especially absurd, and indeed offensive, as a response to terrorist attacks that had just killed thousands of Americans. Adding to the insult and absurdity was the fact that Bush was surrounded by Muslim leaders who condemned the attacks on narrow grounds but shared the overall religious worldview of the hijackers and their al-Qaida handlers. But in Bush’s version of the world, those people were no different than any other Americans, and in fact “love America just as much as I do.”

In saying these things, the president was simply expressing the mainstream liberal view, shared by almost all our political and media elite, who were unable to recognize the religious and civilizational nature of the conflict that had erupted. It was inconceivable to them that authentic religious beliefs could ever motivate anyone to commit an act of mass violence like 9/11. After all, religions were all supposed to be fundamentally the same. They all teach the same things, more or less, and they all lead to peace. Evil and cynical people might try to twist religion and use it to justify their crimes or a political agenda, but such people are not — and cannot be — true representatives of religion.

We heard versions of this over and over again in the years after 9/11 — and especially in the lead-up to the Iraq War. All people, we were told, yearn for liberty, hence we would be greeted as liberators in Iraq. All nations should be organized along the lines of liberal democracy, hence we should ensure that Afghan women are able to get degrees in women’s studies and Afghan girls are able to attend school. What’s more, we could import democracy to these places, and it would work because freedom and democracy are what everyone, everywhere, really wants. In his second inaugural address, President Bush stated explicitly that “it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.”

Ending tyranny in the world might sound like a ridiculous thing for a White House administration to tackle, but they were serious about it. I remember a political science professor of mine from Hillsdale being dispatched to Iraq by the State Department in 2004, after we had toppled Saddam Hussein. He was part of a group of scholars the government had tasked with establishing a basis for Western-style rule of law and constitutionalism in the Koran and in Islamic tradition. That such a basis had not yet been established or discovered in the previous 1,400 years of Islam did not dissuade them. They really thought it was possible, and went to great lengths in the attempt, which of course failed.

It never occurred to them that not all religions and cultures are actually the same, and do not produce the same things. It never occurred to them that Christianity, not the act of voting, is why representative democracy created peace and stability in the West. Or that it might not be possible to establish a basis for constitutional democracy in a Muslim nation because of the nature of Islam. Or that not everyone, in fact, yearns for liberty. Some people yearn instead for justice. Some people would rather have vengeance than freedom and prosperity. If you introduce democracy to a place like Iraq, or Syria, or Gaza, the people might not vote for Western liberalism. They might vote for Hamas.

Even if these things did occur to our leadership class, as they might well have, it would have been unwelcome to bring them up at the time. And in fact almost no one said anything along these lines.

Instead, our leaders doubled down on Stephen Ambrose’s version of the world. The cultural mood of the West in the decade before 9/11 was one of breezy optimism and post-Cold War insouciance. After 9/11 this mood transformed into official policy. Not only did we think we could bring Western-style democracy to tribal Muslim peoples, we thought we could bring those peoples here and integrate them into American life.

The multicultural propaganda that had been fed to us in school throughout the 1990s took shape after 9/11, and we began importing Muslims from far-flung countries in record numbers — people from the same countries that had celebrated and danced in the streets when the towers fell. Pew Research estimates the number of Muslims in the U.S. grew from 2.4 million in 2007, the first time it performed such a tabulation, to 5.5 million today (likely a low estimate). The number of mosques has likewise increased during those years, from an estimated 1,200 to 2,800.

For the left, this was only fair. A legacy of colonialism and American meddling in the Middle East was after all to blame for the backwardness and economic depression of the Muslim world, they argued. We owed it to those countries to allow mass immigration to the West, and if Muslims in the Third World harbored resentment against America, they had good reason for it. This is now mainstream thinking among Democrats. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has repeatedly defended calls to “globalize the intifada,” for example, and has campaigned with the likes of Hasan Piker, who said that the United States “deserved 9/11.”

For the right, it took the arrival of Donald Trump even to be able to talk about these things. And even now, if you have the temerity to notice that Muslims in America fail to assimilate because they have no interest in assimilating, or that they recreate versions of their home countries and cultures here in America, or that Islam is clearly incompatible with American society, half the country will call you a racist.

That is the real legacy of 9/11. It was the beginning of a religious war that we lost because we refused to recognize the religious nature of it. We were committed instead to a secular account of the world in which religion makes no real claims on its adherents and imposes no real costs on unbelievers.

What we owe the victims of 9/11, all these years later, is to be done with all that nonsense, and to see the world, finally, as it really is.

Yeah, like THAT’S ever gonna happen. Sorry, but I’m afraid we Men of the West just don’t have it in us anymore to look the harsher realities straight in the face without flinching and/or dissembling, same as we can no longer call things by their right names. Our Lords and Masters simply don’t allow that, and we’re Americans: we do as we’re told.

Star Wars

Posted on September 17, 2026 by Mike Leave a comment

Hey, remember when shitlibs couldn’t possibly poke enough fun at Ronnie “Raygun” and his preposterous, unworkable, never-happen-in-a-million-years SDI boondoggle?

Nah, me neither.

U.S. Admits It Has Weapons In Orbit
Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink made a bombshell admission this morning, disclosing that there are on-orbit weapons deployed right now to protect America’s interests in space. Those weapons support a Space Control mission set, and the U.S. Space Force has now also shared additional details about that directly with TWZ.

Meink first made mention of what he described as “on-orbit space control weapons” during his keynote speech earlier today at the Air & Space Forces Association’s (AFA) 2026 Air, Space & Cyber Conference, at which TWZ is in attendance. As head of the Department of the Air Force, Meink serves as the top civilian overseeing both the Air Force and the Space Force. Space-based weapons have historically been a very sensitive topic for the U.S. military, with much discussion over the decades about whether such capabilities could already exist to varying degrees in the American arsenal. There has already been a dramatic shift in this regard in recent years, with the head of U.S. Space Command (SPACECOM) openly declaring the acquisition of new anti-satellite weapons to be a top priority just last month.

“Today, we continue to ensure we remain ready to meet the challenges of evolving threats, wherever they exist,” Meink said during his keynote address. “This is why the United States now has on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the joint force against hostile adversary action.”

“That phrase was very well thought out. So whatever I said before is what I say again,” he said when asked if he could elaborate in any way on those capabilities at a question-and-answer session immediately following his speech. “It is critically important that we maintain our dominance not only in the air, but in space, and so we’ve had to take steps to make sure that when we’re threatened, we can take care of that.”

Oooooops. Sorry, shitlibs.

Conspiracy theorizing

Posted on September 16, 2026September 16, 2026 by Mike

Gotta admit, I never have heard this one before.

Ten months after JFK’s assassination, Mary Pinchot Meyer was gunned down. Hours later, the CIA’s counterintelligence chief was caught picking the lock to her art studio to seize her diary.

A Georgetown socialite, painter, ex-wife of a top CIA official, and a rumored lover of the president, Meyer had been deeply shaken by Kennedy’s death in November 1963. While the nation grieved, she became convinced that the assassination was not the work of a lone gunman. She began quietly asking questions, purportedly telling friends like Timothy Leary that the murder was a conspiracy orchestrated by powerful elements within the government.

Less than a year later, on October 12, 1964, Meyer’s search for answers came to a violent end. She was taking her daily walk along the towpath of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal in Georgetown. Just after noon, a mechanic working on a nearby car heard a woman cry out for help, followed by two gunshots. Meyer was found dead, shot once in the head and once in the back at close range.

Police arrested Ray Crump Jr., a young man found wandering nearby completely soaked, though he claimed he had fallen into the Potomac River while fishing. No murder weapon was ever found, and forensic evidence failed to link Crump to the crime. His lawyer successfully argued that the police case was entirely circumstantial, leading to his acquittal. The murder remains officially unsolved.

The aftermath of her death read like a spy novel. When Meyer’s brother-in-law, Newsweek editor Ben Bradlee, rushed to her Georgetown art studio to secure her private diary, he arrived to find James Jesus Angleton—the aforementioned CIA chief and a friend of Meyer’s—already there. Eventually, Bradlee’s wife found the diary and handed it over to Angleton under the agreement that he would destroy it. Years later, Angleton admitted he had kept the journal, which was said to contain details of her affair with Kennedy. Its contents were never fully publicized, cementing Meyer’s legacy as a central figure in Cold War conspiracy lore.

Hm. Interesting, veddy. More:

When Mary Meyer died, no one knew about her affair with John Kennedy, or about her ex-husband’s job managing the CIA’s clandestine services. In newspapers, Cord Meyer—wounded World War II hero and young idealist who helped found the United World Federalists—was identified as an author, with a vague government job. The papers noted that Mary, 43, was a Georgetown artist, born to a wealthy Pennsylvania family, daughter of Amos Pinchot, the Progressive lawyer, and niece of Gifford Pinchot, the conservationist and Teddy Roosevelt’s chief forester. Her younger sister, Tony, was married to Ben Bradlee, then of Newsweek, later of the Washington Post. It was Bradlee who identified the body at the morgue.

Then other news supervened. There was a presidential election coming, Johnson (who had recently signed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution) versus Goldwater (the warmonger, according to the 1964 narrative). Khrushchev was deposed. China exploded its first nuclear bomb.

But over the years, sensational fragments of the story (JFK, CIA) turned up. Inevitably, conspiracy theories emerged. Who killed Mary—really? Was Ray Crump set up? By whom? Why?

As real evidence went mute, the public imagination worked on two possible narratives.

The first was what might be called the Oliver Stone Solution—that is, to posit a conspiracy elaborate enough and sinister enough to do imaginative and, as it were, cinematic justice to the murder of a woman with such suggestive, powerful connections. The journalist Nina Burleigh sifted through plot possibilities in her excellent book on Meyer, A Very Private Woman (1998), and quoted the critic Morris Dickstein on the temptations of the 1960s’ paranoid style—”a sense at once joyful and threatening that things are not what they seem, that reality is mysteriously overorganized and can be decoded if only we attend to the hundred little hints and byways that beckon to us.”

Thus in the Stone Solution, popular on the Internet, Meyer was done in by “the same sons of bitches that killed John F. Kennedy,” as one writer, C. David Heymann, claims he was told by the dying Cord Meyer. Another writer, Leo Damore (also dead), argued that Crump “was the perfect patsy, better even than Lee Harvey Oswald. Mary Meyer was killed by a well-trained professional hit man, very likely somebody connected to the CIA”—the idea being that she knew “too much for her own good.”

The second scenario might be called the Richard Wright Solution, after the author of the 1940 novel Native Son, whose protagonist, Bigger Thomas, is tormented by the oppressions of poverty and racism: “To Bigger and his kind white people were not really people; they were a sort of great natural force, like a stormy sky looming overhead, or like a deep swirling river stretching suddenly at one’s feet in the dark.” In this scenario, Crump one day left his home in black Southeast Washington, crossed the segregated city, passing the Capitol and the White House, and entered white Georgetown. And there—on the home turf of mandarins, of Joe Alsop and Kay Graham and Scotty Reston and Dean Acheson—his path intersected for a moment with Mary Meyer’s.

You could choose your movie. Solution One drew Mary Meyer into the world of James Ellroy, the grassy knoll, Jim Garrison, the Mafia, Judith Exner, Fair Play for Cuba, Operation Mongoose and so on. Solution Two inserted Mary Meyer by accident into an entirely different story: the primal drama of race in America.

The author gropes further with it from there, trying to make it all make sense somehow. As with JFK’s death, though (not to even mention the Epstein foofaraw—YIKES!!), I’d bet way too much water has gone under the bridge for us to ever know for sure the real truth about what happened—memories have faded; investigators, eyewitnesses, and/or protagonists have passed away; evidence been discarded or otherwise lost; public interest wandered.

Related…

Posted on September 16, 2026September 16, 2026 by Mike

To the Albert “Arnold the pig” AlGore meme I ran below, that is.

As you get older, you become allergic to this doomer bullshit, because you’ve seen a million doomsday prophecies fail to ever materialize, and you realize…they’re just constantly lying. https://t.co/GlqrOTbpQO

— Spencer Pratt (@spencerpratt)

September 16, 2026

Gotta say it again: LA sure missed a great big ol’ boat when Duh Peepul failed to make this guy their Mayor, sitting back and supinely allowing the Black/Raman Commie cabal to steal yet another “election” from them.

Good dog

Posted on September 13, 2026September 13, 2026 by Mike

Tactical Hermit says “Don’t Forget About the Dogs,” meaning the 9/11 rescue dogs (the last of which crossed the Rainbow Bridge ten years ago), and he could not possibly be righter.

Steyn sampler

Posted on September 13, 2026September 13, 2026 by Mike

Been rummaging through several of Steyn’s old 9/11-remembrance columns from byone years, and it hit me that a collection of sundry quips and quotes from the articles might be a very cool thing. So, without further ado, off we go!

In any war, you have to be able to prioritize:

You can’t win everything, so where would you rather win? Raqqa or Rotterdam? Kandahar or Cannes? Yet, whenever some guy goes Allahu Akbar on the streets of a western city, the telly pundits generally fall into one of two groups: The left say it’s no big deal, and the right say this is why we need more boots on the ground in Syria or Afghanistan. Yesterday President Trump said he was committed to ensuring that terrorists “never again have a safe haven to launch attacks against our country”.

By that he means “safe havens” in Afghanistan. But the reason the west’s enemies are able to pile up a continuous corpse count in Paris, Nice, Berlin, Brussels, London, Manchester, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Orlando, San Bernadino, Ottawa, Sydney, Barcelona, [Your Town Here] is because they have “safe havens” in France, Germany, Britain, Scandinavia, North America, etc. Which “safe havens” are likely to prove more consequential for the developed world in the years ahead?

Who’s winning what turf? After sixteen years of western military occupation, the Taliban control more territory in Afghanistan than at any time since the first US troops went in. On the other hand, after sixteen years of accelerating Islamic immigration, Europe has more no-go zones, more sharia courts, more refugees, more covered women, more Muslim-dominated schoolhouses, more radical mosques, more female genital mutilation, more grooming and gang rape, more Muslim Brotherhood front groups, more Muslim mayors and legislators, more Muslim-funded Middle East Studies programs at universities …and fewer churches, fewer Jews in Toulouse, fewer gays in Amsterdam, fewer unaccompanied women out after dark in German and Swedish cities, fewer historical representations of Mohammed in Continental museums, art galleries and scholarly books, fewer mixed bathing sessions at municipal swimming pools, fewer lessons on the Crusades and the Holocaust in European schools …and less and less free speech in some of the oldest democracies on earth.

In Afghanistan, we’re fighting for something not worth winning, and we’re losing. In Europe, Islam is fighting for something very much worth winning, and they’re advancing. And, according to all the official strategists in Washington and elsewhere, these two things are nothing to do with each other.

To be fair, a lot of the ever increasing restraints on free expression are self-imposed: newspapers decide that it would be “insensitive” to publish certain cartoons, publishers politely decline novels on certain themes, and in Minnesota white progressives agonize that remembering 9/11 is “Islamophobic”. Which is weird – because a space alien visiting the United States for Monday’s ceremonies would have been stunned to discover that Islam had anything to do with 9/11. As I mentioned yesterday, the President forbore to mention Islam at all: Instead, we were attacked by “horrible, horrible enemies” and “enemies like we’ve never seen before”. Well, we’ve seen a lot of them since, and they appear to have certain things in common – things that this President was once not shy about mentioning.

From SteynOnline, September 12th 2017

The NEA warms up with a little light non-judgmentalism by advising teachers not to ‘suggest any group is responsible’ for the, ah, ‘tragic events’. Just because Osama bin Laden and al-Qa’eda boasted that they did it is no reason to jump to conclusions. ‘Blaming is especially difficult in terrorist situations because someone is at fault. In this country, we still believe that all people are innocent until solid, reliable evidence from our legal authorities proves otherwise’ — which presumably means we should wait till the trial and, given that what’s left of Osama is currently doing a good impression of a few specks of Johnson’s Baby Powder, that’s likely to be a long time coming.

Instead, the NEA thinks children should ‘explore the problems inherent in assigning blame to populations or nations of people by looking at contemporary examples of ethnic conflict, discrimination, and stereotyping at home and abroad’.

And by that you mean…?

‘Internment of Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor and the backlash against Arab Americans during the Gulf war are obvious examples.’

Not that obvious: for one thing, the ‘backlash against Arab Americans during the Gulf war’ is entirely mythical. But you get the gist: Don’t blame anyone. But, if you have to, blame America.

I don’t think the teachers’ union are ‘Hate America’ types. Very few Americans are. But, rather, they’re in thrall to something far craftier than straightforward anti-Americanism — a kind of enervating cult of tolerance in which you demonstrate your sensitivity to other cultures by being almost totally insensitive to your own. The NEA study suggestions have a bit of everything in them: your teacher might pluck out Roosevelt’s ‘Four Freedoms’; on the other hand, she might wind up at the discussion topic about whether it was irresponsible for the media to show video footage of Palestinians celebrating 11 September as this allegedly led to increased hostility toward Arabs. Real live Arab intolerance is not a problem except insofar as it risks inflaming yet more mythical American intolerance.

This stuff went away for a while last October, and some of us were foolish enough to think it might go away for good. That it didn’t has a lot to do with George W. Bush and the strategy that brought him to power. You’ll recall that he campaigned in 2000 as a ‘compassionate conservative’. On his first trip to New Hampshire, he declared, ‘I’m proud to be a compassionate conservative. And on this ground I will make my stand!’ Those of us who ventured on to the ground to stand alongside him found it pretty mushy and squelchy, but figured the bog of clichés was merely a wily tactic, a means of co-opting all the Democrats’ touchy-feely words and thereby neutralising their linguistic advantage.

You can’t say whom we’re at war with, even though, for their part, the other side is admirably straightforward. Just tune in to any Arab TV station for Friday prayers:

‘O God, destroy the Jews and their supporters. O God, destroy the Christians and their supporters and followers, shake the ground under them, instil fear in their hearts, and freeze the blood in their veins.’

That’s Sheikh Akram Abd-al-Razzaq al-Ruqayhi, some hotshot imam live from the Grand Mosque in Sanaa on 9 August on Yemeni state TV. It’s the local equivalent of ‘Thought for the Day’, and even more predictable. Here’s the same dude a week earlier:

‘O God, deal with Jews and their supporters and Christians and their supporters and lackeys,’ he prayed. ‘O God, count them one by one, kill them all, and don’t leave anyone.’

This isn’t some fringe crank sentiment, but what appears to be a standard formulation from the Middle Eastern equivalent of the Book of Common Prayer. Another state TV channel, another mosque, another imam, same script: ‘O God, deal with the occupier Jews for they are within your power,’ said Sheikh Anwar al-Badawi on 2 August live from the Umar Bin-Al-Khattab Mosque in Doha on Qatar Television. ‘O God, count them one by one, kill them, and don’t leave any one of them.’

Same sheikh a week later: ‘O God, destroy the usurper Jews and the vile Christians.’

Hmm. Perhaps we need to call in Bletchley Park. Must be some sort of code. As a matter of fact, you don’t even need to go to the Middle East to catch the death-to-Jews-and-Christians routine. I stayed in the heart of Paris a couple of months back, at the Plaza Athénée, and the eight Arab TV channels available in my room had more than enough foaming imams to go round.

~from The Spectator, August 24th 2002

Exactly a quarter-century ago, I was pottering about the kitchen when the newsman broke into the morning show to say that there were reports that a ‘plane had flown into the World Trade Center. I assumed it was an unfortunate mishap by a Piper Cub from Long Island or some such, switched off the radio and went about my business. So I did not hear that a second ‘plane had hit until twenty minutes later when two of my editors called from London and Toronto to demand instant-reaction columns to events of which I was not aware. I switched on the television to find the familiar New York skyline full of smoke.

I had been expecting delivery of a sofa that morning, and half-an-hour or so later it duly arrived. So I muted the TV and turned to face the chaps to discuss where to set it. When I turned back to the screen a minute or two later, the skyline was no longer there. For a moment, I was too befuddled to comprehend what had happened – and the scale of what America’s enemies had accomplished.

This is my ancient column from that day, composed in the hours that followed, when very little was known. There are passages I would write differently today, and some I would not write at all, but I thought we would re-publish it as is, with the original (Spectator) illustration and headline. It was and is “a war for civilisation”, but in ways I did not fully grasp until six months later, standing across the street from a Viennese maternity shop.

So here we are, a generation later, when no jihadist needs to fly planes into western skyscrapers – because, in New York as in London as in other western capitals, we have handed Islam the keys to those skyscrapers. In the excerpts from the flight manifests that appeared over the next few days, I was struck by the name of Christine Hanson of Groton, Massachusetts, a two-year-old girl sitting between her parents on a doomed flight. She was last heard crying in the background during her father’s telephone call to her grandparents to report that the stewardess had been stabbed. Christine would be approaching thirty now – and I cannot but feel that the intervening years have dishonoured her memory:

~You can understand why they’re jumping up and down in the streets of the Middle East, jubilant in their victory. They have struck a mighty blow against the Great Satan, mightier than even the producers of far-fetched action thrillers could conceive. They have driven a gaping wound into the heart of his military headquarters. They have ruptured the most famous skyline in the world, the glittering monument to his decadence. They have killed and maimed thousands of his subjects, live on TV. For one day they reduced the hated Bush to a pitiful presidential vagrant, bounced further and further from his White House to ever more remote military airports, from Florida to Louisiana to Nebraska by a security staff which obviously understands less about the power of symbolism than America’s enemies do.

There was a grim symmetry in the way this act of war interrupted the President at a grade-school photo-op. The federal government has no constitutional responsibility for education: it is a state affair, delegated mostly to tiny municipal school boards. But one of Bill Clinton’s forlorn legacies is that the head of state and the commander-in-chief of the most powerful nation on earth must now fill his day with trivial initiatives designed to soothe the piffling discontents of soccer moms and other preferred demographics of the most pampered generation in history: programs to connect elementary schools to the Internet, prescription drug benefits for seniors. government ‘lock-boxes’ for any big-ticket entitlement the focus groups decide they can’t live without, and a thousand and one other woeful trivialities.

And so the President was reminded of his most awesome responsibility at a time when he was discharging his most footling. The first charge of any government is the defence of its borders — and, without that, it makes no difference how great your prescription drug plan is. In that sense, Tuesday marked the end of the ten-year-long weekend off that the world’s only superpower has enjoyed since Colin Powell advised against marching on Baghdad. The post-Cold War interlude is over, an era of follies — OJ, Monica — and fatuities, a few of which Tuesday’s horror stories cruelly underlined: employees in wheelchairs, whom Bob Dole’s Americans with Disabilities Act and the various lobby groups insist can do anything able-bodied people can, found themselves trapped on the 80th floor, unable to get downstairs, unable even to do as others did and hurl themselves from the windows rather than be burned alive.

The first named victim I was aware of was Barbara Olson, the wife of the solicitor-general, whom I sat next to at dinner a few weeks ago…She’d postponed her trip to California by a day so she could wish her husband a happy birthday on Tuesday morning, and so found herself on American Airlines flight 11. She had time to call her husband Ted to tell him her plane was being hijacked and that she had been hustled to the back of the cabin with the other passengers and flight crew. By then, the solicitor-general knew that two planes had deliberately crashed into the World Trade Center. He told Barbara what was happening — that she wasn’t in the hands of some jerk who wants his pals sprung from jail and a jet to Cuba but cooler customers with bigger plans. A few seconds later her flight ripped through one side of the Pentagon.

I’m sure that Ted Olson, in the course of the day, saw some of those TV pictures of taxi-drivers, merchants and schoolchildren in Egypt, Lebanon and Palestine passing out candy to celebrate the death of his wife and thousands of others. This is not terrorism — five guys in ski-masks plotting in a basement. This is war, waged in the shadows but openly cheered by millions and millions of people and more covertly supported by their governments, including the smooth, bespoke emissaries of the thug states in Durban last week.

The funniest moment in the early coverage came when some portentous anchor solemnly reported that ‘the United Nations building had not been hit’. Well, there’s a surprise! Why would the guys who took out the World Trade Center and the Pentagon want to target the UN? The UN is dominated by their apologists, and in some cases the friends of the friends of the fellows who did this (to put it at its most discreet). All last week the plenipotentiaries of the West were in Durban holed up with the brutes and treating them as equals, negotiating over how many anti-Zionist insults they could live with and over how abject the West’s apology for past sins should be. Tuesday’s sobering coda to Durban let us know that those folks on the other side are really admirably straightforward; they mean what they say, and we should take them at their word.

This is, as the German government put it, an attack on ‘the civilised world’, and it’s time to speak up in its defence. Those Western nations who spent last week in Durban finessing and nuancing evil should understand now that what is at stake is whether the world’s future will belong to liberal democracy and the rule of law, or to darker forces. And after Tuesday America is entitled to ask its allies not for finely crafted UN resolutions but a more basic question: whose side are you on?

~from The National Post and The Spectator, September 12th/13th 2002

Out of the aftermath, clarity

Posted on September 12, 2026September 12, 2026 by Mike

Lee Smith brings us a seriously gripping account of the frightening progress Pisslam has made apres 9/11, the one I mentioned at the end of the previous post.

Twenty-five years later, the legacy of 9/11 is that there was no 9/11.

Commemorations this week hold that the deadliest attack on the U.S. mainland forever changed the way we live. And that’s true if we mean that for the past 25 years Americans have lived in a collective fugue state from which there seems no exit.

The issue isn’t that nearly a third of the country was born after the attacks or that foreign intelligence services push 9/11 lies into our social media ecosystem. The conspiracy theorists are more shrill a quarter of a century on precisely because our memories of the day, and our reactions to it, have been redirected and erased.

There was never any kind of cover-up; there were no “dancing Israelis” who secretly directed Arab terrorists into the Twin Towers to get American boys to die in the Middle East on behalf of Israel; and there was no controlled demolition of the towers as part of a false flag operation to drive an angry nation to war in the Middle East.

Rather, it was more like the opposite: Elites across the political spectrum blunted the rage of a wounded nation determined to avenge its dead.

By the time of the attacks, New York had been in the crosshairs of Muslim terrorists for decades. The city is the world capital of finance, media, advertising, publishing, and culture, from painting to theater. And much of its success was thanks to the waves of Jewish immigrants that started arriving in the middle of the 19th century. With the United States’ victory in World War II, the human capital that the city had accumulated and augmented for a century turned New York into human history’s new center of gravity.

The serial efforts to bring the city to its knees would require making Western civilization doubt its strength, virtue, and purpose. And how we remember the attacks is proof that these efforts worked.

The whitewash of Sep. 11 was conducted in full view of the public and started almost immediately after the attacks, while aid workers at the World Trade Center were still sorting through the rubble and ashes.

Six days after the Twin Towers collapsed, then President George W. Bush visited the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C., where Muslim leaders joined him onstage. Days earlier, the press attacked him when he described the U.S. government’s planned military response as a “crusade.” So he was eager to show he meant no offense to Muslim sensibilities still smarting nearly a millennium after the conclusion of the last Christian campaign for Jerusalem.

“The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam,” said Bush. “That’s not what Islam is all about,” he continued. And even more remarkably, “Islam is peace.”

Bush’s words had no demonstrable effect on Muslim masses across the world, giddily celebrating bin Laden’s raid. But with the president’s maudlin apologia for a crude belief system that inspired the murders and elevated the causes for which the son of Saudi elites had killed Americans, he unveiled the sentimental underpinnings of the approach that in the post-9/11 period has had disastrous consequences for the country.

Critics of the Global War on Terror argue that the administration’s failure to define a real enemy—rather than a term so abstract that world bodies can safely pretend not to know what distinguishes it from lawful dissent—showed the United States had no coherent strategy to keep Americans safe. But that’s not true: The GWOT had an internal logic. The argument was that we could protect Americans at home and U.S. interests abroad only by first securing the political rights of Muslims in the Middle East.

That’s why U.S. forces righteously focused their fire on those groups and regimes, like Saddam Hussein’s, who seemed to be the obstacle to the democratic aspirations of Muslim citizens. Once these people were free to exercise their civil rights and use their votes to improve their societies, the theory went, young Muslim men would no longer feel compelled to channel their frustrations into terrorism that kills Americans and U.S. allies.

In other words, the GWOT was a U.S. government initiative deploying enormous human, military, and other material resources to shape current-day reality after a fantasy crafted by progressive Middle East academics, Muslim apologists, and idealistic neoconservatives working inside the administration, along with spokesmen for the states and terror groups aiming their guns at Americans.

Agreeing on little else, together these ideological cohorts promoted an ideological fantasy: a culturally rich and politically sophisticated Middle East, like the convivencia of medieval Andalusia, where majority-Muslim polities lived in peaceful and tolerant coexistence with their Christian and Jewish neighbors. America’s post-9/11 mission was the war to restore “moderate Islam”—something that had never existed in the first place.

Washington became the global caliphate of moderate Islam, passing out billions of dollars to virtually anyone who flashed their credentials, as journalists, political activists, and even religious authorities swindled credulous policymakers with the promise that, since they had the ear of the Arab street, they would gladly help turn Muslim opinion in favor of America. It was a massive confidence scheme, gilded more lavishly than any before it and any of those likely to follow. Any Muslim who’d enjoyed even a brief flirtation with “extremism” and then saw the light became an instant Beltway celebrity, invited to lecture at the Pentagon or State Department and testify on Capitol Hill.

The problem was obvious to anyone who visited a D.C. think tank during the period: With so many moderate Muslims giving lectures, writing pamphlets, and doing media appearances, who was left in the region itself to steer Islam in a more moderate direction?

Obviously, no one.

From that heady ascent, Smith moves on along to the name ‘em/shame ’em section of this very lengthy but truly remarkable article. For instink:

The essential question made plain by the Rushdie affair was, What were the stewards of Western civilization prepared to do to protect it? Obviously, artists could be silenced by threats of violence—anyone can. But would the men and women elected to govern the societies that created the novel protect them against societies that played no role in the making of the modern world and were rather intent to destroy the spiritual and political principles, such as freedom of speech, undergirding them?

The answer was soon forthcoming.

A month after (Don DeLillo’s treatise on terrorism and Jurassic media) Mao II was published, Ettore Capriolo, the Italian translator of Rushdie’s book, survived an attempt on his life by a knife-wielding assassin; a week later, Rushdie’s Japanese translator Hitoshi Igarashi was stabbed to death. And then, in 1993, the Norwegian publisher of The Satanic Verses, William Nygaard, was shot three times but survived.

Capriolo’s assailant escaped; Igarashi’s murder remains unsolved; and Norwegian investigators later identified suspects in the Nygaard case, including an Iranian former diplomat and a Lebanese man, but there wasn’t enough evidence for an indictment.

Maybe Khomeini’s agents were lucky to escape three times or, more likely, Tokyo, Rome, and Oslo wanted to avoid the even bigger problems that were likely to ensue had they caught and convicted the assassins. In any case, the Hezbollah-linked attempt on Rushdie’s life in 2022 that left him blind in one eye answered the question once and for all: What were the nations of the West prepared to do to defend it? Nothing.

The global nightmare sparked by the Rushdie affair could have been avoided, said Omar Abdel-Rahman in 1989, “if we had punished Naguib Mahfouz for what he wrote in ‘Children of Gebelaawi,’ then Salman Rushdie never would have dared to write that book.”

Five years later, Mahfouz was stabbed in the neck on a Cairo street by an assailant who said he was inspired to kill the Nobel Prize winner because of Abdel-Rahman’s decree. And it was Abdel-Rahman’s rulings on the permissibility of killing infidels and apostates that made him the leading Islamist religious authority in all Egypt, the so-called spiritual leader of the terror group Gamaa Islamiya.

He also projected power far beyond the Nile. So, when Abdel-Rahman came to America in 1990, he meant to reap what Khomeini had sown.

Egyptian authorities had arrested Abdel-Rahman in 1981 for his part in the assassination of Anwar Sadat for signing a peace accord with Israel. In jail, he met Osama bin Laden’s future lieutenant Ayman al-Zawahiri, then a senior leader of Islamic Jihad, the terror group that partnered with Abdel-Rahman’s gang to kill Sadat. Abdel-Rahman was acquitted by Egyptian courts twice, but the State Department still put him on the terror watch list. Nonetheless, he was granted a visa in 1990 by consular officials at the U.S. embassy in Khartoum. “They didn’t follow the procedures,” said a State Department spokesperson at the time, who called it a “mistake.”

Wrong, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said back then: “The visa he got was not issued by mistake. It is because of the services he did.” According to Sadat’s successor, “The sheik has been a CIA agent since his days in Afghanistan.” There’s circumstantial evidence to support Mubarak’s claim.

What surprised U.S. officials most about 9/11 was that Muslims around the world so overwhelmingly supported it. Even after Khomeini had permanently altered the nature of international affairs by calling on the global ummah to kill Rushdie, Washington was still shocked to see footage of Muslims—most famously Palestinians in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and refugee camps in Lebanon—ghoulishly celebrating the butchering of the main source of their income, Americans.

In that light, there was some logic to Bush’s freedom agenda—after all, you couldn’t wage war against more than a billion Muslims, especially when, as the Rushdie affair had shown, some of them among you were likely to make war on you. The problem was that even as the project to democratize the region faltered, the president and his aides pressed on.

The crucial test came with the 2006 Palestinian elections. Officials and outside experts warned that Hamas was certain to win big, but Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice ignored them. Hamas swept the polls and soon went to war against Mahmoud Abbas’ U.S.-backed Fatah faction, leaving Hamas in charge of Gaza and Fatah ruling the West Bank. The important point is that given a choice, the Palestinians chose the more radical faction, the terrorists.

Just as they always have, and always will. Onwards.

Even as the freedom agenda crashed, the Bush administration admitted millions of Muslim and Arab immigrants to further advance the soft power component of the GWOT. To wit: America was making war against terrorists and bad regimes, not Muslims. The Republican White House was no more racist against Muslims than it was against Blacks, and as Secretary Rice had made clear, Muslims were in the same position Blacks were during Jim Crow, so to prove Americans were not racist, Muslims were invited to make their homes here.

In fact, what Rice and her boss had done was change the lens through which we Americans understand ourselves. In falsifying our collective history by likening it to something to which it bears no likeness, they changed the standard by which we measure the health of our society. America wasn’t healing itself by importing large portions of at least half a dozen shattered and despotic Middle Eastern societies. Rather, we were putting ourselves, our peace and prosperity, in danger.

The countries from which these immigrants came—Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, the West Bank, Gaza—were torn by civil wars and Islamist insurgencies. Having failed to remake these broken societies in our image, U.S. officials now opened the borders to people shaped by conflicts fought over ideas promoted in some of the worst places on earth.

Bush hardly deserves all the blame for presiding over the post-9/11 influx of Muslim immigrants. Muslim immigration continued under the presidencies of Obama and Biden, and in important categories—including refugee admissions during Obama’s final presidential year—the numbers rose substantially. President Donald Trump sought to stem the tide in his first term with the ban against nationals from several Muslim-majority nations, but he lost repeatedly in court. Singling out Muslim nations was racist, of course.

Even parts of Trump’s own administration opposed him. If we can’t give Iraqis U.S. visas, complained Secretary of Defense James Mattis, how can I convince Iraqi officials to let us stay in their country to kill terrorists?

Here Mattis was on to something, except in reverse. Mass immigration from the Muslim world conflicted with what Bush officials referred to as the fly-trap theory. “Our men and women in uniform are fighting terrorists in Iraq,” said Bush, “so we do not have to face them here at home.”

What does that mean today? Estimates show that there are now approximately 5.5 million Muslims in the United States, with an estimated 2 million to 2.5 million migrating to the United States since 9/11. According to a recent poll, 44% of Muslims in America favor Hamas. Does this mean Americans will be fighting terrorists at home?

Yes. The next mass terror attack is probably going to look like Oct. 7, and New York is a likely venue for it.

T’is beyond debate, I’d say. Any sensible sort up there that hasn’t fled the Big Rotten Apple already ought to be giving it some serious thought right about now.

The piece goes on from there; quite long, yes. But even so, you really don’t want to miss one word of it, I solemnly assure you with hand over heart.

Lessons

Posted on September 11, 2026September 11, 2026 by Mike

Learned, and perhaps more importantly, NOT learned.

What We Never Learned From 9/11
First we learned to love our killers. Then we learned to hate ourselves.

After 19 Muslim terrorists killed nearly 3,000 people in the United States, the most sensible thing would have been to close the borders and keep out the people most likely to carry out attacks.

25 years later and with hundreds more dead and wounded in Islamic terrorist attacks since then, we’ve done the exact opposite and allowed the Muslim population to more than double from 1.8 million to 4.5 million. In New York, the epicenter of the attacks, the insurgent Muslim population shot up from 400,000 to over 700,000 so that New York City is now run by an Islamist politician.

Before 9/11, there had been a handful of Islamic terrorist attacks on American soil. This year alone there were three terror attacks and plots in New York and the summer isn’t even over yet. Multiple mosques in New York City openly preach hatred and terrorism in videos posted to social media and nothing is done since Zohran Mamdani has visited some of those mosques.

Mamdani appointed a lawyer for the 20th 9/11 hijacker who had argued that the terrorists were not driven by evil and that “the legacy of 9/11 ought to be recounted primarily through the stories of Muslims” as New York City’s Chief Counsel. More of the Muslim candidates running for office, like Mamdani, or Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, and Dariazilia Avila Chevalier in New York City “I just wiped my hand on the American flag”, express hostility and contempt towards America.

The political ascension of Islamists who openly despise us reflects our hatred for ourselves.

It’s our peerless brother in arms Dan Greenfield, so naturally you’re gonna want to read it all. And yes, he’s one of ***(((Dem JoJooJooJOOOOOOOZ!!))))***, and as y’all know I don’t give a flying fuck.

For the droolcase contingent: No, 911, was NOT an “inside job,” some kind of typically nebulous, nefarious ***(((Jew)))*** plot pulled off by our own government in collusion with the Evil Empire which controls absolutely the entire fucking universe: Israel (SHRIIIEEEEK!!!). The way things are going, looks like I’m gonna need to repost David Wong’s (nom de pen for Jason Pardin, it turns out) brilliant, often funny, completely thoroughgoing takedown of stupid-ass 911 conspiracy theorizing every damned year on this date, until it finally soaks into some of the thicker skulls out there.

To wit:

But here’s the thing. The 9/11 “Truth” guys, the Loose Changers and all the many websites, they don’t just think government is corrupt. They think everybody, and I mean everybody, is either evil on a demonic scale, or a mindless sheep.

For instance, how much money would it take to get you to kill 3,000 random, innocent Americans? Or, say you stumbled upon somebody else’s plan to kill 3,000 innocent Americans. How much would it take to get you to stay silent afterward?

A hundred dollars? Two hundred? Two hundred fifty?

Well if the conspiracy guys are right, there are people reading this right now who took that deal. No kidding.

Here’s why. The entire 9/11 “Truth” movement rests on the idea that the World Trade Center towers were rigged with explosives, a “Controlled Demolition” like you see with old buildings. That’s the whole thing. They say the buildings couldn’t have come down otherwise.

Forget the fact that no experts on the subject agree with them. That’s not the point right now. We’re just trying to get inside these guys’ heads.

Now, maybe you could keep the plan itself a secret. A few dozen murderous black ops guys, demolitions experts with a grudge against the USA, maybe they’ve been brainwashed. Who knows. Maybe it could be done. People point out that the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb was kept a secret, so why not this?

But the cover-up. Holy shit, guys. Covering this thing up after the fact would be like trying to keep the atomic bomb a secret after Hiroshima. Just wait ’till you hear this.

Yes indeedy. As most of you will well know by now, this long piece stomps the 9/11 Truther crowd flat, right down to the last butt-nugget of wild-eyed batshit lunacy. From the freshly updated (circa 2025) intro to Pop Mech’s likewise-thoroughgoing slicing and dicing of the preposterous Truther nonsense:

More than 20 years later, 9/11 conspiracy theories linger on. In the years following the report of this publication, truthers would launch of variety of attacks on Popular Mechanics, accusing the magazine of being a tool of the federal government and drawing tinfoil-hat diagrams to tie Popular Mechanics to the Bush Administration and the supposed big conspiracy. If all this nonsense accomplished anything, it was to presage our current era of “alternative facts” and attacking the messenger whenever the message clashes with one’s predetermined beliefs.

Yes indeedy again. But hey, whatcha gonna do with these retarded douchetools, right?

Update! No shit, Dick Tracy, where’s the fuckin’ squad car?

Texas Board of Education approves controversial new high school curriculum tying ‘radical Islam’ to 9/11 attacks
The Texas Board of Education gave final approval to changes to the state’s high school social studies curriculum, a controversial move that will impact how students are taught about Islam and Christianity.

The amended social studies curriculum, which covers US history, government and world geography, comes after dozens of people gave public testimony, with most expressing their opposition to the finalized version.

The board approved language asserting that “radical Islam” motivated the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks rather than taking a more narrow focus on the terrorist groups involved in the attack.

Ooooooweee, “radical Islam”?!? For all me, you Post Toasties™ can just drop the “radical” from that formulation, for accuracy.

The material also requires students to study early Islam through Prophet Muhammad’s “brutal military campaigns against Jewish and Christian tribes,” the “normalization of slavery” and the taking of female captives as “harem slaves.”

All of which happens to be perfectly, indubitably true, from the word “brutal” to the word “slaves,” no need for the sneer-quotes, thenksveddymuch.

Several Democratic State Board of Education members pushed back against the wording, but the Republican-majority board still approved that section and the other changes on Friday.

Muslim groups and students, as well as multiple curriculum experts, also spoke out against the new changes.

“I feel attacked, as if my religion doesn’t belong,” Habiiba Quresh, a 15-year-old Muslim student, told the board, according to The Texas Tribune. “I shouldn’t have to defend my religion in the middle of history class because of one sentence someone on this board wrote.”

Your sham “religion” doesn’t belong, asswipe, seeing as how the central tenets of your pseudo-faith stand in direct, explicit contradiction of the Founding principles of ordered liberty, individual self-determination, and total religious freedom. Go back to where you came from, Habibbity-bob. If you feel “attacked” and like your religion doesn’t belong, that simply tells us that your teachers are doing their job properly, and should be commended for their excellent work.

Forgotten

Posted on September 9, 2026 by Mike

Remember “never to forget, never to forgive”? Nah, me neither.

The jumpers started at 8:46.

Networks had the tape. They hid Americans choosing the air over the fire.

Then they spent 25 years treating the word Islam like a crime. The footage was “too graphic.” The truth was forbidden.

This day is stamped in my heart forever… pic.twitter.com/90UcqXVv2I

— Amy Mek (@AmyMek) September 9, 2026

I have several friends who were close by the WTC that black morning, and they said the sickening “thump” the bodies of the jumpers made when they hit the pavement, over and over and over again, like some kind of hellish rain, was something they will never really get over. I do not doubt them, nor should you.

Operative word: “dispiriting”

Posted on September 8, 2026September 8, 2026 by Mike

Steyn asks the Big Q.

I’m not sure precisely when the 9/11 era – “The Day That Everything Changed” – became The Day That Everything Changed Back To The Way It Was Before Only Even Nuttier And More Suicidal. But, a quarter-century on, the Taliban are back running Afghanistan, but with more territory than they ever had before; an al-Qaeda guy has been installed with American approval as strongman of Syria; the Christian community in Iraq was extinguished on America’s watch; the Libyan intervention delivered the North African ports closest to Europe into the hands of Isis, with direct consequences for Continental demographics; and – just to confirm the “war on terror” was utterly lost and always misconceived – a Shia Twelver from Uganda who believes in everything the guys we’re droning in Tehran believe is Giuliani’s successor as Mayor of New York City and the new kingmaker of the Democrat Party. If the United States Government had been working for the other side all along, what exactly would it have done differently?

Oh, I’m afraid we all know the answer to that one, only too well: nothing whatsoever.

So, even before the dispiriting observances of the coming week, it’s hard to recall the visceral emotion that in those first weeks and months after September 11th engaged almost every area of American life. With one striking exception, that is. On the eve of the Second World War Irving Berlin’s gift to the nation was “God Bless America”. Across the ocean Hugh Charles and Ross Parker did the same with “There’ll Always Be an England”. But this new war found American songwriters sitting on their hands, the very silence serving as a kind of recessional, for pop culture’s retreat from any aspect of the subject. The short history of American popular music’s contribution to national resolve can be told in two photographs of blockbuster pop stars in military uniform: on the one hand, Glenn Miller, shot down over the English Channel while leading the US Army-Air Force Band, and, on the other, Madonna, who on her world tour a few years back cavorted on stage in a burqa and, when she disrobed, as she inevitably does, was revealed to be wearing army uniform underneath. This was in order to make the highly original point that the Taliban and the Bush Administration were both equally oppressive. Truly, the herd mentality of celebrity “dissent” is indestructible. Would it kill ’em once in a while to dissent from their dissent and try something other than the dreary conformity of celeb cardboard courage?

As for less tediously obvious provocations, as I wrote on the first anniversary of 9/11, “Bruce Springsteen’s blurry equivalist mope of a 9/11 album, The Rising, is a classic example of how even a supposed ‘blue-collar’ icon can’t bring himself to want America to win.”

Well, I mean, y’know, SPRINGSTEIN. If there was ever a bigger phony, a more obnoxiously objectionable Limousine Liberal, than that jerkweed, I’m sure I haven’t heard of him/her/it.

The article veers off in a most unexpected direction from there, which ultimately proves to be even more dispiriting. Which is, y’know, SAYING something.

Update! Lest you think there’s nothing more substantive to this one than le doom et le gloom, hey, it’s Mark Steyn, fercripessake.

Then they rushed the hijackers. Mrs Jefferson kept the line open. A few minutes later, the plane crashed, not at Camp David or the White House or the Capitol, but in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Jeremy Glick knew that he would never see his three-month-old daughter again, Todd Beamer that he would never know the baby his wife was carrying. But both men understood that they could play their part in preserving a civilization for their children to grow up in. By being willing to sacrifice themselves, the citizen-soldiers of Flight 93 saved thousands, including perhaps the terrorists’ intended target – the highest officeholders in the republic. Flight 93 was the decisive event of September 11th. As Jim Bennett of UPI wrote:

The Era of Osama lasted about an hour and half or so, from the time the first plane hit the tower to the moment the General Militia of Flight 93 reported for duty.

And, for a while, that remained true: as I wrote at the time, “No one will ever again hijack an American airliner with box cutters, or, I’d wager, with anything else — not because of idiotic federal regulations, but because of the example of Todd Beamer and his ad hoc platoon.” Faced with a new and unprecedented form of terror, the latest American technology (cellphones) combined with the oldest American virtue (self-reliance) and stopped it in its tracks in just 90 minutes. When the Air France passengers jumped the Shoebomber and the Delta passengers the Pantybomber, they were acting in accordance not with FAA regulations but with Flight 93 rules.

But the years go by…

I’m not a big Neil Young fan. If I never heard the fey, dopey “Harvest Moon” or “Heart Of Gold” ever again, it wouldn’t be too soon. But I’m glad he wrote this song. For serious Young admirers, and the rock biz in general, it was more problematic, even a mere three months after 9/11. The venerable rock critic Dave Marsh said Young’s politics had “all been downhill since ‘Ohio'” – his song about the Kent State shootings – and dismissed “Let’s Roll” as “jingoistic”. But, if it takes a Canadian rocker to purvey a bit of Yank jingoism, let’s have more of it.

Amen to that, Mark old fellow.

“The unerring predictions of climate doom”

Posted on September 2, 2026 by Mike

Gathered together in one place for the first time ever: all the busted, incorrect, failed, and patently preposterous doom ’n’ death prophecies from the climate-alarmist pants-pissers, bedwetters, and assorted ninnyheimers. To wit:

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, John Wright provides a useful timeline of climate catastrophism in response to someone posting “projected” sea rise in Florida due to global warming:

For those of you keeping track:

1958 New York Times: Ice-free Arctic within 70 years.

1967 Salt Lake City Tribute, quoting Paul Ehrlich: Global famine by AD 1975. Involuntary mass sterilization needed to curtail population growth.

1970 Boston Globe, quoting James Lodge: Ice Age by the 21st Century.

1971 Washington Post, quoting NASA: Ice Age within 50 years.

1972 Brown University: Global climate deterioration due to Global Cooling.

1974 Guardian: Ice Age coming fast.

1974 Time Magazine: New Ice Age.

1978 New York Times: No end in sight to cooling trend.

Original source, with more listings than you might be anticipating, can be found here.

(Via Hoyt)

KHAAAAANN!

Posted on August 22, 2026August 23, 2026 by Mike

First up, let’s check out this phat meme (courtesy of Ms Hoyt, thanks!) which is what reminded me of this cool-ass little story in the first place.

Heh. By cracky, that’s just too darn punny right there. Now, let’s get to it.

The Picture That Settles The Khan Chest Debate
It’s been years since I’ve looked at Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, but I do remember as a youngster buying into the idea that Ricardo Montalbán, who played the titular villain Khan, was wearing a prosthetic chest.

In case you’re not aware, it’s sort of an old urban legend that has been around for 35 years. Here is what the trivia on the IMDb says:

It has been widely debated that Ricardo Montalban’s chest was actually a prosthetic piece that he wore during the film. In the director’s commentary in the special edition DVD, Nicholas Meyer is quoted as saying that it was, in fact, Montalban’s actual chest and that he was a very muscular man who worked out. During publicity for the movie, during an appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1982) Montalban explained that he was able to achieve the look seen in the film by doing push-ups. “A lot of push-ups.”

The problem some people had was that Montalbán was an older gentleman at the time of filming and had a chest that was alpha as fuck, coupled with some curious attire positioning and a necklace that in theory would hide a suspect seam, and some poor VHS quality, some insisted it was fake. The layers of crude, fake, makeup Nimoy and Shatner wore — it looks like they rolled their faces in their wive’s makeup drawers — probably didn’t help.

Well, the following pic puts that to rest decisively.

Which, for my money, it….does. I’m satisfied that Montalban’s sculpted, manly chest is/was in fact the genuine article, no prosthetics required. Funny thing is, as a diehard Trek fanboi for pretty much my whole life, I never knew until just now that there ever even was a “Khan’s chest” debate; all along, I had just assumed it was either plastic or some other type of movie-magic fakery. Glad we finally got that all cleared up, aren’t you?

Funniest of all is that in the flick, Montalban’s Khan character was, in fact, a genetically-altered Übermenschen, specifically bio-engineered to be vastly superior in every way to us pathetic, flabby Normals. So in the end, not only was Montalban’s studly bod the real deal, but the man’s Rodin-statue-esque physique was probably a major part of the reason he got picked for the role to begin with. The above article appends another pic from early in Montalban’s acting career that’s even more convincing:

Yep, if THAT don’t persuade you, I can only guess that “Khan’s fake chest” is a position you simply aren’t open to changing yur mind about.

Update! Did a quickie Luxxle search, and whaddya know, further evidence in support of the proposition that Ricardo Montalban had a seriously carved-up, cut-up phyzz.

Montalban 2.

From another of his early movies, 1950’s Right Cross, in which Mr Rich Corinthian Leather portrays (you guessed it) a Mex-American boxing champeen.

Updated update! You wanna see something that really IS fake, phony, and fraudulent? Try this on for size.

Corinthian leather is a marketing term coined by copywriter Jim Nichols with the Omaha-based Bozell advertising agency in 1974 to describe a leather upholstery used in certain luxury vehicles of the Chrysler automobile company.

The advertisements developed the term Corinthian leather to imply a premium product of foreign origin denoting something rich, rare, and luxurious, though the product was in fact made by the Radel Leather Manufacturing Company in Newark, New Jersey.

Though Chrysler first used the term Corinthian leather in advertisements for the 1974 Imperial LeBaron, the term itself would ultimately become heavily associated with the 1975 Cordoba, an intermediate personal luxury car. The success of the advertising campaign closely associated actor Ricardo Montalbán, the spokesman, with the Cordoba’s so-called Corinthian leather. In promoting the Cordoba model, Montalbán described a car interior with thickly-cushioned, luxury seats upholstered in what were variously described as either fine, soft, or rich Corinthian leather.

When asked on Late Night with David Letterman what the term denoted, Montalbán said that Corinthian leather was a marketing term. Montalbán credited commercial writer Jim Nichols for the term. In promoting the Chrysler New Yorker in 1988, Montalbán described the Corinthian leather as a “rich” leather. The term came to include the vinyl upholstering for interior surfaces, such as the backs of the front seats and the head rests, and the lower parts of door facings.

Just in case any of y’all miscreants had somehow conjured the erroneous idea that We Duh Peepul being lied to, led astray, hornswoggled, and duped was something new.

The truth, at last

Posted on August 17, 2026August 18, 2026 by Mike

Truly penetrating analysis from Ace.

Trump often says he wants an immigration system that permits skilled workers into the country, and people who “love” us.

That always hit me as a little, I don’t know, soft. Do I care if immigrants “love” us or not?

Well I’ll tell you what, I care now. Trump is and was right: It should matter to us if immigrants are coming into this country to bring the chaos, corruption, and endless civil wars of their home shithole countries to our Main Streets, or if they’re really coming to join our civilization as supporters and actual, real “cultural enrichers.”

The left has created an ideology called Third Worldism. Third Worldism teaches all people in poor countries to hate white westerners and blame them for all of their poverty and stagnation. The way out of poverty and stagnation is not, as you might think, to adopt the proveably pro-growth and pro-stability doctrines of the west, but instead to just inflict on the west all of the ills and mayhem of the Third World. They believe that if they can just destroy the west, the Third World will thrive. I guess the theory is something like, “The West is all tall trees that catch the sunlight before it reaches the bushes on the ground. If we just tear down and burn all the tall trees, we’ll all grow as high as they once were.”

It’s absurd. But note it is just the companion doctrine of anti-white, anti-American racial socialism in this country, which also advocates for not changing anything about failing “communities” except to destroy the “oppressors” supposedly keeping them down.

Or, as their false God Lenin is reputed to have said, Chyem hoozhye, tyem looschye.

The Plan

Posted on August 7, 2026August 7, 2026 by Mike

Please don’t try to tell me you didn’t know there was one. PLEASE.

For the Muslim Brotherhood in the U.S., Everything Is Going According to Plan
Sure, there are a few dissenting voices. But the left will take care of them.

Before 2007, there were no Muslim in the House of Representatives or Senate at all. The seven Muslim legislators who will be sworn in (on the Qur’an, no doubt) in January will include the four representatives in the 119th Congress: Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.); Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.); Andre Carson (D-Ind.), and Lateefah Simon (D-Calif.). Joining them will be the nation’s first Muslim senator, Abdul El-Sayed (D-Mich.), as well as Reps. Darializa Avila Chevalier (D-N.Y.) and Adam Hamawy (D-N.J.).

After the November elections, there could be more as well, but El-Sayed, Avila Chevalier and Hamawy are virtually assured of election now, as they have nothing to worry about in November. The left, once in power, generally moves to make opposition to its policies progressively (hah) more difficult. In New York, New Jersey, and Michigan, the left has been in power for a long time, and the Republican Party is moribund.

So the number has gone from zero to four to seven, and many more are to come. “Every election cycle, we see more Muslim candidates — not fewer,” crowed Robert McCaw, the executive director of CAIR Action, the explicitly political arm of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). “That’s a clear indication of confidence, growth, and belonging,” McCaw exulted, although it would have been more accurate to say that the growth of Muslim political power in the U.S. is a clear indication of a concerted effort being made in the face of near-total ignorance and/or indifference on the other side.

Hamas-linked CAIR top dog Nihad Awad articulated that effort on August 31, 2024 at a convention of the likewise Hamas-linked Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). “Lawmaking,” he stated with equal parts obviousness and ominousness, “is about making laws.” Yes, of course, and that is why Muslims in the U.S. are seeking political power: the idea is to bring Sharia, which is not just religious, but political, supremacist, expansionist and violent, to the United States.

Awad continued: “Today we have 43 State delegates in the United States who are Muslim. If they want to run for Congress, in the next two or four or six years, they can. We may end up, if we are organized, we may end up with about 50 members of Congress in the next six years, if we only plan and put our money where our mouth and our minds are.”

The Muslim Brotherhood articulated the ultimate goal in a captured internal document dating from May 1991, “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Brotherhood in North America.” It stated that “The process of settlement is a ‘Civilization-Jihadist Process’ with all the word means. The Ikhwan [Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions” (p. 7).

The idea that the Westerners would destroy their own civilization “by their hands” comes from the Qur’an: “It is he who has caused those among the people of the book who disbelieved to go forth from their homes to the first exile. You did not think that they would go forth, while they thought that their strongholds would protect them from Allah. But Allah reached them from a place they did not expect, and cast terror in their hearts so that they ruined their houses with their own hands and the hands of the believers. So learn a lesson, O you who have eyes” (Qur’an 59:2).

From zero (0) to fifty (50) in only a few short years, and there’s no end in sight. Disgusting.

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