Alternative History

Steyn sampler

Posted on September 13, 2026September 13, 2026 by Mike Leave a comment

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 Leave a comment

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 1 Comment

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 1 Comment

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 Leave a comment

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 4 Comments

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.

Down the Big Muddy

Posted on July 30, 2026July 30, 2026 by Mike

The latest in Ross’s brilliantly conceived, deftly executed “Graphic History” series.

A Day with Young Abraham Lincoln in New Orleans, 1828
Historical Backdrop

In the spring of 1828, a nineteen-year-old Abraham Lincoln was hired by James Gentry, the richest man in Gentryville, Indiana, to help float a cargo of pork, bacon, corn meal, potatoes and flour down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans. His partner was Gentry’s son Allen, four years older. Lincoln was paid eight dollars a month and a steamboat ticket home. The boat was a “broadhorn” flatboat — a big unpainted wooden box, roughly sixty-five feet long, steered by a long sweep oar, moving only as fast as the current. Somewhere below Baton Rouge, at a sugar plantation landing, seven men boarded at night intending to rob them; Lincoln fought them off with a hickory club and carried a scar over his right eye for the rest of his life. Then came New Orleans: a city of about 46,000 people, the busiest port in the South. Lincoln had grown up in the backwoods of Indiana. He had never seen anything like it.

That’s merely the beginning; read it all, you’ll be damned glad you did.

Complicit, to the Nth degree

Posted on July 29, 2026July 29, 2026 by Mike

Meet Lizz Wainio.

She was only twenty-seven years old. In the final minutes of her life, she did not ask her family to comfort her. Instead, Honor Elizabeth Wainio used her last phone call to prepare them for a grief she knew she would never have to carry.

Everyone called her Lizz.

Just days before September 11, 2001, she had returned from a long-awaited trip to Europe. She attended a friend’s wedding in Florence, walked through Paris, and lit a candle in a church for her grandmother.

Lizz once told her mother that seeing Paris would make her life complete.

But she believed she still had decades ahead of her.

She was a successful district manager for Discovery Channel Stores, responsible for locations across New York and New Jersey. Friends remembered her as energetic, organized, and deeply affectionate, someone who approached life with urgency and joy.

On September 11, Lizz boarded United Airlines Flight 93 in Newark for a business trip to San Francisco. Forty passengers and crew members were aboard, along with four hijackers.

At 9:28 that morning, the hijackers attacked the cockpit. The aircraft suddenly dropped hundreds of feet, and passengers were forced toward the rear.

Then phone calls began revealing the truth.

Planes had struck the World Trade Center. Another had hit the Pentagon. Flight 93 was not part of an ordinary hostage situation. The passengers understood that their aircraft was also being used as a weapon.

At 9:53, Lizz called her stepmother, Esther Heymann, using an Airfone.

Her voice was calm.

She spoke about the people she loved and tried to ease Esther’s fear. During the conversation, she said that what was happening would be much harder for her family than it was for her.

Facing death, Lizz was thinking about those who would survive her.

She also said she was going to be with her grandmother.

The call lasted about four and a half minutes. Near its end, Lizz heard the other passengers preparing to move toward the cockpit.

“I have to go,” she said. “They’re breaking into the cockpit. I love you.”

At 9:57, the passengers and crew launched their counterattack. They rushed forward, knowing exactly what failure would mean.

At 10:03, Flight 93 crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Everyone aboard was killed.

Investigators concluded that the hijackers intended to strike a target in Washington, most likely the Capitol. The passengers’ resistance prevented the plane from reaching it.

Today, forty wind chimes stand at the Flight 93 National Memorial, one for each passenger and crew member. Every voice remains separate, just as every life aboard was unique.

Lizz had plans, a career, people she loved, and a future waiting for her.

But when terror took everything else away, it could not take her compassion.

Thirty thousand feet above the earth, a frightened young woman chose to comfort others.

Honor Elizabeth Wainio died at twenty-seven.

But in her final minutes, she showed what courage can sound like when it speaks through love.

A bit more here on this lovely young woman, wantonly murdered by shitheel raghead terrorists on America’s second darkest day—the DARKEST being, hands down, when NYC shitlib fools disgraced themselves and their posterity forevermore by selecting the execrable Zoran MammyDamnJammy to be their mayor.

Happily, there are at least a handful of decent New Yorkers who, despite all odds, still do retain at least a modicum of honor, dignity, and self respect.

Families of 9/11 victims want to ban Mamdani from sacred 25th anniversary ceremony at Ground Zero: ‘unwelcome guest’
Families of 9/11 victims are demanding NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani be banned from the 25th anniversary of the attacks at Ground Zero, branding him an apologist for Islamic terror whose presence would be an insult to the memories of nearly 3,000 people murdered.

“Our objection is based on his public record — his failure to meaningfully acknowledge the horror of that day, and his employment of, support for, or association with individuals who have minimized 9/11, defended terrorists, or even suggested America ‘deserved’ the attacks,” said Giovanni Galante – whose 29-year-old wife Grace Catherine Galante was among 2,977 innocents killed by al-Qaeda terrorists.

Galante, 55, is one of the organizers of a petition drive that has collected over 1,100 signatures in a little over a week, including from at least 300 victims’ families.

Good on ya, sir, and heartfelt condolences on the loss so cruelly inflicted on you all those years ago by The Friends Of Mamdani.

Salisbury steak

Posted on July 23, 2026July 23, 2026 by Mike

The fascinating tale of Dr James Salisbury’s renowned brainchild.

alisbury steak — seasoned ground beef patties mixed with breadcrumbs or other ingredients — was invented by James Salisbury, a New York physician who was fascinated by the relationship between diet and health. In the 1850s, he conducted a series of self experiments in which he exclusively ate a single food for a few days or weeks. His first test, a diet of only baked beans, produced disastrous results: “I became very flatulent and constipated, head dizzy, ears ringing, limbs prickly, and was wholly unfitted for mental work,” he wrote in The Relation of Alimentation and Disease (1888). Next came oatmeal and other staples, but it was ground beef, which he called “muscle pulp of beef,” that finally delivered the results he sought.

His prescription was simple: broiled beef patties, served with simple seasonings such as butter, salt, pepper, Worcestershire sauce, and lemon. This recipe, he wrote, “affords the maximum of nourishment with the minimum of effort to the digestive organs.” Vegetables, on the other hand, were not only unnecessary but also harmful in his view; Salisbury declared that vegetarians had “less nervous and muscular endurance than meat eaters.”

During the Civil War, Salisbury applied his nutrition theories to Union soldiers, who were fed a diet of beef patties instead of the usual hard biscuits, which tended to cause digestive issues. In the decades following the war, Salisbury’s diet evolved from medical prescription to one of America’s first fad diets, spurred on by the rise of wellness culture and increased public interest in healthy food. (Other notable 19th-century foods believed to promote health included graham crackers, which were originally intended to suppress the libido, and Kellogg’s cornflakes, which were served by their inventor John Harvey Kellogg at his world-famous sanitarium.)

World War I was a further boon for the Salisbury steak, as the name became preferred to the German-sounding “hamburger.” By the mid-20th century, the dish had become a blue-collar classic. Hearty, inexpensive, and easy to prepare in large batches, it appeared on diner menus and Navy cookbooks across America.

Then came the postwar boom — and with it, the rise of television. In 1953, the Swanson company introduced the TV dinner, a frozen meal packaged in a compartmentalized aluminum tray. Within its first year of production, more than 10 million trays were sold in the U.S., and the Salisbury steak was one of the TV dinner’s most enduring offerings. For a generation of midcentury families, Salisbury steak was the taste of modern life: a hot meal ready in minutes, eaten in front of the television.

The same forces that made Salisbury steak famous would later make it unfashionable. In the 2000s, Americans began to fall out of love with processed foods, in part due to growing awareness of their negative health effects. In 2012, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed a ban on large sodas in the city, and First Lady Michelle Obama encouraged children to “Move!” The Salisbury steak, which was by then synonymous with microwaved TV dinners, fell victim to its association with cheap, unhealthy meals.

That said, not all processed foods suffered this fate, and another reason for Salisbury steak’s decline may be that it was outcompeted by its more convenient cousin, the burger, which rose to prominence as one of America’s most popular and iconic meals during the latter half of the 20th century. With the spread of fast-food chains such as McDonald’s and Burger King, many customers opted for the Salisbury steak’s handheld cousin when in the mood for a beef patty.

Though Salisbury steak has faded from the cultural spotlight in recent years, it is viewed with nostalgia by many who grew up with it and can still be found in home kitchens across America.

I ate a gracious plenty of those Swanson dinners featuring Salisbury steak when I was a kid, and it doesn’t seem to have done me any harm. Not that I know of, at any rate.

Via Insty, who quips, “Dr. Salisbury had your best interests at heart.” In stark today’s crop of Goosesteppin’ Left dietary/health/lifestyle scolds, who assuredly do not.

Burning questions

Posted on July 10, 2026July 10, 2026 by Mike

Whatever pitiful handful of old-school Ainglishters may still be left ain’t gonna like the answer much, I bet.

What would Churchill think of the land of Lucy Connolly and Henry Nowak?
THE emergence of vigilante patrols on the streets of Rochdale following the release from prison of a convicted grooming gang ringleader is, at first glance, a local story. Such episodes are easily dismissed as spontaneous expressions of public anger, the predictable consequence of a controversial criminal case. Yet to do so would be to overlook the more interesting question. Why are citizens beginning to assume responsibilities that belong exclusively to the state?

The significance of vigilantism in Rochdale and elsewhere in Britain lies not in the number of people involved but in the assumption that underlies it: that the authorities either cannot or will not perform one of their most elementary duties. Political legitimacy depends as much on what citizens believe governments are capable of doing as on what governments actually do.

Taken in isolation, the events of recent years in Britain prove very little. Western democracies periodically experience shocking crimes, controversial court decisions and failures of public administration. No single episode tells us much about the condition of a nation. The picture changes when exceptional events begin to accumulate with unsettling regularity.

The Southport murders, where three young girls were killed and many others injured, sent shockwaves throughout the entire country. Beyond the horror of the crime itself came intense scrutiny of the state’s capacity to prevent such atrocities. The public debate that followed was as much about confidence in government as it was about one criminal.

None of this means that Britain stands on the brink of civil war as some commentators suggest. Such a conclusion is unsupported by the available evidence. Hyperbole makes for clickbait, after all. But what if vigilante patrols are not an isolated incident, but the first visible symptom of a broader crisis of confidence in the British state’s capacity to perform its essential functions?

One cannot help wondering how Winston Churchill, the historian rather than the statesman, would read Britain’s present predicament. In A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, he chronicled Britain as a nation shaped by successive waves of transformation. The native Britons gave way to the Romans. The Romans departed. Angles, Saxons, Danes, Vikings and Normans each left their mark upon the island. Civil wars, religious upheavals, industrialisation, imperial expansion followed in turn. Britain’s story did not end there. The post-war decades brought new waves of immigration from the Caribbean, the Indian subcontinent and Africa, adding yet another layer to a nation that had always been shaped by change. To Churchill, these were not interruptions in Britain’s story. They were Britain herself.

Would he regard today’s anxieties as merely another chapter in that long and often turbulent history? Or would he conclude that something more fundamental is taking place – not simply another transformation, but a gradual erosion of the confidence that has long enabled Britain’s institutions to absorb change without losing their authority?

Time alone will answer that question.

Yeppers; like it or not, it most certainly will. Actually, it’s my own belief that it already has, and that it is now much too late for No-Longer-Great Britainistan to have any real hope of reversing course and saving itself.

To date, no civilization, however mighty, wealthy, successful, and/or rigorously defended has endured forever—not the Greeks, not the Romans, not the Ottomans nor the Mongols nor the Picts nor the Saxons etc etc etc. Our English cousins had a darned good run for sure, several centuries at or near the top o’ the global heap. Alas, that run is now well and truly over, and the British future now looks for the most part swarthy, anarchic, Moslem, and frankly, bleak.

Shame, disgrace, dishonor

Posted on July 3, 2026 by Mike

The view from the America-hating Left.

My local paper is honoring the semiquincentennial by running a different story every day which highlight reasons for their shame about being American. In the past week, the featured stories have included slavery, lynchings, the slave trade, the KKK, and segregation. There is no triumph in those stories about what was overcome under the stars and stripes either, just pure venom at what a sinister country this is.

But it’s long been this way. For decades it’s made me sad that the left couldn’t stop hating on America for even one day of the year, but they can’t. I recall listening to the NPR station back in the late ‘90s, and it’s Independence Day coverage was heavily focused on injustices and land theft committed against Native Americans and Mexicans. I fully understood that NPR was providing emotional support to its listeners on a very difficult day. Those of us patriotically celebrating the USA have always caused emotional distress to the left.

Because Democrats are desperately fixated on this country being built on stolen land, they’ll never accept the U.S. as being a legitimate country to take pride in. At this point, all we on the right can do is laugh at them and hope their fervent anti-patriotism propels their party into further disrepute.

Exactly, a hunnert-n-twelve percent correct. Thus:

Next up, a little history.

At the recent Texas Democratic Convention, it opened with, what else, a land acknowledgement to the native Karankawa Indians. This is what attendees heard: “I would also like to acknowledge that we gather on the traditional homelands of the indigenous peoples of the coastal bend and the area known as Corpus Christi. The Karankawa were the people of Corpus Christi Bay.”

Now listen, I’m a guy who believes it’s imperative to celebrate the good and de-emphasize the bad in those who came before us and helped shape this country, but the Karankawa were so rough that even the “civilized tribes” kept their distance.

The Tonkawas of Central Texas allied with and fought alongside white settlers because the Tonkawas were sandwiched between the Karankawas to the southeast and the Comanches to the northwest. History is complicated, but land acknowledgements aren’t. They are simple, no-cost outlets for white guilt.

They are that, certainly—and very little else, same as all the other forms of cheap virtue-signaling set forth in the Holy Church of Liberalism’s catechism. New category, one it appears all too likely I’ll be getting lots of use out of going forward: Stolen land.

Two things: lies, and whining

Posted on June 18, 2026June 18, 2026 by Mike

If it wasn’t for those, they’d have nothing to say at all.

Trump’s UFC fight a lot like 19th century lynching, Boston College historian says
Former CNN anchor Jim Acosta agrees

A Boston College historian recently complained that a UFC fight on the South Lawn of the White House is related to the “impulse” that led to lynching black people in the 19th century.

Heather Richardson joined Jim Acosta’s YouTube show to discuss the mixed martial arts event held on Sunday, June 14, dubbed UFC Freedom 250.

Richardson, a frequent Trump critic, cited her self-proclaimed expertise on Abraham Lincoln.

She said during the Gilded Age there was no “open display of denigration of American symbols and American values” like there supposedly is now.

She then praised people like JD Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie for saying they were “offering a way forward for the United States.”

Richardson then said Trump “is deliberately tear(ing) that apart and he is doing so on the same cultural argument of course that people used to back the first Gilded age that is these cultural wars that turn white Americans against marginalized people of color.”

“Right,” Acosta agreed.

The historian then concluded:

I mean it’s not really a stretch to say that the same impulse that created the UFC fight on the White House lawn is the impulse that really pushed lynching in the late 19th century against black Americans overwhelmingly but also against Italian-Americans in Louisiana for example or Mexican-Americans in the American West or indigenous Americans in the American that idea somehow a really fake idea by the way that America is a white nation and anybody who challenges that needs to be purged from the body politic.

However, many people did think it was a “stretch” to compare a fighting match to the racist lynching of people.

Only because it, y’know, IS. Then again, though: Boston College, typically butt-ugly shitlib bint, self-proclaimed “historian”—what didja expect, anyway? As for that pseudo-historian bushwa, Mark Hemingway has ya covered.

Heather Cox Richardson is not an historian—she’s an IQ test, and anyone that takes her seriously is telling on themselves. https://t.co/Bv9nDylY6d

— Mark Hemingway (@Heminator)

June 17, 2026

Oof.

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