From Europe, the culture war raging in the United States is disturbing. In the presidential election, it seems that radical anti-American forces are questioning the very foundation on which Western civilisation was built. The New York Timesseems too similar to the propaganda we were fed by the Hungarian Stalinist Pravda during the days of communist tyranny.

Contaminating the Past

In the Western world, the past has become the target of an ideological crusade. Many of its historic monuments and symbols are being vandalised, defaced or destroyed altogether. In the United States, the national flag has been treated with derision and denounced by leading members of its cultural institutions as a symbol of racism, oppression and discrimination. Commentators have been regularly condemning their nation’s past and portraying it as a source of irredeemable shame.

In recent times, hostility towards the very foundation on which different Western nations rest has acquired a systematic form. This trend is most strikingly articulated by The New York Times‘ 1619 Project — to devalue and criminalise the founding of the United States.

Through distorting America’s history, this project claims that the year 1619, and not 1776, constitutes the origin of the United States. It was in 1619 that African slaves arrived in Jamestown, and this event has been rebranded as the origins of the US. Why? Because the 1619 Project insists that the US was founded for the purpose of entrenching slavery and that to this day, this nation is dominated by that legacy. According to this inaccurate version of the past, the American Revolution was not so much a war of independence but a selfish act of preserving exploitation and oppression. In this way, the contribution of the American Revolution to the development of the Western ideals of individual liberty and personal responsibility is erased from history. America’s Declaration of Independence and — especially for the time — its remarkably advanced liberal and democratic Constitution and Bill of Rights are implicitly renounced as slave-owners’ charters.

Most significantly, the 1619 project is designed to contaminate the tradition and foundation that underpins the opportunity and mobility that have come to characterise the American way of life. This attempt to vandalise the tradition of a nation and its historic memory is far more toxic than toppling over a statue. Certainly, one of the main authors of the 1619 project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, is in no doubt that her objective was to plunder the past in order to undermine the moral authority of present. Recently she responded to critics who claim that she has distorted history by stating on Twitter:

“I’ve always said that 1619 project is not history. It is a work of journalism that explicitly seeks to challenge the national narrative and therefore national memory. The project has always been as much about the present as it is about the past.”

Hannah-Jones’s explicit conflation of the present and the past should not be seen as an innocent disregard of fundamental temporal boundaries but as a project devoted to contaminating the past in order de-legitimate the institutions of the US in the present.

A script for the vandalisation of history

The way in which the authors of the 1619 Project attempt to seize control of the national narrative is by providing a simplistic, inaccurate but highly evocative script for members of the public. It is a script that many protestors, rioters and looters in the United States have effortlessly internalised. Hannah-Jones has little inhibition about promoting a script that regards not only the Founders of the US but members of the white race with contempt. As she noted in a 1995 letter to a newspaper, “the white race is the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager, and thief of the modern world”. Her reference is not simply to the white people that settled America in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. She added:

“Even today, the descendants of these savage [white] people pump drugs and guns into the Balck community, pack Black people into the squalor of segregated urban ghettos, and continue ot be bloodsuckers in our community.”

In a different world, the denunciation of an entire race would be interpreted as not a million miles from racist prejudice. We live in a world, however, where scripts like the one promoted by the 1619 Project are strongly supported by many of the cultural and educational institutions of society. It is after all The New York Times — once the paper of record in the US — that promoted and endorsed Hannah-Jones’ narrative of hate towards the nation’s past. And to demonstrate that Hannah-Jones enjoyed the moral support of the commentariat, she was awarded the prestigious Pulitzer Prize. Hollywood celebrities rushed in to demonstrate their support for the 1619 Project. Predictably, Oprah Winfrey and the global content platform, Lionsgate, teamed up with Hannah-Jones to bring her work to an even wider audience through multiple platforms.

The embrace of the 1619 Project by celebrities, online influencers and leaders of America’s cultural industry highlights one of the most important development that encourages the cancelling of American culture. The most significant feature of the war against the past is the complicity of cultural institutions and their leaders in the project of estranging society from its traditions and history.

It is not merely universities that promote a vision of the nation’s past as one that people should view with shame. The claim that contemporary cultural institutions bear the burden of guilt for the crimes committed by their ancestors also seems to have been widely internalised by the cultural elites. According to their playbook, America’s history is a story of unremitting violence and greed. There are no “good old days” that can serve as a focus for redemption and nostalgia. Instead of nostalgia, the current regime promoting a vision of the past as “the bad old days” incites guilt, shame and self-loathing. This corrosive orientation towards one’s history invites the performance of apology. The ritualization of remorse towards the events of the past is one of the important accomplishments of this movement.

It seems that this election is not just about which candidate gets elected — it is ultimately about America’s commitment to empirical facts, its extraordinary Constitution and its determination to maintain its leadership role in the world by refusing to allow cheating and corruption, in either its elections or its governmental institutions. One can only hope that the ideals of the Founding Founders will prevail.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16556/the-plot-against-america

Greek authorities suspect that four German civil society organizations are working with Turkish smugglers to assist illegal migrants to avoid sea patrols and land on the Greek islands, resulting in the arrest of 35 NGO activists last week. 

Since the detention of the suspects by Greek authorities, new details are emerging about the case. 

According to Greek portal Proto Thema, four pro-migrant NGOs based out Germany, Norway, and Austria, with Mare Liberum, Sea Watch, FFM, and Josoor International Solidarity becoming the targets of a large-scale police investigation. Their vessels are operating in the vicinity of Lesbos, one of the most popular destinations for illegal migrants since the beginning of the refugee crisis in 2015.

Officially, the organizations aim to save migrants in distress during their sea voyage, however, both Greece and Italy accuse these organizations of acting as a “taxi service” which works with smugglers picking migrants up in agreed locations, claiming that they are picking up the victims of sea disasters.

Many illegal migrants who arrive in Turkey attempt to reach Greece and the EU via the Eastern Mediterranean, and while the Greek authorities are doing everything in their power to stop them, many migrants successfully enter the EU. 

According to Polish news outlet Niezalezna, the Greek authorities accuse the German NGOs of spying on government sea patrols, border patrols and the EU’s border control agency Frontex.

Prosecutors allege that members of these NGOs are placing law enforcement services under surveillance to listen in on communications and then conveying the information uncovered to Turkish smugglers to help them evade sea patrols. The activists are also helping the vessels to evade border patrols and advising them on the best places to land.

Authorities believe these activists gained access to closed Turkish government websites and communications with stolen passcodes, and used that information to help smugglers as well. 

According to Greek media, the investigation has been ongoing for months. Authorities had uncovered a set of maps on the Mare Liberum vessel on which points of departure from Turkey are marked and the landing sites in Lesbos.

Greek law enforcement services have also performed undercover investigations inside Turkey. Agents, posing as illegal migrants, have come into contact with the NGOs and uncovered that they are directly working with the smugglers.

The investigations by the Greeks has allowed the authorities to file 35 charges against the employees of these NGOs. They are accused of assisting in at least 32 illegal border crossings which resulted in the arrival of 3,000 illegal migrants.

The Greeks also want to uncover the way these organizations are financed to discover if there is any funding from the Turkish smugglers. In order to make a determination, they will need assistance from Germany, which is where these NGOs are registered.

rmx.news/article/article/german-ngos-suspected-of-smuggling-migrants-into-greece-dozens-of-arrests-made

Attempted bombing attack committed by a Syrian “refugee” (Tweet above). All the more surprising what regional media from North Rhine-Westphalia made of the police report: They informed that the perpetrator was a “young man from Lüdenscheid”; used not only by public broadcaster WDR and various Cologne daily newspapers.The headline already mentioned the “inhabitant of the German region of Sauerland”, who has now confessed to having placed the explosive device in the toilet of a regional railway.

According to the media, his motive is “disturbing” and “bitter”: he had acted “out of dissatisfaction with his precarious social situation”, according to the police; with his act he had “wanted to attract public attention”. All of this would have been quite harmless – had it not been for former President of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution Hans-Georg Maaßen, who spoiled the beautiful idyll of the German bomber with some background information:

journalistenwatch.com/2020/10/11/medien-terror-syrer/

Last Friday morning, during a police operation in Essing, the use of firearms caused injury to a 25-year-old Syrian from the Kelheim district.The police have been called to the scene of an alleged dispute between the 25-year-old man and a 56-year-old woman. Police came to the aid of the woman, who was in a car when the 25-year-old aggressor attacked the woman from the outside. He had previously smashed the side window with a stone. The man was holding a knife in his hand. After a policewoman fired a warning shot, to which the attacker did not react, she fired another shot at the 25-year-old’s legs.He was admitted to hospital injured. The kind and seriousness of the injuries cannot be specified at this stage. There is no danger to life. The 56-year-old German suffered a cut on her hand in the course of the fight and had to be treated in a hospital.According to initial findings, the assailant and his victim knew each other before today’s confrontation. The reason for the dispute and the specific circumstances of the dispute are currently being investigated. The Landshut criminal police and the Regensburg public prosecutor’s office are investigating him on suspicion of an attempted homicide.On the order of the Regensburg public prosecutor’s office, the 25-year-old was temporarily arrested. He is to be brought before an investigating judge. In addition, as is customary in such cases, the Bavarian State Office of Criminal Investigation is also involved in the investigation and is investigating the police shooting.

polizei.bayern.de/niederbayern/news/presse/aktuell/index.html/320012

At the end of September, the European Commission presented its European Pact for Migration and Asylum. But Marine Le Pen condemned the project in the strongest terms.

Le Pen announced on Friday, October 9 that her party would launch a campaign both in France and on a European scale to fight the European Pact for Migration and Asylum presented by the European Commission in September.

French daily Le Figaro reported that during a press conference given at the headquarters of the RN, in Nanterre, the president of the party did not mince words. According to her, this is an “organized plan to submerge Europe and the nations that make it up” by “ settling immigration that will not leave”.

Not hiding her deep disenchantment with the European Union, she said that the Pact was nothing other than a “globalist project” conceived by the “dictatorship of the European Commission”.

Continuing in the same tone, Marine Le Pen did not hesitate to describe it as a “real pact with the devil” with an impact that would be “the suicide of Europe”.

According to the leader of the RN, the migration policy put in place by the EU “will cause the ruin of our social systems, the worsening of unemployment, the housing crisis, an increase in delinquency and communal conflicts, the progress of Islamism and terrorist risks and call into question the values of our civilization”.

In order to fight against a European Pact which only “encourages immigration” and will lead to the potential arrival of “60 to 70 million migrants (…) in Europe in a few years”, the former candidate for the presidential election, proposed a campaign to save Europe and France.

At the French level, her party intends to “mobilize all local and national elected representatives, whatever their label”. At a European level, her party intends to campaign with its allies of the Identity and Democracy movement with the slogan: “Save Europe”. A petition against the Pact will be launched with the aim of collecting a million signatures.

freewestmedia.com/2020/10/11/marine-le-pen-launched-hard-campaign-against-european-migration-pact/

“My only regret from this situation is that I will have to explain to my two kids that their father is going on trial not because he is a criminal, but because he defended his country”, Matteo Salvini said as Italy’s Parliament stripped him of immunity to open the way for his trial.

For years, Italy’s political ruling class has had a migration policy of surrendering to floods of illegal immigrants — who have usually been organized by criminal traffickers. Europe has never offered Italy a jot of help. Now these “elites” — politicians, opinion makers, journalists — have decided to turn Salvini over to the judges for doing what they did not have the courage to do: defend the Italy’s borders.

Salvini now faces up to 15 years in prison for “kidnapping.” The charge against Salvini dates from 2019 when, as Italy’s interior minister, he prevented illegal migrants from disembarking from a coast guard ship that had recovered the migrants at sea five days earlier. Salvini declared that he was defending his country and would do the same again. “I go with a clean conscience, with the pride of knowing that I defended the honor of Italy,” he wrote on Facebook.

As interior minister, Salvini took a hard line on migrants. He closed Italy’s ports to rescue ships and passed a law that allowed vessels carrying migrants to be seized and fined.

On July 26, 2019, Salvini called for stopping the disembarkation of migrants aboard the Gregoretti as it was reaching Sicily’s east coast. “I have given instructions that no port will be assigned before there is a redistribution across Europe of all 140 migrants on board on paper,” he said. Immediately after it landed — a few European countries had agreed to take the migrants — a public prosecutor opened a file against Salvini for kidnapping.

“The wait for the landing was necessary to agree on the redistribution in other European countries, with the full involvement of the Italian government”, Salvini later justified his decision. Italy at the time was desperately in need of a migrant redistribution agreement in Europe. Europe had, until then, not offered Italy the slightest help. Salvini saw, as Albanian Premier Edi Rama said, that “Italy has been left alone by Europe on migrants”.

Although it might sound melodramatic, what is at stake, as Salvini understood, is, bluntly, the survival of Italy as we know it. According to a report by the Machiavelli Center, if current trends continue, by 2065 first- and second-generation immigrants will exceed 22 million, or more than 40% of the total population of Italy, whose birth rate is “collapsing“.

This is the first time that a court of justice in Europe has been called upon to try a governmental minister — whose job it is to be responsible for the security of a country — for holding migrants at a port pending a redistribution of newcomers across Europe.

There seems to exist an assumption that tens of thousands of people can take boats from Libya to Italy without controls, without deterrence, and without a country being able to exercise its right to self-defense from an epochal migratory tsunami.

By closing the borders, fining the NGOs and making it more difficult to reach the Italian shores, Salvini was able to reduce the number of arrivals in Italy, but sometimes tragically at the cost of deaths of migrants in the Mediterranean. When, however, did it become the obligation of countries to help the illegal people-smuggling industry?

When Italy adopted Salvini’s immigration policies in 2018, the number of migrant arrivals to Italy did dramatically decrease. The number of arrivals went from 119,369 in 2017 to 23,370 in 2018 — a drop of 80%, according to the United Nations.

Last year, however, after Salvini’s departure, the number of migrants tripled. According to the Ministry of Interior, in 2019, when Salvini was interior minister, 7,894 migrants arrived in Italy. Now, in just the first nine months of 2020, 24,332 migrants have landed and are freely flowing throughout Italy and on to the rest of Europe.

Italy recently had to send troops to stop migrants from breaking a coronavirus quarantine. From Salvini’s “closed ports” to anarchy, the step has been short.

The day after the beginning of Salvini’s trial, the government softened the former Ministry of Interior’s rules penalizing NGOs that bring illegal migrants ashore.

Most importantly, Italy is sending a disturbing message to Europe and the rest of the free world: anyone who, by governing the country, defends national borders and tries to stop mass illegal immigration can end up on trial and in prison. We are witnessing the suicide of a country and a continent.

The real horror in this charade is that Italy is still turning away ships carrying migrants, so why is Salvini being set up to take the fall?

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16613/italy-immigration-borders

Yet another one of the conspirators indicted in the plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer has turned out to be an anarchist and this time is an identified Black Lives Matter, Inc.™ supporter.

If you’re keeping book, that now means at least three of the six men indicted by the federal government for the frightening conspiracy to kidnap the governor from her vacation home are avowed anti-Donald Trump anarchists and at least one is a BLM protester. When half the conspirators rolled up by the feds are anarchists, this is what you might call a pattern.

The BLM connection comes from no less than The Washington Post, which buried the lede of its own story by headlining its piece, “Accused leader of plot to kidnap Michigan governor was struggling financially, living in basement storage space,” as if living in a basement was the most surprising thing about the conspirator. Indeed, we can be assured that if one of the conspirators had attended a Trump rally that would have headlined the story.

One of alleged plotters, 23-year-old Daniel Harris, attended a Black Lives Matter protest in June, telling the Oakland County Times he was upset about the killing of George Floyd and police violence.

Parker Douglas, a lawyer for Harris, said his client was a former Marine who lived at home with his parents and did construction work. Douglas said Harris told him some things described in the FBI affidavit were taken out of context while others he “thinks just didn’t happen.” Douglas said his client believes “not everybody mentioned in this knew everything that is described in this complaint.” He said his client, in a brief meeting, had suggested he had voted for candidates from both parties, had not expressed a view on President Trump and seemed to favor small government. [Emphasis added]

Being upset with police and government overreach isn’t exclusive to one political party, as the conspirators’ affiliations show. Sometimes the sides come together as in the case when anarchists gave a momentary sympathetic ear to the defendants in the Bundy Ranch case. Conspirators were upset over Whitmer’s draconian COVID-19 lockdowns and her hypocrisy of ordering people to stay home when her family seemed to defy her own orders. Leftists all over the country have defied lockdown orders to congregate en masse and riot. Conservatives, Jews, and Christians have held protests to counter the lockdowns preventing them from going to their places of worship and peaceably assembling. Both sides don’t appreciate tyranny, it turns out.

The Post reported that the other seven defendants brought up on state charges wanted to start a civil war.

The plotters, according to an FBI affidavit, were motivated in part by their belief that state governments, including Michigan’s, were violating the U.S. Constitution by imposing restrictions to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus — and they referred to Whitmer as a tyrant. As their anger mounted, they trained together with firearms and experimented with explosives, discussing plans to storm the state capitol building and attack police officers in their homes, authorities said.

The Post tried to insert into its story that the head of the group brought up on federal charges, Adam Fox, was a white supremacist, but offered no tangible support for the allegation except a theoretical, third-hand observation. It certainly could be true considering the mostly white anarchists and antifa rioters, who use the same “anarchist A” symbol as the conspirators, certainly seem to be bigoted. They’re bigoted against white people with views different than their own, and believe black people need white Leftists to speak on their behalf. When politicians say white supremacists are the real problem in America, maybe it’s these people they have in mind.
To add to the intrigue, one of the alleged conspirators was pardoned by the Democrat governor of Delaware last year, a point brought up by Trump campaign lawyer Jason Miller, who asked,
Democrat Governor pardoned anarchist lunatic who plotted against another Democrat Governor. Yet Democrats try to blame @realDonaldTrump . Where’s the media outrage? “Delaware last year pardoned man charged in Whitmer kidnapping plot”
Conservative Charlie Kirk wondered the same thing, observing:
A little bit about the “right-wing” terrorists who plotted to kidnap Whitmer: —One was a BLM inc. protestor —One called Trump a “tyrant” —They hated police —They were anarchists —They claimed to hate the Constitution These people are anything but conservative.
The group indicted on both federal and state charges like to shoot their guns in the woods on private property and were clearly scary individuals seemingly capable of doing dangerous and violent things as was clear in the indictments handed up on Thursday.

On the day the FBI announced indictments against six men for plotting to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, she outrageously and irresponsibly blamed the plot on President Trump. Republican stalwart Richard Viguerie has joined the chorus of people calling called on Whitmer to issue a public apology to President Trump for the slander.

We’re all waiting.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2020/10/10/blm-supporter-tied-to-michigan-gov-whitmer-kidnapping-plot-demands-grow-for-her-to-apologize-to-trump-n1034330