The reports of Trump’s death were greatly exaggerated

The New Neo Posted on by

The left so badly wants Trump to die.

Did I say “the left”? It’s not limited just to them. Ever since Trump took office, I’ve heard random friends, acquaintances, and/or relatives wish fervently for his death and praise those who would accomplish it, and none of these people are on the left although they do consistently vote for Democrats. Yes, you might quibble with my definition of “on the left” and say that anyone who votes for Democrats these days is on the left. But I’m referring to what these Democrats would say if you were to quiz them on their beliefs about public policy and the like; those beliefs would bear more resemblance to what one might call “liberal” than leftism.

For example, just on the trans issue, the two or three people I’ve spoken to about this are profoundly ignorant of the facts, and shocked and disturbed to hear them from me. However, because they are firmly convinced that Trump is a profoundly and uniquely evil and despicable person, they will always vote against him and anyone who supports him. My own support for Trump is grandfathered in, as it were, with those who continue to speak to me and haven’t cut me off.

So this sort of thing is no surprise:

The NYT’s Trump story should be that the Far Left is spreading baseless theories about his death. Instead, the story lays out all the “evidence” for why people were right to speculate about it.

And speculate they did, rumors spreading until Trump rained on their parade by appearing, hale and hearty. And these are of course the same people who never noticed how feeble Biden had become, a process that had begun even before he took office although it continued to get worse for his entire term.

I get tired of saying “no surprise,” but it’s no surprise. Most people’s minds are shaped by the things they read and the company they keep. And wish fulfillment fantasies are rife, based on their beliefs.

What the press calls “far-right” parties are growing in Europe’s most populous countries

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s the phenomenon:

For the first time, populist or far-right parties are leading the polls in Europe’s three biggest countries of the U.K., France, and Germany, the latest sign of growing voter discontent in much of the continent following years of high immigration and inflation.

Far-right and anti-immigration parties have already entered government in countries such as Italy, Finland and the Netherlands. But this year marks the first time that they have been ahead in Europe’s biggest economies at the same time. That could provoke a period of political turbulence in all three countries, even if national elections are likely still a few years away.

“It’s significant. Leaders in all three countries are grappling with an ascendant far right that looks on the cusp of power unless politicians can address what’s fueling the rise, which is immigration and cost of living,” said Mujtaba Rahman, head of Europe for risk consulting firm Eurasia.

The left will not be addressing either of those things; their priorities will not let them pivot on that. But in Europe, parliamentary systems allow the most popular party to remain out of power because of alliances between and among less popular parties determined to unite in order to squeeze out the right. This is what’s happened so far in the three countries in question.

As I see it, the “far-right” populist parties that want to curb immigration need to win absolute majorities to take power, and they are nowhere near that level right now.

Joni Ernst won’t be running in 2026

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t know whether Ernst’s bowing out for 2026 will end up mattering:

No doubt, the Democrats will aim for Iowa, as the party seeks to take down the Republican majority.

However, a Democrat hasn’t represented Iowa in the Senate since 2008. President Donald Trump won the state by 13 points in 2024.

I’m seeing reports that third-term Rep. Ashley Hinson will run for Ernst’s seat. But that would also open a seat for the Democrats to snatch in the House.

Iowa seems to me to be a solidly red state. Then again, the result of a recent special election for state rep there was alarming: the Democrat flipped the seat in what had seemed to be a solidly Republican district. Of course, it was a special election in an off-year, and that typically has low turnout and goes to the most energized party.

Republicans had better get more energized in 2026.

And as the sun sets on British freedom of speech

The New Neo Posted on by

Britain never had an especially robust tradition of free speech; certainly nothing to compare with that of the US. So it doesn’t come as a complete shock that Britain has been cracking down on what it defines as “hate speech” and “incitement,” and has arrested a comedian for his tweets.

I confess: I’ve never before heard of Graham Linehan, a British comedian who was arrested yesterday over three anti-trans tweets. Here is his description of the event, plus the offending tweets:

I was arrested for messages on X when I haven’t even been banned from X. The tweets are not my best work but they are completely harmless. I’m furious about what is happening to women in the UK and I despise trans activists because I think they are homophobic and misogynist…. I was arrested at an airport like a terrorist, locked in a cell like a criminal, taken to hospital because the stress nearly killed me and banned from speaking online — all because I made jokes that upset some psychotic crossdressers. To me, this proves one thing beyond doubt: the UK has become a country that is hostile to freedom of speech, hostile to women and far too accommodating to the demands of violent, entitled, abusive men who have turned the police into their personal goon squad.” …

[The tweets]
1. “If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and, if all else fails, punch him in the balls.”

2. (about a photo of a trans rally) “A photo you can smell.”

3. (again about the photo) “I hate them. Misogynists and homophobes. F*** em.

I assume Linehan is correct that this is not his best comedy work. But then again, bad comedy is neither a felony nor even a misdemeanor. It seems to me that it’s that first tweet that got the authorities going, and indeed I see that he was arrested for inciting violence rather than “mere” hate speech.

Linehan said in an online article on Substack that his bail condition stipulates he is “not to go on Twitter” …

… [D]uring his police interview following the arrest, “I explained that the ‘punch’ tweet was a serious point made with a joke”, and that it was about “the height difference between men and women… and certainly not a call to violence”.

In the US, the crime of incitement has several elements that Linehan’s tweet lacks: “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.” Neither element is present; there is no “imminence” and his speech is not likely to produce such action. But he wasn’t arrested in the US, and Britain is different. Plus, in the US:

Mere advocacy of lawbreaking or violence remains protected speech as long as it is not intended to and likely to provoke immediate unlawful action.

Britain has some very twisted priorities about whom to arrest and for what reason. I’m in agreement with this statement:

Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch was critical of the arrest, saying: “Sending five officers to arrest a man for a tweet isn’t policing, it’s politics. Under Labour, we routinely see burglary, knife crime and assaults go unsolved, while resources are wasted on thought-policing.

“It’s time this government told the police their job is to protect the public, not monitor social media for hurty words. The Conservatives would stop this nonsense on day one and make public safety the first duty of policing, instead of pandering to fringe ideologies.

Ah, but the left believes speech is violence (if directed against one of their favored groups), and violence is mere speech (if committed by one of their favored groups).

Today is the 86th anniversary of the invasion of Poland

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve been thinking about September 1, 1939 quite a bit lately. The reason is that I’ve been watching YouTube videos in which Holocaust survivors describe their experiences. I plan to write more about those videos – I have a lot to say. But at this point I’ll just mention that many of them were Polish Jews, and they almost universally describe that day, mentioning that it was frightening but they believed – as did most Christian Poles – that the Polish army would handily defeat Germany (Polish propaganda had been saying this).

On the other hand, there had been Jewish German refugees fleeing to Poland after the Nazis took power in Germany but prior to September 1, 1939, and they had told a frightening story (although not one of genocide – yet). So the German invasion filled most of the Jews of Poland with dread, despite the sanguine predictions of the Polish government and press.

In fact, it was a nightmare for the Poles themselves, in addition to a nightmare for Polish Jewry. This was by design [emphasis mine]:

The result was the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 23, hastily signed so that Hitler could have his pact before his planned invasion of Poland. In the official agreement the Soviets promised not to aid Britain or France in the event of a war with Poland. However, the crucial part of the agreement was a secret protocol that reshaped the map of central Europe. According to this, Bessarabia, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and eastern Poland would become part of Stalin’s sphere of influence while Hitler would get all of western Poland. As Timothy Snyder put it, “the two regimes immediately found common ground in their mutual aspiration to destroy Poland.…Hitler saw Poland as the ‘unreal creation’ of the Treaty of Versailles, Molotov as its ‘ugly offspring.’” …

On August 22, just before the invasion, Hitler delivered a speech to his military commanders at Obersalzberg. In the speech, he said that the object of the war was to physically destroy the enemy. Men, women, and children of Polish descent or language were to be killed without pity. The campaign was to be carried out “with the greatest brutality and without mercy.” To that end, the Einsatzgruppen—SS death squads—and police battalions were formed to exterminate Poles who might oppose German rule. Lists were drawn up of prominent men and women who were to be tracked down and killed as soon as possible. Cities like Warsaw were eventually to be “cleansed” of their Jewish populations and the ethnic Polish population reduced to a small group of slave laborers. Hitler devised a monstrous plan of colonization based on extreme violence and murder; tragically, those plans would evolve into unimaginable crimes that would culminate in the creation of a new kind of industrial-scale killing: the extermination camp.

And on September 17, Stalin gobbled up the Eastern part of Poland – although in 1941 Germany took it all (Stalin got the last laugh on Poland after the war).

There’s much more to be said, but right now I also want to emphasize that although Britain and France declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939, it wasn’t until Churchill became PM in May o 1940 that the true war against Germany began. However, tragically:

After World War II, it was discovered that Nazi Germany’s armed forces were vulnerable throughout the September Campaign. They had not yet reached full fighting strength and might have succumbed to a determined opponent, or at least suffered serious damage. At the Nuremberg trials, German military commander Alfred Jodl said that “if we did not collapse already in the year 1939 that was due only to the fact that during the Polish campaign, the approximately 110 French and British divisions in the West were held completely inactive against the 23 German divisions.” General Wilhelm Keitel stated: “We soldiers had always expected an attack by France during the Polish campaign, and were very surprised that nothing happened…. A French attack would have encountered only a German military screen, not a real defense.” According to General Siegfried Westphal, if the French had attacked in force in September 1939, the German army “could only have held out for one or two weeks.”

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) CBS does what it does best – deceptive editing.

CBS has a response that is 100% predictable:

“Secretary Noem’s ‘Face The Nation’ interview was edited for time and met all CBS News standards. The entire interview is publicly available on YouTube, and the full transcript was posted earlier this morning on CBSNews.com,” a CBS News spokesperson told Fox News Digital.

And the part you cut was completely random and arbitrary, right? And of course everybody watches or reads entire interviews.

(2) Scott Pressler warns that the 2025 elections will go poorly for Republicans if voters on the right fail to embrace and use early voting and mail-in voting. Off-year elections go to the motivated, and although I can’t imagine why the right wouldn’t be extremely motivated, the danger is that the left is far more motivated.

(3) Greta Thunberg’s latest pro-Palestinian publicity stunt is turned back by bad weather. Pity.

(4) The shootings in Chicago continue over the weekend as the mayor and governor take the bizarre anti-Trump stance of failing to support controlling crime and the apprehension of criminal illegal aliens.

(5) Ilhan Omar’s assests:

Rep. Ilhan Omar’s personal fortune exploded to upwards of $30 million in 2024, the Minnesota Democrat disclosed just months after telling the press it is “ridiculous” and “categorically false” to say she is worth millions of dollars.

Omar reported in her latest financial disclosure that she and her husband, former political consultant Tim Mynett, accumulated a net worth at the end of 2024 ranging from at least $6 million to $30 million. Their wealth is derived almost entirely from the value of Mynett’s ownership stake in his two companies that, together, were worth no more than $51,000 at the end of 2023. The exact value of Omar’s personal fortune at the end of 2024 is unclear—lawmakers disclose the value of their holdings and debts in ranges. Still, the figures in Omar’s latest disclosures show that her and her husband’s net worth skyrocketed by at least 3,500 percent in just one year.

Omar’s extraordinary accumulation of wealth in 2024 could raise uncomfortable questions for the Minnesota Democrat, who in February told Business Insider that she has been the subject of a “coordinated right-wing disinformation campaign” that falsely claims she’s worth millions of dollars. Omar said any insinuation that she’s worth more than a few thousand dollars was “ridiculous” and “categorically false.” She also took to X in February, challenging her followers to “maybe try checking my public financial statements and you will see I barely have thousands let alone millions.”

Happy Labor Day!

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a slightly edited version of a previous post.]

Labor Day is the bookend standing at the opposite end of summer from its holiday beginning, Memorial Day.

July Fourth is summer’s early peak, with the promise of long light-filled days ahead. But Labor Day is summer’s last gasp, the moment I dreaded as a child because it marked the end of vacation and the start of the school year. Spiffy new clothes, a shiny bookbag, freshly sharpened pencils, and the promise of the beautiful autumn leaves’ arrival were nice. But they couldn’t make up for the fact that a new school year was beginning. Where oh where had the summer gone?

And it goes even more quickly these days.

Here’s wishing you all a Happy Labor Day. Barbecues, picnics, the beach, just hanging out in your yard, whatever you desire and whatever you decide. And for the historically-minded among you, here’s some information on the origins of the holiday.

Songs with dance as metaphor

The New Neo Posted on by

There are tons of songs about dancing, for obvious reasons. But that’s not the subject matter of this post – songs about dance for the sake of dance. This is about songs that use dance as a larger metaphor for life or love.

Here are just a few:

Could I Have This Dance for the Rest of My Life
For a Dancer
Dance Me to the End of Love
Don’t Forget to Dance
I Hope You Dance
Dance With Me
Oh Very Young

One of the very very best dance-as-metaphor song is “The Dance” by Garth Brooks. Here he is at the beginning of his career. It’s very intense, especially the expression in his eyes:

The song’s lyrics have different meanings to the listeners. Some relate it to the pain of illness and death ending a happy relationship. Others (and I’m in this latter group) see it as describing a once-promising love gone sadly wrong, with all the pain and heartache that entails.

Brooks says it’s his favorite of all his songs, but you may be surprised that he didn’t write it. Here’s songwriter Tony Arata, who tells the story of writing the song here:

The theme – of deep appreciation for even a relationship that has an unhappy ending – is not uncommon in poetry and song. For an example of the latter, we have Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” which celebrates what Cohen called the broken Hallelujah:

There’s a blaze of light in every word
It doesn’t matter which you heard
The holy or the broken Hallelujah …

… And even though it all went wrong
I’ll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah.

Europeans aren’t happy about the “migrants” – plus they have other troubles

The New Neo Posted on by

From Victor Davis Hanson:

Mass protests are now common in Britain against the Labour Party’s open borders policies and generous welfare entitlements for immigrants who arrive illegally and without authentic “political refugee” status.

Greek officials, also swamped by illegal immigration, now cite President Donald Trump’s secure border policies as new models for their own.

The majority of European immigrants now come from majority-Muslim countries in the Middle East and North Africa. Yet many arrivals seem angrier at their newfound liberal hosts than at the dictatorships they fled back home.

Europe’s immigration policies will not work in a multi-ethnic democracy.

Hanson points out that Europe’s welfare states can no longer sustain benefits, their energy policies are damaging, they need to pay more for defense, and their “migrants” are not being forced to assimilate. A really toxic brew.

And yet – what will happen? Are many European countries reaching the point of active rebellion and revolt by what we might call the natives, plus those who emigrated there in order to be free of the constraints of their native third-world countries rather than to export them to Europe? Who will win, the elite internationalists or the proles?