April 17, 2026

April 16, 2026

OPEN THREAD: Do your best work.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

THEODORE DALRYMPLE: We Shall Not Fight on the Beaches.

In 1973, Jean Raspail, who died aged 94 in 2020, published his dystopian novel The Camp of the Saints, for which he is now mostly remembered (certainly outside of France, though he was the author of many other well-considered novels and travelogues, and narrowly missed election to the Académie française). The Camp of the Saints is a book that refuses to lie down, so to speak, despite attempts to render it invisible or make it go away.

* * * * * * * *

Immigrants are not just immigrants. What they bring with them is as important as what they are offered by the host country. If what they bring with them is an evangelizing religion that claims, however fatuously, to be the answer to all of mankind’s little problems, a religion moreover that has a very strong hold over them and that is maintained by an effective system of social ostracism in the event of dissent, they will obviously have more difficulty integrating than if they have no such religion.

Raspail’s flawed novel is an illustration of an elementary political principle. For a liberal democracy to work, there must be a demos; for there to be a demos, there must be something more in common among them than living geographically cheek-by-jowl (without at the same time demanding an absolute uniformity). To import huge numbers of people who do not share, and indeed are resistant to sharing, the minimum that holds a demos together is inimical to liberal democracy.

In this most important sense Jean Raspail was visionary, even if he did not correctly identify the source of the greatest threat. Perhaps the most revealing thing in the book is his account, in the essay that precedes the novel, of how prominent political figures either ignored or repudiated The Camp of the Saints in public, but agreed with it in private. It proved to be a disastrous disjunction.

It’s the good Dr. Dalrymple, so read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Éric Zemmour’s The Suicide of France. The definitive account of France after de Gaulle is now available in English.

Posted at 9:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

“IT WAS ALWAYS THE WOMEN, AND ABOVE ALL THE YOUNG ONES, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy:” “Young women are trying to conserve an ideology they see as the stable bedrock of society, even if it’s actually an acidic collection of delusions that will inevitably destroy society itself. And they’re upset that young men aren’t doing what they see as their role to uphold that order as well. In short, women are natural conservatives. They’re trying to conserve progressivism because it’s the reigning social order and theological governing system of Western civilization. And they’re upset and confused as to why young men aren’t stepping up to uphold it as well.”

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

MISSISSIPPI BURNING (PAST ENGLAND): Britain Would Be Poorest State In U.S., Mississippi Governor Responds With Vicious One-Liner.

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And for those of you who failed geography, there are only 50 states in the Union.

That means if we somehow forgot about Alberta, Canada for a minute and instead annexed Britain to be our 51st state, they would be dead last in terms of income per person.

And let me tell you, there are some pretty poor states in America.

Like Mississippi, for example.

The Magnolia State is in last place on this list, and their governor (who is known for mixing it up on social media), decided to rib our friends across the pond with a good old-fashioned immigration reform joke.

Exit question: “Do you need some air conditioning for that burn?”

More from John Hinderaker of Power Line: Our Poor Relations. “Decline is a choice. Sadly, that is the choice the United Kingdom has made, and there is no sign on the horizon of a reversal.”

Incidentally, note that Mississippi as an economic powerhouse compared to Europe isn’t all that new a development: As Glenn noted in 2002, “More Bad News for Sweden: They’re poorer than the United States — heck, they’re poorer than Mississippi according to a Swedish study — but they also have more crime!”

UPDATE:

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

LEE SMITH: The Return of the Echo Chamber.

The Trump administration set four clear goals: to eliminate Iran’s navy, most of which is now at the bottom of the sea; further degrade its nuclear and ballistic missiles facilities, much of which have been either destroyed or severely damaged; and end the regime’s support for regional proxies, like Hezbollah, now being rolled up by Israel’s Lebanon campaign.

Trump says he’s ready to end the war, save for one last thing: a thousand pounds of highly enriched uranium (HEU), which the Iranians could conceivably turn into a bomb. The administration knows where it is, buried under the rubble left by a B-2 bomber attack during the June strikes. The Iranians can either hand it over or the U.S. will take it. But, as Vance told the media after returning from Pakistan, the HEU and no enrichment are Trump’s two redlines.

Vance isn’t an Obama mole but as leader of the GOP’s so-called “restraintist”—i.e., isolationist—camp he shares many of the Obama faction’s ambitions and anxieties, especially regarding Israel, its place in our foreign policy and how pro-Israel voters shape our domestic politics. While Obama and his circle are fixated on the Jews, restraintists like Tucker Carlson, Vance’s friend and the man usually credited with the vice president’s meteoric political career, are determined to marginalize evangelical voters.

The Obama faction and Vance’s restraintists are therefore structurally aligned, and the former are confident they have a shot at forcing Trump to accommodate Iran because they’ve got a man on the inside pushing things their way. As Carlson put it: “There are people in the White House … working really hard, really late, trying to fix this, to get a peace, even one that diminishes us.”

In yesterday’s Commentary newsletter, Abe Greenwald wrote of “Trump as the Guardrail:”

While Vance works to ingratiate himself with the delusional right, Trump has cut them off decisively. Theo Von is just about the only one of them whom Trump hasn’t gotten around to attacking. In essence, Trump left Vance with one Israel-basher to endorse, and Vance took the opportunity to endorse him.

Trump, for all his outlandishness, retains some longstanding bedrock presumptions about the world and America’s place in it. He possesses a certain clarity that’s nearly gone extinct in everyone else. Trump knows who’s right and who’s wrong in the Middle East. He knows who our friends and enemies are. He knows that sometimes there’s no substitute for American hard power. And he knows when to cut ties.

Compare that to the next generation of so-called conservatives, with their death threats to a widow, conspiracy theories, Jew-hatred, and a calm institutional voice to legitimize it all.

And don’t even mention the left. The liberal media and the Democratic Party are embracing socialists, Islamists, and those who combine both. Yesterday, their darling of the moment, Hasan Piker, was at Yale defending an “End the American Empire” resolution.

All of which is why Donald Trump looks more and more, however improbable, like the last sane man standing.

Speaking of Tucker:

UPDATE:

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

THIS WILL END WELL: Hennepin County Attorney Issues Nationwide Arrest Warrant for ICE Agent for Assault.

Related:

UPDATE:

MORE:

Posted at 6:55 pm by Ed Driscoll

RECONSIDERING FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT:

While we’re wondering, we can only wonder why neither Hoover nor FDR called to mind something of fairly recent memory, namely President Warren Harding’s refusal to leap to governmental quick—and/or possibly permanent—fixes in the face of the post-Great War economic doldrums, doldrums that might well have qualified as a panic. For that matter, one can only wonder what a re-elected Calvin Coolidge might not have done in 1929 had he, in fact, chosen to run in 1928.

By the way, that would be the same Calvin Coolidge who referred to his secretary of commerce as the “boy wonder,” and he was not complimenting him. We can conclude that because Coolidge was known to complain that the aforementioned wonder boy had kept trying to give him advice, “all of it bad.” Who might that cabinet secretary have been but one Herbert Hoover.

That would be the same Herbert Hoover whose misfortune it was to accomplish in 1928  what he had refused to attempt in 1920, namely, run for and win the presidency. During the lead-up to that presidential campaign, leaders of both parties had made serious overtures to the orphaned boy from Iowa who had amassed a small fortune as a mining engineer before serving admirably in the Wilson administration. But Hoover spurned them all.

[Roosevelt biographer David] Beito wastes little time on the eventual Hoover presidency, aside from joining candidate Roosevelt in criticizing this Republican’s penchant for turning to governmental solutions to deal with the panic that might have been. He notes that Hoover spent more on public works than the nine previous presidents combined. A few pages later he quotes from a Roosevelt campaign speech that accused Hoover of presiding over the “greatest spending administration in peace time in all our history.”

Related:

Tweet continues, “Unemployment peaked at 9 percent two months after the crash and started going down. The unemployment rate was down to 6.3 percent when the federal government figured it had to intervene. And that’s when the downward movement reversed and we never saw 6.3 percent again for the next decade. It’s clear as crystal that the disaster came after federal intervention.”

Posted at 5:18 pm by Ed Driscoll

TEACHERS WHO TEACH? Train teachers to teach — not to be guides on the side. “For 30 years, teachers were trained to be ‘guides on the side,’ helping students ‘construct understanding,’ writes Chris O’Brien on Never Stop Learning. They weren’t trained to teach. Now teachers fear being replaced by robots who will explain, model and assess. Humans may be allowed to stick around as counselors.”

Posted at 4:53 pm by Stephen Green

MOVING AT THE SPEED OF GOVERNMENT:

If you’re going to spend $30 million just to not open one grocery store for three years — assuming no delays! — then the money isn’t going to a grocery store.

Posted at 4:35 pm by Stephen Green

MARK FELTON: Bombing Saddam’s Nukes — Joint Israel-Iran Attacks, Iraq 1980-81.

 

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

OUCH:

Posted at 4:06 pm by Stephen Green

THE NEW SPACE RACE: The race to Shackleton Crater is on—will Jeff Bezos or China get there first? “The two landers will arguably be the most ambitious robotic missions ever sent to the Moon. The Endurance spacecraft, built by Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin, will become the largest lunar lander in history, exceeding the size of NASA’s Apollo lunar module that ferried crews to and from the lunar surface more than 50 years ago. China’s Chang’e 7 mission will feature a smaller lander, but the project also includes an orbiter, rover, and a hopper drone to scout for hidden ice deposits.”

Posted at 3:51 pm by Stephen Green