Connexion
The paper of record bared all in a piece about America’s 250th birthday.
Regular New York Times readers have long suspected that the paper’s oppressive bias comes not from actual reporters, but from doctrinaire editors, who assign the pieces, then insert those ridiculous second or third paragraphs that interrupt the flow of the piece, but hammer home the party line.
The paper recently put one of these editors on display on our 250th birthday, by interviewing its former national editor, Jia Lynn Yang, about the country’s founding. She’s not as bad as we expected. She’s worse.
The gist of Yang’s conception of our country is that everything swell about it is a “myth” and the only history worth talking about is that we had slavery. (I’m glad someone has finally pointed that out.)
Yang says conservatives are “obsessed with mythmaking,” whereas liberals—especially journalists like herself—are “obsessed with the knowing of facts.” Continuing to tout the left’s devotion to facts, she adds: “We are not interested in myths. We are kind of in the business of anti-myths.” Laying her cards on the table, she admits, not the least bit pretentiously: “I am fully in favor of the truth as a journalist.”
What integrity!
I won’t mention that the Times exclusively refers to biological men with big swinging penises as “women,” provided they put on a dress and call themselves “Brittney.” Also, with amazing restraint, I will not cite Walter Duranty, Jayson Blair, the Duke lacrosse case, Sarah Palin’s “direct link” to the shooting of Gabby Giffords, the 1619 Project, Russian collusion, and on and on.
So what are the myths believed by conservatives? Do not say George Washington and the cherry tree! Don’t do it. Everyone knows that was just a little parable used as moral instruction. DO. NOT. MENTION. THE. CHERRY. TREE.
Guess what Yang uses as her one and only example of the miasma of myths around our founding. Yes—the cherry tree! I.e., a tale thoroughly debunked for more than a century and barely believed at the time, except by those with a simple, trusting nature, like small children and Times senior editors. (Maybe for Christmas, Yang could explode the myth of Santa Claus.)
She specifically assails the “mythology” that our country is “really special… unlike anything anyone has ever seen before… something totally unprecedented.” Unable to get to all the precedents, she only cited none. But I’m sure there were lots of countries back then that had broken away from monarchies based on their bold assertion of God-given rights.
No, I’m sorry, that’s incorrect. None had. With a few minuscule exceptions, in 1776, every other country in the world—in Europe, Asia, and Africa—was ruled by one sovereign, whose authority was said to come from God. No other nation required the consent of the governed.
Yang’s yawning ignorance extends far beyond U.S. history to encompass all of world history. She claims the reason Americans had to build myths around our founding (well, at least one myth, that utterly despicable one about the cherry tree!) is that we didn’t have the things “that usually bind together a people.”
Number one, we had no official language, and number two, we had no official religion. Others might look at those very characteristics and say they are things that make America “really special… unlike anything anyone has ever seen before .. something totally unprecedented.”
But that can’t be. America is not special.
True, there was no “official” religion or “official” language, but America was hardly a tower of Babel, which, ironically is one of Yang’s myths about our country, despite her being “in the business of anti-myths.” According to her, there was “no unique language” and “a bunch of different Christian groups jostling.”
There wasn’t all that much “jostling.” From 1607 until the early 1800s, America was 98 percent Protestant, 1.7 percent Catholic, 0.2 percent Jewish and zero percent Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, etc. Everyone spoke, or was learning to speak, English. The only other written languages in the colonies—Dutch, German, French, Spanish, and Swedish—were all Indo-European, and used the same Latin alphabet.
But I can see why someone of Chinese descent would say, “You call that a country?” Around the same time, China was home to hundreds of distinct, mutually unintelligible languages as well as hundreds of completely different folk religions.
The third way Yang says we weren’t really a country is that “the literal geographic borders of the country are just constantly in flux, to put it nicely.”
Well, I’m glad she put it nicely! Does Yang think other countries have permanently fixed borders? When our founders were signing the Declaration, Europe was dominated by four gigantic empires—British, French, Austrian and Russian. There was no Germany. There was no Italy. It’s changed quite a bit since then, “to put it nicely.”
China controlled Mongolia, Taiwan and large swaths of Central Asia. Over the next couple centuries, it has lost and regained Macau, Hong Kong, Tibet and currently has its eye on Taiwan. (Now that Trump has blown our entire military budget on Iran, it’s theirs for the taking if they have a few BB guns.)
Yang only gets really excited about American history when talking about slavery. She mentions “slaves” or “slavery” a dozen times. She talks more about the slaves of Thomas Jefferson and Washington than about the men themselves. The first words out of her mouth about those monumental figures are: “Jefferson and Washington were slaveholders.”
She tells us “there’s so much to apologize for and to feel really bad about and guilty about”—including “the American Indians.” (Hey, Ms. Yang! Did you know that, on the Trail of Tears, those poor victimized Indians brought their black slaves with them?)
Thanks to this interview, we finally got a glimpse of one of the little known editors making the Times as ridiculously biased as it is, and it turns out, she’s not some seasoned Machiavellian manipulator, she’s an idiot.
The post Inside the Mind of an NYT Editor appeared first on The American Conservative.
The president has declined to renew the United States’ largest free-trade agreement.
President Donald Trump has decided not to renew the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA), which was up for review this year. The agreement will remain in force until 2036, at which point it will expire unless all three signatory countries have agreed to renew it for another 16 years.
The country’s largest trade agreement, the USMCA was originally negotiated and signed by Trump himself during his first term. It replaced the much-reviled North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which Trump called “the worst trade deal in history” and a “job-killing failure” responsible for the loss of American industrial capacity.
Although the USMCA was negotiated under the first Trump administration and touted as a major achievement (the president called it “the largest, fairest, most balanced, and modern trade agreement ever achieved”), Trump has since been relatively ambivalent on the value of the deal, noting, for example, that the U.S. still runs a major trade deficit with Canada and Mexico.
“It was sort of a good deal, but it was a great deal for one reason,” Trump told reporters in June. “It gave the right to terminate.”
That right to terminate (or rather, to not renew) is what the president is exercising now, as he feels the agreement has not done all he had hoped it would. The economic trends that the USMCA was supposed to arrest—growing trade deficits with Mexico and Canada and American deindustrialization—have continued. Indeed, since the USMCA came into force in 2020, the U.S. trade deficit with its North American partners has exploded. In the past six years the U.S.–Mexico trade deficit for goods has almost doubled, going from $111 billion in 2020 to $197 billion in 2025. The U.S.–Canada trade deficit for goods grew from $14 billion to $48 billion over the same time period, an increase of nearly 250 percent.
American manufacturing is not much healthier for the change, either. While the U.S. manufacturing industry has grown in dollar terms since 2020, the sector has declined in proportion to the rest of the economy. When USMCA entered into force, manufacturing contributed just over 10 percent of the total U.S. GDP. Today, it represents only 9.4 percent. That decline is particularly painful as the U.S. attempts to keep pace with China’s massive manufacturing sector, an effort that looks more doomed with each passing year. The USMCA also failed to bring any revival in manufacturing employment: There are fewer Americans working in manufacturing today than in January 2020.
The lackluster results delivered by the USMCA are hardly surprising. The agreement, though touted as a repudiation of NAFTA, was essentially the same framework with a few modifications and a new coat of paint. It maintained essentially intact the North American free-trade zone, NAFTA’s signal accomplishment, but tightened rules of origin for automotives and automotive parts, strengthened labor standards, and beefed up the enforcement mechanisms for violations of the agreement. It also, of course, added the sunset clause that ends the agreement unless it is renewed by 2036.
The U.S. will continue to negotiate with Mexico and Canada over the terms of the USMCA during its remaining decade, however. The Trump administration is pushing to strengthen the automotive rules of origin even further, among other changes. But drawing up a replacement framework does not seem to be on the president’s agenda, at least for now.
Materially altering the USMCA framework will be difficult. North American trade is deeply integrated, and is becoming more so as the U.S. seeks to decouple supply chains from China. Much of that manufacturing has moved to Mexico, which under President Claudia Sheinbaum has placed steep tariffs on Chinese goods in an attempt to tighten its economic alignment with the U.S. Ending the North American free-trade zone would be a major disruption to the American economy and highly unpopular with U.S. businesses and consumers.
It’s also uncertain how effective doing so would be for American reindustrialization. American manufacturing has trouble competing with China’s cheap labor costs; sourcing parts from lower-cost countries like Mexico allows American companies to reduce the price of their products at the cost of shifting some of the supply chain abroad. Cutting off the possibility of cheaper inputs may stem the flow of offshoring but make American goods too expensive for the market, harming manufacturers.
Still, the Trump administration already began to move beyond the free-trade framework established by NAFTA and only partially preserved by the USMCA. During Trump’s 2025 “Liberation Day” tariff campaign, Canada and Mexico were not treated like free-trade partners: The administration imposed duties on some Canadian and Mexican goods under border-emergency authorities, though USMCA-qualifying products retained their preferential treatment.
These measures marked an important departure from NAFTA’s animating premise: that tariff-free trade among the three countries should be the default. The Trump administration’s position is that access to the U.S. market must be subordinate to American industrial and economic policy priorities. It will continue to push that line in the ongoing USMCA talks this summer.
What will replace the USMCA when it expires in 2036 remains an open question, however, and will probably depend heavily on the results of the 2028 presidential election. Trump himself seems inclined to leave it to his successor, and it is not certain how the party will settle on economic policy as he exits the stage.
Vice President J.D. Vance, the heir apparent, has been one of the most prominent champions of the second Trump administration’s protectionist policies, while Secretary of State Marco Rubio, likely to be the establishment darling in a primary contest, is a proponent of something closer to the pre-Trump Republican consensus on free trade. Either could move the party in his own direction.
Democrats, on the other hand, have been fiercely critical of the Trump administration’s tariff policy, and are likely to seek a return to the days of NAFTA, a position that meshes well with the party’s increasing suspicion of borders generally.
The post Trump Turns Down USMCA Renewal appeared first on The American Conservative.
A new Democratic insurgency looks a lot like the GOP’s agitation of yesteryear.
The editors at the New York Post couldn’t hide their animosity.
“The Hateful Slate” read Wednesday’s screaming headline over an image of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani celebrating with Darializa Avila Chevalier, one of three Democratic Socialists backed by Mamdani who won their Congressional campaigns in New York state on Tuesday night. It was a clean sweep for Mamdani, who watched as Chevalier, Brad Lander, and Claire Valdez toppled establishment Democrats, signaling growing momentum for a progressive movement that first took New York City by storm when Mamdani overwhelmed the former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the 2025 NYC mayoral election. The sudden jolt of outsiders-turned-mainstream is reminiscent of another insurgent political movement, one that swept through the GOP in 2010 and reshaped the Republican Party in ways that later enabled Donald Trump’s takeover.
Two years after Barack Obama’s generational victory, the Republican Party was reeling and directionless as it approached Congressional midterm races in 2010. Years of frustration had built up toward the establishment GOP as voters watched Republican politicians prioritize costly and unpopular wars in the Middle East over the ideological discipline that had driven the party to such great heights after the Reagan Revolution in the 1980s. What ultimately molded this inchoate dissatisfaction into a movement was Obama’s economic platform. For conservative voters who preferred the vision of small-government politics, the 2009 stimulus package, the continuation of Bush-era bank bailouts, and the passage of the Affordable Care Act were each a bridge too far.
In stepped the Tea Party. Featuring a rich cast of aggressive political characters, the Tea Party wasn’t so much built on one figure as it was a coalition of new faces on a mission to lower taxes, limit government spending, and grant greater authority to state governments in response to what many viewed as Obama’s federal overreach. Its champions prioritized anti-government ideas of decentralization and its electorate featured an impressive mixture of both suburban and rural voters.
Though prominent early figures such as Alaska’s former Governor Sarah Palin were eventually eclipsed by the MAGA project, politicians who absorbed the messaging of the Tea Party movement, such as Sen. Rand Paul and the current Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have continued to shape the conservative movement under President Donald Trump. And while Trump’s unique brand of conservatism has increasingly embraced an activist use of federal power that would have been anathema to many early Tea Partiers, his rise was undeniably energized by the anti-establishment energy that the Tea Party used to transform the GOP in the 2010s.
Fifteen years ago, Republican voters revolted against a party they believed had abandoned its principles. Today, a similar backlash is unfolding inside the Democratic Party, where a coalition of young, highly-educated white voters and working-class minority communities is finding common cause in a socialist vision that rejects the party’s neoliberal consensus. For many of these voters, The Biden administration and its cadre of sycophants became synonymous with both an affordability crisis that eroded confidence in the Democratic establishment and a U.S. foreign policy toward Israel that helped enable violence in Gaza and beyond. Though economic concerns are the driving force behind what transpired on Tuesday, opposition to the Democratic Party’s open embrace of Israel has become an equally powerful organizing issue for the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the group that worked to spearhead a slate of progressive candidates seeking midterm success in 2026.
Though the ascendancy of a more progressive Democratic wing has been building for two decades, between the financial crisis to the presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders, the election of 35-year-old Zohran Mamdani in the fall of 2025 is what really transformed a simmering ideological movement into a new political force. More than any left-wing electoral victory in modern American history, Mamdani’s triumph signaled that it could be done, that a socialist with a TikTok channel could challenge the party’s power brokers and capture one of the country’s most visible executive offices. In winning, Mamdani provided evidence that an insurgent Democratic movement is possible.
Worst of all for Republicans, Mamdani is now beginning to deliver on the kinds of platform planks they have long warned could upend America’s hyper-capitalist system. In one of his first headline governing victories, the city’s Rent Guidelines Board voted to freeze the rent for nearly 1 million rent-stabilized apartments, a central campaign promise enacted early in his tenure. At the same time, Mamdani has moved forward with an expanded free childcare program backed by a state-city partnership with Gov. Kathy Hochul and the legislature in Albany. The initiative not only places a signature campaign promise into practice but it underscores a more pressing political reality, one in which Mamdani-aligned progressives are capable of finding common ground with establishment Democrats when governing power is at stake.
Though prominent billionaires such as Citadel CEO Ken Griffin warned that capital would flee as a result of Mamdani’s threat to install a progressive tax agenda, the mass exodus has yet to materialize in any meaningful way. And while conservative commentators predicted crime in the city would surge under his leadership, New York City is currently experiencing the safest start to a year on record: The murder rate has dropped by more than 20 percent compared to last year.
Mamdani’s New York has so far diverged sharply from the dire predictions. Speaking before millions of fans who flooded the streets of Manhattan following the New York Knicks’ first NBA title in over half a century, Mamdani struck a celebratory tone that underscored a broader political point. The city his critics had warned was on the brink of collapse was, at least in the immediate term, experiencing something closer to resurgence than decline. For supporters, the moment crystallized a growing sensation that great things are possible when the constraints of neoliberal orthodoxy begin to loosen.
Early indicators suggest the Democratic coalition may be entering a period of internal reconfiguration, shaped in part by figures such as Mamdani and his fellow New Yorker, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. This shift has prompted concern among the Democratic donor class. Now, moderate Democrats are confronting questions that once defined the Republican Party’s internal struggle, when Trump’s rise culminated in his 2016 presidential victory and a fundamental realignment of the modern GOP.
“Who gets to determine who is a Democrat?” the progressive political commentator Emma Vigeland asked on Thursday’s episode of the Majority Report podcast. “If Democratic voters vote for somebody in a Democratic primary and decide that they’re a Democrat, doesn’t that matter a little bit more than the corporate lobbyists who want to gatekeep who gets to enter into the Democratic Party?”
Mamdani’s rise, the electoral gains of allied progressive candidates, and the early governing outcomes in New York City point to the emergence of a new and increasingly coherent Democratic insurgency. What began as a diffuse ideological movement, spanning the financial crisis, Occupy Wall Street, and the Sanders campaigns, is finally coalescing into a political force that could reimagine the Democratic Party for years to come in ways not dissimilar to the meaningful gains of the Tea Party movement within the GOP. The ripple effects are yet to fully reveal themselves, but as it stands, this is Mamdani’s wave. The question now is whether Democrats want to ride it.
The post The Mamdani Wave’s Republican Harbinger appeared first on The American Conservative.
Two mainstream reporters fail to become introspective deep in the heart of Arkansas.
The New York Times recently ran a podcast on Return to the Land, a membership club for straight, white people. It operates like a Manhattan co-op, with members buying shares that entitle them to a piece of real estate, the main difference being that, instead of being on a tiny island, home to some of the most expensive apartments in the world, this club is located on 160 acres of unused land in a remote part of Arkansas, where the closest grocery store is 30 minutes away.
The reporters covering the story, Rachel Abrams and Debra Kamin, couldn’t have been more shocked if they’d uncovered a lynching. They interviewed a woman who is suing RTL for discrimination after her application for membership was rejected.
Not that it matters to the legality of the community, but the woman, Michelle Walker, seems to be pulling our leg. The fact that Abrams and Kamin pretend to believe her makes me question their perceptiveness as reporters.
Walker is a Jewish woman married to a black man, born and bred in Missouri, whose entire real estate business is in St. Louis; the name of her brokerage is STL Buy & Sell, REALTORS. But she claims she had her heart set on buying into an Arkansas community that both she and the reporters describe as a bunch of “white supremacists.”
The Times ladies insist that Walker looked at joining RTL only in terms of hard dollars and cents, and didn’t mind at all that they are white supremacists.
As Walker explained, “A good investment is a good investment.” Noting that it’s “the perfect five hours as a great little weekend getaway,” her dream was to “maybe build an A-frame on it, do Airbnb with it.” She was excited at the prospect of “other white supremacists that want to vacation there, and on my land.” Vacation with white supremacists!
I haven’t checked RTL’s charter, but I’m almost certain it does not allow Airbnbs. (Nor do New York City co-ops.)
Maybe I’m completely off-base, but I think Walker’s interest in RTL is less about acquiring an investment property and more about annoying a group of white, straight Christians.
Unlike Walker, the reporters don’t hide how stricken they are by such a community. They said the discrimination was “blatant.” (Whereas Manhattan co-op boards are subtle.) They said the Arkansas club was a “blueprint for modern-day segregation.” Hardly. Colleges wrote the blueprint for modern-day segregation eons ago with “affinity dorms” for black, immigrant, Muslim, Jewish, or gay students—pretty much any affinity except white.
Given her abhorrence of segregation, it’s odd that Kamin lives in Tel Aviv, a city that enthusiastically practices both de jure and de facto segregation and is wildly undiverse. In fact, there is no city in America as white as Tel Aviv is Jewish—not Dubuque, Iowa; Burlington, Vermont; or Livonia, Michigan (once called “the whitest city in America”).
CORRECTION: The places where people like Times reporters summer are as white as Tel Aviv is Jewish. Well-heeled New Yorkers would have to drive pretty far from their homes in East and South Hampton, Rhinebeck, and Chatham, New York, to find Our Greatest Strength. (This might be another topic for Abrams and Kamin to investigate someday.)
Kamin mocks the founders of RTL for saying they want to “quote unquote, ‘preserve their culture.’” But aren’t the Hamptons’ (and Tel Aviv’s) impressive lack of diversity also an attempt to, as Kamin puts it, “quote unquote, ‘preserve their culture’”?
While we’re at it, do Times reporters send their kids to public schools so multicultural that they have to pass through magnetometers to enter? Are their local Whole Foods and Zabar’s patronized by a multitude of classes and ethnicities?
There’s always been a direct conflict between freedom of association and anti-discrimination laws. But the current practice is to prohibit discrimination against everyone except white people.
Yet and still, if a private community for straight, white Christian homesteaders in the backwoods of Arkansas that’s bothering no one is keeping liberals up at night, they have become the walking embodiment of H. L. Mencken’s joke about Puritans: They live with the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be residing in an all-white community. (Other than them.)
COPYRIGHT 2026 ANN COULTER
DISTRIBUTED BY IMPOLITE DEBATES LLC
The post Only the Rich Can Discriminate appeared first on The American Conservative.
The recent Supreme Court setback was expected. Now we turn to Section 301 tariffs.
MAGA can be a very emotional movement. That passion led to a historic win in 2024 when President Trump carried every single swing state. But it can also have downsides. Unfortunately, when we run into even a little adversity, we are prone to crippling self-doubt and panic.
A bad court ruling. A hostile media cycle. One misleading, hyperbolic headline. Some anonymous quote from a faceless, NeverTrump bureaucrat. Within hours, social media timelines fill with blackpilling, accusations of betrayal, and declarations that the entire MAGA agenda is dead.
But the Panicans need to relax. We’ve watched the president work for more than a decade. We’ve seen him adapt, change lanes, find another lever to pull, and keep moving. He’s proven doubters wrong over and over again. At this point, he deserves the benefit of the doubt.
And that is certainly true when it comes to the question of the “Trump Tariffs.”
In February, the Supreme Court struck down President Trump’s “emergency power” tariffs, which he argued he could levy using executive authority granted by the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). Included in these were his “trafficking tariffs,” which he levied against China, Canada, and Mexico for failing to prevent the flow of fentanyl into our country, and his “reciprocal tariffs,” which he levied against nearly every nation for the “unusual and extraordinary threat” to the U.S. economy and U.S. national security posed by trade imbalances.
The president obviously preferred a better ruling, just as a power hitter might prefer a fastball down the middle of the plate. But he hasn’t struck out—not even close. Governing is a process. Serious attempts to reorder the global economy were never going to move through the courts uncontested. Judicial review takes time.
Meanwhile, he’s already looking to crush the next pitch.
Soon after the ruling, the administration began exploring alternative tariff authorities under Section 301 of the Trade Act, which allows the United States government to respond to unfair foreign trade practices. This angle puts the tariff argument on much firmer legal and political ground.
A Section 301 framework allows the administration to connect environmental dumping, industrial overcapacity, state subsidies, weak labor standards, and non-market manipulation to a broader argument about systemic trade distortion. This argument targets the trade practices that allow foreign producers to artificially suppress prices through overcapacity and state-backed advantages that American firms cannot realistically match under normal market conditions.
China stands apart because it combines nearly every distortion inside a state-directed command economy built around subsidies, industrial overcapacity, currency manipulation, intellectual property theft, forced labor, and heavy industrial pollution.
While China is the clearest example, the problem is very much a global one. Many countries benefit from weaker environmental enforcement and lower industrial standards. For decades, Washington has treated these distortions as normal features of “free trade,” while domestic industry hollowed out and production shifted overseas.
Environmental activists and regulatory bureaucracies played their own role in this shift by focusing heavily on reducing domestic emissions totals without accounting for how industrial production would move abroad. China now produces massive amounts of the steel, chemicals, batteries, solar panels, and industrial materials required for the so-called green transition while relying heavily on coal power and weak environmental enforcement. American policymakers spent years measuring domestic emissions reductions without seriously accounting for the offshoring of both industry and pollution.
That dynamic carries direct economic consequences. Weak environmental enforcement becomes an economic advantage. Governments willing to tolerate severe pollution hand manufacturers pricing advantages over competitors in countries operating under stricter standards, allowing them to flood markets with cheap, dirty products.
That is exactly why the Section 301 approach matters so much. It treats these practices as interconnected forms of trade distortion instead of isolated policy debates.
Trade policy evolves through institutional fights, legal challenges, and shifting authorities. Durable frameworks usually emerge over time. The administration is adapting in real time while parts of the online right continue embarrassing themselves by treating every procedural setback, temporary injunction, or narrow ruling like the collapse of the entire America First movement.
Real patriots trust the plan. Ignore the “Panicans” and let the President cook—he’s about to hit a dinger.
The post Relax, Panicans: Trump’s Tariffs Are Just Getting Started appeared first on The American Conservative.
The UK is using its borders to create a nation-sized “safe space.”
What connects the rapper Kanye West, pick-up artist Julien Blanc, and left-wing broadcaster Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks YouTube channel? All three are Americans who have been banned from visiting the UK, as their presence has been deemed “not conducive to the public good”—which is essentially British bureaucrat-speak for “they have expressed views that some might find offensive.”
The UK has a notoriously lax approach to illegal migrants who traverse the English Channel on small boats. On arrival, even hardened criminals are regularly offered free accommodation, access to public services, and “human rights” protections that ensure they won’t be deported. Expressing controversial opinions, in contrast, may be the one thing that spurs the British government to pull up the drawbridge.
Uygur and his nephew, the livestreaming mega-star Hasan Piker, are among the latest alleged troublemakers to be blocked from entering Britain. The Home Office confirmed in early June that both have had their electronic travel authorization revoked, scuppering their plans to speak at the London arm of the SXSW arts and technology festival. Uygur had also been due to appear in person on Piers Morgan: Uncensored and Piker at the Oxford Union, a debating society founded in 1823.
Of course, like any sovereign country, the UK has every right to decide who it lets in and who it turns away at the border. Yet these powers are clearly being used in a way that is both needlessly illiberal and ultimately irrational. Home Office policies that were developed with criminals and terrorists in mind seem to increasingly be applied to activists, artists, and public figures deemed merely to be irritating to the government.
Legally, the power to revoke or refuse a UK visa, beyond rules barring entry for serious criminal conduct, rests with the UK Home Secretary—currently Labour’s Shabana Mahmood. She need only decide that a person’s presence in the UK is “not conducive to the public good because of their conduct, character, associations or other reasons”—a deliberately vague condition, granting her broad powers and a great deal of personal discretion. There is no right to appeal a visa revocation (although it is possible to reapply for a visa or an electronic travel authorization for a future visit). In fact, there is no legal obligation at all for Mahmood to set out her reasons for blocking a visa, either publicly or privately, to those affected.
In Piker and Uygur’s case, Mahmood has let it be known to journalists that she fears they could stir up antisemitism, and such fears are not baseless. Of course, both insist they are merely critics of Israel and its treatment of the Palestinians. Yet, as even the left-wing, zealously anti-Israel Guardian concedes, Piker has referred to Orthodox Jews as “inbred” and said he would support “Hamas over Israel,” while Uygur is accused of “propagating antisemitic tropes in his criticism of Israel.”
Still, if the aim of the visa ban were to deny oxygen to such views, then this has backfired spectacularly. For one thing, in our age of online live-streaming, opinions and beliefs are not bound by national borders. All Mahmood has really succeeded in doing is generating publicity for her targets. Piker and Uygur were set to address a narrow crowd of media elites—a “festival pass” to SXSW London costs a staggering £1,200. Yet now they have become the talk of the town, and their bans have been covered in every major British newspaper and on every news channel.
Worse, Piker and Uygur have managed to exploit the Home Office’s lack of explanation to advance their conspiratorial brand of so-called anti-Zionism. “I didn’t get banned for criticising the UK, but for criticising Israel,” Uygur has since claimed. “They broke the irony record by saying it was because I said Israel might control other governments.” Piker was here claiming to see the hidden hand of the Jewish State behind Mahmood’s decision. He added, with no ambiguity, that she had acted at “the behest of Israel.”
Anyone who follows British politics will understand why this claim is manifestly ludicrous. Mahmood herself is a pro-Palestine Muslim, and the Labour government she serves in has been at loggerheads with Israel for some time now. It has suspended arms exports to Israel and recognised a Palestinian state. Downing Street has even hinted that it would be willing to have Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrested on behalf of the International Criminal Court. These are not the actions of a government under “Zionist occupation,” as a Hamas fanboy might put it.
The truth is that the UK does not need Israel’s influence or insistence—or that of any other nation, for that matter—to behave in such a censorious manner. Britain’s universities “no platform” people for offensive speech. The police arrest people for offensive speech. And the government bans people from the country for offensive speech, too. Effectively, the whole UK is being turned into a nation-sized “safe space.”
What is undoubtedly unusual about Uygur and Piker’s bans is that they are men of the left. The majority of visa bans (at least those that the UK government chooses to publicize) are directed either at Islamists or the hard right. Among those banned in the past decade or so include the Stormfront founder Don Black, the Hezbollah spokesman Ibrahim Moussawi, and the Islamic preacher Zakir Naik, who infamously argued that “every Muslim should be a terrorist.”
In fact, only a few weeks before Uygur and Piker were banned from Britain, the Home Office revoked the visas of 11 figures who were due to attend the right-wing activist Tommy Robinson’s “Unite the Kingdom” rally in London. It is hard not to suspect that this played a role in Mahmood’s decision. The UK government is currently under enormous pressure over accusations of “two-tier policing” (that is, cracking down disproportionately on right-wing speech and white working-class protesters). It is also widely seen as insufficiently robust in dealing with antisemitic threats. Banning two left-wing Israelophobes must have felt like an easy way for the home secretary to deflect some of these criticisms.
The upshot of all this is that Britain’s border policies now seem to be based entirely around virtue-signalling and gesture politics. We welcome tens of thousands of illegal migrants to exploit our generosity and kindness. At the same time, we ban American livestreamers to show we have zero tolerance for anyone who might disturb the peace in our multicultural utopia.
Enough. Britain’s borders should be used to protect the British people from genuine harm—from criminality, the undercutting of wages, extreme competition for housing and resources, and other genuine ills—not to save us from naughty words or to be used as a tool for political grandstanding. Maybe following those priorities might be more “conducive to the public good”?
The post Why Britain Banned Hasan Piker appeared first on The American Conservative.
Ethan Rundell is a translator, journalist, alumnus of University of California–Berkeley and Paris’s School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences. He has translated over a dozen books, as well as scores of academic articles. After several years in France, he now lives in North Carolina, where he co-founded Vauban Books, which specializes in French dissident literature. Mr. Rundell and Vauban Books recently earned headlines after Amazon briefly delisted Vauban’s 2025 English translation of Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints.
How did you become the face of The Camp of the Saints in America? How did Blowing Rock, NC, of all places, become a hub of dissident French literature?
It’s funny. That’s a funny question. First, I would like to think that I am not the face of The Camp of the Saints in America. I would like to think that’s Nathan Pinkoski, that we have a division of labor, and he gets to be the face and interpretive voice, and I’m simply the sinister presence behind the scenes and translator. I think very early on, after starting Vauban Books with [University of Wisconsin-Whitewater’s Professor] Louis Betty, Camp of the Saints was on our radar. I’d read the book first 20 to 25 years ago, in French, and was deeply struck by it. I had also read later the English translation from 1975 and, like many other people, was aware of its fraught career in recent years, how the book had become really deeply politicized in ways that are unusual for 50-year-old novels, and here we were starting this publishing venture specializing in so-far exclusively French dissident literature and translation. What could be a better example of French dissident literature than The Camp of the Saints? So very early on, we began kind of prospecting, attempting to make contacts with the French rights-holders and so forth. After many attempts and much effort and a fair amount of expense as well, we acquired the rights.
As for Blowing Rock, I think no one in Blowing Rock or Boone [nearby home of Appalachian State University]—there are, at most, a handful, maybe six, people in Watauga County who are aware of the fact that Blowing Rock, North Carolina, has now become ground-zero of fairly obnoxious and provocative French dissident literature and translation.
Camp has arguably had a more volatile, politically charged existence in the U.S. than any other novel over the past decade. How would you summarize it?
Well, I think the fortunes of this novel in the United States over the past decade are entirely inseparable from those of the first and now second Trump administrations. Famously, there was this episode in 2019 in which the Southern Poverty Law Center somehow—legally or not, right? That’s an open question with them—gained possession of a trove of emails from Stephen Miller, private emails that he had written over some period of time. And in those emails, Miller is to be found advising editors at Breitbart to talk up The Camp of the Saints, which he thinks is a very important book, and he hopes would have some impact on the immigration debate, if only by spreading his vision of things. And so, the SPLC releases to the press, the story is reported, to my knowledge, first on NPR and then by every other prestige outlet in the country. And as one, they almost immediately issued demands that Miller resign from his posts in the White House in the first Trump administration.
And clearly, in this controversy, if that’s what it was, the real target was not Jean Raspail or The Camp of the Saints, which I think it’s very likely none of the people calling for Miller’s resignation had ever read. It was Miller, and in order to make the charge stick, they had to present the novel in the direst possible way. So, suddenly it became a white-supremacist screed. Obviously, it was consistently called racist and obscene. It was also suddenly paired with this other book, The Turner Diaries. I don’t know if you’ve ever looked at The Turner Diaries, but after Camp of the Saints came out, I’d [still] never seen it.
I’m aware of it on a Wikipedia level, and then these hit pieces.
Yeah, I’d heard of it. Someone actually sent me an e-file of The Turner Diaries—to be clear, not because I was thinking, “Hey, maybe we should bring out The Turner Diaries.” I don’t even know why. I was surprised that he did it. And, out of curiosity, I read like the first 20 pages, and it is genuinely obscene. It’s obscene, not just at the level of the story it tells, which is grossly racist and violent, like in the way that I understood what racism meant when I was growing up in the 1980s, not what it means now, which is everything, right? Really, really vile. But, in addition to that, it’s obscene at the level of its prose. It’s so poorly written. To compare The Camp of the Saints to The Turner Diaries is—to say that it’s tendentious is a total understatement, because what The Turner Diaries really is, is not a novel, a work of literature. It’s a terrorist manual masquerading as fiction. That’s what its purpose is.
So, the manner in which the Miller–Camp of the Saints controversy was reported was completely dishonest and misleading, and it failed, right? Miller didn’t get ejected from the White House. But suddenly you had this sort of media object, The Camp of the Saints, which had, in my view, little relation to The Camp of the Saints of the book, the text, the work of literature. And having invested so much in this campaign, the people behind it couldn’t very well abandon it.
Tell us about the experience of being delisted and then relisted on Amazon recently.
We released [The Camp of the Saints] on September 16 of last year. There were a lot of people who had placed pre-orders and so forth, certainly better than our other books. And word got around, I guess, and this guy from the Atlantic, Idrees Kahloon, got wind of it and decided this would be interesting. Or someone did and sent him. He learned that we were having this event at Butterworth’s in DC to celebrate the launch of the book. Nathan Pinkoski was going to be there. I was there, and so forth. And you can imagine, this is a juicy journalistic opportunity, because it’s in DC, it’s the Trump administration. It’s Camp of the Saints. Everyone remembers the Miller story, blah, blah, blah. So, he contacted us to see if he could attend. And, initially, I refused. It was like, “What good is going to come out of the Atlantic talking about us?”
And I asked him, “Have you read the book?” And he said, “No.” I said, “Well, read the book and get back to me.” So he read the book, and he got back to me, and he had a set of perfectly fair criticisms of the book, but he also explicitly supported the notion that it should be in print. And we exchanged some emails. He asked me some questions. And so, finally, I thought, “Okay, well, this guy seems okay.” We let him come to the event, and he interviewed Louis and I there. Then he wrote up his piece in the Atlantic. And, again, it’s critical. But I thought it was fair. I was pleased. A few weeks go by, and suddenly this story from the Atlantic is being reported all over the place in France. So, first you get Slate.fr reporting it, and then this kind of up-market online journal associated with the École normale supérieure, which is, in the humanities and social sciences, [France’s] Harvard.
But nevertheless, in intellectual circles, in Paris and France, Le Grand Continent, on the Left, anyhow, is totally respectable. It means something. So, lots of people have read it, including a number of my friends who were kind of surprised about my activities, and that got the attention of some people at Le Monde. This guy Olivier Faye at Le Monde got in touch with me, and he wanted to interview me, and someone from Libération got in touch with me. And I knew these people were hostile. … So I wasn’t going to talk to him, and I said, “No, get lost.” Politely. I said that, but that was what I meant to communicate to these people. But he did the article anyhow. This is a long, really poorly written, kind of clumsy article, just repeating the standard Wikipedia lines of attack, nothing more.
The only interest from the point of view of Le Monde in this article was that it once again attempted to tie the book to the Trump administration. The average readers of Le Monde hate the Trump administration. They want to believe various conspiracy theories. And they also, on the one hand, want to make the Trump administration look bad, but they want to make their enemies in France look bad too, by tying them to the Trump administration. So going through attacking The Camp of the Saints and Jean Raspail and us was a way of saying, “Look, the right in France is compromised. It’s our domestic enemies who are giving our foreign enemies all of their ideas.” All of this is all make-believe, and what have you. But there you go. That was the purpose of it.
And I thought it was probably dead at that point, until that week of April 17, or whatever it was, on a Thursday. Two things happened. One, we had this brief success on X because there was this video, which you probably have seen, of some migrant kid in England creating this giant hole in—I think it’s called a dry-rock wall [dry-stone wall]—somewhere in northern England, right? And he’s confronted by passersby, who say, “What the hell are you doing?” And the migrant kid has no idea why he’s being condemned for destroying this centuries-old piece of rural England. And so, lots of people were citing the beautiful oak door, the lovely oak door passage [from The Camp of the Saints].
And so, my assistant and I took advantage of that, because, after all, we are trying to sell books, and appended our little commentaries to it, and what have you. By that evening, I checked our Amazon ranking, and it had gone up like 1,000 points. And I thought, “Okay, I think it’s doing something. I’ll check again in the morning.” That same day, New York Magazine ran a piece, a hit piece, on basically everyone associated [with Vauban Books]. You were mentioned there with Orbán, and the Hungarian regime, and the recent election in Hungary. And there was this one little paragraph of this author’s incredibly long piece—stupidly long—in which the author decides to attack Rod Dreher and mentions that Dreher had spoken about The Camp of the Saints, and that Orbán himself had, I guess, praised the book. And that was it, right? And so, the next morning, I woke up and I checked our Amazon ranking. It had gone up yet another 1,000 points. I was like, “Yeah, we’re on a roll here. This is good….”
Since the book came out, we’ve consistently been in the top 10,000 best-selling books in the United States. When this began, we were at like 8,000, and then the next morning we’re 7,000, we’re down to like 4,000, so there was movement. There were people buying the book more often than had been the case just a few days before. I went to my office and decided I was going to ignore the whole thing, get some work done. But later I took a break and said, “You know, let’s check in on Amazon. Go see what’s happening.” And I went to check, expecting that we were continuing to be moving up the rankings, and the listing was just gone.
What did you see on your screen?
I have a screenshot of it somewhere, but it’s something like, “Sorry, this web page does not exist. Please return to the homepage for another search.” Something to that effect. My theory about what happened—and I don’t know if this is true—is that some middle manager at Amazon, or maybe senior manager, saw the New York Magazine article and realized that the book was being sold on Amazon and was outraged. Or, ultimately, that same person had seen that we were moving up quickly, moving up the ranks on Amazon in the space of a 24-hour period, and was outraged and pulled the plug. In any case, there’s this kind of temporal coincidence that’s striking, but I don’t think we’ll ever know.…
So, I got in touch immediately with our distributor here in the United States, because I have no direct contact with Amazon, but our distributor kind of can. And I asked him what was going on, and he said he would look into it. And, over the course of the weekend, since I was in CC to these emails, we received Amazon’s official response, which is that they had reviewed our complaint. And could confirm they’re not going to revise their judgment, confirming that, in fact, the title had been removed on the grounds that it violated their offensive-content policy, and there we were.
It seemed like it was all over, right? I mean, precisely how is a tiny little publishing house with only two full-time employees going to fight the behemoth that is Amazon? But, still, we had to try, and so my assistant and I talked over the course of the weekend. We decided on Monday morning we had to put out a press release. And so we put out this press release on X and contacted all of our friends there. I think we got lucky, because that Monday was a slow news day. The principal talking point on X hadn’t yet been defined, and nothing very interesting was happening.
Suddenly this press release gained all this traction, and within, I think, 18 hours, we got over 2.5 million views. There was a whole spate of stories. Lots of people were contacting us for comment or interview. One way or the other, Amazon became aware of the fact that this was turning into quite an embarrassing episode for them, and should they not reverse course? It was quite likely to turn into a much more embarrassing and perhaps politically damaging episode for them. So, it was flattering for us, because here we are, this tiny little publishing house just doing what publishers do, about to get almost crushed out of existence by the biggest book retailer in the world. And we were able to leverage, I guess, friendship and reputation, and all that. So we were very grateful to all the people who stepped in to help us out. Yeah, so we were David, and they were Goliath, and we won…. The whole ban, if you want to call it that, lasted from Friday until Monday afternoon….
I first read the novel in 2016. If you do a casual internet search, the most visible sources of information make it sound scary. I asked people, “Is this okay? Am I going to be on some kind of list? Is this beyond the pale?” Is this a common reader experience?
It probably is, in two ways. A lot of people very strongly wish to avoid ever reading this novel. It’s a novel they don’t want to read actively, precisely for the reasons that you just mentioned, its reputation. There’s another subset of people who desperately want to read the book, and for those same reasons, they identify with whatever, the sort of sinister reputation that makes it seem dangerous and mysterious and appealing, or they imagine themselves as subject to the same kind of judgment, and thus believe that the book is in some way on their side.
So, yeah, I think that’s entirely true. On the other hand, in brief, our hope was, in a sense, to win it a wider readership that had not necessarily approached the book that way, to get a new hearing for the book, so that new readers who weren’t necessarily wedded to that prior representation would approach it fairly as a work of literature and judge it for themselves by reading it, rather than judge it as a totem or as an artifact of American political conflict, which is what it is in part, right? We wanted to get beyond that. We wanted to defend it as literature, and not just as a byword for one side or the other of some kind of ultimately stupid and Manichaean political division in this country.
Would the controversy be lessened if Norman Shapiro hadn’t used the name “Turd-Eater” in his 1975 translation?
There’s a lot to be said about the two translations. Actually, I’m almost never asked questions about that, which is fair enough, because if you don’t have the French, you’re not going to really be able to assess them.
So, just to answer your question, “Turd-Eater” is not the word in French. That’s not what Raspail says. He uses a synonym, but “coprophage” is the same word in both languages, same Latin origin. It’s usually employed in the context of entomology, or the study of beetles, whatever that’s called, but it’s a different register. So “Turd-Eater” is vulgar, silly. It’s funny, it’s childish, it’s crude. “Coprophage” is ironic. It’s applying a scientific label to a disgusting practice, right? There’s humor in it, but there’s also distance and judgment.
Norman Shapiro, throughout his translation, opted for the demotic turn. He made things cruder than they were in Raspail. He substituted for Raspail’s humor what I must suppose was Shapiro’s humor. He translated the book, in my view, very deliberately for the American readership of his time. I like to joke that, reading Shapiro, you get the impression that when he was tasked with translating this book, he said, “Okay, this is too French. I want this book to be serialized in Playboy magazine. I’m going to translate it for the sort of modal Playboy reader.” That’s not how I approach translation, particularly when I’m dealing with important authors, stylists. I think the reader picks up the translation. Readers don’t just want the content, they want the voice. And so I attempted to reproduce, as far as possible, the voice of the original in English.
But there’s another respect in which I think Shapiro’s translation lent to the controversy. On at least two occasions, Shapiro employs the n-word in his translation, and in passages where it does not occur in the French original. There’s only one passage in the French original where you find the n-word, and it’s employed by an African diplomat in Paris in reference to his coethnics from Africa. And it appears in quotation marks.
The U.S. has a better free-speech reputation than other countries in the Anglosphere. Could you compare the existence of Camp in the United States to some of the other major anglophone countries?
Yes, the United States does have this reputation, and in large measure, I think it’s well deserved. On the other hand, in this particular instance, it’s kind of ironic, because my impression is that Camp has fared much more poorly here than it has in these other countries. Translations of Camp exist in various languages. I’m familiar only with a few of them, like the German translation, the Italian translation,
When we released the book, we thought, “Okay, we’re probably going to have problems in Great Britain. Our distributor is going to dump us. Or Amazon’s going to dump us.” You know something’s going to happen, and it didn’t. And not only that, more surprisingly, the first major reviews that we received for the book were in Great Britain. And oddly enough, the same was true of our [Renaud] Camus work. Our Camus books have gotten pretty good press in Great Britain. In the United States, to this day, they still haven’t.
I think this is symptomatic of the fact that it’s in the United States, specifically, that Renaud Camus and his expression, the “Great Replacement,” and The Camp of the Saints have been assigned this status as totems. Totems for what is evil from a progressive point of view, there’s this progressive narrative. There are good guys, the progressives, and then there are the bad guys, always expanding lists of bad guys, and the bad guys also have their literary counterparts in, specifically, Camus and Raspail. And if you can associate your political opponents with that literature, you discredit them, right? And so, this narrative has been crafted for specifically American political ends, and it only makes sense, I think, that it is here that that narrative must be most fiercely defended. In the UK, it’s just an import, right? In the UK, all they do is ape what happens here, and now they ape it with a delay of three or four years.
Have you or Vauban Books been threatened, apart from the media smears?
Not yet. No, no, no. And we were worried about that, not so much physical threats, though who knows, but Louis [Betty] is a sitting professor, and so it seemed like there was a possibility for retaliation. [The intellectual historian and editor of Vauban’s Towards a Conservative Left] Michael Behrent is a sitting professor. Both of them have tenure, but still, these days, I’m not sure that really matters as much as it used to.
There have been no professional repercussions for either of them, at least that they know of, and there have been none for me. I don’t really depend on anyone in that sense. And so, it’s less obvious in my case, but down the road, we’ll see what happens. I’ve gotten some weird emails, of course, but nothing threatening to hurt you or anything like that. No, just weird stuff, vague stuff. It’s easy to write me, send an email. And, besides, I live in an open-carry state. It’s very generous with all kinds of things in that connection. So, some reassurance there. But no, no, I don’t mean to exaggerate that point. There’s been no reason so far to worry about anything.
On that note, there will come a time when the Democrats will regain power, and their partisans will likely have near-total institutional control again. When that happens, what will it mean for Vauban and Camp’s availability in the U.S.?
My general answer is, ‘Who knows?’ The next answer is, I would not in the least be surprised that when that day comes, Camp has disappeared down the memory hole, and maybe we are just consistently dropped across the board by Amazon, in particular, maybe our distributor in Europe. All kinds of things like that can happen to make it difficult or impossible for us to do business.
The truth is, I’m not radical. My views are just the standard views of 99.999 percent of humanity throughout the entirety of human history, and here, too, on the Left in this country. Until 15 years ago, I used to be a Democrat. I think that these people, the radicals, and in French, there’s this expression “the radical center.” That’s who they are. It’s the center that’s insane. There should be an SPLC that’s studying the center.
Two other quick responses to the final question. When we started Vauban Books, we saw it—we describe it as such on our website—as a project in translation, a counter-project. Let’s say, “Well, should the political tides turn, and everything come crashing down? And we were prevented from engaging in business like a normal company?” Projects have beginnings, middles, and ends. It will be an honor to have been associated with this particular project in the time that we were able to pursue it. And that’s fine. That’s the way it goes. It’s not going to hurt my feelings.
So that’s sort of our position, the pretense that ours is a political and literary culture that’s still interested in freedom of expression allows us to exist. But I think, effectively, unfortunately, it’s just that. It’s a pretense, and once the powers that were and still are in Europe—I like to think of as the empire in exile—returns to its throne in Washington, DC, I think they’re quite ready now, in a way they weren’t five or 10 years ago, to dispense with it altogether. And then, when that happens, I presume that we will receive their attention.
This interview has been condensed for brevity and lightly edited for clarity.
Michael O’Shea is an American-Polish writer and translator. He is a former Visiting Fellow at the Danube Institute in Budapest.
The post Saving Camp of the Saints appeared first on The American Conservative.
The former FBI director James Comey has been indicted and charged Tuesday with threatening President Donald Trump’s life over a post on Instagram depicting seashells spelling out “86 47,” according to a document released by the Department of Justice. “Eighty-six” is slang for “cancel” or “remove.”
“James Comey disgracefully encouraged a threat on President Trump’s life and posted it on Instagram for the world to see,” FBI Director Kash Patel said at a press conference announcing the indictment. This will be the second time the Trump administration has taken Comey to court: He was indicted last year for lying to Congress over his conduct in the FBI’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails. Those charges were ultimately dismissed by the judge hearing the case.
Comey has denied that he is guilty of any crime. “I’m still innocent, I’m still not afraid, and I still believe in the independent federal judiciary,” he said Tuesday.
The indictment follows just three days after a gunman attempted to break into the White House Correspondents’ Dinner to assassinate Trump.
The post Former FBI Director Comey Charged With Threatening Trump appeared first on The American Conservative.
Raquel Pacheco, an Army National Guard veteran, alleges that officials in Miami Beach attempted to suppress her speech rights for criticizing Israel.
The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) filed a new lawsuit last month on behalf of the Miami Beach resident and Army National Guard veteran Raquel Pacheco, arguing that Miami Beach city officials conducted a coordinated campaign to suppress constitutionally protected speech—namely, the advocacy for the rights of Palestinians and criticism of the foreign government of Israel.
On January 7, 2026, Pacheco posted a comment on Facebook criticizing City of Miami Beach Mayor Steven Meiner’s stance on Palestine. She wrote, “The guy who consistently calls for the death of all Palestinians, tried to shut down a theater for showing a movie that hurt his feelings, and refuses to stand up for the LGBTQ community in any way… wants you to know that you’re all welcome here,” referring to a 2024 attempt by Meiner to chill pro-Palestinian speech; Meiner had threatened to revoke the lease of O Cinema, a private Miami Beach movie theater, over its screenings of the Academy Award–winning documentary No Other Land, which documents Israel’s destruction of Palestinian villages in the West Bank.
The mayor reportedly flagged Pacheco’s Facebook comment for police, and on January 12, in an incident condemned by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), two Miami Beach Police Department officers visited Pacheco’s home, questioned her about the post, and advised her to “refrain from posting things like that because that could get something incited.” Pacheco recorded the encounter and the video was posted on X, rapidly going viral.
In the video, Miami Beach police officers confront Pacheco in her doorway. The complaint notes that when Pacheco opened the door, she invoked her right to have an attorney present before answering any questions, which the officers ignored, proceeding to question her anyway. Reading out-loud her own Facebook comments, the officer claimed that the purpose of their visit is “trying to prevent… somebody else getting agitated or agreeing with the statement,” saying that her comments could “probably incite somebody to do something radical.”
When it comes to “incitement,” the Supreme Court has long recognized that speech is constitutionally protected unless 1) it is directed to producing “imminent lawless action” and 2) is likely to produce such action. Speech like Pacheco’s that is merely provocative or critical of public figures, but not an immediate call to violence, is entirely protected by the first amendment.
The ADC’s complaint, filed on Pacheco’s behalf against the City of Miami Beach, Meiner, Police Chief Wayne Jones, City Manager Eric Carpenter, two city commissioners, and unnamed police detectives, alleges four separate First Amendment violations.
The first count charges viewpoint discrimination and invokes the Supreme Court’s repeated holding that viewpoint discrimination is an “egregious form of content discrimination” that is “presumptively unconstitutional,” (Matal v. Tam, 2017, quoting Rosenberger v. Rector & Visitors of the Univ. of Va, 1995) and that political speech, particularly advocacy on controversial issues like pro-Palestinian advocacy, occupies “the highest, most protected position” (R.A.V. v. St. Paul, 1992) under the First Amendment. The ADC’s complaint argues that dispatching police to Pacheco’s home to question her about a post criticizing a public official, and instructing her not to post such content again, is exactly the kind of viewpoint-targeted government action the Constitution forbids.
The second count charges unlawful retaliation, alleging that defendants took direct adverse action against Pacheco in response to protected political speech in a manner that “would chill the future speech of a person of ordinary firmness.” The ADC complaint quotes a second circuit case, Okwedy v. Molinari, which held that “oral or written statements made by public officials” may give rise to a First Amendment claim where they “can reasonably be interpreted as intimating that some form of punishment or adverse regulatory action will follow the failure to accede to the official’s request.” The detective’s directive to Pacheco to “refrain from posting things like that” plainly meets that standard, ADC argues.
The third count charges unlawful prior restraint; the Supreme Court has held that government prohibitions on speech before it occurs are presumptively unconstitutional, and that this principle applies not just to written legal orders but to informal threats and warnings by officials (Multimedia Holdings Corp. v. Circuit Court, 2005).
The fourth count charges unlawful viewpoint discrimination in a public forum, directed at Commissioners Suarez and Bhatt for blocking Pacheco from their official Facebook accounts. The complaint argues that by opening the interactive spaces of their official pages for public discussion of governmental matters, the commissioners created designated public forums subject to First Amendment constraints, and that excluding Pacheco from those pages on the basis of her pro-Palestinian views, violated her constitutionally protected rights to “to read and participate in a public forum, right to petition the government for redress of grievances, and right to access official statements.”
The speech-chilling measures taken against Pacheco, the ADC notes, come amidst two years of official conduct targeting pro-Palestinian speech in Miami Beach. In September 2024, the city passed an anti-BDS ordinance requiring vendors to certify they do not boycott the State of Israel. Under anti-BDS laws, now active across 38 states, Americans can boycott any other foreign government, and even other state governments within the United States but boycotts of that one foreign government are strictly prohibited. Miami Beach’s anti-protest ordinance, adopted in March 2024, is already the subject of separate litigation, with that complaint arguing that Meiner and Suarez made clear the ordinance was designed to impair expression critical of Israel, infringing on the first amendment protections of Miami residents.
The ADC hopes the case will establish that a mayor cannot weaponize police against constituents who criticize him on social media, regardless of the political views being expressed. “It’s virtually unheard of in America for police to show up at someone’s doorstep to interrogate her for airing a political view on social media,” Jenin Younes, the ADC’s National Legal Director tells The American Conservative. “It’s absolutely crucial for the future of free speech that courts make clear to law enforcement and political actors that this conduct isn’t tolerable under the first amendment.”
The post A New Free Speech Case in Florida appeared first on The American Conservative.
Will sanity prevail at the Supreme Court?
This week, the Supreme Court heard arguments on whether the 14th Amendment’s assurance that the children of freed slaves were citizens also means that if an 8-month-pregnant Mexican woman runs across the border and drops a baby, that baby is a citizen, too.
Which brings up the point, let’s hope the dogma doesn’t live loudly within Justice Amy Coney Barrett. That was what the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein said to Barrett during her confirmation hearings, noting that the dogma might not always align with “big issues that large numbers of people have fought for years in this country”—such as, for example, off the top of my head, amendments added to the Constitution after a bloody Civil War to end slavery.
At the time, conservatives accused Feinstein of anti-Christian bigotry, but I thought her remarks were poetic. I’d love to be accused of having the dogma live loudly within me.
On the other hand, if the dogma living within Barrett is not Holy Scripture but the pope’s anti-American pronunciamientos on illegal immigrants, I’ll be on DiFi’s side, even if it was cruel antipapism.
While our laws say that it’s illegal to sneak into our country, uninvited, the pope says—citing Our Lady of Guadalupe—that the laws of the United States must be subordinated to his own florid assertions about the “dignity” of illegals.
The Catholic bishops continued this spirited assault on American democracy by announcing that punishing people for “the mere attempt to immigrate” (illegally) to the U.S. is “immoral,” and, further, that we are “obliged” to let in anyone who wants to come and then support them for the rest of their lives—with generous donations to Catholic Charities, no doubt.
(OK, I know we’re all thinking it, but what exactly is the church’s position on the Export–Import Bank?)
If Barrett rules in favor of our Constitution, and reaches the blindingly obvious conclusion that the post–Civil War amendments’ citizenship clause referred exclusively to recently freed slaves, I vow to stop referring to her as “that papist nut.”
On the other hand, if she goes with the gaseous blathering of a man whose own sovereign territory is protected by 40-foot walls and 135 armed Swiss Guards, then J.D. Vance has to consider becoming a Presbyterian.
MS-NOW’s legal commentators keep claiming that the Supreme Court has never found that anchor babies aren’t citizens. Nor has it ever found that they are. To the contrary, court after court after court has expressly ruled that the 14th Amendment is about freed slaves and freed slaves only.
In what we legal buffs like to call “precedent,” a long string of cases made absolutely clear that the clause refers only to—I quote—“the slave race” (the Slaughterhouse Cases), “persons of the African race” (Ex parte Virginia), “the colored man” (Strauder v. West Virginia), and on and on.
As one Supreme Court decision put it, “no one can fail to be impressed with the one pervading purpose” of the Civil War amendments, that “we mean the freedom of the slave race, the security and firm establishment of that freedom, and the protection of the newly-made freeman and citizen from the oppressions of those who had formerly exercised unlimited dominion over him.”
Lawyers talk about the jurisdiction, residency and domicile requirements of the amendment. All true, but the larger point is: We just fought a civil war. What do you think they were talking about? With 600,000 corpses still littering the landscape, the country did not rise up as one and shout, Wait a minute—if a century later, millions of Mexicans run across the border and have babies, damn straight those kids will be citizens!
In other Supreme Court news this week, the court struck down, 8–1, a Colorado law criminalizing “conversion therapy”—i.e., talk therapy that aims to help someone with gay tendencies quell those feelings. Colorado’s position was: We have to offer people who claim to be transgenders complex surgeries and massive doses of hormones, but if a gay wants to talk to someone about not being gay, he must be stopped!
Maybe the New York Times’ Michael Barbaro should write the next part. This star of the Times’ wildly popular “The Daily” podcast apparently converted not because of therapy, but because he fell in love with a girl. So it does happen, and the fact that it does isn’t an insult to gays.
In my experience, the gays angriest about the mere existence of conversion therapy are the ones who most need it. Maybe throw in anger management classes for free.
I’m no expert—I’m an expert on raising children (I have none) which I’m happy to share with any parents out there, before leaving for a cigarette and a glass of wine—but some gays are born gay. They were gay from age 5. They were gay in the womb. They’re the normal gays. Almost all of them are Republicans. (Just as our blacks are better than their blacks, our gays are way better than their gays.)
But there’s another group, who are gay either out of self-protectiveness or for revenge. Just as girls who are molested as children often become highly promiscuous to go through the same motions, but this time, they’re in control, boys who were molested as children sometimes do the same thing.
I personally know several no-longer-gay men who were sexually abused as kids—speaking of the Catholic Church. (That’s not a cheap shot; several were molested by priests.) Upon remembering the abuse, they realized they weren’t gay at all.
Incidentally, I’m not talking about Jesus-freak evangelicals like me. They all happen to be members of the liberal elite.
Then there’s another group of not-really-gay gays who just hate their parents, hate the world and want everyone to suffer, including themselves. Sodomy is their revenge (so I guess you could say they win in the end). It could have been drugs or self-harm. These days, they’re more likely to join antifa or go transgender and commit a mass shooting.
Maybe shrinks can do something for this latter group, like at least stop them from shooting up a school. But the former group is crying out for counseling. They may not even remember that they were molested. (Girls tell everyone about their trauma, boys repress bad memories—as anyone who’s ever met another human being knows.)
Then there are gays like Barbaro who are gay because it’s a good way to meet girls.
I know some normal gays who were sent to conversion therapy by their parents, and guess what? They weren’t angry. They knew it wouldn’t work, but whatever—mom wanted them to go. It didn’t work, and mom was fine.
Warning: This column is illegal in the state of Colorado.
COPYRIGHT 2026 ANN COULTER
DISTRIBUTED BY IMPOLITE DEBATES
The post Pray Away the Precedent appeared first on The American Conservative.
Lateo.net - Flux RSS en pagaille (pour en ajouter : @ moi) 