The Weekend’s Gun Tragedies Show Why You Must Buy (Even More) Guns

Townhall 

Pity the left because it had a terrible couple of days as it had to grapple with a tragedy, the tragedy being that the murders at Brown University that they were trying to leverage to disarm us so that we could be enslaved were overshadowed by their Gaza-loving jihadi allies going on a videotaped murder spree in Australia. Don’t imagine that they care about some dead kids at a college because they don’t care about that any more than they care about women being beaten, raped, and murdered on the streets of blue American cities by their illegal alien and/or criminal friends. They care about the dead only to the extent that they can leverage the murders to facilitate their long-term agenda of disarming, disenfranchising, and defenestrating us normal people.

It’s very inconvenient when you have videotape of two murderers standing around casually shooting their guns at innocent people – they were targeting Jews, but probably weren’t that picky about which brand of infidel they murdered – and all people can think of is how, if that were happening in Texas, the Palestinian pals would be withering under a storm of lead from the citizens instead of kicking it old school for 10 minutes. Hell, if I were in Texas, like many citizens, my biggest problem responding would be picking which gun to cap their sorry a**es with. 

God bless Texas. Sadly, I’m currently in California, where they prefer we die rather than be able to defend ourselves.

At this writing, there is apparently a person of interest in custody. The left is pulling for it to be yet another of those Republican Christian white cisgender male mass murderers, you hear so much about. That the name, race, and gender identity of the shooter have not been released strongly indicates that it’s not another of those Republican Christian white cisgender male mass murders you hear so much about, but rather, one from an inconvenient demographic. Maybe it’s from an allegedly oppressed race. Maybe it’s another illegal alien. Maybe it’s another deviant trans pervert.

Of course, it doesn’t really matter. Whoever it is, they’re just going to lie about it. The guy could have “KAMALA IS MY BAE” as a tramp stamp over his coccyx, be dressed as an anime furry fox named “Yiffie,” and be on videotape holding up a notarized declaration stating, “I hate Donald Trump and all normal people,” and it would not matter. The social media pinkos, Democrat politicians, and the toe-slurping regime media would be declaring that he’s clearly MAGA and that he’s providing more proof that all Republicans are literal Nazis, except for the eagerly submissive Ned Beatty caucus in Indiana, which will get the privilege of being eaten last as a reward for its craven groveling to the left.

The left’s key weapon is lies. They don’t have the guns or the training or even the inclination to die in the pursuit of the nightmare utopia they seek to impose on themselves at the top. All they have is the ability to complain. It’s a very feminine thing –they want to nag us into submission, as opposed to forcing us into submission. It’s as if Genghis Khan wasn’t a leader of a vast horde of steppe barbarians who slayed everyone in their path who resisted. Instead, it’s Ginger Khan, the unattractive wife of a sexually unsatisfied husband with a taste for Chardonnay and SSRIs, who demands that we, as a society, use our inside voice or she’s going to pester us until we comply. Chairman Mao said power comes from the barrel of a gun, but sometimes power comes from the mouth of a nag. They want to emotionally exhaust us into surrendering to their dictatorship of the hard four mediocre-at.

Of course, there’s a problem. We can say no. We can refuse to fold in the face of their relentless complaining and whining and tell them to shut the hell up. Luckily, the key weapon of the right is guns, and we have most of them. We need to buy even more of them. Chairman Mao was right, but only if we decide that it’s worth the bother to lawfully maintain our freedom against people who want to subject us to their rule.

An armed society is a polite society, but it’s also a masculine society because it recognizes that each citizen has a personal obligation to defend themselves, their family, their community, and their Constitution. Part of the left’s delight in gun control is a class thing, where these affluent, soft-handed sissies with degrees in bi-curious Bolivian folk dancing are going to show the real men who’s boss by stripping them of the weapons that are the essential badge of a citizen. But part of it is to create a mindset that you have no power, that you cannot influence events, that you must wait until your betters deem it proper to intervene on your behalf. Of course, in the gun-controlled blue cities, we see that they deem it unworthy to use force to defend you.

They tried to imprison Kyle Rittenhouse and Daniel Perry, not because they committed a crime, but because they dared to take personal action to stop crime.

This is intentional. They want to make you a subject rather than a citizen, unable to act on your own behalf, relying upon them for your very life. That’s why criminals run free in the street after beating, raping, and murdering women in public. They put criminals back on the streets, even with dozens of arrests. The social contract was that we would give up our right to self-help – they call that “vigilantism” and assume it is something bad – in return for the government taking over the handling of crime and deviants. But the left has breached the contract. Leftist governments refuse to deal with illegal aliens, criminals, and perverts because they like illegal aliens, criminals, and perverts more than they like normal people, and anarcho-tyranny is a powerful tactic to demoralize us into the submission they crave.

I’ve written about this before, and my new conservative action novel, Panama Red, shows in detail a conservative America, after the country splits into red and blue countries, where everybody’s armed all the time. You just don’t see this kind of crap in my fantasy – for now – world. There’s something to be said for not knowing if that guy next to you is packing a .45 under his coat. It makes you think. Well, actually, it doesn’t make you think, because you’re not a criminal and you’re not going to cause problems.

It makes bad people think. It makes them engage in a calculation of whether indulging whatever criminal whim arises in their feral minds is important enough to risk getting high-velocity lead poisoning. That’s a good thing. Criminals should be afraid. Normal people shouldn’t. The Democratic Party’s entire agenda is the inversion of this proper paradigm.

So, it goes without saying that you need to buy guns and ammunition. If you already have guns and ammunition, you need to buy more. No one in a time of crisis – and a time of crisis may well be coming – has ever said, “Gosh, I have too many guns and too much ammunition.” This has never occurred, ever. If you can legally conceal or openly carry, you should do so. Remember to obey the laws of your jurisdiction in all things, and understand that, slowly but surely, we will reestablish gun freedom throughout the land through the courts and through Congress. Concealed carry reciprocity must be a key component of our GOP agenda going forward.

Why? Because this is getting out of hand, folks. The incoming mayor of our biggest city demanded that his jihadi allies “globalize the intifada,” and voilà, they globalized the hell out of it over in Australia. Understand that this is coming here again, hopefully not in as big a way as we might well see thanks to our formerly open borders. 

Regardless, you need to be ready. You need to not only be able to protect yourself and your freedom, but to establish facts on the ground that will make disarming us a practical impossibility. Every gun you buy would create the need for an entire secret police operation by forces violating the Constitution in support of the Democrat agenda.

You think it’s hard to throw 30 million illegal aliens out of the country? Try taking 400 million guns from American patriots—or better yet, 450 million. Like I always say, buy guns and ammo.

Entertainment and podcast thread for Dec 15

 

When in doubt, just have a bunch of Hallmark movies playing.

Aristocracy, Meritocracy, Technocracy, and Revolution

American  Thinker 

All human societies have informal social classes or formal social castes that separate groups of people within the same community.  Generally speaking, notions of aristocracy and hereditary nobility started on the battlefield.  Warrior chiefs of clans became minor kings after killing more rivals without dying themselves.  Rather than remaining in a constant state of tribal conflict, the chiefs of other clans bent the knee and became lesser lords.  Because kings and lords prefer their heirs to be kings and lords, too, bloodlines afforded children the social status that their ancestors had earned on the battlefield.  

A ruling king who provided security and stability earned deference from those under his protection.  Over time, tribes combined to become nations.  Chieftains cooperated to form royal courts.  And the heirs of warrior chiefs adopted customs and traditions that symbolically separated those who rule from those who are ruled.  

During social upheavals, the ruling aristocracy is often overthrown.  This provides hereditary nobles an incentive not only to quell rebellions quickly but also to find ways to keep the interests of non-nobles aligned with the aristocratic class.  Gifts of land, titles, and property buy a certain amount of loyalty.  The creation of minor offices apportions power to those deemed “worthy” of holding it.  The historic growth of administrative bureaucracies creates a path for non-nobles to exercise their talents in the service of those who rule.

To the consternation of Europe’s aristocratic class, the Great War ushered in a popular revolution against the hereditary order.  Several centuries of a growing middle class, increased literacy, industrial innovation, entrepreneurialism, and more widespread property ownership helped to create the social conditions for broad swaths of Europe’s populations to question why bloodlines should matter more than intelligence, talent, and hard work.  Many European families who lost fathers and sons during the First World War blamed European nobles for the calamity. 

By the time the Second World War had provided an extra helping of self-destructive ruin, many of Europe’s noble houses were no more.  Those that had survived were acutely wary of suffering the fates of so many cousins who had been hanged, burned, or shot.  For the surviving members of Europe’s aristocracy to endure, they had no choice but to hand considerable political powers to the common people.  The twentieth century shepherded government reforms, suffrage for men and women without property, public welfare statutes, and expanded opportunities for common people to become part of the State’s governing bureaucracy.  

While these reforms were celebrated as triumphs for “democracy,” it is important to understand that they did not completely supplant the vestiges of European aristocracy.  In the United Kingdom, the House of Lords still recognized the inherent right to rule of certain families.  Men with noble titles still ran central banks, trading houses, and clandestine agencies.  The attachés of those administrative lords still came from the “best families” and attended the “finest schools.”  Increasingly, however, the children of middle class families competed for and secured positions within the larger bureaucratic staff.

This twentieth century transition — in which citizens from low social classes were more broadly included in the functions of government — marked the social pivot to what Westerners call “meritocracy.”  No longer would a person’s bloodline serve as the limits of what that person might achieve in this life.  Instead, natural intelligence, hard work, and determination could provide a person of any means the opportunity to rise as high as he might wish.

“Meritocracy” was an alluring idea to sell to the common people who had already destroyed so much of the aristocrats’ cherished social order in the first half of the twentieth century.  Out with the nobles!  In with the people who deserve to have power!  From the point of view of someone in the lower or middle classes, a system that rewards skill, smarts, and determination sounds much fairer. 

However, “meritocracy” provides an ancillary benefit to a ruling class seeking to maintain control: It keeps the most ambitious members of the non-noble classes competing against each other for a small number of powerful positions and reinforces the legitimacy of the governing system as a whole.  People who study, sacrifice, and struggle to obtain a little power within a governing bureaucracy are not inclined to question, criticize, or delegitimize that system once vested with a modicum of authority inside of it. 

With the rise of the “meritocracy,” residual ruling class families found endless opportunities to keep unsuspecting commoners chasing their tails.  A hundred years ago, “gentlemen” in positions of power had, at most, a college education.  The transition toward “meritocracy” convinced members of the lower classes that they needed all kinds of postgraduate degrees to prove their “expertise.”  Just keep studying, kids, and you might finally have the right credentials to do the same job as a bunch of lords once did before they had reached the age of twenty-two!  In the meantime, stay poor, follow the rules, question nothing, and the ruling class might find a position for you once you’ve begged long enough.

In pursuit of “meritocracy,” commoners have been conditioned to believe that you cannot be successful without at least a college education.  In turn, the remnants of the noble ruling class have turned colleges into indoctrination laboratories that reinforce the ideologies of the ruling system.  Members of the Old Guard, in other words, have found the perfect mechanism through which to subordinate the very people otherwise inclined to overthrow them.  Say ‘Hello’ to the new nobility; it looks just like the old one!

Unfortunately for the powers that be, there are widening cracks now in the “meritocracy” illusion.  Those cracks began with “affirmative action” programs in the United States that perpetuated racial discrimination, and they have continued to expand this century with the broad initiatives across the West in support of so-called “diversity, inclusion, and equity.”  Preferential admissions and hiring decisions in favor of special classes of people identified by their skin color, ethnicity, sexual disposition, disability, or perceived “victimhood” have blown up the perception that “meritocracy” exists at all.  

Instead, what is increasingly obvious is that the same aristocrats who have always made the rules are once again decreeing which classes of commoners will be allowed to mingle among their ranks.  Out with the meritocratic!  In with the multi-racial trans-furries who have trouble doing math!  As institutions in the West expose themselves as part of an unjust and prejudicial political system, the legitimacy of the ruling class is increasingly under attack.

For the first time in many decades, Westerners have begun to notice that much of the old aristocracy supposedly supplanted by the “meritocracy” remains nonetheless in charge.  Surprise!  A century after the supposed end of hereditary rule, men and women with feudal titles still control the European Council, transnational governing bodies, international treaty organizations, and all the central banks.  In other words, the illusion of “meritocracy” gave the ruling class just enough camouflage to survive several more generations.

What happens now?  The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, says that artificial intelligence will soon replace most human jobs.  He insists that there will be a universal high income that every common peasant receives.  He says people will want for nothing...except purpose.  

Perhaps Musk is right.  Perhaps the lower classes will consent to a small number of elites ruling over them in perpetuity.  Perhaps they will consent to mass surveillance, censorship, and State-sponsored “truths.”  Perhaps they will agree to let the families of billionaires behave as entourages within royal courts in support of a coterie of technocratic kings.  

Or perhaps we are destined for social upheaval.  Perhaps what started on the battlefield will return to it.  Perhaps the ruling aristocracy will finally be overthrown.  Regardless, the future will be interesting.

America's 21st Century National Security Strategy

Townhall 

I remember in February 2002 when former SecDef Donald Rumsfeld came up with this logic, "As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know." At that time, I was a young Army Lieutenant Colonel and found this thought process to be somewhat nebulous, but I came to understand it. There are times we refer to the uncertainty of the battlefield as the "fog of war,” and in many ways, today's modern, 21st-century battlefield takes on that characterization.

Back when I first joined the military, the world was rather simple, bifurcated. There was the U.S. and the USSR, and it appeared that all the global actors aligned themselves with one or the other. There were many proxy conflicts that were fought between the two, such as Vietnam and Afghanistan, but for the most part, we operated in the realm of the "known knowns."

A New World Order

Then it happened, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and many saw that as a time when a new "peace" would be ushered in. However, there was a gentleman, Samuel Huntington, who wrote a book, "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order.” This was one of the books I read as part of my second Master’s thesis at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff Officers College (CGSC).

The Clinton Administration had written a National Security Strategy titled "Towards a Universal Cosmopolitan State" as a post-Cold War strategy. It was referring to the philosophy of one Immanuel Kant, who envisioned a global political order where people were seen as equal citizens of the world, national borders transcended for shared moral and legal frameworks, and the advancement of the ideal of universal rights through international cooperation and global governance. Some would say this was the beginning of the globalist ideology.

However, the world did not become more Kantian; it became more Machiavellian, and Huntington's thesis became the way forward. The collapse of the Soviet Union did not usher in peace; it created a situation of known unknowns and even unknown unknowns.

Era of Non-Nation States

So, here we are in this 21st century, and instead of dealing with known nation-states, we must contend with not only nation-states but non-nation-state belligerents, and nation- states that support the non-nation-state belligerents. First, there came the rise of Islamic jihadism, which accelerated upon the rise of the Ayatollahs in Iran. Now, we have the rise of transnational narco-criminal terrorists, and at the intersection of it all, we have the cooperation of these elements with known nation-states.

For some, mainly progressive socialists, who embrace the Kantian globalist ideology, this is quite perplexing. They want open borders, yet that concept lends itself to the proliferation of non-state actors. In essence, their very own policy creates a gap by which our Nation, America, is being exploited and finds itself confronting unlawful enemy combatants on its very streets. We also find ourselves contending with a chemical warfare attack that has resulted in the deaths of over a quarter of a million Americans. Marxist Leftists have now put our Republic in a very precarious position of allowing adversaries into our Country, yet they want no resolution to the matter.

21st Century Strategy

This is the crux of our 21st Century National Security strategy: how does America secure its Nation from without and within from the known knowns, the known unknowns, and the unknown unknowns? And this stretches across the spectrum of economic, energy, domestic, and cybersecurity. 

A great example of this is the current issue with Venezuela, which is run by a Marxist dictator, Nicolas Maduro. There can be no debate as to the known known, the fact that Maduro is collaborating and cooperating with narco-criminal terrorists, the cartels. He is benefiting from this relationship economically. We also need not ponder over the fact that Maduro purposefully infiltrated the violent gang Tren de Aragua into the United States during the open border season of Joe Biden in order to create domestic insecurity in America. Maduro is also an ally to China, Russia, and Iran and the oil wealth of Venezuela, which he nationalized, is further used for the purposes of supporting our declared, known enemies.

Is it necessary for the United States to go to "war" against Venezuela? I think not, but it is necessary for America to grasp the facts, the knowns, and peel back the onion of support to Maduro and undermine the narco-terrorists that enable his regime and kill Americans.

Remember, unlawful combatants are not recognized by the Law of Land Warfare, and their so-called rights are very limited. It is just the same with Islamic jihadism, that we must peel back the support to these unlawful combatants from known nation-states, such as Iran, Qatar, and Turkey. This can be done by diplomatic, economic, and informational means; military should always be the option of last resort, but it must be a credible deterrent.

What is most confounding, again, is the fact that the American Marxist left created these situations and conditions, yet wants no solutions. They do not support our federal law enforcement enforcing immigration law and securing our border. They do not want our Nation to prevent the thriving of human, sex, and drug trafficking into our Nation.

They do not want a strong America, a return to the "peace through strength" strategy of Ronald Reagan. The leftists embrace Islamic jihadists in this Red-Green alliance. In other words, the left in America wants to perpetuate a 21st-century American insecurity.

The bad actors that threaten America have become quite known to us, and sadly, they include seditious and treasonous Americans. These individuals, Marxist leftists, remind me of the quote attributed to Roman statesman Marcus Tulius Cicero, "A Nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious, but it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through the alleys, and heard in the very halls of government itself." We call these traitors Senators and Congressmen... they are the known knowns of the 21st-century national security strategy.

Steadfast and Loyal.

🎭 𝐖𝟑𝐏 𝓓𝓐𝓘𝓛𝓨 𝓗𝓾𝓶𝓸𝓻, 𝓜𝓾𝓼𝓲𝓬, 𝓐𝓻𝓽, 𝓞𝓟𝓔𝓝 𝓣𝓗𝓡𝓔𝓐𝓓

 

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Australian Man Who Wrestled Gun Away From Terrorist Charged With Unlawful Firearm Possession

Dec 15, 2025 · BabylonBee.com

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA — A heroic man who bravely wrestled away a rifle from an Islamic terrorist during the deadly shooting at Bondi Beach on Sunday has been formally charged with the unlawful possession of a firearm.

"Rest assured, this man is going away to a long, long time," confirmed Police Commissioner Mal Lanyon. "No one breaks our gun laws and gets away with it. No one. We have him on video, dead to rights."

Authorities identified the man who illegally held a gun for three minutes as Ahmed Al Ahmed, a Syrian fruit shop owner who thought he was helping when he fought a terrorist and stole his gun away to protect the lives of innocent people. But what he didn't count on was for the entire ordeal to be caught on video.

Ahmed was reportedly shot multiple times during his altercation with the armed gunman and treated for his injuries at a nearby hospital. After waking up from surgery, he discovered he was handcuffed to his hospital bed. Shortly after, a police officer read him his rights.

"I see now that what I did was bad," Ahmed said. "I should never put lives in danger by touching a gun. Shame on me!"

At publishing time, Ahmed had been denied bail.

New BIack Fragility MELTDOWNS You Have to See To Believe - And The Usual Suspects Get Creative

There's Nothing 'Gorgeous' About Socialism

Townhall 

Socialism has failed every time it has been tried on a large scale. It works only in theory, and in small, homogenous enclaves like lily-white Scandinavian nations with Protestant work ethics. Socialism fails in part because it doesn't understand fundamental human nature, but it also fails because it doesn't understand basic economics.

Contemporary fans of socialism are often wealthy, affluent, and coddled Westerners whose toughest day-to-day decision is whether they're going to drive the Mercedes or the Audi to Starbucks that morning. They'll tell us "real socialism hasn't been tried yet" and swear up and down that this time we'll get it right.

This requires that they ignore places like Cuba, East Germany, and Venezuela. The last nation went from one of the wealthiest on earth to one where at least 70 percent of the population now lives in poverty. In Cuba, the government provides monthly food rations: just seven pounds of rice, one pound of beans, a half a bottle of cooking oil, one daily bread roll (recently cut), small amounts of chicken, eggs, milk (prioritized for children), sugar, coffee, and soap/toiletries. It's estimated that these foodstuffs only provide 30 to 60 percent of a person's daily caloric needs. Leftists will look at this and think it simply means they've finally achieved equality. And some will say those are communist nations, not socialist ones. Communism and socialism are two sides of the same coin; the latter is simply a more palatable word for the former.

So when actress Amanda Seyfried chimes in, she deserves to be mocked for her blatant ignorance on the issue. 

Amanda Seyfried says “socialism is a gorgeous idea” as she grapples with the current state of America:

"How about we all don’t have any kind of agendas? How about our agenda is take care of each other? I know [socialism] doesn’t work perfectly, or that people understand what… pic.twitter.com/qWnGTCg0tr

— Variety (@Variety) December 12, 2025

She must've gone to the Tim Walz School on socialism, because he believes something similar, once saying socialism is merely "neighborliness" and "taking care of each other." 

Socialism is liberals pointing a gun at your head and forcing you to be a slave of people that don't work as hard as you do.

— John Hawkins (@johnhawkinsrwn) December 12, 2025

The rest of us see it for what it is: an oppressive ideology that has to be bolstered up by capitalist nations and enforced on the people at gunpoint. In "The Forgotten Man," Amity Shlaes notes that the Soviet Union was dependent on U.S. cash in 1927, only ten years after the revolution. And socialism has killed hundreds of millions over the years in pursuit of that socialist "utopia." 

“I know [socialism] doesn’t work perfectly, or that people understand what the word actually means.”

What socialism actually means: pic.twitter.com/rWxPA9D7SX

— Brian Doherty (@BDOH) December 13, 2025

People fled places like Cuba and East Germany, at great personal risk, because socialism turns nations into unlivable hellholes. Many died trying to escape, and many had to leave behind everything for a chance to be truly free. People don't risk life and limb to escape a "gorgeous idea." 

It’s nice that that is what socialism means to her. A very innocent and juvenile definition. Too bad that it isn’t the reality of how it works in practice. https://t.co/NdLEYnGnvo

— Neva (@pipandbaby) December 13, 2025

It's worth noting that Seyfried has a net worth of around $16 million. If she'd like to "take care of each other," she can start by doling out some of that, and I'll send her my address. She won't, of course, because socialism is for other people, and not the wealthy.

That's assuming, of course, that Seyfried is sufficiently connected to maintain her current social status under a socialist regime. Many online socialists believe such a system of governance will allow them to be creatives—poets, artists, screenwriters—while someone else pays their bills. I know someone who believes he'll be a Twitch streamer in a socialist United States. That's not how it works. Making a socialist nation function means everyone goes to a farm or a factory for grueling, long days of hard labor. Your free time is eaten up standing in breadlines. The fun, cushy jobs and roles go to those who are well-connected with the socialist rulers.

That's the exact opposite of a "gorgeous idea."

When Diplomacy Blurs Into Crime: The Coercion Ecosystem Behind Beijing’s Power

 How a warning to Japan’s new prime minister opens a wider case that Beijing’s foreign operations are inseparable from organized crime

OTTAWA — In this investigative conversation, sinologist Chris Meyer and I start with Chinese threats against Japan’s new prime minister, Sanae Takaichi—and advance the argument that Beijing’s “diplomacy” is increasingly inseparable from criminal subversion operations worldwide, and should be treated as such.

The trigger is simple. Newly elected Takaichi reiterates a strategic reality Japan has been forced to confront for years. An attack on Taiwan would represent a grave threat to Japan. Chris, who writes for Wide Fountain, notes this was not some wild new doctrine, but a restatement of what former prime minister Shinzo Abe had already made public. The response from Beijing, however, does not resemble conventional state-to-state disagreement. Chris describes how China’s consul general in Osaka replied with language that reads like a street-level threat—saying that if Takaichi “sticks her dirty neck out,” it will have to be “sliced off.”

What follows matters even more than the threat itself.

Chris explains how Beijing then moved to the United Nations with a concerted effort to discredit Japan’s prime minister and pressure her to retract her comment—an example of how international institutions can be leveraged as tools of coercion and narrative warfare. I frame it as gaslighting: the familiar move in which Beijing provokes, threatens, and escalates, then turns around and casts the democratic target as the aggressor.

Chris offers a theory for why the intimidation is so brazen. He says there is constant chatter in Beijing that Xi Jinping has been losing leverage internally—over military networks and provincial factions—while his external apparatus, especially diplomatic channels, may be less disturbed. In that scenario, Chris argues, foreign intimidation becomes one of the few levers still available. Louder, uglier, and more reckless precisely because it is meant to compensate for weakness elsewhere.

From Japan we widen to the United Nations not as an abstract symbol, but as a venue where Chris and I argue the line between “diplomacy” and “criminal enterprise” has been blurred before—and where Beijing nonetheless demands to be treated as an arbiter of international law. Chris references the cases of Ng Lap Seng and Patrick Ho as part of the backdrop—figures he describes as operating around the UN ecosystem while pursuing corrupt influence projects.

His core point is that China cannot plausibly posture as the guardian of international legal order while, in the same era, actors linked to Beijing were accused of bribery and covert influence schemes tied to Belt and Road ambitions.

From there, the conversation becomes less about one diplomatic incident and more about a recurring operating system: intelligence-linked influence, organized-crime logistics, and the laundering of legitimacy through formal titles and institutions.

The most sprawling and contemporary case we examine is Cambodia’s Prince Group. Chris describes it as an industrial-scale scam ecosystem — a network of “prison factories” where coerced workers are forced to run global fraud operations under threat of violence, their passports confiscated to prevent escape.

What distinguishes Prince Group, Chris argues, is that it appears to function not merely as a criminal enterprise but as a Chinese intelligence-directed operation designed to destabilize Western nations — and it is far from the only one of its kind operating across Southeast Asia. We also note that U.S. Treasury sanctions and recent indictments highlight that players linked to Prince Group, including a United Front figure named Rose Wang and sanctioned “Hongmen” Triad boss Broken Tooth Koi, perform diplomatic functions for Beijing.

Near the end, we return to North America with a detail that we both treat as chilling. I reference CBC/Radio-Canada reporting about a Chinese operative known as Eric—someone whose phone records reportedly suggested lethal targeting of dissidents, including a Vancouver-based Chinese dissident who later died in a suspicious kayaking incident.

All of that sets up the ending. Canada’s leadership has spoken about re-engaging China as a strategic partner. After what we have just mapped—threat diplomacy against Japan, coercive lawfare at the UN, criminal-corporate influence systems in Southeast Asia, triad-linked “patriotic” networks, and North American beachheads that, in my view, were never checked—what does “strategic partner” even mean? Chris’s answer is unambiguous. In his assessment, there is no reset available with Xi Jinping’s system in place.

VIDEO AT LINK HERE:

https://www.thebureau.news/p/when-diplomacy-blurs-into-crime-the?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1444443&post_id=181696513&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=rd3ao&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

Witkoff and Kushner Meet with Zelenskyy – Discuss Security Guarantees for 5 Hours

As with all information during high-stakes negotiations, particularly ones covered in geopolitics, trillions at stake and power dynamics on this scale, it is prudent to ignore most media reporting and focus on the public statements from the negotiators.

German Chancellor Fredrich Merz seated right next to Zelenskyy, highlighting the oppositional nature of the U.S. vs EU position during negotiations.

STEVE WITKOFF – Official Readout: “The meeting in Berlin between President Zelenskyy, Special Envoy Witkoff, Jared Kushner, and delegations from the United States and Ukraine lasted over five hours. Representatives held in-depth discussions regarding the 20-point plan for peace, economic agendas, and more. A lot of progress was made, and they will meet again tomorrow morning.”

Official Readouts are the statements that all parties agree to.  The “readout” is not a shaping statement giving insight into the deal itself, but rather a status statement of the discussions surrounding the deal.

Team Zelenskyy have been waging a public relations campaign to retain support from echo-chambered EU politicians.  The focus is continuation of funding, essentially money. Team Trump have been less public and approaching the negotiations with prudent pragmatism; less PR more substance; their focus is an end to the killing.  These are two distinctly different priority sets.

DW NEWS – Sunday’s discussions in Berlin between Ukrainianand US officials on ending Russia’s war in Ukraine have concluded for the night, with the talks set to continue on Monday.

In a message sent to reporters over WhatsApp, Ukrainian presidential adviser Dmytro Lytvyn, said the talks “went on for more than five hours and ended for today with an agreement to resume tomorrow morning.”

Lytvyn added Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy would comment on the discussions on Monday once they were completed. (source)