Immigration Enforcement Should Not Be Limited to the 'Worst of the Worst'

Townhall 

Federal law is very clear: If you are in the country illegally, you are subject to removal. One does not need to have committed other crimes or offenses while being in the United States without authorization in order to trigger deportation.

Like any other law enforcement agency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) prioritizes the arrest and removal of foreign nationals who commit violent crimes, pose a threat to national security, or defraud the American public. But that does not mean that ICE should ignore the presence of people who are “merely” violating immigration laws. Every day, all across America, police arrest people for nonviolent offenses such as shoplifting or vagrancy, even though there are murderers and rapists at large.

Our immigration laws do not exist solely to protect the American people from violent felons or terrorists. As the preamble to our Constitution explicitly states, laws are established to promote the “general welfare” of the nation and its citizens. Preventing large numbers of people from taking up residence in this country – even if they are otherwise good, hard-working, God-fearing folks – is necessary.

By definition, immigration always promotes the individual welfare and interests of immigrants. Nobody leaves their native country to settle in another – legally or illegally – unless it serves some compelling personal interest. But the inverse is not necessarily true. Large-scale immigration – especially illegal immigration – can, and often does, undermine the general welfare. This reality is precisely why immigration laws exist – not just in the United States, but in virtually every nation on earth. Needless to say, without a serious threat of enforcement, laws are just words on paper.

About 1,000 jurisdictions around the country, including entire states, maintain sanctuary policies intended to shield illegal aliens from federal immigration enforcement. In many of these jurisdictions, protections extend to criminal aliens. That is how Jose Ibarra had the opportunity to murder Laken Riley as she was out for a morning jog in Athens, Georgia, two years ago. After being allowed to enter the country by the Biden administration, despite being a Tren de Aragua gang member, he was arrested twice, first in New York City on charges of child endangerment and later in Athens for theft, before brutalizing Ms. Riley. Preventing other such tragedies is a prime goal of ICE enforcement, but by no means the only one.

Even illegal aliens who do not commit heinous crimes – and that’s most of them – harm the general welfare of the American public. At the height of the self-induced Biden migrant surge in 2023, New York City found itself at the ground zero of the crisis due to its own self-induced sanctuary and social welfare policies. At the time, then-Mayor Eric Adams estimated that the cost to the city would run $12 billion over the next two years to house, feed, provide healthcare and education for the hundreds of thousands of migrants who had recently arrived.

That is $12 billion that the city did not spend on infrastructure improvement and expansion, enhancing public safety, improving the quality of education, or countless other services or projects that might have promoted the general welfare of New Yorkers. Even if the city had removed the “worst of the worst” – which it didn't, the crushing costs of the most ordinary of the ordinary illegal aliens served no identifiable public interest.

Not only did mass illegal immigration not promote the general welfare, but it also severely undermined it. When the 2023-24 school year commenced, New York City public schools were faced with the impossible task of absorbing 21,000 recently arrived migrant children. Few, if any, of these kids were proficient in English. Many had little or no formal education before setting foot in the United States. Nearly all were destitute and relied on school nutrition programs.

At a base cost of $38,000 per child in 2023 (not including bilingual education and free meals), the quantifiable cost of those 21,000 migrant children ran nearly $800 million. The non-quantifiable costs were even higher. In a school system where unacceptably large numbers of kids were failing to meet standards for math and reading proficiency, flooding classrooms with even less-prepared migrant children further reduced the prospects of every child getting the education they would need to succeed in life. And, since the wealthy and many middle-class families have long ago fled the New York City public school system, those whose general welfare was harmed the most were poorer, mostly minority kids.

Whether it is the IRS ensuring tax compliance, the Highway Patrol enforcing speed limits, or ICE enforcing immigration laws, the fact that the people who are the targets of enforcement are otherwise good people, or our neighbors, should not enter into the equation. Each of these violations of civil laws, examined individually, may be understandable. Collectively, they serve to undermine the general safety, interests and welfare of society, even if the people violating them are not the worst of the worst.

Podcast thread for Feb 5th

 

'sighs'.

Ground Zero Minnesota: The United States Embraces the Culture War

American Thinker 

The administration of U.S. president Donald Trump maintains a firm line in the battle for dominance over immigration policy. In Minnesota, not only the future of the United States is at stake -- it also sends a signal to patriotic forces in Europe.

It has grown eerily quiet around what was once the euphorically conducted German immigration debate. Angela Merkel’s honeymoon with the woke, multicultural unicorn world seems to fade amid knife violence, cultural overreach, and the rising presence of Islam in the country. The increasingly speechless heirs of the ’68 generation are running out of arguments in the face of unprecedented acts of violence, even within Germany’s submissively left-leaning media.

Do they fear the violence that arises from the fusion of leftist radicalism and Islamism? Are they becoming aware that they have nothing to counter the emerging cultural vandalism and maximal intolerance of this milieu -- except for withered sunflowers?

Hardline Measures

The moral outrage in Germany over the tough measures of the American immigration authority ICE in defense of American society against the targeted, politically organized invasion of illegal migrants, currently captures the attention of many citizens.

Yet even tragic deaths change nothing about Washington’s determination to enforce the law. After all, illegal border crossings are exactly that: a violation of law. For European tastes, this is a crude reminder of supposedly outdated concepts such as rules and national sovereignty.

American society, with roots deeply planted in European cultural soil, seems to have activated its immune system and is fighting for its cultural survival against the tidal wave of migration from diverse regions of the world. We are witnessing a struggle for identity, sovereignty, and the rejection of the dissolution of American society by globalists like Joe Biden through illegal mass migration.

The images arriving from America could very well be a foretaste of what awaits sensitive Europeans, should their own civil societies one day rise against their political elite and demand an end to the cultural assault on their population.

The recent deadly incident in Hamburg, in which a Sudanese migrant pushed an 18-year-old Iranian woman onto the train tracks, is no mere anecdote. It exemplifies the chaos that globalism, Eurocentrism, and the culture-war activism of the political class have brought upon the native population.

AstroTurf Movements

German media coverage of ICE protests in the United States leaves a central detail unmentioned. As with the Black Lives Matter protests, these are so-called AstroTurf demonstrations: the impression of a grassroots uprising is created, while strong interests operate in the background.

The not exactly conservative portal t-online recently offered a curious insight into this world of self-righteousness and near-paralytic distortion of reality. Time and again, the reported cases highlight the hatred of Donald Trump, almost inadvertently showing how protest actions evolve into ritualized opposition against the hated president. Yet this highly structured protest is suspicious.

The rallies are orchestrated, and the escalation of conflict -- even violence against ICE officers -- is deliberate and professionally organized. Activist organizations like Indivisible, founded in 2016 in resistance to Donald Trump, or the 50501 Movement, regularly conduct training, coordinate operations, and keep these protest actions alive.

The funding of these groups remains opaque. It is fair to speculate that well-known foundations previously scrutinized by the government -- such as the Soros Foundation -- play a role. Their structures resemble those seen in Germany, with NGOs like Last Generation or Extinction Rebellion.

Creating Transparency

For the Washington administration, it will be crucial to leverage the protests to identify and cut off financial streams -- often linked to Europe. This is a process Europeans may one day face if they decide to confront the internal enemy actively.

Meanwhile, in Europe, Ursula von der Leyen and German chancellor Friedrich Merz defend the NGO apparatus with all their might, with billions in taxpayer money. This keeps the Net-Zero narrative alive and continues open-border policies, allowing generous social programs to nurture migrant sub-communities into ever more influential parallel worlds -- worlds that scorn the secular values of European culture but may soon wield stabilizing power.

In the United States, the midterm elections in November will replace half of Congress. For the globalist political machine, the battle in Minnesota represents Ground Zero. This is nothing less than a fight for power against the president’s administration, which champions a revival of American culture, the end of the Washington swamp, and a return to free-market principles. Should Trump succeed, the extraction economy of the old elites in the U.S. would collapse. The elimination of the Somali daycare schemes -- a billion-dollar fraud -- would mark the opening of the final chapter of America’s independence struggle.

An interesting investigative task for German media would be to examine the origins of these Somali communities -- but this would cast a shadow on the responsible figure, former President Barack Obama, the globalists’ superhero.

One thing is already clear: the opposition will escalate if necessary. Given the Trump administration’s rigor in targeting swamp financing, this struggle is no longer about policy nuances -- it is about political survival.

Political Chimera

An immigration reversal in Europe remains a political chimera. Whether the Union, SPD, or their coalition partners carry out deportations of foreign criminals, it happens only sporadically for tactical campaign reasons. The overarching line of German politics remains committed to open borders, even when the majority of the population calls for sovereign border protection.

It is time to note that in most EU capitals, only political franchise operators act, executing the work of the Brussels central authority locally.

The Left gains fresh voter potential. The cultural resilience of European peoples is being broken. Divide et impera is the guiding maxim of the EU Commission under Ursula von der Leyen, maintained even to the point of collapsing civil societies.

A society that can celebrate traditions like Christmas markets only under heavy police protection and behind concrete barricades is a dead society -- a society that failed to rise when there was still time.

The silenced middle of our societies will take notice when ICE-like enforcement units -- likely first in regions where traces of cultural self-assertion remain, such as Greece or Italy -- restore order, enforce rules, and make clear: illegal border crossings are crimes.

How Did Democrats Get So Stupid?

Townhall 

There are some people who should be grateful that breathing is a reflex, because had it required any mental abilities whatsoever, they surely would have suffocated on the streets, having forgotten to do it. These people should be pitied, but Democrats hold them up as aspirational figures. I get why they do it. Democrats have very little to actually be proud of; what is disturbing, however, is that there are so many people even more dumb who fall for it.

That there are so many people in this country who are so wildly ignorant enough to follow the political left over the cliff is not a shock; the public schools in Democrat-controlled cities have essentially been “ignorant factories” for decades. Manufacturing a mis-educated voting base is the surest way to ensure uninterrupted power, and it sure beats the hell out of having to try to argue in favor of the garbage Democrats advocate for.

But the 2024 election showed that the firewall of ignorance has some pretty big holes in it. Donald Trump won a higher percentage of the black and Hispanic vote than Democrats could overcome with the one demographic they grew in: the AWFULs – Affluent, White, Female, Urban, Liberals.

AWFULs aren’t ignorant, per se – though they are – they operate out of a combination of arrogance and ignorance. They are like teenagers, convinced they know everything and aren’t interested in learning that they do not. While most people grow out of that phase, AWFULs marinate in it and never move on. It’s easier, I suppose, to feel like the whole world depends on you than it is to admit to yourself that your family and friends don’t really like you that much. Emotional holes can only be glossed over, never filled. And AWFULs have some gaping holes.

But beyond that, how did we end up with so many people incapable of independent thought? What happened in the lives of these marchers who repeat, unquestioningly, anything someone with a bullhorn demands they repeat back to them?

Most of the chants the leftists engage in are the same garbage they’ve been chanting since they were planting bombs and murdering police in the 60s – “Hey, hey, ho, ho, something or other has got to go!” – and the rest are wildly anti-Semitic or anti-American. These people seemingly will repeat anything they’re ordered to, which is horrifying. Nazis were “only following orders,” but that started with following the crowds, cheering and saluting on command. 

I don’t understand the left’s desire to cede their individuality to the collective, but I enjoy thinking for myself and have family and friends I love and love me. I don’t need to “belong” to anything outside of my life.

I’m also not riddled with SSRIs and unearned self-esteem. I don’t have a glory wall of participation ribbons or a therapist insisting I’m special; I have accomplishments I’ve achieved and trophies I’ve won.

Somewhere along the line, these progressive Democrats lost that little voice inside their heads that pointed out that every thought they had doesn’t need to be articulated and not everything needs to be broadcast to the whole world.

Thank God they don’t have that voice; it makes it easier to spot and avoid morons when they expose themselves. Still, it is horrifying that so many Americans – people with more advantages than any human beings who ever lived before us – are so willing to shove a stick in their own front wheel. You get one shot at life; why anyone would deliberately make it miserable is beyond me.

These people post videos of their rants – racist diatribes about the country, other Americans, pretty much anything – that make them look like the personification of stupid. They post threats – how dumb must you be to do that – advocate poisoning federal agents and act shocked that they’d be fired for advocating for murder.

There are a lot of really dumb people in this country, and while not every dumb person is a Democrat, every Democrat is a dumb person. I don’t say that to be mean, although they probably wouldn’t understand what I said anyway, I say it because it’s true. There is no reason to think they’re going to get smarter or that the left-wing industrial complex is going to slow down the production of morons anytime soon.

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Trump’s Triumphal Arch Is An Important Rebellion Against Postmodern Thought

The greatness of neoclassical art and architecture lies not merely 

in historical memory but in truth. And that’s why modernists hate it.

The Federalist

President Trump posted to Truth Social a few weeks ago three renderings for the proposed triumphal arch soon to be erected in Virginia’s Memorial Circle, which will frame the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery together in a tasteful ensemble for America’s 250th Birthday.

Right on cue, the artistic establishment, long a citadel of aesthetic terrorism that possesses a near religious zealotry for modernism, expressed its derision. This is merely predictable given that critics have long panned President Trump’s penchant for Classical Architecture, exemplified in his Mar-a-Lago residence built by the heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post (who also dwelled in Washington’s celebrated Hillwood Estate) as “Temu Baroque,” a cheapened simulacrum of what had once been.

Citadel of Modernism vs. The Classical Revival

While classical architecture at its finest rests on bespoke artisan craftsmanship, something not apparent in the president’s Oval Office renovation, which relies more on pastiche, that is ultimately beside the point. President Trump should be praised for finally addressing an issue long ignored by political and artistic elites: the public’s persistent opposition to ugly, federally funded architecture that fails to live up to the dignity and grandeur of the Republic.

Sadly, leftists who see all art as inherently laden with political implications, such as Rep. Katherine Clark of Massachusetts, the third-highest-ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives, do not see it this way, replying to the president’s renderings with the tired non sequitur that “Americans cannot afford health care.”

This controversy echoes earlier uproar over his 2020 executive order, “Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again,” which sought to make neoclassical design the default for federal architecture but was criticized in a New York Times editorial asking, “What’s so great about fake Roman temples?” and warning that mandating a single aesthetic style smacks of “authoritarian overreach rather than democratic pluralism.”

The Arch as Civilizational Language

Motifs of Classical Architecture, such as triumphal arches, however, are not merely artifacts of a bygone empire. It is a declaration of belief, much like our nation’s founding document, that history has meaning, that victory is not achieved by mere accident but through prudence and grit, and that order is not only desirable but a necessary precondition for virtue. When art critics, many of whom C.S. Lewis would probably have called “men without chests,” dismiss proposals to revive such forms as authoritarian nostalgia rooted in kitsch, they commit a fundamental error: the arch has always represented a civilizational language through which the West, confident in its convictions, enacts a triad of truth, beauty, and human flourishing.

This is evident in the apotheosis of modern triumphal arches: the Arch of Constantine, which fused the West’s three great inheritances. From the Greeks came the pursuit of the eternal true, good, and beautiful; from the ancient Jews, the quest for the one, true God and the moral life necessitated from the desire to live in communion with him; and from Rome itself, a desire for nobility and grandeur that elevated public life through form, hierarchy, and law.

Constructed in honor of a Roman emperor whose conversion to Christianity would later earn him the title “Co-Equal to the Apostles” in the Eastern Church, the Arch of Constantine stands at the intersection of these traditions, translating metaphysics into stone. Recycling pagan reliefs while inaugurating a Christian empire, the arch, borrowing a phrase from post-Vatican II conciliar rhetoric, embodies a hermeneutics of continuity, rather than the rupture advocated by adherents of Gibbonian historiography.

That synthesis, however, is not limited to the ecclesiastical. Secularism à la laïcité presents a false binary between Church and State, one that would have left most Western statesmen before 1900 completely confounded. The Arch of Constantine, in particular, served not merely as a historical artifact but as a generative model, instructing Western architects long after Rome’s political fall.

Luminary examples include Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, Washington D.C.’s Union Station, and Brussels’ Cinquantenaire Arcade. Each speaks in a distinct historical key, yet all remain mutually intelligible, singing from the same architectural chorus and perpetuating the West’s enduring affirmation that history is intelligible, public life is worthy of elevation, and political order remains inseparable from moral meaning.

Moreover, this continuity reveals something essential: true innovation does not arise from mere abstraction, but from appreciation for inherited form. Constantine’s Arch itself was an act of creative recomposition, demonstrating that originality does not have to entail adoption of a Year Zero mentality. In the Burkean sense, Civilizations innovate not by bulldozing the past, but by re-working it, allowing old forms to be rejuvenated in order to speak to new circumstances. Contemporary artists such as the painter Giorgio Dante, who seeks to revive the style of the Renaissance Old Masters and the sculptor Gaylord Ho, whose work much like Art Deco appears concurrently classical yet strikingly modern in particular, do a wonderful job of making the old seem new again, which, even if not explicitly acknowledged, is profoundly Christian in spirit.

The political philosopher Patrick Deneen captured this sensibility succinctly, observing that the reactionary looks only to the past, the liberal confines himself to the present, and the progressive fixates on the future, while the conservative seeks to bind all three together. That a vision for the future comes from the end-result of productive dialogue between past and present. It remembers what came before, speaks to the present civic order and gestures towards permanence beyond the moment. Thus contrary to art critics who think a duct-taped banana at Art Basel Miami is hunky dory, the triumphal Arch is not nostalgic, but is rather integrative in relation to time and space. 

The Body as Metaphysics

At the heart of this integration lies a particular anthropology. Classical and neoclassical architecture are grounded in the human body itself. Proportion, symmetry, and hierarchy derive from embodied reality. Columns echo limbs, façades mirror torsos, and sculptural figures such as atlantes and caryatids quite literally bear weight. These figures are not ornamental flourishes. They dramatize a moral claim: dignity is not found in weightlessness or self-creation, but in strength ordered toward form, burden accepted rather than denied.

This claim is deeply unfashionable in our time. Contemporary art increasingly treats the body not as a gift to be honored, but as raw material to be manipulated. The performance artist Orlan, whose surgical alterations are celebrated as acts of liberation, exemplifies this worldview. Flesh becomes a canvas, pain a medium, and identity something asserted against nature rather than discovered within it. What appears transgressive is, in fact, metaphysically impoverished, perfectly aligned with a technophilic culture that views the body as a platform to be optimized, mutilated in the name of living out “one’s truth” or outright discarded.

Camille Paglia diagnosed this tension decades ago. In Sexual Personae, she wrote that “nature is a brutal force, and culture is an artificial order imposed upon it.” The classical tradition understood this truth without illusion. Culture does not abolish nature; it disciplines it. Form arises not from denial, but from reverence. By contrast, much contemporary aesthetics collapses culture into nature, leaving only manipulation where meaning once stood.

It is here that the triumphal arch reemerges not as nostalgia, but as intervention. It insists that limits are not oppressive, that form is not arbitrary, and that the human body is not a problem to be solved. Where postmodern aesthetics revel in fragmentation and irony, classical architecture insists on harmony. Where our age treats embodiment as an inconvenience, the classical tradition treats it as a mystery.

This is why neoclassicism makes a radical claim today. Its greatness lies not merely in historical memory but in truth. It proposes that beauty is objective, that proportion reflects reality, and that the body, rightly understood, reveals rather than obscures meaning. In theological terms, it aligns with what Pope John Paul II articulated in his Theology of the Body: that the body “makes visible what is invisible.” Architecture, like the Incarnation itself, gives form to metaphysical claims.

The discomfort provoked by monumental classical projects reveals less about their alleged authoritarianism than about our unease with judgment. Beauty implies hierarchy. Proportion implies order. And order implies that not all visions of the human person are equal. In an age of moral relativism, this is an unsettling proposition.

Yet civilizations do not remember themselves through slogans or abstractions. They remember themselves through stone. The triumphal arch, whether ancient or modern, stands as a reminder that the West once believed and could believe, once again, that the human body is deserving of reverence, history has no expiration date, and beauty is worth defending. To recover that language is not to retreat into the past, but to affirm, against abstraction and amnesia, that truth can still be made visible.

Europeans Testify On How Europe Is Banning Americans From Saying What They Believe

‘European laws [are] now being exported by the European Union. … American speech is already being affected.’

The Federalist

The European Union now constantly violates fundamental Western rights to freedom of speech and freedom of religion and claims the power to ban speech across the globe, European witnesses testified to the U.S. Congress Wednesday morning.

“European laws [are] now being exported by the European Union. … American speech is already being affected,” testified Lorcán Price, an Irish lawyer for Alliance Defending Freedom International.

Under “hate speech” policies that Europe is applying across the world, “Speech that is lawful today can become criminalized tomorrow. This should concern every person that values freedom,” testified Finnish Member of Parliament Päivi Räsänen. Irish comedian Graham Linehan also testified before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee. In September 2025, Linehan was arrested at Heathrow Airport by British authorities for criticizing transgender policies. Because of that arrest, he testified, “I became the target of a series of harassment campaigns that cost me my career, my marriage, and eventually drove me from my homeland.”

These Republican witnesses testified alongside Democrat witness Deepinder Singh Mayell, the leader of Minnesota’s branch of the American Civil Liberties Union. Democrats on the committee focused on blasting federal immigration enforcement and insisting that attacking and harassing law enforcement is protected “free speech.” Mayell refused to answer when Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, asked if illegal alien child rapists and murderers should be deported.

Linehan and Price pointed out that forbidding citizens from freely discussing their ideas not only violates historic Western rights, but also foments civil unrest. When people can’t talk about their frustrations or work them out through fair and honest elections, they are more likely to resort to violence, the witnesses noted.

Global Surveillance and Speech Repression

The House Judiciary Committee recently released two reports about the European speech dragnet affecting Americans, one in July 2025 and another Tuesday. Tuesday’s report finds vast European Union censorship affects factually accurate American speech, interferes in elections across Europe, and “disproportionately targets conservatives.” These findings indicate that the hub for Western speech repression online has shifted from the United States under the Biden presidency to the European Union.

During the Biden administration, numerous investigations, such as Missouri v. Biden litigation, uncovered that federal officials pressured massive communications monopolies, including Facebook, Google, Instagram, TikTok, and X (formerly Twitter), to erase accurate information and conservative ideas, rigging elections and civil society for Democrats. These mass-censorship efforts, nominally run through federally funded “private” organizations, ended up rigging the algorithms and now artificial intelligence that control what Americans and people the world over are allowed to know.

After President Trump won a second term, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg publicly confirmed to podcast star Joe Rogan that the censorship was real and significant. While U.S. officials under Trump policies no longer engage in a mass internet suppression campaign, the Biden administration’s manipulation of the internet continues to choke online speech worldwide.

So do European Union regulations that affect the same global speech monopolies the Biden administration targeted. That transnational entity increased internet censorship in February 2024 with the implementation of the Digital Services Act (DSA). Under the guise of preventing “disinformation,” the DSA bans Christian and conservative ideas, not just in Europe, but across any large social media platforms that operate in Europe, such as Google and Facebook.

Global Companies Interfering in American Elections

Similar to Communist China, the European Union presumes to extend its “hate speech” laws across the globe under the label “disinformation.” In its first enforcement action under the DSA, the EU fined X, a U.S. company, 120 million euros for allowing free speech on its cross-borders platforms. The action is under litigation. Last week, the EU announced another investigation into X over AI-generated abuse images. Every large platform is used to share abuse images, but so far only X is being investigated by the EU in relation to such images.

Under the DSA, Tuesday’s House Judiciary report says, the EU demands that global social media monopolies blacklist URLs, ban keywords, show users leftist messaging they do not want to see, and display “kindness reminders.” The report shows the EU also censors Americans’ speech about the Ukraine war, election irregularities, support for populist candidates in the United States and Europe, climate change, migration, to shield non-white people and non-Christians from criticism, and critiques of LGBT theology, labeling wrongthink on these issues “disinformation” and “hate speech.”

The DSA uses a similar system to what the Biden administration deployed against Americans: Nonprofits and other organizations “flag” speech to authorities for investigation, including automated, algorithmic flagging and speech suppression. This means the DSA effectively automates the mass repression of Christian and conservative speech, which is also taking place across Europe in individual police and court cases such as Räsänen’s.

7 Years of Prosecution for Tweeting a Bible Verse

Räsänen is awaiting a verdict from Finland’s Supreme Court after a criminal trial in October. Because of her Christian beliefs, Räsänen has been under investigation and prosecution in Finland for nearly seven years. She was first interrogated by police for approximately 13 hours over three days after she posted a Bible verse on X to critique Finland’s state church for publicly supporting a sexual perversion parade.

The police investigation found a Christian theology booklet Räsänen, a medical doctor and wife of a pastor, had written in 2004 called “Male and Female He Created Them.” Finland’s top prosecutor charged Räsänen for her X post quoting the Bible and for writing the booklet under “hate speech” laws that categorize Christian teachings about sex as terrorism. Prosecutors also charged Lutheran Bishop Juhana Pohjola for publishing the theological booklet.

“This case has never been only about us,” Räsänen testified to Congress today. “It is about whether peaceful expression of deeply held beliefs can be treated as a criminal act in today’s Europe. … It is about whether it is illegal to say what you believe.”

As The Federalist reported in October, “The Helsinki prosecutor earlier asked courts to wipe the internet of all Räsänen’s media appearances and writings that mention the physical, psychological, and theological differences between men and women, but later narrowed that sweeping demand to specific writings and audio clips.” Two Finnish lower courts fully acquitted Räsänen and Pohjola, but prosecutors appealed up to recent North Atlantic Treaty Organization member’s Supreme Court, which has not yet issued its verdict in the case.

Like the rest of Europe, Finland receives enormous military and other subsidies from the United States. This means the United States is deploying sensitive and precious resources to protect countries that are expanding the systematic mass repression of not just their own citizens but also of Americans, poisoning today’s West against its own values and traditions and inviting civilizational collapse.

Rising Tide of Punishments for Non-Leftist Speech

Europe is becoming an epicenter of speech and anti-Christian repression. England arrests an average of 30 people a day for social media posts and even reposts that criticize identity politics. That’s 12,000 per year, thousands more than Russia prosecutes under its speech restrictions.

Under the previous U.S. presidential administration, Americans were also imprisoned for speech crimes. Perhaps the most notable examples were Douglass Mackey, who was imprisoned for joking about Hillary Clinton on X, and numerous pro-life demonstrators imprisoned under the likely unconstitutional FACE Act. Mackey’s conviction was thrown out on appeal for lack of evidence, and he is considering suing the U.S. Justice Department for wrongful prosecution.

The Federalist has been a prominent and early target of both Biden administration and foreign censorship efforts that are attempting to replicate the “great firewall” or “internet iron curtain” in Communist China. In 2023, The Federalist, the state of Texas, and The Daily Wire sued the U.S. State Department for funding censorship initiatives that specifically targeted The Federalist.

The Federalist has also been a specific target of European censorship coordinating with communications monopolies that include Google. The same foreign entity that targeted The Federalist informed Biden White House censorship efforts and is behind global leftist efforts to “kill Musk’s Twitter.”

Anti-ICE Activism Represents The Suicide Of Western Civilization

‘Liberalism is the ideology of Western suicide,’ wrote James Burnham more than half a century ago. 

This ideology is hard at work.

The Federalist

What makes a person forego his or her regular professional or personal routine in order to stalk federal law enforcement? What makes that person agree to put himself in close proximity to those law enforcement officers, in the freezing cold, even after multiple incidents have resulted in the death of similar activists? 

It’s a question worthy of serious consideration, given that more than 34,000 Minnesotans have joined various agitator groups to learn to be U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement “observers.” 

I think I know what James Burnham, one of the most important (if today largely unknown) American thinkers of the 20th century, would say about anti-ICE activism. Burnham would say it’s a clear example of liberals’ attempts to accelerate the suicide of their own civilization. 

The Leftist Turned Champion of Conservativism 

By the time Burnham published his book Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism in 1964, he had already lived an extraordinary life. The son of a poor English immigrant who by his thirties had become a railroad vice president, Burnham grew up in privilege and attended Princeton and Oxford in the 1920s (he had J.R.R. Tolkien as a professor). Burnham got a job teaching philosophy at New York University and in the 1930s embraced Marxism, having rejected his mother’s Catholicism.

Yet despite being a trusted collaborator of the exiled communist Leon Trotsky — writing for a variety of prominent left-wing publications — Burnham was something of an intellectual independent, reading Aquinas and Dante alongside Marx. 

Disgusted by Stalin’s Soviet Union, Burnham began moving away from the left. His 1941 book, The Managerial Revolution, proved to be incredibly prescient, warning that the West was increasingly beholden to an unaccountable oligarchy of experts — we now call them woke technocrats. During World War II, Burnham worked for the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime predecessor to the CIA, and after the war helped found a “Congress for Cultural Freedom,” which promoted a liberal but anti-communist alternative to communist propaganda.  

By the time he published Suicide of the West, the stalwart anti-communist had become one of conservatism’s leading intellectuals, writing for William F. Buckley Jr.’s magazine National Review. Buckley labeled Burnham “the number one intellectual influence on National Review since the day of its founding.” He died in 1987, and as recently as 2014, all of his books were “listed as ‘Out of Print,’ or being of ‘Limited Availability.’” Yet their relevance has only grown. 

How Leftists Accelerate Civilizational Collapse 

In Suicide of the West, Burnham censures those of the West “who hate their own civilization, readily excuse or even praise blows struck against it, and themselves lend a willing hand, frequently enough, to pulling it down.” The reasons leftists do this originate in their beliefs about human nature and society. They believe man’s nature is not fixed but changing, “with an unlimited or at any rate indefinitely large potential for positive (good, favorable, progressive) development.”

Burnham contrasts this with the traditional conservative position, “expressed in the theological doctrines of Original Sin,” which posits that human nature has “a permanent, unchanging essence, and that man is partly corrupt as well as limited in his potential.” 

If you reject original sin and think humans are capable of perfection given the right external circumstances, that changes everything, from education to government. For leftists, the goal of education is not to produce a good citizen schooled in traditions and habits of virtue, but to “overcome ignorance.” The more ignorance is resolved and “faulty social institutions or arrangements” are identified and defeated through reform governed by “expert” bureaucrats, the more society improves. Moreover, if society, rather than individuals, is the problem, this creates a permissive attitude toward errant members of the community, “particularly if they belong to groups designated as marginalized.”  

When it comes to the “marginalized,” Burnham observes that the liberal feels an indelible, often overwhelming sense of guilt. “The guilt of the liberal causes him to feel obligated to try to do something about any and every social problem, to cure every social evil.” Yet this feeling of guilt is nonrational, leading the liberal to simply do something about the social problem, “even when there is no objective reason to believe that what he does can solve the problem — when, in fact, it may well aggravate the problem instead of solving it.”  

Societal Suicide in Activist America 

The above (very brief) summary is illuminative when it comes to citizen activists engaged in relentless, provocative confrontation with federal immigration enforcement. Those agitating against immigration enforcement have been indoctrinated not in patriotic love for America, but cynical rage toward it (epitomized in the celebrated if ridiculous comment by musician Billie Eilish about no one being “illegal on stolen land”). This, even after Minnesotans learned that Somali migrants had fleeced taxpayers of an estimated $9 billion through welfare fraud schemes. 

Because left-wing activists believe human nature is fungible and all social problems can be solved through political programs and social engineering, it means individual people — such as criminals and illegal aliens — cannot be held responsible. Indeed, those criminals and illegal immigrants are predominantly from “marginalized” groups and thus require protection rather than legal prosecution.

Meanwhile, the leftists feel an underlying guilt that their race, gender, or religion somehow makes them partly responsible for the suffering of the “marginalized,” which further propels them to seek civic atonement. That they are actually obstructing law enforcement from removing criminals from their communities is irrelevant; ironically, a misplaced assurance in the righteousness of their cause drives them into the streets with signs, whistles, and smartphones. 

“Liberalism is the ideology of Western suicide,” wrote Burnham more than half a century ago. “Except for mercenaries, saints, and neurotics, no one is willing to sacrifice and die for a progressive education, medicare, humanity in the abstract, the United Nations, and a ten percent rise in social security payments.” 

Left-wing agitators think they are saints (and future martyrs), but the prophetic Burnham could perceive what they truly were: men and women who, schooled in an ideology of self-hatred of their own culture and civilization, are deluded into hastening its demise. They are to be pitied, and prayed for.