Authored by Thomas Brooke via Remix news,

The Austrian government will move ahead this week with plans to ban headscarves for girls under 14 in schools, a measure officials frame as promoting equality.

In an interview with Bild cited by Welt, Integration Minister Claudia Plakolm of the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) said, “I want girls, regardless of their religion, to have the same opportunities in our free and Western society. And that’s why I see the headscarf for girls under 14 as a sign of oppression.”

The proposed law sets out a staged response to violations: first, a conversation with the girl concerned, then with her parents, followed by possible involvement of youth welfare authorities. Repeated breaches could result in administrative penalties. Plakolm stressed that the measure would apply only in schools and educational institutions, not in public spaces.

“Public space is rightly a very well-protected area, and that’s something that probably wouldn’t stand up in a constitutional court,” she said.

The minister also linked the proposal to broader changes in Austria’s migration and integration policy.

She said the government plans a “three-year integration phase” for asylum seekers and migrants, during which they will receive only an integration allowance rather than full social benefits.

“There will be no social assistance during this integration phase, but only an integration allowance, and the amount will depend on how willing people are to fulfill their integration obligations,” Plakolm explained.

The move follows an announcement made by Education Minister Christoph Wiederkehr (NEOS) in June for newly arriving children and teenagers to undergo a one-semester integration course prior to starting school.

Under the new system, children will first attend a semester-long orientation class where they will acquire basic German language skills to facilitate communication, fundamental school skills, such as writing, using scissors, and following classroom etiquette, and social values, including respect, equality, and tolerance.

The opposition Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) insisted the move manages the symptoms and fails to address the root cause of mass immigration.

A previous headscarf ban in elementary schools, introduced in 2019 by a coalition of conservatives and the Freedom Party, was struck down by Austria’s Constitutional Court. Plakolm argued that the new version comes with accompanying measures aimed at helping young women live self-determined lives. She emphasized that “the new law is not a measure against Islam.”

Austria’s Muslim community has previously clashed with Plakolm over her rhetoric. In July, the Islamic Religious Community in Austria (IGGÖ) said it was “deeply disturbed” after she described the headscarf as a “symbol of oppression” that must not be permitted in schools. The group warned at the time that her remarks threatened religious freedom and stigmatized Muslim girls.

The move comes amid mounting tensions in Austria’s schools. In October last year, a survey by the Vienna teachers’ union found rising difficulties linked to mass immigration, with many children facing language barriers and some schools reporting extreme incidents.

According to the Kronen Zeitung, these included assaults on teachers, requests from parents that staff wear burqas, and even mock executions staged by pupils. One middle school headmistress described the problems but requested anonymity, citing fear of reprisals.

Read more here…

Authored by Llewellyn Rockwell,

[Originally published July 18, 2016.]

Is it too much to say that since the French Revolution, the left has been the source of virtually all political evils, and continues to be so in our day?

There can be no doubt that great cruelty and violence can be and have been inflicted in the name of preserving the existing order.

But when we compare even the worst enormities of the more distant past with the leftist totalitarian revolutions and total wars of the twentieth centuries, they are in general a mere blip. The entire history of the Inquisition, said Joe Sobran, barely rises to the level of what the communists accomplished on a good afternoon.

The French Revolution, and particularly its radical phase, was the classic manifestation of modern leftism and served as the model for still more radical revolutions around the world more than a century later.

As that revolution proceeded its aims grew more ambitious, with its most fervent partisans demanding nothing less than the total transformation of society.

In place of the various customs and settled ways of a France with well over a millennium of history behind it, the radical revolutionaries introduced a “rational” alternative cooked up in their heads, and with all the warmth of an insane asylum.

Streets named after saints were given new names, and statues of saints were actually guillotined. (These people guillotining statues were the rational ones, you understand.) The calendar itself, rich with religious feasts, was replaced by a more “rational” calendar with 30 days per month, divided into three ten-day weeks, thereby doing away with Sunday. The remaining five days of the year were devoted to secular observances: celebrations of labor, opinion, genius, virtue, and rewards.

Punishments for deviations from the new dispensation were as severe as we have come to expect from leftism. People were sentenced to death for owning a Rosary, giving shelter to a priest, or indeed refusing to abjure the priesthood.

We are plenty familiar with the guillotine, but the revolutionaries concocted still other forms of execution as well, like the Drownings at Nantes, designed to humiliate and terrorize their victims.

Given that the left has sought the complete transformation of society, and given that such wholesale change is bound to come up against the resistance of ordinary people who don’t care for having their routines and patterns of life overturned, we should not be surprised that the instrument of mass terror has been the weapon of choice. The people must be terrified into submission, and so broken and demoralized that resistance comes to seem impossible.

Likewise, it’s no wonder the left needs the total state. In place of naturally occurring groupings and allegiances, it demands the substitution of artificial constructs. In place of the concrete and specific, the Burkean “little platoons” that emerge organically, it imposes remote and artificial substitutes that emerge from the heads of intellectuals. It prefers the distant central government to the local neighborhood, the school board president over the head of household.

Thus the creation of the departments, totally subordinate to Paris, during the French Revolution was a classic leftist move. But so were the totalitarian megastates of the twentieth century, which demanded that people’s allegiances be transferred from the smaller associations that had once defined their lives to a brand new central authority that had grown out of nowhere.

The right (properly understood), meanwhile, according to the great classical liberal Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, “stands for free, organically grown forms of life.”

The right stands for liberty, a free, unprejudiced form of thinking; a readiness to preserve traditional values (provided they are true values); a balanced view of the nature of man, seeing in him neither beast nor angel, insisting on the uniqueness of human beings which cannot be transformed into or treated as mere numbers or ciphers. The left is the advocate of the opposite principles; it is the enemy of diversity and the fanatical promoter of identity. Uniformity is stressed in all leftist utopias, paradises in which everybody is the same, envy is dead, and the enemy is either dead, lives outside the gates, or is utterly humiliated. Leftism loathes differences, deviations, stratifications. … The word “one” is its symbol: one language, one race, one class, one ideology, one ritual, one type of school, one law for everybody, one flag, one coat of arms, one centralized world state.

Is Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s description partly out of date? After all, who touts their allegiance to “diversity” more than the left? But the left’s version of diversity amounts to uniformity of an especially insidious kind. No one may hold a dissenting view about the desirability of “diversity” itself, of course, and “diverse” college faculties are chosen not for their diversity of viewpoints but precisely for their dreary sameness: left-liberals of all shapes and sizes. What’s more, by demanding “diversity” and proportional representation in as many institutions as possible, the left aims to make all of America exactly the same.

Leftists have long been engaged in a bait-and-switch operation. First, they said they wanted nothing but liberty for all. Liberalism was supposed to be neutral between competing worldviews, seeking only an open marketplace of ideas in which rational people could discuss important questions. It did not aim to impose any particular vision of the good.

That claim was exploded quickly enough when the centrality of government-run education to the left-liberal program became obvious. Progressive education in particular aimed to emancipate children from the superstitions of competing power centers (parents, church, or locality, among others) and transfer their allegiance to the central state.

Of course, the leftist yearning for equality and uniformity played a role as well. There is the story of the French Minister of Education who, looking at his watch, tells a guest, “At this moment in 5,431 public elementary schools, they are writing an essay on the joys of winter.”

As Kuehnelt-Leddihn put it:

Church schools, parochial schools, private schools, personal tutors, none is in keeping with leftist sentiments. The reasons are manifold. Not only is delight in statism involved, but also the idea of uniformity and equality — the idea that social differences in education should be eliminated and all pupils be given a chance to acquire the same knowledge, the same type of information, in the same fashion, and to the same degree. This should enable them to think in identical or at least in similar ways.

As time has passed, leftists have bothered less and less to pretend to be neutral between competing social visions. This is why conservatives who accuse the left of moral relativism have it so wrong. Far from relativistic, the left is absolutist in its demands of conformity to strict moral codes.

For example, when it declares “transgender” persons to be the new oppressed class, everyone is expected to stand up and salute. Left-liberals do not argue that support for transgender people may be a good idea for some people but bad for others. That’s what they’d say if they were moral relativists. But they’re not, so they don’t.

And it is not simply that dissent is not tolerated. Dissent cannot be acknowledged. What happens is not that the offender is debated until a satisfactory resolution is achieved. He is drummed out of polite society without further ado. There can be no opinion apart from what the left has decided.

Now it’s true: the left can’t remind us often enough of the tolerant, non-judgmental millennials from whom this world of ubiquitous bigotry can learn so much. So am I wrong to say that the left, and particularly the younger left, is intolerant?

In fact, we are witnessing the least tolerant generation in recent memory. April Kelly-Woessner, a political scientist at Elizabethtown College who has researched the opinions of the millennials, has come up with some revealing findings. If we base how tolerant a person is on how he treats those he disagrees with — an obviously reasonable standard — the millennials fare very poorly.

Yes, the millennials have great sympathy for the official victim groups whose causes are paraded before them in school and at the movies. That’s no accomplishment since millennials agree with these people. But how do they treat and think about those with whom they disagree? A casual glance at social media, or at leftist outbursts on college campuses, reveals the answer.

Incidentally, who was the last leftist speaker shouted down by libertarians on a college campus?

Answer: no one, because that never happens. If it did, you can bet we’d be hearing about it until the end of time.

On the other hand, leftists who terrorize their ideological opponents are simply being faithful to the mandate of Herbert Marcuse, the 1960s leftist who argued that freedom of speech had to be restricted in the case of anti-progressive movements:

Such discrimination would also be applied to movements opposing the extension of social legislation to the poor, weak, disabled. As against the virulent denunciations that such a policy would do away with the sacred liberalistic principle of equality for “the other side,” I maintain that there are issues where either there is no “other side” in any more than a formalistic sense, or where “the other side” is demonstrably “regressive” and impedes possible improvement of the human condition. To tolerate propaganda for inhumanity vitiates the goals not only of liberalism but of every progressive political philosophy.

Even much of what passes as conservatism today is tainted by leftism. That’s certainly the case with the neoconservatives: can you imagine Edmund Burke, the fountainhead of modern conservatism, supporting the idea of military force to spread human rights around the world?

Talk to neoconservatives about decentralization, secession, nullification, and you’ll get exactly the same left-wing replies you’d hear on MSNBC.

Now I can imagine the following objection to what I’ve said: whatever we may say about the crimes and horrors of the left, we cannot overlook the totalitarianism of the right, manifested most spectacularly in Nazi Germany.

But in fact, the Nazis were a leftist party. The German Workers’ Party in Austria, the forerunner of the Nazis, declared in 1904: “We are a liberty-loving nationalistic party that fights energetically against reactionary tendencies as well as feudal, clerical, or capitalistic privileges and all alien influences.”

When the party became the National Socialist German Workers’ Party or the Nazis, its program included the following:

The National Socialist German Workers’ Party is not a worker’s party in the narrow sense of the term: It represents the interests of all honestly creative labor. It is a liberty-loving and strictly nationalist party and therefore fights against all reactionary trends, against ecclesiastical, aristocratic, and capitalist privileges and every alien influence, but above all against the overpowering influence of the Jewish-commercial mentality in all domains of public life. …

It demands the amalgamation of all regions of Europe inhabited by Germans into a democratic, social-minded German Reich. …

It demands plebiscites for all key laws in the Reich, the states and provinces. …

It demands the elimination of the rule of Jewish bankers over business life and the creation of national people’s banks with a democratic administration.

This program, wrote Kuehnelt-Leddihn, “oozes the spirit of leveling leftism: it was democratic; it was anti-Habsburg (it demanded the destruction of the Danube monarchy in favor of the Pan-German program); it was against all unpopular minorities, an attitude that is the magnetism of all leftist ideologies.”

The leftist obsession with “equality” and leveling means the state must insinuate itself into employment, finance, education, private clubs — pretty much every nook and cranny of civil society. In the name of diversity, every institution is forced to look exactly like every other one.

The left can’t ever be satisfied because its creed is a permanent revolution in the service of unattainable ends like “equality.” People of different skills and endowments will reap different rewards, which means constant intervention into civil society. Moreover, equality vanishes the moment people begin freely exchanging money for the goods they desire, so again: the state must be involved in everything, at all times.

Moreover, each generation of liberals undermines and scoffs at what the previous one took for granted. The revolution marches on.

Leftism is, in short, a recipe for permanent revolution, and of a distinctly anti-libertarian kind. Not just anti-libertarian. Anti-human.

And yet all the hatred these days is directed at the right.

To be sure, libertarians are fully at home neither on the left nor the right as traditionally understood. But the idea that both sides are equally dreadful, or amount to comparable threats to liberty, is foolish and destructive nonsense.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ZeroHedge.

Via Camus,

The American scientific establishment, led by figures like Anthony Fauci, was given absolute authority to manage the pandemic.

They got everything they demanded.

As Glenn Greenwald details, their legacy is one of catastrophic failure and unforgivable arrogance.

The American scientific establishment, led by figures like Anthony Fauci, was given absolute authority to manage the pandemic. They got everything they demanded.

As Glenn Greenwald details, their legacy is one of catastrophic failure and unforgivable arrogance. They imposed… pic.twitter.com/sHC7zYw1Fx

— Camus (@newstart_2024) September 12, 2025

They imposed moronic policies: forced masks, mandated vaccines, and the utterly idiotic 6-foot social distancing rule that turned out to be a complete joke.

They shuttered schools with zero regard for the devastating consequences to children.

They lied about COVID’s origins and banished all dissent, colluding with tech giants to deplatform anyone who questioned their orthodoxies—many of which were later proven completely false.

The result?

The United States suffered one of the highest death tolls in the world.

The experts we were commanded to venerate without question failed radically.

Their failure wasn’t just due to error, but to deep-seated arrogance and systemic deceit.

Now, the same institutions wonder why the American people have lost all trust in them.

They continue to act with insularity, as if their decrees still come from Mount Olympus.

But the public has seen the truth: our ruling class is not scientific—they are political and self-preserving.

Their unaccountability is the greatest scandal of all.4

*  *  *

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Authored by T.J. Muscaro via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Florida’s Department of Education announced on Sept. 11 that it will look into public school teachers who, on social media, celebrated or justified the assassination of Turning Point USA CEO and founder Charlie Kirk.

Commissioner Anastasios Kamoutsas sent a letter to school district superintendents telling them that he would be investigating after it was brought to his attention that some educators had posted “despicable comments on social media regarding the horrific assassination of Charlie Kirk.”

“These few are not a reflection of the great, high-quality teachers who make up the vast majority of Florida’s educators,” he wrote.

“Nevertheless, I will be conducting an investigation of every educator who engages in this vile, sanctionable behavior.”

Florida’s Department of Education told The Epoch Times in an email that the commissioner was prepared to use all of his power to hold educators responsible if the investigation proves they should not be in a classroom based on their behavior.

That power includes revoking their educator certificate.

“Although educators have First Amendment rights, these rights do not extend without limit into their professional duties,” Kamoutsas said.

“An educator’s personal views that are made public may undermine the trust of the students and families that they serve.”

The commissioner cited Rule 6A-10.081 of the Florida Administrative Code (F.A.C.), titled “Principles of Professional Conduct for the Education Profession in Florida,” which holds the state’s certified educators to a set of ethical guidelines.

Kamoutsas said that a teacher could violate that rule if his or her conduct “causes a student or his or her family to feel unwelcome or unwilling to participate in the learning environment.”

He also cited sections of two Florida statutes that authorized the commissioner to discipline and sanction the certificate of an educator who “upon investigation, has been found guilty of personal conduct that seriously reduces that person’s effectiveness as an employee of the district school board.”

“Teachers are held to a higher standard as public servants and must ensure their conduct does not undermine the trust of the students and families they serve,” the commissioner said on X.

“We will hold teachers who choose to make disgusting comments about the horrific assassination of Charlie Kirk accountable. Govern yourselves accordingly.”

The official action came after several voices across social media were raised to flag and speak out against people justifying or even cheering the assassination of the conservative influencer.

The social media app BlueSky was required to speak out against some of its users’ comments.

“Glorifying violence or harm violates Bluesky’s Community Guidelines,” the company said. “We review reports and take action on content that celebrates harm against anyone.

“Violence has no place in healthy public discourse, and we’re committed to fostering healthy, open conversations.”

Gov. Ron DeSantis praised Kamoutsas’s actions to hold the state’s teachers accountable.

“Celebrating the assassination of a 31-year-old father of two young kids is disturbing; that teachers would be among those who do so is completely unacceptable,” he said.

Since that announcement, several people began posting screenshots on X of teachers they caught publicly celebrating the assassination, and tagging Florida leaders and the respective school districts.

The Epoch Times reached out to the Foundation of Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), an organization known for defending First Amendment rights on school campuses across the country, to get its take on this move by the Sunshine State.

Senior Program Counsel Stephanie Jablonsky told The Epoch Times in an email on Sept. 12 that while public school teachers retain their First Amendment right to speak as private citizens on matters of public concern, they do not have unlimited protection. However, the actions could be seen as unconstitutional if termination of employment is solely based on the disapproval of a person’s opinion.

“If their off-the-clock speech genuinely undermines their ability to perform their duties or causes serious disruption in the workplace, discipline might be justified,” she said. ”But punishment based solely on disapproval of an employee’s private views is generally unconstitutional, and that’s what seems to be driving a spate of employment investigations and punishments in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s tragic murder.

“The assassination of Kirk as he spoke with students on a college campus was a shocking betrayal of our national commitment to free speech and open debate,” she added. ”Now’s the time to redouble our commitment to those fundamental values, not erode them by punishing people for their personal views.

“Free speech means protecting even the speech one finds repugnant.”

Florida was named No. 1 in education freedom for the fourth year in a row by the conservative Heritage Foundation on Sept. 9.

The U.S. has long been a top destination for immigrants seeking better opportunities. As of 2023, nearly 48 million people in the country were born abroad, representing 14% of the country’s total population.

In this visualization, Visual Capitalist’s Marcus Lu breaks down the largest immigrant groups in America by nationality, highlighting the top 10 countries from each region.

Note that this analysis covers legal immigrants only. Check out our previous post to see a similar breakdown of illegal immigrants coming into the U.S.

Data & Discussion

The data for this visualization comes from the Migration Policy Institute (MPI). It shows the number of foreign-born U.S. residents by country of origin, as of 2023.

Americas: 25.3M Immigrants

Mexico stands out as the dominant source of U.S. immigrants, with nearly 11 million as of 2023. Historical ties, geographic proximity, and longstanding migration channels are major factors.

Several other Latin American countries rank highly, including El Salvador, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic.

Asia: 14.9M Immigrants

After the Americas, Asia & Oceania is the next largest source of U.S. immigrants.

India (2.9 million) is the second-largest country source after Mexico, while China (2.2 million) and the Philippines (2.05 million) also rank in the top five.

Fact: In 2024, Indian students accounted for nearly 30% of all international students in the U.S.

Europe: 4.8M Immigrants

While Europe was once the primary source of immigrants to America, its share has declined over time. The combined European total remains substantial, though spread across many countries.

Africa: 2.8M Immigrants

Africa is the region with the least amount of immigrants living in America.

According to historical MPI data, the annual number of new permanent residents from Africa has grown slowly and inconsistently. This could be due to closer ties between Africa and China.

If you enjoyed today’s post, check out Why Did Asian Immigrants Come to the U.S.? on Voronoi, the new app from Visual Capitalist.

*  *  *

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Authored by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform blog,

“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” ― Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

“What we’ve got here is… failure to communicate. Some men you just can’t reach. So you get what we had here last week, which is the way he wants it… well, he gets it. I don’t like it any more than you men.” – Captain – Cool Hand Luke

It is fitting that I use a quote from a communist to begin this article because it is the communist ideology of hate, murder, and propaganda that has led us to this point of no return. Charlie Kirk was right. America will never be the same. It might not even closely resemble the America at the start of this century by the time this period of upheaval and crisis resolves itself, with the shedding of much blood and death on a scale not seen since World War II. Charlie Kirk was Cool Hand Luke’d for daring to challenge the status quo and daring to question the psychopathic powers that be in this prison planet of our own making.

The senseless slaughter of Iryna Zarutska and Charlie Kirk were the opening salvo in a new U.S. civil war, which is likely to spread to the U.K., Ireland, France, Germany, Australia and wherever else the globalist elite have planted the seeds of revolution through importing Muslim hordes, criminalizing whiteness, glorifying deviancy, outlawing free speech, bankrupting nations, and promoting WW3. The chaos, confusion, vitriol and mayhem is not happening by chance. It is being manufactured by those constituting the invisible government (aka Deep State) as a means to their end game – Digital IDs, CBDCs, Social Credit Scores, 15 Minute Cities (Gulags), Great Taking leading to the Great Reset, and the depopulation of millions with the dehumanization and subjugation of the survivors.

What is happening is not a bug, but a feature in the new world order they envision. The last couple weeks certainly meet Lenin’s criteria of decades happening, as the whirlwind of tragedy, anger, threats, retribution, legacy media lies, political posturing, international coalitions forming into war-like postures, all capped off by the cold blooded murder of “that white girl” by a feral psychotic dangerous black man set loose by a black woman pretending to be a judge, and the assassination of an earnest young christian conservative man who was trying to sway minds and hearts through debate, evidently by an ANTIFA inspired transgender dropout loser who spent his life online with other losers.

I say evidently because I don’t believe anything the government or media tells me. There are dozens of unanswered questions regarding this 22 year old Tyler Robinson as the shooter. Based on what we have been told by the authorities regarding Thomas Crooks, the 20 year-old Butler assassin, I don’t expect any truthful revelations regarding Kirk’s assassin. An official narrative will be concocted, fed to the MSM mouthpieces, and devoured by the ignorant masses as the truth. Questioning the official story will be shouted down as conspiracy theories, even though the conspiracy theorists are now 40 – o versus the official stories over the last decade. Our lives don’t matter, but narratives do matter to those pulling the strings.

Even worse was the complete blackout of Iryna’s murder by the far left dying legacy media. The alt-media forced the world to witness the consequences of left wing policies of encouraging crime and refusing to lock up dangerous black men. False narratives are all the left have. The dying legacy left media live up to Huxley’s observations regarding the truth:

“Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.” – Aldous Huxley

Personally, the images of that beautiful helpless girl staring in stunned terror at the savage beast who just slaughtered her because she was white, and the instantaneous death of Charlie with the blood pouring out of his neck wound have disturbed and haunted me for this entire week. I haven’t been able to sleep. I feel like I’ve been going through the motions at work and at home, as a feeling of foreboding envelopes my consciousnesses. I’m sure others have a similar feeling.

The last time I felt this way was the week following 9/11. I knew the world had changed and the change was not going to be good. The world has once again taken a turn for the worse. There will be no reconciliation between the right and the left. There will be no peace. There will be no turning the other cheek and coming together as a nation. Unification is impossible. You will be required to choose a side, because the violence has only just begun. It will only intensify from this point until there are clear winners and losers.

That young refugee from Ukraine was going home from her shift at a pizza joint. It’s ironic that she would have still been living peacefully in Ukraine if the U.S. had not initiated the hostilities by overthrowing the democratically elected government in 2014, as the neocon/Deep State plan to overthrow Putin by goading him into WW3 was hatched. The millions of deaths and casualties in Ukraine are directly attributable to the dastardly actions of Obama, Biden, Nuland, Graham, McCain and the rest of the warmongering bastards that instigated this war. That racist feral dog that murdered Iryna in cold blood shouldn’t have been on that train either. The left wing communist DAs and judges who released this violent unhinged savage 14 times have her blood on their hands. Both seats should have been empty, but that image of savagery will now encourage a race war.

I know every right leaning talking head, twitter influencer, blogger and politician has been mourning the death of Charlie Kirk on social media at a deafening crescendo, trying to outdo each other in their level of tributes, video compilations, and pictures of his wife and children. He is being treated as a Jesus-like martyr, with connotations of JFK’s Camelot lost. Some said he was destined to be president within the next decade. Maybe so, but we will never know.

Truthfully, until he was murdered this week, I knew very little about the man. I knew he was a popular right leaning commentator, but I had never heard him speak or followed him on twitter. I pretty much lumped him with the other right wing influencers, who make a living off tweets, podcasts, youtubes, and blogging. Everyone’s gotta make a living somehow. They are in a constant battle for likes, retweets, impressions and eyeballs. I’m always suspicious about whether they are paid to support a certain point of view or actually believe what they say.

He was 31 and I’m 62. His Turning Point USA organization was geared to mobilize idealistic young conservative people to embrace conservative family values. After 17 years of trying to change hearts and minds, my site generally attracts cynical old dudes who despise the government and media, knowing change through the ballot box is a fruitless venture. The best we can do now is tribe up with like minded people, gather our preps, make sure we are heavily armed, and buy more ammo. Nothing I’ve seen in the last couple weeks tells me to do otherwise. This train is moving too fast towards the bend, and derailment is a certainty.

From what I could gather, Charlie was an intelligent, loving Christian family man, who loved spirited debates with those who had opposing points of view.

His debating skills were clearly top-notch.

The left wing loons in the media, on college campuses, and in politics despised him because he was more intelligent and articulate in presenting his viewpoint, as they shrieked at, threatened and cancelled those who supported him. The brainwashing of our indoctrinated youth by left wing communist ideology has convinced millions to actually believe Kirk, Trump, Musk, Carlson, etc., are nazis and fascists – deserving to be murdered for their cause. Their warped ideology kills.

Kirk’s Turning Point USA non-profit is essentially a rounding error compared to the Soros NGOs, Gates Foundation, and USAID grifts funding chaos and hate across the land. I checked their 990 Tax return and total donations were $85M, with Kirk’s annual compensation around $400k. Pelosi makes more than that with one insider stock trade. He surely also made significant income from Twitter, podcasts, books, etc. But, he wasn’t what I would call a grifter.

His views pretty much aligned with mine on most major issues – Ukraine war, the Israeli genocide, bombing Iran for Israel, abortion, tranny degeneracy, woke indoctrination in schools, 1st Amendment, 2nd Amendment, covid vaccines, masks, Snowden & Assange, and the Deep State . He did not deserve to die and making him a martyr will ultimately backfire on those celebrating his murder. Cancellation goes both ways, they are finding out.

More people have now read and watched his speeches/debates in the last few days than would have ever been introduced to his views over their lifetimes. His death has created more anger and desire for retribution than I’ve witnessed in the course of my life. Will it be a Boston Tea Party/Fort Sumter moment, triggering a revolution/civil war? Time will tell, but we know one thing for sure, Fourth Turnings never de-intensify. I would say in this past week we have experienced an intensification of our ongoing crisis, with the bloodiest and most intense years yet to come. Tragic iconic photos from my lifetime have marked turning points for the country, and I believe the two photos above will sadly mark a new turning point of death and destruction.

I was six months old when my government murdered JFK. The images from the Zapruder film are disturbing and sad, but the murder of our young president because he threatened the CIA/FBI/Deep State changed the course of our country to the detriment of all but those constituting the Deep State and their billionaire benefactors. Our young have been dying, while those running the show have utilized all the propaganda tools at their disposal to breed hate and fear. Keeping the masses focused on their differences, ensures they don’t all realize the true enemy are those pulling the strings and manipulating the masses, as described by Edward Bernays.

Look at your young men fighting
Look at your women crying
Look at your young men dying
The way they’ve always done before
Look at the hate we’re breeding
Look at the fear we’re feeding
Look at the lives we’re leading
The way we’ve always done before

Civil War – Guns N’ Roses

And history hides the lies of our civil wars
D’you wear a black armband when they shot the man
Who said, “Peace could last forever”?
And in my first memories, they shot Kennedy
I went numb when I learned to see
Civil War – Guns N’ Roses

Two tragically iconic photos during the Vietnam War were turning points in convincing average Walter Cronkite watching Americans we should not be there, sacrificing our young men, killing women and children, and turning our military against college students protesting against another war fought by the poor to benefit the rich. The American empire has degenerated into Murder Inc., spreading death and destruction across the globe to enrich the military industrial complex and the parasite politicians fueling the war machine with our tax dollars, while burdening our children with an unpayable debt.

So I never fell for Vietnam
We got the wall in D.C. to remind us all
That you can’t trust freedom when it’s not in your hands
When everybody’s fightin’ for their promised land and
I don’t need your civil war
Civil War – Guns N’ Roses

The photos of the World Trade Center towers on fire shortly before collapsing into their footprint became the defining moment of this century, thus far. We know the neo-cons (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz) who used the moron baby Bush to kick-start their agenda by pushing through the pre-written Patriot Act, ushering in the ever expanding surveillance state, have seized control of government and set us on a path to destruction. We’ve been spilling blood across the globe, while adding debt at a hyper-sonic pace, based upon lies, corrupt leadership, and at the behest of a globalist billionaire death cult. And here we stand at the brink of a civil war and global conflict, with unknown but likely terrible consequences.

Look at the shoes you’re filling
Look at the blood we’re spilling
Look at the world we’re killing
The way we’ve always done before
Look in the doubt we’ve wallowed
Look at the leaders we’ve followed
Look at the lies we’ve swallowed
And I don’t want to hear no more
Civil War – Guns N’ Roses

We are currently in an existential battle between good and evil. The murderous bastards who killed Iryna and Charlie were the personification of evil, motivated by the satanic urging of the Soros, Gates, Obama, Clinton cult of death. The Democratic party is infested with evil men and women, hellbent on the destruction of our country through the promotion of depravity, social chaos, and rampant criminality without consequences. The real deplorables in this country who cheered Kirk’s death and felt sorry for the black devil who slaughtered “that white girl” are evil. The despicable excuses for journalists in the far left propaganda media are evil.

All of these people are your enemy. Many of your neighbors, coworkers and family are your enemy. They would not shed a tear at your death. We have passed the point of no return. I wish I could visualize a near term positive outcome, but that is impossible after this week. As another old time cynic declared a century ago, normal people need to hoist the black flag.

“Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.” ― H.L. Mencken

A current day cynic, and someone the left would also like to kill,  captures my thoughts exactly. I will not unite or let bygones be bygones with people who wanted me to die for refusing the covid jab and would spit on my grave based upon my views on the Constitution, unwarranted wars, the welfare state, surveillance state, government spending, and the degeneracy of the left. We are already at war, but most don’t realize it yet.

We’ve tried to live in peace, minding our own business, turning the other cheek, and hoping the crazed leftists would fade away, because their ideas are evil and insane. We just wanted to be left alone, but they forced millions to get jabbed with Big Pharma poison under threat of being fired, hoisted their transgender deviancy upon our children, indoctrinated our young with communist bullshit in government schools, opened our borders to third world invaders, burned our cities while making a drug addicted black criminal their fake martyr, placed low IQ diversity stooges in key positions of power, encouraged criminality with no consequences, stole elections, and now they are killing the best of us. It is now time for all normal people to channel William Munny and do whatever is necessary to defeat the evil forces opposing us. Words matter, but actions speak louder than words.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ZeroHedge.

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) reported last week that it had arrested 617 members of the Sinaloa cartel in a global operation.

The week-long operation aimed to dismantle the Sinaloa cartel, which has been flooding the United States with fentanyl, methamphetamine, cocaine, and heroin, the DEA said in a statement.

In addition to the 617 arrests, the DEA seized narcotics, including 480 kilograms of fentanyl powder, 714,707 counterfeit pills, 2,209 kilograms of methamphetamine, 7,469 kilograms of cocaine, and 16.55 kilograms of heroin.

As Alicia Márquez reports below for The Epoch Times, the DEA also seized more than $11 million in currency, over $1.6 million worth of assets, and 420 firearms.

“These results demonstrate the DEA’s unwavering commitment to protecting the American people,” DEA Administrator Terrance Cole said.

“Every kilogram of poison seized, every dollar confiscated from the cartels, and every arrest we make represents lives saved and communities defended.”

“The DEA will not rest until the Sinaloa Cartel is completely dismantled,” he added.

The operation was carried out by DEA agents in 23 domestic field divisions and seven foreign regions from Aug. 25 to 29.

“There are tens of thousands of Sinaloa members, associates, and facilitators operating worldwide in at least 40 countries who are responsible for the production, manufacture, distribution, and operations related to the trafficking of dangerous and deadly synthetic drugs,” according to the statement.

“This coordinated action was a combination of the DEA’s increased focus on law enforcement, intelligence, and national and international collaboration, using all resources at its disposal to degrade the Sinaloa Cartel’s command and control.”

In February, the Trump administration, through the State Department, designated the Sinaloa cartel a Foreign Terrorist Organization, along with seven other Mexican and Latin American organizations.

Mexican Security Secretary Omar García Harfuch dismissed the idea that the Sinaloa cartel is finished.

“No, no, the Sinaloa Cartel has never had a leader as such, that is, there have always been several leaders,” Harfuch said at an Aug. 27 press conference.

Harfuch also spoke about the structure of the Sinaloa organization.

“It is a cartel that has, let’s say, several branches. One of them was Ismael ‘El Mayo’ Zambada, another was ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán, then El Chapo’s sons, El Guano, who is also El Chapo’s brother, and another, ‘El Chapo Isidro,’” Harfuch said, following Ismael Zambada García’s guilty plea in the United States.

On Aug. 25, Zambada, co-founder of the Sinaloa cartel, pleaded guilty in a New York federal court to two counts of drug trafficking, money laundering, and use of weapons, after more than five decades of criminal activity.

Zambada admitted to participating in a drug trafficking operation that for years brought large quantities of illicit substances, including cocaine and heroin, into the United States.

Authored by Paul Terdal via RealClearPolitics,

Here’s a question my home state of Oregon could easily answer: How many kids have received gender transition surgeries in the last 15 years? The state has this data and is required by law to give it to me. Yet instead of doing so, officials are now telling me that they’ve been illegally selling Oregonians’ health information for years. It’s a head-turning argument, but it’s also false. It shows how desperate the state is to avoid answering my question.

I have been a volunteer health consumer advocate for more than 20 years. I have led the development and passage of laws that guarantee insurance coverage of evidence-based autism services, end discrimination against disabled patients seeking organ transplants, and strengthen the insurance commissioner’s enforcement authority. I am also a lifelong Democrat, and as transgender medicine has come into vogue in recent years, I’ve worked to help my state implement evidence-based standards that protect kids.

The key to my work is the Oregon Health Authority’s “All Payer All Claims” database, which has detailed information about health transactions for more than 92% of the state’s population. By law, this data is available to the public, and to protect patients, it’s fully compliant with federal privacy laws and regulations. There is no way to identify any individual patient, full stop.

The Oregon Health Authority makes this data available for purchase, and a few years ago, I purchased access to the 2019 data for a federally funded study. I found that while Oregon had estimated that only about 175 patients would obtain taxpayer-funded gender transition services at a total annual cost of no more than $200,000, more than 7,585 patients had done so at more than 100 times the initial cost estimate. That included 160 children using “puberty blocker” drugs and approximately 370 children taking cross-sex hormones. There were also 33 biological girls who had mastectomies – including some as young as 15 – and two 17-year-old girls who had their uteruses and ovaries removed.

I found this concerning since the Oregon Department of Justice had declared in a February legal filing that “genital surgery is not performed on transgender minors”. Yet the state’s own data confirmed that children really do undergo genital surgery that leaves them permanently sterilized. I publicized my findings late last year.

In February, I contacted the Oregon Health Authority to express interest in a new research project. At first, they offered me 10 years’ worth of data – 2011 through 2020. This would have been invaluable in tracking the recent rise in gender dysphoria diagnoses, the age and other medical conditions of patients who pursue a gender transition, and the types of treatment they received.

Yet when I told officials that I wanted to study “gender-affirming treatment” over that decade, their reaction quickly shifted. From internal emails that I obtained under Oregon’s public records laws, my routine request was immediately flagged for review by senior executives. They were deeply concerned about the political “risks” of providing me with this data.

The first idea they debated was requiring me to sign a new contract that would prohibit me from publishing detailed results of my analysis. Then, they considered just purging all records related to gender dysphoria. They concluded that they didn’t have the legal authority to do that. They ultimately settled on another concerning – and telling – approach. The Oregon Health Authority told me that the state database was out of compliance with federal privacy laws. Therefore, it couldn’t be released to me or anyone else.

This claim falls flat on so many levels. Oregon has been selling this database to dozens of organizations for 15 years. Customers have included academic researchers, journalists, and even computer companies seeking data to train artificial intelligence tools. If this database were illegal, someone would have flagged it by now – not least the state’s lawyers.

More to the point: If Oregon really believed that the database was out of compliance with federal laws, the state would be required to notify the Secretary of Health and Human Services. It would also be required to inform the news media and each and every one of the millions of individuals affected. Yet the state has made no such move. The Oregon Health Authority hasn’t even notified those of us who already possess the data, nor have they tried to recall it. If their lawyers really say they’re not in compliance, those same lawyers would tell them to begin the notifications immediately.

I’m left with one undeniable conclusion: Oregon is withholding the data to prevent me from researching – and telling the public – about the prevalence and practice of gender medicine in my state. That is a severe violation of my constitutional rights under the First Amendment, and in August, I filed a federal lawsuit to vindicate my rights.

I’m appalled to see this kind of authoritarian behavior from my own Democrat-led state government. My fellow liberals wouldn’t tolerate this from a Republican administration, and I refuse to tolerate it from my own.

Authored by Ryan Morgan via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

By the time he set off on his final campus speaking tour, Charlie Kirk had built an organization of some 250,000 members, all the while engaging in conservative political organizing, engineering get-out-the-vote efforts, drawing tens of millions of dollars in funding, and growing a media influence machine.

A driving force behind Kirk’s movement, Turning Point USA, has been his focus on engaging young minds in political debate and setting an example for new generations of political influencers like himself.

Through this mission, Kirk often found himself on a college campus, delivering a speech or sitting down with a table and a microphone and defying his critics with the prompt “prove me wrong,” even in the face of insults and threats.

He continued this mission until the very end.

“Charlie Kirk could’ve been running his multi-million dollar operation from a fancy suite or a fancy office, and he could’ve just hired the dangerous part of what he did out to other activists, and instead of doing that, he always stayed in the trenches. And I think that’s one of the most admirable things about him,” said Gunnar Thorderson, a former Turning Point USA organizer who helped establish the organization’s presence at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, where Kirk was assassinated on Sept. 10.

Thorderson rose from the Turning Point USA chapter president at UVU to a state-level director for the organization in Utah. Now, Thorderson is a sitting member of the Utah Republican State Central Committee. He attributes his trajectory, in large part, to Kirk’s personal mentorship.

“I really got to view him as a mentor and as a personal friend, as he would invest in me one-on-one, on many occasions,” he told The Epoch Times.

Thorderson is among many whose political voices Kirk amplified since co-founding Turning Point USA in 2012.

“I owe my entire political career to Charlie Kirk,” Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) said in an X post the day after Kirk’s death.

“I would quite literally not be in office today if it weren’t for him. Even when my own party was working against me, Charlie endorsed me and campaigned to help me win election.”

Luna’s communications director, David Leatherwood, also came into his own, politically, through Turning Point USA and Kirk’s personal support.

Leatherwood, 37, a self-described gay conservative, first met Kirk in 2017.

“I met Charlie at one of his campus tours in Fort Lauderdale, and we actually filmed a video together where he said that he, you know, supports the gay community, and that e pluribus unum, represents all Americans,” Leatherwood told The Epoch Times.

“And ever since that day, he was always supportive of me, and he invited me to be an ambassador for his organization.”

Raising Young Conservative Voices

Hallie S., 26, from Gainesville, Florida, credits Kirk’s organization with helping her and other conservative students at Santa Fe College be more outspoken with their views.

“I’ve always been more conservative. I was raised conservative, but was never big about speaking up, especially in Gainesville, which is such a liberal area, and you never know how people are going to react,” she said.

Hallie said she was able to revamp the College Republicans chapter at Santa Fe College in Gainesville, thanks in large part to the influence of Kirk and Turning Point USA.

“Charlie Kirk was a huge portion of that. He had a huge impact on politics on college campuses, especially in Santa Fe,” she told The Epoch Times.

“You had all these students that were like, ‘wow, my conservative values are being represented in a way that really had never been represented before.’”

Kelly Shackelford, a First Amendment attorney and president and CEO of First Liberty Institute, said he invited Kirk to speak at a fundraising event in Houston, Texas, shortly after discovering the young influencer.

“Typically at fundraisers, everybody’s 60-and-older,” Shackelford told the Epoch Times.

“And so I wanted to encourage these older people that there are younger people who are coming behind them, and it’s not going to die with them.”

Making an Online Presence

With much of his content shared online, Kirk’s influence spread beyond the numerous college campuses he visited over the years and reached millions online.

Tucker, a teenager who requested his surname not be revealed due to fear of retaliation, told The Epoch Times that Kirk was among a limited number of political influencers whose content he liked to engage with.

“I don’t really like watching political stuff. I mean, it’ll come up like on TikTok or something like that, and I just scroll past it,” Tucker said.

“But when I saw his stuff, I would always click on it cause it was always interesting and he was just somebody that you could look up to.”

During an interview on California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s podcast in March, the Democratic governor confessed that his 13-year-old son wanted to skip school for a chance to meet Kirk.

“Literally last night, trying to put my son to bed, he’s like, ‘Dad I just—what time, what time is Charlie gonna be here? What time?’” Newsom said.

“And I’m like, ‘dude, you’re in school tomorrow.’”

Leatherwood said he was comforted knowing how many moments of Kirk’s life were captured on camera, preserving his thoughts and views.

“The beautiful thing about today and modern technology and our access, our access to media, is that, you know, there are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of footage of him speaking. And those will live on, and I think they’ll actually memorialize his legacy in an even greater way than people can anticipate,” he said.

Driving Debate

Kirk made debate a core component of his mission. As he visited college campuses around the country, he often did so with a pop-up tent emblazoned with the words “prove me wrong,” and he offered up a microphone to those with differing points of view to confront him directly through dialogue.

“He went from campus to campus, engaging with students that he didn’t really view as the enemy ever. It was just that he felt they needed to be educated and that they needed to have proper discourse,” Thorderson said.

“And it was through that that they would end up being convinced of our ideas.”

Not all of Kirk’s interlocutors were swayed by his arguments, but they credited him for allowing a discussion.

“I stand by so little of everything that [Kirk] said, but one of the things he stood by was conversation,” Hunter Kozak said in a video post the day after Kirk’s death.

Kozak, 29, is a student at UVU and was the last person to debate with Kirk before he was shot.

Kirk was just minutes into what was meant to be the first stop of his latest campus speaking tour when he was assassinated.

Dean Withers, who had debated Kirk, broke down in tears while filming a livestream on Sept. 10, as he learned Kirk had been shot. Addressing his initial reaction, Withers filmed another video that evening, acknowledging his disagreements with Kirk.

“Does that mean I think he deserved to lose his life? No. Does that mean I think his two young children, who were in attendance at the event where he was shot, deserved to watch their father die? No. Does that mean I think they deserve to grow up without him? No. Does that mean I think that his wife, who was also there, deserved to lose her husband? No,” Withers said.

“And honestly, if you answered yes to any of those questions, there’s a very clear line drawn between me and you. I don’t want your support, and I don’t support you either.”

Living Beyond Politics

Throughout his stardom as a conservative political influencer, Kirk frequently looked beyond politics and emphasized his Christian faith.

Speaking with The Epoch Times, Thorderson recalled a morning when he and Kirk were traveling for an event and went for a workout in the hotel gym. It wasn’t long before their exercise turned philosophical.

“I remember at the time, I was struggling with my own faith and kind of just playing devil’s advocate with him,” Thorderson recalled.

“And he was just so steadfast in his faith and impressive with his knowledge. And that was a moment where I didn’t feel like he was necessarily preaching to me, but really just trying to connect on a personal level and trying to see me where I was at.”

At other points, Thorderson described Kirk being able to hold a knowledgeable conversation on matters beyond politics and articulate a connection back to his core values.

“He was a savant,” Thorderson said.

Thorderson also recalled having the chance to know Kirk when the Turning Point USA leader was getting to know his wife, Erika.

“He just always valued family and wanted to start a family. And that was just, even before he had kids, that was a core value for him,” Thorderson said.

Kirk leaves behind his wife Erika and two children.

John Haughey, Savannah Pointer, Nanette Holt, and Natasha Holt contributed to this report.

Authored by Savannah Hulsey Pointer via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

President Donald Trump announced that the National Guard would be heading to Memphis to deal with crime.

The president made his comments on Sept. 12 during an interview with Fox News, saying that the administration would take on crime in the Tennessee city, and possibly others, such as New Orleans.

During his comments, Trump said that Memphis is “deeply troubled,” and added that the national guard presence would fix the problem, “just like we did in Washington.”

The president also said he sees New Orleans as a city in “really bad shape,” and that Gov. Jeff Landry wants him to act.

“The governor wants us to go in. We’ll do that too,” Trump said.

The announcement comes just over a month after the Aug. 11 federalization of the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington.

As of Sept. 10, more than 2,300 arrests have been made by federal and local partners in Washington, and more than 220 illegal firearms have been seized, according to Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Trump previously said Chicago could be the next major city to face a federal crime crackdown.

He said the National Guard could “solve Chicago within one week.”

“After we do this, we’ll go to another location, and we’ll make it safe also,” Trump told reporters at the time inside the Oval Office, referring to his efforts in Washington to crack down on crime.

“Chicago’s a mess. We’ll straighten that one out probably next. That will be our next one after this. And it won’t even be tough.”