1) “If The West Won’t Defend Itself, Third World Hordes Will Destroy Us” (Nathan Stone, Federalist)
From the article — The “Allahu Akbar!” screaming invaders — some 60,000 military-aged Moroccans with nothing but the clothes on their backs — were dumped into Ceuta, Spain to destroy it. The laxer ones did their part by turning the streets into toilets and the fountains into bathtubs (two ways of killing beauty fast). The friskier ones waged war against the city and its people. They set cars afire. They cracked open and looted homes and businesses…
Why is all this important? Because Ceuta is the latest reminder of what the stakes are. It’s not just about borders, or even sovereignty; it’s about civilization. “Civilization” gets thrown around a lot, and people have spilled good gallons of ink defining it. The simplest and truest definition is that civilization is the bedrock of who we are as a people.
Being part of a civilization means that the world is divided between “us”— we who see the world this way, we who believe this, and do things this way — and “them” — everyone else. Greeks are not Romans; Romans are not Frenchmen; and Frenchmen are not Americans.
You can lose a lot of things — influence, power, even territory — but if you can keep your civilization, you’re still in the game. It’s why the Jews are still a people (in the religious sense) and the Carthaginians are not. Lose that, and you lose yourself.
2) “The Current Status of American Schools — As we head into the new school year, what follows is a brief assessment of the sorry state of public education in the U.S. and what parents can do about it.” (Larry Sand, American Greatness)
From the article — Student skills are diminishing. Recently, more than 1,800 math and science lecturers at the University of California signed an open letter outlining a distressing problem. First-year undergraduates, they say, are increasingly arriving without the basic skills needed to succeed. At U.C. Berkeley, they maintain that 20-30% of students taking an early calculus course face “severe preparation deficits.” The challenge has become so great, they add, that instructors are forced to reteach middle-school math.
On a similar note, a shocking report on the University of California San Diego campus finds that the number of first-year students entering with math skills below the high school level has increased nearly thirtyfold over five years, to almost one in eight.
Along with worries about undergraduate math skills, there are long-standing concerns about declining literacy levels. Lecturers warn that literature students cannot finish books.
These problems are widespread. At Harvard, some humanities and social-science professors say they feel compelled to shorten texts, according to a report released in October. Students are entering America’s most revered university with less experience reading complex prose and a reduced capacity for focus and sustainedattention andd are struggling with books they completed with ease just ten years ago.
Chronic absenteeism remains a major problem…In the 2024-25 school year, after recovering from the COVID-19 school shutdowns, the chronic absenteeism rate remained high at 23%.
3) “Misidentifying The Enemy: What Happens When a Nation Can No Longer Recognize Its Allies?” (Daniel Cohen, Harbinger’s Daily)
From the article — Yet even as Iran demonstrated exactly who it is, much of the public debate shifted away from the regime responsible for the attack and toward Israel, America’s closest ally in the Middle East. Vice President J.D. Vance argued that Israeli influence helped derail negotiations with Iran, suggesting that voices in Israel preferred continued military action over diplomacy. That framing misses the larger point. The agreement did not collapse because Israel objected to it. It collapsed because Iran has repeatedly demonstrated that it uses negotiations to buy time while continuing to pursue its long-term objectives.
This is where discernment becomes indispensable. A nation that cannot correctly identify its adversaries will inevitably begin questioning its allies instead. History is filled with civilizations that spent more energy arguing among themselves than confronting the threats gathering outside their borders. The danger is not merely military. It is intellectual and moral. When a society begins treating warnings as manipulation and allies as liabilities, it loses the clarity necessary to make wise decisions.
Israel’s relationship with the United States has never been based on sentimentality. It rests on shared strategic interests, democratic values, intelligence cooperation, and a common recognition of the dangers posed by radical Islamic terrorism. Those realities should not disappear simply because political narratives become more convenient than geopolitical facts.
4) “What the Fauci Diaries Reveal About America’s COVID Response: The hearings have revived debate over lockdowns, government power, scientific authority, and who should be held accountable.” (Steve Apfel, American Spectator)
From the article — Fauci’s undoing was to forget that discretion is the better part of valor. Senators, keen to trap him into perjury, desired to nix Biden’s autopen pardon. It’s a crying shame that getting rich while massive misery stalked the land is not a felony. Ditto for sending love notes to himself and logging media stories that really did make him the most famous and talked about celebrity on earth.
Yes Fauci, the vainest of men, disabled a whole generation of school-goers by locking schools. Yes, he lied that Covid came from bats in a wet market rather than a leak from a lab. Yes, he was among the first shutdown adherents. Yes he knew as early as February 2020 that the fatality rate was pretty low…Yes, he deleted emails. Yes, lies tripped off his garrulous tongue. Yes, he approved aborted baby parts used in mice research. Yes and more yeses.
Even so, Governors Gavin Newsome and Andrew Cuomo outdid Fauci by a long chalk in the havoc they sowed, the preventable deaths they caused, and in the business collapse they cold-heartedly supervised. They too should be grilled by Senators.
Though we spare a thought for the commoners, in their hundreds of millions, they weren’t exactly blameless. The greater part, poltroons who caved to PC, were enamoured with a limpid rule of thumb guaranteeing the apocalypse that was Covid…
Related articles: “Fauci Tyrannus: To restore public trust, we must have accountability.” (Jacob Howland, American Mind)…“COVID-19: Fauci’s Holocaust” (Kevin Downey Jr., PJ Media)…“Collins and Fauci and the GOP’s Missed Opportunity” (Chuck Donovan, Washington Stand)
5) “The Typhus Rats of Los Angeles: A medieval disease is rocking the vermin-ridden county.” (Christopher F. Rufo, Ryan Thorpe, City Journal)
From the article — Rats, and the fleas that live on them, can be carriers of deadly diseases—including, most notably, the plague, which, in bubonic form, killed tens of millions of people and laid waste to cities in the Middle Ages. In L.A., however, the main concern is a different medieval disease: typhus.
Since 2009, the number of flea-borne typhus cases in L.A. has increased by a staggering 2,300 percent. Last year, the county recorded more cases than at any point in its history. Some patients have died. Behind the scenes, the authorities responsible for protecting the public admit that they lack the resources they need to get the situation under control.
The rats, meantime, spread disease in predictable ways. They feed on trash, fleas feed on those rats, and the infected fleas bite people, who in turn suffer anything from a mild illness treatable with antibiotics to a sickness that ends in death.
This City Journal investigation—based on interviews with leading rodent experts, on-the-ground reporting, and a review of hundreds of pages of documents obtained via public-records requests—reveals that Los Angeles County has allowed a disease once associated with the Middle Ages to terrorize a major metropolis.
Other Excellent Reads from this Week
* “Abortion Drugs In US Drinking Water: Another Horrifying Consequence Of The Culture Of Death” (Ken Ham, Harbinger’s Daily)
* “Left-Wing Violence Is Being Normalized: Liberal elites created a permission structure for extremism.” (James B. Meigs, (WSJ Free Expression)
* “The Original American Superhero: Young Washington tells an underdog tale for the ages.” (Jack Hunter, Modern Age)
* “Marijuana Overtakes Cigarettes, Alcohol as Most Used Daily Drug in U.S.” (Dan Hart, Washington Stand)
* “The Democrats are a menace to America’s Jews — Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in Michigan’s Democratic primary is an ominous sign.” (Joel Catkin, spiked!)