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Arthur Thorne at The Noticer: Tony Burke makes a mockery of democracy

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Tony Burke makes a mockery of democracy

A few days ago, on December 22, immigration minister Tony Burke uttered statements so morally repulsive and vindictive that they must rank as some of the most appalling in all of Australian history. That’s a tough job, since Burke is competing with a whole range of remarks made by ethically compromised Australian politicians over the past two weeks alone.

In contrast to the Islamists who cut like a scythe into our “social cohesion” by murdering 15 innocent people at Bondi a couple of weeks ago, Burke decided that they effectively don’t matter, and instead turned his gaze toward the National Socialist Network (NSN) who he claimed were “[taking] hate right to the threshold without using the words violence, and escape any further terrorist listing” (I apologise if anyone has trouble trying to make sense of Mr Burke’s poor phraseology). And with these remarks, Burke assured the Australian public that democracy shall not get in the way of his arbitrary political grievances against a non-violent political activist group.

For this crime (apparently, literally) of non-conformity to the expectations of malicious politicians, the NSN must be banned and branded as something akin to “terrorists” anyway. Which means that obeying the law doesn’t mean you are innocent, it just means the law hasn’t been sufficiently altered and curated to encompass those whom the state doesn’t like and wants to target.

This is not some biased strawman – Burke said this himself as clearly as one could ever hope, continuing in reference to the NSN:

“Their behaviour needs to be unacceptable; their behaviour needs to be unlawful; their behaviour needs to be enough that we can proscribe the organisation and prohibit their activity in Australia.”

Burke’s “needs to” is actually his own personal “wants to”, and since he holds the stick with which to beat his chosen target, he can seemingly do as he and the government pleases, making it all up as they go along. It is ad hoc state terror, which leads me to ask, who restrains those who lecture us from their podiums?

This cannot possibly hold up in the High Court. How could it even be possible, so possible that Burke feels confident enough to announce it publicly? It is not just blatantly premeditated political persecution, but it is an admittance that not only are the NSN not terrorists – Burke says they don’t meet the terrorist threshold, hence his announcement of a “new form of listing for those who do not meet the terrorist organisations” – but that their non-terrorism is so personally distasteful that everything should be done to cast some reality-contorting spell that will turn them into what the government clearly wants them to be.

It shouldn’t need to be said that an ethical and just system does not punish people for obeying the law and not being criminals. Burke is literally saying that while the NSN are not criminals, they ought to be, and that he is going to do his best to make them so.

But if a group is not criminal, then they should not be made into criminals without cause; and since no crimes have been committed on behalf of that organisation, there is no legal or moral justification to criminalise them.

No democratic politician should feel emboldened enough to declare that non-violence isn’t good enough, and that even being against violence in principle isn’t good enough if people like Burke appoint themselves the divine ideological arbiters of what people and organisations believe just because he doesn’t like them.

This is a horrific betrayal of every Australian who was brought up in believing in fairness and playing by the rules, for if the rules can be changed on a whim to the disadvantage of everyone but those in power, then the rules mean nothing. It should not require taking off one’s ideological blinders to see that.

It is even worse to suggest, as Burke does, that terrorist activity is not required for an organisation to be designated a “terrorist organisation”, or something akin to it. He uses the term “hate group”, but presumably the difference in practise will be minimal or non-existent, it just needs to be a nominally different definition (and vague in any case) to become legal.

Confusingly, Burke says that the listing will be “checked against previous behaviour”, but just moments prior he admits that their previous behaviour was not criminal.

So, what about the NSN’s “previous behaviour” can possibly lead to this new type of proscription that is not based on any kind of retroactive criminal “justice” or in making things that the NSN has previously done now a crime? And what have they done anyway? Attend protests, march down the street (as Albanese ridiculously likened to terrorism in the same breath as he discussed the Bondi attack only a few days ago), celebrate Australia Day, hold conferences, exercise in the park?

These things can hardly be considered criminal, let alone unique enough to warrant some kind of pseudo-terrorist designation. So, if it is not actions, then what is it?

The only thing left is ideology.

The aim of Burke’s program, the government’s program (which will no doubt garner support from the Liberal Party and others as well), will be to persecute organisations who profess (will they even need to profess?) an ideology or set of beliefs that the government wants outlawed.

I can see no other basis on which any legislation could try to ban the NSN. Of course, whatever the government did it was always going to be ideologically motivated, but now more so than ever they’re eschewing pretexts and just saying in so many words that the NSN (and organisations like it) will be banned for political non-conformity to the state’s ideological platform of multiculturalism, or whatever is supposed to constitute “social cohesion”, which seems to mean little more than eliminating any public discourse which could spark debate and discussion the government doesn’t like.

It is easy and unfortunately tempting to get conspiratorial since the NSN is apparently close to registering its political party, and now it just so happens that a terrorist attack at Bondi is used as a casus belli to target the NSN and outright ban them on the pretext that they merely exist and are anti-Semitic (unfortunately more than a few people have taken this superficial similarity to the Bondi terrorists and turned it into a casus foederis to target the NSN as well, though conveniently, this has not been done with regard to the anti-Zionist left). And from what we know about Bondi, it seems like the government just sort of let it happen.

We have already seen the government use the false pretext of the Dural caravan hoax to push for the laws they want, so we cannot be certain they didn’t do the same with their disregard to the threat posed by the Bondi attackers, although I don’t want to push this idea too far. However, it should perhaps underline the fact that no Australian should be too trusting of the government’s official narrative. It just seems highly convenient if nothing else that one of the Bondi attackers was known and still allowed to obtain firearms as recently as two years ago.

I’m more inclined to suspect the explanation has less to do with conspiracy, and more to do with the fact that the Australian government is filled with such credulous multicultural ideologues that their sensitivity to real threats like Islamic terrorism is inverted because of the perception they have of such people being a part of the multicultural “in-group”. This is why, despite their knowledge of Islamic terrorists and hate preachers, they have no time to bother with them, let alone address the religious motivations of actual terrorists when the worst happens. Not unlike when a left-wing terrorist sets off a bomb at the Land Forces Expo in Melbourne in 2024, and the individual is given a slap on the wrist.

This failure to take real violent threats seriously is the result of their idée fixe, not only with multiculturalism as a perennial and incontrovertible moral good (the Whiggish height of the progressive “ideal”), but conversely, their hatred of the enemies of multiculturalism, which leads them to vastly overestimate the supposed threat of right-wingers, epitomised by the spectre of neo-Nazism.

The explanation for this is simple: the latter only appear more threatening because they are the existential ideological opposition to the ruling class and its regime. Opposition to multiculturalism means opposition to their morality and worldview, and therefore a disruption of their social vision; hence the preoccupation with “social cohesion”, which is used by those in power to mean the assertion of the specifically multicultural social vision.

To make it unchallengeable they use “social cohesion” as a way to essentially cheat politics by bypassing scrutiny in democratic discourse in order to assert a faux-normative imperative, which means a perception of “safety” at the expense of civil liberties and rights.

In practical terms, this means “hate speech” laws to bully the dissenters into silence.

In a real democracy these ideological disputes would otherwise be resigned to the realm of politics and theoretical discourse and debate, and would have nothing at all to do with stoking fears about “violent extremism” just because people like Burke naturally want to preoccupy themselves with their political opponents rather than the actually violent client groups that are more likely to commit terrorism.

And so, it seems likely that no matter what, the government would have acted in this way under whatever circumstances so long as it meant training their sights on groups like the NSN. In this case a pretext wasn’t even necessary, they just needed a big enough general crisis to have an excuse, regardless of how tenuous, to do what they wanted to do anyway.

This fact should go some way, in my view, to discrediting the conspiratorial idea on behalf of some of the right-wing that the NSN are “feds” (this is a problem because it gives people an excuse not to criticise the government’s despotism, and to demoralise and avoid any political unity which could help challenge what’s happening), since they didn’t have to do anything to be effectively framed as the guilty party over recent events – probably for coolly calculated reasons, since most people, it may have been hoped, are so morally offended by the concept of a Nazi that they’d forget all about what has actually happened and who was to blame.

Since I’ve mostly discussed recent remarks made by Tony Burke about the NSN, it seems fitting to quote one of the individuals who has suffered most immediately as a result of Burke’s corrupt and ideologically motivated misuse of power, Matthew Gruter, who was instantaneously deported from Australia for engaging in democratic political discourse by peacefully protesting, and wrote on X:

“You may not like or agree with everything the NSN does.. But “judge a man by his enemies”. All the worst politicians are treating them like the biggest threat to the system.”

Since I have confidence that the average Australian who is aware of what’s happening would not be in support of it, and do not like these politicians in any case (Burke himself was booed recently), I think Gruter has a point.

The Australian people are mostly threatened by overzealous, controlling, and manipulative politicians who want to take away our civil liberties to enrich themselves and silence our disapproval. Setting a precedent by banning peaceful political organisations like the NSN does nothing for our democracy or our freedoms, but it certainly benefits our politicians.

Think about that.

In any case, the most obvious political conclusion is that the Australian government cares much less about actual terrorism than it pretends to (how many words have been spent on condemning the religious ideology of the Bondi terrorists?), and fears much more that peaceful political activists might organise and try to challenge the government using the universally accepted democratic methods that are supposed to be the only legitimate ones.

This, says Tony Burke, “needs to be unacceptable” and “unlawful”.

The only conclusions that can be drawn, therefore, is that the game is rigged and democracy is fake.

Header image: Tony Burke on December 22 (Australian Parliament).

Mondoweiss: One excavator, 10,000 bodies, a sea of rubble: inside Gaza’s effort to retrieve and bury its dead

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Under the relative calm of a ceasefire, Civil Defense crews in Gaza are undertaking the monumental feat of recovering thousands of bodies still trapped under the rubble.
By 
Palestinian crews in Gaza dig mass graves amidst a campaign to recover the remains of bodies that have been trapped under the rubble of buildings since the start of the genocide. December 2025. (Anas Ahmed/Mondoweiss)
Palestinian crews in Gaza dig mass graves amidst a campaign to recover the remains of bodies that have been trapped under the rubble of buildings since the start of the genocide. December 2025. (Anas Ahmed/Mondoweiss)

Fatima Salem waits outside anxiously, as rescue crews dig through the rubble of her family’s home in Gaza City on December 15th. With bated breath, she clings to the hope that all 60 of her family members – brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, and grandchildren – who were buried under the rubble after an Israeli airstrike targeted their building, will be rescued.

But this was not a typical rescue operation, and Fatima was not waiting for signs of life. She knew everyone was dead. That’s because the airstrike on her family’s home happened almost exactly two years ago, on December 19, 2023, just two months into the genocide.

Members of the Salem family stand next to a mass grave to bid farewell to their family members who were killed in December 2023, and recently recovered by civil defense crews. Deir al-Balah, Gaza Strip. December 2025.
Members of the Salem family stand next to a mass grave to bid farewell to their family members who were killed in December 2023, and recently recovered by civil defense crews. Deir al-Balah, Gaza Strip. December 2025.(Anas Ahmed/Mondoweiss)

The 60 members of the Salem family are some of an estimated 10,000 Palestinians whose bodies remain trapped under the extensive rubble across the Gaza Strip. Due to two years of active Israeli bombardment, the targeting and killing of civil defense crews, and the lack of heavy duty machinery required to excavate the tons of concrete rubble, rescue missions in Gaza have been largely stalled.

But on December 15, the Civil Defense in the Gaza Strip announced the start of a long recovery process of bodies that have remained under the rubble for two years. The operations are focused only on the areas in the Gaza Strip not actively being occupied by the Israeli military, which accounts for roughly half of the territory.

The first rescue mission was for the Salem family in Gaza City.

“Here I lost every person dear to me; they are the closest people to me—my brothers and sisters and their families. I lost everyone in this place,” Fatima Salem cried. When she heard about the rescue mission, she rushed to the scene of the destroyed building, where the souls of her relatives had remained trapped for two years.

She said that her family was targeted on December 19, 2023, after they fled from northern Gaza to Gaza City due to the intensification of shelling and fighting in their residential area. They found refuge in a building whose residents had evacuated, and gathered there with their children and families. No one who was in the building at the time of the bombing survived.

“I want to see them, to embrace them, to bid them farewell,” she said as she stood before rows of  bones and skulls wrapped in white plastic shrouds, laid out on the ground in front of her. Some have been identified by their present surviving relatives, while others have not yet been identified.

Omar Suleiman, a member of the forensic department at the Civil Defense, was working at the scene of the Salem family. He described a painstaking process of trying to identify and record the identities of the deceased, saying that crews are documenting descriptions of the condition of the bodies in terms of form, height, and the level of decomposition they have reached, along with preserving a DNA sample when possible.

Workers from the Gaza Ministry of Health transport the bodies recovered from the Salem family building from Gaza City to the cemetery in Deir al-Balah. December 2025, Gaza City. (Anas Ahmed/Mondoweiss)
Workers from the Gaza Ministry of Health transport the bodies recovered from the Salem family building from Gaza City to the cemetery in Deir al-Balah. December 2025, Gaza City. (Anas Ahmed/Mondoweiss)

According to videos published by the Civil Defense on its Telegram channel, what is recovered from the remains of the martyrs is sometimes only bones, not always complete skulls, but rather bones from the chest and the feet, making identification a difficult matter.

According to Suleiman, the level of decomposition in the bodies was very high, which made it difficult for families to identify them. The lack of tools and technology for advanced DNA testing has also made the identification process more difficult. He said that crews were working “with very limited tools and under difficult and exhausting conditions.”

Civil Defense crews say they recovered all the bodies from the building, all belonging to the martyrs of the Salem family, in addition to 17 more bodies buried in the vicinity around the building. After two years, Fatima Salem was finally able to bid farewell.

Thousands of bodies, limited resources

In Khan Younis in southern Gaza, on December 20, recovery operations began in areas of the city, starting with the martyrs of the Abu Hilal family. They were killed on August 13, 2025.

Huda Abu Hilal, in her 20s, was the sole survivor of a strike that targeted her family’s home on August 13, 2025. Though she was inside the building at the time, just before the airstrike, Huda’s mom had asked her to go downstairs for something. At that moment, the home was bombed, and everyone except Huda was killed.

“All my family was killed except me—my mother and father, my sisters, and their children—all of them were martyred,” she told Mondoweiss, adding that because her neighborhood remained under an evacuation order after the bombing, crews were not able to access her home to rescue her family.

Piles of white plastic bags carrying the remains of Palestinians whose bodies were retrieved from under the rubble two years after they were killed.
At the morgue of the Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, a pile of white plastic body bags carry the remains of members of the Salem family, who were killed in an Israeli airstrike in December 2023. Their bodies were retrieved two years later, as part of an ongoing effort by authorities in Gaza to retrieve an estimated 10,000 bodies of martyred Palestinians. December 2025, Gaza City. (Anas Ahmed/Mondoweiss)

At the site, Samah Hamad, head of the forensic department of the Civil Defense, described the challenge ahead for crews.

He said that in Khan Younis alone, there are 75 destroyed buildings with hundreds of bodies buried under the rubble that need to be recovered. Many of the buildings, he said, are located in the area behind the ‘yellow line’ that are inaccessible to Palestinian crews. But even in the areas that they can access, the rescue mission is slow moving.

Hamad notes that the slowdown in these operations is due to the fact that all crews in the Gaza Strip are working with very limited equipment, as only one large excavator is being used in multiple cities and areas in the Strip.

Mass graves built from the rubble of destroyed homes in Deir al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip.
Mass graves built from the rubble of destroyed homes in Deir al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip. December 2025. (Anas Ahmed/Mondoweiss)

For the past two months since the ceasefire was announced, Huda said she would pass by the rubble of the home often, even if just to recite a prayer for her family still trapped beneath the rubble, hoping that they would be rescued soon.

“Now I can honor my martyred family by burying them, and we can move them to graves and make visiting them a habit,” Huda said.

Believable? “Antisemitism in Australia jumps 600% after Bondi attack” | The Jerusalem Post

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“The Australian government is not doing enough to uproot the phenomenon at its source,” Chikli alleged.

Antisemitic incidents in Australia rose by 600% in days following Bondi Beach massacre

Online antisemitic discourse, reports of verbal attacks, and property damage, in Australia spiked by up to 600% following the Bondi Beach terror attack, Israeli government data shows.

People gather at the floral tribute at Bondi Beach to honour the victims of a mass shooting targeting a Hanukkah celebration on Sunday at Bondi Beach, in Sydney, Australia, December 16, 2025.(photo credit: REUTERS/Jeremy Piper)ByYOAV ETIELDECEMBER 26, 2025 05:23

Antisemitic incidents in Australia rose by 600% after the Bondi Beach Hanukkah massacre in Sydney, Israel’s Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism Ministry found in data published on Thursday.

According to the data, in the two days following the mass shooting, there was a sharp spike in expressions of hatred against Jews, alongside physical and verbal violence in public.

Before the terror attack, there were approximately 3,000 posts containing mentions of antisemitism published per day in Australia. However, on the day of the attack, this rose to 17,100, representing an increase of 420%, peaking the following day with over 21,500 posts, illustrating an increase of 600%.

Even after social platform moderating procedures removed some of the posts, the amount of hostile antisemitic discourse remained five times higher than the routine average seen before the massacre.

Data was collected using a continuous monitoring system that identified terms clearly associated with antisemitic rhetoric, including slurs such as “Jewboy” and Holocaust denial terms, while filtering out neutral mentions.

A car decorated for Hanukkah was firebombed overnight in Melbourne’s east, with authorities launching an investigation into the incident. (credit: SCREENSHOT/X/VIA SECTION 27A OF THE COPYRIGHT ACT)The Diaspora Affairs Ministry emphasized that the wave of online hatred did not remain confined to the digital sphere, but rather, was accompanied by verbal attacks in person against Jewish students, and damage to property, which created a sense of threat within the local community.

Against the backdrop of these findings, the ministry announced that it is working in cooperation with Australia’s Jewish community and other Israeli government ministries to issue alerts and provide support to educational and community institutions.

Chikli speaks out, denounces Australian gov’t lack of action

Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism Minister Amichai Chikli addressed the severity of the situation, stating that the data illustrated the depth of the problem.

“The Australian government is not doing enough to uproot the phenomenon at its source,” Chikli alleged.

According to him, “online incitement is part of a dangerous web of hatred that increases the threat to the Jewish community. This is a time for real and determined  action.”

JTA: Ben Shapiro is mounting a last stand against right-wing antisemitism. It’s not going well.

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Very encouraging to see Shapiro flailing away futilely at Tucker, Candace and Fuentes. For all their faults, the tide seems to be turning. People can’t unsee what happened and is happening in Gaza. Even the NYTimes asks, “The Truce Is 2 Months Old. So Why Have Hundreds of Gazans Been Killed?” The answer of course is that the Israelis never intended to honor the truce.

The cease-fire in Gaza is more than two months old. But the killing of Palestinians has not yet stopped for more than a day or two at a time.

Death can come from straying across the Yellow Line, the poorly demarcated border between eastern Gaza, where the Israeli military has entrenched itself, and the western half, where Hamas is seeking to reestablish control over Gaza’s two million-plus residents.

Dozens of times since the truce went into effect on Oct. 10, Palestinians have been killed for crossing east, knowingly or not.

Ben Shapiro is mounting a last stand against right-wing antisemitism. It’s not going well.

Megyn Kelly said Shapiro, not Tucker Carlson, is inflaming antisemitism.

Ben Shapiro gives a speech at Turning Point USA
US conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro speaks during Turning Point’s annual AmericaFest conference in remembrance of late right-wing political activist Charlie Kirk, in Phoenix, Arizona on Dec. 18, 2025. (Olivier Touron / AFP via Getty Images)

On the first day of AmericaFest, Turning Point USA’s convention in Phoenix, Ben Shapiro lit into a host of conservatives that he said were “frauds and grifters.”

He listed Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly and Steve Bannon as “charlatans who claim to speak in the name of principle but actually traffic in conspiracism and dishonesty.” Together, he said on Thursday, they presented a danger to the conservative movement.

Shapiro was extending an assault that he began earlier in the week during a speech at the Heritage Foundation, a heart of conservatism that has been thrown into turmoil by its president’s backing of Carlson after Carlson hosted the Holocaust denier and avowed antisemite Nick Fuentes on his podcast.

An Orthodox Jew and avowed supporter of Israel, the conservative pundit has been mounting a public effort to repudiate antisemitism and similarly aligned forces within his own party. His campaign comes as the GOP’s younger flank have become increasingly disillusioned with American support for Israel in the aftermath of its war in Gaza.

Conspiracy theories about Jews and Israel have proliferated in young right-wing spaces, to the point where Shapiro — who has long preferred to focus on conservative culture-war issues — is now staking his future on rooting them out.

“If you host a Hitler apologist, Nazi-loving, anti-American piece of refuse like Nick Fuentes,” Shapiro told the AmericaFest crowd, “if you have that person on your show and you proceed to glaze him, you ought to own it.” Shapiro used a Gen Z slang term for flattery to allude to Carlson’s interview with Fuentes, elsewhere blasting other rivals for promoting conspiracy theories linking Jeffrey Epstein to the Mossad.

Tucker Carlson at Turning Point USA

Conservative political commentator and podcast host Tucker Carlson speaks at Turning Point’s annual AmericaFest conference, in remembrance of late right-wing political activist Charlie Kirk, in Phoenix, Arizona on Dec. 18, 2025. (Olivier Touron / AFP via Getty Images)

But Shapiro’s address did not go over well with everybody. Much of the energy at AmericaFest, which TPUSA staged in the shadow of the shocking murder by the group’s founder Charlie Kirk earlier this year, appeared to be lining up behind the figures he targeted — several of whom, like Carlson, also took the stage.

“To hear calls for deplatforming and denouncing people at a Charlie Kirk event, I’m like, what? That’s hilarious,” Carlson said in his own speech. Yet he also took the time to defend his thoughts about Jews. “I’m not an antisemite for a very specific reason. Not because it’s unpopular or my donors don’t like it. I’m not an antisemite because antisemitism is immoral in my religion.”

Carlson wasn’t alone in his disdain for the Daily Wire CEO who, for years, had been considered a tastemaker for the young right. Steve Bannon, as part of a speech in which he also called to “re-Christianize America” and mocked the recent murder of Jewish director and Trump critic Rob Reiner, called Shapiro a “cancer” to conservatism.

And Owens, Shapiro’s own former protege, said, “Fuck you, Ben Shapiro.” She made the comment on her YouTube page, where she has been promoting conspiracy theories that Israel had some involvement in Kirk’s murder.

And in remarks to Vanity Fair while at the conference, Kelly, too, countered Shapiro. The former Fox News host blasted him as overly concerned with Israel and said that he and Bari Weiss, the Jewish CBS News editor-in-chief recently in hot water after she pulled a “60 Minutes” story that reflected badly on the Trump administration, are themselves fueling antisemitism.

“Tucker is not making antisemites. They are,” Kelly, a friend of Carlson’s, told Vanity Fair.

She went on to describe Shapiro and Weiss as part of “this very loud group of pro-Israel activists that is trying to make this the litmus test about whether you get to call yourself a conservative, and they lack standing to do that.”

Other conference attendees Vanity Fair spoke to said they were siding with Shapiro’s opponents, and some were happy to debate Hitler’s merits in-between sessions.

Shapiro’s effort to hold a line in the sand is reverberating through the highest levels of government. Vice President JD Vance, who also spoke at the conference and is himself close with Carlson, pointedly did not denounce antisemitism during his own address. Instead, Vance seemed to discourage the idea that conservatives should be excommunicating anyone based on their views.

The showdown at AmericaFest was the latest visible sign of how the next generation of conservatives are increasingly turning against Israel while embracing antisemitic talking points.

Openly antisemitic influencers like Fuentes and Myron Gaines are enjoying a rise in popularity on the right, and Gaines attended AmericaFest himself. The podcaster wore a sweater with a picture of Cookie Monster over an oven and the phrase “Let Em Cook” — a right-wing meme mocking Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust.

Donald Trump Jr. and Megyn Kelly speak onstage at Smart Financial Centre on October 23, 2025 in Sugar Land, Texas. (Marcus Ingram/Getty Images)

A recent focus group of Gen Z conservatives, conducted by conservative think tank The Manhattan Institute, also found that several of them espoused antisemitic and pro-Hitler views. One declared that Jews are “a force for evil,” adding, “I don’t see why we support Israel. I think Israel’s a very evil state. The genocide in Gaza, killing all these poor people. And the only reason we really support them is because they are the biggest donors. We have AIPAC, and these are all Jewish-run organizations.”

Asked what they thought of Hitler, one respondent said, “I think he was a great leader, to be honest.” Another, who called himself “Jewish by blood,” said he had read “Mein Kampf” and concluded, “I strangely understood where he was coming from as far as wanting to improve the national state of Germany.”

Meanwhile, Rep. Elise Stefanik, a pro-Israel MAGA firebrand who had taken on campus antisemitism as a central cause, announced on Friday she was dropping her bid for New York Governor. Stefanik will also not seek reelection to Congress, leaving conservative (and many centrist) Jews with one less ally on the right who seemed to have a fast track to Trump.

A right-wing schism, with Jews and Israel at the center of the divide, is increasingly taking shape. More conservative intellectuals continue to exit the Heritage Foundation, the influential think tank, over its founder’s defense of Carlson. Several are migrating over to a new venture started by former Vice President Mike Pence, a pro-Israel Evangelical who has come out in opposition to Trump since his work in the first Trump administration.

It’s all building up to what Andrew Kolvet, a close friend and associate of Kirk who has taken over many TPUSA duties including hosting Kirk’s eponymous show since the founder’s murder, says are the conservative movement’s new flashpoints: Israel and antisemitism.

“Charlie would go to some campuses, and like 50 to 60% of the questions were about Israel,” Kolvet recently told The New York Times’ Ross Douthat. “For two years that was true.” Young conservatives have been questioning not only the influence of pro-Israel lobbyists like AIPAC, but also the entire US-Israel relationship, Kolvet said.

Kolvet added, “I think Israel has become a symbolic battle about: What does ‘America First’ really mean?”

Come All Ye Fake Christians

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My handy guide to spotting them.

In honor of Christmas, this week we’ll discuss the worst advertisement for my religion: Christians. Sometimes it seems as if there are more fake, phony, fraud Christians than real Christians, but that’s because I read The New York Times (my North Star, which I believe implicitly).

While not dispositive, it’s at least a red flag when the Times writes respectfully about a person’s Christianity.

We’ll begin with Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla.

Last year, Lankford negotiated a secret deal with the Democrats that would have formalized our country’s surrender to open borders. The so-called “bipartisan border security bill” — Lankford is not only allegedly a “Christian,” but, also allegedly, a “Republican” — codified Joe Biden’s illegal and treasonous border policies, requiring all future presidents to continue admitting millions of illegal aliens every year, just like Biden did, in violation of existing law.

(What’s the matter with you, Oklahoma? How could a state like yours end up with a senator like this?)

Naturally, the February 2024 Times article on this wonderful bipartisan border bill stressed Lankford’s Christianity, noting that he “previously ran the largest Christian youth camp in the country and has spoken often about how his faith guides his policy positions.” In this one case, the Times did not refer to Christians’ authoritarianism, homophobia, fear of “the other,” etc.

The photo that ran with the article showed Lankford piously praying with his family, eyes closed and heads bowed, in front of an audience. It’s the gayest photo I’ve ever seen. (At the Times, that’s a plus.)

In a May 2024 article about Christian parents nonplussed when their sons start wearing skirts and calling themselves “Tulip,” there could be no mistaking the good guys for the bad guys.

The appalled parents, according to the Times, are “afraid of change,” expressing “anti-trans fear and zeal,” holding “deeply ingrained notions of masculinity and femininity,” who have “mocked, kicked out and denied communion” to transgenders. (Editor’s note: The “deeply ingrained notions” are also known as “reality.”) These people leveled “vociferous opposition to everything from drag shows to hormone treatments.” (What squares.)

By contrast, the pro-trans Christian counselors are “expert voices,” trying to create “a space of curiosity as opposed to judgment,” who say things like, “we have to allow for questions” and instruct parents of trans kids to use their preferred pronouns “as a form of hospitality.”

(They’d also appreciate it you’d all stop “dead naming” Jesus’ parents. All hail the Blessed Virgin Harry and their life partner Josephine.)

Pretending a boy is a girl and a girl is a boy isn’t nuts, it’s a “celebratory embrace of new identities.” Just sign right here, and we’ll celebrate by whisking your son off for his penilectomy.

Notwithstanding the happy face the Times tried to put on teenage mental illness, the Goebbels-like fad of poisoning and mutilating kids seems to be falling out of favor. If so, one line from the article is looking pretty good: “In many ways, conservative Christians have become the face of the American anti-trans movement.”

I know about Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt’s peculiar version of Christianity not from the Times’ extravagant praise, but from his burbling on about what a big Christian he is whenever he’s about to ignore the cries of crime victims.

When commuting the death sentence of Julius Jones, who committed the minor infraction of murdering businessman Paul Howell in front of his family, then stealing his car, Stitt said, “I grew up in the Christian faith since attending church in my mother’s womb. I memorized the books of the Bible when I was 8 years old. … I served as the song leader for my hometown congregation …,” and on and on.

Earlier that same year, in January 2021, Stitt had released multiple felon Lawrence Paul Anderson from prison, cutting a 20-year sentence down to three years. A month after being sprung, Anderson killed his neighbor, cut out her heart, cooked it and served it to his family with potatoes. Then he killed most of them, too. (You don’t serve potatoes with a human heart; you serve rice.)

Again: What gives, Oklahoma?

Only God knows what is in a person’s heart, blah, blah, blah, but these people are ridiculous.

No, Sen. Lankford, Christianity does not call on us to destroy the last Christian country on Earth. And no, Gov. Stitt, the loftiest Christian goal is not to release Black men from prison. (Or White men, but that’s not what gives fake Christians their self-righteous glow.)

As for those Christians who are “the face of the American anti-trans movement,” perhaps you’ve heard of the last 2,000 years of human history? Christians have always stood apart from the bien-pensant, opposing accepted practices like polygamy, gladiatorial contests, sacrificial offerings to the gods, slavery, abandonment of widows, ostentatious displays of wealth, sexual degeneracy, etc.

Understandably, this imperviousness to popular opinion is upsetting to the Times, the mouthpiece of organized liberal hectoring.

The prophet Isaiah says, “Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil.” That ought to be the Times’ motto, “Calling evil good, and good evil.” Praise from these degenerates is as good as the mark of the devil.

Merry Christmas!

COPYRIGHT 2025 ANN COULTER

Tucker interviews Matt Gaetz: Anti-Semitism is what Jews don’t like

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Matt Gaetz: Ted Cruz’s Delusional 2028 Bid, the ADL, and Identity Politics Taking Over the Right

Surprisingly good interview with Matt Gaetz. Tucker  does his usual schtick on the need for universalism and disavowals against anti-Semitism. He says he’ll donate to Jewish organizations if they  agree to stop the anti-White hate; good luck with that. Gaetz defines anti-Semitism as what Jews don’t like. The untranscribed clip at 00’37” from Rabbi Yehuda Kaplan who was just appointed by Trump (!!) to be special envoy on anti-Semitism  is scary. Kosher food in all the embassies and total propaganda, whether it’s getting Muslims to use textbooks approved by Kaplan to changing algorithms on social media to censor posts they don’t like with the aid of Jews in social media companies. Gaetz’s very cynical view of Congress, etc.

Matt Gaetz: And obviously, ethnonationalism is the object in Israel. It’s the organizing principle of the country. But oftentimes, people are pursuing the policies here in the United States that benefit Israel, and our own interests and the interests of our people and the plight you describe that so many young people have endured is not a priority.

Tucker [00:07:46] White young people that’s why they’re mad why do you think they’re mad because they’ve been told that the country they were born in like officially discriminates against them that’s ongoing

Matt Gaetz [00:07:56] I don’t think it’s just even white people. I think it, it’s also non-white people who see the attack on white culture, not as an attack on like colonialism, but as an attacking success and progress in order. I know a lot of non- white people, they’re like, actually, uh, this, this anti white activity that’s going on is going to make me less prosperous and less safe. And I’m kind of here like for all the criticisms we as whites have taken. We did an okay job setting up an orderly world and we’ve made some mistakes along the way and you’ve got to reconcile those. But at the end, what society would you replace with like what we’ve set up in the Western world? Is there some like vision of the way civilizations were built in Africa or the Far East that we would gleefully adopt?

Jews not happy with TPUSA — Tucker Carlson named “anti-Semite of the year” (despite disavowals)

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A Jewish take: Not happy with TPUSA

A QUICK WORD WITH Jewish Insider’s JOSH KRAUSHAAR
The kids aren’t alright. —

That’s the unmistakable takeaway from a weekend filled with shocking developments surrounding the views of young conservatives, punctuated by a Turning Point USA conference that turned into a proxy war between mainstream voices led by Ben Shapiro, looking to create guardrails against antisemites and conspiracy theorists within the MAGA movement, against a growing cadre of bad-faith right-wing influencers leading the charge to embrace extremist voices into the conservative coalition.

The conference concluded with Vice President JD Vance all but taking the side of the extremists, while offering fulsome praise to his friend Tucker Carlson as an essential part of the Republican Party coalition.

The last several days also featured news of an eye-opening Manhattan Institute focus group of Gen Z Nashville-area conservatives reluctant to offer any negative reaction toward Adolf Hitler and sharing numerous antisemitic stereotypes about Jews. (One 29-year-old woman offered this representative reaction about Hitler: “I think he was a great leader, to be honest. I think what he was going for was terrible, but I think he showed very strong leadership values.”)

The weekend ended with a Jewish Insider scoop that a Trump administration nominee for a senior position at the State Department has a long track record of making derogatory comments about the Jewish community, characterizing Jews as religiously incorrect and in need of conversion.

This moment was further underscored by the hideously antisemitic tirade that Candace Owens went on over the last few days, barely eliciting any serious pushback from conservative movement leaders. Meanwhile, former journalist Megyn Kelly, during her own speech Friday at the TPUSA conference, chose to go after Shapiro and CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss even as Kelly has publicly steered clear of criticizing Owens, citing the fact that she’s a young mother and a personal friend. (Shapiro, she said, is no longer a friend after he criticized her in his speech Thursday night.)

Shapiro, long one of the leading voices on the right, opened the conference with a warning that the conservative movement is in danger from “charlatans who claim to speak in the name of principle but actually traffic in conspiracism and dishonesty, who offer nothing but bile and despair.”

He called out Tucker Carlson, Owens and Kelly by name. “We must not let fear of audience anger deter us from telling the truth; we must not let fear of other hosts deter us from telling the truth,” Shapiro warned. “The fact that Candace has been vomiting all sorts of hideous and conspiratorial nonsense into the public square for years on end while others fly cover for her is … cowardly.”

JTA: StopAntisemitism names Tucker Carlson ‘Antisemite of the Year’ as 2024 winner Candace Owens ramps up anti-Jewish rhetoric

The ignominious award came as Carlson said antisemitism was un-Christian at the Turning Point USA convention.

The activist group StopAntisemitism has awarded the conservative personality Tucker Carlson its ignominious honor of “Antisemite of the Year,” citing his frequent invocation of classic antisemitic stereotypes.

The announcement comes as Carlson sits at the center of controversy on the American right about whether extremists should be welcomed in the Republican Party. It also marks the second year in a row that StopAntisemitism has selected a right-wing figure for its accolade, after years of awarding the mantle to mostly left-wing figures.

“Carlson mainstreams antisemitism by platforming and praising Holocaust revisionists and Nazi apologists, while hiding behind irony and plausible deniability,” the group said in a statement. “By legitimizing extremist voices and weaponizing conspiratorial imagery at massive scale, he has helped drag antisemitic ideas back into the mainstream.”

A watchdog presence with more than 300,000 followers on X, StopAntisemitism regularly mobilizes against activists and social media posts. The group has faced criticism for what some perceive as an inordinate focus on Muslim personalities, pro-Palestinian actions and non-prominent individuals. Its defenders deny that, pointing out that StopAntisemitism also regularly spotlights neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers on the right.

Its finalists for Antisemite of the Year included pro-Palestinian celebrities Ms. Rachel, Cynthia Nixon and Marcia Cross; mixed-martial-arts athlete and Holocaust denier Bryce Mitchell; two personalities associated with left-wing network The Young Turks; and social media personalities on both the far left (Guy Christensen) and far right (Stew Peters).

Carlson received the accolade on Sunday night, at the end of a weekend in which he was a keynote speaker at the convention of Turning Point USA, the young-conservatives group founded by Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated this fall. In its announcement, StopAntisemitism noted Carlson’s speech at Kirk’s memorial service, in which he described the murder of Jesus in a way that both his critics and fans interpreted as implying that Jews or Israelis had been behind Kirk’s assassination.

At the convention, the Jewish pundit Ben Shapiro continued his campaign against Carlson and Carlson declared himself to free of the anti-Jewish animus that he has long been criticized as propagating.

“Let me just affirm one final time. Not only am I not an antisemite — and I would say so if I was — I’m not an antisemite for a very specific reason,” Carlson said in his speech. “Not because it’s unpopular or my donors don’t like it. I don’t have any donors. I’m not an antisemite because anti-semitism is immoral in my religion. It is immoral to hate people for how they were born.”

It was the same explanation that Vice President JD Vance offered earlier this month when he said in an NBC News interview that he believed antisemitism is wrong.

In his own speech to Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest, Vance again refrained from criticizing extremists in the Republican Party, saying that he opposes “purity tests” for inclusion in the conservative movement. He also said he believed that antisemitism in the United States was being fueled by “a real backlash” against U.S. aid to Israel..

As the convention was underway, last year’s “Antisemite of the Year,” the right-wing streamer Candace Owens, embarked on a four-hour broadcast eviscerating Shapiro; amplifying antisemitic theories, including that Jews controlled the slave trade; and promoting a classic work of antisemitism by August Rohling, a German Catholic who believed in the blood libel and argued that the Talmud is a secret guide used by Jews for nefarious purposes. Rohling died in 1931.

Daily Caller article”

Vice President J.D. Vance delivered a fiery speech Sunday, closing down AmericaFest by commenting on the growing rift inside the conservative movement.

Vance proclaimed that “every American is invited” to the America First movement, adding that “we have far more important work to do than canceling each other.” While the VP didn’t call anyone out by name, he offered a direct repudiation of Ben Shapiro’s speech Thursday calling Daily Caller co-founder Tucker Carlson, right-wing podcaster Candace Owens, Steve Bannon and others “frauds and grifters.”

“President Trump did not build the greatest coalition in politics by running his supporters through endless, self-defeating purity tests,” Vance remarked. “I didn’t bring a list of conservatives to denounce or to deplatform,” he said. “Let me just say the best way to honor Charlie is that none of us here should be doing something after Charlie’s death that he himself refused to do in life.” (RELATED: Megyn Kelly Updates AmericaFest As To Whether She And Ben Shapiro Are Still Friends)

Vance went on to say that “we build by adding, by growing, not by tearing down.” Vance then added that Charlie Kirk “understood that any family can have its disagreements, its tough conversations, we can learn and improve and treat one another better, we can love each other despite the disagreements. But winning demands teamwork.”

Carlson dismissed Shapiro’s attacks, calling it akin to “watching your dog do your taxes, while Kelly responded Friday, saying Shapiro “had the nerve to call me a friend right before he called me a despicable coward.”

Erika Kirk endorsed Vance for president in 2028. The conference drew over 30,000 attendees.