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Elon Musk on immigration, remigration, White fertility and the traitors among us

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This is by Jamelle Bouie, a Black NYTimes columnist. So, not surprising. But Musk is clearly the most mainstream voice articulating anti-immigration, pro-remigration, pro-White fertility views, with a healthy dose of condemning the traitors among us. In short, Musk’s views are the views articulated here, except that we attempt to show clearly how the disaster condemned by Musk came about. And we identify the traitors.  The left would love to shut him up, free speech be damned. Bouie of course hates Musk and tries to connect him to William Pierce’s The Turner Diaries. The left cannot tolerate even one voice articulating these ideas because they know that the fears of White dispossession are solidly based and that they resonate among millions of White people.

Why Do We Tolerate Elon Musk’s Racist Commentary?

Elon Musk standing before white stars on a blue backdrop.
Credit…Ioulex for The New York Times
Jamelle Bouie

By Jamelle Bouie

Opinion Columnist

“The Turner Diaries” is a work of white supremacist agitprop. It purports to be the diary of a neo-Nazi militant, Earl Turner, who is working to overthrow the United States government — or as the book calls it, “the System” — through a group called “the Organization.” Turner castigates “the System” for promoting integration, encouraging nonwhite immigration and placing Jewish people, Black Americans and other minorities in positions of authority over whites.

Among other atrocities, the novel describes nuclear attacks on predominantly Black cities, a Holocaust of Jewish Americans, the total ethnic cleansing of California, the subjugation of women and the “Day of the Rope” — a mass public lynching of white people deemed “race traitors” for their relationships with nonwhites. The book’s epilogue describes a future after the “Great Revolution” in which the former United States is now an all-white, utopian garrison state led by the Organization, which went on to export its revolution and exterminate nonwhites worldwide.

The white power movement in the United States, notes the historian Augusta Dell’Omo in “Saving Apartheid: White Internationalism at the End of the Cold War,” “looked to white southern Africa for inspiration as it planned for the coming ‘race war.’” This apocalyptic fantasy of racial conflict in places such as Zimbabwe and South Africa shaped “The Turner Diaries.” And in turn the novel, first serialized in the pages of a white nationalist periodical in 1975 and then published as a stand-alone volume in 1978, became a touchstone for the American and global far right.

“The Order,” a white supremacist terrorist group responsible for three killings, including the murder of the Denver talk-radio host Alan Berg, took its name from the book. And Timothy McVeigh, who bombed the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, carried passages from the book on his person and once sold the book at gun shows.

The ideas, images and language of “The Turner Diaries” have long since entered the gestalt of far-right ideology. The book hovers there even when it isn’t mentioned. In his manifesto, for example, Dylann Roof — who murdered nine people at the Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, S.C. — frames himself as a martyr and calls on white Americans to fight a race war against Black people.

Today, you don’t have to look far or dig deep to see the ambient influence of “The Turner Diaries” on the far right. You need just to spend a little time in the online world of the richest man on the planet, Elon Musk (although to be clear there is no direct evidence that Musk has read the book).

The Musk of the mainstream media is an enthusiastic, if awkward, technologist, industrialist and would-be government reformer, as seen in his now-defunct Department of Government Efficiency. But Musk spends much of his time on X, his social media website, where he amplifies far-right accounts and shares his own white nationalist, anti-immigrant politics for all the world to see.

Over the past month in particular, he has adopted the imagery of a recent film, “Citizen Vigilante,” in which the actor Armie Hammer spends the run time playing a Charles Bronson-esque character who targets alleged criminals, framed mostly as Arab and African migrants. Musk uses that imagery to state his views about what must be done to save Western civilization.

“Yes,” replied Musk to an image of a gun-toting Hammer clad in black with the caption, “First the traitors then the invaders.” He also shared a post from a different user who explained that the point of “Citizen Vigilante,” in which the Hammer character “spends the first half of the movie murdering white people not migrants,” is that you must “always hang a traitor before you hang an enemy.” Musk repeated this several times, including in a post that simply said, “Traitors before invaders.”

Last week, Musk again posted that we must “Deal with traitors before invaders” and then said a few days later that “Anyone who opposes remigration is a traitor.”

“Remigration” is the call, from far-right European political parties, to forcibly remove nonwhite citizens to their supposed countries of origin, regardless of whether they are immigrants or native-born. It is essentially a form of ethnic cleansing and it is envisioned as a response to the supposed “Great Replacement” of white Europeans with nonwhites, an idea originating from a different work of far-right fiction, “The Camp of the Saints,” published in 1973.

As Musk sees it, opponents of remigration are traitors to “the West.” And as “traitors” their proper fate, according to the logic of his posts, is to be killed as punishment for their role in the demographic transformation of majority-white nations and, presumably, as a warning to those who might pollute the national bloodstream by welcoming nonwhites into their lives and into the country.

Musk’s preoccupation with demographic “traitors” flows directly from his obsession with population collapse, which he frames in terms of shrinking European and white American birthrates. “White people are a rapidly diminishing minority of the global population,” Musk wrote in September 2025. “Low birth rate,” he later said, “is the number one threat to the West followed closely by migration. There will be no West if this continues.”

One might even see his destruction of the United States Agency for International Development — responsible, so far, for an estimated 700,000 deaths worldwide — as consistent with his concern with falling white birthrates relative to those in places such as sub-Saharan Africa, where U.S.A.I.D. was active. After all, one way to secure a future for Western children, in this zero-sum view of the world, would be to starve African ones.

Musk, it should be said, insists that no one has died because of his cuts.

In a recent interview with The Economist, Musk denied that he was a racist, even as he defended his far-right views of immigration. “If you have a large and growing, rapidly growing group of people whose beliefs are antithetical to Western beliefs, at some point, there will be a reckoning,” he said.

But those views, as we see, are indistinguishable from what you would find in “The Turner Diaries.” With hundreds of millions of followers on a platform he personally controls, Musk stands as the most prominent purveyor of far-right and ultranationalistic rhetoric in the world. This is the same Musk who is also busy leveraging his vast wealth to shape that same world in his own image.

And what is that image?

As Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff show in their book “Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed,” an important part of Musk’s vision is to see the world as a compound, where “the horizons of humankind” are shrunk “into the defense of white fertility.” This in turn is tied to a larger effort to liberate humanity from the “woke mind virus” that Musk sees as a self-destructive tendency responsible for the “empathy” that has led Western nations to open their societies to others.

This too is little more than a restatement of themes and ideas found in “The Turner Diaries,” where the titular character believes that whites have been corrupted by a “Jewish-liberal-democratic-egalitarian plague.” Slobodian and Tarnoff observe that these views are also downstream of Musk’s upbringing in South Africa, where apartheid leaders fretted over birthrates and the future of white society.

Musk’s virulent racism and vicious, disturbing views are no secret. He does not hide them. They sit in plain view, easily accessible on the social media website he owns, where he does everything he can to promote similarly far-right and white supremacist ideas.

If there is a question to ask, then, it is this: Why does Musk get a pass? Why do politicians, journalists and commentators treat his far-right racist radicalism as a sideshow rather than the core of his political, ideological and industrial project, seen in everything from his deep support for Donald Trump in the United States and Restore Britain in Britain to his decision to construct a massive pollution-generating data center in predominantly Black Memphis, Tenn.

Musk spends a large part of his free time fomenting violence and spreading the same hateful ideology that motivated some of the deadliest shootings and attacks ever to happen on American soil. It is that fact, and not the cars he builds or the rockets he launches, that ought to define his place in public life.

Benjamin Fogel in New Statesman: The betrayal of the South African dream

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A liberal agonizes about ethnic violence in South Africa directed at African migrants. Of course, he ignores the deeper reasons for the collapse of South Africa—the inability of Blacks to run a twenty-first century economy, Black proneness to crime, etc.
South Africa is ranked by the World Bank as the most unequal country in the world; it has an unemployment rate of around 35 per cent, basic services have collapsed in much of the country; and most South Africans are poorer than they were in 2010. All of which makes for ripe conditions for mass unrest and political instability. …
This is a South Africa that no longer aspires to be the egalitarian multi-racial democracy envisioned in its constitution, a country that no longer cares about its international reputation. What unites South Africa’s rising xenophobic politics with its equivalents in Europe and elsewhere is that in our age of de-development and declining expectations, it’s easier to imagine getting your foreign neighbour kicked out of the country than for the state to improve your life. The collapse and fragmentation of the ANC may herald the arrival of something worse.
With mobs waging xenophobic violence on the streets, the promise of the anti-apartheid struggle has dissolved
Today (18 July), South Africans are urged to celebrate Nelson Mandela’s birthday by performing 67 minutes of charitable acts, each to honour his 67 years of fighting for social justice. Mandela Day, as it has become known, is a somewhat manufactured (and corporate-sponsored) example of a lingering throwback to what is referred to as “rainbow nationalism”, an attempt to forge a new post-apartheid national identity based on non-racialism. As the opening line of the 1996 constitution, as well as the historic 1955 Freedom Charter, goes, “South Africa belongs to all who live in it.”
Rainbow nationalism is now a faltering project, subsumed by the African National Congress’s failure to redress the wrongs of the past and deliver an egalitarian, growing economy. South Africa is ranked by the World Bank as the most unequal country in the world; it has an unemployment rate of around 35 per cent, basic services have collapsed in much of the country; and most South Africans are poorer than they were in 2010. All of which makes for ripe conditions for mass unrest and political instability.
This year, following national protests held on 30 June demanding that all undocumented migrants leave the country, one of the leaders of a mysterious movement called March and March, which has risen to national prominence over the last year and advocates for stricter border security, declared that they would use their 67 minutes to remove illegal immigrants from the Eastern Cape province. For months, xenophobic sentiment in South Africa has been expressed through violent marches against “illegal foreigners”, while vigilantes drag suspected undocumented migrants out of their homes, make illegal “citizens arrests” and conduct “inspections” of businesses suspected of employing migrants. At least five people have been killed and tens of thousands displaced, leading to Doctors Without Borders describing the events as a growing humanitarian crisis.
Since 2008, xenophobic violence has become a recurrent feature of the country’s politics, leading to at least 703 deaths. This violence is predominantly directed at immigrants from other African countries and, to a lesser extent, recent arrivals from South Asia; white tourists, retirees and Cape Town’s growing population of digital nomads need not worry. For months, with scenes of violence playing out on social media, most political leaders either dithered or endorsed the protests; President Cyril Ramaphosa seemed more focused on avoiding impeachment than providing leadership. In the months leading up to 30 June, the mood on the ground was tense. Rumours circulating on social media (and backed by credible reporting) suggested there was a real chance of a repeat of the mass violence that followed the jailing of former president Jacob Zuma for contempt of court in July 2021. (Zuma had failed to show up to court to face corruption charges dating back to a controversial arms deal in the 1990s.) The mass unrest that followed left at least 354 dead and billions of pounds worth of property damage, while exposing how unprepared the security forces and state were to deal with the threat of political violence.
Despite a slick and seemingly well-funded communications operation, the numbers that took to the streets on 30 June were not particularly large, in the mid-thousands rather than tens of thousands. And a historic police mobilisation with a R600 million budget (around £28m), aided by South Africa’s massive private security industry, managed to keep things largely under control. But these protests were not always peaceful. Some protestors burned cars and dragged people from their homes; more than 900 people were arrested, and the military was deployed in numerous hotspots in central Johannesburg.
In the words of veteran journalist and editor Mondli Makhanya, “The date of 30 June 2026 – and the months that preceded it and the days that will follow it – was a turning point in its own right. It was when the South African state effectively ceded power to a coterie of rabble-rousers with questionable motives.” The slogans are “put South Africans first” and “abahambe” (“they must go”). For the first time, the new South African flag has been transformed from a symbol of liberation and democracy into exclusion and hate. The leaders of the march clad themselves in the flag in the same fashion as Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Abelardo “El Tigre” de la Espriella in Colombia. From an international beacon of liberty to a nationalist nightmare, it appears South Africa, and South Africans, have changed for good.
The political project of March and March came into sharper focus on 30 June, at the rally in Durban. The crowd chanted “voetsek ANC, voetsek [fuck off ANC]” while Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma, the leader of March and March (no relation of Jacob Zuma), thanked the political parties that had backed the action. And there were several: the Zulu nationalist Inkatha Freedom Party; the right-wing Action SA; cosplay Marxist-Leninist cum Pan-Africanist Mayibuye Africa Forum; the Christian nationalist African Transformation Movement (closely linked to Zuma); and Jacob Zuma’s Umkhonto WeSizwe (MK) party. The protests also attracted opportunistic African National Congress (ANC) populists such as Gauteng Premier Panyaza Lesufi. But the variety of the groups is the point: this is a political coalition with the potential to appeal to a broader section of South Africa than Zuma’s traditional support base, and includes pro-free market parties such as Action SA as well as parties that claim to be left-wing.
There is a longer history at play here, one that reaches all the way to South Africa’s modern foundation. In 2024, the ANC lost its electoral majority for the first time and was forced to form a coalition government with the country’s largest opposition party, the centre-right Democratic Alliance, as well as an array of mostly ethnonationalist smaller parties. The coalition government was branded as a Government of National Unity (GNU) in a throwback to the first democratic government in 1994, in which Mandela’s ANC initially included the National Party and IFP (this arrangement fell apart by 1996). While the new GNU has made some progress, it has failed to deliver economic growth or to arrest South Africa’s continued political and social fragmentation.
The ANC’s decline in a fragmenting social order has created a void that forces such as March and March are trying to fill. Ngobese-Zuma declared that the group was giving the South African government six months to “rid South Africa” of all undocumented immigrants, a date that matches the timing of November local elections. She then told the crowd of roughly 5,000 supporters: “Every Thursday, for the next six months, we are marching until they [undocumented immigrants] are gone.”
Since 30 June, March and March and its allies have intensified their campaigns. In rural areas, hundreds of foreigners have been forced out of their homes, hiding in the bush, forests, or in refugee encampments, often under the threat of “local leaders” who had organised mobs to round up immigrants to hand over to the police, who have arrested even documented foreigners. South African police claim that more than 50,000 undocumented immigrants have been arrested since the beginning of 2026. In effect, government policy on immigration is trailing a violent protest movement.
Political violence is a feature of local elections in South Africa, as potential candidates take out rivals for the spoils (mostly from their own party). This year, with the ANC in sharp decline, this election cycle will have the threat of mass xenophobic unrest hanging over it and is set to be defined by the rise of a new nationalistic politics looking to profit from the fragmentation of the ANC, rather than debates around corruption or service delivery.
This new right politics draws from the rhetoric of the liberation struggle against apartheid as well as more familiar anti-immigrant tropes, ones that could have come out of the mouth of Tommy Robinson. However, this is a politics led by the victims of apartheid, mostly against other Africans, including from countries that gave support to the liberation struggle. This is a politics in which South Africans are depicted as having been robbed and abused by foreigners who sell drugs, exploit their women, and who destroy public services.
Xenophobic mobilisation is being portrayed as a means to reclaim black national sovereignty. Those who criticise xenophobia or question the numerous false claims regarding crime and immigration statistics stand accused of denying the lived experience of the black majority, making them anti-national, out-of-touch middle-class types. This signals a vision of a nation that is narrowing, an identity that those belonging to the wrong ethnicity might find themselves excluded from. While xenophobic sentiment may be fairly widespread, the largest organisations of the working class, such as the shack dwellers movement Abahlali baseMjondolo and the trade union federations Cosatu and Saftu, came out in opposition to March and March and have mobilised in the past against xenophobic cycles.
South Africa bears some of the burden of the poverty and failures of its neighbours. It offers more economic opportunities and refuge from conflicts, and a stepping stone for those looking to make their way to Europe or the Americas. There are 2.4 million foreigners living in the country, the majority of them documented, according to the 2022 census, which is around 4 per cent of the population. Some posters with false information and chain messages claim there are 27 million illegal foreigners in the country. The presence of migrant labour brought in to work the mines from neighbouring countries has been a feature of our political economy from long before the Union of South Africa was formed in 1910. However, the fall of apartheid and the reintegration of South Africa into the global economy have seen new waves of immigration from northern and Western Africa, as well as significant numbers of Zimbabweans fleeing the economic crisis of the late 1990s and 2000s.
South Africa’s economic and social crisis, combined with collapsing basic services like public healthcare and education (a result of systemic underfunding, incompetence and corruption_ predictably produces frustrations and anger for working- (and middle-) class South Africans. It is no coincidence that March and March began by mobilising against the foreigners blamed for undermining public services at schools and hospitals; rather convenient for the elites responsible for undermining public services for their own private gain.
The country also suffers from a public security crisis with one of the highest murder rates in the world, along with high levels of drug addiction and extortion. This is compounded by an impotent police force that is widely and correctly perceived as having been captured by organised crime (the fastest-growing economic sector in the country). Foreigners also make for a convenient scapegoat for South Africa’s public security crisis; while the country has long been a hotbed for transnational organised crime, the majority of its mafias and violent criminals are homegrown.
This is the context in which xenophobia has emerged as a regularised feature of South African politics, in tandem with cycles of xenophobic violence. In the first major cycle of xenophobic violence back in 2008, 62 people were killed, tens of thousands displaced, and countless lives ruined. Similar but smaller-scale xenophobic cycles took place in 2015 (seven killed) and 2019 (at least 12 killed). As Julian Rademeyer, a journalist who covered the violence, notes, these incidents were characterised by denialism and state complicity, with the relative impunity for those responsible demonstrated by how few people are ever arrested.
Credible academic research and journalism have demonstrated that xenophobic violence is not the result of the spontaneous anger of the masses and organic grassroots movements. It is organised by violent entrepreneurs in the name of particular interests, from taking out competition – such as foreign-owned corner stores in working-class neighbourhoods – to gaining political advantage. At the same time, South Africans in the most precarious sections of the labour market, such as farmwork, have to face competition from foreigners over low-paying jobs. As one of South Africa’s leading experts on xenophobic politics, Jean Pierre Misago, describes it, the violence is “a result of deliberate community organising and mobilisation by local leaders”. The 2015 and 2019 cycles were driven by organised social media disinformation campaigns and movements that seemingly emerged from nowhere, claiming to channel the frustrations and anger of the South African majority against foreigners.
As in past cycles of xenophobic violence, many South Africans have been attacked after being “mistaken” as foreigners for the sin of not speaking Zulu or belonging to the wrong ethnic group. In 2008, at least 21 of the 62 people killed were South African nationals. And this is a revival of the tactics and attitudes from South Africa’s darkest history. The apartheid regime sought to divide black South Africans along “tribal” lines, stripping them of citizenship and redefining them as citizens of the artificial “tribal homelands” known as Bantustans. The ANC, while not without its own historic ethnic divisions, always set out to unify black South Africans across tribal lines and later across racial divides, along with the country’s Indian and mixed race minorities.
Xenophobic violence also conjures up memories of the most violent period of the anti-apartheid struggle. The spectacle of angry men led by men in uniforms clutching traditional weapons demanding “they must go” recalls the worst of the so-called “black-on-black” violence in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng in the 1980s and 1990s. A low-intensity civil war was fought between Zulu nationalist militias trained and armed by the apartheid security services and supporters of the anti-apartheid movement, leaving between 20,000 and 30,000 dead. The violence began as a response to the re-emergence of the mass movements in the 1980s, and it later served as a negotiating tactic to strengthen the apartheid regime’s hand against the ANC.
During a recent trip to South Africa, what struck me was the fear of mass unrest accompanied by the lack of leadership from both government and a weakened civil society. Much of the country rightly believes that the state did not have the capacity to combat threats to the nation from both international and domestic actors. Nowhere is this more evident than in the ongoing spectacle of the Madlanga Commission into the capture of political leaders and the justice system by organised crime. The commission delivers shocking evidence on a daily basis, from the looting of public hospitals to police-run hit squads to the hundreds of kilos of missing cocaine from police lock-ups.
The commission has shown that the form of state capture – the capture of the country’s decision-making processes by private interests – that defined Zuma’s presidency went beyond the former president and his most notorious backers, the Guptas. A third-rate Indian business clan, the family managed to gain control of the executive, allowing them to appoint ministers and dictate state contracts. As the Zondo Commission into State Capture detailed, this process saw the equivalent of billions of pounds intended for social development and to benefit poor and working-class South Africans channelled into financial hubs such as Dubai. According to some estimates, state capture cost the South African economy close to £70bn.
To protect this arrangement, the country’s intelligence services and security cluster were hollowed out or given the task of serving criminal interests. Adding to these problems is the ease of pushing disinformation narratives in the current digital sphere, itself thanks to the South African-born owner of a certain social media network. The result is that the country finds itself especially vulnerable to sinister influence campaigns, as demonstrated  the infamous British PR firm Bell Pottinger. Influencers can be hired to spout or amplify any sort of nonsense for under £10, and traditional media is dying out. A few thousand pounds, let alone hundreds of thousands of pounds, can go a long way in South Africa.
As the journalist Fred Khumalo points out, March and March “seems to have deep pockets and a louder share of voice than a simple community organisation”. There is no information regarding who is funding the organisation. March and March appeared on the political scene out of nowhere last year; its leader is a former local radio DJ in Durban, led protests outside primary schools and public hospitals.
Ngobese-Zuma had no history of political activity or online bigotry; she was even chosen by the US State Department in 2023 to participate in its prestigious International Visitor Leadership Program. Her lack of a political history is one of her strengths, allowing her to position herself as just an ordinary, frustrated South African. The other two prominent leaders of the protests are Ngizwe Mchunu, a Zulu cultural activist and talk radio host, and Nkosikhona Ndabandaba, another Zulu cultural activist. In Ngobese-Zuma’s words: “I was becoming more and more affected by children being kidnapped, drugs coming into our communities, and it was always a foreign national behind it.”
There has been much speculation on who is funding March and March, with allegations ranging from Israel to the Guptas; Jacob Zuma was photographed the same week as the protests in India meeting with members of the Guptas, some of whom are still wanted fugitives in South Africa. Mchunu and other figures linked to March and March have also been associated with Jacob Zuma. Analysis from the Institute for Security Studies and AmaBhungane indicates that some of the networks peddling xenophobia and promoting March and March overlap with those who used to defend Jacob Zuma’s relationship with the Gupta family, incited xenophobic violence in 2019 and the insurrection in 2021.
As Tembeka Ngcukaitobi, one of South Africa’s most respected legal minds, asked in reference to the rhetoric deployed during the 2024 elections, “When people say we are witnessing the last days of the ANC, who is going to champion these pillars of non-tribalism, non-racialism, Pan-Africanism and internationalism? What kind of society do we have in mind if we don’t have anyone to defend these values?”
The answer to this was partially revealed on 30 June: this is a South Africa that no longer aspires to be the egalitarian multi-racial democracy envisioned in its constitution, a country that no longer cares about its international reputation. What unites South Africa’s rising xenophobic politics with its equivalents in Europe and elsewhere is that in our age of de-development and declining expectations, it’s easier to imagine getting your foreign neighbour kicked out of the country than for the state to improve your life. The collapse and fragmentation of the ANC may herald the arrival of something worse.

Leftists Accidentally Admit They Believe All-White Town Will Work

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Eric Orwoll’s Return to the Land project is getting harassed by the usual suspects, including a Jewish woman married to a Black man with interracial children, various “civil rights” organizations. and the mainstream media. The podcaster is not at all on board with Orwoll’s movement, but he emphasizes that the media loved it when Black people tried to set up an all-Black community. That community failed all by itself, without the lawsuits and media harassment Orwoll’s community is facing.

Mark Wauck: Trump Titanic, Iran Iceberg; Elect a Clown, Expect a Circus

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Trump Titanic, Iran Iceberg

Mark Wauck

To review:

Image

Depending on context, these statements usually signify desperation on Trump’s part. Over the last few days we’ve been seeing reports that Trump is seeking a new ceasefire—a ten day one—with Iran, using intermediaries like Qatar and Pakistan (probably an intermediary to China, as well). Iran just kept hitting US bases, so Trump escalated big time—he shut down satellite imagery for the Gulf region. That didn’t phase Iran either, and they rejected any ceasefire. Trump sent Little Marco to warn Russia and China to stop helping Iran—it’s so unfair! Russia and China flipped him off. Finally, on Friday, Trump unilaterally stopped attacking Iran. So, overnight, the Houthis hit Saudi energy facilities, to add to the blockade.

Trump is still trying to gaslight the American public, but he’s not fooling the people who really control events:

Robert A. Pape @ProfessorPape

4h

The Titanic of U.S. diplomacy is hitting the Iran iceberg

Trump’s MoU diplomacy was a “wicked escalation trap”—trying to buy off a regime with $12B when power, not cash, is Iran’s goal

With the truce broken, shipping choked, Washington faces 1 choice to avoid major war: real concessions.

Those are the basic dynamics for the losing side in a war. But it’s worse, because nobody can trust Trump.

Krystal Ball @krystalball

Weird. Maybe we shouldn’t have murdered his dad.

Julian E. Barnes @julianbarnes

Jul 24

New: U.S. believes Motjaba Khamanei is far more interested than his father and predecessor in pursuing a nuclear weapon, according to officials briefed on the intelligence assessments.

The result is that there’s a sort of escalation ladder when it comes to trying to entice Iran back to talking. I think it was Chas Freeman the other day who suggested that Trump might have to turn over Iran’s money up front, no conditions, before he can get talks. Here’s a report on how Trump is trying to sweeten things:

The Hormuz Letter @HormuzLetter

5h

BREAKING: The United States has requested a new temporary ceasefire with Iran and is seeking a return to the collapsed and suspended Memorandum of Understanding, with discussions also expected to include Yemen and Trump seeking to make the Houthis part of it, per sources.

Iran is highly unlikely to accept the US offer, having comprehensively rejected all negotiations throughout this week and confirmed it won’t start negotiations under any circumstances, while Trump simultaneously announced the US is about to carry out a ‘massive attack’ on Iran ‘bigger than any attack ever carried out before.‘

Return to the MOU that Trump never complied with? And isn’t that rich that Trump wants to include Yemen as a topic in talks? What about Lebanon?

The Hormuz Letter @HormuzLetter

58m

BREAKING: Trump ordered the US military not to carry out new strikes on Iran Friday night, despite approving his announced “massive attack,” now believing an agreement is possible over the weekend, per Axios.

The cancellation came despite Iran comprehensively rejecting any negotiations with the US throughout this week and confirming it is not talking to the US under any circumstances, and came directly after Trump claimed Iran is talking to the US and that major progress is being made.

The decision also followed an Omani delegation arriving in Tehran for talks on a new arrangement to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, with Trump claiming additional progress there, though Iran denies any talks are taking place.

Additionally, a source close to Iran’s Ghalibaf assesses the operational silence of the past 15 hours as a prelude to an intensification of attacks and not a new attempt at negotiations, with the US military still preparing plans for a return to major combat operations.

The reality is that Trump is facing huge pressure on the economic front—as well as on the military front. The US is not only expending-hard to-replace (in any timely way) munitions, it is also losing other expensive and hard to replace—if at all—assets.

MenchOsint @MenchOsint

Jordan is the key, the last & most important layer defending Israel.

The increasing rate of direct hits is a direct result of Radars & other U.S. equipment destroyed in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar … added to the depletion of air defense interceptors, something that couldn’t have been achieved in a few days.

During 20 years CENTCOM turned Arab countries into a dome protecting Israel, and Iran is now methodically dismantling it.

MenchOsint @MenchOsint

2h

“Trump ordered military not to conduct strikes on Friday.”

After striking the same positions for 14 days, wasting hundreds of PAC-2/3 interceptors, losing military equipment on several bases, Oil to $100, looks like Trump was well advised.

How long before a deal is announced ?

MenchOsint @MenchOsint

> Critical shortages of long-range weapons & interceptors.

> Many long-range radars damaged.

> Iran will retaliate proportionally to any escalation.

Curious what top advisers will tell Trump…

Quote

Clash Report @clashreport

Jul 24

Trump met with top advisers on Friday to consider expanding U.S. military action against Iran.

Source: NYT

MenchOsint @MenchOsint

3h

“Iran Destroyed 11 American Fighter Jets and Helicopters on the ground (from July 8th to July 21st),” – IRGC Spokesperson to Tasnim.

“In the Iranian attacks, 17 reconnaissance and operational drones (type MQ9, 8 of which were brand new), one F-15 fighter jet inside a hangar, one P-8 aircraft, one C-17 transport aircraft, and 8 refueling aircraft were also destroyed.”

Those are significant losses. These reports are per the IRGC, which is probably a more reliable source than CENTCOM:

MenchOsint @MenchOsint

2h

 IRGC Spokesperson provided a list of “Very Heavy Damages” suffered by the US military following Iranian Attacks over a 15-day period (from July 8th to July 21st),

• In the radar and air defense sector:

7 x Command and Control centers

3 x Satellite communication systems

6 x Patriot air defense radar systems

3 x air and sea control and monitoring radars

8 x early warning radar systems

7 x air-based missile defense radars

3 x FPS radar systems

2 x AN/FPS-117 radars

5 x Long-Range radars

2 x Air defense radars

1 x Tactical radar unit

• In the support and logistics sector, aimed at reducing operational capabilities:

6 x Fighter jet and helicopter maintenance centers

3 x Support and logistics centers

12 x Fuel storage

17 x Ammunition and spare parts depots for ships and aircraft

6 x Missile storage facilities

 In the operational infrastructure sector:

6 x MQ-9 drone hangars

1 x F-15 fighter jet preparation hangar

1 x Drone hangar containing 8 brand new drones

2 x Command centers

1 x Aircraft carrier refueling platform

1 x P-8 aircraft hangar

4 x HIMARS missile platforms

5 x Fighter jet hangars

4 x Patriot air defense complexes

6 x Missile launch platforms

1 x Fuel pumping station

2 x Signal communication centers

1 x intelligence data center

1 x AI center, a data processing base belonging to Amazon

1 x remote-controlled vessel (RCV) depot

1 x fuel dock

4 x fighter jet shelters

6 x flight ramps and parking areas

• In the air operations sector:

11 x Fighter Jets and helicopters (on the ground)

17 x reconnaissance and operational drones (8 of which were brand new)

1 x F-15E fighter jet inside a hangar

1 x P-8A Poseidon aircraft

1 x C-17A transport aircraft

8 x Refueling aircraft

4 x Heavy helicopters

6 x Missile storage

Jewish Values in Action

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The New Statesman: Under siege on the Gaza flotilla

An account of Israel’s capture and abuse of hundreds onboard a human rights mission to Gaza

By Noa Avishag Schnall

Once we arrived at the prison, we were repeatedly forced onto our knees while shackled, now in metal handcuffs, and ordered to press our heads against the back of the person in front of us. If anyone raised their head or even turned to look elsewhere, guards slammed it back down. Hāhona Ormsby, a participant from Aotearoa, New Zealand, reported being beaten unconscious as one soldier threatened to taser his genitals before repeatedly kicking him in the same area, causing him to urinate blood.
When the Israeli soldiers commanded us to stand, our heads still lowered, we were made to shuffle forward, constantly stumbling, while gripping the shirt of the person ahead of us, forming a kind of chain gang through the corridors. We slept in restraints under fluorescent lights that never switched off. Any attempt to touch the light switch in the cell was met with threats of tear gas.
My Hebrew gave me access to the casual sadism surrounding us. The guards recognised me from my imprisonment last autumn. “She’s the Jewish one, she’s already been here,” I heard one guard say.
“I’ll give you 100 shekels if you knock her out,” a male guard joked as he handed me off.
“But I have two sons getting married,” a female guard replied, grabbing my arm. “Make it 200.” […]
Some Palestinian prisoners are returned as bodies, unrecognisable to their families, still shackled in death. Images of their corpses are projected on screens in waiting rooms while family members, desperate to pick out some familiar feature, attempt to claim their kin. Palestinians have lost limbs to torture, as well as their eyesight, at the hands of Israeli guards. Cigarette burns, confinement in iron coffins, and long-term exposure to blaring music – which prison guards call “The Disco Room” – are all used, and torture and stress positions are the norm. Skin diseases spread rapidly through overcrowded facilities, and photos of wounds from body lice are regularly circulated.
Under siege on the Gaza flotilla
An account of Israel’s capture and abuse of hundreds onboard a human rights mission to Gaza
By Noa Avishag Schnall
Where do we begin with the myth of universal human rights? I was on my knees, zip-tied, hunched forward, trying to hold, with two fingers, a black plastic bag containing the layers of clothing that had been stripped from me. I managed to shove my passport beneath my forehead, a thin barrier between my skin and the concrete. “Hatikvah”, the Israeli national anthem that I had recited regularly as a child, played on repeat overhead.
“Good dog,” one of the female guards said in English.
This was the second time I had been abducted from international waters and taken to an Israeli prison while reporting aboard a boat bound for Gaza. In my capacity as a journalist, I joined the Freedom Flotilla Coalition’s media-and-medics vessel, the Conscience, last autumn, and sailed again this April and May aboard the Adalah, the Arabic word for justice.
Across more than two dozen flotilla missions since 2008 that have attempted to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza, only the very first boats successfully reached shore. Between 18 and 19 May, Israel’s naval special forces attacked the most recent mission, which included vessels from the Global Sumud Flotilla, hijacking 50 boats in total, detaining 428 participants from 45 countries, and forcibly transporting everyone aboard – including me – to Ashdod port, north of Gaza. Dozens of broken ribs, fractured bones, taser wounds, a collapsed lung, multiple gunshot wounds, injections with unidentified substances, at least 15 instances of sexual assault, an as yet unclear number of rapes (at least two testimonies have been made public), and countless beatings have been reported. The invisible injuries – the ones that will emerge over months and years – remain impossible to tally.
The two ships onto which we were transported functioned as floating prison camps. Roughly 250 nautical miles from Gaza – after our boats had been damaged and abandoned, or sunk altogether, by the Israeli navy – detainees were forced to climb collapsible ladders from military-grade rigid inflatable boats (Ribs), also known as Zodiacs, onto naval ships pitching violently in the sea under the watch of heavily armed Israeli soldiers.
Each detainee was assigned a number, fitted with a wristband, and stripped of their warm clothing. Many of us were soaked from the journey. We were pushed with hands and rifle butts and ordered to remove our shoes and socks before standing barefoot on the wet metal deck while we were searched for the first time, in full view of multiple soldiers.
Five shipping containers were arranged on the deck in a U-shape with their openings facing inwards. The Israelis used a sixth container to process us, which came to be known as the “torture container”. The prison yard contained overflowing portable toilets. Large bags of pitta bread sat in the heat beside crates of water that were plainly insufficient for the number of detainees being processed.
There was not enough room for all of us to find shelter. Human bodies were crushed together inside those shipping containers. Those who could not fit walked in circles around the yard throughout the night to avoid sleeping on the wet ground, under the constant watch of the Israeli guards. Those who secured space inside slept body to body beside strangers, unable to stretch our arms or legs. If one of us got up to use the toilet, our place on the floor was often gone by the time we returned.
To protect ourselves from the cold, we tore apart the plastic bags that had carried the pitta bread and used the small pieces as makeshift blankets, able to cover only parts of our bodies. Cardboard from the water crates became bedding against the metal and splintered wooden floors. Bits of bread served as pillows, cushioning our bones and bruised limbs. Nobody wanted to use the food in this way when mere miles away Palestinians were being starved.
The armed guards watched us from elevated platforms behind razor wire. Four anti-piracy water cannons pointed downward at all times while the Israelis rotated shifts overhead. Hours after multiple requests for menstrual products, the guards tossed a plastic bag down into the enclosure. I watched it hit the ground like a grotesque parody of humanitarian aid delivery – a humiliation disguised as provision, dangerously familiar to those in Gaza.
Over the following two days and nights, Israeli guards fired rounds into the enclosure. Mathilda Mallet, the Guadeloupean captain of another boat in our Freedom Flotilla Coalition, was shot from above by a so-called less-lethal beanbag round. It tore through the flesh of her thigh and she would later require surgery in Istanbul. On the third and final morning on the prison ship, a group of armed guards entered our cage, pointed their weapons at us, and commanded everyone to move behind a line painted on the floor. One Belgian detainee screamed at the guards in a futile and foolish attempt to appeal to their humanity. I watched mere metres away as they shot into the crowd at close range, hitting a man behind the loud Belgian. Both were quickly carried away.
We were called, one by one, into the container for the next stage of processing, our heads violently forced down. Some were beaten so severely that we could hear the blows from the prison yard as we waited for our turn, anguished by our inability to intervene. We were then ordered onto our knees, bent forward with our heads lowered and our hands zip-tied, while the Israeli national anthem played on loop. The floor smelled of urine. Some were held in the sun for hours in that stress position.
After an indeterminate period spent prostrate – a position that broke the skin on our knees and strained our muscles and bones – we were fitted with transport shackles linking our wrists to leg irons with short chains that severely restricted movement. Individuals of all ages, including some in their seventies, were required to maintain this position.
From the port, we were taken to Ktzi’ot prison on transport buses fitted with claustrophobic compartments. Palestinians call these buses “moving graves”. As we travelled, I heard someone begging with the guards to loosen the zip ties cutting off the circulation to their hands. I was paired with a young Malaysian doctor, Liyana Farhan, whose hijab had been ripped off during our detention. We kept each other warm, resting against one another and taking turns to lie in each other’s laps, adjusting ourselves against the metal chains to find what little relief we could.
Once we arrived at the prison, we were repeatedly forced onto our knees while shackled, now in metal handcuffs, and ordered to press our heads against the back of the person in front of us. If anyone raised their head or even turned to look elsewhere, guards slammed it back down. Hāhona Ormsby, a participant from Aotearoa, New Zealand, reported being beaten unconscious as one soldier threatened to taser his genitals before repeatedly kicking him in the same area, causing him to urinate blood.
When the Israeli soldiers commanded us to stand, our heads still lowered, we were made to shuffle forward, constantly stumbling, while gripping the shirt of the person ahead of us, forming a kind of chain gang through the corridors. We slept in restraints under fluorescent lights that never switched off. Any attempt to touch the light switch in the cell was met with threats of tear gas.
My Hebrew gave me access to the casual sadism surrounding us. The guards recognised me from my imprisonment last autumn. “She’s the Jewish one, she’s already been here,” I heard one guard say.
“I’ll give you 100 shekels if you knock her out,” a male guard joked as he handed me off.
“But I have two sons getting married,” a female guard replied, grabbing my arm. “Make it 200.”
Inside the cells, segregated by gender, women continued to plead for their handcuffs to be loosened. One woman, Ämäl Salih, whose hijab had also been ripped from her, was in agony. Her wrist was so severely swollen it appeared fractured. An Iraqi-Turkmen born and raised in Finland, Ämäl would later testify to Turkish authorities about her sexual assault by Israeli guards. From our cell of around 12 women, constantly being rotated, we fought for a diabetic prisoner to receive medication and tried to distract one another from the pain. We were denied toilet paper while being relegated to drink sickness-inducing sink water. Arabic messages were written on the walls, illuminating the lives of Palestinian prisoners held in the same cells a mere month earlier. In some of the writings, prisoners included names and dates of their captivity, as well as messages to their children.
After attempts in English were ignored, our cell collectively decided it was best that I communicate our demands in Hebrew. They were met with indifference or contempt.
To the woman with the wrist injury: “I don’t care.”
To those losing circulation in their hands: “So what?”
To the request for life-saving medication: “Then maybe you shouldn’t have come here.”
To the request for toilet paper: Laughter.
What surprised many flotilla participants was not the abuse itself, but the international reaction to it. We later learned that while we were being chained and beaten, leaked videos of our treatment had sparked outrage across the world. A white activist from Ireland, Catriona Graham, having her head shoved while confronting Israel’s Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, appeared to provoke more horror than the 50,000 Palestinian children who were killed or injured in Israeli attacks over the past two and a half years. Why had our treatment managed to pierce the manufactured, numbing fog that hangs over mainstream media outlets, obscuring, and thus burying, the daily abuse of Palestinians in Israeli prisons?
For decades, Palestinians – many held under administrative detention without charge – have described torture so severe that it resists ordinary comprehension. Currently, nearly 10,000 Palestinians are being held in Israeli military prisons. It seems that it is only when foreign activists emerge from the same places bearing similar testimonies that political leaders and media institutions suddenly find their outrage.
While the flotilla was still at sea, the New York Times published an investigation documenting testimonies from Palestinian prisoners who described being sexually assaulted by Israeli guards while in detention. One Palestinian told the Times that he had been raped by a dog under the supervision of Israeli guards. The journalist cited additional reports from human rights monitors describing similar abuses involving dogs, as well as a 49-page United Nations report published in 2025, which found that Israel had “systematically” subjected Palestinians to “sexualised torture”, with at least “an implicit encouragement by the top civilian and military leadership”. From our own cells, we could hear dogs barking.
In the cell next to ours was Max, a trans man who had sailed on the Adalah as well. Before the Israelis boarded the vessel, he had asked me to help draft a note in Hebrew requesting that Israeli guards comply with their own regulations allowing trans detainees the choice of which gender conducts their strip search. According to Max, women searched him while male guards watched. “You’re a good fucking little dog,” one of them told him in English.
During the interrogation at Ashdod port, a French translator reportedly asked him why he had come at all. “You know what they do to people like you in Gaza,” the translator said. “They treat you like animals.”
Guards mocked his body, made noises of disgust, referred to him as a girl, taunted him, and photographed him partially nude, just as I had been photographed. Many other prisoners reported being photographed completely naked. “Next time we see you,” the guards said to Max in English, “we’ll have guns, and it will be more exciting”. In prison, Max was held alone in a cell before another trans prisoner from the flotilla was eventually placed in the cell with him. Throughout the night, we called out to him in the corridor and received a few hushed responses. Petrified of what might happen after dark, our cell kept watch over the corridor in an effort to keep him safe.
The Israeli prison system is designed to destabilise and dehumanise. Every few hours we were moved to different cells and reshuffled with a new group of participants, preventing any sense of continuity or collective organisation. Unlike during my previous detention, I stopped translating every Hebrew threat I overheard from the guards, including the same threats of sexual assault, rape, or an intent to inflict maximum violence. There seemed little value in transmitting every indignity aloud. (The New Statesman reached out to the Israeli prison authorities and the Israel Defense Forces for comment and received no response.)
What we did not know at the time was that negotiations for our early release were already underway. The guards appeared intent on compressing as much intimidation, violence, and degradation as possible into the remaining hours. We were certain that our detention would eventually end, a conviction that sustained us, and one that Palestinian prisoners are denied.
It feels almost petty to dwell too heavily on our suffering. Palestinian prisoners have endured these systems of torture for decades. This violence is not reserved for men. Palestinian women and children – some as young as 13 or 14 – endure the same prison infrastructure. Lina al-Jarbouni spent 15 years in Israeli prison before her release in 2017.
Some Palestinian prisoners are returned as bodies, unrecognisable to their families, still shackled in death. Images of their corpses are projected on screens in waiting rooms while family members, desperate to pick out some familiar feature, attempt to claim their kin. Palestinians have lost limbs to torture, as well as their eyesight, at the hands of Israeli guards. Cigarette burns, confinement in iron coffins, and long-term exposure to blaring music – which prison guards call “The Disco Room” – are all used, and torture and stress positions are the norm. Skin diseases spread rapidly through overcrowded facilities, and photos of wounds from body lice are regularly circulated.
In May, the 59-year-old journalist Ali al-Samoudi, who had previously been shot by the Israeli military alongside journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in 2022, was released after being held without charge for approximately a year. He emerged from detention having lost 60 kg – half of his body weight – due to starvation and illness. These accounts describe only the visible injuries.
It would be reasonable to imagine that our torturers saw playthings rather than human suffering. But that is a mental construction – one that any person with a moral compass might make in an attempt to explain the unconscionable reasoning behind atrocities, to find logic where there is none. It ultimately provides no solace or comfort in grief. The more unsettling possibility is that the suffering is fully understood within Israeli society and simply deemed permissible – even fun. This is ultimately a question of whose lives the world considers valuable.
It is impossible to emerge from such institutions untraumatised. Yes, flotilla participants were sexually assaulted and beaten. Reports of rape continue to emerge and will likely increase as survivors process what happened to them. But the moral crisis cannot end with us: how can our hearts bleed for the internationals, for the people I sailed alongside, when those for whom we sailed – Palestinians – are forgotten or disregarded as the “justifiable” collateral of Israeli defence?
During my previous five-day incarceration in Ktzi’ot prison in October 2025, I was repeatedly beaten by multiple male and female guards at once, sustaining a black eye, and two people who sailed on the same boat as me testified to being raped by Israeli guards. Yet the brutality we faced on this most recent mission was far more grotesque.
That October, another flotilla participant, journalist Emily Wilder, was able to translate the writing on a massive banner visible from our cells, adorned with an Arabic phrase. A smaller version of the same poster hung in a corridor of Ktzi’ot during our most recent imprisonment in May 2026, beside an Israeli flag. Against the backdrop of a grey, shattered landscape of rubble were the words: “The New Gaza.”

WHY ARE WE SAVING DRUG ADDICTS?

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WHY ARE WE SAVING DRUG ADDICTS?

Win-win: Prisoners give lethal injections to themselves.

Why is a single taxpayer dollar being spent on preventing prisoners from overdosing? We could probably end the country’s drug problem by not saving anyone who overdoses, but here we’re talking about deranged psychopaths. Isn’t that a win-win scenario? This is like trying to revive a suicide bomber.

Apparently, violent predators, who think it’s fun to inflict bodily harm on others, have decided it’s also fun to smoke strips of paper soaked in synthetic drugs. The drug-infused papers are smuggled into penal institutions by girlfriends, on letters from their kids or pages from a book sent in an Amazon box from a third-party seller.

At first, the overdoses baffled prison officials. They’d see an inmate foaming at the mouth, hallucinating, and flailing his arms, and have no idea how he’d gotten the drugs. Solving the mystery took the combined effort of prison wardens, police officers, SWAT teams, doctors, research scientists, hospitals and emergency rooms—all of which, one way or another, are being paid for by you, the inmates’ victims.

But for some reason, all the commentary on prison overdose deaths suggests that “we” are facing a “crisis.” Yes, let’s throw more resources at keeping these savages alive and thriving.

A 2024 article in The Journal of the American Medical Association called prisoner overdoses a “growing public health concern” and helpfully documented the efficacy of various treatments—naloxone, atropine, IV fluids, benzodiazepines, forced-air blankets, warm IV fluids, intubation. The paper added that larger studies would be needed to “better understand and mitigate the risks” to violent criminals who knowingly suck down potentially lethal drugs.

Liberals want to allow completely innocent people to commit suicide with government assistance, but won’t let these useless carbon producers end their lives all by themselves.

NPR, naturally, reported on the “overdose crisis behind bars.” Happily noting that California was taking steps to keep state prisoners “safe,” it bemoaned the fact that correctional institutions elsewhere have not similarly rushed to provide their prisoners with “comprehensive treatment programs.”

In case this point has been buried, all this concern is for incorrigible, repeat violent offenders—murderers, car jackers, armed robbers. Sixty-two percent of inmates in state prisons have been convicted of violent crimes, and that’s just the crime of record. Ninety-to-ninety-five percent of prison sentences result from a plea bargain to a lesser charge than the actual crime.

Nationwide, the average state prisoner has been arrested 9 times and convicted 5 times. You have to be a real overachiever to end up in prison in America.

Thanks to liberals pushing “no bail” laws, not to mention “no arrest for property crimes” laws, there aren’t many “non-violent” offenders in any correctional facility — certainly not inside long enough for their girlfriends to bring them drugs. In Democratic-controlled areas, any crime short of murder barely results in a citation.

Even the movie, “Idiocracy” could not have imagined we’d be this insane. The

idea of that movie was that because the dumbest people have loads of children while the intelligent have few, in 500 years, today’s moron would be the smartest man on Earth.

It’s worse than that, actually: since LBJ, we’ve been paying the least productive Americans to have lots of kids, while forcing the most productive to pay for them. Welfare moms are the queen bees and taxpayers the drone ants who work their entire lives to ensure that the queen can reproduce with abandon.

Republicans trying to show their “populist” side demand Child Tax Credits and a million other subsidies to encourage the least successful people in society to have more kids. Any kind of kid will do! We’ll make it up in volume.

As Thomas Sowell says, “affordable housing” is “a house you can afford.” Similarly, the number of kids you should have is, “the number you can afford.”

Everybody’s mad at Anthony Fauci for funding gain-of-function research, allowing scientists to make viruses more lethal in order to study them. Whatever the wisdom of that, at least they were doing it to save lives by being better prepared to combat some future virus. We’re trying to extend the lives of viruses in human form for no good reason.

Ironically, liberals want to decriminalize drugs —“the war on drugs has failed!”—but when dope accidentally produces such a providential outcome, suddenly they’re bad-ass antidrug enforcers.

With half the legal profession and the entire Democratic Party fanatically blocking any attempt to impose the death penalty, anywhere, ever, the one socially useful act criminals perform may be administering lethal injections to themselves. It would be paternalistic nanny-statism to stop them.

COPYRIGHT 2026 ANN COULTER