Look at them, this crowd of young people in France. They either set a firefighter on fire, or he caught on fire trying to extinguish a fire they set. And they just sit there filming, not trying to help him, nothing. Scenes like this are playing out all over France this week.
Last week, with the pope in the country, the world saw a France that was beautiful, orderly, and filled with peace and light. This week, the devil gave his answer. High school students — mostly, but not exclusively, Muslim and migrant ones — nationwide are rioting and burning their schools. France’s far leftists are involved too. It’s really bad, and ONCE AGAIN I see how badly informed Americans are about what’s happening in Europe by our own media. If only Jews or white people were doing the rioting and the burning, then maybe the US media would take it seriously. Anyway, thank Elon for Twitter, because the videos are everywhere.
Oh look, a woman begs one of the Disaffected Youth™ to stop tearing everything up, 𝕏and he tries to set her face on fire.
“Your universe has no meaning to them. They will not try to understand. They will be tired, they will be cold, they will make a fire with your beautiful oak door...” *— *Jean Raspail, The Camp of the Saints.
It’s staggering, all these videos. 𝕏Here’s a clip of a large band of North African Muslims, parading on motorcycles through Marseille, brandishing Palestinian flags. Where are they going? What are they going to do? High schools are burning all over the city.
𝕏Here is a white leftist with a bullhorn, inciting a mob to “blow everything up.”
𝕏Here is video of a Third World mob looting.
𝕏Here are Third Worlders setting a bus on fire.
𝕏Here are Third World students knocking down a police officer and kicking him in the head.
I could go on and on and on. It’s insane. And yet — and yet! — the French magistrates union has issued a statement calling on authorities to stop repressing students!
How can you even explain this suicidal empathy?
We were talking yesterday about how in the US, we are in a period in which more people than ever are prepared to accept violence to achieve political goals. Well, what is violence? If I were French, I would want the government to start shooting these rioters and looters. Hell, if I were English, I would want the Royal Navy to start sinking the dinghys carrying military-age migrant men. Enough is enough.
I was listening this morning to ▶a recent Triggernometry podcast in which they interviewed Suella Braverman, formerly a Tory Home Secretary, and now a Reform Party member. Braverman talked about how when as Home Secretary in Rishi Sunak’s government, she tried to get the government to take real action to stop the boats, but Sunak and all the other senior Tories refused. She said these metropolitan liberals who run the Tory Party (and of course Labour) simply cannot grasp why people are mad about this.
Braverman said the first step to stop the boats effectively is for Britain to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights, because bogus “human rights” claims keep migrants from being deported. The Tories, she said, are terrified that people will think badly of Britain if it leaves the ECHR. They are more concerned with how other cosmpolitan liberals abroad will think of them than they are with what their horrible misgovernment is doing to their own countries.
Back to France, this is par for the course:
Here is an interview with Thibault de Montbrial, a senior lawyer who works with the French security services to prosecute Islamists. It’s in French, but if you watch it on YouTube, turn on the English subtitles, and you can understand it.
De Montbrial points out that this violence is nationwide now, and it shows clear signs of being co-ordinated by La France Insoumise, the far-left party, which has spoken for years of taking power by “insurrection.”
He goes on to say that the French state has the duty to protect its citizens, and the authority to use whatever force is necessary to do that. De Montbrial says if the State refuses to do that, then it will cause a “major crisis of confidence,” and citizens will take the law into their own hands. (Braverman, in her Triggernometry interview, observes that this is starting to happen in the UK.) De Montbrial points out that videos are emerging from these protests in which students — brown students, meaning those of migrant heritage — brandish flags of Muslim countries, including the Palestinian flag, and chant, “We are children of Gaza!”
This is France today. This is much of Europe today. This is what civil war, in the David Betz sense, looks like.
If the State doesn’t assert its authority and stop the violence, it’s going to become a real civil war. I’m listening to the book O Jerusalem now on audiobook. It’s about the events leading up to, and including, the Arab-Jewish war in 1948, when Israel became a state. There were many, many acts of sectarian violence from both sides in that period — bombings, assassinations, and so forth. That is what “civil war” will mean if it comes to Europe, says David Betz. I’m telling you, just listening to what Palestinians and Jews did to each other in and around 1948, we do not want that here! But we are getting it, and we are getting it because the governments of Britain, France, and other European nations are filled with weak liberals who hate their own countries. That’s my view.
Here’s a piece by a French woman who publicly questioned transgender ideology, and for that was convicted in criminal court in France. In Belgium, Nathan Cofnas, the controversial American scholar, now faces criminal charges for “racism.”
This cannot go on forever. Something is going to break. I don’t know what is more frightening: the idea of what will happen when that something breaks, or the prospect that it won’t break, and European nations will submit to the barbarians they’ve welcomed into their countries.
There’s a huge story about an alleged gang rape carried out by fraternity men at Cornell against an undergraduate woman. The New York governor has handed the case to the state’s Attorney General, and faulted the local DA for not filing rape charges against the men. The NYT reports, though, that the woman, “Jane Doe” (though she has been identified subsequently, as have her alleged attackers) had a drug-fueled threesome with a number of frat brothers.
Here’s the thing: she consented, and believed at first she had consented. The Times, which went through the documents, reports:
Since the evening that began on Oct. 19, 2024, Jane Doe had recounted the night’s events to her roommates without identifying herself as a rape victim. She had exchanged friendly text messages with men she would later accuse of assault. She had heard uncharitable appraisals of herself from undergraduate gossips.
Then she read the words.
“That’s the first time I had ever heard the narrative change that I wasn’t a whore and that I was assaulted,” Jane Doe told investigators, according to documents from a university review of the accusations obtained by The New York Times.
After the night in question, Jane Doe made the walk of shame:
Around 11:15 a.m., she said, Jane Doe arrived home, still in her “big boots and small dress” from the night before, according to the roommate. She had consumed ketamine and had sex with multiple men, she told her two roommates. One roommate told investigators that Jane Doe did not use the word “rape” or “assault” yet.
The next day, on Oct. 21, Jane Doe went to her “big sister” — a woman designated as a mentor — at Cornell’s Tri Delta sorority and told her there were rumors circulating that she was a “slut.” The big sister, a junior at Cornell, told investigators that Jane Doe added with a laugh that “unfortunately they are true.”
One of her sex partners texted her:
“I just wanted to apologize for how things went down the other night,” Mr. Newell wrote. He then said that both he and Matthew Ingalls, another of the men she would later accuse of assault, both felt terrible for being too under the influence of drugs and alcohol to “shut it down and kick people out before it got way out of hand.”
Jane Doe replied and reassured him.
“At the end of the day non of the sexual stuff was illegal and honestly i really liked being w u and matt,” she wrote.
This Jane Doe didn’t decided that she had been sexually assaulted until after other girls started saying she was a slut. That, and she was disinvited from a later party at the frat house:
At Chi Phi, the fraternity was preparing for a Halloween party, and Jane Doe was eager to attend. Text messages included in the investigation show Mr. Ingalls assuring Jane Doe that he and other fraternity members wanted her to be there.
“chi phi is your house and you are welcome here,” he wrote, relaying the views of the fraternity’s president, who was not among those accused of sexual assault.
“thank u i really appreciate that,” Jane Doe responded. “<3 i’ll bring my cigs tomorrow”
But then Jane Doe received a phone call from the fraternity’s president, according to the text messages.
She was disinvited from the party. It was for her own good, he said.
Jane Doe sent a biting text to Mr. Ingalls.
“I knew this was going to happen,” she wrote. “The woman will always get the short end of the stick. Yall aren’t my friends. Yall are covering your asses.”
So, it seems, she filed charges against the men she willingly gang-banged in an effort to repair her reputation, and to pay them back for disinviting her to the party.
This story is disgusting all the way around. These (no doubt) porn-addled men gang-banged a young woman, the sleazebags. But — but! — by her own words at the time, she consented, did not consider it rape, and enjoyed it. No wonder the DA didn’t file charges. But now these men, sleazy as they may be, face criminal investigation for something all evidence shows the girl wanted to do, and enjoyed.
A few years ago, one of my readers wrote about the crisis her undergraduate son was in — this, during the #MeToo years. She told me he had had sex with a girl on campus, but did not want to date her. She paid him back by accusing him later — later! — of sexual assault. In the view of my correspondent, this was 100 percent payback to her son for not wanting to be his sex partner’s boyfriend. But this was #MeToo time, and everybody believed women, as a matter of course. The young man’s life was being ruined on the say-so of this vengeful young woman.
I recall my 1980s college days. There was lots of binge drinking, by men and women, and lots of sex. I participated in it too, and I’m damn sure not proud of it. But we were all drunk. This was a normal Friday and Saturday night at LSU in the 1980s. There were mornings I woke up in bed with a girl, not quite sure how I had gotten there; she felt the same way. We were ashamed, but we were adults, and this was the (bad) choice we made. Were this 30 years later, I would have had to fear being accused of sexual assault. No wonder young men are afraid of young women.
To be very, very clear: I am not defending the acts of these young men. I would be ashamed if one of them were my son, behaving like such a dirtbag. What I am defending, though, is these men against the charge of rape. What they did was morally wrong — but on evidence presented so far, it wasn’t rape. We cannot have a legal system if it’s up to women to decide whether or not they were raped, after time has passed, and they reached the conclusion that it’s to their advantage to rewrite history.
If this goes to criminal trial, I presume they will win (though with female jurors in the post-Lindsay Clancy era, who knows?), but even if they do, the trial will cost them a fortune, and ruin their names. Good luck trying to get a job with that on your record.
Now that Gov. Hochul has decided to politicize this as a feminist, it seems that this has the potential to turn into another Lindsay Clancy case: one that drives another savage wedge between men and women.
This ought to unnerve us all, but it won’t. Yesterday, something called “The Global Reach Project” revealed itself. Here’s part of a letter that went out from Kathy Keller, the widow of famed Presbyterian pastor Tim Keller:
Today is the day we’re launching The Global Reach Project. And I don’t often say I’m “excited” about something, but I am truly excited to tell you about it.
Through this initiative, which we believe God is leading us to undertake, we are setting out to translate 500 of Tim’s most foundational sermons into 30 of the world’s most spoken languages (not counting English). Currently about 20% of the world, which speaks English as a first or second language, can access Tim’s sermons. When we complete this translation project, approximately 70% of the world will be able to listen to them. That would mean his gospel teaching will be available to millions more people.
On the one hand, you might think this isn’t that big of a deal, because someone using Google Translate could quickly translate any sermon, but that’s different than what we are doing. We’re taking a much more rigorous approach. We’re not just translating the words, we’re also taking into account the cultural barriers that exist between one language and another. We’re translating the sermons with theologically trained, bilingual teams, then bringing manuscripts back to me to make sure that all of the nuances (and run on sentences!) that characterized Tim are still there, AND THEN, with special care to verify everything is correct, we’re using AI to produce the translated audio sermons in Tim’s voice.
So they’ve “resurrected” a Tim Keller avatar using AI, and making him give sermons. Hey, anything to Spread The Gospel™, right?
My friends Courtney Monteiro Trotter and Rachel DeVore Fogarty are troubled by this. They’re working on a paper about it, but Courtney gave me permission to excerpt a rough draft.
This relates to ontology - the fancy word for
beingor in this case we are going to use it to markreality. As humans we are given a body that is made up of both matter and spirit. We inhabit a particular space, culture, and time. As Christians, we believe that we are given certain spiritual gifts to be used for the building up of Christ’s body - the church, and that after we die, our body and spirit are separated until the bodily resurrection. The claim of the church has always been that God is the ma…
