Weekend Reading #72

Some longer or more involved reading:

•  Greg Ellifritz of Active Response Training has a new Weekend Knowledge Dump posted with links to interesting stuff and some commentary too. Several that I found notable:
• An article on the difference between social aggression (e.g., the "monkey dance," "educational beatdown" and similar) and asocial violence (violence that does not serve a social function such as to reshuffle the pecking order). 
•  A look at whether a light trigger assists in accuracy and it can (certainly an overly heavy trigger can degrade accuracy as anyone who has ever shot a double action handgun can attest). 
• An explainer on the different FEMA search markings and what they mean. The author also raises a couple cautions about trying to utilize a fake marking after a major disaster.
• A discussion of the pros and cons of using the high ready position with a rifle. But as Greg points out:

    There are way too many egos involved in the shooting industry.  Each claims that their methodology is the one true way.  It’s all bullshit.  Let’s stop being dogmatic. 

    We want to point our weapons in the safest direction we can in every different location.  Sometimes that is up.  Sometimes it is down.  Lighten up a bit. 

 And an excerpt from the article:

 

    Now observe 3 or 4 shooters in a straight line (one behind the other) and have them flow through a doorway, peeling off on alternating sides and driving their muzzles to the corners of the room. What you will notice, as they pass through the door and turn towards their corner, is that they will lean forward to be able to drive the gun. You will actually see a gap created at head level as they peel off left and right before you see a clear space below torso level into the room. This gap, or “Cut,” is what is being exploited by using the High Ready.

    Instead of waiting for the last part of a person’s body to move out of the way with the Low Ready, assaulters found that it was much faster to hold their rifle muzzles up and just drop the rifle down in the torso/head gap (created as the guy in front of them started peeling off left or right). This method proved faster than coming up from Low Ready, where you’re waiting on the lower body to clear. The increased speed of dropping down from High Ready can only be measured in fractions of a second, but in close quarter battles, that is a lot of time. 

•  An article that looks at clues you can pick up from empty shelves and missing items at the grocery store. The author notes that you should be looking not at a single item, but categories of items, particularly if it persists over several days or weeks. For instance, empty canned vegetables on one day might just mean a missed truck or a stocking crew running late; but persistent lack of items, cheaper products disappearing, or being replaced with other items is probably a signal of a breakdown in the supply chain.
• A piece from John Farnham with defensive tips should you find yourself stuck in a car at a drive thru as some found themselves at the recent In-N-Out shooting in Idaho.  
• An article about carrying with an empty chamber and its downsides, to which Greg adds the following comment:

     And speaking about the Idaho active killer attack, one armed citizen attempted to intervene, but he was carrying a pistol with an empty chamber.  He took a round into his primary gun arm before he was able to draw his gun.  When he eventually got the gun out, he was unable to chamber a round due to his injury.  How would you like to be that guy right now, knowing you could have stopped the killing, but you didn’t do so because you were unwilling to get enough training to feel comfortable with your loaded carry pistol?

    If you don’t feel it’s safe enough to carry a chambered striker fired pistol, you need more training.  If you are unwilling to seek training to become competent, you should be carrying a revolver.

    But none of the chamber-empty carry folks will ever carry a six-shooter, even though it’s a far more capable weapon than a chamber-empty semi-auto.  A revolver doesn’t look cool enough.  What does that tell us about a person like that? 

    They are unwilling to take a couple of days worth of training to be comfortable carrying a semi-auto with a loaded chamber.  They are unwilling to carry a revolver with a heavier trigger that is less likely to be accidentally pulled.  Those folks just want to feel like a badass carrying a gun. They don’t have either the mindset or ability to use the gun to save lives.   The gun for them is some kind of a magical talisman that prevents evil acts from occurring in their proximity.   They are more concerned with appearing capable than actually being capable.  I find those folks to be worse than worthless in an emergency.  Contemptible, actually.

•  John Wilder's "Liberty Without a People, a Border, or a Moral Center Is Just a Corridor" which I mentioned this morning, which is mostly a critique of libertarianism (but also socialism and globalism). An excerpt:

    Libertarianism fails because it calls collective self-defense “collectivism” when America is being assailed by collectives of Indians and Mexicans and moslems and other groups that all have a collective strategy to protect themselves at the expense of the rest of society.  If you try to get a job in certain sectors of the economy, if you don’t speak Spanish, aren’t a Brahmin, don’t bow to Allah, or don’t go to synagogue, well, you’re never going to get that job.  They’ll pick people more like them.

    Markets really are the main engines of prosperity, but random, chaotic markets aren’t the predictor of economic success, it’s the people.  In Sweden, all adopted (non-European) foreign children perform well below the norm on IQ tests.  Except the Koreans.

    Go figure.  People make a difference.  I’d rather live in socialist all-Dane Denmark than in multicultural Johannesburg.

    Libertarianism fails because it cannot generate or defend the particular social order that limited government requires.  Full stop.  The Founding Fathers didn’t spring forth from a Libertarian Eden.  Nope.  They were forged in plain-old British values. 

•  Rod Dreher: "Demon On A Plane? Jonathan Cahn’s Story. And: The Aztecs Really Were Unspeakably Evil." You may have seen news stories about the crazy plane passenger that had to be duck taped to his seat. Well, Cahn was the passenger seated next to the crazy guy and discusses how the guy went from normal to crazy at the flip of the switch, like he was possessed, when he realized that Cahn had written a Christian based adventure novel called The Altar Of Pergamon. And the topic of that alter led Dreher to ruminate on the evil that was the Aztek Empire. He included this excerpt from a review of a book about the Azteks (aka Mexica):

That empire was not gentle. Few empires are, but even by the sad standards of human history, the Mexica were extreme. I’m not speaking here about their legendarily creative and inventive ways of humiliating subject peoples,² I’m speaking about the human sacrifices. No, these were not exaggerated by the colonizers, as some revisionist historians would have you believe.³ If anything, the Spaniards lacked the conceptual framework to fully comprehend the industrial-scale, ever-so-civilized and bureaucratic evil of the Mexica, and so they inadvertently downplayed it. The reality, as Clendinnen brilliantly documents, is that human sacrifice was not an occasional or incidental religious custom for the Mexica, like an extra-spicy church service for the people who only show up on Christmas or Easter. No, the mass-butchery of wailing, pleading captives of both sexes and all ages was the core activity around which their entire civilization and society revolved. Their art, their music, their poetry, their approach to warfare, their entire economic system, their kaleidoscopic array of holidays and festivals, all were singularly dedicated to the killing (often preceded by inventive torture) of helpless human beings. And everybody had their role to play:

The killings were not remote top-of-the pyramid affairs. If only high priests and rulers killed, they carried out most of their butchers’ work en plein air, and not only in the main temple precinct, but in the neighborhood temples and on the streets. The people were implicated in the care and preparation of the victims, their delivery to the place of death, and then in the elaborate processing of the bodies: the dismemberment and distribution of heads and limbs, flesh and blood and flayed skins. On high occasions warriors carrying gourds of human blood or wearing the dripping skins of their captives ran through the streets, to be ceremoniously welcomed into the dwellings; the flesh of their victims seethed in domestic cooking pots; human thighbones, scraped and dried, were set up in the courtyards of households — and all this among a people notable for a precisely ordered polity, a grave formality of manner, and a developed regard for beauty.

The scale of it boggles the mind. The Mexica record with pride a single festal occasion on which over twenty thousand victims were sacrificed, the blood rolling in a slow curtain down the steps of the pyramids as four lines of manacled slaves trudged along the great processional ways towards their doom. It was the job of special priests to greet the captives as they entered the city and to explain in detail the honor that was to await them. And it was always human beings. Many primitive cultures have practiced forms of animal sacrifice. The Mexica were neither primitive, nor interested in animals. There was also no “othering” at work here. The Mexica knew that they were killing people who thought and felt and dreamed and loved as they did. Indeed, that was the entire point of it. They constructed an efficient and well-run machine that had as its sole purpose delivering living, breathing, conscious and informed human beings to the killing-stone or the furnace. A whole battery of sophisticated psychological techniques were employed to ensure the compliance of the victims to the end.⁴ Yes, the Spaniards lacked the vocabulary to describe it, but we who live in the aftermath of the twentieth century do not.

Read the whole thing.

• And in light of the actions and words from the female Lindsay Clancy jurors and their supporters: "The Return of Witchcraft, Part One: Understanding the public reappearance of hexing" by Tara Thieke. 

Here is an army willing to do battle against any moral restraint on itself. Copycat killings emerge; the TikTok goddesses pursue their line of thought without remorse. The Sisterhood rebukes the concept of examination of conscience, preferring therapy which validates one’s grievances. It is a massive, massive cultural shift imbuing all human relations, even the mother to child, with its conflation of any self-giving with persecution (both Clancy and her copycat killer described their small sons as being “the antiChrist” or “devil”). The rise of this Sisterhood in tandem with the growth of the “women can do no wrong” belief has life or death repercussions.  

Never Forget: 9/11 in 2026

It is the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, so it time to once again remember what ultimately led to the disaster and the endless Middle-Eastern wars: diversity and globalism.

The 9/11 attacks were, in a very real sense, the result of a liberal, globalist outlook, that believes that every person is the same (or, more accurately, interchangeable). John Wilder recently noted that globalists (as well as a couple other ideologies) depend on Homo Economicus:

What’s a person?  Well, one Homo Economicus is very much like another.  So much so, that they have the same desires, the same wants, the same potential, the same value.  In extremes of this viewpoint, they even have the same intellectual potential. ... 

But to achieve this "perfect" economic human unit, certain constraints must be removed. Wilder lists these as "family, religion, tradition, ancestors, culture, border, community, and hierarchy." It is because of these globalist views that we got the inane comments from our leaders following 9/11 that "Islam is a religion of peace" and similar statements downplaying any suggestion that Islam was evil or barbaric. In his article "What Mohamed Atta Was Trying to Tell Us," Ayaan Hirsi Ali points out that after 9/11:

... President George W. Bush stood at the Islamic Center of Washington to insist that “the face of terror is not the true faith of Islam.” Following Bush’s lead, after later atrocities in Paris, Brussels, Manchester, and elsewhere, Western leaders repeatedly said that the killers had “nothing to do with Islam.” At the same time, the notion of “Abrahamic faiths” was revived or normalized, as though Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were merely variations within one spiritual family, separated by temperament more than by theology or civilizational ambition. 

But such suggestions are ludicrous. The America political scientist Samuel P. Huntington had stated well before 9/11 that Islam had bloody borders, because it is an inherently violent, conqueror culture and people. 

    In fact, 9/11 (or something like it) probably was no surprise to Huntington who had, in 1996, released his prescient book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.  In it, Huntington explained that rather than the end of the Cold War signaling a victory for a global liberal order, the collapse of a bi-polar power structure would cause nations to revert to competition and conflict based around civilizations. And, in that vein, he predicted in broad strokes the conflict between Russia and the West in Ukraine (which is divided between the West and Russian civilization), the competition between China and the West, as well as conflict between Islam and everyone else. 

    But our elites have ignored this to our ultimate ruin. Going back to Ali's article, he explains:

    After centuries of religious war, the West had concluded that privatizing faith was the price of stability and progress. Religion would become hobby, heritage, or private consolation; politics would be conducted in the cooler register of interests. Having made that bargain, Western societies forgot that secularism and pluralism were local settlements, not universal defaults, and so assumed that every rival civilization must ultimately favor the same compartmentalization. When confronted by an adversary for whom the public order was explicitly theological, and for whom the separation of sacred and political authority was itself an offense against God, the West did the only thing its own intellectual settlement allowed: It translated theology into categories it found more manageable.

    As a result, for a quarter-century, America and the West have chosen to enmesh themselves with dysfunctional Muslim societies, with the goal of rectifying “what went wrong.” Simultaneously, they opened their doors to mass Muslim migration, taking in millions of refugees from war-torn societies that had notably failed to be transformed by the influx of American money, democracy experts, and boots on the ground. ...

    As it turned out, the prediction that a large-scale encounter between the populations of the Western nations and Muslim lands might bring about a meaningful social transformation was correct. What Western optimists failed to imagine was that their own societies would be reshaped in the image of the newcomers they sought to evangelize. ...

    Stated differently, if America and the West went to war against an elite vanguard of Muslim extremists who used terrorism as its principal tool, it ended 25 years later with a self-inflicted defeat caused by misdiagnosing the enemy and importing culturally incompatible demographics that could be utilized by that vanguard, as well as by other political vectors, both domestic and foreign. After failing to defeat Muslim terrorists abroad, the West now finds itself fighting the same enemies at home, while watching their own countries transformed by the mass immigration of people who decidedly do not share the common Western fantasy that religion and culture are the source of merely superficial differences. The idea that there are barbarians who live outside the gates has long been part of the Western inheritance. The idea that bringing the barbarians inside the gates might result in the destruction of Western civilization was equally part of that inheritance, even if it was now forbidden to think it. 

Thus, I have to agree with some of the comments from Kurt Schlichter in his article from yesterday, "How 9/11 Changed Everything." He points out:

In the week of the attacks, America understood that 9/11 had to be answered with the full weight of American wrath. Many of us still understand it. If there is one overriding failure in the war on terror, it is that we did not kill enough of the terrorists. Instead, we focused on turning savages into civilized human beings. Our forebears had it right when they dealt with barbarians, whether Roman or British or whoever was disciplining the primitives. It was time to dust off the punitive expedition: go into the territory of the people who attacked you and cause so much damage that the savages use your name to scare their children for the next hundred generations.

And:

... Islamic radicals attacked us not because we like Israel, and not because of some bogus gripe, but because we will not submit to their primitive desert cult. That’s a hard truth for people who cannot conceive of America being in the right. We were in the right. We remain in the right. As for the violence we inflicted in return, they forgot a basic truth: violence must be met with violence. Too many in the West believe the schoolmarm mantra that violence never solves anything. History teaches the opposite. Violence solves everything. 

The problem is that we didn't fight like that. If we had, after Al Qaeda was driven back to the Tora Bora mountain complex in 2001, we would have dropped a strategic nuclear weapon on their heads. That would have given them a story with which to terrify their children. Instead we coddled the savages with the idea that we could win "hearts and minds" which was the Middle-Eastern equivalent of rolling over and exposing our bellies. 

    Niccolò Machiavelli wrote in The Prince it is ideal to be both loved and feared, but if a choice must be made, it is safer to be feared than loved. That should have been our philosophy. So when Schlichter complains about the people that are tired of the forever wars in the Middle-East, he should consider that perhaps that they are not tired of our killing Muslim terrorists but, rather, that they are tired of a leadership unwilling to win quickly and decisively. 

    But on a more basic level, we can only win by returning to our roots including a strong, muscular Christianity and civilizational pride. Restoring those constraints identified by Wilder: "family, religion, tradition, ancestors, culture, border, community, and hierarchy."

Balaclava Ban Meets Burka

Just days after hundreds of people wearing balaclavas and dressed in black blocked roads in Portsmouth to prevent buses from leaving the port with illegal aliens being taken to asylum centers, the city council of Nottingham has banned the wearing of balaclavas or other face coverings. 

    Starting on Tuesday, Nottinghamshire Police said the new restrictions will allow police and council officers to require individuals to remove a face covering where their identity is concealed to commit crime or engage in anti-social behaviour.

    Operating as part of a Public Spaces Protection Order, the powers include £70 on-the-spot fines, the confiscation of face coverings, and referrals to an Immediate Justice Programme requiring community work.    

[snip]

    Officials have stressed that the enforcement is not a blanket ban on face coverings, with officers targeting "crime, anti-social behaviour or intimidating conduct". Clear exemptions will protect individuals who wear face coverings for legitimate reasons, including religious, health, medical or work needs.

Anonymous Conservative notes, in response, an X-post from The British Patriot suggesting that, in response, patriots will resort to wearing burkas.  

    On a related note, the History Debunked YouTube channel discusses why the British people have been disarmed by their government.  

 VIDEO: "Political power grows from the barrel of a gun – why the citizens of Britain have been disarmed" - History Debunked (5 min.)

ICE Launches Tip Line To Report Illegal Alien Truck Drivers

ICE has a tip line for reporting commercial driver's license (CDL) holder that have fraudulantly obtained their license, noting that "[n]ot one more American life should be lost to a reckless illegal alien behind the wheel of a truck." The number is: 866-347-2423. 

    In related news, Border Czar Tom Homan wanted to emphasize that ICE is not just going after violent criminals and terrorists, but all illegal aliens, when he noted that only 60% of ICE arrests involved those deemed a public safety or national security threat. 

Homan said, “Look, if they’re in the United States illegally, they should be worried, because we’re looking for them. The numbers right now are running around 60% criminal and 40% non-criminal. We’re looking for them. And like I say, President Trump said he wants a priority on public safety threats, national security threats. But, as I said from the beginning, that doesn’t mean everybody else is off the table.” 

And the Trump Administration has issued a proposed rule to exclude illegal aliens and foreign visitors from the Census when deciding the number of Electoral College votes and Congressional seats a state receives. 

    In 2024, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) found that each single percentage point increase in the foreign share of a congressional district’s population is associated with a 1.8 percentage point increase in the Democrat share of the two-party vote for that district.

    “This reflects the fact that the voters who live around non-citizens tend to be Democrats, who end up having more voting power due to the presence of a large number of non-citizens,” CIS researchers wrote. “This is not evidence of non-citizens voting.” 

They Knew And Did Nothing

From CBS News: "Spain's spy agency warned of Ceuta border breach before crisis, declassified files show." From the lede:

    Spain's national intelligence agency issued multiple warnings before the Ceuta border crisis about a potential mass crossing of migrants from Morocco into the Spanish exclave in late July, according to declassified documents released by the government on Wednesday.

    The trove of 40 documents, which includes alerts, intelligence reports, charts and communications from multiple law enforcement and intelligence agencies, appears to undermine what Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has said about the level of warning the government had before the sudden influx took place. 

It adds:

    A report from Spain's spy agency sent that day to Moroccan intelligence services warned of plans on social media for migrants to enter Ceuta on July 30 by climbing a border fence separating the exclave from Morocco, or by swimming around it, the documents show. It mentioned that migrants might take advantage of Morocco's national Throne Day, celebrated on July 30.

    That same day, Spain's national intelligence agency issued similar warnings about "several groups on Facebook and WhatsApp encouraging these attempts" in messages to Spain's Civil Guard police force. 

    Once thousands of people were streaming across the border on July 30, a Defense Ministry intelligence report issued that day stated that Moroccan forces were passive and acted negligently to stop migrants.  

Al Jazeera similarly reports:

    The documents show that on July 29 – a day before more than 72,000 people began pouring into Ceuta from Morocco – Spain’s National Intelligence Center (CNI) sent an alert via WhatsApp to the Spanish government’s delegation in the city about calls on social media “for an assault on the fence and by sea tomorrow at 8 pm”.

    “There are two different groups with a total of 180,000 followers,” the declassified message said, referencing social media groups, “just to give you an idea of its scale”.

    On the same day, CNI also warned Moroccan intelligence agencies DGST and DGED of plans for migrants to enter Ceuta by climbing the border fence or swimming around it. The agency mentioned that the plans could take advantage of Morocco’s national Throne Day, celebrated on July 30. 

Yet not only is PM Sanchez denying that there was prior warning, but he also denies that the Moroccan government had anything to do with the invasion despite a police intelligence report stating that Morocco was behind it. It is even more ridiculous of a stance given the evidence from the date of the rush of military age men into Ceuta. The Nation, for instance, relates:

    The human wave that entered Ceuta, including the dozens who drowned trying to get around the border fence sticking out into the sea, were not such desperate refugees, however. Video footage indicates that virtually none of them were carrying bags or other personal belongings. There are also videos showing truckloads of young men, apparently organized by the Moroccan government, being ferried to the edge of Ceuta, as well as scenes of Moroccan border guards waving them through. It even appears that Moroccan intelligence agents were among the crowd in an apparent effort to get a better sense of border security and the Spanish response. Indeed, having tens of thousands of people simultaneously appear at the frontier undoubtedly required major logistical support.

    This provocation appears to have been designed by the Moroccan regime to embarrass Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez in response to his efforts to warm relations with Morocco’s longtime geopolitical rival Algeria, a key supplier of natural gas made scarce as a result of the Ukraine and Iran wars and whose president he met with the previous week. The Moroccans orchestrated a similar cross-border influx in 2021 in retaliation for Spain’s allowing Western Sahara President Brahim Ghali, whose nation Morocco claims for itself, into the country for medical treatment.

An article at the Byline Times also takes the same tack:

    It was immediately branded as a “migrant invasion” and roused the far-right on both sides of the Atlantic – but as the dust settled on the curious influx of more than 50,000 people to the border of Spain’s North African territory of Ceuta last week, some believe the incident actually shows all the hallmarks of a planned incursion, designed to put pressure on Pedro Sanchez’s socialist Government in Madrid.

    That’s the conclusion of Stephen Zunes, a professor of politics and director of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco, who told the Byline Times Podcast, “Some of them were indeed migrants, but whatever their status, it was clearly facilitated by the Moroccan regime. There are videos of lorry loads of young men being trucked to the border. You don’t get 50,000 people simultaneously arriving in a corner of Morocco without a fair amount of logistical support, and the Moroccan police, who usually guard the border, essentially threw the gates open. This seems very much a political effort to undermine and embarrass Sanchez and to divide Europe.” 

    Professor Zunes pointed to a similar incident in 2021 when Brahim Ghali, the President of Western Sahara – over which Morocco claims sovereignty – flew to Spain for medical treatment. Morocco responded by allowing almost 10,000 people into Ceuta and the neighbouring Spanish enclave of Melilla. “It was a shot across the bow,” he said – and one which yielded results. “Morocco has been extracting all sorts of political and economic concessions from the Spaniards, including getting Sanchez to break with nearly 50 years of Spanish policy by coming out against the idea of a referendum on self-determination for the people of Western Sahara.”

    The latest ‘provocation’ appears to have been Sanchez’s effort to improve relations with Morocco’s neighbour and rival Algeria, which has become a key source of natural gas to Spain – not least because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the ongoing paralysis in the Strait of Hormuz. Crucially, Algeria supports the right of the people in the Western Sahara to decide their own fate, including independence. “Western Sahara is recognised as a non-self-governing territory by the United Nations,” Professor Zunes explained. “That is a colony which has the right of self-determination, which which must include the option of independence – something that Morocco has not honoured. Indeed, the United States and Israel are the only two countries that have formally recognised Moroccan sovereignty [over Western Sahara].” 

An article at The Conversation, goes into more detail about the issue of the Western Sahara and Morocco's attempts to hold onto the the territory. (See also "The Ceuta Migrant Wave Was a Power Play by Morocco Against Spain" from the National Review). 

    But while all this explains Morocco's actions, it doesn't explain why Sanchez's government chose to do nothing. In a recent speech, PM Sanchez defended the planned construction of additional migrant facilities in Ceuta, telling the Spanish citizens living there that they must plan on mass immigration through the territory as a new "structural reality".  From the article:

    Sánchez argued that Ceuta consequently needs ‘far greater migrant reception capacity’. The city of around 84,000 residents had little more than 1,000 reception places before the invasion, while reports that the reception centre was operating at more than 300 per cent of capacity emerged days after the border breaches. Madrid has since activated more than 3,500 places and plans to increase capacity to 6,000 while illegal migrants are being processed.

    Important reminder: Sánchez claimed days after the mass invasion that the situation was under control and that most of the migrants had been returned. More than a month has since passed, and the government is expanding capacity to 6,000 while thousands more remain unidentified, wandering around and causing chaos in the enclave.

    Sánchez also rejected describing those who crossed as invaders. ‘We are not talking about invaders,’ he said, but mostly about people ‘looking for a better life’ and opportunities unavailable in Morocco. He later said Spain, as Europe’s frontline in Africa, faces ‘a migratory reality that we have to work with’.

One of the key characteristic about liberals is the lack of in-group loyalty for fellow citizens. Thus, I see Sanchez's actions as his attempts to change the demographic makeup of Spain and Europe; and his viewing Ceuta as a means of doing so. This advances other political objectives as migrants have traditionally been more supportive of socialist movements and politicians. 

    And this inherent "traitor" attitude among liberals and leftists is why PM Sanchez doesn't care that "[m]ore than a month later, Spanish prosecutors say sexual assaults are happening almost every day in Ceuta. Twenty-three rapes or attempted rapes, including nine against children, have been recorded in Ceuta since the mass influx occurred," or that five to ten thousand invaders remain--in fact, as noted above, the Spanish government intends on building shelters for these remaining invaders.   

    But his actions also advance the interests of the European elites as this piece from the Daily Express discusses:

    In Spain, the government of Pedro Sanchez has taken every possible step to undermine Spanish sovereignty. Not only does Sanchez prefer to draw his authority from international institutions rather than the Spanish people, but he has deliberately undermined the very existence of Spain as a sovereign entity. His mass amnesty for illegal migrants, which by some accounts will now number some 2 million people, has called into question the very concept of Spain’s border integrity and the integrity of the Spanish people.

    It has also called into question the key elements of the European Union. Not for the first time, countries are openly questioning the wisdom of free movement within the EU. While some European elites are wary of Sanchez’s actions, and recognise how desperately he acts to distract and protect himself from the spiralling allegations of corruption concerning him and his political and personal family, Sanchez is only enacting on a grand scale the practises of globalist elites.

    The European institutions have overseen the creation of a vast legal and bureaucratic system which undermines sovereignty and border integrity at every turn. The tangled web of Strasbourg, Luxembourg and national courts has made serious attempts to control the border effectively impossible, and rendered equally unlikely serious attempts to return those who have no right to be in Europe. Let us remember: the most significant EU action in relation to borders was not to defend them, but to penalise financially the Hungarian government which attempted to protect its borders.

    Thus, whatever qualities this influx has as an invasion, it is far better understood as a surrender. This collapse of the integrity of Spanish territory is the logical consequence of a political elite who have surrendered any attachment to national sovereignty. Surrendering sovereignty is logically equivalent to the surrender of territory. 

VIDEO: Using A Handgun With A Flashlight

Massad Ayoob goes over using a handheld flashlight with a handgun--the various techniques, the pros and cons, and bit of history. He also demonstrates these with the old, heavy police flashlights where appropriate which makes me glad for the smaller lights (although I understand that the old police flashlights made good impact weapons).   

While some may question the need for these skills when we have weapon mounted lights available, Ayoob points out that there are still many handguns around that don't have rails for mounting lights, that lights are generally too bulky to include on concealed carry pistols, and you shouldn't be using your weapon mounted light to conduct searches.  

 VIDEO: "How to Use a Light and a Gun Together"
Massad Ayoob - Facts and Firearms (14 min.)

Downsides of Mandatory Evacuations

Greg Ellifritz highlights a couple issues with mandatory evacuations in the face of a bomb threat in his article, "Two Contemporary Training Issues to Ponder." His focus is a recent evacuation at a Tennessee high school after it received a bomb threat. The students were--per standard practice--evacuated to a nearby football field where there was no shade, where they sat (or stood) for nearly an hour. Twenty-one students had to be treated for a heat injury, with 3 students in critical condition. 

The first point that Greg raises is the rise in the number of people--and this is something he's noticed in classes he teaches--that suffer from heat injuries in warm weather, which he attributes to a few causes including lack of acclimation to heat due to our air conditioned world. 

The second point is his belief (and one held by security experts) that not every bomb threat deserves evacuation. In fact, he notes, there is probably a greater risk of someone planting a bomb in the rally point for the evacuees than trying to sneak it into a high school (particularly nowadays where entrance to a school is more tightly controlled than in the past). 

Anyway, an interesting read, so check out the whole thing.  

Gov't No Like Spicy Talk!

 An article at The Truth About Guns discusses the federal prosecution of a YouTuber going under the nom-de-plume "Dugan Ashley" in part because Ashley published videos on how to make explosives and some terrorist supposedly used them (although even that is questionable) to make an explosive device that failed to explode. There is, of course, no evidence that Ashley knew the terrorist or had ever directly communicated with him. As the author of the article points out, the issue here is: "Can the government treat publicly posted technical videos as a felony because a terrorist later downloaded them?"

So the government is now going to say what we can and can't say? If some assassin learned a bit about shooting from a YouTube video or article, is that YouTuber going to face prosecution? What if our hypothetical assassin attended a shooting class? Is the instructor now criminally liable? Because that is where a case like this leads should the government prevail. 

And let's be honest. The whole purpose of this prosecution is to chill speech. It is the inevitable result of living in police state. 

Leftist Urge War On The Streets

From Jonathan Turley: "'You Better Get Ready for … War': Socialists Call for 'War in the Streets' and the End of Capitalism." Turley writes:

    “You better get ready for … war.” Across the country, radicals are openly planning for the next stage of their movement, and notably, the Democratic establishment is not part of their plans. Despite the talk of a “Big Tent Party,” socialists are riding high on a surge of support and talking purges and revolution.

    In Chicago, radicals gathered for a conference on Marxism during what many view as the heyday of socialism in the United States. The Democratic Socialists of America is now larger and more powerful than at any time in our history. Socialist candidates are winning elections across the country as Democratic establishment figures from Sen. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) to Gov. Gavin Newsom pander to the movement.

    Speakers in Chicago used the conference to push supporters to the next stage in the movement, including some openly calling for violence and the end to capitalism.

    University of California Santa Barbara History Professor Butch Ware said Democrats “must be destroyed” and urged attendees to be ready for “war in the streets.” Notably, in postings on X, Ware has said that candidates such as New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed are too restrained and are being pushed by the establishment “to contain radicalism.”

    The professor “of Africa and Islam” whose faculty page is appropriately found under “bware” is the latest radical to dismiss the “Big Tent Party” rhetoric of establishment figures like Schumer. He declared, “The Democrats cannot be reasoned with. They must be destroyed.” There is little subtlety in the message, Ware has explained: “You cannot call yourself a revolutionary and not be talking about training with weapons.” 

Not unexpected as this is exactly what Leftists did in the 1960s and '70s, carrying out protests, stoking riots, and conducting extensive terrorist bombing campaigns. But it won't be too many years before the Muslims are talking about destroying the Communists in the Democrat Party.  

AfD Election Win Scares Leftists

From USA Today: "Far-right election win leaves Germany's leader Merz shaken." German Chancellor Friedrich Merz leads the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), a major so-called "conservative" political party in Germany. So why is the Alternative for Germany party considered "far right"? Perhaps I'm missing something, but as best as I can tell, it is because they put Germans and Germany first. Thus, they want to deport illegal aliens and refugees, end support for Ukraine, and patch things up with Russia so Germany can once again enjoy low energy prices. Conversely, Merz hardly sounds conservative with his tax and spend mentality:

Merz, whose own approval ratings have sunk to record lows, faces more state elections in the coming weeks and into next year, though he hopes his mix of reforms and higher spending in some areas will revive growth in Europe's largest economy.  

The Brookings Institute delves more into why the AfD cannot be allowed to succeed, noting:

Many of its proposals would be familiar to MAGA voters: segregation or deportation of refugees, abolition of funding for public broadcasters, total overhaul of schools and law enforcement, no more wind farms, rollback of LGBTQ+ rights, rejection of historical guilt, overtures to Russia.  

Worst of all, it has condemned the Bauhaus school of design--an early brutalist form of architecture popular in Germany in the 1920s and early '30s. Other strikes against the AfD are that its leaders favor "policies of low taxes, welfare cuts and privatization" and its two main leaders are an economist and a businessman, respectively. In other words, as far as I can tell, the AfD is considered "far right" because it doesn't support communism or communism-lite. 

More: "Germany’s Merz shocked by far-right state election triumph but doubles down on unpopular reforms"--AP.