Douglas Murray writes at Gatestone (read the whole excellent article here):

The trial of Geert Wilders has resulted in a guilty verdict. The court – which was located in a maximum security courthouse in the Netherlands near Schipol airport – found the leader of the PVV (Freedom Party) guilty of “insulting a group” and of “inciting discrimination”. The trial began with a number of complaints, but the proceedings gradually honed down onto one single comment made by Wilders at a party rally in March 2014. This was the occasion when Wilders asked the crowd whether they wanted “fewer or more Moroccans in your city and in the Netherlands”. The crowd of supporters shouted “fewer”.

On Friday morning the court decided not to impose a jail sentence or a fine, as prosecutors had requested. The intention of the court is clearly that the “guilty” sentence should be enough. For Wilders himself this will have been another unpleasant ordeal. But he may have become used to them by now. Five years ago Wilders was put on trial for insulting a religion. The first trial fell apart after one of the judges was found to have attempted to influence the evidence of one of Wilders’s defence witnesses. Once the trial restarted, it resulted in an acquittal. So the Dutch Justice system turn out to have been “second-time lucky” in getting the conviction they appear to have so badly wanted.

This is apparent from remarks, incomparably more damning icepicks than “fewer Moroccans”, made by members of the Netherlands’ Labour Party, who of course were never prosecuted: 

“We also have s*** Moroccans over here.” Rob Oudkerk, Dutch Labour Party (PvDA) politician.

“We must humiliate Moroccans.” Hans Spekman, PvDA politician.

“Moroccans have the ethnic monopoly on trouble-making.” Diederik Samsom, PvDA politician.

… Any half-way civilised society – as the Netherlands most certainly is – must see that trying to squash contrary views … is the behaviour of tyrants. This gang-up of the courts and the political elite in an effort to crush dissenting opinion is unbecoming for a great and distinguished nation such as The Netherlands. But they may yet have their comeuppance.

If there is one great mental note of which 2016 ought to have reminded the world, it is how deeply unwise it is to try to police opinion. For when you do so you not only make your society less free, but you disable yourself from being able to learn what your fellow citizens are actually– perhaps ever more secretly – feeling. Then one day you will hear them. And only then – when it is too late – will you remember why you should have listened.

There is a strong probability that the Freedom Party will be the next government of The Netherlands, and Geert Wilders, as its leader, will be Prime Minister.

Similar parties look fair to attaining power in other of the near-moribund countries of Europe. Donald Trump’s victory in America has inspired and strengthened all such resistance movements throughout the sick continent. They may yet restore it to vigorous life.

Our world is changing at an unprecedented pace.

This month, December 2016, Amnesty International sponsored a rally in Brussels, where Muslim speakers celebrated the 9/11 attacks, denied the Holocaust, and demonized gays and Jews.

Amnesty International, founded in Britain in 1961 to help political prisoners wherever they may be, became long ago – close on forty years ago by our reckoning – an anti-humanitarian, terrorist-supporting, often communist-led, anti-West institution.

It is quite as bad, though much smaller in size and effect, as the United Nations with its many iniquitous sub-agencies.

Among our posts exposing the extreme turpitude of the UN, and especially of its Human Rights Council (UNHRC), are these: The UN curbs freedom of speech, June 20, 2008; America begs, August 26, 2010; Beyond outrageous, Sept 1, 2010; A contumelious farce, March 2, 2011.

And see the excellent articles by Claudia Rosett, a great authority on the appalling UN.

In September 2015, the Obama administration welcomed the appointment of Saudi Arabia – one of the most oppressive regimes in the world – to head  a United Nations Human Rights Council panel.

Why are these monstrous international organizations suffered to exist?

It is  a disgrace that the UN  – Evil HQ as we call it – stands on American soil. It would fade away if the United States stopped hosting it and providing about a quarter of its revenue. 

The UN must be destroyed!

… working already, even before he has been inaugurated.

The steel industry is willing to re-hire 10,000 steel workers now that Trump’s de-regulation agenda fires optimism in the market.

And steel shares are soaring,

CNBC is notoriously no cheerleader for Donald Trump. Here’s its own text:

United States Steel would like to accelerate its investments and hire back laid-off employees now that Donald Trump will be occupying the Oval Office, CEO Mario Longhi told CNBC on Wednesday.

“We already structured to do some things, but when you see in the near future improvement to the tax laws, improvements to regulation, those two things by themselves may be a significant driver to what we’re going to do,” he said in an interview with CNBC’s “Power Lunch”.

In addition, the belief that the U.S. economy can grow at least 3.5 percent also adds to what the company can do, Longhi noted.

“I’d be more than happy to bring back the employees we’ve been forced to lay off during that depressive period,” he said, which “could be close to 10,000 jobs.”

In a statement to CNBC later, U.S. Steel clarified that Longhi was “referring to the American steel industry overall, not just to employees of United States Steel Corporation”.

Shares of the Pittsburgh-based company have soared about 80 percent since Trump’s stunning victory on Nov. 8. Investors appear to be betting on increased infrastructure spending, which the president-elect has promised, as well as further restrictions on China-produced steel.

Corporate America is also cheering Trump’s promises of less regulation. Longhi said regulation has a role to play, but believes it “has to be done smartly”.

“When you get into some situations where we’re being asked to control some substances in water that are far lower than what nature naturally offers, that’s irrational,” he said.

“There was a point in time in the past couple years that I was having to hire more lawyers to try to interpret these new regulations than I was hiring … engineers. That doesn’t make any sense.”

The US economy stirs and wakes.

President-elect Trump said yesterday in his “Thank-you” speech in Fayetteville, North Carolina, that the movement he leads is spreading world-wide.

It is. And although the left-biased press wants to depict it as a “far-right” organized threat, it is in fact a genuine grass-roots movement against the all-too-established globalist ruling elite.

Among the ideas that the various groups which make up the populist movements stand for there are – and are sure to be – some that we do not agree with. There are even things President-elect Trump seems to favor that we do not agree with  – eg. minimum wage, and letting his daughter Ivanka almost bring Al Gore back into respectability by chatting with him about “man-made climate change”. But if the movement stops the invasion of the West by Islam – which requires the overthrow of the ruling elites of Europe, the reinstatement of the nation-state as an ideal, the disintegration of the EU, and ultimately the destruction of the UN – we will regard the occasional ideas and actions we don’t like as side-issues and complaint about them as nit-picking.

In Italy even groups on the Left are rising against the tyranny of the EU and the government that connives with it.

Chris Tomlinson writes at Breitbart:

Following the results of the Italian referendum Sunday night, hundreds of protesters took to the streets of Rome demanding that Italy leave the European Union.

Left wing protesters gathered outside the parliament of the Eternal City after it was confirmed that the No vote had defeated the government of Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and their plans to reform the Italian Senate. Protesters held banners telling the government to respect the vote …

Many of the protesters also demanded the resignation of the Prime Minister, who at a press conference after the announcement of the result, said he would tender his resignation to Italian President Sergio Mattarella explaining, “When you lose, you cannot pretend that nothing has happened and go to bed and sleep. My government ends here today.”

The result of the referendum could lead to snap elections as early as February and the growing popularity of the Eurosceptic Five Star Movement* has many worried the Italians could vote to leave the political bloc as Britain had done earlier in the year.

Tensions heated up between protesters and police stationed outside the parliament and ultimately the authorities decided to shut the protest down.  Three individuals were taken into custody by police as other demonstrators yelled “shame on you” to the officers.

One of the student leaders of the protest, 27-year-old Michele Sugarelli, said:

Brexit was not a vote against Europe, it was a vote against the EU, which takes power from the people and makes decisions against their interests. We want the same thing. We want change in Italy and in Europe. We want opportunity for young people, and we want the EU to finish.

Another protester named Pietro described the police tactics saying: “They are being violent because they are afraid. Now is a moment when the elite could fall. People don’t want any more economic sacrifices while the government preserves the interests of the banks and big corporations.”

A student named Lorenzo, who spoke at the protest said: “Everyone talks about young people, but when we actually raise our voice, this is the result.” He went on to note: “I don’t think the EU will survive the next few years. In Italy, everyone hates this thing called the EU. It is falling apart and we hope it happens quickly.”

*From Wikipedia:

The Five Star Movement –  Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S)  – is populist, anti-establishment, environmentalist, anti-globalist, and Eurosceptic.  Its members stress that the M5S is not a party but a “movement” and it may not be included in the traditional left-right paradigm.

We cheer it on, even though we do not like its environmentalism.

President-elect Trump’s “wildly popular” deal with Carrier has elicited sharp criticism from some conservatives, notably from Ben Shapiro (who has consistently displayed antipathy to Trump), and more surprisingly from Sarah Palin.

They accuse the president-elect of “crony capitalism”.

We quote the Investor’s Business Daily editorial opinion of the deal:

President-elect Trump’s deal with Carrier isn’t important because it saved 1,000 jobs. It’s important because of the message it sends to businesses everywhere: Help is on the way.

The reaction to Carrier’s decision to retain some of its employees after meeting with Trump has been amusing. On the one hand, Trump’s critics say the deal was a mere trifle, since there are still so many people out there hurting. On the other hand, they claim that Trump is acting like a third-world despot.

A few headlines paint the picture:

“Trump’s Carrier Victory Is the Economy’s Loss”

“Trump’s Carrier deal is right out of Putin’s playbook”

“Is Trump’s Deal With Carrier A Form Of Crony Capitalism?”

“Trump Cheered for Carrier Deal Even as Other Jobs Are Trimmed”

“Bernie Sanders: Donald Trump ‘Has Endangered’ U.S. Jobs With Carrier Deal”

The White House, meanwhile, sniffed that saving 1,000 jobs was a mere fraction of all the manufacturing jobs supposedly created on Obama’s watch. (Earth to White House: Trump isn’t even president yet. Plus, there are 300,000  fewer  manufacturing jobs today than when Obama took office in January 2009, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.)

To be sure, we are not thrilled with the fact that Indiana agreed to cough up $7 million in special tax breaks for Carrier to keep some of its jobs in the state. It’s a misallocation of resources that only encourages companies to hold states for ransom. But this is, unfortunately, a routine practice among state governments these days. And Democrats can hardly complain about it, since their only recipe for growth is to hand out special tax breaks to companies that do their bidding.

Nor are we fans of Trump’s threats to impose tariffs on companies for making products abroad — since the only people hurt by such tariffs will be the very working class families Trump is claiming to champion.

But listen to what Carrier said after meeting with Trump. It said its decision was made possible “because the incoming Trump-Pence administration has emphasized to us its commitment to support the business community and create an improved, more competitive U.S. business climate.”

If that’s the message Trump is delivering to business leaders, we should all be cheering

It means an end to eight years in which President Obama, instead of supporting U.S. companies, arrogantly scolded business leaders and treated businesses as either piggy banks to be raided or as enemies to be brought to heel through regulations and mandates. We’ve seen the effects of Obama’s approach — eight years of dismally slow growth, stagnant wages, and a surging population of labor-force dropouts.

What’s more, if Trump succeeds in cutting business taxes, allowing companies to repatriate money parked overseas, and easing the regulatory burden on job creators — as he’s promised — he won’t have to browbeat companies into keeping jobs here, because they will already be doing that, and creating millions more.

We can hardly wait to see how Trump’s critics try to put a negative spin on that.

And we have canvassed opinions on this issue among those of our like-thinking Trump supporters who are also free-market economists, and here is a summary of them:

This is not “crony” capitalism. This is all about reducing Government Tyranny to keep business in this country.

It is basic economics. Pro-business tax and regulatory reforms are now certain to be a part of the first 100 days of Trump’s administration. Carrier has to make a clear business decision not just about building furnaces but in all of their business dealings. If you want government contracts you need to not only be competitive with those contracts but you have to qualify even to bid. If a new administration gives preference to American-made, or to companies that keep jobs in America, that is just good policy, not crony capitalism.

If you do the math on it, this deal is win/win and quite compelling (even without including the supposed threat of 6.7 billion in other business). If you take 7 million dollars and divide it by the number of jobs saved (1100) it would cost the state of Indiana $6,363.63 for each job saved. The tax savings is spread over 10 years so that cost is $636.36 per year for 10 years. This cost is easily offset with the potential savings to unemployment insurance, state agency relief for families, health care costs, food stamps etc. This also does not consider that instead of 1100 people drawing from the system they will continue to pay into it. Not to mention the fact that the Carrier plant will continue to be a consumer of goods and services from the local community and continue to pay taxes in excess of their credit. And instead of all those dollars going to Mexico for producing these products, they’ll stay in the US. That has an exponential effect, a clear benefit that is difficult to quantify.

Then there are all the businesses in the area of the Carrier plant that support the 1100 families who will continue to work and spend money in their local communities. Those businesses will not see a dramatic drop in their business as those 1100 families no longer will need to scrimp and save just to get by. Plus Carrier has pledged to spend 16 million on facility improvements which will no doubt help the local economy. This will help everyone in those communities which in turn benefits the state of Indiana directly in the form of taxes.

This deal was also very good for Carrier as it turned a PR nightmare into a huge positive for them. They will likely see an increase in sales when they might have been expecting a decrease (as a backlash to their action). It may even help them to get more government contracts for being willing to work to save American jobs.

So in truth it likely cost Indiana nothing and might even be a windfall. It is the kind of “outside Washington” thinking that will likely turn this country around.

What is the policy of the Left now – apart from being “anti-racist”, “anti-sexist”, and taking an heroic stand against carbon dioxide?

Left politicians speak of their “values”, and sometimes give instances by alluding to “inclusiveness”, “diversity” and “globalization”. Doesn’t seem to be much there to set the pulse racing.

No more talk of Revolution; of workers of the world uniting to throw off their chains; of a dictatorship of the proletariat. In America, the proletariat – or the nearest thing America has to a proletariat, the blue-collar working class – has just voted massively for a capitalist president with a program favoring the nation-state, patriotism, strong borders, strictly controlled immigration.

And the same thing is happening in Europe. Vast numbers of people are agitating and voting for the restoration of national borders and strictly controlled immigration. They are rejecting “inclusiveness”, “diversity” and “globalization” – and the rulers who have imposed millions of hostile, dependent, massively criminal aliens on them.

The Leftists call this movement “populism” and are fiercely against it. “The people? Bah! What do they know!” Leftists are only on the side of “the people” when the people docilely accept their rule.

Their time has passed. They have nothing to offer. The far-left Democratic Party of the US could find no plausible candidates for the presidency. They found three people, one of whom sank without a trace early on, leaving an unhealthy woman with a sleazy record and a ne’er-do-well commie from way back in the last century. The narrow little two-seater bench evinced no “inclusiveness”, no “diversity”. (Globalists everywhere, however, rooted for them with a passion.)

A Democratic Party leader, one of those who led the Party to overwhelming defeat, has just been re-elected to continue leading it. Did she offer something new? A new idea? A new strategy? Nope. Same old, same old.

Will the socialist Left be reborn? And if it is, will it be as a zombie or a rosy baby full of potential?

Our guess? It won’t resurrect, but if it does – as the zombie.

The bad news today is that Norbert Hofer of the Freedom Party lost his bid for the presidency of Austria. With 92 per cent of the votes counted, the Leftist candidate Alexander Van der Bellen has won 53.3 per cent to Hofer’s 46.7 per cent.

The president of Austria is a figurehead, but the election of Hofer would have been a sign that a majority of Austrians want to stop the flood of Muslim immigrants into their country which European governments, and the undemocratic European Union, have brought upon the continent.

Also today, Italians vote in a referendum. Here there is more hope that the result will shake the European status quo.

The Independent reports:

As Italy hovers on the brink of a referendum result that some experts have suggested could ultimately lead to the destruction of the eurozone, all eyes in Europe are turned towards Rome.

If Italians vote in favour of Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s proposals to streamline the Italian government and wipe out two-thirds of the senate, it will be a boost for the centre-left politician’s reform agenda.

But if they vote against – and there is every suggestion it will be a close vote – he is expected to resign, which could trigger political instability and bring new turmoil to Italy’s battered banks.

As soon as voting ends and counting begins at 11pm local time, the results of exit polling will be announced.

Half an hour later, the first projections – based on preliminary counting – are set to be broadcast.

If there is a landslide victory for either side, the result could become apparent after the second project, which is expected sometime between between midnight and one in the morning.

Yet if the result is extremely close, the world could have to wait until all the votes are counted, which could be as late as 3am. …

Before the official blackout on polls on 18 November, there was a projected 53.5 per cent to 46.5 per cent lead for the [anti-Renzi]  “No” camp”. …

This has been a of year of massive protest votes – in the form of Brexit and Donald Trump’s US Presidential victory.

And the “No” vote is being championed by the populist Five Star movement, led by the comedian Beppe Grillo, an admirer of Mr Trump. …

If new elections are called for early 2017 it’s conceivable that the Five Star movement could come to power.

The party is currently on around 28 per cent in the polls, not far behind Mr Renzi’s Democratic party, which has a 32 per cent share.

An emphatic referendum victory might give Five Star the momentum it needs to get into pole position.  …

Five Star has said it would hold a referendum to decide whether Italy should leave the eurozone.

Italy is so large and economically important that many think the single currency itself would break up entirely if its people did vote to depart. …

Eight Italian banks are expected to collapse in the near future if the nation votes “No”.

If the end result is that Italy follows Britain out of the EU,  the benefits of the “No” vote succeeding today will be enormous.

*

Update from Breitbart:

Italian PM Matteo Renzi has suffered a heavy defeat in a key referendum on constitutional reform … 

The projection by the Piepoli Institute/IPR for state broadcaster RAI estimated 57-61% will vote “No”, compared to 39-43% for “Yes”.

The projection points to an even wider margin of defeat for Mr Renzi than was suggested by three exit polls released immediately after polls closed. …

Opposition parties were quick to call for Mr Renzi to go.

“Renzi is going to go and with him the powerful lobbies who were also defeated”, Renato Brunetta, the parliamentary leader of former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s centre-right Forza Italia party.

Matteo Salvini, the head of the Northern League party, said Mr Renzi should quit “in the coming minutes” and called for early elections. …

Spearheaded by the populist Five Star Movement, the biggest rival to Mr Renzi’s Democratic party, the “No” campaign took advantage of the PM’s declining popularity, a struggling economy and problems caused by tens of thousands of migrants arriving from Africa.

The vote is a major victory for Five Star leader Beppe Grillo, who had urged Italians to follow their gut instincts. …

The result is another blow to the European Union, which is struggling to overcome a number of crises and was keen for Mr Renzi to continue his reform drive. …

Some analysts fear a deeper crisis of investor confidence that could derail a rescue scheme for Italy’s most indebted banks, triggering a wider financial crisis across the eurozone.

A collectivist plot hatched at Evil HQ, aka the UN, is being surreptitiously implemented throughout the United States.

Everyone needs to know about it.

It is called Agenda 2030. 

Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh writes at Canada Free Press:

As we cheer the election of a new President, the highly successful entrepreneur and businessman Donald Trump, having averted the advance of global communism and global citizenship, we must not forget the massive damage that has already occurred in our country and around the globe, involving the much debunked manufactured global warming turned into a profitable climate change industry worth trillions, accomplished through the non-stop work and indoctrination of the United Nations Agenda 2030, an onerous plan which has infiltrated every aspect of our society, limiting our freedoms and controlling every facet of our lives under the guise of “sustainable development”. 

One month after the establishment of the United Nations, UNESCO was created by its first director, Julian Huxley. UNESCO’s first task was to teach the world’s school teachers how to indoctrinate their students to become citizens of the world. Judging by the amount of global citizenship preparedness advertised by colleges and universities in the U.S. today, UNESCO has been highly successful. Their materials on the topic of Toward World Understanding, brainwashed many generations in schools around the globe that “nationalism was bad, and had to be replaced with the idea of world citizenship”. (UNESCO Publication 356)

The effort to transform our children into global citizens mutated into the International Baccalaureate Program, an expensive and highly secretive curriculum from Switzerland, supported and paid for by local taxpayers. Parents thought that it was a superior education to our public schools when in reality it is just another attempt to indoctrinate them into global citizens, devoid of national pride, American history, and turning them into full supporters of global governance.

The relentless global governance promoters are convinced that their social engineering philosophy of collectivism is far superior to our free market capitalism. They are not dissuaded by the monumental failures of Cuba, Venezuela, Soviet Union, North Korea, China, Eastern European countries, and other nations forced to survive on the idea of “daddy government knows best”.

With its final goal of a “global neighborhood” (Our Global Neighborhood, 1995), the government-managed society rejects the idea of private property and does not think that controlling the use of private property constitutes taking, despite the existence of our 5th Amendment which requires that government justly compensate owners for the taking of their private property.

The final barrier in the United Nations completion of this global neighborhood is the voluntary funding for the United Nations. The ideas of creating a global tax and a global currency have been introduced numerous times. In 2010, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) revealed its plan to create a global currency.

“International rules, institutions and practices that limit the behavior of people in the United States come from international entities such as the UN, UNESCO, UNEP, UNDP, WTO, ISO and other alphabet bureaucracies,” which creep into domestic policy via non-governmental organization (NGOs) lobbyists who advocate for global governance, politicians, federal employees, and delegates to U.N. meetings. Most in Congress support and promote the principle of global governance but their constituents have no idea what that means.

Why is global governance bad? Our system of freedom and self-governance cannot co-exist in a world governed by the United Nations’ tin pot dictatorships.  They believe that “government is the source of individual rights, and can give or deny those rights to individuals or organizations as the government deems necessary”, in the interest of the collective. …

We are at the crossroads of global governance, enabled by the voluntary participation of developed nations, particularly the United States, which has dragged its citizens into agreements, initiatives, and partnerships, whereby the voters were never consulted about such partnerships and initiatives, they were only subjected to the Vision of the globalists, pushed forward by elected politicians’ voluntary membership in the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI). …

Plans that erode our individual freedoms and national sovereignty start at the local level with promises and euphemisms that are relevant to a particular locality and sound benign enough to the busy American, preoccupied with making a living and supporting his/her family.

The visioning process starts at the local level by a local planning agency (an NGO) or ICLEI itself with a federal grant attached to it. ICLEI was created in 1990 “to advance the concept of sustainable development”, the lynchpin of U.N. Agenda 21 of 1992 and now U.N. Agenda 2030. 

Yes, Agenda 2030 morphed out of Agenda 21. We have expounded, and expostulated about, Agenda 21 in these posts: Beware “Agenda 21”, June 24, 2011; Agenda 21: the “smart growth” conspiracy, November 21, 2011; Three eees for environmental equalizing economics, December 4, 2011; Dark city, May 31, 2012; Destroying American wealth and sovereignty by diktat, June 6, 2012; The mystic UN and Agenda 21, August 3, 2012; Pleistocene Park, August 11, 2012; The death of nations, September 18, 2012; Home sweet closet, December 7, 2012; Getting rid of mother, January 30, 2013; Teaching submission to world government, April 14, 2013; Be alarmed, April 6, 2014; Your tiny home is frozen, July 14, 2014; Agenda 21 grinds slowly but exceeding small, December 7, 2014.

This is how the plot is being carried out:

Once the grant is in place, a facilitator is appointed to lead the visioning process of the local community. Participants are initially chosen carefully in order to support the plan. One local elected official is also included while the community knows nothing about it until the end of the process.  The group may call itself “Yourtown 2030” and will put forth their pre-planned ideas of what your town should look like in 2030 in order to have a “sustainable community” and “smart development”. Anything else [it is implied] is catastrophic for the community.

Any objections are eliminated by advertising a “consensus”. The goals chosen by this visioning are usually recommendations taken from U.N. Agenda 21 or the President’s Council on Sustainable Development documents.

Next comes the plan of action which includes “bike paths, walkways, greenbelts, conservation areas, high-density areas, mixed-use housing, five minute walk or bike to work , shopping, and play, urban boundary zones”, and other buzz-words from the sustainable development vocabulary.

As the plan is near completion, the group starts feeding information to the press in the local media. Public events are held that gloat over the righteous sustainable development and sustainable communities. The elected official on board with the visioning plan is “expected to convince the majority of the governing board to adopt the plan of action”.

Glossies will be printed and mailed out to the population, convincing the community that their visioning plan will make the community better in the 21st century if they protect the environment by reducing their carbon footprint, their commute, their car use, their suburban living, and other activities that make life fun and free, but, the world will be a better place for all.

The elements of the plan are never really publicly debated before elected officials, and, it is too late to oppose it once it is so heavily publicized. The private landowners are usually never consulted, nor are the taxpayers. Many times, once the plan has been adopted and implementation has begun, the community starts feeling the pain of the visioning plan. Local comprehensive land use plans are often so restrictive, the farmers can no longer use their pastures, their lakes, their land, their water to grow food, or plant crops.

Dr. Paugh goes on to describe in detail how the collectivizing plan is being implemented step by step in the area where she lives, Woodbridge, Va. (Go here for the official account of what is happening there, but please read Dr. Paugh’s account first.) Watch out for the same thing being done in your district. (It is being done in ours.)

Finally, she reminds us what this is really all about:

The American Planning Association, one of the main vectors of sustainable development change in this country, has a host of definitions and requirements for any inhabited place in the country as to how the Strong Neighborhood Initiative (SNI) should be implemented according to a specific blueprint designed years ago by the U.N. Agenda 21 planners in Rio.

The neighborhoods must “promote or protect air and water quality, protect groundwater resources, and respond to the growing threat of climate change”, a threat that is not real. “Green infrastructure” must be used, such as “local tree cover mitigating heat gain”. Communities must “utilize measures or practices to protect or enhance local biodiversity and the environment”.

At the end of the day, none of these plans are really about improving the lives of the people, they are about herding humans into small areas where they are more easily controlled by the government. 

If this is not stopped by the new Republican government, one of the worst evils President Obama has allowed to be done will live long after him.

Post Script: The UN must be destroyed!

It is a common belief among conservatives that the democracies of the West are proof against attack by hostile ideologies; cannot be damaged, let alone destroyed by them, because they can absorb them simply by allowing them free expression. This was true when the threatening ideology was Communism in the last century. Internally, no democracy was mortally harmed by Communist movements. Only formidable (though not supreme) military power, surrendered to by profoundly immoral diplomacy, delivered Eastern European countries freshly liberated from Nazism into the mailed fist of the Soviet Union.

But Communism was not an alien ideology. It was European. It was built on the same foundations that liberal democracy itself had in part been built on – an aspiration to make society fair, kind and good according to definitions inherited from Christianity. Liberal democracy discarded dogmatic orthodoxy, and welcomed secular doubt. But Communism, like Christianity itself, pursued its aspiration with the utmost arrogance, injustice and cruelty.

Now the Western democracies are under attack from a very different enemy: Islam. It shares no moral principles with liberal democracy. Despite claiming to be related to the “moral religions” of Judaism and Christianity, and despite having the word “merciful” in its description of its god, it is not a moral religion. It simply demands total submission to the god’s commandments, as they were issued through the mouth of an illiterate warlord of the 7th century. The commandments are frankly cruel and merciless.

And they are obeyed. Obedient Muslims will offer us Westerners a choice between conversion to Islam, or underdog status bought with tribute, or death. They reject freedom of speech because it allows us to criticize them and their creed. From their point of view, everything that can and must be said about the way human beings should live has been said –  by their god through the mouth of his “prophet”. It can only be repeated, never questioned. If you challenge it, if you mock it – you’ll die.

Against such an enemy, our democracies are not proof. We are losing to it. Islam is winning. We are being subjected to Islam.

From Gatestone, by Giulio Meotti:

In the summer of 2005, the Danish artist Kåre Bluitgen, when he met a journalist from the Ritzaus Bureau news agency, said he was unable to find anyone willing to illustrate his book on Mohammed, the prophet of Islam. Three illustrators he contacted, Bluitgen said, were too scared. A few months later, Bluitgen reported that he had found someone willing to illustrate his book, but only on the condition of anonymity.

Like most Danish newspapers, Jyllands-Posten decided to publish an article about Bluitgen’s case. To test the state of freedom of expression, Flemming Rose, Jyllands–Posten’s cultural editor at the time, called twelve cartoonists, and offered them $160 each to draw a caricature of Mohammed. What then happened is a well-known, chilling story.

In the wave of Islamist violence against the cartoons, at least two hundred people were killed. Danish products vanished from shelves in Bahrain, Qatar, Yemen, Oman, the UAE and Lebanon. Masked gunmen stormed the offices of the European Union in Gaza and warned Danes and Norwegians to leave within 48 hours. In the Libyan city of Benghazi, protesters set fire to the Italian consulate. Political Islam understood what was being achieved and raised the stakes; the West did not.

An Islamic fatwa also forever changed Flemming Rose’s life. In an Islamic caricature, his head was put on a pike. The Taliban offered a bounty to anyone who would kill him. Rose’s office at the newspaper was repeatedly evacuated for bomb threats. And Rose’s name and face entered ISIS’s blacklist, along with that of the [subsequently] murdered editor of Charlie Hebdo, Stéphane Charbonnier.

Less known is the “white fatwa” that the journalistic class imposed on Rose. This brave Danish journalist reveals it in a recently published book, De Besatte (The Obsessed). “It is the story of how fear devours souls, friendships and the professional community,” says Rose. The book reveals how his own newspaper forced Rose to surrender.

“The drama and the tragedy is that the only ones to win are the jihadists,” Flemming Rose told the Danish newspaper Weekendavisen.

The CEO of Jyllands–Posten, Jørgen Ejbøl, summoned Rose to his office, and asked, “You have grandchildren, do not you think about them?”

The company that publishes his newspaper, JP/Politikens Hus, said: “It’s not about Rose, but the safety of two thousand employees.”

Jorn Mikkelsen, Rose’s former director, and the newspaper’s business heads, obliged him to sign a nine-point diktat, in which the Danish journalist accepted, among other demands, “not participating in radio and television programs”, “not attending conferences”, “not commenting on religious issues”, “not writing about the Organization of the Islamic Conference” and “not commenting on the cartoons”.

Rose signed this letter of surrender during the harshest time for the newspaper, when, in 2010-2011, there were countless attempts on his life by terrorists, and also attempts on the life of Kurt Westergaard, illustrator of a cartoon (Mohammed with a bomb in his turban) that was burned in public squares across the Arab world. Westergaard was then placed on “indefinite leave” by Jyllands-Posten “for security reasons.”

In his book, Rose also reveals that two articles were censored by his newspaper, along with an outburst from the CEO of the company, Lars Munch: “You have to stop, you’re obsessed, on the fourth floor there are people who ask ‘can’t he stop?'”.

Rose then drew more wrath from his managers when he agreed to participate in a conference with the equally targeted Dutch parliamentarian, Geert Wilders, who at this moment is on trial in the Netherlands for “hate speech”. Rose writes:

He starts yelling at me, “Why the f*ck did you say yes to appear on stage with this terrorist target, are you stupid? Do you have a secret death wish? You have grandchildren now. Are you completely out of your mind? It’s okay if you want to die yourself, but why are you taking the company though all this?”

Jyllands-Posten also pressured Rose when he decided to write a book about the cartoons, Hymne til Friheden (Hymn to Freedom). His editor told him that the newspaper would “curb the harmful effects” of the book by keeping its publication as low-key as possible. Rose was then threatened with dismissal if he did not cancel two debates for the tenth anniversary of the Mohammed cartoons. …

After the 2015 massacre at Charlie Hebdo, Rose, no longer willing to abide by the “diktat” he was ordered to sign, resigned as the head of the foreign desk of Jyllands-Posten, and now works in the US …

Rose writes in the conclusion of his book: “I’m not obsessed with anything. The fanatics are those who want to attack us, and the possessed are my former bosses at Jyllands-Posten.”

Rose’s revelations confirm another familiar story: Jyllands-Posten‘s surrender to fear. Since 2006, each time its editors and publishers were asked if they still would have published the drawings of Mohammed, the answer has always been “no”. This response means that the editors had effectively tasked Rose with writing the newspaper for fanatics and terrorists thousands of kilometers away. Even after the January 7, 2015 massacre at the weekly Charlie Hebdo in Paris, targeted precisely because it had republished the Danish cartoons, Jyllands-Posten announced that, out of fear, it would not republish the cartoons:

We have lived with the fear of a terrorist attack for nine years, and yes, that is the explanation why we do not reprint the cartoons, whether it be our own or Charlie Hebdo’s. We are also aware that we therefore bow to violence and intimidation.

… Is democracy lost? The headquarters of Jyllands-Posten today has a barbed-wire fence two meters high and one kilometer long, a door with double lock (as in banks), and employees can only enter one at a time by typing in a personal code (a measure that did not protect Charlie Hebdo). Meanwhile, the former editor, Carsten Juste, has withdrawn from journalism; Kurt Westergaard lives in hiding in a fortress, and Flemming Rose, like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, fled to the United States.

Much, certainly, looks lost. “We are not living in a ‘free society’ anymore, but in a ‘fear society'”, Rose has said.

Of course, no Western democracy has tried very hard – or at all! – to resist the Islamic onslaught. Governments have invited Muslims into their countries in large numbers. And protected them from criticism.

But that appalling – and inexplicable – state of affairs may be about to change. Perhaps democracy is not lost. Perhaps now that America is about to be led by a man who does not contemplate the possibility of defeat, this most horrible of all possible enemies may be halted, repelled, and discouraged from any renewed attempt at conquest, whether by infiltration or arms, for a very long time.

We hope so.

The Marxist Left and its fellow-travelers are mourning the death of Fidel Castro. It would be good if they realized that his death marks the moment when their appalling creed started to die. The last possible new Marxist regime was perhaps – in the hopes of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and their followers – to be the United States, and even the Whole World (“to save it from climate change”). But they lost their grip on power just when they thought they had it for keeps. And as they stood bewildered, wondering how it had happened, Fidel Castro croaked.

At present there are still lots of Marxists in the world to eulogize the dead tyrant of Cuba.

Among the mourning parties are the Greens.

Jeremy Lott writes at the Washington Examiner:

Green Party perennial presidential hopeful Jill Stein praised former Cuban strongman Fidel Castro on Saturday, as encomiums by many left-of-center politicians continued to roll in following his death.

“Fidel Castro was a symbol of the struggle for justice in the shadow of empire. Presente!” Stein wrote on Twitter Saturday afternoon. The verb form of the word literally means “present.” The way Stein used it was something like a military salute (“present arms!”) but for Latin American leftist radicals. …

Castro’s death Friday, she told [Paste Magazine], “feels like the passing of an era of incredible struggle against empire right across the water — whether you live in Haiti or in Cuba or even much of the rest of South America, there’s been a real struggle for social justice and it’s been very difficult. Cuba was in many ways the face of that movement, which continues to this day”.

In praising Castro, Stein joined former Democratic presidential candidate Jesse Jackson, British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, and many others with progressive pedigrees in heaping praise on the Marxist ruler who has a great deal of blood on his hands.

Just how much blood is a matter of some dispute.

“In our country there have never been death squads – not a single disappearance, no political assassinations, not one person tortured,” Fidel Castro himself insisted in 2001.

However, countless people fled the country over several decades for some reason and many of them have stories to tell.

According to the Cuba Archive, which tries to document the atrocities of the Fidel regime, on his watch at least 3,116 people were killed by firing squad and 1,116 people were executed in other extrajudicial killings. All told, they chalk up an admittedly far from complete death toll of over 7,000 Cubans on his watch.

Far from complete is right. (More on that below.)

Russian President Vladimir Putin remembered Castro as a “strong and wise man” according to a statement released by the Kremlin.

“He embodied high ideals of a politician, citizen and patriot, and was sincerely convinced of the rightness of the cause, to which he gave his whole life,” the Russian leader wrote. “His memory will live forever in the hearts of Russian citizens.”

And this is part of the pablum issued by out-going President Obama:

For nearly six decades, the relationship between the United States and Cuba was marked by discord and profound political disagreements. During my presidency, we have worked hard to put the past behind us, pursuing a future in which the relationship between our two countries is defined not by our differences but by the many things that we share as neighbors and friends – bonds of family, culture, commerce, and common humanity.

The past is always behind us. Thing is, what parts of it provide lessons we need to learn?

Paul Kengor writes at Western Journalism:

How many people were killed by Fidel and his communist dystopia? Unfortunately, no one truly knows … No one knows how many poor souls he tossed into his jails, from political dissidents to priests to homosexuals. Fidel’s prison-state has never permitted human-rights observers … Many sources have tried to pin down numbers and have generated some common estimates:

The Black Book of Communism, the seminal Harvard University Press work, which specialized in trying to get accurate data on the enormous volume of deaths produced by communist tyrants, states that in the 1960s alone, when Fidel and his brother Raul (Cuba’s current leader) established their complete control, with the help of their murdering buddy Che Guevara, an estimated 30,000 people were arrested in Cuba for political reasons and 7,000 to 10,000 were believed to have been executed. Even then, that was merely the start.

From the late 1950s to the late 1990s, it’s estimated that Castro killed between 15,000 to 18,000 people, whether victims of long-term imprisonment or outright execution by bullets.

That is a lot of people for a small island. And it isn’t all. Cuba is a surreal island of no boats, where boats are banned — because people with boats flee. Thus, untold numbers of citizens have attempted the treacherous nearly 100-mile swim to Florida in shark-infested waters. An estimated 100,000 have risked the journey. Of those, perhaps as many as 30,000 to 40,000 died from drowning. As they bob for breath, the Castro government sends military helicopters to drop large bags of sand on them from above. …

So, Fidel Castro is responsible for a lot of death.

Nowhere near enough to satisfy his appetite for it. 

But here, too, these numbers do not capture the level of Fidel’s brutal madness. Consider the actual millions he badly wanted to kill, especially here in America.

If Fidel Castro had his way in October 1962, the United States would have been leveled by atomic bombs and so would little Cuba, which would’ve ceased to exist. The fact is that Fidel recommended to Nikita Khrushchev that Cuba and the USSR together launch an all-out nuclear attack upon the United States, literally igniting Armageddon.

This is no secret. Castro admitted it. In an open forum discussing the Cuban Missile Crisis 30 years later, Castro told Robert McNamara, JFK’s secretary of defense: “Bob, I did recommend they [the nuclear missiles] were to be used.”

“Bob”, eh? The Communist tyrant of Cuba and Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense came to be on first name terms?

In total, said McNamara, there were 162 Soviet missiles on the island. The firing of those missiles alone would have led to (according to McNamara) at least 80 million dead Americans, which would have been half the population, plus added tens of millions of casualties.

That, however, is a conservative estimate, given that 162 missiles was far the sum total that would have been subsequently launched. The United States in turn would have launched on Cuba, and also on the USSR. President Kennedy made that commitment clear in his nationally televised speech on October 22, 1962: “It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.” In response, of course, the Soviets would have automatically launched on America from Soviet soil. Even then, the fireworks would just be starting: Under the terms of their NATO and Warsaw Pact charters, the territories of Western and Eastern Europe would also erupt.

Once the smoke cleared, hundreds of millions to possibly over a billion people could have perished, with Western civilization in its death throes. If Fidel Castro had gotten his way, he would have precipitated the greatest slaughter in human history. (Che Guevara also wanted to launch the nukes.)

The Soviets were horrified. Their ambassador to Cuba, Alexander Alekseyev, was so stunned at what Castro told him that he stood frozen, speechless, crushed. Without waiting for an answer from the numb ambassador, Castro started writing his feelings on paper, which Alekseyev saw as a kind of “last testament, a farewell”.

Fidel was ready to go — go up in a giant mushroom cloud for Marxism. As McNamara learned, this was Fidel’s big chance to die as a “martyr” for Marxism-Leninism. He was ready to “pull the temple down on his head”. 

A shocked Nikita Khrushchev realized he was dealing with madmen. Khrushchev’s son Sergei, in his three-volume biography of his father, said that the Soviet general secretary huddled with top officials in the “code room” of the Foreign Ministry late on a Sunday night and repeatedly ordered, “Remove them, and as quickly as possible”.

Remove the Soviet missiles from Cuba, he presumably meant; not the “madmen” from power, which would have been even better.

Khrushchev urged Andrei Gromyko to instantly get in touch with Washington in order “to save the world from those pushing us toward war”.

As for Fidel, he was “furious” with Khrushchev. “Castro was mortally offended,” recorded Sergei. “He had not managed to engage in a fight with the Americans. He had made up his mind to die a hero, and to have it end that way.” He had been ready to “die beautifully,” as one Soviet official put it. Denied his glorious opportunity, he now considered Khrushchev “a traitor”.

Thankfully, the world averted nuclear war, through the leadership of Khrushchev and Kennedy, and no thanks to bloodthirsty lunatics like Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, who were ready to blow up the world in the name of their Marxist-Leninist nightmare.

In the name of their Marxist-Leninist religion, rather. To them it was no nightmare. To them, vast destruction, the laying waste of continents, the obliteration of cities, the death of all living things, was a glorious dream.

Enough social justice in it for you, Jill Stein?

But for the sane: whose voice among the voices that are heard by multitudes has said what needs to be said?

President-elect Donald Trump:

Fidel Castro’s legacy is one of firing squads, theft, unimaginable suffering, poverty and the denial of fundamental human rights. While Cuba remains a totalitarian island, it is my hope that today marks a move away from the horrors endured for too long, and toward a future in which the wonderful Cuban people finally live in the freedom they so richly deserve. Though the tragedies, deaths and pain caused by Fidel Castro cannot be erased, our administration will do all it can to ensure the Cuban people can finally begin their journey toward prosperity and liberty.”

And Vice President-elect Mike Pence tweeted: “The tyrant Castro is dead. New hope dawns.”