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Wednesday, October 28, 2026

A man with a beard and glasses wearing a dark plaid shirt gestures while sitting on a stage.

Shauna Clinton/Sportsfile for Web Summit Qatar via Getty Images

Far-left political influencer Hasan Piker was recently grilled on a satirical internet show—and the clips it generated were gold.

“Now, Karl Marx said, ‘To each according to his needs.’ You live in a $2.7 million house,” the host said. “Why are your needs more important than 90% of other Californians?”

Piker appeared uncomfortable as he answered—and it wasn’t because he was fully decked out in a Mao suit.

To put it simply, proudly sporting the uniform of a regime that took the lives of an estimated 80 million people, all while enjoying the prosperity of a $2.7 million house and invitations to Oscar parties, isn’t a good look.

But of the socialist states Piker views favorably, former Yugoslavia arguably ranks among the highest. He once published a video titled “Yugoslavia Was Awesome!” in which he praised aspects of the former socialist country, including its living standards.

That idea might seem laughable to survivors like Slavenka Drakulic—literally.

In 1992, she published her book “How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed,” which recounts the stories of daily life under communism in Eastern Europe. While Piker may shrug off the textbook figures on communism’s death tolls, he may be less familiar with one of its nearly invisible effects: the subtle erosion of human dignity, hope, and personal responsibility.

Drakulic’s book brings a magnifying glass to these stories, starting with an account of the life of her friend Tanja. After the death of her lover and the destruction of her journalistic reputation for mildly criticizing nationalization, Tanja committed suicide.

For those under socialist rule, a lack of faith in the future was a characteristic feature of life. Everyone around Drakulic seemed to assume the permanence of the communist state.

“What communism instilled in us was precisely this immobility,” she wrote. “The absence of a future, the absence of a dream, of the possibility of imagining our lives differently.”

For Tanja, that loss of hope proved fatal.

Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl wrote about a similar effect in his well-known book “Man’s Search for Meaning.”

Drawing from his experience in a concentration camp, Frankl concluded that the individuals who were able to persevere held on to a crucial ingredient for life: hope. Even in barbaric conditions, hope allowed prisoners to maintain their dignity and will to live.

Ordinary lives—not just political dissidents—were crushed under the weight of socialist regimes.

“Not big heroes, political prisoners, or dissidents,” Drakulic wrote, “but people who just could not stand it anymore.”

In a society with concentrated state power, citizens increasingly lose the sense that they have a stake in molding the future—and that has a devastating effect not only on hope, but also on individual responsibility.

Litter was therefore pervasive. Drakulic wrote that citizens, having lost a sense of their agency, behaved as if “the public belonged to nobody.”

She continued, “If you can’t destroy the system, you can certainly destroy a telephone booth, ticket machine, or flowers in a park. In this silent war, the losers are our cities.”

Frustration with the system found expression in small acts of neglect. The physical decay of the urban landscape is a mirror image of a population hollowed out from within.

Communism is economically unsustainable—that much is gleaned from the failure of the USSR and its satellite states. But even deeper is its spiritual cost. Forcing humans to live in impoverished conditions, fearful of the all-seeing eye of the state, degrades trust, freedom, and creativity; it degrades the human soul. We must heed Drakulic’s warning of the spiritual rather than merely economic cost of collectivism.

As she stated in the 1990s, “We may have survived communism, but we have not outlived it.” That is because communism is so much more than an economic ideology—it seeps into the very mind and soul of individuals forced to live under its reign.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2026/10/21/socialism-isnt-just-deadly-its-soul-crushing/

“Far Right” Seizes on French Riots

“Far Right” Seizes on French Riots

by John Hinderaker in France, Illegal immigration, Immigration, Leftism, Riots

As predicted, the riots, arson and looting in France have boosted the electoral prospects of the National Rally. Marine Le Pen is now, far and away, the number one choice of Frenchmen for President in the upcoming election. To normal observers, this would not come as a surprise. The riots tend to confirm that the National Rally’s diagnosis of France’s problems is correct.

This simple explanation, of course, is anathema to the French (and European, and American) establishment. On X, Heather Mac Donald has the story. Her tweet is embedded below; this is her full text:

_________________________

The mainstream media are fuming. Marine Le Pen, head of France’s most popular party, National Rally, is exploiting the French riots for her political advantage, the media grouse. Le Pen and her right-hand man, Jordan Bardella, portray the riots as the confirmation of everything they have been warning about for years, especially regarding Third World immigration. This is a ruse, complains the press and its establishment sources, a mere rhetorical trick.

A front-page article in today’s New York Times quotes a political scientist at Paris’s Sciences Po: “The picture of France emerging this morning, in light of all the destruction, plays well into their hands.”

The Wall Street Journal sounds the same note today: “The social instability over the weekend absolutely plays into Le Pen’s campaign that the establishment has delivered chaos,” said Mujtaba Rahman, from the risk analysis firm Eurasia Group.

Even the papers’ headlines echo each other: “France’s Far Right Seizes the Moment as Rioting Stuns the Country” (New York Times); “Marine Le Pen Seizes on French Chaos to Present Herself as Leader in Waiting” (Wall Street Journal).

It is necessary to deconstruct these far-right narratives; thankfully, the press is there to help us. The violence “perfectly aligned with the image the National Rally has long painted of a France divided into two and battling for survival,” a political science professor at the University of Nice, Côte d’Azur told the New York Times.

The Wall Street Journal writes that the “far-right” Le Pen has “cast” France as a nation adrift, “buffeted by waves of immigration and lawlessness that have torn at the country’s social fabric.”

It is mere coincidence that that image of a divided, degraded France constructed by the National Rally and the violence on the streets seem to align. That alignment does not mean that the National Rally was right, just that its demagogy was opportune.

But the waves of hate-filled destruction crashing over France’s once great cities validate Le Pen and Bardella’s diagnosis of France’s demographic catastrophe, not as narrative but as empirical fact. The Wall Street Journal again tries to dismiss Le Pen’s prognostications as a rhetorical maneuver: “Le Pen’s anti-immigration stance…gives her another way to frame the unrest. Le Pen has cast the unrest as the work of far-left radicals allied with youths from France’s banlieues, the poor urban outskirts where much of the country’s minority Muslim population resides.” How else would the Journal “cast” the “unrest?” As the work of lavender harvesters from Provence?

The elite effort at euphemism is by now desperate: “The looting drew attention to a segment of the population—specifically young people from certain neighborhoods, some of whom are from immigrant backgrounds,” pollster Adélaïde Zulfikarpasic told the Journal. “And that hits the themes at the heart of National Rally’s rhetoric.”

A conversation on German public media station ZDF yesterday between the ever-pinched and purse-lipped anchor Marietta Slomka and a French academic in Bonn referred delicately to the “decades-long problem” of poverty, concentration, and “integration” in the Plattenbauten (the concrete slab housing projects) around Paris. The problem is not “integration,” which suggests a failing in the host country, however, it is large-scale Third World immigration, which has turned many of these projects into no-go zones. And now that local anarchy is spreading.

If naming a deliberate attack on Western civilization by those who feel only resentment and envy earns one the title of far-right extremist or racist, so be it. The mayhem in France is not rhetoric, it is reality. And the National Rally’s law enforcement and deportation proposals are precisely what France and the rest of Europe need today.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2026/10/far-right-seizes-on-french-riots.php

Here's Another Lie From Abdul El-Sayed

Here's Another Lie From Abdul El-Sayed

Amy Curtis Follow @RantyAmyCurtis

Abdul El-Sayed is lying. Again.

Frankly, it's hard to keep track of all the lies. He's lied about his ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. He's lied about letting Americans keep their private insurance. He's lied about being a doctor. And now he's lying about his support for gas-powered cars.

"I want us to continue to be the world's leader in internal combustion engines," El-Sayed said.

But his previous statements tell a different story. During a 2016 speech in Boston, El-Sayed called cars the "modern-day cigarette." These comments came when El-Sayed was serving as director of the Detroit Health Department and he was discussing the auto industry's role in the city.

"Detroit is Motown," he said. It'll also be the Motor City. Cars are a big deal in Detroit whether or not you like them. One person made an argument to me that I probably agree with: cars are the modern-day cigarette. They're just like this, like, why do we do it this way?"

He also blamed Detroit's current problem on the cars. "Who built Detroit? The Fords, the Sloans, right? The Dodges of the world," El-Sayed said. "And what did they want to tell everybody? You can have a car and have a great life, right? So they built the entire city around the car. That’s why Detroit looks like this now."

The video shows other times El-Sayed attacked cars.

"Look, I'm a Michigander, and we're car people. We account for more combustion engines than any place on Earth," he said. "And I do not say that proudly."

It's a very unfunny joke.

This is a gem, too.

It shouldn't play well anywhere.

El-Sayed supports the Green New Deal, which ends the combustion engine and works to outlaw fossil fuels. He was called out on his support for the Green New Deal on numerous occasions, which shows he either a) doesn't know what's in the Green New Deal or b) is lying about it.

Ending the combustion engine will destroy our economy and our way of life. Which is what the Democrats want, of course. Do not give them the power to do this.

https://townhall.com/news/amy-curtis/2026/10/22/el-sayed-combustable-engines-n2685014?utm_source=thdailypmvip&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&utm_content=ncl-S2dxZsFhfM&utm_term=&_nlid=S2dxZsFhfM&_nhids=ncLRxt9yFoEQls

Tuesday, October 27, 2026

Why Is Paris and Much of France Burning?

Why Is Paris and Much of France Burning?

Cal Thomas

Watching the riots throughout France (the BBC laughably called them "mostly peaceful" while showing cities in flames, and U.S. media disagreed on whether they are the fault of the right or the left) made me think of the classic 1966 film "Is Paris Burning?"

The plot was inspired by Adolf Hitler's 1944 order for German troops to destroy the city should Allied forces appear ready to capture it. Fortunately, the general tasked with fulfilling the order refused to do it, saving the City of Light.

Unfortunately, the riots may be a precursor to partially fulfilling Hitler's wishes.

How could these riots happen? They were predictable, but too many don't want to face facts or take seriously what the destroyers say they wish to achieve. In a Substack post, Rod Dreher writes of the French riots: "The intifada there - by Muslims, African and Middle Eastern migrants and their children, and radical French leftists - cannot be understood apart from the long civil war between Civilization and Anti-Civilization. At this point, it's hard to predict which side will prevail."

You can't allow people into a country who refuse to assimilate and don't share that country's values and beliefs; otherwise the country will cease to exist. This has been the point President Trump has been trying to make when it comes to the U.S. southern border.

French elections are scheduled for next April and candidates from all political sides are trying to benefit from the riots. Imagine that!

You couldn't have a better answer to "why" than what Guy Milliere has written for the Gatestone Institute: "The founder and leader of France Unbowed, Jean-Luc Melenchon, is a Trotskyist who, already in his youth, embraced the concept of 'permanent revolution.' Melenchon, over the years, has made no secret of his desire for a radical transformation of France. He supports the Islamization of the country and advocates a 'great replacement' of the native French population with a new demographic from the Muslim world that would constitute what he calls the 'new France.'"

French President Emmanuel Macron reportedly kept locked up a French government report describing the Muslim Brotherhood as "a threat that spreads insidiously and progressively." It has put the spotlight not only on the secretive movement's growing influence in France, but also on the extremist threat it poses more widely around Europe.

The government report was leaked to conservative media. As reported by EUReporter, "(The report) names several organizations in France it says are linked to the (Muslim) Brotherhood. They include the Averroes high school in Lille, the Al-Kindi school group near Lyon and two European Institutes of Human Sciences, which focus on teaching Arabic and the Quran." The Brotherhood's strategy, says the report, "is to install a form of ideological hegemony by infiltrating civil society under the guise of religious and educational activities." It also highlights a broader "ecosystem" in several French cities, with Brotherhood-linked structures in education, charity work and religion that "cooperate with each other."

Does this even remotely mirror what is happening in the U.S.? Macron apparently fears being called an "Islamophobe" — a label that is rapidly replacing "racism" as the go-to epithet for anyone who opposes the agendas of the left and Islamism.

Warnings of how Germany was violating the 1919 Treaty of Versailles and rebuilding its military were ignored until it was too late, costing hundreds of thousands of lives in World War II. France appears to be making a similar mistake when it comes to its "enemy within." Will America be next to "burn"? Again, the Islamists openly say we are on their list.

https://townhall.com/columnists/calthomas/2026/10/22/why-is-paris-and-much-of-france-burning-n2685088?utm_source=thdailypmvip&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&utm_content=ncl-EfqXMm56eb&utm_term=&_nlid=EfqXMm56eb&_nhids=ncLRxt9yFoEQls

If They Can't Cheat...

If They Can't Cheat...

Kevin McCullough

Something is in the air. And it's a bit inexplicable. But let me try anyway.

I've been hesitant, on-air and in person, to give an opinion about this year's election.

A second-term president with approval numbers in the 30s by some polls, gas prices higher than anyone wants, and a "personality" that gets dissected endlessly by the party not in power. These would be bad signs if the other side weren't nuts.

Never mind the mile of nuance behind those indicators that voters will actually weigh. Does anyone like a president 100 percent of the time? Are temporarily higher gas prices a reasonable short-term trade for keeping nuclear weapons out of the hands of death-obsessed mullahs who want to see us gone? And haven't voters already weighed in on this president's personality, three election cycles running? Franklin Roosevelt ran four times and pulled roughly 103 million votes across all four combined. Trump has run three times and pulled roughly 214 million combined — more than double FDR's total in one fewer election. Say what you want about him. The personality is baked into the equation by now, and has been for a decade.

So maybe it's for these reasons, and others — he's kept more campaign promises than the last several modern-era presidents combined — that you're not seeing a groundswell of revolt heading into his final midterm.

If the polls are accurate, the House and Senate both look like nail-biters. Good thing he's worked so hard on election integrity. Close races deserve accurate results.

And now look at what the opposing party is literally suing to stop.

Top congressional Democrats, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, filed suit this week alleging the administration has unlawfully pressured states to clean suspected noncitizens off their voter rolls and has leaned on local election officials to comply. Schumer called it bullying. He called it un-American. He said the voters decide elections, not Trump.

Fine. Then let only the voters who are legally entitled to decide actually be the ones deciding. That's the entire point of a clean roll. Democratic leadership is suing to stop a process aimed at confirming that the people voting are the people legally allowed to vote, two weeks before an election. Read that sentence as many times as you need to. That's not a lawsuit defending voting rights. That's a lawsuit defending the status quo of whoever's currently on the rolls, questionable eligibility included.

That nullifies legal votes by diluting them with illegal ones. That's how a candidate can run a campaign largely from his basement, speak carelessly about black voters in ways that would have ended a Republican's career in a single news cycle, and still walk away claiming 80 million votes with a straight face.

CNN's Harry Enten has been straightforward about this, too, to his credit, on a network that doesn't exactly benefit from the message. His numbers say if public polling misses by even a few points — well within the range of past cycles — Republicans hold both chambers. He's right to flag it. Trump has out-defied bigger polling gaps than that in every cycle he's run.

And that brings us to the actual policy differences, which remain the real story underneath all the noise. James Talarico has called parents who won't affirm a child's gender identity "abusive," on the record, and voted against a bill that would have shielded those parents from child-abuse and neglect findings for simply declining to go along. Abdul El-Sayed has spent a campaign aligned with a platform built on abolishing ICE and ties to associations he's downplayed rather than disowned. Others want to pack or restructure the Supreme Court outright. Not one of them has a credible plan to lower prices. Not one of them is campaigning on actually securing the border.

To their credit, American voters are watching European cities burn this autumn — France, Belgium, Italy, Portugal, Albania — and noticing how quickly imported grievance politics curdle into street warfare. We're watching the documented pattern of non-assimilation inside certain Somali and Islamic communities in Minnesota and Michigan play out in federal fraud investigations, and wondering, reasonably, whether we're sitting on our own version of that same problem. We're watching a sitting member of Congress, Ilhan Omar, under active federal investigation serious enough that the administration itself has floated denaturalization and deportation as possible outcomes — something that, if it happens, would make history for reasons nobody should want.

This cycle, from a pure narrative standpoint, should be a layup for the party out of power. Inflation fatigue, approval numbers, a president voters have spent years being told to resent.

But they're nuts. And these are difficult, genuinely concerning times to be voting in anything but full possession of the facts.

https://townhall.com/columnists/kevinmccullough/2026/10/22/if-they-cant-cheat-n2685147?utm_source=thdailypmvip&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&utm_content=ncl-48pkc5XRKA&utm_term=&_nlid=48pkc5XRKA&_nhids=ncLRxt9yFoEQls

French Police Identify Antifa as the “Ideologically Distinct Group” Behind the Riots Despite Democratic Denials

French Police Identify Antifa as the “Ideologically Distinct Group” Behind the Riots Despite Democratic Denials

Years ago, I called Antifa the Keyser Söze of the left, after the character in “The Usual Suspects.” In the film, the character Virgil explains how Söze stayed in the shadows: he became “a myth, a spook story that criminals tell their kids at night.” The strategy was too simple: “the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he did not exist.”

Democratic leaders have long fostered the myth around Antifa, the largest and most violent group on the political left. For years, they have denied the existence of the group even as members were charged with crimes (including terrorism). Now, the French authorities have found that the nonexistent group is the largest of three “ideologically distinct groups” responsible for the violence in France. It appears that either the entire French security system is delusional or the trick is up for the American left.

I have testified before Congress about Antifa, run columns on the organization for over a decade, and written a book discussing Antifa. Yet, Democratic members continued to insist that there is no such group, while other leading Democrats have praised Antifa for instilling fear in MAGA.

It was a curious claim even then, when other Democratic leaders were actively pandering to the violent group.

Former Democratic National Committee deputy chair Keith Ellison — now the Minnesota attorney general — proclaimed that Antifa would “strike fear in the heart” of Trump. His own son, Minneapolis City Council member Jeremiah Ellison, declared his allegiance to Antifa in the heat of the protests this summer.

However, Democratic leaders and pundits have repeated the mantra that there is no such group despite political violence on the left spreading across the country.

Rep. Dan Goldman (D., N.Y.) dared anyone to name a single member of Antifa despite the charging of Antifa members with various serious crimes.

Former House Judiciary Chair Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) was widely ridiculed for denying the existence of Antifa.

Others on the left have joined Goldman in this absurd claim. Late-night host Jimmy Kimmel devoted part of his monologue to assuring viewers that Antifa is no more than a mythical “chupacabra.” “You understand there is no Antifa,” he said. “This is an entirely made-up organization.”

The denials continued even as FBI Director Christopher Wray debunked deniers like Goldman. “Antifa is a real thing.” European countries have banned Antifa Internet sites due to their criminal conduct while Antifa candidates have been elected to office as members of the group.

Now, French authorities identified Antifa as the largest of three “ideologically distinct groups” responsible for the violence in France. The French Justice Minister also banned far-left politicians for fueling the rage. A previously banned Antifa group has been linked to one murder in France. Antifa and communist flags have been prominent in the protests.

A Belgian minister also blamed Antifa for the spread of the violence.

It appears that Keyser Söze is in the open, but Democrats maintain the FBI, Justice Department, and various countries are simply delusional.

The problem is when the myth becomes reality. Left-wing pundits and politicians are caught in this denial web where they have to maintain the absurd idea that Antifa is just an idea.

Some of us have been writing about Antifa for years after watching them intimidate and threaten faculty and students on campuses. One such student came from my campus and proclaimed that Antifa was winning after his arrest for property destruction.

When another radical was arrested after taking an axe to a congressional office, he self-identified as a member of Antifa.

Before Kyle Benjamin Douglas Calvert, 26, implanted an IED device outside of Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall’s office in downtown Montgomery, he put up stickers reading “support your local Antifa.”

Numerous Antifa members have been arrested, including some who claimed to be journalists.

Many protesters belong to Antifa groups that have names like “Rose City Antifa” and offshoots like Love and Rage and Mexico’s Amor Y Rabia. Antifa members have been elected to the French and European parliaments.

Rutgers Professor Mark Bray’s “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook,” called by some the “Antifa bible,” explains that the group is united in its opposition to free speech. “Most Americans in Antifa have been anarchists or antiauthoritarian communists,” he writes. “From that standpoint, ‘free speech’ as such is merely a bourgeois fantasy unworthy of consideration.”

Yet, Democratic leaders seemed to be adopting the 1967 ‘Guide for the Married Man’ when caught with Antifa allies or associations: