The UAE announces it will cuts funds for citizens who want to study in the UK out of fear of Emirati students being radicalized by Muslim Brotherhood Islamists on British campuses.
An Arab state now views a European state as a dangerous Islamist radicalization hotspot pic.twitter.com/uqCxDuDwvr
The UAE — United ARAB Emirates, a Muslim country — is cutting funding for students studying abroad in the United Kingdom because they don’t want radical Islamists influencing them.
The Times of London is actually reporting this rather disturbing news that England, the former crown of Christendom, is a hotspot for Islamic radicalization — so much so that Islamic countries are distancing themselves.
Here are just 5 things that happened in the UK this week:
-we discovered police in our second city, Birmingham, are doing the bidding of Islamist extremists while scapegoating Jews who were targeted for Muslim violence
-we learn child rapists & criminals have been allowed to…
I’M PRETTY SURE ANTHONY BURGESS AND STANLEY KUBRICK DIDN’T INTEND FOR A CLOCKWORK ORANGE TO BE A HOW-TO GUIDE:
I’ve received some questions about what we mean, in our National Security Strategy, when we invoke “civilizational” concerns. So I’m tweeting a relevant news item. https://t.co/kHiP8ByMln
— Under Secretary of State Sarah B. Rogers (@UnderSecPD) January 9, 2026
THE NARCISSISM OF THE ANOINTED:
Michael Shellenberger drops the brutal truth:
Left-wing authoritarianism is almost identical to narcissism
Entitlement (“we decide what you can say”), grandiosity (“we’re the good people”), and psychopathy (“we don’t care about the harm we cause”).
British lawmaker Tom Tugendhat told parliament on Thursday that there were reports of Russian cargo aircraft landing in Tehran and quantities of gold leaving the country.
“We’re also seeing Russian cargo aircraft coming and landing in Tehran, presumably carrying weapons and ammunition, and we’re hearing reports of large amounts of gold leaving Iran,” Tugendhat said. It was unclear what reports he was referencing.
Anti-government protests have gripped Iran since Dec. 28 in one of the biggest challenges yet to the near 50-year rule of the Islamic Republic.
US-based rights group HRANA reported that 34 protestors and 2 members of the security forces have been killed.
Tugendhat asked the government to comment on the information that he said could indicate preparations “for life after the fall.”
Responding to the remarks, UK Minister for the Middle East and North Africa Hamish Falconer said he was “not in a position to give a detailed update” on the assertions.
Britain, Hamish added, believed freedom of assembly and the right to protest were “inalienable rights of the Iranian people” and should be respected by the Iranian authorities.
Tugendhat had earlier suggested senior figures in Iran’s government may already be reaching out to foreign intelligence services and trading secrets in search of protection if the government falls.
Exit question: Iran on the brink? Danielle Pletka of AEI is “Talking through the options.” “It tickles me to think that if the regime does collapse, it all began on October 7, 2023. Cosmic justice….”
UPDATE:
🔴 NOW, PLEASE SHARE:
Tehran is out tonight, confirmed. This is Zafaraniyeh right now, through Starlink. Huge crowds.
WATCHING THIS FOOTAGE IS ONLY POSSIBLE THANKS TO ELON MUSK.
If you look around the media these days, particularly conservative media where no love has been lost for Hollywood, you’ll see that the prevailing wisdom is that the movies as we have always known them are a dead man walking… that the zombie of theatrical motion pictures will shamble on for a while, maybe even for years. But that it will eventually fall over dead, unable to generate enough power even to keep its own legs moving one foot after the other for want of a single fan willing to leave their house and pay to enter a theater.
Not me – I want to click on a Website showing which movies are playing in nearby cities and be overwhelmed with choices that I can’t wait to see on a big screen. But that hasn’t been the case since Covid shut down the moviegoing experience, and afterwards, Hollywood decided to roll over and DEI rather than churn out watchable content for mass audiences. Will that ever happen again? Read the whole thing.
Indeed, ever since the Labour government came to power in July 2024, X and Musk have been a constant thorn in its side. Freed from the tight censorship of the old Twitter, British and international X users have been free to vent their frustrations about a whole host of thorny issues that Labour would prefer not to talk about, from multiculturalism to trans ideology.
Take the grooming-gangs scandal, interest in which was revived in January 2025, seemingly after Musk learned about it for the first time and began tweeting about it relentlessly. News that Labour’s safeguarding minister, Jess Phillips, had refused to hold a national inquiry into the rape gangs may have passed under the radar were it not for the fury expressed on X. Starmer’s immediate response was to accuse anyone demanding justice for these evil crimes of jumping on Musk’s ‘far-right bandwagon’. Six months later, the PM would be forced, shamelessly, to order a national inquiry. The scale of the abuse, rape and torture endured by thousands of working-class girls by predominantly Pakistani men became impossible to deny.
Or take the trans debate. Before Musk’s takeover of Twitter, it was a bannable offence to refer to a ‘transwoman’ as a man. In 2025, the UK Supreme Court clarified that, under the Equality Act at least, a man who claims to be a woman really is a man. The gender-critical movement that struck this blow for women’s rights would have had to struggle even harder to reassert this basic truth without a platform like X, where users are free to ‘misgender’ as they please.
Totalitarians hate free speech:
Isn’t it ironic that the UK threatened to shut down X on the same day Iran shut down the internet to prevent its people from criticising the regime?
Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan showed no sense of urgency to end the anarchy in her city during an interview with CNN’s Chris Cuomo Thursday evening, being shockingly cavalier when asked how long it will continue.
“How long do you think Seattle and those few blocks look like this?” Cuomo asked.
“I don’t know. We could have a Summer of Love!” Durkan replied with a smile. Durken was referencing the 1967 convergence of hippies on San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood.
Cuomo didn’t seem to buy her response. “Well, tell that to the police who are supposed to be in that precinct, though. But I understand your sentiment, Mayor.”
Curiously, they’re building a wall to keep the unwanted out of their “autonomous zone:”
A No-Go zone has been put up in Minneapolis.
Its funny they put up walls and barriers to keep people out, but they didn't want border walls to keep illegal aliens out, which sparked this whole situation in the first place. pic.twitter.com/W8fJW2xC5c
BREAKING: Alpha News has obtained cellphone footage showing perspective of federal agent at center of ICE-involved shooting in Minneapolis pic.twitter.com/p2wks0zew0
I don't remember any Democrats holding protests for this white woman who was killed, or calling for action to stop it from happening again. I never once heard them yell "say her name."
You can literally die in service to the Eternal Progressive Omnicause and Leftists will still repudiate you because you’re White.
It’s just like that soldier who set himself on fire for Gaza and then Leftists began tweeting about how their own followers “better not celebrate a… https://t.co/7LnaeRmHPg
Tweet continues: “It’s just like that soldier who set himself on fire for Gaza and then Leftists began tweeting about how their own followers ‘better not celebrate a white man who wore a uniform’. Never before has an ideology demanded total obedience and sacrifice to the point of offering up your own life while simultaneously treating its own adherents as subhuman. We are dealing with a level of psychological derangement that will bewilder future generations for as long as records of this era exist.”
January 8, 2026
CHANGE:
BREAKING NEWS: Treasury Secretary Bessent announcing tonight from Minnesota:
Starting tomorrow, if you’re on public assistance, you can’t wire money out of the country.
In case you were wondering why CBS is letting Stephen Colbert go, he recalls "seeing Soviet posters basically saying 'in the west women are not allowed to do any of this.' There was a forward-looking feminist agenda to the communist enterprise." While Puck News's Julia Ioffe,… pic.twitter.com/lsNn8dvRGJ
That feminist agenda was so forward-looking that a decade ago, the New York Times was assuring its readers that the Soviet Union was basically one giant Playboy Mansion: Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism.
“We’ve never been at war with our federal government,” the governor inexplicably declared. The implication in Walz’s use of the present perfect tense is that the condition he describes — “war with the federal government” — was not Minnesotans’ previous experience until now.
“We don’t see a desire to work with us on public safety,” Walz continued. “We hear a demonization of our state.” Indeed, “We do not need any further help from the federal government,” the governor added.
Though he emphasized the need for peaceful protest, Walz stressed that it is every Americans’ “patriotic duty” to “get out and protest and speak up to this administration” far beyond Minnesota’s borders. “If you’re in Portland, or you’re in L.A., or you’re in Chicago, or . . . wherever they’re coming next, stand with us — stand with us against this.” We are “not living in a normal world,” Walz mused. And yet, he pondered, perhaps this moment would catalyze a reversion to a more familiar status quo ante. “Maybe we’re at our McCarthy moment,” Walz speculated: “Do you have no decency?”
The famous quote from attorney Joseph Welch addressed to Senator Joseph McCarthy is, “Have you no decency, sir?” which has the inestimable advantage of being syntactically correct.
In one of the most high-profile rows, the Israeli embassy publicly slammed the BBC over its reporting on the Iran protests, with embassy spokesman Alex Gandler claiming the broadcaster has maintained “near-total silence” on the demonstrations while devoting excessive attention to Gaza.
“There is a bias there because it doesn’t fit the narrative,” she said. “The narrative, which they want to say is ‘it is their own culture’. ‘If the Islamic Republic is oppressive, it’s because the people want that.’ But this is not the reality.”
Now, Mr Cleese has joined the critics. He took to X, where he reposted criticism of the broadcaster from the likes of Sharron Davies and Jake Wallis Simons, among others taking aim at the Beeb over the supposed lack of coverage from Iran.
But then, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, to coin a phrase:
It is remarkable that, despite its long record of failure, socialism is now more popular than ever among college students and in progressive precincts of the Democratic Party, at least judging by the cult status of figures such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Now an avowed socialist has been elected mayor of New York, the commercial capital of the United States and home to that great capitalist institution, the stock market. Even more recently, socialists here and around the world have spoken out in unison against the arrest of Nicolás Maduro, the socialist dictator of Venezuela.
It is ironic that these socialists, along with their supporters and fellow travelers, like to censor conservatives for, allegedly, promoting “hate” and “division.” On that basis, they have banned conservative speakers from appearing on college campuses, and just a few years ago urged Twitter and Facebook to close the accounts of conservatives who spoke out against socialism.
This raises the question: given the historical record, why don’t we label socialism as a hate crime?
After all, the evidence for socialism’s malignant effects is obvious to anyone with sufficient curiosity to open a history book. Socialists are responsible for the murder, imprisonment, and torture of many millions and perhaps hundreds of millions of innocent people during the ideology’s heyday in the middle of the twentieth century. That history of murder and tyranny continues on a smaller scale today in the handful of countries living under the misfortune of socialism—Cuba, North Korea, and (most recently) Venezuela.
How do socialists escape the indictment that they are purveyors of tyranny and mass murder? Some of them deny that Stalin, Mao, and others were true socialists or, equally absurdly, assert that true socialism has never really been tried. But socialism has been tried many times in many places and has always failed.
Read the whole thing. As Tom Wolfe wrote in in his 1976 article, “The Intelligent Co-ed’s Guide to America,” Solzhenitsyn “said that not only Stalinism, not only Leninism, not only Communism—but socialism itself led to the concentration camps; and not only socialism, but Marxism; and not only Marxism but any ideology that sought to reorganize morality on an a priori basis. Sadder still, it was impossible to say that Soviet socialism was not ‘real socialism.’ On the contrary—it was socialism done by experts!”
To understand Iraq syndrome, one has to go back to Vietnam.
In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, America’s foreign-policy establishment fell into disarray. A new conventional wisdom took hold among elites: The war had not been lost because of bad strategy or domestic unrest but because it never should have been fought at all. From this conclusion flowed a much larger claim — that the United States needed to fundamentally rethink its role in the world.
This worldview, later known as the “Vietnam syndrome,” argued that America should abandon assertive foreign policy in favor of restraint or outright withdrawal, lest it stumble into further disasters. Underlying this posture was a thinly veiled anti-Americanism: the belief that the United States was not a force for good but a malign presence on the world stage. As former Princeton professor Richard Falk put it at the time, “I love the Vietnam syndrome because it was the proper redemptive path for American foreign policy to take after the Vietnam defeat.”
In other words, America was guilty — and the appropriate response was retreat.
That retreat carried real costs. A world without strong American leadership proved far worse than its critics anticipated. America’s self-imposed paralysis helped usher in the Cambodian genocide, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the rise of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
By the mid-1980s, Ronald Reagan decided it was time to move past Vietnam syndrome. In 1983, the United States intervened in Grenada, deposing a Marxist government in a swift operation that cost few American lives and restored democracy to the island. Shortly thereafter, then-Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger articulated six criteria for military intervention: a vital interest at stake, a commitment to victory, clear political and military goals, continuous strategic reassessment, sustained public support, and the exhaustion of nonmilitary options.
Together, the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations applied these principles in Panama and during Operation Desert Storm. By 1989, Vietnam syndrome was effectively dead.
To the modern reader, George Orwell’s depiction of how enmity alternates between Eurasia and Eastasia seems far-fetched; but when he published his great novel in 1948, such things were a recent memory. It suited Western Leftists, during and after the War, to argue that Hitler had been uniquely evil, certainly wickeder than Stalin. It was thus necessary to forget the enthusiasm with which the two tyrants had collaborated.
Back in the early 2000s, a similar pivot could be seen on the left’s 180-degree turn on the removal of Saddam Hussain. (George Clooney starred in a 1999 movie excoriating Bush #41 for failing to oust Saddam from power):
Venture aloud that the new mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, might just have a touch of the communist about him, and you will run immediately into a wall of indignant pedantry. “He’s not a communist,” his apologists will insist. He’s a “communitarian.” Other preferred substitutions include “collectivist,” “Fabian,” “democratic socialist,” and, in the less intellectually inclined depths of the well, “just, like, someone who cares about other people.”
Whatever. A commie by any other name still smells as foul. Besides, far more important than whether Mamdani wishes to be more closely associated with the Judean People’s Front or the People’s Front of Judea is what he is actually doing with his power — and, alas, what Mamdani is actually doing with his power is appointing lunatics such as Cea Weaver to run the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants. Given that New York City has more people living in rented housing than any other American city has residents, this is a position from which a great deal of mischief can be made.
If Cea Weaver did not exist, one would be hard-pressed to invent her. Weaver seems to have been designed in a laboratory to work in the Ideological Compliance Department of the East German Kommunale Wohnungsverwaltung, but, as the result of an unfortunate accident with a time machine, ended up overseeing housing policy in the most important city in the United States.
New York City’s new renters’ tsar wasted no time in outraging locals by vowing to make life harder for whites in the Big Apple over their role in ‘racist gentrification.’
But Cea Weaver has kept strangely quiet about her own mother – a white professor who owns a gorgeous $1.4 million home in America’s fastest gentrifying city, where longtime black residents are quickly being priced out.
The hardline leftist’s mother Celia Applegate, a professor [of] German Studies at prestigious Vanderbilt University, resides at a pretty, roomy 1930s Craftsman home in one of Nashville’s leafiest neighborhoods.
The history of Germany in the 20th century is one of massive state-sanctioned property theft in both err, post-Weimar Germany, and the Soviet satellite state that succeeded it in East Germany. How much does Cea Weaver root for the Stasi when she pops The Lives of Others into the Blu-Ray player?
Is Weaver mentally unstable? She certainly seems unprepared for the job, which is public-facing and substantial enough to deal with the media. Weaver was adept enough to scrub her social media after the election, but it turned out to be too late. Michelle Tandler kept a lot of receipts, which she posted in a lengthy thread on Monday. However, the first tweet has the right context for today’s events, given the “gentrifier” declaration she made in 2018:
A few months ago, I dug into Cea Weaver's Twitter history because she was Mamdani's housing advisor.
I had a hunch she might get a position on his team.
Well, she did, and she deleted her X account, accordingly.
Ed asks, “Was that aimed at her parents? Or was it just empty sloganeering from someone who never imagined that she would be held accountable for her public statements?”
It could be the former: Newsweek notes that “Weaver’s father, Stewart Weaver, was reported in 2023 to own a home in Rochester, according to real estate publication The Real Deal. At the time, a spokesperson for Housing Justice for All, an organization Cea Weaver worked for at the time, told the publication that Stewart Weaver ‘manages an additional rental property with a family member.’”
More on Weaver and her astonishing vocal fryyyyyyy from Megyn Kelly and Mark Helprin:
UPDATE:
Apparently, she even wants white people to stop reproducing, and be banned from planes…
"came across a mob of 11 year old white boy children… i dunno why we keep procreating."
To be fair, that’s a slightly less extreme aviation position than AOC, 2019’s New Socialist It Girl, who wanted to ban commercial flight entirely that year: The 10 Most Insane Requirements Of The Green New Deal. “Eliminate air travel. GND calls for building out ‘highspeed rail at a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary.’ Good luck Hawaii! California’s high-speed boondoggle is already in $100 billion dollars of debt, and looks to be one of the state’s biggest fiscal disasters ever. Amtrak runs billions of dollars in the red (though, as we’ll see, trains that run on fossil fuels will also be phased out). Imagine growing that business model out to every state in America?”
SPRING FASCISM PREVIEW:
Agitated & organized by large networks of communists & leftist extremists, a large crowd gathered in Minneapolis where the car-ramming anti-ICE rioter was shot dead. They chant about how every person must be allowed in because the US is "stolen land." pic.twitter.com/kkVvJ0YGmK
Come spring however, and as Jon Gabriel wrote in 2024: Welcome to protest season, where the cause changes but the tactics stay the same. “One year, statues are toppled and the next, Jews are bullied, but it’s amazing how the far-left treats such wildly diverse issues with the same small toolbox. It has ever been thus. As one radical wrote for a Students for a Democratic Society publication in the 1960s, ‘The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.’”
“Top Gun: Maverick” actor Miles Teller shared an emotional promise during last year’s FireAid benefit concert.
“All of the money raised will go directly to people who need it now.”
Early reports suggested that was hardly the case. Last September, The New York Post revealed that of the $100 million raised by musicians such as Joni Mitchell, Lady Gaga, John Mayer, Billie Joe Armstrong and more, some of the funds went to nonprofits with very little connection to fire safety or reparations.
The Ohio Republican’s assessment confirms that some of the money in question didn’t go directly to the victims of last year’s Palisades fire as promised.
The German authorities knew for months that the capital’s power network was at risk of an attack by left-wing activists, because plans were laid out in a pamphlet published in August.
Yet as the weekend’s arson-induced outage—which plunged large parts of Berlin into darkness and left tens of thousands of residents without electricity amid freezing winter conditions—revealed, these same authorities simply were not prepared.
AfD co-leader Alice Weidel said this “blatant failure” was telling of “the politically motivated prioritisation” of the security authorities:
Instead of combating real threats, they target blameless citizens and the country’s largest opposition. With devastating consequences for our infrastructure and the safety of the people.
Separately, she pointed the finger at Chancellor Friedrich Merz and his coalition partners, saying “the CDU/SPD Senate bears the responsibility with its inaction” and warning that “the renewed left-terrorist attack on the power grid”—indeed, this was the second left-wing extremist attack on the city’s power infrastructure in just four months—“shows where the state’s downplaying of left-wing extremism leads.”
Yesterday morning, we told you how a Leftist, Antifa-linked eco-activist group in Germany sent Berlin into a blackout during the freezing winter. The Vulkan Group published a letter taking responsibility for the terrorist attack on Berlin’s energy infrastructure, writing, “In the greed for energy, the earth is being depleted, sucked dry, burned, ravaged, burned down, raped, destroyed. The aim of the action is to cause significant damage to the gas industry and the greed for energy.”
It also said it was “cutting off power to those in power.” How harming innocent Berlin residents and businesses is harming those “in power” is beyond us, but the Left doesn’t care who they hurt in pursuit of their agenda.
And, thanks to Germany’s already insane “green” laws, the city is now at risk that its “eco-friendly” heat pumps might actually explode thanks to the terrorists.
NEW – Heat pumps are at risk of explosion due to the ongoing multi-day power outage in southwest Berlin. pic.twitter.com/4JRviXU5kA
Because much of the media subscribes to the notion of “no enemies on the left,” and are terrified of promoting any news that benefits the “far right” AfD, there’s been plenty of anti-journalism to bury the story, or at least the culprits:
Correct. The Antifa-linked group cut off power to tens of thousands of homes as temperatures drop below freezing in Berlin. These stories running cover for the violent far-left are similar to how the “Turtle Island” trans, antifa terrorist suspects in CA were called “activists.”… https://t.co/ECAPNbjXKm
The dramatic seizure of two Russian-linked oil tankers by American forces throws up complicated legal questions as well as the risk of reprisals, experts have warned.
The US Coast Guard on Wednesday swooped on two vessels it had been pursuing for weeks over alleged breaches of the naval blockade imposed on Venezuela.
The vessels – known as Bella 1 and M Sophia – are thought to be part of Moscow’s “shadow fleet” and are accused of flying false flags and carrying out sanctions-busting activities.
But they were seized in what Russia claimed were international waters, a controversial move that would raise complicated questions of international law, shipping industry insiders have said.
US and UK officials have claimed they acted lawfully.
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