Definitely! Words have meaning and how they are used makes all the difference!

 

When Extremists Run the Government

Two can certainly play the “extremist” game.

J.B. Shurk | June 26, 2026 www.americanthinker.com

Politicians, government bureaucrats, central bankers, spy agencies, and mainstream news outlets lie to us every day.  For some people, the previous sentence is patently obvious.  For others, that sentence represents “fringe” thinking.  For certain law enforcement agencies in North America and Europe, that sentence reveals potentially dangerous “extremism.”  

“Extremism” is such a morally squishy word.  It means nothing.  It suggests that the average beliefs of the average person in the average part of an average town are, on average, correct.  Should a person’s beliefs move too far away from the “average,” then that person will eventually fall into the “extremist” abyss.  Of course, the average person long believed that the sun and planets revolved around the Earth.  The average person long believed that bloodletting cured disease. The average person long believed in magic.  Relativity, microbiology, atomic physics, and quantum mechanics belonged to the “extremists.” 

Defining “extremism” depends upon which populations are included when calculating an “average.”  To the average American, Islamic terrorism is religious extremism.  To the average jihadi in the Middle East, terrorism is part of the Islamic faith.  One man’s “extremist” is another man’s “religious cleric.”  Unsurprisingly, as more jihadists migrate to America, the more supportive of Islamic terrorism the Democrat Party becomes.  We now have several Hamas-supporting members of Congress who define Americans opposed to Islamic conquest as “extremists.”  For a decade, Americans were told to be on the lookout for Islamic terrorism: “If you see something, say something.”  Now, if you see something and say something, you will most likely be denounced as an “Islamophobic bigot.”  If the definition of “extremism” can shift 180 degrees since the Islamic terror attacks on September 11, 2001, then “extremism” is a nebulous political label.

In the United States, citizens overwhelmingly support federal legislation that would require photo ID, proof of citizenship, and other safeguards to ensure that elections across the country are free, fair, lawful, constitutional, and secure.  Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans in Congress prefer to maintain the current “on your honor” system that can be gamed to permit large-scale vote fraud and rigged elections.  By any polling measure, Congress’s point of view is far from that of the average American.  Members of Congress, in other words, are the extremists!  If you listen to the extremists in Congress, however, our elections have never been more secure.

In fact, when you look at some of the most important policy issues today, it becomes quite clear that Congress is ground zero for extremism.  Most Americans want Congress to stop spending more money than it receives in taxes; Congress has put us forty trillion dollars in debt.  Most Americans want secure borders and an end to illegal immigration; Congress has enabled an evil human trafficking system to exist for over fifty years that rewards criminals and has flooded the country with somewhere between fifty and a hundred million (nobody knows for sure!) illegal aliens.  Most Americans are concerned about lowering fuel and food prices; Congress has wasted trillions of dollars on “Green New Deal” scams that raise the household costs for fuel and food.  Most Americans believe that college admissions and job hiring should be based on a person’s merit, skill, character, knowledge, and hard work; Congress continues to divide Americans by the color of their skin and their sexual eccentricities.  Most Americans believe that men and women are biologically distinct; Congress pretends that biological sex is an imaginary social construct.  Most Americans believe that a dollar saved today should maintain the same value ten, fifty, or even a hundred years from now; Congress thinks printing and spending dollars, depreciating the U.S. currency, and artificially spiking the dollar-denominated valuation of stocks, homes, and other assets is the best way to fake a constantly “improving” economy.  Most Americans believe that we should refrain from military engagements overseas whenever possible; Congress can’t ever get enough of forever-wars.  Most Americans want their representatives to work for American citizens; Congress believes it should work on behalf of non-Americans all over the world.  Most Americans view their country as a nation; Congress views the United States as both a global empire and a home for every person on the planet.

On the most important issues, Congress is filled to the brim with extremists.  They should be put on official security lists and monitored whenever they travel more than fifty feet from their taxpayer-financed homes.  Instead, in the United States and throughout the West, the extremists run things.

That would explain why Christians are targeted for their beliefs.  That would explain why the governments of Europe and North America have flooded their countries with unassimilable malcontents from the third world.  That would explain why men are allowed into women’s restrooms and why pedophiles are accorded more respect than heterosexual married couples.  That would explain why Western governments have declared war on “climate change” when most people don’t care about elites’ obsession with the weather.  That would explain why so many European and North American politicians are willing to risk a nuclear war with the Russian Federation, while ordinary citizens have never been less willing to fight for the defense of their respective countries.

Perhaps the more that ordinary Westerners realize that it is the people running their governments, universities, and bureaucratic institutions who are most extreme, the less willing they become to do what those extremists say.  Six years ago, the extremists locked down the world because of COVID.  They closed churches, bankrupted businesses, disrupted childhood education, prevented family members from being together, and killed a lot of people with fake “vaccines.”  If public health extremists tried to pull another COVID today, would ordinary Westerners do what the politicians and bureaucrats say?  Or would Western citizens conclude that extremist governments endanger both their lives and liberties?

Two can certainly play the “extremist” game.  Two-hundred-fifty years ago, the British Empire believed the patriots of America’s thirteen colonies to be extremists.  The patriots disagreed.  They considered it extreme for members of Parliament to make decisions on their behalf while residing 3,500 miles away.  The two sets of “extremists” fought it out, and we American “extremists” now celebrate July 4 as Independence Day. 

My question is this: How much longer can the governments of Europe and North America continue to ignore the wishes of their national populations before we find ourselves in a situation where there is an explosion of public declarations of independence from the political and bureaucratic extremists who have ruined people’s lives?  For, as much as Western governments appear to be betting on mass surveillance, central bank digital currencies, censorship, propaganda, and technocratic oppression as weapons of control to help maintain power well into the future, there’s nothing so unpredictable as a fed-up populace ready for a little revolution.  When enough people recognize themselves as average representatives of the public will and their government officials as extremists representing only their own interests, things get interesting.  Being labeled an “extremist” by government extremists means nothing.

One might even ask: Isn’t globalism tantamount to extremism when a politician puts other nations’ interests ahead of his own?  Surely, when a government official undermines the nation he serves by championing open borders policies or wasting taxpayer dollars on “climate change” boondoggles at the U.N., that official deserves to be labeled an “extremist.”  Globalists certainly don’t represent the average North American or European citizen.  But they do represent the average cosmopolitan bureaucrat who sees no country as home.  

In a world of nations whose populations require different things, globalism is extremist.  In a world of varying cultures and competing beliefs, forced multiculturalism is extremist.  In a world where some people wish to be free, international government is extremist.  

Fighting for liberty is not extremist.  It is government tyranny that is extreme.

 

Thank Heaven for Texas! The U. S. Senate could, no should, no MUST take a lesson from Texas.

 

Republicans work the legal system, achieve victory in Texas

In a masterclass of legal jujitsu, Texas attorney general Ken Paxton and America First Legal delivered a decisive blow to one of the Biden administration’s stealthiest immigration maneuvers.

Monty Donohew | June 25, 2026 www.americanthinker.com

In a masterclass of legal jujitsu, Texas attorney general Ken Paxton and America First Legal delivered a decisive blow to one of the Biden administration’s stealthiest immigration maneuvers.  On the same day they filed suit in the Northern District of Texas, the Trump Justice Department relented and refused to oppose the suit.  U.S. district judge Reed O’Connor entered a final consent judgment vacating the 2024 Biden-era rule that expanded immigration judges’ authority to “administratively close” removal proceedings indefinitely.  The policy is dead nationwide. 

The rule sounded technical.  In practice, it turned immigration courts into parking lots.  Cases were paused without resolution, allowing hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens to remain in the United States, obtain work authorization, and access benefits while their removal proceedings sat dormant.  It was de facto relief, backdoor amnesty by administrative fiat, without congressional approval or merits adjudication.  The American people were not consulted or advised, and of course they did not consent.

The immigration court backlog had already ballooned past 3.5 million cases under Biden policies.  Administrative closures rose sharply, from roughly 278,000 in 2021 to nearly 392,000 by 2025.  Many claims that would fail on the merits simply disappeared into indefinite limbo.  This is how one party that lectures the other on “democracy” dictates rather than legislates open borders. 

Texas and America First Legal correctly argued that the Department of Justice and Executive Office for Immigration Review lacked statutory authority to create such broad, open-ended amnesty.  The Immigration and Nationality Act and Administrative Procedure Act do not empower executive agencies to engineer nationwide stays through docket manipulation.  Judge O’Connor agreed.  The Trump DOJ, under acting attorney general Todd Blanche, did not defend the prior administration’s overreach.  It consented.  The result: a permanent nationwide injunction ending the practice.

What makes this victory especially satisfying is the strategy.  Democrats and their aligned advocacy groups perfected the art of suing a friendly (or their own) administration in a friendly jurisdiction to lock in policy wins via consent decrees or judgments.  Blue-state attorneys general, environmental groups, and immigration advocates have long filed in districts with sympathetic judges, often securing settlements that entrench expansive interpretations of law, block enforcement, or create new entitlements. 

These decrees are hard to unwind later, even when administrations change, because they carry the force of court order.  The tactic is realism in objective (achieve concrete law enforcement) and disruptive in execution (bypass legislative gridlock and hostile forums through venue shopping and rapid settlement).

Texas simply applied realism and disruption in reverse.  Paxton sued in a Texas federal court with a proven conservative-leaning judge.  The objective was straightforward: Kill a rule that undermined enforcement and rewarded unlawful presence.  The tactic was equally direct: File, obtain consent from the new administration committed to sovereignty, and secure a binding judgment the same day.  No years of appeals.  No endless discovery.  Just swift restoration of the principle that removal proceedings should resolve cases on the merits or lead to actual removal.

This is effective counter-strategy.  It’s not hypocrisy because it restores norms and supports existing law rather than denigrating it.  For years, the left used courts as an auxiliary Legislature when Congress would not deliver preferred outcomes on immigration, environment, or regulation.  Conservatives are now demonstrating that the same tools can serve the national interest when wielded with discipline.  The difference lies in the objective: One side sought to dilute sovereignty and create parallel systems of relief; Texas sought to restore it.

In the broader context, Biden-era policies drove record encounters, exploded the backlog, and expanded non-merits outcomes (dismissals, terminations, and closures).  Asylum grant rates remained low for adjudicated cases, yet hundreds of thousands effectively gained indefinite presence through administrative maneuvering.  The tactic helped create the migrant predation funnel the administration only recently exposed.  The consent decree does not magically clear millions of cases, but it removes a deliberate tool that made the problem worse.  It forces future resolutions toward substance rather than perpetual pause.

Critics will complain about the speed or the use of consent.  They should direct that complaint to the years of precedent set by the other side.  When one faction treats courts as policy weapons, the other side eventually learns to wield them, too.  Texas chose a realistic goal, ending a specific abuse that functioned as amnesty, and executed it with disruptive efficiency.

Court after court has dismantled Biden immigration initiatives, from parole expansions to family unity programs.  Each reversal chips away at the prior regime’s architecture of non-enforcement.  The administrative closure rule was one more pillar.  It is now gone.

Sovereignty is not restored by rhetoric alone.  It requires consistent, realistic action that disrupts failed policies and replaces them with enforceable ones.  Texas delivered both.  The left’s own playbook, turned against the policies it once protected, produced a clear result: Removal proceedings must mean something again.  That is realism achieved through smart, disruptive tactics.  More, please! 

 

This outstanding summary is by far one of the most important posts I have ever presented! It represents an urgent alert for every American!

 

The Decline Of Academia

A defense of Western meritocracy against the academically destructive DEI incursion.

Lars Møller | June 25, 2026 www.americanthinker.com

In The Decline of the West (1918–1922), Oswald Spengler introduces a biological metaphor, comparing Western civilization to a living organism. Within this concept, Judeo-Christian ethics forms the pulsating heart—the wellspring of compassion, human dignity, and the moral imperative to see the face of the other. Yet it is the brain—cold, discerning, hierarchical, and relentlessly oriented towards truth—that has propelled the West to unparalleled heights of inquiry, innovation, and ordered liberty. That brain is the academy, predicated on uncompromising meritocracy. When this cerebral faculty falters, the body politic convulses into senescence.

In these years, prominent universities of the West—Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale—find themselves infected with a deadly ideological pathogen: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). Reaching far beyond administrative reform, this is the substitution of social activism for academic excellence, racial quotas for individual achievement, and therapeutic empathy for rigorous judgment. The consequences are as predictable as they are devastating. Instead of delivering “justice delayed,” legislators and administrators are destroying an incomparable “culture of knowledge” that has taken centuries to build. Meanwhile, the public will have to pay the price for a slow-motion euthanasia of Western civilization itself.

The greatness of the Western university was never accidental. From the medieval foundations of Bologna and Oxford, through the Renaissance revival of classical learning, to the Enlightenment citadels of empirical science and humanistic scholarship, these institutions embodied the Socratic pursuit of arete—excellence—and the Aristotelian conviction that the polity flourishes when the best rule. Standardized examinations, peer-reviewed publication, and the disinterested quest for truth created a crucible in which talent, disciplined by intellect, could transcend accidents of birth. 

Fluid class mobility followed: the son of a Yorkshire miner or a New England tradesman could, through demonstrated capacity, ascend to influence. This was meritocracy as the practical expression of Western individualism, from the Homeric hero to the Lockean rights-bearer to the Humboldtian ideal of Bildung. It presupposed that reality is knowable, hierarchies are natural, and justice resides in matching deserts to outcomes, not in engineering proportional representation.

The high academic standards that made Western universities the envy of the world rested on this foundation. Admissions and appointments turned on objective metrics: entrance examinations, SAT scores, publication records, citation indices. Excellence was color-blind because truth is color-blind. One did not need to consult ancestral grievance to evaluate a proof in mathematics or a textual emendation in philology. The system was imperfect—wealth and cultural capital conferred advantages—but its logic was sound: reward demonstrated ability, and society reaps the harvest of genius. As Thomas Sowell and others have documented, such systems produced the scientific and technological revolutions that lifted billions from poverty, precisely because they were selected for competence over kinship or political reliability. 

Then DEI enters as an infectious disease in a healthy organism. Cloaked in the language of compassion and redress, it demands that universities lower standards to achieve demographic parity. However, quotas favoring applicants on the basis of racial affiliation are not justice; they are racial discrimination rebranded with therapeutic euphemism. To discriminate against the more qualified Asian or White applicant in favor of the less qualified Black or Hispanic one is not to heal historical wounds but to inflict new ones—on the integrity of knowledge itself and on the innocent individuals denied their due.

Past injustice, however real, cannot justify present injustice against discrete persons who bear no personal guilt. This is the elementary logic of Western jurisprudence, from Roman aequitas to Kantian deontology: individuals are ends, not means to collective racial balancing. The alternative—treating living applicants as avatars of ancestral groups—revives a tribalism that the West transcended centuries ago. It echoes the blood-and-soil obsessions of pre-modern societies and the crude racialism that the academy once repudiated.

When social activism supplants academic excellence, the consequences cascade with Spenglerian inevitability. Research quality declines as hiring and promotion prioritize identity over scholarly output. Curricula fragment into grievance studies, where ideological conformity trumps evidence. Grade inflation and the erosion of rigorous gatekeeping produce graduates less competent in the unforgiving domains of medicine, engineering, and governance. Airlines, hospitals, and laboratories cannot run on sentiment; bridges collapse and patients die when competence is subordinated to representation. The “mismatch” thesis, empirically validated by scholars like Richard Sander, reveals how affirmative action places students in environments where they are doomed to underperform, breeding resentment rather than achievement. Empathy, weaponized, becomes the solvent of standards.

This confusion of meritocracy with empathy heralds something darker: the introduction of “soft totalitarianism.” Western meritocracy, for all its stratification, enabled genuine social mobility through open competition and credentialism tied to open markets. Individuals rose or fell based on demonstrated ability, fostering innovation and accountability. Contrast this with the Soviet model, where education served as a tool of central planning. Admissions and elite advancement depended on Party loyalty and nomenklatura connections. The rhetoric of classless egalitarianism masked nepotism and ideological litmus tests; rewards were artificially compressed, stifling excellence.

The West is replicating ideological pathology under new banners. DEI bureaucracies function as latter-day commissariats, enforcing political reliability through mandatory trainings, bias reporting, and diversity statements that function as loyalty oaths. Institutional autonomy withers as universities become instruments of social engineering rather than independent knowledge production. The “winners and losers” of meritocracy, however imperfect, reflected real differences in talent and effort. The enforced uniformity of equity produces universal mediocrity and seething underground resentments.

Comparisons with academic systems elsewhere illuminate the stakes. In much of the Arab world, admissions to competitive programs rely on high-stakes exams like the Tawjihi, preserving a formal meritocratic shell, though private wealth often circumvents it. In Sub-Saharan Africa, standardized exams coexist uneasily with affirmative action and regional quotas designed to address colonial legacies and socioeconomic gaps. Unsurprisingly, UNESCO critiques note that “pure” merit can mask unequal preparation. 

Yet these regions have not produced the sustained civilizational dynamism of the post-Enlightenment West precisely because their meritocracies are frequently diluted by patronage, political interference, and brain drain. The West’s unique achievement was elevating objective standards while mitigating background disadvantages through universal basic education and competition—not by abandoning the standards themselves. To import equity-driven dilutions is to converge downwards towards the very inefficiencies that have hampered development elsewhere.

As meritocracy erodes, Western civilization loses its cognitive edge. Innovation stagnates; institutions become hollowed-out husks performing rituals of inclusion while reality rebels. The brain of the West atrophies, and the heart—Judeo-Christian compassion—itself becomes corrupted into a masochistic self-flagellation that excuses every failure of the “marginalized” while punishing the competent. Totalitarianism does not always arrive in jackboots; it can creep in through Human Resources offices and faculty senates, enforcing speech codes, viewpoint discrimination, and the slow strangulation of academic freedom. The end is civilizational decline: a Spenglerian winter in which pseudointellectuals preside over ruins, chanting slogans of equity as the lights of inquiry dim.

To defend academic excellence is therefore to defend both sanity and justice. Sanity, because a society that denies biological, cognitive, and cultural realities in the name of equity will collide with those realities catastrophically. Justice, because true justice is individual and proportional—rendering to each according to his gifts and efforts, as the parable of the talents insists. The classical liberal tradition, from Mill’s marketplace of ideas to Hayek’s spontaneous order, understood that progress emerges from competition under rules, not from central imposition of outcomes. The Hebrew prophets demanded righteousness, not engineered equality of result; the Greek philosophers exalted the life of the mind; the Christian tradition affirmed the infinite worth of the person while recognizing natural inequalities in vocation and capacity.

Venerable institutions, once beacons to the world, are now becoming cautionary tales of ideological capture. Restoring meritocracy demands intellectual courage: dismantling DEI apparatuses, reaffirming color-blind standards, protecting dissenting voices, and recommitting to the arduous pursuit of truth over the narcotic of belonging. Hesitation is failure, inviting the tragic suicide of a civilization that conquered famine, disease, and ignorance precisely by honoring excellence.

The brain must be preserved, or the body will perish. Western man’s Faustian spirit—restless, hierarchical, truth-seeking—is currently being challenged. To abandon merit is to abandon ourselves.

Related Topics: Academia, Western Civilization, History

 

NYC is a perfect example of why and how our once great Republic is now in the final phases of 'The Conflict of Multi-culturism'!

 

Colombia to the right! NYC to the left?

Good luck New Yorkers, but some of us have already seen this movie and the ending is not pretty.

Silvio Canto, Jr. | June 23, 2026

Down in Bogotá, they are celebrating the latest conservative victory in Latin America.  The obsessed-with-Trump media is saying that a Trump-backed political outsider beat the left.  What a nasty way of speaking about millions of Colombians fed up with crime and the corrupt policies of President Petro.

Over in New York City, the exact opposite seems to be happening, or another kind of endorsement is in play.  Let’s check this out:

As New York City progressives go, so go the Democrats. New York’s primary election on June 23 will decide whether Mamdani’s election was a fluke or a foghorn alerting the city to a deep blue wave – one that could in turn shape the nation. As a progressive, I hope it’s the latter.

Lander isn’t the only congressional candidate endorsed by Mamdani, and the odds are tough for those running against the backed candidates.

In the 13th Congressional District, the mayor endorsed organizer Darializa Avila Chevalier to replace Rep. Adriano Espaillat. Still, polls are mixed on who will win this race, showing that a Mamdani endorsement may not be all it’s cracked up to be.

We will see how valuable Mandani’s endorsement turns out to be, but there is no question that the moderates are scared to death.  Look at Rep. Dan Goldman.  I guess that he wasn’t anti-Trump or anti-Israel enough for this new brand of democratic socialism spreading in New York City and elsewhere.

The larger point is that people in places like Ecuador, Peru, Costa Rica, Chile, and now Colombia are rejecting the message from the left.  Over in New York City and other cities, it seems to be the opposite as voters are buying what they call democratic socialism.  I guess that they think that life is hard in our cities because the rich are not paying their fair share, or however that slogan goes.  Unfortunately, a lot of the voters buying that nonsense are young people poisoned by our colleges.

As we celebrated Father’s Day on Sunday, I can only imagine what my late father who fled communism so that I could grow up in freedom would say about this.  He’d probably tell me that Castro once said that he would not seize private property or rig elections to help the communists.  Chavez said something like that too.

Good luck New Yorkers, but some of us have already seen this movie and the ending is not pretty.