Holy war

It is a long haul until the midterm elections in November. Many threats and deadlines will have been issued to Iran in that time, many cycles of optimism and pessimism will have been completed. The war may be over, or Donald Trump may be bogged down in an intractable conflict which he privately wishes he had never started. Regardless, his administration must start preparing for what looks to be an increasing certainty: that the Republicans will suffer a heavy electoral reversal. That was looking likely even before Iran and its effect on oil prices. The President’s tariff wars have protected some, but the overall effect on blue- collar jobs has been negative. Moreover, at 3.3 percent, consumer inflation is back at the sort of levels which helped stop Kamala Harris from winning.

Making time to prepare to host the White House Correspondents’ Dinner has not been easy. Presently I’m flying back to New York, where I live, on a red-eye after a show in Las Vegas. My wife and five kids, all under the age of ten, are at home waiting for me. On average, I have one media appearance every day and a half between now and then. I’m not asking you to cry for me. All of this momentum and publicity is terrific. And my preparation for the big night on April 25 is always simmering below the surface. It feels as if reading minds for the last 30 years has been training for this moment. My goal is to have Donald Trump take part – and to save the best for last. If I could read only one mind in this world, it would be that of the most powerful person in the world.

Geostrategists used to fret over the “Eastern Question” or the Maginot Line or the Missile Gap. Today there is no doubt that the overriding geostrategic question of our day is whether the President of the United States is playing with a full deck. With the US-Israeli war on Iran failing, and depleting much of both countries’ non-nuclear defenses, with the Strait of Hormuz closed and western economies spiraling toward depression, Donald Trump greeted the world on Easter morning with a message to Iran’s leaders to “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards,” then threatened the next day to wipe out Iranian civilization. He then denounced the Pope for having imparted Catholic teachings on just and unjust war.

I first met Laura Loomer in the New York office of Project Veritas. She was blonde then, feisty, smart and ambitious. She was also fearless. Because of her outspoken views regarding the dangers of radical Islam – views that I largely share – her career as an investigative journalist and advocate was severely hampered. She became possibly the most censored woman on the planet; forbidden from placing her warnings about Sharia law and radical Islam on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. Even Uber banned her. In 2020, Loomer decided to make a valiant race for Congress against Democrat incumbent Lois Frankel in an overwhelmingly blue Florida district, which happened to include Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s club and winter residence.

“A number of observers of the political, moral and spiritual life in recent years have taken up the famous theme of the decline of the West,” the French journalist Luc Ferry wrote in Le Figaro at the end of January. “They recall that civilizations are mortal, like human beings, and that our own, far gone in decadence, is dying. Nevertheless, I fail to see how one can include the United States in this pessimistic reading of history. Not only does it remain the most powerful economic and military power in the world… politically speaking, whatever one thinks of [Donald] Trump, of his antics and his perverse narcissism, it is difficult to deny that he has given new life to the idea that politics can change the world, that action taken by a leader can have an impact on the real world.

“We have an elite who have been in power for at least the last 40 years, who fundamentally don’t like western civilization and they wanna destroy it,” said Liz Truss, who was prime minister for 49 days in 2022, as she spoke to a half-full room at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Texas. It was her third such speech. The Liz Truss who addresses American audiences bears little resemblance to the awkward, growth-obsessed economics nerd who somehow ascended the greasy pole of British politics, only to slide back down at staggering speed. She’s changed her vocabulary – and her talking points. The few attendees of her panel, snappily titled “Europestan: Can Europe Survive?” could hear Truss lambasting “grooming gangs” and “transgender ideology.

It was a matter of some disappointment to me that Kanye West was barred entry to this country as a person not conducive to the public good. Millions of people have arrived here in the past 20 years and, unlike Kanye, have no intention of leaving. I am not sure what proportion of them are “conducive to the public good.” As a kind offascistic Little Englander, I would hazard a guess at about 8 percent, so quite why we singled out Kanye I am not sure. Of course, he courted a little controversy with his exciting song “Heil Hitler.” No truth, beauty or insight has ever been revealed in a rap song Kanye also divested himself of some anti-Semitic observations via technology’s equivalent of rap music, Twitter.