European voters revolted against their political leaders in last week’s continent-wide parliamentary votes. The result was a bombshell: right-wing parties made huge gains, shaking the existing order to its foundations and sending warning signals to voters in the US, Britain, and Canada …What caused this political earthquake? The answer is simple: immigration … The recent parliamentary elections in Europe – that brought over 300 million to the polls – cannot be ignored. They are a salvo of protest from voters who want immigration halted. They don’t want to see Europe go multicultural, multi-ethnic, lesbian, gay and third world. They want the traditional Europe of high culture, white society, and fiscal caution.

… Focusing on whether Trump is guilty in this case or whether the trial was politically motivated misses a much bigger point. Either way, the crimes he has been convicted of are small fry compared to the crimes of state that he committed while in office. And these crimes are, at most, only marginally worse than those committed by every US president in living memory, irrespective of which of the two major parties they have belonged to … Clearly, it is time we take a step back from the narrow focus on Trump’s latest legal wranglings. Focusing on his shady business dealings committed when out of office obscures the fact that, if there were any justice in this world, Trump as well as all his recent predecessors would be tried for much bigger crimes of state that dwarf in severity anything about hush money payments or falsifying business records.

No aspect of the American Civil War left behind a greater legacy of bitterness and acrimony than the treatment of prisoners of war. “Andersonville” still conjures up images of horror unmatched in American History. And although Northern partisans still invoke the infamous Southern camp to defame the Confederacy, the Union had its share of equally horrific camps. Prison camps on both sides produced scenes of wretched, disease-ridden and emaciated prisoners as repulsive as any to come out of the Second World War … In addition to camps for captured soldiers, the North also established concentration camps for civilian populations considered hostile to the Federal government.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) told Tucker Carlson that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee has designated representatives assigned to each Republican member of Congress to ensure the lawmakers vote for bills Israel supports. Appearing on Friday’s edition of The Tucker Carlson Show, Massie explained some of AIPAC’s tactics to sway lawmakers. The congressman told Carlson that he banned AIPAC from his office after the group lobbied against his reelection. Massie said the bad blood began when he refused the group’s request to write a white paper on Israel when he first ran for Congress. “I have Republicans, you come to me on the floor and say, ‘I wish I could vote with you today. Yours is the right vote, but I would just take too much flak back home,’” Massie stated.

Robby Soave and Jessica Burbank discuss a conversation between Tucker Carlson and Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) about AIPAC, the influential pro=Israel lobby group, and its hold on the US Congress. Every Republican Congressman has an “AIPAC babysitter,” says Massie, who guides each lawmaker on how to further Israeli interests. “Everybody but me has an AIPAC person — like your AIPAC babysitter, who is always talking to you for AIPAC,” Massie said. “Every member has something like this?” Tucker Carlson asked. “Every Repub –, I don’t know how it works on the Democrat side, but that’s how it works on the Republican side …” “That’s crazy,” Carlson responded. “So, I’ve had four members of Congress say, ‘I’ll talk to my AIPAC person’ — that’s literally what we call them, ‘my AIPAC guy,'” Massie said. Runtime: 9:34 mins.

Former US lawmaker Cynthia McKinney says every candidate for Congress must pledge to support Israel’s military superiority in the region and continued large-scale US funding for the Zionist state, or risk losing the ability to raise funds for election campaigns. “If you don’t sign the pledge, you don’t get money,” she says in this interview with Marzieh Hashemi, an American-born journalist who lives in Iran. “You make a commitment that you would vote to support the military superiority of Israel, that the economic assistance that Israel wants, that you would vote to provide that,” she adds. If a candidate does not sign the pledge or perform accordingly, “then you do not get money to run your campaign,” McKinney says. After she made the pledge public, she says, the tactic changed, but the basic requirement remained. Runtime: 9:51 mins.

If one were to argue that a top Spanish government official would someday declare that “from the river to the sea, Palestine would be free”, the suggestion itself would have seemed ludicrous. But this is precisely how Yolanda Diaz, Spain’s Deputy Prime Minister, concluded a statement on May 23, a few days before Spain officially recognized Palestine as a state. The Spanish recognition of Palestine, along with the Norwegian and Irish recognition, is most important. Western Europe is finally catching up with the rest of the world regarding the significance of a strong international position in support of the Palestinian people and in rejection of Israel’s genocidal practices in occupied Palestine … The perception and language pertaining to Palestine and Israel are changing among ordinary people across the world.

A four-day election has shaken the foundations of the European Union, with the far right rocking ruling parties in France and Germany, the bloc’s traditional driving forces. For the next five years it will be harder for the European Parliament to make decisions. French President Emmanuel Macron called snap national elections after Marine Le Pen’s National Rally humbled his pro-European centrists in the polls. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats also suffered as the extreme-right Alternative for Germany shrugged off scandals to make massive gains … Green and pro-business liberal groups across Europe suffered heavy defeats, but mainstream formations held their ground, with the center-right European People’s Party remaining the biggest bloc in the 27-nation EU’s assembly.

Most Black Americans say they’ve experienced racial discrimination regularly or from time to time, which colors how they view U.S. institutions like policing, the political system and the media, according to a study on conspiracy theories … The study found that more than 8 in 10 Black Americans surveyed agreed with the statement that “Black people are more likely to be incarcerated because prisons want to make money on the backs of Black people.” And more than 6 in 10 Black adults surveyed agreed that institutions such as the criminal justice system, the country’s economic system and policing are designed to hold Black people back … In medicine, the survey found that 55% of those surveyed said they agreed with the statement that “medical researchers experiment on Black people without their knowledge or consent.”

Long considered one of the best medical schools in the world, the University of California, Los Angeles’s David Geffen School of Medicine receives as many as 14,000 applications a year … In interviews with the Free Beacon and complaints to UCLA officials, including investigators in the university’s Discrimination Prevention Office, faculty members with firsthand knowledge of the admissions process say it has prioritized diversity over merit, resulting in progressively less qualified classes that are now struggling to succeed. Race-based admissions have turned UCLA into a “failed medical school,” said one former member of the admissions staff … The bar for underrepresented minorities is “as low as you could possibly imagine,” one committee member told the Free Beacon. “It completely disregards grades and achievements.”

Former President Donald Trump complained in an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity about the Israel lobby not having as much influence over Congress as it once did and vowed he would be a staunch supporter of Israel if re-elected. “You know, Israel was the most powerful lobby in the country 15 years ago. Today, between Tlaib and AOC, and all of these people, what they’re doing. Israel, they don’t have the backing that they once had,” Trump said … Trump made similar comments about Israel’s influence in Congress in an interview with Israel Hayomback in March. “Some 15 years ago, Israel had the strongest lobby. If you were a politician, you couldn’t say anything bad about Israel, that would be like the end of your political career,” he said.

Academic fraud is forcing Wiley, a major publisher of scientific journals, to close 19 journals after some were overwhelmed by industrial-scale research fraud. In the last two years, Wiley has retracted over 11,300 papers containing some fraudulent content. Academic publishing is a major industry … The sources of the fake science are “paper mills” — businesses or individuals that, for a price, will list a scientist as an author of a wholly or partially fabricated paper … While articles in scientific journals are supposed to disseminate scientific information, it has devolved into self-promotion. Scientific publishing is how scientists let their peer group know how brilliant they are. It has also become a proxy for productivity. The more papers you are listed as an author on, the better your chances of advancement. 

It is impossible to watch the photographic documentation of the ugly, violent demonstrators during Wednesday’s parade of Jewish supremacy through the streets of Jerusalem without hearing Prof. Yeshayahu Leibowitz’s warning echoing in the background … “The general spirit was that of revenge,” wrote Haaretz journalist Nir Hasson, who was assaulted by a gang of teens who hurled him to the ground and kicked him. “The leading symbol on the marchers’ shirts was the Kahanist fist, the popular chant was a particularly bloody revenge song, alongside chants of ‘Death to Arabs’ and ‘May their village burn.’ … The overall atmosphere was frightening.” … The rioters threatened, cursed, shoved and attacked Palestinian passersby and anyone they identified as a journalist or who tried to film them.

A recent poll by the Forsa Research Institute, conducted last week, has shown a significant shift in German public opinion regarding Israel’s military offensive in Gaza. Commissioned by the German weekly magazine, Stern, the poll found that 61 per cent of Germans disapprove of Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip, with only one-third still in support. This marks a dramatic change from a November poll after the 7 Octoberattacks, when 62 per cent of Germans supported Israel’s military response, and only 31 per cent were opposed. The change in opinion spans all German political parties, including the Social Democrats, coalition partners, the Greens, and the largest opposition party, the centre-right Union, as well as some members of the far-right Alternative for Germany, who are now opposing Israeli military action.

No figure of modern French history is as honored as Charles de Gaulle … In 1940 he refused to accept his country’s defeat by Germany, and from London he founded and led the pro-Allied “Free French” force during World War II. From 1944 to 1946 he headed the provisional government of France. In 1958 he was called from retirement by popular acclaim to resolve the seemingly unsolvable crisis over Algeria … During the years that he dominated his country’s political life – 1958-1969 – he charted an independent foreign policy, tied neither to the US nor the USSR, and strove to make France the preeminent nation in Europe … It’s impossible to read any lengthy biography of this man without admiration for his audacious self-confidence, courage, determination, and cunning.

Israel organized and paid for an influence campaign last year targeting U.S. lawmakers and the American public with pro-Israel messaging, as it aimed to foster support for its actions in the war in the Gaza Strip, according to officials involved in the effort and documents related to the operation. The covert campaign was commissioned by Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs … The ministry allocated about $2 million to the operation and hired Stoic, a political marketing firm in Tel Aviv, to carry it out, according to the officials and the documents. The campaign began in October and remains active on the social platform X. At its peak, it used hundreds of fake accounts that posed as real Americans on X, Facebook and Instagram to post pro-Israel comments. The accounts focused on U.S. lawmakers …

The soldiers who landed in Normandy on D-Day were greeted as liberators, but by the time American GIs were headed back home in late 1945, many French citizens viewed them in a very different light. In the port city of Le Havre, the mayor was bombarded with letters from angry residents complaining about drunkenness, jeep accidents, sexual assault — “a regime of terror,” as one put it, “imposed by bandits in uniform.” This isn’t the “greatest generation” as it has come to be depicted in popular histories. But in “What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American G.I. in World War II France,” the historian Mary Louise Roberts draws on French archives, American military records, wartime propaganda and other sources to advance a provocative argument …

… Far from being universally welcomed as liberators, many troops had a distinctly surly reception from the people of Normandy. The reason for this was simple. Many Normandy towns and villages had been literally obliterated by Allied bombing … Some 20,000 French civilians were killed in the two-and-a-half months from D-Day, 3,000 of them during the actual landings … “It was rather a shock to find we were not welcomed ecstatically as liberators by the local people, as we were told we should be … They saw us as bringers of destruction and pain,” Mr Roker wrote in his diary … In his book, Mr Hitchcock raises another issue … Allied looting, and worse. “The theft and looting of Normandy households and farmsteads by liberating soldiers began on June 6 and never stopped during the entire summer,” he writes.

… [Thomas] Jefferson in early 1784 presented Congress with his own currency plan. Instead of inventing a new unit, as the Morrises had done, he proposed relying on the most familiar coin then in use, the Spanish dollar, which would henceforth be called the U.S. dollar … Jefferson, however, proposed to divide the U.S. dollar into tenths, hundredths, and thousandths, arguing that such divisions are mathematically simpler and would lead to fewer mistakes. This seems self-evident to us today but was far less so to eighteenth-century Americans … Thanks to Jefferson, the U.S. dollar became the first decimal currency in the world, serving as a model for all modern currencies.

A majority of Britain’s young people do not believe Israel should exist, a new UnHerd poll has revealed. A preliminary finding of an exclusive survey of 1,012 voters about foreign policy, conducted by Focaldata and due to be released tomorrow on UnHerd, found that a striking 54% of 18-24-year-olds agreed with the statement that “the state of Israel should not exist.” Just 21% disagreed … The war’s high degree of exposure online and on social media appears to have fuelled interest among Britain’s young … As the Israeli war enters its eighth month, public opinion has slowly shifted in Palestine’s favour … Overall level of support for the Jewish state over the same time frame has plummeted to 16%, according to YouGov figures.