Wednesday roundup

In recent years, India's demonstrated willingness to be a US ally has been an encouraging development on the world stage - which makes its tolerance of the kinds of regimes besetting Iran and Venezuela so unnerving.

Italy's shaky economic situation could trigger a new global crisis, says The American Enterprise Institute's Desmond Lachman.

What's happening with Tommy Robinson in the UK will chill your bones:

On Friday, British free-speech activist and Islam critic Tommy Robinson was acting as a responsible citizen journalist — reporting live on camera from outside a Leeds courtroom where several Muslims were being tried for child rape — when he was set upon by several police officers. In the space of the next few hours, a judge tried, convicted, and sentenced him to 13 months in jail — and also issued a gag order, demanding a total news blackout on the case in the British news media. Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, was immediately taken to Hull Prison.

Hull Prison, in Kingston upon Hull, England, where Tommy Robinson was taken to serve a 13-month prison sentence just hours after his arrest on Friday, May 25.

Most media outlets were remarkably compliant. News stories that had already been posted online after Robinson’s arrest at the Scottish Daily Record, Birmingham Live, The Mirror, RT, and Breitbart News were promptly pulled down, although, curiously, a report remained up at the Independent, a left-wing broadsheet that can be counted on to view Robinson as a hooligan. Indeed, the Independent’s article described Robinson as “far-right” and, in explaining what he was doing outside the courthouse, used scare quotes around the word “reporting”; it then summed up the least appealing episodes in his career and blamed him for an attack on the Finsbury Park Mosque last January. Somehow, the Independent also got away with publishing a report on London’s Saturday rally in support of Robinson.

Also on Saturday, Breitbart UK posted a copy of the gag order, but redacted it as required. The resulting document proved to be a perfect illustration of Western Europe’s encroaching tyranny.

Hamas has not relented in its current aggression against Israel:

On Tuesday, Hamas fired an enormous wave of mortars into Israel, striking an Israeli kindergarten but causing no injuries. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis were forced to bunkers to weather the attack. That wave of mortars followed an attempt over the weekend by Islamic Jihad terrorists to cut through the Gaza border in order to murder Israelis in their beds; during the chase, terrorists fired at Israeli troops. One terrorist was killed, and another injured. The Israeli Defense Forces also announced that several days ago, Hamas attempted to fly a drone loaded with explosives over the border.

If you're looking for a bracing dose of thunderous moral clarity, check out "My 'Black Lives Matter' Problem" by Jason D. Hill at Commentary.  He demonstrates why BLM is wrong as wrong can be on crime, Israel and education. In the course of so demonstrating, he revisits some fundamental conservative principles and states them incisively.


Good things may be happening on the Very Stable Genius's watch, but let us remember that he's an extremely immature brat. How can we forget? He constantly reminds us with  tweets like this one about Bob Iger of ABC / Disney and the Roseanne situation, and this one saying he wishes he hadn't picked Jeff Sessions to be attorney general.

New Quinnipiac poll: Ted Cruz has an 11-point lead over Beto O'Rourke in the Senate race down in Texas.