oh America

America has had a horrific start to 2025. As I write, there is a breaking story of a live mass shooting in Queens, New York at a nightclub. Reportedly 11 people have been shot. I don’t have any further details on that right now, and it may just tragically be yet another American mass shooting.

I was contemplating something fresh to say about the horrors we woke up to this morning, and wondering how to spin the same yarn I keep spinning, which is that we keep telling everyone that if they don’t want an Intifada to arrive on these shores then they have to start speaking up against one. What new is there to say? I thought perhaps of taking New Years Day off, but here we go.

On Bourbon Street today, an ISIS-affiliated terrorist named Shamsud-Din Jabbar killed 15 people in a car-ramming attack and injured 30 more. Initial reports from the FBI say that Jabbar likely had accomplices and did not work alone. Born and bred in Houston, his local mosque has instructed its members to not respond to inquiries by the media, and if approached by the FBI to refer them to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and or the Islamic Society of Greater Houston (ISGH).

Immediately as the news spread, I thought about the riots on the campus of Tulane last year in New Orleans, and the terrorizing of Jewish students by pro-Palestine morons screaming "globalize the intifada". Do you remember the videos of cars flying Palestinian flags with masked students burning Israeli flags and taunting Jewish peers? I recall that Jewish blood was drawn in some of these clashes. The consequences of the student antisemitism are 15 murdered souls today. We are not the extremists. They are.

I am going to say this again for those wondering why NoLa looked more like Ramallah today. You don’t take down powerful nations from outside. You dismantle them from within. Our enemies know this. Open borders results in permission for terrorism to be exported and to grow in cells in the West. But immigration or no immigration, it is the subsuming of ideologies taught in our institutions that is breeding homegrown terrorists without the need for any physical upheaval at all. Administrations that are too relaxed about our borders and our education system are wilfully ignoring the ramifications of allowing anti-Westerners to enter and embed themselves in state apparatus, such as the Army or police or social services where info can be gathered and they can assert authority. Jabbar is former US military. Textbook.

These issues have been going on in Israel for 75 years and counting. They have crippled Europe for the last several decades. And now in a post 9/11 America, the time has come. Those who scream “Globalize The Intifada” are getting what they ordered, and all the easier for the lack of ordinary people opening their mouths to reject it.

You know that Blake Lively film that’s generated all this controversy in the press? Titled: It Ends With Us? Well this is like the opposite of that. It Starts With Us And It Ends With You.

I only went to New Orleans once for a GQ feature on a rock band called Parquet Courts. It was during Mardi Gras and I was following these four New York City rats for a few days. I was more interested in capturing the excess of Bourbon Street than I was writing about the band. The band were obnoxious and difficult. NoLa was fun and easy:

Mardi Gras in New Orleans puts every bachelor party in Vegas to shame. A cross between Halloween and SXSW, the sight is purple, gold and green pouring out of every crevice. The sound is of joy and jazz and the chinking of glasses large enough to hold a liquor cabinet. The smell is of stale ale. The touch is the crunching of plastic beads beneath the feet; a better sensation than walking over broken glass. And the taste? Rain and sweat and life itself.

For five days, the city is teeming with tourists embracing New Orleans' open drinking and 24 hour parades. In every street, revellers drape themselves over balconies and throw cheap necklaces to those dancing below. The catchers wait like chickens in a coop poking their necks out for feed. When they get the beads they scream. One man's trash, another's treasure.

I’ve never been to a place more alive than New Orleans. The life of America. The target of ISIS.

Like clockwork, the clown brigade took to the streets of New York immediately today to celebrate Palestinianism and terrorism mere hours after this display of Jihad murderous violence in an American city. The goons blocked 6th Avenue.

And like clockwork the media blamed the truck.

Speaking of trucks, another story emerged this morning of a Tesla Cybertruck that exploded outside the Trump hotel in Las Vegas. The car was filled with fireworks, and the driver was killed by the explosion. It is also being treated as a potential act of terrorism.

So yes. I was going to come on here this evening and write something poetic about where the real collective punishment lies. Our narcissistic detractors argue that Israel is collectively punishing the Gazans in a war that has surgically aimed to minimize civilian casualties, while they ignore that to continue to peddle Hamas propaganda will ultimately collectively punish them. It’s us against them. All of us against all of these psychotic Jihadists. The sooner people realize this the better.

Last night on New Years Eve I hiked the final sunset of 2024 and thought about how our hostages trapped in Gaza disprove this pretentious era of individualism that we live in. There cannot be an island of individual in a world where our survival depends on one another. We are tethered to the hostages like they are tethered to us. Our peace depends on their safe refuge. Our society’s normalisation relies on Hamas’s surrender.

It doesn’t matter if you care or don’t care about Jews or Muslim or Israelis or Palestinians or black or white, you actually have to care about the hostages. Why? Well you care about yourself right? You care about living in a world without suffering? You care about your children being raised in a safe society, and your leaders being honest about the fact?

The hostages are the ultimate pawn in this war. Without them the whole premise for the war in Gaza weakens. The hostages are the bargaining chip. The hostages are living proof (please G-d) that our civilisation is shared and that we cannot move forward as a people without all of us together. Until the hostages return there is no end to the madness that has engulfed the world since October 7. Every single living breathing person on this planet has a vested interest in screaming for their return. You want things to go back to “normal”? So do we. We cannot do without them. And that is a lesson in humiliation. The hubris of those of who think this doesn’t concern them will pay a price. They are not in control. There are plans ahead much bigger than them. We need unity to release our hostages now so that we can all go home. (What our homes are going to look like afte this, however, is a greater task at hand.)

If your loved ones are struggling this year for a resolution to ring in 2025, let me offer one up to them. In 2025, every sane freedom-loving dweller of the West must commit to using their voice against the global war of Jihad. No more scaredy cats.