Dylan Housman

Listen to this Article The kind of third-worldist brainrot that has long been an undercurrent of America's far-Left is having a moment.

The kind of third-worldist brainrot that has long been an undercurrent of America’s far-Left is having a moment.The “Blame America First” crowd used to be confined to the fringes — coffee shop discussions of a million dead Iraqis, Jane Fonda manning a Viet Cong anti-aircraft gun, DSA conference speakers deriding Barack Obama as a war criminal for taking out Based Pan-Africanist Socialist Revolutionary Gaddafi — but now it dominates the Discourse. Podcasters and newsletter writers from Left, Right, and the schizo middle draw millions of clicks by asserting that American projection of force and pursual of interest is the root cause of all the world’s ills, from Russia-Ukraine to “genocide in Gaza” to the Islamic takeover of Europe.Sadio Camara would likely agree with some version of that anti-Western assessment if you asked him about it. You can’t, though, because he got blown up by a car bomb last month.Camara was the Minister of Defense in the West African country of Mali until his untimely yet instructive death on April 25. It was only a few years earlier that he played a key role in overthrowing his own country’s government, kicking out the United States (and even more so the French), and entering a security partnership with Russia and its mercenaries.Mali is part of the Sahel region of Africa, alongside Niger and Burkina Faso. The average American could be forgiven for not caring much about this part of the world, but they should at least a little: it’s rich in rare earth minerals, resources like gold and uranium, and Islamic terrorists. They also sit along key migration routes from sub-Saharan Africa to Europe, which is to say that they have some bearing on how non-European Europe will continue to become in the future.All three of those countries previously had democratic-ish governments that worked with the United States and France on counter-terrorism. You might recall the tragic ambush in Niger that killed four Green Berets (and 4 Nigeriens) in 2017. Africa has really become a hotspot for Islamic terrorist groups in recent years, and the United States had a major presence in Niger to fight them (and smaller special forces operations in Mali and Burkina Faso).Then, in the early 2020s, they fell one-by-one to Russian-backed coups that installed military juntas and severed ties with the United States.“Move on from the colonial past and hear the anger, the frustration, the rejection that is coming up from the African cities and countryside, and understand that this movement is inexorable,” Malian government spokesman Abdoulaye Maïga told the UN in 2022. “Your intimidations and subversive actions have only swelled the ranks of Africans concerned with preserving their dignity.”There is a little bit of blame to be attributed to Washington, D.C., at this point in the story. Under President Joe Biden, a delegation of officials visited Niger and more or less gave the junta an ultimatum: stop cozying up to Russia and Iran and work with us instead, or else. At the time, Niger was nearing a uranium agreement with Iran. (Surely that won’t be relevant down the road!)They promptly told the Biden administration to kick rocks and booted what remained of America’s presence from the country, including one of our most critical drone bases in the region which we used to kill terrorists.“For Niger it was just very abrupt and very aggressive. They felt that it was the same attitude that the French had,” Zineb Riboua, a research fellow at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East, told me. “The military junta asked them to leave.”“Instead of presenting it as an ultimatum, they could have presented an alternative. Instead of doing a uranium deal with Iran, why don’t you do one with the United States, and you get a school program or something in Niger, something they don’t have,” Riboua said. “A lot of these countries have unemployment issues, and they’re landlocked countries, so it’s very hard for them to do trade and be integrated in the region.”Alas, with the Western colonial powers gone, things should have been on the upswing for the Sahel. We’ve got Russia (primarily via its mercenary forces, the Wagner Group) doing security and fighting the terrorists. We’re trading with Iran and China. All is well.Then they got mugged by reality. The Russians were killing untold numbers of civilians and still somehow managing to cede ground to the jihadists. In fact, in Burkina Faso and Mali, the Russians and government forces actually killed more civilians last year than the jihadists. The security situation was deteriorating rapidly. Then, things really came to a head in April, with the offensive that killed Camara and countless others.The April attack even resulted in Russia’s own mini-Kabul moment, with Russian troops fleeing the region, forced to leave large amounts of weapons behind.The Sahel juntas, just a few years after declaring themselves strong, independent, anti-Western governments that don’t need no protecting from Europe and America, found themselves being overrun by Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) and ISIS.🚨Urgent – 🇧🇫 Burkina FasoUne dissidence d’un groupe entier du JNIM a été signalée dans le nord du Burkina Faso, avec son ralliement à la branche de l’État islamique dans la province du Sahel ( ISSP)Le nombre de combattants concernés serait important. pic.twitter/AXpAFcMsnS— Sahel Alerte (@SahelAlerte) April 15, 2026JNIM are a group of Salafi-jihadist groups, descended in part from al-Qaeda, which now operates in territory larger than every U.S. state besides Alaska, primarily in Mali and Burkina Faso. They’re the ones who rolled up to Camara’s house and detonated a car bomb. They’re probably the closest entity we’ve seen to peak ISIS since its downfall, seeing as their specific goals are to expel foreign forces and establish a caliphate under sharia law.Of course, there is still ISIS itself, which is also active here. ISSP (Islamic State-Sahel Province) has taken over large swathes of Niger, and even launched an attack on the capital’s airport in January (which also housed some Russian mercenaries).The JNIM/FLA coalition attacked and took control of the Malian military base in Hombori, Mopti region in central Mali this morning. pic.twitter/r0k9NrbSHl— Brant (@BrantPhilip_) April 30, 2026The Trump administration has signaled some willingness to get involved and try to rectify the situation, potentially with a mineral deal of some kind, but who knows if it will come too late. The Islamists are taking all three countries by storm now, and have killed nearly 80,000 people since 2019.“We are victims of our wealth — the wealth that imperialists want to seize at all costs, aiming to keep us in slavery. We will secure it,” said Burkina Faso’s “Interim” President Ibrahim Traoré in 2024.They probably wish they had stayed under the boot of Western imperialism after all.

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I love a good intra-right-wing philosophical debate, and last week brought us one with the banning of Cenk Uygur and Hasan Piker from the United Kingdom.Piker and Uygur were slated to speak at an SXSW London when the British Home Office suddenly revoked their visas. Their reasoning was that it would “not be conducive to the public good” for them to enter the country.The radical pair instantly did what people like them always do. They blamed Israel, despite the fact that right-wing influencers who are pro-Israel have also been recently banned, and that the U.K. government is openly hostile to the Jewish state.That led a number of right-of-center intellectuals, some of whom I deeply respect, to argue that the ban was folly. Both the Free Press and National Review editorial boards published pieces criticizing the ban on both pragmatic and philosophical grounds, asserting that the bans would both foster more anti-Israel sentiment and were also a betrayal of free speech and classical liberalism. Several other notable conservatives made similar arguments, including that a “confident” civilization wouldn’t need to do this.But why should the U.K., Europe, or perhaps even the entire West be confident right now?The entire continent is a shell of itself by any conceivable metric. Militarily impotent, economically depressed, and morally bankrupt, Western Europe is simply not in a position to be taking for granted that people will see radicalism for what it is when exposed to it.Only a small minority of young Europeans say they are willing to fight and die for their country. Radical Islamism is becoming more prevalent by the day. Europe needs to be on a defensive posture, and that means fighting back against the forces that seek to destroy it by any means necessary, not being open to a good clean debate for the future of humanity.The principled case for letting the pair travel is that liberalism dictates such. But Piker and Uygur are not British. We’ve seen similar arguments play out in the United States during the second Trump administration, about how to extend rights to non-citizens that we all agree citizens do have.I am not a constitutional lawyer, so I won’t weigh in on the American legality, and I’m not a scholar of the British legal system either, so I won’t opine on Uygur and Piker’s legal rights across the pond, because I don’t know. What I will say is that I see no reason to extend the full charities of Western liberalism to foreigners who wish to destroy it.This is the right’s version of suicidal empathy. Being a free speech absolutist comes from a good place. And within our own borders with our own people, it is necessary. But there’s no compelling reason a society must let in outsiders, with no stake in its fortune, to interlope, spread the seeds of destruction, and then go back where they came from, even from a classically liberal viewpoint.The strongest argument comes from the pragmatists. Rich Lowry makes a version of this case, arguing that the ban is counterproductive because it raises the profile of the offenders in the U.K. and gives them an opportunity to clownishly blame Israel for it.Lowry makes the good points that the British Home Office is run by a critic of Israel, the country is run by a left-wing government, and the country itself is profoundly anti-Zionist at this point, so of course it’s silly to blame Israel. That is all true, which is why I come to the opposite conclusion.The suggestion that this ban is going to make more people aware of the dunce duo, and thus more likely to subscribe to their ideas, falls flat when they are already aligned with the majority. The case that it gives them an opportunity to falsely blame Israel falls flat because the case is so facially absurd.Rather, the prevailing takeaway from this decision is that two destructive provocateurs were made to face consequences for their actions. That is all too rare today, and it’s about time that a Western government stood up for itself.

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There is no bottom for the red-green alliance. • Ro Khanna was having a great week.

Ro Khanna was having a great week.Everyone was feeding right into the publicity stunt he pulled by traveling to the West Bank and getting “detained” by Israelis. Ink was spilled in think-pieces, man-hours were spent on thorough “debunkings,” and Khanna got to fling all the slop he could in various Twitter fights.In the attention economy age, things were going perfectly to plan. Ro was dominating the conversation.There’s just one problem: it wasn’t enough for the people who it was meant to impress.After his trip, Khanna did an interview with the terrorist-friendly third-worldist outlet Drop Site News, seeking to capitalize on his momentum. There, he was confronted by journalist Jeremy Scahill.💢 Jeremy Scahill asks Rep. Ro Khanna:“Do Palestinians have a right to kill Israeli soldiers, Congressman?”“On October 7, did Palestinians have a right to attack Israeli military bases in the Gaza envelope? Yes or no?”🎥 Watch Khanna’s response in the attached clip. Longer… https://t.co/x05LkvFxgU pic.twitter/CmZqgpahBZ— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) July 14, 2026“Do Palestinians have a right to kill Israeli soldiers, Congressman?”“The first targets that were hit on the morning of October 7 were multiple military bases. Did Palestinian forces have the right to attack those military bases?”Scahill, who does very cool things like call terrorists by their formal names (“The Qassam Brigades, Palestinian Forces”), subjected Khanna to a seven-minute struggle session where he repeatedly asked the Congressman to say October 7 was a good thing.Khanna was forced to flail and give generic answers about “non-violent resistance” and even invoked Gandhi. But it wasn’t good enough for Scahill. He needed to endorse killing Israelis. He needed to say October 7 was justified. Anything less was insufficient.I must say I delighted in the exchange. I will admit there was a time I fell on the more non-interventionist, anti-war side of foreign policy. I still do, to a large degree. But I was forced back toward the center as I realized gradually over time just how insane the “anti-war” faction is.The reality is most of them aren’t anti-war when you scratch just a tad below the surface. What they actually are is anti-American and anti-Western. They side with terrorists, dictators, and adversaries of the United States. People like Scahill cry anti-imperialism and then have nothing to say about Vladimir Putin’s genocidal war of aggression against Ukraine.Drop Site wasn’t the only one to call BS on Khanna’s stunt because it didn’t go far enough. Hasan Piker delivered the presidential hopeful a backhanded compliment, calling him “moveable” on Israel, which is better than, say, Chuck Schumer.🚨”If he’s movable on this issue, we can get others to be far, far more aggressive in their posture. I will take Ro Khanna over Chuck Schumer. I will take Ro Khanna over Haley Stevens. I will take Ro Khanna over Cory Booker.” Hasan Piker discussing @RoKhanna‘s inconsistencies on… pic.twitter/vre16FIuAZ— adri ♡ (@socialistadri) July 14, 2026His audience’s reaction? To turn on Piker himself and call him impure.The comments under Piker’s post and the Drop Site interview indicate that Khanna is learning a harsh lesson. Until he embraces out-and-out extermination of the Israeli state and support of Hamas, his silly games will get him nowhere. Only pure, uncut radicalism will do. He joined the leopards-eating-faces party, and now he’s got to dislodge the teeth from his orbital bone.‘I never thought leopards would eat MY face,’ sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.— Adrian Bott (@Cavalorn) October 16, 2015