Approximately a year after tech billionaire Elon Musk acquired X, formerly known as Twitter, in November 2023, a number of major companies collectively removed their ads from the platform.

They all did so while citing dubious concerns that Musk was allowing the promotion of anti-Semitism and “hate speech” on his platform.

The effort to get companies to pull their ads from X was spearheaded by the Leftmedia organization Media Matters.

Companies that pulled ads significantly impacting X’s revenue generation included the likes of Disney, Apple, IBM, Comcast/NBC Universal, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Paramount.

The European Commission also joined in on the ad boycott, with spokesman Johannes Bahrke contending that the EU had “seen an alarming increase in disinformation and hate speech on several social media platforms in recent weeks,” singling out X.

The Biden administration also tacitly supported the campaign against X, with the White House posting the following statement on November 17, 2023: “We condemn this abhorrent promotion of Antisemitic and racist hate in the strongest terms, which runs against our core values as Americans.”

The pretext for all this — what proved to be faux outrage given the subsequent silence on actual anti-Semitism that would soon roil college campuses across the country — was that Musk had dared to agree with an X post observing that Jewish communities support a “dialectical hatred against whites.”

However, the ad boycott was too coordinated to pass the spontaneous, supposedly organic movement sniff test.

Soon, House Republicans began asking questions, with the House Judiciary Committee launching an investigation into the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM).

The Committee concluded that GARM “likely violated federal antitrust laws.”

The criticisms of our universities seem endless: charges of antisemitism; exorbitant student fees leading to lifetime debt; ridiculous programs with no practical use; the list goes on.

While the Ivies continue to flex their muscles with the Trump administration, very little has changed.

The schools insist that they have no responsibility to the people whose money they receive through taxes, and they should be allowed to function unencumbered.

Gradually, however, potential post-high school students are showing they are smarter than those who think they are superior to them.

The celebrated option is the trade school.

We have been talking about the value and benefits of trade schools for years.

Ten years ago, our current Secretary of State Marco Rubio praised the value of these schools, because they were filling a need in the United States:

“Why did we stop doing vocational education in America, people that can work with their hands; people you can train to do this work while they’re still in high school so they can graduate ready to go work? What’s happening is some of these tech companies are taking centers to Canada because they can get people to go over there instead of here. The ideal scenario is to train Americans to do the work so we don’t have to rely on people from abroad.”

What does the Palestinian jihad against Israel have to do with allowing illegal migrants to remain in Los Angeles?

On the face of it, absolutely nothing, and yet there the jihadis are, out burning down the City of Angels along with their leftist allies.

The immediate explanation for this is that both leftists and jihadis have a common enemy — the United States of America — and while that is certainly true, this is much more than just an alliance of convenience. What we are seeing in Los Angeles is just the latest manifestation of a deep affinity between leftists and jihadis.

The pro-Hamas contingent appears to be well represented in L.A. One photo shows a masked man with a Hamas armband and a Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine headband, waving a Mexican flag next to a car that had been graffitied all over with leftist slogans and set on fire.

In a video, rioters sporting keffiyehs throw burning material from an overpass onto police cars below, trying to set them on fire.

Another keffiyeh-wearing rioter says that the U.S. is the “enemy” and that Los Angeles should burn down. [pictured]

The deeper reason why jihadis as well as leftists are out on the streets of Los Angeles is that both rely on terror as the source of their power.

The right to self-defense, and by extension the right to bear arms, has a long and complex history in Britain.

Today, many see strict gun control as a hallmark of British law, but this was not always the case.

Indeed, Britain has a robust tradition of armed citizenry, rooted in common law, enshrined in the 1689 Bill of Rights, and eroded only in the modern era.

British society faces unprecedented strains, from mass immigration, rising crime and public disorder to distrust of the State, so it is worth re-examining whether Britain has moved too far from its historic principles.

The roots of Britain’s approach to bearing arms can be found in the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

The overthrow of King James II and the ascension of William III and Mary II resulted in the English Bill of Rights in 1689.

Mostly focused on the abuses of State (Royal) power, it contained a clause declaring:

“That the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defense suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law.”

It was not an unlimited right. It was conditioned by status and subject to the law, but it established that the government could not arbitrarily disarm the population.

Throughout the medieval and early modern periods, the English militia system required men to possess and train with weapons to ensure that defense was a civic responsibility, not a purely professional one.

Far from fearing private firearm ownership, the State encouraged it, not least because it lacked a standing army and viewed armed citizens as vital to national defense.

This tradition continued well into the 19th century. Gun ownership was common; regulation was minimal.

This changed after World War I, which left Britain with a surplus of weapons, a newly politicized working class that knew how to use them, and an Establishment fearful of a Bolshevik revolution, culminating in the Firearms Act of 1920, the first major piece of modern gun control legislation.