Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

Why do people live in California? The weather is nice and so are the property taxes. Unlike a lot of blue states where property taxes make home ownership all but impossible for working class and even middle class families, California has the 16th lowest property taxes in the country. These low rates have allowed California homeowners and businesses who predated the dot com boom to survive in a state and in municipal areas that are rapidly becoming unaffordable to all but a small few. While housing prices are skyrocketing, property taxes are fixed at the time of sale with assessments limited to 2% increases a year due to Proposition 13 or the People's Initiative to Limit Property Taxation. The 1978 proposition dates back to a time when the state’s taxpayers protected their own financial interests. After a string of successful tax increases and debt hikes, Proposition 13 is on the chopping block. The choppers have been clever enough to introduce a partial repeal that will remov

Early Saturday morning, a bearded perpetrator in a hooded jacket, wearing gloves, smashed the glass door and windows of the Humboldt Republican headquarters with rocks. He poured an unknown liquid into the storefront office before escaping on a bike into the streets of Eureka in the pre-dawn hours. There was one obvious clue. The bike had a giant BERNIE sticker on it. When police caught up to the alleged perpetrator, Michael Valls attempted to escape on his bike, then he tried throwing the bike at the cops, and, when he was finally taken into custody, gave authorities a false name. But police caught him with the Trump flag that he had stolen from the vandalized office. The Bernie Sanders supporter was charged with burglary, felony vandalism, attempted arson, resisting arrest, and providing a false name. The chemical liquid he had poured inside the office turned out to be flammable. Bail was set at only $25,000, and Valls was out of prison by Sunday. It is California after all.

The Democrat presidential primaries have been a long politically correct apology tour. Joe Biden was forced to apologize for opposing crime and busing. Bernie Sanders had to offer up mea culpas for ever being on good terms with the NRA and for questioning open borders, Kamala Harris had to apologize for enforcing whatever passes for the law in California, as did Amy Klobuchar, who also had to apologize for having once supported border fencing and English as the country’s national language. After jumping into the race, Michael Bloomberg launched his own apology tour for trying to stop gang violence with ‘stop and frisk’, for criticizing Obamacare, and the easy loans that wrecked the economy. No candidate, no matter how lefty, is ever truly pure enough for the party of the perpetually woke. Any politician old enough to run for the White House also has a history of believing in things like borders, language, biology, math, law and order, free speech, and any other realities that of

The latest battle over Special Immigrant Visas pitted Stephen Miller, President Trump’s senior advisor, against the Pentagon. The military brass was lobbying for 6,000 special immigrant visas for Iraqis who worked for American forces in the country. These visas were once again billed as helping “interpreters”. That’s a lot of interpreters considering that there were only 5,200 American troops in Iraq. How could there be more Iraqi interpreters for American troops than there are troops? The Special Immigrant Visa scam has been sold for over a decade using the same claim that it’s needed to save the lives of Iraqi and Afghan interpreters who are risking death by helping American soldiers. In one decade, the United States has handed out 75,250 of these visas to Iraqi and Afghan employees, and their dependents. Between 2007 and 2017, they represented 1 percent of all immigrant visas. The truth is that the military brass has wrongly used the incentive of Special Immigrant Visas to

Before The Hobbit movies could begin their trek through theaters, Warner Brothers and the Tolkien Estate had to settle their lawsuit over profits from the original movies for an undisclosed sum. Christopher Tolkien, the now deceased son of the author, stated that the settlement would “allow The Tolkien Trust to properly pursue its charitable objectives." The Tolkien Trust was founded by Tolkien’s children in the seventies to use some of the income from the estate of the celebrated philologist and author for charitable works. Two generations later, these works appear to have drifted quite far from anything that the conservative scholar might have wished. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was a staunch Catholic, a monarchist and proudly provincial. The Tolkien Trust funds fairly few Catholic and many international human rights causes. Its English charities would often have been best left unfunded considering the great harm that they do to the ‘shires’ of his land. In 2018 and 2017,

In 2016, Donald Trump proved that money won’t buy you the Republican nomination. In 2020, his likely challengers are proving that not only can you buy the Democrat nomination, but it’s the best way. Michael Bloomberg is making headlines for spending $300 million on advertising to buy third place. That doesn’t include the $10,000 spent on sushi, $250,000 on furniture, and six figure staffer salaries. With a $61 billion net worth, the billionaire just decided to buy the primaries. And his buying spree is working. The Dems claim to hate billionaires, but two of them successfully bought into the race, Bloomberg and Steyer, while completely lacking the populist appeal that propelled Trump to the top. The Bloomberg-Steyer spending sprees have set off a dieback in the Dem 2020 race where only those candidates with lots of cash can even compete. Warren’s campaign is crumbling along with her financial prospects. Steyer is cutting off Biden at the knees in South Carolina and Bloomberg will

After engaging in terrorism in Iraq, an Al Qaeda leader came to America as a refugee and applied for Social Security disability benefits because his “injuries” in Iraq had made it too hard for him to work. In 2006, Ali Yousif Ahmed Al-Nouri was the Emir of an Al Qaeda terrorist group in Fallujah. The Iraqi city was the scene of brutal battles between Al Qaeda and America. It was where American soldiers had suffered the most casualties in any battle since the Vietnam War. Despite multiple defeats, Al Qaeda remained deeply entrenched in the city and was even able to seize a number of neighborhoods in 2014. By then, Al-Nouri was living in Arizona. Only 2 years after being the Emir of an Al Qaeda group, Al-Nouri had traded the deserts of Al-Anbar for the deserts of the Southwest. How was an Al Qaeda leader able to move to the United States? Easy. He claimed to be a refugee from Al Qaeda. In 2008, the United States raised the refugee admission celling to 80,000 to accommodate the

On a bloody Sabbath in 1929, a Muslim mob massacred the Jewish community of Hebron. The mob used knives, axes, and stones to kill men, women, and children. Many of the women were raped before being murdered. The Islamist atrocities committed against them defy comprehension. Pierre van Paassen, the Canadian journalist, described seeing, "severed sexual organs and the cut-off women's breasts". A more recent summary notes, “Photographs from the time show a girl struck on the head by a sword with her brain spilling out, a woman with bandaged hands, people with their eyes gouged out, a man whose hand had been savagely amputated, and other grisly sights.” Who, outside the perpetrators, could endorse and support such crimes? The Communist Party. The Morgen Freiheit, the Communist Party's Yiddish newspaper in New York, headlined its article, “The Arab Uprising is Spreading - Zionist Fascists Have Provoked the Arab Uprising.” "It is not innocent blood," the

In the 1980s, movies like Die Hard and Back to the Future 2 showed off a Japanese takeover of America. Japan had leveraged unfair trade policies, currency manipulation, and government subsidies to buy up American companies (it’s still happening, but few are paying attention) and was the wave of the future sweeping over America. Everyone was driving Japanese cars, using Japanese electronics, and buying "Made in Japan." And Japan got there by stealing massive amounts of American intellectual property and reselling it to Americans. By 1991, George Friedman’s book, The Coming War With Japan, was flying off the shelves. Why doesn’t the future belong to Japan? There are economic answers. But there’s also a demographic answer. Japan entered the 1980s with an acceptably healthy 14 births per 1,000 people birth rate. The Japanese rate back then was only a little below America’s own 15 births per 1,000 people number. But throughout the 80s, while Japan was supposed to be taking