Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

(What does the future hold? Let's turn back the clock to the end of a year over a century ago.) (Posting this article has become an annual tradition ever since the grim end of 2012. It's a reminder that the end of each year ushers in unknowns, but also opportunities for heroism. History does not stand still, and we should never assume that we know how it will come out.)  The next year  sweeps around the earth like the hand of a clock, from Australia to Europe and across the great stretch of the Atlantic it rides the darkness to America. And then around and around again, each passing day marking another sweep of the hours. While the year makes its first pass around the world, even if it doesn't feel like there is much to celebrate, let us leave it behind, open a door in time and step back to another year, a century past. December 31, 1912. The crowds are large, the men wear hats, and the word 'gay' means happy. Liquor is harder to come by because the end of the year ...

Seven years after her political epitaph was written, she’s back. The Clinton Global Initiative has been relaunched in a big way and Hillary Clinton is fundraising for Biden, her allies are inside his faltering campaign and she’s meeting with foreign leaders on his behalf. Until 2023, Hillary’s career had been on one long downward slide. After she ran out of biographies to sell, she tried writing a children’s book, “Grandma’s Gardens” (which contrary to expectations was not about Vince Foster’s corpse turning up in Fort Marcy Park), then getting in on Chelsea’s racket of putting her name on collections of stories about feminist heroines (Greta Thunberg, Bella Abzug) and that failed, and then she tried to get in on Bill’s racket of putting his name on fictional thrillers about thinly disguised versions of himself with “State of Terror” . In a career low, Hillary was reduced to marketing fanfic in which she’s struggling with “a Republican president nicknamed ‘President Dumb’ who pulls o...

Sometimes you have to kill democracy to save democracy. “What we are seeing right now is the all-out assault on democracy,” Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold claimed in 2021. “Everything we do every single day to ensure the American people can elect, freely choose their election officials,” the chair of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State held forth in 2022. “We believe that democracy literally is on the ballot.” In 2023, democracy is no longer on the ballot in Colorado because Griswold, who had spent every single year warning about an “assault on democracy”, launched an actual assault on democracy to ensure that people in Colorado would not be able to freely vote in elections. After Colorado’s Democrat justices ruled that, on their say-so, former President Trump couldn’t appear on the ballot in Colorado, the state’s GOP proposed to move to a caucus system. And Griswold responded by warning that the Colorado GOP couldn’t change its own primary so that voters can’...

Those who define the oppressors and the oppressed get to perpetrate the genocide. Whether the Jews and Arab Muslims in the Middle East, the Sinhalese and Tamils in Sri Lanka, Hispanics and Indians in South America, or the Chinese in Indonesia, decolonization is a euphemism for the majoritarian oppression of minority groups in the name of liberation. Western anti-colonialism allied with Third World nationalist tribal movements in the name of opposing imperialism and colonialism. Rather than offering equality and human rights, these movements routinely launched programs of ‘decolonization’ which defined citizenship in the newly liberated nation around the ethnicity, language and culture of the majority. Everything from access to higher education to property ownership was reserved for members of their tribe. Western leftists cheered as ‘democratic socialist’ people’s republics spread this program of ethnic, religious and racial repression across Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Many of t...

“Joy is canceled,” read the signs wielded by Hamas supporters protesting a Christmas tree lighting at Columbia University. While a student group tried to sing, the terror backers shrieked, “there’s no room for celebration.” And no room for anything except terrorism and hate. Supporters of the Islamic terrorist group took a special pleasure in attacking Christianity. Carolers singing “Gloria in excelsis deo” or “Glory to God in the highest” at the Washington Square Park Christmas tree near New York University were shouted down by Muslim and leftist allies shrieking , “Shut it down! Shut it down!” People have been killed for merely drawing cartoons of Mohammed, but Muslims feel empowered to shout down Christian hymns before Christmas a few miles from Ground Zero. On the Boston Common, Hamas supporters defaced a nativity scene to read, “Jesus was Palestinian.” Pro-Hamas rioters attacked the Rockefeller Christmas tree lighting in Manhattan. The Muslim American Society, a Muslim Brotherhood...

Most people are the heroes of their own stories, not the villains.  How then do people turn evil?... We talk a great deal about "evil", but rarely about what it is or how we get there. As mobs march through cities chanting for destruction in the name of a rotating list of causes, the question is one that is more important than ever  Evil isn't a chuckling madman in the dark or followers with bloody knives capering around an altar and chanting about their love of evil. There are individuals and small groups that consciously embrace evil, but the essence of human goodness is that we want to be good and have to be tricked into becoming evil.  Most people are the heroes of their own stories, not the villains. Anyone who spends enough time around the criminal justice system or studying history knows that even the worst people are their own heroes.  How then do people turn evil? "Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil," Isaiah 5:20 warns. To become evil, we ...

While most people forgot about Al Gore a decade ago, the 75-year-old environmental tycoon with a net worth in the hundreds of millions (also a former vice president) has doubled down on his flavor of green fascism in the name of saving the planet from everyone but himself. Gore is making $2 million a month from his “green investment firm” which has been having some problems. Its assets fell from $39 billion to $30 billion and its biggest fund suffered a 28% decline . And investors may be rethinking whether a firm that pays Gore $2 million a month so it can claim it’s saving the planet by buying Microsoft, Amazon and Adidas stocks is worth it. But Gore is keeping busy. At COP28, the UN climate summit, he demanded that voting rules be changed so that a majority of countries, rather than a full consensus of nations, could impose mandates on the United States and oil-producing nations. That means a bunch of third world countries would have veto power over our entire economy. Good for the...

“Put my musket in my hand and belt my sword around me,” a returning French soldier pleads with his comrade in ‘Two Grenadiers’. He envisions his body being buried to wait for the return of Napoleon from captivity. “Then will my Emperor ride over my grave, swords will be clashing and flashing; and armed, I’ll rise up from the grave, to guard my Emperor.” In Schumann and Wagner’s musical renditions of Heinrich Heine’s poem, the dark tones give way to the ringing triumphant peals of the Marseillaise, the French national anthem, as the faith of the resurrected soldier is rewarded with a messianic return of Napoleon and his armies. Napoleon’s promise to carry on the work of the French Revolution and “liberate” the world had inspired a cult of personality. Beethoven had initially dedicated his Eroica symphony to Napoleon. And the famous composer was far from alone in being caught up in his cause. The German liberal admirers of Napoleon eventually split into nationalists and radicals. Their c...

In December 2015, after a husband and wife pair of Islamic terrorists shot up a Christmas party in San Bernardino, Kamala Harris, then the Attorney General of California, convened a session on “Islamophobia” that included the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Muslim Public Affairs Council and the Muslim Student Association: all of which had defended Islamic terrorists. With 130 dead in France and 13 murdered in her own state, Kamala gathered a group that included Islamic terror supporters to argue that even after “the recent attacks in Paris and San Bernardino”, it was wrong “to stoke fear and cast aspersions against an entire faith and the millions of law-abiding American Muslims”. After the Islamic mass murders of over 1,000 Israelis, Kamala returned to pushing “Islamophobia”. In the speech that he delivered three days after the massacres, she urged Biden to include a line about “Islamophobia” because of the way that Muslims had supposedly ‘suffered’ from it after the Islam...