Douglas Murray: Bondi Beach Was Inevitable

When it comes to policing speech, the Australian authorities are some of the most repressive in the world. And yet, calls for “gassing,” “Jihad,” and “Intifada” have long gone unpunished, even as Jewish groups there begged for threats against their community to be taken seriously. Synagogues and other Jewish sites have been repeatedly assaulted in the last two years alone.

Then came the horrific terrorist attack in Sydney over the weekend.

There will be many questions about how and why the tragedy unfolded, but the central one, Douglas Murray writes, “is why the Australian authorities did not take the concerns of Jewish Australians seriously, and why indeed they spent the last two years pandering to the ever-growing contingent of Muslim immigrants and others who have clearly been on the path to radicalization.”

Read his powerful essay.

The media shape how Americans—those on the left, and those on the right—think about politics. The progressive mind is guided by outlets like the New York Times, which at its best offers well-sourced reporting but at its worst succumbs to left-wing groupthink. The conservative mind is increasingly influenced by X, which offers an open platform and a range of views but too often amplifies baseless conspiracy theories.

Christopher Rufo argues that X’s algorithm is deranging members of the conservative coalition. Some right-wingers, he writes, have become “effectively indistinguishable from a foreign bot farm—real people who mindlessly submit to the algorithm and enter a drug-like stupor that makes them incapable of analytical rigor or basic fact-checking.”

Read the rest of his analysis here.

In 2022, the federal agency Statistics Canada published “gender-identity” data for people aged 15 and older. What many may not know, however, is that the agency also collected that information about children aged 14 and under.

Now the agency wants to present the data publicly, so it emailed the volunteer group Pflag for input. The group sent back a ten-page “Consultation Guide,” whose authors claim that publishing the data will “contribute to strengthening evidence-based decision making to inform programs and services for these populations.”

“That sounds reasonable enough,” Colin Wright observes, “until one grasps the implications: that infants and toddlers have a ‘gender identity,’ that this identity can differ from their sex, and that governments must know this information so that they can design programs and services around these presumed identities.”

Read his take.

By the end of the year, the New York City Council is likely to pass the Community Opportunity to Purchase Act (COPA), which would grant qualified not-for-profit organizations the right to purchase multifamily dwellings before those properties appear on the public market.

Christian Browne calls it an extraordinary claim of municipal power. It’s also a legally dubious attempt to give City Hall the prerogatives of a private owner, forcing landlords into involuntary contracts with favored nonprofits and eroding the basic right to dispose of one’s property.

Read here to see why he calls COPA an unconstitutional usurpation of private-property rights.

“Islam is not compatible with democracy or the liberal or Judeo-Christian traditions. This needs to be said more by our elites.”

Photo credit: SAEED KHAN / Contributor / AFP via Getty Images