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A group of 9/11 families has started a petition drive demanding NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani be barred from attending the 25th anniversary ceremony honoring the nearly 3,000 lives lost during the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks – because they believe he’s a longtime terror apologist.

Bench spots in Philadelphia just became much more appealing.

The Far-Right 'Terror Plot' That Didn't Exist... Until The UK Government And Media Just Said It Did

Authored by Steven Tucker via dailysceptic.org,

Did you see that huge Muslim gathering held in Suffolk recently, which had to be called off early due to a major far-Right terror plot being hatched against it? You may well have done, as the news was all over the media and referenced in alarmist tones by leading politicians, up to and including the Prime Minister (both the ones we've had this week).

But did you also see that the 'plot' didn't even exist? Quite possibly not, because the subsequent release of everyone concerned (bar one aberrant and misleading exception, who we'll come to later) didn't get anything like as much space in the media, and no mention at all from any of the politicians who had so eagerly jumped the imaginary gun to condemn it.

Empty threats

The disrupted event, called the UK Ijtima, attracted 15,000 members of the Religion of Peace from around the world to gather in the grounds of the country estate of Shrubland Hall in Barham to engage in events of a peacefully peaceful nature. This peace was suddenly shattered, however, when armed counter-terror police descended, warning visitors of a severe threat to their wellbeing in the shape of the nearby presence of some white people, causing the jamboree to be closed down a few hours early on Sunday July 12th. Eight men across the country were detained under the Terrorism Act 2000, whilst a further four individuals were apprehended upon different grounds like conspiracy to commit murder. Counter-terror cops confirmed the arrests were "Right-wing terrorism related".

Then-Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, another recent victim of things having to end early, was quick to express shock at the "credible, serious threat", as was his soon-to-be successor, Andy Burnham.

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood went further, saying the prompt police action "undoubtedly saved lives", making a statement in the Commons, playing up the cancellation as all part of a wider campaign of terror and intimidation being waged against Britain's Muslims by the agents of Anglo-Saxon hatred.

Hannah Spencer, the Green Party MP for Gorton and Gaza, joined in, demanding stronger governmental action against "anti-Muslim hatred" and bemoaning how the "alarming incident" in Barham "has barely been covered in the news", even though it appeared on the BBC, Sky News, ITV and many major newspapers.

The lengthy ITV report is particularly cringeworthy and dhimmified. An interviewee, before any details of the 'plot' were even known, says that, if it had succeeded, it could have been the biggest terror massacre in British history. ITV would not have run an interview just after Axel Rudakubana's arrest in 2024 with someone saying the same thing about his own plan to kill thousands with the bioweapons he was brewing in his bedroom, because Axel was from a minority group himself, and so speculating about his own case was officially discouraged by media and politicians alike, even though his offences, unlike those of the white Barham 'terrorists', were actually real.

Others doing their best to inflate the risk included the Muslim Council of Britain, who used the incident to specifically warn that "the threat facing Muslim communities is real, not imagined". A few days later, of course, it turned out the precise reverse was true as regarded Barham, yet still the MCB's statement remained online and unaltered.

Did it really matter to those bemoaning the 'threat' so loudly here that it ultimately did turn out to be wholly imaginary, though?

PCS gone mad

The PCS, our main civil service union, momentarily confused itself with the CPS, and put out an eerily similar statement to the MCB on the 'plot', also presenting it as part of a wider pattern:

There is no doubt there was a serious risk to life. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood described a "credible threat" and said that police action had "undoubtedly saved lives". Britain's Counter Terrorism Policing (CTP) confirmed that the investigation was "Right-wing terrorism related". This is not an isolated incident. There is increasing evidence of growing Islamophobia and alarming Islamophobic attacks. On Friday June 19th PCS condemned violent attacks targeting Edinburgh's Muslim community. This followed serious violence earlier the same month over several days in Belfast, Northern Ireland. In Manchester and Stockport, mosques have been attacked during evening prayers.

The other attacks upon Muslims referred to by the PCS here were real, physically extant events. The pseudo-events in Barham later turned out not to be. Fran Heathcote, the PCS General Secretary, reassured her union's Muslims that the difference didn't matter, though. Look at the sentence I've highlighted in bold:

Firstly I am thankful that this potentially catastrophic attack was prevented on this occasion without injury. However, I recognise that the threat facing Muslim and other religious communities is very real. Once again, we send our solidarity to those affected who may be feeling frightened and insecure at this time. PCS is ready to support any of our members affected by such events whether threatened or real. This kind of violence has no place in any society. We stand firmly against racism and religious intolerance in all its forms.

A union which explicitly promises to protect its members from imaginary threats? Would that include handing them out free cloves of garlic to ward off vampires, and silver bullets to see off werewolves? I wrote on the Daily Sceptic recently about a bizarre new far-Left faux-academic philosophy called 'eventism', or the unjustifiable social prejudice against false claims of things which never actually happened at all. This philosophy, which allows minority groups like Muslims to demonise majority groups like whites as being collectively 'guilty' of crimes like rape, murder or slavery even if they have never personally committed them, seems also here to apply to non-existent acts of 'terror' like the one which never occurred at Barham.

Bodies like the Muslim Council of Britain expressly want to use such purely imagined 'events' as a basis for implementing concrete polices. As the MCB said in its post-Barham statement, "The MCB calls on ministers to match the language of condemnation with actual action and policy, not another round of statements that change nothing." If you want "actual action", rather than mere abstract words, isn't that a kind of eventism in itself?

Droning on

What actually happened at Barham during the Ijtima, then? It is quite hard to ascertain for certain, due to the mainstream media, police and previously mouthy politicians, all of whom must now know, failing completely to tell us. So, we have to guess.

The best explanation (officially unconfirmed) I have seen appears in a TikTok video from Shayne Wiskin, a Right-wing campaigner who says an anti-immigration patriot group, as it would style itself, had gone to the Ijtima bearing drones. The Ijtima gathering is banned in several Islamic nations around the globe, with the parent sect which organises it, Tablighi Jamaat, sometimes accused of being extremists. Fearing such rumours may be true, the patriots, from something called the British Security Project (BSP), decided to go to a nearby field and pilot some drones equipped with cameras overhead just to check the festival-goers weren't secretly building a nuclear warhead.

If this narrative is true, then the supposed 'Nazi terrorists' were nothing of the kind, just the modern-day equivalent of Uncle Jimmy and his Fairly Secret Army from the 1970s Reginald Perrin sitcoms, attempting to protect the nation from fifth-columnists armed with little more than broomsticks and bravado. The BSP aspires to place over 120,000 members in schools and on trains nationwide, just in case a jihadi or a paedo happens to wander into one someday. This might be difficult as yet, as it would seem lucky to have 120 members. It sounds more like well-meaning fantasists than genuinely dangerous men. To be fair to the police, though, if the below alleged photographs supposedly showing BSP drone-operatives at work are real, they did look somewhat suspicious, and it was hardly unreasonable to investigate what they were doing, albeit the ultimate decision to go in so hard with nationwide arrests of alleged 'accomplices' appears to have been rather over the top.

It isn't so much that the police approached these people that is the problem here - if those were masked Muslims flying drones over a Christian gathering, I'd certainly want them taken in for questioning - it was the political and media reaction to the arrests that was more worthy of critique.

Event management

Having expended so much political capital upon condemning this "credible, serious threat" to the Muslim population, politicians, activists, unions and media could hardly just come out and openly admit they had got it all horribly wrong. This, for example, is how ITV News obediently and uncritically reported the Muslim Council of Britain's initial comments about the affair on its website:

I would have loved to have seen a follow-up headline saying 'Far-right danger MCB described as 'real, not imagined', turns out to be imagined, not real', but I suspect that would have been far too humiliating for ITV to own up to. Also, once again, to do so would have been 'eventist', and so just another unacceptable form of systemic white racism.

The main Establishment face-saving tactic rolled out has been simply to stay silent. Mahmood, Burnham and Starmer don't seem to have issued any corrections or apologies, nor do the MCB or PCS union. As for the media, several outlets have dutifully printed follow-up stories explaining how everyone arrested was later released facing no specific terror charges. However, these seem less prominently reported than the initial news of the arrests, and one particular report, from the BBC, was framed in such a way as to make it all sound like the direct opposite of what really happened:

If you only read the headline there, which many users will, it sounds like there was a real terror threat in Barham after all. But if you examine the whole story, it turns out one of the men arrested, during a search of his home and vehicle, was found to possess two extendable batons and a stun-gun. He had made no attempt to take them to the UK Ijtima, had no intent to use them there and wasn't even present in Barham during the gathering, being apprehended in distant Basildon. For this, the man has already been charged, tried and sentenced to six months in prison on a suspended sentence: the wheels of justice really can spin quite quickly on the odd occasion the state actually wants them to. Elsewhere, the BBC reported the other men's release in more honest terms, but the headline reproduced above looks like a clear exercise in damage limitation.

Speculation nation

There's something about all this that does not add up. I would guess it's more an exercise in quietly obscuring yet another DEI-created policing cock-up rather than a case of initial intentional elite conspiracy, but Reform UK's Deputy Leader Richard Tice thinks otherwise. Tice questions whether the whole thing was some government false-flag psy-op to counteract the widespread belief that the murderer of his fellow Reform member Ann Widdecombe may have been a far-Left extremist, by spuriously dragging alleged far-Right extremists back into the headlines instead. (Some have even tried to link the British Security Project to Ann's killer.) In other words, 'White woman killed for real, make the headlines about poor brown men feeling threatened by made-up non-threats': anti-eventism activism in action.

This is pure speculation on Tice's behalf, of the kind you would normally expect politicians like Mahmood, Starmer or Burnham to immediately condemn - but on this occasion, neither their lips nor their Twitter-fingers, moved. Why? Perhaps because, if they had done, Tice could legitimately have shot back that they were guilty of doing precisely the same thing themselves first.

'Don't speculate about motives,' our leaders command us whenever a Muslim attacks people shouting 'Allahu Akbar!' In this case, some white persons do basically nothing, and our leaders themselves can't stop speculating right from the start, because, when possessed by the dogma of 'eventism', fictional 'events' (inverted commas) which tell the right story become somehow automatically much truer than factual events (no inverted commas) which do not.

We were always brought up to believe that actions have consequences. Today, it seems children are more likely to be taught that complete non-actions have consequences too. Being arrested by counter-terror police for doing absolutely nothing wrong, for example.

Tyler Durden Sat, 07/25/2026 - 08:10

Two people, Dezeree Smith and Tamier Brown-Miller have been indicted for a slew of charges, including kidnapping and human trafficking in New Jersey. The female victim was allegedly forced to have sex with dozens of men while they collected the money.

Beloved Christian singer Brian Doerksen has died just four days after announcing his stage 4 cancer diagnosis.

Brace for the commie tsunami.

"It is definitely grueling,” a Harry Styles friend told Page Six of the star's "Together, Together" tour, which could gross $1 billion.

"It is definitely grueling,” a Harry Styles friend told Page Six of the star's "Together, Together" tour, which could gross $1 billion.

Pardon-seekers are paying lobbyists millions for "executive relief" under President Trump, but critics warn most are being scammed, and even $600,000 couldn't get rapper Boosie BadAzz clemency.

The magic of the series just can't be re-created.

Nearly half of the recent wave of defectors over the last year is in biotechnology and medicine, suggesting China is investing heavily to surpass the United States in medical innovation.

Finland & Spain Have The Highest Unemployment Rates, Japan The Lowest

Unemployment across the OECD averaged 4.9% in May 2026, but labor market conditions continued to vary significantly from one country to another as economic growth slowed across parts of the developed world.

This visualization ranks seasonally adjusted unemployment rates for people aged 15 and older across OECD member countries in May 2026, using data from the OECD.

Finland Tops the Ranking

Finland recorded the highest unemployment rate among OECD countries at 10.8%, narrowly ahead of Spain at 10.3%.

The country’s labor market challenges have been especially pronounced among younger workers, with unemployment reaching 23% among Finns under the age of 25.

Several European Economies Face Labor Market Pressure

Europe dominates the upper end of the ranking, with Sweden, France, Türkiye, Greece, Lithuania, Denmark, Luxembourg, and the Baltic states all posting unemployment rates above the OECD average of 4.9%.

Spain has consistently recorded one of the highest unemployment rates in the OECD for decades, reflecting long-standing structural challenges in its labor market.

Meanwhile, countries such as France and Sweden have also experienced softer labor demand amid weaker economic growth across Europe.

Japan and South Korea Remain Among the Lowest

At the opposite end of the ranking, Japan posted the lowest unemployment rate at just 2.5%, followed by Mexico (2.7%), South Korea (2.8%), Israel (2.8%), and Czechia (2.9%).

These countries continue to benefit from relatively tight labor markets, supported by demographic trends, steady employment demand, or structural labor shortages.

The United States also remained below the OECD average, with an unemployment rate of 4.2%, while Canada stood at 6.6%, reflecting somewhat weaker labor market conditions than its southern neighbor.

Overall, the OECD average unemployment rate of 4.9% suggests that labor markets remain relatively healthy despite slowing global growth and ongoing economic uncertainty.

If you enjoyed today’s post, check out this graphic on the world’s richest countries by GDP per capita.

Tyler Durden Sat, 07/25/2026 - 07:35

Special Operations Forces are waiting in the wings near Iran ready to launch the “most sophisticated operation in military history,” which could see thousands of troops on the ground storming nuclear facilities and navigating boobytraps to recover enriched uranium.

The Queens native took a step toward that goal Wednesday, signing with the Pirates after they selected him in the second round of the MLB draft. 

The University of Minnesota Medical School is launching "first-of-their-kind" taxpayer-funded transgender dolls -- complete with swappable genitals -- for children as young as four years old.

"Why I'm Writing This Anonymously And What That Says About Free Speech In Britain"

Authored by 'regular bloke' via dailysceptic.org,

I have wanted to write for the Daily Sceptic for a long time. It should be a straightforward ambition to fulfil. I have opinions, I support free speech and scepticism, and here is a publication built for exactly that. Instead, my first contribution arrives unsigned. I think the reason why is, in itself, the article.

Ann Widdecombe’s murder has reopened a question that surfaces from time to time: should politicians with ‘unfashionable’ views get extra protection? The investigation continues, so I won’t comment on that, but the fact that the question is even being asked in response to a 78 year-old woman being killed in her own home tells you something regardless of how the investigation concludes. We have been here before. Jo Cox in 2016. David Amess in 2021. A pattern is forming, whatever the final facts of this particular case turn out to be.

The debate this triggers is usually framed narrowly: what security do MPs need? I want to push it wider: what if politicians are not actually the group most exposed? They have protection officers, party machinery and a public profile that makes an attack on them a national story. I have none of that. Neither does anyone else who simply has an opinion and a job to protect.

I recently listened to Professor David Betz of King’s College London’s Department of War Studies, who argued that Britain may be entering a period of increasing internal conflict in which political violence becomes more likely.

Whether or not one accepts his analysis, it’s difficult to ignore the growing sense that our public discourse has become more hostile and less forgiving.

If expressing political disagreement increasingly carries the risk of intimidation or worse, the answer cannot simply be to provide more security for an ever-expanding list of public figures.

That treats the symptom rather than the disease.

The view from nowhere and a nobody in particular

I consider myself an ordinary person.

Thirty-plus years ago I would have considered myself slightly Left-leaning. I liked to think of myself as one of the good guys.

But somewhere in the last three decades the Overton window slid sideways, and views I’ve quietly held throughout – that mass immigration, legal and illegal, hasn’t obviously benefited the culture I grew up in, that free speech should mean everyone’s speech, including the people I disagree with – are now filed under ‘Right-wing’.

I don’t think I’m unusual. Look at the Brexit vote, which for many people was as much about sovereignty and control over immigration as it was about Brussels. Look at any poll on migration levels. There is a large, ordinary, non-extreme constituency that holds views broadly like mine. And a good number of them, I suspect, keep quiet for the same reason I’m staying anonymous here: weighing up whether speaking out is worth the risk. Silence can easily be mistaken for consensus, and I suspect that’s exactly what’s happening here.

Which raises a question I’ve had to sit with while writing this: am I a coward? Publishing anonymously, after all, is a way of having the argument without paying for it. But I don’t think cowardice is really what’s on display here. A coward stays silent. What I’m doing is closer to something else entirely: deciding that saying this at all matters more than saying it under my own name, while still not being willing to bet my livelihood on it. If that’s cowardice, then I suspect it’s shared by a very large, very quiet number of people who hold perfectly mainstream opinions and have simply done the same calculations that I have. That, in itself, might be the more troubling finding than anything else in this piece.

Fear arrives before the crackdown

This is the part I think gets missed in the security debate. We talk about authoritarianism as something that happens to you: a knock on the door, a lost job, a police caution for a tweet. But before any of that, there’s the version that happens inside your own head. You draft the post and delete it. You bite your tongue at the dinner table. You calculate what a client, a neighbour, or a local WhatsApp group might do with an honest opinion, and you decide it isn’t worth finding out.

That calculation isn’t paranoid. The variables feeding it are laid out in article after article in the Daily Sceptic. Prevent’s own material cites “cultural nationalism”, defined as the belief that Western culture is under threat from mass migration and a lack of integration by specific ethnic and cultural groups, as a sub-category of extreme Right-wing ideology. Two-tier policing is underpinned by the College of Policing and National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) Anti-Racism Commitment, which states that policing should not be “colour blind”, a principle many officers and members of the public have read as licence to treat people differently according to race. It is perhaps no coincidence that public trust in these institutions has been falling sharply. Gallup found that Britons’ confidence in the courts dropped 12 points in a single year to 57%, while confidence in local police fell 11 points to 64%, the largest year-on-year declines on record for either measure. When the referee looks like it’s picking sides, people stop trusting the game.

Campaigners have logged tens of thousands of ‘non-crime hate incidents’ a year, the great majority of them originating from something someone posted online. And after events like the Southport riots, an entire category of people were branded ‘far-Right thugs’ as a matter of editorial habit. None of this needs to end in a prosecution for it to work. Its function is to make you flinch before you speak, not after. And it’s working: a YouGov poll found that 57% of Britons admit to sometimes holding back their views for fear of a negative reaction, and research published earlier this year found the same pattern setting in even among teenagers, with around one in five saying they hide their political opinions at school to avoid being ‘cancelled’. Self-censorship of this kind isn’t a fringe habit. It’s now closer to a majority experience.

Nothing dramatic has happened to me. Nobody has knocked on my door. I have not been arrested, cautioned or sacked. I have simply chosen, before any of that could happen, to leave my name off this piece. That is precisely the point. Fear doesn’t need to become reality to change behaviour. The anticipation of it is enough.

That’s the self-censorship no one puts a number on, and I think it’s doing more to shrink public debate than any single policy or piece of legislation. Its success isn’t measured by how many people it punishes, but by how many quietly change their behaviour hoping never to be punished at all.

What the Free Speech Union can’t do

I say this as a member and supporter, not a critic: the Free Speech Union does something genuinely valuable. It represents people who get victimised for exercising their right to free speech, such as those facing job losses, disciplinary action or no-platforming for holding a lawful opinion. It lobbies against bad policy before it’s enacted or written into law. Both of those are real, useful functions.

But none of it reaches the moment someone decides to act with their fists rather than a complaint form. If an opinion gets you followed home, or attacked in the street, the Free Speech Union cannot stand between you and that. Nothing currently can, if you’re not a high profile figure with a protection detail. I don’t say that to be alarmist. I say it because it’s the honest answer to ‘What happens if this goes further?’, and I don’t think we’ve collectively worked out what we do about it.

It’s worth adding: this isn’t only a problem for people like me. Journalists and broadcasters who’ve been pushed out of mainstream outlets over their views have, in plenty of cases, faced worse, genuine, sustained threats, and some have built independent platforms only because staying inside the mainstream tent stopped being an option. I don’t want to suggest their situation is easy. But for many at least, it is a chosen fight, with an audience and often an income attached to it. Mine isn’t. I have a job, clients and neighbours, and none of them signed up for my opinions to become their problem.

So, anonymously

Which brings me back to where I started. I am not a public figure. I have no security detail, no platform to defend and no appetite for becoming a story.

What I have is an opinion that used to be unremarkable and now apparently isn’t, and a reasonable fear that saying so under my own name could cost me clients, friction with neighbours or worse.

So I’m saying it without my name attached, in a publication built specifically to defend my right to say it with my name attached.

If that strikes you as a contradiction, it should.

I think it’s the clearest evidence I can offer that something in this country’s relationship with free expression isn’t working: not a theory about it, but a person quietly acting on the fear of it, in real time, in this very article.

Tyler Durden Sat, 07/25/2026 - 07:00

It's giving Christmas in July — and your skin will want to unwrap this.