Meanwhile, Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum said she also instructed the economy minister to kick off a response plan that includes retaliatory tariffs against the levies. But since Trump’s orders also included retaliation clauses that would increase US tariffs if the countries respond in kind, that means we are now locked in tit-for-tat escalating prisoner's dilemma, one where it progressively gets worse before it gets much worse. The new measures will be on top of existing trade levies on those countries.

The ease with which President Trump has reversed his predecessors’ energy agenda has stunned not only Democrats but also the global environmental establishment. Out with net zero, incentives for wind and solar, and offshore wind on federal lands. In with oil and natural gas production, domestic manufacturing, and the choice of old cars or Teslas, as well as gas or electric cookers.

The big question is whether the UK and Europe will be able to change their strict net zero laws and follow suit. Staying on the same path will sow social unrest as European GDP growth slows, unemployment rises, and differences in standards of living between America and Europe grow.

American states are still free to impose their own restrictions on energy production, and many will continue to do so. But states that want to produce energy can now, in President Trump’s inimitable words, “drill, baby, drill,” and access “that liquid gold under our feet”. The direct consequences will be to lower the costs of American electricity and make it easier to attract energy-intensive manufacturing.

It should be said that the firewall idea is, for Germany, understandable. In 1933, Zentrum, the conservative Catholic party, backed the Nazis’ Enabling Act in the Reichstag. This gave Hitler the parliamentary “supermajority” he needed to rule as a dictator. There were no further elections. The rest is history, of the darkest possible kind. No wonder the Germans ponder this carefully.

France is now all but ungovernable because the legitimate, but high-handed President Macron lost to the extremes the electoral mandate which he had unwisely called a special election to renew.

In Britain, we have paid a high price for the informal equivalent of the firewall. Whenever mainstream parties agree on a major issue, they in effect conspire against the public. Democracy suffers because there is inadequate scrutiny. Public disillusionment ensues. It is also not a coincidence that the Civil Service, public bodies and big corporations used the democratic vacuum to create their own culture of “diversity, equity and inclusion” which means, in practice, uniformity, unfairness and cancellation.

Nevertheless, the overall effect of the firewall is to diminish freedom and therefore democracy. It also has another effect which is too little considered. It causes so much anger that the language surrounding many sensitive subjects is coarsened. If woke’s suppression of normal opinion in the United States, for example, had not become so demented and so often enforced by oppressive laws, would Donald Trump have won his second term?

In recent weeks, that is precisely what we have seen. Jewish women, who had been snatched in their pyjamas amid the corpses of their friends, were dressed up in faux uniforms and Palestine bracelets then presented with “goodie bags” containing photographs of their captivity. The grotesque public signing ceremonies. The ostentatious rubber stamps. The Red Cross officials shamefully playing along against a backdrop of jihadi propaganda. Al Jazeera – which is regulated by Ofcom – describing the spectacle as “a moment of pride, a moment of grace”. It was hard to say which was worse, the cruelty or the creativity.

Where were our anti-racists? Where the MeToo feminists? Where the international law experts? According to Article Three of the Geneva Convention, prisoners of war are “entitled in all circumstances to respect for their persons and their honour”. These were not even prisoners of war. Surely the United Nations should have raised some objection? Surely the Red Cross could have put its foot down? In this age of micro-aggressions, the wholesale debasement of Jews is, as Howard Jacobson put it, “not small enough to be a worry”.

BBC reported: “A non-binding motion calling for tougher border and asylum rules passed with support from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). During the stormy session, politicians of various parties hurled criticism and blame at each other. Conservative CDU leader Friedrich Merz, who tabled the plans, defended his actions as ‘necessary’. But Chancellor Olaf Scholz slammed the move as an “unforgivable mistake”.

Merz now plans to propose actual legislation on Friday – again with possible AfD backing – aimed at curbing immigration numbers and family reunion rights. Any change in policy won’t be implemented before February’s vote. CDU’s leader Merz, in full campaign mode, told the Bundestag that policies aren´t wrong just because the ‘wrong people back it.’

So, Merz wants us to believe that ‘bad people’ are voting for common-sense immigration policies, while the ‘good people’ are voting for suicidal policies promoting the rape and murder of Germans? At least Merz addresses these supposedly ‘good people’: “’How many more children have to become victims of such acts of violence before you also believe there is a threat to public safety and order?’ he asked.”

But it seems now that Germany’s ‘firewall’ against the so-called ‘far-Right’ is crumbling, after the frontrunner to win next month’s election said he could work with the AfD to ‘tighten immigration laws’. Failing outgoing Chancellor Olaf Scholz and his liberal-leftist Social Democratic party (SPD) are freaking out, saying that passing legislation with AfD support would be the end of the ‘firewall’.

Matthias Miersch, SPD general-secretary, told Spiegel magazine: ‘This would mark the beginning of a black-blue [CDU-AFD] collaboration, of which we have always warned against’. Alice Weidel, the AfD co-leader, said: ‘The firewall has fallen! The CDU and CSU [the CDU’s Bavarian sister party] have accepted my offer to vote together with the AfD in the Bundestag on the crucial issue of migration. This is good news for our country!’

In the wake of endless knife attacks by illegal migrants, the CDU leader presented a five-point plan to tighten immigration laws, including an entry ban for all illegals, to be turned away at the border.

Under the guise of helping California teens with self-esteem and emotions, the new program, known as “Soluna,” features blatantly pagan and occult themes. From magicians and Tarot cards to channeling “that high priestess” and touting lesbian characters, the controversial topics are ubiquitous.

One lesson is called “Tarot and Tidings: a holiday spread to protect your peace.” “This season, the cards are stacked in your favor,” reads the text. “This holiday tarot spread holds the secret to boundary-setting magic — meaning less chaos and more clarity.” The Bible refers to such practices as an “abomination.”

Critics warn that the values and ideas promoted with the program run contrary to the faith traditions of many parents and are highly inappropriate at best. Among those sounding the alarm is Brenda Lebsack, a veteran California educator and school board member in the state who has become a leading voice exposing the attacks on children. “The Mental Health Crisis Hotlines, both National and in the state of California, are being used as indoctrination tools,” she told The Newman Report. “When I went through these lessons it is obvious there is another agenda they are trying to accomplish, which is definitely contrary to Judeo-Christian Values.”

Put simply: modern politics has an “evil” problem. When everything must have a practical and human solution, nothing can be identified in terms of any form of cosmic morality or existential struggle. Hence, even when confronted with monstrosities like those in Southport, “rational” justifications are sought: poverty, mental health, marginalisation, online harms, etc.

What if there are sometimes no explanations – what if the horrors that sporadically assault our society are outpourings of evil? Of something which defies societal, “push and pull” factors, the analysis of sociologists or think tanks or policy wonks. What if there is, in fact, something identifiably “evil”, which no number of bans or rushed-through laws can cure?

Rudakubana loathed women and girls, but was also fascinated with ethnic cleansing, telling classmates that Britain needed a “white genocide”. He carefully researched how to kill as many people as possible and seems to have revelled in blood-lust of all kinds; which may explain why he slipped through Prevent’s narrow classifications. In short, this was not an individual who could be categorised using a social worker’s check-list. Sometimes we have to speak in terms of good and evil, and react accordingly.

Now, nearly nine years on, it is important that we remind the public of what the EU is.

The EU is an authoritarian regime, dominated by globalist elites who are rooted not in their own national identity, but rather in one which wishes to erode the very concept of the nation state. They would have nations move aside in favour of an overriding EU superpower which could control every aspect of our lives, largely via diktats issued by unelected EU Commissioners.

We remember of course how Ireland along with other member states dared to vote against the Lisbon treaty. This democratic decision by the people of that country was unacceptable to the EU, so they had to vote again until they provided the ‘right’ answer.

And so it was with Brexit. The EU and their self-appointed elite, which is largely made up of sneering metropolitan middle class liberals, were aghast that the ‘commoners’ would dare to rebel against their instructions. The establishment revolted because the people had first revolted against it.

Instead of considering why 17.5 million people had rejected the continued surrender of UK sovereignty to an EU superpower, the elitist establishment decided they had to increase their noisy demonisation of anyone who did not subscribe to their world view – not realising it was this sneering attitude, the notion that a self-appointed elite will tell the ‘little people’ how to think, that drove so many people to vote for Brexit in the first place. The United Kingdom voted to leave the EU. That must not only be respected, but fully delivered for the entire country.

“I disagree completely with Elon Musk and what he is doing,” Scholz told reporters, in English, on the sidelines of a campaign event in Berlin on Tuesday evening. “We are very happy that the United States liberated our country and helped us to become a democracy again,” he added. “And this is why I am so angry about Elon Musk intervening for the far right and Elon Musk also not acting adequately to this killing of so many Jews and other people in Europe done by Germans in the past. This is the historic responsibility we will continue to take in the future as well. And this is really disgusting, and it is not good for the democratic development in the European Union,” the head of the Social Democrats concluded.