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“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
— C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics
Count de Monet: "It is said that the people are revolting."
King Louis XVI: "You said it! They stink on ice!"
— Mel Brooks, History of the World: Part I
One way or another, virtually unlimited and mostly unfettered immigration could prove the end of "the European project."
The European Union began humbly enough in 1952 as the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). Ostensibly envisioned by French foreign minister Robert Schuman as a means of tying France and Germany's economies so close together that war between them would become impossible. The Low Countries and Italy signed on, too.
But the ECSC fairly quickly evolved into the European Economic Community (EEC), then the European Community (EC), and, finally, the European Union. Each step of the way, the growing number of member states surrendered more autonomy to the Community/Union, headquartered in Brussels.
The long-term effort to create a pan-national superstate is commonly known as "the European project."
Did I really use "finally" a couple of sentences ago? Scratch that word — the whole point of this essay is that the E.U.'s evolution is far from over.
And Another Thing: Europe, as Brussels sees its long-term unification process, reminds me of the old joke about Brazil: It's the country of the future — and always will be.
Let's take a quick look at some recent news, and you'll see what I mean about the end of the European project.
We'll start in the United Kingdom, where we learned that you can take a country out of the E.U., but you can't take the E.U. out of the country.
Here's a protest scene from Britain — where the most popular baby boy's name since 2023 is Mohammed — at a migrant hostel after an "asylum seeker [was] charged with committing three sexual assaults — just eight days after arriving in UK on small boat."
The police have removed the so called “ anti racism “ lot that were calling everybody be far right and fascists.
— Adam Brooks AKA EssexPR 🇬🇧 (@EssexPR) July 13, 2025
The police have been very good, I must say. pic.twitter.com/HZTcJnrO13
Protests like that one are becoming more common in the U.K. as Tory and Labour governments alike allow in wave after wave of migrants.
Ireland deserves its own essay because it's otherwise impossible to fully relate the scope of their immigration troubles. But by Grok's estimate, the country of just seven million people has since 2015 absorbed somewhere between 114,000–172,800 migrants, just from the Middle East and North Africa.
Official figures — particularly involving religion and ethnicity — are impossible to come by because, I suspect, government officials don't want them known. But reports of theft, sex offenses, and robbery are all up significantly since 2015.
France’s immigration woes long predate the current crisis. They’re so well-established and familiar that I won’t bore you with yet another recitation. I'll just say that France invented the Muslim no-go zone, and also invented doing nothing about them.
Perhaps no country is more convulsed in recent weeks than Spain, where anti-migrant protests "rocked a small southeastern Spanish town after a brutal attack on a pensioner by North African youths sparked public outrage." Protestors converged on the town of Torre-Pacheco from all over Spain, leading to three nights of riots and dozens of arrests.
The press tends to dismiss the rioters as "far-right," but violence and increasing extremism are the natural results when a government refuses to protect its citizens from illegal migrants who can't and won't assimilate.
Then there's this shocker:
A 20-year-old Moroccan man set his 17-year-old girlfriend on fire, burning her alive inside a house in the La Isleta neighborhood of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. The victim, who had been living with him in a squatted property, suffered severe burns covering 95% of her body and remains in critical condition in the intensive care unit at Dr. Negrín University Hospital.
Less shocking is that the mainstream press seems happy to mostly ignore the story. I had to go to the U.K. tabloids and Europe's alt-media outlets to confirm the details.
Mustn't rile up the natives, you see.
"Looking at scenes in Spain, Ireland, France, Portugal and here," British journalist (and former pro-Brexit MEP) Alex Phillips posted to X this week, "it is clear we are now at hair's breadth away from mass rioting across Europe over migration."
"And what are the EU doing? Urgently addressing the issue? Facing down the ECHR? Closing borders?"
Of course not. In Brussels — and in Europe's semi-vestigial national capitals — it's business as usual.
On second thought, things are much worse than that. The E.U.'s anti-democratic mindset is now firmly established further down. Or maybe it was always there, and I just failed to notice. Whatever the case, current political events in Germany are illustrative of what I mean.
🇩🇪A group of Syrians "known to the police" beat a 28-year-old on the streets of Kulmbach, Germany.
— Remix News & Views (@RMXnews) July 16, 2025
They hit him with a belt, hurl cans at his head, and pepper spray him.
Local police claim "ordinary citizens have nothing to fear when walking around the city in the evening.” pic.twitter.com/XMbuPLIROH
"Known to the police" is one of those quietly damning phrases you read all too often in these reports.
Germany's major political parties steadfastly refuse to deal with the immigration crisis, leading to the rise of a new populist-right party, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). The country's traditional parties labored mightily to keep AfD out of the government, even after coming in second to the center-right Christian Democrats (CDU), and beating the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) with 152 seats in the last election.
But that wasn't enough.
My friend and Hot Air colleague Beege Welborn reported this week that the SPD is working hard "at cutting the legs out from under the ascendant AfD. Not through winning elections, but by having them banned as a legal party."
For its part, AfD seeks to reverse Germany's creeping Islamification that's already wreaking profound changes on the country — particularly for women. Remix News & Views provided an English-language summary of a recent EMMA magazine article on the subject:
"Women, girls, and families have begun retreating from public pools."
"Those who can afford it are shifting their swimming fun to private settings and installing mini-pools in their gardens (sales figures are skyrocketing)," writes German feminist publication EMMA Magazine.
The magazine notes that sexual assaults and harassment are done "predominantly by men with a migrant background."
"And once again, a piece of public space is being lost for women. Just as they can no longer take the tram in the evenings and have long since stopped partying freely in public or in bars for fear of having date rape drugs in their glasses," writes the magazine.
Did I say "creeping Islamification"? Maybe I should have gone with "galloping," instead.
Former German central banker Thilo Sarrazin warned 15 years ago that “Germany Is Abolishing Itself” (Deutschland schafft sich ab) in his controversial bestselling book. This week, he warned that the "demographic shift in Germany is accelerating faster than predicted."
“Back then, I predicted that within a few decades, Germans would become a minority in their own homeland,” Sarrazin told Czech news outlet Echo24. “But it will come much sooner.”
The reason is as simple as it is inexorable: demographics.
“While in the group of people over 65, 15 percent have a migration background, among 15-year-olds it is 45 percent, and among newborns it is over 50 percent,” Sarrazin continued. “Ethnic Germans account for only about 40 percent of births."
The Great Replacement has already come to Germany, and without massive deportations — particularly of younger migrants — the country will abolish itself.
But by all means, let's trample the will of German voters by sidelining or even banning AfD.
When Sarrazin published his book in 2010, he expected around 50,000-100,000 migrants annually. But starting with the 2015 immigration crisis, that number exploded to 500,000 each year.
"Things are sliding so far out of whack in the country that it soon could be irretrievable," Beege concluded in her Hot Air column.
"Germany needs a bloody popular revolution. And will get one, if this keeps up," Glenn Reynolds posted on Instapundit today.
I'm embarrassed to remind you that the United States played a shameful role in creating Europe's immigration crisis.
In early 2011, the Arab Spring came to Libya, and the Gaddafi regime responded with violent crackdowns on demonstrators. Without so much as consulting Congress as required under the War Powers Act, President Barack Obama launched his "lead from behind" air campaign against Gaddafi forces, alongside the U.K. and France.
Six months later, Libya was a failed state — it still is — and a conduit for "refugees" from all over northern Africa. The situation is so chaotic that nobody on either side of the Mediterranean can keep score, but the number of migrants to Europe who passed through (or came from) Libya is probably in the low hundreds of thousands.
But Hillary got her "We came, we saw, he died" laugh line out of this wholly unnecessary humanitarian disaster, so it's all good.
"We came, we saw, he died"
— In Context (@incontextmedia) October 20, 2022
Hillary #Clinton laughing about Muammar #Gaddafi's death, 11 years ago today. pic.twitter.com/MRDQn8b3if
What a ghoul.
And Another Thing: Gaddafi, not wanting to get pulled out of a spider-hole like Saddam Hussein, voluntarily surrendered his nuclear weapons program in 2004 — which turned out to be surprisingly advanced — in exchange for relaxed sanctions and diplomatic recognition. If you want to know why North Korea and Iran refuse to make a similar deal, look no further than "We came, we saw, he died."
The Syrian civil war marked the start of annus horribilis after annus horribilis. The Obama administration’s feckless “red line” diplomacy and Clinton’s adventurism — plus tacitly turning the place over to the Russians — helped turn yet another country into a refugee generator. Germany, under Chancellor Angela Merkel, opened its doors to virtually unlimited numbers of migrants.
One in 20 Syrians now lives not in Syria, but in Germany.
Brussels is worse than indifferent. Far removed from the concerns of its subjects — and convinced of its moral superiority — Brussels dismisses as far-right bigotry any pushback against mass migration, Islamic extremism, or even just migrant crime. C.S. Lewis's omnipotent busybodies know best, and they wield the levers of power in Brussels, London, Berlin, and Paris. The wants and needs of the people be damned, they will not let go nor change course.
Mel Brooks's peasants are revolting because their masters give them no other outlet. Sporadic protests like we've seen in recent weeks might either escalate into a political revolution like the one that tore down the Iron Curtain, or "lie back and think of England" that is no more.
Whether Europe rediscovers its national identities or loses them entirely, the project is finished.
Last Thursday: How the Trump Team Lost the Epstein Narrative
