This document is part of an archive of postings by John Ray on Dissecting Leftism, a blog hosted by Blogspot who are in turn owned by Google. The index to the archive is available here or here. Indexes to my other blogs can be located here or here. Archives do accompany my original postings but, given the animus towards conservative writing on Google and other internet institutions, their permanence is uncertain. These alternative archives help ensure a more permanent record of what I have written.
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27 October, 2024
Iran couldn't prevent Israeli strike even though they knew it was coming
Strike showed Iranians that they were defenceless
Shortly before 2am on Saturday in Israel, airmen and women wearing bomber jackets bearing the Star of David climbed into the cockpits of about 100 jet fighters, spy planes and refuelling aircraft at an Israeli military base. They were following commands from an underground bunker known as the pit.
Israel’s wartime leaders, who were gathered in the bowels of the military headquarters in Tel Aviv, had just given the green light for the largest attack against Iran in Israel’s history — and its most politically perilous. They called the operation “Days of Repentance”. The assault was calibrated to punish Iran for an attack on Israel but aimed to avoid setting off a full-scale war between the two foes involving American forces and other countries in the region. The attack steered clear of the oil and nuclear facilities that Iran had warned would prompt a retaliation, and appeared to heed the caution urged by US officials.
The attack, however, marked a dangerous new phase of confrontation between Israel and Iran, which began striking each other directly earlier this year. It left Iran even more exposed to further air attacks, with Israel destroying several of the country’s Russian-made S-300 batteries, according to an Israeli official.
“The message is that we don’t want an escalation but if Iran decides to escalate and attack Israel again, this means that we have increased our range of freedom of movement in the Iranian skies,” an Israeli official said.
For weeks, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had signalled that Israel would hit back over Iran’s ballistic-missile assault on Israeli territory on October 1. Pulling it off required weeks of planning and delicate diplomacy.
Iran “knew that Israel was coming, and still they couldn’t prevent anything,” said Assaf Orion, a retired Israeli brigadier general.
The US — sensing an opening after Israel killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar — has been pushing for a ceasefire in Gaza. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Israel and other Middle East capitals this week in an effort to reach a deal that has eluded negotiators for months. The calibrated nature of the attack appeared to leave room for those talks to continue, with negotiators set to meet in the Qatari capital Doha on Sunday.
Videos carried by Iranian media on Saturday (October 26) showed an air defense system continuously firing at apparently incoming projectiles over central Tehran, as Israel's military said it launched three waves of strikes on military sites in Iran.
But even as Israel worked diplomatic channels that could end the war in Gaza and cool tensions with Tehran, Israeli officials were completing details of the retaliatory attack.
On Friday evening, as the sun set marking the start of Shabbat, the Jewish day of rest, Israel’s cabinet in a phone conversation led by Netanyahu agreed to move ahead with an attack that night, according to an Israeli official.
Hours before the attack began, Israel alerted the U.S. and several Arab-world and European capitals about the nature and scope of the attack, according to people familiar with the matter. Officials in some of those countries then alerted Iran.
Israel’s prime minister’s office later said the idea that it informed Iran about the nature or timing of the attack was “false and absurd.” When they finally began, the Israeli strikes unfurled in waves. The attack involved Israel’s most-advanced aerial weapon, F-35 jet fighters, adept at evading radar, people familiar with the mission said.
As the jet fighters were airborne, Israeli officials, conscious that their U.S. counterparts were frustrated that Israel hadn’t forewarned last month that it would kill Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah, also made a point of actively briefing their U.S. counterparts about their attack.
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant called his U.S. counterpart, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who assured him of America’s readiness to defend Israel against backlash from Iran and aligned militant groups.
The first crop of jet fighters destroyed air-defence batteries in Syria and Iraq, clearing the flight path for the second and third sorties to funnel through to Iran.
Their exact route, which hasn’t been shared by Israel, appeared to dodge airspace in Jordan after the Arab nation said it wouldn’t be part of an attack on Iran. Most of the attacks were launched from outside Iranian airspace, said Amir Aviv, a former senior Israeli military official who is often briefed by the defence establishment. Iran said Israeli planes attacked from within Iraqi airspace, around 70 miles from its border.
At around 3.30am in Israel, the country’s military launched the second of at least three waves of attacks, according to people familiar with the matter.
Israel’s strikes targeted Iranian facilities involved in the production of missiles like the cruise and ballistic missiles that targeted Israel twice this year.
One of Israel’s hits was at the sprawling Parchin military site, where Iran once worked on nuclear weapons capabilities, according to the U.N. atomic agency. Four buildings were hit there, including three solid-propellant facilities for missiles, said Fabian Hinz, research fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies focused on Iran’s missile program.
Just before sunrise, Israel’s military said its attack and retaliation were complete. The planes returned at the end of the four-hour assault with no losses.
Soon after, Iranian officials began privately telling Arab nations that the attack hit sites with great accuracy. In public, the regime said it led to “limited damage” and that Iran reserved the right to carry out a response at a time of its choosing. Four Iranian soldiers were killed in the attacks, Iran said.
Israeli officials said they hope that the attack would end a tit-for-tat exchange of fire with Iran and Israel’s military could now focus on its war goals fighting Hamas in Gaza and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Iranian allies.
Orion, the retired brigadier general, said the attack was calibrated but doesn’t mean the end of tensions with Iran. “It allows both sides to finish for now until the U.S. elections, and then see where it goes,” he added.
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Why does the ‘Right Side of History’ always get it so wrong?
Comment from Nicholas Jensen in Australia
Several months ago, after a terse exchange of views at a local pub, I was shocked to learn I’d landed on the Wrong Side of History. “Christ,” I thought. “Not again.” Quite how I ended up there on this occasion – and I’ll come to this soon – remains something of a mystery, though it’s clear polite society won’t be welcoming me back anytime soon.
For those unfamiliar with the expression, the essential thing to know about the Right Side of History is that it is the good side of history, the side of the gods. As for everyone else – you know who you are, you know what you’ve done. You’re not just a lost cause but you’re a lousy person, hopelessly out of step with the rest of humanity.
The other thing to know about the Right Side of History is you can’t dodge it. Occasionally, this can be awkward because some of its most ardent advocates can be very nice, well-meaning people – like teal voters without a cause, though much more authoritarian by nature.
The heavy-duty warriors tend to be familiar characters, easy to spot. In politics, the Obamas and Clintons stand unique among the Right Side of History warriors. “My fellow Americans, I am confident we will succeed in this mission because we are on the right side of history,” was a stock-standard Barack Obama line wheeled out on more than a dozen occasions in his big presidential speeches.
Over on planet celebrity, Taylor Swift recently confessed that she “needed to be on the right side of history” when it came to engaging in politics, while our very own Senator Fatima Payman produced a classic of the genre when she wrote earlier this year of the Middle East: “Let historians write of us that we were on the right side of history, that we boldly reinforced international law, and that we were a shining beacon and voice for freedom.”
It’s worth remembering that we survived a near-lethal overdose of the Right Side of History not so long ago, when public debate of the voice descended into an absurd Manichean struggle between saints and sinners, heroes and villains. As it happens, that little pub skirmish I mentioned earlier occurred when I was asked by a group of mates how I’d voted at the referendum. When the reply came “No”, off to Siberia I trod. (Yes, millennial No voters do exist, in case you’re wondering.)
One obvious trap with this kind of thinking is the belief that the Right Side of History is unique to the puritans of our own age. Every depraved despot and potentate worth their salt, at one time or other, has claimed some guiding force, some special insight into an imagined future that seeks to vindicate their odious deeds. In that sense, the Right Side of History is the perfect weapon, perhaps the most dangerous of all.
Still, there’s no getting around one big problem: history doesn’t work this way and, what’s more, it never has. The Right Side of History presupposes a direction, a teleology, in which history moves inexorably towards an endpoint, a synthesis, from which it can reset and go again. Next to Hegel, Marx and the Whig conception of history, modernity is strewn with the corpses of a thousand dead-end theories on the causes of development and progress. In the end, chance, randomness and indeterminacy seem the more likely candidates.
In these febrile times, where the weaponisation of the past and the debasement of language seems virtually universal, it’s curious to observe just how casually the Right Side of History has morphed into a progressive article of faith, a kind of gibbering battle cry for the self-righteous and the condescending. Still, its expression contains a stark warning, worthy of our attention – namely, that it is better to stick to the sceptical side of history than cling to the wisdom of false prophets.
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24 October, 2024
Nearly everything you assume about colonialism and slavery is wrong
Nigel Biggar’s book, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning(2021) is a much needed corrective to the lies and misinformation being propagated in schools all over the world. For instance, after nearly 150 years of transporting slaves across the Atlantic Ocean, the British abolished the slave trade and spent the subsequent 150 years deploying the Royal Navy to stop the slave trade across the world. Not only was this the first time a major superpower abolished the ancient practice of slavery, but it was also the first instance of an empire suppressing it beyond its borders.
Up to 36 ships from the Royal Navy, over 13 per cent of the Empire’s total manpower, were stationed off the Coast of Africa, policing the Atlantic Ocean until the late 1800s. Britain was able to pressure countries like Brazil into passing legislation which outlawed the slave trade. Before his death in 1865, the twice-Prime Minister Lord Palmerston wrote that ‘the achievement which I look back on with the greatest and purest pleasure was forcing the Brazilians to give up their slave trade’. Ultimately, 2,000 British Sailors gave their life to stop the international slave trade.
But what most people have never been taught though, is that the anti-slavery movement actually began much earlier than 1833. In fact, in 1791, about 30 per cent of the adult male population of Britain signed anti-slavery petitions. Few people realise today that the largest department of the British Empire’s Foreign Office for two decades was the Slave Trade Department, which was set up to suppress slavery worldwide.
It is also a little-known fact today, that according to the historian David Eltis, it cost the British Empire more money to end the slave trade than it received in profits from it. It cost taxpayers nearly 2 billion pounds every year for half a century. For context, the British today spends 2 per cent of their GDP on national defence. In comparison, the British Empire nearly 2 per cent of its GDP every year for 50 years to end the slave trade. In fact, the British taxpayer only finished paying off the debt of ending slavery in 2015.
However, despite these astonishing facts about the British Empire, recent You Gov polling found that 60 per cent of Britons who were proud of the British Empire in 2014, had drastically halved to almost 30 per cent by 2020. Other polling has also shown that only one in five young people view Winston Churchill favourably.
Today, colonialism is routinely called essentially evil, genocidal, greedy, and racist. These attitudes have generated a wave of riots tearing down statues and rejecting anything that has been a product of European colonialism.
So how did attitudes about the British Empire change so quickly? Is the legacy of the British Empire good or bad? Was it built on slavery or cooperation? Did it expand through violence or trade? And was the British Empire essentially racist?
These are the questions at the heart of Cambridge academic Nigel Biggar’s new book, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, and what follows is some his most important ideas which very people have been taught today.
Chapter 1: The Origins of the British Empire
Before asking whether the British Empire was evil, we first need to consider how a small European island at its peak controlled nearly a quarter of the world’s land mass.
So why did England choose to expand? Well, like many complex ideas, there was no single motivation that drove the British Empire. For example, the British Empire began expanding when the Kingdom of Wessex sought to secure its borders in response to Danish and Welsh invasions. Even the conquest of the North America was driven by the threat of Catholic Spain, which was committed to overthrowing protestant Europe.
Additionally, British privateers established colonial ports at key strategic locations in Africa and America in response to Spanish competition. For many young British officers of the East Indian trading company, they were driven by the intention to trade and the excitement of adventure, like John Malcolm, who joined the EIC because his father had gone bankrupt. Malcolm ended up learning and documenting the Persian language and history, eventually became the governor of Bombay. The governor, like many others in the British Empire, was motivated to escape poverty and earn a living.
In fact, British colonialism began and was supported by mutual cooperation with the local population. For example, the EIC secured trading ports in India, and after hiring and training Indian troops, developed small colonies. Many Indian rulers actually paid the British military to protect their kingdoms against other native rulers, who began giving land to the British as payment. As Tirthankar Roy, one of the leading Indian historians of the 21st Century states:
Turning the emergence of the empire into a battle between good and evil creates melodrama; it invites the reader to take sides in a fake holy war. But if good soap opera, it is bad history. The empire was not an invasion. Many Indians, because they did not trust other Indians, wanted the British to secure power. They preferred British rule over indigenous alternatives and helped the Company form a state. The empire emerged mainly from alliances. It emerged from lands ‘ceded’ to the Company by Indian friends, rather than lands it ‘conquered’. The Company came to rule India because many Indians wanted it to.
Interestingly, it was the British who were keener in documenting the culture and languages of Persian, Hindu, and Bengali people, than the locals. For example, the EIC officer Warren Hastings pioneered the revival of Indian Sanskrit.
Money and knowledge were not the only motivation for colonies, it was also agreed by officers like John Malcolm and James Abbott, that to leave India would be dangerous because it would cause a power struggle between warring states. So, if the British Empire expanded through cooperation with local Indian rulers, what about Africa? Again, the British were motivated not just by one goal, but many.
First, Britain wanted to stop the spread of Militant Islam to protect trade with Uganda and Nyasaland.
Second, Britain wanted to end inter-tribal warfare between kingdoms like the Zulu and Ndebele, which was a cause of human misery, slave trafficking, and trade disruptions.
Third, as Lord Salisbury argued in the 1890 Anglo-German Agreement Bill, acquisition of land would stop the escalation of European nations going to war over local conflicts.
Fourth, in places like Egypt, Britain were duty bound to protect their investments in the Egyptian government which was on the verge of bankruptcy. London’s aims in Cairo were not to directly govern, but to enact fiscal reform to the benefit of both countries which was the view of the British comptroller general in Egypt, Lord Cromer. In fact, the colonial office did not want to directly govern Egypt because of the financial responsibility and burden of administration, the exact reason it declined the offer of exclusive control over Gladstone by the Ottoman Sultan.
Fifth, as early as Sir Thomas Munro, the governor of Madras from 1819-27, Britain saw its role in many of its colonies as the precursor to self-government. This reality was made pertinent after the American war of Independence, which saw Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa granted the status of self-governing dominions.
As Biggar points out, there was no single ‘set of motives that drove the British Empire’. It was a collection of reasons which differed between ‘trader, migrant, soldier, missionary, entrepreneur, financier, government official, and statesmen’. These ranged from:
‘The aversion to poverty and persecution, the yearning for a better life, the desire to make one’s way in the world, the duty to satisfy shareholders, the lure of adventure, cultural curiosity, the need to make peace and keep it, the concomitant need to maintain martial prestige, the imperative of gaining military or political advantage over enemies and rivals, and the vocation to lift oppression and establish stable self-government.’
But what about slavery? Wasn’t the British motivated by the benefits of buying, working, and selling slaves?
Chapter 2: The British Empire and Slavery
Before we unpack colonial slavery, we first have to understand its history. Slavery was not unique to the British Empire; rather it is both ancient and universal.
In Asia, for instance, slavery could be found as early as 7th Century AD in China. In North and South America, the Comanche, Aztecs, and Incas all ‘ran a slave economy from the 18th Century. Since Muhammad, the Islamic world has utilised slavery, even receiving white European slaves from Viking traders in the 8th and 9th Centuries.
It is a little-known fact today, but the word slave actually comes from the European group of people ‘Slav’. One historian estimates over 1.25 million Europeans were enslaved in the North African trade before the end of the 18th Century. By comparison, it is estimated that while Europeans transported 11 million slaves from Africa, another 17 million were shipped by the Islamic slave trade. Similarly, African tribes have been enslaving each other for centuries. Many of these slaves was used as human sacrifices. Biggar quotes one report from 1797 which recorded between 1400-1500 people being sacrificed at a royal funeral in Asante Africa.
The British were not even the first or largest slave trader in Africa. The Portuguese Empire was the first European nation to seek slaves from West Africa from 1440. By 1866, the Portuguese had almost shipped 5.9 million slaves, which is 46.7 per cent of the total African slave trade by Europeans, compared to the 26.1 per cent of the British.
So why does the criticism for slavery often rest on Britain, if it was part such an ancient and universal practice? One of the critics to popularise British Slavery in particular was the historian Eric Williams, in his seminal work Capitalism and Slavery (1944), where he argued slavery made ‘an enormous contribution to Britain’s industrial development’.
Unfortunately for Williams, his thesis has since been widely discredited by academics familiar with British Economic history. In the 1960s, Roger Anstey calculated the profits of slavery to be far below the revenue needed to finance the Industrial Revolution. This view was confirmed by David Robertson Richardson who estimated the total profits of the slave trade to be around 1 per cent of Britain’s total domestic investment around 1790. More recently, David Brion Davis, an expert in 20th Century slavery pronounced the death of William’s thesis, declaring that it ‘has now been wholly discredited by other scholars’.
Chapter 3: An Empire of Stolen Land?
What about countries like Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, where native tribes did not always negotiate formal treaties with the British government?
In 1768, Captain Cook was instructed that he was to ‘endeavour by all proper means to cultivate a friendship and alliance with [the native peoples]’ and ‘with [their] consent to take possession of convenient situations in the country in the name of the King of Great Britain’.
So why didn’t the British build an alliance like it did with local groups in India?
First, most of the local tribal groups had shifting borders due to conflict and migration. The Canadian historian Tom Flanagan argues, it is hard to do justice:
‘…to the war of extermination waged by the Iroquois against the Huron, or to the ferocious struggles between the Cree and the Blackfoot over access to the buffalo herds. The historical record clearly shows that, while aboriginal peoples exercised a kind of collective control over territories, the boundaries were neither long-lasting nor well defined and communities must have been repeatedly formed, dissolved, and reconstituted with different identities.’
In America, the Comanches launched ‘an explosive expansion’, which obliterated ‘the Apache civilisation from the Great Plains’ and carved out ‘a vast territory’. From 1750 to 1850 their empire dominated the region, building ‘the largest slave economy in the colonial Southwest’.
In Australia, the historian Geoffrey Blainey points out the rate of violent deaths in some areas between Aboriginal tribal groups was greater than the rate of violent deaths in almost every European country during the second world war. There are several documented accounts of early Aboriginal tribes wiping out other tribes in what is now known as northern Victoria.
In New Zealand, Polynesian explorers began what has been called ‘the Maori colonial era’, which by the 15th Century gave rise to inter-tribal warfare, enslavement, generational vendettas, and sometimes cannibalism. As Biggar points out, ‘The bloodshed ended thanks in part to the influence of Christianity, which forbade cannibalism and slavery, and whose influence was spread by Maori evangelists, many of them former slaves.’ According to a leading New Zealand historian:
‘By 1850 the balance sheet of benefits and disadvantages of British administration might well have appeared favourable to many Maori. There appeared to be a place for Maori people in a variety of colonial activities. They profited from the increased pace of development as settlement expanded. Through government employment on road and other public works, as well as through private contracts, Maori earned considerable amounts in cash. The new authority in the land also gradually overcame some of the old tribal antagonisms and made it possible for tribes to mix and communicate more freely. Under [Governor George] Grey’s administration, some of the long-promised welfare benefits were provided: hospitals were opened and the Education Ordinance provided for Maori education.’
Nevertheless, there were many instances of hostile conflict between natives and settlers, which were often one-sided, brutal and devastating for the local populations. Unfortunately, most of it happened outside of government control, which could not stop the individual expansion of enterprise. As Biggar writes:
‘Sometimes native peoples lost territory to colonists because the latter mistook land that was unoccupied or uncultivated for land that was unowned. Sometimes the natives lost it because they were conquered by ungoverned settlers in war that easily flared up on lawless frontiers, where fear was abundant and trust rare. However, where British imperial authorities succeeded in asserting their ‘sovereignty’ over territory, native title to land was recognised and its transfer to settlers regulated – in principle and sometimes in practice – for the sake of justice and of peace.’
Chapter 4: Conclusion
So why are these reasonable and balanced accounts of the British Empire covered up and rarely discussed? As Biggar points out, ‘The controversy over empire is not really a controversy about history at all. It is about the present, not the past.’
Some of the most important debates in Australia today, in changing the Constitution to have an enshrined Voice to Parliament for Aboriginal people, and the international push for reparations, are justified by a one-sided view of colonial history.
The anger towards the British Empire is so strong that Biggar’s book was pulled by Bloomsbury publishing right before its release because ‘public feeling’ was ‘not currently favourable’. The book had already gone through rigorous peer review from some of the world’s most prominent academics on the subject. Biggar’s book was not cancelled by its publishers for a lack of research, but rather a fear of backlash from anti-colonial activists.
Today, academic papers like From Colonisation to the Holocaust, The Erotics of Resistance, and Colonisations impact on climate change and the queer community pass as serious research. The truth is, all of the most prosperous nations in the world are heirs of the British Empire, its institutions, laws, customs, and language.
If anyone wants to understand where we are today, and where are going, we must have a better and more balanced understanding of our history, which includes the good, the bad, and everything in between.
Without a proper appreciation for history, we may never improve on the prosperity and peace laid down by the foundations of the British Empire.
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23 October, 2024
Biden lets his inner Fascist show
President Joe Biden sparked fury Tuesday night by suggesting Donald Trump should be in jail just 14 days out from the presidential election.
'We gotta lock him up', the 81-year-old president said at event in New Hampshire.
Biden appeared to realize what he said, and tried to correct himself by saying 'we need to politically lock him up. Lock him out. That's what we have to do.'
It comes after Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris takes care to try to shut down 'lock him up' chants that have popped up at her campaign rallies.
She routinely says to leave the matter up to the courts.
The chants clash with her campaign based in part on preserving democracy and long and order from what she calls the Trump threat – and is similar to the 'lock her up' chants at Trump's 2016 rallies that Democrats continue to call out.
Trump has long centered his own campaign around contesting the criminal cases against him, and accuses rivals of practicing 'lawfare' against him.
He faces sentencing in September after his conviction on 34 counts of falsifying business records, which could technically land him in jail, although many experts say the first-time white collar offender is likely to avoid doing jail time.
His son, Donald Trump Jr., teed off on Biden's comments.
'They're not even hiding it. The lawfare against my dad was always about election interference!' he posted on X.
Trump's own campaign rhetoric has included multiple threats to go after people he calls the 'enemy from within,' including Senate candidate Adam Schiff.
He experienced a poll and campaign donation bump during his New York hush money trial, and has railed against 'deranged' special counsel Jack Smith bringing charges against him related to his January 6 election overturn effort.
Biden, who only occasionally jumps on the campaign trail after committing a string of gaffes, made the comment after saying Trump was talking about abolishing the Education Department.
'This is a guy who also wants to replace every civil servant. Every single one. Things he has a right under the Supreme Court ruling on immunity to be able to if need be ... to actually eliminate, physically eliminate, shoot, kill someone he believes to be a threat to him. I know this sounds bizarre. [If]I said this five years ago you'd lock me up - you gotta lock him up,' he said.
'Politically lock him up,' he added.
Although Trump has repeatedly railed against his political opponents and threatened to use the machinery to government to go after them, he hasn't spoken about being able to kill people who are a threat to him.
He continues to try to turn the Democrats' own rhetoric against them.
'If we lose this election, we may not have a country anymore,' he said at his Doral golf club on Monday. 'They say we may never have an election again in this country. This is where we’re going,' he said.
Democrats have raised increasing concern about whether Trump will once again declare victory and refuse to accept the results of the election, as he did in 2020.
He was coy once again when asked at a suburban area McDonald's drive-thru Saturday whether he would accept the election results no matter the outcome.
'Yeah, sure, if it’s a fair election,' Trump said. 'I would always accept it. It's got to be a fair election,' he said.
He continue to call for a win that is 'too big to rid' – implying his rivals will cheat without offering evidence.
'We gotta lock Joe up,' a former Biden aide quipped to Axios, noting that the statement was politically unhelpful.
Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt called on the Harris campaign to condemn Biden's 'disgraceful' remark.
'Joe Biden just admitted the truth: he and Kamala’s plan all along has been to politically persecute their opponent President Trump because they can’t beat him fair and square. The Harris-Biden Admin is the real threat to democracy,' she said.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13989643/Joe-biden-kamala-harris-donald-trump-lock-up.html
********************************************************Tulsi Gabbard announces she is joining the Republican Party and stuns Trump
Former Hawaii Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard announced she is joining the Republican party Tuesday night.
Taking the stage before thousands in Greensboro, North Carolina, Gabbard cemented her conversion from Democrat to Republican.
'It is because of my love for our country and specifically because of the leadership that President Trump has brought to transform the Republican Party that I'm proud to stand here with you today and announce that I'm joining the Republican Party,' she proudly declared.
She continued: 'I'm joining the party of the people, the party of equality, the party that was founded to fight against and end slavery in this country.'
Gabbard said that the GOP and Trump were 'the party of common sense and the party that is led by a president who has the courage and strength to fight for peace.'
The two then embraced on stage in front of a screaming audience.
Former Hawaii Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard announced she is joining the Republican party Tuesday night. The gesture surprised Trump who embraced her on stage shortly after she made the announcement
In 2022, she announced she was leaving the Democratic party to become an Independent.
She then announced in August that she was endorsing former President Donald Trump and promised to do everything she could to secure his election.
Regaining control of the mic after Gabbard's announcement, Trump said he was stunned by the announcement, which he had not known was coming.
'Thank you very much, Tulsi, that's great wow,' Trump said seemingly stunned.
'That was a surprise,' he continued, calling the gesture a 'great honor' and a 'beautiful speech.
The former president called her a 'woman that everybody loves' who has 'so much common sense'.
'Boy you are popular' he told her in front of the crowd as she brought her on stage.
Gabbard said the Democratic Party is now 'completely unrecognizable'. She was a member for more than 20 years.
She ran for president as a Democrat in 2020 and ended up endorsing Joe Biden when she dropped out.
The former congresswoman called Kamala Harris 'anti-freedom' and 'pro-censorship' and slammed her recent foreign policy moves.
'She is anti-freedom, she is pro-censorship, she is pro-open borders, and she is pro-war,' Gabbard said of Harris.
'Without even pretending to care about peace, as President Trump talked about, she has shamelessly embraced the endorsement and support of warmongers like Dick Cheney, and Liz Cheney,' she added.
Gabbard, a National Guard veteran, ran for president in 2019. She clashed memorably with Harris as they fought for the Democratic nomination, eventually won by Joe Biden.
She campaigned on a platform that decried U.S. involvement in the Middle East, saying it made the nation less safe, and directed blame at both Republicans and Democrats.
In 2019, she was the only lawmaker to vote 'present' during the highly partisan first impeachment of Trump.
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In markets, bets are on a Trump victory
With less than two weeks to the US election, financial markets are flagging a victory for Donald Trump.
From betting markets to Trump Media shares and cryptocurrencies, the “Trump trades” have kicked up a gear.
That’s despite Vice President Kamala Harris having a narrow lead over Republican nominee Trump in national polling, although reports of early voting in swing states expected to decide the presidency suggest Trump and his fellow Republicans are faring better than at the same stage of previous elections.
In the betting markets, PredictIt has Trump clearly leading Harris. His price (which equates to the odds of winning the presidency) is US58¢ against her US45¢. Polymarket shows an even bigger margin, with Trump’s odds of winning 63.7 per cent and Harris’ 36.4 per cent, although four big wagers totalling $US30 million ($45 million) might have something to do with that.
Trump’s agenda is more radical than Harris’ and would have a bigger impact on financial markets, making his prospects easier to track from an investor point of view.
His trade policies – baseline tariffs of up to 20 per cent on all imports, a 60 per cent tariff on imports from China and threats of a tariff of up to 200 per cent on imports of cars from Mexico – would reverberate through global markets and the world economy.
Most of the bets being made by investors seem to be reasonably conservative. Broadly, however, they do predict a Trump win.
Trump would maintain his 2017 tax cuts, set to expire next year. They favoured companies and wealthy households, and Trump has indicated he wants to reduce their tax rates even further.
He has promised to cut regulation, free up the energy sector, slash government spending and detain and deport millions of illegal immigrants. He’s also said he wants influence over the Federal Reserve Board’s decision-making, or at least some input.
Beneficiaries from his policies would, at face value, include executives and shareholders across corporate America, the energy sector, pharmaceutical companies, big tech, private prison operators (someone has to oversee the detention of the immigrants), and cryptocurrencies, where the Trump family recently launched a venture.
The prospects of a Trump win, at the macro level, would most likely show up in currency, bond and share markets. His policies are likely to generate a big increase in government debt and a spike in US inflation that would drive up longer-term interest rates and the US dollar, while the tax cuts would be enthusiastically greeted by sharemarket investors.
The US dollar has strengthened more than 3.5 per cent this month against America’s major trading partners’ currencies. The yield on 10-year US Treasury bonds has increased from 3.7 per cent to 4.2 per cent, the term premium (the extra yield required to compensate for holding longer duration bonds) has blown out significantly, and the US sharemarket has risen 2.5 per cent over the same period.
The sharemarket’s response is interesting. Trump’s tax cuts and his deregulatory agenda would be positive for companies and their investors. But most economists agree that his trade and immigration policies would be inflationary and hit consumers hard, particularly low-income households, and have a materially adverse impact on the US economy.
Yet maybe those are viewed as potential longer-term threats when set against the near-term benefits of his tax cuts.
At a more granular level, energy stocks are up almost 3 per cent so far this month, while shares in the two biggest private prison operators – Geo Group and CoreCivic – are up 21 per cent and 11.2 per cent, respectively.
https://www.smh.com.au/business/markets/in-markets-bets-are-on-a-trump-victory-20241023-p5kkj3.html
***************************************All my main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
https://westpsychol.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH -- new site)
https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)
https://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
***********************************************
22 October, 2024
Trump goes all in on his tariffs
Trump is undoubtedly well outside the simple thinking of economic orthodoxy. Most economists think his policies would drive Americans into poverty. Economic development is however complex and they fail to note that, far from Trump being economically illiterate, Trump's degree is in fact in economics and comes from a prestige economics school. They particularly seem to overlook the economic growth that would result from a largely uniform 10% tariff.
They also overlook that history is on his side. There are at least two clear examples of high tariffs being economically beneficial. The first is that America prospered mightily in the 19th century behind a high tariff wall. That is normally attributed to an "infant industry" effect and is therefore not now relevant but it IS relevant. Major American industries have now laggged so far behind Asian industries that they could be said to have reverted to infant status
The second example isn't well known but Australia under R.G. Menzies in the '60s was also very comfortable behind a high tariff wall. For details of that, see:
http://jonjayray.com/trumpism.html
So Trump seems likely to get good economic results next time around tooIt seems like every time Donald Trump makes a public appearance, he promises yet another tax cut. Now he’s doing something similar with his cherished tariffs.
Interviewed by Bloomberg’s editor-in-chief John Micklethwait at the Economic Club of Chicago this week, Trump not only defended his plan to impose a 10 per cent baseline tariff on all imports to the US and a punitive 60 per cent tariff on imports from China, but doubled down.
Arguing that tariffs would not only raise hundreds of billions of dollars in deficit-reducing revenue from the exporting countries, but also provide an incentive to foreign companies to shift their plants to the US, he claimed that the higher the tariff, the more likely it was that companies would build their factories in the US to avoid it.
“In fact, I’ll tell you, there’s another theory, [it] is that the tariff, you make it so high, so horrible, so obnoxious that they’ll come right away,” he said.
“There’s two ways of looking at a tariff. You can do it as a money-making instrument, or you can do it as something to get the companies. Now, if you want the companies to come in, the tariff has to be a lot higher than 10 per cent, because 10 per cent is not enough. They’re not going to do it for 10 per cent.
“But you make a 50 per cent tariff, they’re going to come in.”
“All you have to do is build your plant in the United States, and you don’t have any tariffs,” he said, while threatening to apply high tariffs to imports of European cars, including Mercedes-Benz, to force them to build cars in the US.
He also threatened tariff rates of “100, 200, 2000 per cent” on cars from Mexico, which has a free trade agreement with the US and therefore could provide a back door to the US market.
“They’re not going to sell one car into the United States,” he said.
Trump rejects the consensus view of economists – and the actual experience of his 2018 tariffs on imports from China – that it will be US companies and consumers that pay the price, making them a form of consumption tax.
“We got hundreds of billions of dollars from China alone, and I haven’t even started yet,” he said.
He also thinks his tariffs will raise trillions of dollars to pay for his proposed tax cuts for companies and wealthy households, along with the abolition of taxes on tips, overtime, social security benefits, interest on car loans and credits for state taxes, despite estimates from credible authorities like the Peterson Institute for International Economics that the tariffs would raise only about $US200 billion ($300 billion) a year. The US government’s revenue base is close to $US5 trillion a year.
Most experts in trade policies believe Trump’s tariffs would damage the US economy and its relationships with the rest of the world, including America’s allies.
They also expect that, should Trump do what he has threatened, its trading partners will retaliate with tariffs of their own. The European Union has already drawn up a list of US goods to target.
Because he doesn’t understand how tariffs work, Trump thinks they are marvellous, a type of magic pudding that he can use to finance his ever-expanding list of tax cuts.
“The most beautiful word in the dictionary is ‘tariff’, and it’s my favourite word,” he said. “It needs a public relations firm to help it but, to me, it’s the most beautiful word in the dictionary.”
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget recently estimated that the Trump policy platform would add $US7.5 trillion to US deficits and debt over a decade, and potentially as much as $US15 trillion, but Trump is adamant that his mix of tariffs and tax cuts will generate growth and reduce the deficit.
“I was always very good at mathematics,” he said.
Most of the economic think tanks that have analysed Trump’s tax, trade and immigration policies have concluded they will shrink the US economy, potentially substantially, reduce employment, ignite a new wave of inflation and result in increased deficits and debt.
During his last term as president, Trump claimed his tax cuts and deregulation would generate economic growth of as much as 6 per cent a year. It peaked at only half that level and his policies, even if the impact of spending in response to the pandemic is excluded, resulted in a massive increase in government debt.
For Trump, however, facts and expert knowledge don’t matter. His gut instincts, genius and business experience give him superior insights.
If Trump does regain the presidency and can implement his policies, they will damage the US economy. The regressive nature of his tax and trade policies and the plan to detain and deport illegal immigrants means they will probably damage US society, too.
And the damage wouldn’t be confined to the US. Indeed, even though the policies would do material long-term harm to the US economy and households, it is likely his trade policies would be even worse for US trade partners’ economies and consumers, particularly (but not exclusively) China and the EU.
Last time he was in office, Trump threatened to sack Federal Reserve Board chair Jerome Powell for keeping US interest rates too high for too long (although it is doubtful he had that authority).
This time, he says he just wants to be able to have the ability to influence, rather than direct, monetary policy, although some of his former White House staff have been looking at options for more direct influence over the Fed.
“As a very good businessman and somebody that uses a lot of, uh, sense [...] I think I have the right to say, you know, I think I’m better than [Powell] would be. I think I’m better than most people would be in that position. I think I have the right to say ‘I think you should go up or down a little bit’,” Trump said.
“I don’t think I should be allowed to order it, but I think I have the right to put in comments as to whether or not interest rates should go up or down.”
It’s not surprising Trump thinks he could do a better job than Powell, given his apparently deep insight into the role and its demands.
“It’s the greatest job in government. You show up to the office once a month, and you say ‘let’s flip a coin’ and everybody talks about you like you’re a god,” he said.
That’s not a perspective on central banking that central bankers or monetary economists anywhere would share as they try to make sense of reams of economic and financial data to protect growth and the stability of their financial systems.
****************************************
The Real-World Consequences of Soft-on-Crime Prosecutors, Brought to You by George Soros
A first-of-its-kind documentary for The Heritage Foundation is the culmination of years of work, scholarship, live events, and debates, highlighting the radical nature of the George Soros-inspired rogue prosecutors movement—and the dire consequences to the safety and security of the residents and businesses in the communities overseen by so-called progressive prosecutors.
Told through the eyes of real prosecutors, real victims, and the radicals themselves who support this pro-criminal, anti-victim movement, “Rogue Prosecutors: The Full Story” paints a vivid portrait of how and why crime has risen in cities presided over by rogue prosecutors—and what you can do about it.
We coined the term “rogue prosecutors” in 2020 when we first exposed this toxic and dangerous social experiment. We started with a Daily Signal blog series on individual rogue prosecutors, among them George Gascon in San Francisco and Los Angeles, Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, Kim Foxx in Chicago and others.
We published research papers on how they sabotage the rule of law, implement policies that lead to rising crime rates, and ignore victims. We exposed the fact that there is a blue city murder problem. We published our book, “Rogue Prosecutors: How Radical Soros Lawyers Are Destroying America’s Communities,” and created an audio version of it on Audible.
We debunked the notion that the United States incarcerates “too many” people in our paper “The Myth of Mass Incarceration” by pointing out that most criminals, especially violent criminals, never get caught, much less spend any time in jail or prison.
Over the years, we hosted numerous events, including an event featuring U.S. attorneys who served in cities with rogue prosecutors; an event in Los Angeles featuring women whose children were slain and how Los Angeles D.A. Gascon’s policies helped the criminals and not them; an event at the University of California at Berkeley Law School with former San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, where we debated and exposed radicals who advocated for abolishing all prisons and defunding the police; and created a video series in San Francisco and Oakland, California, called “Societal Rot,” where we showed the consequences of rampant drug use and the soft-on-crime policies of Boudin—who was voted out of office because of it—and Oakland District Attorney Pamela Price.
We produced a mini-movie called “An Avoidable Tragedy,” featuring the murder of Wicomico County Deputy Sheriff Glenn Hilliard by a career criminal who then-Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby refused to hold accountable for his repeated parole violations after his armed robbery conviction.
The new documentary stitches together the full story of the rogue prosecutor movement and features crime policy experts Heather MacDonald and Rafael Mangual, elected district attorneys, and victims of crime.
There are approximately 2,300 elected district attorneys across this great country. Who your district attorney is directly affects public safety, which is the bedrock of a civil society.
We hope this documentary opens the public’s eyes to what’s at stake and the real-life consequences of the rogue prosecutor movement.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/10/21/documentary-exposes-real-life-consequences-rogue-prosecutors/
***************************************21 October, 2024
Trump hatred divorced from reality
Lily Steiner
Mea culpa. I used to be one of Oprah’s biggest fans – recorded and watched every single show, bought her 25th Anniversary CD as soon as I could get my hands on it… The woman was my hero.
She was smart, likeable, honest, and open. You felt that she understood you, without ever having met her. Oprah imparted so much common sense and even opened a school for girls in Africa to make sure they received a full education. How could audiences not feel good about her? She was a regular person who had grown up with a challenging childhood and realised her dreams.
As a fan, I could forgive her idolisation of Michelle and Barack Obama. I understood her excitement for the Obama presidency, being a black woman. But her backing of the Democratic Party at their 2024 convention and filling of the audience with celebrities to celebrate Kamala Harris, is where I had to draw the line.
Her speech at the convention shocked me. She started by accusing Trump of wanting to divide and create an ‘us’ against ‘them’ society.
‘There are people who want you to see our country as a nation of us against them. People who want to scare you, who want to rule you. People who’d have you believe that books are dangerous and assault rifles are safe. That there’s a right way to worship and a wrong way to love. People who seek first to divide and then to conquer. But here’s the thing: when we stand together, it is impossible to conquer us.’
She then continues, suggesting Trump is the one wanting to scare Americans. This claim is made after the constant rhetoric of the Democrats about the death of Democracy if Trump is elected for a second time. America should remember that the Democrats are the ones who flooded the country with millions of illegal migrants from all over the world. It was the Democrats who ignored violent rioters from Black Lives Matter and Antifa, even as buildings were being burnt down.
How on earth could an intelligent woman who lived through Trump’s first term accuse Trump of being a fear-monger and who wanted to ban books…? This was my question upon hearing the speech. Is she unaware of the amazing assistance Trump gave to the black community by increasing funding to black schools and universities along with creating funding for black businesses and encouraging entrepreneurship? I wonder if she has heard the testimonies of regular black communities who are standing strong behind Trump…
Oprah, who has interviewed Trump many times and known him for many years, has previously referred to him as a bully. One may make that accusation of the Democrats after they attempted to impeach Trump not once but twice over nonsense accusations. Is Trump the bully in this scenario? As a long-time fan, I am left to wonder if is the same woman who had her own television show for over 25 years that I thought was an independent thinker. Where is that Oprah Winfrey, my hero?
The world has watched for almost four years as the Biden administration wrought destruction on America, bringing it to the brink of collapse. We have been bombarded by the incompetent Kamala Harris who cackles her way through media appearances.
Donald Trump has a proven track record of accomplishments in office, despite being hampered at every turn by the Democrats. Trump speaks for three or four hours at every rally, generally without a teleprompter, and covers both his policies and vision for making America great again. He has a recovery plan to salvage the nation after four years of Biden.
I do not understand how Oprah put her name behind Kamala Harris, along with so many other celebrities. Have our heroes become followers rather than leaders? I feel shame for what I once admired.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/09/oh-no-oprah/
************************************************Did Trump Propose Deep Medicare Cuts?
In a recent report, “The Trump-Vance ‘Concept’ on Health Care,” Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign claims that former President Donald Trump proposed “deep cuts to Medicare and Medicaid” in his budgets submitted during his term as President, including cuts that would “undermine Medicare’s fiscal position and cut benefits for seniors.”
When it comes to Medicare, these claims are largely false, misleading, and counterproductive.
President Trump’s budgets included proposals to reduce the cost of Medicare through changes to provider payments and drug pricing reforms that have generally received bipartisan support. Specifically, his final budget proposal for Fiscal Year (FY) 2021 included proposed Medicare changes that we find would have:
* Modestly slowed Medicare cost growth – with costs rising by 89 percent over a decade rather than 104 percent and proposed savings representing one-twentieth of projected costs.
* Improved rather than cut benefits by lowering premiums and cost-sharing without reducing covered benefits or meaningfully changing access to care.
* Strengthened rather than undermined the program’s fiscal position, including by extending the solvency of the Hospital Insurance (HI) trust fund by at least 25 years.
Health care spending is the largest area of the federal budget and is experiencing rapid growth that threatens to widen deficits and drive the Medicare HI trust fund to insolvency in just 12 years. Lawmakers will need to consider meaningful savings to lower the cost of Medicare and Medicaid, along with other parts of the budget and tax code.
This presidential campaign has been damaging and unhelpful toward efforts to thoughtfully reform Medicare, with both candidates attacking their opponents for cutting benefits while shying away from offering their own comprehensive plans to address these issues.
This ‘Medi-scare’ tactic only increases the difficulty of implementing urgently needed reforms, thereby making it harder to restore solvency to Medicare HI, lower health care costs for seniors, and reign in deficits.
In their recent report, the Harris campaign claims “Trump will Slash Medicare and Medicaid” and says that “Trump proposed deep cuts to Medicare and Medicaid” in the past.
While some of President Trump’s budgets did propose large reductions to federal Medicaid spending, and there will be reasonable disagreements about this approach to health care savings, none of President Trump’s budgets slashed Medicare or proposed deep cuts to the Medicare program.
Under President Trump’s FY 2021 budget, which the Harris campaign specifically cites, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected Medicare costs would have still grown by 89 percent between FY 2020 and 2030 compared to 104 percent under then-current law.
The total Medicare savings proposed in President Trump’s budget were about 5 percent of total Medicare costs from FY 2020 through 2030 – $500 to $600 billion out of more than $10 trillion. For perspective, prescription drugs savings in the Inflation Reduction Act are projected to reduce Medicare costs by 3 percent by FY 2031 compared to current law, and the insolvency of the Medicare HI trust fund is projected to lead to an abrupt 11 percent cut in benefits.
Trump Administration Medicare Policies Would Have Cut Costs, Not Benefits
The Harris campaign claims that “independent analysts have noted that in every single one of his budgets as president, Trump sought to make significant cuts to both Medicare and Medicaid,” and that these cuts “are plainly intended to… cut benefits for seniors.”
This paints a misleading picture, since President Trump’s proposals generally focused on lowering provider payments and drug costs in a way that would have also reduced premiums and cost-sharing paid by seniors, rather than cutting their benefits.
Included in the FY 2021 budget were proposals to reduce bad debt reimbursements, lower excessive post-acute care payments, and adopt site-neutral payments that avoid paying hospitals and hospital-owned clinics more than private doctors’ offices for the same services. These reforms all resemble policies proposed by President Obama. The budget would have also reformed Medicare payments to hospitals for graduate medical education and uncompensated care, and effectively embraced the bipartisan Drug Pricing Act, which was sponsored by Senators Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) and ultimately became the basis for some parts of the drug savings provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act. Prior budgets included similar proposals, with few if any changes to Medicare benefits.
We have previously described these policies as smart health savings, and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities – cited in the Harris campaign’s report – has written favorably about them. They would all increase the value of Medicare to beneficiaries and make the program more efficient, not cut benefits for seniors.
It is worth noting that, while the Trump Administration’s budgets included bipartisan savings proposals that would have improved the overall financial health of the HI trust fund and lowered costs for taxpayers and Medicare beneficiaries, President Trump has not embraced any of these proposals as part of his 2024 campaign platform.
Trump Administration Medicare Policies Would Have Strengthened the Program’s Fiscal Position
The Harris campaign has claimed that President Trump’s “proposed budgets identify numerous cuts that are plainly intended to undermine Medicare’s fiscal position...”. However, the savings in President Trump’s budgets would have improved Medicare’s fiscal position.
Under current law, the Medicare Trustees project the HI trust fund will run out of reserves in 2036, while CBO estimates the overall cost of Medicare will rise from 3.2 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in FY 2024 to 5.4 percent by 2054.
According to his FY 2021 budget, President Trump’s Medicare proposals would have “extend[ed] the solvency of the Medicare program by at least 25 years” by reducing the cost of some parts of the Medicare HI program and moving funding for medical residents outside of Medicare.
Furthermore, while the overall Medicare savings in the FY 2021 budget were relatively modest, they would have slowed the average annual growth rate of Medicare spending from 7.4 percent per year to 6.6 percent through FY 2030. If Medicare growth were to slow by 0.8 percentage points annually for the next 30 years, costs would rise to 4.3 percent of GDP by FY 2054 instead of the 5.4 percent projected in the baseline – a meaningful improvement.
“Medi-scare” Tactics Are Harmful and Counterproductive
Accusing opponents of trying to slash Medicare and conflating reductions in Medicare spending with cuts to benefits is an all too common tactic employed by both political parties. Sometimes described as “Medi-scare,” this approach has not only been used against former President Trump, but also against GOP presidential candidates Bob Dole and John McCain, Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and even against Vice President Kamala Harris. And time and again, these claims have been debunked.
With health care costs continuing to grow and the Medicare HI trust fund less than 12 years from insolvency, there is an urgent need for policymakers to find ways to shore up the program and avoid large automatic cuts to hospitals and other providers, which would lead to a shortage of care.
There are numerous ways to lower health care costs and restore solvency to Medicare – many with bipartisan support.
Ultimately, the efforts of both 2024 presidential candidates to gain political advantage by describing reasonable Medicare cost savings as “deep cuts” only serve to take needed solutions for dealing with the unsustainable growth of Medicare and other government programs off the table.
https://www.crfb.org/blogs/did-trump-propose-deep-medicare-cuts
***************************************20 October, 2024
Elite still in thrall to Marxist Propaganda
WWII was largely a titanic struggle between two great authoritarian regimes, the Nazis and the Soviets. For postwar American "progressives" a big problem with that was that it was the most Leftist of those two regimes which survived. Progressivism and Communism were very similar in what they preached: "All men are equal" was the lodestar for both. So could Progressivism be seen as in danger of moving farther Left and developing into an authoritarian regime like the Soviets? It was an obvious concern. The similarity between Soviet doctrines and progressive doctrines had to be seen as a warning of what could come.
American Progressives were somewhat sheltered from that perception by the fact that the progressive FDR had recently taken part in defeating one of the two great authoritarian regimes, Nazism. But that was not enough. The progressive era came to an end with the election in 1953 of the centrist "Ike".
But it was an uncomfortable situation for the Left so Leftist intellectuals greeted with a gladsome heart the work of a group of neo-Marxist psychologists who used a chain of devious reasoning to "prove" that all was not as it seemed and conservatives were the "real" authoritarians, thus exonerating the Left from any authoritarian tendencies.
http://jonjayray.com/concis2.html
That claim flew in the face of the great Soviet horror looming over everyone's heads but it was reality enough for Leftist intellectuals. Denying reality is a Leftist talent.And for Marxists to claim that authoritarianism is conservative is perhaps the biggest laugh of all. Who said this:
"Revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon"
They are of course the well-known words of Friedrich Engels -- from his controversy with the anarchists. Yes: THAT Engels, the collaborator of Karl Marx. So Engels was quite frank about the authoritarian nature of Leftism but such frankness did not suit latter-day Marxists at all.
That conservatives are the real authoritarians was in any case a very tough sell. It was the Left who wanted to impose their ideas upon society through all sorts of changes. The conservatives simply wanted to stop them doing that. Leftism is intrinsically authoritarian. If making people do things that they do not want to do and making them stop doing things that they want to do is not authoritarian what else would be?
Nonetheless, the gross fiction that Leftism is not authoritarian has survived largely untroubled in the minds of psychologists and Leftists generally. As an idea, it is just too pleasing to abandon. In recent years, however,there does seem to have been some unshackling in some minds from that idea. So we have on some occasions had books and articles appearing that try to face reality. Below is a precis of a recent such book
Liberal Bullies: Inside the Mind of the Authoritarian Left
Luke Conway
The political left has an urgent and rising problem with authoritarianism. An alarmingly high percentage of self-identified progressives are punitive, bullying, and intolerant of disagreement – and the problem is getting worse.
Using his own cutting-edge research, leading psychologist Luke Conway shows that it’s not just right-wing extremists who long for an authority figure to crush their enemies, silence opponents and restore order; it’ s also those who preach ‘be kind’ and celebrate their ‘inclusivity.’ A persistent proportion of left-wingers demonstrate authoritarian tendencies, and they’re becoming more emboldened as they gain cultural and political power. On a range of scientific and social issues, they are increasingly advocating censorship over free debate, disregarding the rule of law, and dehumanising their opponents. These tendencies are part of an accelerating ‘threat circle’ of mutual hatred and fear between left and right that could tear apart our basic democratic norms.
Concluding with an eloquent call for firm but rational resistance to this rising tide of liberal bullying, Conway presents a way forward for our hyper-partisan era.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Liberal-Bullies-Left-Authoritarianism-Problem/dp/1800752059
**************************************************US election has been flipped upside down as Donald Trump takes swing state polling lead
Donald Trump is on track to win the 2024 US election, according to the latest polling. The former US President has made a stunning comeback with just 19 days until election day.
His Democrat opponent Kamala Harris, who had been leading, has been losing ground in the key battleground states that will decide the election.
Recently, Ms Harris mantained a lead in the popular vote of about +2 points, but that has since slipped to +1.4.
However, the election is not determined by the popular vote. It is decided by the US electoral college system.
Under the system, each US state is apportioned a number of presidential electors, to a total of 538, with a majority of 270 or more needed required to elect the president.
While most of the states lean either heavily blue or red, the swing states can be decided by razor-thin margins.
The latest RealClear Polling numbers bode well for Mr Trump, and are a worrying sign for Ms Harris. The site aggregates the results of numerous polls into averages.
Mr Trump holds a narrow lead +0.3 point lead in Pennsylvania, which has 19 electoral votes. He’s also ahead in North Carolina by +1.4 points. Mr Trump is also poised to flip Georgia and is leading there by +0.7 points.
Ms Harris has maintained a slight lead of +0.3 in Wisconsin.
Mr Trump is leading by +1.0 in Michigan, a state with a second-largest Arab population in the country, and where the Israel-Hamas war could play a role.
Ms Harris looks set to win Minnesota and is leading by +4.7.
Mr Trump is likely to flip Arizona and is leading by +1.1.
He is also slightly in front in Nevada, with a +0.5 margin.
New Hampshire is set to stay blue, with Ms Harris up +7.4 as is Virginia where she leads by j+6.4.
Texas, which some thought may be competitive, is in fact not — as Mr Trump leads by +5.8.
If Mr Trump does indeed win every state that he’s currently ahead in, that would give him 302 electoral college votes.
However, Ms Harris is doing better according to the numbers published by polling site FiveThirtyEight, where she has a 54 per cent chance of being elected president.
The betting markets have also swung in favour of Mr Trump, with Sportsbet now paying $1.67 for a Trump win and $2.25 for a Harris victory.
The election remains incredibly close and even slight voting changes can have significant impacts on the final result.
The election campaign took a bizarre turn as Mr Trump swayed to music for about 30 minutes on stage at a televised town hall event on Monday (local time).
Initially, the event in Oaks near Philadelphia was standard fare ahead of the November 5 election, as Mr Trump took friendly questions from supporters on the economy and cost of living.
With the session moderated by a loyal right-wing ally, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, Mr Trump was on cruise control — although he got the election date wrong by two months, urging supporters to vote “on January 5.”
After the town hall paused for two audience members who required medical attention, Mr Trump then switched focus.
Jokingly asking whether “anybody else would like to faint,” Mr Trump declared: “Let’s not do any more questions.”
“Let’s just listen to music. Let’s make it into a music. Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?” Mr Trump said.
And so they did: for more than half an hour, the Mr Trump playlist blasted while the candidate mostly stood on stage listening and slowly dancing.
Mr Trump has made a brief, jerky dance his signature at the end of rallies for years, nearly always to his exit song — the Village People’s 1978 disco anthem YMCA.
This time, he stayed on stage for nine songs, ranging from opera to a series of his favorites, including Guns N’ Roses’ November Rain, Rufus Wainwright’s rendition of Hallelujah, Elvis and of course YMCA.
And his dance routine expanded from the familiar jerky motion to a slow swaying. Often, however, he did not dance but stood in place and stared out into the crowd and sometimes pointed at people.
Later on Tuesday, Mr Trump later got into a heated exchange with Bloomberg editor-in-chief John Micklethwait.
Discussing Mr Trump’s plan to enact tariffs, Mr Micklethwait repeatedly asked how Mr Trump would enact high tariffs on foreign companies without getting an economic blowback on the American consumer in exchange.
Mr Trump responded his policy would have a positive effect, and later slammed the journalist saying: “You’ve been wrong all your life”.
Playing the health card
Ms Harris, meanwhile, has tried to pivot the conversation to Mr Trump’s health after a medical report was published showing she is in “excellent health”.
She has since challenged Mr Trump to publish his own health records.
“Vice President Harris remains in excellent health,” her physician Joshua Simmons said in the report, adding that she “possesses the physical and mental resiliency required to successfully execute the duties of the presidency.”
Speaking to reporters on Saturday ahead of a trip to North Carolina, Ms Harris called Mr Trump’s unwillingness to publish his records “a further example of his lack of transparency.”
“It’s obvious that his team at least, does not want the American people to see everything about who he is … and whether or not he is actually fit to do the job of being president of the United States,” she said.
***************************************
17 October, 2024
DJ Trump rips up the political script, and brings down house
Donald Trump’s town hall at the Greater Philadelphia Expo Centre, in the suburbs of Pennsylvania’s most populous city, became an impromptu concert on Monday night (Tuesday AEDT) when the former president ditched the political script and fired up the base, cranking out hits from Franz Schubert’s Ave Maria to gay anthem YMCA by Village People.
“Let’s not do any more questions. Let’s just listen to music … Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?” the likely future Republican president declared before launching into a nearly 40-minute DJ session – unprecedented in US presidential campaign history – from his personal playlist.
The 78-year-old bopped and jived onstage at his Oaks indoor campaign rally before thousands of adoring fans in his characteristic style. The episode infuriated Democrats, who seized on it as evidence of Trump’s supposed cognitive decline. “I hope he’s OK,” Kamala Harris’s campaign team sneered on social media.
But that wasn’t the full story. Two attendees had just fainted in the cramped hall. “Would anybody else like to faint?” Trump joked to laughter before launching his music session, which included Guns N’ Roses’ November Rain and Sinead O’Connor’s Nothing Compares 2 U.
Even South Dakota Republican governor Kristi Noem, who was co-hosting the rally, appeared shocked that her leader had flicked the switch to vaudeville, literally.
Trump felt the moment demanded music after the two health episodes soured the mood. And he was right. “Nobody’s leaving,” Trump teased the crowd. “What’s going on?”
And he was OK, too, as evidenced less than 24 hours later when he sat down in Chicago with Bloomberg editor-in-chief John Micklethwait for by far the most intellectually demanding one-hour interview on economics and geopolitics of the US campaign so far, to numerous standing ovations from an elite business audience.
That 24-hour period highlighted the contrasts of this campaign: the most unscripted and genuine, however flawed, candidate in US presidential politics up against the most scripted and fabricated.
By all means, support Democrats for policy or other reasons, but this is surely undeniable. Imagine being Trump’s political advisers in September after he declared women “won’t be thinking about abortion”, Democrats’ top campaign issue, if he’s elected.
While Trump dominated an exchange with one of the top English journalists, Harris sat down on Tuesday (Wednesday AEDT) with black youth podcaster Charlamagne Tha God, hot on the heels of her Call Her Daddy interview a week earlier.
“I say the same thing when I go to Detroit as I do in Philly,” Harris told him, when asked whether it was awkward that she repeated the same tired phrases: “opportunity economy”, “time to turn the page”, “middle-class background”.
And all this in the same week that even establishment left-wing media had to cover accusations the Vice-President had plagiarised numerous sections, including word for word from Wikipedia, of her 2009 book Smart on Crime.
This is surely why the Washington establishment loathes Trump so much. He will be far harder to manage than Joe Biden and certainly Harris should she succeed him. Trump, whatever you think of him, is what the founding fathers of the US envisaged, an independent leader who makes his own decisions, in charge of the executive branch rather than controlled by it.
Democrats must be hoping Trump self-sabotages as Harris’s slender polling advantage steadily erodes. When he announced his candidacy in late 2022 I had thought Trump was an appalling candidate, likely to lose, and hoped Florida Governor Ron DeSantis would thrash him. But I, like most of the media, was wrong. Trump 2.0 appears sharper, more disciplined than Trump 1.0.
His behaviour in July when he was almost killed was undeniably courageous and eerily fateful even for the unreligious. Who of us would have stood up under a hail of bullets, inquired about our shoes and later refused hospital care? Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, whose hopes of a Harris victory I’ve come to believe, must have been astonished. This was real – and, to be fair, unexpected from a perennial Vietnam draft dodger – courage.
US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris speaks during a campaign rally in Douglas, Arizona.
US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris speaks during a campaign rally in Douglas, Arizona.
The only presidential candidate to exhibit more bravery in similar circumstances was Theodore Roosevelt, who insisted on finishing his speech, bleeding, after being shot in 1912.
Even Trump’s vitality has surprised me. A gaunt and lethargic Bill Clinton, who is the same age as Trump, appeared on the Democrats’ campaign trail this week, the former political maestro delivering Republicans a golden video when he declared an illegal immigrant wouldn’t have been able to commit murder in the US had the border been properly vetted.
I don’t want this to read like hagiography. If Republicans lose this unlosable election, which is sure to be close, it will be because of Trump’s political baggage, a mix of forced and unforced errors from his time in the White House, prove insurmountable.
DeSantis or Nikki Haley would have trounced Biden or Harris by a far greater margin given the miserable record of the Biden administration, inflation, unconscionable illegal immigration and a host of unpopular cultural positions the Democrats insist on shoving down the throats of middle America come what may.
Trump is the betting market favourite three weeks out from polling day and a handful of points behind in national polls. Harris will appear on Fox News on Wednesday (Thursday AEDT), which could signal a lack of confidence in her prospects among campaign staff. The idea that Trump would go on MSNBC is laughable.
After near 40 minutes DJing, Trump left the stage as Memory, from the musical Cats, played. If Trump loses, no one is going to forget this campaign or the unlikeliest of political comebacks.
We should relish the contrast in style while it lasts; it’s unlikely to be repeated for generations.
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Disdain for Trump all we learned from angry Harris’s Fox interview
Few viewers would have emerged from watching Kamala Harris’s highly combative interview with Fox News having learned anything about her or her policies except her visceral disdain for Donald Trump.
During the 30 minute interview with Bret Baier, she became at times visibly furious with his lines of questioning. But it was Trump’s rhetoric and mental state that she repeatedly attacked throughout, adding that she would “support and enforce federal law” as president.
Baier and Harris talked over each other continually, and most of Harris’s answers tended toward verbiage - grammatically correct, but saying very little concrete.
“I am running on ‘turning the page’ from the last decade in which we have been burdened with the kind of rhetoric coming from Donald Trump,” she said at one stage, using two phrases about pages and burdens for which she’s often mocked.
Baier began predictably with perhaps Democrats’ weakest policy area, illegal immigration, challenging Harris to state the number of illegal immigrants her administration had allowed to enter the US, which official estimates put to be at least six million.
Harris refused to acknowledge the unprecedented surge had anything to do with Biden administration, and wouldn’t apologise to the families who had lost loved ones after they were murdered by illegal immigrants, events even Bill Clinton conceded earlier in the week might not have happened had the border been more secure.
“Of course, to the extent our administration’s policies had anything to do with those tragic murders, we apologise, and my administration will do much better” was what she should have humbly said, rather than blaming Donald Trump whose border policies were immediately reversed by Joe Biden in early 2021.
At least she gave a stronger answer when asked how she would be different from Joe Biden as president, a question she flunked terribly last week in a soft-ball interview on The View, where she said she couldn’t think of anything she’d do differently.
“I will not be a continuation of Joe Biden’s presidency; like every new president I will bring my life experience, professional experience, fresh and new ideas, I’m a new generation of leadership,” she said.
“For example I have not spent the majority of my career in DC,” she added, quickly trying to talk about her policies to bring down the cost of housing.
Harris ‘lost it’ when Baier played a clip of Donald Trump, who was asked earlier on Fox what he’d meant by his controversial claim the US had “an enemy within”, claiming the clip played was unfair.
When Baier challenged on why and how she had changed her positions on public funding for sex change operations or decriminalisation of illegal immigration, she gave unclear answers.
For Harris critics, the interview will be rich fodder to claim she’s not up to the task of being president. Her performance was at least as much the result of the very bad hand she’s been dealt: trying to defend the Biden administration of which she’s been a central part, whose track record is so unpopular.
It’s difficult to find many positive let alone effusive comments on Harris’s performance on social media. It’s unlikely she’ll give another Fox interview before November 5, but she deserves credit for at least agreeing to it. And it would be great to see Trump in an interview on MSNBC, but given he believes he’s ahead, that’s unlikely.
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16 October, 2024
Trump Is Running A ‘Dudes Rock’ Campaign. It’s Actually Working Pretty Well
If you’re a politician and want to appeal to young men, you shouldn’t spend years belittling them and then, in the eleventh hour, send a Marxist Mr. Magoo candidate on a pheasant hunt only for him to fumble around with a shotgun.
You also shouldn’t hire paid actors and a Jimmy Kimmel writer to whip up a cringe ad about how masculine men aren’t afraid to support a woman like Kamala Harris. But that’s exactly what the Harris-Walz campaign is doing in the final stretches of the race to court all the young men they’ve spent years alienating. They are attempting to repair a brand that has been Bud-Lighted.
Trump, on the other hand, appears to be running a “Dudes Rock” campaign.
What is a Dudes Rock campaign, you might ask? A Dudes Rock campaign is going on a male-centric podcast, instead of a sex advice podcast like “Call Her Daddy,” and chopping it up with a couple dudes about football.
It’s all the UFC appearances Trump has made in the past year. It’s inviting Elon Musk to a campaign rally. It’s the various podcast interviews with the Nelk Boys, Adin Ross, Logan Paul and Theo Von.
And it seems to be working. While Harris and Walz make flaccid, last-ditch efforts to win over men, mainly by doing and saying things that men will find fake and obnoxious, Trump is just being himself, on whatever platform is offered him, and building on his lead among young males between the ages of 18 and 29.
In late August, journalist Peter Hamby warned Bill Maher that a shift in young men toward Trump could blow up Kamala’s hopes of becoming the first female president.
“This is a real issue for Kamala Harris,” Hamby said. “This could be fatal for her campaign … Democrats need to win 60% of the youth vote to win the White House.”
“Hillary came up short; Obama did it; Biden did it. Kamala Harris is right now at, like, 55% of the youth vote,” he went on to say. “If she doesn’t get to 60, she could lose the election, and it’s because young men, Gen Z men, are breaking to Trump.”
This election might really come down to dudes who rock. We shall see.
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US Boots Hit Ground In Israel As Threat From Iran Looms
U.S. servicemembers arrived in Israel on Monday amid the country’s chaotic multifront war with various actors in the region, and more troops will arrive soon, the Pentagon said on Tuesday.
The Pentagon previously announced on Sunday that the troops would be deployed to the Middle East along with a Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile battery system, meant to help Israel defend itself against potential aerial attacks against missile attacks from Iran. The approximately 100 troops that arrived on Monday will help operate the THAAD system, though the Pentagon wouldn’t say when it would be operational, given the sensitive security nature of the situation.
“Over the coming days, additional U.S. military personnel and THAAD battery components will continue to arrive in Israel,” Pentagon spokesman Pat Ryder said on Tuesday. “The deployment of the THAAD battery to Israel underscores the United States’ commitment to the defense of Israel and to defend Americans in Israel from any ballistic missile attacks by Iran.”
Though U.S. forces are not permanently stationed in Israel — unlike other Arab states in the region — it isn’t untypical for troops to be temporarily deployed there for joint training exercises or operational activities. The U.S. also previously deployed a THAAD system to Israel in 2019 and 2023.
The THAAD system that’s been deployed to Israel now is to provide defenses against a possible Iranian ballistic missile attack. Iran launched hundreds of ballistic missiles against Israel in April, and again in late September; it is highly unusual for Iran to launch strikes from within its own orders, as it typically relies on its various terror networks throughout the Middle East to conduct attacks against Israel or U.S. forces in the region.
The current situation in the Middle East is fraught, however, and is quickly escalating. Israel went to war against Hamas in Gaza on Oct. 7, after the terrorist group invaded Israel and killed roughly 1,200 people, and now the current war is turning toward Hezbollah in Lebanon and Iran.
The Biden-Harris administration has urged for caution and de-escalation in the region for months, though the conflict has shown no signs of slowing down. Various ceasefire deals have been discussed though none have come to fruition, as neither Israel, Hamas or Hezbollah seems interested.
U.S. forces have fallen under the crossfire in the conflict in Iraq, Syria and Jordan over the last year; three U.S. servicemembers were killed in a terrorist attack against a coalition base in Jordan in January.
https://dailycaller.com/2024/10/15/us-boots-hit-ground-in-israel-as-threat-from-iran-looms/
********************************************************Leading German Political Journalist Says Banning anti-immigrant party is “Overdue” and Insists Political Repression is Perfectly Fine When Exercised by a “Constitutional State”
The German elite are getting ants in their pants over the rise in popularity of Germany's AfD -- a real conservative party
This man is named Marco Wanderwitz. He is a member of the nominally centre-Right Christian Democratic Union, and he’s been in the German Bundestag – our federal Parliament – since 2002. He reached perhaps the apex of his career late in the era of Angela Merkel, when he was made Parliamentary State Secretary for East Germany. Wanderwitz has been complaining about Alternative für Deutschland for years, and his screeching only gained in volume and shrillness after he lost his direct mandate in the last federal election to Mike Moncsek, his AfD rival. Above all, Wanderwitz wants to ban the AfD, and he has finally gathered enough support to bring the whole question before the Bundestag. Thus we will be treated to eminently democratic debate about how we must defend democracy by prohibiting the second-strongest-polling party in the Federal Republic.
Now, I try not to do unnecessary drama here at the plague chronicle, so I must tell you straightaway that this won’t go anywhere. Even were the Bundestag to approve a ban, which it won’t, the whole matter would end up before the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe, where I suspect it would fail in any case. Basically, the AfD is accumulating popular support faster than our ruling cartel parties can summon their collective will for overtly authoritarian interventions, and as long as this dynamic continues, the AfD will scrape by.
A great many influential people nevertheless really, really want to outlaw the opposition and effectively disenfranchise 20% of the German electorate. Our journalistic luminaries in particular have become deeply radicalised over the past three years. They got everything they ever wanted in the form of our present Social Democrat- and Green-dominated Government, only to have their political dream turn into an enormous steaming pile of shit. Because the establishment parties, including the CDU, have no answers to the crises besetting Germany, they have had to watch popular support for the AfD grow and grow. All their carefully curated talk-show tut-tutting, all their artfully coordinated diatribes about “Right wing extremism”, all their transparently hostile reporting, has done nothing to reverse the trend. If establishment journalists were running the show, the AfD would have long been banned and many of their politicians would be in prison.
Today, Germany’s largest newsweekly, Die Zeit, has published a long piece by Political Editor Eva Ricarda Lautsch, in which she explains to 1.95 millions readers exactly why “banning the AfD is overdue”. The views she expresses are absolutely commonplace among elite German urbanites, and for this reason alone the article is sobering.
Let’s read it together.
Lautsch is disquieted that many in the Bundestag fear banning the AfD is “too risky”, “too soon” and “simply undemocratic”, and that “the necessary political momentum is not materialising”.
The problem… is not the lack of occasions for banning the AfD. Sayings like “We will hunt them down”, Sturmabteilung slogans, deportation fantasies: we have long since become accustomed to their constant rabble-rousing. And this is to say nothing of the most recent and particularly shocking occasion – the disastrous opening session of the Thuringian state parliament a week ago, in which an AfD Senior President was able to effectively suspend parliamentary business for hours. Those with enough power to generate momentum don’t have to wait for it; what is missing across the parties is political courage.
What really distinguishes Lautsch’s article (and mainstream discussion about the AfD in general) is the constant grasping after reasons that the party is bad and unconstitutional, and the failure ever to deliver anything convincing. That “we will hunt them down” line comes from a speech the AfD politician Alexander Gauland gave in 2017, after his party entered the Bundestag with 12.6% of the vote for the first time. As even BILD reported, he meant that the AfD would take a hard, confrontational line against the establishment. He was not promising that AfD representatives would literally hunt down Angela Merkel, although the quote immediately entered the canonical list of evil AfD statements and has been repeated thousands of times by hack journalists ever since. As for the “Sturmabteilung slogans,” the “deportation fantasies” and the “opening session of the Thuringian state parliament” – I’ve covered all of that here at the plague chronicle. They are lies and frivolities, and what’s more, they are so obviously lies and frivolities that it is impossible to believe even Lautsch thinks very much of them. These are things that low-information readers of Die Zeit are supposed to find convincing; they aren’t real reasons.
Perhaps this is why Lautsch backtracks, deciding suddenly that the case for banning the AfD may not be all that obvious after all. She admits that it is “legally risky” because, for a ban to succeed, somebody would have “to prove… that [the AfD] is working to destroy the free democratic order”. This is very hard to do because “it is part of the AfD’s strategy to present itself as the party of true democrats and defenders of the constitution” even though “its representatives have long been working to dismantle the institutions of our Basic Law from within”. Thus, as always, the absence of evidence for anything untoward about the AfD becomes evidence for its malicious, underhanded, democracy-undermining strategies.
Lautsch, desperate to climb out of this circular argument, first seizes upon the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution – the domestic intelligence agency that has been spying on the AfD for years. She insists that it has “already collected extensive material… which in itself could be used to justify a ban”. Lautsch’s “could” is doing a great deal of work here. The problem is that nobody, least of all Lautsch, has any idea what material the constitutional protectors have compiled. We can, however, try to learn from similar cases where we know more. Back in February, for example, I took a very close look at the information the constitutional protectors had amassed on Hans-Georg Maaßen. It was far from encouraging, and the truth is that if our political goons had anything that could really do in the AfD, we would’ve heard about it long ago.
As Lautsch continues, she strays ever further from making any kind of rational case. The last concrete complaint she raises is her claim that “the AfD is shifting the boundaries [of discourse] ever further in the direction of an ethnic conception” of Germanness, and that at the notorious “secret Potsdam meeting” the AfD politician Ulrich Siegmund said some untoward things about foreign restaurants. She rushes past these points, sensing their weakness, and spends the rest of this section on bizarre and irrelevant matters:
There is also the AfD’s self-representation as the representative of the true will of the people. That in itself has little to do with parliamentary democracy. Anyone who claims to already know the will of the people is unlikely to engage in parliamentary debate. The AfD therefore uses parliament primarily as a stage for staging the inflammatory speeches of its representatives and then distributing them on YouTube and TikTok. These are addressed directly to the “people” – and thus removed from parliamentary discussion.
Literally all politicians claim to represent the popular will and to act in popular interests. None of this is illegal or even remotely wrong. The AfD is an opposition party, excluded by the reigning cartel system from participation in government, and so of course it uses parliamentary debate to criticise the lunatics in charge and use social media to distribute its speeches to supporters. What kind of complaints are these? Does Lautsch really want to ban the AfD because it’s good at TikTok?
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15 October, 2024
Iran's very limited options
Iran has been on the brink of possessing nukes for years now. How come that they have failed to take the final step? Easy. There is no way they could use them. They know very well that Iran would be obliterated if it fired nukes at Israel. Safest not to have them
A year after the Hamas atrocities, put to one side the street theatre of protests and Labor’s confused talking points and ask: what really is happening in the Middle East?
On October 7 last year Israel suffered the worst intelligence and defence failure since the country was founded. But now it has overcome internal political divisions to re-emerge as the strongest military power in the region.
Jerusalem has re-established deterrence dominance because of intelligence, targeting and force projection capabilities that its enemies can’t match. Now it is pushing hard to deliver a victory over Iran and its proxies that no one expected. The country has rallied because Israelis know their survival is at risk. The louder the “progressive” assault against Israel in Western democracies, the harder Israel will fight for its security.
By contrast, Iran is failing. Hezbollah, the jewel in the crown of Tehran’s foreign policy, has been blinded, its leadership killed or, literally, crippled. Israel may have started with the aim of pushing terrorist rocket launchers away from its northern border, now Benjamin Netanyahu has a shot to help the Lebanese rise up against the Iranian forces ruining the once-prosperous country.
Hamas and much of Gaza is destroyed. What emerges from the rubble will never commit atrocities again on their Jewish neighbours. War is cruel, but it is better to win than lose.
Tehran’s mullahs know many, probably most, of their people hate them. They rule by fear alone. They see the hollowness of their goosestepping military and dread Mossad’s proven ability to hit them any time they choose.
The Arab countries – Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and others – have never had less interest in supporting the fiction of a Palestinian state. They all hope Israel dismantles Iran’s proxies because these groups destabilise Arab governments.
President Joe Biden’s Middle East policy is in tatters. In October 2022, the centrepiece of his national security strategy was to “pursue diplomacy to ensure that Iran can never acquire a nuclear weapon”.
Last week CIA head Bill Burns said of Iran that “now it’s probably more like a week or a little more to produce one bomb’s worth of weapons-grade material”. Burns claimed: “I think we are reasonably confident that – working with our friends and allies – we will be able to see it relatively early on.”
So the CIA may know on Tuesday that Iran will have a nuclear weapon by Friday. If Iran is allowed to reach that point it will have more than one bomb. The Iranians must refine a large stockpile of enriched uranium to weapons-grade capability. There is enough for a dozen or more nuclear weapons.
This is as devastating an American intelligence failure as Israel missing the October 7 attacks – classic examples of not seeing the obvious while obsessing about details. Biden urged Netanyahu to “take the win” last April – meaning Israel shouldn’t retaliate against Iran’s first direct missile strikes.
Thankfully, Israel ignored the advice. Hitting back, the Israel Defence Forces showed they could disable Iranian air defence to hit any targets they wanted. That gave Tehran pause, but too late to wind back its support for Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis and other proxies. Tehran’s mistake – obvious in hindsight – is that it is one thing to train, fund, equip and motivate jihadist extremists obsessed with the “end of days” and wiping Israel off the map. It’s much harder to keep the crazies on a leash.
What happens next?
A compelling strategic logic drives Israel’s choice: it can do its best (which will be pretty good) to destroy Iran’s nuclear infrastructure or wait for Tehran to declare it has working bombs by Christmas.
Given that choice, what would you advise Netanyahu to do? Pause for a ceasefire maybe, so the proxies can rearm and start firing huge numbers of missiles at Jerusalem and Tel Aviv?
Or perhaps one would advise Israel to embrace a two-state solution, the effect of which would be to give Iran’s proxy Hamas or Fatah in the West Bank a seat in the UN. A pause gives Tehran time to reprocess the uranium it needs for nuclear weapons. No doubt the international community would firmly ask for inspectors to get access to the factories, allowing the CIA to shave a day or two off its week-long estimate for how long it takes to make a bomb.
This is the effect, if not the intent, of Albanese government policy. Australia lacks the courage, perhaps even the capability, to send a navy ship to the Red Sea to protect ships bringing goods and oil to Asia. But with no real stake in the outcome, we are urging Israel to halt combat operations so Iran has more time to build nuclear weapons.
Israel’s choice is clear – of course it will go after Iran nuclear weapons-building capabilities.
The plants reprocessing uranium into weapons-grade material aren’t mobile like the bombs will be. These targets can be “hardened” only to some extent and Israel has shown it has weapons that will dig deep into fortified underground spaces. Once the plan is made, the target set defines itself. Beyond the nuclear facilities, Israel must go after Iran’s air, missile and submarine capabilities, things that deliver nuclear warheads.
Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant has said a strike will be “lethal, precise and especially surprising”, which indicates more things will be in the air than bunker-busting bombs. No one in Tehran will be answering their phones right now.
We will owe Israel a debt if it destroys Iran’s nuclear potential. If Tehran gets nuclear weapons, Saudi Arabia will do the same, followed quickly by Egypt and others. Fundamentally, we are all better off if Israel and the US dominate the Middle East military balance. The only thing that may prevent an Israeli strike is if Biden reverses course, pressuring Tehran into a backdown on attacking Israel, bringing the proxies to heel and walking away from nuclear weapons. I can’t see Biden, much less Kamala Harris, taking that tough course of action.
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As Trump closes on victory, Harris Dems will take desperate measures
Assuming he doesn’t get assassinated before election day, it’s looking likely that Donald Trump will be the next US president. That leads me to believe Democrats will spring both an October surprise and an election day surprise in desperate last-minute efforts to keep Trump out of office.
Vice-President Kamala Harris got a very small polling bump after her TV debate with Trump. The election is so close even a small bump is important. The vice-presidential debate, where Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, clearly beat Democrat Tim Walz, stopped the Harris momentum. Vance put the case about the Biden-Harris policy failures much more strongly and clearly than Trump himself had done.
The next momentum definer was Harris finally doing a series of unscripted interviews with 60 Minutes, The View, Howard Stern and others.
The incident comes on the heels of two assassination attempts - one in Pennsylvania in which a bullet grazed Trump’s ear, and a second, aborted attempt at his Florida golf course.
These were all favourable, pro-Harris settings. Yet she was woeful. Even the friendliest question seemed to produce a stammering, hesitant, agonised retreat to her few rote phrases: “I come from a middle-class background, I’ve been a prosecutor, I’ve locked up people traffickers …”
Some of these interviews she didn’t even do live. They were meant to be “as live”. But in some cases her answers were so awful and the media outlet so sympathetic that when it finally broadcast the interview it cut out all the stammering, incoherent stuttering at the start of answers.
On The View she was asked what she would have done differently to Joe Biden. This presents a very minor challenge for a politician who doesn’t want to appear disloyal to the President but who is marketing herself as the change candidate. The obvious reply is: Biden has been a great president but one area where I think we could have done even better was … Then put in anything you like on the border, inner-city crime, etc. Instead Harris said she couldn’t think of a single thing.
All these Harris moments have become internet memes. Now, you might rightly say that 20 per cent of everything Trump says continues to be offensive, wrong or slightly nuts. That’s true. But Trump is on the media every day, doing countless interviews, speaking at countless rallies. So is Vance. Their views on key policy and values issues are pretty clear.
It may be that neither the debates nor the interviews are having a big effect, but marginal differences are crucial. The RealClearPolitics poll average now has Harris leading by 1.7 per cent nationally. That’s a narrower lead than she had a couple of weeks ago. At this stage in 2020 Biden was ahead of Trump by 10 per cent in the polls. At this point in 2016 Hillary Clinton was leading Trump by 7 per cent.
In both elections the polls seriously underestimated Trump’s vote and both results finally were extremely tight in the battleground states. If the polls are underestimating Trump by anything like those margins this time, the election is already effectively over and Trump’s a handsome winner.
But, and this is a huge but, politics is not the common law. It’s not bound by precedent. Given that there are only seven battleground states where this election will be decided, the state-based polls are particularly important. And the state-based polls have a poor record of reliability. But they all will try to correct for their anti-Trump bias last time.
However, even on the published polls, Trump, right now, is leading in the battleground states. This lead overall is tiny, just 0.4 per cent. RCP’s poll average at this stage gives Trump six of the battleground states – Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, Michigan, Arizona and Nevada. And it gives only one to Harris, Wisconsin.
So, with no toss-up states, that gives Trump what his former aide, Kellyanne Conway, describes as a “narrow landslide” in the electoral college, where he wins 302 to 236. However the RCP no toss-up map has changed back and forth between Trump winning and Harris winning several times.
The Economist magazine this week reports that its model gives Harris a 51 per cent chance of victory, which means essentially it’s even. The betting markets, which have a pretty good record, now substantially favour Trump.
Harris is doing better in the polls than Biden did with one important demographic, white college graduates. But she is doing substantially worse than Biden did with working-class voters, with Hispanics, with blacks, with men and with Catholics. Some of those constituencies she will still win, but she’ll win them by smaller margins than Biden did. That hurts her chances overall.
Hispanics are now supporting Trump at about 40 per cent, more in battleground states. That suggests they’ve become a wholly competitive demographic, which is good for American democracy. The Democrats’ woke cultural hostility to religion is hurting them with Hispanics, and with Catholics, whom Harris will lose.
Nonetheless, Trump could still lose the election. A New York Times/Siena College poll of Pennsylvania, with a respectable sample size and solid methodology, puts Harris ahead in Pennsylvania. Assuming Harris wins one electoral college vote from Nebraska – which, with Maine, is one of only two states to allocate electoral college votes by congressional districts – then Trump must win one of Wisconsin, Michigan or Pennsylvania.
Harris will win if she holds on to the three rust-belt states. No polls really give Wisconsin to Trump, he has been mostly behind in Michigan, so just as the 2000 election between George W. Bush and Al Gore came down to Florida, this election may come down to Pennsylvania.
Democrats are desperate to stop Trump, so I expect from them an October surprise, possibly some extravagant legal move against Trump, and an election day surprise, some new alleged revelation about him that he has no time to counter. These tactics haven’t worked well for Democrats so far, but if the election is indeed tight, and such “surprises” could scare off even 100,000 Trump voters out of perhaps 160 million votes overall, they just may make the difference.
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14 October, 2024
Latest News on RFK Jr Landmark Censorship Case
The 5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals late Tuesday heard oral arguments in the landmark censorship case, Kennedy et al. v. Biden et al.
The hearing focused on two points, Kim Mack Rosenberg, Children’s Health Defense (CHD) general counsel, told The Defender. First, the 5th Circuit is considering whether to uphold a lower court’s August decision that two of the three plaintiffs — Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and CHD — have legal standing to bring the suit.
Second, it’s considering whether to uphold the Lousiana court’s injunction, which would prohibit the Biden administration from coordinating with social media companies to censor Kennedy and CHD’s social media posts until the lawsuit is settled.
The case — brought by Kennedy, CHD and news consumer Connie Sampognaro — alleges that President Joe Biden, Dr. Anthony Fauci and other top administration officials and federal agencies “waged a systematic, concerted campaign” to compel the nation’s three largest social media companies to censor constitutionally protected speech.
During Tuesday’s hearing, Jed Rubenfeld — Yale law professor and attorney for the plaintiffs — told judges, “District court called this the most massive attack on free speech in this nation’s history, and it would be shocking if no plaintiff in the country had standing to challenge it.”
Standing is the legal doctrine that requires plaintiffs to be able to show they have suffered direct and concrete injuries and that those injuries could be resolved in court.
The issue of standing shut down another related government censorship case, Murthy v. Missouri. The plaintiffs in Murthy v. Missouri — the states of Missouri and Arkansas, Drs. Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff and Aaron Kheriaty, The Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft and health activist Jill Hines — argued that the censorship they experienced on social media could be tied to government action and that they were likely to be censored in the future. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the plaintiffs didn’t have standing to bring their case.
The Murthy — originally Missouri et al. v. Biden et al. — and Kennedy v. Biden cases were consolidated because they shared common legal and factual issues. This allowed them to share processes, such as discovery of evidence. However, they continued to be heard and ruled on separately.
The plaintiffs in Kennedy v. Biden are much more likely to be able to prove standing than the Murthy v. Missouri plaintiffs, Mack Rosenberg said:
“With the Supreme Court’s decision in Murthy v. Missouri in the forefront on the issue of standing, we believe that the plaintiffs in our action have clearly demonstrated standing more than sufficient to meet the requirements the Supreme Court described in Murthy in June.”
Mack Rosenberg said there is clear evidence that plaintiffs Kennedy and CHD were specific targets of censorship and that they continue to be censored. “CHD in particular continues to be deplatformed from major social media sites with no end in sight.”
She said the facts “demonstrate that the injunction issued by Judge Doughty was appropriate given the circumstances and the government’s continued actions.”
Collage of Rally and Events
Legal battle has dragged on for over a year
Tuesday’s hearing was the latest development in a class action lawsuit brought by Kennedy, CHD and Sampognaro on behalf of more than 80% of U.S. adults who access news from online news aggregators and social media companies, primarily Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.
The suit was filed on March 24, 2023, in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana.
The case alleged that key officials and federal agencies in the Biden administration violated the plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights by censoring online speech disfavored by the government.
According to the complaint, “the federal government’s censorship campaign has repeatedly, systematically, and very successfully targeted constitutionally protected speech on the basis of its content and viewpoint.”
Nearly a year later, U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty issued a preliminary injunction prohibiting key Biden administration officials and agencies from coercing or significantly encouraging social media platforms to suppress or censor online content containing protected free speech.
However, Doughty stayed the injunction until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on a similar injunction in the Murthy v. Missouri case.
After the Supreme Court on June 26 ruled in favor of the Biden administration in Murthy v. Missouri, Doughty on July 9 denied two motions by lawyers for the Biden administration seeking to overturn the preliminary injunction, which was set to take effect July 7.
Less than 24 hours later, Biden administration lawyers filed an emergency motion with the 5th Circuit, seeking to block the injunction.
The 5th Circuit on July 25 sent the case back to the Louisiana District Court to decide if Kennedy, CHD and Sampognaro have standing to bring the suit. The 5th Circuit also stayed the injunction while the case was being revisited by the District Court.
The District Court on Aug. 20 gave the plaintiffs the green light to bring their suit, ruling that Kennedy and CHD had standing. Doughty concluded that plaintiff Sampognaro does not have standing.
Lawyers disagree on whether plaintiffs have standing
In Tuesday’s hearing, U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) attorney Daniel Tenny argued on behalf of the defendants, saying that the Murthy v. Missouri decision “foreclosed” the plaintiffs’ theories on why the plaintiffs have standing.
Rubenfeld disagreed, saying that Kennedy v. Biden plaintiffs differ in key ways from the Murthy plaintiffs. First, unlike the Murthy plaintiffs, the Kennedy v. Biden plaintiffs have a “specific causation finding,” meaning there is clear evidence that “government defendants, through threats, caused the deplatforming and censorship that they suffered.”
Second, the Kennedy v. Biden plaintiffs have evidence of ongoing injury, not just past injury:
“CHD’s deplatforming — which happened a couple of years ago — is exactly the same right now, unchanged in status as it was then. In other words, the government defendants are directly responsible for the injury that CHD is currently suffering.”
“Number three,” Rubenfeld said, “we have specific evidence of, in the event of a favorable ruling from this court, a significant increase in the likelihood of our plaintiffs receiving relief.”
“That’s the established test for redressability,” he said. Redressability means that the plaintiffs’ alleged injuries are likely to be redressed if the court grants the relief the plaintiffs are seeking.
Right now there is zero likelihood that CHD will get relief, Rubenfeld said. “CHD has been litigating against Facebook for years. They have not reinstated them.”
If the 5th Circuit issues a ruling that Facebook’s actions were likely unconstitutional and that will likely be unconstitutional if Facebook keeps on doing it, “that changes [Facebook’s] incentive and that increases the likelihood that [CHD] will be reinstated.”
In their brief, plaintiffs’ attorneys also argued that Sampognaro, who is potentially immunocompromised, has what’s called “right-to-listen standing” because she needs access to accurate information about COVID-19 and possible treatments, and the censorship has obstructed that access.
Tenny urged the court to continue blocking the District Court’s injunction. Rubenfeld argued the injunction is needed because U.S. governmental agencies are “still today” trying to influence social media platforms “to suppress speech that they deem, they call misinformation.”
He added, “But we have seen over and over again that what they call misinformation often doesn’t turn out to be misinformation and turns out to be protected speech.”
The DOJ declined The Defender’s request for comment on Tuesday’s arguments.
https://principia-scientific.com/latest-news-on-rfk-jr-landmark-censorship-case/
***************************************13 October, 2024
Iran’s toxic foreign policy: A deluge of terrorism, drugs and refugees
In 1985 when Soviet diplomats were kidnapped by Islamist extremists, the KGB resolved the misunderstanding by castrating a relative of the Lebanese Shia Muslim leader, sending him the severed organs and then shooting the relative in the head. It is rumoured the KGB then informed Iran’s Supreme leader, Ruhollah Khomeini, that while the USSR had many nuclear weapons, accidents can happen. The hostages were released and no Russian officials have been kidnapped in the Middle East since.
Similarly, United States President Trump had his own unique way of communicating with Islamists. US Congressman Wesley Hunt explains how in a meeting with Taliban leaders, Trump declared, ‘I want to leave Afghanistan, but it’s going to be a conditions-based withdrawal,’ before issuing a stark warning. ‘If you harm a hair on a single American, I’m going to kill you.’ The translator conveyed this exact message. Trump then ‘reached in his pocket, pulled out a satellite photo of the leader of the Taliban’s home, handed it to him, got up and walked out the room.’ It was one of the quietest periods of US troop deployment to Afghanistan, until the botched withdrawal in 2021.
In today’s alt-post-modern world with Western leaders including those in Australia hyper-active to mean tweets, and victim-based sensitivities, these anecdotes may offend. Yet, many of us are not interested in offending our enemies, as much as we are communicating with them in a language they understand. When you don’t, eventually its our young men and women in uniform who end up paying the ultimate price.
Not so with how the West has been dealing with Iran today. Australia and the Biden administration have a strange fascination with appeasing Iran and its proxies. This is despite the fact its foreign policy is based on terrorism, drugs, refugees and kidnapping for geo-political ransom. During a 2018 counter-terrorism conference in Tehran, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani threated the US with a ‘deluge of drugs, refugees and terrorism in the West’. Consider where we will be if Iran obtains a nuclear weapon.
As Hamas and Hezbollah flags fly and Allahu Akbar is heard on our streets, according to the Iranian Ambassador to Australia, Ahmad Sadeghi, the gates of heaven are open to international terrorists. Ambassador Sadeghi, has been publicly honouring the life of Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah, killed in an Israel missile strike, as a ‘prominent standard-bearer’ with a designated path to heaven. Sadeghi’s statement reveals a toxic foreign policy that has no place in Australia.
The boldness of Sadeghi’s statement is not that it is pitched to his masters in Tehran, it’s that he knows empathy for Islamist extremism is growing across Western communities as well as many institutions we used to trust. Why else would so many of our political leaders, academics, and commentators, seek to mainstream Hamas and Hezbollah, if there wasn’t a change occurring within the fabric of our country? One that is irreversible.
We paid dearly for appeasing extremists last century. In Tim Bouverie’s work on how Britain fell for a delusion with Hitler, Lord Hugh Cecil stated, ‘It was like stroking a crocodile and expecting it to purr’. The lesson from Israel’s fight against terrorism, but lost on many in the West, is simple – you cannot befriend a terrorist. Just ask former US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. Under Clinton the US thought it clever to arm and train Islamist militias against Isis. Instead, it turned Syria-Iraq into a thriving arms bazaar for head-cutting extremists. It never pays to let snakes live in your sleeve. In Australia, they are granted tourist visas.
An Arab proverb says, a fool may be known by six things: anger without cause, speech without profit, change without progress, inquiry without object, putting trust in a stranger, and mistaking foes for friends. Iran is not a friend.
Australia is not alone in this Western trend to appease jihadists, and Iran knows it. The killing of British Conservative MP Sir David Amess in 2021, at the hand of suspect Ali Harbi Ali, should have been called out for what it was – a tactic of Islamist extremism. Instead, limp-wristed British politicians called for ‘a kinder, gentler dialogue’. People who seek the intimacy of death, fed on a mind-diet of graphic violence with a licence to kill from God, are not looking for a hug. And neither is Iran.
Iran funds and supports some of the most effective terrorist organisations in the world such as Hamas, Hezbollah as well as the Houthis in Yemen. Abducting hostages for geo-political ransom is a tactic Iran has been using since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
These terrorist networks are some of the best armed non-state actors on the planet. Thanks to Iran, Hezbollah has amassed weapons systems such as the Fateh-110/M-600 short-range ballistic missile, Shahab short-range ballistic missiles, Toophan antitank guided missiles, M113 armoured personnel carriers and T-72 main battle tanks. They are better equipped than New Zealand.
Tehran-backed Shia terror groups also use targeted assassinations. In 2019 the EU slapped sanctions on Iran after The Netherlands, Denmark and France revealed Tehran was behind the assassination of two dissidents, in 2015 and 2017. In 2018, French security services determined Tehran was behind the plot to bomb a rally of the People’s Mujahedeen of Iran opposition group in a Paris suburb. In 2011 the FBI revealed a Quds Force plot in which a Mexican drug cartel was paid $US1.5 million to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington.
Hezbollah’s reach also extends to Australia beyond flag-waving fanatics. In 2017 it was revealed a Sydney-based money launderer and crime figure, identified as a ‘Hezbollah functionary’, had brokered an arms deal between China, Iran and Hezbollah in 2011. The shipment was discovered as part of an international investigation into Hezbollah’s links with narcotics traffickers in Latin American, the Middle East and China.
Then there is the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp (IRGC). The IRGC is the clenched fist at the end of Iran’s foreign and domestic defence arm. Prior to his elimination in a drone strike outside Baghdad Airport under US President Trump, IRGC’s commander, Major General Hossein Salami, declared, ‘This sinister regime (Israel) must be wiped off the map and this is no longer… a dream (but) it is an achievable goal’. Waiting until Iran has a nuclear weapon would be a grave dereliction of duty on behalf of the international community.
Yet Joe Biden is warning Israel not to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities as Australia pleads for Israel to take it easy on these extremists. To be sure, the Biden administration has displayed weakness and appeasement with Iran all along. Four weeks prior to the 7 October atrocities, Biden handed the biggest sponsor of global terrorism $US6 billion in exchange for five hostages held in Tehran and left an open door to renew negotiations on a revised nuclear agreement. That’s right, a nuclear agreement with the nation planning to wipe Israel off the map.
All these weaknesses bring us to where we are today. Modern nation states don’t traffic drugs and weapons, and terrorism as their foreign policy. Responsible modern Western nations, wanting to be free, cannot continue to accommodate the wicked to appease the virtuous. Even if there is no wider war in a conventional sense with Iran, perhaps Sadeghi recognises what our leaders are failing to see; that Australia has been irreparably changed. We now risk losing what was a generous, compassionate and down-to-earth nation. Once gone you can bet none of these pro-Islamist protestors will fight to get it back.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/10/irans-toxic-foreign-policy/
******************************************************Black Clergy Stand With Israel Against Terrorists
Star Parker
My organization, the Center for Urban Renewal and Education, co-hosted a press conference Monday with Michigan Lighthouse Ministries. Over 50 pastors from across Michigan noted the atrocities committed a year ago to the day by Hamas terrorists against Israeli citizens. They expressed solidarity with Israel.
We chose a church in Michigan for this program because the state is home to the largest Arab-American population in the country.
Michigan is also home to Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a Democrat who is the only Palestinian-American representative in the U.S. House of Representatives and one of the nation’s most strident voices against Israel.
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Were these clergy, mostly black, expressing opposition to Arab Americans? Certainly not. On the contrary, their support of the Jewish state, and the values it embodies and expresses, is an expression of support for the welfare and betterment of all mankind.
Of great concern to these Christian evangelicals is the cloud of darkness spreading and enveloping so much of our world today.
The miraculous return of the Jewish people to their historical homeland after 2,000 years in dispersion and their transformation of desert and swamp into a thriving modern state, with per capita income higher than most European countries, shines laser-like light into the thick dark cloud of evil around us.
Hamas terrorists noted the first anniversary of their Oct. 7 attack by firing missiles into Israel, saying that, given the opportunity, they would commit the same atrocities again and again.
By atrocities, we’re talking about murder, rape, beheadings, burning of babies, mutilation of corpses.
How is it that there is sympathy for this depravity?
Iran, which provides the billions financing Hamas, Hezbollah, and other terrorist organizations, had a gross domestic product of just $5,740 per capita in 2023, according to tradingeconomics.com. This is only 13.5% of Israel’s $42,674 per capita GD, despite Iran having the fourth-largest holdings of oil reserves in the world.
The difference is that Israel is about choosing life and personal responsibility and creativity, and Iran is about a government stealing the wealth of its citizens to finance a hateful, destructive ideology.
Similarly, the Hamas terrorists. The billions infused into Gaza over the years from Iran, but also from European countries and America, was used to fund terror rather than build a country and create wealth.
When I first visited Israel, I saw the similarities of the culture of blame and denial of personal responsibility among the Palestinians that have caused so much destruction in America’s own inner cities. We see a corrupt political leadership exploiting the worst tendencies in people by attributing their suffering to others, fostering a culture of blame, rather than taking personal responsibility for their own lives.
The black clergy that gathered in Michigan on Monday, Oct. 7, did so to stand for truth and to stand for a better world.
Inscribed on America’s Liberty Bell in Philadelphia are these words from the book of Leviticus in the Hebrew Bible: “Proclaim Liberty throughout all the land unto all the Inhabitants thereof.”
The bell was commissioned in Pennsylvania in 1751 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of William Penn’s first constitution for the future state in 1701. Penn observed, “If we will not be governed by God, we must be governed by tyrants.”
This is the message our pastors convey to a world swimming in darkness.
When our own country was attacked by Muslim terrorists on Sept. 11, 2001, evangelical pastors pleaded that the nation do its own soul-searching for its sins. They were chastised for saying this.
But we see, over the 23 years since then, that those sins continue to weaken our nation.
The appeal of our pastors is unwavering support for the one Jewish state, for the Bible we have received from the Jewish nation, and to end, everywhere, the sick and evil culture of blame.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/10/09/why-black-clergy-speak-out-for-israel/
***************************************10 October, 2024
Arab nations are quietly backing Israel. Why can’t the West do the same?
There’s an open secret among the governments of the Middle East that’s driving their respective approaches to the war between Israel and Iran: they all welcome a weakened Iran and the dismantling of its terrorist proxies almost as much as Israel does.
This is why Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi is conducting a campaign across the region to convince the Saudis and others to join him against Israel.
But whatever the regional views of Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Araghchi’s mission is doomed to fail.
000000 The main reason for this, of course, is that these terrorist groups are also a threat to countries across the region and help expand Iranian power at the expense of their own. Iran and its proxies, including Hamas, Hezebollah and the Houthis, are destabilising the region. And, what’s more, they would do so whether there was a war with Israel or not.
The Gulf states and regional powers such as Turkey and Egypt have watched for decades as Tehran manufactured political instability among its regional neighbours while cultivating and arming violent proxies within destabilised border areas.
This is the story of Iran in Iraq and the Popular Mobilisation Forces that the Iranian Republican Guard Corps groomed and still supports. It’s also the story of Iranian-backed pro-Assad militias in Syria, which have joined Hezbollah in attacking Israel since October 7 last year.
This is also the case in Yemen, where Iran-backed Houthis defeated the Saudi and United Arab Emirates-supported Yemeni government in a civil war.
Where Iran arms and trains armed groups inside the borders of other countries, it accelerates institutional weaknesses and feeds chaos, dysfunction and economic stagnation. Syria and Lebanon are two of the classic case studies. You also can extend this chaos-sowing influence to Iran’s supply of missiles and drones to Vladimir Putin in his war against Ukraine.
Turkey welcomes Iranian weakness and Israel’s systematic dismantling of Hezbollah’s leadership because this lessens Iranian influence on Syria and Lebanon. This in turn can reduce the flow of Syrian refugees into Turkey.
The Saudis, moreover, welcome a weakened Iran for the potential leverage it gives over Tehran’s support to the Yemeni Houthis and for the reduced military threat Iran poses to the region. Almost every Arab nation supports Israel’s attack on Iran’s decades-long strategic cultivation of armed proxies. They just won’t say so publicly.
But it’s striking that none of these states has reduced its relations with Israel as the war unfolds. Even the Saudis have signalled that the normalisation of relations with Israel, deliberately disrupted by Yahya Sinwar’s organised atrocities on October 7 last year, can proceed when ceasefires are reached in the war.
While Sinwar had hoped Hezbollah and Iran would join Hamas in its attack on Israel on October 7, he would’ve had no hope of the Arab states surrounding Israel. He knew that despite statements of political solidarity with Palestinians, no regional government really wants to carry the burden of the Palestinians more than they already do.
Sky News host Peta Credlin says bipartisan support between the two major parties has “broken down” when it comes to Israel.
Egypt’s insistence on keeping its border to Gaza shut to fleeing Palestinians is a good measure of things because it highlights the dominance of interests over emotions.
From Jordan to the UAE, from Saudi Arabia to Egypt, Middle Eastern states have clamped down on pro-Palestinian protests since the Hamas attack, largely because they see them as threatening the domestic stability of their own states. The Palestinian issue is seen by them as a “gateway to dissent”.
Another measure of regional thinking is the stalled detente between Iran and Saudi Arabia, trumpeted as a diplomatic breakthrough brokered by China in March last year.
Since the beginning of the war its implementation has been stuck on low-level items because Iran is refusing to reduce its support of dangerous armed groups in the region, with the Houthis being highest on Riyadh’s list.
Iran continues to pretend that it’s not the key backer of the Houthis. Tehran is also clearly doubling down on Hezbollah to stop its most powerful terrorist proxy from being irreparably damaged by Israel and losing the group’s powerful role within Lebanese politics.
Many Israelis are critical of the Netanyahu government. While they’re clear about the existential threat that Hezbollah, Hamas and Tehran pose – even with the recent bounce in support for Netanyahu – many Israelis want a new government that can build on the country’s resurrected military deterrent power once this phase of the war is over.
Many Israelis support the current fighting to damage Hezbollah and remove a much larger threat to northern Israel than Hamas ever posed from Gaza. Like the Saudis, Israelis understand the strategic problem Iran poses to Israel and to the broader region.
None of this is new. Israel is fighting a regional war against Iran and its proxies and the results of this could be a less dangerous Middle East with more open space for regional nations to craft diplomatic solutions and assist weakened states once Iran’s toxic reach is reduced.
It’s time for policymakers in places such as Australia and Europe to not just grapple with the larger regional picture – which provides the context for the war – but also to communicate some of it back to their populations and use it to shape their policies.
That would make a healthy change from the increasingly empty calls for unilateral ceasefires and tepid condemnation of the terrorism that Iran is now so obviously cultivating and enabling across this intricate and essential region of the world.
**************************************************
"White Guilt": Absolution & Narcissism
A couple of nights ago I had a brief conversation with Allen West—who is currently serving as chairman of the Republican Party of Texas—about the subject of “White Guilty.” He expressed the opinion that affluent white women are being terribly manipulated by ruthless actors who harp on their feelings of guilt about the injustices suffered by black people in the past.
I replied that these women are not suffering from a genuinely guilty conscience, but enjoy congratulating themselves for the sense of moral superiority they obtain by ruminating on and discussing their “guilt.”
This feeling is akin to the genuine sense of relief and liberation we achieve when we confess and make amends for our true transgressions against others. Only, in the case of affluent white women indulging in feelings of “white guilt,” they get to enjoy this gratification not for their own sins, but for the sins of other, less enlightened souls. Thus, the emotional exercise is not a form of humility, but of self-aggrandizement.
Oscar Wilde characterized this kind of self-indulgent emotion as sentimentality.
A sentimentalist is simply one who wants to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it. We think we can have our emotions for nothing. We cannot. Even the finest and most self-sacrificing emotions have to be paid for. Strangely enough, that is what makes them fine.
In the 2001 film Storytelling, a dark satire directed by Todd Solondz, a young white female—a literary major at a prestigious university—puts herself in a life threatening situation with a literature professor (who happens to be black) in order to absolve herself of her white guilt. For her, the professor’s moral trait lies not in his character—which is obviously predatory and exploitative—but in his dark skin color. By yielding to his predatory conduct, she not only corrupts herself, but also contributes to the further moral corruption of her professor.
Every privileged man or woman who has a heart will experience negative emotions at the spectacle of a poor person who is struggling. I experience such emotions every time I walk into an airport public restroom and see some poor fellow cleaning the toilettes. Once, on a flight to Europe, I saw an old black man engaged in this dirty and thankless work. Arriving at the Vienna airport, I saw an old white women (who appeared to be Bosnian) doing the same. At such moments, the structure of human existence seems horribly unfair.
Thinking about such emotions reminds me of Robert Frost’s poem, “Acquainted with the Night.”
I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,
But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.
The poet’s feelings are inconsolable, and no form of absolution seems possible for him. I don’t know exactly what Frost was trying to tell us with this poem, but I suspect it has something to do with his yearning for a God who seems to be absent.
The poem seems to express a quandary that Kierkegaard presented in his 1849 work “The sickness unto Death” in which he describes the desperation we are naturally inclined to feel when we perceive that God is absent.
We know that our lives our finite and that we are fallible, and we are often uncertain about how we stand in relation to infinity. This may create enormous anxiety and yearning for absolution. But what, precisely, is the sin for which we seek absolution?
Humans, it seems, are inherently religious creatures, and are constantly casting about looking for something akin to God. Hence, in recent years we’ve seen the rise of what may be properly called secular religions—that is, the Vaccine Cult, Scientism, Wokeism, and perhaps even the Ukraine Cult, whose fervent votaries favor the mortal sacrifice of Ukrainians instead of helping them to negotiate a settlement with Russia.
https://petermcculloughmd.substack.com/p/white-guilt-absolution-and-narcissism
***************************************9 October, 2024
Kamala Harris’s 60 Minutes interview was Prince Andrew-like in its awfulness
Somebody give Bill Whitaker a prize. In his 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, which aired last night, the CBS correspondent did what no other journalist has successfully done since the Vice President was thrust to the top of the Democratic ticket: journalism. He asked Harris challenging questions about the matters voter care about most. He was civil, unaggressive, but professional enough to press her for clear answers. And Harris just couldn’t cope. Her performance was Prince Andrew-like in its awfulness.
That caused the Harris-bot to malfunction
On immigration, for instance, Whitaker asked Harris why the Biden-Harris administration had only just started tackling the issue, after almost four years and an unprecedented surge in illegal border crossings. Harris robotically blamed Congress and Donald Trump, ‘who wants to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem so he told his buddies in Congress “kill the bill, don’t let it move forward”.’
Whitaker was not deterred. ‘But there was an historic flood of undocumented immigrants coming across the border the first three years of your administration,’ he continued. ‘As a matter of fact, arrivals quadrupled from the last year of President Trump. Was it a mistake to loosen immigration policies as much you do did?’
That caused the Harris-bot to malfunction. ‘It’s a long standing problem,’ she warbled. ‘And solutions are at hand and from day one, literally, we have been offering solutions…’
So Whitaker interrupted: ‘What I was asking was, was it a mistake kind of allow that flood to happen in the first place?’
‘I think the policies that we have been promoting have been about fixing a problem not promoting a problem,’ she added.
‘But the numbers did quadruple under your watch?’ Harris ruffled, returned to square one: ‘And the numbers today…because of what we have done, we have cut the flow of illegal immigration, we have cut the flow of fentanyl, but we need Congress to act.’
Oh dear. That’s Harris’s overwhelming weakness as a political candidate. She can talk in soundbites and managerial slogans about ‘solutions not problems’ but on issues of substance she can’t actually offer any solutions, which is a problem.
On the war in the Middle East, Harris was asked if the US has ‘no sway’ over Israel’s leader Benjamin Netanyahu, who has accepted billions of dollars of US aid but seems to be ignoring America’s calls for a ceasefire.
‘The work that we do diplomatically with the leadership of Israel is an ongoing pursuit around making clear our principles,’ said Harris, gnomically.
Again, Whitaker pressed: ‘But it seems that Prime Minister Netanyahu isn’t listening?’
‘We’re not going to stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end.’
Moving awkwardly on, Whitaker turned to the economy, and again Harris offered only platitudes. ‘My plan is about saying that when you invest in small businesses you invest in the middle class and you strengthen America’s economy,’ she said. ‘Small businesses are part of the backbone of America’s economy,” she restated. Pressed on how she would pay for her trillion-dollar spending plans, she said she make the rich ‘pay their fair share.’
When confronted by a serious journalist asking serious questions, she melts
‘We’re dealing with the real world here,’ said Whitaker. ‘How (are) you going to get this through Congress?’ Harris replied that she ‘cannot afford to be myopic…I am (a) public servant, I am also a capitalist’ – as if that clarified things.
Perhaps the most revealing moment was when Whitaker asked why voters say they don’t know what she stands for. ‘It’s an election Bill,’ she said, with a dead smile. Whitaker then mentioned that her flip-flops on issues such as fracking, immigration, and Medicare.
‘In the last year fours I have been vice-president of the United States and I have been travelling our country and I have been listening to folks and seeking what is possible in terms of common ground,’ she replied. ‘I believe in building consensus. We are a diverse people. Geographically, regionally, in terms of where we are in our backgrounds and what the American do want is that we have leaders who can build consensus, where we can compromise and understand it’s not a bad thing as long as you don’t compromise to find common sense solutions. And that has been my approach.’
Harris’s campaign recognises that a majority of Americans don’t feel they can trust Harris. That’s why she is now on what her team is calling a media ‘blitz’. But the clarity never comes. On MSNBC last week, she used the word ‘holistic’ three times to describe her housing policy. At the weekend, she did the ‘Call Her Daddy’ podcast at the weekend with Alex Cooper, who asked how it feels to be attacked for being childless and why men get to decide what women do with their bodies. Harris was more comfortable spluttering bromides in response. When confronted by a serious journalist asking serious questions, however, she melts.
In the hours before the 60 Minutes interview aired, the betting markets spiked in Donald Trump’s favour. Clearly, gamblers understand that the more voters see of Harris, the less they hear, and that’s an issue that is only going to get worse in the last three weeks of her campaign.
******************************************************
Gulf Dividing Ruling Elites, Average Americans Is Wide and Deep, Poll Finds
American elites really have become a toxic, ideological class apart—even if they don’t want to admit it.
A recent survey by Scott Rasmussen called “Elite 1%,” which was conducted by RMG Research for the Napolitan News Service, reveals that there’s a stark divide between the viewpoints of ruling elites and the rest of the American people on a wide range of questions.
The report, released Friday, not only found wide differences in opinion between the American people and the elites, it also concluded that the gap in ideology and power between the groups may be leading to America’s fraught political situation.
The research categorized Americans into several groups, but focused on the gap between a small subset of elites and the rest of the country, which it defined as “Main Street Americans” who represent “70-75% of the U.S. population” and have none of the attributes of those categorized into the “elite” groups.
“They do NOT have postgraduate degrees, do NOT live in densely populated urban areas, and earn LESS than $150,000 annually” is how the survey defined so-called Main Street Americans.
The findings on the differences between the elites and the rest of America clearly represent an unmistakable political split between institutional insiders versus outsiders.
According to the report, “members of the Elite 1% have very favorable opinions of university professors, lawyers, union leaders, journalists, and members of Congress.”
While the elites leaned strongly toward the Democratic Party, those who were Republicans tended to be much more similar to their partisan counterparts rather than to Main Street Americans.
The elite insiders are typically more socially liberal, less likely to trust citizens to govern themselves, and—perhaps unsurprisingly—tend to be far more trusting in institutions to make the right decisions for the country (without much or any input from people outside their class).
They are also far more comfortable with censorship and regulating the lives of ordinary people.
On social issues, the poll found that there’s an enormous gap between most Americans and the elite on the issue of transgenderism and whether biological males should be allowed to participate in female sports.
“If a biological male identifies as a woman, just 17% of Main Street voters believe that person should be allowed to compete in women’s sports,” the research found. “Among the Elite 1%, 29% believe such athletes should be allowed to compete in women’s sports.”
It’s not just women’s sports on which there’s such a wide gap in opinion on the transgender issue.
“Only 9% of voters favor a regulation being developed by the Biden administration that would make misgendering a co-worker a fireable offense,” the study found. “Seventy-five percent (75%) of voters are opposed.”
The elites are also far more likely to announce their pronouns when introducing themselves.
“Only 10% of voters have introduced themselves by expressing their preferred pronouns,” the polling found. “Among the Elite 1%, more than 4 out of 10 have done so. Among the Politically Active Elites, 61% have introduced themselves by expressing their preferred pronouns.”
The elites are suspicious of the Second Amendment and even the First Amendment. Those amendments to the Bill of Rights protect the right to bear arms and the freedom of speech and assembly, respectively.
The polling divide between elites and average Americans on speech is stark:
Voters, by a 59% to 34% margin, believe that letting the government decide what counts as misinformation is more dangerous than the disinformation itself. Among the Elite 1%, the numbers are reversed: by a 57% to 39% margin, they see letting the government decide as the lesser problem.
The elites don’t just want to censor speech, they want to disarm Americans, according to the polling data.
“Seventy-two percent (72%) of the Elite 1% would prefer to live in communities where guns are outlawed,” the report found. “Most voters (51%) take the opposite view and would prefer to live in communities where guns are allowed.”
The research found that 77% of the elites polled want to ban the private ownership of firearms.
On the concept of self-government, elites were far more likely to not only make arbitrary decisions for society, but also to be OK with rigging the system to ensure they stay in power.
“If their campaign team thought they could get away with cheating to win, 7% of voters would want their team to cheat,” the polling found. “Among the Elite 1%, the support for cheating rose to 35%. And, among the Politically Active Elites, 69% would want their team to cheat, rather than accept voters’ decisions.”
Perhaps most surprisingly, the polls found that most elites had no idea that their ideas were so different from those of the mainstream.
The report found that “two-thirds (65%) of the Elite 1%—and 82% of Politically Active Elites—think most voters agree with them on important issues. As has been documented throughout this report, that is far from an accurate assessment.”
The creators of the project noted that while there is nothing wrong with there being large gaps in opinions on serious questions in a society, the Elite 1% “hold tremendous institutional and media power that amplifies their voices at the expense of the American people.”
This power is enhanced, they wrote, by the alliance between the elites “and the unelected managers of the federal government.”
They concluded that the views and overwhelming influence of out-of-touch elites “may be the root cause of the political toxicity in our nation today” and that their “underlying attitudes reflect an implicit rejection of the founding ideal that governments derive their only just authority from the consent of the governed.”
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8 October, 2024
On Anniversary of Oct. 7, College Students Celebrate Rape, Kidnapping, and Slaughter of Jews
As the civilized world mourns the first anniversary of the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust—and prays for the release of the more the 100 hostages, including four Americans, still being held by Palestinian jihadists in terrorism tunnels—American college campuses are rife with celebrations of Hamas’ atrocities.
On Oct. 7, 2023, Iran-backed Hamas militants flooded into Israel, engaging in an orgy of violence and mayhem, killing about 1,200 people, including 38 children, in their homes and at a youth music festival.
They raped women, shot children in front of their parents, and kidnapped more than 250 people, including 30 children. They even filmed and bragged about their atrocities.
But to many students on American college campuses, the Hamas militants who died while perpetrating these atrocities are not monsters to be condemned, but “martyrs” to be celebrated.
Just days after the Oct. 7 massacre, the Students for Justice in Palestine chapters nationwide called for a “Day of Resistance” on posters featuring paragliders like those the Hamas terrorists who had flown over the Israeli security barrier to rape and kill civilians used.
The Students for Justice in Palestine chapter at George Washington University projected the words “Glory to Our Martyrs” on the side of the university’s library.
Even among anti-Israel groups, Students for Justice in Palestine is particularly radical. Several chapters have openly endorsed the five-point “Thawabet” (demands on which there can be no compromise) principles, including that Arabs should “reject all normalization” with Israel, that “armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine,” and that “Palestine is Arab from the river to the sea, with Al-Quds [Jerusalem] as its capital.”
In other words, they call for genocidal violence against the world’s only Jewish state—home to about half the world’s Jews—until it is destroyed and replaced with another Arab state. Unsurprisingly, the infamous chant that is a common feature at Students for Justice in Palestine rallies—“There is only one solution: intifada revolution”—was inspired by the Nazis’ “Final Solution.”
On the anniversary of the Oct. 7 massacre, Students for Justice in Palestine chapters nationwide are calling for a “week of rage,” celebrating “one year of resistance” and hosting vigils for the supposed “martyrs.”
The timing makes clear that they are celebrating the Oct. 7 atrocities as “resistance” and glorifying its perpetrators as “martyrs.” At Columbia University on Monday, hundreds of students marched, chanting “intifada” and “resistance is justified.” One protester held a sign reading “Long Live The Al-Aqsa Flood” (the jihadist name for the Hamas massacre) featuring Hamas terrorists, including a paraglider.
Students for Justice in Palestine chapters and their pro-terrorist protests are not confined to Ivy League or far-left campuses like Berkeley and Oberlin. They’re even popping up at private and state universities in red states. At Rice University in Texas, the group’s chapter is hosting a “Day of Rage” on the anniversary of the Oct. 7 massacre, featuring a speech from a professor at Rice as well as a vigil to “honor our martyrs.”
At Duke University in North Carolina, the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter is hosting a “Vigil for Palestine” Monday, claiming that it “has been one year since Israel began its relentless genocide against the people of Gaza,” even though there is no genocide in Gaza, and Israel didn’t even send troops into Gaza to fight Hamas and attempt to rescue its captive citizens for more than a week after Hamas launched the war.
Students for Justice in Palestine chapters are also hosting a “Week of Rage” or “Week of Resistance” beginning on Oct. 7 at the University of Texas at Arlington, UNC Chapel Hill, and dozens of other universities. Likewise, the Muslim Students Association at the University of North Florida is hosting a “Gaza Week” starting Oct. 7.
Too often, the pro-terrorist rallies have the explicit support of university faculty and staff—which should be no surprise, given how many former campus radicals find employment on campus.
At Oklahoma State University, the psychology department’s diversity committee emailed students encouraging their participation in the “Week of Rage,” which includes a bake sale and the requisite vigil for “martyrs,” and will be capped off with a movie night.
Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters condemned the university for supporting the event, stating that “No school, at any level, should ever celebrate the slaughter and destruction of Israel.” Walters called on the public to demand that “OSU end this culture of hate for Israel on their campus.”
It should be no surprise that the email came from a “diversity committee” at the university. College diversity, equity, and inclusion offices have been hotbeds of antisemitism.
As former university dean and professor Stanley Goldfarb observed in City Journal, DEI “has given [antisemites] a pseudointellectual and seemingly moral framework through which to spew their hatred.”
At the heart of DEI is a simple binary: The world is divided between oppressors and the oppressed. Proponents of DEI cast white people as oppressors and black people as the oppressed.
While they apply this frame primarily to America, they often apply it to Israel, too. Apparently, Israel is a bastion of Jewish whiteness, with a racist commitment to shattering the lives of nonwhite Palestinians.
In fact, a colleague of mine—a former collegiate DEI director, no less—was told that Jews are “white oppressors” and that it was her job to “decenter whiteness.”
Hence, why the campus groups most associated with DEI are now leading the [antisemitic] charge. A good example is White Coats for Black Lives, which I encountered at Penn’s medical school. The group, which serves effectively as the medical-student offshoot of Black Lives Matter, has as its mission to “dismantle racism and accompanying systems of oppression.”
Apparently, that means supporting terrorists who beheaded Jewish babies and raped Jewish women on [Oct. 7]. In the wake of those atrocities, White Coats for Black Lives proudly declared that it “has long supported Palestine’s struggle for liberation.”
Students have the right to speak out and support any cause they wish, including hateful ones. But they don’t have a right to taxpayer dollars.
Student groups like Students for Justice in Palestine typically get access to university funds. At public universities, that means taxpayer funding. And even at private universities, students are often subsidized though government loans and tax credits, in addition to the numerous government grants universities receive directly.
Paying for young people to be indoctrinated as hate-filled radicals is more than taxpayers should be expected to bear.
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Untapped Relief: FEMA Is Sitting on Billions of Unused Disaster Funds
Although the Federal Emergency Management Agency told Congress last month that it had $4 billion in its Disaster Relief Fund, officials also warned that the fund could have a shortfall of $6 billion by year’s end, a situation FEMA says could deteriorate in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.
While FEMA is expected to ask Congress for new money, budget experts note a surprising fact: FEMA is currently sitting on untapped reserves appropriated for past disasters stretching back decades.
An August report from the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General noted that in 2022, FEMA “estimated that 847 disaster declarations with approximately $73 billion in unliquidated funds remained open.”
Drilling down on that data, the OIG found that $8.3 billion of that total was for disasters declared in 2012 or earlier.
Such developments are part of a larger pattern in which FEMA failed to close out specific grant programs “within a certain timeframe, known as the period of performance (POP),” according to the IG report. Those projects now represent “billions in unliquidated appropriations that could potentially be returned to the [Disaster Relief Fund].”
These “unliquidated obligations” reflect the complex federal budgeting processes. Safeguards are important so that FEMA funding doesn’t become a slush fund that the agency can spend however it chooses, budget experts said, but the inability to tap unspent appropriations from long-ago crises complicates the agency’s ability to respond to immediate disasters.
‘Age-Old Game’
“This is an age-old game that happens and it doesn’t matter what administration is in,” said Brian Cavanaugh, who served as an appropriations manager at FEMA in the Trump administration. “It’s unfortunate how complex disaster relief has become, but it’s skyrocketing costs.”
Cavanaugh said neither action from Congress nor an executive order from the White House would be required to tap those funds because FEMA is operating on the sort of continuing resolutions Congress routinely authorizes. If the money is part of “immediate needs funding,” DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas could draw from the billions in untapped money to help the victims of Helene and then inform lawmakers he was compelled to do so, leaving elected officials facing charges they sought to pinch pennies when Americans were desperate.
FEMA did not respond to a request for comment about whether it could access the earmarked funds.
Mayorkas, whose department oversees FEMA, stressed the agency is not broke, and both he and other FEMA officials said last week there was enough money in the Disaster Relief Fund to meet the needs of victims of Hurricane Helene, which with a death count of more than 200 stands as the most lethal storm to hit the U.S. since Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Most of Helene’s bills will come due in the future, and Mayorkas said FEMA can meet the day-to-day needs of operations right now in afflicted states but might be hard-pressed if another storm like Helene were to hit this year. Hurricane season officially lasts until the end of November, but historically, September and October have been the months in which the occasional monster smites the U.S.
“We are meeting the immediate needs with the money that we have,” Mayorkas told a press gaggle Oct. 2 on Air Force One. “We are expecting another hurricane hitting. We do not have the funds. FEMA does not have the funds to make it through the season and … what is imminent.”
On Oct. 3, FEMA, which handles state and local government relief aid as well as the federal flood insurance plan and individual emergency requests, said it had spent at least $20 million in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Florida—three of the states that bore the brunt of Helene as it ripped ashore. The figures FEMA provided did not include Georgia, another state hard-hit by Helene, which made landfall in Florida on Sept. 26 as a Category 4 hurricane.
Longtime FEMA critics said the looming shortfall is not surprising, given its main job is to use federal taxpayer dollars to reimburse state and local governments for recovery costs, in addition to more immediate money it provides to victims on an individual basis.
“It doesn’t strike me as too weird,” said Chris Edwards, policy scholar at the conservative Cato Institute. “Right now, $20 million is peanuts, but it’s not necessarily unreasonable to think the upcoming bills will be much, much higher.”
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7 October, 2024
JD Vance and the ‘new right’ spark Washington policy war
A decade ago, when Republicans were consumed by cutting spending and repealing Obamacare, JD Vance was a 29-year-old conservative law clerk in Cincinnati who thought they were doing it all wrong.
He sent unsolicited emails to right-leaning editors telling them they needed to focus more on the people in rural America whom globalisation had left behind. He started taking an interest in Catholicism when the party was dominated by evangelicals. At one point, he even pushed his way into an invite-only conference in Middleburg, Virginia, according to people who attended, in which conservative intellectuals were trying to rethink the Ronald Reagan-era, limited-government approach that had dominated the Republican Party for decades.
Now Vance, who is preparing to take the stage at the debate against Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz on Tuesday, has emerged as one of the staunchest defenders and attack dogs for former President Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee. In Washington, he has become the unexpected figurehead of a new conservative movement that draws on his early fixation with policy to rewrite Republican orthodoxy with a philosophy that champions industrial policy, questions Wall Street and embraces trade protectionism.
While “Project 2025” has garnered attention for its radical prescriptions for a second Trump term, it has overshadowed a high-stakes debate between old-guard conservatives and the pro-Trump policy movement that calls itself the “New Right.”
As the movement has risen to prominence, its acolytes have helped rally Republicans to support some surprising causes including using U.S. government money to redirect the private sector, like a $280 billion law in 2022 to boost the U.S. semiconductor industry. They have moved the idea of expanding the child tax credit from the Republican fringes to a hotly debated issue in the presidential election. And they have at times expressed admiration for Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, whose crackdown on corporate consolidation has led business executives to push for her ouster.
Old-guard conservatives, from billionaire Charles Koch to antitax activist Grover Norquist, are working to hold together the Tea Party-era Republican coalition that remains a potent force in Washington despite Trump’s rise.
Hundreds of their activists and allies gathered at the Watergate Hotel recently for a gala hosted by the largest Koch-backed advocacy group, Americans for Prosperity, where a string quartet played during cocktail hour and guests snagged cigars as party favours. The group’s chief executive, Emily Seidel, told the crowd they would work against “the insurgence of big government policies on both the left and the right.” ” Thomas Jefferson once warned, ‘the natural progress for things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground,’” Seidel said during her speech, adding: “Our message is clear: Not on our watch.” The crowd erupted in applause.
Vance’s allies say the old guard has already lost – the establishment has larger numbers and deeper pockets, but momentum is on the New Right’s side.
“The pre-Trump political alignment in this country is just gone,” said Oren Cass, a longtime friend of Vance’s who founded a think tank in 2020 called American Compass that has become the most influential New Right group on Capitol Hill. “It’s not coming back.” Courting the next generation Over a steak salad at Hawk ‘n’ Dove, a pub a few blocks from the Capitol that became a GOP favourite after it refused to follow lockdown orders during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, Cass said his goal was to recruit the next generation of conservatives to his side.
Grover Norquist is working to hold together the Tea Party-era Republican coalition that remains a potent force. Picture: Bloomberg via Getty Images.
Grover Norquist is working to hold together the Tea Party-era Republican coalition that remains a potent force. Picture: Bloomberg via Getty Images.
A mild-mannered former Bain & Co. consultant and Mitt Romney policy adviser who lives in leafy western Massachusetts, Cass doesn’t share much in common on the surface with Trump – but their interest in conservative populism has placed the two on the same side of an ideological war.
Cass and his allies have gained a reputation for channelling Trump-era populism into Republican policy proposals, making him popular with a handful of senators including Sens. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) and Todd Young (R., Ind.), in addition to Vance, who represents Ohio in the Senate. Cass’s American Compass helped fill a void in the conservative ecosystem, Rubio said, which some Republicans long worried had become dominated by stale ideas.
Vance briefly dabbled with becoming a professional policy guy. When he wrote the first draft of his best-selling memoir, he focused on how government policies could help those who had been left behind in rural America, according to people Vance spoke to about his book. Instead, his editor convinced him to turn it into a narrative focused on his hardscrabble upbringing.
Catholics and IVF American Compass’s biggest effort to recruit younger conservatives takes place behind closed doors: An off-the-record, invite-only membership group of around 200 20- and 30-somethings who work in politics, law and business and have access to a weekly rotation of salon dinners, seminars, happy hours and an annual retreat at a Hyatt on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
Many events are designed to include families and children, an effort by the group to promote family life, which often has deeply religious underpinnings. While Cass is Jewish, the movement has attracted a number of devout Catholics, and converting to Catholicism, like Vance did, is popular with members. (One Washington conservative joked that, upon hearing that another friend had converted, his reaction was simply: “We lost another one.”)
Members often debate what the New Right’s policy approach should be. Last spring on the Eastern Shore, a breakout group at the annual retreat largely agreed they wanted to make fertility treatments, a hot topic in conservative circles, needed less often by easing the economic burdens on young people so they could start families younger, according to one participant. But the group was divided over what the solution should be in the meantime: better to ban IVF altogether, or allow it to exist as a patch until the country can convince couples to stop delaying childbirth?
Moderate Washington Republicans snicker about the New Right being faddish and overly focused on increasing birthrates. Old-school conservatives like Norquist have used American Compass’s funders – including the Hewlett Foundation, which largely gives to left-leaning causes – and Cass’s unorthodox ideas, like raising the corporate tax rate, as ammunition to accuse him of being a Republican-in-name-only.
One recent morning, around 75 aides were shuffling into a Capitol Hill meeting room for a briefing from an American Compass aide when they were unexpectedly confronted by emissaries from the Republican old guard: Two aides from Norquist’s group were standing in the hallway doling out flyers titled, “Who Said It, Oren or Warren?” referring to liberal Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren. For example: “Have tax cuts been working? No.” Asked about the flyers, Norquist said it was just “some of the interns having fun.” Cass’s influence, Norquist argued, has been exaggerated: “The only time I spend [on him] is talking to reporters.” Tax-code pushback Free-market conservatives still dominate much of Capitol Hill. This month a former aide to Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R., Wyo.) strode into the senator’s office to talk taxes, wearing a cowboy hat and a tie with the Koch-backed group Americans for Prosperity’s logo printed on it.
Lummis didn’t support a bipartisan tax plan earlier this year that American Compass backed. It would have used the tax code as a “social service program,” she told the aide-turned-Americans for Prosperity employee after greeting him warmly.
While the New Right has momentum, its future – and whether it will be dominated by Vance, or someone else – is still in flux.
A Trump loss in November could unleash a renewed campaign by establishment Republicans to wrest back control of the party, potentially scuttling Vance and Cass’s political future.
If Trump wins, many of the stars of the New Right movement could find themselves newly empowered. In addition to Vance, New Right-aligned lawmakers such as Sen. Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) and Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) are seen as possible contenders for senior jobs in a second Trump administration.
Yet Trump remains an unpredictable figure with few closely held beliefs. How he would govern, and whether policy issues would take a back seat to the political crises and palace intrigue that dominated Trump’s first term, is uncertain.
Whatever happens in November, change is afoot, Sen. Lummis said after the meeting. “I think there is a subtle transition going on between the more-establishment Republicans and whatever you wanted to call it – the ‘New Right’?”
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No wonder the legacy media is held in contempt
As readers know, in the US political donations are public information. So if you want you can look to see who gives to which party. That’s how a professor of law at Notre Dame University trolled through five years of data up to 2023 and calculated that US law professors give money to the two main political parties at a ratio of about 36 to 1 Democrats to Republicans. (At least, though, conservatives in the US are trying to do something about this incredible bias by giving money to the Federalist Society – our equivalent is the Samuel Griffith Society – and by pushing state legislatures to disband and fire all DEI employees in their public universities – which is happening in the US, with immediate and positive results, and which is the very first thing any Coalition government should do here in Australia when it turns its mind to our universities.)
Of course, some may say that these sorts of investigations tell us nothing about those who do not donate to a political party. So here’s a question for readers. Do you think that those in the US who do not donate monies to a political party would be disproportionately left-leaning or right-leaning? If it’s the former then the ratio is even worse, even more imbalanced than 36 to 1. If it’s the latter it would be a tad better.
Now there are other ways to try to measure political imbalance and the capture of key institutions by the political left. For instance, you can ask or poll members of these groups. That is what upstate New York’s Syracuse University Newhouse School of Public Communications recently did. (And just so readers are clear, this is not remotely a right-wing outfit.) It polled 1,600 US mainstream journalists in early 2022. What percentage of legacy media journalists, do you think, associate with the Republican party? You get the prize if you answered 3.4 per cent. Yes, under two in fifty were affiliated with Republicans. The rest answered 36 per cent Democrats, 52 per cent independents, and 8 per cent other. And we need to be clear that virtually no journo answering ‘independent’ would ever vote for Donald Trump. In fact, my bet is that a fair few of those who answered ‘Republican’ would be suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome, something you can see in Australia in more than a few of our already sparse number of ‘conservative’ legacy journalists. Just pick up any copy of the Australian and see. Meanwhile, if you think this heavy skew to the political left doesn’t affect news coverage, if only by selection bias, then you probably also buy the claim that the total absence of any conservative presenter or producer on ‘our’ ABC TV current affairs shows in no way prevents the national broadcaster from producing wholly balanced, disinterested and even-handed programs. Yeah, and I’m a woman. (Oops, that quip isn’t what it used to be.)
The Syracuse study also noted that this is part of an ever-worsening ‘we are left-wing family’ trend amongst journalists. Over the last five decades the percentage of journalists identifying as Republicans has plummeted. Back in 1971, 26 per cent of journalists identified as Republicans, 35 per cent as Democrats, 32 as independents, and 6 per cent as other. Not surprisingly, this precipitous dwindling of any sort of political balance or even-handedness across the so-called fourth estate has meshed almost perfectly with the fall in trust Americans say they have in the mainstream media. Just 7 per cent of Americans say they have a ‘great deal’ of trust in the news media. And almost none of that meagre seven per cent comes from the right of politics.
Or consider this. Critics have gone back to look and note ‘that 100 per cent of the US’s ABC News coverage of Kamala Harris is positive, whereas something like 93 per cent of their coverage on Trump is negative’. I doubt that North Korea scores 93 per cent negative coverage. Remember, before Harris was the nominee she had strikingly low favourability ratings, probably she was the most disapproved of vice-president since the question has been asked. Since then the legacy media (not counting Fox) has basically gone all in trying to sell her as some transformative candidate while saying virtually nothing about the fact that she and her campaign simply refuse to do any live interviews, and certainly not with anyone who might ask a tough question. Recall that about two-thirds of Americans think the country is on the wrong track. So if the media were remotely balanced – rather than essentially operating as PR agents for the Democrats – the election wouldn’t be close. Key question: what conservative has any reason at all to trust the media? Heck, forget trust. What conservative has any reason to feel anything other than contempt for most all of the legacy media? (And for me this feeling came to fruition during the lockdowns when virtually all of the press abandoned any sort of scepticism and desire to hold the powerful to account and instead became agents of fear-mongering and unthinking government propaganda. Just sayin’, because the evidence that thuggish lockdown governments got near-on everything wrong is now overwhelming – not that the great and the good can ever openly admit their thuggery and panic.)
One more example. The legacy press has been running hard with the Kamala campaign line that Trump killed off a perfectly good ‘bipartisan border Bill’. This is laughable and every sentient being knows it. This Biden and Harris Bill that had a couple of chamber-of-commerce-type Republicans on board would have funded sanctuary cities, let in about 1.8 million illegals per year, funded lawyers for illegals, half-codified ‘catch and release’, weakened asylum screening, given work permits to illegals, and provided no immediate funds to finish building the wall. This is the so-called ‘border Bill’ that Kamala pretends Trump should have supported. It is obvious why he, and most all other Republicans, were against it and helped kill it off. But the press? Well, they trot out the Kamala line that this is some Bill that those who want an actual border should have supported. Come on! They know this is a lie. But nothing is too much trouble in the Pravda-like service of the Democrats.
I said a few weeks ago that this election boiled down to one question. Can the lefty legacy media drag Kamala over the line? Does the mainstream press have enough remaining support and trust to win this one for her? I said then that I didn’t think they did and that Trump would win. I still think that. Only time will tell but right now I’d even put some money on the Republicans taking the trifecta of the Presidency, Senate and House.
And boy do I hope I’m right.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/10/no-wonder-the-legacy-media-is-held-in-contempt/
***************************************6 October, 2024
Corrupt media to rig this election too?
The future of the world seems decidedly gloomier than in many a year.For the United States and the West, 5 November is a fork in the road with its consequences possibly irreversible.
The electoral choice recalls the contrast between Britain and France in 1940 as they faced the Third Reich. Having prevailed in the Battle of Britain, it was not only the superiority of the Royal Navy, the loyal support of her empire and certain technological advantages, especially radar, that made an invasion of the UK unlikely.
It was also that the British, informed by a free and ethical media, inspired by Churchill, and reliant on a loyal political class and civil service with a reigning monarch dedicated to their service were in ‘their finest hour’. The result was that until the US became a participant in the second world war in December 1941, a virtuous UK, inspired by Winston Churchill, continued to lead the West.
This contrasted with France which, despite its standing as a leading and ancient power, with an empire the world’s largest after Britain’s and an army seen as one of the finest, in a mere six weeks suffered the most shameful defeat.
As they witnessed the flight from Paris of a defeatist and, at times, treacherous establishment, and were misinformed by a corrupt media, the French were, as historian William Safire observes, completely demoralised when a fascist dictatorship was installed, with supreme leadership vested in an 84-year-old, nearly senile one-time war hero, Marshal Pétain.
Donald Trump, on his record, offers to make the United States an America which will be great again, one resembling in many ways the Churchillian Britain of 1941. Indeed, Trump’s intensely courageous reaction to both assassination attempts, and to the cowardly lawfare unleashed against him, is in the tradition of the great Churchill.
Kamala Harris, protected by a corrupt media and establishment, comes with the track record of the Biden-Harris administration: massive inflationary spending, supporting far-left policies, running down the defence forces and undermining the nation by opening the southern border to millions of illegal immigrants, including criminals, terrorists and drug dealers who are flooding the country with fentanyl.
That Harris is no more than a political chameleon is proven by the silence of the Democrat nomenclatura in the face of her claimed conversion to Trumpism.
As to foreign affairs, the Biden-Harris administration is notable for disgracefully abandoning soldiers, citizens and a massive cache of the latest arms in their appalling flight from Kabul, as a result of which Colonel Richard Kemp, former British commander in Afghanistan, called for Biden’s court martial.
The Biden-Harris administration is also notable for reversing Trump’s measures against Tehran, thereby releasing US$100 billion to the mullahs who constantly denounce America as the Great Satan, and enabling them to play the role of the world’s biggest terrorist power funding Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and over a dozen militias and terror groups across the Middle East, with outposts around the world. Biden and Harris have as their vocation an America in serious decline appeasing the Beijing-Moscow-Tehran axis, a decline which over time will come to recall the Fall of France.
As to the Harris-Trump debate, the corrupt media were on show where even they have now admitted only Trump was ‘fact-checked’; either wrongly or for having an opinion different from ABC’s so-called moderators.
As suggested above, it is relevant to compare American media corruption with the fact that the emergence of a corrupt, captured media was a major factor in the Fall of France.
This was examined in a 2012 Swiss-published study by Vincent Bignon from the Banque de France and Marc Flandreau, The Price of Media Capture and the Looting of French Newspapers in the Inter-War Period.
Of particular interest is a comparison between the Paris newspaper Le Temps with London’s The Times where the editor’s independence was protected under the corporate constitution.
French newspapers were looted by their owners accepting funding, including funding from hostile powers, to violate their role; a phenomenon reported in the celebrated work by Marc Bloch, L’étrange défaite (The Strange Defeat), where he blames France’s media and elites for the country’s collapse.
It is extraordinary that much of today’s American media have followed the French example of allowing themselves to be captured.
In furthering this, they have abandoned their role and duty of reporting facts to play instead the role of the Democrats’ propaganda arm.
This was best demonstrated in the US 2020 election when they reported, against all evidence, that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation.
This laptop revealed that the Biden family had been corruptly involved in the sale of access and influence at the highest levels in Washington to foreign moguls and agents from various dictatorships, including communist China’s.
Subsequent polling commissioned by the Media Research Centre found that 17 per cent of Americans who voted for Joe Biden would not have done so had they been aware of the truth about the laptop.
Meanwhile, commentator Mark Levin says the true purpose of the recent debate was so that the media could be ecstatic about Harris, no matter what she did.
Harris was trained to memorise a few pat lines to be used as answers to any question, however irrelevant.
Those answers contained what the leading journal the Federalist reported as twenty-five lies by her about Trump. The totally compromised debate hosts of the ABC did not ‘fact-check’ even one.
All the media wanted was that she would not be exposed as completely unelectable, as Biden had been in the first debate.
It is likely few will forget that, until the Biden-Trump debate, the mainstream media along with Harris and her Democrat powerbrokers blatantly lied about Biden’s competence, or lack thereof.
As Levin says, the chameleon Harris’s real plans for the US are for out-of-control and totally unchecked migration, uncontrolled inflationary spending, unpunished crime, and certainly not tackling inflation and reducing prices of things like food, gasoline, vehicles, and housing – all things that affect the American people.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/09/corrupt-media-to-rig-this-election-too/
*************************************************The shadow US election war
In a Georgia courtroom earlier this year, University of Michigan computer scientist Professor J. Alex Halderman opened his testimony by asking the prosecutor for a pen. Duly produced, Halderman took the pen and walked over to a well-known type of voting machine. He held the pen down on one of the machine’s buttons for a few long moments. Then, in front of the judge, he flipped the machine’s tabulations, changing the winner in a hypothetical election. Thus he highlighted the fallibility of a critical element of the US’s voting system, as yet unfixed in Georgia’s seven-year, still-unresolved Curling v. Raffensperger case concerning voting machine integrity.
You might say this is a one-off defect, in one state, in an election the federal watchdog Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency declared the most secure ever, and you would be misinformed. The Agency’s true 2020 election analysis was winkled out in an internal report obtained later through FOIA requests. It said 76 per cent of assessed digital election machinery was vulnerable to attacks by adversaries, 48 per cent had a critical or high severity vulnerability to attack and 39 per cent of digital entities ran at least one risky service on an internet accessible host. Most secure ever? Nope.
The USA’s election system is not like any other, even among nations with electronic voting machines. The Constitution mandates state control of elections, so there are 50 different systems, further customised by state courts, state election boards, local legal precedents and more. In 2020, the elections were modified in varying ways by a raft of new Covid laws allowing an avalanche of mail-in ballots, early voting and other changes. In 2024, the US election will be affected by a new X factor, namely the extraordinary influx of illegal migrants, estimated at 10 million-plus since 2020.
The GOP is awake to this danger, with Speaker Mike Johnson mounting an 11th-hour attempt to require proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections. But the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act has not passed, and at the moment voting is simply, as Johnson says, an honour system; say you’re a citizen, you get your vote.
And the Biden regime has been working overtime to turn illegals into registered voters; Elon Musk is one of many arguing that US borders have been opened for just this purpose. In March 2021, Biden issued Executive Order 14019, which directs every federal agency to register and mobilise voters. It’s now reported that welfare and other agencies in all but four states (North Dakota, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Wyoming) are giving out voter registration forms to migrants without requiring proof of citizenship. And the rush to naturalise migrants is on, with some 3 million new citizens created under Biden. Processing times have halved, from nearly a year in 2021 to 5 months now, the New York Times reports.
How many illegal immigrants will come out to vote for their new benefactors is anyone’s guess. The non-profit Texas research body Just Facts, which has studied this issue since 2008, predicts up to 2.7 million illegals will vote in 2024, unless laws are tightened. It says 10 to 27 per cent of illegals, estimated at a minimum of 20 million in 2022, are registered to vote, and the vast bulk vote Democrat.
The Democrats’ mastery of the electoral ground game means they will have ample opportunity to use the ballots thus created, as required. Ballots are so much more flexible than votes. You don’t need to win hearts and minds if you can simply mark or duplicate or create or gather ballots at will.
The result of all this is an unprecedented outbreak of election lawsuits this year, with many cases still running, and state electoral laws still changing. The left’s effective legal strategist, Mark Elias, runs a site called Democracy Docket, which tallies the action in terms of ‘pro’ and ‘anti’ voting cases; in his world all efforts at election integrity amount to voter suppression. Last week he announced that the number of election lawsuits had now hit a ‘completely extraordinary’ high of 200. That’s on top of his existing scoreboard, in which he claims twice as many wins as losses in over 250 voting cases already decided.
Dirty voter rolls are a key battleground. Texas recently announced it had removed over a million people from its voter rolls since 2021. Oklahoma has recently removed 450,000 from its voter rolls, including 100,000 dead people and 15,000 duplicate registrations. North Carolina announced a week ago it had purged its rolls of 750,000, including 130,000 dead people and 290,000 duplicate registrations, over the last 20 months. That’s more than 10 per cent of that state’s registered voters. Both Florida and Alabama have complained that federal agencies are uncooperative in providing data on non-citizens, with Alabama now being sued by the Department of Justice for its efforts to cleanse its voter rolls. With the 2020 presidential election decided by some 80,000 votes altogether, these numbers are terrifyingly high.
Moreover, fighting against machines is hard. Data scientist and volunteer Kim Brooks, of a largely anonymous election integrity group called the Georgia Nerds, had been working to clean Georgia’s voter rolls, until she realised she was ‘riding a stationary bicycle’.
She concluded a program within the Georgia voter database was methodically adding back fake voters that she had had removed (dead, felon, stolen ID, etc) within a month. Sometimes those in charge pay the price. On the night of the 2020 election, Milwaukee Election Commission boss Claire Woodall-Vogg ‘misplaced’ a flash drive containing absentee votes and credible observers claimed that boxes of ballots were brought in and tabulated after staff had been sent home around 10.30 p.m. At 3 a.m. Woodall left in a police car, armed with the vote tally. An election colleague sent her an email saying: ‘Damn, Claire, you have a flair for drama, delivering just the margin needed at 3:00 am.’ She was ultimately fired, but not until May 2024.
Such is the anti-Trump vitriol in the US that a recent poll found 28 per cent of Democrats thought the country would have been better off if Trump had been assassinated. Amid such hatred, we can take a willingness to commit election fraud as a given. A Rasmussen poll found nearly two-thirds of Americans were concerned about vote cheating in 2024, with around one-in-five voters reporting having received a duplicate ballot in 2020.
Ballots are already flying out across various states, with Wisconsin admitting some one per cent of voters in a solidly blue county had already received duplicate ballots. So many areas of American life are run corruptly and incompetently, it requires impressive faith to argue the electoral system alone works properly.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/10/the-shadow-us-election-war/
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Iran opens the door to retaliation
Iran unleashed its second direct military assault against Israel on Tuesday, this time with 181 ballistic missiles. All Israeli civilians were ordered into bomb shelters, and most missiles were intercepted. But this is an act of war against a sovereign state and American ally, and it warrants a response targeting Iran’s military and nuclear assets.
This is Iran’s second missile barrage since April, and no country can let this become a new normal. Israel reported a few civilians injured and one Palestinian may have been killed near Jericho in the attack. A terrorist shooting, possibly co-ordinated, killed six Israelis. The work by the U.S. and Israel to shoot down most of the missiles was spectacular, but it shouldn’t have to be, and next time it may not be.
Rockets fired from southern Lebanon are intercepted by Israel's Iron Dome air defence system over the Upper Galilee region in northern Israel on September 27. Picture: Jalaa Marey/AFP
Rockets fired from southern Lebanon are intercepted by Israel's Iron Dome air defence system over the Upper Galilee region in northern Israel on September 27. Picture: Jalaa Marey/AFP
After April’s attack, the Biden Administration pressured Israel for a token response and President Biden said Israel should “take the win” since there was no great harm to Israel. Israel’s restraint has now yielded this escalation, and it is under no obligation to restrain its retaliation this time.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hinted at a stronger response in a statement to Israelis: “Iran made a big mistake tonight — and it will pay for it. The regime in Iran doesn’t understand our determination to defend ourselves and retaliate against our enemies.” He cited the Hamas and Hezbollah leaders who have been killed since Oct. 7, adding “and there are probably those in Tehran who don’t understand this. They will understand.”
But does Mr. Biden understand? Iran’s act of war is an opening to do considerable damage to the regime’s missile program, drone plants and nuclear sites. This is a test for a President who has been unwilling even to enforce oil sanctions against Iran. It is also a chance to restore at least a measure of U.S. deterrence that has vanished during his Presidency.
Before the attack, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin warned Iran of “severe consequences.” National security adviser Jake Sullivan reiterated the pledge after the missile barrage. Having issued such a warning, Mr. Biden has an obligation to follow through or further erode U.S. credibility.
If there were ever cause to target Iran’s nuclear facilities, this is it. Iran has shown that it might well use a bomb if it’s acquired, and Tehran would certainly use it as deterrent cover for conventional and terrorist attacks on Israel, Sunni Arab states and perhaps the U.S. Iran is closer than ever to a nuclear weapon and won’t stop itself. The question for American and Israeli leaders is: If not now, when?
Iran’s revolutionary regime has shown itself again to be a regional and global menace. It started this war via Hamas, which it funds, arms and trains to carry out massacres like the one on Oct. 7, and it escalated via Hezbollah, spreading war to Lebanon. Other proxies destabilise Iraq and Yemen, fire on Israeli and U.S. troops and block global shipping. It sends drones and missiles to Russia and rains ballistic missiles on Israel. All while seeking nukes.
Escalating this confrontation now is a gamble for Iran. With Hamas depleted and Hezbollah in disarray, Iran’s proxies can’t defend it the way they usually would. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei may be betting that Mr. Biden will shrink again from defending the civilised world from a dangerous regime. Will he be right?
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‘Nervous, glum’: Why Vance walked all over Walz in VP clash
Vice presidential debates typically don’t make much of a difference in presidential elections.
But the race between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris is one of the closest in decades, which upped the pressure on their running mates in their only head-to-head contest.
And under the harsh spotlight of prime time TV, Tim Walz struggled to meet the moment.
The Minnesota Governor came from the clouds to join the Democratic ticket based on his folksy charm, his joyful attitude and his viral attack on his opponents as “weird”.
None of that was on show against JD Vance, his Republican rival.
Right from the start, Mr Walz was noticeably nervous. The crisis in the Middle East was the obvious first question, and yet he stumbled through his answer and confused Israel with Iran.
He was often on the defensive and seemed so focused on remembering his lines that he missed opportunities to confront his opponent.
And unlike the Vice President, who was constantly ready with a laugh or a smirk or a shake of the head in response to Mr Trump during their debate, Mr Walz’s expression during Mr Vance’s answers mostly landed somewhere between blank and glum and tired.
That Mr Vance was the more accomplished performer was no surprise. The Yale-educated lawyer regularly confronts tough questions from reporters, while the Democrats have surprisingly steered Mr Walz away from the media in recent weeks, depriving him of practice.
The Republican – who began the night as one of the most unpopular vice presidential picks in history – was also obviously determined to reach out to female voters. By and large, he shied away from his trollish tendencies, instead seeking common ground with Mr Walz while admitting he needed to work harder to convince voters to trust him on issues like abortion.
It made for a far less combative debate than the contest between Ms Harris and Mr Trump, with the pair shaking hands and introducing their wives at the end. But the winner was clear.
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Donald Trump was right, says, ‘I told you so’ as 151,000 violent convicted criminals released into U.S. as Kamala Harris visits southern border to find out what’s going on
“I say, I told you so.”
That was former President Donald Trump’s reaction at a Michigan rally on Sept. 27 of tens of thousands of violent, convicted criminals being let into the U.S. by the Biden-Harris Department of Homeland Security, according to the latest data from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) released on Sept. 25 via Congressional oversight by U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas).
The numbers were breathtaking: 13,376 convicted murderers, 16,120 convicted of sexual assault, 64,579 convicted of assault, 43,546 convicted of burglary, larceny or robbery, 13,876 convicted of weapons offenses, 2,606 convicted of kidnapping and 2,218 convicted of commercialized sexual offenses — all before they ever came to America and were released into the country by the federal government.
According to the House Homeland Security Committee release on Sept. 27, “they had previously been encountered by CBP, turned over to ICE, had their criminal history documented, and then were released into the United States.”
The vast majority of these convicted criminals — 151,851 out of 156,521, or 97 percent — were not currently detained by ICE, with only 4,670 are detention and subject to removal. Of the convicted murderers, the numbers are even worse: only 277 are in detention, or just 2.2 percent.
The rest are apparently just roaming around. But now Harris is promising that when she is in office — apparently heedless that she has already been in office for almost four years — to complete her border visit checkbox photo opportunity, posted on X on Sept. 29, “As president, I will secure our border, disrupt the flow of fentanyl coming into the United States, and work to fix our broken system of immigration.”
But one of the things “broken” is the Biden-Harris administration’s propensity to release convicted criminals into the U.S., simply out of incompetence or worse, on purpose.
The other thing “broken” is public perception that the current Democratic administration even gives a whit about the problem, with Harris upside down on immigration versus Trump, for example, in the latest national Quinnipiac poll taken Sept. 19 to Sept. 22, with 53 percent of likely voters saying Trump would do a better job handling immigration and 45 percent saying Harris. That’s consistent across almost all national polls taken the entire election cycle. If the election comes down to immigration, the border and illegal alien criminals, it might not be close.
Trump found it curious that the numbers were released at all — the letter from ICE as Vice President Kamala Harris made her visit to the U.S. southern border since 2021, stating, “So, these numbers just came out — nobody’s ever seen these numbers for years, nobody’s ever seen them — and probably some patriot in ICE or somebody just did something, they just said the country is going bad, you can’t have a country like that. We have think of it murderers — convicted murderers — imprisoned for life, many get the electric chair or they get whatever their form of death penalty. These are convicted people for life are… now in our country and I can finally look at them and see.”
Here, Trump is reminding voters of his warning in his very first speech as a candidate when he began running for president in June 2015, when he famously stated, “The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems. Thank you. It’s true, and these are the best and the finest. When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
Turns out, Trump was right, yet again. Allowing unrestricted illegal immigration — since Feb. 2021, there have been 8.3 million encounters by the U.S. Border Patrol on the southwest border, the most in recorded U.S. history — will allow a certain percentage of proven criminals, including violent criminals, into the U.S.
So, 156,521 out of 8.3 million, that’s a 1.87 percent violent crime rate, almost 2 out of every 100 let into the country, are convicted, violent criminals. Compare that to the national violent crime rate, which includes murder, manslaughter, rape and robbery, of 0.36 percent, or 363.8 out of every 100,000 — that’s five times the national violent crime rate.
Perhaps Kamala Harris does not need to visit the southern border to find out why this is happening, but by visiting the Oval Office, the Department of Homeland Security and by looking in the mirror.
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1 October, 2024
Israel defends itself — and may save Western civilisation
How will we ever repay the debt we owe Israel? What the Jewish state has done in the past year – for its own defence, but in the process and not coincidentally for the security of all of us – will rank among the most important contributions to the defence of Western civilisation in the past three-quarters of a century.
Having been hit with a devastating attack on its people, beyond the fetid imagining of some of the vilest antisemites, Israel has in 12 months done nothing less than redraw the balance of global security, not just in the region, but in the wider world.
It has eliminated thousands of the terrorists whose commitment to a savage theocratic ideology has claimed so many lives across the region and the world for decades. It has, with extraordinary tactical accuracy, dispatched some of the masterminds of the worst evil on the planet, including most recently Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader in Lebanon. It has repelled and then reversed the previously inexorably advancing power of one of the world’s most terrifying autocracies, the Islamic Republic of Iran. It has demonstrated to all the West’s foes, including Iran’s allies in Moscow and Beijing, that our system of free markets and free people, and the voluntary alliance network we have constructed to defend it, generates resources and capabilities of vast technical superiority.
Above all, it has provided an unexpected but crucial reminder to our enemies that there are at least some willing and able to pursue and defeat them whatever the risk to our own lives and resources.
The only appropriate responses to Israel’s gallantry, fortitude and skill from us - its nominal allies, especially in the US – are “thank you” and “how can we help?”
Instead, time and again Israel’s supposed friends, including the administration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, have, while expressing sympathy over the outrage of October 7 and uttering the usual support for “Israel’s right to defend itself,” repeatedly tried to restrain it from doing just that. Their early, valuable support has been steadily diminished by the way they have too often connived with the anti-Israel extremists in their own party.
Before Israel had even buried its dead last October and as Hamas was busy murdering its hostages, there were calls for Israel to ceasefire. For a year we have heard our leaders’ “balanced” condemnations of Hamas and its terror masters on the one hand and the Jewish state on the other, a false equivalence that says more about the moral disorder in our own politics than about Israel’s motives and actions.
In Europe, they have gone even further, as usual, rewarding Hamas and Hezbollah by nominally recognising a nonexistent Palestinian state and prosecuting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on bogus war-crimes charges.
Do they not get that in the end we have to make a choice: our ally, on the front lines of defense against barbarism or our enemies, those who literally want to see us all buried?
Fortunately for all of us, it seems Israel is prevailing despite the chorus of hecklers.
Perhaps all this sounds too blithe for skeptical readers; or at least premature given the rising expectation of a much wider conflict to come. And it is true that there has been awful loss of innocent lives in Gaza, Lebanon and elsewhere that undoubtedly fuels the ire of the enemy across the world. What if Mr Netanyahu and his government’s aggressive prosecution proves a Pyrrhic victory?
But that wider conflict was perhaps always inevitable, given Iran’s stated objectives and its consistent efforts to achieve them. We can say two things tentatively about that long-feared wider confrontation. First, the strategic tactical, intelligence and technological genius Israel has demonstrated over the past year might have done so much damage to Iran’s proxy armies and their military and political leaders that they will be ill-prepared and equipped for the bigger struggle to come, and Israel – and, let’s hope, reliable allies – better placed to defeat its enemies. Second, having observed this Israeli superiority over that time and eagerness not to bring the destruction on itself a wide war would surely bring, perhaps Iran will be deterred.
Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few, Winston Churchill said of the men of the Royal Air Force after they had repelled Hitler’s Luftwaffe during the Battle of Britain. (Reminder to some recently confused “conservatives”: The former were the good guys; the latter the real villains.)
We should echo those words today as we watch in awe what a country smaller in area than New Jersey, with a population less than North Carolina’s and an economy smaller than that of Washington state, has done for all of us.
As Israelis solemnly mark a year since October 7, we should not only redouble our expressions of sympathy and solidarity. We should show them our gratitude, and if we are willing to be really honest, acknowledge a little of our own shame.
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Who are the stupid party now?
David Lammy, British Foreign Secretary under Labour
David Lammy made an appearance on UK television’s Mastermind Celebrity Edition in 2008. For the uninitiated, Mastermind is a highbrow cerebral quiz show that has been broadcast on the BBC for more than fifty years. Those who have sat in its iconic black chair consider it to be the game show equivalent of Everest. The Harvard-educated Lammy, who was Labour’s Minister of State for Higher Education at the time, would surely have no trouble handling a show with such intellectual fortitude. Right?
Among the many absurdities made by the MP for Tottenham were that Marie Antoinette was the recipient of the Nobel prize in physics, that Henry VII acceded to the English throne after the death of Henry VIII, and that the Rose Revolution took place in Yugoslavia in 2003 – seemingly forgetting the fact that the country ceased to exist more than a decade earlier. He is now serving as Foreign Secretary.
My point is that education does not imply intelligence. Even with the most expensive advanced degrees in the world, if you are unable to understand basic facts, you will not make a very effective politician. What does the term over-educated mean? There are a number of definitions. Here’s mine: someone who can calculate a coffee jar’s volume to the closest decimal place, but lacks the strength to open it.
Lammy has always been an outspoken progressive who has a history of making ridiculous statements. These intemperate outbursts, which take the form of self-righteous moralising, can range from the undiplomatic to the idiotic. This was the man who called Donald Trump a ‘racist KKK and Nazi sympathiser’ and equated Brexiteer Conservatives to Nazis. Often framed via the lens of identity politics, he appears to be Labour’s biggest instigator of race baiting. His most well-known gaffe came in 2013, when the papal conclave chose a new pope. ‘Do we really need silly innuendo about the race of the next pope?’ Lammy tweeted in response to the BBC’s rhetorical question about whether the smoke from the Sistine Chapel’s chimney will indicate the election of a new pope – black or white. When colour is all you see, don’t be surprised if your interpretation is somewhat limited.
Tuesday was Lammy’s first significant foreign policy speech, also referred to as the Kew lecture. In his inaugural address, he seemed to suggest that climate change poses a more pervasive and fundamental threat than autocratic regimes or terrorism. The Foreign Office will make tackling the climate ‘central’ to everything it does. I don’t think suicide bombers are concerned with rising sea levels, and Vladimir Putin is probably not going to be deterred from stationing tanks in Kiev because his soldiers might get a little too warm inside a T-55.
Joking aside, it is extremely alarming how ignorant Lammy is of foreign policy matters. Just prior to his speech, he unveiled a brand-new Substack page. The blog, titled Progressive Realism (PR), describes itself as ‘a foreign policy newsletter where you will find an in-depth look at my approach to the UK’s foreign affairs, and how it is shaped by the principle of progressive realism’. Call me cynical, but the moment I see the word ‘progressive’, an alarm bell goes off in my head. My suspicions were confirmed as I continued reading. It would appear that he has tacitly endorsed the ethnic cleansing of Armenians in Central Asia. ‘Azerbaijan has been able to liberate territory it lost in the early 1990s,’ Lammy writes on PR.
The Foreign Secretary seems to approve of Azerbaijan’s capture of Nagorno-Karabakh, a breakaway region of Azerbaijan controlled by Armenia. In flagrant violation of international law, Baku ethnically cleansed approximately 120,000 Christian Armenians last year. Furthermore, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has close ties with Moscow. Endorsing a dictatorship over a fledgling post-Soviet liberal democracy? That doesn’t sound very progressive to me. It’s a shame that Lammy failed to look on a map and find out the location of the Rose Revolution. It was in Georgia, next door to Armenia.
Maybe he didn’t write the post for mitigation purposes? But since it’s a personal blog, surely you should accept full responsibility for anything that is published under your name? Now he is in a bind. He faces backlash from the Azeris if he apologises. You incur the wrath of the other 50 per cent when you take a position on something you barely understand. This is something that should be written in large font and stapled to the door of every cabinet office in the Western world.
To make this solely about David Lammy would be unfair. You will be shocked to hear that Sir Keir Starmer has added more overeducated, equally useless individuals to his cabinet.
Whereas Lammy appears to be a dead cert to win the coveted stupidest MP of the year award, Anneliese Dodds, the Women and Equalities Minister, is his main rival. Although Dodds holds a PhD from the London School of Economics, it appears that she lacks a basic understanding of the biological reality of sex. She has refused to amend the Equality Act in order to make the legal definition of a woman more explicit. According to the legislation, ‘sex’ refers to your gender identity rather than your biological sex. Closing this loophole would stop transgender women from entering women-only spaces, such as changing rooms, as well as prevent them from joining sports teams that are exclusively made up of women.
What’s abundantly clear to me is that this government appoints people with the IQ of a broken refrigerator. It will inevitably backfire if it is overrun with managerial elites who have no regard for or knowledge of the politics of its people. Since Labour won the election, Keir Starmer’s approval rating has dropped by an astounding 45 percentage points. Rishi Sunak is more well-liked than he is. Eventually, the ruling class is replaced – Pareto called this the ‘circulation of elites’. Nonetheless, hatred toward the powerful is typically incremental. The problem is Labour has barely stepped foot in the door. How long before Starmer is turfed out? Place your bets now.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/09/keirs-cabinet-of-curiosities/
***************************************All my main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
https://westpsychol.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH -- new site)
https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)
https://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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