Displaying posts published in

August 2020

The Thin Veneer of American Civilization By Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/08/the-thin-veneer-of-american-civilization/

In a flash, it’s been blown away, revealing the barbarism beneath. The seeds of destruction were planted long ago.

 N ine months ago, New York was a thriving, though poorly governed, metropolis. It was coasting on the more or less good governance of its prior two mayors and on its ancestral role as the global nexus of finance and capital.

The city is now something out of a postmodern apocalyptic movie, reeling from the effects of a neutron bomb. Ditto in varying degrees Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco — the anti-broken-windows metropolises of America. Walking in San Francisco today reminds me of visiting Old Cairo in 1973, although the latter lacked the needles and feces of the former.

At the present increasing rate of police defunding, homeless encampments, the emptying of jails and prisons, the green-lighting of rioting and vandalism, the flight of the wealthy, the revolutionary change to Skype/Zoom tele-working, and the exodus of upper-middle-class liberal families to safe houses in the New York and New England countryside, once beautiful New York City is in danger of becoming the nation’s aneurysm. That is, after the “recovery,” it and other blue cities may be seen as permanent weak veins and arteries prone to sudden fatal hemorrhaging that could implode at any moment, and thus may become metaphorically tied off, as the country reroutes around them.

MADISON CAWTHORN (R-NORTH CAROLINA DISTRICT 11)

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/jim-treacher/2020/08/11/nc-republican-madison-cawthorn-gets-smeared-for-celebrating-hitlers-loss-n774081

NC Republican Madison Cawthorn Gets Smeared for Celebrating Hitler’s Loss By Jim Treacher

I know only three things about North Carolina Republican Madison Cawthorn: 1) He’s young and photogenic, 2) He was in a car accident as a teenager and is now in a wheelchair, and 3) He’s running for Congress and is favored to win. That last item explains the smear-driven media coverage we’re starting to see. Journalists and other Democrats are starting to panic that this kid is a threat to their power, so they’ll say anything to take him down.

Anti-Lockdown Dr. Scott Atlas Joins Coronavirus Task Force: Is Fauci Finally Out? By Megan Fox

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/megan-fox/2020/08/11/anti-lockdown-dr-scott-atlas-joins-coronavirus-task-force-is-fauci-finally-out-n776616

President Trump announced Monday that Dr. Scott Atlas is joining the White House Coronavirus Task Force. Dr. Atlas is a former chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center and a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Before joining the team, Atlas penned an op-ed in The Hill that showed his approach to the coronavirus outbreak is much different than that of Anthony “Chicken Little” Fauci, who favors draconian lockdowns and now wants people to wear goggles to avoid getting a virus that most people recover from easily.

Here are some excerpts of the piece Atlas wrote, titled “The data is in-stop the panic and end the isolation.”

The tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic appears to be entering the containment phase. Tens of thousands of Americans have died, and Americans are now desperate for sensible policymakers who have the courage to ignore the panic and rely on facts. Leaders must examine accumulated data to see what has actually happened, rather than keep emphasizing hypothetical projections; combine that empirical evidence with fundamental principles of biology established for decades; and then thoughtfully restore the country to function.

Five key facts are being ignored by those calling for continuing the near-total lockdown.

How Forced Isolation Makes Huge Power Grabs Possible Today’s wannabe social controllers are clearly using the virus as a sort of obedience school where we can be conditioned through isolation to conform to their demands.By Stella Morabito

https://thefederalist.com/2020/08/11/how-forced-isolation-makes-huge-power-grabs-possible/

Social isolation has always been the primary weapon in the totalitarian arsenal. Tyrants know how to manipulate the primal human terror of isolation through threats of defamation, firings, and worse.

Pick a dictator, any dictator—Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Mao Zedong, Jim Jones (dictator of his own realm)—and you’ll find a common pattern of imposing aloneness and the terror of it on their prey. You can probably name more examples from the world stage as well as from smaller domains. They may vary in their methods and territories, but all use social pressure to live out the ancient principle of divide-and-conquer. As political philosopher Hannah Arendt noted, totalitarians must first get people isolated against one other in order to rule over them.

Tactics for grabbing power always involve some form of imposed isolation through social pressures: mob swarming, forced false confessions; struggle sessions; hostility towards family, religion, and history; snitch culture; censorship; constant propaganda; and more. “Cancel culture” is just a new term for an old custom of tyrants who use social pressures to go after the raw power they crave. Former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss aptly described cancel culture as social murder.

We should keep all of this in mind as we navigate the fallout of today’s leftist war on reality. Social murderers on Twitter will swarm and attack anyone who states sex distinctions are real, as author J.K. Rowling showed. The hit men of “white fragility” will tell you it’s racist to be colorblind in the tradition of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Susan Rice Was a Diplomatic Disaster Joe Biden doesn’t need a running mate who has shown such poor judgment. By Bret Stephens

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/10/opinion/susan-rice-africa.html

In its 2011 World Report, Human Rights Watch noted the following about Ethiopia under the rule of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi: The ruling party had won parliamentary elections with 99.6 percent of the vote. Supporters of opposition parties endured months of constant intimidation. Journalists and human-rights activists had been forced to leave the country. And hundreds of political prisoners were “in jail and at risk of torture and ill-treatment.”

Meles died the following year. Susan Rice, then the Obama administration’s ambassador to the United Nations, flew to Addis Ababa to deliver a eulogy. 

“Prime Minister Meles was an uncommon leader, a rare visionary, and a true friend to me and many,” she said. While briefly allowing that the two could disagree on issues of democracy and human rights, she showered the deceased strongman with praise. He was, she said, “uncommonly wise,” “brilliant” and “selfless.”

“I suspect we all feel it deeply unfair, to lose such a talented and vital leader so soon, when he still had so much more to give,” she said.

Days later, the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was set ablaze by terrorists; four Americans were killed; and Rice became notorious for offering some factually challenged talking points regarding the cause of the attack. That performance likely sank her chances of succeeding Hillary Clinton as secretary of state. But it’s her overall record as a U.S. diplomat in Africa that should be examined more closely as she is among the final few whom Joe Biden is considering as a running mate.

Israel’s High Court hits a new low: Ruthie Blum

https://www.jns.org/opinion/israels-high-court-hits-a-new-low/

That left-wing activists consider the demolition of terrorists’ homes a cruel form of “collective punishment” is par for the course. But judges are not supposed to base their rulings on political bias.

The ruling by Israel’s High Court of Justice against the home demolition of Palestinian terrorist Nizmi Abu Bakr is the latest example of judicial overreach based on political bias. Abu Bakr confessed to and was indicted on charges of murdering 21-year-old Israel Defense Forces’ Staff Sgt. Amit Ben-Yigal on May 12.

Ben-Yigal, a member of the Golani Reconnaissance Battalion, was one of the soldiers involved in a raid on the Palestinian Authority-controlled village of Yabad in Samaria to apprehend four suspected terrorists. After completing their mission at around 4:30 a.m. on May 12, the troops began to exit the village on foot.

At this point, approximately one dozen residents of the area began pummeling them with bricks and cinder blocks from surrounding rooftops. Abu Bakr targeted Ben-Yigal, making sure to hit him at an angle from which his protective helmet would be of no use.

The 49-year-old terrorist’s aim at the young Israeli’s head was impeccable. Though Ben-Yigal was administered first aid on the scene, he was pronounced dead on arrival at the Rambam Health Care Campus in Haifa.

Subscribe to The JNS Daily Syndicate by email and never miss our top stories

He was the first IDF soldier to be killed in action in 2020, and was promoted, posthumously, to the rank of Sgt. First Class. He was killed a mere month before the end of his military service.

The Democrats’ abandonment of the Jews By Joan Swirsky

http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/swirsky/200810

In 1984, David S. Wyman, a professor of history at Amherst College, published The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941–1945, in which he documented the degree to which leftist icons like President Franklin Delano Roosevelt were presented with irrefutable evidence of Jewish genocide and did nothing to stop the mass murder of six-million Jews in Hitler’s Europe.

Jewish leaders who were given an “audience” with FDR implored him, beseeched him to intervene in this unprecedented annihilation, and showed him graphic evidence of:

Jews being herded into asphyxiating cattle cars on their way to concentration camps,
Jewish infants and children being ripped from the arms of their parents,
Jews clawing at the walls of gas chambers until their last-gasp deaths.

But FDR did nothing! If there is blood on the hands of any politician in the last thousand years, it is on the hands of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

And yet, leftist American Jews––to this day––celebrate his presidency.

MY SAY: PAULINE KAEL ON NIXON IN 1972

In 1972 Nixon won the election in a landslide despite the hatred of the media and academics and general “liberals’ who preferred the Socialist leanings of George McGovern.

The famous witty film critic  Pauline Kael famously commented:

 ‘I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.’”

I know what she meant….I can feel the silent Trump supporters….rsk

Cotton to Higher Ed: Loosen Up or Lose Your Money This is a campaign issue that frightens the Left, and with good reason. Republicans should move swiftly. By Mark Bauerlein

https://amgreatness.com/2020/08/10/cotton-to-higher-ed-loosen-up-or-lose-your-money/

This is how bad higher education has gotten: Republican Senators who worry about federal overreach and don’t wish to harm large institutions in their own states have decided that colleges and universities have fully abandoned their Ivory Tower mission and can only be repaired from the outside. The remedy is called the “Campus Free Speech Restoration Act,” which was introduced by Tom Cotton. Stanley Kurtz explains the salient elements of the Act here. 

The proposal is simple. “Under CAFSRA,” Kurtz writes, “public colleges and universities that promulgate restrictive speech codes, so-called free-speech zones, and other unconstitutional speech policies will lose their eligibility to receive federal student loans and grants through the Higher Education Act.” Private universities will face lesser scrutiny, required only to disclose their rules for free speech and adhere to them or else face lawsuits.

That’s it: Protect free speech or the federal faucet is shut off. College leaders will have a decision to make. They can maintain illiberal practices such as the sequestered free speech zones (which cabin free speech to postage-stamp areas of campus and have even led the ACLU to protest them) and thereby see federal dollars disappear, or they can dismantle those practices and keep the money coming. They can revise their speech codes to fit the First Amendment and lose no funding, or they can maintain those codes and suffer at the bottom line.

The law has several provisions that Kurtz enumerates regarding complaint procedures and review processes, the role of the U.S. Department of Education, etc. that might slow down its passage. A few Republican legislators may claim discomfort with federal intrusion into state and private entities, although massive federal subsidies to higher education happen all the time and, currently, support these unconstitutional practices. Democrats likely will oppose it for the obvious reason that higher education has become a liberal stronghold and pipeline. The censorious campus has worked very well for the Left. Democrats won’t want to change it.

Why We Can’t Afford to Abandon Taiwan The only way to prevent Chinese ascendancy and a potential war is to make it clear that we will not accept their bullying. By Anton Lupan

https://amgreatness.com/2020/08/10/why-we-cant-afford-to-abandon-taiwan/

In the Munich Conference of September 1938, Great Britain and France threw Czechoslovakia to the wolves. In order to appease Adolf Hitler, the Western democracies forced the Czechs to give up the Sudetenland, a heavily fortified region on the border with Germany. This region contained millions of ethnic Germans which Hitler wanted to incorporate into his empire, and the German dictator claimed this would be his “last territorial demand.”

Of course, not long after his “last territorial demand” was satisfied, Hitler invaded and annexed the rest of the country (with the exception of a small Slovak rump state that became a German vassal), and then invaded Poland, starting the deadliest conflict in human history and resulting in at least 60 million deaths. The Western democracies easily could have stopped Hitler at Munich and prevented World War II—we now know that some of Hitler’s top generals were ready to arrest him if the negotiations failed—but instead, cowardice and appeasement won the day. 

In the next few years, it is likely that America will find itself in the position that France and Britain were in during the Munich Conference, and we would do well to learn from their mistakes. Only this time, the country facing the threat of annexation will be Taiwan.

Like Czechoslovakia, Taiwan is a small nation, a prosperous democracy, and a balancing force against an aggressive, totalitarian neighbor: Communist China. And as with Czechoslovakia’s fate at Munich, allowing Taiwan to be gobbled up would only embolden China, leading to more aggression, more territorial claims, and, eventually, the outbreak of war.