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January 2021

Watching as the USA Falls Prey to the Allure of Communism By Eileen F. Toplansky

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/01/watching_as_the_usa_falls_prey_to_the_allure_of_communism.html

Repeatedly, one needs to ask: how is it possible that such a vile and discredited system as communism continues to gain traction among so many people?

Like others before me, I am astonished at the prescience of W. Cleon Skousen, author of The Naked Communist, who, in 1958, explained “how many well-meaning citizens have become involved in pushing forward the Communist program without realizing it.  They became converted to Communist objectives because they accepted superficial Communist slogans.”  Skousen succinctly explained 45 communist goals, and, sadly, Americans have either been bludgeoned into accepting far too many of them or have naïvely accepted them without realizing their ultimate consequences.

Goal #31: “Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of ‘the big picture.’  Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over.”

Consider the execrable move to incorporate the error-filled “1619 Project” into schools and marvel at the success of communists to ensure that American children will come to despise our foundational ideas.  In fact, in his first day as president, Biden ended the 1776 Commission to Create a Patriotic History Curriculum that is in direct contrast to the “1619 Project,” which reflects a decidedly anti-American, factually incorrect, and blatantly biased program that is currently being pushed through the U.S. education system.

National Review and All its Many Ways of Insulting Conservatives By Christopher Skeet

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/01/national_review_and_all_its_many_ways_of_insulting_conservatives.html

The writers and columnists at National Review just had a great week.  Joe Biden was inaugurated, President Trump is gone, and their writers can scratch off their calendars the upcoming rush week at the Lincoln Project frat house and get back to pretending they are conservatives.  It’s been four years since they last parroted the Paul Ryan/Mitch McConnell if-only-we-were-in-power shtick, and they made up much lost ground with a slew of articles critical of Biden’s first days in office. 

But prior to that, they collectively unloaded on the Trump presidency in a manner that dropped all pretense of detached objectivism (implausible as it was) and chortled with unrestrained glee. 

Here is a recap of some of last week’s articles:

1) Dan McLaughlin calls Biden’s inauguration a “day of liberation” for “conservative thinkers, planners, advocates, and policy-makers.”  Great.  Now they can finally get back to successfully promoting and implementing conservative ideas just like they did back in…back in…remind me again? 

Unmasking Samantha Power She’s never explained her needless snooping on Michael Flynn.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/unmasking-samantha-power-11611526126?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

Presidents deserve the advisers they choose absent significant cause. In the case of Joe Biden’s choice to lead the U.S. Agency for International Development, Samantha Power, one question to ask is how honest she was about her role in snooping on Michael Flynn.

In late 2016 Mr. Flynn was the incoming national security adviser for Donald Trump. Mr. Flynn’s conversation with Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. was recorded by U.S. spooks, and his name leaked after being “unmasked” by several figures in the Obama Administration. Who did the leaking—a felony—has never been solved. But the leak fed the media fires over Mr. Trump’s alleged collusion with the Russians, and Mr. Flynn was unjustly prosecuted.

At the time Ms. Power was U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. She was a political appointee and not an intelligence professional. Yet Congress looked into it and found that over her last year in office Ms. Power had unmasked nearly 300 people, without any concrete explanation of why she needed this information.

During an Oct. 13, 2017, appearance before the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Adam Schiff (D., Calif.) asked her directly about the unmasking and leaking of Gen. Flynn’s name. “I did want to get you on the record,” he told her. Ms. Power categorically denied she leaked his name—or any classified information.

Your Government is Afraid of You by Chris Farrell

https://www.wsj.com/news/opinion?mod=nav_top_section

The Swamp is terrified of Trump – still. That explains their fixation on eradicating him and his movement.

You are also supposed to ignore the facts concerning months-long violent protests with killings and burnings across America’s cities by Antifa and BLM. Months ago, Washington DC mayor Muriel Bowser, demanded that the National Guard withdraw from her city amid violent demonstrations. She then named a street after those demonstrators and allowed them to paint their motto across the entire street.

Watch for the same sort of public treatment and language applied to Trump supporters going forward. It is consistent with a government that is in fear of its own people. The type of government that has 25,000 soldiers guarding a few politicians in an empty city.

The Swamp is terrified of Trump – still. That explains their fixation on eradicating him and his movement. “Trumpism” was not extinguished when Joe Biden raised his right hand to become the 46th president.

Fear grips The Swamp. Here is some evidence: the military occupation of Washington, DC; claims of “insurrection”; Speaker Pelosi’s interference with the military command structure; more baseless claims of dark Russian conspiracies; serious discussion of reeducation camps for Trump supporters; marginalizing and criminalizing all things “Trump” – those are all expressions of fear.

Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and President Biden keep using the word “insurrectionists” to describe the rowdy Trumpsters who raided the Capitol building unlawfully two weeks ago. That is deliberate. It makes all the respectable, career politicians, government drones and DC political operatives appear to be “victims” – draped in the flag and bravely defending the Constitution. It also criminalizes all of their opposition. Not just the protestors who raided the Capitol, but all Trump supporters – across the USA – and those opposed to The Swamp mentality to which we have now returned.

China Overtakes U.S. as World’s Leading Destination for Foreign Direct Investment Flows into America nearly halved as Covid-19 dragged on the economy in 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-overtakes-u-s-as-worlds-leading-destination-for-foreign-direct-investment-11611511200?mod=hp_lead_pos2

China overtook the U.S. as the world’s top destination for new foreign direct investment last year, as the Covid-19 pandemic amplifies an eastward shift in the center of gravity of the global economy.

New investments by overseas businesses into the U.S., which for decades held the No. 1 spot, fell 49% in 2020, according to U.N. figures released Sunday, as the country struggled to curb the spread of the new coronavirus and economic output slumped.

China, long ranked No. 2, saw direct investments by foreign companies climb 4%, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development said. Beijing used strict lockdowns to largely contain Covid-19 after the disease first emerged in a central Chinese city, and China’s gross domestic product grew even as most other major economies contracted last year.

The 2020 investment numbers underline China’s move toward the center of a global economy long dominated by the U.S.—a shift accelerated during the pandemic as China has cemented its position as the world’s factory floor and expanded its share of global trade.

Investment RetreatsForeign investment in the U.S. fell sharply in2020 as the country ceded its position as thetop destination for overseas businesses toChina.FDI inflows for some leading hosteconomies, change from 2019 to 2020Source: United Nations Conference on Trade andDevelopment

ChinaU.S.IrelandSingaporeIndiaBrazilCanadaMexico-60%-40-20020

While China attracted more new inflows last year, the total stock of foreign investment in the U.S. remains much larger, reflecting the decades it has spent as the most attractive location for foreign businesses looking to expand outside their home markets.

What Can Israel Learn from the Descent of Lebanon? By Lt. Col. (res.) Dr. Mordechai Kedar

https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/israel-lebanon-lessons/

Lebanon was founded to serve as a home for Christians and other minority groups in the region. Over the years, however, it gave up its national character and symbols and began to fall apart from within. If Israel does not learn from the Lebanese case, it could find itself in a situation no less serious.

Lebanon, like Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and Israel, was born on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire after its lands were conquered by Britain, which, together with France, was given a mandate by the League of Nations to establish independent states in those territories. The idea that dominated the Arabic-speaking intellectual-nationalist world was to set up a big state in the region that would include the Muslim, Christian, Druze, Alawite, and Jewish religious communities.

But many of the Christians in Lebanon, particularly the Maronites, didn’t like this idea, as they were well aware of the fate the Armenians and the Assyrians had suffered in WWI—a dark period during which more than a million Armenian Christians were murdered by Muslims in strange and barbarous ways. They knew a big Syrian state would have a large Muslim majority while the Christians would constitute a minority, just as they had in the days of the Muslim Ottoman Empire.

When the Ottoman Empire collapsed, the Lebanese Christians saw an opportunity to free themselves of the Muslim majority’s yoke. Their guiding principle was that the Lebanese state could solve their problem as Christians. The French—who held the Syria mandate—identified with the Christians’ yearning for independence and cooperated with the effort to turn Lebanon into a separate state for them.

Biden’s First Signal on China: Fond Memories by Gordon G. Chang

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16986/biden-china-signal

In “Four Principles to Guide U.S. Policy Toward China,” the Atlantic Council’s Ali Wyne suggests a weakened America needs to accommodate the People’s Republic of China.

China also cannot get along with the United States, which maintained China-friendly policies for more than four decades. In fact, People’s Daily, the most authoritative publication in China, in May 2019 carried a piece that declared a “people’s war” on America.

China’s “unrestricted warfare” on the United States has taken a toll. Recently, Chinese leaders deliberately spread the coronavirus beyond their borders, making deaths in America mass murder as well as “genocide,” as that term is defined by Article II of the 1948 Genocide Convention.

Moreover, in late January of last year, U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents in the International Falls Port of Entry in Minnesota seized 900,000 counterfeit $1 bills, made in China…. Nobody, in China’s near-total surveillance state, can counterfeit American currency without authorities knowing about it. [C]ounterfeiting another country’s currency is considered an act of war.

Leaders of democracies, despite all the good will in the world, will find they cannot cooperate with thugs.

“I was asked a long time ago when I was with Xi Jinping,” said President Joe Biden in his first hours in office, as he swore in officials, “and I was on the Tibetan plateau with him, and he asked me in a private dinner he and I and we each had an interpreter he said can you define America for me, and I said yes and I meant it. I said I can do it in one word, one word: possibilities. We believe anything is possible if we set our mind to it, unlike any other country in the world.”

In Beijing, Communist Party leaders must be ecstatic. For one thing, during the 10-minute ceremony Biden mentioned no other country.

Moreover, ruler Xi Jinping will think the Tibetan plateau reference significant. Biden’s words, after all, came one day after then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a determination that China was committing crimes against humanity, including genocide, against minorities. Pompeo’s declaration presumably includes the minority Tibetans. Beijing is suppressing them in many of the same ways as it is liquidating Uyghurs, the focus of his historic statement.

Xi and other Chinese leaders will doubtless take Biden’s fond recollection as a sign the new president is not serious about China’s atrocities against minority peoples.

A Hardcore Libertarian Take on the Storming of the Capitol Building Our country is not to be equated with our Capitol. By Ilana Mercer

https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/24/a-hardcore-libertarian-take-on-the-storming-of-the-capitol-building/

Hardcore libertarians differentiate between pro-Trump patriots and Black Lives Matter detritus. 

BLM rioters trashed, looted, and leveled their countrymen’s private property, their businesses. 

Democratic stormtroopers harassed their fellow Americans—meek men and women in eateries, in shopping malls, in the inner sanctum of their homes—often forcing innocents to kneel or recite repulsive, self-incriminating racial catechisms. 

These Mao-like cultural revolutionaries descended like locusts on places where their fellow Americans shop and socialize, sadistically threatening, and often visiting, physical harm upon their countrymen, unless they knelt before them like slaves. 

In contrast, the ragtag men and women of the MAGA movement stormed only the seat of power and corruption that is the State. 

Yet, in reply to the fact that “entire cities were burned to the ground” by the Left’s militarized BLM troops, some of the staunchest of conservatives, staffers at Breitbart, purportedly concluded in error that “storming the Capitol building” is much worse than “than burning down strip malls.” 

Wrong.

Hardcore libertarians, very plainly, think the opposite. Like us or not, the radical, libertarian propertarian—who does not live inside and off the Beltway—will strongly disagree with the contention of the Trump-blaming Breitbarters. 

A certain kind of libertarian, the good kind, distinguishes clearly between those who, like BLM, would trash, loot and level private property—the livelihoods and businesses of private citizens—and between those who would storm the plush seats of state power and corruption. 

The River of Forgetfulness Before we are all reprogrammed, remember for a bit longer that the reset of memory and truth is not just a political agenda, but a holistic effort to redefine our past, present, and future.  By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/24/the-river-of-forgetfulness/

Riotous rogue Trump supporters who broke into the Capitol on January 6 were properly and widely condemned by conservatives. They were somewhat reminiscent of the mobs of fanatic leftists and union members that a decade ago stormed the Wisconsin state capitol at Madison, or the unpunished hundreds of rioters who created havoc on Washington, D.C. streets during the Trump 2016 inauguration. We expect the Capitol stormers will be punished, and not in the lax fashion of the latter two groups that were not. 

Within a few days, the talking points were finalized that all of Donald Trump’s supporters deserved blame for the violence. That riot, the Trump defeat, and the loss of the Senate have greenlighted left-wing talk of “deprogramming,” “de-Baathification,” “re-educating,” and “reprogramming” half the country to ensure they think correctly and act properly from now on—the exact methodology of such brain rinsing apparently to be announced later. 

So we are beginning a great reprogramming of America. The construction of Trump and all of his supporters as abettors, terrorists, seditionists, and traitors is certainly proving useful. After the Capitol conundrum, we have seen over the past two weeks a coordinated and synchronized effort by Amazon, Twitter, and Google to destroy Parler, a small conservative-friendly rival to their social media and internet monopolies. More of such humanitarian taking care of business will follow—all as preemption for the most leftwing agenda in a half-century now rolling out. 

Round-up Time

Silicon Valley’s continued use of social activism to mask 19th-century robber-baron monopolization of its markets remains diabolically brilliant. After all, those who have rings in their noses, and wear tie-dye and flip-flops cannot have anything in common with either John D. Rockefeller, Jay Fisk,  or Big Brother, right? 

Don’t we remember how hipster Apple idealists once fought stodgy Microsoft? Or how liberal techies at Microsoft earlier took on dour, big blue, coat-and-tie IBM and “print” media? Surely, good Harvard drop-out tech revolutionaries cannot possibly have become bad, trillion-dollar corporate cartels? 

Serious Big Brother was never coming to America kicking and screaming in a suit and in a mile-long tie, but rather eagerly welcomed in with jeans and sneakers without socks. The First Amendment could always survive a crude, inebriated Joe McCarthy, but not so easily a social justice ex-barista, doing vanity selfies about diversity, egged on by the “progressive” media, while saving the planet, and “reining” in a hurtful, racist media.

The Conservative Purge Isn’t Over, It’s Just Getting Cranked Up

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/01/25/the-conservative-purge-isnt-over-its-just-getting-cranked-up/

Not quite two weeks ago we noted that Big Tech was settling the family business with its suspensions, bans, and deletions of then-President Donald Trump and as many of his supporters as it could pull into its dragnet. It was only a start. The left wants to wipe the right from the political map as quickly and effectively as possible.

Playing the role this week of Michael Corleone, who in the first of “The Godfather” installments eliminated his families’ enemies, is the Democratic Party. Congressional Democrats are going forward, with the blessing of the new president, whose plea for unity is clearly a sham, with a domestic terrorism bill in both chambers of Congress.

The public is being told the legislation is needed to thwart “the potential threat of more terrorist attacks in Washington and around the country,” says Rep. Brad Schneider, an Illinois Democrat and co-sponsor of the House version. Among other co-sponsors is Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., who in July denied that Antifa, which was wrecking Portland at the time, even existed.

One lone Democrat stands out among this jihad, and, unfortunately, she’s no longer in Congress. Former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii told Fox News on Friday that should the bill become law, it would undermine “our civil liberties, our freedoms in our Constitution,” while “targeting of almost half of the country.” That half being a collection of Trump supporters, conservatives, Christians, and anyone who refuses to go along with the Democrats’ legislative agenda, surrender to Black Lives Matter intimidation, and yield to the dominant narrative.