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June 2021

Anatomy of the Woke Madness How did such collective madness infect a once pragmatic and commonsensical America? By Victor Davis Hanson

/https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/13/anatomy-of-the-woke-madness/

Wokeism has become our most popular secular religion—at least for a moment dethroning climate change. It reduces all of the past and present into puerile binaries between “whites” and “non-whites.”

Its aim is for the present generation to rewrite our history—whether by The 1619 Project and cancel culture or iconoclastic statue-toppling and Trotskyization of names and places. Wokeism becomes a child’s morality tale of noble non-white victims versus villainous white victimizers. Erasing the past and its language supposedly fuels a recalibration of the future, all in the here and now, a holy Year Zero

In the process, wokeism has done a lot of damage to America, and will do even more if left unchecked. Here are its chief characteristics.

Elites vs. Elites

First, remember that wokeism is a top-down phenomenon. It started in academia with “critical race theory” and “critical legal theory.” These are bastard offshoots of harebrained “critical theory,” which arose from a demoralized and adrift Europe after the cataclysms of two devastating European-spawned world wars.

These ‘theories” are merely adolescent delusions that norms, customs, traditions, laws, and rules are just arbitrary “constructs.” Thus they should have no authority over those whom they “oppress.” These relativist props are the tools of the white male hierarchy to gain and consolidate their “power.” So they can only be resisted by rejecting all these insidious “norms,” whether  the canons of physics and math, jurisprudence, standardized test scores, or the idea that police keep the “peace.”

Outside of the campus, the media, the entertainment industry, the corporate boardroom, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley, thousands of rank-and-file social justice warrior demonstrators are not demanding, for example, to enroll women in Special Forces combat units. Grassroots America does not insist on subsidized transgendered surgeries.

Instead, leftist Washington politicos and bureaucrats pressure the Pentagon brass, in quid pro quo fashion. The subtext is that those who promote woke policies are assured of promotion and future exemption from audit of lucrative retirement consulting for defense-related corporations.

The people⁠—that is, 51 percent of America—is not organizing for more cancel-culture censorship on Facebook, or even greater percentages of college admissions determined largely by race. Inner-city residents are not clamoring for less police patrolling. Defunding law enforcement is an elite obsession of those who do not live in insecure places.

Whether in the corporate boardroom or in Hollywood casting meetings or in the campus president’s office, race-based obsessions mostly reflect intramural wars between elites for the lucrative spoils of the one-percent’s news anchorships, roles in TV shows and commercials, diversity deanships, and admissions quotas to the Ivy League.

As a result, class considerations have vanished. They are replaced by absurd racial reductionism. For example, CNN mediocrity Don Lemon, by virtue of his race-mongering, can pose as a multimillionaire victim. The anonymous white deplorables at Walmart, caricatured as smelly in the Lisa Page-Peter Strozk text trove, are his proverbial anonymous oppressors.

Biden Administration Outsources U.S. Asylum Process to UN and Foreign NGOs in Mexico by Chris Farrell

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17436/us-asylum-process-mexico

American taxpayer money is being filtered through the UN to foreign non-profits assisting migrants trying to enter the U.S. Turning over any portion of our immigration process to the UN is a disaster waiting to happen.

Americans always have recourse to elections to replace ineffective and/or corrupt politicians. What recourse for accountability exists for UN officials and their NGO surrogates?

How does the Biden administration ensure the UN will respect U.S. sovereign national security interests related to persons entering our country?

Americans should know that UNHCR operations have not been without scandal and controversy. In April 2019, NBC News ran a three-part series called “Asylum for Sale,” detailing a seven-month long investigation across five countries which uncovered claims against UN officials.

The Biden administration is ignoring immigration law. The UN and non-profits are actively working to subvert and reverse U.S. immigration law.

The UN is squandering U.S. taxpayer money on organizations and processes that undermine our national security.

Most Americans are not even aware that the United Nations is hard at work implementing the Biden administration’s open borders policies for the U.S.-Mexican border. But UN agencies in Mexico play an important role in assisting migrants with U.S. asylum applications and quickly moving them north into the U.S. — currently at an unprecedented level.

The Biden administration has requested that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) channel U.S. funds to non-profit groups in Mexico for identifying and referring the “neediest” asylum seekers to U.S. officials. Reuters reporting on the question of “neediest” includes persons with medical conditions, those who have experienced long periods of displacement, sexual minorities and victims of crime, trafficking and sexual violence. Details are sparse concerning whether the UNHCR realizes a fee or percentage for their channeling efforts.

Palestinians: The Battle to Steal Reconstruction Funds by Khaled Abu Toameh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17466/gaza-reconstruction-funds

The Palestinian Authority says that it should be the only party in charge of the reconstruction and that all funds must be channeled through its government. Hamas, on the other hand, insists that the funds from the international community be sent directly to its coffers.

“The Palestinians must remove this Iranian occupation in Palestine so that they can live in peace.” — Nora Shanar, Saudi author, Elaph, May 10, 2021.

The message the Arabs and Muslims are sending to the Biden administration and other Western donors: Stop showering money on corrupt and failed Palestinian leaders whose stock-in-trade is purloining international funds. The Palestinians do not need money as much as they need new leaders whose commitment to the welfare of their people outweighs their interest in their own pockets.

Last month, Egypt succeeded in its effort to achieve a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. Since then, however, Egypt has been unable to secure an agreement between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority over the reconstruction of buildings and homes that were destroyed during the 11-day Israel-Hamas conflict.

Egypt has gone out of its way to help the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip after the recent round of fighting between Israel and Hamas.

First, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Sisi pledged $500 million to contribute to the reconstruction effort. (Qatar has promised a similar sum to help rebuild the Gaza Strip).

Second, Egypt dispatched the head of its General Intelligence Service, Abbas Kamel, to the Gaza Strip and West Bank for talks with leaders of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority about the reconstruction plan.

Third, Egypt sent dozens of bulldozers, cranes and engineers to the Gaza Strip as part of its effort to assist with the reconstruction.

Fourth, Egypt invited representatives of various Palestinian factions, including the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, to Cairo for talks on ways of helping the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip who had lost their homes during the fighting with Israel. Egypt was also doubtless hoping that the faction leaders would finally reach agreement on ending the dispute between Hamas and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah faction.

Prime Minister-designate Naftali Bennett’s address at the swearing-in of Israel’s 36th government

https://www.jns.org/prime-minister-designate-naftali-bennetts-address-at-the-swear

I want to begin my words by saying, on my own behalf, and in the name of the members of the designated government, in the name of this House and in the name of all the citizens of Israel—thank you. Thank you to the outgoing prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, for your many years of service, replete with achievements, for the sake of the State of Israel. As prime minister you acted throughout many years to embolden Israel’s political, security and economic strength. I saw you from up-close, in extensive security deliberations, late into the night, investigating, making inquiries and considerations out of a sense of grave responsibility.

Benjamin and Sara Netanyahu, over the years, we have not always agreed, but we have both sacrificed much on a personal level in order to serve our people, the people of Israel. Expressing gratitude is a fundamental principle in Judaism. This is the time for the people to say to you: thank you.

I also want to take this opportunity to express my deep appreciation to the tenth president of the State of Israel, Reuven Rivlin, for his years as president, as Speaker of the Knesset, and as a public servant. And to congratulate President-elect Isaac Herzog and wish him much success. God willing, we will work together very well.

Honored ladies and gentlemen, this is a special moment. The moment in which the baton of leading the people and the country passes—as in a relay race—to the next generation. It is a sacred endowment.

The State of Israel is not “just another country.” It is the dream of generations of Jews—from Marrakech to Budapest, from Baghdad to San Francisco—a dream we merited to see realized every day before our very eyes. Each generation has its own challenges, and out of each generation comes the leaders that can overcome them.

The external challenges we face are great: the Iranian nuclear project, which is moving towards a crucial point; the ongoing war on terror; Israel’s image in the world and the unfair treatment it receives in international institutions—these are all sizable and complex tasks.

At this time, we are also facing an internal challenge. The ongoing rift in the nation, as we see in these very moments, which continues to rip apart the seams that hold us together, and has thrown us—one election after another—into a maelstrom of hatred and infighting.

Such quarrels, between the people who are supposed to be running the country, led to paralysis. One who quarrels cannot function.

Why Israel must repossess the Philadelphi Corridor This was land Israel gave away for peace but no peace ever came of it – instead endless Arab aggression. Victor Sharpe

When the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel was signed in 1979, the 14 km (8.7 mile) security and buffer zone known as the Philadelphi Corridor was under Israel’s control. Its purpose was to prevent the illegal importation into the Gaza Strip from Egypt of weapons and terrorists to be used against the Jewish state. The Oslo Accords, signed in 1995, allowed Israel to retain the security corridor, but it soon became apparent that Sinai Bedouin and the Palestinian Arabs were digging ever more sophisticated smuggling tunnels under it.

Then-U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice urged Israel to vacate the vital security strip separating Egyptian Sinai from the Gaza Strip as a “peaceful gesture” to the Palestinian Arabs. This proved to be another land for peace disaster in which the Arabs receive the land but the Israelis don’t receive peace.

Following the infamous and tragic disengagement from Gaza in 2005, forced upon the residents of Gush Katif by Ariel Sharon, Israel ceded control of the Philadelphi Corridor to the Palestinian Authority in September of that year. Meanwhile, extensive smuggling continued. It was only a matter of time before Hamas evicted their Fatah rivals in a bloody coup—which they did in 2007. Hamas, with its charter calling for Israel’s extermination, has ruled the Gaza Strip since then, including the Philadelphi Corridor.

Ahmed Qurei, the former P.A. prime minister, once asked Tzipi Livni, Israel’s erstwhile and left-wing foreign minister, if Israel would repossess the Corridor to seal the border and cut off supplies to Hamas, the P.A.’s deadly rival. Apparently, Livni did nothing, and Hamas has been greatly strengthened militarily ever since. It is, nevertheless, crystal clear that failure to repossess this vitally strategic area now, or very soon, will spell dire security problems for Israel.

What if Egypt should fall again under the control of the Muslim Brotherhood, as it did when Hosni Mubarak was president? There would then be no more need for smuggling tunnels beneath the Egyptian-Gaza border. Instead, endless fleets of trucks would bring military supplies into the Strip from Egypt. Only by fully controlling the Philadelphi Corridor can Israel stem such a lethal tide.

Despite President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s control of Egypt, Egyptian state media, like that of Hamas and the P.A., openly proclaims its adherence to Islam’s eternal requirement that all lands once conquered in the name of Allah must, if lost, be warred on until regained for Allah. This is not extreme or radical Islam. This is authentic Islam, and the non-Muslim world ignores it at its peril. Accordingly, there can never be a lasting peace between Israel and the Muslim world; “peace now” and the “two-state solution” are simply dreams.

Therefore, Israel should repossess the Philadelphi Corridor for its own security and survival. Doing so will no doubt evoke screams of rage from the morally compromised world—but these voices will condemn Israel whatever it does. So it is surely better to be hanged in the media and the international corridors of power as a lion than as a sheep.

Scientific American is not scientific and not American By Ethel C. Fenig

For over 175 years the magazine Scientific American has bragged that it covers

the advances in research and discovery that are changing our understanding of the world and shaping our lives.  (snip) Authoritative, engaging features, news, opinion and multimedia stories from journalists and expert authors — including more than 200 Nobel Prize winners — provide need-to-know coverage, insights and illumination of the most important developments at the intersection of science and society.

However, around six years ago the American segment of the publication changed as it was purchased by a private German-British conglomerate, Springer Nature, which has affiliates and publications worldwide.  And international controversies to go along with its international nature such as highly credible accusations of succumbing to demands for censorship from Communist China against research from scientists in Tibet and independent Taiwan.   

Not very scientific.  

Further veering from science, the magazine entered the political realm for the first time in the November, 2020 election, endorsing Joe Biden for president because well, he is so scientific.  Or something.  And Donald J.  Trump is not.  Or something.

An Explanation of Tactics to Fundamentally Transform America By Janet Levy

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/06/an_explanation_of_tactics_to_fundamentally_transform_america.html

In 1984, former KGB officer Yuri Bezmenov, who defected to the West in the 1970s, alerted Americans to the methods the Soviet secret service was using to subvert our political system.  The aim of the agency, he said, was gradual “ideological subversion” or “psychological warfare.”

Using ample video footage of the late Bezmenov, Brainwashed America — the latest documentary from filmmaker, radio host, and author Brannon Howse — exposes how dangerously far this process of undermining American culture has advanced.  Howse’s conclusions are based on thirty years of study of the history, utilization, and advancement of brainwashing in America.  He defines brainwashing as “a method that manipulates and modifies a person’s emotions, attitudes, and beliefs” and indoctrination as a subtle, pedagogic process “to induce someone to give up basic political, social, and religious beliefs and attitudes, and to accept contrasting regimented ideas.”

In the mid-1980s, the former spy had delineated the phases of the Soviet operation in America: demoralization, destabilization, chaos, and normalization (when communism takes hold).  This came to be called Bezmenov’s “Soviet subversion model.”  As early as 1984, he had claimed that the process of demoralization — turning youths against traditional American values — was complete and that destabilization was well under way to subvert the economy, foreign relations, and defense.  He had warned that Americans may believe it’s peacetime, but they are really “in a state of undeclared war against the basic principles and the foundations of this system.”

Howse’s documentary contemporizes Bezmenov’s warning.  It sets out the twelve-step process of brainwashing aimed at effecting a Marxist revolution in America and illustrates it using events from the coronavirus pandemic.  The twelve steps are: 1) removing principled leadership; 2) encouraging the questioning of values, convictions, and the American worldview; 3) presenting a revisionist history that portrays the free market system as oppressive; 4) propagating moral relativity to cloud the distinction between right and wrong; 5) extolling consensus and collectivism while declaring individualism dangerous; 6) focusing on emotions over facts, reason, and context; 7) fostering anxiety, confusion, social turbulence; 8) concealing the ultimate agenda; 9) using trusted individuals and institutions to enhance credibility; 10) using informants to zero in on those who don’t comply; 11) rewarding compliance and punishing dissent; and 12) winning public trust by manufacturing chaos to lay the groundwork for a benevolent-seeming rescue.

Breaking Back: My Return to the UK I’m not sure if I’m glad to be home. Katie Hopkins

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/breaking-back-my-return-uk-katie-hopkins/

After three months on the road in America giving our side a reason to gather and be reminded that America remains the greatest nation on the face of the planet, my heart finally decided it was time to make a break for Britain.

Each time a concerned-looking patriot asks me at my events, “When are you going home?” I tell them truthfully that I don’t know, that I throw myself to the wind without caution or a sell-by date and wait for my heart to decide.

I truly believe that our paths are already set out in front of us, and in order to walk in your truth every day you have to let go of the control of some of the big stuff that you are taught as a child to think important — like having a plan, or living in certainty.

(I sometimes wonder if those asking me “When are you going home?” are really asking me “When are you ever going to leave?”, like hosts whose guests have overstayed their welcome at a party. But I suspect I am overthinking somewhat.)

Of course, it’s no mean feat breaking back into a country you weren’t supposed to leave (it was illegal to leave the UK or travel to America when I left the country) and returning from a country you weren’t supposed to have been in (the USA still has a ban on Brits entering the country due to our very special kind of COVID).

Patriots at events would ask, “What’s going to happen to you when you return?” And in truth, I didn’t know. But I accepted it might not be pretty. I had an agreement with Frank Gaffney (of the Center for Security Policy) that if I were ever locked up at Her Majesty’s Pleasure in a British jail, he would co-ordinate with Mike Lindell to secure me a mattress topper for my bunk.

Given the plight of the 1/6ers and the threat to liberty facing all patriots under Biden and the Global Cabal of COVID Idiots, a prison line could be a big seller for MyPillow, I am sure of it.

Why Flag Day ‘Disturbs’ Obama and the Dems A president’s troubling relationship with the American flag. Jack Cashill

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/why-flag-day-disturbs-obama-and-dems-jack-cashill/

Named after journalist Michael Kinsley who introduced the concept, a “Kinsley gaffe” occurs when a speaker “accidentally reveals something truthful about what is going on in his or her head.” Last week, the New York Times Editorial Board Member Mara Gay made the season’s most notable Kinsley gaffe in her account on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” of a harrowing trip to New York City’s eastern suburbs on Long Island.

“I was on Long Island this weekend visiting a really dear friend, and I was really disturbed,” said Gay live on MSNBC, where she is a contributor. “I saw, you know, dozens and dozens of pickup trucks with explicatives [sic] against Joe Biden on the back of them, Trump flags, and in some cases just dozens of American flags, which is also just disturbing because essentially the message was clear: This is my country. This is not your country. I own this.”

After Gay had finished recounting how she found “just disturbing” the sight of “dozens of American flags,” co-host Mika Brzezinski chimed in, “Totally agree.”

The Babylon Bee responded with a story headlined, “New York Times Relocates Offices To Beijing So Reporters Won’t Have To See So Many ‘Disturbing’ American Flags,” but for people who fret about flags as Gay and Brzezinski do, the very anticipation of Flag Day, June 14, is no laughing matter.

Perhaps the most prominent of such thinkers—and the most anxious—is Barack Obama. As candidate and later as president, Obama had to pretend to care about the flag. It wasn’t easy. In his most recent memoir, A Promised Land, he spends an unseemly amount of time on an incident that most Americans had forgotten about but that apparently left the former president emotionally scarred—his failure to wear an American flag pin.

Betraying America Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and the New Democrat Order. John Perazzo, Mark Tapson and David Horowitz

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/betraying-america-john-perazzo-mark-tapson-and-david-horowitz-0/

No institution in America – from government offices to schoolrooms to corporate boardrooms and beyond – is safe today from the poisonous racism of Critical Race Theory and the “1619 Project” which posit that United States history is rooted in slavery and white supremacy, and that “whiteness” is an incurable disease. The institution whose subversion poses the greatest threat to our national security is the military, now overseen by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, a determined advocate of these repulsive anti-American views.

Austin has required both Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project as core elements of the Pentagon’s military training programs – concealing their sinister agendas under the innocuous-sounding “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” label. He has ordered a purging of the military ranks of what he calls “extremists,” defined as opponents of these noxious views and supporters of Donald Trump and the Capitol protest of January 6th. This transformational focus of our military forces is the Biden administration’s answer to the growing threat of a heavily-militarized China – a purging of “whiteness” and patriotic pride from the ranks of our frontline defenders.

Lloyd Austin III, nominated in late 2012 for CENTCOM commander by President Barack Obama, who openly sought the “fundamental transformation” of America, spent his eight-year tenure politicizing the military command. When Austin retired from active duty with the U.S. military in 2016, he was a four-star general. He spent the next few years in the private sector as a founder and/or board member of various corporations until last December, when President Biden nominated him for the position of U.S. Secretary of Defense. The Senate subsequently confirmed Austin on January 22 by a vote of 93-2, making him the first black Defense Secretary in American history, and also the most radical – even though most black Americans are patriots and not radical.

Austin was a natural choice for an administration that seems to value the skin color, gender and politics of its appointees over all other characteristics, and – like the President, the Vice President, and the Democratic Party generally – views America as a nation so scarred by its racist history that nothing short of a radical transformation would make it worthy of celebrating and defending. Like Obama, Austin is intent on transforming the American military with dangerous consequences for the 330 million Americans whose mission it is to defend.

During Austin’s Senate confirmation hearing on January 19, he vowed to rid the U.S. military of the many “racists and extremists” that allegedly have infiltrated it. “The job of the Department of Defense is to keep America safe from our enemies,” he said. “But we can’t do that if some of those enemies lie within our own ranks.”