Displaying posts published in

December 2022

Ron DeSantis signals 2024 bid with new book by Paul Bedard

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/washington-secrets/ron-desantis-signals-2024-bid-with-new-book

Following a well-worn path into presidential politics, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signaled his bid Wednesday by announcing the publication of his autobiography and political blueprint.

HarperCollins Publishers said its imprint, Broadside, will publish The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival in late February.

“In The Courage to Be Free, Governor Ron DeSantis chronicles the most consequential decisions of his life and public service, including turning the Sunshine State into the promised land for millions of Americans. He has become one of America’s most closely watched officeholders, having delivered a historic, record-setting 2022 gubernatorial victory, winning by nearly 20 points and more than 1.5 million votes,” said the publishing giant.

Ukraine: Only Bad and Worse Choices We can no longer afford to ignore the lessons of history. by Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/ukraine-only-bad-and-worse-choices/

The war in Ukraine has seemingly devolved into a vicious stalemate. Ukrainian counter-attacks have pushed Russia back, but a definitive ejection of Russia from all its territorial gains at this point doesn’t seem likely. Commentary has settled on two choices for resolving the crisis: a diplomatic resolution that requires Ukraine to sacrifice territory; or a larger Ukrainian offensive to push Russia back to its pre-2014 borders, supported by more aid and materiel from NATO countries, which in practice really means the U.S. Each choice is fraught with difficulty and danger.

This predicament of only bad and worse choices is one endemic to foreign policy, as military violence always exacts the price of  “exorbitant risk,” as Henry Kissinger put it, of unforeseen and costly consequences. In the case of the Russo-Ukrainian war, that risk includes the possibility of Russia using tactical nuclear weapons, and triggering a wider nuclear engagement that could escalate into an apocalypse.

On the other hand, allowing Russia to keep territories acquired by force creates the moral hazard of endangering global supplies of energy, and encouraging Russia and other aggressive irredentist and revanchist powers like China and Iran to make the same wager that the West does not have morale or even resources to punish their aggression.

The difficult solution for avoiding such dilemmas is to anticipate and forcefully deter an enemy’s ambitions, and all the means he has for realizing them, before they become kinetic. Yet the West for a century has done a poor job at such long-range planning and instituting preemptive policies. Too often we have been like Demosthenes’ Athenians in the early 4th century B.C., who failed to preempt King Phillip II of Macedon’s advance against the southern Greek politically free city-states. Demosthenes chastised the Athenians, saying they “carry on the war with Phillip, exactly as a barbarian boxes . . . when struck, [he] always clutches the place; hit him on the other side and there go his hands. He neither knows nor cares how to parry a blow or how to watch his adversary.”

Americans Are Losing Trust in the Military The rise of woke politics has undermined public confidence in the brass.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/americans-are-losing-trust-in-the-military-reagan-institute-survey-11669848047?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

The current era is marked by fading trust in U.S. institutions, but confidence in one pillar has held up: the military. But now even that is eroding, and the question is whether the brass will get the message.

The Reagan Institute releases an annual survey of public attitudes on national defense, and this year only 48% reported having “a great deal of confidence” in the U.S. military in results first detailed here. That’s down from 70% in 2018, and within the margin error of last year’s 45%.

This is consistent with other surveys. Pew Research this year noted a 14-point drop since 2020 in Americans who said they had a great deal of confidence in the military to act in the public’s interest.

The Reagan poll asked Americans what is driving the decline. It isn’t the ability to carry out missions or win in a fight. It is “things going on outside the core competencies of the military,” says Reagan’s Roger Zakheim. “Call it politicization, call it wokeness,” but that’s where “you can connect the dots.”

Critical race theory-related ideas found in mandatory programs at 58 of top 100 US medical schools: report ‘Medical School education is in crisis’

https://www.foxnews.com/media/critical-race-theory-related-ideas-found-mandatory-programs-58-top-100-us-medical-schools-report

CriticalRace.org, which monitors critical race theory (CRT) curricula and training in higher education, has expanded its Medical School Database and found that 58 of the nation’s top 100 medical schools have some form of mandatory student training or coursework related to the polarizing idea that racism is systemic in America’s institutions. 

“Medical School education is in crisis, with ‘social justice’ and race-focused activism being imposed on students, faculty, and staff,” William Jacobson told Fox News Digital. 

Jacobson, Clinical Professor of Law at Cornell Law School and founder of the Legal Insurrection website, founded CriticalRace.org’s sprawling database that has also examined elite K-12 private schools, 500 of America’s top undergraduate programs and military service academies.

Earlier this year, the group uncovered that 23 of the 25 most prestigious medical colleges and universities have some form of mandatory CRT-related student training or coursework. CriticalRace.org expanded the study and found that 46 of the top 100 medical schools have offered materials by authors Robin DiAngelo or Ibram Kendi, whose books explicitly call for discrimination, according to Jacobson. 

“Approaching the doctor-patient relationship through a Critical Race lens is being implemented under the umbrella of ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’ and other euphemisms, such as Ibram Kendi’s ‘anti-racism’ approach. ‘White privilege’ and similar concepts, pushed by Robin DeAngelo and others, are being infused into the medical school culture,” he said. 

The schools examined were based on the rankings by U.S. News’ rankings of America’s top medical schools. The study also found that 38 of the top 100 medical schools have some sort of mandatory CRT-related training for faculty and staff. 

For students, 14 schools were found to have department-specific mandatory training, 31 were found to have school-wide mandatory training and 41 have school-wide mandatory curricula. When it comes to faculty and staff, 18 schools have department-specific mandatory training, 30 have school-wide mandatory training and five have hiring committee-specific training. 

CriticalRace.org details the exact curricula and trainings at each school, along with contact information and an overview of every university. 

“A patient-centric ethos is being drowned out by politics and activism,” Jacobson said, adding that CRT being pushed on medical students is particularly alarming even compared to other areas of higher learning. 

“Because there are only just over 150 accredited medical schools in the U.S., and they are so hard to get into, students really have no options. Unlike universities and colleges, where students may be able to avoid a race-obsessed campus climate, with medical schools students have to submit to race-focused medical education or give up their career hopes,” Jacobson said. 

“We have analyzed CRT-related training in colleges and universities and elite private K-12. As bad as those institutions have become, things are much worse in medical schools because the stakes are so high. Patient care and people’s lives are at risk when doctors and medical providers view patients as proxies for racial or ethnic groups in sociological and political battles,” he continued. “Every person has the right to be treated equally as an individual, based on his or her medical condition, without societal racial politics influencing treatment. Yet increasingly we see the medical establishment, including the American Medical Association, demanding that medical students and physicians become race-focused activists.”

The subjects of mandatory training and coursework are worded and phrased differently at individual schools, but use terms including “anti-racism,” “cultural competency,” “equity,” “implicit bias,” “DEI – diversity, equity and inclusion” and critical race theory, according to CriticalRace.org.

For example, the study found that Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University’s Department of Surgery will “assess and improve upon the current state of surgical trainee evaluation to eliminate the impact of implicit and explicit bias.” 

Biden Rewards Palestinians for Terrorism, Incitement by Bassam Tawil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19172/biden-rewards-palestinian-terrorism

The Biden administration’s recent decision to upgrade its relations with the Palestinian Authority (PA) is yet another sign of how the US is rewarding the Palestinians, as they are the Iranian regime, for their ongoing toxic incitement and terrorism against Israel.

It is the first time the US has created a position at the State Department that is solely responsible for Palestinian affairs.

The decision coincided with two bomb attacks in Jerusalem, in which a 16-year-old Jewish boy was killed and 14 other people wounded.

The Palestinian Authority, in fact, offers stipends to the terrorists and their families as part of its “Pay-for-Slay” program — which serves as an incentive, especially in an area that is not wealthy, for its citizens to continue their violence.

Several Palestinian groups issued separate statements lauding the Jerusalem bombings as “heroic operations” and calling for the murder of more Jews.

Abbas has never called on the terror groups to halt their attacks.

One would have expected the Biden administration to demand that the Palestinian leadership dismantle the terror groups operating under its auspices in the West Bank.

One would have expected the Biden administration to demand that the Palestinian Authority halt the monthly payments for terrorism to the terrorists and their families.

One would have expected the Biden administration to pressure the Palestinians to return to the negotiating table with Israel and abandon their long-time policy of rejecting all offers without even proposing a counteroffer.

The Biden administration, which resumed financial aid to the Palestinians — without any conditions attached — has chosen to ignore the Palestinian leadership’s role in encouraging violence, hate and efforts to eliminate Israel, and to erect, in its place, yet another Islamic state.

The payments to the terrorists and their families successfully encourage many Palestinians to carry out attacks against Israelis: they know that they or their families will be added to the Palestinian Authority’s payroll.

The Biden administration is dead wrong if it thinks that upgrading its relations with the Palestinian Authority will have a moderating effect on the Palestinians or prompt them to improve their policies toward Israel. On the contrary, the move is likely to increase the Palestinian leaders’ intransigence because now they feel that the US is on their side, notwithstanding their incitement and support for terrorism.

By upgrading US-Palestinian relations, the Biden administration is also sending a message to these Arab countries that it stands behind the Palestinians’ rejection of normalization and peace between the Arabs and Israel.

The Biden administration has anyway done nothing to support the Abraham Accords or try to get more Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia, on board. Instead, the Biden administration has done everything in its power to antagonize America’s traditional allies in the Arab world, first and foremost Saudi Arabia. The Biden administration’s policy of appeasement of the mullahs in Iran has already alienated some Arabs, especially the Gulf states.

The Biden administration’s recent decision to upgrade its relations with the Palestinian Authority (PA) is yet another sign of how the US is rewarding the Palestinians, as they are the Iranian regime, for their ongoing toxic incitement and terrorism against Israel.

A Presidential Trojan Horse: The Inflation Reduction Act by Lawrence Kadish

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19177/presidential-trojan-horse

U.S Senator Joseph Manchin has been playing both sides against the middle for the past year and it appears that game is about to end.

This year Manchin offered his vote to pass the so called “Inflation Reduction Act” in return for Senate leadership support of legislation that would loosen regulations now impacting energy pipeline construction in his home state of West Virginia. In some earlier era in Washington, that kind of Capitol Hill give-and-get would have gone unnoticed, just another deal being cut with taxpayers’ money before lunch in the Senate dining room.

That was then. This is now.

Manchin’s vote essentially gave the Biden Administration a blank check, spending hundreds of billions of dollars wherever and whenever they want as the White House ramps up their reelection bid. If one is permitted to say so, a citizen would have to be beyond naïve to believe that this blizzard of federal cash will all be accounted for on behalf of projects that actually strengthen the republic. No one knows that better than Manchin, as he cut his deal with Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer in a scene from “Advice and Consent.”

Now, Manchin’s side deal is in trouble. Political observers say his Republican colleagues spotted his political expediency some time ago and have little reason to support his proposal even if less regulation is a shared ideology

Manchin should not be surprised that his side deal is in serious trouble: he has wobbled across the political spectrum during 2022. It became obvious that he had no north star that guides his political goals. Rather, he seeks to cut deals with whomever he can for the purpose of advancing his own immediate agenda or, as he should, what he perceives as that of his state and constituents. Perhaps that worked in another era but not when, due to justifiable widespread skepticism over election integrity, the future of our democracy is at risk.

One wonders if Manchin wanted a Senate legacy: at 75, he will face a spirited challenger in 2024, whomever the Republicans select. If permitting reform was approved by the Senate he would use it as the cloak needed to ward off voter anger over an “Inflation Reduction Act” that could well be a Presidential Trojan Horse filled with dollars for states that are important when counting electoral votes.

The New Wokeist Faith By Tom McCaffrey

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/11/the_new_wokeist_faith.html

The website of the American Psychiatric Association says:

Psychological attempts to force a transgender person to be cisgender (sometimes referred to as gender identity conversion efforts or so-called “gender identity conversion therapy”) are considered unethical and have been linked to adverse mental health outcomes.

The official position of the APA is that a man who thinks he is a woman is not necessarily deluded, and it would be unethical to treat him as if he were.  It is, in other words, entirely possible for a person who carries an X and a Y chromosome and who is, therefore, biologically male to be, nevertheless, mentally female — a woman “trapped in a man’s body.”

The website continues: “Medical affirmation may include pubertal suppression for adolescents with gender dysphoria and gender-affirming hormones like estrogen and testosterone for older adolescents and adults.” (Emphasis added.)

We who still cling to reality are accustomed to viewing this sort of lunacy as, well, lunacy.  It appears that almost overnight half of America has gone mad.  We are at a loss to explain how otherwise rational, highly accomplished persons like those at the APA could ever have come to believe something that is so self-evidently contrary to reality.  Well, they are not mad.

The story begins in an unlikely time and place. Long before the civil rights movement of the 1960s, American leftists had set their sights on disaffected blacks as potential allies in their campaign against capitalism and Americanism.  The success of this alliance at forcing the defenders of the American Republic into retreat — the Civil Rights Act of 1964, for example, partially nationalized private businesses in the name of racial integration — persuaded the Left to begin striking alliances with other disaffected minorities.  Thus did the Left abandon their commitment to purely economic revolution, and thus was born cultural Marxism.

Bibi’s Back: A Conversation With Israel’s New Prime Minister Bari Weiss

https://www.commonsense.news/p/bibis-back-a-conversation-with-israels?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

EXCERPTS:

BW: Supporters and critics of yours describe you the same way, which is having a real sense not just of duty but really of destiny in your service to Israel. In a way, you view yourself as the leader that can save the Jewish state and therefore the Jewish people. There’s a line in the introduction to your book where you talk about how you wish to be remembered. It’s a simple and short line. You say, “that I helped secure the life of the Jewish state and its future.” But the whole idea behind Zionism—the political movement for Jewish self-determination, Jews being able to live in their own land, not dependent on anyone else, and able to protect themselves—is that the Jews no longer need to be saved. Who do you see Israel as needing to be saved from right now and do you imagine a day when Israel or the Jewish people will ever not need to be saved?

BN: I think life is a constant battle and the life of nations is no different. Nations come; nations go. Civilizations rise and civilizations fall. The Jewish people have broken the so-called iron laws of history. There was a great Italian philosopher, in the 16th century, who said that all nations are born, they flower, then they wilt, and then they die. You can’t escape it. Well, the Jewish people have escaped that. We died 100 deaths and we came back to life.

BW: The Jews are the ever-dying people.

BN: Well, we decided to stop dying. The birth of Zionism said that the way to rescue the Jewish people from the final death, which our modern Moses—Theodor Herzl—saw very clearly 120 years ago, he said we’d be destroyed if we don’t have a way to save the Jews from the fires of violent antisemitism. We would die and we would be erased. My father, 33 years after Herzel in 1933, at all of 23 years old, said we are facing a Holocaust. That’s his word. The Holocaust of Hitlerism, which would destroy the Jewish people. The only way to save the Jewish people, to save the Jewish future, was to have a Jewish state which would be a haven for the millions that would otherwise be trapped in Europe. He devoted his life, before my brother fell in Entebbe, to found the Jewish state.

Liz Peek: Biden mute as protests demand freedom around the world

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/biden-mute-protests-demand-freedom-world

What does the United States stand for? With Joe Biden in the White House, absolutely nothing.

Apparently, we don’t stand for freedom. As brave citizens in China desperately protest that country’s heinous lockdowns and censorship, a spokesman for the Biden administration says that the White House is “going to watch this closely.”  

We don’t stand against human rights abusers. As crippling energy prices threaten the president’s approval ratings, Biden’s emissaries travel to Venezuela, allowing an easing of sanctions and resumed oil exports from a murderous regime that happens to have the world’s largest oil reserves. 

Amnesty International has called out the Maduro government for “extrajudicial executions, excessive use of force, arbitrary detentions and torture and other ill-treatment against those perceived as critical of the government” but the Biden government needs oil. 

We don’t stand for peace in the Middle East. Too small-minded to accept the extraordinary success of the Abraham Accords achieved under President Trump, which created new alliances in the region and ring-fenced Iran, the Biden team continues its pursuit of a new nuclear deal with Tehran. The Biden White House resolutely ignores Iran’s past history of cheating on its nuclear commitments; astonishingly, it allows Russia to act as an intermediary.

We also seemingly don’t stand with women’s rights. Violent and widespread protests in Iran over the killing of a young woman arrested for not wearing a hijab have reportedly resulted in hundreds of deaths and the blinding of hundreds more by rubber bullets and metal pellets fired by security forces. 

The White House, other than issuing the usual supportive pablum, has been largely AWOL. Biden inadvertently boasted on the campaign trail that “We’re going to free Iran” but his team soon walked back the comment, saying that we merely “stood in solidarity” with the protesters. 

Leftwing Hysteria and the Art of the Psychodrama. Part One Victor Davis Hanson

https://victorhanson.com/leftwing-hysteria-and-the-art-of-the-psychodrama-part-one/

What follows is an extended analysis of how the Left obtains power without agendas that win popular support, and how such aggrandizement inflames social relations and national unity.

The progressive media—which constitute the majority of print newspapers, network news, public radio and TV, Google/Apple/Yahoo news, and the best-funded online venues—have fused with the hard-left Democratic Party. Most in the media, like most Democrats, accept the reality that the progressive, and increasingly neo-socialist, agenda does not and will never win majority support.

Americans want a closed border, a crackdown on crime, fossil-fuel independence, control of inflation and drunken spending, and an end to the woke cancel culture.

So how does the fusion media/political Left obtain power? Usually by the politics of distraction and feigned crises—perhaps better defined as the art of the psychodrama.

Daily the Left scans the news. It ceaselessly ferrets out any story that can be sensationalized and distorted to frighten, to anger, or to confuse the public into thinking America is a racist, sexist, homophobic, and downright awful place run by an elite, rich cadre of prejudicial, white-male Christian nationalists.

And then, presto, social media fuels the agreed-on lie. Television news accelerates it. And print journalism distorts it—all part of an agenda to justify radical changes (“fundamental transformations”) in America otherwise impossible.