Displaying posts published in

July 2023

Erdoğan’s Most Eminent Men: Turkey’s New Spymasters by Burak Bekdil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19819/turkey-erdogan-fidan-kalin

Turkey’s two key appointments are new foreign minister and former intelligence chief, Hakan Fidan; and the newly-appointed intelligence chief, Ibrahim Kalın, also an Erdoğan confidant.

Both men have interesting and impressive careers. How both of them have become the only two people who make policy and share power with Erdoğan is illuminating, especially where their careers intersected under the president.

During that meeting, Fidan told the others that if they decided to go to war with Syria he could easily arrange a false flag operation: “Easy for me. I can send four men into Syria, they send eight missiles [into Turkish soil], and there you go.”

The appointments mark formalizing executive cabinet jobs for two most important men in Erdoğan’s most inner circle.

As Turkey’s post-election dust is settling down, the international community has turned its attention to two key appointments announced by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who on May 28 won his 17th election victory in 21 years, and entered his third decade in power.

Turkey’s two key appointments are new foreign minister and former intelligence chief, Hakan Fidan; and the newly-appointed intelligence chief, Ibrahim Kalın, also an Erdoğan confidant.

Both men have interesting and impressive careers. How both of them have become the only two people who make policy and share power with Erdoğan is illuminating, especially where their careers intersected under the president.

America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything Christopher Rufo

America’s most effective conservative intellectual proves once and for all that Marxist radicals have taken over our nation’s institutions.

In the 1960s, Mao launched China’s Cultural Revolution. Cities grew overcrowded. Technocrats demanded progress from above. Anyone opposed was sent to be “re-educated.” China’s revolution was bloody, fast, and a failure, but what if America started a revolution at the same time, based on the same bad ideas, and it’s just been slower, calmer, and more effective?

In his powerful new book, Christopher F. Rufo uncovers the hidden history of left-wing intellectuals and activists who systematically took control of America’s institutions to undermine them from within.America’s Cultural Revolution finally answers so many of the questions normal Americans have, such as:

• Why is nearly every major corporation bending the knee to a far-left agenda?

• How did DEI suddenly become the department no institution can continue without?

• Why is race the main thing America’s rich, white elite wants to talk about? 

• When did the left adopt all this doublespeak, saying progress is a lack of progress, equality is not equality, speech is violence, and violence is speech?

• Has the goal of the left, for a century, actually been the destruction of every Western institution? 

Readers may not know the names of Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, Paulo Freire, and Derrick Bell, but they will recognize the ideas they spread. How their radical, destructive ideology slowly worked its way from prisons to academia to classrooms to your human resources department will come as a shock.

Failing to act soon, Rufo warns, could allow the radical left to achieve their ultimate objective: replacing constitutional equality with a race-based redistribution system overseen by bureaucratic ‘diversity and inclusion’ officials. Most Americans don’t want this, but most Americans are no longer in control of our institutions. If the mainstream media’s depiction of a failing dystopia in need of a fresh start never sounded right to you, this expose and call to arms is the book you’ve been looking for. 

The regime closes ranks around Biden with another sham indictment By Matthew Boose

https://amgreatness.com/2023/07/20/the-regime-closes-ranks-around-biden-with-another-sham-indictment/

After the shock of 2016, Democrats vowed to do everything in their power to preordain elections going forward. Never again would they leave the voters to their own devices. Instead, the people of “our democracy” would be guided through propaganda, censorship, and, if needed, a good old-fashioned show trial. (Or two, or three).

The news this week that Trump is facing yet another sham indictment is further evidence that the Biden regime, rather than abandoning its puppet, is closing ranks around him. While the details of this remarkably audacious “case” are yet unclear, its general outlines are already known from a relentless propaganda blitz that began even before Biden illegitimately seized power in 2020. The conceit is that Trump, by challenging the most questionable election in American history, is some kind of domestic terrorist who disrupted the “peaceful transfer of power.” It cannot be a coincidence that the Marxist attorney general of Michigan, Dana Nessel, announced charges against 16 “fake electors” (fake according to whom?) on the same day that Trump broke this troubling news.

This dramatic escalation in authoritarian shock-and-awe tactics suggests Biden is going nowhere fast. There has been lots of speculation recently that Democrats will replace Biden with another candidate, but this theory underestimates the cynicism and profound caution of the political machine that Biden represents. Democrats control the media, and to an alarming degree, the justice system as well. Why should they tempt disaster by betting on an unknown when they can just tip the scales?

Biden’s “victory” in 2020 was the result of unprecedented manipulation of the process at every stage, from the information voters received to the way they cast their ballots. The left abolished Election Day at a stroke and systematically defrauded voters of information about Biden’s influence peddling. The former CIA director who organized the notorious, bogus “Russian disinformation” letter admitted that the plan was to weaken Trump and provide Joe Biden with a “talking point” about his son’s laptop. The Biden campaign called the letter’s organizer after the debate to say thank you.

The tepid gossip that is now bubbling in the communist media about Biden’s scandals is feigned opposition. The regime is releasing pressure, so to speak, but there is no palace coup underway against “the big guy.” If that were the case, the news coverage would look very different. Whatever happened to Biden’s classified documents? Despite all the damning information that continues to surface about his family’s corrupt money laundering scheme, including text messages that clearly reference Joe Biden, the mainstream media continue to ignore all of the evidence. Who brought cocaine to the White House? That is already yesterday’s news.

Michael Torres Whether You Like It Or Not Guided by activists and flimsy legal reasoning, school districts are asserting a right to conceal children’s gender transitions from parents.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/transgender-secrecy-policies-at-public-schools

More than 10 million American children attend public school in districts that require employees to hide students’ gender transitions from their parents. The revelation of how widespread secrecy polices are comes thanks to a list compiled by the parental-rights advocacy organization Parents Defending Education. While the prevalence of these policies is alarming in itself, the philosophy underlying them is what parents should be most concerned about.

Districts are using legal theories pushed by activist groups like the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network (GLSEN). Among the most important are that children have a federally guaranteed right to privacy from their parents in school, that the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution establishes children’s right to transition without the consent or knowledge of their parents, and that Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 protects transgender students from the “harassment” of school districts “outing” them to non-compliant parents. The Title IX theory, the most chilling, is supported by the radically progressive notion that parents represent a danger to the welfare of transgender children until they prove otherwise by providing “affirmation.”

School districts that buy into these theories are not merely embracing the idea that hiding children’s gender transitions from their parents is legal, but that divulging the information without the child’s consent is illegal and possibly perilous to the student’s safety. In Dover, Pennsylvania, for example, a mother of a middle school student castigated a local school board after discovering that school staff had been addressing her 12-year-old daughter with male pronouns for a year. School officials even sent the child to a hospital for an evaluation without informing the parents. When the mother confronted the school board, she was told that there was a law against informing her. School boards in Chico, California, New Castle, Maine, and beyond have said the same.

No such law exists, however—and the legal theories pushed by activist groups to legitimize secrecy policies are baseless.

The law that districts most commonly cite is the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). That’s likely due to boilerplate policy language promulgated by GLSEN that claims FERPA establishes a child’s right to privacy from their parents. This interpretation of the law is also pushed by public education groups like the Pennsylvania School Counselors Association, which told a local media outlet that “Transgender and nonbinary students have a FERPA-protected right to privacy.”

Carl J. Schramm Lock Them Down America’s public-health establishment has become a threat to individual liberty.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/censorship-and-the-public-health-establishment

Perhaps symbolically, on July 4 a federal judge in Louisiana enjoined a long list of federal officers, including White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, from communicating with social media companies in efforts to suppress speech. The government’s machinery for working hand-in-glove with Google, Meta, and (pre-Elon Musk) Twitter to determine jointly what facts and messages can be shared with the public concerning the Covid-19 pandemic came to a dead stop.

Not unexpectedly, after days of Beltway insiders describing the ruling as the reckless product of an uninformed rural judge, the Biden administration asked the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to stay the injunction, which it has done. For the White House and executive agencies, the ability to control speech online is apparently too great a political tool to give up without a fight.

Judge Terry Doughty’s injunction had determined that the plaintiffs in the case were likely to show that public health officials had conspired with social media platforms to censor empirically established facts about Covid-19: its origins, how it spread, what individuals could do to protect themselves, and the efficacy and dangers of the vaccines. In doing so, those officials impinged on Americans’ right to expect the truth from their government.

From virtually the beginning of the pandemic, the federal government adopted a “take no prisoners” strategy on controlling information about Covid. When Francis Collins, then head of the National Institutes of Health, and Anthony Fauci, chief Covid advisor to Presidents Trump and Biden, found their mistaken belief that everyone was equally susceptible to Covid challenged, they set out to silence dissent.

Scientists who argued that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention should focus its preventive efforts on more vulnerable populations, including those over 65, found their posts removed from social media platforms by nameless operatives prompted by government liaisons, several of whom are named as defendants. The justification, without any evidence or explanation, was that their views constituted “misinformation,” an Orwellian characterization encouraged by federal officials, according to Judge Doughty.

Meet The Self-Interested Trio Behind The Anti-DeSantis Attacks By: Jeffrey H. Anderson J

https://thefederalist.com/2023/07/20/meet-the-self-interested-trio-behind-the-anti-desantis-attacks/

Before you buy the down-with-DeSantis spin, pay attention to who is peddling it.

You can tell who’s feared in politics by who gets attacked. Many political observers believe nominating Ron DeSantis is the GOP’s most likely path to beating Joe Biden and getting an effective conservative president into office. At the same time, DeSantis faces a three-pronged axis working to convince Republican voters that his nascent presidential campaign can’t possibly succeed.  

The first prong consists of legacy media. Naturally, they want nothing to do with a competent, conservative candidate. The second is the Trump campaign; DeSantis is the man Trump must beat to win the GOP nomination. The third is establishment Republicans, who are so caught up in the idea of getting one of their own back in power that they forget they will have to choose between Trump and DeSantis.

Each of these distracts both from the fact that the GOP election cycle will ultimately come down to Trump and DeSantis and from the reality that it’s time for a battle of political heavyweights in the Republican ring.

The Media Need Trump As Their Scapegoat

The corporate media oppose DeSantis for two reasons. First, he’s a conservative who defies their narrative on essentially everything: masks, lockdowns, indoctrinating children with LGBT propaganda, the need for fiscal restraint, the proper role of government, the merits of our founding, the goodness of America, and so on.

Second, they suspect he can win.

Rewarding an Inimical Iran Noah Rothman

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/rewarding-an-inimical-iran/

“It is dead, but we are not gonna announce it,” Joe Biden said of the Iran nuclear deal in a surreptitiously recorded video last year. “Long story,” he added. The story isn’t really that long. Barack Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran was never ratified as a treaty by the GOP-led U.S. Senate, which warned that a future Republican administration would void the agreement. That’s exactly what happened. The end.

But while the Biden administration may privately accept this reality, it seems to believe that it is obliged to behave as though the JCPOA can be resurrected. Since he took office, the president has made a variety of fruitless overtures to the Iranian regime, the most recent of which occurred this week.

According to Reuters, a U.S. official confirmed that Washington had provided the government in Baghdad with a waiver allowing it to purchase Iranian electricity via non-Iraqi banks. The State Department has retailed the move as a humanitarian initiative — “a step Washington hopes may keep Tehran from forcing unpopular power cuts during the sweltering Iraqi summer,” the Reuters report read. But the currency waiver is a concession to Tehran.

The latest waiver was expanded to permit payments to banks outside Iraq at the request of the Iraqi government, apparently in the hopes that this might transfer some of the pressure that Iran has exerted on Baghdad to other countries.

“We have to help the Iraqis with this perennial pressure from the Iranians to access the money,” said the U.S. official.

State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told reporters that “these funds will remain in accounts where they can only be used for non-sanctionable activity, and with every transaction approved in advance by the Department of Treasury.” But coming on the heels of the Treasury Department’s decision to sanction 14 Iraqi banks over allegations that they were siphoning money for Iran, the waiver provides Tehran with new access to hard currency that the Islamic Republic desperately needs.

Andrew Tate’s Betrayal of the West The social media personality celebrates the Islamization of Britain. by Jason D. Hill

https://www.frontpagemag.com/andrew-tates-betrayal-of-the-west/

The first time I heard the controversial social media personality Andrew Tate speak on women, Western society, and masculinity, I immediately thought that he was a radical Islamic extremist. A defector from the Taliban, perhaps? Over the next few months I would hear Tate make outlandish remarks such as, “Women should shut the f**k up, have kids, sit at home, be quiet and make coffee.” And more: speaking of women in general, Tate said, “If I have a degree of responsibility over her, then I must have a degree of authority… You can’t be responsible for a dog if it doesn’t obey you.”

So, when we learned on July 18, 2023, that Tate, who last year converted to Islam, was hoping for, and celebrating the fact of the imminent Islamization of Britain, I cannot say that I was surprised.

In response to the news of a Muslim billionaire winning the right to turn the Trocadero, one of London’s most famous landmarks, into a mosque, Tate (Quran in hand in the photo above) expressed his delight. Here is what he had to say on Twitter:

This building is literally dead centre in the middle of London’s historic centre. Amazing news. The only alternative to Islam for the brits are pride flags as they no longer have any innate culture or patriotisim [sic]. Allah is the best of planners and I look forward to seeing The Islamic republic of Great Britistan in her final form. Alhamdulillah Britain will be fully Islamic soon.

Tate has always had a knack for diagnosing many of the legitimate maladies plaguing Western civilization, which explains his appeal to many conservatives. He is also known for delivering what often seem to be out-of-context solutions to some of these maladies. He understands the crisis in masculinity well and has, at times, offered commonsense advice to young men who are without a sense of purpose or direction in their lives.

Country Star Challenges America’s Culture of Crime And pro-crime “progressives” explode in rage. by Mark Tapson

https://www.frontpagemag.com/country-star-challenges-americas-culture-of-crime/

For decades, gangsta rappers have raked in money, fame, and recording industry awards hand-over-fist by promoting a culture of violence, drugs, crime, misogyny, hedonism, and greed. There has been not a peep of an objection from the Progressive Left to the damage this has done and continues to do to generations of young people, especially in poor inner-city communities, where rappers, gang members, and drug dealers are idolized and emulated by far too many. But let one country music star complain that American cities have degenerated into a wasteland of lawlessness and chaos, and triggered leftists leap to smear him publicly as a violent racist.

Quadruple-platinum-selling country artist Jason Aldean has found himself the target of a wave of leftist condemnation over the new video of a song (which was actually released months ago) titled, “Try That in a Small Town.” The video intersperses actual footage of rioting, looting, and confrontations with police in cities, with shots of Aldean and his band performing before a courthouse in a public square in Columbia, Tennessee.

The lyrics and imagery capture the kind of random violence that has become endemic in Democrat-run urban hellholes all across America – carjackings, the knockout game, and armed robbery – as well as open contempt for law enforcement and the American flag in a country whose children have been taught by decades of leftist educators that their homeland is a uniquely oppressive and evil nation in world history. Aldean warns in the song that that attitude wouldn’t be tolerated in small-town America, and he issues a sort of “molon labe” warning to the anti-Second Amendment activists who aim (pun intended) to disarm law-abiding gun owners.

You’ll Have Blackouts And You WIll Love Them-Generators are on the White House Hit List

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/07/21/youll-have-blackouts-and-you-will-love-them/

The old joke in which one fellow asks what the socialists used for lighting before candles and the other fellow answers “electricity” could use some updating. Substitute “socialists” for “U.S. Democrats.” But it won’t be just the Democrats using candles, it’s going to be all of us.

When the power goes out, most of us just have to wait until it’s restored to get back to our normal lives. In the meantime, as we wander through a dark house flipping useless switches out of habit, we make sure we don’t open the refrigerator and we put off anything we had planned that requires us to burn electricity. The more-prepared among us, though, buy fossil-fuel-powered generators to avoid interruptions

Their future, though, is in doubt. The Biden administration wants those generators to go the way of the incandescent light bulb.

“Just months after a Biden-appointed regulator teased a ban on gas stoves, the administration is working to enact a rule that would prohibit the manufacturing of nearly all portable gas generators on the U.S. market,” the Washington Free Beacon reported earlier this week.

This proposed rule would limit the amount of carbon monoxide a product can release, establishing a benchmark beyond the reach of all but a few current generators. The Free Beacon says the Consumer Product Safety Commission admits “that 95% of portable gas generators on the market cannot comply with its new standard.”

Should the rule become “law,” industry officials expect a shortage of generators will follow, as manufacturers would have only have six months to develop a compliant design. Under normal conditions, that would take years, according to the Portable Generator Manufacturers’ Association.

While some homeowners use standby generators, which have more permanence about them, to provide power when the lights go out, portables are used as well, with “far more people” choosing them because of price. What the cost-conscious consumers didn’t know when they made their purchases is that one day they would be punished for their choice. But those who have standby generators shouldn’t feel too smug. The Democrats will eventually come after those, too.