Why Are Today’s Politics So Awful?” What is today’s cancel culture but a cyber-tarring and feathering?By Thaddeus G. McCotter

https://amgreatness.com/2023/12/02/why-are-todays-politics-so-awful/

Editor’s note: This is a first in a four-part series).

People often ask, “Why are today’s politics so awful?” There are several reasons, many of which will be explored in this four-part series. In a nutshell (pun intended), the Communications Revolution has enormously contributed to the belief that politics is more awful than ever due to its impact upon the public, the media, the politicians, and the country.

Yet, before considering these reasons, one must avoid the temptation to romanticize the political past as a time of eminently genteel debate in a country where that civility led to a destructive civil war. Even during the period of our nation’s founding, American politics has been contentious as evinced by the political battles between the Royalists and the Revolutionaries. Later, one need only look at how Federalist political pamphleteers attacked President Thomas Jefferson (with the truth, by the way); or how President Andrew Jackson was decried as a “tyrant” and “would-be king” by his political opponents, obloquies later echoed in attacks upon Presidents Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and, most recently, Donald Trump.

Nevertheless, while the intensity and invective of political battle has not waned, its visibility has exponentially increased. Due to the Communications Revolution, on a subway or runway, at home or abroad, 24 hours every single day, people possess the ability to casually survey and/or directly engage in politics. No longer does one have to hope the local newspaper publishes their letter to the editor or hope someone in Washington reads their constituent letter. The expression of one’s political opinion and/or agenda can be voiced to the political class and one’s fellow citizens instantaneously and – especially, when in concert with like-minded individuals – effectively.

The consequence of the Communication Revolution’s empowerment of the public it to make politics appear more prevalent and contentious than in the past. While true that more people are publicly expressing their political views, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they are new to their opinions or that the intensity of these opinions has increased. What has undoubtedly happened, though, is that technology has facilitated the public’s ability to express their views.

This results in the sense that Americans are more political and, generally, politics more prevalent and awful than ever. True, it can be a bit unsettling to see a friend or neighbor’s political post, more so when one never thought that friend or neighbor shared your views or party affiliation. (They feel the same when they see your post).

One Senator is Blocking Hundreds of Biden DEI Nominees From Taking Over the Military 40% have expressed support for the imposition of DEI policies upon our armed forces.” by Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/one-senator-is-blocking-hundreds-of-biden-dei-nominees-from-taking-over-the-military/

It’s unfortunate that the destruction of our military isn’t a bigger story and it’s also a shame that so few Republicans and conservatives have backed Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s principled stand to block Biden’s radical military nominees.

Senate Republicans are seeking to bypass his insistence that Biden’s nominees pass proper confirmation with appropriate scrutiny instead of being shoved through.

And that may mean the end of the military as an American institution committed to defending the nation. Instead, it will become another DEI operation.

As this letter from Save America’s Military warns, “independently conducted research has revealed that some 40% of the promotable officers now awaiting Senate approval have publicly expressed support for the imposition of Diversity,
Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies upon our armed forces.”

We’re talking about hundreds of DEI nominees. Here’s the kind of thing we’re talking about.

In the weeks following George Floyd’s death in 2020, a U.S. Air Force officer—currently awaiting promotion to brigadier general—accused his fellow “white colonels” of being the “biggest barriers” to addressing “racial injustice” in the military and being “blind to institutional racism.”

Muslim Assimilation and its Malcontents Rachel Kohn

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2023/12/muslim-assimilation-and-its-malcontents-rachael-kohn/

I was recently called “Islamophobic” on Facebook by a Muslim convert I met once many years ago. The prompt was nothing I said about Islam, but about assimilation being the road to integration for Aboriginal Australians, as it has been for most other individuals and ethnic-religious groups in the West. It was a telling leap to make, given that for twenty-one years my program, The Spirit of Things on ABC RN, featured many Muslims, but perhaps the former community leader and school teacher remembered only the ones who rankled, those who advocated a modern, assimilated version of Islam and denounced some of its belligerent and oppressive expressions.

Marnia Lazreg is a Professor of Sociology at Hunter College and CUNY in New York, and when I went visited her in 2010, I remarked that she was the only faculty member without a photo of herself on her website. She told me that after writing her book Questioning the Veil, it was “dangerous” for her to be recognisable, given the resurgence of Islamist thinking in post-9/11 America. Her own mother took off the veil at the age of fifty after the independence of Algeria, and Marnia’s generation of students never thought of wearing the veil as they contemplated living a new kind of life, reflecting modernity. But Professor Lazreg’s writing about women and their desire to be free from the tyranny of a patriarchal Islamic tradition that confined them to full bodily coverage and the ambit of the home, was ironically problematic in mid-town Manhattan in twenty-first-century America.

Like Lazreg, a Canadian Muslim, Irshad Manji, was also imperilled by the publication of her book The Trouble with Islam Today, and when I interviewed her during a visit to Sydney in 2004, she had security around her at all times. Her book begins with her experience as a young bright student in a madrassa in Vancouver where she was punished by her teachers for asking questions about the Koran. Expected to recite the sacred text without understanding it, she questioned why Muslims are instructed to avoid Jews and Christians, when to her as a young Canadian they were friends and fellow citizens. As a highly successful young host on TV Ontario, where her boss was Jewish, she spoke and wrote about the irrationality of Muslim anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism. Consequently, her books are banned in many Muslim countries.

Palestine, Pedagogy and Protesting Kevin Donnelly

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/education/2023/12/palestine-pedagogy-and-protesting/

The plea published in The Age and the SMH by Melbourne-based teacher Farah Khairat arguing teachers have every right to advocate on behalf of the Palestinians in the Gaza war illustrates how teachers, instead of being balanced and impartial, are intent on indoctrinating students with radical, cultural-left ideology.

Khairat argues she is entitled to present a one-sided, highly emotional account of the war in Gaza to her students — an account where the Palestinians are the victims and Israelis the criminals and there is no mention of Hamas’s evil and barbaric attack killing Jewish women and children. Ignored are the Israeli women raped and abducted, the babies killed and mutilated.  Instead, Khairat writes of “one Palestinian child killed every 10 minutes”, “dozens of teachers and school staff killed” and “children’s bodies covered in dirt, rubble and blood”. She also argues teachers should be allowed to politicise the classroom by “expressing solidarity with the Palestinian cause” and students allowed to wear a Palestinian scarf (keffiyeh) while at school.

In response to departmental directives not to discuss the Gaza war in the classroom, Khairat argues “As an educator, I question the appropriateness of feigning ignorance on such critical matters.  How could I pretend not to be knowledgeable on this topic”. Confusing her personal opinion of Israel and her primary duty to educate students in a balanced and objective way, she writes “I refuse to stay silent because trying to sweep this under the rug is just another form of oppression. To be silent is to be complicit”.

Given Khairat is a member of the Teachers and School Staff for Palestine Victoria group, it’s understandable she has such a jaundiced and one-sided view of the Gaza war.  What is inexcusable is that like-minded teachers have abrogated their responsibility as their students’ guardians. Rather than indoctrinating students with their personal political views and enforcing cultural-left mind control and groupthink, the role of the teacher is to educate students to be knowledgeable and able to evaluate arguments is a rational and balanced way.

Iran’s Regime Soon to Have Nuclear Bombs; Hezbollah Is Next by Majid Rafizadeh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20191/iran-nuclear-bombs

The threat of a nuclear-armed Iran must not be underestimated. Iran’s regime has frequently threatened to wipe a whole country — Israel — off the map, and is also increasing military cooperation with Venezuela and Cuba to threaten the US. Europe, too, remains a rich target for nuclear blackmail. Iran would not even have to use its nuclear bombs; the threat would be enough.

It is high time for the Biden administration and the European Union at least to stop Iran from selling its oil. If not, much of the planet will soon see itself either in World War III or a surrender.

It would have been so much less costly in life and treasure to stop Hitler before he sent the German army across the Rhine in 1936. Perhaps US President Joe Biden is trying to bribe the mullahs not to create any more mayhem before next year’s US presidential election – but the only result of such timidity is that the price goes up – with a worse war to follow. Biden would not have won WWII.

The Iranian regime, through its proxies, has already attacked US forces in Iraq and Syria at least 74 times since October 17. US retaliation – against the proxies, not Iran – apparently could not impress Iran’s regime less. Someone else takes the bullet: that is why Iran has proxies in the first place… The Biden administration is not only allowing to Iran’s mullahs to create a war cost-free, it is paying them to do it.
The threat of a nuclear-armed Iran must not be underestimated. Once Iran obtains nuclear weapons, it will most likely provide some of them to its proxies, including Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen. (Image source: iStock)

Iran is closer than ever before to obtaining nuclear bombs; meanwhile, the Biden administration’s only policy toward the ruling mullahs of Iran is to keep “rewarding” them with billions of dollars.

After the Iran-backed Hamas terror group launched its genocidal war against Israel and Jews, the Iranian regime ratcheted up its enrichment of uranium. The regime claims it now has enough enriched uranium to make three nuclear bombs, according to one of the two confidential reports by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and seen by Reuters.

No Amount Of Subsidies Will Ever Make A Wind/Solar Electricity System Economically Feasible: Francis Menton

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=a3f66ecf7b

The COP 28 climate confab opened today in Dubai. Some 70,000 true believers in the energy transition are said to be gathering. And not one of them appears to be either willing or able to do the simple arithmetic that shows that this can’t possibly work.

So far, no country that has made a commitment to “net zero” has officially backed off. (Argentina may soon become the first.). Things proceed as if all that is needed is to build sufficient wind and solar generation facilities, until eventually you have enough of them to meet demand. But that’s not how this works. The absurdity becomes more obvious every day. Can somebody please tell the poor people making fools of themselves in Dubai?

Let’s consider the latest from Germany. According to Statista here, Germany consumed 511.59 TWh of electricity in 2021 (latest year given, although the numbers have recently changed very little from year to year). Divide by 8760 (number of hours in a year) and you learn that Germany’s average usage of electricity is 58.3 GW. So, can you just build 58.3 GW of wind and solar generators to supply Germany with electricity?

Absolutely not. In fact, Germany already has way more wind and solar electricity generation capacity than the 58.3 GW, but can’t come anywhere near getting all its electricity from those sources. As of June 2023 Germany had 59.3 GW of generation capacity from wind turbines alone, and (as of end 2022) another 67.4 GW of generation capacity from solar panels. The total of the two is 126.7 GW — which would supply more than double Germany’s usage at noon on a sunny and breezy June 21. But, according to Clean Energy Wire here, through the first three quarters of 2023, the percent of its electricity that Germany got from wind and solar was only 52%. Capacity seemingly sufficient to supply double the usage in fact only supplies half. That’s because the supply does not come at the same time as the demand, and the wind/solar generation system provides no mechanism to shift the supply to a time to meet the demand.

And why doesn’t Germany just double the amount of its wind/solar generation, so that those sources would go from supplying 52% of usage to 100%. Because it doesn’t work that way. If they double the wind and solar generation, then on the sunny/breezy June 21 mid-day they will now have over 250 GW of electricity generation — more than 4 times what they need — so they will have to discard or give away the rest. But on a calm night in January, they will still have nothing and need full backup from some other source. Multiplying the wind/solar generation capacity by 10 or even 100 (referred to as “overbuilding”) will increase the costs of the system exponentially, but will never be enough to keep the lights on all the time. Or you can try energy storage to save up the surpluses to cover the deficits, but that also multiplies the costs of the system exponentially. For more than you will ever want to know about energy storage and its costs, read my December 2022 energy storage report, “The Energy Storage Conundrum.”

Liz Peek: Top takeaways, real winner of DeSantis, Newsom debate

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/top-takeaways-real-winner-of-desantis-newsom-debate

Against all expectations, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis absolutely destroyed California’s Gavin Newsom in Thursday night’s Red State-Blue State debate moderated by Sean Hannity on Fox News.

Yes, the governor of Florida had a stronger hand – his state has seen a massive inflow of residents attracted to the better quality of life offered by the Sunshine State, while people have been fleeing California. On issue after issue raised by Hannity, DeSantis could roll out statistics that prove the success of the conservative common-sense policies he has implemented in Florida. 

But the surprise was in his strong and persuasive presentation. DeSantis is generally perceived to be a wooden speaker and campaigner; maybe his run for president has made him more effective. Newsom, on the other hand, is reputed to be the Democrat’s smooth-talking, politically clever president-in-waiting, the likely successor to Joe Biden should the president drop out of the 2024 race.  

The California governor was glib, to be sure, but he turned out to be all fluff — unable to answer questions that he surely saw coming, like why people are fleeing his state or why gasoline prices are $4.85 a gallon compared to $3.17 in Florida and $3.25 nationwide.   

Newsom embarrassed himself by disputing indisputable facts presented by debate moderator Hannity; he had no answers. The California governor could not explain why 750,000 people left his state in the past two years, while 454,000 people moved into Florida, why violent crime is almost twice as high in California as it is in Florida, why taxes are so much loftier, or why homelessness is over three times greater than in Florida. (He actually tried to suggest that the homeless issue had begun under Ronald Reagan’s governorship.). 

Asked about these issues, Newsom mostly skirted the questions, denied the facts or pivoted to talking up President Joe Biden’s record. For instance, he resorted to White House talking points on the large number of jobs added nationally under the Biden administration rather than explain why unemployment is so much higher in California than it is in Florida. On our open border, Newsom blamed Republicans for not backing Biden’s plan for comprehensive immigration reform, rather than admit that the millions of people pouring into our country illegally pose a security threat.

Sometimes, Newsom made up completely non-credible statistics of his own. He claimed, for instance, that more people had moved from Florida to California in the past two years than the other way around. People watching immediately debunked that idea, posting on X, formerly known as Twitter, actual numbers that disproved the governor’s claim.

“To Whom, or to What, Do We Owe the Phenomenon that is Donald Trump?” Sydney Williams

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Donald Trump is like a battery-operated Hyper Pet Critter Dog that runs helter-skelter around the floor. As long as its battery is charged it will annoy most everyone except its owner. Trump’s battery life appears inexhaustible, but is it, and who or what is responsible?

Since January 6, 2021, it has become common for Democrats to claim democracy is under attack, with Donald Trump as prima facie evidence. In a speech on November 2, 2022, shortly before the midterms, President Biden said: “In our bones, we know democracy is at risk.” Just over two months ago, and citing the January 6 attack, he repeated the warning: “We know how damaged our institutions of democracy – our judiciary, the legislature, the executive – have become in the eyes of the American people, even the world, from attacks within, the past few years.” It is a message that resonated with voters in 2022. Will it succeed again in 2024? In that same 2023 speech, he warned that democracies “can die when people are silent – when they fail to stand up or condemn threats to democracy.” While he did not refer to him by name, he was speaking of Donald Trump.

The impetus for his remarks was January 6, and the “attack” on the Capital by Trump supporters. But in both remarks Biden failed to mention that democracy did survive – that the only fatality was that of Ashli Babbitt who was shot dead by a Capital policemen and that Vice President Michael Pence certified the election results, which made Joe Biden President. Nor did he acknowledge that the people were not silent – that the “attack” was condemned by Democrats and Independents – and by many Republicans – and all of mainstream media. More than 1,100 rioters have been charged with close to 300 having been given prison sentences, ranging from six months to eighteen years. The people have not been silent about January 6.

Road to Victory Starts, Ends with Israel E.J. Kimball

https://www.newsmax.com/politics/hamas-hezbollah-iranian/2023/11/30/id/1144266/

To this day, Hezbollah remains a powerful force in Lebanon and a dire threat to Israel, especially those living in the north.

At some point, the war between Hamas and Israel will come to an end.

A looming but important question: what’s next?

What comes next after an Iranian-funded terrorist organization manages to kill over 1,200 Israelis and take 240 of its citizens hostage into Gaza?

The future of the region must be addressed, and whatever resolution is generated must include increased security measures in volatile areas like Gaza, the West Bank, and the northern border with Lebanon.

Additionally, the U.S., and more broadly, the U.N., must give the Jewish State full autonomy and support in dealing with this dangerous conflict.

We are now aware that the Biden administration is putting pressure on the Jewish State to restrain its operations against Hamas by conditioning aid to Israel.

Not only is this giving Hamas exactly what it wants, it continues this long cycle of Israel listening to western influence and ultimately causing more harm to Israel and the Jewish people.

In a recent interview with the BBC, former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett remarked that Israel’s biggest flub over the past 20 years was listening to the advice of Western nations rather than doing the job at hand.

Three Israelis Dead, 13 Injured in Jerusalem Shooting after Cease-Fire Extended Another Day By David Zimmermann

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/three-israelis-dead-13-injured-in-jerusalem-shooting-after-cease-fire-extended-another-day/

Just after Israel and Hamas agreed to extend the existing cease-fire by another day, two Hamas terrorists opened fire at a bus stop near Jerusalem, leaving at least three Israelis dead and 13 injured.

Israeli police received reports of the shooting around 7:40 a.m. local time Thursday when two individuals pulled up in a car armed with weapons and shot several civilians standing by a busy bus station. The gunmen were killed by Israeli security forces at the scene, according to authorities.

Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack later Thursday, saying it was carried out in response to Israeli soldiers killing two Palestinian children in the West Bank the day prior.

“As we mourn our martyrs, we confirm that this operation came as a natural response to the unprecedented occupation crimes” of Israel, the terrorist organization said in a statement, identifying brothers Murad and Ibrahim al-Nimr as the deceased perpetrators.

The mass shooting came shortly after the cease-fire in the ongoing Israel-Hamas war was extended by another 24 hours ahead of the 7 a.m. deadline, allowing Hamas to release more hostages in exchange for Israel freeing its Palestinian prisoners and providing humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip. Unless another cease-fire extension is agreed upon, both warring sides will resume fighting by Friday.