RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21307/us-free-speech-eu-censorship

What is important is the solidarity being forged between the major US social media platforms and the incoming US administration in support of real freedom of expression.

The new US administration will not tolerate levying fines of tens of billions of dollars on major US technology companies by an EU that is drifting towards authoritarianism and is at the same time more dependent than ever on American power.

It would be in Europe’s lasting interest to prepare for the return of free and unfettered expression.

Anyone wishing to gauge the extent of the European Union’s regulatory drift will need to read Articles 34 and 35 of the Digital Services Act (DSA). Given their length it is impossible to quote them in full here, so here is an extract:

DSA Article 34, “Risk assessment”:

“1. Providers of very large online platforms and of very large online search engines shall diligently identify, analyse and assess any systemic risks in the Union stemming from the design or functioning of their service and its related systems, including algorithmic systems (…) and shall include the following systemic risks (…) (a) the dissemination of illegal content through their services (which includes ‘hate speech’); (b) any actual or foreseeable negative effects for the exercise of fundamental rights, in particular the fundamental rights (…) to non-discrimination; (c) any actual or foreseeable negative effects on civic discourse and electoral processes, and public security; (d) any actual or foreseeable negative effects in relation to (…) public health (…) and serious negative consequences to the person’s physical and mental well-being (…).”

Article 35, “Mitigation of risks,” obliges these platforms to take a whole arsenal of preventive and repressive measures, basically to prevent the sharing of information that displeases the European Commission. In short, the idea is to force these platforms to pay hordes of patrol officers to relentlessly hunt down opinions that do not please the European Lord. The preventive nature of these measures means that they can be described as censorship in the strict sense. What’s more, general censorship, because the terms used by the European legislator – hate, non-discrimination, civic discourse, electoral process, public security, public health, well-being – are so vague that censors with (digital) scissors do cut wherever they please, at the whim of the European Prince.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/sen-john-fetterman-to-become-first-sitting-democratic-senator-to-visit-trump-at-mar-a-lago/ar-BB1rbwVn?ocid=winp2fptaskbar&cvid=7148764e0eff4e62f664f37163b33dd4&ei=27

Democratic Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman said Thursday that he has accepted an invitation from President-elect Donald Trump to meet with him at Mar-a-Lago, which will make him the first sitting Democratic Senator known to have visited him at his Florida home since the election.

“President Trump invited me to meet, and I accepted. I’m the Senator for all Pennsylvanians — not just Democrats in Pennsylvania,” Fetterman said in a statement. CBS News first reported that Fetterman accepted Trump’s invitation to meet.

“That is the plan. Yes, we are going to have a conversation,” Fetterman told CBS News. “I think that one, he’s the president, or he will be officially.”

“And I think it’s pretty reasonable that if the president would like to have a conversation — or invite someone to have a conversation — to have it. And no one is my gatekeeper,” he added.

Fetterman has continued to break with his party over his support of many of Trump’s cabinet picks. He has also been very vocal on allegations of antisemitism in the Democratic party and has been a vocal supporter of Israel. Now, he will be the first sitting Democrat in the Senate to visit Trump at Mar-a-Lago.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/10/the-new-orleans-terrorist-attack-and-the-self-radicalization-canard/

Despite plenty of evidence to the contrary, the FBI and the mainstream media quickly declared that New Orleans terrorist Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a Muslim American born in Texas, was “self-radicalized,” “inspired” by ISIS and acted alone.

This is an all-too-common response to acts of radical Islamist terrorism in the U.S. The FBI and the press almost always rule out the possibility that other persons or groups were involved. They also frequently claim that the motives of suspected terrorists who are killed may never be known, even though there may be clear signs that they were motivated by radical Islamist ideology.

The reason for these denials is a misguided belief that it is racist and politically incorrect ever to assess that foreign Islamist terrorist groups or American Muslim clerics and groups bear any responsibility for Islamist terrorist attacks in the United States.

Despite such denials concerning the New Year’s terrorist attack by Shamsud-Din Jabbar, there are compelling reasons to believe they played a role in radicalizing Jabbar and that foreign terrorist operatives facilitated his terrorist attack.

First, it is significant that Jabbar traveled to Cairo, Egypt for 11 days in mid-2023. Since Jabbar was in debt and almost broke, it is unlikely he took such a long, expensive, and exotic trip as a tourist. It is more likely that he visited Cairo to meet members of radical Islamist terrorist groups.  Cairo is the headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood, a terrorist organization and the progenitor of al Qaeda and ISIS.

Is it possible that Jabbar received terrorist training during his 11-day trip to Cairo? Terrorism expert Dr. Walid Phares thinks so, writing in a January 6 tweet:

There is another reason to strongly suspect the involvement of a foreign party—possibly a foreign Islamist terrorist organization—in the New Orleans terrorist attack. Jabbar reportedly carried two bombs in his truck that used a very rare explosive compound called R-salt, a derivative of the explosive RDX. This explosive reportedly has never before been used in terrorist bombings in the U.S. or Europe. R-salt is a powerful and difficult-to-detect explosive. However, homemade bombmakers don’t use explosives like R-salt because they require detonators, which are hard for them to obtain. Jabbar used a makeshift detonator in his R-salt bombs, which did not detonate.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/house-passes-bill-to-sanction-icc-over-arrest-warrants-for-netanyahu-gallant/

The House passed a bipartisan bill to sanction the International Criminal Court on Thursday after the body issued arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant in November.

The bill passed the House by a vote of 243–140, with 45 Democrats in support. Many lawmakers were absent for the vote, which coincided with former president Jimmy Carter’s state funeral in Washington, D.C.

Thursday’s vote marks the second time that the House has passed the measure, which went nowhere last year in the Democrat-dominated Senate. Republican lawmakers revived the bill now that they control both chambers of Congress.

The ICC accused Netanyahu and Gallant, as well as Hamas commander Mohammed Deif, of war crimes during Israel’s ongoing conflict in Gaza, which was sparked by the Palestinian terrorist group’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel. The Jewish state claimed responsibility for the death of Deif, one of the reported masterminds behind the terror attack.

The warrants prevent Netanyahu and Gallant from traveling to 125 countries that are party to the ICC. The pair would be arrested if they were to step foot in any of those jurisdictions.

Congressional Republicans and moderate Democrats, who ally themselves with Israel, sharply criticized the ICC for seeking the arrests of the Israeli leaders. As such, they backed legislation to punish the court.

“A kangaroo court is seeking to arrest the prime minister of our great ally, Israel, which is not only responding to an enemy which conducted a genocide, but an enemy who still holds 100 hostages,” Representative Brian Mast (R., Fla.), who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said on the House floor ahead of the vote.

https://tomklingenstein.com/making-sense-of-trumps-mandate/

Anti-Trump conservatives struggle to interpret our current political moment. Some are the unfortunate victims of extreme cases of Trump Derangement Syndrome which, at this point, have permanently impaired their ability to perform political analysis. But there are others, still worth reading from time to time, who remain surprisingly blinkered by the stubborn march of history. These unfortunate conservatives seem unable or unwilling to acknowledge that the long twentieth century has come to an end. A new political analysis is needed for a moment altogether new.

Consider one scholar from whom I have learned much: Yuval Levin, who has in the past employed his background in political philosophy to explore the deep sources and undercurrents of contemporary politics. In 2014, he treated Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke as the distant founders of contemporary progressivism and conservatism, respectively. In 2016, he channeled Alexis de Tocqueville to diagnose the “fracturing of the American republic.” During the Age of Trump, he has written on the importance of renewing the fundamental institutions of American society and, most recently, on the prospects for a recovered constitutionalism to restore unity to the American polity despite our inevitable political disagreements.

For all his erudition, Levin seems unable to grasp the significance of the 2024 election. In a post-election essay for the Dispatch, he emphasizes “the continuity of our peculiar political era,” characterizing Trump’s victory as “a relatively narrow win owed almost entirely to negative polarization.” Levin dismisses the possibility that “Trump’s eccentric mix of interests and priorities” is “well aligned with the public’s hopes and fears.” In fact, he charges, “Most of what Trump himself is most eager to do, from mass deportations to steep tariffs, would likely prove fairly unpopular when actually put into practice.” 

Levin also expresses a contemptuous lack of curiosity about “the motley crew surrounding Trump, whose political instincts add up to an especially incoherent jumble.” He specifically disparages Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for his alleged fixation on “tak[ing] fluoride out of our drinking water.” Levin concludes by insisting on the continued relevance of his own brand of conservatism: Trump’s “victory does not mean that Trumpian populism alone will now own the right for good.”

https://www.thefp.com/p/paradise-lost-karen-bass-los-angeles-fires?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

The burning of L.A. is not just a natural disaster. It’s a man-made catastrophe.

The first job of the government is to keep people safe. Failing that, its job is to show that someone is in charge when crisis erupts. On 9/11, there was nothing then–Mayor Rudy Giuliani could do to keep the World Trade Center from falling. Yet he became, in that long-ago era, the most popular person in America by staying on the scene and leading at his city’s moment of greatest danger.

That brings us to the fires in Los Angeles—the most devastating in the history of the city, with a reported 27,000 acres burned and the fires mostly uncontained. There, authorities have failed not only at protecting its residents but at inspiring confidence that they had the situation in hand.

We start with Mayor Karen Bass. As the Palisades fire began to consume wide swaths of America’s second-largest city, she was in Ghana to watch the inauguration of that country’s new president.

Bass left Los Angeles on Saturday—two days after the National Weather Service warned that strong winds and “extreme fire weather conditions” would soon threaten the city. On Sunday, the NWS announced a fire weather watch. By Monday, the warnings had become much more urgent, with the NWS tweeting in all-caps that “A LIFE-THREATENING, DESTRUCTIVE, Widespread Windstorm” would hit L.A. imminently.

Yet Bass remained halfway around the world, effectively leaving the crisis to her deputies. They, in turn, insisted Bass could run the city from anywhere via phone and tablet.

https://swtotd.blogspot.com

Many Americans bemoan a decline in culture. But what do we mean by culture? Are we speaking of the arts, religion, traditions, or a shared history? Are we referring to behavior? In a review of Eliot Stein’s Custodians of Wonder, Brandy Schillace wrote in The Wall Street Journal: “Our lives are connected to the land and the animals. Yet we are also threads in the tapestry that stretches back into prehistory, a part of a superorganism that is culture itself.”

So, what is culture? Definitions have changed. Noah Webster, in his 1828 dictionary, defined the word according to its etymological roots: “The act of tilling and preparing the earth for crops.” Forty-three years later, Edward Burnett Tyler, in Primitive Culture, defined the term in words we better understand today: “Culture…is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” From the Oxford English Dictionary: “Culture –The arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively.” In 1952, U.S. anthropologists A.L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions, cited 164 definitions of culture. I think of culture, first as a system of shared beliefs, values, behavior and practices – based on our Judeo-Christian heritage and embedded in our founding documents – and second as works of art, literature and music.

For most of our nation’s history differences ruled. Rural and immigrant communities were often distinct entities. Until the mid-19th Century, most Americans never ventured far from their homes. But from the mid 19th Century on, technological advances unified us in a way unknown to earlier Americans. First we had steam ships, trains and then, later, the automobile, which allowed people to experience the size of our country. Radio then television brought other parts of the country and the world into our lives. The number of newspapers began to shrink. So that by my generation, people read the same news, listened to the same music, watched the same TV shows, saw the same movies, and heard the same nightly newscasts. In 1956 (in a country half the size it is today), Elvis Presley sold 10 million copies of a single song, “Hound Dog.” According to Pew Research, every evening during the 1960s between 27 and 29 million people listened to Walter Cronkite’s news on CBS, an audience greater than today’s combined daily audiences for ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News and MSNBC.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/09/the-fall-of-the-house-of-mouse/

The legendary Walt Disney, watching from above, must be disgusted with what’s happened at the company he founded more than 100 years ago, October 16, 1923, to be exact. Under the leadership of Bob Iger for most of the past 20 years, the company has recently floundered, abandoning its roots in providing wholesome entertainment across its many platforms (theme parks, cruise lines, movies, broadcasting, streaming entertainment) and is now seen for what it has become, a woke institution dedicated to indoctrinating children. And parents have rebelled.

100 years ago, Walt Disney had a vision: to provide wholesome entertainment for families and “children of all ages.” He oversaw the creation of endearing classic movies, theme parks that allowed visitors to enter a whole new world, and his namesake brand of quality kid-safe content. It became world-famous for its uniquely “Disney” way of entertaining everyone. From his unabashedly patriotic content generated during World War II to the “Wonderful World of Disney” that brought families together in front of the TV beginning in the late 1950s, Walt’s world was shaped by his “America First” beliefs.

But all that has changed under the leadership of current CEO Bob Iger. Iger, who joined ABC (the American Broadcasting Company) in 1974, earning $175 a week, has steadily risen through the ranks at ABC through a series of positions at Capital Cities/ABC before it was acquired by Disney in 1995. His rise up toward the C-suite continued unabated until 2005 when the Walt Disney Board selected him to succeed the unpopular Michael Eisner as its CEO.

Since then he has presided over a period of rapid growth in its theme parks division as well as masterminding the acquisition of several intellectual property portfolios—Pixar, Lucasfilm, and Marvel, to name a few—to bolster its standing in Hollywood and become a dominating force in the entertainment industry.

But as of late, since the late 2010s, the company has become a leading force in the woke movement, which has caused problems for the company. It has run into a buzz saw of criticism over its forced introduction of LGBTQIA+ themes and characters into its TV programming and films.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/09/america-and-europe-can-hang-together-or-hang-separately/

Consider these European and American binaries.

On December 20, 2024, a terrorist, Taleb Al-Abdul Mohsen, rammed his SUV into a Christmas crowd in Magdeburg, Germany. He killed 6 pedestrians and injured 299 others.

Eleven days later, on New Year’s Eve in New Orleans, Louisiana, Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar smashed his pickup into a festive crowd. He murdered fifteen and hurt over 35.

Germany’s fertility rate is scarcely above 1.4—about average for a shrinking European Union. About 20 percent of the country is now foreign-born, a record high.

American fertility has precipitously dived to 1.6. The foreign-born now represent 15 percent of the American resident population, the highest in both actual numbers (50 million) and percentages in history.

The German military is a shell of its former self, with fewer than 200,000 soldiers and a shortage of almost all types of weapons.

The U.S. military, after being humiliated in Afghanistan, is currently down some 40,000-plus recruits. It faces shortages of anti-tank weapons, artillery shells, ships, and logistical support.

Germany may finally manage to spend 2% of its GDP on defense; the United States is heading downward below 3%—the lowest in over 80 years since the Great Depression.

Last year, the German economy shrank; this year, it will scarcely grow, in part because of shortages of affordable fossil fuels.

Germans pay four times what Americans on average do for electricity. Yet the Trump administration has promised an oil and natural gas renaissance, hoping to expand both production and exports with envisioned new pipelines and liquefied natural gas terminals.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21298/trump-crazy-ideas

Why is it that people are always calling for someone to think “outside the box,” then when someone does, say, “Aaaak! He thought outside the box!”

In that view, President-elect Donald J. Trump has already committed (at least) three heresies: Buy Greenland, stop China from controlling the Panama Canal and deepen America’s affiliation with Canada.

All three ideas are neither crazy nor even new.

President Harry S. Truman looked at acquiring Greenland in 1946. Thomas Jefferson, after the Louisiana Purchase, proposed buying Cuba – just think how the Cubans would be prospering now, politically and economically, if that deal had gone through. Those acquisitions didn’t take place but in 1917, the US did acquire Denmark’s Virgin Islands for $25 million. As historian Stephen Press writes,

“As secretary of state, John Quincy Adams arranged debt relief for Spain in exchange for Florida. Secretary of State William Seward acquired Alaska. What Mr. Trump proposes is consistent with this American tradition—and with our current borders. Sovereignty purchases are responsible for more than 40% of U.S. land…

“History suggests the benefits of being open-minded about this. Inhabitants of Alaska wouldn’t be better off under Russian sovereignty. Bringing Greenlanders into closer affiliation with the U.S., and sweetening the deal with economic subsidies, could conceivably prove beneficial to all parties”

As for the Panama Canal, President Jimmy Carter handed it to Panama for $1, but on the condition that it permanently remain a neutral zone – not one controlled at both ends by China. “We gave the Panama Canal to Panama,” Trump has pointed out. “We didn’t give it to China. They’ve abused that gift.”

The US built the Panama Canal in the first place to be able to avoid having commercial and military sea traffic avoid the long journey around South America’s southernmost sea route, the Strait of Magellan – where the Chinese Communist Party also located a base.