BOOKS Comments turned off

Marxism: the Next Generation A new book traces the genealogy of wokeness. by Bruce Bawer

Posted By on April 3rd, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/marxism-the-next-generation/

If more Americans had been familiar a couple of decades ago with the history recounted in the pages of Next Gen Marxism – a cogent, comprehensive new book by Mike Gonzalez, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, and Katharine Gorka, an expert on the terrorist threat (and Sebastian Gorka’s better half) – a lot would be different. For one thing, Barack Obama would almost certainly never have been elected president. Fewer people would’ve been suckered into the George Floyd hysteria. Parents would’ve been warned a lot sooner about the existential danger of sending their kids off to study in the Ivy League. And that’s just for starters.

For the history told in Next Gen Marxism is the history of what we now know as wokeness – the leftist sociocultural ascendancy manifested in (among much else) cancel culture, the Antifa and BLM riots, DEI, “judicial reform,” “squatter’s rights,” the near-ubiquitous promotion of transgender ideology, and (not least) the conspiracy of Hollywood, the media, the D.C. swamp, and Big Tech to destroy Donald Trump’s first term and deny him a second.

It can feel as if the woke madness slithered out of nowhere, like some poisonous snake, just a few years ago, only to be coiling itself tightly around our throats very soon afterward. But in fact, this toxic creature has a long lineage that leads back to Rousseau and the French Revolution in the 18th century, Marx and Engels in the 19th, and the Russian Revolution in the 20th. Then there’s Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), whose revolutionary writings – notably his theory of hegemony – have made him, in the authors’ words, “the unrivaled Marxist political theorist of the past half century.” (And guess who, of all people, is America’s “top Gramsci scholar”? None other than Pete Buttigieg’s father, Joseph. It’s one of a number of surprises here – surprises that, perhaps, shouldn’t be quite so surprising.)

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

The Many Ways A Porous Border Means Crime Without Boundaries: James Varney and Abigail Degnan

Posted By on April 3rd, 2024

https://thefederalist.com/2024/04/01/the-many-ways-a-porous-border-means-crime-without-boundaries/

It’s undeniable that the massive surge in immigration since the Biden administration relaxed border policies has been accompanied by much more crime, however unquantifiable.

When President Biden’s supporters attacked him for describing the man who allegedly murdered Georgia co-ed Laken Riley as an “illegal,” they shined a light on one of the most contested words in American politics.

The progressive push to describe border crossers as undocumented or unauthorized can also serve to downplay and obscure the massive issue of crime perpetrated and spawned by the influx of millions of migrants since Biden was elected — often in ways that leave the migrants themselves as victims.

While migrant advocates argue that illegal arrivals commit crimes at lower rates than Americans, the claim is unverifiable because the federal government and most states do not break down crimes by immigration status.

Criminologists also note that it ignores the vast web of statutory crimes concurrent with illegal immigration — drug smuggling, human trafficking, child labor violations, prostitution, the black market in employment, and so on.

What remains undeniable by the law of averages is that the massive surge in immigration since the Biden administration relaxed border policies — a surge it puts at more than 4 million people, but other sources put at millions more — has been accompanied by much more crime, however unquantifiable.

Millions of migrants, though not all, run afoul of laws by their situation more than by overtly malign criminal intent. But their first step across the border is a lawbreaking one, and it is often followed by life on the law’s margins: living in the U.S. without insurance or proper work papers, providing illicit labor for unscrupulous or blasé employers, turning to black markets for counterfeit Social Security cards, and often becoming targets for robbers or extortionists. Their desire to come to America creates a vast pool of criminality involving them or those illegally profiting from them.

“On some criminal matters, like homicides, we’ve got a good sense of the scale there whether we solve them all or not,” said Alex Nowrasteh, a vice president at the Cato Institute who studies the economic impact of immigration. “But some of this other stuff is like all black markets in that it is opaque behavior. We don’t know how much crime there might be and in a sense I think it’s sort of unknowable.”

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

‘The Most Terrifying Poll Result I’ve Ever Seen’

Posted By on April 3rd, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/04/03/the-most-terrifying-poll-result-ive-ever-seen/

Earlier this year, pollster Scott Rasmussen asked voters a simple question: “Would you rather have your candidate win by cheating or lose by playing fair?”

The answers he got back were, as he put it in a Daily Signal podcast last week, “the most terrifying poll result I’ve ever seen.”

Among all Americans, just 7% said they would want their candidate to win by cheating. As Rasmussen put it, he’d rather see that number lower, but that’s not bad.

But more than a third of the elite 1% he surveyed would condone cheating. And among those who are “politically obsessed” – meaning that they talk about politics every day – that number shot up to 69%.

Keep in mind that this elite 1% group is overwhelmingly liberal. According to Rasmussen, these are mainly well-educated urbanites who make more than $150,000 a year and think Joe Biden is doing a great job. Nearly three-quarters identify as Democrats.

They are also highly influential when it comes to policy, and they are completely out of touch with everyday Americans. A few examples from the survey:

Nearly 60% say there is too much individual freedom in America – double the rate of all Americans.
More than two-thirds (67%) favor rationing of energy and food to combat the threat of “climate change.”
Nearly three-quarters (70%) of the elites trust the government to “do the right thing most of the time.”
More than two-thirds (67%) say teachers and other educational professionals should decide what children are taught rather than letting parents decide.
Nearly three-quarters (74%) say they are financially better off than before COVID, compared with 20% of the general public.

These elites are also the people who are constantly wailing and gnashing their teeth about how Donald Trump is a “grave threat to democracy.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Injustice of the Trump Gag Order Andrew McCarthy

Posted By on April 3rd, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/04/the-injustice-of-the-trump-gag-order/

Biden’s provocative speech is allowed because he didn’t direct anyone to do anything; Trump’s is suppressed even though he didn’t direct anyone to do anything.

New York state judge Juan Merchan has expanded the gag order he slapped on former president Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, to include prohibiting Trump from speaking about his daughter, Loren Merchan, a Democratic political operative.

Merchan doesn’t contend that Trump threatened his daughter. Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, the elected progressive Democrat who sought the gag order and later asked for it to be ratcheted up, has not accused Trump of incitement, much less sought to arrest and charge him for such an offense. How could he? There is no evidence that Trump called for violence or even verbal attacks against Merchan’s daughter.

Instead, Merchan rationalizes that Trump is a powerful figure whose followers construe his statements as directives to resort to intimidation and, potentially, violence — even if the statements do not literally say any such thing. Ergo, Trump must be silenced as if he is guilty of coercion.

According to Merchan, Trump must be treated differently because he’s like a government, not an ordinary defendant: “The conventional ‘David vs. Goliath’ roles are no longer in play as demonstrated by the singular power [Trump’s] words have on countless others.”

But wait, isn’t Trump just using his “bully pulpit”?

After all, only two weeks ago, the Biden administration told the Supreme Court that when the government uses its “bully pulpit” — when it uses the singular power of its words to persuade others — it is not to be blamed for the abusive action of others as long as it hasn’t specifically directed them to take any such action.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

South Africa: Safe-haven for Hamas, Islamic State and al-Qaeda Terrorists by Lawrence A. Franklin

Posted By on April 2nd, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20489/south-africa-hamas

“The South African government is the same thing as Hamas. It’s an Iranian proxy, and its role in the war is to fight the ideological and ideas war to stigmatize Jews around the world. ” — Frans Cronje, CEO Race Relations Institute, interview on Chai FM Radio, January 26, 2024.

The ANC’s lax monitoring and prosecution of the terrorist presence in South Africa may have been the result of an understanding between the government and terrorist groups not to execute terror operations in the country while permitting fundraising to continue without interference from South African law enforcement agencies.

Adding to South Africa’s concerns is the possibility that its citizens waging jihad in Mozambique may eventually return and apply their combat experience at home to target the ANC regime.

South Africa’s ruling African National Congress (ANC) has close and long-standing ties to the terrorist organization Hamas. As early as 2015, Hamas had developed personal ties with South Africa’s then-President Jacob Zuma. In October 2015, the ANC hosted a Hamas delegation led by terrorist mastermind Khaled Mashaal, who met with Zuma in Pretoria.

South Africa might appear to have scored another diplomatic victory propaganda victory by getting the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to accept onto its judicial docket the African state’s charge that Israel’s presence in the West Bank is an illegal occupation. This recent initiative follows South Africa’s December 29, 2023 presentation to the ICJ that Israel’s military operations in Gaza were supposedly acts of genocide against the territory’s civilian population.

While South Africa’s latest grandstand maneuver will most likely fail on its lack of merit, the effort did succeed in exposing yet another unsavory dimension of the relationship between South Africa and the terrorist organization Hamas, which initiated the war against Israel on October 7, 2023.

BOOKS, MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

A Stalin-Era Story, Roiling Russia Jay Nordlinger

Posted By on April 2nd, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/04/a-stalin-era-story-roiling-russia/

The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov’s classic, becomes a movie

It’s a miracle,” everyone says. It’s a miracle that Michael Lockshin’s adaptation of The Master and Margarita made it to Russian screens. It’s a further miracle that the adaptation, this movie, has stayed there (so far). Among those who use the word “miracle” is Lockshin himself.

He is the director, and The Master and Margarita? That’s the classic novel by Mikhail Bulgakov, the Russian writer who lived from 1891 to 1940. He worked on the novel from 1928 until his death. In 1930, he burned his manuscript. Then he started again. The novel could not be published during his lifetime. Stalin would not have liked it. It was published decades after Bulgakov’s death, with the first complete version appearing in 1973.

Maybe the most famous line of the book is “Manuscripts don’t burn.” Bulgakov may have picked this up from Christopher Marlowe, whose Doctor Faustus cries, “I’ll burn my books!” (but it is not so simple). There is a lot of the Faust legend in The Master and Margarita: Goethe, certainly. There is even a character named “Berlioz.” (Hector Berlioz composed a kind of oratorio — which can also be staged as an opera — called “The Damnation of Faust.”)

So, that’s what The Master and Margarita is about? A pact with the devil? What the novel is about is a complicated, not really answerable question. Michael Lockshin puts it amusingly, in a conversation with me: “Ask ten Bulgakov scholars what the novel is about, and you’ll get ten different answers. Ask a hundred, and you’ll get a hundred.”

The book has a devil character, yes. (His name is “Woland” and he pays a visit to Moscow, entourage in tow.) The book deals with religion and irreligion. There is a love story. There are various stories, interweaving.

Regardless, everyone can agree on this: The novel depicts the condition of the artist under dictatorship — the life that Bulgakov was living. The life that many were living. Lockshin’s film adaptation depicts the same.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Second Battle for Shifa Hospital Shows Israel Will Accept Only Victory Noah Rothman

Posted By on April 2nd, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/04/the-second-battle-for-shifa-hospital-shows-israel-will-accept-only-victory/

This is what a ‘sustainable campaign’ to eliminate Hamas looks like.

Those who camouflage their hostility toward Israel’s objectives in its defensive war against Hamas as little more than antipathy toward Benjamin Netanyahu must be frustrated today. The dubious claim that Israel is conducting a cruel war devoid of respect for human life is being rebutted today by one of the Israeli prime minister’s foremost domestic opponents.

In a Monday morning statement, former Israeli prime minister and current center-right opposition figure Naftali Bennett called the two-week operation to once again clear terrorist elements from Gaza’s Shifa Hospital an “amazing battlefield achievement.” Indeed, with roughly 200 Hamas fighters killed, another 500 captured, and 6,000 civilians evacuated without a single noncombatant fatality, the outcome was “unprecedented in urban warfare,” as Bennett put it. “These results undermine the false claim that the IDF is targeting civilians,” he said. “If we didn’t care about innocent lives, we’d have simply bombed the whole complex, without risking [the] lives of our own fighters.”

The war Hamas inaugurated on October 7, 2023, has now seen two battles to liberate Gaza’s largest hospital network from terrorist control. The first began late last year and concluded with an impressive IDF operation that cleared out the hospital while preserving the ongoing medical services Shifa provided Gaza’s civilians. The second wrapped up on Monday morning following a two-week operation in which only two IDF soldiers were killed, culminating in the seizure of a trove of weaponry and intelligence as well as the neutralization of the hospital as a terrorist command-and-control node.

Western media outlets don’t paint quite the rosy portrait of this operation that Bennett did. Israel’s pacification of the Shifa complex left “a wasteland of destroyed buildings and Palestinian bodies scattered in the dirt,” Reuters’ report began. That could be said of any military operation, the purpose of which is to defeat an armed opposition and deprive it of defensive infrastructure.

BOOKS, EDUCATION Comments turned off

A to Z Insanity: Kids’ Alphabet Book Has a Gender for Every Letter Catherine Salgado

Posted By on April 2nd, 2024

https://pjmedia.com/catherinesalgado/2024/04/01/a-to-z-insanity-kids-alphabet-book-has-a-gender-for-every-letter-n4927819

Since today is April Fools’, it seems appropriate to discuss an entirely inappropriate alphabet book being pushed to young kids (including by tech giant Amazon), which has a fake “gender” for all the letters of the alphabet.

The book is called “ABC of Gender Identity,” by Devika Dalal, available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. This is how the wacky authoress describes her childhood propaganda text: “Children begin exploring their gender from as young as three years old. But many are taught that there are only two to choose from. In an effort to introduce a wider lens and promote greater diversity, inclusion and acceptance, I developed ABC of Gender Identity – an A to Z alphabet book designed to normalize nonbinary genders.” In other words, it’s a fantasy book masquerading as non-fiction, and proportionately dangerous to innocent young kids who don’t know any better.

The book is now “distributed globally and available at all major retailers and libraries,” the authoress declared. Libs of TikTok shared a video in which a young woman explained that “ABC of Gender Identity” was given to a kid in a British Columbia school. The video showed the child’s mother flipping through the book, which shows a different invented “gender” for each letter of the alphabet. The complete list of inanity was “Agender, bigender, cisgender, demigender, endogender, femme, gender fluid, horogender, intersex, juxera, kynigender, libragender, man (or boy), nonbinary, offgender, pangender, gender (questioning), (gender) reassigned, subgender, transgender, ungender, venngender, woman (or girl), xirl/xay, yinyang ren, ze/zir.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

On Things Collapsing Reports indicate that the Francis Scott Key Bridge will take at least ten years to rebuild. More than 50 years ago, the original was built in five. By Christopher Roach

Posted By on April 2nd, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/04/02/on-things-collapsing/

The recent collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore was profoundly dramatic. It struck a chord because something similar happened in Tampa in 1980. Ships are big and always getting bigger. And this bridge was a bit older and not made with today’s state-of-the-art design and technology.

How did it happen? Was it a freak accident? The poisoned fruit of affirmative action? Sabotage or terrorism? I have no idea, and we may not know for a while.

I do know that if the truth threatens some chestnut of politically correct conventional wisdom, it will be hidden in a footnote, if it is allowed to be released at all. Planes have crashed and ships have crashed into other ships, and the possible influence of affirmative action and lower standards was never really explored in any depth, even though it appeared to be a contributing factor. The powers-that-be seem to think we can take people with one or more standard deviations lower general intelligence and obtain the same result in technically demanding fields like aviation, seamanship, medicine, and engineering.

In Baltimore, the captain or pilot apparently sounded the alarm, permitting the police to save many lives by closing off the bridge to traffic. This was the good news part of the story. But I am more concerned about the timeline for the bridge’s replacement. There are reports that it will take at least ten years.

The original was built in five.

Sclerotic Nation

We went from biplanes to jet fighters in 20 years. Then we went from jet fighters to men in space in another 20. But repeating yesteryear’s technological achievements like building skyscrapers, dams, bridges, railroads, and the like is apparently going to take longer and cost more than it did in years, if it is even able to be repeated.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Iran Smuggles US Weapons from Afghanistan to Terrorists in Israel The weapons denied by Biden to Israel are instead going to terrorists backed by Biden. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on April 2nd, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/iran-smuggles-us-weapons-from-afghanistan-to-terrorists-in-israel/

In December, the Biden administration blocked a shipment of M4 rifles to Israel. The rifles were meant to be used by local community self-defense units of the kind that had served as the front line of defense against the Hamas attack on Oct 7. However the Biden administration claimed that it was concerned that the self-defense units might be Jewish “right-wing extremists”.

The Islamic terrorists attacking them however had no trouble finding M4 rifles. They just expected theirs to come by a more complicated road from Afghanistan, by way of Iran’s terror operatives, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan via a drug smuggling route, and then inside Israel.

The M4 rifles were part of a package that included grenade launchers, anti-tank missiles, anti-tank landmines, RPGs, C4 and Semtex explosives, and hand grenades.

A number of those were clearly American weapons including the M4s and the M203 grenade launchers: both in use in Afghanistan. The Alma Center, founded by IDF Lt Col (Res.) Sarit Zehavi, believes that the M4s are likely “spoils from Iraq, Syria or Afghanistan.”

If U.S. weapons from Afghanistan made their way to Islamic terrorists in Israel, it would not be the first time. Islamic terrorists in Gaza had been previously spotted with M4 and M16 rifles, including during the Oct 7 attacks. Rep. James Comer had dispatched a letter after the Hamas attacks to the Department of Defense asking it to explain the M4A1 Carbines, which were “specially designed for U.S. Special Operations Forces” in the hands of the terrorists.

“The surprise terror attacks by Hamas into Israel were made possible, in part, because of U.S. arms left behind in Afghanistan by the Biden administration,” Larry Keane, the Counsel for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, wrote at the Firearm Industry Trade Association.

The weapons package now intercepted by Israel shows how Iran may have tapped into the weapons left behind in Afghanistan. The weapons shipment appears to be a ‘sandwich’ with Iran moving American weapons to the Islamic terrorists backed by the Biden administration.