EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Boycott Formula How conservatives can restrain left-wing corporate culture. Christopher Rufo

Posted By on November 3rd, 2023

Conservatives have recently scored surprise victories against left-wing corporate culture, with successful pressure campaigns against a trio of blue-chip companies—Disney, Target, and Bud Light—that have revealed the potential of a culture-war tactic once considered the Left’s stock-in-trade: the consumer boycott.

The campaigns are notable because they drew blood, figuratively speaking. Disney, which promised to embed radical gender theory in its children’s programming, watched its stock price plummet and signaled a retreat from the culture war. Target, which featured “breast binders” as part of its seasonal “Pride Collection,” saw a decline in sales and promised to “pause, adapt, and learn.” Bud Light featured a transgender “influencer” in an advertising campaign, sending its reputation and sales into freefall.

What lessons can be drawn from these examples? And how can conservatives use boycotts to fight left-wing cultural capture?

To answer these questions, let’s consult the academic literature on consumer boycotts. First, it’s important to understand the genesis—or, in narrative terms, the “inciting incident”—of a potential boycott. Research suggests that in successful boycotts, activists often highlight a firm’s “egregious act,” a transgression of some deeply held value among consumers, and channel the resulting “negative arousal” into a boycott. To expand participation, activists must create a sense that partaking in the boycott provides an opportunity to “make a difference,” change company behavior, and join in a widely shared cause. The research also suggests that boycotts must begin with a sense of optimism, as the “perceived efficacy“ of a campaign significantly determines its likelihood of success. 

Next, the mechanics. Northwestern University professor Brayden King collected data from 133 boycott campaigns conducted between 1990 and 2005 and used statistical analysis to identify which tactics are most correlated with success. King argues that boycott campaigns succeed through “market disruption,” targeting a firm’s stock price, and “mediated disruption,” targeting a firm’s public reputation. These two strategies are mutually reinforcing, as economic damage can lead to greater media coverage, and greater media coverage of a company’s difficulties can lead to economic damage.

ANTI-SEMITISM, ISRAEL Comments turned off

One Sick War The best way of understanding it is that Israelis are Jews and the ancient plague of anti-Semitism is again sweeping the globe Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on November 2nd, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/11/02/one-sick-war/

There is something surreal, even sick about the current Gazan war.

Throughout European and American cities and campuses, tens of thousands of Middle East immigrants and students, and radical leftists chant nonstop “Free Palestinian from the River to the Sea.”

More recently, they are also yelling, “Israel, you can’t hide, we caught you in genocide.”

Consider the hypocrisy of that dual messaging.

Hamas and its supporters are openly and eagerly calling for the genocidal end of Israel by wiping it out from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

Yet at the same time they also claim it is Israel that is committing genocide—the very current self-described agenda of Hamas and its expatriate community of devotees!

The war has become crazier still.

Hamas and its megaphones abroad also blast Israel daily for retaliating for the October butchery of some 1,300 Israeli infants, children, women, and the elderly.

They further demand Israel must be selective in its airborne targeting of the Hamas killers, who burrow beneath hospitals, mosques, and hospitals and use civilians as shields.

Hamas takes for granted that a supposedly heartless Israel nevertheless will be reluctant to strike the Hamas terrorists when and if they are surrounded by civilians.

Indeed, Gazans are put in more danger by Hamas than they would otherwise be by the Israel Defense Forces.

Yet the world accepts that Israel itself would never employ such a ruse of using civilians to shield its cities from indiscriminately fired Hamas missiles.

The world further knows that if Israel ever employed such a barbaric tactic, Israeli civilian shields would attract—not deter—Hamas rockets.

Hamas’s apologists insist that Israel warn in advance civilians to keep clear of Israel bombs.

Yet at the same time, daily Hamas launches rockets into Israel. And no one in the international community lectures Hamas first to drop leaflets or text Israeli civilians that Hamas rockets are on their way into their vicinity.

Instead, the only purpose of Hamas rockets is to indiscriminately strike and kill Israeli civilians.

BOOKS Comments turned off

The Elite Conspiracy to Monopolize Opinion Through Propaganda By Janet Levy

Posted By on November 2nd, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/11/the_elite_conspiracy_to_monopolize_opinion_through_propaganda.html

Humankind is supposedly ruled by reason. But logic isn’t effective in influencing people, individually or in a group. Advertising, public relations, and propaganda succeed precisely because they bypass reason. They hack the shortcuts the brain uses, changing people’s beliefs and behavior without their realizing it.

Sadly, we are not taught how to guard against these techniques, writes Michelle Stiles in One Idea to Rule Them All: Reverse Engineering American Propaganda. This ignorance, she says, has “devastating consequences for both individuals and society as a whole.”

Some techniques are as old as civilization. Many books cover those used in advertising. Stiles’s scholarly book instead addresses how the ubiquitous manufacture of consent has eclipsed faith in the media and democracy, with stagecraft and narrative supplanting the search for truth. Like a 21st-century Orwell, she warns that tyranny begins with control and abuse of language. She aims to help us recognize the modus operandi of Idea Bullies, who use nefarious means to make an unwary public accept the dominant narrative.

Stiles begins with a startling fact. It wasn’t Nazi Germany or communist dictatorships that first mastered mass persuasion. It was the American government in the lead-up to U.S. involvement in World War I. The working and middle classes saw the war as a businessman’s venture and were reluctant to enlist. To overcome this resistance, President Woodrow Wilson set up the Committee on Public Information (CPI) headed by George Creel. Other key figures were Arthur Bullard, Edward Bernays, and Walter Lippmann.

Together, they drew on and orchestrated the skills of intellectuals, journalists, local leaders, artists, businessmen, and others to get young men to believe in the cause and sign up to fight. Every means was deployed to sell the war to Americans and the world—the printed word, the spoken word, motion pictures, posters, and radio. ‘Four-minute men’—essentially paid shills—would give seemingly extempore speeches at public meetings, plays, and other places to push the war effort. They doubled up as snitches. Those expressing anti-war sentiments were shamed, censored, or faced legal action. In the end, Creel could boast that the committee’s work was a “vast enterprise in salesmanship, the world’s greatest adventure in advertising.”

HOMELAND SECURITY, IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Wray Warns of Possible Attacks, While Mayorkas Harbors Hamas Sympathizer Milt Harris

Posted By on November 2nd, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/miltharris/2023/11/01/wray-warns-of-possible-attacks-while-mayorkas-harbors-hamas-sympathizer-n4923535

Wray told the senators that after the October Hamas attack on Israel, there is an elevated terrorism risk in the U.S. That risk includes homegrown supporters of the group. However, Wray failed to mention that Joe Biden has allowed thousands of the Jihadist groupies to stream into the country through the open border and still, even while he was speaking, was allowing the infiltration to happen. 

“We assess that the actions of Hamas and its allies will serve as an inspiration the likes of which we haven’t seen since ISIS launched its so-called ‘caliphate’ several years ago,” he said.

Wray went on to say: 

The terrorism threat has been elevated throughout 2023. The ongoing war in the Middle East has raised the threat of an attack against Americans in the United States to a whole other level since the horrific terrorist attacks committed by Hamas against innocent people in Israel a few weeks ago. We also cannot and do not discount the possibility that Hamas or another foreign terrorist organization may exploit the current conflict to conduct attacks here on our own soil.

When Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) asked him to assess the threat to Americans, Wray responded, “This is not a time for panic. We shouldn’t stop conducting our daily lives, going to schools, houses of worship, and so forth, but we should be vigilant.”

That’s sound advice, but perhaps as the Director of the FBI, you should take it yourself. Shouldn’t you be thoroughly looking into these pro-Hamas, anti-Israel demonstrations on major college campuses? Shouldn’t the FBI insist on much more sophisticated screening procedures at the border, and shouldn’t the FBI be harassing if not actually arresting and deporting known threats?

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Say, They Want A Revolution …

Posted By on November 2nd, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/11/02/say-they-want-a-revolution/

In his book “Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution,” David Horowitz, a New Left movement founder in the 1960s, refers to a member of the radical Students for a Democratic Society who “once wrote, ‘The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.’ In other words the cause – whether inner city blacks or women – is never the real cause, but only an occasion to advance the real cause which is the accumulation of power to make the revolution.” Now apply that to the tussle over man’s impact on the climate and things become much clearer.

In the minds of the climate alarmists, the revolution looks like tearing down “the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution.” Their objective is to force “major structural changes in economic growth and development,” and the “fight” against climate change “is just a part of it.”

That great revolutionary of the U.S. House, Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, dreamed up a way to use the global warming scare through the Green New Deal, which was less of an environmental bill than a “how-do-you-change-the-entire economy thing.” In other words, a back door for more Marxist revolutionaries to enter.

It doesn’t matter that free-market capitalism is the only economic system in recorded history that has allowed the masses to escape from grinding poverty. All that matters to revolutionaries is the revolution.

MY SAY: Comments turned off

MY SAY:A Cautionary Memoir Today’s Hamas Youth rallies remind me of something. by Ruth King

Posted By on November 2nd, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-cautionary-memoir/

My parents and my younger brother and I lived in Bolivia during the Holocaust. When we settled into life in America after World War II, most of my parents’ friends were European emigres. They were drawn to Jewish academics and physicians who always called each other ”Herr” or “Pan” or “Frau” or “Pani” in German or Polish, and never by first names.

I was particularly fond of the Jewish-German emigres. They had come from the belly of the Nazi beast. They became substitutes for the family I never met — grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins all killed in Europe. They reciprocated my affection and always asked for me as soon as they entered: “Vo ist der tochter?”

While they hated Germany, they loved German poetry and composers and always listened to records and recited poems with translations for me. My favorite was Schiller’s “The Ring of Polycrates,” about a king who feared his good fortune and threw his beloved and very valuable ring into the seas, only to have it come back in a fish cooked for him. This was proof that he was doomed by fate. Decades later it became my daughter’s favorite poem.

I loved being with these people and often sat reverently next to them while they listened to an oratorio or piano concerto, followed by tea and pastries of chocolate mixed with jam. They brought me Snickers. I hungered for their stories about life in Germany before the war. They were all very voluble historians of their life and fate.

One of them was a professor in Hamburg until 1938.  He was so assimilated that he sported a “Messerschmitt” — a dueling scar popular among upper class Germans on his cheek, and a handsome bald pate.

He and his Frau had two sons who also assimilated until the 1930s when the Nazi state abolished all youth groups in Germany except the Hitler Youth or its female equivalent, the League of German Girls — and all Jewish children were barred. In January 1933, there were approximately 50,000 members of the Hitler Youth. By 1939, the vast majority of German children were part of the Hitler Youth organization.

Nonetheless, as the professor detailed it, they were optimistic that sanity would prevail and that Nazi ideology would disappear. And in any event, where could they go? As the infamous Evian Conference (Jul 6, 1938 – July 15, 1938) disclosed, of all the delegates from 32 nations, who all expressed caterwauling sorrow and shock, only one country agreed to absorb additional refugees: the Dominican Republic. And who would go to the jungle — something my parents, and so many Jews, gladly did to flee Europe.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Stop Our Barbarian Boxer Foreign Policy Will we wait until Iran’s proxies strike again? by Bruce Thornton

Posted By on November 2nd, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/stop-our-barbarian-boxer-foreign-policy/

The great 4th century B.C. orator Demosthenes, scolding the Athenians for their passive response to Phillip of Macedon’s escalating aggression, said, “You carry on war with Phillip exactly as a barbarian boxes. The barbarian, when struck, 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.”

Demosthenes’ point was that an enemy must be preempted by anticipating where his next attack will likely come, rather than merely reacting to it––a mistake that for too long has marred our foreign policy.

The news that the Biden administration had ordered nearly a dozen air-defense systems to the Middle East to protect American forces there, made me think of Demosthenes’ simile, and the similar mistakes we are making in dealing both with Hamas’ atrocities against Israel, and with more than four decades of aggression against us by Iran, the world’s most deadly state-supporter of terrorism.

According to the Wall Street Journal, “The U.S. is scrambling to deploy nearly a dozen air-defense systems to countries across the Middle East ahead of Israel’s expected land invasion of Gaza, deploying missile launchers to Iraq, Syria and the Gulf, U.S. officials said. The Pentagon is sending a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or Thaad, to Saudi Arabia, and Patriot surface-to-air missile systems to Kuwait, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.”

This decision follows recent drone attacks against our soldiers in Iraq and Syria, killing one contractor and wounding 24 servicemen. Iranian clients and proxies like the Houthi in Yemen are likely behind the attacks, which the Department of Defense expects to escalate: “What we are seeing is the prospect for more significant escalation against U.S. forces and personnel across the region in the very near-term coming from Iranian proxy forces and ultimately from Iran.”

And if that happens, don’t worry: the U.S. will be “responding decisively.” Does anyone believe that the Mullahs in Iran are frightened by this flaccid threat? The Biden administration has been courting them for over two years to rejoin the nuclear deal, and bribing them with billions of dollars that Iran has used to arm the jihadists now firing missiles at our soldiers.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Utopian Thinking (lll) On Wokeism, Perversion, and the assault on reality: Stephen Rittenberg, M.D.

Posted By on November 2nd, 2023

https://stephenrittenberg.substack.com/p/utopian-thinking-lll?r=2k6p0&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

“It was exhilarating, It was exhilarating, it was energizing.”

-Russel Rickford, Cornell, Associate Professor of History on learning of Hamas atrocities.

In earlier essays we have warned of the threat posed by Utopian ideas and ideologies. These generally involve the attempt at transformation and perfection of human nature. From Rousseau to the present, utopians view human nature as innocent, malleable and corrupted by social institutions. When those institutions are torn down by revolutionaries we can regain Paradise Lost where innocence will once again prevail. Regrettably the route to this utopia requires the elimination of millions who insist on holding on to an imperfect reality. Still that’s an acceptable cost to the utopian ideologue.

In this essay we will focus on an unacknowledged aspect of Utopian thinking—psychosexual perversion, in the form of sado-masochism, and particularly the sadistic pleasures of child murder.

In mankind’s long climb out of chaos and barbarism, the Old Testament is of primal significance. In Genesis G-d, the father, separates light from darkness, separates species of plants from each other and divides the animals into separate species. G-d divides man from woman and children from adults and forbids the hybridization of seeds, animals and plants. Parents are parents, children are children, animate and inanimate differ. The principle of separation and division is the means of bringing order out of chaos. This principle also underlies the incest prohibition and the prohibition of perversions. It clarifies and creates order. The book of Genesis is based entirely on the principle of separation and differentiation. These principles became the basis of our civilizational reality. However, there has always been pushback against this difficult reality. The pushback can be found in the perversions, all of which contain elements of sadism that appeal to the perverse longings universally present.

The French psychoanalyst Janine Chasseguet Smirgel enlarged the definition of perversion to include, not just unusual sexual behavior but also modes of thought. Perversion of thought expresses the wish to overturn reality, the laws of nature including the distinction between male and female, established by the God of the Old Testament- the “paternal order.” These wishes may remain private, or may be expressed in literature and movies, but they can also find expression in ideologies that motivate sado-masochistic acting out, like the torture, rape  and murder of children. Civilized people are horrified by child murder; it attacks the most fundamental creative element of reality—the parent-child connection by which new, unique human individuals are created and nurtured. It is a demonic attack on the paternal universe defined in Genesis. Hamas killers relished forcing parents to watch helplessly as they slaughtered their offspring. Like the rape of women and children these were acts of sadism committed by young death loving men. The pleasure of these killers, the orgastic thrill was so intense they memorialized it in videos which they proudly made for the world to see. And yes, the torture porn has already found its audience, to such an extent that Israel is trying not to have the videos widely seen. Many, many enjoy the sight of babies beheaded and being burned to death in ovens just as was done by Hamas predecessors in Nazi camps. No doubt they will be masturbating to those images. The Marquis de Sade often made clear in his writings that he was attacking the God of the Old Testament and celebrating the pleasures of a return to chaos. For Hamas, children and parents are no different; they are both ‘colonists” and the killers are happily Satanic. So too, civilians are no different than soldiers and therefore can be killed. Unlike the pre civilizational sadists, Israel does try to differentiate between civilians and soldiers, though their enemies make that very difficult. This is crucial because our individual humanity can be attacked and destroyed by an ideology that places group identity above the individual. If a baby can have its gender “assigned” and re assigned, then an individual baby can be dehumanized as a “colonist”—tortured and murdered.

Chasseguet Smirgel argued that torture, rape and bodily mutilation originate in a megalomanic wish to rebel against and overturn reality. I would add that the murder of children is the supreme expression of the sadistic wish to destroy our civilizational reality and replace it with chaos,  It is not just Israel under attack but all who value individual life and freedom. Hopefully we can mobilize strength to win as we did against the Nazis. Let Israel, on our behalf, ‘bare the iron hand.’

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Qatar’s War for Young American Minds By Eli Lake 

Posted By on November 2nd, 2023

https://www.thefp.com/p/qatars-war-for-young-american-minds

The same country now protecting Hamas’s senior leaders has donated billions to American universities. Here’s why.

Right now, senior leaders of Hamas, the perpetrators of the worst atrocity against Jews since the Holocaust, are huddled in Qatar. They’ve been there for years. But American foreign policy has turned a blind eye. Why? One reason might be that for the last 25 years, this small, energy-rich state has pumped billions into America to purchase influence and good favor.

The Qataris have spent their lavish fortune at American law firms, on lobbying contracts with former senior officials, and on junkets and partnerships with big media companies. The biggest recipients of Qatari largesse, though, have been major universities and think tanks.

The numbers are staggering. According to a 2022 study from the National Association of Scholars, Qatar today is the largest foreign donor to American universities. The study found that between 2001 and 2021, the petrostate donated a whopping $4.7 billion to U.S. colleges. The largest recipients are some of America’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning. These schools have partnered with the regime to build campuses in Doha’s “education city,” a special district of the capital that hosts satellite colleges for American universities:

Since 1997, Qatar has donated more than $103 million to Virginia Commonwealth University for a fine arts campus.

Since 2001, Qatar has donated $1.8 billion to Cornell for a medical school.

Since 2003, Qatar has donated nearly $700 million to Texas A&M for an engineering campus.

Since 2004, Qatar has donated $740 million to Carnegie Mellon University for a computer science campus.

Since 2005, Qatar has donated $760 million to Georgetown University for a school of politics.

Since 2008, Qatar has donated nearly $602 million to Northwestern University for a school of journalism.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

How Hamas Defines Cease-Fire A terrorist leader says: Oct. 7 today, Oct. 7 tomorrow, Oct. 7 forever.

Posted By on November 2nd, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/hamas-ghazi-hamad-interview-israel-oct-7-0731bd48?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

Hamas has two messages for two different audiences. To the international community, it pleads for a cease-fire on humanitarian grounds. To the Arab world, it pledges to repeat its Oct. 7 attacks and sacrifice as many Palestinians as it takes to destroy Israel.

That was the message of Ghazi Hamad, a member of the Hamas Politburo, in an Oct. 24 interview on Lebanese television. “We must teach Israel a lesson,” he says, “and we will do this again and again. The Al Aqsa Flood”—the name Hamas gave its Oct. 7 operation to slaughter defenseless Israelis—“is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth,” he says, as translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute.

That’s what a cease-fire means to Hamas: a chance to repeat Oct. 7 another day. The similar idea of a “humanitarian pause,” gaining steam on the Western left, is to Hamas merely an opportunity to reload. There is nothing humane about pressuring Israel to leave a genocidal enemy in power on its border.

“Will we have to pay a price?” Mr. Hamad continues, referencing Hamas’s plan for endless invasions of Israel. “Yes, and we are ready to pay it. We are called a nation of martyrs, and we are proud to sacrifice martyrs.”

Hamas isn’t ashamed to announce its intent to sacrifice Gazans to kill Jews—at least to receptive audiences. A poll published Monday in Beirut’s Al Akhbar newspaper reported that 80% of Lebanese respondents supported Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack. In another Arabic-language interview, on Oct. 19, Hamas leader Khaled Mashal argued that “nations are not easily liberated,” noting that it sometimes has required the deaths of millions of people. He figures he’s the man for the job.