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January 2021

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The Trump Era Held Up A Mirror To Our Shattering CultureBy Emily Jashinsky

By on January 15th, 2021

https://thefederalist.com/2021/01/15/the-trump-era-held-up-a-mirror-to-our-shattering-culture/

Where the anxieties of the working class and Baby Boomers were channeled into Trump, the anxieties of the left were channeled into a furious, culture-wide censorship campaign.

“The madness of Trump, as bad as it was, it really needed to happen. We really needed a reflection of our world’s greatest problem, which is not climate change, but sociopathy and narcissism. Especially in America. It’s going to kill the world. It’s not capitalism, it’s narcissism.” So said songstress Lana Del Rey, reflecting on the Trump administration this week.

She’s right to dig deeper than climate change and capitalism, but wrong to finger an incurable element of the human condition for America’s ills. The broader point, however, is important. Del Rey is arguing that Trump’s political ascent exposed or, perhaps, accelerated a cultural clash. She seems to be convinced this exposition will ultimately be constructive.

I’m not so sure. The problem is not that we’re all as narcissistic as Trump. The problem is that we’re all as anxious. Characterizing Trump as anxious may seem odd—and I’m certainly not invoking the psychological concept—but his central promise to “Make America Great Again” was predicated on a reasonable anxiety that the version of America he knew and loved was slipping away. That resonated immensely, and for some eminently fair reasons.

Where the anxieties of the working class and Baby Boomers were channeled into Trump, the anxieties of the left were channeled into a furious, culture-wide censorship campaign. Each vessel has profound issues made worse by their inevitable confrontation, which accelerated this painful culture clash in which we’re now engulfed. So why are we anxious?

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Are the End Times Near? By David Solway

By on January 15th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/01/are_the_end_times_near_.html

A few years back my wife and I flew to Georgia where she was keynoting a panel discussion on feminism at Kennesaw State University. We were picked up at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta by the conference organizers, who naturally engaged Janice in conversation about the devastation wrought by feminism in the culture at large and academia in particular.

At one point I intervened to suggest that feminism was merely a subsidiary issue, as was the case with every other culture-wrecking movement and socially destabilizing factor confronting the Western world: identity politics, neo-Marxism, political correctness, radical environmentalism, “climate change,” “social justice,” outcome egalitarianism, information censorship, trans-national authoritarianism, abortion on demand, anti-meritocracy, chain immigration, “white supremacy” — the list goes on. Our hosts were initially taken aback, suspecting that I may merely have been playing devil’s advocate, but soon understood the argument I was making. Feminism was no doubt a critical issue, a socially destructive and culturally malignant phenomenon, but only one of many indices of something of far greater import: the approaching disintegration of Western civilization.

Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of The West, published 1918-1922, laid out the trajectory of the enfeeblement and decay that awaited us, developing a theme that went as far back as the Greek historian Polybius, but that, in the wake of a war that wiped out a generation, seemed less a “theme” than an historically imminent reality. The greatest poet of the modern age, William Butler Yeats, felt it in his bones, working out a visionary schematism in his prose volume A Vision and reflecting on the inevitable in his timeless poem “The Second Coming,” written one year after the end of the Great War: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last/Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?” Robert Bork’s must-read Slouching Towards Gomorrah hammers out Yeats’s vision in lurid contemporary detail, pointing toward a “syndrome” of collectivist attitudes dominating the culture, the debilitation of the family structure, and a “left-liberal moral consensus” diluting the text of the U.S. Constitution.

In his master volume On the Eve of the Millennium: The Future of Democracy in an Age of Unreason, published in 1995, Irish historian Conor Cruise O’Brien was not sanguine about the prospects for Western civilization in the coming years.

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Joe Biden: Impeachment’s Biggest Loser By Liz Peek

By on January 15th, 2021

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/01/15/joe_biden_impeachments_biggest_loser_145045.html

EXCERPTS:

To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, there they go again.  Frantic to extinguish any chance Donald Trump will ever again run for office, Democrats have pushed through an express-train impeachment, concluding the president incited “violence against the government of the United States.”  

The hasty undertaking, unencumbered by deliberations, investigations, or witnesses’ sworn testimony, cheapens the sober intent of the impeachment process. It smacks of partisan vindictiveness. When New York Rep. Hakeem Jeffries describes the president himself as a “living, breathing, impeachable offense,” he gives the game away.

But rushing to impeach a president who has only seven days remaining in his term is itself an affront to our democracy. Impeachment is meant to be a last resort means of expelling a president, not a political weapon. There has not been a serious probe of what happened that terrible day, how the rioting was organized and by whom. Timelines and social media accounts show that the breaching of the Capitol took place even as Trump was still speaking to the large crowd of followers, and that the organizers may have plotted out the event in advance, mainly on Twitter and Facebook.

Democrats have no patience for a sober assessment of what went wrong; they want to humiliate a president who provoked and embarrassed them for four years, and who has accomplished much despite their incessant resistance.

Instead, Democrats have wounded not only President Trump, but their own president-elect.

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The Road to Dystopia Philip Ahlrich

By on January 15th, 2021

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/01/on_the_road_to_dystopia.html

When O’Brien, the interrogator from the Thought Police in Orwell’s 1984, holds up four fingers and asks Winston Smith, an imprisoned member of the underground opposition, how many he sees, poor Winston persists in saying he sees four.  But that is not what O’Brien wants to hear.  “No, Winston, you are insane.  There are five fingers.”  The interrogations continue until Winston, wracked with pain and exhaustion and persuaded of his insanity, agrees finally through his tears that he was lying to himself, that he had always been lying to himself, and admitted that he saw five fingers.  He understood that two and two make five.  Emptied of his individuality and broken by the inquisition, he also knew that he had won the victory over himself.  He knew he was a flaw in the social pattern.  He learned, he understood, he accepted.  And in the end, he knew that he loved Big Brother. 

The new liberal programs of revisionist history and psychological persecution now directed toward the American people are not at all dissimilar to the enforcement techniques of Orwell’s Thought Police.  Whoever controls the present controls both past and future.  The Democrats are telling us to live with a lie and to believe the lie, for the lie is stronger than the truth.  They do not tell us that such compulsory instructions are the instruments of a totalitarian regime.

The great lie is that America is a racist nation, that the Constitution of the United States is a racist document, and that you are a racist if you believe otherwise.  We are told to believe these things or we are judged insane by those who are insane.  Unfinished minds that accept these misguided narratives in pursuit of political identity and power are mistaking a disease of reason for a virtue.  Any political movement toward unrestricted power requires pervasive thought and behavioral controls upon targeted populations, and we are now watching the Democratic Party, a faction entirely without conscience, accelerating rapidly down these lines of force in pursuit of one-party rule and eventual socialism.

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The Great Unraveling The old order is dead. What comes next? Bari Weiss

By on January 15th, 2021

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/the-great-unraveling?utm_campaign=post&utm_me

Thought comes before action. Words come before deeds. Media that profits from polarization will stoke it. Lies — maybe harmless for the moment, maybe even noble — create a lying world.

I’ve known this for a while. It’s why I left The New York Times. And it is why, as much as I miss doing journalism, I’ve been cautious at every next step. 

Hate sells, as the journalist Matt Taibbi has convincingly argued, and as anyone looking at Twitter trending topics over the past few years can see. If Americans are buying rage, is there a real market for something that resists it? 

Hate sells and hate also connects. Communities can grow quite strong around hatred of difference, and that’s exactly what’s happened to the American left and the right. It is painful to resist joining a mob when that mob includes most of your friends. It feels good, at least in the short term, to give in.

So part of my hesitation about what comes next is that I have been unsure about who will have the strength to stand apart from the various tribes that can give their members such pleasure of belonging. It is hard to know how to build things that are immune to these dangerous forces when the number of the people who are — or appear to me — immune to it is so very small.

Perhaps a psychologist can explain what makes these people resistant. Is it personality type? Is it principle? Is it rootedness in a real community with real people who you love and who love you and who you trust when they call you out on your bullshit?

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Everything Is Broken And how to fix it By Alana Newhouse

By on January 15th, 2021

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/everything-is-broken?fbclid=IwAR0nDY-7y7m7QPRsOJT8yV5lUM9UyNp5wKadX-qUdemLKr4KwO1cJh_k67o

EXCERPT:

I had barely started processing this when Norman moved to change the subject: “Now, can I ask you two something? How come so much of the journalism I read seems like garbage?”

Oh, God.

David and I looked at each other, simultaneously realizing that the after-school special we thought we were in was actually a horror movie. If the medical industry was comprehensively broken, as Norman said, and the media was irrevocably broken, as we knew it was … Was everything in America broken? Was education broken? Housing? Farming? Cities? Was religion broken?

Everything is broken.

Let’s say you believe the above to be hyperbolic. You never fell through the cracks of the medical system; as far as you understand it, there are plenty of ways for a resourceful person to buy a home in America these days; you easily met a mate and got married and had as many children as you wanted, at the age you wanted to have them; your child had a terrific time at college, where she experienced nothing at all oppressive or bizarre, got a first-class education that you could easily afford and which landed her a great job after graduation; you actually like the fact that you haven’t encountered one book or movie or piece of art that’s haunted you for months after; you enjoy druggily floating through one millennial pink space after another; it gives you pleasure to interact only with people who agree with you politically, and you feel filled with meaning and purpose after a day spent sending each other hysteria-inducing links; maybe you’ve heard that some kids are cosplaying Communism but that’s only because everyone is radical when they’re young, and Trump voters are just a bunch of racist troglodytes pining for the past, and it’s not at all that neither group can see their way to a future that looks remotely hopeful … If this is you, congratulations. There’s no need to reach out and tell me any of this, because all you will be doing is revealing how insulated you are from the world inhabited by nearly everyone I know.

If, on the other hand, the idea of mass brokenness seems both excruciatingly correct and also paralyzing, come sit with me. Being on a ship nearly 4 million square miles in area along with 330 million other people and realizing the entire hull is pockmarked with holes is terrifying.

But being afraid to face this reality won’t make it less true. And this is the reality.

For seven decades, the country’s intellectual and cultural life was produced and protected by a set of institutions—universities, newspapers, magazines, record companies, professional associations, cultural venues, publishing houses, Hollywood studios, think tanks, etc. Collectively, these institutions reflected a diversity of experiences and then stamped them all as “American”—conjuring coherence out of the chaos of a big and unwieldy country. This wasn’t a set of factories pumping out identical widgets, but rather a broad and messy jazz band of disparate elements that together produced something legible, clear, and at times even beautiful when each did their part.

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Will Israel lose its freedom to operate against Iran? – opinion Israel needs to prepare for this new reality where its ability to combat Iranian forces and proxy groups is concerned. By Ruthie Blum

By on January 15th, 2021

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/will-israel-lose-its-freedom-to-operate-against-iran-opinion-655483?fbclid=IwAR3z6bPkCu03rcuy6zviDXEA8tR0PxZObv4aaG4KM0TV5KTZIz3b3jBNzko

Speculation about the extent to which the incoming American administration will appease Iran has been rampant. But US President-elect Joe Biden’s picks for relevant top positions don’t seem to leave much room for conjecture.

Let’s start with William Burns, Biden’s nomination for CIA director. Burns currently serves as president of the left-wing foreign-policy think tank the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, one of whose donors is the Open Society Foundations network, established by George Soros.

Burns has decades of experience as a career diplomat under both Democratic and Republican administrations. Contrary to false hopes, however, this is not a good sign. Burns is a longtime associate of Biden’s. The two have worked closely together, most recently when the latter was vice president and the former was deputy secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, during the administration of former US president Barack Obama.

The most disturbing thing about Burns, whose posts have included ambassadorships to Russia and Jordan, is his key role in covert talks with the regime in Tehran in 2013. These led to the 2015 signing of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) between Iran and the 5+1 countries: the United States, United Kingdom, France, Russia and China plus Germany. By that time Burns had retired, but his imprint lived on in the disastrous nuclear deal.

In this context, Biden’s statement about Burns – “[He] shares my profound belief that intelligence must be apolitical” – is amusing, if not downright disdain-inducing. Equally ridiculous, but cause for greater concern, is Burns’s current faith in the JCPOA from which outgoing US President Donald Trump withdrew in 2018.

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New study: Lockdowns didn’t stop the spread of COVID-19 after all Ed Morrissey

By on January 15th, 2021

https://hotair.com/archives/ed-morrissey/2021/01/15/new-study-lockdowns-didnt-stop-spread-covid-19/

As always, approach all stories that headline the word “study” with some caution. Newsweek’s report on a new study from Stanford published this week in the European Journal of Clinical Investigation should carry the same caveat — one study does not a scientific foundation make. However, the findings in this study of the impact of lockdowns on COVID-19 transmission do seem to fit our own observations, especially in the pandemic’s second and third waves:

The most restrictive non‐pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) for controlling the spread of COVID‐19 are mandatory stay‐at‐home and business closures. Given the consequences of these policies, it is important to assess their effects. We evaluate the effects on epidemic case growth of more restrictive NPIs (mrNPIs), above and beyond those of less restrictive NPIs (lrNPIs).

We first estimate COVID‐19 case growth in relation to any NPI implementation in subnational regions of 10 countries: England, France, Germany, Iran, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, South Korea, Sweden, and the US. Using first‐difference models with fixed effects, we isolate the effects of mrNPIs by subtracting the combined effects of lrNPIs and epidemic dynamics from all NPIs. We use case growth in Sweden and South Korea, two countries that did not implement mandatory stay‐at‐home and business closures, as comparison countries for the other 8 countries (16 total comparisons).

Implementing any NPIs was associated with significant reductions in case growth in 9 out of 10 study countries, including South Korea and Sweden that implemented only lrNPIs (Spain had a non‐significant effect). After subtracting the epidemic and lrNPI effects, we find no clear, significant beneficial effect of mrNPIs on case growth in any country. In France, e.g., the effect of mrNPIs was +7% (95CI ‐5%‐19%) when compared with Sweden, and +13% (‐12%‐38%) when compared with South Korea (positive means pro‐contagion). The 95% confidence intervals excluded 30% declines in all 16 comparisons and 15% declines in 11/16 comparisons.

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The impeachment of freedom of speech If Trump is found guilty, it will have terrible consequences for liberty of thought and speech. Brendan O’Neill

By on January 15th, 2021

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/01/13/the-impeachment-of-freedom-of-speech/

“He did not call for a riot; he did not call for anyone to enter the Capitol Building; he did not say anything about insurrection. As Alan Dershowitz has said, all of Trump’s comments fall under the protections of the First Amendment. It was legitimate political speech – whether you liked it or loathed it – not a cry for the use of imminent violence.”

Donald Trump has once again made history in a way he would rather not have. He has become the first president in the history of the American republic to be impeached twice. The House of Representatives has voted to impeach him for ‘incitement of insurrection’. He will now be put on trial by the Senate. If he is found guilty – not impossible, given how many Republican representatives and senators have been making pro-impeachment noises – he will be turfed out of office at the very end of his presidency and barred from ever standing for political office again.

Who could be against this? Trump, as most of the media, the social-media oligarchies and politicians of all persuasions have been insisting incessantly since the breaching of the Capitol last week, is the new Hitler. The Capitol riot was the Reichstag Fire / the Beer Hall Putsch / Kristallnacht 2.0 – pick your favourite Holocaust metaphor – and Trump is responsible for it. The protesters were insurrectionists – worse, they were terrorists – and Trump was the spiritual and operational instigator of their terrorism. That’s the narrative we have been suffocated with for a week now. The Capitol breach was the 9/11 of our times, serious journalists madly claim, and Trump was its Osama bin Laden. People have actually said this.

In such a moment of hysteria – and we really have reached hysteria now – it can be difficult to call for calm and reflection. But that is what we must do before things go too far. The truth is that this impeachment of Trump is deeply problematic. It is an indictment not just of a president who has done many gravely questionable things in recent weeks, but also of freedom of speech; of the right of everyone – whether president or plebeian – to express him or herself plainly and passionately. Trump is essentially on trial for making heated political comments, for pushing an ideological line – that the 2020 election was ‘fraudulent’ – that many people find offensive. If he is found guilty, he will be found guilty of expressing himself in a way that the political elite considers problematic. Everyone needs to stop, breathe, and consider the impact this would have on the already frail culture of freedom.

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Revenge of the Neocons-Julie Kelly

By on January 15th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/14/revenge-of-the-neocons/

The conflict between neoconservatives and the Trump base sets up a major battle for which faction will control the Republican Party in the post-Trump era.

The conflict between neoconservatives and the Trump base sets up a major battle for which faction will control the Republican Party in the post-Trump era.

It is the retaliation the Bush-Cheney regime has craved for more than a decade.

In a blistering interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer in October 2008, Donald Trump wondered aloud why then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) had not impeached George W. Bush. “The [Iraq] war is a total catastrophe,” Trump said on the once-friendly network that’s been his mortal enemy since 2016. “There’s only one person you can blame and that’s our current president.”

The Manhattan real estate mogul insisted Bush should have been removed from office for lying about Saddam Hussein’s secret trove of weapons of mass destruction, the rationale for the 2003 invasion. “Bush got us into this horrible war with lies, by lying. By saying they had WMDs, by saying all sorts of things that happened not to be true.” Bush was, Trump claimed, “the worst president ever.”

Trump also unloaded on Bush’s inner circle, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Vice President Dick Cheney. “He’s a hawkish guy,” Trump said about Cheney. “He said a few months ago the war was going fantastically . . . you know, it’s just very sad. I just know they got us into a mess the likes of which this country has probably never seen.”

More than 12 years later, Representative Liz Cheney (R-Wy.), the literal and figurative heir to the neoconservative “bloodline,” voted to impeach President Donald Trump. Calling the Capitol the “most sacred place in our Republic”—when you’ve been weaned on the mother’s milk of Beltway bravado and no-bid defense contracts, federal buildings in Washington, D.C. are the most hallowed ground—Cheney announced her intention to support Pelosi’s latest political stunt.

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