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June 2022

Ukraine War Blows Up EU’s Superpower Delusion by Soeren Kern

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18610/eu-superpower-delusion

As the war has dragged on, European unity has collapsed and efforts to transform the European Union into a European superstate — a United States of Europe — have been exposed for what they are: delusions of grandeur.

The EU’s largest member states — France and Germany — have sought to appease Putin at the expense of Ukrainian sovereignty. French President Emmanuel Macron, the strongest backer of European strategic autonomy, insists that Putin should not be “humiliated” and has even called on Ukraine to make territorial concessions to help the Russian dictator save face.

“Calls to avoid humiliation of Russia can only humiliate France. We all better focus on how to put Russia in its place. This will bring peace and save lives.” — Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba.

“Did anyone talk to Adolf Hitler like that during WWII? Did someone say Adolf Hitler had to save face? That we should proceed in such a way that it is not humiliating for Adolf Hitler?” — Polish President Andrzej Duda, Bild, June 9, 2022

“The end of French exceptionalism. Once you claim your main role to be a mediator between right and wrong, days of grandeur are over. ‘Saving face’ is a weak diplomatic aim; Putin can take personal responsibility for his face.” — John Chipman, Director General, International Institute for Strategic Studies.

“Peace at any cost is what we have done for 20 years with Putin. Peace at any cost means Putin wins. We end up losing.” — Latvian Prime Minister Krišjānis Kariņš, Politico, May 30, 2022.

“The west has two goals in the war in Ukraine: to uphold Ukrainian sovereignty and to deter Russia from any similar assaults on European countries in the future…. If another round of European diplomacy leaves Russia once again sitting on its military gains in Ukraine, then Putin will regain political strength at home and feel empowered to launch new military adventures in the future.” — John Sawers, former head, MI6, Financial Times, June 8, 2022.

“The lesson of current experience is that only the United States is capable of holding Russia in check. The vehicle for this remains NATO, which has not outlived itself, but is more important as the security policy core of a free West than it has been for decades.” — Ulrich Speck, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, June 8, 2022.

The leaders of France, Germany and Italy have jointly visited Ukraine in an attempt to present a unified European front regarding the Russia-Ukraine war. The one-day visit was long on rhetoric but short on substance: European unity remains elusive.

The Assault on Children’s Psyches California’s ethnic-studies curriculum is fueling a mental-health crisis among teenagers. Leor Sapir

https://www.city-journal.org/the-assault-on-childrens-psyches

Patricia (a pseudonym) is the mother of a teenage girl who in recent years has come to identify as transgender. She lives in California, considers herself progressive, votes Democrat, and leads a group for parents of children with rapid onset gender dysphoria (ROGD)—that is, youth who suddenly experience distress with their bodies and believe that undergoing medical “transition” will make them whole again. When I spoke to her recently, she recounted how her daughter’s at-first-lesbian and then trans identity emerged in response to feelings of shame about being white.

I have since spoken to more than a dozen ROGD parents and parent-group leaders who tell a similar story. Their schools compulsively tell their children how awful it is to be white, how white people enjoy unearned “privilege,” how they benefit from “systems” put in place by and for white people for the sole purpose of oppressing “people of color.” Plagued by guilt, the children—almost all of them girls—rush to the sanctuary of “LGBTQ+” identity. Once there, they are catapulted into hero status. According to Patricia, some teachers at her daughter’s school are more forgiving toward “queer” and “trans” kids who hand in their homework late.

The students, especially the girls, absorb this messaging. They are acutely sensitive to how identity affects their social status and academic fortunes. They want the warmth that comes with queer/trans identity, but above all they don’t want to be thought of as vicious oppressors. Lacking maturity and self-confidence, they fail to put “anti-racist” indoctrination in its proper context. They do not appreciate its ahistorical, anti-intellectual, and anti-humanist foundations, nor are they aware of the incentives leading teachers and administrators to foist it on them. Being white is not something these teenagers can escape, but they can mitigate its social costs by declaring themselves part of an oppressed group.

U.S. Restraint Has Created an Unstable and Dangerous World Decades of ignoring the menaces posed by Russia and China has led the West to a precipice.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/06/17/us-miliitary-strategy-geopolitics-restraint-russia-china-ukraine-war/

By H. R. McMaster, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and a former U.S. national security advisor, and Gabriel Scheinmann, the executive director of the Alexander Hamilton Society.

The Biden administration failed to deter Russia from its second invasion of Ukraine. Like his predecessors in the White House, U.S. President Joe Biden went to great lengths to placate and reassure Russian President Vladimir Putin in return for stable relations. Biden defied Congress when he refused to sanction the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, unilaterally extended U.S. adherence to the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty without reciprocation by Russia, and honored Putin with a bilateral summit during his first overseas trip. As Putin amassed his troops on Ukraine’s borders, Biden pulled U.S. naval forces out of the Black Sea, refused to send additional weapons to Ukraine, enumerated everything the United States would not do to help Ukraine defend itself, and evacuated U.S. Embassy staff and military advisors. More broadly, the administration proposed a real cut to the defense budget; sought to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in U.S. defense strategy; restricted U.S. production capacity for oil, gas, and refined products that might have displaced Russian supplies; and signaled its willingness to overlook Russian and Chinese aggression in exchange for hollow pledges of cooperation on global issues such as climate change. After surrendering Afghanistan to a terrorist organization and conducting a humiliating retreat from Kabul, the administration’s attempts to deter the Russian invasion with threats of punishment were simply not credible.

Deterrence, however, does not disintegrate overnight. Contrary to the narrative of U.S. belligerence and imperialism that has been impressed on countless university students, the United States has, since the end of World War II, largely pursued a policy of restraint despite its considerable military power.

Biden and Oil: Destroy America in Order to Save It Our current oil shortage did not arise from a foreign war or tsunami, but from a deliberate policy to curtail oil production to force a more rapid transition to battery-powered transportation. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2022/06/19/biden-and-oil-destroy-america-in-order-to-save-it/

Try to follow the Joe Biden energy plan of frantically trying to get his hands on more of something that his own party despises. 

During the Democratic primaries, Biden ran on the premise that he would end all fossil fuels during his tenure. In 2019-2020 that bluster seemed easy demagoguery at a time of near-record low gas and diesel prices. The American people shrugged at such utopianism since they often were filling up their cars for less than $50.

Biden’s video clips from the primary campaign now seem surreal, as he tried to out-green Bernie Sanders in boasting about what has now become his own self-created energy disaster.

Biden monotonously promised at rallies, such as they were, that he would cancel pipelines, stop new federal leasing to oil and gas companies, persuade lenders to restrict loans to them, put the Alaska National Wildlife Reserve off limits, and embrace the green new deal. Those were certainly campaign boasts that he has followed up on. 

His environmental czar John Kerry has just insulted Americans by lecturing them that there is no need to pump more gas and oil to reduce gas prices that are well over $6 a gallon in many of the Western states. The billionaire Kerry exudes Antoinette disdain for the muscular classes, a hubris that now characterizes the elite rich leadership of the Left in general. 

Kerry and his progressive ilk make no effort to disguise that they feel the credentialed such as themselves, the wealthy, and the progressive enjoy the birthright to fly private, to be limousined, and to bounce between multiple energy-hungry mansions. Those compensations are all necessary, to allow them to focus on the divine task of directing and herding the unthinking and blinkered chumps, dregs, crazies and clingers to do what is for their own good—now most recently defined as paying more than $6 a gallon for gas.

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre also reassures the country that there is no reason to pump more oil and gas. Instead, she says, we just need to refine more. At her press conferences, she reads all her answers from prepared notes. But apparently Jean-Pierre’s twenty-something press preppers were oblivious that the United States, thanks to hard-left green opposition, has not built a major refinery since 1976, back when there were 110 million fewer Americans. 

Jean-Pierre has no idea why she cannot now and will never in the future answer a question about fossil fuels honestly. She knows that Left for now got what it wanted. Since January 2021 it has all but destroyed the idea of American energy self-sufficiency. 

Official Child Abuse By Philip Carl Salzman

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/philip-carl-salzman/2022/06/18/official-child-abuse-n1606365

“Apparently, no abuse of our children is too extreme when it serves narratives that signal virtue, even though the narratives are false and unscientific: “public health” that imposes useless material impositions on populations that would not need them even if they worked; unsubstantiated critical race theory that is little more than reverse racism; and trans theory that requires denial of biology and of the well-being of troubled youth. This abuse of our children is a disgrace, and we should all be ashamed that we have let it happen.”

Powerful American institutions have brought their power to bear on our children, to the children’s detriment. Rather than nurture children, these institutions have taken our children as fodder to advance their own power and ideological agendas.

The CDC in collusion with self-serving teachers’ unions imposed a mask mandate on school children and continued that mandate even when adults were no longer required to wear masks. This imposition on children was made in spite of the long-known and well-documented fact that children were the segment of the population least vulnerable to COVID-19 and thus not really in danger. The death rate (probability of dying if infected) for children 0-9 years was 0.0, i.e. no deaths, while for children (including those with comorbidities) 10-19, 0.2%, young adults (including those with comorbidities) 20-39, 0.2%, with an increased death rate for older segments of the population. In short, children were at little risk from COVID.

New York Health provides confirmation that deaths of individuals without comorbidities ages 0-17 was 0.0% of all deaths, ages 18-44, 1.0% of all deaths, with the percentage of deaths increasing, e.g. age 75+ comprising 14.2% of all deaths. Taking into account all deaths, including individuals with comorbidities, deaths of 0-17 make up 0.04% of total deaths, while 75+ made up 47.7% of deaths. Once again, the risk to children was minuscule.

International Swimming Federation Will Ban Some Biologically Male Athletes from Women’s Competitions by Brittany Bernstein

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/international-swimming-federation-will-ban-some-biologically-male-athletes-from-womens-competitions/

The international swimming federation FINA announced a new policy on Sunday to ban biologically male athletes who have gone through male puberty from competing in women’s competitions. 

To qualify for women’s competitions, the swimmers must either have never gone through male puberty or had male puberty suppressed at the stage when physical changes begin to appear or before the age of 12, whichever occurred later, according to the policy.

The athletes also have to prove that they have continuously suppressed their testosterone levels since that time.

“We have to protect the rights of our athletes to compete, but we also have to protect competitive fairness at our events, especially the women’s category at FINA competitions,” FINA president Husain al-Musallam said in statement.

The policy also includes proposals for an additional open competition category. FINA is set to form a new working group that will spend six months studying the most effective ways to set up the new category.

Desperate Democrats Meddle in GOP Primaries John Fund

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/06/desperate-democrats-meddle-in-gop-primaries/

They’re spending millions to help notch primary wins for Republicans they consider unelectable in the general election.

So worried they have spent tens of millions of dollars and counting to promote controversial Republicans in hopes they will win their primaries. In an extremely cynical move, they are pushing candidates in key races who embrace bizarre or unproven theories about the 2020 election and who are the same candidates they claim are a clear and present threat to democracy.

Democratic groups have elevated the profile of marginal or extreme GOP candidates in Colorado, Illinois, Nevada, and Pennsylvania. The reason is that it may work. Helping such Republicans to win their primaries has worked in the past. Democratic senators Claire McCaskill in 2012 and Joe Manchin in 2018 won in part because Democrats worked to nominate the easiest GOP opponents for them (McCaskill was then defeated in her 2018 reelection effort).

In an essay in 2015, “How I Helped Todd Akin Win — So I Could Beat Him Later,” McCaskill recalled her thinking:

We came up with the idea for a ‘dog whistle’ ad, a message that was pitched in such a way that it would be heard only by a certain group of people. I told my team we needed to put Akin’s uber-conservative bona fides in an ad — and then, using reverse psychology, tell voters not to vote for him. And we needed to run the hell out of that ad.

The McCaskill tactic has had some success this year. Pennsylvania state senator Doug Mastriano recently won the GOP gubernatorial nomination in Pennsylvania aided by Democratic-sponsored ads highlighting his conservative agenda. Nonetheless, Mastriano trails Democratic candidate Josh Shapiro by only four points in the latest polls.

In Colorado, liberals are running ads attacking state representative Ron Hanks as “too conservative” in an attempt to raise his profile in the GOP Senate primary.

Show Trials—Then and Now Roger Kimball Roger Kimball

https://www.theepochtimes.com/show-trials-then-and-now_4528243.html?utm_source=epochHG&utm_campaign=rcp

Power Line’s Scott Johnson quoted a TV Guide reporter who described the viewership of the first Jan. 6 House Select Committee’s prime-time television extravaganza as “decent.”In context, “decent” means “dismal” since, as Johnson notes, “the networks graciously handed their prime-time slots over to the committee’s motley crew in unison, Soviet style.”

A show trial is a mock, or make-believe, trial in which the guilt of the party is predetermined.The trial is just a form of theater.Lenin called them “model trials.”

Their aim isn’t to discover the truth—which was supposedly already known—but to stage a propagandist exhibition.

The Soviet Union specialized in the genre, as did communist China, Nazi Germany, and other totalitarian countries.

As the White Queen in “Alice in Wonderland” puts it, it’s always “sentence first—verdict afterwards.”

If you turned on the television on June 9 and you weren’t tuned in to Fox News, you were watching—or “watching”—a couple hours of Bennie Thompson and Liz Cheney conducting a show trial.

They vilified Donald Trump while airing a few misleadingly edited clips from the events of that day.

As I’ve noted elsewhere, the Democrats went all out on this show.

Even Democrats Blame Biden For Surging Inflation: I&I/TIPP Poll Terry Jones

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/06/20/even-democrats-blame-biden-for-surging-inflation-ii-tipp-poll/

If there’s a topic uppermost on most people’s minds today, it is certainly the surge in inflation over the past year. Soaring prices have affected virtually every person in the country. And Americans say they know who’s responsible: President Biden. Surprisingly, that includes more than half of all Democrats, too.

May’s 8.6% annualized inflation rate, the highest in 40 years, shocked financial markets and alarmed consumers and workers alike. As we’ve been reminded over the years, inflation acts as a tax on everyone, lowering standards of living, raising costs across the board, and eroding the very foundations of a productive economy. And once entrenched, it’s very difficult to get rid of.

How did this happen? And does President Biden deserve the blame? June’s monthly online I&I/TIPP Poll sought to answer those questions, asking 1,310 adults across the country the following question: “In general, how responsible are President Biden’s policies for causing the current inflation?”

The answers to the poll, which was taken from June 8-10 and has a margin of error of +/-2.8 percentage points, couldn’t be less comforting for Biden and the Democratic Party.

Of those responding, 64% said Biden was “responsible,” choosing either “very responsible” (38%) or “somewhat responsible” (26%). Just 25% answered “not responsible”, with 17% saying “not very responsible” but a far-smaller 8% saying “not at all responsible.” “Not sure” was 10%.

Mahmoud Abbas Wants to ‘Turn the Screws’ on the U.S. Why exactly are we coddling him in his preposterous demands? Hugh Fitzgerald

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/06/mahmoud-abbas-wants-turn-screws-us-hugh-fitzgerald/

The Palestinian Authority’s president, Mahmoud Abbas, wants to “pressure” the American government to do his bidding before Biden visits the Middle East on a trip scheduled for this July. A report on the rich fantasy life of Abbas is here: “Feeding Palestinian delusions,” by Mitchell Bard, JNS.org, June 8, 2022:

“Palestinian Leadership Plans to Increase Pressure on U.S. ahead of Biden’s Visit.”

This headline in the Daily Alert was illustrative of why Palestinian delusions are mainly responsible for their plight. The article associated with the headline said the Palestinians want to “turn the screws on the White House in order to secure lucrative overtures from the Americans.”

Excuse me. Who is the superpower in this equation?

Somehow believing the United States would care about yet another empty symbolic gesture, Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas announced that he is considering suspending the Palestinians’ 1994 recognition of Israel. At the time, Yasser Arafat’s letter was viewed as a game-changer. Palestinians finally acknowledged reality and took a necessary step to convince Israel to negotiate with the PLO leader. It was not sufficient, however, and ultimately [that recognition of Israel by the PA] has proved meaningless as Abbas repeatedly states that the Palestinians will never recognize Israel as a Jewish state; the Palestinians have spent every year since “recognition” engaged in terror; he and his predecessor, Yasser Arafat, rejected all peace offers; and the Palestinians have not abandoned their pipedream of establishing a state replacing Israel.

Who cares if the PA suspends its recognition of Israel? How will Israel be harmed, given the Abraham Accords that have allowed it to normalize ties with four Arab states, with more members in the offing, including Saudi Arabia? It is the PA that is on the ropes, abandoned by its most important Arab allies, not the Jewish state that with each passing year becomes stronger economically, militarily, and politically. Israel is the original Start-Up Nation that has become a technological powerhouse; every major American tech company now has offices in Israel. Israel has more tech companies that are “unicorns” – that is, upon their IPO, they are valued at more than $1 billion — than any country except the U.S. itself. After China, Israel is the foreign country with the most companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange. After Japan, Israel is the foreign country with the most American patents.