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November 2022

Why these midterms will be the crime elections: Oliver Wiseman

https://spectatorworld.com/newsletter/the-crime-election/

The crime elections

The District of Columbia’s City Council might seem a strange place to start a political newsletter a few days out from the midterms. As Democrats will never miss an opportunity to remind you, voters in Washington, DC will not get a say in a race that will help decide control of Congress. But a meeting of city leaders this week is an instructive part a national story that will be central to next week’s vote.

On Tuesday, the DC Council voted 12-0 to support a rewriting of the capital’s criminal code. Reforms include reduced mandatory minimum sentences, the expansion of the right to jury trials for most misdemeanors, a broadening of the opportunities for early release and the elimination of accomplice liability in felony murder cases. The reforms are opposed by the District’s US Attorney, Matthew M. Graves, and police chief Robert J. Contee. Graves said that some of the provisions “could undermine community safety and impede the administration of justice in our courts.” Also opposed to the proposals as they stand: the city’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, who has said she will not sign them into law, but thinks some kind of reform is needed.

Crime is set to be a decisive factor in next week’s elections. It is the biggest reason why governors’ contests are closer than expected in Oregon and New York. It is the main line of attack in crucial Senate races in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. It is why Los Angeles might be about to elect a former Republican property developer as its mayor. Nationwide, it’s a major issue for swing voters and traditionally Democrat-supporting working-class voters. For some Democrats, this seems to be a head-scratcher: We’ve cut it out with calls to Defund the Police. We get it.

And this is why the DC story is so instructive. It’s not that Democratic leaders are actively defunding the police, or fail to appreciate, at least theoretically, that the issue is a major concern for voters. It’s that they time and again fail to act as though public safety is their number one concern. Violent crime is spiking in Washington. It is the city’s most pressing problem and should be its elected officials’ number one concern. In place of any sense of urgency or decisive action is a blue-on-blue debate about which criminal justice reform measures are worth keeping and which are worth watering down. The message to voters is clear: your worries about safety are not our top priority.

Across the country, the Democratic Party’s messaging on crime has been all over the place. First, the crime problem was nothing more than a Republican scare campaign: a racist figment of the right-wing imagination. When more and more Democrats acknowledged the problem, they made the slightly trollish claim that crime is actually higher in red states. Absent from their pitch to voters on one of the most important issues: a straightforward pledge to actually deal with the problem.

The policies responsible for the coming Democratic disaster Matthew Continetti

https://freebeacon.com/columns/crime-starters-usa/

New York governor Kathy Hochul is a case study in denial. The unelected Democrat is in trouble because she won’t acknowledge the danger of rising crime. When challenger Lee Zeldin, a Republican congressman from Long Island, brought up public safety during last week’s debate, Hochul scoffed. “I don’t know why that’s so important to you,” she said. She might as well have stuck her tongue out at voters. Support for Zeldin has surged in recent days.

Hochul may yet win. New York hasn’t voted for a Republican governor since 2002. Whatever the outcome — and Zeldin has a path to victory — the takeaway is clear: Crime is once again a matter of national concern.

Look at the polls. Sixty-one percent of registered voters told the Pew Research Center this month that violent crime is very important to their midterm vote. An October Gallup poll had crime in third place, after the economy and abortion. The October Fox poll showed that crime was second only to inflation in voters’ minds. According to another recent Gallup survey, a record 56 percent of Americans say there is more crime in their area than there was last year.

Hochul blames this sentiment on mass delusion. “These are master manipulators,” she told MSNBC on October 30. “They have this conspiracy going all across America trying to convince people in Democratic states that they’re not safe.” Hochul didn’t say who “they” are. She meant Republicans.

The truth is that Hochul is the one who’s out of touch. The reason voters are worried about crime is that crime has been rising. Sensational stories of subway murders, carjackings, kidnappings, and shoplifting are not isolated events. Murder and assaults have increased nationwide since 2019. Murder has dropped off somewhat since the beginning of this year, but the decline has been unevenly distributed and other forms of violent crime are going up. The lawlessness that spread across the country in 2020 hasn’t abated.

The Great Reset: A Perfect Storm By David Solway

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2022/11/04/the-great-reset-a-perfect-storm-n1642854

Storms come in many forms and may consist of many different constituent elements, but when all these elements combine at the same critical moment, we call it a “perfect storm.” When such a storm is transposed analogically to the cultural, political, and economic realms, that is, when it seems to impact the entire social environment, we have no choice but to grasp its significance and prepare for its onset by taking protective measures.

Such a storm is now upon us. All its elements clearly point to an orchestrated intention; in other words, it cannot be an accident. And the intention we discern in the current historical moment, the underlying plan, would appear to lay the ground for what has been called a “techno-totalitarian digital dark age,” associated with the Club of Rome, the United Nations, and the World Economic Forum, that is, what has come to be known as the Great Reset — the corporate takeover of property, health, currency, travel, energy, and sustenance. The upshot involves a thorough restructuring of democratic society along neo-medieval lines, an elimination of the middle class, a two-tier political order, and a reduction of the global census.

The sinister elements composing this storm are readily observable to anyone paying attention:

The imposition of a viral pandemic and its official response — lockdowns, social distancing, masks, quarantines, medical apartheid — that effectively closed down the public life and economic structures of entire nations, leading to loss of livelihoods, physical and psychological illness, and spiraling suicide rates.
The mandating of novel genomic “vaccines” that are creating mass casualties, as witnessed in the phenomenon of SADS — Sudden Adult Death Syndrome — which came into prominence post-vaccine. The plethora of dissuasive “fact-checks” on social media and the Internet are further signs that we are living in an age of censorship. The correlation between SADS and the vaccine rollout is overwhelming and may even suggest a causal link. The massive rise in stillbirths may also be attributed to the vaccines.
A “climate change” policy entailing carbon taxes, bans on fertilizers, the shutting down of standard energy production, the marketing of costly and inefficient electric vehicles that threaten to deplete the power grid, and the legislating of largely unworkable and extortionate green renewables based on insecure and fabricated science and dodgy computer models, whose effect has been to impoverish both producers and ordinary citizens in bringing about a new and despotic dispensation.
Supply chain disruptions.
Government-induced food and fuel shortages.
Rampant inflation, pricing the necessities of life beyond the ability of vast numbers of people to afford them.
The official insistence on so-called “abortion rights.”
The focus on and pursuit of LGBTQ+, “non-binary,” transgender, and sexual indoctrination of preschoolers and minors, creating a growing cohort of human beings who do not reproduce, i.e., a condition of sterility.
The proposed creation of a cashless digital economy and the introduction of digital ID with the aim of establishing a China-style social credit system, depriving the individual of personal freedom and discretionary choice.
The initiating of proxy wars, as in Ukraine, further resulting in crippling forms of material scarcity, economic pain, and population stress.

Weaponizing Children By Karen McKay

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/11/weaponizing_children.html

In an Afghan cave, men slept rolled up in their patus, the thin woolen shawl that served as blanket, cloak, camouflage, shelter, shroud. In the dark, a small shape stirred and slipped silently out of its patu. There was no sound but snoring from the other shapes. The light from a small, dying fire reflected on a steel blade in the hand of the small shape, a boy of perhaps ten or twelve hard years.

He had wandered, a scrawny, dirty, barefoot kid, into the mujahed camp, starved, begging for food. The muj took him in, wrapped him in a patu, shared their food with him and treated his sores. The child’s pathetic story was a common one. Half of Afghanistan’s preinvasion population was dead or displaced. Many of the living were maimed, starved and sick, their orchards, crops, and livestock destroyed. 

This child was different. He was weaponized. He crept soundlessly, less than a shadow, in the dark toward the sleeping leader of this small band of fighters, approached from behind, grabbed the man’s beard and yanked the head back. With one quick move he sliced the exposed throat. He slipped toward the next target, but the man rolled over and opened his eyes. Before a question could form, the boy was out the cave’s mouth and melted into the night. Before the sun set again, he was back with his Spetsnaz handler. There are war dog handlers, and there were war child handlers in the Soviet army.

The Soviet attempt to make Afghanistan a captive nation by installing a puppet government in Kabul hadn’t worked out, so they went to Plan B: Invading the country, killing their puppet president, installing another, and then proceeding to systematically wipe out the indigenous population. “We only need ten thousand Afghans left alive to be administrators of the country,” a Soviet official said.

Thousands of Afghan boys aged four to eight were taken by the Soviet army to the USSR. Most of them would be trained as Communist cadre to rule a future Soviet Afghanistan. Some would be weaponized.

For both groups, the first phase of the training was the same: deprogram them as Muslims and sons of a mother and father, make them sons of the State and the State only. Islam demands modesty and forbids alcohol and drugs. The boys were forced to drink alcohol and use drugs until they had no moral resistance to them. They were conditioned to nudity and taught sex by mature female trainers who lay naked with them in bed. Every tie to the mores and customs of their ancestral culture was severed. Their memories of childhood were erased. They had new parents, new beliefs: the State and Marxism.

The children of the administrative group received a secular education to run a country, learned to be good atheists and Marxists. The other group were trained to kill.

Manchin’s rebuke shows how toxic Biden’s energy views are A Democrat was willing to blast them full-bore. By Charles Lipson

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/manchins-rebuke-shows-bidens-energy-views-are-toxic/

It’s not often that a senator launches a brutal, frontal assault on a president from his own party. It’s even rarer when he does it just before a national election. But that is exactly what West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin just did to Joe Biden. At issue was Biden’s recent speech attacking coal, a bedrock of the West Virginia economy. Manchin was furious over Biden’s promise to shut down all of America’s coal-fired power plants.

That view might be red meat for Biden’s audience of green-power advocates and rich California donors, but it is poison in West Virginia. And it is those West Virginians who elected Manchin, the only Democrat still standing in a state that is now deep red.

Manchin didn’t just criticize Biden. He blasted him full-bore, and threw the lifeless carcass over his shoulder on the way back to the truck:

President Biden’s comments are not only outrageous and divorced from reality, they ignore the severe economic pain the American people are feeling because of rising energy costs. …Being cavalier about the loss of coal jobs for men and women in West Virginia and across the country who literally put their lives on the line to help build and power this country is offensive and disgusting. The President owes these incredible workers an immediate and public apology and it is time he learn a lesson that his words matter and have consequences.