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August 2024

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

How Trump Can Win—or Lose—the Election Moving forward, Donald Trump needs to focus his attack on the disastrous Biden governance of the last four years. Make Harris own it. And contrast it with 2017-21 and what will follow in 2025. By Victor Davis Hanson

By on August 5th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/08/05/how-trump-can-win-or-lose-the-election/

The Good News

The good news for the Trump campaign is that the sure Democratic nominee Kamala Harris is a lifelong California hard leftist at a time when the state is emblematic of progressive nihilism. Her extremist advocacies as a San Francisco county and city attorney, state Attorney General, and senator are on record. And they are consistent with what has virtually destroyed the state.

Harris was also a driving force as vice president for Joe Biden’s unpopular and unworkable progressive policies—whether open borders, massive illegal immigration, hyperinflation, fanning woke divisiveness, arguing for lax criminal prosecution, or defunding the police. She was far closer to the mindset of the unhinged Squad than Joe Biden himself.

None of the Biden-Harris administration’s main policy initiatives ever polled 50 percent approval. Abroad, the world blew up under their tenure with an unbridled Putin invading Ukraine, an unbound Iran brazenly using its proxies to attack Israel, and China all but warning the West of its impending absorption of Taiwan—now not a question of if but only when.

So, it should be easy for Trump to win the key midwestern swing states. All he needs to do is repeatedly remind voters that Harris is the most far-left presidential candidate in modern history. He can drive home that she is not only on record endorsing these extreme positions but has been doing so emphatically for years to energize her exclusively left-wing constituents and audiences.

If Trump heeds the lessons of late Lee Atwater, then he need only follow the 1988 Republican campaign script, when hard-left Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis’s 17-point lead in late July melted through nonstop reminders that Dukakis was and always would be far to the left of the American voter.

Dukakis’s efforts to claim that the election was only about his “competence,” not his liberal ideology, evaporated after a devastating series of ads—exposing the “technocrat” Dukakis as an extremist and a hypocrite desperate to disown and hide his prior unapologetically left-wing record from the voters. And Dukakis was a far better candidate than Harris.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Why slavery is not America’s original sin The left’s view of slavery as a uniquely Western evil is a product of deep historical ignorance. Wilfred Reilly (July 2024)

By on August 5th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/07/14/why-slavery-is-not-americas-original-sin/

Modern histories tend to rely heavily on the new ideological pieties of left-wing activists. First among these is the belief that we live in a totally corrupt and oppressive society – in fact, in the world’s most oppressive and corrupt society. Feeding this belief is the widely accepted claim – at least, within the modern Western world – that slavery is the United States’ ‘original sin’, and alleged to be uniquely evil as practised within the US.

One major American textbook, Traditions and Encounters, appears to describe the Western-dominated slave trade as the largest and most brutal in history, calling even the full sweep of Arab / Islamic slavery ‘smaller than the Atlantic slave trade of modern times’. Elsewhere, the 1619 Project’s Nikole Hannah-Jones argues bluntly: ‘America’s brutal system of slavery [was] unlike anything that had existed in the world before. Enslaved people were… property that could be mortgaged, traded, bought, sold, used as collateral, given as a gift and disposed of violently.’

This take has become increasingly prominent within the modern American educational environment. The 1619 Project – which insists that 1619, the year that 20 Africans arrived in the English colonies, and not 1776, was ‘the true founding’ of America – has a formal curriculum. Underpinning this view that slavery in America and the West was uniquely brutal are several unexamined assumptions. Modern Americans tend to project our positive values back into the past while thinking that our sins are uniquely bad. What we don’t understand is that contemporary Western beliefs about human dignity, inalienable rights, a right to freedom, etc, are the exception, not the norm. If they seem like the norm today, that is largely because we have remade much of the world in our image. In reality, as conservative éminence grise Thomas Sowell writes in Black Rednecks and White Liberals (2005), it is probably fair to say that most Westerners think of historical slavery almost entirely in the context of Western white oppression of blacks during what is technically known as the Atlantic Slave Trade. Almost nothing could be further from empirical truth: American slavery was not unprecedented, it was not uniquely brutal and it did not invent any new oppressive systems. It was terrible, but talking about it as if it came out of nowhere means we understand less about history and about global norms. Slavery was ubiquitous throughout the ancient and historical world – often the step of human ‘development’ after simply killing and eating one’s defeated foemen.

Slavery in historical perspective

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

What a ‘Free’ Palestine Would Mean Eugene Alexander Donnini

By on August 5th, 2024

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2024/07/what-a-free-palestine-would-mean/

The claim that Islam is a religion of peace is a nicety invented by Western politicians so as either not to offend their Muslim populations or simply lie to themselves that everything might yet turn out fine. In fact, since its beginning Islam has been pretty violent.         
                                   —Douglas Murray, Islamophilia

Do Westerners who attend pro-Palestinian demonstrations really understand the ideology their support is empowering? I suspect many do not, that their support arises from a genuine humanitarian concern for the people of Gaza. What they don’t understand is that their compassion is being directed and manipulated by Islamic and other totalitarian forces whose primary objectives are not to improve the lives of Palestinians, but to bring about the destruction of Israel and its people, by any means necessary, including genocide. Do they know that Hamas, the current government of Gaza, in its 1988 original Charter (and the 2017 revised edition) advocates for these things (as reported by Bruce Hoffman in the Atlantic on October 10, 2023):

The covenant opens with a message that precisely encapsulates Hamas’s master plan. Quoting Hassan al-Banna, the Egyptian founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is a constituent member (Article 2), the document proclaims, “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it” …

After some general explanatory language about Hamas’s religious foundation and noble intentions, the covenant comes to the Islamic Resistance Movement’s raison d’être: the slaughter of Jews. “The Day of Judgement will not come about,” it proclaims, “until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”

The killing-the-Jews bit is a quote from Sahih al-Bukhari Book 56, Hadith 138, attributed to Mohammad, that is simply reiterating Allah’s instructions to Muslims. Here are a few of many examples: “Strike terror [into the hearts of] the enemies of Allah and your enemies.” (Surah 8:60) “Fight [kill] them [non-Muslims], and Allah will punish, [torment] them by your hands, and cover them with shame.” (Surah 9:14) “I will instil terror into the hearts of the unbelievers, smite ye above their necks and smite all their finger-tips off them. It is not ye who slew them; it was Allah.” (Surah 8:13–17)

You could say then that Hamas are carrying out Allah’s plan here below.

These kinds of mystic marching orders from Allah gave Hamas fighters scriptural and moral justification and authority on October 7, 2023, to behead children, rape women, and chop up, shoot and burn parents and grandparents while chanting Allahu Akbar! before proudly ringing Mum and Dad to tell them what a great job they were doing, taking a few hundred hostages with them as trophies, including several women, who they stripped naked, repeatedly raped, tied to the back of cars and dragged through the streets of Gaza where they were cursed, spat on and stoned by crowds until they were dead.

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OPINION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Why is it okay to mock Christianity, but not Islam? The Paris Olympics opening ceremony revealed the cowardice of the cultural elites. Julie Burchill

By on August 5th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/08/02/christians-have-become-the-worlds-laughing-stock/

Earlier this month, the Church of England issued new ‘guidance’ for teachers at Anglican schools – all 4,630 of them, attended by around one million children. It asserted the modish nonsense that biological sex is secondary to identity and that a ‘transgender man’ is someone ‘who was assigned female at birth but identifies and lives as a man’. The same goes for a ‘transgender woman’, but in reverse.

The schools practise what they preach, too. Earlier this year, one mother told the Telegraph that her four-year-old daughter, who attends a Church of England school, was having to share a toilet with another little ‘girl’ who apparently has a penis. The child’s sex was hidden from classmates and the kids were, naturally, distraught when they found out. According to parents, the ‘transgender’ child ‘flashed their willy’ at the girls.

I guess we were almost expecting it. You could practically see Justin Welby replacing his rainbow Pride badge with an updated pink-blue-and-white ‘Trans Pride’ one. He likely spends his mornings in front of the mirror, practising telling teachers to challenge ‘outdated terms’ and making sure he gets that moving-with-the-times face just right.

As an Anglican, I am well-accustomed to what passes for the ‘thinkers’ of my church acting like embarrassing parents trying to get down ‘wit’ da kidz’. No indignity seems too great to comprehend now. So what if in Genesis 1:27 it says, ‘So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them’? Get with the programme. Apparently, He created they / them.

Christians in the West are so used to being disappointed by their own alleged spiritual leaders that being picked on has come to seem par for the course. Which is why the robust reaction – though not, of course, from our man in Canterbury – to the Last Supper tableaux at the Paris Olympics opening ceremony last week came as something of a surprise.

Anyone who watched even part of the roughly four-hour omnishambles on Friday will have been struck by the theme of extraordinary silliness-on-steroids. It was, as one user on X described it, ‘the longest, wettest episode of Eurotrash ever’.

At times, though, the whole farce did – as silliness often does these days – shade into something sinister. There was the grotesque presence of drag queens, blackface for misogynists, forever seeking to remind us how ridiculous women are. Then there was the beheaded queen – not a king, one notes, dead men not being ‘sexy’ in the way dead women are. She was used as a prop to a dreary heavy-metal band, who talked straight-faced of their desire ‘to give hope to people’. But it was the apparent parody of Leonardo da Vinci’s mural that pushed the opening ceremony from silliness into truly sinister. It was yet another symptom of one of the great cowardly crusades of our age – the war on Christianity.

While ordinary Christians across the world expressed their outrage, the spiritual leader of my faith had nothing to say about the ordeal. This says a lot about how dangerously out of touch the CofE – what my husband amusingly dubbed ‘the BBC of E’ – is with its own congregation. As Anglican Ink pointed out over the weekend, the Bishop of Worcester was quick to call the ceremony ‘unnecessary and highly offensive… the secular elite would not dream of mocking other faiths in this dreadful manner’. Meanwhile, ‘the Archbishop of Canterbury, who spoke of his anticipation of viewing the opening ceremony, has been silent about the deliberate affront to Christians by the organisers’.

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BOOKS Comments turned off

CHAPTER 30: Marxist Past, Present, and Future__Space Is No Longer the Final Frontier—Reality Is by Linda Goudsmit posted August 4, 2024

By on August 5th, 2024

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/27965/chapter-30-marxist-past-present-and-future

Pundicity page: goudsmit.pundicity.com  and website: lindagoudsmit.com 

The woke leftists advocating Marxist Cultural Revolution in America continue to believe in “real” socialism—Karl Marx’s perfect socialist society, the perfect communism that transcends private property. Woke young people have yet to discover that they are means, not ends, in globalism’s War on America. The woke are useful idiots, Marxist soldiers conscripted into service to collapse America from within, whose lives will be terminated once their usefulness expires. There is no place for agitators in the globalist managerial Unistate.

We all live our lives within a historical context. Understanding history is essential for making sense of the present, and for being able to anticipate the future. James Lindsay’s warning, “A Note to Young Woke People,” in his May 2, 2023, New Discourses article, “Intersectionality Is American Maoism,”[i] provides a compelling description of tomorrow for woke idealists participating in America’s Cultural Revolution today:

A Note to Young Woke People

I think you’ll find what I have to say to you mostly incomprehensible, but you need to hear it.

This is what you are participating in, whether you know it or not. This is what your schools and universities and influencers are miseducating you—brainwashing you—into. Western Maoism. Maoism with American characteristics. And this is what you need to know about where it goes. The whole philosophy is based upon the formulations of Georg W. F. Hegel’s vision for how to move History to its intended “End” (the right side of history), and what Hegel said about you is this: “History uses people and then discards them.”

As a movement Woke believes itself to be the movement of History. History is using you to move itself. It will discard you. You know how everything in Woke philosophy is “temporal,” “spatial,” and “contingent”? So are you. You are a contingency for the Woke movement. You have your time—until you don’t. When you become useless or a hindrance to the movement of History, you will be discarded. Every Marxist and Hegelian movement in history has proceeded this way, and this one will not be different. I wish you luck with that.

What you need to understand about the people you’ve been trained to see as your “enemies,” or “transphobes,” “racists,” “fascists,” “homophobes,” or whatever else is that most of the people you think are those things are not those things at all. You have been trained to hate, allegedly in the name of “stopping hate.” These people are, by and large, trying to warn you, not trying to uphold “oppression.”

What you need to know about the people in the movement you’re supporting, including your friends in the movement, is that you’re less than disposable to them. Contingent barely covers it. The Woke movement pretends to care about you—or, worse, “people who look like you”—but it does not. It is using you so its sociopathic fringe can gain power over society, using you as cannon fodder for their unconventional political warfare apparatus. Instead of living your life, growing, learning, preparing a future, you’re doing activism, for them. And they will discard you. Will. You are worse than disposable once they get power: you’re a problem.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The boundaries of free speech Coercive speech codes aren’t the way to fight “cancel culture” Melanie Phillips

By on August 5th, 2024

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/the-boundaries-of-free-speech?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

To loud and horrified criticism, Britain’s new Labour government scrapped a law on free speech days before it was about to come into force.

This law, which had been introduced by the previous Conservative government, was designed to enforce freedom of speech in universities, colleges and student unions. This was in response to “cancel culture”, the shocking suppression of ideas on campus that challenge left-wing orthodoxies and which has resulted in the hounding of conservative speakers and persecution of academics with heterodox views, such as “gender critical” feminists who believe that sexual identity is dictated by biological fact.

Not surprisingly, such embattled feminists along with numerous conservative thinkers and writers have reacted viscerally to the scrapping of this law. 

However, a number of Jewish organisations opposed it. They feared that it would hand a weapon to antisemites and anti-Zionists that would enable them to claim legal backing for their promulgation of poisonous views that threatened the safety of Jews on campus and elsewhere.

So which camp is right?

The Free Speech Union, which has threatened to launch a judicial review of the government’s decision, said that killing off the legislation would make it “virtually impossible for students and academics to challenge radical progressive ideology on campus”.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Palestinians ❤ Hamas by Bassam Tawil

By on August 5th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20839/palestinians-love-hamas

By hailing Haniyeh as a “great leader,” Abbas and his Palestinian Authority cohorts are sending a message to all Palestinians that the murderous Hamas leader is their role model.

[T]he Biden-Harris administration and those who continue to talk about the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel…. must be reminded that Haniyeh, who is being praised by Abbas and the PA as a “great leader,” belongs to a group that has long been waging a Jihad (holy war) to murder Jews and destroy Israel – and that does not have the slightest intention of being “revitalized.”

Abbas and other Palestinian Authority leaders have once again demonstrated their preference to ally with Islamist terror groups such as Hamas rather than to secure a brighter future for their own people. Abbas and the PA have also once again served as a reminder that they share the same goal as Hamas: glorify terrorism and destroy Israel.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) should have been happy over the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, head of the political bureau of the Iran-backed Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.

PA President Mahmoud Abbas appears to have forgotten that Haniyeh represents a group that carried out a violent and brutal coup against his loyalists in the Gaza Strip back in 2007.

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

How California’s Bar Stole $95M From Client Trust Accounts to Fund Open Borders Money stolen from your accounts might be funding pro-illegal advocacy. by Daniel Greenfield

By on August 5th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/how-californias-bar-stole-95m-from-client-trust-accounts-to-fund-open-borders/

The Center for Gender & Refugee Studies has spent years battling on behalf of illegal alien invaders. Earlier, Freedom Center Investigates exposed how the lawfare group housed at a University of California law school provides full service open borders support.

“During Trump, my CGRS colleagues and I expended a tremendous amount of energy challenging the anti-immigrant policies that were issued on what seemed like an almost daily basis,” Karen Musalo, the CGRS founding director, boasted.

The Center also offers a database of “expert witnesses” willing to testify on behalf of the ‘refugee’ claims of border invaders. It urges licensed medical or mental health personnel to register to “support asylum seekers with forensic mental or physical evaluations.”

Who funds the CRGS open borders lawfare? Many of those who fund it don’t even know it.

CGRS is one of the radical leftist groups that benefits from interest seized from trust accounts controlled by lawyers and redistributed to some of the most extreme groups around.

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ELECTIONS, HUMOR AND SATIRE Comments turned off

Headlines You’re Likely to See This Week

By on August 5th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/08/05/what-were-reading-get-tomorrows-headlines-today-and-more/

(We don’t normally try to predict the news, but it’s a virtual certainty headlines like these will appear in mainstream news outlets once Kamala Harris picks a running mate, which is expected this week.)

Harris’ Smart Pick for VP Puts Trump In Tight Spot – NY Times

An Inspired Choice for VP From VP Harris – Wash Post

Harris Knows What Takes to Be a Good VP – Her Choice Proves It – CNN

Harris Pick Adds Fuel to Her Already Turbocharged Campaign – USA Today

Harris Incredible Campaign Just Notched Another Huge Win – LA Times

Trump Freaks Out Over Harris Pick, Insiders Say He’s Rethinking Vance – MSNBC

Harris Pick Puts ‘Weird’ Vance In Tough Spot – AP

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Fact Check: Lousy Jobs Report Brings Out The Worst In Biden-Harris

By on August 5th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/08/05/lousy-jobs-report-brings-out-the-worst-in-biden-harris/

Shortly after Friday’s anemic jobs report came out, the stock market tumbled, recession fears rose, and the Biden-Harris administration issued another Pollyannish report about how great the economy is doing – this time with bigger and bolder lies.

Not only did just 114,000 jobs get created in July, which was well below economists’ expectations, but the jobless rate went up for the fourth consecutive month to 4.3% as 352,000 joined the unemployment lines. That’s not exactly “Morning in America.”

It gets worse.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics also admitted that it had overestimated the job gains in both May and June by a total of 29,000. This continues a nearly unbroken and highly suspicious trend that has resulted in the BLS claiming big job gains each month – which garnered great press for Biden-Harris – then quietly cutting those numbers in subsequent months, often by substantial amounts. So far this year, 279,000 have disappeared.

It also continues the mysterious gap between the number of new payroll jobs reported each month and the number of people who claim to have gained employment in those same months. While 114,000 jobs were created in July, for example, just 67,000 people said they got jobs.

Over the past three years, this gap has widened considerably.

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