Frigid air that normally stays trapped in the Arctic has escaped, plunging deep into the United States for an extended visit that is expected to provoke teeth-chattering but not be record-shattering.
It’s a cold air outbreak that some experts say is happening more frequently, and paradoxically, because of a warming world. Such cold air blasts have become known as the polar vortex. It’s a long-established weather term that’s become mainstream as its technical meaning changed a bit on the way.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/justin-trudeaus-legacy-a-weakened-canada
Justin Trudeau, possibly the worst prime minister in the history of Canada, has resigned. Sort of. He has stepped down as leader of the Liberal Party and won’t run in the next election but will remain at his post until a new leader is chosen. Meantime, Parliament will be prorogued—or discontinued without being dissolved—to avoid the possibility of a successful no-confidence motion, which would surely topple the Trudeau government. The next election is scheduled for October of this year, but in all likelihood it will take place earlier, at some point this spring. So, Canadians will still have to endure another few months of Trudeau—a ham-fisted resignation if there ever was one.
Trudeau’s Liberal Party also seems bound for electoral destruction. All the polls are dire, but some suggest that the defeat will be so thorough that the Liberals may not even win enough seats to be a recognized party. This is a spectacular decline. What makes it even more striking is that Trudeau almost singlehandedly revived the old Liberal Party in 2015 after about a decade of successive defeats, turning a seemingly moribund third-place party into a government. Now the restorer has become the euthanizer. How did it happen?
Trudeau came to power after years of ever larger and increasingly stable Conservative governments under Prime Minister Stephen Harper (2006–2015). Conservatives had been in power before, if rarely, in the twentieth century, but Harper’s party had taken a more ideological and populist turn after an electoral wipe-out in 1993. The renewed Conservative Party was anchored in western Canada, far from the Liberal strongholds of Toronto and Montreal, whose elites had governed Canada for most of the twentieth century. Western Canada’s concerns—agriculture, oil and gas, and other commodities—rose to prominence as never before, and so did a new governing class.
But the old Liberal elite hated them and never saw the new Conservatives as legitimate. The reaction was often hysterical, with some partisans proclaiming that Harper was a more dangerous threat to Canada than ISIS. Trudeau himself captured the Liberal mood when he mused about the possibility of “making Quebec a country” if Canada were genuinely “Stephen Harper’s Canada,” and he insisted on the need to put Quebeckers rather than western Canadians in charge of our “community and socio-democratic agenda,” whatever that meant.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/trump-maga-elon-musk-tech-industry
With Donald Trump set to take office later this month, it’s worth considering how his coalition has changed.
The source of the president-elect’s power—his voting base—is populist in nature. This was evident from the beginning. Trump rallied a new political cross-section and has, over the past decade, transformed the GOP into a multiracial, working-class party. He managed to draw tens of thousands of people to stadiums and arenas and to command a fervent social media following that propagates his message.
Trump’s populist appeal came with a downside: his voters and his vision lacked elite champions who could capably administer the White House and advance the MAGA agenda. There was Trump the president and Trump’s voters, but nothing in between. He lacked the necessary middle layer to control the bureaucracy and negotiate with outside power brokers.
Now Trump has a second chance, and his coalition has seen a major shift: a growing segment of the technology industry has committed itself to the MAGA agenda. The most notable representative of this development is the world’s wealthiest man, Elon Musk. Hundreds of other tech leaders have followed suit, donating to Trump and backing his 2024 presidential campaign.
Some of this is doubtless self-serving. Technologists fear taxes, regulation, antitrust, and other restrictions that would likely have been part of Kamala Harris’s agenda. But part of it is ideological. Many figures on the right, including Musk, have a genuine distaste, even disgust, for “woke” politics and would like to see an innovative, free, and growth-oriented American economy. Some tech leaders were early adopters in supporting Trump, while others have emerged more recently, after it became safe. But the overall message is clear: the tech industry gambled on Trump and, with his election victory, looks to benefit not only financially but ideologically.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/bourbon-street-massacre-is-what-globalize-the-intifada-looks-like/
As woke illiberalism replaced live-and-let-live liberalism as the animating ideology of the American Left, the state of Israel has increasingly found itself on the outs. Never mind that modern Israel was founded by, and for three decades politically dominated by, a bunch of left-wing socialists. Never mind that Harry Truman, an iconic liberal Democratic president, became the first world leader to recognize the fledgling Jewish state a mere 11 minutes after it announced its independence in 1948. None of that history matters on the left anymore, after wokeism supplanted liberalism.
In the fatuous neo-Marxist dichotomy of modern wokeism, Jews are deemed a “white,” “oppressor” class; Muslims, by contrast, are deemed a “brown,” “oppressed” class. To be a leftist in good standing, then, necessitates supporting the latter over the former — and, therefore, supporting Palestinian Arab jihadism over the Jewish people’s eternal will to survive. To the woke, the Palestinian Arabs’ quest to annihilate the Jews of Israel represents a vogue and chic cause — just like Black Lives Matter did five years ago, and just like same-sex marriage did five years before that.
The apotheosis of this bemusing sentiment was the Hamas massacre of Oct. 7, 2023. Sure, babies were beheaded, women were raped, beautiful young music festival attendees were butchered, and Holocaust survivors were executed in their homes — but “Palestine” was being “decolonized,” and every good leftist knows you have to break a few eggs in order to make an omelet! The ends always justify the means, as Saul Alinsky famously taught. Accordingly, in the words of disgraced Cornell history professor Russell Rickford, the Hamas massacre was “exhilarating” and “energizing.”
The imperative now, as thousands of young jihadis infesting America’s university campuses have made clear, is to spread the “love”: to “globalize the intifada” and, in the words of the radical leftists who congregated in Times Square in New York City earlier this week, to foment a worldwide “intifada revolution.” The more, the merrier: Sharing is caring, after all!
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/perfidious-albion/
As the Ottoman Empire was in its death throes, the British government began to look ahead. On November 2, 1917, British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour issued a momentous statement in a letter to Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild, the leader of the British Jewish community:
His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.
This was a significant boost for the Zionist project, as it was the first time that a major power had expressed support for it, and Jewish immigration into Palestine increased.
The British, however, were playing both sides. At the same time that they committed themselves to the establishment of “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, they were also encouraging the most vociferous opponents of the Zionist project, the Arabs. Indeed, no less an authority than Colonel T. E. Lawrence, the celebrated “Lawrence of Arabia,” admitted that the very concept of Arab nationalism was a British invention.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/still-suicidal-and-surreal/
Since the Democrats’ shellacking at the polls on November 5, the party has been undergoing a fractious discussion about what went wrong. A whole roster of the usual suspects has been mooted, including neglect of the working class. But that accurate assessment still doesn’t get that the problem is leftism per se, not bad candidates, polling, tactics, or whatever, no more than New Coke failed for those reasons. It was just a bad product.
Take Vermont Socialist, er, Independent Bernie Sanders’s scolding of his party: “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. . . . And they’re right.”
We know what Sanders means: “changing” to a full socialist planned economy managed by the state, rather than the over-regulated hybrid we now have. But those features of our dirigiste economy have created conditions, dysfunctions, and moral hazards––the tax, spend, print, borrow, hyper-regulate, and redistribute money that during the Biden-Harris administration unleashed inflation and wage stagnation that drove voters, including traditional Democrat constituencies, to vote for Trump.
Nor is the problem that “real” socialism has “never been tried.” History is littered with attempts to create a successful socialist or communist economy, and every one we know of has failed––not because it wasn’t properly managed or had a bad “messaging strategy,” but because unlike free-market capitalism, it has been predicated on unreal assumptions about human nature and motivation, as well as ignoring the power of freedom and choice.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/01/trump_s_arctic_policy_is_no_folly.html
On Sunday, December 22, President-elect Donald Trump reiterated his desire for America to take control of Greenland, saying it is an “absolute necessity.” The very next day, Greenland’s prime minister, Mute Egede, said the autonomous island, part of the Danish kingdom, was not for sale. But Trump’s plan—like that of William H. Seward, who, as secretary of state, oversaw the purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867—is not without tremendous geopolitical advantage to America.
It’s all about gaining greater American control over the Arctic, where Russia and China are cooperating to build a strong presence. Fears that such cooperation will extend to include North Korea and Iran are not unfounded. Many pundits believe that Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran have aligned themselves into a new Axis of Evil. According to Merrill Matthews of the Institute for Policy Innovation, they are in “expansionist mode,” seeking “much more land and power” and “coordinating their efforts to benefit each country’s goals.”
However, the immediate worries for America are from the Sino-Russian efforts, which have significantly expanded over the past decade. China’s northernmost point is 13 degrees of latitude from the Arctic Circle—that’s 1,443 km or roughly 900 miles. Yet, in 2014, Chinese President Xi Jinping audaciously proclaimed China a “near-Arctic state,” launched an “Arctic strategy,” and resolved to make his country a “polar power.”
Cut to 2024. In July, four Chinese and Russian strategic bombers, all taking off for the first time from an airbase in northeast Russia, flew over the Chukchi and Bering Seas. In October, Chinese and Russian coast guard fleets conducted their first joint patrol of the Arctic. These forays followed joint naval exercises in the Bering Strait in 2022 and 2023. The two countries also signed a memorandum of understanding on maritime law enforcement in 2023.
https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/08/fear-of-a-name-why-are-the-media-and-law-enforcement-afraid-to-call-terror-what-it-is/
Shamsud-Din Jabbar posted videos declaring his support for ISIS and drove a pickup truck with an ISIS flag into a crowd in New Orleans. By so clearly associating his murderous rampage with a recognized terrorist group, Jabbar could not have intended more clearly for the incident to be a terrorist attack. In response, FBI assistant special agent in charge Althea Duncan said at a press conference, “This is not a terrorist event… simply improvised explosive devices.”
The Washington Post’s headline was, “Truck rams New Orleans crowd,” and only mentioned ISIS ties in the second subheading. NPR, NBC, and ABC all ran articles about the attack without using the words “terror,” “Islamic,” or “Islamism,” opting not to specify exactly what sort of “attack” it was.
Evidently, law enforcement, in addition to the press, is fearful of naming the problem. The FBI did later state in a press release that it was investigating the incident as a “terrorist attack,” but they should never have hesitated to call it such. Fear of calling terrorism what it is is extremely problematic in and of itself and draws a strong parallel to the Harry Potter series.
For most of the Harry Potter series, very few characters aside from Harry can bring themselves to even say the name of the most dangerous wizard of all time—Voldemort—not unlike the small number of politicians and law enforcement spokespeople who call radical Islam and terrorism what they are. Even Harry’s professors who teach defense and employees of the Ministry of Magic, the governing body in Harry’s world, generally can’t bring themselves to say Voldemort’s name, at least above a whisper. But as Harry’s friend Hermione so wisely puts it, “Fear of a name only increases fear of the thing itself.”
https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/08/new-years-jeers/
Now that the holiday season hoopla is behind us, a look at the latest doings in education is in order. To begin with, the sex cultists are still alive and well. In fact, according to The Heritage Foundation, 16 states force transgender lessons on children.
Heritage’s “Gender Ideology as State Education Policy” report highlights the education standards and frameworks of states that encourage gender ideology, which is defined as “the subordination or displacement of factual, ideologically neutral lessons about biological sex with tell-tale notions such as ‘gender identity,’ ‘sex assigned at birth,’ and ‘cisgender.’”
Not surprisingly, only one of the states—Wyoming—is of the red persuasion. In deep blue Oregon, the state’s health standards include “heterosexual, bisexual, lesbian, gay, queer, asexual, two-spirit, and pansexual.” in their definitions of sexual and romantic orientations.
In a similar vein, New Jersey’s learning standards state, “Gender assigned at birth means the gender that someone was thought to be at birth, typically recorded on their (sic) original birth certificate. The gender someone was assigned at birth may or may not match their (sic) gender identity.”
Hence, with the onslaught of misinformation and proselytizing, it becomes understandable that 5.1% of adults younger than 30 claim to be transgender or nonbinary, per a Pew Research poll, and this social contagion is being used as a political cudgel by many with a perverse agenda.
In reality, according to UCLA’s Williams Institute, an LGBTQ advocacy group, a staggering 99.4% of the population does not have the physical traits that cause someone to become transgender.
Also, Brown University physician and researcher Lisa Littman released a study in 2018 that showed “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” in young people may be driven by “social and peer contagion.” She stresses that nearly 70% of the teenagers were involved with a peer group in which at least one friend had identified as transgender.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21295/pope-francis-bearing-false-witness
Pope Francis has joined the chorus of blood libelers who have accused Israel of genocide, writing: “According to some experts, what is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide.” This indictment is totally false as a matter of fact, law and morality. The Vatican knows what genocide is. It perfected this crime against humanity during the Crusades, the Inquisition and the priest-inspired pogroms that led to the Holocaust.
The reality is that Israel has killed far fewer civilians in relation to combatants than any nation in history while fighting comparable urban wars, especially where Hamas combatants hide among civilians, precisely in order to induce Israel to kill as many civilians as possible.
By accepting Palestinianism and supporting the Hamas narrative, he is siding with the enemies of Christianity, the enemies of Judaism and the enemies of decency. I will not curse Pope Francis; the bible has already done so: “Now the LORD had said unto Abram…. And I will make of thee a great nation…. And I will bless them that bless thee and curse him that curseth thee.”
Since the end of World War II, the Vatican has tried hard to make up for its centuries of attacks on the Jewish people, including the Crusades, the Inquisition, priest-incited pogroms, and theological claims that the Jews killed Jesus. The Vatican’s complicity in genocide during World War II took the form of Pope Pius XII’s refusal to create a “crisis of conscience” among German Catholics by forbidding them from participating in the mass murder of Jews.
Top Stories @ Fox News