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Ruth King

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

It’s Still Timely And Necessary To Get The 2020 Election Right By Vince Coyner

By on January 24th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/01/its_still_timely_and_necessary_to_get_the_2020_election_right.html

A solid majority of Americans know that the 2020 election was fraudulent. That’s a big problem for a country with a representative government, one in which the leaders are supposed to represent the will of the people. We’re a nation of laws ostensibly flowing from a Constitution that sets out explicit limitations on the federal government’s powers and protects a variety of citizens’ rights upon which said government cannot infringe. To the degree that a significant majority of citizens feel that the leader of this government was not constitutionally elected, that’s a problem.

For all its importance, our Constitution is nothing more than a piece of paper. It doesn’t make laws. It doesn’t have an army. It’s not the police. It’s just words on paper. It functions because Americans have confidence in its words as the foundation for the laws of our country and the guideposts governing the actions of those who actually control the army and the police and write the laws.

When that confidence is shaken, society’s foundation is shaken. While the fraudulent election of 2020 is not the first example of that shaken confidence in government, it’s easily the most important. From the economic upheavals wrought by the Industrial Revolution to widespread hopelessness during the Depression to the perceived fecklessness during the Vietnam War and economic malaise of the 60s and 70s, confidence in government has been shaken before but never before has the government’s legitimacy been in widespread doubt.

That changed with the 2020 election. Americans watched as the fraud played out in real-time, right in front of them. With violent riots in the streets that went unrestrained in the months leading up to the election, with courts inexplicably ignoring countless unconstitutional changes to voting laws, and with the media and social media censoring true stories that harmed Democrat chances, it started to seem as if the scales were tipped to one side. On election night and during the following weeks it became clear that this was indeed the case.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Critical Race Promoters Are More Odious Than Marxists They are a parasitic class of haters who only pretend to be supporting revolutionary change.  By Paul Gottfried

By on January 24th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/23/critical-race-promoters-are-more-odious-than-marxists/

Of late, Fox News has been hosting a series called “The MisEducation of America” featuring gatherings of critical race theory’s critics—such as Carol Swain of Vanderbilt University—focusing on the danger of teaching racially divisive versions of American history. According to Swain, a black professor of political science at Vanderbilt, forcing kids to do things like play games called “privilege bingo” are “a prime example of how CRT, has seeped down to K-12 education, and it disturbs students.” Further: “All of these critical theories with Marxist roots are destroying American education, and parents have to save their children. But they also have to work to save other people’s children.”

 Although the media and our universities may choose to ignore Swain’s complaint, she is actually understating the problem she and “MisEducation” host Pete Hegseth are featuring. I’m not sure I see “the Marxist roots” of the crusade against white people and their history in quite the same way Swain and Hegseth see it. We are indeed witnessing class warfare but not of the kind that Marx foresaw. It is a war being waged by white elites against the “basket of deplorables,” the predominantly white, working-class, and small-town Americans whom these elites hate and want to divest of human dignity. Similar conflicts are going on simultaneously in other Western countries, featuring equivalent social conflict.

In none of these cases do we find Marx’s appeals to the proletariat to rise up against those who control the means of production. In fact, we are witnessing exactly the opposite. An alliance of corporate capitalists, feminists, the LGBT lobby, and black race hustlers are directing their fire on the working class, which seems to be the least affected by the hegemonic ideology of wokeness. If anything, we are now looking at what Pedro Gonzalez has characterized as “the counterrevolution of the ruling class.” If Marxist theory, which supposedly is “seeping in” has any application, it would be as an analysis of how our elites are suppressing those they are stepping on and trying through increasingly vicious hate speech to isolate.

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Wokeism Is a Cruel and Dangerous Cult Wokeism’s natural logic is to destroy the lives of people of both genders, of all races, and—if need be—of those of every age, all to leverage an otherwise unworkable ideological agenda. By Victor Davis Hanson

By on January 24th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/23/wokeism-is-a-cruel-and-dangerous-cult/

Wokeism has been described by its critics as the omnipresent use of race—and to a lesser extent, gender—to replace meritocracy and thus ensure equality of result. What follows from implementing that ideology are reparatory actions to reward those of the present by atoning for the injustices done to others in the past. 

Some see it as an update of 1960s cultural Marxism fads. Others scoff that it is just a return to 1980s-style political correctness. 

Still more see it as the logical successor to 1990s-type race, class, and gender obsessions—albeit with a shriller and more dangerous Jacobin, Soviet, and Maoist twist. Wokeism’s hysteria also invites comparisons to the Salem witch trials and McCarthyism. 

But few have described wokeism as the cruel creed that it is. 

Wokeism’s natural logic is to destroy the lives of people of both genders, of all races, and—if need be—those of every age, all to leverage an otherwise unworkable ideological agenda. It is nihilist and destroys everything it touches. It tears apart foes and friends alike, whether by fueling media-driven hatred of Donald Trump or faux-deification of the disaster that is now Joe Biden. 

Woke’s Victims 

Defunding law enforcement and defaming police resulted in record numbers of murders in 12 U.S. cities. A wave of violent crime is even hitting America’s suburbs. 

Without much fear of arrest, indictment, conviction, and incarceration, emboldened violent career criminals for the past year have robbed, assaulted, and killed the innocent with impunity. 

The victims at the bus stop, the subway, or in the furniture store do not seem to warrant media or progressive attention, much less sympathy. 

They are the ignored—the unnamed, and the forgotten collateral damage from the grand experiment of redefining crime as a social construct. The guilty are the elite academics, activists, and billionaires like George Soros who are untouched by what they birthed.

We have all seen videos of the vast expanse of flotsam and jetsam strewn by train thieves along the Union Pacific tracks in Los Angeles. Yet the Wild West mess is still more than just the concrete manifestations of Los Angeles County district attorney George Gascón’s unhinged efforts to excuse criminals from legal consequences. 

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

The Houthis Must Be Relisted as a Terrorist Group by Majid Rafizadeh

By on January 24th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18164/houthis-terrorist-group

Attempts to deliver humanitarian aid to the poverty-stricken people of Yemen appear to have been blocked by the Houthis themselves, as well as by the United States, which has withdrawn support for Saudi Arabia, while giving the Houthis a free pass.

The Houthi strategy, it appears, is to use the dire living situation of the civilians under its control as a shield to get what it wants, such as being removed from the terrorist list and continuing its terror activities without facing any consequences.

If the Biden administration surrenders to this strategy, not only will the terror group feel that it has won, it will also be empowered to ratchet up its violence, crimes, and drone and missile attacks.

A surrender to this form of extortion will also set precedent for other terrorist groups or countries to deprive their populations of humanitarian aid, and hold them as hostages while they blackmail the US and the international community into handing them as a ransom whatever they dream up — in addition to continuing their terrorist activities without any consequences.

The United States can, as it is doing with Iran, re-list the Houthis as a Foreign Terrorist Organization and allow the export of humanitarian goods to Yemen — if the Houthis even permit. If they do not, it is all the more reason to hold them accountable even more harshly rather than reward them.

This morning, Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates, intercepted two ballistic missiles, launched courtesy of the Houthis.

The problem began almost a year ago, courtesy of the Biden administration. After less than a month in office, the Biden administration reversed yet another policy of the former administration. On February 12, 2021, Secretary of State Antony Blinken officially revoked the designation of the Houthis, an Iran-backed militia group, also known as Ansar Allah (“Partisans of Allah”), as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. According to the U.S. State Department press release:

“This decision is a recognition of the dire humanitarian situation in Yemen…. on Yemenis’ access to basic commodities like food and fuel. The revocations are intended to ensure that relevant U.S. policies do not impede assistance to those already suffering what has been called the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.”

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MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

An Insider Mocks the Endless Progressive Guilt Trip By Kyle Smith

By on January 24th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/01/an-insider-mocks-the-endless-progressive-guilt-trip/

Jesse Eisenberg’s directorial debut When You Finish Saving the World skewers the culture of liberal self-scourging.

A n intensely determined social worker played by Julianne Moore drives to work listening to equally intense classical music suggesting her utter, lifelong focus on a dramatic struggle for social justice. Then the camera pulls back to reveal the car she’s in: a pathetic, absurd, lawnmower-sized demi-car.

That’s the kind of perfect juxtaposition — funny, cutting, woefully accurate — that characterizes every smartly-designed scene in When You Finish Saving the World, the sly directorial debut of actor-writer Jesse Eisenberg. Eisenberg (who also wrote the movie, which began as a podcast) politely but devastatingly lampoons the sorts of people he grew up with and works among. And the Sundance Film Festival (where slick Beverly Hills dealmakers in $1,500 ski jackets solemnly take part in “land acknowledgment” ceremonies to parade their guilt about being the heirs of colonialism) is the perfect showcase for the film. Sundance (which is a virtual fest this year) has always hosted an intriguing balance of ruthless Hollywood ambition and silly liberal self-scourging. It can only benefit from taking in a bit of satiric blasphemy about its audience’s culture and politics.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Emergence of Arab Zionism? As Arabs turn towards Israel and survival, the West continues in the opposite direction. Melanie Phillips

By on January 24th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/emergence-arab-zionism-melanie-phillips-0/

While western liberals and the UN Human Rights Council double down in their determination to demonise, delegitimise and destroy Israel, support for that beleaguered country is coming from a surprising direction.

In 2020, people were startled by the Abraham Accords between Israel and the United Arab Emirates. Hope was kindled that this unprecedented linkage might herald an end to the century-old Arab war against the Jewish state.

Now there are signs of a new and related phenomenon: the emergence of Arab Zionists.

In the Jewish Chronicle, Jonathan Sacerdoti has reported that a number of Arab influencers, with hundreds of thousands of followers on social media, have emerged to promote Israel and support the Jews.

A Syrian blogger began a video begging the Israeli government to “occupy” the whole of Syria to save more lives. “The Golan Heights is the only area in Syria that hasn’t been destroyed and had its people killed,” he said.

In another video, an Arab academic was moved to tears by visiting Jerusalem’s Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem, promising: “Today, together, Muslims Jews and Christians, we promise you, it will never happen again.”

In Dubai, 39-year-old Loay Al-Shareef, who declares he is a Zionist, said: “It’s very righteous for the Jews to have their ancestral homeland in the land of Israel.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Epistle of Paul to the Washingtonians “Rally to the cause of freedom and reject medical tyranny.” Lloyd Billingsley

By on January 24th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/epistle-paul-washingtonians-lloyd-billing

In a recent hearing, Sen. Rand Paul called out Dr. Anthony Fauci for smearing the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, distinguished medical scientists from Oxford, Harvard and Stanford, as “fringe epidemiologists.” Fauci and NIH boss Francis Collins had “orchestrated a takedown campaign” instead of debating the facts.

“Dr. Fauci doesn’t want to debate,” Paul said. “He wants to squelch debate because ‘he is science’. If you criticize him, you’re criticizing science.” That prompted Paul to author a Fox News commentary in which he cited Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek, author of The Road to Serfdom.

“Most scientists realize that we cannot plan the advance of knowledge, that in the voyage into the unknown—which is what research is—we are in great measure dependent on the vagaries of individual genius and of circumstance, and that scientific advance, like a new idea that will spring up in a single mind, will be the result of a combination of conceptions, habits, and circumstances brought to one person by society, the result as much of lucky accidents as of systematic effort.”

In other words, Paul explained, “the benefits of scientific progress are only realized if science is free from excessive restraint” and “the same arguments against central planning for an economy also hold for science.” When a central planner errs, “the entire economy is threatened.  Likewise, when a central medical planner errs, all patients are threatened.”

According to Paul, Dr. Fauci’s “fundamental decision to ignore natural immunity has led to a cascade of bad decisions, the effects of which have seeped into all of our lives.”  Long before the current pandemic, Fauci authorized secretive trials of toxic drugs such as AZT on foster children in New York City.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Norway’s Government Welcomes the Taliban to Oslo And flies them in by private jet – at taxpayer expense, of course. Bruce Bawer

By on January 24th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/norways-government-welcomes-taliban-oslo-bruce-bawer/

On April 9, 2002, the Oslo newspaper Dagbladet reported that a man named Ingmar Tveitt, who was a friend of a member of the Norwegian Parliament named Jan Simonsen, had been dining in the Parliament cafeteria on the previous day when security guards asked him to remove his jacket. Why? Because Tveitt, a supporter of Israel, had an Israeli flag pin on his lapel. Some Parliament members found this offensive – even though, as Tveitt pointed out, people were always walking around the premises in Palestinian scarces. Yes, it was a minor incident, quickly forgotten by almost everybody. But that little story stuck in my mind, and I’ve had occasion to recall it now and then, because it told a big truth about the sympathies of Norwegian officialdom vis-à-vis the Middle East

That was twenty years ago. Since then, as the Islamic presence in Norway has steadily increased, Norwegian anti-Semitism, Israel-hatred, and support for Palestine have grown. In recent years, Norway has given Palestinian government bodies about $100 million annually – over $20 per Norwegian taxpayer. Earlier this month, when Norway took charge of the U.N. Security Council, its ambassador to the UN, Mona Juul, said that the Israel-Palestine conflict deserves “more attention” – as if the five million Palestinians hadn’t been getting far more than their share of attention (and Western largesse) for the last half century. Foreign Minister Anniken Huitfeldt, for her part, chided Israel as “inhuman” for listing six Palestinian organizations – all of which Norway helps fund, in addition to the money it transfers to government bodies – as terrorist groups. Even though, by any objective definition, they are terrorist groups.

I was reminded of the Tveitt story this weekend after being apprised of the latest development in the saga of Norwegian involvement in Middle Eastern affairs. The story broke last Friday in the country’s biggest newspaper, VG. “The Taliban,” trumpeted the headline, “is coming to Norway to negotiate.” Norway, I read, had grabbed the brass ring: of all Western countries, it would be the first since the fall of Kabul to welcome a delegation of Taliban leaders to its shores. Reportedly, the distinguished visitors would meet not just with their Norwegian counterparts but also with representatives of the U.S., the EU, the U.K., France, Germany, and Italy, as well as with Afghans living outside Afghanistan, with officials of the Church of Norway and the Norwegian Red Cross, and with sundry journalists and human-rights activists. The meetings, which the Norwegian government had hoped to keep secret, began yesterday and will conclude tomorrow. 

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

The West Barks, But the Putin Caravan Moves On The dangerous delusions about “diplomatic engagement.” Bruce Thornton

By on January 24th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/west-barks-putin-caravan-moves-bruce-thornton/

For nearly two decades Russian President Vladimir Putin has challenged the West’s “rules-based international order” seemingly validated by the collapse of the Soviet Union, which Putin has called “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” During that time, Western leaders have imposed economic sanctions on Russia, and diplomats have scolded Putin for his violation of human rights and the borders of his neighbors, illiberal policies and murders of political rivals, and ongoing attempts to restore the old Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.

But as recent events show, all that tough talk hasn’t slowed Putin down, and if anything has confirmed his contempt for a rich global rival unwilling to face the hard choices necessary for checking his aggression, even though, as the Associated Press said last week, the conflict is heading for a “potentially disastrous confrontation.” With oil prices rising significantly, easing the costs of economic sanctions; China and Iran increasing its cooperation with Russia; and a year of feckless global retreat and appeasement by the Biden administration––including cancelling Trump’s sanctions on the company building the Nordstream 2 pipeline for increasing Russian natural gas deliveries to Europe––Putin may now be calculating that the time is ripe for more aggressive actions to achieve his goal of pushing NATO from Russia’s borders, and restoring its geopolitical clout.

Most recently, Putin has intensified his ongoing pressure against eastern Ukraine by moving nearly 100,000 Russian troops to the border with Ukraine. He’s also sent paratroopers to Kazakhstan to prop up its president, a Putin lackey who is facing serious protests. Many of the protestors have been killed.

The actions against Ukraine are a continuation of aggression going back to the Obama administration in 2014, when Putin seized Crimea from Ukraine, then invaded eastern Ukraine with “little green men,” Russian soldiers in unmarked green uniforms.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Washington in Slumber By Elliott Abrams

By on January 24th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/01/washington-in-slumber/

Sleepy Washington is likely on the verge of being awakened by a major world crisis.

Washingtonians may not fully grasp the impression their city gives to foreign visitors these days. It is one of somnolence. Too many shops or restaurants are closed, temporarily or permanently; the traffic is light; the streets largely empty. As a suburbanite, I drive into Washington for meetings and find I never have to use a parking garage these days. Downtown is sufficiently deserted to make finding a parking meter easy. Thus, to foreign visitors, it often seems that the city is asleep and nothing important is happening right now.

They are right. What, after all, is happening on Capitol Hill? Nothing — or rather nothing but kabuki. Despite knowing what the outcome will be, the Democratic leadership forces votes that will be lost. Perhaps they are thinking this will be useful in November, but for the moment, it means that Congress is doing nothing of serious value.

And what is going on in the executive branch? On the border issues, nothing. On Covid, nothing: The president has said this is mostly a state issue, and anyway, most Americans have given up relying on so-called experts in the federal government. Americans can sign up now for three free masks, a pathetic measure of government action. The “energy in the Executive” of which Hamilton wrote consists nowadays of travel and speeches, and the only thing that gets this president energized is an opportunity to attack his domestic opponents.

On foreign policy, the president is waiting for Putin’s next move. This puts the United States in a position of reaction, issuing repeated warnings of a vague and general nature. Of real action, such as sending 10,000 troops to Poland or announcing a shipment of 2,000 anti-tank missiles to Ukraine, there is none. The only significant thing that happened in the foreign-policy world in the last week or two was the president’s disastrous press-conference error in saying that a small incursion into Ukraine by Putin would not be a very big deal. This was such an amazing mistake that the White House issued a correction in the nature of a retraction within one hour of Biden’s speech. But such errors give insight into the mind of the president, and this insight will have been profoundly unnerving to every American friend or ally anywhere in the world. Those who are dependent on Joe Biden for their security will have shivered last Wednesday evening. Think of it: This is the most dangerous, immediate national-security issue, and it was certain to come up at the press conference, yet the president was not only inarticulate but actually unable to state U.S. policy clearly.

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