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Ruth King

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I Voted for Trump—and You Should, Too, Because the Republic Is at Stake By David P. Goldman

By on November 1st, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/2020/10/31/why-i-voted-for-trump-and-you-should-too-because-the-republic-is-at-stake-n1112201

EXCERPT

If you’re still on the fence, please consider the following.

First: There is a Deep State that abused the credibility of America’s Intelligence Community to overturn a free and fair presidential election. If you don’t believe me, listen to what left-liberal journalist Glenn Greenwald told Tucker Carlson last week. Greenwald brought out the Edward Snowden revelations about National Security Agency spying on American citizens. He has been a thorn in the side of the U.S. Deep State for years, and he now warns about a dirty alliance between the spooks and the progressive Left. The whole “Russia collusion” scandal was concocted out of thin air in order to bring down a presidency. If a handful of self-appointed officials in cahoots with the liberal elite can destroy a presidency, your democratic rights are toilet paper.

Second: The grudge that the Deep State bears against Trump arises from Trump’s opposition to “endless wars.” The people running our Intelligence Community got their jobs through endless wars, and a careful look at how the covert side of this war was conducted would ruin a lot of careers, and worse. When Trump dissented from the Bush-Romney-McCain wing of the party over the Iraq war, he became anathema. Trump’s position has the overwhelming support of the American people. I don’t care what you think of him: He stood down a mutiny by a cabal of spooks determined to thwart the will of the people as expressed in a fair election.

Third: Trump’s “America First” foreign policy achieved tangible results, bringing about a new set of peace deals in the Middle East that the establishment thought impossible. As I wrote earlier this month at The American Mind:

Some will argue that President Trump’s record of success is mixed, and that he might have handled some situations better. But three things should be clear from the past three years of governance. First, “America First” reflects a vision for U.S. foreign policy, not a retread of isolationism. Second, the vision has produced some tangible successes. And third, although the Trump Administration’s record in foreign policy is imperfect, it has real accomplishments to show, in marked contrast to the disastrous performance of the George W. Bush and Barack Obama Administrations.

I do not write as a Trump apologist, although I supported him in 2016 and support him in the current presidential race. In particular I have been critical of his approach to China. Nonetheless, Trump’s record is vastly superior to the “Blame America First” stance of his predecessor, and to the utopian interventionism of the preceding Republican president.

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Trump’s Already Won A consequential presidency has enabled peace and prosperity.Maria Bartiromo and James Freeman

By on November 1st, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-already-won-11604073872?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

Win or lose, America’s 45th president deserves credit for a more competitive economy, a nation at peace and a secure rule of law. Donald Trump doesn’t trample Americans’ rights. He doesn’t start wars; he ends them. And he makes comments that offend people. The cost of supporting Mr. Trump is enduring awkward moments when he says things that presidents shouldn’t say. The benefit is that he champions U.S. liberty and prosperity, and a thriving America is a benefit to the world.

It may seem obvious that a president should prioritize the interests of his country. But when Mr. Trump arrived in Washington, too many politicians seemed to view America as one of the world’s problems. Barack Obama began his presidency with a series of overseas speeches in which he described American flaws. In 2016 he visited communist Cuba where he noted that the U.S. had once sought to “exert control” over the country. Many suffering Cubans wish that we’d succeeded.

Mr. Trump doesn’t apologize for America. When it comes to foreign relations, he thinks that in many ways the U.S. has been too nice. But he also brought the nicest news to the Middle East in decades, a series of historic peace agreements between Israel and its Arab neighbors. In contrast with the expansive ambitions of the Bush era and the apologetic retreats of Obama days, Mr. Trump leads an America that is ready but not eager for war and that encourages former foes to engage in peaceful commerce.

The pursuit of commercial vitality at home has defined his presidency, as it defined his unconventional candidacy. “Is Donald Trump Serious?” asked a New York Times headline in September 2015. A columnist mocked him for seeking to sharply reduce the tax on corporate profits. The real mockery was the damage the levy inflicted. When combined with state and local taxes, the tax rate on corporate income amounted to nearly 40%, the highest in the industrialized world. U.S. companies were fleeing for business-friendly countries.

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EDUCATION, ELECTIONS Comments turned off

If you hate woke education now, wait until Biden is done with it By Andrea Widburg

By on November 1st, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/11/if_you_hate_woke_education_now_wait_until_biden_is_done_with_it.html

Academia has long been the incubator for some of the worst ideas in American society. Since World War II ended, America’s colleges and universities have been indoctrinating young Americans with economic and cultural Marxism, including, among other things, hatred for America, white people, straight people, gender norms, and Christians and Jews. President Trump has finally begun pushing back, but you can expect the Biden administration to double down on this madness if Biden wins.

Every bit of warped thinking in America started in academia. It started simply enough with economic Marxism. Academics began attacking capitalism and free markets after World War II. The trend accelerated rapidly during the 1960s and became the dominant mindset by the end of the 1990s.

The problem with pushing academic Marxism is that it never meshed well with America, which did not have people stuck in stratified economic classes. As Henry Higgins once sang, “An Englishman’s way of speaking absolutely classifies him. The moment he talks, he makes some other Englishman despise him.” It was almost impossible for the English (or other Europeans) to leave their class.

America, though, had social mobility. While there have always been poor people, they have not always been the same poor people. The immigrant was poor, his daughter was working class, and her son was middle class.

Deprived of economic Marxism to undercut America, leftist academics turned to attacking American society at large. Campuses abandoned Martin Luther King to insist that race is determinative and that white skin means an evil mind.

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ELECTIONS, FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Buried news: The world has become safer under President Trump By Jack Hellner

By on November 1st, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/11/buried_news_the_world_has_become_safer_under_president_trump.html

In 2016,  the people of the U.S. listed terrorism near the top of the list of things they were worried about.  

Now it is down on the list because the world has become a safer place under President Trump.

Here’s a little noticed item from Breitbart News:

When the Pew Research Center asked registered voters in summer 2016 what the top issues influencing their votes were, 80 percent said that terrorism was “very important,” more than any issue but the economy. In summer 2020, the issue wasn’t even on the list.

The tenure of President Donald Trump has proven catastrophic for what was, at the time of his inauguration, considered the most dangerous terrorist organization on the planet: the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL), which had split from its parent group al-Qaeda with only two years left to the Obama administration and established its “caliphate” on June 29, 2014.

The Trump era, which resulted in both the demise of the “caliphate” and “caliph” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, experienced an over 60-percent drop in the number of casualties attributable to the core Islamic State group, according to a Breitbart News analysis of data from the State Department’s Annual Country Reports on Terrorism. Under President Barack Obama, ISIS beheaded at least four times the number of civilians as under Trump, despite the fact that ISIS in its current state was founded with less than three years left in Obama’s tenure.

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CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Trump’s Economy Really Was Better Than Obama’s Karl W. Smith

By on November 1st, 2020

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/trump-s-economy-really-was-better-

(Bloomberg Opinion) — Joe Biden has argued that President Donald Trump didn’t so much build a strong economy as inherit one. It’s good line — but it ignores the successes, at least before the pandemic, of Trump’s unconventional policy. If Biden is elected president, he should continue Trump’s economic approach rather than returning to Barack Obama’s.

Between December 2009 and December 2016, the unemployment rate dropped 5.2 percentage points, from 9.9% to 4.7%. By December 2019, it had fallen another 1.2 percentage points, to 3.5%. A cursory look at those numbers might lead you to believe that the improvement under Trump was at best a continuation of a trend that began nearly a decade earlier.

It’s necessary to place those numbers in context. By 2016, officials in the Treasury Department and at the Federal Reserve had concluded that the economy was at full employment and that further improvement in the labor market was unlikely. This was in line with the Congressional Budget Office’s guidance that further declines in the unemployment rate would push the economy beyond its sustainable capacity.

Once in office, Trump ignored this consensus. He implemented a program of tax cuts, spending increases and unprecedented pressure on the Fed to cut interest rates to zero and keep them there. Trump’s goal of 3% growth was derided as delusional, while a bipartisan chorus of commentators declared his policies reckless and irresponsible.

They were anything but. Not only did the unemployment rate continue to fall, but the percentage of Americans aged 25 to 54 either employed or looking for a job saw its first sustained rise since the late 1980s. This inflection point changed the character of the labor market.

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Video: Socialism, Communism and Your Personal Freedom. How a nation is at stake in this upcoming election.

By on November 1st, 2020

https://jamieglazov.com/2020/10/30/conservative-momma-socialism-communism-an

This new edition of The Glazov Gang features Conservative Momma, who focuses on: Socialism, Communism and Your Personal Freedom, unveiling how a nation is at stake in this upcoming election.

Don’t miss it!

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Next Populist Revolt By Matthew Continetti

By on November 1st, 2020

https://freebeacon.com/columns/the-next-populist-revolt/

The combustible politics of a coronavirus ‘dark winter’….

For the past half decade, Europe has acted as a preview of coming attractions in American politics. The reaction to the confluence of immigration and terrorism on the continent foreshadowed the direction the Republican Party would take under Donald Trump. The surprise victory of “Leave” in the Brexit referendum hinted at Trump’s unexpected elevation to the presidency. The terrible images from coronavirus-stricken Italy last March offered a glimpse into New York City’s future. This week, when Italian authorities reimposed curfews, restrictions on business, and bans on communal gatherings, violent protests broke out in Turin, Milan, and Naples. Consider it a taste of the next populist revolt.

Lockdowns remain the preferred tool of governments whose public-health authorities decide the coronavirus is out of control. In September, Israel shut down for a month during the Jewish holidays to reduce its coronavirus-infection rate. In October, New York City targeted certain neighborhoods. In recent days, Newark, N.J., ordered “nonessential” businesses to close at 8 p.m., a county judge imposed a curfew on El Paso, Texas, and Massachusetts has gone back-and-forth on whether schools should be open or closed.

This response has placed the public under extraordinary strain. When officials tell businesses to close, they not only deny individuals who can’t work from home the opportunity to earn a living. They also impose social costs that much of the public is increasingly unwilling to bear. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that depression, substance abuse, and suicidal ideation increased during the spring. Extended families limited contact. Religious practice was curtailed. Having canceled spring holidays, Americans are now informed that Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas need to be reconsidered as well. When individuals inevitably question, disregard, or disobey the commands of science, they are censored, stigmatized, condescended to, or punished.

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ELECTIONS, MEDIA Comments turned off

Article on Joe and Hunter Biden Censored By The Intercept An attempt to assess the importance of the known evidence, and a critique of media lies to protect their favored candidate, could not be published at The Intercept Glenn Greenwald

By on November 1st, 2020

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/article-on-joe-and-hunter-biden-censored

I am posting here the most recent draft of my article about Joe and Hunter Biden — the last one seen by Intercept editors before telling me that they refuse to publish it absent major structural changes involving the removal of all sections critical of Joe Biden, leaving only a narrow article critiquing media outlets. I will also, in a separate post, publish all communications I had with Intercept editors surrounding this article so you can see the censorship in action and, given the Intercept’s denials, decide for yourselves (this is the kind of transparency responsible journalists provide, and which the Intercept refuses to this day to provide regarding their conduct in the Reality Winner story). This draft obviously would have gone through one more round of proof-reading and editing by me — to shorten it, fix typos, etc — but it’s important for the integrity of the claims to publish the draft in unchanged form that Intercept editors last saw, and announced that they would not “edit” but completely gut as a condition to publication:

TITLE: THE REAL SCANDAL: U.S. MEDIA USES FALSEHOODS TO DEFEND JOE BIDEN FROM HUNTER’S EMAILS

Publication by the New York Post two weeks ago of emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop, relating to Vice President Joe Biden’s work in Ukraine, and subsequent articles from other outlets concerning the Biden family’s pursuit of business opportunities in China, provoked extraordinary efforts by a de facto union of media outlets, Silicon Valley giants and the intelligence community to suppress these stories.

One outcome is that the Biden campaign concluded, rationally, that there is no need for the front-running presidential candidate to address even the most basic and relevant questions raised by these materials. Rather than condemn Biden for ignoring these questions — the natural instinct of a healthy press when it comes to a presidential election — journalists have instead led the way in concocting excuses to justify his silence.

After the Post’s first article, both that newspaper and other news outlets have published numerous other emails and texts purportedly written to and from Hunter reflecting his efforts to induce his father to take actions as Vice President beneficial to the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, on whose board of directors Hunter sat for a monthly payment of $50,000, as well as proposals for lucrative business deals in China that traded on his influence with his father.

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HISTORY, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Founders’ priceless legacy by Myron Magnet *****

By on November 1st, 2020

https://newcriterion.com/issues/2020/11/the-founders-priceless-legacy

“Today’s slogan seems to be: speak power to truth.”

However unfashionable to say so at the moment, the American Founding is one of the noblest achievements of the Western Enlightenment. It created something breathtakingly new in history: a self-governing republic that protects the right of individuals—not serfs, not subjects, but equal citizens before the law—to pursue their own happiness in their own way. Who could have imagined that such a triumph would come under the violent attack that now seeks to deny and besmirch it? Whether it flies the banner of The 1619 Project, Black Lives Matter, or Critical Race Theory, the new anti-Americanism condemns the Founding Fathers’ project as conceived in slavery, not liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that we can never be equal citizens with equal rights.

It is a militant anti-Americanism, too. Like the iconoclasm of the most violent English Puritans, who smashed the faces off the carved saints and angels in one sublime medieval church after another, or of the French sans-culottes, who dug up and desecrated nine centuries of royal bodies from their tombs in the Abbey of Saint-Denis, defacing for good measure the statues of the Old Testament kings on the façade of this first great Gothic building, today’s anti-Americanism seeks to pulverize and obliterate our national past as something too offensive and obscene to have existed.

The current upheaval is the latest paroxysm of a cultural revolution that has gained momentum for half a century or more, and its trajectory from the universities to popular culture is too well known to need repeating. What I want to discuss here is the precious value of our inheritance from the Founding Fathers that today’s vandals want to destroy. If they succeed—since history, even our own, doesn’t always go forward and upward, despite the claims of the so-called “progressives”—we will find ourselves in a new Dark Age of constraint and superstition.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

On how Princeton’s crusade against systemic racism has backfired. Roger Kimball

By on November 1st, 2020

https://newcriterion.com/issues/2020/11/keywords-hoist-petard

Perhaps we ought to have included “chickens” and “roost” among the keywords as well. For many years now, woke administrators, professors, and other activists at all the toniest colleges have been like the parade of flagellants in The Seventh Seal: skirling in public about their sins, above all their institutional or (as we have lately been taught to say) their “systemic” racism. Their cries are accompanied by the demand for alms—$50 million at Yale to support “diversity,” $100 million at Brown for kindred exercises in political penance, and so on.

On September 2, Christopher L. Eisgruber, the president of Princeton University, made a major contribution to this emetic genre. In an open letter to the university “community,” he beat his breast about America’s overdue “profound national reckoning with racism.” He didn’t exclude his own university. Indeed, he beat himself harder as he bemoaned Princeton’s long history of “intentionally and systematically exclud[ing] people of color, women, Jews, and other minorities.” Nor, according to him, has that history ended. “Racist assumptions from the past,” President Eisgruber sobbed, “remain embedded in structures of the University itself.”

His confession did not go unnoticed. On September 16, the Department of Education sent President Eisgruber a letter. The letter minutes an interesting discrepancy. Since Christopher Eisgruber became president of Princeton in 2013, the university has received more than $75 million in taxpayer funds. It has also “repeatedly represented and warranted to the U.S. Department of Education . . . Princeton’s compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” What’s Title VI? Among other things, it’s the law that stipulates that no institution receiving federal funds may discriminate against anyone because of “race, color, or national origin.”

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