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Ruth King

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A Momentous Election Donald Trump may be an odd ambassador of freedom. But Joe Biden is but a gibbering front for a vanguard that would destroy America as traditionally conceived. By Roger Kimball

By on October 25th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/10/24/a-momentous-election/

So here we are, 10 days out from the most momentous election of my lifetime. 

Candor requires that I admit that I have often felt that sense of existential emergency around election time. But reflection tells me that the closest thing to the 2020 election was the 2016 election, and that was not because of its wild card—Donald Trump—but because of “sure thing” Hillary Clinton, the single most corrupt serious contender for president in our history. 

That may seem melodramatic, but the truth is often melodramatic. 

I did not, until recently, suspect Joe Biden of serious corruption. The ongoing revelations from Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell” have led me to reconsider that judgment, especially when combined with the ongoing bulletins from Hunter Biden’s former business partner, Tony Bobulinski, who claims that Joe Biden, contrary to his repeated assertions, was involved in discussions about his son’s business dealings. 

So far, I believe, the public is not privy to any smoking-gun evidence about Joe Biden’s involvement, but the gun is warm and the optics are bad. The implicit oath of omertà followed by the media with respect to the saga of Hunter’s laptop has been truly impressive. 

Day after day, the New York Post, which first broke the story a week or so back, has been broadcasting more and more tidbits from this extraordinary trove of perversity and apparent corruption. No matter that the Post is the country’s fifth-largest paper: Twitter, Facebook, the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR, and television news have joined forces to close the public’s eyes, seal its ears, and scream there is nothing to see here, move along, and pay no attention to those muffled cries from the oubliette. It has been an extraordinary act of malignant solidarity, worthy of the Politburo in the heady days of Joe Stalin’s airbrush. 

I think this strategy is in the process of backfiring. Twitter may close down the Post’s account and forbid people to retweet its stories, but that, too, is news and the news, finally, will out. The Streisand Effect will not be denied. 

I have limited curiosity about Hunter Biden’s choice in narcotics or prostitutes. His alleged influence peddling, however, trading introductions to “the Big Guy” for wads of cash, especially if some of that cash wound up in the Biden family fisc—well that is something else entirely. The implications of this story have yet to penetrate the consciousness of the mainstream media, who are playing the three wise monkeys for Halloween, at least so far as Democrats are concerned. But it won’t matter. Curiosity is a stronger passion than politically fired discretion. We’ll find out what’s on that hard drive, and we’ll find out soon. 

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Palestinians: What Needs to Be Done by Khaled Abu Toameh

By on October 25th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16634/palestinians-what-needs-to-be-done

The question is: Will Iran step in to influence the Palestinian Authority? Will Iran manage to convince the Palestinian Authority to become part of an axis that includes Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and all the Iranian‑backed militias in Iraq? Where is Mahmoud Abbas taking the Palestinian Authority? No one knows. Most people I speak to they say he doesn’t really have a strategy to deal with the with the Middle East conflict. His only strategy, they say, is just to remain in power forever.

The Palestinians…. are further isolating themselves by alienating the entire Arab world by going against countries such as Egypt, Jordan and all these Gulf states that once used to give them a lot of money…. Those who were inciting against Israel all those years are now inciting against the Arab world. Those who were demonizing Israel are now trying to demonize their own Arab and Muslim brothers…. The gap between the Palestinians and the Arab world is growing.

One of the reasons why mainstream media does not want to report about many stories over here, is that these stories do not have an anti‑Israel angle.

This whole conflict, whether we like it or not, is not about a settlement, a checkpoint, a wall, and a fence or a settlement. This conflict is really about Israel’s very existence….

They [Palestinian leaders] do not want Arabs and Muslims to be exposed to the wonderful things that are happening in Israel. They do not want them to see that Israel has been a story of success. They do not want these wonderful things to be seen in the Arab and Muslim world because then the Arabs and Muslims might go to their leaders and say, “Excuse me. We want something like what these Jews have. Why can’t we have democracy? Why can’t we have a functioning parliament?”

The question we need to ask ourselves is not who is going to succeed Mahmoud Abbas. The question is will anyone who succeeds Mahmoud Abbas, will he be different? Will he be able to bring about any changes? I’m sorry to tell you that the answer is no…. We are talking about the same ideology, the same mentality, and the same people running the show.

Do not expect many changes in the post‑Abbas era. What needs to change is the mindset. What needs to stop is the incitement, the daily delegitimization of Israel. It is very bad, and it is very widespread. If you do not change that, then you will not see any changes. In addition, the Palestinians need to change their education system. They need to start preparing their people for peace with Israel.

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“Why Are You Killing Christians?” Trump Asks Nigeria’s President by Raymond Ibrahim

By on October 25th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16686/nigeria-killing-christians

In just the first four months of 2020, Fulani herdsmen and other terrorists “hacked to death … no fewer than 620 defenseless Christians,” and engaged in the “wanton burning or destruction of their centers of worship and learning.”

How have formerly simple and unarmed Fulani herdsmen managed to kill, since 2015, nearly twice as many Christians as the “professional” terrorists of Boko Haram….?

“Since the government and its apologists are claiming the killings have no religious undertones, why are the terrorists and herdsmen targeting the predominantly Christian communities and Christian leaders?” — The Christian Association of Nigeria, International Centre for Investigative Reporting, January 21, 2020.

“Why are you killing Christians?” US President Donald J. Trump apparently shocked his Nigerian counterpart, Muhammadu Buhari, by asking this question the first time they met in the White House in April 2018. The Nigerian president admitted this, according to a September 8, 2020 report, toward the end of a recent talk with his cabinet members:

“[W]hen I was in his office, only myself and himself, with Allah as my witness, he looked at me in the face and said ‘why are you killing Christians?’ I wonder, if you were the person how you would react? I hope what I was feeling inside did not betray my emotion…”

He should not have been shocked. Several international observers characterize what Nigerian Christians experience not just as “persecution” but as a “pure genocide.”

Since 2009, “not less than 32,000 Christians have been butchered to death by the country’s main Jihadists,” according to a May 2020 report. Hundreds more have been killed since then. Earlier this year, Christian Solidarity International issued a “Genocide Warning for Christians in Nigeria” in response to the “rising tide of violence directed against Nigerian Christians and others classified as ‘infidels’ by Islamist militants….”

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American Election: Endgame for Party System? by Amir Taheri

By on October 25th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16682/american-election-party-system

The American two-party system resembles cartel arrangements in business: it restricts access to power to two gigantic machines that, like big business driving out little business, prevent diversity and competition on a large scale. As a result, small radial groups are forced to infiltrate the two parties and push them in directions not necessarily wanted by the mass of their followers.

The two-party system offers unusual political stability.

The reverse side, however, is that it narrows policy options to two and the role of elections to deciding the exercise of power rather than its substance.

Does the current presidential campaign in the United States have an ideological content?

Having covered six of the last nine campaigns as a reporter and followed the other three from the sidelines my answer is “yes and no”.

Let’s start with the no side of my equivocal answer first.

The current campaign is focused on two themes that leave little room for the broader questions the US faces with dramatic demographic, cultural and societal changes at home and the crumbling structure of world order.

The first theme of the campaign has been the personality of Donald J Trump. No leader in American history has been the subject of such vilification as Trump.

Jimmy Carter was mocked as “the peanut farmer” and Ronald Reagan dismissed as “Hollywood cowboy”. Bill Clinton was laughed at as “the skirt-chasing bozo” while George W Bush generated an industry with his Bushisms. Barack Obama was dubbed “the ventriloquist’s dummy” who, as Hillary Clinton quipped, “makes a speech each time there is a crisis”. Before that, Richard Nixon had been branded “Tricky Dick” and Lyndon Johnson castigated as serial liar.

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The Lies We’re Told about the American Story By Michael D. Capaldi

By on October 25th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/the-lies-were-told-about-the-american-story/#slide-1

“We are Americans. And we set people free.”

We’re not a racist nation. We’re a nation that wars against racism.

Editor’s Note: The following essay was adapted from remarks delivered to the annual dinner of the Lincoln Club of Orange County, in California, on October 4.

Every American heart must break when lies are told to boys and girls, who then grow up to think the worst about their past: that the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery; that the Civil War was about money, not slaves; or that America is a racist nation.

Of course, Americans didn’t create slavery. America was born to a world in which that savagery was as old and deeply rooted as anything in human history. The Greeks and Romans kept slaves. The Israelites were slaves to the Egyptians, and 500 years after they were freed, King Solomon built the temple to his God with slaves. The Spanish brought slaves to North America 200 years before the American founding, and, in 1776, Europe’s leading states — Spain, France, Portugal, Britain, and the Netherlands — each traded in slaves.

From the beginning, Americans were split wide open about slavery. In her book Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin tells a story from 1835 about William Seward and his wife, Frances, two New Yorkers, who took a trip through the South. Riding in their carriage around sunset, the couple saw a dust cloud rising down the road. Emerging slowly from the dust, Seward wrote, were:

ten naked little boys, between six and twelve years old, tied together, two by two, by their wrists, . . . all fastened to a long rope, and followed by a tall, gaunt white man, who, with his long lash, whipped up the sad and weary little procession, drove it to the horse trough to drink, and thence to a shed where they lay down on the ground and sobbed and moaned themselves to sleep. These were children gathered up at different plantations . . . and were to be driven down to Richmond to be sold at auction, and taken south.

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Conservatives Need to Defend High Culture By Paul Krause

By on October 25th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/10/conservatives_need_to_defend_high_culture.html

It is no secret that art, sacred art, and beauty more generally, are under assault. New “multicultural” guidelines are dictating how art is to be constructed and rewarded. Artistic talent is shunned in favor of diversity quotas. The way to be an artist and art critic, nowadays, is to cry racism or sexism.

Theogonis of Megara divided mankind into two classes of people, the base and the noble. As he said, living through a revolutionary period in ancient Greek society during the rise of democracy, “The deckhands are in control, and the base have the upper hand over the noble.” The outlook of Theogonis is inherently conflictual and violent, not to mention truly classist.

While it is true that much of Theogonis’ poetry reflects his own concerns about Greek societal transformation, his general attitude is often attacked by critics of high culture for its supposed “whiteness,” inegalitarianism, and gendered supremacism. Such assaults on high culture fail to appreciate the real defense of high culture—the belief that all should strive for excellence, nobility, and beauty (even if not all will come to imitate and inculcate that excellence, nobility, and beauty in their own lives).

This emphasis on excellence, indeed, perfection, is what Matthew Arnold understood as the defining characteristic of high culture in “Culture and Anarchy.” Arnold even stated that the emphasis and promotion of high culture was something universal: high culture “seeks to do away with classes; to make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere; to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light.” The point of high culture is to lift everyone to the good things the heavens hold.

The constant attack on high culture, however, is part of the broader rejection of tradition, hierarchy, and heritage that necessarily accompanies high culture. High culture is the product of tradition as much as it is individual genius, one cannot marvel at Michelangelo’s “David” and be so blind to its blending of classical humanist and biblical traditions some two millennia after the fact. The genius of Michelangelo, likewise, would be impossible if not for the Catholic and Platonic traditions which informed his spirit. But one need not be Catholic or Platonic to look in awe and wonder at Michelangelo’s handiwork.

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P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

Leftists are now rampaging against Beethoven’s and Mozart’s last names By Andrea Widburg

By on October 25th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/10/leftists_are_now_rampaging_against_beethovens_and_mozarts_last_names.html

The latest racist screed from the angry left is that it’s a major insult to refer to classical composers by their last names (e.g., Beethoven, not Ludwig von Beethoven). To wokesters desperate for new psychic injuries, the failure to “fullname” classical composers is yet another despicable sign of white privilege.

Here’s the thesis in a nutshell: We refer to well-known composers, all of whom happen to be dead white men, by using only their last names. However, when we speak of works by modern composers who are new on the scene, many of whom are women or minorities, we use their full names (aka “fullnaming”). According to the new political correctness, fullnaming new composers, but not the old, is a sign of inequality.

I felt like an idiot just writing the above words, but that’s the theory that Chris White puts forth in a Slate article entitled “Beethoven Has a First Name: It’s time to ‘fullname’ all composers in classical music”:

[Conductors introducing a program] might talk about Beethoven, Schumann, and Bartók. And they might talk about Alma Mahler, Florence Price, Henry Burleigh, and Caroline Shaw. Many of us, used to the conventions of classical performance, will hardly notice the difference: “traditional” white male composers being introduced with only surnames, full names for everyone else, especially women and composers of color.

The habitual, two-tiered way we talk about classical composers is ubiquitous. For instance, coverage of an early October livestream by the Louisville Orchestra praised the ensemble’s performance of a “Beethoven” symphony, and the debut of a composition memorializing Breonna Taylor by “Davóne Tines” and “Igee Dieudonné.” But ubiquity doesn’t make something right. It’s time we paid attention to the inequity inherent in how we talk about composers, and it’s time for the divided naming convention to change.

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Equality and Envy By Itxu Díaz

By on October 25th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/equality-and-envy/

One of the most striking aspects of equality policies is that they are not born out of demand from citizens, but out of commitment by the elites.

We are not the same. Neither men, nor women, nor races, nor ages, nor nationalities, nor in wealth, nor in training, nor in beauty. We are not equal in any way. And that is a reason to be proud and happy, because at the end of the day we are human and not the product of some factory. Let us once and for all praise difference, bless the inequality that makes some people prefer beer and others water (because otherwise there would be a shortage of beer, and that would cruelly condemn us bohemians to discovering what water tastes like). Allow me to be even clearer: Since the French Revolution, everything that we have called “policies of equality” is nothing but the bureaucratization of envy.

“Why do we need more Women In Politics?” a U.N. Women tweet asked recently. “There are only 14 countries with 50% or more women in cabinet.” If we weren’t living under the strain of egalitarianism, of political correctness, and under the suffocating pressure of a totalitarian roller, anyone reading the tweet would be tempted to take a breath and simply say, “So what? Yes: so what?” I realize that these two words can trigger a world war in the climate of 2020, where dissent pits itself against global progressive abduction.

One of the most striking aspects of equality policies is that they are not born out of demand from citizens, but out of commitment by the elites. In the street there is no demand for women rulers, but for good rulers. We have thousands of examples of bad rulers of both genders. Cristina Kirchner and Pedro Sánchez are of different sexes, and yet they are equally stupid and sectarian. It is hard to understand why the United Nations, all the European governments, the media, and millions of educational institutions and multinational brands promoting the feminist fever of equality are making girls believe from school onwards that they live subjected to men, who are portrayed as potential rapists. Possibly, the reason for this generalized madness (in Europe, it is supported with as much enthusiasm from the center-right as from the left) is what Helmut Schoeck detected in his analysis of society and envy: It is resentment. There is nothing older.

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Biden’s Foreign-Policy Folly By Michael Brendan Dougherty

By on October 25th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/11/02/bidens-foreign-policy-folly/

He has been wrong about everything 

Early on in his first term as vice president, Joe Biden asked for a private meeting with Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Gates had been appointed to the job by President George W. Bush in the shake-up after the 2006 midterm election, and President Obama kept him on for continuity. Biden had abstained from voting for Gates’s confirmation under Bush, making him one of only five senators who hadn’t voted to confirm him.

Besides shoring up Obama’s reputation as a man who could work with longtime moderates in the Democratic Party, Biden’s addition to the ticket was meant to give Obama some extra credibility on foreign policy; Biden had been the ranking member of the Foreign Affairs Committee since 1997. But the White House is different. Gates was serving his eighth president. So Biden solicited his advice on how to play a constructive role as part of the administration’s foreign-policy team.

Gates told Biden that there were two models for a vice president. Under Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush had his team attend all relevant national-security meetings and brief him afterward. Bush gave his opinions and advice only to Reagan himself, usually privately. By contrast, Dick Cheney attended most meetings and was a forceful advocate for his own views. Gates said that the Bush approach was more fitting to the dignity of the office and would also protect Biden. Cheney’s approach came with a price; it eventually became obvious to outsiders when Cheney was losing the argument in the administration, and it diminished him. Writing in his memoir of this time, Gates recalls that Biden “listened closely, thanked me, and then did precisely the opposite of what I recommended, following the Cheney model to a T.”

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Election-Meddling Redux By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on October 25th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/election-meddling-redux/

Our adversaries have figured out that the best way to promote American discord is to give the left-wing media what it craves and watch our divisive politics do the rest.

I t is not an attack on the American election. It is an influence operation aimed at the American media, using the $60 billion per annum American intelligence apparatus to pull it off.

And it’s working.

On Wednesday night, it was suddenly announced that U.S. security services would conduct a press conference to announce vital information. With millions of Americans already voting, with our official Election Day less than two weeks away, and with minds ever attuned to the specter of 2016 election shenanigans that the media-Democrat complex has never stopped litigating, there was an instant supposition that some new “attack on our democracy” was afoot.

Sure enough, out trotted the directors of national intelligence and the FBI, mien studiously grave, to proclaim . . . well . . . I’m not sure if we want to call it abject nonsense or agitation of exactly the kind hostile foreign intelligence services would take joy in hearing from U.S. spy chiefs — in which case, it really is 2016 all over again.

The director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe, somberly explained that those Iranian rascals, posing as (to quote the Wall Street Journal’s report) “the far-right group the Proud Boys,” have been poking at registered Democrats in election battleground states: “Intimidating” them with emails that contain — hope you’re sitting down for this — “false information”; warning them that the Proud Boys have captured “the entire voting infrastructure,” and that Democrats must “vote for Trump on Election Day or we will come after you.” And — try to contain your astonishment — the black hand of Moscow, and who knows what other sinister alien forces, are similarly up to no good.

“These are desperate acts by desperate adversaries,” Ratcliffe declaimed. FBI director Christopher Wray was even more stern: “We are not going to tolerate foreign interference in our elections, or any criminal activity that threatens the sanctity of your vote or undermines public confidence in the outcome of the election.”

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