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Ruth King

Are We on the Brink of a New Dark Ages? By Lev Stesin *****

https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/new-dark-age/

The foreign policy of a progressive US administration could entail a fanatical pursuit of race-based “intersectionality” policies, similar to the proletarian internationalism of yesteryear. If US foreign policy were in fact composed of such policies, many countries would consider China the lesser of two evils. A world dominated by a progressive US on the one hand and communist China on the other could devolve into a new Dark Ages.

America is in turmoil. Some believe it is in decline. Few argue whether the decline is temporary or permanent. Almost everyone agrees that Pax Americana, the post-WWII order, and the unipolar world created by the collapse of the Soviet Union are gone forever.

Naturally, everyone wants to know the contours of the world order ahead of us. Students of history look for answers in the not so distant past. The Cold War, which went on for over four decades, contained many periods that can be called upon to justify almost any historical parallel, but the US-USSR confrontation was not unique. History offers many other relatively recent examples of global conflict, though they were not generally cast as polar battles between good and evil in the manner of the Cold War.

The world order prior to WWI was not black and white. It was gray. Several empires, real and artificial, were jockeying for world supremacy: Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Russia, Austro-Hungary, and a few smaller ones. None was particularly peace-loving. However, all were at some stage of development as a liberal democracy. Some, like Britain, were well advanced, while others, like Russia, were far behind. None was purely evil and genocidal. This state of affairs more or less defined European history from the Middle Ages through the Treaty of Westphalia.

Shy Trump Voters Are Real, And They Could Decide The Election

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/09/08/shy-trump-voters-are-real-and-they-could-decide-the-election/

A recent IBD/TIPP poll found something that appears to confirm the idea that there are lots of Trump supporters out there who won’t admit it to pollsters.

“Overall, 20% of registered voters say they’re uncomfortable revealing their preferred candidate, but that rises to 28% among independents,” it found.

That’s a shockingly high number and one that should worry anybody who expects Trump to get trounced in November.

Think about it: Which candidate are people likely to be uncomfortable revealing their preference for? The candidate who is being heralded as Mr. Empathy and the savior of the nation? Or the candidate who is universally described – in the press anyway – as a racist, xenophobic, dictatorial, dangerous lunatic?

Biden’s supporters have no reason to fear revealing their preference because they don’t have to fear being shamed or hounded or booed or yelled at.

It also found that among registered independents, “24% say they agree with Trump on some issues but are reluctant to admit that in public.”

So, it stands to reason that a large portion of that 28% of independents are secret Trump supporters.

Atlantic Editor Admits Key Detail of Anti-Trump Hit Piece May Be Untrue By Matt Margolis

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2020/09/07/atlantic-editor-admits-key-detail-of-anti-trump-hit-piece-may-be-untrue-n903238

Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, admitted that a key detail of his article about Trump could be wrong during an interview with CNN on Sunday.

“When President Donald Trump canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018, he blamed the rain for the last-minute decision, saying ‘the helicopter couldn’t fly’ and that the Secret Service wouldn’t drive him there. Neither claim was true,” Goldberg wrote in his piece published last week. According to Goldberg, President Trump was overheard saying he wanted to cancel the trip to the cemetery because “it’s filled with losers.”

At least fifteen Trump administration officials who were with Trump on that trip have now disputed the Atlantic report, including former national security adviser John Bolton.

FOIA documents have also definitively proved that Trump’s visit to the cemetery was canceled due to weather. When Goldberg was asked about evidence that the cancelation was due to inclement weather, he admitted that it was likely true.

“I’m sure all of those things are true,” he told CNN.This admission by Goldberg completely undermines his entire story. Goldberg claimed the trip wasn’t canceled because of weather. Evidence proves this claim is false. Goldberg now admits that weather causing the cancellation is true. Why should we believe anything else in the story when the foundation of it is admitted to be incorrect?

I Hope American Soldiers Read Stars and Stripes Forever The independent-minded military newspaper has patriotically told GIs’ stories for 150 years. Seth Lipsky

11599517781?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

It’s nice to see that tweet from President Trump that “America will NOT be cutting funding” for the GI daily Stars and Stripes. He was responding to reports that Pentagon budgeteers were going to shut the paper down by the end of September for the lack of $15 million. Even Congress protested.

I’m not here to plump for subsidies for Stripes, even though it ranks among the greatest newspapers of all time. If the government doesn’t want to support the paper, my instinct would be to see if a private owner can make a go of it. Rather, my purpose is simply to savor Stars and Stripes.

During World War II, some wag supposedly quipped that Stripes was where the brass assigned those GIs who, if left to the regular Army, would contribute to the Allied defeat. It was a wry libel. Stripes was always plenty patriotic, but also independent, in the newspapermanly way.

The tradition that the paper would be reported and edited by enlisted men goes back, legend has it, to World War I. That’s when the sergeant who was its managing editor got arrested in an argument over a comma—or, one version has it, for getting scooped by the Paris Herald. The officer who precipitated that catastrophe quickly realized his error, and freed the sergeant to get the paper out.

Confiscating Books in Sweden by Judith Bergman

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16308/sweden-confiscating-books

The confiscation of books and the upcoming case against author and comedian Aron Flam has ignited a debate in Sweden about the value of freedom of speech. As Flam has pointed out, a Swedish writer who happens to be Jewish having his books, critical of Swedish-Nazi collaboration during the war, seized by the Swedish state is a bit ironic.

Uppsala, once a picturesque and peaceful university town, is now the town in Sweden with the most shootings per capita. “The gangs have been allowed to grow” Manne Gerell, a criminologist at Malmö University told SVT Nyheter in December 2019, adding that the police had “woken up” a little too late.

Perhaps it is time for Sweden’s government to spend fewer resources on prosecuting the speech crimes of pensioners and comedians, and more on fighting violent crime.

In June, four armed Swedish police officers seized and confiscated the entire stock of the book Det här är en svensk tiger (“This is a Swedish Tiger”), written by Swedish author and standup comedian, Aron Flam. The book tells the story of how Sweden’s claim of neutrality during World War II covered up a reality of Swedish collaboration with the Nazi war effort and the profits that the Social Democratic government made from the war.

The title of the book is a play on the words of a 1941 wartime poster of a tiger drawn in the blue and yellow colors of the Swedish flag with the title “En svensk tiger” (“A Swedish Tiger”) and made by Swedish illustrator Bertil Almqvist. The word “tiger” in Swedish means tiger, but it also means to keep silent. The original poster was part of a Swedish government campaign to warn Swedes to keep silent, presumably not to rattle Sweden’s wartime relationship with Nazi Germany.

The UN and EU’s Silence on Iran’s “Shocking Human Rights Violations” by Majid Rafizadeh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16469/iran-human-rights-violations

Last week, the Iranian regime’s Supreme Court issued two death sentences to wrestling champion Navid Afkari, along with six-and-a-half years in prison and 74 lashes, according to Persian-language news broadcaster Iran International. His two brothers were also arrested; Vahid Afkari was given a prison sentence of 54 years and 74 lashes, and Habib Afkari received 27 years and 74 lashes.
“For around 50 days I had to endure the most horrendous physical and psychological tortures… They would place a plastic bag on my head and torture me until I suffocated to the very brink of death. They also poured alcohol into my nose.” — Navid Afkari, Iranian wrestling champion, in a letter.
You would think that the EU or the UN would at least condemn the ruling mullahs of Iran for this brutality. Instead, they reward the regime. On August 14, the UN Security Council voted to allow the 13-year arms embargo on the Iranian regime to expire in October 2020. The ruling means that the ruling mullahs of Iran will be permitted to buy, sell and export as many conventional weapons they wish.
The ruling mullahs now have enough enriched uranium to refine and build a nuclear bomb if they wish to do so. Approximately 1000 kg of uranium enriched at just 5% can be further refined to create one nuclear bomb.
The UN and the EU need to hold the Iranian leaders accountable, or be discarded for irrelevance, where they appear to belong.

The Iranian regime has significantly ratcheted up its human rights violations. The United Nations and the European Union, which preach about human rights, completely turn a blind eye to the regime’s abuses.

A pitifully ‘overworked’ FBI lovebird By Monica Showalter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/09/a_pitifully_overworked_fbi_lovebird.html

Now here’s a fresh whopper from the bowels of the Deep State.  According to the Daily Caller:

Former FBI official Peter Strzok defended the bureau’s surveillance of former Trump aide Carter Page in an interview aired Sunday, attributing failures found in a government watchdog report to agents being “overworked.”

“I don’t think at all that it’s anything improper. You get people who are overworked, who make mistakes — and don’t get me wrong, inexcusable mistakes,” Strzok said in an interview with “CBS Sunday Morning.”

Strzok, the former FBI deputy chief of counterintelligence, was asked about a Justice Department inspector general’s report that blasted the FBI for a series of errors and omissions in applications for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants against Carter Page.

The IG found 17 “significant” errors in the FISA applications, including omissions of exculpatory evidence and failure to investigating information in the infamous Steele dossier.

This is downright comical.

Befuddled Jews Endorse Black Lives Matter by Rael Jean Isaac

https://spectator.org/jewish-organizations-endorse-black-lives-matter/

In this view, opposition to BLM is a product of Antisemitism.
On August 28, strange bedfellows, comprised of over 600 Jewish mainstream organizations and synagogues along with anti-Zionist Jewish groups and grouplets, published a full-page ad in the New York Times under the title “We Speak with One Voice When We Say, Unequivocally: Black Lives Matter.” The incoherent and inaccurate document — virtually everything it said about BLM was wrong — speaks volumes about the sad state of the American Jewish community, whose motto is apparently filmmaker Federico Fellini’s adage: “Don’t tell me what I’m doing; I don’t want to know.”

To dispose first of the ad’s identification of BLM as “the current day Civil Rights movement in this country … our best chance at equity and justice.” The goal of the original civil rights movement could be summed up in Martin Luther King Jr.’s words: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” On the contrary, Black Lives Matter wants whites to be judged solely by the color of their skin — which supposedly ineradicably brands them as privileged racists. Only black lives matter (note the fury unleashed on anyone who dares to declare that all lives matter) and then only the tiny sliver of black lives taken by whites, above all white policemen. In the large number of ordinary black lives taken by black criminals BLM displays a blank disinterest.

Swept up in the fashionable moral panic following George Floyd’s death, in a mad rush to show their superior virtue, Jews stampeded onto the Black Lives Matter bandwagon, heedless of where they were headed.

The Times ad also compares the “conspiracy theories” used by “white supremacists” in the past, including billboards “smearing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as a communist” to politicians currently “deliberately manufacturing fear” of BLM. But BLM makes no secret of its anti-capitalist fervor. It was founded in 2013 by three black women: Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi. In 2015, Cullors stated on video, “We actually do have an ideological frame. Myself and Alicia [Garza] in particular, we’re trained organizers. We are trained Marxists.” Garza openly reveres Joanne Chesimard (who now calls herself Assata Shakur), the Marxist revolutionary, former Black Panther and convicted killer of a New Jersey state trooper. For the past 41 years Shakur has been a fugitive sheltered by Communist Cuba. As for the third of the trio, Opal Tometi, she also referred to Shakur as “dear exiled sister” at a “summit” organized by Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, with whom she is photographed.

Lincoln and the Gates of Hell Eileen F. Toplansky

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Will the fabric of freedom prevail against the gates of hell as the lawless mob gains ascendancy in the country?

It was a question that Abraham Lincoln posed in January 1838 in his address titled “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions” and it is poignantly relevant now as it was then.

His concern was how to fortify Americans against the danger that might beset the country — not from “abroad” but rather from within.  Thus, “if destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.  As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

More prescient words could not have been written as our country is currently torn into ugly camps.  There is “something of ill-omen amongst us” and it is “the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country.”  In today’s America, judges are deliberately thwarting the law–consider the travesty wrought upon General Flynn.  Even though a federal appeals court ordered the criminal case against Michael Flynn to be dropped, U.S. district judge Emmet Sullivan has yet to dismiss the case. Mark Levin in his Men in Black has long warned us about the dangers of activist judges whose judicial tyranny thwarts the Constitution in favor of liberal policies.

As if he were watching the news of today, Lincoln spoke of  “accounts of outrages committed by mobs, [that] form the every-day news of the times. They [had] pervaded the country, from New England to Louisiana [.]”  We need look no further than Portland, or Kenosha, or Washington, DC; Chicago and New York City as accounts of destruction, looting, murder, disregard for police, property, and peaceful gatherings occur yet Democrat leaders and followers cheer on the malevolence.

Malawi to open embassy in Jerusalem, making it first African country in Israel’s capital By Josh Plank

https://worldisraelnews.com/malawi-to-open-embassy-in-jerusalem-making-it-first-african-country-in-israels-capital/

“Looking forward to continue advancing with your government this important goal and our relations,” said Oded Joseph, Israel’s ambassador to Malawi.

Lazarus Chakwera, president of the southeastern African country of Malawi, announced his plan to open an embassy in Jerusalem during a State of the Nation address to the Malawian parliament on September 4.

“My administration recognizes that foreign relations have a significant role to play in promoting the socioeconomic development and growth of Malawi,” Chakwera said.

Lazarus Chakwera, president of the southeastern African country of Malawi, announced his plan to open an embassy in Jerusalem during a State of the Nation address to the Malawian parliament on September 4.

“My administration recognizes that foreign relations have a significant role to play in promoting the socioeconomic development and growth of Malawi,” Chakwera said.

“Our focus on the world stage will be reforming the foreign affairs ministry headquarters and its missions abroad so that our embassies are able to deliver on the ambitious objectives of promoting Malawi’s national interests globally,” he said.