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Ruth King

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Viktor Orbán Isn’t the Illiberal Revolutionary You Think He Is But even those who sympathize with him should keep their eyes open.

By on August 24th, 2018

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/viktor-orban-isnt-the-illiberal-revolutionary-you-think-he-is/

A first-time visitor to Hungary could be excused for thinking he’d arrived at an intensely religious country. In Budapest, the spires of several churches are visible from either bank of the Danube, and the Hungarian double cross is proudly emblazoned across the nation’s ubiquitous coat of arms.

Hungarians are rightly proud of their religious heritage. But such sentiment should not be confused with genuine spiritual conviction. Few people regularly attend religious services, the country’s historic Roman Catholic and Calvinist Churches are shedding adherents, and Hungary’s public square is notably secular. Religious holidays have been absorbed into a broader celebration of Hungarian culture that retains the trappings of Christianity without much in the way of substance. Christmas markets, not Midnight Mass, are the order of the day.

Against this increasingly secularized backdrop, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has famously endorsed “illiberal democracy,” a vaguely defined political project that is partly aimed at shoring up Hungary’s Christian identity. Orbán’s ambitious political agenda has at least one thing in common with Hungary’s historic churches: both are impressive edifices that conceal a hollow core.

Orbán’s recent speech in Romania, supposedly the most concrete explanation yet of what “illiberal democracy” might look like, was just a banal restatement of principles that no center-right party in the United States or Western Europe could possibly object to. Orbán will almost certainly continue to be a hero to right-wing populists and immigration skeptics, but his latest address should put to rest the idea that he is fashioning a comprehensive ideological alternative to political liberalism.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Crime and Punishment By Roger Kimball

By on August 24th, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/08/23/crime-a

One of the reasons so many people are confused by the operations of our self-appointed fourth branch of government—I mean in this instance the unending, Kafkaesque investigations conducted by Robert Mueller and his crack team of anti-Trump shock troops—is that while we have seen plenty of punishment meted out, crimes have been rather less populous on the ground.

Yes, I understand that Paul Manafort has been nabbed for tax evasion and bank fraud, and that he now faces additional charges in yet another court. One of the nice things about our modern prosecutors is their handy multiplication machine that takes what is essentially one crime and gins it up into dozens or even hundreds of counts. Presto! You’re facing 18 counts, peasant—try beating that!

The point is, when you have carte-blanche to torment someone, why stop when you’ve got him locked up for life? Like a cat toying with an injured mouse, the modern major prosecutor keeps batting his prey about till he stops moving altogether. What might have been justice for a serial killer is gleefully applied to someone who fudged his tax returns or tripped over himself answering an FBI agent. Then we have sadism, not justice.

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BOOKS Comments turned off

Zero Hour for Gen X How “the last adult generation” can save us. Mark Tapson

By on August 24th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271118/zero-hour-gen-x-mark-tapson

“America stands anxiously on the cusp of an unknown future,” writes Matthew Hennessey in a new book titled Zero Hour for Gen X: How the Last Adult Generation Can Save America From Millennials. “We are about to get swamped by a millennial wave that has already started crashing hard into the worlds of business, politics, entertainment, religion, dating, medicine, and education.” Considering that millennials are the generation that seems eager to embrace socialism, limits on freedom of speech, and Amazon’s “Big Brother” Alexa in every home, this generational passing of the torch will have dramatic and adverse implications for the future of America as we know it. Matthew Hennessey’s thesis is that Generation X – which emerged between the baby boomers and millennials – must get its act together swiftly if there is to be any hope of a collective national redemption from baby boomer destruction and to avert the Brave New World into which millennials will usher us.

The author defines the parameters of the three relevant generations for the purposes of his book: “Baby boomers are those born roughly between 1946 and 1964. Generation Xers are those born roughly between 1965 and 1980. The millennials are those born roughly between 1981 and 1997… [They] are already the largest American generation, and they’re still growing due to immigration.” They are tech-obsessed, coddled by political correctness, and indifferent to the advance of corporate and government intrusion into every aspect of our increasingly digital lives.

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HOMELAND SECURITY, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

In New Mexico, Terrorists Sign Themselves Out of Pretrial Detention The creepy no-cash-bail movement frees a Muslim terrorist cell. Matthew Vadum

By on August 24th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271135/new-mexico-terrorists-sign-themselves-out-pretrial-matthew-vadum

A potentially catastrophic soft-on-crime reform enacted in New Mexico and now threatening to spread to other states has outraged national security advocates by allowing the alleged leaders of a Muslim terrorist training compound to be granted bail by a Democrat judge.

Excessive bail requirements have long been forbidden by the Eighth Amendment (1791) to the U.S. Constitution. But the no-cash-bail movement that made the recent release of these Islamic militants possible is a subset of the treacherous anti-incarceration movement that’s been sweeping the nation. Changes to New Mexico’s bail laws were approved by voters in 2016. Similar changes are being considering in New Jersey and California. San Francisco already lets accused rapists and kidnappers out on bail.

In a nutshell, leftists like Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), joined by more than a few conservatives and Republicans such as Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, is arguing that the very idea of bail itself is unfair because poor defendants are going to have more trouble raising cash to get released from jail pending trial than wealthier defendants. Whether or not they are actually guilty of the crimes they are charged with, keeping poor people in pretrial detention is somehow unjust, left-wingers claim. Among the notable leftist groups backing this attack on the institution of bail are the ACLU, the ACORN successor group known as Texas Organizing Project, Color of Change, and Black Lives Matter.

Here is a quick recap of what just happened in New Mexico.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

UCLA Is A Disgrace University to host student conference that advocates ‘destruction’ of Jewish self-determination. Shiri Moshe …SEE NOTE

By on August 24th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271127/ucla-disgrace-shiri-moshehttps://www.algemeiner.com/2018/08/22/ucla

It appears that UCLA is unsure about hosting this conference in November, BUT EVEN THE WILLINGNESS TO HOST IT SHOWS THE UNDERLYING BIAS IN THE ACADEMIES….RSK

National Students for Justice in Palestine announced on Sunday that it will host its eighth annual conference at the University of California, Los Angeles, drawing concerns from some members of the school’s pro-Israel community.

The event, based on the theme of “resistance in the face of adversity,” will take place from November 16-18.

In a note explaining the conference’s goals, National SJP and its chapter at UCLA defined Zionism — a diverse national liberation movement that supports the Jewish people’s right to self-determination in their historic homeland — as “ethnic cleansing, destruction, mass expulsion, apartheid, and death.”

Prominent Jewish groups like the World Jewish Congress and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations — whose umbrella includes the nation’s principal bodies of Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox Judaism — have in the past described Zionism as “a longstanding and sincerely held religious belief central to the Jewish religion.”

The conference will seek to remind students “that Zionism is not an insurmountable force,” the organizers explained. “The reason we can have hope is that Zionism is a human ideology and a set of laws that have been challenged and can be destroyed.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

“We’ll Find Out About Brennan” What did the ex-CIA boss know about Obama’s 1981 Pakistan trip – and the attempt to cover it up in 2008? Lloyd Billingsley

By on August 24th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271121/well-find-out-about-brennan-lloyd-billingsley

John Brennan became head of the Central Intelligence agency in 2013 and after leaving in 2017 he retained his security clearance, which President Trump recently revoked. Brennan is threatening a lawsuit, a prospect that delights the president’s lead lawyer.

“I’d volunteer to do that case for the president,” Rudy Giuliani told Fox News. “I’d love to have Brennan under oath for I don’t know how many days, two or three days? We’ll find out about Brennan.” As the former New York mayor is doubtless aware, there is plenty to find out. Consider, for example, Brennan’s role in the famous passport case.

Back in 2008, State Department contractors “unnecessarily reviewed” the passport file of Illinois Senator Barack Obama. The breach came without the knowledge of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who called the senator to apologize. “I myself would be very disturbed if I learned somebody had looked into my passport file,” Rice told reporters.

According to the State Department, two of the contract employees were fired for the security breach and a third was disciplined but remained on the job. The department did not reveal the identities of the employees nor what they might have been looking for in the presidential candidate’s passport file. On the other hand, some information did emerge.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

A is for Activist? By David Solway

By on August 24th, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/08/a_is_for_activist.html

It is dispiriting to note that those to whom we have entrusted the education of our children in the primary and public schools are woefully under-educated practitioners of the discipline. In an article titled “Educational Rot,” Walter Williams laments “the low academic quality of so many teachers.” Williams is referring to the abomination of teacher training colleges, which recruit the dregs of the graduate schools, catering to candidates “who have the lowest academic test scores.” The same applies to graduates of the gender studies programs in the universities, who, unfit for productive employment, often end up in the K-12 classroom. The damage such instructors do to the public school system and to our children is incalculable.

Trained to follow a leftist curricular agenda, a majority of K-12 teachers are set on molding the social justice warriors, anti-free market revolutionaries, radical environmentalists, global warmists, and feminist Furies of the future. The exclusion of the traditional focus on writing skills, effective reading, civics, maths and sciences, and the counter-emphasis on “social justice” themes in the public schools constitutes the first stage of the systematic dumbing down – what historian Niall Ferguson calls The Great Degeneration – that afflicts our society.

Thus, far too many students who emerge from these incubators, whether they are conscious of it or not, suffer not only from mental sluggishness, but from a kind of psychic immiseration. They compensate by trying to persuade themselves that they are useful and enlightened citizens when, for the most part, they are merely antisocial drones. The gene pool is not being chlorinated, as Wendy Northcutt suggests in her 2009 Darwin Awards romp; on the contrary, it is being increasingly contaminated.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

War of Attrition Against President Trump By David P. Goldman

By on August 24th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/war-of-attrition-against-president-trump/

Precisely how does Bill Clinton’s main legal fixer turn up as Michael Cohen’s attorney in a plea bargain with a special prosecutor?

If you put that kind of plot line in a political thriller, the public would laugh you off the newsstand book racks. Nonetheless, we now have Lanny Davis, special counsel to the president for Bill Clinton during 1996-1998, declaring to CNN: “It’s my observation that Mr. Cohen has knowledge that would be of interest to the special counsel about the issue of whether Donald Trump, ahead of time, knew about the hacking of emails, which is a computer crime.” On Tuesday Davis told MSNBC that Cohen knew about “the possibility of a conspiracy to collude and corrupt the American democracy system in the 2016 election.”

There you have it, boys and girls: None of this has anything to do with paying off floozies who claimed to have done the dirty with a presidential candidate. No one cares about that. It’s about using the legal system to extract “confessions” from Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen that will keep the Black Legend alive of a Russian hack of the 2016 elections. Cohen has no more knowledge of this, I am ready to wager, than he does of space aliens colonizing Chicago. Nonetheless, the swamp and their pet jackals in the media will spin new allegations until the public gets dizzy.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

The Forbidden ‘I Word’ Democrats want to hide their only agenda for 2019: impeachment.

By on August 24th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-forbidden-i-word-1535064815

Shhhhhhhhh. Whatever else you do, please don’t mention the “I word” between now and November. That’s the public message from Democratic leaders and most of their media friends this week after Michael Cohen’s guilty plea and his criminal allegations against President Trump. Between now and Election Day, “impeachment” is the forbidden word.

“If and when the information emerges about that, we’ll see,” says once and perhaps future House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. “It’s not a priority on the agenda going forward unless something else comes forward.”

Mr. Cohen’s charges are serious, says Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin, but impeachment talk is “premature” because “more information has to come forward” and it’s “too early in the process to be using these words.”

Now you can say “Alexa, play Potomac Watch” to enjoy our podcast. #AskAlexa

Under the coy headline “Can Trump Survive?”—you already know his answer—Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne counsels Democrats that “the argument for impeaching Trump suddenly became very strong, but this does not mean that turning 2018 into an impeachment election is prudent.”

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

The Diversity of Illegal Immigration Victor Davis Hanson

By on August 24th, 2018

https://www.hoover.org/research/diversity-illegal-immigration

I live on farm beside a rural avenue in central California, the fifth generation to reside in the same house. And after years of thefts, home break-ins, and dangerous encounters, I have concluded that it is no longer safe to live where I was born. I stay for a while longer because I am sixty-five years old and either too old to move or too worried about selling the final family parcel of what was homesteaded in the 1870s.

Rural Fresno County used to be one of the most ethnically diverse areas in the United States. I grew up with first-, second-, and third-generation farmers—agrarians of Armenian, German, Greek, Mexican, Japanese, Portuguese, Punjabi, and Scandinavian descent.

Race and ethnicity were richly diverse; yet assimilation was the collective shared goal—made easier because immigration was almost entirely a legal and measured enterprise. No one much carried for the superficial appearance of his neighbors. My own Swedish-American family has intermarried with those of Mexican heritage. My neighbor’s grandchildren are part white, Japanese, and Mexican. The creed growing up was that tribal affiliation was incidental, not essential, to character.

Family farming was never an easy enterprise. But an us/them mentality prevailed that united diverse farmers against both human and nature’s challenges. Yet most of those rural families now have all moved away or passed on. Their farms are leased to corporate enterprises and their homes rented to mostly immigrants from Mexico—many of them undocumented. Globalized agribusiness and unchecked illegal immigration, in different ways, combined to change central California and has made living in rural areas no longer safe.

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