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Ruth King

‘Bidenomics’ Has Been a Disaster By David Harsanyi

https://pjmedia.com/columns/davidhasanyi/2023/08/11/bidenomics-has-been-a-disaster-n1718157

After 40 years of “trickle-down economics,” President Joe Biden says, “Bidenomics is just another way of saying restoring the American Dream.”

It’s not often that a politician openly pledges to bring the country back to a time of crippling inflation, high energy prices and stifling interest rates. But this president is doing his best to keep that promise.

Unsurprisingly, “Bidenomics” is failing to gain traction among voters. This has caused consternation in the media. One thing to remember, though, is that “Bidenomics” isn’t really a thing. Unlike, say, “Reaganomics,” which helped bring about the largest expansion of the middle class in world history, the president does not subscribe to any coherent or tangible set of economic theories or principles. The White House defines its economic policy as being “rooted in the recognition that the best way to grow the economy is from the middle out and the bottom up,” which is just platitudinous gibberish.

“Bidenomics” encompass anything and everything that’s convenient for Democrats. And in this moment, it’s convenient for them to take credit for merely letting people go back to work. Biden, who once claimed that the Democrats $3.5 trillion Build Back Better plan cost “zero dollars,” isn’t exactly a math whiz. But when he says stuff like “13.4 million jobs have been added to our economy” under his watch, more than “any other president in a full 4-year term,” anyone with even a passing familiarity with the events of the years preceding 2023 knows it’s a lie of omission.

The notion that presidents “create” jobs is itself a fantasy. In this case, though, Biden supported efforts to shutter private businesses during the pandemic, basically closing the entire economy, not only while running for president but after winning office. When Florida, and other states, attempted to ease some restrictions, Biden told them to “get out of the way” so that people could “do the right thing.” The pressure exerted on states to “do the right thing” was immense.

Blame George Soros for the pot stench ruining America’s cities and addicting her citizens by Rachel Ehrenfeld

https://acdemocracy.org/blame-george-soros-for-the-pot-stench-ruining-americas-cities-and-addicting-her-citizens/

A major part of billionaire activist and philanthropist George Soros’s legacy will be the decriminalization of drug use in America. 

In the early 1990s, at the height of the crack epidemic, it was Soros who funded “harm reduction” clinics to distribute drug pipes as part of “safe smoking kits.” Similar “safe user kits” were made available to addicts in 2022 via the Biden administration’s crusade to enable illicit drug consumption throughout America.  

In 1994, shortly after Soros established his Open Society Institute in Manhattan, the mega pollical philanthropist decided to test the American criminal justice system and undermine the public’s resolve to maintain long-held attitudes and moral values. The savvy speculator selectively targeted criminal laws that governed the use of illicit drugs. At the time, using illegal substances was deemed unacceptable by 90% of Americans. But the crafty Soros anticipated that Americans’ attitudes would change once marijuana was legalized, and many would be willing to use drugs. He was right.

In three decades, Soros had managed to flip Americans’ views completely. A Pew Research Center survey in November 2022 found that 88% of the U.S. population supported the legalization of marijuana. His stunningly successful propaganda claimed that the enforcement of laws prohibiting the abuse of dangerous drugs caused “more harm than the drugs themselves.” In 1995, he acknowledged that “Some drugs are addictive,’ but falsely proclaimed “others, like marijuana, are not.”

Using illegal substances was once deemed unacceptable by 90% of Americans. But Soros anticipated that Americans’ attitudes would change once marijuana was legalized, and many would be willing to use drugs. He was right.

‘Channel 14’ accuses business moguls of conspiring to cancel it The channel, unique among Israeli TV stations for its conservative viewpoint, asked the Israel Competition Authority to investigate. David Isaac

https://www.jns.org/israel-news/channel-14/23/8/10/309634/

The Israel Competition Authority confirmed to JNS that it received a request from Channel 14, Israel’s only conservative television station with a news department, to investigate possible illegal coordination by major Israeli businesses to drop the station from their advertising budgets in an effort to shutter it.

Several companies have banded together to “break the channel financially” because they disapprove of its political positions, the station’s owners said, calling it an assault on free speech.

In a letter to the station’s employees this week, Netanel Siman Tov, a representative of the station’s owners, wrote: “A phenomenon in which capitalists use economic terror to limit freedom of expression and impose a political agenda on journalists belongs to dark regimes. It has no place in a democracy, of which a free press is its lifeblood.”

“It’s our intention to use all the legal tools at our disposal to bring justice to everyone who was involved in the attempted cancellation of the channel,” Siman Tov added.

The catalyst for the boycott was controversial remarks made on July 30 by guest panelist Ari Shamai on the channel’s popular “The Patriots” program. Shamai said that the assassin who murdered Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 should be freed from prison.

Although the station swiftly banned Shamai, announcing 45 minutes after the program aired that “in light of the seriousness of the matter, Mr. Shamai will no longer be invited to appear on the channel’s programs,” Israeli food and beverage company Strauss Group announced the next day it was pulling its ads from the station.

In justifying its decision, Strauss said that the pundit’s statement was one of “various offensive statements, repeated over and over again, recently in the programs broadcast on the channel.”

Environmentalists’ Broken Toys: Running Against Harsh Reality

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/08/11/environmentalists-broken-toys/

We’ve recently written quite a bit about electric vehicles’ many flaws – the reasons to hate them, their evil nature, the entire EV con. But they’re not the only green plaything that’s being exposed for the debacle they are. Windmills are just as troubled.

“All over the world, rural people are reacting with fury at the encroachment of large wind and solar projects on their homes and neighborhoods,” writes energy author Robert Bryce.

Last month, “thousands of Druze residents in the Golan Heights,” says Bryce, “rioted to stop the installation of a large wind project on their traditional lands.” Before that, a wind project in Colombia was “canceled after it met fierce opposition from the indigenous Wayuu communities.”

Bryce noted last week that over the last 10 days in the U.S., “local governments in Illinois, Ohio, and Iowa have rejected or restricted wind and solar projects.” According to his database, that makes 574 rejections or restrictions of ​​solar and wind projects in less than a decade. Most of them, 407, have been wind projects.

Bryce predicted the growth of resistance four years ago when he wrote in The Hill that protests in Hawaii then were “a harbinger of more clashes to come if governments attempt to install the colossal quantities of wind turbines and solar panels that would be needed to fuel the global economy.”

The Arc of Reform New College of Florida votes to abolish its gender studies program. Christopher Rufo

https://rufo.substack.com/p/the-arc-of-reform?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Tonight, the New College of Florida board of trustees voted to direct the administration to abolish the university’s gender studies program, becoming the first public university in America to begin rolling back the encroachment of gender ideology and queer theory on its academic offerings.

 The decision, sure to elicit a fierce response from left-wing critics, is part of a broader transformation. In January, Florida governor Ron DeSantis appointed me and a number of other reformers to the New College board of trustees. He tasked us with a challenging mission: to revive classical liberal education and restore the founding mission of the college, which had been established with an appeal to New College at the University of Oxford.

From the beginning, we knew that this assignment would involve more than a “rebranding” campaign; it would require an overhaul of the structure of the college and its programs. In our first months as a board, we initiated significant changes to the central administration, firing the president, replacing the provost, abolishing the DEI department, and hiring political veteran Richard Corcoran as our interim president. We got pushback—student protests, media condemnation, a disapproving visit from California governor Gavin Newsom—but we patiently continued the work, deliberating over questions of governance and making hard choices about the college’s future.

These changes have already borne fruit. Interim President Corcoran has secured millions in new funding from the state legislature, launched an ambitious campus-renovation plan, and recruited the largest incoming class in the college’s history, putting the school on its strongest financial footing in decades.

The U.S. Is In Real Decline—Really! Part Four: Lawlessness and Corruption Victor Davis Hanson

https://victorhanson.com/the-u-s-is-in-real-decline-really-part-four-lawlessness-and-corruption/

Corruption and lawlessness destroy civilizations. The 20th-century American ability to curb both, at least on the everyday level, explains in part the American success story. But now?

On the street level, shoplifting is being redefined in blue cities and states as something like parity or equity, or some sort of Orwellian justified adjustment in income.

The attempt to enforce the law can be far more dangerous than breaking it. We have completely politicized the legal system on the violent end, using race and ethnicity as exemptions from full enforcement of statutes—exemptions that fall most heavily upon the inner-city people of color and poor.

Will the lawlessness continue, as carjacking, car-racing in intersections, smash-and-grab, and overt theft reach the suburbs? Are we more afraid of enforcing the law and being libeled as illiberal for it, or the lawbreaking itself that we cannot always any more avoid?

In Oakland, suburbanites of every race, along with inner-city blacks, now march on government to insist on refunding the police and enforcing the law? But is such a reawakening too little and too late, in the sense that industry, business, and the middle classes now choose instead to avoid the Oaklands of America, on the theory life is too short and dangerous to be martyred on the altar of ecumenicalism?

As Livy reminds us, the remedy for our vices is now deemed worse than the malady itself. Would an attorney general attempting to clean up the DOJ have to be hated and ostracized to succeed? Where and how would an FBI director even begin?

Who Will Say No More to the Current Madness? Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2023/08/10/who-will-say-no-more-to-the-current-madness/

Britain slept in the 1930s as an inevitable war with Hitler loomed.

A lonely Winston Churchill had only a few courageous partners to oppose the appeasement and incompetence of his conservative colleague Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain.

One of the most stalwart truth-tellers was a now little remembered politico and public servant Leo Amery, a polymath and conservative member of Parliament.

Yet in two iconic moments of outrage against the Chamberlain government’s temporizing, Amery galvanized Britain and helped end the government’s disastrous policies.

In the hours after Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, there was real doubt whether Chamberlain would honor its treaty and declare war on Germany.

A Labour Party member, surrogate Arthur Greenwood, got up in the House of Commons to announce that he would be speaking for Labour on behalf of his ill party leader Clement Attlee.

Immediately Amery interrupted, shouting out, “Speak for England, Arthur!”

He was met with overwhelming applause and soon public acclamation.

After all, Amery was a political voice in the wilderness warning that neither his own party nor opposition Labour was speaking or acting for the real interest of the British people.

Paraded Naked and Gang-Raped: The Persecution of Christians in India by Raymond Ibrahim

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19870/persecution-christians-india

“The viral video captures the harrowing ordeal endured by two Christian women…. [They] were paraded naked while a mob of men molested and beat them mercilessly…. [T]he younger woman, aged only 19, was brutally gang-raped by the enraged mob….” — Report, British Asian Christian Association, May 21, 2023.

“To add to the horror, four police officers reportedly stood by and watched as the frenzied attack unfolded, making no attempt to intervene.” — Report, British Asian Christian Association, May 21, 2023.

In the video, the [Hindu] Meitei tribal group can be heard shouting: “If you don’t take off your clothes, we’ll kill you.” — Report, British Asian Christian Association, May 21, 2023.

“In a disturbing twist, the survivors have alleged that the police officers may have actively participated in or facilitated the heinous attack. There are claims that the officers led the women directly to the mob of 800 to 1000 men” — Report, British Asian Christian Association, May 21, 2023.

Several Christians—including a young child—were burned alive by the Hindu tribesmen, according to Morning Star News.

Notably, both the Hindu government and the international press totally sideline the religious identity of both the attackers and the victims, and speak only of “sectarian clashes” between the Meitei (Hindu) and Kuki (Christian).

This is a familiar tactic—as when the Western media talk of Fulani herdsmen clashing with farmers in Nigeria. In reality, the Fulani are Muslims who are engaged in a genocidal jihad on the “farmers,” who are Christian.

It would appear that religion — specifically the rise of Hindu nationalism, which views ethnic Indians who are Christians as traitors — is, once again, the ultimate factor fueling clashes….

“Local police throughout India allow Hindu extremist mobs to attack hapless Christians without consequences.” — Archbishop Joseph D’Souza of the Anglican Good Shepherd Church of India and President of the All India Christian Council, stream.org, July 21, 2023.

“At this point it is obvious to state that Kuki Christians are under full scale attack by radicalized Hindu groups, and that the police are ignoring this injustice.” — thewire.in, July 20, 2023.

The growing persecution of Christians in India has even propelled that nation into being ranked the eleventh-worst country in the world to persecute Christians, according to the World Watch List.

Obama’s Self-Made Myths Still Stand “When the truth collides with a legend, print the legend.” by Tim Graham

https://www.frontpagemag.com/obamas-self-made-myths-still-stand/

The media deification of Barack Obama has really never ended. His election to the presidency in 2008 was treated as a milestone, like man landing on the moon. Allegedly objective journalists lined up in every studio and on every front page to do him homage.

It wasn’t journalism. It was more like idolatry. It was like Bryant Gumbel harshly replying in 1989 to new information about Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s adultery. He said, “When the truth collides with a legend, print the legend.”

This line came to mind in reading a recent Tablet magazine interview with liberal historian David Garrow, a King specialist. Garrow’s massive 2017 tome on Obama, “Rising Star,” was blasted by New York Times chief book critic Michiko Kakutani. She argued his epilogue was like a “Republican attack ad.” This is comical, since Garrow’s epilogue recounted quotes from, among others, liberals at the Times and The Washington Post.

David Samuels — who penned an unforgettable piece for The New York Times Magazine revealing that Obama aide Ben Rhodes boasted of creating an “echo chamber” for Obama’s foreign policy in the press — focused Garrow on a woman named Sheila Miyoshi Jager, who Obama asked to marry him twice.

Samuels is amazed at how no one before Garrow really put Jager into focus. That includes David Maraniss, whose 2012 Obama book preceded Garrow in ruling that Obama’s memoir “Dreams From My Father” was largely fictional, especially Obama turning his girlfriends into a composite white character. He didn’t put Jager in the index. (Jager is half-Dutch, half-Japanese.)

This is the obvious Samuels pull quote: “The idea that the celebrated journalists who wrote popular biographies of Obama and became enthusiastic members of his personal claque couldn’t locate Jager — or never knew who she was — defies belief. It seems more likely that the character Obama fashioned in ‘Dreams’ had been defined — by Obama — as being beyond the reach of normal reportorial scrutiny.”

Samuels suggests Garrow’s book was scorned because it highlighted “a remarkable lack of curiosity” about a man who was “treated less like a politician and more like the idol of an inter-elite cult.” It underlined that as Obama decided he wanted to be president one day, he realized having a white wife would be an obstacle.

Inside Tucker’s World From Chadwick Moore, a timely new biography of the X-Man. by Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/inside-tuckers-world/

During the last few years, the term TDS, meaning “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” has acquired a secondary meaning: “Tucker Derangement Syndrome.” Or, at least, it should have, because the leftist hostility directed at the longtime TV host comes close to rivaling that directed at the ex-president with whom he, more than anyone else on cable news, is so strongly identified. If Trump is the man who challenged the Beltway uniparty in the name of American liberty and government by the people, leading millions of voters to realize that a great many Republicans were as fully a part of the swamp as Democrats, Tucker Carlson is the man who took on the cable news media consensus, demonstrating that Fox News is, in many ways, less a real alternative to CNN and MSNBC than a controlled opposition, on whose airways only a certain degree of dissent from mainstream orthodoxy is permitted. If Trump’s betrayal by many GOP leaders – from Bob Barr to Mike Pence – opened the eyes of a great many of his supporters, Tucker’s expulsion from Fox News illuminated the grim reality that pretty much all of America’s corporate news organizations are, in the end, tainted tools of the cultural elite.

Tucker’s unexpected transformation from jewel in the Fox News crown to fully independent voice on Twitter – sorry, X – is the latest twist in a life story that Chadwick Moore, a former guest on Tucker’s show as well as on other Fox News programs (notably The Five), tells with verve and admiration in his estimable new biography, Tucker. If there were nothing else to praise about it, I would give Moore props for writing the first non-fiction book I’ve read in quite a while that doesn’t have a long, unnecessary subtitle. But, in fact, there’s a lot more to like here. Moore has figured out how to cover the bullet points about Tucker’s childhood and youth without loading us down, in the opening chapters, with details that we don’t really want or need to know. The bottom line, which Moore conveys vividly, is that Tucker, who I’ve always vaguely gathered was a scion of wealth, was in reality the son of Lisa, a spoiled rich San Francisco girl turned hippie (now deceased) who abandoned her husband and her two sons when the boys were little, and Dick, who began his life in a Massachusetts orphanage, raised his boys on his own, went on to be a TV news anchor in San Diego and a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, and is still going strong in his eighties.