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Ruth King

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‘Globalize the Intifada’ Comes to New Orleans Editors The Free Press

By on January 7th, 2025

https://www.thefp.com/p/globalize-the-intifada-comes-to-new?r=4crwli

The enemies of this country are clear about their aims. Have we lost the ability to defend ours?

What would it look like if the masked mobs in our cities vowing to “globalize the intifada” got their wish? It might look like New Orleans on New Year’s Day, when Shamsud-Din Jabbar plowed a pickup truck into the bodies of peaceful citizens, murdering young and old, then getting out and firing a gun at police officers who thankfully succeeded in killing him first, though two were hospitalized.

Eyewitnesses to the attack noticed that the murderer had an Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant flag in his truck. The FBI later confirmed that Jabbar, the Texas-born Army vet turned terrorist, “was 100% inspired by ISIS,” which rapes and enslaves girls, beheads captives, and makes war on the West as well as what it considers “apostates” in the greater Middle East—including all Muslims who reject its vision of an Islamic caliphate. ISIS grew out of al-Qaeda a decade ago and has roots in the Muslim Brotherhood. Jabbar traveled to Egypt—the seat of the Muslim Brotherhood—in the summer of 2023, and the FBI is now investigating what, exactly, he did there.

Even before the New Orleans attack, terrorist vehicle-ramming had already been globalized, with murderous effect. Locations of previous Islamist attacks, which this one eerily resembled, include Nice, France; Berlin, Germany; New York; and, of course, Israel.

But you wouldn’t know any of that listening to Tom Wilson, the CEO of the insurance giant Allstate, who bizarrely felt the need to address the public since the terrorist attack forced postponement of the Sugar Bowl that Allstate sponsors: “We need to. . . overcom[e] an addiction to divisiveness and negativity.” He further urged those tuning in to the football game delayed by the ISIS-inspired mass murder to “accept people’s imperfections and differences.”

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The Biggest Peacetime Crime—and Cover-up—in British History Dominic Green*****

By on January 7th, 2025

https://www.thefp.com/p/muslim-grooming-gangs-cover-up-keir-starmer-elon-musk?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

The serial rape of thousands of English girls went on for many years. Few in power cared. Then Elon Musk started tweeting.

LONDON — The grooming and serial rape of thousands of English girls by men of mostly Pakistani Muslim background over several decades is the biggest peacetime crime in the history of modern Europe. It went on for many years. It is still going on. And there has been no justice for the vast majority of the victims.

British governments, both Conservative and Labour, hoped that they had buried the story after a few symbolic prosecutions in the 2010s. And it looked like they had succeeded—until Elon Musk read some of the court papers and tweeted his disgust and bafflement on X over the new year.

Britain now stands shamed before the world. The public’s suppressed wrath is bubbling to the surface in petitions, calls for a public inquiry, and demands for accountability.

The scandal is already reshaping British politics. It’s not just about the heinous nature of the crimes. It’s that every level of the British system is implicated in the cover-up.

Social workers were intimidated into silence. Local police ignored, excused, and even abetted pedophile rapists across dozens of cities. Senior police and Home Office officials deliberately avoided action in the name of maintaining what they called “community relations.” Local councilors and Members of Parliament rejected pleas for help from the parents of raped children. Charities, NGOs, and Labour MPs accused those who discussed the scandal of racism and Islamophobia. The media mostly ignored or downplayed the biggest story of their lifetimes. Zealous in their incuriosity, much of Britain’s media elite remained barnacled to the bubble of Westminster politics and its self-serving priorities.

They did this to defend a failed model of multiculturalism, and to avoid asking hard questions about failures of immigration policy and assimilation. They did this because they were afraid of being called racist or Islamophobic. They did this because Britain’s traditional class snobbery had fused with the new snobbery of political correctness.

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What’s Wrong with the Postmodern Military? After fifteen months of war, and brilliant Israeli operations, Hamas and Hizballah have managed to avoid total defeat, and the IDF has not yet managed to secure total victory. Ron Baratz

By on January 7th, 2025

https://mosaicmagazine.com/essay/israel-zionism/2025/01/whats-wrong-with-the-postmodern-military/

The October 7 attack from Gaza was not supposed to have been possible. Israelis were continuously assured by the security establishment and political leaders that Hamas was “deterred,” that Israel has an ample, sophisticated defense mechanism, and that its intelligence capabilities were second to none. And so, Israelis had to endure two shocks on that Simchat Torah morning: the large-scale surprise attack itself, which the IDF failed to avert, and the barbaric atrocities committed by Hamas terrorists and Gazan civilians.

Then came a third shock, which might surprise those who rely on English-language news from Israel’s advocates abroad, its political leaders, or the IDF’s own spokespeople: the Israeli high command required weeks to formulate plans and prepare for an operation in Gaza. Even worse, within weeks of the ground operation’s commencement, it became evident that the initial strategy was flawed, poorly planned, and exposed a staggering number of failures in preparation, training, force buildup, equipment, munitions, and execution. Although Israeli society has sprung into action to help deal with logistical problems, it became clear that the IDF was in a dire condition. To this day, a year and three months after the attack, despite numerous tactical successes and an enormous national investment in the war, both Hamas and Hizballah have managed to avoid total defeat, and despite the accomplishments of Israel’s soldiers the IDF has failed to secure total victory.

It goes without saying that Israel has an exceptional national army. Its soldiers’ fighting spirit is second to none, their bravery and commitment are likely unparalleled in the West today. But tactics and bravery alone are not enough. The strategic capabilities of the high command are essential to give shape and direction to successful military campaigns. Therefore, my aim in this essay is to examine what I believe to be the most critical aspect of the reality revealed on and after October 7: the military doctrines and national-security mindset that have led to the decades-long deterioration of the IDF’s capabilities.

To do so, I will briefly turn to the U.S. and outline two successive transformations in Western military thinking. Admittedly, this depiction will be painted in very broad strokes, but despite exceptions and counterexamples, the trend it highlights—the marginalization of classical military and operational art—is very real and increasingly troubling. I will then shift focus to Israel to examine how it has navigated these two transformative waves of strategic thinking.

How the Cold War Upended Military Thought

From the beginning of recorded history until the Second World War, national-security doctrines relied on the operational capabilities of a strong, well-trained fighting force led by a professional high command. Generals were entrusted with the responsibility of winning wars, and warfare was regarded as a specialized art and vocation. Those who excelled in defeating enemy forces rose through the ranks to become military leaders.

Military professionalism was cultivated through two key endeavors. The first was experience, gained in active combat during wartime and through rigorous training during peacetime. The second was military studies. Most great strategists were ardent students of war. They identified something constant in war, an essence that transcended time, which helped would-be generals sharpen their intellectual and vocational abilities, adopt new technologies, develop new tactics and strategies, and adapt to changing threats. Thus, military history and theory were regarded as fundamental pillars of their expertise.

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Trump sentencing: A BS conclusion to a BS case Byron York

By on January 7th, 2025

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/daily-memo/3278083/trump-sentencing-bs-conclusion-to-bs-hush-money-case/

This Friday, though, Trump will have to put aside his work to attend, either in person or virtually, his sentencing in the Manhattan criminal prosecution in which he was convicted of falsifying business records. The case, brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, was widely viewed as the weakest of the four criminal cases brought against Trump by elected Democratic prosecutors and the Biden administration. For one thing, the charges, questionable as they were, were misdemeanors, past the statute of limitations, which Bragg inflated into felonies by alleging that Trump falsified records in a plot to steal the 2016 presidential election, which Bragg did not have the authority to police.

Even anti-Trump commentators were baffled by the case. “When Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg first brought charges against Donald Trump in March 2023, the legal theory behind the indictment remained remarkably unclear,” Quinta Jurecic, an editor of the journal Lawfare, from the liberal Brookings Institution, wrote last April. “Now, a year later, with the trial finally underway … the charges against Trump still have an oddly inchoate quality.” To add to Trump’s problems, the case was presided over by Manhattan Judge Juan Merchan, who, in 2020, violated New York’s rules of judicial conduct to make a small donation to the Biden campaign.

Nevertheless, as the other cases against Trump fell by the wayside — the two federal prosecutions brought by special counsel Jack Smith were bogged down in litigation, and the Georgia case brought by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis was sunk by prosecutorial misconduct — the Bragg case stayed on track. Anti-Trumpers came to support the case because they saw it as the only chance to get Trump before the 2024 election. 

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Canada, the Panama Canal and Now Greenland. What’s Behind Trump’s Expansionist Rhetoric? by Robert Spencer

By on January 6th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21274/trump-canada-panama-canal-greenland

Trump is once again being true to his America-First convictions.
[Trump’s] question to Trudeau was pointed, and remains unanswered: “So your country can’t survive unless it’s ripping off the U.S. to the tune of $100 billion?”
Trump explained that the Panama Canal “was given to Panama and to the people of Panama, but it has provisions, you gotta treat us fairly and they haven’t treated us fairly.”
There’s the bottom line: if the United States doesn’t control the Panama Canal and Greenland, China or Russia likely will, and the consequences could be severe both for the American economy and for national security.
President-elect Donald Trump recently said that the Panama Canal should once again come under American control, and that the US should buy Greenland from Denmark. If the United States doesn’t control the Panama Canal and Greenland, China or Russia likely will, and the consequences could be severe both for the American economy and for national security. Pictured: An aerial view of ships passing the Pedro Miguel locks in the Panama Canal, in May 2023. (Photo by iStock/Getty Images)

First, President-elect Donald Trump tweaked Canada’s far-left Prime Minister Justin Trudeau about becoming governor of the 51st state of the United States of America. Then he said that the Panama Canal should once again come under American control. Make that the 52nd state. And now, are you ready for a 53rd state? Last month, Trump renewed a call he made during his first term: that the United States should buy Greenland from Denmark. Could the man possibly be serious?

Maybe not. The left’s propaganda arm, also known as the mainstream media, loves to portray Trump and his supporters as angry, bitter, ignorant people lashing out against the people who know better what’s good for them. Trump has never gotten credit for his sense of humor, despite the fact that he is easily the funniest man to occupy the White House since Ronald Reagan, and may even surpass the Gipper.

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Why Europe and America need each other European elites have let their snobbery towards Trump blind them to their own interests.Joel Kotkin

By on January 6th, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/01/03/why-europe-and-america-need-each-other/

European elites are greeting the incoming Trump administration with something less than enthusiasm. The UK has sent an ambassador to Washington with a well-expressed disdain for the returning US president. Le Monde, a French publication not known for its pro-American sympathies, called Trump’s election ‘the nail in [the] coffin’ for the US as a ‘democratic model’ for the world. The Guardian, predictably, has called for Europeans to fight to preserve the continent’s welfare and climate regime.

Some seem to think that Trump’s return is the spur Europe needs to finally stand on its own two feet. But they need to recognise, as was the case during the Second World War and the Cold War, that only a strong alliance between Europe and the US offers any hope of resisting the rise of an authoritarian bloc, this time grouped around China.

There are hopeful signs. Since the start of the Ukraine conflict, ties between Europe, Canada and the US have been strengthened. There is some promise in an incipient alliance between North America and India, Japan and Australia. But Europe cannot expect the US to bear the strategic burden itself.

Trump’s insistence that Europe rearm makes sense at a time when the continent is facing immediate threats, most immediately in the Red Sea and Ukraine. Today, almost all European countries outside the UK, Greece and the Baltic states do not spend more than two per cent of their GDP on defence, while the US spends roughly 3.5 per cent.

Although there is an isolationist tendency among MAGA activists, most US voters are in favour of expanding America’s ‘global presence’. In a reinvigorated alliance, Europe has much to offer in terms of production and expertise, particularly given the sad state of the US military industry, as evidenced by shortages of materials to send to allies like Ukraine, Taiwan or Israel.

A similar imperative exists in the economic sphere. Europeans have long prided themselves on producing a stronger, more equitable economy than the military-oriented Americans. Two decades ago, one could legitimately see Europe as a determinative third force in the world economy. This is no longer the case. It’s basically a choice between China and the US.

Europeans might once have hoped that the euro could replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. But after last decade’s euro crisis, and with serious economic problems hitting the likes of France, this now looks like a fantasy. The dollar, despite attempts by China and some developing countries to supplant it, still accounts for close to 60 per cent of all foreign currency reserves and almost 90 per cent of all foreign exchange transactions.

Trump’s tariff threats may seem irrational and self-destructive. But the end of unrestrained free trade, without some sense of reciprocity, has long seemed inevitable. It has died amid a trade regime that helped cause the loss of over 3.7million jobs in the US alone. Living standards across the deindustrialising West have worsened, particularly for the middle class, while Europe has endured a decade of stagnation.

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Who really started America’s culture war? ‘Progressive’ elites have been fighting a silent war on the American way of life for decades. Frank Furedi

By on January 6th, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/01/05/who-really-started-americas-culture-war/

Over the past few years, Western elites have attempted to present the culture war as the work of right-wing agitators. Establishment politicians, pundits and academics claim that it’s the socially conservative who are fuelling today’s cultural conflicts for their own political gain. As one New York Times columnist argued, the likes of Donald Trump have been attacking trans ideology or critical race theory in order to scare and mobilise their voters.

Richard Slotkin’s critically acclaimed A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America aims to go beyond this simplistic view. He tries to provide historical context and an explanation for the culture war now raging in the US. To this end, he attempts to root today’s cultural conflicts in competing national myths, each of which present a ‘different understanding of who counts as American, a different reading of American history and a different vision of what our future ought to be’.

These myths include the myth of the frontier (or the myth of the American west) and two myths around the Civil War – namely, that of emancipation and that of the ‘lost cause’. Of these myths, Slotkin objects most to the myth of the lost cause. This, he argues, presents the Confederacy’s role as a noble but vain attempt to maintain a virtuous way of life, rather than an attempt to preserve the institution of slavery. To these myths, Slotkin adds the myth of the ‘good war’ and the myth of ‘the movement’, a reference to the civil-rights activism of the mid-20th century. The aim of all this is to show how these different national stories continue to provide the resources on which political actors today still draw.

There’s no doubting the ambition of A Great Disorder. But like most liberal-ish American academics writing about the culture war, Slotkin shares the elite view that these conflicts are ultimately the invention of right-wing conservative activists. In effect, A Great Disorder absolves leftists and ‘progressives’ of any responsibility for the cultural battles being fought in our midst.

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Heather Mac Donald What’s Behind the AfD Party’s Rise in Germany Critics call the populist party a threat to democracy, but many Germans aren’t buying it. *******

By on January 6th, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/germany-populist-afd-party-immigration

Elon Musk calls it the “last spark of hope” for Germany. European elites call it the heir to National Socialism. The debate over Germany’s reviled populist party, the Alternative for Germany (Alternativ für Deutschland, or AfD), is worth paying attention to, since it reveals modern Western society’s most fundamental belief structure. That debate is about to heat up further, when Musk holds a live conversation on X with the AfD’s leader. The elites, Musk says, “will lose their minds.”

The Alternative for Germany is a leper in German political life, due to the party’s opposition to Germany’s lax immigration policies. Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, a domestic intelligence agency, has granted itself authority to surveil the party, which it deems a threat to democracy.

Germany’s other political parties have pledged not to cooperate with the AfD. The resulting “firewall” shuts the party out of governing coalitions, no matter how much popular support it enjoys. The AfD is denied the committee chairmanships in the national parliament in Berlin that its numbers would otherwise entitle it to. German courts have almost uniformly rejected the party’s efforts to remove these legal and extralegal barriers to normal participation in political life. The media keep AfD officials off the airwaves. While other political leaders, including far leftists, are regularly quoted in the press and interviewed, AfD representatives are spectral presences, rarely heard or seen on broadcasts or given space in publications.

The problems motivating the AfD’s rise are not spectral, however. Immigration into Germany increased significantly in 2015, when then-Chancellor Angela Merkel famously announced: “Wir schaffen das! [We can handle this!],” in response to the thousands of Syrians then crossing into the country. Twenty-three percent of the German population in 2021 were first- or second-generation immigrants—and that was before the Ukrainian migration. Over 17 percent of the German population are first-generation immigrants, a higher percentage than in the United States, where less than 14 percent of the population were foreign-born in 2022. The burdens on Germany’s social services, criminal-justice system, and housing stock have been enormous. Fifty-five percent of Syrians with at least eight years of German residency were on welfare in 2023, compared with 5 percent of native Germans. More than 60 percent of the people in Germany who depend on government benefits for income are foreign-born or second-generation migrants, according to the Wall Street Journal. The disruption to social cohesion from an unassimilated alien culture is greater still.

Establishment panic over the AfD reached a boiling point in late summer 2024. On August 23, 2024, an illegal Syrian asylum seeker stabbed to death three people attending a “diversity” festival in the western German town of Solingen. The festival commemorated Solingen’s 650th anniversary; it was a telling marker of modern German ideology that the city honored its medieval roots with a paean to “diversity.” Twenty percent of the Solingen population are now foreign-born. No one in the press observed the irony of a “diverse” Solingen resident trying to kill as many of Solingen’s less diverse inhabitants as possible, on the day celebrating his presence in the city.

Elections for the state parliaments of two eastern German states—Thüringen and Sachsen—were scheduled for September 1. The Solingen knifings threatened to boost the AfD’s vote share. And so, the Nazi comparisons poured out. Bodo Ramelow, the minister president of Thüringen and member of the Left party, told public TV station ZDF that he was fighting the “normalization of fascism.” “That is my battle [das ist mein Kampf],” he said. Election signs in Thüringen read: “Whoever votes for AfD is voting for FASCISM! [Wer AfD wählt, wählt FASCHISMUS!].” A female protesting the AfD on the day of the election told ZDF that she was “demonstrating for democracy.” She didn’t want to live in a “Nazi realm,” she said. A journalist in Berlin wrote that the “specter of Nazism continues to haunt Germany.”

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Irish Archbishop Gives His Imprimatur to the Most Grotesque False Charge Against Israel Hugh Fitzgerald

By on January 6th, 2025

https://jihadwatch.org/2025/01/irish-archbishop-gives-his-imprimatur-to-the-most-grotesque-false-charge-against-israel?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=

Eamon Martin, the Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, has a spittle-flecked message for Israel:”Irish Catholic Archbishop: Israeli response to Hamas ‘merciless and disproportionate,’” by Michael Starr, Jerusalem Post, January 2, 2025:

“I highlight Gaza not only because of the severe impact of this conflict but because it is emblematic of the failure of the international community to prevent the escalation of conflict and to protect civilians,” said Martin. “This is despite rulings of the International Court of Justice on protection from genocide, on illegal occupation of Territories, and on systemic discrimination.”

Martin has given his imprimatur to the grotesque charge that in Gaza Israel has been committing genocide. The only attempt at “genocide” in this whole business was that displayed by Hamas on October 7, 2023, when its operatives raped, tortured, and murdered Israelis, gouging out eyes and cutting off genitalia of some of its victims before killing them. The IDF has not been committing “genocide” in Gaza. The IDF has facilitated the delivery of 1.1 tons of humanitarian aid, which is not what an army hellbent on genocide would do. Only 13,000 civilians in Gaza, out of a total population of 2.2 million, have died as a result of the war. And it must be repeated: the IDF has made unprecedented efforts to minimize civilian casualties by warning people away from places about to be targeted. Hamas, on the other hand, by embedding its operatives and hiding its weapons in civilian areas, is deliberately trying to maximize civilian casualties.

Martin said that with more sophisticated and powerful weapons being employed in streets, homes, hospitals, and schools, modern warfare had become indistinguishable from terrorism.

“How can tactics, which cause thousands of civilian deaths, alongside the whole scale [sic] destruction of food, water, health services, and other infrastructure that is essential for survival, ever hope to restore justice and rights, resolve differences, respect human dignity, or provide a path for reconciliation and peace?” asserted the archbishop.

More “sophisticated” weapons have allowed the IDF to strike terrorist targets with greater precision, thus minimizing collateral damage. As for Martin’s charge about the “whole scale” (sic) “destruction of food, water, health services and other infrastructure,” every part of this claim is preposterous. The IDF does not “destroy” food and water in Gaza, but supplies both to the Gazans. The IDF cannot, however, be blamed if, once the trucks bringing the aid are inside Gaza, some of that aid is seized by Hamas both for distribution to its own members and for sale to ordinary Gazans. Nor is Israel destroying “health services” — that is, hospitals. It is Hamas, by hiding its weapons and men, sometimes hundreds of them, inside hospitals, that makes not the hospitals in their entirety, but the places where those men and weapons are located, legitimate targets of the IDF.

Martin is the latest Irish religious leader to issue harsh criticism of Israel’s conduct during the Israel-Hamas War, with Anglican Church of Ireland Canon David Oxley claiming on Remembrance Sunday that the IDF had a cruel policy of targeting schools, hospitals, and mosques, and that Israelis saw Jews as a “master race” – a term usually associated with Nazi ideology.

The Catholic Archbishop Eamon Martin is deplorable, but far worse is the openly antisemitic Anglican Church of Ireland Canon David Oxley, who dares to claim that Israelis see Jews as a “master race.” The Jews as the new Nazis? But why then did that “master race” allow the 160,000 Arabs in Israel in 1949 to not only live, but to multiply until there are now two million Arabs in Israel? And why did the Jews who won control of Gaza in the Six-Day War allow the 400,000 Arabs in Gaza in 1967 to increase until there were 1.2 million Arabs in the Strip when Israel withdrew in 2005? And why did Israel allow the 900,000 Arabs who were living in the West Bank in 1967 to become the three million living there today? Surely the “master race” could have prevented all that.

And if the Israelis believe that Jews are the “master race,” as Oxley claims, why are Arabs allowed to serve on Israel’s Supreme Court, to sit in the Knesset, to have their own political parties? Why are those “inferior” Arabs allowed to become doctors and treat Jewish patients? Why does the “master race” allow Arabs to serve side-by-side with Jews in the military? Or let Arabs play on the same sports teams, and in the same orchestras, or to work with Jews in the same offices and factories? Why does the “master race” of Jews in Israel provide medical care to Arabs, and let Arabs provide medical care to Jews? Why do the “master race” Jews allow Arabs to become the heads of Israeli companies, including the largest. bank in Israel? Why does that “master race” make such tremendous efforts to spare the lives of the “inferior” Arabs in Gaza with its elaborate warnings about targeted sites? Perhaps Canon Oxley should look into the Qur’an, where he will discover that it is Muslims, not Jews, who are taught that they are the “best of peoples” and non-Muslims are “the most vile of created beings.”

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The Hydra of Government: How the Global Engagement Center Lives On Through Rebranding The Global Engagement Center was defunded, only to reemerge under a new name—proof that bureaucracy rarely dies, it just rebrands. Roger Kimball

By on January 6th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/05/the-hydra-of-government-how-the-global-engagement-center-lives-on-through-rebranding/

If you visit the State Department’s website for the Global Engagement Center, you will read that “The Global Engagement Center closed on December 23, 2024.”

Not really.

As has been often observed, the nearest thing to immortality this side of the pearly gates is a government initiative. I have noted in this space and elsewhere that the innocuous-sounding “Global Engagement Center” was actually (in Vivek Ramaswamy’s accurate summary) a “key node of the censorship industrial complex.” According to its mission statement, the GEC was supposed to be focused on “foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining or influencing the policies, security, or stability of the United States, its allies, and partner nations.” I thoughtfully added the italics to the word “foreign.”

The point is that the GEC—like the State Department as a whole (like, indeed, the CIA and the rest of the alphabet soup that makes up our “intelligence” services tout court)—is supposed to be focused outward: on foreign threats. Thanks in part to reporting by people like Matt Taibbi, we know that much of our government has been weaponized against the American people, at least against those of whom the regime disapproves. On issues ranging from COVID to Hunter Biden’s laptop, Taibbi has shown that “every corner of government”—“the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD,  . . . even the CIA”—has leaned on virtually all social and traditional media companies to toe the approved government line. The GEC has played a small but not insignificant role in this clandestine effort to monitor opinion and suppress entities and individuals emitting “Wrongthink” (what George Orwell called “Crimethink”).

Item: Because the GEC could not operate against Americans directly, it did so indirectly by funding entities like the British-based Global Disinformation Index, which compiled a list of publications and individuals that said things the regime did not like. That list was consulted by advertisers wary of winding up on the wrong side of the government. The Washington Examiner made the list. So did RealClearPolitics, Reason, The New York Post, Blaze Media, the Daily Wire, the Federalist, the American Conservative, Newsmax, and many conservative entities. Result? Millions of dollars of ad revenue dried up, imperiling the future of those outlets.

Funding for the GEC was in the original 1500-page obscenity that Speaker of the House Mike Johnson had the temerity to bring to his colleagues as a “continuing resolution” last month. That monstrosity instantly drew some portion of the contempt and ridicule it deserved, not least from Elon Musk, whose fingers got a workout on the platform formerly known as Twitter. A 120-page, slimmed-down version of the bill was hastily cobbled together minus the GEC funding and other objectionable features (a raise for the legislators, for example). That passed, and so a putative “government shutdown” was avoided.

There was modified joy over this seeming victory. The fact that funding for the GEC was cut was one of the principal goads to celebration. Here at last was proof that a bad government activity could actually be zeroed out. No money, no activity.

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