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Ruth King

Erdogan’s Syrian Gambit by Burak Bekdil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19265/erdogan-turkey-syria-gambit

Since the violence resumed, Erdogan has threatened to launch a full-scale military incursion into Syria’s Kurdish areas — which would be the fourth such major Turkish incursion since 2016.

Erdogan most likely calculates that fresh epic tales of military heroism would further consolidate his nationalistic voting base [before June 2023 presidential elections], especially at a time when most Turks are struggling to survive after their incomes have severely eroded under a year-on-year inflation rate of 84%.

A Turkish military incursion would be a fight in a land that already looks like hell.

An estimated 15.3 million Syrians (out of a population of 22.1 million) will require humanitarian assistance in 2023, compared to 14.6 million people in 2022, according to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. — Washington Post, December 12, 2022.

The report also cited… [that] at least 25% of children under the age of five in some [Syrian] districts are stunted and at risk of irreversible damage to their physical and cognitive development as well as “repeated infection, developmental delay, disabilities and death.” — Washington Post, December 12, 2022.

In the predominantly Kurdish northeast Syria, the number of malnourished children has surged by over 150% just in the past six months. — UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, November 8, 2022.

“Washington… is urging Turkey in ever stronger terms not to launch an operation. The Turks do not appear to be heeding Washington’s call, in part because they heard the same tune before their 2018 incursion against the SDF in Afrin, Syria, and didn’t suffer any long-term consequences for ignoring it that time.” — James Jeffrey, Chair of the Middle East program at the Wilson Center and former U.S. ambassador to Ankara, Foreign Policy, December 9, 2022.

The only advantage of a Turkish military incursion might be for Erdogan, who may well be using a war in Syria to distract potential voters from the wretched economy he gave them.

The northernmost region of Syria, which has a 910-kilometer border with Turkey, offers one of the world’s most complex war theaters. That is so not only because of the countless number of state and non-state actors operating in this third-world land with limited hydrocarbons, but also because of shifting alliances, conflicts with conventional and asymmetrical warfare tactics, and the surreal bedfellows that these factors often create.

Biden Opens Door to China Sabotage in North Dakota by Gordon G. Chang

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19260/china-sabotage-north-dakota

The Biden administration just cleared a Chinese company to own 370 acres of land within 12 miles of Grand Forks Air Force Base in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

As a result, China will be able to use a proposed $700 million corn milling plant on the site to spy on military communications and even disrupt them. In Beijing, they must be shaking their heads in disbelief….

[T]he failure to include all military installations in the implementing regulations was a clear case of regulatory malpractice.

As a result of these enormous mistakes, Fufeng USA, a subsidiary of a Shandong province-based agribusiness giant, is, at least for the moment, free to build its wet corn milling and biofermentation plant in Grand Forks.

“The worst-case scenario involves active sabotage of operations at the Grand Forks facility. Should the U.S. and China end up in a shooting war over, say, Taiwan, Fufeng’s property near the Air Force base could be used to send malicious signals to jam passing satellites or disrupt the operation of drones. We have made ourselves vulnerable on our own territory.” — Brandon Weichert, author of Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower, to Gatestone; December 2022.

President Joe Biden can use his authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 to block the sale of the Grand Forks land and the building of the milling facility.

“[T]he most serious problem: The [CIFIUS] Committee is chaired by Treasury, which never saw a foreign investment it did not approve. “This means, as a practical matter, that an agency that basically doesn’t give a damn about national security is entrusted with running a process that supposedly evaluates and protects national security.” — Frank Gaffney, Vice Chair of the Committee on the Present Danger; to Gatestone, December 2022,

The CFIUS mandate must be broadened “to include any foreign investment that threatens our national security interests or, for that matter, other vital interests, in the face of unrestricted and especially economic warfare.” — Frank Gaffney to Gatestone; December 2022

China’s regime, which has declared a “people’s war” on the U.S., uses investments to undermine America. In wartime — the Communist Party believes it is currently in such a struggle with America — Washington needs to prohibit all investments from China, especially ones near critical Air Force installations in North Dakota.

The Biden administration just cleared a Chinese company to own 370 acres of land within 12 miles of Grand Forks Air Force Base in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

What Did Nancy Pelosi Know and When Did She Know It? The January 6 select committee never intended to act as a truth-seeking mission but rather perform a cover-up for what actually happened. By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2022/12/26/what-did-nancy-pelosi-know-and-when-did-she-know-it/

The January 6 select committee finally released its long-delayed report late on December 23 after most Americans had happily turned away from politics to enjoy the Christmas weekend with family and friends. The Friday night news dump, a common tactic when government officials want to bury something controversial, was not exactly a vote of confidence in the panel’s ultimate work product.

As expected, the bulk of the 845-page document spun a well-worn tale that portrayed Donald Trump as the sole villain in a so-called “insurrection” the committee wants us to believe was engineered to keep him in the White House. Page after page included dramatic interpretations of snippets from witness testimony intended to bolster the committee’s preconceived conclusions.

Analysis of how law enforcement and intelligence services failed to prepare for the “attack,” a promise made by the committee in its original sell job to the public, is buried in a relatively brief appendix at the end. And despite confirmation the government was aware violence might occur—the FBI used a threat tag, “CERTUNREST2021,” purportedly to categorize in advance information related to January 6—federal and local agencies did not prevent what the Biden regime branded a terror attack comparable to 9/11. (FBI Director Christopher Wray’s name is not mentioned once in the report and it appears unlikely he sat for a transcribed interview.)

Even so, in the face of extensive evidence that those agencies were on high alert, committee members still faulted Trump: “Few in law enforcement predicted that the President of the United States would incite a mob attack on the Capitol, that he would send them to stop the joint session knowing they were armed and dangerous, that he would further incite them against his own vice President while the attack was underway, or that he would do nothing to stop the assault for hours,” the report dishonestly stated.

Another official who escaped accountability in the report is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the lawmaker mainly responsible for protecting Capitol grounds. Committee members avoided any criticism of Pelosi, instead allowing her to write the foreword. (It’s also unclear whether committee investigators interviewed the speaker.)

Left-Wing Academics Seek to Revoke Honorary Degrees for Conservatives By Eric Lendrum

https://amgreatness.com/2022/12/26/left-wing-academics-seek-to-revoke-honorary-degrees-for-conservatives/

Multiple far-left activists at various universities and colleges are demanding that schools rescind any and all “honorary degrees” that have been bestowed upon prominent conservative figures.

The Daily Caller reports that the latest example comes from Syracuse University, which has begun taking steps to revoke an honorary degree given to Rudy Giuliani, the former Mayor of New York City and later attorney for President Donald Trump. In April, the University Senate passed a resolution demanding that the Board of Trustees take action to rescind Giuliani’s degree. Giuliani, who was hailed as a national hero for his leadership after the September 11th attacks, led the legal team that attempted to fight back against voter fraud in the 2020 election.

Since the 152-year-old university has never done so before, the school does not even have a formal process in place for revoking anyone’s degree. Yet due to pressure from the far-left, a spokeswoman for the school confirmed that the school has officially adopted a new process for doing so, solely for the purpose of hurting Giuliani. The Senate Committee on Honorary Degrees will now make the final decision, and could make its choice as soon as spring.

In addition to Syracuse, three other universities have already revoked honorary degrees for Giuliani: Drexel University, Middlebury College, and the University of Rhode Island.

The effort to revoke honorary degrees has targeted multiple officials from the Trump Administration, including the President himself. Lehigh University and Wagner University rescinded President Trump’s honorary degrees following the peaceful protest at the United States Capitol on January 6th, 2021. He also lost an honorary degree from Robert Gordon University simply for running for president in 2015.

The University of Rhode Island, in addition to Giuliani, also revoked a degree for Lieutenant General and former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who was falsely accused of coordinating with the Russian government and was later exonerated.

DIE on the Road to Global Tyranny By Harry G. Hutchison

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/12/die_on_the_road_to_global_tyranny.html

Francis Fukuyama claimed, dubiously, that we are witnessing the end of history, with the universalization of liberal democracy as the final form of human government.  Yet we live in a world of worrisome pendulum shifts.  Republican congressional leaders disprove Fukuyama’s claim as they celebrate their stunning betrayal of the American people by supporting the passage of the $1.7-trillion McConnell-Schumer omnibus bill.  Rather than protect America’s southern border and comply with Congress’s constitutional duty, this bill moves the country farther to the left by explicitly funding a “woke” identity group supporting LGBT indoctrination in elementary schools, abolishing ICE, and defunding the police.  At the same time, this bill hands more power to a federal government dedicated to the preposterous claim that America is systemically racist.

This explosive proposition is aided and abetted by several additional contentions.  Dangerous contentions include claims that enforcing the United States Constitution fairly and equally, administering laws without focusing on visual identity, and advancing merit rather than identity-based preferences are forms of unconscious racism.  Such claims flourish because our overlords ignore the observation that truth is no defense against fools determined to believe lies.

Elites’ hysterical claims verify René Girard’s observation that concern for victims overwhelms modern culture and signals a genuine exhaustion of all other sources of authority.  Elites’ vulgar claims regarding race also ignore evidence showing that Asian-American women surpass white men in weekly earnings, as well as data showing that Syrian-Americans, Korean-Americans, and Filipino-Americans had significantly higher median household incomes than whites.  They also have higher test scores, lower incarceration rates, and longer life expectancies.  Indeed, African-born black women had higher earnings than U.S.-born white women.

A leaked document shows the EU seeking to clear Jews from Judea and Samaria By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/12/a_leaked_document_shows_the_eu_seeking_to_clear_jews_from_judea_and_samaria.html

Europe has always dreamed of being Judenrein (Jew-free). Even as countries that the Nazis occupied bemoaned their fate, most cooperated with the mandate to turn over their Jews, some more enthusiastically than others (Ukraine, I’m looking at you). The impulse lives on, whether it’s the way in which Europe has spent decades inviting in Arabs who hate the Jews every bit as much as the Nazis did or the way it has undermined Israel at every turn. Regarding the latter effort, a leaked EU document shows that the EU has a secret plan to turn the Jewish sections of Judea and Samaria over to the “Palestinians.”

I should explain why I put the word “Palestinians” in quotation marks. It’s because they are an invented people, a product of Yassir Arafat’s manufactured history for the region. The scant number of Arabs who populated the swampy, fever-ridden land that marked the Biblical nations of Israel and Judah–land that had been a continuous home to the Jews for almost 4,000 years–was a mix of Tunisians, Algerians, and random Arabs who drifted there beginning in the early 1800s when the land was a colony of the Ottoman Empire.

It was the Romans who imposed the name “Palestine” on the Jewish land they controlled as a colony. They did so as an insult, to remind the Jews under their rule of the hated Philistines. There has never been a Palestinian nation. It is a name that reflects only colonial rule, whether Roman, Ottoman, or British.

San Francisco Dying A city in a death spiral.Michael Letts

https://www.frontpagemag.com/san-francisco-dying/

You may have heard the phrase, “Get woke, go broke.” It has become a common phrase in the past few years, mainly because it keeps proving itself true.

San Francisco is a prime example of the death spiral going broke puts cities, businesses, and people into.

The city has long been a bastion of liberalism. When it became fashionable after the death of George Floyd to defund the police, the city jumped at the chance. The people elected a prosecutor who was willing to allow criminals to go free.

This led to police resigning and crime in the city skyrocketing. Not only did violent crime rise, so did public drug use and homeless encampments because no one would enforce those laws.

The citizens and some government officials suddenly realized that police were needed. Politicians tried to refund the department as citizens called for police to enforce the laws.

The problem was the city has slipped into the death spiral. Even as politicians tried to pull it back, the crime problem led to citizens and companies leaving the cities in droves. San Francisco now has some of the lowest office occupancy rates in the country, “thanks to the tech companies that make the city’s lifeblood retreating to remote work, San Francisco has seen residents move to the suburbs – pushed also by rising crime,” the Daily Mail reported.

This has reduced the tax base, which means there is less money available to fund cities programs and services.

To compensate, programs and services will need to be cut or taxes raised. Both of which will drive more people from the city, leaving behind those most in needs of programs and less likely to be contributing much to the city’s coffers through taxes.

Most Americans Don’t Know How Bad the Border Crisis Is Now we see what happens when the media ignore a story. by Byron York

https://www.frontpagemag.com/most-americans-dont-know-how-bad-the-border-crisis-is/

This week could mark the most consequential development on the U.S.-Mexico border since January 2021, when President Joe Biden essentially opened the nation’s doors to millions of illegal border crossers. Depending on how court fights turn out, Title 42, the Trump-era measure that allows the U.S. government to quickly return illegal crossers to Mexico on the grounds of preventing the spread of COVID, will likely soon expire. After that, officials expect a flood of illegal crossers, all coming into the United States confident that they, like hundreds of thousands before them just this year, will be allowed to stay.

The disaster will come on top of the Biden administration’s currently disastrous border policy. In fiscal year 2022, the period from Oct. 1, 2021 to Sept. 30, 2022, Border Patrol agents encountered a record number of migrants crossing illegally into the United States — 2,378,944. Add onto that the estimated 600,000 illegal crossers who got away without any contact with the Border Patrol, and that means close to 3 million border crossers in a single year. The two months since the beginning of the new fiscal year have seen crossings at an even higher rate. And that is before the Title 42 change.

Already, the numbers have risen to unheard-of levels. Recently the Border Patrol reported encountering 16,000 migrants in just 48 hours — 8,000 per day. Compare that to the assessment of Jeh Johnson, President Barack Obama’s head of homeland security, who once said that 1,000 encounters a day constituted a crisis. Now, there are predictions that post-Title 42 encounters might hit as many as 14,000 a day.

Cities and towns along the border have been overwhelmed since the Biden changes took place. Look at these figures from El Paso, Texas, in a story by the Washington Examiner’s Anna Giaritelli: “According to all the data that are publicly available from the city, the 678,000 residents of El Paso have seen 84,082 immigrants released into their town between August 22 and December 11.” That’s an extraordinary influx in the last few months, repeated in other U.S. communities along the border.

Whither Canada? By David Solway

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/david-solway-2/2022/12/26/whither-canada-2-n1656418

How much can one country endure of this arrogance and deception?
– Brian Peckford, Peckford42

Canada has been much on my mind these days, weeks, months, and years, not only because I am a Canadian citizen, but because, like many of my American friends, I am witnessing firsthand the destruction of a country.

The current prime minister’s campaign, amounting to a kind of jihad, to destabilize the nation and create the world’s first “post-national state” proceeds on many levels. Among them, as I have previously catalogued, are a burgeoning national debt, a series of repressive bills making their way through parliament (C-4, C-11, C-12 and C-18), a prohibitive and unnecessary carbon tax, the deliberate destruction of the energy sector, the impending rollout of digital ID surveillance technology, and the notorious invoking of the deeply flawed and inappropriate Emergencies Act to deal with the Truckers’ Freedom Convoy protesting the vaccine mandates. This last travesty was compounded by the government’s striking a Commission of Inquiry in which it set its own terms and appointed its own Commissioner.

PM Justin Trudeau’s declared purpose of protecting Canadians’ health via the vaxx mandates by, among other initiatives, attacking the Truckers as violent, racist, and homophobic was a false-flag operation. As constitutional lawyer Leighton Grey persuasively argues, Trudeau’s “ultimate goal, which the COVID-19 pandemic helped governments like Trudeau’s to advance,” is nothing less than “total surveillance and corresponding control of human populations.”

Grey cites Ayn Rand’s dictum from The New Left: “Civilization is the progress of a society towards privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.” The surveillance state pursued by autocratic governments like Trudeau’s Liberals seeks to achieve the precise opposite: a society of obeisant serfs controlled by an all-powerful panoptic administrative regime. One recalls H.L. Mencken’s pregnant adage: “The urge to save humanity is almost always a false-front for the urge to rule.”

U.S. Voters (Overwhelmingly) Want Their Old Election System Back: I&I/TIPP Poll Terry Jones

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/12/26/u-s-voters-overwhelmingly-want-their-old-election-system-back-ii-tipp-poll/

As 2022 nears an end, another election season has also come to a close. Time for second thoughts, and ideas about what to do to fix an election system that many Americans believe is irretrievably broken. As it turns out, voters have some very strong opinions about that very topic, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll shows.

The recent midterm elections were once again marked by claims of voter fraud and possible ballot manipulation behind the scenes by partisan actors, including even election officials. So we asked Americans of all political stripes and demographic backgrounds what rules and practices would they support to make our electoral system more fair?

More specifically, in our online I&I/TIPP Poll, taken from Dec. 7-9, we asked 1,094 registered voters to select among three possible reforms or rule changes: “Requiring voters to show a photo I.D. to vote,” “Stricter mail-in voting,” and “Banning ballot harvesting.”

The answers showed an overwhelming sentiment in favor of change.

But by far the strongest response was for “Requiring voters to show a photo I.D. to vote.” It garnered 83% support from registered voters, with 60% saying they would support it “strongly” and 22% saying they would support it “somewhat.” Just 12% said they would not support a move, with just 6% saying they would oppose it “strongly,” about the same as those who said they would oppose it somewhat (7%).

The numbers may not add to 100% due to rounding. But the point is clear. Americans are hungry to have their elections once again based on solid identification of the voters with official I.D.s.