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Ruth King

Civilization Cannot Exist Without Righteous Retribution The minimum standard for any culture to survive. by Kurt Schlichter

https://www.frontpagemag.com/civilization-cannot-exist-without-righteous-retribution/

The only thing about the fact that a jury found that the degenerate scumbag who murdered seventeen people should not be executed is that it was just one nimrod juror who held out not to give the vermin the death he deserves. Statistically, even in a red state like Florida, it’s difficult to find a group of twelve people without a moral illiterate or two. In blue venues, it’s hard to find any moral literates at all.

Here’s the thing – a civilization that cannot come up with the moral testicularity to execute a creature who murders over a dozen of its children is a civilization in serious trouble. The minimum standard for any culture that intends on surviving – and surviving means dealing with the barbarians within and without – is to take its own side in the fight for survival. Eventually, there will be a backlash. The only question is how ugly it will be.

This injustice in the Sunshine State – appropriately deplored by Governor DeSantis – is a symptom of the larger problem. You see it manifested across our culture – suicidal tolerance and performative forgiveness. In places like Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and other blue cities – it is always blue cities – the inhabitants murder each other with glee. But more than that, they generally act like savages. We have all seen the videos. Random creeps menacing citizens on the subways, packs of thugs raiding convenience stores or shopping malls, pitched battles between groups of aspiring Einsteins in Walmarts, animals cold-cocking citizens who are simply minding their own business. But no one stops them. No one holds them to account. The cops’ shrug, because the blue politicians have told them to stand down. The answer to those of us who protest is always the same – shut up, racist, and also give us your guns so that you cannot defend yourself from what the government refuses to suppress.

39 Years after Marine Barracks Bombing in Beirut And the killers have still not been brought to justice. by Kenneth R. Timmerman

https://www.frontpagemag.com/39-years-after-marine-barracks-bombing-in-beirut/

Ken Timmerman’s 12th book of non-fiction, And the Rest is History: Tales of Hostages, Arms Dealers, Dirty Tricks, and Spies, was recently released by Post Hill Press. Timmerman was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 and has covered the Middle East for 40 years.

This Sunday is the 39th anniversary of the Iranian attack on the US Marines barracks in Beirut, which took the life of 241 US Marines. It was the single largest loss of life in the history of the US Marine Corps since the battle of Iwo Jima.

Every year on this date families gather for memorial services around the country to commemorate the lives of these first American victims of Islamic Iran’s vicious, relentless, and still unending war on America.

The attack on the US Marines followed on the heels of the April 18, 1983, attack on the US Embassy in Beirut. In my new book, And the Rest is History: Tales of Hostages, Arms Dealers, Dirty Tricks, and Spies, I call these attacks the “first blood” in Iran’s unending war on America.

For years we have known the names of the main perpetrators. Until now, only one has been brought to justice: Imad Fayez Mughniyeh.

Prior to 9/11, he was the terrorist with the most U.S. blood on his hands. A Lebanese-born Shiite Muslim who worked in Yasser Arafat’s elite Force 17, he was hired by Iran as their chief overseas terrorist once Arafat was forced out of Beirut in September 1982.

Mughniyeh was quick to prove his worth to his new masters with a series of massive car bombs in Lebanon. The first, on Nov. 11, 1982, took down the seven-story Israeli military headquarters in Tyre, Lebanon, killing 67 IDF personnel and Border Guards.

Next was the April 18, 1983, bombing of the U.S. embassy on the Beirut corniche, which I witnessed first-hand. Sixty-three people perished in that blast, including seventeen Americans. Among them were Kenneth Haas and Robert Ames, the CIA’s top spies in the Middle East. Indeed. Mugniyeh’s target was a top secret meeting of CIA station chiefs from around the region. In a single blow, Iran decapitated the Agency’s intelligence apparatus in the region.

A Globalist Coup in Westminster? Six weeks in, the UK swamp brings down Liz Truss. by Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-globalist-coup-in-westminster/

Given what’s happened since her death on September 8, it would’ve been fitting for Queen Elizabeth II, in her final days, to have said, in an echo of Louis XV, “Après moi, le déluge.” Because it’s taken no time at all, since her passing, for the British ship of state to run aground.

In her last official act, on September 6, the Queen invited Liz Truss to succeed Boris Johnson as PM. Johnson – whose Spectator columns I’d read with enthusiasm for years – had been swept into power in a 2019 election in which the Tories won an 80-seat majority. The mandate: to get Brexit done. Boris got it done – sort of – but otherwise, in many ways, he spectacularly betrayed basic Conservative principles.

Backed by many voters who hoped he’d be a British Trump, Boris did little or nothing to tackle his country’s version of the swamp. On his watch, English police ignored Muslim rape gangs and arrested law-abiding citizens for criticizing Islam online. Boris championed strict COVID lockdown rules and mandatory vaccination, but broke the lockdown himself and then lied about it – a move that was used as an excuse to give him the heave-ho.

For me, the big lesson of Boris’s downfall was that a terrific political journalist doesn’t necessarily make a decent prime minister. As it happens, during the last months of his premiership I was fitfully making my way through Charles Moore’s magnificent three-volume biography of Margaret Thatcher. What a woman! The more I read, the more I admire her. It really can feel as if she was born to be prime minister. She had what it took – unshakable core beliefs, strong self-discipline, excellent management skills, etc. – to rescue Britain from socialism and help bring down the USSR. Why wasn’t Boris able to do something similar for the UK – and the world – at a time when globalism was threatening liberal democracy? Could it be he just wasn’t wired for the job? Alas, some writers aren’t good for anything other than writing.

January 6 Committee Doubles as November 8 Committee Even after the Capitol riot show’s season finale, partisan programming may continue. James Freeman

https://www.wsj.com/articles/january-6-committee-doubles-as-november-8-committee-11666297630?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

If the average American voter cared about the Capitol riot committee, she might wonder whether the committee’s members or its targets are more loathsome. All along, citizens have had to either laugh or cry at the spectacle of federal election deniers leading an investigation of federal election denial. But is the partisan congressional committee now interfering in a state campaign?

As for the deniers conducting these proceedings, committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D., Miss.) was among the 31 Democrats who sought to prevent the certification of the re-election of President George W. Bush in 2005.

Committee stalwart Rep. Jamie Raskin (D., Md.) has a long history of refusing to accept Republican wins. He recommended dismantling the Electoral College after the 2000 election and after the 2016 election he attempted to prevent the certification of Donald Trump’s victory and then boycotted the inauguration.

And who could forget Rep. Adam Schiff (D., Calif.), who helped poison our politics by spending years falsely claiming to have “more than circumstantial evidence” of Trump campaign collusion with Russia?

After this season’s final hearing was rescheduled to avoid competing for television viewers with hurricane coverage, one might have thought the partisan shenanigans were finally drawing to a close for this oddball committee comprised exclusively of Democrats and Democrat-approved Republicans. But now there’s a question involving the surprisingly tight gubernatorial race in New York.

The Tory Warning to U.S. Republicans Liz Truss is being made the scapegoat for failed tax-and-spend policies.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-tory-warning-to-u-s-republicans-11666305620?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

For the shortest-tenured Prime Minister in British history, Liz Truss sure has a lot of ignominy loaded on her shoulders. She’s apparently responsible for the fall of the pound, a looming recession, and the political demise of the Conservative Party. All accomplished in a mere 44 days.

Ms. Truss resigned as PM Thursday after a fiasco of a premiership, but the fault is far from hers alone. She is being made the scapegoat for the economic policy blunders that the ruling Conservatives have made over 12 years in power, and especially since 2019 under previous Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

Ms. Truss’s tax cuts lasted two weeks as a mere proposal and never even came to a vote in Parliament. She had told the Tory rank-and-file about her tax plans when she ran to succeed Mr. Johnson. The only surprise she offered in office was a cut in the top marginal income tax rate to 40% from 45%—about £2 billion in lost revenue in a year. Yet this supposedly was the nail that lost the shoe, that lost the horse, that lost the economy.

Ms. Truss certainly mismanaged her policy rollout. She didn’t prepare the country or her party to sell tax cuts after a decade of Tory tax-and-spend politics. She lacked an electoral mandate of her own and only narrowly beat former Chancellor Rishi Sunak in the PM contest. When markets fell after exotic pension fund schemes broke down amid rising interest rates, she lost her nerve. She sacked her first Chancellor and threw over her program. The Tory sharks then went for the kill.

But Ms. Truss didn’t create Britain’s 10.1% inflation rate (blame the Bank of England), didn’t produce energy shortages and price spikes (blame the last two Prime Ministers), and didn’t fail to supervise pensions so they wouldn’t gamble to get higher returns. All of that was in motion before she took office.

Rough political justice would now give the premiership to Mr. Sunak, whose policies contributed to this economic mess. Whoever gets the PM job may be volunteering for a suicide mission, as an election must be held by January 2025. Even the Labour Party could beat this pack of panicked Tories.

The dumbest argument is that Ms. Truss’s fall is a warning to U.S. Republicans not to cut taxes. Ms. Truss wanted pro-growth policies to counter the economic failures of the Boris Johnson Tories, who pursued the policies lauded by America’s big government conservatives: more welfare and healthcare entitlements, green energy subsidies, higher taxes on business, and easy money.

If Republicans want to end up like the Tories, they’ll follow the Boris Johnson-Rishi Sunak tax-and-spend model.

Victor Sharpe: As Time Goes By

https://www.renewamerica.com/columns/sharpe/221019

By one of life’s odd coincidences, I recently finished watching Clint Eastwood’s movie on the rise to power of J. Edgar Hoover when I came across a commentary written by J. R. Nyquist in his blog titled, The Time Traveler’s Lesson. It was of an imaginary interrogation by Hoover himself of a man taken into custody by the FBI claiming to be from the future and describing America in the year 2016.

Back in 1964 and upon hearing the time traveler’s description, Hoover exploded in outrage finding the account the most egregious nonsense he had ever heard. No doubt, Hoover concluded, the man’s description of life in the United States 52 years hence was an unmitigated hoax or the man was certifiably insane. But what was it that the time traveler described which so shocked J. Edgar Hoover?

America in the future would be led for eight years by a man with the partly Arabic name of Barack Hussein Obama who was mentored as a youth by a suspected Communist named Frank Marshall Davis.

The time traveler went on to explain that the leading social question of 2016 would be gay marriage. Hoover angrily asked if it was thought by some to be funny to play such a practical joke on the FBI?

Nor did Hoover credit the time traveler’s absurd claim that the national debt was more than $17 trillion in 2016, or that Venezuela and Nicaragua had been quietly taken over by Fidel Castro’s friends, that Zimbabwe, Angola, South Africa along with the Congo were now in the hands of African Communists, or that North Korea possessed nuclear weapons. None of this was believable. None of it made any sense to someone living in 1964 during the Cold War.

When the time traveler finally reported that the United States was reduced to a state of manufacturing inferiority to Red China, there was an abrupt end to the interview. Hoover angrily exclaimed, ”What self-respecting American official in 1964 could possibly allow himself to be so insolently abused?”

HISTORIC RELEASE: Dr. Anthony Fauci’s Official Work Calendar (November 2019 – March 2020) An hour-by-hour timeline of who Dr. Fauci was talking to, what he was doing, and where his meetings were in the months before and after the public disclosure of the pandemic. Adam Andrzejewski

https://openthebooks.substack.com/p/historic-release-dr-anthony-faucis

On Tuesday, January 14, 2020 at 9am, Dr. Anthony Fauci joined staff at the National Security Council (NSC) — the President’s national security and foreign policy advisory shop — for a meeting in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building about the novel coronavirus. Fauci would continue to have meetings in classified settings throughout the month.

Fauci’s calendar entries included NSC meetings, White House Situation Room meetings, and meetings in other classified settings, as Covid-19 was breaking in China. (To our knowledge, the existence of these meetings before January 28, 2020 were not previously disclosed.)

On Friday, January 24th, four days after China admitted human-to-human transmission of the virus, Fauci started attending a small group Covid discussion that first took place in “Anthony’s Office” in a building next to the White House. Anthony, in this case, appears to be an NSC employee and an expert in biodefense and China.

Flashing back to December 2019, when patients in Wuhan were showing up at hospitals with unidentified pneumonia cases, Fauci attended the National Institutes of Health — Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation dinner and workshops on December 19 and 20th – the sixth annual event for NIH staff and Gates Foundation executives.

On the morning of the 19th, billionaire Bill Gates tweeted out his own hopes for the coming year and his now prescient prediction: “one of the best buys in global health: vaccines.”

Today, we only know about these meetings, because our organization at OpenTheBooks.com, in partnership with the public-interest law firm Judicial Watch, sued the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in federal court. NIH had refused to even acknowledge our Freedom of Information Act request.

So, for the first time, here is our exclusive release of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s official calendar:

Awakening from the “Defund” Nightmare Progressive commentators are beginning to notice the damage their criminal-justice policies have wrought in America’s most vulnerable communities. Rav Arora

https://www.city-journal.org/progressives-awakening-from-defund-the-police-nightmare?wallit_nosession=1

Over the past few weeks, several top progressive commentators have completely reversed their views on “defunding police” and adopted a more tough-on-crime approach. Most notably, Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian—key figures of the premier progressive outlet The Young Turks—have awakened to the grim consequences of the policies they initially supported.

Uygur recently posted a viral tweet lambasting the “defund the police” movement as “wildly counterproductive framing” and asking progressives when they will “admit they were wrong?” These statements contrast starkly with Uygur’s tweets during the nationwide George Floyd protests: “I’m done. I’m now supporting #DefundThePolice 100%. I already agreed with the substance of the argument & now I’m down for the framing, too.”

The irony of Uygur’s recent statement is that he fails to answer the very question he poses to the Left: he has not acknowledged that he was wrong. In fact, prominent liberal commentators on platforms from The Young Turks to CNN helped popularize the movement that led to massive cuts to police department budgets in 2020. Major cities such as New York City, Los Angeles, Seattle, Austin, and San Francisco slashed funding for their departments amid an unprecedented rise in officer retirements and low officer morale. The financial, cultural, legal, and psychological ramifications of the Black Lives Matter-fueled defund-police movement correlated with record-breaking 30 percent rise in homicides in 2020, followed by another 6 percent rise last year.

Meantime, Uygur’s fellow Young Turks commentator Ana Kasparian has generated a progressive social media backlash for criticizing soft-on-crime prosecution in California. In a clip that went viral on Twitter, Kasparian decries the events leading up to 20-year-old Carlos Delcid’s alleged killing of an off-duty Monterey Park police officer last month. Before the shooting, Delcid had been sentenced to 180 days in prison, but L.A. district attorney George Gascón dropped three of the five felony charges (including witness intimidation, false imprisonment, and assault with a deadly weapon), resulting in his release the next day.

Biden’s Lies About Energy Can No Longer Be Ignored

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/10/21/bidens-lies-about-energy-can-no-longer-be-ignored/

It’s stunning to hear President Biden (and the rest of the Democrats) spin our growing energy crisis. Like a child with his hand caught in the cookie jar, Biden continually tells the American people, “I didn’t do it!” In fact, yes he did. And he still is.

“Let’s debunk some myths: My administration has not stopped or slowed U.S. oil production,” Biden said on Wednesday, adding that he’s “doing everything in my power to reduce gasoline prices.”

Is that true? In fact, the entire energy policy of the Biden administration has been directed at not just slowing, but stopping U.S. oil production. The intended result: Higher gasoline prices for consumers, yet another Bidenflation tax on American families that is already pushing many to the brink of financial insolvency.

That’s not a partisan talking point, by the way. Even his own administration’s energy officials admit that the goal of the administration is to get rid of fossil fuels by raising prices. They just don’t want it now, before the 2022 midterm elections.

Oil output must be limited in order to “make sure that we’re in a better footing to accelerate the transition,” said Amos Hochstein, Biden’s Special Presidential Coordinator for International Energy Affairs.

By the way, we wrote about this back in March of this year, when Biden was fixated on blaming Russia’s dictator Vladimir Putin for our self-inflicted energy woes.

“Putin’s war is already hurting American families at the gas pump . . . I’m going to do everything I can to minimize Putin’s price hike here at home,” Biden said, as he banned Russian oil imports.

Just as he did back then, Biden this week blamed U.S. oil companies for the energy mess.

“You’re sitting on record profits and we’re giving you more certainty so you can act now to increase oil production now,” Biden said.

More certainty? Record profits? Sure enough, as energy prices soared recently, quarterly oil company profits jumped along with them. But that’s only part of the story.

Behind the anti-Bibi camp’s vilification of Ben-Gvir By RUTHIE BLUM

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-720196

With each passing day ahead of the fast-approaching November 1 Knesset elections, the rhetoric against opposition leader and Likud Party chairman Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu increases in volume and vitriol. Gossip disguised as investigative reportage keeps cropping up about the former prime minister vying to return to the premiership. 

This is coupled with, and often overshadowed by, warnings about the perils of a government that includes MK Itamar Ben-Gvir, No. 2 on the Religious Zionist Party slate. The right-wing firebrand is not only certain to retain his parliamentary seat, but – given his soaring popularity in the polls – will be a prominent figure in a Netanyahu-forged coalition. 

The mudslinging consists of rival politicians and leftist pundits shouting daily from podiums and op-ed pages that Netanyahu will stop at nothing to return to the helm; that Ben-Gvir is a fascist; and that a victory for their camp will mean an end to Israeli democracy.

The ridiculous accusations would be funny if they weren’t echoed in the halls of Washington and Brussels by Israel’s ill-wishers, as well as by ignorant fellow travelers.

Less understood outside of Israel is the real reason that the anti-Netanyahu choir has been singing so loudly about Ben-Gvir. Prime Minister Yair Lapid cannot form a coalition without the backing of the Arab parties. Even with all three of them, he still falls short of the necessary 61-mandate majority. 

One of these is the United Arab List (Ra’am). Though it is the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated southern branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel, its chairman, MK Mansour Abbas, became the first of his ilk to join a governing coalition.