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Ruth King

The Real ‘Reset’ Is Coming The prophets of the new world order sowed the wind and they will soon reap the whirlwind of an angry public worn out by elite incompetence, arrogance, and ignorance. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2022/03/23/the-real-reset-is-coming/

Joe Biden believes the Ukraine war will mark the start of a “new world order.” 

In the middle of the COVID global pandemic, Klaus Schwab and global elites likewise announced a “Great Reset.” 

Accordingly, the nations of the world would have to surrender their sovereignty to an international body of experts. They would enlighten us on taxes, diversity, and green policies. 

When Donald Trump got elected in 2016, marquee journalists announced partisan reporting would have to displace the old, supposedly disinterested approach to the news. 

There is a common theme here. 

In normal times progressives worry that they do not have public support for their policies. 

Only in crises do they feel that the political Left and media can merge to use apocalyptic times to ram through usually unpopular approaches to foreign and domestic problems. 

We saw that last year: fleeing from Afghanistan, the embrace of critical race theory, trying to end the filibuster, pack the court, junk the Electoral College, and nationalize voting laws. 

These “new orders” and “resets” always entail far bigger government and more unelected, powerful bureaucracies. Elites assume that their radical changes in energy use, media reporting, voting, sovereignty, and racial and ethnic quotas will never quite apply to themselves, the architects of such top-down changes. 

So we common folk must quit fossil fuels, but not those who need to use corporate jets. Walls will not mar our borders but will protect the homes of Nancy Pelosi, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates. 

Expansionist Islam Is Putin’s war distracting us from another threat? William Kilpatrick

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/03/expansionist-islam-william-kilpatrick/

While the world justifiably worries about the expansion of Russia under Vladimir Putin, another world power is slowly expanding its reach.

It’s called Islam.  Unlike Russia, Islam is not one large land mass, but it does cover a lot of territory. There are 57 member nations in the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) making the OIC the largest voting bloc in the United Nations.

The world’s attention is currently focused on Russia, but it would be unwise to forget about Islam.  Whereas the population of Russia is about 145 million and declining, Islam’s global population is approximately 1.8 billion and growing.  

It’s becoming clear that Russia under Putin is expansionist.  But it’s difficult to know to what extent.  Will Russia be satisfied in neutralizing Ukraine?  Or does it hope to reassert control over its former satellites in Europe? Or does it seek to control all of Europe?

Coincidentally, some of the territory that Russia covets was once controlled by Islam, and many Muslims believe that any territory once conquered by Islam still belongs to Islam.

Like today’s Russia, Islam is expansionist.  Subjugating the entire world under the rule of Allah is, arguably, the chief purpose of Islam.  And history confirms that gobbling up land in order to spread the faith is precisely what Islam has always done.

Within 100 years of Muhammad’s death, Islam had conquered all of North Africa and Spain as well. And the conquests continued for many centuries.  About half of the world’s great empires were Islamic empires and some of them were of immense size and power.

Modern Day Brown Shirts Suppress Free Speech at Yale Law Why the heckler’s veto is wrong and why universities must prevent its use. Richard L. Cravatts

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/03/modern-day-brown-shirts-suppress-free-speech-yale-richard-l-cravatts/

As further confirmation that universities have devolved into islands of repression in a sea of freedom, some 120 Yale Law School students seriously disrupted a March 10th event. Sponsored by the Yale Federalist Society, the event featured Kristen Waggoner, lead counsel for the conservative Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), and Monica Miller of the progressive American Humanist Association (AHA), appearing together on the panel to discuss (ironically, it turns out) free speech issues. 

Yale’s LGBTQ students had already mobilized their opposition to the appearance of Waggoner, particularly because ADF, they claimed in a flyer they distributed, “is an organization designated by the SPLC [Southern Poverty Law Center] as a hate group” and that the Federalist Society’s invitation to Waggoner provided “a veneer of respectability [that] is part of what allows this group to do work that attacks the very lives of LGBTQ people in the US and globally.” Once it has been predetermined that the organization for which Waggoner is lead counsel was anti-gay, it no longer mattered what she would say at the event. The moral scolds at Yale Law School had already decided she should be canceled and forbidden from giving her opinions about anything at all.

Preventing someone with opposing views to even speak, to make his or her opinions known and heard by the campus community, means that the disruptors are so sure of their beliefs, so positive that their perception is the valid one, the only true one, that they are comfortable with suppressing the alternate beliefs and ideology of those whose speech they seek to silence. Students, even graduate law students, are certainly not omniscient nor do they know the single truths about a range of topics guest speakers bring into debates. Their experience is insufficient to make them credible arbiters of what may be said, and what must not be said, on university campuses. 

They do not have the moral right or intellectual capacity to gauge what is bad speech and what is good speech.

Yes, Ketanji Brown Jackson Accused America of War Crimes. The Media is Lying About It. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2022/03/yes-ketanji-brown-jackson-accused-america-war-daniel-greenfield/

Fact checks were an Orwellian farce before all this. Now they’re just editorials that try to tell you that black is white and white is black.

The media’s hysterical efforts to spin Ketanji Brown Jackson’s record has escalated into an insistence that she didn’t say the things she said.

Jackson had filed a petition on behalf of Gitmo terrorists (she claims that federal public defenders don’t pick their clients, but she continued to be involved in Gitmo cases on a pro bono basis even after moving on to a law firm) and in a petition on behalf of the terrorists, which named President Bush, Rumsfeld and others, accused the United States of America of acts that “constitute war crimes and/or crimes against humanity”.

There’s zero ambiguity in this regard. It’s there in black and white.

The Border Is Open, and al-Qaeda Is Calling on Jihadis to Come In And most Americans don’t even know there’s a jihad threat from which they need to be saved. Robert Spencer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/03/border-open-and-al-qaeda-calling-jihadis-come-robert-spencer/

Old Joe Biden’s handlers have essentially erased the Southern border, and as a result, illegals are streaming in at a rapid clip. Even the New York Times, a reliable Leftist propaganda organ, admitted last October that “migrants were encountered 1.7 million times in the last 12 months, the highest number of illegal crossings recorded since at least 1960.” A new record could be set in 2022, as the UK’s Daily Mail reported Thursday that “more than 170,000 migrants are waiting on the Mexican-side of the U.S.-Mexico border to cross and claim asylum” once the Biden administration trashes, as it is expected to do, Title 42, a Trump-era provision that allowed illegal migrants to be expelled during the COVID-19 hysteria. And as all this is unfolding, al-Qaeda has published a new online magazine encouraging jihad terrorists to immigrate to the United States and commit massacres here. It looks as if yet another Biden-caused disaster is in the offing.

Those 170,000 migrants, according to the Daily Mail, will be just the beginning: “The U.S. could be just hours away from another wave of mass migration if the Biden administration lifts Title 42.” Who are these people who will stream in? What is their background? Come on, man! Nobody knows, and apparently, no one in the Biden administration cares. They’re coming here, they’ll go on welfare, they’ll vote Democrat, and that’s all that matters. Criminals? Terrorists? Maybe — indeed, probably — but who cares?

A BIG NO ON KETANJI BROWN JACKSON

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/03/24/a-big-no-on-ketanji-brown-jackson/

We’ve now listened to three days of a scheduled full week of testimony by Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson. And to be honest, we’ve heard enough. Anyone who truly cares about the Constitution and the rule of law should reject Jackson.

Jackson has a winning smile and pleasant demeanor. Those are nice personal traits, but not ones that necessarily elevate you to the Supreme Court.

Still, she’s also a Harvard Law grad, clerked for Justice Steven Breyer, worked as a public defender, served on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia from 2013 to 2021, and was confirmed by the Senate to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit just last year.

But do those credentials really matter? Maybe they should, but unfortunately they’re mostly political window dressing.

Warhol: The Void Beneath the Emptiness Matthew White

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2022/01/warhol-the-void-beneath-the-emptiness/

Warhol, A Life as Art
by Blake Gopnik
Penguin, 2021, 976 pages, $35

“If you threw dead donkeys at people, they threw money back,” wrote George Orwell in partial explanation of the success of Salvador Dali. Surrealism was an influential example to Andy Warhol too, who, as Blake Gopnik tells us, was a life-long fan of Dali and his pranks. Like Dali, Warhol moved from painting to the more graphic possibilities of film, and, like Dali, Warhol indulged a taste for obscenity. The connections in sensibility are closer than one would think: Dali, like Warhol, had worked as a window dresser for the Bonwit Teller department store in New York, and Warhol even inherited a “muse” from Dali, one Isabelle Dufresne, known as “Ultra Violet”, a French over-dresser, as one of his Factory harpies.

And then there was Marcel Duchamp, the arch-Dadaist, who discovered the “ready-mades” by placing a porcelain urinal on a pedestal in a gallery, signing it “R MUTT 1917”, and declaring it art. So was conceptual art born, in which the idee outranked the objet in importance, a form of art in which Warhol was formally schooled and which he and some other artists used to eventually annihilate the importance of the object altogether. At many turns in the road of Warhol’s career Gopnik identifies a Duchampian precedent, which is a salutary reminder that not only was Warhol often derivative, but his inspiration involved a good deal of ironic humour at the expense of his clients. Warhol developed a deliberate Sphinx-like demeanour as an accompaniment to the art, which was easy to misidentify as profundity rather than cheek. Duchamp, having made his point about the pea-and-thimble trick of Aestheticism, and with characteristic Dadaist unpredictability, at least had the decency to retire early with Gallic sangfroid—he gave up art for chess in 1923—but Warhol was never satisfied with what he had achieved (or earned) with Pop Art, and muddled on until the peculiar circumstances of his own legend turned him into a commercial phenomenon.

Ukraine: Where News Goes to Die Salvatore Babones

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2022/03/ukraine-where-news-goes-to-die/

War is hell, and truth doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance. With all stories of violence and bloodshed coming out of eastern Europe, readers might be forgiven for missing the news that Ukraine’s defender of democracy and champion of freedom Volodymyr Zelensky suspended 11 opposition political parties over the weekend. This comes just after he nationalised all broadcast media to enforce a “unified information policy” under martial law. Ukraine’s liberal president Volodymyr Zelensky is looking increasingly like Canada’s Liberal prime minister Justin Trudeau. As the war drags on, he is approaching the stature of New Zealand’s “single source of truth”, Jacinda Ardern. No wonder the global media loves him.

State media has at least one advantage over private media: it’s not paywalled. Well, unless it’s the ABC. Let’s hope for Ukraine’s sake that Zelensky’s state media also gets the news out more quickly than America’s private media. Just last week, the New York Times finally confirmed that Hunter Biden’s laptop actually was his and the e-mails revealing how he traded on his father’s influence actually were real. Then this week the Gray Lady verified Ashley Biden’s diary, which detailed disturbing aspects of her family’s home life. Both stories originally surfaced in October, 2020. Thank you, Rupert.

Truth will out—eventually. And what better time to out it than during a war, with wall-to-wall news coverage featuring images of death and destruction, and all the chat shows debating the risks (and benefits?) of provoking a nuclear exchange with the latter-day Adolf Hitler, Vladimir Putin. Anyway Hunter’s laptop had to be acknowledged sooner or later: Biden fils may soon be indicted on tax and foreign influence charges. And with the liberal establishment pushing to have Project Veritas indicted for “stealing” Ashley’s diary, it is getting increasingly difficult to maintain that it is a fabrication.

If there are any other dead bodies in the Democratic Party cupboard, now is the time to dump them.

Freedom for Freedom’s Sake Kurt Hofer

https://americanmind.org/salvo/freedom-for-freedoms-sake/

Do we have a goal in mind as we begin a new global war?

“In standing up to Russia and China, are we standing up for freedom of speech and equality before the law, or for “antiracism” and “equity”? Are we mobilizing the totality of our cultural and economic might in the name of traditional nationalism and traditional religion, or of globalism and woke identity politics?”

EXCERPTS

“….. I was in a graduate school class on revolutionary film in Cold War Latin America. Images of Che and Fidel were juxtaposed against those of black civil rights protesters being fire-hosed and Bull Connor’s shepherds snarling and taking down marchers. Much time had passed, but the feeling was the same.

Eventually the intuitions became thoughts; the raw emotions took the shape of ideas. The way I saw America wasn’t how others saw it. The ideas I thought represented America were not the same ones that others held.

In the Cold War, domestic and foreign dissent over America’s role as guarantor of the postwar order of liberal internationalism overlapped like concentric circles and amplified one another. In the nineties, both voices of contention were dissembled beneath the veneer of victory and history’s “end.”

The esprit de corps and bipartisan consensus around arming and defending Ukraine is eerily reminiscent—for many of us, I suspect—of the same “consensus,” composed mostly of the two political parties and mainstream talking-head media outlets, that enabled the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and before that, the war to liberate Kosovo from the Serbs and the Serbian identity, and, before that, the first Gulf War. The heady heights of liberal internationalism, however, can easily yield to the depths of self-doubt. As much as it pains me to acknowledge the incisiveness of beatniks and hippies, the question still looms, just as urgently—if not more so—a half-century later: What are we fighting for?

Social-Justice Activism Invades Medical School By George Leef

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/social-justice-activism-invades-medical-school/

“These “social justice” moves won’t improve medical care; they will waste time and resources on ideological distractions.”

Almost none of the people who run educational institutions in America these days can resist the temptation to signal their virtue (and curry favor with various interest groups) by embracing “social justice,” “anti-racism,” and other leftist tropes. It was bad enough when it was happening in English departments, but now we find it in more worrisome places, such as medical schools.

The University of North Carolina’s medical school is one of them and in today’s Martin Center article, John Sailor examines the controversy.

After criticism of the school’s initial announcement of its new initiatives, it released an “Update” document. Sailor finds that document to be neither clarifying nor relieving. He writes, “Many of the recommendations flirt with violating academic freedom. They include ‘Revise Promotion and Tenure Guidelines to include a social justice domain required for promotion’ and ‘Directors of all phases will begin to examine and change content as needed to include anti-racist concepts as defined in the objectives.’”