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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Biden exposes himself on national TV By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/10/biden_exposes_himself_on_national_tv.html

No, he didn’t pull his pants down but he certainly let the awful contents of his brains hang out for all to see.

Last night, CNN held an invitation-only “town hall” for Biden in Baltimore. The audience was beyond friendly, the questions were obviously vetted, and Anderson Cooper was there to hold Biden’s hand. And still, as the RNC’s Twitter feed reveals, Biden repeatedly showcased his weirdness, incipient dementia, inability to lead, and sheer heartlessness. No wonder only 27% of likely voters are confident that Brandon…er, Biden is up to the job.

I must be honest here: I didn’t watch the town hall. I doubt many did. However, the good people at RNC Research did watch and the clips they shared are illuminating.

What caught everyone’s attention was the moment when Biden combined his creepy whisper with the “White supremacy symbol.” And yes, I know that was a 4Chan hoax, but leftists have used it to go after multiple innocent people, everyone from Navy cadets to Hispanic truck drivers to firefighters to Brett Kavanaugh-supporting lawyers. I doubt they’ll go after the one who has a long history of racism and hanging out with White supremacists.

Intersectionality and American Anti-Semitism How to understand – and counter – the plague of anti-Semitism in America today. Kenneth Levin

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/intersectionality-and-american-anti-semitism-kenneth-levin/

The term “intersectionality” has gained prominence – initially on the nation’s campuses and now well beyond academia – as signifying the supposed shared, “intersecting,” predicaments of racial and ethnic groups, particularly “people of color” (and to a lesser degree women and sexual minorities), victimized by white male racism and its history of imperialism, colonialism, exploitation and slavery.

Promoters of the intersectionality concept have sought to use it to forge a common political agenda among at least some of the groups deemed as falling within the intersectionality rubric, to mount a shared fight against these groups’ perceived oppressors. But perhaps the most substantive campaign mounted by intersectionality allies – most notably elements of the African-American community and of the Islamist/Palestinian community in America – has been to themselves become oppressors, targeting American Jews for defamation, intimidation and physical attack. In doing so, they have joined forces not only with the Far Left in America, which has almost invariably used Jew-hatred as a political tool, but also with white extremist groups, including white supremacists and neo-Nazis, sharing with them anti-Jewish rhetoric and memes, tactics and mutual support. Together, intersectional allies have generated the astronomical rise in attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions in present-day America.

Consideration of the roots of this intersectional alliance and of what drives each party’s anti-Semitism casts light not only on the dynamics of the current assault on American Jews but also on the reality that that assault is not simply derivative of hostility towards Israel and Zionism. Rather, American Jews are a primary target and the anti-Israel animus is at least as much derived from hatred of American Jews as vice versa.  

Even before the recent increase in anti-Semitic incidents, FBI statistics on hate crimes in America had consistently shown that Jews, representing less than 2% of the American population, had been by far the religious community most victimized by such crimes. (The most recent annual statistics, for 2020, showed 57.5% of religion-based hate crimes were against Jews. The next closest targeted community was Muslims, who were the victims of 8.8% of such crimes.) That pattern, and the anti-Semitic predilections of the groups perpetrating it, have long pre-dated those groups’ coming together in part under the intersectionality mantle.

American Anti-Semitism and the Red-Green-Black Alliance

The four major sources of attacks on Jews in America are white supremacists, black nationalists/supremacists, Muslim and Palestinian supremacists, and progressivist/Marxist ideologues.

The American institution most associated today with anti-Semitism is academia.

The Reality of ‘Anti-Racism’ Across America How Midwestern farmers, New York students, Seattle cops, Oakland teachers, and art docents in Chicago are collateral damage in an ideological war.Leighton Woodhouse

The dogma of “anti-racism” began with an incontrovertible reality: For centuries, black Americans have been the victims of structural and often violent discrimination — slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, and attitudes and norms that, to this day, exacerbate poverty and racial disparity. Where anti-racism made its radical departure was in its view about how to fix this knotty problem. 

The proposed solution was no longer what Martin Luther King and Thurgood Marshall taught: that all human beings are created equal and therefore any kind of discrimination is evil. Instead, it was, explicitly, to embrace discrimination, but this time as a tool of “equity.” In practice, this meant racial discrimination against white and Asian people.

This vision of anti-racism, as imagined by Ibram X. Kendi and others, is no longer confined to universities and academic journals. It has long since escaped the confines of the quad and has seeped into so many corners of American life. And rather than eradicating racism, it has re-racialized the people and the places it has touched.

Across the country, there are a series of low-level battles unfolding — on campus, in the classroom, in the courtroom, in the boardroom and at the city council. But also: in farms in the Upper Midwest and the South, in bars and restaurants, in our major urban police forces.

The point is this: In late 2021, these ideas aren’t just ideas. Nor are they confined to elite institutions.They are affecting countless, less visible, ordinary Americans — and they are stoking a backlash that, I fear, we are only seeing the beginning of.

Here’s just some of what’s happening:

Farmers Versus Farmers

In March, President Biden signed the Rescue Plan Act, which was meant to help Americans still reeling from Covid-19. The bill set aside $4 billion just for farmers of color — who have been losing ground for years and now comprise just 2 percent of all American farmers. This was, supporters claimed, restorative justice, given that they had been especially hard hit by generations of systemic racism that stretched back to colonial times.

Get Smart About What Really Happened in the 2020 Election by J. Christian Adams

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17833/what-happened-2020-election

Two ingredients drove the outcome in the 2020 elections: First, private philanthropy injected into government election offices and, second, a banana-republic style suspension of agreed-upon election rules. You didn’t need much outright voter fraud when these two ingredients combined to poison the 2020 election.

The CTCL took “ZuckBucks” and with extreme, strategic precision, re-granted it to thousands of government election officials to “help” them conduct the 2020 election. It converted election offices in key jurisdictions with deep reservoirs of Biden votes into Formula One turnout-machines.

Now, after the fact, some states are fixing the problem and banning private money to government election offices. They should ban it. Florida, Texas, Arizona, Georgia and Iowa have prohibited election offices from receiving private money.

City employees roamed door to door with armfuls of blank ballots, knocking and pushing people at home to vote in a process entirely foreign to state laws. Ballots were collected and delivered by others who had been strictly banned from touching someone else’s ballot before COVID. Over and over, the rules broke down.

After the last election, many of us hoped for a champion to undo voter fraud, that certain thing that drove President Donald Trump from office. A “Kraken.” A powerful force of nature, a metaphor of strength, rising from the depths, restorative of truth and proper process. And unlike the Kraken of legend and Hollywood, a purported force of good.

Failure to understand the complex architecture and confusing events of the 2020 election makes it more likely that something like it will happen again. Indeed, the destabilizing forces at work in 2020 are emboldened by their success. The philanthropic streams of money that fueled the 2020 outcome still exist. They are looking toward 2022 midterm elections to do it all over again.

Liberal Anti-Semitism Strikes Again By Judson Berger

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/liberal-anti-semitism-strikes-again/

Caroline writes here about how the progressive climate-activist group Sunrise DC just withdrew from speaking at a D.C. statehood rally over the participation of Jewish organizations:

The Washington, D.C., chapter of climate activist organization Sunrise movement canceled its speaking appearance at a rally for D.C. statehood and federal voting legislation over Zionist Jewish groups’ participation in the event.

Sunrise DC cited the Jewish Council on Public Affairs, the National Council of Jewish Women, and the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism as groups that support Zionism and the State of Israel in its withdrawal letter.

“Given our commitment to racial justice, self-governance, and indigenous sovereignty, we oppose Zionism and any state that enforces its ideology,” the statement read.

The organization then accused Israel, which it called a “colonial project,” of illegally occupying Palestine and engaging in “violent oppressive tactics that go against the values we advocate for as a hub.”

Sunrise DC also urged a sponsor of the march to revoke the groups’ membership in its coalition.

This reminds me of an incident over the summer when organizers of a Philadelphia food festival disinvited the cooks behind an Israeli food truck, apparently fearing protests over their presence. In the fallout from this decision, the event, which was supposed to celebrate diversity, was canceled. An organizer also claimed they had to shut things down because a Palestinian food truck couldn’t also attend — creating a presumably unacceptable imbalance in what style of falafel people would chew.

The entire episode was idiotic and smacked of anti-Semitism. The same is true here.

Let’s look at the groups that Sunrise DC finds to be “incompatible.”

The Left Is Locked in A Life-and-Death Struggle With The Family For Marxists, there is one very special key to everything. Don Feder

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/left-locked-life-and-death-struggle-family-don-feder/

For Marxists, killing the family is the key to everything.  The war on the family isn’t peripheral; it’s central to the revolution.

The National Council on Family Relations, a professional association started in 1938 and consisting of hundreds of marriage and family therapists and researchers, just announced a webinar called, “Toward Dismantling Family Privilege and White Supremacy in Family Science.”

Just as white people are “privileged,” according to CRT, so too is the nuclear family, which supposedly enjoys “unearned benefits in U.S. laws, policies and practices” over “non-traditional configured family systems” – including single-parent families and “committed partners living together and raising children.”

The question which seems almost too-obvious to ask (but which alludes most social scientists) is this: Why is it that intact (two-parent) families consistently outperform others on every measurement – income, independence and children who are healthier, happier and less prone to social pathologies.

Who can fail to see that most problems in the black community are due to the virtual disappearance of two-parent families? Since the 1960s (when the Great Society began its war on the black family in the guise of fighting poverty), the black crime rate, out-of-wedlock birthrate and welfare rate have soared.

Due to the success of Black Lives Matter, everything now is seen through the lens of institutional racism – criminal justice, electoral politics and, of course, the family.  When BLM’s founders described themselves as “trained Marxists,” believe it.

Until negative publicity forced them to take it down, BLM’s website proclaimed: “We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another….”  Western-prescribed?  Presumably, there are no nuclear families in Africa or Asia.

Wreaking a ‘Fundamental Change in the Economy’ Biden aims to complete Obama’s demolition of a free and prosperous America. Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/wreaking-fundamental-change-economy-lloyd-billingsley/

“The president wants to make fundamental change in our economy and he feels coming out of the pandemic is exactly the time to do that,” said White House press secretary Jan Psaki in an October 12 briefing. The reference to “fundamental change” recalls a statement from the composite character president David Garrow described in Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama.

“We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America,” the composite character said in November of 2008. The United States of America was already a top-heavy welfare state from FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society, so the candidate, formerly known as Barry Soetoro, must have had something else in mind. In 2021 it should all be evident.

In 2008, the United States of America was also a democracy, in which the people choose presidents as different as Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. Under the composite character’s fundamental transformation, the outgoing president picks his successor and deploys the upper reaches of the DOJ, FBI and intelligence community to support the president’s pick and attack her opponent, even after he wins the presidency. This fundamental transformation was on full display from 2016 through 2020, with massive election irregularities.

Long before September 11, 2001, the United States of America recognized the threat from radical Islamic terrorism. The composite character president looked the other way at Islamic terrorism and regarded his domestic political opponents as the true threat.

For example, in 2009 Department of Homeland Security boss Janet Napolitano released Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment. This document warned of “white supremacist” types that reject federal authority. This was code for anyone less than worshipful of the composite character, particularly those who value their constitutional rights.

Sheer Chaos and Anarchy on the Border? By Victor Davis Hanson

https://pjmedia.com/columns/victor-davis-hanson/2021/10/21/sheer-chaos-and-anarchy-on-the-border-n1525658

Afghanistan — the most humiliating defeat in recent U.S. military history?

A labor-starved supply chain in shambles and holiday shelves emptying out?

The worst inflation in 30 years that seems soon ready to match Carter-era levels?

Gas hitting $5 a gallon with winter heating fuels soaring?

Free-for-all looting in the major cities without consequences?

Joe Biden’s policies and Biden himself diving in the polls?

Never in recent American history has any administration birthed such disasters in its first nine months.

Yet most Americans are arguing not over the sheer chaos and disasters of the Biden Administration, but rather how could such sheer pre-civilizational calamity occur in modern America?

Were these disasters a result of historic incompetency? Or mean-spirited nihilism? Or a deliberate effort to create the necessary turbulence to birth a new American revolution? Or a bit of all three?

Start instead with the idea that what most Americans see as sheer ruin is not what the left-wing puppeteers, who are pulling the strings of the Biden marionette, see.

As Florida COVID Cases Plummet, Media Falls Silent By A.J. Kaufman

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/ari-j-kaufman/2021/10/20/as-florida-covid-cases-plummet-media-falls-silent-n1525537

Florida now has one of the lowest coronavirus case rates in the nation, with around 80 percent of its adult population vaccinated.

Left-leaning media has long had a pathetic, cruel obsession with bashing the Sunshine State, mainly because of its outspoken Republican governor.

The Acela Corridor elites have been proven wrong over and over, and once infections and deaths across Florida began dropping well over a month ago, they finally relented.

Now, on a per capita basis, Florida posted fewer cases than every state but California last week.

But in August, when the Delta variant hit the South, the left effectively cheered deaths and couldn’t stop taking partisan shots.

New York Times columnists like the repugnant Paul Krugman often played pure politics with the pandemic, solely blaming red state leaders.

As Dan McLaughlin tabulated Wednesday, “the last time the columnist tweeted the word ‘Florida’ was August 19. The last time he mentioned ‘DeSantis’ was August 27. The last time Krugman mentioned the Republican ‘death cult’ was September 28. The last time he mentioned COVID was October 1, and the ‘pandemic’ October 7. The last time the Nobel Prize winner used the word ‘Delta’ on Twitter was on September 6, noting that it was “amazing to me how many news reports on the Delta disaster manage to avoid mentioning ‘Republicans.’”

Under Biden, We’ve Gone From ‘Make America Great’ To ‘Lower Your Expectations’

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/10/21/under-biden-weve-gone-from-make-america-great-to-lower-your-expectations/

As the economy falters in the wake of rising inflation, chronic worker shortages, and a deepening supply chain crisis, the rhetoric from the Biden administration and its defenders has shifted from “we’ve got this” to “stop your whining.” Is this what Americans bargained for when they ditched Mr. Mean Tweets for Joe “Nexnelsrent” Biden?

A perfect example of this shift is an op-ed by a contributing columnist to the Washington Post – Micheline Maynard – who says that the real problem we face today isn’t skyrocketing prices, bottlenecks at the ports, and empty shelves. It is us spoiled brats.

“American consumers, their expectations pampered and catered to for decades, are not accustomed to inconvenience,” she writes. “Time for some new, more realistic expectations.”

Maynard’s op-ed, and the Washington Post, took plenty of flak for blaming the victim. But the truth is that it is increasingly the way the White House is talking as well.

At a press briefing on Tuesday, a reporter asked White House spokesperson Jen Psaki why, given that supply chain problems were “clear in March of 2020,” didn’t the administration act sooner. “It was crystal clear that things were not improving on the supply chain,” the New York Times reporter said, trying hard to choke out a tough question. “People couldn’t get dishwashers and furniture and treadmills delivered on time, not to mention all sorts of other things.” 

Psaki interrupted the report to say, with a smirk, “The tragedy of the treadmill that’s delayed.”