RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/why-the-secrecy-around-the-foreign-source-of-the-springfield-hoax-bomb-threats/

The office of Ohio governor Mike DeWine is not disclosing which country is responsible for some of the bomb-threat hoaxes called into Springfield schools. The aim is to “discourage further threats to the schools and other buildings.”

This is more than a little frustrating because the general public already has a short suspect list. The FBI has already publicly discussed the desire of Russia, China, and Iran to influence the 2024 election and how “sowing discord and undermining democracy is consistent across the board.” Earlier this month, an official with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence told reporters:

The big three foreign influence actors, Russia, Iran, and China are all trying by some measure to exacerbate divisions in U.S. society for their own benefit, and see election periods as moments of vulnerability. These actors most likely judge that amplifying controversial issues and rhetoric that seeks to divide Americans can serve their interests by making the U.S. and its democratic system look weak, and by keeping the U.S. Government distracted with internal issues instead of pushing back on their hostile behavior globally.

…The IC continues to assess that Russia is the pre-eminent and most active foreign influence threat to this year’s U.S. elections. Russia is looking to amplify divisive rhetoric and influence electoral outcomes, which both speak to Moscow’s broader foreign policy goals of weakening the United States and undermining Washington’s support for Ukraine.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2024/10/the-coming-world-crisis/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

The U.S. faces a choice between courage and cowardice

The 31-year-long apparent peace that followed the Soviet Union’s collapse ended on February 24, 2022, when territorial conquest once again became an instrument of the revisionist powers. Yet history, particularly that of the globe-spanning violence that preceded World War II, reminds us that once crises begin to cluster, they tend to worsen and become a worldwide eruption of violence.

In this respect, democracies today are in a situation similar to that of the 1930s. The folly of the century preceding the ’30s was not precisely appeasement — the strategy that grants an aggressive adversary limited, albeit significant, gains to satiate its appetite for expansion — but rather a lack of recognition of the systemic inevitability of contestation and conflict. The threat today, similarly, is not appeasement but the avoidance by democratic political leaders of strategic reality. War is coming, sooner or later. Democracies must prepare for a long-term struggle. And much as in the 1930s, we do not have the luxury of time or a head start.

It is more helpful to speak of a world crisis than of a world war, given the linguistic vagaries of “warfare,” a word that has a legal as well as a moral-political definition. The idea of world war is restrictive. What we term the First World War saw combat in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and Asia. But the conflict’s focal point was Europe, with relevant but limited skirmishing in the Middle East and Africa and almost no military activity in Asia after early 1915 because of the limited resources Germany could deploy beyond Europe. Was the First World War, then, not properly a world war? It involved every major power at the time. It was, moreover, the first modern conflict in which two major-power participants — the U.S. and Japan — were not European. Thus we might term the conflict a world war despite its focus in Europe.

This, however, raises a more important question of definition — that of time. The First World War stemmed from what may be termed the First World Crisis. Prior to the mid 19th century, international politics was nearly synonymous with European politics for the simple reason that technological, political, and military advances in Europe made the European powers incontestably dominant over any major actor elsewhere. The European wars that occurred between the 15th and 19th centuries, culminating in Napoleon’s bid for continental dominance, had global implications. The grand strategy of Napoleonic France included, at minimum, Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia, and South Asia: France’s objective was to stress Britain’s link with its invaluable imperial possession, India, an end that it never achieved. Yet the central issue of the Napoleonic Wars — the structure of European and, by implication at the time, world order — was settled on European battlefields, in the European littoral, and at negotiating tables with dozens of European diplomats hashing out the details after the fighting was done. By the early 20th century, changes in the international power distribution could transform a European crisis into a world crisis.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/another-9-11-anniversary-and-we-have-still-learned-nothing/

In the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks which turned the World Trade Center into a hellscape, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, where the Taliban government had protected the 9/11 mastermind, Saudi cleric Osama Bin Laden. Two years later, we invaded Iraq at least partly on the premise that Saddam Hussein was connected to Bin Laden.

Saddam was deposed and captured quickly enough, being executed in 2006. Bin Laden survived in hiding until Navy SEALs killed him in May 2011. In December of that year, the U.S. withdrew from Iraq. The U.S. military stayed in Afghanistan until a debacle of a withdrawal in August 2021.  As of this writing 30 detainees are still in Guantanamo Bay on 9/11-related charges.

The Watson Institute reported that the Afghanistan war took 70,000 civilian lives and that between 186,000 and 316,000 civilians were killed in Iraq.  Over 7,000 Americans died in these two conflicts. Harvard University estimates that the American taxpayer paid between $4 and $6 trillion for our Afghanistan and Iraq ventures. With such an astronomical price in blood and treasure for 9/11 and its aftermath, we need to ask some questions as we reach another anniversary of that evil day.

Do we truly understand why 9/11 happened?

Have we assessed our response to determine if it has been effective?

Did the pain of 9/11 cause us to increase our determination to cherish and protect our civilization all the more from hostile enemies?

Forgive my cynicism, but the answer to these questions is no, no, and no.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/beijings-spy-games

A former high-level New York State employee has been charged with acting as an undisclosed agent for Communist China. This incident, along with other similar ones, presents a significant challenge to the United States: How do we effectively address the national security threat from spies within our borders without descending into destructive witch hunts?

Linda Sun, who held several prominent positions in New York State government, including serving as deputy chief diversity officer under former governor Andrew Cuomo and deputy chief of staff under Governor Kathy Hochul, was arrested along with her husband Chris Hu early this week. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York has charged Sun, who never registered as a foreign agent, with “violating and conspiring to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act” and having been involved in numerous political activities to advance the interests of the People’s Republic of China and the Chinese Communist Party, including “blocking representatives of the Taiwanese government from having access to high-level New York State officers.” The couple allegedly collected considerable financial benefits for Sun’s actions, and their families in China received special treatment from the government.

This case is the latest of several incidents involving high-level Democratic politicians and alleged Chinese spies. Former California senator Dianne Feinstein, who served as the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, had a Chinese spy on her staff for an astonishing 20 years. In 2020, Americans learned that Fang Fang, a suspected Chinese spy, had been building relationships with up-and-coming local politicians in the Bay Area and across the country, including California representative Eric Swalwell, a member of the House Intelligence Committee.

These cases are only the tip of the iceberg. In the ongoing and escalating strategic competition between China and the United States, Beijing will undoubtedly recruit and deploy more spies. Notably, Beijing sees spies as more than just tools to collect critical information. The United Front Work Department (UFWD), a secretive Chinese government agency, is a crucial player in this competition. Its primary function is to conduct overseas influence campaigns by cultivating prominent people in the West and, through them, to influence policies and public opinion and silence or discredit critics.

https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/chinas-campaign-to-infiltrate-america-is-worse-than-you-thought/

On the menu today: Tear your eyes away from campaign coverage for a few moments and contemplate a pair of bombshells regarding the Chinese government’s far-reaching efforts to influence U.S. policy and suppress critics of the regime — violently, on U.S. soil. First, the Washington Post unveils a shocking report, showcasing how agents of the regime in Beijing attempted to curb-stomp pro-democracy activists during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in San Francisco last November. Then, federal prosecutors announced charges against Linda Sun, the former deputy chief of staff to Kathy Hochul, for being an agent of the Chinese government in exchange for “millions of dollars in bribes.”

You know whom I want to win the 2024 elections? American elected officials who work for Americans, not Xi Jinping. Apparently, they’re rarer than you would expect.

Who Runs the Streets of San Francisco? Apparently, the Chinese Government Does

It will not surprise you that I feel more warm and fuzzy toward the Washington Post than the typical conservative.

When the mainstream media does good and important journalism, I think conservatives ought to applaud and encourage more of it, and yesterday, the Post unveiled a doozy, showcasing the scale and range of violence during Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s visit to San Francisco for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in November — violence that appears to have been directed and facilitated by agents of the Chinese government, targeting democracy activists and critics of the regime.

https://tomklingenstein.com/how-the-department-of-defense-went-woke/

The transformation of the United States Armed Forces over the last century has been as radical, as sudden, and as thoroughgoing as virtually any experienced by a military body in all of recorded history. Over the course of two world wars, the demands of combat at unprecedented scale sped along the integration of both racial minorities — especially black Americans — and women across every branch of the Armed Forces. 

It took less than a generation, however, for this integration (and the principles of color-blindness that emerged from it) to be overtaken by a new social imperative: proportional representation, enforced by group quotas and later the widespread framework of “DEI.” No longer would it be enough for the military to select the best of the best, regardless of race or other innate factors. Under the new regime, the Armed Forces became a representative institution, one whose political/racial composition — modeled on that of the nation at large — took priority over its warfighting capabilities.

This pivot was accomplished largely by successive commanders-in-chief, starting with Harry Truman and carrying on through the Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Obama, and Biden administrations. The transformation, however, cannot be blamed entirely on progressive presidents. Civil Rights-era Supreme Court decisions, racial conditions on funding imposed by Congress, initiative by the military bureaucracy, interference by outside activist groups — all these and more were essential to turning the merit-based force that won two world wars into an identity-centric institution that has not seen a major victory since 1991.

Today, the drive for proportional representation colors every action of the military establishment. Recruiting strategies are crafted with racial targets front of mind, and the entire DoD approach to personnel now revolves around identity groups. Each branch now works actively to increase the representation of women and minorities in the most critical roles, including aviation, combat operations, and the highest echelons of command. This identity-based decision-making is mutually exclusive with the singular insistence on merit that undergirds any strong military force.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/08/28/radical-islam-braying-the-donkey-party/

The Hadith of the Islamic Shiite tradition talks about the Prophet Muhammed’s talking donkey, which he named Yaʽfūr. (“The Beginning and the End” by Ibn Kathir, Chapter Six: “The Conversation of the Donkey.”)

Today, Iran serves as the talking donkey. According to Maj. Gen. Hossein Salami, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Iran has become not only a regional but also an international power. Salami attributed this transformation to Teheran’s large investments in developing its advanced military technology and defense industry. Salami did not thank the Biden administration for facilitating these developments, but he should have. It was the Biden administration’s lifting of sanctions on Iran’s oil sales that provided the Islamic Republic with hundreds of billions of dollars to invest not only in its defense industry but also in its “resistance” proxies in the region and around the world.

The United States feeble response to Iran’s direct aggression against US forces, as well as its proxies Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and others, allowing their violent disruption of more than 50 percent of the commercial shipping in the Red Sea, is suitably understood by the mullahs as weakness.

The Biden administration’s furtherance of President Obama’s disastrous policy to turn Iran into the leading power in the Middle East and its reluctance to act in its defense and regional interests strengthen Iran’s resolve to toss the United States from the Middle East. Iran’s supreme leader and preachers regularly bray for “Death to America.” But the Biden administration and, if elected, the anointed Democrat presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, will most likely continue supporting Iran and its proxies and recklessly turn a deaf ear to the blaring braying of Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and Abdul-Malik al-Houthi‘s repeated dictum, “Death to America.”

https://tomklingenstein.com/the-crisis-in-the-armed-forces/

Editor’s Note: A cold civil war is won or lost by the capture of institutions. Even today, many conservatives regard the military as one of the last institutions resisting capture by the new regime. Will Thibeau, director of the American Military Project at the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life, argues that precisely the opposite is true: that the Armed Forces were “among the first American institutions to formally embrace the radical logic of group quotas.“ This new organizing principle is directly linked to a steep decline in military standards and performance, with life-and-death consequences for Americans and America.

Part I of Identity in the Trenches: The Fatal Impact of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion on U.S. Military Readiness.

In August 2021, the world watched as American forces scrambled to evacuate Afghanistan as the Taliban reclaimed power. The panicked withdrawal reached a tragic climax on August 26, when 13 American service members (and more than 100 Afghan civilians) were killed by a suicide bomber in the Kabul airport, where security was a U.S. responsibility. Four days later, when the last military planes took off from that same airport, hundreds of American citizens were left behind. A month later still, when the secretary of Defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the CENTCOM commanding general were called before Congress to account for the failure, they neither offered explanations nor accepted responsibility. The message was clear: Incompetence would be the new norm for the U.S. military — a predictably lethal status quo.

The Afghanistan debacle was dramatic, but it was only one small part of a much larger picture. The United States Armed Forces were once the envy of the world, in large part because we selected the best of the best, and instilled in our fighting men an unshakeable military ethos. Both the ethos and the selection, however, have been in steady decline as the Department of Defense succumbs to a dangerous ideology: that of group quotas, or forced outcome equality for identity groups based on race and sex.

Critics of the current state of affairs in our Armed Forces waste precious breath on disturbing but minor issues like reading lists, drag shows, and TikTok trends. This paper serves as a call for focus and precision on the prevalence of race and sex-based quotas, and the accompanying collapse in professional standards, in the fight to reclaim the integrity of the institution of the military. 

Quotas, by one name or another, have been defense policy since 1965 when Secretary Robert McNamara decided to make the Pentagon the leading edge of the effort to adhere to the principles and policies of the Civil Rights Act. This history is important to understand because it clarifies the mission ahead.