RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/america/farewell-america-hello-victorias-swamp/

“It almost catches in the throat to admit the prospect of life once more in Melbourne is a downer. But here I am, booked in 48 hours to leave a country where the things of which conservatives dreamed but never hoped to see are being fulfilled by a Trump administration committed to refurbishing free speech and property rights, the twin pillars on which Western democracy rests and depends.

Instead, it will be Jew-haters on parade, a politicised police force, courts packed with Labor mates and an opposition more passionate about its intramural party feuds and lawsuits than rescuing Victoria from debt, corruption and incompetence.:

It would be an exaggeration, although only a small one, to say the US bathes right now in the sunny optimism of another ‘morning in America’ like the one Ronald Reagan brought to a country sick half to death of Jimmy Carter, but by several handy measures the Second Age of Trump is certainly off to a spirited start. Republicans are dancing, literally, as are quarterbacks and prize fighters, and from the stunned Left there have been no outbreaks worth noting of the reflex to riot and protest. They’re whipped and they know it, those aggrieved intersectionalists, so unsettled by the loss of House, Senate and Oval Office that the instinct to fill the streets with public nuisances is for the moment in abeyance. But they know what’s coming. Trump’s proposed cabinet of slashers, heretics, critics, crusaders, protectionists, free-market libertarians and assorted silicon smarties is a proclamation of intent to gore the Left’s most sacred cows, a restoration of the First Amendment’s right to free speech high on that to-do list.

All of which makes it very hard to be leaving the United States, especially when the destination is Melbourne, where my US election year ends next week at Tullamarine. It’s a dismal thought. Years ago, my friend Imre Salusinszky warned that the Australia of memory and imagination might not match the fact of a society changed deeply over the decades I had spent in New York. It was hard to believe. Whenever I’d flown home, the holidaying visitor to an overgrown country town by the Yarra, everything was as it should be — the easiness of life under a big blue sky, the footy, great food,  cheap golf, magpies instead of sirens, zinc creme and the Boxing Day Test. But Imre was proven right when I ignored his caution and came home for good. Things had changed and not for the better. A welter of Labor victories, broken only by the limp and hapless Baillieu years, saddled the state with debt and an authoritarian nannyism that grew more assertive and obnoxious year by year. But it was the Covid madness that did it for me, put pay to any last delusion that Victoria, its once lovely capital and the state’s most vital institutions were not in some way rotting before our eyes.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/the-u-s-a/trump-redux-defeating-identity-despots/

Donald Trump’s victory on November 5 was more than just a defeat for his hapless opponent. It was a defeat for the Democrat powerbrokers who foisted Kamala Harris on the American public without the former senator from California attaining a single party delegate during this year’s primary season (or, for that matter, in 2019-20). It was, similarly, a defeat for the mass media, which reconfigured her as “the voice of a new generation” once she became the Democrats’ presidential nominee, despite deriding her performance as vice-president over the previous three and a half years. Finally, and most importantly, November 5 marks the day Americans rejected the despotism of Obama-style identity politics.

Leading Democrats are now arguing over whether to blame Joe Biden or Harris for the Democrats’ worst result in a presidential election since 1988, including the loss of all seven battleground states. The Biden camp points out that Biden won six of those states in 2020 and could have hardly done worse than Harris this time. But that argument does not hold up in the light of Biden’s abysmal performance in his televised debate with Trump. Old Joe was on target to do as badly as Harris did, or worse. More than 75 per cent of American voters believed their country was on the wrong track—inflation, a doubling of the price of petrol, soaring mortgage rates, 10 to 20 million unvetted immigrants pouring across the southern border, foreign wars, boys in girls’ sports, and so on were affecting the national mood. Biden was not the man to turn things around. Not only was his administration responsible for many or all of these problems, but in the June 27 debate, Trump exposed Biden’s serious cognitive decline for all the world to see; not even the Democrat powerbrokers and their allies in the mainstream media could hide it any longer.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/editors-column/the-fight-for-free-speech/

“The taboo against telling the truth is what protects the woke establishment. Trump has been derided as everything from a boor and a buffoon to a fascist. Yet it was he, not his preening critics, who observed, “If we don’t have free speech, then we just don’t have a free country. If this most fundamental right is allowed to perish, then the rest of our rights and liberties will topple just like dominos one by one.” Amen to that. And merry Christmas, happy Hanukah, and happy holidays to all.”

The attack on free speech is one of the most disturbing manifestations of the “woke mind virus” which has captured ruling elites in the West. Donald Trump’s re-election is its most encouraging rebuttal. The historic size of Trump’s victory is evidence that we have, at last, passed “peak woke”. The lamentations and gnashing of teeth of America’s left liberals is, one hopes, its wake.

At the top of the president-elect’s to-do list he says is ending the “censorship cartel … that has arisen under the false guise of tackling so-called ‘mis-’ and ‘dis-information’” driven by a “sinister group of Deep State bureaucrats, Silicon Valley tyrants, left-wing activists, and depraved corporate news media … conspiring to manipulate and silence the American people” by suppressing “vital information on everything from elections to public health”.

The good news is that Trump’s proposed legislation to protect free speech in America will hamper Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s attempts to censor social media in Australia.It follows a pushback on the Starmer Labour government’s attack on freedom of speech in the UK. Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson’s attempt to quietly throttle the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act has been condemned by more than 600 academics, writers, and public intellectuals including Stephen Fry, Ian McEwan, historian Tom Holland, Lady Antonia Fraser, and former Poet Laureate Sir ­Andrew Motion. While they might have their political differences, they were united in condemning the government for not protecting ­“humane and liberal values” or opposing “cancel culture” in British universities.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21156/taiwan-ukraine-survival

[T[he United States has an obligation to defend Ukraine — and it is definitely in its interest to do so.

In the Budapest Memorandum, the three parties [the US, the UK and Russia] made six pledges to the former Soviet republic, the most important of which was “their commitment to Ukraine, in accordance with the principles of the CSCE Final Act, to respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine.”

“[W]hen negotiating the security assurances, U.S. officials told their Ukrainian counterparts that, were Russia to violate them, the United States would take a strong interest and respond.” — Steven Pifer, former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine.

If Russia keeps the territory it has seized — certainly if it grabs even more — countries will believe that American promises to defend them are worthless and will begin building a nuclear deterrent of their own.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, after all, will not stop there, just as he did not stop after breaking apart Georgia in 2008 or after seizing Crimea in 2014. “If Ukraine falls, Poland, the Baltic republics and other NATO member states will face existential threats,” Greg Scarlatoiu, president of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, told this publication. Then, the U.S. and its NATO partners will be even more stretched — and less able to defend Taiwan — than they are now.

When Chinese leaders saw Washington’s failure to act, they soon moved against Second Thomas Shoal and other Philippine reefs in the South China Sea, went after Japan’s islets in the East China Sea, and started reclaiming and militarizing features in the Spratly Island chain. Obama and Biden legitimized the worst elements in the Chinese political system by showing everybody else that aggression worked.

The best way to stop China from attacking Taiwan is to defeat its proxies, especially Russia in Europe.

As Tsai Ing-wen, who stepped down as Taiwan’s president in May, said on November 23, “A Ukrainian victory will serve as the most effective deterrence against future aggression.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-i-c-c-should-be-d-o-a/

The International Court of Justice, one of the many multinational institutions that comprise the “rules-based international order,” issued arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and a Hamas leader who was killed in July.

This geopolitical virtue signaling reminds us once again that the West’s feckless foreign policy idealism is bankrupt morally, intellectually, and practically––the latter except for the enemies of Western principles and interests. Our recent transformational election should usher that failed idealism into the dustbin of history.

First, the ICC exists by dint of a multinational treaty, and has jurisdiction only over those participating states. So how does Hamas, a terrorist gang to whom Israel handed the Gaza Strip in 2005, fall under the ICC’s jurisdiction? And on behalf of what “state” and government did the ICC started this litigation in the first place? One the court invented, a “State of Palestine.” As the Wall Street Journal explains, “It then deems the state’s borders to include Gaza and lets the Palestinian Authority sign for the territory Hamas has controlled since 2007. International ‘law’ is malleable when it targets Israel.

Next, the crimes alleged by the court are blatant lies. Israel is not inflicting a genocide on the Palestinian Arabs, an utterly shameless lie given that Hamas and other terrorists have explicitly called for genocide against Israeli “from the river to the sea.” No more credible is the accusation that Israel is “intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population.” In fact, rather than a wanton disregard for civilian lives, no army in history fighting a guerilla war among civilians has ever shown such concern for the lives of non-combatants that Israel has.

Indeed, as the Journal emphasized in March, “Israel doesn’t need prompting to provide humanitarian aid or to act with caution. According to retired British Col. Richard Kemp, the average combatant-to-civilian death ratio in Gaza is about 1 to 1.5. This is astonishing since, according to the United Nations, the average combatant-to-civilian death ratio in urban warfare has been 1 to 9.”

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/08/05/dont-let-free-speech-be-a-victim-of-these-riots/

Here comes the crackdown. After days of rioting and disorder across England, Sir Keir Starmer has vowed to get tough – and not just on those criminal and far-right elements directly involved in the despicable violence that followed the horrendous murder of three young girls in Southport last Monday. The thuggish and racist behaviour of the few has rapidly become a pretext for constraining the liberties of the many.

The UK prime minister, in two Downing Street press conferences last week, unveiled a suite of proposals to try to quell the rioting. He vowed to impose criminal-behaviour orders on certain agitators. He threatened to roll out facial-recognition software and AI to help track people’s movements. Most striking of all, he damned the supposedly malign influence of ‘large social-media firms and those who run them’, and demanded that they get a firmer grip on the posting of misinformation. He also warned that there would be consequences for those who ‘whip up’ disorder by spreading rumours or speculation online.

The home secretary, Yvette Cooper, went further this morning on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. She declared social-media companies to be responsible for both the ‘shocking misinformation that has escalated’ the riots, as well as ‘the deliberate organisation of violence’ on these platforms.

It is entirely possible to loathe the actions of these rioters, while also being alarmed by the government’s response and its implications for free speech. Any crackdown on so-called misinformation, or even on the ‘whipping up of hatred’, is not going to be confined to those who are directly participating in or inciting violence. It will inevitably be wielded against dissenting views more broadly. This is always what happens.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/08/02/christians-have-become-the-worlds-laughing-stock/

Earlier this month, the Church of England issued new ‘guidance’ for teachers at Anglican schools – all 4,630 of them, attended by around one million children. It asserted the modish nonsense that biological sex is secondary to identity and that a ‘transgender man’ is someone ‘who was assigned female at birth but identifies and lives as a man’. The same goes for a ‘transgender woman’, but in reverse.

The schools practise what they preach, too. Earlier this year, one mother told the Telegraph that her four-year-old daughter, who attends a Church of England school, was having to share a toilet with another little ‘girl’ who apparently has a penis. The child’s sex was hidden from classmates and the kids were, naturally, distraught when they found out. According to parents, the ‘transgender’ child ‘flashed their willy’ at the girls.

I guess we were almost expecting it. You could practically see Justin Welby replacing his rainbow Pride badge with an updated pink-blue-and-white ‘Trans Pride’ one. He likely spends his mornings in front of the mirror, practising telling teachers to challenge ‘outdated terms’ and making sure he gets that moving-with-the-times face just right.

As an Anglican, I am well-accustomed to what passes for the ‘thinkers’ of my church acting like embarrassing parents trying to get down ‘wit’ da kidz’. No indignity seems too great to comprehend now. So what if in Genesis 1:27 it says, ‘So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them’? Get with the programme. Apparently, He created they / them.

Christians in the West are so used to being disappointed by their own alleged spiritual leaders that being picked on has come to seem par for the course. Which is why the robust reaction – though not, of course, from our man in Canterbury – to the Last Supper tableaux at the Paris Olympics opening ceremony last week came as something of a surprise.

Anyone who watched even part of the roughly four-hour omnishambles on Friday will have been struck by the theme of extraordinary silliness-on-steroids. It was, as one user on X described it, ‘the longest, wettest episode of Eurotrash ever’.

At times, though, the whole farce did – as silliness often does these days – shade into something sinister. There was the grotesque presence of drag queens, blackface for misogynists, forever seeking to remind us how ridiculous women are. Then there was the beheaded queen – not a king, one notes, dead men not being ‘sexy’ in the way dead women are. She was used as a prop to a dreary heavy-metal band, who talked straight-faced of their desire ‘to give hope to people’. But it was the apparent parody of Leonardo da Vinci’s mural that pushed the opening ceremony from silliness into truly sinister. It was yet another symptom of one of the great cowardly crusades of our age – the war on Christianity.

While ordinary Christians across the world expressed their outrage, the spiritual leader of my faith had nothing to say about the ordeal. This says a lot about how dangerously out of touch the CofE – what my husband amusingly dubbed ‘the BBC of E’ – is with its own congregation. As Anglican Ink pointed out over the weekend, the Bishop of Worcester was quick to call the ceremony ‘unnecessary and highly offensive… the secular elite would not dream of mocking other faiths in this dreadful manner’. Meanwhile, ‘the Archbishop of Canterbury, who spoke of his anticipation of viewing the opening ceremony, has been silent about the deliberate affront to Christians by the organisers’.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/06/27/stop-the-ukrainian-meatgrinder/

Nearly eleven months ago, in August 2023, the New York Times reported that U.S. officials had estimated that some 500,000 Russians and Ukrainians had been killed, wounded, or missing in the then 18-month Ukrainian War.

Both Russia and Ukraine underreport their losses. Hundreds of thousands of additional casualties have followed in the 28 months of fighting.

In the West, the mere mention of a negotiated settlement is considered a dangerous appeasement of Russia’s flagrant aggression. In Russia, anything short of victory would be seen as synonymous with the collapse of the Putin regime.

Yet as the war nears two and a half years this summer, some facts are no longer much in dispute.

Controversy still arises over the circumstances of the 2014 overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych.

Russia charges that the West engineered the “Revolution of Dignity”—an effort to westernize the former Soviet republic, to expand the borders of Europe right to the doorstep of Russia, and eventually to fully arm Ukraine as a member of NATO.

Westerners counter that most Ukrainians wished to be part of Europe and independent from Russian bullying—and they had a perfect right to ask to join either NATO or the EU or both despite anticipated escalating tensions.

After the heroic Ukrainian defeat of the 2022 Russian bid to take Kyiv, there have been few significant territorial gains by either side.

Like the seesaw bloodbath on the Western Front of World War I, neither side has developed the momentum to force the other to negotiate or grant concessions.

As nuclear Russian threats against Europe mount, NATO is seeking to regain deterrence capabilities by boosting defense budgets, incorporating robust frontline nations Sweden and Finland, and uniting over shared concerns about Russian aggression.