The Poison Fruits of Identity Politics in the Military   The U.S. military is at a crossroads. Its leadership must validate the trust and respect that has been afforded to it by the public, or risk watching that respect evaporate. By Mackubin Owens

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/22/the-poison-fruits-of-identity-politics-in-the-military/

For many years, the U.S. military has been among the most trusted of American institutions, certainly the most trusted part of the U.S. government. It has maintained that status despite its failure to achieve success in the post-9/11 wars. Americans seem to have accepted the argument that this failure has more to do with the political constraints placed on the military than on the military’s doctrine, planning, and execution. They have continued to accept the military’s self-image as a profession rather than a self-interested bureaucracy, and have supported its professional ethos understood as duty, honor, and sacrifice.    

But attitudes toward the military seem to be changing. According to a recent survey conducted by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute, the number of Americans who express a great deal of confidence and trust in the military has dropped from 70 percent to 45 percent in just the past three years, including an 11 percent drop since February.

Among those who expressed a low degree of confidence in the U.S. military, 13 percent cited “political leadership” as a reason. Although only a plurality, that figure seems to indicate that views of the military have been affected by the toxic political polarization that has afflicted the body politic in recent times.

For instance, the survey indicates that Americans in general are losing confidence in the military. In 2018, 87 percent of Republican respondents said they had a great deal of confidence in the military. In 2021, that number had declined to 53 percent. In 2018, 59 percent of Democratic respondents and 66 percent of independents expressed a great deal of confidence in the military. In 2021, those figures dropped to 42 percent and 38 percent respectively.

Please—Stop the Coup Porn Military officers should quit all their coup porn talk—either to remove a president they don’t like, or to project their own reckless, insurrectionary behavior onto their political opponents.  By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/22/please-stop-the-coup-porn/

In a recent Washington Post op-ed, three retired generals, Paul Eaton, Antonio Taguba, and Steven Anderson warn of a supposedly impending coup should Donald Trump be elected in 2024. 

The column seemed strangely timed to coincide with a storm of recent Democratic talking points that a reelected Trump, or even a Republican sweep of the 2022 midterms, would spell a virtual end of democracy. 

Ironies abound.   

From Election Day in 2020 to Inauguration Day 2021, we were told by the Left that democracy was resilient and rightly rid the nation of Trump.    

The hard Left, for one of the rare times in U.S. history, was now in complete control of both houses of Congress and the presidency.   

Spiking inflation, supply-chain shortages, near record gas prices, open borders, the flight from Afghanistan,  multi-trillion-dollar deficits, and polarizing racial rhetoric all followed. 

In response to these events, Joe Biden’s popularity utterly collapsed. His own cognitive challenges multiplied the unpopularity of his failed policies.  

In reaction, the Left again pivoted. It suddenly announced that should it lose congressional power in 2022 or the presidency in 2024, democracy was all but doomed. 

Apparently, what changed Democrats’ views was that democracy was working all too well in expressing widespread public disgust . . . with the Left. 

‘Intellectual Terrorism’ in France A professor is canceled for questioning the concept of Islamophobia. Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/intellectual-terrorism-france-bruce-bawer/

Promises, promises. In October of last year, in an apparent attempt to co-opt the Islam issue from his conservative rivals, French President Emmanuel Macron announced a sweeping new program to defy the Islamic threat to his nation’s society, culture, and values. A major focus of the program was education: Muslim parents, vowed Macron, would no longer be permitted to keep their children from learning facts of which their religion disapproved, and university professors would help shape a new “Islam of the Enlightenment,” whatever that might mean. I wrote at the time that Macron’s promises seemed destined to end up on the scrap heap, and indeed, instead of making significant new demands of Muslims, French authorities have persisted in 2021 in their noble tradition of ruthlessly demonizing and prosecuting critics of Islam, notably the presidential candidate Éric Zemmour. Also this year, in yet another apparent bid to win conservative voters, Macron took to the bully pulpit to condemn the importation of “woke” left-wing ideas from America. His government doesn’t seem to have accomplished much of anything on this front, either. For a perfect example of Macron’s utter failure to live up to his own stirring rhetoric on both the Islam and “woke” fronts, consider the case of Klaus Kinzler.

After 20 Years of Blindness, a Nazareth Arab Gets Her Sight Restored by Israeli Doctors Being healed by the people you want to kill. Hugh Fitzgerald

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/after-20-years-blindness-nazareth-arab-gets-her-hugh-fitzgerald/

When the settler-colonial apartheid state of Israel is not making Gaza into an open-air prison, or setting up illegal settlements between the Jordan and the sea, or blighting the lives of the Palestinians whose lands they have stolen, or attacking Palestinian civilians without warning and with no conceivable justification, or poisoning the wells of inoffensive Palestinian farmers, or makes plans for its long-delayed expansion from the Nile to the Euphrates, it sometimes does things – oh, hell, it is always doing things — that contradict these malignant tales. One such example, about Hana Awad, a blind Arab lady from Nazareth who had her sight restored by path-breaking Israeli doctors, was made public in mid-December.

The report on this medical miracle is here: “Blind Woman Regains Eyesight at Israeli Hospital With Artificial Cornea Carved From Her Shin Bone,” by Sharon Wrobel, Algemeiner, December 15, 2021:

A blind woman has regained her eyesight after 20 years following a first-of-its-kind surgery at an Israeli hospital.

The rare procedure carried out at Israel’s Beilinson hospital restored the sight of 60-year-old Hanan Awad from Nazareth, who suffered from a severe corneal disease which led to her blindness. During the complex surgery, which was performed for the first time at an Israeli hospital, a piece of bone from Awad’s leg and an artificial cornea were implanted in her eye.

Arsonist to Head Illinois Town’s Fire Department Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/12/arsonist-head-illinois-towns-fire-department-daniel-greenfield/

Why settle for a metaphor, when you can literally appoint an arsonist to head the fire department?

There were high emotions and high drama at a fire district board meeting in Illinois Monday, as a once-convicted arsonist was named acting fire chief of the volunteer fire department, KTLA sister station KTVI in St. Louis reports.

The board removed John Rosencranz as chief of the Prairie Du Pont Volunteer Fire Department and replaced him with Assistant Chief Jerame Simmons. The two were seated at the same table when the change was made.

Board members said they had good reasons for making the change but they have not made those reasons public.

Our Potemkin Democracy When progressives say “democracy,” they don’t mean what you think it means. Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/our-potemkin-democracy-bruce-thornton/

Lately we’ve heard a lot of anxious talk about threats to “our democracy.” Here at home, Hillary Clinton surfaced to warn that a Donald Trump win in 2024 “could be the end of democracy,” recycling the tired “Trump is a danger to democracy” cliché. Abroad, the Biden administration recently convened a virtual Summit for Democracy comprising over a hundred world leaders, many of whose countries, like the Democratic Republic of Congo hardly qualifies as  democratic. There Biden intoned the creaking, hoary formulas of the “rules-based international order,” as he called for a “vision” and the “courage to once more lead the march of human progress and human freedom forward.”

This totemic use of the word “democracy” serves mainly partisan political and ideological interests, rather than a serious understanding of the complex history and dangers of democracy per se. As such, “democracy” functions as a feel-good marketing tool like “organic” or “all natural,” and merely confuses our response to the challenges of tyranny.

In terms of our foreign policy, the Summit for Democracy reinforces the disastrous democracy-promotion policies of the last 20 years, which ended so ignominiously in Afghanistan this year. The parochial arrogance of thinking that nations and peoples not part of the Western tradition want to imitate us ignores the reality of the true diversity comprising different cultures, mores, faiths, and ideals about how we live, and for what we will kill and die. The label “democracy,” then is like the Western suits and ties donned by international political leaders: an often-insincere, superficial concession to the Western powers that created and dominate the modern world, and that other nations want to exploit, weaken, or supplant.

Hence the futility of Biden’s promise to “launch an initiative to spend up to $424 million for programming around the world that supports independent media, anti-corruption work and more,” according to the Associated Press. Even if such plans materialize, we all know they’ll do nothing meaningful other than line the pockets of government functionaries, international activists, and NGO’s.

It’s Time to Abolish the Teachers Unions A disaster for students and good teachers alike. Larry Sand

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/its-time-abolish-teachers-unions-larry-sand/

The above caveat about government unions – usually known by the kinder and gentler “public employee unions” – was not issued by the Koch Brothers or Donald Trump. The statement was made by none other than progressive icon Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Additionally, George Meany, president of the AFL-CIO for 24 years, once stated, “It is impossible to bargain collectively with the government.” Both men understood that the very nature of government makes it wrong for its leaders to enter into negotiations with any union. When government unions negotiate, they often sit across the table from people they helped put in office with generous campaign contributions. And when these unions go on strike, they walk out on the taxpayer.

In the private sector, if a business is forced to pay its workers more money, those costs are passed on to the consumer. If the cost of a product is raised too high, the purchaser can choose to go elsewhere. Most unions get this and realize they can’t bargain for excessive salaries and perks. But some unions push things too far and ultimately price their members out of a job. An example of the latter is the United Auto Workers, whose exorbitant demands drove car buyers to Japanese models and automakers to produce cars elsewhere, thus sending Detroit down the road to ruin.

Welcome to the insane world of so-called transgenderism By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/12/welcome_to_the_insane_world_of_socalled_transgenderism.html

The Daily Mail reports that one “man” believes that women and motherhood shouldn’t automatically be paired. Yes, it’s another deep dive into the madness of transgenderism, which reminds us that we cannot allow leftists to decouple America from reality.

Bennett Kaspar-Williams is a biological female. (With unintentional humor, she describes her breast amputation as “a huge weight off my shoulders.”) She is married to Malik (biological sex unknown). The couple, who present as two gay, bearded men, wanted a baby, so Bennett stopped taking testosterone and, somehow or other became pregnant. The baby, a boy (whose gender they assumed), was born last year.

The Daily Mail (which accepts the pretense that Kaspar-Williams is male) is now addressing the horrors of having healthcare workers call her, and treat her as, a woman:

‘The only thing that made me dysphoric about my pregnancy was the misgendering that happened to me when I was getting medical care for my pregnancy,’ he said.

‘The business of pregnancy – and yes, I say business, because the entire institution of pregnancy care in America is centred around selling this concept of “motherhood” – is so intertwined with gender that it was hard to escape being misgendered.

Roses are Red, Crime is Blue By Brian C. Joondeph

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/12/roses_are_red_crime_is_blue.html

Roses are red, violets are blue, is an old nursery rhyme, poem, and eventual song title, ending in “the honey’s sweet and so are you.” A modern-day version might be rewritten:

Peace is red, crime is blue

Vote for Democrats, and you’ll find this true

Rising crime in American cities is often ignored by the media which, instead, focuses on the Omicron variant and fully vaccinated universities and sports teams shutting down over new COVID cases, flying in the face of common sense and everything we have been told about vaccinations.

ABC News dipped its toe into crime reporting recently with this headline, “It’s just crazy: 12 major cities hit all-time homicide records.” While COVID cases might be spiking, so is crime, with some cities breaking decades-old homicide records.

“It’s terrible to every morning get up and have to go look at the numbers and then look at the news and see the stories. It’s just crazy. It’s just crazy and this needs to stop,” Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney said after his city surpassed its annual homicide record of 500, which stood since 1990.

Is this what President Joe Biden means by “build back better”?  Is this somehow former President Donald Trump’s fault, despite him being out of office for almost a year now? ABC News offers a few potential explanations but misses a big one.

Experts say there are a number of reasons possibly connected to the jump in homicides, including strained law enforcement staffing, a pronounced decline in arrests and continuing hardships from the pandemic, but that there is no clear answer across the board.

It’s interesting that the media and law enforcement have trouble finding motives or explanations when those might be politically incorrect. For example, if a young Muslim male shouts “Allahu Akbar” before opening fire on a crowd of shoppers, big media will struggle to find motive. This story of a French terrorist shooting makes the point, “The New York Times claimed Wednesday that it is ‘unclear’ what motivated the gunman who shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ before opening fire on a Christmas market in France.”

A Larry Krasner Christmas Happy holidays from Philadelphia’s criminals to a wedding party and even a U.S. Congresswoman.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-larry-krasner-christmas-crime-philadelphia-11640208516?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

On the unseasonably warm night of Dec. 10, a groom stepped outside of his wedding reception for a breath of fresh air. Two men saw him. One drew a handgun, and they demanded the groom’s Rolex watch. The robbery occurred downtown a short stroll away from the Liberty Bell.

Welcome to the holiday season in Larry Krasner’s Philadelphia. Days before the groom’s ambush, the progressive district attorney claimed that “we don’t have a crisis of lawlessness, we don’t have a crisis of crime, we don’t have a crisis of violence.” The remarks infuriated Philadelphia residents, who are the victims of the crime he said doesn’t exist.

Philadelphia has seen a record 544 homicides so far this year, up from 347 in the entirety of 2019. Police have recorded some 1,785 nonfatal shootings this year. More than 84% of the victims of the gun violence in 2021 were black, according to the Philadelphia Office of the Controller.

Police data also shows some 2,283 gun robberies as of Dec. 19, a 28.6% increase over the same period last year. Retail theft is up more than 20% this year, and auto theft more than 15%, with nearly 11,000 vehicles stolen.