NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump Nearing the Crossroads As 2024 approaches, what will Trump do? By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on November 4th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/03/trump-nearing-the-crossroads/

“Or will Trump redo 2016, bulldoze to the nomination, go for the jugular of the now hard-left Democratic Party, clobbering his way to a 2016-like Electoral College victory—or a defeat that others who copied his agendas might have avoided?”
The Left may not wish to admit it, but the fortunes of a once moribund Donald Trump of January 2021 have now largely recovered—even before the stunning gubernatorial victory of Republican Glenn Youngkin in Virginia. 

How and why? 

One, Joe Biden did not, as dishonestly advertised, prove to be good Ol’ “Lunch bucket” Joe. He was no moderate from Scranton. Instead, Biden has served as the clueless gun barrel through which hard-core leftists fired off the most unpopular agenda in memory. 

Open borders, huge deficits, the Afghanistan catastrophe, looming stagflation, empty shelves, bottlenecked ports, soaring energy prices, toxic critical race theory, the disastrous previews of the Green New Deal, a weaponized federal government, and the addled decline of Biden himself have done more than just collapse support for the president and his policies.  

More importantly, Biden’s string of catastrophes endangers the very stuff of life, from the ability to afford gas to finding goods on the shelves. 

Two, for 10 months, Donald Trump has been stripped of all his social network outlets. The progressive Silicon monopolies thought they had silenced the once omnipresent Trump. 

But their muzzles had unintended consequences. The less Trump was on social media, the more the public remembered his good policies rather than his controversial tweets. 

Three, Donald Trump was as responsible or not responsible for COVID-19 deaths as is Joe Biden. On Biden’s watch, more have died each day on average from the disease than during Trump’s tenure from the start of the pandemic. 

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Biden’s Border Agenda Has Now Reached Peak Derangement The administration’s policies are not compassionate. They are part of a deranged agenda meant to slowly erode this nation’s resources by importing much of the world’s poverty problem.  By Brian Lonergan

Posted By on November 4th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/03/bidens-border-agenda-has-now-reached-peak-derangement/

Those who supported the ascension of Joe Biden to the White House could be forgiven for acting out of weariness and naïveté. They were tired of the political bloodsport from the previous four years and were promised a return to “normalcy” and competence. On the border issue alone, however, this administration has created buyers’ remorse on a grand scale as it implements hard-Left, radical policies that are permanently changing the country for the worse.

The most recent initiative to derail American exceptionalism is the move to terminate the Trump-era Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), which include the “Remain in Mexico” policy. In a memo announcing his intent to terminate the program, Department of Homeland Security Director Alejandro Mayorkas included among the verbiage in his four-page document a clause saying that “I recognize that MPP likely contributed to reduced migratory flows.”

Talk about burying the lead! 

For any other DHS secretary, reducing migratory flows and preventing the kind of chaos we saw recently with the Haitian migrants under a bridge in Del Rio, Texas, would be a good thing. It would suggest a plan to maintain stability in our country and deter others from making the perilous journey.

In Bidenworld, however, Mayorkas got his job specifically because establishing border security is not on his radar. He operates more like the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, not the individual responsible for the federal agency in charge of protecting the homeland of the United States. His tattered credibility continues to sink with his bizarre dedication to repeating the lie that “the border is closed,” when all visual and statistical evidence points to the opposite conclusion. Will Biden fire him for gross incompetence? Of course not, because Mayorkas is doing exactly what he was put in place to do.

If Biden’s purported compassion for the world’s huddled masses were applied unconditionally, he could at least be credited with consistency. Alas, his Albert Schweitzer shtick ends when his party’s political interests are not served. It is the only explanation for the contrast between his “save the children” talk when it comes to Central America and Mayorkas slamming the door shut on oppressed Cubans.

The difference? Refugees from the Northern Triangle are considered more likely to vote with Democrats. Cubans have been living under the boot of a hardline Communist dictatorship for generations and are wise to the progressive lure of cradle-to-grave benefits. Sorry Cubans, the lofty rhetoric about saving the impoverished and persecuted children of the world does not apply to you.  

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

China Has No Interest in Climate Change by Con Coughlin

Posted By on November 4th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17912/china-climate-change

Beijing remains committed to opening hundreds more coal-fired power plants in the coming years, with the result that China’s new coal plants will more than offset all the closures of other coal-fired stations that have taken place in the rest of the world during the past year.

Beijing’s unwillingness to make any significant contribution to attempts at the COP26 conference to reduce global emissions has raised legitimate concerns that China is seeking to gain an economic advantage over its Western rivals as they struggle with the challenge of meeting net zero targets.

There is a growing body opinion on both sides of the Atlantic that dramatic reductions in carbon omission could wreak economic havoc for Western economies if the pursuit of “green” economies is pursued at the expense of maintaining energy supplies. In Europe, for example, the race to abandon traditional fossil fuels as a major source of energy has led to increased reliance on energy supplies from Russia through its controversial Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

Mr Xi’s refusal to engage seriously with the COP26 climate change agenda also makes a mockery of the Biden administration’s contention that the best way to improve Beijing’s conduct is through deeper diplomatic cooperation.

Beijing’s main motivation is to undermine Western capitalism, not support it, which is why he has no intention of supporting the West’s ill-considered dash for net zero carbon emissions.

Nothing better summarises Chinese President Xi Jinping’s attitude to the West’s obsession with tackling climate change than the old Chinese saying, “Hide a knife behind a smile.”

As world leaders gathered for the COP26 summit in Glasgow, Western leaders were desperately trying to reach a deal on cutting carbon emissions, which United Nations climate experts claim is a major cause of climate change.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Public Education Has Always Been About Indoctrination It didn’t start with CRT and transgenderism. Don Feder

Posted By on November 4th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/public-education-has-always-been-about-don-feder/

Glenn Youngkin’s upset victory in the Virginia governor’s race shows the power of parents who are furious about public school indoctrination.

Education became a central part of Youngkin’s campaign. Without it, he would not have mobilized millions of concerned parents across the Commonwealth and sailed to victory against an ex-governor in a blue state.

Election night coverage included an interview with a woman who survived Mao’s Cultural Revolution, who said she stood in a cold rain for 8 hours that day handing out ballots. With laser-like focus, Xi Van Fleet said the contest in Virginia came down to Marxism versus Americanism.

The most important part of Youngkin’s victory speech was when he emphatically voiced his commitment to choice in education. Ban Critical Race theory? Absolutely. Listen to families? Of course. But, ultimately, public education can’t be reformed.

Public schools were created not to educate, but to indoctrinate. From Marx to Dewey to the current leadership of the Democrat Party and the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers, revolutionaries have always targeted youth and seen schools as the spearhead of the revolution.

When he was governor of Virginia in 2015, Terry McAuliffe (who was deservedly defeated in this election) was pushing Critical Race Theory in the schools, something he claimed did not exist in his 2021 campaign for governor.

When McAuliffe said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what to teach,” he was articulating a first principle of public education going back to its beginnings in the early 19th century: “Give us your money. Give us your kids. Then close your eyes. Shut your mouth. And let us do our job of transforming society.”

Today, the cutting edge is Critical Race Theory (whites are inherently evil), the 1619 Project (America is inherently evil) and what one proponent called the Queering Up of public education.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The Glasgow Festival of Globalist Virtue-Signaling Lots of moral preening and apocalyptic rhetoric on the agenda. Bruce Thornton

Posted By on November 4th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/glasgow-festival-globalist-virtue-signaling-bruce-thornton/

The Biden administration is attending the UN’s 26th “Conference of Parties,” the annual summit on what used to be called “Global Warming,” but is now dubbed “Climate Change.” Thirty thousand government officials, including heads of state posing for photo-ops, and government clerks enjoying taxpayer funded junkets, along with noisy activists, NGOs, and “green energy” corporate grifters hunting for more subsidies––all are spewing tons of CO2 into the atmosphere to attend the summit, leaving behind a King Kong-sized carbon footprint.

As with the other COP meetings, however, there will be lots of moral preening, apocalyptic rhetoric, and grand promises, but little of practical utility will be accomplished.

American progressives love such climate pow-wows, which indulge their various ideological shibboleths and demonstrate their superior morality and dedication to “science.” Leftist “Greens,” or “watermelons”––Green on the outside, Red on the inside–– find environmentalism in general a convenient weapon for discrediting free-market capitalism and especially the U.S. for daring to kick a communist superpower into the dustbin of history. Democrats, who like socialists “never let a good crisis go to waste,” find the lurid apocalyptic fantasies of “global warming” a good pretext for redistributing more taxpayer money to political clients. Thus the corporate clean-energy rackets and race-baiters will get money from programs like those in the proposed $550 billion “climate reform” legislation for researching and mitigating the “disparate impact” of climate change on “communities of color.”

And of course, Dems find anthropogenic, catastrophic global warming (ACGW) an opportunity for smearing their political enemies as “deniers,” “kooks,” and disbelievers in science who “cling to guns and religion” and, don’t forget, are “racists” and “xenophobes” to boot. Then there’s the hated Donald Trump, who pulled out of the Paris Accords that grew out of a previous COP agreement. This for the Dems was a heinous act of blasphemy that besmirched Barack Obama’s globalist triumph in signing the agreement, and is yet another sign of their enemies’ stubborn resistance to the global ruling class’s “rules-based international order.”

Speaking of Obama, Steven Groves of the Heritage Foundation recalled in an interview that at the 2009 COP Obama “pledged that the world’s wealthiest nations would give $100 billion per year by 2020 to the world’s poorest counties to help them fight climate change.” Groves continued, ‘“Here we are in 2021, [and] there has never been $100 billion put together, much less $100 billion per year,’” adding that there is ‘“not $100 billion in any green climate fund, nor any real prospect of there being $100 billion.’” And even if there were such a fund, what nation would hold dead-beats accountable when they refused to contribute?

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Royal Marines defeat the U.S. Marines at the ‘Battle of the Mojave Desert’ By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on November 4th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/11/the_royal_marines_defeat_the_us_marines_at_the_battle_of_the_mojave_desert.html

The battle was a training exercising but the ramifications of the loss, which reveals the damage progressives have inflicted on the military, are extremely serious.

For many Americans, the Marines occupy an almost mythic place in their minds as an invincible force that runs to the guns and fights no matter what. That’s why it was so shocking to learn that, during a joint training exercise in the Mojave Desert, Britain’s Royal Marines inflicted such a shellacking on the Americans that the latter had to surrender halfway through the exercise. This is a direct result of the Pentagon having gone woke under Obama—something that Trump failed to undo—followed by Biden doubling down on Obama’s policies.

Marines used to be synonymous with dogged determination. Tripoli (1805), the Halls of Montezuma (1847), Belleau Wood (1918), Guadalcanal (1943), Iwo Jima (1945), Inchon (1950), Chosin Reservoir (1950), Khe Sanh (1968), Hue (1968), Fallujah (2004)—each of these names brings to us visions of Marines running to the gun, marching through the woods, slogging through the snow, fighting over volcanic islands, and never retreating, never stopping.

But the Marines have been in war non-stop since 2001 and that’s a long time for a fighting force. At a certain point, rather than experience building them up and strengthening them, non-stop war wears men down. They lose their edge and their fire.

The American military has had another force bearing down on it that may be an even greater enemy than Islamists the world over. That force has been wokeism. Beginning with Obama, the American left has been using the military as a social justice experiment. According to James Hasson, author of Stand Down:  How Social Justice Warriors Are Sabotaging America’s Military, Obama purged the officer class of old-timers and brought in progressive ideologues.

Under their aegis, Navy ships went green (when they were just meant to be mean) and bore the names of well-known leftists (gay-rights advocate and pederast Harvey Milk and socialist activist Cesar Chavez, who happened to hate illegal immigrants).

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Winsome Sears’s Victory Speech By Dominic Pino

Posted By on November 4th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/watch-winsome-searss-victory-speech/

As Alexandra DeSanctis pointed out this morning, progressives are still sticking to the racism narrative to explain their loss in Virginia last night. She notes that along with Glenn Youngkin, Virginians elected Winsome Sears, a black woman, as lieutenant governor and Jason Miyares, a Cuban American, as attorney general. She writes, “It’s hard to imagine why Virginians voting en masse for the GOP out of thinly veiled racial animus would throw in their lot with this ticket.”

It is indeed hard to imagine, yet progressives are imagining it anyway. They have an academic theory to justify it in critical race theory, which asserts that even if nobody is being intentionally racist, systems can still be racist. They view the modern Republican Party as supportive of (or at least sympathetic to) white supremacy, so Republicans’ winning, no matter what race they are, perpetuates white supremacy in a country that was, in progressives’ view, founded on prejudice and slavery.

If you accept the premises of the argument, there’s a certain logical sense to it. Of course, the premises of the argument are exactly what conservatives contest, and rightly so. This is not a racist country; it was not founded on slavery; and as David Harsanyi has written persuasively, the evidence shows it is the most tolerant place on earth. But in the context of academic theory, even very smart, evidence-driven people can come to believe some truly strange things.

The problem is that most voters don’t buy the theory.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

2021’s Big Election Lesson: ‘It’s The Culture, Stupid’

Posted By on November 4th, 2021

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/11/04/2021s-big-election-lesson-its-the-culture-stupid/

By any reasonable measure, Tuesday’s off-year elections around the country were a sweeping repudiation of the Democratic Party, as the defeat of Virginia’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe by virtually unknown Republican Glenn Youngkin shows. The donkey party’s extreme-left vision for America has suffered what could be a fatal blow, but only if the GOP is smart enough to take advantage of this great opportunity.

A quick look around the country on Wednesday morning led to an inescapable conclusion: Average Americans are fed up with the Democrats’ woke agenda and are eager to escape it.

After four years of Donald Trump, Americans in 2020 handed the reins of national government over to the Joe Biden Democrats. And what do they have to show for it?

Rising inflation, an unprecedented flood of 1.5 million illegal immigrants, radically politicized public education, soaring crime rates, the loss of our hard-won national energy independence, totalitarian federal government targeting concerned parents as possible “domestic terrorists,” the disastrous pullout from Afghanistan that left hundreds of Americans stranded, among many other things.

Wednesday’s headlines from the elections around the nation show just how badly the Dems fared:

Glenn Youngkin’s Win Officially Ends the Clinton Era in American Politics

Slate of conservative candidates declare victory in hotly contested Denver suburb school board race

Another Shocking Victory Happened in Texas Last Night and Suggests 2022 Doom for Democrats

Republicans made incredible gains in yesterday’s elections

Note to Dems: it’s not 2020 anymore

Incumbent Brown declares Buffalo mayor write-in win over socialist India Walton

Backfire: Minneapolis voters slam abolish-the-police proposal – and city council

Election day chaos: N.J. waits to see who will be governor while major upsets loom in Legislature

NY state ballot proposals demonstrate how badly Dems have misjudged public sentiments

We could go on, but you get the idea. Democrats did worse than expected across the country, while Republicans did better.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Halloween comes late for Democrats The results not just in Virginia but New Jersey will haunt them for the next year By Charles Lipson

Posted By on November 4th, 2021

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/halloween-comes-late-democrats-mcauliffe/

When a Republican wins in a reliably Democratic state, it’s big news. That’s exactly what happened in Virginia on Tuesday, where newcomer Glenn Youngkin defeated former governor Terry McAuliffe. Youngkin won even though McAuliffe had a well-oiled political machine and high name recognition, and was campaigning in a state Joe Biden won by 10 points only a year ago.

Yet all those advantages were for naught. The Commonwealth will have a Republican governor for the first time in over a decade. It is likely Republicans will win the other two statewide races as well, for lieutenant governor and attorney general. They could even win the House of Delegates, which had been under firm Democratic control.

For Democrats, fright night stretched beyond Virginia into New Jersey, where as of press time the incumbent Democratic governor, Phil Murphy, is struggling to keep his position. The race is still too close to call.

Since Democrats easily carried both states in the last presidential and gubernatorial races, these results must send a shiver through the party. The Virginia race was particularly important. To understand its implications for 2022, we need to understand how Youngkin won.

The key was independent voters, especially the suburban voters who rejected Trump in 2020. Youngkin persuaded many of them, as Trump could not. The vote also demonstrates that Virginians are none too pleased with the performance of Democrats, who control both the state and national governments.

McAuliffe’s loss shows his party cannot recapture those disaffected voters by constantly asserting that their every opponent is a Trump wannabe or white supremacist. Instead, what they should do is to break free of their far left and put forward a moderate agenda. And they have to deliver effective results on the ground. Yet so far, national Democrats have delivered only failure: inflation, onerous mandates, empty store shelves, racially divisive school lessons, and a humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan. Those are fierce headwinds for local candidates.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Reconsidering Colin Powell’s record on Israel and Iran Moshe Phillips

Posted By on November 4th, 2021

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/316151

“Colin Powell was at times accused of being less than sympathetic to Israel, [but] that was not at all the case,” former Defense Department official Dov Zakheim recently claimed in the Washington Jewish Week newspaper. But a careful examination of Powell’s record shows that friends of Israel in the U.S. had legitimate concerns.

The well-known anecdotes about Powell speaking some Yiddish and serving as a “Shabbos goy” as a teenager are heartwarming. It’s too bad that this seems unrelated to interactions with Israel.

It was Powell who pressured Israel not to respond to Saddam Hussein’s Scud missile attacks during the Gulf War. As missile after missile struck the heart of Israel, as more than 4,000 buildings were damaged and 74 Israelis were killed, Israel’s hands were tied by Powell’s pressure.

In April 2001, Palestinian Arab terrorists in Gaza fired hundreds of rockets at Israeli kindergartens and kibbutzim. Israel hit back at the terrorists. Powell’s response? He publicly denounced Israel’s response as “excessive and disproportionate.”

Abraham Foxman, the longtime national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said Powell’s harsh criticism of Israel was an “overreaction” and “an erroneous judgment about the Israeli action.” Malcolm Hoenlein, executive Vice President of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, said Powell’s language “was inappropriate and subject to distortion by the media.”