Federal Biden Inquisitors FBI sends the wrong signals for Biden’s campaign against “domestic terrorism.” Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/federal-biden-inquisitors-lloyd-billingsley-0/

Last week, Jill Sanborn, assistant director of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division, told lawmakers that James Hodgkinson “intended for the shooting to be his final act on Earth,” when he attacked Republican lawmakers on June 14, 2017, nearly killing Rep. Steve Scalise. According to Sanborn, Hodgkinson knew  “he would likely be killed,” a tacit acknowledgement that the FBI had indeed classified the attack as “suicide by cop,” not an act of terrorism.

“I am not aware of the rationale,” Sanborn told lawmakers. “I was not in my seat at the time, so I would have to get back to you on the specifics of what the rationale was.” In the seat of acting FBI director at the time was Andrew McCabe, a Clinton crony and major player in the Russia hoax. McCabe did not testify about the rationale for calling the attack suicide by cop. 

“If it were to happen today, we would open it as a domestic terrorism case,” Sanborn testified. DOJ assistant attorney general Brad Wiegmann told legislators that James Hodgkinson was a domestic terrorist, nearly four years after the FBI failed to do so. All told, it was quite a performance from the FBI-DOJ duo. 

Hodgkinson, a supporter of Bernie Sanders, carried a list of Republican lawmakers and belonged to a Facebook group called “Terminate the Republican Party.” Hodgkinson purchased an SKS rifle, a Russian or Chinese made precursor to the AK-47, and practiced his marksmanship. Hodgkinson also recorded a video of the field where Republican lawmakers played baseball. 

On June 14, 2017, as the Republicans practiced, Hodgkinson opened fire, seriously wounding Rep. Steve Scalise and Zack Barth, an aide to Rep. Roger Williams. The Sanders supporter then engaged the Capitol Police in a gun battle, not what one would expect from someone out to commit suicide by cop. That absurd designation recalls an episode from the composite character president David Garrow described in Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama.

‘They Are Burning Us Alive!’ Say Sinai’s Coptic Christians Liquidated. Raymond Ibrahim

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/they-are-burning-us-alive-say-sinais-coptic-raymond-ibrahim/

The recent execution of a Coptic Christian man in the Sinai is a reminder that the peninsula is a hotbed of wanton, jihadi terrorism in dire need of a crackdown.

Although the murder of 62-year-old Nabil H. Salama was videotaped in an Islamic State propaganda video—meaning it received some media attention in the West—much lesser known is that the Muslim terrorists have been terrorozing, massacring, and displacing the small Coptic community for years in the Sinai.

Early 2017 probably saw the worst atrocities.  Then, the Islamic State in Sinai had released a video promising more attacks on the “worshipers of the cross,” a reference to the Copts of Egypt; the terrorists also referred to the Copts as their “favorite prey” and the “infidels who are empowering the West against Muslim nations.”

Thereafter followed a massive “jihad” on the Copts; the following are some of the more notable examples, all occurring in early 2017, mostly in al-Arish, Sinai:

A 65-year-old Christian man was shot in the head and killed; the Copt’s 45-year-old son was then abducted and tortured by the Muslim terrorists; they then burned him alive and dumped his charred remains near a schoolyard (image here).
A 35-year-old Christian was in his small shop working with his wife and young son when three masked men walked in, opened fire on and killed him.  The Muslim murderers then sat around his shop table, eating chips and drinking soda, while the slain Copt lay in a pool of blood before his terrified wife and child.
A 57-year-old Christian laborer was shot and killed as he tried to fight off masked men trying to kidnap his young son from off a crowded street in broad daylight. After murdering the Coptic father, they seized his young son and took him to an unknown location.
A 45-year-old Christian schoolteacher was moonlighting at his shoe store with his wife, when masked men walked in the crowded shop and shot him dead.
A 40-year-old Coptic medical doctor was killed by masked men who, after forcing him to stop his car, opened fire on and killed him.  He too left a widow and two children.
A group of armed Muslims attacked St. George, a Coptic Christian church in the Sinai on Sunday 15, 2017, leaving seven—including a young child—dead, and 15, mostly women and children, wounded.   
A Christian father and his two sons were abducted; their decapitated bodies were later found discarded.

The Zarif-Kerry Bromance Saga Continues Iran’s Foreign Minister credits Kerry for telling him about Israeli airstrikes in Syria. Joseph Klein

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/zarif-kerry-bromance-saga-continues-joseph-klein/

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif evidently had no idea that Israel had launched 200 airstrikes against Iranian targets in Syria until John Kerry, now President Biden’s climate czar, told him, according to Washington Free Beacon reporter Adam Kredo.  Kredo managed to obtain the audio file of Zarif’s leaked phone interview in which Kerry’s disclosure was revealed and had it independently translated.

“Kerry told me that Israel had launched 200 airstrikes against you [Iran],” Zarif is heard saying. “You didn’t know?” asked his interviewer. “No, no,” Zarif replied.

If this information had already been made public in the press, there would be no reason for Zarif to use what was supposed to be a confidential interview to cite Kerry as his source. In any case, whether or not Kerry was simply passing on information already reported in the press, it begs the question of what else Kerry might have shared with Zarif from intelligence sources that Zarif chose not to mention during his interview.

Kerry should be required to testify under oath to Congress about Zarif’s claim. If it turns out that Kerry was sharing any classified information with Zarif to which he had access before, during or after his term as Secretary of State, he should not only lose his government job and security clearance. He should face possible prosecution.

“These are very serious allegations and knowing the position that he holds in government and position that he did hold, yes, it should be investigated. Knowing if these are true, I think it should go beyond him just resigning,” said Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), the House Minority Leader.

Republican Rep. Lee Zeldin, a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said that “Israel remains America’s staunchest and most loyal ally in the Middle East, and the idea that America’s former top diplomat would leak sensitive information about covert military operations to the world’s largest state sponsor of terror — putting Israeli lives at risk — is massively alarming.” Rep. Zeldin added that Kerry should “immediately testify before the House Foreign Affairs Committee to address these serious allegations, and if Kerry did actively undermine Israel, he must resign from the Biden administration immediately and have his security clearance revoked​.”

Who’s Afraid of Tim Scott? The GOP senator forced the president and vice president to respond to him. William McGurn

https://www.wsj.com/articles/whos-afraid-of-tim-scott-11620078729?mod=opinion_featst_pos3

Kamala Harris went first. In the Republican response to Joe Biden’s address to Congress, Sen. Tim Scott avowed that America “is not a racist country.” The next day on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” the vice president was asked if she agreed with him.

“I don’t think America is a racist country,” she said, “but we also do have to speak truth about the history of racism in our country and its existence today.”

The following day, it was President Biden’s turn. In an interview with NBC’s “Today,” he, too, was asked about Mr. Scott’s characterization—and he, too, agreed. “I don’t think America’s racist,” he said, “but I think the overhang from all of the Jim Crow [laws], and before that slavery, have had a cost, and we have to deal with it.”

Though no one was impolite enough to bring it up, Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris would never have said what they did if the black Republican senator from South Carolina hadn’t used his moment to force their hands. Essentially, he dared them to speak aloud the logical conclusion from all their repeated references to systemic racism and the threat of white supremacy. Wisely recognizing that this would be political poison, they flinched.

How different from only two weeks ago, when a Columbus, Ohio, police officer saved the life of a black teenager by shooting another black teen about to stab her. Asked about it, White House press secretary Jen Psaki went right for the progressive go-to: “Black women and girls, like black men and boys, experience higher rates of police violence.”

That’s the trouble with narratives. They are one size fits all, with no room for considering the individual case on its merits and particular circumstances. This is what Mr. Scott was referring to when he suggested race is used as “a political weapon to settle every issue the way one side wants”—by slamming anyone who raises an inconvenient fact as racist or dismissing speech as invalid based solely on the speaker’s racial identity.

America Courts Disaster by Rewarding Failure When politics become not just one thing, but the only thing in the most influential areas of society, it foretells disaster Benjamin Weingarten

https://weingarten.substack.com/p/america-courts-disaster-by-rewarding?token=eyJ

Is a country that rewards failure, corruption, and deceit destined to fail?

This disquieting question comes to mind when one considers how members of the commanding heights of society have increasingly failed—at least on merit—upward.

Some recent news items illustrate this point.

The Biden administration has seen a number of its nominees confirmed, with varying Republican support, in spite of their checkered records.

Samantha Power, the U.N. ambassador during the Obama administration, was found to have made several hundred seemingly unjustifiable unmasking requests—exposing the name of someone incidentally recorded by government surveillance—and apparently lied about one such series of requests, regarding retired Gen. Mike Flynn, in testimony to Congress. Her inglorious record spans from our shores to Israel, Syria, and well beyond the Levant.

Power was rewarded by being confirmed to head the U.S. Agency for International Development and is likely to be seated on the National Security Council.

Lisa Monaco, the former Obama administration homeland security adviser, played a critical role in word and deed in propagating Russiagate/Spygate. She was rewarded by being confirmed as deputy attorney general, where she is expected to take a major role in combating domestic violent extremism. There are indications that this effort could lead to the targeting of like-minded political dissenters to the ones wrongfully ensnared in Russiagate/Spygate.

Setting aside Biden administration nominees, word broke last week that Mary McCord, a former senior Obama Department of Justice official responsible for rubberstamping the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant applications to spy on Carter Page, helping oversee the Crossfire Hurricane operation, and like Power, targeting Flynn, was named to the eight-member amici curiae of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). Amicus curiae are responsible for advising the FISC on critical matters, including, ironically, legal arguments advancing the protection of civil liberties.

Biden’s Massive Hidden Tax Hike That You’ll Be Forced To Pay

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/05/05/bidens-massive-hidden-tax-hike-that-well-all-have-to-pay/

You’re about to get hit with a huge tax. No it’s not to pay for the new infrastructure bill or the Green New Deal, which will cost trillions of dollars in new taxes, though they do play a role. Nor does it come from paying for the trillions of COVID-19 “stimulus” packages that Congress has passed, even as the economy roared out of its recession late last year. No, this tax is far more insidious than all that.

It’s inflation. A tax that costs everyone dearly, rich and poor alike.

Americans have gotten used to having little or no inflation. They’ve forgotten how awful it is. Economically speaking, it’s the most devastating of all taxes, because it comes entirely from government. And citizens don’t realize they’re paying it until too late.

If you’re under 45, you might not understand. After all, more than 90% of your life has been spent with declining or even non-existent inflation. When you got a raise, your pay really went up. And when you went to the store to buy things, prices often were below where they were a year earlier.

But guess what? With a tidal wave of tax hikes and new spending from the Biden Democrats, a raft of new “green” federal regulations on the way, key global shortages of foodstuffs, a rising minimum wage, and tight markets for industrial goods such as lumber, steel and even microchips, not to mention a Fed that loves to print money, we may be on the verge of an inflation surge that could take down our financial markets and cut deeply into average Americans’ standard of living.

The Two Faces of American Foreign Policy By Dr. Alex Joffe,

https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/american-foreign-policy/

The ongoing crisis in American culture has brought two seemingly unrelated trends to the forefront: advocacy of technocratic expertise aimed at solving global issues, and condemnation of America’s allegedly irredeemable racism. American diplomacy exemplifies these trends through the figures of Secretary of State Antony Blinken and UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield. Both trends are founded in Puritanical moralism, according to which salvation is difficult if not impossible and “crisis” is a tool for accumulating power.

Though American foreign policy has always vacillated, its actual practice has managed at least the appearance of consistency. But in a period when American society as a whole is undergoing a psychodrama regarding race, class, history, climate, and “whiteness,” it is not surprising that diplomatic practitioners have been affected.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken and UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield are telling examples of both intellectual trends among American elites and the institution of American diplomacy. For both, there are extraordinary crises that must be addressed immediately by the global community. But the contrasts between Blinken’s level presentation of globally oriented technocratic “expertise” and Thomas-Greenfield’s full-bore anti-Americanism cannot be more profound. In neither case do American interests come first. Can they been reconciled or explained?

Antony Blinken’s pedigree as a certified internationalist (and fluent French speaker) need not be recapitulated. His return to the State Department was heralded as the return of American probity and leadership. What are his priorities and methods? His remarks to the Virtual Leaders Summit on Climate are indicative. “What the United States can do at home can make a significant contribution toward keeping the Earth’s warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius,” he stated, without elaboration. “But of course, no country can overcome this existential threat alone.”

Elsewhere, Blinken has depicted human-induced climate change as a veritable Frankstein’s monster causing “[m]ore frequent and more intense storms; longer dry spells; bigger floods; more extreme heat and more extreme cold; faster sea level rise; more people displaced; more pollution; more asthma,” as well as “Higher health costs; less predictable seasons for farmers. And all of that will hit low-income, black and brown communities the hardest.” Almost as bad, “Russia is exploiting this change to try to exert control over new spaces. It is modernizing its bases in the Arctic and building new ones, including one just 300 miles from Alaska. China is increasing its presence in the Arctic, too.”

To address these unfolding horrors, America will put “climate crisis at the center of our foreign policy and national security, as President Biden instructed us to do in his first week in office. That means taking into account how every bilateral and multilateral engagement—every policy decision—will impact our goal of putting the world on a safer, more sustainable path.” The US will then “mobilize resources, institutional know-how, technical expertise from across our government, the private sector, NGOs, and research universities” and “emphasize assisting the countries being hit hardest by climate change,” notably by “leveraging instruments like the financing provided by the Export-Import Bank to incentivize renewable energy exports; the proposed expansion of tax credits for clean energy generation and storage in the President’s American Jobs Plan; and the Administration’s ongoing efforts to level the global playing field for American-made products and services.”

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The Curious Case of the Asian American Victim Richard Bernstein

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/05/04/the_curious_case_of_the_asian_american_victim_774865.html

The mass shooting in Atlanta on March 16, which took the lives of six Asian women among the eight victims, appears to be a one-off event – the violent act of a deeply troubled 21-year-old man who, according to what he told the police, was trying to wipe away sexual temptation, in the form of massage parlors that he felt guilty patronizing.

But that’s not how the incident was treated by the Asian American commentariat. Instead, a consensus quickly formed among journalists, scholars, and cultural figures writing op-eds and giving broadcast interviews that the shooting represented a pervasive, historical victimization by Asian people at the hands of the white majority. It was almost as if shootings of Asian women by white gunmen were an everyday occurrence, rather than a singular, exceedingly rare event.

Bee Nguyen, the first Asian woman to be elected to the George state assembly, declared at a rally four days after the shooting that the incident requires us “to demand justice not only for these victims but for all victims of white supremacy.” The Asian-American Association of Massachusetts, a supposedly nonpartisan group established by the state legislature, issued a statement blaming the attack on “misogyny, white supremacy, and the historical portrayal of Asians as the ‘Yellow Peril.’”

The Korean American novelist R.O. Kwon wrote a “letter to my fellow Asian women whose hearts are breaking,” published in Vanity Fair, saying that the Atlanta murders represented “the passing of women shot for what they looked like, killed by a racist gunman and by this country’s white supremacy.”

Two days after the attack, the page one headline in The New York Times read, “How Racism and Sexism Intertwine to Torment Asian-American Women,” with the article quoting several women excoriating the Atlanta police for even thinking that the massage parlor shootings may not have been racially motivated. There were no views on the other side of the issue in the Times coverage. Similarly in a New York Times podcast, the poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong said, “We have also been victims to systemic racism throughout history,” except, she continued, “we have been conditioned to pretend that it doesn’t exist.”

“I think that came from the white supremacist system that we live in,” she added.

The Politics of Attacking Tim Scott .By Charles Lipson

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/05/04/the_politics_of_attacking_t

After a week of vicious personal attacks on Sen. Tim Scott, it’s time to step back and ask what’s really going on here. Why such ferocious pushback after Scott’s calm rebuttal to President Biden’s speech to Congress? Why are the assaults so nasty, so personal? What are the political implications?

One implication should be clear, but another is well hidden. The obvious one is the attacks are meant to keep Black voters firmly within the Democratic coalition. Condemning dissidents like Scott as “race traitors” implies that the only way to keep faith with Black America is to support Democrats and their progressive agenda.

This unified, enthusiastic support from African Americans is crucial for the party to win elections in purple states. Scott is challenging that unanimity. Donald Trump did, too, and made some inroads, but Scott is a far more congenial messenger. He’s a happy warrior with an impressive background and a record of accomplishment, personal and professional.

Related movements, such as “Blexit” (Black Exit from the Democratic Party), don’t have to be large to be politically important. Small inroads matter because our electorate is so evenly divided, so many contests are tight, and Democrats can win only if (1) Blacks turn out in very large numbers and (2) almost all of them vote Democratic.

That’s also why Democrats are furious about Georgia’s new voting law. Of course, they genuinely believe it is an obstacle to Black voting. But there’s another, equally important reason. They think attacking the law shows African Americans across the country (and many progressives) that the Democratic Party really cares about them and that Republicans are racist. This PR campaign has led to some ludicrous hyperbole, such as President Biden calling the law “Jim Crow 2.0.” That’s an insult to people who actually suffered through Jim Crow, who were denied the vote, education, good jobs, and dignity under that legal regime (which lasted from the 1890s until the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act).

How does Sen. Scott threaten this Democratic coalition? Both by conveying his own views so effectively and by encouraging other prominent Blacks to join him. The more such voices, the harder it is to marginalize them as “tokens.” The more who speak out, the more socially acceptable it is for African Americans to vote Republican. The more traction this movement gains, the more dangerous for Democrats. Again, a small shift in this key constituency could matter.