RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/15/no-leaders-attended-the-g7-summit/

When I was a child, I made the mistake, as many children do, of thinking that the actors I saw in movies were in some way responsible for their lines. As the playwright Moss Hart heard from a lady sitting behind him: “Actors say the cleverest things!”

But it didn’t take me long to notice that while an actor can make good material great, he cannot make bad material good. If you give him stupid and implausible things to say, he will look stupid and implausible. He may or may not be aware of how he looks; that’s not his job: His job is to act the way someone tells him to act, and to say what someone tells him to say.

And that brings us to the picture of the G7 leaders on the beach in Cornwall. Nobody who watches the film of these people arriving, coming down the boardwalk carefully spaced, hygienically elbow-bumping in lieu of shaking hands, and finally taking up positions for their photo op—nobody would believe these people are world leaders. Because they aren’t. They aren’t running the western world. They are run by the people who really are running the western world—people whose names we don’t know. The people on the beach in Cornwall are there simply in recognition of the working man’s need to see an elected head of state. They are actors.

A Rasmussen poll in March found that just 47 percent of Americans believe Biden is actually doing the job of president. At least as many people believe the job is being done by some other person or persons behind the scenes. And that 47 percent who believe Biden is doing the job must think it’s an awfully easy one, since you don’t have to remember where you are or with whom you are speaking. Even as an actor, Biden’s powers are failing.

It is hardly more plausible that Boris Johnson, a man who looks and talks like a buttered scone, is actually determining policy in Britain. Remember his great pandemic speech: “I must give the British people a very simple instruction: You must stay at home. . . . If you don’t follow the rules, the police will have the power to enforce them . . .” That would have stuck in the throat of any real leader of any real democracy. Churchill would be vomiting in his grave. But Boris Johnson’s eyes were burning with earnestness as he relayed the instructions given to him by the civil service bureaucracy and whatever other hidden powers are running his mouth.

Justin Trudeau meanwhile seemed genuinely hurt when nobody liked his little Bhangra dance routine back in Delhi in 2018. It’s not entirely his fault: He was in Indian costume, and he slipped into the role. He forgot for a moment that his full time job was pretending to be a prime minister.

You could replace Biden with any Hollywood actor—George Clooney, Tom Hanks, Denzel Washington, Meryl Streep—and it wouldn’t make the slightest difference in how the country is being run or what policies are pursued. You could replace Biden with a paper cup. That might destroy the illusion (though not by much). Biden is a figurehead, rather more embarrassing than the Queen of England, and rather less powerful.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/anatomy-lynching-lloyd-billingsley/

“Their lives were taken in a brutal, cowardly, and brazen act of violence. This killing was no accident. This was a terrorist attack motivated by hatred in the heart of one of our communities.” 

That was Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, speaking to reporters last Tuesday. Over in Pakistan, Prime Minister Imran Khan blamed the attack on “growing Islamophobia” in Western countries that “needs to be countered holistically by the international community.”

Ontario premier Doug Ford proclaimed that “justice must be served for the horrific act of hatred that took place.” London, Ontario, mayor Ed Holder told reporters, “this was an act of mass murder, perpetrated against Muslims, against Londoners, and rooted in unspeakable hatred.” London detective superintendent Paul Waight said, “there is evidence that this was a planned, premeditated act, motivated by hate. We believe the victims were targeted because of their Islamic faith.” 

Mustafa Farooq of the National Council of Canadian Muslims said “this is a terrorist attack on Canadian soil, and should be treated as such.” What, exactly, was this carefully planned terrorist attack that had drawn such international wrath?

On June 6, Salman Afzaal, 46, his wife Madiha, 44, their daughter Yumna, 15, Fayez, nine, and Salman’s mother, Talat, 74, immigrants to Canada in 2007, were waiting an at intersection when they were struck by a truck driven by 20-year-old Nathaniel Veltman. The crash killed all but Fayez, who remains in hospital. 

Police arrested Veltman, reportedly wearing body armor, a military-style helmet, and a Nazi T-shirt. He allegedly laughed about the crash, indulged in strange chanting, and requested that a movie made of him. As one headline put it “Christian terroristwho mowed down Muslim family ‘was laughing’ as he got out of blood covered truck.” 

The sole source for these details was a “veteran cabbie,” now allegedly too traumatized to speak, so the spokesman was Iranian immigrant Hasan Savehilaghi, who operates the cab company. Since Savehilaghi had not been a witness on the scene, the account was entirely hearsay. Savehilaghi did not explain how Veltman had planned to be driving near the intersection precisely when the Afzaal family was waiting to cross the street. 

Nathaniel Veltman, it turns out, is one of six children, including a twin sister, and grew up in a Christian family in Strathroy, Ontario. Veltman attended Fanshawe College in London and works at a local egg packing company. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/g7-and-globalist-diplomacy-fetish-bruce-thornton/

The most recent G7 summit has come and gone, accomplishing little except to remind us how useless and dangerous has been our long fetish for diplomacy. These meetings and other multinational confabs are merely part of the New World Order’s marketing campaign to convince the free West that multinational technocratic elites are better at advancing national interests than are the sovereign peoples to whom government office-holders are accountable.

Here in the U.S., such advertising campaigns also provide progressives with a permanent partisan club for beating conservatives and foreign policy realists who want to put America’s national interests and security ahead of those of some mythic “global community,” a euphemism for nations who talk globally but act locally.

American Democrat and Republican globalists have for decades smeared nationalism and promoted instead greater integration into the “rules-based international order.” Conservative presidents who resisted were pilloried as unsophisticated jingoists and trigger-happy militarists clinging to worn-out ideas from a more savage time. Ronald Reagan, with his allegedly crude, unnuanced “we win, they lose” and “evil empire” rhetoric was mocked as a dangerously naïve warmonger, with his arms build-up and “Star Wars” fantasies about anti-missile defense systems. But Reagan’s success showed that for diplomatic “covenants” to be effective, there had to be a credible “sword” backing the agreement.

This caricature of Republican presidents ran wild during the George W. Bush years. The second war against Saddam Hussein was attacked as a “failure of diplomacy” despite the serial diplomatic failures of Hussein’s violating more than a dozen UN Security Council resolutions as well as the terms of the Gulf War armistice. Typical was the statement of Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, who said he was “saddened that this president failed so miserably at diplomacy that we’re now forced to war.” Of course, the New York Times also peddled this DNC talking point, writing of Bush’s “failure to enlist the help of the United Nations in conducting the war,” despite Bush’s spending several  months trying to get the UN Security Council to “help.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/06/a-hesitant-half-hearted-stand-against-china/

Beijing appeared piqued by the transatlantic unity on display as a triumphant Joe Biden marshaled his European counterparts to defend world order at a dizzying series of summits in Cornwall and Brussels this week. Today, it sent 28 jets through Taiwan’s air-defense-identification zone, its largest-ever incursion. But surely Chinese Communist Party officials, and other American adversaries, were also relieved that the statements from these meetings were watered down by hesitant European governments.

The G-7, NATO, and U.S.-EU summits yielded communiqués setting out ambitious goals aimed at shoring up and retooling these alliances for the 21st century’s greatest challenges, among which the president says is autocracy’s global competition with democracy. “I think we’ve made some progress in reestablishing American credibility among our closest friends,” Biden said at the G-7 summit. There, the leaders of the world’s largest economies committed to hundreds of billions of dollars in global infrastructure investment to counter the Belt and Road Initiative and called out Chinese human-rights abuses.

National-Security Adviser Jake Sullivan explained how the G-7 delivered an apparently unified statement on China despite disagreements between members. “When you add it all up, actually, the whole became greater than the sum of its parts, because there is a broad view that China represents a significant challenge to the world’s democracies.” 

The math can be described otherwise: These alliances can go only as fast as the lowest common denominator of agreement between these countries allows them to go. Which is why these gatherings yielded directionally promising statements but were nevertheless hindered by countries who are loath to confront the CCP. The G-7 explicitly rapped Beijing for its coercion of Taiwan and human-rights abuses, while making oblique mention of forced-labor practices in a separate section — because EU, German, and Italian officials were more circumspect. The portion on COVID origins calls for a transparent investigation, but it calls for one under the aegis of the compromised WHO investigation process.