Central and Eastern Europe Help Show the Path Forward As the post-Trump American Right continues to cohere and slowly finds itself, it should look to the likes of modern-day Poland and Hungary for some concrete pointers. Josh Hammer

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/27/central-and-eastern-europe-help-show-the-path-forward/

I’m writing from Warsaw, Poland, making for both my first time venturing behind the old Iron Curtain and my first trip back to Europe since the onset of COVID-19. Despite the overcast weather endemic to this part of the globe, the mood on the ground is unmistakably buoyant.

Poland, along with its fellow Visegrad Group member Central European nations of Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic—and perhaps also including nearby Austria—has emerged as a perhaps unlikely ground zero in the fight to save Western civilization from a debilitating and increasingly all-encompassing liberal decadence.

The sad history of the region continues to pervade daily life here. Locals routinely respond to questions about what sites tourists should visit in one of two ways: “The Nazis destroyed everything in the war” or “The Soviet occupation ruined everything.” Few regions in the world know totalitarian repression and occupation like this area of the blood-soaked European continent does. The Visegrad states, which have rarely tasted national independence over the vicissitudes of the past millennium, felt the full brunt of both Nazi fascism and Soviet Communism in all-too-recent memory.

The silver lining, and the reason this region is so interesting from a contemporary economic and geopolitical perspective, is that out of the joint tyrannical fires of Nazism and Communism were forged, in the decades following the fall of the Berlin Wall, a robust appreciation for the integrity of the independent nation-state and the importance of Judeo-Christian-inspired societal goals, such as family formation and fortified communitarian ties.

Put more simply, the four Visegrad states and Austria have emerged as veritable redoubts of traditional Western values and substantive political priorities, such as national borders, immigration properly limited to promote assimilation and intergenerational cultural stability, and the transcendental meaning and fulfillment that only religion can provide.

You Knew DOJ’s Kristen Clarke Was a Radical, But It’s Much, Much Worse Than They’re Letting On By J. Christian Adams

https://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2021/05/27/justice-departments-kristen-clarke-all-about-skin-color-n1450172

Newly confirmed Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Kristen Clarke is a thoroughly modern woman. She could never have been confirmed even during the Clinton administration because of her racially-soaked radical worldview.

But these are revolutionary times, where skin color has gained newfound importance in a way we haven’t seen since June 1964 when segregationists chased civil rights marchers down the streets of St. Augustine, Florida.

If you think the comparison doesn’t work, then you haven’t been paying attention, or you are watching too much MSNBC.

I suppose everything old is new again. Content of character is out. Color of skin is in.

And thus Clarke squeaked by this week on a 51-48 vote to manage the most powerful division of the Justice Department.

The Civil Rights Division has its tentacles in every single aspect of American life – schools, jails, elections, hotels, mortgages, movie theaters, church sermons, bathrooms, computer software, rent rates, service animals on planes, pool chair lifts, mental hospitals and forcing police departments to adopt radical policing policies. I left 100 other topics off the list.

And now, another racialist radical is in charge in the division where I was once an attorney.

Clarke is no ordinary racialist radical, though. She brings a reputation for being racially greedy. I have some personal experience with her on this point.

In 2007, I was working on what would become the Voting Rights Act case of United States v. Georgetown School Board.  I was one of the lawyers who spent many days in South Carolina investigating violations of the Voting Rights Act. Georgetown had a voting-age black population of 34 percent but the at-large elections for school board resulted in no blacks ever being elected to the nine at-large seats.  While there is no right to proportional representation, in theory, blacks could conceivably have won three of nine seats.

‘Defund the Police’ Mayoral Candidate Dragged by Young Car Thieves By Kevin Downey Jr.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/kevindowneyjr/2021/05/27/defund-the-police-mayoral-candidate-dragged-by-young-car-thieves-n1450337

Atlanta city councilman and mega-liberal mayoral candidate Antonio Brown, who voted last year to defund the Atlanta Police Department by a whopping $73 million, was dragged alongside his car by kiddie-thieves stealing his 2016 Mercedes on Wednesday. The suspects were described as being between the ages of 7 and 11 years old.

Brown, who is running on a platform of “reimagining” the police, arrived at a ribbon-cutting ceremony at a new Dunkin Donuts-Baskin Robbins combo store around 12:30 p.m. Moments after he stepped out of his car, 4 kids swarmed into his keyless, push-button-start Mercedes and took off. Brown attempted to stop the kids, one of whom “acted like he had a gun.” Brown claimed he was dragged, “about a block” before he let go.

“As he started to speed up, and I knew that if I had not let go, I knew I probably could have killed myself because he was going so fast, I would have started to tumble. And I would have hurt him,” the councilman said, Fox News reported.

I have no idea how the child car thief would have gotten hurt in this scenario. I also have no idea how getting dragged “about a block” didn’t result in numerous injuries for Brown.

Brown’s Instagram, with a whopping (sarcasm) 3,454 followers, posted 10 pictures of the ribbon-cutting ceremony where he and his car were separated by children. The pictures have thus far garnered a staggering (more sarcasm) 114 likes.

The Wright Stuff Richard Wright’s 40s novel is back – and his brave anti-Communist stand deserves attention. Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/wright-stuff-lloyd-billingsley/

Richard Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground, written in the 1940s, has now made the best-seller list in 2021. In this short novel, police torture an innocent black man into confessing a double murder. The author, who died in 1960, also spent time in a political underground, and that too has escaped the attention it deserves.

Born in Mississippi in 1908, Richard Wright gained fame for Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945). Wright also served a stint in the Communist Party, and explained his experience in The God That Failed (1949), with former Communists such as Arthur Koestler (Darkness at Noon),  Andre Gide (The Immoralist) and Ignazio Silone (Fontamara). As Wright discovered, the Communists held his intelligence and literary skill against him.

“He talks like a book,” said one of the comrades, “and that was enough to condemn me forever as a bourgeois.” In the Communist Party, Wright learned, “a man could not have his say.” Party Stalinists smeared Wright as a “bastard intellectual” and “incipient Trotskyite,” with an “anti-leadership attitude.” The Communist Party, dominated by whites, “felt it had to assassinate me morally merely because I did not want to be bound by its decisions,” and Wright got the message loud and clear.

“I knew that if they held state power I should have been declared guilty of treason and my execution would have followed.” In his stories, Wright had assigned “a role of honor and glory to the Communist Party.” That was now “finished” and “I knew in my heart that I should never be able to write that way again.”

Richard Wright was a close friend of Frank Marshall Davis, who read the galley proofs for Native Son and reviewed Black Boy for the Associated Negro Press (ANP). Wright used the photo Davis had taken of him to accompany the Time magazine review of Black Boy.

In his memoir Livin’ the Blues: Memoirs of a Black Journalist and Poet, Davis accused Wright of selling out and “redbaiting.” Davis remained in the Communist Party and spent much of his life defending all-white Stalinist dictatorships in the USSR. In the late 1940s, the CPUSA sent Davis to Hawaii, then a prime target of Stalinist expansionism. That failed when Hawaii became a U.S. State in 1959. Frank remained on the island and his pro-Soviet activities landed him on the FBI’s security index.

Ami Horowitz Video: Raising Money From Woke Students for Hamas to Kill Jews Welcome to the university campus’ heart of darkness. Ami Horowitz

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/video-ami-horowitz-raises-money-woke-students-ami-horowitz/

In his latest “Ami on the Loose” video, filmmaker Ami Horowitz travels to Portland State University to see if he can raise money for the Palestinian terror group Hamas to attack “soft targets” in Israel like cafes and schools. Check out how dishearteningly successful he is in the very short, must-see video below:

St. Louis Mayor Guts the Police Tishaura Jones faithfully fulfills the leftist agenda. Matthew Vadum

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/st-louis-mayor-guts-police-matthew-vadum/

The newly arrived radical leftist mayor of St. Louis, Missouri, the city with the worst murder rate in America, is committed to leaving her constituents at the mercy of violent criminals by defunding the local police department and shutting down one of the city’s two jails.

St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones, a woke black Democrat, was sworn in in April after narrowly defeating Cara Spencer, a similarly woke leftist white woman.

Jones’s campaign, which focused on “progressive” criminal justice reforms, was unabashedly racist. She said during a debate that Spencer wouldn’t be a good mayor because her skin was the wrong color.

A “white person doesn’t have to worry about their children getting hit by a stray bullet when he’s outside,” Jones said. “While I appreciate the role of white allies in this movement of progress, I don’t believe that they have the lived experiences to lead a majority-minority city.”

Her victory speech was weighted down with platitudes.

“I will not stay silent when I spot racism,” Jones said. “I will not stay silent when I spot homophobia or transphobia. I will not stay silent when I spot xenophobia. I will not stay silent when I spot religious intolerance. I will not stay silent when I spot any injustice.”

Her father is crooked former elected official Virvus Jones. Mr. Jones was the city’s chief financial officer from 1988 to 1995 when he left office after pleading guilty to felony tax fraud.

His Twitter feed is woke, incendiary, and subversive. His Twitter profile is a cross between Hillary Clinton and Nero. It reads simply: “An African Proverb: The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.”

In a May 23 tweet he whined as follows: “Warrants issued for non violent or victimless crimes should not be a death sentence for black people. Police in the US are the equivalence [sic] of slave patrols[,]” he wrote, embracing a lie promoted by the 1619 Project. “Most of the warrants the police serve are not for violent crimes so there is no reason to shoot at a person fleeing.”

St. Louis is in rough shape as Mayor Jones takes the reins.

The city had 262 homicides or 87 homicides per 100,000 residents in 2020, the highest in the country, Fox News reported, and it is on track to break that record this year.

As of April 7, St. Louis had 50 homicides since January 1, 2021, an increase of 10 from April 7 the previous year.

The 262 figure for 2020 is five less than the record of 267 set in 1993, according to police. “But because the city’s population has declined since 1993, the per capita homicide rate was much higher in 2020. The homicide pace in 2021 is ahead of last year’s pace,” KMOV4 reports.

“More police doesn’t prevent crime,” Jones told The Telegraph.

It’s Getting Bad for the Jews By Michael Brendan Dougherty

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/its-getting-bad-for-the-jews/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=also-from-author&utm_term=first

Thoughts on the rising hostility in the United States and in Europe

 F or the past couple of years, there have been reports about an uptick in “random” assaults in New York. Men are just walking along a street in Brooklyn, and they get sucker-punched. Except it isn’t random. The victims are Orthodox Jews. This growing uptick in assaults has been punctuated by mass killings at Jewish synagogues in San Diego, Pittsburgh, and upstate New York. In recent weeks, as a conflict between Israel and Palestinians in Gaza has become the occasion for a coming-out party for a newly confident anti-Zionist wing in the American Left, we also see newly confident thugs assaulting Jews in Manhattan’s Diamond District while shouting slogans about Palestine.

This is a scandal beyond words. Secular and religious Jews are formed to be sensitive to these upsurges in hostility and violence because their history as a people in exile tells them that these spasms of violence do not just subside. They tend to grow and grow until Jews are finally forced to emigrate. Jewish life is dying out in Paris precisely because of a growing pattern of street harassment and assaults that are punctuated by terrorist attacks aimed at killing masses of Jews at synagogues and kosher supermarkets. Parisian Jews are leaving for Israel. There was a time they might have left for New York. I expect that for many Jews, the realization that New York could go the way of Paris would be the bitterest pill to swallow.

Speaking of the Europeans, what’s going on there is also a scandal. The news of rockets being fired from Gaza into Israel, and Israel launching attacks on the positions from which they are fired, set off major protests in European cities. Now, criticism would be one thing. The state of Israel, the Israel Defense Forces, and even the Israeli people are just that — people — and they are capable of folly, prejudice, and cruelty like any other. And the Palestinians are people too — many of them living in a situation that is abjectly miserable. Imagine both resenting Israel and having the foreign government of Iran pay for the thugs of Hamas to be your political leadership while you seek satisfaction and try to make a life for your family.

But these protests in European cities are not focused on legitimate criticisms of Israel. In North London, a group of Muslim men drove a kind of convoy through a Jewish neighborhood, shouting slogans such as, “F*** the Jews, rape their daughters.”

But crude as this was, there is something more scandalous about the protests in Europe. Muslims might at least feel like a party to the Israeli–Gaza conflict, in some way. What’s truly disturbing is the mass of secular Europeans who come from long lines of native residents in their countries joining in.

It brings up the question of why Israel’s actions bother Europeans so much. The oppression of the Kurds by Turkey occasions not a peep of protest. You’d think it might, given European connections to Turkey through NATO and other European Union–led deals about migration. Or the fact that the tyrant Recep Erdogan travels to European capitals and holds massive campaign rallies to capture the votes of Turkish men and women who live abroad. If the motor is a kind of anti-Americanism — American support for Israel is often brought up at these European protests — then why not protest the humanitarian disaster that has been Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, which causes starvation and has exacerbated the worst cholera outbreak in modern history?

The Fall of Saint Anthony Fauci By Michael Brendan Dougherty

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/06/14/the-fall-of-saint-anthony-fauci/#slide-1

On the unforced errors of America’s most political doctor

In mid March of 2020, most Americans, including those in the White House, were still trying to understand the COVID-19 crisis unfolding around them. In a span of 24 hours, the NBA came to a sudden halt when players tested positive for the virus; seemingly minutes later, the American actor Tom Hanks announced from Australia that he and his wife, Rita Wilson, had this mysterious new illness; stock markets crashed around the world; President Donald Trump declared a pause on travel from Europe; and the World Health Organization, belatedly, labeled the spread of the coronavirus a pandemic. On March 16, the Trump White House called for 15 days to slow the spread of the virus — a lockdown.

The White House coronavirus task force was meeting regularly and issuing daily briefings at that time. In the Situation Room, economic advisers began presenting their models and predictions for the economic effects of lockdown to the task force, including its leader, Vice President Mike Pence, and the president. What the advisers reported was shocking. Just four weeks of lockdown would lead to millions of Americans unemployed, extreme burdens on the public purse, and the greatest one-month contraction of the American economy since the Great Depression. A health adviser present said that, as the lights came up following the presentation, the faces of most of the advisers in the room were ashen. The gravity of what had just been said — all of which shortly came to pass — seemed to have stunned everyone into silence.

Except one man. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), immediately turned to Vice President Pence and asked a question that appeared to dismiss not only the imminent miseries of lockdown but the relevance of the entire subject from the proceedings: “I’m still in charge, right?”

More or less, yes, Fauci was still in charge. And he still is. Though he had spent the weeks before that day giving interviews in which he told Americans to be more concerned about the seasonal flu than the coronavirus, and that the wearing of masks by the public would be useless at protecting them from it, Fauci was cast as the face of America’s best pandemic response, the one figure who took it seriously. Fauci was the anti-Trump, possessed of a “quaint fondness for facts and evidence-based science,” according to the New York Times. Trump’s biggest supporters, sensing that Fauci was delighting in this role and despairing as they were of lockdowns, turned on the doctor, demanding he be fired. The White House began treating the administration’s most prominent medical expert as a threat, circulating anti-Fauci talking points. Which made progressives embrace him all the more. On social media your liberal friends call their COVID-19 vaccine shots their “Fauci ouchies.” Fauci became the latest warrior-saint of “the Resistance,” holding aloft the banner of science and reason.

France Suspects Russian Role in Campaign to Discredit Pfizer Vaccine Several French bloggers said they received emails offering to pay for social-media videos criticizing the Covid-19 vaccine by Matthew Dalton

https://www.wsj.com/articles/france-suspects-russian-role-in-campaign-to-discredit-pfizer-vaccine-11621978289

PARIS—French counterintelligence authorities are investigating whether the Russian government was behind an attempt to pay high-profile health and science bloggers to sow public doubts about the safety of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine, a French security official said.

Several French bloggers said publicly they received emails in recent days from a person claiming to work for a marketing firm called Fazze. The emails, some of which were reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, offered to pay the bloggers to make videos on YouTube, Instagram and other platforms criticizing the vaccine developed by Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE, which has been the most widely used vaccine in France. One blogger told French TV he was offered €2,050 (about $2,500) for a video.

The security official said counterintelligence authorities suspect the Kremlin could be responsible for the emails. The official compared the emails to campaigns run by the Internet Research Agency, a Russian firm that U.S. authorities have identified as responsible for Moscow’s effort to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Western officials have said these operations are an attempt by the Kremlin to undermine public confidence in Western institutions.

The Kremlin didn’t respond to a request for comment. It has previously dismissed accusations that Russia was using disinformation campaigns against Western vaccines and has denied interfering in the U.S. election.

Fazze listed an address in London on its website, which was taken down Tuesday. Fazze isn’t registered as a U.K. company. A post on a Russian employment website describes it as a subsidiary of AdNow, a Moscow-based marketing agency. AdNow didn’t respond to a request for comment. The LinkedIn accounts of Fazze employees, now deleted, show many have been educated in Russian schools, such as Siberian Transport University.

The Pandemic of Anti-Semitism Jew-hatred is wrong whether it comes from neo-Nazis or left-wing activists. By Donna Brazile

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-pandemic-of-anti-semitism-11622131302?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

“I am proud to stand with Jews against anti-Semitism, just as many Jews have stood and continue to stand with black Americans against racism. We haven’t stamped out the virus of hatred yet, but all people of goodwill must continue trying to achieve this vital task.”

As if the coronavirus pandemic isn’t bad enough, another sickness is breaking out across the world—a pandemic of anti-Semitism. Hatred of the Jewish people is only one expression of the virus of prejudice. Even our most brilliant scientists can’t develop a vaccine for this disease. All of us—citizens and government officials—need to do our best to stamp it out.

“The recent attacks on the Jewish community are despicable, and they must stop,” President Biden tweeted Monday. “I condemn this hateful behavior at home and abroad—it’s up to all of us to give hate no safe harbor.” All Republicans and Democrats should applaud Mr. Biden’s firm stance.

Hours later, the president signed the Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act into law, in response to racist attacks against Asian-Americans carried out by bigots who blame them for the coronavirus pandemic.

The latest eruption of anti-Semitism has been sparked by fighting between Israel and Hamas, the terrorist group that controls the Gaza Strip. But the perpetrators of these vile anti-Semitic attacks, in the U.S. and elsewhere, use the actions of Israel as an excuse to mount assaults against Jews.

There is nothing anti-Semitic about policy disagreements with the government of Israel. Jews themselves, including Israelis, are sharply divided in their opinions of the government, just as Americans are sharply divided in our views of the U.S. government. But attacking people because they’re Jewish isn’t about a policy dispute—it is about simple hatred.

Those on the left who profess to champion Palestinian rights are sorely misguided if they believe praising Adolf Hitler, beating up Jews in New York and elsewhere, and defacing synagogues in the U.S. and Europe with swastikas will aid Palestinians.