RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/biden-admin-revives-funding-to-anti-semitic-u-n-agency/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=

The United States, Antony Blinken announced this afternoon, will “restart U.S. economic, development, and humanitarian assistance for the Palestinian people.”

In addition to reviving direct U.S. funding to a variety of projects in Gaza and the West Bank, this will also include $150 million to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, a specialized organization that aids Palestinian refugees. The Trump administration had suspended funding to UNRWA in 2018, calling the agency “irredeemably flawed.” And it remains so today.

First, it’s worth recalling the true purpose behind UNRWA’s creation. Consider that of all the millions of people displaced around the world, only Palestinian refugees have their own, distinct U.N. agency. Refugees from every single other country on the planet instead seek assistance from the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

In addition to that, although the agency purports to represent over 5 million refugees who it claims may one day return to Israel, most of them don’t actually qualify as refugees according to the U.N.’s criteria. Most have never even stepped foot in the country, since they were born well after the 1948 conflict. According to a recently released U.S. government assessment, the number of true refugees, applying the standard criteria, ends up at around 200,000, and perhaps even less than that.

So why stand up this separate organization? The very existence of the program, and the widespread support that it consistently receives at the U.N. General Assembly, stands as yet another example of the U.N.’s pervasive, institutional bias against Israel. After the U.N. Human Rights Council, which disproportionately singles out the country in its every session, UNRWA is the single most obvious example of this discrimination, which is designed to make Israel into a pariah state on the international stage.

https://americanmind.org/features/lefts-war-free-speech/end-nationalism-end-america/

Today’s globalist dogma is incompatible with our country’s survival.

Twenty-First-century progressive liberalism sees the American nation as a problem. There are three core points of contention: 1) the concept of nation-state sovereignty; 2) the actual American nation itself—its culture, history, and people; and finally, 3) the prospects for constitutional republican self-government in America.

From Democratic Sovereignty to Global Governance

For decades, mainstream liberal foreign policy experts who have served at the highest levels of American government (John Kerry, Strobe Talbott, Harold Koh, Anne-Marie Slaughter) and in the academic world (G. John Ikenberry, Robert Keohane) have advocated transferring aspects of national sovereignty from nation-states, including ours, to global institutions. Indeed, President Obama himself told the United Nations General Assembly in 2016: “We’ve bound our power to international laws and institutions—I am convinced that in the long run, giving up freedom of action—not our ability to protect ourselves but binding ourselves to international rules over the long term—enhances our security.”

Harold Koh, the State Department’s chief legal advisor under Obama, recommended that U.S. courts “download” international law into American law, stating that it is “appropriate for the Supreme Court to construe our Constitution in light of foreign and international law.” Anne-Marie Slaughter, an international lawyer who served under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, argued that nations should cede a degree of sovereign authority “vertically” to supranational institutions such as the International Criminal Court. She declared that transnational networks “can perform many of the functions of a world government—legislation, administration, and adjudication—without the form,” thereby creating what the American Bar Association has endorsed as the “global rule of law,” with transnational law logically superior to the U.S. Constitution.

Liberal scholars have recognized that global governance is often at odds with democratic self-government. The liberal internationalist argument is that nation-state democracies like the United States cannot be relied upon to develop fair “global rules” because they ignore the interests of non-citizens.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-clean-up-phase-of-bidens-presidency-is-about-to-end/

“Biden has spent these early months dealing with the lingering reminders of the man he replaced. But this chapter of his presidency might be drawing to a close.”

One rarely emerges empty-handed from an hour or two in the C-SPAN archives. I spent some time the other day watching a 2009 episode of Q&A, where Brian Lamb interviewed Christopher Hitchens. A passing reference to the debate over post-9/11 interrogation methods reminded me that it is far too early to make oracular judgments about Joe Biden’s presidency — much less to classify him as a “transformative” president like Franklin Delano Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan. The event, decision, speech, or law that will define Biden in American history has yet to happen.

Presidents spend the first months of their tenure in office dealing with issues and problems left over from the previous administration. George W. Bush, for example, wanted his first tax cut to increase economic growth after the bursting of the tech bubble. Barack Obama’s first tasks after taking the oath were stabilizing the financial system and lessening the fallout of the Great Recession. Donald Trump had to manage, in his inimitable style, the portfolio of ISIS, the southern border, and North Korea that Obama handed him in January 2017.

And yet all of these chief executives will be remembered not for what they accomplished before the arbitrary and overblown milestone of the “first 100 days,” but for how they responded to challenges that did not appear until long afterward.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/bidens-infrastructure-bill-aims-to-end-single-family-zoning/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=blog-post&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=first

With the introduction of his massive, $2.3 trillion “infrastructure” bill, President Biden’s campaign to end suburban single-family zoning has begun. If you think this issue was debated and resolved during the 2020 presidential campaign, you are mistaken. It’s true that Biden’s campaign platform openly and unmistakably pledged to abolish single-family zoning. As soon as President Trump made an issue of that pledge, however, Biden went virtually silent on the issue and the Democrat-supporting press falsely denied that Biden had any designs on single-family zoning at all. Now that he’s president, Biden’s infrastructure bill openly includes programs designed to “eliminate” single-family zoning (which Biden calls “exclusionary zoning”).

How, exactly, does Biden plan to end single-family zoning? According to the fact sheet released by the White House, “Biden is calling on Congress to enact an innovative new competitive grant program that awards flexible and attractive funding to jurisdictions that take concrete steps to eliminate [‘exclusionary zoning’].” In other words, Biden wants to use a big pot of federal grant money as bait. If a county or municipality agrees to weaken or eliminate its single-family zoning, it gets the federal bucks.

The wildly overreaching Obama-Biden era Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) regulation — which Biden has pledged to revive — works in a similar fashion. The difference is that by adding another gigantic pot of federal money to the Community Development Block Grants that are the lure of AFFH, Biden makes it that much harder for suburbs to resist applying — and that much more punishing to jurisdictions that forgo a share of the federal taxes they’ve already paid so as to protect their right to self-rule.