NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Orwellian Noble Peace Prize Why we shouldn’t waste our time on the Nobel committee’s Newspeak. by Bruce Thornton

Posted By on October 18th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-orwellian-noble-peace-prize/

Last week nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize were announced, and the nominees were typical of the Prize’s history. A perusal of past winners reveals that the majority of prizes are for good intention, moralizing internationalism and its institutions, short-lived peace treaties, feckless disarmament, and any choice that gratifies global anti-Americanism.

And let’s not forget terrorists and their enablers included in this year’s nominees: the United Nations’ Palestinian refugee agency, the International Court of Justice, and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. All three reflect the Prize’s long history of promulgating globalism and the “rules-based international order” that has serially failed to deter aggression.

The Wall Street Journal’s profile of this year’s nominees is a must read. Take the International Court of Justice, which took up South Africa’s specious charge of “genocide” against Israel, a despicable lie, given that South Africa seems unconcerned that Hamas’ founding charter explicitly calls for the genocide of Israel’s Jews. Worse, the ICJ “ruled that Israel ‘must immediately halt its military offensive’ in Rafah and other areas ‘which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.’”

The other two nominees–– United Nations’ Palestinian refugee agency, and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres––are just as morally idiotic, and obviously hostile to Israel and indifferent to the Israeli people. Employees of the UNRWA joined in Hamas’ butchery, and Secretary General Guterres claimed that Hamas’ violence, rape, and murder did “‘not come in a vacuum,’ but instead was grown from a ‘long-standing conflict, with a 56-year long occupation and no political end in sight.’”

The moral equivalence between the victims and murderers, like the lie “occupation,” makes a mockery of the UN’s claims to serve justice and peace. As the Journal concludes, “These aren’t peace makers. They’re apologists for war makers.”

Fortunately, the Peace Prize was awarded to Japan’s Nihon Hidankyo, an organization comprising atomic-bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki who lobby to rid the world of nuclear weapons. This choice expresses the Nobel Committee’s preference for good intentions and impossible disarmament dreams, but it’s much more respectable and less morally offensive than celebrating enablers of terrorist murderers.

But the Nobel Peace Prize has before legitimized not just the enablers, but the terrorists themselves. In 1994, Yasser Arafat, head of the terrorist Palestinian Liberation Organization, shared the prize with Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin “for their efforts to create peace in the Middle East.” The fruit of that collaboration between the terrorist and two leaders of a liberal democratic state was the doomed Oslo Accord signed in 1993.

ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Harvard’s Fundraising Crisis The president of America’s wealthiest university discovers that in the wake of its failure to defend its Jewish students, fundraising has been ‘disappointing.’

Posted By on October 18th, 2024

https://www.nysun.com/article/harvards-fundraising-crisis?lctg=1434403439&recognized_

“Disappointing” is the word being used by Harvard University’s president, Alan Garber, to describe the plunge in financial contributions that the school has recorded this year. His comment, during an interview with the Crimson last week, previews the release later this month of the University’s 2024 financial report, which is expected to show a collapse in funding as a result of Harvard’s pusillanimity in the wake of the war against Israel. 

Mr. Garber may be disappointed, but he can hardly be surprised. Harvard, in the words of six Jewish students suing the school, has become in the past year “a bastion of rampant anti-Jewish hatred and harassment.” The university is in federal court fighting against, incredibly, these Jewish students over its failure to protect them from the “severe and pervasive” antisemitic discrimination that exploded on campus in the wake of October 7.

The university claims that it has taken “tangible steps” to address antisemitism and that the Jewish students’ “dissatisfaction with the strategy and speed” of the school’s efforts “does not state a legally cognizable claim.” The dismissal motion was denied by a district judge who ruled that Harvard had failed to respond to campus antisemitism. “In other words,” the judge wrote, “the facts as pled show that Harvard failed its Jewish students.” 

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Jeffrey H. Anderson Border Bait-and-Switch The Biden administration is using misleading statistics and rhetoric to hide its role in perpetuating the migrant crisis.

Posted By on October 18th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/border-bait-and-switch

During the vice presidential debate, Tim Walz claimed, “Look, [border] crossings are down compared to when Donald Trump left office.” Similarly, CNN reports, “Migrant crossings at the US-Mexico border remain at their lowest levels since 2020,” while a USA Today headline reads, “Illegal migration at the US border drops to lowest level since 2020.” These claims are true only if one doesn’t count it as a “crossing” when an illegal alien arrives at a port of entry along the border and is subsequently released into the United States.

Because the Biden administration is now funneling huge numbers of illegal aliens towards ports of entry with the help of its CBP One app, encounters elsewhere along the border are down. Yet, there are still far more aliens entering the country each month than there were under Trump—or even Barack Obama. The Biden administration continues to perpetuate the border crisis while simultaneously trying to mask that crisis with subtle policy changes and deceptive phrasing.

The primary reason we’ve had a border crisis for more than three and a half years is that the Biden administration—in a marked departure from every prior presidency—has refused to enforce federal immigration laws. Specifically, it has refused to enforce the requirement that asylum seekers be detained until their claims have been adjudicated. Instead, it has simply released them into the U.S. Knowing this, millions of migrants have arrived at our border, uttered the password “asylum,” and reaped the benefits of this administration’s failure to execute the laws.

The Immigration and Nationality Act declares that “if an alien asserts a credible fear of persecution, he or she shall be detained for further consideration of the application for asylum.” Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito writes that such detention “requirements, as we have held, are mandatory.” Yet the Biden administration has treated these requirements as discretionary, continually releasing aliens into the interior of the country. As U.S. District Court Judge T. Kent Wetherell observes, this has been “akin to posting a flashing ‘Come In, We’re Open’ sign on the southern border.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

DEI Captures the Treasury Department How left-wing racialism is corrupting America’s national financial system. Christopher Rufo F. RUFO

Posted By on October 18th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/dei-captures-the-treasury-department
The Treasury Department is ground zero for the Biden administration’s “whole-of-government” DEI agenda. The agency, which serves as the guardian of the American financial system, has translated critical race and gender theories into official policy—all under the guise of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

We have conducted an exclusive investigation that reveals the stunning capture of the Treasury, which, under the current DEI mandate, has worked to advance the principles of left-wing racialism, directing billions of dollars to favored racial and “underserved” groups, hiring a cadre of radical race “experts” to cement the new orthodoxy within the department, and considering potential auditees’ race in IRS tax investigations.

This ideological shift started at the top. In her first months in office, Treasury secretary Janet Yellen sent a statement to the department’s workers that “commitment to the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion is expected of every employee.” She sent the statement on the anniversary of the May 2020 death of George Floyd, at 9:29 a.m., to symbolize the nine minutes and 29 seconds that police officer Derek Chauvin had pinned Floyd to the ground. The statement set the tone: the Treasury secretary had a new ideological agenda—and expected compliance all the way down.

To implement this agenda, Yellen quickly built a centralized DEI apparatus within the department, establishing an official Equity Hub, tasked with implementing Biden’s executive orders on diversity, and an Advisory Committee on Racial Equity, made up of activists and executives. She also hired left-wing race activist Janis Bowdler as the department’s first Counselor for Racial Equity, a high-level position “charged with coordinating Treasury’s efforts to advance racial equity including engaging with diverse communities throughout the country.”

Yellen and Bowdler wasted no time, working to advance some of Treasury’s most flagrant racial programs, which subordinated lending standards, federal contracting, hiring policy, and even IRS auditing rules to the new racial calculus.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

The Most Unserious Presidential Candidate Of All Time? Francis Menton

Posted By on October 18th, 2024

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=818c491012

The American presidency has definitely had its ups and downs over the years, but at least the occupants of the office, and the contenders who have sought it, have taken the job of being President seriously. Until now, uniformly, they have thought it important to outline some kind of a vision for the country, and to propose policies intended to achieve that vision. Even if in some instances you might disagree entirely with the candidates’ vision, at least they had it. Or, if they really didn’t have a vision, or much of one, then they pretended to.

In this sense, has there ever been a more fundamentally unserious candidate for President than Kamala Harris?

Joe Biden dropped out of the race on July 21, so it has now been nearly three months since Harris became the presumptive nominee. In that time, Harris has studiously avoided all occasions to make clear statements about vision or policy. Until this very night, she has declined all interviews with any outlet that might be even slightly challenging. Even more incredibly, she has not held a single official press conference. From Fox News yesterday:

Vice President Kamala Harris has gone 86 days as the presumptive, and now, official Democratic nominee for president without holding an official press conference.

A press conference would be a signal opportunity to get broad public exposure, particularly to people who are not already her supporters. Any serious candidate ought to be affirmatively seeking opportunities for such exposure. The failure to hold a single such event points strongly to the conclusion that she and/or her advisors believe that she is not up to the challenge.

I haven’t yet had a chance to watch tonight’s interview, so I will update this post after I have had that opportunity. However, from what I can quickly learn, she showed up late, severely limited the time available, and filibustered questions in order to run out the clock for possible follow ups. Here’s a review at the Federalist from columnist Eddie Scarry.

The last time I went looking for Harris’s official positions on any issue or policy, her campaign website was completely silent on the subject. Since then, a section has been added to the official Harris website called “Issues,” so I guess that’s progress. But review of that section reveals a combination of platitudes and evasions calculated to avoid the key questions.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

FBI Caught Red-Handed Fudging Crime Data

Posted By on October 18th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/10/18/fbi-caught-red-handed-fudging-crime-data/

Readers of I&I know all about how the Biden-Harris regime has been fudging jobs numbers to make monthly gains look bigger than they really are. Turns out, it’s been doing the same with crime statistics … this time to make it look like violent crime is on the way down.

RealClearInvestigations dug into the FBI’s data and found that the law enforcement agency had been criminally misreporting crime statistics in a way that just happened to help Biden-Harris look like it’s been tough on crime.

Last fall, for example, the FBI reported that violent crime had dropped by 2.1% in 2022. That number was celebrated by Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and the press, which said it was proof that Donald Trump was lying about a crime wave.

RealClearInvestigations discovered that the FBI had secretly updated its crime statistics, and instead of showing a 2.1% drop in violent crime, there was a 4.5% increase in 2022.  

These weren’t minor revisions in the crime numbers.

Where the FBI originally reported 21,288 fewer cases of violent crime in 2022, its revised number shows a 58,741 increase. Instead of a slight drop in the number of burglaries, the new numbers show an increase of nearly 30,000. Every category was revised sharply upward.

RealClearInvestigations quotes Carl Moody, a professor at the College of William & Mary who specializes in studying crime, who says that “the huge changes in 2021 and 2022, especially without an explanation, make it difficult to trust the FBI data.”

FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Biden-Harris Threat against Israel Is a Moral Disgrace The Editors of National Review

Posted By on October 17th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/10/biden-harris-threat-against-israel-is-a-moral-disgrace/

Israel’s ongoing war against Iran and its terrorist proxies is a political problem for Democrats. While most Americans sympathize with Israel, a segment of the Democratic Party is harshly critical of the U.S. ally and, in some cases, openly pro-Hamas. This contingent is loud and heavily concentrated in the swing state of Michigan. Ever since the October 7 attacks, President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have sought to thread this needle by talking about their commitment to Israel’s defense while routinely haranguing Israel for its conduct of the war and pressuring the nation to operate with more restraint.

This tension has come into full view over the past week.

On the one hand, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced that the U.S. would be sending an advanced anti-missile system to Israel, along with troops to operate it, to bolster the defense against Iran. On the other hand, Biden has been pressuring Israel into a more limited response to Iran’s second ballistic-missile attack in five months, including publicly opposing an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

In the midst of this, Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken sent a joint letter to Israeli officials — promptly released publicly — chastising Israel for not ensuring enough humanitarian aid in Gaza and warning that if Israel does not meet the administration’s demands within 30 days, the U.S. could suspend aid to Israel. Conveniently, this would place the potential aid-suspension date a week after the November 5 election.

In other words, Harris can spend the closing weeks of the presidential election arguing to the pro-Hamas caucus that the administration has put Israel on notice while still claiming to supporters of Israel that no decision has been made to suspend aid.

The substance of the letter places the blame for insufficient aid getting into the hands of Gazans on Israel, claiming that Israelis are creating too many barriers to aid entering the strip. Yet Israel must vet aid going in because Hamas has historically used aid deliveries to smuggle in weapons. Also, Hamas inhibits the flow of aid within Gaza, looting delivery trucks and hoarding food and supplies for their own fighters.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Election 2024: Those Who Lecture Versus Those Tired of Being Lectured Hectoring the electorate on its supposed ignorance or moral shortcomings has become a Harris campaign trademark. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on October 17th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/10/17/election-2024-those-who-lecture-versus-those-tired-of-being-lectured/

The election is finally shaping up to be not only liberal Democrat Harris versus conservative Republican Trump.

Instead, it has become a larger contest between those who talk down to their fellow Americans and those who are increasingly sick and tired of being lectured. How smart is it, for example, for Harris supporters to claim nonstop that ex-president Trump is a fascist dictator—and thus, by extension, those also who vote for him?

Women voters poll about 53-5 percent for Kamala Harris. Trump enjoys a similar, although likely somewhat smaller, majority margin of male voters.

Yet Harris—along with campaign surrogates Barack Obama and Bill Clinton—has been lecturing both black and white male voters nonstop that they are misled.

Or they supposedly suffer from false consciousness—as if they have no clue that Harris and her progressive agenda are really in their own self-interest.

Such haughtiness reached a zenith when Harris ran ads of actors costumed as supposedly working-class men. They voiced scripted talking points to prove that “real” men are progressive Harris supporters.

But the actors were so patently ridiculous, their canned lines so unreal, that most viewers likely thought the ads were run by Trump himself—to show how arrogant, out-of-touch elites must imagine how the so-called “clingers” and “deplorables” think and talk.

The Trump campaign also tries all sorts of strategies to win over women voters, from promising to rectify the Biden-Harris hyperinflation to reducing spiraling crime in towns and cities.

But one method they avoid is claiming women are ignorant of their real self-interest and deluded by Harris—accurately assuming that a candidate does not win voters by belittling their intelligence.

Harris and Obama both dressed down black men, claiming they are especially culpable for not voting en masse for Harris—even though a far higher percentage of black males will vote for Harris than for Trump.

This hectoring the electorate on its supposed ignorance or moral shortcomings has become a Harris campaign trademark.

ELECTIONS, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Kamala doesn’t know the first thing ‘about fascism’ In the post-7 October world, the Dems’ Trump-Hitler hysteria just doesn’t wash anymore. Brendan O’Neill

Posted By on October 17th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/10/16/kamala-doesnt-know-the-first-thing-about-fascism/

It’s hard to know what’s worse about Kamala Harris agreeing that Donald Trump is a fascist. Is it that eight, long years after Trump was first elected president in those heady days of 2016 the Dems are still playing the Hitler card? That they’re still wailing ‘You’re a NAZI’ like idiot 15-year-olds in the throes of a particularly bad temper tantrum? Or is it that they think they can still get away with crap, with this cheapest of cheap shots, in the post-7 October world? At a time when something that really does have a whiff of fascism to it – the unhinged animus for the world’s only Jewish nation – is sweeping not through Trump’s ranks, but theirs?

To put it another way: when Harris murmurs her haughty approval of the use of that f-word, is she being trite or ignorant? Overreliant on knackered cliché or blind to what has changed – which is it, Madame VP?

It was in a chat with the comic Charlamagne tha God that Harris agreed that Trump has fascist tendencies. Yesterday, on his hip-hop radio show, The Breakfast Club, Charlamagne suggested to Harris that Trump’s vision for America is ‘about fascism’. ‘Why can’t we just say it?’, he asked. Here was an opportunity for Harris to make good on her supporters’ belief that she will rise above our ‘age of political name-calling’and say that while she disagrees with Trump, she doesn’t believe he’s Mussolini reincarnate. But instead she said: ‘Yes, we can say that.’

The ‘Yes We Can’ cry really has degenerated of late. Now it’s ‘yes we can’ call our opponents fascists. Yes we can reach to the very bottom of the barrel of slurs and haul up the Hitler thing again. Yes we can overlook that Trump is now on what might be his third assassination attempt and keep calling him a fascist threat to the republic regardless. ‘When they go low, we go high’, said Michelle Obama. The Harris equivalent is ‘When they go low, we go even lower’ – all the way into the gutter of calling everyone we dislike a fascist with no regard for meaning, accuracy or truth.

Harris’s playing of the old tunes had the media classes dancing in the aisles. She went ‘further than she [has] before’ in casting her rival as a ‘dangerous authoritarian leader’, said a gleeful New York Times. Where her aides worry she’s ‘too cautious’, this time ‘she did not hold back’, said the NYT. It especially appreciated her warning that this man who’s ‘about fascism’ might ‘destroy our democracy’. Harris ‘agrees Trump is “about fascism”’, trumpeted CNN. In the UK, the Independent was positively cock-a-hoop over Harris’s ‘assailing [of] Donald Trump as an un-American “fascist” who isn’t fit to serve a second term’. She didn’t quite say all that, but hey, people embellish when they’re excited.

The media elites are thrilled that the Dem pick for president has given them permission to substitute name-calling for serious debate all over again. For how much easier it is, and how much more flattering to one’s outsized sense of self-importance, to holler ‘Hitler’ at Trump rather than try to understand why tens of millions of people intend to vote for him. Why so many in the working classes see a better future under the Trump-Vance economic programme than they do under the regime of ‘vibes’ Harris promises. These people take refuge in self-aggrandising ‘fascism’ talk to avoid confronting their own staggering unpopularity among vast swathes of working America.

The Hitler 2.0 thing was always dumb. It was always ahistorical. It was always fuelled more by the blind fury of coastal elites who had been unceremoniously bumped from their perch of power by the Great Unwashed. At times it was dangerous, too. The branding of Trump as a ‘Hitler pig’, as someone who had ‘The Reich Stuff’, as a man whose ascent to the White House represented a ‘new dawn of tyranny’ that was not unlike the ‘rise of fascism’ – nurse! – did not only massively exaggerate the threat of Trumpism. It also relativised the crimes of Nazism. It made the unique horrors of the 1930s seem almost mundane through comparing them with the rise of a controversial politician in the 2010s. The elites’ ‘fascism’ fretting that Harris has now resuscitated whipped up undue fear of Trump and ignorance about the past.

But this time round, it’s even worse. For now they’re screaming ‘fascist’ at Trump while all but ignoring the truly disturbing sight of young Americans marching through the streets carrying massive ‘Jew heads’ with blood-stained horns, and keffiyeh-wearing leftists on the New York subway shouting ‘Raise your hand if you’re a Zionist’, and students on the leafy lawns of Ivy League campuses calling the Jewish State the ‘pigs of the Earth’ and telling Jews to fuck off ‘back to Poland’. After 7 October, I don’t want to hear one word about fascism from the Dem elites or the media class, for there are people out there who vote for you and who read you who really are behaving like little Hitler pigs.

ELECTIONS, MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Drug Costs Explode As Kamalanomics Massively Backfires

Posted By on October 17th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/10/17/drug-costs-explode-as-kamalanomics-massively-backfires/

Go to Kamala Harris’ campaign website and among the very short list of alleged achievements is this: “She cast the deciding vote to lower drug prices and cap insulin prices for our seniors.”

The only problem is that drug costs for seniors have skyrocketed since Harris signed that bill.

Harris is pointing to the criminally misnamed “Inflation Reduction Act,” which got zero Republican votes, and which was supposed to lower the cost of prescription drugs by giving, as Harris puts it, “Medicare the power to negotiate lower drug prices with Big Pharma.”

When George W. Bush established Medicare Part D, he let private insurers negotiate with drug companies over prices and then compete for seniors’ business. The result was a program that cost both seniors and taxpayers far less than government bureaucrats had expected, offered seniors a wide range of options, and had premiums that barely budged for more than a decade.

In fact, average monthly premiums for a Part D plan were lower when Donald Trump left office than under Barack Obama.

Harris’ tie-breaking vote has turned this once-successful program upside down.

Seniors next year will face premiums that are 57% higher, on average, than they were in 2021.

“Seniors in some states face even bigger hits to their wallets,” finds a state-by-state analysis done by the Heritage Foundation. “Under the Biden-Harris administration, Medicare drug plan premiums jumped by more than 90% in 10 states. Premiums more than doubled in three of those states (California, 122%; New York, 116%; and Nevada, 104%).”

And the number of plans offered has been cut in half. Which means less competition, which in turn will fuel further price hikes.