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Is the Left Happy That They Got Their Wish? Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on September 26th, 2023

http://Is the Left Happy That They Got Their Wish?

America has been in a veritable cultural revolution since the 1960s. Nearly all our major institutions finally became woke—the administrative state, traditional and social media, universities, K-12, the corporate boardroom, entertainment, professional sports, and the foundations.

So the Obama and the Biden administrations finally seemed to have achieved their aims, in what the Obamas once boasted would be the “fundamental transformation” of America into something unrecognizable by its Founders. But what they gave us was nihilism—the destruction of norms, laws, and customs. There is no border, no criminal justice system, no real president any more.

The citizen is a serf, the illegal alien the veritable citizen. The former needs a passport to reenter the country, the latter is waved on through. There is a slob in gym shorts and a hoodie establishing dress codes for the Senate, teen murderers bragging that they won’t spend a day in jail, and a would-be state legislator filming herself doing sexual gymnastics while begging for cash only to be upset over the invasion of her “privacy.” So the Left got what it wanted and gave us our new America.

The curious result, however, is that even the elite Left is now forced to live among, and cannot always escape, the ruination it created—and for the first time is becoming slightly unhappy with what it birthed.

Critical legal theory has now trickled down into most of our large cities. It insists that criminals are not criminals at all, but rather victims of prior racial and class oppressions. Thus their victims should blame society for their injuries, not their predatory victimizers. Critical legal theory is a sort of Marxist redistribution schema—the middle class almost deserves its equal share of violence commensurate with that of the inner city.

As a result, in Chicago and Oakland and hundreds of other cities, prosecutors let out criminals without bail or sometimes even indictments—in part out of spite and hatred of middle- and upper-middle-class America that supposedly deserves a payback for its bourgeois indifference, in part out of sheer ignorance of the unleashing of human nature once all deterrence is removed.

And the result?

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Censorship is Death of Science and Leads to Death of People America should be a bulwark against it, but it wasn’t during the pandemic. By Jay Bhattacharya

Posted By on September 26th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/09/25/censorship-is-death-of-science-and-leads-to-death-of-people/

On May 15, 1970, the New York Times published an article by esteemed Russia scholar Albert Parry detailing how Soviet dissident intellectuals were covertly passing forbidden ideas around to each other on handcrafted, typewritten documents called samizdat. Here is the beginning of that seminal story:

Censorship existed even before literature, say the Russians. And, we may add, censorship being older, literature has to be craftier. Hence, the new and remarkably viable underground press in the Soviet Union called samizdat.

Samizdat – translates as: “We publish ourselves” – that is, not the state, but we, the people.

Unlike the underground of Czarist times, today’s samizdat has no printing presses (with rare exceptions): The K.G.B., the secret police, is too efficient. It is the typewriter, each page produced with four to eight carbon copies, that does the job. By the thousands and tens of thousands of frail, smudged onionskin sheets, samizdat spreads across the land a mass of protests and petitions, secret court minutes, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s banned novels, George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” and “1984,” Nicholas Berdyayev’s philosophical essays, all sorts of sharp political discourses and angry poetry.

Though it is hard to hear, the sad fact is that we are living in a time and in a society where there is once again a need for scientists to pass around their ideas secretly to one another so as to avoid censorship, smearing, and defamation by government authorities in the name of science.

I say this from first-hand experience. During the pandemic, the U.S. government violated my free speech rights and those of my scientist colleagues for questioning the federal government’s COVID policies.

American government officials, working in concert with big tech companies, defamed and suppressed me and my colleagues for criticizing official pandemic policies – criticism that has been proven prescient. While this may sound like a conspiracy theory, it is a documented fact, and one recently confirmed by a federal circuit court.

In August 2022, the Missouri and Louisiana attorneys general asked me to join as a plaintiff in a lawsuit, represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance, against the Biden administration. The suit aims to end the government’s role in this censorship and restore the free speech rights of all Americans in the digital town square.

Lawyers in the Missouri v. Biden case took sworn depositions from many federal officials involved in the censorship efforts, including Anthony Fauci. During the hours-long deposition, Fauci showed a striking inability to answer basic questions about his pandemic management, replying “I don’t recall” over 170 times.

Legal discovery unearthed email exchanges between the government and social media companies showing an administration willing to threaten the use of its regulatory power to harm social media companies that did not comply with censorship demands.

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The Origins of the Biden Disaster. Part One Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on September 26th, 2023

https://victorhanson.com/the-origins-of-the-biden-disaster-part-one/

In a much-heralded Washington Post column, David Ignatius recently called for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris not to run again.

But to justify such a Draconian call, he first reviewed their tenures and concluded of Joe, “In sum, he has been a successful and effective president.” Consider the logic: the more successful a president, the quicker he must get out of office?

Obviously, if Ignatius really believed that assessment, then he would not be calling for Joe to step aside. While Joe has deteriorated a great deal cognitively since his January 2021 debut, even before his inauguration he was clearly unfit physically and mentally for the job—a fact of course known to liberals like Ignatius and others.

So the subtext of this new ridiculous argument that a successful Joe must suddenly depart is essentially the following:

In 2020, Joe Biden was health-wise unfit to become president. The Left backed him, however, by persuading virtually the entire field of 2020 primary candidates to step aside—given his competitors, many of whom had polled well ahead of Joe and won primaries, were deemed either too socialist (Sanders), too shrill and off-putting (Warren), too sanctimonious and insufferable (Buttigieg), too nutty (Spartacus-Booker), and too boring, condescending, and effusively rich (Bloomberg) to ever get elected.

A previously inert Joe was then coronated as the only hope left by the leftwing donor class. And in lockstep, the Democratic minority-base was then persuaded (quid-pro-quo-ed) to back the heretofore losing Biden.

Suddenly Joe won the primary in South Carolina. Or as a giddy NPR said of his late February 2020 South Carolina victory:

The 77-year-old former vice president has now notched an expected yet much-needed victory in the South Carolina primary, according to The Associated Press’s projection. Just days ago, the press and the pundits had declared his candidacy dead. (emphasis added) “Now, thanks to all of you—the heart of the Democratic Party—we just won and we’ve won big because of you, and we are very much alive,” an energized Biden said at an event with supporters in Columbia, S.C.

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TEN REASONS NOT TO OWN AN ELECTRIC VEHICLE

Posted By on September 26th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/09/26/10-reasons-not-to-own-an-ev/

From California to New York to Washington, Democrats are using the coercive force of government to herd Americans into electric vehicles. Here are 10 reasons why we should resist both this egregious abuse of power as well as the social pressure that demands we all go electric:

The mandates are an egregious abuse of power. Where do government officials, both elected and unelected, derive the authority to tell Americans what vehicles they cannot own and what vehicles they must own? There is none. Yes, there are laws intended to keep dangerous cars and trucks off the streets for safety reasons. But no automobile is a threat just because it burns gasoline or diesel. Dare we say that those who buy an EV are complicit in securing for the state a power it was never intended to have?

The mandates are an egregious abuse of power Part ll. The federal government oversteps its constitutional limits when it tells manufacturers that two-thirds of the vehicles they build must be electrified.

EVs are not zero-emission vehicles. As one of our contributors wrote in a well-researched, heavily sourced piece, life-cycle assessments show that the “manufacturing, charging, operating, and disposing of electric vehicles produces more of every major category of pollutants than conventional cars.” 

The EV manufacturing chain is an environmental malignancy. That same writer, James D. Agresti, president of Just Facts, has also noted “the ‘environmental implications’ of mining lithium to make batteries for electric cars ‘would directly counter the intent’ of ‘incentivizing electric vehicle adoption.’” He further makes the case by citing a Brookings Institution study, which “found that ‘continued reliance on China’ will ‘increase the risk that sourcing of critical minerals will cause or contribute to serious social or environmental harms.’”

EVs are fire hazards. All automobiles catch fire, but EVs burn hotter, longer, and take far more water to extinguish than a conventional car that’s burning. Firefighters use about 500 gallons of water to put out regular car fires. EV fires can require from 6,000 gallons to 20,000 gallons to get the job done. Oh, yes, the smoke from an EV fire is particularly toxic, not terribly dissimilar to that of Zyklon B.

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Jimmy Lai’s 1,000 Prison Days The publisher’s bravery has exposed China’s false promises to Hong Kong.

Posted By on September 26th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/jimmy-lais-1-000-prison-days-china-ccp-arrest-sentence-kong-truth-freedom-protest-5feea2a8?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Jimmy Lai marks his 1,000th day in Hong Kong’s Stanley Prison on Tuesday, an ignominious anniversary that should remind the world of Mr. Lai’s bravery and China’s disdain for international treaties and the rule of law.

Mr. Lai is the founder and owner of the pro-democracy paper Apple Daily, which the Hong Kong government confiscated without due process. What makes his sacrifice so compelling is that Mr. Lai could have avoided a prison cell by fleeing to one of his homes abroad.

China and its Hong Kong factotums have sought every way possible to target Mr. Lai for daring to advocate for freedom for Hong Kong’s people. The 75-year-old has been convicted for his peaceful participation in three protests, including a vigil to commemorate the Chinese victims of the 1989 crackdown on Tiananmen Square.

He was also convicted on business fraud charges the U.S. State Department has rightly denounced as “spurious.” But his biggest trial, on national-security charges that could carry a life sentence, is scheduled for December. The government has denied Mr. Lai his choice of lawyer in the case.

Everyone in Hong Kong knows he will be found guilty—an example of how Hong Kong is following China’s dictates despite the promise Beijing made to Britain of autonomy for 50 years after 1997 in a formal treaty. The real question is how a city that holds political prisoners can purport to be a world financial center.

Mr. Lai is one of what the Hong Kong Democracy Council says have been 1,647 political prisoners since the start of the 2019 protests. While a financial center depends on the free flow of information and rule of law, in today’s Hong Kong people can be arrested for expressing the wrong opinion. Yuen Ching-ting was a 23-year-old student who in June was charged with posting seditious pro-independence posts on Facebook while studying at her university in Japan.

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The New Moral Order Is Already Crumbling Globalism, climate-change alarmism and cultural self-annihilation have all come under serious challenge. By Gerard Baker

Posted By on September 26th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-moral-order-is-already-crumbling-climate-europe-immigration-australia-25d21439?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

The new moral order our secularist elites have been busy constructing since the end of the Cold War is collapsing around them.

Over the past 30 years, the values of Judeo-Christian belief that had inspired and sustained Western civilization and culture for centuries have been steadily replaced in a moral, cultural and political revolution of the postmodern ascendancy. But the contradictions and implausibilities inherent in this successor creed have been increasingly exposed, and its failure to supply the needs of the people is discrediting it in the popular mind.

This new edifice has been built around three principal pillars: First, the ethical primacy of global obligation over national self-interest, in economic and geopolitical terms, but most directly and consequentially in a rejection of the morality of national borders and an embrace of something like open-door immigration. Second, a quasi-biblical belief in climate catastrophism, in which man’s essential energy-consuming sinfulness can be expiated only by massive sacrifice of economic progress. Third, a wholesale cultural self-cancellation in which the virtues, values and historic achievements of traditional civilization are rejected and replaced by a cultural hierarchy that inverts old prejudices and obliges the class of white, male heterosexuals to acknowledge their history of exploitation and submit to comprehensive social and economic reparation.

This fall, throughout the West, on three continents, each of these three pillars is crumbling,

In Lampedusa, the Italian island midway between Europe and Africa, and at Eagle Pass, Texas, and elsewhere along the visible and increasingly invisible frontiers that separate the global North from the South, the idea of permissive migration in an economically unequal world is being tested to destruction. Lampedusa was inundated last week with another surge of migrants from Africa, larger than the population of the island itself. In Texas, the influx across the border with Mexico became a torrent.

The demographic tsunami from the global South as the North’s population shrinks is in its early stages, and most people can see clearly what happens when leaders insist on a moral code that suggests our obligations to indigent foreigners are as great as those to our own citizens. It won’t survive the political backlash now under way in both Europe and America, as even U.S. Democrats and Brussels Eurocrats are slowly starting to grasp.

The second pillar, the moral imperative of self-abasing action to combat climate change, is falling too—most interestingly again in Europe and the U.K., where it has long been the official religion of the secularist priesthood.

Last week, Britain’s notionally Conservative government took a small but symbolically important step in climate apostasy, announcing some sensible tweaks to a program of regulatory decarbonization mandates, such as pushing back by a few years the phasing out of new gasoline-powered cars. The move was precipitated by the high and rising costs to ordinary citizens of these measures and didn’t actually involve—yet—a formal retreat from the ambitious goal of making the country “carbon neutral” by 2050. But the howls from almost the entire establishment were an encouraging sign that the priesthood knows its days are numbered.

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Why is Hamas Sending Palestinians to Die at the Border with Israel? by Khaled Abu Toameh

Posted By on September 26th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19997/hamas-sending-palestinians-to-die

During the past few days, the Iran-backed Palestinian terror group Hamas has again been encouraging Palestinians living under its rule in the Gaza Strip to march toward the border with Israel and attack Israelis.

The latest attacks on Israelis by Hamas, however, appear to be less linked to Israel….

Hamas, instead of directing its grievances toward Qatar [for cutting grants to Hamas], responds by sending young Palestinian men to throw explosive devices, Molotov cocktails, and stones at Israeli troops near the border with the Gaza Strip.

Apparently, Hamas is hoping that the “Zionist enemy” (Israel) will come to its rescue by putting pressure on Qatar not to cut its financial grant. With many of its leaders sitting in Doha, Hamas must be rather fearful about coming out in public against Qatar.

The official said that civil servants, including senior Hamas officials, have not received full salaries because of the reduction in the financial grant. Hamas, in other words, is admitting that the renewed violence is not linked to Jerusalem or the Temple Mount, but to its leaders’ desire to obtain more funds from Qatar.

The real blackmail, however, is coming from Hamas. First, Hamas is implying that if it doesn’t get the funds, it will accuse the Qataris of collaboration with Israel, harming the Gulf state’s image in the Arab and Islamic countries. Second, Hamas is openly stating that it will continue to send Palestinians to attack Israeli soldiers near the border if the Qataris do not resume the financial aid.

Will the international community call out the Hamas leaders for sending young men to their deaths for the sake of the money being witheld? Based on experience: not likely. Far more likely is that we will hear loud and bitter condemnations of Israel for “opening fire” at Palestinian protesters along the border with the Gaza Strip.

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China and Russia: The New Axis of Evil by Con Coughlin

Posted By on September 26th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19987/china-russia-axis-of-evil

Xi has been eyeing the South and East China Seas, coopting the Solomon Islands, building and militarizing his own artificial islands, and threatening not only Taiwan, but neighbours such as Australia, India and Japan.

It is more than twenty years since then US President George W. Bush first identified an “axis of evil” of rogue states that threatened global security, and now a new alliance of malign states is taking shape with Russia and China acting as its new lynchpins.

Back in 2002, when Bush first articulated his notion of rogue nations in his State of the Union address made in the wake of the September 11 attacks, he identified Iraq, Iran and North Korea as states that, together with their terrorist allies, “constitute an axis of evil…by seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger.”

Putin seized and occupied territory in Georgia in 2008, and Ukraine in 2014 (Crimea) and 2023, not to mention his relentless bellicosity towards the Baltic states and eastern Europe.

There are mounting concerns… in Western security circles that in return for providing any uplift in military support for Russia, Kim wants Moscow to provide technical assistance for his missile and satellite programmes, which would seriously enhance North Korea’s ability to threaten the West with its nuclear arsenal.

Any attempt by Russia to help improve North Korea’s military strength will also benefit China’s Communist rulers: it will provide North Korea with the ability to intensify the threat that all three countries pose to the US and its allies — and to global security.

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NO POSTING ON SEPTEMBER 25, 2023

Posted By on September 24th, 2023

In observance of Yom Kippur.

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President Joe Biden: Stop the Second Armenian Genocide by Uzay Bulut

Posted By on September 24th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19989/second-armenian-genocide

After besieging and starving 120,000 Armenians of the South Caucasus Republic of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) since December 2022, Azerbaijan launched a large-scale military offensive against Artsakh on September 19, subjecting the capital Stepanakert and other cities and villages to intensive fire using heavy artillery and drones.

“My Facebook feed is full of pictures of missing children since yesterday. Most of them were at schools when the Azerbaijani military attacked so they were separated from their families. The lack of electricity, mobile and internet disruptions complicate the search efforts.” — Anush Ghavalyan, journalist in Armenia, on X (formerly Twitter), September 20, 2023.

Artsakh has never been part of independent Azerbaijan. Artsakh — ruled by Armenian monarchs, and even by Persian rulers — has always preserved its Armenian identity.

Today, Azerbaijan is falsely claiming Artsakh as Azeri land, on the pretext that in the 1920s, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, as part of his strategy of divide and conquer, decreed that Artsakh should be part of the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic as an autonomous oblast (province) even though Christian Armenia could not be less compatible with Muslim Azerbaijan.

“Failure to stand up to Azerbaijan could also result in an escalation that leads not only to the total destruction of the Armenians of Artsakh but also to a wider war in the region as Azerbaijan and its ally Turkey pursue territorial ambitions in southern Armenia and northern Iran.” — Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, on X (Twitter), September 19, 2023.

The US government also has influence regarding Azerbaijan. President Joe Biden can discourage any such expansionist projects with one strong phone call to Azerbaijan’s President Aliyev, by urging him to stop the invasion of Artsakh and Armenia if he does not want serious consequences. Those could include U.S. sanctions on Azeri government officials and an end to U.S. military assistance to Azerbaijan. The latter would be consistent with the FREEDOM Support Act. The US should also send a humanitarian airlift to the starving population of Artsakh — consistent with America’s heralded tradition of aiding at-risk populations.

The frightening question is: Is the US internationally regarded as having leadership anymore?