FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Biden Abroad: The Moral and Material Collapse of U.S. Foreign Policy By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on June 29th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/06/28/biden-abroad-the-moral-and-material-collapse-of-u-s-foreign-policy/

The American post-Cold War order from the Ronald Reagan through George W. Bush administration is over.

Barack Obama began its erosion with his tired lectures about the past sins of the United States.

Obama empowered radical Islamists. He invited Russia back into the Middle East after a forty-year hiatus. He snored while Vladimir Putin swallowed large areas of Ukraine. He nonchalantly allowed ISIS almost to take over Iraq. And he authored the Libyan misadventure.

Joe Biden has greatly amplified what Obama inaugurated. He accentuates the Obama-authored foreign policy disasters by his own family corruption.

If the U.S. had an honest media, a disinterested Department of Justice, and a professional FBI, the Biden family would likely be facing felony bribery charges and an impeachment vote for leveraging the interests of the U.S. for a few millions of Ukrainian and Chinese cash.

Biden has forfeited any moral credibility America once had in sermonizing to the world about the advantages of transparent democracy.

Instead, Washington under Biden went full Third-world. His family got rich from his offices, and Joe Biden warped government agencies in efforts to take out his next possible presidential rival.

Antony Blinken, Biden’s current Secretary of State, is known mostly for meekly accepting a dressing down from Chinese diplomats in 2021 and subsequent ritual humiliations.

Blinken was also the author of the 2020 election shenanigan of soliciting former intelligence authorities to publish a preposterous lie that Hunter Biden’s laptop had all the “hallmarks” of “Russian disinformation.” Blinken’s inspired farce was dreamed up to aid a then struggling candidate Biden in his last presidential debate.

The net result of the Obama-Biden continuum has been the moral and material collapse of U.S. foreign policy.

Americans are bewildered that China is now buzzing our jets. It plays chicken with American warships.

It mocks our homeland defenses by sending a spy balloon with impunity across the continental United States.

It is defiantly mum about its creation of a gain-of-function virus under the auspices of the People’s Liberation Army, despite the ensuing Covid epidemic that killed over 1 million Americans.

The weird reaction of the Biden administration to these affronts is either to contextualize Beijing’s aggression or to ignore them entirely.

Under the earlier Obama-Biden “reset” of Russia, we also paid little attention to the past aggressions of Vladimir Putin, appeased his provocations, and earned the 2014 Russian take-over of the Ukrainian border and Crimea.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Controlled Demolition of Nation-States By J.B. Shurk

Posted By on June 29th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/06/the_controlled_demolition_of_nationstates.html

Generally speaking, central banks are empowered to control the supply of money by employing a number of tools that include buying government debt, selling government bonds, adjusting reserve requirements, and setting official interest rates.  Operating under various legal mandates to sustain an overall healthy economy, central banks ostensibly pursue policies that will produce relatively low inflation, steady economic growth, and low public unemployment.  

What if these stated goals are merely talking points meant to justify a central bank’s continued monopoly over a nation’s creation of money, and the true objective of any central bank is to maximize wealth for the wealthiest economic players?  Central banks, after all, are usually institutionally independent from government interference.  They are private firms managed by the world’s financial elite.  How might a central bank pursue a hidden agenda to grow the wealth of its friends at the public’s expense?

The easiest and most effective way would be to create artificial “boom and bust” cycles during which economies greatly expand and then quickly shrink.  How does this work in practice?  First, a central bank lowers interest rates — the cost of borrowing money — and thereby encourages ordinary citizens to take out loans.  These loans are used to buy houses and cars and start small businesses.  By artificially lowering interest rates below the natural market rate, central banks stimulate consumer purchases and small business expenditures beyond what Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” would have rendered on its own.  Investors who have an economic interest in selling houses, cars, and inventories for small businesses all benefit from the central bank’s intervention.

Additionally, because central banks have encouraged borrowing, they have pumped more money into the greater economy.  With the supply of money artificially increased, some individuals are willing to pay more now than before for the same goods or services.  Consequently, the prices of goods and services increase, producing inflation.  There are two important effects stemming from inflation: (1) a middle-class citizen on a fixed income must now pay more for living expenses, while (2) a higher-class citizen who owns stocks, homes, and other assets will see the currency-denominated value of those assets increase.  In other words, inflation acts as a tax on poorer individuals who own little and a supplement for wealthier individuals who own much.  While a middle-class citizen living paycheck-to-paycheck will effectively have less income, a higher-class citizen whose principal wealth exists in the form of assets will have increased net wealth.  Inflation effects a wealth transfer from the poor to the rich.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Still Appeasing After All These Years How authoritarian and expansionist nations won’t be stopped. Bruce Thornton

Posted By on June 29th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/still-appeasing-after-all-these-years/

Despite the Biden administration’s two years of cringing, futile negotiations with the Iranian theocrats, he’s back with yet another disastrous proposal–– an unwritten “understanding” regarding the mullahcracy’s efforts to build nuclear weapons. But the regime is close, perhaps mere months, to having enough enriched uranium at the purity needed to manufacture weapons. The current outreach, if successful, will lead to a much more dangerous Middle East, especially for our allies like Israel and Sunni Muslim states.

The “understanding” as reported does nothing to fix the deep flaws in our foreign policy toward Iran for the last 44 years, particularly the failings of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action signed in 2015 by the U.S. and six other world powers. The provisions of this new plan include pledges from Iran not to enrich uranium any closer to the 90% needed for nuclear weapons, along with the return of American hostages. As a down payment, Iran a few weeks ago received from Iraq $2.76 billion after Biden waived sanctions on the funds. But don’t worry, Iran will spend the windfall on “food and medicine,” an old bait-and-switch we saw Saddam Hussein pull on us after the first Gulf War.

In return for our feckless generosity, Iran will receive further sanctions relief and other payments totaling as much as $20 billion, with a promise of no new sanctions, even as Iran keeps possession of its 60% enriched uranium, enough for five bombs. Nor is it clear the mullahs will face inspections and censures from the International Atomic Energy Agency. By the way, there’s no word on an IAEA finding in February that Iran has already enriched uranium to 84%, a claim that Iran brushed off as an “inspector’s error.”

As the Wall Street Journal editorial said, ‘“Trust but verify’ is being turned on its head. There’s no trust and little verification. The new strategy is hope and pay.”

Moreover, these terms are even worse than the JCPOA that serially has failed to slow down Iran’s march to nuclear weapons, its international adventurism, or its support for terrorism. The “understanding” merely reprises the fatal assumption that signing multinational agreements and joining globalist institutions, absent a credible threat of force, can slow down or stop an aggressor. In particular we shouldn’t put our faith in Iran. After all, in 1970 Iran had signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, but after the ’79 revolution secretly began violating its terms. So it shouldn’t be surprising that the mullahs started violating the JCPOA before the ink on the agreement had dried.

EDUCATION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Why are schools transitioning kids behind their parents’ backs? Gender ideology is a menace to parental rights and children’s welfare. Jo Bartosch

Posted By on June 29th, 2023

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/06/28/children-should-not-be-transitioning-at-school/

Britain’s schools, aided and abetted by doctors and social workers, have fallen under the influence of gender ideology. This is putting youngsters at risk from the very adults charged with their care.

For Callum and Susan (not their real names), this ideological bias hit home after their autistic 16-year-old daughter told them that she was really a boy.

In response to this news, the parents organised a meeting with their daughter’s school. ‘Initially when we met the head teacher, we agreed a plan that there would be no social transitioning at school’, Callum told this weekend’s The Sunday Times. ‘[The head teacher] said it is right that we do not change her name or her pronouns for her time at school’, he said.

But despite that meeting, the situation soon escalated. Shortly before the girl’s 16th birthday, the school referred her parents to social services, and a social worker turned up at the family home. In stark contrast to the cautious approach taken by Callum and Susan, the social worker affirmed the daughter’s new gender identity. The social worker told them that their daughter was in fact a boy and that she should be referred to by a male name and pronouns.

In response to the school’s decision to call in social services, Callum and Susan hired lawyers to help them access the school’s records. Shockingly, these records revealed that a doctor had prescribed testosterone to their daughter behind their backs. They also learned that she’d been given advice on gender identity by a local youth project which works closely with the local council and has provided classes for children in schools across the region.

The girl’s parents have since raised the secretive treatment of their daughter as a safeguarding concern. Her father told The Times: ‘We feel that our daughter’s mental and physical health is being put at risk and we have been shut out from any discussion, even though we have parental responsibility for her.’

Part of adolescence is learning to keep things from your parents. It’s when one becomes independent and develops an identity away from the family home. For those of my generation, this largely meant finding a musical tribe, sneaking into nightclubs and snogging unsuitable people. But for today’s teens, it seems this rebellion has turned aggressively inward. Rather than dressing as goths or emos, kids struggling with teenage angst are hiding behind a pre-packaged range of gender and sexual identities, each with a bespoke flag and pronouns.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

When Do We Reach Peak Climate Insanity? It Needs To Be Soon

Posted By on June 29th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/06/27/when-do-we-reach-peak-climate-insanity-it-needs-to-be-soon/

The global warming gasbags and climate catastrophics seem to have an endless amount of energy. Like the posse chasing Butch and Sundance, they don’t get tired, or hungry, or slow down, or even break formation. But unlike that posse, they’ll never catch what they’re chasing.

To listen to the climate alarmists, the casual observer would be convinced that the incineration of Earth due to combustion that produces carbon dioxide is imminent. As in next year … or maybe next week.

Here’s Rep. Rashida Tlaib, Democrat from Michigan:

“We have to be much more aggressive in regard to fossil fuel expansions,” she recently said. The Daily Mail characterized her rant as a “pep talk” for activists who are laying the groundwork for “a campaign of blocking highways and chaotic protests later this summer.”

According to the Mail, “Europe’s top climate activists are planning a ‘large-scale civil disobedience campaign‘ of highway blockages, hunger strikes and disruption at ‘federal properties’ in the U.S. in August.”

One who has already obstructed the free movement of others is of course Greta Thunberg, the young Swedish climate activist who is famous for, well, being a sniveling brat feted by the world’s most superficial people even though she’s achieved nothing that would be of benefit to her fellow man. Last week she and others were arrested for spending five days blocking ​​oil tankers in the Malmo, Sweden, harbor. Anyone who thinks this is sane behavior should themselves immediately rush to their local mental health clinic.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Democrats’ Definition Of Democracy Is Like The Marxist Definition Of Peace

Posted By on June 29th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/06/29/the-democrats-definition-of-democracy-is-like-the-marxist-definition-of-peace/

‘The meaning of peace,” Karl Marx said, “is the absence of opposition to socialism.” To the Soviets, peace was the state in which resistance to their territorial and philosophical ambitions was not only futile, it was fatal. If Democrats were as straightforward as their philosophical consigliere, they would define democracy, which they refer to in worshipful tones, as the absence of any challenge to their political power. Given how that party has continually revealed its authoritarian core, there can be no other explanation.

We’ve argued before that the Democrats don’t want to govern under constitutional limits but instead rule without constraint, which can happen only when their power is unchallengeable. We could point to the current administration’s direct and proxy prosecutions of the previous president. Its effort to eliminate a threat to its agenda is without precedent in our country, primarily because in the past Americans avoided a never-ending cycle of persecution and prosecutorial paybacks in which political stability is undermined. We have a long tradition of primarily civil politics and the peaceful transition of power. 

The criminalization of politics is only one iteration of the left’s doctrine that politics are war by other means, though. The Democrats, with in-kind aid from the media, are also trying to bully the Supreme Court into submission to their will. Their message to the Court’s conservative justices: Rule our way or we will harass you until you resign.

In this war with multiple fronts, the Democrats are attempting to establish a permanent majority through a direct assault on elections. We’re talking about far more than the “cabal” that was mobilized in 2020 to guarantee the presidency for Joe Biden.

FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Biden Follows Jimmy Carter’s Failed Middle East Model U.S. interests and regional stability suffer when the president harangues Israel rather than work with it. Mike Watson

Posted By on June 29th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-follows-jimmy-carters-failed-middle-east-model-israel-iran-nuclear-deal-40f45751?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Little in the Middle East is going America’s way. Iran’s uranium enrichment is approaching weapons grade, Beijing is brokering deals between Tehran and Riyadh, and the Arab League has welcomed Syria’s brutal Bashar al-Assad back into the fold. At a time like this, one would think the U.S. would be working hand in glove with one of its last steady allies in the region: Israel. A recent trip to the Jewish state revealed this isn’t the case.

There’s no shortage of issues primed for cooperation. Jerusalem is concerned about Iran’s nuclear enrichment and well-equipped proxy armies. Those items should also worry Washington, and working on them together could lead to deeper engagement on such issues as the burgeoning Russia-Iran arms trade and China’s regional influence. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly hopes that China’s Middle East maneuvers will force President Biden to tend to the region better.

Yet rather than focus on American interests in the region, the Biden administration has poured its energy into meddling in Israel’s judicial reform and demanding more engagement with the Palestinians. The closest the administration has come to advancing urgent U.S. interests is prodding Israel to export weapons to Ukraine and occasionally raising concerns about Chinese investments in sensitive areas.

The president’s pursuit of backward priorities is fundamentally contradicting his regional goals. Much like President Obama, Mr. Biden seems intent on pacifying Iran. Even after two years of failed talks, he seems to think that an agreement pausing Tehran’s nuclear program will eventually lead to a diplomatic breakthrough that will resolve America’s and its allies’ concerns—or, failing that, give the U.S. enough time to make a graceful exit from the Middle East. Unfortunately for Mr. Biden, the mullahs haven’t rushed to return to the nuclear deal Mr. Obama crafted and Donald Trump exited. The administration is now reportedly working on a more limited “understanding” with Iran.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Netanyahu Revives Judicial Overhaul Stripped of Most Controversial Piece In interview, Israeli prime minister says he wants to find middle ground on court-system changes and Ukraine

Posted By on June 29th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/netanyahu-revives-judicial-overhaul-stripped-of-most-controversial-piece-33160de?mod=hp_lead_pos7

JERUSALEM—Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he would drop the most controversial part of his plan to remake the country’s court system, pushing ahead with legislation stripped of a provision that would have given the national legislature the power to overturn rulings by the Supreme Court.

“It’s out,” Netanyahu said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal that also touched on relations with the U.S., his decision not to supply weapons to Ukraine and his concerns about deepening ties between Russia and Iran.

Netanyahu’s initial judicial-overhaul plan, which sparked large-scale unrest that paralyzed the country earlier this year, was opposed by many secular and liberal Israelis who said they feared the measures would give the government too much power and lead to a rollback in civil liberties.

“I’m attentive to the public pulse, and to what I think will pass muster,” said Netanyahu, who has previously said he wouldn’t support an “unlimited override clause.”

Netanyahu allowed lieutenants to advance the initial legislation, but he has taken control of the plan’s substance and messaging since he paused the effort in March after civil unrest. The prime minister also said he would revise another controversial piece of the legislation, which would have given the ruling coalition more power to appoint judges, though he said he wasn’t sure yet what the new version would look like.

The revisions are unlikely to persuade opposition politicians to support the plan, and risk alienating the religious far-right and ultraorthodox parties that play a critical role in Netanyahu’s coalition government and see the country’s courts as too activist and hostile to their agenda.

It is unclear whether they go far enough to forestall a repeat of mass protests that grew so severe that Netanyahu in March suspended the legislation and started compromise talks with the opposition. He said the sides failed to reach an agreement and that he would move forward with his own revised plan.

He said that with his new version of the law he was determined to find a middle ground so any changes would “stick for a generation.” The opposition says Netanyahu risks plunging the country back into turmoil if he doesn’t return to the negotiating table.

The prime minister said he has also sought a middle ground in Israel’s response to the war in Ukraine.

Netanyahu rejected calls from some Washington lawmakers and Ukrainian officials to join the West’s effort to arm Ukraine, saying, “We have concerns that I don’t think any of the Western allies of Ukraine have.” He said he needs to ensure Israel has “freedom of action” in Syria, where Israeli pilots often bomb Iranian targets in the vicinity of Russia forces, which prop up the Damascus government.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Trump Distraction  A realignment upon MAGA principles is possible if we can convert it into a concrete agenda that thousands of candidates from the local to the national level articulate and fully intend to carry out. By Edward Ring

Posted By on June 28th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/06/27/the-trump-distraction/

Whether owing to his actual words and actions, or due to the endless, baseless assaults of the deep state and corporate media, or some combination of all of these things, there are millions of Americans for whom Donald Trump now has no credibility. Beyond the damage done to Trump’s personal brand and political future, this reality portends dire consequences for the nation. It has enabled the special interests who oppose the policies Trump champions to fatally stigmatize them by associating them with the man.

It’s a dirty trick, but politics is a dirty business. Every political sentiment at odds with the special interests that run the country is labeled “Trumpism,” and hence becomes toxic.

The Globalist Game of Distraction

This game of distraction is bigger than Trump. Americans are beginning to realize that they’ve been betrayed by their elites. The globalist agenda of open borders, unfettered movement of capital, rejection of traditional values, rejection of meritocracy, deliberate overreaction to “climate change,” and heedless accumulation of debt to fund the development of foreign economies—including the Chinese military—has been accepted and promoted by virtually every major institution in America: unions, corporations, academia, K-12 public education, the media and entertainment industry, Democrats, and even a majority of Republican politicians. They profit by advancing this agenda, and in so doing elevate the cost-of-living for all Americans while at the same time depriving them of good jobs.

When Trump entered politics in 2015, he exposed and rejected this agenda in its entirety. Within a few years, tens of millions of Americans who hadn’t considered these issues as part of a connected whole, if they’d even considered them at all, were awakened and voting for a politician who was committed to dismantling the entire globalist project.

Trump’s continued relevance promises to blur even further the conventional dividing lines in American politics. What is the significance of Left vs. Right, when communists and corporations in 21st-century America are working together to advance big government globalism? How do the old distinctions apply when they both support an authoritarian, collectivist, and micromanaged society? There is ample evidence for this seeming paradox.

On most of the big issues of our time, including the rejection of traditional moral values, the centrality of “climate change” as a transformative economic and political agenda, and the need for affirmative action, racial redress, and open borders, communists and corporatists share a surprisingly congruent agenda. Their only point of divergence concerns private property, and even that may be illusory when considering the realistic prospect of publicly held corporations with activist directorates and activist shareholders with virtual ownership and control of the entire economy.

Trump blew the lid off this whole artificial dichotomy, and from coast to coast, Americans are still digesting the implications.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Hamas in Sweden by Nima Gholam Ali Pour

Posted By on June 28th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19756/hamas-in-sweden

The European Palestinians Conference, held in Malmö, Sweden on May 27, had clear and strong connections with Hamas….

When the Swedish media wrote about the connection between the European Palestinians Conference and Hamas, however, MPs, one by one, began withdrawing from the conference — although, notably, without distancing themselves from Hamas.

As Hamas is classified as a terrorist organization within the European Union and therefore also within Sweden, it would of course be embarrassing for these gentlemen to admit that they were prepared to participate in a conference with connections to Hamas, and that they only refrained because of negative media attention.

The MP who did not withdraw… was Social Democratic Party MP Jamal El-Haj, who represents Malmö in parliament. El-Haj, who has Palestinian roots, has sat in parliament since 2016, and has a history of repulsive statements and activism concerning the Israel-Palestine issue.

El-Haj, who has Palestinian roots, has sat in Sweden’s parliament since 2016, and has a history of repulsive statements and activism concerning the Israel-Palestine issue. In 2018, El-Haj said in an interview, totally incorrectly, that Israel is an apartheid state that engages in ethnic cleansing. Despite this statement, the Social Democrats placed him on the parliament’s foreign affairs committee….

El-Haj has not made the situation easier for his party after this scandal. He actually defended his participation. In a social media post, he wrote: “This conference is about my mother’s right to return to her home in Palestine. There is nothing in the world that can make me give up such a dream”.

What was left out, of course, is that the Arabs who stayed in Israel in 1948, and now number nearly two million, are still in their homes, with Israeli citizenship and equal rights. What took place was that five Arab armies attacked Israel on the day of its birth — and lost. The Arabs who fled during the conflict were perceived by the people in Israel who had not fled as disloyal fifth columnists, who had declined to stay and protect the country alongside them. Therefore, after the war, those Arabs were not allowed back. These are now known as Palestinians.

Even after El-Haj’s participation in the Hamas conference, he has been allowed to remain on the foreign affairs committee, which shows just how high the Social Democrats’ tolerance level for extremists is.