How to Save France? A new bestseller tackles that crucial question. by Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/how-to-save-france/

In 2013, I wrote here about a new French bestseller, La France Orange Méchanique (France Clockwork Orange). In his book, the author, who adopted the pseudonym Laurent Obertone, did something very simple but also very powerful: looking past France’s national media, which, then as now, routinely either ignored or whitewashed or invented excuses for Muslim crime in that country, he examined the crime reports in countless local and regional media organs, all of which, it turned out, added up to a horrific picture of what Obertone described as a “new type of ultra-violent crime,” a “violence of conquest,” that had, it was clear, transformed what had once been a peaceful country into a veritable war zone.

But Obertone did more than quote crime reports. He served up a stern j’accuse: instead of taking Islamic violence seriously and responding to it with shows of strength, French authorities, he charged, routinely reacted with shows of extraordinary tolerance, because they equated tolerance with virtue, even as they considered it racist or Islamophobic or fascistic to criticize or judge or even acknowledge the sheer barbarity of even the most brutal Muslim offenses.

Obertone has now come out with a new book, and it has the simplest and bluntest of titles: Guerre – which in English, of course, is War. Divided into three sections, it’s several things in one: a snapshot (and unsparing analysis) of the contemporary French state, a self-help book, a manifesto, a training manual, a pep talk. His message is stark, his tone acidly cynical. France, he asserts, is governed by men and women whose first loyalty is not to the welfare and security of the French people but to a set of “progressive” values – none of which serves the best interests of the general public – and to their own power, which enables them to institutionalize these values no matter how many French citizens find them appalling. In their devotion to and promotion of these values, these political elites enjoy the full support of the country’s legacy media, the cultural establishment, and the academy. Taken together, these factions make up what Obertone calls “The Sect.”

Heather Mac Donald Prophets of Doom The dishonesty with which the media has portrayed Donald Trump from the beginning threatens our civil coexistence.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/prophets-of-doom

A quiz: Who said the following, and which speaker did the New York Times deem dark and demagogic?

“We’re not going to have a country” if my opponent wins.

My opponent is “a threat to our democracy and fundamental freedoms.”

“There is one existential threat:” my opponent.

“The only existential threat to humanity is climate change, and [my opponent] didn’t do a damn thing about it.”

The 2024 presidential election “might carry near-existential stakes.”

Blacks and Hispanics “have to wake up knowing that they can lose their very life in the course of just living their life. . . . [they] have to worry about whether their sons or daughters will come home after a grocery store run or just walking down the street or driving their car or playing in the park or just sleeping at home.”

“America must heed this warning”: my opponent is a “fascist.”

“No one has ever been as dangerous to this country” as my opponent.

“Folks don’t care if tanks roll by on the way to the store as long as the milk doesn’t cost more than 4 years ago.”

Answer key: The first quote is from Donald Trump. The rest are from: Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, Joe Biden, the New York Times, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Kamala Harris, and a New York Times reader.

Despite the media caterwauling, voters aren’t buying that Trump is a ‘threat to democracy’ By Jonathan Turley

https://nypost.com/2024/10/23/opinion/despite-the-media-caterwauling-voters-arent-buying-that-trump-is-a-threat-to-democracy/

“Democracy dies in darkness” is the Washington Post’s slogan, but can it handle the light?

The Post has been doggedly portraying the election between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris as a choice between tyranny (Trump) and democracy (Harris). Yet when it commissioned a poll on threats to democracy shortly before the election, it did not quite work out.

Voters in swing states deem the greater threat to democracy to be Kamala Harris, who is running on a “save democracy” platform.

The poll sampled 5,016 registered voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

When asked whether Trump or Harris “would do a better job” of “defending against threats to democracy,” 43% picked Trump while 40% picked Harris.

Notably, this was the same result when President Biden was the nominee. While over half said that threats to democracy were important to them, the voters trusted Trump (44%) more than Biden (33%) in protecting democracy.

Even with the slight improvement for Harris, the result was crushing for not just many in the Harris campaign but the press and pundits who have been unrelenting in announcing the end of democracy if Harris is not elected.

Former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) has declared with authority that either you vote for Harris, or this “may well be the last real vote you ever get to cast.”

I have long criticized the apocalyptic, democracy-ending predictions of Biden, Harris and others as ignoring the safeguards in our system against authoritarian power.

Nevertheless, Harris supporters have ratcheted up the rhetoric to a level of pure hysteria. Recently, Michael Cohen, a convicted felon and Trump’s disbarred former lawyer, told MSNBC that if Trump wins the election, he will “get rid of the judiciary and get rid of the Congress.”

The DEI scam destroying education and fomenting antisemitism must end An insightful case study of how it works at the University of Michigan demonstrates the danger of allowing woke ideological rule. The next administration can do something about it. Jonathan Tobin

https://www.jns.org/the-dei-scam-destroying-education-and-fomenting-antisemitism-must-end/?

Give credit where it’s due. In recent years, The New York Times has become an almost unreadable publication. Left-wing bias is present in nearly every article as a partisan agenda has been weaponized by a business plan in which the so-called “newspaper of record” has marketed itself almost exclusively to affluent liberal readers. This has resulted in a cascade of biased reporting and editing aimed at affirming those readers’ prejudices and pre-existing opinions about issues, candidates and lifestyle choices. Though other major papers, as well as broadcast and cable channels, have taken similar paths, no other news outlet better exemplifies the way legacy corporate mainstream media has discarded journalism for political activism.

Still, the organization is large enough that every once in a while, articles that are more in line with the traditional purpose of journalism—seeking the truth and exposing corrupt practices no matter who is the guilty party—seem to sneak into the Times. An example of such a piece was published in its Sunday magazine and written by veteran investigative reporter Nicholas Confessore.

The article ran under the headline, “The University of Michigan Doubled Down on D.E.I. What Went Wrong?” It took a deep dive into the way one of America’s elite public universities had embraced the concept of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), and how this ideological commitment had not merely consumed a considerable portion of its budget but also transformed the institution into one in which students, faculty and staff have been pitted against each other in an endless racial war that serves only to exacerbate divisions and undermine academic freedom.

The story is far from perfect. It fails to adequately trace the origins of the woke catechism of DEI, and its progression from the radical left’s toxic neo-Marxist ideas of critical race theory and intersectionality. Instead, Confessore seeks to tie it to failed liberal attempts to deal with racial disparities in education like affirmative action. Anyone who wants to understand how and why DEI came to dominate education in the United States, in addition to the arts, corporate business culture and even the government, would do well to read Christopher Rufo’s brilliant 2023 book, America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything.

Biden: ‘We Gotta Lock Him Up’ — Still Don’t Believe Left’s Illegal Lawfare Assault On Trump Is Real?

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/10/24/biden-we-gotta-lock-him-up-still-dont-believe-lefts-illegal-lawfare-assault-on-trump-is-real/

Democrats have denied that their serial attempts to imprison former President Donald Trump and a long list of his former aides, political allies and supporters amount to an illegal campaign of political lawfare. But how else do you describe President Joe Biden’s shocking demand this week that “we gotta lock him (Donald Trump) up”?

Of course, immediately after saying it, Biden even in his attenuated mental state realized he had said something horribly wrong. So he backtracked, auto-erased his initial comment and said, “politically lock him up.” Which of course is a non-sequitur.

Lock him up for what? Does it really matter? As the Queen said in Alice In Wonderland, “Sentence first — verdict afterwards!” Biden and his allies just want Trump to go away. For a long time, if possible.

The point is, the goal of lawfare isn’t justice. It’s political. Raw politics of furthest-left kind, first used by the Chinese communists, then exported to leftist governments across Latin America. American leftists have embraced the idea with fervor, in particular the idea of using government to censor and silence your political foes.

“A recent report by the House Judiciary Committee drew striking parallels from Brazil’s censorship regime to the Biden administration’s actions urging social media platforms to censor Democratic rival Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or silence critics like Tucker Carlson,” wrote Joseph Humire, a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation. “These actions undermine the rule of law and weaken America’s moral standing at home and throughout the Americas.”

All can now see the Democrats’ endgame here. Trump has been rising in the polls, while Vice President Kamala Harris has been falling. Indeed, Trump right now stands a good chance of winning, as both recent polls and betting web sites show.

‘The House With Nobody In it’ – In Washington D.C.? by Lawrence Kadish

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21038/house-with-nobody-in-it

“The House with Nobody In It” by Joyce Kilmers (1886-1918), brings to mind a certain house in Washington, D.C. — the White House. Our White House is not just a residence, it is a command post. The Free World depends on it. If there is no apparent occupant, how will the U.S. contend with threats to our allies and us?

China, Russia, Iran and North Korea are “the new ‘Axis of Evil,'” according to Politico, hardly a right-wing outlet. How worried should we be? Probably very.

The United States is already facing two wars at full tilt, and another, it seems, on the way. Russia is still trying to seize Ukraine the same way it seized Crimea. In the Middle East, Israel, the size of New Jersey, is fighting a defensive war on seven fronts to protect its existence and that of civilization from a genocidal Iran — about to have nuclear weapons — and its proxies. In the Pacific this month, warships from Communist China have been encircling Taiwan, threatening Japan and the Philippines, and seemingly preparing to crush US naval assets should they try to intervene.

At home, the United States has in recent years been overrun by more than 10 million illegal migrants, including an estimated 1.7 million “gotaways” about whom nothing is known, such as how many there actually are. More than 323,000 children who have crossed the border are “missing.” No one even knows their names or where they are, or who might be abusing them. Presumably they have been forced into slavery, sex slavery or dangerous labor. All those are in the U.S. in addition to an estimated 10.5 million illegal migrants who were here before 2021.

Violent gangs, such as MS-13 and Tren de Aragua, which are made up of youths mainly from South America, have been increasingly infiltrating the U.S. been commandeering apartment blocks at gunpoint and terrorizing people in Colorado, Texas and New York.

An unprecedented surge of 55,000 illegal migrants from China have entered the U.S. in recent months. China does not grant visas to its people to vacation in the Adirondacks. While some of these migrants might be seeking a better life, others seem to have the “the makings of a Chinese army” inside the US. There has been a “massive surge” of unaccompanied “military-age Chinese men,” with “many of them having ‘known ties’ to the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and People’s Liberation Army,” according to Rep. Mark Green. They are possibly waiting for orders from CCP headquarters to sabotage the US electric grid, air traffic control, bridges, ports and other infrastructure. Some of these men have been trying to enter US military facilities. FBI Director Christopher Wray has already warned that Chinese hackers might be waiting for “just the right moment to deal a devastating blow.”

How BLM Blew $90 Million. Plus. . . Emily Oster asks: Are smartphones stealing childhood? The New York Times fails to disclose a source’s ties to Hamas. And more. Madeleine Kearns

https://www.thefp.com/p/front-page-how-blm-blew-90-million-plus?img=https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com

It’s Wednesday, October 23, and this is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Coming up: Are smartphones stealing childhood?; the Abercrombie & Fitch CEO charged with sex trafficking; plus, legacy media quotes a Municipality of Gaza spokesperson without revealing his likely ties to Hamas. But first, the rise and collapse of Black Lives Matter. 

A lot can change in four years. Just ask Kamala Harris, who’s walked back various 2019 policies such as a fracking ban and support for Medicare for All. Now she’s boasting about owning a Glock. Meanwhile, Democrats have forgotten they ever uttered the words “defund the police.” But perhaps the most vivid example of how we’re not in 2020 anymore—and that the vibes have most definitely shifted—is the fall of Black Lives Matter. In 2020, after George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police, the movement took on quasi-religious status, with chapters raising $90 million in one year. Today, the BLM brand is widely recognized as a scam that lost $6.2 million in the last fiscal year. 

Earlier this month, Tyree Conyers-Page—a.k.a. Sir Maejor Page—the 35-year-old former leader of the BLM chapter for Greater Atlanta, was sentenced to 42 months in federal prison for money laundering and wire fraud. Instead of spending the $450,000 raised from 18,000 donors to “fight for George Floyd,” Page splurged on tailored suits, nightclub bar tabs, an evening with a prostitute and, as he texted to a friend, “a big-ass” mansion in Ohio. 

Page is not an outlier. Take Melina Abdullah, co-director of BLM Grassroots, who media reports accuse of using the organization’s money to pay for vacations to Jamaica and her own personal expenses. Though Abdullah has not been charged with a crime, California’s attorney general has threatened to revoke her organization’s tax-exempt status if she fails to turn over its delinquent tax filings and late fees by Sunday. 

“Abdullah has denied the allegations, but at least $8.7 million in donations is unaccounted for,” writes investigative reporter Sean Patrick Cooper in his first piece for The Free Press. “The answer to where the money went may come soon.” 

“Maybe,” Sean concludes, “if the founders had been as committed to social justice as to enriching themselves, BLM could have enjoyed a long life as a progressive institution.” Instead, the movement is a cautionary tale for what happens when people with good intentions are given too much money. Read Sean Patrick Cooper on how BLM misspent millions of dollars. 

Victory within Reach By J.B. Shurk

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/10/victory_within_reach.html

Victory is such a glorious word.  Anybody who has ever felt victorious knows exactly what I mean.  Those of us who have been lucky enough to grasp it also know that it does not last.  It arrives, fills the soul with a warm sensation of contentment and gratitude, and vanishes almost as quickly as it appeared.  Once the effervescence of victory blows away, those who felt its touch speak of it with reverence.  The word is pronounced more slowly and with more care as the passage of time pushes it deeper into our memories.

I hope President Trump is re-elected in the next couple weeks and that those reading now will feel what I describe above.  Some might say, “It’s just politics,” or “It doesn’t really matter,” or “We never win.”  But it isn’t just politics, it matters a great deal, and winning is only a small component of the 2024 election.  You can walk into a casino, pull the lever on a slot machine, and become a big winner.  But you will not feel victorious.

Why is that?  Because victory is about so much more than winning.  Victory is success in a struggle against overwhelming odds.  It is the completion of a challenge with almost unbearable difficulties.  To be victorious is to push through pain and anguish.  It requires transforming into something greater than you were when you started the journey.  It comes with physical and emotional costs.  That’s why victory tastes so sweet.  It is an exotic fruit that grows on a tiny island in the middle of a vast ocean.  Once you find it, nothing ever tastes the same.

Have we suffered?  Absolutely.  We’ve endured as politicians sent the best blue-collar jobs overseas and manufacturing towns collapsed.  We’ve watched the Federal Reserve print dollar bills on demand, lawmakers jack up the national debt to once unimaginable sums, and investment banks gamble with our retirement savings.  We’ve fought wars for “American freedom” only to discover that the people pushing those wars could not care less about our constitutional rights or individual liberties.  We’ve seen the American dream fade as the cost of living precipitously rises and opportunities for economic advancement disappear.  We’ve witnessed the fracturing of the Union as the federal government intentionally disregards immigration law and floods the country with tens of millions of foreign nationals with little interest in assimilation.  We’ve experienced cartel violence while officials cook the books and lie about crime going down.  Hell, yes, we’ve suffered…but we’ve also persevered.

California’s Unelected Tyrants A bureaucratic culture of intimidation, extortion, and political retaliation, mixed with gross incompetence, is life in California. We may hope it doesn’t become life in America.By Edward Ring

https://amgreatness.com/2024/10/23/californias-unelected-tyrants/

Democrats claim that the MAGA movement constitutes a “threat to democracy.” Once you cut through their incessant rhetoric on race and gender, the threat the Democrats most fear is that an elected chief executive may actually try to control the executive branch. And when candidate Trump aligns himself with capable businessmen, including Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, government bureaucrats aren’t wrong to be afraid for their jobs along with the repressive policies they’ve imposed.

Voters who still haven’t made up their minds which threat to take seriously—“protecting democracy” vs. “draining the swamp”—should ponder life in California, where Democrats, run by bureaucrats and billionaires, wield absolute power. Decriminalized crime. Record homelessness. Punitive, impossible cost of living. The highest taxes. Failing schools. Fleeing businesses. And a state bureaucracy that is openly hostile towards unsubsidized home builders, oil and gas producers, farmers, loggers, ranchers, manufacturers, and any other productive, job-creating citizens.

If you want to pick one bureaucracy in California that epitomizes the ignorance, fanaticism, arrogance, and corruption that plagues that state, look no further than the California Coastal Commission. Ran by an unelected 12-member board, this state agency has the power to stop virtually any activity they wish if it is within five miles of the Pacific Coast or in the ocean within three miles of land. For nearly a half century, along an 840-mile coastline stretching from Oregon to Mexico, the Coastal Commission has been a capricious tyrant.

One of the most consequential examples of the Coastal Commission’s recent abuse of power was their unanimous rejection of a proposed desalination plant in Huntington Beach in Southern California. This facility would have produced 55,000 acre-feet per year of fresh water from the ocean and had already painstakingly secured permits and approvals from a dizzying array of federal, state, regional, and local agencies. The company attempting to build the plant, Poseidon Water, spent over 20 years and more than $100 million fighting off environmentalist lawsuits and paying for innumerable engineering studies and permit applications. The plant would have been an exemplary model of how to safely desalinate ocean water with minimal environmental impact. But in May 2022, in a 12-0 decision, the California Coastal Commission killed the project.

Jeffrey H. Anderson Return of the Masks Ignoring the evidence of medical studies, five Bay Area counties announce mask mandates in health-care facilities.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/return-of-the-masks

Regardless of Americans’ preference for seeing each other’s faces and breathing in fresh air, many public health officials are still fond of masks mandates. Accordingly, almost five years after Covid-19 hit our shores, a handful of counties encircling the San Francisco Bay have announced new mask mandates in various health-care facilities. San Mateo, Santa Clara, Alameda, Contra Costa, and Napa Counties have all declared mask mandates for health-care workers in hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, or both, starting the day after Halloween and extending until early spring.

San Mateo County, which borders the southern part of San Francisco, has announced that its mask mandate in skilled nursing facilities will also cover family members and friends who visit patients. The county’s health officer has asked the local sheriff and chief of police to “ensure compliance with and enforce this Order,” as a “violation of any provision of this Order constitutes an imminent threat and immediate menace to public health.” She declares that such violations are “punishable by fine, imprisonment, or both.”

One of the great lessons from the pandemic should have been that America’s founders knew what they were doing when they separated the powers of government, and when they entrusted policymaking to the legislative branch. Americans shouldn’t be put in the position of potentially being tyrannized by one kingly official wielding largely unchecked powers. Yet the source of the mandates in at least three of these counties, and likely in all five, is a lone individual: the county health officer (joined, in Alameda County, with the city of Berkeley’s acting health officer).

The health officers are dictating medical protocols to doctors. Many doctors don’t want to wear masks because they compromise interaction with patients, because they force people to breathe in unhealthy levels of their own carbon dioxide, and—most importantly—because the best scientific evidence suggests that they don’t work. But, convinced that they know better, the health officers are ordering doctors to obey their commands or else face punishment by law enforcement for being a “menace to public health.”

For the record, cloth masks won’t qualify as acceptable face coverings, at least not in San Mateo, Santa Clara (home of San Jose, Stanford, and Silicon Valley), or Napa (home of the French Laundry restaurant). The good news is that, in all three counties, masks won’t be required in the health-care facilities’ gift shops. So, even if you don’t get to smile at your loved one when you visit, you’ll still get to shop for souvenirs or knick-knacks unimpeded.