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The West’s Last Chance? Has it already passed? by William Kilpatrick

Posted By on January 20th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-wests-last-chance/

Those who make a business of projecting trends often neglect the acceleration factor.  The march of history may be usefully described as “slowly” followed by “suddenly.” Yet we are rarely prepared for those times when history seems to “speed up,” and decades of change are compressed into years or even months.  We assume that current trends will continue, and we are surprised when they don’t.

An excellent book on the subject is Tony Blankley’s The West’s Last Chance.  Blankley, a nationally syndicated columnist who served President Reagan as a speechwriter and senior policy adviser, began the book with an overview of sudden changes in the course of history:  the conquests of Alexander the Great, the French Revolution, the American Civil War, and the Nazi’s rapid takeover of much of Europe.

He then made the case that we are on the brink of another historical reversal of massive proportions—namely, the takeover of Europe by Islam. He suggested that the takeover would be accomplished through demographic changes rather than war and he further suggested that Europeans would mount little resistance to it.

According to Blankley, the lack of resistance would have its source in the fact that demographic changes move slowly and are thus less noticeable.  One can see that an attacking army ought to be resisted, but the threat of rising birth rates seems a much less urgent matter.

Moreover, for much of the world the pre- 9/11 decades were a time of relative calm.  For one thing, the differences between the West and the Soviet Union had been patched up. The liberal elites claimed that it was merely a case of mutual misunderstanding.   The solution to most problems, it was asserted, was to understand the “other.” The best way to do that was to practice “political correctness”—a non-judgmental approach to political and social issues. Ironically, political correctness was the prelude to the highly judgmental ideology of “woke.”

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At Davos, the Rev. John Kerry Signals His Place Among the Elect By Jack Cashill

Posted By on January 20th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/01/at_davos_the_rev_john_kerry_signals_his_place_among_the_elect.html

John Kerry at Davos

“When you start to think about it, it’s pretty extraordinary that we — select group of human beings because of whatever touched us at some point in our lives — are able to sit in a room and come together and actually talk about saving the planet,” said Kerry.

Before getting to the sillier part of his homily, allow me to explain what Neo-Puritanism is and why it has surfaced. The concept is implicit in the very word “progressive.” In the last decade or two, that word has replaced “liberal” as self-definition among the Left. On the Right, we shorthand the Left’s shifting semantics into the more useful “woke,” a word that on the Left originally meant someone who had awakened and seen the light.

At the risk of tautology, progressives, by definition, progress. Unlike old-school liberals who could content themselves with a status quo, progressives move forward. They refuse to rest, refuse to reflect. That much said, few among them have any clue as to what their ultimate destination might be. For instance, who ten years ago thought that “trans rights” would be a hill on which the woke would be willing, if not to die, at least to pout.

Like their seventeenth-century New England namesakes, the woke exist in a perpetual state of anxiety. For the original Puritans, the anxiety derived from a Calvinist theology that spared only the “elect” from eternal damnation. The problem was that no amount of good works could assure one’s “elect” status. Only faith could do that, but even the faithful could not be certain that their faith would suffice.

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Has COVID Backlash Sparked a Movement? By J.B. Shurk

Posted By on January 20th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/01/has_covid_backlash_sparked_a_movement.html

Friends of freedom generally agree about four points:

(1) Protections for expansive individual liberty and respect for limited government are essential for the promotion of human rights, self-determination, and prosperity.

(2) Over the course of American history, the U.S. government has strayed far beyond the original limitations of its enumerated powers as set forth in the Constitution.

(3) Globalism, international government, plutocracy, rule by “elite” experts, unchecked bureaucracy, and the steady erosion of inalienable rights all work to maximize the power of centralized authority while minimizing the power of individual citizens.

(4) The most important conflict raging today is between individual liberty and coercive State control.

Where defenders of liberty disagree is in their assessment of the future.  Some believe that so much ground has now been lost in humanity’s centuries-long struggle for freedom that centralized government control over each individual is all but certain.  Technology’s rapid intrusion into the private sphere, the exponential expansion of the national security surveillance State, the rise of government-directed mass censorship, the successful efforts of multinational corporations and banks to influence national government directives, and the Intelligence Community’s vast programs for manipulating public opinion on a global scale all lend support to this admittedly pessimistic point of view.  

On the other hand, there are those who see the ebb and flow of human liberty as a natural occurrence, technology as a set of instruments that can just as ably expand freedom as curtail it (conquerors and liberators use the same weapons, after all), and encroaching totalitarianism as a necessary precursor for sparking popular revolt.  From this vantage point, the darker things get, the more likely real change is afoot.  I fall into this latter camp, and I will repeat a couple truths I hold dear: (1) before any system can be overhauled, there must first be a revolutionary shift in social consciousness, and (2) transformational change often occurs when people least expect it.  

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Where did all the far-left organizers at the anti-Netanyahu rally go? The gaggle of radical sponsors at the first anti-judicial reform rally vanished from the second. by David isaac

Posted By on January 20th, 2023

https://www.jns.org/where-did-all-the-far-left-organizers-at-the-anti-netanyahu-rally-go/

The first mass rally against the current Netanyahu government, on Jan. 7, was very left-wing—even radically so, observers from both sides of the political aisle agreed. The demonstration, ostensibly against the coalition’s proposed legal reforms, featured “anti-occupation” slogans and PLO flags, and was headlined “March of Rage,” terminology that could have been on loan from Gaza.

Some protesters openly wondered what one issue had to do with the other. A left-wing journalist voiced fears that center-left protesters, whose concern was defending the Supreme Court, would feel they had been deceived and would stay home the next time.

But something strange happened on the way to the second demonstration: The far-left groups that had played so prominent a role in the first disappeared, to be replaced by one organizer, the Movement for Quality Government in Israel (MQG).

“On the promo poster for the second rally [on Jan. 14], their logo alone appeared. All the other organizations that had been listed on the poster from the first demonstration were gone. It looked like the Movement for Quality Government was solely responsible for the second demonstration,” said Alon Schvartzer, head of the research and policy division for Im Tirtzu, a Zionist NGO.

The second demonstration on Jan. 14 featured only the Movement for Quality Government in Israel as the sponsor.
Schvartzer said that his guess is the change came as a result of pressure by politicians such as opposition leader Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz, head of the National Unity Party, who didn’t want to risk being associated with radical groups and Palestinian flags. “In the next election, they want to appeal to people from the center, not the left, or in this case, the radical left,” he explained to JNS.

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There is evidence, albeit circumstantial, to back Schvartzer’s claim. Neither Lapid, Gantz nor any major opposition leader attended the first rally. The most prominent politician present was Labor Party leader Merav Michaeli, along with a few Knesset members, including fellow Labor member Gilad Kariv. Ayman Odeh, leader of the Arab Hadash-Ta’al Party, also attended, as did former politician Tzipi Livni.

Shvartzer added that Lapid and Gantz started calling for people to take to the streets in early December. Clearly, something didn’t sit right with them if they didn’t participate in the first mass rally.

The situation changed somewhat during the second rally. Gantz made an appearance, as did fellow National Unity party lawmaker Gadi Eisenkot. Former politician and member of Gantz’s Blue and White faction Moshe Ya’alon also attended. However, Matan Kahana, one of the more right-wing members of Gantz’s party, did not, saying he didn’t want to be seen standing next to Palestinian flags.

The third protest, scheduled for Saturday evening, looks to see the full weight of the opposition parties in attendance as Lapid has reversed an earlier decision to avoid mass rallies. “Come and protect our beloved country from democratic ruin. Yes, I’ll be there too,” he said in a social media video post.

The risk of being associated with radicals has diminished, said Schvartzer, noting the Movement for Quality Government is considered mainstream among left-wing demonstrators. “It’s not a grassroots group but it has succeeded in presenting itself as one of the leaders of big anti-Netanyahu demonstrations in the past year. It has a large budget,” he said.

Unlike the other left-wing groups, the organization is focused on legal issues. It was one of the petitioners to the Supreme Court in the recent Aryeh Deri case, which led the high court to rule against the Shas Party chairman serving as a cabinet member in the Netanyahu government.

Promotional material for the third protest, scheduled for Saturday evening, Jan. 21, again lists as its sponsor only the Movement for Quality Government, or in some cases, adds “and protest groups,” which go unnamed.

While some may have been concerned that the far-left nature of the first demonstration would put people off, such fears proved unfounded. From a crowd of 20,000 at the Jan. 7 rally at Habima Square in Tel Aviv, the numbers swelled to 80,000 at the second.

“The mainstream news channels didn’t talk about the radical left orientation of the first rally,” said Schvartzer. “Instead, they featured the president of the Supreme Court telling us that we need to do something to stop the reforms. So people went to the demonstration and they got that impressive number.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed his dissatisfaction with the media at the weekly cabinet meeting the day after the first rally.

“I was simply shocked. I saw posters over the weekend that compared the minister of justice [Yariv Levin] to the leader of the Nazis. They talked about the Sixth Reich [a reference to Netanyahu’s current sixth government]. This is wild incitement that passed without any condemnation from the opposition or the central media channels,” he said.

Makor Rishon investigative reporter Shilo Freid told JNS that Standing Together was the main organizer of the first rally. The stage was decorated in the organization’s color scheme and logo. Its purple signs were seen throughout the crowd. He described the group as a leader of radical leftist activities. He says it isn’t involved with legal issues, but rather is focused on ending the “occupation.” Its website says it’s “a grassroots movement mobilizing Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel in pursuit of peace, equality, and social and climate justice.”

Freid emphasizes that the associations behind the rally are heavily funded from abroad. Twenty-seven percent of Standing Together’s budget comes from foreign sources, he said, citing Guidestar Israel, a website providing information on non-profits and operated by Israel’s Ministry of Justice.

Standing Together also received $1,026,222 in 2012-2021 from the New Israel Fund, according to Im Tirtzu’s research. A U.S-based NGO known for financing controversial groups, the Israeli branch of New Israel Fund stepped out of the shadows to openly tout its financial support for the first rally, telling its supporters in an email that it had “assisted with a special grant to the many civil society organizations that took part in the production of the giant demonstration on Saturday night in Tel Aviv.”

The first demonstration’s poster included a host of far-left groups, most unconnected to the issue of judicial reform.
Other groups involved in organizing the first protest were Breaking the Silence (its co-directors Avner Gvaryahu and Yael Lotan were featured speakers), the Association for Civil Rights in Israel and the Abraham Initiatives. All three enjoy generous financial support from the European Union.

Too many groups to mention were included on the poster advertising the first rally. The fight to block reforms to the Supreme Court is one that affects them directly, Schvartzer noted.

“The Supreme Court is like their second home. It’s where they focus their activities. Some appeal to the court 40 to 50 times a year. Taking away the Supreme Court’s power is like taking away their own because they don’t have the support of the Israeli people,” he said.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Whitewashing of Antisemitism, a Hatred of Many Colors by Richard Bernstein

Posted By on January 20th, 2023

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2023/01/19/the_whitewashing_of_antisemitism_a_hatred_of_many_colors_876229.html

It was a common occurrence on the streets of one of New York City’s Jewish neighborhoods: A man dressed in the long black coat and broad hat worn by Hasidic Jews was walking in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, his two young children in hand, when suddenly a black man ran up behind him and hit him hard on the back of the head. 

Incidents like that one last May unfold repeatedly in New York, several of them in December alone – an outdoor menorah in Coney Island vandalized; a father and son wearing yarmulkas shot with a BB gun on Staten Island; a group of visibly Jewish boys chased by a gang firing a taser and shouting “Jews run! Get out of here”; a Hasidic man beaten outside a bus stop in Crown Heights.   

Rationalizations for black antisemitism can be strained, as when the spewings of billionaire rapper Ye, the former Kanye West …
Invision

Such attacks are part of a larger groundswell of antisemitism that has received wide notice across the country in recent years. But what has not gotten much attention is the reticence to even mention the ethnicity of antisemitic perpetrators unless they are white. It appears that discussion of this ancient hatred is being constrained by contemporary politics.  

In covering and condemning these acts, most major news outlets and politicians from President Biden on down have described antisemitism as almost entirely a sub-species of white supremacy or white nationalism, invoking the mob in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 shouting “Jews will not replace us,” or the murder of 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018 by a white nationalist fanatic.  

This narrative obscures the complexity and diversity of the sources fueling the spike in antisemitism, some experts say. Right-wing hate groups are playing their usual part, but so too are blacks and members of other minority groups. The non-white antagonists are erased from the public discourse even though it’s generally understood that it’s hard to address a societal problem when society is unwilling to discuss it openly and honestly.  

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D.C. Journalist Proves Biden Did Absolutely Nothing Wrong By Assuming He Did Absolutely Nothing Wrong Eddie Scarry

Posted By on January 20th, 2023

https://thefederalist.com/2023/01/19/d-c-journalist-proves-biden-did-absolutely-nothing-wrong-by-assuming-he-did-absolutely-nothing-wrong/

Missing classified documents are only a problem when a president that the bureaucracy doesn’t like has them.

If the entire news media, plus Biden’s vindictive Justice Department, hadn’t put the country through months of insanity over the petty “confidential documents” drama at Mar-a-Lago, Biden’s own scandal of having illegally retained government material when he was a private citizen would be a pretty boring affair.

But they didn’t. They decided to get cute and make this a criminal matter. Now they get the same treatment.

Wait! they claim in unison. This is different! Biden did the right thing and Trump did the wrong thing!

Admittedly, that’s a totally fair and obvious point when you start with the assumption that over the six years Biden was in wrongful possession of government secrets, the material just sat there, untouched and unread (and make the concurrent assumption that the same wasn’t true of the Trump documents). They simply gathered dust, month by month, sound asleep in office drawers and garage boxes, forgotten by Biden, time, and the federal bureaucracy. Then, when one fateful day Biden’s lawyers happened upon the documents, they immediately dialed the National Archives for a swift transfer to the proper authorities.

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Al Gore Attempts Own ‘Greta Moment’ In Unhinged Davos Rant: “Equivalent Of 600,000 Hiroshima Bombs Daily” by Tyler Durden

Posted By on January 20th, 2023

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/al-gore-attempts-own-greta-moment-unhinged-davos-rant-equivalent-600000-hiroshima-bombs

Al Gore is testing out his performative Greta mode at the World Economic Forum in Davos this week. The former Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate who as early as the 1990’s was dubbed in the pages of The Washington Post as “very boring” and as having a “naturally stiff, wooden persona” momentarily (and very awkwardly) tried to go climate activist beast mode during a Q&A panel.

His attempt this week to pull off a “Greta moment” and shed his notorious stiffness resulted in an unhinged rant wherein he claimed that carbon emissions and greenhouses gases are trapping “as much extra heat as would be released by 600,000 Hiroshima class atomic bombs exploding every single day on the earth.”

That’s right, you heard him correctly… six-hundred-thousand Hiroshima bombs every single day – according to his bizarre rant, which he further said is “boiling the oceans” and creating “rain bombs” and “atmospheric rivers” resulting in millions of “climate refugees”. 

“Climate refugees are expected to reach one billion in this century”… he said, before turning to the “xenophobia” somehow unleashed on the world in the process due to the “Hiroshima bombs”. 

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The Super Shady Coverup of the Paul Pelosi Story Is Worse Than You Thought By Matt Margolis

Posted By on January 20th, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2023/01/19/the-super-shady-coverup-of-the-paul-pelosi-story-is-worse-than-you-thought-n1663357

Remember when the Paul Pelosi story was big news for a while, then weird things started coming out, and then suddenly everyone stopped talking about it?

Yeah, I do.

Back in October, the story came, and Democrats pounced on it, pushing the narrative that some deranged Trumpster had broken into the Pelosi home and attacked the husband of the then-House Speaker in some politically motivated MAGA attack. Of course, it was soon revealed that the attack was most definitely not a Trump supporter — but actually a left-leaning supporter of Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ causes, as well as a nudist activist who reportedly struggled with drug abuse. Oops.

But it gets weirder. It was initially reported that when the police came, the attacker was wearing nothing but his underwear — which was later retracted. There was a report that there was a third unnamed individual who let the police in — which was later retracted. Then there was the report that detailed how Pelosi opened the door for the police before returning to the interior of his home to reengage his attacker — which was later retracted, and NBC News reporter Miguel Almaguer got suspended for reporting it — even though his report matched details recorded in court documents. As the story lingered, we were left with questions than answers, and yet three key pieces of evidence — Pelosi’s 911 call, the police body cam footage, and Capitol Police security footage — have not been released.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Turkey: Putin’s Open Door for Harming Western Interests by Burak Bekdil

Posted By on January 20th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19314/turkey-putin-western-interests

For Putin, Erdoğan’s friendship is growing ever more important — and vice versa.

Turkey has refused to join Western sanctions against Russia over Ukraine, thereby throwing a lifeline to Putin. Turkish skies remain open to Russian airlines and its doors open to hundreds of thousands of Russians and their money. Turkish exports to Russia are surging. In July alone, exports to Russia shot up by a dizzying 75% year-on-year.

Russian cash helped plug the growing hole in Turkey’s foreign currency reserves — at a time when Erdoğan needs foreign money for the country’s ailing economy before the presidential and parliamentary elections this June.

In March, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu said that Russian oligarchs were welcome in Turkey. In October, the Financial Times reported that between January and August 2021, a record $28 billion from unclear origins had flowed into Turkey.

“Putin’s goal remains anchoring Erdoğan more and more to Russia through a vast mesh of mutually beneficial operations in the fields of defense, energy, trade, and finance… By doing this, Putin is comforting an embattled incumbent president and is openly bolstering Erdoğan’s position in the upcoming elections…. [T]he world is witnessing the Russian president using Turkey for his own benefits.” — Marc Pierini, senior fellow at Carnegie Europe and a former EU Ambassador to Ankara, August 30, 2022.

The Erdoğan-Putin bond has two main pillars. One is pragmatism: They both strategically, politically and economically benefit. The other is ideological: They both hate the West.

Turkish Islamists, especially neo-Ottomans, have historically hated Russia — both Czarist and Soviet. Similarly, Russians and Soviets have never been great fans of the Turks — both Ottoman and republican. Today, however, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, with a big foot in NATO, is exhibiting a pro-Russian tilt never seen before, and at a time when Russian President Vladimir Putin is seen as an existential threat to Western interests. What is the secret behind this sudden marriage?

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Insanity On Display?

Posted By on January 20th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/01/20/insanity-on-display/

John Kerry, former senator, former secretary of state, and now chief climate alarmist for the Biden administration, said in so many words Tuesday during his World Economic Forum rant that it’s too late to save the planet from global warming. Yet he claimed climate programs still need more “money, money, money, money, money, money, money.” The only reason he’s not the worst person in the world is because he has so much competition at Davos.

What Kerry actually said was that he is “not convinced we’re going to get there in time to do what the scientists said, which is avoid the worst consequences of the crisis,” meaning that he doubts that the global temperature will stay under the cap of 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial temperature set by scientists (though it is actually a random figure with no scientific support).

Yet he continues to crusade for a cause that hopes to strip Westerners of both their wealth – yes, according to the United Press International, he said “money” seven times – and freedom to move about.

With absolutely zero self-awareness, the man who flies in private jets, has multiple homes (which most of us would consider mansions) and more cars than most families, and up until a few years ago owned a yacht, preached about “the way we live,” and thundered against “the incredible sort of destructive process of growth the way we interpret it.” He called it “robber-baron growth.”

But his luxurious lifestyle and those of the other wealthy men and women fighting global warming must be OK, because he assured members of his fawning audience that they are all special, “a select group of human beings” who “are able to sit in a room and come together and, uh, actually talk about saving the planet.”