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April 2021

Unstoppable: The Incredible True Story of Siggi Wilzig

https://unstoppablesiggi.com/

Winner – Best of Los Angeles Award’s “Best Holocaust Book – 2021”

“A must-read that hopefully will be adapted for the screen. Greene lets Wilzig’s effervescent spirit shine through, and his story will appeal to a wide variety of readers.” – Library Journal

Unstoppable is the ultimate immigrant story and an epic David-and-Goliath adventure. While American teens were socializing in ice cream parlors, Siggi was suffering beatings by Nazi hoodlums for being a Jew and was soon deported along with his family to the darkest place the world has ever known: Auschwitz. Siggi used his wits to stay alive, pretending to have trade skills the Nazis could exploit to run the camp. After two death marches and near starvation, he was liberated from camp Mauthausen and went to work for the US Army hunting Nazis, a service that earned him a visa to America. On arrival, he made three vows: to never go hungry again, to support the Jewish people, and to speak out against injustice. He earned his first dollar shoveling snow after a fierce blizzard. His next job was laboring in toxic sweatshops. From these humble beginnings, he became President, Chairman and CEO of a New York Stock Exchange-listed oil company and grew a full-service commercial bank to more than $4 billion in assets.

Siggi’s ascent from the darkest of yesterdays to the brightest of tomorrows holds sway over the imagination in this riveting narrative of grit, cunning, luck, and the determination to live life to the fullest.

END NATIONALISM-END AMERICA: JOHN FONTE

https://americanmind.org/features/lefts-war-free-speech/end-nationalism-end-america/

Today’s globalist dogma is incompatible with our country’s survival.

Twenty-First-century progressive liberalism sees the American nation as a problem. There are three core points of contention: 1) the concept of nation-state sovereignty; 2) the actual American nation itself—its culture, history, and people; and finally, 3) the prospects for constitutional republican self-government in America.

From Democratic Sovereignty to Global Governance

For decades, mainstream liberal foreign policy experts who have served at the highest levels of American government (John Kerry, Strobe Talbott, Harold Koh, Anne-Marie Slaughter) and in the academic world (G. John Ikenberry, Robert Keohane) have advocated transferring aspects of national sovereignty from nation-states, including ours, to global institutions. Indeed, President Obama himself told the United Nations General Assembly in 2016: “We’ve bound our power to international laws and institutions—I am convinced that in the long run, giving up freedom of action—not our ability to protect ourselves but binding ourselves to international rules over the long term—enhances our security.”

Harold Koh, the State Department’s chief legal advisor under Obama, recommended that U.S. courts “download” international law into American law, stating that it is “appropriate for the Supreme Court to construe our Constitution in light of foreign and international law.” Anne-Marie Slaughter, an international lawyer who served under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, argued that nations should cede a degree of sovereign authority “vertically” to supranational institutions such as the International Criminal Court. She declared that transnational networks “can perform many of the functions of a world government—legislation, administration, and adjudication—without the form,” thereby creating what the American Bar Association has endorsed as the “global rule of law,” with transnational law logically superior to the U.S. Constitution.

Liberal scholars have recognized that global governance is often at odds with democratic self-government. The liberal internationalist argument is that nation-state democracies like the United States cannot be relied upon to develop fair “global rules” because they ignore the interests of non-citizens.

Texas Attorney General Sues Biden Administration For Releasing Criminal Aliens By Jordan Davidson

https://thefederalist.com/2021/04/07/texas-attorney-general-sues-biden-administration-for-releasing-criminal-aliens/

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, joined by the state of Louisiana, sued the Biden administration over the president’s executive orders directing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to release convicted criminal illegal aliens into the United States.

In the lawsuit filed in district court, Paxton argues ICE is violating federal law by releasing “dangerous illegal aliens already convicted of felony offenses” into the United States after the Biden administration issued memos making it more difficult for migrants who are not a “national security threat or criminal offender with an aggravated felony conviction” to be issued detainer requests ordering their deportation. This change, the lawsuit states, is the direct result of a “broader shift in federal policy that began on the first day of the Biden Administration and has resulted in a ‘crisis on the border.’”

“President Biden’s outright refusal to enforce the law is exacerbating an unprecedented border crisis. By failing to take custody of criminal aliens and giving no explanation for this reckless policy change, the Biden Administration is demonstrating a blatant disregard for Texans’ and Americans’ safety,” the Republican said in a press release on Tuesday. “Law and order must be immediately upheld and enforced to ensure the safety of our communities. Dangerous and violent illegal aliens must be removed from our communities as required by federal law.”

While the policy before Biden exercised executive power stated that ICE could send the Texas Department of Criminal Justice detainer requests ordering criminal aliens to be deported upon their release, the new directive pushes ICE to cut back on detainer requests and forces the state criminal justice department to “release criminals into the community or continue housing them at the expense of Texas taxpayers.”

The ‘Clean Up’ Phase of Biden’s Presidency Is About to End By Matthew Continetti

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-clean-up-phase-of-bidens-presidency-is-about-to-end/

“Biden has spent these early months dealing with the lingering reminders of the man he replaced. But this chapter of his presidency might be drawing to a close.”

One rarely emerges empty-handed from an hour or two in the C-SPAN archives. I spent some time the other day watching a 2009 episode of Q&A, where Brian Lamb interviewed Christopher Hitchens. A passing reference to the debate over post-9/11 interrogation methods reminded me that it is far too early to make oracular judgments about Joe Biden’s presidency — much less to classify him as a “transformative” president like Franklin Delano Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan. The event, decision, speech, or law that will define Biden in American history has yet to happen.

Presidents spend the first months of their tenure in office dealing with issues and problems left over from the previous administration. George W. Bush, for example, wanted his first tax cut to increase economic growth after the bursting of the tech bubble. Barack Obama’s first tasks after taking the oath were stabilizing the financial system and lessening the fallout of the Great Recession. Donald Trump had to manage, in his inimitable style, the portfolio of ISIS, the southern border, and North Korea that Obama handed him in January 2017.

And yet all of these chief executives will be remembered not for what they accomplished before the arbitrary and overblown milestone of the “first 100 days,” but for how they responded to challenges that did not appear until long afterward.

Biden’s Infrastructure Bill Aims to End Single-Family Zoning By Stanley Kurtz

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/bidens-infrastructure-bill-aims-to-end-single-family-zoning/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=blog-post&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=first

With the introduction of his massive, $2.3 trillion “infrastructure” bill, President Biden’s campaign to end suburban single-family zoning has begun. If you think this issue was debated and resolved during the 2020 presidential campaign, you are mistaken. It’s true that Biden’s campaign platform openly and unmistakably pledged to abolish single-family zoning. As soon as President Trump made an issue of that pledge, however, Biden went virtually silent on the issue and the Democrat-supporting press falsely denied that Biden had any designs on single-family zoning at all. Now that he’s president, Biden’s infrastructure bill openly includes programs designed to “eliminate” single-family zoning (which Biden calls “exclusionary zoning”).

How, exactly, does Biden plan to end single-family zoning? According to the fact sheet released by the White House, “Biden is calling on Congress to enact an innovative new competitive grant program that awards flexible and attractive funding to jurisdictions that take concrete steps to eliminate [‘exclusionary zoning’].” In other words, Biden wants to use a big pot of federal grant money as bait. If a county or municipality agrees to weaken or eliminate its single-family zoning, it gets the federal bucks.

The wildly overreaching Obama-Biden era Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) regulation — which Biden has pledged to revive — works in a similar fashion. The difference is that by adding another gigantic pot of federal money to the Community Development Block Grants that are the lure of AFFH, Biden makes it that much harder for suburbs to resist applying — and that much more punishing to jurisdictions that forgo a share of the federal taxes they’ve already paid so as to protect their right to self-rule.

Cotton Backs Arkansas Legislature’s Override of Hutchinson’s Veto By John McCormack

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/cotton-backs-arkansas-legislatures-override-of-hutchinsons-veto/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=corner&utm_term=first

U.S. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas backs the Arkansas legislature’s action to stop doctors in the state from performing gender-transition surgeries on minors or prescribing puberty-blocking hormones to minors who identify as transgender. 

“I support our legislature’s action to protect children from dangerous, life-altering, irreversible harms,” Cotton tells National Review in a statement.

In order to enact the law, the state legislature on Tuesday overrode the veto of Republican governor Asa Hutchinson.

On Tuesday night, Hutchinson was grilled by Fox News host Tucker Carlson about the veto.

“Let’s let parents and doctors make decisions,” Hutchinson said. 

“Then why don’t we allow 18-year-olds to drink beer in Arkansas? Why don’t we allow them to get tattoos? Why don’t we allow 15-year-olds to get married?” Carlson replied. “You vetoed a bill that would’ve protected children — not adults, children, to whom a different standard applies — from a life-altering, permanent procedure.”

The Woke Meritocracy How telling the right stories about overcoming oppression in the right way became a requirement for entering the elite credentialing system by Blake Smith

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/04/05/investigative_issues_elite_students_melding_of_meritocracy_and_wokeness_reveals_deeper_ruling_class_rot_771375.html

Every level of American education, from earliest grades to elite universities, is informed, to a greater or lesser extent, by two apparently contradictory forces: competition in the name of meritocracy, and identitarian notions of social justice. Meritocracy and wokeness seem to be at odds, particularly in debates about criteria for college admissions or the continued existence of selective public secondary schools. Between those who see meritocratic admissions as giving fair rewards to hard work and ability, and those who demand that schools focus on students’ identities rather than individual performance, there appears little room for compromise.

But the two positions have unexamined common ground, coexisting in the consciousness of students and teachers. At the University of Chicago, where I have taught for three years, I see students combine meritocratic and identitarian ideas in ways that reveal these two apparently antagonistic modes of thought to be not only compatible, but complementary symptoms of our collective failure to think honestly about the real purposes of education. Notions of meritocracy and social justice alike direct our attention away from the way our schools do not simply reward competence or resist inequality, but also shape the character of our elites and our very nation.

My students have experienced their schooling as both a long, isolating competition and as a continuous solicitation to stage their membership in racial and other identity groups. By the time they come into my yearlong great-books-style seminar, “Self, Culture, and Society,” they have been through more than a decade of evaluations that compare them to peers through supposedly objective (and therefore, uncriticizable) measures of competence. They are ranked not so much by teachers as by rubrics and metrics, and they learn to see the world in terms of such individualizing but impersonal rankings.

In almost every instance, my students come to study at the University of Chicago not because some particular quality about this school (its “nerdy” reputation, location, etc.) appealed to them, but because it was the “highest-ranked” school that accepted them. Once here, they organize their leisure and career aspirations around rankings. Many student clubs require potential members to submit applications and undergo interviews, and students seem to get a certain sadistic thrill from doing to others as the educational system has done to them. Already in their sophomore years, they are applying for internships that will open paths to careers in consulting and finance, which they also perceive in terms of rank—only a few “top” firms in New York, they have learned from peers and parents, are worthy of a bright young person’s ambition.

Anatomy of a Hunter Biden business deal involving Ukraine (It’s not Burisma!) Memos show dizzying array of firms, $275,000 cash payment, and flagged transaction following interaction with indicted oligarch’s team in 2015.By Seamus Bruner and John Solomon

https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/tuesanatomy-hunter-biden-foreign-business-deal-involving

In his new memoir, Hunter Biden declares there is a simple explanation for a life filled with addiction to drugs and alcohol. “I have the capacity and tenacity to use to excess, and a single-minded unwillingness to quit,” he writes. “That makes addiction easy, rather than hard.”

Unraveling his extensive deals with foreign characters — some with controversial histories — while his father was in government, however, is a more complex story.

And no other anecdote illustrates that better than Hunter Biden’s brief engagement with a fugitive Ukrainian oligarch’s team in 2015, one that began with discussions about lobbying his father’s administration to make an indictment go away and ended with a separate $3 million deal and a handsome $275,000 transfer into a firm that routinely paid the younger Biden.

Following the money is a dizzying exercise, with multiple business firms and bank accounts and a discussion about one deal that ends with payment for another business opportunity.

The tale begins in April 2015, when Hunter Biden got an email from his business partner — the now-convicted felon Devon Archer — about a plan to assist the oligarch Dmitri Firtash, a Ukrainian who was under U.S. indictment by the Obama-Biden administration, and at the time, a fugitive.

The goal was to see whether Firtash’s felony indictment could be erased or eased with the help of the Obama-Biden State Department, where Hunter Biden’s father held much sway and where the vice president’s longtime national security adviser, Tony Blinken, served as deputy secretary under John Kerry, according to emails and interviews published last week by Just the News.

A bakery, a water plant and her LA home: Everywhere Kamala has flown in the 14 days since she was placed in charge of migration crisis (but not, obviously, the border)By Jack Newman

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9444413/Kamala-Harris-not-visited-Mexico-border-taking-charge-migrant-crisis.html

The Vice President was tasked with addressing the crisis at the border amid a surge in migrant numbers
In two weeks she has only held one phone call with the Guatemalan President and offered no interviews
She did not visit the border despite traveling home to California for four days with no public commitments
More than 170,000 migrants were caught trying to cross the border in March, its highest level in two decades
Harris is yet to hold an interview or make a trip to see the ‘humanitarian crisis’ despite her new role

Kamala Harris has still to visit the US-Mexico border or even hold a press conference about her new duties in the two weeks since being tasked with addressing the migrant crisis.

The Vice President spent Easter weekend at her Brentwood home in Southern California where she baked a ‘beautiful’ roast pork with rice and peas, but did not find time in her schedule to visit the nearby border.

In the past two weeks she has also visited Connecticut for a talk with the Boys and Girls Club of New Haven, traveled to Oakland to meet with Gavin Newsom to show support amid his potential recall election, and made a trip to a bakery in Chicago.

Harris has also been busy moving into her new residence at the Naval Observatory just days after she complained about living out of suitcases while it was being renovated.

If Democrats Will Cry ‘Racist’ No Matter What, Republicans Should Pass Much Stronger Laws Everyone knows why Democrats don’t want voters to show ID. It has nothing to do with racism, and everyone knows it. So why are we playing this stupid game?By Joy Pullmann

https://thefederalist.com/2021/04/06/if-democrats-will-cry-racist-no-matter-what-republicans-should-pass-much-stronger-laws/

In March, Georgia Republicans amended their state’s election laws in a weak attempt to assuage voters disgusted with their enabling of the 2020 election circus. To punish their political opponents for requiring voter ID and creating an election season of a month long or more Democrats called up their character assassination squads.

Democrats have been throwing every bit of pressure they can at Georgia elected officials to get their way without winning power legitimately through elections. This has included pressure from Democrats’ current and last U.S. presidents, Joe Biden and Barack Obama.

Biden called on companies to push his political goals outside of the legitimate political system by boycotting Georgia. He is the first president to openly push private companies to boycott a U.S. state over fully legal political outcomes he dislikes.

Biden also explicitly voiced support for Major League Baseball economically punishing Americans represented by members of his political opposition by withdrawing MLB’s All-Star game from Atlanta. MLB quickly complied.