Displaying posts published in

December 2021

The left doesn’t own minority voters Unless left-wing parties drop their woke dogmas, they’ll struggle in the increasingly diverse West. Joel Kotkin

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/12/29/the-left-doesnt-own-minority-voters/

Demographic transitions present political opportunities, but do not protect politicians from their own folly. The shift in most Western countries to a more racially and ethnically diverse demographic has been widely seen by left-wingers as an opportunity to cement their ascendancy.

Yet after early successes with this strategy, the parties of the left have witnessed the departure of some minority voters – Hindus in Britain, Asians in Australia, and Asians and Hispanics in the United States. In some cases, minorities are opting out of the intersectional bandwagon, which includes certain cultural attitudes, imposed progressivism in schools, and an increasing tolerance of crime.

Sadly, racialism and constant campaigns to address ‘systemic racism’ have driven a certain element of working-class whites not only in Trumpian America, but also in France, Britain, Germany and even Scandinavia, towards nativist, even openly racist, politics. As Michael Lind among others suggest, the fashionable focus on ‘white privilege’ and assigning original sin based on someone sharing DNA with settlers and slave owners also doesn’t work with the majority of Americans, who come from families who came to America after the Civil War. Meanwhile, crowing about ‘the end of white America’ might be popular in ethnic-studies departments, but it does not translate into a better life for most minorities.

Racial minorities’ shift to the centre and the right represents a healthy step, as it undermines the racialist, us-versus-them rhetoric shared both by the nationalist right and the intersectional left. Once politicians begin addressing people as people, with their own interests, and not as artefacts of their own heritage, we can look to employ diversity not as a weapon, but as an asset.

When you ask them, most people of colour do not generally share the politics of the faculty-lounge racialists. Nor do most Americans. The overall PC agenda, built around identity politics, is rejected by 52 per cent of Americans, according to a recent NPR poll. Opposition to PC is even greater among Latinos. The vast majority of all races, noted a 2018 survey, reject the woke anti-racist meme, even as it is widely adopted by the billionaire class and corporate HR departments.

Invisible Catastrophes: Why Global Warming Goons Sell Fake Science Rael Isaac

https://spectator.org/patrick-moore-fake-invisible-catastrophes-review/

Patrick Moore’s new book argues that these prophecies of doom come from the same old thing — human self-interest.

By Rael Jean Isaac

If there are intelligent young people in your family who parrot the received wisdom about climate change but whose minds are not yet set in progressive stone, Patrick Moore’s Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom is the book to give them. To be sure, there are a number of excellent books debunking the claims of an imminent climate Armageddon: to name just a few, Rupert Darwall’s The Age of Global Warming, Steve Goreham’s The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism, Marc Morano’s The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change, and S. Fred Singer’s Hot Talk, Cold Science.

 

Despite the wealth of resources, there are a number of reasons why Moore’s book is especially powerful and persuasive. First is the author’s background. Patrick Moore has impeccable environmental credentials: in 1971, as a Ph.D. student, he embarked on the protest voyage against U.S. underground hydrogen bomb testing in Alaska that inaugurated the environmentalist group Greenpeace, and he devoted the next 15 years of his life to that organization.

Second, Moore establishes a radically different, and far more appropriate, framework for discussing climate change. Global warming crisis doomsayers focus on the last 170 years while Moore looks at geologic time. In that perspective, the Earth has been cooling steadily for the past 50 million years. Rather than living in the imminent danger that our planet will become too hot for life, Moore explains, we are still in the Pleistocene Ice Age, albeit in one of its many warming period, called the Holocene Interglacial. Life has flourished better in warmer periods than in the comparatively cold period we are in today. In any case, the slight warming of 1.2 degrees Celsius since 1850 is relatively inconsequential.

Moore turns global warming theory on its head.

Israel’s contributions to the US enhance 2022 Amb. (ret.) Yoram Ettinger

Israel’s contributions to the US enhance 2022
 https://bit.ly/3eASNDs
Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger, “Second Thought: a US-Israel Initiative”

As 2022 begins, Israel is the most critical partner of the US in sustaining its edge over China, Russia, Europe and Japan in the development and manufacturing of game-changing commercial and military technologies.

In 2022, with merely 0.11% of the global population, Israel will remain second only to – and closely collaborating with – the US as far as the development of ground-breaking hightech innovations. Moreover, Israel’s brainpower has attracted 20% of the global investment in cyber technologies, while the number Israel’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) startups account to some 20% of the global total.

In 2022, Israel will be second only to the US in the development and manufacturing of commercial, military and dual-use intelligence technologies and systems (e.g., remote-control jammers, counter-IED and booby-trap measures, remote-control explosives neutralization, electronic warfare and electromagnetic spectrum). In fact, around 60% of Israeli-developed intelligence and counter-terrorism systems have reached the US through joint ventures with leading US manufacturers, US-owned research and development centers in Israel, and US acquisitions from Israeli manufacturers.  

For example, hacking into the iPhone of the San Bernardino Islamic terrorist (who murdered 14 people at a Christmas celebration in December 2015) was facilitated by an Israeli mobile forensic technology used by the FBI.  Also, the 2006 killing of the top al-Qaeda terrorist in Iraq, al-Zarqawi, was facilitated by the Israeli-developed and manufactured (“Rafael Armament Development Authority”) Litening infrared targeting and navigation pod, installed on a US Air Force F-16.

Jim Jordan’s Jaw Drops As Dr. Makary’s Truth Bombs Expose The CDC, NIAID, NIH – Natural Immunity [VIDEO] What are they trying to hide? By Zach Heilman

https://www.redvoicemedia.com/2021/12/jim-jordans-jaw-drops-as-dr-makarys-truth-bombs-expose-the-cdc-niaid-nih-natural-immunity-video/

Jim Jordan asked Dr. Makary a series of questions, and Makary’s answers led Jordan to a stunning conclusion.

It’s either they know the answer and don’t want the American people to know, or they do know the answer and are trying to hide it.

Lebanon: Do Not Let the Palestinians Destroy Our Country by Khaled Abu Toameh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18080/lebanon-palestinians

A growing number of people in Lebanon fear that… Hamas could drag Lebanon into another war with Israel — as Lebanon’s Hezbollah terrorist militia, backed by Iran, has done for the past three decades.

The fears of the Lebanese are well-grounded in reality.

Since 2007, Hamas has fired thousands of rockets at Israel from the Gaza Strip, triggering military confrontations that have wreaked havoc on the lives of Palestinians living there.

The Lebanese are making it clear that they do not want Hamas — or any other Palestinian group — to drag them into another war with Israel. They are saying that they are done with decades-long Palestinian efforts to transform Lebanon into a war zone.

With all this clarity on the part of the Lebanese, it remains to be seen whether international bodies will themselves speak out to prevent another catastrophe in Lebanon carried out by a Palestinian terrorist group.

It appears that the Palestinians are determined to continue their fight against Israel until the last Arab. For decades, the Palestinians have used Israel’s neighboring countries, especially Jordan and Lebanon, as launching pads for various types of attacks against Israel.

In the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s several Palestinian groups, including Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), set up military training bases in Jordan and Lebanon to launch attacks on Israel.

Watch Out: Academia Has Declared War on Military History by James Jay Carafano Tom Spoehr

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/watch-out-academia-has-declared-war-military-history-198117

Fewer and fewer major universities promote world-class work in the military history field.

Here’s What You Need To Remember: In today’s great power competition, knowledge, critical thinking and prudent judgment are as vital as military hardware, artificial intelligence, and powerful economies. In our hyper-competitive world, we need all hands—and brains—on deck.

Distinguished war historian Max Hastings recently lamented, “In centers of learning across North America, the study of the past in general, and of wars in particular, is in spectacular eclipse.” This created a bit of a buzz among “classically” educated national security professionals—i.e., those who learned the blocking-and-tackling basics of their field through the study of history.

But this “buzzing” matters little. While they would like history to be used to help keep America safe, free and prosperous, these folks don’t control how history is taught and propagated. That’s controlled by American academia, American universities have no intention of fixing the problem. Instead, they are unilaterally disarming America’s knowledge base.

Crisis! What Crisis?

Fewer and fewer major universities promote world-class work in the military history field. There are probably two basic reasons for that. One is that, in this field, universities mostly function to produce scholars for other universities. As the demand for such academic scholars dissipates, so do universities’ investments in the field. And it’s a field particularly unattractive to foreign “investors.”

U.S. universities rake in billions in foreign investments. China alone averages a billion dollars a year. Pretty much all of it goes to hard science and engineering. Military history goes empty-handed.

Dems Will Take an Even Harder Run at Destroying America in 2022 By Stephen Kruiser

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stephen-kruiser/2021/12/29/the-morning-briefing-dems-will-take-an-even-harder-run-at-destroying-america-in-2022-n1545096

Let’s get back to the Dems and their antics now.

As I am often given grief for frequently reminding people, we’re still less than a year into Biden’s God-awful tenure in the Oval Office and what potential relief we have on the horizon is still almost a year away. I mentioned in yesterday’s Briefing that eleven months could very well feel like eleven years. I sincerely hope that’s not the case but I’m a realist.

One thing I know for certain is that the Dems are in an all-around panic about next November. Sure, a lot can happen between now and then but, look around, this Biden mess most likely won’t be cleaned up by then.

Democrats are more focused on the long game than Republicans, however. Just because they’re down in the dumps at the moment doesn’t mean that they’re taking their eyes off of the various insane leftist prizes that they want.

My latest column dissects an Op-Ed that appeared in The Hill yesterday, and it perfectly illustrates just how focused the Dems still are. Here’s an overview:

A professor of politics named John Kenneth White has penned an opinion piece for The Hill titled “The Constitution isn’t working.” It’s an odd article because White actually gets a couple of things right at the beginning but eventually veers off into a boilerplate regurgitation of the leftist fever-dream wish list: nuke the Electoral College, JANUARY 6, reform the filibuster…yeah he had a ghostwriter from the Democratic National Committee working with him on this.

There were some valid points that professor White could have explored differently and given readers some real food for thought. It’s nigh on impossible for any Democrat to do something like that, however, because they are all basically automatons when it comes to the approved messaging. Here’s a snippet from near the end of White’s article that I didn’t include in mine:

It won’t be enough merely to reform the filibuster, add more justices to the Supreme Court, change presidents or surrender presidential powers to Congress. A document written in 1787 is inadequate for the 21st century. The Electoral College is poised to create more misfires, with popular vote winners not becoming president, as has happened twice already this century. Territorial expansion has resulted in 16 percent of the U.S. population controlling half the seats in the U.S. Senate.

He not only wants to blow up the Constitution, he then wants to blow it up a second time just to make sure.

The Everlasting COVID Crisis Can we muster the fighting spirit and a willingness to push back against the administrative tyranny that rings round all of modern life? By Josiah Lippincott

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/28/the-everlasting-covid-crisis/

In 1972, three black men, Melvin Cale, Louis Moore, and Henry D. Jackson, Jr., hijacked Southern Airways Flight 49, demanding $10 million and safe passage to Cuba. The hijacking lasted nearly 30 hours and involved multiple stops throughout the United States, Canada, and eventually, Cuba. In the process of negotiating with the FBI, the hijackers threatened to ram their aircraft, a Douglas DC-9, into the High Flux Isotope Reactor in Oak Ridge, Tennessee if their demands weren’t met.

Until that point, American airlines had resisted installing metal detectors in airports, worried that treating Americans like common criminals to board a plane would wreck their burgeoning industry. But that threat of nuclear attack, and the 130 other hijackings between 1968 and 1972, convinced the government to take a stand at last. In 1973, the FAA used its bureaucratic and administrative powers to make passenger screening mandatory. In 1974, Congress validated the requirement, ignoring passenger rights’ groups that protested the intrusive screening of luggage and persons in order to board aircraft. 

There is an important lesson here: Once the modern American state imposes surveillance measures it never relaxes them, even when the threat no longer exists. That’s why, even after American troops have left Afghanistan, Osama Bin Laden was killed, and ISIS has been destoyed, Americans are still removing their shoes in airports, treated like would-be terrorists for traveling. The humiliating X-ray machines that force grandmothers, children, and ordinary businessmen alike to stand like felons with their hands up while probing machines attempt to peek under their clothes at their naked bodies is the height of ritual humiliation.

The seeming elimination of this surveillance network’s reason to exist doesn’t mean these leftover policies of the war on terrorism are over—far from it! My children and grandchildren, barring some dramatic political shift, will be subject to the same post-9/11 security measures I grew up with. 

Us So Stupid How the Left views middle Americans as sub-human. Don Feder

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/us-so-stupid-don-feder/

Bette Midler should wear a name tag that reads, “Hi, I’m a super-rich, Hollywood elitist who thinks Red Staters are sub-human.” But that would be superfluous.

After Sen. Joe Manchin announced that he could not support Biden’s $4.5 trillion Build Back Better/Socialism Forever Plan – which would have been gas on the raging fires inflation (now at almost a 40-year high) – Midler attacked his West Virginia constituents as “poor, illiterate and strung out.” I’m surprised she didn’t add something about their teeth and the marriage of first cousins.

Personally, I would rather live next-door to the average West Virginian than the typical denizen of Beverly Hills. (See, Bette, even though I voted for Trump twice, I can use big words.) Being called illiterate and strung out by a member of the entertainment conglomerate – who generally have the IQs of gnats and are only occasionally sober — is, to say the least, ironic.

This is not about the calorically-challenged, hideously unattractive, singer/ whatever, but the way “progressives” view us, and why the left is increasingly dangerous to life and liberty.

Bette’s tirade is only the latest chapter in the left’s war on normalcy. Back in 1993, the Washington Post described conservative Christians as “largely poor, uneducated and easy to command.”

I wrote at the time that I was a Jew who identified with the political agenda of the Christian right, owned several pairs of shoes, graduated from an East Coast university, was admitted to the practice of law in two states and considered myself an independent thinker, guided by reason.

Bassem Eid: Israel ‘The Best Place To Be an Arab’ The “apartheid” that isn’t. Hugh Fitzgerald

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/bassem-eid-israel-best-place-be-arab-hugh-fitzgerald/

Bassem Eid is a Palestinian living in Israel who has had an extensive career as a human rights activist. His initial focus was on human rights violations committed by Israeli armed forces, but for many years he has broadened his research to include human rights violations committed by the Palestinian Authority (PA), and the Palestinian armed forces, on their own people. He founded the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group in 1996, which closed in 2011, for lack of any cooperation from the Palestinian Authority. He now works as a political analyst for Israeli TV and radio.

Bassem Eid is one of a handful of Palestinians and Israeli Arabs – another is Khaled Abu Toameh — who dare to tell the truth about Israel, which means they seldom get their articles republished abroad in the mainstream media which wants only damning stories about the mistreatment of Arabs by the Jewish state. His latest piece, titled “Israel – The Best Place To Be An Arab” — on how Arabs actually fare in Israel, as opposed to how they are said to fare by, inter alia, the UN General Assembly, the UN Human Rights Council, the E.U., Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Roger Walters, and many others – is here: “Israel – the best place to be an Arab,” by Bassem Eid, Times of Israel, December 22, 2021:

Although Israel is the world’s only Jewish state, it is home to a free and thriving Arab community. For decades, anti-Israel activists have decried Israel as an illegitimate state which represses Arabs and Muslims. Israel has been incorrectly labeled as a state for “settler colonialism” and apartheid. These baseless claims could not be further from the truth.

Researchers have conducted surveys to shine a light on the true treatment of Arabs living in Israel. According to these surveys, there is a growing trend of Israeli Arabs ditching their former Palestinian identity and starting to identify more heavily with their Israeli nationality. This switch in national identity is great news for everyone who holds a stake in the Middle East. It proves that Arabs have been able to call Israel home, while Israel is able to maintain its Jewish majority. Despite being the world’s only Jewish state, Israel is a welcoming, diverse country that boasts a thriving Arab population.