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August 2022

Biden’ Open Door to Terrorists Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2022/08/biden-open-door-terrorists-daniel-greenfield/

A few Republican senators are making an important point.

Ten Republican Senators sent a letter to members of the Biden administration this week demanding an explanation for a rule change that will allow some individuals who have materially supported terrorist organizations to immigrate to the U.S.

“We write because the American people deserve an explanation regarding the broad, open-ended nature of this authority for exempting individuals who would otherwise be barred from immigration to the United States for supporting a terrorist organization,” Sen. Bill Hagerty (Tenn.) and his colleagues wrote in the letter addressed to Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas and Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

The point that they make in their letter is that Biden not only provided a waiver for terrorists, but made it as open-ended as possible.

The June 8 determination by the Departments of Homeland Security and State announced that people who have provided “insignificant” or “limited” material support to terrorist organizations in the past will no longer be barred from immigration.

Donald Trump has enemies everywhere……..even inside his own house! Roger Kimball

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/donald-trump-enemies-everywhere-jared-kushner-peter-navarro/

I think that Michael Anton is correct that “the people who really run the United States of America have made it clear that they can’t, and won’t, if they can help it, allow Donald Trump to be president again.”

“The people who really run the United States”: that would be denizens of the Swamp, the bureaucratic elite, their media and academic mouthpieces, worker bees in the ambient welfare jelly and the nomenklatura who win elections and circulate in and out of the corridors of power.

It’s a powerful, nearly monolithic force, a monument to special privilege and two-tier justice — and the prospect of dismantling it is daunting to say the least. The fact that Donald Trump, from the moment he sailed down the elevator at Trump Tower to announce his candidacy in 2015, managed to open a bleeding fissure in that smug consensus shows why the ruling class considers him so dangerous. One man, almost without allies, inexperienced in the ways of the Swamp, dependent at every turn on ambassadors and front men from the very thing he had campaigned to destroy: how much damage could he really do?

Kathy Hochul’s call for 5.4M Republicans to leave New York is dangerous and disgusting By Tim Hoefer

https://nypost.com/2022/08/25/kathy-hochuls-call-for-5-4m-republicans-to-leave-new-york-is-dangerous/

Gov. Kathy Hochul, who hasn’t proven shy about issuing orders, had one for the state’s Republicans this week — all 5.4 million of them: “Just jump on a bus and head down to Florida where you belong, OK?” she said. “You are not New Yorkers.”

If you can move beyond the frankly disgusting political partisanship and intolerance, her message is fiscally irresponsible, even dangerous. The governor probably already knows this, but the state’s extensive public sector is heavily reliant on personal income taxes paid by residents, and with nearly $14 billion in projected budget gaps over the next five years, it can’t afford to lose any taxpayers, let alone 5.4 million of them.

The Empire State has already lost 1.5 million residents in the past decade, and there’s no sign of that trend letting up. In fact, more than 350,000 New Yorkers relocated during the 12 pandemic-plagued months leading up to July 1, 2021.

Kathy Hochul said Republicans should move down to Florida.
Getty Images

In her attempt to be snappy, Hochul exposed a major problem that has gripped our state since the dawn of the Cuomo-Hochul era: New Yorkers are leaving, and they’re taking their tax dollars with them.

American civilization is being destroyed from within by the ‘Republic of Nice’ Turning a blind eye to open borders, raging crime, cultural decay and homelessness Don Feder

ttps://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/aug/27/american-civilization-is-being-destroyed-from-with/

Civilization isn’t self-renewing. It takes work and will. In America, we won’t do the work and no longer have the will.

The signs of imminent collapse are all around us:

1. A ruling class that’s opened the floodgates of uncontrolled immigration — and damn the consequences

2. Crime without punishment

3. Elites that mock the values on which our nation was founded

4. Supporting barbarians at the gates

5. Refusing to procreate in sufficient numbers to maintain our population.

A shocking video from Texas shows Border Patrol agents calmly unlocking a gate that had previously been secured by the Texas National Guard, to allow dozens of “migrants’ to enter the country. The president’s open border policies are hugely successful, with more than 2 million Welcome Wagon encounters so far this year, compared with 1.27 million for the same period last year.

You Can’t Give The FBI The Benefit Of The Doubt On Anything  Francis Menton

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-8-27-you-cant-give-the-fbi-the-benefit-of-the-doubt-on-anything

The FBI — They’re the nation’s premier law enforcement agency. We rely on them to protect us from every sort of crook and bad guy, not to mention international terrorists. When they’re investigating something important, it’s understandable that they can’t disclose to the public what they’re up to. That would give away the game, and give the bad guys the chance to escape. So we need to trust them, to let them operate mostly in secrecy, and just give them the benefit of the doubt that they are doing the right thing.

Boy, has that narrative gotten blown to smithereens over the past few years. Starting with the Russia collusion hoax in 2016, it’s been one revelation after another of the thoroughly corrupted FBI meddling in domestic politics to advantage Democrats. They’re the new armed militant wing of the Democratic Party. As far as anyone can tell from the news, the people at the highest levels of the FBI today are completely obsessed with covering up for President Biden while using their law enforcement powers to go after former President Trump on the thinnest of pretexts. Today, nobody in their right mind should give the FBI the benefit of the doubt about anything. If you assume that everything they are doing is corrupt, you are highly likely to be right.

For this post, I’ll forego a review of the FBI’s role in the Russia hoax, and just consider some of the most recent developments.

Hunter Biden laptop

The faulty towers of higher education The college system is broken — can it be fixed?

https://spectatorworld.com/book-and-art/faulty-towers-education-will-bunch/

One of the few issues about which the American left and right agree is that higher education is, as Orwell would say, in a bad way. But even in that source of agreement lurk countless points of dispute, regarding the sources of dysfunction (corporate greed, grade inflation, libezoomers?) and possible solutions (ending tenure, forgiving debt, creating safe spaces?).

In After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics — and How to Fix It, Will Bunch, a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, argues that the cause of the higher-education crisis is conceptual: we see higher education as a personal privilege rather than a public good, something to be earned rather than a right that is owed. Bunch sees a straight line connecting the increase in college tuition and student debt to America’s growing social, cultural and political divisions.

To make his case, Bunch interviews people from various demographics (almost all from his home state of Pennsylvania) as illustrations of the different ways higher education — or its lack — affects everyday Americans. He also provides a history of American higher education from the end of World War Two to the present day. This history begins with the idealism of the G.I. Bill and President Truman’s Commission on Higher Education in the 1940s, both of which expressed optimism about the role of college in strengthening American democracy. But in the 1960s, students realized the flaws in this democracy — the ways that America fell short of its ideals — and pro- tested accordingly.

Europe’s Twilight: Christianity Declines, Islam Rises by Giulio Meotti

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18786/europe-christianity-islam

Comparing only the weekly frequency of Friday prayers in the mosque and Sunday Mass in the church, the future is clear: 65% of practicing Catholics are over 50 years old. By contrast, 73% of practicing Muslims are under the age of 50.

In an essay on L’Incorrect Frédéric Saint Clair, political scientist and analyst, explains that “the milestone of 10,000 mosques, at the current rate, will be reached around 2100”. Will we have 10,000 full mosques and 10,000 practically empty churches?

“[A] mosque is erected every fortnight in France, while a Christian building is being destroyed at the same rate.” — Edouard de Lamaze, president of the Observatory of Religious Heritage in Paris; Catholic News Agency, May 4, 2021.

“During my first trips to the Middle East, in the early 1980s, I did not see veiled women and gradually the veil spread everywhere. It is the sign of the re-Islamization of Muslim societies and, in this sense, it takes on a political and geopolitical dimension. It is part of a conquest strategy. France is in a state of self-dhimmitude…. a legal and political status applicable to non-Muslim citizens in a state governed by Islam according to a prescription of the Koran (9:29). [Dhimmis] do not enjoy equal citizenship with the ‘true believers,’ who are Muslims.” — Annie Laurent, essayist and scholar author of several books on Islam, Boulevard Voltaire, May 19, 2022.

“…France, due to a colonial complex and a sense of guilt, anticipates a legal and political situation that is not (yet) imposed on it but which could be a day in which Islam it will be a majority and therefore able to govern our country…. [T]he situation is really worrying. Before it becomes dramatic, it is urgent to put an end to the concessions we are multiplying to Islamism by hiding behind our values. Because by doing so we erase our own civilization”. — Annie Laurent, Boulevard Voltaire, May 19, 2022.

Christianity in Germany “seems stable, but in reality it is on the verge of collapse. Pastors and bishops, but also many actively involved lay people, see landscapes in bloom where in reality there is nothing but the desert “. — Markus Günther, essayist, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, December 29, 2014.

“Muslims, the winners of demographic change,” headlined Die Welt. “US researchers predict that for the first time in history there will be more Muslims than Christians. Societies change. Even Germany’s”.

In Trier, Germany, where Karl Marx was born, the diocese announced an unprecedented cut in the number of parishes which, in the next few years, will be reduced from 900 to 35.

L’Echo, the main Belgian economic newspaper, says: “Brussels was at the forefront of secularization before confronting an active Muslim minority. The first religion in Brussels today is Islam”…. Belgian anthropologist Olivier Servais confirmed a Muslim presence in Brussels at 33.5 percent, predicting a majority in 2030.

French writer André Malraux said it: “A civilization is everything that gathers around a religion”. And when one religion declines, another takes its place.

Sarcelles, Saint-Denis, Mulhouse, Nantes, Chambéry, Strasbourg, La Rochelle… The impressive images of stadiums full of Muslim faithful, who arrived from all over France for the feast of Eid Al Kabir, seventy days after the end of Ramadan. In Saint-Denis, the city where the kings of France rest; in Nantes, the city of the Dukes of Brittany; in Strasbourg, the city of the cathedral and seat of the European Parliament, in Mulhouse, in the heart of Alsace.

Retired FBI boss disassembles Trump search warrant: Feds ‘going to regret this’ Retired Assistant Director Kevin Brock says FBI didn’t exhaust other means or appear to have established probable cause for search.

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/all-things-trump/fbis-former-intel-chief-raid-trump-home-i-think-they-are-going

The FBI’s former intelligence chief declared Friday the agency should not have criminalized the records dispute between Donald Trump and the National Archives and that the bureau appears to have failed to meet the probable cause standard for the invasive search of the former president’s Florida estate.

“I think they’re going to regret this,” retired Assistant Director Kevin Brock told the “Just the News, Not Noise” television show after reviewing a heavily redacted affidavit the FBI used to persuade a judge to allow the Aug. 8 search at Mar-a-Lago.

Brock, ordinarily an ardent defender of his former agency, has raised concerns for several days that the bureau did not exhaust other means to resolve the dispute over presidential and alleged classified records Trump kept. He said he did not believe the FBI adequately considered the possibility that Trump had wide latitude to declassify records and declare them personal.

He said Friday his concerns were only heightened by the court-ordered release of the search warrant affidavit, which he noted was still heavily redacted.

“I will caveat all of this by saying we can only see what we can see, but the first thing that jumped out to me is that the probable cause statement focuses on the nature of the documents, and where they are,” said Brock, a respected three-decade agent who rose to become the bureau’s first intelligence chief under Director Robert Mueller. “But it doesn’t, at least in the unredacted portion, address the main element of the criminal federal statutes that they cite.

The Success Sequence — An Alternative To Radical School Indoctrination Steven Mosley

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/08/26/the-success-sequence-an-alternative-to-radical-school-indoctrination/

Do you know what’s being taught in the sex education program at your child’s school? It’s unlikely that it’s “The Success Sequence.” And that’s unfortunate – because it should be.

In 2019, I ran for school board in Fairfax County, Virginia – one of the nation’s most infamous battlegrounds when it comes to woke public education. I ran on a platform of school choice, listening to parents and reforming the school’s sex ed program to align with community values. Key to my platform was promoting The Success Sequence.

I like to call the Success Sequence the greatest poverty-breaking tool known to man. Unlike most government programs that might cost thousands – if not millions – of dollars per school district to implement with sketchy results, the Success Sequence costs nothing but perseverance and self-discipline.

It teaches that the best way to move up from poverty to the middle class and beyond is to do the following things in sequential order:

Graduate from high school.
Get a full-time job. 
Get married before having kids.

According to an American Enterprise Institute study, “97% of Millennials who follow what has been called the ‘success sequence’ are not poor by the time they reach their prime young adult years.” This is in comparison to over half of the poor young adults who were found to have not followed the sequence. And it is abundantly clear that not following The Success Sequence is even more disastrous for those in poor or black and Hispanic communities.

Federal Court Blocks Biden Admin from Forcing Doctors to Perform Gender Transitions By Caroline Downey

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/federal-court-blocks-biden-admin-from-forcing-doctors-to-perform-gender-transitions/

A federal appeals court blocked a Biden administration plan Friday that would coerce doctors to perform gender-transition medical procedures and abortions that violate their conscience or medical judgment.

The plaintiffs, a religious hospital and group of over 20,000 health-care professionals, launched the lawsuit against the Department of Health and Human Services in August 2016 after the federal government mandated that most health-care providers perform and provide insurance coverage for such procedures.

The district court had determined that HHS could not interpret or enforce Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, which prohibits health-care programs that receive federal funds from discriminating against patients on the basis of sex, to compel Franciscan Alliance to insure gender-reassignment surgeries or abortions, according to the court filing. In May 2016, HHS expanded Section 1557’s definition of sex discrimination to include discrimination on the basis of “termination of pregnancy” and “gender identity.” Secretary of HHS Xavier Becerra appealed the district court’s ruling.

While Becerra’s appeal was pending, the Biden administration issued a “Notice and Guidance on Gender Affirming Care,” doubling down on its reasoning, which Judge Don Willett found on Friday to be flawed, that Obamacare mandates that hospitals perform gender-reassignment surgeries and abortions.

On Friday, circuit judges Jennifer Walker Elrod, Willett, and Kurt Engelhardt affirmed the decision of the district court that granted Franciscan Alliance a permanent injunction, barring the HHS from forcing it to provide gender-reassignment surgeries or abortions against its religious beliefs.

Earlier this month, Luke Goodrich, attorney with the Becket Fund who has been working on the case since the Obama-era rule was first issued, said in a call with reporters that if the plaintiffs had lost, the Biden administration would have declared “open season” on religious hospitals that object to gender transitions.