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June 2023

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The Trump Distraction  A realignment upon MAGA principles is possible if we can convert it into a concrete agenda that thousands of candidates from the local to the national level articulate and fully intend to carry out. By Edward Ring

By on June 28th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/06/27/the-trump-distraction/

Whether owing to his actual words and actions, or due to the endless, baseless assaults of the deep state and corporate media, or some combination of all of these things, there are millions of Americans for whom Donald Trump now has no credibility. Beyond the damage done to Trump’s personal brand and political future, this reality portends dire consequences for the nation. It has enabled the special interests who oppose the policies Trump champions to fatally stigmatize them by associating them with the man.

It’s a dirty trick, but politics is a dirty business. Every political sentiment at odds with the special interests that run the country is labeled “Trumpism,” and hence becomes toxic.

The Globalist Game of Distraction

This game of distraction is bigger than Trump. Americans are beginning to realize that they’ve been betrayed by their elites. The globalist agenda of open borders, unfettered movement of capital, rejection of traditional values, rejection of meritocracy, deliberate overreaction to “climate change,” and heedless accumulation of debt to fund the development of foreign economies—including the Chinese military—has been accepted and promoted by virtually every major institution in America: unions, corporations, academia, K-12 public education, the media and entertainment industry, Democrats, and even a majority of Republican politicians. They profit by advancing this agenda, and in so doing elevate the cost-of-living for all Americans while at the same time depriving them of good jobs.

When Trump entered politics in 2015, he exposed and rejected this agenda in its entirety. Within a few years, tens of millions of Americans who hadn’t considered these issues as part of a connected whole, if they’d even considered them at all, were awakened and voting for a politician who was committed to dismantling the entire globalist project.

Trump’s continued relevance promises to blur even further the conventional dividing lines in American politics. What is the significance of Left vs. Right, when communists and corporations in 21st-century America are working together to advance big government globalism? How do the old distinctions apply when they both support an authoritarian, collectivist, and micromanaged society? There is ample evidence for this seeming paradox.

On most of the big issues of our time, including the rejection of traditional moral values, the centrality of “climate change” as a transformative economic and political agenda, and the need for affirmative action, racial redress, and open borders, communists and corporatists share a surprisingly congruent agenda. Their only point of divergence concerns private property, and even that may be illusory when considering the realistic prospect of publicly held corporations with activist directorates and activist shareholders with virtual ownership and control of the entire economy.

Trump blew the lid off this whole artificial dichotomy, and from coast to coast, Americans are still digesting the implications.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Hamas in Sweden by Nima Gholam Ali Pour

By on June 28th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19756/hamas-in-sweden

The European Palestinians Conference, held in Malmö, Sweden on May 27, had clear and strong connections with Hamas….

When the Swedish media wrote about the connection between the European Palestinians Conference and Hamas, however, MPs, one by one, began withdrawing from the conference — although, notably, without distancing themselves from Hamas.

As Hamas is classified as a terrorist organization within the European Union and therefore also within Sweden, it would of course be embarrassing for these gentlemen to admit that they were prepared to participate in a conference with connections to Hamas, and that they only refrained because of negative media attention.

The MP who did not withdraw… was Social Democratic Party MP Jamal El-Haj, who represents Malmö in parliament. El-Haj, who has Palestinian roots, has sat in parliament since 2016, and has a history of repulsive statements and activism concerning the Israel-Palestine issue.

El-Haj, who has Palestinian roots, has sat in Sweden’s parliament since 2016, and has a history of repulsive statements and activism concerning the Israel-Palestine issue. In 2018, El-Haj said in an interview, totally incorrectly, that Israel is an apartheid state that engages in ethnic cleansing. Despite this statement, the Social Democrats placed him on the parliament’s foreign affairs committee….

El-Haj has not made the situation easier for his party after this scandal. He actually defended his participation. In a social media post, he wrote: “This conference is about my mother’s right to return to her home in Palestine. There is nothing in the world that can make me give up such a dream”.

What was left out, of course, is that the Arabs who stayed in Israel in 1948, and now number nearly two million, are still in their homes, with Israeli citizenship and equal rights. What took place was that five Arab armies attacked Israel on the day of its birth — and lost. The Arabs who fled during the conflict were perceived by the people in Israel who had not fled as disloyal fifth columnists, who had declined to stay and protect the country alongside them. Therefore, after the war, those Arabs were not allowed back. These are now known as Palestinians.

Even after El-Haj’s participation in the Hamas conference, he has been allowed to remain on the foreign affairs committee, which shows just how high the Social Democrats’ tolerance level for extremists is.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

The Iran Deal That Must Not Be Named It’s so bad that the Bidenites don’t want it to be reviewed by the Senate. by Hugh Fitzgerald

By on June 28th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-iran-deal-that-must-not-be-named/

The bad, no, terrible, deal — no, sorry, terrible “understanding” – that the Bidenites are about to conclude with Iran is now clear. It is so bad that the Bidenites don’t want it to be reviewed by the Senate, where even Democrats, such as the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Robert Menendez, and Richard Blumenthal, have expressed great reservations. The Bidenites think that by sleight of word, calling this agreement a mere “understanding” rather than an “agreement,” Joe Biden won’t have to submit it to the Senate for its approval. Robert Spencer wrote about this here, and more on this mini-deal, that gives Iran potentially tens of billions of dollars in exchange for the same kind of promises the Islamic Republic broke before, can be found here: “Biden admin. won’t acknowledge Iran deal explicitly to skirt Congress – analysis,” by Lahav Harkov, Jerusalem Post, June 18, 2023:

In the Harry Potter books, characters call the villain “He Who Must Not Be Named,” for fear that saying “Voldemort” will conjure up the evil villain.

The Biden administration won’t say “Iran Deal,” apparently because it fears Congress. It is negotiating “the deal that must not be named.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Soros Succession The family drama behind the $25 billion leftist empire. by Daniel Greenfield

By on June 28th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-soros-succession/

Millions of people watched the series finale of Succession, a show based on the Murdoch family succession drama, complete with shots at Republicans, conservatives and FOX News.

The real life succession drama of the Soros family was however greeted with a few media puff pieces including at Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. The passage of the $25 billion Open Society network which topples governments, uproots societies and funds the leftist internationale to the next generation of the Soros clan garnered media press releases.

But there’s plenty of succession drama in the family of the leftist billionaire.

As George’s firstborn, Robert Soros might have been expected to inherit the throne. A trader like his father, Robert was temporarily given the reins to Soros Fund Management before having them taken back, and then given back again. Robert’s marriage broke up after he allegedly cheated on his wife, who had cancer, with a nude model. The divorce case dragged on, threatening his finances, and he left to start his own Soros Capital Management.

Robert’s younger brother Jonathan, who had shared the role of chief investor with him, seemed like the likely heir apparent. Jonathan, like his father and unlike his older brother, had a much more ambitious political vision, getting down and dirty with the leftist groups his father backed.

Jonathan even carried the middle name of Tidavar: George’s antisemitic father, who charged Jews trying to escape the Holocaust “whatever the market would bear” and who had dispatched his son to participate in the confiscation of Jewish property to “cheer the unhappy lad up”.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

The ‘Idiocracy’ Is Upon Us: Gen Z Can’t Read or Write Cursive By Rick Moran

By on June 28th, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2023/06/27/the-idiocracy-is-upon-us-gen-z-cant-read-or-write-cursive-n1706622

According to Pew Research, Gen Z consists of everyone born between 1997 and 2012. How “they” arrived at that time period is a mystery, and frankly, I don’t much care how or why they picked that date range to define a generation of snowflakes.

After learning this, I hate them even more: Generation Z never learned to write in cursive.

That’s a tragedy, since there is no more achingly beautiful form of the English language than a love letter written in what we used to call “longhand.” There is something so magnificently personal and private about writing how you feel about that special someone using whirls and loops in ink from an old-fashioned fountain pen.

Even more catastrophic is that Gen Z never learned to read cursive. And therein lies a tale of lost civilized behavior that may never be recovered.

Deseret News:

With the development and prominence of technology, cursive has become increasingly obsolete, but what impact will this have for the future?

According to The Atlantic, this means, “In the future, cursive will have to be taught to scholars the way Elizabethan secretary hand or paleography is today.” This directly impacts archival work. Many written documents from the 19th century and other early time periods are written in cursive. While it was once taken for granted that American students would know how to read cursive, now that cannot be the case.

Archival work largely depends on a reader’s ability to read hard-to-read texts in shorthand and/or cursive. Will this mean that universities will start having to offer college courses in history programs on how to read cursive? Only time will tell.

The villain in this tale of the evil destruction of a treasured way to communicate is Common Core.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Russia: No One Knows Anything: Steven Hayword

By on June 28th, 2023

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/06/russia-no-one-knows-anything.php

Screenwriter William Goldman’s famous line about Hollywood—”No one knows anything”—applies fully to the confusing scene in Russia right now. And let’s not go further without also bringing up for the millionth time Churchill’s description of Russia as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.”

There’s a sentence in one of the Wall Street Journal‘s many articles about the matter today that reminds of this: “The full story behind why Prigozhin launched—then stunningly halted—his revolt isn’t yet known.” One reason for this is the scarcity of western European or American reporters inside Russia who have developed good sources and understand the country. In this regard one must wonder whether it is a mere coincidence that the American reporter most fluent in Russian and with intimate knowledge of the country—Evan Gershkovich—was arrested and jailed several weeks ago. (If you have a long Cold War memory, re-run the Nick Danilov arrest in Moscow in 1986, just weeks before the climactic Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Iceland.) Joe Biden has been strangely quiet about the matter, and while there is one obvious explanation for that, it is also possible that our intelligence agencies didn’t have any hint it was going to happen, or did know it, and Biden’s team didn’t know just what, if anything, to do or say about it.

Lots of aspects of this “coup” or “insurrection” don’t make a lot of sense, unless . . . it was an exercise from the old Communist playbook going back to the Stalinist purges of the 1930s of setting up a “controlled opposition” as a means of smoking out dissidents and disloyal party members so they could be eliminated before a threat grew. And even legitimate protest groups, like Solidarity in Poland in the early 1980s or Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, were always quickly infiltrated (kind of like the FBI and the Proud Boys, Weather Underground, etc), and divided, disrupted, or rolled up.

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MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Senate Democrats Take One More Step Toward Socialized Medicine Sally C. Pipes

By on June 28th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/06/28/senate-democrats-take-one-more-step-toward-socialized-medicine/

It’s been less than a year since Democrats enacted the Inflation Reduction Act, which gives Medicare the power to set the prices of certain medicines. 

Those price controls have yet to go into effect. But Democrats already want more. They’ve introduced new legislation that would amp up those price controls — and even permit the government to refuse to cover drugs in order to drive a harder bargain with pharmaceutical companies.

As for the patients who would benefit from those drugs — or may even need them to stay alive? They may end up being collateral damage.

The Democrats’ new price control gambit is the SMART Prices Act, introduced by Sens. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., Peter Welch, D-Vt., and 23 of their colleagues. They say their bill would “build on” the IRA. 

That law, which President Biden signed last August, subjects 10 medicines to price controls under Medicare in January 2026. The government will set the prices for 15 more in 2027, another 15 in 2028, and 20 more per year in 2029 and beyond.

The SMART Prices Act would take things even further. It would empower Medicare to set prices for 20 drugs in 2026, instead of the current 10 under the IRA. In 2027, that number would jump to 40 — many more than the IRA stipulated.

The new bill would also subject medicines to price controls five years after approval by the Food and Drug Administration. That’s up to eight years quicker than under the IRA and significantly sooner than when generic or biosimilar competitors can enter the market.  

This provision would gut the generics industry. Generic firms face substantial upfront costs. They must create medicines that are bioequivalent to the innovative branded drugs they’re copying. And they have to build facilities in which to manufacture them. 

They recapture those investments by underpricing their wares relative to branded drugs and capturing a small margin on each sale. Patients, of course, benefit from those lower prices. 

But if Washington sets a rock-bottom price on a brand-name drug, there will be no incentive for a generics manufacturer to enter the market.

That’s problematic for several reasons. For starters, the government’s mandated price may not be as low as a competitive market could generate. So patients may end up paying more than they should. 

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