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September 2023

Democracy and the Crisis of Authority by Amir Taheri

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19940/france-democracy-crisis-authority

Marseille, France’s second-largest city and biggest port, is depicted as a European version of Chicago in the Prohibition times with gang warfare, shootings, protest strikes by police and tension among “communities” routine features of daily life.

The usually tame French media describe the situation as a “challenge to law and order”… President Emmanuel Macron goes further by warning about a “loss of authority” that he intends to correct by as yet unknown measures.

Loss of authority isn’t limited to Marseille gangs engaged in war over a bigger share of the drug market… Authority is also under constant challenge in Paris itself, where one could see numerous shop windows shattered by protesters in the recent riots against a two-year increase in the legal minimum retirement age. Even once sleepy cities such as Nîmes and Limoges have been affected by “loss of authority”.

However, Macron’s first moves and the ideas his entourage are circulating look more like dancing around the issue rather than addressing its root causes.

Where does authority come from?

The classical answer is that it comes from the two key tools of persuasion and coercion that a properly constituted government has for imposing its decisions. Beyond that, however, one may argue that authority emanates from continuity of rules and mores, the accumulation of a cultural, including religious, heritage that transcends here-and-now considerations.

Macron tries to address that problem by talking of “duties” as opposed to “rights”, something that contradicts the core values of the French Revolution. In the French Revolution’s worldview, citizens, regardless of whether they do their duties or not, have inalienable rights. In Macron’s redefinition, a citizen’s rights may look like rewards for duties performed.

But who sets those rights and duties?

Can one talk of duties in the service of an autocratic regime that one hasn’t chosen?

Oliver Anthony and the woke hatred for the working class Anthony’s genius has been to expose the rank classism of the Dems and their hangers-on.Brendan O’Neill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/09/02/oliver-anthony-and-the-woke-hatred-for-the-working-class/

The thing I love most about Oliver Anthony, aside from that apocalyptic timbre in his country singing, is that he’s forced the elite to unmask itself. We live under elites-in-denial. ‘We’re not the establishment!’, cry the movers and shakers of the upper middle-classes, even as they force your kids to genuflect to gender ideology, screw up economic growth with their climate-change hysteria, and dictate with Caesar-like conviction what is and isn’t sayable in the modern town square of social media. And yet in their foaming response to Mr Anthony, they’ve told on themselves. They’ve revealed that they know perfectly well who this red-bearded warbler from Farmville, Virginia is singing about in his rebellious ballads against The Man: it’s them.

Anthony has become a viral sensation since his song ‘Rich Men North of Richmond’ hit the internet. His pained anthem – think Nashville with a dash of Nietzsche – is No1 in the US. He’s hob-nobbing with Joe Rogan. He’s fawned over by top Republicans (much to his irritation. ‘I. Don’t. Support. Either. Side’, is his wise take on America’s polarised politics.) And he’s generated miles of commentary as coastal elites who normally only encounter men in beards when a hip barista hands them their seven-dollar coffee try to work out why this fella from Farmville has hit a nerve.

In short, his protest song has done what protest songs are supposed to. It’s shaken shit up. It’s rattled our rulers. That’s the brilliant irony of someone like Billy Bragg writing in the Guardian of all places that Anthony’s song isn’t truly ‘blue collar’ and thus is not a proper protest song. Mr Bragg, that Anthony offends a cultural turncoat like you, the Eighties outsider turned bien pensant bore, and that he horrifies the plummy scribes of the Guardian who probably think Farmville is an iPhone game, is all the proof we need that this is a protest song, and a good one.

Anthony’s genius is that he has forced our elites-in-denial to do what elites must occasionally do: demonise dissent. Just as old establishments bristled at Elvis’s sexy hips or the Sex Pistols’ anarchical antics or Sinéad O’Connor’s blasphemies against Rome, so the new establishment loses sleep over Anthony’s angry crooning on ‘bullshit pay’, high taxes and obese folk who live off welfare. He’s ‘punch[ing] down on the poor’, says Bragg in the Guardian – which is rich from a newspaper that spent the past seven years raging against the dumb gammon (ie, pigs) who voted for Brexit.

Anthony embodies country’s ‘nastiest impulses’, tuts Time magazine. His songs feel ‘parochial to the point of bigotry’, it says. The Independent’s culture reporter damns ‘Rich Men North of Richmond’ as ‘doggerel’. Worse, it’s ‘artless’, a ‘blunt-force hissy fit’. That’s what The Man has always said about the musical revolts against him – that they’re gauche, trashy, with a huge chip on their shoulders. Blue-rinse Christians said it about punk; now twentysomething woke graduates say it about Oliver Anthony.

One of the funniest sights of recent weeks has been liberal columnists poring over Anthony’s lyrics and class-splaining why he’s not a Real Protest Singer. Listen to Woody Guthrie, not this, they plead, like those right-on whites in the 1990s who were aghast that some blacks seemed to prefer the nihilistic swagger of NWA to the righteous anti-racism of Public Enemy.

Moms for Liberty: ‘We Do Not Co-Parent With the Government’ Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich, the ‘joyful warriors’ who founded the group, discuss Covid shutdowns, teachers unions, transgenderism and the SPLC’s smear. By Tunku Varadarajan

https://www.wsj.com/articles/we-do-not-co-parent-with-the-government-justice-descovich-education-rights-d9609fc6?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Tina Descovich found herself surrounded by “Muslim dads.” The scene was a school-board meeting late last year in Dearborn, Mich. Local parents were angry about sex-themed books at the school library, which they regarded as “pornography.”

After chatting with Ms. Descovich for a few minutes, a Dearborn dad realized she was a founder of Moms for Liberty, a nonprofit parents’ rights group that came into being on Jan. 1, 2021. He shook his head and told her she didn’t “seem like a racist at all.”

“That’s because I’m not,” she replied.

With its dogged focus on school reform, hostility to teachers unions and opposition to Covid shutdowns and mandates, the group is hated on the left and typecast as far-right—or worse—by much of the media. I speak with Ms. Descovich, a 49-year-old mother of five, at Moms for Liberty’s headquarters here, between Miami and Jacksonville. Seated with her is Tiffany Justice, 44, the group’s co-founder and a mother of four. The modest office has no external signage to identify its occupants. Both women have received such a deluge of threats—by email, voicemail and even handwritten letters—that there’s a deputy at the Brevard County Sheriff’s Office whose main job is to review each one. “Someone calling himself Satan writes to me every week,” Ms. Descovich says wryly. “He lives in Denver.”

A more influential antagonist is the Southern Poverty Law Center. The SPLC, founded in 1971, has a storied history of fighting the Ku Klux Klan via civil lawsuits and cooperation with law enforcement. The media uncritically describe it as a civil-rights group, even though in recent decades its has shifted its focus to smearing conservative organizations as hate groups.

OPEN THE BOOKS- THIS WEEK

In 2023 we are on pace to complete over 600 live television and radio interviews.

Here’s just a sample of how hard we are working to defend YOU, the hard-working taxpayer from government waste, fraud, corruption and taxpayer abuse:

NEO-GENDER INVESTIGATION: We launched our investigation into California Governor Gavin Newsom spending millions and encouraging K-12 students to Invent Their Own Gender!
CONGRESSIONAL OVERSIGHT CITATION: U.S. Senator Joni Ernst cited our oversight of the administrative state in her Make ‘Em Squeal Award — two-thirds of federal workers are literally phoning it in working from home.
NIH FACT-CHECKING: We contributed context to a NewsGuard fact-check on third-party royalties paid to Dr. Fauci and 2,400 other scientists at the National Institutes of Health. 
NATIONAL INTERVIEWS ACROSS THE COUNTRY: Our auditors held public officials accountable in live interviews on local broadcast news: FOX17-Nashville, TN; CBS-Austin, TX; Good Day Maine-Portland, ME; NBC-Las Vegas, NV; and FOX45-Baltimore, MD.
BREAKING NASHVILLE INVESTIGATION: In Nashville, our deputy policy director Rachel O’Brien broke the story of the city’s homeless division violating audit standards while spending tens of millions of dollars in the last two years. 
DIGGING INTO NATIONAL DEBT AND “CLUB FED”: We did live radio and television interviews on topics ranging from “The National Debt Is Our #1 National Security Threat” to “Club Fed” — the pay and perks of the federal bureaucracy.
EPA FUNDING + JOE MANCHIN: National journalists cited our findings on topics ranging from “How Big Is Joe Manchin’s Social Security Check?” to “Most EPA Employees Really Don’t Want To Show Back Up To The Office.”
COMING UP: And our auditors also contributed data and findings to journalists who will publish breaking investigations in next week’s national news.  

… Stay tuned! 

Florida Grandmas, Obstructionists, and Fence Shakers: America’s New Terrorists While the GOP sleeps, the Biden Department of Justice and federal judges in D.C. are systematically creating a new list of federal terrorism crimes. Julie Kelly

https://www.declassified.live/p/florida-grandmas-obstructionists

U.S District Court Judge Amit Mehta admitted he continues to “struggle with” what happened on January 6.

The Obama appointee made that public confession Wednesday afternoon during the sentencing hearing for Florida resident Connie Meggs. A D.C. jury convicted Meggs, 61, of numerous offenses including obstruction of an official proceeding and interfering with law enforcement related to her conduct on January 6. Meggs traveled to the nation’s capital with her husband, Kelly, a member of the Oath Keepers who is currently serving 12 years in prison for his role in January 6. (Mehta imposed that sentence in May.) She spent less than 20 minutes inside the Capitol, brought no weapon, and assaulted no one.

Nonetheless, Mehta condemned January 6 as a “crime committed against the citizens of the United States.” The four-hour disturbance “altered the social fabric in a way a normal crime does not,” Mehta claimed—which is true just not in the way he thinks. He further insisted the country would have been “far better off if no one had come to Washington” that day.

Despite Meggs losing everything after January 6—including both her parents—and spending 45 days in a Florida jail denied release after her February 2021 arrest followed by 2 1/2 years on home detention wearing an ankle monitor, Judge Mehta was not finished inflicting pain on the grandmother of three. Meggs, often uncontrollably sobbing, read a lengthy letter of apology to the court while angrily blaming her husband for choosing the Oath Keepers over their family. “I’m a good person,” Meggs told Mehta as her son and grandchildren broke down in the gallery. “Please don’t take their mother and grandmother away from them.”

But Mehta, while criticizing the Department of Justice for seeking an “overly punitive” prison sentence of up to ten years, will take Meggs away from her already broken family. Acknowledging her lack of criminal history, devotion to her family, and work in her community, Mehta still insisted she still must pay a further price for not understanding the ‘broader context” of her involvement in the events of January 6. “We don’t have January 6, it does not happen, without people like you,” Mehta scolded.

Not only did Mehta order Meggs to serve 15 months in prison, but he also agreed to DOJ’s request to add a “terror” enhancement to her sentence. “[Meggs] committed offenses that were calculated to influence or affect the conduct of the government by intimidation or coercion, or to retaliate against government conduct,” assistant U.S. Attorney Kathryn Rakoczy wrote in the government’s 62-page sentencing recommendation for Meggs and her co-defendants, which included a 72-year-old man from Ohio and an autistic young man also from Florida. “All five defendants were active participants in the Oath Keepers’ conspiracy to prevent, hinder, or delay the certification proceeding, and to use force, intimidation, or threats to prevent members of Congress from discharging their duties during that proceeding.”

Mehta concurred. Connie Meggs, a churchgoing, patriotic grandmother, is now branded a domestic terrorist.

Worst Soros DA Got Training in How to Discriminate Against “White Victims” “If a white victim continues to harm you, ask that they be transferred.” by Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/worst-soros-da-got-training-in-how-to-discriminate-against-white-victims/

All Soros DAs are terrible. Pamela Price is in a league of her own.

DA Price is as open as possible about wanting to give criminals a pass and constantly accuses her critics of racism. Everyone from the NAACP to the local Asian community have condemned her. When she refused to meet with the families of murder victims, Rep. Eric Swalwell of all people invited the mother of a murder victim to testify to Congress. The sheer awfulness of Price has alienated virtually everyone.

Highlights include the murder of a 2-year-old Asian boy in which DA Price said she was looking for ways to “support AAPI victims of violence in ways that open up broader possibilities for healing and non-carceral forms of accountability” and then “accused Asian-Americans complaining about her pro-crime policies of “mob violence” and claimed that “as a descendant of people in this country who were historically subjected to mob violence in the form of lynchings, racist profiling and wrongful convictions, I am particularly sensitive to the danger of this type of comment” and proposed a forum to “better educate” Asian Americans.

Then the NAACP took its turn.

In the letter, the local NAACP chapter said residents are “sick and tired” of the shootings, car-break-ins and highway shootouts and implored city leaders to declare a state of emergency.

“There is nothing compassionate or progressive about allowing criminal behavior to fester and rob Oakland residents of their basic rights to public safety,” the group wrote.

“It is not racist or unkind to want to be safe from crime. No one should live in fear in our city.”

The group, along with Bishop Bob Jackson of the Acts Full Gospel Church, said Price’s unwillingness to charge and prosecute serious criminals, as reported by The Post, has created “the proliferation of anti-police rhetoric and created a heyday for Oakland criminals.”

Heather McDonald discovered that Price was reacting to the criticism by hosting anti-racism training teaching her staff how to discriminate against “white victims”.

Iranian Regime’s Mullahs Pocketing Billions Thanks to the Biden Administration by Majid Rafizadeh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19944/iran-pocketing-billions

The Biden administration continues to ratchet up its appeasement policies with the ruling mullahs probably to revive the disastrous nuclear deal which would pave the way for the Islamist regime of Iran legally to have as many nuclear weapons as it likes; lift sanctions against the theocratic regime; strengthen the ruling mullahs with additional billions of dollars — for terrorism, nuclear weapons, the missiles to deliver them, “exporting the Revolution”, and suppressing their own people — and allow them to rejoin the global financial system and enhance their legitimacy on the global stage.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced last month that America “will continue to enforce all of our sanctions” and “will continue to push back on Iran’s destabilizing activities in the region and beyond.”

That just is not accurate. Sanctions are not being enforced: Iran’s oil export is booming and has surged above two million barrels a day. The ruling mullahs are now producing ever more oil and selling it at levels close to the pre-sanctions era to countries such as China, which desperately needs it, while the Biden administration has effectively cut off US oil exploration.

“Although we have some other incomes,” former President Hassan Rouhani previously acknowledged, “the only revenue that can keep the country going is the oil money.” – en.radiofarda.com, November 19, 2019.

Instead of enforcing sanctions, the Biden administration has been issuing waivers, making the sanctions appear to be simply cosmetic.

“At least $16 billion has now been made available to Iran without any congressional input—and more might be on the way. Another $6.7 billion is reportedly moving to Iran via the International Monetary Fund Special Drawing Rights… and reportedly … another $3 billion of regime assets frozen in Tokyo. India and China….” – Richard Goldberg, former White House security official, thedispatch.com, August 15, 2023.

The regime will most likely use the funds to further arm and assist Russia in its invasion of Ukraine; brutalize its own citizens; undermine US national security interests; fund its terrorist and militia groups across the Middle East and expand more deeply into Latin America.

Christopher F. Rufo: MSNBC’s War on Truth

https://christopherrufo.com/p/msnbcs-war-on-truth?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

The left-wing news network releases a deeply misleading documentary about the reforms at New College of Florida.

Earlier this week, MSNBC released a documentary about the reforms at New College of Florida titled The War on Woke. The film would more accurately be described as part of MSNBC’s ongoing war on truth. As a trustee of New College, I feel obligated to respond to three accusations in the film that are false and misleading.

First, MSNBC host Alex Wagner claims that New College has recruited a disproportionate number of student athletes, enticed them with generous scholarship offers, and, despite an all-out effort to build a new baseball team, “doesn’t have a baseball field for them to play on.” The intention of these claims is to discredit New College; it is also driven by the same spirit of resentment against men, athletes, and conservatives captured in a recent New York Times headline about the changes: “At College Targeted by DeSantis, Gender Studies Is Out, Jocks Are In.”

None of these charges holds merit. The proportion of student athletes at New College is in line with other liberal arts colleges. It is standard practice for athletic programs to use scholarships to recruit potential students. And the baseball field accusation is simply false: according to New College baseball coach Mariano Jimenez, the college has struck an agreement to use the fields at IMG Academy, a Division I-level athletic facility near the New College campus—a fact that Jimenez directly communicated to the MSNBC producers, who ignored it to advance their narrative.

Second, MSNBC would like viewers to believe that academic life at New College is in chaos. Amy Reid, the gender studies professor whose program is being terminated, complained that “it’s going to be hard for the college to continue without the dedication and expertise and investment of time and energy of our tenured faculty members.” New College parent Tracy Ferro claimed that the school had no academic advisor for marine biology and “not one class for marine bio that was being offered” for her daughter.

These accusations also don’t square with the facts. Reid wants viewers to believe that New College was previously an academic utopia, but during her 28 years as a faculty member, the college’s standings plummeted across all metrics, leaving it as the lowest-performing public university in Florida. Yes, nearly 40 faculty members have departed, but this is a positive development: administrators can now recruit new faculty better suited to restoring the school’s classical liberal arts mission.

Dems Favor Palestinians Over Israelis For First Time, Poll Shows Poll comes as progressive lawmakers have worked to shift the Democratic Party’s support away from Israel Alana Goodman (March 23)

https://freebeacon.com/latest-news/dems-favor-palestinians-over-israelis-for-first-time-poll-shows/

Democrats are for the first time more likely to favor the Palestinians over Israelis in the Middle East conflict, according to a new Gallup poll, reflecting the party leadership’s growing opposition to the Jewish state.

Forty-nine percent of Democrats now say they sympathize more with Palestinians, compared to 38 percent who side with Israelis—a staggering 11-point swing since just last year.

The poll comes as far-left, anti-Israel lawmakers have worked to shift the Democratic Party’s support away from Israel over the past several years.

High-profile “Squad” members, including Reps. Ilhan Omar (Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (Mich.), and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) have accused Israel of “apartheid” and called for cutting off military support to the Jewish state.

Omar’s claim that U.S. politicians only back Israel because of donations—”It’s all about the Benjamins baby,” she wrote on Twitter in 2019—was widely denounced as anti-Semitic and led to Republicans removing her from the House Foreign Affairs Committee earlier this year. In 2021, House Democrats voted to block funding to Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system under pressure from far-left lawmakers.

Israelophobia, newest form of the oldest hatred The distinction between hating Jews and hating Israel is bogus ; Melanie Phillips

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/israelophobia-newest-form-of-the?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Antisemitism is a rotten term for the “longest hatred” that targets the Jewish people. For a start, there is no such thing as “semitism” to be “anti”.

The word “antisemitism” was invented by a 19th-century Jew-hater, Wilhelm Marr, who wanted to invest this prejudice with the spurious characteristic of race in order to appeal to a society that increasingly defined itself in scientific terms.

Today, with Jew-hatred having reached unprecedented global levels, the inadequacies of “antisemitism” are becoming ever more manifest. Many wrongly believe that it’s just another form of racism. Few understand that it’s a uniquely paranoid, deranged and murderous mindset.

Because Judaism and the Jews are so poorly understood, few recognise that this unique people is victimised by a unique prejudice. And few acknowledge that the prejudice changes shape as societies change.

Used for the sake of convenience, “antisemitism” fosters further misunderstanding over the issue of Israel. People assume that prejudice against the Jewish people is against Jews as people. Few understand that Judaism isn’t a private confessional faith as the west understands religion to be.

They don’t realise that Jewish religious identity is rooted in the land of Israel, where the Jews were historically the only people for whom it was ever their national kingdom. So they fail to grasp that Israel is at the very heart of Judaism. Denouncing the right of the Jews to the land is to attack Judaism itself.

But because “antisemitism” is associated with bigotry against Jews as people — and specifically with genocidal Nazism — individuals bridle when it’s used to describe their hostility to the State of Israel.

In other words, demonising Jews and wishing they would disappear from the world may be beyond the pale, but demonising Israel and wishing it would disappear from the world is just fine.

In his new book Israelophobia, published next week, Jake Wallis Simons takes this false distinction apart. The Jew-hatred that is now at epidemic levels throughout the west focuses overwhelmingly on the Jewish homeland

Simons, the editor of Britain’s Jewish Chronicle for which I write, does an outstanding job detailing the astounding tsunami of falsehoods, distortions, double standards and vilification engulfing Israel. Although atrocities and human rights abuses are taking place all over the world, this obsessional campaign is directed only at Israel, the sole democracy in the Middle East.