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February 2024

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Joel Kotkin: Unhinged progressives are a gift to Trump The woke zealotry of the Biden administration is turning vast numbers of Americans into reluctant Trumpers.

By on February 16th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/02/11/unhinged-progressives-are-a-gift-to-trump/

In 1931, the slogan of the German Communist Party became: ‘After Hitler, our turn.’ This kind of wishful thinking is making a comeback in contemporary America. Prominent Democrats and the ‘progressive’ apparat of the Biden administration see the nomination of Donald Trump – their version of Hitler – as the best way to mobilise their shaky coalition and to keep hold of power.

Biden’s supporters believe Trump is so odious that the American people will accept anyone – even someone as obviously mediocre as Joe Biden – to keep him out of power. This worked back in 2020, when Trump’s bungling of Covid-19, his chaotic management style and his consistently vile – though clearly not fascist – persona allowed Biden to gain the White House.

This assumption also proved correct in the 2022 Midterms. Democrats bankrolled numerous unelectable Trumpistas in congressional and state races, a cynical gambit they are repeating again this year. This helped them dodge a potential wipeout at the polls. The seemingly inevitable nomination of Trump by the Republicans looks perfectly suited to a repeat performance in the 2024 presidential election.

Yet as the German Communists learned in 1933, sometimes getting what you want does not always work out so well. Biden might be heralded as the second coming of FDR in the mainstream press, but most Americans have clearly had enough of him. A recent poll puts him at a dismal 37 per cent. As things stand, he is now slated to lose to Trump, particularly in key swing states. Some surveys suggest Trump is even gaining among independents and is pulling some suburban professionals back into his camp. As former presidential candidate Andrew Yang puts it, Biden’s shaky performance could be about to deliver ‘Trump, the sequel’.

So why is Biden so unpopular? This is partly down to inflation – undoubtedly made worse by Biden’s economic agenda. But it is also due to his pandering to the so-called progressives on just about everything – from the border and climate change to LGBT issues. According to longtime Democratic analyst Ruy Teixeira, Biden seems incapable of shifting to where the voters are. For Democratic senator Joe Manchin, much of the problem stems from the fact that the president has surrounded himself with ‘far, far-left liberals’.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Tucker Carlson Is Wrong About Moscow David Harsanyi

By on February 16th, 2024

https://pjmedia.com/davidhasanyi/2024/02/16/tucker-carlson-is-wrong-about-moscow-n4926486

At the World Government Summit, Tucker Carlson told a gathering of world leaders that Moscow was “so much nicer than any city” in the United States. “It’s radicalizing for an American to go to Moscow,” Carlson went on. “I didn’t know that. I’ve learned it this week, to Singapore, to Tokyo, to Dubai and Abu Dhabi, because these cities, no matter how we’re told they’re run and on what principles they’re run, are wonderful places to live that don’t have rampant inflation.”

If you’re wealthy, I imagine, Moscow is pretty great. This is true of most European cities. When you’re an American tourist, you tend to stay in clean and beautiful city centers, eat at the best spots and wander around the most attractive areas of town. In Europe, you get to see onion domes that were built by serfs dotting the skyline. I’m sure it’s neat.

It is also true that if you’re an average person, Moscow is awful. The average Muscovite is most likely to live in some grim outlying apartment complex, many of which were built during the Soviet era. That’s if they’re lucky. Many Russians live in Novosibirsk, Ekaterinburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Omsk and Ufa. Russia’s per capita yearly GDP is around $13,000. In the United States, it is around $83,000. It’s around $46,000 in Mississippi, our poorest state. Most Russians are living in what most Americans would consider poverty.

There probably isn’t a single quantifiable economic measure in which Russia bests the United States. None of this is even to mention that Russia is an extraordinarily corrupt place, the price of which is embedded into virtually every business transaction. I’m not sure Americans appreciate how little graft they deal with in their everyday lives. Then again, Russia ranks in the vicinity of Uganda and Togo on the corruption indexes.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Verdict Against Mark Steyn Effectively Stifles Speech In America By Huck Davenport

By on February 16th, 2024

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/02/the_verdict_against_mark_steyn_effectively_stifles_speech_in_america.html

In 1925, John Scopes was put on trial for teaching evolution. He lost. It was called the trial of the century and captured the nation’s attention. For Americans, assaults on free speech are intolerable. Speech is the lifeblood of freedom. It is the hill we will die on because, instinctively, we know that without it, it would also mean death. At least, we used to know.

Last week, the 21st century’s trial of the century came to a similarly ignoble end, but nearly without coverage, without interest, without outrage. Polymath Mark Steyn, appearing pro se, lost a defamation suit (ironically) defending against Michael Mann when a DC jury ordered Steyn to pay damages of $1 but imposed staggering punitive damages of $1 million.

Some background: Michael Mann co-wrote a paper in 1999 using tree-ring data as a proxy for temperature (thicker rings, warmer temperatures) to show that over the last 1000 years, temperatures declined slightly until 1960 when they dramatically spiked up—the shape of what would infamously be called the “Hockey Stick.”

The IPCC featured Mann’s work prominently in their 2001 report. It catapulted Mann to stardom and ignited the radical climate-industrial-political complex. The resulting Green agenda has consumed trillions and turned everyone’s life upside down.

The problem was that hundreds of scientists were highly critical of Mann’s work. Stephen McIntyre, for one, an Oxford-educated PhD in mathematics, published several papers, one in the same journal that published Mann’s original paper, concluding Mann’s result “lacks statistically significance,” and worse, he showed that Mann’s data manipulation “is so strong that a hockey-stick … is nearly always generated from (trendless) red noise.”

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MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

The Zone of Interest 2023 A masterpiece from a TV commercial director. by Danusha V. Goska

By on February 16th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-zone-of-interest-2023/

Friend, please do something for me. Put this article aside and find the nearest theater showing The Zone of Interest. Walk into the theater knowing as little as possible about it. Then return to this article so we can exchange notes. I need to talk about this movie with others.

The Zone of Interest is going to generate a great deal of talk. There will be debates and podcasts. There will be university courses and peer-reviewed scholarly articles. There will be a backlash industry pooh-poohing every accolade the film receives. If you wait too long, your chance to have your own experience of the film may slip out of your hands. You may feel, “The Zone of Interest is its own industry. Seeing it would be too much like homework. I’d prefer the latest superhero movie.”

You may be thinking, “Another Holocaust film. They’re just are fishing for an Academy Award! Why can’t we have movies about other atrocities? And I don’t like watching people being tortured.”

First, there is no torture, and almost no violence, in this movie. I cry at movies and I didn’t cry while watching Zone. Days later, while merely thinking about it, I cried. I had nightmares. Even in my nightmares, there was no blood. There were merely well-groomed, clean people behaving in accord with their value system, their character, and their mental defenses. And we need Holocaust movies because the Holocaust was a big deal. And we can have movies about other atrocities, too, like Twelve Years a Slave and Killers of the Flower Moon.

Zone is universal and timeless, like W. H. Auden’s poem “Shield of Achilles,” which uses Jesus’ crucifixion and Achilles’ shield to discuss twentieth-century atrocity. Both Auden’s poem and Zone say as much about slavery or the Cambodian Killing Fields or the Gulag as films directly addressing those topics.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Taibbi: Same People That Cooked Intel Report Russia Interfered With Election Also Surveilled Trump Aides In 2016

By on February 16th, 2024

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2024/02/14/taibbi_same_people_that_cooked_intel_report_russia_interfered_with_election_also_surveilled_trump_aides_in_2016.html

Racket News editor Matt Taibbi on Wednesday told FOX News host Jesse Watters about a “broad political espionage campaign” involving the same people in the intelligence community that cooked the intel assessment that Russia interfered with the election.

JESSE WATTERS, FOX NEWS HOST: The point remains that the Obama-Biden White House, their CIA and FBI director launched an illegal preemptive war against democracy, got caught, and have been covering it up for eight years. Shellenberger and Taibbi also said redacted FOIA documents suggested that Biden has been conspiring against Donald Trump with the intelligence committee to prosecute the former president in federal court. Which would be an impeachable offense. Matt Taibbi is the Racket News editor-in-chief and “Griftopia” author. So this is great reporting. It’s hard to verify because we were told that this special counsel, Durham, was going to get to the bottom of it. Are you saying he missed this?

MATT TAIBBI, RACKET NEWS: We were told that the scope of the Durham investigation was limited to a few areas and that he wasn’t looking at this particular direction. The information that we have, the investigation that was conducted by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, what they found was a broad political espionage campaign and there were two main conclusions that are at the center of our reports.

One is that at least 26 Trump aides and associates were improperly and without predication placed under surveillance in election year of 2016. And the other one is that these same folks cooked the intelligence for the January 6, 2017 intelligence community assessment saying that Russia interfered, I’m sorry, conducted an influence campaign to help Donald Trump. It is a WMD-style story. They suppressed dissenting opinions and created a false narrative.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

U.N. Aid Chief Calls Hamas a ‘Political Movement,’ Denies That It Is a Terrorist Group By Jimmy Quinn

By on February 16th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/u-n-aid-chief-calls-hamas-a-political-movement-denies-that-it-is-a-terrorist-group/

During a television interview yesterday, the United Nations’ top humanitarian-aid official denied that Hamas is a terrorist organization. “I’ve worked with many, many, many different terrorist and insurgent groups. Hamas is not a terrorist group for us,” he said, opting to describe it as a “political movement” instead.

The official, Martin Griffiths, oversees the coordination of the U.N.’s humanitarian aid in his capacity as undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs. He made the comments during an interview on Sky News yesterday after an anchor asked him about the difficulties of negotiating with terrorist groups. Griffiths also said that it’s “very difficult to dislodge these groups without a negotiated solution which includes their aspirations.”

This sparked a controversy, with the Israeli government’s official social-media account calling the U.N. an “abomination.” Although the U.N. officially does not consider Hamas to be a terrorist organization, the U.S., the EU, and numerous other governments have designated it as such. Griffiths could have certainly referred to Hamas as a terrorist organization despite the perplexing lack of its official designation by the U.N.

He later tried to walk back his statement, referring to Hamas’s “acts of terror on 7 October” and writing that he merely meant to say that it is not on the U.N. Security Council’s list of terrorist organizations.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Biden Shields Palestinians in the U.S. From Deportation

By on February 16th, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/14/us/politics/biden-palestinians-deportation.html

The president, who is facing mounting criticism over U.S. support for Israel, used an authority that exempts people from deportation if their homeland is in crisis.

President Biden on Wednesday shielded thousands of Palestinians in the United States from deportation for the next 18 months, using an obscure immigration authority as he faces mounting criticism over U.S. support for Israel in the Gaza war.

About 6,000 Palestinians are eligible for the reprieve under a program called Deferred Enforced Departure, which allows immigrants whose homelands are in crisis to remain in the United States and work legally.

In a memo obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Biden said that “many civilians remain in danger” in Gaza after the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas.

“Therefore, I am directing the deferral of removal of certain Palestinians who are present in the United States,” he said.

The decision comes as Mr. Biden faces pressure over the war, particularly among Arab Americans who were once a reliable constituency for him. In recent weeks, pro-Palestinian groups have been demonstrating outside his campaign stops, chanting “Genocide Joe.”

While Mr. Biden’s criticism of the war has grown more forceful since the Oct. 7 attack, the United States has not signaled that it plans major policy changes such as putting conditions on billions of dollars in military aid to Israel.

Israel’s war against Hamas has killed more than 28,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s health ministry. Much of Gaza has been left in ruins as Israel bombards the territory in retaliation for the attacks on Oct. 7, when Hamas killed more than 1,200 people in Israel.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Don Of The ‘Biden Crime Family’-Will Biden be Convicted Before Trump?

By on February 16th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/02/16/the-don-of-the-biden-crime-family/

The evidence of President Joe Biden’s criminal activity continues to grow. As has often been said, the wheels of justice grind slowly, but we’d like to see them get in gear in time for voters to know that their president is a crook.

During testimony earlier this week before the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, former Hunter Biden associate Tony Bobulinski said “it is clear to me that Joe Biden was ‘the Brand’ being sold by the Biden family.”

“The Biden family business was Joe Biden, period.”

Simply put, Bobulinski said Joe has been the recognizable name that the Bidens sold to amass wealth that few Americans can conceive of.

“From China to Ukraine, the Biden crime family sold access to Joe Biden,” Bobulinksi said during an impeachment inquiry deposition.

He further revealed that “the Chinese Communist Party through its surrogate, China Energy Company Limited,” a business syndicate, infiltrated and compromised Joe Biden and the Obama-Biden White House.

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MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Liz Peek: Pfizer Super Bowl ad proves just how damaging Biden’s COVID response has been for America

By on February 16th, 2024

https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/4470475-pfizer-super-bowl-ad-proves-just-how-damaging-bidens-covid-response-has-been-for-america/

Why did Pfizer spend millions of dollars on a Super Bowl ad? And why are they paying Travis Kelce $20 million to act as their vaccine spokesperson?  

Because their reputation — and the reputation of America’s medical authorities — needs serious rehabilitation. A Gallup survey conducted last fall found only 18 percent of Americans have a very or somewhat positive view of the pharmaceutical industry, down from 25 percent in 2022. That’s a worse rating than any other industry group but retail.   

This is one of the most damaging leftovers of the Biden presidency.   

Joe Biden’s authoritarian approach to managing the COVID-19 outbreak, forcing all workplaces of 100 or more people to require the vaccine or regularly test their employees and the censorship of opposing views on vaccine side effects and on treatments, not only trampled on Americans’ rights — it may have led to preventable deaths.  

Nothing could have highlighted Americans’ distrust of the pharmaceutical industry more starkly than the Pfizer ad, which aimed to rebuild not only its brand but general attitudes toward medicine. It’s hard to imagine a world where a leading drug-maker feels the need to remind people that science has led to life-saving breakthroughs like the invention of penicillin and treatments for cancer, yet here we are. 

The ad, wedged between promotions for beer and donuts and other more conventional fare, combined a jazzy upbeat tune with pictures of the founders of Pfizer, seeming to place them in the same scientific galaxy as Sir Isaac Newton and Copernicus, who came alive in their portraits long enough to join in the fun. It was memorable, mainly because it seemed so out of place. 

Pfizer’s problem is, first, that sales of its COVID-19 vaccines and therapies have cratered as the disease has faded. But more important, Pfizer is dealing with backlash against Biden’s heavy-handed dictates about vaccines.  

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Strange Disconnect Between Israel and Ukraine Victor Davis Hanson

By on February 15th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/02/15/the-strange-disconnect-between-israel-and-ukraine/

Most of Europe, the U.S., and the West understandably supported arming Ukraine to repel Vladimir Putin’s Russian aggression. By contrast, such support for democratic Israel was strangely mixed.

The Ukrainian and Israeli wars are similar and yet also different conflicts—but in more ways than we can imagine.

Ukraine was invaded by a huge Russian state, with a population three-and-a-half times greater, a gross national product ten times larger, and an area thirty times its size.

Hamas, by contrast, is a terrorist clique of about 50,000-70,000 gunmen and terrorist kingpins who run Gaza. It is dwarfed by the Israeli population (20 times larger), economy (27 times greater), and area (60 times larger).

Both Russia and Hamas started the wars. Russia was convinced it would easily crush the smaller neighbor. Hamas hoped to spark a pan-Islamic jihad against the Jewish state.

Most of Europe, the United States, and the West understandably supported arming Ukraine to repel Vladimir Putin’s Russian aggression.

By contrast, such support for democratic Israel was strangely mixed.

In many elite, political, academic, and media circles, Israel is criticized for its massive retaliation after October 7, 2023.

The Western attitude toward the two wars grows even more inconsistent, if not incoherent.

There are constant calls for Israel to be “proportionate” in Gaza following the massacres of nearly 1,200 Jews, the vast majority civilians.

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