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March 2024

The Art World’s Enfant Terrible Runs for Senate Stefan Simchowitz is a provocateur. ‘Why am I running as a Republican? Because I’ve seen up close the hypocrisy of the left and it’s unfathomable.’ By Suzy Weiss

https://www.thefp.com/p/stefan-simchowitz-senate

PASADENA, CA — Stefan Simchowitz, 53, is no one’s idea of a viable candidate, including his own. 

“I have no illusion that I can win or that I stand a chance to win, which is also quite liberating, because I’m not running to win a campaign. I have no prayer,” he tells me. 

Simchowitz, who is running for Senate as a Republican in a seat that has been held by a Democrat for 32 years, is perched at the kitchen island in one of his four homes, an updated Victorian farmhouse on an acre in Pasadena that he’s been building into an exhibition space and artist residency for the past year or so. He calls it Red Barns. 

In a tan Altadena Hardware shirt and one of his signature bucket hats, the contemporary art dealer once dubbed “the Art World’s Patron Satan” offers me sparkling water and a bite of his blueberry muffin. Unlike the Democrats vying for Dianne Feinstein’s open seat—Representatives Katie Porter, who has a $12 million war chest and Adam Schiff ($32 million)—and the Republican front-runner, former L.A. Dodger Steve Garvey, Simchowitz doesn’t seem concerned with shaking hands, kissing babies, or winning votes.

“Sometimes if you know you’re going to lose you can only win,” he says. Stefan sees this campaign as a “vehicle to sell his ideas.” In other words: a performance art project of sorts. How else to make sense of this Democrat-turned-Republican, with no political experience, throwing his hat into the ring? 

This outsider approach has served him well as the enfant terrible of the art world, where he’s circumvented the closed-circuit system of MFA programs, critics, museums, galleries, auction houses, and curators that decide whether an artist is marketable, and for how much. Simchowitz came up by finding starving artists—literally on the brink of starvation, he claims—on Facebook and Instagram, then paying for their studios, materials, and sometimes entire bodies of work outright, before flipping them to buyers, or holding them in his extensive private collection. 

His clientele—which historically includes tech founders who exited their companies and started itching for a Josef Albers; newly flush poker players; and A-list entertainers—trust him implicitly. “He sees opportunities and then he puts a spotlight on them,” Brian Butler, a longtime gallerist in L.A., tells me. “He’s got a tenacity about him.” (Butler himself is voting for Katie Porter, but says he’d vote for Simchowitz “if I was a Republican.”) Though Butler calls Simchowitz a “super mensch,” he conceded he has a “gruff exterior.” 

While his bluntness and allergy to pretension has earned him fans, the management class of the art world scorns him with equal passion. Many collectors, dealers, and artists won’t work with Simchowitz, or anyone who does, arguing that he exploits struggling artists by buying up all their work, then artificially pumping and dumping it. Another L.A. gallerist once called him a “sociopath” and compared him to Charles Manson before walking it back. 

Trump is still on the ballot. Supreme Court ensures American democracy is the winner. The Supreme Court opinion may be one of the most significant in its history, not because of what it did but what it would not allow to be done. Jonathan Turley

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2024/03/05/supreme-court-trump-ballot-unanimous-ruling-election/72843559007/

“Nothing in the Constitution requires that we endure such chaos.” Those words from the Supreme Court in its Trump v. Anderson ruling on Monday put an end to the effort of Democratic secretaries of state to engage in ballot cleansing by removing former President Donald Trump from the 2024 election.

The court’s decision was one of the most important and impactful moments in its history.

During the first Trump impeachment in 2019, I cautioned Democrats not to toss aside constitutional standards out of their hatred for the president. I quoted from the play “A Man For All Seasons,” when Sir Thomas More is told by his son-in-law that he would “cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?” More responded, “And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ‘round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?”

As More described England, the United States also is “planted thick with laws, from coast to coast.” The nation’s highest court on Monday decided to leave them standing.

After months of activists and experts calling for the court to allow ballot cleansing by individual states, the justices refused. Figures like Harvard professor Laurence Tribe had insisted that the legal theory allowing Trump’s removal from ballots was “unassailable” and rejected opposing positions as “absurd.”

Many news outlets posted the analysis of former federal court Judge J. Michael Luttig, who also called the theory “unassailable” and denounced the arguments against disqualification as “revealing, fatuous, and politically and constitutionally cynical.” He predicted that the court would simply affirm the Colorado Supreme Court.

Democratic members of Congress further pushed the narrative that only judicial activists and MAGA justices would oppose disqualification. Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., declared: “This is their opportunity to behave like real Supreme Court justices.”

Think what you want about Trump.But even liberal justices agree Trump should stay on ballot. Progressives still melted down.

We Are the Victims and Everything We Do is Justified Breaking the “Self-Reinforcing Victim/Villain” cycle. by Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/we-are-the-victims-and-everything-we-do-is-justified/

At the heart of everything from the debate over the Gaza War to DEI to toxic interpersonal relationships is a disastrous loop known as the “self-reinforcing victim/villain” cycle.

The self-reinforcing victim/villain cycle is a deceptively simple and incredibly destructive paradigm for any kind of relationship, national, communal or personal, in which one party constantly attacks the other while claiming that it is the victim fighting against oppression.

The paradigm is guided by the idea that there is a permanently fixed victim and villain, that the victim is constantly suffering attacks from the villain and that anything the victim does is justified because he or she has no agency except to resist the assaults of the villain.

While some Hamas supporters have lied or tried to cover up the atrocities of Oct 7, Ghazi Hammad, a Hamas official, initially denied them, but then burst out with, “the existence of Israel is what causes all that pain, blood, and tears. It is Israel, not us. We are the victims of the occupation. Period. Therefore, nobody should blame us for the things we do. On October 7, October 10, October 1,000,000 – everything we do is justified.”

“We are the victims”, “nobody should blame us” and “everything we do is justified” perfectly capture the cruel workings of the cycle. So many westerners have sided with Hamas because they accept, incorporate and make use of the same cycle in their own politics and lives.

The very same arguments adapted from Marxism and therapy culture play out routinely in “whiteness” and “colonialist” discourse in America, Europe and other free world nations.

The “self-reinforcing victim/villain” cycle dispenses with arguments, evidence or any reasoned assessments of rights. These may occasionally be thrown in when convenient, but make no real difference because the central premise of the cycle is the lack of any objective standard that both sides have to meet. International law, racial tolerance, peace treaties or negotiations are invoked in a purely one-sided fashion. It is understood that the officially designated victim never has to abide by international law, to stop hating or to sincerely agree to stop the violence.

The Illusion of a Palestinian ‘Demilitarized’ State by Bassam Tawil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20460/demilitarized-palestinian-state

[A]ny commitment to a demilitarized state by the Palestinian leadership would be legally worthless.

“Any treaty is void if, at the time it was entered into, it conflicts with a ‘peremptory’ rule of general international law (jus cogens) – a rule accepted and recognized by the international community of states as one from which ‘no derogation is permitted.’ Because the right of sovereign States to maintain military forces essential to ‘self-defense’ is such a peremptory rule, Palestine, depending upon its particular form of authority, could be entirely within its right to abrogate any pre-independence agreement that had compelled its demilitarization.” [Italics in original.] — Louis René Beres, professor emeritus at Purdue University, and an expert in international law and political science, jurist.org, December 23, 2023.

“Therein lies the jurisprudential core of the Palestinian demilitarization problem: International law would not necessarily require Palestinian compliance with any pre-state agreements concerning the use of armed force. From the standpoint of such authoritative law, enforcing demilitarization upon a sovereign state of Palestine would be sorely problematic.” [Italics in original.] — Louis René Beres, jurist.org, December 23, 2023

“Unhidden, both the Arab world and Iran still have only a ‘One-State Solution’ for the ‘Israel Problem.’ It is a ‘solution’ that eliminates Israel altogether, a physical solution, a ‘Final Solution.’ Even today, official Arab maps of ‘Palestine’ (PNA and Hamas) show the prospective Arab State comprising all of the West Bank (Judea/Samaria), all of Gaza and all of Israel. They knowingly exclude any references to a Jewish population and list ‘holy sites’ of Christians and Muslims only.” — Louis René Beres, jurist.org, December 23, 2023

No one can stop a future Palestinian state from becoming a lawless and militarized state. Such a state on Israel’s doorstep would pose a direct and grave threat to Israel’s existence and actually facilitate the mission of the Iranian regime and its terror proxies to murder more Jews.

As part of its effort to promote the idea of a “two-state solution,” the Biden administration has been talking about the need to establish a “demilitarized” Palestinian state next to Israel.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is reported to have asked the State Department for a “review of what a demilitarized Palestinian state would look like based on other models around the world.”

Christopher F. Rufo Giving DEI the Pink Slip Major institutions have started rolling back their diversity bureaucracies.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/giving-dei-the-pink-slip

Last year, conservatives began taking action against the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” bureaucracy. The Manhattan Institute released a model policy to abolish DEI, exposed abuses in public universities, and advised political leaders, most notably Florida governor Ron DeSantis, in the crafting of legislation abolishing public-university DEI programs at the state level. To date, three states—Florida, Texas, and Tennessee—have passed laws abolishing or restricting DEI. A total of 17 states have either passed such laws or are considering them.

Our efforts are bearing fruit. Last week, the University of Florida, the flagship state institution, announced that it had dissolved its DEI department and terminated the employment of all DEI officials. UF was spending an astonishing $5 million per year on DEI programs, which university president Ben Sasse wisely redirected toward faculty recruitment. The new budget would presumably include recruitment for UF’s Hamilton Center, a new home for conservative scholars. Sasse also offered a positive alternative to DEI, promising to hold the institution to the much better standard of “universal human dignity.”

Conservatives are rightly celebrating the move as a watershed. DEI is not an inevitability; it is a choice that can be undone.

Corporate America is following suit. Firms including Google, Meta, and Zoom have quietly cut back DEI departments and laid off employees. I have recently spoken with a number of Fortune 500 executives, who explained that, following the summer of George Floyd, companies felt immense pressure to “do something” about racial disparities. But four years later, they have realized that DEI programs undermine productivity, destroy merit-based systems, and poison corporate culture. Because of our successful campaign to expose the true nature of DEI, they now have the political space—in essence, the social permission—to wind down these programs.

2024 demographic reality sets the record straight Yoram Ettinger

http://bit.ly/4c2GegI

Demographic reality contradicts conventional wisdom

*The number of annual Jewish births in Israel surged by 69% from 1995 (80,400) to 2023 (135,639), compared to a 17% increase of annual Arab births in Israel during the same period, as reported by the February 2024 Monthly Bulletin of Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics (ICBS).

*The 2023 Jewish births (135,639) were 76% of total births (178,454), compared to 69% in 1995.

*In 2024 (based on the 2022 data), the Jewish fertility rate (3.03 births per woman) is higher than the Arab fertility rate (2.75), as it has been since 2016. It is higher than the fertility rates in all Muslim countries other than Iraq and the sub-Sahara Muslim countries.

*In 1969, Israel’s and Judea and Samaria’s (West Bank’s) Arab fertility rate was 6 births higher than the Jewish fertility rate. In 2015, both fertility rates were at 3.13 births per woman, reflecting the dramatic Westernization of Arab demography in Judea and Samaria and pre-1967 Israel, triggered by Arab modernity, urbanization, the enhanced social status of Arab women, older wedding age (24), expanded participation of Arab women in higher-education and the job market, a shorter reproductive time (25-45 rather than 16-55) and the increased use of contraceptives. 

*In 2023, there were 43,353 Israeli Jewish deaths, compared to 31,575 in 1996, a 37% increase, compared to a 43% increase in 2022 (while the size of the population almost doubled!), which reflects a society growing younger. In 2023, there were 6,108 Israeli Arab deaths, compared to 3,089 in 1996, a 98% increase, which reflects a society growing older.  

*In 2023, the number of Israeli Jewish deaths was 32% of Jewish births, compared to 40% in 1995 – an expression of a society growing younger. In 2023, the number of Israeli Arab deaths was 14.3% of Arab births, compared to 8% in 1995 – a symptom of a society growing older.

*Israel’s robust Jewish fertility rate is attributed to high-level optimism, patriotism, attachment to Jewish roots, frontier mentality, communal solidarity, high regard for raising children, and a declining number of abortions (34% decline since 1990, while the policy on abortion is liberal).

*In 2024, there is a potential wave of Aliyah (Jewish immigration) of some 500,000 Olim (Jewish immigrants) from the Ukraine, Russia, other former Soviet republics, West Europe, Argentina, the USA, etc., awaiting the Israeli government recognition of Aliyah as a top national priority (as it was until 1992), resuming a pro-active Aliyah policy. 

*Contrary to conventional wisdom, Israel’s Jewish emigration has declined since 1990, where there was an addition of 14,200 to the number of Israelis staying outside Israel for over a year. In recent years, the annual addition of emigrants has declined to an average of 7,000, while the overall population of Israel doubled itself from almost 5 million to almost 10 million. Thus, in 2020, there was an unusually high addition of 10,800 (probably due to  COVID-19 related travel restrictions), and in 2021 there was an addition of merely 1,400 (due to COVID-19).

Demographics is Destiny? Sydney Williams

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Apart from Israel, which has a TFR (Total Fertility Rate) of 2.9, no Western nation (including Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan) has a birthrate above replacement rate, which implies – barring immigration – a West that faces aging and, ultimately, declining populations. (It is only fair to point out that China, Russia, and North Korea also have declining birthrates.

As Mr. Karabell wrote in the review quoted above: “Governments worldwide have evolved to meet the challenge of managing more people, not fewer and older.” Yet the opposite is in the offing. The effect on living standards could be startling. Economic growth depends on many factors: free markets, rule of law, global and fair trade, the right to property ownership, innovation, entrepreneurship, secure borders, but also on an expanding working-age populations.

Or, at least, a growing population has always been a key driver for economic growth. However, in a 2019 review of Paul Morland’s The Human Tide, Jason Willick wrote: “New technology such as cloning, space travel and artificial intelligence could mean the current demographic slowdown is not an endpoint but an interregnum before another era of radical political change sweeps all before it.” That is possible, and it is also possible that artificial intelligence will forego the need for additional white-collar jobs. But there is no way to avoid an aging population, along with ever-higher costs of healthcare for the elderly. Robots and computers do not pay taxes; people do.

The United States is better situated than most Western nations, as it attracts migrants to offset declining birthrates, though our population continues to age. Europe, as well, attracts migrants from the Middle East and North Africa, but at a lesser rate, and with less assimilation. While birthrates have declined in developing countries, many are still positive. Nigeria, for example, with a population of 226 million and a TFR of 5.3, is projected to have a population of 550 million by 2100. According to projections both Pakistan and Nigeria will surpass the United States in terms of population by 2100. China’s population will shrink to about one half that of India, the only country predicted to have a population over one billion in 2100.

The United States of Lawfare The Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling about ballot access is a major blow against distorting the legal system for partisan gain But there are big battles yet to come Charles Lipson

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/comment/2024/03/04/donald-trump-supreme-court-colorado-ballot-us-election/

“Scarcely any question arises in the United States which does not become, sooner or later, a subject of judicial debate.” So Tocqueville wrote 200 years ago in what is still the greatest book about both America and democracy. His observation remains as true today as it was in the 1830s. It applies to the likely nominees of both political parties.

Most of attention has been devoted, quite rightly, to the mountain of legal problems facing former President Trump. But it is worth noting that the current occupant of the White House faces legal problems of his own. 

Joe Biden has been shown to possess classified documents without authorization and store them in insecure places, like his garage. The allegations were laid out in detail by Special Counsel Robert Hur, who declined to prosecute because President Biden was “elderly” and “forgetful” : hardly the sort of descriptors a presidental candidate would want to promote. 

Troubling as President Biden’s cognitive problems are, his legal issues are dwarfed by those facing former President Trump. The former president’s supporters and many independent voters see them a “lawfare,” the tendentious use of the legal system for political gain. His opponents see them as the even-handed rule of law.

What is striking about the cases pending against Trump is how they all came together in the midst of a presidential campaign. Surprise, surprise. Of course, the alleged crimes and civil violations occurred years ago.

ICC Language Indicates Bias against Israel Moshe Phillips

https://www.sdjewishworld.com/2024/03/03/icc-language-indicates-bias-against-israel/

The International Criminal Court is examining Israel’s policies in what it calls the “occupied Palestinian West Bank.” But how can the court possibly render a fair verdict when that very term is a complete and utter falsehood?

For as long as any of us can remember, the phrase “occupied Palestinian West Bank” has been a regular part of the vocabulary used by the media, as well as the political and diplomatic world. The fact that those words have been around for a long time doesn’t make them true.

Contemporary American English includes all sorts of names and phrases that don’t mean what they actually suggest. “French fries” are not French. “Koala bears” are not bears. “Driveways” are for parking, not driving—and parkways are the opposite. That’s all great fodder for stand-up comedians who specialize in observational humor.

But the way the terms “occupation,” “Palestinian” and “West Bank” are used is no joking matter.

“Occupation” was accurate for a short period of time. But Israel’s “occupation” of the territories in question ended long ago.

The Israelis first occupied those areas in self-defense during the Six-Day War in June 1967. Between 1993 and 1995, however, that occupation came to an end. It was replaced by an agreed-upon division of the region between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. The Israelis withdrew from the parts where 98% of the Palestinian Arabs reside. There are no Israeli troops, no Israeli administration and no Israeli military governor there anymore. So who exactly is “occupying” it? The Palestinian Authority, of course.

The P.A. has its own armed troops (euphemistically called “security forces”), its own administration and its own governors. It runs the courts, the police, the schools, the news media and everything else that constitutes an occupation.

The only part of the area that Israel occupies is where Israelis reside. And that Israeli presence is stipulated by the Oslo Accords. Not that Israel’s right to the area is based on the Oslo agreement, of course. It’s based on 3,000-plus years of continuous Jewish inhabitation and many centuries of Jewish national sovereignty—not to mention international law and the Hebrew Bible. But the fact is that the P.A. agreed to it.

New job for the Border Patrol: Shooting bandits By Monica Showalter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/03/new_job_for_border_patrol_shooting_bandits.html

A dirty, dangerous, job and the Border Patrol shouldn’t have to do it.

As if the Border Patrol doesn’t already have enough to do changing diapers and ‘processing’ tens of thousands of illegal border crossers to their destinations of choice in the U.S., now somebody’s got bandit duty.

According to Fox News:

Border patrol agents in California shot and killed a bandit who was robbing other migrants as they crossed into the U.S. from Mexico.

Multiple U.S. Customs and Border Protection sources confirmed that a criminal migrant who crossed the border in the San Diego sector was shot and killed by a member of the Border Patrol’s elite Border Patrol Tactical unit, or BORTAC, early Sunday morning.

The incident happened in a remote area where the bandits had been seen crossing into the U.S., robbing migrants and returning to Mexico.

Border Patrol agents responded to “bandit activity” on Sunday morning, when they came across a small group of bandits who were robbing migrants as they were walking to an area where migrants surrender to agents so they can be processed.

So, bandits are now becoming a problem at the border, a problem we didn’t have much of until Joe Biden opened the border.

It’s shocking stuff, pretty much like the Wild West now, except that banditry isn’t the only illegal thing going on at the U.S. border — the crossings themselves are illegal, but those doing it are viewed as now entitled to a safe illegal crossing, not an unsafe one, complete with security guards, still illegal as heck, though and more service with a smile.

Now, there wouldn’t be any bandit activity if there weren’t fat, juicy, easy targets for bandits to rob to begin with. Bandits could just as easily rob people in cities and plenty of them do. But they know that most designer-dud-clad illegal migrants, some with suitcases, carry a lot of money. And so long as those illegal crossings continue and migrants know that if they can get in, they can stay, the bandit harvestings will be ample.