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April 2024

Shock and Awe on the Campaign Trail A Rubicon has been crossed, and advance troops are already besieging various outposts of our taken-for-granted institutions and assumptions about our social lives. By Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2024/04/28/shock-and-awe-on-the-campaign-trail/

I would wager that a million or more words have been written about the trials and tribulations—but especially the trials—of Donald Trump. I have written quite a few myself, here at American Greatness and elsewhere.

Some stories from the left are of the gleefully salivating variety. “Goodie! The Bad Orange Man is Getting His and Might Even go to Jail.  Hallelujah!”

But it is my impression that more and more commentary has a worried, if not an out-and-out tone of alarm.  Former Attorney General William Barr is no fan of Donald Trump. But he recently announced that he was endorsing Trump because the likely alternative—Joe Biden—was so much worse.

I suspect that, with the passage of time, that endorsement will be seen to mark a turning point in l’affaire Trump. If even an anti-Trump figure like Bill Barr has lined up behind the former president, a rearrangement of the stars is underway.

Note well: The primary fulcrum of this change is not an assessment of the relative merits of Trump vs. Biden.  Rather, it’s a reaction against the perversion of the DOJ and the coercive power of the state under Biden.  Trump is the most obvious victim. But any opponent of the regime is a potential target.

“Shock and Awe” is the popular phrase military folks use to describe a strategy of using “spectacular displays of force to paralyze the enemy’s perception of the battlefield and destroy their will to fight.”

That is a good description of what the Biden administration is attempting to do to Donald Trump.  Thanks to the incisive reporting of Julie Kelly, Mike Davis, and others, we now know that there was extensive co-ordination between the Biden White House and the myriad prosecutors, attorneys general, FBI agents, and other official factota to formulate a strategy to indict, intimidate, and neutralize Trump as a political actor.

The Travesties of the Trump Trials Tragically for the country, to stop this left-wing madness, the Trump travesties may not be the end, but the beginning of precisely what the Founders feared. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2024/04/29/the-travesties-of-the-trump-trials/

Do not believe the White House/mainstream media-concocted narrative that the four criminal court cases—prosecuted by Alvin Bragg, Letitia James, Jack Smith, and Fani Willis—were not in part coordinated, synchronized, and timed to reach their courtroom psychodramatic finales right during the 2024 campaign season.

These local, state, and federal Lilliputian agendas were designed to tie down, gag, confine, bankrupt, and destroy Trump psychologically and physically. They are the final lawfare denouement to years of extra-legal efforts to emasculate him.

Indeed, the nation is by now worn out by these serial assaults on constitutional norms: the Hillary-funded Steele dossier subterfuge; the pre-election Russian laptop disinformation campaign; the two impeachments without special counsel reports; the impeachment Senate trial of a private citizen; the effort to remove Trump’s name from state ballots; the ongoing attempt to emasculate the Electoral College; or the radical opportune changes in state election laws to ensure massive mail-in balloting.

Recently, Andrew McCarthy has reviewed in depth this coordination between White House personnel and prosecutors, long known and long denied by the left. Biden, for example, had complained to aides about Attorney General Merrick Garland’s tardiness in getting special federal prosecutor Smith appointed—and thus apparently ensuring Trump was convicted before the election.

Nathan Wade, Fani Willis’s now-fired paramour prosecutor, visited and consulted with the White House counsel’s office when he was acting supposedly as a purely local county prosecutor. The January 6th left-wing-dominated congressional committee consulted with the Biden administration in sending forth its criminal referrals about Trump’s purported role in the protests. And to handle his pseudo-indictment against Trump, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg hired Biden Justice Department official Vincent Colangeio.

Two, the prosecutors’ delayed criminal indictments and E. Jean Carroll’s civil suit were predicated only on Donald Trump running for reelection. After his 2020 defeat, the loss of the two Republican senate seats in Georgia, and the January 6 demonstrations/riot, Trump was written off by pundits as politically toxic.

Rx for America by Lawrence Kadish

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20603/rx-for-america

We might start by returning to energy independence. The climate would not be hurt one bit: The US has plenty of oil under the ground; we can extract it more cleanly than anyone. Instead, we are paying exorbitant prices to, say, Russia for oil that is far dirtier, while the Chinese Communist Party are opening two new coal plants a week. The result, in terms of clean air, is therefore currently either net-zero or, thanks to “protecting” the planet from America’s clean oil, actually down.

Additionally, the US outlay for buying overpriced foreign oil and gas for immediate domestic use has simply served to finance both Russia’s war on Ukraine, and Iran and Hamas’s war on Israel. If the US were to start drilling, refining and exporting oil again, its price would go back down to $40 or $50 a barrel, nearly half its current $83 – and Russia and Iran, soon unable to afford their global aggression, would be forced to stop.

Next, the US should return to a policy of strong economic growth. No country has ever taxed itself into prosperity. Let America’s animal spirits — in a creative, economically open market — loose again. Lower everyone’s taxes and tear up all regulations that are now throttling growth. Most regulations are probably only there because some adversarial country that is trying to cut the US down to size — think Russia and China — wants them to be.

America’s “competitors” are not competitors. They are openly adversaries (here, here, here, and here) and would seem to love nothing more than putting the US out of business. They are already doing their best to cripple and displace the US technologically, militarily and economically. The Chinese Communist Party, after causing more than a million Americans to die by deliberately lying to the world about the human-to-human transmissibility of Covid-19, are literally poisoning Americans by smuggling in fentanyl and other lethal drugs. According to Dr. John C. Hagan, writing in Missouri Medicine:

“Enough fentanyl to kill every person in the United States is smuggled in monthly. Prosecutors and courts consistently fail to prosecute drug dealers whose products kill more than 100,000 people per year.”

Video: Drag Queen Leads Children in Chants of ‘Free Palestine’ Welcome to the Left’s harrowing twilight zone.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/drag-queen-leads-children-in-chants-of-free-palestine/

Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk posted to X (Twitter) the short video clip below of a radical Left double-indoctrination whammy: a drag queen hired by “Valley Families for Palestine” leading children in a chant of “Free Palestine.”

No word on whether it was explained to the children that drag queens would be tossed from the rooftops of “Palestine.”

Check it out below:

Why Are Women in America Cheering for Hamas and Iran? Phyllis Chesler

https://spectator.org/why-are-women-in-america-cheering-for-hamas-and-iran/

Have you noticed that young women all across America are demonstrating for Hamas, Iran, and Palestine? Why would such privileged and educated women, the heirs to the #MeToo movement and to Second and Third Wave Western feminisms, cheer for male rapists and male killers, arguably the most blood-thirsty and sadistic misogynists this side of Ghenghis Khan? Why side with Islamist barbarians who have jailed, tortured, and executed their own women over a slipped Islamic veil, and who would forcibly convert their Western female admirers to Islam, veil them as well, and coerce them into polygamous marriages?

[T]hey are privileged political opportunists posturing as victim-pariahs who feel that they are “occupied” by Western patriarchy.

Do these educated daughters of affluence understand that were they to express any views deemed dissident in Gaza, Teheran, or Kabul or, were they to announce that they were “queer” or gay, (which is how some of these activists identify themselves), that they would be instantly honor killed?

In the months since 10/7, in addition to the odious, faux-feminist silence about the gang-rapes of both women and men, the torture of babies and whole families, the kidnapping of civilians — a terrifying tsunami of hatred towards Israel, America, and Jews has exploded into non-stop jihadi-style, belligerent mobs, whose goal is to disrupt civil society and gain both attention and followers for their reprehensible views. The news of Hamas’s pogrom on steroids, unleashed their Jew hatred, and whetted the mob’s appetite for more of same.

Majority Of Voters (Still) Back Border Wall, Stiff Immigration Controls: I&I/TIPP Poll Terry Jones

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/04/29/majority-of-voters-still-back-border-wall-stiff-immigration-controls-ii-tipp-poll/

When it comes to immigration, one thing is clear: Americans overwhelmingly favor building a border wall and strongly enforcing existing immigration laws, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll shows. It’s a big reason why immigration has become the No. 1 issue in the 2024 presidential election.

For our April national online I&I/TIPP Poll, taken April 3-5 from 1,432 registered voters, we asked the following broad question:

“Since President Biden took office in 2021, immigration rules have been loosened, allowing for the entry of 5 million undocumented immigrants from around the world, according to the government’s own count. How would you address the immigration issue?”

The answers once again showed a strong general preference for a return to the stiffer border controls that had significantly diminished illegal entry into the U.S.

ELECTIONS

Sunday, April 28
General Election: Trump vs. Biden
CNN

Trump 49, Biden 43

Trump +6

General Election: Trump vs. Biden vs. Kennedy vs. West vs. Stein
CNN

Trump 42, Biden 33, Kennedy 16, West 4, Stein 3

Trump +9

Pennsylvania: Trump vs. Biden
CBS News/YouGov

Trump 50, Biden 49

Trump +1

Wisconsin: Trump vs. Biden
CBS News/YouGov

Trump 50, Biden 49

Trump +1

Michigan: Trump vs. Biden
CBS News/YouGov

Trump 49, Biden 51

Biden +2

Michigan: Trump vs. Biden vs. Kennedy vs. West vs. Stein
CBS News/YouGov*

Biden 45, Trump 43, Kennedy 9, Stein 3, West

Biden +2

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY RECEIVED NEARLY $6 BILLION IN FEDERAL CONTRACTS AND GRANTS SINCE 2018

https://mailchi.mp/5dc015c64d16/35b-from-us-taxpayers-funded-world-health-organization-59964?e=0c8ccf8e98

American taxpayers are disturbed by the moral rot they’re seeing at Columbia, Harvard, Yale and other elite universities. However, you should be alarmed that you’re also funding it.

Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com quantified the federal contracts and grants awarded to Columbia and other elite universities in a five-year period from 2018 through 2022. 

Turns out that American taxpayers contribute more to these universities than the students and their families do through tuition payments. These universities are more federal contractor today than educator.

Yesterday, my interview on The National Desk by Sinclair Broadcast, owners of nearly 200 ABC, NBC, CBS, and FOX local stations across America, broke down all the numbers…

INTERVIEW: IT’S TIME TO OPEN THE BOOKS ON COLUMBIA, HARVARD, YALE AND THE REST OF THE “ELITE” UNIVERSITIES

Here is just a sample of our findings: 

CHAPTER 16: Ideological Invasion Space Is No Longer the Final Frontier—Reality Is (forthcoming release June 2024) by Linda Goudsmit

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/27751/chapter-16-ideological-invasion

Pundicity page: goudsmit.pundicity.com  and website: lindagoudsmit.com 

The Frankfurt School (Chapters 11 and 15) is best understood as a philosophical and sociological movement that spread through Western universities around the world. Instead of embracing individualism and the separation of powers that distinguish our constitutional republic, Frankfurt School émigrés continued to advance their collectivist ideology with religious fanaticism, missionary zeal, and the hubris characteristic of supremacist ideologues.

The movement began with Hungarian Marxist philosopher George Lukács (1885–1971), minister of culture in Bolshevik Hungary in 1919. Before the Bolsheviks came to power, Hungary was a Catholic nation. Lukács recognized the necessity of collapsing the traditional nuclear family in Marxist revolutions, following Lenin’s dictum, “Destroy the family, you destroy the country.”

As deputy commissar for education and culture, Lukács targeted Hungary’s family unit and its traditional sexual morals. He implemented a program called cultural terrorism, which had two tactical objectives. First, target children’s minds through lectures that encouraged them to ridicule and reject Christian ethics. Second, groom them with graphic sexual content and instruction in free love and sexual intercourse. People in Hungary were so enraged it forced Lukács to flee the country.

Lukács met Felix Weil, a wealthy German Marxist, at a Marxist study week in Frankfurt in 1923. Together, they set up the Institute for Social Research at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. Weil’s doctoral thesis explored the practical problems of implementing socialism, and he was very interested in Lukács’s new cultural approach to Marxism.

Under the direction of radical German philosopher Max Horkheimer, the psychological theories of Sigmund Freud and sociological theories of Karl Marx were integrated, and the Institute for Social Research gave birth to a new species of Marxism. Cultural Marxism presented the novel theory that society was psychologically oppressed by the institutions of Western culture. This new type of Marxism required a new methodology for implementation.

THE PERILS OF A BAD DEAL: RUTHIE BLUM

https://www.jns.org/the-perils-of-a-bad-deal/
Whenever I sit down to craft a piece on the “Bring Them Home Now” protests, a call I received at my office in 2009 haunts me into changing or tweaking topics. The person initiating the conversation that day introduced himself as the grandfather of Gilad Shalit.

No further clarification was required. By this point, the Israel Defense Forces soldier who’d been captured by Hamas terrorists nearly three years earlier had become a household name. So, too, had his family.

“How dare you?” Tzvi Shalit began, going on to berate me for jeopardizing the campaign for Gilad’s release. My latest column, he said, was not only insensitive; it was downright dangerous.

Stunned by his accusation and intimidated by his understandable pain, I stuttered a sympathetic response. Yet, neither my apology for having caused unintended offense, nor my explanation that the article in question was actually a critique of the media for stifling debate, did any good.

As far as he was concerned, I was siding with the enemy—not the organization holding his grandson in Gaza, mind you, but the then-caretaker government of outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

After his resignation over corruption charges, he was replaced by Tzipi Livni as head of Kadima in the party’s September 2008 primaries. Her inability to form a coalition in the following weeks spurred the February 2009 general election.

And though Kadima garnered a majority of Knesset seats, Livni still couldn’t form a government. Likud chairman Benjamin Netanyahu succeeded where she failed, and thus it was he who succeeded Olmert as prime minister.