Displaying posts published in

July 2024

Joe Biden on the Back Foot Roger Franklin Editor, Quadrant Online

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/america/2024/07/joe-biden-on-the-back-foot/

Within minutes of the attempt on Donald Trump’s life, Joe Biden’s handlers suspended all campaign advertising. They had no choice. As demonstrated in the weeks leading up to the shooting, the Democrats’ ads had assailed him as a threat to everything that is good and decent about America. Incendiary rhetoric, as the President intoned on Sunday night in his address to the nation, must be condemned.

Below, excerpts of that Oval Office (in italic) message and, below each, some links and background to what might well be the biggest example of hypocrisy since Captain Renault evinced shock at finding a roulette wheel in Rick’s gin joint.

My fellow Americans, I want to speak to you tonight about the need for us to lower the temperature in our politics and to remember, while we may disagree, we are not enemies.  We’re neighbors.  We’re friends, coworkers, citizens.  And, most importantly, we are fellow Americans.  And we must stand together. 

Translation: We must stand together, especially those amongst my fellow Democrats who have been calling on me to stand down. 

Yesterday’s shooting at Donald Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania calls on all of us to take a step back, take stock of where we are, how we go forward from here. 

How indeed! The day before Thomas Matthew Crooks’ bullet took the tip off Donald Trump’s right ear, the man demanding “a step back” from fighting words variously described Trump as “a rapist”*, “a convicted criminal”, “a business fraud”, “a threat to this nation” who is “unhinged” and, inevitably, an enemy of “our democracy” who would force the public servants he doesn’t sack to pledge their loyalty to him personally.

The woke media’s grotesque gloating over the shooting of Trump The media elites’ Trump Derangement Syndrome has utterly shattered their morality.Brendan O’Neill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/07/15/the-woke-medias-grotesque-gloating-over-the-shooting-of-trump/

Imagine being taken off the airwaves because your bosses are worried you might gloat over an attempted murder. That, reportedly, has been the fate of pundits on MSNBC’s maddeningly woke talk show, Morning Joe. It’s been pulled from the air today, in the wake of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, allegedly out of fear that a guest might make an ‘inappropriate’ comment about the shooting. CNN has the lowdown. It reports that MSNBC benched its best-known show, despite the ‘seismic’ events of the past 48 hours, as a pre-emptive strike against the possibility that one of the ‘stable of two-dozen-plus guests’ would say something nuts about the violence visited on Trump.

If this is true – and we have no reason to doubt that it is, given the liberal media’s been full of ‘inappropriate’ chatter on the shooting of Trump – it is terrifyingly revealing. That one of America’s top liberal broadcasters seemingly cannot trust its own talking heads to be sombre and decent in the aftermath of the attempted slaying of a former president is extraordinary. It points to more than the problem of shock-jockery, where people who say outrageous things tend to get the most clicks and clout. It speaks to something worse than Trump Derangement Syndrome. No, it shines a light on the wholesale unanchoring of the woke elites from the norms of democratic politics, and their drift into an alternative world of invective and vengeance.

Xi Jinping and China: Running Out of Time, Ready to Strike by Gordon G. Chang

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20788/china-xi-ready-to-strike

Why is Chinese President Xi Jinping moving so fast at this time to exert control over peripheral waters? Prominent China analyst Willy Lam wrote last October that China’s leader perhaps sees a closing window of opportunity and therefore is in a hurry to annex territory.

Whether he goes to war or not, he is getting ready to do so. Both the Financial Times and CNN have reported that businesses have been establishing military units inside their organizations. “Chinese Companies Are Raising Militias Like It’s the 1970s,” the cable network reported.

Xi is engaged in the fastest military buildup since the Second World War. In addition, he is purging military officers opposed to war, trying to sanction-proof his regime, stockpiling grain and other commodities, surveying the U.S. for nuclear weapons strikes, and mobilizing civilians for war.

His economic policies emphasize war preparation, and he looks determined to take China into battle, regardless of prospects. “Even if we cannot win, we must fight,” Xi is reported to have said to military officers in 2017, in connection with Taiwan.

I believe that Xi wants war — or at least a ramping up of tensions — to prevent senior Chinese leaders from moving against him. He is not looking to rally the Chinese people with provocative actions or even an attack; he wants to defang political opponents in the Communist Party.

Xi may not yet have made the decision to go to war, but he has clearly made the decision to risk war. That means he can strike when we least expect it.

In recent weeks, China has surged its naval fleet into both surrounding and far away waters.

Most significantly, the People’s Liberation Army Navy sent two strike groups into the South China Sea. The larger, centered on the Shandong aircraft carrier, operated off the main Philippine island of Luzon before transiting into the Western Pacific for blue water flight operations. The other is an Expeditionary Strike Group led by a Type 075 Yushen-class amphibious assault ship, one of China’s largest and most advanced. Four of China’s Type 055 Renhai-class cruisers, described as “the most lethal surface combatant in the world,” escorted the two strike groups.

Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and stepping back into American history David Samuels

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/portal-donald-trump-elon-musk-david-samuels

EXCERPTS

The photograph of a bloodied former President Trump defiantly pumping his fist in the air beneath the American flag as his Secret Service minders struggle to protect him was immediately among the most indelible political images of the past half-century. As memorable as a hunched Richard Nixon signaling V for victory, or JFK standing tall in West Berlin, these are the kinds of images that are impossible for political operatives to gainsay or counterfeit, because they capture character in action. Once seen, these images are impossible to unsee. This was one of them.

In Trump’s case, the photograph was of a man who took a bullet in front of his supporters and lived, just like he said he would. He got up with blood on his face, in front of 10,000 or more people, and showed both the presence of mind and the unkillable ego strength to stage the political photograph of the century with himself as the star. Worship him or hate his guts, it was the most Trumpian act imaginable.

For the record, I don’t vote. I think it’s wrong for reporters to pick sides. But I found Trump to be a vulgarian whose first term in office was mostly a disaster, culminating in the social catastrophe of mass lockdowns and mandatory vaccinations whose health effects remain to be reckoned with. In his time in office, he was: easily distracted; surrounded himself with a sordid assortment of flunkies and scum; confused words with actions; and displayed the managerial ability to run a shoeshine stand in one of his few remaining Manhattan buildings, which are decorated in taste so gaudy it seems likely to repel even midlevel Azerbaijani millionaires, or whoever the audience for these places was originally supposed to be.

However, as it turns out, I am even less of a fan of the people who have spent the last seven years weaving wild conspiracy theories about a duly elected president in an attempt to drive him from office by zeroing out the store of public trust in every institution in America, and in doing so have turned the American press, academia, and other places that once served entirely useful social functions into a Soviet-style moral, intellectual, and aesthetic wasteland.

Christopher F. Rufo A Compromised Secret Service The agency has sacrificed its basic mission on the altar of DEI.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/a-compromised-secret-service

It was a shot heard around the world. 

On Saturday, a gunman whom the FBI has identified as Thomas Matthew Crooks fired a burst of rifle shots at former president Donald Trump, grazing his ear and nearly killing him. The attempted assassination is an historic, and perilous, moment. We’ll get commentaries and investigations, and the government will announce reforms.

But amid all the chaos weaves the thread of another story, one that reveals a mounting problem in our political life. A surprising number of the Secret Service agents protecting the former president were women. And, according to video recordings of the scene, many did not acquit themselves favorably.

Scene one: after President Trump ducks, a group of agents leaps to him and protects him with their bodies. A female agent who rushes to the stage acts bravely, without a doubt, but the point of the “huddle” is to protect the president. The agent was much shorter than President Trump, leaving his head and neck exposed after he stood up.

Scene two: as Trump enters the escape vehicle, a female Secret Service agent fumbles her gun and cannot find her holster; another female agent appears confused and, in the moment of crisis, decides to use both of her hands to put on her sunglasses; a third looks frightened and uncertain.

These agents wear the typical Secret Service outfits—Kevlar vests pressing against white shirts; black blazers with gold pins; dark sunglasses—but to an impartial observer, they do not appear to have the same poise, confidence, and strength as the male agents around them.

The obvious question: Why so many female agents? The answer, unfortunately, is the same as in many other institutions: DEI. The Secret Service has highlighted “diversity” as a key priority and its director, Kimberly Cheatle, named to the position in 2022, has pledged to increase dramatically the number of women in the ranks.

This is official policy. The Secret Service openly boasts that it “prioritizes recruiting women candidates” and has formulated an “affirmative action” plan to increase the number of women, LGBT, Native Americans, and other identity groups.

Heather Mac Donald Edge of the Abyss Our divides are as much epistemological as political.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/political-rhetoric-and-the-trump-assassination-attempt

By December 2023, the Biden campaign’s frequent equation of Donald Trump with Adolf Hitler had caught the attention even of some in the mainstream media. “In most situations, comparing a political opponent to Adolf Hitler might seem like an extraordinary step,” wrote Politico. “For Joe Biden’s campaign, it has become part of the routine of running against Donald Trump.” CNN predicted that the Trump-is-Hitler “attack line” would likely be “central” to the president’s efforts to win reelection. Other outlets contributed their own Trump-Hitler comparisons. The New Republic’s June 2024 issue, a special report on “American Fascism,” showed a blended image of Trump and the Führer on its cover.

It was not even necessary to make an explicit Hitler comparison; the similarities were too obvious. Robert Kagan told the Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart that Trump was a “natural dictator.” If you “give him unchecked power in the United States, I think any sensible person would find that a frightening proposition.” Americans are whistling past the graveyard, Kagan warned. All checks on presidential power will be impotent against Trump’s attacks on the Founder’s constitutional order, he declared.

“Existential threats” can seem to demand a different set of rules from those governing ordinary political life. Had the July 20, 1944, assassination plot against Hitler been successful, the plotters would have been greeted across the world as heroes.

Thomas Matthew Crooks, who missed blowing out Donald Trump’s brain by a few inches and who murdered a Trump supporter instead, may have thought of himself as just such a hero-in-waiting.

So now we gaze into the abyss. Every act of political violence opens up the prospect of the collapse of civil order. When political disagreement becomes lethal and political leaders risk their lives to run for or occupy political office, we trade the civil peace bequeathed to us by centuries of Western civilization for Third World anarchy.

Now Available–the Kindle Edition of My Memoir, Israel Odyssey From tranquil upstate New York to the tumultuous Land of Israel. P.David Hornik

https://www.amazon.com/Israel-Odyssey-P-David-Hornik-ebook/dp/B0D2QG46RX https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/israel-odyssey-p-david-hornik/1145635457?ean=9781504096751

Almost ten years in the making, here at last is the Kindle edition of Israel Odyssey—my memoir of making aliyah from upstate New York to the Land of Israel (the print edition comes out on September 10). Almost ten years—not because it’s a long book (it’s about 200 pages in print), but because it went through a process of revisions, re-revisions, revisionings, recasting, revamping—whatever, until I realized I had to quit at some point and go with what I had.

That event of aliyah happened almost exactly 40 years ago—in September 1984. Which means the story leads from the post-Holocaust, post-establishment-of-Israel era of American Jewry; to the still-socialist, comically inefficient (but at last beginning to reform) era of 1980s Israel—marked also, of course, by a Lebanon war and a First Intifada; and through some more tumultuous decades up to the October 7 shock and the very difficult and challenging reality of today.

It’s about, that is, how those historical phenomena interacted with my own story, affecting me on personal, artistic, and spiritual levels, leading me to thoughts and conclusions I couldn’t have imagined in tranquil upstate New York. Israel Odyssey is, I hope, a good read if you’ve made aliyah, are considering aliyah, or are just interested in a personal narrative with an emphasis on emigration and its powerful effects. Of course, I’ll be posting about the print edition when it comes out on September 10.

The Biden Titanic Victor Davis Hanson

https://victorhanson.com/the-biden-titanic/

Joe Biden’s escalating dementia and the long media-political conspiracy to hide his senility from the public are the least of the Democrats’ current problems.

Biden’s track record as president may be more concerning than his cognitive decline. He has literally destroyed the U.S. border, deliberately allowing the entry of more than 10 million illegal aliens. His callous handlers’ agenda was to import abjectly poor constituencies in need of vast government services without regard for the current struggles of a battered American middle class and poor.

The widespread poverty of a vast new cohort of illegal immigrants could serve as indictments of a “racist,” “unequal,” and “unfair” America—as if the residents of East Palestine, Ohio or inner-city Chicago had anything to do with the centuries-long corruption and oppression of Mexico and Latin America that daily drives thousands of their own poorest citizens northwards to a society founded on very different ideas than those of their homelands.

Note that the left, neither in Mexico nor in America, never asks why millions of these impoverished people prefer to break into a supposedly racist America. Much less do they even distinguish those principles and values that once made America prosperous, free, and secure from their antitheses that have sadly made much of Latin America mostly poor, without freedom, and insecure.

Biden inherited near-zero real interest rates and inflation at 1.4 percent. Almost immediately, in nihilistic fashion, Biden did to a sound economy what he had done to a secure border. So, he recklessly printed money at a time of spiraling, quarantine-ending demand and supply chain disruption. Middle-class wages never caught up with Biden’s inflation, as prices for key staples are nearly 30 percent higher than when he took office.

The cost of servicing the ballooning national debt at high interest is now nearly $1 trillion per year. The world abroad is aflame, lit by Biden’s inexplicable withdrawal from Kabul, his mixed signals to Vladimir Putin on the eve of his invasion of Ukraine, his deliberate alienation of Israel, his appeasement of Iran and China, and his cuts in the defense budget, coupled with his woke war on mythical “racists” in the military.

Back to Berlin “Just remember, for remembering, we honor the dead and save them from dying again in oblivion.” by Mark Tapson

https://www.frontpagemag.com/back-to-berlin/

Since the October 7 terror attacks in Israel, anti-Zionism has surged on both the Left and the Right. While decent people of the world reeled in horror at the atrocities committed by Hamas, left-wing Jew haters throughout the Western world took to the streets to celebrate the terrorist group’s savagery and to call for the eradication of Israel. This has given right-wing antisemites the cover to came out of the woodwork and cluster around online influencers like slimy Nick Fuentes and grifter Candace Owens.

Speaking of Owens: her latest antisemitic inanity is her defense of Nazi “Angel of Death” Josef Mengele’s medical experiments on Birkenau prisoners, claiming that the reports of his sick experiments on twins, for which there is abundant documentation, are so “completely absurd” that they sound suspiciously like “bizarre propaganda.” “Why would you do that?” she wondered conspiratorially. “Literally, even if you were the most evil person in the world, that’s a tremendous waste of time and supplies.” It’s truly depressing to realize that Owens, who fancies herself to be such a free-thinking individual that she is neither a “flat-earther” nor a “round-earther,” has over five million followers on X (formerly Twitter), a significant number of whom are loud-and-proud anti-Zionists.

The point is, Jew-hatred and Holocaust denial have gone shockingly, unapologetically mainstream. So forgive the belated review of a six-year-old film, but now seems an especially urgent and relevant time to bring attention to an underappreciated Holocaust-related documentary of unexpected emotional power called Back to Berlin, which cuts through the usually overwhelming statistics of the victims of Hitler’s Final Solution, by highlighting the personal stories of a small number of Holocaust survivors and their families.

In this 75-minute film from 2018, cameras follow eleven Israeli Jews on an epic 2015 motorcycle trek from Tel Aviv to Berlin – nearly 3000 miles across nine countries. Their mission is to follow in the footsteps – or the tire tracks, if you will – of an original batch of eleven Jewish bikers who traveled that route to participate in the infamous 1936 Olympic Games, where Hitler himself was in attendance.

Isn’t This What The Left Wanted?

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/07/16/isnt-this-what-the-left-wanted/

Like Robert Redford’s character in “The Candidate” — who unexpectedly won a U.S. Senate race and then bewilderedly asked “What do we do now?” — the Democrats, the media, the Hollywood-celebrity industrial complex, and the leftist-dominated professoriate are in a similar position. They have to wonder what to do next after their wish that someone would take out Donald Trump was attempted and failed.

In the hours after Trump was shot in a botched, but only by millimeters, assassination bid, the media scolds began to insist that we must “take down the temperature.” President Joe Biden followed that with a national address Sunday in which he said “we must stand together” as Americans. Trump is reportedly revising his convention speech to focus on unity, believing that he has now been given “a chance to bring the country together,” rather than Biden’s failings.

While Biden struck the right tone in his Oval Office speech, let’s not pretend that the political left hadn’t been looking for any way possible to “stop Trump,” even if that meant in the minds of some on that side that he had to die. And they almost got what they wanted.

Trump is still alive, though, leaving the Democrats in a thorny “now what?” situation.

We don’t doubt that many of the left who fantasized about Trump taking a fatal bullet, such as John McWhorter, are now feeling some remorse. But for every one of those there are too many who were frustrated that the would-be assassin missed his shot by the smallest of margins.