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July 2024

Trump’s China Tariffs: Extraordinarily Good for America by Gordon G. Chang

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20819/trump-china-tariffs

This is a contest that the United States cannot lose. In short, trade-surplus countries, such as China, cannot prevail over trade-deficit ones, such as America. Last year, America’s merchandise trade deficit with China was $279.4 billion.

That is why, ultimately, China will have to pay the cost of tariffs that Trump — or any other American leader — may impose. Clearly, China’s regime knows this. People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s self-described mouthpiece and therefore the most authoritative publication in China, this month is arguing that America should not raise tariffs.

China steals each year somewhere in the neighborhood of a half trillion dollars of American intellectual property. Critics of tariffs, whether they make valid points or not about increased costs, have an obligation to say how they would eliminate or reduce this criminal practice through other means.

Why should Americans want to decimate the Chinese factory sector? The Communist Party of China sees the U.S. as an enemy and seeks the destruction of the American republic. The struggle, in short, is existential. China’s regime cannot wage the fight against America without American money.

So why should Americans supply the cash to their enemy?

Spectre of the Fall: is the West Doomed? Mervyn Bendle

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/society/2024/07/spectre-of-the-fall-is-the-west-doomed/

Conclusion As this brief survey indicates, there is a considerable body of scholarship and commentary illuminating the dire future into which Western societies are allowing themselves to descend. Tragically, there seems to be little political will or capacity to confront this challenge, in itself a marker of the extent of the decline, but at the same time there are several political events approaching that may give rise to hope. Time will tell, but time is running out.

A spectre haunts Western Civilization – the spectre of its decline and fall. And invariably, it seems, this spectre is envisaged in terms of Rome, as Bryan Ward-Perkins confirms in The Fall of Rome & the End of Civilization (2006): “Deep within the Western psyche lies an anxiety that, if ancient Rome could fall, then so too can the even the proudest of modern civilizations”. Indeed, unfolding events “make it possible to use Roman history to show the West is experiencing only the beginnings of what will be an unfolding and, potentially, even an existential crisis, and secondly, that this crisis is revolving around the same key components that undermined its ancient Roman counterpart.” (Peter Heather & John Rapley, Why Empires Fall: Rome, America & the Future of the West,  2023)

Death Spiral The West may already have entered a ‘death spiral’ comparable to that which doomed the Roman Empire 1500 years ago, as Adam Creighton points out in a recent article, ‘Joe Biden’s decline is a perfect mirror of West’s slow decay’. He quotes prominent Stanford academic John Ionnidis, who defines such a precipitant societal collapse as a “vicious cycle of self-reinforcing dysfunctional behaviour characterised by continuous flawed decision making, myopic single-minded focus on one set of solutions, denial, distrust, micromanagement, dogmatic thinking and learned helplessness.”

Contrived Panics Climate change hysteria and the Covid-19 over-reaction may be cited as two example of this phenomenon. In particular,

Nothing confirms the collapse in governing wisdom so much as the destructive response to COVID-19, when across a few years almost all advanced governments crushed their citizens living standards, rights, and educational outcomes over a new virus whose fatality rate was known among experts from early 2020 to be less than 0.05%.

One result of this carefully contrived panic was that several gigantic pharmaceutical corporations made absolutely immense profits supplying vaccines that may have been either unnecessary or harmful, or both, but which were compulsory. Meanwhile they fund the regulators that were to meant to oversee their activities and ensure public health. It’s very notable that no comprehensive, properly empowered inquiry– e.g., a Royal Commission — into the Covid-19 disaster has been undertaken.

He ‘Wanted to Kill as Many People as Possible’: The Persecution of Christians, June 2024 by Raymond Ibrahim

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20817/persecution-of-christians-june

One elderly and ailing Orthodox priest, Fr. Nikolai Kotelnikov, had his throat slit by the Muslims yelling “Allahu akbar” [“Allah is the greatest”]. – asianews.it, June 24, 2024, Russia.

ISIS militants, using machetes and rifles, slaughtered more than 80 Christians….ISIS emphasized the religious identity of its victims in a post, saying that “Caliphate soldiers” killed “Christians.” According to one report, many of the slain were “very young” and were targeted for “refusing to convert into Islam”…. some bodies were found “tied up” and “decapitated.” – premierchristian.news, June 18, 2024, Democratic Republic of Congo.

In Lahore Pakistan, authorities arrested Jameela Khatoon, a 62-year-old mentally ill Christian woman, after a Muslim shopkeeper, Muhammad Asif, complained that she had committed blasphemy against his namesake, the prophet of Islam. Jameela is being charged under Section 295-C of Pakistan’s Penal Code, which carries a mandatory death sentence for those who insult Muhammad. Earlier that day, after Jameela had entered Asif’s shop, they argued about shampoo. – britishasianchristians.org, June 7, 2024, Pakistan.

[A]n “anti-terrorism” court, despite lack of evidence, handed out another death sentence to Ehsan Masih, a 27-year-old Christian man, for allegedly sharing a “blasphemous” video against Muhammad on a social media platform. – morningstarnews.org, June 7, 2024, Pakistan.

[A]n impoverished Christian rickshaw driver, [Dennis Albert], is facing a long prison sentence, possibly for life, for stepping out of his carriage onto some papers alleged to have been pages of the Koran. – morningstarnews.org, June 18, 2024, Pakistan.

“Dennis has studied till 10th grade, but he had no clue that the pages he was standing on had religious value. He’s a simple rickshaw driver earning an honorable livelihood for himself. He did not have any intention of hurting religious sentiments of any person or community… He’s losing hope for his freedom. He’s being kept in a special barrack reserved for blasphemy accused…” – Imran Albert, the rickshaw driver’s brother, morningstarnews.org, June 18, 2024, Pakistan.

“Typically kidnapped girls in Pakistan, some as young as 10, are abducted, forced to convert to Islam and raped under cover of such Islamic ‘marriages’ and are then pressured to record false statements in favor of the kidnappers, rights advocates say. Judges routinely ignore documentary evidence related to the children’s ages, handing them back to kidnappers as their ‘legal’ wives.” — morningstarnews.org, July 9, 2024, Pakistan.

[A] Muslim factory owner tortured his Christian employee to death — Waqas Salamat, age 18 — for refusing to continue working for him…. Muhammad instantly sent some factory workers to collect him; they bound his hands and feet and carried him to Muhammad’s factory. There, Muhammad, his son, and several Muslim employees began torturing Waqas for hours—beating him with pipes and administering electric shocks to him—until he died. He was the main breadwinner for his impoverished family. According to his mother, Rubina.

“Our financial condition is such that we didn’t even have enough money to arrange for his burial… Waqas was my beloved son and my biggest support. He would often tell me that he’ll work very hard to make life easier for us….” — morningstarnews.org, June 11, 2024, Pakistan.

Karma, Karma, Karma, Karma Kamaleon By J.B. Shurk

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/07/karma_karma_karma_karma_kamaleon.html

Knock, knock.Who’s there?Kamala. Kamala who?Whoever you need me to be.  Cackle cackle.

A mistress to a powerful San Francisco politician twice her age…or a vocal advocate for the “Me Too” movement.  

A tough-on-crime prosecutor…or a “Defund the Police” cheerleader.

A likable-enough pragmatist…or “the most liberal nominee in U.S. history.”

A defender of Israel…or a supporter of Hamas terrorists.

A second-generation immigrant proud of her Indian and Jamaican heritage…or a staunch member of the African-American community who affects a southern accent.

Joe Biden’s trusted “border tsar”…or someone who barely knows where America’s borders are.

Whoever Kamala Harris needs to be in order to advance her career prospects, she will do her best to pretend that is who she has always been.  Her problem — one she shares with many talentless politicians — is that she lacks both the brainpower and the charisma to convince others that she is more than an uninspiring hack.  Usually, such low-caliber politicos peter out in local precincts where could-a-been dreams go to die.  Kamala, however, has always had a knack for finding the right VIP to reward her ambition.

Racism and Sexism: The Campaign Theme of the Harris-Whoever Ticket Get ready for a heaping dose of racism and sexism this campaign season. It’s all that the Democrats have left. By Richard Truesdell and Keith Lehmann

https://amgreatness.com/2024/07/26/racism-and-sexism-the-campaign-theme-of-the-harris-whoever-ticket/

Is Kamala Harris the quintessential DEI hire? It’s a legitimate question, given that Joe Biden made it clear during his 2020 election-year campaign that he would only consider a black woman for his VP slot. As president, he also claimed that the choice of Supreme Court Justice replacement for Stephen Breyer would be limited to a black woman. Not even the most qualified black woman, just someone possessing dark skin and lady parts.

Biden could have simply told the country that he was going to choose the most qualified person for either position. Instead, he said that his choice was going to be based primarily on skin color and gender.

What has this wrought? Let us tell you, it has positioned the capabilities of otherwise well-qualified people into the corner of racial and sex bias, regardless of intentions. Of course, maybe that was the intention all along.

You cannot convince anyone with even moderate powers of observation that this is not happening. Joe Biden and now Kamala Harris, along with their Democrat power operators, place intrinsic qualities such as skin color, gender, and sexual preference over meritocracy in assigning important roles in government cabinet positions, committee assignments, and security operations.

We have seen the result, and it isn’t pretty.

A former and potential future president was less than an inch away from having his brains blown out of his skull on live television. In a testimony before the House of Representatives on Monday, the head of the Secret Service, Kimberly Cheatle, with the expressed responsibility of protecting presidential contenders from harm during a campaign, claims that she tried her best but admitted the task was just too much. That implies just about everything toxic about DEI. She has subsequently resigned, much to the relief of everyone.

Let’s explore DEI, which is diversity, equity, and inclusion.

America’s Lab Rats? Many Americans feel that the country has become unrecognizable due to decades of globalization and a technological revolution that has eroded middle-class livelihoods and deepened social divides. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2024/07/28/americas-lab-rats/

Half the country thinks something has gone drastically wrong in America, to the point that it is rapidly becoming unrecognizable. Millions feel they are virtual lab rats in some grand research project conducted by entitled elites who could care less when the experiment blows up.

Consider: Our military turns over $60 billion in state-of-the-art weapons to terrorists in Kabul and then flees in disgrace?

Terrorist flags fly in place of incinerated Old Glory at the iconic Union Station in Washington as radical students and green card-holding guests deface statues with threats that “Hamas is coming” while spewing hatred toward Jews—and all with impunity?

A wide-open border with 10 million unaudited illegal immigrants?

Once beautiful downtowns resembling Nairobi or Cairo—as paralyzed mayors spend billions without a clue how to remedy the self-created disaster?

Fast food drive-ins priced as if they were near-gourmet restaurants?

In truth, this apparent rapid cultural, economic, and political upheaval is well into its third decade. The disruptions are the results of the long-term effects of globalization and the high-tech revolution that brought enormous wealth into the hands of a tiny utopian elite. Almost overnight, every American household became a consumer of cellular phones and cameras, laptop computers, social media, and Google searches.

We then entered into a virtual, soulless world of hedonism, narcissism, and the cheap, anonymous cruelty of click-bait, cancel culture, doxing, ghosting, blacklisting, and trolling. The toxic COVID lockdown and the DEI racist fixations that followed the George Floyd death only accelerated what had been an ongoing three-decade devolution.

By 2000, a former market of 300 million American consumers was widening to a globalized 7 billion shoppers—at least for those mostly on the two coasts, whose expertise and merchandising were universalized in megaprofit high-tech, finance, investment, media, law, and entertainment.

Heather Mac Donald Girling the Boy Scouts Progressives notch another victory in their war on American institutions.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/girling-the-boy-scouts

The Boy Scouts of America has a Chief Diversity Officer & Vice President of Diversity and Inclusion. The organization requires all Eagle Scouts to earn a badge in diversity, equity, and inclusion. It admitted girls to its program for 11- to 17-year-old boys in 2019 and changed the name of that program from the Boy Scouts to Scouts BSA. The word “boy” has been routed from the organization’s promotional materials and replaced with “youth,” as in: “For more than 100 years, Scouting programs have instilled in youth the values found in the Scout Oath.”

Does it matter, then, that the Boy Scouts of America has now extirpated the last use of “boy” found in its entire portfolio—the “boy” in “Boy Scouts of America,” the name of the parent organization? It does. That the Boy Scouts cannot tolerate even an atavistic use of “boy” reveals how powerful the impulse is to efface males from our culture. The transformation of the Boy Scouts of America into Scouting America is an object lesson in the incapacity of traditional institutions to withstand progressive takeover.

The need for an entity that valorizes males, or that merely acknowledges their existence, is greater today than when the Boy Scouts was founded in the early twentieth century. The British war veteran Robert Baden-Powell despaired at the lost boys he saw in London’s slums, seemingly deficient in the Victorian virtues of honesty, hardiness, and self-reliance. Baden-Powell envisioned an organization that would combine boys’ craving for heroism with a code of chivalry, wrapped in the lure of the outdoors. He and his North American counterparts understood masculinity as self-sacrificing and ennobling. Chief Scout Citizen Theodore Roosevelt reminded the American Boy Scouts in 1915 that “manliness in its most rigorous form can be and ought to be accompanied by unselfish consideration for the rights and interests of others.” Baden-Powell wrote that the Scout must ask himself, when forced to choose between two courses of action: “ ‘Which is my duty?’ that is, ‘Which is best for other people?’ ”

The value of an all-boys organization was self-evident to the Boy Scouts’ founders and to the Scout leaders who followed them. Masculine comradeship underlies males’ willingness to undertake military and civic sacrifice. Boys compete with one another, torment one another, but also sometimes elevate one another. They seek adult males to emulate—ideally their fathers but, in the absence of their own father, a father figure embodying masculine virtue. That father figure can even be imaginary; boys’ aspirations are fired by tales of male courage and the accomplishment of great feats.

“As-a-Jew” Jews Are Nothing New The long and pernicious history of anti-Zionist Jews. by Kenneth Levin

https://www.frontpagemag.com/as-a-jew-jews-are-nothing-new/

“As-a-Jew” has become a widely used term for Jews who publicly denounce Israel and even call for its dissolution but commonly preface their condemning the Jewish state with assertions that they speak “as Jews.” The intent is typically to convey that their anti-Israel stance is consistent with Jewish morality and sensitivity, which their pro-Israel co-religionists are supposedly betraying.

Among the more well-known examples of as-a-Jew Jews who directly or indirectly promote Israel’s demise are members of groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow, which ally themselves with Hamas-affiliated organizations in their militating for dissolution of the Jewish state. Numerous individuals, including Peter Beinart and Judith Butler, have virtually made careers of plowing the same field.

Since the Hamas massacre of Israelis on October 7, 2023, and the Israeli invasion of Gaza to dismantle Hamas and prevent its promised endless repetition of that slaughter, as-a-Jew Jews have parroted Hamas in its claims of an Israeli “genocide” in Gaza. They have done so even though the ratio of civilian to terrorist casualties in Gaza is the lowest ever recorded in a conflict in which one party has – in violation of international law – imbedded itself in urban populations and used those populations as human shields. As-a-Jew Jews cast this embrace of Hamas propaganda as an expression of their more profound Jewish morality.

But the superior morality as-a-Jew Jews ascribe to themselves predates, of course, October 7. Its foundational thesis is that Jews are uniquely disqualified from any right of national self-determination and are remiss in asserting and clinging to such a right. Proper, moral Jewish behavior dictates, according to these people, that Israeli Jews accept becoming a minority in an Arab-dominated state. It dictates allowing the descendants of those Palestinians who fled the 1947-48 war – a war which they and their Arab allies initiated to quash creation of a Jewish state in a small part of Mandate Palestine – to return to what is now Israel and to transform the territory between the Jordan and the Mediterranean into the twenty-third Arab state “from the river to the sea.” The as-a-Jew proponents of this course characterize their envisioned entity as a “binational state,” but it would inevitably be an Arab majority state. These righteous as-a-Jews are no doubt cognizant of how well religious and ethnic minorities – whether Christians or Yazidi or Druze or Muslim Kurds – are treated in the great majority of the twenty-two current Arab states. Yet they have no qualms in subjecting the seven million Jews of Israel to similar treatment.

CHAPTER 29: Gnosticism, the Frankfurt School, and Freirean Education Space Is No Longer the Final Frontier—Reality Is by Linda Goudsmit

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/27945/chapter-29-gnosticism-the-frankfurt-school

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

The reader will recognize the unmistakable voice of Gnosticism in ideological Marxism and the myriad Marxist species attacking America and its children in schools today. Political Marxism, which focuses on social agency (an individual’s independent capability or ability to act on one’s own will) and class conflict, was reconstituted as cultural Marxism by the Frankfurt School (Chapter 15). Its members launched the Marxist Cultural Revolution against America in 1935. To understand the foundations of Frankfurt School tactical maneuvers, particularly social change through education, a 2009 article written by Timothy Matthews is very instructive. “The Frankfurt School: Conspiracy to Corrupt”[i] begins with a prescient quote by English Catholic historian Christopher Dawson:

Western civilization at the present day is passing through a crisis which is essentially different from anything that has been previously experienced. Other societies in the past have changed their social institutions or their religious beliefs under the influence of external forces or the slow development of internal growth. But none, like our own, has ever consciously faced the prospect of a fundamental alteration of the beliefs and institutions on which the whole fabric of social life rests…. Civilization is being uprooted from its foundations in nature and tradition and is being reconstituted in a new organisation which is as artificial and mechanical as a modern factory. —Christopher Dawson. Enquiries into Religion and Culture (1936), p. 259.

Basically, the Frankfurt School believed that as long as an individual had the belief—or even the hope of belief—that his divine gift of reason could solve the problems facing society, then that society would never reach the state of hopelessness and alienation that they considered necessary to provoke socialist revolution. Their task, therefore, was as swiftly as possible to undermine the Judeo-Christian legacy. To do this they called for the most negative destructive criticism possible [Marxist Critical Theory] of every sphere of life which would be designed to destabilize society and bring down what they saw as the ‘oppressive’ order. Their policies, they hoped, would spread like a virus, ‘continuing the work of the Western Marxists by other means’ as one of their members noted.

Want More Unity And Freedom? Try Returning To Constitutional Federalism Gary M. Galles

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/07/29/want-more-unity-and-freedom-try-returning-to-constitutional-federalism/

The current electoral cycle has featured a political culture in which candidates and their partisans claim to be advancing unity, but the primary form of the unity advanced is agreement among some that they want what does not belong to them or to dictate what others can do, and that they want government to “make it happen.” Unfortunately, that is not the kind of widespread unity that benefits “we the people.”

That is what recent events, from the attempted assassination of Donald Trump to Joe Biden’s argument for why he was staying in, then getting out, or the race, to Harris’s promises to unify people by giving them even more federal “something for nothing” have only turbocharged.

But as long as the dominant political culture remains unchanged, and even more so if it intensifies, all those self-depictions of being unifiers will remain empty promises. If we really wanted more unity in the sense used outside current politics — general agreement, rather than some who agree to harm others for their purposes — we would be well advised to revisit the federalism designed in our Constitution, because of the limits that places on the latter usage.

At America’s creation, a decentralization of power — a federal system, rather than a national system, (more accurately termed “The States, United solely for specified joint purposes,” than “The United States”) — played a key role in protecting Americans’ liberties from infringement. That also allowed more unity at the federal level by eliminating many fights over who could exercise federal power to over-ride the choices of citizens and their governments that were closer to home.