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August 2024

Kamala’s Bait-And-Switch: Progressivism For Socialism

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/08/23/kamalas-bait-and-switch-progressivism-for-socialism/

If you’re one of the shrunken number of people who have bothered to watch the Democratic National Convention, you will by now certainly know it’s been long on rhetoric, and incredibly short on policy specifics. That’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

On Thursday night’s final evening of the Democratic National Convention, the party’s candidate and current Vice President Kamala Harris didn’t release a party platform. So “our democracy,” as the Dems like to call it, apparently doesn’t come equipped with any policy promises. Just a candidate, who received zero votes in any primary.

The truth is, the increasingly far-left Democratic Party doesn’t want anyone to know that it plans to push the nation even further to the socialist side of the scale because they know it won’t sell with average Americans who still think the ol’ U.S. of A. is a special place.

As such, it’s no surprise Harris has been a bit gauzy about what she intends to do if elected. Why, it’s almost as if the Dems are hiding something from us.

And they are. As one DNC speaker put it, “we got 70 days to act right, y’all. After 70 days, we can go back to acting crazy, right?” Followed by an answer from one of the assembled panelists: “Right.”

That’s it. Just try to act normally for the next two months or so. Win the election, then all bets are off. A “democracy” built on lies wins.

So what will Harris do for the next two months? Pretend her agenda is no different than the one that the DNC has already adopted.

Kamala Harris Picks Terror Supporter as “Liaison” to American Jews by Daniel Greenfield

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20888/kamala-harris-jewish-liaison

A member of John Kerry’s team under President Barack Obama, whose biased attacks on Israel and support for Iran and Islamic terrorists in Israel helped lead to the current regional crisis, [Ilan] Goldenberg had spent the years leading up to October 7, 2023 doing everything possible to make the Hamas attack happen.

He had urged that more money should go into the Hamas territory and argued that Israel should allow in workers from Gaza. “You used to have 25,000, 100,000 Gazans working inside Israel. That needs to happen again.” That led to Oct 7.

Harris’s new Jewish “liaison” opposed every single pro-Israel move by both Republicans and Democrats, whether it was moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, or even cutting off aid to the “pay-for-slay” program of the Palestinian Authority. Instead, he urged anti-Israel moves, including a unilateral recognition of a “Palestinian” state on Israel’s territory.

Goldenberg had been a vocal proponent of the Iran nuclear deal, and attended an event by National Iranian American Council (NIAC): the Iran lobby. He had argued that, “In the aftermath of a successful nuclear deal, U.S. relations with Iran should shift from that of an adversary to that of a competitor.”

And Goldenberg had been part of the team that was responsible for and had defended the Obama administration’s opposition to Israel at the UN.

Previous Jewish liaisons were usually involved with Jewish communal life and could speak to a variety of issues. Goldenberg is simply an anti-Israel activist whose only issues are empowering Iran and Hamas.

Instead of selecting someone from the Jewish community or any of her political aides, Harris chose someone whose sole function will be to justify her anti-Israel policies to the Jewish community, and who will filter any efforts by the Jewish community to push back against them.

During the 2021 battles with Hamas, Goldenberg explained why Biden was only pretending to support Israel.

Lies, deceit and manipulation with the aim of empowering Hamas and destroying Israel.

The Kamala campaign and her political allies are leading a fundamental break with Israel, even before the election, while disguising it with happy talk for the benefit of some of their donors.

The appointment of one of the most persistently hostile foreign policy figures as a ‘liaison’ to the Jewish community sends a powerful message that this administration will be as anti-Israel as him and that Kamala will reconfigure her relationship with American Jews around her anti-Israel policies. Not even Obama went that far. What does it say that Kamala is already doing it now?

The Return of History: Liberal Values and Global Realities Only when we understand the fragility of liberal democracy will we be properly motivated to defend it. Zak Schneider

https://quillette.com/2024/08/21/the-return-of-history-liberal-values-and-global-realities-ukraine-russia-europe/

My socialisation into polite liberal society—my crunchy, Quaker-school education and my progressive cultural milieu in a Northeastern American metropolis—helped to forge my worldview. I was, after all, the product of a culture and a generation in which the liberal world presided over the most peaceful and prosperous societies in the history of humanity. Liberalism seemed to be the natural order of things. I failed to appreciate that my experience was born of a unique moment in human history, and that my enculturation represented a break with normal human existence.

Rather than people competing in conquest and blood, as was the case for nearly all of human history, postwar liberal democracies relied upon consent and converging economic incentives to a greater degree than at any previous time. In this new world, it was taken for granted that liberal values would appeal to anyone given the choice, and reorient people towards economic interdependence and international cooperation. Western societies were free and prosperous, so after the Cold War, many Western commentators and analysts naturally assumed that those newly liberated from tyranny would want to emulate them.

The time I spent living and working in a small Baltic country bordered by an aggressively imperial neighbour forced me to reassess the assumptions with which I was raised. Lithuanians understand that the default state of human beings is not cooperation and humanist values. They were therefore not surprised that, after the Cold War, some actors continued to defy economic self-interest in the name of ideology and festering resentment, bucking the trend of liberalisation.

A failure to appreciate this reality is where well-intentioned liberals like me went wrong.

The British state ‘Blob’ has declared war on Israel Civil servants have blocked new arms sales to Israel – even before the Labour government changes policy. Mick Hume

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/08/21/the-british-state-blob-has-declared-war-on-israel/

The powerful UK network of woke, unelected civil servants and officials known as ‘the Blob’ has become notorious for trying to subvert democracy at home, defying the previous Tory government on everything from Brexit to immigration policy.

Now the Blob is spreading its anti-democratic tentacles internationally, pressing its allies in the Labour government to abandon Israel, which is fighting against Islamist terrorists for its survival as the only democracy in the Middle East. The Blob is so blinded by its loathing of Western-style democracy that it seems prepared, effectively, to declare war on Israel.

A UK Foreign Office official has just made news headlines by resigning over British arms sales to Israel. Mark Smith, who worked in counter-terrorism at the British Embassy in Dublin, reportedly sent an email to top civil servants and government advisers declaring it was his ‘duty as a public servant’ to protest against alleged Foreign Office complicity in Israeli ‘war crimes’ in Gaza.

‘Each day we witness clear and unquestionable examples of war crimes and breaches of international humanitarian law in Gaza perpetrated by the state of Israel’, he wrote. Smith said he had told ministers and officials to stop British arms sales, but they had refused to follow his advice, so he had to resign.

The political arrogance of this obscure embassy official, in demanding that the elected UK government must do as a supposed ‘public servant’ says, is matched by the wilful ignorance of his view on the war in Gaza. The one ‘clear and unquestionable’ fact that should be evident through the fog of war is that Israel is fighting an existential battle against the genocidal, Jew-hating death cult of Hamas, which has vowed to repeat the pogrom of 7 October ‘again and again’ if it gets the chance.

A ban on UK arms sales might not make much material difference to the war effort. But it would signal a further Western retreat from defending Israel (already evident in the US and the EU), and leave the world’s only Jewish state even more isolated internationally.

Smith’s decision to flounce out of the Foreign Office and take his civil-service pension with him might make him look like a lone protester. In truth, the Blob has been working to stop Britain aiding Israel since the war began – and the Labour government appears to be taking its orders.

Vote for School Choice on Election Day Parental freedom in education as an election issue is a good bet. By Larry Sand

https://amgreatness.com/2024/08/22/vote-for-school-choice-on-election-day/

As I noted in 2022 and 2023, school choice, where applicable, should be a campaign issue. With untold numbers of national, state, and local candidates on the ballot in November, voting for parental freedom is a winner. While this cause is usually associated with Republicans, Democrats who are not beholden to the teachers’ unions should also get on board.

Keri Ingraham, a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute, highlights numerous success stories of pro-school choice legislators. In March, Texas saw six representatives ousted who voted against parental freedom. The Texas runoff election a few months later found three more representatives opposed to school choice voted out of office.

In Kentucky’s primary election in May, the two Republican representatives who received the most money from the teachers’ unions lost by 44 and 48 points each.

In Tennessee, after a bill to expand a school voucher program failed, Gov. Bill Lee went to work endorsing candidates who favored expanding school choice. His effort was successful, as 12 out of the 15 candidates he endorsed were victorious in the state’s primary election on August 1.

In Missouri, voters chose six pro-school choice candidates in their August 6 primary election, a clear sign of the strategy’s effectiveness.

Corey DeAngelis, a senior fellow at the American Federation for Children, adds that three Republicans in the Idaho House who had the most support from the teachers’ unions lost in the primary election, while their opponents all supported school choice.

Who Is ‘Destroying Democracy in Darkness?’ Have those who lectured us about democracy in danger now decided to save it by destroying it? By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2024/08/22/who-is-destroying-democracy-in-darkness/

The 2023-2024 campaign season is not just the strangest on record, it’s also arguably the most anti-democratic.

Ostensibly, the Democratic Party has claimed over the last decade that Donald Trump posed a continued and existential threat to the republic.

That allegation subsequently justified a variety of anti-democratic means to neuter his first two presidential candidacies, his presidency, and now his third and final run for the White House.

A near decade ago, we witnessed the 2015-2016 Hillary Clinton/Democratic National Committee/FBI-assisted effort to plant the false accusation of Trump-Russian collusion to warp the 2016 election.

That gambit centered around the fraudulent Steele dossier and nearly fatally crippled the Trump 2016 campaign. That hoax would later sidetrack 22 months of his presidency before being proven a fantasy.

On the eve of the 2020 election, the left next birthed the Russian laptop disinformation campaign.

That hoax also warped a presidential debate with false charges that Hunter Biden’s own incriminating laptop was once again the work of Russians seeking to conspire with Trump.

Those unusual efforts continued during the Biden administration.

For the first time in election history, the allies of one campaign sought to persuade some 16 states to try to remove a major party’s likely nominee from their primary and general election ballots.

The plan was to smother a Trump third presidential bid in its infancy, and thus once again not allow the people to accept or reject his candidacy.

Nearly simultaneously, four federal, state, and local prosecutors filed dozens of felony charges against Trump.

They all shared some strange similarities.

These indictments would likely not have been filed, had Trump not run for office. Nor would any of them have proceeded had Trump not been a controversial conservative Republican seeking reelection.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to Drop Out of Presidential Race By Haley Strack

Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will drop out of the presidential race by the end of the week, and is considering endorsing former president Donald Trump, according to multiple reports.

Kennedy will likely announce the decision, which was first reported by ABC News and confirmed by the New York Times, when he addresses the nation on Friday from Arizona, calling it quits as his campaign coffers dwindle. The speech will be “about the present historical moment and his path forward,” Kennedy’s campaign said this week.

Tim Walz Accepts VP Nomination in Speech Combining Misleading Attacks on GOP with Cheery Optimism By Brittany Bernstein

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/tim-walz-accepts-vp-nomination-in-speech-combining-misleading-attacks-on-gop-with-cheery-optimism/

Minnesota governor Tim Walz accepted the Democratic nomination for vice president on Wednesday night in a speech before the party’s convention that was filled with falsehoods about Republican positions on a number of issues, from abortion to entitlement reform.

Walz, like other Democrats who spoke at the convention in previous days, falsely suggested that access to IVF may be in danger. He spoke about his and his wife’s experience with using fertility treatments to conceive their two children.

“I’m letting you in on how we started a family because this is a big part of what this election is about: freedom,” he said.

However, there is no evidence that Republicans are looking to ban IVF. In fact, the GOP platform passed at the party’s own convention last month expressly stated support for IVF. “We will oppose Late Term Abortion, while supporting mothers and policies that advance Prenatal Care, access to Birth Control, and IVF (fertility treatments),” the platform reads.

Walz touted how he has “protected reproductive freedom” as governor of Minnesota, where he says, “We respect our neighbors and the personal choices they make and even if we wouldn’t make those same choices for ourselves, we’ve got a golden rule: mind your own damn business.”

He went on to claim “some folks,” like former president Donald Trump and Senator J. D. Vance, “just don’t understand what it takes to be a good neighbor.”

Mike Gonzalez A Decade of Ignorance Ferguson inaugurated ten years of lies about race in America.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/ferguson-inaugurated-ten-years-of-lies-about-race-in-america

This month marks the tenth anniversary of events that changed the trajectory of this country, and not for the better. On August 9, 2014, Darren Wilson fatally shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Riots erupted the next day and continued for months nationwide. Black Lives Matter exploited the mayhem it had helped cause, helping it swell into a malign global force. The activist model pioneered at Ferguson has had a lasting impact on American politics, as this year’s pro-Hamas demonstrations prove.

The catalyzing event was a personal tragedy, but from a journalistic perspective, it should have been pretty ho-hum. Wilson was a cop, and Brown had just robbed a convenience store, violently overpowering the clerk. When Wilson tried to stop him in the street, Brown scuffled with him, reaching inside his police SUV through the driver’s window. Brown then ran off and Wilson gave chase. At some point, Brown turned around and charged Wilson. That was when Wilson killed him.

The entire encounter, the Department of Justice later said in a revealing report, lasted two minutes. And that’s how long the story would have lasted, too, except that Wilson was white and Brown was black, and had just turned 18 less than three months earlier.

Those with political motivations manipulated the tragedy in several ways. They claimed that Brown had tried to surrender, raising his hands and pleading with Wilson, “Hands up, don’t shoot!” but the policeman still wantonly gunned him down. That fed the narrative that the killing was part of an epidemic of police killing unarmed blacks in America. And this, in turn, reinforced a theme that the country is “systemically racist” and oppressive.

Iran’s Ayatollahs bully the US by destabilizing Saudi Arabia Yoram Ettinger

http://bit.ly/4dzWi9V

Since the February 1979 Ayatollahs’ Islamic Revolution – which transformed Iran from “America’s policeman in the Gulf” to the epicenter of anti-US terrorism – Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has attempted to erode the US strategic posture, regionally and globally, including Latin America.  Thus, the IRGC has agitated and radicalized the Shiite communities in the pro-US, oil-producing, Sunni Arab countries, while training Shiite terrorists and providing them weapons and explosives. The IRGC has focussed on Bahrain and Saudi Arabia (Bahrain’s patron), and especially on Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province, which is the home of the bulk of Saudi oil reserves, as well as, the main Saudi refinery and export terminal of Ras Tanura, where the Shiites – who are a 20% minority in Saudi Arabia – constitute a majority.  Moreover, the Ayatollahs claim title to the major offshore Al-Durra oil and natural gas field, currently controlled by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

The Saudi perception of Iran’s Ayatollahs

*The Saudi Crown Prince, Muhammed bin Salman (MBS), the de facto ruler of the kingdom, does not allow the March 2023 resumption of the Saudi-Iranian diplomatic ties to smother the reality of the inherently subversive, terroristic, anti-Sunni and imperialistic track record of Iran’s Ayatollahs. MBS is cognizant of the fact that the Ayatollahs’ 1,400-year-old Shiite ideology – as stipulated in their 1979 Constitution, school curriculum, mosque sermons, and documented in their systematic rogue policy – mandates the toppling of all pro-US, oil-producing, “heretic” Sunni regimes, especially Saudi Arabia, which controls Mecca and Medina, the two holiest Moslem sites, and rivals the Ayatollahs for the dominance of the Moslem World and the Persian Gulf.

*He is aware that Saudi Arabia is a top prize for the Ayatollahs, since it constitutes the chief component of the Persian Gulf’s 48% of global oil and natural gas reserves, a focal point of global economy, in general, and the price at the pump, in particular. Furthermore, toppling the pro-US Saudi regime would accord the anti-US Ayatollahs control of the Arabian Peninsula, which dominates much of the shipping route between Europe and the Far East.