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September 2024

Normalizing Atrocities Landmarks of shame. by Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/normalizing-atrocities/

Hamas’ orgy of rape, murder, and callous, indiscriminate cruelty such as mutilation, torture, burning alive, and beheadings that began last October 7 and is continuing almost a year later, marks an escalation extreme even by the standards of that blood-stained region. Morally horrific have been the “protests” on prestigious U.S. university campuses, abetted by simpatico, or cowardly, professors and administrators. These riotous displays also feature property damage, record-breaking assaults against Jews, and chants explicitly or implicitly calling for another Holocaust, and celebrating the Nazis’ Final Solution.

Yet another landmark of shame has been the covert and overt support for Hamas by European governments and the E.U., including America’s president who for electoral gain poisoned the materiel support given to Israel, and is still pressuring Israel’s government to come to an agreement with genocidal murderers, instead of destroying them and degrading their capacity to slaughter more innocent Israeli citizens.

What the West has done is to normalize unspeakable atrocities, and legitimize blatant antisemitism that in the postwar period used to be a hatred mainly typical of marginalized political freaks. How does that transformation––from a widely proscribed and condemned hatred, to one exuberantly flaunted during protests, and legitimize by government policies––happen? And what has to change to put such beliefs back into the realm of cranks and conspiracy mongers?

The first question has a general answer found in humanity’s universal practice of dehumanizing enemies. Historically, human beings’ default stance toward strangers and those different from one’s tribe is distrust and dislike, if not hatred. The idea of our elite’s “citizen of the world” cosmopolitanism arose in ancient Greece, but parochial loyalties and hatreds remained powerful in Greek poleis. The tendency to prefer those like ourselves, whether culturally, politically, ideologically, or ethnically, is particularly obvious today in political factions, and ideological identity politics. Like James Madison’s “factions,” this tendency is “sown in the nature of man.”

A byproduct of this sorting is some level of dehumanization. In a relatively peaceful society such as ours today, the “other” is typically identified linguistically by insulting or demeaning epithets, on the left many of them compounds sporting the suffix “-phobic.” Sometimes metaphors using animals or insects make the dehumanization explicit. All such insults, however, don’t necessarily lead to mass murder or other atrocities. Pace wannabe censors, words are not violence. But heinous actions by definition are, and such crimes invariably call on a catalogue of dehumanizing epithets.

The pro-Hamas protests and display of support, however, are extreme even by the standards of advocacy apparent during the antiwar protests in the Sixties or during the post 9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. For example, antiwar activists, many of them Marxists, did give aid and comfort to the enemy, lied about the actions of our troops, and worked to discredit the war in the minds of voters and Congressmen.

Fair Debate Moderators Would Have Fact-Checked Harris on These Misleading Claims By Alex Welz

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/fair-debate-moderators-would-have-fact-checked-harris-on-these-misleading-claims/

The ABC anchors never disputed any of Vice President Kamala Harris’ claims.

Guns

On gun control, the vice president claimed, “We’re not taking anybody’s guns away” and pointed out that both she and her running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, are gun owners.

In late 2019, though, Harris publicly claimed, “We have to have a buyback program, and I support a mandatory gun buyback program.” Neither moderator probed deeper into her sudden policy shift on the position.

As a senator in 2019, Harris signed onto a bill that would have banned so-called “assault weapons,” a category that encompasses the most commonly owned rifle in America, the AR-15. And at a rally just a month ago, Harris vowed to sign into law a ban on such weapons if she’s elected in November.

The moderators failed to raise Harris’s record in the Senate and the positions she’s taken on the stump this cycle.

Abortion

The moderators also passed up an opportunity to drill down on what, if any, abortion restrictions Harris supports, allowing her to simply deny that abortions were ever performed in the final trimester.

“I absolutely support reinstating the protections of Roe v. Wade,” said Harris when asked if she would support any restrictions on abortion.

Although Trump remained uncommitted on vetoing a prospective national abortion ban, Harris refused to oppose abortion in “the eighth month, ninth month, seventh month” when challenged directly by the former president, simply replying, “C’mon.”

“Under Roe v. Wade, you could do abortions in the seventh month, the eighth month, the ninth month,” Trump said. Harris interrupted him: “That’s not true.”

Roe v. Wade requires a “health exception” up until the point of birth. But the definition of “health” under that framework extends to “mental health, financial concerns, and familial circumstances,” according to the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute.

China’s Weapons of Choice: First Wuhan Covid, now Fentanyl-Laced Drugs by Lawrence Kadish

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20932/china-weapons-fentanyl

We can debate the economy, decry the border mocked by illegal immigrants, and step around the criminally deranged allowed to stagger through our streets, but it is the deliberate and calculated effort to destabilize our nation through fentanyl that is the dagger thrust toward the heart of America.

In a national survey conducted by the respected polling company McLaughlin & Associates, it was revealed that a third of those voters asked acknowledged they know of someone who has been harmed by fentanyl. Consider that number: over 100 million people have seen the devastating impact of this drug. It reflects a crisis that makes the past plagues of heroin and cocaine a side show.

Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) Administrator Anne Milgram acknowledged as much earlier this year when she stated:

“The shift from plant-based drugs, like heroin and cocaine, to synthetic, chemical-based drugs, like fentanyl and methamphetamine, has resulted in the most dangerous and deadly drug crisis the United States has ever faced.”

As presidential candidate Donald Trump connects with the American people on issues vital to our shared future, he needs to pledge as central to his next administration the defeat of the fentanyl scourge stalking our land. To do so will require him to confront the global supplier of that poison: China.

The New UK Government’s Anti-Israel Policy Is a Disgrace by Con Coughlin

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20926/uk-anti-israel-policy

The pretence that the UK’s new Labour government has moved away from the blatant anti-Semitism that was rife under former leader Jeremy Corbyn has been brutally exposed by the actions of David Lammy, the party’s new Foreign Secretary.

It was during Corbyn’s stint as Labour leader that his party faced constant accusations of anti-Semitism. A damning report produced by the Jewish Labour Movement in 2019 said the party harboured “endemic, institutional anti-Semitism” and that there was “overwhelming evidence that anti-Semitic conduct is pervasive at all levels of the party.”

Having been a close political ally of two prominent Labour politicians accused of anti-Semitism, it is hardly surprising therefore that two of Lammy’s first initiatives since his appointment as Labour’s new foreign secretary in July have been aimed at discrediting Israel.

His [Lammy’s] first act was to withdraw the British government’s official objection to attempts to persuade the International Criminal Court to issue an injunction for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on war crimes charges.

At the same time Lammy confirmed that the UK was to restore its funding to UNRWA, the UN agency responsible for supporting Palestinian refugees, after support for the organisation was withdrawn by a number of countries — including the US — over claims its staffers were directly involved in the October 7 attacks carried out by Iranian-backed Hamas terrorists against Israel.

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/hamas-israel-attack-united-nations-unrwa-0ec8d325

Lammy has now added to his anti-Israel stance by suspending a number of UK arms contracts to Israel, a decision that was announced on the same day that Israel buried the latest group of hostages to be murdered by Hamas terrorists, a decision that was denounced as “shameful” by Netanyahu.

Anti-Semitic Rioters Clash with Police Outside Presidential Debate Venue By Eric Lendrum

https://amgreatness.com/2024/09/11/anti-semitic-rioters-clash-with-police-outside-presidential-debate-venue/

On Tuesday night, a mob of anti-Israel rioters descended on the debate hall in Philadelphia where former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) met for the first time in the campaign.

According to the New York Post, the crowd clashed repeatedly with nearly 100 police officers in riot gear as the candidates debated inside the National Constitution Center. Leaders of the mob claim that at least three of them were arrested.

Police used their bikes to create makeshift shields with which to push the rioters back, while rioters wore keffiyehs, devil masks, and other forms of face coverings. At least one rioter ignited a red flare. Although other protesters were present, expressing opposition to other matters such as abortion and President Trump himself, only the anti-Israel crowd was left by the end of the night, with the outbreak of violence scaring all of the other protesters away.

During the debate, Harris shifted her position dramatically by declaring that she has always supported Israel’s right to defend itself ever since the deadly terrorist attacks by the Islamic group Hamas on October 7th, 2023, which killed over 1,400 Israelis.

President Trump attacked her for her past anti-Israel stances, saying she “hates Israel,” while also criticizing her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (D-Minn.) for his anti-Israel statements.

The issue of Israel has proven to be a divisive one in the presidential campaign for the last year. Following the attacks on October 7th, anti-Semitic protests and riots have sprouted up all over the country, particularly on college campuses, with young Americans and Muslim Americans overwhelmingly demanding the destruction of Israel, using the anti-Semitic chant “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

A Forgettable Warped Debate The sappy Harris won the visuals; the grouchy Trump likely the issues. But the real losers were ABC and its two partisan moderators, Muir and Davis. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2024/09/12/a-forgettable-warped-debate/

The September 10th presidential debate went down as expected. Summed up, it was Sappy and the Blob pile on Grouchy.

The swarmy and evasive Kamala Harris preened, posed, and proffered empty platitudes.

The ABC moderators proved they were predictably and shamelessly biased.

And an irate Donald Trump confirmed that he was too touchy and easily triggered.

Harris’s instructions were not to explain her agenda. She never defended disowning policies that she had embraced as a lifelong, self-confessed, “woke” “radical.”

Instead, Harris’s threefold strategy was simple enough—and it mostly worked.

One, goad Trump as a coward and racist. Then smile and call for unity, kindness, and an end to such name-calling.

Harris’s orders were to zero in on hair-trigger irrelevancies that would incite and sidetrack the thin-skinned Trump.

So, Harris claimed his massive rallies were failures, crackpot—and worst of all, boring!—as she falsely added that weary attendants left early.

All that was missing from her adolescent putdowns was Barack Obama’s earlier convention speech obscenity that Donald Trump supposedly suffered from undersized genitalia.

In Harris’s upside-down, projectionist world, ex-president Trump caused the Biden-Harris disastrous skedaddle from Afghanistan.

He was accused of being mostly responsible for the effects of the global COVID-19 plague that killed over 100 million.

Trump, Kamala and the Very Online election From childless cat ladies to cat-eating immigrants, why is there so much BS in this presidential contest? Brendan O’Neill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/09/11/trump-kamala-and-the-very-online-election/

EXCERPT

Even though they clashed on big issues – including the economy and abortion rights – the debate felt strangely substance-free.

It is the hollowness of the contest that means such thin fare as childless cat ladies and cat-eating immigrants can dominate the headlines.

My advice to the candidates: get off the internet. Worry less about what will get you likes from people who haven’t seen sunlight in months, and more about what America’s hard-working families want and need. Forget cat-eating immigrants and cat-loving billionaires, and talk to real people, in the real world, most of whom have dogs anyway, and children. From the economy to housing to the border, America has many crises, and the people deserve a vision for how to fix them. There are 55 days left – up your game.

Christina Buttons, Christopher F. Rufo Chaos in Aurora How the federal government subsidized the migrant madness in suburban Colorado.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/chaos-in-aurora

Aurora, Colorado, is normally a quiet, nondescript suburb 30 minutes outside Denver. In recent months, however, the city has been at the center of a national scandal.

Beginning last year, a large influx of Venezuelan migrants, some of them members of the notorious Tren de Aragua street gang, reportedly had “taken over” a series of apartment buildings in Aurora—and unleashed terror. Last month, Venezuelan migrants were allegedly implicated in an attempted homicide, an arrest of purported gang members, and shocking security footage that showed heavily armed men forcibly entering one of the apartments. In response to the chaos, police mobilized en masse and vacated one of the complexes after the city, alleging code violations, deemed it uninhabitable.

An obvious question: How did members of Venezuelan gangs suddenly find themselves in suburban Colorado? To answer this, we have conducted an exclusive investigation, which leads to a troubling conclusion: the Biden administration, in partnership with Denver authorities and publicly subsidized NGOs, provided the funding and logistics to place a large number of Venezuelan migrants in Aurora, creating a magnet for crime and gangs. And, worse, some of the nonprofits involved appear to be profiting handsomely from the situation.

The story begins in 2021, when the Biden administration signed the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) into law, allocating $3.8 billion in federal funds to Colorado. The City of Denver, which had declared itself a “welcoming city” to migrants, drew on this reservoir of money to launch its Emergency Migrant Response resettlement program, with the goal of housing and providing services to a massive flow of migrants.

Denver, in turn, signed multimillion-dollar contracts with two local NGOs, ViVe Wellness and Papagayo, to provide housing and services to more than 8,000 predominantly Venezuelan migrants. These NGOs are run, respectively, by Yoli Casas and Marielena Suarez, who, according to professional biographies, do not appear to have previous experience in large-scale migrant resettlement.

Nevertheless, the city flooded them with cash. According to public records, between 2023 and 2024, ViVe Wellness and Papagayo received $4.8 million and $774,000, respectively; much of this funding came from the Migrant Support Grant, which was funded by ARPA. Then, in 2024, ViVe secured an extra $10.4 million across three contracts, while Papagayo received $2.9 million from a single contract to serve migrants; two of those five contracts were awarded to implement the Denver Asylum Seekers Program, which promised six months of rental assistance to nearly 1,000 migrants.

Liz Cheney Has It Backward: Never-Trumpers Would Have Hated Reagan, Too

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/09/12/absolutely-no-chance-cheney-and-other-never-trumpers-would-have-supported-reagan/

Liz Cheney – who recently endorsed Kamala Harris, a person Cheney described as a “radical liberal” just four years ago – now says there is “absolutely no chance” that Ronald Reagan would support Donald Trump.

She has it exactly backward. It’s people like Liz Cheney and the cabal of other never-Trumpers who never would have supported Reagan when he ran in 1980.

“Donald Trump doesn’t stand for any of the things that Ronald Reagan did,” Cheney said. “It’s another place where I would urge my Republican colleagues … to really look at Donald Trump’s policies, to really look at the danger that he presents,” Cheney said in an interview on ABC News’ “This Week.”

Cheney’s claim that Reagan didn’t support Trumpian policies is demonstrably false.

In his first term, Trump enacted pro-growth tax cuts, started eliminating regulations, and built up the nation’s military after years of neglect by Democrats. He appointed conservatives to the Supreme Court. He championed the working class.

In Reagan’s first term, he did likewise.

Reagan called the Heritage Foundation’s 1980 “Mandate for Leadership” – a massive guide to conservative policymaking – the bible for guiding his administration and handed it out to every Cabinet official. Trump enacted two-thirds of the recommendations contained in Heritage’s 2016 “Mandate.”

Here’s the fact check that ABC didn’t give Kamala Harris

https://nypost.com/2024/09/11/opinion/heres-the-fact-check-that-abc-didnt-give-kamala-harris/?utm_campaign=iphone_nyp&utm_source=mail_app

During Tuesday night’s debate, ABC News moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis interrupted Donald Trump five times to “fact-check” his answers.

They did the same to Kamala Harris … never.

The vice president was allowed to skate through the debate without substantive follow-up questions or pushback on some of her obviously false claims.

So since ABC didn’t do its job, here are some of the fact checks they should have made:

Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris listens as former President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a presidential debate at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on September 10, 2024.AFP via Getty Images

Kamala claim: “As of today, there is not one member of the United States military who is in active duty in a combat zone in any war zone around the world, the first time this century.”

Fact check: Our troops in Middle East are absolutely in a combat zone, under attack from Iran, which the Biden-Harris administration has allowed to grow more aggressive in its use of proxies. In January this year, three US soldiers in Jordan were killed by a drone attack from an Iran-aligned group, and dozens of others have been wounded in similar strikes.

Kamala claim: “What you’re going to hear tonight is a detailed and dangerous plan called Project 2025 that the former president intends on implementing if he were elected again.”

Fact check: The Heritage Foundation, an independent think tank, produced Project 2025, not the Trump campaign. Trump has repeatedly said he wasn’t involved in its writing, does not believe in its policies and won’t implement it.