Displaying posts published in

January 2025

The Biden Era Wheezes Its Way to a Fittingly Deluded End By Jeffrey Blehar

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-biden-era-wheezes-its-way-to-a-fittingly-deluded-end/

Joe Biden just finished addressing the American people from the Oval Office, for the final time in his presidency. And at the end of it all, with this humiliatingly garbled ramble that read like the sort of delusional self-exculpatory fantasy his caretaker wife might whisper consolingly into his ear, Biden concluded his career much as he began it over half a century ago: as a venal, petty-souled fool in denial about his own limitations and failures. (We learned nothing tonight that we didn’t already know. Nothing was revealed.)

In a thick, slack-toned voice, stumbling over his words from beginning to end as he squinted at a teleprompter with vacant eyes, Biden slurred through the single most incoherent speech of his life. He began by taking complete credit for the breaking Israeli hostage deal with Hamas — which was to be expected — and then launched into a sleepy lecture awkwardly framed around the Statue of Liberty and how it was built to sway in the wind, much like America was built to be flexible enough to withstand his presidency. One marble-mouthed cliché after another poured from his half-opened maw, smooth featureless pabulum with all the texture and flavor of Gerber baby food. (Shall America “lead by the example of power or the power of our example?” An imponderable for the ages.)

He then turned to what was doubtless intended as the high-minded legacy section of his farewell speech: a warning against the new “oligarchy [that is] taking shape” before our very eyes, the “tech-industrial complex.” This limp attempt to invoke Eisenhower’s farewell address was followed by an equally tired rehash of every complaint the mainstream media and the Democrats have been rehearsing against Silicon Valley since they lost hammerlock control over it. (Both “disinformation” and “misinformation” were cited.)  Robber-barons and trust-busting were invoked as appropriate images to compare with the dangers posed by Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.

His delivery collapsed into utter incoherence near the end of the speech, as he rambled on about climate change and artificial intelligence and giving America a “fair shot,” before returning clumsily to his opening Statue of Liberty metaphor. Americans will remember nothing about it a day from now. Thus ends the Biden presidency.

Liel Leibovitz Radicals for Palestine Are Fundamentally Anti-American Championing violent, sectarian conduct in pursuit of their political goals, they stand in direct opposition to the nation’s core principles.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/pro-palestinian-protestors-intifadah-anti-american

Anyone who happened to amble by the downtown Manhattan courthouse in early December, just after a jury acquitted Daniel Penny—the former Marine who put Jordan Neely, a deranged and threatening fellow subway passenger, in a chokehold that led to his death—would have noticed something peculiar.

It wasn’t that the sidewalk was filled with protesters, or that they were chanting slogans that ignored the facts of the situation, presenting Neely—a mentally ill man with 42 previous convictions, including for violent assaults on the subway—as an innocent lynched by a malicious white vigilante for no reason other than his being black. It was, instead, that many of the protesters were wearing keffiyehs, the traditional Arab headwear popular with the pro-Palestine crowd, as well as pins or t-shirts featuring the Palestinian flag.

Approximately 5,674 miles separate southern Manhattan from northern Gaza, and neither Penny nor Neely had anything to do with Israel or the Palestinian cause. Why, then, would the activists who rushed to condemn Penny’s actions as racist adorn themselves with Palestinian paraphernalia?

The answer is stark: because “Palestine,” an entity that has never existed, has always been a codeword for chaos. For many activists, being “pro-Palestine” is not to support the creation of a national homeland for some Arabs side-by-side with the State of Israel; the Palestinians themselves, as former president Bill Clinton recently reminded us, have repeatedly rejected every U.S.-brokered attempt at independence. These radicals are pro-Palestine because they are anti-America, and because they champion violent, sectarian conduct that is anathema to our core values.

If that seems like an unfair characterization, consider Fatima Mohammed, one of the leaders of Within Our Lifetime, a cornerstone of New York’s “pro-Palestine” vanguard. “I pray upon the death of the USA on a public platform,” she tweeted on May 9, 2021, “but yolo [you only live once] I guess.” A year later, Mohammed gave a speech in midtown Manhattan, praying to Allah to grant victory to the jihadis. For her tireless advocacy of violence—against America, Israel, and the Jews—she was elected by her classmates to give the commencement address at the City University of New York’s law school graduation. She dedicated her talk to calling for a “revolution” against the “fascist” NYPD and the American armed forces, both of which, she argued, were merely tools of “white supremacy.”

Her views, alas, aren’t rare among the pro-Palestine crowd. Nerdeen Kiswani, another prominent activist, explained in a speech at a 2021 rally that she and her colleagues have a simple aim: “We don’t need tens of thousands of people to shut down and disrupt this city,” she said. “We have to up the stakes.”

Heather Mac Donald Can Trump Make America Safe Again? The new administration should return federal law enforcement agencies to their original missions.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/trump-administration-america-safety-law-enforcement

Upon being nominated in 2021 to head Joe Biden’s Justice Department, Merrick Garland announced that the DOJ’s top priorities would be “ensuring racial equity” and “meeting the evolving threat of violent extremism.”

The U.S. had just lived through race riots, mass looting, and the largest annual homicide increase in the country’s history. Americans were getting robbed at gunpoint while eating in restaurants; thieves were smashing trucks and SUVs into storefronts to make off with merchandise, cash registers, and ATMs.

But when Garland and his boss referred to violent extremism, they were referring to white supremacists. “The most dangerous terrorist threat to our homeland is white supremacy,” President Joe Biden said at Howard University’s commencement in May 2023, “and I’m not saying this because I’m at a Black HBCU. I say it wherever I go.”

He wasn’t kidding. “Our own intelligence agencies in the United States of America have determined that domestic terrorism rooted in white supremacy is the greatest terrorist threat to our Homeland today,” Biden said in September 2022 at a White House Summit on combating hate. The Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies regularly issued alerts about looming outbreaks of white supremacist violence. Those outbreaks never materialized, including those predicted for Election Day 2024.

Fighting largely phantom white supremacy was just one of the Biden administration’s obsessions that diverted it from the core duty of government: maintaining law and order. The Trump administration should reverse all identity-based policies from the Biden era and refocus federal law enforcement agencies on combating crime and illegal immigration. Doing so will guarantee an improvement in public safety.

The Biden administration made race and ethnicity the key factor in crucial criminal justice positions. By March 2022, 48 percent of Biden’s picks for U.S. attorney positions were black, though only 13 percent of the U.S. population is black.

This disparity would be worrisome enough in its own right: turning any irrelevant characteristic into a selection criterion guarantees an inferior pool of candidates. But given the academic skills gap, such a large racial preference means an even larger sacrifice of meritocratic standards. Twenty-two percent of black law graduates never pass the bar exam after five tries, for example, compared with 3 percent of white test takers. State bar associations are lowering pass scores on bar examinations in the hope of qualifying more black attorneys. Black LSAT scores and law school class rankings are at the bottom of distribution curve.

How ‘anti-racist’ policing let grooming gangs run riot The 1999 Macpherson report made police forces terrified of accusations of racism. Ian Acheson

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/01/15/how-anti-racist-policing-let-grooming-gangs-run-riot/

A couple of years ago, I was encouraged to apply to sit on a board that would help the College of Policing produce a new code of ethics. My unsuccessful application was perhaps fatally brief. When asked what attributes should be central to a new code, I replied, simply, ‘moral and physical courage’.

I was put in mind of this after the smouldering rape-gang scandal exploded into flames this month, fanned by the most networked man on the planet, Elon Musk. Now momentum is gathering behind calls for a national inquiry – and in particular, into the behaviour of the police. Why did the gatekeepers for public safety desert their posts?

The charge sheet is stark. In multiple grotesque examples of child sexual exploitation by organised gangs of men, police forces failed to act to safeguard victims and deliver justice. The reports and reviews, delivered piecemeal after various grooming-gang court cases, revealed staggering incompetence and callous indifference on the part of far too many police forces, from Thames Valley to South Yorkshire to Greater Manchester. There was a pattern to their failures. Their investigations were inadequate. They failed to see brutalised young girls as victims. And they put the protection of their reputations ahead of justice.

In each instance, the victims were predominantly white girls and the perpetrators were predominantly older, south Asian men, most of them of Pakistani heritage. The police should have responded by upholding the law and protecting the vulnerable regardless of the seeming racial, ethnic dimension to the offending. The actual response was very different. As Professor Alexis Jay’s 2015 report into child sexual exploitation in Rotherham revealed, 1,400 children were sexually abused and raped in the town between 1997 and 2013. Jay found that both the police and council staff were reluctant to confront the problem due to the ethnic origins of the perpetrators and the fear of being labelled racist. The lack of police action allowed the abuse to continue unchecked.

In Scandinavia, the Elites Freak Out about Trump’s Designs on Greenland Or pretend to. by Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/in-scandinavia-the-elites-freak-out-about-trumps-designs-on-greenland/

This is about Scandinavia, but let’s start with the Anglosphere. The other day, on his Talk TV show Piers Morgan Uncensored, the eponymous host discussed various topics with a panel whose most garrulous member was Kara Swisher, a stunningly obnoxious lesbian columnist – yes, even more obnoxious than Piers himself – whom I’ve never seen or read before but who obviously thinks that she’s brilliant and that everyone else is an idiot.

The subject of Trump wanting to acquire Greenland came up. It turned out that neither the slimy Piers nor the odious Kara had been aware until Trump began talking about Greenland recently (or, actually, resumed talking about it after having done so briefly during his first term) that the island is owned by Denmark. Nonetheless both of them had strong opinions about the issue. For Kara, Trump’s refusal to rule out the use of military force to annex Greenland was one more reason to call him a fool. But hey, at least Trump knew that Greenland is owned by Denmark.

For the rest of Piers’s panelists, as for many other stateside talking heads, the Greenland issue was mainly a cause for mirth. But let’s  move on to Scandinavia, where, for the most part, it was anything but.

“Just think of it for an instant,” wrote Maja Sojtaric in Norway’s Nettavisen: “an upcoming president of the world’s largest military power is willing to use his superior force to take over the territory of one of his allies.” Yes, commented Sojtaric, Trump is “easy to mock,” but “his wish to take territory from one of his allies is not a joke.” On the contrary, she warned, it’s “unbelievably dangerous. It destabilizes NATO. It ought to worry us here in Norway. A destabilization of NATO makes us extremely vulnerable.”

See For Yourself: Newsom Is All Smiles As L.A. Burns

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/01/16/see-for-yourself-newsom-is-all-smiles-as-l-a-burns/

Has there ever been a more reprehensible human being in charge of the once-great state of California.?

As fires were consuming homes and destroying neighborhoods – largely due to the criminal incompetence of Gov. Gavin Newsom, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, and the legions of hopeless inept leaders in the one-party state – Newsom seemed to be having the time of his life.

We can’t read his thoughts. But from his expressions, it’s as if this is all great news to Newsom because it gives him more time in the spotlight. He can’t seem to help himself but smile as the news media descend on Los Angeles, follow him around with cameras, let him bloviate, and make him the center of attention. The only time Newsom genuinely expressed anger and frustration was when responding to President-elect Trump’s criticism of his failed leadership during this crisis.

Newsom’s not the only one who seems delighted with his moment in the sun. The Castro-loving Bass, too, can’t seem to stop smiling at the massive devastation her party unleashed on her citizens.

This all should be a wake-up call for California voters to wipe the smiles off the faces of these “progressive” leaders who wasted massive amounts of taxpayer money set aside for fire prevention, left the state unprepared for a disaster they knew was coming, and then pointed fingers of blame everywhere but at themselves.

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, below are 23,000 words showing just what smug cretins these people are. All these are screenshots of events as Californians saw their homes, schools, businesses, churches, and livelihoods go up in flames.

The Deal: A Guide for the Perplexed by Seth Mandel

https://www.commentary.org/seth-mandel/the-deal-a-guide-for-the-perplexed/?utm_medium=email&_hsenc=

The emerging ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas is a perplexing document, because the strongest argument in its favor is that the agreement will earn Israel President-elect Trump’s gratitude. Since the value of that goodwill is by definition unknowable, the deal should be judged on its own terms.

Here’s what to expect, barring last-minute changes, and what it means for the future of the conflict.

The ceasefire would begin with Hamas releasing three Israeli hostages (likely to be American citizens) and Israel beginning to remove its troops from populated areas of Gaza. A week later, Hamas is expected to release four more hostages—at which point Israel will begin allowing Gazans to return to north of the Strip. According to the BBC, cars, animal carts and trucks would pass through an Egyptian-Qatari-operated scanner, while the people would go on foot.

The rest of the first phase would see, over the course of about a month, Hamas release another 25 or 26 hostages, most of whom are believed to be alive. Israel would continue facilitating the return of Gazans to the north of the strip while redeploying its troops out of Gaza—save for a half-mile buffer zone on its eastern and northern borders and in the Philadelphi Corridor in the south. Israel would also release about 1,000 Palestinian security inmates in Israeli jails. Of those, nearly 200 are in prison for murder or serving long-term sentences for violence. These would be sent to live outside of the Palestinian territories.

Israel and Hamas are supposed to negotiate the second phase of the deal as they implement the first phase. In the second phase, Hamas would release the remaining hostages in return for another to-be-determined number of Palestinian inmates in Israeli jails. Israel would withdraw from the rest of Gaza. A third phase would see Israel trade the bodies of deceased Hamas fighters in return for the bodies of deceased Israeli hostages.

The ADL Global 100: Index of Antisemitism® An estimated 2.2 billion people – 46% of the world’s adult population – harbor antisemitic attitudes. This is more than double the number of people surveyed a decade ago when ADL introduced the ADL Global 100.

https://www.adl.org/adl-global-100-index-antisemitism?utm_medium=email&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-

About the ADL Global 100

Conducted by ADL and coordinated with Ipsos and other research partners, the ADL Global 100 Index gauges levels of antisemitic sentiments through an index comprised of 11 questions that measure general acceptance of various negative Jewish stereotypes. Survey respondents who say at least 6 out of the 11 statements are “probably true” or “definitely true” are considered to harbor elevated levels of antisemitic attitudes. Respondents were from 103 countries and territories.

Negative attitudes toward Jewish people are one part of how ADL assesses levels of antisemitism. ADL also accounts for the number and nature of antisemitic incidents annually, polls of Jewish communities about their experiences with antisemitism, government policies and other factors. This shows how the fight against antisemitism requires countries to adopt and implement a whole-of-society strategy that involves all levels of government, corporations, academia, civil society and the public.

The Scourge — Or Not — Of “Ultraprocessed Foods” Francis Menton

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=5edc814ed7

“Ultraprocessed foods.” That sounds really bad. In fact, not just really bad, but really, really bad. Bad on a level with, maybe, “assault rifles” or “cis-heteronormativity.” Definitely, with a condemnatory name like that, “ultraprocessed foods” would be something that no sensible person would ever eat, or at least certainly not in large quantities.

The term “ultraprocessed foods” has been in usage for a while, but the frequency seems to have exploded everywhere in the past few months. Perhaps that has resulted from the naming of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to be the next Secretary of Health and Human Services. Kennedy has made a thing about proclaiming a health crisis in the U.S., which he asserts is substantially brought about by our “broken food system.” On November 15 — just after President-elect Trump tapped Kennedy to lead HHS in the new administration — The New York Times had a piece outlining Kennedy’s critiques of the “food system.” Number one on the list of Kennedy’s critiques identified by the NYT was “ultraprocessed food.”

After reading this, I thought it might be time for me to get on top of what this “ultraprocessed food” stuff might be. Is this something that you need to really be concerned about, or is it just another one of the usual scare tactics of the left to try to take more control of your life? The answer, as will not surprise you, is the latter.

The Hostage Deal Copes Realistically with a Nasty Situation Israel is still on the way to a win. P. David Hornik

https://pdavidhornik.substack.com/subscribe?utm_source=email&utm_campaign=email-subscribe&r=

In the war ignited by the October 7 massacre, Israel set two goals that were incompatible: retrieving all the hostages and destroying Hamas. I’ve only recently, with the help of a couple of analysts who have pointed this out, come to grasp the incompatibility. I was among those who kept believing Israel could achieve both those goals in tandem with each other.

In the 15+ months of this war so far (it’s still being waged as, at the time of writing, I hear explosions from Gaza 25 miles away), Israel has managed to militarily rescue seven hostages. An eighth was found by troops after his captors had abandoned him.

All of the seven who were military rescued were being held in apartments. Reportedly, after the rescue of four hostages from two apartments in June, all the hostages still being held in apartments were moved to tunnels. There, all of them are closely guarded by terrorists, possibly suicide terrorists. These captors can hear Israeli troops approaching and, if they do, will kill the hostages (and possibly themselves as well). That was what happened to the six Israeli hostages murdered in a tunnel in August.

Some say that, instead of prodding Israel into the current hostage deal at this stage, President Trump should have waited a few more days to take office and then have supported Israel in “starving out” Hamas. But “starving out” Hamas would mean the hostages—already on near-starvation diets and in very weakened condition—would get “starved out” too, and would be in further acute danger from a desperate and vindictive Hamas.

In other words, for those who want to see the hostages freed, something like the current deal is the only option.