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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Fascists All the Way Down Meet historical fascism’s true heirs.Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fascists-all-the-way-down/

In the famous anecdote usually attributed to Bertrand Russel, a scientist lecturing on the earth’s position in the solar system is corrected an old lady who says the earth is actually supported by a giant turtle. When the scientist asked what supports the turtle, she triumphally answered, “It’s turtles all the way down!”

Since the Twenties and the rise of Italian Fascism and German Nazism––which eventually become the main referent of the word––the term has become an all-purpose question-begging epithet so promiscuously abused in the Thirties that, as George Orwell said in 1944, “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies something not desirable.”

As the word’s use by progressives and leftists––at this point synonyms for “Democrats”––have shown for decades, their understanding of conservatism’s principles and tenets is limited to the infinite regression of “fascists all the way down.” In this election season, they are binging 24/7 on “fascists” with plenty of “Hitlers” thrown in to ratchet up the evil quotient with evocations of genocide and the horrors of the death camps.

The problem is not just the blatant abuse of history, truth, and language, which since ancient Athens has been a habit typical of representative governments that give widely diverse citizens freedom of speech. The more pertinent and dangerous point about this misuse of “fascist” as a political smear is that it obscures how much American progressivism has in common with historical fascism––an oversight made worse by the left’s assumption that conservativism and capitalism are ideologically and organically fascist, and thus profoundly more unjust and dangerous than socialism and other forms of statism.

In reality, as Jonah Goldberg explained in his 2008 book Liberal Fascism, fascism is a phenomenon of the left, not the right––an “inconvenient truth,” Goldberg writes, “if ever there was one.”

It’s All About Control: The Elite Plan for the Great Food Reset By Janet Levy

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/11/it_s_all_about_control_the_elite_plan_for_the_great_food_reset.html

Besides ‘degrowth’ and ‘net zero,’ one other dangerous buzz phrase being bandied about by proponents of the Great Reset is “nature-positive food systems.”  The stated goal of moving to new food systems is to reduce nitrogen emissions, livestock production, and meat consumption.  This is to be achieved by consuming plant-based products, lab-grown foods, and insects (as a source of protein).  The moot question, however, is whether such a change is at all necessary?

The U.N., the World Economic Forum (WEF), the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and other NGOs would have us believe so.  These institutions are controlled by the global elite, who aim to create monopolistic markets for themselves and enslave people, turning them first into captive consumers without choice, and eventually, without free will.  So, the U.N. and its co-conspirators have manufactured a food crisis, and by linking it to their other fabrication — an exaggerated climate crisis — they are using it to reset the world’s food system.

Their plan to “transition to net zero, nature-positive food systems by 2030” translates into a war on traditional farmers.  Unable to absorb the added costs of new regulations and controls, small, independent producers are being squeezed out of farming.  Their place is being taken by multinational agribusinesses.  Unchecked, these multinationals will dominate farming in a decade or two.

The Futile Quest for Equity By Robert Weissberg

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/11/the_futile_quest_for_equity.html

Being a pedestrian in New York City can be dangerous. As one headline put it, “Last Years was Deadliest in NYC Streets in Nearly a Decade.” Reckless drivers killed 124 pedestrians, 50 motorcyclists, and 19 bike riders. New York City has tried to reduce these fatalities with lower speed limits, cameras to catch those running red lights and clearly marked pedestrian safety zones.

Surprisingly, the city recently reversed course and eliminated the $250 fine for jaywalking or crossing against the signal. Why invite more deaths and injuries? According to city council member Mercedes Narcisse, “Laws that penalize common behaviors for everyday movement shouldn’t exist, especially when they unfairly impact communities of color,” and since in 2023, 90% of the issued tickets targeted black and Latino pedestrians.

Repealing the jaywalking law is about equity, as understood politically, and requires that all outcomes must reflect population proportionality, and if they do not, government must level them, or at least make it appear that differences are nonexistent. So, though we may be unable to stop unsafe behavior, government can keep such unequal behavior out of the public eye by decriminalizing it, even if imposing equity disproportionately harms the intended beneficiaries. Note. blacks nationally experience death when walking at a 118% higher rate than whites. The New York City law does not help anybody. It probably hurts blacks the most. The only beneficiaries are those made uncomfortable by encountering statistics depicting blacks and Hispanics in a bad light. Why not end poverty by eliminating economic data?

This example is only one of many equity crusades. The city has also relaxed enforcing the law against those not paying subway and bus fares since culprits were disproportionately black and Hispanic. That such fare avoidance may bankrupt the public transportation vital for the city’s poor is irrelevant. Furthermore, as in other cities, “broken windows” policing where minor offences such as public intoxication have been sharply reduced since too many blacks and Hispanics were arrested. New York City’s district attorney Alvin Bragg has “reduced” crime by not prosecuting offenders though actual crime remains rampant.

The equity battle goes beyond decriminalization. Many schools today no longer disproportionately punish blacks for misbehaving, regardless of their bad behavior, while adjusting test standards to eliminate gaps in academic performance.

Steyn on the Personal Toll of Lawfare

https://x.com/Hillsdale/status/1837909084084793523?utm_campaign=hc_current&utm_medium=email&_hsenc=p2ANqtz–

“You prove your innocence, but at the end you’re a charred, smoking lump, and so is your career and so is your savings account.” In this excerpt, Mark Steyn reveals the risks of facing an American justice system where the process is the punishment. Steyn’s entire talk and other events from Hillsdale’s 2024 Constitution Day Celebration are now available to watch. 

Remember the J6 Political Prisoners Eileen F. Toplansky

I always wondered how the Nazis and the communists could just take over a country of millions and then destroy the bodies and souls of the people.

In America, it is happening before our very eyes. In fact, the American Gulag is sadly alive and well.  At the Gateway Pundit site article titled “J6 Political Prisoner Jake Lang Thrown in Permanent Solitary Confinement”of October 24, 2024, one learns that

“The Biden-Harris regime has passed a red line that hallmarks all totalitarian regimes: persecution and torture.

“January 6 Political Prisoner Jake Lang has been thrown in solitary confinement permanently for posting a video from a secret contraband cell phone of himself praying, Holy Bible in hand, on the floor of his prison cell.

“Lang is a January 6 patriot and founder of the community fundraiser for all of the J6ers, SponsorJ6.com, who has spent nearly 1,400 days behind bars without a trial [emphasis mine]. Jake’s treatment has become an example of the egregious overreach of a weaponized federal government. For almost four years, he’s been incarcerated as a political hostage of the Biden-Harris regime, enduring unimaginable hardship, including over 900 days in solitary confinement.

Patriots are being urged to call the following and demand that all January 6 detainees be moved back into their own cell block C3B in the Central Treatment facility so as to avoid being further mistreated.

Thumb on the Scale Public trust in science is eroding, thanks to the scientific establishment’s recent forays into partisan politics. By Joel Zinberg M.D.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/waning-public-trust-in-science

Americans’ trust in the scientific establishment took another hit last week with the revelation that a prominent advocate of adolescent transgender treatments had suppressed the findings of her federally funded research showing that puberty blockers did not improve mental health in children with gender distress. Johanna Olson-Kennedy worried that the study’s findings would be “weaponized” by opponents of the transgender treatments she promotes. This reinforces suspicions that scientists and their publications are less interested in the search for truth than they are in promoting progressive political causes.

This advocacy extends to partisan politics itself. In only the second presidential election endorsement in its history, Scientific American urged readers to “Vote for Kamala Harris to Support Science, Health and the Environment.” Two months earlier, Nature, the prestigious British science publication, extolled Harris’s background as the daughter of a scientist and her support for diversity initiatives in STEM, a single-payer health insurance program, abortion rights, and climate change, enthusing that her candidacy has “stirred optimism among scientists.”

Both publications broke with their traditional nonpartisanship in 2020 when they endorsed Joe Biden. Similarly, the normally nonpolitical New England Journal of Medicine published an October 2020 editorial castigating the Trump administration and unfavorably comparing its pandemic response to that of China, which “chose strict quarantine and isolation.” Trump administration officials, the editorial alleged, were “dangerously incompetent. We should not abet them and enable the deaths of thousands more Americans by allowing them to keep their jobs.”

Rx for America by Lawrence Kadish

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21074/rx-for-america

In the autumn of 2024, there are many things to consider about the future of our nation, as citizens of the greatest nation on earth will soon be exercising their right to choose our next leader.

Among the challenges:

The fate of 21st century nations will rise or fall based on their access to energy. Those leaders who fail to see this simple but stark reality will preside over the decline and fall of their nation.

As a result, the United States faces a crucial decision this Election Day: Which president will recognize that truth and act upon it in a world where enemy states seek to control strategic energy reserves?

Fracking technology has made the United States not only capable of being energy independent, but an exporter of energy to allied nations equally concerned about their fate. Rather than allow the full might of America’s fossil fuel industry to power our society, however, the Biden-Harris administration has preferred to find reasons to curtail, inhibit, and harm this industry’s ability to do so. The Biden-Harris Administration apparently prefers to pursue a “green energy” agenda dictated by so-called “progressives,” with wind and solar alternatives that could not possibly meet the demands of an energy-hungry nation.

The energy policies of this White House are reflective of a still-larger failure at a time when our nation finds itself at a critical turning point in history. No country has ever spent or taxed itself into prosperity. Washington needs to use the next four years to lower taxes and dispense with the federal regulations that are now throttling growth.

Christopher F. Rufo How Gender Ideology Captured the State Department An executive order prompted the agency to recast its mission.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/how-gender-ideology-captured-the-state-department

The U.S. Department of State is charged with advancing American interests abroad through complex and delicate diplomatic missions, as well as maintaining the safety of those missions and the Americans serving them.

The institution’s lodestar should be the national interest, but under President Joe Biden, the State Department has demoted that critical objective in favor of a new global agenda: to spread radical gender theory to foreign nations.

The shift began at the top. President Biden and, in turn, the apparatus beneath him led America’s leftward charge on the world stage. Upon taking office in 2021, the administration used the previous year’s racial unrest as a pretext to issue a slew of executive orders and memoranda entrenching left-wing ideologies in all levels of the federal government, under the guise of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” or DEI.

As part of this initiative, the White House required each federal agency to submit detailed DEI progress reports regularly, appoint a chief diversity officer, and create “Agency Equity Teams,” whose leaders were tasked with “delivering equitable outcomes.” These requirements contributed to what the president called “an ambitious whole-of-government equity agenda.”

The gender component of this agenda spread to the State Department through the president’s “Memorandum on Advancing the Human Rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Intersex Persons Around the World.” Published in February 2021, this memorandum directed State and other agencies to monitor closely and report on the “LGBTQI+” policies of our allies, to “broaden the number of countries willing to support and defend” the radical Left’s understanding of gender—for example, by funding pro-transgender “civil society advocates” in order to shift public opinion in those countries—and to tie in the principles of gender theory to America’s foreign-aid programs.

If necessary, the memo maintained, agencies should use “the full range of diplomatic and assistance tools” to ensure foreign governments’ compliance with this agenda, including “financial sanctions, visa restrictions, and other actions.”

Women Deserve Better Than Hillary … or Kamala By J.B. Shurk

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/10/women_deserve_better_than_hillary_or_kamala.html

Kama-lama-ding-dong’s got the blues.  This was supposed to be her time.  This was supposed to be her rise.  She was supposed to make her-story.  Instead, Kam-Kam’s on her way to an Election Night drubbing, a week-long bender, and a few months of solitude in celebrity rehab.  She should take Hillary Clinton along, too.  A period of detox and sobriety could do both some good.  And the American people would benefit from their prolonged absence from television news.

America will one day have a female president.  She will be smart, articulate, prudent, and brave.  She will treat her campaign for office as a chance to prove to the American people that she has their best interest at heart.  She will be thoughtfully prepared to answer any and all questions.  Nobody will say it’s “her turn” or pretend she is more talented than she really is.  Nobody will hold her to a lower or higher standard because of her sex.  She will rise to the top because she earns it.  Americans will listen to her speeches, watch how she conducts her personal life, and conclude that she is the right leader for the time.  And when she is elected, no one will mumble, “She won only because she’s a woman.”  She will win on her own merits.

The Democrats have done women no favors by pushing the candidacies of Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris.  Neither has the necessary disposition for holding the highest office in the land.  Both are rash and unwise.  They are selfish and unjust.  They are intemperate and vengeful.  They are self-conscious and uncertain.  They are unkind, impatient, and self-serving.  They exude no faith in God, inspire no hope in others, and display no courage.  They are weak in mind and soul and encourage such weakness in others.  They are unfit to lead.  They are not remarkable women.

That Democrat party elites have forced Hillary and Kamala on the American people shows how little they actually think of women.  Hillary is an inveterate liar and shameless shrew whose chief accomplishment in life has been to obtain enough dirt on Washington insiders to stay out of prison.  She won a seat in the U.S. Senate because New Yorkers pitied her when it became clear that her president husband is a lecherous creep incapable of moderating his own depravities.  Giving Hillary a prestigious government job after Bill’s Oval Office debauchery with an intern barely old enough to drink legally was a Hallmark card kind of way for the American people to say, “Sorry your husband humiliated you while you were first lady.”  Had voters known that Hillary was already scheming for the top job and only pretending to be wounded by Slick Willy’s philandering, they would have been much less likely to overlook her own personal qualities.  And they certainly were not hoping that Hillary’s presidential ambitions would one day return both immoral Clintons back to the White House!  

Who Is Actually Running the Country? by John Richardson

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21040/who-is-running-the-country

Members of both American political parties and other concerned observers have been asking for a while now, “Who’s actually running the country?”

More often it seems as if is a cadre of unelected bureaucrats – a faceless politburo – who uphold the law or not, according to political expediency or whim.

American author and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy has called this group “a machine.”

Are “open borders” legal or not? Are immigration laws being violated or not? Are illegal aliens legal or not? Are prosecutions of presidential candidates within a month of a presidential election “election interference” or not? Were the deliberate lies of former US intelligence officials to the US public about the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s laptop actionable “election interference” or not?

What we should probably be asking, as we head to November, is: “Do we really want to go on living like that?”

Members of both American political parties and other concerned observers have been asking for a while now, “Who’s actually running the country?”

Answers include:

Former President Barack Obama, who, in November 2020, said on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert:

“People would ask me, knowing what you know now, do you wish you had a third term? And I used to say, “You know what? If I could make an arrangement where I had a stand-in, a front man or front woman, and they had an earpiece in, and I was just in my basement in my sweats looking through the stuff, and then I could sort of deliver the lines, but somebody else was doing all the talking and ceremony, I’d be fine with that.”