NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

A Landmark on the Road to Decline What the Biden regime and its political operators don’t consider. by Bruce Thornton

Posted By on May 17th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-landmark-on-the-road-to-decline/

The normalization of antisemitic terror we have witnessed among protestors since the October 7 attacks on Israel is a portentous landmark on the West’s road to civilizational degeneration. Every dimension of our socio-political order––all three branches of the federal government, and many blue-state governments; popular entertainment and high-brow culture; mainline churches; corporate boards and C-suites; national security and defense agencies, and education from K-12 to universities–– has been corrupted by illiberal, if not antihuman ideologies that undercut the foundations both of our political freedom and equality, and the morality and ethics that nourish both.

We’ve known for decades that our educational systems have been failing to educate the young, even as politics, social fads, and culture war propaganda have replaced foundational skills like reading, writing, basic science, critical thought, and history. More inimical to learning is the illiberal attacks on First Amendment rights to free speech and academic freedom, and the enforcement of a rigid orthodoxy that punishes and “cancels” those who challenge the party line. Such a regime stifles truth and replaces history with false narratives that serve autocratic agendas.

The protests in support of Hamas, antisemitism, and genocide show how ignorant of basic historical facts are many students attending our most prestigious universities. Consider the historical terms like “imperialism” and “colonialism” incessantly chanted like mantras. They are now stripped of their meaning and reduced to question-begging epithets ––“mind-blockers” and “thought-extinguishers,” as the great historian of Soviet mass murder Robert Conquest describes them, which serve “mainly to confuse, and of course to replace, the complex and needed process of understanding with the simple and unneeded process of inflammation.”

“Inflammation” is exactly the purpose of similar clichés like “genocide,” “settlers,” “famine,” “disproportionate,” “Palestinian homeland,” and all the other slogans and chants we’ve heard over the last eight months from the callow, self-righteous protestors. But it’s not just ignorance of history, but also moral idiocy that afflicts the “activists” siding with sadistic killers

And how grotesque is the lack of self-awareness among affluent “snowflake” undergrads who want to trespass, destroy, assault, and burn, and then demand they be fed, accommodated, and never required to be held accountable by the police, district attorneys, their universities, or future employers? They are the products of the same pathologies to which Sallust, the 1st century B.C. Roman historian, attributed the Roman Republic’s demise: “decadence and hubris—the natural dividends of prosperity.” Just as in Rome, the same cultural malignities now dominate our civilization.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Geert Wilders to Join New Dutch Government “‘strictest-ever’ asylum policy” by Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on May 17th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/geert-wilders-to-join-new-dutch-government/

Last November, Dutch voters rallied for Geert Wilders. The PVV party became the largest party in the Dutch parliament. Normally that should have meant that Wilders, who has spoken out against Islamization and globalization, should have been on track to become prime minister. But after quite a few months of negotiation, there will be a coalition government. Wilders isn’t being allowed to be PM but he has announced a tough asylum policy and an end to the EU’s ‘green’ war on farmers.

And the EU, the media and the rest of the machine will do everything possible to stop it.

Dutch voters have come out over and over again against an invasion of their country.

According to November exit poll data, men and women, urban and rural, old and young voted for the far-right party.

In parts of the Netherlands, such as the northeast, the previous election — in which, due to pandemic precautions, 70-plus voters could cast their ballot by post — revealed a generational gap between older voters, who still backed traditional parties, and younger voters, who supported Wilders more often. “The children of PVDA-ers [Labor Party] have become PVV-ers,” said De Voogd, referring to the Freedom Party by its Dutch acronym.

As well as luring voters away from other parties, the Freedom Party tapped into a major new voter potential: Non-voters. Dutch voter analysis has shown that Wilders’ second-largest source of new votes — about 11 percent — had come from people who had abstained in 2021.

And this is the first time there’s a government that may actually act.

The Netherlands has today said it will opt out of European Union rules and bring in its ‘strictest-ever’ asylum policy following Geert Wilders’ shock election victory.

The parties said they would file a request to the European Commission for an opt-out on European asylum policy ‘as soon as possible’. People without a valid residence permit will be deported ‘by force if necessary,’ said the report.

FOREIGN POLICY, OPINION Comments turned off

Only America First Can Reverse the Global Chaos Caused by the Biden Administration It is undeniable that our world today is much more unstable and dangerous because President Biden abandoned President Trump’s successful America First national security policies. By Fred Fleitz

Posted By on May 17th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/17/only-america-first-can-reverse-the-global-chaos-caused-by-the-biden-administration/

There is only one word to describe the result of President Biden’s foreign policy: chaos.

Just consider how we have seen the Biden administration treat Israel, one of America’s closest and most important allies.

Biden officials have been far more critical of Israel than Hamas in the aftermath of the horrific October 7 Hamas terrorist attack, during which over 1,200 Israelis were brutally murdered. Biden officials haven’t been demanding that Hamas release the hostages it took during this attack or agree to an immediate cease-fire. Instead, they have been publicly pressuring Israel to stop the war in Gaza because this conflict is extremely unpopular with Biden’s progressive base and is hurting him in the polls.

Moreover, because of his differences with Israel over the war in Gaza, last week Biden said he was withholding weapons from Israel that recently were approved by Congress. But this week, the Biden administration said it was moving forward on a new $1 billion arms deal for Israel.

Adding to this confusion, the Washington Post reported on May 13 that the Biden administration is withholding sensitive intelligence on Hamas and is refusing to share this information until the Netanyahu government makes concessions to not launch a full-scale raid into the southern Gaza city of Rafah. This intelligence reportedly concerns the whereabouts of Hamas’s leadership and Hamas tunnels in southern Gaza.

Think about that. President Biden is actually withholding terrorism-related intelligence from a close U.S. ally while it is at war against a terrorist group.

And it gets worse. Iran fired over 300 missiles and drones at Israel on April 13, the first Iranian attack ever against targets on Israeli soil. There have been more than 150 attacks by Iranian proxies against U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria since October 2023. Yemen’s Houthi rebels have fired dozens of advanced drones and missiles against ships in the Red Sea since last October. And the Biden administration’s refusal to enforce U.S. sanctions against Iran caused its revenues to be $71 billion greater by last fall than they would have been if Trump-era sanctions had been enforced.

These troubling developments in the Middle East are part of a broader deterioration of global security during the Biden administration, including the disastrous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, an increase in Chinese military provocations against Taiwan and in the South China Sea, a surge in North Korean missile launches, major advances in Iran’s nuclear weapons program, and a new anti-Western “axis” comprised of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Brittany Bernstein :Pro-Palestinian ‘Anarchists and Communists’ Claim Responsibility for Vandalism at University of California President’s Office

Posted By on May 17th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/pro-palestinian-anarchists-and-communists-claim-responsibility-for-vandalism-at-university-of-california-presidents-office/

A pro-Palestinian group of “anti-colonial anarchists and communists” says it was behind a recent vandalism attack against the University of California Office of the President.

The group claimed to have released hundreds of cockroaches and defaced the building’s exterior in a Sunday morning assault.

“With the Aurora Borealis above us and the martyrs in our hearts, we attacked the UC Office of the President in solidarity with the Palestinian Resistance,” read a post by the “sacred black and red” on Indybay. “Using a fire extinguisher filled with red paint we covered the facade and smashed seven windows. Then, with access to the building, we released 500 cockroaches inside and emptied a second fire exintguisher [sic] onto the interior.”

However, while the president’s office confirmed to the San Francisco Standard there was damage done to its building, it did not confirm cockroaches had been released into the building. Police are investigating the incident as a “hate-related crime.”

The alleged vandals said they “finalized the act by leaving a water jug inscribed with ‘Bonk’ at the scene — an homage to the militants of Cal Poly Humboldt and the international student encampment movement.” The comment was an apparent reference to a pro-Palestinian protester at Humboldt’s California State Polytechnic University who hit a police officer with an empty water jug in April.

The vandals went on to post a screed about the UC system’s “entanglements” with Israel that calls for the abolition of the UC system.

“The University’s true fascist form has been put on full display, and hiding behind hollow progressive ideals is no longer an option for the dead-eyed desk killers,” the group wrote. “Abolish the UC showed us in 2020 that the University of California is nothing more than a settler colonial project, that their police are protecting the gates of colony, where knowledge is produced and captured by the State to only dig its claws deeper into the flesh of Indigenous lands here and abroad.”

“Let us not forget the UC became co-ed to breed settlers and populate the west coast,” it added. “Speaking only to the UC’s material connection to the Zionist entity obfuscates the extent of the political, theoretical, and cultural entanglements between the UC and the Israeli State. The University does not simply fund Israel, it creates Israel, and launches this white-colony into the post-modern Empire. What does divestment mean when the very essence and foundation of the institution is a fascist regime? Where does Zionism begin and end in the University of California? Is divestment an oxymoron? The UC must be abolished.”

EDUCATION Comments turned off

California University President Placed on Leave after Approving Israel Boycott:Zach Kessel

Posted By on May 17th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/california-university-president-placed-on-leave-after-approving-israel-boycott/

The president of Sonoma State University in California was placed on an indefinite leave of absence two days after he sent an email to the university community announcing that he had acceded to campus encampment organizers’ anti-Israel demands.

Ming-Tung “Mike” Lee issued a statement on Tuesday informing SSU students, faculty, and staff that, after standing for 19 days, the anti-Israel encampment on the university’s lawn had achieved at least one of its goals: an academic boycott of Israel.

“Over the past week, senior administrators met with students and faculty to listen to and discuss student demands. On Friday, May 10 and Tuesday, May 14, I joined the group to hear directly from them,” Lee wrote.

He went on to address the new academic boycott:

SSU will not pursue or engage in any study abroad programs, faculty exchanges, or other formal collaborations that are sponsored by, or represent, the Israeli state academic and research institutions. SSU also commits to immediately updating any SSU pamphlets and SSU-hosted websites that may still be circulating or searchable and to remove hosting or linking to any pamphlets, flyers, or brochures advertising the study abroad program where students are encouraged to study abroad in Israel. SSU will make it clear to any students that any such programs are terminated until further notice and not simply suspended.

Lee also indicated his desire to seek “divestment strategies” in accordance with the encampment organizers’ demands and wrote of his personal condemnation of what he called Israel’s “genocide.”

OPINION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Left Bows Low and Cries ‘Allahu Akbar’ Phil Shannon

Posted By on May 17th, 2024

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/islam/2024/05/the-left-bows-low-and-cries-allahu-akbar/

Odd bedfellows are often found in politics or war, but is the secular Left’s lovey-dovey relationship with the anti-Semitic, genocidal Hamas fanatics in Gaza and, indeed, Islam generally, really such an odd pairing? We are entitled to speculate because there appears  no limit to what it would take for the woke Left to say, along with a majority of other Australians, ‘to hell with Hamas, to hell with Islam’.  Neither the bestial nature of the Hamas terror attack on Israel and the imported Jew-hate that consequently erupted here in Australia, nor the Muslim teen jihadi’s stabbing of a Sydney bishop, have proved to be a threshold too far for the modern Left.

No matter what depths of depravity are reached by Islam, it remains ring-fenced by the impregnable force-field of ‘Islamophobia’, one of the top sins in the Woke catechism and zealously enforced by the Left, even though ‘Islamophobia’ should more accurately be called ‘Islamo-awareness’ rather than an ‘irrational’ fear of Islam. Whilst Islamo-Fascism has a long history (one common enemy in particular united both the  Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and the Fuhrer, for example), Islamo-Leftism is a relatively new phenomenon in a Left which has traditionally been wary of, indeed hostile to, ‘radical Mohammedans’ (in Trotsky’s words) and their milieu.

So, what is going on with the infatuation of the Left with the barbaric, Jew-killing, gay-hating, women-raping, head-lopping religious fundamentalists of the Islamic faith, and their often silently supportive, more ‘moderate’, brethren?

Islam’s demographic march

Like the rest of the West, Australia is beginning to undergo Islamicisation.  In 1966, Muslims made up fewer than one in a thousand Australians (Islam did not statistically reach even the 0.1 per cent population needed to warrant its own religion category in the Census of that year).  From that invisibly low base, however, the acceleration has been rapid.  By the 2021 Census, Muslims in Australia had reached a population of 813,392 or 3.2 per cent of the total population.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Biden’s $7.5 Billion EV Charger Plan Backfires Spectacularly

Posted By on May 17th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/05/17/bidens-7-5-billion-ev-charger-plan-backfires-spectacularly/

At a Rose Garden event this week, President Joe Biden bragged that “Thanks to my Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, we’re building a network of 500,000 charging stations all across America.”

This is about as believable as the story of his uncle’s cannibalistic demise.

The truth is that Biden’s five-year, $7.5 billion effort to jump-start the development of electric vehicle charging stations is doing the opposite. The money has so far produced only eight new charging stations in two years. The overall growth rate in EV charging stations has slowed since he signed that bill. And earlier this month, Tesla gutted its EV charger efforts, dealing the entire scheme a huge blow.

In other words, this is shaping up to be a massive waste of taxpayer money.

The slow rollout of the Biden-approved EV stations is in part due to cumbersome rules and regulations required to access the money. That’s no surprise.

But it’s actually having a broader negative impact, slowing the growth of EV stations overall.

In the two years before Biden signed that infrastructure bill, the number of EV charging stations grew by roughly 20,000, according to data compiled by the Department of Energy. In the two years since, just 16,000 stations went online, even as EV sales accelerated. The result is that the ratio of charging stations to EVs is about half what it was in 2021. The administration says not to worry, because the buildout will soon take off. We aren’t holding our breath.

But even if the stations do start to roll out, these numbers don’t account for the large number of charging ports that aren’t working at any given time because of communication failures, power outages, software bugs, or other problems with the complicated tech.

A survey by J.D. Power found that almost 21% of drivers using public charging stations reported malfunctions. And when a Wall Street Journal reporter went around to 30 fast-charging stations in the Los Angeles area, she encountered problems at more than 40% of them.

BOOKS Comments turned off

‘The elites are hoarding the American Dream’ Batya Ungar-Sargon on the establishment’s betrayal of the working classes.

Posted By on May 17th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/05/15/the-elites-are-hoarding-the-american-dream/

Whatever happened to the American Dream? Only a generation ago, millions of Americans still held to this vision of meritocracy. The US prided itself on being the land of opportunity, where the rigid class system of the old world could be overcome. But as Batya Ungar-Sargon lays out in her new book, Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women, the dream has collided with a new reality. An oligarchy has emerged, propping itself up by keeping the working classes down. The laptop class thrives, while hardworking Americans are increasingly struggling to get by.

Batya discussed all these issues and more on the latest episode of The Brendan O’Neill Show. What follows is an edited extract from the conversation. Listen to the full thing here.

Brendan O’Neill: What has happened to meritocracy in America?

Batya Ungar-Sargon: What’s happened in the US is tragic. Americans still like to see ourselves as a classless society. We want to believe that we’re a nation that has abandoned the burdens of aristocracy. Part of how we left those burdens behind was by believing that the US should adopt a meritocratic drive. We pushed the idea that a person’s talents should raise them up as high as possible. But this drive for meritocracy has effectively calcified into an oligarchy of credentialism.

What I mean by this is that certain kinds of talents, such as being able to sit and study for a very long time, can pretty much guarantee you a successful life in America. But the talents that we need much more, like being able to drive a truck for 12 hours straight or care for the elderly, are treated as though they are worthless. The people who do these tasks – the working classes – are treated like they’re nothing.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Russia, China and Iran Must Not Seize Control of Sudan by Con Coughlin

Posted By on May 16th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20640/sudan-control-russia-china-iran

Moscow has undertaken a radical change in its involvement in the Sudanese conflict, with the Kremlin now providing al-Burhan’s Islamist-aligned SAF its “uncapped” military support.

In return, Moscow is hoping the Sudanese leader will honour a deal struck in 2020 to allow Russia to establish a naval base in Port Sudan, a move that would enable the Russian navy to threaten directly Western trade routes passing through the Red Sea.

If, as now seems likely, both Russia and Iran, together with China, succeed in deepening their foothold in Sudan, as well as gaining access to key maritime bases such as Port Sudan, they will be in a strong position to challenge the West’s ability to protect key shipping routes in the Red Sea.

Iran’s presence in Sudan, moreover, will present a major challenge to Israel: it will complete Tehran’s strategic encirclement of the Israelis.

The Western powers must act urgently to protect this pivotal African state from falling into the hands of hostile autocratic regimes, such as Iran, Russia and China, which seek to use Sudan as a base from which to maintain their assault of the West and its key allies in the region.

A modern-day “Scramble for Africa” is taking place in war-torn Sudan, where an unholy collection of hostile autocratic states, namely Iran, Russia and China, are competing for a stake in the country’s key resources, especially the all-important maritime base of Port Sudan in the Red Sea.

Back in the late nineteenth century, the original “Scramble for Africa” was the term coined to describe the efforts of European colonial powers such as Britain, France and Germany to expand their influence throughout the African continent. Their campaign of expansion proved so successful that by the outbreak of the First World War, only Liberia and Ethiopia remained free from the shackles of European colonisation.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up, by Abigail Shrier reviewed by Kay Hymowitz

Posted By on May 16th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/review-of-bad-therapy-why-the-kids-arent-growing-up

Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up, by Abigail Shrier (Sentinel, 320 pp., $30)

Abigail Shrier’s first book, 2020’s Irreversible Damage, launched the mother of all cancel campaigns. Because the book attributed the sudden and inexplicable rise in juvenile gender anxiety to social contagion rather than the activist-approved explanation of social progress, Shrier, an occasional contributor to City Journal, was branded a “transphobe.” Amazon employees demanded the company remove the book from its virtual shelves. Unlike the suits at Target, who briefly did exactly that, Amazon stopped short of cancelling the book and settled for banning any paid advertising. Despite growing questions about juvenile transgender treatment, including among practitioners, many libraries continue to treat Irreversible Damage as radioactive. Only last month, a Japanese publisher reneged on plans to publish the book, proving that, whether or not transgenderism is contagious, the urge to cancel those out of line with approved ideas unquestionably is.  

Shrier’s new book Bad Therapy, an astute and impassioned analysis of the mental-health crisis now afflicting adolescents, may cause a similar emotional meltdown in some corners of American culture. Shrier’s target is more expansive than it was in Irreversible Damage; she aims her fire at the therapeutic mindset that pervades not just the offices of psychologists and counsellors, but elementary, middle, and high school classrooms, best-seller lists, middle-class homes, and government agencies. It’s a pernicious development because a therapeutic mindset easily paralyzes kids’ natural defenses and resilience, hence the crisis we confront today. Assuming a Bad Therapy backlash comes, it is unlikely to be as heated as it was in the case of Irreversible Damage—therapists, who have the most to lose if Shrier’s analysis were to win out, are a more sedate crowd than trans activists—but one hopes that for the sake of the rising generation, any pushback won’t prevent people from heeding the warnings of this important book.