WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Empire Lost America is at its weakest point in at least a century, and China, as well as the rest of the world, notices.  By Max Morton

Posted By on October 22nd, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/21/empire-lost/

According to Russia’s Interfax news agency, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov recently announced, “Just like the overwhelming majority of other countries, Russia views Taiwan as part of the People’s Republic of China. This is the premise we proceed from and will continue to proceed from in our policy.” At the time of this statement, Russian forces were conducting joint naval exercises with Chinese forces in the Pacific—culminating in a 10-ship joint formation sailing through Japan’s Tsugaru Strait on October 18. 

This, following a series of unprecedented Chinese military aircraft incursions into Taiwan’s airspace, has rattled Taiwan and America’s other allies in the region, namely Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Brunei and Malaysia. During the first week of October, over 150 aircraft, including advanced SU-30 fighters and H-6 heavy bombers, flew into Taiwanese airspace. An unprecedented 56 tactical aircraft penetrated Taiwan’s airspace in a single 24-hour period on October 4, the highest single day total to date. 

China has already taken control of multiple islands claimed by these allies in an effort to access vast oil and natural gas resources, as well as project its military power in the contested territorial waters of the South China Sea. China’s ongoing trade dispute with Australia has also ratcheted up tensions in the region. 

The U.S. foreign policy establishment has rushed to assure Taiwan and its other allies that the United States intends to honor its regional security agreements. Of late, Joe Biden has publicly pledged to defend the Japanese Senkaku islands, which China claims as its territory. 

The Wall Street Journal reported on October 7 that several small U.S. Special Forces and Marine Corps detachments have been quietly training Taiwanese special military units to bolster the island nation’s defensive capabilities . . . a move which has all the appearances of an intentional U.S. tripwire in Taiwan. 

Recent Pentagon estimates have warned that China could retake control of Taiwan by force as early as 2027, but current events suggest a much shorter timeline. Much of America’s foreign policy establishment is convinced that China wouldn’t put at risk the 2022 Beijing Olympics scheduled for February, and that it fears the international sanctions and pariah status that would likely result if China invaded Taiwan. 

The problem with this analysis is that it is based on a Western worldview, which is to say one that does not account for actual Chinese interests. There is no guarantee that China is using the same equation or making the same calculations that western diplomats and intelligence agencies are making vis à vis Taiwan, or for that matter, the geopolitical status quo in the Pacific. 

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

State Department Celebrates ‘International Pronoun Day’ By Liz Sheld

Posted By on October 22nd, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/21/morning-greatness-state-department-celebrates-international-pronoun-day/

Here is what’s on 46 agenda today:

9:30am: The President receives the President’s Daily Brief

46:
State Department Celebrates ‘International Pronoun Day’
Democrats weigh slashing $200B in housing aid from spending bill
Dems toil to save SALT following last-minute scare
Democrats raise proposed IRS bank reporting threshold from $600 to $10K
Biden pitches unfinished economic agenda in personal hometown remarks
US, Israel to hold discreet discussions on reopening of US consulate in Jerusalem: report
Sinema pans tax hikes, throws new wrench in Dem spending plan: Report
Representatives erupt at committee hearing on holding Bannon in contempt: ‘Blah, blah, blah’
Over 40% of Afghan refugees at US bases are children, Pentagon says

Civil unrest:
Parents in Michigan sue to stop AG Garland going after them over protests
Shouting, threats, negative billboards and an influx of cash. This year’s school board races are like none before
Police recommend charges against four over Sinema bathroom protest
Climate Activists Refuse To Speak At DC Statehood Rally Because Jewish Groups Will Attend
Ivy League Firebombers Plead Guilty, Face 10 Years Under Terror Law
2 Chicago cops shot after officer accidentally fires gun during struggle with suspect: report
Mom Goes After Her Child’s School District Director Over Comments About ‘Wealthy White Women’
Virginia county is violating election law amid governor race, lawsuit claims
Chicago Mayor Lightfoot gets heat for requesting suburban police officers fill in for cops she may fire
NYC mayor ‘troubled’ by video showing unmasked officers forcibly removing masked subway commuter

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Anti-gun actor Alec Baldwin shot a woman to death By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on October 22nd, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/10/antigun_actor_alec_baldwin_shot_a_woman_to_death.html

Preliminarily, it is tragic that 42-year-old Halyna Hutchins, a rising cinematographer in Hollywood, died yesterday on the set of Rust, a movie being filmed in Santa Fe, New Mexico. My thoughts are with the loved ones she left behind. Having said that, I cannot escape a feeling that karma had a hand in this one because the finger on the trigger of the gun that killed Hutchins belonged to Alec Baldwin, a hysterical leftist who is fanatically opposed to the Second Amendment.

To give a sense of Baldwin’s hostility to gun rights, in 2018, the smug and constitutionally illiterate Baldwin had some harsh words for Dana Loesch, an NRA spokeswoman:

Despite his supreme arrogance, Baldwin clearly does not understand that the Second Amendment is not a mere “law.” It’s the expression of a right inherent in citizens of a free country.

But what was especially interesting about that tweet was that bit about Loesch stepping over dead bodies. As it happens, Loesch has never killed anyone. Indeed, at a guess, upwards of 99.9% of law-abiding American gun owners will go through life, not only not killing anyone, but also never even having to use their guns against another person. But Alec Baldwin killed someone with a gun. He has a body count.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Biden exposes himself on national TV By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on October 22nd, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/10/biden_exposes_himself_on_national_tv.html

No, he didn’t pull his pants down but he certainly let the awful contents of his brains hang out for all to see.

Last night, CNN held an invitation-only “town hall” for Biden in Baltimore. The audience was beyond friendly, the questions were obviously vetted, and Anderson Cooper was there to hold Biden’s hand. And still, as the RNC’s Twitter feed reveals, Biden repeatedly showcased his weirdness, incipient dementia, inability to lead, and sheer heartlessness. No wonder only 27% of likely voters are confident that Brandon…er, Biden is up to the job.

I must be honest here: I didn’t watch the town hall. I doubt many did. However, the good people at RNC Research did watch and the clips they shared are illuminating.

What caught everyone’s attention was the moment when Biden combined his creepy whisper with the “White supremacy symbol.” And yes, I know that was a 4Chan hoax, but leftists have used it to go after multiple innocent people, everyone from Navy cadets to Hispanic truck drivers to firefighters to Brett Kavanaugh-supporting lawyers. I doubt they’ll go after the one who has a long history of racism and hanging out with White supremacists.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Intersectionality and American Anti-Semitism How to understand – and counter – the plague of anti-Semitism in America today. Kenneth Levin

Posted By on October 22nd, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/intersectionality-and-american-anti-semitism-kenneth-levin/

The term “intersectionality” has gained prominence – initially on the nation’s campuses and now well beyond academia – as signifying the supposed shared, “intersecting,” predicaments of racial and ethnic groups, particularly “people of color” (and to a lesser degree women and sexual minorities), victimized by white male racism and its history of imperialism, colonialism, exploitation and slavery.

Promoters of the intersectionality concept have sought to use it to forge a common political agenda among at least some of the groups deemed as falling within the intersectionality rubric, to mount a shared fight against these groups’ perceived oppressors. But perhaps the most substantive campaign mounted by intersectionality allies – most notably elements of the African-American community and of the Islamist/Palestinian community in America – has been to themselves become oppressors, targeting American Jews for defamation, intimidation and physical attack. In doing so, they have joined forces not only with the Far Left in America, which has almost invariably used Jew-hatred as a political tool, but also with white extremist groups, including white supremacists and neo-Nazis, sharing with them anti-Jewish rhetoric and memes, tactics and mutual support. Together, intersectional allies have generated the astronomical rise in attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions in present-day America.

Consideration of the roots of this intersectional alliance and of what drives each party’s anti-Semitism casts light not only on the dynamics of the current assault on American Jews but also on the reality that that assault is not simply derivative of hostility towards Israel and Zionism. Rather, American Jews are a primary target and the anti-Israel animus is at least as much derived from hatred of American Jews as vice versa.  

Even before the recent increase in anti-Semitic incidents, FBI statistics on hate crimes in America had consistently shown that Jews, representing less than 2% of the American population, had been by far the religious community most victimized by such crimes. (The most recent annual statistics, for 2020, showed 57.5% of religion-based hate crimes were against Jews. The next closest targeted community was Muslims, who were the victims of 8.8% of such crimes.) That pattern, and the anti-Semitic predilections of the groups perpetrating it, have long pre-dated those groups’ coming together in part under the intersectionality mantle.

American Anti-Semitism and the Red-Green-Black Alliance

The four major sources of attacks on Jews in America are white supremacists, black nationalists/supremacists, Muslim and Palestinian supremacists, and progressivist/Marxist ideologues.

The American institution most associated today with anti-Semitism is academia.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Progressives Demand More Giveaways for Illegal Immigrants Biden’s open-border policies expand the pool of entitled illegals. Joseph Klein

Posted By on October 22nd, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/progressives-demand-more-giveaways-illegal-joseph-klein/

Progressive advocates for illegal immigrants are pressing for an expansion of New York State’s $2.1 billion giveaway of subsidies to illegal immigrants who are otherwise ineligible for government relief. Passed last April as part of the New York State budget, the “Excluded Worker Fund” has provided one-time payments as high as $15,600 to illegal immigrants who have been able to document that they lost work during the COVID-19 pandemic. Other illegal immigrants without this level of documentation were still able to receive payments of $3,200 to match the amount of COVID-19 related assistance that many American citizens and other legal residents have received from the federal government.

The New York Times described the Excluded Worker Fund as “by far the biggest of its kind in the country and a sign of the state’s shift toward policies championed by progressive Democrats.” But evidently, the fund is not big enough as far as the progressive advocates for illegal immigrants are concerned.

The Excluded Worker Fund is already running out of money. “To date, the state has distributed just over two-thirds of the fund, to about 128,000 people, a fraction of the nearly 351,000 claims that were received,” the New York Times reported on October 19th.

What else would you expect from yet another poorly conceived progressive Democrat program? Demand for the illegal immigrant subsidies has outstripped the money available to pay for them. The number of claimants to date has exceeded by over 20 percent the number of illegal immigrants that the Director of Immigration Research at a liberal think tank estimated last May would benefit from the program. 

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Biden Administration Plans To Protect Immigration Fraudsters It’s all about mind over matter – and if Joe doesn’t mind, it doesn’t matter. Michael Cutler

Posted By on October 22nd, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/biden-administration-plans-protect-immigration-michael-cutler/

America’s borders and immigration laws are its first and last line of defense against threats to national security, public safety and public health.

A review of the relevant section of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) 8 U.S. Code § 1182  (Inadmissible aliens) will provide clarity as to the intent and importance of our immigration laws that Biden refuses to enforce.

Indeed, the Biden administration continues to wage an escalating war against immigration law enforcement yet the largely compliant mainstream media never asks how Biden’s policies are in the best interests of America or Americans.

The disaster on the southern border has been well-documented and the dangers that this creates for national security, public safety, public health cannot be over-estimated.

However, there are many other elements of the immigration system and immigration fraud has been identified as the key method of entry and embedding for terrorists- and not just the terrorists who participated in the deadly attacks on September 11, 2001 but other terrorists who sought to carry out deadly attacks inside the United States before and even after the terror attacks of 9/11.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Is a sanctions rethink in the works? Lawrence Haas

Posted By on October 22nd, 2021

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/577738-is-a-sanctions-rethink-in-the-works

The Biden administration’s announcement that it will limit economic sanctions as a tool of foreign policy could prove significant, since it follows two decades in which policymakers of both parties dramatically increased the use of sanctions against governments, individuals, and entities that they considered bad actors.

“After the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks,” the Treasury Department wrote in a new report after a nine-month review, “economic and financial sanctions (‘sanctions’) became a tool of first resort to address a range of threats to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States. This tool rests on the formidable strength of, and trust in, the U.S. financial system and currency.”

Looking forward, the Treasury wrote, “Economic and financial sanctions should be tied to clear, discrete objectives that are consistent with relevant presidential guidance — such as countering forces that fuel regional conflict, ending support to a specific violent organization or other malign and/or illicit activities, stopping the persecution of a minority group, curtailing nuclear proliferation activities, enhancing multilateral pressure, or ceasing specific instances of atrocities.”

Fine. But the notion of limiting the use of sanctions — e.g., trade embargoes, investment restrictions, asset freezes on governments or individuals — could prove a sea change for U.S. policymakers who, in recent years, have viewed sanctions as the go-to response to global bad behavior.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Elite Universities Are the Worst for Free Speech Samuel Abrams

Posted By on October 22nd, 2021

https://www.realcleareducation.com/articles/2021/10/20/elite_universities_are_the_worst_for_free_speech_110653.html

Inside the 2021 College Free Speech Rankings

One of the great values of an American collegiate experience is that students have the chance to engage deeply with differing opinions. To this day, I am grateful for the cornucopia of people, traditions, views, and cultures that I was able to engage with two decades ago when I, then a fairly conservative Jewish teenager, left the East Coast to go West and to college at Stanford University.

I would be lying if I said that there were no evenings when I felt hurt, misunderstood, shocked, and angry when my ideas were challenged and came into conflict with others. But there were far more nights where I was able to connect, learn, and grow in ways unimaginable to me in high school. I certainly remember the frustrations and agony of being challenged, but I remember more powerfully the ecstasy of having my mind opened up to new ideas and changing my opinions when I heard someone or something new. My old dorm even hosted a speaker’s series where huge turnouts were common for guests on both the left and the right and no one shouted down anyone; we even hosted the frequently-protested Dinesh D’Souza without incident.

While I, along with significant numbers of other students, did not like nor agree with the ideas shared by many of the speakers we heard, their perspectives were always worth hearing and then debating late into the night. Sadly, my undergraduate experience of being able to hear, respond to, and then reject or accept a plethora of views is under threat. Today, cancel culture runs rampant on our college campuses, and viewpoint diversity is no longer considered a sacred, core value in higher education.

Thanks to the largest data set ever compiled on student’s views toward free speech, we now know that students who attend the nation’s elite schools – those that purportedly thrive in the world of research, innovation and discovery – are actually more likely to try to cancel speech than their peers who attend lower-ranked educational institutions.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Biden’s State Department is a laughingstock China launches a hypersonic missile but Antony Blinken is very worried about gender pronouns. Stephen Miller

Posted By on October 22nd, 2021

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/state-department-laughing-stock-pronouns-antony-blinken/

Last week, the State Department learned that twice this summer China had tested a new hypersonic missile weapon with nuclear capabilities. According to the Financial Times, the rocket employed a “fractional orbital bombardment” that also had the guidance ability to “glide” around the earth in orbit.

The test reportedly stunned the Biden administration, and comes on the heels of a string of embarrassing global events for the US, including the fall of Afghanistan and Russia opting not to raise natural gas supplies to Europe after the completion of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Secretary of State Tony Blinken reacted with a series of “deeply concerned” letters. The State Department had once again been caught flat-footed.

But fear not: Blinken has his priorities straight. This week, his State Department responded forcefully and with great clarity to its adversaries and hostile foreign regimes around the world: by recognizing International Pronouns Day. The agency stands in solidarity with people who list pronouns “on their email and social media profiles” through ShareAmerica, the department’s platform for communicating American foreign policy worldwide.

The State Department’s blog brags that “the White House also debuted a website contact form with gender-neutral pronouns and the non-binary prefix ‘Mx.’ And the Department of State announced June 30 that US passport forms will allow applicants to choose male or female gender, regardless of what their other documents indicate, and will eventually include an option for non-binary, intersex and gender-nonconforming people.” Neat!