A House That Has Done What a House Should Do: A Tribute to a Great American by Lawrence Kadish

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17453/alfred-joyce-kilmer

National leadership is meant to reside in the White House, capable of providing America with a shared vision that allows democracy and its citizens to thrive and flourish. And yet this White House may mirror the darkness that Kilmer mourns.

Kilmer knew what he was fighting for. He insisted on leading multiple patrols that put him in harm’s way. He wore the uniform of the “Fighting 69th” because he was a patriot who embraced American exceptionalism before the world even knew that a world power founded on freedom had been born.

He was an American doughboy killed by a German sniper in the closing months of World War I, defending freedom, literally on the front lines.

Sergeant Alfred Joyce Kilmer left behind a wife and five children. He also left behind a library of poetry that still speaks to us at a time of political turmoil and deep division within a country; a nation that remains the world’s last best hope for a cause that Kilmer courageously died for.

This Isn’t Your Father’s Left-Wing Revolution Today’s revolutionaries aren’t fighting “the Man”—they are “the Man.” By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/09/this-isnt-your-fathers-left-wing-revolution/

Starry-eyed radicals in the 1960s and 1970s dreamed that they either were going to take over America or destroy it. 

One of their favorite psychodramatic mottos was “Change it or Lose it,” even as protests focused on drugs, music, race, class, sex, fashion—and almost anything and everything. 

Sixties radicals tutored America on long hair, wire-rim eyeglasses, and who was a drag, a square, a bummer, and who was hip, cool, groovy, mellow, and far out. Most of these silly revolutionaries were not unhinged Weathermen killers or SDS would-be Communists, but just adolescents along for the good-time ride.

With the end of the draft in 1972, the winding down of the Vietnam War, the oil embargoes, and the worsening economy, the ’60s revolution withered away. Cynics claimed the “revolution” was always mostly about middle-class students with long hair, kicking back during the peak of the postwar boom, indulging their appetites, and ensuring they would not end up in Vietnam. 

It is not even true that the ’60s at least ensured needed reform. The civil rights movement and equal rights for women and gays were already birthed before the hippies, as were folk songs, and early rock music. 

Instead, what the ’60s revolution did was accelerate these trends—but also radicalize, manipulate, and coarsen them. 

The grasping “yuppies” of the 1980s were the natural successors to let-it-all-hang-out hippies. The ’60s were at heart a narcissistic free-for-all when “freedom” often entailed self-indulgence and avoiding responsibility. 

Is the Biden Administration Helping Iran to Achieve Its Nuclear Dream? by Con Coughlin

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17454/iran-biden-nuclear-dream

The improvement in Iran’s technical ability to develop nuclear weapons is the result of a number of steps Tehran has taken during the past year to increase its nuclear activity, all of which constitute clear violations of the terms Tehran agreed under the JCPOA.

Consequently, if the predictions are correct and Raisi emerges triumphant in the presidential elections [June 18], the prospects of the hardliners making any tangible concessions over the country’s nuclear programme will be negligible…. [Raisi] made his name during as a prominent member of Iran’s notorious Death Commissions, when opposition activists were either executed or sent to clear minefields during the Iran-Iraq war.

As a result, the only achievement of Mr Obama’s deeply-flawed nuclear deal with Iran will have been to enable the ayatollahs to achieve their dream of acquiring nuclear weapons, with all the implications that will have for the future security of the globe.

The most likely outcome of US President Joe Biden’s ill-considered attempt to revive the nuclear deal with Iran is that it will lead to a dramatic reduction in the time frame Tehran requires to build an atomic warhead.

One of the central goals of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) struck with Iran by former US President Barack Obama was to delay Tehran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons for more than a decade.

At the time the deal was agreed in 2015, intelligence experts predicted it would take it Iran about one year to develop the technological know-how to develop a nuclear warhead if Iran was allowed to continue with its nuclear activities.

In an attempt to slow Iran’s research into nuclear weapons, the JCPOA required Tehran to eliminate its stockpile of medium-enriched uranium, cut its stockpile of low-enriched uranium by 98%, and reduce by about two-thirds the number of its gas centrifuges for 13 years. For the next 15 years, Iran would only enrich uranium up to 3.67%.

Yet, despite the JCPOA being in force for nearly six years, the latest estimates suggest that Iran is only a matter of months away from having the ability to produce sufficient quantities of weapons-grade uranium for one nuclear warhead.

Turkey’s Erdogan Whips Up Antisemitism by Uzay Bulut

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17435/turkey-erdogan-antisemitism

“Anywhere which was connected with these people or with these prophets who were all Muslims becomes a Muslim territory…. So any place like this [Israel] had to be freed…. had to be liberated. So, Islam appeared… from their point of view — as a liberator. And therefore, there is no Islamic occupation…. So, there is no Islamic occupation. There is only Islamic liberation.” — Moshe Sharon, Professor Emeritus of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, YouTube, September 10, 2015.

Such accusations are, of course, totally false, but imagine how many ignorant people worldwide they infect with violent Jew-hatred.

In reality, both Muslim Arabs and Ottomans violently invaded Jerusalem and remained occupiers there for centuries.

What actually needs to be condemned is Hamas’s terrorism. It is Hamas that aims to destroy Israel, that commits war crimes, and that attempts genocide… as seen, for example, in Article 7 of the Hamas Charter. Moreover, it is Hamas that harms its own people and puts them in danger, and uses them as human shields: an additional war crime. Hamas has made no secret of advocating the use of civilians as human shields.

Erdogan’s offer to change the administration of Jerusalem is an open assault on the sovereignty and security of Israel. The three religions are already present and enjoy religious liberty in Jerusalem, unlike the tiny, dying non-Muslim community in Turkey…. Erdogan also issued a threat — his word — to Jerusalem if he does not get his way….

A major reason for this Jew-hatred appears to be irresponsible leaders who repeat hateful propaganda while remaining completely blind to, or proud of, their own crimes.

As Hamas indiscriminately bombed Israeli cities from May 11 to May 17, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan delivered a speech in Ankara in which he targeted both Israel and Jews with antisemitic slurs. Erdogan disseminated countless falsehoods that misinformed the Turkish public about Israel, the Jewish people, Gaza, and other issues — all the while fanning the flames of antisemitism.

In discussing the Islamic history of Jerusalem, where the Jews were living for more than a thousand years before Islam even appeared with Mohammad (c. 570-632) — and scooping up ancient Jewish leaders on the way:

“Jerusalem… is a region that hosts the most ancient settlements of humanity. Many prophets who were also our prophets, from Prophet Abraham to Prophet David and Prophet Solomon, lived in these lands and left their marks on these lands.”

A peer-reviewed psychoanalytic journal publishes a grotesque anti-White screed By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/06/a_peerreviewed_psychoanalytic_journal_publishes_a_grotesque_antiwhite_screed.html

Critical Race Theory reared its ugly head in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association when Donald Ross, a San Francisco-based psychoanalyst (and teacher) shared with the world the fact that “whiteness” is a “malignant, parasitic-like condition.” One of his colleagues was also good enough to offer an approving review in the same issue.

The American Psychoanalytic Association is a real organization, founded in 1911 and has over 3,000 members. It also publishes the peer-reviewed Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (“JAPA”).

In its most recent edition, JAPA published a peer-reviewed article by Donald Moss, who is White. In 2017, Moss received the Elisabeth Young-Bruehl award for work against prejudice.

Moss is currently a teacher at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis. He works to “understand and dismantle structured forms of hatred– ‘hating in the first person plural’–racism, homophobia, misogyny and xenophobia.” (And yes, that quoted sentence is gibberish.)

You’ll find more gibberish in Moss’s JAPA article, entitled “On Having Whiteness.” However, gibberish or not, anyone can grasp the racial hatred. According to the abstract:

Whiteness is a condition one first acquires and then one has—a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which “white” people have a particular susceptibility. The condition is foundational, generating characteristic ways of being in one’s body, in one’s mind, and in one’s world. Parasitic Whiteness renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse. These deformed appetites particularly target nonwhite peoples. Once established, these appetites are nearly impossible to eliminate. Effective treatment consists of a combination of psychic and social-historical interventions. Such interventions can reasonably aim only to reshape Whiteness’s infiltrated appetites—to reduce their intensity, redistribute their aims, and occasionally turn those aims toward the work of reparation. When remembered and represented, the ravages wreaked by the chronic condition can function either as warning (“never again”) or as temptation (“great again”). Memorialization alone, therefore, is no guarantee against regression. There is not yet a permanent cure

To appreciate how utterly vile and insane this is, substitute the words “Black” or “Jew” in place of White, and you’ll be reading something that would be perfectly at home in the Journal of the American Nazi Society or the Annals of the KKK. Moss’s affiliation happens to be with the “Green Gang,” which targets “hatred” toward the “natural world.” (Whites apparently aren’t natural.)

Social Media Blitz Exposes Campus Racism Triggered by Critical Race Theory Rooting out the new racism espoused by the radical Left. Sara Dogan

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/tonight-social-media-blitz-exposes-campus-racism-sara-dogan/

A cutting-edge social media campaign conducted in April and May by the David Horowitz Freedom Center targeted and exposed the racist and segregationist actions and programming of prestigious colleges and universities taken under the guise of “anti-racism” and Critical Race Theory. Ten prestigious institutions of higher education including Harvard University, the University of Southern California, Georgetown University, and the University of Minnesota were outed for their racist leanings and decisions.  

The universities targeted by the Freedom Center’s campaign were included among the “Most Racist” for varied reasons, but the unifying theme was their allegiance to the new philosophy of Critical Race Theory (CRT), a radical revision of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream that each American be judged “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” While Dr. King and the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s promoted “colorblindness,” CRT pushes the opposite view, that our character and our place in society is predetermined by our skin color.

As Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher Rufo explained recently in an interview with The Atlantic, “Critical race theorists believe that American institutions, such as the Constitution and legal system, preach freedom and equality, but are mere ‘camouflages’ for naked racial domination. They believe that racism is a constant, universal condition: it simply becomes more subtle, sophisticated, and insidious over the course of history. In simple terms, critical race theory reformulates the old Marxist dichotomy of oppressor and oppressed, replacing the class categories of bourgeoisie and proletariat with the identity categories of White and Black. But the basic conclusions are the same: in order to liberate man, society must be fundamentally transformed through moral, economic, and political revolution.”

Guided by this ahistorical revolutionary subtext, America’s colleges and universities have increasingly promoted racially-segregated classes and “anti-racist” training programs which actually endorse racist tropes and promote racial conflict.  To combat this return to Jim Crow, the Freedom Center published a report and created a new website, TopTenRacistUniversities.org, exposing the Top Ten Most Racist Colleges and Universities in America. The social media campaign served to highlight this report and its conclusions and bring them to a wider audience.

Harvard University, #1 on the Freedom Center’s list of most racist universities, was sued for blatant discrimination against Asian applicants in spite of their superior academic achievements, made possible by characterizing their personalities as “lacking” and “one dimensional.”

Canada to Fight ‘Far-Right’ Groups After ‘Terrorist Attack’ That Killed Four Muslims Politicizing a tragedy. Christine Douglass-Williams

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/canada-fight-far-right-groups-after-terrorist-christine-douglass-williams/

Four members of a London, Ontario Muslim family were run over and killed by a pickup truck last Sunday evening, while out on a leisurely walk. The youngest, a 9-year-old boy, suffered serious but non-life-threatening injuries. Police Chief Steve Williams concluded “We believe the victims were targeted because of their Islamic faith,” sparking national fury over a hate-driven act that left a nation stunned and empathetic.

The fact that five members of a family, comprising three generations, could be run over in this horrific manner because of their faith strikes at the core of civilization, but let’s be clear: Western civilization — where all human life is valued.

What is troubling about the reaction to this case is the speedy politicization of it, revealing just how low politicians are willing to stoop to exploit a profound tragedy for their own agendas. Indeed, Prime Minster Justin Trudeau quickly vowed to hunt down what he deemed to be “far right” groups — a “project” that he started a long time ago. What is highly disturbing is that Trudeau has absolutely zero evidence regarding the political leanings of  20-year-old Nathaniel Veltman — who has been charged with four counts of murder and one of attempted murder.

Reuters reported that Veltman isn’t known to belong to any hate group. The local mayor, meanwhile, called the deaths “mass murder, perpetrated against Muslims,” casting Canada as a country where Muslims are in danger everywhere.

This tragedy highlighted a troubling quality about some members of Canada’s leadership — who didn’t hesitate to manipulate the tragedy, thus harnessing a climate of mob rule and bypassing due process. From front-line police “commentary” right up to the Prime Minister — who is using this tragedy to continue hunting down “far right” groups — a pattern is now set in motion, and it will be surely exploited further by special interest lobbies comprising the red-green axis. 

Gender Studies Faculty Sides With Hamas Facts and history are not the concern of the morally-elevated professoriate. Richard L. Cravatts

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/gender-studies-faculty-side-hamas-richard-l-cravatts/

Seeming to give proof to Orwell’s observation that some ideas are so stupid they could only have been thought of by intellectuals, yet another group of academics—this time faculty in some 120 Gender Studies departments—has, after the latest conflict in Gaza, followed the lead of various student governments, faculty, and other academic organizations by launching yet another attack in the cognitive war against Israel.

With the characteristic pseudo-intellectual babble that currently dilutes the scholarly relevance of the social sciences and humanities, a “solidarity statement” issued by the Palestinian Feminist Collective (PFC) pretentiously announced that “as gender studies departments in the United States, we are the proud benefactors of decades of feminist anti-racist, and anti-colonial activism that informs the foundation of our interdiscipline.” 

“We center global social justice in our intersectional teaching, scholarship, and organizing.,” these moral termagants continued.  “From Angela Davis we understand that justice is indivisible; we learn this lesson time and again from Black, Indigenous, Arab, and most crucially, Palestinian feminists, who know that ‘Palestine is a Feminist Issue.’”

Palestine may be a feminist issue in the addled minds of these academics, but, tellingly, they conveniently make no mention in their statement of the terrorist group Hamas which is singularly responsible for initiating this latest clash with Israel and which commits a war crime each time its militants launch a rocket toward civilian neighborhoods with the intention of murdering Jews. And while these gender studies activists seem so concerned for the emotional and physical welfare of Palestinian women, they do not mention any Israeli women in their statement or commiserate with the reality of living with a genocidal enemy at one’s border. They do not mention mothers of children in southern Israeli towns like Sderot, a frequent Hamas target, where bedrooms have been converted to bomb shelters, residents sometimes have only 15 seconds to seek cover from incoming rockets, and over 40 percent of the town’s children suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of living with the specter of terrorism and possible death clouding daily life.

And, apparently, their virtue-signaling mission to realize “global social justice in [their] intersectional teaching, scholarship, and organizing” has not enabled these gender studies faculty to notice the injustice and violence currently being meted out against Israelis, either as a result of the shower of some 4300 Hamas rockets launched from Gaza in the latest assault with the intention of murdering Jewish civilians, or as part of an ongoing intifada which has claimed the lives of  Israelis who have been injured and murdered by psychopathic Palestinians wielding knives, guns, rocks, incendiary kites, and even automobiles used as weapons.

Critical Race Theory’s Marxist Roots And its existential danger to our political freedom and unalienable rights. Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/critical-race-theorys-marxist-roots-bruce-thornton/

The expanding influence of Critical Race Theory and its Black Live Matter “praxis,” as Marxists call applied theory, has raised concerns about its incoherent pronouncements and illiberal aims. The origins of this ideology is an important question, for CRT has nothing to do with civil rights, or improving black lives or making them “matter.” It’s about increasing its practitioners’ power in our institutions in order to “fundamentally transform” the United States from a country of ordered liberty and limited government, to a “soft” despotic, intrusively regulated technocracy at best, or an illiberal socialist tyranny at worst.

CRT has its roots in Marxism, as one of the founders of BLM has bragged. And, like the Soviet version of Marxism, BLM’s growing influence over our social, educational, political, and corporate institutions––already compromised by a century of progressive ideology, itself a kissing-cousin of Marxism––is an existential danger to the Constitutional safeguards of our political freedom and unalienable rights.

The first Marxist feature is the dubious habit of thought often called the “hermeneutics of suspicion.” This intellectual grift also defines postmodernism in general, and ideological movements like poststructuralism, radical feminism, and postcolonialism, all of which are fellow travelers of Marxism.

This method of analysis assumes that the reality of all social, political, artistic, and other cultural phenomena cannot be known from the public words and actions of social and political institutions, but rather must be found in the deeper, subterranean ideologies of the power elite that runs them.  This “ruling class” shapes political and institutional “discourses” and “knowledge regimes”––the “epiphenomena,” as Marxists call them–– in order to benefit their tyrannical, selfish interests by oppressing others, whom they keep imprisoned in a “false consciousness” that hides from them the true agents and causes of their oppression.

Hence for CRT, all the progress in race relations––the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Brown vs. Board of Education, the growth of the black middle class, the elimination of legal segregation, and the increase in black office-holders including the presidency––are mere “epiphenomena” that have not eliminated the underlying “systemic racism.” According to CRT, this occult “racism” keeps racism alive and accounts for all the “disparate impacts”  that deny “equity” (i.e. the equality of result) to blacks and other minorities, but benefit and reward “white privilege” and “white supremacy” at the expense of black well-being.

Correcting that “false consciousness,” especially “white fragility,” the denial of white “privilege” and “racism,” explains the efforts to include CRT in school curricula from pre-school to university, and in training programs for employees of corporations and the federal and state government agencies so that they interpret their functions from the CRT perspective. The goal is to expose and reform these institutions’ true oppressive nature that is obscured by their duplicitous, self-serving public claims and motives. Hence the “1619 Project,” which has revolutionized and deformed the discipline of American history from grade school to university.

Making Book on Trump What can we learn from the library of volumes by Trump haters? Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/making-book-trump-bruce-bawer/

The presidency of Donald Trump was not just a boon for CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. It was also a gift to the book business. There was, publishers found, an apparently insatiable hunger for anti-Trump screeds.

One after another of these tomes hit the bestseller lists. While there were the inevitable differences among them in style and perspective, virtually all shared a single theme: Trump was not just a president whose politics the authors disliked; he was the worst person ever to hold the office, unique in his bigotry, corruption, ignorance, stupidity, egomania – indeed, in the estimation of many, comparable to Hitler. In general, the author paid very little if any attention to Trump’s actual political ideas, programs, or accomplishments; instead, their focus was on his personality and personal views, real or imagined – and, by extension, on the supposed attitudes of Trump’s supporters, whose very enthusiasm for him was treated as a character flaw and, indeed, an existential threat to American democracy, tolerance, and social cohesion. Some, if not all, of the writers did not trouble to hide the fact that their disdain for Trump and his voters was rooted in snobbery, regional prejudice, and ideological rancor.

These books fell into a number of general categories. Some were works of reportage by journalists who covered Trump. Some, such as former FBI agent Peter Strzok’s Compromised: Counterintelligence and the Threat of Donald J. Trump (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020, 384 pages), former FBI director James Comey’s A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership (Flatiron, 2018, 312 pages), Comey’s Saving Justice: Truth, Transparency, and Trust (Flatiron, 2021, 240 pages), and former FBI deputy director Andrew G. McCabe’s The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump (St. Martin’s, 2019, 288 pages) were by members of the intelligence community and former government officials. Some, such as Michael Cohen’s Disloyal: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump (Skyhorse, 2020, 432 pages) and Mary Trump’s Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Creates the World’s Most Dangerous Man (Simon & Schuster, 2020, 240 pages), were by former associates and family members. Some were by psychologists who professed to diagnose Trump’s mental conditions; some were by NeverTrump conservatives; some pushed the Russian collusion narrative; some spun conspiracy theories. And some, such as How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (Random House, 2018, 240 pages) by Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley, Twilight of Democracy by Russian author Masha Gessen (Riverhead, 2020, 288 pages), and Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Autocracy (Doubleday, 2020, 224 pages), by longtime Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum, linked Trump to historical fascism. We cannot examine each of these categories in detail but let’s take a quick spin through some of the more important ones, highlighting their distinctive qualities, after which we will consider what they have in common and above all what they reveal—not about Donald Trump himself, but about their authors. For Trump is a unique figure in American life who stands as a kind of Rorschach on which people project their deepest fears and prejudices.

First, a look at the works of reportage (to use the term loosely). It’s important to note at the outset that political reporting, as traditionally understood, went out the window when Trump came down that escalator at Trump Tower and, in the view of mainstream journalists, began a years-long national emergency Some even declared openly that this crisis required them to dispense with even an attempt at objectivity. They were now champions of the people against Trump’s tyranny and lies, whose job was not to report the news but to stand as the last bulwark of democracy. This self-dramatizing posture led to a great deal of narcissistic preening. And on this front, no one was more objectionable, and more ridiculous, than Brian Stelter and Jim Acosta-