Coming Soon: China’s Navy Patrolling Off New York by Gordon G. Chang

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17414/coming-soon-china-navy-patrolling-off-new-york

Chinese planners are not only thinking of the continent [Africa], they are also eyeing islands in the Atlantic, specifically Terceira, one of the Azores.

On that island, part of Portugal, there is a port and, of even greater interest, Air Base No. 4. Better known as Lajes Field, the facility is jointly operated by the U.S. Air Force and its Portuguese counterpart.

If China controlled the base, the Atlantic would no longer be secure…. Chinese planes could patrol the northern and central portions of the Atlantic and thereby cut air and sea traffic between the U.S. and Europe. Beijing would also be able to deny access to the nearby Mediterranean Sea.

Pentagon budget cutters have been scaling back activities at Lajes, making it a “ghost base.” As a result, Lajes is ripe for China to take it over.

China could get a base even closer than [Lajes]. About 90 miles east of Palm Beach, on Grand Bahama Island, a Hong Kong-based business is spending about $3 billion on a deep-water container facility, the Freeport Container Port.

Sri Lanka is perhaps the model for China’s militarization of the Bahamas. In addition to the overly large facility in Freeport, there is a Chinese-funded port on Abaco Island, also part of the Bahamas. The port in Abaco is essentially useless from a commercial point of view and could fall into Beijing’s hands.

China, therefore, could have two naval bases close to Florida, unless the Biden administration moves fast to block Chinese penetration of the Bahamas.

At the moment, America is, with trade and investment, strengthening a hostile Chinese regime, which has declared the U.S. to be its enemy. Last year, America’s two-way trade with China totaled $560.1 billion.

China is scouting for a naval base on the west coast of Africa. In the near future, therefore, Chinese ships could be regularly patrolling off America’s East Coast.

In recent testimony before the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, General Stephen Townsend, commander of U.S. Africa Command, has been sounding the alarm.

At the moment, China’s only offshore military base is in Djibouti, on the Horn of Africa. The facility is near some of the world’s busiest shipping routes, including those going through the Suez Canal.

Townsend believes the People’s Liberation Army Navy is surveying locations on Africa’s west coast, from Mauritania in the north to Namibia in the south. “Now they’re casting their gaze to the Atlantic coast and wanting to get such a base there,” the general told the Associated Press.

Africa is important in its own right. “Located at the crossroads of the world, Africa watches over strategic choke points including the Strait of Gibraltar, the Strait of Sicily, the Red Sea, the Bab al Mandeb, and the Mozambique Channel,” General Townsend points out in a publicly released 2021 Posture Statement for Congress. “The land mass of Africa is larger than the United States, China, India, Japan, and most of Europe combined.”

The African continent is home to 11 of the 25 fast-growing economies and is the world’s most demographically vital region.

Just Who Made Obama’s Birth Certificate an Issue? By Jack Cashill

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/05/just_who_made_obamas_birth_certificate_an_issue.html

In his controversial new book on the 2020 election, Battle For The Soul: Inside the Democrats’ Campaigns to Defeat Donald Trump. Edward-Isaac Dovere repeats a canard that has become something of a staple of Democratic mythology.

According to Dovere, in November 2020, then-president Barack Obama had a hard time making sense out of Hillary Clinton’s loss “to a man he thought of as a moronic carnival barker.”  Dovere traced Obama’s grudge against Donald Trump to the birth certificate issue.

Obama, writes Dovere, “would never forgive [Trump] for turning a fringe obsession with his birth certificate into an issue he’d had to address from the White House briefing room in 2011.”

Dovere errs on several counts.  Trump was not the one who turned the birth certificate into an issue.  Obama was.  Nor did Obama have to address the issue from the White House.  He could have easily settled it in his attorney’s office three years earlier.  More importantly, perhaps, it was not the birth certificate that provoked Obama’s wrath.  It was Trump’s ability to see Obama the same way Obama saw himself — as a fraud.

In the way of background, a week prior to the 2008 Democratic National Convention, attorney Philip Berg filed a federal suit in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania challenging Obama’s constitutional eligibility to be president.  A Democrat and former deputy attorney general for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Berg expected to be taken seriously.  He wasn’t.  The media expressed zero interest in his suit.

Blinken and Netanyahu: Ships Passing in the Night The first meeting between the U.S. secretary of state and Israel’s prime minister laid bare a series of problems that politely slipped past one another. That is not the end of them. By Shoshana Bryen

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/27/blinken-and-netanyahu-ships-passing-in-the-night/

After their meeting in Jerusalem on Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made what were supposed to be “soft” public statements. The politely worded remarks deliberately slid past serious policy differences, but those differences cannot and should not be hidden. Moreover, they should form the basis of conversation between the two allies in the future.

Blinken laid out four reasons for his visit to the region. 

First, “to demonstrate the commitment of the U.S. to Israel’s security.” This needs no comment.

Second, “to start to work toward greater stability and reduce tensions in the West Bank and Jerusalem.” 

Blinken didn’t mention the six weeks of intense Palestinian Authority (PA) incitement to violence, including speeches and music videos promising glory for those who killed Jews. A music video was repeatedly broadcast in which Palestinians declared, “I fired my shots, I threw my bomb, I detonated, detonated, detonated my [explosive] belts . . . My brother, throw my blood on the enemy like bullets.” Mahmoud Abbas’ religious affairs ministry told viewers, “Islam does not want you to be submissive to others,” and “if you die fighting, you go to paradise; if you kill the enemies, they go to hell.” Check out the “TikTok Intifada.” 

This, of course, caused tension for Palestinians who believed Israel ultimately would respond. But in addition, Blinken might have noted the tension in Israel resulting from that same incitement, and the ensuing violence, along with the periodic addition of terrorist Hamas rockets being fired into civilian neighborhoods.

The third reason, said Blinken, was “to support urgent humanitarian and reconstruction assistance for Gaza, to benefit the Palestinian people.” 

Joe Biden did say Hamas would be kept away from the reconstruction money and materiel, but it is unclear how that will be enforced and who will do the enforcing, as the PA has absolutely no control over what Hamas does in Gaza. Neither does the United States. Nor does the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). Nor do the usual European donors, who are, this time, showing some skepticism about pouring more money down the hole. 

Central and Eastern Europe Help Show the Path Forward As the post-Trump American Right continues to cohere and slowly finds itself, it should look to the likes of modern-day Poland and Hungary for some concrete pointers. Josh Hammer

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/27/central-and-eastern-europe-help-show-the-path-forward/

I’m writing from Warsaw, Poland, making for both my first time venturing behind the old Iron Curtain and my first trip back to Europe since the onset of COVID-19. Despite the overcast weather endemic to this part of the globe, the mood on the ground is unmistakably buoyant.

Poland, along with its fellow Visegrad Group member Central European nations of Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic—and perhaps also including nearby Austria—has emerged as a perhaps unlikely ground zero in the fight to save Western civilization from a debilitating and increasingly all-encompassing liberal decadence.

The sad history of the region continues to pervade daily life here. Locals routinely respond to questions about what sites tourists should visit in one of two ways: “The Nazis destroyed everything in the war” or “The Soviet occupation ruined everything.” Few regions in the world know totalitarian repression and occupation like this area of the blood-soaked European continent does. The Visegrad states, which have rarely tasted national independence over the vicissitudes of the past millennium, felt the full brunt of both Nazi fascism and Soviet Communism in all-too-recent memory.

The silver lining, and the reason this region is so interesting from a contemporary economic and geopolitical perspective, is that out of the joint tyrannical fires of Nazism and Communism were forged, in the decades following the fall of the Berlin Wall, a robust appreciation for the integrity of the independent nation-state and the importance of Judeo-Christian-inspired societal goals, such as family formation and fortified communitarian ties.

Put more simply, the four Visegrad states and Austria have emerged as veritable redoubts of traditional Western values and substantive political priorities, such as national borders, immigration properly limited to promote assimilation and intergenerational cultural stability, and the transcendental meaning and fulfillment that only religion can provide.

You Knew DOJ’s Kristen Clarke Was a Radical, But It’s Much, Much Worse Than They’re Letting On By J. Christian Adams

https://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2021/05/27/justice-departments-kristen-clarke-all-about-skin-color-n1450172

Newly confirmed Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Kristen Clarke is a thoroughly modern woman. She could never have been confirmed even during the Clinton administration because of her racially-soaked radical worldview.

But these are revolutionary times, where skin color has gained newfound importance in a way we haven’t seen since June 1964 when segregationists chased civil rights marchers down the streets of St. Augustine, Florida.

If you think the comparison doesn’t work, then you haven’t been paying attention, or you are watching too much MSNBC.

I suppose everything old is new again. Content of character is out. Color of skin is in.

And thus Clarke squeaked by this week on a 51-48 vote to manage the most powerful division of the Justice Department.

The Civil Rights Division has its tentacles in every single aspect of American life – schools, jails, elections, hotels, mortgages, movie theaters, church sermons, bathrooms, computer software, rent rates, service animals on planes, pool chair lifts, mental hospitals and forcing police departments to adopt radical policing policies. I left 100 other topics off the list.

And now, another racialist radical is in charge in the division where I was once an attorney.

Clarke is no ordinary racialist radical, though. She brings a reputation for being racially greedy. I have some personal experience with her on this point.

In 2007, I was working on what would become the Voting Rights Act case of United States v. Georgetown School Board.  I was one of the lawyers who spent many days in South Carolina investigating violations of the Voting Rights Act. Georgetown had a voting-age black population of 34 percent but the at-large elections for school board resulted in no blacks ever being elected to the nine at-large seats.  While there is no right to proportional representation, in theory, blacks could conceivably have won three of nine seats.

‘Defund the Police’ Mayoral Candidate Dragged by Young Car Thieves By Kevin Downey Jr.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/kevindowneyjr/2021/05/27/defund-the-police-mayoral-candidate-dragged-by-young-car-thieves-n1450337

Atlanta city councilman and mega-liberal mayoral candidate Antonio Brown, who voted last year to defund the Atlanta Police Department by a whopping $73 million, was dragged alongside his car by kiddie-thieves stealing his 2016 Mercedes on Wednesday. The suspects were described as being between the ages of 7 and 11 years old.

Brown, who is running on a platform of “reimagining” the police, arrived at a ribbon-cutting ceremony at a new Dunkin Donuts-Baskin Robbins combo store around 12:30 p.m. Moments after he stepped out of his car, 4 kids swarmed into his keyless, push-button-start Mercedes and took off. Brown attempted to stop the kids, one of whom “acted like he had a gun.” Brown claimed he was dragged, “about a block” before he let go.

“As he started to speed up, and I knew that if I had not let go, I knew I probably could have killed myself because he was going so fast, I would have started to tumble. And I would have hurt him,” the councilman said, Fox News reported.

I have no idea how the child car thief would have gotten hurt in this scenario. I also have no idea how getting dragged “about a block” didn’t result in numerous injuries for Brown.

Brown’s Instagram, with a whopping (sarcasm) 3,454 followers, posted 10 pictures of the ribbon-cutting ceremony where he and his car were separated by children. The pictures have thus far garnered a staggering (more sarcasm) 114 likes.

The Wright Stuff Richard Wright’s 40s novel is back – and his brave anti-Communist stand deserves attention. Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/wright-stuff-lloyd-billingsley/

Richard Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground, written in the 1940s, has now made the best-seller list in 2021. In this short novel, police torture an innocent black man into confessing a double murder. The author, who died in 1960, also spent time in a political underground, and that too has escaped the attention it deserves.

Born in Mississippi in 1908, Richard Wright gained fame for Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945). Wright also served a stint in the Communist Party, and explained his experience in The God That Failed (1949), with former Communists such as Arthur Koestler (Darkness at Noon),  Andre Gide (The Immoralist) and Ignazio Silone (Fontamara). As Wright discovered, the Communists held his intelligence and literary skill against him.

“He talks like a book,” said one of the comrades, “and that was enough to condemn me forever as a bourgeois.” In the Communist Party, Wright learned, “a man could not have his say.” Party Stalinists smeared Wright as a “bastard intellectual” and “incipient Trotskyite,” with an “anti-leadership attitude.” The Communist Party, dominated by whites, “felt it had to assassinate me morally merely because I did not want to be bound by its decisions,” and Wright got the message loud and clear.

“I knew that if they held state power I should have been declared guilty of treason and my execution would have followed.” In his stories, Wright had assigned “a role of honor and glory to the Communist Party.” That was now “finished” and “I knew in my heart that I should never be able to write that way again.”

Richard Wright was a close friend of Frank Marshall Davis, who read the galley proofs for Native Son and reviewed Black Boy for the Associated Negro Press (ANP). Wright used the photo Davis had taken of him to accompany the Time magazine review of Black Boy.

In his memoir Livin’ the Blues: Memoirs of a Black Journalist and Poet, Davis accused Wright of selling out and “redbaiting.” Davis remained in the Communist Party and spent much of his life defending all-white Stalinist dictatorships in the USSR. In the late 1940s, the CPUSA sent Davis to Hawaii, then a prime target of Stalinist expansionism. That failed when Hawaii became a U.S. State in 1959. Frank remained on the island and his pro-Soviet activities landed him on the FBI’s security index.

Ami Horowitz Video: Raising Money From Woke Students for Hamas to Kill Jews Welcome to the university campus’ heart of darkness. Ami Horowitz

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/video-ami-horowitz-raises-money-woke-students-ami-horowitz/

In his latest “Ami on the Loose” video, filmmaker Ami Horowitz travels to Portland State University to see if he can raise money for the Palestinian terror group Hamas to attack “soft targets” in Israel like cafes and schools. Check out how dishearteningly successful he is in the very short, must-see video below:

St. Louis Mayor Guts the Police Tishaura Jones faithfully fulfills the leftist agenda. Matthew Vadum

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/st-louis-mayor-guts-police-matthew-vadum/

The newly arrived radical leftist mayor of St. Louis, Missouri, the city with the worst murder rate in America, is committed to leaving her constituents at the mercy of violent criminals by defunding the local police department and shutting down one of the city’s two jails.

St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones, a woke black Democrat, was sworn in in April after narrowly defeating Cara Spencer, a similarly woke leftist white woman.

Jones’s campaign, which focused on “progressive” criminal justice reforms, was unabashedly racist. She said during a debate that Spencer wouldn’t be a good mayor because her skin was the wrong color.

A “white person doesn’t have to worry about their children getting hit by a stray bullet when he’s outside,” Jones said. “While I appreciate the role of white allies in this movement of progress, I don’t believe that they have the lived experiences to lead a majority-minority city.”

Her victory speech was weighted down with platitudes.

“I will not stay silent when I spot racism,” Jones said. “I will not stay silent when I spot homophobia or transphobia. I will not stay silent when I spot xenophobia. I will not stay silent when I spot religious intolerance. I will not stay silent when I spot any injustice.”

Her father is crooked former elected official Virvus Jones. Mr. Jones was the city’s chief financial officer from 1988 to 1995 when he left office after pleading guilty to felony tax fraud.

His Twitter feed is woke, incendiary, and subversive. His Twitter profile is a cross between Hillary Clinton and Nero. It reads simply: “An African Proverb: The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.”

In a May 23 tweet he whined as follows: “Warrants issued for non violent or victimless crimes should not be a death sentence for black people. Police in the US are the equivalence [sic] of slave patrols[,]” he wrote, embracing a lie promoted by the 1619 Project. “Most of the warrants the police serve are not for violent crimes so there is no reason to shoot at a person fleeing.”

St. Louis is in rough shape as Mayor Jones takes the reins.

The city had 262 homicides or 87 homicides per 100,000 residents in 2020, the highest in the country, Fox News reported, and it is on track to break that record this year.

As of April 7, St. Louis had 50 homicides since January 1, 2021, an increase of 10 from April 7 the previous year.

The 262 figure for 2020 is five less than the record of 267 set in 1993, according to police. “But because the city’s population has declined since 1993, the per capita homicide rate was much higher in 2020. The homicide pace in 2021 is ahead of last year’s pace,” KMOV4 reports.

“More police doesn’t prevent crime,” Jones told The Telegraph.

It’s Getting Bad for the Jews By Michael Brendan Dougherty

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/its-getting-bad-for-the-jews/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=also-from-author&utm_term=first

Thoughts on the rising hostility in the United States and in Europe

 F or the past couple of years, there have been reports about an uptick in “random” assaults in New York. Men are just walking along a street in Brooklyn, and they get sucker-punched. Except it isn’t random. The victims are Orthodox Jews. This growing uptick in assaults has been punctuated by mass killings at Jewish synagogues in San Diego, Pittsburgh, and upstate New York. In recent weeks, as a conflict between Israel and Palestinians in Gaza has become the occasion for a coming-out party for a newly confident anti-Zionist wing in the American Left, we also see newly confident thugs assaulting Jews in Manhattan’s Diamond District while shouting slogans about Palestine.

This is a scandal beyond words. Secular and religious Jews are formed to be sensitive to these upsurges in hostility and violence because their history as a people in exile tells them that these spasms of violence do not just subside. They tend to grow and grow until Jews are finally forced to emigrate. Jewish life is dying out in Paris precisely because of a growing pattern of street harassment and assaults that are punctuated by terrorist attacks aimed at killing masses of Jews at synagogues and kosher supermarkets. Parisian Jews are leaving for Israel. There was a time they might have left for New York. I expect that for many Jews, the realization that New York could go the way of Paris would be the bitterest pill to swallow.

Speaking of the Europeans, what’s going on there is also a scandal. The news of rockets being fired from Gaza into Israel, and Israel launching attacks on the positions from which they are fired, set off major protests in European cities. Now, criticism would be one thing. The state of Israel, the Israel Defense Forces, and even the Israeli people are just that — people — and they are capable of folly, prejudice, and cruelty like any other. And the Palestinians are people too — many of them living in a situation that is abjectly miserable. Imagine both resenting Israel and having the foreign government of Iran pay for the thugs of Hamas to be your political leadership while you seek satisfaction and try to make a life for your family.

But these protests in European cities are not focused on legitimate criticisms of Israel. In North London, a group of Muslim men drove a kind of convoy through a Jewish neighborhood, shouting slogans such as, “F*** the Jews, rape their daughters.”

But crude as this was, there is something more scandalous about the protests in Europe. Muslims might at least feel like a party to the Israeli–Gaza conflict, in some way. What’s truly disturbing is the mass of secular Europeans who come from long lines of native residents in their countries joining in.

It brings up the question of why Israel’s actions bother Europeans so much. The oppression of the Kurds by Turkey occasions not a peep of protest. You’d think it might, given European connections to Turkey through NATO and other European Union–led deals about migration. Or the fact that the tyrant Recep Erdogan travels to European capitals and holds massive campaign rallies to capture the votes of Turkish men and women who live abroad. If the motor is a kind of anti-Americanism — American support for Israel is often brought up at these European protests — then why not protest the humanitarian disaster that has been Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, which causes starvation and has exacerbated the worst cholera outbreak in modern history?