Defying the Odds: Trump’s Bronx Speech and Its Impact The man I heard in the Bronx bears scant resemblance to the bumbling yet dangerous ogre that the world has fabricated around the name Trump. Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/26/defying-the-odds-trumps-bronx-speech-and-its-impact/

Donald Trump’s Bronx rally on Thursday was memorable not only for its display of political virility in a foreign—i.e., Democrat—clime but also for the rhetorical excellence of the speech that Trump, in his usual circuitous manner, delivered.

Tweeting (or X-ing) the column I wrote about the event, I dilated on the suppleness of Trump’s speeches. “I know this sounds odd,” I wrote,

but here goes: Donald Trump has delivered some of the very best political speeches in American history.  We’re not supposed to notice that because, well, Trump.  But it is true.  Go back and listen to his 2017 speech in Warsaw.  It is a masterpiece.  Ditto his 2020 speech at Mount Rushmore. Although delivered in a different register, his speech yesterday in The Bronx will, I predict, turn out to be one of the most significant of the 2024 campaign.  Among other things, it will be seen to mark the moment when Trump’s gathering momentum became unstoppable.

Time will tell whether I am right about that concluding observation. While we wait, I thought I would share some reactions to my column—or, rather, to a misreading of something I said in response to a reader. I was asked “Do we know who writes [Trump’s speeches]?” I replied,  “Well, I do!” meaning I, like many people, know who writes Trump’s speeches, not that I write them myself.

A London-based friend whom I have not seen in a while wrote me an anguished, imploring note:  “Please tell me it isn’t true that you are writing Trump’s speeches. Surely it wasn’t you who advised him to say that immigrants were poisoning the blood of America? Straight out of the Mein Kampf playbook.”

Nope, not I. I am pretty sure the remark in question  was fermented and mis en bouteille by Trump himself.  Tout le monde—at least, the world of the elite media—was appalled by the remark just as they had been appalled by Trump’s calling shithole countries like Haiti “shithole countries,” his referring to Nikki Haley as “bird brain,” or many similar exercises in invective. In my view, none of Trump’s remarks bear any similarity to Mein Kampf, nor do I think he is an “authoritarian figure.”  My friend did say that “I wasn’t implying that Trump was actually a Hitler figure, but that his use of those words showed a staggering ignorance of their historical associations. I don’t see him as a fascist but as an ignoramus.” From “Hitler” to “ignoramus” is a slight upgrade, I suppose,  but not exactly the cat’s meow.

My friend and I went back and forth on Trump. In the course of the exchange, she went from comparing him to Hitler to saying that “most alarmingly he seems to be Putin’s useful idiot.” To that charge, I responded that “I know some people say that. I do note that Putin did not invade Ukraine during Trump’s presidency.  And I doubt Putin regarded Trump’s  destruction of hundreds of Russian troops in Syria in 2018 as a gesture of friendship, but who knows?”

My friend then allowed that “Putin annexed Crimea long before he went for the full invasion. What is most alarming is that Trump seems to feel he has Putin under his influence when it is really the other way around.”

Undercover Prosecutor Merchan Helps Bragg Lawlessly Stress Cohen’s Guilty Plea Andrew McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/05/undercover-prosecutor-merchan-helps-bragg-lawlessly-stress-cohens-guilty-plea/?utm_source=

The judge in Trump’s Manhattan criminal trial has stacked the deck against the former president.

Editor’s Note: This is the first of two columns on how Judge Juan Merchan has allowed prosecutors from Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s office to prove a federal campaign-finance crime against former president Donald Trump by relying on blatantly inadmissible evidence — the guilty pleas of Michael Cohen and a non-prosecution agreement David Pecker struck with the Justice Department. The second column will appear tomorrow.

How far out on a limb is Judge Juan Merchan willing to go to help Manhattan’s elected progressive Democratic district attorney, Alvin Bragg, convict former president Donald Trump based on inadmissible evidence?

Very far.

As I’ll discuss in this column and a second one tomorrow, the inadmissible evidence in question consists of (a) guilty pleas by Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, to two Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) felonies in a case brought against him by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York (SDNY); and (b) a non-prosecution agreement that former American Media Inc. CEO David Pecker — Trump’s longtime friend, who controlled the National Enquirer — entered into with the Justice Department because he feared being indicted under FECA. (Relatedly, AMI agreed to pay a fine to the FEC.)

To avoid too much redundancy, let’s focus on Cohen’s guilty pleas, which trigger the same legal objections as the non-prosecution agreement and the fine. The two pleas relate to non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) that Cohen helped obtain for Trump’s benefit during the 2016 presidential campaign in connection with two women — Karen McDougal and Stormy Daniels — who claimed to have had extramarital affairs with Trump in 2006. McDougal, a former Playboy model, was paid $150,000 by the National Enquirer, pursuant to an arrangement Cohen, then a lawyer for Trump and the Trump Organization, made with Pecker. Subsequently, when Pecker balked at paying Stormy Daniels (a porn star whose real name is Stephanie Clifford), Cohen paid for that NDA himself — only after, he claims, Trump promised that he’d be reimbursed, which he was in monthly installments in 2017.

We have been over why the guilty pleas are worthless (see, e.g., here and here). In my opinion, as a former SDNY prosecutor who worked there for nearly 20 years — and was a supervisor there for over a decade — they are worthless as evidence. But you needn’t agree with me on that because it is incontestable that they are worthless — or at least should be — as a matter of law.

Surprise: The more elite the school, the more likely the pro-Hamas encampment By Monica Showalter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/05/the_more_elite_the_school_the_more_likely_the_pro_hamas_encampment.html

Hedge fund big Bill Ackman, who’s lit a fire under Harvard over its antisemitism, seems to be still mulling the problems with universities.

He noted this, from the analysis of Washington Monthly:

According to Washington Monthly:

Student protestors at college campuses nationwide, united by their outrage at Israel’s actions in Gaza, can rightly be described as diverse. Despite the masks, it’s clear that they come from different racial backgrounds, and their views range from the belief that Israel should give up on its war effort to the conviction that Israel should be destroyed entirely.

But one thing is not especially diverse about the protests: the campuses on which they’ve been happening.

Many of the most high-profile protests have occurred at highly selective colleges, like Columbia University. But since the national media is famously obsessed with these schools and gives far less attention to the thousands of other colleges where most Americans get their postsecondary educations, it’s hard to know how widespread the campus unrest has really been.  

We at the Washington Monthly tried to get to the bottom of this question: Have pro-Palestinian protests taken place disproportionately at elite colleges, where few students come from lower-income families?

The answer is a resounding yes.

Declan Leary Can Americans Still Mourn As Americans? For the first time in more than a century, Memorial Day will be observed with a gaping hole in our national memory.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/can-americans-still-mourn-as-americans

Only a nation can mourn its dead. There is always the abstract reverence for sacrifice, the human awe that acts of valor inspire; that is universal. But to mourn takes something greater. You can admire the Dying Gaul, or Horatius at the bridge; you can only grieve for your countrymen.

This may be, in part, why it took more than a century for Memorial Day to take shape in this country. America was a nation born in war—unlike almost any in history before it—yet the early devotions to its fallen sons were mostly the private remembrances of soldiers’ organizations. A generation of relative peace followed, with fewer than 3,000 battle deaths between 1815 and 1861.

Then came civil war, when secession put the question of the American nation to a mortal test. Recent interpretations left and right have centered slavery at the expense of Union, the principle that Lincoln and other Northern leaders claimed as their motivation: that the American nation was bound by ties of law, of history, of purpose that could not be broken. Ultimately, more than 360,000 Northern men and boys died for that proposition—nearly twenty times as many Americans as had died in all theaters of conflict since 1775.

The war had settled the question: this was one nation. Yet that nation had also been transformed, in no small part because so many thousands of its sons had shed their blood. And so their sacrifice became a central object of the American civil religion: in Lincoln’s famous homage to the fallen men at Gettysburg, in the highly visible practices of the Grand Army of the Republic, and especially in the observance of Decoration Day, when the graves of the war dead would be adorned with flowers, flags, and other objects of patriotic reverence. The remembrance of their sacrifice served doubly to remind the mourners of the cause for which they fought, as a visible illustration of the price by which the Union—the American nation—had been preserved.

This was not the whole story, though. Beside those many Union dead, some 258,000 Americans had fallen in service to the South. Their families and communities would honor them, of course. But what was the nation to do about them?

Free speech is in dire shape By Jay Bhattacharya

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/3016509/free-speech-is-in-dire-shape/

The following are the prepared remarks of Jay Bhattacharya upon receiving the 2024 Bradley Prize, an award to “honor scholars and practitioners whose accomplishments reflect The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation’s mission to restore, strengthen, and protect the principles and institutions of American exceptionalism.”

Thank you! I am so grateful to be honored by the Bradley Foundation today. I am especially thankful
because, in my view, this award is not just to honor me but to acknowledge so many brilliant scientists,
politicians, public servants, teachers, lawyers, firefighters, small business owners, CEOs, and people
from every walk of life who risked their jobs, their reputations, or their family bliss to oppose COVID-19
tyranny. I dedicate this award to each of them.

It’s not hard to see that our pandemic response failed. Official counts attribute more than a million
deaths to COVID in the United States and almost seven million worldwide. By early 2022, about 95% of
Americans had contracted COVID despite the harsh countermeasures in most states, including
confinement of broad populations, business closures, cessation of religious and other gatherings,
school closures, and widespread violation of fundamental civil liberties. Very clearly, these measures
failed to protect Americans from COVID.

Many powerful scientific bureaucrats justified these policies with the idea that all scientists agreed that
the lockdowns would work to suppress or even eliminate the virus. This was known false by spring 2020. For instance, the Swedish experiment with keeping schools open in spring 2020 was a
tremendous success. Lockdowns are inherently leaky because human societies, human health, and
human well-being require physical proximity. It is unhealthy to treat our fellow human beings primarily
as biohazards.

German Police Stop Muslim Terror Attack on Synagogue One of the Muslim men was shot after attacking a police officer. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/german-police-stop-muslim-terror-attack-on-synagogue/

We hear a lot of talk about “Islamophobia”, but the proportion of Muslim terror plots against other people’s houses of worship is incredible and a truly global phenomenon. There are so many that all you can do is say, “here’s another one.”

And here’s another one.

German authorities said on Friday that they have arrested two men suspected of plotting a knife attack on worshippers at a synagogue in the southwestern city of Heidelberg, The Associated Press reported.

The pair discussed “the killing of one or more visitors in the attack on the synagogue followed by death as martyrs, whereby the two persons wanted to be shot to death by police,” authorities said in a joint statement quoted by AP.

The two suspects are German citizens, with the 18-year-old also holding Turkish nationality, authorities said. Their names were not released.

One of the Muslim men tried to attack the police.

The 24-year-old, armed with knives, was shot during the search around three weeks ago when he ran towards a police officer and did not respond when spoken to. He was injured. According to earlier statements by investigators, the suspect suddenly fled out of a window with several kitchen knives during the operation. There he deliberately threw a knife at a police officer and ran towards him with other knives.

He was doing what his religion taught him to do. And these two men were far from alone. There is a reason this keeps happening over and over again, and it’s not about Israel or even Jews. It’s about Islam.

The sooner we come to terms with that reality, the sooner we can intelligently address the situation.

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY ANSWERS FOR MASSIVE CASH HAUL FROM QATAR

https://mailchi.mp/fd11b7e3e8ac/35b-from-us-taxpayers-funded-world-health-organization-59980?e=0c8ccf8e98

On Thursday, Northwestern was held to account in a hearing by the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Labor Force.

NU President Michael Schill had to answer for shocking concessions he made to anti-Israel protestors who occupied his campus.

Schill was confronted with our findings that nearly $1 billion in foreign cash has poured into the school since 2007. The bulk of it came from Qatar, the tiny nation that harbors key Hamas leaders. 

Yesterday, I joined The National Desk to discuss our findings and the hearing: 

A staggering $690M was donated from Qatar to NU, much of it for their mutual partnership: a degree-conferring campus (NU-Q) in Qatar.  

Rep. Burgess Owens (R-UT), with a huge check as a visual aid, walked through the details:  

NU-Q has a partnership with Al Jazeera for journalism students; more than 1/3 of the campus speakers expressed pro-Hamas sentiments. 

The royal family of Qatar funds Al Jazeera, which delivers the Qatar point-of-view in the news.  

NU-Q mints journalists hired by… Al Jazeera.  

NU-Q has at least one visiting professor associated with an organization accused of funneling funds to Hamas. 

Of $690 million, Northwestern took $173 million to agree to the satellite campus, and another chunk of money to provide scholarships in tandem with the government-backed Qatar Foundation.  

What’s Spanish for ‘Chutzpah’? Bret Stephens

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/05/21/opinion/thepoint#spain-palestine-recognition

This week’s announcements by the governments of Ireland, Norway and Spain that they will recognize a Palestinian state are drawing predictable reactions from predictable quarters. Some see them as useful rebukes to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war strategy in Gaza that will further isolate Israel. Others, including me, view them as feckless gestures that reward Hamas’s terrorism.

That’s a column for another day. For now, it’s enough to note the Spanish government’s sheer nerve.

Though Spanish public opinion overwhelmingly supports swift recognition of Palestinian statehood, it’s another story when it comes to Spain’s own independence movements. In 2017 the regional government of Catalonia held a referendum, declared illegal by Spain’s Constitutional Court, on the question of Catalan independence. Though turnout was low — in part because Spanish police forcibly blocked voting — the Catalan government said nearly 90 percent of voters favored independence.

The central government in Madrid responded by dismissing the Catalan government, imposing direct rule. Two years later, under the current left-wing government of Pedro Sánchez, Spain sentenced nine Catalan independence leaders to prison on charges of sedition, though they were later pardoned. This year the lower house of the Spanish Parliament voted to grant amnesty to those involved in the 2017 campaign as part of a deal to prop up Sánchez’s government, despite a Senate veto. Seventy percent of the Spanish public opposes the amnesty.

Catalans aren’t the only ethnic minority in Spain that has sought independence, only to encounter violent suppression. In the 1980s the Spanish Interior Ministry under a socialist government responded to the long-running Basque separatist movement with state-sponsored death squads, notoriously responsible for a string of kidnappings, tortures and assassinations. The Spanish government called the separatists terrorists — as indeed some were — though their tactics look tame compared with Hamas’s. By the time the conflict ended in 2011, it had claimed more than 1,000 lives.

The Free World: An Alarming Status Report by Majid Rafizadeh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20660/free-world-alarming-status

It seems urgent for the long-term survival of the United States and the Free World – where people enjoy unprecedented freedom of speech, property rights, economic opportunity, religious freedom and other civil liberties – not to accept assaults on these hard-won achievements either at home or abroad.

Adversaries have become increasingly empowered, and allies may well be losing confidence in the West’s leadership. This week it was announced that three countries in Europe, Ireland, Norway and Spain – all of which have long, unfortunate histories of antisemitism – plan to recognizing a Palestinian State that will be terrorist.

US President Joe Biden assured Russia in 2022 that a “minor incursion” into Ukraine would be all right. Predators do not “do” minor.

The Biden administration handed over Afghanistan to a terrorist group, the Taliban; now it looks as if the Biden administration and these three racist countries in Europe are determined to hand Gaza to another terrorist group, Iran’s proxy, Hamas, which openly says it is more committed than ever to destroying its free, democratic neighbor, Israel.

Israel is trying to protect its citizens and maintain its sovereignty in the face of relentless aggression, while battling not only Hamas but also two illegitimate antisemitic courts (the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice), the antisemitic United Nations, antisemitic European countries, well-funded antisemitic demonstrations in the West, and the Biden administration… [which] for years has been trying to force out Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The US would doubtless prefer an Israeli prime minister who would allow Hamas to remain in control of Gaza and reconstitute its military capabilities; who would allow the creation of a terrorist Palestinian state bordering Israel, and who would stand aside as genocidal Iran obtains nuclear weapons.

In addition, the Communist Chinese regime, seeing the Biden administration reward aggression, past, present, and presumably future, is encircling the Philippines and Taiwan and sending tens of thousands of young men of military age in packs across America’s southern border, and more than 5,000 over its northern one.

One can only wonder which of the likely leaders of the Free World will permit — or put a stop to — these staggering negative trends of geopolitical deterioration in the future.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20660/free-world-alarming-status

It seems urgent for the long-term survival of the United States and the Free World – where people enjoy unprecedented freedom of speech, property rights, economic opportunity, religious freedom and other civil liberties – not to accept assaults on these hard-won achievements either at home or abroad.

Adversaries have become increasingly empowered, and allies may well be losing confidence in the West’s leadership. This week it was announced that three countries in Europe, Ireland, Norway and Spain – all of which have long, unfortunate histories of antisemitism – plan to recognizing a Palestinian State that will be terrorist.

US President Joe Biden assured Russia in 2022 that a “minor incursion” into Ukraine would be all right. Predators do not “do” minor.

The Biden administration handed over Afghanistan to a terrorist group, the Taliban; now it looks as if the Biden administration and these three racist countries in Europe are determined to hand Gaza to another terrorist group, Iran’s proxy, Hamas, which openly says it is more committed than ever to destroying its free, democratic neighbor, Israel.

Israel is trying to protect its citizens and maintain its sovereignty in the face of relentless aggression, while battling not only Hamas but also two illegitimate antisemitic courts (the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice), the antisemitic United Nations, antisemitic European countries, well-funded antisemitic demonstrations in the West, and the Biden administration… [which] for years has been trying to force out Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The US would doubtless prefer an Israeli prime minister who would allow Hamas to remain in control of Gaza and reconstitute its military capabilities; who would allow the creation of a terrorist Palestinian state bordering Israel, and who would stand aside as genocidal Iran obtains nuclear weapons.

In addition, the Communist Chinese regime, seeing the Biden administration reward aggression, past, present, and presumably future, is encircling the Philippines and Taiwan and sending tens of thousands of young men of military age in packs across America’s southern border, and more than 5,000 over its northern one.

One can only wonder which of the likely leaders of the Free World will permit — or put a stop to — these staggering negative trends of geopolitical deterioration in the future.

Tyranny by Any Other Name Still Stinks By J.B. Shurk

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/05/tyranny_by_any_other_name_still_stinks.html

Tyranny takes hold when good people are lulled into inaction.  Those of us who mind our own business and prefer government to leave us alone are particularly prone to falling into this trap.  Because we have no use for government, we hope government will have no use for us.  So we are silent while evil grows far from our homes.  We tend to our basic comforts and ignore evil as it nears.  And, eventually, we even collaborate with evil in order to avoid making a public scene.  In an effort to “get by” without causing too many waves, tyranny’s waves grow bigger and stronger until they crash upon our homes.  By then, it is too late to batten down the hatches.  Evil has already broken through our doors.

I had hoped that we would have more time.  That must be the common sentiment shared by every generation grappling with what comes next.  I had hoped that the sheer destruction of the twentieth century would be enough to buy us many more decades of relative peace.  Regrettably, two world wars and a nuclear-tipped Cold War did nothing to temper governments’ lust for power or their financial backers’ lust for wealth.  WWI’s clash of empires should have discouraged the growth of trigger-happy alliances and endless conquest.  The evil unleashed by WWII’s totalitarian regimes should have discouraged the growth of centralized institutions and vast, unaccountable, “just following orders” bureaucracies.  Instead, military alliances, central banks, international governing bodies, administrative Leviathans, and trade organizations have accumulated more power today than at any other time in history.  The twenty-first century is the century of empire-building and totalitarianism, and unless ordinary people rein in the excesses of their own governments, the mass destruction that follows will make the first two world wars look like measly hors d’oeuvres.

Can it be done?  Can global bloodshed be averted?  Can Western nations be saved before they devolve into hotbeds of revolution and civil war?  Or do the mounting conflicts all around us signify that we are already too late?  The answers to those questions depend, in part, on whether regular citizens sufficiently resist being used as cannon fodder in the years ahead and whether global leaders sufficiently fear losing everything they now have.  Had the great monarchies of Europe understood that WWI would facilitate their demise, perhaps they would have been more hesitant to allow a tangled web of military alliances to decide their fate.  Chasing honor and glory led European nobles straight to their graves.  Had Mussolini, Hitler, and Tojo known that they would die shamefully, perhaps their thirst for empire could have been quenched.  Lord Acton’s famous observation deserves a corollary: those who seek absolute power must be destroyed absolutely.