BOOKS Comments turned off

Joan Swirsky Interviews author Linda Goudsmit on her recently published opus: The Book of Humanitarian Hoaxes: Killing America with ‘Kindness

Posted By on August 1st, 2020

https://canadafreepress.com/article/joan-swirsky-interviews-author-linda-goudsmit-on-her-recently-published-opu

Joan (JS): Linda…when did you have the blazing insight that what you were witnessing in the politics of American leftists were not sincere efforts to improve the system, but rather elaborate hoaxes designed to destroy our country?  

Linda (LG): From 2017 to 2019––I wrote a number of articles in response to current events. At about the third article, I realized that there was a consistent pattern of leftist political policies that were presented as altruistic, but in  reality were deceitful, tactical, political strategies deliberately designed to collapse––to destroy––America from within. 

JS: Indeed, your book spells out the quite astounding number of 50 Humanitarian Hoaxes! And quite courageously, you identify the culprits you believe are responsible for this malevolent con job on America. I must add here that readers can also access your articles at: lindagoudsmit.com and goudsmit.pundicity.com

LG: Yes, there are many perpetrators of this stealth attack––and malevolence describes its destructiveness. But the Huckster-in-Chief is Barack Hussein Obama who, from his first appearance on the national and international stage, proclaimed his intention to ”fundamentally transform America.” Of course, most Americans had no idea that Obama’s goal was to replace our constitutional republic with socialism. We are witnessing the extraordinary success of his seditious plan today. 

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Slow and Ugly Implosion of South Africa Continues By Eileen F. Toplansky

Posted By on August 1st, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/07/the_slow_and_ugly_implosion_of_south_africa_continues.html

In 2018, Tucker Carlson highlighted the expropriation of land from white farmers in South Africa.  He stated, “As land seizures based on skin color shows, South Africa is once again becoming a place where an entire group of people is targeted for discrimination and violence on the basis of their skin color.”

Twenty-six years ago, “South Africans engaged in a peaceful revolution.  As late as the 1980s commentators predicted that any transition from white minority domination and black majority rule would precipitate a bloody civil war.  Instead, in 1994 South Africans replaced president F.W. de Klerk with Nelson Mandela in a free and fair election that astonished the world.”  Thus, “South Africans of all races voted in the country’s first democratic elections, choosing Mandela as their first black president.  The inhumane apartheid regime seemed to be miraculously ending peacefully, though much work remained to improve the lives of all South Africans.”  By the “late 1980s, however, South Africa’s economy was in a deep recession and large segments of the country were becoming ungovernable.”

Former president Jacob Zuma (2009–18) “brought the country a reputation for corruption and ineptitude.”  In fact, in 2018, the World Bank ranked South Africa as the most corrupt country in the world.

In 2018, Hammond and Tupy, “in reviewing South Africa’s flirtation with the idea of changing its constitution to let the state expropriate farmland without compensation, wrote that South Africa need only look north to Zimbabwe to see the disastrous consequences of this kind of policy.”  Zimbabwe’s former dictator, Robert Mugabe, gave “the green light to his paramilitary supporters to invade commercial farms, seize some 23 million acres of land and the confiscated farms were resettled with small scale agriculturalists.  Many of the new would-be-farmers had no real knowledge of commercial agriculture and many soon returned to subsistence farming.  The actual commercial farmers left for other African countries and the result was devastating food shortages in a nation once dubbed the ‘bread basket of Africa.'” 

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel Was Ground Zero for the New Woke Religion How coverage of the Jewish state became a signifier of the ideological activism that now permeates Western culture by Matti Friedman

Posted By on August 1st, 2020

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/israel-woke-religion

This year many people have discovered that liberal life and institutions in the West are in the grip of something resembling a new religion. Anyone following the doings of the past few months won’t need a recap of the attempted “cancellations” of scholars and scientists for heresies, the purge of editors for running the wrong op-ed, or the excommunication of J.K. Rowling.

Adherents of the thought system vaguely described as “woke” believe themselves to be fighting evil in the name of justice. They share a hierarchy of good, a lingo, purity tests, and a stark division of the world into friend and foe, all of which borrow heavily from religious modes of thought. But one of the most obvious signs that religion is in play, and not merely empirical observation or political criticism, is the way this ideology has focused and amplified the condemnation of Jews.

All of this has made me think differently about my experience as a reporter in Israel a decade ago, and particularly about an essay I wrote in 2014 for Tablet, which was one of the first publications to pick up on these trends. That essay, “An Insider’s Guide to the Most Important Story on Earth,” and a second one that appeared in The Atlantic, described the replacement of journalism here by activism, the subjugation of objective description to higher ideological truth, and the manufacture of politically driven morality plays in the guise of news. I took this to be a problem related to, and perhaps limited to, perceptions of Jewish people and of Israel.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Do Burning Cities Mark Start Of Democrats’ ‘Civil War 2.0’?

Posted By on July 29th, 2020

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/07/29/do-burning-cities-mark-start-of-democrats-civil-war-2-0/

The upsurge in rioting, looting, destruction and violence in cities across the country won’t just peter out, as many hope. Sadly, mainstream media outlets refuse to cover the actual news, while Democratic politicians actually express solidarity with those who are burning down our cities. It’s become obvious to one and all: The left media and so-called progressive Democrats would rather see urban bonfires than lose to Donald Trump in November.

Asked recently about 59 straight days of protests and violence in Portland, New York Rep. Jerry Nadler called reports of Antifa rioting there a “myth.” Not to be outdone, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi likened the federal police sent to quell the disturbances to “Nazis.”

This is today what passes for leadership in the Democratic Party, which since losing in 2016, has undergone an extreme makeover to become the most radical “mainstream” party in the U.S. in modern times. To find its equivalent, you’d have to go back to … let’s see, 1860 and 1861, when the very same Democratic Party convinced 11 states to secede from the union, thus setting off the Civil War.

Plus ça change, as the French would say.

Egged on in 2020 by that same radical party, Antifa, Black Lives Matter and other extremist groups have gone on an unchecked spree. Vandalism, looting, murders and politically motivated beatings have metastasized across the nation, making city after city into unlivable hellholes.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Attorney General Barr Scorches Democrats Matthew Vadum: Congressional Dems get exposed on their treacherous enabling of orgies of violence.

Posted By on July 29th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/attorney-general-barr-scorches-democrats-matthew-vadum/

U.S. Attorney General William Barr gave congressional Democrats a much-deserved dressing down for endlessly excusing the orgy of violence in cities across America that has followed the wrongful death of George Floyd in Minneapolis May 25 at the hands of police.

The Democratic Party officially endorsed Black Lives Matter in 2015 and has all but endorsed Antifa, the purported anti-fascists who embrace fascistic tactics in the name of combating fascism, a term they define promiscuously. President Donald Trump has vowed to designate Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization.

Even the increasingly anti-American radicals at the New York Times, which gave birth to the hateful propaganda campaign known as the 1619 Project, have been forced to admit that many police have been injured in the violent nightly demonstrations that have raged for months.

In a court filing July 22, the U.S. attorney’s office in Oregon disclosed that 28 federal law enforcement officers had been injured as of that date during the civil unrest in Portland. Another court filing said there are now 114 federal law enforcement officers in Portland, brought in from federal agencies such as Customs and Border Protection and the Federal Protective Service. Local police said separately that 59 officers had been injured.

The deployment of federal agents to Portland began on the Fourth of July weekend. Reportedly, the crowds of angry subversives have since swelled from the hundreds to the thousands, as the radicals viewed the federal presence aimed at protecting federal property as a kind of invasion on their home turf.

Industrial-grade mortar fireworks have reportedly been fired at police officers and federal agents, and on July 27 a bomb was detonated at the federal courthouse in Portland.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Confused And Pointless Rage Of An Entitled Generation By Matt Walsh

Posted By on July 29th, 2020

   https://www.dailywire.com/news/walsh-the-confused-and-pointless-rage-of-an-entitled-generation/

What happens when you take a generation of people, carefully instill in them an overriding sense of entitlement, give them lives of immeasurable comfort and ease, grant them every right and liberty known to man, but then at the same time tell them, somehow, incredibly, that they are oppressed — and then finally, after decades of this sort of schizophrenic conditioning, grant them free reign to express their confused and unearned rage in whatever way they desire, including felony vandalism and assault? Well, we are now seeing the results of that social experiment, and they are as ugly as expected — the country witnessing an eruption in rioting and mayhem by members of what the Feds generally describe as “violent anarchist” groups.

Indeed, the entitlement of these left-wing “protesters” — many of whom are white and by the Left’s own terms “privileged” — is the most striking and inescapable thing about them. These are people who believe they actually have the God-given — or whoever-given — right to shut down roads, stop traffic, intimidate, harass, assault, burn, loot, and pillage, without consequence. They really believe they have this right.

For example, DC activist Julia Clark posted a lengthy Twitter thread over the weekend complaining about cars that kept driving down roads that she and her comrades had decided to close. Of course they had no authority to close any roads at all, but that is a minor detail in Julia Clark’s mind. If Julia Clark decides that a road is closed, well then, damn it, it’s closed. And that’s all there is to it.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

VIDEO: AG BARR: SINCE WHEN IS IT OKAY TO TRY AND BURN DOWN A FEDERAL COURT??

Posted By on July 29th, 2020

https://twitter.com/DailyCaller/status/1288144511433150464

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The lunacy of the ‘largely peaceful protest’ The media says one thing while also saying the opposite Roger Kimball

Posted By on July 29th, 2020

https://spectator.us/lunacy-largely-peaceful-protest-riots-orwell/

The great conundrum facing the anti-American left at the moment is how to react to the violent protest ripping up various Democratic-run cities. What is the preferred narrative? The two main choices are 1) it’s all peaceful protest, the ‘right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances’? or 2) let ’er rip: we’re out there destroying stuff and hurting people because the country’s falling apart and the sooner the better. Just so, a contributor to the Oregonian, announcing his fears of an impending ‘anti-democratic, racist police state’, wondered whether he would find ‘the courage to resist racism and fascism’, by which I suspect he means a free, open, and democratic election in which a candidate he does not favor has the indelicacy to win.

For it should go without saying that the overriding criterion for choosing which narrative to plug is this: which story will do the most damage to Donald Trump and Republican prospects in the November election?

By and large the media has opted for option one, reasoning that most people, taking note of the Democratic character of all the most serious sites of mayhem, might forget to blame Donald Trump for the rampaging fiends tearing up our cities and shooting toddlers, policemen, stray pedestrians and each other.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Charles Lipson: When ‘J’Accuse” Is Just a Smear The false, malicious attacks on Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass

Posted By on July 29th, 2020

https://spectator.us/jaccuse-smear-john-kass-chicago-tribune-george-soros/

Last week, the Chicago Tribune’s most prominent writer, John Kass, wrote a column decrying the rise in urban violence. Its compelling title: ‘Something grows in the big cities run by Democrats: an overwhelming sense of lawlessness.’

In today’s woke world, it is risky to speak such hard truths about gang shootings, unprosecuted shoplifting, looting, carjackings and more. This rising lawlessness is often cloaked in the language of protest, racial justice and income equality. Speaking out against it runs real risks. You might be doxxed, your home tagged with graffiti, or your family threatened. If you are a columnist, like John Kass, you might face ostracism from left-wing colleagues, attacks by the reporters’ union, and concessions to the mob by your paper’s editor, Colin McMahon.

The dispute began when the union representing Tribune writers (of which Kass is not a member) decided to go after him, full-bore. Their false charge was…wait for it…Kass’s column was anti-Semitic. Why? Because Kass noted that a major accelerant of urban violence has been the weak response by public officials, especially state and local prosecutors. Some of those prosecutors won office as part of a progressive political movement, specifically focused on winning control of prosecutors’ offices. That quiet movement had met with a lot of electoral success. One of its major supporters and funders is George Soros. Soros’s family background is Jewish.

BOOKS Comments turned off

More Praise for Mike Gonzalez’s The Plot to Change America By Roger Clegg

Posted By on July 29th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/more-praise-for-mike-gonzalezs-the-plot-to-change-america/

This penetrating and insightful book — with the secondary title, “How Identity Politics Is Dividing the Land of the Free” — has already been favorably reviewed by us here. It also features a nice blurb from Rich Lowry (“an incisive, unsparing treatment of identity politics”), as well as from Michael Barone and Ben Shapiro. So it hardly needs my endorsement. But the publication date is this week, and I’d like to add briefly my enthusiastic two cents.

As the title of the earlier NR review indicates, the book’s principal theme is identifying “The Intellectual Roots of Today’s Identity Politics.” A second strong theme — as you would expect from the author, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a Cuban emigre to boot — is a critique of the results of this Left-rooted sickness. And Mr. Gonzalez’s third theme is prescriptive: He aims to answer the question, posed in a different context over 100 years ago by a rather influential leftist, “What is to be done?” As the author succinctly puts it:

To achieve that end [i.e., to defeat the plot to change America], the most urgent tasks are to expose myths, reveal what really happened, explain why it is urgent to change course, and offer a strategy to do so. Though we should not fool ourselves into thinking it will be easy to eliminate identity politics, we should not overthink it, either. Identity politics relies on the creation of groups, and then on giving people incentives to adhere to them. If we eliminate group making and the entitlements, we can get rid of identity politics. Explaining all this is this book’s main goal.

That’s from the introduction, by the way; if you’re able to read that (and the conclusion) online, you should, since it will persuade you better than anything I can write to read the rest of the book.