NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

David Goldman:Two Adams, Two Foundings

Posted By on March 28th, 2024

https://americanmind.org/features/national-conservatism-vs-american-conservatism/two-adams-two-foundings/

There’s no escaping the tensions inherent in National Conservatism, and in political life.

Charles Kesler’s indictment of the conflicting elements in National Conservatism—between religion and secular rationalism; tradition and Constitutionalism; nationalism in the sense of “shared inheritance as the essence of shared identity and common will” and America’s “exceptional” nationalism—is so compelling as to make any attempt at refutation pointless. I plead guilty on all counts, but with extenuating circumstances. I signed the National Conservatism manifesto in full awareness of its inconsistencies, and would do so again today.

“Our nationalism has always been exceptional,” Kesler observes, “featuring more individualism, more pluralism, more freedom, and more statesmanlike deliberation and prudence than is typical. We think of ourselves as a founded nation; most nations don’t think they have or need such a clear, conscious, and principled beginning.” I would go even further: The supposed “shared inheritance” of the European nations is less the result of sedimentary accretion of traditions stretching back into the mists of time, than an ossified remnant of an earlier founding. I wrote in my review of Yoram Hazony’s 2022 book Conservatism: A Re-Discovery that “the nation as it came into existence after the ruin of the Roman Empire was not—as Hazony seems to imply—a spontaneous agglomeration of families, tribes, and clans for purposes of self-defense. On the contrary, it was a project of the Catholic Church, which sought to civilize the Visigoth barbarians who conquered Spain and the Merovingians and later Carolingian rulers of France.”

Kesler draws a bright line between Europe’s ethnocentric nationalism and America’s concept of citizenship—rightly so. The nationalism of the 19th century was a Romantic attempt to reinvigorate the nations of Europe by reinventing the Middle Ages after Napoleon leveled the Old Regime. It was a new founding rather than a continuation of ancient and accretive traditions, and it prepared the slippery slope that led to the World Wars of the 20th century. Europe’s atavistic nationalism was not a revival of tradition but a perverse innovation. Sometimes empire is better. The Austro-Hungarian Empire provided governance far superior to the plethora of nationalisms sponsored by the Versailles Treaty.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

The New Racism is Poisoning America By Janet Levy

Posted By on March 28th, 2024

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/03/the_new_racism_is_poisoning_america.html

The idea that past racism can be undone with more racism is ludicrous.  Affirmative action, established in the 1960s, emphasized equality of opportunity.  But it has transmogrified — through the politics of DEI, sexual orientation, and gender identity — into a new form of racism emphasizing equality of outcome.

Unconstitutional quotas deny college admissions and government jobs to whites and non-black, non-Latino, non-Native groups.  The worst is the recent invasion of healthcare by DEI-driven policies.  Belonging to a DEI-privileged group outweighs need.  White patients may have to wait longer than blacks or Hispanics for cardiac care or kidney transplants.  All in the name of “health equity” and righting past wrongs done to those groups.

This column will examine four recent lawsuits—among the many—against such policies. It will also show how a retribution-focused movement to embed racial preferences in medical treatment has gained traction over the last few years in the healthcare industry.

The first case is from Montana, where in 1991, the 52nd legislature enacted and codified House Bill 424 (originally House Joint Resolution 28) as Montana § 2-15-108, MCA. The law aimed to “take positive action to attain gender balance and proportional representation of minorities” in state boards, commissions, committees, and councils. Bias was alleged to cause the imbalance.

In September 2023, two vacancies opened for the 12-member Board of Medical Examiners, but the governor has been unable to make appointments since the appointments must adhere to DEI.  Do No Harm, an organization representing physicians and healthcare workers countering DEI in medicine, has filed a suit in U.S. District Court for the District of Montana (Helena Division), saying Montana § 2-15-108 violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Biden Administration’s Terrorist Pier in Gaza: The Trojan Horse For Terrorists to Take Over the Region by Bassam Tawil

Posted By on March 27th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20520/gaza-pier-qatar

Placing Qatar — rather than, say, the United Arab Emirates — in charge of the Gaza pier entrenches a terrorist-sponsoring Trojan Horse at Hamas’s beck and call. Qatar will use the pier to supply Hamas with more money and more powerful weapons. The port will also undoubtedly be used to smuggle Islamist jihadis from all around the world into the Gaza Strip to launch more massacres against Israelis.

Qatar has a long history of supporting the Muslim Brotherhood and its Islamist offshoots, but also Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Hezbollah and the Al Nusra Front.

If Qatar really wants an end to the Israel-Hamas war, all it has to do is order its Hamas puppets immediately and unconditionally to release all the Israelis kidnapped by Hamas terrorists October 7 and held hostage in the Gaza Strip. Hamas leaders Ismail Haniyeh and Khaled Mashaal, who are based in Doha, would not be able to refuse. Qatar is their lifeline.

The Qataris, however, are evidently in no rush to pressure Hamas: Qatar is clearly facing no pressure from the Biden administration. On the contrary, the Biden administration just agreed to extended Qatar’s ability to host America’s Al-Udeid Air Base, the headquarters of CENTCOM, for another ten years – for nothing in return.

“Congress must weigh in and cancel the 10-year extension of the military base in Qatar… The U.S. should seize assets tied to individuals and entities in Qatar for supporting terrorist groups, especially those tied to Iran, a state sponsor of terrorism…. It’s time to put Doha on notice that they are jeopardizing their relationship with the U.S. by providing material support to designated terrorist groups. Qatar is clearly acting like a state sponsor of terror and should not be allowed to use the U.S. banking system to bypass existing, though not enforced, sanctions on funding Iran and its terrorist proxies.” — Former US intelligence officer Michael Pregent, The Hill, January 22, 2024.

The US should definitely start withdrawing from Al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar.

Thanks to the Biden administration — which is also pressuring Israel not to eliminate the remaining Hamas terrorist battalions in the southern Gaza Strip city of Rafah — Qatar and its Hamas pawns are having the last laugh. In light of the Biden administration’s decision to turn itself into an ally of terrorists and their supporters, such as Hamas and Qatar – instead of strengthening US relations with Israel and its allies in the Gulf who are fighting terrorism — it is a very long last laugh, indeed.

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

The Worst Cold War Documentary Ever Made, Part 2 Noah Rothman

Posted By on March 27th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-worst-cold-war-documentary-ever-made-part-2/

I jumped the gun near the end of my review of the first three episodes of Netflix’s documentary series Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War. As I wrote in “The Worst Cold War Documentary Ever Made,” the series did not address the Korean War, the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, the Berlin Crisis of 1958, a brief Chinese–Taiwanese war, or the global communist guerrilla insurgency. But the series’ coverage of the 1950s did not end with episode three, as I suspected it had. The series pivoted in episode four to the so-called missile gap and Fidel Castro’s 1959 Cuban revolution, introducing both phenomena to establish the backdrop against which the Cuban Missile Crisis took place. Unfortunately, the film did so only to promote further the narrative that it had established in its first three episodes, which are organized around the notion that the United States was the foremost belligerent in the Cold War.

“The Russians were not on a crash program to build missiles,” the Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg said of the discovery unlocked by the launch of America’s first spy satellites. The Soviets were “not trying to be superior,” which meant that they “weren’t trying to dominate the world militarily.” Nefariously enough, American policymakers declined to internalize the conclusion that was so intuitive to Ellsberg. That was motivated reasoning designed to perpetuate the “fraudulent belief” that the Soviets represented a military threat to the West only because it was “very profitable.”

With this, Turning Point’s audience is treated to a Marxian theory of everything that explains the Cold War as an outgrowth of the fact that the American economy was “increasingly oriented around defense, and security, and nuclear weapons,” in the author Audra Wolfe’s formulation. “It’s sort of in everyone’s interests to keep building toward this world-ending moment because it’s good business,” the journalist Garrett Graff posits. Indeed, the arms race was a game, and “both sides played it,” said author Scott Anderson, by which he meant Democrats and Republicans, not the Americans and the Soviets.

HOMELAND SECURITY, IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

The Coming Terrorist Attack on U.S. Soil, Part III Peter Kirsanow

Posted By on March 27th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-coming-terrorist-attack-on-u-s-soil-part-iii/

The disaster at the southern border continues to grow. Border Patrol recorded an astonishing 250,000 encounters with illegal immigrants in December. This figure includes thousands of single, military-age men from China, Russia, and Iran.

The number of individuals on the terror watch list crossing the border has increased 2,500 percent during the Biden administration. In fiscal year 2023 more than 35,000 individuals with criminal records were arrested at the southern border, a tenfold increase since the beginning of Biden’s term (the actual figures are likely far larger since the reported numbers don’t include “gotaways,” conventionally estimated to constitute 50 percent of the total number of individuals entering the country illegally).

NORAD recently reported detecting more than a thousand unmanned-aerial-vehicle incursions along the border per month.

These alarming figures seem to have little impact on DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who regularly appears bored or distracted at congressional hearings concerning the border. His nonchalance is shared by many open-borders advocates, some of whom casually note that none of the individuals on the terror watch list who’ve crossed the border have committed a terrorist act on U.S. soil. Yet. This is what passes for reasoned analysis from open-borders elites.

Perhaps they calculate (or hope) that a terrorist attack won’t occur in their city; terrorists, after all, traditionally prefer high-profile targets. But not always. The terror might be magnified if the attack occurred in a place where people feel relatively safe — a minor-league baseball game in Wichita, a parade in Dubuque, a fair in Salem.

Or perhaps the elites calculate that terrorists entering the country today won’t execute their plans until the next administration. Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) would exclusively blame a Trump administration for anything that occurs on or after 12:01 p.m. on January 20, 2025, even if the attack were planned and executed solely by individuals who crossed the border during the Biden administration.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Plague That Besets Our Schools Is Extensive Armpit licking, condoms, transgenderism, and socialism are on full display. By Larry Sand

Posted By on March 27th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/03/27/the-plague-that-besets-our-schools-is-extensive/

The year, now a quarter old, reveals that the country’s rapid slide into educational purgatory is moving apace. Leading off the grossness parade is a school in Oklahoma where students lick and suck the armpits and toes of their fellow students in the name of charity. (This may garner a shrug in San Francisco, but Oklahoma?!)

While no district personnel were directly involved, video footage from Deer Creek High School in Edmond, OK, showed mid-teens participating in and watching the disgusting events unfold.

Getting caught with their pants down—so to speak—the school leaders assured us that no staff or faculty were involved in the cringeworthy event. But then the school became upbeat about the happenings. It celebrated the fact that the licker/suckers raised $152,000 for charity, asserting, “We would like to thank all of the patrons, businesses, and sponsors who contributed to the success of this year’s Wonderful Week of Fundraising.”

In other pervy news, Elk Grove, CA, parents discovered in January that a 3rd-grade teacher was inviting all the 3rd through 6th-grade classes to a new LGBTQ club he was starting. The “UBU Club” was for “boys who crush on boys” and “girls who crush on girls,” but anyone could come, the kids were told. Yet, most tellingly, parents weren’t notified about the club.

Also, in California, a bill introduced in January is now going through the legislative process. If passed, it will require that public high schools notify students where they can get free condoms on campus and allow schools to distribute condoms during sex education classes for middle and high school students.

ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Harvard’s Federal Funds at Risk over Anti-Semitism Investigation By Eric Lendrum

Posted By on March 27th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/03/26/harvards-federal-funds-at-risk-over-anti-semitism-investigation/

Harvard University could lose over $500 million in federal funding after it has been accused of obstructing a congressional probe into anti-Semitism on campus.

According to the Washington Free Beacon, the threat was made by Congresswoman Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), chairwoman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, which is leading the investigation into allegations of systemic anti-Semitism at Harvard and other elite universities in the United States. In the aftermath of the October 7th attacks on Israel, there have been numerous riots, protests, and other instances of anti-Semitic rhetoric, committed overwhelmingly by college-aged agitators and sometimes taking place on campus. Jewish students have been increasingly harassed by anti-Israel activists in the months since the war began.

Harvard received $625 million in federal funds alone in the year 2021, making up 67% of its total sponsored revenue. The Ivy League school could be at risk of losing all of this money after it has stonewalled the committee’s efforts to further investigate the nature of such anti-Semitism on campus, as well as possible lenience on the administration’s part towards the anti-Israel forces.

“The ultimate thing is obviously, trying to hold back some of their money if they’re just not going to make the students safe,” said Foxx in an interview. “That’s always an option for us.”

In February, the committee issued a subpoena for Harvard regarding documents that detailed the university’s handling of anti-Semitism. The university has been slow in handing over documents, including sending numerous documents that were heavily redacted.

“It’s hard to know whether it’s arrogance, ineptness, or indifference that is guiding Harvard,” Foxx continued. “They know the investigation is not going away.”

MEDIA Comments turned off

NBC News Officially Bans Republicans From Working There “No organization, particularly a newsroom, can succeed unless it is cohesive and aligned.” by Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on March 27th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/nbc-news-officially-bans-republicans-from-working-there/

For the longest time, the media played this game of pretending that it doesn’t consist entirely of a bunch of leftist activists who exist to promote their political agenda and attack those of their political opponents.

The pretense is wearing thin. And who knew that Ronna McDaniel of all people would be the breaking point? But it’s kind of like the way that the media’s attacks on dishwater liberals like McCain and Romney, portraying them as Hitler 2.0 just because they posed a threat to Obama, helped kill the media’s credibility.

The attacks on McCain and Romney made it clear that it wasn’t about “conservatives” or “right-wingers”, the media was out to destroy anyone running as a Republican and would tell the same lies about them.

Now NBC News has officially banned Republicans, even ones like Ronna McDaniel, from working there.

Ceasar Conde, the Chair of NBCUniversal News, issued a statement purging Ronna McDaniel while declaring that, “no organization, particularly a newsroom, can succeed unless it is cohesive and aligned.”

Conde claimed that McDaniel was hired in order to present “audiences with a widely diverse set of viewpoints”, but that gets in the way of a “cohesive and aligned” newsroom where everyone shares the same politics.

In his conclusion, Conde claims that NBC News still wants to “seek voices that represent different parts of the political spectrum.”

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Trump Could Pull Off The Greatest Political Comeback In American History Paul F. Petrick

Posted By on March 27th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/03/27/trump-could-pull-off-the-greatest-political-comeback-in-american-history/

Having secured sufficient delegates to become the first thrice-nominated Republican presidential candidate since Richard Nixon and the only person to bear the GOP standard in three consecutive elections, Donald Trump moves closer to completing the greatest political comeback in American history.

A Trump triumph in November would far surpass any previous political rehabilitation, including Nixon’s 1968 victory. Despite the effortless manner in which Trump dispatched his intraparty rivals, the road to a Trump Restoration remains perilous. Not since Napoleon returned from Elba has the global establishment been so focused on the defeat of one man. Luckily for Trump, he is an authority on comebacks.

“Not since Napoleon returned from Elba has the global establishment been so focused on the defeat of one man.”

“The Art of the Comeback” (1997) was published by Random House almost exactly 10 years after the same publisher released “The Art of the Deal” (1987). Sequels, being derivative in nature, are rarely superior to the first installment. But this one is because Kate Bohner is a better ghostwriter than Tony Schwartz. Nevertheless, the volumes are similar. In both books, Trump’s edifice complex is on full display. Each is essentially a photo album of skyscrapers. But “Comeback” is more relevant to Trump’s present situation.

“Comeback” contains the story of Trump’s return from near insolvency when the early 1990s recession devastated the New York real estate market. “Survive ‘til ‘95” was the mantra Trump put into practice via a complex restructuring of his business’ debt, much of which he had personally guaranteed. His back against the wall, Trump persuaded creditors that they were better off if he were a going concern. And when the economy roared back stronger than ever, so did Trump. Other developers were not so fortunate.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

China’s ‘Unrestricted Warfare’: Is It Here Already? by Pete Hoekstra

Posted By on March 27th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20519/china-unrestricted-warfare

China-linked hackers appear to be looking to attack U.S. infrastructure, especially key components such as the electrical grid, water reservoirs and treatment plants, pipelines, and transportation and communications systems, among other targets.

The goal is seemingly to disrupt the U.S. everything critical to life – if you have no electricity, your cellphone will not work; no water will come out of the tap; gas pumps will not pump gas; flights and trains will stop, and disease from disabled sewage treatment plants will spread. There will be havoc and panic. The government and military will be unable to protect the nation. That is what is meant by “unrestricted warfare.” Not a bullet was fired. It did not have to be. According to Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, it is perfect.

What are some of the steps that should be taken?

The West has correctly identified the CCP as the malign threat that it is; now we have a responsibility to put into place the measures and deterrents to prevent it from attacking us through cyberspace or any other way. Let us not wait until we experience a 9/11-scale cyberattack that could be far more damaging to the U.S. than what took place on that dark day more than 20 years ago.

If there is one thing FBI Director Christopher Wray has been consistent on, it is the threat of Communist China across a wide range of fronts. At an unprecedented event on July 6, 2022, Wray and his British counterpart, MI5 Director General Ken McCallum, held a joint public appearance – the first ever — to discuss the growing security challenge posed by China. Evidently, they saw the matter as urgent.