Another Never-Trump Fifth Columnist Giving aid and comfort to a party assaulting our Constitution and freedoms. by Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/another-never-trump-fifth-columnist/

Another Trump election, another shameful display of so-called Republican moral preening about Donald Trump being “unfit” for office, a “threat to democracy,” and an “abuser of our allies.” This time it’s William S. Cohen in the Wall Street Journal, an erstwhile Congressman, Senator, and Secretary of Defense between 1973 and 2001.

His tissue of Democrat campaign clichés and smears accompanies a preposterous panegyric to Kamala Harris’s make-believe foreign policy prowess, despite nearly four years of Biden’s and her abject failures abroad. Once again, a Potemkin conservative is carrying water for a party that has moved dangerously leftward as it continues the progressives’ long march to dismantle our Constitution, and with it our unalienable rights and political freedom.

Cohen’s second sentence makes clear his foreign-policy ideology: “Vice President Kamala Harris is an internationalist who believes in the rule of law and in a rules-based system that strives for global order and stability.” In other words, a proselyte of the “rules-based international order” that privileges “diplomatic engagement,” multinational institutions, and international law over a realist policy predicated on conflicting global national interests.

As such, Cohen extols Harris’s “commitment to help Ukraine defend its freedom and independence from Vladimir Putin’s criminal onslaught,” a New World Order project par excellence. That is, she supports a foreign policy that privileges the globalist elite technocrats and their interests over our national sovereignty, and our own citizens’ security and interests. Worse yet, Cohen can’t tell us what specific strategy Harris has for resolving this bloody and expensive war.

As for Harris’s loyalty to the “rule of law,” how does that square with Joe Biden’s usurping Congress’s Article One power to make the laws, and instead giving it to unelected and unaccountable federal agency clerks? Or his failure to fulfill his obligation “to take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed”?

The Post-Election Temper Tantrum

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/10/30/the-post-election-temper-tantrum/

Two months ago, as the Democrats were preparing for their national convention in Chicago, we were concerned that it would be a repeat of the party’s 1968 convention that was marred by riots. But sanity prevailed. It was a relatively quiet affair. Will the Democrats be just as quiet if Donald Trump wins next week’s election? It’s more likely that they will erupt with rage.

After all, there have been two failed attempts to assassinate Trump. Yes, the suspects in both cases appear to be disturbed. But it’s been the nonstop vilification of the former president from the left that likely motivated them. The prospect of another term for Trump is going to push many over the edge that they’ve been teetering on since the man announced in 2015 that he was running for president.

From the Oct. 28 Wall Street Journal:

Across America, more than a dozen progressives in various positions of influence told The Wall Street Journal that they are dreading the prospect of Trump’s return to power, and dismayed that half the country might see a completely different reality than they see. Some are bracing for unrest. On a recent evening, more than 200 people joined a Zoom meeting titled Mass Training For Women’s Safety Teams — hosted by a Women’s March veteran who noted its timing amid ‘escalating political violence.’”

There is precedent. Trump’s 2016 election win provoked an outbreak of violence that lasted for days.

“For the third night in a row, anti-Donald Trump demonstrators took to the streets in several big cities and on college campuses across the United States, including an outburst of smashed windows and a dumpster fire in Portland that police countered with pepper spray and flash-bang devices,” USA Today reported on Nov. 11, 2016.

The day before, Al Jazeera said the protests against “Trump’s election victory had turned violent.”

Months later, on Jan. 21, 2017, Reuters reported “black-clad activists among hundreds of demonstrators protesting Donald Trump’s swearing-in on Friday clashed with police a few blocks from the White House, in an outburst of violence rare for an inauguration.” At least 217 were arrested.

Women Deserve Better Than Hillary … or Kamala By J.B. Shurk

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/10/women_deserve_better_than_hillary_or_kamala.html

Kama-lama-ding-dong’s got the blues.  This was supposed to be her time.  This was supposed to be her rise.  She was supposed to make her-story.  Instead, Kam-Kam’s on her way to an Election Night drubbing, a week-long bender, and a few months of solitude in celebrity rehab.  She should take Hillary Clinton along, too.  A period of detox and sobriety could do both some good.  And the American people would benefit from their prolonged absence from television news.

America will one day have a female president.  She will be smart, articulate, prudent, and brave.  She will treat her campaign for office as a chance to prove to the American people that she has their best interest at heart.  She will be thoughtfully prepared to answer any and all questions.  Nobody will say it’s “her turn” or pretend she is more talented than she really is.  Nobody will hold her to a lower or higher standard because of her sex.  She will rise to the top because she earns it.  Americans will listen to her speeches, watch how she conducts her personal life, and conclude that she is the right leader for the time.  And when she is elected, no one will mumble, “She won only because she’s a woman.”  She will win on her own merits.

The Democrats have done women no favors by pushing the candidacies of Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris.  Neither has the necessary disposition for holding the highest office in the land.  Both are rash and unwise.  They are selfish and unjust.  They are intemperate and vengeful.  They are self-conscious and uncertain.  They are unkind, impatient, and self-serving.  They exude no faith in God, inspire no hope in others, and display no courage.  They are weak in mind and soul and encourage such weakness in others.  They are unfit to lead.  They are not remarkable women.

That Democrat party elites have forced Hillary and Kamala on the American people shows how little they actually think of women.  Hillary is an inveterate liar and shameless shrew whose chief accomplishment in life has been to obtain enough dirt on Washington insiders to stay out of prison.  She won a seat in the U.S. Senate because New Yorkers pitied her when it became clear that her president husband is a lecherous creep incapable of moderating his own depravities.  Giving Hillary a prestigious government job after Bill’s Oval Office debauchery with an intern barely old enough to drink legally was a Hallmark card kind of way for the American people to say, “Sorry your husband humiliated you while you were first lady.”  Had voters known that Hillary was already scheming for the top job and only pretending to be wounded by Slick Willy’s philandering, they would have been much less likely to overlook her own personal qualities.  And they certainly were not hoping that Hillary’s presidential ambitions would one day return both immoral Clintons back to the White House!  

Who Is Actually Running the Country? by John Richardson

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21040/who-is-running-the-country

Members of both American political parties and other concerned observers have been asking for a while now, “Who’s actually running the country?”

More often it seems as if is a cadre of unelected bureaucrats – a faceless politburo – who uphold the law or not, according to political expediency or whim.

American author and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy has called this group “a machine.”

Are “open borders” legal or not? Are immigration laws being violated or not? Are illegal aliens legal or not? Are prosecutions of presidential candidates within a month of a presidential election “election interference” or not? Were the deliberate lies of former US intelligence officials to the US public about the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s laptop actionable “election interference” or not?

What we should probably be asking, as we head to November, is: “Do we really want to go on living like that?”

Members of both American political parties and other concerned observers have been asking for a while now, “Who’s actually running the country?”

Answers include:

Former President Barack Obama, who, in November 2020, said on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert:

“People would ask me, knowing what you know now, do you wish you had a third term? And I used to say, “You know what? If I could make an arrangement where I had a stand-in, a front man or front woman, and they had an earpiece in, and I was just in my basement in my sweats looking through the stuff, and then I could sort of deliver the lines, but somebody else was doing all the talking and ceremony, I’d be fine with that.”

The Media Is Implementing Sinwar’s Genocidal Strategy by Alan M. Dershowitz and Andrew Stein

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21065/hamas-media-genocidal-strategy

Although they could easily distinguish between combatant and non-combatant deaths, Hamas refuses to do so.

They [Hamas] fail to acknowledge that many of these so-called children were also combatants.

They do the same with women, conveying the impression that only men are terrorists.

Without the support of the media, this strategy would not succeed.

And useful ignoramuses on university campuses, along with bigots in international organizations, falsely accuse Israel of genocide, despite the successful efforts of the IDF to reduce civilian casualties to the minimum possible….

In the absence of an honest accounting, the media will continue to do Sinwar’s nefarious work in increasing Palestinian casualties in order to increase the pressure on Israel.

Sadly, the media’s dangerous cooperation with terrorists tells us more about them than about the war about which they purport to be “reporting.”

Following the death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, documentary evidence has emerged confirming what many observers already knew: namely, that Sinwar weaponized the death of Gazan civilians, especially women and children.

The Ordeal and Triumph of Mr. Netanyahu

https://victorhanson.com/the-ordeal-and-triumph-of-mr-netanyahu/

https://victorhanson.com/the-ordeal-and-triumph-of-mr-netanyahu/

Ordeal

After the October 7 massacres, the obituaries of the long political career of Benjamin Netanyahu, published both in Israel and in the West, became orthodox. He was considered as politically inert as Donald Trump once was after January 6, 2021.

The conventional wisdom speculated not if, but only when he would be forced out of office.

Western leaders and the Israeli left, and indeed even the Israeli non-left, as well as American and European pundits, claimed that the laxity of the Netanyahu government was entirely to blame for the grotesque massacre of October 7.

Indeed, last fall, there arose almost a competition of critics to assert all the ways in which Netanyahu was played by Hamas.

Accordingly, Netanyahu’s sweeping Supreme Court reforms had supposedly needlessly split the country, demoralizing the military and eroding Israeli deterrence in the eyes of Palestinian terrorists. Or his purported strategy of playing off the more lethal and toxic Hamas against the Palestinian Authority was supposedly proof of his reckless naivete.

Still, other opponents argued that his 16 years as Israel’s longest-serving prime minister and his age of 75 made him a Joe Biden-like relic of the past, simply too old and too familiar to be any longer effective. He was told it was well past time to step down and let a new generation break out of the old toxic Middle East mindsets.

And indeed, after October 7, Netanyahu faced a bleak regional and global landscape—analogous to what a 65-year-old Churchill faced in June 1940 when all of Western Europe was in the hands of the Nazis and a lonely Britain was without a single wartime ally—with a sympathetic America still hesitant to commit to ensuring its existence.

Massive immigration from the Middle East into Europe and the United States—spiked by hundreds of thousands of oil-subsidized foreign students in Western universities, coupled with the post-George Floyd woke/DEI hysterias—had made European and American political parties unapologetically not just anti-Israel but now increasingly anti-Semitic as well.

Western governments at times seemed far more terrified of their own Muslim citizens, foreign residents, radicalized students, and left-wing activists of their political parties than they were of any terrorist threats emanating from Iran and its surrogates.

“We Are in The Midst of a War of Revival,” Netanyahu Tells Knesset “Our victory will not be just for us, it will be for all of humanity,” he says Ira Stoll

https://www.theeditors.com/p/we-are-in-the-midst-of-a-war-of-revival?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_

Yesterday Prime Minister Netanyahu addressed the Israeli parliament, or Knesset, in Hebrew, offering context and a progress report on the war. At least one longtime nonpartisan observer of Netanyahu’s long career described it as superb and one of Netanyahu’s best speeches. An official English translation isn’t yet publicly available but thanks to the magic of artificial intelligence I was able to muster this rough but fluid and rapid translation of the speech. If readers have corrections to the text, by all means send them along and I will update.

The honorable President Yitzhak Herzog; Distinguished Speaker of the Knesset, Amir Ohana; Deputy President of the Supreme Court, Justice Yitzhak Amit and his wife Rivka; dozens of Knesset members; Leader of the Opposition, Member of Knesset Yair Lapid, Members of Knesset, my brothers and sisters, To the bereaved families, relatives of the abducted men and women who stand relentlessly before our eyes, distinguished guests, everyone. We are in the midst of a war of revival. 

On Simchat Torah, on October 7th, a year ago, we suffered a severe blow, but we got back on our feet. We did not break, we did not fall apart, and not only did we not surrender, we launched a powerful counter-offensive against our attackers, a war that is changing the face of the Middle East. 

From then until today, alongside the terrible pain that is the lot of the entire nation, we are defending ourselves with high spirits and supreme determination for the revival of Israel. 

Whoever attacked us brought upon themselves an unprecedented disaster. 

There is a line of similarity in the current war to the War of Independence. Then we faced seven Arab countries, and today we are facing seven fronts of terror. 

But I must emphasize, today we are facing a completely different challenge, against a cruel and barbaric enemy that threatens not only us, it threatens the entire Middle East, it threatens the entire world. Its evil intentions are to kill, destroy, and annihilate. The axis of fanatical evil, led by Iran, which has killed thousands in the past year with its cruelty, threatens to destroy our country and threatens to capture more and more territories. It seeks to take over our region by force and from here threaten first of all the West, not only the West, first of all the West. 

The Washington Post Declines to Endorse for President, and Civilization Melts Jeffrey Blehar

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-washington-post-declines-to-endorse-for-president-and-civilization-melts/?utm_source=recirc-

The Washington Post — newspaper of the federal clerisy, official organ of the Resistance, the place where “Democracy Dies in Darkness” — announced this afternoon that not only will it not be endorsing either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump for president in 2024, but that it will never make an endorsement again. (This is truly a shame; as a colleague lamented to me, now I guess we’ll just never know how these people really felt about 2024.)

The reactions across media have ranged from disgust to outright garment-rending peals of agony — resignations have already been filed — and you’d have to have a heart of stone not to be laughing until tears roll down your cheeks at every last one of them. I’d be remiss if I didn’t share a few, if only to illustrate the absurdity of it all.

Let’s get one thing out of the way first, however: This was a business decision by Jeff Bezos. Publisher and CEO Will Lewis wrote the piece announcing the Post’s decision not to endorse (erm . . . “change its policy going forward,” that is), but all other reporting (including, hilariously, the Post’s own employees’ union) clearly indicates that this is a directive from on high, one that Lewis was willing to go along with. I think I know why — and it’s not the dull and obvious answer of “Bezos just worries about Trump regulators hurting Amazon” — but hold that thought for now.

Because before that we should note that Bezos wasn’t actually the first to act on this. Only yesterday, the media world flew into a similar outrage over the owner of the Los Angeles Times blocking his editorial board from issuing a presidential endorsement. The editorial page editor resigned after owner Patrick Soon-Shiong asked the board to — this is not a joke, dear readers — write a sober “pros and cons” analysis of each candidate instead. (I am deeply disappointed myself, because nobody should have been denied the comedy of reading the Times rate Donald Trump’s good qualities.)

The reactions to the Times kerfuffle were muted, because to be perfectly honest, nobody reads or cares about the Los Angeles Times. But the news from the Post was greeted with a collective gran mal seizure from online media lefties. There are simply too many denunciations from the cheap seats to mention here, but internally it was ugly: Editorial board member Robert Kagan announced his immediate resignation, while former editor Marty Baron tweeted “this is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty” (leading one to assume he wrote the Post’s current masthead slogan, among other things). Meanwhile, notoriously surly race-harridan Karen Attiah first fell into stunned silence on Twitter, tweeting only “Jesus Christ” and “Today has been an absolute stab in the back.”

The Third Awokening: A 12-Point Plan for Rolling Back Progressive Extremism by Eric Kaufmann

Woke is not a fad but a cultural revolution—a movement that can only be stopped by a drastic intervention in our institutions and culture.

We in the West are in the third wave of cultural-left ideological enthusiasm. Each “Awokening” has crested, fallen a little, consolidated, then surged again to reach a higher level. The cumulative result is an elite creed which has produced a crime wave, a worsening education system, chaos at the border, and social division. Fired by a cultural socialism that puts equal results and emotional protection for minorities at the center of their moral universe, today’s young people are twice as intolerant of conservative speech as older generations. These young people will be the median voters and employees of tomorrow, leading and controlling the country. Woke cultural socialism is not the classical liberalism of the American Constitution, but a modern “majorities bad, minorities good” Left-liberalism. It is powered by a set of ‘liberal’ emotional attachments rather than liberal principles. These underpin a moral panic about whites and males combined with a starry-eyed patronizing approach to minorities.

Today’s woke extremism is not a repudiation of liberalism, but a perverse extension of it. Our only way out is to use elected, constitutional, government power to break the grip of wokeness in our institutions and schools, steering them toward neutrality and classical liberalism. To do so, the conservative and moderate majority must place culture front and center and spare no effort to win the battle of ideas. Nothing less than the future of our civilization depends on it.

We live under a tyranny of the self-righteous From the Middle East to climate change, every issue is now a battle between ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Patrick West

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/10/25/we-live-under-a-tyranny-of-the-self-righteous/

We no longer live in an age of moral relativism, but one of moral absolutism.

That’s one observation made by Canadian academic Eric Kaufmann in his latest book, Taboo, published this year. It’s an arresting inversion of a long-held view. Everyone today does indeed seem to know what is ‘right’ and what is ‘wrong’.

But it also makes it hard to square the argument that postmodernism is at the root of our ethical woes and moral vacuum. Rather than living in a state of doubt and ambivalence, as postmodernism’s most optimistic advocates argued in the 1990s, we now actually inhabit a world where people cleave to firmly held truths and fight over them with righteous fury.

This can be seen most evidently in the present day over Israel and the Middle East. For many, the Israelis – and very often, by extension, the Jews – are the personification of evil. Hence, the precipitous rise of virulent anti-Semitism and of correlating sympathy for the Palestinians. In the minds of many, this is a war of good against evil. The Palestinian flag has itself become a universal symbol of goodness. And when you feel you have good on your side, any sort of appalling or belligerent behaviour or words are permissible.

This Manichean viewpoint is replicated in matters over the environment. Here, those who supposedly have right on their side deem it acceptable to resort to any sort of anti-social behaviour because it’s for a ‘good cause’. Self-righteousness is an intoxicating sensation and a self-perpetuating one. The self-righteous become consumed by their own sense of power. Elsewhere in this regard, others abide by the creed that race determines everything. Others hold to the inviolable sanctity of trans rights.