ELECTIONS Comments turned off

‘The Democrats are now the party of the rich’ John R MacArthur on how the Democratic Party betrayed the working class.

Posted By on November 19th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/11/18/the-democrats-are-now-the-party-of-the-rich/

In the US presidential election, the Democrats revealed their true colours. Candidate Kamala Harris spent her campaign espousing wispy platitudes and chasing celebrity endorsements, while President Joe Biden smeared half the electorate as ‘garbage’. The Democratic Party’s transformation from the party of the people to the party of the woke elites seemed all but complete, and it delivered a humiliating electoral defeat to the populist Donald Trump.

John R MacArthur joined The Brendan O’Neill Show last week to discuss the Democrats’ self-immolation. What follows is an edited extract from their conversation. You can listen to the full thing here.

Brendan O’Neill: Were you surprised at Donald Trump’s victory?

John R MacArthur: I wasn’t surprised that he won, but I was surprised he won the popular vote. I thought it would be closer. It just shows how weak the Democratic Party now is in so many respects. Hillary Clinton, who was a terrible candidate with a lot of baggage, still won the popular vote against Trump in 2016. For Harris to lose the popular vote speaks to a degradation beyond anything even I had thought possible.

The reason the Democrats lost was articulated by critics like Bernie Sanders, who wrote recently that the Democrats have become the party of the rich, not the working class. He says they have to make up their minds whose side they’re on.

The Democrats made up their minds a long time ago. They made up their minds in the 1990s, when Bill Clinton signed free-trade deals such as NAFTA and normalised trade relations with China. These decisions sent millions of manufacturing jobs from the US to countries like Mexico and China.

This election demonstrated the complete inversion of American politics. Harris outraised Trump three-to-one, and it didn’t come in small contributions. More than half of the people with a family income under $100,000 a year voted for Trump. Harris won a majority of the people with a family income above $100,000. There’s been a total inversion of what we used to think of as the New Deal coalition.

O’Neill: Would you say that Trump won this or that the Democrats lost it?

MacArthur: Trump’s popular vote total is almost exactly the same as it was four years ago. It’s not a MAGA landslide. Harris received 11million fewer votes than Biden in 2020. Where did those 11million voters go? Some went to Trump, but most of them presumably just didn’t vote.

We have to examine why they didn’t vote Democrat. One of the things that comes to mind is inflation, which the Democrats didn’t address, other than keeping interest rates high. One of Biden’s first acts was to expand the child tax credit, which literally cut the child poverty rate nearly in half. But they didn’t do anything else to help the poor cope with higher food prices. So the Democrats hadn’t taken care of the poor. They didn’t give them a reason to vote Democrat.

There are also a lot of working-class people who are still angry about NAFTA. I know lots of union members who say that it was nice of Biden to join the picket line, but it was too late. They will never vote for the Democratic Party again.

Then the party imposed Harris on the electorate. There was no primary and there had been no vetting. The Democratic Party told people they should be happy because she’s black and she’s a woman. Everybody resented that. Black people resented it. White people resented it. Deep down, nobody wants to vote for someone because of what colour or sex they are.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Mad Britain: Nine-Year-Olds Being Investigated by Police for Non-Crime Hate Incidents by Robert Williams

Posted By on November 19th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21122/nine-year-olds-investigated-by-police

Mainstream Britain might finally be waking up to the fact that it elected a totalitarian government that increasingly seems to behave like the Chinese Communist Party.

Since 2014, British police have reportedly recorded more than 250,000 non-crime hate incidents in England and Wales. The non-crime incidents, logged in a system, can even show up, when employers ask for a copy of a prospective employee’s criminal record.

Daily Telegraph journalist Allison Pearson… was visited by police earlier this November, informing her that she was accused of a “non-crime hate incident.” A tweet she had posted more than a year ago, the police told her, was “stirring up racial hatred.” She asked who accused her and why, but the police told her she could not be told what her offending tweet was, nor the “victim’s” name. She is now under investigation for spreading material allegedly “likely or intended to cause racial hatred”.

There are lots of things… the mainstream British media has ignored for decades: Mass migration from the Muslim world; rampant violence and terrorism; Muslim grooming gangs, raping, torturing, sometimes killing, hundreds of thousands of British children and young women, while the police covered up their crimes.

“As a Rotherham grooming gang survivor, I want people to know about the religious extremism which inspired my abusers. Grooming gangs are not like paedophile rings; instead, they operate almost exactly like terrorist networks, with all the same strategies. As a teenager, I was taken to various houses and flats above takeaways in the north of England, to be beaten, tortured and raped over 100 times.” — Ella Hill, survivor of abuse by Rotherham grooming gangs, The Independent, March 18, 2018.

Hundreds of people were handed prison sentences for up to several years, for social media posts about the brutal murder of three little girls in Southport this summer. They were jailed for criticizing mass migration and Islamization, but the government said they were stirring up racial hatred. Now, it turns out that the murderer of the three girls, who still has not gone on trial, was in fact an Islamist terrorist, a fact that Starmer’s government covered up and lied about.

Will the British mainstream media fight to see that the many — who were jailed for speaking their minds about these murders on social media — are now freed?

Tommy Robinson was severely punished by British authorities for making documentaries about the grooming gang scandals. A few weeks ago, he was imprisoned, again, for refusing to be silenced, and moved to one of Britain’s most notorious prisons, which houses some of the most murderous Islamist terrorists. Nobody in mainstream British media seems the least bit concerned about his safety.

Meanwhile, actual crimes in the UK continue to soar.

Police do not even bother to properly investigate crimes, such as burglaries, whereas Allison Pearson’s lone non-crime tweet is being investigated by three of Britain’s largest police forces…. According to the Criminal Bar Association, “the backlog of criminal cases is on track to reach 80,000 by March 2025.”

Niyak Ghorbani, an Iranian podcaster…. has probably been arrested more times for exposing terrorism in the UK than he was for protesting the Islamic regime while he still lived in Iran.

Most recently, the police informed a man that saying “God bless you” is a crime, if it causes “distress” to someone who has a different belief – such as Muslims.

Mainstream Britain might finally be waking up to the fact that it elected a totalitarian government that increasingly seems to behave like the Chinese Communist Party.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Former Israeli Hostage Confronts Pro-Hamas UCLA Encampment Leader By Haley Strack

Posted By on November 19th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/israeli-hostage-confronts-pro-hamas-ucla-encampment-leader/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mXI4reXwnk

At 6 A.M. on October 7, Moran Stella Yanai saw rockets rain down from the sky into southern Israel, where she was attending the now-infamous Nova music festival. Like other Nova attendees, when Yanai realized that terrorists had invaded Israel, she ran and tried to escape via car. When she contacted Israeli police, they told her to get off the road, where Hamas terrorists were slaughtering anyone who dared to flee.

Yanai ran into a field where she was eventually captured by terrorists who filmed her kidnapping. Yanai’s parents discovered that their daughter had been taken hostage by that video. Thirteen Hamas members then dragged Yanai into a car and drove her across the Gazan border, where she remained for 54 days until she was freed in November’s hostage deal.

She promised other hostages in captivity that she would do “everything” within her power to bring them home. One of the ways she’s done so has been by sharing her story here in the United States with skeptics, government officials, and friends of Israel. At 40, Yanai is a poised, powerful, well-spoken individual who, months ago, sat down to debate Aidan Doyle, one of the University of California-Los Angeles students responsible for leading the university’s anti-Israel encampment, on the merits of Israel’s war in Gaza. The second part of the debate was released this week and has since gone viral — mainly because, even when speaking with the former hostage, Doyle refused to shed his pro-terrorist outlook.

Doyle is not a foreign policy expert, nor has he ever been to Israel or Gaza, but he is a mustached young progressive whose social-media feed went viral when the UCLA anti-Israel encampment sprung up, which has made him somewhat of an online hero among radicals. The philosophy student posted a series of videos after police arrested multiple encampment-occupiers for trespassing and vandalism, bemoaning the police’s cruel use of force.

At 6 A.M. on October 7, Moran Stella Yanai saw rockets rain down from the sky into southern Israel, where she was attending the now-infamous Nova music festival. Like other Nova attendees, when Yanai realized that terrorists had invaded Israel, she ran and tried to escape via car. When she contacted Israeli police, they told her to get off the road, where Hamas terrorists were slaughtering anyone who dared to flee.

Yanai ran into a field where she was eventually captured by terrorists who filmed her kidnapping. Yanai’s parents discovered that their daughter had been taken hostage by that video. Thirteen Hamas members then dragged Yanai into a car and drove her across the Gazan border, where she remained for 54 days until she was freed in November’s hostage deal.

She promised other hostages in captivity that she would do “everything” within her power to bring them home. One of the ways she’s done so has been by sharing her story here in the United States with skeptics, government officials, and friends of Israel. At 40, Yanai is a poised, powerful, well-spoken individual who, months ago, sat down to debate Aidan Doyle, one of the University of California-Los Angeles students responsible for leading the university’s anti-Israel encampment, on the merits of Israel’s war in Gaza. The second part of the debate was released this week and has since gone viral — mainly because, even when speaking with the former hostage, Doyle refused to shed his pro-terrorist outlook.

Doyle is not a foreign policy expert, nor has he ever been to Israel or Gaza, but he is a mustached young progressive whose social-media feed went viral when the UCLA anti-Israel encampment sprung up, which has made him somewhat of an online hero among radicals. The philosophy student posted a series of videos after police arrested multiple encampment-occupiers for trespassing and vandalism, bemoaning the police’s cruel use of force.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

You Don’t Have to Go Away Mad, Bob Casey — Just Go Away Jeff Blehar

Posted By on November 19th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/you-dont-have-to-go-away-mad-bob-casey-just-go-away/

The Pennsylvania supreme court has spoken — spoken again, spoken with exasperation, spoken for the third time during the election cycle — and has finally lowered the boom on Senator Bob Casey Jr.’s futile attempts to fight his loss to Dave McCormick in the 2024 Pennsylvania Senate election.

As most here are already well aware, Casey lost narrowly to McCormick on November 5, but rather than concede the race, he instead hired Democratic elections lawyer Marc Elias to try to squeeze a victory out of electorally impossible math. Elias’s proposed workaround? Cheat! Yes, just violate the law and dare someone to stop them. Let’s hope that, after today, they have finally been stopped.

McCormick currently leads Casey by around 17,000 votes, with nearly all valid ballots counted. All that remains to be counted are invalid ballots — those rejected for facial invalidity in one way or another, most often for missing signatures or missing date marks. Elias’s strategy has been to enjoin the Democratic commissioners of the Boards of Elections in Centre, Montgomery, Bucks, and Philadelphia Counties (all heavily Democratic strongholds except for Bucks, which was fought to a draw this year) to continue counting undated late-arriving mail ballots.

The problem is that Pennsylvania law and case law specifically stipulate that such ballots are invalid. The matter had already been litigated before the state supreme court twice before Election Day — and both times the court insisted that no, the law meant exactly what it said: Undated absentee or mail ballots are presumptively invalid.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

How America’s Accurate Election Polls Were Covered Up The Real Clear Politics National Average was removed by Wikipedia before the election and the New York Times denounced its failure to skew data. A solution to the “mystery” of crappy polling? Matt Taibbi

Posted By on November 19th, 2024

https://www.racket.news/p/how-americas-accurate-election-polls

John McIntyre couldn’t believe it. The publisher of the Real Clear Polling National Average, America’s first presidential poll aggregator, woke on October 31st to see his product denounced in the New York Times. Launched in 2002 and long a mainstay of campaign writers and news consumers alike, the RCP average, he learned, was part of a “torrent” of partisan rubbish being “weaponized” to “deflate Democrats’ enthusiasm” and “undermine faith in the entire system.”

“They actually wrote that our problem was we didn’t weight results,” says an incredulous McIntyre. “That we didn’t put a thumb on the scale.”

The New York Times denounced a poll aggregator’s lack of subjectivity.

The Times ended its screed against RCP’s “scarlet-dominated” electoral map projection by quoting John Anzalone, Joe Biden’s former chief pollster, who said: “There’s a ton of garbage polls out there.” But being called “garbage” in America’s paper of record was nothing compared to what happened to RCP at Wikipedia.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Pro-jihad vandals invade home of University of Washington president, carve Hamas symbols Robert Spencer

Posted By on November 19th, 2024

https://jihadwatch.org/2024/11/pro-jihad-vandals-invade-home-of-university-of-washington-president-carve-hamas-symbols?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=pro-jihad-vandals-invade-home-of-university-of-washington-president-carve-hamas-symbols

A significant escalation, and more is to come.

“Pro-Palestinian vandals invade home of University of Washington president, carve Hamas symbols,” by Danielle Greyman-Kennard, Jerusalem Post, November 15, 2024:

Pro-Palestinian vandals invaded the home of University of Washington President Ana Mari Cauce, on Thursday, damaging her car and leaving pro-Hamas symbols, the university confirmed in a statement.

University spokesperson Victor Balta said in an email Thursday evening that “several masked perpetrators” invaded Cauce’s home, where they slashed the tires to her car and painted “pro-Hamas symbols” across multiple surfaces. Videos circulating online show inverted triangles being painted onto home’s walls.

Those recorded promised, “you will not know peace until you meet the demands of our movement.”

“Free Palestine” and “blood on your hands” were also spray painted on Cause’s property.

“Making threats against a public official in an attempt to intimidate them is a crime,” Balta said in the statement. She confirmed that police were investigating the incident and that it “will not influence University policy.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Can Elon And Vivek Really Slash $2 Trillion From Bloated U.S. Budget?

Posted By on November 19th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/11/19/can-elon-and-vivek-really-slash-2-trillion-from-bloated-u-s-budget/

As you’ve probably figured out, the headline above is a trick, a rhetorical question. Because we know going in that our government has spent so much since the COVID-era began that there’s no question it can be cut sharply. And, in answer to the question above, $2 trillion is just a start.

But that’s just a base number set by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, tagged by President-elect Donald Trump to head the new Department of Government Efficiency, or “DOGE” for short.

“As President Trump said, what we need is common sense,” Musk said. “This won’t be business as usual. This is going to be a revolution.”

And by that, he means a root-and-branch restructuring of the U.S. government and its sprawling, wasteful mega-bureaucracy, with co-leader Ramaswamy set to “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.”

Ambitious indeed.

We’re ecstatic to hear a presidential administration entering with genuine talk of sharply reducing the actual size of government. With $36 trillion in debt (and rising fast), we as a nation will soon be functionally bankrupt, unable to pay our bills or raise more money in debt markets to continue our spending.

The fiscal situation is grave, affecting everything from defense to Social Security and Medicare and everything in between.

As such, the plan by the DOGE-duo of Musk and Ramaswamy can actually be seen not as a radical attack on government, but rather as an effort to restore some balance after four years of the Democrats’ insane spending and debt accumulation to pay for its COVID schemes.

FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Biden Administration Sent Over $2,000,000,000 to ‘Palestinians’ Since Oct. 7 Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on November 18th, 2024

https://jihadwatch.org/2024/11/biden-administration-sent-over-2000000000-to-palestinians-since-oct-7?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=biden-administration-sent-over-2000000000-to-palestinians-since-oct-7

Kill over 1,000 people in one of the worst Islamic terrorist attacks in modern history and what do you get?

Over $2 billion and counting. Or around $2 million for every person they murdered on Oct 7.

USAID, which has been repeatedly accused of complicity in funding Islamic terrorism around the world just bragged that it handed out another $230 million while boasting of its total of $2.1 billion in ‘aid’ since Oct 7.

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is providing $230 million in additional funding to support economic recovery and development programs in the West Bank and Gaza. This significant investment highlights USAID’s commitment to improving the lives of individuals and communities in the region amidst challenging conditions. Since 2021, USAID/West Bank and Gaza has invested over $600 million in economic support funding of the Palestinian people, in addition to the over $2.1 billion in humanitarian assistance since October 7, 2023.

The Biden-Harris administration has made America one of the world’s leading funders of Islamic terrorism. Take away a lot of our ‘humanitarian aid’ and a lot of the terrorism will go with it.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The tide is turning against the green elites Western publics are rejecting the self-destructive and immiserating policies of Net Zero. Joel Kotkin

Posted By on November 18th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/11/18/the-tide-is-turning-against-the-green-elites/

It is the global climate-change conference that no one cares about. The latest United Nations (UN) ‘conference of the parties’, otherwise known as COP29, is currently being hosted in oil-rich, authoritarian Azerbaijan. Not many political heavy-hitters have decided to attend but assorted elites, grifters and media have attended hoping it will bring them more financial manna from heaven.

The late-19th-century US political wire-puller Mark Hanna once quipped: ‘There are two things that are important in politics. The first is money and I can’t remember what the second one is.’ Billions, potentially trillions, have been sunk into green projects enriching the already wealthy and their nonprofits, in what outgoing US treasury secretary Janet Yellen has proclaimed the greatest business opportunity of the 21st century.

Hopefully, Yellen didn’t put all her financial eggs in the green basket. The election of Donald Trump as US president only adds to the current woes of the climate industry. The wind-energy sector is increasingly beleaguered and huge numbers of climate start-ups are failing. Despite receiving billions in subsidies, green companies are recording big losses, declaring bankruptcy or avoiding new projects – even in China. Yellen’s opportunity of the century is becoming its most obvious bust, with little apparent impact on the climate.

Of course, the green industry will keep going, as long as there are funds to subsidise it. The alliance between big corporate interests and activist bureaucracies has created what political scientist Bjorn Lomborg has labelled the ‘climate-industrial complex’. As energy analyst Robert Bryce points out, parts of Wall Street have been ‘feeding at the trough’ and will lobby Trump and Congress to keep some of their goodies. At the same time, some deep-blue states, like California and New York, are girding themselves by issuing their own green regulations to replace those that might have come from DC.

The only major country set to benefit from the ‘energy transition’ is China, which continues to spew more greenhouse gases than all advanced countries combined. It is using efficient, cheaper fossil fuels to dominate the solar-panel industry, building its battery capacity to roughly four times the size of America’s while exercising effective control of rare-earth minerals and the technology for processing them.

All this leaves the rest of the world, notably Europe and the UK, embracing a Net Zero strategy that is fundamentally unfeasible without imposing massive costs on the middle and working classes. One particularly dubious aspect of Europe’s all-electric policy lies in the energy grid. According to the Financial Times, UK businesses are already having problems getting extra juice. EVs, which are projected to double the demand for electricity by 2040, will only increase the pressure on the UK’s grid. The Labour government is already looking to ban the use of home chargers during peak hours.

The working classes in Western nations have particular reason for concern. In the UK, the path to lower emissions has been driven by deindustrialisation. The manufacturing sectors’ share of GDP has dropped by 50 per cent since 1990, at the cost of several million jobs. This parallels a two-thirds drop in the UK’s domestic energy production. It now increasingly depends on energy imports from the Middle East and other unstable regions.

Arguably, the most traumatic change is taking place in Germany, the last redoubt of European manufacturing and engineering prowess. Overall, Germany’s entire industrial structure is in decline. It is estimated that it could lose upwards of 400,000 of its estimated 800,00 car-manufacturing jobs by 2030.

Given the damage being done to Europe’s industrial base, the political tide is unsurprisingly turning against the greens. The gilets jaunes demonstrations in France in the late 2010s have been followed by large-scale farmers protests in the Netherlands, Poland and Germany. This year, voters gave the greens a ballot-box kicking at the European Parliament elections. Even as the technocracy sticks to its green religion, voters are headed in the opposite direction.

The election of Donald Trump, one of whose campaign slogans is ‘drill, baby, drill’, all but guarantees that the war on fossil fuels waged by the Obama-Biden administrations is dead. Whereas his Democratic rival, Kamala Harris, was strongly backed by ‘green tech billionaires’, Trump received strong support from oil and gas interests, who may enjoy at least a temporary boom. Delays on new liquified natural gas (LNG) export facilities will be lifted, and the tacit mandate for electrical vehicles is also likely to disappear. This shift represents an alternative to the expensive, economy-sapping, ultra-green policies being adopted by Britain’s Labour government and throughout the EU.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Unlike Their Membership, Teacher Union Leaders Are Far Left Ignoring the rank and file. by Larry Sand

Posted By on November 18th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/unlike-its-membership-teacher-union-leaders-are-far-left/

The teacher union leadership is in a collective snit after it became clear that Donald Trump would be reelected as U.S. president. American Federation of Teachers boss Randi Weingarten stated in a press release on Nov. 9, “At this moment, the country is more divided than ever, and our democracy is in jeopardy. Last night, we saw fear and anger win.”

National Education Association boss Becky Pringle was somber, posting on Facebook, “We woke up today to a world that feels darker than it did yesterday. I hear the fear about the safety of our families and communities. I feel the profound anxiety for the future of our country. I see the worry, anger, and heartbreak. But despair is not the answer.”

Pringle’s post was widely contested in the comments section, however. Typifying the pushback, educator Laurie Speed posted, “I wish that you would not assume that all of your members are liberals. Many voted for Trump, and they are feeling optimistic. I wish NEA were bipartisan. The education of our children is important to both parties. As educators, we can set the example for our students to follow regarding how to collaborate with others whose opinions differ from ours.”

Speed nails it! Ignoring its rank and file, teacher union leadership is far left, and has been for years. When NEA president Reg Weaver spoke at the Democratic Convention in 2008, his opening words were, “I am here today on behalf of 3.2 million NEA members to tell you why we support Barack Obama for president of the United States.”

It sounded as if every member of the NEA was backing Obama. Then, in his last sentence, he left no doubt. “That, my friends, is why the 3.2 million members of the National Education Association are organized, energized, and mobilized to help elect Barack Obama as the next president of the United States of America.”

Yet, the same Reg Weaver stated a few years before that one-third of NEA membership is Republican, one-third Democrat, and one-third “other.”