Time to Pull the Plug on Forced Electric Vehicles by Pete Hoekstra

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20127/forced-electric-vehicles

[O]ur federal and state governments are investing huge sums of money into projects that will benefit a foreign government [Chinese Communist China] one that might not have America’s best interests in mind.

The harshest reality check may come in the form of expensive inventory build-up of unsold EVs that Ford thought customers would buy but is now finding out that customers do not want.

Another red flag for EVs is the lack of profitability for Ford and GM’s models. Ford lost $32,000 on every EV it sold in 2023 and expects its EV business to lose $4.5 billion on the year. GM saw its quarterly profits cut by $1.5 billion due to EV losses.

It is time for our policy makers to stop and seriously evaluate if we as a nation are prepared to make these gigantic investments in unproven technologies that risk our nation’s energy and transportation leadership.

Now is not the time for communist-style “central planning,” or to let ideologues drive America’s policy and its future over the proverbial cliff.

The recent headlines regarding the forced transition from gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles to electrical vehicles (EVs) are screaming “Slow down!” even as federal and state governments are barreling along trying to regulate and mandate them.

Threats to the United States now at a Whole New Level By Scott S. Powell

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/11/threats_to_the_united_states_now_at_a_whole_new_level.html

It turns out that nations do not stumble into wars and conflict. Wars are generally the result of globalist forces with ulterior motives or political leaders who seek to shore up and protect their political position by demonizing a target, like Russia, and then rallying the people’s support around the enemy of that target, like Ukraine, in the name of patriotism and American interests.

The American people are wising up after spending $8 trillion over some twenty years in the so-called war against terror in the Middle East in Iraq and Afghanistan — protracted engagements that cost lives and ended in failure, often creating resentment from the native people we were purportedly trying to help. In 2001, the year of 9/11 that triggered the war on terror, total U.S. national debt stood at about $3.4 trillion. Today U.S. national debt has grown by 10-fold to $34 trillion.

The permanent elite in Washington recently assured the American people (with no discussion or accounting for costs) that the U.S. military could fund and prevail in a two-front war — one against Russia in the European theater to defend Ukraine; and the second against China in the Pacific theater to defend Taiwan.

That was until the Middle East blew up on October 7th, thrusting the United States into a new kind of war with multiple fronts. Radical Muslim jihadis never conceded that 9/11 would be the final attack on the United States. In fact, the Iranian mullahs and Hezb’allah have stated repeatedly that they seek to inflict death and destruction on both Israel and America on a mass-casualty scale never seen before.

The American people are also finally wising up about the harm that globalists at the U.N., the international banking cabal and the World Economic Forum have already wrought in Europe with their replacement migration policies that induced European nations to open the doors to immigration from Middle Eastern and North African countries. As a result, the population of Muslims increased 16-fold — to about 30 million, spread out across most European and Scandinavian countries with disastrous social costs — bringing cultural and political division, riots, and crime.

Concealed Foreign Money to US Universities Linked to Campus Antisemitism, Erosion of Liberal Norms: Report By Dion J. Pierre

https://www.algemeiner.com/2023/11/09/concealed-foreign-money-us-universities-linked-campus-antisemitism-erosion-liberal-norms-report/

Billions of dollars in concealed and undocumented donations from foreign governments — many of which are authoritarian — to US institutions of higher education are strongly correlated with an erosion of liberal democratic norms and increased antisemitism on college campuses, according to a new report.

“Over the last decade, institutions of higher education across the United States of America received billions of dollars from foreign donors that were not reported to the US Department of Education, as required,” said the report, titled “The Corruption of the American Mind.” “In its totality, these findings described how a lack of transparency in funding reporting occurred in tandem with antidemocratic norms and antisemitism across American institutions of higher education.”

The report — produced by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) — presented several key findings, going through concealed and undocumented funds to universities uncovered by the US Department of Education.

The ISGAP’s findings included that at an estimated 100 US colleges received $13 billion in “undocumented” contributions from foreign governments, many of which were Middle Eastern and authoritarian. Schools that received this money were found to be home to prevalent campaigns to silence professors and experienced higher levels of antisemitic and anti-Zionist incidents on campus.

From 2015-2020, the report noted, schools that accepted money from Middle Eastern donors had, on average, 300 percent more antisemitic incidents than schools that did not accept such donations.

The Left’s Cheerleading for Hamas’ Terror A product of our education system. by Ian Prior

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-lefts-cheerleading-for-hamas-terror/

One would have to be living under a rock to ignore the sickening carnage of October 7, the latest outrage in a horrific terrorism campaign that Hamas has been waging against innocent civilians in Israel for over thirty years. In 1993, all but a tiny sliver of American society, the containing its most radical and foreign elements, recognized Hamas as a monumental evil that must be eradicated without equivocation or regret.

But thanks to the toxic brew of mass immigration and K-12 indoctrination, the America of 2023 is a very different place.  Now, college professors applaud bestial acts of rape, murder, kidnapping as  “de-colonization,” students rally in support of inhuman aggression, and elected officials in Congress  advocate for “Palestine” and for Israel to stand down and then disappear. As a Stanford University student named Julia Steinberg put it in The Free Press, “I am 21 years old and Jewish. Apparently, 48 percent of my peers want people like me dead.”

Years of indoctrination in the name of “critical theory” lies at the heart of this genocidal blood lust. “Critical theory” and “social justice” were sold as tools to combat “systemic racism.” But as these teacher training slides from Loudoun County Public Schools and Tredyffrin/Easttown Public Schools demonstrate, the real goal has always been about identifying, shaming, and overthrowing the so-called “oppressors.”

Thus, our children are taught that every white person is a racist, all men are evil, and American is a uniquely despicable nation. “Privileged” girls in elementary, junior, and high school must share bathrooms, locker rooms, and athletic fields with biological males because “trans” people are “oppressed. Even people who are “average/thin” and people that “[a]dhere to rigid time schedules” are despised because, by their very existence, they are “oppressors” of the obese and the indolent.

Hamas Supporters Probably Aren’t Fit to Practice Law Don’t denounce student radicals’ ‘values.’ See if there’s any substance behind their positions. By Hadley Arkes

https://www.wsj.com/articles/hamas-supporters-probably-arent-fit-to-practice-law-1b42128d?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

Dozens of law firms have signed an open letter to law-school deans warning that “anti-Semitic activities would not be tolerated at any of our firms.” Earlier, Davis Polk & Wardwell had said it was reconsidering job offers to three Ivy League students who held leadership positions with organizations that signed letters supporting Hamas’s assault on Israel, and Winston & Strawn withdrew an offer to a New York University student who called the atrocities “necessary.”

The letter calls on the schools to affirm “the values we all hold dear” and reject “unreservedly that which is antithetical to those values.” It asserts that “there is no room for anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, racism or any other form of violence, hatred or bigotry on your campuses, in our workplaces or our communities.” Weeks earlier the president of the University of Pennsylvania, jostled by donors into saying something emphatic, picked up the same script and said that “hateful speech that denigrates others” is “contrary to our values.”

But are the “values” of Sullivan & Cromwell the same as the “values” of Kirkland & Ellis, or of the University of Pennsylvania? Is there nothing in the distinct character of these institutions that can produce a moral response with edge and substance? The term “value judgment” came to us through Nietzsche and Max Weber, when people lost their confidence in speaking of moral truths and began to speak rather of the things they happened to “value,” which may not be what others “value.”

It was hardly controversial for the law firms to denounce “hatred or bigotry.” But what is it exactly that the law firms are enjoining the universities to do? The firms would doubtless assure the schools that they are against interfering with the freedom of the demonstrators to assemble and to speak.

The Players of the Gazan “War” and Their Strategies: Part One: the Terrorists of Hamas and Hezbollah Victor Davis Hanson

https://victorhanson.com/the-players-of-the-gazan-war-and-their-strategies-part-one-the-terrorists-of-hamas-and-hezbollah/

Hamas

Hamas was quite clever in lying to the IDF, Mossad, and the Israeli government that it was finally resigned to fostering its own internal development. Its guest workers inside Israel—sometimes 20,000 a day—supposedly were emissaries of goodwill and would spike prosperity in Gaza. Hamas talked of its rivalries with the Palestinian Authority and for a bit quelled its eliminationist rhetoric—as if it was useful to Israel to play off Hamas against Abbas and the West Bank. Again, all a clever ruse as it crafted a plan to kill more Jews in any one day since the Holocaust.

So meanwhile for a year Hamas planned and trained, likely with the Iranians, to stage a mass-murder raid into Israel—at peace, during the holidays, early in the dark of morning, and ironically to be staged 50 years almost to the date after the similar surprise attack on Israel that had started the Yom Kippur War. Hamas in other words would then brag it had done more damage to Israel in a single day than any other terrorist organization in history.

So the overall killing strategy of Hamas was clear enough. Send 2,000 gunmen through the wall, via the air, and at sea to murder unarmed Jewish civilians, and butcher and mutilate them to such a savage degree that the murderers would either so shock the Israelis by their inhumanity that the Israelis would be stunned into concessions, or the inhuman butchery would at least suggest to the world that only premodern people so oppressed could be capable of such animal-like cruelty. That is, the world would eventually blame Israel for reducing Palestinians to such a state of bestial despair.

Then the Hamas killers and their tag-along opportunistic civilian counterparts would retreat with Israeli captives, the more elderly, young, and vulnerable the better. So the second part of the strategy was to leave the mutilating behind, get safely back to subterranean Gaza to hide the captives in their network of tunnels, and then either use them as shields to deflect retaliations or to swap some children and women for Hamas killers jailed in Israel or threaten to kill them all unless the IDF relented and stood down—or all that and more.

The Barbarian Evasions Hamas’s progressive apologists seek self-justification in the moral incoherence of relativistic absolutism. David A. Eisenberg

https://quillette.com/2023/11/09/the-barbarian-evasions/ When I ask my students to rethink the universality of human rights, the mere suggestion befuddles them. Creatures of their progressive times, the a priori existence of such rights is as firmly established in their minds as the existence of witches or geocentricity was in the minds of their ancestors. Even as they indulge […]

The ABC on Gaza: Exactly as Expected, Except Worse Tony Thomas

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/thier-abc/2023/11/the-abc-on-gaza-exactly-as-expected-except-worse/ Forlorn creatures of habit, our household watches                   https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/thier-abc/2023/11/the-abc-on-gaza-exactly-as-expected-except-worse/   Australian Broadcasting Company’sTV flagship 7pm News (Victoria) nightly. As I remarked across the dinner table at 6.59pm on Tuesday, “Stand by for Hamas footage of suffering children in Gaza, with no ABC mention that Hamas uses […]

High Stakes and a Simple Choice Bernie Marcus

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/11/09/high_stakes_and_a_simple_choice_150037.html

Bernie Marcus is the co-founder of Job Creators Network, a philanthropist, and the retired co-founder of The Home Depot.

I am 94 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.

We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments. There are rarely consequences for the wrongdoers because George Soros-elected prosecutors across America refuse to prosecute them.

Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.

This should not be a partisan issue. This should be an issue for all Americans – Democrats, Republicans, and Independents – that I hope to reach with this op-ed. You enjoy the freedoms and values on which the nation was founded. Sadly, I see these freedoms and values being eroded today as government gets bigger and weaponized against its political opponents.

I wrote this op-ed because of my love for America, not for any financial gain or advantage. I have been retired for 30 years and spend my time engaged in philanthropic causes, with which I have committed to share 90% of my net worth. I was born here and can give testimony about The American Dream. I lost my job and was broke when I was 48 years old. A dear friend of mine suggested that my misfortune presented a great opportunity to build a small business based upon an idea I had shared with him. Only in America, the land of opportunity, could being without a job and broke be a great opportunity. In 1978, my partners and I built four hardware stores, and this small business grew and is known as The Home Depot. We could only have done this in America because of America’s system of free enterprise and pro-jobs growth government policies. The state of America today, especially record inflation, government over-regulation, and the problems of the last three years, would prevent my partners and I from succeeding as we have.

Part of our legacy must be passing on to future generations of Americans our founding freedoms and values, including The American Dream. We must change the current trajectory of the nation and solve the problems created in the last three years. We must also reject calls from some politicians to replace our free market system with big government socialism. Most of them seem to have never had a job outside of government. All they know is making government bigger and more intrusive in the lives of its citizens.

Schools for Hamas-Cide The slaughter in Gaza has exposed the presence of Jew hatred in many of our schools By Larry Sand

https://amgreatness.com/2023/11/09/schools-for-hamas-cide/
While the slaying of some 1,400 Jews by Hamas is a major tragedy in and of itself, other important facets of the story merit attention. For example, a Harris poll taken after the massacre reveals that 51% of  American 18-24-year-olds think the murder of innocent Jewish men, women, and babies was justified, and much of this Jew hatred can be attributed to our nation’s schools. 

Rethinking Schools, a radical activist outfit established in 1986, whose products are used by 200,000 teachers and are on university reading lists, asserts that educators have a “moral and educational responsibility” to join and teach about “the movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel.”

Also, a wing of Rethinking Schools, the Zinn Education Project, which has developed history curricula since 2008, is used by 155,000 teachers nationwide. On October 10, the organization declared that the terror, violence, murder, and rape we’ve seen in the past week “is the direct result of decades of Israeli occupation.” 

In Oakland, the teachers union has accused Israel of carrying out genocide and ethnic cleansing. The teachers union in Seattle passed a resolution in 2021 supporting the same lie. In Virginia, a school board member in Fairfax County has, under the banner of culturally responsive pedagogy, pushed for an explicitly anti-Israeli curriculum.

Also, Black Lives Matter, which has had success infiltrating our public schools, insists that the recent events in the Middle East are a “direct result of decades of Israeli settler colonialism, land dispossession, occupation, blockade, apartheid, and attempted genocide of millions of Palestinians.”

Then there are the colleges. The colleges! Yes, the same cohort of far-left, cultural ignoramuses who can’t define what a woman is and offers classes like “Queering Menstruation” and “Anal 101” are now, not surprisingly, weighing in on the Middle East.

In addition to Black Lives Matter and Critical Race Theory, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion tenets have become de rigeur on college campuses. The DEI-ists see everything in black and white, labeling white people as oppressors and blacks as the oppressed. While DEI typically concerns itself with USA issues, Israel, too, is on the hook, being tarred as a bastion of Jewish whiteness with a racist commitment to shattering the lives of Palestinians, who are considered people of color.