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The Real Reason the Left Hates J.D. Vance He exposes what their ideology really is. by Tom Knighton

Posted By on November 4th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-real-reason-the-left-hates-j-d-vance/

Before he ever ran for public office, I read J.D. Vance’s book, Hillbilly Elegy. It had angered someone who got triggered pretty easily, so I wanted to read it for myself. What I got was an eye-opening and entertaining memoir of Vance’s childhood, some parallels with things I see in my own community, and a glimpse at just why the left would come to hate him so much.

The truth is that Vance is a lot of things that people want in a candidate. He’s young, well-spoken, intelligent, and understands the issues.

Your average leftist would hate him for that alone, but they have more of a reason.

You see, Vance represents just how much of their ideology is an absolute lie.

Many leftists like to argue that America is a nation of haves and have-nots and that the haves got there via things like inheritance, cronyism, and other nefarious methods. They want people to believe that the system is rigged against them and they can never make it out of poverty on their own. The idea of “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” just isn’t realistic.

The problem is that Vance did just that.

He came from the lower socioeconomic strata. He joined the Marine Corps in order to pay his way through college. There, he worked his tail off to graduate with solid grades so he could go to law school at Yale.

Over my many years, I’ve seen a lot of leftists claim that getting out of poverty is all but impossible. Some have even claimed the military wasn’t an option for escape despite the fact that yes, it is, and it’s obvious to anyone who cares to look.

Vance shows that there’s a pathway toward college if you want it badly enough.

He went from relative poverty to being a venture capitalist, a United States senator, and possibly just a week away from becoming vice president of the United States.

What’s more, he did it without becoming a leftist like Barack Obama or Bill Clinton. He recognized the virtue of his own hard work and rather than pretend he’s some rare soul who made it out, he recognized that while others might not get quite where has, they can escape their poverty-stricken lives and become more of they’re willing to work for it.

They hate him because his very existence proves that what they’re peddling to millions of people is nothing more than nonsense.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Desolation of Palestine Before Zionism, a largely uninhabited land. by Robert Spencer

Posted By on November 4th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-desolation-of-palestine/

In the eighteenth century, an English traveler, Thomas Shaw, noted that Palestine was “lacking in people to till its fertile soil.”The French count Constantine François Volney, an eighteenth-century historian, called Palestine “ruined” and “desolate,” observing that “many parts” had “lost almost all their peasantry.” Volney complained that this desolation was unexpected, for the Ottoman imperial records listed larger populations, which led to tax collection efforts’ being frustrated. Of one area, Volney wrote: “Upwards of three thousand two hundred villages were reckoned, but, at present, the collector can scarcely find four hundred. Such of our merchants as have resided there twenty years have themselves seen the greater part of the environs…become depopulated. The traveller meets with nothing but houses in ruins, cisterns rendered useless, and fields abandoned. Those who cultivated them have fled.”

Another English traveler, James Silk Buckingham, visited Jaffa in 1816 and wrote that it had “all the appearances of a poor village, and every part of it that we saw was of corresponding meanness.” In Ramle, said Buckingham, “as throughout the greater part of Palestine, the ruined portion seemed more extensive than that which was inhabited.” Twenty-two years later, the British nobleman Alexander William Crawford Lindsay, Lord Lindsay, declared that “all Judea, except the hills of Hebron and the vales immediately about Jerusalem, is desolate and barren.”

In 1840, another traveler to Palestine praised the Syrians as a “fine spirited race of men,” but whose “population is on the decline.” He noted that the land between Hebron and Bethlehem was “now abandoned and desolate,” marked by “dilapidated towns.” Jerusalem was nothing more than “a large number of houses…in a dilapidated and ruinous state,” with “the masses…without any regular employment.”

In 1847, a U.S. Navy officer noted: “The population of Jaffa is now about 13,000, viz: Turks, 8000; Greeks, 2000; Armenians, 2000; Maronites, 700; and Jews, about 300.” Significantly, he counted no Arabs there at all.

ELECTIONS, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Fascists All the Way Down Meet historical fascism’s true heirs.Bruce Thornton

Posted By on November 4th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fascists-all-the-way-down/

In the famous anecdote usually attributed to Bertrand Russel, a scientist lecturing on the earth’s position in the solar system is corrected an old lady who says the earth is actually supported by a giant turtle. When the scientist asked what supports the turtle, she triumphally answered, “It’s turtles all the way down!”

Since the Twenties and the rise of Italian Fascism and German Nazism––which eventually become the main referent of the word––the term has become an all-purpose question-begging epithet so promiscuously abused in the Thirties that, as George Orwell said in 1944, “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies something not desirable.”

As the word’s use by progressives and leftists––at this point synonyms for “Democrats”––have shown for decades, their understanding of conservatism’s principles and tenets is limited to the infinite regression of “fascists all the way down.” In this election season, they are binging 24/7 on “fascists” with plenty of “Hitlers” thrown in to ratchet up the evil quotient with evocations of genocide and the horrors of the death camps.

The problem is not just the blatant abuse of history, truth, and language, which since ancient Athens has been a habit typical of representative governments that give widely diverse citizens freedom of speech. The more pertinent and dangerous point about this misuse of “fascist” as a political smear is that it obscures how much American progressivism has in common with historical fascism––an oversight made worse by the left’s assumption that conservativism and capitalism are ideologically and organically fascist, and thus profoundly more unjust and dangerous than socialism and other forms of statism.

In reality, as Jonah Goldberg explained in his 2008 book Liberal Fascism, fascism is a phenomenon of the left, not the right––an “inconvenient truth,” Goldberg writes, “if ever there was one.”

ISRAEL Comments turned off

‘End of the War’ in Gaza, Lebanon, Iran? Not Quite Yet by Guy Millière

Posted By on November 4th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21084/end-war-gaza-lebanon-iran

US President Joe Biden said that Sinwar had been an “insurmountable obstacle” and that his death offered “the opportunity… for a political settlement” in Gaza. A short time later, US Vice President Kamala Harris said that it was now possible to “finally end the war in Gaza.”

Had Israel complied with the Biden-Harris administration’s request and not gone into Rafah, Sinwar would still be preparing the next massacres and making sure that Hamas keeps stealing the humanitarian aid intended for the people of Gaza. When the IDF killed him, just a mile from the Egyptian border, he was found carrying a large sum of money and the passport of a man described as an “UNRWA teacher.”

Hamas continues to steal the humanitarian aid and then sells it on the black market at extortionate prices, from which Hamas has “profited by at least half a billion dollars.” Approximately 200 trucks of aid enter Gaza every day, yet the media report that Gazans are “starving” and that the blame for the supposed “war crime” goes, of course, to — Israel.

[B]y waiving sanctions that block Iran from selling its oil, the Biden-Harris administration has effectively been funding Iran’s nuclear weapons program to the tune of roughly $100 billion.

“After Iran’s Oct. 1 missile attack, Mr. Biden told Israel not to attack Iran’s nuclear program. Mr. Trump replied, ‘Isn’t that what you’re supposed to hit? It’s the biggest risk we have, nuclear weapons.’ He reportedly told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, ‘Do what you have to do’… [Trump] tells Israel to do what it needs to do to end the war quickly in victory. Ms. Harris piles on restrictions and insists a cease-fire lead to a two-state solution disconnected from reality.”— Elliot Kaufman, Wall Street Journal, November 1, 2024.

“Now, as the ICC expands and abuses its powers to attack Israel, and Unrwa is exposed as compromised by Hamas, Mr. Biden blocks new sanctions against the ICC and tries to preserve Unrwa.” — Elliot Kaufman, Wall Street Journal, November 1, 2024.

Which will Americans vote for this week? The policies of President Trump or the policies of Presidents Biden and Obama?

October 17. Israeli authorities announce that Yahya Sinwar, the leader of the Hamas terrorist organization, the man who planned and ordered the atrocities of October 7, 2023 and the hostage-taking that accompanied them, has been eliminated. In the hours that followed, US President Joe Biden said that Sinwar had been an “insurmountable obstacle” and that his death offered “the opportunity… for a political settlement” in Gaza. A short time later, US Vice President Kamala Harris said that it was now possible to “finally end the war in Gaza.”

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Is This The Biggest Suppression Poll in History? Matt Margolis

Posted By on November 4th, 2024

https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2024/11/02/is-this-the-biggest-suppression-poll-in-history-n4933899

I warned you about suppression polls, and the mother of all suppression polls appears to have just dropped. And it’s not even from a swing state.

The latest Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll just dropped, and it claims that Kamala Harris has a three-point lead in Iowa.

“Kamala Harris now leads Donald Trump in Iowa — a startling reversal for Democrats and Republicans who have all but written off the state’s presidential contest as a certain Trump victory,” the Des Moines Register reports. “A new Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll shows Vice President Harris leading former President Trump 47% to 44% among likely voters just days before a high-stakes election that appears deadlocked in key battleground states.”

The results follow a September Iowa Poll that showed Trump with a 4-point lead over Harris and a June Iowa Poll showing him with an 18-point lead over Democratic President Joe Biden, who was the presumed Democratic nominee at the time.  

“It’s hard for anybody to say they saw this coming,” said pollster J. Ann Selzer, president of Selzer & Co. “She has clearly leaped into a leading position.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has abandoned his independent presidential campaign to support Trump but remains on the Iowa ballot, gets 3% of the vote. That’s down from 6% in September and 9% in June.  

Fewer than 1% say they would vote for Libertarian presidential candidate Chase Oliver, 1% would vote for someone else, 3% aren’t sure and 2% don’t want to say for whom they already cast a ballot.  

It’s worth noting that an Emerson College poll out of Iowa was released on Saturday as well, and it had Trump ahead nine points. Trump has led in every poll out of Iowa against either Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. Yet, this poll is making a huge splash. Why?

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

On Election Eve, Majority Of Voters Deeply Dissatisfied With Biden-Harris Years: TIPP Tracking Poll Terry Jones

Posted By on November 4th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/11/04/on-election-eve-majority-of-voters-deeply-dissatisfied-with-biden-harris-years-tipp-tracking-poll/

As most know, reading the tea leaves about who will win an election by looking only at political preference polls can be difficult. Polls jump around, and people often don’t want others to know who they will vote for. But there is a way around that: Ask people how they feel about their own lives. The TIPP Tracking Poll did just that, asking voters how they’re doing under the Biden-Harris administration. Not well, it turns out.

In a national online survey taken from Oct. 30 to Nov. 1, the TIPP Tracking Poll asked a series of four questions to 1,603 registered voters, with a margin of error of +/-2.5 percentage points. The responses suggest a majority of Americans harbor deep disappointments over the path the nation has traveled since the outbreak of COVID.

But it’s a split majority: Registered Democrats continue to express positive feelings about both the Biden-Harris administration and the general direction of the country. Republicans and independent/third-party voters remain mostly dissatisfied.

The first question asked simply: “Are you better off now compared to your situation pre-COVID?”

A majority of 54% said “no,” while 36% answered “yes.” Another 10% responded “not sure.”

But a closer look reveals two very different views, based on party affiliation. Among Democrats, 56% said they were better off now than before COVID, while only 34% felt they were worse off, with 10% not sure.

They inhabit a different mental universe than those in the other two major political groupings. For Republicans, 69% said they were worse off, versus 23% saying they were better off and 8% not sure. Independents weren’t far behind at 62% “worse,” 27% “better” and 11% unsure.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

US Elections and the Old Family Album by Amir Taheri

Posted By on November 3rd, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21083/us-elections-family-album

The kinder authors use the label “conservative” against those left behind as if that were an insult. But one conserves only what one regards as precious and worth preserving. Advocates of wokeism never bother to ask why so many Americans don’t wish to board that bus and try to cling to their American way of life, as portrayed in Rip Smith’s old family album in “Magic Town”.

In theory, the US has a multiparty system. In practice, however, for the past few decades at least, it has appeared as 43 effectively one-party states with the remaining seven swinging between two parties.

The strength of the American system lies in the fact that the structures of the republic set limits to democratic waywardness caused by momentary changes of public mood and cultural-ideological fashions such as wokeism.

For decades, at least until the early days of the current century, a saying attributed to a 19th century vaudeville troupe was often used to assess the prevailing political mood in an imaginary “average America”: Will it play in Peoria?

I first heard the phrase in 1974 from Thomas Philip (Tip) O’Neil, the 47th Speaker of the US House of Representatives. In answer to questions about likely policies the federal government might pursue on various issues, he said: “We have to see how it plays in Peoria!”

The subtext was that Peoria, a small town in Illinois, represents the mood in America.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Finally, a leader who’s willing to fight the culture war Kemi Badenoch is the anti-Kamala, just the breath of fresh air the Western world needed. Brendan O’Neill

Posted By on November 3rd, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/11/02/finally-a-leader-whos-willing-to-fight-the-culture-war/

Imagine if, a few years ago, you had told the wet leftists of the British establishment that one day there’d be a black woman in charge of a major political party and that they would freak out about it. That instead of celebrating this final breakthrough for race relations, these self-styled progressives would be bitterly murmuring into their muesli that ‘She’s a bit abrasive’ and ‘God help us now’. They’d have refused to believe you. Yet here we are. Kemi Badenoch has won the Conservative Party leadership contest and becomes the first black person ever to lead a major party in Britain. And the left ain’t happy.

Badenoch has succeeded Rishi Sunak as Tory leader. She beat Robert Jenrick, winning 53,806 votes from party members to his 41,388. That’s a solid win. She has a clear mandate to steer the party in her preferred direction. Ideally that will be away from both the frothing Brexitphobia of the One Nation melts and the thin, Johnny Come Lately ‘populism’ of Jenrick and his socially odd support base. And towards a greater willingness to fight the culture war. Towards a readiness, even a glee, to lock horns with a political class that has thrown everything from biological truth to our very own national story on to their bonfire of the vanities. Kemi could be the culture warrior we’ve been waiting for.

She has more than proved her mettle in the battle of ideas. She knows what a woman is, which instantly makes her more deserving of a vote than Keir Starmer, who famously turns into a gibbering wreck whenever he’s asked basic questions about biology. Badenoch hasn’t so much ‘waded in’ to the ‘trans row’, as the media like to describe it, as she has marched in, sword of truth raised. She insists we must ‘protect women’s spaces’ from the presence of men. Whether it’s ‘rapists being housed in women’s prisons’ or ‘men playing in women’s sports’, it’s just not on, she says. And we must be free to say so without the ‘fear of being accused of transphobia’. Three cheers for that.

She has stood up for the right of young gay folk to discover their sexuality without being pumped with puberty-blocking drugs or mauled by surgery to ‘correct’ their ‘wrong’ bodies. The sinister medical meddling with gay kids’ bodies is a species of conversion therapy, she says, essentially aimed at ‘making them straight’. She’s right. And her views were lately echoed by JD Vance, who said ‘trans-affirming healthcare’ is ‘pharmaceutical’ conversion therapy. Badenoch has even met with the LGB Alliance, the brilliant gay-rights group ruthlessly maligned by the lost souls of the woke as a ‘hate group’. She’s a better friend of homosexuals than anyone on the Labour benches.

She has challenged the fashionable view of Britain as ‘institutionally racist’. Actually, she says, this is ‘the best country in the world to be black’. Her praise of this plucky nation that ‘sees people, not labels’ infuriates the mostly white wet-wipes of the opinion-forming classes who get off on flagellating both themselves and the kingdom for all the racial crimes of history. To these people, there’s nothing worse – really, nothing – than the sight of a black lady saying ‘It’s good to be black in Britain’. It shatters their ideologies of self-loathing from which they derive their cultural power and media clout. A black woman nipping at the heels of the fashionable shame of white influencers? It just won’t do.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Israel is not a ‘settler-colonial state’ The Jewish State was born through anti-imperial struggle. Jake Wallis Simons

Posted By on November 3rd, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/11/03/israel-is-not-a-settler-colonial-state/

Portraying Israel as a colonial imposition on indigenous people, a ‘settler state’ expropriating their land and culture, is a major pillar of Israelophobia. As I explain in Israelophobia: The Newest Version of the Oldest Hatred and What To Do About It, it is rooted in the suggestion that Jews have no place in the Middle East and are alien to the region, a claim that is easily dismissed with even the briefest look at history. Yet the demonisation persists.

Take Akub, a fashionable Palestinian restaurant in London’s Notting Hill. It is more than just a high-end eatery. In an interview with the New York Times in 2022, its French-trained chef and founder, Fadi Kattan, said his mission was to ‘reclaim a cuisine that is part of a broader Arab tradition involving foods like hummus, falafel, tabbouleh, fattoush and shawarma, that he felt was being co-opted by Israeli cooks’. It seems that whereas normal people cook food, in the eyes of Kattan, Israelis ‘co-opt’ it. This position relies on a highly selective view of history. As one reader remarked in the comments section: ‘Jews have also been making these foods for centuries and have appropriated nothing. There’s been a continuous Jewish presence in the land of Israel for thousands of years. What’s more, many of these foods are not limited to the land of Israel, but common across the former Ottoman Empire.’

People often forget that Judaism is two millennia older than Islam and 1,500 years older than Christianity. Israel was the cradle of Jewish civilisation. At least a thousand years before the birth of Jesus Christ, Jerusalem’s most famous Jew, King David, made the city the capital of the Land of Israel. It has been home to greater or lesser numbers of Jews – the very word ‘Jew’ is a shortening of Judea, the ancient kingdom radiating from Jerusalem in the Iron Age – in Jerusalem ever since.

Culturally, Jews have always intertwined their identity with the land of Israel, particularly since they were exiled to Babylon around 598 BC, when their powerful yearning for return took hold. For millennia, Jews in the diaspora have prayed facing towards the Holy City, exclaimed ‘next year in Jerusalem’ at Passover, mourned the destruction of the Temple by breaking a glass at weddings, longed to be buried there, prayed at the remaining walls of the destroyed Temple, and visited on pilgrimage. Many throughout history have taken the step of uprooting their families and returning to their homeland. All these practices continue to this day.

A thread can be traced backwards through Jewish history that shows the ancient roots of the ideal of repatriation. Beginning in 1516, Palestine – as it had been renamed by the Romans – fell under Ottoman rule, which would last for more than 400 years. Less than 50 years after the conquest, Joseph Nasi, the Duke of Naxos, a Portuguese Jewish diplomat favoured by the Ottomans, attempted to return Jews to their homeland without regard for scriptural prophecies about awaiting the coming of the messiah. In a way, he was the first Zionist.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Judge Glock The Economy Election Kitchen-table issues will be decisive on November 5.

Posted By on November 3rd, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-economy-election

You could consume hundreds of hours of television news and spend weeks reading newspaper election coverage and still not know that the economy is by far the most important issue on voters’ minds. The media focus on culture-war issues and tend to portray the election as a fight for “the soul of the nation.” In reality, voters are far more concerned about things like grocery and housing prices.

Polling data make this clear. Fifty-two percent of voters in a recent Gallup poll described the economy as “extremely important” to their vote; no other issue earned that tag from a majority. Another 38 percent of voters rated the economy as “very important.” Notably, Gallup found that the share of voters rating the economy as “extremely important” was higher in this year’s poll than that recorded in each of the closest-to-the-election polls for presidential elections dating back to 1996, with the exception of that conducted amid the Great Recession in 2008.

Gallup’s results were not an outlier. A September Pew Research Center poll found that 81 percent of registered voters described the economy as very important to their vote, the largest share for any issue; the runner-up was health care, with 65 percent. An Associated Press and NORC poll similarly found the economy was “[o]ne of the most important issues” for 79 percent of voters, again the largest share recorded for any issue; health care again came next at 56 percent.

Voters’ specific concern is inflation. When asked to clarify the most important economic issue, 69 percent said the cost of living, according to an Ipsos poll; no other economic issue cracked double digits. Rising prices are also a particular concern among the young. A September NBC poll found that inflation or cost-of-living was the most important issue overall for almost a third of under 30 voters; no other issue garnered more than 11 percent.

This all should be positive news for Donald Trump. According to a recent New York Times/Siena poll, likely voters named the former president more trustworthy on the economy than they did Harris by a seven percentage-point margin.