NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

And Just Like That, It’s No Longer an Insurrection By Victoria Taft

Posted By on July 14th, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2023/07/13/and-just-like-that-its-no-longer-an-insurrection-n1710334

And just like that, the January 6 insurrection is no more. And the deconstruction story is really something. At the center of this narrative switcheroo is non-other than Ray Epps.

Before we get to that, let’s remember how we got here. It took only moments for the Democrat media complex to anoint the January 6 breach and riot at the U.S. Capitol Building an “insurrection.” As if beckoned by an unseen force, narrative builders dutifully lined up to receive the official wafer on their tongues, and voilà! “Trump supporters” who had never committed an act of violence at years of peaceful and crowded rallies were eligible for a 20-year prison stretch.

Shortly thereafter, the insurrection became a deadly insurrection when the same media reported, wrongly, that police officers were killed by rioters on January 6.

The only ones who died on January 6 were killed by police.

Awful it was, but insurrection? No.

Now, however, insurrection is just passé.

And you can thank Ray Epps

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Is America Losing The Battle For Naval Superiority To Red China? By: Shawn Fleetwood

Posted By on July 14th, 2023

https://thefederalist.com/2023/07/13/is-america-losing-the-battle-for-naval-superiority-to-red-china/

The U.S.’ ongoing naval challenges give Red China an opportunity to accumulate more power throughout the Indo-Pacific.

It’s no secret Red China has spent the past several decades heavily investing in its armed forces. In a matter of decades, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has evolved into the largest military in the world, retrofitted with some of the latest and most advanced weapons systems.

Such developments have prompted Beijing to take more aggressive actions throughout the Indo-Pacific region in recent years. Just last month, a U.S. destroyer was abruptly cut off by a People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) vessel during a transit through the Taiwan Strait. The incident occurred a few weeks after a Chinese fighter jet came within 400 feet of a U.S. reconnaissance aircraft while the latter was conducting a patrol of the South China Sea.

China has also made it a habit of conducting regular intrusions into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone and has, at times, carried out naval operations in the Taiwan Strait. Beijing has furthermore issued numerous threats to invade Taiwan if the island refuses to abdicate its sovereignty to the Chinese government. Taken collectively, these actions demonstrate growing confidence among Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party in their nation’s military capabilities.

While the U.S. currently maintains its status as global hegemon, its ongoing naval challenges give Red China an opportunity to accumulate more power throughout the Indo-Pacific. Persistent failure to maintain a sizeable fleet and meet recruiting targets is hampering the Navy’s ability to fulfill its operations, which are necessary for upholding U.S. national security and peace throughout the world.

IMMIGRATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

French riots show the future of Joe Biden’s America By William Davis

Posted By on July 14th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/07/french_riots_show_the_future_of_joe_bidens_america.html

As the U.S. deals with the consequences of mass immigration, important lessons can be learned from our oldest European ally.

Over the past few weeks, France has been engulfed in riots after a 17-year-old boy was shot and killed by a police officer during a traffic stop. The rioting and looting have largely been centered in communities with many migrants from North African and Islamic nations. The rioting has caused more than one billion dollars in property damage, and has led to thousands of arrests. It has also led to a renewed debate in Europe about the costs of mass migration and whether or not those costs are worth it.

It’s not just the U.S. that has experienced an influx of foreign nationals in recent years. France took in a record number of migrants in 2022, both legal and illegal. The European Union resettled nearly one million migrants last year, not including refugees from war-torn Ukraine. The main countries of origin for these refugees were Syria, Afghanistan, Turkey, Venezuela, and Columbia. Just as we’ve seen in the U.S., these large influxes of migrants have had a destabilizing effect on the continent’s cultural, economic, and political life. The carnage occurring in France is the result of long-simmering tensions finally coming to the surface. It’s the results of migrants from third-world, war-torn countries not assimilating into their new country, but bringing the baggage from their old countries with them.

During the France riots, a group of North African migrants could be seen chanting “f*ck France,” and “We’re just here for the welfare!” The crassness of these migrants certainly isn’t representative of everybody seeking to come from the third world to prosperous western nations, but it is indicative of a larger problem with mass immigration. Many of these foreign nationals come from countries where violence and chaos has been normalized, and the importation of migrants from these types of countries can also serve to normalize the same type of disorder in their new countries. This is why what’s happening in France should serve as a warning sign for Americans.

More than five million illegal aliens have crossed the U.S.-Mexico border since Joe Biden took office, according to a study from the Federation for American Immigration Reform. With some exceptions, these migrants tend to be low-skilled, poor, and come from countries where violence is normal and women and certain minorities are degraded. By importing millions of foreign nationals who come from countries with cultures and values that are diametrically opposed to ours, American leaders are setting the stage for exactly the kind of strife and turmoil that is occurring in France.

Other nations in Europe that have taken in fewer migrants are not experiencing the same disorder and breakdown in national cohesion that France is currently experiencing. Take Poland, for example, which has much stricter immigration controls and far more national self-respect than most European countries, and as a result has largely remained peaceful and united. Poland Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki used the French riots to present a stark dichotomy between the two nations.

HISTORY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

How Jews Fared in 19th Century ‘Palestine’ Before Zionism and Balfour. July 14, 2023 by Hugh Fitzgerald

Posted By on July 14th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/how-jews-fared-in-19th-century-palestine/

In recent years, Palestinian and other Arab propagandists have claimed that before the Zionists appeared, supposedly intent on taking over by force land “belonging to the Arabs,” the local Arabs in “Palestine” (a toponym not used by the Arabs until the late 20th century, for until 1948 they thought of the area as part of “southern Syria”) had gotten along quite well with the Jews who had been living in the area long before the arrival of the first Zionist pioneers from Europe.

In this version of history, it was only when Jews, having become Zionists, suddenly became land-grabbers, “stealing Arab land,” that the Arabs, quite justifiably, turned on them in self-defense.

This claim is as false as the one that so many peoples in the West accept about Islamic Spain being a splendid example of interfaith tolerance and cultural syncretism. Elder of Ziyon several months ago compiled news reports from the period before the Balfour Declaration, even before the first stirrings of Zionism, to show what had been the real relations of Muslims to Jews in “Palestine.” More on the evidence showing the treatment that Jews had to endure at the hands of Muslims in “Palestine” in the period “before Balfour and before Herzl” can be found here: “A short catalogue of Arab intolerance of Jews in Palestine before both Zionism and the Balfour Declaration,” Elder of Ziyon, April 10, 2023:

There is no doubt that there were some friendships between some Jews and Arabs in Jerusalem and throughout the Arab world, but to use them as evidence of widespread acceptance of Jews as equals or near-equals is not only flawed reasoning but utterly false.

The evidence that Jews were treated horribly is irrefutable.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Illegal Immigration and Western Spiritual Sickness Enforcing the law has become abnormal. Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on July 14th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/illegal-immigration-and-western-spiritual-sickness/

The usual suspects have weighed in on recent belated efforts to enforce U.S. immigration laws.

Our now bankrupt media, the corrupt government of Mexico, and the Diversity/Equity/Inclusion apparat have damned a series of laws recently passed by the Florida legislature and signed by Governor Ron DeSantis that enforce existing federal immigration laws.

Such critics seem oblivious to the current violence that is paralyzing Europe in general, and in particular France—as if such European chaos offers no lessons for the U.S. or any other salad-bowl, open-borders Western nation.

Florida decided no longer to provide de facto and illegal exemptions to foreign nationals who entered and now reside in the state illegally.

Gov. De Santis is conveying a message to the country that not enforcing the laws, exempting those who break them, or treating foreign nationals as if they had a birthright to enter the U.S. illegally, does not even win gratitude from those who violate U.S. law.

Such American magnanimity is seen, and rightly so, by illegal immigrants and the government who sends them here, as Western spiritual decadence. Thus illegal immigration is to be unapologetically leveraged and forever manipulated—and rarely to be reciprocated with any appreciation.

The Mexican government was not only more fearful of destroying the U.S. border during the Trump years; it oddly also gave the hated Trump more respect than it had shown either the supposedly messianic Barack Obama or compliant Joe Biden.

Indeed, the more Mexico praised and manipulated Obama and Biden, the more contempt it showed the U.S. Paradoxically, the more Mexico denounced Trump, the more it conceded to Trump that it must begin to cease its export of multimillions of its own citizens.

No one is now arguing that Florida is breaking any laws by enforcing them.

Again, the outrage is instead over the state’s legal adherence to the law.

No one privately believes the illegal aliens affected by the new enforcement are euphemistically merely “undocumented migrants.”

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

The Moral Equivalence of Political ‘Karens’ In the end, there’s only one choice. by Bruce Thornton

Posted By on July 14th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-moral-equivalence-of-political-karens/

EXCERPT:

“Problem-solving,” then, bespeaks the influence of progressive technocracy, rule by credentialed elites. In times of crisis like war, “working across the aisle” and “bipartisanship” make sense. But in legislating peace-time policies, such cooperation can empower malign bills, like last December’s $1.85 trillion omnibus spending bill that threw more fuel onto the feckless spending and debt bonfire. This fiscal atrocity was a bipartisan, “reach across the aisle” disaster, with

18 Republican Senators and nine House Republican members voting for the bill.

Protecting our unalienable rights and freedoms is the purpose of federal power, whereas “solving problems,” with few exceptions, should be the purview of states, communities, and civil society.

Finally, the understandable “pox on both your houses” sentiment frequently involves a specious moral equivalence. We can sympathize with the dying Mercutio’s curse on both the Montagues and Capulets, but Romeo and Tybalt are not morally equivalent. Romeo was impulsive and naïve, but Tybalt was a vicious bully and a thug.

So too with No Labels’ moral equivalence between the two parties, or especially between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, which is the rationale for fielding a third-party candidate. But the metric for judging between parties and candidates is not decorum or “problem-solving,” but freedom: Which candidate and party is the champion and defender of ordered liberty, and the Constitution’s institutional bulwarks against tyranny? Which respects the freedom of individuals, families, the states, and civil society to direct and manage their lives without the heavy hand of a technocratic Leviathan and its bureaucratic minions interfering and imposing their ideological preferences?

In the end, there’s only one choice––between freedom and tyranny. Everything else is the duplicitous distractions of political guildsmen and lupine opportunists.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Affirmative Action Battle Moves on to the Military Racial discrimination is now illegal at Harvard, still legal in the Army. by Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on July 14th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/affirmative-action-battle-moves-on-to-the-military/

One of the Biden administration’s big arguments for racially discriminating against white and Asian students in college admissions was the need for military diversity. More than half of the ‘national interest’ section in its amicus brief argued that the military “depends on a well-qualified and diverse officer corps” which requires that colleges select for diversity over merit.

“It is not possible to achieve that diversity without race-conscious admissions, including at the nation’s service academies,” Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar told the Supreme Court.

The Roberts decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard shot down affirmative action as a legal practice, but punted on the question of racial discrimination within the military and its service branch academies. A footnote briefly stated that, “no military academy is a party to these cases, however, and none of the courts below addressed the propriety of race-based admissions systems in that context. This opinion also does not address the issue, in light of the potentially distinct interests that military academies may present.”

The idea that racial discrimination should be illegal at colleges, but still legal at service branch academies like the Air Force Academy and the Naval Academy, is a loophole. Justice Sotomayor argued that the exception proves that “the Fourteenth Amendment does not categorically prohibit the use of race in college admissions.” And it’s hard to deny her reasoning. Either racially discriminating against students is legal or it’s illegal. National security can only go so far to justify an illegal practice especially when it’s a social element with an indirect effect.

Democrats quickly attacked Justice Roberts for seemingly leaving the carveout on military diversity that the Biden administration had demanded as a matter of national security.

“Adding insult to injury is that the Court exempted military service academies, like West Point and the Naval Academy, from its own ruling,” Rep. Elissa Slotkin complained. “So the majority on the Court does in fact recognize the inherent importance of a diverse military and that diversity makes our country not only more fair, but more stable and secure — but they refuse to allow our colleges and universities to hold the same values.”

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel and Its Global Discontents Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on July 14th, 2023

https://victorhanson.com/israel-and-its-global-discontents/

I just returned from 17 days abroad and watched a lot of BBC and CNN international news, given there were no other alternatives. Their coverage of the recent Israeli effort to destroy a terrorist network in Jenin was surreal. It can be summed up as the following: Killing Jews randomly inside Israel is acceptable behavior. But trying to stop that by using violence to break up terrorist enclaves are crimes against humanity.

This asymmetry is, of course, not new. But what continues to explain the Western, and indeed, European, dislike of Israel?

The old anti-Semitism?

The fear of Islamic terrorism (Europeans slurring Judaism and Jews earn no rebuke, but printing a cartoon mocking the prophet can get an editor killed)?

The boilerplate leftwing mantra of “imperialism” and “colonialism” that slurs Israel as a Western interloper that has no business in the historic homeland of the Jews?

The Western overdog syndrome? Elite Westerners, Europeans in particular, must pay obeisance to the “victims” of the West?

Add up the biases and the current Pavlovian hostility still remains surreal. Yet one thing remains constant: year-by-year the leftwing/radical Palestinian/the Squad mantra of a Palestinian nation “to the sea” is not going to happen, ever.

I also just returned from Israel, and I was there a year ago as well. It has never seemed so wealthy, busy, and confident—despite media accounts to the contrary and Palestinian terrorists’ recent attacks on Jews inside Israel.

Construction cranes are ubiquitous. Young people predominate. Families are everywhere with not one or two, but three, four, and five children.

There are few visible homeless. There are no smash-and-grab crimes, no car jackings, no Saturday night shooting gallery à la Chicago, nor gratuitous violence such as in a typical day in Portland or San Francisco. I saw no excrement on the sidewalk. Sophisticated San Franciscans should send a delegation to Tel Aviv to be instructed in municipal hygiene.

Contrary to propaganda, Israel is diverse. There are black, brown, and white Jews, secular and religious, native born and immigrant. There are lots of Arab Israelis who at least publicly, whatever their private sentiments, seem to enjoy living more inside Israel than outside it.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Ten Reasons Why Affirmative Action Died Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on July 14th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/07/12/ten-reasons-why-affirmative-action-died/

The end of affirmative action was inevitable. The only surprise was that such intentions gone terribly wrong lasted so long.

First, supporters of racial preferences always pushed back the goal posts for the program’s success. Was institutionalized reverse bias to last 20 years, 60 years, or ad infinitum? Parity became defined as an absolute equality of result. If “equity” was not obtained, then only institutionalized “racism” explained disparities. And only reverse racism was deemed the cure.

Second, affirmative action was imposed on the back end in adult hiring and college admissions. However, to achieve parity, remediation early at the K-12 school level would have been the only solution. Yet such intervention was made impossible by teachers’ unions, the rise of identity politics and government entitlements. All were opposed to school choice, self-help programs, critiques of cultural impediments, or restrictions on those blanket entitlements,

Third, class, the true barometer of privilege, was rendered meaningless. Surrealism followed. The truly privileged Barack and Michelle Obama and Meghan Markel lectured the country on its unfairness—as if they had it far rougher than the impoverished “deplorables” of East Palestine, Ohio.

Fourth, affirmative action supporters could never square the circle of proving that racial prejudices didn’t violate the spirt of the Declaration of Independence and the text of the Constitution. What they were left with was the lame argument that because long ago the 90% white majority had violated their own foundational documents, then such past bad unconstitutional bias could legitimately be rectified by present-day “good” unconstitutional bias.

Fifth, supporters never adequately explained why the sins of prior generations fell on their descendants who grew up in the post-Civil Rights era. Nor could they account for why those who had never experienced institutionalized racism, much less Jim Crow apartheid or slavery, were to be compensated collectively for the suffering of long-dead individuals. No wonder 70% of the American people in many polls favored ending affirmative action including a half of African-Americans.

Sixth, there never was a “rainbow” coalition of shared non-white victimhood—a concept necessary to perpetuate the premise of white privilege, supremacy, and rage, so integral to race-based reverse discrimination. More than a dozen ethnicities earn more per capita than do whites.

Asians have been subject to coerced internment, immigration restrictions and zoning exclusions. Yet on average they do better than whites economically and enjoy lower suicide rates and longer life expectancies. The arguments for affirmative action never explained why Asians and other minorities who faced discrimination outperformed the majority white population. As a result, affirmative action ended up discriminating against Asians on the premise they were too successful!

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Have We Reached Peak Virtue Signaling With EVs?

Posted By on July 14th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/07/14/have-we-reached-peak-virtue-signaling-with-evs/

The cars that were going to save our world from the scourge of carbon-based global warming are, says one media outlet, “​​piling up on dealer lots” because they can’t be sold. Maybe we’re finally at the point where most if not all of those who are desperate to demonstrate their green cred already have an EV and don’t need another battery-powered adult toy.

Even though “the auto industry is beginning to crank out more electric vehicles (EVs) to challenge Tesla,” Axios reported Monday, “there’s one big problem: not enough buyers.”

Two days later, Market Watch said that as “EV sales stall … there’s a ‘step back from euphoria.’”

While ​​Tesla Inc. and BYD Co., a Chinese conglomerate, have strong growth numbers, the rest in the industry, which has been incentivized to build, build, build by government mandate, can’t sell their EVs.

Korean luxury brand Genesis “sold only 18 of its nearly $82,000 Electrified G80 sedans in the 30 days leading up to June 29, and had 210 in stock nationwide — a 350-day supply,” Axios says.

Meanwhile, “Audi’s Q4 e-tron and Q8 e-tron and the GMC Hummer EV SUV, also have bloated inventories well above 100 days,” and “the Kia EV6, Hyundai Ioniq 5 and Nissan Ariya are also stacking up.” Even “the once-hot Ford Mustang Mach-E now has a 117-day supply.” 

Axios is blaming the high price of EVs for the lack of sales, but that doesn’t explain why Tesla and BYD continue to sell electric cars. Could be there’s another factor.