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LETS’ PLAY “WHO IS THE FASCIST!” ERIC LEVINE

Posted By on October 26th, 2024

During her recent Town Hall on CNN with Anderson Cooper, Vice President Kamala Harris told her audience that she believes Donald Trump is a fascist.  It would have been interesting to hear her response if she was asked to define what the term “fascist” means. 

Clearly, she has no clue.  If she did, she never would have taken the bait and answered the question.  In reality, she and the policies of the Democratic Party have more in common with fascism than MAGA world. 

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines fascism as:

A populist political philosophy, movement, or regime… that exalts nation and often race above the individual, that is associated with a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, and that is characterized by severe economic and social regimentation and by forcible suppression of opposition. At the core of fascism is loyalty to tribe, ethnic identity, religion, tradition, or in a word, nation. 

Harris and her fellow Democrats use the terms “fascist” and “patriot” interchangeably to suit their narrative.  Their supporters are “patriots.”  Republicans or Americans who take issue with their policies, are “fascists.”   President Biden highlighted the point when he referred to Republicans and Trump supporters as “semi-fascists.”   Putting aside that the term “semi-fascist” has no knowable definition, the intent of the accusation was clear, accuse Trump and his supporters of being as evil as Hitler.  It was offensive when Biden made the statement.  It is no less offensive now when Harris uses the term so flippantly. 

ISRAEL, NATIONAL SECURITY AND DEFENSE Comments turned off

Who Leaked U.S. Intelligence on a Possible Israel Attack on Iran? This type of intelligence compromise harms American national security because it discourages U.S. allies from sharing critical threat intelligence with our country. Fred Fleitz

Posted By on October 25th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/10/25/who-leaked-u-s-intelligence-on-a-possible-israel-attack-on-iran/

Fred Fleitz previously served as National Security Council chief of staff, CIA analyst, and a House Intelligence Committee staff member. This article was cleared for classification purposes by the CIA Classification Prepublication Review Board.

A recent leak of U.S. intelligence analysis on how Israel might retaliate against Iran for a massive missile attack against the Jewish state on October 1 has outraged Biden/Harris administration critics and further damaged U.S.-Israel relations.

Given their opposition to an Israeli attack on Iran, Biden/Harris officials had a strong motive to leak this information. However, the huge number of U.S. government employees who likely had access to this intelligence means there are many other suspects.

The intelligence in question was a one-page classified analysis by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) titled “Israel: Air Force Continues Preparations for Strike on Iran and Conducts a Second Large-Force Employment Exercise, October 15-16, 2024.” This top-secret report was accompanied by a one-page chart that discussed the weaponry Israel might use to attack Iran.

The NGA assessment was made public after it was anonymously posted to a Telegram discussion group popular with Iranians.

Understandably, President Biden and other senior U.S. officials would want to know when Israel will attack Iran, what it will attack, the weapons it will use, and the timing of the attack. Normally, U.S. officials would just ask their Israeli counterparts for this information. However, because of the increasingly poor relationship between the Biden/Harris administration and the Netanyahu government and reported leaks to the press by White House officials of their confidential discussions with Israeli officials, the Israeli government does not trust the Biden/Harris administration. As a result, Israel has refused to share this type of sensitive Israeli national security information with the United States. The Biden/Harris administration, therefore, must rely on the U.S. Intelligence Community for information about Israeli plans to attack Iran.

There has been some speculation that a Biden/Harris administration official leaked the analysis to sabotage a possible Israeli attack on Iran that they fear could influence the November 5 presidential election. There is no evidence so far that any administration official was involved in such a gravely serious leak against Israel.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

China’s Blockade of Taiwan: Irresistible Momentum to War by Gordon G. Chang

Posted By on October 25th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21047/china-blockade-of-taiwan

Beijing maintains that the island has been an “inalienable” part of China since time immemorial. The People’s Republic has never exercised control over Taiwan. In fact, no Chinese regime has ever held indisputable sovereignty to it. Chiang Kai-shek, the first Chinese ruler to exercise control of the whole island, arrived in 1949.

A quarantine is a cunning maneuver at a time that China is not prepared for a full-scale war and is not ready to start hostilities by launching an invasion of Taiwan’s main island.

Not prepared? Xi Jinping does not trust the Chinese military, a war on Taiwan would be extremely unpopular with the Chinese people, and the Chinese regime is extremely casualty averse.

Xi, therefore, is trying to intimidate everyone else into submission.

“The real target is the United States.” … They were “practicing ways to ambush the U.S. Navy if it heads towards an already held-hostage Taiwan.” — Chang Ching of the R.O.C. Society for Strategic Studies.

Xi’s implied threats to use these weapons are particularly ominous. We have to ask ourselves: When in history has a militant regime engaged in belligerent acts and constantly threatened to go to war but did not actually do so?

China on October 22 conducted live-fire exercises in the Taiwan Strait.

The bellicose move follows a 13-hour simulated blockade of Taiwan on October 14 and 15. The People’s Liberation Army, in the Joint Sword-2024B exercises, employed a record 153 planes as well 26 ships, including the Liaoning, one of the country’s three aircraft carriers.

The Chinese Coast Guard participated in the massive drill as well, carrying out, as the Economist noted, an “unprecedented” patrol around the main Taiwan island.

The drill, according to the Chinese Coast Guard, was a “practical action to control Taiwan island in accordance with the law based on the one-China principle.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Two Lawsuits Challenge Swampbuster and the Regulatory Labyrinth of the Administrative State By Janet Levy

Posted By on October 25th, 2024

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

Dwight Waldo, whose 1948 book The Administrative State gave the eponymous term widespread usage, believed that public administration is rational action designed to maximize public goals.

Unfortunately, the administrative state and its bureaucrats no longer have the public on their minds.

Without any constitutional authority, the administrative state frames, enforces, and adjudicates the regulations of a plethora of alphabet agencies. Unelected bureaucrats, politicized by monied NGOs and lobbyists, exercise powers of all three branches of government, disregarding the separation of powers and the checks-and-balances provisions of the Constitution.

Such is the viselike hold of the administrative state that Chief Justice John Roberts, dissenting in a 2013 judgment on a regulatory scheme of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), wrote: “The administrative state ‘wields vast power and touches almost every aspect of daily life….’ The Framers could hardly have envisioned today’s ‘vast and varied federal bureaucracy’ and the authority administrative agencies now hold over our economic, social, and political activities.”

An example of the arbitrary power the administrative state wields are some of the rules agencies have framed for the Swampbuster provisions, passed by Congress in 1985, under which the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) can deny benefits to farmers who do not voluntarily give up farming on wetlands. And who designates wetlands? It is the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), a federal agency of the USDA. Using Swampbuster, the USDA has come to regulate property it would otherwise not have been able to.

However, four recent Supreme Court decisions have reined in the administrative state. The court swept aside decades-old precedents to shift the balance of power from the agencies to the courts. The Swampbuster provisions and NRCS-framed rules, too – seen by many legal experts as violative of property rights and overly broad in implementation – have been challenged in two recent lawsuits. Though the courts have yet to decide on the Swampbuster lawsuits, the four Supreme Court decisions will likely have a strong bearing on the cases.

Here, in brief, are the salient points of the four rulings:

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

It’s Still the Economy, Stupid Globalists! By J.B. Shurk

Posted By on October 25th, 2024

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

A paradigm shift occurs when there is a radical change in thinking from an accepted point of view to a new one.  Changes in social consciousness are not easy.  Institutions defend orthodoxy with all their assorted powers, while new ideas receive support only from iconoclasts who are often dismissed as kooks or disparaged as domestic enemies.  

Prevailing opinion is like a heavy boulder sitting in the valley between several steep hills.  For a novel idea to succeed, its proponents must push that boulder up the slope until it reaches the top of a neighboring peak.  Two observations follow from this analogy: (1) when moving the heavy boulder of conventional wisdom in a new direction, the gravity of traditional consensus works to roll it right back into the valley where it originally rested, and (2) once the boulder is finally pushed up a hill with the force of sufficient evidence and popular support, it will quickly roll down the other side and rest in a new valley of conventional wisdom.  Changing human minds, in other words, is a punishing exercise until you reach a tipping point, when social change occurs rapidly.

We are right now in the midst of one of these phenomenal paradigm shifts.  Americans are “awakening” to the idea that the federal government does not have their best interests at heart.  They are pushing back against mass illegal immigration.  They are resisting government surveillance and censorship.  They are questioning economic regulations that have weakened private property rights while giving a small number of corporations and financial elites almost total control over commerce, the food supply, and the monetary system.  

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Hamas Loyalist Professor: Russell Rickford at the Cornell University “[October 7th] was exhilarating! It was exhilarating! It was energizing.” by Sara Dogan

Posted By on October 25th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/hamas-loyalist-professor-russell-rickford-at-the-cornell-university/

#3: Russell Rickford, Cornell University

Cornell associate professor of history Russell Rickford made national headlines for his enthusiastic and boisterous approbation of Hamas’s barbaric October 7th massacre of Israeli civilians during which over 1200 were maimed, mutilated, and slaughtered, and hundreds more taken hostage.

At a rally hosted by the ironically-named group, Jewish Voice for Peace, in Ithaca, New York on October 15, 2023, barely a week after Hamas’s attack, Rickford lauded Hamas in the highest terms and celebrated the outright slaughter of Israel’s Jews.
“What has Hamas done?,” Rickford asked. “Hamas has shifted the balance of power. Hamas has punctured the illusion of [Israeli] invincibility. That’s what they’ve done…Hamas has changed the terms of debate.”
Rickford continued extolling the virtues of the terrorist group, saying that “Hamas has challenged the monopoly of violence” and that the Palestinians “were able to breathe for the first time in years” thanks to the bloody October 7th massacre.

“[I]t was exhilarating! It was exhilarating! It was energizing! And if they [Palestinians] weren’t exhilarated by this challenge to the monopoly of violence, by this shifting of the balance of power, then they would not be human. I was exhilarated!” Rickford concluded, expressing sheer joy at the extent of Hamas’s slaughter.

Even in the highly anti-Semitic world of higher education, Rickford’s remarks praising the massacre were considered a step too far. The professor requested and was granted a leave of absence from the university but remained an employee and is still listed as a professor on the university’s website.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Kamala Loses One-Person CNN Debate Even the state media can’t cover for her anymore. by Mark Tapson

Posted By on October 25th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/kamala-loses-one-person-cnn-debate/

As we enter the final stretch of election season, every day seems to bring another Trump/Vance victory in spite of a hostile media, and another embarrassing loss by the Harris/Walz campaign. Recently, for example, Trump endeared himself to regular Americans by putting on an apron and working the McDonald’s drive-thru; conversely, McDonald’s dealt a fatal blow to Kamala’s claim she had worked for them as a teenager by releasing a statement declaring they could find no evidence of that. She is looking more and more like the most hapless, brainless, inauthentic, unqualified presidential nominee in modern history, if not ever. Even the state media like CNN can’t cover for her anymore, as evidenced by the tepid assessments of CNN commentators in the wake of Kamala’s recent CNN town hall hosted by Anderson Cooper.

To recap: when the Democrats realized that Joe Biden could no longer be propped up as their 2024 candidate, they found themselves painted into a corner. The Democrat kingmakers – Barack Obama, Susan Rice, and Valerie Jarrett – needed to step in and depose the decrepit Biden but didn’t want to fall back on Vice President Harris, whom they knew was devoid of accomplishments, likeability, brains, and presidential charisma, but how could they not go with her? Running the vice president as the nominee would ordinarily be the obvious move; leap-frogging over Kamala and selecting someone else would be a clear acknowledgement that she had never been anything but a diversity hire. And how could the party of identity politics not go with a “woman of color”? It would discredit their entire ideology.

So they rolled the dice and installed Kamala, knowing she was not ready for prime time but counting on a supportive media and a strategy of painting Trump as Hitler 2.0 to get her over the finish line. But in the ensuing months she has not only not risen to the occasion, she and her campaign are flailing to such an extent that all they have left is to fear-monger hysterically about Trump as A Threat to Democracy™.

Then came CNN’s Wednesday evening town hall in Philadelphia. David Urban nailed it when he declared afterward that she lost a one-person debate. A couple of examples of her prevaricating and fumbling will suffice to give a sense of just how badly the event went for her.

When Cooper hit her with a question she should have seen coming from a mile away – is Trump’s idea of a border wall actually “stupid,” as she had initially called it? – she panicked immediately and rambled about Trump until Cooper interjected to get her back on track. As an open borders enthusiast who plans to give citizenship to millions of illegals in the country, she had the nerve to say that there needs to be a legal process for immigration and that she will secure the border. Cooper flustered her further by pressing: “So you don’t think the idea of a border wall is stupid anymore?” and she responded again by attacking Trump and complaining that “he didn’t do much of anything” with the wall.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

It’s unhinged to compare Trump to Hitler This fear-mongering campaign will only turn more voters off the Democrats. Jenny Holland

Posted By on October 25th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/10/24/its-unhinged-to-compare-trump-to-hitler/

It was the October surprise that surprised no one. America’s political and media elites have this week alleged that Donald Trump is just like Adolf Hitler. This might be a little more shocking if they hadn’t been claiming exactly this for the best part of eight years.

The prompt for the latest round of hysterical Trump-Nazi comparisons came from John Kelly, a former Trump chief of staff turned Trump-hater. In an interview with the New York Times, Kelly claimed that his former boss spoke wistfully of Hitler and said he wished that he had Hitler’s generals. Kelly is certain that Trump meets the ‘definition of a fascist’, having found a general definition online.

Trump’s campaign adamantly refutes Kelly’s claims. But vice-president Kamala Harris, Trump’s increasingly desperate presidential rival, has predictably seized on Kelly’s comments. She took time out from her busy schedule of preparing truly terrible answers for her CNN Town Hall yesterday, to stand in front of a podium with the presidential seal on it and denounce Trump as ‘a fascist’ who wants ‘unchecked’ power. Citing Kelly’s claims, she said that Trump wants ‘a military who will be loyal to him, personally, one that will obey his orders, even when he tells them to break the law or abandon their oath to the constitution of the United States’.

It seems the empty ‘joyous’ vibe that initially characterised Harris’s campaign has now given way to dystopian fear-mongering about the return of fascism. Harris is now reviving the core message of Joe Biden’s campaign – that Trump poses an existential, fascist-like threat to American democracy. It’s desperate stuff.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Biden Iran Scandal Gets Worse

Posted By on October 25th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/10/the-biden-iran-scandal-gets-worse/

The source of last week’s leak of U.S. intelligence about Israel’s plans to strike Iran, which has occasioned an investigation, isn’t yet known. What should be obvious, though, is that no individual who has had extensive contact with Iranian intelligence and diplomatic officials, and who has deferred to the direction of those officials before, should have ever been put in a sensitive position in the first place.

The Biden administration has ignored this rather simple rule.

The most glaring example of its questionable handling of the Iran portfolio is Biden Iran envoy Robert Malley’s continued employment by the State Department amid a probe into his handling of classified materials and the possibility that he shared information with the regime. Though Malley has since been suspended, it’s noteworthy that the administration has opted to technically keep him in the role, no doubt wishing to avoid the political fallout that would come with terminating him.

Possibly worse than Malley’s appointment is that of Ariane Tabatabai, an academic turned State Department and Pentagon official. She was part of the now-infamous Iran Experts Initiative — a program used by Tehran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs to cultivate relationships with foreign academics who could carry water for the regime.

At one point, according to reporting from Semafor, which revealed the program’s existence, Tabatabai opted to skip a conference in Israel after an Iranian official instructed her not to go. She also consulted with this same Iranian official regarding how she should testify in hearings before Congress. Her job today — chief of staff to the Pentagon official who oversees special operations.

It’s true that the leak of documents from the National Security Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency could have come from any number of places. According to a former official who spoke to the Washington Free Beacon last week, they appear to have been available to “thousands upon thousands” of U.S. officials via a classified system.

But it’s also true that since October 7, pro-Hamas ideologues within the State Department have labored to leak information that would help their cause and damage Israel’s war effort.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Canada to ‘Significantly Reduce’ Immigration as Trudeau Caves to Public Pressure: Brittany Bernstein

Posted By on October 25th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/canada-to-significantly-reduce-immigration-as-trudeau-caves-to-public-pressure/

Canada plans to “significantly reduce” the number of immigrants it allows into the country over the next two years, as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau reverses course amid falling public support for immigration.

Canada previously set a target of 500,000 new permanent residents in 2025. Under the new immigration plan, Canada will decrease that target by 21 percent, to 395,000. After 2025, the limit will shrink by roughly 4 percent each year as the government looks to set a target of 365,000 new permanent residents by 2027.

And for the first time ever, Canada will set a target for temporary immigrants. The new limitations, which will impact international students and foreign workers, will see admittance of non-permanent residents drop by roughly 445,000 in 2025 and 2026. By comparison, the country allowed in 800,000 temporary immigrants in 2023.

“This is temporary — to pause our population growth and let our economy catch up,” Trudeau said Thursday. “We have to get the system working right for all Canadians.”

The prime minister said during a news conference that the new plan is being put into place because the country “didn’t get the balance quite right” as it responded to the “tumultuous times” that followed the Covid-19 pandemic.

The new policy marks an about-face from Trudeau’s previous support for immigration that had allowed for a record increase of immigration to the country since he took office in 2015. Trudeau’s government raised annual permanent resident targets from 272,000 when he took office to 485,000 this year.

Immigration has driven 97 percent of the country’s population growth as it contends with worsened housing shortages, inflated rent prices, strained public services and rising unemployment. The country’s unemployment rate is particularly high among young people — 14 percent compared to 6.5 percent unemployment overall.

Fifty-eight percent of Canadians now feel that immigration levels are too high, according to a poll by the Environics Institute, which found public opinion on immigration levels has “effectively flipped from being acceptable (if not valuable) to problematic”.