The New Ugly Americans How odd that those on the Left who in the past decried “American imperialism” are now proving the greatest imperialists of all. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/03/the-new-ugly-americans/

The old cultural imperialism was supposedly greedy corporatism like Disneyland, McDonald’s, and Starbucks sprouting up worldwide to supplant local competitors. 

But these businesses spread because they appealed to free-will consumer demand abroad. They were not imposed top down. 

The U.S. presence in Afghanistan collapsed in August 2021 amid the greatest American military humiliation in modern history. A billion-dollar new embassy was abandoned. Hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of new infrastructure at the huge Bagram Airbase was dumped. 

We still do not know how many billions of dollars of sophisticated new weapons were left to the Taliban and now are making their way through global terrorists’ marts. 

Yet, in our skedaddle, the LGBTQ flag still flew high from our new Kabul embassy.

A George Floyd mural was prominent on city streets.

And gender studies programs—to the tune of $787 million in American subsidies—were showcased at Kabul University, in one of the most conservative Islamic countries in the world.

Rainbow flags and Black Lives Matter banners have hung from our embassy in South Korea. 

Such partisan cultural activism is a diplomatic first.

The woke Left has now weaponized the country’s diplomatic missions abroad to advance highly partisan and controversial agendas that can offend their hosts, and do not represent the majority of American voters at home.

American foreign policy toward other nations seems now to hinge on their positions on the transgendered, LGBTQ acceptance, abortion, climate change, and an array of woke issues from using multiple pronouns on passports to showcasing transgendered ambassadors. 

The Biden Administration in January 2022 stopped the EastMed pipeline. That joint effort of our allies Cyprus, Greece, and Israel sought to bring much needed clean-burning Mediterranean natural gas to southern Europe.

Apparently, our diplomats felt it violated our own New Green Deal orthodoxies. So we imperialists interfered to destroy a vital project of our closest allies.

East Palestine derailment update By Bruce Thompson

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/05/east_palestine_derailment_update.html

We are now three months past the derailment of the Norfolk Southern freight train in East Palestine Ohio. What have we learned? On Feb. 6, 2023, Michael Graham of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) informed the public that the derailment was caused by a broken axle on one of the freight cars. He noted that the train had a crew of three, and that the crew was able to disconnect the two locomotives and move away to a safe distance. There was no information about the potential imminent explosion of one vinyl chloride tank car, just the comment, “Once the fire is out, the railcars will be moved for further damage assessment.” Later that day, there was a “vent and burn” operation in conformance with the Federal Railway Administration handbook covering such situations. The towering column of smoke and flame caused quite a ruckus. And as is usually the case, no one wants to take ownership of the decision to proceed in conformance with federal regulations. Where was Pete “#SecretaryPete” Buttigieg?

Clearly, there are two issues to address, the first would be to reduce the number of broken axles in the whole fleet of rolling stock on America’s railroads. Then we can look at the vent and burn strategy. This was not the first rail accident where a broken axle on a freight car carrying non-hazardous material caused the derailment of tank cars carrying hazardous fuel oil with a resultant fire and significant pollution. The NTSB even has videos and a completed report of the prior accident in Caselton, North Dakota. Two BNSF freight trains (BNSF is owned by Democrat mega-donor Warren Buffett) were passing going in opposite directions when an axle on a grain car broke and the car derailed. It fell onto the parallel track and the unit train with a string of tank cars containing fuel oil collided with the wreckage, derailed, and caught fire.

The NTSB re-creation video shows an interval of 93 seconds from the time the axle broke to when the crew of the crude oil train reported they were on fire.

When are Democrat voters going to wake up and hold their representatives accountable? By Tim Jones

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/05/when_are_democrat_voters_going_to_wake_up_and_hold_their_representatives_accountable.html

It really is bizarre that there are so many people in this country that continue to vote for Democrats every election cycle — at all three levels of government: federal, state and local — when economic and social problems continue to get worse almost by the day. 

During Biden’s administration, inflation, crime and out-of-control illegal immigration have been the most notable. It’s a reminder of be Einstein’s famous aphorism “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing everything over and over again and expecting different results”. This describes the Democrat electorate in nutshell, except for all of the institutional elites to whom these chronic problems don’t apply. They just sit back and virtue-signal their wokeness while living comfortably and securely in their gated communities

The facts and metrics that are demonstrably true seem to be ignored every election day. Biden’s administration has actually made life worse for everyone, including every single person within the Democrat voter base regardless of race, sex and ethnicity.

Of course, those in the upper classes, so many of whom vote for Democrats out of a seriously misguided noblesse oblige, are never seriously affected by bad Democrat policies they support. It was Bill Gates who convinced Joe Manchin, senator of West Virginia to cast the deciding the for the Inflationary Reduction Act that’s now projected to add an additional $1 trillion in more new spending under Biden.

South Korea Knows The Korean War Isn’t Over Is the U.S.-South Korea alliance secure? by Austin Bay

https://www.frontpagemag.com/south-korea-knows-the-korean-war-isnt-over/

A lesson in so-called forever war is deep background for this week’s celebration of the seven-decade-long U.S.-South Korea bilateral alliance.As U.S. President Joe Biden and South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol meet in Washington their nations have cause to celebrate. Ranking economies by GDP, the U.S. (population 330 million) is No. 1 and South Korea (52 million) is No. 12 (possibly 10).

But behind the photo-ops aides are discussing North Korea’s nuclear threats and communist China’s regional and global threats.

Difficult fact: The Korean War remains unfinished business. When media claim Afghanistan was America’s longest war, they ignore the frozen war on the Korean peninsula and the American troops still there, pulling guard duty.

The July 27, 1953, Korean Armistice Agreement established a ceasefire. Seventy years later there is no peace treaty.

Around 2.6 million human beings died during the war’s most intense combat (June 1950-July 1953). One million South Korean civilians died (estimated). North Korea lost a million soldiers and civilians. The U.S. military lost 37,000 killed in action.

In November 1950, the Chinese Communist Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) invaded North Korea and attacked American units. By July 1953 the PLA had suffered an estimated 600,000 dead.

So, here’s a fact relevant to 2023 and the Biden-Yoon meeting: At its height the Korean War was a war between the U.S. and communist China.

The PLA withdrew after the armistice. The U.S., however, didn’t cut and run. The war didn’t end. North Korea, backed by communist China and Russia, waged “gray zone war” — terror, firefights and infiltration in 1990s Pyongyang added threats of nuclear war.

We’ve a relic Cold War stand-off. Behind North Korea is an imperialist and expansionist communist China. The U.S. still stands with South Korea.

The War on Merit Comes to Science Welcome to the corruption of the hard sciences by identity politics. by Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-war-on-merit-comes-to-science/

Last week the Wall Street Journal published a column by two scientists, Jerry A. Coyne and Anna I. Krylov, detailing their travails in trying to get scientific journals to publish their “commentary about how modern science is being compromised by a de-emphasis on merit.” They were met with rejection, one editor calling the essay “downright hurtful,” and another one writing that “the concept of merit . . . has been widely and legitimately attacked as hollow.” It finally was published in the Journal of Controversial Ideas, which champions “free inquiry,” a fast-disappearing virtue in our age of “woke” intolerance.

The politicization of academic disciplines in the humanities or history or the “human sciences” is bad enough, but its dangers are nothing compared to the corruption of the hard sciences by illiberal identity politics. The roots of this dangerous ideology lie in the notion of “equity,” a fancy word for the equality of results. Both “equity” and ideological distortions of science have a long history of destructive outcomes.

The notion of absolute equality or radical egalitarianism was born 2500 years ago with democracy and its extension of political rights to non-elites. As Aristotle defined radical egalitarianism, “it arises from the notion that those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects; because men are equally free, they claim to be absolutely equal.” As such it is inherently tyrannical, for given the unequal distribution of talent, brains, opportunity, industry, and sheer luck, only by unjustly reducing the equality of some can absolute equality exist for all.

And as James Madison said in his discussion of “faction,” the clashing “political interests and parties” that can threaten our freedom result from “unequal faculties of acquiring property”––just as we see today with “equity” and “disparate impacts” and the redistribution of wealth in order to mitigate what one faction deems are unfair distinctions based on a spurious “merit” that makes some wealthier and more privileged than others. “Equality of outcome” thus exacerbated this inherently contentious and divisive dynamic.

Biden Ed Sec Says Low Civics Scores Show Students Need Critical Race Theory “It may be best to have students learning from home” by Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/biden-ed-sec-says-low-civics-scores-show-students-need-critical-race-theory/

You have to give the promo lefties credit for staying on message. No cult member has ever been as determined to ignore everything factual, moral or legal in pursuit of the agenda. They start fires and then show up to pour more gasoline on them while warning that cuts to the arson department will undermine our best defense against fires.

After lefties, doing the bidding of teachers’ unions, closed the schools, the educational system ceased to function leading to catastrophic drops in test scores. None of the lockdowners has been willing to claim their share of the credit and Biden’s Secretary of Education manages to suggest that poor civics scores is proof that we need to teach kids more critical race theory.

Knowledge of civics among the nation’s eighth-graders fell for the first time since the federal government began testing children under the current framework in 1998, according to new results that come amid a broader concern about pandemic-era learning loss.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress tests, known as the Nation’s Report Card, also show a 5-point decline in average scores in history.

Biden’s Secretary of Education, who kept trying to close schools, has some thoughts on the matter.

“The latest data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress further affirms the profound impact the pandemic had on student learning in subjects beyond math and reading,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said in a statement, noting the abysmal math and reading NAEP scores released last fall.

“It tells us that now is not the time for politicians to try to extract double-digit cuts to education funding, nor is it the time to limit what students learn in U.S. history and civics classes,” the secretary said.

We spent insane amounts of money on a school system that did not function because the primary beneficiary of all that ed spend, bureaucrats, teachers’ unions and assorted administrators, decided to close the schools. If we want to increase spending on schools, let’s claw some of that money back from their salaries and budgets.

And no matter how much we spend, it’s not going to get any better because education isn’t a money game. It’s a parent game. All the stats clearly show it. If the parents don’t care, then a student has to be really dedicated to overcome that hurdle. And how many kids are?

Trans Massacre Manifesto Still a Mystery The Nashville shooting, and the callous official response, portend a year of living dangerously. by Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/murder-manifesto-still-a-mystery/

“The investigation has advanced to the point that writings from the Covenant shooter are now being reviewed for public release and that process is underway and will take a little time.”

That was a spokesman for the Metro Nashville Police Department speaking to the New York Post last Thursday. That day marked one month since Audrey Hale, a woman who thought she was a man, murdered Evelyn Dieckhaus, 9, Mike Hill, 61, William Kinney, 9, Katherine Koonce, 60, Cynthia Peak, 61, and Hallie Scruggs, 9, at the Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee.

Nashville police “could not give a firm date when the writings would be released.” Shortly after the murders, Nashville city councilman Robert Swope told reporters “the manifesto is going to be released. It’s just a matter of when.” In the meantime, the FBI is reportedly “processing” the material.

“It’s really not even a manifesto,” according to Nashville city council member Courtney Johnson.  “It’s diaries of a mentally ill person.” The councilwoman, a real-estate agent, did not explain how she was qualified to diagnose Audrey Hale, who carefully planned the attack for months.  “What I was told is, her manifesto was a blueprint on total destruction, and it was so, so detailed at the level of what she had planned.”

According to Johnston, “that document in the wrong person’s hands would be astronomically dangerous.” So it was the “document” that was dangerous, and Johnston didn’t understand “these claims that law enforcement is hiding something.” That should be a simple matter.

The Wages Of Woke Are Death

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/05/04/the-wages-of-woke-are-death/

Going woke means more than, as the saying says, going broke. It also means the ultimate loss of life. The grip of wokeness on our society will eventually kill Americans.

Let’s begin with health care. Medical school students, whose learning should be focused on the healing arts, are being taught social justice ideology. Apparently white supremacy, oppression and structural racism must be addressed by America’s doctors-to-be, as well as the sin of being white.

Diversity, equity and inclusion studies are being required at some schools, which of course crowds out time used in the past to acquire the knowledge and develop the skills needed to be a good doctor. Politics have no place in medical schools, but there they are.

At the same time, some schools, as many as 40, are dropping standardized testing for diversity’s sake, reports the Daily Caller. The Medical College Admission Test, which “determines an individual’s ability to problem solve, think critically, and understand concepts about medical study,” does not serve the purposes of the social justice mafia. Now there are other legitimate academic avenues to medical school outside the MCAT. But as we’ve seen in other institutions of higher learning, standards designed to demonstrate and ensure competence are being killed off.

Given these facts, it’s a certainty that many of this country’s doctors of tomorrow and beyond will not have the competence needed to keep patients alive and well. Americans will die or suffer unnecessarily because wokeness demanded that the medical community marginalize them.

Jordanian MP Lauded as “Hero” for Smuggling Weapons into Israel by Bassam Tawil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19616/jordan-mp-smuggling-weapons

Why would a member of the Jordanian parliament who hates Israel with a passion and supports a terror group whose charter calls for the elimination of Israel try to smuggle weapons? To kill Jews.

That is precisely why Al-Adwan is seen by many Jordanians and Palestinians as a “hero” and a “brave man.”

It is not difficult to imagine the public outcry had an Israeli MP been caught trying to smuggle weapons into Jordan or any other country.

Sadly, the campaign of solidarity with the Jordanian parliament member who was caught while trying to smuggle a large cache of weapons into Israel signals the hatred that Jordanians and Palestinians feel towards Israel and Jews.

This hate is the direct result of decades of indoctrination and brainwashing of Jordanians and Palestinians. Israel does not harbor any bad feelings towards Jordan. The opposite is true. Israel has always been supportive of the Jordanian monarchy and the stability of the Hashemite regime was and still is an important cornerstone of Israel’s security.

As for the international community and the mainstream media in the West, they could learn from the failed smuggling attempt that Israel’s security concerns are not unjustified and not exaggerated. This week, over 100 rockets were fired from Gaza into Israel, a country roughly the size of Victoria Island. What would the UK do if one rocket – let alone 100 – were fired into England? Or Germany, if rockets were fired at Munich? Or France, if rockets were fired at Nice or Cannes or St. Tropez?

Israel daily faces attempts by Hamas and other terror groups to carry out terrorist attacks to kill Jews. The next time people complain about “tough Israeli security measures,” please remind them of that?

Imad Al-Adwan, a member of Jordan’s parliament, is being praised as a “hero” by many Jordanians and Palestinians after he was reportedly caught trying to smuggle weapons into Israel.

On April 22, Israeli authorities arrested Al-Adwan, 35, when he tried to cross from Jordan into Israel through the Allenby Bridge border crossing. A video posted on social media showed the contents of three bags containing 100 kilograms of gold, 12 automatic rifles and 270 semi-automatic pistols discovered in his possession.

The Trump 2024 Dilemma: What Would Ben-Gurion Do? He saw the need to help the British fight the Nazis while opposing the British occupation of Palestine.By Ruth R. Wisse

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-trump-dilemma-what-would-ben-gurion-do-israel-british-white-paper-re-election-52ed5dcc?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

“It is now more urgent than ever to recover and restore the best of America, but also more difficult because the former president fails to embody the greatness of America that he seeks to restore. Sober Americans will therefore defend the Trump record without supporting his candidacy, and deny him re-election while defeating those who did not allow him to govern.”

“We can’t win with Trump and we can’t win without him,” a friend said, echoing many other sober Americans. But I suggested that recent Jewish history shows a way out of the bind Republicans face in regaining the White House without its former incumbent.

In 1939, as World War II began, the Jewish community of Palestine faced simultaneous and competing challenges from Europe and at home.

Adolf Hitler intended to wipe out the Jews of Europe. Jews in the Land of Israel urgently needed to provide refuge for the millions being refused entry everywhere else. They faced resistance in Palestine, where the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin Al-Husseini, was determined to prevent the fleeing Jews from entering their homeland. He incited the local Arab population to violence, warning the British overseers of potential pan-Arab resistance against the British throughout the Middle East.

Britain had been entrusted with the mandate for Palestine after defeating the Ottomans in World War I. Though the mandate was intended to include the establishment of a Jewish national home, three-fourths of the territory was given to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, and British authorities undertook neutral supervision over the rest. The more the Arabs rioted in the 1920s and ’30s, the more the British gave way to their demands and prevented Jews from arming in self-defense. This culminated in the British White Paper of 1939, which severely restricted Jewish immigration and prevented Jews’ rescue from certain death.