2024 Election Showdown: Harris’s America vs. Trump’s Comeback Were Kamala Harris elected, the “fundamental transformation of the United States of America” into a one-party socialist redoubt would be complete. By Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2024/10/20/2024-election-showdown-harriss-america-vs-trumps-comeback/

A couple of days ago, The American Mind published a scary tale in which I pondered the question: what would America be like in the (admittedly unlikely) event that Kamala Harris should win the 2024 presidential election?

The brief answer: it wouldn’t be pretty.

Although Harris has recently been pretending that she is in favor of border security (just as Donald Trump is), fracking (just as Donald Trump is), and law and order (ditto), she would quickly revert to form. The border would remain open and America’s oil, gas, and coal would remain in the ground. Who knows what would happen to Trump’s idea, also adopted by Harris, of exempting tips from federal income tax? We do know, however, that Harris would continue the Biden-Harris assault on free speech, weaponizing the DOJ against critics of her administration.

Assuming the Dems got control of the Senate, Harris would pack the Supreme Court, reinstituting the left-wing bias that had prevailed throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Donald Trump and his close supporters would finally be neutralized, bankrupted, and jailed for life. The federal debt would continue to skyrocket, as would taxes and anything like economic innovation would be stamped out by regulatory zeal masquerading as environmental sensitivity. The left-wing sacrament of unrestricted abortion would be nationalized, nominally by the readoption of Roe v. Wade but in fact by the sanctification of infanticide. The discriminatory culture of ESG and DEI would be further institutionalized, thus undermining any support for meritocracy or such traditional values as colorblind justice.

In short, though there would still be a place called the United States of America, the polity and the political values that existed under that name for nearly 250 years would have vanished, absorbed by the statist, freedom-tarnishing energies of an unaccountable administrative state. The masks would be dropped, the euphemisms retired. The basic hatred of what the United States has been would come to the fore. Harris gave us a little taste of what to expect in her remarks on Columbus Day (a holiday she wants to rebaptize as “Indigenous Peoples’ Day”): “European explorers,” she said, “ushered in a wave of devastation, violence, stealing land, and widespread disease.” Were she elected, the “fundamental transformation of the United States of America” into a one-party socialist redoubt would be complete.

As I say, I regaled readers with that horror story in my essay for The American Mind. Here I would like to offer a few thoughts on the alternative story: What if Donald Trump wins the election? What then?

Trump: Netanyahu Is Winning by Doing the Opposite of What Biden, Harris Say

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2024/10/19/trump-netanyahu-winning-by-doing-the-opposite-of-what-biden-harris-say/

Former President Donald Trump told a rally in Pennsylvania Saturday that Israel was succeeding in its war because Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did the opposite of what President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris had told him.

As Breitbart News has noted, Netanyahu had managed to destroy most of Hamas, kill Hezbollah’s leaders, and — in recent days — eliminate Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, largely by defying Biden and Harris.

Trump picked up on that point at a rally in Latrobe, east of Pittsburgh:

This election is a choice between whether we will have a[n] incredible four more years of failure — it’s such a horrible four years. We had a horrible think of that. Everything they touch turns to [Audience: “Shit!”]. Everything. Inflation, Afghanistan. How about Afghanistan — most embarrassing moment in the history of — everything they’ve touched. Even now. He’s telling Israel everything he said to Israel was exactly the opposite. He’s the greatest — I will say this about Biden. He’s the single greatest expert on foreign policy in history. You know what that means? If you did the exact opposite of what he suggested every single time, you’d go down as the greatest foreign policy president in history. If you did the exact opposite — everything is a failure. And he’s telling Bibi Netanyahu, don’t do this, don’t do that, don’t do this — all our great congressmen are there — and don’t do any of these things. And Bibi didn’t listen to him and I tell you what, they’re in a much stronger position now than they were three months ago. That’s for sure. Nobody’s ever seen anything like that like this happened. And Bibi called me today, and he said it’s incredible what’s happened. They said it’s pretty incredible, but he wouldn’t listen to Biden because if he did, they wouldn’t be in this position. And she’s worse than him. She’s not as smart as him. And I’m not saying he’s the smartest. I’m not saying he’s the smartest, but she’s not as smart as him.

The Times of Israel reported that Netanyahu and Trump spoke after an Iranian-backed assassination attempt in which a Hezbollah drone targeted Netanyahu’s home. Neither Biden and Harris called Netanyahu after the event.

Geert Wilders for Breitbart: Why European Patriots Should Support Israel

https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2024/10/03/geert-wilders-for-breitbart-why-european-patriots-should-support-israel/

War is terrible. If only because there will always be innocent victims on both sides. But sometimes war is inevitable, because war can be just. Nowhere is this clearer today than in the war Israel is waging against the powers that want to wipe not only the state of Israel but also the Jewish people of the face of the earth.

Last Tuesday, Iran fired 180 ballistic missiles at Israel. Wednesday, Hezbollah fired over 100 rockets into Israel from Lebanon. In order to neutralize the Hezbollah terrorists, the Israeli army has launched the first ground offensive in southern Lebanon since 2006.

The war in the Middle East is rapidly escalating. But it is clear who is to blame and it is equally clear which side we must back. We stand with Israel, because its enemies are evil and neutrality in the face of evil is evil.

The war began almost exactly one year ago, on the 7th of October 2023. This day will forever remain one of the most infamous days in the history of Israel and the free world. Everyone has seen the horrific pictures of the massacres at the Supernova music festival and in the Jewish villages near the border with Gaza. Hundreds of innocent people, including children, babies and elderly people, were killed, kidnapped and raped by the terrorists of Hamas.

Everyone remembers how the corpse of 22-year-old German Jewish Shani Louk was paraded in Gaza City in the back of a pickup truck, while people cheered and spat on it. And then there are the hostages – more than 250, of whom an estimated 100 perhaps are still alive in the dark tunnels beneath Gaza after 363 days of captivity.

What happened one year ago was a wake-up call for Israel, but it was also a wake-up call for us, reminding us of the deep hatred of Muhammed, the founder of Islam, towards the Jews. It can be found in his book, the Quran (e.g. Surah 4:47: “You who have been given the Book! Believe in what we have sent down… before we obliterate faces”), and in the Hadiths, the collections of Muhammed’s words and deeds written down by his contemporaries (e.g. Sahih Muslim 41-6985: “The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdullah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him”).

But almost as shocking as the events one year ago has been the hideous surge of anti-Semitism and moral cowardice in our own countries during the past twelve months.

Israel Fights Alone, Carrying by Itself a Catatonically Suicidal West by Majid Rafizadeh *****

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21031/israel-fights-alone-carrying-by-itself

Little Israel is showing the world how to win again – and saving civilization and a free way of life into the bargain …. let Israel keep winning!

The problem with the JCPOA was, of course, its “sunset clauses.” They assured Iran that it could legitimately have as many nuclear weapons as it can produce in just a few short years.

The West has left Israel to fight a war that should never have been Israel’s alone. The Western nations, through diplomatic miscalculations, the need for votes, cowardice and a fear of conflict, have essentially outsourced their responsibilities for maintaining global peace to Israel, watching from the sidelines as the conflict ramps up.

If the West is too fearful or reluctant to engage directly in the fight against injustice, terror, and tyranny, the very least it can do is stand with Israel and stop trying to sabotage it at every turn. Support should not be limited to words but include political, diplomatic and military backing. By failing to support Israel fully, the West is empowering exactly those countries working to revise the world order — from one of freedom to one of tyranny — by displacing the West.

It is a grotesque reflection on the international community, particularly the Biden-Harris administration and the European Union, not to be offering unequivocal support. Israel’s struggle is not just for its own survival but for the security and peace of the Free World. The West, through its passivity, is failing not only Israel, it is hollowing out its own survival.

Culminating with the dispatch of arch-terrorist Yahya Sinwar this week, how many of the world’s most vicious terrorists has Israel liberated the world from in a few short weeks? Little Israel is showing the world how to win again — and saving civilization and a free way of life into the bargain. For those of us fortunate enough to live in a free society rather than in a society of fear, as the former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky calls them, let Israel keep winning!

The New “European Zionism” and Viktor Orban’s Hungary David Goldman

https://www.newsweek.com/new-european-zionism-viktor-orbans-hungary-opinion-1969603

“Zionism for the nations of Europe,” wrote Dutch anti-immigration crusader Geert Wilders in Breitbart this month. “The Europeans should follow the example of the Jewish people and safeguard the sovereignty of their nation-states.” Wilders’ party took first place in Holland’s national elections late last year, a portent of the so-called shift to the Right that propelled nationalist parties to electoral success this year in Germany, France, Austria, and the Czech Republic. But the first European “Zionist” and the inspiration for many European conservatives was Hungary’s long-serving Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

Hungary is a small nation that is determined to survive the demographic winter that has crept across the industrial nations. It devotes nearly a tenth of its budget to support for families, but even more important than family subsidies is a renewed national spirit and resistance to the European Commission’s attempt to homogenize the nations of Europe into a supranational blur.

“Humans are about to enter a new era of history. Call it ‘the age of depopulation. For the first time since the Black Death in the 1300s, the planetary population will decline. But whereas the last implosion was caused by a deadly disease borne by fleas, the coming one will be entirely due to choices made by people,” economist Nicholas Eberstadt Oct. 10 in Foreign Affairs.

That’s a death sentence for Europe’s smaller nations. When Orban came to office in 2010, government demographers gauged the total fertility (number of live births in a lifetime) for Magyar women at just 0.83, then the lowest in the world. Since then, Hungary’s TFR has roughly doubled to about 1.6, and a surge in the marriage rate portends further improvement.

Orban became a figure of controversy in 2016 when he refused to open Hungary’s borders to the millions of Middle Eastern migrants fleeing the Syrian civil war and other conflicts, defying migrant quotas assigned by the European Commission. It also put Orban in conflict with the world’s wealthiest Hungarian, George Soros, whose Open Society Foundation promotes free migration.

European nationalists look to Israel as a beacon of hope. It’s the only high-income country with a fertility rate above the 2.1 breakeven level—so far above breakeven at three children per female that its working-age population will more than double from today’s 4.5 million to 11 million by the end of this century, according to UN demographers. The same UN projections show that the working-age population of Turkey and Iran will fall by about half, and by three-quarters in Taiwan and South Korea.

Death of a fascist The elimination of Yahya Sinwar is a great moment for Israelis and Palestinians alike. Brendan O’Neill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/10/17/death-of-a-fascist/

So Yahya Sinwar has been killed. The leader of Hamas in Gaza is no more. The man widely believed to have been the architect of the pogrom of 7 October has been eliminated. The worst mass murderer of Jews since the Nazi era has been served the ultimate and most righteous punishment. The fascist is dead. This is a great day not only for Israel and the Jewish diaspora that has been smarting for more than a year from the horrors that Sinwar and his army of anti-Semites visited on southern Israel, but also for all of humanity.

It was during a ground operation in Rafah in southern Gaza that the IDF killed three terrorists. One was Sinwar. Rafah, of course, is the city every virtue-signaller in the West told Israel to leave well alone. ‘All eyes on Rafah’ went the social-media cry a few weeks back. Yet it turns out the man who green-lighted the rape, kidnap and slaughter of more than a thousand Jews was there. Listen, if your campaigning entails putting a moral forcefield around a fascist overlord, if it involves the protection of a Jew-killer from the Jews looking for him, then you might not be as virtuous as you think.

There will doubtlessly be much agonised analysis of Sinwar’s life. I expect we’ll even see the morally lost talking heads of the Western press gab about what a pensive leader he was or how his early life in a rundown refugee camp pushed him towards violent hate for the Jewish State. For now though, before all the unseemly handwringing, the basic facts of his life will suffice. He got involved in terrorism in the early 1980s. He later served as Hamas’s punisher of alleged Palestinian collaborators with Israel, earning him the nickname ‘The Butcher of Khan Younis’. He spent time in jail for the murder of such ‘collaborators’, one of whom he strangled to death with his bare hands, another of whom he suffocated with a keffiyeh. In 2017 he became leader of Hamas in Gaza. And in 2023 he okayed Hamas’s fascistic onslaught against the Jews of southern Israel.

This is a man who deserved to die. His crimes against the Jews were legion. He took the postwar cry of ‘Never Again’ and stomped it into the dirt. ‘Again, again’ was his preferred slogan. His violent disregard for Jewish life was a function of his deep-seated anti-Semitism – you don’t get to be leader of a terror group whose founding covenant committed it to an apocalyptic war on the Jews without being a Jew-hater yourself.

128 U.S. Orthodox Jews Are Barred from Lufthansa Flight By Susan Quinn

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/10/128_u_s_orthodox_jews_are_barred_from_lufthansa_flight.html

Ever since the end of World War II and the Holocaust, the Germans have made a show about fighting anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial, like the nation’s fairly recent passage of strict laws against hate speech, detailed below:

The German penal code prohibits publicly denying the Holocaust and disseminating Nazi propaganda, both off- and online. This includes sharing images such as swastikas, wearing an SS uniform and making statements in support of Hitler.

It also places strict limits on how social media companies must moderate and report hate speech and threats. These hate-speech laws were, after three far-right terror attacks in 2019 and early 2020 prompted German authorities to warn of increasing extremism.

But anti-Semitism has a long history in Germany, and in 2022, we learned of an anti-Semitic incident on Lufthansa Airlines that demonstrates its persistence, which has now resulted in a $4 million fine by the U.S. Department of Transportation, a penalty incurred from allegations that Lufthansa Airlines had discriminated against a large group of Jewish passengers. The situation was mishandled in so many ways that we have to wonder if there was an underlying zeal for acting assertively against a large group of Orthodox Jews.

The passengers were traveling from New York to Budapest, Hungary for an annual memorial event for an Orthodox rabbi. Although there were 128 Jewish passengers, they were not traveling as a group. There are inconsistencies in the stories about what instigated the passengers’ removal after they disembarked in Frankfurt and then were not permitted to reboard to continue their trip to Budapest, but here’s what an article at CNN reported:

The misbehavior detailed in the [airline] report includes 60 passengers onboard ‘repeatedly disregarded’ safety and public announcements from flight attendants and the flight deck. The crew said that some passengers obstructed flight attendants in economy class from its on-board food and beverage service, ‘inconvenienced other passengers’ and argued with the crew about wearing masks.

Another description from other passengers, via an item at The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, doesn’t appear to confirm these comments:

On the first leg of the flight, some passengers said they were told by the crew to wear face masks and not to stand in the aisles. The passengers said they didn’t see anyone that didn’t comply. Lufthansa at the time required passengers to wear a face mask, while U.S. and German law prohibit passengers from assembling in aisles or galley areas during a flight.

The captain of the flight informed a Lufthansa security manager of misbehavior by passengers traveling on to Budapest. No specific passengers were identified, according to the Transportation Department. Still, the airline put a hold on more than 100 passengers’ tickets. 

Finally, a press release sent out by Lufthansa:

In a press release, the airline said the incident ‘resulted from an unfortunate series of inaccurate communications, misinterpretations, and misjudgments throughout the decision-making process’ and that these actions, ‘although regrettable, do not support any finding of discrimination and the department’s findings in this case.’

Voter Fraud: The Only Issue That Matters in 2024 By Joan Swirsky

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/10/voter_fraud_the_only_issue_that_matters_in_2024.html

No, it’s not “the economy, stupid,” in spite of the schizophrenic stock market since our remarkably resilient capitalistic economy ran head-on into the socialist-cum-communist Biden-Harris regime, with its $1.8-trillion deficit.

And no, it’s not domestic policy, where we have had the luxury of being on the receiving end of these:

High taxes.
High food prices.
High gas prices.
Sky-high regulations.
Alarmingly high crime rates throughout the country, particularly in states run by Democrats, where arrests are few, bail is nonexistent, and raging criminals enjoy no consequences for their assaults, rapes, murders, racist attacks, etc.
Eleven million illegal and unvetted aliens are further draining our economy  thanks to the largesse of this regime, which is housing them in fancy hotels and providing food, health care, iPhones, education for their children, and even monthly stipends that are higher than what American families and veterans receive.

And no, it’s not foreign policy, in which:

We’ve spent trillions of dollars supporting thugs like Zelensky in Ukraine but couldn’t find the funds, as ace investigative journalist Kelleigh Nelson spells out, to help the ravaged victims of the government-manipulated hurricanes Helene and Milton in several southern “red” states.  Talk about an October surprise!
There are now five wars that didn’t exist four years ago — in Yemen, Darfur, Myanmar, Ukraine, and Israel — costing us more trillions of dollars and precious lives.
The Biden-Harris regime is indefensibly antagonistic to our trusted and invaluable ally, Israel, as it has waffled on its support and threatened an arms embargo for that tiny Jewish state, surrounded and at war with seven menacing enemies whose charters call for its annihilation and death to every Jew on Earth.  And yet we have a president who threatens Israel not to destroy the Iranian nukes.

Vengeance Noah Rothman

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/vengeance-2/

“The glory in this moment, therefore, is owed to Israel alone. And although it has become a thankless mission, all those who stand against barbarism and tyranny are the beneficiaries of Israel’s actions.”

The Israeli military confirmed on Thursday that Yahya Sinwar — Hamas’s longtime strategist, the group’s leader since summer, and the foremost architect of the October 7 massacre — has been eliminated.

Sinwar is only the latest high-profile terrorist to meet his fate at the hands of the IDF. His predecessor at the top of Hamas’s hierarchy, Ismail Haniyeh, was killed in Tehran when a bomb covertly smuggled into an Iranian diplomatic safehouse exploded in July. Mohammed Deif, the commander of Hamas’s military wing, was neutralized in a July airstrike after seven unsuccessful IDF attempts to deliver him to justice. Hamas deputy commander Marwan Issa met his fate in March, two months after his deputy, Saleh al-Arouri, was cut down in the suburbs of Beirut by an Israeli drone.

A little over a year after the war Hamas inaugurated against Israel on 10/7 in the deadliest one-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, the terrorist organization has been entirely decapitated. Its fighters are scattered, disorganized, and reduced to chaotic rearguard actions against the Israeli troops busily rolling them up. Critics of Israel’s campaign like to insist that Hamas is an idea and therefore cannot simply be dispatched like the thousands of its fighters the IDF has cut down. True enough, but an idea cannot shoot at you or launch rocket attacks on your cities. That requires well-connected, deeply embedded commanders with years of experience conducting asymmetrical insurgent attacks on a superior force. Those commanders are all dead.

The Israeli officials who have pursued Hamas’s barbarians until the end have done so without much encouragement from the West. Indeed, the death of every Hamas commander was fretted over in the West as though it created a new impediment to peace and to the negotiations over the hostages Hamas itself captured on 10/7 — 97 of whom still have not yet been located. Joe Biden’s administration withdrew almost all rhetorical support for Israeli operations in places like Rafah, where Sinwar himself was taken out. Benjamin Netanyahu’s government deserves the gratitude of the civilized world for rejecting these entreaties seeking Israel’s surrender in its righteous war.

Harris Has No Credibility on Immigration Rich Lowry

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/10/harris-has-no-credibility-on-immigration/

She can’t answer for the administration’s failures at the border because there simply is no good answer.

Kamala Harris isn’t great at answering questions but is perhaps at her very worst in addressing the border.

This isn’t because she can’t string sentences together (she can, although the results are always mixed) or she doesn’t know what she’s saying (she’s quite deliberate in sticking to her talking points). No, she can’t answer for the administration’s failures at the border because there simply is no good answer.

What is she going to say? Yes, we completely screwed this up and, I regret to say, did it on purpose. I’ve learned my lesson, though, and want to reverse field on this issue going forward.

An answer like that wouldn’t be sincere, but since when has that been an obstacle?

Since she and her team obviously believe that a confession is not in her interests, her only alternative is to deceive, obfuscate, and evade, and hope it’s enough to see her through to November 5.

She tries to sound like she’s always wanted to be a border hawk — if only she’d been able to get her way.

“The first bill we proposed to Congress was to fix our broken immigration system,” she said on 60 Minutes a week or so ago, “knowing that if you want to actually fix it, we need Congress to act. It was not taken up.”

Every single word of this, with the possible exception of the prepositions, is misleading. The proposal was a massive amnesty bill. It was intended “to fix” the system only if you believe the real problem is that illegal immigrants in the United States haven’t yet been legalized. The bill had no meaningful border provisions, not even more Border Patrol agents.

By complaining that the legislation wasn’t taken up, Harris clearly wanted to create the impression that GOP obstruction stymied the bill. Yet Democrats had unified control of Congress at the time and chose to ignore the proposal because everyone understood it was an absurd nonstarter.