News of the GOP’s Demise Was Greatly Exaggerated Just one more way the #NeverTrump conglomerate has shown itself to be #AlwaysWrong. By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2022/11/07/news-of-the-gops-demise-was-greatly-exaggerated/

Barring an 11th-hour catastrophe or widespread cheating, Republicans are expected to stomp Democrats across the board in Tuesday’s election.

Polls show Republicans with a big edge on issues that matter most: By double digits, voters trust Republicans to handle inflation, the economy in general, and crime. Democrats only hold a slight edge on education, a longtime Democratic advantage that’s been slipping away in the post-lockdown era.

GOP candidates are competitive in races previously considered safe for Democrats, including Senate seats in New Hampshire and Washington. Republicans are not just poised to take control of the House and the Senate but possibly a handful of governorships and state legislatures, which will have a huge impact on how the 2024 presidential election is handled.

Even more alarming news for Democrats is eroding support among reliable constituencies. Latinos, blacks, and suburban white women—voters who often represent the winning margin for Democratic candidates—are moving in the direction of the GOP this year while working class whites, once the crown jewel of the Democratic Party, continue their exodus from the party that now caters to the rich and overly credentialed.

Which raises an important question: What does Bill Kristol say now?

Kristol, a founding father of the modern-day neoconservative movement who sold his soul, reputation, and part of his sanity to left-wing billionaires in his insatiable lust to destroy Donald Trump, warned for years that Trump would destroy the Republican Party. Since 2016, the notoriously-wrong pundit has predicted any number of doomsday scenarios related to Trump, most notably the demise of the GOP.

During the 2016 GOP nominating convention, Kristol lamented that the Republican Party “had fallen into the grip of a vulgar demagogue with a thuggish retinue.” A year later, Kristol declared the GOP wasn’t salvageable, promising to start an independent party as an alternative to a Trump-hijacked Republican Party. Kristol and his NeverTrump cohorts transformed into full-blown Democrats by the 2018 midterm elections. Trump, Kristol claimed in 2018, was a “cancer metastasizing at a rapid rate” within the GOP.

 “I think the party brand is getting much more enmeshed in everything Donald Trump says and stands for; the whole future of the Republican Party is now an open question,” the former aide to Vice President Dan Quayle openly mused that year. (Shortly thereafter, the owner of the Weekly Standard, the influential magazine Kristol launched in 1995, shut down the publication.)

Kristol endorsed Joe Biden in 2020 and pushed for the full-scale annihilation of the Republican Party, including governors who were “killing Americans” by reopening their states’ businesses after the pandemic and “banning masks.”

The Lost American Generation By Eileen F. Toplansky

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/11/the_lost_american_generation.html

James Stevens Curl has recently written how he has “become increasingly concerned with creeping dumbing-down, not least in the field of education, where it became obvious to [him] many years ago that standards were dropping through the floor in the dishonest campaign by politicians and professional ‘educators’ to claim that they were getting better every year, with resulting ‘grade-inflation.'”  He “devised some very simple tests … regarding ambitions, interests, hobbies, the results of which were shocking, quite apart from that fact that the answers to [his] questioning revealed a void, a scary emptiness, untempered by any evidence of intellectual curiosity, cultural foundations, or much else besides.”

Moreover, Curl “selected a short paragraph from a published work, and asked candidates to read.”  “Many stumbled over some quite common words, but one could not read at all.  Only very few were able to get through the paragraph fluently, without making mistakes.  Simple tests in spelling, use of punctuation, and so on revealed abysmal ignorance.  It was obviously a massive lie, a confidence-trick, a disgraceful piece of jingoistic nonsense for politicians and pundits to claim for the nation a ‘world-class education,’ getting better every year.”

In fact, American education has been sliding into the abyss for 50-plus years.  The forerunner to affirmative action was open enrollment.  Begun in the late 1960s, the result was that ill prepared students were suddenly thrust into a college environment and expected to keep up with the still rigorous college expectations.  I tutored many of these students, and to this day, I still recall asking them to use a thesaurus.  They did not know what it was or how to use it.

Fast forward a half-century, and my now-college students still do not know what a thesaurus is.  But why should they?  Spelling rules, vocabulary expansion, grammar instruction, geographical knowledge have all been deliberately cast aside.  These young people may be the most credentialed students, but they are the least educated.  It has been a purposeful and highly successful left-wing maneuver to create an “educated” class of serfs who will eventually do the left’s bidding.

The following are examples of the work I receive from what I now call the “lost generation.”  Nothing has been edited.

Plastics-and-Such: The Labor of the Virtuous By David Solway

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2022/11/07/plastics-and-such-the-labor-of-the-virtuous-n1643700

EXCERPT:

Some time back, I had an interesting conversation with the friendly manager of our village garbage dump, who confided that the ordinances requiring the separation of the various kinds of refuse into separate bins and pits were nothing but bureaucratic nonsense coupled with public virtue-signalling. It made no ultimate difference to the disposal process, which I had long suspected to be the case. Though I knew that my efforts to relieve Janice of superfluous labor were likely non-starters, I had thought the words of an authority, a veritable scholar of waste management, on the question might have an effect. It was not to be. Tins, milk cartons, wine bottles and plastic containers of every conceivable stripe continued to be scrubbed to a high polish, and placed into the appropriate Tuff-Guy kitchen bags before ending their now immaculate existence in one of six different dumpsters. My argument was dismissed as typically male indifference to the niceties of household maintenance. Women always know better.

Writing in City Journal, John Tierney points out that even Greenpeace now claims that recycling is a dead end. Recycling plastic waste is environmentally harmful to reprocess, is contaminated by toxic materials, and is not economical, apart from being hopelessly impractical and labor-intensive. Sending such waste materials to landfill is both cheaper and provably less harmful to the environment, though it will inconvenience those who “perform garbage-sorting as a ritual of atonement, a sacrament of the green religion.” Tierney does not mention the scandal of polypropylene Covid masks, which not only do not prevent virion transmission and lead to hypoxia and fungoid diseases, but will eventually find their way to marine waters and can take centuries to degrade. They cannot be recycled.

Veterans Day and What’s at Stake in the Mid-Term Elections A prayer for a patriotic cultural renaissance within our Armed Services. by Scott S. Powell

https://www.frontpagemag.com/veterans-day-and-whats-at-stake-in-the-mid-term-elections/

When Washington politicians decided to change the dates of holidays to give federal government employees predictable three-day weekends through the 1968 Uniform Monday Holiday Act—which moved the dates of celebration of Presidents Day (formerly Washington’s Birthday), Memorial Day, Labor Day and Columbus Day—they met such opposition from Veterans about changing the date of their holiday, Veterans Day, that they gave up. Apparently, the politicians had forgotten that Veterans Day was first known as Armistice Day, and was celebrated on November 11th because that was the day agreed upon by the Allied nations and Germany to begin a total cessation of hostilities in World War I. In fact, the guns and artillery went silent on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918, after some 20 million people from both sides had given their lives in the war effort.

Veterans Day would not be diminished as another commercially oriented “floating” holiday but remain a sacred and fixed day tied to history and to celebrate valor and sacrifice embodied in veterans of foreign wars.

While Veterans remain one of the most patriotic groups in America, there is great concern—even alarm—that the politization of America’s armed forces that started in the Obama years, has now again accelerated, and metastasized into nothing short of betrayal of the military by the powers behind the Biden administration.

President Joe Biden is directly responsible for the worst, most humiliating and damaging defeat in the history of American warfare—the shocking and disgraceful U.S. departure from Afghanistan starting on August 15, 2021. The botched U.S. retreat resulted in the death of thirteen Marines, with more injured, and it left behind to enemy hands several hundred Americans and some $80 billion of military hardware (much of it state of the art) that included Black Hawk helicopters, thousands of Humvees and armored vehicles, and countless numbers of assault rifles—enough to arm dozens of terrorist groups all over the world, whose primary target is the U.S and its allies. Because these results were completely avoidable, many see Biden’s decisions that brought about this disaster calculated and deliberate—as if to help our enemies.

Now What? Will our new Congress show it is worthy to represent free men? by Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/now-what/

It looks like the Republicans come January will control both houses of Congress. The government will still be divided, so neither party will make any big legislative changes in the next two years. The president will no doubt use executive orders to get around Congress to push the Dems’ agenda, but such tinkering is hostage to the next president. So what should the Republicans do for the next two years?

We know what they shouldn’t do, and that’s indulge in happy talk about “bipartisanship” or “reaching across the aisle” or trying “to get things done.” The Democrats have swung so far to the left that there’s very little common ground, outside a national emergency, on which to base cooperation. The moderate Democrat is a near-extinct species, and the radical ideologues have cowed them into compliance. Most Dems who have some common sense and respect for the Constitution’s checks and balances against tyranny have been silenced.

So first, the Republicans must ignore charges of “obstructionism” and “partisanship.” The first principle of the Constitution is “first do no harm,” and one way to do that is for our Senators and Representatives to “set ambition against ambition,” and use their Constitutional powers to stymie the Dems’ tyrannical ambitions. These days that means, as Florida Senator Marco Rubio put it, that the Senate’s “most important job” in a divided government is “to stop bad things from happening,” like confirming the president’s nominees for the courts, his cabinet, and other federal officials.

So no more talk like “the president deserves to have his nominees ratified.” That, and the Republican preemptive cringe when it comes to race and sex, is how we get Supreme Court justices whose only recommendation is their race and/or sex. Like Orwell’s saints, all Biden’s picks should be presumed guilty until proven innocent.

In other words, the next two years should see a concerted effort to start holding accountable the bipartisan, big-government guild that too many Republicans have joined, accepting many progressive assumptions about, for example, the role of the federal government in creating, managing, and expanding federal agencies.

Your Children Belong To The State Armando Simón

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/11/08/your-children-belong-to-the-state/

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” — George Orwell

The incidents of schools indoctrinating children, along with school boards scorning the wishes and objections of their parents may seem puzzling, to say the least. Let me shed some light.

Unlike the hundreds of films that have been made on the Nazis, to my knowledge only two have been made on the genocidal Khmer Rouge of Cambodia, “First They Killed My Father” and “The Killing Fields.” There was a brief scene in the latter of which I think most people did not catch the significance. The Communists had taken over the country and had begun indoctrinating the children. The teacher had drawn on the blackboard stick figures representing a family holding hands. A child was asked to come up to the blackboard whereupon he erased the child figure’s hand holding the mother, thereby separating the child from the family. The teacher smiled with approval.

In all the versions of Marxist regimes, one goal was to separate the children from the parents and own them by the state. Children were encouraged to spy and report them to the authorities for any anti-Communist remarks parents made. And this, indeed, occurred often in the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, and Cuba (even Stalin was disgusted when this took place).

Recently, we saw an instance of a son snitching to the FBI on Christmas Eve over his father’s political views and participation in the January 6 protest. There have been other instances of children turning on their parents. The FBI has started to encourage friends and family to spy on each other and report any dissidents.

This phenomenon rarely occurred in the National Socialist regime, the reason being that its ideology was not anti-family, whereas Marxism is (so was Spartan society, another totalitarian state). Engels and Marx considered the family unit to be a miniature version of capitalism, wherein the man sees the wife and children as property to be exploited, a view echoed by modern feminists since many had a Marxist background. Engels, incidentally, was the first of what is now commonplace, an oxymoron capitalist, that is, a capitalist who promotes Communism.

The Democrats Told Us Who They Were When They Locked Us Down

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/11/08/the-democrats-told-us-who-they-were-when-they-locked-us-down/

The Democrats and their media accomplices keep telling us the Republicans are the fascists and autocrats hungry for power. But just the opposite is true. The Democrats themselves made it clear during the pandemic that they are the party of authoritarianism.

In the spring of 2020, this country went into a lockdown. As Jeffrey Tucker of the Brownstone Institute has noted, government officials canceled public worship services, segregated the large cities, abolished in-person education, foisted masks on all the kids, destroyed millions of businesses, and censored speech “so that we could barely discover facts.” They shut down concerts, imposed limits on house parties, scrapped weddings and funerals, locked the elderly into their homes and blocked visitation, ended dentistry, and imposed travel restrictions across state borders, says Tucker.

Some officials, however, saw that the rules were oppressive and restored liberty in their states. None of them are Democrats.

The authoritarian streak that runs throughout the Democratic Party came roaring out, no longer hidden just below the surface. Here was their chance to feed their hunger for more raw power. And they dined sumptuously.

The actions of both elected and unelected Democrats were not “hard calls,” as an Atlantic contributor recently labeled them in an appalling plea to grant amnesty to the offenders. They were the coercive orders of monstrous minds that perversely enjoy telling others what they cannot do and what they must do, who take great satisfaction in demanding and receiving obedience to their diktats.

France Sliding toward Barbarity and Chaos by Guy Millière

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19080/france-barbarity-chaos

Hundreds of thousands of immigrants enter Europe illegally each year. Many head for France and stay there. They have been benefiting, since 2000, from financial aid and free medical care to which even poor French citizens do not have access. If they are arrested, like Lola’s murderer, they are ordered to leave the country, but are not placed in a detention center so the order, never enforced, is not an order at all. In 2020, 107,500 orders to leave France were issued; fewer than 7% took place.

Approximately 48% of all crimes committed in Paris in 2021, he notes, were committed by illegal immigrants. Murders almost as gruesome as Lola’s — most of which are committed by illegal immigrants — are committed nearly every day. No one even mentions them. The victims often have their throats slit.

Maurice Berger, a psychiatrist, speaks of “gratuitous violence”: violence for no other reason than the pleasure of committing it. He reports that in France, gratuitous violence resulting in injury or death happens, on average, every two minutes. France reports more than two hundred rapes a day.

In L’archipel français (“The French Archipelago”)… sociologist Jérome Fourquet writes of a French “collective nervous breakdown” and the “crumbling” of French society. He notes that the religious and historical moorings of the French people are disappearing: churches are empty, important moments in the country’s history are no longer taught in schools… France’s Muslim population, on the other hand, maintains its culture, customs and traditions, assimilates into French society less and less, and appears more and more filled with contempt and hatred for France…

Speaking about a “great replacement” of the population in France is taboo. Anyone who does it is immediately demonized and described as a follower of conspiracy theories. But the numbers are clear… In addition to hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants already in France, approximately 400,000 more immigrants from Africa and the Arab world enter France each year. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of French people emigrate from France annually. In 2018, the most recent year for which figures are available, 270,000 French people left. Over the past 20 years, the number of French people living abroad has increased by 52%.

Whenever someone is arrested, injured or killed by the police in or near a no-go zone, riots break out. When an arrest turns violent, the police are asked to let criminals seeking refuge in a no-go zone escape. The government evidently fears that a larger conflagration might occur.

Inside classrooms, in high schools and primary schools, the French educational system is subject to Islamic intimidation…. Those who might have thought that the beheading of Samuel Paty would lead the authorities to make drastic decisions were proven wrong. Today, teachers throughout France report the relentless threats they receive. In the complaints they file, many say that Muslim students threaten “doing a Samuel Paty” to them.

Economically, France is in decline. French GDP has gone from fifth in the world in 1980 to tenth today…. France is among the European countries which impose the heaviest tax burden on its population (45.2% of GDP in 2022). France also has the highest level of public expenditure in the developed world (57.9% of GDP in 2022) — and an increasing share of public expenditure goes toward financial aid to immigrants, legal and illegal…. Taxes, however, are insufficient to pay for these public expenses….

“Worse than the rise of barbarity is the feeling that our leaders are in denial and unable to take the strong and effective decisions that would be necessary to ensure the protection of the population. Barbarity spreads when the authorities no longer know how to be the guarantors of law and order.” — Céline Pina, author, Le Figaro, October 19, 2022.

Iran’s Mullahs Throw Biden a Lifeline Supporting freedom would aid U.S. interests and take a toll on Russia. By Walter Russell Mead

https://www.wsj.com/articles/tehrans-mullahs-throw-biden-a-lifeline-iran-middle-east-russia-ukraine-drones-weapons-oil-sanctions-china-protests-women-11667849350?mod=opinion_featst_pos1

Joe Biden is a lucky man. The heroism of the Ukrainian people saved him from a Russian victory. Now the people of Iran, led by their women, are offering him a historic opportunity to weaken Russia, reduce long-term American vulnerabilities in the Middle East, and even return a sense of caution and sobriety to Chinese foreign policy.

Like many great opportunities, it comes unexpectedly. The Middle East has been a dreary place for Team Biden. The failure to enlist the Iranians in a renewed nuclear deal, the shambolic Afghan withdrawal, the embarrassing fist bump with a price-hiking Mohammed bin Salman, Benjamin Netanyahu’s electoral victory: Nothing in the Middle East has gone Joe Biden’s way.

This string of embarrassing failures has confirmed the administration’s determination to downgrade the Middle East as a strategic priority. But the Middle East refuses to stay quiet.

Blowing off Biden administration threats dating back to last summer, Iran is selling sophisticated drones to Russia for use in the war on Ukraine. Those drones have enabled Russia’s latest assault on Ukraine’s electrical infrastructure, threatening shutdowns of Ukrainian industry and leaving civilians without light or heat as winter nears. As Robin Wright observes in the New Yorker, Russia salvaged Iran’s position in Syria in 2015 by bolstering the criminal Bashar al-Assad regime. Now Iran is returning the favor by helping Russia in its flagrantly illegal attack on Ukraine.

Enter the women of Iran, whose resistance to clerical bigotry opens the door to a new era in Iranian and even world history.

We do not know whether the Iranian protesters can win. The track record of democratic revolutions across the Middle East is anything but inspiring, and the protesters in Iran have yet to coalesce behind a single group of leaders or political program. But using all the diplomatic and economic tools at America’s disposal to help the Iranian people’s fight for freedom is both the right thing to do and the best way to advance U.S. interests at a critical time.

Israel’s Right-Wing Coalition Gets the Cold Shoulder From Biden Many on the left warn that democracy is in peril, just because the government they back isn’t in power. By Eugene Kontorovich

https://www.wsj.com/articles/israels-right-wing-coalition-gets-the-silent-treatment-from-biden-netanyahu-ben-gvir-supreme-court-legal-reform-west-bank-arab-abbas-11667848331?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

The victory of Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition has many on the left bemoaning the end of democracy in Israel. Even before voting began, Sen. Robert Menendez (D., N.J.) threatened harm to bilateral relations should Israelis vote to the right. The State Department has said it would boycott some right-wing ministers, and President Biden waited almost a week before calling to congratulate Mr. Netanyahu. Yet Secretary of State Antony Blinken apparently had time Friday to phone Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who last stood for election (to a four-year term) in 2005.

What has degraded Israeli democracy, according to critics, is the electoral success of Itamar Ben-Gvir’s party. Mr. Ben-Gvir’s critics cite his past in the far-right Kahanist movement. For all the consternation, one would think he was the future prime minister, rather than the head of a second-tier party, with seven of 120 seats in the Knesset.

Yet those saying Mr. Ben-Gvir’s inclusion in the government is unacceptable were untroubled by the departing government, which included Ra’am, a party affiliated with Israel’s Islamic Movement, which was founded by a convicted terrorist; or the far-left Meretz, with roots in an actual Stalinist party; or by Prime Minister Yair Lapid’s apparent willingness to accept support from Hadash, a still-Communist party whose members of the Knesset recently justified terrorism against Israeli civilians.

Another theme in the dire forecasts for Israeli democracy are legal-system reforms that the new government may pursue. The measures would actually reinforce democracy and introduce checks and balances to a political system in which the Supreme Court has far more power than its American counterpart.

Like the U.S. Supreme Court, Israel’s strikes down laws as unconstitutional—even though Israel doesn’t have a written constitution. The court has, without statutory authority, taken upon itself the power to strike down any law or government action as “unreasonable”—that is, anything the justices don’t think is a good idea. The justices—they currently number 15—decide what laws to bestow “constitutional” status on. They also dominate the committee that appoints new justices as well as lower-court judges. Candidates don’t undergo confirmation hearings before the Knesset.