Freakout Nation Alexander Zubatov

https://americanmind.org/salvo/freakout-nation/

America is in the midst of a nervous breakdown.

Between the psychological damage caused by government-imposed lockdowns, the stress of an economy flirting with recession, and our increasingly acrimonious domestic politics—amplified by the social media panopticon—there is ample cause to question the state of the American psyche. In the past, our political and cultural leaders would call for toughness and stoicism in the face of adversity. Today, however, our ruling class dismisses and condemns these virtues as “toxic masculinity,” extolling, instead, displays of victimization and vulnerability.

Modern America is becoming increasingly defined by a burgeoning victimhood culture. Even athletes, once models of perseverance and resolve, are now celebrated for bowing out and choking under pressure. The champion in this event is Naomi Osaka, whose every unraveling is lauded by reporters as a bold act bringing attention to the issue of mental health in sports. A healthy society would have scorned Osaka into re-conformity with the expectations associated with her ostensible status as a world-class athlete and, in doing so, would have benefited both her and society itself.

The importance of stable cultural expectations and norms and their correlation to individual mental well-being is attested by Philip Rieff in his 1966 classic of sociology, The Triumph of the Therapeutic. Rieff distinguishes between the kinds of social “commitment therapies” that had been the norm in all traditional cultures and the individualized “analytical therapy” that is dominant today. Rieff sees cultures, at least traditional cultures, as systems for helping the individual cope with nature and society. Such cultures commanded us to suppress certain behaviors that might otherwise have been natural and instinctive, and they did so for the sake of integrating us as fully as possible into a social world:

All such systems of therapeutic control, limiting as they do the area of spontaneity, are anti-instinctual; what we mean, ordinarily, by cultures, are just these systems. We call these systems “therapeutic” because these controls are intended to preserve a certain established level of adequacy in the social functioning of the individual, as well as forestall the danger of his psychological collapse.

Palestinians, Yet Again, Attack Jewish Pilgrims On Temple Mount Only a week after Jerusalem Day. It’s relentless. Hugh Fitzgerald

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/06/palestinians-yet-again-attack-jewish-pilgrims-hugh-fitzgerald/

Another Jewish holiday, another Arab attack on Jewish visitors to the Temple Mount. This time, it was the religious holiday of Shavuot, on June 5, exactly a week after Jerusalem Day, May 29, when Arabs last threw rocks and Molotov cocktails from inside Al-Aqsa at Jewish pilgrims. A report on the latest outbreak of Arab violence on Temple Mount is here: “Police clash with Palestinians on Temple Mount as Jews visit during Shavuot holiday,” Times of Israel, June 5, 2022

Police scuffled with Palestinians on Jerusalem’s flashpoint Temple Mount holy site on Sunday morning as Jews toured the compound during the Shavuot holiday.

Palestinians barricaded themselves inside the compound’s Al-Aqsa Mosque and threw stones at police in response to the visits. There were no reports of injuries or arrests in the incident.

The Palestinians constantly allege that Israeli Jews are “desecrating” the Al-Aqsa Mosque. But it is the Palestinians themselves who desecrate the mosque, by using it both as a place to store weapons – rocks, and bottles ready to be quickly transformed into Molotov cocktails – and as a military encampment from which they hurl those weapons at Jewish visitors and Israeli police.

Footage from the scene showed officers outside the mosque doors, while Palestinians barricaded inside threw stones out of windows and chanted “Allahu akbar,” or “God is great.”

Biden’s WHO Takeover Handing American sovereignty over to the UN is still on Biden’s “to do” list. Matthew Vadum

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/06/bidens-who-takeover-matthew-vadum/

The Biden administration’s bid to surrender American control over public health emergencies in the United States to the World Health Organization fell short at the UN’s 75th World Health Assembly in Geneva last month, but there is no reason to believe Biden won’t try again.

This drive is part of our illegitimate placeholder president’s effort to undo all the good things that former President Donald Trump accomplished. Trump slashed U.S. funding of WHO and served notice the country would pull out of the Communist Chinese-influenced agency, but Joe Biden aims to super-charge WHO’s authority in world affairs by amending an international pandemic treaty known as the International Health Regulations (IHR) 2005.

Of course, WHO is a bureaucratic monstrosity, a purveyor of leftist horror propaganda that, like its parent, the United Nations, should not exist.

WHO demanded the catastrophic lockdowns, getting creative and using them to push the pseudoscience of manmade global warming. “Countries must set ambitious national climate commitments if they are to sustain a healthy and green recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic,” WHO said in October 2021, claiming that “air pollution, primarily the result of burning fossil fuels, which also drives climate change, causes 13 deaths per minute worldwide.”

The Kavanaugh Assassination Plot is a Leftist Inside Job Conservative justices are in hiding because AG Garland won’t enforce the law. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/06/kavanaugh-assassination-plot-leftist-inside-job-daniel-greenfield/

After police arrested a California leftist on a mission to assassinate Justice Kavanaugh, the Biden administration finally condemned the campaign to intimidate the Supreme Court.

“As the president has consistently made clear, public officials, including judges, must be able to do their jobs without concern for their personal safety or that of their families,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre falsely claimed.

After leftist activists had posted a map of the homes of Supreme Court justices to harass them, Jen Psaki had retorted. “I don’t have an official U.S. government position on where people protest.”

There is in fact such a position and it’s illegal under 18 U.S.C. § 1507 which states that anyone with “the intent of interfering with, obstructing, or impeding the administration of justice, or with the intent of influencing any judge, juror, witness” “pickets or parades in or near a building….  or residence, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.”

Biden just decided not to enforce these laws in order to allow his leftist allies to intimidate the justices.

Not one of the leftists who have spent years harassing Supreme Court justices with protests outside the court and even their homes has been sent off to prison. Nor will they. Pounding on the doors of the Supreme Court, marching around the homes of justices, and trying to prevent them from coming to court have become basic parts of the activist playbook.

Even after the Kavanaugh assassination plot, leftists are continuing to protest outside his home.

Israel Never Targets Journalists Palestinians refused a joint investigation into the death of Shireen Abu Akleh. By Yair Lapid

https://www.wsj.com/articles/israel-never-targets-journalists-shireen-abu-akleh-al-jazeera-reporter-killed-palestine-11654800434?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

Less than two hours after the death on May 11 of journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, I contacted Hussein al-Sheikh, the Palestinian minister responsible for cooperation with Israel. We all agree that something awful happened, I told him. I proposed that we hold a joint investigation into her death.

The Palestinians refused. We may never know exactly what caused her death, but the important thing is that, like 511 other journalists who were killed in recent years around the world, she died while carrying out her duties. Being a journalist in wartime is a dangerous business. I know—I was a journalist for 31 years and covered the First Lebanon War.

What happened next can’t be excused by the fog of war. Palestinian propaganda used Abu Akleh, accusing Israel of deliberately targeting her. She would surely have known better.

If the outrageous claim that Israel targets journalists were true, why would she have worked in the region for more than 20 years? How can it be explained that still today hundreds of foreign journalists work in the same place? Al Jazeera, a network run by an Islamist state that is openly hostile to Israel, has permanent staff in Israel who are protected by the state the network slanders on a regular basis?

Protesters Descend on Amy Coney Barrett’s Home One Day after Kavanaugh Assassination Plot By Brittany Bernstein

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/protesters-descend-on-amy-coney-barretts-home-one-day-after-kavanaugh-assassination-plot/

Protesters gathered on Thursday evening outside Supreme Court justice Amy Coney Barrett’s home, where she lives with her husband and seven children, according to reports.

The protests, as reported by George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, come one day after a California man allegedly attempted to assassinate Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Early Wednesday morning, police detained 26-year-old Nicholas John Roske after he exited a taxi in front of Kavanaugh’s home in Maryland wearing black clothes, according to a criminal complaint. The man told authorities he called 911 because he was having suicidal thoughts. He told a dispatcher he had come “from California to kill a specific” Supreme Court justice, the affidavit said.

The Left’s Political-Violence Problem Andrew McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/06/the-lefts-political-violence-problem/

Progressives have a long history of applauding violence when it’s aimed at their ideological opponents.

You’ll be happy to know that the New York Times did get around to covering Wednesday’s attempted murder of a United States Supreme Court justice. All you need to do is pick up the paper.

Well, no, no, it’s not front-page material — except for a teeny, tiny blurb under the vacuous heading “Arrest Near Home of Justice,” right under such feature page-one stories as “Vanishing Word in the Abortion Debate: Women” and “Back to the Office” Does ‘Never’ Work for You?”

Can’t really blame them though, right? I mean, today’s huge story — the only story really — is “INSIDE AN ATTACK ON DEMOCRACY.” Remember Thursday is Insurrection™ Day! Or, I should say, Insurrection™ Night — as in this evening’s prime-time Dem-dominated January 6 committee TV extravaganza, produced, at the behest of Nancy Pelosi’s House, by a bigwig former ABC executive.

Maybe the assassination story got a mention on page 2? Nope, sorry about that, not page 2 . . .  or 3 . . . or 10 . . . or even 15. No, you’ll need to dig all the way down to page A-20 to find the Gray Lady’s grudging coverage of how “Man With Pistol, Crowbar And Zip Ties Is Arrested Near Kavanaugh’s Home.”

Do you think the Left might just have a political-violence problem?

Well, imagine what the coverage would be if, say, we switched out the word Kavanaugh and substituted Sotomayor. Think we’re still talking page A20? Of course not. It would be the only story — a story permitted to eclipse even Insurrection™.

The Democrats’ ‘Insurrection’ Against The Supreme Court

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/06/10/the-democrats-insurrection-against-the-supreme-court/

It’s bad enough that someone in America could become so unhinged by nonstop far-left media propaganda that he’d try to kill a Supreme Court justice. But far worse is the blasé reaction by the Democratic Party and its extreme-left pro-abortion allies to the attempted murder of Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Following his arrest in the early hours Wednesday, Nicholas John Roske told federal law enforcement officials that he intended to kill Kavanaugh. He was, he said, angry that the Supreme Court might soon overturn the Roe v. Wade abortion decision — which, by the way, would only mean that states, not the federal government, would determine abortion laws.

Roske meant business. He was toting a bag that, as the arrest record noted, contained a Glock 17 pistol, ammunition, a knife, zip ties, pepper spray, duct tape, and other items, which he hoped to use to kill Kavanaugh.

Just another deranged lunatic? A one-off by a lone nut? Hardly. It seems the Democrats’ increasingly violent rhetoric in recent years continues to bear its poison fruit.

A mere day before Roske was nabbed, pro-abortion activists firebombed a pro-life CompassCare pregnancy center outside Buffalo, in what the Washington Free Beacon described as “the latest in a series of attacks on pro-life offices and churches since the leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade.”

5 Questions That Must Answered Before The J6 Committee Begins Its Theatrical Production By: Tristan Justice

https://thefederalist.com/2022/06/09/5-questions-that-must-answered-before-the-j6-committee-begins-its-theatrical-production/

Don’t expect answers from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Jan. 6 Committee weaponized to operate as a political witch hunt.

he House Committee on Jan. 6 will launch its dramatic summer hearings tonight in a prime time show trial produced by a former ABC News executive as desperate Democrats aim to shift the narrative ahead of the midterms.

The nine members of the Select Committee appointed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will introduce the panel’s findings and question a pair of witnesses while presenting graphic footage of the riot to a nationwide audience. Every cable network, except Fox News, will broadcast the proceedings in an arrangement sought by the partisan probe to elevate the evening’s drama shining light on a three-hour riot that happened more than 18 months ago.

Absent from the panel asking questions, however, will be any Republicans appointed by GOP Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy after Pelosi took the self-proclaimed “unprecedented” step of barring Reps. Jim Banks, R-Ind., and Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, from the probe. Instead, Pelosi hand-picked the most vocal pair of NeverTrump House members to serve in their place, Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., and Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., who serves as vice chair and was disowned by her own party.

Joe Biden’s ‘Green Energy’ Dreams: Enriching Friends, Crushing the Working Class By Levi Russell

https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2022/06/08/joe_bidens_green_energy_dreams_enriching_friends_crushing_the_working_class_836339.html

President Biden has moved on from making excuses for the massive inflation caused by his failed energy policies and perilously weak foreign policy to claiming that it is the price we must all pay for a “transition” to a new world order. This new order will give us slower but, allegedly, more stable economic growth and a complete abolition of all non-”green” energy. This commentary likely appeals to the climate hysterics in his party, but falls on deaf ears for the rest of us. 

As Jude Clemente pointed out last month, Biden’s policies and their catastrophic effects have likely ruined many Americans’ taste for a policy-driven transition away from conventional energy sources. The latest Gallup poll tracking Americans’ top issues of concern puts the economy at #1 (39%). Poor leadership in the government was the top non-economic issue at 20%. According to the poll, only 2% of Americans listed climate change and the environment as their top issue of concern.

As much as EPA Administrator Jennifer Granholm, whose husband runs a consulting firm for “green” energy companies, claims that she wants to make electric cars more affordable for Americans, she must realize that such a claim is nonsense. The EPA cannot make anything cost less. It can take money from poorer people and give it to richer people in the form of subsidies for EVs. It can make normal cars much, much more costly. Climate hysterics in the government know this and simply won’t admit it.