ANTI-SEMITISM, MEDIA Comments turned off

The New Yorker’s Fact Crisis Is Masha Gessen’s performative anti-Zionism an exception to the magazine’s commitment to factual accuracy and independent style, or a reflection of broader decay David Mikics

Posted By on August 7th, 2024

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/fact-crisis-at-the-new-yorker

It was a commonplace among right-minded people at the dawn of the 20th century that hatred and bigotry were the products of ignorance and would be eliminated through the sanitary means of education. Unfortunately, the horrors of the 20th century would prove this theory to have been radically false. Even the horrors of the Holocaust failed to immunize Western societies against the plague of antisemitism, which is clearly thriving in major Western culture centers to an extent that Victorian optimists and post-Holocaust pessimists alike would find incredible.

So how did so many intelligent people go wrong? In the case of plain old bigotry, they missed the fact that hatred and resentment are at least as foundational to the human psyche as love or the desire for social progress. It is also clear that antisemitism is distinguished from other tribal hatreds and bigotries by the fact that it is a conspiracy theory, and conspiratorialism in societies, institutions, and individuals has an inherent tendency to become more extreme and deranging over time rather than less so. That’s because, by substituting a cosmos of false causes for real ones, conspiracy-theorizing traps its victims in a mirror world in which they progressively lose hold of demonstrable relationships between causes and effects. The more deranged the sufferers become, the more dissonance they feel, and the angrier they get at those they hold responsible for their ills—and, in their minds, the world’s ills. Entire societies—the Spanish Empire, czarist Russia, 20th-century Germany—can descend into the pit of conspiratorial antisemitism and never be heard from again. Which is why normal people who don’t ordinarily give a hoot one way or another about Jews and Israel should greet the yearlong orgy of deranged Jews-are-Nazis pronouncements from the country’s leading universities and culture organs with alarm.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Cori Bush Loses Her Primary Chris Queen

Posted By on August 7th, 2024

https://pjmedia.com/chris-queen/2024/08/06/live-results-kansas-michigan-missouri-and-washington-primaries-n4931388
BIG BREAKING NEWS: Our friends at Decision Desk HQ have declared Wesley Bell the winner of the Democrat primary in Missouri’s 1st District, which means that Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) has lost!

The Squad is now a little less Squaddy. And that’s a good thing.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Middle East at the Boiling Point—Israel Already Told: Don’t The West chooses dishonor, and gets war. P.David Hornik

Posted By on August 7th, 2024

https://pdavidhornik.substack.com/subscribe?utm_source=email&utm_campaign=email-subscribe&r=8t06w&next=https%

Biden said to tell Netanyahu US won’t support Israeli response to an Iran attack (JNS.org)

“Let me be crystal clear…. If you launch a big attack on Iran, you’re on your own.”

So President Biden reportedly told Prime Minister Netanyahu on the night of April 14—when Iran launched over 300 missiles and drones at Israel, an attack that was almost totally rebuffed by Israel and a coalition the US had put together to help protect it.

The New York Times report goes on:

Mr. Netanyahu pushed back hard, citing the need to respond in kind to deter future attacks. “You do this,” Mr. Biden said forcefully, “and I’m out.” Ultimately, the aides noted, Mr. Netanyahu scaled back his response.

Less than four months later and—surprise, Iran, possibly in tandem with Hizballah and other proxies, is believed to be preparing an even bigger attack than that of April 14. After all, it paid no price for the April 14 attack. Israel indeed “scaled back its response” with a single strike on an Iranian air-defense system on April 19. Netanyahu, who “cit[ed] the need to respond in kind,” was right that a much greater response would have been needed “to deter future attacks.” But it’s too late for that now, and we are where we are.

Both Iran’s April 14 attack and its presumed upcoming attack were triggered by Israeli assassinations of terror leaders. Iran is trying to establish a new normal: Israel had better remove this weapon—assassinations of major terror leaders—from its arsenal, because otherwise it will find itself each time under a vastly larger, potentially devastating attack. Such assassinations, however, have been an important weapon for Israel for decades.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Joe Biden and the Dems’ Supreme Court “Reform” The war on our Constitution and Bill of Rights. by Bruce Thornton

Posted By on August 7th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/joe-biden-and-the-dems-supreme-court-reform/

Joe Biden may be a “political corpse,” but he has six months to get off a Parthian shot or two. He’s already taking aim at the Supreme Court––one of our most important branches of government for protecting citizens and their unalienable rights from the lust for power of the rest of the federal government and their encroaching tyrannical ambitions.

Biden launched this attack––endorsed by the Democrat Party and its probable presidential candidate Kamala Harris––in a column for the Washington Post, where he claimed, “What is happening now is not normal, and it undermines the public’s confidence in the court’s decisions, including those impacting personal freedoms. We now stand in a breach.” Having ginned up a “crisis” that can’t be let to go to waste, Biden is calling the assault a “reform” comprising 18-year term limits for justices; and government oversight, external to the Court itself, to investigate and punish dubious charges of “corruption.”

The Wall Street Journal stated the obvious: “This is an invitation for partisans to besiege the Court with complaints, however trivial.” For example, the judge on Trump’s trial for allegedly mishandling classified documents has received “more than 1,000 complaints in a week as part of what it called an ‘orchestrated campaign.’” Biden’s offensive against the court is not about some “crisis of ethics” and holding “corrupt” justices to account, but making it easier to discredit and recuse conservative justices and originalists who believe that the Constitution means what it says. These so-called “reforms” are political weaponss for illegal meddling in the Court’s decision-making in order to protect progressive policies and culture-war preferences.

This attempt of the executive branch to bend the highest court to its political will is not new, but rather reflects the progressives’ technocratic and tyrannical impulses blocked by the Constitution’s separated and balanced government powers and enumerated rights.

In 1937 Franklin Delano Roosevelt, his New Deal schemes blocked by a court with conservative leanings, tried to weaken the court with the Judicial Reform Act that allowed the president to appoint up to six new justices, one for every sitting justice over 70 years old. This attempt to neuter one-third of the government died in the Senate Judiciary Committee Report: “It is a measure which should be so emphatically rejected that its parallel will never again be presented to the free representatives of the free people of America,” the Committee concluded.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Walzing With Kamala With Tim Walz, Harris placates party anti-Semites – and doubles down on radicalism. by Lloyd Billingsley

Posted By on August 7th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/walzing-with-kamala/

Kamala Harris has selected Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her running mate, a choice that left many pundits puzzled. For the real deal on Walz, consider Powerline’s John Hinderaker, a Minnesotan quite familiar with Kamala’s VP choice:

“I think it was a process of elimination,” writes Hinderaker, “Mark Kelly seemed like a strong candidate, until it came out that he invested in a spy satellite company with the Chinese.” Harris wanted Josh Shapiro, “but at the eleventh hour, helped by an essay Shapiro wrote when he was in college, the anti-Semites blocked him.”  That left Tim Walz, “a small-minded, mean-spirited man,” who will fit well with the Harris ticket.

“He ran a basement campaign for re-election in 2022,” Hinderaker recalls, “refusing to show up for debates with Republican Scott Jensen after the first one went badly. So Jensen was left debating an empty chair.” Walz was also “largely responsible for the George Floyd riots that devastated Minneapolis and other cities, because he dithered for days rather than calling out the National Guard. By his own admission, he held off out of sympathy for the rioters’ cause. We are still living with the consequences.”

On Walz’s watch, Hinderaker notes, “Minnesota became a high-crime state for the first time ever.” Before Harris picked Walz, Powerline’s Scott Johnson, also a Minnesotan, wrote a Free Beacon piece headlined “Take My Governor – Please.”

After Biden’s debate with Trump, Walz was one of those contending that demented Joe was still “fit for office.” As Johnson explains, “Walz knew he was lying. Walz knew we knew he was lying. He casts the pale shadow of a man incapable of embarrassment and presents as an example of life imitating art, in this case the advertising art that created Joe Isuzu.”

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

By Picking Walz, Harris Confirms That The Radical Left Is Fully In Control Of The Democratic Party

Posted By on August 7th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/08/07/harris-first-decision-proves-the-radical-left-completely-controls-the-democratic-party/

There’s a reason nobody expected far-left Kamala Harris to pick a far-left governor from a deep blue state as her running mate. It’s never worked.

In the wake of Jimmy Carter’s crushing defeat in 1980 and repeated Democratic losses thereafter, the party decided that to win presidential elections they had to at least appear as moderates.

Bill Clinton won by labeling himself a “new Democrat” and picked Al Gore, then a fellow moderate Southerner. Gore in turn tapped Joe Lieberman as his running mate. Barack Obama tried to position himself to the right of John McCain and ran with Scranton Joe Biden. Hillary Clinton picked Virginia moderate Sen. Tim Kaine to balance the ideological scales. Biden ran as a sensible centrist with a talent for working both sides of the aisle (and picked Harris more as an insurance policy against impeachment than anything else).

Which is why pundits across the board expected Harris – in what amounts to the first important decision she has made as presidential candidate — to pick a more mainstream governor with cross-party appeal from a swing state like Arizona or Pennsylvania.

But the radicalized, hopeless woke Democratic party couldn’t bring itself to OK anyone like that. So instead, Harris decided to “balance” the ticket with another leftist.

As Axios reported today: “Many Republicans expressed surprise and relief at the choice of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate, readying renewed ‘radical’ liberal attacks.”

OPINION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Don’t let free speech be a victim of these riots The despicable behaviour of the few must not become a pretext for silencing the many. Fraser Myers

Posted By on August 6th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/08/05/dont-let-free-speech-be-a-victim-of-these-riots/

Here comes the crackdown. After days of rioting and disorder across England, Sir Keir Starmer has vowed to get tough – and not just on those criminal and far-right elements directly involved in the despicable violence that followed the horrendous murder of three young girls in Southport last Monday. The thuggish and racist behaviour of the few has rapidly become a pretext for constraining the liberties of the many.

The UK prime minister, in two Downing Street press conferences last week, unveiled a suite of proposals to try to quell the rioting. He vowed to impose criminal-behaviour orders on certain agitators. He threatened to roll out facial-recognition software and AI to help track people’s movements. Most striking of all, he damned the supposedly malign influence of ‘large social-media firms and those who run them’, and demanded that they get a firmer grip on the posting of misinformation. He also warned that there would be consequences for those who ‘whip up’ disorder by spreading rumours or speculation online.

The home secretary, Yvette Cooper, went further this morning on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. She declared social-media companies to be responsible for both the ‘shocking misinformation that has escalated’ the riots, as well as ‘the deliberate organisation of violence’ on these platforms.

It is entirely possible to loathe the actions of these rioters, while also being alarmed by the government’s response and its implications for free speech. Any crackdown on so-called misinformation, or even on the ‘whipping up of hatred’, is not going to be confined to those who are directly participating in or inciting violence. It will inevitably be wielded against dissenting views more broadly. This is always what happens.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Heather Mac Donald The One-Drop Rule, Transformed What the uproar over Trump’s race comments obscures

Posted By on August 6th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-one-drop-rule-transformed

Donald Trump’s recent comments about Kamala Harris’s shifting racial identity were an unforced error. It was a certainty that Trump would be unable to navigate the arcane and ever-evolving taboos around race without saying something that would provide fodder for several days of front-page “Trump is a racist” coverage in the New York Times and other media outlets.

This latest episode of racism-hunting is worth examining in some detail, however, since it reveals how topsy-turvy the current definition of “racism” has become.

Trump voluntarily walked into the lion’s den last Wednesday, facing off against a panel of interviewers at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Chicago. That is to his credit; let us see if Kamala Harris would be willing to take questions at, say, a gun-owners’ convention. After a string of adversarial questions, ABC News reporter Rachel Scott asked Trump whether he thought it was acceptable for some of his supporters to label Harris a “DEI hire,” and whether he would tell them to stop doing so. Trump responded: “How do you define DEI? Go ahead.” Scott translated the acronym: “Diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

This was not, of course, what Trump was getting at. He pushed on, but as usual, failed to clarify his intent: “OK, yeah, go ahead, is that what your definition is?” Scott stood her ground: “That is literally the words.” Scott and Trump went back and forth in the same vein for a few more rounds before Scott finally articulated what DEI means in practice: “Do you believe that vice president Kamala Harris is only on the ticket because she is a black woman?”

Trump then reframed the issue: “Well, I can say, no. I think it’s maybe a little bit different. So, uh, I’ve known her a long time, indirectly, not directly very much. And she was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn black and now, she wants to be known as black. So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she black? I respect either one but she obviously doesn’t because she was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden she made a turn and she became a Black person.”

These are the observations that have been labelled “overtly racist,” a manifestation of racial “animus,” disparagement of the vice president in “clearly racial terms,” a “lie,” and one of a “barrage of vicious attacks” on Harris. But were they any of these things?

ISRAEL Comments turned off

U.N. Says Nine Employees Likely Involved in October 7 Attacks, Won’t Release ‘Confidential’ Report Jimmy Quinn

Posted By on August 6th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/u-n-says-nine-employees-likely-involved-in-october-7-attacks-wont-release-confidential-report/

The U.N. said today that an internal investigation found that nine staffers of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East likely participated in the October 7 terrorist attacks — but that it will not release the details about what they did that day.

The organization revealed that it fired the nine staffers, some of whom it had initially terminated in January when the allegations first surfaced, and that one staffer fired that month had rejoined the scandal-plagued agency, which has used pro-terrorism textbooks in its schools.

While U.N. spokesman Farhan Haq, announcing the findings at a press briefing today, said the employees “may have been involved,” he confirmed that what the organization means is that it is likely or highly likely that the staffers joined the attacks.

After Israel initially told other governments and the U.N. that twelve UNRWA staffers had taken part in October 7, several of those countries, including the U.S., suspended their funding for the agency, and the U.N. kicked off two internal investigations.

Subsequent findings from Israeli intelligence reportedly hold that about 1,200 employees of the organization in Gaza are tied to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Headline Fail of the Week Brittany Bernstein

Posted By on August 6th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/the-moderate-genocidal-madmen-of-hamas/

In an opinion essay for Politico magazine, NYU history professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat finds similarities between former president Donald Trump and Italian dictator Benito Mussolini: “Mussolini, Trump and What Assassination Attempts Really Do.”

“Assassination attempts are an effort to change a political order in one fell swoop. But history shows that they often backfire, and more often serve not to eliminate a strongman, but to strengthen him and his cult of personality. Mussolini showed how that’s done,” she writes.

Ben-Ghiat explains that Mussolini was shot while walking through the streets of Rome after giving a speech to a conference of surgeons. The bullet grazed Mussolini’s nose; he posed for a photograph hours later with a big white bandage on his nose.

“The history of Mussolini’s consolidation of power and the attacks that punctuated that process carry lessons for our understanding of the mentality and methods of Donald Trump after the attempt on his life at a rally last month,” she adds.

After Trump was shot in the ear at the rally in Butler, Pa., he stood to his feet and raised a fist to the crowd and shouted, “Fight, fight, fight.”

“With that gesture, Trump tended to his personality cult, reassuring millions of his devoted followers that he had survived and was unbeaten — just as Mussolini did with his photo almost 100 years before,” Ben-Ghiat writes, adding, “The danger is what comes next.”

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