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1
Politics & Religion / Re: Anti-semitism & Jews
« on: December 03, 2023, 10:55:17 AM »
Below is a brilliant column by Daniel Greenfield regarding how American liberal Jews have forgotten how to fight leftist and Islamic Jew-hatred. It's a somewhat long read, but well-worth the time. His analysis of the situation is, as usual, superb.

American Jews Never Learned to Fight Leftist Jew-Hatred
And talking about ‘anti-Semitism’ is part of the problem.


December 1, 2023 by Daniel Greenfield

[Make sure to read Daniel Greenfield’s contributions in Jamie Glazov’s new book: Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America.]

After the Holocaust, the American Jewish community, like most liberals, reduced the mass murder of millions of Jews to a problem of intolerance and prejudice. A massive effort was undertaken to educate about what had happened rather than what was happening.

While the first Holocaust museums were being built, the persecution and killing of Jews had mostly shifted over to the Soviet Union and its allies in the Arab Muslim world. American Jews failed to grapple with this shift much as they failed to come to terms with the reality that black nationalist groups were quickly eclipsing the KKK when it came to the domestic hatred of Jews.

These are the key ingredients that led to the current open climate of Jew-hatred in America.

Instead of talking about what the hatred of Jews looked like today, American Jewish liberals insisted on dwelling on what it had looked like decades earlier in America and in Europe. Like the generals who are always refighting yesterday’s war, they were not dealing with the present.

They relied heavily on “antisemitism”: a term invented in the 19th century by a German socialist bigot, Wilhelm Marr, to emphasize the race of the Jews. But post-Holocaust hatred of Jews on the Left was more often cultural than racial. Karl Marx, the progenitor of Marxism, had been of Jewish descent from a Christian family, and had spread poisonous antisemitic venom. Lenin, who had one Jewish grandfather, oversaw the oppression of Jews while denying they were a distinct people. The Soviet expectation was that the Jews would disappear as a people, but, aside from Stalin’s final years, avoided any plans for the racial extermination of the Jews.

The Marxist and the Islamic position, unlike the Nazi racial position, did not require the physical extermination of the Jews at a genetic level, only a cultural genocide. Jews would be allowed to exist under Communism or Islam, as long as they abandoned their religion and national identity. The liberal focus on fighting racial antisemitism left it unprepared to fight such cultural hatred.

Even though the Soviet persecution of the Jews as a people had been underway for generations, American liberal Jews never developed a vocabulary for describing it. Or showed much particular interest in it until a new generation of young activists in the USSR and America finally made it a burning issue that rose to national and international attention in the 1970s.

The Communist persecution of Jews was manifested in many of the same ways as the contemporary leftist hatred of Jews. The party and the regime claimed to oppose ‘antisemitism’, even passed laws banning it, while suppressing Judaism and Zionism as ‘reactionary’ and ‘nationalistic’. The Soviet Union could point to examples of high-ranking Jewish figures who had rejected Zionism and Judaism, and represented the Communist ideal for the Jews.

As Lenin put it, “whoever, directly or indirectly, puts forward the slogan of Jewish national culture is (whatever his good intentions may be) an enemy of the proletariat… he is an accomplice of the rabbis and the bourgeoisie… on the other hand, those Jewish Marxists who mingle with the Russian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian and other workers in international Marxist organizations, and make their contribution… towards creating the international culture of the working-class movement… uphold the best traditions of Jewry by fighting the slogan of ‘national culture.’”

Jews had to be culturally, but not racially eradicated. Those Jews who joined with non-Jewish Marxists in the rejection of Judaism and Zionism were praiseworthy Marxists. Those who did not were an “enemy of the proletariat” to be executed like a number of my great-uncles.

Like most Soviet implementations of Communist ideology, this was a ‘Potemkin village’ of lies. Jews, regardless of their religious observance or interest in Israel, had been explicitly targeted for persecution and mass murder, were specially designated as being Jews in government documents, and the government’s formal anti-Zionism and anti-Judaism was just the same old ‘antisemitism’, complete with hook-nosed cartoons, dressed up in progressive clothing.

Much the same is true of contemporary leftist Jew-hatred which is based on Marx’s stereotypes of Jews as capitalists, but draws heavily on the Soviet playbook of substituting anti-Zionism for antisemitism, and trotting out model Jewish socialists to defend the persecution of Jews.

The liberal Jewish failure to meaningfully confront the Soviet hatred of Jews left them unprepared for the leftist movements that mainstreamed the same hatred in America.

There were plenty of warnings. Decade after decade, academics pushing these positions on college campuses, journalists embedding them in magazines, and fringe politicians making these arguments grew in power and influence while the liberal establishment talked of ‘antisemitism’ purely in terms of far-right racial supremacism or small town prejudices.

The rise of black nationalist antisemitism in the seventies, which was often explicitly racialist in nature, produced flailing responses. The American Jewish liberal establishment held up faded pictures of Heschel marching with MLK, failing to grasp that this made black nationalists despise MLK rather than like Jews, and prattled about the Jewish contribution to civil rights. The liberal establishment was so committed to a model of top-down persecution that it was unable to defend Jews against antisemitism that appeared to be coming from a minority on the bottom.

When various forms of critical race theory made the formula official that black people and minorities could not be racist toward anyone with more privilege than them, a position that legitimized a general hatred of white people, Asians and Jews, there was little response. The formal understanding that Jews could now be freely hated was ignored by liberal Jews.

Some outnumbered figures launched a struggle for the soul of liberalism, but they had little and fleeting support from an establishment that was still influential enough to make a difference. The liberal Jewish establishment was more interested in being in the vanguard of civil rights than in protecting Jews from the emergence of an ideology that deprived them of their civil rights.

Only after the Hamas mass murder of over 1,000 Jews and the statements of support for it at major universities, did some donors and community leaders wake up enough to push back. It took the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust and the widespread acceptance of it by their friends for them to realize how bad the situation had gotten, but not to realize why.

And that is the crucial issue.

The pro-Hamas Left insists that it is not ‘antisemitic’ and most of it probably believes that’s true because while traditional bigotry and hatred created the Islamic obsession with killing Jews and the conviction in the old Marxist Left that the Jews were not a legitimate people, the final product is cloaked in talk about liberation, decolonization and an end to privilege and oppression.

It may support the mass murder of Jews, but it doesn’t culturally ‘feel’ like ‘antisemitism’.

The Leftist hatred of Jews doesn’t fit the liberal model in which there is a continuity of oppression. A downtrodden minority faces prejudice, which escalates into political repression  and then violence. First there are the jokes, then laws and then bullets. Leftists cheering for Hamas would argue that since they don’t tell ‘antisemitic’ jokes, they can’t be considered antisemitic even while they’re calling for the mass murder of Jews.

This is why the traditional model of talking about antisemitism has failed so badly.

The liberal insistence on teaching tolerance by addressing the roots of bigotry rather than its outcome has been a disastrous failure because where far-right bigotry is a continuity, left-wing bigotry is a discontinuity of ideological abstractions leading indirectly to mass murder. The ideological detachment from reality can be measured in the fact that inmates in Nazi camps did not shout, “Heil Hitler” before dying, but those in Soviet gulags were known to shout, “long live Stalin” before being executed. The Nazis knew what they were doing, Communists often did not. They existed and still exist in an ideological haze of slogans rather than people.

‘Antisemitism’ is an ideological abstraction that leftists reject because it appears to refer to a certain type of person and behavior that their ideological purity tells them that they couldn’t be. They’re not the sorts of people who talk about ‘jewing down’ or believe in the inferiority of races and therefore, even while they’re smashing Jewish store windows and attacking a Holocaust museum, they can’t be ‘antisemites’. They know ‘antisemites’ are ‘right wing’ and when they’re assaulting Jews in the street, they, like the Soviet Communists, are fighting against ‘Zionism’.

The emphasis on antisemitism, on the roots of bigotry rather than their outcomes, makes such moral evasiveness easy for leftists. Focus on the mass murder of Jews, the broken glass and a mob outside the doors of a Holocaust museum, and then you’re talking about hateful outcomes.

Those are much harder to evade than abstractions.

The analysis of ‘antisemitism’ rather than the concrete reality of Jew-hatred has played into the hands of a leftist culture of hate that uses analysis to disguise the reality of its actions.

Confronting the realities of the assaults on Jews will require taking stock of a cultural war, rather than a racial one, and deal with outcomes instead of motives. Talking about ‘antisemitism’ becomes misleading when confronting a form of antisemitism that hides its ethnic hatred behind cultural and political hostility. And that will require discussing cultural, religious and political differences, topics which liberal Jews are uncomfortable with.

The modern liberal consensus, like that of the Soviet Union, is racially diverse but ideologically unified. The illusion of multiculturalism in the Soviet Union or a college town in America is limited to only those cultural differences that don’t clash with the dominant leftist belief system. This is a comfortable echo chamber for those who agree and a repressive cage for those who do not.

Liberal Jews bought into this system in a big way because they were terrified of feeling different. They shed their religious traditions for non-threatening culturally Jewish versions of liberal Protestantism and stayed silent about the mass murder of Jews during the Holocaust. The rebirth of Israel challenged their theology and their politics, but mostly their anonymity.

While American Jewish anti-zionists lashed out at Israel in resentment for creating tension between their politics and their identity, Israel was just the canary in the coal mine. Black nationalists weren’t attacking Jewish teachers because of Israel. And Marxists weren’t targeting Jews because of the Jewish State. To a liberal establishment that was turning leftist, the existence of a traditional Jewish community was unsustainable in either Israel or America.

Oct 7, like the protests for Soviet Jewry and the defenses of Israel, forced American Jews to break with their political community in support of their religious and ethnic community. It’s a painful and alienating experience, but like any escape from a toxic relationship, also liberating.

Among the unexamined truisms that need to be rethought is ‘antisemitism’.

Antisemitism refers to race and when it comes to the hatred of Jews, culture trumps race. Aside from the Nazis and a few ‘Jewish Question’ obsessed racialists, hardly anyone who hates Jews would propose using genetic screening to track down people of Jewish descent who don’t even know that they are Jewish to exterminate them. Most cultural ‘antisemitism’ has a racial component, but it’s triggered by the idea of the Jews as a community and a people.

The term ‘antisemitism’ conflates someone who doesn’t like Jews, but would never engage in violence or support violence, with those who engage in and support violence against Jews. Furthermore some of those who support the mass murder of Jews don’t believe that they’re prejudiced against Jews, but believe that killing Jewish children is the right thing to do.

Talking about ‘antisemitism’ or even ‘hatred’ is wholly inadequate in such situations.

The idea of a continuity of bigotry often breaks down in the madness of contemporary political discourse. The same term used to describe someone who resents Jews moving into his town should not be used to also describe someone massacring Jews. Calling it all ‘antisemitism’ minimizes it and puts the local jerk on the same level as Hitler or Hamas. And that’s a mistake.

The liberal Jewish establishment has spent too much time fighting ‘prejudice’ and not enough time dealing with ‘eliminationist’ sentiments. The existential threat is not prejudice: it’s genocide.

Fighting the leftist and Islamic hatred of Jews will require developing a new terminology and a new approach than the same old tired ‘fight against antisemitism’ establishment rhetoric. Liberal Jews will have to confront their own fears and rethink their assumptions to take on the threat.

During the Hitler-Stalin Pact, Jews had to confront Communists and their sympathizers who were now suddenly insistent on a friendship with the Nazis. That genocidal alliance crystalized a rejection of Communism by American Jews as “Jewish workers assaulted Communists who tried to defend their alliance with the Nazis, calling them, ‘Communazis.’”

The pact between Islam and the Left manifested once again in the response to the Oct 7 atrocities should be met the same way. The Left should be rejected the same way the Communists were. The ‘Communazis’ have been replaced by ‘Commuhamasniks’, but that is the only thing that has changed. American Jews must relearn how to fight this enemy.

After three generations of failing to confront the leftist hatred of Jews, it’s time to fight.



2
Politics & Religion / Re: Western Civilization
« on: November 10, 2023, 06:20:15 PM »
Also look at the Arabic term Takfir -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takfir

3
Politics & Religion / Re: Western Civilization
« on: November 10, 2023, 12:53:00 PM »
ccp:

Islam is a death cult. It is more than just a religion, it is a totalitarian, barbaric socio-economic system which places zero worth on human life.

Ultimately, every Muslim is called to murder, enslave or subjugate unbelievers, and this has been the case since the inception of Islam about 1400 years ago. The Jews are just proverbial canary in the coal mine. Christians are targets as well, and any member of an alternate sect of Islam (Sunni, Shia, etc.) Mohammed was crystal clear on this in the Qur'an and the hadith. Not one word can be changed because universally, Muslim clerics consider the Qur'an the word of Allah. See Robert Spencer's excellent piece on this below. I'm not sure what relevance the percentage of Muslims killed by other Muslims has. EVERY unbeliever must die under the dictates of Islam.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/trump-the-fight-between-israel-and-hamas-is-between-civilization-and-savagery/





4
Politics & Religion / Re: Western Civilization
« on: November 09, 2023, 06:43:07 PM »
There is No Moderate Jihad
And that’s why co-existence is impossible.
November 8, 2023 by Daniel Greenfield



[Make sure to read Daniel Greenfield’s contributions in Jamie Glazov’s new book: Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America.]

Civilized nations have spent generations trying to convince themselves that the primary religious and national impulses of the Muslim world come down to more than conquest and mass murder.

The horrors of the past few years in Afghanistan and Israel both came down to the mistaken belief that you could negotiate and reach an agreement with Jihadist movements.

Both D.C. and Jerusalem had become enchanted with diplomatic initiatives to the Muslim world, from the Abraham Accords to two years of relative peace with Hamas, politicians, generals and diplomats were convinced that they had finally unlocked the secret of coexistence.

But there’s no perpetual motion machine, no diet that lets you eat what you want and no coexistence with an ideology that is built on conquering and destroying all outsiders.

Individually, contextually and circumstantially coexistence is possible. But not in the long run.

How long that long run is depends not on building relationships, but showing strength. Civilized people treat coexistence as a means of developing bonds but the other side uses periods of coexistence to test for weaknesses. Coexistence on their side is a wholly insincere facade, no matter how authentic it may appear, that gathers information to be used when the attack comes.

Israeli Kibbutz residents thought that they were building relationships with day laborers from Gaza. They chatted about life, their kids and their various hardships. Then those same laborers returned to kill, rape and abduct them. But that is how that was always going to end.

That is how it will end for us with the millions of immigrants that we have taken into our nations.

It is a fundamental error to view Hamas as an “extremist” group. It is an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood whose political parties rule a number of Muslim countries. Its political organizations also dominate Muslim communities in America and Europe. Most of Al Qaeda’s leaders were also members of the Muslim Brotherhood. The myth of a split between political Islam and militant Islam, between moderate and extreme Islamic movements was always just that.

As Erdogan, the brutal Islamist tyrant who became the poster boy for moderate Islam said, “Islam cannot be either ‘moderate’ or ‘not moderate.’ Islam can only be one thing.” He has since, despite previous claims of turning more moderate and rebuilding relationships, renewed his support for Hamas, and threatened western nations with a Jihad against the “crusaders”.

The trouble with all the dreams of coexistence is that Islam is Jihad and Jihad is Islam. The most fundamental external expression of Islam is a drive to conquer the entire world, not in some uncertain ‘end of days’ future, but here, now and in the present. The difference between the so-called moderates and extremists comes down to quibbling over when and how that conquest is to begin, where it is to be implemented and who is to take charge of it.

But the actual conquest is an ongoing project. Every Islamic war, whether against Muslims or non-Muslims, is waged as part of an agenda of global conquest. Muslim civil wars are waged between different factions under the banner of Islamic leadership. And the purpose of Islamic leadership is to impose Islamic law in its lands and then invade other lands to impose the same brutal theocratic repression there.

The Jihad is the defining force of Islamic political and religious life. Much as with Communism, coexistence with it is impossible. It was impossible to coexist with members of a movement that believed in conquering and subjugating everyone under the red flag and the little red book. Individually you could chat with a Communist or help them with their groceries, but the ideology doomed any long term relationship with someone who wanted you dead or as a slave.

This was a difficult lesson that we never learned during the Cold War. Is it any wonder that we’re incapable of grasping this concept now when our civilization’s future is once again on the line?

The Cold War was fought on the optimistic premise that everyone wanted the same things we did, and that once we taught them to want them, they would adopt our means of getting them. Convince Communists that color TVs were fun and they become democratic capitalists. What sounded like a good argument to us has failed in every country that it’s been tried, except those that, like Japan and Germany, were originally democratic and capitalist. Instead we convinced China that it should make and sell us the TVs and use the money to build up its military, and convinced the Muslim world to move here, kill us and take the TVs.

We are not the world and the world is not us. Not all religions, cultures and countries are alike. Most have things that they believe in every bit as strongly as our fanciful belief that all people are basically good and that if we could just get them in a room, we would agree on most things. That’s what we did with multiculturalism and it’s why we now have violent riots every few years because we don’t agree on basic things like what we want out of life or how we treat each other.

That’s why we should not delude ourselves into thinking that the Jihad is a fringe, the misbehavior of a tiny minority, and that even that tiny minority doesn’t really buy into it. Every religion and movement has its hypocrites, but the belief that the world must be purified by Islam is as sincerely held by the majority of its believers as by those who fought for Communism. That is the religious impulse, more than any other, at the heart of Islam and its promise to Muslims.

Each religion has elements that make it exceptional. What makes Islam exceptional is not the collection of beliefs, scriptures and rituals often cribbed from Judaism and Christianity, but what it offers that these religions do not, an imminent redemption of the world achieved not in the distant future, but in the present day through the violent actions of its followers. That, and not borrowed scripture and ritual, is what allowed Islam to defeat Jews and Christians.

Western nations view this as ancient history while Muslims see it as an enduring struggle. That is why they talk, as Erdogan does, about “crusaders” and taunt the Jews with the massacre of Khaybar by Mohammed’s bandits. Convinced that history can never repeat itself, we dismiss the idea that it’s relevant or that the people we are dealing with are serious about bringing it back.

Civilized people are shocked by the horrors that ISIS, Boko Haram or Hamas perpetrate because they refuse to learn history or to see how it might be relevant to current events. It’s fashionable to draw a line, whether it’s 5 minutes ago or in 1967, and begin the clock from there. Why is this happening, they wonder, as if this had not been the longstanding practice of Islamic armies to behead fallen enemies, mutilate bodies or to rape women for over a thousand years. They assume without a shred of evidence that such practices must have been abolished.

What we are experiencing is not a reaction to anything we did. It has nothing to do with our views on a ‘Palestinian’ state, whether we draw Mohammed or welcome refugees. The Jihad is the founding religious impulse of Islam with over a thousand years of history behind it. The Jihad not only predates the United States of America and the rebirth of Israel, but dates back to a name when pagan kings ruled the various parts of England. It predates colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, globalism, the dollar, WWI and the Carter administration.

The Jihad made Islam possible. It is also what gives it meaning. It is the precarious reality that colors all relationships with the Muslim world. We have learned to ignore it at our own risk. And every time we unsee it, people die. They die by the dozens, the hundreds and the thousands. And the killing and the dying happen because we mistake what is at best a Cold War for a rich relationship. We think that we are building bridges when we’re really welcoming invaders.

To survive, we need to see all the things that we’ve been unseeing. We have to recognize that these horrors are not aberrations, they are the norm. It’s the pleasantries and periods of coexistence that are the aberration. It’s not a problem we can negotiate away. It’s not solvable by spreading democracy or building up trade relationships. The only reason we weren’t living with these horrors on an everyday basis is that the Western world became too powerful to have our coastlines and ships raided for slaves as used to be common practice in the past.

What the Muslim world and it leftist allies call “imperialism” and “colonialism” meant that kidnapped European women stopped showing up in the harems of the Ottoman Caliphate and European children as slaves in his armies. It also meant that the Jews were able to rebuild their country and, briefly, Christians in the region were also able to freely lift their heads again. We forgot that we had become strong to stop ourselves from falling victim to the endless Jihad. And our sons and daughters came to sympathize with former enemies who would rape and kill them.

Now we have made ourselves weak and the horrors are returning. We struggle to coexist with those who want to kill us. And then we wonder why they keep killing us. There’s our answer.

Coexistence is death, resistance is life. Until we learn to stop coexisting with our killers, they will go on killing us. All else is an illusion. A fantasy that we keep feeding ourselves. There is no moderate Islam because there is no moderate Jihad. And there is no moderate Jihad because there is no moderate way to conquer and enslave non-Muslims. Islam is a state of perpetual war. To know Islam is to never know peace. We coexist with Islam and so we are at war.



5
Why There is Never Peace Between Israel and the Palestinians
Hint: it's not about negotiations over territory.
October 12, 2023 by Robert Spencer


[Make sure to read Robert Spencer’s contributions in Jamie Glazov’s new book: Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America.]

In its analysis of the war that has begun between Hamas and Israel, CNN noted on Saturday that the Biden regime was just in the process of pressuring Israel to make a series of concessions to the Palestinians in order to further the cause of normalization of ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia. In this, both the sinister establishment media propagandists of CNN and the sinister kleptocrats of the Biden regime betrayed their fundamental failure, or refusal, to understand why there is this apparently endless conflict between Israel and the Palestinians in the first place.

CNN reported that “as recently as this week, Biden had hoped to be nearing the completion of a major agreement with Israel and Saudi Arabia to establish formal diplomatic ties, potentially transforming the entire Middle East. The expectation had been that the deal would include agreement from Netanyahu on certain concessions to the Palestinians, including potentially freezing settlements and agreeing to an eventual Palestinian state.”

The universal assumption is that freezing settlements and agreeing to a Palestinian state (which the Palestinians have previously rejected on numerous occasions) will bring peace. Yet this is not true, and the Palestinians themselves have made that clear on numerous occasions over the years. Back on Oct. 5, 2018, on “Not a Neighbor,” a program on official Palestinian Authority television, Sharia judge Muhannad Abu Rumi denounced the idea that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was about territory and could thus be subject to negotiations:

People could be deluded or think…that we have no way out with the Jews…The liberation of this land is a matter of faith, which will happen despite everyone. The Jews leaving this land is a divine decree…The war is not only over this strip of land, as you all know the Jews want everything and not just a part. They want to subjugate us, and that we be slaves to their command…

Just a week after that, during a Friday sermon at the Islamic Center of South Florida, Imam Hasan Sabri offered a succinct encapsulation of the principle of “Drive them out from where they drove you out” (Qur’an 2:191): “If a land is occupied or plundered, it should be liberated from its occupiers and plunderers, even if this leads to the martyrdom of tens of millions of Muslims.”

Sabri ridiculed the very idea of negotiations: “Take the Palestinian cause, for example. It is not being plotted against with a deal they call ‘the Deal of the Century.’ Why do they call it a ‘deal’? Because whoever is involved in this treason is not a man of principles. These are peddlers, not men with a cause. All they want are positions and jobs. That is why for them, the cause is nothing but a deal, a matter of give and take. For them, it is nothing but a deal.”

To this, Sabri contrasted the “position of a believing Muslim about the Palestinian cause,” which he characterized in this way: “That Palestine in its entirety is Islamic land, and there is no difference between what was occupied in 1948 and 1967. There is no difference between this village or that village, this city or that city. All of it is Islamic waqf land that was occupied by force. The responsibility for it lies with the entire Islamic nation, and the [Palestinians] should benefit from this land. If a land is occupied or plundered, it should be liberated from the occupiers and plunderers, even if this leads to the martyrdom of tens of millions of Muslims. This is the ruling, and there is no room for discussion or concessions.”

There is no room for discussion or concessions because of the nature of the foe as they communicate it to their people. An Egyptian Muslim cleric, Sheikh Masoud Anwar, on Al-Rahma TV on Jan. 9, 2009, also stated that negotiations with the Israelis were worthless because Jews could not be trusted. He declared: “The worst enemies of the Muslims — after Satan — are the Jews. Who said this? Allah did.” Indeed he did: it’s in the Qur’an (5:82).

Numerous Muslim clerics have for many years contradicted the general assumption that the Israeli/Palestinian conflict was over land and could be settled through negotiations. As Barack Obama pressed Israel to resume peace talks with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, in the summer of 2013, Sheikh Hammam Saeed, the leader of the Jordanian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, thundered that eradicating all Jewish presence from the Holy Land was a matter of Islamic law. He termed the idea of a negotiated settlement “heresy, according to Islamic law, because Allah says that Palestine belongs to the Islamic nation, while they say that Palestine belongs to the Jews. Anyone who says that Palestine belongs to the Jews has no place in the religion of Allah, and no room in this creed. This is an issue of heresy and belief.”

Examples of this kind of rhetoric could be multiplied endlessly. Yet in the next few days, Biden and his cohorts will demand that Israel stop defending itself and return to the negotiating table. You know, some men you just can’t reach.


6
Politics & Religion / Re: Israel, and its neighbors
« on: October 11, 2023, 11:48:34 PM »
What Hamas Was Really Out To Do
This was not a terrorist attack; it was an annexation.
October 12, 2023 by Daniel Greenfield



[Make sure to read Daniel Greenfield’s contributions in Jamie Glazov’s new book: Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America.]

After the Hamas atrocities, experts scurried to explain why it had embraced “ISIS tactics”. Many saw the attacks purely as a way of sabotaging Israel’s talks with Saudi Arabia. Others argued that Hamas had tried for a small attack that escalated when Israel failed to promptly respond. Some express bafflement at what Hamas could have hoped to gain from such an attack.

The experts as usual are wrong because they don’t understand Hamas. And their ignorance stems from their inability to grasp Islamic terrorism because they don’t understand Islam.

Hamas, like the PLO and other Islamic terrorist groups, had spent much of its existence promising to do exactly what it tried to do, invade Israel, and seize and occupy its territory, taking Jewish villages and towns by stages over the years until one day besieging Jerusalem.

The Palestinian Authority, funded by American taxpayers, still airs Arafat’s old speeches in which he calls for “millions of martyrs marching to Jerusalem”. Americans and Israelis refused to take such rhetoric seriously. The cost was over 1,200 lives when Hamas tried to carry it out.

In operational terms, Hamas transitioned from a terrorist organization to a guerrilla force like ISIS or Hezbollah. Israel had been conditioned to expect small hit and run raids. It was not expecting an actual invasion. A hit and run raid with this many Jihadists makes no sense.

This wasn’t a hit and run raid.

Israeli military leaders are now saying that Hamas had not come just to attack, but to occupy and take over the Jewish communities that it invaded. It brought heavy firepower and some of its best trained Jihadists to not just attack, but to hold, fortify and annex those areas.

What the world witnessed was mostly the first stage of a three stage plan. In the second stage, Hamas Jihadists would have secured the captured communities while in the third stage, Hamas civilians, especially women and children, would have been brought in to occupy them. The Israeli military would have had to choose between firing on enemy civilians crossing the border or trying to fight Hamas once it was operating from behind its own human shields.

The captured villages would have been functionally annexed. Even if Israel had recaptured them, it would then have to expel the Muslim civilians now living inside them. Human rights groups and international pressure might have prevented Israel from taking such a step.

Fortunately Hamas never reached the third stage of its plan. Israel managed to destroy the invaders before they were able to fortify themselves and complete the second stage.

But there is every reason to think that Hamas or other Islamic jihadists will try it again.

The Hamas attacks were predictable when viewed in the context of Israel’s history and of the tactics of Islamic groups like ISIS, the Taliban, Boko Haram in Nigeria, Al Qaeda and ISIS affiliates in Mali, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Houthis in Yemen, to name just a few.

Terrorism is only the first stage of Islamic warfare. Once they have the numbers and the firepower, Islamists transition to guerrilla warfare, seizing and holding territory that they then expand outward from, killing and driving away non-Muslims and unaffiliated Muslims.

The Hamas attacks followed that same strategy. Even the vicious cruelty, the rapes, the beheadings, the torture and the dead children, are part of the standard Islamic playbook. Beyond gratifying their followers and gaining new recruits, atrocities are used to drive away the non-Muslim populations so that Muslim populations can be brought in to replace them. .

Terror was used to depopulate Kashmir of Hindus. The Islamic crimes included raping and sawing a Hindu teacher in half while she was still alive. ISIS employed similar tactics as do the Islamic Jihadis operating in Africa. Rape and the murder of children are used to panic non-Muslims into fleeing and leaving the area to be colonized and occupied by Muslims.

Muslims had used these same tactics against Jews before the State of Israel was reborn. During the Hebron Massacre in 1929, Muslims tortured, killed and mutilated women and children to destroy the Jewish community in the historic city. During Israel’s War of Independence, Muslim forces, similar to those deployed by Hamas, tried to overrun Jewish communities and butcher their inhabitants. The difference is that the typical ‘kibbutz’ back then was heavily fortified and its residents were able to hold out even against superior numbers.

While some of the ‘kibbutzim’ targeted by Hamash held out this time around, others were unprepared for an attack of this kind. Their limited security forces were overwhelmed by superior manpower once the Hamas terrorists were able to get past their security barriers. What would not have worked against a kibbutz in 1948 has succeeded tragically well in 2023.

What went wrong in Israel was not just an intelligence failure, but a conceptual failure.

Hamas views itself as a successor to the Arab Muslim forces that had attacked Jews in the 20’s and 30s, not to mention the 40s, using these same tactics. Its jihadist force is known as the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades after a Muslim cleric who had tried to conduct his holy wars in Syria and Libya, before coming to Israel where his ‘Black Hand’ targeted Jewish communities.

Israel, like America, treated the actions of terrorists as relevant, but their ideological worldview as irrelevant, even though the only way to predict their actions is by understanding what they believe. This schizophrenic approach to terrorism is necessary to avoid dealing with the Islamic beliefs that motivate the Jihadists to do what they do. Every time government officials around the world claim that the terrorists have nothing to do with Islam, they are blinding themselves.

The false notions that there are “moderate” and “extremist” Islamic terrorists or that the various terrorist groups are just reacting to something we did, rather than advancing their beliefs, has made it impossible for nations to accurately predict future Islamic attacks.

Modern counterterrorism is reactive, training on what the terrorists are doing now, and learning to prevent it, with no ability to anticipate when the terrorists change their tactics, as Al Qaeda did when it switched from centrally planned long-range attacks to ‘lone wolf’ attacks locally. These transformations can only be anticipated by understanding the purpose of Islamic warfare.

The Jihad is a colonial settler project to subjugate the world under Islamic law. Senior Hamas official Mahmoud Al-Zahar said last year that “we are not talking about liberating our land alone… the entire 510 million square kilometers of Planet Earth will come under [a system] where there is no injustice, no oppression, no treachery, no Zionism, no treacherous Christianity.” Seizing Israel is just another stage toward seizing all 510 million kilometers.

Experts fail to comprehend Islamic terrorism because rather than understanding how Jihadists think, they project their own tendency toward unnecessary geopolitical complexity onto them. Unable to admit that the only way to meet ruthless armed force is with ruthless armed force, they overthink everything and assume that Islamic terrorists want us to ‘react to them’.

Islamic terrorists cannot be trusted when it comes to negotiations, but they should be taken at their word when they describe what their ultimate goals are. Hamas has been telling us all along what its goals are. Over the last 5 years, it proposed a ‘March of Return’, urged Gazans to cut through the border fence and promised that they would conquer Israel and seize Jerusalem.

The failure to take Hamas at its word about its intentions is what led to this nightmare.

Israel’s political and military leadership needs to fundamentally reorient its thinking. Hamas partially succeeded in its invasion. That means that if left to control Gaza, it will do it again. The success it achieved will spur a wave of recruits and money. Already the propaganda images have allowed Hamas to temporarily eclipse ISIS as the leading jihadist organization in the world.

Hamas has always made its intentions clear. It is out to mobilize all of Israel’s Arab Muslim population and those of the surrounding countries to provide it with money and manpower to attack, invade and destroy Israel. After long years of shelling, it launched a first major invasion to depopulate and then seize Jewish communities within range of the Gaza border.

Some Jewish communities have now been depopulated. While some residents will rebuild, others will leave. Hamas is celebrating such departures as a validation of its strategy that with enough terror all the Jews of Israel will leave the land. And the Muslims will take over.

Hamas leaders gambled that hiding behind civilians would allow them to survive any Israeli retaliation. After enough bombs have been dropped on empty buildings and the media accuses Israel of devastating Gaza and killing civilians, Biden will threaten to cut off support. Previous Israeli retaliations have consistently played out this way and this one may too unless a united Israel is willing to defy the Biden administration and finish the job. Otherwise Israel should anticipate that Hamas will rebuild bigger and stronger than ever with more wealth and a flood of new recruits motivated by tangible evidence of what horrors they can accomplish. The hostages will be traded for terrorists once family members level enough pressure on the government. And Hamas will resume planning for another invasion. And this one may succeed.

The experts will go on getting it wrong because they don’t understand Islam. And without understanding an enemy’s worldview and beliefs, predicting their actions is very difficult.

Intelligence failures are rooted in a materialistic reading of the enemy. Israel was nearly destroyed 50 years ago during the surprise attack of the Yom Kippur War because its intelligence head was convinced that the timing made no tactical sense. And he was right. But the Egyptian invaders prioritized attacking on the holiest day in the Jewish calendar.

The Yom Kippur War timetable may have made no secular strategic sense, but it made sense to those who understand that the purpose of Islamic warfare is to assert the supremacy of Islam over all other religions. A mandate embodied by the Islamic cry of, “Allahu Akbar”.

From a secular strategic perspective, the Hamas invasion baffles experts, but scheduled on the day of Simchat Torah, the joyous conclusion of the Jewish High Holy Days, it makes perfect sense. It was not a terrorist attack, but an invasion meant to fulfill the Islamic mission of reconquering Israel, driving out the Jews and colonizing their towns and cities, killing most, taking captives for ransom, and others as slaves, which is the entire purpose of Hamas.

And of every Islamic terrorist group operating in and around Israel.

The next time, Hamas will try to reach its third stage, to fortify, occupy and annex communities within Israel. And then the enemy will no longer be ‘out there’, but beginning its conquest of Israel, seeking to link up with Arab Muslim towns and villages for the final campaign of Jihad.

Unless Israel finishes Hamas now, it will be fighting Hamas deep inside the Jewish State.



7
Politics & Religion / Re: Anti-semitism & Jews
« on: October 10, 2023, 03:14:30 PM »
Biden's team of racists and anti-semites...

October 10, 2023 by David Horowitz and John Perazzo



[Order David Horowitz’s book: The Enemy Within: How a Totalitarian Movement is Destroying America.]

Editor’s note: Because of Hamas’ current barbaric terror attack inside Israel, it is vital to stress how the Biden administration has empowered the terror group in Gaza – and helped spawn its current destruction inside the Jewish state. Frontpage Editors have therefore deemed it urgent to run an article by David Horowitz and John Perazzo that originally appeared in PJMedia.com in its April 13, 2021 issue: Biden’s Team of Racists and Anti-Semites: An Anti-American Coalition in the Heart of the White House.


Formally introducing his cabinet to the public, Joe Biden proudly declared: “This is the first [time] in American history that the Cabinet looks like America.” Looking at the actual appointments and not just the gender, skin color and ethnic origins of the Biden team, it is a team that may look like America but doesn’t think like America. In fact, it is a team whose outlook is anti-American.

Take Biden’s Vice Presidential choice, Kamala Harris, whose antipathy for America oozes from her every pore. At a February 2019 presidential campaign stop, for example she said Columbus Day should be replaced with “Indigenous People’s Day” because “we are the scene of a crime when it comes to what we did with slavery and Jim Crow and institutionalized racism in this country.”  This is an accurate summary of the way the Biden White House views its native land, and it is a view encapsulating three big lies.

What America did with the slave system it inherited from the British was end it. America’s abolition campaign began with its revolutionary proclamation that all men are created equal and have a God given right to liberty. America began implementing this right in 1787, the first year of its existence, with the enactment of the Northwest Ordinance, outlawing slavery in a territory the size of the original 13 colonies.  Within twenty years slavery was abolished in all the northern states. As for the “original sin” of enslaving the black Africans brought to this country that properly is the achievement of the Africans themselves who then sold their brothers and sisters to Europeans at slave auctions in Ghana and Benin.

All forms of institutional and systemic racism including Jim Crow were outlawed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In one of his first statements as president Biden claimed that “systemic racism” has been built into every aspect of our system.” This is a bald-faced lie. The opposite is the truth. Under the 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, systemic racism is outlawed in America. With the exception of affirmative action policies sanctioned by the Supreme Court, there is no systemic racism in America,. If there were systemic racism, there would be a tsunami of legal suits to punish those who practiced it. There is no such tsunami because the claim is a baseless lie.

When 220 U.S. cities were attacked by criminal Black Lives Matter mobs last summer Kamala Harris called them “a coalition of conscience,” and supported the Minnesota Freedom Fund, which made bail payments on behalf of people who were arrested for criminal acts. At the time, Harris claimed that “the life of a Black person in America … has never been treated as fully human….” Tell that to the white majorities who elected Barack Obama the 43rd president of the United States twice. “America,” she claimed “has never fully addressed the systemic racism that has existed in our country.” Chinese communist propagandists couldn’t have framed this malicious indictment better. Not surprisingly Harris has praised racial arsonist and anti-Semite Al Sharpton as a “friend [who] has spent his life fighting for what’s right.”

Picking a cabinet and White House team by skin color and gender, is, of course, racist and “sexist” in their pure forms. Biden’s transgender Assistant Secretary of Health, Rachel Levine, picked to celebrate transgenderism is, in her actual political life, a criminal cohort of Andrew Cuomo, removing her own mother from a nursing home, as Pennsylvania’s Secretary of Health, while committing COVID-19 patients to nursing homes where they killed thousands of not so well-connected elderly residents.

Biden’s Assistant Attorney General in charge of Civil Rights, Kristen Clarke, is the first black woman to be appointed to the position. She is also a racist, praising Farrakhan disciple Tamika Mallory and holding the Farrakhanite view that melanin which is responsible for rich black skin color “endows blacks with greater mental, physical and spiritual abilities” than white people. Clarke has long embraced the doctrines of critical race theory, a crackpot racism which maintains that America is permanently racist to its core, and that consequently the nation’s various institutions and traditions are, by definition, invalid. In 2020, Clarke denounced the “systemic racism that pervades every aspect of our lives, especially when it comes to policing and the operation of the criminal justice system of our country.” For reasons already mentioned this is a racist invention. If police departments were systemically racist how explain all the black police chiefs running those departments in major American cities, or the absence of major lawsuits invoking the Civil Rights Act which outlaws such practices?

In November 2020, Clarke said that collegiate policies permitting black students to be admitted under far lower academic standards than Asian students are “critical for promoting diversity … in an increasingly multi-ethnic society.” This is the statement of a racist who puts skin color first and meritocracy at the end of the line.

Linda Thomas-Greenfield is the second black U.S. Ambassador to the UN. For those not addicted to the new racism in fashion in the Democrat Party, her maiden address to the UN General Assembly praising the malicious and historically illiterate  1619 Project, is cause for alarm. The project conceived by a black racist frames America as a nation defined by slavery and racism, and denies that white America played any role in liberating blacks or creating a society which has made them the richest, freest, most privileged blacks anywhere in the world, including black Africa and the Caribbean. Naturally she has praised the Marxist Black Lives Matter organization as a noble movement for “racial justice.”

Late in his presidency, Donald Trump issued an executive order establishing The 1776 Commission, an advisory committee designed to encourage American schools to provide students with a “patriotic education,” and to counter the America-hating narrative of critical race theory and the 1619 Project. Biden revoked Trump’s executive order — on grounds that the “systemic racism that has plagued our nation for far, far too long couldn’t be ignored any longer.” Susan Rice, his newly appointed Director of the United States Domestic Policy Council, warns Americans about “how serious  a problem we face from nationalists and white supremacists who have demonstrated a willingness to resort to violence in some instances.” On January 26, 2021, Rice said that “for too many American families, systemic racism and inequality in our economy, laws, and institutions still puts the American dream far out of reach.  She didn’t explain – if what she says is true – why the Biden administration isn’t suing all those nationalists and white supremacists for practicing institutional and systemic racism which was outlawed over fifty years ago by the Civil Rights Act.

When it comes to Biden’s Middle-East policy, the president has diligently deployed skin-color racism to put a team of anti-Semites and supporters of the terrorist regimes in Teheran, the West Bank and Gaza in charge. Chief among them, of course is Susan Rice. In 2015, Rice publicly lauded the Iran nuclear deal as the “most comprehensive and effective” anti-nuclear agreement ever devised. She has continued to support the deal ever since. When President Trump withdrew the U.S. from the deal in 2018, for instance, Rice falsely stated that “Iran has fully complied with its obligations,” and that the inspections authorized by the deal were “the most intrusive international inspection and monitoring regime in history.”

Biden’s new Administrator of USAID, Samantha Power, is a dedicated opponent of Israel. During a 2002 interview  Power said that even if it meant “alienating a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import” (i.e., Jewish Americans), the United States should stop investing “billions of dollars” in “servicing Israel’s military,” and should invest that money instead “in the new state of Palestine” – a regime (not a state) that annually invests hundreds of millions of dollars in terrorism against men, women and children in the Jewish state. During a February 2016 UN Security Council debate on the Middle East, Power – then U.S. Ambassador to the UN equated Palestinian Arab acts of terrorism targeting Jews, with virtually non-existent “settler violence” by Jews in the West Bank. She also falsely portrayed the Palestinian Authority (PA) as an entity that was “pressing for calm,” when, in fact, the PA not only “pays Arabs huge sums of money to murder Jews,” but also “incites violence against innocent Jews in the PA’s speeches, official newspapers, social media, textbooks, schools, clubs, government-controlled mosques, government-controlled television specials, and government ceremonies honoring terrorists.”

Biden’s new Undersecretary of Defense,  Colin Kahl, co-drafted the language that attempted – ultimately without success – to omit from the 2012 Democratic Party platform any reference to Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. In an August 2012 op-ed in Foreign Policy magazine, Kahl praised President Obama’s call to push Israel’s borders back to the 1949 Armistice lines, which would reward 70 years of Arab aggression and deprive Israel of defensible borders; to accept the creation of a Palestinian state governed by the terrorist organizations PLO and Hamas; and to reject the notion of Jerusalem as Israel’s undisputed capital. In the same article, Kahl blamed the poor living conditions of Palestinians on the “economically debilitating effects of Israeli occupation” – rather than on the Palestinian leaders’ massive corruption and ongoing terrorist aggression.

Biden’s new Under Secretary of State for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights, Uzra Zeya, is a former staffer at the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, a notoriously anti-Israel publication, where she compiled research for a book claiming that “the Israel lobby” had established a secret network of PACs that bribed and extorted congressional candidates into adopting positions favorable to Israel, thereby “subvert[ing] the American political process to take control of U.S. Middle East policy.”

Wendy Sherman, Biden’s Deputy Secretary of State nominee, has referred to the late PLO leader Yasser Arafat, the world’s most prolific Jew-killer since Hitler, as “the leader of a resistance movement,” while minimizing the moral horrors of Palestinian suicide bombings against innocent Israeli civilians as “nagging disruptions from the Palestinian side.”

In her 2018 book, Not for the Faint of Heart,” Sherman claimed that the Iran nuclear deal, which she helped to negotiate on behalf of the U.S., “was anchored” by: (a) “a common wish to make peace,” and (b) additional “higher principles” that would help facilitate a “reimagining of the world” whereby Americans might “see our adversaries not as eternal enemies, or dispensable ones, but as virtual partners.” Moreover, Sherman falsely claimed that the Iran deal would allow for “intrusive” and “scrupulous” inspections of Iranian nuclear sites.

Symone Sanders is the Senior Advisor and Chief Spokesperson to Vice President, Kamala Harris. Sanders was one of the 2020 Biden presidential campaign’s three senior advisers who apologized to radical Islamic organizations after Biden staffer Andrew Bates had tried to distance Biden from Linda Sarsour, a notorious Jew-hater who, despite supporting the Hamas-inspired Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions (BDS) movement and having ties to numerous Islamic terrorist organizations, was a featured speaker at the 2020 Democratic National Convention. In addition to her apology, Sanders also retweeted a tweet by Emgage, a radical Islamist group, saying that Sarsour “has dedicated her career to fighting for justice.”

Biden’s new Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken,  is opposed to designating Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a foreign terrorist organization and imposing sanctions on it, even though The Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran established the IRGC explicitly to “strike terror into [the hearts of] the enemies of Allah” — meaning most prominently the U.S. and Israel — and to “expan[d] the sovereignty” of Islam across the globe. The IRGC’s “terror involvements” have included: “planning 9-11,” “murdering hundreds of American troops in Iraq,” promoting “Iranian nuclear proliferation and weapons delivery systems development,” and “providing weapons, training, funding, and logistical support to Iranian terrorist proxies.”

Biden’s new Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, is a signatory to a J Street letter arguing that the Democratic Party platform should incorporate additional criticism of Israel. The letter also draws a moral equivalence between Palestinian terrorists and their victims, Israeli Jews, by employing the phrase “violence, terrorism, and incitement from ALL sides.” Further, the letter rejects the notion of Israeli and Jewish sovereign rights in the historically Jewish lands of Judea and Samaria, and accuses Israel of perpetrating an “occupation” of Palestinian land. This is the lie genocidal Palestinian terrorists use to justify their unprovoked aggressions against the Jewish state, which was created – like Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and Iraq – on land that belonged to the Turks for 400 years previously. Turks are not Palestinians or Arabs.

Biden’s new Deputy Director of the White House Office of Legislative Affairs is Reema Dodin. In her student days at UC Berkeley, Dodin was a campus radical who organized a number of anti-Israel rallies. Among other things, she was a leader of the Muslim Students Association, a Muslim Brotherhood front. The Muslim Brotherhood is an Islamic supremacist organization whose credo proclaims that “death for the sake of God is the highest of our aspirations.” Dodin described the 9/11 attacks as an understandable Islamic response to U.S. support for Israel, which was “angering” Muslims worldwide. Drawing a parallel between the 9/11 hijackers and Palestinian jihadists, she said: “[N]ow you have three generations of Palestinians born under occupation. Maybe if you start to look at Palestinians as human beings, you will stop the suicide bombers.” In a 2002 speech in California, Dodin justified suicide bombing as “the last resort of a desperate people.”

At a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing in 2010, Biden’s new Special U.S. Envoy for Iran, Robert Malley, called for the U.S. “to unveil a set of parameters” that included the creation of a Palestinian state along the “1967 borders,” which would have rewarded the Arab aggressors in the Six Day War and been suicidal for Israel. He also advocated: (a) the deployment of third-party armed forces in Judea-Samaria; (b) the forced relocation of hundreds of thousands of Jews from their homes in that region; and (c) Israel’s relinquishment of control of the Golan Heights to Syria, on the premise that Syria was “unlikely to sponsor militant groups … [or] destabilize the region … once an agreement has been reached.”

Biden’s new Senior Director for Intelligence Programs at the National Security Council is Maher Bitar. As a student at Georgetown University, Bitar was an executive board member of Students for Justice in Palestine, an organization that supports the Hamas terrorists and the BDS movement. A 2006 photo from that time period shows Bitar wearing a keffiyah – a terrorist emblem – while dancing in front of a banner reading, “Divest from Israel Apartheid.” At a Palestine Solidarity Movement conference at Georgetown in 2006, Bitar moderated a session that taught attendees how to demonize Israel as a nation guilty of “colonization,” “occupation,” and “oppression.”

Biden’s new Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Israel and Palestinian Affairs is Hady Amr. In January 2002, Amr wrote: “I was inspired by the Palestinian Intifada.” Amr warned that Arabs “will never, never forget what the Israeli people, the Israeli military and Israeli democracy have done to Palestinian children. And there will be thousands who will seek to avenge these brutal murders of innocents.” He also accused Israel engaging in the “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians. Ethnic cleansing of Jews is of course the overt goal of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, whereas more than a million Palestinians are Israeli citizens with more rights than the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza.

In sum, while the Biden White House may “look like” America, once one gets past skin color and gender, it is a team of racists and anti-Semites. “Diversity” is exposed as a racist rationale for assembling an anti-American coalition in the heart of the White House itself.

David Horowitz is the founder of the David Horowitz Freedom Center and the author of the newly published book, The Enemy Within: How a Totalitarian Movement Is Destroying America.

John Perazzo is the editor of DiscoverTheNetworks.org—an encyclopedic guide to the political Left and a project of the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is the author of Black Lives Matter: Marxist Hate Dressed Up As Racial Justice.



8
Politics & Religion / Re: The Way forward for Republican party
« on: September 19, 2023, 02:25:27 PM »
Car Bans Could be a Deciding Factor in 2024
- Daniel Greenfield

9 Democrat-run states, California, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Oregon, Rhode Island and Washington, have moved to ban cars by 2035.

The Biden administration has exploited EPA emissions standards to accomplish the same thing.

The green push to ban cars and force everyone to buy electric vehicles is a core part of the program and also highly unpopular with families struggling with high prices and inflation. Electric vehicles are far more expensive and much less reliable than cars and most can’t afford them.

59% of Americans oppose a ban on cars while only 40% support it. But, in worse news for banners, support for the ban has consistently fallen over the last years by 7% while opposition to it has increased. Republicans and Independents are obviously stalwartly opposed, but even among Democrats, opposition has grown until a third of Dems is opposed.

On a state by state level, opposition remains strong even in states whose Democrat governors unwisely chose to sign on to a 2035 car ban date. In Maryland, 60% opposed Gov. Wes Moore’s car ban while in New Jersey some 58% are opposed including 42% of Democrats. In Washington, 48% opposed Gov. Jay Inslee’s car ban while 38% backed it. Of those who opposed it, 31% were strongly opposed.

In Virginia, which was put on track to a car ban by following California’s illegal emissions mandates, 58% oppose a gas car ban while only 33% support it. Tellingly, while 42% strongly oppose a car ban only 12% strongly support one. Even among Democrats, support and opposition are nearly tied 44% to 43%. In Minnesota, 65% oppose a car ban while only 29% support it. (47% strongly oppose the ban while only 9% strongly support it.)

Nationwide, support for car bans is strongest among urban voters. And yet even there, ban backing never quite tops 50%. In suburban areas, support drops down to 31% and rural areas falls all the way to 24%. That stands to reason because to whatever extent electric vehicles are viable, it’s only in the core density of major urban areas. Outside them, they’re unusable.

Polls also shows support for a car ban is tied to income. Even the cheapest electric vehicles are out of the price range of most Americans. That’s why opposition to car bans climbs for families making less than $40,000 and even those making up to $80,000. The proposed car ban means families being unable to replace their minivan. It means mothers who can’t drop off their kids at school and fathers who can’t drive to work.

A car ban is an extinction level event for American families. If it goes through, 53% of Americans won’t be able to buy a car. Imagine how much their lives will change.

Pro-ban politicians act as if there will be a smooth transition from cars to electric vehicles.

The reality is that electric vehicles are not viable in any way, shape or form. America’s biggest car companies have spent and lost billions trying to make electric vehicles.

Ford is losing $32,000 on every electric car it sells. In 2023, it lost $3 billion on its EV boondoggle. Ford claimed that it will make 2 million electric cars by 2025 (at which point it would then lose $64 billion) but it only sold 61,575 electric vehicles in 2022. GM shut down the Chevy Bolt, its cheapest electric vehicle after losing $7,400 on every one it sold. It promises to profitably sell 1 million electric vehicles in 2025, but it only sold 44,000 at a loss in 2022.

The math on electric vehicles simply does not work. Many people point to Tesla. But the truth about Tesla is it made money through the fines that California imposed on makers and buyers of cars. In 2022, Tesla made $1.78 billion from carbon credit sales. Companies that make actual cars have to buy the credits from Musk’s Saudi company and pass on the cost to consumers.

While subsidizing electric vehicles for the rich by fining working class car owners worked well enough for Tesla, it’s not a pathway to shifting the entire country over to electric cars. What will really happen by 2025 is that the vast majority of Americans will be cut off from the market. They’ll be left trying to keep old cars and used cars on the road for as long as possible.

Why aren’t politicians talking more about this? Some are operating in the D.C. bubble and don’t recognize the profound impact this will have on the lives of hundreds of millions of people. Others see a 2035 deadline as being so far in the future that it doesn’t need to be dealt with now. And still others are constantly reacting to a passing parade of crises and outrages.

Car bans are far from the only issue out there, but it could have a deciding impact in 2024.

Democrats have committed to a policy that is wildly unpopular outside their small base of urban college graduates who idealize 15 minute cities navigated by bike shares. And they’ve done so with limited pushback from a Republican party that is schizophrenic and feckless in its inability to focus, to make a coherent case and to message on the things that actually matter to voters.

The car bans are an act of cultural, social and economic warfare by an urban elite against the rest of the country. If successful, they would make life all but impossible in rural areas, and increasingly challenging in many suburban areas. They would tear apart families, wreck jobs and push struggling people underwater.

Politicians have gone from two cars in every garage to no cars in the garage at all.

It’s hard to think of any single policy to devastating in its scope and so likely to outrage the working class voters that Republicans are trying to court as car bans. And yet Republicans are failing to talk about them because they are as detached as Democrats from the consequences.

Republicans assumed that they would win in 2022 by passively profiting from the miserable economy. The midterms proved that to be a profound miscalculation. If Republicans want to politically profit from the poor economy, they have to do more than put up stickers pointing a finger at Biden. They have to connect the economic misery directly to Biden’s policies.

Car bans could be a deciding factor in 2024, but only if Republicans and moderate Democrats talk about them. Otherwise another disastrous radical policy will bury much of the country.


10
Politics & Religion / Prager: Judeo Christian values
« on: September 05, 2023, 05:46:48 AM »
PragerU 5-minute video on Judeo-Christian Values. This is a superb, short explanation of what they are.

https://www.prageru.com/video/what-are-judeo-christian-values

11
Politics & Religion / Re: Political Rants & interesting thought pieces
« on: September 05, 2023, 01:06:31 AM »
Dennis Prager: Why Young Americans Are Not Taught About Evil. The Ignorance is Almost Total.

Most of our schools teach almost nothing of importance, and nothing is more important than the study of good and evil. In the United States today, nearly all schools, from elementary through graduate, concentrate on teaching about racism, sexism, preferred pronouns, homophobia, transphobia, LGBTQIA+, climate change, diversity, equity, inclusiveness and white guilt. In other words, most of our educational institutions, including the most prestigious, do not educate.

Here are a few proofs.

It is almost certain that the great majority of American high school and college students (with the obvious exceptions of Christian students) could not name the Four Gospels (presuming they even know what they are); five of the Ten Commandments (presuming they know what those are); or the names of two Shakespeare plays. Most American students know little about the American Revolution, let alone about the French or Russian Revolutions. The same holds true for the Constitution and every other American founding document. It is doubtful that, other than Washington and Jefferson having owned slaves, American students know anything about these men or could name two other Founders.

When it comes to evil, the ignorance is enormous, often almost total. For example, according to Pew, about half of Americans ages 18-39 cannot identify Auschwitz or any other Nazi death camp. And there is every reason to assume that much fewer than half could identify the Gulag Archipelago (20 million-plus murdered); the Ukrainian forced famine (5 to 6 million murdered in a little over a year); Mao’s Great Leap Forward (about 60 million murdered); or Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge (about one in every four Cambodians murdered).

As noted, almost no one outside of Russia has ever heard of the Russian Civil War, let alone knows anything about it. One reason is that the winners, the communists, had no desire that people know about it. Yet, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, about 10 million people, the great majority noncombatants, were killed.

Why don’t students know about evil?

The first reason is that nearly all the genocides of the 20th century were committed by communists, and the Left, which runs virtually all educational institutions, has always had a soft spot for communism. If people were to recognize that communism has been the greatest source of evil in the modern age in terms of numbers murdered, number of lives destroyed, liberty stolen, and the sheer amount of human suffering inflicted (greater by those metrics than those of the Nazis before they were forcibly stopped), the Left would lose much of its appeal.

Another reason is the foolish notion that people are basically good. This has been a left-wing belief since the French Enlightenment leader Jean-Jacques Rousseau came up with the idea. As he wrote in his book, “On Philosophy, Morality, and Religion,” “Man is a naturally good being, loving justice and order; there is no natural perversity in the human heart… All the vices imputed to the human heart are not natural to it.”

This nonsense had been foreign to the Western mind. Its view of humanity was rooted in the Bible, and neither Bible-based religion — Judaism or Christianity — affirmed the goodness of the human heart. As Genesis states, “The will of man’s heart is evil from his youth,” and the rest of the Bible repeatedly warns us against following our hearts.

However, as the West began to abandon the Bible, including belief in the God of the Bible, Westerners began to believe in man. As Marx put it, “Man is God.” People had no choice. For if there is no God to believe in, one must believe in man — or one has literally nothing to believe in. Therefore, belief in man’s inherent goodness became both psychologically and philosophically necessary.

A third reason follows from the second. With the exception of the mass murder of the Armenians (which was committed by Muslim Turks), the genocides and the other horrors of the 20th century were committed by secular regimes. Given the centrality of secularism to leftism, this fact has been kept from young people. Likewise, the fact that all these genocides were committed by big governments is not taught to young people because big government is also central to left-wing ideology. In other words, a true depiction of the evils of the 20th century would mean the end of the two pillars of left-wing ideology: secularism and big government.

If you want to make a more moral world, you must begin with the study of evil. But, for the reasons enumerated here, the Left is not — and cannot be — interested in fighting real evil. So, the Left fights made-up evils: American systemic racism, transphobia, capitalism, carbon emissions, sexism and former President Donald Trump, to name a few.

This is why young people know almost nothing about evil. The Left doesn’t want them to know about it. Because knowledge of evil inevitably leads directly to rejection of the Left.



12
Politics & Religion / VDH: Save the Rule of Law by Destroying It.
« on: September 03, 2023, 08:06:06 AM »

13
Politics & Religion / Baraq the Manchurian
« on: September 03, 2023, 07:26:01 AM »
Barack Obama - The Real-Life Manchurian Candidate?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/barack-obama-the-real-life-manchurian-candidate/

14
Politics & Religion / S&P 500 performance by President...
« on: January 02, 2020, 03:26:25 AM »
Very interesting graph.  Note well that for all the hoopla about Trump's stock market rally, at this point in his presidency, he's actually a bit shy of where Obama was at the same point.  That's not to say that Trump has much more to crow about, but interesting nonetheless.  This surprised me.

https://www.macrotrends.net/2482/sp500-performance-by-president

19
Politics & Religion / Re: 2020 Presidential election
« on: December 15, 2019, 04:11:16 AM »
Here is my prediction:  I believe Trump will win with a larger margin than he did the first time, and the Republicans will take back the house and possibly increase their majority in the Senate.  Once again, the mainstream media is completely detached from the sentiment among average Americans about this impeachment sham.  Many independents and Democrats will, I believe, vote for Trump this time around.

20
Politics & Religion / Excellent review of Robert Spencer's latest book...
« on: December 15, 2019, 03:46:00 AM »
The Palestinian Delusion - The Catastrophic History of the Middle East Peace Process
get it today at Amazon.com

https://www.jihadwatch.org/2019/12/the-palestinian-delusion-refutes-the-myth-that-todays-palestinians-descend-from-indigenous-inhabitants-of-israel

21
As Robert Spencer correctly states here - either Abdullah is kidding himself, or the U.S.  He cannot possibly be ignorant of these relevant verses in the Koran:

www.jihadwatch.org/2018/02/king-abdullah-of-jordan-maybe-theres-a-lack-of-understanding-of-islam-in-washington

25
Trump Embraces The PLO Fantasy

The new president is gearing up to make the same mistake as his predecessor.

March 15, 2017
Caroline Glick

Originally published by the Jerusalem Post.

US President Donald Trump is losing his focus. If he doesn’t get it back soon, he will fail to make America great again or safe again in the Middle East.

After holding out for a month, last week Trump indicated he is adopting his predecessors’ obsession with empowering the PLO.

This is a strategic error.

There are many actors and conflicts in the Middle East that challenge and threaten US national interests and US national security. Iran’s rise as a nuclear power and regional hegemon; the war in Syria; Turkey’s abandonment of the West; and Russia’s regional power play all pose major threats to US power, security and interests. The Muslim Brotherhood, Islamic State, Hamas and other Sunni jihadist movements all threaten the US, Europe and the US’s Sunni allies in the region in a manner that is strategically significant to America.

None of these issues, none of these actors and none of these threats are in any way related to or caused by the PLO and its interminable, European-supported hybrid terror and political war against Israel. None of these pressing concerns will be advanced by a US embrace of the PLO or a renewed obsession with empowering the PLO and its mafia-terrorist bosses.

To the contrary, all of these pressing concerns will be sidelined – and so made more pressing and dangerous – by a US reengagement with the PLO .

And yet, over the past week, Trump has indicated that the PLO is now his focus.

Last Friday, Trump spoke on the telephone with Mahmoud Abbas. Abbas is head of the PLO and the unelected dictator of the corrupt, terrorism-sponsoring, PLO -controlled Palestinian Authority in Judea and Samaria.

According to media reports, Trump told Abbas – whose legal term in office ended eight years ago – that he views him as a legitimate leader. According to the official White House report of the conversation, Trump also reportedly told Abbas that he supports reaching a deal between Israel and the Palestinians. Such a deal, to the extent it is ever reached, involves expanding PLO control over Judea and Samaria and parts of Jerusalem at Israel’s expense.

Trump also invited Abbas for an official visit to Washington. And the day after they spoke, the Trump administration moved $250 million in US taxpayer dollars to Abbas’s police state where for the past 25 years, Abbas and his cronies have enriched themselves while feeding a steady diet of antisemitic, anti-American jihadist bile to their impoverished subjects.

To build up his credibility with the PLO , Trump put his electoral pledge to move the US embassy to Jerusalem on ice. The real estate mogul ordered Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to deny Jews the right to their property and their legal right to use state lands in Judea and Samaria.

And swift on the heels of that conversation with Abbas, Trump’s chief negotiator Jason Greenblatt was dispatched to Jerusalem to begin empowering the PLO at Israel’s expense.

According to media reports, Greenblatt intended to use his meeting Monday with Netanyahu to reject Netanyahu’s commitment to build a new Israeli town in Samaria. Greenblatt was also reportedly intending to dictate the parameters for yet another round of negotiations with the PLO.

After meeting with Netanyahu, Greenblatt continued on to Ramallah to embrace Abbas.

Also during his stay, Greenblatt is scheduled to meet with IDF generals who are responsible for giving money and providing services to the PLO.

And Greenblatt doesn’t have the Palestinians to himself.

Following Trump’s conversation with Abbas, plans were suddenly afloat for Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner and Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump to visit Israel and spend an afternoon with Abbas in Ramallah.

If things develop as reported, then Trump is serious about embracing the PLO and intends to have his top advisers devote themselves to Abbas and his henchmen. If that is the case, then Trump is setting himself, his advisers, his daughter and the US up to fail and be humiliated.

The PLO is the Siren that drowns US administrations. It is to the PLO that America’s top envoys have eagerly flown, gotten hooked on the attention of the demented, anti-Israel press corps, and forgotten their purpose: to advance US national interests.

If Trump is serious about repeating this practice, then rather than repair the massive damage done to the US and the Middle East by his two predecessors, the 45th president will repeat their mistakes. Like them, he will leave office in a blaze of failure.

To understand why this is the case, three things must be clear.

First, the PLO will never make peace with Israel. There will never be a Palestinian state.

There will never be a peace or a Palestinian state because the PLO wants neither. This is the lesson of the past 25 years. Both Abbas and his predecessor Arafat rejected peace and statehood multiple times and opted instead to expand their terrorist and political war against Israel.

Why did they do that? Because they are interested in two things: personal enrichment – which they achieve by stealing donor funds and emptying the pockets of their own people; and weakening, with the goal of destroying Israel – which they achieve through their hybrid war of terrorism and political warfare.

The second thing that needs to be clear is that the Palestinians are irrelevant to the rest of the problems – the real problems that impact US interests – in the region. If anything, the Palestinians are pawns on the larger chessboard. America’s enemies use them to distract the Americans from the larger realities so that the US will not pay attention to the real game.

Iran will not be appeased or defeated if Trump empowers the PLO in its war against Israel and continues feeding PLO leaders’ insatiable appetite for other people’s money.

The Sunni jihadists will not beat their swords into plowshares if the US coerces Israel to cough up land to the PLO . To the contrary, they will be emboldened.

Russian President Vladimir Putin will not move his forces out of Syria or stop giving nuclear technologies to Iran if the US turns the screws on Israel. Putin will come to the conclusion that Trump is either weak or stupid to damage Israel, the US’s most serious ally.

And of course, Israel will not be better off if Trump decides to push it back onto the peace train which has caused it nothing but harm for the past quarter century.

Trump’s election opened up the possibility, for the first time in decades, that the US would end its destructive obsession with the PLO. For three months, Israelis have been free for the first time to discuss seriously the possibilities of applying Israeli law to all or parts of Judea and Samaria. And a massive majority of Israelis support doing just that.

On the Palestinian side as well, Trump’s election empowered the people who have been living under the jackboot of Abbas and his cronies to think about the possibility of living at peace with Israel in a post-PLO era. Polling results indicate that they too are eager to move beyond the Palestinian statehood chimera.

But now, it appears that Trump has been convinced to embrace the PLO obsession. The same entrenched bureaucrats at the State Department and the same foreign policy establishment in Washington that brought the US nothing but failure in the Middle East for a generation appear to have captivated Trump’s foreign policy. They have convinced him it is better to devote his top advisers to repeating the mistakes of his predecessors than to devote his energies and theirs to fixing the mess that Obama and George W. Bush left him with. They have gotten him to believe that it is better to empower the PLO than develop coherent strategies and plans for dealing with the problems of the region that actually endanger US interests and imperil the security and safety of the American people.

26
Politics & Religion / Brandon Smith's latest...
« on: March 10, 2017, 05:55:22 AM »
Are We Witnessing The Weirdest Moment In Economic History?

Wednesday, 08 March 2017    Brandon Smith


It is an unfortunate reality that most people tend to be oblivious to massive sea changes in geopolitics and economics. You would think that these events would catch the immediate attention of everyone as they happen, but usually it is not until they realize that the microcosm of their personal lives is subject to the consequences of the macrocosm that they wake up and take notice.

There are, however, ways to train yourself to pick up on signals within the news cycle and within political and financial rhetoric; signals that indicate a great shift is perhaps on the way. Sometimes these initial signs are subtle, sometimes they are as subtle as a feminist slut-walk. I would point out that over the next few months there are dangerous correlations so numerous and blatant in the economic sphere that I would almost rather watch a marching gaggle of frumpy feminists wearing nothing but electrical tape than bear witness to the mayhem that is about to strike the unwitting public.

What am I talking about? Well, let’s go through the list…

Federal Reserve Meeting March 14-15th

As my readers know well, I have been warning since before the election that the Fed would use a Trump presidency as an opportunity to pull the plug on near-zero interest rates and remove a primary pillar supporting stock markets — stock buybacks made possible by free overnight loans to numerous banks and corporations. Without QE and low interest rates the equities bubble will inevitably implode.

Corporate earnings certainly aren’t holding up stocks, neither is GDP or consumer spending. The Fed is the only determining factor of the ongoing bull market. Anyone who claims otherwise is probably a mainstream analyst or overzealous day trader with a vested interest in keeping the illusion going.

It is not surprising to me at all that the “rate hike odds” for March have been increased by mainstream analysts to 90% in the span of a week. I don’t know why anyone uses these arbitrary odds as an indicator of anything. I’ve been receiving emails all month asking me if I still believe the Fed will hike rates while the odds are “so low.” Look, the Fed does not make decisions at these meetings. They make decisions months in advance and the meetings are window dressing.

Too many people operate under the delusion that the central bank wants to continue propping up stocks, which is why they cannot grasp why the Fed would raise rates. In reality, the stage has been perfectly set to allow the bubble to implode. When the elites have a perfect scapegoat, they use it, and conservative movements represent that perfect scapegoat today.

The important thing to remember, though, is the timing of this particular meeting…

U.S. Debt-Ceiling Suspension Ends March 15th

So, in case you weren’t tracking the economic situation two years ago, the U.S. government almost went bust (in a sense) in 2015. The debt ceiling sets limits on how much the government can borrow to fund itself, and that limit was hit hard under the Obama administration after he managed to nearly double the national debt during his tenure. Congress passed legislation to allow borrowing to continue until March 2017, and of course, much of that capital was “borrowed” from the Federal Reserve, which, of course, creates it out of thin air. With the return of the debt ceiling, the question is — will Congress be able to extend and delay again? With Trump running on a platform of fiscal responsibility, CAN they extend again?  Do they even want to, or is this an engineered crisis event?

Once again, the timing of all this is a little odd. The Fed is raising rates into the first year of the Trump presidency leaving equities increasingly open to destabilization. In addition, the government might not be able to continue borrowing from them, or there will be a renewed extension but the costs of borrowing will run much higher. In either case, this month seems to pronounce the beginning of something; a considerable move away from the standard operating procedures that the elites have been using for the past several years. With such changes come consequences, always.

Formal Initiation Of Brexit On March 15th

The skeptics have been telling me for months that even though I was right about the Brexit vote victory the elites “would never allow” the British to leave the EU. Well, it doesn’t look that way to me so far. Theresa May plans to formally notify the EU of British exit on March 15th triggering two years of negotiations which will undoubtedly send economic shock waves throughout the globe on a regular basis.

Of course the Brexit will move forward! Why not? Globalists need a continuing atmosphere of crisis to distract the masses from their great global reset, and they need multiple scapegoats for the economic disaster that their reset will cause. Enter conservative movements in Europe; once again the perfect target to pin a crisis on.

French Elections Start April 23rd, End May 7th

Yet another election in which the EU hangs in the balance. Recent polls indicate that Marine Le Pen, the designated “populist" candidate, is falling behind. I have to ask, though, have we not learned our lesson yet on the meaninglessness of political polls? I think most of us have.

I believe Le Pen will be one of the final two candidates to move on to the election in May, and though I am not as certain as I was on Brexit and Trump, I am going to go ahead and predict a Le Pen win. If there is any sizable terrorist event in the next couple of months in the EU, or expanded Muslim riots, she is a guaranteed win. This brings up the very real prospect of a “Frexit” in the near future, and analysts should expect that a Le Pen win will be met with some panic in the financial world.

Potential Italian Election Move On April 30th

The Italian political process is a little confusing to me, but what I can tell you is that this spring or early summer you will probably be hearing a lot more about it. Former Italian prime minister and current Italian Democratic Party leader Matteo Renzi is set to decide on a the date for a leadership vote, which may come as early as April 30th. The outcome of this vote will likely decide how soon the next official Italian election will take place.

The election is required to be held before May 2018, but there is increasing pressure to hold elections in 2017, perhaps even this coming summer. I would not be at all shocked to see a surprise announcement of an early Italian election after the leadership vote is held.

Why should anyone care? The consensus is that Renzi’s party will be overrun by anti-EU factions and that this may result in a kind of “Italiexit.” The outcome of Italy’s series of votes and political restructuring will have wide reaching effects on the psychology of the markets for many months to come.

German Federal Election Held September 24th

Yes, even Germany is quaking this year in the wake of a potential “populist” tsunami. Angela Merkel is exceedingly unloved by her own people lately as her approval ratings collapse. Once-silent sovereignty champions in the country are becoming more and more vocal about Merkel’s rather insane open immigration policies which were the key element that drew millions of Muslims into the EU. It was the German government’s promise of endless entitlement programs that created the incentive for the mass migration in the first place, and now, finally, the German people are fed up with the complete lack of cultural assimilation and what many see as the destruction of western values.

I do not think that Germany will abandon the supranational concept of the EU regardless of the outcome of the election, but the removal of Merkel would signal a less agreeable Germany, which would exacerbate the already tottering European Union. Meaning more economic uncertainty in 2017.

If You Thought 2016 Was Weird…

If you thought 2016 was weird, I suggest you get comfortable with the surreal because it is not going away anytime soon. 2017 is a veritable treasure trove of falling elevators, and I haven’t even covered half of the issues facing the economy this year. But what about the macro-analysis?

To summarize, it seems to me that many of these events, stacked so closely together, are not coincidental in their timing. As I have noted in articles such as The Economic End Game Explained, globalists have been openly planning for decades to set in motion a vast financial overhaul and the launch of a single global economy and currency (the seeds being planted starting in 2018). If this is still their timeline, then it would follow that they would need a series of fiscal earthquakes designed to shake up the “old world order” to make way for a “new world order.”

Perhaps each of these events will result in a “stable” outcome and there is nothing to be concerned about. That said, I don’t believe in chance. Most geopolitical outcomes are influenced by internationalist players, which makes the outcomes of these events predictable. This is what made the Brexit predictable, and it is what made Trump’s victory predictable. Everything about the confluence of political and economic events in 2017 suggests to me a festering crisis atmosphere.

As I have always said, economic collapse is a process, not a singular moment in time. This process lulls the masses into complacency. You can show them warning sign after warning sign, but most of them have no concept of what a collapse is. They are waiting for a cinematic moment of revelation, a financial explosion, when really, the whole disaster is happening in slow motion right under their noses. Economies do not explode, they drown as the water rises one inch at a time.

 

27
Politics & Religion / Mexican rapists pouring into America...
« on: March 08, 2017, 03:47:03 PM »
'IMMIGRANT PRIVILEGE' DRIVES CHILD RAPE EPIDEMIC

Ann Coulter - March 8, 2017

Before breathing a sigh of relief that, unlike Western Europe, we don't have Muslim rapists pouring into our country, recall that we have Mexican rapists pouring into our country.

Almost all peasant cultures are brimming with rapists, pederasts and child abusers. Latin America just happens to be the peasant culture closest to the United States, while the Muslims are closest to Europe.

According to North Carolinians for Immigration Reform and Enforcement, immigrants commit hundreds of sex crimes against children in North Carolina every month -- 350 in the month of April 2014, 299 in May, and more than 400 in August and September. More than 90 percent of the perpetrators are Hispanic.

They aren't even counting legal immigrants. Aren't those worse? Only certain Republicans get excited about the difference between legal and illegal immigrants. The rest of America is trying to understand the point of the last 40 years of legal immigration. Why was this necessary?

Below is a very short excerpt from a few days in November 2013. As Stalin is supposed to have said, sometimes quantity has a quality all its own.

-- Abundez, Jose, Juan (11/12/2013): Felony Sex Offense -- Parental Role

-- Aguilar-Sandoval, Jersson, Iss (11/21/2013): Felony First Degree Sexual Offense; Felony First Degree Rape; Felony First Degree Kidnapping

-- Aguilar, Rafael (11/04/2013): Felony Indecent Liberties With Child

-- Aguilar, Rigoberto, Castellano (11/04/2013): Felony First Degree Rape; Felony Indecent Liberties With Child; Felony Stat Rape/Sex Offn Def>4-<6yr

(Note: That's sex with a child between 4 and 6 years old.)

-- Manzano, Gustavo, Adolfo (11/20/2013): Felony Indecent Liberties With Child; Felony Rape of Child

-- Monje, Alcides, Aguilar (11/18/2013): Felony Stat Rape/Sex Offn Def >=6yr; Felony Indecent Liberties With Child, 13.

The list, for a single month in a single state, goes on in the same vein through 87 separate offenders. When not providing North Carolina meatpackers with cheap labor, immigrant workers seem to spend all their time raping little girls.



To be fair, there are also Asian names, such as Y'Hon Nie (Indecent Liberties With Child, First Degree Sex Offense-Child, Second Degree Sexual Offense); and David Vo Minh (First Degree Sex Offense-Child, Indecent Liberties With Child).

North Carolina's cheap labor advocates better be paying Sen. Thom Tillis well. It sure isn't the average North Carolinian demanding that he shill for amnesty. Illegal immigration alone costs North Carolina taxpayers billions of dollars per year.

Our nation's epitaph, with a photo of Sen. Tillis, could be: "We built a powerful economic engine that attracted people, but then some businessmen saw their chance to screw the country and make a pile for themselves. Let's bring in low-wage workers so we can externalize our costs to the taxpayer!”

Except North Carolina's businesses aren't just externalizing their costs to the taxpayers. They're externalizing their costs to little girls.

The reason websites like North Carolinians for Immigration Reform and Enforcement are so important is that the government and the media hide immigrant crime from the public.

They cite bogus studies that compare immigrants to America's criminal class. (We didn't want immigrants who are only slightly less criminal than our worst inner cities.)

Or they announce their impressionistic conclusions. (I heard about a crime in Montana -- that state must have a lot of crime, is not a scientific way to argue.)

Or they refuse to count any criminal without an ICE detainer against him as an immigrant, at all. (Is the court translator a hint that the defendant isn't a 10th-generation American?)

The way to determine how many immigrants are committing crime is to count them. Why does the government refuse to do this?

The number of immigrants in prison would be a good start, but that's only the tip of the iceberg.

Immigrant criminals flee back to their own countries after arrest. Prosecutors deport illegals rather than imprison them -- and then the illegals come right back. Some George Soros-inspired prosecutors allow illegals to plea guilty to a minor offense, to prevent them from being deported.

To get the full picture, government investigators will need to talk to crime victims, police and prosecutors, too.

And we want honesty -- not studies that count anchor babies and second-generation immigrants as "the native population.”

The media is the government's co-conspirator in hiding immigrant crime. I have approximately 1,000 examples of media subterfuges on immigrant crime in Adios, America! The Left's Plan to Turn Our Country Into a Third World Hellhole.

Here are a few recent examples from Sen. Tillis' North Carolina.

Headline: "Burke County man convicted of raping 13-year-old girl," Charlotte Observer, Feb. 1, 2017 (Ricardo Solis Garcia -- an illegal whom Mexico refused to take back);

Headline: "Burlington man charged with child rape," The Times News, Jan. 19, 2017 (Felipe Samuel Rivera Rodriguez);

Headline: "Angier man accused of having sex with 14-year-old girl," The Fayetteville Observer, Aug. 29, 2016 (Estevan Roberto Silva).

NOTE TO READERS: The North Carolina Estevan Roberto Silva -- sex with a 14-year-old girl -- should not be confused with the Texas Esteban Villa Silva -- sex with a 12-year-old girl about 60 times -- or the Alabama Esteban Silva Jr. -- 42-year-old man convicted of sex with a 12-year-old girl. All these child rapes were revealed in coded headlines like "Man pleads to sexual relationship with girl.”

Other informative North Carolina headlines:

Headline: "Man, 42, arrested for sexual offense with girl under 13" (Carlos Gumercindo Crus);

Headline: "Man charged with sexual assault of a minor" (Jose Freddy Ambrosio-Gorgonio);

Headline: Man Pleads Guilty in Child Rape Case (Luis Perez-Valencia).

It's too relentless to be a coincidence.

There have been more stories in the American media about a rape by white lacrosse players that didn't happen than about thousands of child rapes in North Carolina that did.

I'm pretty sure our media is opposed to rape. But evidently, not as opposed as they are to America.

COPYRIGHT 2017 ANN COULTER
DISTRIBUTED BY ANDREWS MCMEEL SYNDICATION

28
NYT Reporter Who Said Trump was Wiretapped Now Says Trump's Wiretapping Claims Are Unfounded

Because "the truth is more important now than it was in January."

3.7.2017  News   M.J. Randolph


Well, this is awkward. 

This weekend, President Donald Trump made a claim (via Twitter, natch) that President Obama wiretapped his phones at Trump Tower during the Presidential election. Though Obama administration officials emphatically deny this surveillance happened, the controversy has once again divided the nation down partisan lines.

On Saturday, New York Times reporter Michael S. Schmidt helped write a story called, “Trump, Offering No Evidence, Says Obama Tapped His Phones.”  This piece echoed the common liberal mantra that attempted to paint the new President as unhinged and unnecessarily alarming. However, Jeff Dunetz on LidBlog points out a rather inconvenient truth for the NYT reporter: on January 19 and 20, the same Michael S. Schmidt helped write an article that claimed members of the Trump team were being wiretapped and passed on the President.

"That’s right, the same NY Times reporter who was one of the sources for the President’s claim, said that there was no evidence for the claim," wrote .

He continued:

This is the ultimate in liberal media bias.  In January Michael S. Schmidt perpetuated the rumor that team Trump had Russian connections, and to support his point he said that Trump’s people were wiretapped. However when President Trump claimed his people were wiretapped, the same guy,  Michael S. Schmidt said there was no evidence.

Either the Times editors and Mr. Schmidt are trying to skew the story, or they are all suffering from a form of dementia and have no memory.

And the New York Times wonders why no one trusts them? Just for kicks, let's remember their Academy Award ceremony commercial called -- ahem -- "The Truth is More Important Now than Ever."


Maybe they should've called it "The Truth is More Important Now than in January."



29
This is a transcript from today's radio show:

CALLER:  The point I wanted to make, you were talking earlier about what’s going on with President Trump and the possible wiretapping of Trump Tower. And I’ve also read online that supposedly there’s a possibility that Jeff Sessions’ office was being tapped also, at least that’s what Corey Lewandowski said, but my point I wanted to make was I think that Trump should take this opportunity to turn the tables on the Dems and the libs. I don’t like their tactics, but they are effective.  And one of the things you’ve talked about in the past many times is the idea that investigations need to be done because of the seriousness of the charge.

RUSH:  Right.

CALLER:  I can’t think of anything more serious than the possibility that the presidential campaign was being wiretapped, and I would use that argument and just push the Democrats back on their heels and say, “The seriousness of the charge, we have to look.”  I mean, you could run with this for months.  That’s what I would do.

RUSH:  Trump is doing that.  So far, he doesn’t have anybody willing to join him in the investigation, ’cause most people’s reaction — can I share this with you?

CALLER:  Of course.

RUSH: The first Trump tweet was on Saturday, and I’m on the golf course Sunday, and it’s a mother-in-law convention out there.  The winds are like 35 miles an hour.  It’s just impossible.  So we started talking about things to try to distract from how poorly we were playing, and these guys — and these are, you know, my age, 50 to 55, 60, successful people, and they’re shocked at what Trump said. They think, “Oh, no, the guy’s going off his rocker, oh, my God, oh, my God.”

I tried to bring ’em back down.  I said, “No,” that’s when I hit them.  “Wait a minute, now.  What do you mean?  Is it more reasonable to think that it could be or that it isn’t?”  And so they started thinking about it the way I was thinking about it.  So I think the initial reaction of even some people on Trump’s team, “Oh, my God, you don’t say that, oh, gee.”  Because in their minds, you never win accusing Obama or the Democrats of anything.  The media’s gonna come out and destroy you.

But Trump is not everybody.  Trump doubled down on it today.  You better be applauding Donald Trump. If what you just said you want, you better be applauding Donald Trump.  Because he’s taking it — this is exactly what he’s doing out there, Pete.  He’s doing exactly what they have been doing to him.  This whole Russia-rigged-the election thing is a bogus charge and he decided to pick the grenade up and throw it right back at the media-Democrat complex.

And it’s working.  They’re now running around like stuck pigs.  “What investigation?  He wasn’t under investigation.”  He wasn’t under investigation?  I thought the last six months — “No, no, no, there are no wiretaps on Trump.  That’s absurd.”  Well, then how do people get hold of his phone calls to these foreign leaders?  “Well, I don’t know, but he’s not under investigation.  Nobody ever said he’s under investigation.”

Katy Tur, infobabe NBC, was on Meet the Press Sunday saying there hasn’t even been a single report alleging that Trump was working with the Russians.  I looked at that.  I didn’t watch it live, I was on the way to the golf course.  I looked at it later.  I said, “Are you kidding me?”  This is the same reporter who had not heard that Obama had told the Russians to tell Vladimir to wait, he’ll be more flexible after the election.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: My point yesterday about is it reasonable to think that Obama could indeed have wiretapped Trump and his campaign, given other aspects of the investigation we’ve been hearing. We know that Trump’s under investigation. We know that some of his peeps are under investigation supposedly ’cause of collusion with the Russians. So we know there was an investigation going on.

Is it unreasonable or reasonable to think that Trump could have been wiretapped too? People were saying, “That’s outrageous! Trump’s off his rocker.” No, no. It’s entirely reasonable if everybody — and Trump’s phone calls have been transcribed and broadcast and reported in the media. So they played that segment — in fact, here it is — and they asked Newt to react to it.

RUSH ARCHIVE: There has been a sabotage effort to undermine Trump and his administration since the election. … t’s totally reasonable to believe that something like this could be happening. It would be unreasonable to think that this is crazy, unreasonable to think that this is absurd, unreasonable to think that this is nothing more than a big batch of conspiracy theories stitched together for whatever purpose.

RUSH: Bill Hemmer played that for Newt Gingrich today on America’s Newsroom, and he said, “Okay, flip Limbaugh’s logic around. Is it reasonable to think that actually this is crazy?”

GINGRICH: I think if you’re a left-winger and you believe that everything Trump does is wrong, you can believe that. But if you look at the unending process of leaks — by the way, all of them breaking the law. You have a New York Times columnist actively calling on IRS agents to break the law and leak President Trump’s taxes. The left has gone crazy since the election. There’s this whole model right now that anything goes on the left, and then they want the rest of us to believe that they’re reasonable.

RUSH: Right. And then here’s Mike Pence. He was on Brian Kilmeade’s Fox News Radio show this morning, and they were talking about Trump’s tweets accusing Obama of wiretapping Trump Tower, and Pence said this…

PENCE: I think the president’s tweet speaks for itself. He’s expressed himself on it, and, you know, we’re very pleased that the congressional committees have made it clear that they will look into that matter just as they’re looking into every aspect it.

RUSH: See, this is why it’s a brilliant thing that Trump did, whether he knew it or not, ’cause it’s gonna come back and bite them. We just had a caller saying, “Look, why don’t we play the game the way they do? They say, no evidence. That means we have to investigate it. The seriousness of the charge.”

Well, you know what? You can’t get a more serious charge than a sitting president wiretapped a presidential campaign. You can’t get a more serious charge. And by the Democrats’ own definition that mandates an investigation. And Congress said they’ll do it. They’re gonna fold Trump’s allegation into the rest of this. And now the Democrats are walking it back, “There wasn’t any investigation, there wasn’t any investigation, what do you mean? Where are you getting this?”

It’s like Katy Tur, the infobabe on NBC. She’s on Meet the Press Sunday. She said she’s not aware of any news agency alleging that there was collusion between Trump and the Russians. I saw that, and I said, “What is it, does she really not know,” which is the entirely possible. I think journalists are some of the most ill-educated people. I don’t even think they’re educated. They’re indoctrinated. They know one side of things and they have no curiosity about anything else.

She’s also the infobabe who did not know that Obama was overheard on an open mic telling Dmitry Medvedev in 2012, Putin’s second in command; he’s the president of the Russian Federation, said (paraphrasing), “You tell Vladimir that I’ll have much more flexibility in getting rid of our nukes here after I’m reelected.” She didn’t know that had happened. How do you not know that? Well, NBC didn’t report it. CBS didn’t report it. ABC didn’t report it. The New York Times didn’t report it.

There’s no way she would know it. Yet it happened, and they don’t know it. And now she’s out there saying there’s no new organization that’s ever alleged collusion between Trump and the Russians. She was dead serious. And her own network is reporting that. Everybody else in the Drive-Bys is reporting that.



30
Politics & Religion / Obama's Opposition Movement...
« on: March 07, 2017, 11:06:27 AM »
#OBAMAGATE: EXPOSING THE OBAMA DEEP STATE

Obama’s third term has begun. Our Republic is in danger.

March 7, 2017  Daniel Greenfield 

After Trump secured the nomination, Obama’s people filed a wiretapping request. As he was on the verge of winning, they did it again. After he won, they are doing everything they can to bring him down.

It was always going to come down to this.

One is the elected President of the United States. The other is the Anti-President who commands a vast network that encompasses the organizers of OFA, the official infrastructure of the DNC and Obama Anonymous, a shadow government of loyalists embedded in key positions across the government.

A few weeks after the election, I warned that Obama was planning to run the country from outside the White House. And that the “Obama Anonymous” network of staffers embedded in the government was the real threat. Since then Obama’s Kalorama mansion has become a shadow White House. And the Obama Anonymous network is doing everything it can to bring down an elected government.

Valerie Jarrett has moved into the shadow White House to plot operations against Trump. Meanwhile Tom Perez has given him control of the corpse of the DNC after fending off a Sandernista bid from Keith Ellison. Obama had hollowed out the Democrat Party by diverting money to his own Organizing for America. Then Hillary Clinton had cannibalized it for her presidential bid through Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and Donna Brazile. Now Obama owns the activist, OFA, and organizational, DNC, infrastructure.

But that’s just half the picture.

Obama controls the opposition. He will have a great deal of power to choose future members of Congress and the 2020 candidate. But he could have done much of that from Chicago or New York. The reason he didn’t decide to move on from D.C. is that the nation’s capital contains the infrastructure of the national government. He doesn’t just want to run the Democrats. He wants to run America.

The other half of the picture is the Obama Deep State. This network of political appointees, bureaucrats and personnel scattered across numerous government agencies is known only as Obama Anonymous.

Obama Inc. had targeted Trump from the very beginning when it was clear he would be the nominee.

Trump had locked down the GOP nomination in May. Next month there was a FISA request targeting him. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court denied the request, and it is still unknown whether the request targeted Trump, or only his associates, but it’s silly to pretend that the submission of such a request a month after he became the presumptive GOP nominee was apolitical.

The second, narrower, FISA request came through in October.  This one was approved. The reason for getting a FISA request in October was even more obvious than June. October is the crucial month in presidential elections. It’s the month of the “October Surprise” when the worst hit pieces based on the keenest opposition research is unleashed. Obama’s opposition research on Trump involved eavesdropping on a server in Trump Tower. Nixon would have been very jealous.

After the election, Obama Inc. began to spread out its bets. Some of his people migrated into his network of political organizations. Others remained embedded in the government. While the former would organize the opposition, the latter would sabotage, undermine and try to bring down Trump.

An unprecedented campaign for full spectrum dominance was being waged in domestic politics.

Political opposition wasn’t a new phenomenon; even if a past president centralizing control of the organizational and activist arms of his party to wage war on his successor was unprecedented. But weaponizing unelected government officials to wage war on an elected government was a coup.

Obama Anonymous conducted its coup in layers. The first layer partnered congressional Democrats with OA personnel to retain control of as much of the government as possible by the Obama Deep State. They did it by blocking Trump’s nominees with endless hearings and protests. The second layer partnered congressional Democrats with the deeper layer of Obama operatives embedded in law enforcement and intelligence agencies who were continuing the Obama investigations of Trump. 

This second layer sought to use the investigation to force out Trump people who threatened their control over national security, law enforcement and intelligence. It is no coincidence that their targets, Flynn and Sessions, were in that arena. Or that their views on Islamic terror and immigration are outside the consensus making them easy targets for Obama Anonymous and its darker allies.

These darker allies predate Obama. The tactics being deployed against Trump were last used by them in a previous coup during President Bush’s second term. The targets back then had included Bush officials, an Iran skeptic, pro-Israel activists and a Democrat congresswoman. The tactics, eavesdropping, leaks, false investigations, dubious charges and smear campaigns against officials, were exactly the same.


 
Anyone who remembers the cases of Larry Franklin, Jane Harman and some others will recognize them. Before that they were used to protect the CIA underestimates of Soviet capabilities that were broken through by Rumsfeld’s Halloween Massacre and Team B which helped clear the way for Reagan’s defeat of the Soviet Union.

Under Bush, the Deep State was fighting against any effort to stop Iran’s nuclear program. It did so by eliminating and silencing opposition within the national security establishment and Congress through investigations of supposed foreign agents. That left the field clear for it to force a false National Intelligence Estimate on President Bush which claimed that Iran had halted its nuclear program.

Obama broke out the same tactics when he went after Iran Deal opponents. Once again members of Congress were spied on and the results were leaked to friendly media outlets. Before the wiretapping of Trump’s people, the NSA was passing along conversations of Iran Deal opponents to the White House which were used to coordinate strategy in defense of the illegal arrangement with Islamic terrorists.

The same wall between government and factional political agendas that Nixon’s “White House Plumbers” had broken through on the way to Watergate had been torn down. NSA eavesdropping was just another way to win domestic political battles. All it took was accusing the other side of treason.

And worse was to come.

During the Iran Deal battle, the NSA was supposedly filtering the eavesdropped data it passed along.

In its last days, Obama Inc. made it easier to pass along unfiltered personal information to the other agencies where Obama loyalists were working on their investigation targeting Trump. The NSA pipeline now makes it possible for the shadow White House to still gain intelligence on its domestic enemies.

And the target of the shadow White House is the President of the United States.

There is now a President and an Anti-President. A government and a shadow government. The anti-President controls more of the government through his shadow government than the real President.

The Obama network is an illegal shadow government. Even its “light side” as an opposition group is very legally dubious. Its “shadow side” is not only illegal, but a criminal attack on our democracy.

When he was in power, Obama hacked reporters like FOX News’ James Rosen and CBS News’ Sharyl Attkisson. He eavesdropped on members of Congress opposed to the Iran Deal. Two men who made movies he disliked ended up in jail. But what he is doing now is even more deeply disturbing.

Obama no longer legally holds power. His Deep State network is attempting to overturn the results of a presidential election using government employees whose allegiance is to a shadow White House. Tactics that were illegal when he was in office are no longer just unconstitutional, they are treasonous.

Obama Inc. has become a state within a state. It is a compartmentalized network of organizations, inside and outside the government, that claim that they are doing nothing illegal as individual groups because they are technically following the rules within each compartment, but the sheer scope of the illegality lies in the covert coordination between these “revolutionary cells” infecting our country.

It is a criminal conspiracy of unprecedented scope. Above all else, it is the most direct attack yet on a country in which governments are elected by the people, not by powerful forces within the government.

"We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain,” President Lincoln declared at Gettysburg.  “That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Obama’s shadow government is not just a war on President Trump. It is a war on that government of the people, by the people and for the people. If he succeeds, then at his touch, it will perish from the earth.

Obama’s third term has begun. Our Republic is in danger.

31
David Stockman correctly diagnoses (IMHO) the current debt calamity we are living in, and says that stocks are wildly overvalued, and Trump is powerless to stop this train wreck from occurring this year:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xgNncFHAng


32
Politics & Religion / Obama's Shadow Presidency...
« on: February 15, 2017, 05:53:32 PM »
Unprecedented, but then so was Obama's Presidency - with it's explicit goal of dismantling this nation as founded.  He has hardly given up on that goal, and will work very hard to undermine Trump, along with many D.C. career appointees who despise Trump and his plan to root out corruption.  This promises to be a long, nasty fight.  I think Trump is up for it, however.  Even Republicans in Congress are in many cases working to dismantle his Presidency - just as it has begun.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/265808/obamas-shadow-presidency-matthew-vadum


33
Politics & Religion / Obama's Shadow Presidency...
« on: February 15, 2017, 11:41:43 AM »
This is entirely unprecedented - but then - so is Barack Obama and his efforts as U.S. President to dismantle the nation as founded:

http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/265808/obamas-shadow-presidency-matthew-vadum


34
Politics & Religion / Russian insiders fear Trump assassination?
« on: February 14, 2017, 12:25:38 PM »
With full understanding of the fact that this comes second-hand from Foreign Policy magazine via InfoWars - I offer it for what it's worth.  Rush Limbaugh today opined on his radio program that Washington establishment insiders - including Republicans - will do anything to discredit and eliminate Trump, as he poses a threat to their comfortable positions of power and influence.  Limbaugh advised that Trump should aggressively root out these disloyal operators and name names.  He also stated that he feels that it is a grave mistake on Trump's part to ask for Flynn's resignation IF it were done primarily because of the media screaming for his scalp.  It will only embolden them, said Limbaugh.

http://www.infowars.com/russian-insiders-fear-washington-establishment-will-assassinate-trump/


35
Politics & Religion / Global Debt Level is Unsustainable...
« on: February 13, 2017, 07:34:48 PM »
The author is correct here - this ought to be blindingly obvious at this point:

www.sovereignman.com/trends/worlds-largest-hedge-fund-manager-predicts-bleak-future-for-markets-20855/


36
Irreversible Damage - The U.S. Economy Cannot Be Repaired

Brandon Smith - February 2, 2017


As I outlined in my article 'The False Economic Narrative Will Die In 2017', the mainstream media has been carefully crafting the propaganda meme that the Trump administration is inheriting a global economy in “ascension,” when in fact, the opposite is true. Trump enters office at a time of longstanding decline and will likely witness severe and accelerated decline over the course of the next year. The signs are already present, and this fits exactly with the basis for my prediction of the Trump election win — conservative movements are indeed being set up as scapegoats for a global economic crisis that international financiers actually created.

Plus, it doesn’t help that Trump keeps boasting about the farcical Dow hitting record highs after his entry into the White House. Talk about the perfect setup…

With the speed at which Trump is issuing executive orders, my concern is that people’s heads will be spinning so fast they will start to assume an appearance of economic progress. Here is the issue — some problems simply cannot be fixed, at least not in a top down fashion. Some disasters cannot be prevented. Sometimes, a crisis has to run its course before a nation or society or economy can return to stability. This is invariably true of the underlying crisis within the U.S. economy.

It is imperative that liberty activists and conservatives avoid false hope in fiscal recovery and remain vigilant and prepared for a breakdown within the system. Despite the sudden political sea change with Trump and the Republican party in majority control of the D.C. apparatus, there is nothing that can be done through government to ease fiscal tensions at this time. Here are some of the primary reasons why:

Government Does Not Create Wealth

Government is a wealth-devouring machine. The bigger the government, the more adept it is at snatching capital and misallocating it. Such a system is inherently unequipped to repair an economy in a stagflationary spiral.

I’m hearing a whole lot of talk lately on all the jobs that will be created through Trump’s infrastructure spending plans, which reminds me of the desperation at the onset of the Great Depression and the efforts by Herbert Hoover to reignite the U.S. economy through a series of public works programs. Reality does not support a successful outcome for this endeavor.

First off, Trump’s ideas for infrastructure spending to kick start a U.S. recovery are not new. The Obama administration and Congress passed the largest transportation spending bill in more than a decade in 2015 and pushed for a similar strategy to what is now being suggested by Trump. I should point out though that like Herbert Hoover, Obama’s efforts in this area were essentially fruitless. Obama was the first president since Hoover to see “official” annual U.S. GDP growth drop below 3 percent for the entirety of his presidency, with GDP in 2016 dropping to a dismal 1.6 percent.

Though projects like the Hoover Dam were epic in scope and electrifying to the public imagination during the Depression, they did little to fuel the overall long-term prospects of the American economy. This is because government is incapable of creating wealth; it can only steal wealth from the citizenry through taxation to pay debts conjured out of thin air, or, it can strike a devil’s bargain with central banks to print its way to fake prosperity.

Some might argue that Trump is more likely to redirect funds from poorly conceived Obama-era programs instead of increasing taxes or printing, but this does not change the bigger picture. Redirected funds are still taxpayer funds, and those funds would be far better spent if they were returned to taxpayers rather than wasted in a vain effort to increase GDP by a percentage point. Beyond this, the number of jobs generated through the process will be a drop in the bucket compared to the 100 million plus people no longer employed within the U.S. at this time.

Bottom line? Though new roads and a wall on the southern border are winners for many conservatives, infrastructure spending is a non-solution in preventing a long-term fiscal disaster.

Interdependency Is Hard To Break

Another prospect for raising funds to pay for job generating public works projects is the use of tariffs on foreign imports. Specifically, imports of goods from countries which have maintained unfair trade advantages through global agreements like NAFTA, CAFTA or the China Trade Bill. This is obviously a practical concept and it was always the intention of the founding father post-revolution for government to generate most of its funding through taxation of foreign imports and interstate commerce, rather than taxation of the hard earned incomes of the citizenry. However, the idea is not without consequences.

Unfortunately, globalists have spent the better part of a half-century ensuring that individual nations are completely financially dependent on one another. The U.S. is at the very CENTER of this interdependency with our currency as the world reserve standard. In order to change the nature of the inderdependent system, we have to change the nature of our participation within that system. This means, in order to assert large tariffs on countries like China (which Trump has suggested), America would have to be willing to sacrifice the main advantage it enjoys within the interdependent model — we would have to sacrifice the dollar’s world reserve status.

Keep in mind, this is likely to be done for us in an aggressive manner by nations like China. China’s considerable dollar and treasury bond holds can be liquidated, and despite claims by mainstream shills, this WILL in fact have destructive effects on the U.S. economy.

Also keep in mind that with higher tariffs come higher prices on the shelf. The majority of goods consumed by Americans come from outside the country. Higher tariffs only work to our advantage when we have a manufacturing base capable of producing the goods we need at prices we can afford. The American manufacturing base within our own nation is essentially nonexistent compared to the Great Depression. In order to levy tariffs we would need a level of production support we simply do not have.

The point is, an unprecedented change in America's production dynamic would have to happen so that we do not face heavy fiscal consequences for the use of tariffs as an economic weapon.

Manufacturing Takes Time To Rebuild

Much excitement has been garnered by reports that certain U.S. corporations will be bringing some manufacturing back within our borders over the course of Trump’s first term as president. And certainly this is something that needs to happen. We should have never outsourced our manufacturing capability in the first place. But, is this too little too late? I believe so.

I remember back in 2008/2009 mainstream economists were applauding the Federal Reserve’s bailout efforts and the call for quantitative easing, because, they argued, this would diminish the dollar’s value on the global market, which would make American goods less expensive, and by extension inspire a manufacturing renaissance. Of course, this never happened, which only adds to the mountain of evidence proving that most mainstream economists are intellectual idiots.

It is important that we do not fall into the same false-hope trap in 2017. While Trump may or may not handle matters more aggressively, there is only so much that can be accomplished through politics. Rebuilding a manufacturing base after decades of outsourcing takes time. Many years, in fact. Factories have to be commissioned, money has to change many hands, wages have to be scouted for the best possible labor per-dollar spent and people have to be trained from the very ground up in how to produce goods again. In many cases, the skill sets required to maintain functioning factories in the U.S. (from engineers to machinists to assembly line labor to the people who know how to manage it all) just don’t exist anymore.  All we have left are millions of retail and food service workers forming mobs to demand $15 an hour, which is simply not going to encourage a return to manufacturing.

Beyond this, at least in the short term, America will have a much stronger dollar on the global market, rather than a weaker dollar, due to the fact that the Federal Reserve has initiated a renewed series of interest rate increases just as Trump entered office.  While the mainstream theorizes that the Fed will turn "dovish" and back away from rate hikes, I think this is a rather naive notion.  It serves the elites far better to create a battle between Trump and the Fed - therefore, I see no reason for the Fed to back away from its rate hike process.  Trump will demand a weaker dollar, the Fed won't give it to him, and ultimately, the global economy will start to see the dollar as a risky venture and dump it as the world reserve; which is what the globalist have wanted all along so that they can introduce the SDR as a bridge to a new world currency.

With a "strong" dollar (relative to other indexes) there is even LESS incentive for foreign nations to buy our goods now than there was after the credit crisis in 2008. If the dollar loses world reserve status (as I believe it will during Trump’s first term), then at that point we will have a swiftly falling currency — but too swift to fuel a manufacturing reboot.

Is there even enough internal wealth to support the rise of manufacturing within the U.S. for a period of time necessary for our economy to rebalance?  If there is I’m not seeing it.  We are a nation mired in debt.  So much so that even selling off our natural resources would not erase the problem.

Ultimately, the shift away from being tied to a globalized system towards a self-contained producer nation with a citizenry wealthy enough to sustain that production in light of limited exports to foreign buyers is a shift that requires incredible foresight, precision and ample time. It is not something that can be ramrodded into existence through force or by government decree. In fact, the act of trying to force the change haphazardly will only agitate an economy already on the verge of calamity.

Solutions Start With The Citizenry, Not Washington

I understand that conservatives in particular want to “make America great again,” and I fully agree with that goal. But, someone has to point out the inconsistencies in the current strategy and recognize that the situation is beyond repair. To make America great again would require decentralized efforts to maximize production and self reliance at a local level, not centralized federal tinkering with the economy. The globalists have been far too thorough in their programs of interdependency. The only way out now is for the system to crash and for the right people to be in place to rebuild.

Sadly, not only will a crash result in great tragedy for many Americans, but it is also an outcome the globalists prefer. They believe that THEY will be the men in the right place at the right time to rebuild the system in an even more centralized fashion. They hope to sacrifice the old world order to inspire the social desperation needed to convince the masses of the need for a “new world order.” Again, this crash cannot be avoided, it can only be mitigated. We can prepare and become self sufficient. We can fight to ensure that the globalists are not in a position to rebuild the system in their image once the dust settles. But, we should not place too much expectation that the Trump administration will be able to solve any of our economic problems, if that is even their intent.  The solution remains in our hands, not in the hands of the White House.


38
Trump, master of media combat, turned this term around on them - now all of a sudden they want to "retire" the term.  Cowards.

www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/265466/media-will-pay-price-its-fake-news-daniel-greenfield


39
Politics & Religion / Sober Analysis by Thomas Sowell...
« on: December 14, 2016, 09:01:41 AM »
As always, Sowell makes a calm assessment of the situation we face:

http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/265136/where-are-we-thomas-sowell


40
Politics & Religion / Glenn Beck is a con man...
« on: September 26, 2016, 05:18:25 PM »
This passage is from the Wikipedia entry for Glenn Beck.  I maintain that he is a (possibly brilliant - or alternatively extremely talented, if you prefer) con man.  He'd give P.T. Barnum a run for his money:

On November 10, 2014, Beck announced on TheBlaze that he had been suffering from a severe neurological disorder for at least the last five years.[44] He described many strong and debilitating symptoms which made it difficult to work,[45] and that he had "a string of health issues that quite honestly made me look crazy, and quite honestly, I have felt crazy because of them."[46] Beck related that a chiropractor who specializes in "chiropractic neurology", Frederick Carrick, had "diagnosed [him] with several health issues, including an autoimmune disorder, which he didn’t name, and adrenal fatigue." Over a period of ten months he had received a series of treatments and felt better.[47] A number of medical experts have expressed doubt about the legitimacy of Beck's diagnosis, treatment,[48] and the credentials of the chiropractor,[49] with Yale University neurologist Steven Novella dismissing chiropractic neurology as "pseudoscience": "Chiropractic neurology does not appear to be based on any body of research, or any accumulated scientific knowledge,....[and] appears to me to be the very definition of pseudoscience."[50]


41
Politics & Religion / Re: Tea Party, Glen Beck and related matters
« on: September 26, 2016, 01:11:16 PM »
Yes - sadly, I think Beck is essentially a con man, quite possibly with a serious psychiatric disorder.  I say this having attended his "Restoring Honor Rally" in Washington, D.C. at the Lincoln Memorial in 2010.  At that point I thought he was genuine.  
His actions and statements since then have proven otherwise.

42
Politics & Religion / Re: Tea Party, Glen Beck and related matters
« on: September 26, 2016, 12:56:20 PM »
Glenn Beck went bat-s**t crazy right after Trump won the Republican nomination.  The man is mentally unstable, in my opinion.

43
Despite mall shooter’s “SubhanAllah” post and admiration for ISIS caliph, police search for motive

September 26, 2016 10:44 am By Robert Spencer

He had a history of violence and sexual abuse of women — almost as if he grew up in a culture that revered violence and thought of non-Muslim women as “uncovered meat.” He posted admiration for al-Baghdadi and Khamenei and a call for Muslims to repeat “SubhanAllah” multiple times.

Maybe he wasn’t a jihadi and there is some mitigating explanation for all of this. When authorities refuse to discuss it and appear to dismiss it out of hand, however, it only reinforces the impression that there is some deliberate effort to cover up jihad attacks — an impression that authorities reinforce all too often.



“A portrait of violence emerges of suspect in Washington state mall killings,” by Rick Anderson, Los Angeles Times, September 25, 2016 (thanks to Darcy):

    A disturbing portrait began to emerge Sunday of Arcan Cetin, the man suspected of killing five people at a Washington state mall, but authorities appeared no closer to determining the motive for the crime.

    Cetin, 20, who came to the United States from Turkey as a child, was described by authorities as having called out women’s names as he allegedly killed them in a hail of bullets Friday night at the Cascade Mall in Burlington.

    By the time he was found carrying a computer bag near his home in nearby Oak Harbor about 24 hours later, he was depicted by the sheriff who arrested him as “zombie-like” and docile….

    As Lt. Chris Cammock of the police department in Mount Vernon, south of Burlington, said Saturday, he and a task force investigating the shooting have a lot of questions to answer.

    “I don’t know what his motivations were to do this. I don’t know what his motivations were to continue [shooting]. I don’t know what his motivations were to stop,” Cammock said….

    Investigators have not revealed what, if anything, Cetin — who pronounces his first name as “ar-zhan” — has told them since his arrest. But his capture and jailing were greeted with both relief and anger.

    Uhlaine Finnigan, 19, a former classmate at Oak Harbor High School, remembered Cetin as someone to avoid in the school hallways. She didn’t want to comment further Sunday but gave permission to use her recollections from a Facebook post after his arrest.

    “He’d grab and slap my friends and … even caressed my friends chest, along with other women,” she wrote. “Has been known to be violent towards girls too.”

    Another classmate, Austin Hendrix, 19, told the Seattle Times, “He would grope women in high school and middle school.”…

    According to his Facebook page, Cetin is a native of Turkey, not Russia, and goes by the nickname “the Turk.” He came to the U.S. with his parents and is a legal permanent resident, officials said.

    The Associated Press quoted a neighbor, Amber Cathey, 21, describing Cetin as “really creepy, rude and obnoxious” — so much so, she said, that she complained to apartment management and kept a stun gun handy. Cathey said she blocked him on Snapchat after he sent her a photo of his crotch.

    His Tumblr page, with “arcanmotherrussiavodkaandak47” as part of the Web address, includes a photo of him with an apparent assault-style weapon. He also posted, without comment, a photo of serial killer Ted Bundy at age 4, sitting next to a snowman.

    Court records show Cetin has faced three domestic violence assault charges in Skagit and Island counties, involving disputes with his stepfather. There is no record of any convictions. In December, however, a judge ordered Cetin not to possess firearms. The judge also suggested imposing a no-contact order, but the stepfather objected, saying Cetin was going through “a hard time” and needed the stepfather’s help.

    One post on Cetin’s Tumblr page urged readers to repeat the phrase “Subhan Allah” (“Glory to God”) 10 times “and then reblog this, do not stop reblogging it.”

    Police had no comment on the suspect’s religious beliefs.

44
Politics & Religion / Keith Lamont Scott was scum...
« on: September 23, 2016, 12:04:24 PM »
Protest Thugs and the Real Evil in Charlotte

Nothing says “family man” like assaulting women and children.

September 23, 2016

Daniel Greenfield - Frontpagemag.com


Keith Lamont Scott was scum.

He had been convicted of assault with a deadly weapon in two different states and convicted of assault in three states. He had been hit with “assault with intent to kill” charges in the 90s. His record of virtue included “assault on a child under 12” and “assault on a female.”

The media spin; “Family and neighbors call Scott a quiet ‘family man.’”

Nothing says “quiet” like “assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill” and nothing says “family man” like assaulting women and children.

Keith Lamont Scott, the latest martyr of Black Lives Matter and its media propaganda corps, was shot while waving a gun around. He had spent 7 years in jail for “aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.”

This vicious monster’s career of crime ended when he was shot by Brentley Vinson, an African-American police officer, protecting himself from the latest rampage by this “quiet family man.”

Brentley Vinson is everything that Scott isn’t. The son of a police officer, Brentley dreamed of following in his father’s footsteps. He used to organize his football team’s bible studies and mentored younger players. Former teammates describe him as a “great guy” with “good morals.” His former coach calls him a “natural leader” and says that, “We need more Brent Vinsons… in our communities.”

Except that Obama, Black Lives Matter, the media, the NAACP and everyone else going after this bright and decent African-American officer has decided that what we really need are more Keith Lamont Scotts. And the streets of Charlotte are full of “Scotts” throwing rocks at police, assaulting reporters and wrecking everything in sight in marches that are as “peaceful” as Scott was a “quiet family man.”

That’s what Hillary Clinton wanted when she tweeted that, “We have two names to add to a long list of African-Americans killed by police officers. It’s unbearable, and it needs to become intolerable.”

What exactly should be intolerable? An African-American police officer defending his life against a violent criminal who happened to be black? Should black criminals enjoy a special immunity? The greatest victims of black criminals are black communities.

Whom does Hillary Clinton imagine she’s helping here? Instead of standing with heroic African-American police officers like Vinson, she’s championing criminal scum like Scott.

Tim Kaine, Hillary’s No. 2, wants us to think about Scott’s family. We should do that. Scott’s brother announced on camera that all “white people” are “devils.” Timmy should check to see if he can get an exemption from white devildom.  But if there are any white devils, it’s men like Kaine and women like Hillary who enable the worst behavior in a troubled community while punishing those who try to help.

Every time the lie about “peaceful” protests is repeated, another black community becomes unlivable.

Twenty police officers have been injured and National Guard troops have arrived to deal with all those “peaceful” protests. Protesters chanted, “Black Lives Matter” and “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” before throwing things at police and then peacefully shooting each other. Stores had their windows broken and decorated with Black Lives Matter graffiti. A Walmart was peacefully looted and trucks were torched.

A police officer was peacefully hit by a car. Another was peacefully hit in the face with a rock. Mobs besieged and attempted to break into hotels. Reporters were attacked and a photographer was nearly thrown into a fire. White people were targeted by the racist Black Lives Matter mob and assaulted.

But all these peaceful rioters are probably just quiet family men too.

The peaceful protests are as big a lie as the “bookish” Keith Lamont Scott reading a book in his car. Police had no trouble finding a gun. They couldn’t have found Scott anywhere near a book. The only thing he could have done with a book is try to beat someone to death with it. Maybe a child.

Scott wasn’t a quiet family man; he was a violent criminal with a horrifying vicious streak. He and the rest of the Black Lives Matter rioters remind us of the monsters that we need dedicated police officers to protect us from.

The spin on what happened between a deranged black criminal and a courageous black police officer fell apart as fast as the Freddie Gray case, where black police officers were targeted and a city terrorized over conspiracy theories relating to the accidental death of a drug dealer.

The claims of racism are absurd. Not only was Scott shot by an African-American police officer, but Charlotte Police Chief Kerr Putney, who has taken the lead in defending him, is also African-American.

Are we supposed to believe that an African-American police officer and an African-American police chief are racists or that these two black men took the lead in a genocidal conspiracy to kill black men?

That’s the laughable premise of the racist Black Lives Matter hatefest that alternates between “Stop killing us” street theater and violent assaults on police officers, reporters and anyone in the area.

But the truth doesn’t matter. Black Lives Matter rioters are still chanting, “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” long after the Michael Brown lie fell apart. They’re holding up signs reading, “It Was a Book.”  The lie is backed by some of the biggest media corporations in the country, by $130 million from George Soros and the Ford Foundation, by Barack Hussein Obama and by Hillary Clinton.

These are the malign forces destroying Charlotte, as they trashed Baltimore. On the ground there are the vulture community organizers of Black Lives Matter, funded by the left, who parachute in to organize race riots, behind them are the reporters who sell the spin live on the air and the photographers who capture glamor shots of the racist rioters, and after them come the lawyers of the DOJ out to ruin, terrorize and intimidate whatever law enforcement survived the riots.

They did it in Ferguson and a dozen other places. Now they want to do it in Charlotte.

They want to do it because they hate white people and black people. They hate peace and decency. They hate the idea of people getting up in the morning and working for a living. They hate the idea of good officers, white and black men and women, like Brentley Vinson, who genuinely believe in doing the right thing. They want unearned power. They demand unearned wealth. And they thrive on destruction.

This is the real evil in Charlotte. And we need to stand up to it. From the ghetto to the manors of the liberal elite from burning cars to pricey restaurants in exclusive neighborhoods, it plots against us.

It is a lie repeated a million times. Sometimes the lie is simple. Other times it’s sophisticated. But the way to fight it is to begin with the truth.

The truth is that Keith Lamont Scott was a violent criminal who came to a bad end because of his own actions. Just like Michael Brown, Freddie Gray and too many other Black Lives Matter martyrs to count.

The truth is that everything Black Lives Matter does reminds us of why we need police officers.

The truth is that this is not about race, but about those who want to build and those who want to destroy. It’s about the difference between Brentley Vinson and Keith Lamont Scott.

It’s about what kind of country we want to be. Is it a country that celebrates a young black football player who chose to follow in his father’s footsteps, who organized bible study and helped others, who risked his life to keep other people safe. Or is it one that celebrates Keith Lamont Scott, who assaulted a woman, a child and anyone else he could get at, who terrorized three states and died as he lived.

Obama and the left want a nation of Keith Lamont Scotts. But now it’s our turn to choose.

45
DEPORT THE RAHAMI FAMILY

It’s time to send Muslim terrorists a message.

September 21, 2016  Daniel Greenfield - FrontPageMag.com


The Rahami family came to America from Afghanistan as refugees. They made life miserable for their neighbors. When the police tried to bring some order, they cried Islamophobia.

Two of the Rahamis have posted in support of the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda and other Islamic terror groups on social media. The third actually built and planted bombs to kill Americans. He terrorized two states, tried to kill and maim countless Americans and then shot it out with police.

Ahmad Khan Rahami, the central figure in the terror case, brought his wife here from Pakistan and she departed days before his attack. His mother left for Pakistan a few weeks before his bombing spree.

The media, eager for a story of redemption, has widely broadcast the claim that Mohammed Rahami, Ahmad’s father, told the FBI that he was a terrorist. But that was years ago. And Mohammed didn’t turn in his son because there was a terror plot, but because he attacked family members.

As Mohammed put it, “Because he doing bad. He stab my son and hit my wife. I put him in the jail."

This wasn’t Mohammed Rahami being a good citizen. It was a dysfunctional oversized family of Muslim refugees causing problems for local law enforcement over their own internal disputes.

Ahmad stabbed his brother in the leg with a knife. His father told the FBI that Ahmad was a terrorist. Then he recanted the accusation and said that he had made it out of anger.

This wasn’t patriotism. It wasn’t helpful. It was selfish abuse of the system.

We get a lot of lectures from politicians about the contributions of Muslims, especially refugees, to America.

Here are the sum total contributions of the Rahami family to America. 29 wounded people in Manhattan. 1 wounded police officer in Linden, New Jersey. A chicken place that was the subject of disputes with law enforcement. A lawsuit against Elizabeth, New Jersey stemming from that chicken place, which threw around accusations of Islamophobia. Previous legal issues and a jail sentence for Ahmad over his family dispute. 1 assaulted police officer due to issues with the chicken place.

Then there’s Ahmad’s unwed girlfriend and his baby whose case will be wending through the courts.

A conservative ballpark figure for the Rahamis and their various legal issues would be $100 million. Considering the sheer cost of scrambling manpower and resources across states, the hospital bills, the various insurance costs, the jail time, trial and security, that’s probably erring on the thrifty side.

Unless one of the Rahamis cures cancer, there is nothing they can do to even the score.

3 of the Rahami children support Islamic terrorists. For all the nonsense about “internet radicalization”, it’s obvious that support for terrorism and hatred for America ran in the family. And it might not even end with Ahmad sneering on a stretcher. There’s a history of multiple siblings engaging in terrorism. The most effective Islamic terror cells in this country in recent years have been siblings and married couples.

We can waste more time puzzling it out or we can just get the Rahamis out of the country and let them be Pakistan’s problem or Afghanistan’s annoyance. They don’t have to be our problem anymore.

And that is what we should have done back when these “refugees” first tried to set up shop here.

America does not have a desperate need for terrible fried chicken places or domestic disputes. The FBI doesn’t need to waste more time chasing terror suspects who might not have evolved into terrorists yet because they’re too busy stabbing other family members. It doesn’t need more accusations of Islamophobia. And it does not need the Rahamis.

Immigration policy is about making intelligent choices. And we are making the dumbest immigration choices possible.

The Rahamis and the Tsarnaevs, two dysfunctional terror families of asylumites, are typical of our terrible decisions. Both ate up large numbers of resources while giving us only terror and death.

Politicians tell us that Muslim refugees “contribute” to this country. But is it possible that we can get non-terrorists to make us fried chicken? And is cheap fried chicken really worth the cost of bombs going up? Would we be willing to pay a dollar more for fried chicken so we can just get on a plane without the TSA or so that the countless people who have been killed from 9/11 and onward could still be with us?

Let’s have an adult conversation about this crisis. And we can start by recognizing that granting asylum to the Rahamis was a mistake. If Ahmad’s bombs had worked properly, it might have been an even bigger mistake. As it was countless people were traumatized, countless millions have been squandered on dealing with the Rahamis and there’s no reason to believe that’s about to stop.

We can and should undo that mistake.

Denaturalizing those Rahami family members who have made statements supportive of Islamic terror and then deporting them would be an excellent start. It would send a message to other terror families that playing dumb after their son goes on his terror spree won’t work anymore.

But, for that matter, there’s no reason not to deport the entire Rahami family except technicalities.

We let them in under false pretenses. We let them stay under false pretenses. They have been nothing but trouble. We can’t undo the damage they have done in the past, but we can prevent them from doing any more of it in the future.

It’s either that or we can rerun the same tired narrative from every previous attack. The family will offer contradictory statements. Neighbors and school friends will be shocked at how normal Ahmad was. Rahami’s lawyer will blame everything from discrimination to mental illness. The whole soap opera will play out for the next few days until we all get tired of it. Just the way that it did with the Tsarnaevs.

We’ve seen this movie too many times. Maybe we should change the channel.

Denaturalization and deportation will send a message that we’re serious. It will encourage families of terrorists to come forward when they actually suspect something, instead of abusing the system.

When a Muslim terrorist kills Israelis, Israel demolishes his house. This sends a message that the terrorists are destroying exactly the thing that they are trying to gain. They want to conquer Israel and take over its land. But instead their racist atrocities are depriving them of the land.

Ahmad Rahami sought to kill non-Muslims in order to impose the rule of Islam on America. His writings contained a call to kill non-Muslims. They expressed admiration for Anwar Al-Awlaki, the Al Qaeda leader, who had declared, "We will implement the rule of Allah on earth by the tip of the sword."

We don’t need to demolish the Rahami family home or their fried chicken place. But we do need to make it clear that Rahami’s actions have not only failed to bring this goal closer, but represent a setback toward that goal by removing the rest of his family from the country.

The Rahamis have been our problem for far too long. It’s time to make them someone else’s problem. We can go back to living in denial until the next attack or we can send the Muslim terrorists of tomorrow a message.

46
Crafty:

Over the relative short-term, yes.  Point acknowledged.  However the vast majority of those people may lose all of their gains in one breathtaking plunge when the crash occurs if they fail to time it properly, which is virtually impossible to do.  I will eat my words if Wesbury accurately predicts the downturn.  I'm not losing sleep over this prospect.

47
Thank you, GM!   :lol:  Wesbury conveniently fails to mention that JUST TO MAINTAIN PACE WITH THE POPULATION GROWTH (workers retiring vs. new young people reaching working age) requires that the economy create approximately 250,000 jobs/month.  That hasn't happened on average SINCE 2008.  There is no recovery.  It doesn't exist.  It's a BIG LIE.  It's nothing more than propaganda designed to prop up the political status quo which is benefiting people like Wesbury.


48
But of course NPR and the rest of the traditional media are insisting Trump made this up out of thin air, and it is HE who is guilty of starting the controversy:

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/09/16/hillary-clinton-campaign-manager-admits-birtherism-started/

49
Politics & Religion / Ugly Economic Developments Coming Very Soon...
« on: September 15, 2016, 01:53:40 PM »
The World is Turning Ugly as 2016 Winds Down

Brandon Smith - www.alt-market.com

I have to say that the negative reverberations in our current economic and political environment are becoming so strong that it is impossible for people to not feel at least some uneasiness in their gut. I imagine this is the same kind of sensation many felt from 1914 to 1918 during World War I and the terrible birth of communism, or perhaps in the early 1930s at the onset of the Great Depression and the rise of fascism. Some global changes are so disturbing that they send shockwaves through the collective unconscious before they ever hit the mainstream. People know that something is about to happen, even if they cannot yet clearly define it.

At the beginning of August in my article “2016 Will End With Economic Instability And A Trump Presidency” I stated that:

"I believe a softer downturn will begin before the election (the U.S. presidential election) takes place, most likely starting in September. This will give a boost to the Trump campaign, or at least, that is what the polls will likely say. I would also watch for some banking officials and media pundits to blame this downturn on Trump’s rise in the polling data. The narrative will be that just the threat of a Trump presidency is “putting the markets on edge."

Unfortunately, it would seem so far that this prediction was correct. Currently global markets have crossed into severe volatility with a vengeance after around three months of eerie calm. Why? Well, as I warned in the same article linked above as well as numerous others since the beginning of this year, the Federal Reserve is determined to continue raising interest rates into a recessionary environment as they almost always do, and equities markets addicted to cheap debt cannot tolerate even one additional rate hike from the central bank.

So far all evidence suggests that the Fed plans to raise rates again soon; I believe at the end of this month.  The only seemingly "anti-hike" voice at the Fed so far has been board member Lael Brainard, but even her statements promote a false narrative that a America is on track to "recovery".

Many normally “dovish” members of the Fed have openly suggested that now is the time to hike.  Voting members at the Fed have been vocal about a shift in policy.  The latest example being head of the Bank of Cleveland, Loretta Mester. She argues that rates have remained “too low for too long,” and rejected notions that lower rates are necessary to maintain stability.

This is the same kind of language Fed members used right before the rate hike in December 2015, the first rate hike in around a decade.  And, to add to the fervor, even JP Morgan Chase head Jamie Dimon is calling for interest rates to rise.

Get ready folks, because all the naysayers that claimed another rate hike is “impossible" are probably about to be proven wrong yet again.

My warning on an accelerating Trump campaign being blamed for weak stock markets has also come true. Already, Bloomberg is launching the meme that the idea of Hillary Clinton losing the election to Trump “because of her health” is a “landmine for vulnerable markets.”

This is some incredible spin by the elitist controlled media, but again, very predictable. The globalists are setting the stage to blame the economic collapse they created on conservative movements. Clinton’s “health issues” are being set up as the scapegoat for a Trump win, which conjures additional social unrest as many on the Left will argue (in the event of a Trump win) that Trump prevailed on a technicality. That is to say, the extreme Left will argue that Trump’s presidency is not legitimate.

Another scenario is also possible but I think less likely — the potential for Clinton to bow out of the election due to her health, causing a rationale for a postponed election. I do not think a postponed election really serves the interests of the elites, but it would certainly trigger massive chaos if it occurred. Only in the strangest of any election year in American history could this even be thought of as a legitimate danger.

Another global indicator, oil, is tumbling yet again as all the jawboning from OPEC on a “production freeze” has failed to boost crude prices for more than a week at a time. Frankly, no one is buying the hype anymore. Those who bet on the WTI index shooting past $50 to $60 a barrel this year should have been paying more attention to alternative analysts. The only other factor that has kept oil from crashing down into the $30 range has been random inventory draws. These reports, though, are little more than a stop gap. Companies have been shifting crude to different facilities in order to create the illusion of inventory draws and higher demand. But usually within a week the reports catch up to the real supply and an inventory spike sends oil crashing down again.

Add to this the latest news that Congress has passed a bill allowing the families of 9/11 victims to sue the Saudi government for their part in the attack, and you have a recipe for a dumping of the dollar as the world’s petrocurrency. Even if Obama vetoes the bill, I believe a two-thirds majority of congress will override that veto. A catastrophe in oil markets is inevitable.

Whether in oil markets or other sectors of finance and social stability, make no mistake, catastrophe is exactly what national governments are preparing for.

This is most obvious today in the European Union. The German government in their first revision of their civil defense plan since the cold war has warned the public to prepare for an unspecified event by stockpiling at least 10 days worth of food and five days worth of water. Germany is also debating the idea of placing troops on the streets to “protect against ISIS.”

And Germany is not alone. French presidential candidate Nickolas Sarkozy has made some highly disturbing statements on security in a recent interview, outlining measures he believes will best protect the public from “militants.” From Reuters:

France needs to get tough on militants by creating special courts and detention facilities to boost security, the country’s former President Nicolas Sarkozy said in a interview published in Sunday newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche.

“Every Frenchman suspected of being linked to terrorism, because he regularly consults a jihadist website, or his behavior shows signs of radicalization or because is in close contact with radicalized people, must by preventively placed in a detention center,” Sarkozy said in the interview.

Sarkozy, who announced last month his candidacy for the April 2017 presidential election, has said there is no place for “legal niceties” in the fight against terrorism.

Even in the face of Islamic extremism and terrorism, the concept of “detention facilities” where people are held without charge and without trial on the mere suspicion of being a danger to society should horrify anyone with any sense. The fact of the matter is, these violations of personal freedom and of due process are NEVER used for only one group of people. Totalitarian governments ALWAYS use one group as an excuse for the police state, then over time they expand the police state outwards to oppress everyone.

This is the kind of rhetoric that liberty movement activists in the U.S. fought against in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA); but it is making a resurgence in Europe and in America as well. If you think Sarkozy is a marginal example, I recommend you re-watch this interview with Gen. Wesley Clark, who argues that “radicalized people” who are disloyal to the U.S. government should be placed in internment camps. He suggests that Britain, Germany and France need to take similar measures. It would appear that they are doing just that.

Never forget that “radicalism” is an arbitrary designation, and the label can be applied to just about anyone for any reason. A trend in police state language is growing in the mainstream in the name of fighting terrorism, but the abrupt urgency in Europe is rather odd. Only a few months ago, EU leaders were using some outrageous mental gymnastics in order to avoid confronting the notion of Islamic terrorism. Now, they are suddenly concerned? Why?

I believe Europe is about to witness a catalyst for financial crisis, and they are using terrorism as an excuse to preposition martial law resources before this event takes place. They don’t care about stopping ISIS, but they do care about locking down and controlling an angry citizenry in the wake of an economic downturn. If a few more terrorist attacks occur in the meantime, then hey, that only helps the elites in their efforts to pacify the public for the sake of “security.”

Official preparedness warnings from Germany, for example, are of little use to the public. A supply of a mere ten days of food and five days of water is useless during any sizable crisis. But, the German government can now say that they “tried to warn people.” Sarkozy’s statements are the most blatant call for a police state I have yet seen from an establishment puppet politician, and this should worry people. The fact that he is being so open and honest about the end game indicates to me that a dangerous shift is imminent.

It would appear, according to EU government behavior, that whatever is about to happen globally is going to hit hardest in Europe first and then spread to the U.S. and the rest of the world. I recommend readers watch the EU very carefully over the next few months. If you have any financial or survival preparations you have been putting off, I suggest you take care of them before the end of this year. From what I see so far, geopolitically and economically the global situation is only going to become more unstable in the near term.

50
Politics & Religion / Walter Williams: Corrupt Academics and the Media...
« on: September 07, 2016, 11:06:41 AM »
Corrupt Academics and the Media

Walter E. Williams - Townhall.com - September 7, 2016

Some are puzzled by the dishonesty, lack of character and sheer stupidity of many people in the media. But seeing as most of them are college graduates, they don't bear the full blame. They are taught by dishonest and irresponsible academics. Let's look at it.

"A Clash of Police Policies," a column written by Dr. Thomas Sowell, presents some readily available statistics: "Homicide rates among black males went down by 18 percent in the 1940s and by 22 percent in the 1950s. It was in the 1960s, when the ideas of Chief Justice (Earl) Warren and others triumphed, that this long decline in homicide rates among black males reversed and skyrocketed by 89 percent, wiping out all the progress of the previous 20 years."

Academics and the media blame poverty and discrimination for today's crime. No one bothers to ask why crime was falling in the 1930s, '40s and '50s, when blacks faced far greater poverty and discrimination.

The 1960s riots were blamed on poverty and discrimination. Poverty and discrimination were worse in the South than in the rest of the country, but riots were not nearly so common there. Detroit's deadliest riot occurred at a time when the median income of black families in Detroit was 95 percent of their white counterparts, plus the black unemployment rate was 3.4 percent and black homeownership was higher than in other major cities.

Academics teach that the breakdown of the black family is the legacy of slavery and discrimination. They ignore the following facts. In 1950, 72 percent of black men and 81 percent of black women had been married. Also, only 17 percent of black children lived in single-parent households; today it's close to 70 percent. Every census from 1890 to 1950 showed that black labor force participation rates exceeded those of whites. During the late 1940s, the unemployment rate for black 16- and 17-year-olds was less than that for white teens.

According to the 1938 Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, that year 11 percent of black children and 3 percent of white children were born to unwed mothers. Before 1960, the number of teenage pregnancies had been decreasing; both poverty and dependency were declining; and black income was rising in both absolute and relative terms to white income. As late as 1965, 75 percent of black children were born to married women. Today over 73 percent of black babies are born to unwed mothers. Again, so much for the "legacy of slavery" argument.

Academics teach that school integration is a necessary condition for black academic excellence. Blacks, their logic implies, cannot achieve academic excellence unless they go out and capture a white kid to sit next to their kids. Public charter schools such as those in the Knowledge Is Power Program, or KIPP, and Success Academy Charter Schools are having some successes without race mixing. Sowell points out that only 39 percent of students in New York state schools who were tested recently scored at the "proficient" level in math, but 100 percent of the students at the Crown Heights Success Academy scored at that level in math. Blacks and Hispanics are 90 percent of the students in the Crown Heights Success Academy.

More than 43,000 families are on waiting lists to get their children into charter schools. Teachers unions are opposed to any alternative to public education and contribute to politicians who place obstacles and restrictions on the expansion of charter schools. The NAACP, at its 2016 national convention in Cincinnati, voted to support "a moratorium on the proliferation of privately managed charter schools."

It's easy to understand why the NAACP is against any alternative to public schools. Many of its members work in public education. However, many of those people do want alternatives for themselves. In Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, 25 percent of public-school teachers send their children to private schools. In Philadelphia, 44 percent of teachers send their children to private schools. The percentages are similar in several other cities: Cincinnati, 41 percent, Chicago, 39 percent and Rochester, New York, 38 percent. This demonstrates the dishonesty, hypocrisy and arrogance of the elite. They effectively say, "One thing for thee and another for me."

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