Tuesday, October 15, 2024
Iran's very limited options
Iran has been on the brink of possessing nukes for years now. How come that they have failed to take the final step? Easy. There is no way they could use them. They know very well that Iran would be obliterated if it fired nukes at Israel. Safest not to have them
A year after the Hamas atrocities, put to one side the street theatre of protests and Labor’s confused talking points and ask: what really is happening in the Middle East?
On October 7 last year Israel suffered the worst intelligence and defence failure since the country was founded. But now it has overcome internal political divisions to re-emerge as the strongest military power in the region.
Jerusalem has re-established deterrence dominance because of intelligence, targeting and force projection capabilities that its enemies can’t match. Now it is pushing hard to deliver a victory over Iran and its proxies that no one expected. The country has rallied because Israelis know their survival is at risk. The louder the “progressive” assault against Israel in Western democracies, the harder Israel will fight for its security.
By contrast, Iran is failing. Hezbollah, the jewel in the crown of Tehran’s foreign policy, has been blinded, its leadership killed or, literally, crippled. Israel may have started with the aim of pushing terrorist rocket launchers away from its northern border, now Benjamin Netanyahu has a shot to help the Lebanese rise up against the Iranian forces ruining the once-prosperous country.
Hamas and much of Gaza is destroyed. What emerges from the rubble will never commit atrocities again on their Jewish neighbours. War is cruel, but it is better to win than lose.
Tehran’s mullahs know many, probably most, of their people hate them. They rule by fear alone. They see the hollowness of their goosestepping military and dread Mossad’s proven ability to hit them any time they choose.
The Arab countries – Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and others – have never had less interest in supporting the fiction of a Palestinian state. They all hope Israel dismantles Iran’s proxies because these groups destabilise Arab governments.
President Joe Biden’s Middle East policy is in tatters. In October 2022, the centrepiece of his national security strategy was to “pursue diplomacy to ensure that Iran can never acquire a nuclear weapon”.
Last week CIA head Bill Burns said of Iran that “now it’s probably more like a week or a little more to produce one bomb’s worth of weapons-grade material”. Burns claimed: “I think we are reasonably confident that – working with our friends and allies – we will be able to see it relatively early on.”
So the CIA may know on Tuesday that Iran will have a nuclear weapon by Friday. If Iran is allowed to reach that point it will have more than one bomb. The Iranians must refine a large stockpile of enriched uranium to weapons-grade capability. There is enough for a dozen or more nuclear weapons.
This is as devastating an American intelligence failure as Israel missing the October 7 attacks – classic examples of not seeing the obvious while obsessing about details. Biden urged Netanyahu to “take the win” last April – meaning Israel shouldn’t retaliate against Iran’s first direct missile strikes.
Thankfully, Israel ignored the advice. Hitting back, the Israel Defence Forces showed they could disable Iranian air defence to hit any targets they wanted. That gave Tehran pause, but too late to wind back its support for Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis and other proxies. Tehran’s mistake – obvious in hindsight – is that it is one thing to train, fund, equip and motivate jihadist extremists obsessed with the “end of days” and wiping Israel off the map. It’s much harder to keep the crazies on a leash.
What happens next?
A compelling strategic logic drives Israel’s choice: it can do its best (which will be pretty good) to destroy Iran’s nuclear infrastructure or wait for Tehran to declare it has working bombs by Christmas.
Given that choice, what would you advise Netanyahu to do? Pause for a ceasefire maybe, so the proxies can rearm and start firing huge numbers of missiles at Jerusalem and Tel Aviv?
Or perhaps one would advise Israel to embrace a two-state solution, the effect of which would be to give Iran’s proxy Hamas or Fatah in the West Bank a seat in the UN. A pause gives Tehran time to reprocess the uranium it needs for nuclear weapons. No doubt the international community would firmly ask for inspectors to get access to the factories, allowing the CIA to shave a day or two off its week-long estimate for how long it takes to make a bomb.
This is the effect, if not the intent, of Albanese government policy. Australia lacks the courage, perhaps even the capability, to send a navy ship to the Red Sea to protect ships bringing goods and oil to Asia. But with no real stake in the outcome, we are urging Israel to halt combat operations so Iran has more time to build nuclear weapons.
Israel’s choice is clear – of course it will go after Iran nuclear weapons-building capabilities.
The plants reprocessing uranium into weapons-grade material aren’t mobile like the bombs will be. These targets can be “hardened” only to some extent and Israel has shown it has weapons that will dig deep into fortified underground spaces. Once the plan is made, the target set defines itself. Beyond the nuclear facilities, Israel must go after Iran’s air, missile and submarine capabilities, things that deliver nuclear warheads.
Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant has said a strike will be “lethal, precise and especially surprising”, which indicates more things will be in the air than bunker-busting bombs. No one in Tehran will be answering their phones right now.
We will owe Israel a debt if it destroys Iran’s nuclear potential. If Tehran gets nuclear weapons, Saudi Arabia will do the same, followed quickly by Egypt and others. Fundamentally, we are all better off if Israel and the US dominate the Middle East military balance. The only thing that may prevent an Israeli strike is if Biden reverses course, pressuring Tehran into a backdown on attacking Israel, bringing the proxies to heel and walking away from nuclear weapons. I can’t see Biden, much less Kamala Harris, taking that tough course of action.
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As Trump closes on victory, Harris Dems will take desperate measures
Assuming he doesn’t get assassinated before election day, it’s looking likely that Donald Trump will be the next US president. That leads me to believe Democrats will spring both an October surprise and an election day surprise in desperate last-minute efforts to keep Trump out of office.
Vice-President Kamala Harris got a very small polling bump after her TV debate with Trump. The election is so close even a small bump is important. The vice-presidential debate, where Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, clearly beat Democrat Tim Walz, stopped the Harris momentum. Vance put the case about the Biden-Harris policy failures much more strongly and clearly than Trump himself had done.
The next momentum definer was Harris finally doing a series of unscripted interviews with 60 Minutes, The View, Howard Stern and others.
The incident comes on the heels of two assassination attempts - one in Pennsylvania in which a bullet grazed Trump’s ear, and a second, aborted attempt at his Florida golf course.
These were all favourable, pro-Harris settings. Yet she was woeful. Even the friendliest question seemed to produce a stammering, hesitant, agonised retreat to her few rote phrases: “I come from a middle-class background, I’ve been a prosecutor, I’ve locked up people traffickers …”
Some of these interviews she didn’t even do live. They were meant to be “as live”. But in some cases her answers were so awful and the media outlet so sympathetic that when it finally broadcast the interview it cut out all the stammering, incoherent stuttering at the start of answers.
On The View she was asked what she would have done differently to Joe Biden. This presents a very minor challenge for a politician who doesn’t want to appear disloyal to the President but who is marketing herself as the change candidate. The obvious reply is: Biden has been a great president but one area where I think we could have done even better was … Then put in anything you like on the border, inner-city crime, etc. Instead Harris said she couldn’t think of a single thing.
All these Harris moments have become internet memes. Now, you might rightly say that 20 per cent of everything Trump says continues to be offensive, wrong or slightly nuts. That’s true. But Trump is on the media every day, doing countless interviews, speaking at countless rallies. So is Vance. Their views on key policy and values issues are pretty clear.
It may be that neither the debates nor the interviews are having a big effect, but marginal differences are crucial. The RealClearPolitics poll average now has Harris leading by 1.7 per cent nationally. That’s a narrower lead than she had a couple of weeks ago. At this stage in 2020 Biden was ahead of Trump by 10 per cent in the polls. At this point in 2016 Hillary Clinton was leading Trump by 7 per cent.
In both elections the polls seriously underestimated Trump’s vote and both results finally were extremely tight in the battleground states. If the polls are underestimating Trump by anything like those margins this time, the election is already effectively over and Trump’s a handsome winner.
But, and this is a huge but, politics is not the common law. It’s not bound by precedent. Given that there are only seven battleground states where this election will be decided, the state-based polls are particularly important. And the state-based polls have a poor record of reliability. But they all will try to correct for their anti-Trump bias last time.
However, even on the published polls, Trump, right now, is leading in the battleground states. This lead overall is tiny, just 0.4 per cent. RCP’s poll average at this stage gives Trump six of the battleground states – Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, Michigan, Arizona and Nevada. And it gives only one to Harris, Wisconsin.
So, with no toss-up states, that gives Trump what his former aide, Kellyanne Conway, describes as a “narrow landslide” in the electoral college, where he wins 302 to 236. However the RCP no toss-up map has changed back and forth between Trump winning and Harris winning several times.
The Economist magazine this week reports that its model gives Harris a 51 per cent chance of victory, which means essentially it’s even. The betting markets, which have a pretty good record, now substantially favour Trump.
Harris is doing better in the polls than Biden did with one important demographic, white college graduates. But she is doing substantially worse than Biden did with working-class voters, with Hispanics, with blacks, with men and with Catholics. Some of those constituencies she will still win, but she’ll win them by smaller margins than Biden did. That hurts her chances overall.
Hispanics are now supporting Trump at about 40 per cent, more in battleground states. That suggests they’ve become a wholly competitive demographic, which is good for American democracy. The Democrats’ woke cultural hostility to religion is hurting them with Hispanics, and with Catholics, whom Harris will lose.
Nonetheless, Trump could still lose the election. A New York Times/Siena College poll of Pennsylvania, with a respectable sample size and solid methodology, puts Harris ahead in Pennsylvania. Assuming Harris wins one electoral college vote from Nebraska – which, with Maine, is one of only two states to allocate electoral college votes by congressional districts – then Trump must win one of Wisconsin, Michigan or Pennsylvania.
Harris will win if she holds on to the three rust-belt states. No polls really give Wisconsin to Trump, he has been mostly behind in Michigan, so just as the 2000 election between George W. Bush and Al Gore came down to Florida, this election may come down to Pennsylvania.
Democrats are desperate to stop Trump, so I expect from them an October surprise, possibly some extravagant legal move against Trump, and an election day surprise, some new alleged revelation about him that he has no time to counter. These tactics haven’t worked well for Democrats so far, but if the election is indeed tight, and such “surprises” could scare off even 100,000 Trump voters out of perhaps 160 million votes overall, they just may make the difference.
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All my main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
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https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)
https://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
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Monday, October 14, 2024
Latest News on RFK Jr Landmark Censorship Case
The 5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals late Tuesday heard oral arguments in the landmark censorship case, Kennedy et al. v. Biden et al.
The hearing focused on two points, Kim Mack Rosenberg, Children’s Health Defense (CHD) general counsel, told The Defender. First, the 5th Circuit is considering whether to uphold a lower court’s August decision that two of the three plaintiffs — Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and CHD — have legal standing to bring the suit.
Second, it’s considering whether to uphold the Lousiana court’s injunction, which would prohibit the Biden administration from coordinating with social media companies to censor Kennedy and CHD’s social media posts until the lawsuit is settled.
The case — brought by Kennedy, CHD and news consumer Connie Sampognaro — alleges that President Joe Biden, Dr. Anthony Fauci and other top administration officials and federal agencies “waged a systematic, concerted campaign” to compel the nation’s three largest social media companies to censor constitutionally protected speech.
During Tuesday’s hearing, Jed Rubenfeld — Yale law professor and attorney for the plaintiffs — told judges, “District court called this the most massive attack on free speech in this nation’s history, and it would be shocking if no plaintiff in the country had standing to challenge it.”
Standing is the legal doctrine that requires plaintiffs to be able to show they have suffered direct and concrete injuries and that those injuries could be resolved in court.
The issue of standing shut down another related government censorship case, Murthy v. Missouri. The plaintiffs in Murthy v. Missouri — the states of Missouri and Arkansas, Drs. Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff and Aaron Kheriaty, The Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft and health activist Jill Hines — argued that the censorship they experienced on social media could be tied to government action and that they were likely to be censored in the future. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the plaintiffs didn’t have standing to bring their case.
The Murthy — originally Missouri et al. v. Biden et al. — and Kennedy v. Biden cases were consolidated because they shared common legal and factual issues. This allowed them to share processes, such as discovery of evidence. However, they continued to be heard and ruled on separately.
The plaintiffs in Kennedy v. Biden are much more likely to be able to prove standing than the Murthy v. Missouri plaintiffs, Mack Rosenberg said:
“With the Supreme Court’s decision in Murthy v. Missouri in the forefront on the issue of standing, we believe that the plaintiffs in our action have clearly demonstrated standing more than sufficient to meet the requirements the Supreme Court described in Murthy in June.”
Mack Rosenberg said there is clear evidence that plaintiffs Kennedy and CHD were specific targets of censorship and that they continue to be censored. “CHD in particular continues to be deplatformed from major social media sites with no end in sight.”
She said the facts “demonstrate that the injunction issued by Judge Doughty was appropriate given the circumstances and the government’s continued actions.”
Collage of Rally and Events
Legal battle has dragged on for over a year
Tuesday’s hearing was the latest development in a class action lawsuit brought by Kennedy, CHD and Sampognaro on behalf of more than 80% of U.S. adults who access news from online news aggregators and social media companies, primarily Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.
The suit was filed on March 24, 2023, in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana.
The case alleged that key officials and federal agencies in the Biden administration violated the plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights by censoring online speech disfavored by the government.
According to the complaint, “the federal government’s censorship campaign has repeatedly, systematically, and very successfully targeted constitutionally protected speech on the basis of its content and viewpoint.”
Nearly a year later, U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty issued a preliminary injunction prohibiting key Biden administration officials and agencies from coercing or significantly encouraging social media platforms to suppress or censor online content containing protected free speech.
However, Doughty stayed the injunction until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on a similar injunction in the Murthy v. Missouri case.
After the Supreme Court on June 26 ruled in favor of the Biden administration in Murthy v. Missouri, Doughty on July 9 denied two motions by lawyers for the Biden administration seeking to overturn the preliminary injunction, which was set to take effect July 7.
Less than 24 hours later, Biden administration lawyers filed an emergency motion with the 5th Circuit, seeking to block the injunction.
The 5th Circuit on July 25 sent the case back to the Louisiana District Court to decide if Kennedy, CHD and Sampognaro have standing to bring the suit. The 5th Circuit also stayed the injunction while the case was being revisited by the District Court.
The District Court on Aug. 20 gave the plaintiffs the green light to bring their suit, ruling that Kennedy and CHD had standing. Doughty concluded that plaintiff Sampognaro does not have standing.
Lawyers disagree on whether plaintiffs have standing
In Tuesday’s hearing, U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) attorney Daniel Tenny argued on behalf of the defendants, saying that the Murthy v. Missouri decision “foreclosed” the plaintiffs’ theories on why the plaintiffs have standing.
Rubenfeld disagreed, saying that Kennedy v. Biden plaintiffs differ in key ways from the Murthy plaintiffs. First, unlike the Murthy plaintiffs, the Kennedy v. Biden plaintiffs have a “specific causation finding,” meaning there is clear evidence that “government defendants, through threats, caused the deplatforming and censorship that they suffered.”
Second, the Kennedy v. Biden plaintiffs have evidence of ongoing injury, not just past injury:
“CHD’s deplatforming — which happened a couple of years ago — is exactly the same right now, unchanged in status as it was then. In other words, the government defendants are directly responsible for the injury that CHD is currently suffering.”
“Number three,” Rubenfeld said, “we have specific evidence of, in the event of a favorable ruling from this court, a significant increase in the likelihood of our plaintiffs receiving relief.”
“That’s the established test for redressability,” he said. Redressability means that the plaintiffs’ alleged injuries are likely to be redressed if the court grants the relief the plaintiffs are seeking.
Right now there is zero likelihood that CHD will get relief, Rubenfeld said. “CHD has been litigating against Facebook for years. They have not reinstated them.”
If the 5th Circuit issues a ruling that Facebook’s actions were likely unconstitutional and that will likely be unconstitutional if Facebook keeps on doing it, “that changes [Facebook’s] incentive and that increases the likelihood that [CHD] will be reinstated.”
In their brief, plaintiffs’ attorneys also argued that Sampognaro, who is potentially immunocompromised, has what’s called “right-to-listen standing” because she needs access to accurate information about COVID-19 and possible treatments, and the censorship has obstructed that access.
Tenny urged the court to continue blocking the District Court’s injunction. Rubenfeld argued the injunction is needed because U.S. governmental agencies are “still today” trying to influence social media platforms “to suppress speech that they deem, they call misinformation.”
He added, “But we have seen over and over again that what they call misinformation often doesn’t turn out to be misinformation and turns out to be protected speech.”
The DOJ declined The Defender’s request for comment on Tuesday’s arguments.
https://principia-scientific.com/latest-news-on-rfk-jr-landmark-censorship-case/
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https://westpsychol.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH -- new site)
https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)
https://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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Sunday, October 13, 2024
Iran’s toxic foreign policy: A deluge of terrorism, drugs and refugees
In 1985 when Soviet diplomats were kidnapped by Islamist extremists, the KGB resolved the misunderstanding by castrating a relative of the Lebanese Shia Muslim leader, sending him the severed organs and then shooting the relative in the head. It is rumoured the KGB then informed Iran’s Supreme leader, Ruhollah Khomeini, that while the USSR had many nuclear weapons, accidents can happen. The hostages were released and no Russian officials have been kidnapped in the Middle East since.
Similarly, United States President Trump had his own unique way of communicating with Islamists. US Congressman Wesley Hunt explains how in a meeting with Taliban leaders, Trump declared, ‘I want to leave Afghanistan, but it’s going to be a conditions-based withdrawal,’ before issuing a stark warning. ‘If you harm a hair on a single American, I’m going to kill you.’ The translator conveyed this exact message. Trump then ‘reached in his pocket, pulled out a satellite photo of the leader of the Taliban’s home, handed it to him, got up and walked out the room.’ It was one of the quietest periods of US troop deployment to Afghanistan, until the botched withdrawal in 2021.
In today’s alt-post-modern world with Western leaders including those in Australia hyper-active to mean tweets, and victim-based sensitivities, these anecdotes may offend. Yet, many of us are not interested in offending our enemies, as much as we are communicating with them in a language they understand. When you don’t, eventually its our young men and women in uniform who end up paying the ultimate price.
Not so with how the West has been dealing with Iran today. Australia and the Biden administration have a strange fascination with appeasing Iran and its proxies. This is despite the fact its foreign policy is based on terrorism, drugs, refugees and kidnapping for geo-political ransom. During a 2018 counter-terrorism conference in Tehran, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani threated the US with a ‘deluge of drugs, refugees and terrorism in the West’. Consider where we will be if Iran obtains a nuclear weapon.
As Hamas and Hezbollah flags fly and Allahu Akbar is heard on our streets, according to the Iranian Ambassador to Australia, Ahmad Sadeghi, the gates of heaven are open to international terrorists. Ambassador Sadeghi, has been publicly honouring the life of Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah, killed in an Israel missile strike, as a ‘prominent standard-bearer’ with a designated path to heaven. Sadeghi’s statement reveals a toxic foreign policy that has no place in Australia.
The boldness of Sadeghi’s statement is not that it is pitched to his masters in Tehran, it’s that he knows empathy for Islamist extremism is growing across Western communities as well as many institutions we used to trust. Why else would so many of our political leaders, academics, and commentators, seek to mainstream Hamas and Hezbollah, if there wasn’t a change occurring within the fabric of our country? One that is irreversible.
We paid dearly for appeasing extremists last century. In Tim Bouverie’s work on how Britain fell for a delusion with Hitler, Lord Hugh Cecil stated, ‘It was like stroking a crocodile and expecting it to purr’. The lesson from Israel’s fight against terrorism, but lost on many in the West, is simple – you cannot befriend a terrorist. Just ask former US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. Under Clinton the US thought it clever to arm and train Islamist militias against Isis. Instead, it turned Syria-Iraq into a thriving arms bazaar for head-cutting extremists. It never pays to let snakes live in your sleeve. In Australia, they are granted tourist visas.
An Arab proverb says, a fool may be known by six things: anger without cause, speech without profit, change without progress, inquiry without object, putting trust in a stranger, and mistaking foes for friends. Iran is not a friend.
Australia is not alone in this Western trend to appease jihadists, and Iran knows it. The killing of British Conservative MP Sir David Amess in 2021, at the hand of suspect Ali Harbi Ali, should have been called out for what it was – a tactic of Islamist extremism. Instead, limp-wristed British politicians called for ‘a kinder, gentler dialogue’. People who seek the intimacy of death, fed on a mind-diet of graphic violence with a licence to kill from God, are not looking for a hug. And neither is Iran.
Iran funds and supports some of the most effective terrorist organisations in the world such as Hamas, Hezbollah as well as the Houthis in Yemen. Abducting hostages for geo-political ransom is a tactic Iran has been using since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
These terrorist networks are some of the best armed non-state actors on the planet. Thanks to Iran, Hezbollah has amassed weapons systems such as the Fateh-110/M-600 short-range ballistic missile, Shahab short-range ballistic missiles, Toophan antitank guided missiles, M113 armoured personnel carriers and T-72 main battle tanks. They are better equipped than New Zealand.
Tehran-backed Shia terror groups also use targeted assassinations. In 2019 the EU slapped sanctions on Iran after The Netherlands, Denmark and France revealed Tehran was behind the assassination of two dissidents, in 2015 and 2017. In 2018, French security services determined Tehran was behind the plot to bomb a rally of the People’s Mujahedeen of Iran opposition group in a Paris suburb. In 2011 the FBI revealed a Quds Force plot in which a Mexican drug cartel was paid $US1.5 million to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington.
Hezbollah’s reach also extends to Australia beyond flag-waving fanatics. In 2017 it was revealed a Sydney-based money launderer and crime figure, identified as a ‘Hezbollah functionary’, had brokered an arms deal between China, Iran and Hezbollah in 2011. The shipment was discovered as part of an international investigation into Hezbollah’s links with narcotics traffickers in Latin American, the Middle East and China.
Then there is the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp (IRGC). The IRGC is the clenched fist at the end of Iran’s foreign and domestic defence arm. Prior to his elimination in a drone strike outside Baghdad Airport under US President Trump, IRGC’s commander, Major General Hossein Salami, declared, ‘This sinister regime (Israel) must be wiped off the map and this is no longer… a dream (but) it is an achievable goal’. Waiting until Iran has a nuclear weapon would be a grave dereliction of duty on behalf of the international community.
Yet Joe Biden is warning Israel not to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities as Australia pleads for Israel to take it easy on these extremists. To be sure, the Biden administration has displayed weakness and appeasement with Iran all along. Four weeks prior to the 7 October atrocities, Biden handed the biggest sponsor of global terrorism $US6 billion in exchange for five hostages held in Tehran and left an open door to renew negotiations on a revised nuclear agreement. That’s right, a nuclear agreement with the nation planning to wipe Israel off the map.
All these weaknesses bring us to where we are today. Modern nation states don’t traffic drugs and weapons, and terrorism as their foreign policy. Responsible modern Western nations, wanting to be free, cannot continue to accommodate the wicked to appease the virtuous. Even if there is no wider war in a conventional sense with Iran, perhaps Sadeghi recognises what our leaders are failing to see; that Australia has been irreparably changed. We now risk losing what was a generous, compassionate and down-to-earth nation. Once gone you can bet none of these pro-Islamist protestors will fight to get it back.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/10/irans-toxic-foreign-policy/
******************************************************Black Clergy Stand With Israel Against Terrorists
Star Parker
My organization, the Center for Urban Renewal and Education, co-hosted a press conference Monday with Michigan Lighthouse Ministries. Over 50 pastors from across Michigan noted the atrocities committed a year ago to the day by Hamas terrorists against Israeli citizens. They expressed solidarity with Israel.
We chose a church in Michigan for this program because the state is home to the largest Arab-American population in the country.
Michigan is also home to Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a Democrat who is the only Palestinian-American representative in the U.S. House of Representatives and one of the nation’s most strident voices against Israel.
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Were these clergy, mostly black, expressing opposition to Arab Americans? Certainly not. On the contrary, their support of the Jewish state, and the values it embodies and expresses, is an expression of support for the welfare and betterment of all mankind.
Of great concern to these Christian evangelicals is the cloud of darkness spreading and enveloping so much of our world today.
The miraculous return of the Jewish people to their historical homeland after 2,000 years in dispersion and their transformation of desert and swamp into a thriving modern state, with per capita income higher than most European countries, shines laser-like light into the thick dark cloud of evil around us.
Hamas terrorists noted the first anniversary of their Oct. 7 attack by firing missiles into Israel, saying that, given the opportunity, they would commit the same atrocities again and again.
By atrocities, we’re talking about murder, rape, beheadings, burning of babies, mutilation of corpses.
How is it that there is sympathy for this depravity?
Iran, which provides the billions financing Hamas, Hezbollah, and other terrorist organizations, had a gross domestic product of just $5,740 per capita in 2023, according to tradingeconomics.com. This is only 13.5% of Israel’s $42,674 per capita GD, despite Iran having the fourth-largest holdings of oil reserves in the world.
The difference is that Israel is about choosing life and personal responsibility and creativity, and Iran is about a government stealing the wealth of its citizens to finance a hateful, destructive ideology.
Similarly, the Hamas terrorists. The billions infused into Gaza over the years from Iran, but also from European countries and America, was used to fund terror rather than build a country and create wealth.
When I first visited Israel, I saw the similarities of the culture of blame and denial of personal responsibility among the Palestinians that have caused so much destruction in America’s own inner cities. We see a corrupt political leadership exploiting the worst tendencies in people by attributing their suffering to others, fostering a culture of blame, rather than taking personal responsibility for their own lives.
The black clergy that gathered in Michigan on Monday, Oct. 7, did so to stand for truth and to stand for a better world.
Inscribed on America’s Liberty Bell in Philadelphia are these words from the book of Leviticus in the Hebrew Bible: “Proclaim Liberty throughout all the land unto all the Inhabitants thereof.”
The bell was commissioned in Pennsylvania in 1751 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of William Penn’s first constitution for the future state in 1701. Penn observed, “If we will not be governed by God, we must be governed by tyrants.”
This is the message our pastors convey to a world swimming in darkness.
When our own country was attacked by Muslim terrorists on Sept. 11, 2001, evangelical pastors pleaded that the nation do its own soul-searching for its sins. They were chastised for saying this.
But we see, over the 23 years since then, that those sins continue to weaken our nation.
The appeal of our pastors is unwavering support for the one Jewish state, for the Bible we have received from the Jewish nation, and to end, everywhere, the sick and evil culture of blame.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/10/09/why-black-clergy-speak-out-for-israel/
***************************************All my main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
https://westpsychol.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH -- new site)
https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)
https://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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Thursday, October 10, 2024
Arab nations are quietly backing Israel. Why can’t the West do the same?
There’s an open secret among the governments of the Middle East that’s driving their respective approaches to the war between Israel and Iran: they all welcome a weakened Iran and the dismantling of its terrorist proxies almost as much as Israel does.
This is why Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi is conducting a campaign across the region to convince the Saudis and others to join him against Israel.
But whatever the regional views of Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Araghchi’s mission is doomed to fail.
The main reason for this, of course, is that these terrorist groups are also a threat to countries across the region and help expand Iranian power at the expense of their own. Iran and its proxies, including Hamas, Hezebollah and the Houthis, are destabilising the region. And, what’s more, they would do so whether there was a war with Israel or not.
The Gulf states and regional powers such as Turkey and Egypt have watched for decades as Tehran manufactured political instability among its regional neighbours while cultivating and arming violent proxies within destabilised border areas.
This is the story of Iran in Iraq and the Popular Mobilisation Forces that the Iranian Republican Guard Corps groomed and still supports. It’s also the story of Iranian-backed pro-Assad militias in Syria, which have joined Hezbollah in attacking Israel since October 7 last year.
This is also the case in Yemen, where Iran-backed Houthis defeated the Saudi and United Arab Emirates-supported Yemeni government in a civil war.
Where Iran arms and trains armed groups inside the borders of other countries, it accelerates institutional weaknesses and feeds chaos, dysfunction and economic stagnation. Syria and Lebanon are two of the classic case studies. You also can extend this chaos-sowing influence to Iran’s supply of missiles and drones to Vladimir Putin in his war against Ukraine.
Turkey welcomes Iranian weakness and Israel’s systematic dismantling of Hezbollah’s leadership because this lessens Iranian influence on Syria and Lebanon. This in turn can reduce the flow of Syrian refugees into Turkey.
The Saudis, moreover, welcome a weakened Iran for the potential leverage it gives over Tehran’s support to the Yemeni Houthis and for the reduced military threat Iran poses to the region. Almost every Arab nation supports Israel’s attack on Iran’s decades-long strategic cultivation of armed proxies. They just won’t say so publicly.
But it’s striking that none of these states has reduced its relations with Israel as the war unfolds. Even the Saudis have signalled that the normalisation of relations with Israel, deliberately disrupted by Yahya Sinwar’s organised atrocities on October 7 last year, can proceed when ceasefires are reached in the war.
While Sinwar had hoped Hezbollah and Iran would join Hamas in its attack on Israel on October 7, he would’ve had no hope of the Arab states surrounding Israel. He knew that despite statements of political solidarity with Palestinians, no regional government really wants to carry the burden of the Palestinians more than they already do.
Sky News host Peta Credlin says bipartisan support between the two major parties has “broken down” when it comes to Israel.
Egypt’s insistence on keeping its border to Gaza shut to fleeing Palestinians is a good measure of things because it highlights the dominance of interests over emotions.
From Jordan to the UAE, from Saudi Arabia to Egypt, Middle Eastern states have clamped down on pro-Palestinian protests since the Hamas attack, largely because they see them as threatening the domestic stability of their own states. The Palestinian issue is seen by them as a “gateway to dissent”.
Another measure of regional thinking is the stalled detente between Iran and Saudi Arabia, trumpeted as a diplomatic breakthrough brokered by China in March last year.
Since the beginning of the war its implementation has been stuck on low-level items because Iran is refusing to reduce its support of dangerous armed groups in the region, with the Houthis being highest on Riyadh’s list.
Iran continues to pretend that it’s not the key backer of the Houthis. Tehran is also clearly doubling down on Hezbollah to stop its most powerful terrorist proxy from being irreparably damaged by Israel and losing the group’s powerful role within Lebanese politics.
Many Israelis are critical of the Netanyahu government. While they’re clear about the existential threat that Hezbollah, Hamas and Tehran pose – even with the recent bounce in support for Netanyahu – many Israelis want a new government that can build on the country’s resurrected military deterrent power once this phase of the war is over.
Many Israelis support the current fighting to damage Hezbollah and remove a much larger threat to northern Israel than Hamas ever posed from Gaza. Like the Saudis, Israelis understand the strategic problem Iran poses to Israel and to the broader region.
None of this is new. Israel is fighting a regional war against Iran and its proxies and the results of this could be a less dangerous Middle East with more open space for regional nations to craft diplomatic solutions and assist weakened states once Iran’s toxic reach is reduced.
It’s time for policymakers in places such as Australia and Europe to not just grapple with the larger regional picture – which provides the context for the war – but also to communicate some of it back to their populations and use it to shape their policies.
That would make a healthy change from the increasingly empty calls for unilateral ceasefires and tepid condemnation of the terrorism that Iran is now so obviously cultivating and enabling across this intricate and essential region of the world.
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"White Guilt": Absolution & Narcissism
A couple of nights ago I had a brief conversation with Allen West—who is currently serving as chairman of the Republican Party of Texas—about the subject of “White Guilty.” He expressed the opinion that affluent white women are being terribly manipulated by ruthless actors who harp on their feelings of guilt about the injustices suffered by black people in the past.
I replied that these women are not suffering from a genuinely guilty conscience, but enjoy congratulating themselves for the sense of moral superiority they obtain by ruminating on and discussing their “guilt.”
This feeling is akin to the genuine sense of relief and liberation we achieve when we confess and make amends for our true transgressions against others. Only, in the case of affluent white women indulging in feelings of “white guilt,” they get to enjoy this gratification not for their own sins, but for the sins of other, less enlightened souls. Thus, the emotional exercise is not a form of humility, but of self-aggrandizement.
Oscar Wilde characterized this kind of self-indulgent emotion as sentimentality.
A sentimentalist is simply one who wants to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it. We think we can have our emotions for nothing. We cannot. Even the finest and most self-sacrificing emotions have to be paid for. Strangely enough, that is what makes them fine.
In the 2001 film Storytelling, a dark satire directed by Todd Solondz, a young white female—a literary major at a prestigious university—puts herself in a life threatening situation with a literature professor (who happens to be black) in order to absolve herself of her white guilt. For her, the professor’s moral trait lies not in his character—which is obviously predatory and exploitative—but in his dark skin color. By yielding to his predatory conduct, she not only corrupts herself, but also contributes to the further moral corruption of her professor.
Every privileged man or woman who has a heart will experience negative emotions at the spectacle of a poor person who is struggling. I experience such emotions every time I walk into an airport public restroom and see some poor fellow cleaning the toilettes. Once, on a flight to Europe, I saw an old black man engaged in this dirty and thankless work. Arriving at the Vienna airport, I saw an old white women (who appeared to be Bosnian) doing the same. At such moments, the structure of human existence seems horribly unfair.
Thinking about such emotions reminds me of Robert Frost’s poem, “Acquainted with the Night.”
I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,
But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.
The poet’s feelings are inconsolable, and no form of absolution seems possible for him. I don’t know exactly what Frost was trying to tell us with this poem, but I suspect it has something to do with his yearning for a God who seems to be absent.
The poem seems to express a quandary that Kierkegaard presented in his 1849 work “The sickness unto Death” in which he describes the desperation we are naturally inclined to feel when we perceive that God is absent.
We know that our lives our finite and that we are fallible, and we are often uncertain about how we stand in relation to infinity. This may create enormous anxiety and yearning for absolution. But what, precisely, is the sin for which we seek absolution?
Humans, it seems, are inherently religious creatures, and are constantly casting about looking for something akin to God. Hence, in recent years we’ve seen the rise of what may be properly called secular religions—that is, the Vaccine Cult, Scientism, Wokeism, and perhaps even the Ukraine Cult, whose fervent votaries favor the mortal sacrifice of Ukrainians instead of helping them to negotiate a settlement with Russia.
https://petermcculloughmd.substack.com/p/white-guilt-absolution-and-narcissism
***************************************All my main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
https://westpsychol.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH -- new site)
https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)
https://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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Wednesday, October 09, 2024
Kamala Harris’s 60 Minutes interview was Prince Andrew-like in its awfulness
Somebody give Bill Whitaker a prize. In his 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, which aired last night, the CBS correspondent did what no other journalist has successfully done since the Vice President was thrust to the top of the Democratic ticket: journalism. He asked Harris challenging questions about the matters voter care about most. He was civil, unaggressive, but professional enough to press her for clear answers. And Harris just couldn’t cope. Her performance was Prince Andrew-like in its awfulness.
That caused the Harris-bot to malfunction
On immigration, for instance, Whitaker asked Harris why the Biden-Harris administration had only just started tackling the issue, after almost four years and an unprecedented surge in illegal border crossings. Harris robotically blamed Congress and Donald Trump, ‘who wants to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem so he told his buddies in Congress “kill the bill, don’t let it move forward”.’
Whitaker was not deterred. ‘But there was an historic flood of undocumented immigrants coming across the border the first three years of your administration,’ he continued. ‘As a matter of fact, arrivals quadrupled from the last year of President Trump. Was it a mistake to loosen immigration policies as much you do did?’
That caused the Harris-bot to malfunction. ‘It’s a long standing problem,’ she warbled. ‘And solutions are at hand and from day one, literally, we have been offering solutions…’
So Whitaker interrupted: ‘What I was asking was, was it a mistake kind of allow that flood to happen in the first place?’
‘I think the policies that we have been promoting have been about fixing a problem not promoting a problem,’ she added.
‘But the numbers did quadruple under your watch?’ Harris ruffled, returned to square one: ‘And the numbers today…because of what we have done, we have cut the flow of illegal immigration, we have cut the flow of fentanyl, but we need Congress to act.’
Oh dear. That’s Harris’s overwhelming weakness as a political candidate. She can talk in soundbites and managerial slogans about ‘solutions not problems’ but on issues of substance she can’t actually offer any solutions, which is a problem.
On the war in the Middle East, Harris was asked if the US has ‘no sway’ over Israel’s leader Benjamin Netanyahu, who has accepted billions of dollars of US aid but seems to be ignoring America’s calls for a ceasefire.
‘The work that we do diplomatically with the leadership of Israel is an ongoing pursuit around making clear our principles,’ said Harris, gnomically.
Again, Whitaker pressed: ‘But it seems that Prime Minister Netanyahu isn’t listening?’
‘We’re not going to stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end.’
Moving awkwardly on, Whitaker turned to the economy, and again Harris offered only platitudes. ‘My plan is about saying that when you invest in small businesses you invest in the middle class and you strengthen America’s economy,’ she said. ‘Small businesses are part of the backbone of America’s economy,” she restated. Pressed on how she would pay for her trillion-dollar spending plans, she said she make the rich ‘pay their fair share.’
When confronted by a serious journalist asking serious questions, she melts
‘We’re dealing with the real world here,’ said Whitaker. ‘How (are) you going to get this through Congress?’ Harris replied that she ‘cannot afford to be myopic…I am (a) public servant, I am also a capitalist’ – as if that clarified things.
Perhaps the most revealing moment was when Whitaker asked why voters say they don’t know what she stands for. ‘It’s an election Bill,’ she said, with a dead smile. Whitaker then mentioned that her flip-flops on issues such as fracking, immigration, and Medicare.
‘In the last year fours I have been vice-president of the United States and I have been travelling our country and I have been listening to folks and seeking what is possible in terms of common ground,’ she replied. ‘I believe in building consensus. We are a diverse people. Geographically, regionally, in terms of where we are in our backgrounds and what the American do want is that we have leaders who can build consensus, where we can compromise and understand it’s not a bad thing as long as you don’t compromise to find common sense solutions. And that has been my approach.’
Harris’s campaign recognises that a majority of Americans don’t feel they can trust Harris. That’s why she is now on what her team is calling a media ‘blitz’. But the clarity never comes. On MSNBC last week, she used the word ‘holistic’ three times to describe her housing policy. At the weekend, she did the ‘Call Her Daddy’ podcast at the weekend with Alex Cooper, who asked how it feels to be attacked for being childless and why men get to decide what women do with their bodies. Harris was more comfortable spluttering bromides in response. When confronted by a serious journalist asking serious questions, however, she melts.
In the hours before the 60 Minutes interview aired, the betting markets spiked in Donald Trump’s favour. Clearly, gamblers understand that the more voters see of Harris, the less they hear, and that’s an issue that is only going to get worse in the last three weeks of her campaign.
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Gulf Dividing Ruling Elites, Average Americans Is Wide and Deep, Poll Finds
American elites really have become a toxic, ideological class apart—even if they don’t want to admit it.
A recent survey by Scott Rasmussen called “Elite 1%,” which was conducted by RMG Research for the Napolitan News Service, reveals that there’s a stark divide between the viewpoints of ruling elites and the rest of the American people on a wide range of questions.
The report, released Friday, not only found wide differences in opinion between the American people and the elites, it also concluded that the gap in ideology and power between the groups may be leading to America’s fraught political situation.
The research categorized Americans into several groups, but focused on the gap between a small subset of elites and the rest of the country, which it defined as “Main Street Americans” who represent “70-75% of the U.S. population” and have none of the attributes of those categorized into the “elite” groups.
“They do NOT have postgraduate degrees, do NOT live in densely populated urban areas, and earn LESS than $150,000 annually” is how the survey defined so-called Main Street Americans.
The findings on the differences between the elites and the rest of America clearly represent an unmistakable political split between institutional insiders versus outsiders.
According to the report, “members of the Elite 1% have very favorable opinions of university professors, lawyers, union leaders, journalists, and members of Congress.”
While the elites leaned strongly toward the Democratic Party, those who were Republicans tended to be much more similar to their partisan counterparts rather than to Main Street Americans.
The elite insiders are typically more socially liberal, less likely to trust citizens to govern themselves, and—perhaps unsurprisingly—tend to be far more trusting in institutions to make the right decisions for the country (without much or any input from people outside their class).
They are also far more comfortable with censorship and regulating the lives of ordinary people.
On social issues, the poll found that there’s an enormous gap between most Americans and the elite on the issue of transgenderism and whether biological males should be allowed to participate in female sports.
“If a biological male identifies as a woman, just 17% of Main Street voters believe that person should be allowed to compete in women’s sports,” the research found. “Among the Elite 1%, 29% believe such athletes should be allowed to compete in women’s sports.”
It’s not just women’s sports on which there’s such a wide gap in opinion on the transgender issue.
“Only 9% of voters favor a regulation being developed by the Biden administration that would make misgendering a co-worker a fireable offense,” the study found. “Seventy-five percent (75%) of voters are opposed.”
The elites are also far more likely to announce their pronouns when introducing themselves.
“Only 10% of voters have introduced themselves by expressing their preferred pronouns,” the polling found. “Among the Elite 1%, more than 4 out of 10 have done so. Among the Politically Active Elites, 61% have introduced themselves by expressing their preferred pronouns.”
The elites are suspicious of the Second Amendment and even the First Amendment. Those amendments to the Bill of Rights protect the right to bear arms and the freedom of speech and assembly, respectively.
The polling divide between elites and average Americans on speech is stark:
Voters, by a 59% to 34% margin, believe that letting the government decide what counts as misinformation is more dangerous than the disinformation itself. Among the Elite 1%, the numbers are reversed: by a 57% to 39% margin, they see letting the government decide as the lesser problem.
The elites don’t just want to censor speech, they want to disarm Americans, according to the polling data.
“Seventy-two percent (72%) of the Elite 1% would prefer to live in communities where guns are outlawed,” the report found. “Most voters (51%) take the opposite view and would prefer to live in communities where guns are allowed.”
The research found that 77% of the elites polled want to ban the private ownership of firearms.
On the concept of self-government, elites were far more likely to not only make arbitrary decisions for society, but also to be OK with rigging the system to ensure they stay in power.
“If their campaign team thought they could get away with cheating to win, 7% of voters would want their team to cheat,” the polling found. “Among the Elite 1%, the support for cheating rose to 35%. And, among the Politically Active Elites, 69% would want their team to cheat, rather than accept voters’ decisions.”
Perhaps most surprisingly, the polls found that most elites had no idea that their ideas were so different from those of the mainstream.
The report found that “two-thirds (65%) of the Elite 1%—and 82% of Politically Active Elites—think most voters agree with them on important issues. As has been documented throughout this report, that is far from an accurate assessment.”
The creators of the project noted that while there is nothing wrong with there being large gaps in opinions on serious questions in a society, the Elite 1% “hold tremendous institutional and media power that amplifies their voices at the expense of the American people.”
This power is enhanced, they wrote, by the alliance between the elites “and the unelected managers of the federal government.”
They concluded that the views and overwhelming influence of out-of-touch elites “may be the root cause of the political toxicity in our nation today” and that their “underlying attitudes reflect an implicit rejection of the founding ideal that governments derive their only just authority from the consent of the governed.”
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All my main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
https://westpsychol.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH -- new site)
https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)
https://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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Tuesday, October 08, 2024
On Anniversary of Oct. 7, College Students Celebrate Rape, Kidnapping, and Slaughter of Jews
As the civilized world mourns the first anniversary of the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust—and prays for the release of the more the 100 hostages, including four Americans, still being held by Palestinian jihadists in terrorism tunnels—American college campuses are rife with celebrations of Hamas’ atrocities.
On Oct. 7, 2023, Iran-backed Hamas militants flooded into Israel, engaging in an orgy of violence and mayhem, killing about 1,200 people, including 38 children, in their homes and at a youth music festival.
They raped women, shot children in front of their parents, and kidnapped more than 250 people, including 30 children. They even filmed and bragged about their atrocities.
But to many students on American college campuses, the Hamas militants who died while perpetrating these atrocities are not monsters to be condemned, but “martyrs” to be celebrated.
Just days after the Oct. 7 massacre, the Students for Justice in Palestine chapters nationwide called for a “Day of Resistance” on posters featuring paragliders like those the Hamas terrorists who had flown over the Israeli security barrier to rape and kill civilians used.
The Students for Justice in Palestine chapter at George Washington University projected the words “Glory to Our Martyrs” on the side of the university’s library.
Even among anti-Israel groups, Students for Justice in Palestine is particularly radical. Several chapters have openly endorsed the five-point “Thawabet” (demands on which there can be no compromise) principles, including that Arabs should “reject all normalization” with Israel, that “armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine,” and that “Palestine is Arab from the river to the sea, with Al-Quds [Jerusalem] as its capital.”
In other words, they call for genocidal violence against the world’s only Jewish state—home to about half the world’s Jews—until it is destroyed and replaced with another Arab state. Unsurprisingly, the infamous chant that is a common feature at Students for Justice in Palestine rallies—“There is only one solution: intifada revolution”—was inspired by the Nazis’ “Final Solution.”
On the anniversary of the Oct. 7 massacre, Students for Justice in Palestine chapters nationwide are calling for a “week of rage,” celebrating “one year of resistance” and hosting vigils for the supposed “martyrs.”
The timing makes clear that they are celebrating the Oct. 7 atrocities as “resistance” and glorifying its perpetrators as “martyrs.” At Columbia University on Monday, hundreds of students marched, chanting “intifada” and “resistance is justified.” One protester held a sign reading “Long Live The Al-Aqsa Flood” (the jihadist name for the Hamas massacre) featuring Hamas terrorists, including a paraglider.
Students for Justice in Palestine chapters and their pro-terrorist protests are not confined to Ivy League or far-left campuses like Berkeley and Oberlin. They’re even popping up at private and state universities in red states. At Rice University in Texas, the group’s chapter is hosting a “Day of Rage” on the anniversary of the Oct. 7 massacre, featuring a speech from a professor at Rice as well as a vigil to “honor our martyrs.”
At Duke University in North Carolina, the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter is hosting a “Vigil for Palestine” Monday, claiming that it “has been one year since Israel began its relentless genocide against the people of Gaza,” even though there is no genocide in Gaza, and Israel didn’t even send troops into Gaza to fight Hamas and attempt to rescue its captive citizens for more than a week after Hamas launched the war.
Students for Justice in Palestine chapters are also hosting a “Week of Rage” or “Week of Resistance” beginning on Oct. 7 at the University of Texas at Arlington, UNC Chapel Hill, and dozens of other universities. Likewise, the Muslim Students Association at the University of North Florida is hosting a “Gaza Week” starting Oct. 7.
Too often, the pro-terrorist rallies have the explicit support of university faculty and staff—which should be no surprise, given how many former campus radicals find employment on campus.
At Oklahoma State University, the psychology department’s diversity committee emailed students encouraging their participation in the “Week of Rage,” which includes a bake sale and the requisite vigil for “martyrs,” and will be capped off with a movie night.
Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters condemned the university for supporting the event, stating that “No school, at any level, should ever celebrate the slaughter and destruction of Israel.” Walters called on the public to demand that “OSU end this culture of hate for Israel on their campus.”
It should be no surprise that the email came from a “diversity committee” at the university. College diversity, equity, and inclusion offices have been hotbeds of antisemitism.
As former university dean and professor Stanley Goldfarb observed in City Journal, DEI “has given [antisemites] a pseudointellectual and seemingly moral framework through which to spew their hatred.”
At the heart of DEI is a simple binary: The world is divided between oppressors and the oppressed. Proponents of DEI cast white people as oppressors and black people as the oppressed.
While they apply this frame primarily to America, they often apply it to Israel, too. Apparently, Israel is a bastion of Jewish whiteness, with a racist commitment to shattering the lives of nonwhite Palestinians.
In fact, a colleague of mine—a former collegiate DEI director, no less—was told that Jews are “white oppressors” and that it was her job to “decenter whiteness.”
Hence, why the campus groups most associated with DEI are now leading the [antisemitic] charge. A good example is White Coats for Black Lives, which I encountered at Penn’s medical school. The group, which serves effectively as the medical-student offshoot of Black Lives Matter, has as its mission to “dismantle racism and accompanying systems of oppression.”
Apparently, that means supporting terrorists who beheaded Jewish babies and raped Jewish women on [Oct. 7]. In the wake of those atrocities, White Coats for Black Lives proudly declared that it “has long supported Palestine’s struggle for liberation.”
Students have the right to speak out and support any cause they wish, including hateful ones. But they don’t have a right to taxpayer dollars.
Student groups like Students for Justice in Palestine typically get access to university funds. At public universities, that means taxpayer funding. And even at private universities, students are often subsidized though government loans and tax credits, in addition to the numerous government grants universities receive directly.
Paying for young people to be indoctrinated as hate-filled radicals is more than taxpayers should be expected to bear.
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Untapped Relief: FEMA Is Sitting on Billions of Unused Disaster Funds
Although the Federal Emergency Management Agency told Congress last month that it had $4 billion in its Disaster Relief Fund, officials also warned that the fund could have a shortfall of $6 billion by year’s end, a situation FEMA says could deteriorate in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.
While FEMA is expected to ask Congress for new money, budget experts note a surprising fact: FEMA is currently sitting on untapped reserves appropriated for past disasters stretching back decades.
An August report from the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General noted that in 2022, FEMA “estimated that 847 disaster declarations with approximately $73 billion in unliquidated funds remained open.”
Drilling down on that data, the OIG found that $8.3 billion of that total was for disasters declared in 2012 or earlier.
Such developments are part of a larger pattern in which FEMA failed to close out specific grant programs “within a certain timeframe, known as the period of performance (POP),” according to the IG report. Those projects now represent “billions in unliquidated appropriations that could potentially be returned to the [Disaster Relief Fund].”
These “unliquidated obligations” reflect the complex federal budgeting processes. Safeguards are important so that FEMA funding doesn’t become a slush fund that the agency can spend however it chooses, budget experts said, but the inability to tap unspent appropriations from long-ago crises complicates the agency’s ability to respond to immediate disasters.
‘Age-Old Game’
“This is an age-old game that happens and it doesn’t matter what administration is in,” said Brian Cavanaugh, who served as an appropriations manager at FEMA in the Trump administration. “It’s unfortunate how complex disaster relief has become, but it’s skyrocketing costs.”
Cavanaugh said neither action from Congress nor an executive order from the White House would be required to tap those funds because FEMA is operating on the sort of continuing resolutions Congress routinely authorizes. If the money is part of “immediate needs funding,” DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas could draw from the billions in untapped money to help the victims of Helene and then inform lawmakers he was compelled to do so, leaving elected officials facing charges they sought to pinch pennies when Americans were desperate.
FEMA did not respond to a request for comment about whether it could access the earmarked funds.
Mayorkas, whose department oversees FEMA, stressed the agency is not broke, and both he and other FEMA officials said last week there was enough money in the Disaster Relief Fund to meet the needs of victims of Hurricane Helene, which with a death count of more than 200 stands as the most lethal storm to hit the U.S. since Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Most of Helene’s bills will come due in the future, and Mayorkas said FEMA can meet the day-to-day needs of operations right now in afflicted states but might be hard-pressed if another storm like Helene were to hit this year. Hurricane season officially lasts until the end of November, but historically, September and October have been the months in which the occasional monster smites the U.S.
“We are meeting the immediate needs with the money that we have,” Mayorkas told a press gaggle Oct. 2 on Air Force One. “We are expecting another hurricane hitting. We do not have the funds. FEMA does not have the funds to make it through the season and … what is imminent.”
On Oct. 3, FEMA, which handles state and local government relief aid as well as the federal flood insurance plan and individual emergency requests, said it had spent at least $20 million in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Florida—three of the states that bore the brunt of Helene as it ripped ashore. The figures FEMA provided did not include Georgia, another state hard-hit by Helene, which made landfall in Florida on Sept. 26 as a Category 4 hurricane.
Longtime FEMA critics said the looming shortfall is not surprising, given its main job is to use federal taxpayer dollars to reimburse state and local governments for recovery costs, in addition to more immediate money it provides to victims on an individual basis.
“It doesn’t strike me as too weird,” said Chris Edwards, policy scholar at the conservative Cato Institute. “Right now, $20 million is peanuts, but it’s not necessarily unreasonable to think the upcoming bills will be much, much higher.”
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All my main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
https://westpsychol.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH -- new site)
https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)
https://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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Monday, October 07, 2024
JD Vance and the ‘new right’ spark Washington policy war
A decade ago, when Republicans were consumed by cutting spending and repealing Obamacare, JD Vance was a 29-year-old conservative law clerk in Cincinnati who thought they were doing it all wrong.
He sent unsolicited emails to right-leaning editors telling them they needed to focus more on the people in rural America whom globalisation had left behind. He started taking an interest in Catholicism when the party was dominated by evangelicals. At one point, he even pushed his way into an invite-only conference in Middleburg, Virginia, according to people who attended, in which conservative intellectuals were trying to rethink the Ronald Reagan-era, limited-government approach that had dominated the Republican Party for decades.
Now Vance, who is preparing to take the stage at the debate against Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz on Tuesday, has emerged as one of the staunchest defenders and attack dogs for former President Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee. In Washington, he has become the unexpected figurehead of a new conservative movement that draws on his early fixation with policy to rewrite Republican orthodoxy with a philosophy that champions industrial policy, questions Wall Street and embraces trade protectionism.
While “Project 2025” has garnered attention for its radical prescriptions for a second Trump term, it has overshadowed a high-stakes debate between old-guard conservatives and the pro-Trump policy movement that calls itself the “New Right.”
As the movement has risen to prominence, its acolytes have helped rally Republicans to support some surprising causes including using U.S. government money to redirect the private sector, like a $280 billion law in 2022 to boost the U.S. semiconductor industry. They have moved the idea of expanding the child tax credit from the Republican fringes to a hotly debated issue in the presidential election. And they have at times expressed admiration for Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, whose crackdown on corporate consolidation has led business executives to push for her ouster.
Old-guard conservatives, from billionaire Charles Koch to antitax activist Grover Norquist, are working to hold together the Tea Party-era Republican coalition that remains a potent force in Washington despite Trump’s rise.
Hundreds of their activists and allies gathered at the Watergate Hotel recently for a gala hosted by the largest Koch-backed advocacy group, Americans for Prosperity, where a string quartet played during cocktail hour and guests snagged cigars as party favours. The group’s chief executive, Emily Seidel, told the crowd they would work against “the insurgence of big government policies on both the left and the right.” ” Thomas Jefferson once warned, ‘the natural progress for things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground,’” Seidel said during her speech, adding: “Our message is clear: Not on our watch.” The crowd erupted in applause.
Vance’s allies say the old guard has already lost – the establishment has larger numbers and deeper pockets, but momentum is on the New Right’s side.
“The pre-Trump political alignment in this country is just gone,” said Oren Cass, a longtime friend of Vance’s who founded a think tank in 2020 called American Compass that has become the most influential New Right group on Capitol Hill. “It’s not coming back.” Courting the next generation Over a steak salad at Hawk ‘n’ Dove, a pub a few blocks from the Capitol that became a GOP favourite after it refused to follow lockdown orders during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, Cass said his goal was to recruit the next generation of conservatives to his side.
Grover Norquist is working to hold together the Tea Party-era Republican coalition that remains a potent force. Picture: Bloomberg via Getty Images.
Grover Norquist is working to hold together the Tea Party-era Republican coalition that remains a potent force. Picture: Bloomberg via Getty Images.
A mild-mannered former Bain & Co. consultant and Mitt Romney policy adviser who lives in leafy western Massachusetts, Cass doesn’t share much in common on the surface with Trump – but their interest in conservative populism has placed the two on the same side of an ideological war.
Cass and his allies have gained a reputation for channelling Trump-era populism into Republican policy proposals, making him popular with a handful of senators including Sens. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) and Todd Young (R., Ind.), in addition to Vance, who represents Ohio in the Senate. Cass’s American Compass helped fill a void in the conservative ecosystem, Rubio said, which some Republicans long worried had become dominated by stale ideas.
Vance briefly dabbled with becoming a professional policy guy. When he wrote the first draft of his best-selling memoir, he focused on how government policies could help those who had been left behind in rural America, according to people Vance spoke to about his book. Instead, his editor convinced him to turn it into a narrative focused on his hardscrabble upbringing.
Catholics and IVF American Compass’s biggest effort to recruit younger conservatives takes place behind closed doors: An off-the-record, invite-only membership group of around 200 20- and 30-somethings who work in politics, law and business and have access to a weekly rotation of salon dinners, seminars, happy hours and an annual retreat at a Hyatt on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
Many events are designed to include families and children, an effort by the group to promote family life, which often has deeply religious underpinnings. While Cass is Jewish, the movement has attracted a number of devout Catholics, and converting to Catholicism, like Vance did, is popular with members. (One Washington conservative joked that, upon hearing that another friend had converted, his reaction was simply: “We lost another one.”)
Members often debate what the New Right’s policy approach should be. Last spring on the Eastern Shore, a breakout group at the annual retreat largely agreed they wanted to make fertility treatments, a hot topic in conservative circles, needed less often by easing the economic burdens on young people so they could start families younger, according to one participant. But the group was divided over what the solution should be in the meantime: better to ban IVF altogether, or allow it to exist as a patch until the country can convince couples to stop delaying childbirth?
Moderate Washington Republicans snicker about the New Right being faddish and overly focused on increasing birthrates. Old-school conservatives like Norquist have used American Compass’s funders – including the Hewlett Foundation, which largely gives to left-leaning causes – and Cass’s unorthodox ideas, like raising the corporate tax rate, as ammunition to accuse him of being a Republican-in-name-only.
One recent morning, around 75 aides were shuffling into a Capitol Hill meeting room for a briefing from an American Compass aide when they were unexpectedly confronted by emissaries from the Republican old guard: Two aides from Norquist’s group were standing in the hallway doling out flyers titled, “Who Said It, Oren or Warren?” referring to liberal Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren. For example: “Have tax cuts been working? No.” Asked about the flyers, Norquist said it was just “some of the interns having fun.” Cass’s influence, Norquist argued, has been exaggerated: “The only time I spend [on him] is talking to reporters.” Tax-code pushback Free-market conservatives still dominate much of Capitol Hill. This month a former aide to Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R., Wyo.) strode into the senator’s office to talk taxes, wearing a cowboy hat and a tie with the Koch-backed group Americans for Prosperity’s logo printed on it.
Lummis didn’t support a bipartisan tax plan earlier this year that American Compass backed. It would have used the tax code as a “social service program,” she told the aide-turned-Americans for Prosperity employee after greeting him warmly.
While the New Right has momentum, its future – and whether it will be dominated by Vance, or someone else – is still in flux.
A Trump loss in November could unleash a renewed campaign by establishment Republicans to wrest back control of the party, potentially scuttling Vance and Cass’s political future.
If Trump wins, many of the stars of the New Right movement could find themselves newly empowered. In addition to Vance, New Right-aligned lawmakers such as Sen. Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) and Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) are seen as possible contenders for senior jobs in a second Trump administration.
Yet Trump remains an unpredictable figure with few closely held beliefs. How he would govern, and whether policy issues would take a back seat to the political crises and palace intrigue that dominated Trump’s first term, is uncertain.
Whatever happens in November, change is afoot, Sen. Lummis said after the meeting. “I think there is a subtle transition going on between the more-establishment Republicans and whatever you wanted to call it – the ‘New Right’?”
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No wonder the legacy media is held in contempt
As readers know, in the US political donations are public information. So if you want you can look to see who gives to which party. That’s how a professor of law at Notre Dame University trolled through five years of data up to 2023 and calculated that US law professors give money to the two main political parties at a ratio of about 36 to 1 Democrats to Republicans. (At least, though, conservatives in the US are trying to do something about this incredible bias by giving money to the Federalist Society – our equivalent is the Samuel Griffith Society – and by pushing state legislatures to disband and fire all DEI employees in their public universities – which is happening in the US, with immediate and positive results, and which is the very first thing any Coalition government should do here in Australia when it turns its mind to our universities.)
Of course, some may say that these sorts of investigations tell us nothing about those who do not donate to a political party. So here’s a question for readers. Do you think that those in the US who do not donate monies to a political party would be disproportionately left-leaning or right-leaning? If it’s the former then the ratio is even worse, even more imbalanced than 36 to 1. If it’s the latter it would be a tad better.
Now there are other ways to try to measure political imbalance and the capture of key institutions by the political left. For instance, you can ask or poll members of these groups. That is what upstate New York’s Syracuse University Newhouse School of Public Communications recently did. (And just so readers are clear, this is not remotely a right-wing outfit.) It polled 1,600 US mainstream journalists in early 2022. What percentage of legacy media journalists, do you think, associate with the Republican party? You get the prize if you answered 3.4 per cent. Yes, under two in fifty were affiliated with Republicans. The rest answered 36 per cent Democrats, 52 per cent independents, and 8 per cent other. And we need to be clear that virtually no journo answering ‘independent’ would ever vote for Donald Trump. In fact, my bet is that a fair few of those who answered ‘Republican’ would be suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome, something you can see in Australia in more than a few of our already sparse number of ‘conservative’ legacy journalists. Just pick up any copy of the Australian and see. Meanwhile, if you think this heavy skew to the political left doesn’t affect news coverage, if only by selection bias, then you probably also buy the claim that the total absence of any conservative presenter or producer on ‘our’ ABC TV current affairs shows in no way prevents the national broadcaster from producing wholly balanced, disinterested and even-handed programs. Yeah, and I’m a woman. (Oops, that quip isn’t what it used to be.)
The Syracuse study also noted that this is part of an ever-worsening ‘we are left-wing family’ trend amongst journalists. Over the last five decades the percentage of journalists identifying as Republicans has plummeted. Back in 1971, 26 per cent of journalists identified as Republicans, 35 per cent as Democrats, 32 as independents, and 6 per cent as other. Not surprisingly, this precipitous dwindling of any sort of political balance or even-handedness across the so-called fourth estate has meshed almost perfectly with the fall in trust Americans say they have in the mainstream media. Just 7 per cent of Americans say they have a ‘great deal’ of trust in the news media. And almost none of that meagre seven per cent comes from the right of politics.
Or consider this. Critics have gone back to look and note ‘that 100 per cent of the US’s ABC News coverage of Kamala Harris is positive, whereas something like 93 per cent of their coverage on Trump is negative’. I doubt that North Korea scores 93 per cent negative coverage. Remember, before Harris was the nominee she had strikingly low favourability ratings, probably she was the most disapproved of vice-president since the question has been asked. Since then the legacy media (not counting Fox) has basically gone all in trying to sell her as some transformative candidate while saying virtually nothing about the fact that she and her campaign simply refuse to do any live interviews, and certainly not with anyone who might ask a tough question. Recall that about two-thirds of Americans think the country is on the wrong track. So if the media were remotely balanced – rather than essentially operating as PR agents for the Democrats – the election wouldn’t be close. Key question: what conservative has any reason at all to trust the media? Heck, forget trust. What conservative has any reason to feel anything other than contempt for most all of the legacy media? (And for me this feeling came to fruition during the lockdowns when virtually all of the press abandoned any sort of scepticism and desire to hold the powerful to account and instead became agents of fear-mongering and unthinking government propaganda. Just sayin’, because the evidence that thuggish lockdown governments got near-on everything wrong is now overwhelming – not that the great and the good can ever openly admit their thuggery and panic.)
One more example. The legacy press has been running hard with the Kamala campaign line that Trump killed off a perfectly good ‘bipartisan border Bill’. This is laughable and every sentient being knows it. This Biden and Harris Bill that had a couple of chamber-of-commerce-type Republicans on board would have funded sanctuary cities, let in about 1.8 million illegals per year, funded lawyers for illegals, half-codified ‘catch and release’, weakened asylum screening, given work permits to illegals, and provided no immediate funds to finish building the wall. This is the so-called ‘border Bill’ that Kamala pretends Trump should have supported. It is obvious why he, and most all other Republicans, were against it and helped kill it off. But the press? Well, they trot out the Kamala line that this is some Bill that those who want an actual border should have supported. Come on! They know this is a lie. But nothing is too much trouble in the Pravda-like service of the Democrats.
I said a few weeks ago that this election boiled down to one question. Can the lefty legacy media drag Kamala over the line? Does the mainstream press have enough remaining support and trust to win this one for her? I said then that I didn’t think they did and that Trump would win. I still think that. Only time will tell but right now I’d even put some money on the Republicans taking the trifecta of the Presidency, Senate and House.
And boy do I hope I’m right.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/10/no-wonder-the-legacy-media-is-held-in-contempt/
***************************************All my main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
https://westpsychol.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH -- new site)
https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)
https://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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Sunday, October 06, 2024
Corrupt media to rig this election too?
The future of the world seems decidedly gloomier than in many a year.For the United States and the West, 5 November is a fork in the road with its consequences possibly irreversible.
The electoral choice recalls the contrast between Britain and France in 1940 as they faced the Third Reich. Having prevailed in the Battle of Britain, it was not only the superiority of the Royal Navy, the loyal support of her empire and certain technological advantages, especially radar, that made an invasion of the UK unlikely.
It was also that the British, informed by a free and ethical media, inspired by Churchill, and reliant on a loyal political class and civil service with a reigning monarch dedicated to their service were in ‘their finest hour’. The result was that until the US became a participant in the second world war in December 1941, a virtuous UK, inspired by Winston Churchill, continued to lead the West.
This contrasted with France which, despite its standing as a leading and ancient power, with an empire the world’s largest after Britain’s and an army seen as one of the finest, in a mere six weeks suffered the most shameful defeat.
As they witnessed the flight from Paris of a defeatist and, at times, treacherous establishment, and were misinformed by a corrupt media, the French were, as historian William Safire observes, completely demoralised when a fascist dictatorship was installed, with supreme leadership vested in an 84-year-old, nearly senile one-time war hero, Marshal Pétain.
Donald Trump, on his record, offers to make the United States an America which will be great again, one resembling in many ways the Churchillian Britain of 1941. Indeed, Trump’s intensely courageous reaction to both assassination attempts, and to the cowardly lawfare unleashed against him, is in the tradition of the great Churchill.
Kamala Harris, protected by a corrupt media and establishment, comes with the track record of the Biden-Harris administration: massive inflationary spending, supporting far-left policies, running down the defence forces and undermining the nation by opening the southern border to millions of illegal immigrants, including criminals, terrorists and drug dealers who are flooding the country with fentanyl.
That Harris is no more than a political chameleon is proven by the silence of the Democrat nomenclatura in the face of her claimed conversion to Trumpism.
As to foreign affairs, the Biden-Harris administration is notable for disgracefully abandoning soldiers, citizens and a massive cache of the latest arms in their appalling flight from Kabul, as a result of which Colonel Richard Kemp, former British commander in Afghanistan, called for Biden’s court martial.
The Biden-Harris administration is also notable for reversing Trump’s measures against Tehran, thereby releasing US$100 billion to the mullahs who constantly denounce America as the Great Satan, and enabling them to play the role of the world’s biggest terrorist power funding Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and over a dozen militias and terror groups across the Middle East, with outposts around the world. Biden and Harris have as their vocation an America in serious decline appeasing the Beijing-Moscow-Tehran axis, a decline which over time will come to recall the Fall of France.
As to the Harris-Trump debate, the corrupt media were on show where even they have now admitted only Trump was ‘fact-checked’; either wrongly or for having an opinion different from ABC’s so-called moderators.
As suggested above, it is relevant to compare American media corruption with the fact that the emergence of a corrupt, captured media was a major factor in the Fall of France.
This was examined in a 2012 Swiss-published study by Vincent Bignon from the Banque de France and Marc Flandreau, The Price of Media Capture and the Looting of French Newspapers in the Inter-War Period.
Of particular interest is a comparison between the Paris newspaper Le Temps with London’s The Times where the editor’s independence was protected under the corporate constitution.
French newspapers were looted by their owners accepting funding, including funding from hostile powers, to violate their role; a phenomenon reported in the celebrated work by Marc Bloch, L’étrange défaite (The Strange Defeat), where he blames France’s media and elites for the country’s collapse.
It is extraordinary that much of today’s American media have followed the French example of allowing themselves to be captured.
In furthering this, they have abandoned their role and duty of reporting facts to play instead the role of the Democrats’ propaganda arm.
This was best demonstrated in the US 2020 election when they reported, against all evidence, that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation.
This laptop revealed that the Biden family had been corruptly involved in the sale of access and influence at the highest levels in Washington to foreign moguls and agents from various dictatorships, including communist China’s.
Subsequent polling commissioned by the Media Research Centre found that 17 per cent of Americans who voted for Joe Biden would not have done so had they been aware of the truth about the laptop.
Meanwhile, commentator Mark Levin says the true purpose of the recent debate was so that the media could be ecstatic about Harris, no matter what she did.
Harris was trained to memorise a few pat lines to be used as answers to any question, however irrelevant.
Those answers contained what the leading journal the Federalist reported as twenty-five lies by her about Trump. The totally compromised debate hosts of the ABC did not ‘fact-check’ even one.
All the media wanted was that she would not be exposed as completely unelectable, as Biden had been in the first debate.
It is likely few will forget that, until the Biden-Trump debate, the mainstream media along with Harris and her Democrat powerbrokers blatantly lied about Biden’s competence, or lack thereof.
As Levin says, the chameleon Harris’s real plans for the US are for out-of-control and totally unchecked migration, uncontrolled inflationary spending, unpunished crime, and certainly not tackling inflation and reducing prices of things like food, gasoline, vehicles, and housing – all things that affect the American people.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/09/corrupt-media-to-rig-this-election-too/
*************************************************The shadow US election war
In a Georgia courtroom earlier this year, University of Michigan computer scientist Professor J. Alex Halderman opened his testimony by asking the prosecutor for a pen. Duly produced, Halderman took the pen and walked over to a well-known type of voting machine. He held the pen down on one of the machine’s buttons for a few long moments. Then, in front of the judge, he flipped the machine’s tabulations, changing the winner in a hypothetical election. Thus he highlighted the fallibility of a critical element of the US’s voting system, as yet unfixed in Georgia’s seven-year, still-unresolved Curling v. Raffensperger case concerning voting machine integrity.
You might say this is a one-off defect, in one state, in an election the federal watchdog Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency declared the most secure ever, and you would be misinformed. The Agency’s true 2020 election analysis was winkled out in an internal report obtained later through FOIA requests. It said 76 per cent of assessed digital election machinery was vulnerable to attacks by adversaries, 48 per cent had a critical or high severity vulnerability to attack and 39 per cent of digital entities ran at least one risky service on an internet accessible host. Most secure ever? Nope.
The USA’s election system is not like any other, even among nations with electronic voting machines. The Constitution mandates state control of elections, so there are 50 different systems, further customised by state courts, state election boards, local legal precedents and more. In 2020, the elections were modified in varying ways by a raft of new Covid laws allowing an avalanche of mail-in ballots, early voting and other changes. In 2024, the US election will be affected by a new X factor, namely the extraordinary influx of illegal migrants, estimated at 10 million-plus since 2020.
The GOP is awake to this danger, with Speaker Mike Johnson mounting an 11th-hour attempt to require proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections. But the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act has not passed, and at the moment voting is simply, as Johnson says, an honour system; say you’re a citizen, you get your vote.
And the Biden regime has been working overtime to turn illegals into registered voters; Elon Musk is one of many arguing that US borders have been opened for just this purpose. In March 2021, Biden issued Executive Order 14019, which directs every federal agency to register and mobilise voters. It’s now reported that welfare and other agencies in all but four states (North Dakota, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Wyoming) are giving out voter registration forms to migrants without requiring proof of citizenship. And the rush to naturalise migrants is on, with some 3 million new citizens created under Biden. Processing times have halved, from nearly a year in 2021 to 5 months now, the New York Times reports.
How many illegal immigrants will come out to vote for their new benefactors is anyone’s guess. The non-profit Texas research body Just Facts, which has studied this issue since 2008, predicts up to 2.7 million illegals will vote in 2024, unless laws are tightened. It says 10 to 27 per cent of illegals, estimated at a minimum of 20 million in 2022, are registered to vote, and the vast bulk vote Democrat.
The Democrats’ mastery of the electoral ground game means they will have ample opportunity to use the ballots thus created, as required. Ballots are so much more flexible than votes. You don’t need to win hearts and minds if you can simply mark or duplicate or create or gather ballots at will.
The result of all this is an unprecedented outbreak of election lawsuits this year, with many cases still running, and state electoral laws still changing. The left’s effective legal strategist, Mark Elias, runs a site called Democracy Docket, which tallies the action in terms of ‘pro’ and ‘anti’ voting cases; in his world all efforts at election integrity amount to voter suppression. Last week he announced that the number of election lawsuits had now hit a ‘completely extraordinary’ high of 200. That’s on top of his existing scoreboard, in which he claims twice as many wins as losses in over 250 voting cases already decided.
Dirty voter rolls are a key battleground. Texas recently announced it had removed over a million people from its voter rolls since 2021. Oklahoma has recently removed 450,000 from its voter rolls, including 100,000 dead people and 15,000 duplicate registrations. North Carolina announced a week ago it had purged its rolls of 750,000, including 130,000 dead people and 290,000 duplicate registrations, over the last 20 months. That’s more than 10 per cent of that state’s registered voters. Both Florida and Alabama have complained that federal agencies are uncooperative in providing data on non-citizens, with Alabama now being sued by the Department of Justice for its efforts to cleanse its voter rolls. With the 2020 presidential election decided by some 80,000 votes altogether, these numbers are terrifyingly high.
Moreover, fighting against machines is hard. Data scientist and volunteer Kim Brooks, of a largely anonymous election integrity group called the Georgia Nerds, had been working to clean Georgia’s voter rolls, until she realised she was ‘riding a stationary bicycle’.
She concluded a program within the Georgia voter database was methodically adding back fake voters that she had had removed (dead, felon, stolen ID, etc) within a month. Sometimes those in charge pay the price. On the night of the 2020 election, Milwaukee Election Commission boss Claire Woodall-Vogg ‘misplaced’ a flash drive containing absentee votes and credible observers claimed that boxes of ballots were brought in and tabulated after staff had been sent home around 10.30 p.m. At 3 a.m. Woodall left in a police car, armed with the vote tally. An election colleague sent her an email saying: ‘Damn, Claire, you have a flair for drama, delivering just the margin needed at 3:00 am.’ She was ultimately fired, but not until May 2024.
Such is the anti-Trump vitriol in the US that a recent poll found 28 per cent of Democrats thought the country would have been better off if Trump had been assassinated. Amid such hatred, we can take a willingness to commit election fraud as a given. A Rasmussen poll found nearly two-thirds of Americans were concerned about vote cheating in 2024, with around one-in-five voters reporting having received a duplicate ballot in 2020.
Ballots are already flying out across various states, with Wisconsin admitting some one per cent of voters in a solidly blue county had already received duplicate ballots. So many areas of American life are run corruptly and incompetently, it requires impressive faith to argue the electoral system alone works properly.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/10/the-shadow-us-election-war/
***************************************All my main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
https://westpsychol.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH -- new site)
https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)
https://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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