Trump hatred divorced from reality

Lily Steiner

Mea culpa. I used to be one of Oprah’s biggest fans – recorded and watched every single show, bought her 25th Anniversary CD as soon as I could get my hands on it… The woman was my hero.

She was smart, likeable, honest, and open. You felt that she understood you, without ever having met her. Oprah imparted so much common sense and even opened a school for girls in Africa to make sure they received a full education. How could audiences not feel good about her? She was a regular person who had grown up with a challenging childhood and realised her dreams.

As a fan, I could forgive her idolisation of Michelle and Barack Obama. I understood her excitement for the Obama presidency, being a black woman. But her backing of the Democratic Party at their 2024 convention and filling of the audience with celebrities to celebrate Kamala Harris, is where I had to draw the line.

Her speech at the convention shocked me. She started by accusing Trump of wanting to divide and create an ‘us’ against ‘them’ society.

‘There are people who want you to see our country as a nation of us against them. People who want to scare you, who want to rule you. People who’d have you believe that books are dangerous and assault rifles are safe. That there’s a right way to worship and a wrong way to love. People who seek first to divide and then to conquer. But here’s the thing: when we stand together, it is impossible to conquer us.’

She then continues, suggesting Trump is the one wanting to scare Americans. This claim is made after the constant rhetoric of the Democrats about the death of Democracy if Trump is elected for a second time. America should remember that the Democrats are the ones who flooded the country with millions of illegal migrants from all over the world. It was the Democrats who ignored violent rioters from Black Lives Matter and Antifa, even as buildings were being burnt down.

How on earth could an intelligent woman who lived through Trump’s first term accuse Trump of being a fear-monger and who wanted to ban books…? This was my question upon hearing the speech. Is she unaware of the amazing assistance Trump gave to the black community by increasing funding to black schools and universities along with creating funding for black businesses and encouraging entrepreneurship? I wonder if she has heard the testimonies of regular black communities who are standing strong behind Trump…

Oprah, who has interviewed Trump many times and known him for many years, has previously referred to him as a bully. One may make that accusation of the Democrats after they attempted to impeach Trump not once but twice over nonsense accusations. Is Trump the bully in this scenario? As a long-time fan, I am left to wonder if is the same woman who had her own television show for over 25 years that I thought was an independent thinker. Where is that Oprah Winfrey, my hero?

The world has watched for almost four years as the Biden administration wrought destruction on America, bringing it to the brink of collapse. We have been bombarded by the incompetent Kamala Harris who cackles her way through media appearances.

Donald Trump has a proven track record of accomplishments in office, despite being hampered at every turn by the Democrats. Trump speaks for three or four hours at every rally, generally without a teleprompter, and covers both his policies and vision for making America great again. He has a recovery plan to salvage the nation after four years of Biden.

I do not understand how Oprah put her name behind Kamala Harris, along with so many other celebrities. Have our heroes become followers rather than leaders? I feel shame for what I once admired.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/09/oh-no-oprah/

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Did Trump Propose Deep Medicare Cuts?

In a recent report, “The Trump-Vance ‘Concept’ on Health Care,” Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign claims that former President Donald Trump proposed “deep cuts to Medicare and Medicaid” in his budgets submitted during his term as President, including cuts that would “undermine Medicare’s fiscal position and cut benefits for seniors.”

When it comes to Medicare, these claims are largely false, misleading, and counterproductive.

President Trump’s budgets included proposals to reduce the cost of Medicare through changes to provider payments and drug pricing reforms that have generally received bipartisan support. Specifically, his final budget proposal for Fiscal Year (FY) 2021 included proposed Medicare changes that we find would have:

* Modestly slowed Medicare cost growth – with costs rising by 89 percent over a decade rather than 104 percent and proposed savings representing one-twentieth of projected costs.

* Improved rather than cut benefits by lowering premiums and cost-sharing without reducing covered benefits or meaningfully changing access to care.

* Strengthened rather than undermined the program’s fiscal position, including by extending the solvency of the Hospital Insurance (HI) trust fund by at least 25 years.

Health care spending is the largest area of the federal budget and is experiencing rapid growth that threatens to widen deficits and drive the Medicare HI trust fund to insolvency in just 12 years. Lawmakers will need to consider meaningful savings to lower the cost of Medicare and Medicaid, along with other parts of the budget and tax code.

This presidential campaign has been damaging and unhelpful toward efforts to thoughtfully reform Medicare, with both candidates attacking their opponents for cutting benefits while shying away from offering their own comprehensive plans to address these issues.

This ‘Medi-scare’ tactic only increases the difficulty of implementing urgently needed reforms, thereby making it harder to restore solvency to Medicare HI, lower health care costs for seniors, and reign in deficits.

In their recent report, the Harris campaign claims “Trump will Slash Medicare and Medicaid” and says that “Trump proposed deep cuts to Medicare and Medicaid” in the past.

While some of President Trump’s budgets did propose large reductions to federal Medicaid spending, and there will be reasonable disagreements about this approach to health care savings, none of President Trump’s budgets slashed Medicare or proposed deep cuts to the Medicare program.

Under President Trump’s FY 2021 budget, which the Harris campaign specifically cites, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected Medicare costs would have still grown by 89 percent between FY 2020 and 2030 compared to 104 percent under then-current law.

The total Medicare savings proposed in President Trump’s budget were about 5 percent of total Medicare costs from FY 2020 through 2030 – $500 to $600 billion out of more than $10 trillion. For perspective, prescription drugs savings in the Inflation Reduction Act are projected to reduce Medicare costs by 3 percent by FY 2031 compared to current law, and the insolvency of the Medicare HI trust fund is projected to lead to an abrupt 11 percent cut in benefits.

Trump Administration Medicare Policies Would Have Cut Costs, Not Benefits

The Harris campaign claims that “independent analysts have noted that in every single one of his budgets as president, Trump sought to make significant cuts to both Medicare and Medicaid,” and that these cuts “are plainly intended to… cut benefits for seniors.”

This paints a misleading picture, since President Trump’s proposals generally focused on lowering provider payments and drug costs in a way that would have also reduced premiums and cost-sharing paid by seniors, rather than cutting their benefits.

Included in the FY 2021 budget were proposals to reduce bad debt reimbursements, lower excessive post-acute care payments, and adopt site-neutral payments that avoid paying hospitals and hospital-owned clinics more than private doctors’ offices for the same services. These reforms all resemble policies proposed by President Obama. The budget would have also reformed Medicare payments to hospitals for graduate medical education and uncompensated care, and effectively embraced the bipartisan Drug Pricing Act, which was sponsored by Senators Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) and ultimately became the basis for some parts of the drug savings provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act. Prior budgets included similar proposals, with few if any changes to Medicare benefits.

We have previously described these policies as smart health savings, and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities – cited in the Harris campaign’s report – has written favorably about them. They would all increase the value of Medicare to beneficiaries and make the program more efficient, not cut benefits for seniors.

It is worth noting that, while the Trump Administration’s budgets included bipartisan savings proposals that would have improved the overall financial health of the HI trust fund and lowered costs for taxpayers and Medicare beneficiaries, President Trump has not embraced any of these proposals as part of his 2024 campaign platform.

Trump Administration Medicare Policies Would Have Strengthened the Program’s Fiscal Position

The Harris campaign has claimed that President Trump’s “proposed budgets identify numerous cuts that are plainly intended to undermine Medicare’s fiscal position...”. However, the savings in President Trump’s budgets would have improved Medicare’s fiscal position.

Under current law, the Medicare Trustees project the HI trust fund will run out of reserves in 2036, while CBO estimates the overall cost of Medicare will rise from 3.2 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in FY 2024 to 5.4 percent by 2054.

According to his FY 2021 budget, President Trump’s Medicare proposals would have “extend[ed] the solvency of the Medicare program by at least 25 years” by reducing the cost of some parts of the Medicare HI program and moving funding for medical residents outside of Medicare.

Furthermore, while the overall Medicare savings in the FY 2021 budget were relatively modest, they would have slowed the average annual growth rate of Medicare spending from 7.4 percent per year to 6.6 percent through FY 2030. If Medicare growth were to slow by 0.8 percentage points annually for the next 30 years, costs would rise to 4.3 percent of GDP by FY 2054 instead of the 5.4 percent projected in the baseline – a meaningful improvement.

“Medi-scare” Tactics Are Harmful and Counterproductive

Accusing opponents of trying to slash Medicare and conflating reductions in Medicare spending with cuts to benefits is an all too common tactic employed by both political parties. Sometimes described as “Medi-scare,” this approach has not only been used against former President Trump, but also against GOP presidential candidates Bob Dole and John McCain, Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and even against Vice President Kamala Harris. And time and again, these claims have been debunked.

With health care costs continuing to grow and the Medicare HI trust fund less than 12 years from insolvency, there is an urgent need for policymakers to find ways to shore up the program and avoid large automatic cuts to hospitals and other providers, which would lead to a shortage of care.

There are numerous ways to lower health care costs and restore solvency to Medicare – many with bipartisan support.

Ultimately, the efforts of both 2024 presidential candidates to gain political advantage by describing reasonable Medicare cost savings as “deep cuts” only serve to take needed solutions for dealing with the unsustainable growth of Medicare and other government programs off the table.

https://www.crfb.org/blogs/did-trump-propose-deep-medicare-cuts

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Elite still in thrall to Marxist Propaganda

WWII was largely a titanic struggle between two great authoritarian regimes, the Nazis and the Soviets. For postwar American "progressives" a big problem with that was that it was the most Leftist of those two regimes which survived. Progressivism and Communism were very similar in what they preached: "All men are equal" was the lodestar for both. So could Progressivism be seen as in danger of moving farther Left and developing into an authoritarian regime like the Soviets? It was an obvious concern. The similarity between Soviet doctrines and progressive doctrines had to be seen as a warning of what could come.

American Progressives were somewhat sheltered from that perception by the fact that the progressive FDR had recently taken part in defeating one of the two great authoritarian regimes, Nazism. But that was not enough. The progressive era came to an end with the election in 1953 of the centrist "Ike".

But it was an uncomfortable situation for the Left so Leftist intellectuals greeted with a gladsome heart the work of a group of neo-Marxist psychologists who used a chain of devious reasoning to "prove" that all was not as it seemed and conservatives were the "real" authoritarians, thus exonerating the Left from any authoritarian tendencies.

http://jonjayray.com/concis2.html

That claim flew in the face of the great Soviet horror looming over everyone's heads but it was reality enough for Leftist intellectuals. Denying reality is a Leftist talent.

And for Marxists to claim that authoritarianism is conservative is perhaps the biggest laugh of all. Who said this:

"Revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon"

They are of course the well-known words of Friedrich Engels -- from his controversy with the anarchists. Yes: THAT Engels, the collaborator of Karl Marx. So Engels was quite frank about the authoritarian nature of Leftism but such frankness did not suit latter-day Marxists at all.

That conservatives are the real authoritarians was in any case a very tough sell. It was the Left who wanted to impose their ideas upon society through all sorts of changes. The conservatives simply wanted to stop them doing that. Leftism is intrinsically authoritarian. If making people do things that they do not want to do and making them stop doing things that they want to do is not authoritarian what else would be?

Nonetheless, the gross fiction that Leftism is not authoritarian has survived largely untroubled in the minds of psychologists and Leftists generally. As an idea, it is just too pleasing to abandon. In recent years, however,there does seem to have been some unshackling in some minds from that idea. So we have on some occasions had books and articles appearing that try to face reality. Below is a precis of a recent such book


Liberal Bullies: Inside the Mind of the Authoritarian Left

Luke Conway

The political left has an urgent and rising problem with authoritarianism. An alarmingly high percentage of self-identified progressives are punitive, bullying, and intolerant of disagreement – and the problem is getting worse.

Using his own cutting-edge research, leading psychologist Luke Conway shows that it’s not just right-wing extremists who long for an authority figure to crush their enemies, silence opponents and restore order; it’ s also those who preach ‘be kind’ and celebrate their ‘inclusivity.’ A persistent proportion of left-wingers demonstrate authoritarian tendencies, and they’re becoming more emboldened as they gain cultural and political power. On a range of scientific and social issues, they are increasingly advocating censorship over free debate, disregarding the rule of law, and dehumanising their opponents. These tendencies are part of an accelerating ‘threat circle’ of mutual hatred and fear between left and right that could tear apart our basic democratic norms.

Concluding with an eloquent call for firm but rational resistance to this rising tide of liberal bullying, Conway presents a way forward for our hyper-partisan era.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Liberal-Bullies-Left-Authoritarianism-Problem/dp/1800752059

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US election has been flipped upside down as Donald Trump takes swing state polling lead

Donald Trump is on track to win the 2024 US election, according to the latest polling. The former US President has made a stunning comeback with just 19 days until election day.

His Democrat opponent Kamala Harris, who had been leading, has been losing ground in the key battleground states that will decide the election.

Recently, Ms Harris mantained a lead in the popular vote of about +2 points, but that has since slipped to +1.4.

However, the election is not determined by the popular vote. It is decided by the US electoral college system.

Under the system, each US state is apportioned a number of presidential electors, to a total of 538, with a majority of 270 or more needed required to elect the president.

While most of the states lean either heavily blue or red, the swing states can be decided by razor-thin margins.

The latest RealClear Polling numbers bode well for Mr Trump, and are a worrying sign for Ms Harris. The site aggregates the results of numerous polls into averages.

Mr Trump holds a narrow lead +0.3 point lead in Pennsylvania, which has 19 electoral votes. He’s also ahead in North Carolina by +1.4 points. Mr Trump is also poised to flip Georgia and is leading there by +0.7 points.

Ms Harris has maintained a slight lead of +0.3 in Wisconsin.

Mr Trump is leading by +1.0 in Michigan, a state with a second-largest Arab population in the country, and where the Israel-Hamas war could play a role.

Ms Harris looks set to win Minnesota and is leading by +4.7.

Mr Trump is likely to flip Arizona and is leading by +1.1.

He is also slightly in front in Nevada, with a +0.5 margin.

New Hampshire is set to stay blue, with Ms Harris up +7.4 as is Virginia where she leads by j+6.4.

Texas, which some thought may be competitive, is in fact not — as Mr Trump leads by +5.8.

If Mr Trump does indeed win every state that he’s currently ahead in, that would give him 302 electoral college votes.

However, Ms Harris is doing better according to the numbers published by polling site FiveThirtyEight, where she has a 54 per cent chance of being elected president.

The betting markets have also swung in favour of Mr Trump, with Sportsbet now paying $1.67 for a Trump win and $2.25 for a Harris victory.

The election remains incredibly close and even slight voting changes can have significant impacts on the final result.

The election campaign took a bizarre turn as Mr Trump swayed to music for about 30 minutes on stage at a televised town hall event on Monday (local time).

Initially, the event in Oaks near Philadelphia was standard fare ahead of the November 5 election, as Mr Trump took friendly questions from supporters on the economy and cost of living.

With the session moderated by a loyal right-wing ally, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, Mr Trump was on cruise control — although he got the election date wrong by two months, urging supporters to vote “on January 5.”

After the town hall paused for two audience members who required medical attention, Mr Trump then switched focus.

Jokingly asking whether “anybody else would like to faint,” Mr Trump declared: “Let’s not do any more questions.”

“Let’s just listen to music. Let’s make it into a music. Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?” Mr Trump said.

And so they did: for more than half an hour, the Mr Trump playlist blasted while the candidate mostly stood on stage listening and slowly dancing.

Mr Trump has made a brief, jerky dance his signature at the end of rallies for years, nearly always to his exit song — the Village People’s 1978 disco anthem YMCA.

This time, he stayed on stage for nine songs, ranging from opera to a series of his favorites, including Guns N’ Roses’ November Rain, Rufus Wainwright’s rendition of Hallelujah, Elvis and of course YMCA.

And his dance routine expanded from the familiar jerky motion to a slow swaying. Often, however, he did not dance but stood in place and stared out into the crowd and sometimes pointed at people.

Later on Tuesday, Mr Trump later got into a heated exchange with Bloomberg editor-in-chief John Micklethwait.

Discussing Mr Trump’s plan to enact tariffs, Mr Micklethwait repeatedly asked how Mr Trump would enact high tariffs on foreign companies without getting an economic blowback on the American consumer in exchange.

Mr Trump responded his policy would have a positive effect, and later slammed the journalist saying: “You’ve been wrong all your life”.

Playing the health card

Ms Harris, meanwhile, has tried to pivot the conversation to Mr Trump’s health after a medical report was published showing she is in “excellent health”.

She has since challenged Mr Trump to publish his own health records.

“Vice President Harris remains in excellent health,” her physician Joshua Simmons said in the report, adding that she “possesses the physical and mental resiliency required to successfully execute the duties of the presidency.”

Speaking to reporters on Saturday ahead of a trip to North Carolina, Ms Harris called Mr Trump’s unwillingness to publish his records “a further example of his lack of transparency.”

“It’s obvious that his team at least, does not want the American people to see everything about who he is … and whether or not he is actually fit to do the job of being president of the United States,” she said.

https://www.news.com.au/finance/work/leaders/us-election-has-been-flipped-upside-down-as-donald-trump-takes-swing-state-polling-lead/news-story/ee3a9fdf7d95646468019d49c8cbbafa

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DJ Trump rips up the political script, and brings down house

Donald Trump’s town hall at the Greater Philadelphia Expo Centre, in the suburbs of Pennsylvania’s most populous city, became an impromptu concert on Monday night (Tuesday AEDT) when the former president ditched the political script and fired up the base, cranking out hits from Franz Schubert’s Ave Maria to gay anthem YMCA by Village People.

“Let’s not do any more questions. Let’s just listen to music … Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?” the likely future Republican president declared before launching into a nearly 40-minute DJ session – unprecedented in US presidential campaign history – from his personal playlist.

The 78-year-old bopped and jived onstage at his Oaks indoor campaign rally before thousands of adoring fans in his characteristic style. The episode infuriated Democrats, who seized on it as evidence of Trump’s supposed cognitive decline. “I hope he’s OK,” Kamala Harris’s campaign team sneered on social media.

But that wasn’t the full story. Two attendees had just fainted in the cramped hall. “Would anybody else like to faint?” Trump joked to laughter before launching his music session, which included Guns N’ Roses’ November Rain and Sinead O’Connor’s Nothing Compares 2 U.

Even South Dakota Republican governor Kristi Noem, who was co-hosting the rally, appeared shocked that her leader had flicked the switch to vaudeville, literally.

Trump felt the moment demanded music after the two health episodes soured the mood. And he was right. “Nobody’s leaving,” Trump teased the crowd. “What’s going on?”

And he was OK, too, as evidenced less than 24 hours later when he sat down in Chicago with Bloomberg editor-in-chief John Micklethwait for by far the most intellectually demanding one-hour interview on economics and geopolitics of the US campaign so far, to numerous standing ovations from an elite business audience.

That 24-hour period highlighted the contrasts of this campaign: the most unscripted and genuine, however flawed, candidate in US presidential politics up against the most scripted and fabricated.

By all means, support Democrats for policy or other reasons, but this is surely undeniable. Imagine being Trump’s political advisers in September after he declared women “won’t be thinking about abortion”, Democrats’ top campaign issue, if he’s elected.

While Trump dominated an exchange with one of the top English journalists, Harris sat down on Tuesday (Wednesday AEDT) with black youth podcaster Charlamagne Tha God, hot on the heels of her Call Her Daddy interview a week earlier.

“I say the same thing when I go to Detroit as I do in Philly,” Harris told him, when asked whether it was awkward that she repeated the same tired phrases: “opportunity economy”, “time to turn the page”, “middle-class background”.

And all this in the same week that even establishment left-wing media had to cover accusations the Vice-President had plagiarised numerous sections, including word for word from Wikipedia, of her 2009 book Smart on Crime.

This is surely why the Washington establishment loathes Trump so much. He will be far harder to manage than Joe Biden and certainly Harris should she succeed him. Trump, whatever you think of him, is what the founding fathers of the US envisaged, an independent leader who makes his own decisions, in charge of the executive branch rather than controlled by it.

Democrats must be hoping Trump self-sabotages as Harris’s slender polling advantage steadily erodes. When he announced his candidacy in late 2022 I had thought Trump was an appalling candidate, likely to lose, and hoped Florida Governor Ron DeSantis would thrash him. But I, like most of the media, was wrong. Trump 2.0 appears sharper, more disciplined than Trump 1.0.

His behaviour in July when he was almost killed was undeniably courageous and eerily fateful even for the unreligious. Who of us would have stood up under a hail of bullets, inquired about our shoes and later refused hospital care? Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, whose hopes of a Harris victory I’ve come to believe, must have been astonished. This was real – and, to be fair, unexpected from a perennial Vietnam draft dodger – courage.

US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris speaks during a campaign rally in Douglas, Arizona.
US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris speaks during a campaign rally in Douglas, Arizona.
The only presidential candidate to exhibit more bravery in similar circumstances was Theodore Roosevelt, who insisted on finishing his speech, bleeding, after being shot in 1912.

Even Trump’s vitality has surprised me. A gaunt and lethargic Bill Clinton, who is the same age as Trump, appeared on the Democrats’ campaign trail this week, the former political maestro delivering Republicans a golden video when he declared an illegal immigrant wouldn’t have been able to commit murder in the US had the border been properly vetted.

I don’t want this to read like hagiography. If Republicans lose this unlosable election, which is sure to be close, it will be because of Trump’s political baggage, a mix of forced and unforced errors from his time in the White House, prove insurmountable.

DeSantis or Nikki Haley would have trounced Biden or Harris by a far greater margin given the miserable record of the Biden administration, inflation, unconscionable illegal immigration and a host of unpopular cultural positions the Democrats insist on shoving down the throats of middle America come what may.

Trump is the betting market favourite three weeks out from polling day and a handful of points behind in national polls. Harris will appear on Fox News on Wednesday (Thursday AEDT), which could signal a lack of confidence in her prospects among campaign staff. The idea that Trump would go on MSNBC is laughable.

After near 40 minutes DJing, Trump left the stage as Memory, from the musical Cats, played. If Trump loses, no one is going to forget this campaign or the unlikeliest of political comebacks.

We should relish the contrast in style while it lasts; it’s unlikely to be repeated for generations.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/dj-trump-rips-up-the-political-script-and-brings-down-house/news-story/88614359cd417534a98ee162342ca94e

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Disdain for Trump all we learned from angry Harris’s Fox interview

Few viewers would have emerged from watching Kamala Harris’s highly combative interview with Fox News having learned anything about her or her policies except her visceral disdain for Donald Trump.

During the 30 minute interview with Bret Baier, she became at times visibly furious with his lines of questioning. But it was Trump’s rhetoric and mental state that she repeatedly attacked throughout, adding that she would “support and enforce federal law” as president.

Baier and Harris talked over each other continually, and most of Harris’s answers tended toward verbiage - grammatically correct, but saying very little concrete.

“I am running on ‘turning the page’ from the last decade in which we have been burdened with the kind of rhetoric coming from Donald Trump,” she said at one stage, using two phrases about pages and burdens for which she’s often mocked.

Baier began predictably with perhaps Democrats’ weakest policy area, illegal immigration, challenging Harris to state the number of illegal immigrants her administration had allowed to enter the US, which official estimates put to be at least six million.

Harris refused to acknowledge the unprecedented surge had anything to do with Biden administration, and wouldn’t apologise to the families who had lost loved ones after they were murdered by illegal immigrants, events even Bill Clinton conceded earlier in the week might not have happened had the border been more secure.

“Of course, to the extent our administration’s policies had anything to do with those tragic murders, we apologise, and my administration will do much better” was what she should have humbly said, rather than blaming Donald Trump whose border policies were immediately reversed by Joe Biden in early 2021.

At least she gave a stronger answer when asked how she would be different from Joe Biden as president, a question she flunked terribly last week in a soft-ball interview on The View, where she said she couldn’t think of anything she’d do differently.

“I will not be a continuation of Joe Biden’s presidency; like every new president I will bring my life experience, professional experience, fresh and new ideas, I’m a new generation of leadership,” she said.

“For example I have not spent the majority of my career in DC,” she added, quickly trying to talk about her policies to bring down the cost of housing.

Harris ‘lost it’ when Baier played a clip of Donald Trump, who was asked earlier on Fox what he’d meant by his controversial claim the US had “an enemy within”, claiming the clip played was unfair.

When Baier challenged on why and how she had changed her positions on public funding for sex change operations or decriminalisation of illegal immigration, she gave unclear answers.

For Harris critics, the interview will be rich fodder to claim she’s not up to the task of being president. Her performance was at least as much the result of the very bad hand she’s been dealt: trying to defend the Biden administration of which she’s been a central part, whose track record is so unpopular.

It’s difficult to find many positive let alone effusive comments on Harris’s performance on social media. It’s unlikely she’ll give another Fox interview before November 5, but she deserves credit for at least agreeing to it. And it would be great to see Trump in an interview on MSNBC, but given he believes he’s ahead, that’s unlikely.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/kamala-harriss-interview-with-foxs-brett-baier-was-strikingly-adversarial-and-angry/news-story/6fe4a02ce088e08ab010da513105d9c0

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https://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

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Trump Is Running A ‘Dudes Rock’ Campaign. It’s Actually Working Pretty Well

If you’re a politician and want to appeal to young men, you shouldn’t spend years belittling them and then, in the eleventh hour, send a Marxist Mr. Magoo candidate on a pheasant hunt only for him to fumble around with a shotgun.

You also shouldn’t hire paid actors and a Jimmy Kimmel writer to whip up a cringe ad about how masculine men aren’t afraid to support a woman like Kamala Harris. But that’s exactly what the Harris-Walz campaign is doing in the final stretches of the race to court all the young men they’ve spent years alienating. They are attempting to repair a brand that has been Bud-Lighted. (RELATED: Democrats Bud Lighted Their Entire Brand, And It’s Too Late To Save It)

Trump, on the other hand, appears to be running a “Dudes Rock” campaign.

What is a Dudes Rock campaign, you might ask? A Dudes Rock campaign is going on a male-centric podcast, instead of a sex advice podcast like “Call Her Daddy,” and chopping it up with a couple dudes about football.

It’s all the UFC appearances Trump has made in the past year. It’s inviting Elon Musk to a campaign rally. It’s the various podcast interviews with the Nelk Boys, Adin Ross, Logan Paul and Theo Von.

And it seems to be working. While Harris and Walz make flaccid, last-ditch efforts to win over men, mainly by doing and saying things that men will find fake and obnoxious, Trump is just being himself, on whatever platform is offered him, and building on his lead among young males between the ages of 18 and 29.

In late August, journalist Peter Hamby warned Bill Maher that a shift in young men toward Trump could blow up Kamala’s hopes of becoming the first female president.

“This is a real issue for Kamala Harris,” Hamby said. “This could be fatal for her campaign … Democrats need to win 60% of the youth vote to win the White House.”

“Hillary came up short; Obama did it; Biden did it. Kamala Harris is right now at, like, 55% of the youth vote,” he went on to say. “If she doesn’t get to 60, she could lose the election, and it’s because young men, Gen Z men, are breaking to Trump.”

This election might really come down to dudes who rock. We shall see.

https://dailycaller.com/2024/10/15/donald-trump-dudes-rock-campaign-young-men-males-gen-z-millennials-podcasts/

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US Boots Hit Ground In Israel As Threat From Iran Looms

U.S. servicemembers arrived in Israel on Monday amid the country’s chaotic multifront war with various actors in the region, and more troops will arrive soon, the Pentagon said on Tuesday.

The Pentagon previously announced on Sunday that the troops would be deployed to the Middle East along with a Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile battery system, meant to help Israel defend itself against potential aerial attacks against missile attacks from Iran. The approximately 100 troops that arrived on Monday will help operate the THAAD system, though the Pentagon wouldn’t say when it would be operational, given the sensitive security nature of the situation.

“Over the coming days, additional U.S. military personnel and THAAD battery components will continue to arrive in Israel,” Pentagon spokesman Pat Ryder said on Tuesday. “The deployment of the THAAD battery to Israel underscores the United States’ commitment to the defense of Israel and to defend Americans in Israel from any ballistic missile attacks by Iran.”

Though U.S. forces are not permanently stationed in Israel — unlike other Arab states in the region — it isn’t untypical for troops to be temporarily deployed there for joint training exercises or operational activities. The U.S. also previously deployed a THAAD system to Israel in 2019 and 2023.

The THAAD system that’s been deployed to Israel now is to provide defenses against a possible Iranian ballistic missile attack. Iran launched hundreds of ballistic missiles against Israel in April, and again in late September; it is highly unusual for Iran to launch strikes from within its own orders, as it typically relies on its various terror networks throughout the Middle East to conduct attacks against Israel or U.S. forces in the region.

The current situation in the Middle East is fraught, however, and is quickly escalating. Israel went to war against Hamas in Gaza on Oct. 7, after the terrorist group invaded Israel and killed roughly 1,200 people, and now the current war is turning toward Hezbollah in Lebanon and Iran.

The Biden-Harris administration has urged for caution and de-escalation in the region for months, though the conflict has shown no signs of slowing down. Various ceasefire deals have been discussed though none have come to fruition, as neither Israel, Hamas or Hezbollah seems interested.

U.S. forces have fallen under the crossfire in the conflict in Iraq, Syria and Jordan over the last year; three U.S. servicemembers were killed in a terrorist attack against a coalition base in Jordan in January.

https://dailycaller.com/2024/10/15/us-boots-hit-ground-in-israel-as-threat-from-iran-looms/

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Leading German Political Journalist Says Banning anti-immigrant party is “Overdue” and Insists Political Repression is Perfectly Fine When Exercised by a “Constitutional State”

The German elite are getting ants in their pants over the rise in popularity of Germany's AfD -- a real conservative party

This man is named Marco Wanderwitz. He is a member of the nominally centre-Right Christian Democratic Union, and he’s been in the German Bundestag – our federal Parliament – since 2002. He reached perhaps the apex of his career late in the era of Angela Merkel, when he was made Parliamentary State Secretary for East Germany. Wanderwitz has been complaining about Alternative für Deutschland for years, and his screeching only gained in volume and shrillness after he lost his direct mandate in the last federal election to Mike Moncsek, his AfD rival. Above all, Wanderwitz wants to ban the AfD, and he has finally gathered enough support to bring the whole question before the Bundestag. Thus we will be treated to eminently democratic debate about how we must defend democracy by prohibiting the second-strongest-polling party in the Federal Republic.

Now, I try not to do unnecessary drama here at the plague chronicle, so I must tell you straightaway that this won’t go anywhere. Even were the Bundestag to approve a ban, which it won’t, the whole matter would end up before the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe, where I suspect it would fail in any case. Basically, the AfD is accumulating popular support faster than our ruling cartel parties can summon their collective will for overtly authoritarian interventions, and as long as this dynamic continues, the AfD will scrape by.

A great many influential people nevertheless really, really want to outlaw the opposition and effectively disenfranchise 20% of the German electorate. Our journalistic luminaries in particular have become deeply radicalised over the past three years. They got everything they ever wanted in the form of our present Social Democrat- and Green-dominated Government, only to have their political dream turn into an enormous steaming pile of shit. Because the establishment parties, including the CDU, have no answers to the crises besetting Germany, they have had to watch popular support for the AfD grow and grow. All their carefully curated talk-show tut-tutting, all their artfully coordinated diatribes about “Right wing extremism”, all their transparently hostile reporting, has done nothing to reverse the trend. If establishment journalists were running the show, the AfD would have long been banned and many of their politicians would be in prison.

Today, Germany’s largest newsweekly, Die Zeit, has published a long piece by Political Editor Eva Ricarda Lautsch, in which she explains to 1.95 millions readers exactly why “banning the AfD is overdue”. The views she expresses are absolutely commonplace among elite German urbanites, and for this reason alone the article is sobering.

Let’s read it together.

Lautsch is disquieted that many in the Bundestag fear banning the AfD is “too risky”, “too soon” and “simply undemocratic”, and that “the necessary political momentum is not materialising”.

The problem… is not the lack of occasions for banning the AfD. Sayings like “We will hunt them down”, Sturmabteilung slogans, deportation fantasies: we have long since become accustomed to their constant rabble-rousing. And this is to say nothing of the most recent and particularly shocking occasion – the disastrous opening session of the Thuringian state parliament a week ago, in which an AfD Senior President was able to effectively suspend parliamentary business for hours. Those with enough power to generate momentum don’t have to wait for it; what is missing across the parties is political courage.

What really distinguishes Lautsch’s article (and mainstream discussion about the AfD in general) is the constant grasping after reasons that the party is bad and unconstitutional, and the failure ever to deliver anything convincing. That “we will hunt them down” line comes from a speech the AfD politician Alexander Gauland gave in 2017, after his party entered the Bundestag with 12.6% of the vote for the first time. As even BILD reported, he meant that the AfD would take a hard, confrontational line against the establishment. He was not promising that AfD representatives would literally hunt down Angela Merkel, although the quote immediately entered the canonical list of evil AfD statements and has been repeated thousands of times by hack journalists ever since. As for the “Sturmabteilung slogans,” the “deportation fantasies” and the “opening session of the Thuringian state parliament” – I’ve covered all of that here at the plague chronicle. They are lies and frivolities, and what’s more, they are so obviously lies and frivolities that it is impossible to believe even Lautsch thinks very much of them. These are things that low-information readers of Die Zeit are supposed to find convincing; they aren’t real reasons.

Perhaps this is why Lautsch backtracks, deciding suddenly that the case for banning the AfD may not be all that obvious after all. She admits that it is “legally risky” because, for a ban to succeed, somebody would have “to prove… that [the AfD] is working to destroy the free democratic order”. This is very hard to do because “it is part of the AfD’s strategy to present itself as the party of true democrats and defenders of the constitution” even though “its representatives have long been working to dismantle the institutions of our Basic Law from within”. Thus, as always, the absence of evidence for anything untoward about the AfD becomes evidence for its malicious, underhanded, democracy-undermining strategies.

Lautsch, desperate to climb out of this circular argument, first seizes upon the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution – the domestic intelligence agency that has been spying on the AfD for years. She insists that it has “already collected extensive material… which in itself could be used to justify a ban”. Lautsch’s “could” is doing a great deal of work here. The problem is that nobody, least of all Lautsch, has any idea what material the constitutional protectors have compiled. We can, however, try to learn from similar cases where we know more. Back in February, for example, I took a very close look at the information the constitutional protectors had amassed on Hans-Georg Maaßen. It was far from encouraging, and the truth is that if our political goons had anything that could really do in the AfD, we would’ve heard about it long ago.

As Lautsch continues, she strays ever further from making any kind of rational case. The last concrete complaint she raises is her claim that “the AfD is shifting the boundaries [of discourse] ever further in the direction of an ethnic conception” of Germanness, and that at the notorious “secret Potsdam meeting” the AfD politician Ulrich Siegmund said some untoward things about foreign restaurants. She rushes past these points, sensing their weakness, and spends the rest of this section on bizarre and irrelevant matters:

There is also the AfD’s self-representation as the representative of the true will of the people. That in itself has little to do with parliamentary democracy. Anyone who claims to already know the will of the people is unlikely to engage in parliamentary debate. The AfD therefore uses parliament primarily as a stage for staging the inflammatory speeches of its representatives and then distributing them on YouTube and TikTok. These are addressed directly to the “people” – and thus removed from parliamentary discussion.

Literally all politicians claim to represent the popular will and to act in popular interests. None of this is illegal or even remotely wrong. The AfD is an opposition party, excluded by the reigning cartel system from participation in government, and so of course it uses parliamentary debate to criticise the lunatics in charge and use social media to distribute its speeches to supporters. What kind of complaints are these? Does Lautsch really want to ban the AfD because it’s good at TikTok?

https://dailysceptic.org/2024/10/15/leading-political-journalist-says-banning-the-afd-is-overdue-and-insists-political-repression-is-perfectly-fine-when-exercised-by-a-constitutional-state/

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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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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.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/what-is-it-albanese-and-wong-dont-get-about-irans-threat-to-israel/news-story/691c788cf9c2a11a33324a32cfd230a9

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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.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/can-harris-stop-trump-get-ready-for-some-big-democrat-suprises/news-story/4a524db68e1f5663657cf7fb03300b5a

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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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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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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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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/

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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/

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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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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.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/arab-nations-are-quietly-backing-israel-why-cant-the-west-do-the-same/news-story/d3ab3379ee8ca4fb062802162ce06331

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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

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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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