The beginning of a new age of music. The post Meta MTV and the Buggles: the most historic music video in history first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

Young men once occupied a special — even unique — place in the West. Alexander the Great was 20 years old when he became king of Macedonia, and 25 when he conquered the Persian Empire; by the age of 30, he had brought most of the known world to heel. Augustus was 17 when he inherited Julius Caesar’s will; Charlemagne was 24 when he became the undisputed king of the Franks; and Napoleon was 24 when he became a general in the French army. On July 4, 1776, James Madison was 25; Alexander Hamilton was 21; and James Monroe was just 18. Christ himself was estimated to be roughly 30 — not young, per se, but hardly old, either — when he began his ministry. Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our fall 2024 print magazine, which includes this article and others like it. The West’s greatest achievements were secured by men in the prime of their lives who were eager for glory, ready to die for immortality, and determined to write their names in the annals of their people’s history. From the early Viking raiders who sailed westward to explore and conquer alien worlds, to the European kings who struggled to unite and forge nations, to the Christian missionaries and explorers who crossed oceans to bring their God to new lands, Western Man’s undying thirst for new frontiers drove his civilization onward to destiny. They were the dreamers, poets, artists, statesmen, priests, philosophers, soldiers, and kings whose restless and irrepressible desire to know, explore, create, and conquer painted a civilization upon the empty canvas of primordial Europe. It was young Western men who poured out from the shores of their respective kingdoms to conquer continents, build a global empire, and give birth to the modern world. This article is taken from The American Spectator’s fall 2024 print magazine. Subscribe to receive the entire magazine. For what young men gave to the West, the West gave back to them in kind. Youthful masculinity was afforded a certain kind of poetic glory in the West. But today, it is precisely what all of modern American — and more broadly, Western — society seems dedicated to punishing. The very virtues that were once celebrated and idolized by the bards and poets are now depicted as vices by the modern social and cultural regime. The very structure of American life appears, at times, to be organized around suppressing the same distinct ethos that originally shaped it. In practice, this manifests as both an attack on young men specifically and an attack on masculinity in general — not just on the “gender norms” we hear about incessantly today, but on the masculine virtues and ways of viewing and interacting with the world. The phenomenon goes by many names, but perhaps the most popular descriptor, at least on the younger and more internet–savvy end of the Right, is “The Longhouse” — a term that “refers,” as the pseudonymous writer L0m3z put it in First Things, “to the remarkable overcorrection of the last two generations toward social norms centering feminine needs and feminine methods for controlling, directing, and modeling behavior.” Lomez writes: Nowhere is this more apparent than in the realm of free speech and the tenor of our public discourse where consensus and the prohibition on “offense” and “harm” take precedence over truth. To claim that a biological man is a man, even in the context of a joke, cannot be tolerated. Instead, our speech norms demand “affirmation.” We are expected to indulge with theatrical zealotry the preferences, however bizarre, of the never-ending scroll of victim groups whose pathologies are above criticism.… Further, these speech norms are enforced through punitive measures typical of female-dominated groups –– social isolation, reputational harm, indirect and hidden force. The emasculation of American life is both a literal process — whereby women are increasingly replacing men in traditionally male-dominated positions of power — and a more abstract, but no less potent, transformation, wherein feminine tastes, attitudes, and behavioral norms and expectations are replacing their masculine predecessors. As Lomez notes, “The Longhouse distrusts overt ambition. It censures the drive to assert oneself on the world, to strike out for conquest and expansion. Male competition and the hierarchies that drive it are unwelcome. Even constructive expressions of these instincts are deemed toxic, patriarchal, or even racist.” Art by Bill Wilson for The American Spectator It is no coincidence, then, that political and ideological polarization among young people is increasingly splitting across gendered lines. “The Left,” broadly construed, is the party of the insiders — corporate managers, government bureaucrats, academic administrators, Big Tech C-suites, NGOs, and foundations, and so on. “The Right,” broadly construed, is the party of the outsiders — the Americans who, as a result of their geographic location, economic status, occupation, demographic characteristics, religious worldview, and sociological background are most alienated from the centers of social, cultural, and political power in modern America. The insiders represent, defend, and benefit from the new system; the outsiders resent and are disenfranchised by it. The result is that, by many measures, gender-based ideological polarization within Generation Z is more pronounced than at any other time in recent memory. A University of Michigan survey tracking the political views of twelfth-grade boys and girls dating back to the 1970s found a sharp and drastic divergence to the right among young men starting around 2015 — and a sharp and drastic divergence to the left among young women around the same time. “Twelfth-grade boys are nearly twice as likely to identify as conservative versus liberal, according to [the] respected federal survey of American youth,” the Hill wrote. At the same time, “women ages 18 to 29 are more likely to identify as liberal now than at any time in the past two decades, according to Gallup surveys. Young women are almost twice as likely as young men to claim the liberal tag.” A major global survey written up in Reuters back in April found that young American men were “the only U.S. population group to turn more conservative over the past decade.” Art by Bill Wilson for The American Spectator A slate of other polls, surveys, and studies published over the past few years tell the same story. According to Gallup, the share of young men who identify as Republican has increased by double digits over the past decade. According to a Wall Street Journal poll published in late July, the majority of young men (ages 18–29) now support Trump — a 29-point swing from 2020. Young women, on the other hand, supported Biden over Trump by a whopping 30-point margin. (For context, the gender gap between young men and young women was only 5 points in the 2008 presidential election). The trend extends to specific issue-based positions: On everything from a border wall to gender identity to abortion to tax cuts, the Journal poll found that young men sit to the right of young women by double-digit margins. On “abortion should be legal,” the gap between young men and women is 37 points; on “let kids pick their gender identity,” the gap is 35 points; on both “build the wall” and “extend the Trump tax cuts beyond 2025,” the gap is an astounding 43 points. What’s particularly notable is that by at least some measures, the rightward shift appears to be accelerating at the younger end of the spectrum: According to PRRI’s annual poll of Generation Z — which helpfully breaks down results between “Gen Z adults” (ages 18–25) and “Gen Z teens” (ages 13–17) — younger Gen Z boys are 25 points more likely, on net, to identify as conservative over liberal than their older Gen Z counterparts. The significance of the rightward shift among young men is evident in the fact that it extends beyond the relatively small cohort of highly politically engaged or active constituencies. Youth male culture today is often either implicitly or explicitly right-wing. This is visible in the most popular and well-known influencers among boys — Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Elon Musk, and so on. This is the true measure of the political culture in a particular demographic: Even for the apolitical members of the group, the environmental backdrop — the podcasts they listen to, the figures they idolize, the topics of discussion with their friends and broader social circle — is either right-wing or right-wing–coded. Political and ideological polarization among young people is increasingly splitting across gendered lines. This divergence isn’t just happening in America; it’s taking place across the developed world. “In the US, Gallup data shows that after decades where the sexes were each spread roughly equally across liberal and conservative world views, women aged 18 to 30 are now 30 percentage points more liberal than their male contemporaries. That gap took just six years to open up,” the Financial Times reported earlier this year. But the precisely same phenomenon is occurring in Germany (which has a 30-point gap), the United Kingdom (which has a 25-point gap), and any number of other developed nations. An Ipsos survey of male and female “Zoomers” across 26 countries, published earlier this year, found consistent double-digit gaps between young men and women on issues like same-sex marriage. What all this means for America — and for the Right’s place within it — remains unclear. The genre of rightism emanating from the alienated, disenfranchised young male masses is certain to be distinct from the movement conservatism of the past few decades. It will be angrier, more militant, and organized largely around an emerging set of issues that are often described as the “culture war.” In reality, these issues are merely different battlefields in the far more fundamental war surrounding the most essential questions of American identity. Young men know, at a visceral level, what defeat in this war would mean. They understand, better than many of their older counterparts, the stakes. They are the Right’s natural allies — if the Right is willing to embrace them. Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our fall 2024 print magazine. The post The Rightward Rebellion: Why Young Men Are Flocking to Conservatism appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Vice President Kamala Harris has turned down an invitation to speak at the Al Smith dinner in New York City. Her staff says she will be busy campaigning, but that is a poor excuse: every presidential candidate, save for Walter Mondale in 1984, has accepted the invitation (New York Archbishop John Cardinal O’Connor did not extend an invitation to either candidate in 1996, and that is because he could not bring himself to invite President Bill Clinton; he had just vetoed a ban on partial-birth abortions).  The Al Smith Dinner, named after the first Catholic to run for president in 1928, is well-attended by elites from government, media, business, and the entertainment industry. It is an opportunity to showcase one’s policies and persona. This is the real reason Harris is taking a pass: she fails on both counts. Neither Harris nor Trump is Catholic, but that doesn’t matter as much as their policies. Trump is pro-life, pro-school choice, and pro-religious liberty. She is anti-life, anti-school choice, and anti-religious liberty. Given this reality, a Catholic setting is not exactly the kind of venue that Harris would relish.  On abortion, Harris has never found one she couldn’t justify. A proponent of abortion on demand, she claimed during the debate with Trump that he was wrong in saying that she would allow abortions “in the seventh month, the eighth month, the ninth month.” She answered, “That’s not true.” It is true, and it is what Roe v. Wade allowed. To deny that late-term abortions exist is simply wrong. In 2019, the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute admitted that at least 12,000 late-term abortions take place annually in the U.S. In 2023, a fact-checker at the Washington Post conceded that at least 10,000 late-term abortions take place each year. Harris has consistently voted against every school choice measure ever proposed. Beholden to the teachers unions, she will not allow indigent minorities the same right to send their children to the school of their choice that more affluent Americans enjoy.  When it comes to religious liberty, Harris is a cosponsor of the Equality Act and the sponsor of the Do No Harm Act. Both would exempt the bill’s provisions from the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), the most consequential religious liberty legislation ever adopted. This says it all. Without RFRA, Catholic doctors and hospitals could be forced to perform abortions and sex-reassignment surgeries. This is what Harris wants. So radical is she on this issue that in 2019 she answered an ACLU survey saying she would have taxpayers fund sex-reassignment surgery for illegal aliens and federal prisoners.  Important as these policy reasons are, there is a bigger reason why Harris is not going to the Al Smith Dinner. Her persona is the problem. The event is known for allowing the candidates to “roast” each other. This is right up Trump’s alley — he is lightning fast and loves to roast his foes on a regular basis. But for Harris, this kind of setting would be a disaster. Let’s face it — she talks like a preschooler and has a hard time stringing two coherent sentences together. No matter what the question is, she begins by personalizing her response, all the while thinking of something — anything — to say. This event demands that the participants be quick on their feet, and that is not exactly her strong suit. And she won’t have her dancing sidekick, Tim, or her billionaire buddy, Oprah, there to bail her out.  Sen. Chuck Schumer wants Harris to attend the Al Smith Dinner. It’s time Trump sent him a MAGA hat. READ MORE: Pope Francis Equates Opposition to Illegal Immigration to Abortion What Attacks on Catholic Churches Reveal About Society The post Kamala Smart to Skip Al Smith Dinner appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

On Monday, Sept. 23, the 300,000 residents of Haifa, Israel, rushed to bomb shelters as oscillating wails of rocket sirens pierced the city for the first time since the outbreak of war 11 months ago. Overhead, bright orange flares from Israel’s Iron Dome defense system streaked across the sky to intercept a barrage of rockets fired from Hezbollah in Lebanon. The assault marked the first time since 2006 that Israel’s northern port city, where I live, has come under attack. Most of the barrage was intercepted, but a direct hit was made at the University of Haifa on top of Mount Carmel.   Hezbollah began firing rockets into northern Israel on Oct. 8 in solidarity with the Hamas attack on Oct. 7. The northern front has since been a tit-for-tat war, with Iranian-backed Hezbollah rocket barrages (which have displaced over 60,000 Israeli residents) facing off against Israeli Defense Force (IDF) strategic retaliations as part of operation “Northern Arrow.” Tensions have incrementally heightened since August following the IDF strike in Tehran that killed Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and Iran’s threat to fully mobilize Hezbollah militants across Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq. The prospect of a full-scale ground war is looming on the horizon.   The days preceding the attack on Haifa, however, marked the highest escalation of tensions yet, triggered by a series of covert operations. On Sept. 17, hundreds of pager devices started exploding in the Beirut neighborhood of Dahia, a district controlled by Hezbollah. Largely obsolete in the U.S., the use of pagers (or beepers) is widely used by Iranian proxy terrorist networks for rapid SMS communication and alerts without the GPS tracking common in today’s smartphones. Other Hezbollah stronghold cities throughout Lebanon soon reported the same incident, and chaos erupted as the public became suspicious of anyone using a wireless device. By the end of the day, Hezbollah forces had shifted tactical communications to handheld radios and walkie-talkies. The following day, while mourning those killed by pagers, the radios and walkie-talkies began detonating, maiming thousands and wreaking havoc in Iranian proxy networks across the region. Arab news outlets, such as the Saudi State media Al-Hadith, reported a “state of panic in Lebanon” with the hysterical public “trying to get rid of wireless devices.” After two days of freak explosions, the Lebanese Health Ministry reported at least 60 apartment fires, 25 vehicle fires, roughly 4,000 injured personnel, and over 30 dead. Fingers immediately pointed to Israel, including Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s, who called the attack “unprecedented.” Israel remained relatively silent while media outlets scrambled to connect the dots between various Taiwanese and Hungarian firms believed to have manufactured the devices and the Iranian Tellerim Company who bought the pagers and distributed them to Hezbollah operatives anywhere from five months to a few days prior to their detonation. A picture soon emerged of Israeli operatives under the Mossad purchasing overseas manufacturing firms and winning a bid to supply Iran with their explosive-outfitted pagers and radios. The devices were intended as part of an elusive future operation but were detonated early based on evidence that Hezbollah leaders found some devices to be suspicious. As the dust settled from pagers and radios, Channel 12 News in Israel reported an airstrike near Damascus International Airport on Friday, Sept. 20, that eliminated Abu Haider al-Khafaji, a senior member of Hezbollah in Iraq. The following day, Israeli F-35 jets took off from Ramat David Air Base, 12 miles southeast of Haifa, and bombed the apartment of Ibrahim Aqil, commander of the Radwan Forces, in the Beirut neighborhood of Dahia. Local news reported four successive explosions that toppled the building where Aqil was meeting with Palestinian leaders and other Hezbollah officers. As the second-highest-ranking Hezbollah leader, Aqil had a $7 million U.S. bounty on his head for killing U.S. soldiers.  Hezbollah retaliated with major rocket attacks penetrating deep into northern Israel resulting in significant property damage, forest fires, and some injury. In addition to the standard Katyusha and Grad rockets, with 10 to 20 kilogram warheads, the Israel public also faced new Iranian-supplied Fadi 1 and 2 rockets. Several had slipped past the Iron Dome, and their 100 to 150 kilogram warheads made direct hits on houses in Metula on the Lebanese border and the Haifa suburb city of Kyriat Bialik over the weekend. The IDF responded with continual airstrikes on militant strongholds in northeast Lebanon and rocket launch sites across Baalbeck and the southern Litany and Beqaa regions using gunship helicopters for the first time in the war. Since the weekend alone, over 2,000 munitions have been dropped to hit 1,500 targets in Lebanon. The mission became more sensitive as intelligence located many of the recent rocket launch sites and arms storehouses in residential towns and neighborhood apartment buildings. IDF video footage of precision strikes on select buildings shows multiple secondary explosions after the initial strike, confirming the intelligence of hidden arsenals. The Monday attack on Haifa, however, did little to slow the Israeli workday or deter resilience. The city center rests on the southern end of the Bay of Haifa, while a high-rise urban sprawl crawls up the slopes of the biblical Mount Carmel where it is believed the prophet Elijah challenged the pagan god Baal before ascending up to heaven in a chariot of fire. The port city is 25 miles from the Lebanese border and the third-largest city in the country after Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Haifa is also the proud economic heartbeat of Israel and home to refineries, manufacturing, and a busy seaport that includes the IDF Naval base. The city is also one of the most demographically diverse in the country, historically known as a “mixed city,” with large concentrations of Arab Christians and Muslims, descendants of German Protestants, Druze, and Baha’i mixed harmoniously with the Jewish population. Despite additional rounds of siren alerts on Tuesday, life in Haifa resumed as normal. The port authority released a statement that “[F]ollowing recent events, we find it necessary to reassure that our ports … are fully open for business and functioning at full capacity.” The statement concluded by boasting that Israeli ports are considered the safest in the world due to multiple layers of security.  Many military and intelligence pundits, however, including analyst Avi Issacharof, believe this is only the start of a possible Third Lebanese War. “Despite a series of severe blows, Hezbollah and its leader Hassan Nasrallah show no signs of backing down. Instead, the group appears more determined than ever to demonstrate its resilience and capability to strike Israel,” Issacharof stated on Tuesday. As both Hezbollah and Israel are paying lip service to ground invasions and full-scale war, neither side shows signs of backing down.  The post Unprecedented Operations and Attacks Intensify the Israel–Hezbollah Conflict appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

It is quite likely that the UN secretary general has not read my book I Will Not Eat Crickets but, if he has, he certainly has not understood it. I devoted a whole chapter to laughing at him because he acts like a ghost from an ’80s movie: always trying to scare everyone, although in the end he only succeeds in provoking laughter. Once again, António Guterres has put on his white sheet and proceeded to the opening of the UN Summit of the Future being held these days in New York with a shiver-inducing speech. “Uuuuuhhhuhuuu,” he said. As this is a highly anticipated summit for all lovers of terror, the UN secretary general has taken great care, and has achieved something truly frightening in his speech. In fact, as I read it, the hairs on my legs stand on end: “Geo-political divisions keep deepening. The planet keeps heating. Wars rage with no clue how they will end. And nuclear posturing and new weapons cast a dark shadow. We are edging towards the unimaginable — a powder keg that risks engulfing the world.” Well, it was not so unimaginable for Guterres, who has been announcing the end of the world for a decade. Otherwise, I saw him older, more bloated, perhaps overfed and not exactly on crickets, and it looked as though global warming was taking its toll on his flushed cheeks. Or maybe it’s just that the lunch after the arrival of the world leaders’ private jets got a bit out of hand. “Let us toast to global warming!”; “Let us toast to Agenda 2030”; “Let us toast to the idiot citizens who will pay us for the global apocalypse party!”; and “Waiter, bring us another bottle, we still have to toast Ukraine, Gaza, inequality in Africa, gonorrhea in Australian kangaroos, and home-brewed craft beer.” For the rest of it, the verbiage of the Summit of the Future is too much like the verbiage of the Summit of the Past. Gustavo Petro, the president of Colombia, has come up with a very original idea, which no other communist has ever come up with before: “The richest 1 percent of humankind is responsible for climate change.” Impressive! I can imagine the CCP laughing their asses off and sending him another invitation to a free night of luxury and debauchery in Beijing. Safety tip, Petro: refuse Chinese electronic gifts. The kind of politician who arouses admiration at the UN is Cyril Ramaphosa, president of South Africa. His speech is typical of what corrupt African millionaire politicians have been doing for decades: demanding more outside aid for poor Africans, while they continue to impoverish them from the inside. Even so, Western leaders continue to take the bait and are moved by the show. Ramaphosa, who came to power to end corruption, engaged in the sale of animals while in office, and became famous in 2020 when $580,000 appeared hidden in the sofa of the residence of one of his farms. He, paraphrasing Bill Clinton at the Oval Office door, said something like, “It’s not what it looks like,” and since he is an African Marxist, he was exonerated of all charges of corruption and violations of the Constitution, and no one at the UN or anywhere else asked him to explain himself further. In his speech on Tuesday, he announced that he wants more “inclusion” on the UN Security Council: “Africa and its 1.4 billion people remain excluded from its key decision-making structures.” And, of course, he reserved some time to insult Israel. Too boring. Jordan’s King Abdullah II, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez (Venezuela President Nicolás Maduro’s apprentice who is destroying my country) have also gone there to say that Israel is the devil and to denounce a genocide without a single word of affection for the families of the Israeli victims, the young women kidnapped, tortured, raped, murdered, and humiliated even after they were killed by Hamas rats on the infamous Oct. 7. Disgusting. I am told that some grandfather named Joe Biden was there to tell stories about when he was in office. He didn’t say anything relevant, except that his administration had been a success. The joke is obvious.  And from Brazil’s president, Luiz Lula da Silva, I was expecting a comment on corruption, or at least something interesting about the menu of the Curitiba prison where he was locked up, although he was treated like a king (he never stepped foot in a common cell), but lately he doesn’t feel like talking about anything important, so guess what he talked about. Indeed, climate change: “The planet is no longer waiting to demand payment for the next generation and is fed up with unfulfilled climate agreements — it is tired of neglected carbon reduction targets and financial aid to poor countries that do not arrive.” Okay, Lula: why don’t you tell this to your friends in the CCP? And one more thing: why don’t we shut down this absurd and useless theater of the UN? READ MORE: Trump Assassination Attempt With GoPro in Tow Florida’s Investigation of the Trump Assassination Attempt Could Yield Frightening Results The post The UN Circus Begins: The Clowns Start Their Traditional Acrobatics appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

If you ask Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) — and Detroit Metro Times, the progressive weekly magazine in Detroit, did — the protests staged by students at the University of Michigan were peaceful. In fact, they were the ideal kind of peaceful protest. A number of students simply decided to turn the campus into their own personal camping ground while learning about prior genocides, like the one that occurred in Armenia in 1915, and calling for the university to sever its ties with Israel. Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel — who is a Democrat and Jewish, a fact that seems pertinent in this particular instance — sees the whole incident quite differently. Early this month she filed charges against 11 people involved in the protests. Not only were the students disturbing the peace, the encampment was not up to code (the price of running a sit-in protest in 2024) and students had refused to comply with safety directives. Masked students had shown up by the dozens to chant slogans and bang drums outside board members’ homes, and one can hardly blame those board members for feeling a bit threatened. All of this happened back in May. Now, four months later, Nessel is doing that thing the law should do with people who disobey it: she’s charging them for the crimes they committed. The charges are against nine alumni and students who had run-ins with the police while being removed from the encampment and against two counterprotestors for separate incidents that included allegedly destroying protesters’ flags and “ethnic intimidation.” Appropriately, Nessel pointed out that free speech does not excuse bad behavior. “Conviction in your ideals is not an excuse for violations of the law,” she said. One could hardly call Nessel’s actions biased or excessively punitive. Most of us would probably have liked to see a more heavy-handed approach. But not Rep. Rashida Tlaib. Tlaib called out her Democratic colleague for treating students protesting the war in Gaza on an American campus differently than students (likely the same students) protesting other leftist causes: “We’ve had the right to dissent, the right to protest,” she told the Detroit Metro Times. “We’ve done it for climate, the immigrant rights movement, for Black lives, and even around issues of injustice among water shutoffs. But it seems that the attorney general decided if the issue was Palestine, she was going to treat it differently, and that alone speaks volumes about possible biases within the agency she runs.” Tlaib has a point. If students are being prosecuted for unruly and illegal behavior related to protests calling on the University of Michigan to sever the very few financial ties it has with Israel, they should also be prosecuted for unruly and illegal behavior related to protests against climate change. In fact, perhaps students should always be prosecuted for unruly and illegal behavior. What Tlaib is really frustrated about is that, because most Americans don’t want college students camping out and chanting antisemitic (and genocidal) slogans, the Democrat Party is trying to distance itself from these anti-Israel protests — at least in the lead-up to the election. It simply doesn’t do to have the activists on the ground spewing antisemitic slurs while you’re asking your Jewish donors to fund a presidential election campaign. But Tlaib is a true radical. She, unlike many in the Democrat Party, actually believes what she says. I can have a certain amount of respect for that. Nessel, of course, fired back over X. “Rashida should not use my religion to imply I cannot perform my job fairly as Attorney General. It’s anti-Semitic and wrong.” Of course, Nessel is hardly the person who should bring up fairness when it comes to being attorney general, as she’s also an ideologue. She just happens to realize, unlike Tlaib, that being anti-Semitic isn’t exactly in vogue right now. Other Democrats in Michigan agree. When Jake Tapper asked Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to weigh in, she — in a response that might as well have been the official statement of the Democrat Party —  said that she had no intention of getting “in the middle of this argument that they’re having.” Why? Because it isn’t useful at the moment. READ MORE: Don’t Blame Trump For Amber Thurman’s Death. Blame the Abortion Pill. Witches Are Always Queer The post Rashida Tlaib and Dana Nessel Are Duking It Out. Democrats Shrug. appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Things that happen every year at a certain time can be fun. Think birthdays, anniversaries, cherry blossoms, and The American Spectator’s gala. This year’s gala was more than a success. It was more than a hit. It was magical. The music was good, the food was good, the faces were cheery, and everyone there seemed to want to be there. We saw a nice video greeting from Jon Voight, trailed by the Reagan trailer, followed by Lila Rose accepting an award for her holy work saving innocent souls in the womb. Even the speeches were good, and Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) hit the keynote in describing how his medical career prepared him for his political career, and how he discovered during the COVID-19 pandemic that political motivations and medical crises create a toxic brew. Yet — not to minimize the well-structured and well-delivered vibe of the entire event — the spell that bound this magical evening came when editor Paul Kengor and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pulled up chairs on the stage and sat down for a back-porch gabfest. The Kennedys: Old Democrat Family Doing Things the Old Democrat Way Rather than provide a transcript, permit me to offer an impression and to try to convey the moment, the feeling, and the flavor, but not necessarily all the content. We got a sense of old Joseph Kennedy Sr.’s house, with Joe Jr, as the “golden child” and the apple of his father’s eye. He made the family proud, but he sadly went down with his fighter plane in the Pacific in World War II. Then Jack filled in and, after serving as a senator from Massachusetts, he went on to win the presidency. Nephew Robert Jr. sat in the front row at the inauguration. He was proud of how Uncle Jack was striving to keep America out of wars while shouting down the mongers and the mongrels. (READ MORE: How Kamala Bested Newsom in Their Decades-Long Feud) Even after President Kennedy sent advisers to Vietnam, there were fewer military men on that mission than were sent by him to protect one black student at the University of Mississippi. When the injury toll in Vietnam reached 75, the president signed an order to bring all the men back stateside. He was shot within a month of that, and Lyndon B. Johnson pushed things in the other direction, eventually sending over a half-million men, a tenth of whom came home in body bags. RFK Jr. told us about current events as well. He explained the history of Secret Service details. Originally, the protection provided by that agency during campaigns was limited to the two major-party candidates. But after his father, Robert F. Kennedy Sr., was shot during a campaign rally, the policy was changed overnight and agents were assigned to third-party candidates as well. He — RFK Jr. — was the first candidate of his stature to be denied protection since that era. He had received numerous threats and appealed several times for protection. Indeed, he got the clear impression that the reason he was denied was not that people in power wanted to see him hurt, but that they were seeking to impoverish his campaign. Because smaller-party candidates have smaller donation limits, the million dollars a month he had to spend on private security was a major drain on resources. The Democratic Party of old was devoted to free speech and wide-open access to long-shots and outsiders in primary campaigns. RFK Jr.’s own family, as loyal as they were to the Democratic Party, did not hesitate to mount campaigns against incumbents, like his father challenging Lyndon Johnson in 1968 and his Uncle Ted competing with Jimmy Carter in 1980. Now the culture within that party has shifted so radically, even to the point that they manipulated events so that Kamala Harris could become this year’s candidate without a primary and a convention challenge. In one pithy insight, RFK Jr. noted that the demos have little to say among “Democrats.” How ironic, how sad! (RELATED: RFK Jr.’s Fight for Principle) He told an amazing story that has not been reported on at all. A man came to one of his campaign rallies with a bag full of weapons. He presented a badge as a U.S. Marshal, indicating he was there to assist the security team. He was brazen enough to try to deceive the professional protectors, but a sharp-eyed member of Kennedy’s team thought the badge looked a little too shiny. It did not give an impression of being worn out with extensive use. They confronted him and discovered two weapons on his person and many more in a tote bag. There was so much more, and it is well worth your time to listen to the recording. Let me conclude with his trenchant insights about Trump. RFK Jr. shared an anecdote from some years ago in which his wife wanted to attend an event in Florida, but he didn’t want to spend the money. She asked Trump to bankroll her trip, and he agreed. RFK asked her, “Doesn’t he know that I sued him twice over environmental issues on his properties?” She replied that he did, but didn’t take it personally. RFK has made his deal with Trump. He consented to drop his campaign and offer his endorsement in exchange for his issues — including better supervision of foods and medicines — becoming part of the campaign. Trump has not just offered nominal backing in some political paper or on a website; he has actually incorporated them into his rhetoric at public rallies. A special guy. A special mission. All were a great fit for this special event. The post <i>The American Spectator</i>’s Gala Provides a Glimpse Into the Kennedy Family appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

While the gap may be closing, polls tend to show that more Americans trust former President Donald Trump than Vice President Kamala Harris on economic issues. This sentiment is understandable, given the strong pre-pandemic economy during Trump’s first term and the challenges of inflation and declining real wages under the Biden–Harris administration. However, voters pinning their economic hopes on a Trump comeback might find themselves disappointed. There’s no denying that the Trump-era economy prior to COVID-19 was good. Low unemployment, strong GDP growth, and a booming stock market were hallmarks of his presidency. In contrast, the Biden–Harris years have been marked by an erosion of American families’ purchasing power. Adding to voter skepticism about a Harris economy is the vice president’s apparent lack of a clear pro-growth vison. She’s flip-flopped on many issues while rarely talking to the press. It’s difficult to know what she really believes about critical economic matters like health care and fracking. When Harris has given specifics, they’ve been awful. That includes her anti-price gouging idea, which she has repeated many times, and her desire to hike corporate and capital-gains tax rates. She obviously believes growth comes from government. However, I have to wonder whether a second Trump term would deliver the economic resurgence voters hope for. The circumstances Trump would inherit are far more challenging than those he faced in 2017. Consider government debt. On the eve of the pandemic, outstanding public debt was too high — around $18 trillion — but paled in comparison to the current $28 trillion or so. There’s no reason to trust Trump to cut spending or pass the necessary reforms, in part because he explicitly says he won’t touch Social Security and Medicare, the two main drivers of our fiscal problems. In addition, even with the economy booming during Trump’s first term, he and Congress nevertheless managed to grow the budget deficit to nearly $1 trillion. It stands at nearly $2 trillion today and is projected to reach $2.8 trillion in 10 years. Trump may believe he’ll bring enough economic growth to wash away our financial troubles. But he’s mistaken. The scale of the current debt and future indebtedness is so large that economic growth alone won’t be enough. There is a lot of evidence that debt can act as a drag on the economy. One of Trump’s most pro-growth achievements was the 2017 tax-cut package, perhaps only surpassed by his regulatory reforms. Some provisions are scheduled to expire after 2025, and Congress will probably make the extension worse than the original law. Democrats are pushing hard to raise child credits and other counterproductive tax breaks. With deficits so high, there will be simultaneous pressure to raise taxes in anti-growth ways. With a willing Congress, Trump might manage to further lower taxes on corporate income and capital gains. But cutting taxes is unsustainable without cutting spending, and he’s made the budget math even more daunting by recklessly promising to lift the cap on state and local tax deductions and exempt tip income, overtime pay, and Social Security income from taxation (amounting to trillions of dollars). Trump could achieve lots of growth with a rigorous energy-deregulation program, but that’s a serious political challenge that requires discipline and a team he may not have. Other Trump policy proposals would be destructive. He feels strongly that he’d have “a better instinct than, in many cases, people that would be on the Federal Reserve or the chairman” in setting interest rates. If he decides as president that he’s the one who should control monetary policy, he’d be further politicizing what should be an impartial, methodical job, meaning serious trouble in the long run. More bad news is Trump’s just-announced wish to cap interest rates on credit card debt. Price controls proposed by Republicans are just as destructive as those proposed by Democrats. An economy can survive a lot of abuses from the government, but it’s almost impossible to endure politicians’ attempts to overrule supply and demand, which lead to serious shortages and other problems. Awful, too, is Trump’s proposal to impose across-the-board 10%-20% tariffs, with a special 60 percent levy on Chinese goods. This would be enormously costly for consumers and damage relationships with our best and most loyal trading partners, denying Americans things we want and need. The allure of returning to pre-pandemic economic prosperity is strong, but no administration can simply turn back the clock. Given some of the policies Trump is talking about on the campaign trail, he might have a harder time than people believe. Veronique de Rugy is the George Gibbs Chair in Political Economy and a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. To find out more about Veronique de Rugy and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM READ MORE: The Real Relationship Between Trump-Style Tariffs and Economic Growth Welcome Elon Musk’s Efficiency Commission (Just Don’t Expect Congress To) Welcome to the Permission-Slip Economy The post Why We Shouldn’t Expect a Return to the Trump Economy appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

WASHINGTON — Public opinion on the Oct. 7 attacks that killed 1,200 in Israel has flipped among Gazans, according to a recent poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research. A majority of Gazans now believe the Hamas terror spree was incorrect, Reuters reported last week. That’s a first. And yet, last week the United Nations approved a nonbinding resolution — by a 124-14 vote — that demanded Israel end its “unlawful presence in the occupied Palestinian territory.” The United States and Israel provided two of the 14 no votes to the Palestinian-drafted measure; 43 countries abstained. “The United Nothing,” scoffed Andrew Tucker, director general of The Hague Initiative for International Co-operation — thinc — as I sat with Tucker and other thinc staff Thursday. “Pretty much everything that the U.N. has ever done on Israel is nonbinding.” Tucker believes the purpose of these U.N. votes is to “win the PR war.” So while Israel defends its right to exist, the U.N. shows itself to be increasingly irrelevant with nonbinding measures to undermine the only democracy in the Middle East. It’s disappointing to go through the votes of countries that preen about their superior politics — yet their leaders can’t even stand against a resolution that doesn’t do anything. Canada abstained. The U.K. abstained. Germany abstained. The leaders of these august nations rightly bristled when then-President Donald Trump downplayed the importance of NATO. And here they are, ducking in plain sight. Australia abstained. Sweden abstained. Switzerland, too. And it’s barely a story. Iran voted for the resolution — as would be expected, given Tehran’s funding and support for the Oct. 7 massacre. But Japan voted in favor of the anti-Israel resolution, along with France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Iceland, and Spain. Sad. As Tucker noted, “The world knows it needs Israel, and yet at the same time, there’s a diplomatic war against Israel.” It’s as if there are two homes in America for magical thinking on the Middle East: U.N. Plaza and college campuses. “It feeds into antisemitism on the campuses,” Tucker said of the U.N. vote. Activists who toss out phrases like “genocide” and “apartheid” will have a new talking point: “illegal occupation.” Olimpia Galiberti, a researcher with thinc, sees TikTok’s hand in campus protests that support boycotting, divesting and sanctioning Israel. Students who get their “news” from social media don’t know much about Israel’s history or its vital role in checking Iran. So kudos to the 12 countries that voted with Israel and the U.S.: Argentina, Czech Republic, Fiji, Hungary, Malawi, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Tonga, and Tuvalu. They’re hardly the big names in Turtle Bay, and yet they’ve shown the common sense lacking among the pecksniffs of London, Paris and Berlin. Contact Review-Journal Washington columnist Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com. Follow @debrajsaunders on X. COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM READ MORE: Liberal Neighbors to JD Vance — Hillbilly, Go Home Kamala Harris Talks to NABJ — Five Takeaways The post United Nations: As Irrelevant as a Campus Protest appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.