A man who was a student once at New York’s Yeshiva University wrote of attending a Talmud class taught by a European-born rabbi who was a fine scholar and an excellent teacher. The rabbi had called upon him to explain a certain complex argument in the text, and he had offered his answer, which reflected his own preparation and intelligence. The man tried to recreate the teacher’s distinctive English as he set down the rabbi’s response to him: “You’re right, you’re right, you’re a hundred prozent right … but you’re wrong.” Harris’ party indulges in a flood of words that are meant to sound good but only hang out a welcome sign for Hamas’s malevolent agents of apocalypse. The rabbi’s response is steeped in the understanding that, as one Hebrew proverb puts it, the action is the main point. One can make many arguments, this way and that, and remain on a treadmill. Even worse, we can make endless rationalizations for things that, were we not entranced with the idols of our own thoughts, we would recognize as foolish or worse, certainly not worth further thought. But we are fascinated with our own ability to spin thoughts and develop the arguments that come from them. Were we not held to something higher than home-made abstractions as our ultimate aim, we could spend our entire lives bowing to the work of our minds. Sometimes, our fascination with thoughts and words is appropriate. Speech defines us as humans. It is a divine gift that, as Rabbi Yishmael put it 1,900 years ago, that “the Torah speaks in human language” — God is gracious with His gift of language and uses it to share His wisdom and purpose. It is, however, that very divine language that tells us at the very beginning of Genesis that the world is itself divine speech. So language is both within us and without us, and if we are to be whole in God’s gift, we must not allow a rupture to develop between the inner and the outer, the words as they are in our minds and the words of creation enwrapped within the world. (READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin: Tucker Carlson Gives Credibility to a Hatemonger) Our abstractions must constantly adjust themselves to better reflect the concrete reality they aspire to model. If we don’t hold them to that task, they can bring us to spectacular failure.  There is no more searing example of such failure than the appeasement of Hitler. The British Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, was so sure that his thoughts and words could determine reality, that he said in 1938 to Hitler’s special envoy that he would like to see “the Führer entering London at the side of the English King amid the acclamation of the English people.” After Hitler had already consumed Austria, accepted Chamberlain’s gift of the Sudetenland, and then, despite his signing an agreement that Chamberlain declared to mean “peace in our time,” swallowed the rest of Czechoslovakia whole, and now was demanding that the city of Danzig be given to him, the British ambassador to Berlin advised his government that the demand was “not on the whole unreasonable.” Media was then flexing its muscles. Not unexpectedly, those who work in media are prone to this intoxication with unhinged words more than most. Perfectly precious is this incident recounted by Piers Brendon:  The Director General of the BBC suggested that “it would be a good idea to relay to Germany ‘the famous song of the nightingale’ in Bagley Woods as a token of Britain’s peace-loving intentions.” The song of the nightingale is beautiful. Peaceful intentions are lovely. The goal of peace is just fine. But the reality was that the Nazis already had found a way to include love of the outdoors and of beauty with their industrial barbarism. In the Nazi world, beauty was co-opted. Auschwitz and other centers of slavery and factories of death had their own orchestras, which augmented the savagery rather than dispelling it. Kamala Harris’ statements on Israel and Hamas are only another updated version of words and ideas thoroughly detached from concrete reality. She began with something real: a true and honest condemnation of Hama’s orgy of torture, rape, and massacre on October 7. She then pivoted, as she had done just a few days before, and with barely a breath, and her characteristic condescending tones, insisted that the casualties in Gaza have been too many and that the war must result in a Palestinian state — the famous “two-state solution.” Not the utter defeat which is the only way to destroy entrenched Nazism, but a state ready to be run by the same people that participated in or cheered the hideous orgasmic spree of October 7. How lovely! Just like the nightingale’s song in Bagley Woods. And the orchestra playing in Auschwitz. The True Nature of Hamas Hamas is not a musician’s union. It is not a righteous cause, though it uses the language of religious morality to describe what they do. Nazis as well successfully portrayed their vile program as moral and right.  Hamas was founded and continues to exist for the purpose of utterly destroying Israel the state and Israel the people. In language borrowed from Nazi propaganda, which was widely and approvingly read during World War II, they describe in their original covenant how all the great disasters of the world have been caused by the Jews. They intend, like the Nazis, to seek a final solution of this problem. Hamas is interested in a one state solution, stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, in which they envision about as many Jews as currently live in the Palestinian territories, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq — none (at least openly).  Perhaps Ms. Harris and her party envision the Palestinians rising against Hamas, willing and eager to live in peace and build prosperity with Israel. But a series of polls, taken by Arabs, not Jews, shows a steady 80+ percent support of Hamas. This holds true through the PA-governed areas as well. A great majority of Israelis wanted the two-state solution in the 1990s. That support was there in spite of the bloody Yassir Arafat being their negotiating partner, who spoke one thing to the West and when speaking to his people in Arabic, incited violence. It continued even as Arafat initiated the Second Intifada, incinerating families sharing meals in a pizza shop, commuters going to work on city buses, shoppers buying clothes in a mall, and on and on. Finally, the ultimate hawk, Ariel Sharon, delivered the entire Gaza Strip to the Palestinians in 2005 and withdrew every single Israeli soldier and policeman.  In response, in a free election, Gaza overwhelmingly voted Hamas in. And instead of peace, Hamas dug its tunnels and launched unending rockets day after day, year after year. And then October 7. In the real world in which we live, the one that God challenges us to face and to make better, this is the actuality. Harris’ ideas are no more realistic a way to deal with Hamas, Hezbollah than the methods of Halifax and Chamberlain were to deal with Hitler.  Hamas and the Chamberlain Treatment Churchill gave Chamberlain credit as a loyal countryman. He employed both him and Halifax in high-level positions in his National Government. We need not declare those advocating equally absurd policies today as guilty of anything more than negligence and foolishness. (READ MORE: Trump’s Vision Transcends the Party) When led with Churchillian clarity, even those people played a positive and important role. No doubt Harris and company might as well, but only if led by someone who sees reality more clearly than she does. She spins words, but she did nothing about the border, and as head of the Space Agency, she is leaving astronauts stranded in space. But the results of elevating wishful thinking to state policy is to send an RSVP to every narcissistic psychopath in control of a country, of which there are quite a few today.  Whatever his faults, and there are many, Trump gets this. He gets that words mean less than nothing if there are not deeds that assure that lofty ideas translate to policies that actually make the world better, disabling the hateful tyrants, and protecting and giving heart to those who believe in civilization and peace. This is the point that needs to be hammered home, as Harris’ party indulges in a flood of words that are meant to sound good but only hang out a welcome sign for the malevolent agents of apocalypse.  From now till November, that is our message — it is all about action. Four years of no Russian expansion, the only administration in the new millennium of which that is true. Four years of containment of Iran and all its proxies. Four years of near-total peace in the Middle East, after demolishing ISIS’s last strongholds. Four years of the lowest interest rates and highest employment and workforce engagement — at least until the China virus.  The action is the main thing. When not serving sound policy, talk is cheap and its results are reliably disastrous. The post Kamala’s Words Mean Nothing Against Hamas appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

The current goings-on in Springfield, Ohio, and the surrounding area have captured national media attention. Stories of tens of thousands of immigrants, unceremoniously dumped by the Biden-Harris administration into a sleepy heartland town of barely 60,000, causing traffic accidents, clogging up welfare and social services, devouring the housing market, and leaving native-born American citizens homeless and financially overburdened — to say nothing of the rumors of household pets being feasted upon — have reignited the inexplicably-contentious debate over immigration and border control.   However, defending the home of your family, the nation in which your children and their children are to grow up and live … these things are assuredly Christian. Among the ranks of unrestricted-immigration apologists are those who cite some perverted form of Christian morality as justification for standing by meekly while one’s own nation is invaded. Social media in particular is crawling with folks spouting off variations of “If you struggle with letting immigrants into your country, you clearly haven’t let Jesus into your heart.” (READ MORE from S.A. McCarthy: What Attacks on Catholic Churches Reveal About Society) Never mind that most of those trotting out these imbecilic cliches aren’t Christian themselves and wouldn’t dare to adhere to Christ’s teachings on, say, lust, divorce, adultery, or the Eucharist. What Is Demanded of Christians? Of course, the argument that Christian charity demands allowing corrupt regime elites to airdrop hordes of third-world insurgents into your neighborhood is imbecilic. In his treatise on charity in the encyclopedic Summa Theologiae, the great St. Thomas Aquinas explains that charity (or love) is subject to order, and that one actually has an obligation to love some people more than others — or at least before others: One’s obligation to love a person is proportionate to the gravity of the sin one commits in acting against that love. Now it is a more grievous sin to act against the love of certain neighbors, than against the love of others. Hence the commandment (Leviticus 10:9), “He that curseth his father or mother, dying let him die,” which does not apply to those who cursed others than the above. Therefore we ought to love some neighbors more than others.… We must, therefore, say that, even as regards the affection we ought to love one neighbor more than another. The reason is that, since the principle of love is God, and the person who loves, it must needs be that the affection of love increases in proportion to the nearness to one or the other of those principles. For … wherever we find a principle, order depends on relation to that principle. In other words, charity is ordered by God. While we do have an obligation to love all those made in the image and likeness of God, that obligation is strongest in a particular order: God must be loved first, followed by our own selves (not, Aquinas explains, in a selfish or miserly fashion, but in the matter of tending to our spiritual nature), and then followed by those closest to us, such as family, friends, and countrymen. Aquinas explains that “friendship among blood relations is based upon their connection by natural origin, the friendship of fellow-citizens on their civic fellowship, and the friendship of those who are fighting side by side on the comradeship of battle.” He concludes, “Wherefore in matters pertaining to nature we should love our kindred most, in matters concerning relations between citizens, we should prefer our fellow-citizens, and on the battlefield our fellow-soldiers.” Americans have an obligation to love their country and to love their fellow-citizens, even above non-citizens, just as a father has an obligation to love his wife and children above the homeless of his town; and if a father were to come home one night to find a homeless man in his own house, eating his food, and terrifying his wife and children, Christians would indeed agree that the father has an obligation — not merely a right or an option, but an obligation — to evict the intruder. Defending Your Home Is Christian The leftist mantra of multiculturalism — the lotus eaters’ droning that all cultures are good and worthy — is not so much a means of seeking out the good and the worthiness of other cultures, but of convincing the masses that all cultures are interchangeable, that all are one and the same. This is, of course, patently false. After all, the Haitian immigrants receiving government-funded benefits and renting two-story, multi-bedroom houses in Ohio wouldn’t agree that the crime-ridden slums they escaped from in their home country are equivalent to life in America. Different cultures have different attributes and customs, and those unique cultural attributes and customs are, at times, in need of defense. It is for this reason that Pope Pius XII wrote, “It is quite legitimate for nations to treat their differences a sacred inheritance and guard them at all costs.” (READ MORE: Trump Waffles on Florida’s Abortion Amendment) Demanding that corrupt bureaucrats not dump 20,000 immigrants from the third world into your backyard is not un-Christian. However, defending the home of your family, the nation in which your children and their children are to grow up and live and love and work and play, protecting and preserving the characteristics and customs unique to your nation and your region, these things are assuredly Christian. These things must, of course, be done with love, never with malice, but Christians do have an obligation to do them. The post Immigration Control Is Smart, Not Un-Christian appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Reds: The Tragedy of Communism By Maurice Isserman (Basic Books, 384 pages, $27.99) Reds: The Tragedy of Communism opens with a warning aimed at the reader: the “history of American Communism requires the ability to weigh complex and often ambiguous evidence and judgments.” Author Maurice Isserman, a noted historian at Hamilton College, continues: “Be prepared to keep two opposed ideas in mind.” He advises those “unwilling to do so” to “put this book down right now.” The italics increase: The Communist movement helped win democratic reforms that benefited millions of ordinary American citizens, at the same time that the movement championed a brutal totalitarian state responsible for the imprisonment and deaths of millions of Soviet citizens. And,  The Communist Party USA was an advocacy group entitled to normal constitutional guarantees of free speech, and at certain times and places it was also a criminal conspiracy. Furthermore, “studying the history of communism should be neither an exercise in filiopietism, the excessive veneration of ancestors, nor of demonology, the classification of malevolent spirits.” Well, of course. (READ MORE: Boston Red Sox and MLB Impose Communist Struggle Session on Player) To his credit, Isserman relates the acknowledgment of Fred Beal, a union organizer found guilty of second-degree murder for deaths in a 1929 mill strike who had fled to the Soviet Union, there witnessing such horrors as “famine deliberately induced by the Soviet government” only to return because he would “‘rather be an American prisoner than a free man in Russia.’” Isserman even takes Communists, who turned a blind eye, to the proverbial woodshed. Others — including others on the non-Communist Left — saw clearly what American Communists indignantly denied, that life under Soviet Communism in the Stalin era was defined by pervasive fear of an all-powerful repressive regime that routinely and on a massive scale employed spying, denunciation, imprisonment, torture, and murder against innocent victims. Isserman describes the lure of luxurious travel for the apparatchiks and the schizophrenic reversals in Party directives, such as in the case of the Soviet-Nazi pact. He discusses John Dewey and Sidney Hook’s Committee for Cultural Freedom’s manifesto published in the May 27, 1939 issue of the Nation, which rejected the “totalitarianism” of Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union. He also discusses the “counterblast,” endorsed by 400 signatories, denouncing the “‘fantastic falsehood’ that the Soviet Union was in any sense comparable to the fascist powers” — hitting the newsstands three days after the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact. He admits forthrightly that some Communists conducted espionage. Yet, also, as the opening directive states, “The Communist movement helped win democratic reforms.” The 1930s, the period of the Party’s “greatest influence,” “fought for such causes like unemployment insurance, social security, and racial equality.” Isserman is to be commended for refraining from insulting detractors, as Harold Meyerson did in reviewing Reds in the American Prospect and comparing the necessity of “screening out of reality we now associate with Fox News” to that of Communists. A Short Shrift to the Real Anti-Communists Still, Reds often does not model the even-handedness that its author lectures the reader to maintain. This is because the sources — polemical statements and memoirs, written by Communist activists (or their Communist ghostwriters), and scholarly books written by activist, Communist-sympathizing historians, provide most of the evidence. At the same time, the contributions of former Communists or sympathizers on the right, who wrote volumes on the subject, are given short shrift. Whittaker Chambers barely gets a mention, but uninfluential Party diarists are discussed at length. The focus is on strawman Joseph McCarthy and the “hysteria” of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. The McCarran Act’s requirement that “fifteen national and district Party leaders” register with the Subversive Activities Control Board is cast as an unjust demand for self-incrimination “as criminal conspirators and foreign agents.” An inordinate amount of ink is spilled on the sufferings of writers like Arthur Miller during the “postwar Red Scare” and on the aptness of the witch hunt analogy in his play The Crucible. When it comes to the fall of Communism, Mikhail Gorbachev is presented as the hero who hears the voice of the people and magically vanquishes communism. The naïve reader would think that President Reagan had nothing to do with it. The one mention of Reagan comes as criticism of his action as California Governor when he threatened to “cut the UCLA budget if [Communist Party member Angela] Davis continued to teach on its campus.” (READ MORE: A Witness Emerges From Another Communist Gulag) There is a mention of one ex-Communist who became a conservative, Frank S. Meyer, but the discussion is truncated. Meyer’s differences with the authoritarian structure of the party as revealed in his letter in 1943 to party chief Earl Browder is discussed. Isserman explains that “The Bolshevik model of a disciplined cadre organization excluded most ordinary Americans.” Meyer proposed a new kind of structure based on “‘traditional American concepts of democracy,’” which Isserman interprets as being “a lot like the British Labour Party, which he had joined all those years earlier in Oxford before becoming a Communist.” And this is where he leaves the discussion of one of the most important thinkers of the mid-20th century conservative movement. The reader needs to go to the endnote to even learn that “Meyer remained in the CP for another two years, encouraged by Browder’s decision to dissolve the Party in 1944. In the fall of 1945, he quit, becoming a leading conservative activist and intellectual, and a cofounder of National Review magazine” and the author of The Moulding of Communists: The Training of Communist Cadre (1961). Meyer became a pivotal figure in the movement, promoting “fusionism” — i.e., the fusion of the two conservative wings, traditionalism and libertarianism. He is one of many Communists-turned-conservatives who rethought the entire project of progressivism — big government, collectivism, and redistribution — and, in the process, advocated for a return to American founding principles. It would seem that a book about the American Communist movement would have at least a paragraph devoted to such apostates, no? In Highlighting Black Communists, Isserman Ignores Black Anti-Communists Isserman goes to the Earl Browder Collection at Syracuse University to get his quotations from Meyer’s letters. But in that same collection is a dossier on George S. Schuyler, the most widely read black columnist in America from the mid-1920s through the 1940s. Schuyler recognized the motives of the Communists from the time they first established their headquarters in New York City in 1919, which is what Richard Wright pointed out in The God That Failed: Blacks were recruited to be “street agitators” and suffer the blows from police. While Isserman recounts the work of black socialist labor organizer and activist A. Philip Randolph, he ignores the star writer who got his start at the Messenger, the socialist monthly that Randolph edited. While Randolph organized the Sleeping Car Porters union, the writer he had hired, George Schuyler, became the star columnist in the black newspaper he made number one in circulation, the Pittsburgh-Courier. George Shuyler portrait (Carl Van Vechten via Wikimedia Commons/ No Known Copyright) To make the case for the Communists’ civil rights advocacy, Isserman lauds the fact that Lovett Fort-Whiteman, as a delegate to the Fifth World Congress in 1924, “delivered a report to the Comintern audience including Joseph Stalin” that argued for the unorthodox position that black people “‘are not discriminated against as a class but as a race’” and “urged the American Communist Party to begin organizing among Black southern sharecroppers.” Instead of referencing Schuyler’s warnings to the black community at the time, as Fort-Whiteman, a former contributor to the Messenger, made his Soviet-funded recruiting tour, Isserman turns to Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950, a mendacious work by Yale historian Glenda Gilmore attempting to expiate her segregationist Southern roots by rehabilitating Communist agitators as the first civil rights leaders. Isserman does not mention Fort-Whiteman’s death in the Gulag. Gilmore does. The Communist-championing historian casts a death by starvation and beating (Fort-Whiteman had all his teeth knocked out) in a place where the temperature went down to 60-below in romantic terms and partly as his own fault (for being recklessly enthusiastic about Communism). She calls his death on Jan. 13, 1939, “an ordinary death for the place. Fort-Whiteman had not been able to meet the work quota; for this, he ‘was severely beaten many times’” and his food rations were greatly decreased. She imaginatively recreates his dying moments: Deep disappointments, crushing blows, starvation: It took them all to break Lovett Fort-Whiteman. Did he dream, there in a frozen hole [where he was forced to sleep] in the tundra, of hot nights on Sweet Ellum Street back home in Dallas? Of midday classes at Tuskegee, where sweating students performed the heavy work of uplift? … Or did he dream his own “dream deferred,” of bringing revolution to Chicago streets, equality to the South, and black liberation to the Kremlin? There in Kolyma no one mourned him, no one knew that he was the first African American Communist. No one knew of his eagerness, his recklessness.… In the final, perfect equality of the gulag, it mattered not a whit that he was a black man. The “perfect equality of the gulag”? Ironically, Gilmore writes that Fort-Whiteman “never allowed [himself] to be silenced.” Her book is among the most frequently cited in Reds. In the case of nine black boys and young men accused of raping two white women in Scottsboro in 1931, Isserman pushes the Communist propaganda line (of William Z. Foster, Howard Zinn, the Daily Worker, and other similar communist mouthpieces) that the defendants “would surely have gone to their deaths in the electric chair, except for one new factor, the presence, nearby, of Communist organizers.” His source again is Gilmore. Actually, the defendants would have gotten out of prison much sooner than they did had the Communists not forced the case away from the competent hands of the NAACP to exploit it for publicity and fundraising, as I describe in Debunking Howard Zinn. As Schuyler pointed out repeatedly in his columns and articles, the Communists sent agitators to disrupt NAACP meetings and stole money raised by church-going black workers for the defendants. They deliberately prolonged the case, for example, by not filing a bill of exceptions in time for a new trial and by making threats against the judge. The last two Scottsboro boys were not paroled until after 1944 — and that was only after the NAACP was allowed to rejoin the case. Walter White and W.E.B. Du Bois, two of the black members of the NAACP leadership, also denounced the Communists for trying to make the Scottsboro Boys into “martyrs” for their cause. And then there is Angelo Herndon, described by Isserman as a “valuable recruit” at the age of 18, “who joined the Party after reading a pamphlet about the Gastonia strike, and was drawn to its vision of interracial unionism. Herndon became an organizer and was arrested in Atlanta the following year, charged with promoting ‘insurrection,’ and sentenced to twenty years of hard labor. Herndon’s case, handled by the Communist-controlled International Labor Defense (ILD), drew considerable publicity, and appeals would go all the way to the Supreme Court, which invalidated the Georgia insurrection law in 1937.” Who benefited from Herndon’s involvement that led to time in jail? Did he find “interracial unionism” there? Isserman’s Sources Are Unreliable. That Hasn’t Stopped Widespread Praise. In my book, I refuted a similar presentation by Howard Zinn, who quotes from a 1937 publication put out by the International Labor Defense and League for Struggle for Negro Rights about how Herndon complained about how passages from the Communist literature that he possessed were read to the jury and about how he was asked, “’Did I believe in the demand for the self-determination of the Black Belt?’” The Black Belt was to be carved out of 11 Southern states, and as Schuyler pointed out in the NAACP’s Crisis, was intended to spark a civil war — the strategy by which communists came to power worldwide. (Isserman mentions the Black Belt on page 114, but only to quote Mark Solomon who claims that the issue “‘elevated the Black movement to an elevated position in the Leninist pantheon.’”) (READ MORE: The Spectacle Ep. 132: Venezuelan Fraud Is A Cautionary Tale For Americans) Herndon was actually recruited in Cincinnati and brought to Atlanta to lead marches that were intended to provoke violence and police “suppression.” Schuyler recounted in his 1966 autobiography, Black and Conservative, that “A Greenwich Village Communist woman” had attempted to recruit him for the same purpose. But he had “laughed aloud. So they got Herndon; he carried out his Red assignment, and he was promptly nabbed, jugged, tried and sentenced to the Georgia chain gang; then released on bail. Soon the Communists were parading him around the country at mass meetings that proved very lucrative.” Earl Ofari Hutchinson, too, wrote that Herndon was seen as just “another martyr,” to give “the Party greater visibility and stature among blacks.” Indeed, Herndon seemed to be naïve and compliant — just the kind of black man Communists were looking for. Browder, when being interviewed by Theodore Draper, called Herndon a “good boy” — although not a good Communist. Herndon did see the truth about Communism. By the end of the 1940s, he had returned to the Midwest to lead a bourgeois life as a salesman. Again, Isserman’s sources are unreliable: Herndon’s 1937 autobiography (written while he was still in prison); Black Liberation/Red Scare: Ben Davis and the Communist Party by Gerald Horne, an admitted communist-sympathizing activist-scholar; and, again, Gilmore. Far from being friends of blacks, Communists were their exploiters; as Schuyler learned from interviewing a black former Communist Party member, when it came to crunch times, blacks were the first to be fired by the Communists. The other group that Communists allegedly advocated for were workers. But while Communists and progressives may not have liked the Taft-Hartley Act, Schuyler did, for it opened up unions to black membership. As indicated in an article he wrote for the Guardian, Isserman seemed to have a certain group in mind: American communists in the 20th century included in their ranks people of talent, vision, and genuine idealism. Their tragedy lay in their willingness to subvert their own best instincts in their devotion to a flawed and irrelevant historical model, the Bolshevik revolution and the Soviet state. And in doing so, they helped set back for generations the opportunities for the emergence of a genuinely American left. May the new generation emerging on the left avoid their mistakes. Similarly, Steven Mintz at Inside Higher Ed wrote that Reds “should be required reading for today’s leftwing activists.” Students and casual readers of Reds will be left in the dark about those like Meyer and Schuyler who saw the fundamental flaws of Communism (and progressivism) and went back to American founding principles. Unfortunately, no balance in academia or publishing would allow readers such a perspective. George Schuyler and the other black anti-Communists have been memory-holed, thanks to generations of Communist-sympathizing academics and publishers. Mary Grabar, a resident fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization, began her research on George Schuyler there in 2011 and continues to search for a publisher for her biography of him. She is the author of Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America, Debunking The 1619 Project: Exposing the Plan to Divide America, and the forthcoming Debunking FDR: The Man and the Myths. The post Black Anti-Communists Have Been Memory–Holed appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Few scientific efforts have been so dramatically ruined by politics as climate science. For over 30 years, thousands of climate scientists have pushed the message that the world is in serious jeopardy because of human-caused climate change. They have signed manifestos saying we are in a “climate emergency” that will lead to “untold suffering,” that humanity is at “code red,” and that life as we know it is “under siege.” Climate science should have provided us with facts on which we can debate policies. It is curious, given all these scientists stating all these extreme warnings, that many Americans haven’t paid them a lot of attention. In fact, a Pew poll suggested that although most Americans showed concern about climate change, it is often viewed as comparatively unimportant. In the words of the Pew survey authors, “[Climate change] is a lower priority than issues such as strengthening the economy and reducing health care costs.” This statement does not seem congruent with a “code red” emergency that suggests life is “under siege.” Why worry about mere health care costs when the world is ending via climate apocalypse? This incongruent apathy isn’t just a conservative thing. That same Pew survey also found that although Republicans are more likely than Democrats to have negative attitudes towards climate change, climate science skepticism can nonetheless be found on both sides. What accounts for this bipartisan doubt? (READ MORE from Lucian G. Conway: Can We Please Give Philadelphia to New Jersey?) The answer is easy: Climate science isn’t viewed as especially scientific. It is instead viewed as political. Nothing makes people distrust sources of information like the belief that they are over-politicized. For example, recent research by Clark and colleagues shows that people distrust institutions they view as overly politicized, even when they agree with the political goals of the institutions. Even liberals distrust over-politicized liberal institutions. No movement has cannibalized its own credibility with political contamination quite like climate science. Our lab’s research in the Journal of Environmental Psychology showed that a primary predictor of why people oppose climate change policies is that they think the claimed “97% scientific consensus” around climate change represents political agendas more than scientific fact. Americans began to suspect that the scientific consensus isn’t really a consensus about science at all. Is this because the American public is anti-science? No. It is because climate scientists themselves insisted on blurring the lines between provable scientific facts and a far-left political agenda. For example, in the original 1992 World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity — a document signed by over 1,700 academics that became a manifesto for climate science — scientists listed five things we “must” do. Number five is instructive: “We must ensure sexual equality, and guarantee women control over their own reproductive decisions.” Whatever you think about those issues, it is noteworthy that on the surface they don’t have anything specific to do with the science of climate change. They don’t tell us facts or base conclusions on those facts. Instead, at least 20 percent of the recommendations signed by all those scientists were fundamentally political. And it isn’t getting better. In the manifesto version updated in 2022, scientists claim that the original 1972 version was abhorrently too politically conservative, noting that the original “is a narrative rooted in colonialism and racism, and current-day unjust and inequitable socioeconomic systems.” I’m not sure what that has to do with climate science — and that’s the point. Right now, this doesn’t strike me (or a lot of Americans) as especially about science, but rather about a giant political package that we’re required to accept whole or else be decried as heretics. Science and Political Power If climate scientists were only promoting an abstract political ideology, we could perhaps afford to dismiss this state of things with a sigh. But their political positions often push for extreme action. They want to make us use less fuel and eat less meat. They want to control the number of kids we have. They don’t want us to care about economic growth. Even if climate scientists prove to be right about some of the down-stream consequences of human activity — and I’m still open to that possibility — that uncertain outcome must be weighed against the costs of their proposed policies. (READ MORE: The Curious Case of Conservative Happiness) Like the farmers protesting green policies in Europe, I see the costs of these policies with my own eyes in the present. Those costs seem far more certain than the vague uncertain outcomes pitched by the climate-science crowd. As a result, what we really need is a truly balanced discussion of climate policies that weighs the known real costs against the potential gains. With climate scientists, we generally get instead a lot of simple-minded political propaganda as a substitute for serious scientific thought. Climate science should have provided us with facts on which we can debate policies. Instead, it took an axe to the scaffolding of scientific credibility that held it upright, and we’re all worse off as a result. The post The Political Contamination of Climate Science appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Proponents of MAHA Along with the devious machinations of the Democrat party, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. unabashedly exposed the state of America’s corrupt and incestuous health and food systems in his speech announcing he would drop out of the presidential race in key swing states. RFK Jr. pledged to “Make America Healthy Again,” a refrain that a handful of health advocates, journalists, and pundits have been imploring policymakers to do for the past decade. Doctors such as Peter Attia and Mark Hyman, and maybe lesser known but equally established doctors such as Stacy Sims and Gabrielle Lyons, have all offered keen insight into what true metabolic health looks like. Food investigators and journalists such as Michael Pollan, Marianne Nestle, Nina Tiecholz, and Robert Lustig have worked to expose the insidious nature of big food conglomerates and implored us to change the way we eat and treat chronic health issues. If MAHA succeeds in any significant way … a decent portion of the U.S. economy shrinks. Most of these experts don’t get mainstream media exposure because most of their recommendations run counter to everything prescribed by government regulatory agencies like the CDC, FDA, and NIH. Some of them recommend a diet that completely flips the food pyramid on its head, with fats and protein comprising the most abundant source of calories and nutrients. Many doctors and nutritionists now tout the benefit of eating a decent amount of non-industrial animal products like meat, butter, cheese, and dairy, challenging everything we’ve been taught for the past 50 years. These professionals exposed the lies that have led to the fear of cholesterol and dietary fat. Others, like Pollan, would promote a more plant-centric remedy. Regardless, all would agree that the massive proliferation of packaged, processed, and highly addictive food has led to what is now known as SAD — the standard American diet. Not only is it sad, it is deeply corrupt. Along with RFK Jr.’s speech, Caley and Casey Means’ interview with Tucker Carlson (which has over 2.0 million views on YouTube, snippets of which have inundated social media), has forced America’s chronic disease epidemic into the spotlight. It’s about time. Show Me the Money According to the CDC, 37.3 million people in the United States have diabetes (just over 11 percent), 8.5 million are undiagnosed, and 96 million have pre-diabetes, double the rates from 20 years ago. Diabetes is just one of several diagnoses characterized as chronic disease — a health condition that is persistent, requires ongoing medical care, and has a negative impact on daily activities. Others include cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and autoimmune diseases. Chronic diseases and mental health conditions account for 90 percent of the nation’s healthcare spending, translating to nearly $4.1 trillion annually. Indirect costs such as missed work and reduced productivity more than doubles that number, making the total cost of chronic disease in the U.S. equivalent to around 20 percent of the American economy. A few months ago, a House GOP report found that obesity will cost the U.S. up to $9.1 trillion in medical costs over the next decade. The earlier children get sucked into this whirlpool of expenditures, the more profitable the health care field becomes. In his podcast with Tucker Carlson, Kennedy stated, “There is nothing more profitable in our society today than a sick child because all of these entities are making money on them — the insurance companies, the hospitals, the medical cartel, the pharmaceutical companies.” A sick child is job assurance. Like Kennedy said, “They have lifetime annuities. They want them sick for the rest of their lives.” Given the size and complexity of the medical-pharmaceutical-food industrial complex, it seems unlikely that CEO’s are sitting in a dark smokey room somewhere plotting to keep our children sick. (Although, these days, that doesn’t seem completely implausible: some doctors condone cutting off healthy body parts of children and voluntarily sterilizing them.) But it doesn’t require a belief in conspiracy to understand the gravity of the problem.  A lot of people are making a lot of money off chronic disease in this country. America Runs on Sick Care According to the Census Bureau’s 2019 American Community Survey (ACS), there were 22 million workers in the healthcare industry, accounting for 14 percent of all U.S. workers. This number is rising and it is by no means a comprehensive number. Some mental health counselors, those working independently outside the hospital system as nutritionists or health coaches, and other health related fields are probably not captured in this survey. Employment in the healthcare industry has far outpaced the national average. However, most reports state that the number of primary care physicians is shrinking. That means the medical bureaucracy and administration is likely increasing, rather than those who actually treat health concerns. The entire economies of some cities rely on the medical industry with major hospitals, healthcare systems, insurance companies, and pharmaceutical companies employing thousands of people in any given metropolitan region. Furthermore, America’s top 15 food companies (think Kellogg’s, Kraft Heinz, Nestle, Mars, Inc., etc.) employ somewhere upward of two million people in the United States. This does not include fast food workers. McDonald’s alone employs over 1,336,229 crew members in the United States. That’s a lot of people getting their paycheck from the processed food industry. America has grown a decent portion of its economy on the back of constituents’ poor health. This is why many people say we don’t have a healthcare system — we have a sick care system. It seems morally reprehensible at best, unconstitutional at worst, with many NIH scientists accepting royalties from pharmaceutical companies and other medically related companies who in return, received kickbacks in the form of federal contracts and grants. Not to mention seven of the top 20 lobbying groups in the United States are health related, spending almost $84 million dollars to ensure their interests are protected. If MAHA succeeds in any significant way, the well-established healthcare industry loses its best clients and a decent portion of the U.S. economy shrinks. If even a fraction of Americans gets off the processed food-disease-pharmaceutical merry go round, it will be worth it. But make no mistake: walking this back when so many are profiting from the revolving door of disease and metabolic dysfunction, will not only be tough, but economically disruptive. Still, our government has a moral imperative not to force people to eat a certain way, but to remove the roadblocks that prevent our country from being healthy. At the very least, they can stop erecting those roadblocks themselves. Chronic disease poses an existential threat to this country. The question is, even with RFK Jr. by his side, will Donald Trump have the courage and political will to put an end to it? Is he serious when he claims he wants to leave a legacy of healthy children and a healthy environment? We may not find out if America doesn’t choose wisely in November. READ MORE from Jennifer Galardi: The Democrat Party is a Cult CPAC: Why Jennifer Galardi Left Hollywood Behind The post Can America Afford To Be Healthy Again? appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

WASHINGTON — The debate over the debate is just getting started. Here are a few takes on the ABC News debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. ABC Lost Everyone knew the ABC News debate would be one-sided. Moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis did nothing to push back against that low-bar expectation as they joined Harris to make the debate a three-against-one affair. Harris did not respond to Muir’s opening question — are Americans better off than they were four years ago? Rather than answer, Harris led with her standard talking point about growing up as a “middle-class kid.” The moderators’ failure to call her on her non-answer set the stage. Illegal border crossings got so out of control that on June 4, Biden signed an executive order to undercut his earlier orders. I don’t know what ABC brass were thinking, but I know what they weren’t thinking: How could the network make the debate look even-handed? One more thing: Trump should have expected as much and brought his A game. Harris Not Asked About Joe? Two journalists had a chance to ask Harris about President Joe Biden’s mental capacity after his dismal performance during a June 27 debate with Trump, which ultimately led Biden to end his reelection bid. Biden has blamed a cold, over-preparation, and jet lag from an international trip two weeks earlier for his poor performance during that face-off with Trump. ABC should have asked: Does she agree? Harris regularly lunches with the president, whom Special Counsel Robert Hur had referred to as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Americans have a right to know if the man who will sit in the Oval Office until Jan. 20 is up to the job now. The failure to press Harris on Biden’s mental capacity was nothing short of journalistic malpractice. Trump and Abortion Davis asked Trump why American women should trust Trump on abortion, given his evolving positions on a six-week ban for the procedure. I think Trump gave a good answer — that voters should be able to determine their states’ abortion laws, and thanks to the right-leaning U.S. Supreme Court justices who threw out Roe v. Wade, they do. I remember when letting voters decide big issues was considered a good thing. Trump challenged the moderators to ask Harris if she would “allow abortion in the eighth month, ninth month, seventh month?” They did not. Trump and Project 2025 Harris tried to tie Trump to Project 2025, a 922-page document put together by Heritage Foundation staff and other conservatives that lays out a menu of right-of-center policies for a possible Trump second term. Harris called Project 2025 “a detailed and dangerous plan” Trump intends to implement. Be it noted, Trump has disavowed the conservative template, says he had “nothing to do with it,” hadn’t read it and won’t read it — which probably didn’t go over well with the folks at Heritage. Harris and Immigration If there is one issue where the American people have soured on Biden, and by extension, Harris, it is immigration. Biden’s day-one executive orders on immigration essentially invited millions of migrants to cross the U.S. border illegally. Illegal border crossings got so out of control that on June 4, Biden signed an executive order to undercut his earlier orders. Did the moderators ask Harris about the ticket’s about-face? Yes. But when Harris sidestepped the question, they did not press her for an informative answer. Instead, the ABC panel drilled down on Harris’ complaint that a border security bill — after three years of Biden not signing a good executive order — had conservative support, until Trump opposed it. The three years of chaos should have been the issue, but that’s just me. Accountability for Harris: On a Milk Carton Trump was most effective when he challenged Harris to do more about the border before the Nov. 5 election. “How come she’s not doing” it? Trump asked. Because if there is one thing you have to say about Trump, he knew what he wanted to do and he tried to do most of it. After the debate, what Harris would do on these issues remains a mystery. Contact Review-Journal Washington columnist Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com. Follow @debrajsaunders on X. COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM READ MORE from Debra J. Saunders: ABC Moderators Go After Trump. Harris Remains Blurry. Hunter Biden Pleads Guilty. The President Should Pardon Him.   The post More Takeaways on the Trump – Harris Debate appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Every year when the school season starts I remember that I was a lousy student in school until I got to college and was finally able to study what I wanted. The fundamental reason was disinterest and my youthful eagerness to fight against injustice. I considered most subjects too unappealing by my standards of fun — essentially, soccer, rock, and poetry — and it seemed unfair that teachers should make a boy in love with the Humanities learn mathematical formulas, so I exercised my right to strike academically. I never got nervous in an exam, because nerves, like sweating, seemed to me ever so mundane. In other words, I got bad grades in mathematics out of pure activism, not just lack of ability; my professor, an old hound, did not share this opinion. But the truth is that I was offended if I ever managed to pass a science exam, just as much as I was unable to avoid getting the best grades in the class in philosophy, literature and the like. Maybe these confessions of a bad student will help some misunderstood kid today. In spite of everything, I never cheated, except once. One of the lessons I considered stupid, having Atlases and world maps at home, was memorizing the cities of my country, as well as the countries and capitals of places you will never go to, unless you are on the run from justice. Since, besides, God did not bless me with a good memory, when I got to the final exam I copied all the answers from my deskmate’s exam, who was a guy who had looked like he wanted to become a geographer or something, because if not, one cannot understand his determination to hold to memory the fact that the capital of Mozambique is Maputo, that of Botswana, Gaborone, and that of Tajikistan, Dushanbe. I was a great student of Latin, perhaps because I longed to read the classics in their language, and a lousy learner of all other languages. The only thing I liked about natural sciences was that the teacher let us smoke in the lab (in those days we were so free!), and that we attended class under the defiant gaze of a stuffed lynx presiding over the bookshelf. When I felt fed up with enduring my hour of science class, I would look at the lynx and think: “poor thing, it suffers through eight hours of class a day and can’t even protest.” That made me feel better. I was more interested in the poetry of the Spanish Golden Age than in the very boring morphological analysis, which sounded to me like trying to apply something as tedious as mathematics to the beautiful tool of written language, in order to spoil it. (READ MORE from Itxu Diaz: Cheney’s Change of Vote Means Nothing) Technical drawing and I were incompatible: it brought together the worst of mathematics and the worst of drawing. You had to apply absurd formulas, it was forbidden to sketch freehand, which is the only exciting thing about drawing, and you had to help yourself with more tools than you need in able to perform open-heart surgery. Especially odious was the compass, besides being extremely dangerous, it is incredible that of all the things that Ancient Greece bequeathed us, the teachers chose to force us to buy that horrible contraption, instead of, I don’t know, Homer’s Odyssey. As for the rest of it, my drawing teacher didn’t like me crossing things out, and honestly, I’m a writer, my life consists of crossing things out all the time. I never got nervous in an exam, because nerves, like sweating, seemed to me ever so mundane. I never arrive punctual to class, unless I liked the subject, and in a somewhat incomprehensible way I won the affection of most of my professors, perhaps because they knew that I was not born for academic discipline, and that my time in those classrooms was something temporary, something like a bureaucratic formality, before giving free rein to my true vocation: rum taster.  Not long ago I returned to my school and found that most of the things that used to amuse us are now forbidden: you can no longer smoke on the sly, there is no longer the bar where we used to go to buy candy, and, during recess, you can no longer move the secretary’s tiny car from its parking space (sometimes I wonder how the hell we could lift it between six kids to place it twenty parking spaces further along). Now the teachers can’t throw the eraser at your head (the Literature teacher held the world record for accuracy in the Eraser category and in the bloodier Key chain category), you’re no longer allowed to sneak into the school to play soccer when it’s closed, and you need more signed documents to leave during school hours than you do to take a transatlantic trip with a backpack full of plutonium. (READ MORE: The Second Coming of Ronald Reagan) I had a Spanish language teacher who told me, when I was 10 years old, “you will go far,” and I had a Physics and Chemistry teacher who told me “you will never go anywhere.” The amazing thing is that, in the end, they were both right.  The post My Teachers Knew I Was a Bad Student appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

What could possibly go wrong with a federal database run by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) that includes the date of birth, complete current address, and a “unique identifying number” from a passport or a driver’s license, as well as an image of the document from which the identifying number comes for each “beneficial owner” of some 32.6 million small corporations? In 2021, Congress imposed that mandate to allow federal authorities to investigate and prosecute financial crimes, like money laundering. The Corporate Transparency Act is a trap that is scheduled to shut in January 2025. It promises draconian penalties for knowing or willful violations even though it is a small, easily overlooked 21-page part buried in the 1,500-page 2001 Defense Authorization Act, and is misdirected. The Act Punishes Business Owners to Look for Matryoshka Companies The problem according to the Federal Government is shell companies, some of which are multi-layered, like Russian nesting Matryoshka dolls. That layering of one corporation inside a second and then inside a third facilitates money laundering, drug running, and other financial crimes by hiding their owners and operations from outside viewing. (READ MORE: The Spectator P.M. Podcast Ep. 67: Starbucks Is Losing Money, So It Ousted Its CEO) The problem is that few of the 32.6 million corporations licensed by the States or Tribes are shell corporations engaged in criminal activity. The vast majority are solo or small firm lawyers and accountants, dry cleaners, restaurants, and other small businesses that have incorporated to get liability protection and other benefits, not to engage in criminal activity. If Congress is concerned about shell corporations or nested entities, it should regulate them, not people who have incorporated for legitimate business reasons. The people obligated to report are the corporation’s “beneficial owners,” not just the owners of the 32.6 million corporations. These include senior officers, people with the authority to appoint or remove senior officers and board members, people who exercise substantial control over the organization,  and someone who “directly or indirectly, including as the trustee of a trust or similar arrangement, exercise[s] substantial control” over the entity. This means that the FinCEN database will include the personal data of more than 32.6 million people.  Of course, Congress exempted 24 larger and otherwise regulated entities like banks, credit unions, insurance companies, and investment advisors from the Act. In particular, corporations with more than 20 full-time employees, a physical office inside the United States, and gross receipts over $5 million are exempt. That exemption and the others do no good for the vast majority of small corporations. An Alabama Court Rejects the Corporate Transparency Act The burdens are substantial, and six legal challenges to the constitutionality of the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA) have been filed. In March 2024, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama found the law unconstitutional.  The court rejected the government’s reliance on its unenumerated, inherent national security and foreign affairs powers, which, in the government’s hands, can become limitless. It noted that, in 2014, the Supreme Court held that a woman who put a chemical compound on her husband’s mistress’s door handle to inflict irritating, but harmless burns, could not be prosecuted for violating the Chemical Weapons Convention Implementation Act. Rather, the Supreme Court said that the law did not “reach purely local crimes.” In the same way, incorporation is, fundamentally, a matter of state law. (READ MORE: The Wolves of K Street: A Real Threat to Democracy) The Commerce Clause of the Constitution empowers Congress to “regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.” In November 1942, when the United States was embroiled in World War II the Supreme Court held that the Commerce Clause did not prohibit the federal government from regulating an Ohio farmer’s use of the wheat he grew, did not sell, and then used to feed his livestock. That holding goes only so far.  The government’s reliance on the Commerce Clause is misplaced for several reasons. First, the act of incorporation, according to the government, does not involve commerce. Not all of those 32.6 million incorporated entities actually engage in commerce, but the government wants the personal information of every “beneficial owner.” In addition, Congress nowhere mentioned commerce or its instrumentalities in the text of the law. The court concluded, “Because the CTA doesn’t regulate the channels and instrumentalities of commerce or prevent their use for a specific purpose, it cannot be justified as a valid regulation of those channels and instrumentalities.” Finally, the “connection between incorporation [which the government agrees is not a commercial activity] and criminal activity is far too attenuated to justify the CTA.” (READ MORE: Arkansas AG Claims Temu Is Chinese Spyware) The court also rejected the government’s reliance on its tax powers, noting that the civil penalties for noncompliance are not taxes. Returning to the starting point, what could go wrong with a government database containing the personal information of more than 32.6 million people? To ask the question answers it. Recall the 2015 data breach at the Office of Personnel Management that involved 22.1 million records containing highly sensitive information of federal employees and applicants. More recently, the records of some 15 million veterans were lost in a breach at Change Healthcare. And, litigants claim that every one of our Social Security numbers is out there on the internet for use by bad actors. FinCEN’s database of more than 32.6 million people is just another inviting target. The post Shut the Corporate Transparency Act Trap appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

from Sarah Westall: TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/

This is the most powerful Trump ad yet. Share it will all your power!!! https://t.co/iGD77bAS3d — Alex Jones (@RealAlexJones) September 14, 2024