It is a sport like Whack-a-Mole. Players follow every Trump word, gesture, movement — and, as soon as they spot the thing, they whack at it, presumably to get a point or a “like” or a “follower” or a smiley emoji. It stinks, but this is an underbelly of society. I went through it myself at one rabbinic position I held briefly during my 32-year (so far) rabbinic career. I had been hired by a congregation’s “rabbinic search committee,” and the committee was split. A solid majority loved my wife, Ellen of blessed memory, and they liked me enough. I was the rabbi they were looking for. But a distinct, if not distinguished, minority absolutely hated me. The Zelensky Impeachment. We now know that it was the Bidens who grifted their way through the Ukrainian economy. That is not surprising, I guess. I take my stands and speak my mind. Most people like encountering such a person; some people hate it. Read Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged and you will get the idea. Still, the majority ruled, and I was retained. Within two weeks, the opposition secretly coalesced and laid out a methodical strategy to get me fired. They would work to persuade synagogue members to cancel their memberships, an important component of shul funding. I launched a Youth Program, and they worked to persuade parents not to send their kids. (Crazy, right?) I started a weekly program that I myself had experienced a few years earlier with my son, and we loved it.  It was called “Parents and Kids Torah Learning,” and parents would come to the synagogue with their kids every Saturday night to devote an hour to studying some Bible together, or parents would help their sons and daughters with homework assigned by their religious-studies teachers at the Jewish school.  (READ MORE from Dov Fischer: Trump’s Excellent History-Changing Populist Republican Convention) Toward the end of the hour, I would tell a Bible story, and then Ellen would arrive with boxes of pizza. The kids loved it. We even upped it a notch: the boy and girl who attended most frequently got to spend an entire day at Disneyland with the rabbi and his wife, and ended the night by stopping by our home for Ellen’s (amazing) chocolate chip cookies. When word got out that the project was booming, the satans plotted to kill it. They actually convinced parents to stop coming, stop bringing their kids. One father and grandfather showed up with their son/grandson and soon were getting yelled at in public by the lead Satan for breaking the boycott. “But [name of boy] loves this thing. He talks about it all week.” The satans excluded the guy from their inner circle. He could not take the social isolation, so he stopped bringing his son (a darling kid). There is a book about such people, written by a Christian pastor, based on similar situations in Protestant churches, called Clergy Killers. A pastor friend recommended it to me when he and I shared our “Twilight Zone” moments. Others in that genre: Ten Ways to Kill a Pastor and Pastor Abusers. I share one anecdotal example that brings me back to Trump’s TDS haters: In a Shabbat sermon, I was discussing the Biblical account of Avraham’s (Abraham’s) effort to marry off his son, Yitzchak (Isaac), to a woman worthy of becoming the second Matriarch of the Jewish people. Toward that end, Avraham sent his majordomo, Eliezer, from Canaan back to Charan, where Avraham was born and where his extended family lived. Eliezer went by camel, laden with gifts of wealth, which he would offer to a family whose daughter would be the right one. However, Eliezer was concerned that, as a simple majordomo, he was hardly qualified to pick such a perfect wife for both Yitzchak and the future Jewish people. Therefore, he boldly endeavored to make a deal with G-d: “Here I stand by the spring as the daughters of the townspeople come out to draw water; let the maiden to whom I say, ‘Please, lower your jar that I may drink,’ and who replies, ‘Drink, and I will also water your camels’ — let her be the one whom You have decreed for Your servant Isaac. Thereby shall I know that You have dealt graciously with my master.” (Genesis 24:13-14) Continuing with my sermon, I related that Rivkah (Rebecca) emerged and indeed unknowingly fulfilled the prophecy. She brought Eliezer water, and then — despite the physical challenge amid the heat of the day — this young girl walked all the way back to the well, drew more water, and carried that heavy bucket a distance to slake the camel’s thirst. I then threw in the kind of quip that has trademarked me for some fifty years. I said, “Now that’s someone who would walk a mile for a camel.” (If you are of an age when that company advertised regularly on TV, radio, and in newspapers, you will catch the reference.) Well, the sermon was well received, and the quip drew some giggles. But the satans went to work. Soon enough, an emergency meeting of the synagogue’s executive board was called — an emergency meeting on these charges: “The rabbi is publicly encouraging kids in shul to start smoking cigarettes.” End of story. Point made. I think back to that garbage every time I see or hear the mainstream leftist media attack Donald Trump over every minor nothing they can swat at. They search and dig to find any blip they can. When they can’t find a thing, they fabricate it from thin air. The Russian collusion with Putin? That tied him up for two years. Schiff, the despicable liar who soon will be a California Senator, swore he had documentary proof of it. Of course it was absurd! Honestly, even if you hate Trump, why would Putin help Trump get elected over Hillary? It makes no sense. Putin owns the Clintons. And they are so weak. Remember the American ambassador in Libya on her watch? Trump is such a tough sonovogun. Why would Putin want Trump in the White House? Indeed, Trump’s election stopped Putin’s designs on Ukraine for four years. One lie after another, grasping at straws. The Zelensky Impeachment. We now know that it was the Bidens who grifted their way through the Ukrainian economy. Then the second impeachment. All were conducted at Christmas time, aimed at humiliating and destroying Trump. The irony: If things continue as they hopefully seem, history instead will report not that he is the only president in American history to have been impeached twice but that he was twice impeached by a corrupt Congress voting on straight party lines and yet was then reelected by the American people to serve as president again while (i) Nancy Pelosi, the Wannabe Kingslayer, ended up spending her last days trying instead to take down her own party’s president, and (ii) Liz Cheney was voted out of Congress by her electorate and went on to a career in … (What does she do anyway?) It continues after President Trump’s amazing Republican National Convention success. Every speech was great, from all sectors of the American social spectrum. The energy was contagious. A very solid Vice Presidential choice. A great family that many, many, many people wish they could say about their own kids. And yet the media satans went right to work. (READ MORE: The Democrats’ Panic Reveals Vance’s Strength) Yes, let’s all be fair: He spoke too long. And he should have stuck more to the perfectly scripted speech, which was knocking home runs all over the place and setting off all the lights and bells on the pinball machines. The moving call for unity, the gripping account of the assassination attempt, the emotional homage to the heroic firefighter, Corey Comperatore.  He shouldn’t have ad-libbed as much as he did. True is true; fair is fair. A few ad-libs, OK. Trump must be Trump. If the satans had focused their criticisms there, in moderation, OK. But the satans’ hatred never stops. They always search and scrounge, hunting for sound-bites to take out of context and then to attack or mock. So they ripped him for mentioning Hannibal Lecter. Really, that’s your best shot? The reference was valid: countries like Venezuela and El Salvador are releasing sickos and nut jobs from their mental institutions and, with the Biden-Kamala porous border, sending them here, where they seize, rape, and murder American females like Laken Riley, Rachel Morin, and Jocelyn Nungaray. They are not literally sending cannibals (like those who ate Biden’s uncle?) but indeed are sending mental cases who rape and murder. Trump was speaking figuratively, to impress an image with a New Yorker’s style of showmanship, and then the satans mangled his words to mischaracterize them. Or when he said that Kim Jong Un misses him. They take that out of context and make it sinister. He obviously was quipping and kidding. That is how New York humor works. My congregants and readers know I do that, too. I am a Jew from Brooklyn. That’s how we Outer Borough types are. And leftists know it darn well because, when it is a leftist from Brooklyn, they laugh at his Curb Your Enthusiasm schtick for twelve annual seasons. This despite the fact that Larry makes fun of blacks (with “Black Leon” the most stereotypical Black imaginable, hyper-sexed, every sentence an “MF,” since Amos and Andy), and mocks “fat people” and people in wheelchairs and Hispanic toll collectors and maids. From Larry, all the progressive woke opinion makers laugh and laugh. But when Trump jokes far less offensively, they call him a “racist” and berate him. Shame on them. It is like the satans I encountered during that one isolated bizarre three-year period at that temple. Each and every sentence, quip, pun, and aside was scrutinized as a possible basis to fire me. It was terribly annoying. But I had a very sweet and resolute wife, my own strong disposition, and I came out OK. I ended up with a fabulously better congregation through these past 19 years; freedom at the pulpit, freedom to expand by starting writing honestly and forthrightly here, freedom to teach law for twenty years, and freedom to thank G-d for endowing the satans with the wisdom to agree to a six-figure settlement. Even so, I never had to put up with the persecution President Trump has faced: investigations based on cruel and vicious lies from the day he assumed office, two impeachments based on nothing, lawfare in three states and the District of Columbia — which is not a state — gag orders, bans from social media, efforts to shame him publicly in the eyes of his wife and children, and a gunshot at him. May He come out of it not only “OK” but as the 47th President. If finding fault in Trump is a sport, those who play it are vicious and evil sorts. And they keep losing at their own game. Subscribe to Rav Fischer’s YouTube channel here at bit.ly/3REFTbk  and follow him on X (Twitter) at @DovFischerRabbi to find his latest informative and inspiring classes, interviews, speeches, and observations. The post The Sport of Finding Fault in Trump appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

It seems every news report we have received in the last few days has referenced the search for the unknown “motive(s)” for Thomas Crooks’ trying to assassinate former President Donald Trump, an effort which injured the former president and also killed and injured innocent bystanders. Thomas Matthew Crooks … was a miserable self-obsessed loner who had some history of supporting Republicans and progressives.  When it comes to explaining upsetting events, people abhor a vacuum. Why do people want to know so desperately why something like this happened?  Because they think that the more accurately they can explain why something happened, the more accurately they can predict when and why it might happen again and ultimately control and prevent its reoccurrence. (READ MORE from Schaler and Vatz: Don’t Blame ‘Mental Illness’ for Mass Murder and Political Missteps) We have been writing on the fruitless search for “motives” of miscreants for decades, and here is what we have found: Specific motives are more often than not simply unknowable. Moreover, it doesn’t matter, in this case, whether Crooks was left-wing or right wing (evidence exists that he was conflicted), and when they are ascertainable, so what? John Hinckley is believed to have tried to assassinate Ronald Reagan to impress Jodie Foster, a person who never knew him, and given her sexual orientation would not have been interested in him regardless. Mark David Chapman, who murdered John Lennon, said he did so due to an alleged personal resentment against Mr. Lennon and a desire to emulate Holden Caulfied of the novel The Catcher in the Rye. They were just two insignificant people until they tried (or succeeded) to kill   important people. Knowing a motive doesn’t matter because motives do not tell you who is going to try and kill someone. Everyone can be seen to have a motive to kill.  Moreover, we cannot deprive a person of liberty or responsibility simply because we believe they are going to commit a crime. We have in our admittedly lengthy professional lives known many bizarre people, some of whom seemed capable of violence, but there is no way to predict who will be violent except by previous or ongoing behavior. Shall we start putting loners and “weird” people in protective custody for their own good and public safety? People who murder famous people are usually utterly uninteresting people, “nobodies,” who gain salience with society-at-large only one way: taking the life of an important person that makes them famous. And unfortunately, thanks to media sensationalism, they are right.  We label murderers like Crooks as having an “existential” motive.  Killing another gives the murderer a sense of meaning in his or her otherwise empty life. Probable Motive That is the likely motive in this case.  Thomas Matthew Crooks, often now identified by his full name like Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray and others, bespeaking their new-found assigned significance, was a miserable self-obsessed loner who had some history of supporting Republicans and progressives. Was he an ideologue?   There is no evidence of it.  He was friendless and bullied, but millions of people in this country are friendless and bullied … very few kill people and try to kill famous people. Did he expect to live?  No way of knowing, but by killing former President Trump he would likely have the existential significance of being known well and reviled by people who otherwise wouldn’t give him the time of day. There is no way in a country of 340 million people to prevent such attempts at violence from those who cannot be successful at anything else, but who think that people now will have to “know me.” Those committed to assassination prevention know that family or others’ providing the means for such miserable criminal-but-otherwise-nothings to murder others obviously can facilitate the acts themselves.  That is an avenue the criminal justice system should pursue. (READ MORE: Lies, Damned Lies, and Mass Shooting Statistics) Please, though, no more searches for the motives of this miserable miscreant.  Unless investigators find unknown ties to unsavory groups or countries, he is not worth anyone’s time. Jeffrey A. Ph.D. M.Ed., (ijas@me.com) is a psychologist and a retired professor of Justice, Law and Society at American University’s School of Public Affairs, and a retired member of the psychology faculty at Johns Hopkins University.  Dr. Schaler supervises existentially-oriented psychoanalysts and lives in Ellicott City, Md. Cell:  240-460-0987 Richard E. Vatz (rvatz@Towson.edu), Ph.D. is former psychology editor of USA Today Magazine.  He is a retired Towson University Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Political Rhetoric and Communication. Cell 443-801-1281 The post A Worthless Search for Trump Shooter’s Motive appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Middletown, Ohio — After being introduced as Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s running mate last week at the Republican National Convention, Ohio Republican Senator JD Vance was accorded a hero’s welcome this afternoon in his hometown of Middletown, Ohio. “The idea,” said Vance, “that George Soros and Barack Obama and a couple of elite Democrats … decided to throw Joe Biden overboard is an insult to voters. Hundreds of Ohioans thronged the Middletown Performing Arts Center at the Middletown High School. Vance was not scheduled to speak until 2:00 p.m., but they began queuing up early, undaunted by long lines and nasty weather. The line to the entrance extended around the building for more than a mile. As for the weather, it was no deterrent. Attendees withstood rain and heavy storms throughout the morning, coming early to share their excitement for the hometown hero. (READ MORE from Hunter Oswald: The Plot That Almost Killed Hitler) The scene had a festive vibe. Those waiting in line played music and did group chants, invoking Vance’s name or shouting the now-famous Trump slogan from Butler, Pennsylvania: “Fight! Fight! Fight!” People from all backgrounds came wearing “Trump-Vance” t-shirts. Meanwhile across the street, a group of Democrat dissenters gathered in protest. But they were small. There was a lot of good midwestern conversation. The hometown folks seemed eager to share their thoughts and enthusiasm with The American Spectator. Chris, a Middletown native, expressed his excitement for Vance, whose Hillbilly Elegy made him famous long before his elevation by Trump. “His story resonates with me,” says Chris. “His challenges are some of the challenges that I have experienced in my life.” Beyond his personal identification with Vance, Chris believes that Vance “will attract younger voters” to the Trump ticket, “which is great.” Vance’s unique personal story was something that these small town southern Ohio natives could certainly relate to, but they also understood that people nationwide could relate. Donald, another resident, told me that “Vance’s unique experience is one of his greatest strengths.” Pols in Middletown The rally began with Republican local and state officials from around the Butler County area (yes, ironically, Middletown, Ohio shares the same county name as Butler, Pennsylvania) and state of Ohio, along with Republican national candidates, particularly Ohio’s U.S. Senate candidate Bernie Moreno (who is locked into an important race with incumbent Ohio Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown) and U.S. Representative Warren Davidson. Moreno and Davidson vocally shared their support for Donald Trump and expressed why they believed that JD Vance is the right guy to be at Trump’s side in 2024. Then came Vance’s turn to speak. The room where he spoke was filled with over 800 people — the max capacity for the venue. I was told that organizers had to turn away almost a thousand people. Vance did not speak long, but he spoke effectively. For about 30 minutes, Trump’s running mate spoke to supporters about what he and Trump wish to do. For the majority of the rally, Vance spoke about how the “fight” (a common word of the afternoon) for America was grounded in “fighting for Middletown.” Vance talked about how his upbringing in Middletown had meant so much to him. He said that his hometown had a special “something that if we don’t fight [for it], will not be around for the next generation of kids.” Vance addressed various national issues. He spoke of “fixing the crisis” at the Southern border, of his and Trump’s plan to reassert America’s energy independence, and to “fight to restore the American dream.” Those statements had the crowd on its feet cheering, “Drill baby, drill!” and “U.S.A.! U.S.A!” A theme of Vance’s speech was that the fight for Middletown, Ohio is a fight for the forgotten towns and people of America. In closing, Vance emphasized the peculiar nature of this election, addressing the Democratic Party’s dumping of Joe Biden as the nominee, despite Biden winning the party’s primary. “The idea,” said Vance, “that George Soros and Barack Obama and a couple of elite Democrats got into a smoke-filled room and decided to throw Joe Biden overboard is an insult to voters. That is not how it works. That’s a threat to democracy.” (READ MORE: Keir Starmer’s Win Signals the UK’s New Leftist Course) JD Vance’s message is clear; if America is to be restored and offer its children a future of hope and opportunity, then Americans must vote to reelect Donald Trump. And as Democrats face chaos and uncertainty from the fallout of Joe Biden’s decision to not run for reelection, Vance’s very personal and classic midwestern rally was a clear signal of his certain commitment to fight to win the 2024 election. The post Middletown Rally Signals Vance’s Strength appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Someone who regularly visited Crooks home and work also visited a building in Washington, DC located in Gallery Place. This is in the same vicinity of an @FBI office on June 26, 2023. Who’s device is this? pic.twitter.com/b9ZIO5utDC — Oversight Project (@OversightPR) July 22, 2024

? BOOM ? Rep. Anna Paulina Luna leaves disgraced Secret Service Director Cheatle shaking and in SILENCE after catching her in perjury LIE "You have perjured yourself. I ask that we bring perjury charges against the Director. We are prepared to hold you in contempt!" WATCH: pic.twitter.com/4wimNzGDbP — Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) July 22, 2024

This is the last time Joe Biden was seen. It was five days ago. Nobody knows where he is, what he’s doing, if he’s okay, or who is running the country at the moment. pic.twitter.com/ozT7YBYhVW — Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) July 22, 2024

by Martin Armstrong, Armstrong Economics: Donald Trump has guaranteed to end the war in Ukraine if elected president, vowing to do so before his first day in office. The recent outpouring of support for Donald Trump has led world leaders to consider the possibility of a second Trump presidency. Perhaps no one would dread a […]

NEW AUDIO DATA. UPDATED analysis. I am pulling back on the estimated distance of shooters for rounds 6 and 7, and adding two additional rounds discovered in multiple audio files. We now have 10 rounds total, with #10 believed to be Secret Service, and #9 believed to be PA LEO.… pic.twitter.com/63M7tCB0rv — HealthRanger (@HealthRanger) July […]

"There was no Plan B in my life, ever" - Jon Bon Jovi