Employees from some of the world’s leading AI companies published an unusual proposal on Tuesday, demanding that the companies grant them “a right to warn about advanced artificial intelligence.”  Whom do they want to warn? You. The public. Anyone who will listen.  The 13 signatories are current and former employees of OpenAI and Google DeepMind. They believe AI has huge potential to do good, but they’re worried that without proper safeguards, the tech can enable a...

June 6, 2024, marks the 80th anniversary of “D-Day,” the Allied landings on the Normandy coast of France. We tend to make a great deal of decennial anniversaries, and this one, in particular, deserves a special salute. Given that the youngest soldiers, sailors, and airmen who served on D-Day were, with rare exceptions, no younger than 18, those who are still with us today are only just shy of 100 years old. When the 90th anniversary rolls around, it’s unlikely that we’ll have any survivors left from the ranks of those who saw action on that day. The ceremonies will be extensive. The D-Day landings involved U.S., British, and Canadian forces, so it’s fitting that these countries are prominently represented. President Biden will attend, as part of a state visit to France. King Charles will be there as well, as well as Canada’s Prime Minister Trudeau. As a sign of how the world has moved on since World War II, Chancellor Scholz of Germany will take part in the ceremonies. These dignitaries and many others will participate as guests of President Macron of France. But current events have also intruded. (READ MORE: Reagan Remembered) Although the Soviet Union was a World War II ally, Russia’s representatives have not been invited, while Ukrainian President Zelensky will attend. Invading your neighbor, we’re reminded, isn’t something to be celebrated on such an anniversary. As for recalling sacrifices made on the Eastern Front in World War II, a Ukrainian presence is certainly justified. After all, some of the biggest battles in the east were fought in what is now Ukraine, with some 14 million Ukrainians killed during the war. Seven million Ukrainians served in the Red Army, including the man who planted the flag atop the Reichstag building in Berlin in 1945. So there’s much to remember, much to discuss, and much to reflect upon as we commemorate the D-Day landings. And this may well be the last such grand occasion before D-Day is relegated to the history books altogether. It’s not just the veterans themselves who are passing from the scene; the ranks of their children, the ones for whom soldierly recollections had immediacy and poignancy, are also starting to thin. At 80 years on, D-Day stands exactly equidistant between ourselves today and 1864, the climactic year of the Civil War. It’s a long time ago, a very different world. Normandy Trenches But as we celebrate one of the most decisive battles of modern history, perhaps we should also take a moment to recall the battle for Normandy in all its fullness. The events of D-Day itself have long captured our imaginations, replete as they are with high stakes and high drama. Movies such as The Longest Day and Saving Private Ryan have embellished our appreciation of the invasion as a narrative, but there is absolutely no doubt that the fight to secure a beachhead was an event of massive importance. In retrospect, it’s almost impossible to imagine how the war might have turned out had the invasion failed. Would the Allies have won? Likely enough, given their preponderance of material resources, but would victory have been so decisive? That’s very hard to say, and anything less than a decisive victory might well have given us a very different world than the one we’ve enjoyed for the last 80 years. Still, while the battle could have been lost had the landings failed, their success in no way guaranteed the victory that ensued. The U.S. Army counts the “Normandy campaign” as having lasted from June 6 until July 24. The latter date is hugely significant. From the morning after the landings onward, the invasion had devolved into a slow and brutal slugging match, the Germans trying to contain the Allied lodgment, the Allies grinding forward to expand it enough to enable a breakout. Just inland from the beaches was the bocage, a countryside of tiny fields bounded by hedgerows, sometimes only a football field apart, stippled by small villages and walled farms, each of them readily transformed into little fortresses, and, collectively, a mosaic of strongpoints that strongly favored the defenders. (READ MORE: The Hero Who Saved a Cathedral) Soon, progress inland came to be measured in yards per day, rather than miles, an advance that recalled, painfully, the worst of the World War I trench fighting. The British and Canadians struggled for weeks, inching toward the strategic city of Caen, which planners had hoped to capture on the afternoon of D-Day. The Americans likewise bled steadily to make small gains, and even their great accomplishments, such as the capture of the critical port of Cherbourg and the crossroads of St. Lo, all came at horrendous cost. To take one example, the 29th Infantry Division, which alongside the 2nd Ranger Battalion was the dramatic focus of Saving Private Ryan, suffered many more casualties before taking St. Lo. It was said after Normandy that the 29th, a Virginia and Maryland National Guard unit, actually consisted of three divisions: one in the field, one in the hospital, and one in the cemetery. Historian Carlo D’Este, one of the most respected chroniclers of the campaign, observed that after one month of hard fighting across the length and breadth of the beachhead, the battle had become a complete stalemate. Hidden within that apparent stalemate, however, were the seeds of Allied victory. Command of the air and the sea meant that the Allied armies could be reinforced and expanded even more rapidly than those forces opposing them, crippled, despite their apparent logistical advantage, by relentless air strikes all along the roads leading to Normandy. Despite the tactical advantage of being on the defensive, the German divisions were being ground down just as viciously as their opponents, and with less in the way of reinforcement. Those Who Died After D-Day Ensured Its Victory As the British and Canadians pushed toward Caen, the Americans prepared for a massive offensive, known as “Operation Cobra.” Preceded by huge (and sometimes hideously misdirected aerial bombardment) Cobra began on July 25, turning the German flank, and breaking the German position wide open. The stalemate had been broken, and a new campaign had begun. The costs had been immense. The Allies had lost some 4,400 men killed on D-Day; the Americans on Omaha Beach, but also the Canadians on Juno Beach had suffered grievously. The seven weeks that followed, however, dwarfed the suffering and the sacrifices of D-Day itself. With due allowance for the armies’ different end dates for the campaign, the battle for Normandy witnessed the deaths of some 20,000 Americans, 11,000 British, and 5,000 Canadians. (READ MORE: War: Where Men Win Glory) So as we reflect upon the meaning of D-Day this week, and give due credit to those who stormed the beaches on the day itself, let’s also take a moment to remind ourselves that the battle for Normandy would require much more than that depicted in the opening half hour of Saving Private Ryan. The same grit and determination that carried men past the beach obstacles, across the minefields, and onto the heights above the beaches would be called upon again and again in the days to come. On this 80th anniversary then, let’s honor all those who won the battle of Normandy, those who gained the beachhead, but also those who saw the battle through to victory. James H. McGee retired in 2018 after nearly four decades as a national security and counter-terrorism professional, working primarily in the nuclear security field. Since retiring, he’s begun a second career as a thriller writer. His recent novel, Letter of Reprisal, tells the tale of a desperate mission to destroy a Chinese bioweapon facility hidden in the heart of the central African conflict region, and a forthcoming sequel carries the Reprisal team from the hills of West Virginia to the forests of Belarus. You can find it on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback editions, and on Kindle Unlimited. The post Remembering Normandy in Full 80 Years Later appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

My friend Daniel Greenfield, the outstanding contributor over at FrontPage Magazine, is no Pollyanna. If you’re a religious reader of Greenfield’s work, as I am, you’ll know he’s one of the most brutally honest and savage critics of the Left that we’re blessed to have, and in that brutal honesty, he’s credibly accused of presenting current circumstances as dire. To which Greenfield has a defense: Current circumstances are dire. Interestingly enough, though, Greenfield’s excellent new book Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against the Left contains a quite optimistic look at the future of America. (RELATED: The Spectacle Ep. 115: The Left’s War on the American Republic Is Older Than You Think) Greenfield makes the point that the kooks, crooks, and villains who make up the modern Left aren’t very new at all. They’re merely new iterations of an irritating faction in American politics that has been around from the very beginning. We’ve always had socialists, communists, urban machine pols, traitors, and thugs. The ones our Founding Fathers contended with might actually have been worse than what we’ve got now. It seems hard to imagine, especially given our current miseries, but Domestic Enemies makes a terrific case for just that contention. Greenfield doesn’t belabor things too much in giving a blow-by-blow presentation of all of the terrible leftist movements America has faced. He focuses his analysis on the period between the calling of the constitutional convention in 1787 and the Civil War, and particularly the 1864 election. We’re presented with the idea that American politics was dominated by aristocratic white men in that timeframe and that the arguments animating our political process had to do with the commercial disputes of the ruling classes. Not so, says Greenfield. In fact, in his telling, politics hasn’t changed all that much. Take, for example, the obnoxious Aaron Burr, the nation’s third vice president most remembered for having killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel. There is a great deal more about Burr that ought to be understood, and Greenfield handily fills in those gaps. For example, Burr was a principal in the hideously corrupt Manhattan Water Company, a supposed utility chartered by the state of New York to supply potable water to the people living at the southern tip of the island which was funded by property taxes. It dipped into the same rancid communal water source the people of New York City were using before its charter and used its proceeds to build an election-rigging political machine, complete with a crooked loan operation, which ultimately became the Tammany Hall operation. Burr attempted to rig the 1800 presidential election, unsuccessfully. He was later convicted of treason and became something of a globetrotter in his efforts at power-hungry scheming, including an attempt to become emperor of Mexico. And he was very, very enamored of the French Revolution, which was ongoing at the same time our Founding Fathers were attempting to write the Constitution. Greenfield takes pains to show just how destructive and pernicious the French Revolution was. He does a real service in reminding the reader of that. It isn’t all that well-recognized anymore, but the French helped our revolutionary efforts before they overthrew their king. The France to whom America owed allegiance and friendship was a very different entity a decade later, and the French Revolution was an entirely different animal than our own. The French Revolution was iconoclastic and utopian in ways ours was not, and it was far less civil, far bloodier, far more destructive, and far more disruptive to its neighbors. (READ MORE: America Is Not a Parchment Promise) The principles of our revolution are largely embodied in our Bill of Rights, which establishes that the government exists to safeguard the God-given liberties of the governed. Our focus is on the pursuit of happiness; its achievement is up to each of us. As such, our constitution takes pains to bottle up the powers of government in a system of checks and balances. However, the French concept is that the government exists to provide the happiness of the whole society, not to safeguard its pursuit by the individual. The French revolutionaries answered the criticism of those who weren’t on board with their methods of providing that happiness with the guillotine. In that vein, the radical leftism of, say, the Soviet Union and Communist China — our major external threats over the past 80 years — finds a direct progenitor in the French Revolution. And the French sent agitators across the Atlantic time and again to make demands of America and to attempt to displace our revolution with their own. As Greenfield notes, they found a lot of willing American stooges. He argues that our politics has been a never-ending struggle between the principles of our revolution and the French ever since. Most of the worst scoundrels in our political history have embraced the French principles, among them atheism, sex-as-entertainment, what we would now call “equity” rather than equality under the law, wealth redistribution, censorship of the press, and political violence. They’ve all been around for a very long time here in America. Read Domestic Enemies and you’ll recognize that the blight of urban Democrat politics goes back to the nation’s founding, that literal communists have been around even here in America since before Karl Marx, that modern labor unions in this country stem from a secret society founded by a pulp novelist, and that the use of street thugs as a political weapon has been a core characteristic of Democrat politics since the party’s founding. (READ MORE: The Curious Trump Tie: Alito’s Flag and Merchan’s Trial) So why is this a hopeful book? Because, as Greenfield says, American patriots have defeated the Left and its assorted radicals and sleazeballs many times over the course of our history. There is no reason we can’t beat back the current iteration of this threat. And as he says, the Left always fails, because they get every aspect of human nature wrong. It’s paradoxical, given their resilient appeal to weak minds, but it’s true. After all, the French Revolution failed spectacularly. So did the Soviet Union. And, ultimately, so will the Chicoms. Greenfield’s book gives examples of how the good guys have won against the Left throughout American history. He’s asking us to learn and apply those lessons so that the radicals are disappointed yet again. We should. Buy this book. The post We’ve Always Had To Contend With These People appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

With America focused completely on Trump’s conviction under the stealth version of the 1798 Sedition Act, the Obama-led whizzes in charge of our foreign policy let Old Joe read out a grand new proposal for a Gaza ceasefire. Obama’s fingerprints are all over this beauty. Obama has used hatred to his advantage, as is his way. We all hate, don’t we? Therefore, no one side stands out — all are equivalent. (RELATED: Make America Hate Again) Despite his genius for presenting himself as at one with our American traditions, he is aligned with those whose hatred is the guiding star of their politics. Nazi, Shmatzi — everybody hates everybody else. Everybody uses hate to their advantage, so what’s the difference between one side and another? Hamas, Israel — they’re all the same to these guys. Though they know they haven’t won on the politics of it, they have moved the ball way downfield in this blue country and wish to force their view as long as they still have the power to do so. It’s a new version of the same old thing, the nihilism that infected the Western world after World War I. No difference between one side and another; all the old stories are bunk; civilization is just a pretty lie; religions are all just fancy excuses for hate. Just make the best deal you can, and don’t fight anyone (except your political opponents, and them with the overwhelming force that cynics always bring to bear when they rule). (READ MORE by Shmuel Klatzkin: Welcome to Venezuela, America) American Foreign Policy Was Once Dependable In the ’30s, democracies were flaccid in the face of the robust and energetic avatars of cynical force: Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler. Despite its many advantages in hardware and reputation, France’s nihilism had hollowed out the resolve that enabled it to suffer and prevail in the Great War. It is stunning to realize that as late as May 1940, the leading candidate to succeed Chamberlain as prime minister was Lord Halifax, who, as historians point out, was prepared and ready to make peace with a triumphant Germany, pull Britain’s army out of Europe, accept second-class status to Germany, and rely on Hitler’s assurance that he would respect the diminished independence he offered. But Churchill rallied Britain around the story of civilization and freedom. By civilization, he meant Christian civilization — a civilization dedicated to the dignity of the individual and the rejection of hate. The story he told resonated with America. The very first meeting of Churchill and Roosevelt yielded an iconic photo of Churchill and FDR, on the deck of a battleship, fervently singing a hymn together, as they sat amidst the servicemen at prayer. America fought what Eisenhower would later call the “Crusade in Europe.” Both there and in the Pacific fight against the Japanese power worshippers, Americans put their lives on the line again and again in such living hells as Iwo Jima, Okinawa, the Bulge, and over the skies of Germany day after day with no fighter protection. Despite the horrors of the war, the great story of civilization that upholds human freedom and dignity gave us purpose and enabled us to see the job through to the extirpation of Hitler’s Nazism and Japanese militarism. The job wasn’t done until it was done, because the result had to be equal to the sacrifice. Not only that, but those who had sacrificed maintained their dedication to see us through decades of resolute and dangerous opposition to the great cynical power that remained — Stalin and the regimes he set in motion. Not only that, but it was the Greatest Generation who saw us through the resolution of our internal racism, who were revolted by the scenes of Americans forcing their fellow Americans into a second-class life. Truman integrated the armed forces, Eisenhower sent the National Guard into Little Rock to enforce the Supreme Court’s banning of school segregation, LBJ saw through comprehensive civil rights and voting rights legislation and the whole country ratified a constitutional amendment against the poll taxes used to deny the vote to a whole race. The Biden Administration’s Ceasefire Betrays the American Story But the Obama revolution turned this around. Infected by the disease of academia — woke before we knew the word — he built a deep inner intellectual structure that enabled him to slowly and deliberately take apart the guts of the American story while projecting the image that he was upholding it. Despite his uniting rhetoric in 2008, his policies reflected Ivy League cynicism. Americans are bad guys just as much as anyone else. Make the best deal as you can with the regimes that live for hatred and domination, and get rich yourself. The result today is this last Biden pronunciamiento, attempting to forcibly reframe the meaning of the war in Gaza. It is based on this singular idea: There is no difference between the Hamas engineers of war by rape, torture, and hostage-taking and a constitutional government that has maintained its freedoms throughout 76 years of unrelenting war against its independence. (READ MORE: With All Eyes on Gaza, Hezbollah Attacks From the North) The Biden administration requires that Israel must let Hamas survive. What’s a little orgiastic torture, rape, and slaughter? Nothing worth fighting about too seriously Nothing that needs the decisive rejection that only a complete defeat can express. Put Hamas back in power. No big deal. Withdraw. Let Hamas parade before the world as the winners. Reward them with the attainment of recognition. Forever incentivize terror as the best way to win. The wokesters who are in power have tried to slip this through while we are distracted — while they are in the process of achieving a seismic change in our country through their subversion of our justice system. They believe that America must embrace the nihilism and cynicism that form their true faith. It’s all power; civilization is not real. The ritual which this religion now requires is the international establishment of the absolute equivalence between the Hamas Nazis and the liberty and human dignity that till now have animated our national striving and Israel’s. The American rise to greatness has been linked to the story that we have lived up to more than any country that has trod the world’s stage. Our best leaders told that story best. Lincoln was the most eloquent in this country. His words clarified what was worth living for and what required our sacrifice. Thousands and thousands of Americans responded with the ultimate dedication to the aim: “Let us die to make men free,” as the Battle Hymn of the Republic put it. Or, in Lincoln’s words, “that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth.” The Obama/Biden wokesters think that this is only silly nonsense. Their cynicism is the truth. Like religious fanatics of past ages, like the believers in the savage religions of Hamas and the secular totalitarians, they are intent on forcing their beliefs on us all. It’s up to us all to show what we truly believe. Our sacrificial dedication alone will make it clear. The post Biden Distracts Americans. Turns on Israel With New Ceasefire Proposal appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

SACRAMENTO — In a recent report commissioned by the California Legislature to consider new antitrust regulations to govern the state’s tech industry, the California Law Review Commission at least acknowledged the significance of this sector. It notes that 1.5 million Californians are part of the tech workforce. Tech companies account for nearly 17 percent of the state’s economy. These companies’ revenues and sales account for nearly a third of California’s Gross Domestic Product. The state’s capital-gains-dependent budget relies on these companies’ tax revenues. California is indeed the national — and international — leader in the tech economy. Even though it’s been hemorrhaging tech jobs since the COVID-19 crisis, California still accounts for 30 percent of the nation’s “tech output,” according to a review by Apricitas Economics. And the European Union’s “industry is a dwarf in comparison,” per venture capitalist Mark Minevich, writing in Forbes. “Europe’s tech companies as a whole are worth about 30 percent of any one of the Big Four American firms.” (READ MORE: Gavin Newsom Is Not Having a Good Time) The European comparison is vital because the law review commission is setting the stage for a wave of legislation that would model California’s tech laws on the EU’s regulations. The commission isn’t widely known and only holds advisory powers, but its recommendations are influential. “While the commission’s hearings tend to be overlooked, it is notable – and unsettling – that reportedly 90% of its legislative recommendations have become law,” notes Angela Harris in a CalMatters commentary. She fears this assault on Big Tech will harm small businesses, too. One of the key reasons the U.S. tech industry has soared while Europe’s has wallowed is that the United States has traditionally taken a lighter hand toward regulation. Minevich points to Europe’s inflexible labor laws, trade restrictions, and “complex regulatory frameworks” that punish innovation and impose hurdles to startups. If California follows the EU model — and California often turns to Europe for inspiration in labor and environmental law — then it could stifle our homegrown industry. And California laws often become the de facto national model. The commission’s 17-page working group report on tech platforms reads in a fairly even-handed manner, as it sets up three different scenarios: 1) maintaining the (relatively) free-market status quo; 2) enacting legislation that addresses single-firm conduct by limiting “monopolization”; or adopting far-reaching legislation addressing the basic design and operation of tech platforms. The latter echoes the EU approach. It’s clear from a number of the reports the commission authorized by experts that this is the direction the California Legislature might go. (READ MORE: Newsom Picks Pontificating Over Governing) The legislature’s directive gives the game away. It directs the commission to study “whether the law should be revised to outlaw monopolies by single companies,” “whether the law should be revised in the context of technology companies so that analysis of antitrust injury in that setting reflects competitive benefits such as innovation and permitting the personal freedom of individuals to start their own businesses and not solely whether such monopolies act to raise prices,” and “whether the law should be revised in any other fashion such as approvals for mergers and acquisitions.” The California Legislature appears frustrated that Congress has failed to pass any of the wide-ranging tech laws that California progressives support. Per the report, this includes the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, which bans companies from engaging in “self-preferencing” — e.g., limiting the ability of platforms to give preference to their own integrated products. Other stalled federal measures would require app stores to provide open access to third-party products and create a new federal bureaucracy to oversee tech platforms. Those are terrible ideas modeled largely on the European Digital Markets Act (DMA), yet California lawmakers are likely to revive them in our state in next year’s legislative session. “The DMA exhibits three core features that are incompatible with the two-fold commitment to innovation and free-market competition that are hallmarks of California’s tech ecosystem,” argues a 2023 analysis from the Chamber of Progress, a tech-related trade group. First, the DMA “institutes ‘ex-ante’ prohibitions of certain common business practices that federal antitrust and California state antitrust law typically assess on an ‘ex post’ case-by-case basis,” the chamber explained. In other words, the European approach is to impose prior restraint on companies rather than look at any particular practice. Second, the DMA takes a “big is bad” approach that punishes companies for growth. Third, it adds that the DMA “reflects a rule-bound regulatory apparatus that would necessitate a permanent regulatory agency.” When has any government agency — particularly one in California — encouraged innovation? (READ MORE: The Problem for Newsom’s Aspirations: California’s Impending $73 Billion Fiscal Disaster) Basically, the California Law Review Commission includes many of the troubling tech-regulation ideas that have come down the pike in recent years. One of its working-group reports proposes model legislation that would make it “unlawful for one or more persons to engage in anticompetitive exclusionary conduct that affects any part of the trade or commerce within the state.” Anti-competitive conduct is defined so broadly that it would include “a meaningful risk of diminishing the competitive constraints imposed by the defendant’s rivals and thereby increase or create a meaningful risk of increasing the defendant’s market power.” So a state bureaucracy could intervene any time a company was successfully expanding its market share. This is just one proposed idea, but it provides insight into the legislature’s thinking. State officials continually tout the strength of the state’s tech economy in response to critics who note a business exodus to states including Texas and Florida. But if Gov. Gavin Newsom and lawmakers want to maintain that strong economic showing (and shore up its deficit-plagued budget), they need to quickly put the kibosh on the commission’s tech-industry-stifling proposals. Steven Greenhut is the Western region director for the R Street Institute. Write to him at sgreenhut@rstreet.org. The post Is California Trying to Kill Its Tech Economy? appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Apparently advocating U.S. extended involvement in lengthy wars that turned out to be disastrous costly quagmires is not a humbling experience for what is left of the American neoconservative movement. Today’s neoconservatives are a far cry from the Irving Kristols and Norman Podhoretzs who founded the movement in the late 1960s and provided intellectual and policy-making support for the Reagan administration’s successful foreign policies that won the Cold War. The neoconservative remnant — the lead cheerleaders for the endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the first two decades of the 21st century — today pushes for greater U.S. involvement in the Ukraine war. Anyone who disagrees with them, including those who reasonably contend that NATO expansion in the aftermath of the Cold War contributed to the rise of Putin and revived Russian imperialism, is labeled “pro-Putin” or “pro-dictatorship.” Now they are promoting a new book by Jacob Heilbrunn, a former critic of the neoconservatives, who has apparently joined the movement despite editing a journal — the National Interest — that prides itself on promoting foreign policy “realism.” Heilbrunn’s new book is titled America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators. The timing of the book is no accident. Heilbrunn attempts to use a foreign policy “history” of American conservatism from the 1920s to the present to persuade voters that Donald Trump favors foreign dictators over Democrats, and if elected will likely attempt to establish a dictatorship here in the United States. (READ MORE: American Appeasement Emboldens Bad Actors) All one needs to do is read the reviews of the book by neoconservative writers and others on the anti-Trump left to see what is going on here. Writing in the Bulwark, founded by Trump-deranged neocons Bill Kristol and Charlie Sykes (a regular contributor to Trump-deranged MSNBC), Ronald Radosh criticizes Heilbrunn for contending that “neoconservatives were the predecessors of MAGA” but praises him for labeling Pat Buchanan pro-Putin for arguing that “NATO expansion and intervention in the Balkans were colossal errors” — which they were — and pro-authoritarian for supporting Hungary’s democratically-elected Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Radosh is at one with Heilbrunn in seeing Trump and his supporters as threats to “liberal democracy” and proponents of an “illiberal world order.” Radosh concludes that “An illiberal United States would be a natural ally of illiberal Russia, and illiberal Russia can help create an illiberal United States.” This is yet another version of the Russia hoax just in time for the 2024 election. (READ MORE: What Does America First Actually Mean?) In American Purpose, neocon intellectual Arch Puddington praises Heilbrunn for helping to expose “right-wingers who succumbed to the allure of the tough-guy autocrat, ranging from Pinochet to Hitler.” Puddington criticizes “today’s MAGA operatives, who claim democracy’s mantle while aligning themselves with democracy’s enemies,” and identifies William F. Buckley, Jr and early National Review conservatives as MAGA’s predecessors in aligning the right with unsavory dictators. Like Radosh, Puddington defends the neoconservatives from Heilbrunn’s attempt to link them to Trump’s America First movement. Instead, Puddington writes, the neoconservatives “should be credited with their early and perceptive warnings about the threat to democracy, here and across the globe, from Trump’s MAGA movement, national conservatism, and the right-wing media machine.” Heilbrunn’s most important message, Puddington writes, is that Trump and the “authoritarian Right” are “dedicated to first gaining political power and then dismantling the institutions of democracy.” (READ MORE: Just Call National Review the Stupid Party Review From Now On) But it’s not just neoconservatives who are praising Heilbrunn’s book. Favorable reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, New York magazine, the Economist, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and other leftist anti-Trump newspapers and magazines. It is a full-court media assault on Trump using Heilbrunn’s book as a vehicle intended to persuade voters that Trump intends to destroy democracy both at home and abroad. Conservative critics of Heilbrunn’s book, like James Piereson in the New Criterion and Helen Andrews in the American Conservative, point out how bad the book is as history, intellectual or otherwise, but they make the mistake of judging the book on its merits. Heilbrunn tipped his hand earlier this year when in the National Interest he described Joe Biden as a “vigorous leader” who has demonstrated “diplomatic savvy” as a “war president” in the Ukraine conflict, while labeling critics of U.S. co-belligerency in the Ukraine War as being “chicken about backing Kyiv” and of engaging in “cowardly trucking to the Kremlin.” America Last is not history and is not meant to be history. It is a campaign book that the leftist and anti-Trump media is already using to concoct another Russia hoax on the American people. If in the meantime the United States gets drawn into another war of choice that just might escalate into a broader European war, so be it. At least Donald Trump won’t be president again. The post Neocons Slander the American Right appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

It’s early, I know. But I just checked, and Instagram’s logo looks normal. So does Google’s, YouTube’s, and even Facebook’s. Maybe Etsy has me figured out, but I scrolled top to bottom, and it’s a lineup of Father’s Day gift ideas. Not a rainbow in sight. Isn’t it June? Usually, by this point, we’ve been inundated with rainbow-colored products, from stickers to magnets to kids’ bathing suits. This year feels tame. There’s a documentary on gay animals narrated by Elliot Page (a female actor who claims to be a man) coming out, and most restaurants in downtown Columbus are decked out in flags. But it feels like they’re doing it out of habit, not out of some militant desire to shove immorality down our throats. (READ MORE: The Purpose of Pride Month) Thus far, most of the TikToks I’ve seen of Pride parades and celebrations come not from the New York Times (there wasn’t a single Pride-themed article in sight on the front page this morning) or CNN, but from Libs of TikTok. That matters because it means the Left is only half-heartedly shoving those parades down the throats of those who don’t want to go. The way we see them is when the Right exposes them (as it should). We’re only on day five, so maybe it’s too early. Scott McKay did note on Tuesday at The American Spectator that athletic departments are publishing rainbow graphics, some bar is celebrating the month with a “gender neutral” beer, and the Dublin airport isn’t exactly friendly to “Normies.” But these instances are looking more and more like remnants of past years, rather than part of a militant crusade. And that’s fantastic. It’s not just that we can hear the sweet bells of a cultural win ringing in the distance, but also that this kind of muted response is exactly what needs to happen to break the positive feedback loop that keeps this kind of perversion “loud and proud.” Anyone who spent any time with a schoolyard bully knows that bullying is a result of two things: insecurity and a need for attention. If you give the bully the attention he craves (even if it’s negative attention) you, as the victim, create a positive feedback loop that will keep him coming back to get more. The same thing is true for adults who believe the lie that society misunderstands them and their sexuality. They crave attention, even if it’s negative attention, and we’ve been giving it to them for years. (READ MORE: Save the Hollywood Children) But businesses, even big ones like Bud Light and Target, don’t crave all forms of attention. They signed onto the Pride agenda out of a mistaken belief that it might increase sales while signaling to progressive bigwig cultural fiends that they were on the right side of history. What they discovered is that their customers have no interest in being on the “right side of history.” It’s possible that the boycotts worked. Maybe Target learned a lesson when Christian moms stopped buying scented candles at Target because they didn’t want to have to walk their brood of children past kids’ bondage wear. Bud Light certainly did when college kids and dads looking for a cheap beer for barbeque night found alternatives — and other companies took note. I’m not saying we should rest on our laurels. Pride — the rainbow flags, the parades, the public celebration of perverted sins of the flesh — must be eradicated completely from our society. That’s the goal here. I’m just saying that, on day five of my least favorite month of the year, it feels like we’re making some progress. Here’s to making more in 2024. This article is an excerpt from The American Spectator’s Spectator P.M. newsletter. Subscribe today to read future letters from our staff! The post Isn’t It Pride Month? appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Time for a brief look back into history: In the two world wars in the first half of the 20th century, the United States of America was the best ally a country could have. “The Americans” were the proverbial cavalry coming over the hill to rescue the good guys from the bad guys. The “good guys” were people who wanted to live in freedom in their own countries. The “bad guys” were malevolent, imperialistic tyrants who sought to conquer and enslave other nations. We fought those enemies of human rights with the single-minded goal of soundly defeating them. We accomplished that worthy goal and came out of World War II having obliterated German, Italian, and Japanese militarism. Alas, war-weary, the decision was made to end combat without thwarting Soviet Russia’s imperialistic designs — a fateful decision for which we are paying a price today.  Since World War II, we seem to have forgotten that wars are fought to be won. Our leaders lost moral clarity over 50 years ago during the Vietnam War. They failed to define “victory.” Consequently, our military forces became bogged down in a ghastly war of attrition. After years of needlessly wasting lives, the Americans got fed up with the futility of it all. President Nixon pulled our troops out, and the Democratic congress even stopped supplying desperately needed weapons to our erstwhile allies, ensuring their total defeat.  During the Vietnam War, the dreadful term “no-win wars” entered our national vocabulary. Since then, fighting no-win wars seems to have become the default modus operandi of the U.S. military. True, we won the Cold War. But when it comes to actual troops on the ground, we still haven’t recovered the ability to define victory and then to achieve it (see Iraq and Afghanistan). We (or our political leaders, at least) seem to have abandoned the traditional American view of war as a contest between right and wrong, good and evil, with decisive military victory as the unambiguous goal. (READ MORE: Countering the Criticisms Aimed at Ronald Reagan) Today, our leaders’ rhetoric remains largely unchanged — they still pay lip service to the U.S. being on the side of freedom and national self-determination — but actual policies tell a different story. We express sympathy and support for Ukraine and Israel as they fight back against ruthless aggressors, but our actual support for them is tentative and equivocal. The message boils down to this: We sure are sorry about what has been happening to you, but we don’t want you to achieve a clearcut victory over your aggressors.  Apparently, official Washington’s fixation on “no-win wars” extends to American allies. We don’t want them to win, and so we criticize their military strategies, oppose their objectives, and withhold crucial military aid. (In the case of Israel, we even call for regime change.) Frankly, the whole sordid business reeks of treachery and betrayal. The Ukrainians and Israelis have clear visions of what would constitute a victory for them: Ukraine seeks to drive all Russian occupiers back into Russia; Israel seeks to degrade the ability of Hamas to launch additional terrorist waves of atrocities in Israel against Jewish (and American) civilians. Yet, until recently Joe Biden told the valiant Ukrainians that they are not to strike Russian assets that are inside Russia. He has pressured the Israelis to grant a ceasefire to Hamas that would give the terrorists time to organize their next murderous offensive. (READ MORE: America’s Foreign Policy Utopians Ignore Culture) Biden’s policy toward Israel makes the most sense when viewed through the cynical lens of politics. Israeli lives and safety are nothing to Biden compared to his desire to be re-elected. He needs the votes of Arab sympathizers in states like Michigan, and he is perfectly willing to trade the lives of our allies for votes. Biden doesn’t have either the patriotism or the spine to say to pro-Hamas voters, “The United States opposes genocide, period. If you can’t accept that Jews have the same right to live that you do, then you should go back to the countries you came from.” But what can explain his attempts to rein in the Ukrainians? Is there any realistic quid pro quo that Vladimir Putin might concede in exchange for America putting the brakes on Ukrainian fighters? None whatsoever. Biden openly expressed his desire that the Ukrainians refrain from striking Russia’s domestic oil-producing infrastructure because he doesn’t want oil prices to soar during an election year. If that is how shallow Biden’s support of Ukraine is, then Ukraine’s prospects for survival are dim. Putin must be chortling in the Kremlin. Surely, as we remember with gratitude the heroism of millions of American servicemen who laid down their lives in the service of noble moral principles, it is distressing to see an American political establishment today that is averse to fighting evil in the name of good and remains stuck in a no-win-war mentality. The whole world must doubt whether the U.S. can be a reliable and trustworthy ally. The post The US Is No Longer a Trustworthy Ally appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Three American citizens, Tyler Thompson, Marcel Malanga, and Benjamin Reuben Zalman-Polun, were arrested by the Congolese military last month after getting mixed up in a failed coup led by Christian Malanga against the president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). What Happened? Christian Malanga, originally from the DRC and the leader of the coup and a minority opposition party, the United Congolese Party, was living in self-imposed exile in Salt Lake City, Utah, until last month. Malanga described himself as the “president-in-exile” of a new DRC nation called New Zaïre on his website. During his attempted coup in May, Malanga first attacked the home of a close ally of President Felix Tshisekedi before moving on to the Palais de la Nation (the presidential palace). He live-streamed his attempt to overthrow the Congolese government and stated “[President] Felix, you’re out. We’re coming for you,” while inside the Palais de la Nation. The ultimate goal of the coup is unclear because President Tshisekedi does not live in the Palais de la Nation, nor was he present there during the nighttime coup. The Congolese military quickly took control of the situation, and Malanga was killed while resisting arrest. Six people were also killed during the attacks, and three American citizens, along with 50 other suspects in the coup, were detained. No reason or comment has been given by the DRC as to how Malanga’s group was able to enter the Palais. Americans Involved Marcel Malanga, son of Christian Malanga, was one of the three Americans allegedly involved in the attempted coup. Marcel can be seen standing next to Malanga at one point in his livestream in the Palais de la Nation. There is also a video of him being taken into custody by the Congolese authorities. Tyler Thompson, another American detained after the coup and a friend of Marcel, had flown to Africa with Marcel for what his family believed was a vacation to South Africa and Eswatini. It is unclear how Thompson got involved in the coup, but a friend of Thompson and Marcel claimed he had been offered between $50,000 and $100,000 to act as a “security guard” for Christian Malanga. The families of both Marcel Malanga and Tyler Thompson maintain that the men are innocent. Little information is available on the third American, Benjamin Reuben Zalman-Polun, and his involvement in the coup. Zalman-Polun, a convicted cannabis trafficker, supposedly connected with Malanga through a gold mining company set up in Mozambique in 2022, but it is unclear how Malanga recruited him. US Response In response to the arrests, Lucy Tamlyn, the U.S. ambassador to the DRC, stated, “We will cooperate with the DRC authorities to the fullest extent as they investigate these criminal acts and hold accountable any U.S. citizen involved in criminal acts.” (READ MORE: WE SHOULD STOP EXPLOITING AFRICA – AND START CARING) The State Department has stressed that “consular access” is highly important for the three detained Americans. A request for the detained citizens to have consular access has been made, but the request has not yet been fulfilled. The Congo has also refused to say whether the three Americans will appear in court. Nearly a month has passed since the coup occurred and very little information is available for the families of the three detained Americans, including whether they are alive and healthy. The families have been pressuring the U.S. government to secure this information from the Congo, but so far to no avail.   The post Congo Continues to Deny US Access to Americans Detained for Alleged Involvement in Failed Coup appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.