The Left’s Hamas embrace shows that a creation culture complements the Left’s cancel culture. While the latter is recognized, the former is overlooked. Not satisfied with nullifying its opponents, the Left also vivify victims according to its subjective worldview. Between the two, there is no place for objectivity — least of all regarding truth and justice. READ MORE: Are We Seeing the End of Cancel Culture? The Democratic Socialists of America called the Left’s first pro-Palestine rally on Oct. 8 in New York City. Its intent was as clear as its timing was grotesque: to remake the Hamas–Israel war into one about Palestine instead. The same day, Harvard University’s Palestine Solidarity Committee led 30 groups in signing a letter “hold[ing] the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” Similar efforts would take place across the country. By Nov. 17, the U.S. Department of Education was investigating cases of anti-Semitism (and, because it’s Biden’s Department of Education, cases of Islamophobia too) at seven colleges, including Columbia University, Cornell University, the University of Pennsylvania, and New York University. The incidents would only grow and spread. By April, pro-Palestine encampments were sprouting on numerous college campuses. Next would come building takeovers — and they are still coming. Then, it was graduation disruptions. Expect more. Any event or large gathering has become a target. There are a multitude of “whys” that the Left will gladly offer — demands for divestment from Israel, an end to research ties, immediate ceasefire. Yet overlooked among these demands is the one that should have been asked of them and should have come first: Why the Hamas–Israel war as a cause for protest? There was no shortage of conflicts from which the Left could have chosen on Oct. 8, 2023. Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 in an unprovoked act of naked aggression; Russia has committed war crimes, including targeting civilians and using gas attacks; and the number of Ukrainian casualties far exceeds that of those claimed in Palestine. If the Ukraine’s suffering was somehow insufficient, there were also longstanding wars in Yemen, Myanmar, and the Sahel. Yet the Left chose the Hamas–Israel war, and it chose the day after Hamas’ terrorist attack to start it. Its choice committed the Left to a laborious salvage operation. Before its Oct. 7 atrocities, Hamas had brutalized the Palestinian people for years, including embedding its terrorists within the civilian population in tunnels that would guarantee civilian casualties. It held an unknown number of Israeli citizens hostage. The Left had to ignore all this, convert Israel’s retaliation against Hamas into a war against Palestine, absolve Hamas’ genocidal attack against Jews, and then claim that Israel’s self-defense against Hamas terrorism was instead a genocidal attack on Palestinian civilians. In short, the Left extended its sympathy to the most unsympathetic group imaginable and endeavored to make that group sympathetic. Why? Because the Left’s worldview is the West versus the Rest. Only once a conflict fits that template can the Left embrace it. The Left did not see that potential in any of the rest of the world’s wars; so, it immediately seized the one it thought could work and then went about recasting a terrorist attack into something that fit its template. Hamas became Palestine, then victim (the Rest); Israel went from victim to aggressor (the West). By so doing, the Left revealed its creation culture. For the Left to see something, that thing must fit the leftist worldview; if it doesn’t, it will be made to conform. The Left’s Hamas exercise is beyond subjectivity. It is the exclusion of objectivity. Injustice, racism, oppression, exploitation — even wrong itself — can only run one direction: from the West to the Rest. An example of the practical result of the Left’s exclusion of objectivity is the Defund the Police psychosis. Violence in the Black community is allowed to increase in the name of racial justice. In the Left’s Gaza protests, it is calls for ceasefire, no arms for Israel, ignoring hostages, and “river to the sea” — all under the guise of “justice.” The Left’s embrace of Hamas exemplifies its abandonment of principle — not simply in a specific instance but even of principle as a concept. The Left shares only words with the rest of society, not those words’ meanings. The Left only values words as tools — levers for the toppling of the social order, wedges to be driven into any societal crack into which they can be jammed. The Left cannot see injustice objectively even when it is black and white because it insists only on seeing the world as Black versus White — the Rest versus the West. Its vision is the reverse of a blind spot, instead seeing only what fits — or can be made to fit — within its pinpoint gaze of life. To ensure it does, the Left has not only a cancel culture but a creation one too. As its ideological alchemy shows, what the Left wants, the Left creates. The Left sees only its worldview. If things do not conform, it creates them anew; if things oppose, the Left cancels them. The rest of society must, therefore, see the Left for what it is and for what its words and actions mean. There is only one thing America can thank the pro-Palestine protesters for: allowing us to see the Left’s myopia in its fullness — creating as well as canceling. J.T. Young was a professional staffer in the House and Senate from 1987-2000, served in the Department of Treasury and Office of Management and Budget from 2001-2004, and was director of government relations for a Fortune 20 company from 2004-2023. The post Forget Cancel Culture. The Real Danger Is the Left’s Creation Culture. appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Anglo-American tradition long ago set the principle that law should be enforced locally — the idea that the county sheriff and able-bodied local private citizens were the prime institutions for maintaining public order. In England, service on what was called the “posse comitatus” was mandatory, and refusal to serve meant loss of citizenship. As power became more centralized, the posse remained a major colonial institution that kept order and controlled insurrection. READ MORE from Donald Devine: Even the Washington Post Knows the Government Has Messed Up the Economy Posse comitatus became even more important as colonialists moved into the American West, where the posse and sheriff were the main institutions enforcing local peace. The American Constitution followed the principle by leaving most domestic peacekeeping to states — and, through them, counties — which served as the base for Civil War recruitment, especially in the North. Seeking post-war reconciliation between North and South, the Posse Comitatus Act (PCA) of 1873 forbade the military from local law enforcement and removed such troops from the South. In the 1980s, posse comitatus additionally forbad military enforcement of drug trafficking and terrorism laws. In 1957, President Dwight Eisenhower side-stepped PCA to use the military to integrate segregated Arkansas schools by invoking general anti-insurrection powers. In 2006, President George W. Bush amended the PCA to allow national troops to be used domestically in a wide range of emergencies after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. But as threats waned, in 2008 these changes were revoked by Congress in their entirety. And posse comitatus was strengthened again in 2021. There is much media use of the term “Insurrection Act” (IA) as an exception to the PCA. But the so-called IA actually consists of various congressional acts passed between 1792 and 1871 that have been used to bypass the PCA and allow presidents to use the military within states against “insurrections.” In 2023,” insurrection” was invoked by several states to deny former President Donald Trump access as a candidate to state ballots by invoking the 14th Amendment’s “insurrection clause.” But the Supreme Court ruled that since no congressional action was taken to apply the amendment to presidents in law, it could not be used to justify such restrictions. Most recently, centralist legal institutions have especially criticized two provisions within the insurrection laws as much too broad. According to Brookings Institution senior fellow William A. Galston: [One] provision authorizes the president to call out the National Guard or regular military forces “whenever the President considers that unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States, makes it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any State by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings.” The other “gives the president power to ‘take such measures he considers necessary’ to suppress ‘any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination or conspiracy’ if it meets certain specifications.” These were both pre-PCA laws, but the Supreme Court has not specifically used PCA to limit them. So today there is some support for  American Law Institute recommendations to amend IA laws to: 1) “require the president to consult, prior to the deployment of troops, with the governor of any state into which troops will be deployed”; 2) “require the president to make findings on the need to invoke the Insurrection Act, and to report these findings to Congress, along with a summary of consultations with state authorities, within 24 hours of deployment”; and 3) “establish a time limit on the president’s authority to deploy troops.” Others have added 4) “a limit of no more than 30 days unless Congress explicitly authorizes an extension.” As Galston argues, these are hardly extreme changes (and they’re more consistent with PCA), so such changes should be acceptable to both parties and ideally could be passed by Congress even before the 2024 election. The Washington Post supports such presidential limits as necessary to control a possible Trump presidency, which it argues would be a “threat to democracy.” But even so, the four recommendations have not proved attractive to progressives generally, beyond as a political means to attack Trump. President Joe Biden could still win the election, and he might desire full IA power to limit state Republican immigration, anti-climate, or education actions. Even if Biden loses, the Left knows it will be back in power someday and might want that power then. So, what about the Right? Politically, any action now would surely need the active support of candidate Trump. The Left assumes that such support by the “suppressor of democratic rights” is impossible. Yet, as less-biased former CIA analyst and Cuban expat Martin Gurri explained last year, “[R]elax. Trump is too old, too isolated, and too ADD to have a shot at dictatorship — and if he tried, the result would be comedy rather than tyranny.” Indeed, “January 6 was not an insurgency aiming to install Trump as Chief Authoritarian. In an insurgency, people with guns shoot at each other and lots of them die.” The only one actually killed during Jan. 6 was an unarmed protester. Still, as Wall Street Journal columnist and sometimes Trump critic Holman W. Jenkins Jr. argues, anti-democracy talk is a diversion from the real threat to democracy today, which comes from centralized bureaucratic agencies very much not of the posse comitatus type. As he shows, 2024 will be the third presidential election in a row where the intelligence agencies and their mainstream media outlets have provided the “news” meant to determine the electoral results. The FBI’s James Comey began the story by aiming only moderate criticism of official document-handling carelessness but presenting no actual charges against the overwhelmingly favorite Democratic presidential candidate in 2016. But his ham-handed handling inadvertently led to the election of underdog Donald Trump. To correct that error by Inauguration Day 2017, Comey, the CIA’s John Brennan, and the DNI’s James Clapper had successfully promoted the later-disproved “Russian intelligence” myth. Moreover, this charge of Russian collusion has been kept “mainly media proof ever since,” from 2020 right up to today’s 2024 election. Jenkins now warns that rather than worrying about Trump as a potential dictator, people should actually “worry about a future leader with President Obama’s gifts not Donald Trump’s” — referring to a cultured communicator — “while remembering that the collusion hoaxes were promoted by official U.S. agencies.” “Mr. Trump turns out to be less of a danger to our institutions than they are to themselves,” Jenkins concludes. Even if Trump so desired, would his second presidential administration be able to control an overwhelmingly Democratic bureaucracy where even the chairman of the military Joint Chiefs of Staff informed his Chinese military equivalent before Trump became a lame-duck in 2020 that he would warn him if Trump or others took inappropriate actions? “If we’re going to attack, I’m going to call you ahead of time,” Mark Milley said. “It’s not going to be a surprise.” Some democratic dictatorship! Interestingly, posse comitatus localism is popular with Trump’s base voters, and bureaucracy is not. What if candidate Trump were to come out now and support Insurrection Act reform along the lines of the four American Law Institute recommendations? The idea of a supposed anti-democracy candidate wanting to take power away from the executive and return it to the people in the states would have enormously popular appeal and would confound opponents. For Trump, that would end the antidemocracy myth, put opponents on the defense, and place an important limit on an out-of-control bureaucracy, and it would do so by strengthening the decentralized posse comitatus ideal so historically necessary for a free society. And it is the right thing to do for the country. Any takers? Donald Devine is a senior scholar at the Fund for American Studies in Washington, D.C. He served as President Ronald Reagan’s civil service director during his first term in office. A former professor, he is the author of 11 books, including his most recent, The Enduring Tension: Capitalism and the Moral Order, and Ronald Reagan’s Enduring Principles and is a frequent contributor to The American Spectator. The post It’s Time to End the Anti-Democracy Myth: Trump Must Reform the Insurrection Act appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

A recent report from Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) shows that more women across the nation are getting abortions, an increase that continues despite the efforts of pro-lifers to prevent it. The 2022–2023 Annual Report the nation’s largest abortion provider claims that the organization performed almost 400,000 abortions for that time period. That’s a 5 percent increase from the 380,000 reported for 2020 to 2021. The rising number of abortions comes in the wake of the Supreme Court’s June 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which returned abortion regulation, or lack thereof, to the states. In its report, Planned Parenthood touts its legal efforts to overturn and prevent abortion restrictions in dozens of states. (READ MORE from Elyse Apel: Biden Sparks Outrage After Divisive Commencement Address) “One year after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision ended the constitutional right to abortion, Planned Parenthood litigators and coalition partners had filed lawsuits against abortions bans in a total of 20 states,” the report describes. “While some of these bans have since gone into effect, the delay Planned Parenthood fought for meant that more people could get the care they needed, when they needed it.” The organization has continued its pro-abortion campaign, with its political action group spending millions of dollars to back pro-abortion candidates around the nation in a bid for the 2024 election. Increased Taxpayer Funding of Abortion Not only are abortions up, but government funding of abortion is also on the rise.  Planned Parenthood reported $633 million in revenue from government reimbursements and grants in 2020 to 2021. By the end of 2022, its funding had increased to nearly $700 million, a 4 percent increase — and nearly half of its total yearly revenue.  Lila Rose, a prominent pro-life activist, called attention to this massive funding by the government of a highly controversial issue. “Planned Parenthood murdered an average of … 1,076 babies every day, 45 babies every hour, 1 baby every 80 seconds,” Rose said on X. “We must defund & shut down Planned Parenthood NOW.” Overall, Planned Parenthood saw increased revenue from every source of funding. The total increased by $350 million, from $1.45 billion in 2020 to 2021 to $1.8 billion in 2022 to 2023.  Planned Parenthood Heads Up Global Movement Since Dobbs, Planned Parenthood has tried to remain at the forefront of the pro-abortion cultural movement. Key to its plan is enlisting social media influencers to contribute to the “national campaign” to “destigmatize abortion.” “We collaborated with a group of 28 social media influencers to expand PPFA’s digital presence and reach their combined 34.7 million followers,” the organization reports. “This influencer collective produced 648 posts on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube about sexual and reproductive health and rights.” The organization’s campaign also has international reach. According to the report, Planned Parenthood Global, which works “to advance sexual and reproductive health and rights globally,” has achieved “policy wins” in eight different countries. PP Global specifically targeted “Africa and Latin America” this past year, hosting events intended “to inspire and connect” women. Unfortunately, it seems that, for now, Planned Parenthood’s campaign is working. It remains to be seen how voters will respond to its efforts in November. The post Abortions Are on the Rise, Planned Parenthood Proudly Reports appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Most surveys of young men reveal that their mental health is a disaster. I read in a Men’s Health study (yes, every reader has his vices) that almost 60 percent of the men surveyed have felt anxiety in the last two weeks because of money (40 percent), their personal life (35 percent), work (12 percent), or news and world events (10 percent). A quick sociological diagnosis: The money thing proves that voting for Democrats is bad for mental health, and that stands to reason because their leader is an expert on the subject; personal life is a euphemism for love, heartbreak, and arguments about who should empty the dishwasher; work doesn’t worry anyone much anymore; and there are only two types of people who feel anxiety about what they see in the news about the state of the world — the pope, and the eco-anxious who hyperventilate because of climate change fears. And the pope is right. READ MORE from Itxu Díaz: Analyze This One More Time: De Niro Compares Trump to Hitler On the other hand, 54 percent of those surveyed have felt depressed in the last two weeks. I include myself among them: The girl I like looked at me the way one looks at an octopus in an advanced state of putrefaction. The problem here is that only respondents who have suffered real depression know what they are talking about; the rest are simply sad, are upset, or missed the train this morning (or their crush has looked at them like an octopus looking at an octopus in an advanced state of putrefaction). To cure all these ills, a doctor who writes in the magazine suggests spending time alone: “Alone time allows men to reconnect with themselves and take time for self-care.” As a chronically anxious and depressed person, I have no interest in reconnecting. In fact, I think I came hardwired from the factory. The only member of my body that sometimes becomes independent is my liver after binging heavily, but otherwise, I feel more like a unit. Time for self-care is a good prescription, I guess, the problem is that we live in an epidemic of self-care. Everyone around me is joining gyms, doing Pilates or yoga, or meditating by gazing out to sea for half an hour a day. They say it keeps them relaxed, but then they make a huge song and dance out of the slightest setback and instantly lose their inner peace. “I feel much more relaxed” is the new “I have a lot of gay friends.” Without wishing to antagonize the doctor, I don’t think we need much more alone time. In the most connected and social century in history, we are more disconnected and alone than ever. Our only anchor to the rest of society is a cellphone, a kind of inhuman interaction for which we have not been programmed. It is as if you prevented a robot from communicating with others based on zeros and ones and forced it to deal with them only through shows of affection: caresses between two machines, besides being noisy and cold, would be as ridiculous as they would be ineffective. Sometimes I think that we experience this same paradox every time we try to comfort someone with a hug icon via WhatsApp. It may ease our conscience, but I have something horrible to tell you: It is not possible to hug via WhatsApp, unless you consider a kiss on the lips and a double-click on the mouse to be comparable. We are made of skin because we need to touch the skin of others; I in particular dream of touching Scarlett Johansson’s skin. Isolating ourselves may be an emergency remedy, but it’s not a good idea. On the contrary, we need not only to be with others but to actually open ourselves to them and, in a way, give ourselves to them. Many depression- and anxiety-related problems begin to heal when they are brought out into the light, and a good deal of our problems are put into perspective when we spend quality time listening to the problems of others.  All in all, you can throw everything I’ve said so far in the trash. I think there is something more important than that. Perhaps the main cause of the unstoppable rise of depressive mental illness is the lack of transcendence and meaning in life. We think we have overcome the suicidal nihilism of the 20th century, only because the technology around us has flourished and hedonism keeps us entertained. The truth is that fin-de-siècle nihilism has not died; it has just gone silent, and the speed at which technology entertains us is just a way of postponing deep thought until the next day. But that only increases our emptiness. Without God, man cannot be grounded. And we are carried away by the winds of sadness, anxiety, or hopelessness.  The primary prescription against anxiety, then, should not be to be alone but to be on your knees. Translated by Joel Dalmau. Buy Itxu Díaz’s new book, I Will Not Eat Crickets: An Angry Satirist Declares War on the Globalist Elite, here today! The post The Cure for Mental Health Is Not More Alone Time appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Joe Biden’s address to the NAACP in Detroit Sunday demonstrates the extreme risk the president’s handlers take in allowing him to debate Donald Trump. READ MORE from Daniel J. Flynn: Democrat Whispers Become Audible: Jettison Joe The scripted speech required 10 post-delivery revisions by the White House. The errors corrected included quotidian ones of the like not just 81-year-olds but 18-year-olds make in conversation, such as when he claimed: “Black moms, who have [sic] nearly three times more likely to die from pregnancy complications than a white woman.” Understandable small flubs combined into a large embarrassment, highlighted when he called the Jan. 6 protesters not “insurrectionists” but “erectionists.” Did he possibly mean Sergeant Miles, the adult film actor sentenced to prison for his role in the Capitol Hill riot whose other roles include Submitting to Sergeant Miles, Raw Power, and Menage a Trans 8? The most Bidenesque of the gaffes occurred when the president detailed how during the coronavirus pandemic Barack Obama sent him, his vice president, to Detroit to help fix matters. Obama left office about three years prior to the first COVID-19 death in the United States. “When I was vice president,” Biden recalled, “things were kind of bad during the pandemic, and what happened was Barack said to me, ‘Go to Detroit! Help fix it.’” The White House insisted the president meant recession and not pandemic, and the cure presumably intended to refer to the automobile industry and not ailing patients. Granting this leaves alive the realization that this man frequently shifts around events and personalities not just by mere years but by decades (see his recent conversation with François Mitterrand, 1918–1996, about the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol Hill riot). The president’s detractors likely look at the 10 corrections from just one speech as Exhibit 129b for the case for senility. This misses a few more salient points. First, Sen. Biden periodically said ridiculously foolish and outright false statements as a younger man. Then, stupidity rather than senility served as the explanation. Cannot dumb young people become dumb old people? Second, the primary problem illustrated by his Detroit speech pertained not to slips of the tongue and brain but to his lack of social comfort around African Americans. Recall in 2012 when he accused Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney before a largely black audience of seeking to “put y’all back in chains”; in 2020 when he insisted to Charlamagne tha God that “if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black”; and his repeated claims that South African authorities arrested him for protesting the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela or that police in Delaware arrested him for defending a black family moving into a white neighborhood, a yarn he told Howard Stern just last month. And, of course, few can forget Lifeguard Joe’s story of gaining Corn Pop’s respect. In Detroit in front of the NAACP, the president spoke of his political enemies “trying to erase Black history” and how Donald Trump “worsens the mortality rate for Black moms.” He feels it necessary to lie about himself or his political adversaries when among African Americans. He adopts verbiage and a speaking cadence foreign to his own that he presumably thinks allows him to fit in with people with whom he clearly does not. His oration drifts into demagoguery, a comment about him but more so about his low opinion of his audience. Yes, the Detroit speech, overflowing with errors and lies, presents a politician dangerous to leave alone in front of a camera without a script. More so does it display that politician’s awkwardness around African Americans. Juxtapose Biden’s weirdness with Charlamagne tha God with the ease of Donald Trump interacting with staff and customers at an Atlanta Chick-fil-A and visiting a Harlem bodega as black and brown voices chanted “Trump” and “USA” last month. Republicans in banker suits often less naturally mixed among African Americans than Barack Obama or Bill Clinton. The roles have reversed in 2024, which helps explain a boom in the support of blacks for Trump, particularly black men. A New York Times/Siena College poll from earlier this spring indicated a more than quintupling of Trump’s support among African Americans since 2020 (4 percent to 23 percent). Yes, Sunday’s scripted speech foreshadowed the disaster of leaving the president on a debate stage for 90 minutes in an unscripted environment. That a Democratic president felt it necessary to shore up African American support by giving a speech to the NAACP in Detroit, and another address at Morehouse College in Atlanta, indicates the disaster for a party that can no longer count on its most loyal constituency for lockstep support. The post Biden’s NAACP Speech Signals an Overlooked Iceberg Ahead appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Writing in Foreign Affairs, Stuart Eizenstat contends that President Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy was a success. “[D]uring his one term in office,” Eizenstat asserts, “Carter left an enduring and positive foreign policy legacy that few presidents who have served two can match.” Loyalty is a worthy virtue. Eisenstat was Carter’s domestic policy adviser, and Carter is reportedly in hospice care. But loyalty should not erase the historical record of foreign policy failures that caused even many Democrats to abandon Carter and their party to support Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election. Jimmy Carter was one of the worst foreign policy presidents in our nation’s history. READ MORE from Francis P. Sempa: Joseph Nye, Useful Idiot Eizenstat devotes much of his article to one of Carter’s few foreign policy successes: the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel. But, as Steven Hayward has pointed out, “[w]hile Carter could justly claim Camp David as a major foreign policy triumph, it was also in the Middle East where the greatest shipwreck of his foreign policy, and ultimately his presidency, took place: Iran.” We are today still suffering from Carter’s ill-advised policies toward that country. Iran under the shah was a strategic asset of American foreign policy, helping to police the vital Persian Gulf. The shah, for all of his faults, was a reliable U.S. ally for 25 years until the Carter administration’s indecisiveness led to his downfall and, more importantly, the rise of the first radical Islamic state in the region — a revolutionary clerical regime devoted to spreading Islam throughout the region, and perhaps beyond. It was the beginning of what Norman Podhoretz called “World War IV.” Podhoretz explained it in these terms: We are once again up against a truly malignant totalitarian enemy. In World War II, the totalitarian challenge to the liberal democratic world … came from the Right; in World War III [the Cold War] it came from the Left. Now, in World War IV, it comes from a religious force that was born in the seventh century, that was schooled politically at the feet of the totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth, that went on to equip itself with the technologies of the twenty-first, and that is now striving mightily to arm itself with the weaponry of the twenty-first as well. The roots of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on our country, the lengthy and mishandled wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the debacles of the Arab Spring, Iran’s quest for a nuclear weapon, and the current war between Israel and Iranian proxies Hamas and Hezbollah can be broadly traced to the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which occurred on Jimmy Carter’s watch and which he did nothing to prevent. The dangerous flaws of Carter’s foreign policy were brilliantly exposed by Jeane Kirkpatrick, a long-time Democrat, in a November 1979 article in Commentary titled “Dictatorships & Double Standards.” Her first two sentences announced the theme of the essay: The failure of the Carter administration’s foreign policy is now clear to everyone except its architects, and even they must entertain private doubts, from time to time, about a policy whose crowning achievement has been to lay the groundwork for a transfer of the Panama Canal to a swaggering Latin dictator of Castroite bent. In the thirty-odd months since the inauguration of Jimmy Carter as President there has occurred a dramatic Soviet buildup, matched by the stagnation of American armed forces, and a dramatic extension of Soviet influence in the Horn of Africa, Afghanistan, Southern Africa, and the Caribbean, matched by a declining American position in all these areas. Kirkpatrick went on to explore the disastrous policies and the intellectual source of those policies, which led to the rise of an anti-American Islamic regime in Iran and a communist dictatorship aligned to Cuba and the Soviet Union in Nicaragua. She compared it to the flawed policies of the late 1940s that led to the fall of Chiang Kai-shek’s government and its replacement by Mao’s communist regime in China. In his first major foreign policy address at the University of Notre Dame in May 1977, Carter announced to the world that the United States was “now free of that inordinate fear of communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in that fear.” “Human rights” would be the cornerstone of Carter’s foreign policy. Eizenstat in his Foreign Affairs piece praised Carter’s commitment to “human rights,” but as Kirkpatrick pointed out in her Commentary article, the human rights situation was far worse for the people of Iran under the Islamic clerics, and far worse for the people of Nicaragua under the Ortega brothers. Carter’s human rights policy was an utter failure.  Carter’s approach to the Soviet military buildup and geopolitical offensive around the world for a time shifted what the Soviets called the “correlation of forces” in their favor until the Reagan administration abandoned Carter’s flaccid detente policy (which included cutting the defense budget, canceling weapons systems, promoting arms control, and announcing a pullout of U.S. forces from South Korea) and replaced it with a geopolitical offensive strategy that in the end helped bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union. To be sure, as Eizenstat notes, Carter — after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, under pressure from the few remaining Democratic hawks in Washington, like Sen. Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson and Carter’s own national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski (who previously lost out in policy disputes to the dovish Secretary of State Cyrus Vance), and with a view to the upcoming election — reversed course somewhat by proposing defense increases, sending aid to the Afghan rebels, and announcing the so-called Carter Doctrine to ensure the continued flow of oil from the Persian Gulf, but by then the damage had been done. Carter’s efforts at arms control had opened what nuclear strategists called a “window of vulnerability” where the Soviets could theoretically threaten a strategic nuclear “first-strike” that could destroy most of our land-based missiles, as well as submarine and bomber bases, undermining the deterrent effect of our nuclear triad. His negotiated SALT II Treaty was dead on arrival in a Democratic-controlled Senate. And, of course, there was the nightmarish humiliation of the Iran hostage crisis and the feeble, unsuccessful rescue attempt launched by the Carter administration that ended in tragedy. When all of those failures are weighed against the Camp David success, to claim that Carter left an enduring and positive foreign policy legacy is absurd. It is notable and telling that in response to Carter’s foreign policy failures, an unprecedented number of Democrats — some of whom worked on national security matters for Scoop Jackson — abandoned the Democratic Party and served with distinction in the Reagan administration. Many of those same Democrats in the years of Carter’s presidency had joined the Committee on the Present Danger, which alerted America to the growing Soviet threat and the Carter administration’s unwillingness to effectively meet that threat. The voters registered their opinion of Carter’s foreign and domestic policies by handing Reagan a landslide victory in 1980. So, while one can wish Jimmy Carter a peaceful and comfortable end of life process and appreciate favorable words being written and said about him by those who worked for him when he was president, the historical record shows that he was one of the worst presidents in our nation’s history. The post Jimmy Carter’s Foreign Policy Was Not a Success appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

The University of California at San Diego is a DEI stronghold, and things are about to get worse. Starting next year, students who choose “selective” majors such as computer science, bioengineering, and aerospace engineering — high achievers, in other words — will face more discrimination. As civil rights attorney James Breslo explains, the “primary determiner” for admission to these programs “will be the status of the students’ parents.” READ MORE from Lloyd Billingsley: Newsom Believes the Globe Is Getting Hotter Even as California Freezes For selective majors, UCSD “awards one point each for having a 3.0 GPA or higher in the major screening courses; California residency; Pell Grant eligibility; and first-generation college status (as determined by information received at the time of initial admission to UC San Diego).” The University of California admits the top tier of the state’s high-school students, so a 3.0 GPA is no problem. On the other hand, as Breslo notes, “half of the criteria is based upon the student’s parents,” so their income, college record, and so forth is the determining factor, not the grades and aptitudes of the student. “The reason for the new policy is pretty obvious,” contends the attorney. “It will advantage black and Latino students, and disadvantage white and Asians,” the latter a group “already overrepresented” on campus. Breslo also sees the move as an end-run around the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which specifically addressed discrimination against Asians. As UC officials have forgotten, California has already addressed discrimination against all students. As Breslo recalls, “In 1996, Californians voted, 55 to 45 percent, to ban the use of affirmative action in admissions to state schools and in state employment.” The attorney is right about the numbers but somewhat misleading on the issue. The UC system had discriminated on the basis of race for decades, as demonstrated in the landmark case of Allan Bakke. The California Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI), Proposition 209 on the November 1996 ballot, banned “racial preferences” in state college admissions, employment, and contracting. Schools could still take affirmative action to help students on an economic basis but could no longer discriminate on the basis of race and ethnicity. In 2010, the state Supreme Court upheld the measure, and, as Hoover Institution scholar Thomas Sowell notes in Intellectuals and Race, the number of African-American and Hispanic students graduating from the UC system went up, including a 55 percent increase in those graduating in four years with a GPA of 3.5 or higher. Critics still claimed that the civil rights initiative somehow harmed “diversity,” which often escapes definition. As college bosses see it, if the UC system does not reflect the ethnic proportions of the population, the reason must be deliberate discrimination, remedied only by the type of racial preferences imposed before 1996. The problem is that proportionality dogma is not found in the U.S. or California constitutions, in state law, or in reality. As Sowell has often noted, nowhere in society are people found in their proportions in the population at large. Diversity dogma fails to account for personal differences, effort, and choice. No group is “overrepresented” at the University of California or anywhere else, and the more high achievers the better. The DEI bureaucrats serve no purpose, and the UCSD parent ploy is another violation of the California Civil Rights Initiative, which is state law. In 2020, an axis of politicians and government bureaucrats tried to repeal CCRI through Proposition 16. The people kept it in place by a margin of 57.3 to 42.77, as Breslo notes, an even wider margin than 1996’s. For parents, students, and taxpayers across the country, the lessons should be clear. Beware of back-door discrimination schemes such as California’s parent ploy. Student achievement, and nothing else, should be the primary determiner for so-called selective majors. Raise standards in K–12, keep the SAT, and never confuse the people of California with the state’s woke ruling class. To maintain civil rights and boost student achievement, get a measure like the original California Civil Rights Initiative before the voters of your state. Lloyd Billingsley is a policy fellow at the Independent Institute in Oakland, California. The post Beware the University of California’s Parent Ploy appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

by Joseph P. Farrell, Giza Death Star: You might have noticed that in recent months and years there has been a gradual “uptick” in stories related to “aliens” and “extra-terrestrials”, including this not-so-surprising announcement from the Vatican of dubiously Catholic Pope Francis (article courtesy of someone who wishes to remain completely anonymous): Why Has The […]

by Geoffrey Grinder, Now The End Begins: Biometric payment options will soon be everywhere as this lost world moves closer and closer to the 666 Mark of the Beast System. The book of Revelation shows you from 2,000 years ago that the day would come where people would pay for things using a biometric payment system. […]