America is a country of immigrants. In 2021, I co-led a grassroots team that rescued almost 400 endangered women from Afghanistan; some went to Europe, some came here. Over the years, I have submitted affidavits for at least ten Muslim women in flight from being honor killed and in search of political asylum. Their legal team interviewed them. I also did and found their testimonies entirely credible. The problem with Islam is not about race but about culture, about tribal and religious customs overruling Western customs. Call me a racist or an Islamophobe, (and many have), and you’d only be exposing your own considerable ignorance.  The hot button issue of immigration is not about race or racism. The two issues are unfairly linked. Unproven allegations of “racism,” (when immigration is discussed), can wreck someone’s reputation and lead to their being defamed, ostracized, silenced, fired, and sued. (READ MORE from Phyllis Chesler: Snowflake Work Habits) For example, last month, in North Carolina, sixteen-year-old Christian McGhee was suspended from high school after he asked his English teacher to define whether the word “alien” referred to “space aliens or illegal aliens who need greencards [sic].” Another student joked that he was “going to kick Christian’s ass” for what he said. No action was taken against this student. The suspension forced Christian to miss an important track event. On May 5th, lawyers filed a suit against the Davidson County School District on Christian’s behalf. Immigration is about Islamism, about idiotically welcoming cultures that fiercely oppose human rights, women’s rights, democracy, fact-based truth, tolerance of difference, respect for intellectual diversity; cultures that practice female genital mutilation (FGM), honor killing, Jew and infidel hatred, those who wish to live lives apart in accordance with their interpretation of Shari’a law, and who dream of a Caliphate replacing a Western way of life. Not all Muslims are Islamists. Many have come to the West to enjoy our freedoms. Those Muslims whom I know and with whom I work, are the bravest of dissidents and free-thinkers. Many support Israel. Some are ex-Muslims, others have converted to another religion or have become atheists. Some are religious Muslims who seek to reform Islam. They could not hold such views and safely remain in Muslim countries.  Thus, while all Muslims are not terrorists, (how many times must one say this?), all 21st century terrorist attacks in the West and in Israel, have been carried out by Muslims. To repeat: Immigration is not about race. Not all Muslims are persons of color or share the same skin-color. Many are olive-brown-or black-skinned but some are not. The problem with Islam is not about race but about culture, about tribal and religious customs overruling Western customs and laws of the land. Immigration is also about how Islamists who have immigrated legally have chosen to use our laws and our political processes in order to implement Shari’a law and Muslim tribal customs. Immigration is about economics — how many non-violent immigrant “dreamers,” in flight from persecution or in search of an economic future, can America afford to subsidize in terms of housing, food, education, medical and dental care? And for how long? President Biden’s belief that immigrants will take low-paying jobs that will benefit big business totally overlooks the potential job losses for working poor citizens.  Immigration is about the wisdom or suicidal foolishness of opening our borders to unvetted floods of criminal drug lords, human traffickers, Islamic Jihadists — and to those who do not wish to work, learn English, or assimilate into a Judeo-Christian West. Immigration is about certain cultural differences that may be — indeed, that have proven to be — insurmountable. President Trump’s 2018 Executive Order suspended for a period of time, immigrants from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen, and from any country designated as a state sponsor of terrorism. We may recall that the very day President Biden was sworn in, (January, 2021), he revoked President Trump’s immigration policies. There would be no wall built on our southern border, and immigrants from certain countries in South and Central America (El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Nepal) and from at least four Muslim countries (Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Yemen) were once again welcome.  As we know, America’s cities have been flooded by unvetted “illegal aliens,” (whoops! By undocumented wonderful people), primarily men, some of whom have proven to be criminals who beat up police, murder each other as well as strangers, steal, and who sexually assault children and women both in their lodgings and on the streets. Quo Vadis? Where are we headed? Dare I write about this? Yes, I must. Actually, I have done so many times before. Dare I again suggest arrests, trials, jail sentences, and then deportation for those who’ve committed violent crimes? Yes I must. (READ MORE: Why Are Women in America Cheering for Hamas and Iran?) This is true for drug and human traffickers from Central and South America and for Jihadists from the Middle East and Central Asia. How about those who “merely” practice FGM (forced genital mutilation), force their daughters to veil and to submit to arranged marriages, and who honor kill them if they refuse to go along? What about immigrants who indoctrinate their children into hatred of Jews, Christians, and other infidels and who preach Jihad? Since we believe in a separation of religion and state, what can we do if Jihad is preached in mosques? Or when such indoctrination takes place in public and private schools? Wait a minute. What if those who engage in such practices were born in America? I have no easy answers for us but these are questions that we must wrestle with and resolve before it is too late. The post Immigration of Cultures Hostile to the West Must End appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

He was right in front of me and had a head bigger than Trump’s balls. He moved around a lot, like he had a scorpion crawling up his leg, and when the song was over and we were clapping for the band, he kept dancing, and maybe he’d been doing it since swallowing that pill in he summer of ’67 in Haight-Ashbury. It was like John Belushi in the outtakes of The Blues Brothers. Like Belushi but not funny. He was incredibly annoying and clingy, and he couldn’t quite get the blonde he’d put his arm around and christened in gin several times. Because he drank gin and asked for a lot of flowers in his glass, and I’m not surprised, as we already know that the extremes of cosmic stupidity always end up touching, either because of the urns or because of the concentration of aromatic herbs in the gin and tonic. I took the opportunity to ask the owner if he was insured; not my big head, but the floor, I added, laughing at my own witticism. In the end, I could see it coming, he stepped on my foot. But it wasn’t just some minor thing. It was the stomp of a huge beast that had just escaped from a Lovecraft nightmare. I think my fingernails cracked and my eyeballs swelled. For a moment I considered grabbing the guy by the scruff of the neck and smashing him into the bass player, who wasn’t innocent wearing a Che T-shirt either, or throwing him over the bottles in the pub, which could have triggered an extraordinary pre-railway brawl. But I restrained myself, thinking that nothing would make him more excited than getting a slap in the face. Because there are guys who are born with that talent. And in one of his constant invasions of my space I took the opportunity to empty half a glass down the back of his neck. Not good. A couple of ice cubes fell too. Clin, clin, clin. Come back for another, you big head, I said to myself. And then he turned around, hardly looking like he was going to hug me, and I instantly flashed him a 32-piece smile and two silver sparkles, along with eyes that were as compassionate as they were cynical. In case he wasn’t already moved by my young guinea pig look, I cocked my head to one side and muttered an “I’m sorry” that would make an Islamic State executioner wince. Then she stepped in. The blonde girl started laughing out loud, because some women see reality in a dimension hidden from men, which is that of evil, and she immediately realized that someone was pimping her superman and found it all very funny. And she didn’t miss the chance to press the ice cubes down his back, and he was forced to respond with some rather pitiful caresses and lower the heat, and I hadn’t felt so happy in a long time. The band kept on playing classics and the guy with the galactic head kept on annoying, which is his thing, reaching levels that are hard to take, even for someone who is reasonably in favor of animals living in freedom. And in a treacherous hip sway, to the rhythm of Hombres G -sufre, mamón-, he lost his balance with commendable clumsiness, and came at me like the fiscal policy of the European Union, and I felt a moral obligation to stop him, but it seemed wonderful poetic justice to dodge him like in Matrix, contemplate how he cracked his skull against the ground, and then put his hands to my head, saddened by the blow. I took the opportunity to ask the owner if he was insured; not my big head, but the floor, I added, laughing at my own witticism, with that stubbornness so typical of writers the night after collecting the royalties and spending them on a packet of pipes. Still, I held out my hand, for the blonde was already rolling on the floor with laughter and he seemed more inclined to finish her off than to come to her aid. Standing up, freshly humiliated, she stomped a little on the ground, hoping to find a pothole or a puddle of oil, or some other excuse. Then she cursed a waiter, and turned her head as if looking for the referee to blame, and then I understood that he needed to be a victim, because he was in fact touching his groin with a serious expression as if he had suffered a sudden muscle tear. And then the blonde came back, trailing her circus behind her, to deal him the final blow, looking at him with inconceivable love: “I love you for the fun you are.” And I, chronicler and witness, would bet an arm and a leg that this is the same thing that hyenas say every night to their cats, after entertaining themselves by torturing him thoroughly. And for an instant, I must be getting old, I felt sorry for the big head. READ MORE from Itxu Diaz: The Man Who Waits Beautiful Celebrities Dressed by Mad Geniuses The Globalization of Idiots The post The Fool and the Blonde appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Joseph Nye, the intellectual champion of “soft power” and adviser to Democrat presidents reaching back to Jimmy Carter, is one of those liberals whom Lenin purportedly called “useful idiots”: intelligent, well-meaning intellectuals who always seem to give the benefit of the doubt to their country’s enemies. In his May 6th syndicated column, Nye laments the change in U.S. strategy toward China from “engagement” to “great-power competition,” but claims that cooperation with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) remains possible in certain areas.  It was the Reagan administration that won Cold War I by reversing the flaccid detente policies …  Jimmy Carter. Nye reports that he recently visited China as the chair of a “Sino-American ‘track two dialogue,’ where citizens who are in communication with their respective governments can meet and speak for themselves,” as if the Chinese participants in this dialogue from the Central Party School in Beijing are anything other than hardcore communists towing the CCP line. The Chinese group, apparently, knows what issues to bring to the forefront to tickle liberal hearts: climate change, global public health, arms control, artificial intelligence, free trade (meaning no economic decoupling), and people-to-people contacts. (READ MORE from Frances P. Sempa: Defeating China’s ‘Great Game’ in Cold War II) We need, Nye writes, to “restore a sense of mutual understanding” between the U.S. and China. On climate change, Nye’s group urged its CCP Party School counterparts to urge their government — the world’s biggest polluter and carbon producer — to more rapidly add renewable sources of energy to its numerous coal-fired plants. On global public health, Nye writes, “both governments handled COVID-19 badly,” and we shouldn’t “argue over whom to blame,” despite China’s obvious culpability for the Wuhan lab leak and its cover-up which killed millions throughout the world. On arms control, Nye acknowledges that China’s goal is to reach parity with the U.S. and Russia, but welcomes discussions of “strategic stability” and “non-proliferation.” Perhaps Nye should recall what Jimmy Carter’s Defense Secretary Harold Brown said about arms control with the Soviet Union: We build, they build; we stop, they build. Does he really believe China will stop at nuclear parity? On artificial intelligence, Nye claims that both sides share an interest in “human control” of military weapons. On economics, Nye agrees with his CCP counterparts that economic decoupling “would be bad for both sides.” On people-to-people contacts, Nye wants to stop the “hassling” of academics and scientists by immigration officials on “both sides.”  Nye, like many of the national security bureaucrats that populated the Carter administration, sees some form of detente as the only way to avoid great power war with our principal communist enemy. Nye, like many of those same bureaucrats who served in the Clinton administration, believes that engagement and trade between adversaries will help prevent war. Nye, like many of the Obama administration policymakers, believed that China could be persuaded to join a U.S.-led liberal world order. Nye, like the Biden administration’s national security team, refuses to acknowledge that we are in an existential conflict with China — just as we were with the Soviet Union — and that one side will prevail in that conflict, hopefully without war as in Cold War I.  It was the Reagan administration that won Cold War I by reversing the flaccid detente policies of the first president Nye served, Jimmy Carter. Reagan summarized his strategy in simple terms that do not appeal to liberal intellectuals such as Nye: “We win, they lose.” Ronald Reagan won the Cold War with “hard” power, not “soft” power: a massive military build-up across all domains; an offensive geopolitical strategy to undermine communist control of satellite nations; a rhetorical offensive that highlighted the evils of communism; economic and political warfare. Victory in that Cold War was won by “peace through strength,” not finding areas of cooperation. (READ MORE: The US Has Never Pivoted to the Indo-Pacific) We can all agree with Nye that it is in America’s interest to avoid a kinetic war with China. That war, however, won’t be avoided by “soft power” and exploring areas of cooperation on climate change, public health, arms control, and trade. It won’t be avoided, in other words, by basing policy on Nye’s useful idiocy.      The post Joseph Nye, Useful Idiot appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

“I have a theory, and the theory is mine,” says the pompous twit on the old Monty Python show, “which is to say that it is my theory.” And after he engages in one pointless tautology after another, he delivers himself of his theory about the dinosaurs, which is that they are slender at the head, grow big in the middle, and then taper off again at the tail. [T]he large majority of the protestors at our universities must know that they are pretty ignorant of Israeli and Arab politics. The main difference between his “theory” and most of what I encounter on social media is that he happens to be correct; that’s what bodies of dinosaurs do. But his theory, which he is quite proud of, is like the opinions that we are all encouraged to have and to express, in this way.  It takes no brains, and no careful study of the matter, to come up with it.  A salutary difficulty is lacking.  Difficulty keeps us honest. I have sometimes called it the Principle of the Bad Violinist.  There is no such person, because it is so difficult to play the instrument well enough so that your audience will not bleed from their ears, you must be a very fine player, or you will not play at all.  The principle applies to a wide range of endeavors. (READ MORE from Anthony Esolen: The Classical Education Reformers Have a Chance) The poetry I find in my old editions of The Century Magazine is sometimes excellent; usually interesting; always at least competent. For there was a floor below which the poets could not sink.  That floor was provided by the need for metrical form. Few people can compose a good limerick, let alone a decent and sensible poem in meter and rhyme.  So most people will not make the attempt in the first place, or if they do and it does not succeed metrically, the result will be scouted at once.  But once free verse became the norm, that initial and fundamental difficulty was obviated, and the result has been a flood of bad work. I am not saying that all free verse is bad: far from it.  I am saying that it is a hundred times easier to write bad poetry in free verse than it is to write it in meter and rhyme.  To extend Robert Frost’s metaphor, you get a lot more tennis players if you take away the net. Similarly, you can tell the rate at which an academic discipline can be corrupted by the difficulty involved in engaging in it at all.  Medieval studies, for example, held out for a long time against the simplistic and the politically tendentious, because you actually had to know a lot of things to engage in the enterprise, and some of those things took a long time to learn: languages, most obviously. In the sciences, physics is the last to go, because it is too heavily dependent upon high-level mathematics and the identification and analysis of interacting forces, none of which can be encapsulated in slogans.  It is very hard to be a bad physicist, simply because it is very hard to be any kind of physicist at all. Other disciplines should also be thus protected, but are not, because the standards for engaging in them have been altered.  Take history, for example.  If the historian’s job is to determine what happened, how it happened, why it happened, and how most accurately, fairly, and dispassionately to conceive of it as a moment in the story of a people, then that takes many years of patient and sometimes tedious work.  The good historian must cultivate virtues that are of little use to the politician or the man of action: delayed gratification, humility, a broad survey of many apparently unrelated items, a scrupulous submission to the truth, the capacity to enter imaginatively into the motives of persons far removed from yourself and your own beliefs, and a modest assessment of what we can know for certain, what we can assert with a fair probability, and what must remain but a decent conjecture.  Doubtless, the historian’s human biases will come into play: Edward Gibbon does not well hide his disdain for the ancient Church. Still, Gibbon was a great historian, as was Francis Parkman in his magisterial work on the Indian tribes of North America.  But once you let it be known that political utility is the criterion for judging the historian, or once you say that since no one is ever perfectly objective, the very demand of objectivity may be dismissed, as if one story were as good as another just because they are both stories, then you have cleared away that foundational difficulty, and fools rush in where wise men once walked only with the gravest circumspection. For another example, take the teaching of English literature.  It used to be assumed that English was its own intellectual field, with its principal eras, genres, and authors to be studied.  Let us suppose that you conceive of your task, in the tenth grade, to introduce students to British poetry from its beginnings in Old English to the end of the Victorian era.  It is too much to cover, so of course you will have to let slip many a first-rank poet.  But the difficulty remains, and it is good for you that it does.  How do you teach students how to read a poem by John Donne, when they cannot hear the meter, and when they do not expect the images and the metaphors in a poem to refer to specific things and their specific actions?  How do you teach students how to hear the implicit and often quite subtle ironies in a dramatic monologue by Robert Browning?  How do you show them the difference between what Wordsworth means by Nature and what Pope meant by it?  Please understand, dear Reader, that I know from nearly four decades of experience that most college freshmen will not recognize even the names of the four poets I have mentioned.  No, all these things involve some formidable initial difficulties, and that is why most college English majors now do their best to avoid them, and why our high school students will encounter very little poetry written before 1900.  It is also why English is so often taught as the tail-end of the political dog. (READ MORE: Tocqueville, the Indians, and America’s Natural Bounty) In a democratic republic, or rather among the habits that persist after the soul of the thing itself has died, everyone is encouraged to have and to express political opinions, and the further most of us are from the exigencies of difficult labor (farming, mining, quarrying, lumbering, construction) and of difficult mercantile enterprise (transportation of materials and goods, manufacture, trade, banking), the easier it appears to us to form opinions about anything in the world, and the more gratification we derive from expressing them, if only because everyone else is doing so, and the fight is on. And perhaps a certain psychological factor is also at work.  Somewhere, deep down, buried under the sludge of self-esteem and many years of slovenly schooling, the large majority of the protestors at our universities must know that they are pretty ignorant of Israeli and Arab politics; that they would be hard pressed to name a single figure of importance on either side in 1950 or even 2000; that they cannot describe the land and its features; that they do not know what it is like to be an ordinary Israeli citizen, whether Jew or Christian or Muslim, trying to live an ordinary life.  I am not taking sides in this issue.  I am suggesting, though, that an uneasy conscience, a sense in the gut that you do not know what you are talking about, tends, in a highly charged political atmosphere, to make you shriller, more strident, more obnoxious, quicker to charge your opponents with wickedness or bad faith, and less open to calm and rational discussion.  Again, there is no perceived initial difficulty.  The floodgates are open. Since one shout raises another in opposition, we see that the habits of self-expressed stupidity and impatience breed the same in others, if only because nobody enjoys being yelled at.  The results are there on social media for everyone to see.  Let true schools learn the lesson. The post Self-Expression and Stupidity appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

from RoadtoRoota: TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/

from Sputnik News: Sputnik investigates the role of the media and foreign-backed NGOs in turning up the political temperature in the Central European country. Robert Fico remains under the care of doctors at a hospital in the city of Banská Bystrica after a brazen assassination attempt Wednesday against the Slovak Prime Minister shocked the country […]

In a telling slip of the tongue earlier this week, Joe Biden referred to the uninterrupted stream of illegal immigrants crossing the US border as an “influx” of “Hispanic voters.” During an interview with a [...] The post Biden Calls Illegals Crossing The Border ‘Hispanic Voters’ appeared first on The People's Voice.

A reparations meeting was held today in Boston, and the people in attendance want $50 million from white churches. Why? Do they have slaves? The Wokes convinced at least some people in the black community that white people were robbing them of their land and wealth and now owe them all their wealth. The wokes […] The post Boston Reparations Meeting in Nutsville appeared first on www.independentsentinel.com.

The lady in the clip below came here from El Salvador and is unhappy with her placement, WHICH SHE IS GETTING AT TAXPAYER EXPENSE. She wants to stay and collect welfare, but she’d like someplace better than Rochester. She says, “It’s very traumatic…Rochester no good.” She’s high maintenance and offers nothing in return. She should […] The post Illegal Migrant Shows Her Lack of Gratitude appeared first on www.independentsentinel.com.