Rep. Elise Stefanik Rejects Allegations of Invoking 'Great Replacement Rhetoric' (VIDEO)

She had a killer interview with Harris Faukner on Fox this morning. She's spunky and fired up. I love her message. Last night's primaries were a disaster for the Democrats, and she's expecting the GOP to sweep into power and start shutting down the left's radical agenda next January.

It's no wonder Democrats are now trying to destroy her, alleging her campaign spots have invoked the dreaded "great replacement theory."

At the Wall Street Journal, "GOP Leaders Face Calls to Denounce White Supremacy, ‘Replacement’ Theory":

Stefanik rejects any tie between party rhetoric and racist violence as Cheney criticizes Republican leadership.

WASHINGTON—Some GOP lawmakers are calling for Republican Party leaders to forcefully denounce white supremacy, after the deadly shooting in Buffalo, N.Y., sparked renewed focus on political rhetoric related to race and immigration.

Eleven of the people shot at the supermarket were Black, and two were white. In documents posted online that police think the alleged shooter wrote and compiled, he cited racist conspiracy theories he discovered on Internet message boards. At several points, he condemns both Democrats and Republicans as being controlled by a Jewish conspiracy.

In the documents, the writer presents racist and anti-Semitic views and references the “great replacement,” a conspiracy theory centered on the notion that whites are being systematically replaced with other racial groups and immigrants. Police said he targeted the grocery store because of its location in a Black neighborhood. In one document, he attacks immigration as “ethnic replacement.”

In the aftermath of the shooting, in which 10 people were killed, Democrats and some Republicans who are vocal critics of former President Donald Trump and his political movement called for other GOP lawmakers to condemn white supremacist rhetoric. Mr. Trump rose to prominence during his first presidential campaign in part by deploying harsh language about illegal immigrants that his critics said often was dehumanizing and racist.

After a woman was killed at a 2017 march of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va., Mr. Trump wavered on condemning the marchers, at one point saying there were “very fine people, on both sides.”

Rep. Liz Cheney (R., Wyo.), who was kicked out of the Republican House leadership last year after sharply criticizing Mr. Trump over the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol, said House GOP leaders have enabled white nationalism and anti-Semitism and must renounce those views within the party. “History has taught us that what begins with words ends in far worse,” Ms. Cheney tweeted.

Back in February, she said party leaders should have been tougher on Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.) for speaking at an event organized by a white nationalist.

Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R., Ill.) tweeted that the “replacement theory they are pushing/tolerating is getting people killed.” Mr. Kinzinger, who isn’t running for reelection, said Republicans need to oust Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, the No. 3 House Republican, along with Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.).

“We’ve never supported white supremacy,” Mr. McCarthy said Monday night. “The suspect is the very worst of humanity and for political individuals to try to make some political game out of this shows how little they are.”

A spokeswoman for Mr. Trump, Liz Harrington, said, “It is truly disgusting to use an evil act of mass murder by a mentally ill individual against your political opponents. But nothing is beneath the Democrat Party. Our prayers are with the victims and their families.”

Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the House Republican Whip, said Republicans have been very vocal against white nationalism. He also referenced the 2017 shooting at a congressional baseball game practice that left him badly wounded, saying he knew from experience that the aftermath of a tragedy is a time for prayers, not ratcheting up the rhetoric and blame.

Ms. Stefanik, in a statement, said she was “heartbroken and saddened to hear the tragic news of the horrific loss of life” in Buffalo. Her camp rejected the idea that being tough on illegal immigration amounted to promoting white supremacy or racism.

Stefanik senior adviser Alex deGrasse said any attempt to tie the shooting to Ms. Stefanik “is a new disgusting low for the left, their Never Trump allies” and the media. “Ms. Stefanik has never advocated for any racist position or made a racist statement.”

The comments came after scrutiny of her past campaign ads. The Washington Post reported that Ms. Stefanik’s campaign committee paid for Facebook ads last year that said Democrats were seeking a “permanent election insurrection” by giving millions illegal immigrants citizenship in an attempt to bolster their election chances...

 

Twitter, the Supreme Court, the Progressive Revolution

From Caroline Glick, at the Jewish News Syndicate, "As long as revolutionary progressives maintain their control over key U.S. national institutions, Republican election victories will be insufficient to save the U.S. and restore liberty to its citizens":

May 8, 2022 / JNS) America is in the throes of a revolution. As historian Victor Davis Hanson has noted, progressives now control nearly every national institution. They control Wall Street, Silicon Valley, universities, local school boards, the teachers’ unions, the entertainment industry, the vast majority of the media, the Justice Department, the FBI and the U.S. military, and currently, the White House and both houses of Congress.

Progressives use their control over these institutions to change both the character of the United States and the rules of the game in a manner that will enable them to perpetuate their power regardless of the sentiments of the American people.

Progressives are rewriting American history. They are taking aim at God and believers, and at the nuclear family, while indoctrinating children against their families and their country. There is no area of human endeavor that progressives have not politicized.

One of the last national institutions where the conservatives hold sway is the Supreme Court. And last Monday, the Supreme Court came under a malicious assault whose clear goal is to subvert its independence. In a move without precedent in U.S. history, Politico published a draft Supreme Court decision written by Justice Samuel Alito. Alito is a member of the Court’s conservative majority.

Today’s Supreme Court comprises five conservatives, one centrist and three progressives. Alito’s draft explained why the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which removed the power of states to determine the legality of pregnancy termination, making abortions legal nationwide, was unconstitutional and overturned it. If Alito’s decision, which is supported by his fellow conservative justices, becomes final, the power to determine the legality of pregnancy termination will devolve back to the individual states.

Second, the leaker sought to incite righteous rage among progressives, that will pressure the two remaining moderates in the Democratic majority in the Senate to vote to abrogate the Senate filibuster. By preventing Republicans from using the filibuster, the razor-thin Democrat majority will be able to ram through radical legislation ahead of their expected losses in the congressional elections in November.

Among other things, unfettered by the filibuster, progressives will be able to expand the number of justices on the Court from nine to 15. And if they move fast enough, President Joe Biden will be able to pack the court with an additional six progressive justices and thus effectively seize permanent control of the high court.

As for those elections, all major polls foresee progressives suffering crushing, historic defeats in both houses. Until Obama’s presidency, when progressives seized control of the Democrat Party, polls like the current ones would have compelled the Democrats to abandon their progressive policies and make a ninety-degree turn to the center. But today, every demonstration of public opposition to progressive policies convinces progressive revolutionaries to double down. When last year parents began protesting anti-American, racist and increasingly pornographic indoctrination of their children in K-12 schools, Attorney General Merrick Garland instructed the FBI to treat protesting parents like “domestic terrorists.”

Progressive-controlled state and local governments have responded to public outcries against skyrocketing crime rates by passing laws banning pre-trial detention and bail, sending violent criminals back on the streets.

In every sphere of public endeavor, progressive politicians, bureaucrats and activists have met public opposition and protest with tyranny and rebuke.

One of the main weapons in the progressive arsenal is disinformation—the deliberate distortion of information to advance an agenda...

This disinformation campaign brings us to Twitter, the social media platform purchased last month by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man. Over the past decade, Twitter became the social media network with the largest influence on the public discourse. No self-respecting journalist, activist or policymaker can afford not to have an active account.

Twenty years ago, the internet and the social media platforms it generated became the largest free market of ideas in human history. They were also the engine for political victories for conservative politicians in the United States. For the first time, the internet gave conservative candidates the ability to communicate directly with voters, without the mediation of liberal/progressive media behemoths. All of this began to change during Obama’s presidency, as more and more conservative voices suffered a spectrum of sanctions, from shadow bans, which blocked their audience from seeing what they were posting, to banishment from Facebook and other social media platforms.

The process accelerated and became more extreme in the aftermath of Trump’s defeat of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential race.

Trump’s victory was a grave embarrassment for the Silicon Valley oligarchs. Clinton blamed them for her loss. Her basic claim was that had Facebook, Twitter and Google not permitted the Trump campaign more or less the same use of their platforms as they ostensibly offer everyone, Trump would not have won. As Clinton and her supporters put it, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey and their colleagues were supposed to prevent Trump and his supporters from “disseminating disinformation,” that is, campaign materials, on their platforms. Freedom of expression, Clinton and her supporters insisted, wasn’t for everyone.

Chastened, to prevent Trump’s reelection in 2020, Zuckerberg donated $340 million to election non-profit groups he founded for the purpose of increasing Democrat vote numbers in key swing states like Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona and Georgia. At the same time, Facebook and Twitter initiated a censorship campaign against Trump and his supporters the likes of which no one had ever experienced.

That censorship campaign reached its height weeks before the election, when the New York Post published the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop. President Joe Biden’s son, a crack addict, had abandoned his laptop in a repair shop in Delaware. After his efforts to return the laptop were unsuccessful, the owner of the store turned its contents over to the FBI because the computer contained evidence that Biden and his family may have committed several felonies.

At a minimum, the contents of the laptop exposed that Hunter Biden and his uncle Jim Biden had pocketed millions of dollars from foreign firms with direct ties to the Chinese, Ukrainian and Russian governments. Hunter Biden seemed to implicate his father in the influence-peddling operations in several of his emails.

The Post story was explosive because it was entirely true. It was Hunter Biden’s laptop. All the details of the deals were authentic. They exposed a web of influence peddling with hostile governments that made clear that Biden and his family were ripe for extortion by those governments. Yet, rather than allow their platforms to be used to inform the American people of this information, Twitter led the way in preventing the public from hearing about it. Twitter de-platformed the New York Post and private users who dared to link to the story. Facebook followed suit. Fifty retired U.S. intelligence and security chiefs proclaimed the story was “Russian disinformation.”

It took a year for the New York Times and Washington Post to admit that the laptop was indeed Hunter Biden’s laptop and that the New York Post stories were entirely true. In the meantime, in the name of fighting “disinformation,” Twitter, Facebook, Google and other internet giants had denied the American people access to information that, as post-election polls made clear, would have swung the election in Trump’s favor.

Since its first days in office, the Biden administration has openly pressured technology giants to increase their censorship and block conservative voices, claiming that such silencing and suppression is necessary to fight racism and fake news...

 

Disinformation Governance Board

The funniest thing about this is I engaged this lady on Twitter a while back, not knowing a thing about all the crazy information on her. 

The next you know she's appointed as the White House Disinformation Czar, after having a looong record of spreading insane disnfo herself.

Glenn Greenwald has it, "Homeland Security's 'Disinformation Board' is Even More Pernicious Than it Seems":

The power to decree what is "disinformation" now determines what can and cannot be discussed on the internet. It is now in the hands of trained disinformation agents of the U.S. Security State.

The most egregious and blatant official U.S. disinformation campaign in years took place three weeks before the 2020 presidential election. That was when dozens of former intelligence officials purported, in an open letter, to believe that authentic emails regarding Joe Biden's activities in China and Ukraine, reported by The New York Post, were "Russian disinformation.” That quasi-official proclamation enabled liberal corporate media outlets to uncritically mock and then ignore those emails as Kremlin-created fakes, and it pressured Big Tech platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to censor the reporting at exactly the time Americans were preparing to decide who would be the next U.S. president.

The letter from these former intelligence officials was orchestrated by trained career liars — disinformation agents — such as former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Yet that letter was nonetheless crucial to discredit and ultimately suppress the New York Post's incriminating reporting on Biden. It provided a quasi-official imprimatur — something that could be depicted as an authoritative decree — that these authentic emails were, in fact, fraudulent.

After all, if all of these noble and heroic intelligence operatives who spent their lives studying Russian disinformation were insisting that the Biden emails had all of the "hallmarks" of Kremlin treachery, who possessed the credibility to dispute their expert assessment? This clip from the media leader in spreading this CIA pre-election lie — CNN — features their national security analyst James Clapper, and it illustrates how vital this pretense of officialdom was in their deceitful disinformation campaign...

This same strategic motive — to vest accusations of “disinformation” with the veneer of expertise — is what has fostered a new, very well-financed industry heralding itself as composed of “anti-disinformation" scholars. Knowing that Americans are inculcated from childhood to believe that censorship is nefarious — that it is the hallmark of tyranny — those who wish to censor need to find some ennobling rationale to justify it and disguise what it is.

They have thus created a litany of neutral-sounding groups with benign names — The Atlantic Council, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, various "fact-checking” outfits controlled by corporate media outlets — that claim to employ “anti-disinformation experts” to identify and combat fake news. Just as media corporations re-branded their partisan pundits as "fact-checkers" -- to masquerade their opinions as elevated, apolitical, authoritative decrees of expertise -- the term "disinformation expert" is designed to disguise ideological views on behalf of state and corporate power centers as Official Truth...

This scam is the critical context for understanding why the Biden Administration casually announced last week the creation of what it is calling a "Disinformation Board” inside the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). There is no conceivable circumstance in which a domestic law enforcement agency like DHS should be claiming the power to decree truth and falsity. Operatives in the U.S. Security State are not devoted to combatting disinformation. The opposite is true: they are trained, career liars tasked with concocting and spreading disinformation. As Politico's Jack Schafer wrote:

Who among us thinks the government should add to its work list the job of determining what is true and what is disinformation? And who thinks the government is capable of telling the truth? Our government produces lies and disinformation at industrial scale and always has. It overclassifies vital information to block its own citizens from becoming any the wiser. It pays thousands of press aides to play hide the salami with facts….Making the federal government the official custodian of truth would be like Brink’s giving a safe-cracker a job driving an armored car.

The purpose of Homeland Security agents is to propagandize and deceive, not enlighten and inform. The level of historical ignorance and stupidity required to believe that U.S. Security State operatives are earnestly devoted to exposing and decreeing truth — as CNN's Brian Stelter evidently believes, given that he praised this new government program as “common sense” — is off the charts. As Jameel Jaffer, formerly of the ACLU and now with the Columbia’s Knight First Amendment Institute put it, most troubling is “the fact that the board is housed at DHS, an especially opaque agency that has run roughshod over civil liberties in the past.”

Typically, any attempt to apply George Orwell's warning novel 1984 to U.S. politics is reflexively dismissed as hyperbolic: a free and democratic country like the United States could not possibly fall prey to the dystopian repression Orwell depicts. Yet it is quite difficult to distinguish this “Disinformation Board” from Ingsoc's Ministry of Truth. The protagonist of Orwell's novel, Winston Smith, worked in the Ministry of Truth and described at length how its primary function was to create official versions of truth and falsity, which always adhered to the government's needs of the moment and were subject to radical change as those interests evolved.

That the Board will be run by such a preposterous and laughable figure as Nina Jankowicz — a liberal cartoon, a caricature of a #Resistance Twitter fanatic who spent 2016 posting adolescent partisan tripe such as: “Maybe @HillaryClinton's most important point so far: ‘A @realDonaldTrump presidency would embolden ISIS.’ #ImWithHer” — has, in some sense, made this board seem more benign and harmless. After all, how nefarious and dangerous can a board be when it is governed by a person as frivolous and banal as this, calling herself “the Mary Poppins of disinformation”? But just as banality can be a vehicle for evil, it can also be a vehicle for repression and tyrannical control. Jankowicz, reacting with horror to Elon Musk's vow to restore a modicum of free speech to the internet, just last week on NPR touted the virtues of censorship: "I shudder to think about if free speech absolutists were taking over more platforms, what that would look like for the marginalized communities ... which are already shouldering ... disproportionate amounts of this abuse," she said.

Her just-released book, entitled “How to Be A Woman Online: Surviving Abuse and Harassment, and How to Fight Back,” is full of justifications for online censorship. Last year, she condemned me and Fox News host Tucker Carlson as “disgusting” for the crime of criticizing the fabrications of then-New York Times front-page reporter Taylor Lorenz, on the ground that powerful professional women (with the right political ideology) must not be criticized because such accountability results in harassment...

 

Kathy Boudin, Weather Underground Terrorist of 1960s and 1970s, Dead at 78 (VIDEO)

She was the mother of Chesa Boudin, the radical San Francisco District Attorney who's up for recall on June 7. She pleaded guilty in 1984 to first-degree robbery and second-degree murder in the shooting death of Brink's security guard Peter Paige in the Weather Underground's 1981 armored truck robbery, in Rockland County, New York.

Chesa was raised by the notorious, violent Weather Underground militants Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. Kathy Boudin, a "model prisoner," served 22 years behind bars at New York's Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women. She was paroled in 2003.

As the New York Times reports, "Kathy Boudin, Radical Imprisoned in a Fatal Robbery, Dies at 78":

She had a role in the Brink’s heist by the Weather Underground that left two police officers dead. But she became a model prisoner and, after being freed, helped former inmates.

Kathy Boudin, who as a member of the radical Weather Underground of the 1960s and ’70s took part in the murderous 1981 holdup of a Brink’s armored truck and then, in prison and after being freed two decades later, helped inmates struggling to get their lives on track, died on Sunday in New York. She was 78.

The cause was cancer, said Zayd Dohrn, whose family adopted Ms. Boudin’s son, Chesa Boudin.

On a March day in 1970, Ms. Boudin was showering at a townhouse on West 11th Street in Greenwich Village when an explosion collapsed the walls around her. She and fellow extremists had been making bombs there, the intended target believed to have been the Fort Dix Army base in New Jersey. Three of them were killed on the spot. A naked Ms. Boudin managed to scramble away with a colleague and found clothes and brief refuge at the home of a woman living down the block.

She then disappeared.

Within a few years, so did the Weather Underground. A breakaway faction of the leftist Students for a Democratic Society, it called itself Weatherman, borrowing from “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” a 1965 Bob Dylan song with the lyric “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” The name evolved into Weather Underground.

In that era of turbulence over civil rights and the increasingly unpopular Vietnam War, the group set off bombs at the United States Capitol, New York City Police Headquarters and other buildings. If anything, it was more adept at issuing long manifestoes, laden and leaden with references to Karl Marx, Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh, and asserting the world’s “main struggle” as being that “between U.S. imperialism and the national liberation struggles against it.”

With the Weather Underground fading by the mid-1970s as the war ended, its leaders, one by one, emerged from hiding to face the legal consequences of having been on the F.B.I.’s most-wanted list.

Not Ms. Boudin (pronounced boo-DEEN). “The very status of being underground was an identity for me,” she recalled years later in interviews with The New Yorker at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in Westchester County, N.Y., where she came to be imprisoned. She continued: “I was making a difference in no way, so then I elevated to great importance the fact that I was underground.”

That ended in October 1981, when she teamed up with armed men from another radical group, the Black Liberation Army, to hold up a Brink’s truck in Rockland County, N.Y., making off with $1.6 million. During the stickup, the gunmen killed a security guard, Peter Paige. They transferred the cash to a U-Haul truck that was waiting roughly a mile away. Ms. Boudin was in the cab of the truck, a 38-year-old white woman serving as a decoy to confound police officers searching for Black men.

The U-Haul was stopped by the police at a roadblock. Ms. Boudin, who carried no weapon, immediately surrendered, hands in the air. But gunmen jumped from the back of the truck and opened fire, killing Sgt. Edward J. O’Grady and Officer Waverly L. Brown. Though some accused her of surrendering as a tactic to get the police to lower their weapons before being attacked, Ms. Boudin insisted that that was not the case.

Not Ms. Boudin (pronounced boo-DEEN). “The very status of being underground was an identity for me,” she recalled years later in interviews with The New Yorker at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in Westchester County, N.Y., where she came to be imprisoned. She continued: “I was making a difference in no way, so then I elevated to great importance the fact that I was underground.”

That ended in October 1981, when she teamed up with armed men from another radical group, the Black Liberation Army, to hold up a Brink’s truck in Rockland County, N.Y., making off with $1.6 million. During the stickup, the gunmen killed a security guard, Peter Paige. They transferred the cash to a U-Haul truck that was waiting roughly a mile away. Ms. Boudin was in the cab of the truck, a 38-year-old white woman serving as a decoy to confound police officers searching for Black men.

The U-Haul was stopped by the police at a roadblock. Ms. Boudin, who carried no weapon, immediately surrendered, hands in the air. But gunmen jumped from the back of the truck and opened fire, killing Sgt. Edward J. O’Grady and Officer Waverly L. Brown. Though some accused her of surrendering as a tactic to get the police to lower their weapons before being attacked, Ms. Boudin insisted that that was not the case.

At her sentencing, she turned to the victims’ relatives. “I know that anything I say now will sound hollow, but I extend to you my deepest sympathy,” she said. “I feel real pain.” As for her motives, “I was there out of my commitment to the Black liberation struggle and its underground movement. I am a white person who does not want the crimes committed against Black people to be carried in my name.”

She proved to be a model prisoner at Bedford Hills, mentoring other inmates, attending to those with AIDS, writing poetry and expressing remorse for her role in the Brink’s robbery deaths...

Shoot, she was *such* a model prisoner that even William F. Buckley, the august founder of National Review, wrote a letter to the parole board supporting her release. 

Still more here.

The video at top is a "Brave New Films" hagiography. 

Searching in vain, I found not a single television news report on her death by any of the so-called mainstream broadcast, cable, or streaming outlets. 

I did find, miraculously, an old "CBS Sunday Morning" segment (here) on the 1970 townhouse explosion in Greenwich Village, which killed three Weather Underground bomb-makers, Diana Oughton, Ted Gold, and Terry Robbin. As reported at the Times' story here, Kathy Boudin was on scene, escaped, and went to ground after her three comrades blew themselves up. 

This television news blackout is no surprise: President Barack Obama was a known associate of Bill Ayers during the latter's post-Weathermen university professor's life; and indeed, Obama launched his 1995 Illinois state senate campaign at a meet-and-greet at Ayers' house in Chicago.

Not a word of this will be brought up by our irretrievably corrupted legacy news outlets, lest the Democrats' chances in 2022 and 2024 be further deep-sixed by the "resurfacing" of "old news" reports on the party's most esteemed Democrat Party president in modern history, who was"palling around with terrorists."

Shoot, the current Democrat-Media-Disinformation-Complex beats Winston Smith's "memory hole" operations seen in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four --- and that's no joke.

ADDED: From Gail Heriot, at Instapundit, "THE BRINK’S ROBBERY/TRIPLE MURDER WAS ON THIS DAY IN [OCTOBER 20] 1981":

Please keep in your thoughts Brink’s guard Peter Paige and Nyack police officers Edward O’Grady and Waverly Brown (who was Nyack’s first African-American officer). All three were murdered in the course of the 1981 Brink’s heist. Also remember Brink’s guard Joseph Trombino, who was seriously wounded, but survived, only to be killed twenty years later on 9/11.

The perpetrators were six members of the Black Liberation Army and four former members of Weather Underground who had since formed the May 19th Communist Organization.

Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about the trial of the first three defendants (one from the BLA and two from the M19CO)...

Still more at Instapundit. 

International Workers' Day

Yesterday, actually, May 1st.

According to Wikipedia,"the date was chosen in 1889 for political reasons by the Marxist International Socialist Congress, which met in Paris and established the Second International as a successor to the earlier International Workingmen's Association."

Here's more, "Workers of the World Unite! May Day Celebrates Working-Class Solidarity":

The origins of a holiday celebrating workers can be traced back to labor and trade union movements in the late 19th century. As dreadful working conditions in factories became highly publicized during this period, particularly in meat packing plants, through works such as Upton Sinclar’s The Jungle, movements to improve working conditions (both for workers and for public health and safety) grew in size and intensity. On May 3, 1886, as workers rallied to demand an eight-hour workday in Chicago’s Haymarket Square, mass confusion erupted when a bomb exploded in the crowd and the police opened fire on the crowd. The Haymarket Affair, as this event is remembered, was used as pretext for widespread repression of workers and for the arrests of labor organizers, radicals and immigrants.

Not coincidentally, as progressive organizations and labor parties around the world began to celebrate International Workers Day on May 1 in commemoration of the Haymarket Affair, Labor Day was established in 1894 in the U.S. on the first Monday of September with the support of the American Federation of Labor, in part to distance the labor movement from its more radical elements. May Day continues to be celebrated around the world; and in the US, it has taken on special significance for immigrants’ rights activists. The convergence of the demands of workers for better wages and working conditions, and the demands of immigrants for dignity and freedom from the violence imposed by the immigration enforcement regime, is a fitting tribute to the role that immigrants have played in the labor movement in the United States.

The history of the labor movement is largely the history of human beings, living at the margins of mainstream society, uniting in solidarity, asserting their rights and fighting for a better, more fair world. It unfortunately remains true that racism, xenophobia and white supremacy redound to the benefit of those with economic and political power. From racist appeals to white supremacy that destroyed radical efforts during Reconstruction towards true multiracial democracy, to the xenophobic red scare that followed Haymarket and the repression of the Black Panther Party, racism and anti-immigrant rhetoric represent not only an existential threat of violence for marginalized people, but also a powerful weapon used by the ruling class to undermine solidarity among working people. Immigrants and marginalized people continue to be used as scapegoats for crime, poverty and other societal problems which can rightly be attributed to systems of exploitation that entrench privilege and power, and not those oppressed by these same systems.

It is, in many ways, the time of monsters. The Trump presidency ushered in a new era of domestic repression of Black and brown people and brought violent white supremacist rhetoric back into American mainstream political discourse. President Biden was elected with broad progressive support but has largely failed to roll back the worst Trump-era immigration policies. The COVID pandemic laid bare the harsh reality facing American workers, forced to risk their health and livelihood, often without adequate workplace protections, while America’s billionaires added nearly $2 trillion to their net worth. The United States continues to spend more on its military than the next nine countries combined while millions of its people are unhoused.

And yet, a new generation of the working class—union members and unorganized workers alike, students, LGBTQIA+ people, immigrants, Black, brown, and Indigenous people—stands ready to meet this political moment and organize to demand a better future. Workers at the Amazon JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island recently won the first union victory at any Amazon facility, led by a Black supervisor who was fired after organizing a walkout to protest unsafe working conditions at the start of the pandemic. Activists throughout the state are mobilizing to shut down the ICE Processing Center in Folkston in solidarity with detainees on hunger strike in the facility. And here in Athens, a coalition of organizations are demanding Community Benefits Agreements for large public projects, and United Campus Workers of Georgia are campaigning for a living wage for UGA workers. This May Day, let their struggles be our struggles. The only way forward is with solidarity among the multiracial working class of the United States and workers of the world.

Yes, because our pampered and privileged "students" and LGBTQIQ+ plus activists are taking all the assembly line-workers' jobs, low-skill manual laborers' jobs, fast-food and retail workers' jobs, and those in cleaning and janitorial services, the food industry, construction labor, longshoreman, parking lot attendants and car washers, truck drivers, and low-level white-collar worker positions, and more! 

Down with the colonialist, racist, multi-phobic finance capitalists of the world! 

Hey, hey! Ho ho! Late-stage capitalism's got to go! 

Yes, these "industrious" purple-haired campus proletarians have joined in working class solidarity with all the world's expropriated and oppressed! *Yawn.*

More here, "Workers around the world mark May Day with rallies for better working conditions."

Not a 'Kitchen Table Issue,' Jen Psaki? (VIDEO)

From Abigail Shrier, "Actually, Our Kids Are All We're Thinking About":

Yesterday, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki accused Republican lawmakers of “engaging in a disturbing, cynical trend of attacking vulnerable transgender kids,” and exploiting them. “Instead of focusing on critical kitchen table issues like the economy, COVID, or addressing the country’s mental health crisis,” she said, “Republican lawmakers are currently debating legislation that, among many things, would target transgender youth with tactics that threaten to put pediatricians in prison if they provide medically necessary, life-saving care for the kids they serve.”

Life-saving care? Surely she must mean insulin or antibiotics?

No, she means “gender affirming care” that devilish euphemism for puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and experimental surgeries whose benefits are unproven, but whose risks—permanent sexual dysfunction, infertility, cardiac event and endometrial cancer are a few—ought to nudge any doctor toward soul searching. As I’ve written many times, these treatments are often recklessly administered, of questionable benefit to children, and attended by forbidding risks.

For these reasons, in the last two years, national gender clinics in France, the UK, Sweden and Finland have all reevaluated or curtailed their use. But as Psaki made clear, any legislator who tries to follow suit will face double-barreled legal opposition from the current Administration. Psaki said:

Legislators who are contemplating these discriminatory bills have been put on notice by the Department of Justice and the Department of Health and Human Services that laws and policies preventing care that health care professionals recommend for transgender minors may violate the Constitution and federal law. To be clear, every major medical association agrees that gender-affirming health care for transgender kids is a best practice and potentially life-saving.

There is, in fact, no proof that “affirmative care” improves the mental health of gender dysphoric youth long-term—much less that its interventions are “life-saving.” An outstanding recent paper in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy is only the latest to expose the poor empirical basis for these treatments with minors. It’s a must-read paper for any policy maker, parent, or psychologist grappling with this fraught question.

The authors state, as if with a sigh: “The evidence underlying the practice of pediatric gender transition is widely recognized to be of very low quality.”

Activists often exaggerate the suicide risk to gender dysphoric minors—as well as the mental health efficacy of these treatments—in order to coerce parents into acceding to the interventions. But as the authors point out: “The ‘transition or suicide’ narrative falsely implies that transition will prevent suicides. [N]either hormones nor surgeries have been shown to reduce suicidality in the long-term.”

That the Biden administration would peddle an activist talking point with no solid factual basis signals how desperate it is to please the radical flank of its supporters. That is too bad. Leaders who mollycoddle the activists quietly corrupting nearly every institution of American life fool themselves that they are merely paying a tax. They don’t realize it’s a ransom, and that those who demand it will never be satisfied until they have despoiled every American institution. And much worse in this case: they encourage irreversible harm to children.

In an address chock-a-block with fictions, perhaps Psaki’s most surprising was the notion that unlike the “economy, COVID” and the “country’s mental health crisis,” the risks gender activists now pose to our children is not a “kitchen table issue.” It is - she means - the sort of thing that excites Twitter, not normal Americans.

In Psaki’s worldview, then, Americans are not shaking their heads at their talented daughters, wondering if they ought to bother helping them train in a sport. Nor does she think Americans are desperately worried about what radical teachers are pushing on their kids at school—from racial essentialism and division to phony gender science about their bodies and identities.

But in the real world, Americans are very, very worried about these things. I’ve been privileged with a special window into their terror: an inbox full of thousands of desperate parents who write me daily of their teen daughters caught in the grips of a sudden transgender epiphany. And Ms. Psaki, I can promise you this: given the widespread availability of medical gender treatments, on demand, without therapist oversight and often without requiring parental consent - that is not merely one of that family’s concerns. It is all that family is thinking about. Every minute of every day—dear God, how can I save my little girl from doing harm to herself?

America has essentially become an unlocked medicine cabinet for gender medicine seekers as young as 15. As a result, any family with a kid who announces she is trans —whether encouraged by peers or social media or an activist educator, or accompanied by serious mental health co-morbidities—is hurled into crisis. The only thing parents know for certain is that a quick medical transition will be encouraged by virtually every adult she encounters. Far less certain is whether the family can do anything to stop it...

Still more.

 

Walking the Transgender Movement Away from the Extremists

This is an amazing essay.

From Jonathan Rauch, at American Purpose, "Today's radical gender ideologues are harming the transgender community the same way left-leaning activists harmed the gay and lesbian rights movement in the early 1990s":

I’m ... well aware that many of the same arguments which were used against gay people are now being deployed against trans people. Gays were (supposedly) redefining marriage; trans people are (supposedly) redefining sex. We (allegedly) smeared all disagreement as homophobic; they (allegedly) smear all disagreement as transphobic. We were usurping democratic majorities, destroying privacy, defying nature, recruiting children, and politicizing science; they’re—well, you get the idea. Seeing the many parallels makes me humble about getting the trans issue wrong.

But I also see a different and more disturbing historical parallel. A generation ago, in the early 1990s, the gay and lesbian rights movement (as it was then called) came under the sway of left-leaning activists with their own agenda. They wanted as little as possible to do with bourgeois institutions like marriage and the military; they elevated cultural transgression and opposed integration into mainstream society; they imported an assortment of unrelated causes like abortion rights. To be authentically gay, in their view, was to be left-wing and preferably radical.

A loose collection of gay and lesbian conservatives, libertarians, and centrists watched with growing concern. We thought that the activists were dangerously misguided both about America and also gay people’s place in it. We resented their efforts to impose ideological conformity on a diverse population. (In 2000, a fourth of gay voters chose Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush.) We saw how they played to the very stereotypes that the anti-gay Right used against us. We knew their claim to represent the lesbian and gay population was false...

RTWT.

 

The Left Doesn't Want to Diddle Your Kids

I said basically the same thing the other day, with a similar explanation in brief, here: "'Real Time' Panel Discusses Florida's 'Don't Say Gay' Legislation (VIDEO)." 

Oh sure, there are definitely a few heinous groomers around here or there. 

They're evil. But in toto, the left is gunning for ideological hegemony over all of U.S. politics and culture, which Andrew Breitbart perceptively warned about years ago. Honestly, it may be too late to turn back the tide, so you have to put up pockets of resistance, like I do with my college students. I do a *ton* of ideological deprogramming. Young people don't read. Students today basically know nothing. The entertainment social media culture --- with an epidemic of youth narcissism  and privilege --- has destroyed their brains, and therefore their intellectual skills, critical thinking abilities, and the gift of perspective. So they glom onto anything that's trendy and allegedly cool. 

It's a fucking tragedy. 

In any case, I saw this dude Josh Daws on Twitter last night expounding like he was *the* expert on all of the. Okay, not too bad:

I'm seeing a lot of people on the right share this meme. While it may be a strong satirical response to those who get lost in nuance, it fundamentally fails to recognize why the left wants to talk to your kids about sexuality. Let's connect some dots. 🧵 1/23.

The left doesn't want to diddle kids. They want to create little revolutionaries. To do that they need to sever the bond between students and the parents they believe are raising their children to be hateful bigots. 2/23.

In order to sever the bond between parents and their children, the left is using a two-pronged approach. Critical Race Theory and radical gender ideology (properly known as Queer Theory) are not two unrelated sets of ideas. They are two parts of the same strategy. 3/23.

CRT is usually the first set of ideas to be introduced. This is often enough to radicalize racial minorities, but it's merely step one for white (or white adjacent) students. 4/23.

CRT instills in these students a negative self-identity as they're taught to believe they're recipients of enormous privilege that was stolen from others and that they are complicit in historic and ongoing injustice. In child terms, they're taught to believe they're bad. 5/23.

Apart from the shame and guilt, this also gives them a worldview at odds with the one their parents grew up with and are trying to pass on to their kids. Step one is complete. 6/23.

Once CRT is done tearing down these kids and leaving them with a negative self-identity, Queer Theory (QT) is introduced and offers them a wide assortment of positive self-identities to choose from. 7/23.

Instead of living with the shame and guilt of being a member of the oppressive dominant culture, these students can be celebrated for coming out as gender nonbinary or pansexual. 8/23.

In an instant, these kids can trade their negative self-identity and all the accompanying guilt and shame of being an "oppressor" for a positive self-identity as a much-venerated "oppressed" minority. 9/23.

At this point, the left desperately wants this new identity to stay at school so it has time to be cemented before the parents find out. In the guise of helping these students, schools withhold this information about their child's new identity from mom and dad. 10/23.

Once the parents do find out about their child's new identity it's firmly in place and an adversarial relationship between the child and parents has been manufactured. It takes extraordinarily deft parenting to repair the relationship once it has reached this stage. 11/23.

The parents' tendency will be to overreact and push the child further into the arms of the woke radicals who now have the little revolutionary they wanted from the beginning. The bond between parents and child has been severed ending the perpetuation of hate and bigotry. 12/23.

The left is determined to replicate this process in as many families as they can using whatever means at their disposal. It's not about diddling kids. It's about capturing the minds of impressionable children. 13/23.

Unfortunately, this creates environments where actual predators can thrive. When young children are isolated from their parents, encouraged to adopt different beliefs, and keep secrets from their parents, they are made easy targets for abusers. 14/23 "But my school has Christian teachers and a Christian principal. They couldn't possibly have this agenda." Aha. This is where we turn to @joe_rigney and connect another dot. 15/23.

Hear me loud and clear on this. Most teachers love the kids in their classrooms and want only the best for them...

Still more.

 

The Lynching of Justice Clarence Thomas

 At FrontPage Magazine, "A hospitalized justice, a racist campaign, and the media heckler’s veto":

Even as Justice Clarence Thomas was hospitalized, a leftist lynch mob rallied on social media calling for his impeachment or death. They weren’t especially picky about which one it would be.

The same radical faction championing Biden’s selection of a black woman for the Supreme Court as a groundbreaking step forward and berating Republicans for refusing to support her were simultaneously demanding that the only sitting black justice on the court step down.

The calls for Thomas’ death are based on pure unadulterated hatred. And so are the calls for his impeachment. None of them have even the faintest basis in anything resembling the law.

The Women's March called for the impeachment of Justice Thomas because his wife, Ginni, had advocated against election fraud. Or as the racist leftist hate group put it, "The revelations that Ginni Thomas advocated for the overthrow of our democracy are disqualifying — not just for her as a human being of any decency, but for her husband.”

A “human being of any decency” wouldn’t be going after a judge by targeting his wife.

The only possible reason for disqualifying Thomas would be the presumption that men are obligated to control their wives. And prevent them from expressing political views in public.

Is this the exciting new feminist position that the Women’s March would like to debut?

Would any of the great minds at the Women’s March like to contemplate the legal implications of creating a male guardianship for women of the kind that might have existed in the 18th century?

Justice Breyer’s wife is a member of the English nobility, it doesn’t mean he answers to the Queen.

Judges whose spouses have an “interest” in a case are obligated to recuse themselves from it. But having political views about a national issue is not the same thing as having an “interest” in it. I doubt there’s a single judicial spouse who didn’t have an opinion on the 2020 election. And many of them may have signed petitions, posted comments, or otherwise urged an outcome.

Or participated in the Women’s March attacking the legitimacy of the 2016 presidential election.

That’s political activism, it’s not an “interest”.

The New York Times and the New Yorker cited a federal law stating that judges must rescue themselves if their spouses have “an interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome of the proceeding.” A point of view is not an interest. If it were, there could be no married judges.

Nevertheless law professor Lawrence Tribe tweeted, “That clearly applied here.” How?

“By writing to Meadows, who was chief of staff and active in the ‘Stop the Steal’ movement, she joined the team resisting the results of the election,” Stephen Gillers, an NYU prof quoted by the New York Times, convolutedly argued. “She made herself part of the team and so she has an interest in the decisions of the court that could affect Trump’s goal of reversing the results.”

Millions of Americans have phoned, sent letters and emails to members of Congress advocating particular policies. Did they all join the “team” of every single public official whom they contacted? Should any judges they’re married to have to recuse themselves from those cases?

Had Ginni Thomas been formally employed by the Trump team, it would be another story. Instead she was an activist urging members of the team to do everything they possibly could.

It doesn’t make her a member of the team.

If that weren’t absurd enough, both media outlets have cited a law stating that “any justice, judge or magistrate judge of the United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.” Is there any federal judge, appointed as part of a partisan process, whose impartiality can’t be reasonably questioned in partisan cases?

As usual the Left has invented a standard that it doesn’t intend to apply in any other cases. Certainly not in any cases where it would inhibit its stable of unconstitutional judicial activists.

“What did Justice Clarence Thomas know, and when did he know it?” a New York Times op-ed demanded. The author, Jesse Wegman, a Times editor, presumably knows the political views of his wife, Kyra, and also, presumably, he writes his own views in his columns. Not hers.

This isn’t a complicated concept for any functional adult.

Supreme Court justices are aware of the storm of controversy over the cases in front of them. They’re expected to follow the law and rule accordingly without taking into account the views of family members, friends, and New York Times editors. That’s what they do for a living.

Thomas married Ginni in 1987. By then he was nearly 40 years old and had worked as a lawyer, a prosecutor, and as a civil rights official in the Reagan administration. He had developed his own point of view on the world. A unique one as testified by his rulings over the years.

Leftists and their media would like us to believe that the only reason Justice Thomas believes anything or rules on anything is because his white wife tells him to do it. That’s stupidly racist.

Even those who violently hate Thomas ought to be able to admit that he has a developed judicial philosophy and that his rulings reflect that unique worldview. The idea that a man who has defied expectations throughout his life, who has persevered despite being repeatedly hit with every racial slur in the book, is just following his wife’s lead is dumb beyond belief.

And yet this is the argument that the lynch mob targeting Justice Thomas is going with.

After all the fury over his wife’s activism, what does this amount to in Justice Thomas’ rulings? Where is the evidence of any conflict of interest or any violation of the law? It doesn’t exist.

The New York Times noted that "Justices Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr." responded to the Supreme Court rejecting an election lawsuit by Texas by "issuing a brief statement suggesting the majority had acted too soon in shutting the case down." Actually Alito wrote the dissent, with Thomas joining him, on procedural grounds. At the time the dissent was issued, the media and its legal experts argued that it was not a ruling on the election, but on jurisdictional standing.

The paper also misleadingly notes that, "Justice Thomas addressed election fraud in a dissent from the Supreme Court’s decision to turn away a challenge to Pennsylvania’s voting procedures." The Supreme Court had previously deadlocked several times over the issue with previous dissents by Alito, Gorsuch, and Thomas, and the Thomas dissent highlighted by the paper had focused on the importance of providing "clear rules for future elections."

The media and its legal experts, shoddy as they may be, know all this perfectly well. They know that the paper is deliberately misrepresenting these cases in order to single out Thomas.

And that there’s no basis for doing so.

Thomas wrote as one of the court’s two leading conservatives, along with Alito, and there was nothing unique in his dissents that deviated from his judicial philosophy. Using his wife to attack him is the despicable tactic of a ruthless totalitarian movement with no shred of decency.

Having run out of any credible legal arguments, the lynch mob once again borrows the familiar logic of Russiagate to argue that their smear campaign proves that Thomas must recuse.

“Judging by the nature of the text messages and the uproar over them, that provision alone is enough to require Justice Thomas’s recusal, legal experts said,” the New York Times argued.

Since the New York Times and its media partners are the source of the “uproar”, conservative judges would have to recuse every time lefties launch a vocal smear campaign against them.

That’s using the media as a heckler’s veto to bar conservative judges from cases.

And that’s what this is really about.

'Real Time' Panel Discusses Florida's 'Don't Say Gay' Legislation (VIDEO)

I hate this debate. I'm just sickened by it. 

I also hate attacks on opponents as "groomers." Maybe their are some, but those at the forefront of the opposition are radical trans activists pushing cultural Marxism on society to destroy the nuclear family and incite social revolution (as if that's not happened already). "Groomer" is a bigoted attack on legitimate interest group actors, and it's puerile. 

Fucking just beat these people at the polls, damn! 

The bill, now signed into law, is called "CS/CS/HB 1557 - Parental Rights in Education," and if you read it, it's just common sense. 

Anyways I watched this episode below on HBO because Batya Ungar-Sargon was scheduled and I like her a lot. 

If you haven't yet, get your copy of Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy. It's an outstanding book which should be winning all kinds of awards. 

WATCH: 

Corporate America's Now the Bastion Radical Leftism (VIDEO)

Here's Vivek Ramaswamy, for Prager University:

How Vladimir Putin Weaponizes Refugees

From Ayaan Hirsi Ali, at UnHerd, "Immigrants have become a tool of war":

For the last three decades, Europe’s leaders have pursued a noble strategy to prevent conflict using trade, aid and diplomacy. But their reliance on soft power has had an unintended consequence: it has left them divorced from reality.

Soft-power tools are honourable and often pragmatic methods of conflict prevention and, at times, resolution. Just look at America’s Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after the Second World War, or the foreign aid provided today by the wealthy West to smaller and poorer nations.

However, as we are now seeing, it is deluded to conclude that evil men can be stopped by soft power alone. In the days since Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Europeans have been reminded of the necessity of having a well-funded and well-trained military. It has also become clear that we need to abandon our irrational energy policy, which imagines meeting Europe’s energy needs exclusively from ‘renewable’ sources.

Nevertheless, a key battlefield in the conflict playing out in Ukraine continues to be overlooked — and that is immigration policy. This is, of course, nothing new: just as soft power has been divorced from hard power, so immigration policy has been divorced from national security, even though it has been a destabilising factor in Europe for at least a decade.

Both sides of the immigration equation — the push and pull factors — dramatically affect Europe’s national security. The unyielding flow of immigrants from Africa, the Middle East and South Asia remains a source of civil unease. Social cohesion and national identity have become incendiary issues in polling stations across Europe. Intolerance towards immigrants is high and extremist parties remain popular. At the same time, radical Islamist extremism and the constant threat of terrorism still linger.

Add to this the burden on local resources — on housing, healthcare, education and policing — and it’s hardly surprising that the status quo exacerbates resentment towards immigrants, while undermining trust in the political class. It is no accident that Putin and other adversaries have been using misinformation and disinformation to support anti-immigrant parties and other groups on the far-Right.

What is less well-known, however, is how immigrants have become a tool of war — one that is increasingly deployed by cruel, inhumane autocrats such as Putin.

Since the start of this conflict, at least half a million Ukrainians have crossed into neighbouring countries; according to the EU’s latest warnings, that figure could rise to seven million. To put that in perspective, when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, roughly 1.5 million Ukrainians were displaced. But even then, there was no exodus to the EU; the refugees simply relocated to other regions within the country.

This time, however, it’s unclear if Putin will leave any Ukrainian territory for them to flee to. And make no mistake: this is all part his plan. Indeed, Putin has become the world’s leading advocate of hybrid warfare. In 2016, US General Philip Breedlove, Head of Nato forces in Europe, recognised this, warning that “Russia and the Assad regime are deliberately weaponising migration from Syria”.

Yet in recent years, it’s been in Libya that Putin has pursued his most fierce — and secret — weaponisation of migrants...

 Keep reading.

Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West's Fault

This article from John Mearsheimer is getting a lot of attention, as well as the lecture video I posted the other night. 

Prescient, you might say. (And liberalism here means "classical" liberalism grounded in philosophies of the Enlightenment, from folks like Emmanuel Kant, John Locke, etc.). It's not the American ideological "liberalism" associated with an earlier version of the Democrat Party, now a radical, extreme left party, not *liberal* at all). 

At Foreign Affairs, "The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin":

According to the prevailing wisdom in the West, the Ukraine crisis can be blamed almost entirely on Russian aggression. Russian President Vladimir Putin, the argument goes, annexed Crimea out of a long-standing desire to resuscitate the Soviet empire, and he may eventually go after the rest of Ukraine, as well as other countries in eastern Europe. In this view, the ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 merely provided a pretext for Putin’s decision to order Russian forces to seize part of Ukraine.

But this account is wrong: the United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for the crisis. The taproot of the trouble is NATO enlargement, the central element of a larger strategy to move Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit and integrate it into the West. At the same time, the EU’s expansion eastward and the West’s backing of the pro-democracy movement in Ukraine—beginning with the Orange Revolution in 2004—were critical elements, too. Since the mid-1990s, Russian leaders have adamantly opposed NATO enlargement, and in recent years, they have made it clear that they would not stand by while their strategically important neighbor turned into a Western bastion. For Putin, the illegal overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected and pro-Russian president—which he rightly labeled a “coup”—was the final straw. He responded by taking Crimea, a peninsula he feared would host a NATO naval base, and working to destabilize Ukraine until it abandoned its efforts to join the West.

Putin’s pushback should have come as no surprise. After all, the West had been moving into Russia’s backyard and threatening its core strategic interests, a point Putin made emphatically and repeatedly. Elites in the United States and Europe have been blindsided by events only because they subscribe to a flawed view of international politics. They tend to believe that the logic of realism holds little relevance in the twenty-first century and that Europe can be kept whole and free on the basis of such liberal principles as the rule of law, economic interdependence, and democracy.

But this grand scheme went awry in Ukraine. The crisis there shows that realpolitik remains relevant—and states that ignore it do so at their own peril. U.S. and European leaders blundered in attempting to turn Ukraine into a Western stronghold on Russia’s border. Now that the consequences have been laid bare, it would be an even greater mistake to continue this misbegotten policy.

THE WESTERN AFFRONT

As the Cold War came to a close, Soviet leaders preferred that U.S. forces remain in Europe and NATO stay intact, an arrangement they thought would keep a reunified Germany pacified. But they and their Russian successors did not want NATO to grow any larger and assumed that Western diplomats understood their concerns. The Clinton administration evidently thought otherwise, and in the mid-1990s, it began pushing for NATO to expand.

The first round of enlargement took place in 1999 and brought in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. The second occurred in 2004; it included Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. Moscow complained bitterly from the start. During NATO’s 1995 bombing campaign against the Bosnian Serbs, for example, Russian President Boris Yeltsin said, “This is the first sign of what could happen when NATO comes right up to the Russian Federation’s borders. ... The flame of war could burst out across the whole of Europe.” But the Russians were too weak at the time to derail NATO’s eastward movement—which, at any rate, did not look so threatening, since none of the new members shared a border with Russia, save for the tiny Baltic countries.

Then NATO began looking further east. At its April 2008 summit in Bucharest, the alliance considered admitting Georgia and Ukraine. The George W. Bush administration supported doing so, but France and Germany opposed the move for fear that it would unduly antagonize Russia. In the end, NATO’s members reached a compromise: the alliance did not begin the formal process leading to membership, but it issued a statement endorsing the aspirations of Georgia and Ukraine and boldly declaring, “These countries will become members of NATO.”

Moscow, however, did not see the outcome as much of a compromise. Alexander Grushko, then Russia’s deputy foreign minister, said, “Georgia’s and Ukraine’s membership in the alliance is a huge strategic mistake which would have most serious consequences for pan-European security.” Putin maintained that admitting those two countries to NATO would represent a “direct threat” to Russia. One Russian newspaper reported that Putin, while speaking with Bush, “very transparently hinted that if Ukraine was accepted into NATO, it would cease to exist.”

Russia’s invasion of Georgia in August 2008 should have dispelled any remaining doubts about Putin’s determination to prevent Georgia and Ukraine from joining NATO. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, who was deeply committed to bringing his country into NATO, had decided in the summer of 2008 to reincorporate two separatist regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. But Putin sought to keep Georgia weak and divided—and out of NATO. After fighting broke out between the Georgian government and South Ossetian separatists, Russian forces took control of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Moscow had made its point. Yet despite this clear warning, NATO never publicly abandoned its goal of bringing Georgia and Ukraine into the alliance. And NATO expansion continued marching forward, with Albania and Croatia becoming members in 2009.

The EU, too, has been marching eastward. In May 2008, it unveiled its Eastern Partnership initiative, a program to foster prosperity in such countries as Ukraine and integrate them into the EU economy. Not surprisingly, Russian leaders view the plan as hostile to their country’s interests. This past February, before Yanukovych was forced from office, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov accused the EU of trying to create a “sphere of influence” in eastern Europe. In the eyes of Russian leaders, EU expansion is a stalking horse for NATO expansion...

 

Europe's Dependence on Russia's Natural Gas Supplies Following the Invasion of Ukraine

Oil.

Petroleum.

Fossils fuels.

No matter how much radical environmentalists deceive the leaders of the developed democracies, the fact remains that without fossil fuels, these countries would perish.

At the Economist, "If the supply of Russian gas to Europe were cut off, could LNG plug the gap?":

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has led to renewed speculation about the future of European energy, and in particular about its supply of natural gas. The continent gets around a quarter of its energy from gas. In 2019 Russia provided over 40% of that gas. The West has not gone so far as to place limits on Russian gas exports, although Germany has suspended the licensing of Nord Stream 2 (ns2), a completed but not yet operational pipeline between Russia and Germany. But what if Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, were to cut off gas to the West? One alternative source of energy is liquefied natural gas (lng), which is usually transported by sea. To what extent could lng replace piped Russian gas as a source of energy for Europe?

Europe already uses a lot of lng; it makes up around a quarter of the region’s natural-gas imports. One question is how much more of the stuff Europe can process. lng is first turned into a liquid in order to be transported; it must then be “re-gassed” at terminals, usually near the coast, before it can be used to heat and power homes. Heavy investments in regasification plants mean that Europe has plenty of idle capacity. The region’s import terminals ran at 45% of capacity last year, according to Energy Intelligence, an industry publisher, although not all of these terminals are in the right place. Germany has no terminals, while Spain has a quarter of the continent’s capacity, even though its gas infrastructure is largely isolated from the rest of Europe.

The more pressing problem is the available supply of lng. The biggest exporters of lng are America, Australia and Qatar. Although they all have plenty more gas, all are already exporting at or near full tilt. It takes a long time to expand liquefaction and export capacity, so Europe’s best short-term hope would be to get hold of existing lng cargoes originally destined for elsewhere. But Asia also has a strong appetite for lng. China’s imports grew by 82% between 2017 and 2020, for example; last year it overtook Japan as the world’s biggest importer. And around 70% of lng traded globally is on contracts that run for ten years or more. Europe tends to rely on spot markets and shorter contracts. In the past that has allowed Europe to take advantage of low prices when stocks were plentiful, and ensured that countries did not commit themselves to using fossil fuels decades into the future. But it also leaves Europe at the mercy of the market.

When Europe’s gas reserves dwindled over the autumn and winter, in part because Russian supplies dropped, lng imports shot up (see chart). So did prices. In the past, spot prices in Asia have typically been higher than in Europe. But in recent months the price in Europe has at times matched Asian levels. The invasion of Ukraine has only made things worse...

Still more.

 

Can Ukraine's Resistance Defeat the Russian Army?

This was published before armed hostilities broke out Thursday.

At War on the Rocks, "Can Ukrainian Resistance Foil a Russian Victory?":

The plans of a country facing invasion by a larger foe rest on a fragile hope: Once a nation’s conventional defenses are defeated, a pre-planned, citizen resistance will arise and contest the occupying invaders. Partisan warfare will impose costs on the occupiers, prevent the enemy from consolidating gains, and create the time and space required to receive external support for liberation. If Russia launches a fresh invasion, Ukraine will surely seek to fall back on such a strategy. Kyiv’s resistance plans — which have been carefully and loudly choreographed — are a key part of its hopes to deter Russia. Still, questions remain about Ukraine’s calculation for committing to a partisan-style guerrilla war. If Russia invades, will Ukraine’s partisans fight, survive, and change strategic outcomes? Would the threat of a citizen resistance, across the depth and breadth of Ukraine, meet its promise?

As a former U.S. Army special operations officer, I have spent some time building resistances or fighting them. On behalf of the Joint Special Operations University, I have more recently worked with countries to help craft resistance strategies as part of their total defense plans. In my experience, state-sponsored resistance movements defy easy categorization. Few stock templates exist because resistance plans are crafted to the political will, geographic constraints, alliance structures, and social dynamics of a given nation-state. It is also difficult to predict the behaviors of citizen resistors under the stress of invasion and occupation. Although I cannot predict what will happen, I can offer a framework to better understand the role of Ukraine’s citizen-resistance plans in resisting a Russian invasion.

Look Fearsome

A citizen-resistance must show enough of its capability to be feared. This truth comes in handy in the mountains nearby my home. When I see a bear while hiking, I calmly raise my arms and side-embrace anyone with me to look like a hyper-sized, multi-limbed threat. The bear experiences just enough doubt to pause and move on, seeking easier prey. Resistance, employed as a deterrent, has a similar effect. When a state threatens to fight a superior force with a motley collection of citizen-patriots, it must show enough width and breadth to make the invader pause. Ukraine has a credible threat in this regard. With its seven-year history of citizen-militias, quasi-official proxies, and official resistance formations, there is no question that invading forces will be met by gutsy irregulars. Ukraine has a Territorial Defense Force structure of over 150 battalions, geographically assigned to cover all of Ukrainian territory. These units are not uniformly functional, nor are they fully manned and equipped. However, they do provide a localized agency by which to organize infrastructure security and resistance. Ukraine is vocally advertising its resistance movement as one of many signals intended to deter invasion.

As I have previously discussed in Small Wars Journal, Ukrainian resistance units formed organically and spontaneously in 2014, often funded by private-sector oligarchs, rather than the state. Since then, Ukraine has regulated or incorporated many of these irregulars into the fabric of its defense plans. A recent poll indicated that 24 percent of Ukrainians plan to engage in armed resistance if attacked. The Ukrainian armed forces are currently outnumbered and face potential invading forces from the north (Belarus), east (Russia) and south (Crimea, Black Sea, Transnistria). If such an envelopment occurs, resistance forces will be required to fight when and where Ukrainian regulars cannot. Ukraine’s visible partisan warfare plan, when coupled with other deterrence measures, is aimed at deterring a new Russian offensive.

Switzerland employed such a strategy in 1940. When Nazi Germany conquered and occupied much of Europe in the spring and summer of 1940, tiny, neutral Switzerland was fully surrounded by Axis powers. Switzerland mobilized 400,000 citizen-soldiers, and planned to fight in the cities and destroy civil infrastructure before withdrawing to the Alps — favorable terrain for a guerrilla resistance. German staff estimates concluded that Switzerland could only be conquered with a massive commitment of Wehrmacht combat power. As such, Hitler decided against an attack. Other factors contributed, of course: Swiss industrial output, favorable neutrality and banking policies, and demands on German forces elsewhere. Still, Swiss preparedness to resist was a major factor. Spared in the summer of 1940, the Swiss successfully deterred in the moment and, as it turned out, for the rest of the war. Like the Swiss, the goal of Ukraine’s resistance build is to prevent an invasion instead of fighting one.

A Legal Framework

Ukraine passed an innovative law, “On the Foundations of National Resistance,” in July 2021. The law creates a legal framework by which to incorporate, organize, and guide a citizen resistance, as well as a specification of the role of irregulars, militias, and other citizen resistance actions. Since the Ukrainian government understands that not all resistance is productive resistance, the law sets legal boundaries by which the state can monitor, contain, or block counter-productive resistance.

The specter of all citizens taking up arms in a chaotic moment is as nightmarish to Ukraine as it is to Russia. Such chaos could advantage Russia, as it did in February 2014, when Russia snatched Crimea in a lightning strike of creative statecraft. The precipitating event for Russia’s Crimea takeover was a Ukrainian political crisis that led to widespread anti-government protests and civil unrest. In today’s unfolding crisis, Ukraine fears the unlawful spaces where Russian hybrid tactics thrive. Ukraine seeks to avoid wholesale societal breakdown, even if such chaos directly threatens invading Russians. The Ukrainian government has passed legal frameworks to prevent the emergence of chaos that advantages Russia. 

Radical Inclusion 

The power of resistance movements is their ability to bring opposition to scale, presenting multiple dilemmas to skilled, but task-saturated occupying forces. Resistance movements are, by definition, under-gunned and will lose in a conventional fight. Ukrainian planners are aware that Russian regular forces can and will take terrain, if ordered to do so. Furthermore, Russian tactical battle groups will not cede terrain to Ukrainian regulars, much less to the citizen-farmer defending his land with a hunting rifle. The widespread use of civil resistance, amplified by social media, presents a challenge to invading forces who will be intensely focused on winning kinetic battles...

Keep reading. 

Invasion of Ukraine and the Rise of America's Isolationists

Interesting piece, from Zoe Strimpel, at Bari Weiss's SubStack, "America Is Afraid of War. Putin Knows It":

The problem is not just that the United States has, over the past two decades, waged two unsuccessful wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq. Nor is it just that Americans are tired of fighting and don’t care about the former Soviet Union, although there’s some of that. (In a poll just released by the Associated Press, just 26 percent of Americans say the U.S. should play a major role in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.) Nor is it just that Joe Biden is a weak president who lacks the energy needed to do battle with the likes of Vladimir Putin. (See, for example, the statement Biden put out shortly after the invasion was announced.)

It’s that the United States seems to have forgotten the point of waging, or threatening to wage, war. Peace is earned through strength. We can’t ask for it. We can’t talk our way into it. We can’t simply impose (or lift) sanctions. We have to achieve it by threatening—credibly—to pummel into oblivion anyone who gets in the way.

There is a reason that Teddy Roosevelt’s famous 1901 pronouncement—“Speak softly, and carry a big stick”—has become something of a cliché. It’s because it works.

This used to be understood, or taken for granted, not only in Washington but in London, Paris and every other NATO capital. That is no longer the case—in no small part because both left and right, while moving further apart from each other in almost every other respect, have converged on a shared neo-isolationism. Today, almost no one in any position of authority is willing to make a moral argument for going to war.

If you grew up in the second half of the 20th century, during the Cold War or immediately after, you heard often about America being the world’s policeman. During this time, Britain watched its empire collapse and the American empire, which the Americans never called an empire, rise. America promised to respect freedom, democracy and minority rights, and it backed that up with force: a sprawling conventional army, a vast navy, thousands of fighter jets, a nuclear umbrella that extended across the West.

I felt the safety of this promise keenly as a child in London. Most of my extended family had been decimated by the Third Reich, and the idea of a liberal and humane controlling authority was enormously reassuring.

Of course, America had many faults. There were plenty of Vietnamese who did not regard it as a beacon of freedom. The same was true in large pockets of Latin America and Africa. And it was haunted still by slavery. It had gotten much wrong, at home and overseas.

But still. America was the crown jewel of the West, the culmination of a 2,500-year-old evolution that stretched back to the Athenian polis. It had hurtled human progress forward, created gleaming skylines and world-renowned universities and an American Dream that—amazingly—was open to the entire world. It was an invitation to everyone. At the heart of all this was a new kind of civilization that transcended ancient bloodlines and tribal affiliations. It was rooted in the Enlightenment, and its radical promise—that all men are created equal—offered dignity and hope. It was held together by a democratic tradition, an individualism that was rugged but tempered by a sense of community and duty, and the rule of law.

All of this is blindingly obvious but has become almost embarrassing to say out loud. That’s because we no longer know who we are or why it matters...

RTWT.

 

The World's Proletarian Working-Class Has Awoken! (And Progressive-Socialist Elites Won't Stand For It.)

Following up, "Prime Minister Justin Trudeau Invokes Canada's 'Emergencies Act' to Shut Down Truckers' Protest (VIDEO)."

The radical left in power is crushing dissent? Burying the working-class, the alleged dialectical-historic force now driving the world's workers toward the proletarian utopia? 

You don't say? 

Here's Batya:

The workers of the world are literally uniting. And yet these truckers have not been embraced by the left. Instead they have been tagged as fascists and racists by progressive pundits, activists, and politicians—those who tweeted “Stay Home! Slow the Spread!” while truckers delivered their Amazon Prime packages.

This spectacle—of workers fulfilling Marx’s fantasy, only to be smeared by the very people who claim to prioritize the working class—captures in stark relief the split emerging between the working class and the left that used to represent them...

Well, everything's upside down, so what the fuck? The populist-nationalists are gaining the upper hand, and idiot left-progressives are basically propelling the "far right" that they so much hate straight into power. 

Idiots. Bloody idiots, the lot of them.

Laura Ingraham: The Left's Racial Hatred Never Ends (VIDEO)

The never-ending obsession with race is one the top factors driving political polarization, thanks to the radical left.

Hateful, hateful people. And they never learn, either. Expect a lot of pushback this year culminating in a massive walloping for the Democrats in the midterm elections. I can imagine it now: Just sitting in front of my TV next November, watching the returns come in, rubbing my hands together with glee. If Biden loses in 2024 (if he even runs), it's going to be a new day in America, and Republicans cannot squander the opportunity to turn things around. They need to get ruthless. Beat the left at their own game, divide the opposition, and destroy them.

Here's Ms. Laura:

The Totalitarian Left's Joe Rogan Freakout

These people are bloodthirsty.

Indiscriminate too, as Joe Rogan's really not a conservative.

From Glenn Greenwald, "The Pressure Campaign on Spotify to Remove Joe Rogan Reveals the Religion of Liberals: Censorship":

The Pressure Campaign on Spotify to Remove Joe Rogan Reveals the Religion of Liberals: Censorshiphttps://t.co/SAMtK31UY8

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 29, 2022

American liberals are obsessed with finding ways to silence and censor their adversaries. Every week, if not every day, they have new targets they want de-platformed, banned, silenced, and otherwise prevented from speaking or being heard (by "liberals,” I mean the term of self-description used by the dominant wing of the Democratic Party).

For years, their preferred censorship tactic was to expand and distort the concept of "hate speech” to mean "views that make us uncomfortable,” and then demand that such “hateful” views be prohibited on that basis. For that reason, it is now common to hear Democrats assert, falsely, that the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech does not protect “hate speech." Their political culture has long inculcated them to believe that they can comfortably silence whatever views they arbitrarily place into this category without being guilty of censorship.

Constitutional illiteracy to the side, the “hate speech” framework for justifying censorship is now insufficient because liberals are eager to silence a much broader range of voices than those they can credibly accuse of being hateful. That is why the newest, and now most popular, censorship framework is to claim that their targets are guilty of spreading “misinformation” or “disinformation.” These terms, by design, have no clear or concise meaning. Like the term “terrorism,” it is their elasticity that makes them so useful.

When liberals’ favorite media outlets, from CNN and NBC to The New York Times and The Atlantic, spend four years disseminating one fabricated Russia story after the next — from the Kremlin hacking into Vermont's heating system and Putin's sexual blackmail over Trump to bounties on the heads of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, the Biden email archive being "Russian disinformation,” and a magical mystery weapon that injures American brains with cricket noises — none of that is "disinformation” that requires banishment. Nor are false claims that COVID's origin has proven to be zoonotic rather than a lab leak, the vastly overstated claim that vaccines prevent transmission of COVID, or that Julian Assange stole classified documents and caused people to die. Corporate outlets beloved by liberals are free to spout serious falsehoods without being deemed guilty of disinformation, and, because of that, do so routinely.

This "disinformation" term is reserved for those who question liberal pieties, not for those devoted to affirming them. That is the real functional definition of “disinformation” and of its little cousin, “misinformation.” It is not possible to disagree with liberals or see the world differently than they see it. The only two choices are unthinking submission to their dogma or acting as an agent of "disinformation.” Dissent does not exist to them; any deviation from their worldview is inherently dangerous — to the point that it cannot be heard.

The data proving a deeply radical authoritarian strain in Trump-era Democratic Party politics is ample and have been extensively reported here. Democrats overwhelmingly trust and love the FBI and CIA. Polls show they overwhelmingly favor censorship of the internet not only by Big Tech oligarchs but also by the state. Leading Democratic Party politicians have repeatedly subpoenaed social media executives and explicitly threatened them with legal and regulatory reprisals if they do not censor more aggressively — a likely violation of the First Amendment given decades of case law ruling that state officials are barred from coercing private actors to censor for them, in ways the Constitution prohibits them from doing directly.

Democratic officials have used the pretexts of COVID, “the insurrection," and Russia to justify their censorship demands. Both Joe Biden and his Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, have "urged” Silicon Valley to censor more when asked about Joe Rogan and others who air what they call “disinformation” about COVID. They cheered the use of pro-prosecutor tactics against Michael Flynn and other Russiagate targets; made a hero out of the Capitol Hill Police officer who shot and killed the unarmed Ashli Babbitt; voted for an additional $2 billion to expand the functions of the Capitol Police; have demanded and obtained lengthy prison sentences and solitary confinement even for non-violent 1/6 defendants; and even seek to import the War on Terror onto domestic soil.

Given the climate prevailing in the American liberal faction, this authoritarianism is anything but surprising. For those who convince themselves that they are not battling mere political opponents with a different ideology but a fascist movement led by a Hitler-like figure bent on imposing totalitarianism — a core, defining belief of modern-day Democratic Party politics — it is virtually inevitable that they will embrace authoritarianism. When a political movement is subsumed by fear — the Orange Hitler will put you in camps and end democracy if he wins again — then it is not only expected but even rational to embrace authoritarian tactics including censorship to stave off this existential threat. Fear always breeds authoritarianism, which is why manipulating and stimulating that human instinct is the favorite tactic of political demagogues...

Keep reading.

 

Allison Fluke-Ekren, American Battalion Commander for Islamic State in Syria, Charged with Providing Material Support to Terrorist Organization (PHOTO)

The Department of Justice filed charges in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.

Man this is wild.

A mild-mannered Kansas school teacher? (On right at the photo.)

Pretty mind-boggling. 

At the New York Times, "American Woman Accused of Prominent Role in Islamic State":

The F.B.I. has arrested an American woman who federal prosecutors said had risen through the ranks of the Islamic State in Syria to become a battalion commander, training women and children to use assault rifles and suicide belts, the Justice Department disclosed on Saturday.

The woman, Allison Fluke-Ekren, 42, a former teacher from Kansas, was charged with providing material support to a terrorist organization. The circumstances of her capture in Syria were not immediately known, but the F.B.I. flew her to Virginia on Friday to face prosecution.

Prosecutors described Ms. Fluke-Ekren as playing an unusually outsized role in the Islamic State as a woman and an American. Charges against American women involved with the Islamic State have been rare.

Investigators said Ms. Fluke-Ekren was smuggled into Syria in 2012 from Libya. She traveled to the country, according to one witness, because she wanted to wage “violent jihad,” Raj Parekh, a federal prosecutor, wrote in a detention memo that was made public on Saturday.

According to a criminal complaint that was filed in 2019, a witness told the F.B.I. that Ms. Fluke-Ekren and her husband brought $15,000 to Syria to buy weapons. Her husband, the witness said, eventually rose to be the commander of all snipers in Syria in 2014. He later died in an airstrike while conducting a terrorist attack on behalf of the Islamic State, investigators said. Ms. Fluke-Ekren met her husband in the United States, according to court documents.

The same witness also told the F.B.I. that Ms. Fluke-Ekren had a plan in 2014 to attack a college in the United States using backpacks filled with explosives. Prosecutors did not reveal which college she had wanted to target. The criminal complaint said her plan was presented to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State at the time, who approved it for funding. The witness said the attack was put on hold after Ms. Fluke-Ekren learned she was pregnant. Ms. Fluke-Ekren had multiple children, but it is not clear how many.

Prosecutors said Ms. Fluke-Ekren moved to Egypt in 2008, lived there for about three years and then traveled to Libya, where she stayed for about a year before sneaking into Syria. According to one witness, Ms. Fluke-Ekren departed Libya because another terrorist organization, Ansar al-Sharia, was no longer conducting attacks in that country and she wanted to wage violent jihad.

In his memo arguing to keep Ms. Fluke-Ekren behind bars while she awaits trial, Mr. Parekh said she had been a “fervent believer in the radical terrorist ideology of ISIS for many years.” The prosecutor said the government had numerous witnesses who were prepared to testify against her.

According to the detention memo, the mayor of the Syrian city of Raqqa, the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed capital, approved the opening of a military battalion to train women to help defend the city. Ms. Fluke-Ekren, investigators said, soon became the leader and organizer of it.

Witnesses said that Ms. Fluke-Ekren taught classes for members of the battalion, and on one occasion, a young child of hers was seen holding an assault rifle. One witness said that more than 100 women and girls had received training from Ms. Fluke-Ekren. She had hoped to create a cadre of suicide bombers that could infiltrate enemies’ positions, but the effort never materialized, according to the complaint. Ms. Fluke-Ekren told another witness about her desire to attack a shopping mall using a remote-detonated vehicle full of explosives. The witness said she wanted to kill large numbers of people.

Court documents said that after the death of her husband, Ms. Fluke-Ekren married another Islamic State terrorist, a Bangladeshi man who specialized in drones and was working on a plan to drop chemical bombs from the air. He also died. She then married an Islamic State military leader who was responsible for the defense of Raqqa, a witness said.

A witness also said that Ms. Fluke-Ekren claimed to have tried to send a message to her family with the goal of tricking them into believing she was dead so the U.S. government would stop trying to find her. She told the witness that she never wanted to return to the United States and wanted to die a martyr in Syria.

Federal prosecutors in Virginia have mounted an aggressive effort to prosecute terrorists captured overseas. The cases can be extremely difficult because witnesses and other evidence can often only be found in war zones, as well as because of geopolitical considerations...

And at the DOJ's page, "American Woman Who Led ISIS Battalion Charged with Providing Material Support to a Terrorist Organization" (via Memeorandum).