Real inflation is running about 20%, Kamala parties like it’s 1971, the New York Times is shocked, shocked to discover Hunter Biden asking for state favors for foreign cronies, gold hits new highs, laughing at an old SNL skit is now a thoughtcrime, and an update on Intel’s woes.
The New York Times reports that the federal government is accelerating the naturalization of immigrants in America as part of a process of “reshaping the electorate, merely months before a pivotal election,” according to one observer quoted in the piece.
“The federal government is processing citizenship requests at the fastest clip in a decade, moving rapidly through a backlog that built up during the Trump administration and the coronavirus pandemic,” reports the newspaper.
One Honduran woman marveled at the fact that authorities were able to process and approve her application in as little as six months.
The story highlights how many of these new citizens will immediately become eligible to vote in key battleground states, including Georgia, Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania.
The piece includes a very revealing quote from Xiao Wang, chief executive of Boundless, a data analysis company.
“The surge in naturalization efficiency isn’t just about clearing backlogs; it’s potentially reshaping the electorate, merely months before a pivotal election,” said Wang.
“Every citizenship application could be a vote that decides Senate seats or even the presidency,” he added.
In other words, knowing that immigrants are far likelier to vote Democrat, the Biden administration is importing them at breakneck speed in order to tip the scales for Kamala Harris.
3.3 million immigrants have become citizens during Biden’s time in office, with data showing that more will vote Democrat than Republican.
This has partly driven the Trump campaign’s efforts to appeal more to “Jamal” and “Enrique,” and not so much “Karen,” although the strategy has caused division amongst Trump’s base.
The legacy media has consistently denounced the idea of mass migration being a deliberate ploy to increase the voter base for Democrats as part of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, while simultaneously admitting it’s happening.
Democrats have declared that they have no confidence in the electorate and must create a new one…
Restaurant owner says that the real inflation rate is closer to 20% over six months:
The owner of four restaurants made this video when inflation was at 3.5%. Today, we’re told that inflation is at 2.9%. He looked at the prices of some products and concluded that the government’s inflation numbers don’t make sense. Since February, food prices have increased:
How does Kamala Harris plan to combat inflation? By channeling Richard Nixon from 1971 and imposing wage and price controls.
After the unoriginal Vice President Kamala Harris stole former President Trump’s proposed ‘no tax on tips’ policy, she’s at it again with yet another recycled idea. This time, she’s echoing President Biden’s actions and rhetoric to crack down on sky-high food prices by proposing the first-ever federal ban on “corporate price-gouging in the food and grocery industries”—a move that reeks of socialism.
“There’s a big difference between fair pricing in competitive markets, and excessive prices unrelated to the costs of doing business,” the Harris campaign wrote in a statement, adding, “Americans can see that difference in their grocery bills.”
The Harris campaign said the vice president will unveil the new federal proposed ban on Friday at a campaign rally in the battleground state of North Carolina as part of a broader economic policy platform. The proposal will ensure food companies can’t exploit consumers to increase profits, according to CBS News, citing Harris-Walz campaign officials.
Harris’ policy speech will also call on the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys to examine corporations violating price-fixing rules. Her remarks are expected to echo Biden’s actions and rhetoric, especially with his war against meat processing companies that he alleges are responsible for higher burger prices at the supermarket.
VP Harris’ campaign argues that lowering Americans’ costs is a function of socialist-style price controls. Yet this is the quickest way to understand that Harris’ economic team has no actual understanding of inflation.
Heritage Foundation’s EJ Antoni explained, “Here’s your “price gouging” narrative: average costs paid by businesses have risen just as much as costs charged to consumers – if businesses are being “greedy,” they’re doing it all wrong…”
Instead of curbing out-of-control government spending, which debt rises $1 trillion every 100 days, and understanding that monetary inflation driven by the Federal Reserve’s money creation is the root cause of inflation, Harris deflects the actual problem: The Fed. She instead goes after big corporations for ‘illegal price gouging.’
Thus unable to understand the disasterous economic policies of the past are doomed to repeat it…
“Conversation Between Musk And Trump Generates Over A Billion Views.” You can see a transcript of the interview here.
In a post last month (“How The Democrats Los Silicon Valley”), I mentioned that top Silicon Valley venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz had endorsed Trump.
Ben Horowitz, in particular, seemed like an unusual Trump supporter, coming from a liberal Jewish background. Now it looks like Trump has another, thanks to his X space with Elon Musk last night: Zynga founder Mark Pincus. During the first Trump administration, Pincus opposed Trump’s “Muslim ban”, but after the leftist celebrations following October 7th last year, he seemed to have some second thoughts about that.
Despite corporate media’s unabashed u-turn to support Kamala Harris, her campaign has been busted creating made-up headlines next to the names of real news outlets to trick people into thinking they’ve stumbled upon the real thing, Axios reports.
Upon hearing the news, The Guardian lost their shit, telling Axios: “While we understand why an organization might wish to align itself with the Guardian’s trusted brand, we need to ensure it is being used appropriately and with our permission. We’ll be reaching out to Google for more information about this practice.”
The ads include links to real articles from the outlets, however the headlines and supporting text were altered.
“Democratic California State Lawmaker Switches To Republican Party…State Sen. Marie Alvarado-Gil, who represents the state’s fourth Senate district, said she joined the Senate Republican Caucus and party after deep reflection and to help ‘in their fight to fix California.'”
While Joe Biden was vice president, his son Hunter attempted to obtain State Department assistance in securing a deal for Ukrainian gas company Burisma, of which Hunter was a highly-compensated board member despite having no experience in its industry, the New York Times reported on Tuesday. The revelation of the 2016 episode underscores allegations that Hunter sought to enrich himself by trading on his father’s influence.
The Times report draws on newly-released government records pertaining to Hunter’s pushing of a Burisma deal in Italy. The Biden White House had resisted releasing the files for years, only to relent soon after Biden was pressured into abandoning his reelection bid.
One wonders how long the New York Times would have waited to report this if Biden were still seeking reelection? My guess is never.
Go figure. It’s amazing what some actual reporting — and a withdrawal from a presidential election — can shake loose, no?
Just four short years ago, we were all assured by the Protection Racket Media that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation, and that allegations of influence-peddling by the Bidens were just political dirty tricks, right? Right? Wrong. The New York Times’ Ken Vogel reports that Hunter’s efforts to sell influence within the administration were well known during Joe Biden’s term as Vice President. It’s even about Burisma, the company that we were told paid Hunter a lot of money for his energy-industry expertise.
Oh, and the records of it got “withheld” by the Biden administration for “years,” too:
Hunter Biden sought assistance from the U.S. government for a potentially lucrative energy project in Italy while his father was vice president, according to newly released records and interviews.
The records, which the Biden administration had withheld for years, indicate that Hunter Biden wrote at least one letter to the U.S. ambassador to Italy in 2016 seeking assistance for the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, where he was a board member.
Well, we did have records in October 2020. Hunter Biden kept records of these dealings on his laptop, which he abandoned in a repair shop. When the New York Post reported on the contents of the laptop, including a number of emails that made clear he leveraged his fathers office to sell influence at Burisma and elsewhere, the media ignored it — even though one of Hunter’s partners (Tony Bobulinski) publicly authenticated the messages when asked.
Nearly four years later, the NYT gets around to the truth. And if you’re questioning the timing, you have good company, because Vogel appears to be somewhat curious about it as well:
The department’s release of documents to The New York Times came shortly after President Biden dropped out of the presidential race, and as his son prepares to stand trial next month on charges of evading taxes on millions of dollars in income from Burisma and other foreign businesses.
Go figure again! It’s as if the cover-up extended as long as Joe Biden had electoral interests to protect. Now that Biden has pulled out of the race, there’s no need to keep covering up for Biden Inc.
“California Sheriff Blasts Harris For Using His Image In “Misleading” Campaign Ad, Says He Supports Trump.” “In light of a recent political ad put out by Kamala Harris featuring Sheriff [Mike] Boudreaux, as well as other local law enforcement, the Sheriff wants to make it abundantly clear that his image is being used without his permission, and he does NOT endorse Harris for President or any other political office.”
The same Jew-haters who drove Columbia University’s president Minouche Shafik off are now coming for Kamala Harris.
Only a short week ago, Harris was heckled by pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel protesters, like those who has spilled out from college campuses after October 7. Protesters screamed out at her as she stood on stage repeating her stump speech. As they yelled, Harris tried to shame them. “I’m speaking,” she said, hearkening back to her VP debate against Mike Pence in 2020. “I’m speaking” in context means several things, including an attempt to grab control based on her identity factors: black, female. By identitarian logic, the vice president is oppressed, and by the logic of progressive discourse, that means that she gets to speak first, and that what she has to say carries all that much more weight. An event simply in favor of her candidacy was crashed in New York City on Wednesday night where agitators set off smoke bombs and held up signs saying “No Votes for Bombala’s Genocide.” 14 of them were arrested.
The agitators wanted some kind of response, some kind of indication of what Harris’ policy on Israel and Gaza might be if she gets voted into the White House. And they haven’t gotten it. Meanwhile, there are clearly massive anti-Israel events planned for the Democratic National Convention next week. While Kamala is trying to keep the euphoria going, attempting to dance and sing her way into the White House, her base will be out in the street demanding answers. Will she be lenient like Magill? Bend over backwards like Gay? Or call in a bigger force, like Shafik, because she doesn’t know how to handle it on her own?
The far left of Harris’ party hates Israel. They love Palestinians not for their culture or policies–which include anti-LGBTQ and anti-female regulations as in other strict, Muslim countries–but simply because they are “oppressed.” And Harris can’t handle them. Even at her speech, rarefied identity wasn’t enough to keep them in their place. The campus riots will likely start up again. As soon as the college-bound finish their orientations, they’ll be picking up their marching orders and protest signs to join their comrades on the quad.
There is already noise that Harris would like to throw Israel under the bus, to eradicate funding and arms shipments. The same woman that waved the flag of Ukraine in Congress as she promised to send him endless weapons and aid, may think the aid packages and arms sales to Israel go too far. Harris may sympathize with the protesters.
before his honeymoon [in Communist China in 1994], Walz launched a company called Educational Travel Adventures, which specialized in bringing American students to China. An article in the local Chinese media reported that he and his bride brought 50 students from America. The company continued to send students to China until 2003. It is important to note that operating a business in China requires all kinds of permits—both official and unofficial—from Chinese authorities at the local, provincial, and central levels. These permits were typically obtained either by paying bribes or by securing endorsements, whether tacit or open, from government officials.
Professional atheist Richard Dawkins posts that men and women are different and male boxers shouldn’t be competing with female boxers. Result: Facebook nuked his account.
So what do you do when your software problem brings a customers operations down hard? Well, if you’re Crowdstrike and the customer is Delta airlines, then you slam Delta for not recovering fast enough.
Python Development Foundation suspends developer for enjoying old “Jane, you ignorant slut” skit. I can only imagine the snowflake reactions to the Chevy Chase/Richard Pryor word association skit…
Flock of self-driving Waymo cars in San Francisco honk all night in their parking lot. As you might be able to guess, nearby residents are just thrilled at this development…
Speaking of electric cars, there’s concerning over letting them park in parking garages because of the possibility of them catching fire and the difficulty of extinguishing same.
Remember how Intel said the problem with their chips was microcode? Yeah. That may not be the case (or at least not the whole case), and it may actually be a process problem involving oxidation of vias (i.e., the connection between two metal layers).
British Prime Minister Sir Kier Starmer has vowed that police have his full support in taking on “extremists” as anti-mass migration protests and riots have broken out across the United Kingdom following the mass stabbing at a children’s dance party in Southport earlier this week.
Facing a full-blown crisis less than one month into office, recently elected leftist Prime Minister Starmer gathered top cabinet ministers on Saturday as unrest erupted in dozens of towns and cities throughout the UK, in many cases in typical Labour Party strongholds in the north of England, in response to the slaying of three young girls and the stabbing of eight others, including children, allegedly by a 17-year-old Rwandan-heritage second-generation immigrant on Monday.
The Guardian, citing the far-left Hope Not Hate organisation, reported that an estimated 35 locations had been scheduled to see protests on Saturday, some of which saw violent clashes between participants and the police, as well as attacks on businesses, particularly in Belfast, Hull, Liverpool, and Manchester. According to The Telegraph, at least 90 arrests were made throughout the country on Sunday.
Snip.
The prime minister’s response to his first crisis of his expected five-year term has been heavily criticised by the Reform UK party of Nigel Farage, who accused Starmer of failing to address the root cause of the anger, which is mass migration.
On Friday, Farage’s deputy, Boston and Skegness MP Richard Tice, said: “Many millions of concerned British citizens are furious at lawless Britain. Children being slaughtered. Machete mobs abound. Soldiers being stabbed. Police violently attacked in airport.
“Instead of empathy, Keir Starmer labelled folk as “far-right”. Out of touch, clueless.”
As Farage put it a month ago, “Something is going very, very wrong with the country.”
He rails against the social justice push to paint the history of the UK as a merely a long story of oppression (sound familiar?), and the radical increase in crime that recent immigration policies (including those under ostensible “conservative” governments) have brought to the UK, and notes that crime used to be concern of the middle class and elderly, but now is a worry of the young as well, who get assaulted when going out to concerts and events at night. “The answer, of course, to that is a completely different, less woke approach to policing.”
We’ve accepted absolutely, since the late 1940s, that immigration into Britain can be a good thing. Certainly the choice of food in most of our towns is rather better as a result of it. But what has happened over the course of the last 25 years is something entirely different. It is mass migration on a level that in fact begins not just to divide and damage communities, and potentially to set people apart from each other, which is dangerous. But also, I think, a feeling that perhaps something about our culture is directly under threat. That sense of who we are. and that this is a problem. Just think about the numbers. You know Tony Blair came to power…Teddy Blair comes to power and opens the door, and bear in mind for the previous 50 years, net migration had been 30—40,000 a year, that’s what it had been for 50 years. Tony Blair comes to power and opens the door, and net over his premiership 2.7 million people come. And the conservatives accelerate it, because now nearly 4 and a half million have come since they came to power.
Just as in the United States, UK residents have been subjected to boiling the frog, using high immigration levels to change the character of the country.
Much like our froggy friends, the British people are being gradually induced into a dangerous “new normal”, in which criminality, disorder, and personal tragedy are part and parcel of life in this country. As a result of our failed policies on crime, immigration, and integration over the past thirty years, we have gradually transitioned from one of the world’s safest societies to a country in which criminality is the norm. There is a risk that the public becomes used to this new reality, and stops expecting politicians to address the root causes of disorder.
Rather than reacting to the slow drip-feed of news stories on an individual basis, it can be informative to step back and take a holistic view. In just the past few weeks, the headlines have been dominated by events which, in the aggregate, point to a precipitous decline in public order.
On July 11th, the new Labour government announced that 5,000 prisoners would be released early, in order to ease prison overcrowding. On July 15th, reports emerged that London’s once-great Metropolitan Police had failed to solve a single burglary, phone theft, or car theft in 166 London neighbourhoods over the past three years. On July 17th, a Jordanian refugee who attacked a female police officer in Bournemouth was spared community service on the grounds that he could not speak English — and on July 18th, two asylum seekers from Egypt who stole a watch worth £25,000 in London’s West End were spared jail.
That same day saw two separate cases of rioting. In the Harehills area of Leeds, police were attacked and a double-decker bus was set on fire by local residents after four Romani children were taken into care by social services. In East London’s plurality-Bangladeshi borough of Tower Hamlets, rioting broke out in response to political unrest in Bangladesh.
Let me stress this again — all of these incidents took place within the space of a single week. In years gone by, each of these high-profile incidents would have dominated national attention, and provoked a conversation about the state of law and order in this country. Today, they’re little more than fodder for the 24-hour news cycle, as fleeting as stories about vapid celebrity drama or tiresome political rigmarole.
The list goes on. July 23rd, Anjem Choudhary is charged with directing an Islamic terrorist group. July 24th, British cadets at an Army Barracks in Gillingham are told not to wear uniforms in public after an officer is targeted and stabbed. July 26th, protests break out after police in Greater Manchester are recorded restraining two brothers seen fighting passengers at Manchester Airport. July 27th, six people arrested after a drive-by shooting in Watford. July 29th, one man dead and two others injured after a knife fight in East London. July 30th, a machete fight breaks out in Southend and protestors take to the streets in Southport following a brutal knife attack at a ballet school, which killed three girls and injured eight others.
As anybody familiar with the sorry decline of South Africa will be able to attest, decline is a process, not a moment. It consists of thousands of individual incidents, system failures, and personal tragedies. When ordinary citizens become accustomed to high levels of violence and criminality, it becomes harder to address the underlying causes of those issues. Adaptation, rather than prevention, becomes the name of the game — gated communities and private security for those who can afford it, atrophying police capacity for those who can’t.
Restoring the kind of high-trust, stable society that we once enjoyed will be a slow, long process — but it is a process which begins with a restoration of law and order. El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele demonstrates that, even while implementing misguided policies such as price controls, a country can still achieve stability and growth if it can maintain law and order. This simple principle gives businesses the confidence to prosper, ensures a harmonious public realm, and gives ordinary citizens — particularly women — peace of mind as they walk the streets.
The Muslim child rape gangs in Rotherham and Oxfordshire should have been huge warnings to how unlimited, unassimilated Muslim immigration into the UK was dangerously destroying the rule of law and social cohesion, but evidently not.
America may not (yet) have Muslim rape ranges, but we certainly have high levels of unassimilated immigration destroying law and order and social cohesion. A course correction to secure the border is badly needed.
So Emmanuel Macron took a look at EU election results and went “OK, I’ll throw snap elections in France to scare you away from voting for Le Pen.” French voters: “Challenge accepted.”
France’s right-wing National Rally is expected to emerge as the single largest party in the first round of the parliamentary election. National Rally led by its new leader, 28-year-old Jordan Bardella, will secure nearly 34 percent of the vote, followed by the newly formed alliance of leftist and Marxist parties, the New Popular Front, which secured 28.5 percent, polls released after Sunday vote show.
“According to an estimate by French polling institute Ipsos Talan, the far-right National Rally party is estimated to win between 230 and 280 seats in the 577-seat National Assembly,” the TV channel France24 reported.
This is few seats short of the 289-mark needed to form the government in the 577-seat National Assembly parliament. National Assembly’s possible post-election coalition partner, the conservative Republicans, is set to get between 41-61 seats with 10 percent of the vote share, early polls indicate.
The French news agency AFP, however, reported National Rally gaining majority in the first round of the vote. “The polling agencies projected this would give the RN a majority of seats in the 577-seat National Assembly after the second round and a possible absolute majority,” the news agency reported.
Leftists and Islamists reacted to the news by doing what they do best: rioting.
The streets of Paris became a war zone overnight Sunday as tens of thousands of left-wing rioters took to the streets in fiery opposition to the historic election victory by the country’s right-wing National Rally (NR).
Rioters smashed storefront windows, vandalized monuments and set massive bonfires in public squares after the election results revealed the party, headed by nationalist Marine Le Pen, took 33% of the vote in the decisive first round of France’s legislative elections.
Naturally, the French left are fighting “Fascism” by unleashing violence upon their political enemies.
An increasing number of Europeans have at last understood that the large-scale presence of Muslims in their countries now threatens to undermine the civilization of Judeo-Christian Europe, and has already resulted in a situation that is far more unpleasant, expensive, and physically dangerous for Europe’s non-Muslims, than would be the case without that large-scale Muslim presence. And the rise of right-wing populism reflects the widespread alarm over the power waged by European political and media elites, who largely oppose restrictions on Muslim immigration. The EU is run by people who are not loyal to the ideal of the nation-state. They are international bureaucrats, able through the supra-national European Union, to impose minimum immigration quotas on its member states. This has led to much unhappiness in those states, some of which — like Hungary— are simply refusing to comply.
For all the endless cries of “Far right, far right!” in the mainstream media, National Rally’s positions on not only immigration, but ecoskepticism and Euroskepticism seems to be shared by the majority of French, and indeed by European voters as a whole. It is only their globalist leaders who disagree.
Some readers may be wondering what a National Rally victory will mean for NATO, as well as Ukraine’s continued resistance to Russia’s illegal war of territorial aggression. Well the dark pinks at the World Socialist Web Site have their commie knickers in a knot because Marine Le Pen supports both. “France’s neo-fascist National Rally (Rassemblement National-RN) is aligning itself with NATO’s war escalation against nuclear-armed Russia. It is abandoning its ambiguous tactical criticisms of Macron’s military policies and its campaign promise to withdraw France from NATO.”
All good news in my book.
The National Front under Le Pen père had a lot of worrying antisemitic and anti-American baggage. Under Le Pen fille and Bardella, it seems to have jetisoned most of that baggage, and resembles other Euroskeptic parties across the EU.
When Giorgia Meloni of the conservative Brothers of Italy was elected head of Italy’s coalition government, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth from the usual Eurolefty sorts and their media cheering corner about how radical, populist, etc. etc. she was. Plus the usual accusations of fascism, due Brothers of Italy having a bit of that DNA from one of the party’s it joined with being the successor party to the successor party of Il Duce. (It’s Italy. You can’t really tell all the twists and turns of party lineage without a dense color-coded flow chart.)
Wait, you can’t tell it with one, either.
But Meloni has generally governed as a fairly stand-issue slightly rightist leader by European standards. But recently she’s been saying and doing things that show she has a bit more starch than the usual Euroweenie leader.
Italy will pull out of China’s flagship Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the government has confirmed.
Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s administration notified Beijing that it would cease participating in the BRI ahead of a deadline at the year’s end.
Italy was the only major Western nation to sign up to the BRI, one of China’s most ambitious trade and infrastructure projects, in 2019.
The move was heavily criticised by the US and others at the time.
Launched by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013, the BRI aims to invest an estimated $1tn (£794bn; €925bn) across Asia and Europe. Projects including new and upgraded railways and ports aim to connect China with Europe and other parts of Asia.
Snip.
Only a fraction of the up to €20bn worth of investment in Italy promised by Mr Xi in 2019 has materialised.
Italian exports to China were worth €16.4bn last year, compared to €13bn in 2019.
By contrast, Chinese exports to Italy rose to €57.5bn from €31.7bn over the same period.
The bill benefited China a lot more than Italy. Indeed, Chinese investment in Italy actually dropped after signing the Belt and Road agreement, from $650 million in 2019 to just $33 million in 2021. (I suspect Flu Manchu had a lot to do with that, but, well, that was China’s fault too.)
Giorgia Meloni said, “In Europe there is a very Islamization process distant from the values of our civilization!”
Italy’s prime minister Giorgia Meloni scoffed at Islamic culture and said that there is no place for it in Europe. “I believe that there is a problem of compatibility between Islamic culture and the values and rights of our civilization,” she said.
The premier added, “The Islamic cultural centers in Italy are financed by Saudi Arabia where Sharia is in force. In Europe there is a very Islamization process distant from the values of our civilization!
The comments come after the Italian prime minister hosted a political festival organised by her far-right party- the Brothers of Italy- in Rome which was attended by British prime minister Rishi Sunak. In his speech, Rishi Sunak said that he would push for global reforms to the asylum system while warning that the threat of growing number of refugees could “overwhelm” parts of Europe.
A whole lot of people in Europe are thinking the same thing, but few have stated it as bluntly as Meloni, and virtually none among EU country Prime Ministers. (Though Hungary’s Viktor Orban has come closest.)
Despite the Russo-Ukrainian War and the growing recession, unlimited Islamic immigration into traditionally Christian European countries is the hot-button topic European elites have been desperate to avoid talking about, and the one in which governing elite groupthink seems farthest away from the actual will of the people.
Expect it to continue to be a hot topic as long as European leaders continue to ignore the consensus among citizens of EU nations that they don’t want Muslim illegal aliens coming to their country.
San Diego tries enforcing the law, a sampler of the lies Obama told about his life, Blade-Runners take on Big Brother’s cameras, a nuke rises in Texas, and a Cthuloid horror swims the chilly waters of Antarctica. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
San Diego tries “this one weird trick” to deal with homeless problem: Enforcing the law.
Police began enforcing San Diego’s controversial new camping ban Monday, and although officials said they’ve so far focused only on Balboa Park, the new ordinance combined with other enforcement of laws long on the books has already made notable changes in the encampment landscape.
The “Unsafe Camping Ordinance” allows officers to force people off public land if they’re sleeping within two blocks of a school, shelter, trolley station, waterway or park “where a substantial public health and safety risk is determined.”
Capt. Shawn Takeuchi, head of the city’s neighborhood policing division, said his five-member team did arrest several homeless people Monday by Balboa Park, but only for existing warrants.
Others were given a warning, he said. If any of the same people are found illegally camping a day later, they’ll get a ticket even if they’ve moved locations.
Nobody in Balboa Park accepted offers for shelter Monday, the captain added. Enforcement will continue to focus on schools and parks in the near future, and officials declined to say where the team might move next.
Do you think Austin’s government might start enforcing the city’s camping ban? Of course not. Then how are they supposed to rake off the graft? (Hat tip: Instapundit, who offers some takeaways worth highlighting:
1. The homeless respond to policy and incentives like anyone else. The mere announcement of a future camping ban (plus some enforcement of other existing rules) rapidly cleared out major problem areas.
2. The provision of shelter or housing is neither necessary nor sufficient to accomplish these clear-outs. Of the people asked to leave Balboa Park on the first day of enforcement (issuance of warnings), none accepted offers of shelter.
3. The NGOs that have colonized the homeless problem have neither the incentive nor the knowledge to solve it. The head of one shelter was confused by the magical disappearance of his potential clients. “Where did they go?”
There is a fascinating passage in Rising Star, David Garrow’s comprehensive biography of Barack Obama’s early years, in which the historian examines Obama’s account in Dreams from My Father of his breakup with his longtime Chicago girlfriend, Sheila Miyoshi Jager. In Dreams, Obama describes a passionate disagreement following a play by African American playwright August Wilson, in which the young protagonist defends his incipient embrace of Black racial consciousness against his girlfriend’s white-identified liberal universalism. As readers, we know that the stakes of this decision would become more than simply personal: The Black American man that Obama wills into being in this scene would go on to marry a Black woman from the South Side of Chicago named Michelle Robinson and, after a meteoric rise, win election as the first Black president of the United States.
Yet what Garrow documented, after tracking down and interviewing Sheila Miyoshi Jager, was an explosive fight over a very different subject. In Jager’s telling, the quarrel that ended the couple’s relationship was not about Obama’s self-identification as a Black man. And the impetus was not a play about the American Black experience, but an exhibit at Chicago’s Spertus Institute about the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann.
At the time that Obama and Sheila visited the Spertus Institute, Chicago politics was being roiled by a Black mayoral aide named Steve Cokely who, in a series of lectures organized by Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, accused Jewish doctors in Chicago of infecting Black babies with AIDS as part of a genocidal plot against African Americans. The episode highlighted a deep rift within the city’s power echelons, with some prominent Black officials supporting Cokely and others calling for his firing.
In Jager’s recollection, what set off the quarrel that precipitated the end of the couple’s relationship was Obama’s stubborn refusal, after seeing the exhibit, and in the swirl of this Cokely affair, to condemn Black racism. While acknowledging that Obama’s embrace of a Black identity had created some degree of distance between the couple, she insisted that what upset her that day was Obama’s inability to condemn Cokely’s comments. It was not Obama’s Blackness that bothered her, but that he would not condemn antisemitism.
Snip.
Perhaps the most revealing thing about Jager’s account of her fight with Obama, though, is that not one reporter in America bothered to interview her before David Garrow found her, near the end of Obama’s presidency. As Obama’s live-in girlfriend and closest friend during the 1980s, Jager is probably the single most informed and credible source about the inner life of a young man whose election was accompanied by hopes of sweeping, peaceful social change in America—a hope that ended with the election of Donald Trump, or perhaps midway through Obama’s second term, as the president focused on the Iran deal while failing to address the concerns about rampant income inequality, racial inequality, and the growth of a monopoly tech complex that happened on his watch.
The idea that the celebrated journalists who wrote popular biographies of Obama and became enthusiastic members of his personal claque couldn’t locate Jager—or never knew who she was—defies belief. It seems more likely that the character Obama fashioned in Dreams had been defined—by Obama—as being beyond the reach of normal reportorial scrutiny. Indeed, Garrow’s biography of Obama’s early years is filled with such corrections of a historical record that Obama more or less invented himself. Based on years of careful record-searching and patient interviewing, Rising Star highlights a remarkable lack of curiosity on the part of mainstream reporters and institutions about a man who almost instantaneously was treated less like a politician and more like the idol of an inter-elite cult.
Snip.
Progressive theology is built on a mythic hierarchy of group victimhood which has endured throughout time, up until the present day; the injuries that the victims have suffered are so massive, so shocking, and so manifestly unjust that they dwarf the present. Such injuries must be remedied immediately, at nearly any cost. The people who do the work of remedying these injustices, by whatever means, are the heroes of history. Conversely, the sins of the chief oppressors of history, white men, are so dark that nothing short of abject humiliation and capitulation can begin to approach justice.
It goes to say that nothing about the terms of progressive theology is original. It is the theology of Soviet communism, with class struggle replaced by identity politics. In this system, Jews play a unique, double-edged role: They are both an identity group and a Trojan horse through which history can reenter the gates of utopia.
Read the whole thing to see all those facts about Obama that the media ignored…including his fantasies about having sex with men.
Members of the IPCC, such as Pedro Moura-Costa (above) and Gareth Philips, had major conflicts-of-interest. They owned, created and/or worked for businesses — such as Ecosecurities and SGS Forestry — that would directly profit from the report’s conclusions.
In fact, the IPCC panel members’ companies were positioned to earn millions of dollars from the report. But the mainstream media did not report these conflicts and instead piled on the “global warming” and “carbon offset” bandwagons.
Solar energy portal Ecotopia reported that members of the IPCC “…had vested interests in reaching unrealistically and unjustifiably optimistic conclusions about the possibility of compensating for emissions with trees… [and] should have been automatically disqualified from serving on an intergovernmental panel charged with investigating impartially the feasibility and benefits of such ‘offset’ projects.”
According to accounts of four people with knowledge of the situation, M. Kaleo Manuel, a Native Hawaiian cultural practitioner and DLNR’s deputy director for water resource management, initially refused West Maui Land Co.’s requests for additional water to help prevent fires from spreading to properties managed by the company. Manuel eventually released water but not until after the fire had run its course.
His office has not yet commented on the delay of water resources.
How much damage could have been prevented with the extra water is not yet known. However, the question of “Why?” needs to be addressed in the wake of one of the worst natural disasters in Hawaii’s history. Though bureaucratic red tape might be the most obvious suggestion, a recent interview with M. Kaleo Manual offers some interesting and disturbing insight. Manuel waxes philosophical on “water equity” (“equity” being a pervasive woke buzzword) and an ancient “reverence” of water as god-like. He uses these beliefs to support his rationale for keeping tight controls over Hawaiian water supplies; not as a resource to be used, but as a holistic privilege offered by the government.
Economist who named BRICS says the idea of a common BRICS currency is “embarrassing.”
“It’s just ridiculous,” [Lord Jim O’Neill] told the Financial Times in an interview on Monday. “They’re going to create a BRICS central bank? How would you do that? It’s embarrassing almost.”
The economist spoke ahead of the 15th BRICS summit next week, where the nations will meet to decide whether to expand membership to other countries and may also float the idea of the common currency.
The following story was related to me by a former Governor of Minnesota, who was of Norwegian descent. A number of years ago, a Norwegian dignitary (the Prime Minister, I think) visited Minnesota. Talking to our governor, the Prime Minister tut-tutted about Minnesota’s crime rate, saying that there was much less crime in Norway. Minnesota’s governor replied, “We don’t have a crime problem with our Norwegians, either.”
That anecdote came to mind when I read, in the London Times, “Sweden’s slide from peaceful welfare state to Europe’s gun-killings capital.”
Today, Sweden is Europe’s capital of gun homicide. Last year, according to the Swedish national council for crime prevention, 63 people were shot and killed: more than double the European average and, per capita, multitudes higher than London or Paris.
… The effect on Swedish society has been striking. As well as the lives lost, the violence has brought down a government, changed laws and policies, and become the biggest talking point in a country that once prided itself on its reputation as a peaceful welfare state.
Violent crime will do that, although, to be fair, Sweden’s homicide rate is considerably lower than ours. But it is now significantly higher than homicide rates in quite a few other European countries, including Norway. Why is that? Have Swedes suddenly started getting violent? No.
It has also kicked the hornet’s nest of integration. Today, one fifth of all people living in Sweden were born outside the country.
Dow Chemical is planning to build a small nuclear reactor to power their plant in Calhoun County. Good for them. The TRISO-X fuel they’re using sounds like it will be a pebble bed reactor design.
“Target Sales Dipped in Last Quarter Due to Pride Backlash.”
The Europhilic, farmer-oppressing, climate cult-believing government of The Netherlands has fallen over immigration policies.
The Dutch government collapsed on Friday after failing to reach a deal on restricting immigration, which will trigger new elections in the fall.
The crisis was triggered by a push by Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s conservative VVD party to limit the flow of illegal immigrants to the Netherlands, which two of his four-party government coalition refused to support.
“It’s no secret that the coalition partners have differing opinions about immigration policy. Today we unfortunately have to conclude that those differences have become insurmountable. Therefore I will tender the resignation of the entire cabinet to the king,” Mr. Rutte said in a televised news conference.
Tensions came to a head this week, when Mr. Rutte demanded support for a proposal to limit entrance of children of war refugees who are already in the Netherlands and to make families wait at least two years before they can be united.
This latest proposal went too far for the small Christian Union and liberal D66, causing a stalemate.
Mr. Rutte’s coalition will stay on as a caretaker government until a new administration is formed after new elections, a process which in the fractured Dutch political landscape usually takes months.
News agency ANP, citing the national elections committee, said elections would not be held before mid-November.
Opposition parties in the Netherlands were pleased with the fall of the Rutte IV Cabinet. BBB frontwoman Caroline van der Plas tweeted a photo of herself smiling asking others to show the face they made when they heard the news.
“Goodbye Rutte, Kaag and the rest!” writes PVV leader Geert Wilders. He said he has requested a parliamentary debate.
PvdD leader Esther Ouwehand hopes for “the definitive end of the Rutte era.” She said, “Unprecedented that the prime minister created a new crisis in an attempt to save his own skin.”
Rutte’s government is the one that tried to seize land from farmers to prevent them from farming as part of their global warming/anti-meat/land seizure agenda. That government deserved to fall. Actually, what it deserved was having angry farmers armed with torches and hay rakes track members down in the streets and thrash them within an inch of their lives, but the Dutch haven’t been much in the revolution business since 1648.
From this remove, it would be nice if the elections could pave the way for a BBB/PVV Euroskeptic coalition focused on property rights, abandoning insane climate change mandates, restricting Islamist immigration, and protecting free markets and free speech. But European politics seldom proceeds along such (to us) logical lines.
Finland’s newly elected parliament on Tuesday voted in favour of National Coalition Party leader Petteri Orpo to become prime minister, as widely expected, ushering in a right-wing government and ending Social Democrat Sanna Marin’s rule.
Orpo will lead a coalition of the conservative NCP, the nationalist Finns, the minority-language Swedish People’s Party and the Christian Democrats, which together won a majority of parliamentary seats in the April 2 election.
The new finance minister will be Riikka Purra, head of the eurosceptic Finns Party, while the NCP’s deputy leader Elina Valtonen will become foreign minister when the government takes office later on Tuesday.
“I warmly thank you for the confidence you’ve shown me,” Orpo told parliament shortly after the vote.
A self-styled fiscal conservative, Orpo campaigned on a promise to reduce the government’s budget deficit by cutting spending while also reducing taxes and seeking to boost private sector job creation.
The new coalition also shifts immigration policy to the right, aiming to cut refugee quotas, raise the bar for work-based visas and make it more difficult for foreigners to obtain citizenship, key priorities for the Finns Party.
Orpo is hardly a bomb-thrower, with previous stints on the boards of the European Investment Bank and the European Stability Mechanism, which are embedded very deep inside the EU’s deep state. Nor will Finland’s new coalition be mistaken for the second coming of Ronald Reagan.
But time and time again we’re told that the EU policies (just like Social Justice policies in the U.S.) are popular, while time and time again EU member states elect government that oppose many of those policies, especially those favoring unlimited Muslim immigration into member countries.
Finally, those who assert that Euroskeptacism goes hand in hand with appeasing Russia will find that they’re mistaken, as Orpo backed Ukraine and Finland joining NATO.
For Finland Russia’s proximity is a key geostrategic fact, and the war in Ukraine indicates how the problems associated with Russia’s aggressive behaviour have materialized. Russia is defining its interests in a way that threatens peace in Europe and creates insecurity in others. During the past decade, there have been uprisings in several of Russia’s neighbors, which the Kremlin has sought to violently suppress. Russia seeks a new sphere of influence and wants to halt the democratic development of other countries. Not NATO, but the people’s will to decide for themselves seems to be a threat to Putin’s regime.
Finland’s new government, like the old, is firmly in the NATO camp. Funny how fighting the Soviet Union/Russia repeatedly throughout the 20th Century will do that…
We touched on this last month: For a long time, Democrats have boasted that immigration (legal and otherwise) would make them the “natural majority party” in short order. Well, looking at the results from the 2020 and 2021 elections, there’s a lot of evidence to the contrary.
For years, progressives have prophesied that a more culturally diverse America would be a more Democratic America, with a grand coalition of African-Americans, Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans teaming up with liberal whites to put the Republican Party on a path to extinction. If anyone could have summoned this coalition into being, through opposition, it was Donald Trump, the president who made hardline stances on issues like immigration a cornerstone of his politics. Yet Trump actually increased his share of the minority vote in 2020. One exit poll suggested that he had received the highest share of the black vote of any Republican over the past 20 years. The GOP expanded its support among Hispanics, too, to its highest level since 2004.
Digging deep into neighborhood-level results, the New York Times unearthed some surprises. “Across the United States, many areas with large populations of Latinos and residents of Asian descent, including ones with the highest numbers of immigrants, had something in common this election: a surge in turnout and a shift to the right,” the paper noted. Much of this movement toward Trump occurred in heavily Hispanic communities in South Texas, many bordering Mexico. The liberal Democratic theory that a less-white America will be bluer politically appears less and less plausible. In fact, Joe Biden may owe his 2020 victory to shifts in the white vote.
This presents both an opportunity and a challenge for the Republican Party and conservatives more broadly. The 2020 election results suggest that they can find support among some immigrant communities, but the GOP is also home to America’s immigration skeptics, who worry that progressives have judged the situation correctly—that as America grows more diverse, it will also become more socially and culturally liberal. But if the progressive narrative about immigrants and their political allegiance is flawed, then so, too, is the electoral basis for conservative skepticism about immigration.
In 1996, California had one of the most contentious ballot-initiative fights in its history. Proposition 209 gave voters the choice to end the state’s system of racial preferences, used in the university system and elsewhere to extend opportunities to members of certain minority groups. The battle lines were clear: liberals overwhelmingly opposed Prop 209; conservatives supported it.
Voters went on to approve Prop. 209, and a Los Angeles Times exit poll conducted that year showed that white votes made the difference. Majorities of every other ethnic group opposed the referendum.
Last year, liberals organized to overturn Prop. 209 with Proposition 16, which would once again authorize the state explicitly to consider race in college admissions and public hiring. It’s easy to see why organizers were optimistic about their chances. For one, California was much more Democratic in 2020 than it was in 1996: Joe Biden won the state with 63 percent of the vote, compared with Bill Clinton’s 51 percent. The progressive narrative about demographic destiny provided even more reason for optimism. California was a majority-white state in 1996; by 2020, whites had become a minority, and Latinos a plurality, of residents.
Prop. 16’s endorsers included virtually every top Democratic official in the state, including now-vice president Kamala Harris, as well as major corporations like Uber, Twitter, and Facebook. This was also the year of America’s great racial reckoning, when liberals everywhere were openly encouraging institutions to transfer opportunities—even for cartoon voice actors— from whites to nonwhites.
Yet when the votes were counted, Prop. 16 had failed—and by a slightly larger margin than Prop. 209 succeeded in 1996 (57 percent in 2020 vs. just under 55 percent in 1996). California’s increased diversity had done nothing to improve the proposition’s chances. Even worse, polling conducted a few weeks before the vote suggested that just 37 percent of Latinos supported Prop. 16, only 3 percentage points higher than whites.
Though Prop. 16 supporters raised small sums of money compared with other referendum fights, they outraised the measure’s opponents by more than 16 to 1. The opposition to Prop. 16 was made up of a ragtag group of grassroots activists. Many were immigrants who came to America because of its promise that hard work and ingenuity would determine their success, not the color of their skin. Take Ronald Fong, a California-based doctor who emigrated with his parents to the United States from Hong Kong in the 1960s. “The public school system actually was pretty decent,” he said of the United States. “And there was a great deal of trust [among] my parents that the school system would educate us. And for the most part they did fine. It really was that sort of, you know, ethics of hard work, and keeping your nose to the grindstone, good things would happen,” he explained.
Over time, Asian-American immigrants like Fong came to believe that elite college admissions processes were designed to discriminate against them. They have sued institutions like Harvard, alleging that such schools are penalizing Asian applicants to balance student demographics. The campaign against Prop. 16 offered a chance to strike a blow against such a system.
Though Fong didn’t have much political experience, he reached out to others who felt similarly, both inside and outside immigrant communities. They set out to mobilize opposition to Prop. 16. “We did YouTube videos, we did a lot of . . . literal and figurative door-knocking,” he explained. “We had home-made signs, we tried to do car rallies as much as we could. It was . . . a bake sale and car wash mentality and tenacity in terms of getting our message out.”
Snip.
In 2018, Gallup released a set of global surveys asking people whether they wanted to relocate permanently to another country. Of the more than 750 million people whom Gallup estimated would like to move, about one in five (21 percent) preferred the United States as a destination. The second-most popular country, Canada, was the chosen destination for 6 percent of respondents.
This number may surprise Americans who get their views of global attitudes from cable news and social media, which often serve as the propaganda arms of the country’s oikophobic elite. But America’s immigrants take a different view. A 2019 Cato Institute study found that three out of four naturalized U.S. citizens said they were “very proud” to be American—higher than the 69 percent of native-born Americans who said the same. A higher percentage of immigrants also believed that “the world would be better if people in other countries were more like Americans” (39 percent of immigrants shared this view versus 29 percent of natives). Almost 70 percent of native-born Americans said they were “ashamed” of some aspects of America; only 39 percent of immigrants agreed. These differences also show within minority communities. Seventy-three percent of immigrant Muslims, for instance, told Pew they agreed that the “American people are friendly to Muslims,” compared with 30 percent of native-born Muslims who say the same.
We can only speculate about why these differences exist, but it’s important to recognize that immigrants have something most native-born people don’t: a basis for comparison.
My own parents came to this country from Pakistan in the 1970s. They described America to me as a country with some of the kindest, most welcoming people in the world. As a child, I had a hard time believing them. But the more I traveled abroad myself and studied global problems, the more I came to the same conclusion.
Immigrants don’t come to the United States just because they like the people. They largely come here to work, and many are a living testament to the American Dream. As a group of academics showed in one 2019 working paper, “children of immigrants have higher rates of upward mobility than their U.S.-born peers.”
There is, of course, a world of difference between assimilated, upwardly mobile legal immigrants and a permanent underclass of unassimilated illegal alien Mexican laborers, but it seems like Democrats fully expect the former to vote like the latter. And people who came to America for economic opportunity are really pissed off when you lock them out of earning a living for months on end.
The Democratic Party has historically taken Latinos for granted, something that we just witnessed play out in several elections across the country. Driven by two main issues–education and public safety–Latinos are emerging as a significant voting bloc capable of flipping blue seats red and realigning either party in regard to platform and policy.
In Virginia, Republican Glenn Youngkin defeated Clintonista Democrat Terry McAuliffe for governor. Youngkin ran on school choice, an issue dear to Latinos who understand that education is the key to prosperity and the middle class. A survey by AP VoteCast showed that black voters supported McAuliffe by nearly 8-to-1. Latino voters, on the other hand, appear to have favored Youngkin, who received 55 percent of the Hispanic vote, compared to only 43 percent supporting McAuliffe. If Latinos had voted in the same pattern as other minority voters, it would have guaranteed a Democratic victory. They didn’t, which does not portend well for the future of the Democratic Party, since President Joe Biden won Virginia by 10 percentage points a year earlier.
So did Latinos leave the Democratic party, or did the Democratic party leave them?
The Democrats have lurched left towards socialism, embracing values that vilify private property and individual rights. During Barack Obama’s 2008, 2012, and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaigns, Latinos were solidly Democratic voters, second only to African Americans in their loyalty. However, the Barack Obama that ran in 2008 and captured the hearts of Americans would be considered a right wing Republican by today’s standards.
The Democratic Party and Latinos have changed over the past decade and now seem irreconcilable. This is especially worrisome to Democrats since Latinos are the largest of the fast-growing demographic groups in the nation, growing by 23 percent from 2010 to 2020. Latinos now account for 62.1 million or 18.7 percent of the U.S. population.
Last year, the Biden-Harris ticket won a comfortable majority of Latinos across the country, but the administration’s poor handling of the border crisis directly impacts Latinos, and it is a serious mistake for anyone to believe that Latinos favor open borders. In fact, polls routinely demonstrate that helping illegal immigrants achieve legal status is of low concern to most American Latinos, who list jobs, education, housing, crime, and other such matters as of higher importance.
In South Texas, which has long been seen as the gateway to the rest of the region, there have been signs that the Republican Party is making headway with Latinos. In the runoff for the 118th Texas House district, which includes San Antonino–a majority 73% Hispanic city–Republican John Lujan eked out an upset win against Democrat Frank Ramirez by 300 votes. Lujan is a veteran firefighter and former Bexar County sheriff’s deputy, and ran on a platform promising to fight efforts to “defund the police.” Democratic also-ran Robert “Beto” O’Rourke campaigned heavily for Ramirez, claiming that the nation is “watching and paying attention about what happens here, because national Republicans are saying this is a stepping stone to … South Texas.” He’s probably eating his words now.
It should be noted that O’Rourke—a white man of Irish descent who was given the nickname “Beto” as a child initially to distinguish him from his namesake grandfather—is not Latino.
For decades, Texas Democrats have banked on the growth of voters of color*, particularly Black and Latino voters, as the key to their eventual success in a state long dominated by Republicans.
But with less than a month left for candidates to file for statewide office in the 2022 elections, some in the party worry Democrats could see their appeal with those constituencies threatened by a Republican Party that is rapidly diversifying its own candidate pool.
The GOP slate for statewide office includes two high-profile Latinos: Land Commissioner George P. Bush and former Texas Supreme Court Justice Eva Guzman, who are both running for attorney general.
I bet it really sticks in the craw of Texas Democrats that a Bush is Hispanic and Beto isn’t.
It also includes two Black candidates who have previously held state or federal office: former Florida congressman Allen West and state Rep. James White, who are running for governor and agriculture commissioner, respectively.
By contrast, the Democrats’ most formidable candidates are white — Beto O’Rourke, who is running for governor, and Mike Collier, Matthew Dowd and Michelle Beckley, who are running for lieutenant governor.
They then list some Democratic Party minority candidates. If I every do a roundup on the Attorney General’s race we’ll cover them, but none of the people they mention look like they have a chance.
In MSM pieces on Democrats, it always seem to be the “messaging” that’s the problem, not the fact that their ideas are unpopular:
[Political scientist Sharon] Navarro said Democrats will have to perfect their messaging on this point to be successful, not simply rely on voters of color to side with them. Earlier this month, Republicans in Virginia flipped the major statewide offices by making the election about wedge issues like so-called critical race theory and forcing Democrats on the defensive. Texas Republicans could do the same on issues like border and election security.
“So-called” Critical Race Theory. As always, the Democratic Media Complex idea that they can warp the fabric of reality by insisting that only SJW-approved words can be used to frame the debate is another reason why they lose.
“Republicans have a better understanding of how to create the message and how to flip it for the audience,” Navarro said.
Jean Card, a Republican political analyst, said that strategy paid off in Virginia, where the GOP elected Winsome Sears, a Jamaican-born Black woman, as lieutenant governor and Jason Miyares, the son of a Cuban immigrant, as the state’s first Latino attorney general.
“What we saw here was policy over personality,” Card said. “That’s why they were so effective as candidates.”
Also, Republicans can actually address issues without worrying that telling the truth will offend some intersectional Democratic Party faction.
And truth is always a powerful weapon.
*”Voters of color” and “people of color” are both politically correct catchphrases intended to paper over the vast difference between different groups. These phrases essentially mean “minorities that should be voting for Democrats” and, as such, their use should be avoided. And it seems that an awful lot of Democrats recently decided that Asians are secretly white people…
Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Border control, Social Justice Warriors, Iran and Geto Boys all feature in today’s roundup…
The idea that we can go back to a “Pre-Trump Normal” is an illusion.
Washington sophisticates, and the DC press corps in particular, are deeply parochial. Trump didn’t create worldwide skepticism about globalism, resentment of sinecured elites, or frustration with an out-of-touch cultural vanguard. He merely rode them to power.
Politicians and pundits can disagree with this populist trend, but it’s electorally suicidal to ignore it. As I note in USA Today, one look around the globe shows that, in many ways, Trump is the new normal.
These actions on the part of Iran follow a series of sanctions from the US Treasury Department, which on Wednesday (June 12) imposed sanctions on a financial conduit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Qods Force, and last week (June 7) sanctioned Iran’s largest petrochemical holding group.
US officials are also considering sanctions against the Iranian financial body that was established as a trade channel with Europe – a move that would underscore US intolerance to any international workarounds to the Iran sanctions campaign.
You don’t need to read the tea leaves closely to know the administration’s plan for its “maximum pressure” campaign. But one thing the tea leaves don’t show are plans for war. And the reason is simple: the sanctions are working to help achieve President Donald Trump’s priority goal, which is to undermine Iran’s influence and support for terrorism in the Middle East.
The Treasury’s latest steps follow a State Department press briefing, during which its spokesperson, Morgan Ortagus, listed the negative effects Iran sanctions were having on that country’s terrorist proxies and on its other actions in the region. She pointed to the Lebanese group Hezbollah’s “pleas for public donations via billboards, posters and collection cans” and stressed that “Iran is withdrawing Hezbollah fighters from Syria and cutting or canceling their salaries.” This is a big deal.
She also pointed to Hamas’s austerity plan in Gaza and to the IRGC’s budget cuts for Iraq Shia militia groups. She highlighted fuel shortages in Syria due to the cut in Iranian oil supply and noted the IRGC cyber command “is short on cash.”
Others have also picked up on this emerging trend: that Iran sanctions are starving Iran’s proxies of critical funds. The Washington Post reported that US sanctions against Iran have “curtailed” Iran’s finances to Hezbollah, which “has seen a sharp fall in its revenue and is being forced to make draconian cuts to its spending.” A fighter with an Iranian-backed militia in Syria told The New York Times that he lost a third of his salary and other benefits, lamenting, “Iran doesn’t have enough money to give us.”
When he withdrew the United States from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or what is often called the Iran nuclear deal, last year, President Trump made his top goal clear. Before even addressing Iran’s nuclear capabilities or speaking about working toward a new agreement, he emphasised Iran’s support for terrorism and plans for regional influence as among his key concerns and reasons for withdrawing from the deal. Working to undermine that behavior has been the administration’s top priority in its Iran policy.
Sanctions are particularly taking a bite out of Hezbollah. One wonders, yet again, what the Obama Administration thought it was achieving with the insane and costly Iran deal…
This essay suggests that defeating Social Justice Warrior madness will be more difficult than we think, because it’s essentially a religious phenomena:
The shock presidential election of 2016 might have prompted partisans on both sides to ask whether the vocabulary on which they relied had become a lifeless hindrance. On the Left, the Clinton political machine suffocated every dissenting voice within the Democratic Party, which denied its members the opportunity to rethink the identity politics death-grip that was strangling them. Then as now, Sanders, more smitten by Marx than the halfway-Nietzscheanism of identity politics, invited his fellow Democrats to step back from the brink. Alas, itself guilty of class privilege, the donor class of the Democratic Party living in Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and in the wealthy enclaves surrounding New York City needed a fig leaf to cover its class sins—and, so did not, and will not, allow Sanders to win the Democratic nomination and thereby reveal their unrighteousness.
The Democratic Party will again double down on the rhetoric of identity politics, lose the 2020 presidential election, and conclude—as it did with Russiagate—that some demonic force temporarily bent the arc of history in the wrong direction. The demonic force responsible this next time around? “Hate speech” from the lips of those in the center and on the Right who refuse to rehearse the Red Letter political liturgy identity politics tirelessly repeats—or bow before the false gods that identity politics worships.
Partisans on the Right were given a gift: President Trump. He came into the Republican Party, and the Republican Party understood him not. Many did not want to receive this gift. Having read their Aristotle and Burke, and wishing to remain gentlemen, they withdrew from the political fray—preferring the decorous tyranny of candidate Clinton, the very paragon of identity politics, to the incivility of candidate Trump who, alone among Republican candidates, had the temerity to combat it. “Our tastes, not our ideas, define us”—that is what the 2016 election apparently taught the GOP.
Now forming a Conservative Book Club of sorts, these gentlemen ponder great ideas, entice donors to fund their conferences and think tanks, and all the while enjoin us to believe the vocabulary of the pre-2016 Republican Party continues to be adequate to the troubles we face. It is not.
Today, whether at conservative conferences or in conservative think tanks, the listener even moderately attentive to the conversation will hear of the perils of progressivism and of cultural Marxism, of the need to defend family values, of the importance of being pro-life, of the importance of free markets, and of the threat of multiculturalism. These terms—indeed the constellation these terms form—emerged during the Reagan Presidency, more than three decades ago. If the 2016 Presidential election tells us anything, it is that this verbiage has hardened into nearly lifeless political rhetoric, sustained on life support through institutional buy-in and the assurances of political philosophers sympathetic to conservatism who tirelessly promote the link between the veritable ideas they study and the political vocabulary that has been in place for decades is timeless.
Times have changed, however. Philosophy must gently persuade; that is its privilege and its weakness. Philosophers are concerned with eternal truth. Partisans, by contrast, are concerned with timely rhetoric, opinion, and persuasion. They must engage in comparatively immediate combat. So long as conservatives inattentively conflate philosophizing and partisanship, they will continue to produce partisan vocabularies that masquerade as eternal truth—and partisans unable to respond in a timely manner to shifting times. To win, partisans must know when the weapons of their enemies have changed. Wars—and this is a crucial point to understand—are not won using weapons from earlier engagements. Only armchair soldiers and Conservative Book Club members have the luxury of replaying those battles.
Neither liberals nor conservatives understand the weapon of identity politics, and the immense destruction it can cause. Identity politics does not simply parse different kinds of people. Identity politics is concerned with the relationship of transgression and innocence between different, purportedly monovalent, kinds of people. Identity politics is not just about who we are, it is about a moral stain or purity that defines who we are.
The language of stain and purity, of transgression and innocence, is Christian language. Other religions are concerned with these categories as well, but our long familiarity with Christianity in America means that the invocation of these categories by the practitioners of identity politics derives from Christianity, and from Protestantism in particular. Surveys may indicate that America has lost or is losing its religion; the fever of identity politics that now sweeps the nation suggests these surveys are looking in the wrong place and asking the wrong questions. America has not lost its religion. America has relocated its religion to the realm of politics.
Identity politics transforms politics. It turns politics into a religious venue of sacrificial offering. Ponder for a moment, Christianity. Without the sacrifice of the innocent Lamb of God, there would be no Christianity. Christ, the scapegoat, renders the impure pure—by taking upon Himself “the sins of the world.” By the purging of the scapegoat, those for whom He is the sacrificial offering purify themselves. Identity politics is a political version of this cleansing for groups rather than for individuals. The scapegoat in the case of identity politics is the white heterosexual male who, if purged, supposedly will restore and confirm the cleanliness of all other groups of communities. He is the transgressor; all others—women, blacks, Hispanics, LGBTQs—have their sins covered over by the scapegoat, just as the scapegoated Christ covered over the sins of all the descendants of Adam.
The theological perversity of replacing the Divine Scapegoat of Christianity with the all-too-mortal white heterosexual male scapegoat does not imply that he is innocent. Rather, in identity politics, the white heterosexual male becomes more than who he really is—a member of a scapegoated group who takes away the sins of the world, rather than a mortal, like everyone else, involved in transgression, and searching for redemption. The mystery of transgression and innocence, however, cannot be resolved at the level of groups, because in reality not one of them is univocally pure or stained. But identity politics stands or falls on the claim that groups are such unities of transgressors or innocents. Therein lies its weakness, at which all the armament allied against it must be aimed.
Charles Murray changes his mind. “I want to shut down low-skill immigration for a while.”
“Open borders advocates are panicking after the arrest of Irieno Mujihca, the leader of Pueblo Sin Fronteras, a pro-open borders group funded by globalist financier George Soros that has worked to undermine United States immigration policy and sponsor Central American caravans.”
“Tech reporter Peter Bright has been arrested for soliciting sex with children online. He was employed by Ars Technica until recently. A federal complaint alleges that Bright sought to molest a 7- and 9-year-old and met with an undercover agent for this purpose, at which point he was arrested. It also states that Bright claimed to be in a sexual relationship with an 11-year-old.” Was he a “male feminist” and “anti-#GamerGater”? Of course he was.
“The folks running The Bulwark must decide which they value more, being conservative or being anti-Trump. They have, I’d argue, already picked the latter.”
Texas Senator Ted Cruz and New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez team up again on a bill to make birth control available over the counter.
New York Times leftist: “Hey Rep. Dan Crenshaw! If you really cared about 9/11 victims, you would have co-sponsored the 9/11 Victims Compensation fund!” Rep. Dan Crenshaw: “I did.” New York Times leftist: “Uhhhhh….” DELETE DELETE DELETE. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
Woman kills boyfriend over alien reptile cult. “Shriner told NJ.com she believed Rogers was a ‘Vampire Witch Reptilian Super Soldier.'” Plus: liquor and firearms! Going to use the “David Icke” tag even though he’s nowhere mentioned, as that’s how I keep track of all the reptoid news…
Bad Idea Theater: Netflix Roast of Anne Frank. You’re probably thinking to yourself “Must be The Onion or The Babylon Bee.” No, this is an actual thing that people actually did. (Indeed, Jewish comics seemed to be the driving force behind it.) I suspect it’s only the second unfunniest spoof on the Holocaust, behind Heil Honey, I’m Home, which was also a real thing.
I’ve managed not to have any news about Houston rap group Geto Boys in a LinkSwarm ever, and now two pieces drop this week. First, dwarf frontman Bushwack Bill (legal name Richard Shaw) has died at age 52 from pancreatic cancer. Now Scarface, AKA Brad Jordan, is running for Houston City Council. (Hat tip for both: Dwight.)
Here are two pretty interesting essays on the “revolt of the masses” currently roiling world politics.
The first is from Christopher Caldwell about France from two years ago, and which prefigures the “yellow vest” riots:
In France, a real-estate expert has done something almost as improbable. Christophe Guilluy calls himself a geographer. But he has spent decades as a housing consultant in various rapidly changing neighborhoods north of Paris, studying gentrification, among other things. And he has crafted a convincing narrative tying together France’s various social problems—immigration tensions, inequality, deindustrialization, economic decline, ethnic conflict, and the rise of populist parties.
Snip.
A process that Guilluy calls métropolisation has cut French society in two. In 16 dynamic urban areas (Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Aix-en-Provence, Toulouse, Lille, Bordeaux, Nice, Nantes, Strasbourg, Grenoble, Rennes, Rouen, Toulon, Douai-Lens, and Montpellier), the world’s resources have proved a profitable complement to those found in France. These urban areas are home to all the country’s educational and financial institutions, as well as almost all its corporations and the many well-paying jobs that go with them. Here, too, are the individuals—the entrepreneurs and engineers and CEOs, the fashion designers and models, the film directors and chefs and other “symbolic analysts,” as Robert Reich once called them—who shape the country’s tastes, form its opinions, and renew its prestige. Cheap labor, tariff-free consumer goods, and new markets of billions of people have made globalization a windfall for such prosperous places. But globalization has had no such galvanizing effect on the rest of France. Cities that were lively for hundreds of years—Tarbes, Agen, Albi, Béziers—are now, to use Guilluy’s word, “desertified,” haunted by the empty storefronts and blighted downtowns that Rust Belt Americans know well.
Guilluy doubts that anyplace exists in France’s new economy for working people as we’ve traditionally understood them. Paris offers the most striking case. As it has prospered, the City of Light has stratified, resembling, in this regard, London or American cities such as New York and San Francisco. It’s a place for millionaires, immigrants, tourists, and the young, with no room for the median Frenchman. Paris now drives out the people once thought of as synonymous with the city.
Yet economic opportunities for those unable to prosper in Paris are lacking elsewhere in France. Journalists and politicians assume that the stratification of France’s flourishing metropoles results from a glitch in the workings of globalization. Somehow, the rich parts of France have failed to impart their magical formula to the poor ones. Fixing the problem, at least for certain politicians and policy experts, involves coming up with a clever shortcut: perhaps, say, if Romorantin had free wireless, its citizens would soon find themselves wealthy, too. Guilluy disagrees. For him, there’s no reason to expect that Paris (and France’s other dynamic spots) will generate a new middle class or to assume that broad-based prosperity will develop elsewhere in the country (which happens to be where the majority of the population live). If he is right, we can understand why every major Western country has seen the rise of political movements taking aim at the present system.
Snip.
After the mid-twentieth century, the French state built a vast stock—about 5 million units—of public housing, which now accounts for a sixth of the country’s households. Much of it is hideous-looking, but it’s all more or less affordable. Its purpose has changed, however. It is now used primarily for billeting not native French workers, as once was the case, but immigrants and their descendants, millions of whom arrived from North Africa starting in the 1960s, with yet another wave of newcomers from sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East arriving today. In the rough northern suburb of Aubervilliers, for instance, three-quarters of the young people are of immigrant background. Again, Paris’s future seems visible in contemporary London. Between 2001 and 2011, the population of white Londoners fell by 600,000, even as the city grew by 1 million people: from 58 percent white British at the turn of the century, London is currently 45 percent white.
While rich Parisians may not miss the presence of the middle class, they do need people to bus tables, trim shrubbery, watch babies, and change bedpans. Immigrants—not native French workers—do most of these jobs. Why this should be so is an economic controversy. Perhaps migrants will do certain tasks that French people will not—at least not at the prevailing wage. Perhaps employers don’t relish paying €10 an hour to a native Frenchman who, ten years earlier, was making €20 in his old position and has resentments to match. Perhaps the current situation is an example of the economic law named after the eighteenth-century French economist Jean-Baptiste Say: a huge supply of menial labor from the developing world has created its own demand.
Snip.
Guilluy has written much about how little contact the abstract doctrines of “diversity” and “multiculturalism” make with this morally complex world. In the neighborhoods, well-meaning people of all backgrounds “need to manage, day in, day out, a thousand and one ethno-cultural questions while trying not to get caught up in hatred and violence.” Last winter, he told the magazine Causeur:
Unlike our parents in the 1960s, we live in a multicultural society, a society in which “the other” doesn’t become “somebody like yourself.” And when “the other” doesn’t become “somebody like yourself,” you constantly need to ask yourself how many of the other there are—whether in your neighborhood or your apartment building. Because nobody wants to be a minority.
Thus, when 70 percent of Frenchmen tell pollsters, as they have for years now, that “too many foreigners” live in France, they’re not necessarily being racist; but they’re not necessarily not being racist, either. It’s a complicated sentiment, and identifying “good” and “bad” strands of it—the better to draw them apart—is getting harder to do.
France’s most dangerous political battles play out against this backdrop. The central fact is the 70 percent that we just spoke of: they oppose immigration and are worried, we can safely assume, about the prospects for a multiethnic society. Their wishes are consistent, their passions high; and a democracy is supposed to translate the wishes and passions of the people into government action. Yet that hasn’t happened in France.
Guilluy breaks down public opinion on immigration by class. Top executives (at 54 percent) are content with the current number of migrants in France. But only 38 percent of mid-level professionals, 27 percent of laborers, and 23 percent of clerical workers feel similarly. As for the migrants themselves (whose views are seldom taken into account in French immigration discussions), living in Paris instead of Bamako is a windfall even under the worst of circumstances. In certain respects, migrants actually have it better than natives, Guilluy stresses. He is not referring to affirmative action. Inhabitants of government-designated “sensitive urban zones” (ZUS) do receive special benefits these days. But since the French cherish equality of citizenship as a political ideal, racial preferences in hiring and education took much longer to be imposed than in other countries. They’ve been operational for little more than a decade. A more important advantage, as geographer Guilluy sees it, is that immigrants living in the urban slums, despite appearances, remain “in the arena.” They are near public transportation, schools, and a real job market that might have hundreds of thousands of vacancies. At a time when rural France is getting more sedentary, the ZUS are the places in France that enjoy the most residential mobility: it’s better in the banlieues.
Read the whole thing.
There are also some related thoughts on the elite/worker divide from Instapundit Glenn Reynolds:
In the old Soviet Union, the Marxists assured us that once true communism was established under a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” the state would wither away and everyone would be free. In fact, however, the dictatorship of the proletariat turned into a dictatorship of the party hacks, who had no interest whatsoever in seeing their positions or power wither.
Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas called these party hacks the “New Class,” noting that instead of workers and peasants against capitalists, it was now a case of workers and peasants being ruled by a managerial new class of technocrats who, while purporting to act for the benefit of the workers and peasants, somehow wound up with the lion’s share of the goodies. Workers and peasants stood in long lines for bread and shoddy household goods, while party leaders and government managers bought imported delicacies in special, secret stores. (In a famous Soviet joke, then-leader Leonid Brezhnev shows his mother his luxury apartment, his limousine, his fancy country house and his helicopter only to have her object: “But what if the communists come back?”)
Djilas’ work was explosive — he was jailed — because it made clear that the workers and peasants had simply replaced one class of exploiters with another. It set the stage for the Soviet Union’s implosion, and for the discrediting of communism among everyone with any sense.
But the New Class isn’t limited to communist countries, really. Around the world in the postwar era, power was taken up by unelected professional and managerial elites. To understand what’s going on with President Donald Trump and his opposition, and in other countries as diverse as France, Hungary, Italy and Brazil, it’s important to realize that the post-World War II institutional arrangements of the Western democracies are being renegotiated, and that those democracies’ professional and managerial elites don’t like that very much, because they have done very well under those arrangements. And, like all elites who are doing very well, they don’t want that to change.
Snip.
But after the turn of the millennium, other Americans, much like the workers and peasants in the old Soviet Union, started to notice that while the New Class was doing quite well (America’s richest counties now surround Washington, D.C.), things weren’t going so well for them. And what made it more upsetting was that — while the Soviet Union’s apparatchiks at least pretended to like the workers and peasants — members of America’s ruling class seemed to view ordinary Americans with something like contempt, using terms such as “bitter clingers,” “deplorables” and flyover people.
Suddenly, to a lot of voters, those postwar institutional arrangements stopped looking so good. But, of course, the beneficiaries showed no sign of giving them up. This has led to a lot of political discord, and a lot of culture war, since in America class warfare is usually disguised as cultural warfare. But underneath the surface, talk is a battle between the New Class and what used to be the middle class.
