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Monday, June 27, 2022

Obama Said He Would Make History. Now He's Been Indicted.

By On June 27, 2022 In
“Let’s make history happen,” Obama told the cheering crowd at the Ice Palace Film Studios in Miami.

“Andrew has lived the American dream. And if you give him your vote he will fight to make sure every child in Florida has the same chance," he gushed.

That was four years ago.

Andrew Gillum has lived the American dream of being found naked and confused in a hotel room full of prescription pills and vomit along with two other men, one of whom was a porn star who had a profile on Rent.Men, before assuring voters that he had not been using meth.

Then he announced that he would be going to rehab because he was depressed over losing to Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Hopefully no other American child ever gets the chance to live out that particular dream.

Now Gillum continues living out Obama’s dream by being indicted on 21 charges stemming from an FBI investigation dating back to 2016. The investigation was known when Obama and the Democrats decided to “make history” and champion him to run Florida.

Obama claimed at the rally that “the character of our country is on the ballot.” He wasn’t wrong.

The Gillum indictment lays out how the former mayor and aspiring governor and his allies moved money through a variety of non-profits and PACs including the National Black Justice Coalition.

The National Black Justice Coalition describes itself as "America’s leading national civil rights organization dedicated to the empowerment of black lesbian, gay, bisexual” and, transgenders. It also boasts of having "enlisted the leadership and partnership of Andrew Gillum to help build the strategy and blueprint for this network, at every level" as part of its "Good Trouble Network".

I’m not so sure that a 21-count indictment really qualifies as “good trouble”.

The indictment also accuses Sharon Lettman-Hicks, the CEO of NBJC, of diverting $50,000 for Gillum's use. The NBJC has intersected with the Soros network, it's signed any number of letters, petitions, and activist agendas alongside top lefty organizations. And it's been funded by the Kresge Foundation, the Haas foundation, and the Tzedek Social Justice Fund among many others.

This awkwardness might explain why Gillum is being repped by a top party consigliere.

Gillum is being represented by Marc Elias, Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign general counsel, a rumored key Russiagate figure, Kamala's general counsel and Biden's go-to-lawyer for the 2020 election. Elias is not the guy who represents you when you’ve become a complete disgrace and the Democrats want nothing more to do with you. Gillum’s lawyer shows that the hand of the party still rests benevolently on the head of its former favorite Florida son.

“We look forward to putting this case to rest and giving Andrew and his family peace of mind once and for all,” Elias claimed. The top Democrat lawyer failed to clarify which family considering that Gillum claimed that he was bisexual in the wake of the hotel incident.

By claiming that he “identifies as bisexual”, Gillum made history all over again and spurred a range of favorable publicity along with mentions of the National Black Justice Coalition.

And the second and third chances just kept right on coming.

In 2019, Gillum handed a giant $100,000 check to the chair of the Florida Democratic Party from his PAC Forward Florida Action. Then it turned out that giant checks can't be cashed and the money didn't exist. The indictment mentions that Forward Florida, a related group, played a role in what the indictment describes as Gillum and Hicks having "defrauded Individual F of $150,000 of his $250,000 contribution". Elias’ defense in this regard may prove instructive.

Democrats have not abandoned Gillum throughout his downward luge slide through politics.

Why not?

Gillum’s appeal in the last decade was obvious. Democrats were looking for more Obamas and they found Cory Booker, Gillum, and a number of other young black technocrats whose rhetoric fused Big Tech and the Baptist church. The Obama effect was the illusion that the Left could comfortably bridge the contradictions between its white elites and its black base, between the values of Martha’s Vineyard and the inner city without having to give up any power or control.

The answer was a black technocratic leadership under a horde of imitation Obamas who would all fly to Davos and come back to explain why everyone needed to ride bikes and eat soy.

In the twenty-twenties, Obama and his ideology have dated about as well as the Arab Spring. And some of the mini-Obamas, like Gilllum, have wilted even more badly in the face of history.

“We have an opportunity to send both Mr. DeSantis and Mr. Trump a message,” Gillum had boasted at the Obama rally. “We have a chance to send them an unapologetic message: that their brand of politics is no longer acceptable in the state of Florida.”

Instead, Obama and Gillum’s politics have become unacceptable in Florida.

History has happened. Florida has gone from a swing state to a Republican one. Under the man who beat Gillum, it’s attracting refugees from blue states and growing at a record rate. And Gillum continues to make his own kind of history by sinking to new lows with his party.

“'The Obama Excitement': Can Andrew Gillum Capture It?” the Washington Post asked.

It’s safe to say that he has.

Gillum’s campaign line used to be, “Bring it home.” Now, as Obama’s pastor used to say, the chickens are coming home to roost. The justice system is trying to bring Gillum home.

“I have spent the last 20 years of my life in public service and continue to fight for the people,” Gillum responded to the indictment.

The last time Gillum held public office was in 2018. There have been various misconduct allegations against him going back to 2014 when he first ran for mayor. His public service since then mainly seems to consist of angrily tweeting things about Gov. Ron DeSantis.

"DeSantis and Republicans want to erase us from the History books and now from the Halls of Congress. Voters will remember this Maduro/Putin-tyranny in November and beyond. NOT today Satan!" Gillum, who has denied using meth, tweeted back in May.

It wasn’t all that long ago that Obama was hailing Gillum as “one of the most inspiring, gifted candidates”. Biden, apparently reading from the same teleprompter, touted him as "one of the most exciting, new, young leaders" who was on the way to "reclaiming America’s soul".

Instead Gillum, like Obama and Biden, lost his soul, and shows no signs of getting it back.

Florida, once in play, now appears as out of reach for Democrats as Gillum’s political career. But no matter how many scandals Gillum gets into, there’s always someone to write his comeback narrative.

"Will America Accept Andrew Gillum?" Slate asked a few years ago after he came out as bisexual. "Don’t write him off yet."

The Feds, to give them credit, haven’t. Neither apparently have the Democrats.






Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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Sunday, June 26, 2022

Male Democrats Under 50 Are Now More Anti-Feminist Than Older Republican Men

By On June 26, 2022 In
"Drag queens make everything better. Drag queens are fun," Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel gushed. "A drag queen for every school! That is what would be fine for a kid."

"Drag storytellers, and the libraries and schools that support them, are advancing a love of diversity, personal expression, and literacy that is core to what our city embraces," New York City Mayor Eric Adams tweeted after a newspaper report that the city had spent over $200,000 on transgender strip shows and other drag acts in public venues, including schools and libraries.

At 53 and 61, Dana Nessel and Eric Adams have been touted as the future of the Democrats, but they're already deeply out of step with Democrats under 50.

Especially young male Democrats.

A new Southern Poverty Law Center survey reveals massive age and gender gaps that show that gender identity politics is alienating younger generations of Democrat men and women.

The survey found that 47% of Democrat men under 50 believe that "gender ideology has corrupted American culture" and only 41% disagree. That a majority of Democrat male Gen Xrs, millennials, and zoomers are out of step with the radical gender ideology that their party has embraced as its standard ought to be a warning for a party dominated by an aging leadership.

However only 20% of Democrat men over the age of 50 see gender ideology as a threat.

Kamala Harris, 57, recently announced that the White House would be launching a task force to stop "gendered disinformation" while falsely claiming that disagreeing with leftist radical gender ideology is a threat to "democracy". This latest effort to criminalize political dissent is dangerous and risks driving an even deeper wedge between Democrats and the future of their party.

While dissent on gender ideology is sharpest among young men, 37% of younger Democrat women also believe that "gender ideology has corrupted American culture" while 44% disagree. This is a surprisingly narrow gap especially when contrasted with the 26/60 and 20/69 agree/disagree splits among Democrat baby boomer women and men.

42% of Democrat younger men say that the transgender movement is a threat to children and 40% believe that it is actively "trying to indoctrinate children."

Even 34% of younger Democrat women agree that the indoctrination of children is happening.

Hidden within the larger Democrat poll numbers is a massive generational and gender split in the ‘Sex Wars’.

The gap between boomer liberal men and younger generations is starkest when it comes to feminism and gender roles.

While only 2% of boomer liberal men agreed that "feminism has done more harm than good", 46% of young male Democrats, a majority, believe that is the case. The change from a 4/94 to a 46/41 split is a massive generational shift on feminism by young Democrat men.

The split is much less pronounced among liberal women, but the number who believe that feminism has done more harm than good has still more than doubled from 10% to 23% or nearly a quarter of what is supposed to be the most liberal demographic of the Democrat party.

While the narrative has been that culturally each generation is becoming more liberal, and that is true on some issues, such as drugs and gay marriage, but the SPLC survey would indicate that younger people are actually becoming more conservative on gender politics.

The number of Democrat men who believe that males are undervalued in today's society has exploded from 28% among boomers to 60% among younger generations.

Strikingly, this is now an area where younger Democrat men are almost perfectly aligned 60/29 with both older Republican men 63/29 and younger Republican men 65/29. While the media often claims that Republicans are losing young people, the SPLC survey offers an example of where even young Democrat men now reflect the worldview of older Republican men.

Meanwhile at a 46/41 view of feminism as destructive, male Democrats under 50 are now more anti-feminist than Republican men over 50.

While an aging Democrat establishment has embraced radical gender ideology, drag shows for kids, transgender indoctrination in schools, and the #MeToo movement, their own younger male base is turning on it and even opposition among younger women is making massive inroads.

That’s why the Biden administration was flirting with using the National Guard to stop parents from protesting the sexualization of children at school board meetings, and is now rolling out yet another disinformation task force to criminalize and suppress opposition to its gender ideology.

The Left isn’t just losing the country, it’s starting to lose its own party.

Even as the Democrat establishment doubles down on gender identity culture wars, there are major gaps emerging between members of their own party who have skin in the game and those who don’t. The generational gap is between an older generation of Democrats who dominate the political establishment, but whose cohort is no longer grappling with the problems of parenthood, and the challenges of employment and education in the #MeToo era.

Polls that group together older and younger Democrats have covered up a generational fracture that is significant because of what it reveals about the party. Younger male and even female Democrats haven’t moved to the right on gender identity politics because of FOX News, Facebook, or the other “disinformation” threats that the Biden administration wants to fight.

If that were the case, it would affect older Democrats more than younger Democrats.

This is a life experience cultural shift. Parents are seeing gender identity politics in their children’s classrooms. Men are being sidelined educationally and professionally.

And it’s happening on a seismic enough scale that it’s showing up in national surveys.

Democrats made a hard bet on leftism because of generational and racial demographics, but the Latino swing rightward has interrupted that narrative, as have conservative trends among millennials. These latest numbers reveal mixed feelings among many younger Democrats about their party’s gender identity politics and show why parental rights politics aren’t going away.

The Democrats are losing generations of their own young men. And they don’t even know it.





Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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Thursday, June 23, 2022

He Called America Racist, Now He's in Charge of Our Nukes

By On June 23, 2022 In
It was the summer of 2020. Black Lives Matter riots were terrorizing, destroying, and burning American cities. And the first black deputy commander of Air Force Global Strike Command told everyone in the Air Force that he was terrified that white people could kill him at any moment.

“Here I am as a lieutenant general in the United States Air Force," then Lt. Gen Anthony Cotton whined to Air Force Magazine. “When I see what happened to Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks—and the list goes on and on."

"That could be me," he claimed.

Since Cotton was, unlike Breonna Taylor, probably not harboring an armed drug dealer who opened fire on police or, unlike George Floyd, overdosing on fentanyl during a struggle with police as the climax to a long criminal career, that was a disingenuous smear from a top officer.

The spectacle of successful black men like Obama, Merck CEO Kenneth Frazier, or Gen. Anthony Cotton falsely claiming that America is so racist that any of them could suffer the fate of career criminals simply because of an accident of skin color is pathetic and disgusting. The Merck CEO or the Air Force general are as likely to suffer the fate of George Floyd as their white counterparts are to end up like a dead white meth addict shot in a raid in Georgia.

But Cotton knew what he was doing. What he was doing was dishonorable and self-serving.

And it worked.

Two years after complaining about police lights flashing in his rearview mirror and someone challenging his parking spot, Cotton has been nominated by Biden to head U.S. Strategic Command.

It’s been a rapid ascent for Gen. Anthony Cotton who had been appointed to head Air Force Global Strike Command last year, after being Deputy Commander of the same in 2019, up from the head of Air University in 2018. Air University, like a lot of Air Force and Navy educational institutions, had gone painfully woke. And Cotton earned his political stripes in the process.

Gen. Anthony Cotton, a four-star general, racked up some “firsts” attached to his name in the Black Lives Matter era, but that never seems to lessen the accusations of racism.

Charles Q. Brown, Jr. is the Air Force's first black chief of staff, and has been tipped to replace Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Milley. That hadn’t stopped Brown from crying racism and smearing the country he claims to serve.

In a speech in which Brown “seemed to barely contain his rage”, he ranted “that the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution ‘that I’ve sworn my adult life to support and defend’ have not always delivered ‘liberty and equality’ to all.”

"I am a Black man who happens to be the Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force," Kaleth O. Wright, the second black man to serve as the highest ranking noncommissioned officer, tweeted. "I am George Floyd…I am Philando Castile, I am Michael Brown."

Cotton is following a familiar identity politics career model that’s bad for America, but good for unprincipled men who are willing to smear their country and play the victim.

Is America any less racist with the first black Air Force Chief of Staff, Chief Master Sergeant, head of Air Force Global Strike Command and now likely head of Strategic Command?

Somehow it’s only more racist.

Last year, Cotton claimed that "diversity, inclusion are tools for national defense" and that diversity is a "warfighting imperative". Perhaps actually winning wars would be imperative.

Has the Air Force become any more lethal on the battlefield ever?

“This team is exactly what we are looking for,” Cotton said of the Diversity and Inclusion Council at Malmstrom Air Force Base. “It is a diverse and unified team that is having crucial conversations about diversity and inclusion.”

The Montana Air Force base near Great Falls now has a Pride Month and will be spreading "unconscious bias training" which claims that all white people are racist.

Malmstrom has had a number of issues. Its nuclear missile unit has failed safety and security inspections, and bungled a response to a "simulated hostile takeover of a silo housing a nuclear missile". There was also a cheating scandal involving 34 missile launch officers during a nuclear proficiency test and many more who knew about the cheating, but didn’t report it.

This was part of a string of problems going back over a decade. Cotton had been in charge of ICBMs at Malmstrom from 2009 to 2011. And he’s gone on climbing the ladder ever since.

Malmstrom's nuclear arsenal is there to deter a nuclear war or end it quickly if it begins.

Having “crucial conversations about diversity” is not its mission, maintaining security procedures and being ready to kill one hundred million people in China, if necessary, is.

Are woke missileers who have conversations about how racist America is better at their jobs?

As head of U.S. Strategic Command, Gen. Cotton will have a leading responsibility in defending or going on the offensive against America’s enemies. But does he view America as the enemy?

Now that its leadership is “diverse” in the sense of being concentrated among members of a single race who agree that the country they claim to serve is a racist place that randomly kills black people on account of their race, is the Air Force any better for it?

FrontPage Magazine’s latest pamphlet, How Obama and Biden Destroyed the Greatest Military the World Has Ever Seen, documents how readiness rates for F-22 stealth fighters are at the halfway mark, CV-22 Ospreys are at 50%, F-35As are at 68%, F-15E's are at 66%, and the B-1 Lancer is at 40%. The B-1s are under Air Force Global Strike Command.

Instead of cleaning house, the Biden administration is rewarding failure and doubling down on wokeness. The Air Force isn’t ready for a major war, but its diverse leaders are eager to fight one against other Americans.

In an interview with Air Force Magazine, Cotton was described as saying that he "hopes the U.S. can reach a point where he doesn’t have to talk to his adult children about how to stay safe every week" from what is apparently the lurking menace of evil white people everywhere.

Given the opportunity, you have to wonder whether Cotton would nuke Beijing or Texas.

“It’s time for our nation to really dive into this and get after it—once and for all. And hopefully, you know, I don’t have to have those conversations with my kids," he complained.

Perhaps it’s time for the Air Force to stop having conversations about racism mandated by racists and for our nation to stop handing over our national defense to those who hate her.






Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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Wednesday, June 22, 2022

On Juneteenth, Bullets Fly From Obama Boulevard to John Lewis Way

By On June 22, 2022 In
Over the Juneteenth weekend, 9 people were shot in Harlem. Among them was Darius Lee, an aspiring basketball player from the mostly black neighborhood, who was the only one killed in the mass shooting. The wounded included two women and six men in a shooting that began over the filming of a rap video.

Over 40 shots were fired.

Elsewhere in the Big Apple, a gunman ran up to three men in Queens and opened fire with a rifle, wounding two and killing one. Dwayne Whyte was arrested in the shooting.

"When is enough going to be enough? When we gonna put these guns down?" a community liaison asked after the Harlem attack.

"The emboldened individuals responsible for this are exactly who our officers are battling every day to make our city safe," NYPD Commissioner Keechant Sewell said.

The New York mass shootings were one of a number of shootings over the Juneteenth weekend.

In Washington D.C., the “Moechella” illegal street party “celebrating black culture and protesting gentrification” turned into an even more illegal firefight with one killed and three wounded.

“We have a child who was killed today at an event that did not have any proper planning for the number of people who were here and with guns involved,” DC Mayor Muriel Bowser complained.

But Chase Poole, the 15-year-old boy, had his own gun on him and had been shot twice before, including once this year.

One of the wounded was a D.C. cop.

Moechella organizers posted a statement thanking everyone for coming to the "Juneteenth activation" and declaring that Moechella is a "symbol of black culture in dc and is built on the foundation of peace."

“At some point and time, we have to say enough is enough," a neighborhood activist said. "It's not enough to wax poetic about what police do to Breonna Taylor, or about what happened to George Floyd if we don't also have the same level of care and concern for what's going on in our communities."

In Los Angeles, Juneteenth came to Obama Boulevard as two were shot in a car near a Target store, killing a 17-year-old boy but leaving two 4-year-olds in the back seat unharmed.

In Philly, nine Juneteenth shootings wounded six and killed three. One of the deadliest incidents happened at a cookout where the crowd was watching an NBA game before a drive-by shooting killed one and wounded another.

On the southwest side of San Antonio, Juneteenth was marked with a drive-by mass shooting at a family BBQ. Seven people were shot and two of them killed.

"I did hear some of the kids screaming, 'that's my dad, that's my dad'", one witness described.

There had already been a previous drive-by shooting at that same house back in May.

In Columbus, Ohio, three people were shot during Juneteenth as "two groups of males" got into an argument and "pulled handguns and began shooting at each other." The Columbus Dispatch describes shootings in the area as a "not uncommon occurrence."

In Chicago, where the lack of shootings would be more uncommon, 47 people were shot in honor of Juneteenth. The victims included an 11-year-old girl. A 16-year-old boy was also shot in the arm and a 17-year-old girl was grazed by a bullet. Fredrica Coleman, a black 36-year-old woman, was shot and killed.

At the Tysons Corner Mall in Fairfax, Virginia, Juneteenth was rung in when rapper No Savage allegedly opened fire at the mall during an argument before driving away in a black Cadillac. The Washington D.C. rapper was easily identifiable by a neck tattoo that reads, "SAVAGE".

Three shoppers were injured while fleeing the shooting.

In Baltimore, five people were killed and 10 wounded over Juneteenth weekend.

That neighborhood has seen 8 murders in the past few months and two just on that block alone.

“My boys know the difference between gunshots and fireworks. They shouldn’t have to know the difference,” A local woman whose children were playing not far from where a previous murder victim died, said.

Graffiti on the scene read, “NO SHOOT ZONE #168.”

One of the Baltimore dead was Trevon White, the owner of a soul food eatery, who had given an interview before the shooting.

"Baltimore City is a great place to open a business," he claimed.

Shortly thereafter he was dead.

In Indianapolis, three people were shot at a gas station, but witnesses refused to cooperate. The city has hit a new record with over 100 murders in less than six months for only the third time in its history.

In New Orleans, 14 people were shot over Juneteenth weekend. Two of them have died. In Milwaukee, there were 14 shootings that wounded 15 and left 3 people dead. In Detroit, there were two shootings in a single park in which four victims, all black, were shot, one of them fatally. In Nashville, a man with tattoos over his eye and on the back of his neck opened fire at a garage at Rep. John Lewis Way.

‘Good trouble’, this isn’t.

The media made much of Biden creating Juneteenth National Independence Day last year and the celebrations this year. There are articles on how to celebrate Juneteenth without "cultural appropriation". But it might be better to celebrate it without violence and mass shootings.

Slavery is long since over, but black communities across the country remain in thrall to crime.

It isn’t “systemic racism” that threatens black people, but everyday violence that takes no holidays, that erupts just as regularly on Martin Luther King Day and on Juneteenth, and on streets named after Obama and Rep. John Lewis. Externally the solution may be police and a functional criminal justice system, but internally the change has to come from within.

It’s been a long time since black people needed to be liberated from white people.

Activists act as if the critical issue is a liberation from some nebulous external force, systemic racism, white supremacy, white privilege, or unconscious bias. Black Lives Matter activists and successful politicians, businessmen and generals claim that they feel threatened by police. But the sad truth is that, like the rest of us, the enemy and the threat comes from within.

The only meaningful liberation that still needs to happen on Juneteenth is a moral revolution. Until that revolution comes, Juneteenth will be a bloody reminder that the liberation that matters is not that of the body, but of the soul and the spirit.







Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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Tuesday, June 21, 2022

A Year Later, Why is Afghanistan Still Classified?

By On June 21, 2022 In
Last month, the Brits had a knock-down and drag-out fight over the withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee denounced the "fundamental lack of planning, grip or leadership at a time of national emergency" and blasted the Foreign Office for having "provided answers that were intentionally evasive and often deliberately misleading".

"The former head of the armed forces told us that the decision to withdraw was 'strategically illiterate and morally bankrupt,'” the committee’s report noted.

"The international withdrawal from Afghanistan has been a disaster in terms of planning, execution and consequences for the U.K.'s wider interests,” it concluded. “It undermined the security of the United Kingdom by encouraging our enemies to act against us."

While British parliamentary proceedings are often vitriolic, nothing was being said here that was more than common sense. Meanwhile American military personnel, veterans, and families who had lost loved ones in Afghanistan were once again being denied closure and real answers.

The Foreign Affairs Committee report and the calls for the resignations of British officials are refreshing. No American official has resigned over the disaster and Democrats are doing everything possible to stalemate any serious legislative hearings into what happened.

In sharp contrast to the British parliamentary proceedings, House Democrats recently managed to hold a classified hearing over a war and subsequent defeat that ended nearly a year ago.

As Republican members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee noted, "even though the State Department offered to have a portion of the hearing unclassified", Democrats decided "to close it to the public and make the question-and-answer section at one of the highest levels of classification, TS/SCI." TS/SCI means Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information.

When members of Congress are more bent on keeping a hearing closed than the State Department, it’s hard to describe that as anything more than a cover-up for political purposes.

There was no reason for a hearing billed as being about “the evolution of U.S. policy towards Afghanistan from 2017 through August 2021” to be fully classified under TS/SCI. Afghan government officials have fled, American forces are no longer on the ground, and the Taliban and its Al Qaeda allies are in charge. If there’s any intelligence still being gained from human or electronic sources, that could have been easily kept classified or left out of the hearing.

Especially when that hearing deals with decisions made between 1 and 5 years ago.

The officials doing the talking, like Molly Phee, the Deputy Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation, who claimed to have "established the conditions that can transform the trajectory of the conflict,” are not superspooks, they’re Foggy Bottom bureaucrats who have failed at most things and, like Phee, promoted to Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs after the disaster in Afghanistan, just keep failing upwards until even worse things happen.

The hearings would have been an opportunity to ask Phee, Zalmay Khalilzad’s deputy, some pointed questions. House Democrats understood that keeping the hearings classified would make that a pointless exercise, allowing senior officials to recite talking points no one will hear.

Chairman Gregory Meeks claimed that the hearing had to be classified to "ensure that Members have access to the most detailed information available — including information that cannot be disclosed in an unclassified setting.” What information is that? Well, it’s classified.

Meeks could have agreed to hold multiple hearings, public and private, on this crucial issue.

Foreign Affairs Committee members pointed out that, “our committee has to date only had one open, full committee hearing with an official from the Biden administration.” Much like holding a hearing under TS/SCI classification, there’s no defensible reason except deliberate obstruction.

While the beginning of Biden’s downfall in the polls can be closely traced to the Afghan withdrawal, empty shelves, inflation, and the economic crisis have long since taken over, but as the anniversary of the withdrawal approaches, the Afghanistan stonewalling has not stopped.

Around the same time that the British parliament was having it out, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) issued a report on the collapse of the Afghan army that blamed the disastrous Taliban deal and the poorly planned withdrawal.

The report pointed to decisions such as "limiting airstrikes after the signing of the U.S.-Taliban agreement" and the entire fallacy of trying to turn the Afghan military into a "mirror image of U.S. forces" that "required a high degree of professional military sophistication and leadership" and was dependent on airpower.

SIGAR documented the fact that no one essentially knew how much military equipment was in Afghanistan, who was using it, and how much of it the Taliban have in their possession now.

Its appendix contains the withering big picture assessment that "the U.S. military has mounted four large-scale security sector assistance (SSA) efforts in the last 72 years, and three of the four have been catastrophic failures. In Vietnam and Afghanistan, the United States spent years and billions of dollars training and equipping national armies, only to see them quickly collapse in the face of far less-equipped insurgencies once U.S. logistical, equipment enabler, and air support were withdrawn."

The explicit comparison between Vietnam and Afghanistan is important, not just as a partisan talking point, but as an analysis of what went wrong in two of the most devastating recent wars.

And how little we learned from them.

This is one of the things we need to be talking about at a congressional level before we do it all over again a decade or two from now. SIGAR has been dutifully issuing reports with such titles as "Contracting with the Enemy: DOD Has Not Fully Implemented Processes Intended to Prevent Payments to Enemies of the United States" and "Theft of Funds from Afghanistan: An Assessment of Allegations Concerning President Ghani and Former Senior Afghan Officials."

But once SIGAR’s work is wrapped up, it will be all too easy to bury those reports.

Meanwhile the Biden administration and House Democrats are colluding to suppress any meaningful accounting or discussion of what happened in Afghanistan. Even as the House Democrats are obsessively holding hearings over January 6, they have sabotaged and obstructed public hearings about Afghanistan to protect their administration and allies.

If the British Parliament, led by the ruling party, can hold scathing no-holds barred hearings into the treasonous actions, bad decisions, and corrupt policies that went into the defeat, there’s no reason that the United States Congress can’t do the same thing. And as the August anniversary of the debacle approaches, House Democrats will have to work harder to stop the truth.






Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. 

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Sunday, June 19, 2022

Globalists Were Wrong. The World Isn't Flat.

By On June 19, 2022
First it was baby formula, now there’s a tampon shortage. Tampons are affected by the rising price of oil affecting the cost of plastic and higher cotton prices due to mask manufacturing and the war in Ukraine. A whole lot of fertilizer comes out of Ukraine and Russia. So does neon which is used to make semiconductor chips. The chip shortage is shutting down car plants. It's also keeping the Biden administration from issuing gas refund cards.

This is the thoroughly interconnected world celebrated in prose by journalists like Thomas Friedman who marveled at how Big Data and globalization brought everything together.

"No two countries that both have a McDonald's have ever fought a war against each other," Friedman once claimed. In his greatest paean to globalization, The World Is Flat, he argued that, "No two countries that are both part of a major global supply chain, like Dell's, will ever fight a war against each other as long as they are both part of the same global supply chain."

McDonald's in Russia has closed and the ones in Ukraine might be blown up any time. Russia restricted its neon exports while Ukraine's neon exports have fallen sharply. Dell's CEO Michael Dell has warned that the global chip shortage could last for years.

So much for the Golden Arches and Dell theory of globalist conflict prevention.

The world isn’t flat, it’s all too round. Much like history isn’t an ascending trend line to the right side, it’s also a circle. That’s why Islam is once again at war with Europe, Russia is invading Ukraine, China is relaunching its empire, and the ‘flatland’ is experiencing a dimensional shift.

The American economy increasingly looks like the Soviet Union with rigid central planning that is incapable of adjusting to the dynamism of the market and whose institutions are so uncompetitive that they lack the incentive to do more than pretend to try. And like the Russians, Americans are being forced to learn to live with unexpected expected shortages.

Globalization advocates had just recreated Marxist central planning with a somewhat more flexible global model in which massive corporations bridged global barriers to create the most efficient possible means of moving goods and services around the planet. Borders would come down and cultural exchanges would make us all one ushering in the great union of humanity.

What an interdependent world really means is Algerian Jihadists shooting up Paris, gang members from El Salvador beheading Americans within sight of Washington D.C. tampon and car shortages caused by a war in Ukraine, and more radicalism and extremism than ever.

Trying to “flatten” the world just makes it pop up again.

The technocratic new world order of megacorporations consolidating markets and then doling out products with just-in-time inventory systems now flows through a broken supply chain. Rising inflation and international disruptions makes it all but impossible for even the big companies to plan ahead, and so they produce less and shrug at the shortages.

We’re in a wartime economy because our system has become too vast and too inflexible to adjust to chaos. Biden keeps trotting out the Defense Production Act for everything until given time the entire economy has been Sovietized. The more that the government tries to impose stability on the chaos, the less responsive and productive the dominant players become.

Market consolidation due to government regulations has left a handful of companies sitting atop the market. When one of them, like Abbott for baby formula, has a hiccup, the results are catastrophic, others like Procter & Gamble, which controls about half the menstrual products market, don’t have to worry about losing market share to competition. Similar consolidation in food, paper products, and supermarkets have replaced a dynamic economy with cartels.

Behind all the brands on the product shelves is a creaky Soviet system in which a handful of massive enterprises interconnected with the state lazily crank out low-quality products from vast supply chains that they no longer control and feel little competitive pressure to perform better. The only thing that is still American about the supermarket experience is the advertising.

The problems with the system were less noticeable when its predictive mechanisms worked and its foreign suppliers were eager for American dollars. Under stress, the failure points are all too obvious and what is less obvious is that the system has no intention of repairing any of them.

It doesn’t need to.

An out-of-touch elite responds to problems with meaningless reassurances, glib jokes and wokeness. Like Soviet propaganda, the only thing corporate statements communicate is the vast distance between the lives of those running the system and those caught inside its gears.

But despite their complicity, the massive monopolistic enterprises didn’t make this world.

Biden and the Democrats have been eager to blame companies for “profiteering” from the inflation created by federal spending. Few companies prefer the current crisis to 2019. Hardly anyone except bottom feeders enjoys not being unable to rationally plan for the future. Major corporations and their investors care more about a growth plan than quarterly profits.

The Democrats were the biggest champions of globalization. Their regulations led to record market consolidation and domestic job cuts. Corporations were pressured to export dirty Republican jobs to China and keep the ‘clean’ Democrat office jobs at home. The devastation wreaked havoc on the working class and the middle class, and rebuilt our entire economy to be dependent on China and a worldwide supply chain only globalists could believe was bulletproof.

OPEC’s impact on fuel prices under Carter became the model for the entire economy. A war anywhere impacts Americans. Dozens of countries have the power to wreck our economy, intentionally or even unintentionally. Even the environmental promises of energy independence have become a farce in which our government pleads with China for more solar panels.

Interdependence hasn’t even led to the world government that globalists wanted, but global chaos in which impotent western powers try to talk the rest of the world out of fighting to avoid being swamped by refugees, high energy bills, and empty shelves in supermarkets.

After selling off American economic sovereignty, globalists proved unable to maintain global stability. Lacking the will to actually stand up to China, Iran, or Russia, all they can do is hold more international conferences and build up a useless multinational bureaucracy.

Say what you will about the League of Nations, but it only had 700 employees in Geneva. The UN's 44,000 employees are just the tip of the iceberg in the huge ranks of multinational organizations who all claim to be upholding the international order while running up the tab.

Globalization globalizes the ineptitude of the global order. Its grand plans, like those of the Soviet Union, are never a match for the chaos of human nature and its ambitions. Politicians, philanthropists, and philosophers had labored to replace American dynamism with a clockwork machine. The old Baggage clockworks became servers upholding a cloud that proved to be very handy for instant communications, but ran up against the same ‘flattening’ limitations.

America was never meant to be flat. It was a land discovered by those who understood that the world was round. Flattening America has depressed its economy and its spirit. A flat world with no room for American exceptionalism is instead becoming a playground for Chinese and Russian exceptionalism. And America’s economy is becoming one big permanent shortage.





Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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'Peace Circles' Instead of Prisons Lead to Shootouts in Chicago

By On June 19, 2022 In
1,120 people have been shot this year in Chicago and 282 people have been murdered. Last week, four people were shot and killed in four hours in just another Wednesday.

Good thing the city has “peace circles”.

Police defunders have been tasked with coming up with “restorative justice” alternatives to the three P’s, police, prosecutors, and prisons, that ask criminals to apologize to their victims.

That’s the principle of the “peace circle” in which the thug meets with his victim, says “sorry” and then leaves a free man to shoot, stab, or kill.

Chicago's pro-crime politicians eagerly embraced "peace circles". There are peace circles in schools and a whole lot of "trained facilitators" have hung up their shingles. While pro-crime activists claim that peace circles come from Indian culture, they’re actually one of the stupidly disastrous ideas promoted by Howard Zehr, a white leftist who went to a black college on a minority scholarship, and helped inflict the concept of “restrorative justice” on the country.

The Circuit Court of Cook County has a salaried Restorative Justice Community Court Peace Circle Keeper. And dangerous criminals keep being diverted from prison to peace circles.

That's what happened when cops caught Ojani Cruz with a gun during a traffic stop. Prosecutors wanted him locked up, but one judge let him out on his own recognizance while another sent him to have his arrest record expunged at a peace circle.

"They say, 'Peace, peace', when there is no peace," Jeremiah prophesied.

A month after being enrolled in the peace circle treatment, Cruz opened fire on a couple sitting in a minivan. He "circled the vehicle" and "kept firing until he ran out of bullets". When it was all over, a 20-year-old woman was shot in the back and left paralyzed from the waist down.

Prosecutors have charged Cruz with first degree murder and the judge denied bail, but it's too little too late. Had the justice system been allowed to do its job, Cruz would have been locked up. But instead Chicago’s restorative justice and peace circles claimed another victim.

“We cannot prosecute our way out of the kinds of crimes," Cook County Chief Judge Timothy Evans falsely claimed. “People who hurt people have generally been hurt themselves.”

Evans, a Chicago alderman for nearly two decades, has spent another disastrous three decades on the Cook County bench, and even Democrat officials have had enough.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot blasted Evans for "making Chicago neighborhoods less safe.”

“There is no dispute that people charged with murder and other crimes of violence are out in communities with zero supervision, both adults and juveniles."

Klevontaye White was let loose with nothing more than an ankle monitor after 15 counts of aggravated sex assault with a firearm, he cut off his bracelet and then engaged in a shootout with police. The police didn’t bring their peace pipes. They shot back and won the fight.

And Newsweek put Klevontaye on its list of “black people killed by police”.

7-year-old Jaslyn Adams was shot and killed at a McDonald's by a group of thugs, one of whom had been out with an ankle monitor despite being accused of robbery, manufacturing/delivery of cocaine, and aggravated unlawful use of a weapon. This has become typical of Chicago’s pro-crime policies where even the worst monsters can freely walk the streets.

"I have about 100 people on home monitoring who are charged with murder," Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart said.

"Two brothers who murdered a person 11 bullets into them, in front of witnesses,” Lightfoot argued. “And at least one of them was out on another gun charge, on electronic monitoring. This isn’t working. We need to have trials and we need to put dangerous people behind bars so that the community is actually safe.”

But Judge Evans still loves peace circles and restorative justice for violent thugs. “We thought, if somebody is on drugs or stealing television sets or cell phones or whatever it was, all we had to do was arrest them, prosecute them, convict them and send them to jail," he rambled.

Now Evans preaches the gospel of freeing as many criminals as possible.

In 2021, Cook County had the most murders in almost 30 years. In May 2022 it was reported that downtown shootings were up 64%.

“This is just the start,” Evans announced to cheers, while opening a "restorative justice" court. “Englewood, we are on our way! Roseland, we are on our way!”

It was more of a threat than a promise.

Englewood has racked up 23 murders and 102 wounded this year. Roseland is lagging behind with 6 murders and only 29 wounded.

The peace circles keep growing and people keep dying because the justice system in Chicago, like those in cities where pro-crime policies prevail, stands on the side of the criminals.

Judge Evans claimed that in the new system, “we are focusing on punishment, but on healing”.

But there’s no healing for the family of Jaslyn Adams, for the woman shot and paralyzed for life by a peace circle alum, or any of the other victims being protected by the peace circles.

In Chicago, there’s no peace for the people, only for the politicians and the criminals, who are often one and the same.

Judge Patricia Spratt, who presides over the North Lawndale Restorative Justice Community Court, said that the court is about "repairing harm. Not being retributive and sending you to jail".

How will Chicago’s pro-crime judges repair the harm they have caused to crime victims?

It’ll take a hell of a peace circle to raise the dead.




Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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Thursday, June 16, 2022

Congress Must Hold Hearings on Biden Administration’s Domestic Terror Ties

By On June 16, 2022 In
A few weeks after the Buffalo mass shooting, another domestic terrorist attack occurred in the upstate New York city. CompassCare, a pregnancy care clinic guiding new mothers away from abortion, was firebombed by the pro-abortion hate group, Jane's Revenge. The group has been linked to the firebombing of at least two other pro-life offices and organizations last month.

Its threatening graffiti included the warning, "If abortions aren't safe, then you aren't either."

"We demand the disbanding of all anti-choice establishments, fake clinics, and violent anti-choice groups within the next thirty days," the Jane's Revenge communique threatened. "We are forced to adopt the minimum military requirement for a political struggle."

While Congressional Democrats are moving ahead with their Jan 6 hearings which seek to falsely blame Republicans and conservatives for the Capitol riot, they have no interest in allowing similar hearings about the ongoing campaign of domestic terrorism by their leftist allies.

Instead, the Biden administration is giving a pass to even the worst offenders.

The Biden administration's DOJ decided to reduce a plea for Colinford Mattis and Urooj Rahman, two radical lawyers who were handing out and throwing Molotov cocktails during the Black Lives Matter race riots, from 10 years in prison to 18 months.

The DOJ’s reason for giving the leftist domestic terrorists a pass is because of the "history and personal characteristics of the defendants". The key characteristic here is political.

Despite a massive national wave of violence, deaths, injuries, and billions of dollars in damage involving tens of thousands of racialists and leftists, there has been virtually no accountability.

In Portland, where a federal courthouse was besieged for over a year by a military style assault which bombarded personnel with commercial grade fireworks, threw bricks and shone lasers into the eyes of federal agents, Biden’s DOJ gave most of the insurgents a pass.

As of last year, Biden's DOJ had tossed overboard half the cases from the riots. At Senate hearings, Attorney General Merrick Garland insisted that the leftist recreation of the Fort Sumter attack wasn’t a “core attack on our democratic institutions” which is a political, not a legal test.

As media accounts noted, “More than half of the dropped charges were ‘dismissed with prejudice,’ which several former federal prosecutors described as extremely rare. ‘Dismissed with prejudice’ means the case can’t be brought back to court.”

This was a deliberate effort by Biden’s DOJ to not only give the leftist insurrections a pass, but to protect them from any further legal action after the illegitimate leftist regime is out of power.

In the Black Lives Matter mostly peaceful Molotov cocktail case, a former federal prosecutor stated that, "Swapping in a softer plea agreement after having gone through the plea hearing is an exceedingly rare event in federal court."

The Biden administration seems to be creating a lot of these “rare” events for its terrorist pals.

Last year, Senate Democrats confirmed Tracy Stone-Manning, Biden's nominee to head the Bureau of Land Manangement, despite her past as a domestic terrorist. Biden's nominee had admitted to not only being part of an eco-terrorist group, but sending a terroristic letter to the Forest Service threatening "You bastards go in there anyway and a lot of people could get hurt."

Every single Senate Democrat, including Manchin and Sinema, voted to confirm a spokeswoman for what even the FBI describes as a "radical group" responsible for numerous attacks, including arson.

Many of these same Senate Democrats claim to care a great deal about domestic terrorism, including Senator Dick Durbin, Senator Tammy Baldwin, and others who co-sponsored the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act even as they rewarded a domestic terrorist with a top job.

This is not just an administration that goes easy on leftist domestic terrorists, it’s an administration of, by and for leftist domestic terrorists that is run by the worst extremists.

While the Democrats and their media continue to falsely allege that the Trump administration was responsible for the Capitol riot and somehow wanted it to happen, despite the rioters leaving while the former president was speaking and his statement discouraging violence, the Biden administration has demonstrated that it has deep connections to leftist domestic terrorists.

And that is something genuinely worth investigating in a sitting presidential administration.

The Black Lives Matter race riots played a key role in changing the political narrative and undermining the Trump administration. The threat of further race riots was used to intimidate voters into supporting Democrats and assorted radicals in the 2020 election and beyond.

The Biden administration benefited from these riots. Much as it’s benefiting from the current surge of pro-abortion domestic terrorism, including threats of insurrection aimed at blocking the Supreme Court from issuing its ruling. Clearly an attack on a “core” institution.

#ShutdownDC, for example, is planning to "expand the current political crisis by shutting down the Supreme Court." The leftist group which is linked to the Democratic Socialists of America, major unions, and a whole range of lefty D.C. protests, has openly laid out its plans, but you couldn't pay the FBI or DOJ to care. AG Merrick Garland hasn’t even condemned the move.

“Insurrections” only matter when they obstruct the Left, not when they carry out its agenda.

Considering the Supreme Court leak, another “rare” event, it’s time to investigate the links between Biden administration officials and domestic leftist terrorist organizations.



(Note to Email readers. Next week, my articles will be switching to a different service. The transition will hopefully be smooth as possible, but you may see more than one email or you may be asked to verify that you want to be subscribed. If you experience any problems, feel free to email me.)




Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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Wednesday, June 15, 2022

Drink Monkey Milk to Save the Planet

By On June 15, 2022 In
Walk down the aisle of any any woke supermarket whose patrons drive electric SUVs with Bernie stickers and you’ll find shortages of everything except “plant-based substitutes” for real food. Don’t bother looking for rotisserie chicken, there’s a shortage. Forget the eggs, they’re not only cage-free and going at the rate of three for a dollar, they’re also more absent than Biden.

Milk can be had in every possible variety except the kind that comes from a cow. The stock of ‘ersatz’ alternatives to milk testify to the green gold rush touched off by the urgent need to save the planet. Cows, despite roaming the plains for thousands of years before Al Gore, Greta Thunberg and Teslas, are bad for the earth. But so it turns out is absolutely everything else.

“Revolution is like Saturn, it devours its own children,” a fictional Danton famously declaimed in a play about the world's original leftist revolution. In the cases of the supermarket dairy aisle, the non-dairy dairy revolution is devouring itself metaphorically, but not doing as well literally.

Almond milk was going to save the planet. There were predictions that the almond milk market would be worth $13 billion which is pretty good for something that requires enough sweetener to destroy your teeth just to taste moderately palatable. But almond milk isn't milk since, even in a woke biological paradigm where men can be women and bees can be fish, you still can't milk a tree. And almond milk isn't almonds either, because it's only about 2% almonds. What is almond milk really: it’s sugar and thirty other ways of saying sugar without actually using the ‘s’ word.

But more problematically, (and to wokes everything eventually becomes problematic), it's also bad for the planet. A few years ago, environmentalists began claiming that almond milk was hurting bees. Reliable scientific journals like People Magazine and Men's Journal raved, "The World's Almond Milk Craze Is Killing Bees at a Staggering Rate" and "Almond Milk Is Killing Billions of Honey Bees." So much for saving the planet by milking trees into a vile pale fluid.

There are of course people who genuinely need dairy alternatives, but the woke obsession with “plant-based alternatives” has the same medical basis as the gluten allergy that activist coeds developed shortly before they began waving “Black Lives Matter” signs on campuses.

Fake milk had become about the serious business of saving the planet from mankind.

And so after the almond milk revolution failed, it was on to rice milk, which was projected to reach $1 billion by 2032 despite being 88% water. But rice milk turned out to be the most polluting fake milk around. Rice paddies, even without any cows around, "are full of methane-producing bacteria."

Wokes don’t object to the bacteria, they marinate in it, but they are against methane.

People who drive their Land Rover electric SUVs with a bike rack on top so that they can park a block away and then bike to work switched to oat milk. Oat milk, which is even worse than almond milk, but according to two out of three starving Marin County alley cats beats rice milk, was projected to have a market share worth $7.6 billion by 2028. But then Oatly, a Swedish vegan brand of oat milk, was accused of ties to former President Trump because Senator Mitch McConnell's brother-in-law was on the board of a company that had invested in it.

Soon wokes were trying to set their Swedish vegan oat milk on fire and failing miserably.

Also oat milk is bad for the planet. As a Swedish report noted, "Monoculture dairy farming is in most cases better for the soil than monoculture oat growing, simply because most dairy farms grow perennial grass, clover or alfalfa." And, "when you buy a liter of milk, the farmer gets some 30-40 cents, while when you buy oat milk, the farmer gets 3-4 cents."

Exhausted suburban wokies, fresh from Black Lives Matter struggle sessions waged at cocktail parties with hardcover copies of Ibram X. Kendi coloring books, tried soy milk, but stopped once their husbands began joining the women's swim team. Also the soy business is being blamed for the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. Saving the planet without destroying it is hard work.

In the face of all the fake milk wars, the virtue signaling and the smear campaigns, the Twitter hashtag boycotts and calls for divestment, coconut milk seemed like an easy compromise.

Until the monkeys arrived.

The global coconut milk market is projected to hit $2.9 billion which is pretty good for a bunch of monkeys. Coconuts come from Thailand and the easiest way to pick them is to send a monkey.

A monkey can pick a thousand coconuts a day, a human worker can manage less than 80, while a woke employee wouldn’t even do one before claiming to feel unsafe and launching a Twitter protest. But Thailand’s coconut monkeys still enjoy more human rights than the Chinese slave laborers who make everything else that wokes wear, use, and virtue signal with.

PETA and animal rights groups however objected and the coconut monkey wars began.

Companies were accused of using “forced monkey labor” in contrast to the voluntary monkey labor of Hollywood film sets and national politics, not to mention the voluntary cow, sheep, goat, and chicken labor in the United States. Confused Thai coconut milk companies then had to hire consultants to prove that they were not selling monkey milk to activists who didn’t want to hear it.

Carrie Symonds, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson's wife, who has been dubbed “Princess Nut Nuts” and “Carrie Antoinette", launched a campaign to get British supermarkets to stop selling monkey milk. Or milk that animal rights activists claim came from coconuts picked by monkeys.

Only coconuts picked by workers receiving pennies a day would be acceptable.

PETA claims that expecting monkeys to pick coconuts deprives them of any "opportunity to eat, play, or spend time with their families”. Much like Boris Johnson's pandemic lockdowns.

How stupid can the Left’s woke virtue signaling get? Ask the unemployed monkeys.

And now the war for monkey milk has spread to America.

Two years ago, Chaokoh coconut milk claimed that it uses "zero monkey labour" and that its products are "environmentally sustainable". Now Walmart has joined other retailers in banning it over the monkey thing. Not because monkeys handling your food is a health risk, but because it’s unfair to the monkeys to have them involved in producing fake milk for fake progressives.

All of this is exhausting and is the Left in a nutshell. Just not an almond or coconut one.

To be a leftist is to incessantly virtue signal, to demand everyone get on the highway to utopia, and then to stop, pull over on the side of the road and denounce highways as immoral.

Leftist revolutions, national or culinary, like all extremist movements break down into mutual recriminations, backbiting, purity tests, and the impossibility of ever meeting them.

Fake milk is a particularly stupid example of the same trends that pervade campuses, companies, the entertainment industry, professional sports, and anything that goes woke. To go woke is not just to go broke, but to spend all of your time worrying that you might be out of step with the party and finding relief from that anxiety only in rushing to denounce fellow leftists.

Farming anything on a large scale is an intensive process, as any farmer or functioning adult could have told wokies, that's going to require a lot of land, a lot of cheap labor, and will impact the environment. Leftists choose not to understand this because what they really want to do is virtue signal by embracing an exciting new thing before denouncing it and all the followers who jumped on their bandwagon. The fake milk revolution will end the way all leftist revolutions do.

Wokes can’t even agree on a fake milk to virtue signal around, because they have a congenital need to turn anything no matter how small into a fractious crusade as outlets for their egos.

After the bees, the monkeys, and Mitch McConnell’s brother-in-law made it impossible for wokes to drink any of their fake milks, they might as well try to go back to real milk. If they can find any.






Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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Tuesday, June 14, 2022

The Last Jewish Congressman in New York

By On June 14, 2022 In
In 2020, there were three Jewish House members from New York City. By the end of 2022, there may be none even in the state with Rep. Zeldin, a Republican, running for governor.

How things got that way is indicative of what happened to both the Democrats and the Jews.

The primary between Rep. Jerrold Nadler and Rep. Carolyn Maloney pits two establishment remnants against each other. Both old Democrats have been in office since the early 90s. Now Maloney, 76, and Nadler, 74, have been forced to fight it out when a plot by Democrats to aggressively gerrymander the state to protect their control of the House backfired in court.

It would be a sad state for anyone to be represented by Nadler, let alone New York’s Jews. And Nadler doesn’t represent them. Instead he supported the Iran deal and is backed by the PAC for the Soros anti-Israel lobby group, J Street. Last year, he responded to Islamic violence against Jews, by stating, “I remain deeply concerned by the violence in Jerusalem, including Israeli police violence, and I urge all parties to exercise restraints.”

When New York Jews turn to pro-Israel members of Congress from the city, they usually go to Rep. Ritchie Torres, a black gay Latino politician from the Bronx who has become the most vocal pro-Israel Democrat from the city and can also be counted on to drop in on Bill Maher.

Whether or not Nadler survives another term, he isn’t representing anyone except himself. And the old tier of New York Jewish House members is making way for allies of the leftist “Squad”

Within the last two years, Rep. Nita Lowey retired, making way for Rep. Mondaire Jones, the other first "black" gay congressman from New York, who promised to be pro-Israel, but only by the current standards of a party drifting into the militantly anti-Israel camp. Rep. Elliot Engel was ousted by Rep. Jamaal Bowman, an AOC ally and a militant opponent of Israel and Jews.

What Torres, Jones, and Bowman all have in common is that they’re “progressives”, which is to say lefties, who have ties to the Sanders machine. Torres was a Sanders delegate, although Sanders didn’t endorse him, Jones and Bowman were both endorsed by Bernie Sanders.

While AOC’s theatrics may get much of the attention, hard lefties are remaking the face of New York’s congressional delegation, replacing the old Jewish, Irish, and Italian Democrats with minority radicals. Whoever survives the Nadler and Maloney matchup will likely have to make way for another “progressive” from the same political template before too long.

Senator Schumer, 71, young by the standards of a very old establishment, lives in fear of a primary challenge, and is unlikely to have a future if the Democrats lose the Senate.

New York’s Jewish community has not disappeared. Or at least not in the literal sense.

But the most cohesive elements of it, the Orthodox Jewish communities of Brooklyn, tend to be conservative and are gerrymandered into districts meant to diminish their influence. The same is true of Middle Eastern and Russian Jewish immigrant communities who also vote Republican.

A 2020 nationwide poll of Orthodox Jews found that 83% intended to vote for Trump over Biden. And while polls are fallible, voting maps from 2012 showed Romney decisively winning Orthodox, Middle Eastern, and Russian Jewish areas. In one precinct of Middle Eastern Orthodox Jews, Romney took 97% of the vote. Trump may have done even better.

It’s understandable why the Democrat establishment has used gerrymandering and every dirty trick in the book to keep a conservative electorate that trends Republican from being counted.

“There are places, in New York for example, where you’ve seen a growing ultra-Orthodox community becoming more active in politics,” David Axelrod, an Obama adviser, had warned. “The question is whether the rest of the Jewish community stays, remains politically active.”

Jews in New York are quite politically active, but no longer as a single group. The disappearance of Democratic Jewish House members from what was once the heartland of immigrant communities reflects the disintegration of any sustained liberal Jewish identity.

There are plenty of young Jewish liberals and leftists, but they don’t belong to communities. And they are less likely than ever to see themselves as members of a people. The old tribal logic of immigrants voting for people like them has all but disappeared among New York Jewish Dems.

The older generation, the one that Nadler belongs to, that Lowey and Engel represented, was still culturally Jewish, even if their first allegiances were to liberalism and to the Democrats, and even if their Jewishness consisted of little more than a Yiddish word and childhood memories.

But their younger counterparts don’t even have that. Or really anything except leftist culture.

New York’s Jewish House members have disappeared because there are no longer Jewish Democrat communities. Instead there are Republican Jewish communities who are being gerrymandered and people with Jewish last names who belong to no community, who are generally agnostic when it comes to religion, and whose only culture is pop culture.

Jewish Democrats helped destroy their own electorate. And are eliminating themselves.

There are still plenty of Jewish House Democrats, but they are increasingly less likely to represent actual Jewish communities. And that doesn’t bode well for their future.

Nadler is the embodiment of an aging and fading establishment that abandoned its Jewish identity, replacing it with party allegiance and leftist politics, only to be left with nothing.

The lesson of the last Jewish congressman in New York ought to hit home for an antiquated communal infrastructure of federations and organizations that were assembled a century ago. These institutions are run by the Nadlers and Loweys until they’re turned over to woke staffers who transform them into something unrecognizable and devoid of anything Jewish.

That is how former Holocaust museums end up running George Floyd exhibits.

It’s not just about the Jews. In the last decade, Democrats have similarly been shedding their old Irish and Italian immigrant bases. St. Patrick's Day and Columbus Day parades have been taken hostage by identity politics, and Democrat pols boycott them as often as they march.

Black Lives Matter rioters vandalized St. Patrick’s Cathedral and went unpunished. Columbus statues have been removed with the complicity of the new Democrat establishment.

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot responded to a deal with Italian-American groups to replace the city's famous Columbus statue attacked by Black Lives Matter race rioters, by shrieking, "My d--- is bigger than yours and the Italians." That is the ugly and racist Democrat future.

There’s no room in it for the old immigrant coalition of the Italians, the Irish and the Jews. And the Democrats are shedding Israel the way they’re dumping St. Patrick’s and Columbus.

The question is not when will the Jews wake up, but will there be any left to wake up.

The last Jewish congressman in New York is a metaphor for the passing of the communities that made the liberal American Jew into more than just another atomized upper middle class worshiper at the shrines of FDR, Adlai Stevenson, and the Kennedy family. The disappearance of those communities will also eventually dismantle their institutions and infrastructure.

The Jewish communities that will remain will be traditional, religious, and conservative.

And if you doubt that, just ask the last Jewish congressman in New York. If you can find him.





Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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