Some 2,200 years ago, Antiochus IV set up an idol in the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem and had pigs sacrificed on the altar. Joseph Biden II has his own plans for a pig and an altar in Jerusalem.

Bidentiochus’ Chanukah gift to the Jews is an Islamic terrorist consulate in Jerusalem.

Like Antiochus, the Biden administration has spent the past few months alternately terrorizing and bribing Israelis to accept its plans for a consulate to the terrorists killing Jews in Jerusalem.

“We want the American Consulate to constitute the seed of a U.S. embassy in the State of Palestine,” Mohammad Shtayyeh, the PLO’s current prime minister, had boasted.

Biden is clearly on the same page.

Russia and China operate diplomatic missions to the PLO in Ramallah. If the Biden administration really wanted to open a consulate to be closer to the terrorists, they would stick it in that terrorist capital: a former Christian city taken over by Islamic killers as their base in Israel.

Instead like the old dead Syrian-Greek tyrant, Biden wants to plant his idol in Jerusalem.

Antiochus had forbidden the Jews to keep the Sabbath, inaugurate the new monthly moon of Rosh Chodesh, and celebrate the holidays. Biden followed in his footsteps by forbidding the Jews to celebrate Jerusalem Day marking the liberation and reunification of the city.

The joyous celebration in which children sing and wave Israeli flags, and thousands of people from across the country and the world take part in a parade through the Old City, was denounced by Biden's State Department as a "provocation". What else is a provocation?

Prayer.

The Biden administration ordered Israel to “preserve the historic status quo on the Haram al-Sharif / Temple Mount – in word and in practice.” This “historic status quo” was imposed by the Muslim occupiers and bans Jews from praying at their own holiest site.

The Trump peace plan had proposed that, “People of every faith should be permitted to pray on the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif, in a manner that is fully respectful to their religion, taking into account the times of each religion's prayers and holidays, as well as other religious factors."

The PLO, Hamas, and the Biden administration rejected this call for basic religious freedom.

Instead the Biden administration, following in the footsteps of Antiochus, has ordered that only Islamic idolatry should be permitted on the site of the Holy Temple.

The only thing Biden hasn’t done is erect an altar to Zeus and sacrifice a pig on it.

Maybe he’s saving that for his next Chanukah party.

The Biden administration restarted the flow of cash to the PLO even though the Islamic terrorist group continues to incite and finance the murder of Jews. In the week before Chanukah, an Islamic terrorist opened fire in Jerusalem’s Old City killing Eliyahu David Kay, a 26-year-old guide at the remnant of the Temple known as the Western Wall, and wounding 4 others.

The PLO’s Palestinian Authority media declared that the terrorist had “died as a martyr.”

In response, Biden’s State Department warned its employees to stop visiting the Old City so that none of its personnel will be caught up in the terrorist attacks that the administration is funding.

When Biden isn’t sending hundreds of millions of dollars in “aid” to the Taliban in Afghanistan, he’s dispatching hundreds of millions to the Palestinian Industrial Terrorist Complex. Hundreds of millions of dollars a year is what the PLO spends on its “Pay-to-Slay” program for terrorists.

Meanwhile the Biden administration is applying diplomatic pressure on Israel by refusing to vote against a UN resolution calling for the destruction of the Jewish State and warning against allowing Jews to live in homes in parts of Israel claimed by its Islamic terrorist allies.

The creation of a terrorist consulate in Jerusalem is against both Israeli and American law.

When President Trump moved the embassy to Jerusalem, he followed the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995. The Act had been co-sponsored by Biden and stated in plain language that, “Jerusalem should be recognized as the capital of the State of Israel.”

Before that, Biden had co-sponsored 1992's SR-113 which had congratulated "the residents of Jerusalem and the people of Israel on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the reunification of that historic city" and called on "the President and the Secretary of State to issue an unequivocal statement in support of these principles." Maybe Biden ought to follow his own resolution.

In 1990, Biden co-sponsored SSR-0106 which had gone even further by denouncing "ambiguous statements by the Government of the United States concerning the right of Jews to live in all parts of Jerusalem" which "raise concerns in Israel that Jerusalem might one day be redivided and access to religious sites in Jerusalem denied to Israeli citizens."

From that Biden has gone on to denounce the right of Jews to live and pray in Jerusalem.

When an Israeli court ruled that Muslim occupiers who had been illegally resettled by the UN in Jewish homes in Jerusalem when Jordan invaded, occupied, and ethnically cleansed the holy city had to pay rent or leave, the Biden administration warned Israel not to evict the occupiers.

While Jews don’t have a right to live in their own homes in Jerusalem, Biden wants to impose his terrorist consulate on Jerusalem on behalf of the Islamic terror state he hopes to create.

Having turned over Afghanistan to Al Qaeda, ISIS-K, and the Taliban, he wants to turn over Jerusalem to the PLO and Hamas.

Biden had vowed during his campaign to open a terror consulate in Jerusalem without even consulting the Jewish State. Now as Chanukah approaches he is ramping up the pressure. The Islamists and appeasers in Biden’s State Department have reportedly taken to yelling and threatening Israeli officials over their refusal to place Biden’s PLO pig on the altar.

But the legacy of Chanukah tells us that the fortitude of faith can prevail over tyranny.

The Democrats and the media pretended that their problem wasn’t with Israel, but with Netanyahu. And yet now that Netanyahu is out of office, nothing has changed at all.

They didn’t hate Netanyahu: they hated the Jewish State. Just like they don’t hate any particular Republican president, when they burn American flags and cities: they hate America.

Like Antiochus, they hate the religious conviction and moral tradition that Israel represents. It’s what drives their obsession with denying Jews the right to pray at the Temple Mount, and with struggling to keep Jews out of every house in the city that exists as a living testament of G-d.

Why is the Biden administration following in the footsteps of Obama’s religious war to claim Jerusalem for Islam? How better to destroy the roots of the Jewish and Christian religions?

The Biden administration wants to turn Chanukah from a celebration of religious rebirth to its suppression in the very city where the faith and arms of a tiny people defeated the might of an evil empire and unleashed a heavenly fire from a neglected flask of oil in the Holy Temple.

As Jews light the menorah once again the way that their ancestors thousands of years lit that single menorah, flooding the courtyards and alleyways of Jerusalem with a golden glow, they send a message to Antiochus IV and Biden II that faith in G-d is stronger than any tyrant.

The arrest of Los Angeles Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas over a bribery scheme was nothing special. Recent arrests and indictments have decimated the ranks of the Cincinnati and Detroit city councils. The corruption of urban Democrat machines is a dog bites man story and the responsibility of those machines for much of the misery they blame on the myth of “systemic racism” may well be the single most underreported story in the establishment media.

What makes the Ridley-Thomas arrest stand out is that the bribe was academic.

And he got a job at the University of Southern California.

USC named Sebastian a  "professor of practice of policy and social work" and also gave him a scholarship to study for a master’s in social work. Prosecutors allege that Marilyn Flynn, the dean of USC's School of Social Work, and a major donor to Mark Ridley-Thomas, told "multiple USC officials about Sebastian Ridley-Thomas, explaining who his father was and saying his admission should be given the highest priority."

An hour earlier, the dean had been told that a $9 million contract was ready to go.

Flynn urged USC figures to rush it through “in the interests of showing MRT that we can deliver.” The indictment emails show the USC dean greedily salivating that, “there are significant amounts of county funds available” and “should give us $1M each year for three years.”

Where was that money coming from? Contracts with the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services and Department of Mental Health. Some of the most vulnerable members of society, the people whom the Democrats and the USC social workers claimed to be protecting were actually being used as counters in a corrupt scheme to enrich Democrats.

The whole thing came apart when the Mark Ridley-Thomas Committee for a Better L.A. funneled $100,000 through the USC School of Social Work to Sebastian's Policy, Research and Practice Initiative. Whistles were blown and both Mark and Marilyn Flynn were busted.

Despite the massive abuse of taxpayer money, the corruption of both government and academia by the largest social work program in the country and a Democrat dynasty, this USC scandal has received practically no coverage outside the local media. The difference between the national media’s gleeful coverage of allegations that B-list celebs had bent the rules to get their kids into USC and this much more serious case is strikingly revealing. And it’s not over.

While Mark Ridley-Thomas may be an obscure name to most people outside Los Angeles, that’s not the case with Rep. Karen Bass, a member of Congress, who had been touted as one of the top two Biden VP picks, and is considered a front-runner to become LA’s next mayor.

Bass, a Castro supporter with Communist ties (“‘I’m Not a Communist’: Potential Biden Running Mate Reassures” an NBC News headline had read last year) hasn’t been charged with anything, but her case is in some ways even more curious than that of Sebastian.

The lefty House Democrat had received an unsolicited $95,000 tuition award from the USC School of Social Work allowing her to “earn” an online master’s degree.

The Los Angeles Times noted that, “some of her coursework was supervised by a prominent campaign donor who was also a USC professor at the time”. Flynn, “offered the scholarship to Bass even though she had not directly applied to the social work program.”

Flynn approached Bass and offered her a "scholarship" that was not available to students. The USC School of Social Work dean claimed that Bass was chosen because she "demonstrated an exceptional potential for contribution to the field" and had “obvious leadership skills.”

What did Flynn actually expect from Bass’ “contribution to the field”? Good question. Just don’t expect the same national news media that was defending Bass over her support for Castro and other Communists to ask any such basic questions even while the Castroite runs for mayor.

The LA Times also noted that, “The full value of Bass’ scholarship was not listed on her congressional disclosure forms until 2019, when forms from several years were amended and a total of more than $80,000 in free tuition was added to her gift disclosures.”

Academia’s lefty bias is nothing new, but USC represents a more complicated financial entanglement with the Democrats. The university spends half a million a year on lobbying, it takes in millions in government contracts, and its faculty, administrators and other employees plowed over $2.6 million into political campaigns in 2020 alone. The vast majority of that money, 96.5% or nearly $1.8 million donated to federal election candidates, went to Democrats.

The USC School of Social Work had grown so big because of an online “deal with the devil” that the university had struck with 2U, a multi-billion dollar online education platform founded and run by Christopher “Chip” Paucek who had served as the deputy campaign manager for Democrat Senator Barbara Mikulski. (Another Mikulski alum is Democrat political consultant Bob Shrum, who heads the USC Dornsife Center for the Political Future, and was quoted by the LA Times.)

USC and 2U offered a $115,000 online social work master's degree, aggressively targeting minority and underperforming students with GPAs as low as 2.5 and leaving them with huge debts and low income careers. 2U allegedly got 60% of the revenue from the program which helped make it a huge player in the online education space while USC was left with the debt.

Mass education and the welfare state have proven to be quite profitable for Democrat elites while poisoning everything that they touch and leaving broken lives in their wake.

The real scandal at USC was the familiar one of Democrat elites exploiting black people in the name of empowering them and black leaders happily participating in the program. Some of the damage was passed along to taxpayers in the form of scholarships, and the varied players were able to move money around to each other until a few of the players became too brazen.

It’s a much bigger scandal than a Full House cast member trying to get her daughter into USC.

Marilyn Flynn, now the USC School of Social Work's former dean, has been indicted, and pled not guilty. Mark Ridley-Thomas also pled not guilty and was suspended from the Los Angeles City Council. In a bizarre arrangement, his chief of staff is serving as the district’s “caretaker”.

But it’s implausible that Flynn or Ridley-Thomas acted alone. In their alleged corrupt actions, they consulted and coordinated with multiple USC and local government officials. This isn’t the story of a few corrupt people, but a corrupt system which exploits those it claims to be helping.

How did Rep. Karen Bass, with her six-figure government salary, qualify for a $95,000 scholarship? Don’t ask USC whose spokesperson sneered that they had no idea, “what policies and procedures were in place at the School of Social Work 10 years ago.”

The cynicism is almost as breathtaking as the corruption.

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

While the supply chain crisis left American store shelves bare, Biden went to a UN climate conference to save the world. Saving the world is a whole lot easier than stocking shelves. Ask any teenager.

Like the Soviet Union and other Communist countries, we have become a nation of moral crusaders and misery where goods shortages are papered over with wars against intangible social problems. Public officials no longer solve problems, like ivory tower academics they delve into root causes and produce theories explaining why the problems can’t be solved without changing society and humanity.

It’s as if you invited a plumber to fix your toilet only to lectured about the history of plumbing in ancient Egypt, gender roles, and social expectation while your toilet goes on flooding the floor.

While Democrats go down the rabbit hole of root causes, their cities are overrun with crime and human waste, prices for everything skyrocket, and some goods can no longer be had at any price. Confronted with this reality, they build walls of words, seizing on talking points to convince the public that the problems don’t exist or that they’re actually symptoms of deep social problems going back centuries even though they only date back to last week. Either approach frees them from having to solve them.

Do elites turn socialist as they become more incompetent or do they become more incompetent as they embrace socialism? The chicken and the egg problem that made even formerly prosperous Eastern European and Latin American countries into miserable failed states, that divided the two Koreas between booming industry and mass hunger, is arriving in America with much the same outcome.

American bureaucracy is bigger than ever. The growth of administrators in every field outpaces that of ordinary workers, clients, and products produced. No single decree from a scowling boss in Moscow turned a booming nation of individualists into a timid managerial state with endless rules that apply to every facet of work and everyday life. It was the slow accumulation of individual inertia, cultural safetyism, and crises, real and manufactured, that fossilized into a state of permanent administration.

The hunger of the administrative state for more power and the natural insecurities of its wards gave us everything from the welfare state to universal masking. The shutdowns and mandates of the pandemic are only the latest inevitable development from a system that reacts to every crisis with collective panics that transfer power from the public to unelected bureaucrats. Whatever the details of a crisis, its primary function is to generate more regulations and more overseers to see everyone follows them.

None of these regulations do anything except generate more insecurity and seize more power. Each succeeding generation views unrestricted freedom as an increasingly alien condition. A generation terrified of the Second Amendment birthed a generation terrified of the First Amendment. Each set of restrictions is deemed insufficient by the frightened generation that is raised under their rule.

If you think today’s college students are snowflakes, wait until the children who were raised to fear their own parents as sources of infection and to wear masks everywhere finally come of age.

It’s no great challenge to convince a society of frightened people that the end of the world is near.

Call it the ice age, global warming, climate change, or whatever panic brand replaces them when the marketers and pollsters decide that the current term is insufficiently triggering: to people who have been taught to be afraid of everything the end of the world is an entirely plausible scenario.

Environmentalism, like every root cause crisis, tells us to be afraid of ourselves. The terror of our words, our faces, our thoughts, and our possessions has always haunted the Left. Where visionaries saw possibilities, socialism has only seen threats. Its promises to save the world don’t spring from a place of courage, but of fear of others and of the inability of its acolytes to come to grips with real life.

Those who can, do. And those who can’t, warn others that doing anything is the root of all evil.

What else could such a worldview bring forth other than the incompetence, corruption, and tyranny that we see all around us. Problems become power grabs and so there’s no incentive to solve them, only to make them worse. Leftist ideology rationalizes most problems as inherently unsolvable in the short term, only in some long term utopian eventuality that reboots all of human society around its ideals.

Problems like empty store shelves or crime in the streets are ultimately caused by capitalism, individualism, the nuclear family, and the existence of humanity. There’s no solving them without addressing root causes like human nature, civilization, and the survival instinct. Like the USSR, the goal posts for solving even the most mundane problems get moved all the way into infinity.

This arrangement is quite convenient for the bureaucracies, public and private, from which leftist systems and ideologies draw their power. It frees teachers not to teach, companies not to innovate, and officials not to solve problems even as they organize moral crusades against the end of the world.

The true purpose of bureaucracy is always to eliminate competition. The chaos of individualism is collectively managed by stultifying regulations whose goal isn’t fixing problems, but preventing surprises. The administrative state can accept the deaths of millions as long as it follows the rules. That’s why all the administrators who forced nursing homes to accept coronavirus infected patients were never held responsible for the mass deaths that resulted from their horrifying decisions.

Most were even rewarded.

The pandemic shutdowns weren’t motivated by fear of infections, but of unscheduled and uncontrolled infections. The administrative state doesn’t mind people dying, as long as they decide who dies.

And who lives.

World leaders fleeing problems at home to talk global warming at the UN’s COP26 are leaving behind real challenges that they’ve given up trying to solve and are saving the world. What makes leaders like Biden or Boris Johnson, Merkel or Trudeau, who have badly screwed up the prosaic problems they were tasked with believe that they can change the climate when they can’t do much smaller things?

Western leaders no longer tackle real problems that can be solved, only imaginary ones that can’t. Like their socialist forebears they define an overwhelming problem, economic classes, systemic racism, or climate change, and then spend all their time at seminars on how to best tackle its root causes. The solution invariably involves moving money around in ways that favor them and their power base.

This brand of messianic workshopped Communism is even worse than the original because actual Communist regimes at least cared about production while wealthy western leftists outsource production to third world countries so they can spend more time fighting systemic racism or the weather.

Our shortages may be currently less severe than those of a proper Communist dictatorship, but our leaders are even more detached from the basic responsibility of elected officials which is not to “safeguard democracy”, but to justify their work to the system and the people who elected them.

With Biden, America skipped past Lenin and Stalin to go right to the Brezhnev era with senescent apparatchiks overseeing the decline of a country and an economy they don’t actually understand.

America’s elites, bad or good, used to understand how things actually worked. And then they became the products of Ivy League institutions which traded practical skills for abstract theories. Our elites have learned how to lie to us and to rob us, and tell us it’s for our own good, and how to retreat into academic theories to avoid dealing with reality. They’ve learned how to manipulate the artificial systems of bureaucracy and its abstract rule sets, but know next to nothing about the real world.

They’re happy to save the world. Just don’t ask them where the beef is.

Biden claims that the Build Back Better Act will help ordinary Americans, but the legislation, like so much in Washington D.C., is a collection of pork for corrupt special interests. One of those special interests is the media which suppressed negative stories about Biden and the Democrats, like the FBI investigation of Hunter Biden, while promoting disinformation, like the Steele Dossier, targeting President Trump: Biden’s opponent in the presidential election.

Congressional Democrats, with the complicity of some Republicans, had previously proposed media subsidy schemes that included tax credits for media companies, tax breaks for subscribing to papers, and even a $5,000 tax credit for taking out an ad in the local paper.

The media subsidy scheme in Biden’s Build Back Better Act offers $1.9 billion to the media with a payroll tax credit covering 50% of salaries, as much as $25,000, for the Democrat propagandists on media company payrolls, and another 30% over the next four years.

While the Democrats claim that this $1.9 billion special interest giveaway to the media is helping "local news", it's capped at 1,500 employees. The Washington Post has only a little over 1,000 “journalists” on its payroll. The legislation is written in a typically convoluted fashion, so it’s not altogether clear if the premier propaganda outlet of the Democrats, owned by the richest man in the country, would qualify for these subsidies at a time when Americans are struggling to get by.

Lest there be any doubt that the so-called "local journalism" provision is a State Media scheme to subsidize hit pieces on Republicans, Democrats explained that's exactly what it's there for.

Rep. Earl Blumenauer touted the ability of "local journalism" to stop Republican candidates like  Edward Durr, a truck driver who spent $153 to defeat New Jersey Senate boss Steve Sweeney: the biggest Democrat power broker in the state.

“There was no opportunity for local media to provide even basic information about the candidates,” Rep. Blumenauer whined. “The guy would never have been elected if he had gotten any scrutiny at all.” By scrutiny, the leftist Democrat means hit pieces, of the kind that the media belatedly began generating after the truck driver’s unexpected election night win.

Give the media $1.9 billion in subsidies and they can stop the next truck driver from beating their Senate boss through lies, smears, intimidation, and disinformation campaigns.

If this dirty deal were any more corrupt, it would be taking place in a brothel.

But Democrats are not just relying on the innate biases of the media. One of the biggest dark money investments of their political machines have been fake news local operations.

Democrat groups like Report for America and Courier Newsroom have embedded subsidized reporters and created fake local news outlets to push leftist agendas. Report for America is funded by the usual Democrats megadonors, the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Knight Foundation, as well as by Big Tech monopolies like Google and Facebook.

Courier Newsroom, backed by the controversial Acronym/Pacronym network, had begun generating fake local news sites for the 2020 election with names like “UpNorth News” in Wisconsin. It's being rebooted with the backing of George Soros and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman who had previously been caught pushing fake news through the Alabama Project.

The Alabama Project had, in its own words, targeted the state's Senate election, by having "orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet.”

The LinkedIn co-founder apologized, claimed that he knew nothing and that it would never happen again. And here he is, alongside Soros, backing Good Information Inc. which will fund non-profit propaganda media and invest in for-profit media that pushes its political agenda.

Good Information Inc., is just a rebooted version of Courier Newsroom’s fake news network.

The Build Back Better Act’s $1.9 billion media subsidy isn’t just funding an industry aligned with the Democrats, but one that has become a false flag operation for its messaging apparatus.

The Dems might just as well add $1.9 billion in subsidies for their own political consultants.

The connection between the media’s political fake news operations and the pork isn’t even being disguised.

CNN’s Brian Stelter quotes “Report for America co-founder Steven Waldman, who has helped lead the drive for the tax credit”, saying, "It's a huge breakthrough for local news if it becomes law.” Report for America is indeed vocally advocating for the Democrat media subsidy. And it would be a “huge breakthrough” if part of the cost of Democrat messaging operations were being subsidized by American taxpayers freeing Dem megadonors to wage war elsewhere.

But the core business model of the leftist machine has been to not simply establish political operations that can swing elections, but figuring out how to make them into permanent taxpayer-funded features of public life so they can move on to their next “startup”.

Waldman, like CNN and Report for America, not to mention many of RFA’s megadonors, operate out of New York City. Their interest isn’t in local news, it’s in winning elections. Local elections are now routinely swung by rivers of cash coming out of New York and California. Not satisfied with using billions to rig local elections in places they would never visit, they want American taxpayers to subsidize their political activists and their fake news operations.

The media has gone to work telling Americans that giving them billions is actually a wonderful idea in the ultimate example of a conflict of interest. What the media neglects to mention is that its outlets are facing hard financial times because they have alienated two thirds of their audience. Unable to convince Americans to watch, read, and pay for their lies, they’re now resorting to extracting the money through the politicians they’ve been working to elect.

The same radical shift in the media that alienated its readers and viewers also vested the industry with the political power to steal billions from Americans and put it in their pockets.

The media is no longer an independent industry, it’s an arm of the ruling party.

The $1.9 billion in media subsidies is a timely reminder that the only thing that the trillions in special interest pork are actually “building back better” is the Democrat Party.