Enter your keyword

Sunday, September 24, 2023

The Clintons Welcome Trans Queens, Muslim Politicians, Foreign Oligarchs

By On September 24, 2023 In
The Clintons are back in Manhattan, baby.

Once again random celebrities, Orlando Bloom, Matt Damon, Patrick Dempsey, Karlie Kloss, will rub shoulders with random foreign leaders like Mia Mottlev, the Prime Minister of Barbados,

Irfaan Ali, the President of Guyana, Biden administration officials, the heads of nonprofits with made up titles like “intersectional environmentalist”, heads of UN agencies, New York Times reporters, professional humanitarians and shady foreign oligarchs. (Mostly the latter.)

Getting to the Midtown Manhattan Hilton may not be easy due to its proximity to the masses of illegal aliens clustering around hotels that have been turned into homeless shelters, but once there delegates to the Clinton Global Initiative 2023 will have the chance to be in the same room as Atiqul Islam, the Mayor of Dhaka, and Qween Jean, the founder of Black Trans Liberation, not to mention Ashley Judd, who hopefully will not beat each other to death with swag bags.

Six years ago, when CGI appeared to be deader than everyone who had witnessed the Clintons commit federal offenses, a comeback appeared to be impossible, but thanks to the boundless generosity of Google, Pfizer, the UAE’s DP World, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Waltons, and Alfonso Fanjul, the glorious triumphant resurrection of Bill, Hillary and Chelsea is upon us.

Wait, are you wondering who Alfonso Fanjul is? The Clintons have a lot of friends. Especially wealthy friends with foreign last names. The Fanjul family controls Domino Sugar, which benefits from government subsidies, and Alfonso was a co-chair of Bill’s 1992 campaign.

But let’s not dwell on Alfonso, when another CGI sponsor is the MEBO Group.

Originally known as the “Beijing Guangming Traditional Chinese Medicine Institute”, MEBO boasts that it is a “significant partner of the Clinton Foundation” and will launch “a new action commitment” to “take action to deal with global warming and climate crises.”

MEBO, according to its head, Kevin Xu, claims to be working on “techniques that would allow humans to endogenously regenerate their own organs in the similar way that invertebrate animals do” and notes that “some government officials are appointed for life, such as federal judges in the United States. These individuals could have a powerful influence on society if they were able to hold office for centuries, which might be possible with in situ organ regeneration.”

With organ regeneration, Hillary Clinton could spend an eternity in a living hell watching people who are not her be elected president every 4 years, but Bill Clinton might be more open to it.

But enough about shady foreign oligarchs.

The Clinton Global Initiative is back under its exciting new motto, ‘Keep Going’, and has managed to bring together Padma Lakshmi, Cindy McCain, Chelsea Clinton and Jen Psaki to save the planet. Also possibly Ukraine. (Although the planet may be easier to save.)

It would be a pity to ruin all that goodwill by asking about Domuschiev Impact which is listed as only one of two presenting groups. Wouldn’t it be better to report on Matt Damon’s thoughts on water (he’s for it) or the Pope’s thoughts on war (he’s against it) than to go asking inconvenient questions about the foreigners that the Clintons befriend and then drag along behind them.

Domuschiev appears to refer to Kiril Domuschiev, a Bulgarian tycoon, CGI board member and new best friend. Earlier this year, Bill Clinton stopped by Bulgaria (hasn’t everybody) in a big shindig where the U.S. ambassador got a copy of Clinton’s book, ‘My Life’ translated into the melodious Bulgarian, ‘Otkradnete Vsichko’, with Kiril Domuschiev in attendance.

Clinton told the audience that he will “always be proud to be the first American president to come here”. But why was Bill in Bulgaria? He was there by the invitation of the chairman of the Confederation of Industrialists and Employers: Kiril Domuschiev. The Domuschievs own media companies, ship building enterprises, a soccer club and possibly a badly aged former president. They also own Huvepharma, a livestock health company that is expanding in Nebraska.

But the Clinton Global Initiative isn’t about Chinese, Indian or Bulgarian oligarchs who just happen to be giving the Clintons a lot of money, it’s about listening to former model Christy Turlington talk about whatever she’s there to talk about and see how surprisingly well preserved Tony Blair looks and how Hillary Clinton still hasn’t bitten anyone an hour into the proceedings even though she keeps clenching her teeth and balefully glaring at Nicholas Kristof.

The Clintons had mastered turning nonprofits into the Emmys or at least the Golden Globe awards. The beautiful people are here and so are the strategically ugly people. There are women in hijabs and men in ten thousand dollar suits. Gov. Gavin Newsom is somewhere in the area if he wasn’t abducted and eaten by some of the hungry migrants outside. So is Gov. Whitmer who reportedly ate a few of the migrants when her lunch order was running late.

Why must we dwell on the fact that the supporting sponsors for CGI 2023 includes the Fondation Botnar? You don’t want to hear about the Botnar Foundation, do you? Why must we drag the noble name of a former president through the dust simply because he has the same class and standards when it comes to foreign money as Hunter Biden with an armful of crack pipes?

Alright, Octav Botnar was a wanted fugitive who fled the UK for Switzerland. He died in 1998, but not before taking center stage in helping Democrats and Israeli leftists finance a campaign against Prime Minister Netanyahu.

What is it with the Clintons and foreign criminals anyway?

Other people collect paintings of old ships or bearskin rugs, but Bill, Hillary and Chelsea keep distracting from their noble work of helping Matt Damon fight against water by hooking up with any foreign billionaire with a gleam in his eye and a loose checkbook.

The Clintons haven’t changed, but who thought they really would?

Behind the hype about the return of Tony Blair, the arrival of two Biden cabinet members, a former model, a former NBA player and a former president, the Clinton Global Initiative remains a shoddy foreign influence peddling operation for corporations and foundations that don’t have the class to just go to prison for sponsoring an all-ages drag show.

When you end up at the Clinton Global Initiative, it’s either because you’re a tacky foreign arriviste, a celebrity trying to seem serious before you’re too old to act, or a foreign leader who will show up to absolutely anything as long as there’s a camera… like Ukraine’s Zelensky.

In good news for Swiss and Bahama bankers, Hillary Clinton and Olena Zelenska, America’s most loathed lady and Ukraine’s first lady, have teamed up on the CGI Ukraine Action Network which sounds like a failed martial arts TV import from the 1990s, but is actually supposed to help the otherwise overlooked Ukrainian people who weren’t helped by anybody until now.

The Clintons are years late to the party. But they always are. Much like Nigerian scammers whose illiterate solicitation emails self-select the easiest marks, Clinton scams are so obvious that the only people who fall for them think that they’re the ones doing the scamming.

And maybe they are. In a ravenous ecosystem where the predators wear Prada, it’s hard to know who’s really ripping off whom. Only that the Clintons are probably the best at it.

At the Midtown Manhattan Hilton where hip-hop equity activists with funky hair rub shoulders with the leaders of Asians poverty NGOs that may not even exist, local politicians try to attract some favorable attention and foreign oligarchs claim that they can regenerate organs, truth is as nebulous as it was when Bill was being asked about having relations with that woman.

Teach girls in Afghanistan to code with satellites? Sure, why not. What about training formerly abused Somali women to grow sustainable marijuana? Sounds good. Or retraining former coal miners to fight climate change by blocking traffic in London? Let’s do it. It’s all made up, by me, but so is the program agenda at the Clinton Global Initiative and less creatively at that.

The Clinton Global Initiative is a magical fantasy propped up by Iranian, Indian and Bulgarian oligarchs, by the tawdry lure of the Clinton name, and by the fact that the masses of migrants flooding Manhattan still haven’t managed to overrun the steel and glass 54th Street Hilton.

Bill’s there, looking red and befuddled, Hillary’s there, gritting her teeth into a diamond hard smile, and Chelsea’s there, waiting for someone to be nice to her, knowing that this is all there is or will ever be. Like a 737 carrying a Commerce Secretary trying to land in Croatia, it’s all down from here. Getting the largest Medicaid managed care organization in the country or an Iranian video game tycoon to pony up is a very temporary balm for a future that already slipped away.

Once upon a time, Bill was going to be the new JFK, Hillary was going to be the first female president, and Chelsea was, well, going to be recognized unprompted by strangers on the street.

Now that’s all gone.

The party has moved on and all that’s left is a tawdry scam at a hotel so boring that not even Salvadorans want to invade and urinate over all its floors. The motto of CGI 2023 is ‘Keep Going’. That’s also the Clinton motto. After having failed out of the political system, they’re still going. Why? Revenge, high blood alcohol content, fear of irrelevance or desperate greed?

Like the celebrities who crowd CGI’s events, the Clintons can’t stop or people will forget them.





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

Thank you for reading.
Comments
Posted by: at No comments:
Tags: , ,

Friday, September 22, 2023

Woke James Bond Novels Replace Him With Disabled Black Gay Superspy

By On September 22, 2023 In
“Do you expect me to talk?” No, I expect you to go woke.”

Earlier this year word came that Ian Fleming Publications Ltd, which controls the rights to the deceased author’s novels, hired sensitivity readers to go through his books and purge anything that might offend sensitive woke souls. The newly republished novels warn that, “this book was written at a time when terms and attitudes which might be considered offensive by modern readers were commonplace.”

Now that old Bond is dead, a new woke Bond can safely rise. Even though Ian Fleming has been dead since 1964, the estate turned to other authors to prime the giant money pump. Initially new Bond novels were written by prestigious writers like Kingsley Amis or former military men like John Gardner, but in more recent years turned the books over to wokes.

The latest of these come from Kim Sherwood, a University of Edinburgh lecturer who is interested in “women’s stories” and was authorized to write a feminist James Bond trilogy.

How do you write a feminist trilogy around one of the least feminist fictional characters around?

Easy, get rid of him.

In the new feminist novels, Miss Moneypenny has been promoted, Q has been replaced by a computer, and Bond by a woman, a black man and a Muslim man.

Sherwood’s feminist trilogy of Bond novels has the superspy go missing while she invents new zeroes to take his place. Sherwood’s “feminist perspective” on James Bond gets rid of the white man and offers an “ensemble cast of heroes who we can all identify with.”

“I want to bring a feminist perspective to the canon,” Sherwood pitched, to “create a space for all of us to be heroes.” As long as they aren't white men. The new zeroes prioritize “inclusivity, female heroes, and heroes of colour” including a black gay disabled 004, a female 003 and a Pakistani Muslim 009.

Sid Bashir, the Muslim replacement for James Bond, remembers standing by his mother’s side at an Islamic cultural fair after 9/11 under a banner reading, “Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic.” Another scene quotes the Koran and has Bashir saying, “May Allah bless your family.”

“I was born poor, black and gay, I know about hard times,” 004 who, it is important to note, is black and gay says.

This isn’t just bad writing, it reads like a right-wing parody of wokeness.

Joseph Dryden, aka 004, the disabled black gay replacement for Bond, is fighting to stop an evil billionaire who claims he can reverse 'climate change' without people having to reduce their 'carbon emissions'.

"You're not the first white industrialist to put a man who looks like me in a cage," he scolds the, inevitably, white male villain.

Moneypenny stops to deliver a lecture on 'climate change; warning of 'arctic melting, rising seas, flooding deadly heat waves" unless we "shift toward a global commons" and "sustainable, inclusive development" using "low material growth" while "driving down inequality". In this version of Bond, not only is he missing, but his bosses are Communists.

One scene takes place in a police station overrun by a leftist mob where “feminists, anarchists”, socialists and advocates for climate justice” have turned it into an “anti-capitalist party center.”

This is the woke utopia. Inclusivity means erasing everyone who doesn’t fit into this leftist vision of the ideal society.

“Bond has always been a fantasy, but it’s a fantasy that can reflect us and shape us and I’m so excited to get to be part of that for a contemporary world,” Kim Sherwood argued.

The thing about fantasies is that they have to be grounded in something. The old Bond was a series of fantasies grounded in the Cold War and some espionage experience by Fleming, but wokeness is already a fantasy and Bond authors no longer know anything except politics.

Politics in Bond novels used to be subtext, but now it’s text.

Earlier this year, Ian Fleming Publications Ltd rushed to publication a new novel, On His Majesty’s Secret Service, to mark Charles III’s coronation. Every monarch gets the 007 writer that he or she deserves. Queen Liz got Fleming while King Charlie has to make do with Charlie Higson, a comedian, who famously accused Winston Churchill of being secretly gay.

The Bond novel celebrated Charlie’s coronation, dubbed “King Charles the Woke”, by going up against COVID conspiracists, immigration opponents, and critics of Black Lives Matter and the transgender movement who asked things like “What are we going to do about the Muslims?”

Conservatives are a pretty reliable demographic for James Bond novels, but much like the film industry, publishing is making it clear that it not only doesn’t want them as writers, but even as readers. That is even more true of the Big 5 publishing industry in the United States.

If Ian Fleming, the actual Bond author, were alive today, he would be one of the villains. Fleming was anti-union, opposed to the welfare state and a conservative. But the old Bond novels upheld the primacy of Britain while in the new woke novels, the touchstones are no longer patriotism and country, but diversity.

“Bond was struck by something. It was a long while since he’d been at any kind of function that was almost exclusively full of men. It felt strange. There was not even a pretence at diversity here. Athelstan hadn’t been the least bit concerned about ensuring that half of the people he’d hired to carry out his coup should be women, or non-white, or disabled,” the novel has him say.

Fortunately, the new Bond novels more than make up for it with women, non-white and disabled superspies who battle the forces of ignorance and skepticism about mutilating children.

Heroically they penetrate super-secret fortresses and uncover plots to say politically incorrect things on social media after Islamic terrorist attacks. And they always take time out to remind you of their suffering as black, gay, disabled Pakistani Muslims who are the real victims.

Who needs Bond, James Bond, when we’ve got Victim, Woke Victim?





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

Thank you for reading.
Comments
Posted by: at 4 comments:
Tags: , , ,

Thursday, September 21, 2023

Bombs, Rockets and Torture Cells: The EU is an Islamic Narco-State

By On September 21, 2023 In
Less than an hour from the capital of the European Union, gangs fight gun battles in the streets or bomb each other’s outposts. Crime reporters, police and prosecutors are bought off or killed. Torture cells are set up in shipping containers and bodies can be cleanly disposed of, but when the gangs really want to send a message they set up a public execution or fire off a rocket.

That’s the way things are done, not in Bogota or Beirut, but in Antwerp.

Europe’s initial Islamic migration followed port cities. Among those leading port cities were Rotterdam and Antwerp which have become the hubs of Europe’s cocaine crisis. The Moroccan Muslims who came to the quintessentially European cities used them as links to their relatives who were growing marijuana back home. While Islam ruthlessly suppressed the use of alcohol, hashish use became widespread among the invading armies of the new religion. Islamic terrorists nourished on the drug became some of the most useful Jihadis carrying out attacks against Christian knights during the Crusades. Morocco was one of the world’s largest producers of hashish and the new Muslim immigrants established local drug empires.

The drugs grew harder and so did the gangs. Marijuana made way for cocaine in Rotterdam and Antwerp. The gangs became organized crime syndicates whose power rested on control of the docks. The docks in Antwerp are under the control of a hard leftist Belgian union that gleefully shuts down the country and violently clashes with the police during its strikes, but it knows better than to stand up to the Muslim gangs. Leading union figures have allegedly been bribed and ordinary dock workers who refuse to transport the cocaine off ships disappear.

A 2020 bust turned up a secret torture room in a shipping container with a dentist’s chair, handcuffs, pliers and scalpels. And cameras set to record it all as a lesson to others.

The Muslim gangs aren’t subtle. That we hardly hear about them is due to politics and terror.

In the Netherlands, they sent a message to the media by firing an anti-tank rocket at one magazine and then smashing a van through the lobby of the country’s biggest newspaper and setting it on fire. Reporters and bloggers have been killed, and abduction threats have been issued against everyone from the crown princess to the prime minister.

The terror is obvious, but so is the politics.

The Mocro Maffia, which controls a third of Europe’s cocaine market, was built by Moroccan immigrants to the Benelux countries. Media accounts make a point of describing most of the perpetrators in an attack as being “of Dutch origin” or from some other part of Europe to obfusticate the immigration issue. With a Moroccan Muslim criminal organization whose roots in Europe go back to the 1960s, it stands to reason that many of its younger members were already born in Europe: some even to second generation immigrants also born in Europe.

But that doesn’t make them European. And even Europe’s native criminal population is becoming Arabized and Islamized from prison level converts to more elite figures.

When Robert Mink Kok, a major Dutch drug trafficker who had considered becoming a lawyer before turning to crime, was targeted, authorities raided his compounds in Lebanon, including in Hezbollah’s drug hub in the Bekaa Valley where they found anti-tank rockets. Kok had married into a Lebanese Arab Muslim drug clan with its own drug labs and private army. The Lebanese drug clan and Kok had allegedly been working to bring two metric tons of cocaine into Europe.

The majority of drug kingpin figures, like Ridouan Taghi, once the most wanted man in the Netherlands, are North African Muslims and, when they go to ground it’s either in Muslim countries (Taghi was identified in Dubai) or, like Taghi’s associate, Sayid Razzouki, head for the shelter of the Latin American cartels whose drugs they move into Europe.

The immigrants, some of whom have been in Europe for 60 years, others who were born there, are not becoming integrated, instead parts of Europe are turning into Lebanon or Morocco. The same ports that once brought Muslim immigrants to Europe are now controlled by immigrant crime bosses who are making Europe play by their rules.

It’s not just Belgium and the Netherlands: Sweden had 90 gang bombings last year.

While the media harps on gun ownership in the United States, Muslim gangs in Sweden have taken to throwing hand-grenades and home-brewed explosives at each other. While the Muslim gang members still shoot at each other, they also like hurling explosives at apartment buildings.

At the end of August, there were four blasts in one hour at different buildings in Gothenburg where 10% of the country’s Muslim settler population lives. Unlike Belgium and the Netherlands, Sweden’s gangs and their weapons come from the shattered remnants of the former Yugoslavia: Bosnians and Albanians brought as refugees formed gangs and smuggled weapons from family members in their own homelands. They were joined by the Black Cobra gang: an Iraqi, Lebanese and ‘Palestinian’, organization expanding out of Denmark.

Authorities blame some of the infighting in Sweden’s Muslim gang scene on Rawa Majid, also known as the ‘Kurdish Fox’, who operates out of Turkey. Majiid had come to Sweden as a refugee baby only to build a massive criminal empire and plan RPG attacks. The killers are particularly indiscriminate. “If there are more than one on the scene, shoot all of them. Women, children, it doesn’t matter,” one gang member ordered.

The state of terror is serious, but perhaps even more serious is the growing role of the Muslim mafias in politics. Some gang bosses bribe everyone from police officers to inspectors to local politicians. Other gangs have been getting their members involved in elections, delivering votes, and even moving their members into public office. It’s unknown to what degree elected public officials have been compromised, but some are beginning to call localities and even entire cities, narcostates.

Some of the Benelux countries, always prone to financial corruption, have become hubs for drug smuggling, human trafficking, and organized crime. Muslim gang members openly battle for territory. And the proceeds of the money are laundered through local family businesses. Rising businessmen financed by drug money are getting involved in politics. Hip-hop gang culture crossbred with Korans and mosques is transforming European cities into Islamic narco-states. The next Afghanistan or Beirut may turn out to be in Europe after all.





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

Thank you for reading.
Comments
Posted by: at No comments:
Tags: , ,

Wednesday, September 20, 2023

Democrat Car Bans Could Change the 2024 Election. Why Won't Republicans Talk About Them?

By On September 20, 2023 In
9 Democrat-run states, California, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Oregon, Rhode Island and Washington, have moved to ban cars by 2035.

The Biden administration has exploited EPA emissions standards to accomplish the same thing.

The green push to ban cars and force everyone to buy electric vehicles is a core part of the program and also highly unpopular with families struggling with high prices and inflation. Electric vehicles are far more expensive and much less reliable than cars and most can’t afford them.

59% of Americans oppose a ban on cars while only 40% support it. But, in worse news for banners, support for the ban has consistently fallen over the last years by 7% while opposition to it has increased. Republicans and Independents are obviously stalwartly opposed, but even among Democrats, opposition has grown until a third of Dems is opposed.

On a state by state level, opposition remains strong even in states whose Democrat governors unwisely chose to sign on to a 2035 car ban date. In Maryland, 60% opposed Gov. Wes Moore’s car ban while in New Jersey some 58% are opposed including 42% of Democrats. In Washington, 48% opposed Gov. Jay Inslee’s car ban while 38% backed it. Of those who opposed it, 31% were strongly opposed.

In Virginia, which was put on track to a car ban by following California’s illegal emissions mandates, 58% oppose a gas car ban while only 33% support it. Tellingly, while 42% strongly oppose a car ban only 12% strongly support one. Even among Democrats, support and opposition are nearly tied 44% to 43%. In Minnesota, 65% oppose a car ban while only 29% support it. (47% strongly oppose the ban while only 9% strongly support it.)

Nationwide, support for car bans is strongest among urban voters. And yet even there, ban backing never quite tops 50%. In suburban areas, support drops down to 31% and rural areas falls all the way to 24%. That stands to reason because to whatever extent electric vehicles are viable, it’s only in the core density of major urban areas. Outside them, they’re unusable.

Polls also shows support for a car ban is tied to income. Even the cheapest electric vehicles are out of the price range of most Americans. That’s why opposition to car bans climbs for families making less than $40,000 and even those making up to $80,000. The proposed car ban means families being unable to replace their minivan. It means mothers who can’t drop off their kids at school and fathers who can’t drive to work.

A car ban is an extinction level event for American families. If it goes through, 53% of Americans won’t be able to buy a car. Imagine how much their lives will change.

Pro-ban politicians act as if there will be a smooth transition from cars to electric vehicles.

The reality is that electric vehicles are not viable in any way, shape or form. America’s biggest car companies have spent and lost billions trying to make electric vehicles.

Ford is losing $32,000 on every electric car it sells. In 2023, it lost $3 billion on its EV boondoggle. Ford claimed that it will make 2 million electric cars by 2025 (at which point it would then lose $64 billion) but it only sold 61,575 electric vehicles in 2022. GM shut down the Chevy Bolt, its cheapest electric vehicle after losing $7,400 on every one it sold. It promises to profitably sell 1 million electric vehicles in 2025, but it only sold 44,000 at a loss in 2022.

The math on electric vehicles simply does not work. Many people point to Tesla. But the truth about Tesla is it made money through the fines that California imposed on makers and buyers of cars. In 2022, Tesla made $1.78 billion from carbon credit sales. Companies that make actual cars have to buy the credits from Musk’s Saudi company and pass on the cost to consumers.

While subsidizing electric vehicles for the rich by fining working class car owners worked well enough for Tesla, it’s not a pathway to shifting the entire country over to electric cars. What will really happen by 2025 is that the vast majority of Americans will be cut off from the market. They’ll be left trying to keep old cars and used cars on the road for as long as possible.

Why aren’t politicians talking more about this? Some are operating in the D.C. bubble and don’t recognize the profound impact this will have on the lives of hundreds of millions of people. Others see a 2035 deadline as being so far in the future that it doesn’t need to be dealt with now. And still others are constantly reacting to a passing parade of crises and outrages.

Car bans are far from the only issue out there, but it could have a deciding impact in 2024.

Democrats have committed to a policy that is wildly unpopular outside their small base of urban college graduates who idealize 15 minute cities navigated by bike shares. And they’ve done so with limited pushback from a Republican party that is schizophrenic and feckless in its inability to focus, to make a coherent case and to message on the things that actually matter to voters.

The car bans are an act of cultural, social and economic warfare by an urban elite against the rest of the country. If successful, they would make life all but impossible in rural areas, and increasingly challenging in many suburban areas. They would tear apart families, wreck jobs and push struggling people underwater.

Politicians have gone from two cars in every garage to no cars in the garage at all.

It’s hard to think of any single policy to devastating in its scope and so likely to outrage the working class voters that Republicans are trying to court as car bans. And yet Republicans are failing to talk about them because they are as detached as Democrats from the consequences.

Republicans assumed that they would win in 2022 by passively profiting from the miserable economy. The midterms proved that to be a profound miscalculation. If Republicans want to politically profit from the poor economy, they have to do more than put up stickers pointing a finger at Biden. They have to connect the economic misery directly to Biden’s policies.

Car bans could be a deciding factor in 2024, but only if Republicans and moderate Democrats talk about them. Otherwise another disastrous radical policy will bury much of the country.





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

Thank you for reading.
Comments
Posted by: at 5 comments:
Tags: ,

Tuesday, September 19, 2023

Biden’s Candidacy and the Radicalizing Power of Desperation

By On September 19, 2023 In
On paper, Biden’s candidacy makes no sense. Unpopular even in his own party, most Americans believe that at the age of 80 he’s too old to run, and his long string of gaffes, lies and inappropriate behaviors are only bringing more Americans over to that view.

Even the majority of Democrats would like another candidate. Yet, bafflingly, the party has allowed Biden’s people to rig the primary calendar. Alternative candidates, most notably California’s Gov. Gavin Newsom, have been told to back down, and more fringe candidates, in and out of the party, have been subjected to harassment and smear campaigns.

A party uniting around an incumbent isn’t unusual, but in a bad economy and with widespread public dissatisfaction, there’s no apparent reason why the party should be clinging to an unpopular old white man from one of the smallest states in the country who has no strong base. It would have been nearly unthinkable for the Dems to drop Obama in 2012, but there’s no real reason for the Dems to make a politician who can barely campaign its presumptive nominee.

The Democrats (like the Republicans) have become even more of a party of superannuated elites where Sen. Dianne Feinstein may not know where she is and Rep. Nancy Pelosi has just announced she’s running for another term, but none of them could lose the White House.

Biden can. That’s what makes the DNC gamble on Biden seem so implausible. Unlike the Obamas or the Clintons, Biden doesn’t have the deep base of loyalists or the political machine to intimidate, silence and clear the field. Nor does he have even their minimal political appeal.

And yet that is exactly the point.

Biden is the presumptive nominee not because he is a sure thing, but because he can’t win. That would make no sense to.a traditional Democrat’s way of thinking, but the party is no longer run by the old school, but by a new school of radicals. Its goal is not to win elections, but to radicalize the party and the country. A hopelessly weak candidate facing an unwinnable election against Trump or DeSantis serves that purpose far better than a Newsom victory.

An unwinnable candidate in an election they can’t afford to lose will once again radicalize the Democrats and force them to break rules they hadn’t even previously thought of breaking.

To leftists the election isn’t the issue, only the revolution. From the leftist perspective they won in both 2016 and 2020 because they were able to radicalize the party, its apparatus and rank and file members. Getting suburban housewives to put on pink hats and howl in the streets after a massive defeat doesn’t look like anything that the party would have found rewarding in 1956, but the Left is not out to win elections, but to end them and take over the entire country.

While Republicans celebrated, leftists broke new ground in radicalizing Democrats and in coordinating the machinery of the administrative state to act openly against Trump and Republicans. Republicans had won an election, but leftists had unleashed a state within a state. Openly sidelining elected officials for unelected ones is much more fundamental to the leftist agenda than any of the culture war battles because it prepares the way for a totalitarian state.

Then after terrorizing Democrats and some independents with monstrous caricatures of Trump for four years, the party and its allies were willing to do anything in 2020. And they did.

Biden’s weakness, elderly and running a basement campaign, was a strength, not a weakness.

Democrats, convinced that they couldn’t win naturally, pulled out all the stops, at the state level, exploiting public health emergencies, unilaterally changing voting rules, setting off race riots and bringing the country to its knees. Would they have been as desperate with a strong candidate?

Now Democrats know just how weak their candidate is and how bad their position is. What can the Left convince them to do to win in 2024? The real question is what won’t they do.

The serial raids, indictments and investigations are just a sample of what is being unleashed.

The real purpose of this exercise is not the 2024 election. The next presidential election, like the previous ones, and all those before it, is just a means to an end to the Left. It uses those elections, win or lose, to radicalize and tear apart the country, to seize control of governing institutions and encourage those under its control (and even sometimes those on the other side) to dismantle the governing processes and safeguards against a totalitarian dictatorship.

It’s not even 2024 and leftists have normalized arresting and indicting presidential candidates and trying them during an election season. Democrats were not ready for that in 2016. If Biden weren’t on the ticket now, maybe they would still hesitate. But desperate people do anything.

The two-sided process of radicalization is to prepare the people and institutions for an emergency seizure of power. The Left finally grasped in the seventies that Americans will never go 0-60 to an overnight dictatorship. Comrade Sunshine and Brother Number 19 showing up on television tomorrow to announce food will be rationed will lead to a swift civil war.

Incremental radicalization however opens the Overton window for certain emergency power grabs and acts of domestic violence. Whether it’s temporary suspensions of the 2nd Amendment, pandemic shutdowns, domestic surveillance, or BLM riots, they’re all tests of what we are willing to incrementally accept as the new normal until our rights have been slowly cooked..

The Left exploits or manufactures a crisis, and then sees what desperate people will be willing to go along with. What do you do if you believe children are being massacred to protect the profits of gun manufacturers? What kind of violent acts would you be willing to commit if you believe black people are being subjected to genocide by police descended from slave institutions? What kind of repression would you be willing to sign off on to survive a virus? What would you do if the country were on the verge of falling to a fascist dictator who will lock you up?

These are all things that the other side has been sincerely taught to believe. And act on.

People are being made desperate to radicalize them into being willing to do anything. The more desperate they are, the weaker their position looks, the more crimes they will commit.

Even though the Left controls the country’s institutional power, much of its wealth, almost all of its culture and communications, and is far more effective than conservatives, your average leftist believes that his movement is beleaguered and fighting against the rich and powerful.

How do you make all of those people even more desperate and radical in 2024?

Run Joe Biden again.

Biden’s presidential candidacy makes no sense except to make Democrats so desperate that they will fall into the leftist trap and set even more of the Constitution on fire, use abusive tactics ever more likely to bring on a civil war and break any kind of credible system of elections.

Who benefits from that? Democrats would benefit more from running a strong candidate who can win rather than running a weak candidate who can’t. Leftists benefit from radicalizing the Democrats and tearing apart the country because their goal isn’t election: it’s revolution.

History shows that once leftists are arresting political candidates for having the wrong politics, they don’t stop with those on the right, they quickly go after Democrats, moderates and anyone who falls short of their radical doctrines. That is how it began in the USSR. It’s beginning here.

Biden may appear to be as unlikely an engine for the radicalization of a nation as he is an unlikely candidate, but an unwinnable candidate is the best incentive for breaking the rules. The more leftists convince Democrats that they need to break more rules, the closer they come to their true objective of breaking all the rules and then taking over America.







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

Thank you for reading.
Comments
Posted by: at 9 comments:
Tags: , , ,

Monday, September 18, 2023

John Steinbeck and the Fall and Rise of Israel’s ‘Mount Hope’

By On September 18, 2023 In
In 1966, a year before the war that would fundamentally change the country and the region, John Steinbeck arrived.

“I want to see everything in Israel,” he told the press.

Outraged novels of class warfare like ‘Grapes of Wrath’ had once made the author a favorite of the leftist establishment, but Steinbeck had turned to other topics. He considered his life’s work to be ‘East of Eden’, a retelling of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel in California, which touched on his own dark family history that he had followed all the way back to Israel.

Steinbeck’s support for the Vietnam War had infuriated the literary establishment and even though he had won the Nobel Prize and his acceptance speech became one of the most famous of its kind, he continued to be dismissed as an outdated fossil. And the author, prone to an old school literary machismo, who never much liked parties and crowds, dismissed them.

After facing the establishment’s fury over the Vietnam War, Steinbeck was not worried about the leftist reaction to his visit to Israel. And he looked at Israel through the lens of a writer who had chronicled pioneers and messianists, but also a man who had come to see the world caught in a struggle between good and evil, the forces of democracy against those of Communism.

“The Israelis are the toughest and most vital people I have seen in a long time,” Steinbeck wrote to the LBJ administration with which he had developed a close relationship. “Their army is superb. They say that Israel’s secret weapon is ‘No Alternative’. They have no place to go and anyone who will invade them will have to kill them all, men, women and children, and they all go down fighting. Only they won’t go down. Right now with the weapons they have and they command, they could lick the whole Arab League single handed.”

Steinbeck was a little over a year away from being proven right when the Six Day War would see Israel, outnumbered and outgunned, defeat Egypt, Syria and Jordan, not to mention forces sent by Kuwait, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. But if the American author’s enthusiasm was especially passionate, it might have been because unlike a lot of visitors, his family had left blood here.

“I’ve started for there several times and never made it,” Steinbeck wrote. “I wonder if I have an unconscious reluctance because of what my great-grandfather tried to do there in the 1840s.”

One of his stops in Israel was to ‘Mount Hope’ and the ‘Steinbeck farm’ that his grandfather had left behind after his brother was murdered by the local Arab Muslims. The Grossteinbeck family (the name was later shortened) had joined a Christian mission in the 1850s that was the first to try and build outside Jaffa. But the idealistic farmstead had not taken into account the fanatical Muslim hatred for Christians and Jews who, under Islamic law, had no rights at all.

The Grossteinbecks and other settlers had faced Arab Muslim harassment but what happened in 1858 had international repercussions and brought American military power to bear in Israel.

90 years before Israel, as a Jewish country, had even been reborn.

In January 1858, five Arab Muslim men came to the farmstead under the pretext of looking for a lost cow, convinced Frederick Grossteinbeck, the brother of John’s grandfather, to parley and then fatally wounded him.

Frederick retreated to the farmhouse where he prayed, “Oh ! Father forgive all my sins and help me to bear this dreadful pain” while his wife Mary tried to stop the bleeding from his stomach.

Mary Steinbeck, John’s great-aunt, then only 24 years old, was dragged away and raped by each of the Arab Muslim invaders in turn. “He violated me. Before I had time to rise, another one came ; he violated me and bit my cheek. Then a third one violated me. They then went into the house, and I got up and followed them. I went to Frederick ; I could not feel his pulse,” she testified.

The Muslim colonists also sexually assaulted Frederick’s mother-in-law and robbed the farm.

While the United States had no military presence in Israel (then ruled by the Ottoman Islamic caliphate) and was unused to projecting much force abroad, its leaders were much less feckless than ours when it came to the honor of Americans.

In an account that was included in a report submitted by President James Buchanan to the Senate, the Consul to Egypt, stated that he met the Islamic leadership intending, “to make them feel our power, and the influence of our consuls, it is very evident that every effort must be made in the present case, so to act as that such a case shall never occur again,” he wrote.

American flags were raised to make a diplomatic point despite the protests of the Ottomans.

The assaults on the Steinbeck family alerted many Americans for the first time to the mistreatment of foreign and domestic Christians in Israel. Bringing justice to the perpetrators came to be seen as a test of American power and the survival of Christians in the region. The Senate report included a description of the massacre of Christians in 1856 in Nablus.

“We had to threaten them with the presence of a squadron to bombard Jaffa,” Consul Edwin DeLeon, a Jewish American diplomat who later worked as the Confederacy’s representative to Europe, wrote. “The expediency and propriety of detailing a war steamer to that coast, as a visible emblem of our power, to reassure the terrified Christians, to averawe [sic] the fanatic savages, who, like wild beasts, now lie in wait for them, and, finally, to insure the effectual punishment of those five bloodhounds of Jaffa we have in bonds, whose brethren else may rescue or bloodily avenge them on the unprotected heads of the Christians and Jews of Palestine.”

Describing his meeting with Ottoman officials, DeLeon rejected all social formalities. “When further asked by the governor whether our countries were not at peace, I promptly responded ‘ No ; we regard murder of men and the violation of women, when permitted and screened by governors, as a declaration of war. You have commenced it, not we.’”

When John Steinbeck visited the ‘Steinbeck farm’, he was conversant with the bloody scenes that had taken place in the rooms and they informed his view of the region. And with his literary imagination, he may have been able to see them as he walked around the quarters.

During his World War II special correspondent dispatches, Steinbeck had described the American soldiers as having “no love lost for the Arabs. They are the dirtiest people in the world and among the smelliest. The whole countryside smells of urine, four thousand years of urine.” He mentioned that the soldiers stayed out of cities because of all the “many little religious rules and prejudices that an unsuspecting dogface can run afoul of.”

But what must have really struck Steinbeck is that the precarious outpost outside Jaffa that his ancestors had labored and bled for was now a neighborhood. The ‘Mount Hope’ settlement has since become known as the ‘HaTikvah’ or the ‘Hope’ quarter of Tel Aviv.

During Israel’s War of Independence, Hassan Salamah, a leader of the Army of the Holy Jihad, had attacked the ‘Hope’ community now populated by Jews. The Muslim attackers were so confident of victory that they brought sacks to carry away the loot and torches to burn the rest.

While the mob fell to looting and burning, 16-year-old Ezra Tzapadiya, a Jewish refugee from Beirut who had smuggled himself into the country at only 15, managed to pick off the attackers by copying their battle cry. (Ezra lost an eye in the battle but went on to have a successful musical career.) The Muslim attackers failed to realize that by burning the Jewish homes they had highlighted themselves against the flames and were wiped out by the Israeli defenders.

Disgraced among his fellow Muslim Jihadis, Salamah had to turn to ex-Nazi volunteers to carry out attacks on the Jews. His son, Ali Hassan Salameh, became the architect of the Munich Massacre, and received CIA protection that allowed him to escape Israeli assassins for 7 years until his entire convoy was taken out in Beirut.

20th century Israelis, like 19th century Americans, meant business, and would not allow the murders of their families to go unpunished.

That is no longer the case. ‘Mount Hope’ or the ‘HaTikvah Quarter’ became a working class Jewish neighborhood, but has since been overrun by African migrants. Some of these migrants made headlines when they recently rioted in a dispute over Eritrean politics back home. Even long before the rioters, residents of the ‘HaTikvah Quarter’ have asked the government to stop the plague of crime, drugs and gang violence that has overtaken their community.

The new conservative Israeli government and its battles over judicial reform arose in part from the difficulty of deporting the tens of thousands of illegal Africans who have taken over parts of Tel Aviv. The leftist Israeli Supreme Court has repeatedly blocked lifesaving measures like amendments to the Infiltration Prevention Law allowing the country to deport the invaders.

Mount Hope, once worthy of its name, has once again become a source of despair, but it is also a reminder of the resilience of history. Steinbeck’s grandfather had left behind Jaffa for America. His father raised the family in Salinas, California: a new promised land. Israeli and American settlers had cultivated fields and changed the world around them for the better.

When Herman Meville, the author of ‘Moby Dick’, had visited the Christian settlement, he had dismissed the idea that there was any possibility of a Jewish return to Israel.

“The idea of making farmers of the Jews is in vain. In the first place Judea is a desert with few exceptions. In the second place, the Jews hate farming. All who cultivate the soil in Palestine are Arabs. The Jews dare not live outside walled towns of villages for fear of the malicious persecution of Arabs and Turks. Besides, the number of Jews in Palestine is comparatively small. And how are the hosts of them scattered in other lands to be brought here? Only by a miracle,” he wrote.

The Jews proved to be excellent farmers and the Jewish villages became settlements, towns and cities guarded by their young men. And Jews came there from around the world.

“You can search the world over and you’lI not find Israel’s equal for a stinking past of heroic proportions. The present is even worse if that is possible- surrounded by enemies dedicated to her destruction, hemmed in between the sea and illiterate compromises of an absent, but quite an innocent, academy of the nations. And the people, the Israelis, the remnants of the trampled, tormented and rejected Jews from 87 nations,” John Steinbeck wrote a year before the war that might have ended Israel, instead helped secure its future and reclaim its territory.

Israel, he summed up, “bears up what I have always felt– that only those people who have nothing to do and no place to go are tired.”

‘Mount Hope’ is not just in Israel, it is where we are too. It is a reminder that no matter how dark the past, we can strive to reclaim the future. Nothing is so hopelessly lost that hope cannot rise from it again as long as we do not despair. Only those who do nothing are truly tired.

There is hope in that 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.

Thank you for reading.
Comments
Posted by: at 3 comments:
Tags: , ,

Friday, September 15, 2023

NYC Pays Al Qaeda Terror State $200M to Rent Hotel Rooms to Illegal Aliens

By On September 15, 2023 In
The Roosevelt Hotel claims that it’s the place “where classic elegance meets contemporary luxury”. Classic elegance and luxury at the midtown Manhattan hotel looks like busloads of migrant invaders arriving and camping outside the golden doors. The scene is no better inside where 41 migrants have been arrested for beating wives, girlfriends and significant others.

There have also been assaults on employees and an arrest for child endangerment.

While the Roosevelt Hotel may have an old name, Mayor Eric Adams and New York City actually leased it from Pakistan for $220 million. That amounts to paying $210 per room for each night that an illegal alien invader uses it to smoke meth or abuse their wives and daughters.

The Roosevelt Hotel was named after Teddy. You can imagine what he would have done if thousands of foreigners had invaded a hotel and turned it into a drug den on his watch.

In a city where a quarter of young children live in poverty, that $220 million could probably be put to better use than paying the Islamic terror state linked to the September 11 attacks on New York City for the privilege of housing the hordes of invaders in “contemporary luxury”.

Mayor Adams has already jettisoned his promise of universal day care to care for the migrants.

Inside the Roosevelt from the gilt sign at the entrance to the art deco halls has been tarnished. Migrants squat under the massive crystal chandelier in the ballroom and sleep on the red carpet. Despite supposedly being poor and desperate, many are swiping and clicking through their smartphone apps while they wait for their next taxpayer-funded benefit to arrive.

Once the setting for movies like Wall Street and The French Connection, the storied hotel is now home to another kind of corrupt crime story. The black marble pillars and spacious rooms have been fully occupied by an endless invading army that continues to stream across the border. The smells and the level of filth are reflective of the three remaining working showers.

The massive influx of migrants has made the area near Grand Central Station as unsafe as it was in the 1970s. Despite the hotel being supposedly reserved for families, Central American and African male migrants in their twenties wearing blue surgical masks that cover most of their faces swarm the area and move in packs at night around nervous tourists and local businesses.

The fame of the Roosevelt Hotel appears to have traveled along the migrant pipeline and male migrants have fought, sometimes violently, to stay there instead of being relocated to homeless shelters. Local businesses, already battered by the pandemic, have been hit hard by the crisis.

The cost of housing the invaders is being paid to the Pakistani government. Even though

Pakistan International Airlines, under the control of the terror state’s government, was barred from flying directly to the United States after 9/11, it was allowed to take over the hotel and run it into the ground. The Biden administration has since allowed PIA to resume direct flights.

The Pakistani government harbored Osama bin Laden. Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif had initiated negotiations with Al Qaeda and offered to “reestablish normal relations.” Former Prime Minister Imran Khan, nicknamed ‘Taliban Khan’, had called Bin Laden a “martyr”.

Now New Yorkers are stuck paying hundreds of millions of dollars to an Islamic terror state tied to the attacks that killed so many fellow residents and citizens to provide luxury housing for the latest wave of the invaders. Osama bin Laden would be proud of what is happening here.

Beyond Pakistan, other foreign business interests are also benefiting from the foreign invasion.

Chinese developer Jubao Xie, who put up the world’s tallest Holiday Inn in Manhattan, got $190 a night, $93,000 a day and $2.8 million a month to house the invaders. The skyscraper hotel, a bafflingly ugly eyesore, was in trouble before the migrant bailout was approved by a bankruptcy judge. A number of other foreign owned hotels are also benefiting from the arrangement.

The use of high-end hotels to house the illegal invaders has not only wrecked classic storied hotels like the Roosevelt or the Paramount, but it has also ruined the surrounding areas that the Giuliani administration had struggled to drag away from the blight that had overtaken Midtown.

Where tourists are supposed to arrive by train, take in Broadway shows and go to a nice restaurant afterward, the streets swarm with migrant thieves, beggars and madmen.

Row Hotel, a classic Times Square hotel that promises “comfort and security while away from home” turned into another migrant hellhole. That’s where Daniel Hernandez Martinez, a migrant who was arrested six times for five assaults in two months, attacked a man with a bike tire.

Martinez was responsible for a one-man crime wave in the Times Square area. The criminal migrant was apparently staying in a $500 a night hotel which a former worker described as a

‘free for all’ of drugs, sex and violence where the rooms have been trashed and defiled.

Messages at the formerly stylish hotel described everything from a 10-year-old girl drunk alone in the room to an intruder carrying a machete. “Every day, we find about ten kids alone in their hotel rooms, either drinking or doing drugs. Weapons will be in the room,” a worker described.

And while America’s enemies are laughing and profiting, we are doing this to ourselves.

Open borders is only half the story. At a local level, the other half of the story is the ‘right to shelter’ regulations like those in New York City and other epicenters of the migrant invasion that guarantee everyone a room regardless of how illegal, violent or diseased they may be.

The homeless industrial complex claimed that the only reason junkies were wandering the streets was that an unfair capitalist system had deprived them of affordable housing. They invented a ‘right to shelter’ and radical leftist politicians who came to power implemented it.

A decade ago, I wrote about the rise of “homeless by choice” in which migrants, tourists and traveling junkies showed up in New York City to claim their “three meals a day, a microwave oven, TV, free laundry, free Internet, free health care and a prepaid cell phone with 300 minutes a month.”

And I warned that it would end badly. Now instead of a few thousand junkies, there are tens of thousands of migrants. And they’re just the beginning. Each of them also wants their free phones, health care, meals and everything else they think that they’re entitled to.

Including a stay in a luxury hotel.

Back then, one in four homeless in New York listed addresses outside the city. Today it’s probably the vast majority. There’s no longer even the pretense of a homeless problem.

New York City’s homeless problem just consists of people from other countries showing up in the city and demanding a room at the Roosevelt, the Row or the Paramount. Why be a sucker and pay $300 bucks for a hotel when you can just arrive as a refugee and demand a free room.

The taxpayers will pay for it and hand over the cash to Pakistan to finance more terrorism.




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

Thank you for reading.
Comments
Posted by: at 4 comments:
Tags: , ,

Thursday, September 14, 2023

Let’s Kill Hollywood

By On September 14, 2023 In
Over the summer, Barry Diller warned that the double strike by Hollywood actors and writers could “potentially produce an absolute collapse of an entire industry.”

Diller, who once headed Paramount and 20th Century FOX, may know what he’s talking about.

Hollywood, trying to compete with the vast resources of dot coms like Netflix and Amazon, has been spending untold billions of dollars to convince everyone to buy subscriptions to their streaming services. Netflix will spend $17 billion, Amazon spent $16.6 billion while Disney blew through $32 billion. Disney is trying to recoup some of the billions it lost on Disney+ by cutting costs and going into the lucrative but shady business of sports betting through ESPN.

Once upon a time, Disney might have worried about the damage to its ‘family friendly image’ but once it started peddling sexual materials to kids, gambling is actually a major step up.

The entertainment industry’s big companies have blown through over $100 billion to secure streaming subscribers. The longer the strike lasts, industry figures like Diller fear that the pipeline of new shows and movies will fade and the subscribers will go away. After spending a fortune they don’t have to lock in subscribers, Hollywood may be left with nothing.

But if Hollywood were to die, would anyone really miss it very much?

From the popularization of the cowboy to space exploration and the action hero, Hollywood once made up a vital part of the American mythos. Where the industry once sold the American Dream around the world, it has traded that in for a new woke identity that disdains the country.

New Hollywood is no more integral to the American story than the video game industry or Silicon Valley. It’s an addiction mechanism that no longer adds the faintest iota of anything to the culture. It can no longer pretend to be a dream factory, it’s where the dream goes to die to be reborn as intellectual properties with scripts written by woke AI that will soon star AI actors.

Hollywood is still big business and the strikes are estimated to cost the economy $5 billion, but there are industries that add far more, with less negative side effects, that are under siege.

Occasionally conservative movies, like ‘Sound of Freedom’, emerge as a reminder that the country can have a film industry that speaks to us without Hollywood. And that such an industry would be much more likely to emerge if Hollywood were to destroy itself or be destroyed.

Disney has been battered by its wasteful streaming spending, but also by its battle with Gov. DeSantis in Florida. The biggest old school studio in Hollywood took such a severe beating because the industry is far more vulnerable than most conservatives realized it was.

Hollywood has dozens of vulnerabilities from a dependence on tax credits and foreign investors to its infamously illegal accounting practices and countless legal exemptions. Until recently, Hollywood studios threw around their weight in red states, announcing boycotts over religious freedom issues and demanding (and getting) millions in tax credits from Republican governors.

There’s no real sign that’s changing outside of Florida.

Georgia has allocated a whopping $1.3 billion in Hollywood tax credits. That’s more than New York and California combined. A proposal to cap the credit at under $1 billion, and save $1.7 billion, was shot down by House Speaker David Ralston (now retired), who argued, “I’m not prepared to run that industry out of Georgia.” Capping Hollywood tax credits at a gargantuan $900 million somehow amounted to running the entire film industry out of Georgia.

Hollywood was more than ready to run Republicans out of Georgia by backing Stacey Abrams.

From Alabama to Mississippi, even the most conservative southern states have lined up to court Hollywood even when they lose money doing it. For example, Mississippi gets 49 cents to the dollar it spends on incentives, while other states are doing even worse.

Rather than fighting Hollywood, conservative states are actually backing it with tax dollars, pleading with it to come to their neck of the woods and film movies and shows which depict Americans as backward racists. Most Republican states have actually created, added or expanded their film tax credits in the last few years in a desperate bid to bring in more jobs.

And in the process they’ve ignored the cultural damage that Hollywood is doing to us.

There are exceptions to the rule. There was outrage when Netflix released ‘Cuties’ depicting the sexualization of young girls. DA Lucas Babin in Tyler County, TX,, who has his own history in the entertainment industry, got a grand jury to indict Netflix. While the streaming giant has far more money and resources, Babin has managed to tie it up in court.

While most people thought that the battle over ‘Cuties’ had ended back in 2020, it has kept on going into 2023. Babin has been badly outmatched and outspent, but he also showed that it’s possible to take on the biggest giant in the industry, which wields almost unlimited resources and whose wealth is utterly staggering, and still make it feel some pain.

Imagine if more conservatives were willing to take on Hollywood instead of pandering to it?

Conservatives complain about a culture war and too many would rather fight it with lame memes than with sharp legal elbows. Hollywood has never been this vulnerable and yet most conservatives do little more than complain about ‘wokeness, rather than expecting their elected officials to do to Hollywood what leftist politicians are trying to do to the oil and gas industry. Not to mention the automobile industry, gun manufacturers and countless others.

The Left has spent generations fighting corporations, sometimes to take them over, other times to outright wipe out an industry, while conservatives are still too timid to think big in this way.

The entertainment industry consists of a handful of incestuous giants that dominate video, music and book publishing with no legal pushback or serious challenge from conservatives. Its lobbyists know that all they need to do is spread some money around Capitol Hill, hire a few former Republican staffers to lobby for them and they can get whatever they want.

And that is how it will be until conservatives start expecting more from their politicians.

If the governor of a state that is heavily dependent on tourism can take on Disney and the DA of Tyler County can take on the most powerful entertainment industry corporation, there’s no excuse for House and Senate Republicans to keep doing favors for Hollywood, or for most red states to shove millions of dollars at productions wanting to show their people as inbred hicks.

Rep. Laurie Schlegel, a freshman state representative in Louisiana, recently brought down Pornhub, a massive industry giant, by passing bills mandating age verification. Those bills have been moving from state to state, threatening a pornography company with an estimated annual revenue of $97 billion. That’s what happens when politicians stop explaining why they can’t do things and actually do the simplest thing possible even when it supposedly ‘can’t be done.’

It doesn’t take much to be a giant slayer when the giants have glass jaws. What it does take is principles, a refusal to be bribed and a determination to take down cultural enemies who have countless regulatory weaknesses, but lots of money and a base of support from their users.

Hollywood can be killed and something better, more American, can rise from the ashes. The industry has never been this fragile and vulnerable. All it will take is the willpower to do 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.

Thank you for reading.
Comments
Posted by: at 3 comments:
Tags: , ,

Wednesday, September 13, 2023

CAIR Wants Schools to Consult Mosques Before Teaching Sex Ed

By On September 13, 2023 In
Prayers in schools and any kind of religious content, from the Ten Commandments to Christmas songs, remain widely opposed by litigious leftist organizations like the ACLU. And even the most modest efforts to keep kids from being exposed to graphic pornographic content have been assailed by the Biden administration which has sued school districts for trying to keep kids safe.

That’s why CAIR’s guide telling schools how to treat Muslim students is so extraordinary. The Islamist organization lays out rules for Islamic school prayers and tells schools to consult with mosques about sex ed. It warns schools against allowing Muslim girls to interact with boys in co-ed environments like swimming and dancing. And, in a time when leftist governors and school boards force girls to shower with transgender boys who claim to be members of their sex, it even insists that Muslim girls should shower in their burkinis even in single sex settings.

But what is truly extraordinary about the CAIR guide is that there will not be a word of protest against it from the same political establishment and media that smeared Florida laws empowering parents to protect students from sexual content as “Don’t Say Gay”.

There was a good deal of political discomfort when Muslims in Dearborn, MI, an Islamic dominated city, stormed a school board meeting to denounce LGBTQ content. Rather than addressing the fundamental conflict between its politics and Islamic law, the leftist media dishonestly blamed Republicans for having brainwashed Muslims to hate gay people.

Had an influential Christian or Jewish organization put out a similar guide to schools barring them from interacting in co-ed settings or being taught sexual materials, there would be outrage. The media would warn that we were on the verge of theocracy and schools would redouble their sexual programming. But that won’t be the reaction to the Muslim guide.

What will almost certainly happen instead is that the guide will be privately passed around by school administrations and treated as a mandate without it ever being publicly discussed.

But if implemented, these secret carve outs and exemptions will represent discrimination.

For example, under ‘Sex Education’, the CAIR guide states that “sex education material presented in schools are another sensitive matter to many Muslim families.” That is obviously true for all religious families, but apparently only Muslims will be entitled to that privilege.

CAIR claims that, “Islam puts great emphasis on modesty, chastity and morality.” As if Christians and Jews don’t. All parents and students should be able to opt out of sexual content in classes. Treating that as an exclusive entitlement for one single group is discriminatory.

Finally, in a truly extraordinary demand in an educational system that aggressively eliminates even the most basic vestiges of religion, CAIR tells schools that sex ed requires, “close contact with local Islamic centers is essential to encourage input from the Muslim community.”

Can anyone imagine a Christian group telling schools to run their curriculum past the local church in order to get approval from parents? Parental rights advocates were investigated as terrorists by the Biden administration for asking for much more modest limitations on porn and the ability to actually review what their children were being taught by woke teachers.

Beyond that, CAIR lays out an extensive set of proposed accommodations including not shaking hands with members of the opposite sex or looking “at persons of different sexes directly”. CAIR also proposes private showers since “Muslim boys and girls may not wish to take same-sex communal after-sport showers without wearing appropriate covering of their bodies.”

Furthermore, “Muslims may raise religious objections to coed physical education classes” and “should not be forced to participate in coed swimming classes.” They also should not be expected to bow in martial arts classes because that is reserved for their deity of choice. (Muslims in international competitive martial arts sports regularly bow to their opponents.)

Muslims understandably “may be hesitant to recite the pledge of allegiance”, but are expected to pray in schools including individual prayers in unused classrooms and group prayers on Fridays. They also need to wash their feet in the sink that everyone else washes their hands in.

CAIR warns that “lunch items containing ingredients derived from pork must be highlighted clearly” along with dijon mustard, jello and lard. Cafeteria personnel also won’t be allowed to use the same cutter “that has contacted pepperoni pizza” to avoid “cross-contamination.”

Even non-Muslim parents will be warned not to bring snacks that Muslims can’t eat.

The latter goes beyond any kind of reasonable accommodation into forcing Islamic religious practices on other students and their families. Telling other students that they can’t eat bacon sandwiches is not accommodation, it imposes an Islamic ban on pork on everyone else.

Not satisfied with mandating religious behavior for Muslim and non-Muslim students, CAIR tips its hand by demanding control over textbooks and ensuring that they incorporate Islamic views.

“One common error is the definition of ‘Allah’ as a particular Muslim god rather than the same God of Christianity and Judaism,” CAIR complains. It insists that, “Muslim educators should participate in the textbook selection process, particularly for history, social studies, and geography texts.” Are Christian and Jewish authorities allowed the same level of input?

While Muslims do believe that Allah is also the god of Christians and Jews (and that, as the Koran repeatedly claims, Jews and Christians falsified Allah’s teachings which are only to be found in the Koran, not the Bible), many Christians and Jews do not believe this. There is no need to impose an Islamic view on Christians and Jews about their own religions. Schools can teach that Muslims believe that they are the successor (or predecessor) religion to Judaism and Christianity, much as the Bahai believe that they are the successor religion to Islam, but that this is their perspective. Much as Mormons and Christians have different understandings of their relationship, Muslims, Christians and Jews have very different perspectives on the matter.

When Islamist groups like CAIR pressure school officials to impose their theological dogma on non-Muslims, this amounts to transforming schools into missionary enterprises for Islam.

CAIR has been putting out its guide to educators since 1997 and it has not changed a great deal in that time. The latest more polished edition leaves out the missionizing Koran quotes and has softened language that appeared to be mandating student behavior in schools such as “men and boys are always to be covered from the navel to the knee” or “Muslim boys and girls may not take same-sex communal after-sport showers without wearing appropriate covering of their bodies.“ While the language has been made less severe, the intent is the same. CAIR is seeking to exercise control over the behavior of Muslim students in school.

This is also where the CAIR guide fundamentally differs from parents advocating for children. CAIR doesn’t represent parents, it represents Islamic dogma. While Democrats and the media have assailed parental advocacy, they have had nothing to say about an Islamist group putting out a guide dictating the behavior of administrators, teachers, students and non-Muslim parents.

And the real question may be how much of an influence has CAIR’s guide had on schools providing special exemptions for Muslims that they would not allow for non-Muslim students?

Parents of all religions, and of no religion, should be able to opt their children out of coming into contact with sexual materials. And if Democrats and the media want to attack Christian and Jewish parents for making such requests, they should also be consistent and take on CAIR.

Anything else is evidence of religious discrimination.

CAIR wants schools to consult mosques before teaching sex ed. Any schools that have done this also have to consult churches, synagogues and all other religious groups. Schools that allowed Muslim parents to opt out more easily than non-Muslim parents have engaged in religious discrimination and should be sued. The same goes for allowing school prayers and any other exemptions that were reserved specifically for Muslim students, but not non-Muslim ones.

We cannot have a country where non-Muslim girls have to shower with ‘transgender’ boys while Muslim students are offered private showers. Nor a country where mosques get approval over sex ed courses and Islamic scholars determine the theological content of textbooks.

The supreme right to determine the education of children belongs not to schools or to CAIR, but to parents.





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

Thank you for reading.
Comments
Posted by: at 1 comment:
Tags: , ,

Popular

Blog Archive