Showing posts from June, 2018

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A Tale of Two Deep States

“Why the hell are we standing down?" That was the question that the White House's cybersecurity coordinator was asked after Susan Rice, Obama's national security adviser, issued a stand down order on Russia. Testimony at the Senate Intelligence Committee hearings on Russian interference in the election once again raised the central paradox of the Russia conspiracy theory. If Russian interference in the election represented the crisis that we are told it did, why did Obama fail to take any meaningful action? The White House’s own cybersecurity people wanted an aggressive response before being told to stand down. Obama issued a bloodless warning to Russia while his people deliberately crippled our offense. Democrats and the media blamed the Russian hacking on Trump. But it was Susan Rice who had told the cybersecurity team to “knock it off” and Obama’s people who hadn’t wanted him to be “boxed in” and forced to respond to Russian actions. Was this just the usual appe

Prohibitionism in a Civil War of Values

“Prohibitionism never works” is a cliché. And like most clichés, it’s true and not true at the same time. Everyone believes that prohibitionism works and never works. The progressive advocating for drug legalization believes just as fervently in the power of gun control as in the futility of banning pot. He doesn’t see the contradiction, because he knows that the drug laws never stopped him from getting high. But he would never want to buy guns, legally or illegally. So banning them should work. The first law of prohibitionism is that banning things other people want seems easy. But banning the things that you want appears impossible. Prohibitionism never works for you, but works for him. We ban all sorts of things. Many of them, like nuclear bombs or lethal toxins, are things that few would want. So prohibiting possession of them works fairly well. But when there’s significant demand, then no amount of legal and social sanction can stop a black market from continuing to operat

Illegal Aliens Fatally Separate American Parents and Children

In 2008, Colorado separated a Jewish boy from his parents. Marten Kudlis was separated from his parents while waiting for his mother to bring him his ice cream. The 3-year-old boy who had just been playing in the park never got his ice cream. Instead Francis Hernandez, an illegal alien driving 81 miles an hour, slammed into a pickup truck, killing the two women inside, and smashing it through the glass wall of the Baskin Robbins. Blood and broken glass covered the floor. Little Marten, who had just learned to ride a bike, died of a slashed jugular vein and was buried with a teddy bear. Francis Hernandez had been arrested 16 times in 5 years without ever being turned over to immigration authorities. That failure to enforce immigration law separated a little boy from his family forever. Advocates for illegal migration claim to be outraged by family separation. They want illegal alien invaders like Francis to go on separating American children from their families. What the fa

The Future of American Zionism

President Trump boldly moved the embassy to Jerusalem. And a poll shows a nearly even split among American Jews opposing and supporting it, while 85% of Israeli Jews back the courageous decision. 77% of Israelis back Trump's handling of US-Israel relations while 57% of American Jews disapprove. How can the vast majority of Israelis be happy with the relationship while the majority of American Jews aren’t? The answer gets at the heart of the split between what American and Israeli Jews want from Israel. And also to the root of a deeper split within the Zionist tree. Modern Zionism is split between positive aspirational Zionism and negative respectability Zionism. Positive Zionism was the movement of a cultural, religious and national minority to reclaim an independent identity and unleash the potential of the Jewish people. Negative Zionism was a reaction to anti-Semitism. And then, when Zionism became safe, it became a trophy of communal respectability. Now that Zionism

Islamic Insanity and Muslim Madness in the Netherlands

On a pleasant Wednesday in Schiedam, a Dutch city near Rotterdam’s sizable Islamic population, a 26-year-old Syrian refugee stood on a balcony waving an axe and shouting, “Allahu Akbar.” The police arrived at the modernistic dark and gray building, limned in steel and glass, where the nameless Syrian was shouting about the supremacy of his religion and its axe to all others in Schiedam. The Dutch cops tried to calm him down. Instead he attacked a police dog which later died of its injuries. After some failed attempts at negotiating his surrender, the Syrian was shot in the leg. Paramedics loaded him into one of two yellow ambulances dispatched for the occasion and maneuvering past a police Volvo took him off to be an even bigger burden on the taxpayers of the Netherlands. Even before murdering a police dog, the Syrian refugee had been in contact with various aid agencies. By the time he’s done being treated, evaluated, counseled, tried, defended, prosecuted and judged, he will ha

The Murder of a Jewish Girl in Germany

On May 22, Susanna Maria Feldman went missing. It was the day after the Jewish holiday of Shavuot which celebrates G-d’s revelation of the Ten Commandments to Moses and a nation of freed slaves. The fifth commandment is, “Honor thy father and mother.” The sixth is, “Thou shalt not murder.” And in the German city of Mainz, whose Jewish community dates back to Roman times, a worried mother waited for the worst. Susanna had gone off with her friends. They came home. And she didn’t. Her mother received a WhatsApp message from her daughter's phone on the afternoon of the 22nd. "Mom, I'm not coming home. I went to Paris with my friend. Don't look for me. I'll come back after 2 or 3 weeks. Bye." According to Diana, Susanna’s mother, the message sounded nothing like her daughter. 4 hours later, the teenage girl’s phone was switched off. There was nothing more. "I hope and pray that nothing bad has happened to her," she posted on Facebook. "Pl

Islamic Anti-Semitism is Islamic Imperialism

We ask that the verses of the Qur'an calling for the killing and punishment of Jews, Christians and unbelievers be rendered obsolete," the manifesto states. It cites the murders of Sarah Halimi and Mireille Knoll, two elderly Jewish women murdered by anti-Semitic Muslim thugs, the fact that "French Jews are 25 times more likely to be attacked than their fellow Muslims", and the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Jews from the encroaching no-go zones. "10% of the Jewish citizens of ÃŽle-de-France - that is to say about 50,000 people - were recently forced to move because they were no longer safe in some cities and because their children could not attend the schools of the Republic,” it courageously warns. “This is a quiet ethnic cleansing being carried out in in the country of Emile Zola and Clemenceau." The manifesto was written by former Charlie Hebdo editor Philippe Val, who had republished the original Mohammed cartoons from the Jyllands-Posten despite

Black Victimhood's White Victims

"I have a horrible story to bring you about a woman named Sherita Dixon-Cole," Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King began. Dixon-Cole claimed that she had been sexually assaulted during a traffic stop by a Texas police officer. The story, like so many black victimhood myths about police officers, turned out to be a lie. Body camera footage conclusively disproved it. But by then the damage was done. The Root had posted a photo of the officer as part of a post alleging a racist culture of police rape. “Black women have always… found themselves at the intersection of state and sexual violence, because this country teaches men… that black women are disposable,” it insisted. Behind the pseudo-academic jargon of social justice were the same racial prejudices and tribal fears of victimized women that led to Emmet Till’s death. Only this time the races were reversed. And the vigilantes organized a cyber-lynching party by sending hate and abuse to a completely different Tex

A Conspiracy Theory About a Conspiracy

"Paranoia predisposed him to believe in nefarious, hidden forces driving events," the New York Times writes of Trump. "Political opportunism informed his promotion of conspiracy theories." But that could just as easily apply to the New York Times. The Times is unaware of the sublime hypocrisy of accusing the President of the United States of "sowing widespread suspicions about the government" even as it is doing just that. The paper of broken record specializes in spreading conspiracy theories claiming that President Trump didn’t actually win the 2016 election but that “nefarious, hidden forces” made it happen. Its promotion of conspiracy theories about the 2016 election is obviously informed by its “political opportunism.” But so are most conspiracy theories. A conspiracy theory is usually the conspiracy. Democrats spread claims that the JFK assassination was a right-wing conspiracy. That conveniently redirected blame from the Socialist who pull