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Wednesday, July 28, 2021

Biden Frees Al Qaeda Commander Who Blew Up Buddhas

By On July 28, 2021
When the Taliban and its Al Qaeda allies blew up two giant Buddha statues in Afghanistan,it put the Jihadist alliance on the world's radar even before the September 11 attacks.

The destruction of the statues was widely condemned by just about everyone. Even Democrats.

Now, Joe Biden has decided to free an Al Qaeda commander who helped bomb the statues.

As the Taliban retake Afghanistan, Biden’s decision to free Abdul Latif Nasir signals support for the Jihadists and for the North African Muslim Brotherhood regime that agreed to harbor Nasir.

There were plenty of reasons to keep Abdul Latif Nasir safely locked up in Gitmo. Even the Obama administration, which made it its mission to free every Islamic terrorist, was having trouble springing Nasir. Government documents describe the accused Al Qaeda terrorist as an explosives instructor who also trained Al-Qaeda recruits in the "use of the AK-47, rocket-propelled grenades, Beka machine gun, and mortars" and received "advanced training in explosives and poisons at the chemical laboratory" at Osama bin Laden's Mall Six Compound.

Nasir admitted to being "the emir of al-Qaida fighters at the Kabul front" and had been in charge of 250 Jihadists at Tora Bora. He's young enough, in his fifties, to jump into any one of a number of conflicts, and he has the kind of experience that would be invaluable to Al Qaeda and ISIS.

Just to make things even easier for the Jihadists, the Biden regime isn’t even trying to ship Nasir to some out-of-the-way place, but is sending him right back to Morocco whose elected political system is run by the Muslim Brotherhood's Justice and Development Party (PJD).

PJD boss Saad-Eddine El Othmani, falsely described as ’moderate’ by the media, recently congratulated Hamas, PJD’s fellow Muslim Brotherhood branch, for its "victory" over Israel. Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda leaders had been Brotherhood members and the PJD has its own terrorist links. Sending Abdul Latif Nasir to the Brotherhood’s Morocco is aiding terrorism.

"The United States commends the Kingdom of Morocco for its long-time partnership in securing both countries' national security interests. The United States is also extremely grateful for the Kingdom's willingness to support ongoing U.S. efforts to close the Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility," the Biden administration stated in a note of appreciation, thanking the Muslim Brotherhood for helping Biden free Islamic terrorists while compromising national security.

While in American custody, Abdul Latif Nasir praised the bombing of the Ghirba Synagogue in nearby Tunisia. Al Qaeda claimed credit for the attack and Nasir was able to name one of the attackers. He also praised an Egyptian bus attack in which Islamic terrorists threw Molotov cocktails at buses full of tourists, but claimed that the targets had been intended to be Jews.

Morocco currently has the largest Jewish community in the region outside Israel. After claiming to care about antisemitism, Biden has chosen to dispatch an antisemitic terrorist to Morrocco.

There is a lot of old and ugly unfinished Arab Spring business from the Obama administration hanging over Nasir. Releasing him reopens some of those old wounds and lethal threats.

Both American and Morrocan authorities suspected that Nasir had been a member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group. The Obama administration had celebrated the Muslim Brotherhood's brokering of a peace deal with the LIFG in which it switched its allegiances from Al Qaeda to the Brotherhood. That deal with Obama and the Brotherhood proved to be Gadaffi’s last mistake.

The LIFG played a crucial role in the Islamist overthrow of Gaddafi, but the decision to harbor LIFG Jihadists struck home when an Islamic terrorist linked to the group carried out the Manchester Arena bombing which killed 23 and injured over a thousand. Another LIFG member, Ahmed Abu Khattala, led the attack on the American mission in Benghazi leading to the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens. Releasing Nasir is the latest chapter in pandering to the LIFG.

What all of this means is that if Abdul Latif Nasir decides to get back in the game, he’ll have plenty of options in his own backyard and plenty of contacts. He won’t be the only ex-Gitmo terrorist as the Jihadists released by Biden join those already set loose by Obama.

Al Qaeda figures identified Nasir as a "member of the Training Subcommittee of the Military Committee" and as a "weapons purchaser". Before the assessments were hijacked by Obama's pro-terror activists, they warned that he "will probably engage in future hostilities or support foreign fighters".

The assessment also noted that Nasir had "threatened members of the JTF-GTMO guard force to the effect of referencing the 11 September 2001 attacks".

Nasir had gone to Afghanistan because he “wished to fight and die as a martyr.”

Like its predecessor Obama administration, the Biden administration is empowering terrorists and endangering lives around the world. The assessments and reports on Nasir suggest that it’s highly likely that he will return to the Jihad. He has already allegedly been involved or sought involvement in a variety of conflicts from Chechnya to Libya to Afghanistan. But the instability created in North Africa by Obama’s Arab Spring will leave him plenty of options back home.

Nasir has also expressed a preference for killing Jews. His release is another warning that the Biden administration, like its predecessor, has no regard for the threat Jihadists pose to Jews.

Finally, if Nasir returns to training Islamic terrorists, it’s likely that American soldiers will face his students in battle. Despite Biden’s false claim to have withdrawn from Afghanistan, 600 U.S. soldiers have been left behind. Not to mention diplomats, aid workers, and other Americans.

American forces also continue to maintain a presence in North Africa and the Middle East. Last month, the United States held African Lion, the annual military exercise in the region, in Morocco which involved, among others, personnel from the Georgia National Guard.

Releasing Nasir endangers the lives of American forces participating in future military exercises.

Among Abdul Latif Nasir's dark history, the assessment mentions that the Al Qaeda terrorist was "the explosives expert who assisted the Taliban in destroying the Bamyan Buddha figures".

As the Taliban retake Afghanistan, Biden’s decision to release the terrorist linked to an act that first brought the Taliban to the attention of the world sends a message of support for terrorism.

The Jihad could not have gotten a clearer thumbs up from the Biden administration.





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

Click here to subscribe to my articles. 

Thank you for reading.


Monday, July 26, 2021

'Saving Afghan Interpreters' is a Scam That Would Bring 100,000 Afghans to U.S.

By On July 26, 2021
Getting the United States out of Afghanistan is relatively easy compared to getting Afghanistan out of America. The latest stage of the withdrawal is accompanied by frantic calls to “save Afghan interpreters” coming from the same media that also wants us out of Afghanistan.

But what’s the use of leaving Afghanistan if we’re going to bring it with us to America?

The “interpreter” scam is one of the longest running immigration hoaxes on record.

Before the withdrawal, there were some 2,500 American soldiers in Afghanistan. After the withdrawal, there are around 600 soldiers left behind.

And there are 20,000 Afghan “interpreters” applying for SIVs or Special Immigrant Visas.

How can there be 20,000 interpreters for 2,500 soldiers?

It’s not as if we haven’t been handing out SIV visas like candy already.

70,000 Iraqis and Afghans came here on the so-called translator/interpreter visas from 2007 to 2017. And 48,601 of those SIVs went to Afghans. At its peak, under Obama, there were 100,000 American soldiers in Afghanistan. That’s an “interpreter” to every 2 soldiers.

By March 2021, 100,000 Afghans and Iraqis had been approved for SIVs.

But the vast majority of “interpreters” aren’t interpreters. They were “Afghan allies” working in some capacity with or for the United States. While the media keeps talking about 20,000 “interpreters” embedded with American forces, hardly any of the SIV applicants fall into that category. Applicants didn't even have to work for the United States. They could have worked for any of the over 50 countries taking part in the ISAF mission in Afghanistan. Not to mention any of the local subcontractors or aid groups that were being funded by the United States.

In 2016, 58 translators and 165 family members received visas. As did 4,283 government workers and 10,100 family members. In 2020, 19 interpreters and 58 family members received SIV visas and 1,829 government workers and their 6,134 family members. When the media claims that we’re leaving Afghan interpreters to die, it’s lying. There are few actual interpreters actually applying for SIVs. The vast majority of applicants were just making money from the U.S.

The visa inflation is driven by family members. Of the 100,000 SIV immigrants, 31,000 were the actual applicants, while another 69,000 were family members. The current list of applicants in the pipeline breaks down to 700 "interpreters" or principal applicants and 1,800 family members.

With 20,000 principal Afghanistan applicants, that means we could easily be looking at over 60,000 total Afghan immigrants in the short term. And the numbers may go as high as 100,000.

The long term numbers under family reunification programs would be absolutely staggering.

And the 20,000 number is still not the full total of principals. Just the ones in the system now. With a current deadline for applicants set to expire in December of next year, there’s plenty of time for more applicants to hop on the gravy train. And as Afghanistan collapses, there will be less scrutiny possible of the applicants, some of whom will already be waiting as refugees.

What’s the cost of all this to Americans?

The "interpreters" function more like refugees and “are eligible for the same resettlement assistance and federal public benefits as refugees”. In the past, 85% of SIV migrants, in partial numbers at least 60,000, received refugee aid and were resettled across the country.

The media claims that SIV migrants will quickly be able to adapt and adjust. Government data however shows that 60% of SIV migrants remained unemployed after 90 days, including 58% of those with "good spoken English" and 65% of those with "post-secondary education".

By 2017, SIVs made up a quarter of migrants receiving refugee resettlement assistance.

In one year, SIVs managed to account for 13% of the State Department’s resettlement programs and 8% of HHS’ refugee resettlement programs.

Even those SIV migrants who were employed could still be living off American taxpayers with a GAO report noting that, “of those SIV households receiving earnings from employment, 89

percent were also receiving income through Refugee Cash Assistance, Matching Grant, or TANF programs, which is slightly higher than the rate of the overall refugee population.”

Aside from the financial expense of bringing tens of thousands of migrants from a failed state to America, there’s the terrorism and criminal risks.

The media keeps claiming that all of the applicants have been screened and aren’t a threat.

Even a pro-SIV report noted, “As of 2019, the State Department only had one analyst conducting security checks for the backlog of over 18,000 applications.”

Immigration authorities ask an American “co-signer” to “certify that, to the best of his or her knowledge, you present no threat to the national security or safety of the United States” even if the co-signer only has a relationship with the Afghan’s “contract or sub-contract supervisor.”

With that sort of screening, it’s no wonder that some SIVs who have come to the United States have carried out violent attacks and allegedly became involved with Islamic terrorism.

Last month, the Biden administration demanded 8,000 more SIV visas. While the Democrats can’t directly bring all the applicants immediately here, they intend to move them to third countries from where they’ll be able to continue applying to enter the United States.

“The idea here is to be able to facilitate their departure from Afghanistan to another location so that they can complete the SIV process. Whether that leads to all of them coming to the United States or some, I mean, we just don't know. It'll be done on a case-by-case basis, but the idea is to be able to facilitate their departure from Afghanistan so that that processing can continue,” the Pentagon’s John Kirby said.

More radical voices however want to fly as many Afghans as possible to America right now.

Some media outlets, including the New York Times, are reporting potential numbers as high as 100,000 Afghans. That would mean evacuating some 2% of the population of Kabul here.

Such an invasion would have catastrophic consequences for Americans.

The United States has already handed out 100,000 SIVs to Afghans and Iraqis. We’re now looking at the possibility of another 100,000 with no real end in sight even after that.

Americans will have resettled an entire Tallahassee or Chattanooga worth of "interpreters".

Senator Mark Warner and Senator Marco Rubio have claimed that failing to bring the Afghans to America would be "a stain on our national conscience". The real stain on our conscience is politicians who put Americans last and put open borders migration first. Americans have spent countless blood and treasure fighting for the Afghans. But the Afghans won’t fight for themselves. As American forces leave, they’re deserting, surrendering, and retreating.

That’s their choice.

Over 2,000 Americans died for Afghanistan. No more Americans should die at home.

SIV visas have brought violent rapists and terrorists to America. Every single visa puts American lives and national security at risk.

The move to bring 100,000 Afghans to this country is a warning that it’s much easier to get Americans out of Afghanistan than it is to get Afghanistan out of 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.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. 

Thank you for reading.

Sunday, July 25, 2021

The Age of Political Cults

By On July 25, 2021

"Any religious idea, any idea of any god at all, any flirtation even with a god, is the most inexpressible foulness," Vladimir Lenin



The rise of political craziness is intertwined with the decline of religion. The political cults aren't necessarily attracting atheists or agnostics, though there are plenty of both, rather they're drawing on the growing number of people who may be formally religious, but who aren't finding inspiration in faith.

What do you do when G-d, the Bible, and the struggle within don't move you? You find what does.


The rise of Marxism, Socialism, and Communism drew on the decline of religion among European Christians and Jews. The Nazis and their European counterparts were pagan atheists who distilled the essential appeal of socialism and marketed it to a more outwardly religious middle-class crowd.


American radicalism is religion for the irreligious. The Communists and Nazis had borrowed what they thought were the innate emotional and historical appeals of Judeo-Christian religion without the divinity or any of the substance. They succeeded at creating cults of personality that played into a historical drama that vowed to transform the world at the cost of struggle, sacrifice, and the submission of the individual.


Our own age of political cults is doing the same thing.


The American age of political cults didn't begin yesterday. While Europe was shattering under the pressures of economic depression, future shock, and a world that seemed both too small and too big, the same story was playing out on these shores. The FDR era and the New Deal gave Americans their own smaller Fuhrer and taste of socialism, but we lacked the European appetite for destruction whetted by the innate sense that history was coming to a close and required one last Gotterdammerung at the end.


Now the appetite for an American Gotterdammerung is here. For the first time the majority of Americans don't believe that things will get any better. Religion is declining sharply and the political cults offer a cataclysmically redemptive purpose with visions of rising oceans, growing poverty, inescapable racism, and a catastrophic way out that requires not faith, but action.


There's no way to understand the rise of political cults without touching the despair that feeds them.


No one abandons their values and beliefs, or turns to evil and hate, without a root cause of despair. In the face of a deep despair, anything that offers hope starts to seem like a light at the end of a tunnel.


Or hope and change. 



"In the long run, National Socialism and religion will no longer be able to exist together," Adolf Hitler




America's religious and cultural immune system had done a reasonably good job of staving off political messianism until the latter half of the twentieth century. Then as now the impetus for the madness came from the combination of rapid change, threatened destruction, and a sense of decline.


You can only tell young people so often that the end is near and not expect them to go a little crazy.


It helps when the agents of destruction appear to come from some force of science, whether it's class warfare, nuclear war, or global warming that appears to be outside the realm of religion.


Never mind the fact that none of the secular prophecies of an apocalyptic class war, nuclear war, or the oncoming ice age had come to pass. The political cults draw authority from scientism without being scientific. But in a modern age, they appear to be more relevant than religion to those who live exterior lives in a world manifestly made of steel and glass, rather than soul and spirit. When experts tell you that wine is bad for you, or that lockdowns are good for you, or that the world is ending, you believe.


You believe without any actual faith or inspiration. Instead, you find those elsewhere. The cults.


Political cults don't return to religion, rather they find hidden meanings, pseudoscientific or pagan, in the secular world. They make a religion of politics and they find their theology and scripture in daily events, in pop culture references, in sociology, and class, gender, and race. What appears perverse and senseless to you can seem miraculous to them. Men and women changing genders. Political messiahs who promise to change the world. Secret conspiracies and revelations only they are privy to. 


The miracles of a political cult lie in a potent sense of conviction, in its rise to power, and in the secret knowledge of a hidden world beneath the apparent surface of the steel and glass reality around us.


Politics is about power and every political cult worships power. 


Power is the deity of the political cult. Its messianic age comes with the seizure of power. Is theology is the right side of history. Its scripture is rhetoric. And its hope is shadowed by hate. To desire power is to really desire power over others. The despair at the root of political cults is fed by murderous violence that eventually sickens even its perpetrators, destroys their souls, and leeches away their energies.


When a totalitarian cult triumphs, it rises from a murderous orgy to a lethargic torpor of decline. Having killed millions without ever getting closer to utopia, it no longer has a goal or direction, just power.



"What do we have, a republic or a monarchy?" A republic, if you can keep it," Benjamin Franklin




America's immunity to political cults began with its founding. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were revolutionary documents, but their promise lay in liberty, not in political messianism.  They were not offering a new age of power, but the freedom for Americans to live their own lives. 


Americans were not looking to change the world or even themselves, but to be left alone within their own communities, their states, their churches and synagogues, their families and their homes.


The Revolution did not usher in a new cultural revolution or even a new political revolution. Rather it protected, expanded, and defended what had already been built using principles that aligned with the sentiments and values of most Americans.


Political cults turn politics into the end whereas Americans insisted that politics was the means.


Politics turns to totalitarianism, to cults of personality, and to cults when it comes to believe that politics is the end, that it is everything we need, rather than that it is the means to allow us to live our lives.


Politics is not redemptive. It does not save us. It saves us only from tyranny and other threats.


The difference between preventative politics and coercive politics is also the gap between constitutional politics and political cults.


To the political cult, politics is all that matters. Politics takes on an outsized dimension encompassing human history and overshadowing theology and religion. Only politics can save or destroy us, is the cult's message. And in a world in which politics seems to be everywhere, it's a compelling message.


It's also false.


Politics can be a weapon at its worst. At its best, it's a management tool. It can be used to suppress or protect religion, but it's not a religious experience. 


Political cults invent political apocalypses, global warming, systemic racism, and class warfare, to be met with political redemptions, but they've shown no ability to meet even their own challenges, let alone save mankind. 


Power can be vitally important. It's crucial for survival in a crisis. But power rarely makes anyone a better person.


That is the big lie at the heart of the political cult which worships power and pretends that power is redemptive. 


History tells us authoritatively that it's not.


Power corrupts and political cults therefore worship corruption. Everything else follows plainly from that.


Thursday, July 22, 2021

While Military Leaders Lie, White Men Die

By On July 22, 2021
After George Floyd’s drug overdose death, military leaders declared an emergency.

From former Secretary of Defense Esper’s false claim that, “racism is real in America, and we must all do our very best to recognize it, to confront it, and to eradicate it” last summer to Secretary of Defense Austin’s fight against “racial disparities”, the focus has been on the supposed oppressed status of black people in the military. That’s despite the slate of black leaders, including Austin and Air Force Chief of Staff Brown, holding top military positions.

But the supposed statistical racial disparities that are being used to conduct a racial witch hunt against the bogeyman of systemic racism in the military ignores the biggest racial disparity.

The suicide rate among white soldiers is 20.2 out of 100,000 person years and 12.8 among black soldiers. Suicide is the real indicator of high stress and nearly every group in the military, such as Hispanics at 16.0 and Asians at 21.5, have a higher suicide rate than black people.

Suicide rates in civilian and military life prove that systemic racism is a hoax. And that’s why they are a deeply uncomfortable subject for diversity experts because, despite claims that white men are the most privileged group in society, and that minorities, especially black people, are the most oppressed and are suffering unbelieable stress, white men are the ones actually committing suicide in much higher numbers than the “oppressed” minority groups.

A recent New York Times article struggled to explain why "social stressors — lower socioeconomic status and racism among them — are more prevalent and severe for the black population than the white one" yet "the black suicide rate is about one-third that of whites".

Given a choice between an inescapable statistical fact and the myth of systemic racism, politicians, experts, and the media dismiss the facts and stick with their racist myth.

Suicide rates show who is actually being pushed to the brink… and who isn’t.

And while the suicide rate is a serious enough problem in the country at large, it’s a crisis in the military where four times as many military personnel killed themselves as were killed in combat.

The 30,177 suicide death toll for current and former military personnel since 9/11 is horrifying.

In the fourth quarter of 2020, while military leaders obsessively focused on fighting racism, there were 156 known suicides across the services marking a horrifying 25% rise.

The suicide rates testify to the fact that we didn’t just lose a war, we lost a culture war.

While American military personnel were killing themselves at unprecedented rates, their “leaders” were fighting an imaginary crisis of racism with critical race theory, commissions, surveys, and assorted witch hunts searching for a problem that they know doesn’t exist.

Meanwhile they were ignoring a problem that was there because the people committing suicide had the wrong gender and the were the wrong skin color for military leaders to care about them.

Not only are black people not the worst off in the services, but in one study the black suicide rate among VHA users actually fell from 15.6 in 12.76 while the white rate rose 46.16 to 48.51. Among black female veterans, the suicide rate fell from 14.83 to 2.60 even as the white female rate held steady at 25. “Non-minority males”, also known as white men, remain the likeliest to kill themselves even as military leaders focus on the sham of “diversity and inclusion”.

Air Force Chief of Staff Brown has a racism sob story about not being recognized in his parking space, other racism stories unleashed by the brass during its “conversations about racism” remain equally petty and trivial, meanwhile white men are actually dying at disturbing rates.

While the Air Force lectures airmen on “unconscious bias”, there were over 100 suicides among personnel in 2019 and 2020. “The last two years have not been the best for the United States Air Force,” Brown admitted. “The goal is to actually get it as close to zero as we can, and get those who are having challenges.” Those who are having challenges are white men.

They’re the same group that Brown and other military leaders have smeared as racists.

Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Michael Gilday has urged naval personnel to read the racist ravings of Ibram X. Kendi and rolled out videos claiming that racism is endemic in the Navy.

“Being African-American in America is not fun,” an aviation technician claimed in an official Navy video. As Gilday falsely accused whites of racism, white Navy personnel kept killing themselves.

A suicide rate of one a month is normal at Fort Hood as the brass focus on more important things like changing the name of the base because Civil War history has become offensive.

Suicide is the second leading cause of death in the military. In 2018, there were 304 male suicides and only 21 female suicides. There were 234 white suicides and 42 black suicides.

In total, 400 white people from active duty to the reserves to the guard killed themselves and only 72 black people. If black personnel are more oppressed, under more stress, and need more special care than white personnel, why are white personnel under so much stress that they’re killing themselves at high rates while black suicide rates are some of the lowest?

The new politically correct military leadership is working hard to cover up the crisis.

As white enlisted men keep dying, Rand's National Defense Research Institute, which is funded by the Department of Defense and the Navy, among others, commissioned a report claiming that the Pentagon should focus "attention on suicide attempts, particularly among non-Hispanic black, Hispanic, and non-Hispanic Asian military personnel.”

Everyone except the white men actually killing themselves.

The Rand report also fussed over high drinking rates by "bisexual service members" while insisting that “socially disadvantaged groups—such as racial/ethnic minorities, women, and sexual-orientation minorities” were the ones actually at risk in the military.

Rand focused on self-reported suicide attempts while ignoring actual suicide rates.

And as the Pentagon worried about "socially disadvantaged groups" and bisexual drinking habits, 75.6% of the active duty personnel killing themselves were white.

Even though only 65% of active duty personnel are white.

Among the National Guard, white people made up 67% of the force and 83% of its suicides.

The crisis of white male suicides is unglamorous and politically incorrect. The dead are disproportionately young white enlisted men. Very few officers kill themselves. The white men committing suicide at unprecedented rates believe that they have no future. And a military leadership obsessed with diversity and inclusion is doing everything it can to prove them right.

While Pentagon elites focus on breaking the ‘brass ceiling’ through affirmative action, ordinary soldiers trying to support a family on food stamps and seeing no future are killing themselves.

They’re doing it while General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, defends imposing the ugly racism of critical race theory on the military while whining that he wants to "understand white rage".

The Ivy League grad with degrees from Princeton and Columbia might do well to start with the internalized rage and pain that is driving the white men in his charge to take their own lives.

If only he gave a damn.

While the brass play their academic and political games, our soldiers are dying, not on foreign battlefields, but at their own hand. What’s driving them is not white rage, it’s white despair.

Austin, Milley, Brown, Gilday, and other military leaders have invented a crisis of racism because it lets them unleash diversity initiatives and hector the troops about unconscious bias. Like so many corporations and government institutions which have embraced critical race theory, political correctness allows them to avoid tackling the real crises they are responsible for.

The brass understands that pushing the big lie of systemic racism is good for their careers while addressing what’s driving enlisted white men to suicide would not lead to a profitable retirement.

And while they lie, white men die.





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

Click here to subscribe to my articles. 

Thank you for reading.

Tuesday, July 20, 2021

Biden Admin Goes After Israel Over a Jihadi Polygamist’s Terror Mansion

By On July 20, 2021
One Sunday evening an Islamic terrorist opened fire at a bus stop in Israel and hit three religious seminary students who had been out hiking. Yehuda Guetta, a 19-year-old, was shot in the head and lay in the hospital for four days while doctors labored to save his life. They failed.

Benaya Peretz, another of the 19-year-olds, was seriously wounded. He later recalled, “The terrorist stopped in front of me – he was so big. He shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ and just started firing.” Amichai Hala, the third student, only realized that he had been shot in the back of the neck when he tried to get up. Unlike their friend, both of the young men survived the attack.

The terrorist, Muntasir Shalabi, a wealthy 44-year-old man, drove away in his silver SUV. Israeli soldiers arriving on the scene opened fire, blowing out the rear windshield as he made his getaway.

The Palestinian Authority’s local Fatah leadership celebrated the attack and urged Muslim settlers in the area to "get rid of the contents that were stored in the cameras of your homes or your businesses today" to protect the terrorist. Locals also helped by torching the abandoned vehicle used by the terrorist before the Israelis could get to it and recover any evidence.

Despite the best efforts of the terrorists and their accomplices, and Shalabi’s efforts to disguise his appearance, Israelis captured him. And then the Biden administration came after Israel.

Israel arrested the killer and prepared to demolish his terror mansion which is used to break up terrorist cells and deter future attacks. But the Shalabi estate was not just any home: it was the local Hollywood Hills.

Turmus Ayya, a small and wealthy Muslim town, is where you live when you have money.

Many of the residents have obtained American passports and alternate between working in the United States and using their estates in Turmus Ayya as their summer homes. The Shalabi McMansion was typically grandiose, luxurious, and vulgar, boasting enclosed glass wings and the star and crescent of Islam. And the terrorist living there had United States citizenship.

The Biden administration, which had ignored the murders of American citizens by Islamic terrorists, quickly jumped into action assigning the Shalabi case its highest priority.

While an American woman arrested in a Muslim country for not wearing a hijab or for looking at a man can expect to be ignored by the local embassy, Biden’s State Department dispatched representatives from the embassy to attend the court hearings involving the Shalabi house.

Secretary of State Blinken and other top State Department officials berated Israelis over it. The intense pressure from Washington D.C. on the Israeli government and the court temporarily halted the demolition, but then justice was done and the terror mansion was blown up anyway.

The United States embassy, now under new management, complained that, “the home of an entire family should not be demolished for the actions of one individual.”

Except that not just Shalabi, but his wife and son had also been detained after the attack. And Shalabi’s wife expressed support for her husband’s campaign of brutal violence.

The exploded terror mansion isn’t even Shalabi’s full-time home: it’s his summer place.

While the media described Muntasir Shalabi as a father of seven children, it neglected to mention that’s because he has multiple wives. Some of whom live in the United States.

A petition filed on behalf of the terror mansion by Hamoked, an anti-Israel lawfare group funded by the EU, the UK, and the UN, claimed that the terrorist “lived most of the time with his other wives and children in homes he owned in the United States”.

The pro-terrorist lawfare group also insisted that Shalabi, when he wasn’t traveling around the world to his multiple mansions to shack up with his wife-of-the-month, had psychological problems and “repeatedly stated that he was motivated by suicidal thoughts.”

That must be why after the terrorist attack, Shalabi fled and tried to disguise his appearance. And why he was taken alive, instead of dying for Allah the way a good terrorist should. But it’s not as easy to blow yourself up when you’ve got mansions and wives around the world.

That’s not the behavior of a troubled suicidal man, but of a murderous coward.

What was the source of the wealth that allowed the terrorist to own homes and set up families around the world? No one’s talking except to portray Shalabi as a victim of Israeli oppression.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib, who has never found a terrorist she won’t defend, tweeted, “Just this week, Israel demolished and leveled the home of a Palestinian family in the beloved village of Turmusaya. For what? To dehumanize.”

The “beloved village” is as much of a village as Beverly Hills. And Tlaib knows exactly why the mansion was blown up. It’s because it’s the home of an Islamic terrorist.

Elisha Guetta, the father of the murdered boy, blasted the Biden administration, saying that he was “shocked that the US is condemning the demolition of my son’s murderer and is supporting a terrorist who arrived from the US to carry out a vicious shooting terror attack against innocent Jewish students."

“It would be expected that the US, which has often been the victim of terrorism, would stand with terror victims rather than with their murderers,” he wondered.

Biden’s State Department is picking the terror mansion over the murdered boy.

“We attach a good deal of priority to this," State Department spokesman Ned Price warned that his administration would keep on fighting Israel over this "as long as this practice continues."

Or as long as the Biden administration continues.

"Punitive demolitions exacerbate tensions at a time when everyone should be focused on principally ensuring calm," he complained. Price might want to take that up with the terrorists his administration insists on funding. The Shalabi mansion would still be ugly and standing if the head of its household hadn’t tried to murder a bunch of students waiting at a bus stop.

But Israeli reactions to terrorist attacks are always provocative while terrorist attacks never are.

Rep. Gregory Meeks, the Chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and a longtime Castro shill, joined the pressure campaign reportedly putting in an angry phone call of his own. Despite efforts by Democrats to describe Meeks as pro-Israel, he had tried to halt arms sales to Israel during the recent conflict with Hamas and repeatedly criticised the Jewish State.

While the media kept portraying Shalabi as a “lone-wolf terrorist”, a Hamas group showed up to pay a solidarity visit to the demolished terror mansion. Photos of the event show a Hamas flag flying from the rubble of the home and a banner of Shalabi next to Hamas regalia.

Unfortunately for them, they announced the visit ahead of time on social media, posting, “The Hamas student faction at Birzeit University invites you to attend a visit to the family of the heroic prisoner Montasir Shalabi.” The Israelis were waiting and took the lot in for questioning.

The Shalabi terror mansion may be dust and rubble, but the Biden administration will not forget the martyred mansion and intends to fight on so that no more terror mansions are blown up.

Hady Amr, a Biden bundler and anti-Israel activist, who serves as the Democrat "point man" on the terrorist conflict against Israel, will take on the issue on his next visit. Amr, who had accused Israel of "ethnic cleansing" and responded to the death of a Hamas leader by threatening that "there will be thousands who will seek to avenge these brutal murders" is on the case.

During his visit, Amr will pressure Israel over terror home demolitions.

While inflation rises and crime skyrockets, freedom fighters protest in Cuba and China escalates its crackdown, the Biden administration will go on fighting for a polygamist’s terror mansion.





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

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Thank you for reading.

Wednesday, July 14, 2021

Biden Turns Entire Government Into a Democrat Voter Machine

By On July 14, 2021
In February, Biden signed an executive order which included one of the most blatant efforts to roll out a voter turnout operation across the span of the entire federal government.

The Interagency Working Group on Promoting Naturalization brought together the heads of agencies to figure out the best way to create as many new Democrat voters as possible. The agencies included the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Education, Health and Human Services, the Department of Education, the Department of Defense, and the USDA.

This month, the Interagency Strategy for Promoting Naturalization was released. The Obama administration had its own project for turning aliens into citizens as quickly as possible in order to get them on the voting rolls, but the new strategy goes beyond anything Obama tried to do.

The new strategy begins with using DHS to assemble all the available data on the "potential naturalization-eligible populations" and breaking it down by age, sex, and zip code, as well as other demographic details, to target "outreach".

By "outreach", the working group of agencies headed by Biden appointees means converting aliens into citizens.

That data will allow the government and a spectrum of “partners”, most of them Democrat allies, to target resident aliens the way a corporation targets potential customers of its products.

Except that the data is coming from the government and the product is voting for Democrats.

While citizenship is in theory non-partisan, the strategy makes it clear that it's targeting potential Democrat voting blocs such as refugees, asylum seekers, and agricultural workers, not to mention “underserved and marginalized communities” through "community-based organizations". What that means is that the federal government is going to be pumping even more money into Democrat community groups to encourage them to turn resident aliens into citizens for a massive voter turnout operation funded by taxpayers.

The federal government won't just be financing a Democrat turnout operation, it's mobilizing all of its resources to provide the data and the logistics across a variety of federal agencies.

But the money potentially won't just be coming from the government.

One of the more curious items mentions exploring "the feasibility of accepting private donations to support the USCIS Citizenship and Integration Grant Program". If Congress won't allocate enough money, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other Democrat mega-donors might.

The resulting "public-private partnership" would combine Democrat mega-donor cash with federal government resources for a voter turnout operation that would put the government even more firmly under the control of the Democrat donor class in order to rig the next elections.

The new strategy begins with turning refugees into resident aliens and turning aliens into citizens by utilizing the resources of the immigration system. That's not dramatically new, but the goal of the new strategy is to have every component of the government push citizenship.

The strategy doesn’t just run the expected informational campaigns through the post office or museums, but it also uses parts of the government that the aliens are expected to interact more closely and meaningfully with, like HUD, SSA, and the Department of Labor, to function as citizenship offices. Some federal agencies are barely doing their actual jobs, but will now also be tasked with finding new voters to help the Democrats survive a backlash from existing voters.

But the strategy doesn't stop there. Instead the Biden administration is going to encourage Mexico and other countries to promote the benefits of American citizenship to their own citizens.

The strategy proposes to engage in "outreach to foreign embassies and consular networks that may be interested in providing information and resources on citizenship".

Why would foreign consulates be interested in selling American citizenship to their citizens?

The answer is remittances. In just one month, Mexicans in the United States sent over $3 billion back home. Remittances from the United States make up as much as a fifth of the GDPs of El Salvador and Honduras. Citizenship means more welfare benefits and therefore more remittances as taxpayer money flows out of the United States and across Latin America.

Biden intends to “partner” with foreign governments to encourage their citizens to get citizenship in this country and reap all the benefits that would entail because it means more money taken from taxpayers and sent overseas, and it means more votes for the Democrats.

It’s a win-win for socialists on both sides of the border, and a huge loss for American taxpayers.

The strategy also seeks to use foreign consulates and embassies to "clarify" to their "nationals" the "impact of dual citizenship".

A foreigner living in the United States who visits his own consulate will have material promoting American citizenship handed to him while being assured that he can remain a dual citizen.

The next step of the campaign will push citizenship through local governments, community colleges, and labor unions by providing them with "anonymized data about potential clusters of naturalization candidates". The Biden administration will be providing targeted data for what is a thinly disguised voter outreach operation to its political partners.

This is the next best thing to handing over the data to the DNC.

Not satisfied with turning Border Patrol agents into 'coyotes' delivering illegal aliens deep into America, it will also have them hand out "information on naturalization" to resident aliens.

Refugees and other migrants, especially those with "limited English proficiency, medical conditions, and disabilities" will get a special push to speed them "on their path toward naturalization" especially "those at risk of losing SSI income and other federal benefits".

This means telling aliens who have a 7-year window for SSI payments that they'll be able to stay on the welfare gravy train if they become citizens. Future Democrat voters are being bribed with taxpayer money to become citizens and vote for more benefits for themselves.

And then just to make it obvious that this is a partisan stunt, the strategy calls for videos from "senior administration officials", proposing that "Dr. Biden, who continues to work as an English and writing instructor, could encourage immigrants to learn English" and that "as a daughter of immigrants, Vice President Harris could highlight her family's immigration journey".

Jill Biden would be better served learning the language she claims to teach, but is marginally literate in, to say nothing of her husband’s tsunami of malapropisms, and Kamala’s father was a foreign student and official, not an immigrant, but facts only get in the way of the agenda.

Meanwhile the Biden administration’s voter turnout machine proposes to promote the benefits of American citizenship through Mexican consulates, provide targeted information about the aliens that need to be turned into citizens to labor unions, and open the door to private funding of its governmental voter turnout operations. HHS, the USDA, and the military are meant to function as components of a partisan effort to find and convert as many Democrat voters as possible.

The Democrats are facing a challenging electoral map in 2022 and 2024, and they’re plotting to use the entire structure of the government to overcome those challenges by creating new voters. Even as Biden opens the borders as wide as he can, the new government voter turnout machine will try to turn illegal aliens into residents and then into citizens, while turning the people who were once Americans into displaced and powerless refugees in their own land.







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

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Thank you for reading.

Monday, July 12, 2021

California Legalized Theft. Porch Piracy Soared.

By On July 12, 2021
California legalized theft with Proposition 47. Since then pharmacies and small businesses have been forced to shut down by a wave of shoplifters with nothing to fear from the law.

But it’s not just stores that are reeling from the crime wave unleashed by criminal justice reform.

Proposition 47 was passed in 2014. LAPD crime data shows that package thefts shot up from 500 to 700 between 2014 to 2015. By 2016, they rose to 1,000, and 1,200 in 2017.

In Sawtelle, home to Little Tokyo and a historic Japanese neighborhood, package theft went from practically zero to a record high in only a few years after Democrats legalized stealing.

Legalizing theft didn’t just hit stores, but led to an epidemic of ‘porch piracy’.

In Los Angeles, brazen criminals took to driving behind delivery trucks and stealing the packages as soon as they were delivered. Others dressed up in Amazon uniforms.

But nowhere was the problem as bad as in the pro-crime metropolis of San Francisco.

Porch piracy has been growing across America alongside the Black Lives Matter riots and the election of Democrat mayors, council members, and prosecutors who support criminals.

In 2018, less than a third of people responding to a survey said that they had been ripped off, but by 2020, the number had shot up all the way to 43%. One survey estimated that porch pirates had been responsible for over $5 billion in thefts in cities across the country.

But San Francisco has topped the nation in package thefts for two years straight.

It’s no coincidence that California, which has led the way in legalizing crime, accounts for three of the top ten cities for porch pirates and that the state ranks third in the nation. But San Francisco has been unique in its tolerance for crime and contempt for crime victims.

Pharmacies have been shutting down across San Francisco due to the shoplifting epidemic, and as the nation’s Big Tech capital turned to online retail, the thieves turned to porch piracy. Big Tech companies have urged homeowners to adopt high tech solutions like doorbell cameras, but recording the thieves is next to useless when nothing happens to them.

One article chronicled a multi-year effort by a socialist union leader, a Google employee, and a lesbian BLM supporter to stop a heroin addict who was repeatedly caught stealing packages. The junkie blamed racism, and refused to show up in court. Police officers came, wrote her tickets, and she went right on stealing. Judges issued bench warrants, and then released her, telling her to report to drug rehab, and she went right back to stealing. While one of her victims was in court waiting for the case to be heard, the thief was stealing packages from his porch.

She was hit with a stay-away order, forced to wear an ankle monitor, and none of it helped.

When a trial finally happened, she was convicted and sent to a drug rehab program. She failed drug tests, refused to show up for hearings, went on stealing packages, and was sentenced to more drug rehab.

And that’s what happens when people spend a lot of time and effort to try and get justice.

San Francisco is both the epicenter of the tech industry and the pro-crime movement. Big Tech donors have fueled the rise of pro-crime prosecutors like George Gascon and Chesa Boudin, even as they have cashed in by selling doorbell cameras and package security systems. But surveillance technologies are useless when there’s no law enforcement to back them up.

A packaging supply company conducted a survey and found that the "four states with the lowest search rates of package theft (Alabama, South Carolina and Arkansas came 2nd, 3rd and 4th respectively) were all southern states.” The company concluded that “the south is safer from porch piracy than the north.” But California isn’t the north. The issue isn’t geography, it’s the law.

A bill to criminalize porch piracy was killed last year. It’s been reintroduced again this year.

"It doesn’t matter how many times somebody steals a package, it’s still only a misdemeanor. And in California right now, a misdemeanor is usually a citation. People aren’t showing up for their court dates or not paying the misdemeanors, and they just keep on stealing from people’s porches," Senator Brian Jones (R-Santee) noted.

Why shouldn’t porch pirates steal packages when all they come away with is a citation?

As long as the porch pirates steal less than $950 worth of packages, it’s classified as petty theft. The same decriminalization of theft that led to an epidemic of shoplifting, forcing stores and pharmacies to close, has also led to a boom in porch piracy. When brick-and-mortar stores close, that leaves people more dependent on online deliveries and vulnerable to porch pirates.

In an economy dominated by Big Tech, porch piracy, like everything else, has become a weapon in a rivalry between unfathomably huge companies. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and his radical leftist wife, Patty Quillin, have been some of the biggest pro-crime donors.

The Netflix CEO was the sixth biggest donor for Proposition 47. The Big Tech boss vastly outspent pro-victim donors opposed to legalizing theft. While legalizing theft had little impact on Netflix, whose big product is an online subscription service, it’s hurting Amazon, one of its biggest video streaming competitors. Ordinary Californians are just Netflix’s collateral damage.

Homeowners are turning to locked delivery boxes and rigged packages. A cottage industry of companies provides doorstep security solutions and YouTube is full of guides to rigging up every type of package trap from glitter bombs to fouler concoctions to surprise porch pirates.

But no matter what homeowners do, the rates of porch piracy keep rising because glitter bombs will never be as effective a deterrent as a working criminal justice system.

Proposition 47 hasn’t just hurt stores. The thieves empowered by criminal justice reform have stolen birthday presents, prom dresses, and priceless heirlooms. They’ve destroyed special days and stolen moments that can never be replaced. And above all else they’ve robbed millions of ordinary people of their sense of security in their own homes.

California’s experiment in legalizing theft has been successful in stealing public safety.





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

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Thank you for reading.

Sunday, July 11, 2021

Ibram X. Kendi’s Parents Worked to Give Him a Good Life. He Called Them Racists.

By On July 11, 2021
Ibram X. Kendi, the critical race theory prophet of his own twisted brand of antiracism, has become mandatory reading material at colleges, corporations, and in the military.

How to Be an Antiracist topped the New York Times bestseller list. Any of the progressive housewives, Fortune 500 executives, and assorted people being forced to page through the book would learn by the second chapter how Kendi’s middle-class black parents were racist.

“Both of my parents emerged from poor families, one from Northern urban projects, one from Southern rural fields. Both framed their rise from poverty into the middle class in the 1980s as a climb up the ladder of education and hard work. As they climbed, they were inundated with racist talking points about black people refusing to climb, the ones who were irresponsibly strung out on heroin or crack, who enjoyed stealing and being criminally dependent on the hard-earned money of climbing Americans like them,” Kendi writes. “My parents, along with many others in the new Black middle class, consumed these ideas.”

What makes these ideas racist? Believing that you can get ahead through hard work is whiteness talking. And expecting good habits to lead to good outcomes is racist because it ignores the systemic racism that makes success impossible for black people. Kendi’s parents, Larry and Carol Rogers, an accountant and business analyst, not only bought into the middle class dream, but they worked hard, and they succeeded at giving him a comfortable childhood.

"My parents... fed me the mantra that education and hard work would uplift me, just as it had uplifted them," Kendi agonizingly recalls. And if nothing else, he partially disproved them, becoming enormously successful on the back of education, but a worthless one in identity politics, and on denying the value of hard work.

"My parents—even from within their racial consciousness—were susceptible to the racist idea that it was laziness that kept black people down," he recalls.

Kendi’s problem is laziness, but it’s a particularly white kind of laziness. How to Be an Antiracist, like most critical race theory texts, leans heavily on the personal narrative of his particularly uninteresting life. Kendi manufactures victimhood out of thin air, when his father waves to him on the basketball court, he suggests that might have gotten him lynched or killed by the police.

His grandmother dies after a struggle with Alzheimer’s. "A disease more prevalent among African Americans," Kendi notes. "There may be no more consequential white privilege than life itself." Black people have a 3.5 percent higher prevalence of Alzheimer’s than white people for a disease that is the fifth most common cause of death among American senior citizens.

When your claim to oppression is your grandmother’s Alzheimer’s, you’re low on material.

But Kendi’s story is a familiar one to generations of white and then minority immigrants where the first generation labors hard to succeed, and then sends its kids to college only to have them come back as radicals who complain that their parents sold out by abandoning their dreams.

The old boomer paradigm that fed sixties white radicalism has kicked in among minority millennials of the upper middle class with a vengeance. The new black nationalist surge on college campuses largely owes its growth to privileged black men and women like Kendi, whose parents took the corporate route, while the kids rebelled and went into Black Studies.

“I always wonder what would have been if my parents had not let their reasonable fears stop them from pursuing their dreams,” Kendi whines. “Instead, Ma settled for a corporate career in healthcare technology. Dad settled for an accounting career. They entered the American middle class”.

Kendi’s racialism is reducible to that cliched radicalism of a son embarrassed by his insufficiently woke parents. It’s about as white as anything. And so is Kendi’s career which has taken him from condemning corporations to producing diversity content for corporations. Like most professional radicals, he wants to overthrow the system by becoming the system.

How to Be an Antiracist’s rants against “assimilationism” echo seventies black nationalism through modern personal identity politics that demands we acknowledge everyone’s identity. Whether it’s white people who insist that they’re Koreans, men who claim to be women, or corporate drones who insist they’re radicals, everyone wants to be who they aren’t.

Kendi’s fake African identity is a familiar brand of identity politics, but born out of the same shallow narcissism of a comfortable generation that seeks meaning in fake identities. A middle class kid named Henry Rogers is reborn as a black nationalist named Kendi. But the fake new identity doesn’t make him more authentic, but less so. The only way to assert a fake identity is for the man in the mask to go on a rampage against his authentic roots and his old past self.

If Obama’s racial memoirs were at least aspirational, Kendi’s is anti-aspirational.

Black people, whether it’s Kendi’s own parents, or black leaders from W.E. DuBois to Eleanor Holmes Norton are guilty of racism for urging achievement. Asking anyone, especially a member of a minority group, to work harder is racist. Suggesting that black people have problems that are caused by anything other than systemic racism is assimilationist.

And yet Kendi’s entire worldview, despite its trappings of sham Africanism, is white.

It’s not some imaginary whiteness, but that of academic identity politics which is absurdly white. Kendi’s parents may have been black, despite some distant white ancestor whom he makes much of, but his entire value system is derived from white political correctness.

He arrived at college "as a racist, sexist homophobe", Kendi writes. The fault was, as usual, his middle class parents. "Dad’s sexist ideas demanded he lead and Ma’s sexist ideas submitted. She would call him the head of the household. He would accept the calling." Horror of horrors.

Kendi’s parents “demonized” single mothers, along with drug dealers and criminals. He blames Reagan and internalized whiteness, but the black opposition to crime preceded Reagan and was a matter of basic self-interest that united the NAACP, the Nation of Islam, and everything in between. It took white people to redefine drug dealers as victims of white oppression.

The cult of the criminal in black activist circles is not a reflection of any organic movement within the black community, but the imposition of a white Marxist perspective. The collapse of support for police defunding in the black community in every poll shows just how alien it is. It’s every bit as alien as Kendi’s hostility to black masculinity which is equally white and assimilationist.

How to Be an Antiracist is meant to be part memoir, but Kendi doesn’t have much of a story to tell. That’s surprisingly commonplace among critical race theory memorists whose lack of interesting personal content, beginning with Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, has only made their works more successful. If Obama’s memoirs offered elements of the exotic, the black middle class activist against whiteness succeeds because his story is familiarly white.

We have come a long way from Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice or Alex Haley’s dubious Malcolm X biography. Today’s black nationalist is a suburban college kid nurtured by a middle class two-parent family who denounces the suburbs, the middle class, and families like his as racist.

But the familiar problem, which Kendi only loosely describes in his chapter on dueling consciousness, and which is better embodied by the title of Black-ish, is that the generation of middle class black parents who kept their children safe from crime (Kendi’s father put up a basketball court in their backyard because he was worried about his son getting shot) succeeded all too well. Like too many generations of Irish, Italian, Jewish, Latino, and Asian parents, they raised radical woke snowflakes who are good for little except complaining.

Assimilationism has done its job all too well. The trouble is that the engines of assimilationism, universities, mass culture, and the upper middle class are assimilating the new generation out of America rather than into it, breeding dissatisfaction and nurturing radicalism as their identity.

Revolutions are made by the prosperous, not the dispossessed. Lenin, a member of a noble family, warred on the nobility. Castro, the son of a plantation owner, fought the plantations. Mao, the son of a landlord, oversaw the mass murder of landlords. The Left makes children into the enemies of the values of their parents. And How to Be an Antiracist is really a very old story about the resentments of middle class children who never really learned how hard life can be.

Ibram X. Kendi calls everything he doesn’t like racist. “Racist and antiracist are not fixed identities. We can be racist one minute and an antiracist the next,” he argues. Racism, like most identity politics tropes, is everywhere and nowhere. It’s an identity politics weapon that is an attack on identity while claiming to be a defense against attacks on identity.

Mostly racism consists of the common sense approaches of his parents to dealing with a dangerous world while antiracism consists of his clueless disregard for how life really works.

Kendi complains about the “constant fearmongering about Black drug dealers, robbers, killers,” of his parents, but young black men are far more likely to be killed by the former than by the police whom he and the Black Lives Matter movement fearmonger endlessly about.

His parents made a difficult journey that he does not understand and has no concept of how difficult it would be to recreate in his own privileged circumstances. That’s the same perch which countless of his white leftist peers occupy. It’s no wonder that he’s so popular with them.

How to Be an Antiracist doesn’t convey a racial crisis, but the crisis of an American upper middle class which has lost touch with its own roots and whose children have become an enemy of its aspirational values. That, more than anything else, is leading the country into the kind of shopworn Marxism that Kendi and other radicals peddle as narcissistic identity politics.

Defining everyone, including his parents, as racists, interpreting and reinterpreting the world through academic lenses, is the hobby of privileged people who don’t have real problems.

Ibram X. Kendi may not have real problems, but the rest of the country isn’t so privileged.

And Kendi has become another of the problems undermining the black community, destroying the middle class life his parents worked so hard to achieve, and tearing apart 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.

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Thank you for reading.

Wednesday, July 07, 2021

The New Social Justice War on Drugs is Bigger Than Ever

By On July 07, 2021
California legalized pot 5 years ago, but you couldn’t tell that from the scale of the drug war.

Every few months brings another massive bust. A 40-acre illegal pot farm in an obscure part of Death Valley, the "most elaborate illegal marijuana" setup in Mendota with 50,000 pot plants that was so big that police could smell it from 1,100 feet in the air, “vast groves” worth $169 million in the eastern Sierras, and $285 million in the old Shasta region of the gold rush.

In 2019, California seized almost 1 million pot plants. One busted operation not far from San Francisco was processing 500 pounds of marijuana a day.

Governor Newsom had kicked things off with an address announcing that he was pulling the California National Guard from fighting what he described as President Trump’s “manufactured crisis” on the border to “refocus on the real threats facing our state”, like “illegal cannabis farms”.

Next year, 7 Laotians were brutally murdered at an illegal marijuana operation in Riverside by Mexican cartel members over Labor Day. With helicopters piloted by the Air National Guard and black SUVs full of DEA agents showing up in small towns, it’s like the drug war never ended.

Somehow the drug war in California is worse than ever.

Pro-pot advocates promised that legalizing drugs would bring in the money. And it did. Billions of dollars have been spent on “legal drugs”, but far more is being spent on illegal drugs.

The old drug war was fought by Republicans who believed that drugs were bad, but the new drug war is being fought by Democrats who love pot, but love drug money even more.

The issue isn’t morality: it’s money.

An ounce of pot is estimated to cost as much as $100 more bought legally than on the street. The profit margins are great and decriminalization expanded the illegal market even more than the legal one. Buyers no longer fear being busted, sellers have little to worry about, and even the growers who take much of the risk don’t have to worry about the stigma. Illegal growing has become an environmental and financial violation. The only real thing to fear are the cartels.

Mexican cartels now control much of the wilderness that California’s militant environmentalists had insisted on protecting from development. But while developers might fear the Sierra Club and its government allies, the cartels and the immigrant growers under their control don’t. What they’re afraid of is having their throats cut in the middle of the night. And as massive marijuana growing operations take off in wilderness areas, it turns out that the environmentalists were saving all that land so that drug lords from south of the border could grow millions in pot.

While California’s legal agriculture industries are dying: its illegal pot industries are prospering. If you want to grow avocados, good luck getting the water. Instead, Californians are buying Mexican avocados, from which the cartels take their cut, while the water goes to illegal operations that aren’t worried about permits or environmentalist pressure groups in Sacramento.

California's rice production will fall by 20% and its avocado production fell by nearly half in 2019 from 338 million pounds to 175 million pounds, while its illegal pot production vastly increased.

The old drug warriors wore suits and ties. The new drug warriors are the “entrepreneurs” who spent fortunes lobbying politicians in the hopes of cornering the market only to be stuck with a small slice of it aimed at upscale buyers willing to pay premium prices at boutique pot shops.

The environmentalists who once got high to commune with nature are among the most vocal special interests urging an aggressive war against this new form of agriculture which can’t be regulated. Behind them are identity politics groups and unions which want their cut of the cash.

A glance at the members of the Cannabis Advisory Committee shows some of the special interests involved from the pot workers branch of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union to the head of the California NAACP to environmentalists. Legal drugs means money for unions and community groups, which really means money for Democrats.

Mexican drug cartels don’t pay consulting fees or offer donations to environmentalists, they don’t provide a cut to the black caucus, or hire unionized workers. It’s not the beheadings or rapes that bother California Democrats who shrug at such things from their gated communities.

But the illegal drug business is cutting into the profits from their legal progressive drug cartel.

That’s why Governor Newsom claimed that massive invasions of the country by illegal aliens are a “manufactured crisis”, but illegal pot farms that don’t pay his party are a serious threat. Illegal aliens build the power and wealth of the Democrats, but illegal pot farms steal from it.

Karl Marx observed that history repeats itself as farce. California’s Marxists are doing everything possible to live up to their leader’s teachings. After spending two generations fighting against the old drug war in the name of civil rights, they’re fighting a new drug war for civil rights.

Civil rights being anything that increases the power and wealth of California Democrats.

That’s why California’s Democrat majority passed a $100 million bailout for the “legal” pot industry. The widely reported bailout is really for the Democrats because it pays cities to hire experts to work with the industry on environmental compliance. What’s really going on is that the Democrat machine is paying its own environmental consultant class nine figures to navigate the roadblocks that same consultant class created in order to profit from the pot business.

That’s part of why an ounce of pot is $100 cheaper from the street than from a store.

Social justice is just a bunch of Marxist rhetoric behind which the same political mafia is moving money into its own pockets while laundering them through whatever ‘ism’ it’s fighting this week.

Whether it’s the environment or systemic racism, it’s another way for Democrats to get paid.

The old drug war was justified as a battle against a serious social ill, while the new drug war is just corrupt rent-seeking. The new drug warriors ridiculed the idea that locking up people for the harm caused by drugs was morally justified, but insist that locking up people because they haven’t paid the Sacramento mafia its share of the vigorish is completely morally justified.

California Democrats legalized drugs, further wrecking working class families, trashing what’s left of local agriculture and water supplies while feeding organized crime, to score $1.8 billion in tax revenues. But the illegal market is estimated at $8.7 billion. The new drug war is about the Democrats getting their hands on those extra billions by going back to the old drug war.

Why did California Democrats legalize drugs? It wasn’t to end the war on drugs, nor to make marijuana accessible to users with medical problems, or any of the other lies and excuses.

It was to make billions of dollars.

California’s new drug war pits socialists against drug lords over control of the drug market. It’s a familiar dynamic in South America that, like so much else, has crossed over the border.

The Democrats cloak their new social justice drug war in racial justice, offering “reparations” from their drug money to black people, in environmentalism, decrying the impact of illegal grows, in unionization, and in the whole colorful spectrum of leftist virtue signaling. But virtue signaling is no match for the ruthless determination of the cartels and their state sponsors.

In the battle between the legal drug cartels of the Democrats and the illegal drug cartels of South America, the illegals are winning as they have won everything else in California.





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

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Thank you for reading.

Monday, July 05, 2021

How Civil Rights Made America a Critical Race Theocracy

By On July 05, 2021
When Obama wanted to defend his ties to Jeremiah Wright, he began his speech by denouncing America's "original sin of slavery". The phrase is widely and unthinkingly used. And its consequences are the 1619 Project and critical race theory. If slavery is America’s original sin, then the purpose of America and her people becomes striving to atone for that primal sin.

Suburban Democrat housewives reading Robin DiAngelo and corporate struggle sessions forcing members to affiliate by race are just striving to atone for America’s “original sin”.

And if they resemble a cult, it’s because civil rights moved from the legal to the spiritual.

Dismantling the legal infrastructure of segregation took on religious and psychological overtones. The legitimacy of ending school segregation was tainted by psychosocial nonsense like the ‘Doll Study’ which found that children preferred white dolls to black dolls. Even then the original sin of civil rights was that its more academic proponents could not properly define rights, and sought affirmative remedies that transformed how we thought rather than what we did.

What we do can be in the legitimate purview of government, what we think is not. And yet over the years civil rights became obsessed with the origins of discrimination in the human mind.

Countless tests were devised, many absurd, (“What color is a gorilla’s skin underneath the fur?” one particularly awkward racist test for racism asked) that were meant to measure our thoughts.

The less racist our society became in function, the more civil rights fixated on a gestalt of psychosocial racism which explained racial disparities by blaming hidden thoughts leading to assumptions that perpetrated systemic racism even as its white perpetrators remained unaware.

The truly dangerous part of this conclusion was that the focus of discrimination had moved from actions to thoughts. Critical race theory is being imposed on everyone from schoolchildren to soldiers because civil rights violations had been redefined from the physical to the mental. Civil rights was no longer fighting separate drinking fountains, but unconscious and implicit biases.

The National Guard wasn’t being sent to open up schools, but to open up the human mind.

When the government tells you what to do, it risks becoming a tyranny, but when it starts telling you what to think, it becomes a theocracy. Critical race theory, like most of America’s experiments in secular theocracy, came out of academia whose experts have failed miserably when it comes to tangible policy results, but excel at telling people what to think.

The original sin of academia is constructing grand theories. The social sciences found the root causes for its grand theories in the interface between society and psychology. Their solutions begin with having the government change how people live and then when that doesn’t work, changing how they think.

The sociologists who wrecked the black industrial communities of the north with welfare refused to accept responsibility for the disaster they helped cause and instead began blaming racial disparities on the hidden workings of society and the human mind.

While academic civil rights was psychoanalyzing America, the civil rights movement had soured from Martin Luther King Jr’s Christian emphasis on national redemption across racial lines to the Islamic tribalism of Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam in whose mythology black people were chosen and white people were a tainted race created through eugenic breeding. America was an evil empire doomed to be destroyed by the arrival of UFOs protecting the master race.

The next generation of activist clergy was outwardly Christian, but had come either directly, like Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s mentor, or indirectly like James Hal Cone, Warnock’s mentor, through the racist ideology of the Nation of Islam. When Jeremiah Wright shrieked, "God Damn America! That’s in the Bible," he meant it literally with America as Babylon and Rome. To the Black Hebrew Israelites, whose movement has been linked to a number of recent terrorist attacks, America is Edom. The common theme is that America is a mythic evil to be destroyed.

The set of ideas that people associate with critical race theory fuses the two corrupt successors of the civil rights movement, academic racial psychoanalysis and racial nationalism, through the writings of second generation black nationalists who had come through academia, like Ibram X. Kendi, and journalism, like Ta-Nehisi Coates and the 1619 Project’s Nikole Hannah-Jones.

The modern proponents of critical race theory fuse academic beliefs in subconscious systemic racism and black nationalist convictions that America and white people are inherently evil.

That’s where critical race theory becomes critical race theocracy.

This brand of ‘wokeness’ is legitimately theological because its origins lie as much in black religious identitarian movements as in the academic jargon in which it cloaks its racism. The synthesis of the two very different literary genres results in strange poetry, personal confessionals wrapped in bad sociology and worse history, mythic appeals and nonsense jargon, that runs through everything from the 1619 Project to ‘Between the World and Me’.

Critical race theory’s defenders insist that it’s an academic movement, that its proponents are experts, and that it just wants to discuss its ideas, but it operates like a theocracy, silencing and suppressing opponents, critics, and even insufficiently radical supporters. Its entire rationale is built on denying that anyone can legitimately disagree with it or that debate is even possible. A movement that dismisses reason and objectivity as forms of oppressive whiteness has no interest in dialogue, only in terrorizing its way to power as racial nationalists seek to do.

The Nazis decreed theories and creative works off limits because they believed that ideas could not be separated from the race of their creators. Critical race activists agree that theories and works carry the race of their creators in their intellectual DNA. The Nazis banned some works over ‘Jewishness’ while critical race theory activists seek to ban them over their ‘whiteness’.

The most brutal theocracies are those which are the most pessimistic about human nature. The Nazis believed that people were animals who could never transcend their biology, Islamists believe that people must be ruthlessly conquered and ruled to bring peace, and leftists believe that power relations doom humanity to cycles of exploitation without an enlightened tyranny.

Critical race theory is infused with the academic pessimism of the Left, the identitarian racial pessimism of black nationalists, and the spiritual pessimism of black nationalist theology. It exists in a perpetual state of struggle and its exceptionalism is rooted in its victimhood. It needs white people as an ultimate enemy whose existence gives it its negative meaning.

Whiteness abstracts white people as a perpetual enemy for a racial and a spiritual struggle.

America’s fall into the grip of this racist theocracy obsessed with a struggle against whiteness, driven by racial paranoia and moral despair, is a direct legacy of the intellectual and moral failings of the aftermath of the civil rights era. These failings were as much white as they were black. While the black family disintegrated in the grip of the welfare state, white elites lost their religion and built an alternative culture whose meaning came from politics and pop culture.

Wokeness is just the horrid synthesis of white secularism and black nationalism, of a society where music is worship, politics is religion, self-medicating is meditation, and activism is faith. The endless narcissistic refractions only produced a victimhood culture whose great crusade is enforcing conformity through the only means possible in a fragmented society that has lost its moral and intellectual underpinnings: online bullying and political terrorism.

Kingian civil rights is inaccessible to a secular society with no concept of forgiveness or humility. It’s also inaccessible to people whose warped version of religion teaches them to hate others.

To paraphrase John Adams, "Civil rights was made only for a moral and religious people, it is wholly inadequate for any other." Critical race theory is the inadequacy of a political society trying to come to grips with moral and religious questions, but with no other tools than power and the abstractions of a scientism that is suited to studying distant galaxies, but not people.

The Founding Fathers, now the enemies of critical race theory whose statues are being torn down, were humble enough to limit the ambit of government to the realm of government. And they made it clear that it was not their role to tell people what to think or to believe.

America held together through conflicts that should have torn the country apart because we fought over the nature of government, not over the nature of man. The Confederate statues that have occasioned so much ire were the legacy of a country that was able to knit together its wounds as former enemies forgave and honored each other in the aftermath of its worst war.

Even when we were a moral and religious people, we did not go to war over what was in our souls. The leftist theocracy terrorizing millions of Americans is particularly unfit to judge souls, but the intellectual failures of academia and the moral failures of elite culture and leftist clergy has localized the failures of the black community in the psychosocial gestalt of systemic racism.

The only way to save black people then becomes controlling how everyone thinks.

Liberal theology had made the civil rights movement into the epochal moral event of America as their ancestors had made the civil war the defining event that transformed the soul of the nation. This was exactly the brand of moral narcissism that Lincoln found so frustrating about the abolitionists long before their distant descendants put on black and began toppling his statues.

Civil rights became a force that gave white liberals meaning. And that was another way of saying that civil rights became a religion. The devolution of civil rights legislation from inhibiting state discrimination based on race to enforcing state discrimination based on race was the trajectory of a theocracy based on the same sort of realpolitik that corrupts religions.

The Founding Fathers removed government restraint while the new theology of civil rights imposes government restraint, first over actions, then over ideas, and finally over thoughts.

Equality has made way for equity and the human mind is the new lunch counter. The only way to achieve civil rights is, as in the Soviet Union, Communist China, Cuba, and every leftist tyranny, by removing civil rights from all and distributing them to the most deserving. The hypocritical corruption of the system demands not just tyranny, but theocracy, not just control over bodies, but over the minds whose owners might question this self-serving arrangement.

What was once a supremely achievable goal, the end of government restraint, has made way for the usual unachievable utopian goal of an ideal society of the supremely enlightened.

The paradoxes of critical race theory come from its paradoxical intellectual origins through the social science academics who believe that everyone can be reeducated and the black nationalists who believe that white people are inescapably evil. They compromise by believing that white people are inescapably evil and must be constantly reeducated anyway.

It’s a compromise that allows white leftists to pursue meaning through civil rights and black nationalists to pursue racial identitarianism while leaving out non-misanthropes of all races.

Ending this nightmare will require confronting the corruption of civil rights. Positive rights lead to tyranny and negative rights to freedom. When we define rights as things the government does for us, rather than things the government stops doing to us, we all end up as slaves. Civil rights cannot and should not be used to achieve equity by chasing racial disparities. That sociological and theological rabbit hole inevitably takes us into the realms of psychology and sin.

Those are places where the government does not belong and should not be allowed to venture.

Critical race theory is less a theory than a theocracy, but both a theory and a theocracy can be torn down by attacking its fundamental assumptions. The failure to challenge theories leads to theocracies. If we want to defeat this theocracy, we need to start with its fundamental assumptions about white evil and black victimhood, and about an original sin that passes not only from fathers to sons, but from plantation owners to recent immigrants.

America and Europe did not invent slavery, but they were the first to comprehensively destroy it. The presumption of guilt that traces every Third World blight or domestic inadequacy to some combination of colonialism, imperialism, and other nonsensical ‘ism’ is false and wrong. We do not need to constantly redeem ourselves for doing what no other civilization managed to do.

We already have.

There is no room for a racial theocracy in America, not in our colleges, our institutions, or our military. Its existence is a declaration of war on not only our past, but our present and our future.

Destroying a village won’t save it and destroying civil rights in the name of civil rights is a farce.

When civil rights isn’t regulating how you treat others, but how you think about them, and how you think about the theories that explain why they’re the victims, that’s an uncivil theocracy.





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

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