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Thursday, June 30, 2022

The Military Went Woke. Now It Can’t Find Recruits

By On June 30, 2022
The military is facing the worst recruiting environment since the end of the Vietnam War.

The Army is at only 40% of its recruiting numbers for the fiscal year despite raising its maximum enlistment bonus from $40,000 to $50,000. It now offers new recruits up to $10,000 for showing up to basic training in 30 days. And is no longer even asking them for a high school diploma.

"We've never offered $50,000 to join the Army," Maj. Gen. Kevin Vereen, head of U.S. Army Recruiting Command, said.

While the Army runs anime lesbian wedding ads, it’s pushing away the recruits it needs, young patriotic men from traditional backgrounds. When the Biden administration’s brass decided to mandate vaccinations, they automatically rejected the 60% of potential recruits who aren’t.

By Obama’s second term, male Army ROTC cadets were being forced to march in women’s high heels. Under Biden, that escalated to mandatory transgender pronoun training while figuring out living arrangements for men who suddenly decide that they’re really women.

The Army has stopped worrying about winning wars and is instead working to establish the “Army as a global leader in DEI”. That’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Obama's Army Secretary Eric Fanning’s had already ordered mandatory implicit bias training for “soldiers and employees in senior leadership and management positions”. The Army is now preparing for the prospect of accommodating men in women’s housing and deploying HIV positive men.

While the Army brass complains that it can't find recruits, even with gay wedding ads, transgender housing and HIV positive deployment, it's been kicking out unvaccinated soldiers.

In February, it reported that commanders had "relieved a total of six Regular Army leaders, including two battalion commanders, and issued 3,073 general officer written reprimands to Soldiers for refusing the vaccination order." As of June, 60,000 Army Reserve and National Guard soldiers are unvaccinated. That's 12% of the Army Guard and 10% of the Army Reserve.

“Army readiness depends on soldiers who are prepared to train, deploy, fight and win our nation’s wars,” Army Secretary Christine Wormuth claimed. “Unvaccinated soldiers present risk to the force and jeopardize readiness.”

HIV positive soldiers don’t present a risk or jeopardize readiness, but unvaccinated soldiers do.

Instead of spending $684 million on recruitment, and a $4 billion 10 year contract with Omnicom, one of whose subsidiaries worked on the Biden campaign, the Army could try to stop actively alienating and firing the young men actually willing to fight and die on the battlefield.

And maybe then the Army might be able to stop lowering standards and issuing moral waivers for criminal records. Or forcibly extending the assignments of recruiters and making them work on federal holidays in the hopes of recruiting 60,000 active duty soldiers.

A Quinnipiac poll earlier this year found that only 40% of Democrats would stay and fight if America were invaded, while 52% would run away. 68% of Republicans would stay and fight. 70% of men would stay and fight in contrast to, understandably, 40% of women, and 61% and 57% of Hispanic and white people would stay and fight, in contrast to only 38% of black people.

Polls like these provide obvious common sense guidelines as to whom to recruit. Instead the woke army, like the rest of the woke military, keeps trying to recruit the wokes who don’t want to fight for their country and don’t even think their country is worth fighting for.

While the Army is the most troubled of the military branches, the Air Force is 4,000 personnel underwater.

“We have warning lights flashing," Maj. Gen. Ed Thomas warned. “Our ‘qualified and waiting’ list is about half of what it has been historically."

Good thing the Air Force, like other branches, is screening recruits for “extremism” and the unvaccinated, and focused above all else on increasing its diversity quotas. The Air Force is less interested in recruiting in the South and bemoans the fact that 86% of Air Force aviators are white men. And those are exactly the people whom the Air Force brass no longer want.

“As Airmen in the U.S. Air Force, it’s our duty to acknowledge our biases whether we realize they exist or not,” airmen who are accused of being racist because they’re white are being told.

No wonder there are warning lights flashing in recruitment.

Navy recruiters are focused on the popularity of Top Gun Maverick to bring in new recruits. But the hit Tom Cruise movie has little relationship to the reality of a woke Air Force whose racialist brass are obsessed with critical race theory and whose planes don’t actually fly.

In the movie, the pilots fly F/A-18s and no one screams at them about their pronouns and their unconscious racial biases. Or their vaccination status. In real life, F/A-18E/F's have a 51% mission capable rate. And the Navy’s woke leadership is focused on fighting “systemic racism:”

The Navy is offering a $25,000 "quick ship" bonus to recruits. "The Navy is the only U.S. military branch currently offering this high of an enlistment bonus for any new enlistee," it brags, and suggests that the "the enlistment bonus could be as high as $50,000."

But the Navy, like the Army and other services, can’t buy its way out of a morale crisis.

The United States military is never going to win a bidding war against corporations. Amazon warehouse team members make more than starting recruits. And they're generally less likely to die. The only real military recruiting edge is a patriotic commitment to defending your country.

Military recruiters blame a national manpower shortage and their advertising strategy follows the familiar one of corporations going woke, appealing to the perceived wokeness and narcissism of Gen Z. Major corporations are being roiled by the radical activists they have recruited this way who are demanding that corporate leaders adopt not only their values but their agenda. Or else.

The brass trying to dress up the military in woke colors to make it appear that it shares their values are writing a big blank check that no one, not even Gen. Milley, wants to cash.

The Obama and Biden administrations appointed brass who gutted the services and replaced patriotic and nationalistic values with woke virtue signaling and radical politics. Now they’re discovering that when jobs are going begging, no one wants to join a woke military.

Patriots don’t and wokes won't either.

Wokes willing to die for a cause are a lot more likely to join riots than the military. Those who see the military as serving their cause are, like actual white supremacists, exactly the kinds of “dangerous extremists” who are just joining up to gain experience for domestic terrorism.

There is a solution to the recruiting crisis. It doesn’t involve spending hundreds of millions on ad campaigns or anime lesbian weddings. The place to start is with the reasons for serving.

In the aftermath of the disgraceful Afghanistan retreat and of a War on Terror that has been effaced by political correctness, military service appears more senseless to many than it did after Vietnam. And in a nation riven with division, the military has come to reflect those divisions, with its brass firmly putting their thumbs on the partisan scale and adopting the leftist ideas and woke cultural values that are hostile to the majority of the men under their command.

The military, like so many institutions, went woke, now it’s finding out that woke leads to broke. Rebuilding morale begins with a renewed commitment to national values and patriotism, to serious warfighting and meritocratic striving, and to a culture built on teams, not racial divisions. And while the woke brass stay, the recruits stay away.





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, June 29, 2022

Who Would You Kill?

By On June 29, 2022
The proximity of two Supreme Court decisions, one upholding the right to carry guns for self-defense, and the other, dispensing with Roe v. Wade and the myth of a constitutional basis for abortion, has unleashed the furies of political outrage and hot takes.

“Gonna be very weird if Supreme Court ends a constitutional right to obtain an abortion next week, saying it should be left to the States to decide, right after it just imposed a constitutional right to concealed carry of firearms, saying it cannot be left to the States to decide,” Neal Katyal, Obama's Solicitor General and a potential Democrat Supreme Court nominee tweeted.

He wasn’t alone.

"States can’t decide how to regulate guns. Also SCOTUS: States decide how to regulate women’s bodies and abortion," St. Louis Mayor Tishaura O. Jones tweeted.

"The Supreme Court's back-to-back decisions on guns and abortions have the practical impact of preventing Democratic states from regulating guns — and allowing Republican states to prohibit abortions," New York Times political reporter Shane Goldmacher tweeted.

The conflation of ‘New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen’ and ‘Dobbs v. Jackson’ is compelling to lefty legalists who have never taken the Second Amendment seriously.

But beyond the legal fact that the Right to Bear Arms is in the Constitution and the right to kill babies isn’t, there is a moral difference of values that is worth contemplating here.

Justice Clarence Thomas, when writing his opinion striking down concealed carry restrictions in New York, emphasized that they prohibited "law-abiding citizens with ordinary self-defense needs from exercising their Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms in public for self-defense."

The number of justifiable homicides has increased as pro-crime politicians have dismantled the criminal justice system and refused to lock up even career criminals.

St. Louis, Mayor Jones’ city, has seen the number of justifiable homicides triple in three years.

Many and perhaps even most of the justifiable homicides in St. Louis involved black people who live in communities and neighborhoods suffering from high crime rates.

In Philly, justifiable homicides were up 67% in one year. And there have already been 8 justifiable homicides in the city this year. The folks defending themselves in the City of Brotherly Love are often minorities who have despaired of the criminal justice system under a Soros DA.

It's as fashionable for lefties to deplore a black man shooting a thug who tried to rob him as it is to rave that dropping a federal mandate for Roe v. Wade will make it harder to kill babies.

The lefties who fund campaigns to save death row inmates also fund those that kill children.

The Trolley Problem is a classic ethical triage dilemma. It can be summed up as, "who do you kill"? The answer from the contrast between abortion and gun control is to kill the children.

The moral chasm between the premeditated murder of the innocent and the desperate self-defense of beleaguered men fighting for their lives is both damning and revealing of the fundamental flaws of victimhood utilitarianism and Marxist power dynamics as guides.

How did we get to the point where babies can be killed and murderers can’t?

The answer lies in the reduction of individuals to classes and classes to victims. Feminist analyses reduced babies from human lives to tools of the patriarchy, lacking agency and able only to deprive women of their own agency. Abortion became a fundamental means of restoring feminist agency. The killing of children was celebrated as a revolutionary feminist act.

The inherent violence of leftist radical politics made the murder of millions of children into a revolution against the patriarchy. Any attempt to limit, stop or roll back the federal mandate under which states were allowed to regulate everything except the killing of babies was an attack on this form of liberation on which all the “rights” of women and even men were said to depend.

A post-familial society defined by BAs, MAs and PhDs, by C-suites and lifelong careers, interrupted by awkward hookups and affairs terminating in #MeToo scandals and abortions depended on the “legal, safe, and convenient” mass murder of millions of unwanted babies much the way that cotton depended on slaves and iPhones depend on Chinese slave labor.

Killing people to maintain a particular lifestyle is a common reason for genocide.

Even as feminist analyses were redefining abortion as a revolutionary act of liberation, class and racial warfare analyses were transforming crime into another tool of social liberation.

"Rape was an insurrectionary act," Black Panther activist Eldridge Cleaver wrote. Race riots are now routinely redefined as “uprisings”. Fighting crime is a reactionary plot to stop the revolution.

Leftist revolution was all about hurting and killing people, not just in the organized fashion of gulags and firing squads, but in private acts like a visit to Planned Parenthood or violent crime. Defending against these acts of violence was counterrevolutionary uniting pro-abortion and pro-crime, the license to commit violence in the name of bringing about a more just world.

Gun control was never about preventing crime. Even as Democrats advocate for gun bans, they dismantle the criminal justice system, eliminating bail, freeing killers, thugs and drug dealers, and refusing to enforce even those laws, including gun laws, that are already on the books.

The purpose of gun control is preventing people from defending their lives and freedoms.

The Left’s revolution in a larger philosophical sense is about the social redistribution of agency through acts of terror, personal, collective, and governmental. “Who would you kill” is not a hypothetical question. Nor is it a question that has not been carefully thought out by the Left.

Over the last century, leftists have given a great deal of thought to who deserves to die. Their regimes, from the USSR to Communist China, Cuba, Cambodia, Nicaragua, and many others had detailed thoughts on who needed to die to bring about a more just society. But it’s not just radicals in black and red screaming furiously at rallies who have come to think in those terms.

Or, as Oprah once said, “There are still generations of people, older people, who were born and bred and marinated in it, in that prejudice and racism, and they just have to die.”

Crime and abortion are both acts of violence. The Supreme Court has ruled that individuals and states have the right to defend against these forms of leftist violence. Conservative justices have sided with the victims of violence against the perpetrators of that violence.

The Left has told us clearly and unequivocally whom it would kill. The Supreme Court has told us whom it would save.





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.

Tuesday, June 28, 2022

Where Are the Abortion Insurrection Hearings?

By On June 28, 2022
Friday evening’s Arizona State Senate session had to be cut short as the legislative body came under siege from Abortion Insurrection rioters.

"We have a security threat outside," Senate President Karen Fann announced. Legislators were evacuated into the basement and then had to be evacuated once again from the basement after tear gas fumes being used to stop the insurrectionists entered the building.

The Arizona Department of Public Safety reported that a pro-abortion rally by "an estimated 7,000 to 8,000 people" turned into "anarchical and criminal actions by masses of splinter groups" who "attempted to breach the doors of the Arizona Senate and force their way into the building. The violence of their efforts literally shook the building".

The statement reported that “the glass doors bowed from attempts of forced entry” and noted damage to a variety of war memorials including those honoring murdered police officers and veterans of the Korean War and the War on Terror.

"Violent pro-abortion protester attempts of an insurrection at the Arizona State Senate were thwarted Friday night, thanks to the swift action from local and state law enforcement," the Arizona Republican State Senate Caucus stated in its press release.

“They were aggressively banging on the windows in a way that at any moment it could break,” Senator Michelle Ugenti-Rita said. “This wasn’t a knock on a window.”

The Arizona Abortion Insurrection was one of a number of violent abortion riots around the country incited by top Democrats.

"The hell with the Supreme Court,” Rep. Maxine Waters had ranted at a rally. "We will defy them."

In Los Angeles, insurrectionists took her seriously.

In Los Angeles, an abortion insurrectionist was charged with the attempted murder of a police officer after attacking a cop with a torch, described as a "makeshift flamethrower", and leaving him with burns.

Other abortion insurrectionists threw rocks, fireworks and bottles at police.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez raved that the Supreme Court was "illegitimate" and urged protesters to get "into the streets".

That's what they did in New York City. In Manhattan, insurrections besieged conservative organizations. There was an alleged arson attempt at the Women’s National Republican Club and chants of "Burn it down" outside FOX News.

In Portland, insurrectionists threw smoke bombs at police and smashed up local businesses, as well as the Mother and Child Education Center. The pregnancy non-profit's director denied that they were anti-abortion and described herself as a "pro-choice, liberal Catholic Democrat.”

But offering anything to children except death was enough to make Mother and Child a target.

The Abortion Insurrection in Phoenix, New York City, Portland, and Los Angeles had been incited by top Democrats, and enabled by their activist, corporate, and non-profit allies.

The Phoenix protest was allegedly linked to a branch of Radical Women, “the oldest socialist feminist group in existence,” which has ties to Trotskyists, and the Party for Socialism and Liberation, a domestic Communist party. The media promoted the rallies while failing to disclose the radical nature of the groups involved in it resulting in people bringing children to a riot.

Woke corporations, including Patagonia and Live Nation, promised to cover bail so that Woke Capitalists and Communists were working together to enable an insurrection.

But those are just the tip of the spear.

The Abortion Insurrection was carefully organized, beginning with a Supreme Court staffer feeding the original draft decision to the media. Democrat groups instantly organized a protest movement suggesting that they were likely aware of the leaked draft before it was published.

Abortion insurrectionists screamed outside the court and harassed justices in their homes so that some had to be evacuated along with their families. One insurrectionist was arrested after plotting to assassinate Justice Kavanaugh. Despite the growing violence, Speaker Pelosi and leading Democrats refused to protect the justices from their rioting leftist political allies.

A wave of terrorist attacks against pro-life pregnancy centers has been waged by a pro-abortion domestic terror group, Jane's Revenge. It left behind graffiti warning, "If abortions aren't safe, then you aren't either" that has also appeared at the scene of some of the recent abortion riots.

The DOJ and the FBI appears to be doing little to follow up on the terrorism and Twitter has allowed leftists to spread a list of pregnancy centers, inciting violence under the same slogan. Senate Democrats, including Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, instead urged the FTC and Google to go after pro-life pregnancy centers for refusing to kill children.

The Abortion Insurrection has all the hallmarks of a carefully organized and directed campaign.

"We are currently there being held hostage inside the Senate building due to members of the public trying to breach our security," Arizona State Senator Kelly Townsend had tweeted. "We smell tear gas and the children of one of the members are in the office sobbing with fear. I expect a J24 committee to be created immediately.”

She later posted a video of the rioters hammering violently on the glass doors of the building.

A J24 Committee would be able to do what the J6 Committee is claiming to do which is track how the entire insurrection was organized and financed, what the command and control operations look like, how the money is being moved around, and what connections the insurrectionists have to top Democrats, staffers, and donors. Including George Soros.

The last two decades normalized mass leftist protests and the last decade mainstreamed violent rioting. The only way to put a stop to it is by shining the clear light of day on its inner workings.

The Left has built a complicated political machine with many moving parts in which massive hijacked foundations direct money through numerous pipelines to smaller seed groups, leftist organizers moonlight as non-profit activists or fellows during the day while organizing riots at night, and meaningless names like Antifa, BLM or Jane’s Revenge are used to cover up the larger ideological organizations and operations that are running things behind the scenes.

A congressional committee empowered to investigate, compel testimony, and force the handover of information is needed to follow up on the work of conservative journalists. It is vitally important that the public understand that the violent riots in the streets are being funded by the same donors whose organizations set the political agenda for the Democrats.

The “insurrection” is coming from inside the house.

The Abortion Insurrection is the latest in a series of leftist riots being conducted by the same players using rotating pretexts. The attack on the Arizona State Senate was an attempt to intimidate and disrupt a legislative session, and to penetrate the building. It ought to be investigated and broken down as an insurrection and a component of a larger strategy.

"This wasn't a peaceful or lawful protest," Attorney General, Mark Brnovich said. "We must never tolerate these criminal attempts to tear down our institutions and intimidate our officials."

Arizona officials and law enforcement suppressed the insurrection, but it’s time for Congress to step up and exposer the forces behind the domestic terror campaign that is holding not just legislators in Phoenix, but our entire nation, hostage.





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, June 27, 2022

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

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

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

That was four years ago.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why not?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s safe to say that he has.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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






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

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Thank you for reading.

Sunday, June 26, 2022

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

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

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

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

Especially young male Democrats.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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





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

Click here to subscribe to my articles. 

Thank you for reading.

Thursday, June 23, 2022

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

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

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

"That could be me," he claimed.

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

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

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

And it worked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Somehow it’s only more racist.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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






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

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Wednesday, June 22, 2022

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

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

Over 40 shots were fired.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three shoppers were injured while fleeing the shooting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shortly thereafter he was dead.

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

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

‘Good trouble’, this isn’t.

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

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

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

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

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

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







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

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Tuesday, June 21, 2022

A Year Later, Why is Afghanistan Still Classified?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And how little we learned from them.

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

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

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

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






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

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Thank you for reading.

Sunday, June 19, 2022

Globalists Were Wrong. The World Isn't Flat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It doesn’t need to.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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





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

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

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

Good thing the city has “peace circles”.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was more of a threat than a promise.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




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

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