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Wednesday, August 31, 2022

Bill Gates Lobbied Manchin for Inflation Bill That Benefits His Green Investment Fund

By On August 31, 2022 In
As reported exclusively by Frontpage Magazine, Americans can expect to see their chances of an IRS audit increase fourfold under the Biden-Manchin ‘Inflation Increase Act’. The massive upsurge in IRS enforcement was justified as a way to pay for the massive spending in the bill. Much of that spending consists of green pork for Democrat donors and special interests.

The media had spent the past month persuading Americans that they will see economic benefits from the green pork, but once the bill was passed through lies and dirty tricks, we know that it offers as much as $350 billion in loans, subsidies and guarantees to green companies.

Overseeing the Department of Energy’s loan program is Jigar Shah: the founder of SunEdison.

SunEdison was one of the biggest of Obama's subsidized green energy bankruptcies, receiving $1.5 billion in government grants and subsidies. While Solyndra's bankruptcy, after receiving a $535 million loan from the Obama administration, is infamous, there were quite a few disasters.

The $350 billion that the ‘Inflation Increase Act’ is playing with will be far worse.

While Americans have little to cheer about a government program handing out money to its allies and donors, not to mention Tesla owners and the Bay Area elite, Bill Gates is happy.

“Everybody wants to be part of this,” Carmichael Roberts, the head of Bill Gates's green energy investment fund, gushed. “The calls that I’m getting now — tremendous, already."

Gates was described as having personally lobbied Senator Manchin and Schumer in "anticipation of a rare moment in which significant federal dollars might be secured for the clean-energy transition." Billions of those dollars, ripped out of the hands of truck drivers, veterans and small businessmen, will have been “secured” for Gates and his ventures.

A wave of middle class IRS tax audits will be unleashed to pay for those “federal dollars”.

“I bet you there’s somewhere between 300 to 1,000 companies that will exist now because of this bill that would not have existed,” Gates’ venture fund boss boasted.

The question is how many of those will the Gates fund be invested in?

Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a fund backed by Bill Gates, announced earlier that it raised over $2 billion to invest in green companies and that it plans to raise that to $15 billion. It currently has a public portfolio of 70 companies, many of which have government connections.

Ventures led a $20 million investment round into Blue Frontier which had obtained the rights to technology developed at the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Sustaera, which claims to remove carbon dioxide, received seed R&D funding from the Department of Energy followed by a $10 million round of financing from Ventures. Quidnet describes the DOE as "among the public and private investors in Quidnet Energy’s innovative energy storage system" and Bill Gates led a $10 million round of investment in the company.

As a Bloomberg article described, “This is no hypothetical for Gates. His investments through Breakthrough Energy, the Gates organization that does climate work, has sunk at least tens of millions into green cement startups such as Ecocem, Chement and Brimstone. None have yet reached commercial scale. He saw the bankruptcy filing of a battery startup he backed, Aquion, that might have had a fighting chance if energy-storage tax credits were available.”

Now most Americans will be forced to back these disastrous green startups and lose their shirts.

But when Bill Gates and his allied billionaires speak, politicians obey and Americans suffer.

Ventures is part of the larger Breakthrough Energy group which also includes Breakthrough Energy Action. The action arm spent over $1 million lobbying on green energy last year.

The firm which saw the most Action lobbying cash was KDCR Partners which that year had hired Patrick Hayes. Hayes was Senator Joe Manchin's outgoing chief of staff and his former legislative director. Bill Gates' Action lists Hayes as one of its lobbyists.

Forget Silicon Valley. Where else can you invest a few hundred thousand in lobbying cash and come away with a few hundred billion in subsidies while the middle class pays for it?

The board members and investors of Breakthrough Energy Ventures include Bill Gates, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, Virgin's Richard Branson, Facebook billionaire Dustin Moskowitz, Walmart heir Ben Walton, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, along with Chinese Communist tycoon Jack Ma of Alibaba and Saudi Arabia's Prince Alwaleed bin Talal.

One of the things that many of the investors and board members have in common is that they, hopefully with the exception of the Chinese Communist billionaire, Branson, and the Saudi prince, are Democrat donors. Moskowitz has spent tens of millions on Democrats in presidential elections, Reid Hoffman has been spending $100 million, Bloomberg spent $100 million in an effort to help Biden win three states, while the Gates Foundation poured $70 million into the dark money machine of the Democrats alongside Moskowitz and George Soros.

The formal lobbying of Breakthrough Energy Action may just be a way of conveying the will of its megadonor bosses whose wallets are capable of making and breaking the Democrats.

It’s no secret that Bill Gates played a key role in getting the ‘Inflation Increase Act’ passed.

Bloomberg, the eponymous publication owned by his fellow Breakthrough Energy board member, credited Gates with lobbying Manchin and pressuring Schumer to cut a deal.

The Microsoft founder was described as having “tapped into a relationship with Manchin that he’d cultivated for at least three years”.

“My dialogue with Joe has been going on for quite a while,” the billionaire, whose marriage allegedly broke up over his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, bragged. “Almost everyone on the energy committee came over and spent a few hours with me over dinner.”

What followed was a story in which one of the richest men in the world convinced elected officials to ignore their constituencies and spend a fortune on green pork. The ‘Inflation Increase Act’ proved once again that in Washington D.C., voters don’t matter, only power brokers do.

Given a choice between obeying his voters or Bill Gates, Senator Manchin picked him.

“You know, people say Joe likes coal or something like that,” Gates said. “That’s really not fair. Joe wanted a climate bill.”

Or at least Bill Gates did. And so he got one.

“I will say that it's one of the happier moments of my climate work,” Bill Gates said of the passage of the 'Inflation Increase Act'.

Happiness for Bill Gates and his allies means misery, poverty and IRS audits for the country.






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

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Tuesday, August 30, 2022

Betrayal, Rules of Engagement and the Kabul Suicide Bombing

By On August 30, 2022 In
The suicide bombing at the Kabul airport that killed 13 military personnel and as many as 200 Afghans became one of the defining moments of the disgraceful days of the final retreat.

The Biden administration and its allies had claimed that the withdrawal meant that no more Americans would die in Afghanistan and yet more military personnel died in one day of the withdrawal than in the final two years of the war. And one year later, unanswered questions remain about one of the deadliest attacks in that bloody war. Who was the suicide bomber? How was he able to get close enough to pull off his attacks and why wasn’t he stopped?

Even though the terrorist has been widely named as Abdul Rahman al Logari, one year later the Biden administration has yet to officially release his name. When the Washington Examiner's Jerry Dunleavy inquired of the State Department, he was directed to the Pentagon which sent him to the FBI. Al Logari’s identity was made public by ISIS-K after the attack. The only ones keeping the name secret are Biden administration officials and their departmental allies.

Why?

The most obvious reason was that during the Trump administration, the CIA had warned India that Al-Logari was planning to carry out a suicide attack in New Delhi. Indian authorities caught him and turned him over to the CIA which kept him in a prison near Bagram Air Base. During Biden’s disastrous withdrawal, Bagram was abandoned and the Taliban freed the prisoners.

Al-Logari among them. The only reason the Kabul airport suicide bombing happened was because Biden allowed Bagram to fall into Taliban hands before all of our people were out of the country. The fall of Bagram forced the evacuation to flow through the Kabul airport which trapped most Americans behind enemy lines and also freed the suicide bomber who struck the airport where our military forces were cut off and surrounded by the enemy on all sides.

But that may not be the full story.

While 13 American military personnel were killed in the bombing, many were wounded. One of those was Tristan Hirsch who suffered a traumatic brain injury and lost some of his friends.

In an interview with the Chico-Enterprise Record, Hirsch described the horrors he had witnessed in those final days. And he revealed that they knew about the suicide bomber.

“We knew about him two days prior to the attack,” he said. “We knew what he looked like. The CIA let us know; he looked exactly as they’d described him.”

That would stand to reason since the CIA had the original intelligence that caught him in 2017, and had held him at Bagram. The Agency would have had images and biometrics of Al-Logari.

According to the former Marine, the bomber came and went.

“A friend of mine who was a sniper racked back his rifle and was ready to kill the guy,” Hirsch said. “We asked for permission and the reply was, ‘let me get a military judge to see if it’s legal.'”

The rules of engagement imposed by the Obama administration had crippled the ability of American military personnel to preemptively take out Islamic terrorists.

“We're fighting on with our hands tied behind our back,” a staff sergeant had complained.

Obama’s rules of engagements led to a massive loss of American lives. The Obama surge significantly increased troop numbers, raising them to 100,000, but prevented them from actually fighting the enemy. These were the years during which the war in Afghanistan was lost. Everything else since then was just a holding action for a war that we had already lost.

Under Obama's rules of engagement, troops were forbidden to take out a terrorist unless he was visibly in the act of attacking Americans. Unless a terrorist was actively setting off a bomb, he couldn't be shot. American deaths skyrocketed while the Taliban insurgency really took off.

The Trump administration had rolled back some of those rules of engagement. Democrats and the media complained about the increase in civilian casualties. It’s not clear what the rules of engagement were under Biden, but according to Hirsch, the battalion commander was worried. Even if he complied with the rules of engagement, he might still face political vendettas from the Biden administration, the Left and even from some Republicans for killing an “innocent” man.

The best evidence of this is that a drone strike on a suspected suicide bomber in the aftermath of the Kabul suicide bombing led to an outcry from some Republicans because he allegedly turned out to be an aid worker and not a terrorist. The demands that the military punish those personnel behind the drone strike from both the Left and some on the Right shows exactly why the Kabul suicide bombing happened when it could have been preemptively prevented.

Politics came before saving the lives of Americans.

“What the strike in Kabul really sends home is the reality that for all of our technical capacity, we’re really good at reaching out and killing people and still really bad at knowing if the people we’re killing are the people we’re after,” Rep. Peter Meijer, an anti-Trump Republican who recently lost reelection, sneered.

The men on duty at Kabul Airport were not invested with whatever brand of omnipotence Biden, Democrats, Rep. Meijer and assorted backseat drivers expected. They had a choice between preemptively taking action against a man who had been identified to them as an enemy, or waiting until he did something that made it all too obvious that he was here to kill them.

They waited and 13 American military personnel died.

The terrorist attack at Kabul Airport was a microcosm of the war in which the lives of the men on the ground mattered less than the effete sensibilities of Washington D.C. elites, the partisan politics of party members looking to score cheap points by hanging them out to dry, and the obsession with, even at the very end, winning the hearts and minds of the Afghans.

And it’s only going to get worse.

Lloyd Austin, Biden's woke Secretary of Defense, has announced a new program to further tie the hands of American military personnel. The Civilian Protection Center of Excellence will cost “tens of millions of dollars” a year with 150 staffers and will involve extra "screenings" before drone strikes are launched that will once again put terrorist lives ahead of Americans.

A few hours before 9/11, Bill Clinton was giving a speech in Australia where he revealed that he could have taken out Osama bin Laden. “I nearly got him. And I could have killed him, but I would have had to destroy a little town called Kandahar in Afghanistan and kill 300 innocent women and children, and then I would have been no better than him. And so I didn’t do it.”

The actual number was 200. And Clinton’s people were worried about damaging a mosque.

Bill Clinton missed numerous opportunities to kill Osama bin Laden. Multiple screenings, meanderings and concerns about collateral damage and political fallout scuttled each one.

Nearly 3,000 people died in New York, Pennsylvania and Washington D.C. because of it. Thousands more have died of diseases and health problems linked to the Islamic attacks.

A generation after Bill Clinton’s decision to put the lives of 200 Muslims in Afghanistan ahead of 5,000 lives in this country, Joe Biden did the same thing all over again. With similar results.

The campaign against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan ended as it began, with a Democrat in the White House who put enemy lives ahead of those of Americans. And then launched a coverup.

Long before the Mar-a-Lago raid, Sandy Berger, Clinton's national security adviser, stole classified documents from the National Archives involving the failure to kill Bin Laden, stuffed them into his socks and pants, buried them in a construction trailer, and then cut them up and destroyed them.

He got off with a fine.

The Biden coverup of the Kabul airport suicide bombing had been a quieter affair. A matter of refusing to answer questions, playing dumb and changing the subject.

But as the men who were there continue to speak out, it may not remain quiet for long.





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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Monday, August 29, 2022

Under Biden, You’re 4 Times More Likely to Face an IRS Audit

By On August 29, 2022 In
"I direct that any additional resources… shall not be used to increase the share of small businesses or households below the $400,000 threshold that are audited relative to historical levels,” Treasury Secretary Yellen wrote to IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig.

That directive has been used by media "fact checkers" to deny that the massive increase in IRS personnel under Biden’s Inflation Increase Act will also increase audits of the middle class.

Yellen’s statement initially seems reassuring until you look closely at its curious language.

Treasury Department spokeswoman Julia Krieger used the same phrasing when claiming that "audit rates relative to historical norms for people earning under $400,000 each year" would not increase.

“Historical” is an interesting term. Media fact checkers act as if it means current rates. But if it means current rates, Yellen and the Treasury spokeswoman could have just said so. The specific use of “historical norms” by both women is not an accident: it’s policy.

What’s the difference between “current rates” and “historical levels”?

A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report noted that from 2010 to 2019, audit rates dropped from "0.9 percent to 0.25 percent" due to "reduced staffing as a result of decreased funding". Audit rates for taxpayers earning from $25,000 to $500,000 were even lower at 0.17%.

Would “historical norms” cover 2010? It’s hard to believe that they would not. Even the most generous interpretation of Yellen’s language is that IRS audit rates would significantly increase.

At 0.25 percent, 1 in 400 taxpayers might be audited while at 0.9 percent, that number would climb catastrophically to 1 in 111. That’s still a range, but it’s a markedly smaller one.

And Americans will be four times more likely to be audited after the Biden-Manchin bill.

Taxpayers earning between $75,000 and $100,000 had their audit rates drop 30%. Those making from $200,000 to $500,000 had theirs fall 72%.

A 72% increase in middle class audits would then be well within “historical norms”.

And that’s just the beginning.

History goes back a long way. How far back do Biden and Yellen’s “historical norms” for audits go?

IRS audit rates have been falling steadily for some time. A study on the IRS site notes that, "In the early 1960’s, the percentage of individual tax returns that were audited by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) was about 6 percent, and this percentage fell to 2.5 percent by the mid-1970’s."

A 6% audit rate would take us from 1 in 400 to audits of 1 in 17 taxpayers.

Another historical difference is that $400,000 back then looked very different than it does now.

As the Tax Foundation describes, "The top marginal tax rate in 1960 was 91%, which applied to income over $200,000 (for single filers) or $400,000 (for married filers)".

If Yellen were to apply 1960’s “historical norms” to audit rates today, would they be the same rates at which people earning the top marginal tax rate were audited back then?

Writing to Senate members, Commissioner Rettig used a more specific term, that Yellen then repeated, that "audit rates will not rise relative to recent years for households making under $400,000 annually." Recent years appear to preclude the 1960s. Or so one would think.

But are 1960s audit rates the direction that Yellen and the IRS would eventually like to go?

As of 2017, the IRS had 9,510 auditors on the job. Defenders of the agency credited the decline in audits to the decline in auditors. They will often point out that there were 12,553 auditors in 1960, and over 15,000 later in the decade. The rise in auditors paralleled a rise in audits.

The decline in auditors then mirrored a decline in audits.

For now, Yellen holds out the possibility of a return to 2010 rates when the IRS budget ballooned under the greedy eye of the Obama administration which had set out to destroy the middle class by robbing and taxing them to death while destroying the economy. IRS advocates blame Republicans for “defunding” the IRS by rolling back Obama’s surge of spending.

The accounts from the IRS, Treasury personnel and non-profit analysts over the years have formed a perfectly clear picture of an agency whose audit rates have fallen off because of a lack of personnel. Since a majority of audits are directed at working class and middle class people, there is no reason to think that an increase in audits won’t be directed at the population which holds most of the nation’s money and yet is able to offer the least legal resistance.

IRS personnel have written and testified that auditing corporations and the wealthy offers the most challenge and takes the most time. Given more staff, they’ll chase the easiest targets, the ones least likely to be able to afford to wage legal battles, and the easiest to intimidate.

Given a choice between hunting big game and casting a wide net, the latter will win out.

Using the term “historical” suggests that Yellen and her cohort consider the current low audit rates to be an aberration that they intend to remedy. There’s nothing reassuring about a call to return to a “historical” period when audit rates might quadruple or even increase by 3200%.

"We are the greatest country in the world, yet the agency that touches more Americans than any other continually struggles to receive sufficient resources to fulfill its important mission,” IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig wrote.

It is probably true that the IRS “touches” more Americans than any other agency. Few Americans though wanted to be touched. And thanks to Joe Biden, who has spent his career on the unwanted touching of women and girls, more Americans than ever will be “touched”.




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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Sunday, August 28, 2022

A Mass Murderer of Jews Goes to Berlin

By On August 28, 2022 In
81 years after the Mufti of Jerusalem visited Hitler and asked him to kill all the Jews, Mahmoud Abbas, his current successor as leader of the “Palestinian” cause, arrived in Berlin.

At a press conference with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Abbas refused to apologize for his Munich Massacre of Jews and falsely claimed that Israel had carried out "50 holocausts" against the Arab Muslim settlers occupying Israel.

Scholz, Merkel's successor, said nothing at the joint press conference, but later tepidly condemned the remarks. “I am disgusted by the outrageous remarks made by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas,” he tweeted. Why should he be? This is who Abbas is.

After a Muslim settler recently opened fire at a bus stop and shot a number of Israelis and American tourists, including a pregnant woman who was hit in the stomach, Abbas' Fatah celebrated the attack, posting on Facebook, "Praise to the rifle muzzles."

In 1929, years before Hitler took power, the Hevron massacre by the Muslim settler population brutally killed the local Jewish men, women and children, mutilated their bodies and scattered limbs and organs. Every year, the Palestinian Authority honors three of the killers as "martyrs".

One of the PA's martyrs, Muhammad Jamjoum, confessed to murdering five Jews. Another, Ataa Al-Zir, murdered three innocent people back when Hitler could only dream of killing Jews.

The “Palestinian” cause is the modern standard bearer of the Nazis. The terrorist group whose representative was invited to Berlin has killed more Jews than anyone since the Nazis.

And has spent more time lying about it than any ordinary Holocaust denier in Germany.

Abbas earned his doctorate for his Holocaust denial thesis from the USSR's Patrice Lumumba University: created to train third world assets for a Communist war on free nations, . The KGB reportedly recruited the "Palestinian" terrorist leader, gave him the code name "mole" and put him to work under the man who now serves as Putin’s special representative the region.

When Abbas wasn't working for the Communists, he was being inspired by the Nazis. Edy Cohen, an Israeli researcher who wrote a book on Hitler’s Mufti, warned that Abbas' Holocaust denial thesis was "inspired by and based on the work of Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust." Abbas and Eichmann had both made killing Jews and lying about it their life’s work.

31 years after the visit by Hitler's Mufti, Abbas and the "Palestinians" made their grand bid to replace the Nazis with the Munich Massacre of Israeli Jewish athletes.

The Munich Olympics were meant to show off the new Germany. And they did. In the new Germany, the job of killing Jews had been outsourced to Muslim 'guests'.

German authorities had refused to provide security because it would clash with the country's image makeover and so the Muslim terrorists were able to freely operate in the Olympic Village.

The unarmed Israeli coaches and athletes fought the 8 armed Muslim terrorists for their lives. Some were killed outright, one was castrated, while others were taken hostage. Germany rejected Israeli pleas to allow them to send a hostage rescue team. Shortly after the massacre was over, it began secret negotiations with the terrorists to cut a deal to recognize the PLO.

After the massacre, the bodies of deceased terrorists were sent back where they were buried with full honors. Those terrorists who were arrested, were shortly released. The Olympics refused to initially even postpone the games and made no reference to the massacre. It took over 40 years for the Olympics to officially commemorate the dead athletes and coaches.

Abbas was one of the senior officials who planned the massacre and provided the money to carry it out. Despite that, Chancellor Scholz decided to hold a joint press conference with a Holocaust denier responsible for the worst post-Holocaust massacre of Jews on German soil.

Was he really surprised or disgusted? And will there be any consequences?

As Stephen M. Flatow, an American father whose daughter Alisa was brutally murdered in a bus bombing in Israel, wrote in a recent JNS editorial that, “Germany sent the Palestinian Arabs $199 million last year.”

“Let’s not lose sight of the incredible hypocrisy of governments that shed crocodile tears over the Munich massacre, and then send hundreds of millions of dollars to a man who helped perpetrate it,” he writes.

The German representative in Ramallah repeatedly boasts of all the money flowing from Berlin to the terrorist territories. None of that money will stop. No diplomatic relations will be cut.

In the past few months, Abbas has met with Biden, France's Macron and Romania's Klaus Iohannis where the Islamic terrorist leader was decorated with the “Star of Romania”.

The only country to turn down a visit by Abbas was the Saudi Kingdom.

When Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, often accused of anti-Semitism by the Left, visited Israel in 2018, he "broke protocol" by not scheduling a visit with Abbas. That was a rare exception to the world leaders who have hugged and shaken hands with the terrorist boss.

Biden, Putin and Xi Jinping have all paid tribute to Abbas and to the notion that Israel's existence on its own land represents some sort of "occupation" when the only occupation is the one carried on by the Arab Muslim colonists who terrorize Israel’s indigenous Jewish population.

Despite clamoring about the occupation, Abbas promised Xi Jinping to stand with China in its occupation of Hong Kong and the repression of fellow Muslims in Xinjiang. He endorsed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Not surprising for a dictator who was last elected in 2005.

Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority, an imaginary place that never existed and still doesn't, claims to represent the equally imaginary Palestinian people. Whom does he actually represent? A poll of the Arab Muslim settlers living in the terrorist-occupied territories in Israel earlier this year revealed that 73% want Abbas to resign and that he would lose any election. So there isn’t going to be an election and the big lie of “Palestine” will keep on going.

Abbas is a terrorist who doesn’t represent anyone except his armed minions and state sponsors. A “Palestinian” state is as historically legitimate as ISIS, and its leader is as legitimately in office as Adolf Hitler. The only thing that the murderous leadership of a fictional terror state have ever given the world is international terrorism.

Despite these indisputable facts, Chancellor Scholz chose to welcome Abbas. And the rest of the world’s leaders will go on welcoming the Holocaust denier and former KGB agent the way that Berlin once welcomed Hitler’s Mufti. What was once the ugliness of the Nazi regime has become the multinational human rights consensus of the international community.

The Mufti of Jerusalem and Mahmoud Abbas had a simple message. Hitler invited the Mufti of Jerusalem because he agreed with his call to kill the Jews. The only reason that the leaders of the world community continue to invite Abbas over is because they agree with his message.

It would be undiplomatic of them to say so. They invite him to say it for them instead.





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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Thursday, August 25, 2022

'We Lied the Last 1,000 Times, Trust Us Now'

By On August 25, 2022 In


Remember the time the media justified the feds investigating, entrapping, eavesdropping and arresting Trump associates based on a bunch of nonsense assembled by a former British secret agent working for the Clinton campaign? Don’t worry, this time it’ll be different.

Or how about when a senile former FBI boss was dragged out of retirement to serve as the public face of a team of Democrat prosecutors who ran an “independent” investigation of Trump for two years that turned up absolutely nothing? Probably not this time.

This time there are nuclear secrets at Mar-a-Lago which actually turned out to be a pardon agreement, expired passports and Melania’s unmentionables. Who could have seen that coming after this long history of entirely trustworthy political hit jobs disguised as investigations?

Democrats, their media and their media’s contracted experts tell us we should trust the DOJ, the FBI and the same folks who have been pulling some variation of this scam for the last six years to know what they’re doing when they set out with a search warrant empowering them to grab every single box at Mar-a-Lago, every administration record and anything else they want.

In America, the public is supposed to distrust the government and the government is supposed to trust the people. In D.C., the government doesn’t trust the public, but tells the public to trust the government. And who wouldn’t trust an investigation based on a secret affidavit that can’t be released because then the public might find out it’s as legit as Steele and Mueller?

If you can’t trust hacks pulling a political hit job before an election, whom can you trust?

Peter Strzok, the former FBI agent who was fired for attacking Trump even while he was supposed to be investigating him, told MSNBC that, "the American public should trust what the FBI is doing." If you can’t trust a disgraced former FBI agent obsessed with destroying Trump to assure you that his compadres are running an honest investigation, whom can you trust?

Last year, Strzok also insisted that, "there was never an FBI investigation of the Trump campaign". A year of investigations, informants, FISA warrants never happened. Much like Strzok’s affair with a colleague, his political biases, and his post-disgrace career as a professor at Georgetown University teaching counterintelligence theory also never happened.

Not only did we lie to you a thousand times over, but we’re still lying to you right now.

Trust us.

The media, which is trusted by 11% of Americans, tells them that they ought to have faith that Joe Biden, whom even 75% of Democrats don’t want to see in office anymore, and his political appointee, AG Merrick Garland, who got the job as a consolation prize for not getting a SCOTUS seat, probably know what they’re doing by going after a potential 2024 opponent.

They do. What they’re doing has nothing to do with the words coming out of their lying mouths.

But we have to focus on what really matters.

Rep. Adam Schiff wants to replace Pelosi. A whole bunch of retired Obama appointees who ran the CIA, FBI, NSA and some other three-letter words into the ground need CNN contracts. The media has lost millions of readers and billions of dollars. It’s shedding jobs faster than Chinese mask makers and CNN’s entire viewing audience can fit in the back room of a 7-11.

Only Trump can save them now. Or at least another Trump investigation.

We’ve all been through this. The Trump investigations are the Marvel movie franchise of politics. They’ve been around forever and after all that time and energy, they never go anywhere. The purpose of the investigation is the investigation. The changing charges are a pretext for perpetuating a political witch hunt. The promises of a takedown flicker out like the old Mueller votive candles. And yet the true believers are still convinced that this time it’ll be different.

Trust us. That message isn’t there for Republicans who haven’t trusted the media since 1972. It’s not there for the independents who never trusted the media. It’s there for the Democrats who still believe what CNN tells them. And they’re holding on for the endgame that never comes.

Children born when the Democrats first began investigating Trump on various charges that have all since fallen apart are now first graders. An entire generation was born and is now being groomed by woke preschool teachers to think that they’re the opposite of whatever sex they were born while the Steele dossier and the Mueller investigation added up to nothing.

They will at this rate grow up, go to worthless colleges that will saddle them with seven-figure debts, get jobs installing solar panels or teaching equity to squirrels, and grow old while the Democrats conduct another investigation and another FBI raid on Trump’s tomb.

There’s never going to be a trial because those require evidence. Court cases have much higher standards than impeachment proceedings where Jamie Raskin can pound the pulpit, wave his arms and know that it doesn’t matter because the vote will split down party lines.

Unlike his associates who lack the resources to spend years fighting a federal investigation, and plead out to end the torture, Trump has the money and the lawyers to play the game. And that’s why there can’t be an actual trial. There will only be the perpetual investigation. Interlocking teams of Democrats at the federal and state levels will generate and juggle investigations.

The only thing any of those investigations will do is generate more investigations.

Like generals still refighting the Vietnam War, Democrats have tried to ‘Nixon’ every single Republican president and haven’t brought one single one down since 1974. The investigations of Reagan, two Bushes, and Trump wasted enough money to clone Biden some real hair. Impeachment resolutions have been introduced against every single Republican president since. Rep. Henry B. Gonzalez, who spent almost 40 years in Congress, launched impeachment proceedings against Reagan and Bush. If he were still around, he’d be thrilled.

The difference is that the investigations are now permanent. They begin before a candidate even runs, follow him through his time in office, and hound him after he leaves. Trump was the first target of the permanent investigation. He won’t be the last. The permanent investigation is government opposition research. It interlocks directly with political campaigns, whether those of Hillary or Biden, and feeds material back and forth between government investigators and campaign hacks. It takes out their allies and aides to weaken them.

This isn’t a criminal case. It can be a counterintelligence investigation, a fishing expedition for process crimes and procedural violations that never finds a justifiable original crime. The one thing it can’t produce is an original crime that justifies the original investigation. That’s also why the investigation has to be permanent. If it were to ever end, there would have to be a reckoning. An endless investigation however always holds out the promise that one day there will be something. The fraudulence of the endless Trumpgate is why it can never end.

“Trust us. This time it will be different. It can’t all have been a bunch of lies. Right?”





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. 

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Monday, August 22, 2022

Why Aren’t Our Generals Learning?

By On August 22, 2022 In
A third of the way into his article, “Afghanistan Did Not Have to Turn Out This Way”, David Petraeus, former head of Central Command, who led forces in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and then headed the CIA, admits the war was never going to end.

“Some senior officials, including me, had cautioned that we would not be able to do in Afghanistan what we had done in Iraq—that though we might be able to drive violence down, we would not be able to ‘flip’ the country, as we had during the surge in Iraq, and provide it a whole new beginning,” he writes.

"When we recognized that we couldn’t 'win' the war, we did not even seriously consider that we might just 'manage' it," Petraeus complains.

Managing the war would mean a permanent military presence in Afghanistan.

There was never any serious plan to withdraw from Afghanistan. Nation building, Petraeus argues, “was not just unavoidable; it was essential”. “How else do you help build the forces and capabilities that allow you to hand off crucial tasks—such as denying sanctuary to terrorists, securing the population and infrastructure, and running the country and its myriad institutions?”

The Afghan government and its military were never meant to function independently and couldn’t. As the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction’s report demonstrated, the Afghan military had not been designed to work independently. When the United States and our allies withdrew, the infrastructure was gone and it collapsed.

Petraeus’s theme is that Afghanistan fell because of a lack of commitment from us, but his idea of commitment is a permanent military presence propping up a permanently failed state.

“Forever war” gets thrown around a lot. And it’s unavoidable. The western world has been in a forever war with Islam for over a thousand years. There’s no reason to think that’s about to change except through our surrender. But did it ever make sense to turn Afghanistan into the frontier of a forever war? What Petraeus ignores is that the war quickly migrated back to its epicenter in the Middle East and the fighting followed it. Al Qaeda became irrelevant.

While Petraeus lobbied for a presence in Afghanistan, Obama’s Arab Spring poured gasoline all over the Middle East. Afghanistan became a backwater of the Global Jihad. And despite recent events, it still is. When Osama bin Laden headed to Afghanistan, there were few places in the Middle East where Islamists could safely organize, build training camps and plan a great war.

Al Qaeda turned to the outskirts, Africa and Afghanistan. These days, ISIS, Al Qaeda allies, and other Jihadists have plenty of room in Iraq, Syria, the spaces between Israel and Egypt, and Libya, not to mention much of Africa. Most importantly, they built networks in Europe and have a physical and internet presence that can recruit Islamic terrorists across America.

“Islamist extremists will seek to exploit ungoverned, or inadequately governed, spaces,” Petraeus observes. But those spaces now include European no-go zones, significant portions of the Middle East, and, at the rate we’re going, will come to include parts of the United States.

The Bush solution was to build up democratic governments as alternatives to the Islamists. Obama flipped that formula on its head by presenting Islamists as the democratic alternative. That approach led eventually to a deal with the Taliban and the collapse of Afghanistan.

But what happens in Afghanistan may matter much less than the broader scope of the war.

Petraeus warns that Afghanistan will "likely will be an incubator for Islamist extremism in the years ahead".

True, but the country with the highest percentage of ISIS fighters was Tunisia, the vanguard of Obama’s Arab Spring. That's followed by Saudi Arabia, Russia, Turkey, Jordan, and France. Afghanistan doesn't even place, but America, with 150 Jihadis, is 25th, right behind Algeria.

America and Europe’s major cities have long since become incubators of what he calls “Islamic extremism”. The Jihadist imams aren’t just running mosques, they’re teaching in major universities, they’re not just recruiting in prisons, but in Congress. Qatar’s Al Jazeera isn’t just a drop box for Osama’s videos, it sets the foreign policy agenda for the entire media. And D.C.

Petraeus is still fighting yesterday’s war, because he never understood the nature of the enemy. There’s no sign that any of our blind generals can offer more than the same failed strategies.

The Afghanistan withdrawal was a disaster because it was based on a series of lies built around nation building, beginning with the idea that Afghanistan could ever function as a non-Islamist and non-terrorist state, and concluding with the bigger myth that a deal could be made with the Taliban. Diplomats try to turn military problems into political ones, but Petraeus admits that he knew better, that there could be no political solution to Afghanistan’s problems.

Hanging over all this is the shadow of the failed policies of the Cold War.

After America abandoned efforts to fight Communism at home, we did our best to fight it abroad. The Soviet Union and Communist China dragged us into brutal battles against insurgent forces into narrow theaters that drained our morale and public support for the war on Communism. It also allowed the Left to radicalize the culture and begin the takeover of the Democrats.

Islamists and their leftist allies recreated this gameplan in the aftermath of September 11. And it worked the same way. The anti-Islamist Democrat is as extinct as his anti-Communist counterpart. Public support for the War on Terror collapsed after Afghanistan and Iraq.

A smarter retired general who serves on numerous influential boards and committees might examine how it was that our enemies got us the same way twice. And how we failed to learn anything either time. But we have a distinct shortage of smart generals or leaders of any kind.

Petraeus’ arguments recapitulate familiar Cold War paradigms. He argues for sustained commitments in war theaters, bipartisan foreign policies and accepting the fallibility of allied governments. These were the arguments coined by Cold War interventionists in response to leftist anti-war movements. And they have a certain truth to them, but they’re also defeatist.

Fighting Islamic terrorist outbreaks, like Communist ones, in certain places like Afghanistan made sense, turning them into another outpost of a global cordon sanitaire is a level of imperialist ambition we cannot afford and that Petraeus isn’t even proposing. Instead he envisions that we commit to fighting in the same theater in 2022 that we did in 2002.

Even if it makes no particular sense.

The Bush administration made plenty of mistakes, but believing that we should permanently remain in Afghanistan wasn’t one of them. It was Obama who insisted on an Afghan surge. That disastrous policy was championed by men like Petraeus and it led us absolutely nowhere.

The trouble with Petraeus and so many of the generals, woke or un-woke, is that they’re McClellans, procedurally and politically competent, but lacking any larger vision of the war.

That’s why we continue to win battles while losing the war.

Almost every time Petraeus mentions the I” word, it’s paired with, “Islamist extremism” or “ultraconservative interpretations of Islam”. Like so much of his essay, it’s an outdated formulation that acts as if the central issue in a global conflict is tone rather than victory.

Winning battles while losing the war has taught them nothing except to ignore the war harder.

Our enemies are using ideology to win a war. Our generals still believe that the war can be managed if we avoid dealing with reality, the nature of the enemy, the battlefield and the fact that the trajectory of the fighting has been steadily drawing closer to our interests and to us. If we don’t find some better generals soon, they will go on managing the war while dooming us to an absolute defeat within another generation, not in Afghanistan, but here on our own soil.

Afghanistan was always going to turn out this way. The question is how will America turn out?




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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Sunday, August 21, 2022

Iran Builds Its Own Online ISIS in America

By On August 21, 2022 In
The stabbing of author Salman Rushdie by a Lebanese Shiite Muslim from New Jersey may be the culmination of efforts by Iran to imitate Al Qaeda and ISIS by building its own online terror network to carry out attacks inside the United States of America. The latest reports indicate that Hadi Matar, Rushdie's attacker, had been in touch with members of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

The recent indictment of a member of the IRGC regime terror network for soliciting the assassination of former National Security Advisor John Bolton provided a window into how Iran has targeted former Trump administration members.

The IRGC operative struck up a relationship with an Iranian-American on social media by initially offering $10,000 for photos of Bolton. This is a familiar form of espionage tradecraft in which a foreign spy solicits an American to perform a seemingly harmless and legal act, often involving photography, such as taking photos of individuals or cars, that is then revealed to be espionage committed at the behest of a foreign power. The patsy is then told that he has a choice between committing more serious crimes or being turned in to the FBI as a spy.

The Russians and the Chinese routinely operated this way (which also helps account for the large number of Chinese spies in America, as their citizens coming to this country are compelled to sign papers agreeing to cooperate with their intelligence services that becomes a source of leverage and blackmail), and it now appears that Iran has picked up the same trick.

The IRGC operative promised that Iran would pay $250,000 for hitting Bolton with a car. Indicating that the Iranians had already had their own surveillance operation that they did not want to compromise, the IRGC claimed that Bolton often took walks alone in the park.

The indictment and the Rushdie stabbing cast light on some mysterious incidents including an Iranian woman from Berkeley who catfished an American on a dating site, met up with him at a Henderson, Nevada hotel room, and then stabbed him in the neck as, “revenge against U.S. troops for the killing of Qasem Soleimani". The death of the IRGC terror leader has been the pretext for assorted terror plots against military personnel and Trump administration members.

The media dismissed the March stabbing as oddball behavior. Media accounts suggested that the stabber was mentally ill. But Henderson is close to Nellis Air Force Base which hosts the MQ-9 Reaper: the same model that was used to take out Soleimani. The attack appeared to be a systematic effort to target a U.S. Air Force drone pilot, lure him to a hotel room, blindfold him, and then kill him. It was a terror plan that only looks ridiculous because it failed.

This is certainly not the first time that Iran has tried to pay for assassinations in the United States. A decade ago, IRGC operatives planned to kill the Saudi ambassador with a bomb at Cafe Milano, a prestigious D.C. resteurant patronized by senators, by employing an Iranian used car salesman from Texas in a plot that was arranged through meetings in Mexico.

A decade later, the internet eliminates any need for international travel. Iran’s terror operatives can solicit Shiite Muslims in this country to commit terror attacks for them with no risk.

At least to the IRGC.

The failure of Al Qaeda terror plots after 9/11 amid the invasion of Afghanistan led the terror group to abandon its founding premise of serving as “The Base” and to crowdsource terrorism through the internet. Myspace was created a few months before the invasion of Iraq. A year later, Facebook emerged. Terror 2.0 took longer to arrive than Web 2.0, but it was close.

The vast majority of Al Qaeda and ISIS terror attacks no longer required the expensive and dangerous travel and training arrangements that had undone so many previous operations. Most of the crowdsourced terror attacks failed when Jihadists contacted ISIS and Al Qaeda only to connect with the FBI, but a few, in Boston, San Bernardino, New York and Orlando succeeded spectacularly. The same crowdsourcing momentum that had made Uber and Airbnb into billion dollar companies also made Jihad risk-free and cheap for terrorist organizations. The perpetrators were dubbed “lone wolves”, but are really the Uber drivers of the Jihad.

Iran has been slow to get into the game. Shiite Muslims are a minority and the IRGC has relied on subsidiary terror groups like Hezbollah, the PMU’s in Iraq, or for that matter Sunni Islamists like Al Qaeda and Hamas, to do its dirty work. America, unlike Europe, still doesn’t have extensive terror networks beyond those of Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood. And Hezbollah utilizes its networks as a money train for smuggling drugs and cigarettes. The Lebanese Shiite Jihadist network may be conducting some of the surveillance, but it doesn’t want to threaten its cash flow from America that also buys it some independence from Iran.

Online crowdsourcing frees Iran from the need to risk the more profitable terror networks. There is evidence that the Islamic terror state is soliciting Iranians and Shiite Muslims in the United States over social media to do its dirty work while offering them sizable sums of money. It’s unknown whether the Rushdie attack came off this way, but the perpetrator’s social media was filled with Iranian Jihadist propaganda. That would have made him a likely recruitment target.

If Iran is working to duplicate its own version of the Al Qaeda and ISIS online training and recruitment system, the threat to Americans could be much more serious than the stabbing of one dissident writer in New York or a man catfished on a date in Nevada. The Islamic regime’s ideal scenario for nuclear weapons would be to detonate them with plausible deniability.

Iranian operatives have carried out direct assassinations of political dissidents in Europe, but have been cautious about putting boots on the ground inside the United States. Despite our weakness and their bluster, Iran still fears and respects us more than Europe. As America gets weaker and our society becomes more fractured, that may not last. For now, Tehran would prefer to carry out attacks by cultivating disposable foreign assets. And once such a capability exists and has been sufficiently tested, it could be used for mass casualty terrorist attacks.

Even nuclear ones.

The Biden administration is rushing to cut a deal with Iran that will legitimize its nuclear weapons program even as the IRGC continues to plot terror attacks in the United States. Obama’s “breakthrough” proposal to detach a nuclear deal from terrorism left us negotiating in bad faith with a regime that made no secret of its determination to kill Americans.

Crowdsourcing Jihad creates further distance between the state sponsors and funders of terrorism, the perpetrators and their victims. The Pulse massacre and the Boston Marathon bombings were traceable to individuals, and then only distantly to the Islamic terror groups providing information and training, and hardly at all to the governments behind them.

Iran would like to replicate this model knowing that America’s morale is much weaker than its military and intel capabilities, and that if there is enough plausible deniability, we will do nothing about even the worst kinds of attacks like September 11. Just ask Qatar and the Saudis.

The gradual uptick in Iran-linked domestic terrorism is a warning that Iran’s efforts to create its own cadre of Shiite ‘lone wolves’ over the internet may be working. And that worse may come.






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, August 17, 2022

An Afghan Muslim Refugee Carried Out America’s Worst Islamophobic Killings

By On August 17, 2022 In
Diversity is our strength so it couldn’t have been too shocking that an Afghan Muslim refugee was responsible for America’s single worst Islamophobic killing spree. Much as another Afghan, Omar Mateen, brutally carried out the single largest massacre of gay people in America.

Americans are generally fairly tolerant so liberals decided to import bigoted immigrant killers.

When the migrant surge began, politicians and the media assured us that Afghans would make profound contributions to America. They have already set two particularly ugly national records.

And that was bound to happen.

Long after the last American soldier had left Afghanistan, the fighting between Sunnis and Shiites continues in the terrorist state with ISIS-K carrying out bombing attacks on Shiite mosques.. The massive influx of Afghan refugees to America has brought the bloody ethnic, tribal and religious clashes from that failed state to America.

Including the true and undiluted Islamophobia that only Sunnis and Shiites are truly capable of.

“I am angered and saddened by the horrific killings of four Muslim men in Albuquerque,” Joe Biden had tweeted. “While we await a full investigation, my prayers are with the victims’ families, and my administration stands strongly with the Muslim community. These hateful attacks have no place in America.”

"The targeted killings of Muslim residents of Albuquerque is deeply angering and wholly intolerable," Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham tweeted. "We will continue to do everything we can to support to the Muslim community of Albuquerque and greater New Mexico during this difficult time. You are New Mexicans, you are welcomed here, and we stand with you."

CAIR offered a $10,000 reward for the perpetrator of the "hateful shooting spree" and demanded that Biden make it his responsibility to "protect Albuquerque Muslims from further harm". But when the perpetrator turned out to be a fellow Sunni Muslim, CAIR is no longer describing his actions as “hateful”, but “deranged”. Soon he’ll be dismissed as mentally ill.

The media was even less circumspect, interviewing local Islamists who claimed that they feared American intolerance and the media warned that "another Islamophobic attack could happen".

The killing of four Muslim men from "South Asia", the last of them outside a Lutheran Family Services refugee services office, was indeed Islamophobic in the most traditional way.

The alleged perpetrator, Muhammad Syed, a Sunni Muslim refugee from Afghanistan, was reportedly angry at his daughter’s marriage to a Shiite Muslim.

And took it out on some local Shiite Muslims in Albuquerque which is now the new Afghanistan.

Since the withdrawal, four Afghan refugees have been accused of sexual assault, two involving children and two involving adult women. Some 324 Afghans with terror ties have popped up on watchlists. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg that we actually know about.

In the 6 years since he arrived in America, Syed had racked up quite a record.

In 2017, the Afghan Muslim refugee, along with his wife and son, had been accused of assaulting his daughter's boyfriend. That was in 2017. Next year, Syed was accused of grabbing his wife by the hair and throwing her out of the car. Then he allegedly attacked her at a Human Services office and pulled out "a large chunk of hair" from her scalp.

That same year, his son called the police claiming that Syed had been beating his mother, while he and his sister tried to hold him back. The beating left the younger Syed covered in blood.

By 2020, Syed was allegedly busted for refusing to comply with police orders after running a red light. Police reports indicate that four years after coming to America, Syed still only spoke "pashto" except for apparently the term "mother______r".

Syed may not have enriched our culture, but we had clearly enriched his.

"I am deeply disturbed by the killings of four Muslim men in Albuquerque. As law enforcement continues to investigate these heinous attacks, we remain clear that we stand with the Muslim community in New Mexico and around our country. Hate has no place in America," Kamala Harris had tweeted.

Hate has a huge place here and Kamala and her boss have made plenty of room for it.

Syed’s killing spree wasn’t domestic terrorism as we understand it. The Afghan Muslim refugee, who told police that he had fought in his country’s special forces, was settling communal grudges and disputes the same way that his countrymen usually do.

Men beating wives and family members isn’t unusual in Afghanistan. Neither is responding to a daughter’s rebellious relationship with murder. The case is only notable because it’s in America.

And because top elected officials, including Biden and Kamala, are in denial about it.

Democrats frequently remind us that other Muslims are the leading targets of Muslim terrorism. That’s true insofar as Islam has a rich 1,360 year history of fatally settling theological differences. The world’s greatest ‘Islamophobes’ are Muslims who have been killing each other and members of variant sects because, beginning with Mohammed, for most of their history the inherent violence of Islam leaves few other options for resolving religious differences except “submission”. Cultural differences end with slavery, forced marriage, repression and genocide.

In the decades since the Islamic terrorist attacks of September 11, Biden, Kamala, local officials in New Mexico and most of the country's political elites and cultural establishment have learned to respond to Islamic violence with cries of Islamophobia. But what happens when Islamic violence is no longer being directed at Americans, but at other Muslims?

Americans are some of the least hateful people in America. Polls and surveys show that we are less racist, more tolerant of religious differences, and more willing to share spaces with people who are different than they are than most of the rest of the world.

And, it ought to go without saying, Afghanistan.

Taking in massive numbers of Afghan Muslim refugees has had the opposite effect. Multiple Afghan refugees have already been caught up in ordinary domestic physical and sexual offenses. And that’s just the recent arrivals, not longtimers like Syed in New Mexico.

The mass migration of Afghans to America means that we now have to police cultural, gender, and religious disputes in a population that could not, even with our extended help over the course of two decades, settle those differences in their own country. Now we have been cursed with the even more hopeless task of trying to settle Afghan differences in America.

The Albuquerque killings, like the assaults on military bases housing refugees, and the sexual assaults off those bases, is a warning of the scale and hopelessness of the task before us.

From Omar Mateen, the perpetrator of the second deadliest mass shooting in America at the Pulse nightclub, to Muhammad Syed, Afghan immigration means violence, terror and death for everyone as the norms of a deeply broken culture pop up in cities like Albuquerque.

Syed, who violently clashed with his family members and had repeated run-ins with the law until his violent impulses allegedly turned lethal, is not an outlier, he is the face of the future.

Our future.

What happened in Albuquerque is just what happens when Afghanistan comes to 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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Monday, August 15, 2022

Samantha Power Stonewalls Inspector General on Afghanistan on Terror Cash

By On August 15, 2022 In
In June, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction’s office (SIGAR), dispatched letters to Secretary of State Blinken and Samantha Power complaining that the State Department and USAID were stonewalling its investigation of waste, corruption and terror cash.

"Two SIGAR audits are also being hindered by a lack of cooperation from State and USAID. The first evaluates your agencies’ compliance with the laws and regulations prohibiting transfers of funds to members of the Taliban and the Haqqani Network," the letter to Power complained.

The Haqqani Network, which is allied with Al Qaeda, gained control of Kabul security and played a key role in preventing Americans from being evacuated and in the seizure of American military equipment left behind, even as the Biden administration described the Islamic terrorists responsible for the murder of Americans as “partners”. Despite claiming to no longer have ties to Al Qaeda, Ayman Al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda's leader, was recently taken out at a Haqqani Network safe house. And, afterward, Haqqani members quickly evacuated Zawahiri's family.

Any funding going to the Taliban, the Haqqanis and Al Qaeda must be investigated.

In a recent interview, Special Inspector General John Sopko noted that his office was aware of the, "close to $800 million that we’ve spent in Afghanistan since the collapse of the government last August".

“I guess people don’t realize that,” he told reporters. “And I think people should realize that."

Samantha Power's policy of relying more heavily on local aid groups has made it that much more difficult to track where USAID’s money goes. And may be one reason that USAID has been stonewalling the Afghanistan watchdog.

Instead of turning over the information, Blinken and Power's people have lawyered up.

"A State official has informed SIGAR that department staff have received internal direction to not engage with or speak to SIGAR without prior clearance from State legal counsel," the open letter that was also sent to members of Congress revealed.

Illegally refusing to cooperate with an inspector general and then using State Department lawyers to impede any investigation in a matter involving possible terrorist financing is shocking.

It should be major news. Instead there’s been little coverage and less interest.

Beyond terrorism financing, the State Department and USAID have spent months stonewalling the inspector general’s office on matters such as "the settlement of Afghan refugees" and wouldn't even reveal "funding information regarding its ongoing programs in Afghanistan, citing ongoing consultation with its legal counsel." Instead of cooperating with the watchdog’s audit, USAID argued that it would use its "internal process to conduct cost audits.”

That is not the way organizations with clean hands behave.

Last month, Rep. Mike Turner sent a letter to the Biden administration asking him to order the State Department to begin cooperating with the Afghanistan investigation.

Senator Chuck Grassley sent one to Samantha Power warning that stonewalling the Afghanistan special inspector general is in violation of "federal law requiring federal employees to comply with IG investigations".

"Instructing federal employees to obtain permission to cooperate with an IG investigation is clearly at odds with federal law," Grassley wrote. "It is also reported that you have refused to permit SIGAR employees to travel internationally to conduct on-the-ground research."

Samantha Power’s abuses were notorious during the Obama administration and like the behavior of most of the Obama vets, they have only become more shameless under Biden.

In response to a question about the State Department’s refusal to cooperate with the investigation, spokesman Ned Price made matters worse by replying that a SIGAR report on the collapse of the Afghan military "does not reflect the consensus view of the State Department or of the U.S. Government."

The seeming admission by a Biden administration appointee that the State Department was retaliating against an inspector general for blowing the whistle on its disaster received no attention despite making the whole thing even more illegal.

Price is not just another government apparatchik, he was formerly Obama's special assistant at the NSC and resigned when Trump came into office. His comments at the press conference and the lack of response from the Biden administration made it clear that he was speaking for the White House. By authorizing the stonewalling, the Biden administration was also undermining the oversight authority of the House and Senate. And was clearly doing so deliberately.

SIGAR recently dispatched its latest quarterly report to Congress noting that the Biden administration had authorized "transactions and activities involving the Taliban and members of the Haqqani Network so long as the transactions are for the official business of the U.S. government or certain international organizations, or for NGOs working on certain humanitarian projects."

It also included the false claim by Biden's DIA head made to Congress in May that "the Taliban have held to their word about not allowing al-Qaeda to rejuvenate."

Al-Zawahiri’s death in a Haqqani safe house makes it clear that the Taliban remain aligned with Al Qaeda.

As the United States approaches $800 million in spending in Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover, there is no way to know how much of the money is going to Islamic terrorists. And the State Department and USAID have violated federal law on obstructing audits and investigations while experiencing no consequences either in the form of legal sanctions or media pressure.

The Biden administration is determined to prevent any scrutiny of taxpayer money going to terrorists. And after having authorized such deals, it’s won’t let SIGAR peek over its shoulder.

The question is no longer what Biden, Blinken and Power are hiding, but how bad it is.





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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Sunday, August 14, 2022

The Hot Pagan Nights of August

By On August 14, 2022 In
"On summer nights, star of stars, Orion’s Dog they call it, brightest, of all, but an evil portent, bringing heat, and fevers to suffering humanity," Homer lyrically described it in The Iliad.

The ancient Greeks believed that heat waves were caused by heat from Sirius: the dog star. We postmoderns don’t believe in any silly superstitious nonsense like that knowing all too well that the ‘dog days of summer’ are caused by Styrofoam containers and a lack of carbon taxes.

To bring attention to this urgent crisis, the Spanish city of Seville, the Spanish Office for Climate Change and the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center, decided to start naming heat waves. This one was named “Zoe”, which was how assimilated Alexandrian Jews in Egypt rendered “Chava” or “Eve”: meaning the mother of all life.

Postmoderns are also too smart to believe in the Bible or the story of G-d creating the world. They know that the world emerged accidentally out of chaos and is always on the verge of being destroyed by mankind. Instead a foundation under the aegis of CIA officials, named after a leading oilman and the widow of JFK’s premier opposition researcher will name the heat.

To pagans, the minutiae of the natural world, heat and cold, the position of the stars, were the revealed religion that they could experience. Postmodern pagans feel the same way. Global warming is the old pagan climate religions, the worship of rain and sun, tree and wave, animal and earth, not out of a desperation to survive, but a spiritual void in a culture that has lost its moral capacity.

Naming the heat and blaming it on man’s sinful refusal to appease the natural forces by abandoning his technology is a postmodern paganism that sees summer heat as an ill portent. What we lack in the arts of a Homer, we more than make up for in a panicked bureaucracy.

According to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, every year is the warmest year on record and this is no exception though one might query the hippos whose skeletons were found in the Thames and the lions who roamed where London now stands, the remains of elephants have been found in Seville, and giraffes lived in Italy long before Caesar brought one over and the Romans took to eating the long necked creatures as a delicacy.

Europe tried to stop global warming by abandoning its domestic energy capabilities, turning to solar and wind energy, and when that failed, to Russian gas delivered through Ukrainian pipelines. The resulting war between the two countries has now lasted over 150 days and one can only imagine how much heat the destruction of cities and the endless bombing has unleashed.

One of the things that the ancient Greeks understood that the modern greeks don’t is hubris.

Much has been made of 'Zoe' giving Seville whopping 110 degree temperatures, or what Arizonans call mild summer weather, but the intemperate Spanish city hit 116 in August 1946, and 123.8 in 1876. The latter, like most temperature records made before Earth Day, has been withdrawn for its heretical implication that there were any hot days before the advent of Al Gore.

Weather is as much an art as science. It has objective measurements, but subjective experiences.

“This is a bad country, this America, where you always have to drink, either to get warm, or to get cold,” a Hessian mercenary fighting against Americans during the War of Independence complained.

A more contemporary European visitor, French Ambassador Philippe Etienne, arrived recently in Alaska and began by opining, "We had just, in Europe, two heat waves already this summer... So it’s really important for all of us in the world, reaching our goals, limiting the global warming."

If you’re going to limit global warming, Alaska would be the place to start.

Back in Europe, the Globe Theater, which has gone both woke and broke, marked Earth Day with "Shakespeare and Climate Emergency", examining the works of the Bard through climate panic, or the other way around. We are told however that Shakespeare "would have had no conception of the scientific link between emissions and climate change."

That seems unlikely considering that he wrote of “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Shakespeare’s monarch was not apt to spend billions paying researchers to claim that the sky is falling unless everyone takes to biking to work and eating soy patties.

But apocalyptic scams were nothing new even in his time.

That was the era when the Prophetia Merlini or prophecies of Merlin, mostly forgotten today, were still seen by some as predicting the future. “Oak trees will burn in the forests and acorns will grow on the branches of lindens. The Severn estuary will flow through seven channels and the river Usk will boil for seven months. The heat will kill its fish and snakes will take their place.”

“Sometimes he angers me with telling me of the moldwarp and the ant, of the dreamer Merlin and his prophecies,” Shakespeare comments in Henry VI. “And such a deal of skimble skamble stuff.” The skimble skamble stuff of dreams is all around us now. In the hot noonday sun where only mad dogs and Englishmen walk, climate prophets cry, “Doom” and do BBC interviews.

Bill McGuire, a British academic who blogs for the eco-terrorist group Extinction Rebellion who have taken to glueing themselves to things like Oxford Circus, the Science Museum and the European Commission headquarters, has a new book out, “Hothouse Earth”.

"There is now no chance of dodging a grim future of perilous all-pervasive, climate breakdown," he declares in a book that will be out in paperback for only $16.95.

This follows up on his 2002 book, "A Guide to the End of the World" looking at the "frightful prospects that await us in the 21st century" and "Surviving Armageddon" from 2005 about "massive earthquakes and super-eruptions, collision with vast boulders from space."

Now this is the sort of skimble-skamble stuff to set off idiots gluing themselves to things.

“This is a call to arms. So if you feel the need to glue yourself to a motorway or blockade an oil refinery, do it. Drive an electric car or, even better, use public transport, walk or cycle. Switch to a green energy tariff; eat less meat," McGuire raves.

Notably he leaves off suggestions about environmentalist nutters gluing themselves to bookstores selling his book or interrupting his speaking engagements the way that they seem to have taken to gluing themselves to classical works of art. He urges fans to order his book at local bookstores and kill some trees and emit some fumes, instead of buying it on Kindle.

The end is always near. And from the earliest literature of mankind, it makes for good book deals. Zoe will be the first of the named heat waves sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation. Any ambassadors from Paris or barbers from Seville who fly to Alaska will be deemed climate refugees and allowed to move into igloos. The heat waves of summer will give way to the storms of the fall and the snowfalls of winter. And all will be heralded as climate change.

People with nothing to believe in must turn to something. They find ill omens and portents, conspiracy theories and rumors, they bow down and worship the earth and the sun.

It’s far more appealing than turning to G-d.

But as Shakespeare wrote, "The day is hot, and the weather, and the wars, and the King, and the Dukes; it is no time to discourse."





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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