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Monday, July 31, 2023

Bidens Wanted Billions, Not Millions, From Burisma

By On July 31, 2023 In
The release of an FBI informant’s allegations about the Biden family’s dealings with Burisma finally explains what a Ukrainian energy company wanted with a corrupt American political clan.

Why was Burisma paying a vice president’s son tens of thousands of dollars a month?

According to the allegations on the FBI’s FD-1023 form released to Sen. Chuck Grassley by whistleblowers, Burisma wanted to launch an IPO in the United States and was looking to first buy an American energy company. Such a move would have required regulatory approval and would have also potentially been very lucrative for anyone on the inside.

The allegations by the FBI informant describes Mykola Zlochevsky, Burisma’s co-founder and a former minister in the ousted pro-Russian Yanukovych government, saying that “it costs 5 (million) to pay one Biden, and 5 (million) to another Biden”.

And yet the rewards could have been even richer.

While the informant urged Zlochevsky to launch his IPO by forming an American company or buying a shell company, Hunter Biden had allegedly told the energy boss that his company “could raise much more capital if Burisma purchased a larger US-based business that already had a history In the US oil and gas sector.” Allegedly some Texas companies were on the table.

Why did Hunter Biden allegedly pitch Burisma on a messier and more expensive process? An obvious potential answer is that the Biden family may have hoped to cash in by being on the inside. To understand Burisma’s plans and those of the Biden family, we need to look at what was going on with the oil and gas sector beginning in 2014, when Hunter started being paid a small fortune to sit on the Ukrainian energy company’s board, through 2016 when some of the initial conversations that the informant reported to the FBI were first taking place.

2014 was a good year for oil and gas IPOs. Texas’ Parsley Energy rode annual revenues below Burisma’s estimated $400 million to a big IPO, rising revenues and an eventual $4.5 billion sale. Looking at examples like these, Hunter and Zlochevsky could have envisioned bringing together a Texas oil company and a Ukrainian oil company united around a similar political business model. The Biden name would have cleared the way for permits in Texas and political cover in Ukraine. Indeed the one thing we know that Joe Biden did for Burisma was threaten to pull foreign aid unless the Ukrainian government fired Viktor Shokin, a prosecutor who had been looking into Burisma’s affairs, and was seen as a block to any successful IPO in America.

The plan, implied by the FBI informant, was for Joe Biden to clear away Burisma’s problems in Ukraine and pave the way for the takeover of a Texas energy company. The Biden family would have potentially been on the ground floor of the Texas deal (and Hunter and other Biden family members could have been cut sizable checks or received shares on the American end) before being on the inside of an IPO for a combined company that would potentially be worth billions.

But political developments in Ukraine and a roller coaster ride in the energy markets, made that a shaky proposition. The Texas deal and the IPO never happened. Burisma and the Bidens didn’t look like they had much of a future. In the fall of 2015, Joe Biden held a press conference with Barack Obama at which he announced that he would not run for president.

This is when the FBI informant began meeting with Burisma officials and they vented about Hunter Biden who was increasingly outliving his purpose, but who was also too dangerous to let go. Only in March 2017 was Hunter’s $1 million a year salary finally cut. By then Zlochevsky had been entangled in legal proceedings and a Burisma launch in the United States was impossible.

Any political future for Joe Biden or financial future for Hunter Biden seemed to be equally done.

As the Burisma deal began falling apart, so did Hunter Biden. His ex-wife Kathleen Buhle’s memoir describes his transition from alcoholism to heavy drugs beginning around the start of the Burisma deal. Between the various memoirs and investigations, it’s widely known that Hunter burned through a massive fortune.

“The board fee had morphed into a wicked sort of funny money,” Hunter Biden wrote in his own memoir. “It hounded me to spend recklessly, dangerously, destructively. Humiliatingly. So I did.”

But the Burisma millions may have just been the beginning of a much bigger pay day. Before his father visited Ukraine, Hunter wrote of the Burisma arrangements, “this is a huge step for us.”

“We need to have a plan on how we develop a corporate entity or LLP that allows us to draw on funds generated here to free us from existing (under-producing current commitments) and to build our own investment and expansion strategy.”

Hunter Biden was living like a guy who expected to be making much more than he was. Burisma, like his Chinese deals, remained unfulfilled. Hunter may have been out to be more than a mere millionaire on paper while trying to keep up with payments on his houses and his Porsche, but aspiring to become a billionaire. The vice president’s disfavored son had spent much of the Obama administration trying to monetize his dad’s position for the rest of the family.

Joe Biden had something Barack Obama did not: a brother and a son who could hustle aggressively. And yet with the Obama administration approaching its end, Hunter had come away with only a taste of the foreign money that the Clintons had gorged themselves on.

Burisma, like the China deals, had never delivered the big payoff that Hunter had been chasing. The foreign companies remained foreign and they quickly tired of paying Hunter. The deal of a lifetime was slipping away even as his father’s time was drawing near. By the end of 2015, a Biden presidency seemed wildly unlikely. The smart money was on Hillary Clinton winning and then serving two terms. As painful as that was for Republicans, it was even more so for Hunter who was watching the last opportunity to monetize his father’s career slipping away.

Any chance that Joe Biden had for a future presidential campaign would require big money.

Hunter’s debts were piling up and once his father left office, they would come due. It’s not surprising that Hunter’s substance abuse issues, which had been around for a while, became catastrophic. One way or another the good life was over and Hunter had decided to go out with a bang. Only when his father relaunched his political career did the spree become inconvenient.

Hunter Biden wrecked his last opportunities under Vice President Biden and made himself too toxic to be able to significantly cash in with foreign investors under President Biden.

The FBI’s informant lays out an implied picture of just how much money the Bidens were chasing. This was not about the millions of dollars, money that Hunter casually wasted on crack, prostitutes and a lifestyle beyond his means, but potentially billions of dollars.

It’s not hard to imagine how a Burisma – Texas deal could have come together and how it could have benefited a whole circle of Biden family members, associates and key donors. Had such an arrangement succeeded, Joe Biden would have gained an incredibly wealthy family and donor circle that could have given him a shot or later another shot at the White House without becoming too dependent on the political favors and donors that made him a puppet president.

When Joe Biden intervened to protect Burisma, was he just protecting his son’s income stream of five figures a month or was he looking to gain billions for his family and his political allies?

The difference is more than just a matter of zeroes.

Democrats and their media have insisted that Hunter’s sins were his own and that Joe Biden’s involvement was limited to helping his troubled son. This narrative has been undermined by not only the FBI informant’s disclosures, but also by allegations from past business partners, a WhatsApp message from Hunter explicitly threatening a Chinese business in his father’s name, and the lengths to which the FBI went to shut down any investigation of anyone beyond Hunter.

Joe Biden’s defense has been to argue that no one can show that he profited financially from Hunter’s business deals. While a web of shell companies was used to move money around to Biden family members, no one has yet conclusively proven that money went directly to the man described in various communications as ‘the big guy’. But the difference between a deal potentially worth millions and billions would be that the latter wouldn’t just subsidize Hunter’s Porsche or prostitutes, but Joe Biden’s future political career.

When Biden told Ukrainian officials, “we’re leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor’s not fired, you’re not getting the money”, was he hoping to buy his way back into the White House using Burisma’s money?

Did Joe Biden intervene for Burisma to help Hunter pay off his debts or to become president?





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, July 30, 2023

While U.S. Diplomats Negotiated With China, China Hacked Them

By On July 30, 2023 In
In June, America and China traded hacks.

Secretary of State Blinken traveled to Beijing in a visit that had been delayed for a few months after the public learned that China had been flying a spy balloon over America. After days of “high-level talks”, the Biden administration official claimed that the trip was a success.

“We have made progress and we are moving forward,” the State Department official declared.

Meanwhile, China had been hacking.the State Department. While Secretary of State Blinken and State Department officials prepped for the biggest Chinese diplomatic exchange of the administration, Chinese hackers pulled off an ingenious targeted attack aimed at accessing the emails of State Department and other government officials including Blinken’s own messages.

The Biden administration and China had different definitions of “moving forward”.

Secretary of State Blinken learned that China had tried to hack his emails a day before he was set to visit Beijing, and he chose to go ahead with the trip without making any public mention of it, not wanting to spoil the photo op. The previous scheduling of the trip had been bumped because of China’s spy balloon and Blinken chose to demonstrate to the enemy that no amount of abusive behavior was going to stop the Biden administration’s appeasement.

The Biden administration’s idea of diplomacy was talking to China, while the People’s Republic wanted to know what Blinken and other top officials were going to say before they got there. Besides targeting Blinken and State Department officials, Chinese hackers also came after Commerce Secretary Raimondo and members of her department. That won’t stop Raimondo from visiting China later this year. No Chinese attack or provocation will stop the appeasement.

Secretary of State Blinken turned to the cameras in Beijing and stated that an agreement had been reached that “sustained communication at senior levels is the best way to responsibly manage our differences” even while knowing that China’s idea of sustained communication was trying to get at his emails. China has its own idea of how to “establish better lines of communication” and it begins by hacking the hacks to read their communications.

And the Biden administration’s idea of better communications is to hide what happened.

When an incident spills out into the press, the Biden administration brings out Hillary Clinton’s old ‘reset button’ and announces that diplomatic meetings have made everything right again.

Even though the hack had been made public by Microsoft, the Biden administration has not directly addressed it because that might interfere with its China diplomacy. That is in keeping with its policy of refusing to talk about any Chinese attack that doesn’t happen in broad daylight.

The Biden administration initially refused to take action against China’s spy balloon and covered up reports about it while pleading with the Chinese embassy for answers. Only when photos of the balloon taken by Montana residents went viral did the administration finally shoot it down.

The State Department hadn’t wanted the spy balloon to interfere with Blinken’s trip. Even while it publicly condemned China, it was quietly appeasing it, shutting down export controls and human rights measures as an apology for the public action taken against its spy balloon.

Biden has since dismissed the spy balloon as “unintentional” and “silly” and has spent the spring and summer dispatching his top hacks to plead our case to the Communists in Beijing. The Communist dictatorship turned down a meeting with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, instead it publicly showed off a simulation in which it destroyed the USS Gerald R. Ford and conducted aggressive intercepts of Navy vessels and Air Force planes. It’s reportedly building up its spy operation in Cuba and may start actually moving troops onto the Communist island.

Rather than address China’s aggression, Biden has kept on sending more emissaries.

The exchange of hacks has been going on all summer with CIA Director Bill Burns making a ‘secret’ trip to China in June to tell the Communist spies about “the importance of maintaining open lines of communication in intelligence channels.” China’s idea of maintaining open lines of communication was to hack the CIA and expose its agents during the Obama administration.

Despite China’s high-profile hacks, the high-profile hacks keep coming. Next up, Climate Envoy John Kerry, the administration’s leading apologist for China, will visit in the middle of July. Instead of advocating for the climate, Kerry has advocated for Chinese slave labor solar panels and argued that none of its crimes, national, international or against us, compare to the grave climate threat from ordinary Americans driving to work or running their air conditioners.

It’s doubtful that China has gone to the trouble of hacking Kerry and his team. Why bother?

The message from all of these visits is that there will be no meaningful consequences. Whatever China does, the Biden administration will keep pursuing “dialogue” to maintain “open communications” to “stabilize the relationship”. And that gives China a green light to attack.

“I think there is a way to resolve, to establish a working relationship with China that benefits them and us,” Biden claimed. China already has a working relationship with us. China attacks us and we try to figure out why it would do such a thing. Spy balloons, military encounters, threats of destruction and hacks are met with diplomatic appeasement. After turning over our economy to the Communist dictatorship, we keep talking about how to fix our relationship.

The stark contrast between America’s idea of diplomacy and China’s idea of diplomacy is that we want dialogue and they want control. The People’s Republic of China is not interested in conversations or relationships, they want to know our bottom lines and anything they can exploit to gain a strategic advantage. That’s why diplomacy with China will always fail.

Generations of Chinese Communist officials came of age reading Mao’s quote that, “politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed.” Americans view diplomacy as a means of bringing nations together, while China’s Communist Party sees it as a zero-sum game. For them to win, we must lose. The more we negotiate with China, the more we lose.




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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Friday, July 28, 2023

Every Electric Car You Buy Will Fund Al Qaeda

By On July 28, 2023 In
The Taliban recently announced that, “five countries are interested in investing in the lithium mining sector in Afghanistan’s Nuristan province”. A Chinese company has already put down a $10 billion bid that would include infrastructure along with improved roads for the terror group.

Shahabuddin Delawar, the Taliban’s mining boss, boasted that, “we have 2.5 million tons in Nurestan alone. Extract it, and Afghanistan can be one of the richest countries in the world.”

And who would be in charge of an estimated $50 billion worth of lithium?

Hafiz Muhammad Agha Hakeem, the governor of the Nuristan province, recently appeared on a UN Security Council list of Taliban governors who were affiliated with Al Qaeda. The Islamic terrorist group had a stronger foothold in the area than almost any other part of Afghanistan. When Al Qaeda had been driven out of the rest of Afghanistan, it stayed on and went on fighting and killing Americans in Nuristan, While the area was named after a non-Pashtun minority who had been forcibly converted to Islam, it became a Taliban and Al Qaeda route to Pakistan.

Al Qaeda will be in charge of its share of an estimated $1 trillion in lithium in the country (not to mention the gem mines). The lithium, desperately needed for electric car batteries, will be mined by Chinese companies and resold to the United States for “green energy”.

Every electric car you buy will help fund Al Qaeda.

‘Green energy’ requires massive amounts of lithium batteries. Even while Americans were being told that switching to electric cars and a renewable power grid would lessen our dependence on middle eastern oil and avoid shortages of ‘non-renewable’ oil, we were actually becoming dependent on a material dominated by our enemies in China and Afghanistan, and Tesla, the most popular brand of electric car, is a company with sizable Saudi shareholders.

‘Renewables’ depend on non-renewable lithium mined ruthlessly by China wherever they can. The United States could mine its own lithium, much like we could drill for our own oil and gas, but the Biden administration puts roadblocks in the way of our energy independence. Climate Envoy John Kerry insists that we’re better off buying Chinese solar panels made by slave labor than to mine, drill and become independent of Beijing and, now the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

The Pentagon’s Task Force for Business and Stability Operations had called Afghanistan the “Saudi Arabia of lithium.” Now it’s the Al Qaeda of lithium instead. After justifying buying slave labor solar panels and lithium mined by poisoning entire villages from China, the same arguments will be used to justify buying lithium batteries that Al Qaeda gets a cut from.

We have no choice but to turn over our economy to our enemies to ‘save the planet’.

Al Qaeda has set up a new training camp in Nuristan where “foreign Arab fighters” are once again arriving to be trained as suicide bombers. The improved “mountain roads” that China plans to build will enable Al Qaeda and the Taliban to move suicide bombers through Pakistan in coordination with Jihadi groups like the Tehreek-e-Taliban… and from there anywhere.

While Al Qaeda used to have to rely on oil money from the Saudis, Qataris and other wealthy Muslim oil states, along with some drug smuggling, kidnapping and cash from humanitarian aid groups, it will have the opportunity to tap into enormous wealth to fund its terrorism. If that happens, Al Qaeda will not only have avoided defeat, but could become deadlier than ever.

And all of our ‘green energy’ ventures will be funding future attacks against ourselves.

Green energy will become a means of transmuting virtue signaling cash into terrorism. That may be why Biden joined the Taliban in denying the UN Security Council’s report on Al Qaeda’s presence in Afghanistan.

“I said al Qaeda would not be there. I said it wouldn’t be there. I said we’d get help from the Taliban. What’s happening now? What’s going on? Read your press. I was right.” Biden falsely claimed. The Taliban’s Foreign Affairs Ministry argued that Biden’s denial “refutes the recent report by UN Sanctions Monitoring Team.” Both Biden and the Taliban are lying about Al Qaeda.

Denying Al Qaeda’s presence will make it easier to eventually lower what few sanctions there are on the Taliban and to make us dependent not only on Communist China, but on Al Qaeda.

The Biden administration has been moving forward to eliminate most car sales by 2030. By then 67% of cars being sold on the market are supposed to be electric and unaffordable to the majority of Americans. California, Massachusetts, New York, Washington, New York and a number of other states are preparing to ban the sale of real cars by 2035. As is the EU.

While most people will no longer be able to afford to buy a new car in the next decade unless these onerous rules are overturned, those who do will send the price of lithium through the roof.

And that may also set off an unprecedented wave of Islamic terrorism.

From the Saudis and the Qataris, Islamic terrorism has always been funded by American energy needs. The downward shift to unreliable ‘green energy’ has changed nothing except that we may cut out the middle men in their desert skyscrapers and fund Al Qaeda directly.

Out of the mines of Nuristan, once known as ‘Kafiristan’ for their origins as soldiers in Alexander the Great’s army and being among the last to resist submission to Islam, will pour a stream of lithium that will taint the land around it and that will be used to fund terrorism, but that environmentalists will claim is ‘green’, ‘clean’ and ‘sustainable’ though it’s none of the above.

The mines will exist side by side with the Al Qaeda training camps packed with new recruits from the middle east traveling along the roads from Pakistan that will be built by China.

Our governments will take away our cars, our stoves and our livelihoods while forcing us to become dependent for our transportation, our energy and even our cooking on China, the Taliban and Al Qaeda all in the name of saving the planet from an imaginary crisis.

We will pay China and Al Qaeda for the privilege of driving to work or cooling our homes. And for the privilege of killing us.





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, July 26, 2023

Barbie and the Left’s War on Childhood

By On July 26, 2023 In
Barbie dolls are meant for little girls from 3 to 12, while the Barbie movie is rated PG-13. The material in the movie isn’t appropriate for children, but neither is it appropriate for adults.

Parents are expected to take young girls to the movie which is one part pink glitz, as it is being marketed through every corporate media outlet, and one part extended feminist rant denouncing men and our society. Tacky and vulgar, Barbie the movie is the work of children in adult bodies who have been given adult powers, but confuse leftist virtue signaling with adult responsibilities.

Barbie is the latest invasion of childhood spaces by adults who have never grown up. Peter Pan long ago stopped being a fantasy and became an extended societal nightmare. The majority of attendees at Disney theme parks are no longer families, but childless millennials, and the same is true of subscribers to the Disney+ streaming service. Barbie follows up on Disney’s legacy of replacing family and children’s programming with deconstructionist millennial nostalgia binges.

The theme of so many classic children’s fantasies from Peter Pan to Narnia was there was a dividing line between childhood and adulthood. A time had to come when the toys were put away and the business suits were put on. But a generation came of age that put on the business suits and kept the toys out, that held off buying a car and a home, getting married and having children, to go on playing games. This is the generation that Barbie was made for.

Past writers nurtured childhood fantasies, yet knowing that they could never truly be a part of them, while their contemporary counterparts angrily stomp all over those fantasies with a mixture of adult themes and childish bitterness. Unable to truly immerse themselves into the escapist play of their childhood, they poison the well so that children won’t be able to do it either.

If they can’t play with their old toys, no one, especially children should be allowed to play.

This is the psychodrama that drives so much of the obsessive deconstructionism of classic characters and stories. Bitter aging millennials ‘update’ children’s stories so that they are no longer for children and fill them leftist virtue signaling and political rants. The classic “if you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention” bumper stickers come to Barbie and everything else.

Writer-director Greta Gerwig brings an even dumber version of the same feminism that she used to dumb down her distorted adaptation of Little Women over to Barbie. The pink glitz and plastic sets of Barbie replace the lush period costumes of Little Women, but underneath are the same complaints about how unfair life is to women in a “patriarchal society”. Gerwig’s problem isn’t actually the ‘patriarchy’: it’s that she’s about to turn 40 and is still an unserious child.

The ‘patriarchy’ didn’t make Gerwig decide to date her much older current husband and Barbie co-writer Noah Baumbach after he broke up with his older wife, Jennifer Jason Leigh (and then skewered her in a movie, ‘Marriage Story’, in which she’s replaced by Scarlett Johansson.) Like previous cinematic feminist heroine Lena Dunham, Gerwig confuses her bad judgment with the patriarchy and uses a movie about a toy to blame society because she can’t make adult decisions.

Barbie captures the perpetual immaturity of media feminism better than ever Disney could. It’s a $300 million production that amounts to a session of aging women acting out a childish feminist narrative with Barbie and Ken dolls come to life. Underneath the pop tunes and fashions, its message is that being a woman and a doll are unhappy things. Call it a ‘late stage’ feminism in which there is little for women to aspire to beyond the spite that the movie spits at men.

What does feminism even mean in a world in which women dominate college admissions, but they also officially no longer exist? As marriages and families stretch further into the distance, what’s left except, as Gerwig’s counterpart in the movie played by America Ferrera does, than to find some toys to play with while mourning the rites of passage of adulthood and aging…

The realities of human existence were once confronted through faith and meaning, but Gerwig was raised a Unitarian Universalist, who went to Catholic School and loves the “ritual of religion”, having gone to “mosque and to synagogues”, while Noah Baumbach, despite making movies depicting Jewish characters, is the son of a Jewish father and a Protestant mother.

Faith and meaning are not on the table when all you have is pop culture and your old toys.

Toys writ large dominate Hollywood. The Marvel Cinematic Universe has swallowed up most of the industry and serious actors line up for their opportunity to appear in it. Mattel’s new CEO decided to take the Disney approach and view the toy company as a bunch of IPs that could be turned around into deconstructionist movies for depressed adults who hate being grown up.

Next up is a ‘surrealistic’ Barbie movie that will dig into ‘millennial angst’ and “focus on some of the trials and tribulations of being thirtysomething, growing up with Barney—just the level of disenchantment within the generation.” And the possibilities are endless.

With properties like American Girl, Hot Wheels, and Masters of the Universe, Mattel could have its own miserable cinematic universe for dysfunctional overgrown children who cry and denounce society while playing with their old toys. Just imagine how a Hot Wheels movie can lecture us about the environment or what He-Man could tell us about toxic masculinity.

It’s funny, but it’s also tragic. A generation of adult children have ruined childhood, not just by wrecking the privileged fantasy worlds that children naturally create, but by trying to make children into miniature adults. The sexualization of children in schools and pop culture is the natural outgrowth of adults who, like child molesters, think of themselves as still being children.

Adults protect and nurture children. A society in which bitter adults exploit children, deny them the safe harbor of their dreams and force them to act out personal and political psychodramas for their benefit is a deeply sick society. Like the Islamic terrorists who train children to kill, the child soldiers of the pop culture revolution are told from an early age that the world is on the brink of destruction and that their family members and friends are evil people. And that their mission is to dedicate their lives and personal happiness to changing the world.

Children who are denied safety and security, politicized at an early age, sexually groomed, become broken adults who are never able to move past their childhood traumas. And that is the ideal audience for feminist Barbie, depressed Barney and a whole world of broken toys.

Hollywood, like the rest of the leftist cultural empire, has collapsed the distinctions between adults and children. Appropriating and colonizing the culture of childhood is a generational imperialism that reflects the immaturity of adults and the abuse of children. Adults who refuse to let go of their toys, are also refusing to let children be children.

Instead, they force children to grow up while they never do.





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, July 25, 2023

Affirmative Action Battle Moves on to the Military

By On July 25, 2023 In
One of the Biden administration’s big arguments for racially discriminating against white and Asian students in college admissions was the need for military diversity. More than half of the ‘national interest’ section in its amicus brief argued that the military “depends on a well-qualified and diverse officer corps” which requires that colleges select for diversity over merit.

“It is not possible to achieve that diversity without race-conscious admissions, including at the nation’s service academies,” Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar told the Supreme Court.

The Roberts decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard shot down affirmative action as a legal practice, but punted on the question of racial discrimination within the military and its service branch academies. A footnote briefly stated that, “no military academy is a party to these cases, however, and none of the courts below addressed the propriety of race-based admissions systems in that context. This opinion also does not address the issue, in light of the potentially distinct interests that military academies may present.”

The idea that racial discrimination should be illegal at colleges, but still legal at service branch academies like the Air Force Academy and the Naval Academy, is a loophole. Justice Sotomayor argued that the exception proves that “the Fourteenth Amendment does not categorically prohibit the use of race in college admissions.” And it’s hard to deny her reasoning. Either racially discriminating against students is legal or it’s illegal. National security can only go so far to justify an illegal practice especially when it’s a social element with an indirect effect.

Democrats quickly attacked Justice Roberts for seemingly leaving the carveout on military diversity that the Biden administration had demanded as a matter of national security.

“Adding insult to injury is that the Court exempted military service academies, like West Point and the Naval Academy, from its own ruling,” Rep. Elissa Slotkin complained. “So the majority on the Court does in fact recognize the inherent importance of a diverse military and that diversity makes our country not only more fair, but more stable and secure — but they refuse to allow our colleges and universities to hold the same values.”

“This decision is deeply upsetting but outright grotesque for exempting military academies. The court is saying diversity shouldn’t matter, EXCEPT when deciding who can fight and die for our country,” Rep. Jason Crow tweeted, inverting an illegal racial preference into a disadvantage.

Justice Roberts’ footnote and the outcry from Democrats and Republicans over the status of service branch academies suggests that affirmative action at service branch academies may have to be revisited at some point. Meanwhile some members of Congress are acting.

Senator Roger Wicker, a ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, plans to introduce his ‘Military Merit, Fairness, and Equality Act of 2023’ as an amendment to the defense bill which would “prohibit the Department of Defense from prioritizing the demographic characteristics of service members above individual merit and demonstrated performance.”

The senator has said that as part of that his amendment “would further prohibit our military service academies from engaging in race-based affirmative action.”

This legislation isn’t likely to advance in a Democrat Senate, but may be the beginning of an important conversation. Affirmative action did not arrive in the military yesterday, it has been around for far too long, but in recent years it has escalated to an alarming degree.

In May, an exclusive investigation by Front Page Magazine and the David Horowitz Freedom Center revealed that Air Force Chief of Staff Charles Q. Brown Jr., Biden’s nominee to succeed Milley as the next Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had signed off on a quota that would keep the number of white male officers in the Air Force down to only 43%.

Even before Senate hearings on Brown’s nomination get underway, the American Accountability Foundation filed a complaint against the Air Force boss on the grounds that “General Brown has made statements in favor of making hiring and promotion decisions in the Air Force based on race.” It notes Brown’s public statements such as “I hire for diversity” and “I purposely build my office, my front office, and my team with diverse” backgrounds.

Military officials have stated publicly that service academies “employ race as a factor in recruiting and admission policies and decisions.” This is illegal, but there’s a reason that it’s been the trump card of proponents of this form of systemic racism. Many things get a pass when national security is introduced into the equation. National security has been used by the Biden administration to argue that abortion and transgender procedures on children should be legal. The Biden military brass have chosen to halt confirmation of 150 nominees, including the new commandant of the Marine Corps, rather than abandon its allegiance to abortion.

While the Biden administration has no interest in winning any wars, it wants to fight its culture wars using the military. Service branch academies have become battlegrounds on issues such as BLM and the LGBTQ movement. The Biden administration has also led a purge of alumni and conservatives from boards, including from the Air Force Academy and the Naval Academy.

Chief Justice Roberts may have wanted to avoid addressing racial discrimination at service branch academies, but it is an inescapable question. Unlike Harvard and Yale, there isn’t a sympathetic high-achieving minority group in the crosshairs. Asians are seen as underrepresented in the military and especially the officer corps, but their numbers have been growing sharply.

Asian students and candidates generally suffer from racial preferences in academic settings, but the military is still a case where they are seen as statistically underrepresented and less likely to be impacted by affirmative action. That is another reason why the Left would like to take the battle over systemic racism in college admissions into the service branch academies.

A legal battle over racial discrimination in and around the military would have white people as the victims. And not only white people, but poor white people. As the Biden amicus brief notes, “West Point, for example, reports that its efforts to emphasize socioeconomic status have actually reduced racial diversity”. What that means is that providing special preferences to poor kids reduced ‘diversity’ by helping poor white candidates. The same people who form the backbone of the active duty combat military. Discriminating by race is required, the Biden administration implicitly admitted, to keep poor white kids down in the ranks.

Those are the same poor white kids taking jobs at an Amazon warehouse or a fast food place instead of risking their lives for a military brass that wants them to be ready to die without hope of rising in the ranks to a real career because they were born with the wrong skin color.

There is a compelling moral case to be made for ending racial discrimination in the military. And an even more compelling national security case. Senator Wicker noted that, “a recent survey found nearly 7 in 10 active members believe the armed forces are being politicized and that this would affect whether they encourage their children to enlist”. The Biden administration claims that it needs to racially discriminate for national security, but its racism harms national security.

The Supreme Court needs to have the courage to do to systemic racism in the military what it did to systemic racism in civilian higher education. A nation, a society and a system cannot endure half-slave and half-free, half-racist and half-equal. It’s time to end military racism.



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, July 24, 2023

Muslim Mobs Get a Pass for Assaulting Jews in NYC and LA

By On July 24, 2023 In
In May 2021, Joseph Borgen was violently assaulted by a Muslim mob while walking down the street in midtown Manhattan in the vicinity of an anti-Israel rally. The Jewish man was kicked, punched, pepper sprayed, beaten with a metal object, and ended up in the hospital.

Borgen was taunted as a “dirty Jew” and the assault was caught on video. “They were kicking me in my ribs, my stomach,” he described.

Waseem Awawdeh, the best known of the attackers, was out two days later. Even after Awawdeh reportedly told prison guards, “If I could do it again, I would do it again”, Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg offered him a plea deal of only six months in prison. After public outrage, including protests and condemnations by elected officials, it was raised to eighteen months.

Faisal Elezzi, another of the attackers, got off with probation and an obligation to complete “anti-bias programming”.

That same month in Los Angeles, a pro-terrorist Muslim convoy was driving down the street near the Jewish neighborhood of Fairfax, and began harassing outdoor diners at a sushi place. Members of the Muslim mob waved a PLO terror flag, demanded to know who at the restaurant was Jewish, and witnesses said chanted, “death to the Jews” and “free Palestine”.

The Muslim attackers reportedly punched, kicked, threw bottles and pepper sprayed their targets who were members of the Persian Jewish community who had fled Islamic violence in Iran.

Samer Jayylusi and Xavier Pabon were arrested and immediately released on bail. They have since been sentenced to probation and ordered to visit a Holocaust museum.






The assaults in Manhattan and Los Angeles went viral. Videos of Muslim mobs attacking Jews made their way around the country and the world. They ended up appearing in national news stories. And yet most of those suspects got off with a slap on the wrist and diversity training.

“We take these cases extraordinarily seriously. That sort of hate has no place in Manhattan,” Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg had claimed.

“A hate crime is a crime against all of us,” Los Angeles DA George Gascon had promised, referring to the case. “My office is committed to doing all we can to make Los Angeles County a place where our diversity is embraced and protected.”

Both district attorneys have been linked to the pro-crime progressive prosecutor networks championed by George Soros as well as other leftist billionaires. And their promises of justice evaporated into consequences that could barely qualify as a slap on the wrist.

Of the four defendants sentenced so far in these four cases, whose sentences are known, three received probation and anti-bias classes. 75% of the perpetrators in these Muslim mobs may have spent only a few days in prison and have walked away with nothing except some classes.

The message that has been sent by DA Alvin Bragg, DA George Gascon and Judge Laura F Priver of the California Superior Court is that Muslim attacks on Jews will go unpunished. According to reports, Judge Priver thought that “counseling and Museum of Tolerance program was a better solution than sending the two to state prison as the prosecution had requested.”

While these two Muslim mob attacks on Jews caught the attention of the world, there have been individual assaults that have gone unnoticed and mostly unpunished.

Also in 2021, Suleiman Othman accosted Blake Zavadsky in a Brooklyn neighborhood with a sizable Jewish and Muslim presence and demanded, “Why do you support those dirty Jews? What are you doing in my neighborhood?” Othman then assaulted the Jewish man.

“The hateful and unprovoked assault this defendant admitted to today left one victim hurt, but also shook an entire community,” District Attorney Eric Gonzalez declared. “His conviction, jail time and probation should send a message that this kind of intolerance has serious consequences.”

In reality, Othman was offered a six month plea deal and when he turned that down, got only 60 days in prison and probation.

DA Gonzalez, like Bragg and Gascon, is a pro-crime prosecutor who ran on a platform of reducing incarceration. He’s a member of pro-crime organizations like the Soros-funded Fair and Just Prosecution alliance of prosecutors who commit to giving criminals a pass.

Gonzalez’s office had previously resisted filling hate crime charges against Farrukh Afzal, a Muslim cab driver who tried to run over a Jewish man, then after failing to hit him, got out and assaulted a second Jewish man, Rabbi Lipa Schwartz, 62, while shouting, “Allah, Allah” and declaring that he wanted to “kill all Jews”.

The Pakistani Muslim severely beat the rabbi who had been on the way to synagogue for morning prayers. He shoved him to the ground and repeatedly hit him in the head. When another Jewish man attempted to intervene, Afzal attacked him too, until he was finally restrained.

The DA’s office had attempted to dismiss it as a road rage incident with no hate crime element to it even though Afzal had eight prior arrests. Eventually he was convicted, but not of hate crimes, and while he was supposed to have been sentenced, there is no word on the outcome. No records appear for anyone by that name in the city system while the state system shows a man by that name who committed assault had a parole interview date last year.

Antisemitic attacks are routinely greeted by promises that they are being taken very seriously followed by the offenders quietly getting a slap on the wrist. Millions watched videos or read news stories about the violent Muslim mob attacks in New York City and Los Angeles. Only thousands are aware that most of the perpetrators walked away with anti-bias classes.

Pro-crime DAs like Bragg, Gonzalez and Gascon claim to take ‘hate’ very seriously, while remaining committed to a criminal justice reform movement that rewards criminals.

It is difficult to know to what extent the slaps on the wrist for Muslim mob attacks on Jews are due to sympathy for the ideological antisemitic motives of the perpetrators or a general belief that violent criminals should be coddled rather than being locked up. But to the victims it really doesn’t make much of a difference. The targets of Muslim antisemitic violence may be collateral damage in a pro-crime movement or leftist solidarity with terror supporters.

But the message to both Muslim mobs and the Jewish community is abundantly clear.

In the two cities with some of the largest Jewish populations in the country, Jews are fair game. Muslim thugs have little to fear from the legal system when they attack Jews except a few days in prison and a visit to a Holocaust museum.




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, July 23, 2023

White Men Face Systemic Racism in the Workplace

By On July 23, 2023 In
A recent survey revealed that 1 in 6 hiring managers had been told to avoid hiring members of a particular gender and race. Normally editorials and cable news hits would have been scheduled, politicians would have held hearings and the civil rights apparatus of every federal and state agency, including the Department of Labor, would have launched massive investigations.

But since the group being discriminated against were white men, civil rights professionals and the media gave each other a thumbs up and congratulated themselves on a job well done.

Even while academics, journalists and politicians went on blathering about the nonsensical notion of ‘systemic racism’ toward minorities in a country where white people pass themselves off as minorities for career advancement, educational attainment and business opportunities, the survey peeled back the real face of systemic racism.

52% of hiring managers believe that their workplace practices racial discrimination and 50% believe that they will be fired if they don’t go along with it by refusing to hire white men.

While the media pushed ridiculous stories claiming that highways, soap dispensers, and national parks were guilty of systemic racism, the revelation that more than half of the country’s hiring managers are practicing systemic hiring discrimination for fear of losing their jobs may just as well have been the wind blowing through a forgotten corner of a southwestern desert.

The exposure of the most pervasive systemic racism in generations was met with yawns.

Surveys are a dime a dozen, but at least a decade of different surveys from different firms all happen to point in the same direction. An Ernst & Young study from 2017 found that a third believed that white men were being overlooked. That same year a majority of white people answering an NPR survey said that they believed white people faced discrimination.

31% of that group described being discriminated against when applying for work, 19% had faced discrimination when it came to promotions, and 18% when applying for college.

While media elites sneered at such surveys and dismissed them by pointing to the number of white men at Fortune 500 companies, it was working class white men who were likeliest to believe in discrimination against whites. 65% of whites without college degrees believed that white people faced discrimination, as did 64% of those earning less than $50,000 a year.

The white people being discriminated against have the least wealth and power.

A Pew survey from 2018 found that 20% of those who reported racial discrimination at work were white. “White males are an undesirable classification currently in environments seeking the managed utopia of balance and ‘diversity,’” one worker said. “People with the same skills and experience, but different ethnicities, have different opportunities. A person formally classed as a minority will get preference over a white,” another stated.

What’s behind this systemic discrimination? Two three letter acronyms: ESG and DEI.

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs fueled by Environmental, Social, and Corporate governance are the backbones of the new systemic racism. Racial discrimination at work of the kind described by so many workers and hiring managers has its roots in government, private equity and corporate programs from the Biden administration’s mandate that every agency develop an equity program, to mandatory diversity statements at universities, to ESG scores.

DEI is a fundamental part of ESG scores demanded by woke investment firms and governments. Implementing DEI programs in pursuit of ESG scores leads to systemic racism.

Take Google: the company with one of the highest ESG scores in the world. How does the ESG sausage get made? The Big Tech monopoly’s diversity report boasts that it “achieved our best year yet for hiring women globally, as well as black+ and latinx+ employees in the U.S.”

A lawsuit by a former Google recruiter, Arne Wilberg, cast light on how this is achieved.

Wilberg’s lawsuit appeared to provide documented evidence that Google had “implemented clear and irrefutable policies, memorialized in writing and consistently implemented in practice,
of systematically discriminating in favor of job applicants who are Hispanic, African American,or
female, and against Caucasian and Asian men.” For example, “the manager of YouTube’s
Tech Staffing Management Team, Allison Alogna, wrote an e-mail to the staffing team in which
she writes, ‘Hi Team: Please continue with L3 candidates in process and only accept new L3
candidates that are from historically underrepresented groups.’”

This is what DEI, ESG and employment discrimination looks like in the workplace. Had a major corporation been caught refusing to hire non-Asian minorities, there would have been a storm, multi-million dollar fines and a national conversation. But five years later documented evidence of employment discrimination against white and Asian employees by one of the biggest companies in the world have led to nothing. And that is all too typical of the double standard.

Compare that to a $20 million fine leveled against Walmart for using physical ability tests for grocery order filler positions and a $118 million Google settlement for underpaying women.

To paraphrase a long dead white man, “why does racism never prosper? If it prospers, none dare call it racism.” The only forms of bigotry we punish are those disapproved of by the state and that, by definition, means that they do not represent systemic racism. The only real systemic racism is that which the system and the state implement, but do not acknowledge.

Systemic racism is a form of bigotry that is approved and implemented by the state. The best way to spot it is by its pervasiveness and the lack of any government action against it.

White men and women are the only groups that can be safely discriminated against in hiring policies and promotions without investigations, million dollar fines or legal recourse. And they are therefore the ones who are most in need of workplace protections and civil rights action.

ESG ratings and DEI policies are the only forms of systemic racism still tolerated in the modern workplace. Eliminating them will require taking on the system even as it hides behind finding racism everywhere, from showers to sweatpants, except in its own ‘anti-racism’ policies.

The real systemic racism is backed by the system. And there’s no room for it in 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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Friday, July 21, 2023

While U.S. Diplomats Negotiated With China, China Hacked Them

By On July 21, 2023 In
In June, America and China traded hacks.

Secretary of State Blinken traveled to Beijing in a visit that had been delayed for a few months after the public learned that China had been flying a spy balloon over America. After days of “high-level talks”, the Biden administration official claimed that the trip was a success.

“We have made progress and we are moving forward,” the State Department official declared.

Meanwhile, China had been hacking.the State Department. While Secretary of State Blinken and State Department officials prepped for the biggest Chinese diplomatic exchange of the administration, Chinese hackers pulled off an ingenious targeted attack aimed at accessing the emails of State Department and other government officials including Blinken’s own messages.

The Biden administration and China had different definitions of “moving forward”.

Secretary of State Blinken learned that China had tried to hack his emails a day before he was set to visit Beijing, and he chose to go ahead with the trip without making any public mention of it, not wanting to spoil the photo op. The previous scheduling of the trip had been bumped because of China’s spy balloon and Blinken chose to demonstrate to the enemy that no amount of abusive behavior was going to stop the Biden administration’s appeasement.

The Biden administration’s idea of diplomacy was talking to China, while the People’s Republic wanted to know what Blinken and other top officials were going to say before they got there. Besides targeting Blinken and State Department officials, Chinese hackers also came after Commerce Secretary Raimondo and members of her department. That won’t stop Raimondo from visiting China later this year. No Chinese attack or provocation will stop the appeasement.

Secretary of State Blinken turned to the cameras in Beijing and stated that an agreement had been reached that “sustained communication at senior levels is the best way to responsibly manage our differences” even while knowing that China’s idea of sustained communication was trying to get at his emails. China has its own idea of how to “establish better lines of communication” and it begins by hacking the hacks to read their communications.

And the Biden administration’s idea of better communications is to hide what happened.

When an incident spills out into the press, the Biden administration brings out Hillary Clinton’s old ‘reset button’ and announces that diplomatic meetings have made everything right again.

Even though the hack had been made public by Microsoft, the Biden administration has not directly addressed it because that might interfere with its China diplomacy. That is in keeping with its policy of refusing to talk about any Chinese attack that doesn’t happen in broad daylight.

The Biden administration initially refused to take action against China’s spy balloon and covered up reports about it while pleading with the Chinese embassy for answers. Only when photos of the balloon taken by Montana residents went viral did the administration finally shoot it down.

The State Department hadn’t wanted the spy balloon to interfere with Blinken’s trip. Even while it publicly condemned China, it was quietly appeasing it, shutting down export controls and human rights measures as an apology for the public action taken against its spy balloon.

Biden has since dismissed the spy balloon as “unintentional” and “silly” and has spent the spring and summer dispatching his top hacks to plead our case to the Communists in Beijing. The Communist dictatorship turned down a meeting with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, instead it publicly showed off a simulation in which it destroyed the USS Gerald R. Ford and conducted aggressive intercepts of Navy vessels and Air Force planes. It’s reportedly building up its spy operation in Cuba and may start actually moving troops onto the Communist island.

Rather than address China’s aggression, Biden has kept on sending more emissaries.

The exchange of hacks has been going on all summer with CIA Director Bill Burns making a ‘secret’ trip to China in June to tell the Communist spies about “the importance of maintaining open lines of communication in intelligence channels.” China’s idea of maintaining open lines of communication was to hack the CIA and expose its agents during the Obama administration.

Despite China’s high-profile hacks, the high-profile hacks keep coming. Next up, Climate Envoy John Kerry, the administration’s leading apologist for China, will visit in the middle of July. Instead of advocating for the climate, Kerry has advocated for Chinese slave labor solar panels and argued that none of its crimes, national, international or against us, compare to the grave climate threat from ordinary Americans driving to work or running their air conditioners.

It’s doubtful that China has gone to the trouble of hacking Kerry and his team. Why bother?

The message from all of these visits is that there will be no meaningful consequences. Whatever China does, the Biden administration will keep pursuing “dialogue” to maintain “open communications” to “stabilize the relationship”. And that gives China a green light to attack.

“I think there is a way to resolve, to establish a working relationship with China that benefits them and us,” Biden claimed. China already has a working relationship with us. China attacks us and we try to figure out why it would do such a thing. Spy balloons, military encounters, threats of destruction and hacks are met with diplomatic appeasement. After turning over our economy to the Communist dictatorship, we keep talking about how to fix our relationship.

The stark contrast between America’s idea of diplomacy and China’s idea of diplomacy is that we want dialogue and they want control. The People’s Republic of China is not interested in conversations or relationships, they want to know our bottom lines and anything they can exploit to gain a strategic advantage. That’s why diplomacy with China will always fail.

Generations of Chinese Communist officials came of age reading Mao’s quote that, “politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed.” Americans view diplomacy as a means of bringing nations together, while China’s Communist Party sees it as a zero-sum game. For them to win, we must lose. The more we negotiate with China, the more we lose.





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, July 20, 2023

The Islamization of North Dakota

By On July 20, 2023 In
Three blocks from where Mohamad Barakat opened fire on police officers and firefighters, the Islamic Society of Fargo-Moorhead squats across from a school bus company. Nearby are other elements of the new enclave like the Somali Community Development group which offers English and citizenship classes and the Al Hamdi Restaurant from whose vicinity an eyewitness reported hearing the shots that took the life of one police officer and wounded two others.

“The first thing we always want to know in a situation like this is, ‘Why?”Why would somebody do this?'” Chief David Zibolski wondered. Perhaps he should ask in Fargo’s own Little Mogadishu and inquire of the politicians who turned Fargo into a refugee camp.

It is not even the first Islamic terrorist from Fargo.

In 2016, Dahir Adan, a Somali refugee who penetrated the country along with a massive family that was tragically resettled in Fargo, went on a stabbing spree in a St. Cloud, MN mall. The Somali refugee had gone around the mall shouting “Allahu Akbar” dedicating the violence to his Islamic deity, and demanding to know if potential targets were Muslims before stabbing them.

ISIS claimed credit for the attack after Adam, like Mohamad, was fatally shot and killed, but not until after he stabbed 10 Americans. Fargo Muslims however quickly rushed to play the victim.

“Somali mall workers are afraid to go to their jobs today. I was even afraid to use public restrooms,” Hukun Abdullahi, a local nonprofit leader, had claimed.

Moorhead Mayor Del Rae Williams admitted that her biggest concern from the Muslim terrorist attack was that, “the more we make, you know, these kind of things an issue, the more people are abusive to (refugees) publicly.”

Police Chief David Todd denied, “I don’t have any indication that radicalization is occurring here in Fargo.” Seven years later, Officer Jake Wallin, who had survived Afghanistan and Iraq, was murdered by a Muslim attacker in Fargo. There’s never any indication until someone dies.

The violent attacks by Mohamad Barakat and Dahir Adan may surprise people who still think of Fargo, North Dakota as quintessentially American. Refugee resettlement has changed that.

8% of Fargo is foreign born. Much of that population comes from the Middle East and Islamic areas in Africa like Sudan and Somalia. Even much of the European refugee contingent is Bosnian. The massive influx of refugee resettlement allowed local politicians to boast that Fargo was growing much faster than the rest of the state or the country.

Fargo’s population shot up from 74,000 in 1990 to 90,000 in 2000 to 128,000 today. Somalis flooded Fargo, as did Iraqis, Bosnians and Bangladeshis. Amid the pure snows rose mosques, ethnic welfare nonprofits, Halal markets and other outposts of the new population.

By 2000, six hundred Somali families occupied Fargo, by 2004, Somalis outnumbered Hispanics in the Fargo public school system. Refugee resettlement, led by Lutheran Social Services, continued bombarding the state with foreign migrants, 70% of them embedded into the Fargo area.

“Millennials who are increasingly working in these jobs like to have a multicultural area that has differences in people,” Fargo Mayor Tim Mahoney contended. “We really need a diverse population to be more like a normal American city.”

When Fargo City Commissioner Dave Piepkorn had warned that millions of taxpayer dollars were being spent on refugee resettlement and that the area was becoming more dangerous, Somalis launched a recall campaign. Piepkorn has since been stripped of Deputy Mayor status.

Little wonder that few elected officials have had the courage to speak out against what is being done to Fargo and North Dakota.

Lutheran Social Services of North Dakota, its coffers swollen by dumping migrants from Islamic terror states on the area, suddenly faced a dieback under the Trump administration. The organization filed for bankruptcy and shut down in 2021, but rather than offering any relief, things actually got worse for Fargo and North Dakota.

Under Republican Gov. Doug Burgum, the former head of Lutheran Social Services, became the Executive Policy Director at the state’s Department of Human Services. Burgum, who is now running for president, announced that the state would take over refugee resettlement from Lutheran Social Services. Burgum had previously turned down an offer from the Trump administration to allow governors to end the practice of refugee dumping.

While Gov. Burgum claimed that the state would handle the invasion more responsibly than Lutheran Social Services had, bringing in the head of LSS put the lie to any such notion. Gov. Burgum had proclaimed that April would be Arab American Heritage Month, not to honor the Christian Lebanese, actual refugees who had first fled Islamic terror to move to North Dakota, but those Muslims who “built the first mosque in the United States of America.”

By 2022, the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service North Dakota had taken over for the LSS and 78 Afghans, along with Syrians, Somalis and Iraqis were being resettled in the state.

That same year Rep. Hamida Dakane, who wears a hijab, became the first Somali legislator in the state House of Representatives from a district in Fargo. Dakane had found fame after an alleged vandalism incident at the Moorhead Fargo Islamic Center, holding up a “Hate Has No Home in Moorhead” sign as representatives of “Lutheran, Catholic, Presbyterian and Satanism” movements gathered to help. Then she joined Fargo’s Human Rights Commission.

“I am not representing a Muslim state,” Dakane, who entered this country on a student visa, noted. “There is a lot of things in Islam that doesn’t align with Democrats, but that doesn’t apply to the community.”

Mohamad Barakat may have had less patience waiting for North Dakota to become Islamic.

Fargo is slowly getting there. Somali restaurants, halal markets and ethnic associations are dotting the map. Especially around the area where Mohamad Barkat murdered a police officer. School districts are spending a fortune dealing with non-English speakers, primarily Somalis and Kurds, and a great deal of money goes to subsidize Headstart and food stamps.

Gangs proliferate trafficking in drugs and prostitution. And worse crimes appear and disappear.

Omar Mohamed Kalmio, a Somali refugee who shot and killed his American Sioux girlfriend, her mother, brother and another family member in nearby Minot, is still fighting his life sentence. Kalmio should have been in ICE custody after he and a group of Somalis had previously stabbed a man in the back with a knife.

In Grand Forks, Hawo Osman Ahmed, had allegedly threatened women with a knife. “Come over here I’m going to cut you,” she had warned, “I’m going to slice your neck.”

“I feel like I’m a Muslim woman who’s being attacked because I am a Muslim woman living in Grand Forks,” she later complained.

Authorities generally steer clear of such cases if they know what’s good for them. The prosecution of a sex trafficking ring by the Somali Outlaws gang across the country which allegedly involved girls as young as twelve was shut down by federal authorities, advocates and political pressure amid claims of racism, Islamophobia and cultural differences .

“We are heartbroken by this tragic loss,” Gov. Burgum said in response to the Somali act of violence that killed one police officer and wounded two others. “We also pray for the full recovery of the officers and civilian who were wounded in this horrible incident.”

‘Horrible incidents’ like these could be averted by ending refugee resettlement.

Gov. Burgum refused to end refugee resettlement when he had the opportunity to do so. The blood of the victims of refugee resettlement are on the hands of those who enable 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.

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Tuesday, July 18, 2023

While Navy Pushes 'Pride', a Third of Attack Subs Are Out of Order

By On July 18, 2023 In
On June 16, 2023, a date which will live in infamy, the Pearl Harbor base featured the story of Lt. Nick Grant, an “out gay cisgender man” who was a co-chair of the Naval Medical Force Pacific Transgender Care Team (NMFP TGCT).

The title of the Pride Month feature was “serving with pride”.

The Navy’s medical service, which can’t seem to do anything about active duty personnel killing themselves, has multiple “transgender care teams” for different regions composed of multiple specialists for different areas to “oversee and, in many cases, provide mental health, hormonal, and surgical interventions as needed to facilitate the gender transition process.”

There are some who say that the Navy ought to be focused on other things. Like getting its submarines to work. In the latest numbers, nearly 40% of attack subs are out of commission.

With only 31 subs operationally ready, the US Navy is more unready than ever to face off against the People’s Liberation Army Submarine Force of Communist China.

In 2017, 28% of submarines were out of commission. By 2022, it was 33%, and now it’s 37%. At the rate that the woke Naval brass are going, most subs will soon be out of order.

Under Biden, the number of operational nuclear powered attack subs has never gone above 33 out of 49. A third of our submarine attack fleet being out of order has become the new normal.

If only the Navy could repair subs as quickly as its transgender care teams castrate sailors.

As the U.S. Pacific Fleet (SUBPAC) commander responsible for 37 attack and ballistic missile submarines, Rear Admiral J.T. Jablon is “committed to broadening the diversity, equity, and inclusion of our Submarine Force”.

“Diverse representation without equity and inclusion degrades our readiness. Barriers to inclusion are the unconscious biases we carry without our awareness,” J.T. Jablon claimed in the official DEI statement. Everyone in the submarine fleet must be subjected to racial struggle sessions and political indoctrination, opportunities must be awarded based on race.

Not only hasn’t DEI improved readiness, but submarine readiness has drastically dropped.

“Diversity and inclusion are cornerstones of high organizational performance and mission effectiveness,” J.T. Jablon argued. The state of the submarine fleet proves otherwise.

The Navy is more diverse than ever. Pride Month is celebrated at American naval bases all across the Pacific. And even the most basic functions of the fleet are out of order.

When Biden nominated Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro, a Democrat fundraiser, the former contractor was supposed to untangle the supply chain issues. But his company, SBG, benefited from government contracts as a “minority-owned business and a service disabled veteran owned small business” and he’s shown no ability to fix the Navy’s problems.

Del Toro, who had served on the Naval Academy Alumni Association’s Special Commission on Culture, Diversity, and Inclusion to purge political dissent, announced that his focus would be on China, Culture, Climate, and COVID. The US Navy is going green and promised that, like California, it would reach “net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050”.

The Navy’s 2023 budget wastes $718 million on fighting global warming. That’s more than 10% of the $6.2 billion in maintenance costs for 151 Navy vessels. If the Navy focused as much on getting its vessels operational as it does on global warming, identity politics and other partisan leftist causes, we would have subs in the water and have nothing to fear from China.

Instead, China is laughing while the US Navy commits to “100 percent zero-emission vehicles by 2035” and “100 percent carbon pollution-free electricity” and has partly achieved its goal by having “37 percent zero-emission attack submarines” sitting and doing nothing.

“They have 13 shipyards, in some cases their shipyard has more capacity — one shipyard has more capacity than all of our shipyards combined. That presents a real threat,” Del Toro observed of China’s shipyards. We could have shipyards too, but they ‘emit’ things.

At a Naval diversity summit, Secretary Del Toro told senior leaders that, “in order to maintain our strategic edge, the Navy and Marine Corps team must operationalize innovative and cohesive initiatives, rooted in DEI’s goals.” Our strategic edge is blunted, the fleet is failing and our capabilities are falling behind China while our military operationalizes leftist political agendas.

Instead of working on vessels, the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard urges everyone to become an “ally” and consult “reputable sources like the Trevor Project, the Human Rights Campaign, and GLAAD.”

Meanwhile, a GAO report found that ‘steaming hours’ for Navy vessels had consistently decreased even as the DOD treated the number of the decreased as classified information. Navy officials responded to the maintenance backlogs, not by improving performance, but by trying to decommission and reduce the number of ships in the fleet to improve the numbers.

In 2019, more than half of the aircraft carriers were not ready to deploy. The US Navy is already badly backed up just repairing ships on routine deployments. In the event of a naval military conflict, another GAO report found that it would be absolutely overwhelmed.

The GAO report stated that the Navy “is in the early stages of determining how it will provide battle damage repair during a great power conflict.” The Navy has spent far more time thinking about how it will implement DEI programs and castration opportunities for sailors than it has how it will cope with repairing battle damage during a war.

The shipyards are not ready with “more than half the equipment at the shipyards is past its expected service life.” The submarines are not ready, with only 31 mission capable attack subs. And the fleet is not ready for a military conflict with a GAO report warning that “the Navy could handle a single battle damage event,” but they were “uncertain how the Navy might handle multiple simultaneous or near-simultaneous events”. But the DEI indoctrination is ready.

92% of ship fires may be going unreported, but Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday is on track with his true mission. “My goal is to put the Navy in a place over the next 20 years where we’re the most diverse service in the DoD,” Gilday told the State of the Navy.

China’s goal is to have the largest Navy in the world. After achieving that goal in 2020, it has kept on building and aims to have 400 vessels. But we will have the most diverse Navy. Our ships won’t work, but our struggle sessions will. We won’t win any wars except on ourselves.

The People’s Republic of China may take pride in ruling the seas, but we’ll take pride in Pride.



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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