Category Archives: Culture

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Blogging from France! This is how the good and noble 'Palestinians' treated the hostages they seized.

Ville de Nice, France (8:43 AM local time) — In the ‘First World,’ we at least feed even the worst of the prisoners.

One thing is certain: even if you do not particularly like Jews, or know any Jews, for those of us in the Western world, members of Western civilization, the Jews of Israel are the last, easternmost bastion of Western civilization.

That’s what happened to the six hostages murdered just before the Israel Defense Force got there. The reports from the autopsies found that they had attempted to defend themselves, bravely but futilely, at the end.

One of the female hostages, an adult woman, weighed less than 90 lb when her body was recovered. This is what the Arabs would do to you, if they had the power.

Click on the tweet to see the extension.

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What did we achieve?

Captain Harry Wales in Afghanistan.

There was little choice for the United States to go into Afghanistan following the September 11th attacks. There were 2,459 American military deaths, along with 20,769 Americans wounded. Along with that were 1,822 civilian contractors and 18 Central Intelligence Agency operatives killed in the two months short of twenty years we were there. 457 British soldiers were killed there, and another 2,209 wounded seriously enough to be admitted to field hospitals.

Even His Royal Highness, Prince Henry of Wales, before he went bat guano insane over Meghan Markle, served in Afghanistan, as an Apache helicopter pilot.

Al Qaeda was routed reasonably quickly, although Osama bin Laden wasn’t killed until May 2, 2011, at a compound hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan. His successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, lasted until July 31, 2022, after the United States had evacuated troops from the country, by an American drone strike at a villa in Kabul that he used.

Al Qaeda Is Back—and Thriving—in Afghanistan

The architects of 9/11 are profiting from gold and gem mines in the Taliban-led country.

By Lynne O’Donnell, a columnist at Foreign Policy and an Australian journalist and author. | March 22, 2024

Al Qaeda is back to its old tricks in Afghanistan. Much as it did before masterminding the 9/11 attacks, the terrorist group is running militant training camps; sharing the profits of the Taliban’s illicit drug, mining, and smuggling enterprises; and funneling the proceeds to affiliated jihadi groups worldwide.

An unpublished report circulating among Western diplomats and U.N. officials details how deeply embedded the group once run by Osama bin Laden is in the Taliban’s operations, as they loot Afghanistan’s natural wealth and steal international aid meant to alleviate the suffering of millions of Afghans.

The report was completed by a private, London-based threat analysis firm whose directors did not want to be identified. A copy was provided to Foreign Policy and its findings verified by independent sources. It is based on research conducted inside Afghanistan in recent months and includes a list of senior al Qaeda operatives and the roles they play in the Taliban’s administration.

To facilitate its ambitions, al Qaeda is raking in tens of millions of dollars a week from gold mines in Afghanistan’s northern Badakhshan and Takhar provinces that employ tens of thousands of workers and are protected by warlords friendly to the Taliban, the report says. The money represents a 25 percent share in proceeds from gold and gem mines; 11 gold mines are geolocated in the report. The money is shared with al Qaeda by the two Taliban factions: Sirajuddin Haqqani’s Kabul faction and Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada’s Kandahar faction, suggesting both leaders, widely regarded as archrivals, see a cozy relationship with al Qaeda as furthering their own interests as well as helping to entrench the group’s overall power.

There’s more at the original.

So, after going in and spending almost twenty years there, spending trillions of dollars and seeing over 2,000 American soldiers coming bad in body bags, all to destroy al Qaeda, the terrorist group are back.

The younger President George Bush included in the mission ousting and, supposedly, destroying the Taliban, the hardline Islamist faction which governed the country at the time. It wasn’t too difficult for American soldiers and Marines to kick the Taliban out of power, but, as we all know, the US, under President Donald Trump, negotiated a withdrawal from that abysmal place, though it wasn’t accomplished until August of 2021, under President Joe Biden. Naturally, under Mr Biden, the final departure was a complete mess and foul-up, in which 13 more Americans were killed, and the US handed power right back to the same Taliban President Bush swore would be driven from power.

And now we have this:

Taliban publish vice laws that ban women’s voices and bare faces in public

The Taliban say it’s mandatory for Afghan women to conceal their voices and bare faces in public

by The Associated Press | Thursday, August 22, 2024 | 12:19 PM EDT

ISLAMABAD (AP) — Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers have issued a ban on women’s voices and bare faces in public under new laws approved by the supreme leader in efforts to combat vice and promote virtue.

The laws were issued Wednesday after they were approved by supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada, a government spokesman said. The Taliban had set up a ministry for the “propagation of virtue and the prevention of vice” after seizing power in 2021.

The ministry published its vice and virtue laws on Wednesday that cover aspects of everyday life like public transportation, music, shaving and celebrations.

They are set out in a 114-page, 35-article document seen by The Associated Press and are the first formal declaration of vice and virtue laws in Afghanistan since the takeover.

“Inshallah we assure you that this Islamic law will be of great help in the promotion of virtue and the elimination of vice,” said ministry spokesman Maulvi Abdul Ghafar Farooq on Thursday.

There’s more at the original

Al Qaeda are back and the Taliban are back, returning to the same basic Islamist and authoritarian principles they imposed in their previous regime. And that, along with the failure of democracy in Iraq, raises the obvious question: what the f(ornicate) did we gain from all of the blood spilled and all of the treasure burned up and blown up?

President Bush was seduced by Natan Sharansky’s and Ron Dermer’s book, The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror, in which the authors argued that the only moral foreign policy is to expand democracy across the world, and that once a people experience democracy, they will want to keep it. More, democracies will never be aggressors against their neighbors. Mr Bush tried to impose democracy on Iraq and Afghanistan — remember the purple-stained ‘I voted’ fingers? — but once American soldiers were not there to enforce democracy, it just never took.

Democracy is an artifact of Western civilization, a development of northern European and American culture. We managed to impose democracy on Japan and South Korea, but only after they had been completely devastated by war, and much of their military aged male population were killed or wounded. Those nations have copied and assimilated Western culture to the extent that they could. Israel is a Western democracy because it was resettled by Jews fleeing from Europe.

But let’s tell the truth here: We will never see true democracy or Western civilization in the Muslim Middle East, and we should not be naïve enough to waste our money and our blood on trying to push it. Iraq and Afghanistan are abject lessons in this.

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Once again, the left want to restrict our choices It's all for our own good, right?

I have said it many times before: today’s left are pro-choice on exactly one thing, prenatal infanticide. In everything else, they want the government to take control of your lives. William Teach noted that the Biden Administration are trying to shut down existing coal-fired electricity generation plants through emissions regulations which would force them out of business. The Democrats tried to force every American to take an experimental and long-term untested ‘vaccine’ against COVID-19, punishing those who refused with loss of their jobs. They have put in regulations designed to ban the sales of new gasoline-or-diesel-powered trucks and automobiles by 2035, even as the Administration threaten to shut down the coal-fired generation plants, even though 16.2% of our electricity is produced from burning coal. I’m not quite sure how the math works out in trying to push plug-in electric vehicles and concomitantly reducing our electric generating capacity.

Not only do they want to force people into plug-in electric vehicles, the government also wants to regulate the choices we have in those vehicles:

As cars and trucks get bigger and taller, lawmakers look to protect pedestrians

by Joel Rose | Friday, August 23, 2024 | 5:00 AM EDT

RUCKERSVILLE, Va. — In a cavernous white room full of bright lights, video cameras and microphones, a driverless cart hurtles at 37 miles per hour into the side of a large SUV.

Researchers at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety have crash-tested thousands of cars and trucks like this one over the past three decades at their facility in central Virginia.

But a few years ago, they noticed that those vehicles were getting bigger and heavier. So they decided to make the cart that crashes into them larger, too.

“It was meant to represent a small pickup or a midsize SUV, and those vehicles have gotten heavier and heavier over time,” says Becky Mueller, a senior research engineer at IIHS. “So it’s 500 kilograms more weight because that’s what the vehicle fleet now reflects.”

Americans’ cars and trucks are getting bigger and taller, while roadway fatalities have also climbed sharply over the past decade.

Why have cars and trucks gotten bigger and taller? Because those are the vehicles that the car-buying public have chosen to buy. American automobile manufacturers have moved to produce the vehicles that their customers want to buy. Article continues below the fold, because it contains an embedded video. Continue reading →

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Live by the gun, die by the gun A public service homicide

Yeah, I’m treading on Robert Stacy McCain’s “Aspiring Rapper Update” turf with this one, but it was a Philly story, so I can call dibs.

Abdul Vicks, 25, had some sort of rap career as “YBC Dul”, and Philly Crime Update told me that he had “millions of streams” for his ‘songs,’ if rap can actually be called a song, and I don’t think it can.

Popular rapper who prosecutors say was ringleader of violent gang was fatally shot in Olney

Abdul Vicks, who performed as “YBC Dul,” was fatally shot on the 5500 block of North Sixth Street, just after 3:30 p.m. Friday.

by Ellie Rushing and Robert Moran | Saturday, August 23, 2024 | 7:14 PM EDT

A popular 25-year-old rapper — who prosecutors say was considered the ringleader of a notoriously violent West Philadelphia-based gang — was shot and killed Friday afternoon in the city’s Olney section, a law enforcement source said.

I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked, that The Philadelphia Inquirer, which told us that there are no gangs in the city, just “cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families,” who sometimes had “beefs” with other cliques, used the word “gang,” especially when one of the writers of this article, Ellie Rushing, was also the first name in the byline of that September 19, 2022 article.

Police said the shooting occurred just after 3:30 p.m. on the 5500 block of North Sixth Street. The victim, who was identified as Abdul Vicks, was taken by private vehicle to Einstein Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead at 3:55 p.m.

The newspaper’s source remains anonymous, because he was not authorized to speak to the press about the case. As of the writing of this article, no arrests have been made.

Prosecutors say Vicks, who performed as “YBC Dul,” was considered the ringleader of the West Philadelphia-based gang called YBC, or Young Bag Chasers.

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain, “‘Public Service Homicide’ in Killadelphia“

Philly Crime Update also told us that young Mr Vicks, who will never become the elder Mr Vicks, was also known by a gang name, “Mr Disrespectful.” It appears that someone else has “disrespected” Mr Vicks.

Earlier this month, 22-year-old Quamere Hall, a Vicks associate, was arrested at the Criminal Justice Center and charged with the shooting death of a 34-year-old man last year.

Hall, another rapper who performs as “Mere Pablo,” was at the Criminal Justice Center to show support for Arshad Curry, a fellow YBC member who was scheduled to be sentenced for shooting five people, three fatally, in 2021. Curry was sentenced to 42½ to 85 years in prison.

Last year, three other YBC members were convicted of killing two teens.

Let’s tell the truth here: other than for the families of the Young Bag Chasers, this is all pretty good news. Mr Vicks, the supposed ‘ringleader’ of the gang, has been taken off the streets, permanently. Mr Hall has been arrested for murder.

Arshad Curry, a.k.a. “Most Wanted,” Raheis Sherman, street name “F5ive,” Zaire Crawford, a.k.a. “1k” or “Murda K”, Yaseam Miles, a.k.a. “Baby Wick” or “Ya Ya”; and Semaj Nolan, a.k.a. “Reek12Hunnit,” some of them with the Chaser’s allied gang, the Young Face Arrangers, are all behind bars, most for decades. How can it be a bad thing when bad guys are off the streets?

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What could possibly go wrong?

Illinois goes by the nickname “Land of Lincoln,” because that was where the Kentucky native became an adult and built his legal and political career. Mr Lincoln is known, among other things, for his folksy witticisms, including the famous, If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have? The answer is ‘four,’ because calling a tail a leg does not make it so.

Sadly, the Prairie State doesn’t seem to be living up to its other nickname, because our 16th President would have said that a man calling himself a woman doesn’t make him a woman.

Transgender Pedophile Who Sexually Assaulted His Children Now Being Held At Illinois Women’s Prison

By Reduxx Team | Monday, August 19, 2024

James, not Michelle, Blessent. Photo by Bloomington, IL, Police, and is a public record.

A transgender pedophile in Illinois is being housed in a women’s prison after being found guilty on multiple counts related to the sexual assault of his two children. Michelle Blessent, born James, is being held at the Logan Correctional Facility in Lincoln, Illinois.As previously reported by Reduxx, Blessent, 35, was initially arrested in April of 2023 in a file which included five counts of predatory criminal sexual assault of a victim under 13.

But on November 15 of that year, three more charges were applied, including one additional count of predatory criminal sexual assault of a victim under 13, one count of grooming, and one count of exploitation of a child. In a public notice posted to their official Facebook, the Bloomington Police Department confirmed that the new charges were related to the original victim. During the course of the trial, a second young victim under the age of the 13 was named. Both of the victims are reported to be Blessent’s biological children – a boy and a girl.

At the time of his original arrest in April, a public information officer with the Department admitted that they were treating the arrest as that of a woman because of Blessent’s “gender identity.”

Which only goes to prove that the state of Illinois is run by idiots!

Mr Blessent applied to legally change his name to Michelle in July of 2022, and completed that process in December of that year.

On June 26, Blessent was sentenced to 42 years for each of two counts of predatory criminal sexual assault of a victim under 13, as well as three years for a count of grooming. The sentences will run consecutively, totaling 87 years. Under Illinois law, Blessent must serve at least 85% of the time for the counts of sexual assault, meaning he will not be eligible for parole until 2095, at which point he would be 106 years of age.

Part of Mr Blessent’s defense was that he had been taking estrogen, which he claimed made it difficult for him to get and maintain an erection, but that also means that he’s a physically intact man male. Nevertheless, he is being incarcerated at a women’s prison.

What could possibly go wrong?

In 2019, the Illinois Department of Corrections approved the transfer of a transgender inmate from an all-male prison to a women’s prison after he claimed he’d been the victim of sexual harassment and abuse. Janiah Monroe, born Andre Patterson, had successfully obtained transfer with the assistance of various trans activists and law firms, while claiming he had been struggling with PTSD from his initial placement in a men’s prison.

Monroe, who had convictions on several felonies including second-degree murder, was later accused of raping a female inmate at Logan, sexually harassing female inmates, and threatening staff members.

Though the IDOC attempted to move him back to the men’s estate, Governor Pritzker’s office overruled the decision and allowed him to remain at the women’s prison. Pritzker is known for being an ardent supporter of trans activism, and is the brother of Jennifer Pritzker[1]Mr Pritzker was named James by his parents when he was born., a trans-identified male billionaire who frequently funds trans causes.

So, what could possibly go wrong? Andre Patterson showed Illinois what could go wrong, but it seems that the state didn’t learn its lesson. Will Mr Blessent try the same thing now that he’s locked up, for the rest of his miserable life — or at least until he turns 106! — what more could the state do to him if he chose to rape a female inmate? The Land of Lincoln does not have capital punishment, so Mr Blessent cannot be punished more severely than his current sentence, though solitary confinement is a possibility.

Even that might be ended, as the state House passed the “Nelson Mandela Act“, which greatly restricts the use of solitary, 73-40, on May 24, 2024, and it has been sent to the state Senate. If this passes, there would be almost no in-prison discipline that the state could impose on Mr Blessent should he assault a female inmate.

This guy is clearly mental! He sexually abused his own children, so what mental reservations can he be said to have when it comes to sexual abuse. He may have been taking estrogen, but he’s still a man male, which normally means that he could overpower most women.

Today’s American left seem to have adopted the furthest left positions when it comes to anything even remotely connected to sex, and if transgenderism is the reductio ad absurdum of the sexual spectrum, the left don’t seem to recognize the absurdity of it. In their desire to be all inclusive of any and every sexual perversion, they have even attacked those liberal women who reject transgenderism as real and rational.

References

References
↑1 Mr Pritzker was named James by his parents when he was born.
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Karma comes to Taylor Lorenz!

Our regular readers, both of them, will remember Taylor Lorenz, a columnist at The Washington Post covering technology and online culture. Miss Lorenz most significant claim to fame was her investigation and doxing of Chaya Raichik, the owner of the Twitter site Libs of TikTok. The left hated LoTT, because Miss Raichik’s schtick was to find the idiocy that the left were posting to TikTok — and there was a lot of it — and expose it far more widely, to the ridicule of the libs. At the time, Miss Raichik was working as a real estate agent, and the exposure was designed to cost Miss Raichik her job.

In the end, it simply made Miss Raichik more popular and wealthy, but it also made Miss Lorenz more of a public figure as well, invited to some of the hoitiest and toitiest of Hollywood soirees.

Of course, despite her insistence that everybody wear face masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19 — though she subsequently deleted it, she informed readers that she was at least somewhat immunocompromised — as late as August of 2023, she didn’t wear one herself.

Well, in a true sauce for the goose moment, it seems that Miss Lorenz has been outed for something. From NPR, not exactly an evil reich-wing site:

‘Washington Post’ reviews star columnist Taylor Lorenz’s ‘war criminal’ jab at Biden

by David Folkenflik | Thursday, August 15, 2024 | 7:55 PM EDT

Senior editors at the Washington Post are reviewing a prominent tech columnist’s private story on social media, which appears to label President Biden a “war criminal” in a photo.

The Post’s Taylor Lorenz attended a White House event for digital influencers on Wednesday. In the photo she shared with a circle of friends on Instagram, Biden appears over her shoulder; the damning caption rests just below him, accompanied by a text frowny face.

After the New York Post’s Jon Levine — a frequent critic of hers — revealed the Instagram photo caption yesterday in a tweet, Lorenz wrote back at him: “You people will fall for any dumbass edit someone makes.”

I am thoroughly amused.

A fact-check appended to Levine’s tweet cited her apparent denial. (The contextual note to the tweet says, “Taylor Lorenz says this is a digital manipulation which has added a false caption.”) Lorenz told her editors that someone else had added the caption to the photo.

NPR has obtained a screengrab of Lorenz’s actual post, which contained that caption. It was not shared with her wider Instagram audience of 143,000 followers.

Four people with direct knowledge of the private Instagram story confirmed its authenticity to NPR. They spoke to NPR on condition they not be identified due to the professional sensitivity of the situation for Lorenz.

“Our executive editor and senior editors take alleged violations of our standards seriously,” a spokesperson for the newspaper told NPR. “We’re aware of the alleged post and are looking into it.” Lorenz declined to comment.

The Post has already been cutting staff, due to the newspaper losing a lot of money. If Miss Lorenz loses her job over this — something which is certainly not guaranteed — would it not be a delicious bit of karma for trying to cost Miss Raichik her real estate position?

Lorenz has since told associates that a close friend took her posted picture and superimposed the caption upon it, as a joke, and that she shared it with the group on the private Instagram posting.

If that is true, then yes, Miss Lorenz has admitted posting it on Instagram. Perhaps she thought it was a joke, but as a social media savvy reporter, she should have realized just what a stink this would cause, as well as understanding that once something goes out into the internet, it can be seen by the wrong people, and used against her. Using utter stupidity as an excuse isn’t a good look.

Perhaps Miss Lorenz is now learning about sauce for the goose!

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Ivy League research associate wants clerks at Wawa to pay for her commute

Talia Borofsky, from her Twitter profile.

Cry me a river! Talia Borofsky is “a postdoctoral research associate in Princeton’s High Meadows Environmental institute, where she researches the evolution and ecology of cooperative hunting.” Dr Borofsky lives in foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia but commutes to work at Princeton University, and she greatly saddened by the fact that cashiers at WalMart and hamburger flippers at McDonald’s won’t be paying as much for her daily commute!

Amtrak’s sudden fare increases bite the hand that feeds it

Amtrak recently raised multi-ride fares along the Northeast Corridor without adequate prior warning to its ridership. The drastic increase is a slap in the face to taxpayers, writes Talia Borofsky.

by Talia Borofsky | Thursday, August 15, 2024 | 12:00 PM EDT

In July Amtrak raised multi-ride fares along the Northeast Corridor by anywhere from 32% to 70% without directly notifying its ridership in advance.

Amtrak, a federally funded and federally majority-owned company, is meant to serve the public. The drastic fare increase is a slap in the face to taxpayers after the infrastructure bill dedicated a total of $22 billion in direct grants to the company.

You might think from Dr Borofsky’s first two paragraphs that her complaint is that she wasn’t notified far enough and directly enough in advance, but that’s not it. What upsets her is that she’s having to pay more for a direct service she receives.

Investopedia notes:

Amtrak receives considerable subsidies from both state and federal governments but it’s managed as a for-profit company. This isn’t unusual. No country in the world operates a passenger rail system without public support.

But Amtrak’s “for-profit” status is sadly ironic. The train company has never been profitable since its founding nearly fifty years ago. It’s only thanks to its subsidies that the company has survived.

In other words, Dr Borofsky’s daily commute has never been entirely paid for by her fares. It has always been subsidized by taxpayer dollars, many of which are taken from people who earn less money than she does. But hey, if you’re a daycare worker in Philly, or a laborer for a roofing company in Lexington, shouldn’t you be glad to know that some of the money you pay in taxes goes to pay for “a postdoctoral research associate” at an Ivy League university, who earned her doctorate at Stanford, the hoitiest and the toitiest of the colleges west of the Mississippi, to research “the evolution and ecology of cooperative hunting”?

As a postdoc at Princeton University, I commute from Philly to Princeton using Amtrak. This commute used to make financial sense; rents in Philadelphia are almost half the price of those in Princeton, and Princeton provided a helpful although limited commute subsidy.

However, the commute became unaffordable for me and likely many others on July 1; the 10-trip (one-way) ticket package between Princeton and Philly shot up from $230 to $390, and the monthly pass increased from $576 to $975. These sudden increases have impacted many postdocs and graduate students at Princeton, whose budgets were already strained by the previous fares.

There’s such a whiff of elitism from Dr Borofsky’s OpEd. As a “postdoctoral research associate” at an Ivy League university, she is paid much more than most Philadelphians. According to Glass Door:

The estimated total pay range for a Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University is $57K–$67K per year, which includes base salary and additional pay. The average Postdoctoral Fellow base salary at Princeton University is $62K per year.

The minimum of $57,000 is slightly higher than the median household income of $56,517 for Philadelphians overall. But Dr Borofsky apparently believes that the baggers at Giant Food Mart or the clerk at Wawa brewing her large coffee for the train ride — yeah, I’m guessing about that last, but everyone in Philly should drink Wawa coffee! — should have to contribute a bit more to pay for her train ride.

Dr Borofsky continued to tell readers about Amtrak’s poor service, and that the suddenness of the fare increase was “exploitative.” I have no qualms with her point that the increase was sudden, nor that Amtrak’s service isn’t the greatest.

But it’s her concluding one-sentence paragraph that gets me:

Train travel should be viable for all, not just the wealthy.

No, train travel should be available to those who pay for the service. Why should I, a retiree, be required to pony up some of my tax dollars so that Dr Borofsky doesn’t have to pay for the service she receives? Why should the janitors at Princeton be required to help fund her commute?

The subtitle of her article states, “The drastic increase is a slap in the face to taxpayers,” but no; the drastic increase is a boon to the taxpayers, the ones who are already subsidizing her train ride. The good research associate should pay for the services she receives herself.

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This morning’s rant

In the superhero flick The Avengers, there’s a scene in which Loki, taken from the Norse God of Mischief, cows a large crowd in Germany with the shouted command, “Kneel!” Loki grins as he addresses the crowd, sarcastically asking if such is not their natural state, to kneel, to be ruled by others. Of Captain America and Iron Man save the day, and perhaps some of the more historically aware viewers would connect Captain America rescuing a German crowd from obeisance to an authoritarian dictator to events 74 years ago, but today I have to wonder: just how many Americans are willing to kneel before Loki?

We have an American electorate in which roughly half of the public seem willing to vote for politicians supporting the Biden Administration’s attempts to require all new vehicles sold in the United States to be plug-in electric or otherwise zero-emission by 2035, even though few new car buyers today have been willing to shell out their hard-earned dollars to buy one for their families. We can see our British cousins happily throwing people in jail for saying the wrong things, and polls of good American citizens show considerable support for restrictions on our freedom of speech and of the press. And when the federal, state and local governments over-reacted to the COVID-19 panicdemic — no, that’s not a typo; I spelled it exactly as I saw it — by restricting our freedom of religion, with the forced closing of churches, and our right of peaceable assembly, by restricting travel and gatherings, millions and millions of sheeple went blithely along with it. It took a change in the Justices on the Supreme Court to get those restrictions (mostly) ruled unconstitutional, and even then it was only in limited decisions.

We have seen the federal government declare that the ” Intentional refusal to use someone’s correct pronouns is equivalent to harassment and a violation of one’s civil rights,” and that “The EEOC guidance states, ‘intentionally and repeatedly using the wrong name and pronouns to refer to a transgender employee could contribute to an unlawful hostile work environment’ and is a violation of Title VII,” in their attempt to compel ‘correct’ speech by those people who disagree with the cockamamie notion the girls can be boys and boys can be girls. New York City has regulations which can punish businesses and employees for not going along with ‘preferred pronouns’ and names. The New York Times, which so adamantly defended its First Amendment rights in New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971), gave OpEd space to Andrew Marantz, a staff writer for The New Yorker, to write that Free Speech is Killing Us, and Chad Malloy, a male who thinks he’s a woman named ‘Parker,’ to tell readers How Twitter’s Ban on ‘Deadnaming’ Promotes Free Speech. Restrictions on speech actually equals free speech according to Mr Malloy, and I suppose the editors who accepted and printed his article!

Today’s Democrats are bewailing that AIPAC, the American Israel Political Action Committee, spent money in several Democratic primary elections to defeat clearly anti-Semitic congressmen, even though those same Democrats used political action committees and scads of ‘outside money’ in the congressional campaigns of 2018 and 2020.

Today’s American left are willing to chip away at our right to keep and bear arms, and I continually see messages from the gun grabbers demanding people justify their ‘need’ for certain firearms, as though our rights are contingent upon other people believing we are exercising them properly.

I have said it many times before: today’s American left are pro-choice on only one thing. In everything else, they are willing to let the government control them, to order their lives, for our own good, don’t you know?

What has happened to America? How did we go from millions of men being willing to put their lives on the line to defeat fascism to now having millions of Americans willing to surrender their rights in the name of ‘order’?

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Anti-Semitism in America isn’t about religion

It was just last night, at 10:14 PM EDT, that I published an article pointing out that Vice President Kamala Harris Emhoff opted against choosing Governor Josh Shapiro (D-PA) as her running mate, noting that, despite the denials, it was all because he and his wife are Jewish. With the open drive toward anti-Semitism by the young and the ignorant among the harder left, and Mrs Emhoff’s husband, Douglas Emhoff also being Jewish, there’s just no way the Vice President and her staff would make a selection which would drive the anti-Jewish and anti-Israel leftists away.

And on Monday morning, The Philadelphia Inquirer gave OpEd space to Zev Eleff, president and professor of American Jewish History at Gratz College in Melrose Park, that barely glossed over — if you can even call it that much — the radical anti-Semitic left in the decision:

Josh Shapiro, the veepstakes, and the role of faith in presidential politics

I’m proud that the governor was reportedly on the short list of Kamala Harris running mates. Yet I was also troubled by those who asked whether America was “ready” for a Jewish vice president.

by Zev Eleff | Monday, August 12, 2024 | 6:37 AM EDT

The polarizing discussion surrounding Gov. Josh Shapiro’s faith and his recent bid to join Kamala Harris on the Democratic ticket struck a very different tone than the Jewish presidential question of 1959. Back then, the journalist Bernard Postal polled a who’s who of American politics — Earl Warren, Hubert Humphrey, Dwight Eisenhower, to name-drop a handful of the 30 respondents — on a very pithy question: “Can a Jew be elected president?”

Postal was prompted by the wide speculation that John F. Kennedy, the Catholic senator from Massachusetts, would run for president in the next election. “I believe that a candidate’s religion should have no bearing upon his qualifications for the Office of President,” wrote Kennedy to Postal. “Accordingly, Catholics, Protestants, and Jews should all base their appeal to the voters upon their record of accomplishments and their program or action.”

Postal reported that most agreed with Kennedy, hopeful “that before too long the voters will do away with the tacit but nonetheless effective religious test that has traditionally barred all but white Protestants from the Presidency and the Vice Presidency.”

There’s a lot more at the original, but, like so many historians, he has missed the point!

Dr Eleff’s OpEd piece tells the reader something of the history of religious tolerance, as it slowly gained a foothold in the American body politic. While there were a few, and I stress the description few, anti-Semitic influences and incidents in the United States, the bigotry against Jews, Muslims, and Catholics in the United States was fairly minor as far as being based on their faith. It was more pronounced based upon ethnicity, and ethnicity was not part of the professor’s OpEd.

Catholics don’t really come with an ethnicity link in the United States, other than we are primarily white and Hispanic; the percentage of blacks who are Catholic has always been small. For Muslims, much of the ethnic mix are of Arabic or African extraction.

Jews? In the United States, they are almost exclusively white, and so indistinguishable in appearance, other than by the way some sects of Judaism in the US dress, that the Nazis in Germany actually published a “Jewface” caricature of ‘Jewish physiognomy,’ because Jews weren’t that easy to distinguish in many cases just by looking. The Nazis wanted everyone to be able to know who was Jewish! In the United States, in most of Europe, Jews are characterized primarily by ethnicity. In a way that would be funny if it wasn’t so pathetically sad, so many good, white Europeans and Americans view Jews as not being white, while much of the Arab Middle East sees Jews as too white, and not ethnically connected to the Holy Land.

Do Mr and Mrs Shapiro attend the synagogue? Does Mr Emhoff go to Temple? If anyone has asked those questions, I haven’t seen them, but my point is that the discrimination against Jews is not really religious, at least not in the 21st century. We all seem to know that Jews have a different faith than Christians or Muslims — though I would point out here that every Catholic Mass on Sunday has a reading from the Old Testament, the pre-Christian Jewish holy books — but how many actually understand Judaism, as a religion, to be offended by the religious differences?

And let’s tell the truth here: a large percentage of Americans who might tell you that they are Christian don’t attend church. Joe Biden is famously Catholic, and attends Mass frequently, but his being a Democrat is far, far, far more important to him than being Catholic!

Today’s anti-Semitism is almost entirely political. We good, white Christians drove the Jews out of Europe, because the Nazis tried to kill them all. Half of the Jews of Europe were killed by the Third Reich, but those who survived were thoroughly dispossessed. They couldn’t return to their homes in Europe because they had no homes in Europe, and even if they had, their neighbors would have been the same good, white Christians who turned them over to the Nazis. Zionism was a political movement, started long before the Nazis came to power, but it became a political and social imperative thanks to the Nazis.

Mr Shapiro was not chosen as Mrs Emhoff’s running mate because he is religiously Jewish, but because his ethnic and family history is Jewish. Among today’s fanatical and anti-Semitic left, that’s all it takes.