Here’s another bizarre fact. According to an Oct. 13 New York Timesarticle, Hamas fighters who flew paragliders into Israel to massacre Jews did their training in Lebanon. It seems highly unlikely that the United States, with intense intelligence operations right there, somehow missed the hordes of paragliders all of sudden randomly flocking to do training in Lebanon at the same time—not least because the U.S. ambassador to Lebanon, Dorothy Shea, is a paragliding enthusiast who posted videos of her own airborne adventures as recently as mid-August.
Moreover, sources for the Times piece claimed that for over a year Iran helped plan the Hamas attack in coordination with Hezbollah, using Lebanon and Syria as training grounds. The Times piece corroborated an Oct. 8 Wall Street Journal article that reported that Iran had planned the invasion and greenlighted it the Monday before. But reporters at the Journal’s Washington, D.C., bureau, who had no access to the Journal’s foreign sources, were dead set against their Middle East-based colleagues publishing a piece based on their own reporting that made Iran’s role clear. Their interest was in protecting their official sources in Washington, who continued to deny any Iranian role in the attack.
The Biden administration has no plans to confront a regime that it is keen to arm with a nuclear bomb. Since the Obama administration first began negotiations with the Iranians over their nuclear program, the United States has given Iran tens of billions of dollars and made available to the clerical regime additional hundreds of billions. Iran, in the eyes of the Biden team, is not a potential belligerent but a prospective partner.
Outside the campaign, groups like Voters Organized to Educate and Step Up for Action also hit the streets with their own canvassing teams. Many of their canvassers were formerly incarcerated people who spoke about the effect that the prosecutor’s office had on them.
Spending from outside groups, like the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana, also evened the fundraising score. Although as a non-profit it doesn’t endorse, it mounted a six-figure media buy to run “issue” ads about the candidates’ positions on marijuana charges that dovetailed neatly with Williams’ message. Investor George Soros also dumped $220,000 into the campaign to defeat Landrum.
—The Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate, December 12th, 2020.
The George Soros-backed Orleans Parish, Louisiana, district attorney and his mother were carjacked Monday night in New Orleans by two suspects who allegedly pointed high-powered automatic rifles at them, according to reports.
FOX 8 in New Orleans reported that district attorney’s office spokesperson Keith Lampkin confirmed DA Jason Williams, and his mother were carjacked at gunpoint as he was helping her into a car.
“DA Williams and his mother were unharmed, and both thank the [New Orleans Police Department] for their hard work tonight and every night responding to crime victims,” Lampkin told the station.
According to Allan H. Ryskind in his excellent book Hollywood Traitors: Blacklisted Screenwriters — Agents of Stalin, Allies of Hitler, [Abraham] Polonsky was “a thoroughgoing Communist who took the Fifth when he testified before HUAC [the House Un-American Activities Committee] in 1951 but to eventually admitted to Party membership.” Polonsky once described a meeting for the founding of the Committee for the First Amendment this way: “You could not get into the place. The excitement was intense. Every star was there.” He went on: “We Communists had not created the organization, but we believed in its usefulness and helped to organize its activities.”
Polonsky was placed on a Hollywood blacklist for almost two decades. In his intro to the special edition Force of Evil disc, Scorsese calls this “a great loss” for American cinema, but two things can be true at the same time: Polonsky could have been a talented filmmaker who was also a danger to the country. Yes, Joe McCarthy and some other anti-communists often went too far. The great anti-communist Whittaker Chambers warned about McCarthy and his often reckless tactics. Yet there were communists in the government. Chambers also wrote this famous and prescient passage: “The simple fact is that when I took up my little sling and aimed at Communism, I also hit something else. What I hit was the forces of that great socialist revolution, which, in the name of liberalism, spasmodically, incompletely, somewhat formlessly, but always in the same direction, has been inching its ice cap over the nation for two decades.”
No need to defend the blacklist, when Hollywood itself revived it with force during the #MeToo era, thus rendering films like The Front, starring Woody Allen, completely superfluous.
The turbines sit on the land of a semi-nomadic indigenous people, the Sámi, whose at least 70,000 members mostly live in Norway, but also inhabit Sweden, Finland and the Kola Peninsula in the Russian Federation. At issue are the Sámi ancestral lands and the pastures of reindeer herders. For Greta, their rights, and those of indigenous peoples everywhere, trump humanity’s need for electricity – even if that electricity is green. In this case, the Fosen Vind development is held to have broken national and international law by erecting the turbines, and by building 131km of connecting roads and power lines. Its actions, critics say, ‘have destroyed winter pastures and migration routes crucial for maintaining sustainable reindeer herding’. And so Fosen Vind is held up by activists as an example of ‘green colonialism’.
I came to D.C. to work in the Reagan Administration because (to oversimplify) it was pro-Constitution, pro-U.S. global leadership, pro-military, pro-Israel, pro-democratic capitalism, and pro-American dream. And that's why I now support the Biden Administration and Democrats.
This afternoon came word of a horrific set of explosions at a hospital in Gaza. Within minutes, Hamas propagandists were not only claiming a death toll of 500 but that an Israeli rocket had targeted and destroyed the hospital. One might perhaps think it prudent to keep one’s powder dry when a terrorist organization claims its enemy did something bad. You would think wrong. Within minutes of that, this was the headline and subhed atop the New York Times: “ISRAEL STRIKE KILLS HUNDREDS AT HOSPITAL, PALESTINIANS SAY. At least 500 dead; Israel urges caution as it investigates.”
Please note it did not read “Missile Strike Kills Hundreds at Hospital; Investigation Ongoing.” The formulation of the headline sentence was designed to make Israel the motive actor, even if the final clause acknowledges it as a Palestinian claim.
Oh, and did the entire gang of moral equivalencers go immediately to work. My favorite, or my least favorite, is of course NGO hustler supreme Kenneth Roth, who is to human rights what Gogol’s Chichikov was to dead souls. He began tweeting and retweeting the claim that Israel had committed this supposed barbarity. Not to be outdone, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, who is to legislating as Joseph Goebbels was to newspapering, stated outright on X that Israel had murdered people at the hospital.
The DNC-MSM has long been a major distributor of Pallywood’s product:
Progressives are now trying to cancel author George Orwell, according to an article published Sunday.
A biography of Orwell’s wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, describes him as a “sadistic, misogynistic, homophobic, and sometimes violent man,” according to the Telegraph. And apparently the darkness within his most iconic text “1984” was a reflection of the inner Orwell … so one biographer claims.
“He desperately wants to be decent, and wanting to be decent is an honourable thing, a noble thing. But writing a book like 1984, which is violent, misogynist, sadistic, grim, paranoid: that comes out of a writer’s flaws,” O’Shaughnessy’s biographer, Anna Funder claimed of Orwell, with absolutely no grounds to base her assertion on.
Does J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” storyline mean she is a violent wizard with delusional tendencies? No. So why would “1984” mean Orwell was a psycho?
The irony of the left trying to cancel Orwell, who isn’t alive to defend himself, over absolutely nothing, is beyond ridiculous. It’s downright embarrassingly, and shows how utterly thin-skinned we are in 2023.
DENNIS PRAGER: German Nazism’s Successor: Islamic Nazism. “There is an ideological successor to the Nazis. Just as the primary aim of Nazism was to kill every Jew in Europe, the primary aim of tens of millions of radical Muslims is to kill the seven million Jews in Israel and eradicate the one Jewish state.”
The Hamas attack on Israel was not a direct attack on the United States, but the attack killed at least 30 Americans, and to many of us, it was so heinous and bloodthirsty that it felt like an attack on America, or perhaps against humanity itself. In past crises, public-opinion polling has shown a “rally around the flag” effect — a surge in support for the head of state and reduced criticism for the leader of a country.
Meanwhile, as Dominic notes, Sky News asked Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen whether Joe Biden has the energy for another five years in office. She answered that Biden is “very involved, very vibrant.” When Americans think of Biden, I don’t think “vibrant” is the word that comes to mind.
When even Democratic Party operative with a lavaliere Scott Pelley describes the (p)resident as “tired,” you know the pilot light is completely out.
Enter Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who announced on October 12 that he would be deploying flights from the Florida, at no expense to Americans trapped overseas. The first flight touched down last night in Florida, with DeSantis in attendance and waiting for the evacuees — 270 Americans, 91 of them children — on the tarmac. The optics were a coup for DeSantis, while Trump shouted all caps away on Truth Social, and Biden slurred his way through a coordinated 60 Minutes interview, where, as his usual aged and aloof self, he, once again, did not address American casualties.
DeSantis stepped up, unquestionably, and took command of getting Americans home. He did so in a way that even had a media that’s usually hostile to him reporting on it. NBC News reporter Dasha Burns was on the scene in Tampa. The optics of the situation is that DeSantis is present and focused, while the two geriatric frontrunners were pre-occupied — either with Ticketmaster junk fees and telling more personal embellishments about gays getting thrown out of restaurants, or back in a courtroom and unloading on international allies at rallies.
WATCH: Canadian Conservative PM Candidate Gives Master Class in Handling Activist Disguised as ‘Reporter.’
Pierre Poilievre is a longtime member of the Canadian Parliament, is the Opposition Leader, and is also the leader of Canada’s Conservative Party. He’s been described by some media outlets as “the man who could beat [current Prime Minister Justin] Trudeau” and “the favorite to win the country’s next election,” which could be as soon as next year.
* * * * * * * *
Poilievre, who is calmly eating and crunching on an apple, repeatedly asks him throughout the segment who was making the claims (which revolved around Poilievre supposedly being a right-wing extremist), and what “page” he was allegedly taking out of former President Donald Trump’s “playbook” (another statement made by the reporter that he could not substantiate).
As the description on the tweet says, this is master class-type stuff here and should be a blueprint for conservatives to operate off of when interacting with left-wing activists masquerading as members of the press:
This video offers an exceptional learning opportunity on how to effectively address a left-leaning media. It showcases the ideal approach that everyone should adopt. pic.twitter.com/ZmB32CTnNJ
Conservatives are once again successfully demonizing and devaluing a term embraced by liberals, and this time they are doing it with the help of Democrats.
Even in purportedly liberal bastions like San Francisco and Oakland, the word “progressive” is being twisted to denote radical ideas and inept leadership instead of hope and revolutionary change.
Republicans and many moderate Democrats have perpetuated a distorted narrative around progressivism, and any term associated with it. Both groups paint progressives as detached from reality, which diverts attention from their own patchy records on critical issues like public safety and housing.
As the late Fred Siegel wrote in 2014 book The Revolt Against the Masses, “Progressivism” stole a huge base from laissez faire classical liberals and rebranded as “liberalism” in the 1920s, after the brutal, racist Woodrow Wilson had made such a hash of the term during WWI:
For the ardent Progressive Frederick Howe, who had been Wilson’s Commissioner of Immigration, the pre-war promise of the benign state built on reasoned reform had turned to ashes. “I hated,” he wrote, “the new state that had arisen” from the war. “I hated its brutalities, its ignorance, its unpatriotic patriotism that made profit from our sacrifices and used it to suppress criticism of its acts. . . . I wanted to protest against the destruction of my government, my democracy, my America.” As part of his protest, the thoroughly alienated Howe distanced himself from Progressivism. Liberals were those Progressives who had renamed themselves so as to repudiate Wilson. “The word liberalism,” wrote Walter Lippmann in 1919, “was introduced into the jargon of American politics by that group who were Progressives in 1912 and Wilson Democrats from 1916 to 1918.” The new liberalism was a decisive cultural break with Wilson and Progressivism. While the Progressives had been inspired by a faith in democratic reforms as a salve for the wounds of both industrial civilization and power politics, liberals saw the American democratic ethos as a danger to freedom at home and abroad.
After decades of failure during the Great Depression, the Great Society, and the events leading up to the Republican Congressional revolution of 1994, the left began to rebrand as “progressive” rather than “liberal.” By 2015, Hillary Clinton, she of “vast right-wing conspiracies,” Russian collusion fabulism, and most recently, “formal deprogramming of the cult members,” was claiming, “I take a backseat to no one, when you look at my record in standing up and fighting for progressive values.”
The Chronicle notices another phrase that, as the leftist cliché goes, Republicans have pounced on:
Another phrase that fell victim to right-wing manipulation is “defund the police.” This rallying cry emerged in response to police brutality and the urgent need for police reform. Yet, conservatives skillfully spun it as an attack on law and order, suggesting that those who support reallocating money toward social services are putting the safety of communities at risk. It’s a classic case of conservatives distorting the meaning of a phrase to suit their own fear-mongering agenda.
Which is odd, because during the annus horribilis of 2020, fervent leftists were pretty darn clear that “defund the police” meant just that:
At least until the left that discovered “defund the police” didn’t play very well in many minority neighborhoods that count on law enforcement to keep the peace, to the point where: Democrats Trying to Rewrite History on ‘Defund the Police.’
More from the San Fran Chronicle:
So is reclaiming the terms related to progressivism and rehabilitating their true meaning. This is challenging but not impossible. Progressives should aggressively rebut conservative distortions of their work, and articulate their genuine intentions.
The Republicans, and the moderate Democrats who naively carry their water, want to lead California down a dangerously regressive path. The first step to stopping them is to reclaim the terms progressives once popularized, and remind people of their true meaning.
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