Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill on Monday to stop
Big Tech companies from deplatforming political candidates, including by
imposing significant fines on social media providers found guilty of
the practice.
Senate Bill 7072, which DeSantis signed at Florida International University in Miami, intends to end social media censorship of Florida political candidates.
“This session, we took action to ensure that ‘We the People,’ real
Floridians across the Sunshine State, are guaranteed protection against
the Silicon Valley elites,” DeSantis said, according to WTXL-TV.
“Many in our state have experienced censorship and other tyrannical behavior firsthand in Cuba and Venezuela.
“If Big Tech censors enforce rules inconsistently, to discriminate in
favor of the dominant Silicon Valley ideology, they will now be held
accountable,” the governor added.
The bill’s text prohibits social media platforms “from willfully
deplatforming a candidate” and “provid[es] fines for violations.”
It also “provid[es] requirements for public contracts and economic
incentives related to entities that have been convicted or held civilly
liable for antitrust violations”; “provid[es] that social media
platforms that fail to comply with specified requirements and
prohibitions commit an unfair or deceptive act or practice”; and
“authoriz[es] the Department of Legal Affairs to investigate suspected
violations under the Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act and bring
specified actions for such violations,” among other provisions
The bill also implements strong penalties against social media platforms
caught in violation of the law — a fine of “$250,000 per day for a
candidate for statewide office and $25,000 per day for a candidate for
other offices.”
The Verge
reported, “The law wouldn’t apply to temporary social media bans on a
candidate, and wouldn’t apply to instances where a platform removes
specific posts that violate that platform’s terms of service.”
The outlet added, “But any social media ban that lasts longer than 60
days would result in a fine, and, the platforms would have to make
available to users any content the candidate posted before their account
became inactive.”
Bill sponsor and Republican
state Sen. Ray Rodrigues said last month that “big tech is not a free
market” and that the state has a role in regulating such companies,
according to the South Florida Sun Sentinel.
“When the battle is between a monopoly on one side and hard-working
Americans on the other, the right side of history has always been on the
side of the people,” Rodrigues said.
“It has never been on the side of the monopolies, not in this country,” he said.
Not everyone is pleased with the new legislation.
Critics have referred to the bill as the “Donald Trump Bill,” according to WTXL.
“The Florida Legislature has decided to put politics over policy with
the passage of SB 7072. The bill is unconstitutional, arbitrarily
exempts large Florida-based corporations, and will hurt the citizens of
the state,” Robert Callahan, the Internet Association’s senior vice
president of state government affairs, said in a statement.
Where to Get the Vaccine against Left-Wing Anti-Semitism?
President
Trump was expelled from Twitter and Facebook. However, the head of
Hamas, the head of the Palestinian Terrorist Authority, and the
president of Iran were not denied use. They still publicly express
their hatred of both America and Israel. Why? Because if freedom of
speech exists in Biden's America, it is mainly for anti-American and
anti-Semitic forces.
Twitter
bosses have a clear understanding of what kind of tweet Trump would
have posted when, during a missile strike on Israel, the BLM thugs
staged a White House rally in support of Hamas using swastika
flags. Facebook bosses have a pretty good idea of what Trump would say
about the thousands of rockets fired at Israel. Without exception,
Washington-based journalists can accurately predict that Trump would
never have sent an American Hamas-supporter to negotiate between Israel and Hamas.
Are
Jews currently being persecuted by Roman centurions? Are the Spanish
inquisitors trying to exterminate the Jews? Are trains packed with Jews
currently moving to Treblinka?
No,
none of this is happening. On the contrary, the friendly-to-us
American conservatives, the German conservatives, immediately after the
start of the missile attack on Israel, removed the German flag from
party headquarters and instead hung the flag of Israel. Right after the
attack on Tel Aviv, all of Rome got covered with Israeli flags. An
enormous Israeli flag flies over Kyiv with the help of a cargo
drone. The world is in solidarity with Israel as never
before. Nevertheless, the persecution of the Jews is evident.
Let's
define what is currently driving the persecution of Jews. What is the
ideological dimension of this persecution? Who are the
performers? Who, perhaps without realizing it, is an assistant in this
matter?
Who
in America is the unwitting accomplice of those who want to destroy
both Israel and all Jews? American Jews of the left are such
shortsighted collaborators. Being traditionally Democrats, they did not
notice (or did not want to notice) that since the late 1950s and 1960s,
the Democrat party has shifted radically to the left. By Obama's time,
it had become an openly socialist, openly anti-American, and openly
anti-Semitic party.
Who
is the executor of the current Jewish pogroms? Each country has its
own mayhem heroes. In America, these are Antifa and BLM. In the Middle
East, these are the Palestine Liberation Organization (created by the
Soviet KGB and still led by a Kremlin agent), Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and
Iran. In Europe, they are the Laborites who turned London into
Londonistan. Most of them are religious or ideological fanatics,
brainwashed so profoundly that they cannot be treated by any means.
What
is the ideology of those who control this whole process? Who runs its
brain center, and does such a center exist at all? The answer to that
disquieting question, perhaps, lies on the surface. Those who yesterday
promoted the classic socialist slogan of disbanding the police or
defunding the police are today mourning the deaths of Hamas
commanders. The same people offer a panegyric to goons. It's the same
people everywhere — in America, in Israel, and in Europe. They differ
in their skin color, religion, nationality, educational level, and
sexual orientation.
However, they are united because they are all leftists, the adherents of post-Marxism ideology.
In
different countries, they try to hide under different signs. They can
call themselves Socialists, Laborites, Democrats, Social Democrats,
Democratic Socialists — this incomplete list of "progressive humanity"
is long, as is the list of nuances over which non-ideological (read:
insignificant) disagreements exist among them. They are the ideological
heirs of the previous generation of the left — Marxists, Bolsheviks,
Mensheviks, Stalinists, National Socialists, Trotskyists, Communists,
Maoists. This list is also very long.
The
first Middle East movement to unite socialism and Islam was the Muslim
Brotherhood, founded in 1928 in Egypt (the so-called "socialist
theocracy"). This union was a manifestation of the unique ideological
parallels between the 7th-century pseudo-religion (Islam) and the 19th-century pseudo-religion
(socialism). The unification of Islam and socialism was precisely the
mixture that the Soviet leaders loved so much; such a mixture became the
ideal breeding ground for international left-wing terrorism (under the
pretext of the "national liberation movement" and the "struggle against
the Israeli occupation of Arab lands").
Socialists
and the Muslim Brotherhood are also united by methods of achieving
their goals. Modern socialists prefer peaceful, legislative, gradual
changes to achieve their main goal: the redistribution of wealth. They
avoid bloody revolutions; their favorite course of action is slow,
almost invisible evolution. In non-Muslim societies, except for
periodic acts of terrorism, gradualism is precisely the Muslim
Brotherhood mode of operation. This is one reason why the socialist
movements have joined forces with their ideological counterparts from
the Muslim Brotherhood, which also prefers evolutionary social changes.
"Muslim
socialism" is similar to orthodox socialism; both call for "just
redistribution of wealth" and other classic leftist ideas of class
struggle. In countries with a non-Muslim majority, such as the United
States, Muslims are falsely referred to as the "oppressed proletariat,"
and the Jewish and Christian majority is falsely referred to as the
"oppressive bourgeoisie."
The
incredible, unthinkable alliance between previously irreconcilable
religious fanatics and socialist atheists is one of the most phenomenal
events in human history.
Yasser
Arafat, the Palestine Liberation Organization leader, was probably the
first leader to officially embrace Islamic-socialist ideas. In 1967,
immediately after the Six-Day War, he was rewarded for this with a
brand-new invention by the KGB, known as the Arab Palestinian
Nation. (Until 1967, only Jews were called Palestinians.)
Hamas calls itself the Islamic Resistance Movement. Its Charter
states: "The Islamic Resistance Movement is one of the branches of the
Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine." In addition, the Hamas Charter
requires (in a somewhat heretical form for traditional Islam) that in
the fight against Israel, "a woman should go out and fight the enemy
even without the permission of her husband, and a slave even without the
permission of his master."
In
traditional Soviet-style, the Hamas Charter condemns "occupying
imperialism" and "the forces of the capitalist West." Soviet communists
have long been out of power in Russia, but friendly relations between
the Kremlin and Hamas are flourishing. The Chinese Communist Party also
defends the interests of Hamas, as does the rest of the left.
All
this looks inscrutable on the surface, although it has an entirely
rational basis in most cases. At the same time, the baffling attitude
of left-wing Jews toward Israel belongs to an entirely different,
irrational category. For example, how can left-wing American Jews wish
for the death of their fellow believers in Israel? However, everything
becomes evident if you carefully dot the i.
The right-wing American Jews, like all American conservatives, want Israel's prosperity and peace with its neighbors.
The
left-wing American Jews, who, together with the Democrat party,
continue to evolve toward more and more radical left positions, cannot
forgive Israeli Jews (and Netanyahu personally) for an ideological turn
toward conservatism. Therefore, they joined forces with comradely
radical leftist movements, Islamic terrorist groups, and other genocidal
maniacs (all of them — in Stalin's terminology
— are "socially close") to punish Israel. Punish with missile attacks,
terrorism, Iranian bomb, boycotts, and UNESCO resolutions to turn
Israel into a rogue state.
Using
a cocktail of post-Marxism and Islamism, the flirting-with-communism
American left is trying to force Israel to leap back into the vile left
quagmire. Furthermore, as everybody knows, for all leftists, including
the Party of (D)eceit, the end justifies the means.
Therefore, now more than ever, the world needs a vaccine against left-wing anti-Semitism.
It’s always been very troubling that the Obama/Biden Administration seemed willing to throw everything under the bus to make a deal with Iran that was no real deal at all, with nothing for the United States and no guarantee of preventing a nuclear weapon at all.
As Josh Meyer explained in a ground-breaking story in Politico, they even derailed an investigation into Hezbollah while it was smuggling cocaine into the U.S., so as not to upset Iran. But the Obama/Biden Administration was never held to account for those actions.
Even during the Trump Administration, Democrats and former members of the Obama/Biden Administration including John Kerry met with Iranians secretly to try to figure out how to get the deal back even after President Donald Trump had pulled us out of it. This, despite the fact that Iran is our enemy, one of the chief state sponsors of terrorism in the world. As we noted, citing the Washington Times, perhaps “particularly striking because Iran at the time was backing plots to kill Americans stationed in neighboring Iraq and the regime was funneling money, including funds it received from sanctions relief under the JCPOA, to terrorist organizations Hamas and Hezbollah.”
So, it’s not surprising that the Biden team is now trying to get us back into it. The question is: are they as willing to throw everything under the bus as Barack Obama had been? It would seem so.
Joe Biden announced that he was going to be lifting sanctions on Iran without even having any kind of commitment or movement from Iran. Why? Because Iran wanted to restart the deal. Iranian activists fighting the oppression in the country had begged Biden not to do it, so that he wouldn’t empower the mullahs. But, he didn’t care about them.
Now, Iran, knowing they have Biden in there, willing to give them anything and not hold them to account, is blowing off even the weak requirements that were in place as part of the deal.
As Jazz Shaw at our sister site Hot Air reports, Iran’s parliament speaker, Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, says that they would no longer even be allowing the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) access to surveillance images to their nuclear sites. Oh, and that “time was running out” for a deal.
Iran’s hard-line parliament in December approved a bill that would suspend part of UN inspections of its nuclear facilities if European signatories did not provide relief from oil and banking sanctions by February.
The IAEA struck a three-month deal with Iran to have it hold the surveillance images, with Tehran threatening to delete them afterward if no deal had been reached.
It’s not clear now if they’ve deleted those three months’ worth of images. But, it means the IAEA has no ability to assess what Iran has been doing. Imagine the temerity to play around IAEA like this.
So, the normal reaction one should have to this is that they’ve been playing these games, one should not bend over for them — because they haven’t acted in accordance with the deal to begin with.
Iran has already shot far past the maximum allowable uranium enrichment levels defined in the Obama-era deal. They’re now up in the range of 63 percent enrichment using their new IR-4 centrifuges and have announced that they will soon be installing their IR-9 centrifuges which are allegedly far faster and more efficient. This puts them only a few steps away from being able to make a bomb.
Why would you continue to lift sanctions, given these games? But, unfortunately, that’s exactly what Biden is doing.
The House of Representatives on Wednesday passed legislation to create a 9/11-style commission to investigate the events of January 6, 2021. Thirty-five Republicans, including the ten who voted to impeach Donald Trump for “inciting” the violence that day, joined Democrats to advance the bill to the U.S. Senate where its fate is unclear.
The vote, ironically, came almost four years to the day that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, at the behest of many Republicans, appointed Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate the concocted crime of Trump-Russia election collusion. The January 6 commission, if passed, would be yet another extension of Crossfire Hurricane, the illicit probe launched by the FBI in 2016 in an effort to destroy one of Barack Obama’s most despised political enemies.
One special counsel investigation, numerous congressional and senate inquisitions, and two impeachment trials later, the Left’s insatiable lust to take down Donald Trump remains unsatisfied. But now, rather than just targeting the president and his family, millions of Americans must be punished for defying the ruling regime—which only partially includes the federal agencies, political leaders of both parties, the news media, and Big Tech. This dangerous crusade is accelerating at an alarming pace at the highest levels of government; apparently, it is of no concern to nearly three dozen Republican members of Congress who are helping Joe Biden and the Democrats exact their revenge on Trump supporters.
Prior to the vote, Democrats and Republicans promised the January 6 commission would expose the truth. The American public, the lawmakers admonished, deserve a full accounting of who was involved, who was responsible, and how to prevent another “attack” in the future.
“Make no mistake about it . . . this is about facts, it’s not partisan,” Representative John Katko, the New York Republican congressmen who worked with Democrats to draft the legislation, preached from the floor. “We must never forget that the truth trumps politics and if the truth is what we seek, we have nothing to fear from bringing the clarity that only the truth can bring to the chaos and confusion of January 6,” Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) lectured.
“This is truth time,” shouted Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas). “Can we stand for the truth?”
The dramatic rhetoric about truth and facts comes amid a rapidly disintegrating narrative related to the Capitol breach—it wasn’t “armed,” it wasn’t an “insurrection,” it didn’t result in the deaths of five people, and it wasn’t orchestrated by “domestic violent extremists”; a new video obtained by American Greatness shows Capitol Police allowing protesters into the building. A handful of House Republicans finally are pushing back on dubious parts of the storyline and demanding to know who killed Ashli Babbitt, the unarmed veteran who was the only fatality that day.
The Sicknick Lie Persists
But the most heinous lie about January 6, by far, is the one surrounding what happened to Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, who passed away at the age of 42 on January 7. In an effort to provoke heightened outrage across the country, the Capitol Police issued a press release shortly after Sicknick died claiming he was killed in the line of duty. “Officer Sicknick was responding to the riots on Wednesday, January 6, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol and was injured while physically engaging with protesters,” the statement read. “He returned to his division office and collapsed. He was taken to a local hospital where he succumbed to his injuries.”
The news of Sicknick’s murder triggered widespread anger and grief, which was amplified the next day when the New York Times reported Sicknick had been bludgeoned to death by Trump loyalists using a fire extinguisher. “Mr. Sicknick, 42, an officer for the Capitol Police, died on Thursday from brain injuries he sustained after Trump loyalists who overtook the complex struck him in the head with a fire extinguisher, according to two law enforcement officials,” the Timesreported on January 8.
That sketchy account was picked up without question by news outlets and commentary sites on both the Left and the Right. Blood was now on the hands of President Trump and every lawmaker who planned to object to the certification of the election by the Electoral College on January 6, the public was told.
Joe Biden extended his condolences to Sicknick’s family. “The people responsible should be held accountable—and they will be,” Biden pledged the same day.
Heartbreaking optics soon followed, including a solemn police procession through Washington, D.C. on January 10. His remains lay in honor in the Capitol rotunda, a rare honor, for a memorial service attended by Republican and Democratic congressional leaders as well as Joe Biden and his wife. Another procession delivered Sicknick’s remains to Arlington National Cemetery.
But on February 12, the Times quietly retracted its original account. And after a long delay, the D.C. Medical Examiner’s Office finally admitted Sicknick died of a stroke caused by blood clots; the autopsy also did not find he died from a reaction to chemical spray, another lie created in the aftermath of the murder-by-fire-extinguisher myth.
Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick did not die of anything related to the mayhem at the U.S. Capitol on January 6. His employer, the New York Times, Democratic House impeachment managers, the entirety of the national press corps, Joe Biden, and politicians from both parties, just to name a few, peddled the lie for months. Most major news organizations still haven’t retracted their initial reporting sourced by the Times’ false article.
Repeating the Same Phony Mantra
So why are the very same people now vowing to get to the truth about January 6 after continuing to lie about Brian Sicknick? Nearly every Democratic congressman and a few Republicans on the House floor Wednesday repeated the falsehood that Sicknick was killed by Trump supporters in the line of duty. Here are just a few examples:
Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), Democratic sponsor of the bill: “At least one Capitol Police officer died because of the violence.”
Yvette Clarke (D-N.Y.) “I rise today on behalf of . . . the Capitol Police and the late Brian Sicknick. The seat of our democracy [was] breached and invaded by a mob of incensed bloodthirsty individuals, sycophants all.”
Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) “On January 6, the world witnessed an attempted insurrection against our government. The mob that stormed our Capitol resulting in the death of a Capitol Police officer . . . desecrated the seat of our democracy.”
Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) “We owe it to the men and women in uniform who fought . . . for hours to protect our lives. Three of them lost their lives.” (Democrats also attributed two suicides to the total death toll.)
Val Demings (D-Fla.) “The violent mob beat down the police officers who protect us every day. Some have died and they deserve better.”
And, of course, Katko felt compelled to add: “Capitol Police officers Brian Sicknick and Howard Liebengood, as well as D.C. police officer Jeffrey Smith, all lost their lives in the wake of the January 6 attack. They deserve better and we’re gonna deliver this. We’re gonna deliver this on behalf of Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick.”
You get the drift. On the bright side, it was refreshing to see Democrats find a police department they could support instead of demean and defund.
If January 6 was indeed the worst attack on the country since the Civil War, as Joe Biden preposterously claims, or comparable to 9/11, Pearl Harbor, and the Oklahoma City bombing, why do politicians and the media have to lie about what happened? After all, no one fabricated stories about dead sailors in December 1941 or dead babies in April 1995 or dead airline passengers and office workers in September 2001. The facts were horrific enough—no embellishment needed.
Trump haters hit a new low with the twisted exploitation of Sicknick’s untimely death to score political points. But now, even after the truth is well known, they continue to leverage his passing as a weapon against Trump and his supporters. The January 6 commission, to that end, isn’t about truth—only revenge.
The problem with sloganeering is that it almost always absconds from nuance, and that’s especially true when talking about something as complicated as the varying differences between cultures. Despite that, the repetition of “diversity is our strength” has been constant in Europe and the United States among populations and politicians who lean to the left side of the aisle.
Yet, at some point, the question should be asked what that actually means in context and whether it’s universally true. Regarding that, I’m pretty sure Europe is currently learning the hard way that it’s not.
Here are some recent scenes from pro-Palestinian protests in the UK and Germany.
Now, a rational person might be asking exactly what causing violence and destruction in the country that took you in is accomplishing, but nothing in these videos is rational. This is the result of massive cultural differences which were not accounted for when Europe flung open its borders for years following the refugee crisis in the Middle East.
That’s not to say that refugees should never be allowed in, but there should certainly be a plan to assimilate them into Western ideals, right? That suggesting that is even controversial shows how dumb and self-deprecating societies have gotten over the last decade. Cultures are not inherently good and healthy, and what we’ve seen in the streets of Gaza, for example, is genocidal, not just a difference in viewpoint. Every culture should be judged on its own merits and precautions should be taken when necessary.
What we are seeing in Germany is especially scary as it harkens back to the abuse of Jews in the 1930s leading up to the Holocaust. Who is going to stand up and stop this? Because it doesn’t appear the leadership in that country is willing to do much of anything.
The often illiberal and sometimes murderous doctrines that refugees bring with them don’t just disappear from their consciousness the moment they cross into a first-world country. To assume that is to be incredibly short-sighted. Jews are being attacked on the streets in the United States as well because we’ve made many of the same mistakes. Western governments have treated refugees as an opportunity to virtue signal for elections instead of actually having systems set up to prevent what we are now seeing.
People are going to have to stand up and say enough is enough. That doesn’t mean there can be no immigration, but it does mean you can not be negligently stupid about it. A majority of Palestinians via polling data are rabidly anti-Semitic. Their leaders call for the genocide of the Jewish people. Brushing that off when it comes to dealing with the importing of these cultures is not compassion. It’s simply dangerously naive.
There Is No Moral Equivalence between the Palestinians and Israel
On
May 14, 2018, the 70th anniversary of the birth of the state of Israel,
a modern-day miracle, the U.S., under President Donald Trump, fulfilled
a promise made by Congress in the 1995 Jerusalem Embassy Act, passed by
a 95-3 vote in the Senate to move our embassy from Tel Aviv to
Jerusalem, the eternal capital of the Jewish people. That bill
unfortunately came with a presidential waiver, and every president
since, including Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Hussein Obama,
promised to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem but failed to do
so. Only one, Donald Trump, a modern-day Cyrus and eternal friend of
Israel and the Jewish people, kept his promise.
Simultaneously,
45 miles away from the festivities in Jerusalem, at the Gaza border
with Israel, the so-called "March of Return," an annual event
inaugurated in 1998 by arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat, had been going on
for weeks and culminated on May 14. It commemorated what the
Palestinians call the "Nakba" or "Catastrophe," their self-pitying
reference to Israel's Independence Day. Fifty thousand Palestinians,
most of them Hamas terrorists, attempted to breach the border with
Israel for the purpose of killing or kidnapping Jews in neighboring
Israeli villages. Women and children, the "human shields" Hamas is
famous for, accompanied the marchers to maximize civilian casualties for
the compliant press.
The
peaceful marchers, as instructed, brought guns, knives, pipe bombs, and
grenades and hid them under their clothing. They also brought fire
kites to inflict damage on Israeli fields and crops. More than sixty of
the invading Palestinian terrorists were killed at the border,
dutifully reported with glaring split-screen images of the chaos in Gaza
and the events in Jerusalem, designed to tarnish the embassy event,
President Trump, and Israel.
Israel
abandoned Gaza in 2005. Every Jew dead or alive, including those
buried, were evacuated. Israel left behind elaborate greenhouses and
other infrastructure and synagogues, all which was destroyed in scenes
reminiscent of Kristallnacht. In 2006, Palestinians in Gaza
voted in Hamas over the Palestinian Authority. In June of 2007, Hamas
launched its military takeover of Gaza, killing hundreds of its Muslim
brothers in the Palestinian Authority by dragging them through the
streets chained to cars, throwing them off roofs, and shooting them in
the heads in front of their wives and children.
Hamas
is a terrorist organization, recognized as such by the U.S. and the
European Union. They call openly for the destruction of the state of
Israel and do not recognize the right of Israel to exist within any
borders. They are the Palestinian offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood
and as such seek not the destruction of not only Israel, but all of
Christendom and Western civilization including the U.S. and the
establishment of a global caliphate. Since taking over Gaza, they have
done nothing to help their citizens build the institutions of a civil
society, to promote normal democratic discourse, or to develop a free
market economy, preferring instead welfare dependency based on
international aid. In the process, they have inflicted great suffering
on their citizens, running what is in effect an open-air prison state
for 2 million people. There are high unemployment and poverty, poor
sanitation, and inadequate health care. Gaza, with its proximity to
Israel’s high-tech economy, ports, trade, beaches, and tourism, and a
willingness by the nations of the world, business interests, and aid
organizations to help them develop their private sector, should have
been Singapore on the Mediterranean. Instead, it is
Afghanistan. Israel blockades Gaza because Hamas is an Iranian-backed
terrorist organization that engages in acts of terror. Hamas uses its
assets and plentiful aid to build tunnels; fire missiles at Israeli
civilians; and breach borders with armies of armed terrorists to kill,
main, and kidnap. Egypt blockades Gaza for the same reason.
Israel
is a first-world nation that provides for its citizens the highest
standard of living in the Middle East, equivalent to that of Western
Europe. It is an open democracy governed consensually by the rule of
law, with human rights, free speech, religious freedom, a free press,
and a world-class free-market economy. It boasts the best hospitals,
universities, museums, and symphonies in the world and leads the planet
in any number of cutting-edge technologies. Its more than one million
Israeli-Arab citizens are the freest Muslims in the Middle East. None
is interested in joining his Muslim brethren under the benighted
Palestinian Authority or Hamas, preferring instead to keep his
citizenship in the Jewish State — for good reason.
Hamas,
on the other hand, like its secular terrorist counterpart in the West
Bank (Judea and Samaria), the Palestinian Authority: corrupt,
kleptocratic, genocidal extremists. Of all the nationalist movements
around the world, the Palestinians, Hamas or the P.A., are the least
deserving of a state — and should not be given one. The world scarcely
needs another dysfunctional terrorist regime. There is no difference
between either of them and ISIS or al-Qaeda except that for
"intersectional" and anti-Semitic purposes, they enjoy good press from a
left-dominated media — as long as it is Jews engaging them.
The
Assad regime, for example, in the ongoing Syrian Civil War, has killed
thousands of Palestinians in the Yarmouk Refugee Camp in Damascus, the
largest Palestinian refugee community in Syria, transforming it into a
"death camp," engaging in wanton acts of barbarity far worse than
anything Israel has ever committed. But you never hear about this
because it involved Arabs killing Arabs — not Jews, and therefore of no
interest to the left.
There
is one card the Palestinian jihadists know they can always play. That
is the support and positive spin of their egregious behavior by the
international left, including the media, the E.U., the U.N., the U.S.
Democrat party, and many liberal-leftist American Jews and their various
anti-Zionist organizations (J Street, Jewish Voice for Peace, and many
others).
They
will discredit the Israelis, delegitimize them, hold them to an
impossible standard, and continually advance the Hamas narrative of
brutal IDF soldiers cutting down innocent, defenseless Palestinian
Muslims — despite Israel having the most moral and honorable military in
the world, one that goes well beyond any other fighting force to
protect innocent life, often at huge costs to its own soldiers.
The
media and their political functionaries thus create and perpetuate the
crisis. By supporting the jihadist narrative, they encourage more of
the same and avoid putting pressure on Palestinians to create a
functioning, viable state. The media and the rest of the anti-Israel
cabal can be relied on to defend genocidal Islamic terrorists.
Hamas
sees dead Palestinians as a photo op. No media, no dead
Palestinians. Yes, our media and their leftist allies have blood on
their hands, rivers of blood, most of it Palestinian. It is they, not
Israel, who prolong the agony, suffering, and death.
Deeds, not words, will rebuild America's cities and restore the people’s trust. Fill the potholes and the rest will follow.
All politics is local, former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill used
to say. Presidents and senators have big plans about the broad strokes
of history, but most local government means providing important services
to people without a lot of fuss or theatrics.
Fill the potholes. Pick up the trash. Keep the schools and parks
open. None of this requires much in the way of ideology, just honest
work. The job of a mayor should not need much theorizing.
Here is the problem, however: theorizing is easy.
In our postmodern moment, it is far simpler to talk endlessly about
what is problematic than to fix the problems. National and international
issues grab headlines while the minutes of a city council meeting go
unread. Mass media and the internet have blurred the differences between
cities and states that once had their own local culture, but the nature
of government has not changed: the people in charge of zoning and local
ordinances affect your life much more than anyone in Congress does.
Mayors and local politicians could use this fact to advance their
careers if they wanted to. Imagine a mayor who governed with a basic
five-item agenda: efficient trash collection, competent police and fire
departments, clean parks, reliable utilities, and no potholes. That
sounds like an ideal town but, in actuality, it is just basic competence
and no-nonsense efficiency.
It should be an easy path to political success for a local pol that
wants to work hard. But what do we get instead? Bloviating on issues
beyond their control while the cities burn. During the summer of 2020,
while Washington, D.C.’s local government was as inept as ever, as the
city convulsed with protests and riots, it seemed like nothing worked.
Yet Mayor Muriel Bowser was able to mobilize the power of her city’s
government quickly and efficiently — to paint Black Lives Matter in huge
letters across 16th Street. That does not fix a single broken piece of
infrastructure, but it shows where the mayor’s heart is. Improving
people’s lives takes effort and might offend some entrenched interests.
Sloganeering is free.
In
Chicago, the story is similar. Mayor Lori Lightfoot ran as an outsider,
having never before held elected office. She promised police reform,
something Chicago needed. But that project has gone nowhere.
Meanwhile, Lightfoot takes the easy path to national headlines by announcing she will not speak one-on-one to white reporters
under certain circumstances. The weird, racist policy does nothing for
the average Chicagoan and infringes on the independence of a free press,
but it costs nothing, takes no effort, and earns the plaudits of the
far-left critical race movement.
In Philadelphia, the people find a sclerotic city government, high
taxes, and an increasingly fraught relationship between the politicians
and the police. Mayor Jim Kenney came to office with no program, in
particular, just the inclination to steer a middle path among the
factions of the city’s Democratic Party.
But Kenney has not fixed anything in his city, choosing instead to
merely drift along with the currents of left-wing opinion. Pull down a
statue of Frank Rizzo? No problem. Open the schools? Maybe next year.
City
government works best when it concentrates on working, not talking. No
one knew this better than the last mayor to be elected to the
presidency: Calvin Coolidge.
In rising from the Northampton, Massachusetts, city council to the
White House, Coolidge absorbed valuable lessons about the nature of
government. In a speech to the Massachusetts State Senate in 1914, he
summarized some of them:
Do the day’s work. If it is to protect the rights of the
weak, whoever objects, do it. If it is to help a powerful corporation
better to serve the people, whatever the opposition, do that. Expect to
be called a stand-patter, but don’t be a stand-patter. Expect to be
called a demagogue, but don’t be a demagogue. Don’t hesitate to be as
revolutionary as science. Don’t hesitate to be as reactionary as the
multiplication table. Don’t expect to build up the weak by pulling down
the strong. Don’t hurry to legislate. Give the administration a chance
to catch up with legislation.
Like another famous New Englander, Bill Belichick, Coolidge exhorts us all simply to do your job.
That applies doubly to the government. Don’t talk about doing it. Don’t
make grand pronouncements about how it could be a better job. Just do
it.
If that sounds prosaic: it is. But prose precedes poetry.
The efficient performance of these quotidian tasks forms the basis of
trust. People look to institutions — including the government — for
answers at times, but they will only do so if those institutions show
that they can do what they promise. After that trust is earned, after
those needs are fulfilled, then can leaders inspire the people to higher
things.
Coolidge knew this, too. In that same speech, he reminded his fellow legislators:
Man has a spiritual nature. Touch it, and it must respond
as the magnet responds to the pole. … Let the laws of Massachusetts
proclaim to her humblest citizen, performing the most menial task, the
recognition that all men are peers, the humblest with the most exalted,
the recognition that all work is glorified.
These are sentiments that all of our local leaders should proclaim,
but no one will listen unless those speaking to them first do the day’s
work. Painting slogans on the street is fine, but who will care when
every other block is full of potholes and litter?
Critical theorists tell those who question them to “do the work”;
that is, read a hundred books of tedious philosophy. But those in
government should take that lesson more literally. Reading Michel
Foucault and Jacques Derrida is not work; administration is.
It may be boring and arduous at times, but so are many of the things
that make life function, endure, and prosper. Deeds, not words, will
rebuild the cities and restore the people’s trust. Fill the potholes and
the rest will follow.
Article by Vasko Kohlmayer in The American Thinker
No Race Has Ever Done More for Another Race than White Americans Have Done for Black Americans
In
the last twelve months we have been ceaselessly bombarded by claims
that America is a racist society in which Black people are oppressed by
White people.
This is a truly astonishing claim because nothing could be further from the truth.
You
can conduct a quick reality check yourself. Despite their fervent
accusations of racism, those who make them have not been able to point
to a single racist law, ordinance or practice in the whole of
the United States. This holds true across the spectrum: the federal,
state and local levels. If the United States were indeed an
institutionally racist society, you could surely find at least one law
or practice in this vast nation to support your contention. But they
cannot do it and that for a good reason: there aren’t any.
Please
mark this well: In the whole of the United States there is not a single
law or ordinance that can be identified as racist or discriminatory.
There has not been one for at least five decades. Please do contemplate
the implications of this.
The
only “proof” of racism offered is underrepresentation in some areas and
overrepresentation in others. But this situation in not due racism or
discrimination. The reason why Blacks are underrepresented among
neurosurgeons, for example, is the same reason they are overrepresented
in the NBA, the NFL and in many areas of entertainment. It is
fundamentally a matter of inclination, availability, skill and talent.
Similarly,
the reason why we have proportionally more Black people arrested for
violent crimes than White people is because Black people commit violent
crimes at greater rates than White people. In fact, Black people have by
far the highest crime rates of any racial demographic in the United
State. Nor is this disproportion a result of some underlying racist
policies or practices. It has been repeatedly shown that this situation
is largely due to the moral breakdown of the Black community where
nearly two-thirds of children now grow up in broken families. Such
children are many times more likely to commit violent crimes than
children from intact homes. And once this state of affairs becomes
established, it often ends up being a vicious circle. According to the Atlantic,
“kids have a habit of imitating their parents’ criminal behavior. It’s
no wonder, then, that by one measure, 10 percent of families account for
two-thirds of criminals.” This is the true reason for high rates of
Black incarceration, not racism.
Children
from broken families are also far more likely to underperform in
school, which is one of the reasons why Blacks are underrepresented in
professions that require high levels of educational attainment such as
neurosurgery.
The
notion that Blacks in America are oppressed by White people is a
complete lie. The exact opposite is, in fact, the case. Rather than
being discriminated against, American Blacks enjoy special rights,
privileges and advantages that are unavailable to White Americans. These
advantages extend into every aspect of America’s public life and can be
traced to legislation passed back in the 1960s.
“A
system of racial privileges for blacks was forced on universities,
employers, and the population. Less qualified blacks were given
preference over more qualified whites in university admissions,
employment and promotion. Freezes are used against white admissions,
employment, and promotion until racial balance is achieved.”
Rather
than being institutionally oppressed, American Blacks have been
accorded a whole array of institutional advantages over Whites.
This
represents a truly remarkable state of affairs, because it stands as
the only known instance in history whereby a racial majority in power
has voluntarily agreed to relinquish its standing and allow
discrimination against themselves in favor of a racial minority.
We
urge you to pause and spend some time contemplating the profound
significance of this. Never before has such a thing happened in the
annals of mankind.
Can
you conceive of any other race that would ever do such a thing? Can you
imagine an Arab majority voluntarily discriminating against themselves
in favor of Blacks? Can you imagine the Chinese doing this? Or Indians?
As far as Blacks themselves they have been known – when in power – to be
among some of the most ruthless oppressors of other races and
ethnicities. Can you imagine a ruling Black majority in any country
relinquishing its power and discriminating against themselves in favor
of a minority? This is simply unimaginable.
And
yet White Americans have done precisely this. They are the only racial
group in history about whom such a thing can be said. This is a historic
achievement and a powerful testimony to the intrinsic kindness and
goodwill of White Americans.
The
help that White Americans have extended to Blacks is not limited to
voluntary self-abnegation, reverse discrimination and preferential
treatment. In 2012, for example, nearly half of the Black population
have been on some kind of federal means-tested program. According to the data provided
by the United States Census Bureau, “at 41.6 percent, blacks were more
likely to participate in government assistance programs in an average
month” than any other racial demographic. As a point of comparison,
Black participation in these programs was three times the rate of
non-Hispanic Whites.
Thus,
over the years, trillions of dollars have been pumped into the Black
community through various government initiatives. From nearly thirty
trillion spent on the war on poverty a disproportionate share has flowed
into the Black community. According to the analysis by Independent Institute:
The
estimated aggregate cost of the War on Poverty is nearly $28 trillion,
which is three and a half times higher than the $8 trillion total price
tag of every major war since the American Revolution.
If
we make the assumption that the rate of Black participation in the War
on Poverty related programs has historically been around 40 percent (see
here),
Black people would have received more than 10 trillion dollars in
government transfer payments as part of this initiative alone.
Reparations, anyone?
And
do you remember Barrack Obama, a Black man, who was elected President
of the United States almost solely because of the color of his skin.
Were Mr. Obama White, he would have stood no chance of being catapulted
to the highest office in the land given his rather limited
accomplishments at the time of his candidacy. Furthermore, Barrack Obama
was elected president not once but twice with most of his votes coming
from White people.
Given
the feeble condition of Joe Biden, it is quite likely that we will have
another Black president soon. Like Barrack Obama, Kamala Harris has
been selected for her high post almost solely on the basis of the color
of her skin. How could this occur in an allegedly racist society? How
can a prospect of two Black presidents in a quick succession come about
in a nation that discriminates against Black people? This would simply
be absurd.
In
light of all this, how can anyone claim with a straight face that
America is a racist country? Such accusations run in complete
contravention of reality and are levelled for political reasons by those
– mostly leftists – who are keen on weakening American society through
strife and division.
To claim that America is a racist country constitutes one of the most egregious forms of gaslighting we have seen.
If
you truly care about racial justice, modern White Americans should be
held out and celebrated as an unprecedented example of racial empathy.
Never before has any racial group extended such an effort and displayed
such a sincere desire to help and elevate another racial group as white
Americans have done toward their black fellow citizens.
Rather
than being slandered by political opportunists, White America should be
praised and celebrated for its unprecedented acts of racial goodwill.
No race has, indeed, done more for another race than white Americans
have done for their Black compatriots.
