OP Bumped as WW3 Begins: With U.S. on the Brink of War With Iran

Bonchie reporting for RedState 

At the end of Donald Trump's presidential term, Iran was nearing an economic collapse with little ability to project strength outside of funding terrorist proxies. Internal revolutions were brewing, and the Mullahs were in their weakest position in decades. 

Then Joe Biden took over. Since then Iran has been revitalized, seeing significant growth in its military budget due to the waiving of sanctions. The Islamic power has also come far closer to developing usable nuclear weapons. What did the United States get in return? It received a frayed relationship with long-time ally Saudia Arabia and absolute chaos from Kabul to Tel Aviv. 

Wherever Biden's foreign policy has been, abject failure has followed. One can't help but laugh at this post from his 2020 presidential campaign. 

Biden always has the "answers" until he's actually in charge, and his weakness has begotten aggression. As RedState reported in the early morning on Friday, Iran is preparing to attack Israel directly, a move that would draw the United States into a broader war. 

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Iran Attack on Israel Expected Within the Next 48 Hours

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American military forces are already being positioned to respond. 

What is the Biden administration doing to prevent this catastrophe? It's pulling out the same playbook it used in its attempt to stop the Russian invasion of Ukraine. 

Specifically, all of these leaks to major news outlets like The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg are purposeful and are meant to signal to Iran that we know when, where, and what they are going to do. Taking away the element of surprise can be a powerful tool in war. That's where the idea that Tehran "may temper the size and scope" of its attack in response to these revelations comes from. 

As we know, that didn't work with Russia. They moved into Ukraine anyway, and Biden's weakness across the globe no doubt played a role in that. Ask yourself, what has changed since then? Is there any reason for Iran to believe a retaliatory strike from the United States would be anything more than blowing up some warehouses in the deserts of Syria? 

Again, when you spend years fluffing and empowering an Islamic dictatorship for no logical reason (which points to something more nefarious behind the scenes), the consequences are predictable. Biden's strategy against Russia before it invaded Ukraine, holding off on sanctions in an attempt to appease Moscow, turned out to be a colossal mistake. The president is repeating that mistake by continuing to waive sanctions on Iran instead of taking a hardline before the missiles start flying. 

There is considerably more economic leverage to be exerted over Iran due to its position compared to Russia. Instead of using it, Biden is running the same formerly failed play, desperately leaking tough talk to the press that our enemies no longer believe. The results may very well be predictable. Let's hope not.

Historical Anomalies of the 2024 Presidential Election Part 2: America’s First Lame Duck Election

 For undecided GOP and independent voters, the question is this: Is it in the country and their party’s best interest to make Mr. Biden the lame duck and Mr. Trump the dead duck?

https://amgreatness.com/2024/04/13/lame-duck-election/

[Last week, we examined the historical anomaly of Mr. Donald Trump attempting to become only second president in American history to win non-consecutive terms of office and the challenges of endeavoring to do so against the incumbent who defeated him. (President Grover Cleveland being the first and only one to accomplish this feat.) Now, we analyze a second historical anomaly in play with which both former Presidents Trump and Biden must contend.]

For the first time in American history, regardless of which major party candidate wins, upon taking the oath of office, the president-elect will become a lame duck. The reason, of course, is the Twenty-second Amendment to the United States Constitution, which, in pertinent part, holds:

“No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.”

One may be tempted to dismiss the fact of America’s first lame duck election as grounds for winning a bar bet but little else. Yet, it is a critical factor in the pending presidential election.

To wit, polls have shown Democrats are not confident that Mr. Biden is their strongest potential presidential nominee, and most have hoped he would not again seek their nomination for a second term. Still, resigned due to a lack of challengers, the party will likely renominate Mr. Biden. (As previously noted: I have previously argued that Mr. Biden will ultimately not be his party’s nominee in 2024. If he is, rarely will I ever be happier to be mistaken.)

Not that Mr. Trump has cornered the market on his own party’s affections. As his primary proved, he retains a hardcore base large enough to win the nomination; however, many Republican voters remain adamantly opposed to not only his renomination but to his reelection as president. Typifying such “never Trump” Republicans is one new to their ranks, former Vice President Mike Pence, who has publicly stated his refusal to vote for his former ticket mate.

Unsurprisingly, then, in a nation that craves entertainment, the Trump vs. Biden rematch spurs as much enthusiasm in the electorate as a sequel to Gigli.

Shauneen Miranda’s March 28th Axios article cites an AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll that found: “Roughly a quarter of Americans expressed satisfaction or excitement about either candidate winning another term.” In other words, roughly 75% of Americans are dissatisfied or unexcited by both Trump and Biden.

Interestingly, too, Republicans were more excited about Trump winning the rubber match than Democrats were about Biden prevailing: “40% of Democrats said they’d be “extremely/very” excited if Biden won, while 54% of Republicans said they’d be “extremely/very” excited about another Trump administration.”

Given the rubber match’s dearth of enthusiasm and inspiration, what is motivating the respective partisans and the remainder of the electorate? Donald Trump. He is literally driving both GOP and Democrat voters and the undecideds.

Indeed, the title of Ms. Miranda’s article says it all: “Dems fear Trump win more than Republicans fear Biden: Poll.” And the poll’s numbers speak for themselves: Two-thirds of Democrats are “extremely/very fearful” of a Trump win, but only about half of Republicans feel the same level of trepidation regarding a Biden victory. Among all voters, roughly 40% feared a Trump triumph, while about 30% feared a Biden win.

Oh, and Ms. Miranda also cites another article noting voters are angry, too. Good times….

Recapping: voters are angry, afraid, and unenthused about the Trump vs. Biden presidential rubber match. Mr. Biden has a better hold on his base, not due to his merits but due to his party’s fear of his opponent. Yet, while Mr. Trump is the driving force motivating both parties bases, he has less of a hold on his own GOP base because Republicans fear his opponent less than the Democrats fear Mr. Trump. Critically, the overall electorate shares this view.

What lurks behind the lack of enthusiasm is also what may cost Trump come November: America’s first lame duck election.

While not necessarily realizing the unprecedented historical anomaly, Americans understand the practical implication: whoever of the two known quantities wins in 2024 can only help or harm the country for four years. True, the stakes remain great, but the stakes are halved—four years as opposed to a potential eight.

Perhaps, then, for unenthused, undecided voters, the lame duck election will provide an even greater temptation to not decide. Contrarily, however, it could provide a greater incentive to vote. If they err in promoting their principles and pursuit of happiness by voting for the wrong candidate, at least it is only for four years, not potentially longer.

Yet, for undecided GOP voters who are leery of Mr. Trump and his MAGA supporters, the lame duck election’s calculus is not the same. If Mr. Trump is elected, he will, of course, be limited to only four more years in office. But former President Trump’s victory will lead to his supporters and the GOP-Populist movement being cemented within the Republican Party, both in its grassroots and its establishment. Thus, the reelection of Mr. Trump will not be merely a finite four-year span. It has longer-term ramifications for the party.

This is the message Mr. Pence and other “never Trump” Republicans are trying to send undecided GOP voters: “Do not vote for Mr. Trump. The republic and Republican Party cannot survive the political resurrection of Mr. Trump and his MAGA supporters.” This argument could well find a receptive audience, as undecided GOP voters are likely the reason fewer Republicans fear Mr. Biden winning. Thus, for these GOP voters, the calculus “it’s only four more years” becomes a measurement of what they believe they and the country can endure if their vote knowingly helps reelect Mr. Biden.

As a result, given the candidates’ respective ages and stages of their careers, come January 2025, one man will be a presidential lame duck; the other man will be a political dead duck. For undecided GOP and independent voters, the question is this: Is it in the country and their party’s best interest to make Mr. Biden the lame duck and Mr. Trump the dead duck?

New York Times Writer Doesn’t See Race— When The Alleged Criminal Is Black

A New York Times writer showed no interest in the race of men in New York randomly assaulting women, but she did care about the race of Rockettes.

 https://thefederalist.com/2024/04/13/nyt-writer-doesnt-see-race-when-the-alleged-criminal-is-black/

Ginia Bellafonte just five years ago was beside herself at how Caucasian the line-up of Rockettes dancers was, calling the performance she attended during the Christmas season “an eerie celebration of whiteness.” 

(‘Tis the season!)

But in a painfully obtuse article this week, the New York Times columnist found nothing remarkable about the obvious racial pattern among a raft of women randomly sucker-punched by men on the streets of her own city. Namely, that the assailants are all black.

That overt detail was evidently beside the point to Bellafonte, who was instead preoccupied this time not with the race of the offenders, but with the sex of the victims.

“Like all conversations about crime in New York City these days,” wrote Bellafonte, “the one taking hold around these attacks over the past month has quickly defaulted to questions about mental illness and whether the men walking around impulsively hitting women in the face were merely disturbed — as if it warranted no consideration that a psychological malady might find such brute expression in an antagonism directed at women.”

The spate of attacks in recent weeks involves unsuspecting women who, out of nowhere and in broad daylight, suffer a blow to their heads by strange men passing by. It’s true this makes the matter especially appalling. But if the consistency in the sex attacked is useful, wouldn’t it be helpful to state other similarities?

As Bellafonte noted in her column, two arrests have been made in relation to the sucker-punch episodes, although she identified neither by name and only described one of the men in part as having “an Instagram page with provocative images of young women and pictures of himself standing in front of a ‘Trump: Make America Great Again’ sign.”

So, the politics of this man are important — he’s MAGA! — but not his race or name. Fascinating.

Contrary to what a reader might assume, the alleged Trump-loving woman abuser is not named Kyle Vanderbilt. It’s Skiboky Stora, a 40-year-old black man who ran for New York mayor and whose Instagram page shows him menacing women around the city.

In one video, he stalks a white woman who’s attempting to avoid him on the sidewalk as he repeatedly tells her to “slow down” and “put the phone down.” In another, he records a men’s clothing ad featuring a white male model and says, “Look what these white people got going on in our community. Little black kids see this sh-t.”

As for the second man charged with abruptly bashing his fist into an unknown woman’s head, that man is 30-year-old Mallik Miah. I’ll let you guess his race. (He’s black.)

Bellafonte wrote in her article that this should be “a moment to heighten the effort at helping women protect themselves.” Wouldn’t knowing the racial profile of the likely criminal provide a boost in that area? The more information, the better.

After all, Bellafonte was acutely aware of racial matters in her equally dangerous visit to the Rockettes performance. “The show I saw featured, as far as I could tell, only one African-American dancer in the lineup of close to 40,” she wrote. “There were, in the end, more camels on stage than black women.”

I emailed Bellafonte on Friday asking about her omission of the men’s ethnicity in her column about the assaults, but received no response. Perhaps she’s busy counting the number of black diners at Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville.

At the end of March, police said there had been at least seven surprise knockout attacks on women. Other perpetrators still at large are seen on videos that show they’re black. Is there any question that, if this were a pattern of white men whaling on innocent passersby in the middle of the day, a writer at the New York Times would find it worth mentioning? We’d be hearing about rampant white male supremacy for weeks.

The racial details of unassuming women victimized by violent men on the sidewalk are apparently of no consequence when the criminals are black.

Trump Rally, X22, and more - April 13

 

🚨🚨 I've just gotten more cryptic teasers for Monday that are 100% suggesting that....

There is 100% a legit chance that Hetty may not just be mentioned in 1 of the episodes, she could actually show up, even just for a quick 'blink and you'll miss it' moment.

🚨🚨

Conrad Black: Only after Hamas is destroyed can there be a Palestinian state

 Conrad Black: Only after Hamas is destroyed can there be a Palestinian state (msn.com)

Given the Gazan war and the tensions that are always present in the Middle East but are particularly high now, a little original thinking would be particularly useful. As I have had occasion to write in this space before, there can be no resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian issue until the terrorist apparatus of Hamas is completely destroyed. This is not just another episode, the latest skirmish, in the endless series of such incidents until on some far-off day by sheer attrition the parties turn their swords into plowshares.

Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7 was an act of war in violation of an agreed ceasefire and was conducted with the maximum possible barbarity, with the support of the Iranians, to sabotage an impending agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia, and specifically targeted against the most vulnerable people — children, women and the elderly, and those who had shown their commitment to reconciliation with the Arabs by choosing to live so close to the border of Gaza. It combined the sneak attack aspect of the Japanese descent on Pearl Harbor with the repulsive notion of a massacre of the innocents as on 9/11 at the World Trade Center in New York. The loss of life was somewhat smaller in Israel, but proportionately much greater.

There could be no clearer statement of the absolute refusal of Hamas, the governing authority in Gaza, to accept the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state. Since they will never agree to it, they’ve made it clear that they will never cease to persevere against Israel in the most barbarous manner possible. Since no peace, beyond a tactical ceasefire certain of eventual violation, is available with such a recalcitrant and genocidally motivated organization as Hamas, the road to peace is through the extermination of its terrorist capacity.

Israel is approximately halfway towards that goal and has substantially worked out a plan for its completion. It is clear that hundreds of millions of dollars of assistance given supposedly as humanitarian aid, including from the government of Israel, to the Hamas regime in Gaza has gone to strengthen Hamas’s military capabilities and to build the most elaborate subterranean network of bunkers and tunnels in history. It is here that the remaining Hamas fighters are lurking, counting on misplaced western hysteria about civilians and hostages to save them from the justified vindictive wrath of the Israel Defence Forces.

How Israel's war against Hamas has impacted the Middle East | Watch (msn.com)

When then-prime minister Stephen Harper gave one of the most cogent and important speeches of any Canadian prime minister since Pierre Trudeau’s imposition of the War Measures Act in 1970, to the Knesset in Jerusalem in 2014, he concluded his remarks: “Through fire and water Canada will stand with you.” This is the appropriate policy for a western democracy to espouse. The Jews and Syrians are the senior sovereign peoples in the region between Persia (Iran) and the Mediterranean, and the idea that all of Israel constitutes an occupation of other people’s land is false. The Palestinians are Arabs that are supposedly, according to some theories, descended from the Philistines and can be distinguished from the Jews, Bedouins (Jordan), Syrians, Egyptians and the Lebanese Christians who may broadly claim descent from the Phoenicians.

In the same address in 1917 when the British foreign secretary, Arthur James Balfour, promised a Jewish homeland in Palestine, then governed by Turkey, he promised not to compromise the rights of the Palestinian Arabs, and the obligation to grant a state to Israel as a homeland for the Jews comported a parallel obligation to find a suitable jurisdiction for the Palestinian Arabs. Obviously, that second obligation has not been fulfilled but the way to address it is not to attempt to destroy the obligation to the Jews, which has been fulfilled and which they have transformed miraculously into a wealthy and flourishing democracy: the Jews have made the desert bloom.

The five countries created in the aftermath of the First World War by the senior Allied leaders, French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George and the president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, meeting in Paris, were Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq. They have all disintegrated, all of them except Czechoslovakia violently. (Jordan was established separately two years later by British colonial secretary Winston Churchill, as he said, “on a sunny Sunday afternoon in Jerusalem.“) Most of the European states that were the components of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia are doing well, some of them very well.

If the West had leaders of the stature of the chief authors of the treaty of Versailles in 1919, it would be time to meet again with suitable leaders from the Mideast, and reconsider demarcations between the failed states of the region. The West Bank, as has been foreseen for the last 25 years in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, should go to a new Palestinian state after being narrowed somewhat: Israel cannot be asked to return to a width of only nine miles from the Mediterranean to its eastern border 30 miles northwest of Jerusalem. Gaza should be deepened very substantially, and an assured and secure permanent road placed between the West Bank and Gaza.

The Palestinian state would be welcome to east Jerusalem as a capital, and a special regime would have to govern sacred sites shared by different faiths, most conspicuously the Dome of the Rock, built upon Solomon’s Temple and the second Temple of Jerusalem. As the majority of the population of Jordan are Palestinians, Jordan could concede a modest amount of territory adjacent to the West Bank to give the Palestinian homeland a larger population and greater geographic depth (and give greater stability to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan by relieving it of some of its Palestinians).

Iraq has been an almost complete failure and the Kurds have earned a sovereign state of the Kurdish territory of Iraq and with the right to receive Kurds from neighbouring countries who wish to settle there. It is an oil-rich region around Mosul and the Kurds are resourceful people who would land on their feet quickly. The Shiite majority of Iraq in its south and east, culminating at Basra, have a religious affinity with Iran but not a cultural one and they could remain connected to Sunni Iraq around the city of Baghdad if some kind of confederation could be agreed.

Some percentage of Kurdish oil revenues could be paid to the emergent Iraqi confederation in exchange for Kurdish independence. Syria and Lebanon should probably be divided along local ethnic lines, giving the principal groups a relatively high degree of autonomy and it would be necessary, for there to be any security, for the surrounding powers — Turkey, Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and ultimately Iran when it learns to behave responsibly again — to guarantee these arrangements, with the support of NATO and Russia, which would sponsor them.

If Canada had shown any recent aptitude for constructive international arrangements and had maintained a level of economic growth and military strength and diplomatic innovation adequate to make it relevant in the councils of the world, as it was during the Second World War and through most of the Cold War and during the Harper government, it would be well positioned to propose the opening of discussions towards a comprehensive regional agreement, as soon as Hamas had been destroyed as a terrorist operation.

As it is, we bring nothing to the theatre, and have no diplomats of the stature to make a difference, as Lester Pearson was during the Suez crisis of 1956. In international relations as in other spheres, vacuums are unnatural, and all of this will be different with the regime changes that now appear to be likely and desirable in Ottawa and Washington.

National Post

FBI: Decline and Fall

posted by Ben Madison at American Thinker 

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has reached a stage in its development where it stands as an open threat to the constitutional protections of American citizens. What began as a little-known bureau of the U.S. Department of Justice in 1908 functioned as the department’s detective wing, investigating violations of federal law. Its primary focus was to compile, record, file, and obtain information that could be used in the prosecution of crimes against the government. It has now evolved into an agency that functions as a political tool for the power elites to threaten and intimidate any person, group, or domestic entity that could be perceived as an enemy or opponent to the elite political agenda.

J. Edgar Hoover became the head of the “Radical Division,” which directed its attention to aliens on American soil who could be classified as promoting anarchy or revolution. Records kept of German aliens in the U.S. leading up to and during WW I were extensive. The bureau was considered to be more of a compiler of information rather than an investigative law-enforcement entity. It did not have any legal prosecutorial powers or surveillance abilities against American citizens who had not committed a federal crime. The information gathered by the FBI was to be used by the Justice Department against alien-born anarchists.

As the years passed, the role of the FBI increased significantly. By the late 1930s, with WW II underway in Europe, President Roosevelt expanded the powers of the FBI. In 1939 Roosevelt issued a secret directive authorizing the FBI to take charge of all home-front investigations involving espionage and sabotage in anticipation of the coming war. Once the Japanese attacked the U.S. in 1941, Hoover already had files on thousands of Japanese and Germans in the country as possible antagonists. Roosevelt’s decision to inter all Japanese people regardless of citizenship was opposed by Hoover, who was against interring American citizens. The FBI had been given the power to arrest and to control the interment camps as well.

At the end of WW II, the FBI’s focus was on the communist “Red Scare,” which equated to espionage being conducted by the Soviet Union in America. Hoover began an “under-the-radar” program code-named Venona. Working with the Army Security Agency (now the NSA), they were able to decrypt encoded Soviet messages being sent to Americans. The consensus was that these were either Soviet plants or Communist sympathizers. The information or its source could not be used in any legal proceedings because it was unconstitutional. Yet the information was gathered and filed away to be used at some point as an effective intimidation tool. Although Venona was effective in leading to the eventual prosecution of the Rosenbergs, Hiss, and other Soviet agents, its existence was never revealed until the 1990s, after Hoover’s passing.

With the fear of communist infiltration still going strong well into the 1950s, President Eisenhower gave Hoover a blank check to do whatever was necessary to combat the Red menace. Hoover began COINTELPRO, or the Counterintelligence program. The strategy was to no longer just to prosecute communist party members or haul them up in front of congressional committees, but to manipulate, misinform and disrupt the party in secret. They would attack party members with misinformation and create distrust among members in an attempt to discredit the organization as a whole. They would print false propaganda and create false headlines all with the purpose of disrupting the structure of the communist party in America. Part of COINTELPRO was known as Operation Solo. This was a successful coup for Hoover. Two Communist Party officials, Jack and Morris Childs, had become disaffected with the party. The FBI persuaded them to remain party members while acting as agents. They rose through party ranks, with Morris eventually becoming the main liaison between the CPUSA and the Kremlin. Information on party objectives, the spy network, and even Soviet policy was obtained by the FBI.

As successful as the results were in this case, COINTELPRO was eventually used as an effective yet illegal tool against other groups and individuals. In the 1960s there was considerable concern about the civil rights movement. With unsubstantiated intel that Dr. Martin Luther King was employing at a high level in his organization two communist party members, the FBI decided to not only wiretap the suspected communists, but to wiretap Dr. King as well, even though they had no evidence that Dr. King was a communist. One can only guess as to how many were surveilled since then.

The FBI of today has taken an unprecedented leap towards an autocratic police force. Its reputation as a nonpartisan, ethical protector of the Constitution has been reduced to that of partisan, unethical detractor of the Constitution. We can no longer expect that all federal crimes will be investigated and prosecuted. We no longer expect that justice is blind but that the FBI uses blinders when investigating certain people. The FBI of today is investigating and intimidating parents of schoolchildren and knocking on the doors of those who post opinions on social media. The FBI of today is stonewalling and obfuscating congressional requests and hearings. The FBI is compiling information on anyone who objects to the Democratic Party’s narrative and manipulating through intimidation organizations that don’t support it. Forcing tech providers to remove posts that are pro-Trump or anti-vaccine or anything that offends the current administration is not, and never should be, a function of our federal law enforcement agency.

We have seen the changes in the FBI from an informational resource for the Justice Department to an agency that has usurped the constitutional freedoms afforded us, in the name of political protection of a narrative that supports hubris and power. One can only wonder what other schemes, plans, and subversive actions are now occurring that we do not know about. The bureaucracy will continue to prevail until the people take charge of the government.

Biden’s Re-Election Would Forfeit America’s Role as the Leader of the Free World

 The present administration is on a course whose logical conclusion is the destruction of American strength, influence, and even significance.

https://www.nysun.com/article/bidens-reelection-would-forfeit-americas-role-as-the-leader-of-the-free-world

It is a mistake to consider all the doomsday comments of those expressing alarm at America’s strategic deterioration as just the usual election-year hyperbole. A continuation of the Biden administration’s principal policy initiatives will steadily reduce the comparative standing of America in the world and ultimately forfeit its leadership of the West, the western preeminence in the world, and any right of America to claim to be the leader of the democratic world.

This problem of simply dismissing such alarmist statements as routine election-year politics has been compounded by the hysteria of President Trump’s enemies, in comparing him with Hitler, having greeted virtually every prior aspect of his political career with responses of outright hysteria.

The national intelligence director, James Clapper, flatly stated as a fact that Mr. Trump was a Russian intelligence asset and that Russian intervention had tipped the election to him in 2016. Speaker Pelosi said that his tax bill of 2018, which reduced taxes for 83 percent of American taxpayers, was “the worst thing that has happened in the history of this country.”

There is some merit to the claim that Mr. Trump himself inaugurated this era of skyrocketing hyperbole with his tendency to exaggerate both his own accomplishments and the shortcomings of opponents. Culturally, this comes from the distinctive techniques of the New York real estate promotion industry, as well as the presentation of great sporting events, and other spectacular promotions that comprised Mr. Trump’s business background, and at which he was very successful.

Perhaps the blame for this popularization of ludicrous and destructive partisan hyperbole should be shared between the parties and their different leaders. Practically every president after Calvin Coolidge has been prone to exaggerate his own accomplishments and the shortcomings of his opponents. 

Yet comparing a man who recently served a four-year term as president in which he produced a full-employment, minimal-inflation economy, practically ended illegal immigration, turned the country into a net exporter of petroleum products, and avoided wars, while greatly contributing to stability in the world and improving peace prospects in the Middle East, with Adolf Hitler is indicative of a paranoid psychosis among his opponents. 

Claiming to find any similarity between Hitler and anyone who has ever served as President of the United States is so monstrously defamatory that it is not sane.

With all that said, the present administration is on a course whose logical conclusion is the destruction of American strength, influence, and even significance. While not all of these trends can be laid entirely at the door of the Biden administration, it has, in every case, accelerated them. Many of the world’s greatest universities and American higher education, in general, are being reduced to indoctrination centers and vastly overpriced academies for producing graduates in subjects from which they could not possibly earn a living income.

The immigration policy of this administration, an authentic policy original for President Biden, is to allow into America as many people as can humanly reach and cross its porous southern border. Other than a very belated response to some political realities, there is no indication that the administration envisions anything less than a vast transformation of the nature of America and its steady inundation with multi-ethnic unskilled people whose presence in ultimately overwhelming numbers will create a high level of social chaos and sharply reduce the standard of living of all Americans. 

The goal is presumably a desire to assure permanent, Democratic, electoral victory, hyper-charged with the Americophobic vehemence of the racist extremists that were welcomed into the Democratic Party in the summer of rioting and arson of 2020 that was blamed on “Trump chaos” while Democratic-governed cities defunded the police.

This complies, conveniently, with the far-left Democratic view that theft and robbery are a semi-legitimate form of income distribution: self-help of a refreshingly efficient kind compared to recourse to the bureaucracy of the social safety net. It is, again, a particular innovation of the Biden administration to invoke thoroughly unproved claims and wild scenarios of climate change to inflict high energy prices on Americans, while reducing America to the importation of energy from self-declared enemies, such as Venezuela. 

This administration is the chief beneficiary of the fusion of the permanent state with most of the national political press, which has been reduced to a morally bankrupt propaganda outlet for failed policies and failed public people. This administration has carried to unprecedented extremes the intermittent past practice of using the prosecution system to torment and intimidate political opponents. The red ribbon Mr. Biden has put on the whole package is the Sisyphean burden of a federal debt bomb of about 120 percent of gross domestic product.

Both parties are responsible for the disgraceful and dangerous impasse afflicting  aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Free China. Some compromises are necessary in Ukraine, and if they are not made, and Russia occupies Ukraine, Russia will have substantially rolled back the West’s great bloodless strategic victory in the Cold War, and Russia will move on to the next item on its menu, confident that even if eastern European resistance is strong, western support is weak. If Israel is effectively discouraged from eliminating Hamas, it will be a victory for terrorism, and a confirmation that ultimately terrorism is invincible, and that Israel will never know days of real peace. This cannot be allowed to happen.  

If preemptive assistance is not given to Taiwan, it will be a material encouragement to Communist China to strangle that island until it capitulates. The alliance that we have been trying to assemble in the Far East and South Asia will then disintegrate as everyone makes the best deal they can with China since they will then know that America, for the first time since Commodore Perry opened the Japanese ports in 1853, is a wash-out in matters of security in the Pacific.  

This is not hyperbole; this is the course America is now on. It is time to set aside snobbery and minor irritations with Mr. Trump’s style infelicities and adopt the course and the political choice that will spare America and the world the consummation of these terrible policy errors.

CONRAD BLACK

Lord Black, Baron Black of Crossharbour, was Chairman of Hollinger International Inc. and a founding director of the New York Sun.