War is Not Law Enforcement

posted by Civis Americanus at American Thinker 

The Hamas apologists who now infest Ivy League and other campuses either do not know, or willfully choose to ignore, the fact that war is not a law enforcement activity whose purpose is to punish the guilty and spare the innocent.  If we look at the history of warfare, their complaints about civilian losses in Gaza are disinformation and dissimulation, with no other identifiable purpose than to protect Hamas from the consequences of its actions.  The same goes for the bleating from António Guterres, UNRWA, and the International Court of Justice.  They are nothing more than our era’s counterparts of Axis Sally, Tokyo Rose, and Lord Haw-Haw.

This does not mean that it is ever acceptable to target genuine noncombatants, and Israel bends over backward to avoid hitting them.  Even enemy combatants in most wars, however, are guilty of nothing more than wearing the wrong color uniform.  Patriotism, being conscripted, and joining an army because one has no other prospects are not crimes that deserve any punishment, although the end result can be the same fate that countries with capital punishment reserve for only the worst murderers.  For every Ted Bundy who is executed for serial murders, or Charles Manson who dies of old age in prison for slaughtering innocent people, thousands of combatants are shot or blown up for no other reason than their service to the wrong (as perceived by the other side) government.

“The Man He Killed” by Thomas Hardy made this clear during an era in which few people joined armies out of patriotism.  An army was instead often the only alternative to debtor’s prison, starvation, or the workhouse, as the poem makes clear.

Had he and I but met
By some old ancient inn,
We should have sat us down to wet
Right many a nipperkin!

But ranged as infantry,
And staring face to face,
I shot at him as he at me,
And killed him in his place.

In “The Rochester Recruiting Sergeant” by Pete and Chris Coe, which is set to the same music as “Waltzing Matilda,” a recruiting sergeant tries to get men to join Queen Anne’s army.  Nobody with a trade will join, but one laments, “Ah, but I had long endured the parish queues [bread lines]” and takes the Queen’s Shilling.  The Thirty-Third Regiment of Foot was meanwhile known as the Havercakes because recruiting sergeants would hold up oat cakes on their swords to entice hungry men into the ranks.  This scene from Sharpe’s Regiment, starring Sean Bean and Daragh O’Malley, shows how it was often done.

In Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, the protagonist knifes to death an enemy soldier who jumped into a trench (or shell hole) with him.  He then opens the man’s wallet, not to rob him, but out of curiosity, and sees photographs of the man’s family along with his civilian occupation.  He realizes he has killed somebody’s husband and somebody’s father, and for no other reason than the fact that their respective governments told them to be where they were.

German and English soldiers celebrated Christmas together in 1914, and even exchanged gifts.

Ordinary human beings have no desire to kill other human beings.  Even during the Second World War, when Germany was ruled by one of the most evil regimes ever known, the ordinary German soldier was there only because he was told to be there (or else).  The war criminals who ran the concentration camps were, in fact, as far from the front lines as they could get.

We have seen so far, then, that even the vast majority of enemy combatants, much less civilians, are not evil people.  They die or suffer wounds and/or privation solely because of their governments’ choices, and not because of anything they did personally.  War is a quarrel between nations, and not a law enforcement process to identify the guilty and exonerate the innocent.

Hamas Is Guilty

The current war between Israel and Hamas is in fact an exception to everything I just wrote.  The vast majority of the combatants who died in the Second World War, even on the Axis side, were ordinary people who would have otherwise returned to their families and civilian occupations to contribute to their societies.  Terrorists who disguise themselves as civilians, commit a mass shooting at a peace concert, slaughter people in their own homes, gang-rape women, and burn babies in ovens are war criminals who deserve to be killed wholesale.  The world is better off without them, and Israel is simply taking out the world’s trash.

Another analogy consists of the eradication of cancer, which almost always involves collateral damage to healthy tissue.  Surgeons must remove the margins of a tumor in case they contain malignant cells.  Chemotherapy destroys growing cells wholesale (this is why cancer cells suffer the most from it), which is why patients suffer nausea from intestinal damage along with hair loss.  There is no “nice” way to remove cancer, but cancer will kill the patient if it is permitted to survive.  One does not have ceasefires or peace treaties with cancer because this just gives it a chance to recover and metastasize.

If Hamas is cancer, though, the Israeli Defense Forces are the best oncologists.  Who else could use the equivalent, in terms of everything but radioactivity, of 120 Hiroshima-class bombs for only 34,000 fatalities, including those at whom the weapons were aimed?

22,000 Unintended Fatalities from 120 Hiroshimas

Al Jazeera, which is no friend of Israel, stipulates that Israel has killed 34,000 Gazans (including the 12,000 or so Hamas terrorists it intended to kill) with 75,000 tons of explosives.  If we assume that all were one-ton charges, Israel has deployed the destructive power of more than 120 Hiroshima-class bombs to kill less than half the number killed by only one such weapon in August 1945.  This reinforces the proposition that Israel is wielding violence with almost superhuman precision against terrorists who are often menaces to peaceful Gazans as well as Israelis.  It is also to be noted that collateral losses among noncombatants, while regrettable, were less than two for every terrorist despite the terrorists’ use of the noncombatants as human shields.

How did I get 120 Hiroshima-class bombs at 15 kilotons from 75 kilotons of explosives?  While the destructive volume of an explosive is directly proportional to the amount present, volume is meaningful only if the target (like an aircraft or submarine) is in a three-dimensional environment.  If the environment is only two-dimensional, much of the blast goes upward to endanger only birds and aircraft that happen to be in the area.  The damage area is proportional to the two-thirds root of the explosive power.  A one-ton (0.001 kiloton) bomb is therefore 0.01 equivalent kiloton, and 75,000 add up to 750 equivalent kilotons.  The Hiroshima bomb, at 15 kilotons, did as much area damage as about 6.1 one-kiloton bombs dropped separately.  Seven hundred fifty divided by 6.1 is more than 120.

In summary, then, the difference between the war in Gaza and traditional wars is twofold.  Unlike legal combatants of all nations who carry their arms openly, follow the rules of war, and do not use civilians as human shields, Hamas consists solely of terrorists who deserve death.  In addition, even though Hamas does its best to use noncombatants as human shields, Israel has done close to a superhuman job of excising the terrorists with minimal harm to their human surroundings.

Mark Levin: Here's why Biden has been awful for America

X22, Red Pill News,a nd more- April 30

 

New Bombshell Evidence Emerges: Was Trump Set Up in Classified Docs Saga?

 

This week in Florida, Judge Aileen Cannon unsealed a trove of new documents that Jack Smith fought to keep hidden. And you'll soon find out why. Among the documents unsealed were extensive exhibits, motions, and other filings shedding light on the intricate web of communication between the Biden White House and the National Archives and Records Administration in the lead-up to Trump's indictment.

Investigative journalist Julie Kelly found something interesting in the documents that could change everything. The first things is testimony from an FBI agent who testified that the General Services Administration (GSA) had been in possession of Trump's boxes in Virginia before ordering Trump's team to come get them.

"So an entire pallet full of boxes that had been held by GSA somewhere outside of DC is dumped at Mar-a-Lago," Kelly notes. "Apparently these are the boxes that ended up containing papers with 'classified markings.'"

"I will double check indictment but I don't recall this event in the timeline," she added.

So, it appears that the Biden administration may have been responsible for shipping classified information to Trump's Mar-a-Lago home in Florida. This development is significant because Trump has previously blamed the GSA for packing the boxes that contained the classified documents, only to later accuse Trump of essentially stealing them and using that as pretext for sending the FBI to raid his Mar-a-Lago home in August 2022.

"It was a set-up from the get-go," remarked Tom Fitton, the founder of Judicial Watch.

SOURCE: 

The Travesties of the Trump Trials ~ VDH

Tragically for the country, to stop this left-wing madness, the Trump travesties may not be the end, but the beginning of precisely what the Founders feared.

by Victor Davis Hanson for American Greatness

Do not believe the White House/mainstream media-concocted narrative that the four criminal court cases—prosecuted by Alvin Bragg, Letitia James, Jack Smith, and Fani Willis—were not in part coordinated, synchronized, and timed to reach their courtroom psychodramatic finales right during the 2024 campaign season.

These local, state, and federal Lilliputian agendas were designed to tie down, gag, confine, bankrupt, and destroy Trump psychologically and physically. They are the final lawfare denouement to years of extra-legal efforts to emasculate him.

Indeed, the nation is by now worn out by these serial assaults on constitutional norms: the Hillary-funded Steele dossier subterfuge; the pre-election Russian laptop disinformation campaign; the two impeachments without special counsel reports; the impeachment Senate trial of a private citizen; the effort to remove Trump’s name from state ballots; the ongoing attempt to emasculate the Electoral College; or the radical opportune changes in state election laws to ensure massive mail-in balloting.

Recently, Andrew McCarthy has reviewed in depth this coordination between White House personnel and prosecutors, long known and long denied by the left. Biden, for example, had complained to aides about Attorney General Merrick Garland’s tardiness in getting special federal prosecutor Smith appointed—and thus apparently ensuring Trump was convicted before the election.

Nathan Wade, Fani Willis’s now-fired paramour prosecutor, visited and consulted with the White House counsel’s office when he was acting supposedly as a purely local county prosecutor. The January 6^th left-wing-dominated congressional committee consulted with the Biden administration in sending forth its criminal referrals about Trump’s purported role in the protests. And to handle his pseudo-indictment against Trump, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg hired Biden Justice Department official Vincent Colangeio.

Two, the prosecutors’ delayed criminal indictments and E. Jean Carroll’s civil suit were predicated only on Donald Trump running for reelection. After his 2020 defeat, the loss of the two Republican senate seats in Georgia, and the January 6 demonstrations/riot, Trump was written off by pundits as politically toxic.

Then his historic comeback in the subsequent year terrified the left. The reboot prompted the subsequent indictments and suits years after the purported crimes. It was left unsaid that had Trump not been a conservative Republican and leading presidential candidate, he would have never been indicted.

Three, most of the indictments either had no prior precedent in criminal law or will likely never be used again, at least against anyone left-wing. Moreover, many of the writs relied on manipulation of statutes of limitations.

Neither Bragg nor any other local prosecutor had previously transformed a supposedly local affidavit misdemeanor into a supposed federal campaign finance violation, a gambit so preposterous that it had been passed on by federal attorneys.

Letitia James was the first New York Attorney General to indict a state resident for the supposed crime of overvaluing real estate to obtain a loan, which was paid back timely and in full, to the profit of lending institutions. No bank, after auditing Trump’s assets and viability to pay back loans, was unhappy to loan to him. But all were quite happy to profit from the hefty interest—and would likely be happy to loan to him again.

James sought to make Trump a criminal without ever finding a crime, much less a victim. Nor, until the checkered and unethical career of Fani Willis, had any local prosecutor ever indicted an ex-president for a supposedly improper phone call questioning whether all the state’s votes had been fully counted.

Alvin Bragg’s case was nonexistent given the statute of limitations on supposed misdemeanors committed over six years prior—until Bragg transmogrified the accusations of minor crimes into felonies and, with them, extensions granted supposedly due to the COVID lockdowns.

In Carroll’s case, her unsubstantiated accusations of a sexual assault were also well past the statute of limitations until a left-wing New York legislator and unapologetic Trump hater passed a special law—a veritable bill of attainder aimed at Trump—waiving the statute of limitations for a year in cases of accusations of long-past sexual assault in the state of New York.

Four, all the indictments and suits took place in either blue cities, counties, or states. And most of the jury pools in or near New York, Atlanta, or Miami were or will be heavily Democrat. So far, the New York judges who have overseen Trump’s civil and criminal trials—Justices Engoron, Kaplan, and Merchan—were all liberals, appointed by Democrat or liberal politicians, and some have donated to Democrat causes. They were not shy about expressing disdain for defendant Trump. No changes in venues were ever allowed.

Five, all the prosecutors, Bragg, James, Smith, and Willis, are likewise either Democrats or associated with liberal causes. In the case of Bragg, James, and Willis, all three ran for office and raised money on promises and boasts of getting Donald Trump. And all three have now set the precedent that local and state prosecutors can warp the law and use it to go after an ex-president and leading presidential candidate of the opposite party for naked political purposes.

Six, all these cases were equally applicable to high-profile Democrat politicos. E. Jean Carroll’s defamation suit was the most laughable of all the court dramas, but its outline and protocols just as easily could have applied to Tara Reade. She came forward to accuse candidate Biden of having sexually assaulted her years earlier—roughly about the same period’s as Carroll’s fluid timelines. Her story is about as believable or unbelievable as Carroll’s. But the difference was that whereas the media canonized the delusional and self-contradictory Carroll as a useful anti-Trump tool, it demonized Reade as a crazy loon and liar—and a potential impediment to Biden’s 2019-20 primary campaign.

Bragg had to torture the law to fabricate a federal campaign finance indictment against Trump. But Hillary Clinton clearly violated federal campaign statutes—and was variously fined—when she tried to hide her “opposition research” payments to Christopher Steele as “legal expenses.” In truth, Steele was hired and paid to concoct a fake anti-Trump dossier and likely should have been barred from working for a presidential campaign given he was not a U.S. citizen.

In the case of Smith, simultaneously with his case against Trump, his twin special prosecutor, Robert Hur, found that Joe Biden had unlawfully removed classified files for much longer than Trump (30 years plus), in a much less secure location (his rickety garage), and without a president’s authority to declassify his documents. Moreover, he had disclosed their contents to his ghostwriter, who destroyed evidence under subpoena by Hur. Yet unlike Trump, Biden was not charged, given that Hur claimed that Biden, in his opinion, was so old and amnesiac that he might win sympathy rather than a conviction from a jury.

Willis indicted Trump for supposedly trying to pressure officials to “find” missing Trump ballots, thus supposedly violating “racketeering” statutes, as he oversaw an attempt to find troves of ballots he thought had been cast for him. Of course, in the same state, Stacy Abrams, after losing the gubernatorial race of 2018, claimed she had actually won, despite losing by over 50,000 votes. She sued to overturn the election and then made a celebrity-political career touring the nation, falsely claiming she was the real governor and her victorious opponent was an illegitimate governor.

For that matter, in 2016, left-wing organizations, celebrities, and thousands of political operatives sought to overturn the Trump victory by appealing to the electors to renounce their states’ popular vote tallies and thus become “faithless electors.” In sum, there was a true conspiracy, or, better, a “racketeering” scheme, to use Willis’s parlance, to coordinate various groups to overturn the constitutional duties of electors to throw the election to Hillary Clinton. Clinton, along with the likes of ex-president Jimmy Carter and soon-to-be House Minority Leader Hakim Jeffries, would continue to deny that Trump was the legitimately elected president.

In sum, the number of suits against and indictments against Trump grew in correlation to his political fortunes. They were designed in the election year 2024 to do what Democrat voters likely cannot. They are ridiculous and sui generis, and will never be used against anyone other than Trump. They have done more damage to democracy, the rule of law, and equal justice to the law than all of the antics that Trump is accused of.

Moreover, they will set in motion a dangerous tit-for-tat cycle of weaponization that threatens the very constitutional order of the United States.

If Trump is elected to restore the rule of equal justice, will a Republican special counsel revisit Robert Hur’s work and find ex-President Biden quite capable of standing trial for the crimes Hur has already investigated and confirmed?

Will then a new Republican-appointed FBI director order a SWAT-like raid, with Fox News forewarned and Newsmax reporters on the scene, to descend into the Biden beach house?

Will county and state prosecutors in Utah, Montana, and Oklahoma feel that to stop this cycle of illegality, they must charge the Biden family members by bootstrapping local indictments onto federal crimes?

Will conservative women in the future come forward in Arkansas, Idaho, and Alabama to claim that in their past, they now suddenly remember that decades ago a prominent Democrat candidate harassed them? Will their right-wing lawyers cherry-pick the proper red-state judge?

Will conservative district attorneys find ways to indict Joe Biden on the various imaginative bookkeeping and “loan repayments” used to disguise the fact his corrupt family received well over $20 million from illiberal foreign interests, much if not all of it camouflaged to avoid income taxes?

Will some South Carolina legislator get a bill of attainder passed in the legislature, ending the statute of limitations for a year for all those in 2016 who sought to undermine the electors and flip them to Hillary Clinton?

In August or September, will a right-wing state prosecutor and a conservative judge find that Joe Biden’s creative bookkeeping warrants a $450 million fine, payable before appeal?

And will Republican officials and judges in purple states move to get Biden’s name off the ballot?

Such scenarios are endless and, given the current precedents, could all be justified as desperate deterrent measures to shock the left into ceasing their efforts to sabotage our constitutional system and rule of law.

A final note. There is a divine order of balance in the world, one known variously by particular civilizations as kismet, nemesis, karma, or what goes around, comes around payback. We’ve already seen such forces at work: Sen. Schumer at the head of a mob at the doors of the Supreme Court, calling out threats to justices by name, only now finding pro-Hamas thugs circling his own home. Or Democrats during the Trump years straining to find ways to invoke the 25^th Amendment, now humiliated into claiming a non-compos-mentis Joe Biden is “sharp as a knife.”

Tragically for the country, to stop this left-wing madness, the Trump travesties may not be the end, but the beginning of precisely what the Founders feared.

The Left Wants to Play Stupid Games

posted by Derek Hunter at Townhall 

As the old saying goes, “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.” The Democratic Party is the China of stupid prizes, churning out 95 percent of the world’s supply and, as it just so happens, their recipients as well. 

The problem isn’t that so many on the left set up these dumb paradigms, it’s that the ripple effect of their stupidity ruins so many things for normal people who just want to be left the hell alone. They’re the fat kid cannonballing into the hotel pool while everyone else is simply relaxing in the sun. One dumbass can make a whole of people wet. It’s what Democrats do.

That’s why I love the idea of making every single one of these campus mutants as famous as possible. They wear their little masks, possibly because they’re immunodeficient – life in the basement between riot seasons – which just so happens to coincide with election years when Democrats need help motivating their drone army leads to a serious vitamin D deficiency – or because they’re hoping their faces will be covered to prevent them from being identified by any potential future employers. 

If it’s the former, that explains a lot. If it’s the latter, that explains almost everything else, with the remaining slice of the possibility pie being they are simply so physically repugnant to the naked eye that not to cover as much of is as possible with an N95 mask or a “Yasser Arafat Doily” (technically called a keffiyeh, it is commonly used in civilized countries to indicate involuntary virginity) would violate the decency of even the people who have no decency. 

Look, if I were there I’d want as many faces covered as possible too – the average leftist’s face is more effective than Ozempic as an appetite suppressant. I do, however, love the idea of making each of these “before radical plastic surgery” models famous, which includs putting out their mugshots and their names, attaching the latter to every picture or video you see of them online goosesteppingly following orders to intimidate Jews or other normal people who aren’t more concerned with the fate of a group of people than are the people claiming to “fight for their liberation” by duct taping themselves to as many of them as possible while they blindly launch munitions at civilians from the rooftops of hospitals.

I doubt the sincerity of people whining about civilian collateral damage when your heroes started this was by deliberately targeting civilians (because they were too cowardly to attack the Israeli military), hoping to inflict as many civilian casualties as possible.

I forget where I heard it first, maybe it was Bill Maher, or where it originated from, but it doesn’t matter because the sentiment is true that “The Palestinians would wipe out every single Jew but can't, Israel could wipe out the Palestinian, but won't.”

I’m sure I butchered the quote, but the sentiment is absolutely true and accurate. 

What’s terrifying is these drum-circling, brain dead rubes on campus would either join in to help the Palestinians or are so ignorant of reality that they don’t realize that once the Hamas terrorists they’re cheering on are done with their chosen target, they’re next. “But we danced for peace together” as your last words will only be remembered in the celebratory phone call to the parents of the guy who raped you then set you on fire. Of course, it will be difficult to understand through all the laughing they’ll be doing, but the sentiment will be conveyed. (Sound brutal? They did it after the October 7th terrorist attack, what makes you think you’re so special they’d let you live?)

The reason to oppose this outcome is not the karmic justice of it all, it’s that too many human beings not cheering on terrorists would die in the process. It’s hard to have concern for people who play stupid games and win – remember those girls who ran away to join ISIS, only to discover that they were catfished by terrorists using them as a modern “joy division”? 

Still, physical human suffering is not something to wish on anyone. Consequences, on the other hand, are since they are the only way people, either those receiving them or others watching, learn from their mistakes. 

Maybe some of these people will wake up one day and feel shame for the horrors they supported, maybe they won’t. But in sticking with one of my rules for life – that no business should ever hire someone it would be a lawsuit to fire – none of them should even be considered for a job unless and until they do. That’s why the people exposing who they are, people like the fearless Andy Ngo, who has dedicated his life to fighting these people, are so important. When future employers search the names of prospect, thanks to Ngo and people like him, the truth will show up and the resume moved to the circular file where it belongs. 

Play stupid games….

Democrats, in a Last Ditch Defense as Summer Approaches, Near the Bottom of Their Profound Bag of Dirty Tricks

 Democrats carry California and New York by about 3.5 million votes more than the Republicans carry Texas, Florida, Tennessee, and South Dakota, Mr. Trump could lead the remaining 44 states by ten million to 14 million votes.

Last week was the first time in some years that the United States seemed to be returning to its senses. The Supreme Court heard the argument from former President Trump’s counsel that he deserved immunity for actions taken in the execution of the office of president. It was likely from the questions of the justices that the majority of them are going to find some level of immunity.

The court will likely not report its findings until the end of June and if there is then anything left of the indictments of Mr. Trump, there is still unlikely to be any chance of a trial of those issues before the election, nor any significant absorption of the former president’s time to campaign for reelection.

The absurdly negligent and egomaniacal conduct of Fani Willis seems to have sunk the Georgia case, at least until after the election. This will bring down the great Democratic pseudo-legal assault on Mr. Trump to the unutterable nonsense now underway at New York, led by the district attorney, Alvin Bragg. We had one full week of trial last week, and it was an even more conspicuous fiasco than had been anticipated.

David Pecker, formerly of the National Enquirer, called as a state witness, gave useful evidence for the defendant. He confirmed that he sometimes acted at Mr. Trump’s behest to kill potentially damaging stories. This is a practice in which every remotely significant politician in the United States and all other democratic countries have engaged since Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton waged press wars against each other in the last decade of the 18th century.

After this first week of the so-called hush money trial, no one, not even those in the legions of fanatical Trump-haters, purport to find any damage to Mr. Trump, and nothing in the innocuous testimony to date enables the identification of any crime being alleged. The vacuity of this case is far beyond Mr. Bragg’s abilities to disguise. The opening of the trial had been hoped by the Democrats to focus an unpleasant light on the former president and have a negative impact on his polling results.

The reverse was the case, as there continues to appear to be a larger number of Americans, repelled both by the shambles of this administration and by this perversion of the criminal justice system and its reduction to being merely an adjunct to the dirty tricks division of the Democratic National Committee, than the slowly declining numbers of Americans who are almost pathologically averse to the prospect of Mr. Trump returning to the White House.

The Democratic strategist and continuator of the Saul Alinsky tradition, David Axelrod, expressed in a television news program last week his concern that the failure of the Bragg indictment could “taint” the other charges. The fear is that the failure of this unimaginably spurious effort to confect a felony out of two non-misdemeanors that are not really connected and in defiance of time limitations, will make the subsequent legal cases less plausible. 

Bingo. This is a completely disreputable and farcical action that Mr. Bragg himself had abandoned, but was goaded into relaunching and armed with a top Trump-hating Justice Department Trump-prosecutor to advance. It does indeed weaken the Democratic strategy to strangle Mr. Trump’s reelection effort in a morass of phony legal challenges.

The Alinsky of our times laments the fact that the utterly nonsensical prosecution is likely to fail and make the reception of further nonsensical prosecutions less shocking to the voters. The feared result of this is that the strategy of a barrage of unfounded and overblown legal complaints will not, after all, have the desired effect of destroying the Trump campaign.

There appeared also to be progress in the tensest foreign crises. Mr. Trump’s intervention on behalf of passage of the substantial aid packages for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan has been instrumental not only in emboldening the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, to bring the legislation forward and pass it, but also so far has dissuaded the right-wing troglodytes and Paleolithic isolationists in the Republican House delegation from acting on their mouthy threats to try to overturn the speaker.

The correlation of forces in Ukraine has shifted again, and Russia appears likely to be mired up to the American election day in a stalemated war with a much smaller country it illegally and brutally invaded and expected to have crushed two years ago.

Equally important, the Israeli government appears to have reached an agreement with Washington whereby in exchange for a moderate response to the failed Iranian attempt to carpet bomb Israel with attack drones and cruise and ballistic missiles, Israel would no longer be hassled by the United States for moving to complete the extermination of Hamas as a terrorist organization, after Israel evacuates more than a million women, children, and apparently noncombatant men. These are groups Hamas specializes in using as human shields for their terrorist units.

The appalling apologetics under the threadbare and much abused right of freedom of expression of Jew-baiting mobs disturbing the campuses of many of the country’s traditionally leading universities are slowly forcing the Biden administration to opt for the traditional Democratic moderate center over the America-hating venomous snake that it had nurtured at its breast since the “summer of love (and) peaceful protest” of 2020 that led to outright lawlessness in many cities, killed at least 25 people and injured hundreds, and cost over $2 billion of property damage.

The attempt to straddle between these two irreconcilable groups that is the fallback strategy of the desperate administration that four years ago encouraged this army of racist lunatics that now accuses President Biden of genocide, is collapsing. Good sense is slowly recapturing municipal and state governments that defunded police, decriminalized minor larceny and drug abuse, and induced a mighty urban crime wave. 

The approximately 90 percent of the national political press that remain uncritical supporters of an administration that is generally reckoned to have failed, still claims it will be a close selection. There is no reason at this time to expect a close election. The rabidly anti-Trump CNN groaned to acknowledge that their latest poll last week gave Mr. Trump a six-point lead over Mr. Biden.

Most polls show Mr. Trump running between two percentage points and six percentage points ahead in the overall popular vote, but except for Rasmussen and Trafalgar almost all the polling organizations are operated by left-wing universities and media outlets, and they traditionally underestimate Mr. Trump by 2 points or 3 points.

When it is factored in that the Democrats carry California and New York by about 3.5 million votes more than the Republicans carry Texas, Florida, Tennessee, and South Dakota, equivalent groups of states in electoral votes, Mr. Trump is now likely to lead the remaining 44 states by ten million to 14 million votes.

Last week the Republicans announced a plan to deploy 100,000 campaign workers to counter Democratic ballot harvesting, especially in the swing states where Mr. Trump is now leading by a larger margin on the balance of error in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and North Carolina. The Republicans are also recruiting large numbers of specialist lawyers in all the swing states and have solemnly declared that they will fight for every unverified vote in a way that they did not begin to do four years ago.                           

This is the last-ditch defense of the Democrats: stealing the election with harvested ballots that cannot be verified or scrutinized. They are almost at the bottom of their profound bag of dirty tricks and continue to fail on the economy, the southern border, the green terror, crime, and foreign policy, apart from what Donald Trump and Speaker Johnson salvaged for them last week in the bill to aid Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan.

At this point, a fair election seems reasonably possible, and the chances of tarring and feathering the leader of the opposition are unpromising. The American system has always saved itself in the past, and there are clear indications that it is doing so now.

https://www.nysun.com/article/democrats-in-a-last-ditch-defense-as-summer-approaches-near-the-bottom-of-their-profound-bag-of-dirty-tricks

CONRAD BLACK

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

NEW FEATURE: 🎭 𝐖𝟑𝐏 𝓓𝓐𝓘𝓛𝓨 𝓗𝓾𝓶𝓸𝓻, 𝓜𝓾𝓼𝓲𝓬, 𝓐𝓻𝓽, 𝓞𝓟𝓔𝓝 𝓣𝓗𝓡𝓔𝓐𝓓

Introducing a new W3P daily feature; 

The 𝐖𝟑𝐏 𝓓𝓐𝓘𝓛𝓨 𝓗𝓾𝓶𝓸𝓻, 𝓜𝓾𝓼𝓲𝓬, 𝓐𝓻𝓽, 𝓞𝓟𝓔𝓝 𝓣𝓗𝓡𝓔𝓐𝓓 

Here’s a place to share memes, cartoons, jokes, music, art, nature, 

man-made wonders, and whatever else you can think of. 

This feature will appear every day at 1pm mountain time. 

Communist Defectors Warn About Four Stages Of Subversion — And America Is On The Last One

Xi Van Fleet and Yuri Bezmenov witnessed the evil of communism in China and the Soviet Union. 

The same evil is at work in the U.S.

posted by Scott S. Powell at The Federalist

Forty years ago, a KGB defector, Yuri Bezmenov, revealed the systematic plan Soviet communists used to take down countries and establish a communist-type society and regime. More recently, a Chinese defector immigrant, Xi Van Fleet, has been on a crusade to warn Americans about the parallels between what is happening in America today and what Mao did in the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

The systematic plan Bezmenov revealed involves four fluid stages of communist subversion: 1) demoralization, 2) disorientation, 3) crisis, and 4) normalization. In Mao’s America, Xi Van Fleet explains how Mao’s destruction of the “Four Olds” (old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits) is being replicated by today’s leftist cancel culture, which will end what is left of freedom in America if not stopped.

Demoralization

The first stage in the Bezmenov analysis, demoralization, lasts a generation or more. One of its main thrusts is to undermine the Judeo-Christian beliefs, customs, habits, and traditions that have been foundational to America — these parallel the Four Olds that Mao destroyed in China.

Another target for demoralization is the family, which communists want to replace with the state. Xi Van Fleet points out that just as the Chinese Cultural Revolution turned children against their parents, American families are under increasing attack. Government schools, the medical establishment, and popular culture — which now support the transgender movement — are increasingly turning children against their parents.

A third demoralization strategy is breaking the people’s loyalty and love for their country by rewriting history, denigrating the founders and national heroes, and destroying historic monuments — again, the Four Olds. In summary, the goal of demoralization is to disconnect people from the virtue of the past and render them unable to assess what is true.

Disorientation

The second stage of the communist strategy, according to Bezmenov, builds on demoralization to advance society’s disorientation, a condition wherein the masses feel bewildered and helpless. While it’s impossible to prove intentionality at this time, the China-originated Covid-19 pandemic caused massive disorientation in the U.S. when the government mandated masks, social distancing, quarantines, lockdowns, and the abandonment of tried-and-true medical practices of preventive and therapeutic treatments.

Another important part of disorientation happened early in the Covid crisis after the death of George Floyd. Assertions of systemic racism in law enforcement triggered rioting, looting, and the destruction of several billion dollars’ worth of property, along with the tearing down of historic statues and memorials in many cities across the United States.

Americans became further disoriented when they realized government authorities were unable or unwilling to do anything about the destruction in big cities across America. There were few arrests while more than 2,000 police officers were injured. Disorientation may have reached its peak when cities with the most lawlessness, such as Minneapolis, Seattle, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, initiated efforts to defund local law enforcement.

Crisis

Following disorientation is the crisis stage. An unprecedented crisis stage for America came in November 2020 with election rigging. Democrat operatives exploited the fear factor of Covid-19 in the summer months of 2020. They visited almost every swing state to change voting rules to accommodate expanded mail-in ballots, drop boxes, and extended vote-tally deadlines — all of which facilitate vote fraud.

The crisis that ensued from election irregularity was deepened by the massive media and social media censorship and cancellation campaigns that began well before the Nov. 3, 2020, election. The Department of Homeland Security division called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, better known as CISA, collaborated with the Stanford University-based NGO Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) to suppress information that would help Trump.

EIP launched a campaign to prevent the public from challenging the anticipated voting irregularities by getting agreements from all the social media companies — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, and Pinterest — to modify their customer terms-of-service policies to incorporate language about “delegitimization.” Once that was accomplished, according to Mike Benz, a former U.S. State Department communications policymaker and an expert on propaganda, the door was opened to algorithmic mass censorship and cancellation.

EIP exerted pressure on all the social media companies to adhere to their customer service policies and censor, cancel, or deplatform any content that contained “delegitimized” narratives about new election protocols and “processes,” election “issues and outcomes,” “mail-in ballots,” “early voting,” “drop boxes,” “Dominion Voting Systems,” and “Antifa.”

The media treatment of the Hunter Biden laptop story that broke in mid-October 2020 in the New York Post illustrates just how quickly the channels of propaganda and media manipulation fall into place. The laptop story (which contained massive incriminating evidence revealing a compromised Joe Biden family), was immediately delegitimized and taken down from every social media site. At the same time, 51 former top intelligence officials signed a letter, published in The New York Times and The Washington Post, stating that the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

After the 2020 election, social media effectively thwarted discussion about election fraud. Again EIP insisted that social media companies uphold the terms-of-service contracts that required censoring social media content containing newly delegitimized terms, such as “Stop the Steal,” “dead voter rolls,” “Sharpiegate,” “stolen election,” “ballot harvesting,” and “Postal Service,” to name a few. Additionally, people questioning the integrity of the 2020 election were marginalized by the media and discredited as “election deniers.”

Bemenov’s four stages are fluid, so demoralization and disorientation continue in the crisis stage. We see this with lawfare against Donald Trump, his aides, and some 1,200 Jan. 6 participants arrested by the FBI.

The target is not just Trump and his supporters, but the American people, who are now seeing that large parts of the justice system in America resemble that of a banana republic. With equal justice under the law and respect for the Constitution being mocked, the subliminal message is, “This is not the America you know; it’s a new world that you have entered, so get used to it.”

Normalization

While America is still in the crisis stage, some subversion experts argue that the lawfare, censorship, and cancellation regimes that now exist are really part of the last stage of communist takeover known as normalization — Bezmenov’s fourth and final stage. If America’s borders remain open and the American people are denied access to information, become accustomed to rigged elections, accept limitations on free speech, and acquiesce to the rewriting of history, the constitutional republic that was the United States will be gone, and the new world of communist global elite control will be normalized.

John Adams, the second president, unequivocally warned, “Liberty once lost is lost forever.” It is no longer enough just to man the ramparts. It’s time for the people to turn the tables on the elite destroyers of our constitutional republic.