Candace, we hardly knew ye. Where are the eyes that looked so mild? Hurroo, hurroo Where are the eyes that looked so mild? Hurroo, hurroo Where are the eyes that looked so mild When so many hearts you first beguiled? Why did ye run to Mengele denial? Oh Candace, we hardly knew ye. Adapted from the legendary Irish ballad When I was a kid, a group of my friends and I followed the nonsensical “professional wrestling.” In the schema of the “World Wide Wrestling Federation” (WWWF), there were “Faces” (Good Guys) and “Heels” (Bad Guys). We obviously knew it was phony. Amid the foolishness, a new WWWF star Good Guy was introduced: Cowboy Billy Watts. He was the “goodest” of Good Guys. Never lost. Fan favorite. Quickly rose to the top of the constellation of stars. I became his #1 biggest fan in the whole universe. Right up there in 1960s Dov World alongside Mickey Mantle and Superman. Eventually, the unthinkable happened — remember: all this nonsense was scripted and staged as an ongoing storyline — Cowboy Billy Watts’s growing ego got the better of him, and he jealously turned on Bruno Sammartino, the quintessential Good Guy and WWWF world champion. Tragically (!), Cowboy Billy Watts went from most popular Face to most hated Heel. Initially, I could not accept that my hero, Cowboy Billy Watts, had become a Bad Guy. (Postscript, in real life — decades later — it also emerged that he was a nasty racist.) Which brings me to Candace Owens. So many of us conservative American patriots saw in her earliest public appearances manifestations of greatness. Her articulation. Her razor-sharp smarts. Her refusal to be intimidated by the mainstream. The Left despises nothing more than a (i) conservative (ii) black (iii) woman. Just ask Justice Clarence Thomas, who is only two of the three. In the world of the Left, blacks are forbidden to be conservative. Jason Reilly? Thomas Sowell? North Carolina Lt. Governor Mark Robinson? Tim Scott? Dr. Ben Carson? Allen West? Shelby Steele? Larry Elder? She was the defiant challenge to that blatant Biden bigotry that bellows: if you are dark skinned but conservative, then “you ain’t black.” [S]he ends up painting herself into corners by spouting opinions and “exposing” conspiracies built on nonsense. They couldn’t break her, our magnificent Candace. The harder they hit, the stronger she countered. It seemed she was destined for greatness — perhaps one day to become a regular columnist in a major daily news publication, or host her own TV show. Maybe even the U.S. Senate. They couldn’t break her. Only Candace Owens herself could break her. And now, before our very eyes, we are witnessing “The Wreck of the Candace Owens.” It is as sad as the turn of Cowboy Billy Watts. Soon enough, though, one feels hoodwinked and bamboozled for ever having thought otherwise of the scoundrel. Good Guys don’t “just become” Bad Guys. When an intense and near-invulnerable person doubles down to demonstrate that no one is his or her boss, that no one will intimidate her by suggesting politely she has inferred something factually wrong, then we sometimes witness an unbreakable hero but often, instead, behold the self-destruction of hubris. It is a tragic flaw, worthy of a Shakespearean tragedy — or of the World Wide Wrestling Federation. Imagine what Candace Owen could have been. We will never know. And, by now, who remembers Cowboy Billy Watts? A rigid stance defending truth is noble, standing by honorable principles no matter the personal cost. We admire heroic personalities who even go to prison for their righteous beliefs. Nelson Mandela, Anatoly Sharansky. Alexei Navalny, that guy who just died in Russia on Putin’s watch. Mohandas Gandhi. Martin Luther King. Andrei Sakharov. Vaclav Havel. Rosa Parks. Ze’ev Jabotinsky. Yitzchak Shamir. Candace Owens tragically sees herself that way prematurely. It is tragic when a person of such potential simply basks in ignorance, rejecting peripheral information and knowledge to augment her smarts. Consumed with the narcissistic and even paranoiac sense that people of power are trying to silence her, she defiantly assures her following that she is a proud black woman who will not be silenced.  Poor thing. Like so many others, while advancing up the ladder, she was blessed to encounter one or two sponsors or mentors to pave early roads for her. Many of us can remember those who believed in us and gave us that break. As such, Candace Owens found Dennis Prager, the well-known radio celebrity who brought her into his “Prager University.” Then she got another break when Ben Shapiro brought her into the Daily Wire. They opened doors and mentored her, and she proved worthy. She brought them a new niche of viewers and listeners attracted by her unique brand. Then along came Kanye West (who asks to be called “Ye”), the gifted conservative-leaning musical talent, fashion entrepreneur, and maniacal anti-Semite. When Kanye West tweeted crazed anti-Semitic outbursts about going to “Def Con 3,” Jews obviously were disgusted. But Candace raced to defend him. This kind-of makes sense. There are so few prominent black entertainment conservatives, and Kanye West may have been her Cowboy Billy Watts. With that, she began her descent into anti-Jewish hell. She proffered all sorts of defenses for Kanye West, while Prager and Shapiro, prominently Jewish, presumably sought to persuade her that Kanye West is not where she wants to build her brand. Alas, as a narcissistic proud black woman who will not be intimidated, she felt excited by the opportunity to defy her sponsors, finally to break her imagined chains — of guidance, opportunity, and mentorship. Don’t you tell me whom I can defend. OK, that happens all the time. Simon and Garfunkel split. The Beatles broke up. But then it got sinister and pernicious. Her two foundational conservative mentors are Jews, proud and self-respecting Jews. So, instead of just targeting her two mentors personally with vitriol for seeking to dissuade her from defending West’s Jew hatred, she doubled-down on her delusional heroic pro-Kanye defiance and determined that the nastier way to hurt Prager and Shapiro personally would be by attacking Israel. See the connection? A Jew annoys you, so you attack Israel? Got that? It is as reasonable as if her two early life mentors happened to be of Armenian heritage, so now she hits them by advocating politically for Turkey and Azerbaijan, while denying the Medz Yeghern (Armenian Genocide of 1915-1916) ever happened. Suddenly, she starts telling her embarrassingly uninformed audience absurdly that she went to Israel and saw apartheid with her own eyes because there is an “Arab Quarter” in Jerusalem’s Old City and a separate “Jewish Quarter” there. Apartheid! It never occurred to her why because she is so razor smart — she truly is — that facts need not align with her feelings. The four “quarters” of the Old City (which also has a “Christian Quarter” and an “Armenian Quarter”) were not designated by Israel or Jews but by a British cartographer mapping out the Old City in the 1840s, a century before Israel was established. Apartheid? It is like designating a community in San Francisco as “Chinatown,” one in lower Manhattan as “Little Italy,” and another in upper Manhattan as “Spanish Harlem.” She sarcastically “endorsed” Nikki Haley for “president of Israel” because Haley agrees that Hamas-ISIS must be crushed. Went after “secret Jewish gangs” in Hollywood. Devoted a crazy episode of her show to attacking “Washington, D.C. Jews.” She even “liked” a social media post that a rabbi was “drunk on Christian blood.” (FWIW: By Torah law, Jews are forbidden to ingest even a speck of blood remaining in slaughtered beef or other animals. To extricate every trace of blood from meat, first it must be washed and scrubbed thoroughly to remove every discernible trace. Then it has to be immersed fully in room-temperature water for at least 30 minutes. Then the meat has to be washed off. Then the meat must be coated on all sides with a layer of coarse “kosher[ing] salt,” and it is placed for at least one hour on a board with holes that allow any remaining blood, if any, to trickle out. Then the salt and anything else on the meat must be washed off in three separate washings. That is the deal with ingesting blood as per Leviticus 7:26-27. Absolutely forbidden to Jews, even if the meat otherwise is kosher slaughtered.) She provided her YouTube platform to debunked Israel hater Norman Finkelstein. When Finkelstein speaks unchallenged, he sounds reasonable. By contrast, Piers Morgan invited Douglas Murray to debate him, and Murray mopped the floor with Finkelstein. Murray is educated and informed; by contrast, Owens has exposed that she is a blank without a script. And her animus continues: Suggesting that Israel had advance knowledge of 9/11. Casting doubt on the Nazi medical torture experiments of Dr. Joseph Mengele, calling such accounts “bizarre propaganda.” Stating that the six-pointed Star of David originates from a pagan Canaanite god that was “fed” with child sacrifices.  Asserting that it was the Allies’ treatment of Germans during WWII that should be the humanitarian focus, not the claims of “the Zionists”: The reason why this particular episode [of my podcast] is so detrimental to Zionism is because they [the Zionists] have polluted American minds to believe that we must defend Israel out of morality and the evils of the Holocaust. Learning about how many people who committed holocausts and mass murders were protected by Israel is disruptive to that narrative. Plain and simple. Learning about what the allies did to peaceful German civilians and their children is similarly disruptive to what we have learned in school. Jews always are the canary in the coal mine. First, the conspiracy theorists go after the Jews; next, they are accusing America of perpetrating genocide against Germany during World War II. For Candace, it is exciting to be a brave, fearless black woman who will not be intimidated by anyone telling her what she may not say. She can say anything she wants. (Ask Alex Jones about Sandy Hook.) So her present campaign against her presumed eternal enemies, Ben Shapiro and Dennis Prager, hated for urging her to rethink her endorsement of Kanye West’s insanity, drives her to “reveal” all the secret evils of the Jews. Ever heard or seen that playbook before? In Judaism, we speak of three dimensions that comprise a person’s intelligence: (i) smartness (chokhmah), (ii) knowledge (da’at), and (iii) understanding/ insight (binah). Candace clearly is blessed with smarts. Alas, a smart person who lacks knowledge can sound smart, but only to those more ignorant than she — such as her social media following of ignorant teens, conspiracy theorists, and others of such ilk. A random scan through a few hundred comments on her YouTube post the time she hosted Finkelstein reveals how ignorant, infantile, and sycophantic her commenting followers are. The pattern of comments can be summarized by this paraphrasing: “Candace, you are so smart and so beautiful to look at. Thank you for having the courage to bring this wise professor to teach us about Israeli apartheid.” “Candace, I never knew that about Israel’s genocide. Thanks. And I love looking at your face.” “Candace, you are so brave to stand up to the Zionists. You are fearless — AND GORGEOUS!!” “Candace, this Prof. Finkelstein is the first time I ever learned anything at all about Israel. No wonder the whole world hates them. He is so brave, and I couldn’t stop looking at you!” That is her audience: not NASA scientists, brain surgeons, hard-working Americans on assembly lines, or homemakers rearing families. Rather, the blind leading the blind. Candace: Smart but Ignorant Candace is so smart but, as she unwittingly demonstrated when commenting on the 19th century residential quarters of Old City Jerusalem, also is pathetically ignorant as to many complex matters. Without knowledge, there can be no useful understanding or insight, despite smartness, because it has no foundation. It would be like having missed the news of Saturday, July 13, from Butler, Pennsylvania, then seeing Donald Trump at the Republican National Convention a few days later with his ear heavily bandaged, and applying one’s smartness and understanding, without knowledge and information, to conclude: “Trump must have gotten into one heck of a street fight.” Ignorance is not bliss, especially in a self-styled pundit. Owens’s tragedy is that, determined to prove that she is a proud black woman, and that no one will tell her what she may say, she ends up painting herself into corners by spouting opinions and “exposing” conspiracies built on nonsense. Then, when her mendacity or fantasy is debunked, she is too proud to acknowledge her ignorance, so instead doubles down, retreating to her own “Def Com 3.” I was among those who initially thought Candace Owens was a special new voice in America. Fifty years earlier, I had been eagerly enthusiastic about Cowboy Billy Watts. I did not want to accept that my Good Guy had gone bad. But he had, and he even turned out years later, in real life, to be a nasty racist. I conceded. Now I confront the reality that Candace Owens, too, has moved from potential greatness to scum. Candace, we hardly knew ye. But now we know Ye and ye. READ MORE from Dov Fischer: Of Kamala’s Coconuts, Venn Diagrams, and Yellow School Buses Millions of Jews Agree With Trump’s Criticisms of the ‘Crappy’ Ones Kamala Harris and the Too-Late Solution Subscribe to Rav Fischer’s YouTube channel here at bit.ly/3REFTbk  and follow him on X (Twitter) at @DovFischerRabbi to find his latest informative and inspiring classes, interviews, speeches, and observations. The post Candace, We Hardly Knew Ye … and Ye appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Commentators such as Victor Davis Hanson have called the “coronation” of Vice President Kamala Harris as presumptive Democrat presidential nominee a coup coming upon another coup: the 2020 primary when front-runner Bernie Sanders was pressured by shadowy party bosses to drop out in order to leave the “moderate” electable Joe Biden. As David Samuels says, we do have a shadow government … with Obama’s people in the White House running the show. Now the elected candidate has been forced out and replaced with Harris, who had “entered no primary,” won not a single delegate in 2024 — or in 2020, when “she dropped out of the race even before the first Iowa and New Hampshire balloting.” Delegates will be denied the ability to put forth nominees, as Harris is nominated virtually. Many wonder how the Democrat Party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt could come to such high-handedness, where such party bosses as Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama subvert the democratic process. The editorial board of the New York Post asked what happened to the party of “‘Lunch Bucket Joe,’” who “always aimed to identify with … the working class — the party’s base from the days of FDR and Harry Truman.” Democrats were now embracing “hyper progressive” and elitist Kamala Harris. David Samuels presents a similar, commonly held view of American political history, of five American Republics with the last one founded by Barack Obama, who had toppled the Fourth Republic, which had been founded by Franklin Roosevelt. FDR, presumably, “excised the New England elites in favor of the ‘New Deal alliance’ of Southerners and northern urban immigrant voters.” But then Bill Clinton embraced “global trade treaties like NAFTA and GATT, and China’s entry into the WTO, which blew up the broad middle class that FDR’s party had spent decades building and turned the Democrats into the party of Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan.” Today’s Obama-led Democrat Party is “college-educated, corporate-controlled,” an “alliance of civil rights, anti-imperialism, and identity politics.” Such assumptions — which are making the “conservatives” at Compact agitate for another New Deal — are based on the false idea that Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a self-identified member of the Hudson River Valley landed gentry, became a “traitor to his class” and championed the cause of workers and the “common man,” thus instituting a “golden age” for the middle class. This is a myth that FDR and his retinue promulgated and which I debunk in my book, Debunking FDR: The Man and the Myths (2024). While Roosevelt’s name and class brought him unequaled favorable publicity, the truth is that he lived off of his family’s riches, mostly handed down by his maternal grandfather, an opium-pusher in China. Other sources came from monopolizing coal mines (a company town in Pennsylvania was named Delano) and railroads. But from the beginning, during his one-term stint (January 1911–January 1913) as a 29-year-old New York State Senator, FDR presented himself as a “reformer.” One of the headline-grabbing issues of the day was the direct primary in the election of United States Senators, to be wrested from the party “bosses.” Roosevelt had his doubts that a direct primary bill would have much effect, but it was a good issue to support to elevate his reputation. Knowing that star-struck reporters would favorably record his words, he gave public speeches for the direct primary, supported direct primary bills that actually accrued more power to party bosses, and played to the press corps in Albany by precipitating a headline-grabbing angry three-hour debate that ultimately ended in a recess with nothing passed. Roosevelt’s decision to appeal to Southerners and northern urban immigrants was similarly based on political calculation as demographics shifted. He cast himself as a “farmer,” even claiming to be nothing more than a “Georgia cracker farmer” after investing in the Warm Springs property. But as a letter to fellow Hudson River Valley gentleman farmer Henry Morgenthau, Jr. revealed, Roosevelt thought a “large number” of Upstate farmers displayed “sheer, utter, and complete ignorance.” FDR actually did the bidding of Wall Street, where he worked for several years as a Wall Street lawyer (though not a very good one) and invested in dubious schemes involving German currency and selling stock in his various companies to gullible Americans who ended up losing most of their investments. Nor was the New Deal, presumably instituted to end the Depression, designed by the Brain Trust, the Ph.D.s with new ideas about how to uplift the masses as commonly thought. It was a creation of the very elites — bankers, corporate heads, and Wall Street speculators — to make institutional changes to their own benefit. John T. Flynn, one of FDR’s most consistent contemporary critics (who has now been memory-holed), in the June 1939 Yale Review, called the Brain Trusters “messenger boys” for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, U.S. Steel, other corporations, and Wall Street speculators and bankers. More recently, in 1989, scholar Thomas Ferguson presented them as providing “a transmission belt for the ideas of others, including, notably, investment bankers from Lehmann Brothers.” FDR may have rejected J.P. Morgan but only to allow the advancement of rival Chase National Bank, on whose board sat FDR’s cousin Vincent Astor. The Agricultural Adjustment Act was not designed by farmers but by “messenger boys” funded by the Rockefellers and the Chamber of Commerce. The National Recovery Administration, which fixed prices and set codes to benefit the six-hundred or so largest businesses in the country, was architected by Wall Street speculator Bernard Baruch. The AAA benefited large landowners and drove small farmers and tenant farmers from the land, and the NRA destroyed small businesses. The poor got very little of the New Deal funding, which was largely a patronage scheme — Tammany Hall on a national scale, with taxpayer-supported New Deal funds going to party bosses and areas where votes were needed. Social Security similarly exploits workers. As Flynn wrote in 1939, “the Social Security Act was made the excuse for laying upon the workers under the guise of creating a vast reserve a pay-roll tax to support ordinary expenses.” Taxpayer-supported deposit insurance has been used to bail out banks in the 1980s and in 2008/2009. Obamacare, as David Garrow has pointed out, is “a great achievement for the health insurance industry.” The progressive policies were designed to benefit the wealthy. When conservative Democrats like Senator Walter George, of Georgia, opposed his policies, such as court-packing, FDR publicly, in their presence, ridiculed them during the 1938 midterm “purge.” Today, the purge has been completed, with Democrats voting in lock-step or as a bumper sticker says, “Vote Blue, No Matter Who.” As David Samuels says, we do have a shadow government, a “spooky arrangement” with Obama’s people in the White House running the show. But contrary to Samuels’ view of history, the “shadow government” was in place during the FDR era. Baruch was the largest donor to the Democrats in 1932. He also reviewed all the speeches Roosevelt gave during the presidential campaign. Since at least the regime of FDR, the Democratic Party has been un-democratic. “Lunch Bucket Joe” was as unreal as “Georgia Cracker Farmer” FDR. We need to understand that as hyper-progressive Kamala Harris is refashioned into another working-class icon and the party bosses start playing “Nine to Five” as her theme song. READ MORE: He’s No FDR Donald Trump: The Conservative FDR The post FDR and the Democrats’ Unmatched Undemocratic Ways appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

We Win They Lose: Republican Foreign Policy & the New Cold War By Matthew Kroenig & Dan Negrea (Republic Book Publishers, 220 pages, $25) In January 1977, Richard V. Allen, who would eventually become President Ronald Reagan’s National Security Advisor, visited then former Governor of California Ronald Reagan at his home in Los Angeles. During their four-hour conversation, Reagan revealed to Allen what he believed should be America’s stance for dealing with the Soviets: “Dick, my idea of American policy toward the Soviet Union is simple, and some would say simplistic.… It is this: We win and they lose.” [T]he authors argue that Presidents Donald Trump and Ronald Reagan shared the same ideals on foreign policy. While his words may have appeared simplistic then, Reagan’s statement would soon become the crux of American foreign policy in the 1980s once he won the presidency. That thinking, almost like a slogan in retrospect, would define his presidency and secure America’s victory over the Soviet Union by the end of the decade. Thirty-three years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, America and the free world once again finds itself facing a new kind of Cold War, this time against the Chinese Communist Party. And yet, despite America’s status as the world’s superpower, U.S. leadership has lacked a clear strategy for how to effectively deal with China and deter its expansionist authoritarianism, pushing the world closer to global confrontation. One may even wonder if the very spirit that won us the first Cold War is lost. Is there even any hope of a strategy for America to win this new Cold War? For Matthew Kroenig, vice president and senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, and Dan Negrea, senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Freedom and Prosperity Center, there is a strategy. In their latest work, We Win They Lose: Republican Foreign Policy & the New Cold War, Matthew Kroenig and Dan Negrea apply their longtime expertise into a comprehensive strategy that can help America win the “New Cold War” against China. That is quite an ambition. Nonetheless, these two scholars have laid out a strategy in this book. Before revealing their proposed strategy, Kroenig and Negrea start off by asking an essential question, namely: Why does U.S. foreign policy exist and what exactly is its purpose? It’s a fundamental question but also one of fundamental importance. Unlike the adage about Las Vegas, “what happens overseas does not stay overseas.” Of course, going into this question, we all realize that the United States is already involved in global affairs, or as Kroenig and Negrea put it, “We live in an interconnected world.” Thus, the answer as to why America has a foreign policy is implicitly revealed by Kroenig and Negrea: “This global interconnectedness is why the United States needs a foreign policy. The United States government needs to be engaged overseas to secure the interests of the American people.” Even with that question answered, the deeper question still remains: what’s the purpose of U.S. foreign policy? Kroenig and Negrea explain that the core of U.S. foreign policy is in America’s founding documents. The Declaration of Independence states that that all Americans have the inalienable rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” and the purpose of our government, as found in the Preamble of the Constitution, is to “provide for the common defense [security], promote the general welfare [prosperity], and secure the blessings of liberty [freedom].” As Kroenig and Negrea state, “These values articulated in America’s founding documents mirror the three primary goals of U.S. foreign policy as spelled out in countless national security strategies over the years: the security, freedom, and prosperity of the American people.” These purposes go back to our literal beginning as a republic. And they continue to this day. Indeed, readers of this book will be surprised that when it comes to foreign policy there is wide agreement between Republicans and Democrats. “There has been a rough bipartisan consensus on the above interests for U.S. foreign policy,” say Kroenig and Negrea. The real divide on foreign policy, they argue, is over what interests “to prioritize and how to pursue them.” This divide is where Kroenig and Negrea expose readers to the clash between the conservative and the progressive approaches to foreign policy. For conservatives, “U.S. foreign policy is to advance American interests and protect the American people in an inherently dangerous world.” Progressives, on the other hand, “see U.S. foreign policy as a tool to advance the enlightenment project.” In a detailed analysis of each side, Kroenig and Negrea dive deeper into the conservative and the progressive worldviews, examining their views on the sources of international conflicts, the value of American power, the role of international organizations, and the very moral differences that distinguish them. That brings us to Democrat President Joe Biden. Biden’s reliance on the progressive approach and lack of a clear strategy has led America and the Free World closer to kinetic confrontation. When it comes to China, write Kroenig and Negrea, Biden has caused a dangerous “say-do gap;” that is, the ratio between rhetoric and actual action taken. This Biden approach has allowed for the CCP to build-up China’s military, develop unfair economic advantages, manipulate international organizations, and press further acts of aggression against Taiwan and in the South China Sea. When examining China’s actions following the disastrous Biden withdrawal from Afghanistan, the handling of U.S. support and uncertainty in the Russo-Ukraine war, and his misguided response to Iran’s efforts to build nuclear weapons, it’s quite clear that Biden’s progressive approach has failed. But what should be done going forward? Despite the gloomy reality that has been brought on by the Biden administration’s failures, the key to winning the new Cold War against China lies within the very principles that won America the first Cold War. It is here that the authors unveil their proposed strategy, which they call “the Trump-Reagan Fusion.” Despite present negative conceptions regarding Donald Trump’s supposed isolationism, the authors argue that Presidents Donald Trump and Ronald Reagan shared the same ideals on foreign policy. Both believed in the that if peace is to be achieved, it must be from a position of strength rather than appeasement; that is, “peace through strength,” as Reagan called it. During their presidencies, Trump and Reagan held that free trade is the key to prosperity, and both desired to avoid protectionist measures. But they also believed that if certain nations engage in malicious or unfair trade practices, then measures should be sought out to penalize those nations. Moreover, while Trump and Reagan recognized America’s military and economic strength, they also understood that within America’s core values lies a power that exploits the very weaknesses that lay within collectivist and authoritarian regimes, such as the former Soviet Union and China. Kroenig and Negrea essentially synthesize Reagan’s “we win and they lose” mentality with Trump’s “America First” policies. The Cold War With China The case made by Kroenig and Negrea is further strengthened by their comprehensive analysis of the present threat posed by China. “Under dictator-for-life Xi Jinping,” state Kroenig and Negrea, “the CCP has become more threatening in the use of its economic, diplomatic, and military power to challenge U.S. interests.” They point to China’s efforts to build-up its conventional forces and nuclear arsenal, its manipulation of international institutions like the World Health Organization and the United Nations, its use of espionage and state control to create unfair trading practices, and its infiltration into America’s own backyard via corporate, educational, and cultural institutions. In all of this and more, the threat that China poses is exponential. “If China succeeds,” write the authors, “the consequences would be devastating for the security and well-being of all Americans.” While China clearly poses the most serious threat to the United States, confronting the allies of China is equally essential in stopping Beijing. The CCP’s reliance on its strategic partnerships with Russia, North Korea, and Iran — a new Axis of Evil — presents serious challenges to counter its global influence. Beyond making their case as to how America can deal with China and win the New Cold War, Kroenig and Negrea attempt to formulate a consensus on foreign policy amongst conservatives within the Republican Party. Despite today’s divisions, they seek to identify “common principles, worldviews, and policy approaches that bring conservative foreign policy thinkers together under one tent.” Their Trump-Reagan Fusion approach seeks a conservative consensus regarding international institutions, U.S. climate and energy policy, and border security. We Win They Lose provides a straightforward and impressive case for a conservative approach to foreign policy that can turn the tide in the New Cold War. America may be in a state of malaise, but the road to victory is as clear to us today as it once was for Reagan; indeed, it’s as simple as “we win and they lose.” READ MORE from Hunter Oswald: Middletown Rally Signals Vance’s Strength The Plot That Almost Killed Hitler Keir Starmer’s Win Signals the UK’s New Leftist Course The post Winning the New Cold War appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

The headline of an August 1 ABC News story by Mike Levine provides the message editors hope the readers would take away: “New DHS watchdog report details how close Kamala Harris came to ‘viable’ pipe bomb on Jan. 6.” My suspicion is that she stumbled into a plot by her own allies to create chaos and was told in no uncertain terms to keep her mouth shut. Levine and his editors flirt here with exposing Harris’s Achilles heel — her whereabouts during the afternoon of January 6. Having satisfied themselves long ago with their own propaganda, they likely do not know the peril to which they have exposed Harris. This seemingly helpful “news” story has more potential of blowing up in her face than the alleged pipe bomb ever did. Apparently, ABC News obtained a copy of a new report from the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general’s office. The report purports to provide “an official and detailed account of how Kamala Harris, then the incoming vice president, ended up within feet of a ‘viable’ pipe bomb that had been planted in the bushes right outside the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters.” The report, which was shared with members of Congress on Thursday, describes how two Secret Service teams assigned to sweep the DNC where Harris was visiting on the afternoon of January 6 somehow missed a pipe bomb allegedly planted outside the building the night before. As a result, Harris’s armored vehicle came within 20 feet of the bomb. The ostensible thrust of the article is to review Secret Service practices in the wake of the agency’s failures at the Trump rally in Butler, PA, last month. The editors’ larger purpose, however, is to rehash the half-truths they have been telling about January 6 ever since that fateful day. According to the report, the Secret Service anticipated that the “Save America” rally on the Ellipse would be like the two previous post-election Trump rallies in Washington. At those rallies, the minimal violence was, writes Levine,  “limited to clashes between opposing protesters.” In reality, at both events, Trump supporters were  attacked by Antifa and BLM agitators. This explains why the Secret Service confiscated numerous knives and bottles of pepper spray at the rally. Unable to carry guns in DC, protestors brought lesser weapons for self-defense. The sentence that follows the weapons revelation is pure deception: “At 2:13 p.m., a little more than an hour after Trump finished his speech at the rally, rioters breached the Capitol building.” What Levine fails to note, however, is that the Ellipse is roughly a 45-minute walk from the Capitol. He also neglects to mention that the ubiquitous Ray Epps and his crew breached the Capitol perimeter at 12:53. They did not hear Trump speak. At 1:06 p.m. the undertrained Capitol Police began promiscuously lobbing tear gas and flash bangs into the still peaceful crowd mustered on the west side of the Capitol. It is likely that none of these people heard Trump speak. At 1:06 p.m. Trump had yet to make the closing remarks that were alleged to have incited the crowd. The building may have been breached at 2:13, but Ashli Babbitt, who stayed to the end of Trump’s speech, did not reach the Capitol until 2:23. We know Babbitt’s timeline because she was shot and killed twenty minutes later, one of four protestors to die that day, three as a result of police action. No police died that day or died as a result of injuries sustained that day. The worst injury any officer sustained was a concussion. All reports to the contrary are flat-out lies. The bomb at the DNC was found minutes after 1:00 p.m. Lots of suspicious things happened in and around that time. Just before 1:00 p.m. Epps and crew breached the Capitol perimeter. Just about 1:00 p.m. a still unidentified man hung a noose on a scaffold that stood unmolested for hours. Just about that time a still unidentified man atop the Capitol scaffolding urged people to “keep moving forward.” Minutes before 1:00 p.m. a bomb planted by a still unidentified bomber was found near the RNC, which prompted the search at the DNC. About 20 minutes after 1:00 p.m. the Secret Service evacuated Harris from the DNC to a still unidentified location. We do not know where she went, but we know where she did not go, the U.S. Capitol. Herein lies the problem for Harris. As a Secret Service “protectee,” Harris enjoyed a special status. To have breached the “restricted” area where Harris was visiting, as scores of protestors were accused of doing, strengthened the case against them. Then UCLA student Christian Secor was one protestor out of many who was affected by Harris’s deception. On March 19, 2021, the Department of Justice argued to extend Secor’s pre-trial detention based in no small part on the fact that he threatened Harris’s space. Secor would eventually be sentenced to three years in prison for non-violent offenses. When Vice-President Mike Pence initiated the joint session at 1:00 p.m. to certify votes, the DOJ claimed, “Vice-President-Elect Kamala D. Harris, in her role as a Senator representing the State of California, was also present.” The DOJ further claimed that Harris “remained within the Capitol building” all the time leading up to resumption of the certification process at 8:00 p.m. Where Was Kamala Harris? Not until November 4, 2021, did Politico reveal that Harris was not in the Capitol or on the Capitol grounds on January 6 at any time during the riot. Her silence on this issue, reported Politico, impacted “many of the 650-plus defendants” arrested to that point. “DOJ is now moving to correct the record,” added Politico, “acknowledging in court that Harris was in fact away from the Capitol during the riot and only returned later.” To this point, Harris has never spoken about her proximity to the pipe bomb despite the dramatic potential of such a revelation. My suspicion is that she stumbled into a plot by her own allies to create chaos and was told in no uncertain terms to keep her mouth shut, even if it meant putting innocent people in jail. If there is a better explanation, I’m all ears. Jack Cashill’s new book, Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6, is available in all formats. READ MORE from Jack Cashill: Obama Still Accusing Trump of ‘Completely Ignoring Science’ ‘The Profile in Courage Award’ Is the Perfect Prize for Barack Obama Has Obama’s Would-Be Publisher Read ‘Breaking the War Mentality’? The post ABC Exposes Kamala Harris’s J6 Achilles Heel appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Vivek Ramaswamy’s “national libertarian” plan to bring in foreign workers is a flawed concept, replete with the pitfalls of all other legal immigration programs. In his recent speech at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, D.C., former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy pitched his case for reduced U.S. legal immigration, but defended a system that would still continue to import foreign laborers to compete with and displace American workers. In remarks that sought to distinguish his vision of “national libertarianism” from “national conservatism,” Vivek laid out a plan that would bring in “high-quality” foreign worker immigrants. Any visa program that does not put in place an ironclad number limitation is a dangerous unlocked door. Ramaswamy did stress immigration restriction measures that the NatCon audience cheered. He naturally condemned all illegal migration and the ongoing border chaos. He rejected chain migration for extended family reunification, i.e., the motor of the current legal system, as not serving the U.S. national interest. Vivek spoke out forcefully on the need today for large scale deportations, vigorous domestic enforcement of immigration laws, and even the end of jus soli birthrights for illegal immigrants (which currently makes their babies born on U.S. territory American citizens). All good stuff, but where Mr. Ramaswamy and his national libertarianism vision parted with many at NatCon was in his plan to keep the door open to importing more foreign workers.  Amazingly, Vivek still advocated the need for such a program, despite decades of massive immigration, legal and illegal, which has left the country with a foreign born population of over 51 million, 15.6 percent of the total. That is the highest level in our history; when America in 1924 hovered close to the 15 percent mark, it was the basis for a national pause that ended mass immigration. Under the Ramaswamy plan, only foreign worker immigrants who were “high quality” would be accepted.  For Vivek, high quality essentially meant his legal immigrants would be screened to ensure that they held a solid knowledge of American history and civics, and an ability to speak English.  A flaw in Vivek’s plan is the assumption that a foreigner’s skill in passing a high-school level civics test and knowing something of the English language equates with growing up with American values. Moreover, Vivek did not even pause to make a thorough normative argument on why America should constantly be importing foreign labor of any kind. He did assert, rightly, that the United States must be viewed as more than a giant economic money-making zone, yet the basic justifications for his plan were all tethered to a short-term business analysis, one that had only the perspective of labor and capital. This is a regrettable approach that lands Vivek squarely on Wall Street, with other billionaire entrepreneurs, far away from the concerns and values of Main Street conservatives. Vivek’s immigration justification takes us right back to The Wall Street Journal and Cato policy papers. It is the same antiquated view that is comfortable with Washington lobbyists hustling in the halls of Congress and in federal agencies to expand the number of H-1B visas and create other narrow, special-interest visa categories. Those who spin this special-favor lobbying for the general public, in an attempt to identify a national interest, generally point to U.S. companies becoming more competitive and profitable (at the expense of domestic labor) or the need to bring in foreign laborer to fill jobs, typically farm work, that Americans allegedly “will not do.” True or not — and in most cases the arguments are dubious — all these scenarios still involve Washington politicians picking winners and losers. One might expect that national libertarians (Vivek’s camp) would advance a policy of principle that calls on the federal government simply to stay out of labor markets. Uncle Sam should guarantee the rule of law, i.e., protect the national border from outside incursions of illegals, while leaving the country’s domestic labor needs to America’s internal free market. Such a policy would recognize the inherent vulnerability of all domestic jobs that are opened up to cut-throat foreign competition. National libertarians should not kid themselves. Virtually all modern American employment categories — i.e., medical doctors, insurance salesmen, swimming instructors, physicists, you name it — could be radically and quickly remade by the importation of foreign workers to compete with Americans. Main Street conservatives believe in the integrity of borders. They are typically good free-enterprise capitalists, unlike the Wall Street types who go to Washington to seek government favors like work visas. Main Street businesspeople work in the world of small family enterprises and trades, such as carpenters, truck drivers, and barbers. Unlike Wall Street billionaires, they face our country’s modern reality where there are millions, indeed many tens of millions of foreigners, who are capable and willing to arrive on our shores prepared to work for less and for longer hours than regular Americans. Turning on the immigration faucet to import this endless labor supply has everything to do with immediate business profits, and very little to do with the fate of American workers, their quality of life, or the enlightened national interest. In his NatCon speech, Vivek asserted: “The old neoliberal view is that immigration policy is inextricably linked to economic policy, where the sole objective was economic growth, while the national protectionist view, historically viewed as the NatCon view, in response to that was inextricably linked to labor policy.” Mr. Ramaswamy, bright thinker that he is, still underplays the societal disruption that comes with all mass immigration. The NatCon view — or better the Main Street view — is concerned with more than just the impact on labor policy.  It is also concerned with the unintended negative consequences and dislocation in our communities that Vivek did not even address: such as the stress on local school systems, hospitals, social services, and housing markets. As a quality-of-life question, we need to ask how many millions should live in our country? Main Street conservatives also assert that if Wall Street could not easily resort to foreign labor, U.S. businesses might be compelled to innovate new employment strategies that would engage marginalized Americans.  It has happened before on a vast scale. The so-called “Great Migration” of black Americans out of the Jim Crow South to cities in the North and Midwest was fueled by work opportunities in northern factories. Traditionally, those bottom-rung manufacturing jobs went to incoming European migrants, but when World War I and America’s 1924 moratorium halted most legal immigration, the country’s black citizens, for once, had a chance to join the modern U.S. labor market. Instead of holding open the door for more guest workers, Vivek should call on Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and other billionaires to address marginalized Americans. Because foreign workers are cheaper, more manageable, and, yes, even more productive in some cases, U.S. employers will not give them up unless pro-American policies turn off the faucet.  As Steven Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies has documented through extensive research: Advocates insist there are simply not enough workers without immigrants. This argument ignores the long-term deterioration in labor force participation among U.S.-born men. Moreover, there is a significant literature showing that being out of the labor force is associated with social pathologies such as crime, social isolation, overdose deaths, and welfare dependency. Policymakers should consider encouraging work among the millions of working-age Americans on the economic sidelines rather than ignoring the problem and continuing to allow in large numbers of legal and illegal immigrants. It is also unclear how thoroughly Vivek has examined the difficulty of implementing U.S. visa programs; like all government programs, they encounter problems achieving the results that policymakers envision on their blackboards. For example, Mr. Ramaswamy implied his program would put all foreign workers on a path to U.S. residency and potentially American citizenship.  He rightly rejected today’s flawed dual citizenship model, but it is unclear how he would enforce such a norm beyond demanding that applicants pass a U.S. civics test. Decades of experience in America’s immigrant communities indicates that new arrivals are slow to cut ties to the old country, and it often takes generations to Americanize them. This is particularly true in our modern age of cheap jet travel, digital communication, and multicultural propaganda that ceaselessly proclaims that diversity, not unity and national identity, is America’s strength. Moreover, as a national libertarian, Mr. Ramaswamy should be highly suspicious of the operational efficiency of any government-run program, including visa processing. Yet he seemed confident that federal government officials would smoothly implement his foreign worker visa program, built on carefully vetting applicants and ensuring their high qualifications. Having once worked in this sausage-making arena, I must, alas, disabuse Vivek that federal government agencies are nimble migrant processing operations. In part, the chaos associated with visa processing is tied to the never-ending global demand to enter our country, by hook or by crook. The worldwide scramble of illegal migrants, unleashed by Biden-Mayorkas, to reach our borders is a good indicator. The ongoing, unprecedented border pandemonium brutally illustrates the desperate migratory forces that target U.S. legal immigration. All visa programs — regardless of whether lobbyists design them for foreign investors, students or laborers — are replete with shocking levels of fraud, corruption and scams, often managed by organized crime syndicates in the sending country that reach alarmingly into the United States.  Just examine the foreign fraud record in the U.S. diversity visa program.  It is hard to imagine how any of this would change under Vivek’s new worker visa plan. Finally, Vivek did not address the numbers. All immigration programs concocted in Washington must always answer one essential question: how many visas are to be issued?  Before Biden-Mayorkas blew up legal immigration, the United States was taking in about 1.1 million annually, mainly through the family reunification process. When a questioner asked Vivek how many migrants he contemplated accepting in his program, the former presidential candidate was surprisingly unsure. “The question of what number is the wrong question to ask,” he explained, “I think the right question is what is the quality of immigrants we want.” Any visa program that does not put in place an ironclad number limitation is a dangerous unlocked door. Vivek is rightly suspicious of the administrative Deep State and an inattentive Congress; why would he conceptually give a blank check on worker visas? Imagine a future Alejandro Mayorkas armed with such a program. Vivek has spoken out bravely in defense of American sovereignty against attacks from the left, a fact we recognize and applaud, but by keeping alive a supposed need for an immigration program based on foreign workers, he is bringing a dangerous Trojan Horse into our camp. Main Street conservatives need to banish the idea that some magically fine-tuned foreign worker visa program is out there that will serve the national interest. It is a fairy tale. READ MORE: What Is Harris’s Pre-2024 Border History? Left-Wing Media Outlets Rewrite Kamala’s Role as ‘Border Czar’ Mexico’s Efforts to Capture Fentanyl Plummet, Sparking U.S. Concern The post Beware Vivek’s Plan for Work Visas appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

from The Jimmy Dore Show: TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/

by Paul Joseph Watson, Summit News: “The donations are the largest contribution by Mrs Clinton’s organisation to a non-profit in the last three years” You know those posh blue and pink haired children that have got nothing better to do but glue themselves to the road and throw soup at Van Gough paintings? Hillary Clinton […]