Some are calling it Kamala Harris’s “Sister Souljah moment,” referring to when, in June 1992, then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton publicly rebuked racist comments made by a popular female hip-hop…

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Politics The Tragedy of Kamala Harris Thanks to party machinations, Harris will be the weakest president to enter the White House since Buchanan. Credit: image via Shutterstock When President Joe Biden declined the Democratic nomination on X a few weeks ago, my first thoughts were of England. Party regicide, until now alien to American shores, has been a feature of English politics for centuries. Now that Speaker Emerita Pelosi is effectively bragging that Biden was pushed out in a party coup, it’s worth reflecting on our cousins’ experiences with regicide and how this new phenomenon will affect our politics.  The Tory Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli remarked that “assassination has never changed the history of the world” after the slaying of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. His party, which abandoned his wisdom in countless ways, ignored this advice in 1990. The story of Margaret Thatcher’s downfall is well known, and, in many ways, the accounts of political savagery aimed at Thatcher seem quaint. But the process by which Thatcher was dethroned, and the seeds of euroskepticism planted by her dramatic downfall, are not dissimilar to what’s unfolding in the American body politic. First, there is the conundrum of who should follow the ousted leader. Michael Heseltine, Thatcher’s one-time cabinet member, famously plunged the political knife into Thatcher’s front. Expecting to become prime minister, Heseltine organized the cabinet coup that dethroned the Iron Lady. But the resentment for Heseltine among the Conservative Party faithful and pro-Thatcher MPs was palpable. John Major, the mild-mannered accountant, would take the reins of government instead. Heseltine’s remark upon resigning from the cabinet in 1986 came to define his four-year spat with Thatcher: “I knew that he who wields the knife never wears the crown.”  Unlike Heseltine, however, Nancy Pelosi does not even seek it. Taking Seymour Hersh’s reporting at face value (a dodgy proposition, granted), it is clear that a combination of parliamentary forces, donors, and ex-party leaders forced the sitting president of the United States out of the campaign. Pelosi, the most powerful speaker of the House in American history, has effectively reduced the presidency to a “creature of the legislature” and crowned an heir with a remarkably similar resume to her own. In this, Pelosi has de facto altered the United States Constitution.  But what of our protagonist, our modern Macbeth? Kamala Harris may yet wear the crown, but can she change the course of history? Perhaps in the short term. John Major and his ilk were able to integrate Britain further into Europe. A succession of stridently neoliberal governments, notably Blair and Brown’s New Labour, would reshape Britain. By David Cameron’s ascension and subsequent coalition with the Liberal Democrats, there was little concern that Thatcher’s growing opposition to further European integration would resurface as a viable political threat to the neoliberal project. But Cameron’s machinations discounted the course of history, and Britain set itself free from European bureaucracy with the 2016 Brexit vote. Neoliberal actors in Britain managed to slow history, but they were unable to bring it to an end. The subsequent convulsions in the Conservative Party, and by extension Great Britain, are what we can reasonably expect in our own politics. Devoid of leadership, the Tory Party has fractured and stands to be eliminated if it is unable to unite around popular organizing principles. But the crisis isn’t contained to the Tories; it’s a blight on the nation itself. Britain has suffered six prime ministers in eight years while losing their beloved head of state. Charles III, recently diagnosed with cancer, exacerbates and seems to reflect the seemingly intractable British crisis. Reform UK’s and the Green Party’s significant share of the vote but minute representation in parliament is placing pressure on the “first-past-the-post” system that is credited with Britain’s consistent center-right tack. Britain’s military might is long gone, and outside of the City of London, England is devolving into an economic backwater. PM Starmer’s promise to restore centrist stability collapsed within weeks of the beginning of his premiership as the consequences of neoliberal immigration policy exploded onto Britain’s streets. Kamala Harris’s task, like Starmer’s, is to triple down on the failing neoliberal policies that have led the West to this moment of collective crisis. Harris has been tasked with placing the forces of global realignment back into Pandora’s Box. As president, she will face the prospect of major power conflict on every inhabited continent except Australia, the emergence of BRICS and other threats to Western financial hegemony, and a domestic population that, in part, views her as a usurper. She will face this moment of crisis with the power and legitimacy that was made available to Rishi Sunak and Theresa May—that is, none. At a moment of crisis that requires the full power and will of the American executive, the nation faces the prospect of being led by a creature of Nancy Pelosi’s legislature. Harris, who will in every way be held hostage by the whims of donors, agency heads, and congressional leadership, will be the constitutionally weakest American president since Buchanan. Like Buchanan, she will be condemned by history to oversee a confluence of crises over which she will exercise little control but nonetheless receive much condemnation for. Thus the tragedy of Kamala Harris. The post The Tragedy of Kamala Harris appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs Unfree Britain Cracks Down on Protests  It’s unfair, but it’s a fact: The native British majority is the only ethnic group in the country not allowed to riot. Credit: image via Shutterstock There is a Rudyard Kipling poem about a landowner who is frustrated by a tenant who keeps poaching his game. He decides not to prosecute his tenant’s flagrant lawbreaking after he reflects on the many generations of this man’s family who have seen all the other landowners of this patch come and go, from the present reaching back to Roman times. His dead are in the churchyard—thirty generations laid. Their names were old in history when Domesday Book was made; And the passion and the piety and prowess of his line Have seeded, rooted, fruited in some land the Law calls mine. I thought of this poem when I saw a viral video of a former member of parliament disputing the very existence of the English ethnicity. The former Labour MP Sion Simon called out the talking head across from him on a news show for contrasting English anti-immigration rioters with Muslim pro-Palestine rioters: “It’s not legitimate to distinguish between Muslims and English. It’s not legitimate to say ‘ethnic English’ versus ‘Muslims.’ We don’t talk like that in this country anymore.” When the man struggled to understand what was offensive about his factual description, Simon prodded him, “What’s ‘ethnically English’ mean?”  Perhaps the former Labour MP has not fully grasped the meaning of “Their names were old in history when Domesday Book was made.” To spell it out: William the Conqueror commissioned the Great Survey a thousand years ago, which is a very long time, yet many English families that still exist today were as ancient to him then as he is to us. It does not get more indigenous than that. People throw around the G-word flippantly, but surely this deserves to be called genocidal. Americans are frequently told by Kiev’s partisans that it is genocidal rhetoric when Vladimir Putin says Russians and Ukrainians share a common heritage as brother Slavic peoples. Even if he had never killed a single Ukrainian, it would still be genocidal, we are told, because it would deny the Ukrainians their right to a distinct peoplehood. This denial of Englishness is far more sweeping.  The purpose of this erasure is to render unsayable all the positions that a British government that did not hate its own people would take as a matter of course, such as: “White British” people are less than 37 percent of the population of London; they have been driven from their own capital by people who arrived only the day before yesterday; no government housing should be given to foreigners until native British are back in the majority in the city their grandfathers built.  That should be the commonsense moderate position. Instead, the most conservative opinion permissible on London demographics is that the slow eradication of English people from the city is a fact of life, like the weather, on which the people’s government may take no position for or against. The current Labour government is further to the left: It has just announced that it will scrap a proposed residency requirement for government housing giving priority on the waiting list to those who have lived in the UK for at least 10 years. Kipling could not bring himself to be angry at the poacher in the poem, however brazen his lawbreaking. In the same way, I cannot bring myself to feel outrage over the lawbreaking of the rioters and gesticulators whom the British police are now packing off to prison with such alacrity. But that does not mean rioting is wise. It is tempting to argue that, as long as Britain is descending into ethnic balkanization, English people should be able to do the same thing every other group does: sow a little rowdiness in the streets, then reap government favors both rhetorical and material. Alas, British people will never be just another minority, even 40 years from now when, demographically, they are. They will always be the legacy majority whose demonization justifies everyone else’s cushy sinecures and community outreach splash-outs. Truly it is unfair that every other group, from Bengalis to Gypsies, gets to riot and then have their demands met, while British natives with legitimate grievances (such as not wanting little girls to get stabbed to death) get punished for the same behavior that in others is rewarded. But this two-tier treatment is fundamental to the whole ideology of the diversity state. It is the moral bedrock on which everything rests. No appeal to fairness can hope to put a crack in it.  Street protests should only be done with a clear purpose in mind. One alternative purpose, if shaking goodies out of the government doesn’t apply to English people, is to make like-minded citizens know they aren’t alone. The British public has been subjected to a staggering amount of propaganda in the last 20 years designed to make multiculturalism seem like a vast consensus and to make anyone who objects to it feel demoralized and outnumbered. If the silent majority knew how many people thought as they did, for example by seeing thousands take to the streets in the name of ending mass immigration, they might be emboldened. But here, again, the terrain of battle is not favorable. The British government has extensive experience in astroturfing “anti-racist” protests, and they reached into their bag of tricks again last week in order to make a show of strength on behalf of the regime. In publicizing this display of power, the regime had the help of even the Daily Mail. It is obviously desperately important to the government that any silent majority stay demoralized. Two weeks ago, three little girls aged 6, 7, and 9 were hacked to death at a Taylor Swift–themed dance class by a teenager with a curved kitchen knife whose parents moved to the UK from Rwanda in 2002. Is it legal for a British resident to write a social media post saying that Axel Rudakubana should never have been in this country in the first place? That the correct number of refugees Britain should accept per year from the machete-murder capital of Africa is zero? Would the government ever disclose it if the perpetrator admitted the reason he chose a Taylor Swift–themed dance class of all places was because he thought it would be full of white people, or would that detail be suppressed?  Hopefully the answers to those questions will be made clear soon. This has been a depressing month in British history, and it is hard to see what the good guys can hope to achieve in the near term. But at least we are learning a great deal about where things stand. The post Unfree Britain Cracks Down on Protests appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs Why Did Washington Memory-hole Gaza? Suddenly a White House “priority”—getting aid to starving civilians—has vanished from the news cycle. Some are calling it Kamala Harris’s “Sister Souljah moment,” referring to when, in June 1992, then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton publicly rebuked racist comments made by a popular female hip-hop artist as a way of distancing himself from extreme elements of the Democratic base.  For her part, Harris appeared to be drawing her own line Wednesday, shutting down chants from pro-Palestinian protesters at a Detroit rally on Wednesday, with a firm, “I’m speaking now.” The chants— “Kamala, Kamala, you can’t hide, we won’t vote for genocide”—received this stern rebuke from the vice president: “You know what? If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking.” Harris’s team said the Democratic nominee for president had already met with the protesters earlier so any suggestion she was ignoring this important segment of her constituency was wrong. Her defenders on social media applauded her willingness to call out disruptive tactics that feed into the notion that the party is divided. “At a moment when former President Donald J. Trump is attacking her as ‘radical’ her confrontation with protesters on the left offered a visual rebuttal,” wrote the New York Times’s Rebecca Davis O’Brien. Heckling protesters and Sista Souljah moments aside, the incident raises another question, just as important—is Kamala hiding from the Israel–Gaza issue? And are the mainstream media and the Biden administration helping her do it? Consider that just four months ago, her boss had stood up at the State of the Union and pledged a military “surge” of humanitarian aid into Gaza to save starving Palestinians on the ground. “To the leadership of Israel I say this: Humanitarian assistance cannot be a secondary consideration or a bargaining chip,” Biden said. “Protecting and saving innocent lives has to be a priority.” By July—just four months later—the humanitarian pier project was built and then dismantled amid stunning failure. A major reason: The Israelis never provided safe passage for the aid delivery. The entire spectacle has been memory-holed. But the population in Gaza is getting less aid than it was in March, and is now at risk of suffering from diseases not seen since the 1950s—like polio—and somehow the “priority” has just vanished as a topic at White House and State Department briefings.  Calls for Israel to allow more trucks into Gaza? Silence. Questions about what aid organizations are equipped to deliver global donations waiting at the border? Crickets. Updates on the maritime corridor which in May was hailed as a “multinational and combined effort” between the U.S., Cyprus, Israel, the UN, and international donors, including the UAE, the United Kingdom, and the European Union? None. “For the White House, no news on Gaza is good news, for food aid or otherwise,” charged Steve Semler, journalist and co-founder of the Security Policy Reform Institute (SPRI). He diligently tracked the rise and fall of the military “pier” that was supposed to bring salvation to the 2 million population, but ended up floating away with millions of U.S. tax dollars instead. “The Biden-Harris administration realizes its Israel policy is a massive political liability, but refuses to compromise with its base on that policy. Instead, the administration tries all sorts of things to make the issue go away,” he told TAC. “It stops talking about food aid in press conferences, it omits details about taxpayer-funded military aid to Israel, it pretends Biden has no leverage over Israel to open humanitarian corridors despite those billions in military aid.” The focus instead is on the looming conflict between Israel and Hezbollah and the potential for the U.S. to get dragged into the fight, which could include a direct confrontation with Iran. The U.S. is moving more military assets into the region, including giving F-22 Raptors to Israel. CENTCOM chief Michael ‘Erik’ Kurilla, has met twice with Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) leaders in the last week. Appearing only to buy time for Israel to continue laying waste to Gaza, Secretary of State Antony Blinken shuttles back and forth to say the same things over and over about urging Israel and Hamas to sign a ceasefire agreement. After Israel’s assassination of Hamas’s chief negotiator, Ismail Haniyeh, the prospects for a deal have dimmed significantly. The administration puts no obvious pressure on the Israeli government to stop the ongoing bombing of civilian structures, including schools used as shelters (more than 100 were killed in such an attack Saturday), tent cities, water facilities, and private homes, not to mention its complete refusal to ensure aid to the starving and diseased population inside. According to a Reuters report a month ago, humanitarian aid is barely getting into northern Gaza. While some commercial food supplies are making it into the southern crossings, deliveries are erratic—trucks have to be manned by armed guards paid for by the companies and that means prices, when they actually get to market, are far too high for regular Palestinians to afford. There are now fewer than 80 trucks of any stripe getting into Gaza a day, far below the 600 trucks needed to feed the population.  “Food aid is getting in as a trickle, just a trickle, a few dozen trucks a day,” Chris Gunness, Director of the Myanmar Accountability Project, and former spokesman for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), told TAC. “That is why people are literally starving to death.”  Trucks coming from Israel and the West Bank have been attacked by Israeli settlers. If they do make it to the crossings, food piles up and rots while waiting for delivery. Even when trucks make it through the laborious Israeli inspection process, they run into a buzzsaw of security issues inside: Israeli military attacks, armed gangs. Some 70 percent of humanitarian aid trucks, which typically do not have guards (too expensive) are looted. There are few or no police on the streets anymore, the Israeli military have killed or sent them all fleeing, according to this Wall Street Journal report. Interestingly, USAID Director Samantha Power, probably the administration’s most prominent humanitarian, plays only a bit part these days. The last time she spoke candidly out about Gaza was to say that Israel was the chief impediment to food deliveries. That was back in May. She has since announced $100 million in U.S. aid, but we know it is not going anywhere. The administration apparently won’t talk about it openly, just to reporters on background. And yet the administration is actively continuing to fuel the Israeli military with weapons used in Gaza to make the situation worse, releasing a fresh $3.5 billion tranche on Friday and deciding not to withhold aid from an IDF unit accused of human rights abuses in the West Bank. It turns a blind eye to comments made by Likud party members and ministers who have defended the use of rape against Palestinian prisoners and the starving of the entire population as “morally justified.”  Speaking on the Judge Andrew Napolitano podcast this week, Ret. Col. Doug Macgregor, a TAC contributing editor, pointed out how high-level Israelis have talked about how “they’re dealing with the Amalek—animals—that deserve the worst, and that anything you do to the animals that are In front of you is justified, so the notion of any sort of moral restraint is completely absent.” “The only way to deal with that is to confront it directly but we’re not going to do that. Our government will not confront it. They may say something in private, but from the standpoint of the current leadership in Israel, they know they exert infinitely more influence and control over the Senate and the House in the United States than President Biden, or, for that matter, President Harris, does,” he added. Harris did raise hopes when she said the following after her visit last month with Benjamin Netanyahu: “The images of dead children and desperate hungry people fleeing for safety, sometimes displaced for the second, third or fourth time. We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering and I will not be silent.” But is this more rhetoric than substance? Her office’s response to the heckling protester story Wednesday smacked of trying to have it both ways, the default administration tone. It came in a X post by her top advisor, Phil Gordon: .@VP has been clear: she will always ensure Israel is able to defend itself against Iran and Iran-backed terrorist groups. She does not support an arms embargo on Israel. She will continue to work to protect civilians in Gaza and to uphold international humanitarian law. Harris is obviously engaged in a delicate dance. Her progressive base is in no mood for triangulation on this issue, yet she is running a national campaign in which many Democratic top donors are especially pro-Israel, as is the leadership and party establishment.  Semler sees a glass half full and doesn’t think, given the political dynamics, the Harris team can ignore the issue for much longer: “In Minnesota, for example, one in five Democrats voted ‘uncommitted’ in the presidential primary. Current Minnesota Governor and [vice-presidential nominee] Tim Walz has no choice but to talk about Gaza, and so the media has no choice but to cover it. So while the food aid issue is for the time being in retreat, I think the broader Gaza issue is here to stay.” Perhaps especially if a candidate only gets only one “Sista Souljah moment” per campaign. The post Why Did Washington Memory-hole Gaza? appeared first on The American Conservative.

The following article, Paul: Tyranny in the UK – Can it Happen Here?, was first published on Conservative Firing Line. As the UK descends into tyranny, where just re-Tweeting something the government doesn’t like can land a person a multi-year jail sentence, Americans are wondering, “can it happen here?” After all, we have the guarantees of the First Amendment. But while we shake our heads at UK authorities jailing people for their social media posts … Continue reading Paul: Tyranny in the UK – Can it Happen Here? ...

Sargon of Akkad: We, the Unheard British People That Politicians Ignore, Deny and Defy - EXTREMELY WELL SAID - 226,222 views July 27, 2024 Sargon of Akkad - My speech given at the Unite the Kingdom rally. - FAIR USE FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES - Mirrored From: https://www.youtube.com/@SargonofAkkad