On Saturday June 8, pro-Palestinian protestors in red clothing and carrying red banners surrounded the White House, proclaiming themselves the symbolic red line for Gaza that President Biden drew then ignored. The White House Press Corps has also become obsessed with the red line question. Where exactly is the red line? Has Israel crossed it? Can we know if they have? By what metric? Does the red line even exist, or has the President walked it back as the protestors allege? Questions like this have become red meat for reporters. Another similar example of this Washington parlor game was the reinforcements issue during the Vietnam War. Biden drew the red line on March 9 when MSNBC’s Jonathan Capehart asked, “What is your red line with Prime Minister Netanyahu? … For instance, would invasion of Rafah, would you have urged him not to do? Would that be a red line?”  “It is a red line, but I’m never going to leave Israel,” the president answered. He stressed that “the defense of Israel is still critical” so it did not mean the U.S. would cut all aid, “but there’s red lines that if he crosses …” and then the president’s answer became vague. In a later interview Biden clarified that going into Rafah was the red line foul. (READ MORE from James S. Robbins: The Myth of Student Protest) However, when Israel in fact started going into Rafah on May 6, the White House was forced to clarify. So, whether taking the Rafah crossing, moving slowly into Rafah neighborhoods, taking control of the Gaza border with Egypt, or even sending tanks in the center of Rafah itself — none of these actions crossed the red line. The matter became acute when an Israeli airstrike on Hamas targets killed scores of Palestinian civilians. Horrific video from the scene showed charred corpses and a decapitated child. Surely this crossed the line? No, according to NSC spokesman John Kirby, because Israel is “not moving into a major ground operation in population centers in the center of Rafah.” The White House even took credit for Israel having listened to their concerns and moderated their tactics, something Israel denied. But drawing the red line at “major ground operations” is the kind of subjective definition which will mean many more such questions will be coming from journalists no matter what Israel does. This is not the first time a president has been left red-faced over red lines. In August 2012, President Obama said he had been “very clear” to Syria’s leader Bashar Assad “that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized.” He reiterated the point several times. Even then-Vice President Joe Biden said, “we’ve set a clear red line against the use or the transfer of” Syria’s chemical weapons.  None of this redlining would have been all that controversial except that Assad actually did use chemical weapons. Then the White House tried to deny that a red line had ever been set, or that the president didn’t really mean it, or that he meant using a lot of chemical weapons instead of just a few, or that “the world” set the red line, not Obama. Drawing a red line is a dramatic rhetorical gesture. And once drawn, they become irresistible story lines for the press. The issue is not whether red lines should exist, or if they are good policy; but rather a question of credibility when they are not enforced, or are explained away after the fact.  Another similar example of this Washington parlor game was the reinforcements issue during the Vietnam War. When major U.S. ground forces were deployed, President Johnson decided that for political reasons U.S. force commitments had to be limited. In 1965 he publicly authorized a maximum 125,000 troop deployment to Vietnam, but this number immediately began to creep upward based on military necessity. Every time the number changed, it became a story, eroding White House credibility. The troop ceiling finally leveled off at 525,000 in the summer of 1967, and this was a line Johnson was determined not to cross. For the rest of that year, U.S. forces in-country stayed slightly below this self-imposed limit.  But the following spring, after the Tet Offensive devastated North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces, military leaders saw an opportunity to escalate the war and finish the job. A heated debate raged between administration factions over whether to hold the arbitrary limit sacrosanct. The on March 9, the New York Times published internal Pentagon documents on the debate leaked by Daniel Ellsberg, fueling public controversy over whether the U.S. was actually winning the war as the administration claimed. The troop increase request was taken as evidence of panic. Had there been no troop limit in the first place this story would not have landed as hard; as it was, the media storm that resulted frightened officials into abandoning the reinforcements, and the rest is history. (READ MORE: Progressives Demand a Ceasefire in Gaza. Biden’s Struggling to Give It to Them.) So for the Biden White House the red line row is a self-inflicted wound, an artificial, irrelevant issue over something the president never should have said in the first place. It puts the administration in a permanent defensive posture, in which every move by Israel will be measured against this hypothetical limit resulting in continued questioning and skepticism. Like the temporary floating pier that broke apart and beached, the Gaza red line has become another symbol of weakness for an administration that has lost control of both events and the narrative. James S. Robbins is the Dean of Academics at the Institute of World Politics and author of This Time We Win: Revisiting the Tet Offensive. The post Red Faced Over Red Lines appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

The aircraft carrier USS George Washington cruised through the south Atlantic last week in the first joint U.S. naval  exercise with Argentina in more than 30 years. Leftist Peronistas who  governed the country during much of those decades gave bases to China, supported Maduro’s regime in Venezuela and covered up Iran’s involvement in terrorism, as they drove the country to bankruptcy. Argentina’s new libertarian president Javier Milei, recently elected on a landslide by Argentinians suffering an annual inflation of 15,000 percent , is  changing course and his foreign minister, Diana Mondino, has just signed an agreement for “High Level Strategic Dialogue” with U.S. secretary of state Anthony Blinken . “I want a free capitalist world but it must be protected from those seeking to  prey on it,” Milei said in a recent interview with  The Free Press. (READ MORE from Martin Arostegui: Cuba Is Training Leftist American Anti-Semites. The Biden Administration Is Helping.) The Biden administration has had to overlook Milei’s vitriolic attacks on “ globalist collectivism” and his open admiration for Donald Trump, to  seize a much needed chance to roll back  Chinese, Russian, and Iranian encroachments on the western hemisphere which have reached alarming levels and are increasingly coordinated. “A realization by the U.S. intelligence community and the Pentagon that Washington could completely loose control of the hemisphere unless they took advantage of the opportunity to strengthen ties with Argentina allowed national security concerns to prevail” The American Spectator was told by Fabian Calle of the Argentine Council for International Relations, who is an advisor to the new government. Biden’s State Department had otherwise shunned right wing leaders, such as El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, who they threatened to sanction over his brutal but effective crackdown on the country’s “Mara” gangs, while appeasing communist dictators in Venezuela and Cuba to gain favor with iconic center leftists like Brazil’s Lula da Silva. Results:  Venezuela’s model of dictatorship in democratic camouflage is being adopted in other countries; Lula is parroting Hamas propaganda and welcomed Iranian war ships in Rio harbor last year. Cuba has allowed China to set up an electronic listening station and hosting a Russian naval squadron including a nuclear submarine which arrived in Havana this week and sails next to Venezuela. A series of U.S. defense and intelligence officials have traveled to Argentina for high-level discussions with their new Argentine counterparts over recent weeks. The head of the U.S. Southern Command, Gen. Laura Richardson, who has been outspoken in denouncing the growing Chinese and Russian presence in the region, has made several trips to arrange delivery of badly needed assistance to Argentina’s neglected armed forces. CIA director Nicholas Burns has flown to Buenos Aires as has FBI director Christopher Wray who arrived on board a giant Air Force C-17 Globemaster. There is some progress. Chinese construction of a port  in Tierra del Fuego dominating strategic waterways connecting the Atlantic with the Pacific has been stopped. Gen. Richardson repeatedly warned in congressional statements, that the facility would have “dual use” as a military base that could hinder the only crossing point between the two oceans for aircraft carriers which are too large to cross the Panama Canal. Negotiations are currently underway to switch the port concession over to the U.S., which also wants control of  the “Hidrovia” or a canal system under construction by China in the crime ridden Triborder region, which connects Argentina’s northern Parana river with Bolivia and could be turned into a major drug trafficking route. The FBI has been allowed to impound an Iranian Boeing 707  cargo jet covertly operated by the IRGC through a Venezuelan air charter company, which was running hundreds of flights between the Middle East and Latin America, according to Argentine security officials. It was grounded in Argentina in 2022 through the enforcement of U.S. sanctions which blocked its refueling by an American owned company servicing Argentine airports. The pilot was identified as a member of Quds as were seven other Iranians on board, most of whom carried Venezuelan passports. They were returned  to Venezuela before Milei took power, preventing a U.S. supervised interrogation. Argentine security officials told The American Spectator, however, that the secret IRGC flights involved “ logistical support” for Hezbollah cells forming throughout the hemisphere. Argentina was the target of devastating Hezbollah attacks in the 1990s and Peronista governments tried  covering up the involvement of Iranian diplomats in the bombings that demolished the Israeli embassy and a Jewish community center, killing over 100 people.  A special prosecutor appointed by Argentina’s congress to investigate the case was assassinated. Argentine officials fear what China might do  if they accede to U.S. demands to dismantle a China’s Tiangong deep space ground station in Argentina’s southern Patagonian province of Neuquen equipped with a 65 foot antennae and operated by a PLA linked company that forbids outside inspection. While presumably built to guide a projected Chinese lunar expedition,  the facility could also  guide hypersonic missiles over the Antarctic for a sneak attack on the U.S., interfacing with Chinese satellite tracking stations in Bolivia, Venezuela, and Cuba. “I’m surprised that the government of Argentina permits the Chinese armed forces to operate in Neuquen. We don’t know what Chinese soldiers are doing with that telescope”  U.S. ambassador to Buenos Aires Mark Stanley recently told the Argentine newspaper La Nacion. Construction of  the satellite base was authorized by former president Cristina Kirchner through a corrupt deal in which private owners of the 494 acres were never paid for the property. She is so worried about possible prosecutions for what was possibly the most corrupt government in Argentine history. On a recent visit to Moscow, she met with NSA defector Edward Snowden to ask him what U.S. intelligence agencies have on her. Argentine intelligence officials told The American Spectator that Cuba has greatly influenced Kirchner who declared before the Argentine congress in 2021 that “the future is with China and Russia.” Kirchner left Argentina vulnerable to Chinese economic blackmail. Beijing is already calling in a debt of an $8 billion owed through its interest free credit or SWAP system ruthlessly leveraged to exercise political control over Latin American and African governments. Argentina doesn’t have the cash to pay off China. The Peronistas emptied out the nation’s reserves, leaving  Milei with a negative balance of -1.5 billion and Beijing can further sink the economy by cutting imports from Argentina, whose entire soy bean production is committed to China. (READ MORE: Russia Is Pounding Eastern Ukraine’s Industrial Heartland) Milei is trying to generate a free market based recovery with drastic cuts in the obese state sector, diversification from commodities, and cancelation of uncompetitive trade agreements. He visited  Wall Street and Silicon Valley last week to sell his plan, receiving an enthusiastic reception from Elon Musk and other CEOs eyeing Argentina’s vast mineral wealth in lithium and copper. But if China sabotages the economy at a time in which the population is suffering the effects of austerity measures, violent protests could be activated by Venezuelan agents who have largely taken control of Peronista social organizations and labour unions, according to intelligence sources. Street violence supported by Venezuela, which has destabilized conservative governments throughout the continent in recent years, could be further coordinated with Iranian sponsored terror attacks over Milei’s  support for Israel. Securing Argentina is crucial for America’s future in its own hemisphere as well as a test for its ability to pull distressed friends out of Chinese quick sands. The next months will be critical for Milei and we can only hope that it isn’t too late to turn back the Biden administration’s failed policies in Latin America. The post Milei Must Wiggle Argentina Out of China’s Grasp appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

One aspect of post-pandemic analysis that sets my hair on fire is the folklore that in the early stages of the Covid outbreak, health experts were “trying to explain the latest public health advice to a frightened public even as scientists were struggling to learn about the new virus.” That publications like Time and the Atlantic have persisted with this “we didn’t know” memory-holing is to be expected. But when I read a similar take in The American Spectator last Friday — albeit in the context of an article I generally agreed with — I admittedly blew a fuse. Fauci and Birx lied to Americans that the “science” behind these guidelines came from research out of Australia….  No, it didn’t. In reference to the lockdowns and social distancing edicts, writer Debra J. Saunders said this: “I understand why these quick-draw policies were hatched. It was panic.” She went on: “When COVID-19 first appeared on U.S. shores, the public faced an unknown threat of dubious origin — and people were dying. Americans were desperate for information from authoritative sources.” Yet even The New York Times observed on the first anniversary of “fifteen-days-to-slow-the-spread,” that in early 2020 scientists knew pretty much everything there was to know about the virus: “how it spreads, who among us is more vulnerable, and what simple precautions can be taken against it.” (READ MORE from Carina Benton: Meloni Must Stop the Boats) If you zero in on the critical period from mid-February to mid-March, 2020, one point becomes glaringly obvious: although the “experts” knew this novel disease didn’t pose a threat to most people, they recommended unprecedented and severe containment measures, which we now know weren’t based on science but “sort of just appeared,” as Dr. Anthony Fauci put it. That’s not “panic.” It’s malfeasance. Let’s retrace the timeline. In mid-February, 2020 a team of 25 international experts led by Senior Advisor to the WHO-Director-General, Dr. Bruce Aylward, embarked on a two-week fact-finding trip to Wuhan. The WHO-China Joint Mission’s February 28 report praised China’s “ambitious, agile, and aggressive disease containment effort” in the face of a “highly contagious” and “rapidly escalating and deadly epidemic.” However, the numbers buried within the document provided crucial context. The report found that “approximately 80 percent of laboratory confirmed patients [in China] had mild to moderate disease [and recovered].” In children under 19, Covid was mild and constituted around 2.4 percent of reported cases; only 0.2 percent of children infected with the virus developed “critical disease.” Aylward later confirmed that children did not appear to be major spreaders of Covid and there had been very few examples of outbreaks in schools. The report stated that asymptomatic spread (i.e. people with no symptoms spreading the disease) “appears to be relatively rare and does not appear to be a major driver of transmission.” Dr Aylward told a session organized by Dr. Craig Dalton for the Health Protection Officers of Australia on March 6 that widespread asymptomatic spread was an “urban myth.” Nevertheless, a schizophrenic narrative quickly emerged and was replicated over the first two weeks of March in press briefings, media releases, and interviews across the globe. On the one hand, there was consensus that the disease was mild for the vast majority of people. We heard this almost verbatim on March 4 from Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, on March 12 from French President Emmanuel Macron, and on March 6 from Australia’s Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Professor Paul Kelly. On March 16 Kelly emphasized that “for most people, it is a minor disease and we’re finding that wherever it has developed in the world … that’s pretty standard.” Fauci stated in a March 4 White House Coronavirus Taskforce press briefing that “the risk of infection throughout the [U.S.] is … low…” and “the risk for a young person who gets infected [of] getting into trouble is really low.” Dr. Robert Redfield, then Director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), echoed this. He explained that the recommended mitigation strategies, including washing hands, covering sneezes and coughs, and staying home when sick, were “absolutely no different than what we ask the American public to do for the flu.” On March 8 U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams reassured Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan that “most people who get the coronavirus are going to have a mild disease,” that “very few will actually need to be hospitalized” and that “the average age of people who are dying from coronavirus is 80 plus.” On March 11, Fauci, Redfield, and Dr. Robert Kadlec, Assistant Secretary of Human Services for Preparedness and Response, testified to the House Oversight and Reform Committee that “the immediate risk of this new virus to the American public is low” and that “our nation’s healthcare system is better prepared than it has ever been.” Yet at the same time, there was fear mongering and an unmistakable drive towards replicating China’s unprecedented lockdown strategy. Aylward supported implementing extreme social distancing (the WHO was at the time arbitrarily recommending 2 meters) and restricting freedom of movement. In a Feb. 25 telebriefing, Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the CDC’s director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases and early incident manager for the Covid response, warned Americans of “severe disruption” to everyday life as she braced the public to expect “school closings, workplace shutdowns, and the canceling of large gatherings.” On February 27 Fauci was privately encouraging former “Dallas” actress and AIDS awareness advocate, Morgan Fairchild, of all people, to prep her social media followers for eventual “behavioral adjustments” including “social distancing, teleworking, temporary closure of schools.” Dr. Deborah Birx later admitted to advocating full lockdowns under the euphemism of “flatten-the-curve guidance.” (READ MORE: To Win the ‘Culture War,’ We Need Fewer Conservatives and More Counter-Revolutionists) Hence on March 9 the groundwork for lockdowns was officially laid via the earliest CDC guidelines. As I previously reported, Fauci and Birx lied to Americans that the “science” behind these guidelines came from research out of Australia (authored, funnily enough, by the very Dr. Dalton who had interviewed the WHO’s Dr. Aylward on March 6.) No, it didn’t. Fauci had never even contacted the Australians. Their paper had been published online only days before and wasn’t peer-reviewed, which Fauci knew. In any case, it was hardly “science.” The paper relied on a combination of dodgy Chinese data and pandemic influenza research that actually found no proven benefit from the most common social distancing measures. What followed next is best described in Birx’s own words : The White House had handed down guidance, and the governors took that ball and ran with it …California was first, doing so on March 18. New York followed on March 20.… In relatively short order by the end of March and the first week of April, there were few holdouts. The circuit-breaking, flattening-the-curve shutdown had begun.” No, she wasn’t panicked; she was elated. I have low expectations of jail time for these sociopaths and sadists. But let’s at least cut the fables and acknowledge a historical fact, very much on the public record, and right in front of the nose of anyone who bothers to look: they knew the disease wasn’t dangerous to most people, yet they locked us up anyway.    The post Health ‘Experts’ Knew Covid Wasn’t Dangerous To Most Americans appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

from Redacted: TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/

by 2nd Smartest Guy in the World, 2nd Smartest Guy in the World: Since the 1970s, Fauci has repeatedly used the same playbook to reshape America’s scientific apparatus to serve corporate America and become one of the most powerful bureaucrats in history. From AIDS to VAIDS, how Dr. Mengele 2.0 aka Dr. Fauci infiltrated, perverted […]

In 2004 everyone thought Mötley Crüe hated each other. But they reformed, and we asked them about it

Much to the dismay of the Left Wing parties, the conservative, anti-Muslim immigration AfD (Alternative for Germany) Party is now the second most popular party in the country.  And the way things are going now (Right wing parties making gains all over Europe), it won’t be long until we see the end of the Muslim […]