"What's an upbeat?" The post Metallica producer Flemming Rasmussen on Lars Ulrich: “I thought he was useless” first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

By the beginning of 2024, the Democrats had settled on a simple strategy to retain control of the Presidency and the Senate while regaining a majority in the House of Representatives. The most important element of the plan was to work with corporate media to assure that the electorate remained focused on the purported threat to our democracy presented by former President Trump and his “extremist MAGA” supporters. This would permit President Biden and other Democrats seeking reelection to avoid pesky questions about inflation, the border crisis, rampant crime rates and dangerous conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East. Their strategy collapsed on June 27. Alex [Soros] doesn’t seem to realize that his overt support of Harris will doom her campaign if she is the Democratic presidential nominee. That was, of course, the date of the presidential debate during which America’s worst kept secret was revealed to the shrinking number of voters who still believed Biden was fit to serve a second term. His performance was so unnerving that it immediately prompted calls for him to drop out of the presidential race. An AP-NORC poll showed that 65 percent of Democrat voters wanted him to withdraw. The Washington Post reported Saturday that 37 congressional Democrats had also called for him to step aside and West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin joined the chorus on ABC’s “This Week.” At some point during this barrage of bad news Biden finally accepted reality and announced on X that he would be dropping out of the race: My fellow Democrats, I have decided not to accept the nomination and to focus all my energies on my duties as President for the remainder of my term. My very first decision as the party nominee in 2020 was to pick Kamala Harris as my Vice President. And it’s been the best decision I’ve made. Today I want to offer my full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party this year. Democrats — it’s time to come together and beat Trump. Biden also posted a letter on X in which he takes credit for all manner of fictitious accomplishments that allegedly leave the country better off than when he found it: “America has never been better positioned to lead than we are today.” This delusional assertion is followed by an even more astonishing claim: “We have protected and preserved our democracy.” Never mind the colossal bait-and-switch the Democrat power brokers have just perpetrated on the 14.5 million primary voters who backed Joe Biden. It is by no means certain that, had they been given a choice between Kamala Harris and another candidate during the primaries, these voters would have chosen our incompetent Vice President. Yet it is probable that the party’s 739 unelected “super delegates” will arrange for Harris to “win” the nomination no matter who challenges her. And she will be challenged. Her 2020 presidential run was so cringeworthy that she had to drop out before the first primary. Since becoming Vice President, she has become a national joke. Her inclination to produce meaningless word salads in response to straightforward questions, combined with her notorious cackle, would again be deadly in an honest contest for the nomination. Republicans, meanwhile, salivate for a campaign with Harris at the top of the Democrat ticket. GOP VP nominee J.D. Vance offered these observations on X regarding this point: Joe Biden has been the worst President in my lifetime and Kamala Harris has been right there with him every step of the way. Over the last four years she co-signed Biden’s open border and green scam policies that drove up the cost of housing and groceries. She owns all of these failures, and she lied for nearly four years about Biden’s mental capacity — saddling the nation with a president who can’t do the job. President Trump and I are ready to save America. Soros and the Democrats Is the “save America” verbiage MAGA hyperbole? Consider this revelation from the Wall Street Journal, “Democratic megadonors George and Alex Soros, the father-son pair who are responsible for tens of millions of dollars in spending each election cycle, both threw their weight behind Kamala Harris on Sunday shortly after Joe Biden announced he would exit the race.” On X, Alex Soros posted a picture of himself arm and arm with Harris beneath the following exhortation: “It’s time for us all to unite around Kamala Harris and beat Donald Trump. She is the best and most qualified candidate we have. Long live the American Dream!” Who believes that Soros actually supports the “American Dream”? The obvious answer is, of course, “no one.” This photo suggests that Alex is a little slow on the uptake compared to his father, George. The latter understood that it was necessary to remain in the background while he financed destructive policies like “defund the police.” Alex doesn’t seem to realize that his overt support of Harris will doom her campaign if she is the Democratic presidential nominee. If the Democrats nominate Harris, the Trump-Vance campaign will ensure that the voters are well aware of the Soros connection. And every down ballot Republican running will be telling the voters about it. This may well add up to the sum of all Democrat fears — all three branches of government under GOP control. READ MORE from David Catron: There Is Probably No Stopping Trump Now The Democrats’ Faustian Bargain With Biden Biden’s Debate Debacle Disqualifies His Entire Party The post The Sum of All Democrat Fears appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

The success of a political thriller in print or film depends on something more than good writing — great timing. Take one of best screen thrillers of all time, Three Days of the Condor, directed by Sidney Pollack. Robert Redford stars as a CIA desk clerk who finds himself the prey of a deadly conspiracy and doesn’t know who to trust, especially his colleagues. Condor came out in the thick of the post-Watergate fog which suggested CIA involvement in the infamous burglary via the participation of former, or perhaps not, Langley operative Howard Hunt. But as a conservative journalist in 2022, I had a major advantage over my liberal peers — an awareness of reality. With Nixon’s successor Gerald Ford then President, most people in 1975 assumed a domestically intrusive CIA would be taking orders from the White House. Yet few would have suspected the intelligence branch might be working against the White House and may have brought down the previous Republican President. The widespread uncertainty and suspicion of the era was a feast for talented cinematic liberals like Pollack and Redford, inspiring Redford’s most chilling line in the picture, “Maybe there’s a CIA inside the CIA.” The movie is a masterpiece unlike the lesser-known novel that inspired it. The clever concept is the same — about a CIA employee tasked with reading thriller novels then imputing their smarter ideas for the agency. “Who’d invent a job like that?” Redford’s character self-reflectively asks. But the title change from Six Days of the Condor to Three Days of the Condor signals the improvement. It takes three extra days for author James Grady to tell the original story. And his denouement — the government assassins were running drugs from Laos — was anticlimactic and already cliched. Pollack and ace screenwriter Lorenzo Semple Jr. (Batman the TV series, Never Say Never Again) knew exactly what to slash and what to update. With the long gas lines of 1973 fresh in the public’s mind, Redford’s confrontation with the villain had an extra relevance. “Oil … That’s it, isn’t it? This whole damn thing was about oil.” Seventies producers knew how to improve on source material, not despoil it pushing a woke agenda like today’s Hollywood witches (see Kathleen Kennedy — Star Wars, Barbara Broccoli — James Bond). Men turned the decade’s bestselling books into classic films — Love Story, The Godfather, The Exorcist, Jaws, All the President’s Men. Condor perfectly fit the bill being not only exceptionally suspenseful but incredibly timely. Bad timing was the risk I took two years ago when I decided to make my new novel a political thriller. I had gambled once before and lost. As a young punk USA Today reporter in 1989, I began writing the ultimate Cold War spy thriller. After all, I thought, who has long been America’s archenemy and would be for the foreseeable future — the Soviet Union of course. Then, just as I finished the book in 1991, the USSR collapsed like a house of cards. I blamed my hero, Ronald Reagan, for ruining my fiction career. Two decades later, bolstered by three well-received novels (Jake for Mayor, Paper Tigers, The Christmas Spirit), I chose to reenter the thriller arena. I had a professional reason. For ten years, I’d critically assailed the mainstream arts’ erasure of the tough guy action hero and the sultry femme-fatale in favor of a constantly rejected feminist fantasy — the asexual macho heroine. In my very first article for this publication from 2018, “The Hollywood Compliance Decree,” I stated that even a basic movie thriller like Taken was already beyond Hollywoke’s creative capability. The final wimpification of James Bond by Barbara Broccoli and Daniel Craig in the ghastly No Time to Die (2021) was the last straw for me (see my review of it). I love the Ian Fleming novels and the seven Sean Connery pictures plus On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Seeing the ultimate male hero turned into an asexual mope was a personal affront. Ironically, Ian Fleming once felt the same. Fleming created James Bond as a hard-boiled alternative to more patrician British detectives such as Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey and John Creasey’s the Toff, entertaining as they are. He channeled his idols, Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, into Bond. I planned to do the same to the endless parade of woke male pretenders, by bringing cool men and hot women back to the page. Introducing young DC private-eyes Mark Slade and Neil Cork in The Washington Trail. A Thriller for Our Time I realized the book would come out in 2024 (August 13th to be exact) amid a volatile election year. Consequently, I had to predict the state of the presidential race two years in advance. A wrong call would have meant another two years of writing down the drain. But as a conservative journalist in 2022, I had a major advantage over my liberal peers — an awareness of reality. I knew Joe Biden was already falling apart (see my 2020 piece “The Star Trek Election“) and anticipated he’d be badly trailing the Republican candidate, most likely Donald Trump, this year. And that’s just what happened. My book takes place last January with the vegetative incumbent president losing to his predecessor, whom the deep state conspired to oust. Elements in the intelligence communities fear the former chief executive will exact revenge on them, and they’ll do anything to stop him — including murder. Today, things are happening faster than the fall of the Soviet Union, such as the assassination attempt on Trump a week ago. And as I write this, Joe Biden has dropped out of the presidential race. Only this time, I was ready for it. What if the events now taking place are the result of the secrets uncovered by Slade and Cork on The Washington Trail? I hope you’ll read it and find out. Where have all the cool men, hot women, and non-woke storytelling gone? For one place my timely new political thriller novel, The Washington Trail, about two DC private eyes, a femme-fatale, and a plot to end America in a volatile election year. Pre-order today, get it next month, and let me know what you think. READ MORE from Lou Aguilar: The Picture of Donald Trump The Curtains Are Drawn on Biden and Europe’s Rulers Biden Voters Get the Red Pill The post The Impeccable Timing of a Political Thriller appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Have you not noticed that over the past few weeks President Biden and his minions have been very quiet about pressuring Israel for a cease-fire in Gaza? Trump…. could — and should — make it perfectly clear that Hamas is our enemy as is Iran, and that Israel has a blank check in its efforts against both. Israeli forces have taken the fight into Hamas’s last stronghold — the city of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip — and not one of the Biden crew is saying anything about it. Biden, Secretary of State Tony Blinken, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, and CIA Director William Burns have all been shuttling between meetings with Israeli PM Netanyahu and “representatives” of the Iranian-backed Hamas terrorist network. They have been siding with the Hamas terrorists because 100,000 Muslim Democratic primary voters in Michigan voted not for Biden but for “uncommitted” in Michigan’s Democrat February primary. Biden has, since then, had little sympathy for our only real ally in the Middle East and has supported the Dems’ Hamas Caucus — Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes, Ilhan Omar, and their ilk — instead. (READ MORE from Jed Babbin: Putin’s Audacious Murderers) Biden withheld U.S. smart bombs from Israel and other members of his team have put maximum diplomatic pressure on Israel to sign some sort of temporary peace agreement with the Hamas terrorists. Such an agreement would have left Hamas victorious after its devastating attack on Israel. That would be more than unjust: it would be destructive of Israel’s future and our own national security. But now, as the Wall Street Journal points out acerbically, Biden and his incompetents have finally figured out that it’s Hamas that is blocking peace, not Israel. Biden’s idiots have reluctantly come to that conclusion because, since about late May, Israel has been agreeing to their formulas for a cease-fire while Hamas has continued to refuse to release its hostages. For the record, Hamas killed at least thirty-two American citizens in its October 7 attack on Israel. They also took eight American hostages, only five of whom are believed to be alive. They are: Edan Alexander, Sagui Dekel-Chen, Keith Siegel, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, and Omer Neutra. Some, perhaps all, hold both U.S. and Israeli citizenship. At least three died in Hamas custody: Gadi Haggari, his wife Judith Haggari, and Hayden Chen. Those who killed them should be made to assume room temperature. As Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz has pointed out, the Rafah operation was delayed by months of diplomatic efforts by the U.S. but went ahead on May 6. Katz said, “And we were right. Everyone knows it now, even the U.S., because everyone warned that it would be a catastrophe. It’s a war, yes. It’s not a picnic. But they said that it would take four months to evacuate the population. It took only days.” As the WSJ reported, more than a million Gazans quickly evacuated Rafah to designated safe zones. Israel is fighting our war, not just theirs. If any doubt remained it was erased by the Israeli Saturday air strike on Yemen.  We have had an aircraft carrier battle group in the Red Sea for months, trying — unsuccessfully — to deter the Houthis (another Shiite group and a proxy for Iran) from attacking Red Sea shipping. Our ships have successfully shot down a lot of Houthi missiles and drones, but the strikes on shipping continue. The carrier group — which will remain on station and be replaced soon by another — has had no deterrent effect. That has now probably come to an end. After a Houthi drone killed a man in Tel Aviv, Israel struck the Yemeni port city of Hodeidah, substantially disabling the port and probably crippling Iranian shipments of arms to the Houthis. Israel is fighting our wars, not just theirs. Biden hasn’t done anything effective to get our hostages back. And not only from Hamas. The Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich has just been sentenced to 16 years in a Russian prison on phony spy charges. Mark Swiden and Kai Li, both U.S. citizens, are wrongfully detained by China, also presumably on phony charges. Those situations are different from the Hamas hostages’ because they are held, albeit unjustly, under some legal process. Trump Options on the Hostages Should he become president once again, Trump can and should greatly increase diplomatic efforts and economic sanctions against both Russia and China to get these people back. Toward that end, he said something in his convention speech which is very much worth noting. Trump said, “To the entire world, I tell you this: We want our hostages back, and they better be back before I assume office, or you will be paying a very big price.” He didn’t say which hostages he was speaking of, but it’s obvious that the five still kept by Hamas are at the top of the list. They must be because their lives are in the greatest danger. If Trump is returned to the White House, he will have any number of options to deal with Hamas and its benefactor, Iran. First and foremost, we should offer U.S. forces to help the Israelis find and rescue all those still held by Hamas. Our SEAL Team Six and Delta Force are damned good at it. The Israelis may not need this help, but Trump should offer it nevertheless. Second, whatever intelligence resources we have should be brought to bear on finding the hostages. Again, the Israelis may not need this help but we should bring it to bear. Third would be for Trump to end our pressure on Israel to sign the ridiculous Biden cease-fire accords. He could — and should — make it perfectly clear that Hamas is our enemy as is Iran, and that Israel has a blank check in its efforts against both. Fourth, Trump could send USAF and USN air forces to help Israel in its second-front war against Iranian-backed Hizballah forces in Lebanon. Again, Israel may not want the help but it should be offered nevertheless. Fifth would be for Trump to re-instate his “maximum pressure” campaign of economic sanctions which wrecked the Iranian economy. Biden has let them off too many times. Those of us of a certain age remember clearly the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979-1980. Iranian “students” seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held fifty-two hostages for 444 days. It ended on the day Ronald Reagan was inaugurated president with the release of all of the hostages. It’s too much to hope for that Trump’s inauguration would result in the release of the five Americans still held hostage by Hamas. Yayah Sinwar, the leader of Hamas forces in Gaza, has been in hiding, probably in Hamas tunnels, since the October 7 attack. He has probably surrounded himself with hostages both American and Israeli to use them as human shields. (READ MORE: Trump Is Lucky, but The Secret Service Blew It) Sinwar must be dealt with and not gently. Israeli forces — and their special forces — are excellent and are on the hunt for Sinwar. Whatever assistance we can give them should be brought to bear immediately. Biden has been too politically scared to do this. He is weak in mind and in the strategic and tactical senses. As this column has often pointed out, the late Donald Rumsfeld often said that weakness is provocative. If he gets the chance, Trump will be far stronger. Bringing our hostages home should — and probably will — be Trump’s immediate task. The post Trump Must Be Bold To Free Hamas Hostages appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

With the election season heating up, there’s a lot of talk about reforming our criminal justice system and the role police and qualified immunity play within that system. But perhaps the biggest problem facing our criminal justice system is out-of-control prosecutors. With little accountability and no limits in place to prevent oversteps, criminal prosecutors are free to abuse the justice system without facing consequences. Real reform…. means mandatory reporting laws, creating oversight offices, reforming ethics rules, creating new penalties, and so forth. While neither side of the political divide seems interested in solving this problem, only the left expresses concern about it and receives accolades from the media for its supposed efforts. The media consistently portrays left-wing prosecutors as well-intentioned reformers fighting a broken system. (READ MORE: Even Portland Is Fed Up with Progressive Policies ) Last year, the Los Angeles Times editorial board went so far as to say that the Republican opposition to Democrats’ “reforms” presented a threat to democracy. In October, ProPublica published a piece labeling one such prosecutor a “voice for change.” Any resistance to these narratives is chalked up to right-wing obstruction. But make no mistake, these so-called progressives have no intention of reining in government abuse. Instead, they’ve prioritized ideology over criminal justice. You don’t have to look far to see that if a prosecution fits their narrative and ideology, they’re willing to break every rule in the book to see it through. Take Andrew Weismann, an ultra-partisan Democrat who served as a federal prosecutor on the case of United States v. Brown in 2004. There, the Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals determined that prosecutors brought an indictment for conduct that was not even a crime and, in the process, withheld evidence. And that’s not to mention the witness intimidation that occurred. Now, Weismann is a media darling of the left and an MSNBC contributor. NYU even hired him as a professor. In addition to protecting their own, progressives have always used the criminal justice system to harass their political opponents. In 2022, FBI agents with guns drawn raided and terrorized Mark Houck and his family. Why? Because he shoved a Planned Parenthood volunteer who was harassing Mr. Houck’s eleven-year-old son. A civil suit brought by the supposed victim had already been summarily dismissed. Even the far-left Philadelphia DA declined to prosecute. Not so with this politically minded Justice Department. They brought charges under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, a statute that protects abortion clinics from harassment. The Biden DOJ tried to send this man to prison for years because of a harmless shove in protection of his son. Thankfully, a jury found Houck not guilty of all counts. Meanwhile, during this same period, Attorney General Merrick Garland refused to take action against those criminally harassing and attempting to intimidate the families of U.S. Supreme Court justices, something that 18 U.S. Code § 1507 expressly prohibits. A few months ago, the Biden DOJ targeted and threatened a surgeon who blew the whistle on a hospital covertly performing transgender procedures. Now, the Biden administration has charged him with privacy violations under HIPAA, even though there is still no indication that he actually revealed information identifying any patient. That’s just at the federal level. We see progressive local DAs targeting innocent people all the time when it suits their ideology and political objectives. Back in 2013, Wisconsin prosecutors went after the political supporters of Governor Scott Walker with no evidence, raiding their homes and seizing their phones and computers. Time and time again left-wing prosecutors like Manhattan’s Alvin Bragg will prosecute people using force to defend themselves while at the same time covering for the criminal attackers. The powers to be on the left are not actually concerned with prosecutorial abuse per se. Instead, when it comes to using prosecutorial power, they prioritize rectifying perceived power imbalances in society at large and securing their political fortunes. We have a government abuse problem, not a social justice problem. (READ MORE: A Modest Proposal for Police Reform) The ails of our criminal justice system center on the failure to check this government abuse. Real reform requires passing actual legislation and creating accountability for prosecutors. That means mandatory reporting laws, creating oversight offices, reforming ethics rules, creating new penalties, and so forth. The powers that be on both the right and the left have no real interest in such reforms. Instead, they ask you to put your trust in their prosecutors. The days of blindly trusting prosecutors must end. Alex Xenos is an attorney and Young Voices contributor. His writing has appeared in Boston Herald, DC Journal, and NH Journal, among other publications. Follow him on Twitter: @AMXenos. The post Destroying Our Criminal Justice System appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Leave it to the editors of Foreign Affairs, the establishment journal of international relations, in the wake of the Biden debate debacle and Donald Trump’s vigorous response to his assassination attempt, to find two political science professors to conclude that if Biden or Trump wins in November, America will be viewed as a “senile superpower.” Where have they been for the past four years? Why didn’t they warn us about this in 2020? The timing is exquisite — just as the Democrats appear ready to forego a Biden candidacy and choose a younger, more “vibrant” replacement (Kamala Harris, Michelle Obama, Gretchen Whitmer, Gavin Newsome, Josh Shapiro), these political scientists discover that not only is Biden cognitively impaired, but so is Trump. Joshua Byun, assistant professor of political science at Boston College, and Austin Carson, associate professor of political science at the University of Chicago, write that “the problem of an aging president does not apply to Biden alone.” Donald Trump, they write, “is hardly a model of youthful sharp-mindedness.” The authors claim that Trump “has shown moments of confusion, unrelenting digressions, striking ignorance, and egregious (but perhaps partly intentional) misrepresentations.” Unable to hide Biden’s cognitive decline any longer, the anti-Trump professors place Trump in the same cognitive category as Biden. “[F]or both Biden and Trump,” they write, “a second term carries the risk that doubts about the president’s competence will permeate international diplomacy and burden U.S. foreign relations.” In reality, the authors have merely updated their February 2023 article in International Studies Quarterly titled “More than a Number: Aging Leaders in International Politics.” In the abstract to that piece, the authors argued that chronological age is not important, instead it is how aging leaders interact in face-to-face encounters that determines whether foreign leaders will perceive them as senile or mentally and physically fit. In the Foreign Affairs piece, the authors note that an aging Konrad Adenauer (83) showed himself physically firm and mentally alert during one of the Berlin crises in 1959, while 73-year-old Zhou Enlai “showcased his vigor and intellectual sharpness” in meetings with then-American National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger. Donald Trump has shown no signs of senility or cognitive impairment — quite the opposite — yet the authors write: “Even if one believes that Trump’s verbal and physical signs of aging are milder, foreign counterparts will be rendering senility-related judgments about Trump, too.” Unable to rescue Biden, the professors invent signs of Trump’s cognitive impairment just as the Democrats seem ready to force Biden to bow out of the race in favor of a younger candidate. I searched in vain for previous articles and comments by either professor noting Biden’s cognitive impairment. Where have they been for the past four years? Why didn’t they warn us about this in 2020? Carson in a social media post before the Biden debate debacle, argued that while Trump appears to be more vigorous and alert than Biden, “this is regardless of how the two men might actually compare in terms of health and competence.” He quotes a “speaker and coach on leadership” who said about Trump, “Oh, he’s aging. He makes at least as many mistakes as Joe Biden, but because he does it with this bravado, it doesn’t seem like senility. It seems like passion.” Perhaps Trump was “senile,” when after being shot in the ear with a would-be assassin’s bullet, he pumped his fist in defiance and yelled “fight, fight.” And Carson states that “Democrats and some Republicans have said Mr. Biden remains sharp in private conversations.” They aren’t saying that anymore. The purpose of this Foreign Affairs piece seems quite obvious — the professors likely have concluded, as many Democrats have, that Biden cannot beat Trump in November. Best to admit Biden’s cognitive impairment and chase him from the race so that a younger Democrat can be compared to the “aging” Donald Trump. (A few days after the professors’ article was featured on the Foreign Affairs website, Biden caved-in to the pressure and dropped out of the race). With professors like these, it is a wonder that anyone sends their kids to college. READ MORE from Francis P. Sempa: Toning Down the Dangerous Rhetoric Didn’t Last Long Former Trump Defense Official Makes the Case for Prioritizing Asia Over Europe ‘Existential Threat to Democracy’ The post Now They Say Trump Is Too Old appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Rabbi Yoseph Yitzchak Schneersohn became leader of the Chabad movement in 1920, the year that Lenin and his Communists finally consolidated their control over Russia. Jews had hoped for some relief. The civil war had seen the Petliura massacres, in which the one of the White Armies fighting the Reds deliberately targeted the Jews as enemies and murdered about 100,000 of them, aside from the rape and pillage that always accompanied their visits to Jewish areas. Let us each in our own, less than perfect and so very human way, further that turning towards the deepest of things. Now that was over. But what followed was not much better. Lenin was an evangelizing atheist. He would tolerate no rival for the allegiance of his subjects, and he did not hold himself responsible to a Supreme Power. He set about demolishing organized religion. (READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin: Our Political Leaders Have Been Revealed) Lenin’s government had a special section, the Yevsektsia, dedicated to wiping out the practice of Judaism. Yevsektsia stood for yevreiskaya sektsia, the Jewish section. It was run by Jewish Communists, Jews who hated their heritage and now took action to destroy it.  These betrayers of their own now made their way forward in the party. They used their inside knowledge to help Lenin dismantle the traditional community structures that had seen the Jews through many prolonged difficulties under the tsars. Rabbi Schneersohn set himself to organizing an underground network to resist. Through a network of utterly dedicated followers they strove to maintain education, observance, and morale in the face of relentless persecution by the regime and its secret police. It was dangerous work. It led to the gulags or death. The danger only increased when Lenin died and Stalin took over. Eventually, in 1927, the secret police imprisoned the rabbi and interrogated him under torture and resolved to execute him. But the news had escaped the control of the torturers, and soon telegrams were arriving in the Kremlin from all over the world. Senator William Borah, a conservative Republican and chairman of the Senate’s Foreign Affairs Committee, joined with Senator Robert Wagner, a liberal Democrat, in petitioning the Russians, as did the Coolidge State Department. Other European governments expressed their concern, including Weimar Germany. This week marks the ninety-seventh anniversary of the date that the rabbi was notified that he was going to be set free and expelled from Russia, a date still celebrated today by those who identify with Chabad. When the first stage of his liberation came to pass, and he left Leningrad by train, hundreds of his followers came out to bid farewell, not caring that they were under surveillance and might well be arrested and made to disappear for attending. The rabbi addressed the people as he got on the train: May God be with us as He was with our ancestors; may He not forsake us nor abandon us … Only our bodies went into exile, but not our souls … We must proclaim openly before all that with regard to any matter of our religion — Torah, mitzvahs, and Jewish custom — it is not subject to the opinion of others, nor can any oppressive force be used against it. And that message of where the ultimate power lies, thrown down in challenge in the rail station before Stalin’s secret police, still rings out today, decades after Stalin’s empire crumbled. The rabbi moved first to Latvia and then to Poland, and that is where he was in 1939 when Hitler invaded, kicking off World War II and the horrors it brough, including the deliberate massacre of a full third the world’s Jewish population. The rabbi was in the chaos of Warsaw. Bombed and now occupied by Nazi troops. There, too, the hand of freedom reached out to him. The American government prevailed upon the Germans to send someone to escort the rabbi to safety, and within a few months, he had arrived in New York. The rabbi was ever grateful to all that America had done on his behalf. On the other hand, he warned his followers not to be beguiled and to think that the self-sacrifice our religion requires of us would not be required in America. In this respect, he told his flock, “America is no different.” Freedom Beckons Us to Him With the resurgence of antisemitism, and with the Left’s selling it as something America must embrace, we can see what the rabbi meant. Religion is not meant to go to sleep when times are good. That is a formula for decadence and corruption and civilizational collapse. It must always be vigorous and intelligent. It must make us always aware that the great biblical cry for liberty, “Let my people go!,” is only half the verse, which concludes “that they may serve Me.” Our freedom depends on our allegiance to the deepest of all things; it is not just a blank check to do whatever. Forgetting about the purpose of freedom endangers freedom itself. Our Constitution itself cannot survive indifference to the deepest of commitments, our commitment to the source of our own souls, who is the Source of all beings. As John Adams presciently declared: “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”(READ MORE: The Lies of the Biden Presidency Are a Problem) With the failed assassination of Trump in our minds, talk about God’s governance are suddenly on many peoples’ lips. There is a widespread recognition that we need a new mindset, a new sense of shared purpose, shared citizenship, shared humanity. In his speech accepting his nomination, Donald Trump publicly recognized God’s providential hand in sparing his life, and refrained from using the attack on his life as a weapon with which to bash his political foes. It came as a great relief to a troubled nation, a relief not totally diminished by the rambling and combative statements that followed later. Let us each in our own, less than perfect and so very human way, further that turning towards the deepest of things. It is the core of our freedom, as individuals and as a nation together. It’s the message Rabbi Schneersohn brought to our shores, made only clearer and more powerful for having survived the cruelties and persecutions of the twin horrors of Communism and Nazism. Let’s not wait until we must suffer the cruelties of tyranny ourselves. It’s time to find our soul as a nation once more, renew our spirit and be living examples of liberty. Its power draws people’s souls if we only will show what it really means to us. Rededicating ourselves to the One who upholds us all, we cannot fail. The post Let Us Recognize God’s Providential Hand appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

In the last few hours, up to four people of sound mind have asked me if I thought that the attempt to kill Trump could have been a self-assassination attempt. We’re talking about adult people, educated, with important jobs, who — although I wouldn’t put my head on a block either — should be able to pass a drug test without too much trouble. They weren’t even all leftists, they weren’t even all anti-Trump, and they weren’t even joking. There are people out there that believe that Trump is such a moron as to ask a guy to shoot him but try not to kill him too much. The purely human Trump knows well that he has been very close to death. It goes without saying that security remains one of the major issues. But it’s impossible to get them to change their minds about what I consider to be the biggest global problem in July 2024: the epidemic of stupidity. These are people we have to live with and it forces us to take a breath, clear our throats, and respond with things such as “no, I don’t think Trump is trying to blow his own head off to win the election. Throughout history, headless presidents have enjoyed very little success in the race to the White House.” It is obvious that the attack has boosted Trump’s image. Not for nothing. The shooting, I have already written, was not against Trump, it was against his voters, against conservative ideas, and indeed against the entire free and democratic nation as we know it. The growing support for Trump is not the general empathy for an innocent man who almost got killed. We also feel compassion while watching Biden stumbling blindly and that is not the reason one might vote for him. The support for Trump is a result of his heroic reaction fitting in perfectly with his government program, giving him all the credibility that the Democrats have tried to take away from him in recent months. I don’t care if it’s a minority. I worry that the first thing some people think when they’ve come close to killing the future president of the United States is, “Well, I’m sure it’s all set up by his own team to win the election.” I mean, those people walk the streets, they have kids, they take them to school, they go to work. I don’t know, those people fly airplanes, or handle cases in their lawyers office, or perform open-heart surgery, all the while exuding the worst kind of psychopathy. The Republican candidate we are seeing after the attack is a renewed man. He has not changed, he has only strengthened his convictions. That is as far as the political Trump is concerned. The purely human Trump knows well that he has been very close to death. That’s why he said at the convention: “And I’ll tell you, I stand before you in this arena only by the grace of Almighty God.” Anti-Trump Media Subdued Things are not going well for the Democrats. Even the New York Times seems to have taken the smile off Joe Biden’s face. Just this Friday its digital front page went with “Biden Plans to Resume Campaigning as More Democrats Urge Him to Quit.” And they are not being as belligerent with Trump as they have been up until now. Are you aware of what this means? Indeed, everything is changing, everything is happening very quickly and right before our eyes. Even Mother Jones, always radically anti-Trump, has considerably keyed down its usual bile, limiting themselves to a criticism of there being too many men on stage at the Republican National Convention. “The 2024 RNC was indeed a man’s world,” the author concludes, “one that many asserted would be nothing without women dutifully supporting them.” Coyly feminist lip service. Is that really all the criticism for the politician who until a few days before the attack, for the leftist media, was going to end democracy in the United States? So I’m left with a bittersweet taste in my mouth. On the one hand, it seems that even the most critical are willing to view Trump differently (too bad someone had to try to kill him first), on the other, I maintain my concern about the epidemic of stupidity, and the lunatics who have asked me with all seriousness if Trump had tried to kill himself to win votes. READ MORE from Itxu Diaz: A Summer of Satire: Let It Go, Let It Go. Can’t Hold It Back Anymore! French Elite Have Done It Again Get Your Boat Ready for a Perfect Summer Vacation The post Trump Shooting Reveals a Stupidity Epidemic appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

There was much self-congratulation at last week’s meeting of NATO allies over the effort to “Trump-proof” the alliance. The fact that the leaders of the world’s greatest defensive alliance see the once and likely future leader of the country providing the bulk of its military capacity as a mortal threat suggests a certain lack of perspective. It is beyond negligent that Europe has not spent the two-and-a-half years since the invasion mobilizing its vast resources to defend Ukraine. What is it exactly about Trump that threatens our European allies? Was it his warning that the Nordstream pipeline and a dependence on Russian fossil fuels endangered German security? Was it his depiction of China as a strategic competitor gaming WTO rules to seize market share and extract critical technologies from the West? (READ MORE from Karl Pfefferkorn: Failure Is for Other People) Or perhaps it was Trump’s persistent criticism of allies who failed to meet their defense spending obligations? Can any of these points now be viewed as threats to the alliance, no matter how belligerently they were presented? No. So why the frantic effort to protect NATO from a Trump redux? Allies Dislike Trump’s Style Much of the European contempt for Trump derives from style rather than substance. European grandees spend their time here among America’s coastal elites, who share their center-left politics and the genteel mannerisms of the transatlantic cultural elite. John Kerry is an exemplar of the sort of American our European allies find congenial: a haughty Boston Brahmin and loyal to the green catechism as Greta Thunberg. The fact that most of the country’s interior rejected his 2004 candidacy should suggest to the Euros that there is an America beyond their preferred social circle they might want to become acquainted with. From a VFW post in Lincoln Nebraska, NATO countries look less like loyal allies and more like Eurotrash spongers who disappear before the waiter presents the bill, leaving the American patsy searching his pockets for cash. When Trump prods our allies to meet their spending commitments, he speaks for millions of Americans who may never darken the door of the Brookings Institute, but who pay their taxes and wish to know what we are getting for our disproportionate commitment to the defense of Europe. Our European allies also fail to set aside their loathing for Trump’s antagonistic style and consider how he appears to the leaders of the predatory states threatening NATO and the West. Both Putin and Xi rose through communist hierarchies that inculcated a ruthless amorality and contempt for weakness. The closest parallel to this career path in the United States may be New York City real estate development, which also rewards aggression and punishes losers, albeit with bankruptcy rather than labor camps. Which is to say, Trump is a type that Putin and Xi understand and respect. How else can we explain the rather restrained behavior of these two thugs during the Trump administration, and their subsequent predation after his replacement by the feckless Biden team? The question for our allies is not who they find most clubbable, but who is best suited to deter NATO’s adversaries. A superannuated Biden has clearly lost his capacity for deterrence. The specific fear among our allies is that a new Trump administration will either abandon Ukraine altogether or impose a settlement on Kiev that rewards Russian aggression. While Trump may well share our allies’ moral condemnation of Putin’s invasion, he also understands that American interests in this war are not identical to Ukraine’s. (READ MORE: Europe: With Friends Like These …) Reclaiming all of Ukraine’s lost territory is not worth sparking a general war between Russia and NATO, much less a nuclear exchange. The U.S. military is already stretched thin, and facing down a rapidly expanding Chinese Navy practicing the isolation if not outright invasion of Taiwan. It may not be in the interests of the U.S. to pour treasure and weapons into a grinding, inconclusive ground war in Ukraine, especially if it comes at the expense of our ability to meet our obligations to other allies. Ultimately, the defense of Ukraine must be primarily a job for European nations. The European Union has three times Russia’s population, and an aggregate economy nine times the size of Russia’s. Europe’s technological capacity and industrial base could simply overwhelm Russian suppliers now scrounging old equipment in Siberia and importing obsolete chips from China. It is beyond negligent that Europe has not spent the two-and-a-half years since the invasion mobilizing its vast resources to defend Ukraine.  As a rough comparison, recall that two-and-a-half elapsed between Pearl Harbor and the invasion of Normandy, during which time the United States transformed itself into a military superpower. At a minimum, Europe should become Ukraine’s Arsenal of Democracy, freeing the U.S. to address the looming conflict in the western Pacific. Nothing would placate a new Trump administration more than a decisive European commitment to assume responsibility for Ukrainian security and “Putin-proofing” the NATO alliance. The post Hey Allies, Why Not ‘Putin Proof’ NATO Instead? appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.