Donald Trump has lately made clear he wants little to do with Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for the next Republican president that has attracted considerable blowback in his race for the White House. “I have no idea who is behind it,” the former president recently claimed on social media. Many people Trump knows quite well are behind it. Six of his former Cabinet secretaries helped write or collaborated on the 900-page playbook for a second Trump term published by the...

A set of conservative policy proposals known as Project 2025 has become a lightning rod for opponents of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump as they seek to highlight what they say are the dangers of him retaking the White House. Trump has recently tried to distance himself from Project 2025, even though many of his closest policy advisers are deeply involved. The campaign of Democratic President Joe Biden says the project is proof that Trump would adopt a...

The literate side of songwriting The post From Steinbeck to Hemingway: John Prine’s favourite books of all time first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

It was announced last month that England’s King Charles has knighted British historian Niall Ferguson, the author of 16 books and numerous essays and articles on history, foreign policy, and politics, for his service to literature. Ferguson has taught at Oxford and Cambridge, the London School of Economics (LSE), New York University, and Harvard. He is currently a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a senior faculty fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, a visiting professor at LSE, and a regular columnist at the Free Press.  Ferguson’s books include The Pity of War, a brilliant revisionist history of World War I in which he provocatively argued that Britain should have stayed out of the war; Empire, in which he argued that the British Empire was, all things considered, a force for good in the world; The War of the World, a detailed and harrowing chronicle of the bloody 20th century; Colossus, which recognized and applauded America’s imperial role in the 20th and 21st centuries; and Kissinger: The Idealist, the definitive first volume of the life and career of the great American statesman. (READ MORE: We Must End the Democrats’ Failed Foreign Policy) Ferguson credited his knighthood to his “formative influences” — his parents, grandparents, his teachers, family members, and friends. “I am grateful to His Royal Highness for this recognition, and to God and Great Britain for my good fortune,” he said.    Ferguson: An Astute Observer of Modern Trends Ferguson was among the first observers to recognize that the United States was in a Cold War with China. Unlike the Tom Friedmans of the world, Ferguson understood that China remains committed to Marxism-Leninism and is, therefore, an ideological rival of the United States and its democratic allies. Ferguson discussed the U.S.–China dispute over Taiwan, noting that it is similar to the Cuban Missile Crisis, except this time China could play the U.S. role in imposing a blockade of the island while we play the Soviet role of deciding whether to challenge the blockade. And while the U.S. had geographic and military advantages in the Cuban crisis, China would have those same advantages in a Taiwan crisis.  Ferguson also occasionally delves into U.S. domestic politics. In a recent provocative piece in the Free Press, Ferguson noted the “political, social, and cultural resemblances . . . between the U.S. and the USSR,” including a “gerontocratic leadership,” increased “public cynicism of nearly all institutions,” a declining life expectancy, massive public debt, and a nomenklatura or elite class that serves its own interests. In America, Ferguson argued, the elite class is largely the Democratic Party that controls the federal bureaucracy, the major foundations, the universities, and most major corporations. (READ MORE: The Hale–Bopp Comet Election) In another Free Press column, Ferguson noted what he called the “Treason of the Intellectuals,” as he watched so many of America’s elite academics — professors, students, university presidents — take the side of the Hamas terrorists against Israel in the wake of the Oct. 7 massacres of Israeli citizens. He compared our leftist academia to the German professoriat in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, when “German academics acted as Hitler’s think tank.”  Earning Enemies on the Left For these and other “sins,” Ferguson has earned enemies on the Left, which he doesn’t mind at all. He has dared to call President Biden “senile,” while also describing former President Trump as a “blowhard.” He likened those on the left in the media who suddenly acknowledged Biden’s cognitive impairment after the debate to Captain Renault in the movie Casablanca who is “shocked, shocked” that gambling is going on at Rick’s place while being handed his own winnings. He has described Biden’s foreign policy as a “failure,” citing its inability to deter the Taliban, Russian President Vladimir Putin, or Hamas. And he suggested that Biden may not be able to deter China from blockading Taiwan. Biden’s foreign policy, he said, “makes Trump look good.”  And Ferguson is worried that artificial intelligence will, like Google, make us lazier thinkers because it can do the work for us. We are delegating too much of our mental work to machines, he says. (READ MORE: Biden Says He’s Running. Democrats Get in Line.) Sir Niall Ferguson thinks a lot, and we are better for it. His historical works are insightful, honest, analytical, and easy to read. His essays are timely and thought-provoking. The fact that someone so brilliant and popular is a conservative who cares not what the elite liberal class thinks of him, drives the left crazy. Well done, King Charles. The post Bravo, Sir Niall Ferguson appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

On Saturday evenings at the merry Kengor abode, the kiddies, mom, and the old man huddle in the living room with heaps of food and popcorn (and wine for the adults) to hunker down for a movie. I said “merry,” but honestly, the run-up to what ultimately appears on the TV screen can be chaotic, frustrating, challenging, and often disappointing. The big problem is finding a family-friendly movie for the brood of mom, dad, and eight children ages 10 to 27. Of course, we typically don’t have all eight kids around. Some are grown and out of the house. Usually, we’ll have four or five. Not that that helps narrow the cinematic options. Thanks to modern woke Hollywood and our cesspool culture’s vulgarians, the kids’ eyes and ears can be assaulted with perversity through a mere cursory search for options. “Quick, cover your eyes!” my wife yells out to the kids. (READ MORE: Hard Miles: An Easy Movie to Like) Thanks, Netflix. Thanks, Amazon. Thanks, Disney. You freaks. But I digress. What I’m getting at is that it’s agonizingly difficult to find a family-friendly film, especially one made after, oh, 1950. Well, I’m happy to report that we found one last weekend. It might be one of the best family-friendly movies in years. It’s called Unsung Hero. A Christian Film of a Different Flavor Written and directed by Richard Ramsey and Joel Smallbone, the film is about the real-life Smallbone family of Sydney, Australia. After the father loses just about everything financially, the Smallbone crew heads to America, namely, Nashville, in hopes of recovering losses and pursuing the father’s dreams of success as a music promoter, particularly in the world of contemporary Christian music. The father, David, is played by his real-life son, Joel David Smallbone. The family eventually finds success not through the father’s name but through the oldest daughter, the real-life talented Christian singer Rebecca St. James (played splendidly by Kirrilee Berger), and the younger sons (Luke and Joel David), who later form the excellent Christian band For King & Country. The father, David, struggles terribly throughout the tale, as does his wife, Helen (played by Daisy Betts). Helen is the glue that holds the family together, especially spiritually. The family goes to God to carry them as their source and strength through rich and poor (mostly poor). Pulled off nicely by a virtually unknown cast, the movie is not maudlin, nor is it filled with the evangelical-speak we’ve unfortunately come to expect from films in this genre. It’s not saturated with the God’s Not Dead simplicity that drives away viewers who don’t spend Sunday mornings at Church services resembling rock concerts. And to be sure, that’s no small achievement given that the musical stars that hail from this real-life family appeal to precisely such audiences. (READ MORE: Yakima Canutt: The Little-Known but Great American Stuntman) The movie is neither naïve nor saccharine, though we can still expect it to be mocked by the culture’s crude scolds who hate what’s good. There are many dark night-of-the-soul moments for the father, for the mother, and for the oldest daughter, Rebecca. The father carries his cross throughout, as does his accompanying partner and witness, Helen. From the opening scenes, the father’s stress level builds to the point that I expected to see him dead 10 minutes into the film, with mom as a widow thereafter raising the kids herself. But he perseveres. There’s no lack of character development; the writers did it right. Singing the Unsung Family’s Praises What becomes clear during this ordeal is that the father needs to understand that he’s going to ultimately find his way not through his own life, even as he nobly pushes himself to provide for his family, but rather through his family. Their mission is his mission. Their walk is his walk. They are his fulfillment. His life will find its deeper meaning when he realizes that his family is his calling in a much fuller way than he ever anticipated. That realization is beautifully captured about three-quarters into the film when David’s own father, who’s another unsung hero, enlightens his son by saying: “Your family. They’re not in the way. They are the way.” Those are the grandfather’s final words in the film before his death. Yes, the family isn’t in the way but is the way. The remainder of the film consummates that message, as Rebecca rises to become the unanticipated vehicle to the family’s musical success — unbeknownst to her dad. Then, the other kids follow, too. Success is truly a family affair. All along, the mother of seven is the hero behind the scenes, though no longer so unsung, thanks to this film’s exposure. The heroic Mrs. Smallbone is not unsung anymore. (READ MORE: Farewell to the Legend: Roger Corman) And lastly, maybe the best line in the film comes at the very close, before the credits. It comes from Mother Teresa, whose words appear on the screen: “If you want to change the world, go home and love your family.” Amen to that. Spend time with that family, love that family, and watch this truly family-friendly film with your family. They are the way. The post <i>Unsung Hero</i>: A True Family-Friendly Film appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

When my wife Ellen of blessed memory, who passed on to Paradise in 2020, and I bought our house 20 years ago, it needed some work. We got a highly recommended electrician to switch many ceiling fixtures with recessed lighting. He did a nice job. I oversaw his work while Ellen was out all day. That night, I looked forward to surprising her as she walked in the door. As I flicked on the lights, I not only surprised her but also me. The electrician had forgotten to reconnect the house lighting to the electric grid. In California, it had been the style to spray on all ceilings a kind of stuff that looked sort of like cottage cheese. Everyone had it at the time. It was for insulation, to reduce indoor heat in the summer and cold in the winter, or something like that. Maybe it also was to reduce harsh acoustics. By the time we bought our house, everyone was getting rid of that stuff, and so did we. I hired a highly recommended cottage cheese-on-the-ceiling remover. He did a great job. All the cottage cheese was gone and replaced, as agreed, with a lovely repainted texture. Pretty. Just one thing: He then had painted every room’s ceiling in the house blue. Blue ceilings. We had agreed on an off-white, like the walls. I came home from a day’s meetings and entered the House of Blue. WTH! (“H” stands for “Heck.”) I phoned him, and he was both decent and honest. He explained that he is a one-man operation and does an average of five jobs each day. His wife takes the five orders and lays the stack of five pages on their dining room table each morning, in the order of the jobs to be done. He just follows the stack. That morning, his wife had opened their front door, and there was a brief gentle breeze that blew the pages onto the floor. She picked them up and restacked the pile as she remembered it. She made a mistake. We were his first job that day. He never bothered to notice that the page topping the pile was for a different address and customer name than mine. They wanted blue. He gave me two or three new coats of off-white. I wonder whether he next had to repaint their ceilings blue, or if they decided they got lucky with Fischer Off-White. We had ugly worn-out carpeting torn out and replaced with floor tiles. The flooring people came and delivered the wrong tiles. Ellen and I looked at each other and agreed: The wrong tiles were nicer. Sometimes morons are good. A Bathroom-Turned-Sauna It brought back memories of when I built a house in Samaria, Israel (the “West Bank”). My prior wife and I were one of 35 American couples in our 30s who got together in New York’s outer boroughs and decided to create a “Jewish West Bank settlement” in Judea and Samaria. As a first step, we decided it should be legal, so our group communicated with the late legendary Israeli leader, Prime Minister Menachem Begin of blessed memory. His wife, Aliza, had just passed away. His heart was broken. We applied to have our pending community legalized. We were building on land that no Arab had ever claimed in the heart of Biblical Samaria (Shomron) in what the Arabs and United Nations call the “West Bank.” By contrast, the Jewish Bible, the Christian Bible, and all maps for 2,500 years have called it Judea and Samaria. So did we. And we always will. We offered the Prime Minister to name our new community in memory of his righteous departed wife. Begin was deeply moved. And so the Naveh Aliza neighborhood in the Ginot Shomron section of Karnei Shomron was declared legal, and we set up a life there. At the time we were 35 young families. Today there are 850 families in Ginot Shomron and 10,000 Jews in Karnei Shomron. The Bible records G-d’s promise that the Jews would return to Samaria and plant vineyards there. Jews have returned there, and there never ever will be a “Palestine” country or state there. The U.N. and the International Court of Justice can choke on it. Countries that have “recognized” such a non-entity can remain delusional about their “Two State Delusion.” But the 850,000 Jews now populating East Jerusalem and the rest of Judea and Samaria — soon to be one million — are there for keeps. (READ MORE: The Palestinian Authority Is Jihadist Too) What — Joe Biden is pressing for Israel to abandon Judea and Samaria? Well, how much you wanna bet the Jews of Judea and Samaria outlast Biden? And Jimmy Carter. And Obama. And Ocasio. And Rashida Tlaib. And Ilhan Omar. And Jamaal Bowman. And Cori Bush. But it was not all smooth — because incompetence knows no borders. We all built duplexes with finished basements. My neighbor asked the architect to put in a laundry chute so that the dirty laundry upstairs could free-fall into his basement washing machine. The architect in Israel never heard of such a thing. It was 1985 Israel, and we might as well have been asking him to build a high-speed underground travel tube to the Tundra. He spoke only Hebrew, and we were pretty well versed in the Holy Tongue, but neither Isaiah, Jeremiah, nor Ezekiel ever had spoken of laundry chutes. Somehow we conveyed the idea to him, with charades, drawings, and acting out. He said got it. “Yesh Mayvin. Yesh Mayvin.” When the house was built, my friend moved in and dropped his first batch of clothes down the laundry chute. Turned out that the chute never made it to the basement but opened over the kitchen stove, dropping socks right into a pot of boiling chicken soup. Chicken socks. With stripes. We had our experiences in our home, too. The electric company forgot to hook up our home to the town’s main electric grid, a foreboding of what would happen to us 20 years later in California. Incompetence knows no borders. But the classic incompetence we experienced came in the bathrooms. The first time we flushed the toilet, the entire bathroom was enveloped in a steamy mist. We figured it was a fluke. Must have been. So we tried again. We now had a sauna, a “shvitz.” WTH? We called the plumbers, three guys who were dead ringers for the Three Stooges — Moshe, Elly, and Metultal (Hebrew for “curly”) — and they came back to examine their Mona Lisa. They looked, they peered, they huddled, and then team leader Moshe raised his finger in ecstasy, pointing to his temple. “We figured it out! It seems we hooked up all your toilets to the hot water instead of the cold water.” I never imagined such a thing was possible. Oh, of course, it is logistically possible, but who would have thunk it possible for such incompetence to flourish in a land that invented the CT scan, Waze, and the Iron Dome? When you are surrounded by that many imbeciles, you get to thinking: Could that mistake be a good thing? Instant toilet disinfectant! A germ-free lavatory. But the flip side became more clear: mold, sweating at the worst time to sweat, and most of all — no one normal does that. Moshe, Elly, and Metultal fixed their screw-up. As they left — none too soon — I coulda sworn that Metultal was saying “Nyuck, Nyuck, Nyuck!” in Hebrew. Incompetence Is Forever I am prompted by two recent incompetences to share these memories. Earlier this week, we noticed that our Homeowners Association (hereinafter, the “Gestapo”) still had not mailed us a $4 key for which they had charged us $25. We initially had offered to come in, pick it up, and pay by card. They responded that they accept only checks — this is the Year 2024 — and do it only by postal mail. Fine. OK, that is not incompetence, only quirky. So we mailed them the check. After many weeks, my wonderful darling wife, Denise, mentioned to me that we still had not yet received the cockamamie key. She called, and once again was assured that this time it really would be in today’s mail. “The key is in the mail.” Watch this column for updates. But the zinger that sent me off the Biden-Harris-Clooney-Pelosi-Jean-Pierre merry-go-’round to write this was my visit to my local bank today. Like most people who have received the memo, I have not gone to the bank for years. I deposit by phone, pay by card or online platform, and live by plastic. When COVID erupted in 2020, that was my signal. Two years later, I underwent that lung transplant for which I needed to take immunosuppressants forevermore. So I do the simple thing. However, something came up for which I needed to sit with a banker for 45 minutes to proceed with a more sophisticated banking matter. Therefore, although I could have deposited by phone app, I figured I might as well bring with me some checks I had on hand to deposit. To my utter amazement, I discovered that there are people who never got the memo and still deposit by waiting in line for the grass to grow. They don’t even trust the ATMs. The line to deposit was at least 50 minutes long. You know how it goes. You get in line, not expecting it to take that long. Then it does, and you start thinking “The heck with it — I’m outta here!” But then you consider that you have spent so much time waiting already that you may as well get some bang for the wasted 20 minutes, not realizing that your wait is not even halfway over. I call this phenomenon “Vietnam War Syndrome.” And then it is 35 minutes and then 40, and what are you going to do? You have wasted so much time already, so how can you now walk away? Well, slow and steady wins the race (as long as your competitors are slower and less steady). I finally get my turn at the teller window. The person is speaking broken En . . . g . . . li . . . sh, but that’s OK because I can’t even speak that person’s language in its broken dialect. She sees my checks payable to “Rabbi Dov Fischer.” She looks up my account number and says “I ca . . . nno. . .t de . . . po . . .sit these.” Why not? “Because the name on your account is not ‘Rabbi.’” I explained to her that “Rabbi” is not my first name but an honorific like “Pastor,” “Father,” “Sister,” “King,” “Emperor,” “Sultan,” “Emir,” and “President.” Really, if his credit card company finds an excess balance of $75 and sends a check payable to “Pope Benedict XVI,” but his account was set up as “Joseph Alois Ratzinger,” they won’t accept his deposit? Or if it is set up as “Benedict XVI,” but the check is payable to “Pope Benedict,” they won’t accept it because (i) the account says his first name is “Benedict,” not “Pope,” and (ii) it leaves out the XVI? Or, reflective of an American high school graduate, the check gets the Roman numerals wrong, like XIV? Like, what, the teller is going to maintain the check was intended for Pope Benedict XIV (who lived from 1675 to 1758). My dear wife Ellen of blessed memory often quoted Judge Judy: “Beauty fades; dumb is forever.” Subscribe to Rav Fischer’s YouTube channel here and follow him on X (Twitter) at @DovFischerRabbi to find his latest informative and inspiring classes, interviews, speeches, and observations. The post Incompetence Knows No Borders appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

from The David Knight Show:  TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/

from Revolver News: Over three years have passed since January 6, 2021, and the truth of what really happened that day has never been more relevant. For the regime, the stakes involved in selling the official narrative of January 6 as a uniquely horrific domestic terror event are higher than ever. Such are the stakes […]