'Ever Seen Energy Like This for a President?' Trump's First Big Appearance Since Sham Trial Was LOUD

Joe Pags Weighs in on Pardoning Trump and So Does X

WATCH: Charlamagne Tha God Sets CNN Straight on the Big Difference Between Biden and Trump for Election

Perfect kind of obnoxious rock. The post The greatest songs to listen to on a motorbike, according to Josh Homme first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

It seems to strange to talk about laws of war. As William T. Sherman declared, war is hell. On the other hand, the story of the misuse of law reaches into antiquity as well. And as we see today, distorted ideas of law are used in the prosecution and support of a war that is as hellish and ugly as any in history — Hamas’ orgy of rape, torture, kidnap and murder against every Jew they could find, and which they fully intend to continue whenever they are able. In war, two opposing governments employ organized armed forces to establish their will. Neither side recognizes the law of the other side. Israel… has done more to protect civilians than any nation in the history of urban warfare. In modern times, we have evolved laws of war. These laws are understood to bind anyone who is warring. Breaking them can expose the violator to reactions ranging from nothing at all to censure, sanctions, and, as in the aftermath of World War II, trial for war crimes resulting in penalties of imprisonment or death. The enforcement is spotty and inconsistent, largely because the laws of war are not the result of a single government’s legal processes and are not tried by a judiciary that commands constitutional respect. Countries are leery of ceding their sovereignty to an international organization that may not reflect their own commitments to law and liberty. One only need think of the spectacle in the past of a United Nations commission on human rights being chaired by Iran and a majority of whose members were other anti-democratic states. (READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin: Welcome to Venezuela, America) One could say much the same about the United Nations as a whole as well as the ICJ and the ICC. Their corruption and posturing reflect a degree of decadence with which we are not yet comfortable, despite all the hard work put in by the Squad and like-minded poseurs in academia, the legacy media, and the current State Department. Nonetheless, the idea of limiting war’s barbarity seems necessary, and laws encoded in such places as the Geneva Conventions commend most people’s assent. Among its many aims is the protection of civilian life from being targeted for terror and death as part of a war strategy. For law to work, it must command wide respect. In democratic countries, the rule of the majority and the protection of minority rights under any policy are the keystones. They hold up the structure that command the assent and respect, and sometimes the affection, of the vast majority of its citizens. In war, where there are no bonds of citizenship but rather, violent hostility, the laws depend on a wary mutuality. War has long respected the truce flag to allow people to approach to parley without fear. It was usually observed even in as violent a conflict as World War II.  Another such agreement has been, after World War I, the refraining from the use of poison gas. Churchill had commanded large stocks of it to be acquired in 1940, expecting that the Germans would use it freely as they had the time before. But the Germans used it only to exterminate Jews and other civilian prisoners, and by mutual consent, it stayed off the battlefield. World War II featured indiscriminate bombing of civilian populations. This grisly practice was begun on a large scale by Japan in China, then used in the Spanish Civil War, then on a massive scale by the Germans in Poland and Holland and in the Blitz in England.  Once one side in a war employs such an illegal weapon, the other side, as long as it does not wish to lose, will not grant its enemy an unfair advantage. When the Kaiser’s armies began gas warfare in Belgium in 1915, the Allies soon followed suit. The Nazi bombings of Warsaw, Rotterdam, London, and Coventry were matched and exceeded by the fire-bombings of Hamburg and Dresden and the leveling of other German cities. The Japanese bombings of Wuhan and Manila were matched and doubled by the bombings of Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. No country that does not wish defeat can allow the other side to break the laws of war while itself remaining bound.  The war in Gaza has proven a remarkable exception to this rule. Hamas’ initial attack violated a remarkable number of the laws of war as encoded in the 1949 Geneva Convention. It deliberately attacked the civilian population. It used murderous force. It employed torture. It used rape. It took hostages. It took hostages into sexual slavery. It denied them food and safe shelter.  Other abuses had been present already. It uses hospitals, mosques, schools, and UN institutions to shelter its military personnel, equipment, and structures from legal attack. It has for years randomly attacked Israel’s civilian population with rockets that cannot be directed with accuracy, and whose only reliable use is to create terror. It used its civilians to spy and map out the Israeli villages across its border in order to know how to be able to take over its civilians and murder, rape, or kidnap them. (READ MORE: Tyrants Don’t Get Humor) In the face of all this, Israel has bound itself to observing the same laws Hamas regularly violates. The model seems to be that of Rush Limbaugh, using, as he used to say, only half his brain just to make it fair. What has it done?  By any objective standard, there has never been a lower ratio of civilian to military deaths in any urban war in history. Ignoring the pure fantasy of Hamas’ casualty figures, as anyone not naïve or malevolent must do, West Point urban warfare expert John Spencer says the ratio for the war in Gaza is either 1.5 civilian deaths per military death, or perhaps an even one-to one. Spencer compared that to others in a Newsweek article: The UN, EU and other sources estimate that civilians usually account for 80 percent to 90 percent of casualties, or a 1:9 ratio, in modern war (though this does mix all types of wars). In the 2016-2017 Battle of Mosul, a battle supervised by the U.S. that used the world’s most powerful airpower resources, some 10,000 civilians were killed compared to roughly 4,000 ISIS terrorists. Israel has accomplished 90 percent evacuations of military targets, having made more than 100,000 phone calls, dropped leaflets, incredibly giving out maps that their enemy would certainly benefit from. It has done more to protect civilians than any nation in the history of urban warfare, even with all the evidence of popular enthusiasm for Hamas’ war and the participation of hundreds and perhaps thousands in the rape, murder, pillage, and hiding and abusing of hostages. Strangely — but it shouldn’t be strange knowing the hostility of Obama to Israel and his enduring influence in the Biden Administration — the U.S. government does not tout this but joins in the malicious and only rarely merely ignorant carping of those seeking to toady to Iran and its various proxies in Western countries and throughout the world. It is a nihilistic enterprise which our government only opposes fitfully and incoherently. Its aim is to have us see ourselves as the mullahs see us — utterly bereft of any morality or purpose, sitting ducks for their militant and exclusive version of religion, which now quite openly embraces genocide. (READ MORE: All Are Bound by the Law) That is not the truth of who we are. America knows it and is ready to ditch the incoherence. It’s time to get back on the path of peace. First step — end the possibility of the orgiastic butchers of Hamas ever holding power again. The post Israel Abides by Rules of War Its Enemies Would Never Dream Of appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Catholic Bishop Robert Barron has, over the past decade or so, become one of the best-known high-profile figures in American Catholic circles. His book and, later, television series Catholicism have elucidated and clarified the history and teachings of the Catholic Church for thousands. His Word on Fire ministry has played a part in keeping alive the Catholic tradition of public intellectualism. His podcast has facilitated earnest and even thought-provoking debate amongst Catholics and between Catholics and those of other faiths. But his latest published work is, at best, naïve — and, at worst, downright stupid. This way of thinking, championed by Maher and his ilk, destroys objectivity in reasoning and morality. In an op-ed piece for CNN — of all places — published last week, Barron hailed the pot-smoking, atheistic liberal talk show host and sometime-comedian Bill Maher as an “ally.” Barron begins by lamenting Maher’s staunchly-held atheism, glossing the godless pundit’s decades of ranting against God. The bishop then notes that Maher has seemingly pivoted of late to “articulating his opposition to the ‘woke’ ways of thinking that have managed to capture the allegiance of most of the major institutions of our country.” “As he has done so, I have found myself, time and again, nodding my head in agreement,” Barron writes of Maher’s grimly humorous tirades against the woke ideology. “To my surprise, the nemesis had become an ally.” The bishop proceeds to gush over Maher’s commitment to “classical liberalism” and fostering “fraternity across ideologies,” concluding, “Three cheers for Bill Maher!” Like Maher, Barron was born in the latter half of the 1950s. Both men grew up in an American society that no longer exists. In his op-ed, Barron joins Maher in lamenting that those on opposing ends of the political spectrum today tend to view one another as an “existential threat,” instead pining for the days “when Republican President Ronald Reagan and former House Speaker Tip O’Neill, a Massachusetts Democrat, could sit down for a friendly drink at the end of a workday.” The fact of the matter is that the opposite ends of the political spectrum are an existential threat to one another. One side clamors that the wanton slaughter of unborn children in a moral imperative, that transing children and horrifically mutilating their genitals is laudably compassionate, that order and authority are meaningless, that morality is determined by emotion, and that God has no place in the public consciousness. The other side argues that human dignity is a gift worth treasuring, that children — born and unborn — should be protected, that order is necessary for society to thrive, that morality transcends mere legal letters, and that all rights and goods are derived from God. The America that both Barron and Maher grew up in is dead — and Maher is among those who contributed to its death. While Barron says that the narcissistic brand of atheism Maher and so many others rabidly promoted and preached over the past several decades “annoyed” him, it did far more than just “annoy” the social fabric of America and the West: it normalized the notion that the human mind reigns supreme over all, including God. It was, in fact, a type of naturalism — the sin of Satan, the declaration that nature can replace Supernature, that the creature can replace the Creator, that man can replace God. This way of thinking, championed by Maher and his ilk, destroys objectivity in reasoning and morality. If there is no God, no eternal Entity who is Truth Himself, then who is man to say what is true? If there is no God, no eternal Entity who is Authority, then by what authority does any man say that this is morally right or that is morally wrong? By man’s own authority, of course, but which man’s authority? Since, without God, man has no authority to appeal to higher than himself, he must appeal to the masses. Enter mob rule and morality by consensus: whatever the largest (or loudest) group of people say is right must be accepted as right. But again, without God, there is no objective imperative, there is nothing compelling man to reason over appetite. Thus, the largest group will more often than not determine morality based on appetite, on emotion, on what “feels” good, since there is no standard to measure what is good. Consensus-based morality, then, becomes not just mob rule but animal mob rule. Worse still, appetites and emotions are easier to manipulate and easier to appeal to than reason. Want to score easy political points? Promise people something that feels good. Sex carries a resulting responsibility — a new human life — so just get rid of that responsibility via abortion. Money is nice to have, so promise that the mob can keep more because you’ve “forgiven” debts that they owe. Getting high is a quick way to forget about pain and misery, so let everyone buy pot, put a cannabis dispensary on every street corner. Just as the bloodthirsty French revolutionaries enthroned a whore in Notre Dame de Paris, so Maher and the ideology he has championed deposed human reasoning and morality and enthroned nothing more than appetite. Despite his clever jabs at transing children, Maher’s own statements bear this out. Discussing abortion, the talk show host did push back against the left-wing narrative that pro-lifers want to oppress women or do away with women’s rights and rightly insisted that pro-lifers genuinely believe abortion is the killing of an unborn child. “They think it’s murder — and it kind of is,” he said. Then the other shoe dropped: “I’m just okay with that. I am. I mean, there’s eight billion people in the world. I’m sorry, we won’t miss you.” Maher and his narcissistic, egocentric philosophy are not deserving of “three cheers.” Barron’s impulse is that of a society that died decades ago. There is no making peace with evil, there is no reconciling the tenets of leftism with those of conservatism, there is not now any common ground to be found. Maher’s ideology saw to that. “I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Choose life, then, that you and your descendants may live” (Deuteronomy 30:19). READ MORE from S.A. McCarthy: The Holy Eucharist and the Hint of an Explanation The Pernicious Persecution of Traditional Catholics The Bogeyman: The Leftists’ Hatred of the Catholic Church The post Bishop Robert Barron Praises Atheist Bill Maher. Why? appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

I was in second grade when an assassin’s bullet tore apart the brain of the President of the United States. It was a different time. All but a tiny minority of us readily accepted the official story. It occurred to almost nobody to imagine that upstanding citizens like Gerald Ford, Allen Dulles, and Chief Justice Earl Warren would sign their names to a report that they knew to be, or suspected might be, a lie. When, in the years and decades that followed, independent investigators came out with books offering alternate theories about the assassination, some of us read them — I read a couple, with intense interest — and allowed ourselves to be diverted by what seemed like outrageously far-fetched scenarios involving one or more of the following possible culprits: LBJ, the CIA, the FBI, the Mob, Moscow, Havana, and the Texas oil barons. But when we finished reading the books, we set them aside and returned to what we thought was the real world, in which American government institutions and the mainstream American media were nothing less than trustworthy. More and more of us, thank goodness, are realizing — just how demonic the people pulling Biden’s strings are. Not until the candidacy, the presidency, and the post-presidency of Donald Trump were millions of us awakened to the fact that there was indeed a Deep State, a swamp, a morally nefarious political and media and military-industrial establishment, whose membership was not confined to a single party and whose determination to hold on to its own power was so all-consuming that it was capable of doing absolutely anything to destroy anyone whom it recognized as a threat to that power. Trump was that threat. Decades earlier, JFK, who had expressed an interest in reining in the CIA, had perhaps also been a threat. The difference, of course, is that in 1963 it was infinitely easier to hide high-level chicanery than it is in the age of the Internet. (READ MORE from Bruce Bawer: Twelve Corrupt Jurors) Instead of staging a murder in Dallas, the Deep State tried to bring down Trump with the death of a thousand cuts: the Steele Dossier, the “fine people” hoax, the Mar-a-Lago raid, the dismissal of Hunter Biden’s laptop as Russian disinformation by a small army of intelligence veterans, the drinking-bleach lie, the 2020 election fix, the insurrection narrative, the two impeachments, the high-profile, Soviet-style arrests of Trump allies like Roger Stone, and the innumerable lawsuits, each more absurd than the next. For some of us, the scales fell from our eyes early on. For others, apparently, it didn’t happen until May 30 of this year. Hillary Clinton had gotten away with a litany of actual crimes of the utmost seriousness. Ditto Joe Biden. For years, Trump’s enemies in the judicial system had combed through his history of business activities in search of something he could be charged with. But even to the surprise of some of Trump’s greatest admirers, they found nothing. Somehow, in a long and storied career in big-time New York real estate — a notoriously dirty business — Trump had apparently failed to do anything worth prosecuting. So in the end they felt compelled to make stuff up — and to bend the rules of jurisprudence in pretty much every imaginable way. A judge so crooked that he came off like a mustache-twirling villain in a third-rate Victorian stage melodrama empaneled a jury of twelve Manhattanites — residents of a borough whose economy Trump helped rescue but an overwhelming majority of whose tonier residents hate his guts, in many cases for no other reason than that, in their view, he’s an outer-borough vulgarian — and presided over a disgusting sham of a trial that would have made Stalin blush. On May 30, Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts. And his enemies cheered. “Holy Cow, 34 for 45!” read the sickeningly flippant headline on the column by the New York Times‘s execrable Maureen Dowd. Whether the whole thing had been legally legit or not meant nothing to them. In order to undermine a political enemy, their comrades had contorted the justice system, and for the likes of Dowd that was just plain dandy. There’s disillusion and there’s disillusion. When I was a child I spoke as a child, and so on. I was raised to be a patriot. I grew up in New York City — but in Queens, in an unstoried neighborhood that, according to the quadrennial post-Election Day maps in the New York Times, always stood out from most of the rest of the borough by voting Republican, a neighborhood where even today almost everybody flies the flag on national holidays and gathers in the local park on the Fourth of July to recite the Pledge of Allegiance and sing the National Anthem. As a kid, I wasn’t proud to be an American — being proud would have meant that being an American was some kind of achievement. No, I was honored. I was awed. Being born in the 20th century, in the freest country on earth, and in what was then the planet’s largest and most extraordinary city, seemed to me the greatest privilege any human being since the Assyrian Empire could ever have experienced. I felt I’d triumphed in the lottery of life. If I was proud, I was proud of my country for having saved the world, not so many years before my birth, from the evils of Nazism and of the brutal Empire of Japan, and for, in my own lifetime, serving as the selfless protector of freedom in countries around the world. More specifically, I was proud of men like my uncle Harry Everett Thomas, Jr., who as a young man had been a bombardier in the U.S. Air Force, who after being shot down over Germany had spent several grueling months in a Nazi POW camp, and who ended up retiring as a Lieutenant Colonel. As far as I was concerned, he had risked his life and scarred his soul in service to a sublime cause and a glorious republic. To be sure, as I grew up, I increasingly recognized that no country, not even America, could live up to the more admirable chapters of its history at every turn. Movies like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and books like Plunkitt of Tammany Hall opened my eyes to the reality of rampant government corruption. Spending much of my childhood in the Deep South of the early 1960s, I was exposed to racism at its ugliest (as well as to the courage and nobility of ordinary people who took significant risks to oppose it). Humans, after all, are imperfect creatures, some of them quite terribly imperfect. What distinguishes Americans from other homo sapiens isn’t that we’re any better than other people; it’s that we’re gifted with a political system built on a Declaration of Independence that is unique in the nobility of its ideals and a Constitution that was brilliantly designed to rein in the worst of human impulses and encourage the best. But it’s one thing to revere our founding documents; it’s another to buy into the naive belief that every one of the people who rule us shares our reverence for them and wakes up every morning determined to live by them. Alas, the Trump years made Plunkitt and his ilk, and the tough-as-nails Boss Jim Taylor in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, look like rank amateurs. Nothing I had ever read or seen or heard of had prepared me for the sheer ruthlessness of the Deep State — the utter indifference to our country’s founding values, the thoroughgoing disinterest in the truth itself — that underlay its cynical campaign to demolish Donald Trump. And these people weren’t just out to crush Trump — in the course of doing so, they were perfectly willing to topple the very pillars of American liberty. But even for many of us who had spent years observing that anti-Trump campaign, the verdicts of May 30 represented a step beyond. For the first time ever, a former President had been officially — and unjustly — marked as a felon. Plenty of his predecessors actually had committed felonies — the names LBJ, Clinton, and Obama come immediately to mind — but had never come close to being prosecuted, let alone convicted. “This is bigger than Trump. This is bigger than me. This is bigger than my presidency,” Trump said after the verdicts came down. He was right. What happened on May 30 marked the culmination of years of absolutely spectacular abuse of power by his enemies, and it was the ultimate confirmation that there are countless Americans in positions of high authority for whom their own sinecures in one branch of government or another mean infinitely more than the principles that they swore to uphold when they took those jobs. The schemes they have hatched over these past several years, and the grotesque travesty that went down in that Manhattan courtroom during the past few weeks, concluding on May 30, makes it blindingly — and, yes, painfully — obvious that America is no longer the country many of us thought it was and loved it for being. Is it possible that it hasn’t really been that country since November 22, 1963? (READ MORE: Biden Is George III. Who Does That Make Trump?) To find oneself thinking such things is to be drenched with grief. It makes one look back at one’s life and see all sorts of things in a very different light. Yes, for most of us America was and has been a land of freedom and of plenty. It has been a blessing to immigrants from all over the world who, coming to America with next to nothing in their pockets, have made successful careers, bought their own homes, and seen their children thrive. But for those who’ve come too close to uncovering the mischievous machinations of the permanent bureaucracy, it’s been a country in which the FBI could break into your home in the middle of the night, arrest you on trumped-up charges, tie up your life for years with baseless lawsuits, and drive you into bankruptcy with legal fees — if not worse. America is a very beautiful house — the most beautiful house on the block — but its upper story is infested with rabid rats that need to be dealt with. But there is hope. One positive sign is that more and more former never-Trumpers have been moved by the injustices done to him by his enemies to reconsider their opinions of him and, indeed, of his whole long list of judicial entanglements. Another positive sign is that a great many deep-pocketed Americans have been motivated by the Trump verdicts to make huge donations to his presidential campaign. They realize — as more and more of us, thank goodness, are realizing — just how demonic the people pulling Biden’s strings are, and just how little they care for the values on which this country was founded. And this swelling new assemblage of Trump supporters see that if this evil cabal isn’t removed from power prontissimo and replaced by a government of, by, and for the people — and doesn’t that sound quaint now? — the America envisioned by our Founders, and built up over the generations by our forefathers, will be lost forever. The post The Trump Verdict Is a Turning Point for America appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

WASHINGTON — Jurors are tougher than voters. They expect defendants — or their lawyers — to tell the truth. Hence the 34 guilty verdicts on charges that former President Donald Trump falsified business records to influence the 2016 election. White House Counsel’s Office spokesperson Ian Sams released a statement in which he said, “We respect the rule of law.” Don’t get me wrong. I still think Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg engaged in prosecutorial overreach with a case based on amorphous charges for moldy behavior. That is, the prosecution engaged in election interference fueled by partisan rancor. So I believe Trump is likely to see the verdict and sentencing reversed on appeal because you don’t prosecute a former president based on novel legal theory. But for now, Trump is a convicted felon. And that’s in part because Trump was dishonest. He rightly chose not to testify, but he wrongly spent years denying that he had relations with Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, who were paid $130,000 and $150,000, respectively, in “hush money.” As Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, told CNN, “You don’t pay someone $130,000 not to have sex with you.” Also, I don’t think jurors appreciate giving up weeks of their lives for someone who didn’t take the process seriously. The guilty verdict may not be good news for President Joe Biden. As Trump maintained after the verdict, “The real verdict will be Nov. 5 by the people, and they know what happened here.” As for Biden, sure, the 81-year-old will be running against a convicted felon — but that feeds into Trump’s pose as a victim of a “rigged” system and an underdog. And really, it’s hard to look like a winner when your 77-year-old opponent could be in handcuffs at any time. Another fly in the ointment: The president’s son Hunter is set to go to trial next week on federal charges related to lying about his drug use to buy a gun in 2018. Hunter Biden, a Yale Law graduate, also faces charges of tax evasion. According to the indictment by special counsel David Weiss, the president’s son stands accused of spending money he didn’t pay on taxes instead on “drugs, escorts and girlfriends, luxury hotels and rental properties, exotic cars, clothing, and other items of a personal nature, in short, everything but his taxes.” After the guilty verdict, White House Counsel’s Office spokesperson Ian Sams released a statement in which he said, “We respect the rule of law, and have no additional comment.” But this is not the last word. Contact Review-Journal Washington columnist Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com. Follow @debrajsaunders on X. COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM READ MORE from Debra J. Saunders: 2024 Could Be a Race Between Bidenomics, Trump Tax Cuts Libertarian Party Says, ‘Become Ungovernable.’ Trump Says OK. The post Trump Is Now a Convicted Felon. That May Not Be Good for Biden. appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Last week the Islamist theocrats who rule Iran buried one of their own, President Ebrahim Raisi, killed in a helicopter crash week before last. In the manner of dictatorships, the Iranian authorities promoted massive displays of grief, with crowds numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Some, of course, may have been genuinely mournful, while one suspects that the vast majority attended because they knew that the secret police were counting heads. It’s ever so in dictatorships.  The morally-compromised International Criminal Court indicts Israel for its efforts to bring Hamas to justice, and it receives the applause of Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib. One suspects that more than a few, however quietly, attended in that spirit of going to a funeral to make sure that the deceased is really dead. Representatives of 68 nations attended, some from the usual rogues gallery of tyrants, some from those countries the mullahs have so assiduously cultivated — one might say “bribed” — and some from countries that should have had the grace and good sense to avoid rubbing shoulders with the likes of Ismail Haniyeh, widely regarded as the overall leader of Hamas, someone that even our own State Department, notably squeamish about the applying the term, has designated as a terrorist. The Taliban were there as well, and all manner of bad actors. (READ MORE from James H. McGee: What the Red Ball Express Teaches Us About Ukraine) Unsurprisingly, loud chants of “death to America” rose up from the throngs of mourners, along with acclaim for the October 7 Hamas massacres of innocent Israeli civilians. With Iran’s Revolutionary Guards orchestrating the proceedings, the cheerleaders for rape and murder were out in full force. Now the cheers have faded, and, if we are to believe the Iran experts, it’s unlikely that Raisi’s passing will mean much with respect to the power structure within Iran or in terms of Iran’s relations with the world. Raisi’s death removed one obvious candidate to succeed the aging and increasingly frail Ayatollah Khamenei, but there’s nothing to indicate anything resembling a real shakeup in Iranian internal affairs. The Revolutionary Guards Council’s stranglehold on Iranian domestic politics and foreign policy will likely remain, as will Iran’s weird fusion of Stalinist repression and Shiite fundamentalism. Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis will still be Teheran’s puppets, deployed against us at the Mullah’s bidding. Israel will continue to be the “little Satan,” we will be the “great Satan” and the thoughts of some kind of grand rapprochement with Iran, a revival, for example, of the once-touted nuclear deal, will remain nothing more than a fever dream of the Obama holdovers running the Biden administration’s foreign policy. But before we close the books on Raisi, we might do well to reflect upon the meaning of his life and ponder some of the overseas reactions to his death, both in other countries and within the ranks of our own so-called “progressive” elites. Arguably, his death offers a kind of Rorschach test, an inkblot through which a certain prominent strain of politico/moral values might stand revealed. It’s rare, after all, to experience a moment when we’re invited so forcefully to reflect upon the historical significance of a genuinely monstrous human being. Raisi’s sobriquet, the “Butcher of Teheran” was eminently deserved. A product of the revolution that overthrew the Shah, the same revolution that “held America hostage” for 444 days. He was one of those young men who rejoiced in the deaths of American special operators in a rescue attempt gone terribly wrong, one of the earliest of the “hate America” crowd. But even more, his hatred encompassed the secular and open-spirited Iran that had emerged in the 60s and 70s, an Iran ready to move on from the Shah’s autocracy, but not in the direction of the religious fanatics.  Raisi, however, and the thousands of religious radicals like him, had other plans for the country. From the very beginning he embraced and exemplified the violent passions of the revolution. He and his comrades, in a manner akin to Lenin’s Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917, formed a hard core vanguard, dedicated to taking control of the revolution and bending it to the purposes of the Ayatollah. Raisi soon became a leading light of the newly-created “judicial” system, rising rapidly through the ranks, making a name for himself as the most radical enforcer of the new Shiite dictatorship. To quote Amnesty International, over the past 44 years Raisi was “directly involved in or oversaw the enforced disappearance and extrajudicial executions of thousands of political dissidents.” He also oversaw the “torture of thousands of protestors and violent persecution of women and girls defying compulsory veiling, among other serious human rights violations.” He was a member of the “death commission” that in 1988 was responsible for the murder of thousands of political prisoners. As recently as 2018, he publicly defended these massacres as “one of the proud achievements of the Islamic Republic.”  In the same article, Diana Eltahawy, Amnesty International’s Deputy Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa offered the following blunt assessment. Raisi should have been “criminally investigated” for “crimes against humanity … while he was alive,” and that his death “should not rob his victims and their families of their right to truth and to see all others complicit in his crimes held to account.” Even in a world pockmarked with horror, one would look very hard to find someone as evil — as purely evil — as Raisi. One might wish, with Ms. Eltahawy, that Raisi’s death would not prevent an accounting with his crimes, but the world’s reaction to his death offers little reason for comfort. We might start with Iran’s major allies, Putin’s Russia, Xi’s China, and Kim’s North Korea. I’ll leave the proofs of renewed “Axis of Evil” for a dedicated analysis later, but it’s instructive that Putin, Xi, and Kim all singled out Raisi for praise. Putin characterized Raisi as a “man of his word” and “always good to work with” while expressing  his sympathy to Iran. China’s Xi noted that Raisi’s death meant that “the Chinese people have lost a good friend.” North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, described Raisi’s death as “a great loss.”  But it didn’t stop there. The U.S. State Department issued a press release expressing “official condolences” for the death of Raisi and the others killed in the helicopter crash (a statement, fortunately, condemned by Republicans in the House of Representatives). At the United Nations, Security Council representatives, including U.S. Deputy Ambassador, Robert Wood, stood in respect in a “moment of silence,” a move condemned by Israel’s U.N. Ambassador, Gilad Erdan. Erdan scathingly observed that the council had “bowed its head for a man responsible for massacring and murdering thousands in Iran, in Israel, and around the globe. What next? Will the Council dedicate a moment of silence to commemorate Hitler?”  We might do well to take Ambassador Erdan’s question and ask it of those among us who’ve spent the months since October 7 praising Hamas. After all, and at every level, from the steps of Congress to our college campuses, what we’ve witnessed has been nothing less than an outpouring of support for moral monstrosity not seen since the days of Hitler. And Ebrahim Raisi was just such a moral monster, and the regime he served so fanatically lives to perpetuate such monstrosity at home and to expand it across the world. If our campus protestors and their enablers retained a shred of moral decency, Raisi’s death and, even more, his life, might have served as the occasion for stepping back from their fatuous indulgences in hatred. They might have looked in the mirror and seen in themselves something very like the young Raisi of 1980, aflame with hatred, burning to impose his vision on others, regardless of their hopes and dreams. It might have been an occasion to demonstrate their solidarity with the women of Iran, who truly are the victims of unremitting religious repression.  But no, no such thing has occurred, because these people lack the moral compass necessary to understand what real repression looks like. Instead, they pretend that campus cops are the IDF. Palestinian cosplay as ridiculous as the “Handmaid’s Tale” costumes of a few short years ago. The morally-compromised International Criminal Court indicts Israel for its efforts to bring Hamas to justice, and it receives the applause of Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, cheered on at a conference sponsored by groups linked to Hamas. Would that she and others like her might be given pause by the example of Raisi’s life, by the necessity of an accounting for the horrors properly laid at his tomb. But we can hardly expect those who identify with murderers and rapists to understand the moral deficiencies exemplified in Raisi’s life. (READ MORE: The Hero Who Saved a Cathedral) I’m not a fan of demonstrations. In a better world, college students would go to class, go to the library, work hard to understand, honestly, the world around them, and equip themselves to contribute positively through the knowledge and skills they’ve acquired. In a better world, they would learn at the feet of professors dedicated to honest and open inquiry, not narrow-minded ideologues, themselves uncomfortably akin in spirit to men such as Raisi. It’s scarcely accidental that no less a figure than the Ayatollah Khamenei himself has now praised both these students and the leftist professors who’ve nurtured and encouraged them. Nor is it accidental that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has now chosen to blame the October 7 massacre of Israelis by Hamas on the Abraham Accords, the most notable Middle East peace initiative in decades. In a better world, voters would reject the likes of AOC, Tlaib, and Omar and all those who surf the waves of hatred. In a better world, our U.N. Security Council representative would have kept his butt firmly planted in his seat, rather than honoring the “Butcher of Teheran.”  I long instead for a day when our leaders would stand up once more for America, for the good people of this country, the ordinary citizens of this and all the preceding generations who’ve worked, who’ve built, who’ve farmed, who’ve raised families, all whose diligence has given us a country still envied around the world. Americans have just observed Memorial Day, reminded of all those who gave their lives so that we could live in freedom and enjoy the pursuit of happiness that is our birthright as Americans. Perhaps our leaders might stand up for them. James H. McGee retired in 2018 after nearly four decades as a national security and counter-terrorism professional, working primarily in the nuclear security field. Since retiring, he’s begun a second career as a thriller writer. His recent novel, Letter of Reprisal, tells the tale of a desperate mission to destroy a Chinese bioweapon facility hidden in the heart of the central African conflict region, and a forthcoming sequel carries the Reprisal team from the hills of West Virginia to the forests of Belarus. You can find it on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback editions, and on Kindle Unlimited.  The post The Death of a Theocrat and Our Morally Obtuse Progressives appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.