Follow NewsClips channel at Brighteon.com for more updatesSubscribe to Brighteon newsletter to get the latest news and more featured videos: https://support.brighteon.com/Subscribe.html

Follow NewsClips channel at Brighteon.com for more updatesSubscribe to Brighteon newsletter to get the latest news and more featured videos: https://support.brighteon.com/Subscribe.html

In a striking statement during a wild press conference, President-elect Donald Trump has vowed that if the hostages still being held in Gaza by Hamas are not released by the time of his Jan. 20 inauguration, “all hell will break out in the Middle East.” In remarks at Mar-a-Lago, Trump threatened: “It will not be good for Hamas and it will not be good, frankly, for anyone. All hell will break out. I don’t have to say anymore, but that’s what it is.” It was an extraordinary statement. It also harkens back to what happened in January 1981, specifically on Jan. 20, 1981, at the time of Ronald Reagan’s inauguration. For 444 days, 52 American hostages had been held captive by Islamist fanatics in Tehran. They had been seized at the U.S. embassy on Nov. 4, 1979, in protest of President Jimmy Carter allowing the Shah of Iran admission into the United States for medical treatment for cancer. Carter had outrageously abandoned the Shah, who had long been America’s top ally in the Middle East. President Richard Nixon had said, “Whatever the Shah wants, the Shah gets.” As Henry Kissinger put it, America’s partnership with Iran was the “starting point” of its foreign policy in the region. Our two “pillars of strength” were Iran and Israel. Until Jimmy Carter came along. Carter lost Iran. The Shah was replaced with the Ayatollah. Iran immediately went from being a top ally to becoming the world’s worst terror state. A situation that remains to this day. The seizure of those U.S. hostages was a stunning, unprecedented situation for Americans. Carter tried to get them released, even authorizing a daring but failed rescue mission on April 4, 1980, known as Desert One. It became an infamous military fiasco. No hostages were rescued; instead, U.S. soldiers were killed during the aborted operation. For those reasons and many more, Carter was crushed by Reagan in the November 1980 election, losing 44 of 50 states and the Electoral College 489 to 49. Ronald Reagan became president of the United States on Jan. 20, 1981. The moment that he swore the oath of office, with his right hand placed on his mother Nelle’s Bible — opened to 2 Chronicles 7:14, where Nelle had written, “A wonderful verse for the healing of a nation” — the hostages were freed. In his Inaugural Address, Reagan affirmed: “We’re not, as some would have us believe, doomed to an inevitable decline. So, with all the creative energy at our command, let us begin an era of national renewal.” That theme pervaded Reagan’s inaugural ceremony. There was no mistaking the message. The next day’s headline beamed across the New York Times: “Reagan Takes Oath as 40th President: Promises an ‘Era of National Renewal.’” It is no exaggeration to say that the change in mood began at that moment, as the hostages were let go in Tehran — prompting the Times to continue the Reagan headline into a second line across the top-of-the-fold: “Minutes Later, 52 U.S. Hostages in Iran Fly to Freedom After 444-Day Ordeal.” It has long been a source of controversy and debate as to what exactly the incoming Reagan team might have done — or what Ronald Reagan himself might have said — to precipitate the release of the hostages. Carter National Security Council official Gary Sick promoted a conspiracy theory about an “October Surprise.” But it was hardly a surprise. I’ve written about the event for years in books. I often quote a revealing Nov. 4, 1980 statement from Col. Charles W. Scott, one of those in captivity that day when Reagan defeated Carter in the presidential election. Scott recalled the reaction of his captors to Reagan’s victory: “I remember specifically when one of the guards came in and said, ‘Reagan is now the new president. What do you think will happen when he comes into office?’ I didn’t say a word, I just went ‘boom.’ And they said, ‘Really?’ And I said ‘Yeah, the first day he’s in office after the Inaugural ceremony, he’ll go back to the White House and say, ‘OK, tell the Iranians if they don’t let those hostages go by midnight tomorrow night, its war.’” Reagan’s opponents on the Left also promoted that image — though for very different reasons. They aimed to portray him as a wild man, a nutjob, a trigger-happy cowboy looking to blow up the world starting Jan. 20, 1981. Ironically, the Left’s framing of Reagan as a warmonger surely served to scare the Iranians into more conciliatory behavior. Over 20 years later, I interviewed Reagan adviser Richard V. Allen about this. (See Paul Kengor’s tribute: “We Win, They Lose:’ Remembering Richard V. Allen.”) Allen told me that Reagan “sought to be very careful not to inflame” or undercut the Carter administration, refraining “from doing or saying anything that would jeopardize whatever the administration was doing to secure the release of the hostages.” On the other hand, conceded Allen, “We never discouraged any journalist from thinking that, or better yet, writing or saying, in effect, ‘The Iranians had better watch out, make their deal with Carter now, because once Reagan is in office, things will be radically different.’” No question. In fact, in March 1980, Ronald Reagan publicly stated (akin to what Donald Trump is expressing now) that the United States should issue a deadline for the hostages’ release and take “unpleasant action” against Iran if the deadline was not met. Like Donald Trump today, Reagan didn’t describe what that action might look like. He didn’t need to. Then came Reagan’s electoral victory on Nov. 4, 1980. As with Trump’s victory on Nov. 5, 2024, Reagan escalated his rhetoric against the Islamist hostage takers. “In the weeks leading up to the Inauguration,” wrote Reagan later in his memoirs, “I had gone out of my way to say some nasty things in public about the Ayatollah Khomeini, hoping it would encourage him to expedite the negotiations before we arrived in Washington.” In December 1980, Reagan explicitly warned: “There should be no delay in freeing the hostages.” Clearly, the Iranians knew that Reagan meant business. They didn’t fear Jimmy Carter, but they did fear Ronald Reagan. Today, one imagines that Hamas fears Donald Trump far more than it fears Joe Biden. Whatever prompted the Iranian release of the U.S. hostages in January 1981, there’s no debating that the release happened, and it was a joyous moment and dramatic departure from four years of the awful presidency of Jimmy Carter. The only four-year presidency that we’ve seen since that resembles Carter’s disaster has been the Biden presidency. Biden likewise ruined the Middle East region from Iran to Afghanistan, not to mention his shared economic-domestic incompetencies, particularly massive inflation and energy/gas prices. With Joe Biden and Jimmy Carter, history has repeated itself. Will history in January 2025 likewise repeat itself for the better, with another big switch to a Republican president, again commencing on Inauguration day? Will Donald Trump see hostages released on Jan. 20, just as Ronald Reagan did? We shall see. Trump is certainly doing his part to try to make it happen. READ MORE from Paul Kengor: American Spectator Editor Paul Kengor on Jimmy Carter Why It’s a Wonderful Life Is the Greatest Christmas Movie Ever Looking Back at the Year — 1984 The post Trump and Reagan: Two Hostage Crises, Two Inaugurations appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Let’s go ahead and start this column with a photo comparison, shall we?   You probably already know that the guy in the middle is Justin Trudeau. You likely already know the guy on the right is Fidel Castro. The guy on the left? That’s Pierre Trudeau, who is supposed to be Justin’s dad. The rumor that goes way back is that the elder Trudeau, then a rising Canadian political star (he ultimately became prime minister), and his, er, liberated wife took a trip to Havana to pay homage to Cuba’s communist dictator, and, well, one thing led to another. Yes, but that’s just a conspiracy theory. This is not quite the debunking the “fact-checkers” have assured you it is, is it? That reminds me of another side-by-side-by-side photo comparison… Of course, you’re crazy if you think the guy in the middle looks more like the communist newspaperman on the right than the foreign bureaucrat on the left, right? What we can do is, as I did in Racism, Revenge, and Ruin, recognize that Frank Marshall Davis was at least the intellectual father of Barack Obama, if not the biological one, so is Fidel Castro the spiritual mentor of Justin Trudeau. Thank God that over the past nine years, we never had a Canadian missile crisis. What we’ve had instead is a front-row seat to Canada’s implosion as a free and prosperous nation under Fidelito Trudeau’s Liberal Party regime, so much so that many Canadians have just plain given up. Do we even keep a score of the number of Canadians who have decamped for sunnier climes and friendlier tax rates in the United States over those nine years? A lot more than the number of American leftists headed the opposite way, which is perhaps a pity. Anyway, the toll on the average Canadian in loss of freedom and economic well-being thanks to Fidelito and his gaggle of World Economic Forum stooges running that country into the ground has been so severe that the Liberals are down to a 28 percent approval rating. Interestingly enough, they’re now beginning to lose ground to something called the New Democrat Party, a Hard Left communist outfit fronted by someone named Jagmeet Singh who presents himself as rather less than a serious leader. Think Bernie Sanders with more testosterone but no book-publishing scam or multiple houses. That’s why on Monday, Justin Trudeau was “Bidened.” You understand what “Bidening” is, don’t you? It’s the removal, by a party, of its unpopular leader in a desperate attempt to salvage an election. The Liberals are going to take a well-deserved shellacking in an election that could come as early as March but won’t, for a bunch of obvious reasons including the fact that Canada has been sent into a panic by Donald Trump’s suggestion that tariffs on Canadian goods would rise to 25 percent unless and until Canada begins much better cooperation on securing their U.S. border and helping to halt the flow of drugs and human cargo. There isn’t a soul among the Liberals’ leadership, though, who isn’t complicit in all of Fidelito’s destructive policies. They’re all open-border globalists. They’re all climate alarmists. They’re all COVID nazis. They’re all anti-Christian wokers. They’re all proponents of neo-communist tax policies and corporate fascists out to destroy small business. And they’re all true believers in transgender ideology. Think of The Squad and you have Canada’s Liberal Party. And then consider that Singh and the New Democrats are even further left than that. And as ridiculous as these people are, they’ve had a pretty long run in power. Now they’re desperate to keep it. Because Pierre Poilievre is coming. And he’s the disruptive scourge Canadian politics so badly needs. I had forgotten what it was like to have a Canadian leader with a brain. Keep going, @PierrePoilievre! https://t.co/xyyjU7QMKY — Gad Saad (@GadSaad) December 18, 2024 You might know Poilievre from this… I knew I liked Pierre Poilievre the first time I saw him take a bite of that apple two years ago. pic.twitter.com/v3uYazJaCE — charmane harbert (@callme_Chari) January 7, 2025 But you ought to know him from this, which is an absolutely devastating indictment of Trudeau’s government… This is one of the greatest speeches I’ve ever seen any politician deliver. And Poilievre’s right. We’re not relying on him because we want to. We’re relying on him because he’s our last hope for this country.pic.twitter.com/wJvLaMVX68 — Jason James (@jasonjamesbnn) December 17, 2024 This is obviously resonating, and Trudeau and the Liberals no longer are. So Fidelito was “Bidened.” Before that happened, he prorogated Canada’s parliament — or, essentially, kept them from meeting because, were they to meet, the members would have dropped a vote of no confidence on his head and forced a snap election. The goal now is to delay that election until the fall and give more time to whichever of Fidelito’s stooges is to play the part of Kamala Harris in this analogy. In hopes that Fidelito 2.0 might fare better than Kamala did. That didn’t sit very well with Poilievre at all… Nothing has changed. Every Liberal MP and Leadership contender supported EVERYTHING Trudeau did for 9 years, and now they want to trick voters by swapping in another Liberal face to keep ripping off Canadians for another 4 years, just like Justin. The only way to fix what… pic.twitter.com/YnNYANTs1y — Pierre Poilievre (@PierrePoilievre) January 6, 2025 …and he’s correct about that. It isn’t that Trudeau went senile like Biden did, or that he sprouted a pair of goat’s horns, or that somebody matched his DNA to Castro’s (sorry, I just had to). It’s that his policies, which are the policies of all the other leftist Liberal Party stooges, have ruined that country for business and life. And when Trump started trolling Trudeau as the “governor” of the “51st state” last month, it gave Poilievre the opportunity to do this… Pierre Poilievre’s message to Donald Trump. Canada will never become the 51st state of the United States. pic.twitter.com/5EWAz91x9k — Joe Anidjar (@PuckDaddy93) December 21, 2024 Here’s hoping this effort collapses and Canada gets a chance to right its ship behind Poilievre. Should that happen, there is a real possibility for Canada and the U.S. to make progress on a host of fronts — for example, Kevin O’Leary’s conversations with Donald Trump around unifying the currencies and creating a common market, which would, among other things, make it a lot more difficult for the Left in either country to put a stop to energy production in the name of stupid climate alarmism. But for now, we can take some solace that, while Trudeau is almost certainly going to emerge as an elder-statesman “humanitarian” luminary feted across the globe by various leftist muckety-mucks and festooned with filthy lucre for speech-giving and other services, he will no longer have the power to immiserate is own people. That’s a win. It’s a win that Trump, whose trolling of Canada continued Tuesday even after Trudeau’s resignation and now serves the purpose of allowing Poilievre to distance himself from Trump in advance of the Canadian election, can take some credit for. Trump says maybe Pierre Poilievre will win, maybe not, and that he doesn’t care what he says. He says he will use economic forces to make Canada the 51st state. He loves the Canadian people and says Canada and the United States would be something, especially if we removed that… pic.twitter.com/00bKzRulzI — Joe Anidjar (@PuckDaddy93) January 7, 2025 And this is almost as entertaining as Poilievre was with that apple. READ MORE from Scott McKay: You Get (and Deserve) What You Tolerate. That Isn’t Good News for the UK. An Outrage, and Then a Tragedy, in New Orleans Five Quick Things: The EOY 5QT The post Hasta la Vista, Fidelito! appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Yesterday marked the 10 anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo massacre. For those who’ve forgotten, and for the increasing number too young to have a genuinely active memory, the events were as follows. Charlie Hebdo was a famously outrageous — and outraging — French satirical magazine. One might compare it to Babylon Bee, but such a comparison only works for a Babylon Bee pumped up with steroids. Indeed, the best comparison for today’s The American Spectator readers might be a “roid rage” version of the Bee. Therein lay its almost indefinable appeal, its “je ne sais quoi,” a bull in china shop commitment to destroying all manner of everyday political and cultural pieties. Its values weren’t mine 10 years ago, nor are they mine today, but their breathtaking — and often hysterical — contempt never failed to provoke at least a rueful chuckle, sometimes a belly laugh, usually followed by a kind of guilt — did I really find that funny? Many didn’t, not least those of a radical Islamist persuasion, ready to be offended when Charlie Hebdo satirized the prophet Mohammed. On the morning of Jan. 7, 2015, two such critics armed themselves and charged into the magazine’s offices with AK-47s — so much for the vaunted European gun control measures — and expressed their editorial concerns by massacring 10 magazine staffers, as well as a guard, a maintenance worker, and a sadly unfortunate visitor. Leaving the premises, they encountered a police officer, himself a Muslim of North African descent, and murdered him as he lay wounded on the street. Two days later, the two attackers were run to ground and, after a day-long siege, killed by members of GIGN, the premier French counterterrorism unit. Two days after that, more than 40 world leaders and millions of ordinary Frenchmen gathered in Paris and across France to show their solidarity with the Charlie Hebdo victims. These included Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, British Prime Minister David Cameron, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and, surprisingly enough, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Significantly, U.S. President Obama chose not to attend, nor did Secretary of State John Kerry, who, of course, has since made quite a name for himself flitting about the globe in support of a vacuous climate change agenda — solidarity with the victims of Islamist terror evidently was not a priority. While the U.S. ambassador to France did attend, Attorney General Eric Holder, who was actually in Paris at the time on other business, also failed to attend the march. For one brief moment, after an act of unspeakable horror, the world seemingly came together, united to proclaim, “Je suis Charlie.” During the march and for many weeks afterward, the catchphrase became “Je suis Charlie,” that is, “I am Charlie,” a bold proclamation of solidarity in support of free speech and against Islamist violence. Some of us found inspiration in this, and hope. Hope that this might mark a turning of the tide, a recognition, finally, that Islamic radicals must be fought at every turn, that their radicalism itself should be expunged from polite society, and that their violence should be countered with overwhelming force whenever and wherever it occurred. But it was not to be. The last decade has instead witnessed the march of radical Islam across the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and the United States, often with the complicit tolerance and even the outright encouragement of Western “progressive” elites. How else, after all, are we to interpret the reaction to the Oct. 7 Hamas pogrom, a year marked by demonstrations across the West in support of the ideological brethren of the Charlie Hebdo murderers? How else to interpret the Biden administration’s two-faced response, strings attached to its military support for Israel, unwillingness to call out Hamas — and Iran — as the perpetrators of evil? How else to understand the apparent inability of the U.K. government to take energetic action against the phenomenon of Pakistani grooming gangs mass raping impoverished white teenage girls? Why has it taken the scorn of Elon Musk to move a discussion that has languished for more than a decade as British authorities tie themselves in knots to avoid drawing the obvious conclusion, that this is a horrifically brutal expression of a culture war being waged against their nation’s most vulnerable children. (READ MORE: You Get (and Deserve) What You Tolerate. That Isn’t Good News for the UK.) How might we understand our government’s unwillingness to call out the destruction of Christian communities in Africa as they wither under the assault of Muslim terrorists? How else should we respond when our State Department ignores the clear religio-cultural motivation while subsuming these attacks under the heading of “resource rivalries driven by climate change.” (READ MORE: The Continuing Assault on Nigeria’s Christian Farmers) To borrow a phrase from that “great humanitarian,” Al Gore, the genuine “inconvenient truth” of the last decade finds its best expression in the initial unwillingness of our FBI to label the New Orleans attack an act of terrorism. The most significant truth of the last decade has been the West’s collective unwillingness to stand up for its traditional values in the face of an unrelenting assault by radical Islam. For one brief moment, after an act of unspeakable horror, the world seemingly came together, united to proclaim, “Je suis Charlie.” And then, just as quickly, it forgot what this necessarily meant, forgot what it meant to stand up for our best selves. This morning, looking back, we might well be ashamed. READ MORE from James H. McGee: To Terror No Sanction The ‘Wright’ Choice at the Department of Energy Weimar America: The Threat Is on the Left 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. A forthcoming sequel finds the Reprisal team fighting against terrorists who’ve infiltrated our southern border in a conspiracy that ranges across the globe. You can find Letter of Reprisal on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback editions and on Kindle Unlimited. The post Whatever Became of “Je suis Charlie?” appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

By now you have likely heard that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has announced that he will be resigning from his post as the leader of Canada and the Liberal Party of Canada. He made the announcement on Monday and stated that he intends to stay on as leader until a replacement can be found. The resignation comes after mounting pressure from within and without his party has pushed him to the point of no return. His popularity is at an all-time low, and the Liberals who presently have 153 members of Parliament (MP), are projected to win so few seats in the next election that they may be able to drive to work together in an airport shuttle van.  According to surveys, Trudeau has become Canada’s “worst prime minister.” (RELATED: Justin Trudeau Is in Deep, Deep Trouble) Now, some may be wondering why Trudeau has announced that he will be resigning and why he doesn’t simply leave now for someone else to take his place. After all, in America, if a president resigns, the vice president would take his place; however, this isn’t how it works in Canada. The prime minister of Canada is elected to Parliament as an MP and he assumes the office of prime minister because he is the MP who was elected by his party internally as the leader of the party. When Canadians go to the polls, they do not vote for the Prime Minister directly — unless they live in his riding (district) — but instead vote for whichever MP is running in their riding who belongs to the party they want to see in power. So, Justin Trudeau is a sitting MP from the Papineau riding in Montreal, and he is the leader of the Liberal Party, which makes him prime minister. Prime ministers do have deputy prime ministers, but this is not the same thing as a vice president, and the deputy does not simply assume office if the chief resigns. As per the electoral norms of Canadian Parliamentary procedure, the Liberal Party of Canada must hold an election to find a new leader who will take the place of Trudeau before he can step down officially. Even if the prime minister were to die in office, there is no official procedure to replace him, and it hasn’t happened since before the 20th century when the Governor General — acting on behalf of the King — had more power and could appoint a successor. However, to make matters more complicated, the Liberals have a Minority government, which means they do not have 170+ seats in the House of Commons. This means that the other parties could in theory vote the Liberals out and bring down their government if they chose to do so with a vote of no-confidence, which is a given at this point. So, Trudeau has decided to “prorogue” Parliament, which entails an ending of the current session while the House of Commons is dismissed until a future date. A prorogation is not a dissolution, but more like a pause, albeit a pause where all the bills and acts heretofore presented must be thrown out. If Trudeau had a majority, then his party could hold a leadership race while Parliament continues to function, because there would be no threat of a no-confidence vote. This exact thing happened in 1993 when Prime Minister Brian Mulroney announced his intention to retire from politics while his party held a majority in the House of Commons. All of this is to say that Trudeau will officially resign from his role as the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada as soon as a successor is selected, which should happen by March 24, as Parliament has been prorogued until then. It is then expected that the opposition parties will oust the new leader, who will enjoy perhaps a few days or short weeks as prime minister, and an election will be held after the governor general issues the “writs” for the election, which must conclude between 36-50 days after that. Exactly when the election will take place is not certain, because it is not the case that on day one of the new session, the government can be brought down by a confidence vote. If I had to guess, we are likely looking at a May or June election, and it is expected that Conservative Party of Canada leader Pierre Poilievre will win in an epic landslide and may have the largest margin of victory in history. Until then, Canada will have a lame-duck prime minister who has given up on his nation to negotiate with President Trump about the tariffs that have been threatened. READ MORE: What Sort of 51st State Would Canada Be? The Road Ahead for America and Canada Exit Trudeau Stage Left The post Justin Trudeau Announces His Resignation: What Americans Need to Know appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

In another post-election move, the Biden administration’s Pentagon is releasing 11 more “suspected” terrorists from Guantanamo Bay and “resettling” them in Oman, where the New York Times says they will start “new lives.” They include two men suspected of being bodyguards for Osama bin Laden and another man who was believed to be associated with a planned 9/11-type hijacking in Southwest Asia. All 11 “enemy combatants” in the Global War on Terror were held at Gitmo since being apprehended after the 9/11 attacks on the United States. The Biden administration wanted to release the prisoners in 2023 but backed down after congressional opposition. Biden is also reportedly negotiating with the Taliban to release another bin Laden associate in a trade for Americans being held in Afghanistan. These moves come on the heels of a military judge insisting that the Pentagon must abide by its controversial plea deal that spares the life of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two accomplices. Despite the Pentagon’s explanation for the release (to reduce the detainee population of Gitmo), the release of these terrorists aids our enemy in what Norman Podhoretz called “World War IV.” The Global War on Terror launched by the Bush 43 administration, and continued by the Obama administration, had many flaws, including futile efforts to promote democracy and remake the Middle East in America’s image and a diversion of focus and resources from the then-emerging great power competition with a rising China. But the enemy was real. Podhoretz called it “Islamofascism,” and its intellectual origins could be traced to the 7th century’s idea of global jihad, which radical Islamists have used to justify wars and conquests since then. Podhoretz subtitled his book “The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism,” and it has turned out to be a long struggle indeed. Podhoretz labeled it World War IV to place it in the historical context of the two kinetic world wars of the 20th century and the Cold War which Podhoretz (in agreement with James Burnham) called World War III. Podhoretz wrote in 2006: We are once again, up against a truly malignant totalitarian enemy. . . [that] comes from a religious force that was born in the seventh century, that was schooled politically at the feet of the totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth, that went on to equip itself with the technologies of the twenty-first, and that is now striving mightily to arm itself with the weaponry of the twenty-first as well. This war, Podhoretz noted, began in the midst of the Cold War (just as the Cold War began before World War II ended), with Islamic terrorist attacks in the early and mid-1970s. But a crucial development in this war was the Islamist takeover of Iran, which provided radical Islam with a nation-state from which to wage World War IV — one of the terrible legacies of the foreign policy of the late Jimmy Carter. (RELATED: Carter Was to Reagan What Buchanan Was to Lincoln) Islamists subsequently bombed the World Trade Center in New York in 1993, a truck bomb attack in 1995 destroyed the Khobar Towers in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia (killing 19 American airmen and injuring 240 other Americans), and the USS Cole was damaged by Islamist suicide bombers in 2000. Then on September 11, 2001, Al Qaeda brought down the towers of the Word Trade Center and destroyed portions of the Pentagon, killing nearly 3,000 people. Podhoretz and other neoconservatives, to be sure, oversold this conflict, which led to the endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, that wasted resources and lives, and distracted our attention from the growing threat from China. But our struggle with Islamofascism is real and enduring. The Heritage Foundation’s James Jay Carafano recently warned that the Biden administration — with its “humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan,” “feckless policies in the Middle East and North Africa,” the “demobilization of our counterterrorism efforts,” and its reckless “open borders” policy — has left us woefully unprepared to meet the challenge of radical Islam. And now, Biden’s Pentagon has released from confinement more of our enemies who will undoubtedly fill the ranks of Al Qaeda and other terrorist armies. You reap what you sow. READ MORE from Francis P. Sempa: The Panama Canal and the Firing Line Debate Presidential Medal of Freedom to George Soros Avoiding the McNamara Trap With China The post Releasing Terrorists Is Aiding the Enemy appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

by Pam Martens and Russ Martens, Wall St On Parade: There is a precise date as to when the American public became overtly aware that the stock market structure had become outrageously rigged. That date is March 30, 2014 when famed author and former Wall Street veteran, Michael Lewis, went on 60 Minutes to proclaim: “The United […]

from ZeroHedge: To say Steve Bannon is not a fan of Elon Musk would be putting it lightly. In 2023, the former White House chief strategist suggested that Musk is a “total and complete phony,” who is “owned lock, stock, and barrel by the Chinese Communist Party.” Then last week, after Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy […]