Accuse Others Of What You Do. Fascist Tactic. Noonan Get's It. What Will Putin Do? Does He Simply LIck His Wounds?

Amy and Steve at Derby:

A few things to contemplate:

If you agree you are obviously sane and more likely to think like a conservative and a Republican. If you disagree you are more likely to believe in free lunches, think like a hypocrite and are a Democrat.

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Fascist Democrats accuse others of what they do. It is the clever game of demagogues like Schumer, Pelosi, Schiff, Biden and/or his handlers who are experts. 

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Who’s a Threat to Democracy?

The pro-choice left is attacking the legitimacy of the Supreme Court.

By The Editorial Board

The latest theme on the political left is that the Supreme Court Justices who might overturn Roe v. Wade are at war with democracy. It’s a strange argument, since overturning Roe would merely return abortion policy to the states for political debate in elections and legislatures. That’s the definition of democracy.

But since they brought it up, by all means let’s talk about who is really threatening democracy. An independent judiciary is crucial to democratic self-government, and after the leak of Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion, the left is targeting the Justices who might vote to end Roe.

An outfit known as Ruth Sent Us is inviting people to harass six “extremist justices.” The group, named after the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, this week published the locations of their homes in a map on its website (though it vanished without explanation on Friday).

The group is calling for protests at Catholic churches this Sunday and at the Justices’ homes next week. Why Catholic? Presumably because the church teaches that abortion is wrong and four of the five Justices said to be joining Justice Alito’s opinion are Catholic. The anti-religious animus at work here isn’t subtle.

Everyone has the right to protest, but assailing the families of judges at home is a blatant attempt at intimidation. If the leaker wanted to mobilize public hostility to the Court, he is succeeding.

Where would someone get the idea to harass the Court? Well, perhaps from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who stood on the Supreme Court steps in March 2020 as the Justices considered a previous abortion case.

“I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions,” he literally screamed.

He was referring to Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. Chief Justice John Roberts publicly rebuked Mr. Schumer, but what did he mean by “the whirlwind”?

Remarkably, White House press secretary Jen Psaki has declined to criticize the Ruth Sent Us intimidation tactics. “I think the president’s view is that there’s a lot of passion, a lot of fear, a lot of sadness from many, many people across this country about what they saw in that leaked document,” she rationalized.

Ms. Psaki also declined to criticize the leak of the draft opinion, though it clearly harms the reputation of the Court. What happened to President Biden’s concern for declining public trust in government institutions?

The threats against the Court are enough that a fence has gone up around the Supreme Court building, and new security has been laid on. A violent act by a fanatic can’t be ruled out, and this warrants the attention of Attorney General Merrick Garland. Federal law makes it a crime to threaten federal judges, and that includes threats of vigilantism.

A Virginia statute makes it a misdemeanor to picket “before or about the residence or dwelling place of any individual, or who shall assemble with another person or persons in a manner which disrupts or threatens to disrupt any individual’s right to tranquility in his home.” One or more of the targeted Justices live in Virginia.

So which side of the Roe argument is really antidemocratic? The law before the Supreme Court is Mississippi’s ban on abortion after 15 weeks. The abortion-rights movement has failed to persuade the people of Mississippi, and now it wants five unelected Justices, 1,000 miles away in Washington, to take that policy choice away from the voting public.

Fundamental rights promised by the Constitution aren’t subject to popular rule, but Justice Alito’s point in his draft opinion is that abortion isn’t one of them, and nobody seriously imagined it might be until Roe in 1973.

The actual threat to democratic norms is the left’s onslaught on the legitimacy of the Supreme Court. An independent judiciary is the guarantor of the freedoms that actually are in the Constitution. Democrats should reflect on the way that judges appointed by Mr. Trump turned back his bogus claims of a stolen election in 2020.

The Supreme Court’s job is to say what the law is, not to be a body of philosopher kings to impose progressive outcomes. Overturning Roe won’t usurp democracy. It will put the abortion debate back where it belongs in a democracy—for voters to decide.

And:

Noonan get this one right. 

In order to create resistance and turmoil radical Democrats have brought out their liar squads with "MAGA" Biden leading the charge.

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The End of Roe v. Wade Will Be Good for America

The mistaken abortion decision, a product of vanity, roiled and distorted our politics and poisoned our culture.

By Peggy Noonan

Let’s start with true anger and end with honest hope. The alarm many felt at the leaking of an entire draft Supreme Court decision shouldn’t be allowed to dissipate as time passes. Such a thing has never happened. Justice Samuel Alito’s preliminary opinion being taken from the court, without permission or right, and given to the press was an act of sabotage by a vandal. It hardly matters whether the leaker was of the left or right. It reflected the same spirit as the Jan. 6 Capitol riot—irresponsible destructiveness. As the book has been thrown at the rioters, it should be thrown at the leaker.

The justices can’t sit around and say oh no, we’re just another victim of the age. If they have to break some teacups to find who did it, break them. Chief Justice John Roberts worries, rightly, about the court’s standing. This is the biggest threat to it since he joined. At the very least it might be good if the justices would issue a joint statement that they are appalled by the publication of the decision, don’t accept it, won’t countenance it.

Apart from the leaker, here is what I always want to say when the issue is abortion. The vast majority of human beings on both sides are utterly sincere and operating out of their best understanding of life. Yes, there were plenty of people the past 50 years who used “the issue” to accrue money and power. But this long life tells me the overwhelming majority of people held their views for serious reasons. They sincerely saw the prohibition of abortion as a sin against women; they sincerely saw abortion on demand as a sin against life.

You have to respect the opposing view.

And you have to respect that as a wound, the Roe v. Wade decision never healed, never could. Josh Prager, in his stupendous history of that decision, “The Family Roe,” noted the singular fact of this ruling: Other high court decisions that liberalized the social order—desegregation of schools, elimination of prayer in the schools, interracial marriage, gay marriage—were followed by public acceptance, even when the rulings were very unpopular. Most came to have overwhelming support. But not Roe. That was the exception. It never stopped roiling America. Mr. Prager: “Opposition to Roe became more hostile after its issuance.”

Why? Because all the other decisions were about how to live, and Roe was about death. Justice Alito seems to echo this thought in his draft opinion, which would turn the questions of legality and illegality over to each state. This is not a solution to the issue, it is a way of managing it—democratically.

Some states, New York and California for instance, have already passed their own liberal abortion laws. Some states, such as Texas and Utah, will ban most or all abortions within their boundaries. It will be uneven, a jumble. But the liberal states will have their liberal decision, the conservative states their conservative ones, and that is as close to resolving the dilemma as we, as human beings in a huge and varied nation, will get.

I respect and agree with the Alito draft, didn’t think Roe was correct or even logical, and came to see the decision as largely a product of human vanity. Of all the liberal jurists who have faulted it, the one who sticks in the mind was Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who after questioning Roe’s reasoning said, in 1985, that it appeared “to have provoked, not resolved, conflict.” It did.

I am pro-life for the most essential reason: That’s a baby in there, a human child. We cannot accept as a society—we really can’t bear the weight of this fact, which is why we keep fighting—that we have decided that we can extinguish the lives of our young. Another reason, and maybe it veers on mysticism, is that I believe the fact of abortion, that it exists throughout the country, that we endlessly talk about it, that the children grow up hearing this and absorbing it and thinking, “We end the life within the mother here,” “It’s just some cells”—that all of this has released a kind of poison into the air, that we breathed it in for 50 years and it damaged everything. Including of course our politics.

It left both parties less healthy. The Democrats locked into abortion as party orthodoxy, let dissenters know they were unwelcome, pushed ever more extreme measures to please their activists, and survived on huge campaign donations from the abortion industry itself. Republican politicians were often insincere on the issue, and when sincere almost never tried to explain their thinking and persuade anyone. They took for granted and secretly disrespected their pro-life groups, which consultants regularly shook down for campaign cash. They ticked off the “I’m pro-life” box in speeches, got applause and went on to talk about the deficit. They were forgiven a great deal because of their so-called stand, and this contributed, the past 25 years, to the party’s drift.

Abortion distorted both parties.

Advice now, especially for Republican men, if Roe indeed is struck down: Do not be your ignorant selves. Do not, as large dumb misogynists, start waxing on about how if a woman gets an illegal abortion she can be jailed. Don’t fail to embrace compromise because you can make money on keeping the abortion issue alive. I want to say “Just shut your mouths,” but my assignment is more rigorous. It is to have a heart. Use the moment to come forward as human beings who care about women and want to give families the help they need. Align with national legislation that helps single mothers to survive. Support women, including with child-care credits that come in cash and don’t immediately go to child care, to help mothers stay at home with babies. Shelters, classes in parenting skills and life skills. All these exist in various forms: make them better, broader, bigger.

This is an opportunity to change your party’s reputation.

Democrats too. You have been given a gift and don’t know it. You think, “Yes, we get a hot new issue for 2022!” But you always aggress more than you think. The gift is that if, as a national matter, the abortion issue is removed, you could be a normal party again. You have no idea, because you don’t respect outsiders, how many people would feel free to join your party with the poison cloud dispersed. You could be something like the party you were before Roe: liberal on spending and taxation, self-consciously the champion of working men and women, for peace and not war. As you were in 1970.

Or, absent the emotionally cohering issue of abortion, you can choose to further align with extremes within the culture, and remain abnormal.

But the end of Roe could be a historic gift for both parties, a chance to become their better selves.

And if Roe is indeed overturned, God bless our country that can make such a terrible, coldhearted mistake and yet, half a century later, redress it, right it, turn it around. Only a thinking nation could do that. Only a feeling nation could do that. We’re not dead yet, there are still big things going on here.

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Common sense always seems to be the casualty of politics.

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What I Learned When I Ran for Governor of Massachusetts

American voters are hungry for common sense and purpose. Republicans and Democrats are giving them strife and division instead.

By Danielle Allen

We often hear that America is a deeply polarized society, divided by party, region, and lifestyle. We the people, pundits tell us, are hopeless, too busy pulling down the other side to clean up the wreckage. But what if we the people aren’t really the problem? What if most everyday Americans share a moral compass, even if they sometimes approach issues from different directions? What if the real problem is that our political institutions stop us from coming together?

In December 2020, I set out to test this possibility by journeying into the heart of American politics. I launched a 15-month campaign for governor of Massachusetts. I was a political outsider and a first-time candidate. I hadn’t run for anything since secretary of communications in high school, unless you count faculty council at the universities where I’ve been a professor. When Woodrow Wilson ran for office, people asked him why he’d left the university. His answer: “I was tired of the politics.” There’s a deep truth there, but at the end of the day, I can’t pretend running for faculty council is anything like running for governor. I truly was a novice.

Which means I brought a fresh perspective. The hypothesis of my candidacy was that we Americans aren’t who our national politics and politicians tell us we are. National election results lead us to believe that we’re at each other’s throats, bitterly divided, full of hate and hostility for one another. My research and civic leadership—including practical engagement on Covid policy through a rapid response impact initiative at Harvard—taught me something different.

I had noticed one mode of political participation in which Americans often show clear agreement on issues: state ballot measures. They are used in a variety of states, and they reveal an American people with a shared moral orientation. In 2018, a 65% majority of Floridians passed a ballot proposition to restore voting rights to people who had completed their felony sentences. In 2020, more than 75% of Massachusetts voters favored the Right to Repair Initiative, which gives small auto shops a legal right to access car data, allowing them to remain competitive with auto manufacturers. In that same year, 73% of Mississippians voted in a new state flag to replace old emblems of the Confederacy with new forward-facing symbols.

These three examples give a glimpse of a people with a steady and appealing moral compass oriented toward inclusion and fairness. That’s our America.

The goal of my campaign was to sync our politics back up with that supermajority. We wanted to give voice to the commitments that more than two-thirds of voters can get behind. These include a commitment to inclusion and fairness, carried out in a spirit of unity—the same spirit behind those diverse, successful ballot measures. They include a respect for entrepreneurship and business, and the need to build partnerships that link civil society, the public sector and the marketplace in resisting the power of monopolies.

I ran on a commitment to knit the state together as one commonwealth, and the campaign launched with a video titled, “Reimagine.” It called Massachusetts to transformation in the language of the Declaration of Independence. We wanted to forge partnerships across communities and among the public sector, nonprofits and business. In the 200-some communities we visited, we encountered an appetite and readiness to build those partnerships. Everywhere across our Commonwealth, people were ready to come together and face pressing challenges—the opioid epidemic, the housing crisis, the threat of rising sea levels. People were hungry to come together. My hokey metaphor of “knitting the state together” traveled well.

At the same time, we saw how voters struggled to fit that energy into existing political institutions. Too many people no longer saw a place for themselves in political parties. Active volunteers for my campaign—ones who were willing to host organizing house parties, call voters, and tell their neighbors about us—weren’t willing to enroll in my party on behalf of our campaign. The majority of Massachusetts voters are no longer enrolled in a political party.

Yet the parties control which candidates make it to the ballot for the state primary. Party primaries are open to unaffiliated voters, but the majority of voters can’t participate in determining which candidates will be available for their consideration until the primary. Our campaign foundered inside the Massachusetts Democratic Party ballot-access process, where candidates compete with one another to get their name on the ballot in roughly 600 winner-take-all local caucuses.

Unlike the Iowa presidential caucuses, these aren’t proportional. During the caucuses, the path to ballot access disappeared. Could we have organized better? Sure, though I invite anyone to give it a shot in pandemic conditions. Could I have been a better candidate? Absolutely. But I was good enough to outraise two of the three longstanding politicians in the race. I would have liked to have had the chance to bring my message directly to primary voters, but the law of politics was that our campaign must, in such conditions, fail.

What does this experience tell us? We the people are healthy, but our vehicles of political participation need some attention. We need either refurbished or new vehicles of participation to have a healthy democracy. The parties continue to own and steer our mechanisms of representation; they are the only vehicle currently available for putting forward a case for representation. Yet the majority has turned their backs on these vehicles. Our system of representation is in crisis.

The good news is that we the people want to participate. The people of Massachusetts—and, I’d wager, of America—are hungry for common-sense representation and common purpose. But we need healthy parties, or alternatives, if we’re going to have the voice, choice, and representation we deserve. In 2021, I decided to throw my hat in the ring to give people that choice. In 2022, I hope we can reinvigorate Americans’ political participation by giving them institutions that empower participation.

Ms. Allen is on leave from Harvard, where she is a university professor and director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics.

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Anything is possible when you are dealing with a desperate autocrat who is losing. Ukraine and the West, for the moment, are winning and Putin is losing what he thought was winnable. That could drive him to attempt to reverse the tide through escalation. What seems incongruous would be his attempt to do so with the same military structure that caused him to lose in the first instance.

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How Does Russia Lose in Ukraine? Putin May Tell Us Monday

If he would rather be defeated by NATO than his smaller neighbor, his Victory Day speech may let us know.

By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

Only one of Vladimir Putin’s bets is paying off: His oil and gas revenues are still intact and even benefiting from higher prices.

His most characteristic miscalculation, after witnessing Ukrainians mobilizing by the hundreds of thousands in 2004 and again in 2013-14 to protect their country against political dominance by Russia, was to believe they wouldn’t defend it militarily. He told himself these earlier demonstrations weren’t real, they were foreign-organized and -financed, just as he tells himself the same about protests in Russia.

It’s worth pausing to note how thoroughly nothing is turning out the way he planned. Tens of thousands of dead, whole cities reduced to rubble, horrific war crimes, the Russian economy in tatters, now a burgeoning series of direct attacks by Ukraine air power on Russian soil. Thousands of military-age Russians are reported to be fleeing the country to avoid becoming fodder in his military debacle.

Listen to the statements or tweets of his most Western-facing servants, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and all-purpose lapdog Dmitri Medvedev. They don’t bother suggesting the war isn’t a disaster for Russia, only that it can become a disaster for the West too.

Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds, authors of an analysis published by the U.K.’s Royal United Services Institute, share an intuition of this column: In mid-March, Mr. Putin passed up an opportunity to cut his losses. “Instead, the decision was made to not only continue with the narrative of a struggle against Nazism in Ukraine, but to expand the scope of ambition to one of systems confrontation”—i.e., between Russia and NATO, which Mr. Putin, in a fact that is perhaps not widely appreciated, has always acknowledged to his people greatly outclasses Russia in conventional military power.

Whatever Mr. Putin has in mind, his annual Victory Day speech on Monday, marking the collapse of the Hitler regime in 1945, is expected by military analysts to frame what comes next. Meanwhile, commentary in the U.S. seems to accept as inviolable President Biden’s pledge that U.S. troops will not become directly engaged. Are we still quite sure about this?

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has made no bones about it: He is eager for NATO intervention. What’s more, he currently faces military-cum-political choices—about whether to trade ground or risk his troops on the attack—that can’t help but be influenced by a suspicion that the Biden administration no longer is willing to let Ukraine fail.

Likewise the Russian side, which has become disabused of easy victory and recognizes the degree of NATO commitment, has felt the ground shifting. To return to a theme, it becomes increasingly conceivable Mr. Putin would prefer being stopped by the Western alliance, with its acknowledged superiority in conventional air power, rather than by Ukraine, which would only dramatize the hollowness, corruption and lack of motivation of the Russian army and paint an unacceptable contrast between the two regimes.

Hold on to your hat. If Mr. Putin wants to draw NATO into the war, he knows how to do it. Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov, one of the war’s three authors along with Mr. Putin and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, made an unusual visit to the front lines last week. Presumably he went to see for himself the state of his army. What conclusions did he draw, especially about its ability to hold territory against a Ukrainian counteroffensive in coming months fortified by a large influx of Western equipment?

Which brings us to Joe Biden. He has conducted his presidency, at least by one interpretation, as if he meant what he said early on: a transitional figure.

He chose to cater to the left. It didn’t make him popular but didn’t enfeeble him by provoking a civil war in his own party. He wanted out of Afghanistan and didn’t care what the exit looked like.

In a podcast with the Journal’s Gerard Baker, former CIA chief and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo allowed the possibility Ukraine could yet fail and “we’ll live in that world.” This isn’t the worst of the possible outcomes (nuclear war would be). But in the past few weeks, presumably based on the best military advice, with solid intelligence and who-knows-what communication with elements of the Putin regime, Mr. Biden has put U.S. chips on forcing Russia to swallow something that resembles defeat rather than the simple stalemate Mr. Putin is likely now going for. Anything that looks more like a failure by Ukraine will also look like a failure by the U.S.

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Another insane Palestinian terrorist attack foiled:

https://www.jewishpress.com/news/terrorism-news/terror-attack-foiled-in-tekoa-gush-etzion/2022/05/08/

Terror Attack Foiled in Tekoa, Gush Etzion

By Hana Levi Julian 

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 A picture from our 50th anniversary party in Orlando of almost all family members attending. Henry and Jessica had to leave early.

No way to get so many of so many ages to all focus at the same time.

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We deplorables only get a shot at the target every two years so it is imperative we should appear and not miss the target.

Radicals and bleeding hearts are at it 24-7.

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The Exasperated American Will the voters channel their furor at this regime of lies into an unprecedented turnout at the polls in November?  By Victor Davis Hanson

Ruth King

Posted By on May 9th, 2022

A large majority of Americans now have no confidence in Joe Biden and his administration, which often polls below 40 percent, with negatives nearing 60 percent.

Despite the 15-month catastrophe of his regime, the level of his own unpopularity remains understandable but still remarkable. After all, in 2020 voters already knew well of his cognitive deficits and the radicalism of his agenda. They saw both clearly starting in 2019 and during the 2020 Democratic primaries, the primary debates, and the general election.

So what did Biden’s voters imagine would happen when a cognitively challenged president, controlled by hard-Left subordinates, entered office—other than what he has done?

Now, as then, the media is fused to the progressive agenda and does—and did—its best to turn a non-compos mentis Biden into a bite-your-lip centrist empath in the Bill Clinton “I feel your pain” mode.

The American people know that on every occasion their president speaks, he will slur his words at best. At worst, he will have little idea where he is, where he has been, or what he is supposed to be saying or doing. When he is momentarily cognizant, he is at his meanest, or he simply makes things up.

Our new normal of a mentally incapacitated president is not entirely new in American history—Woodrow Wilson was an invalid during the last months of his presidency. But Wilson’s condition was well hidden. Quite novel is the idea that the American people know the man in the White House is cognitively disabled and simply expect him to confirm that bleak diagnosis each time he opens his mouth.

If Donald Trump exaggerated, Biden flat out lies daily. His most recent untruth was his assertion that the MAGA movement represents “the most extreme political organization that’s existed in American history.” Biden cannot really believe that roughly half the country is now more dangerous than Antifa, Black Lives Matter, the Weathermen, the American Nazi Party, the American Communist Party, and the Ku Klux Klan. And this comes from the mythically moderate “good old Joe from Scranton”?

The bullied people also know the Biden problem has no remedy. The 25th Amendment that Democrats and the Left raised nonstop in efforts to remove Trump—from the Rosenstein-McCabe wear-a-wire embarrassment and former Yale psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee’s congressional tomfoolery to the incessant Montreal Cognitive Assessment demands—won’t apply to Biden.

Either the media will continue to rebrand his incapacity as Ciceronian eloquence or it will privately gloat that Kamala Harris is so off-putting, so uninformed, so unpopular that the people would prefer an amnesiac Biden to a nonimpaired Harris. The truth is, the three doyens of Democratic progressivism—Joe Biden, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.)—all struggle with cognitive decline and rely heavily upon the media and the Democratic Party’s political attack machine to enjoy asymmetrical exemption. (Though, in Feinstein’s case, her support is wavering.)

Americans feel there is no remedy for this downward spiral until November. To get a sense of their dilemma, imagine a Richard Nixon in 1973 caught lying during Watergate but with Spiro Agnew waiting in the wings without a trace of scandal—except with one difference: the current media is now attacking not the president’s shortcomings, but the president’s critics who point them out.

Even if the Republicans were to win a 60-vote majority in the Senate, they would hesitate to impeach Biden simply because Harris is a more frightening prospect. And some Marquess of Queensberry centrist RINOs would not wish to codify the Democrats’ new standard of impeaching an opposition president the minute he loses the House of Representatives in his first midterm.

Most of the country has awakened to the fact that the Trump-Russia collusion story was essentially a Hillary Clinton campaign effort to destroy a political opponent, a presidential transition, and a presidency. And they know Clinton will never be indicted for her conspiracies and racketeering even if her minions rat her out to seek reduced charges for themselves.

That hoax was followed by an impeachment vote over a phone call based on two more lies: 1) the Biden family was neither corrupt nor used Joe Biden’s office as vice president and his future political career to leverage payments from Ukraine, and 2) Donald Trump canceled military aid to Ukraine rather than sent them critical Javelin anti-tank missiles put on hold by the Obama Administration.

Americans know Google, Facebook, and Twitter censors were all enlisted in the effort to destroy a former president and his outspoken supporters. And they know there is no real remedy unless two or three more enlightened billionaires follow Elon Musk’s lead.

If Roe v. Wade were to be repealed, many Americans in red states will remain appalled that some blue states will allow abortions, especially late-term abortions after 22 weeks. But nearly all will accept the rule of constitutional democracy and thus the states’ rights to make their own laws that do not conflict with federal legislation as passed by Congress and signed by the president.

These red-state citizens know the opposite is certainly not true: blue state officials will do all they can to attack those who disagree with them, who consider abortion the destruction of human life in the womb. Expect more California-style official travel bans.

Americans know that the Department of Homeland Security’s new “Disinformation Governance Board” will, by design, be run by an arch-disinformationist Nina Jankowicz. The board’s entire purpose is to coordinate with the media to brand oppositional expression as “hate speech” and “mis-, dis-, and mal-information” so that critics preemptively self-censor and moderate their opposition.

In this regard, they know that the Biden regime awards positions of great power in the U.S. government to those who do the very opposite of the intended offices’ purview. The goal is pure nihilism.

Thus, a mythographer and propagandist will adjudicate “truth.” A homeland security secretary will do his best to make the border entirely insecure. The secretary of transportation will see to it that freeways and bridges are not built. The department of energy’s task will be to ensure less energy is produced and its transportation is more expensive and more dangerous than ever. And the secretary of defense will oversee the most humiliating retreat in modern American history in Afghanistan as he cites our chief existential threat to be either climate change or “white supremacists.”

The people know the Left eventually always loses the support of the voters. But leftists still believe they can achieve and retain power, given that they control America’s cultural and informational institutions.

The Left remains hell-bent on radically changing the demography of the United States. And it always manufactures new hysterias—from the claim that Trump was “100 percent responsible” for every American death during the COVID-19 pandemic, to border officers “whipping” innocent illegal aliens, to Vladimir Putin single-handedly causing sky-high gas prices and the worst inflation since the 1970s. Each week brings another prairie fire hysteria. No sooner than it is exposed and refuted, and the Left is on to another conflagration.

Americans have a rough idea that the tragic death of George Floyd was not proof of an epidemic of lethal police shootings of black males. Yet that single death set off the entire woke conflagration of 2020 and, with the hysterias of the lockdowns, has nearly wrecked the country.

Yet in 2021, out of more than 10 million arrests in the United States, police shot about six unarmed black men. The same year, 346 police officers were shot, 63 fatally—to left-wing indifference. Moreover, roughly 8,000 blacks were murdered mostly by other blacks—to callous media and political silence. Thousands of lost black lives mattered little—except the fewer than 1 in 1,000 of that total who were tragically and lethally shot while unarmed by police.

Finally, Americans were angry at the rioting inside the Capitol on January 6, 2021. But they cannot forgive the needless lies surrounding that illegal act in an effort to fabricate an insurrection out of a spontaneous buffoonish riot.

So they recoil at the lies about Officer Brian Sicknick’s death. They are baffled about the silence surrounding the number of FBI informants among the January 6 protestors. They are angry about the lies surrounding the lethal shooting of an unarmed Ashli Babbitt. They don’t understand the refusal to release all videos or communications pertinent to the government’s reaction to the riot. And they do not fathom the disproportionate treatment of those charged with unlawfully entering the Capitol versus those 14,000 arrested during the summer of 2020, when rioting led to more than 35 deaths, some 1,500 police officer injuries, and $2 billion in property damage and massive looting.

They shake their heads when Senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) directly threatened two Supreme Court judges by name outside the court, ginning up an angry protest group at the doors. They are baffled that the White House press secretary sees nothing wrong with disseminating the private addresses of Justices in order to ensure mobs of protestors show up at their homes to intimidate them.

Of course, exasperated Americans are furious over the open border. They are angry their lives are being insidiously destroyed by the Biden inflation and energy prices. They are humiliated by the Biden debacle in Afghanistan and angrier still over his spiking crime wave and his mean-spirited senility. They resent Biden’s efforts to blame all these self-inflicted miseries on Donald Trump, or the “Putin price hikes” or the inability of a presidency to do anything about supposedly organic forces beyond his purview.

But behind the popular furor is a sense of impotence in the face of the untruth they are assaulted with day after day. In other words, bullied Americans are angry that people who control the nation’s institutions deliberately mislead them and do so because they hate them.

Let us hope that they channel this historic exasperation in November in a manner we have never seen before in the modern era.

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More subtle bias to emanate from Biden's White House and his dark heart:

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Biden Taps Anti-Israel Activist, CNN Spouse as White House Press Sec

The White House announced on Thursday that Karine Jean-Pierre, a veteran anti-Israel activist who is married to CNN correspondent Suzanne Malveaux, will replace outgoing press secretary Jen Psaki, raising potential ethical quandaries.

The announcement drew celebratory headlines in the mainstream press: Jean-Pierre is the first black woman and openly gay person to serve in the role.

But her relationship with the CNN reporter raises ethical questions about her new role. The White House did not respond to a request for comment about whether Jean-Pierre would recuse herself in dealing with CNN. Malveaux's colleagues include Valerie Jarrett's daughter, CNN justice correspondent Laura Jarrett, and Israel ambassador Tom Nides's wife, Virginia Moseley, who serves as CNN's senior vice president of news gathering.

"Suzanne Malveaux will continue in her role as CNN national correspondent covering national/international news and cultural events but will not cover politics, Capitol Hill, or the White House while Karine Jean-Pierre is serving as White House press secretary," a CNN spokesperson told the Washington Free Beacon.

Jean-Pierre’s anti-Israel past—which includes a stint as senior adviser and national spokeswoman for MoveOn.org, a far-left anti-Israel group that advocates for boycotts of the Jewish state—is raising red flags in the pro-Israel community. The selection of an Israel critic is also likely to further strain ties with the pro-Israel community and Israeli government, which already is strongly opposed to the Biden administration’s efforts to ink a new nuclear deal with Iran.

Jean-Pierre has been open about her animosity toward the Jewish state. She has accused Israel of committing "war crimes" and has backed efforts to boycott the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the United States' most prominent pro-Israel lobbying shop, cheering Democrats in 2019 for boycotting the group's annual gathering in Washington, D.C., for "boldly [choosing] to prioritize diplomacy and human rights over the power of a lobbying organization." AIPAC, she claimed, helped the Trump administration "sabotage" the Iran nuclear deal and also "supported the group that's credited with inspiring President Trump to enact the Muslim Ban and has been known to spread anti-Muslim racism." She accused the group without evidence of trafficking in "severely racist, Islamophobic rhetoric."

Ellie Cohanim, who served as the State Department's deputy special envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism during the Trump administration, told the Free Beacon that Jean-Pierre's promotion sends the wrong signal during a time of rising anti-Semitism.

"Joe Biden’s promotion of Jean-Pierre signals to all would-be Israel haters that their efforts will be rewarded with White House appointments and promotions," Cohanim said. "At a time of rising anti-Semitism in America, Biden’s promotion of Jean-Pierre is exactly the wrong signal to send."

"Promoting Jean-Pierre further proves the point that the Democrat party has become a breeding ground of anti-Israel hostility that goes right up to the White House," Cohanim added.

"As a child of Holocaust survivors and as an American Jew, I am both appalled and frightened that Biden has chosen as his principal deputy press secretary, Ms. Jean-Pierre, who has shown essentially antisemitic hostility toward Israel and is willing to lie about and vilify Israel and Jews to promote her ugly Israelophobic agenda," Mort Klein, CEO of the Zionist Organization on America, said in a statement.

"Americans should be deeply concerned that this outrageous, incomprehensible anti-Israel, pro-terrorist and pro-Iran appointment indicates the dangerous direction the Biden administration is going to take against America’s greatest ally Israel and U.S.-Israel relations," Klein said.

One veteran pro-Israel community leader expressed shock that the president decided to hire Jean-Pierre.

"Jewish Americans will get slapped in the face every time they turn on the television and see someone standing at the podium who has said such vile things about Israel," said the source, who would only speak candidly on background. "Just days after the [Anti-Defamation League] boldly declared anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism, the forces of radical left anti-Semitism got a boost from the President of the United States."

MoveOn, the far-left group that Jean-Pierre worked for from April 2016 until August 2020, also pressed Democratic lawmakers to boycott AIPAC’s annual conference, as well as the organization itself. "[Democratic] candidates should be prepared for push back regarding their involvement with AIPAC," a MoveOn spokeswoman told Politico in 2020.

MoveOn also has championed anti-Israel leaders in Congress, including Reps. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.), who were the organization’s first endorsements in the 2020 election cycle.

The group also ran interference for Omar and Tlaib when they were accused of making anti-Semitic statements and stoking hatred of Jews. Democrats, the group said in 2019, "must stand strong in solidarity with Reps. Tlaib, Omar—stand up to Israel right-wing government for doing Trump's racist, political dirty work."

And when far-left activist Linda Sarsour was criticized for anti-Semitism, MoveOn came to her defense, tweeting that she "is a leader in the fight for justice for all of us." MoveOn also defended Angela Davis, the notorious communist activist, as a "civil rights leader" after an award was revoked due to her anti-Semitic past.

Biden praised Jean-Pierre as a "talent" in a statement on the new hire.

"Karine not only brings the experience, talent and integrity needed for this difficult job, but she will continue to lead the way in communicating about the work of the Biden-Harris administration on behalf of the American people," the president said in a statement. "Jill and I have known and respected Karine a long time and she will be a strong voice speaking for me and this administration."

Update May 6, 11:53 a.m.: This piece has been updated to include comment from CNN.

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Way past the time to smote Hamas hard:

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Hamas Is Scared Out of Its Wits

But the reality on the ground is that while Hamas is trying to ride the wave of violence and gain strength from it, it is not responsible for it, nor does it control its intensity and severity. Hamas does not control the Palestinian street, and certainly not the Palestinian Authority. The Palestinian arena, including the Arab Israeli public, is characterized by a lack of leadership, a lack of direction, and internal chaos.

At the end of the day, every Palestinian understands that Hamas is headed nowhere — one look at Gaza is sufficient to understand this. The terrorist organization is in charge of the Gaza Strip, and the situation of the local population has never been worse, with very little hope of it improving in the foreseeable future.

Hamas is trying to cause a flare-up in Judea and Samaria and among the Arab Israeli public because it fears a direct confrontation with the Israeli military on the Gaza border, for the State of Hamas will be the one to pay the price for any fighting in the strip. Hamas’s policy projects no sophistication or boldness, only weakness.

Even Yahya Sinwar’s attack on Islamist Ra’am party leader Mansour Abbas is proof that the Hamas chief and his associates fear that Abbas’s policy of integration into Israeli society is gaining popularity among Arab Israelis, and that many Palestinians would prefer Israeli citizenship if given the choice.

This is Israel’s great victory over Palestinian nationalism — but now is not the time to celebrate, as the chaos of the Palestinian arena poses a security challenge for Israel. These waves of terror require an active policy, not just maintaining the status quo or waiting until the next event on the calendar and the terror wave it might bring with it.

Eyal Zisser is a lecturer in the Middle East History Department at Tel Aviv University.

This article first appeared in Israel Hayom.

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https://www.instagram.com/reel/CapSK92AJSv/?igshid=MDJmNzVkMjY=

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