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A New National Climate Army
Democrats want to pay young Americans to tell you how to behave.
By The Editorial Board
As the U.S. recovers from a pandemic, with workers in services and manufacturing in short supply across the economy, here’s what no one sensible thinks America urgently needs: a huge new federal Civilian Climate Corps.
Yet that’s exactly what Democrats want to create as part of their plan to expand government into every corner of American life. It isn’t enough to lecture Americans about the supposed perils of climate change. Now they also want to tax you and other Americans to pay your children to spend years lecturing you.
President Joe Biden has requested $10 billion for the climate shock troops in his American Jobs Plan. Like so many other ideas in this Administration, the idea comes from the Democratic left, specifically the Sunrise Movement and Evergreen Action. Their idea was adopted by New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey, who have proposed a Climate Corps that employs 1.5 million Americans over five years.
The precedent is FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps, which paid Americans to work when the jobless rate was more than 20% in the Depression. But Sunrise says that program had “deep flaws, including exclusionary racist and sexist practices of hiring almost solely white men and its nonconsensual development on stolen Native American land.” Evergreen Action says the Climate Corps would “confront the interlocking crises of climate change, environmental and racial injustice, and economic inequality.”
If that mission sounds grandiose, you’re understating things. “The climate crisis is impacting every aspect of our lives,” so “the only way we are going to fully combat it is if we fully transform every aspect of our society and economy as we know it,” says Ellen Sciales, a Sunrise spokesperson.
The White House says the Climate Corps would “put a new, diverse generation of Americans to work conserving our public lands and waters, bolstering community resilience, and advancing environmental justice.” Democrats envision a Corps that’s part green-jobs program, part behavioral hectoring squad, part social-justice brigade, and part union-recruitment effort.
According to Mr. Markey’s summary, Climate Corps troops can work on coastal restoration, repair national park trails, install rooftop solar panels, and help with climate disaster recovery, among other jobs. The Senator has also promoted an origami fortune-teller to help potential recruits decide a Climate Corps career path. He doesn’t say if a Patagonia fleece is included as a signing bonus.
Another Climate Corps option is to become a “clean energy educator.” Some recruits could design posters to encourage climate-friendly behavior, and Ms. Sciales says other jobs “could include things like caring for the elderly, community, and childhood education, building community structures to bring communities together, and in the process talk to people about limiting carbon emissions in their communities.” Brace yourself for teach-ins on the sins of meat eating and natural-gas stoves.
Under the AOC-Markey bill, Climate Corps enrollees would earn at least $15 an hour. They’d also get health coverage, “child care services, counseling services, and other supportive services when needed.” Oh, and education grants of $25,000 a year. Eighty House and Senate Democrats said in a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer last week that the Climate Corps “must provide a pathway to good jobs, and especially union jobs.”
Mr. Schumer, who fears a primary challenge from AOC, is backing the Climate Corps, so it will make it into the reconciliation bill. If only we could get a climate change against progressive folly like this
Meanwhile:
Charlie Kirk has his assembled his own Army who happen to believe in America's greatness and who love this country.
You have a choice. You can support Biden's "little brother Blackshirts" or Kirk's red blooded little brothers.
Students are getting ready to head back to campus.
The radical Left thinks that’s good news for their extreme, anti-America agenda.
They’re counting on using — and abusing — their power to indoctrinate students and to teach an entire generation to hate our country, our Founding Fathers, and our way of life.
But the Left is about to face their worst nightmare: the Turning Point Generation!
Thanks to your support, Turning Point USA’s army of 400,000+ student activists in all 50 states will bring our winning, pro-America message to their classmates at 2,500+ high schools and college campuses from coast to coast.
These young people love our country.
They believe in American greatness.
And they reject the toxic lies of the Left because they know the socialist agenda of The Swamp will destroy America and their future!
These bright, patriotic students are ready to be on the offense against campus radicals who push the worst of the “woke” agenda, and to make sure their generation hears the truth so young people will turn their backs on socialism and learn to love America again.
Thanks to the support of Real Americans like you, this year Turning Point USA will:
— Mobilize our army of 400,000+ student activists so we can take the American Culture War fight directly to the radical Leftists who dominate academia
— Recruit more than 165,000 NEW young conservative activists and increase our presence to more than 3,000 campuses from coast to coast
— Train more than 25,000 young people at our conferences, so they’re ready to lead the next generation and make the case for American Greatness to their peers
— Engage MILLIONS of Americans online and every day through our social media outreach and our 375+ online ambassadors who have over 80,000,000 followers
— Earn BILLIONS of views of our online video content as we expose the lies of the Left and tell the truth about American Greatness
Richard, these young people — the Turning Point Generation — WILL win the American Culture War and save their classmates from the lies and empty promises of the radical Left!
Thank you for standing with them as they return to campus. In the coming weeks They need your support now more than ever.
For America,
Charlie Kirk
Founder & CEO Turning Point USA
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Bret Stephens writes another insightful op ed:
The Necessity of Jewish Power
By Bret Stephens
The relationship of the Jewish people to power is complicated, to say the least. We are terrified by its absence, uneasy in its possession, conflicted about its use. We are accused by those who hate us of having it in inexhaustible abundance — and we are haunted by the fear that what power we do have could dry up like a puddle in summer. Historically, most civilizations have hungered for power, gloried in it, and vanished in its absence. Jewish civilization, by contrast, never had much power even in its ancient sovereign days — and then somehow endured for nearly two millennia without any power at all. Even now, Jews are at least as concerned about abusing power as we are about squandering it.
These ambivalent attitudes regarding power are not just defining aspects of Jewish identity. They are also, in many ways, ennobling ones. For much of the world, power is a simple idea: The more of it, the better. For Jews, power has always been a difficult idea. Judaism is perhaps the first and arguably the finest sustained attempt to subordinate power to morality — to insist that right makes might, rather than the other way around. From the time of the prophets, Jews have made the critique of power a canonical aspect of our tradition. The quintessential Jewish prophet, Nathan, is the one who rebukes the quintessential Jewish king, David.
The Jewish view of power, elaborated over the centuries, forms the basis of much of what we today consider elementary aspects of civilized behavior. “Thou shalt not destroy,” Bal Tashchit, comes down to us from Deuteronomy. Maimonides counseled armies to besiege cities from three sides only, so as to give noncombatants the chance to escape from the fourth. “We are to learn to deal kindly with our enemy,” enjoined Nachmanides, the 13th-century rabbi.
As in biblical and medieval periods, so, too, more recently. It was a Dutch Jew, Tobias Asser, who in 1873 co-founded the Institute of International Law, for which he later won a Nobel Peace Prize; an Austrian Jew, Alfred Fried, who co-founded the German peace movement in 1892; a Polish Jew, Raphael Lemkin, who initiated the UN’s Genocide Convention; a Polish-English Jew, Joseph Rotblat, who was arguably the leading figure of the postwar antinuclear movement; an English Jew, Peter Benenson, who started Amnesty International in 1961; two American Jews, Irving and Dorothy Stowe, who co-founded Greenpeace in 1971; and another three American Jews — Robert Bernstein, Jeri Laber, and Aryeh Neier — who founded Helsinki Watch, known today as Human Rights Watch, in 1978.
What all these figures had in common was a shared horror at the abuse of power and a conviction that those abuses could be curbed by arousing public conscience. They were, in their way, latter-day prophets, secular in their religious observance but spiritually rooted in Jewish ethics, history, and sensibility. Contemporary social and political life is impossible to imagine without their work.
Yet it’s also impossible not to take note of two facts, one tragic, the other ironic.
The tragedy is that none of these groups have made a decisive impact. The politicians and generals who took Germany to war in 1914 were not hampered by their domestic peace movement. The nuclear powers have rarely done more than pay lip service to the “No Nukes” activists. And Bashar al-Assad is neither shamed nor deterred by outraged press releases from human-rights groups. The gap between conscience and action remains as wide today as it was at the dawn of the human-rights and international-law movement.
The irony is that many of the organizations and institutions founded by Jews (or inspired by Jewish principles) have dedicated themselves with curious intensity to attacking Jewish power. In April 2021, Human Rights Watch issued a report accusing Israel of practicing apartheid. The antinuclear movement often makes a fetish of a “nuclear-free Middle East,” an ill-disguised euphemism for wanting to strip the Jewish state of its insurance policy against a second Holocaust.
Or maybe this is no irony at all. In her seminal 2007 book, Jews and Power, Ruth Wisse notes that the Hebrew prophets “linked a nation’s potency to its moral strength, putting the Jews on perpetual trial for their political actions before a supreme judge.” If power is, by its nature, morally suspect, then Jewish power, vast or slight, will inevitably arouse Jewish criticism, fair or otherwise.
There has always been an allure to powerlessness. It means freedom from the personal and political burdens of responsibility, the moral dilemmas of choice. In an age in which victimhood is often conflated with virtue, it has social cachet. To be powerless is to be pure. To be pure is to be innocent.
But innocence comes at a price, one that has been particularly terrible for Jews. Nineteen centuries of expulsions, ostracism, massacres, blood libels, torture, and systemic discrimination led to Zionism, which was, very simply, a movement and demand for sovereign Jewish power in the Land of Israel. Had that demand been met a decade sooner, it might have prevented, or at least greatly mitigated, the horrors of the Holocaust. That the State of Israel was born, raised, and remains under fire isn’t a sign of the failure of Zionism. It’s a reminder of its necessity.
Judaism is perhaps the first and arguably the finest sustained attempt to subordinate power to morality—to insist that right makes might, rather than the other way around.
So, too, is the fact that Jews in the Diaspora no longer feel quite as safe as they once did. Tolerant, pluralist, justice-oriented, law-based liberal democracy was supposed to be the superior alternative to life in an impoverished and embattled Jewish state. Yet with each passing year, the argument becomes harder to make, in Europe and North America alike.
What passes for Jewish “power” in the West — wealth, influence, and institutional position based on individual merit — isn’t really power at all. It is status. It requires the acquiescence of a non-Jewish majority. It lacks the implicit threat of force. When real political power is held by Jews in the United States — whether it is Chuck Schumer as Senate majority leader or Antony Blinken as secretary of state or J.B. Pritzker as governor of Illinois — it is for purposes that are not themselves Jewish.
Jewish status also offers diminishing returns in an era of diminishing trust in institutions and growing hostility to wealth, influence, and the very concept of individual merit. Success is a double-edged sword when “privilege,” no matter how fairly it was earned, becomes a synonym for evil. Jewish status can be revoked at any moment, for any reason. It is a sandcastle built at the water’s edge.
In the new game of ideological musical chairs, Jews may soon find they have nowhere to sit when the music stops.
Some readers may find it improbable, if not preposterous, that it could ever be taken away again, at least in the United States. Other ancient Jewish communities, also robbed of their place in countries in which they once thought of themselves as safe, doubtlessly felt the same way: the Jews of Portugal until their expulsion in the 1490s; the Jews of Germany until their annihilation in the 1940s; the Jews of Egypt and Iran until conditions became intolerable after Nasser and Khomeini came to power. In the past 20 years, Jewish life in Europe, whether in Sweden or France or Britain or Ireland, has started to feel intolerable, too.
As for the U.S., May 2021 may be remembered as the moment after which American Jews never felt entirely safe again. In the midst of the fighting between Israel and Hamas, a friend in Jerusalem — more alarmed by what was happening to Jews in the U.S. than in Israel — reminded me of Lenin’s observation, “There are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen.”
It wasn’t just that Jews were being hunted and assaulted in Times Square or West Hollywood. This had happened before, in Pittsburgh and Poway and Jersey City and Monsey, in ways that were far worse. The horror lay in the fact that so few of America’s institutional leaders — the same university presidents, civic leaders, and CEOs who have been nothing if not outspoken in their denunciations of racism, sexism, transphobia, Islamophobia, anti-Asian hate, and so on — could bring themselves to condemn this rampaging anti-Jewish violence, and even then, only in the most cautious of terms. If antisemitism was once, as Norman Podhoretz put it in the 1980s, the “hate that dare not speak its name,” anti-antisemitism is now the decency that dare not speak its name.
The trend will likely get worse. Jewish security in the West has always rested on a set of social values and assumptions that are now being systematically undermined — on the right, through increasing hostility to the ideal of an open society; on the left, through increasing hostility to the ideal of an open mind. On both sides, too, there is a turn to conspiracy thinking, a suspicion of success, a vituperative hostility toward elites, a fetishization of racial identity, and an increasingly Manichaean worldview that sees life as a battle between the virtuous and the wicked, based on criteria over which individuals have little or no control.
Whenever illiberalism overtakes politics, including democratic politics, the results never augur well for Jews. In the new game of ideological musical chairs, Jews may soon find they have nowhere to sit when the music stops.
For decades, the core Jewish critique of Israel has been that a Jewish state is bad for the Jews.
The critique has taken many forms. Israel (so the arguments go) would be too small and weak to survive: demographically outnumbered, militarily undermanned, geographically squeezed, religiously and culturally alien to its region. Israel would be too poor: nearly the only state in the Middle East with no oil or natural gas to speak of, boycotted by its neighbors, wedded to a socialist ideology that generated more inspiration than success. Israel would be too tribal: a tiny country riven by terrible divisions between Jews and Arabs, the religious and the secular, left and right. Israel would be too Jewish: a home for backward Middle Eastern Jews and Haredi Jews who would turn Israel into an Iranian-style theocracy. Israel would be too greedy: a country that would try to swallow the Palestinians territorially and be swallowed by them demographically.
More recently, the critique is that Israel is too strong for its own good — and for the good of the Jewish soul. Some American Jews on the ideological left feel ashamed of Israel: ashamed that it hasn’t created a Palestinian state, that it continues to build settlements, that it uses what they see as excessive military force against its enemies, that it fails to empathize enough with Palestinian suffering, that it has forged strong ties with morally unsavory foreign actors (from evangelical Christians to Donald Trump), and so on. Many of these Jewish critics wear this shame as if their own moral reputations and personal well-being rested on it. Implicitly, they buy into the antisemitic slander that every Jew is on the hook for the misbehavior — real or perceived — of any Jew.
As with Mark Twain, reports of Israel’s impending demise have so far been greatly exaggerated. But the critique of Israeli strength deserves a closer look on two grounds, one factual, the other philosophical.
The factual question is whether Israel is really abusing its power. “Abuse” is in some ways a subjective term, in the sense that many factors weigh on whether the use of force is excessive. Are there plausible alternatives to using force? Is it restrained by considerations of domestic law and respect for innocent life? Is it proportionate to its objective, and is the objective worth the cost? How would other states, including other democracies, respond in similar situations — that is, if rockets fired by a terrorist group began raining down by the thousands on their own cities and towns?
Powerlessness can be corrupting, too, when ordinary people choose self-abasement, or cowardice, or faithlessness, or dishonesty, or silence, all for the sake of simply being left alone and alive.
What there is no doubt about is that Israel is using far less power than it has. Israel’s military would have no trouble inflicting vastly greater damage in Gaza and retaking the Strip in its entirety. Similarly, if Israel wanted to “solve” issues with the Palestinians through ethnic expulsion — much as the United States did to Native Americans, Poland and Czechoslovakia to ethnic Germans, India to Muslims, Pakistan to Hindus, and Turkey to Greeks — it could easily have done so as well. But Israel doesn’t, because it tries, not always successfully, to live by the idea that there are moral limits to the use of force, irrespective of strategic considerations. The only territory that Israel can truly be said to have ethnically cleansed is Gaza — of its Jewish population in 2005.
And then there is the philosophical question: Is strength more corrupting than powerlessness? It is obviously true, per Lord Acton, that power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
But this truism leads people to the mistaken belief that the reverse is also true — that powerlessness tends to ennoble and absolute powerlessness is positively saintly. In fact, powerlessness can be corrupting, too, when ordinary people choose self-abasement, or cowardice, or faithlessness, or dishonesty, or silence, all for the sake of simply being left alone and alive. The moral life, for people and nations alike, requires the possibility of meaningful choice. That, in turn, requires power, including sovereign power. Israel exists so that a Chosen People can exercise the full meaning of chosenness by also being a choosing people.
Power does not have to be an obstacle to a moral life. It can be a basis for it.
A basis is not a guarantee. But part of the measure of how much Israel has enriched Jewish life is that it has allowed Jews to explore questions of power and morality from the standpoint of practice, not critique; to understand the dilemmas of politics, foreign relations, warfare, welfare, and similar subjects through experience rather than observation. Above all, it raises the possibility that a Jewish state might pioneer a Jewish way of practicing statecraft and peoplehood that is distinct from, and potentially better than, the way statecraft and peoplehood are practiced elsewhere. In an era in which the practice of statecraft throughout the West is often incompetent and the concept of peoplehood is crumbling, a Jewish state may have at least as much to teach as it yet has to learn.
In December 1941, on a beach on the Latvian coast called Skede, German soldiers and their local henchmen murdered 2,749 Jewish women and children, stripping them to their underclothes and shooting them in groups of 10 over three days of methodical slaughter.
Among those victims were three members of my extended family, Haya Westerman and her sisters, Becka and Ethel. Shortly before she was murdered, Haya told an acquaintance, “If you meet any of my children, tell them I was not afraid. Tell them to continue living knowing that I was not afraid.” That acquaintance survived and did, in fact, meet Haya’s daughter, Raya Mazin, to whom she told the story of her mother’s final days.
I came to know Raya many years later, in Israel, where she and her husband had emigrated in the early 1970s. Her husband had long since passed away, but she had a son, and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and she lived an active life right until her death a few years ago, at 96. She, too, died unafraid. But, unlike her mother, she died knowing that, thanks to Jewish power, there is a Jewish future — a future in which what happened on that beach 80 years ago will never happen again.
And:
Cruz responds to deceit:
https://www.
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Cliff May sends a warning which Biden is likely to ignore:
Tehran’s crimes, acts of war, and other provocations
Unless Biden responds forcefully to the latest, expect more
By Clifford D. May
The plot was audacious: Agents of the Islamic Republic of Iran would kidnap an American citizen on American soil. Masih Alinejad, an Iranian-born journalist and human rights activist, was to be grabbed, spirited out of Brooklyn to Venezuela, and then on to Tehran where she would have been imprisoned, tortured and, almost certainly, executed.
Last week, the FBI, to its enormous credit, foiled the plot. “Not on our watch,” FBI Assistant Director William Sweeney told reporters.
Spokesmen for the Islamic Republic dismissed the charges as “ridiculous and baseless.” If you believe that, Ms. Alinejad can get you a good price on a bridge not far from her home.
How dare Iran’s leaders commit such a crime? Let’s connect a few dots. Ten years ago, Iran’s rulers planned to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to America on American soil. A bomb was to explode in Café Milano, an elegant Georgetown eatery, while Adel al-Jubeir was enjoying his antipasto.
Other diners, as well as restaurant employees and passersby on the street, would have been collateral damage. This act of terrorism was foiled only because the plotters made the mistake of involving an undercover informant working with the DEA.
The question I suspect is not being asked in the White House: Did Washington’s failure to impose serious penalties on Iran’s rulers in response to the 2011 plot lead them to believe they risked little with the 2021 plot? And if no serious penalties are imposed on Iran’s rulers now, what might they try next?
In “Call Sign Chaos,” published two years ago, Jim Mattis, who headed U.S. Central Command in 2011, termed the bombing plot “an act of war.” There was no doubt about responsibility. “I saw the intelligence,” General Mattis wrote. “We had recorded Tehran’s approval of the operation.”
He added that “only Iran’s impression of America’s impotence could have led” Iran’s rulers “to risk such an act within a couple of miles of the White House.” It was therefore essential, he believed, that the theocrats feel more than a slap on the wrist.
President Obama ignored that advice. Committed to “engagement,” he was secretly negotiating with those theocrats. Therefore: “We treated an act of war as a law enforcement violation, jailing the low-level courier,” Mr. Mattis wrote. “The Iranians had not been held to account, and I anticipated that they would feel emboldened to challenge us more in the future.” In 2012, Mr. Obama fired the general.
Three years later President Obama, without Congressional approval, transferred billions of dollars to Iran’s rulers in exchange for their promise to temporarily limit some aspects of a nuclear program that was transparently not for peaceful purposes as they claimed.
President Trump withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (which was neither comprehensive nor a plan of action) and imposed economic sanctions that, over the less than two years they were in place, enfeebled Iran’s economy. President Biden has prioritized reviving the JCPOA, offering Tehran a range of economic incentives, so far without result.
How will he respond to the abduction attempt? After meeting with Ms. Alinejad last week, Secretary of State Antony Blinken “affirmed that the U.S. will always support the indispensable work of independent journalists around the world. We won’t tolerate efforts to intimidate them or silence their voices.” Note: No mention of Tehran. And no mention of penalties.
Iran’s rulers have committed many other crimes and provocations, including a string of attacks by militias they support – the most recent last week – on U.S. forces deployed in Iraq and Syria.
I’ll discuss just one more outrage today. Wang Xiyue is a naturalized American citizen and doctoral candidate at Princeton. A few years ago, he embraced the “prevailing academic view” that “allegations of the regime’s malign behavior” were “American propaganda.” In 2016, he felt confident traveling to Iran to work on his dissertation so long as he “remained apolitical and focused on historical research.
He arrived not long after the implementation of the JCPOA and during what appeared to be a period of rapprochement between Washington and Tehran. Nevertheless, he was soon arrested, thrown into solitary confinement, forced to make a false confession, and sentenced to 10 years in prison on espionage charges for which not a shred of evidence was produced.
His interrogator “made clear that my sole ‘crime’ was being an American. He told me I was to be used as a pawn in exchange for U.S.-held Iranian prisoners and the release of frozen Iranian assets.”
After 40 months behind bars, Iran’s rulers released him in exchange for the release of Masoud Soleimani, an Iranian accused of attempting to export biological materials from the U.S. to Iran in violation of sanctions laws. The message sent to Tehran: By taking Americans hostage you have nothing to lose and much to gain.
“Haybat” is a word I’ve learned from my Farsi-speaking friends. It implies the awe, majesty, and fear that power inspires. Leaders who have it can stun and deter their enemies. Leaders who lack it are regarded as a coyote does a Cockapoo.
There was a time when American leaders had haybat, a time when Americans could cite what I call the Marilyn Monroe Doctrine. In the 1957 film, The Prince and the Showgirl, the character portrayed by the great star of the silver screen tells a foreign plotter who has threatened her: “I’m an American citizen. Nobody can do anything to me!”
Do Iran’s rulers think President Biden possesses haybat? Do the Taliban, Vladimir Putin, and Xi Jinping? If you answered in the affirmative, I want to mention again that, for a very reasonable price, you can be the proud owner of a marvelous bridge in Brooklyn.
Clifford D. May is founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and a columnist for the Washington Times.
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