Once Land Of The Free ,Now Land Of The Intimidated Lamb Waiting To Be Slaughtered.

Logic not convincing to wokees!

PJ, Dagny, Abby, Brian Blake and Penny

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 Dem Mark Kelly Says His Party ‘Not Even Close’ To Understanding Border Crisis

By Benjamin Wilson

Democratic senator Mark Kelly (Ariz.) in an interview Monday said his party is "not even close" to understanding the complexities of the migrant crisis at the southern border.

"It didn’t take me long to realize that there are a lot of Democrats who don’t understand our southern border and a lot of Republicans who just want to talk about it," Kelly told the Washington Post. "And I continue to talk to my Republican colleagues about how we have to do more. We have to do more in border security."

Kelly's comments come as the Biden administration has overseen an all-time high of 2.4 million border apprehensions during fiscal year 2022. More than one million of the apprehensions resulted in expulsions under Title 42, a rule that gives officials the power to quickly expel migrants. A federal judge struck down the policy last week but delayed its expiration for five weeks. Fifteen attorneys general filed a motion Monday to stop its termination.

"Because invalidation of the Title 42 Orders will directly harm the States, they now seek to intervene to offer a defense of the Title 42 policy so that its validity can be resolved on the merits, rather than through strategic surrender," the AGs said.

Kelly has faced criticism in recent years from law enforcement officials over immigration, with National Border Patrol Council president Brandon Judd and Arizona Police Association president Justin Harris alleging Kelly has been "completely absent" on border security.

"It appears that he'll give lip service to a topic, but then when push comes to shove, he's right in step with his party," Judd told the Washington Free Beacon in November 2021. "And we know that as far as his party goes with border security, they're missing in action."

Living United for Change, a group that protests Immigration and Customs Enforcement and called for the defunding of the Phoenix Police Department, spent around $350,000 to help Kelly defeat Republican Blake Masters in this month's midterm election.

Along with improving security, during the interview Kelly pointed to the "Dreamer" program and visa systems as areas for reform.

"Our country would really benefit from stronger border security and comprehensive immigration reform," the senator said. 

And:

It is already underway:

If You Really Wanted to Destroy the United States, Then . . .

By Victor Davis Hanson 

It would be hard to imagine any planned agenda to destroy America that would have been as injurious as what we already suffered the last two years. 

First, you would surrender our prior energy independence. 

Reduce new gas and oil leases on federal lands to the lowest levels of any president in history. Cut back production at precisely the time the world is emerging from a two-year lockdown with pent-up consumer demand. 

Make war on coal and nuclear power. Drain the strategic petroleum reserve to make the pain for consumers more bearable for midterm election advantage.

Cancel the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge oil and gas field. Block pipelines like the Keystone oil pipeline and the Constitution natural gas line.

Overregulate and demonize frackers and horizontal drillers. Ensure there is less investment for their exploration and production. 

Make use of internal combustible engines or fossil fuel power generation prohibitively expensive. Achieve a green oil-dependency along the lines of contemporary Europe.

Second, print trillions of dollars in new currency as the lockdowns end, demand rises, and consumers are already saturated with COVID-19 subsidies. Keep interest rates low, well below the rate of inflation, as you print more money. Ensure that passbook holders earn no interest at the very time prices skyrocket to the highest per annum level in 40 years. 

“Spread the wealth” by sending money to those who already have enough, while making it less valuable for those deemed to have too much. Ensure runaway high prices to wean the middle class off its consumerism and supposedly to inspire them to buy less junk they don’t need. Damn the rich in the open and in the abstract, court them in the concrete and secret of darkness.

Third, end America’s physical boundaries. Render it an amorphous people and anywhere space. End any vestigial difference between a citizen and resident. Up the current nearly 50 million who were not born in the United States —27 percent of California’s population—to 100 million and more by allowing 3 million illegal aliens to enter per year. 

Fourth, destroy the public trust in its elections. Render Election Day irrelevant. Make proper auditing of 110 million mail-in/early ballots impossible. Normalize ballot harvesting and curing. 

Urge leftist billionaires to infuse their riches to “absorb” the work of state registrars in key precincts to ensure the correct “turn-out.” 

Blast as “election denialists,” “insurrectionists,” and “democracy destroyers” anyone who objects to these radical ballot changes, neither passed by the U.S. Congress nor by state legislators. Weaponize the FBI, CIA, and Department of Justice.

Fifth, redefine crime as one rich man’s crime, another poor man’s necessity. 

Let those who need “things” exercise their entitlement to them. Rewrite or ignore laws to exempt the oppressed who take, or do, what they want as atonement for past systemic racism and oppression.

Six, junk the ossified idea of a melting pot and multiracial society united by common American values and ideals. Instead, identify individuals by their superficial appearance. Seek to be a victim and monetize your claims against perceived victimizers. Call anyone a “racist” who resists.

Encourage each tribe, defined by common race, ethnic, gender, or sexual orientation affinities, to band together to oppose the monolithic “white privilege” majority. Encourage social and tribal tensions. Racially discriminate to end discrimination.

Greenlight statue toppling, name changing, boycotting, cancel culturing, ostracizing, and Trotskyizing. Erase the past, control the present, and create a new American person for the future.

Seven, render the United States just one of many nations abroad. Abandon Afghanistan in shame. Leave behind thousands of loyal Afghan allies, billions of dollars in equipment, a billion-dollar embassy, and the largest air base in central Asia. Appease the theocracy to reenter the Iran nuclear deal.

Beg enemies like Venezuela, Russia, and Iran to pump more oil when it is politically expedient for us to have abundant supplies—oil that we have in abundance but won’t produce. Discourage friends like Guinea from producing more energy and cancel allies’ energy projects like the EastMed pipeline. 

Trash but then beg Saudi Arabia to pump more oil right before the midterms for domestic political advantage.

Eight, neuter the First Amendment. Enlist Silicon Valley monopolies to silence unwanted free speech while using Big Tech’s mega profits to warp elections. Declare free expression “hate speech.” Criminalize contrarian social media.

Nine, demonize half the country as semi-fascists, un-Americans, insurrectionists, and even potential domestic terrorists. Try to change inconvenient ancient rules: seek to pack the court, end the filibuster, junk the Electoral College, and bring in two more states. 

Twice impeach a president who tried to stand in your way. Try him when he is an emeritus president and private citizen. Raid his home. Seek to indict a future rival to the current president.

Ten, never mention the origins of the COVID virus. Never blame China for the release of SARS-CoV-2 virus. Exempt investigations of U.S. health officials who subsidized Chinese gain-of-function research. Ignore the Bill of Rights to mandate vaccinations, mask wearing, and quarantines. 

We have done all of the above. It would be hard to imagine any planned agenda to destroy America that would have been as injurious as what we already suffered the last two years. 

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BREAKING NEWS...

Special Counsel Investigating Trump Was Key Figure In IRS Targeting Scandal

Source: Daily Caller

Jack Smith, the special counsel appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate former president Donald Trump’s possession of classified information, was a key figure in the IRS’s infamous targeting of conservative non-profits, according to a 2014 report by Republicans on the House +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 

Bibi can now return as PM.  He is Israel's best protection against Biden and Blinken's stupidity and dangerous efforts to appease Iran.

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Likud and Religious Zionists Reach Coalition Agreement

Jewish Press News Desk 

Prime Minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu, chairman of the Likud party and Bezalel Smotrich, chairman of the Religious Zionist party have finally and officially reached an agreement in their coalition negotiations. The portfolio assignments are very similar to what JewishPress.com first reported on Wednesday.

Bezalel Smotrich will be the Minister of Finance. Ofir Sofer will be the Minister of Aliyah and Absorption. Orit Strook will be the Minister of National Missions, as well as a minister in the Defense Ministry in charge of settlements in Judea and Samaria. Ohad Tal will be a deputy minister. Simcha Rothman will be the chairman of the Constitution, Law, and Justice committee and Religious Services Committee. Michal Waldiger will be Chairwoman of the Reforms Committee.

It was agreed that Strook’s activities regarding settlements would be done in coordination with Prime Minister Netanyahu. Smotrich’s position as Minister of Finance will be in (future) rotation with Aryeh Deri.

Under this new government, the IDF’s Civil Administration which is in charge of all civilian life in Judea and Samaria will likely find itself redefined, and much of its authority dispersed to civilian ministries and authorities. The Likud and Religious Zionism agreed they will also work to define a joint platform on Jewish identity, education, law, settlements and society.

Netanyahu said, “This is another significant step that brings us closer to establishing a national right-wing government that will take care of all the citizens of Israel. I thank the chairman of religious Zionism for the partnership and am convinced that we will work together in fruitful cooperation for the sake of the people of Israel.”

Smotrich said, “We are taking another historic step today to establish a Jewish, Zionist and national government that will restore security and governance, promote historic reform in the legal system, regulate and develop the settlement enterprise, strengthen Jewish identity in the spirit of religious Zionism and proudly wave the flag of Zionism, the absorption of Aliyah and society in Israel. I thank Prime Minister-designate Netanyahu for the trust, and my friend, MK Yariv Levin, for leading the efforts to establish the government with professionalism, friendship and fairness. Together we will do a lot of good for the State of Israel and work hard for all the citizens of Israel.”

The Likud has now reached agreements with Shas, Otzma Yehudit, Noam, Religious Zionists. The only party left is UTJ and for portfolios to be assigned within the Likud party.

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Robbing Peter to pay Paul? There are times when animals are smarter than humans.
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The Auschwitz Institute for the Prevention of Genocide and Mass Atrocities hails the antisemitic hate group Black Lives Matter and falsely claims that America is guilty of ongoing “mass atrocities” against black people by a “racist society”.

That’s despite the fact that Black Lives Matter is an antisemitic hate group which not only denounces the Jewish State, but whose riots were associated with attacks on synagogues.

It would be easy to mistake the institute bearing the name of the infamous Polish concentration camp where over 1 million Jews were murdered for a Holocaust memorial organization.

It’s not. What it is is a lot more troubling.

Despite its Manhattan address, the Auschwitz Institute was actually set up in Poland and “approved” by the state museum which operates under the auspices of the Polish government.

Supporters include the Ford Foundation, which has a history of funding anti-Israel movements along with Black Lives Matter, the French and German foreign offices, the Dutch government, the United States Institute of Peace and the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.

The Conference was set up to provide reparations by Germany to Holocaust survivors. It’s supposed to help survivors and yet it’s listed as a donor to a political organization that supports an antisemitic and racist movement that slurs the nation which ended the Holocaust.

The latest available tax documents show $10,000 provided by the Claims Conference to the Auschwitz Institute, alongside funding from the Australian, Irish and United States governments.

The Auschwitz Institute’s staff is notable for being largely non-Jewish, but does include Duaa Randhawa, a program officer for online education, who is a veteran of the violently antisemitic Council on American-Islamic Relations: whose associates have supported the murder of Jews.

Some have even praised Hitler and called for another Holocaust.

Dina Bailey, the head of U.S. programs for the Institute, is an African-American diversity trainer.

The  Auschwitz Institute has employed, coordinated and cited materials from George Soros’ Open Society networks. Soros had collaborated in the persecution of Jews during the Holocaust, has blamed Jews for antisemitism and funded antisemitic activities since then.

And while the Auschwitz Institute takes no particular anti-Israel position, nor is it particularly concerned with the threatened genocide aimed at a nation with millions of Jews.

The troubling hijacking of the Holocaust to promote Black Lives Matter, issue ‘land acknowledgements’ and other woke virtue signaling is all too typical of the appropriation of the Holocaust for leftist causes.

Holocaust museums have been clearing out exhibits about the mass murder of Jews to make way for Black Lives Matter propaganda.

The Holocaust Museum of Houston promotes Ibram X. Kendi’s “How To Be An Antiracist” and “When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir” by Patrisse Kahn-Cullor. The Holocaust Memorial Resource & Education Center of Florida triggered a massive backlash with its George Floyd exhibit. But the Auschwitz Institute is a particularly graphic example of not only a growing trend of woke Holocaust exploitation, but also Holocaust expropriation.

The Claims Conference acts as the official trustee for Holocaust victims, claiming and negotiating over property and compensation in their name, and then dispensing it. These funds are supposed to be allocated to organizations that provide support for survivors.

It’s difficult to see how the Auschwitz Institute fits that criteria.

The Auschwitz Institute actually represents the troubling intersection of Holocaust universalization and state-sponsored wokeness. The role of foreign governments, including some of those involved in perpetrating the Holocaust, which now support an institute that smears the country that ended the Holocaust, is obscene. Especially when that institution also appears to be funded with money that was meant to be used to help Holocaust survivors. 

The transformation of the Holocaust from history to metaphor has been a convenient way of moving past the inconvenient facts and to the convenient narratives in which international organizations and multilateralism are the solution to preventing future genocides, even though they not only failed to prevent the Holocaust, but any actual future genocides whatsoever.

International organizations have instead become the enablers of genocide, impotent in the face of actual atrocities, but all too willing to accuse America, Israel and other free countries of war crimes. The metaphorical alchemy that turned the victims and liberators of the Holocaust into the perpetrators has also relieved the activists from having to address actual antisemitism. 

It is no coincidence that the multilateral organizations that promised to prevent another Holocaust have instead become some of the loudest enablers of Islamic terrorists, of Hamas, the PLO and Iran, of those who admire Hitler and boast of wanting to finish his work.

A few years ago, the Government Affairs Coordinator of Minnesota’s CAIR chapter allegedly posted, “i wish hitler was alive to f*** up the jewish ppl and add more jewish causalities to the 6 million he killed in the holocaust.” It was one of multiple antisemitic and genocidal views put forward by figures associated with CAIR.

A CAIR employee in St. Louis had tweeted, “#crimesworthyoftherope being a Jew” and “I just want to spit in their faces. All of them any Jew Israeli I come across I hate them all.”

CAIR’s Arizona Outreach Coordinator had tweeted in the past, “All of the Palestinians are wondering why hitler didnt finish the job. Still my hero though.” A CAIR intern tweeted that Israel, “will become the Jews’ grave. 

And now a former CAIR figure can work for the Auschwitz Institute.

There is something fundamentally wrong with this picture. And it begins with the detachment of the Holocaust from the Jews. And the complicity of Jewish liberals in this narrative. Much like the detachment of Jewish history from Israel, it enables a worldview that justifies genocide.

All over again.

 

And that is also how money intended for Holocaust survivors can be used to fund activities involving an organization that promotes an antisemitic hate group whose rioters vandalized synagogues.

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CJ Roberts will find a basis for rejecting this case, claiming too late to unwind fait accompli, He is more interested in making sure SCOTUS's image is protected and is very politically averse. 

This was sent to me by a long standing friend and fellow memo reader:

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WILL THE BRUNSON BROTHERS SAVE AMERICA?

This is going to blow your mind.  Please be sitting down in your most comfortable chair, relax, breathe deeply, and have your favorite adult beverage at the ready – just sip between paragraphs or you might lose it.

The four Brunson Brothers all play the trumpet, and have a recording studio, Rock Canyon Studios, in Provo, Utah.  Deron, however, is also a lawyer, a very smart lawyer who has cases heard in the Supreme Court.  He recently initiated a lawsuit now stuck in Federal Court, with his brother Loy as the Claimant.

So Deron filed the suit again with Raland as the Claimant, filing it as Brunson v. Alma S. Adams; et al. in Utah 2nd District Federal Court on June 21, 2021.

And who are the Defendants in addition to Alma Adams?  385 Members of Congress (of whom Adams is one), plus Mike Pence, Kamala Harris, and Joseph Robinette Biden.

On what grounds?

That on January 6, 2021, the 117th Congress held a proceeding to count the electoral votes for the 2020 presidential election – during which 147 Members claimed there was factual evidence the election was fraudulent.

That the Defendants (named as “Respondents”), in refusing the request to investigate such evidence to determine its validity but holding the questionable EV vote in spite of it, was a clear violation of their solemn Oath to uphold the Constitution.

That a successfully rigged US presidential election has the same end result as an act of war, putting the victor into power by force or fraud, representing a national security breach on a unprecedented level like never before seen seriously damaging the fundamental freedoms of the Claimant, all US Citizens, and courts of law.

In violating their Oath to protect the Constitution from such a fundamental threat, the Respondents committed an act of treason against the United States.  The only proper remedy is for them is their permanent removal from office, and not allowed to hold a public office again.

In sum, the Brunsons pose this critical Question of Law:

“The Question: How can you support, and defend, the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic?  Answer: You investigate.  If there are claims that there is a threat, even if you don’t believe there is a threat, you investigate.  How else can you determine if there is a threat unless you investigate?  You can’t.

Were there claims of a threat to the Constitution?  Yes.  Where did these serious claims come from?  147 members of Congress.  What was the threat?  That there were enemies of the Constitution who successfully rigged the 2020 election.  

Is this lawsuit about a rigged election?  No, it’s about the members of Congress who voted AGAINST the investigation thereby thwarting the investigation.  Was this a clear violation of their oath?  YES.”  

 What’s diabolically clever of them is not to claim the election was stolen, but that Defendants voted 377 against (plus 8 abstaining) the request of 147 of their collegages there be a ten-day audit of the election before certifying the EV vote on Jan 6.

Now about the timeline.  The suit was filed in June of last year, and was dismissed last February.  The Brunsons appealed to the 10th Circuit, then realized how they could file a petition for writ of certiorari (judicial review) directly to the Supreme Court. They satisfied the Clerk of the Court’s request for more information, with their Writ being accepted by the Court last month.

One week ago, November 23, Elizabeth B. Prelogar, the Solicitor General of United States, the official attorney on record for the defendants, and in behalf of the 388 defendants, waived their right to respond to this lawsuit, thus allowing the SCOTUS to move forward.

Ramand J. Brunson v Alma S. Adams is officially filed with the Supreme Court, docketed as Case 22-380.  It’s worth your while to read it, if only to understand how well-argued in legal reasoning the case is made.

The nine Justices will meet soon to discuss the case and decide by vote if they want to move it to a hearing, where they will formally judge the case and decide by majority vote if the defendants should be removed from office.

At the very least, Elon Musk needs to blast this all over Twitter.  At the very least, all America needs to thank the Brunsons for their heroism.  To keep up with the case, see http://ralandbrunson.com/

For who knows – Chief Justice Roberts may decide to own up to the catastrophic damage he caused our country by refusing to hear Texas v Pennsylvania, and vote along with his four colleagues to save America this time.

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Unless something, by way of an investigation into the2020 election,  is undertaken, I personally am concerned the 2024 election is already determined. Why do I say this.  First of all, Musk will soon reveal technology was employed to withhold information, that had it been known, the election results were obviously effected.

Second, the assistance/benefits given by these technology entities could be seen as excessive contributions that are legally questionable.  

Third, as I noted in an earlier memo, one man one vote is a scared concept and is undercut by the enormous effort that permits voting assistance, collection and bundling mass absentee votes.

I just stood in line and voted Monday. Took me 30 minutes. One of the most sacred rights I have because I live in this country took 30 minutes.  I have the privilege's every other year.  Yet if progressives and radical Democrats have their way I will no longer be free to speak my mind, write these memos etc.  No nation in the world offers this blessing and this is what makes America unique.

People who hate me, hate my race, hate my religion, within some legal curbs, have the right to spew their views. They can say things I disagree with and I can respond. 

God gave humans mouths and other humans, who apparently want to play God, believe they should have the right to zip mouths. Not only is resistance regarding freedom to speak dangerous it is illogical and amoral.

Today, when parents attend School Board meetings many of them are not allowed to speak and if they do they are deemed urban terrorists.

Would you prefer to live in Iran, China, Russia? Are "liberals" so emotionally insecure their sensibilities cannot permit them to allow others to be free?

I understand why those who hate and/or fear our nation take this poisonous  position. They want power and control and/or they want elected officials, who work for a bloated government, to have control. 

Every American institution is under attack. Voting is the final step. It is the very heart of our freedoms.

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Sent by a friend and fellow memo reader:

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INTERESTING ESSAY .... AND SO TRUE AND SAD... see if you agree.

 

Men, like nations, think they're eternal.  What man in his 20s or 30s doesn't believe, at least subconsciously, that he'll live forever? In the springtime of youth, an endless summer beckons. As you pass 70, it's harder to hide from reality.... as you lose friends and relatives.

 

Nations also have seasons: Imagine a Roman of the 2nd century contemplating an empire that stretched from Britain to the Near East, thinking: This will endure forever.... Forever was about 500 years, give or take.... not bad, but gone!!

 

France was pivotal in the 17th and 18th centuries; now the land of Charles Martel is on its way to becoming part of the Muslim ummah.

 

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the sun never set on the British empire; now Albion exists in perpetual twilight. Its 96-year-old sovereign is a fitting symbol for a nation in terminal decline.

 

In the 1980s, Japan seemed poised to buy the world. Business schools taught Japanese management techniques. Today, its birth rate is so low and its population aging so rapidly that an industry has sprung up to remove the remains of elderly Japanese who die alone.

 

 I was born in 1945, almost at the midpoint of the 20th century - the American century. America's prestige and influence were never greater. Thanks to the 'Greatest Generation,' we won a World War fought throughout most of Europe, Asia, and the Pacific. We reduced Germany to rubble and put the rising sun to bed.  It set the stage for almost half a century of unprecedented prosperity.

 

 We stopped the spread of communism in Europe and Asia and fought international terrorism. We rebuilt our enemies and lavished foreign aid on much of the world. We built skyscrapers and rockets to the moon. We conquered Polio and now COVID. We explored the mysteries of the Universe and the wonders of DNA...the blueprint of life.

 

But where is the glory that once was Rome? America has moved from a relatively free economy to socialism - which has worked so well NOWHERE in the world.

 

We've gone from a republican government guided by a constitution to a regime of revolving elites. We have less freedom with each passing year. Like a signpost to the coming reign of terror, the cancel culture is everywhere. We've traded the American Revolution for the Cultural Revolution.

 

The pathetic creature in the White House is an empty vessel filled by his handlers. At the G-7 Summit, 'Dr. Jill' had to lead him like a child. In 1961, when we were young and vigorous, our leader was too. Now a feeble nation is technically led by the oldest man to ever serve in the presidency.

 

 We can't defend our borders, our history (including monuments to past greatness) or our streets. Our cities have become anarchist playgrounds. We are a nation of dependents, mendicants, and misplaced charity. Homeless veterans camp in the streets while illegal aliens are put up in hotels.

 

The president of the United States can't even quote the beginning of the Declaration of Independence ('You know - The Thing') correctly. Ivy League graduates routinely fail history tests that 5th graders could pass a generation ago. Crime rates soar and we blame the 2nd Amendment and slash police budgets.

 

 Our culture is certifiably insane. Men who think they're women. People who fight racism by seeking to convince members of one race that they're inherently evil, and others that they are perpetual victims. A psychiatrist lecturing at Yale said she fantasizes about 'unloading a revolver into the head of any white person.'

 

 We slaughter the unborn in the name of freedom, while our birth rate dips lower year by year. Our national debt is so high that we can no longer even pretend that we will repay it one day. It's a $30-trillion monument to our improvidence and refusal to confront reality. Our 'entertainment' is sadistic, nihilistic, and as enduring as a candy bar wrapper thrown in the trash. Our music is noise that spans the spectrum from annoying to repulsive.

 

 Patriotism is called an insurrection, treason celebrated, and perversion sanctified. A man in blue gets less respect than a man in a dress. We're asking soldiers to fight for a nation our leaders no longer believe in, while meekly most of us submitted to Fauci-ism (the regime of face masks, lockdowns, and hand sanitizers) shows the impending death of the American spirit.

 

 How do nations slip from greatness to obscurity?

 

   * Fighting endless wars they can't or won't win

 

   * Accumulating massive debt far beyond their ability to repay

 

   * Refusing to guard their borders, allowing the nation to be inundated  by an alien hord   

 

    * Surrendering control of their cities to mob rule

 

    * Allowing indoctrination of the young

 

     * Moving from a republican form of government to an oligarchy

 

      * Losing national identity

 

      * Indulging indolence

 

      * Abandoning faith and family - the bulwarks of social order.

 

In America, every one of these symptoms is pronounced, indicating an advanced stage of the disease.  Even if the cause seems hopeless, do we not have an obligation to those who sacrificed so much to give us what we had?  I'm surrounded by ghosts urging me on: the Union soldiers who held Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg, the battered bastards of Bastogne, those who served in the cold hell of Korea, the guys who went to the jungles of Southeast Asia and came home to be reviled or neglected.

 

This is the nation that took in my immigrant grandparents, whose uniform my father and most of my uncles wore in the Second World War. I don't want to imagine a world without America, even though it becomes increasingly likely.

 

During Britain's darkest hour, when its professional army was trapped at Dunkirk and a German invasion seemed imminent, Churchill reminded his countrymen, 'Nations that go down fighting rise again, and those that surrender tamely are finished.'

 

 The same might be said of causes. If we let America slip through our fingers, if we lose without a fight, what will posterity say of us?  While the prognosis is far from good. Only God knows if America's day in the sun is over."

 

 Read it and weep, forward or erase it! I read it and am now forwarding it to you, believing that we in America are at the moment in time to stand up, or let it fall! We now may soon be at the next step in our country's future. I believe that it might be closer than we think.

 

Author UnKnown

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How antisemitism became an American crisis

Alexander Nazaryan Tue, November 29, 2022, 12:42 PM

A sign at a protest in New York City reads End Jew Hatred.

A sign at a protest in New York City in 2020. (Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

Jews have always been fleeing, but America was the country from which Jews would never have to flee. They fled from Eastern Europe, Germany and the Soviet Union (as my family did in the 1980s). They settled on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and in West Philadelphia. They opened delis in Denver and Indianapolis. They went to Ivy League colleges and played in the NFL.

And now, suddenly, after all this time, after so many waves of assimilation and acceptance, after “Seinfeld” and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, many American Jews have come to feel like strangers in their own home.

“America was our promised land but we might not be safe here anymore,” the artist Deborah Kass recently wrote, expressing a sentiment that is increasingly voiced at synagogues, where armed guards are now commonplace, and at Shabbat tables, where younger American Jews are suddenly facing anxieties that had supposedly been expunged several generations ago.

Not so. One of America’s most successfully assimilated minorities is being yanked out of its hard-won comfort zone, astonishing Jewish scholars and religious leaders, as well as extremism experts who see the sharp spike in antisemitism as a symptom of deeper social malaise that could threaten other groups — and American democracy itself.

For many Jews, it adds up to the all-too-familiar feeling of being caught, in this case, between a progressive left with a growing antipathy to Israel and a hardening conservative movement whose xenophobic tendencies spell obvious trouble.

During a recent High Holidays sermon, a rabbi confronted congregants at his Washington, D.C., synagogue with a forthright question: “How many people in the last few years have been at a dining room conversation where the conversation has turned to where might we move? How many of us?”

Since then, the question has taken on even more urgency. Last week, having just announced his third run for president, former President Donald Trump hosted a Thanksgiving dinner at his South Florida estate with two of the most prominent antisemites in the United States: white nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes and rapper-entrepreneur Kanye West.

Trump denied knowing Fuentes’s lurid background, though the 24-year-old would-be fascist is a verified user on Trump’s own Truth Social network and has long traveled in the same far-right circles from which the former president draws some of his support. As for West, there is no doubt that Trump knows of the rapper’s antisemitic tirades, which led to the severing of most of his professional relationships.

“Even a social visit from an antisemite like Kanye West and human scum like Nick Fuentes is unacceptable,” David Friedman, who served as Trump’s ambassador to Israel, wrote on Twitter. “Antisemites deserve no quarter among American leaders, right or left."

As he faced mounting condemnation over the long weekend, Trump issued three separate statements attempting to explain how the dinner took place, but none of them condemned the antisemitic views of the men with whom he dined.

It was not Trump’s first flirtation with antisemitism or antisemites. Steve Bannon — his last campaign manager in 2016 and, afterward, his chief White House political strategist — was frequently denounced for use of classic antisemitic tropes (“globalists,” “international bankers,” etc.). Trump’s administration also harbored figures like Sebastian Gorka, proudly affiliated with a pro-Nazi outfit in his native Hungary, and Darren Beattie, who openly consorted with far-right extremists. Just days after taking office in 2017, Trump issued a Holocaust Remembrance Day statement that failed to include any mention of Jews, 6 million of whom were murdered by the Nazis.

Infamously, he praised the “very fine people on both sides” of a 2017 clash in Charlottesville, Va., between white supremacists and counterprotesters. Carrying torches, the racist demonstrators chanted, “Jews will not replace us.”

Fuentes, the future Mar-a-Lago guest, was there.

A sharp rise in anti-Jewish attacks

“Antisemitic and racist stickers were posted on the campus of the University of Albany by a neo-Nazi group.”

“A Jewish teenager [in Brooklyn] was punched in the back of the head by a man riding a bicycle.”

“Antisemitic fliers were distributed in a residential area [of Tempe, Ariz.].”

“The Holocaust Museum of Los Angeles was flooded with antisemitic messages.”

Those are just a very small sampling of the antisemitic incidents that took place in the second half of October across the United States.

“You’ve seen a normalization of antisemitism,” Anti-Defamation League president Jonathan Greenblatt told Yahoo News at a recent conversation at the organization’s offices in Manhattan. “We've watched the numbers increase dramatically.” In 2014, the storied anti-bias organization (which now fights racism, nativism and gender-based violence in addition to antisemitism) recorded 912 incidents targeting Jews across the United States; by 2021 the number had spiked to 2,717, a record number. (The ADL started keeping track of antisemitic incidents in 1979.)

An investigator at the scene of a shooting that killed 10 at a supermarket in Buffalo, N.Y., in May. The gunman had shared antisemitic rants on Gab, a site that attracts extremists. (Matt Rourke/AP)

Jews are targets of about 60% of all religion-driven hate crimes across the United States, a fact that is especially surprising since Jews make up only 2.4% of the American population. “It’s a community that desperately needs our support because it’s getting hit from all sides,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said in recent congressional testimony.

Wray delivered that message on Nov. 18, a Thursday. On Friday, two men were arrested at New York's Penn Station, where they had arrived with weapons and an intent to carry out an act of violence in a local synagogue (Jews gather for Shabbat services on Friday nights). Similar threats against New Jersey synagogues had resulted in the arrest, several days before, of a high school senior who said there was “a really good reason” to attack Jews.

Then on Sunday, basketball player Kyrie Irving of the Brooklyn Nets was allowed back into the team’s lineup after having been suspended for sharing a link to a virulently antisemitic documentary film, “Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America!”

Irving’s imminent return to Barclays Arena in downtown Brooklyn was accompanied by a march down Flatbush Avenue by the Black Hebrew Israelites, a group that often espouses an especially harsh brand of antisemitism. Their presence was endorsed by Jaylen Brown, a vice president of the union representing NBA players.

Brown later said he thought he was cheering on a historically Black fraternity, but he has consistently defended Irving in the face of his suspension. Most players have stayed silent, making some observers wonder if the league’s high-profile commitment to social justice was ever anything more than a marketing ploy.

Keeping Jews out of America

The proud product of a Northern European lineage, Madison Grant was born and raised in New York. He graduated from Yale and helped found the Bronx Zoo, as well as heading many other conservation efforts, at one point working closely with Theodore Roosevelt. He was a model American of the early 20th century: rugged and learned, philanthropic and patriotic.

Grant was also an ardent racist. In 1916 he published “The Passing of the Great Race: The Racial Basis of European History.” A pretentious jumble of undercooked pseudoscientific nonsense, Grant’s book celebrated Northern Europeans while warning that supposedly inferior races were gaining too much traction in the United States. “We shall save democracy only when democracy discovers its own aristocracy,” he wrote.

Grant’s argument, such as it is, hauntingly foreshadows the “great replacement” theory popular with white supremacists like Fuentes as well as more mainstream conservative figures like Fox News host Tucker Carlson and Republican politicians such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, co-founder of a congressional caucus to defend “Anglo-Saxon political traditions.”

The MS St. Louis arrives in Antwerp, Belgium, in June 1939 after being denied entry to Cuba, the United States and Canada. The ship carried over 900 mainly German Jewish refugees from Nazi persecution. (Three Lions/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

At the time of its publication, “The Passing of the Great Race” found a fan in a failed Austrian painter who spent the 1920s formulating an outlandish ideology that blamed Jews for everything that had gone wrong, and was presently going wrong, in Germany: Adolf Hitler.

In fact, American antisemitism is older than America itself. In 1654, Peter Stuyvesant, the first governor of New York, wanted the “very repugnant” two dozen Jews who had arrived in Manhattan from Brazil to be expelled, worried that “they might become a charge in the coming winter.”

As immigration accelerated in the second half of the 19th century, racist and antisemitic sentiment became more deeply entrenched in official policy, thanks to men like Grant who thought their hatred of Jews served a civic function.

The links between American nativism of the early 20th century and the early 21st is painfully apparent in a new documentary by filmmakers Ken Burns, Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein, “The U.S. and the Holocaust,” which argues that the United States could have done far more to stop the murder of European Jews by Hitler, but chose not to do so in part because of influential figures like Grant, who looked down on Jews and didn’t want more of them in the United States. They wanted to keep them from spoiling America.

The idea tracks to those espoused today. “History has shown that societal trust and political unity are threatened when foreign citizens are imported en-masse into a country,” reads an internal memorandum describing Greene’s new caucus.

Even more influential than Grant was the little-known Breckinridge Long. Like Grant, Long was a member of the WASP elite, raised in St. Louis to a storied Confederate family and educated at Princeton. Serving in the State Department, he wrote a 1940 memorandum to colleagues: “We can delay and effectively stop for a temporary period of indefinite length the number of immigrants into the United States. We could do this by simply advising our consuls, to put every obstacle in the way.”

There was a specific type of immigrant that Long was especially keen on blocking. He had praised Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” as “eloquent in opposition to Jewry and to Jews as exponents of Communism & chaos.” His views informed immigration policy until 1965, when President Lyndon Johnson made it much easier for immigrants to come to the United States, especially immigrants from Asia and Africa.

Some conservatives today want to undo the 1965 immigration reform — that is, to go back to an immigration system like the one envisioned and enacted by men like Breckinridge Long.

The filmmakers say they did not expect their work to comment as thoroughly as it does on the present. They thought they were working on history, not commentary. The shift was “sort of incomprehensible,” says Botstein, whose Jewish grandparents fled the Nazis.

Except that the documentary she, Burns and Novick would spend the next several years making would show just how perfectly comprehensible the recrudescence of antisemitism was. One of the messages of the documentary seems to be that unless history is fully addressed, neither antisemitism nor other hatreds will go away on their own.

People listen as Joseph Borgen, a victim of a hate crime, speaks at a rally in Cedarhurst, N.Y., in 2021 denouncing antisemitic violence. (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

Antisemitism has been called “the oldest hatred” for its durability and persistence. In the second century A.D., the Roman historian Tacitus denounced Judaism as “base and abominable.” For many centuries, the Catholic Church persisted in the conviction that Jews had killed Christ, which the Vatican did not renounce until the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. Jews were killed by the thousands in the Spanish Inquisition of the 15th century; during the 19th century they were murdered by roving bands of czarist troops in pogroms across the Russian Empire.

But the United States was supposed to represent a break from Europe’s ancient prejudices and animosities. In the second half of the 20th century, Jews assimilated readily into the higher rungs of American society. They gained entry to the very same Ivy League colleges from which they had been excluded only decades before. Jews joined country clubs and corporate boards. They moved into the “good buildings” of New York's Upper East Side once reserved for Protestants who could trace their lineage back to 17th century English or Dutch colonists. They settled in the tony suburbs outside Washington, Boston, Philadelphia and New York, where racial “covenants” had once explicitly kept them out.

The 1970s saw the first Jewish secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, and the first Jewish U.S. attorney general, Edward Levi.

“The Triumph of the Jews,” read in the New York Review of Books.

For decades, there was no need for urgency or alarm.

In the summer of 2016, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump shared that used a Star of David to highlight Hillary Clinton’s supposed corruption. “That was a turning point for many,” a Jewish Republican of the incident.

In of the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump denounced the “corrupt machine” he charged with eviscerating the American working class. Images of powerful men and women flashed across the screen: his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, naturally enough, but also philanthropist George Soros, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen and Goldman Sachs chairman Lloyd Blankfein.

Soros, Yellen and Blankfein may all have enormous influence, but so do plenty of other figures who routinely show up on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. Something else bound the trio and made them such an appealing target for Trump’s populist appeal: They are all Jewish.

Deborah Lipstadt, the Biden administration’s special envoy to combat antisemitism, describes Trump’s suspicion of elites as textbook antisemitism. “Globalist powerful interests conspiring behind the scenes — the antisemite uses that talk,” she told Yahoo News in an interview. “Someone else may also use that talk, but then you get to the antisemitism.”

Trump was a paradox, frequently expressing a deep friendship with American Jews, but sometimes doing so in ways that bordered on the antisemitic. His administration included not only fringe figures on the far right but also his son-in-law Jared Kushner, an observant Jew who was among the president’s closest counselors. Kushner’s wife, Ivanka Trump, converted to Judaism and was also a senior White House adviser.

“Trump's complicated,” Greenblatt of the ADL says. “He has Jewish grandchildren. His daughter is probably the most prominent convert in the United States. But the reality is that he emboldened extremists.”

Donald Trump does not exactly fit the mold of a traditional antisemite. A native of Queens, N.Y., he tends to espouse the kind of crude mishmash of ethnic animosities one might have encountered in the 1970s at a slightly seedy Queens Boulevard pub. "You’re not going to support me because I don’t want your money," Trump told a room full of Republican Jews while initially campaigning for president. Last year he wondered if a documentarian who had come to film him was a “good Jewish character,” according to a recording that the filmmaker .

More committed antisemites tend to obsessively invent signs of Jewish influence. Trump may not be in their ranks, but he isn’t exactly opposed to them either, as last week’s dinner with Fuentes and West made clear. If anything, he is disconcertingly devoted to courting unabashed antisemites, even at the risk of offending Jewish members of his own family, not to mention millions of voters.

“There’s always been a lunatic fringe,” Greenblatt told Yahoo News. “It just used to be on the fringe. Now it feels like they’re in the middle.”

Trump’s supporters will point to the fact that Kushner, his son-in-law, was among the most high-profile Jews to serve in a presidential administration. And, they have argued, his policies consistently benefited Israel. Trump moved the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, on the contested holy city. And he helped broker the , which normalized diplomatic relations between Israel and several Arab nations.

How, , could a figure who has done so much for Israel withstand such relentless accusations of antisemitism?

Yet the support for Israel, Burns argues, “conveniently whitewashes” the history of antisemitism. It also shuts down any possibility of Republican introspection; faced with charges of antisemitism, Republican leaders will argue that their party supports Israel far more stridently than the Democrats do.

For many Republicans, that support has less to do with an appreciation of historical Jewish land claims than on cultural and political calculations: Israel figures significantly into evangelical And since evangelicals are deeply influential in the GOP, their views on supporting Israel have become central to the Republican platform.

Over the summer, Republican candidate for Pennsylvania governor Doug Mastriano faced accusations of antisemitism. Those accusations, his wife Rebecca explained, could simply not be true.

“As a family, we so much love Israel,” . “In fact, I’m going to say we probably love Israel more than a lot of Jews do.”

Returning to his alma mater Dartmouth in 1934, did not like what he saw. “The campus seems more Jewish each time I arrive in Hanover. And unfortunately many of them (on quick judgment) seem to be the ‘kike’ type,” Whelden complained to the school’s director of admissions.

Similar views were commonplace at Yale, Harvard and elsewhere. Most prestigious universities maintained anti-Jewish quotas well into the 20th century. Most have since and apologized: Dartmouth , under the leadership of its first Jewish president; Stanford admitted to having kept out Jews.

Today, of course, no such quotas exist. But for many Jewish students, recent years have made campus life increasingly untenable, in large part because of burgeoning pressures from the left.

“I've heard reports that it is just getting difficult to be openly Jewish on some campuses,” says Lipstadt, the antisemitism envoy, who has taught at Emory University in Atlanta for nearly three decades.

Earlier this fall, law students at the University of California, Berkeley, under whose provisions no campus group that supported the measure could host a speaker supporting “Zionism, the apartheid state of Israel, and the occupation of Palestine.”

The move was decried by detractors as the creation of “Jewish-free zones,” a description that some Jewish law students said was hyperbolic. But, those same students said, that didn’t make the new bylaw any more ominous. “Student leaders now accept the exclusion of Jews because of an aspect of their identity. There is tolerance to marginalize us because of our faith. Thus, their widespread approval of the silencing of Jewish voices,” .

As the possibility of a peaceful solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict receded, the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement gained traction across the United States. Supporters of BDS try to isolate Israeli corporations, as well as corporations that do business with Israel. They maintain they are not targeting Jews, but a state acting outside the bounds of international law — a state that only happens to be Jewish.

“I think it’s such a simplistic way of looking at it,” says Lipstadt, arguing that the distance between anti-Zionism and antisemitism is much shorter than BDS proponents might want to admit. She and others point out that the inordinate energies devoted to singling out every offense — and there are plenty of them — committed by Israel, while ignoring the myriad offenses committed by much more powerful nations, suggests that something darker than a concern for human rights is at work.

“If you say to me that Israel shouldn't exist because it doesn’t have a right to exist,” Lipstadt says, “I have to ask, well, what about China and the Uyghurs, Myanmar and the Rohingya, the United States and Native Americans, Canada and the First Nations, Australia and the Aborigines, New Zealand and the Maori?”

Anti-Israeli sentiment also became increasingly incorporated into the racial justice movement that powered a cultural resistance to the Trump administration. Once, Jewish leaders like had walked arm in arm with Martin Luther King Jr. Now that bond was rapidly severing, isolating American Jews from their long-standing allies on the left.

In 2018, that “white Jews, as white people, uphold white supremacy,” setting off a furious debate that seemed to further alienate Jews from a progressive movement they once helped create (as the far right likes to remind people, many Jews were prominent socialists and leaders in the civil rights movement).

In the summer of 2020, “Palestinian Lives Matter” became a rallying cry during the protests that followed the killing of George Floyd. “BLM has found an ally in pro-Palestinian activists, including the BDS movement,” Arab News columnist Osama Al-Sharif , referring to Black Lives Matter.

Even if most institutions that supported Black Lives Matter — either rhetorically or in practice — did not also address the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, a linkage was made between Jews and oppression. And if many Jews, in both the United States and elsewhere, had come to reject the post-Holocaust narrative of victimhood, they also did not want the Jewish experience maligned or erased.

But that is exactly what has taken place. The new preamble to New York City’s charter, passed by an increasingly progressive City Council, describes the “grave injustices” that the city’s founding visited on “Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, Pacific Islander, Middle Eastern, and other People of Color, women, religious minorities, immigrants, people who are LGBTQ+, and people with disabilities.”

It makes no mention of Jews, neither the ones Stuyvesant tried to remove from Manhattan in 1654 nor the millions who would spend subsequent generations trying to overcome bigotry.

If the culture dictates the bounds of the acceptable, then contemporary culture appears to be sanctioning animosity toward the Jews. “The physical violence is a right-wing phenomenon,” says , senior editor at the Jewish affairs magazine Tablet and the author of a book about the 2018 in Pittsburgh. But, he adds, “the scary thing happening in the cultural left is that the institutions that would rally to our defense do not pay sufficient attention.”

The antisemitism among some on the left has been especially galling to progressive Jews because of how thoroughly they were involved in the the civil rights movement and other forms of social justice activism. Antisemitism in the Black community is not a new phenomenon; Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan has been .

What appears to have changed is the sanction those views are receiving from the broader culture. Without necessarily legitimating their views, cultural elites appear to have, at least in part, cast American Jews as oppressors deserving disapproval.

“A sacred circle is drawn around those whom the progressive modern left are prepared to go into battle for,” the British author David Baddiel has written, “and it seems as if the Jews aren’t in it.”

In 1922, a reporter for the New York Times filed a report on a rising firebrand who was harnessing German discontent with furious diatribes against the “November criminals” who, in his view, had caused Germany’s defeat in World War I. The primary culprits of this dolchstosslegende, or stab-in-the-back myth, were the Jews, but the Times reporter assured his readers that Adolf Hitler was not a real antisemite.

Yes, the rhetoric was a little rough, and so were some of Hitler’s followers. “But several reliable, well-informed sources confirmed the idea that Hitler's anti-Semitism was not so genuine or violent as it sounded, and that he was merely using anti-Semitic propaganda as a bait to catch masses of followers and keep them aroused, enthusiastic, and in line for the time when his organization is perfected and sufficiently powerful to be employed effectively for political purposes,” .

A century later, Germany perhaps more thoroughly than any country has ever reckoned with its sins. But that is only because the sins of Nazism are so deep — and so lasting. And those sins should serve as a reminder of what antisemitism can bring, what the crackpot ideas of Nick Fuentes and Kanye West can do to a nation willing to accept them.

“You should be against antisemitism, because it’s wrong,” says Lipstadt. But it is also a warning sign, she argues. “Antisemitism is at the root of the decay of most societies.”

Jews tend to thrive in open, democratic societies for the simple reason that those societies tend to value civic participation over ethnic identification. And if those societies accept Jews, who make up at most a small percentage of almost every country, other minority groups are more likely to be accepted as well.

“If you’re a true dyed-in-the-wool antisemite, you believe your courts are controlled by Jews, your banks are controlled by Jews, your media is controlled by Jews, your leaders are controlled by Jews,” Lipstadt says. “You have no faith in your democracy. And that’s the beginning of the end of democracy.”

Popular discontent with political and corporate elites surfaces regularly in American politics, with Jews predictably invoked as the antagonists of ordinary people. In 1896, President Grover Cleveland was after he engineered a rescue of the gold standard that involved the banker John Pierpont Morgan — , who were Jewish.

For the populist “silverites” (so called because they supported a monetary policy backed by silver and gold, not just gold), “the Jew was an organic part of the conspiracy theory of history,” the historian Richard Hofstadter would later write.

The gold standard may be a curiosity safely relegated to the past, but alleged Jewish manipulation of finance and politics remains very much an issue of the present, one that motivates people of all political persuasions.

After the mortgage crisis of 2007-08, it exploded into the open. The right increasingly embraced immigration restrictions and tariffs on trade, while the left — powered by the Occupy Wall Street movement — trained its ire on corporations and the politicians who abetted them.

And once again, the Jews were trapped. During the rise of Nazism in Germany, they had been blamed for both socialism and high finance, an obvious contradiction nobody bothered to resolve. Those same contradictions reappeared in the second decade of the 21st century, with Jews once again pummeled by the populist wave.

“Populism is one of those ideologies that never spares the Jews,” explains Tablet editor Oppenheimer.

The very notion of populism marshals the frustrations of ordinary people against powerful elites. And whether those elites are invoked by the name of Rothschild or Soros, Jews inevitably find themselves blamed for society’s most intractable ills.

“Jews are the go-to scapegoat,” Greenblatt says, conceding an all-too-real reality for which neither he nor anyone else has an easy solution. “They just are, right?”

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