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Macon slapped Biden's face and undercut us with China in regard toTaiwan.
On he other hand, I also feel here we go again send in our troops because a democracy is incapable of defending itself.
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Our French Revolution+++
COMMENTARY BY
Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and author of the book "The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won." You can reach him by e-mailing authorvdh@gmail.com.
We are in a Jacobin revolution of the sort that in 1793-94 nearly destroyed France. And things are getting scary.
The Democratic Party vanished sometime in 2020.
It was absorbed by hard-left ideologues. They were bent on radically altering, or hijacking, existing institutions to force radical, equality-of-result agendas that otherwise do not earn majority support.
The American people want affordable power and fuel and energy autonomy. They do not want a Green New Deal that results in dependence on the Middle East.
They want fiscal sobriety, not a permanent stagflationary economy marked by bank failures, soaring interest rates, crony capitalism, and subsidies for those who choose not to work.
They know no country can exist without a border, much less while offering blank checks to foreign cartels that kill 100,000 Americans yearly.
They demand realist deterrence abroad, not the current woke military whose erosion is spelling the end to American credibility and global stability.
Racialists are eerily embracing discredited Neo-Confederate notions of racial chauvinism, discrimination, segregation, and the old one-drop rule of racial obsession. They are turning America toward a Balkanized war-of-all-against-all.
To implement such an unpopular program, the new Left must radically alter our institutions.
So the “Democrats” periodically threaten to pack the courts, end the filibuster, destroy the Electoral College, and override the states’ prerogatives to establish balloting laws.
They deny the committee assignments of the House minority leader. They engage in stunts like tearing up the State of the Union address on national television. With impunity they mob the homes of Supreme Court justices to leverage their decisions.
This revolution is run by elites and is a top-down operation.
University deans all but prompt students to disrupt invited campus speakers. District attorneys release violent arrested criminals without bail. Woke generals call their Chinese counterparts to warn them against their own commander in chief.
The Pentagon lectures the country on its supposed innate racism—even as the United States continues to lose wars abroad, abandons billions of dollars of equipment to terrorists, and allows Communist China to surveille domestic American military bases with impunity.
Words change their meanings. “Racist” now means “don’t dare object.” “White” became the pejorative stereotype used by racists. “Diversity” means tired orthodoxy. “Equity” is a synonym for bias. “Inclusion” ensures exclusion.
Institutions are no longer recognizable. The FBI as we knew it no longer exists. Three former FBI directors either lied under oath to federal investigators or pleaded amnesia in congressional testimonies.
Our highest former national intelligence officers lied under oath to the Senate. The IRS is weaponized against political opponents of the Democrats. The Department of Justice is more likely to send the FBI after grammar school parents than mobs threatening the homes of Supreme Court justices.
Still, to thoroughly erase America, our Jacobins must radically alter our customs and traditions.
So under the cover of the COVID-19 quarantines, Election Day was made irrelevant. In the new America, 70% did not vote on the designated day but, fueled by third-party vote harvesting and relaxation of audits of non-Election Day ballots, extended the vote over a period of several weeks.
Like the Jacobins, names and dates had to be radically transformed. 1619, not 1776, is now America’s birthdate and, we are told, it was an ignominious one.
Statues are toppled, careers Trotskyized.
Biological males suddenly have hijacked women’s sports—destroying five decades of women’s hard-won efforts to achieve equal treatment and respect in athletics.
What triggered the collective madness and this Jacobin takeover?
The Left’s perfect storm of the 120 days of riot, death, arson, and looting of 2020? The COVID-19 pandemic? The disastrous two-year lockdown? The 2016 election of the outsider Donald Trump?
All those catalysts and more.
As the country collapses under leftist nihilism, the revolution’s last gasp is to destroy Trump—by empowering him. That is, the leftist legal vendetta is designed to win him just enough empathy to be nominated the Republican Party’s presidential candidate, but then to keep on indicting, gagging, and hemorrhaging him legally until Election Day 2024.
Trump was the first president to be impeached twice, to be tried by the Senate as a private citizen, and to have his private home raided by the FBI. Now he is the first president to have been indicted, effectively ending America’s moral authority abroad.
America now has three potential futures and two are bad.
First, the Jacobins have two more years to finish what they started as the Founders’ dream descends into our worst nightmare.
Second, the revolution has so warped our legal system, our voting on Election Day, and the FBI, the CIA, the Justice Department, and the IRS, that even a despised, unpopular Left will “win” elections.
The third is that New York prosecutor Alvin Bragg has jumped the shark.
His pathetic prosecution is so patently incoherent, illiberal, and in spirit anti-American that two-thirds of the country will soon conclude the center is not holding. The Jacobins’ reign of terror is unsustainable. And so in 2024 the Left will not be defeated, but so defeated so that it is utterly discredited.
The choice is ours.
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‘I was Screaming Before You Interrupted Me’: American Politics has Become Amplified Rage
Below is my column in the Hill on the Tennessee controversy over the expulsion of two Tennessee legislators. Liberal members and pundits have lionized the two legislators who shutdown the proceedings while declaring the GOP “fascists.” The controversy perfectly captured our increasingly amplified age of rage.
Here is the column:
Nobel Laureate Albert Camus once said, “Insurrection is certainly not the sum total of human experience but … it is our historic reality.” Those words came to mind this week when Tennessee’s House of Representatives expelled two members accused of disrupting legislative proceedings in what some called an “insurrection” or a “mutiny.”
The scene on the floor of the Tennessee House perfectly captured our “age of rage.” Protesters filled the capitol building to protest the failure to pass gun-control legislation. However, they were in the minority in both the state and its legislature. Three Democratic state representatives — Justin Jones from Nashville, Justin Pearson from Memphis, and Gloria Johnson of Knoxville — were unwilling to yield to the majority. They disrupted the floor proceedings with a bullhorn and screaming at their colleagues.
It is a scene familiar to many of us in academia, where events are regularly canceled by those who shout down others. The three members yelled “No action, no peace” and “Power to the people” as their colleagues objected to their stopping the legislative process. Undeterred, the three refused to allow “business as usual” to continue.
Nothing says deliberative debate like a bullhorn. American politics, it seems, has become a matter of simple amplification.
Many on the left lionized the three for their disruption of the legislature. President Biden denounced the sanctioning of their “peaceful protest” as “shocking, undemocratic, and without precedent.”
There was little criticism of the members for obstructing the legislative business or refusing to accept the democratic process that rejected their gun-control demands.
Today, for many, there is no room for nuance. Instead, they live in a world occupied only by “fascists” and “insurrectionists.”
I have long been critical of the media declaring the Jan. 6, 2021 riot on Capitol Hill as an “insurrection” in spite of my criticism of Trump’s speech on that day and the riot that desecrated our constitutional process. Many in the public agree. Despite the efforts of the House’s Jan. 6 committee and the media referring to the riot as an insurrection, some polls show that 76 percent of the public view it as a protest that went too far. Likewise, a Harvard study showed more citizens viewed Jan. 6 as motivated by loyalty to Trump than a desire for a national insurrection.
The public sees these distinctions. Most of us are supportive of the prosecution of rioters while recognizing that most of the protesters that day did not participate in any violation of law. Likewise, most citizens are able to denounce members for taking a bullhorn to a legislative debate while rejecting calls for their expulsion.
What these Tennessee House members did was wrong — but it was no insurrection. Nor was it worthy of expulsion, as opposed to censure or other sanctions.
Yet, every controversy is now repackaged to amplify talking points, even when they cannot withstand the most cursory examination.
Take Rep. Johnson’s insistence that, as the only white member of the three, she was spared expulsion due to racism. That ignored distinctions raised by Johnson and her supporters during the debate that, unlike Jones and Pearson, she did not use a bullhorn; her counsel also insisted that she separated herself from the protesters. Johnson’s distinctions swayed one member to defeat expulsion, but Johnson then declared the result was evidence of sexism and racism: “pretty clear I’m a 60-year-old white woman, and they are two young Black men. I was talked down to as a woman, man-splained to.”
The media was also captured perfectly in this controversy. For example, it was difficult to distinguish between CNN reporter Sara Sidner and protesters. Sidner corrected Republican Caucus Chair Rep. Jeremy Faison (R-Cosby) as he tried to explain why the members were expelled for “riling up” the crowd. Sidner insisted that the crowd already was “riled up” by the failure to protect them from guns. She then explained that the public was “extremely upset that your legislature wasn’t trying to deal with the issue of keeping children safe.”
House Minority Leader Karen Camper (D-Memphis) praised the protest as “good trouble,” a reference to the words of the late U.S. Rep. John Lewis’ guiding principle on civil disobedience.
This is now our “historic reality.” Liberals and the media, long criticized for downplaying violence from the left, are now rationalizing a disruption of legislative procedure as “good trouble” because the cause is considered to be correct. Conservatives are equally quick to declare protests by those on the left to be “insurrections,” or to declare their opponents to be (in the words of Donald Trump) “enemies of the state.”
Only a few days before the Tennessee House floor fight, a confrontation occurred off the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives in Washington which captured perfectly this new political reality.
Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) was shown on videotape screaming about gun control in the Capitol as his colleagues left the floor following a vote. Various Democratic members, including former House Majority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), tried to calm Bowman. However, when Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) asked Bowman to stop yelling, Bowman shouted back: “I was screaming before you interrupted me” — which could go down as the epitaph for our age.
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at The George Washington University. Follow him on Twitter @JonathanTurley.
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Typical U.N flunkie. No wonder the Organization is a failure at all levels.Trump knew how to handle them. Take away their hominy andgrits.
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‘Obscene’ UN official makes outrageous statement about Israel
“You have no shame. You really are the Special Rapporteur for Jihad,” attorney Arsen Ostrovsky replied to Francesca Albanese.
By Adina Katz, World Israel News
A United Nations Special Rapporteur with a history of antisemitic social media postings blamed the Jewish state for a spate of recent deadly terror attacks.
Italian attorney Francesca Albanese, who is currently leading a UN investigation into Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, took to Twitter to frame last Friday’s deadly shooting attack and car ramming attacks, which killed three innocent civilians, as acts of justified resistance.
“The loss of life in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and Israel is devastating, especially at a time that should be of peace for all, Christians, Jews, Muslims,” Albanese wrote on Saturday, less than a day after the murders perpetrated by Palestinian terrorists.
“Israel has a right to defend itself, but can’t claim it when it comes to the people it oppresses/whose lands it colonizes,” she continued.
“Self-defense can’t be used as a blanket claim when the repression has mainly served to perpetuate the military occupation in West Bank/Jerusalem/Gaza, denying Palestinians their rights for 56 years,” she wrote.
Albanese did not explain how a car ramming attack against British and Italian tourists on the Tel Aviv boardwalk committed by an Arab citizen of Israel, which left a visitor from Rome dead, had to do with the so called “Occupied Palestinian Territories.”
“Israeli actions in the Occupied Palestinian Territories only stoke the flames of violence, perpetuating a cycle of needless suffering for both sides. The occupation must end,” she stated.
Albanese failed to mention that Israel has been targeted in recent days by rocketfire from Lebanon, Syria and the Gaza Strip.Neither did she acknowledge that the attack in Tel Aviv took place well within Israel’s 1967 borders.
“You really are obscene. You have just justified Palestinian terror. Even in the face of one of your own Italian citizens being murdered by [a] Palestinian terrorist,” wrote attorney Arsen Ostrovksy, the CEO of pro-Israel NGO the International Legal Forum (ILF.)
“You have no shame. You really are the Special Rapporteur for Jihad,” he added.
“*Israel has a right to defend itself* except anywhere that Francesca Albanese thinks it’s ok for Jewish civilians to be targeted for murder,” replied Joel Petlin, a journalist and school superintendent in Kiryas Joel, New York. “Quite the sentiment from a UN official.”
In December 2022, media reports regarding Albanese’s social media presence revealed that she repeatedly posted that Europe is cowed by Holocaust guilt and that the U.S. is controlled by a powerful Jewish cabal that subjugates politicians.
Arab terrorEuropean antisemitismFrancesca AlbanesePalestinian terrorUNHRCUnited Nations Human Rights Council
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