Obama is the last one who should talk about upholding laws since he circumvented the Senate by going around them contrary to what the Constitution explicitly dictates. The rest of his e mail is typically wordy Obama touching all bases and winding up trying to pleasing everyone with platitudinal bull shit.
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I have been asking the same question. When will Biden get rid of his twig and actually use a club.
How many missile attacks on our troops with these idiots tolerate.
We were told Trump was going to blow up the world. Biden's weakness has us in two wars and his cowardliness with only expand them to more tragedies. How much blood does Biden need to wash his hands?
Time will tell.
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Biden Speaks, but Will He Act?
Iran’s proxies are shooting at Americans without a U.S. response.
The Editorial Board
President Biden on Thursday night finally told Americans the truth about a new world of threats, which he called “an inflection point.” It’s also a decisive moment for the Commander in Chief: Will Mr. Biden respond if Iran keeps attacking U.S. forces abroad? And will he build support in Congress to restore U.S. military power?
Wars in Israel and Ukraine “can seem far away,” the President said in a rare Oval Office address. “And it’s natural to ask: Why does this matter to America?” But “history has taught us that when terrorists don’t pay a price for their terror, when dictators don’t pay a price for their aggression, they cause more chaos and death and more destruction,” and the threats to America increase. Vladimir Putin, Mr. Biden noted, views the Baltic countries in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as rogue Russian provinces. He won’t stop at Ukraine.
Give Mr. Biden credit for making this case directly to the American public. He ducked talking about Ukraine for 20 months, reserving his few remarks for foreign capitals or international meetings. That became untenable after the Oct. 7 attack on Israel. Thursday’s address included the usual bromides about democracy, but the current moment is about building hard power and the will to use it.
Mr. Biden was straightforward that prevailing in both Israel and Ukraine is “vital for America’s national security.” He correctly noted that Iran is supporting Hamas and Russia’s invasion, though he could have told Americans more about Russia and Iran’s deepening relationship.
Iranian military personnel have trained Russians in Crimea on drones. The Russians appear to be furnishing training jets for the Iranian military. The two are working in tandem to push U.S. forces out of Syria. This axis of animosity is a coordinated effort to crush U.S. allies and establish themselves as dominant regional powers.
Mr. Biden included a line about holding Iran “accountable,” but the President hasn’t so far. He didn’t mention attacks this week on U.S. forces in the Middle East. Iran’s proxies will continue to take shots as long as the American response is timid, and the risk of dead Americans is real.
The core problem is the decline of American deterrence. The President has sent two carrier strike groups and fighter aircraft to the region. But Tehran is still testing whether Mr. Biden is willing to use them. One issue is Mr. Biden’s frail delivery, which may figure into the calculation of adversaries. But a country manages a crisis with the President it has, for better or worse.
A failure to respond to Iran’s provocations would broadcast that America lacks the will to defend itself. Mr. Biden failed to deter Mr. Putin from invading Ukraine after the Afghanistan fiasco, and a defeat in the Middle East would echo with China in the Pacific.
The larger project is rebuilding the U.S. as the arsenal of deterrence, and Mr. Biden’s more than $100 billion funding request is a start. The package includes about $14 billion for Israel, including help for air defenses as Israel burns through Iron Dome interceptors.
The Administration wants $61 billion for Ukraine, and isolationist voices in both parties will resist. But much of the request is marked for the U.S. defense industrial base—that is, increasing U.S. military capacity. The funding includes replenishing U.S. weapons stocks and expanding ammunition lines.
That is also essential for deterring the Chinese Communist Party from striking Taiwan. Mr. Biden wants $3.4 billion to boost U.S. submarine readiness and production, an American edge over Beijing’s forces. The U.S. currently can’t build enough boats to meet its own needs while also selling hulls to the Australians as part of the important Aukus agreement.
But the $7 billion total for Pacific priorities is too meager. Congress can fill out that request into a real plan to build more long-range missiles and three attack submarines a year to hit the needed 66 hulls in the U.S. Navy, from 49 now.
Mr. Biden’s request deserves bipartisan support, but he will get more from Republicans if he faces the reality that he can’t have both more military power and ever-more welfare and green-energy subsidies. He should choose, and now is the time for guns over butter.
Americans are receiving an education in what the world looks like when U.S. deterrence erodes, and rebuilding that power and will should be the top bipartisan priority in Washington. Americans grow weary of the costs of being the “essential nation,” as Mr. Biden called the U.S. on Thursday evening. But the alternative is unfolding in Israel, Europe and Africa, and the U.S. needs to prepare for the worse that may be coming.
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The Jewish Liberal's Bible fessed up. The paper's staffing is now full of sympathetic Islamist radicals these days. Thus, I am not surprised this fish wrapper newspaper jumps first and investigates too late. I suspect they were unhappy they had to retract than feel contrite.
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The silence is deafening.
In New York, the home of the largest Jewish population outside of Israel, not a single major museum has so far expressed its official support for the Jewish state and, by extension, the Jewish people. Not one major gallery chose to send a message of empathy and take a public stand against the slaughter of Jewish civilians despite, by now, the widely reported grim toll: the estimated 1,400 Israelis killed, including babies, women, and the elderly. Just imagine for a second anything of this magnitude taking place in your community, among your people.
The art world’s silence speaks volumes. As a Jewish woman, who’s been writing about art, artists, galleries, museums, auction houses, foundations, fairs, lawsuits for more than 17 years, I feel a mix of pain, disappointment, rage, and fear. Why are the Jews being slaughtered and the art world turns a blind eye—and goes on shopping at Frieze London as if nothing happened? Where is the solidarity? Where is the empathy? Where is the moral compass?
I have reached out to museums including the Met, the MoMA, the Guggenheim, and the Whitney; galleries including Gagosian, Pace, Hauser & Wirth, and David Zwirner; auction houses Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Phillips.
It’s been radio silence for the first week, with only a few lonely voices, including the Jewish museums around the country and an art industry newsletter, The Canvas, speaking up in solidarity with Israel after the attack.
This week, as the humanitarian crisis developed in Gaza following Israel’s retaliation, critical voices quickly drowned out those voices of support. Just yesterday, 8,000 artists signed an open letter, declaring their solidarity with the Palestinians, but conspicuously not saying a word about the largest Jewish massacre since the Holocaust. Published in Art Forum magazine, the letter called on institutions to break their silence. The signatories included prominent artists such as Nan Goldin, Martha Rosler, Barbara Kruger, Kara Walker, and Peter Doig.
Those who remain silent are the same businesses and institutions that issued almost instant (and correct) support for Ukraine after Russia’s invasion last year, for Black Lives Matter after George Floyd’s murder; that telegraph their support for LGBT rights and minority rights through exhibitions, policies, and statements.
These are the same institutions and businesses whose endowments, boards, and coffers have been oiled by wealthy Jewish patrons for decades. And these are the same entities who employ and represent staffers and artists, who may see Israel as the aggressor often without real understanding of historic complexity in the region and throughout centuries. It’s a fashionable view.
“Where are you, people? Who are you, people?” said New York-based private art dealer and collector Alberto Mugrabi, whose father was born in Israel. “We are seeing who is with us and who is not.”
Why the silence? I’ve asked myself and others this week.
“Now, at this moment, the art world could stand by Israel and say those are atrocities,” said Tania Coen-Uzzielli, director of the Tel Aviv Museum, which has been closed alongside all other public institutions. “I cannot hear this voice.”
A member of a WhatsApp group of 20 museum directors around the world, she has received just four personal messages since the attack. The group as a whole has been silent, including all of its American members. “I don’t know why,” Coen-Uzzielli said. “I am struggling with this. Really.”
Perhaps people are afraid to say the wrong thing and offend someone. Perhaps museums are afraid to be criticized or canceled by their constituencies. Perhaps galleries are afraid to lose business.
Powerful art patrons such as Qatar’s Sheikha al Mayassa, who has been one of the top art buyers of the past 20 years and is the chairperson of Qatar Museums, posted images of the Palestinian flag projected onto museum buildings in Doha on social media after the massacre.
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We are witnessing a Holocaust denial-like phenomenon unfolding in real time.
So tomorrow, Israel will screen for foreign journalists the raw, unedited footage of Hamas’ atrocities in the October 7 Massacre, as captured by its death squads’ body cams.
And:
And:
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This is what I mean when I write Obama surrogates continue to fill important shoes in the Biden Administration.
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EXCLUSIVE
Krishanti Vignarajah: Meet the Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama Associate Who Will Resettle Palestinians in Your Hometown
The war in Israel may send a million Palestinians to America. Progressives are already calling for the country to open up its borders to these Muslim migrants. Squad member Jamaal Bowman said last week that the country must open up its arms to Palestinians.
Jamaal—yes, that’s Jamaal with two A’s for “affirmative action”—Bowman recently stunned the nation with the claim that he accidentally pulled a fire alarm in the congressional building: “It was a dumb choice, but it is what it is.”
Jamaal’s call to bring in potentially millions of new Palestinian refugees is arguably even more stupid than his fire alarm defense. At a time when our southern border records over 200,000 migrants per month, it may seem like the wrong time to invite more in—especially when they hail from a terrorist hotbed.
But it turns out terrorist sympathizers bring the migrants here. It was revealed this week that Homeland Security asylum officer Nejwa Ali previously worked for the Palestinian Liberation Organization, a body designated by the government Ali works for as a terrorist group. The PLO press office, she worked for, was expelled from the country by the Trump administration. She went to work for the feds shortly thereafter.
Ali
Ali is also a big fan of Hamas, using her social media to praise the Palestinian jihadi attacks on Israeli civilians.
The Daily Wire:
Several of Ali’s posts glorifying the terrorist attacks include the statement, “Respect our existence, or expect resistance. Simple. No Apologies,” a suggestion that as long as Israel exists on what she considers occupied land, attacks on civilians are acceptable.
Jews seeking to come to America might have a hard time if Ali were their immigration officer. “Israeli, American privilege is disgusting. When Israelis acknowledge the government and military are solely responsible for the attack. Period,” she wrote. “I hold every Israeli accountable for their governments [sic] actions, IF they do not speak against Israel.”
On October 9, she posted to Facebook: “How Nejwa wakes up,” accompanied by a video captioned “F*** Israel and any Jew that supports Israel” and a photo that says “A nation that has nothing but Allah has everything it will ever need.” She also added an anti-Semitic cartoon of a Jewish nose.
Ali’s story should make Americans wonder: Who are the types of people welcoming immigrants into our country? It may surprise readers to learn that ostensibly Christian charities are responsible for bringing foreigners to small towns throughout America. The government works with nine volunteer agencies for refugee resettlement, five of which are nominally Christian. The nine are:
Church World Service (CWS) (Christian)
Episcopal Migration Ministries (EMM) (Christian)
Ethiopian Community Development Council (ECDC)
Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) (Jewish)
International Rescue Committee (IRC)
Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services (LIRS) (Christian)
US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI)
United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) (Christian)
World Relief (WR) (Christian)
Much attention is paid to the Catholic Charities and their efforts to aid migrants—legal and illegal—in America. Less attention is paid to the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, a group that was instrumental in bringing Somalis to Minnesota. One of those Somalis, incidentally, is the terrorist-sympathizing congresswoman, Ilhan Omar. LIRS is proud of this connection, boasting about it on Facebook.
LIRS, like the other charities, isn’t a mere non-profit. It’s an appendage of the US government. Over 80 percent of its funding comes from the federal government. In 2018, it received $41,631,000 in state assistance. The other agencies, with the exception of HIAS, also receive the majority of their funding from the feds.
LIRS proclaims itself as guided by a fundamental Christian purpose. Its description on the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America’s website reads:
We are a church that does God’s work in the world and in local communities pursuing justice, peace and human dignity for and with all people.
In partnership with Lutheran congregations and Lutheran social ministry organizations, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service has welcomed more than 379,000 refugees to the United States since 1939. This ongoing partnership and work is driven by God’s love for all people and a vision for congregations to be welcoming and generous centers for mission and ministry.
However, LIRS isn’t even run by a Christian. Its current president and CEO is Krishanti (Krish) O’Mara Vignarajah, a Hindu woman with impeccable globalist credentials. She was born in Sri Lanka and came to the U.S. as a child. She has degrees from Yale and Oxford. Early in her career, she worked at McKinsey. Later on, she became a high-ranking staffer in the Obama administration. She worked as a senior adviser to Hillary Clinton and John Kerry at the State Department. She finished her time in the administration as Michelle Obama’s policy director. In 2018, she ran unsuccessfully for Maryland governor, earning a measly 8.2% in the Democratic primary.
She then took her talents to LIRS in 2019. The group was troubled upon her arrival. The previous president was fired for mismanaging the group’s funds, which primarily come from taxpayers. Vignarajah appeared to put things in order and bolster the group’s connections to the corridors of power.
In a 2022 speech delivered at the University of Maryland, Vignarajah argued she had more power to bring migrants to the U.S. in the nonprofit world than in the federal government:
Through her experience as a nonprofit executive and senior in the White House and State Department, Vignarajah offered significant insights into the challenges and opportunities provided by both sectors. As a government leader, she recalls immense influence and ample resources to address policy issues. However, she encountered much greater bureaucratic and political limitations compared to her current work in the nonprofit sector, in which she feels she is better able to “speak truth to power.” Her experiences in both the nonprofit and government spaces have fueled her passion for cross-sector collaboration.
In the same speech, she complained about the Right’s views on immigration and how it’s imperative to correct this “misinformation.” She also shared her view that immigrants are the real Americans:
Vignarajah also shared her current priorities in immigration policy. In her work, she has found negative, misinformed narratives at the root of nearly all immigration issues. When examining statistics and economic data, she sees some arguments, such as increased crime and unemployment as a result of immigration, do not hold up. Despite this, addressing false narratives surrounding the impact of immigration remains a prime challenge for policymakers working in this space.
“The general perception that is really so problematic is this ‘otherness,’” explains Vignarajah. “Unless you are part of the indigenous community or someone in your family was forced here through slavery, someone in your lineage made a decision to come to the United States. I think that’s where it’s important to understand the truth, which is that ‘they’ are ‘us.’”
Vignarajah has kept up cozy relations with those in power. In 2021, LIRS hosted Secretary of State Antony Blinken for an event to promote refugee resettlement. Blinken made sure to inform the audience that he and Vignarajah had worked together at State:
Krish, thank you very, very much. And it’s – first of all, it’s wonderful to see you again. For those of you who don’t know, Krish is a former part of our State Department team. I’m so glad that you’re continuing your remarkable service in this capacity.
Vignarajah’s tenure at the State Department working under both Hillary Clinton and John Kerry is interesting for a number of reasons. In order for refugees to be resettled, they must first be created, and few secretaries of state created more refugees than Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton was a major proponent of US involvement in the Syrian Civil War on the side of the so-called Sunni Rebels (which included Al-Qaeda and ISIS), resulting in the creation of nearly 7 million refugees.
The Syria catastrophe wasn’t even Clinton’s worst. She is rightfully most notorious for her intervention in Libya and for the assassination of Libyan dictator Qaddafi. This has created a power vacuum and a situation of chaos that persists to this day. Here is Hillary cavalierly laughing about Qaddafi’s assassination.
The removal of Qaddafi has created a dark and booming industry of human trafficking of refugees into Europe.
For migrants from sub-Sahran Africa, Libya was a destination even before Muammar Qaddafi fell in 2011, and the country turned itself in a boat launch to Europe.
All of which sets the stage for what Libya is today: A trading floor for African lives. Since Gaddafi’s demise, no coherent government has taken control of the country. The political void has been filled by armed groups—including Islamists affiliated with ISIS and al Qaeda—competing for territory. But in terms of economics, Libya has devolved into a primitive state. In addition to oil, it now trades in humans.
Although most of the refugees created by Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy misadventures were dumped into Europe, a healthy number had to be resettled in the United States, of course. Luckily, the State Department was just as obliging in resettling refugees into America as it had been in creating them in the first place—a perverse system in which Vignarajah played an integral role.
Indeed, refugee resettlement, particularly of Muslim migrants, was a major priority around the time Vignarajah worked there. In 2015, the State Department announced it would dramatically increase refugee intake over the next two years. Donald Trump curbed this increase upon assuming office in 2017.
Vignarajah was deeply critical of Trump’s efforts to keep out migrants from terror-ridden Muslim nations. In 2020, she was included among the voices deeming it an “Islamophobic” policy.
Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, CEO of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, said in a statement that the ban is devastating for “thousands of men, women and children whose only beacon of hope is the safety and prosperity that America can offer.”
“We are grateful to leaders who are trying to mitigate and prevent the damage these policies have done and restore our role as one of the leading advocates for protections for all vulnerable people, regardless of their country of origin,” said LIRS’ Vignarajah in her statement.
Vignarajah celebrated Biden’s elimination of the travel ban in early 2021, saying it turned “the page on this dark chapter in American history.”
Vignarajah and her group became the face of the volunteer effort to settle Afghans in America following the Taliban’s takeover in 2021. She was interviewed on Sunday morning talk shows, cable news, public radio, and several major print publications. She wrote op-eds on the subject for the Washington Post and USA Today. Vignarajah was the go-to source for the media’s effort to persuade Americans to welcome tens of thousands of unvetted Afghans.
She chastised Congress for not being generous enough to Afghan migrants. Her justifications were obviously inflected by her deep state loyalties to the State Department. She claimed that not doing enough for the Afghans will hurt America’s global standing, an item of key importance to those who care for the Globalist American Empire’s success:
To the media, she painted an extremely rosy picture of the resettlement process.
ABC:
“In the last year, we have undertaken a Herculean effort of resettling tens of thousands of Afghans into communities all across the country. It’s really been an all-hands-on-deck mission. And it’s really been inspiring to see how everyone from veterans to civic groups to faith communities, have pitched in,” said Krish Vignarajah, CEO of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services. “Our new Afghan neighbors are slowly but surely settling in. We see how relieved they are to be safe, to see them finding a sense of community and to see how hopeful they are for the future.”
But the actual picture wasn’t so rosy. Many Afghans demonstrated their cultural differences upon arrival and committed horrific acts.
Washington Times:
The 77,000 Afghans evacuated to the U.S. have all been processed and released from military bases, but not before racking up a striking number of criminal entanglements including violence against women and sexual assaults on children.
Federal prosecutors in Virginia charged a man with molesting a 14-year-old girl. As investigators dug into his phone, they said, they found child pornography among thousands of photos he kept. They have now charged him with that offense, too.
Another evacuee stands accused of bashing his wife with a cellphone charger and slashing her wrists with a razor blade. Investigators say he was mad at his wife for taking one of the seats at an evacuee meeting, while his brother had to stand.
Still another evacuee is awaiting sentencing after a jury found him guilty of groping a child. He defended his actions to investigators, saying it was part of his culture to hug and kiss children.
These people are being dropped off in small towns with the help of agencies like LIRS. Your tax dollars pay for them to settle in and upend local cultures.
But that’s the whole purpose refugee resettlement, according to Vignarajah. In a 2022 interview with Baltimore magazine, she made no reference to God or the Bible for why her group wants more immigrants in small towns. She instead sees immigration as a vehicle for cultural enrichment, a necessary response to climate change, and the solution to declining white birthrates.
Baltimore Magazine:
Our approach to the refugee crisis is not just humane and empathetic but also self-interested. Refugees make our communities economically stronger, physically safer, and culturally richer.
We also need to prepare for climate displacement, which will be the biggest driver of migration in the 21st century. But we need to act now—and embrace the help immigrants bring. At a time when we have the lowest birth rate since the census started tracking it, record numbers of older adults retiring, and financial stresses on Medicare and Social Security, we need a younger, bigger workforce. Immigration must be part of the solution.
Nejwa Ali and Krish Vignarajah perfectly represent the open-borders regime. Neither one is loyal to the historic American people. Neither one cares for the things that made America great. They just care about bringing more people like themselves to this country to fundamentally change it. Vignarajah’s control of a Chrisitan group to advance this mission exposes the rot in the refugee industry.
These groups aren’t really Christian. They’re just tentacles of the Globalist American Empire, deployed to help further the Great Replacement.
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Israel’s 17th Day of War
By Sherwin Pomerantz
Today marks 17 days of war in Israel that shows little sign of being scaled back. The Israel Defense Forces bombed 320 terror targets in Gaza over the last 24 hours attempting to clear the strip of its Hamas leadership. The Israeli military spokesperson confirmed that 222 people were abducted into Gaza. This includes babies and old people as well. As a result of the invasion by Hamas there are now 21 children who are orphans from 13 families. 18 of those 21 are cases where both parents were killed. To date the military has suffered the loss of 308 of its troops.
While the ground invasion has yet to begin, today a great deal of Israeli military equipment was repositioned indicating that the entry into Gaza may begin sooner rather than later. Rocket fire from Gaza continues to slow but remains a danger to those in the south as do the occasional rockets from Lebanon directed at the north of Israel. It is, of course, possible that Israel is intentionally holding off the ground invasion preferring to bomb the northern Gaza in an effort to get Hamas to yield, whatever that means. Or to have the troops go in to mop up as it were. Time will tell.
In a televised interview earlier today, Mosar Hassan Yousef, author of the book “Son of Hamas” opined that comparing Hamas to ISIS is not accurate as Hamas is much more dangerous than ISIS.
Regionally the US seems to be preparing for an escalation of hostilities well beyond Gaza. In addition to the two large aircraft carrier attack groups positioned in the Mediterranean Sea off our coast, another aircraft group is moving into position in the Persian Gulf to counter the appearance of Chinese naval vessels in the area. In addition, the US has destroyers in the Red Sea, one of which downed three missiles last week fired by Yemen in the direction of Israel.
US ground troops have also been deployed in the region. At the end of last week 10,000 army combat troops deplaned in Saudi Arabia and set up operations there in anticipation of a possible deployment in the region. This in addition to the 2,000 marines who arrived in the region earlier in the week. Clearly the US is trying to warn the Shiite Axis headed by Iran but including Iraq, Yemen, and Hezbollah in Lebanon not to escalate the war beyond Gaza.
Regarding humanitarian aid to Gaza, additional trucks laden with aid for Gaza were admitted through the Rafah Crossing between Gaza and Egypt again today. But it is a one-way street, as the Egyptians are not letting anyone enter Egypt from Gaza, not even foreign nationals.
Regarding the resiliency of the population, it was reported today that 200,000 Israelis had returned to Israel to support the war effort, both those who were called to service and others who simply wanted to be here. According to reports ElAl airlines was even letting people sit on the floor in order to accommodate the demand. They also flew on the Sabbath something that has not been done since the law was passed limiting their operations to six days a week, Selected train routes in Israel also ran on the Sabbath, really unique as trains do not normally run here on Shabbat.
I continue to be impressed with the incredible level of unity and volunteerism that surfaced basically overnight. And, as importantly, the disunity that we saw for the first nine months of the year has been totally shelved. Let’s hope this all ends soon and that we will have learned from the experience the need for us to continue united and mutually respectful of each other and the sacrifices made by all.
Sherwin Pomerantz has lived in Israel for 40 years, is CEO of Atid EDI Ltd., a international business development consultancy. He is also the Founder and Chair of the American State Offices Association, former National President of the Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel and a past Chairperson of the Board of the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies.
And:
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The Day the Delusions Died
A lot of people woke up on October 7 as progressives and went to bed that night feeling like conservatives. What changed?
By Konstantin Kisin
When Hamas terrorists crossed over the border with Israel and murdered 1,400 innocent people, they destroyed families and entire communities. They also shattered long-held delusions in the West.
A friend of mine joked that she woke up on October 7 as a liberal and went to bed that evening as a 65-year-old conservative. But it wasn’t really a joke and she wasn’t the only one. What changed?
The best way to answer that question is with the help of Thomas Sowell, one of the most brilliant public intellectuals alive today. In 1987, Sowell published A Conflict of Visions. In this now-classic, he offers a simple and powerful explanation of why people disagree about politics. We disagree about politics, Sowell argues, because we disagree about human nature. We see the world through one of two competing visions, each of which tells a radically different story about human nature.
Those with “unconstrained vision” think that humans are malleable and can be perfected. They believe that social ills and evils can be overcome through collective action that encourages humans to behave better. To subscribers of this view, poverty, crime, inequality, and war are not inevitable. Rather, they are puzzles that can be solved. We need only to say the right things, enact the right policies, and spend enough money, and we will suffer these social ills no more. This worldview is the foundation of the progressive mindset.
By contrast, those who see the world through a “constrained vision” lens believe that human nature is a universal constant. No amount of social engineering can change the sober reality of human self-interest, or the fact that human empathy and social resources are necessarily scarce. People who see things this way believe that most political and social problems will never be “solved”; they can only be managed. This approach is the bedrock of the conservative worldview.
Hamas’s barbarism—and the explanations and celebrations throughout the West that followed their orgy of violence—have forced an overnight exodus from the “unconstrained” camp into the “constrained” one.
The Reality of Woke Ideology
Many people woke up on October 7 sympathetic to parts of woke ideology and went to bed that evening questioning how they had signed on to a worldview that had nothing to say about the mass rape and murder of innocent people by terrorists.
The reaction to the attacks—from outwardly pro-Hamas protests to the mealy-mouthed statements of college presidents, celebrities, and CEOs—has exploded the comforting stories many on the center-left have told themselves about progressive identity politics. For many years, they opted for the coping mechanism of pretending that the institutional capture of universities, corporations, and media organizations by the woke mind virus was no big deal. “Sure, students shutting down events they disagree with is annoying,” they would say, “but it’s just students doing what students do.”
October 8 was a wake-up call for those who didn’t appreciate that the ideology of the campus has spread to our cities, supercharged by social media.
We woke up on October 8 to the clamor of street protests in cities across the West condemning Israel even before any major Israeli response to the attacks. We watched celebratory crowds brandish swastikas and chant “gas the Jews” at events purporting to be about the loss of Palestinian lives. We saw Black Lives Matter chapters lionize terrorists.
In London, where I live, we watched the mayor deliver glib assurances that “London’s diversity is our greatest strength” in the midst of a wave of antisemitic attacks, and as Jewish schools were forced to close because of safety concerns.
Across the West, we noticed that our representatives refused to condemn Hamas’s kidnappings, and that the legacy media was all too eager to swallow and regurgitate Hamas propaganda.
Prior to the October 7 massacre, many students, alumni, and donors with the “unconstrained vision” trusted that the university—for all its many problems—remained the West’s best environment for civil discourse.
But then they watched university presidents who were quick to issue statements condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the killing of George Floyd fall silent, or offer the most slippery, equivocal statements carefully crafted to avoid offending anti-Israel groups. They watched an Israeli at Columbia get beaten with a stick, and heard reports about the physical intimidation of students on campuses across the country. They read about dozens of student organizations at Harvard signing a letter holding Israel “entirely responsible” for the massacre of Israelis.
The events of the last two weeks have shattered the illusion that wokeness is about protecting victims and standing up for persecuted minorities. This ideology is and has always been about the one thing many of us have told you it is about for years: power. And after the last two weeks, there can be no doubt about how these people will use any power they seize: they will seek to destroy, in any way they can, those who disagree.
This unpleasant conclusion is surprising only if you are still clinging to the unconstrained vision. But if there is any constant in human history, it is that revolutionaries always feel entitled to destroy those who stand in their way.
Just as hope about the possibility of peace with jihadists seems suicidally naive, reconciliation with citizens seized by the woke mindset seems a long way off.
Immigration
Nowhere is the shift from the unconstrained to constrained vision starkest than on immigration.
For decades, both Europe and America basked in an “unconstrained vision” of immigration. In the U.S., the melting pot that could integrate the nineteenth-century Germans, Irish Catholics, or Japanese could surely absorb those crossing the southern border. And many of these new arrivals would do jobs Americans didn’t want to do. Europe needed immigration to deal with an aging population, with many European countries inviting people from their former colonies to fill labor shortages and skills gaps.
But over time, especially from the late 1990s onward, the unconstrained vision ran rampant through media and political elites, and immigration went from being a solution to specific problems to a moral good in its own right. (I am myself an immigrant. When I moved to Britain from Russia in 1996, net immigration into Britain ran at 55,000 people a year. Last year, net immigration stood at over 600,000 people.)
Over the past decade, more and more people in America and Europe have quietly shifted toward the “constrained” view of immigration. The Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump were early warning signs of this ongoing transformation. Today, we see New York, where nearly 60,000 newly arrived migrants are putting tremendous strain on shelters and city services like healthcare, education, and public transport. The city has already spent over $1 billion to address this crisis, and projections indicate that housing costs alone could exceed $4.3 billion by next summer. Lifelong Democrats in Manhattan tell The New York Times that “we have too many people coming in,” and that “Biden could do something more about putting our borders up a little stronger. I mean, we’re not here to take in the whole world. We can only do so much.”
Europeans have learned similar lessons from their own migrant crisis. In Britain, we spend approximately $10 million a day on hotels for people who have come here illegally. We refuse to deport foreign criminals over “human rights” concerns. Readers may recall seeing recent media reports about the small Italian island of Lampedusa, whose population quadrupled in a day as large numbers of illegal immigrants arrived. We have now learned that a man who shot two Swedish soccer fans dead in a terror attack in Brussels last week arrived there illegally via the island in 2011. The man was known to the authorities as a security risk due to his jihadi links, but when his asylum application was rejected in 2020, he was not deported. How many such people are allowed to come and stay in Europe is impossible to say, as hundreds of thousands of people make illegal crossings into Europe every year.
But despite these shocking statistics, the issue of illegal immigration has been impossible to discuss in polite company for decades. No matter how bad the problem became, to raise concerns about it would almost always lead to accusations of bigotry and xenophobia.
What we have witnessed over the last two weeks—with enormous pro-Hamas rallies in cities like London, Paris, and Washington, D.C.—has the potential to change the immigration debate in a decisive way. It is much harder to pretend that allowing people to enter our country illegally is a moral good when you watch some of them celebrate mass murder in the streets of your capital cities.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has recently announced the intention to deport illegal immigrants “on a large scale” as his coalition hemorrhages votes to anti-immigration parties. France has banned pro-Palestine protests and warned that foreign nationals who take part will be removed from the country. Britain has also threatened to revoke the visas of foreigners who praise Hamas. Whether this represents a permanent realignment toward a more constrained view of immigration or merely a temporary blip on the path to progressive dystopia remains to be seen.
Border Security
To express concern about border security has for many years been coded as “right-wing.” But how many people, after the horrors of October 7, believe that a secure border is anything other than the most basic test of national security?
I have just returned from a week in Los Angeles where, on recognizing my name, every single Armenian Lyft driver struck up a conversation in Russian. Once the inevitable complaints about the rising cost of living were out of the way, several shared with me their own journeys into the U.S. and those of their families. I was struck by the fact that those who came in the 1990s and 2000s had usually come legally, but more recent arrivals had made their way through Mexico. One man told me about smuggling his two brothers and 80-year-old father through the southern border: “It’s easy,” he told me.
I have no doubt he is correct: 2023 saw the highest number of illegal crossings since records began. And polling shows that the American people, who are otherwise uniquely welcoming of new arrivals, aren’t happy about it. The problem with illegal immigration isn’t just its scale; it’s that we have no idea whether the people coming are 80-year-old Armenian retirees or jihadi terrorists plotting another 9/11.
It is clearer now than ever before that borders aren’t about bigotry, they’re about security. In a sign of the times, Joe Biden is now continuing work on the border wall that Democrats spent years criticizing Donald Trump for erecting.
The West
The reason the readjustment is necessary and, in my view, highly likely, is that proponents of the unconstrained vision have been allowed to ride roughshod over the concerns of ordinary citizens. They have used this window of opportunity to implement extraordinarily impractical and outright harmful ideas because they take the unbelievable levels of safety, plenty, and freedom we enjoy in the West for granted. The one form of privilege you will never hear them address is the first-world privilege that we all benefit from every day.
They have done this because the fundamental flaw in the unconstrained model of the world is a failure to understand Thomas Sowell’s greatest maxim: there are no solutions, only trade-offs. When you let your institutions be captured by an ideology of intolerance and illiberalism masquerading as progress, that has consequences. When you sow division at home and signal weakness abroad, that has consequences. When you debase the public’s faith in what they are told by the media and their government, that has consequences too.
Western civilization has produced some of the most stunning scientific, technological, social, and cultural breakthroughs in human history. If you consider yourself “liberal” or even “progressive,” it must surely be clear by now that America and her allies are the only places in the world where your values are even considered values. If our civilization is allowed to collapse, it will not be replaced by a progressive utopia. It will be replaced by chaos and barbarism.
Will this waking-up moment persist? It depends, in large part, on our courage to look reality in the face.
As Sowell explained, “When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.”
And the truth is that we have indulged in magical thinking for too long, choosing comforting myths over harsh realities. About terrorism. About immigration. And about a host of other issues. In our hunger for progress, we have forgotten that not all change is for the better. Now the world is paying the price for that self-indulgence. Let’s hope recent events are the wake-up call we so desperately need.
Konstantin Kisin is the co-host of the podcast Triggernometry. You can read all of Konstantin’s work on his Substack.
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I believe this to be so but they are useless if they remain silent.
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84 Percent of Americans Side with Israel Over Hamas
Hill: More than 80 percent of Americans are siding with Israel amid an ongoing war against Hamas in a new Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll. The survey found that 84 percent of respondents sided more with Israel in the Israel-Hamas war, compared to 16 percent who sided with Hamas. Broken down by age, 52 percent of 18-to-24-year-olds said they sided more with Israel, while 48 percent said they sided more with Hamas. In contrast, 95 percent of respondents 65 years and older said they sided with Israel while 5 percent sided with Hamas. The survey also found that 76 percent said Hamas’s killing of 1,200 Israeli civilians could not be justified by the grievances of Palestinians, while 24 percent said it could be justified (Hill). PR Newswire: 88% of voters think Israel has the responsibility to protect its citizens by retaliating against Hamas. 84% of voters believe Israel has the right to defend itself by launching air strikes in heavily populated Palestinian areas with warnings to those citizens. 70% of voters think Israel should eliminate Hamas, not end its campaign against Hamas now. 63% of voters believe it was right for Israel to cut off power, water and food to Gaza until its hostages are returned (PR Newswire).
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Joe Biden Quietly Builds the Wall
by Noah Rothman
The border crisis has gotten so bad that the president is reviving Donald Trump’s signature infrastructure project. It sometimes seems that journalists are determined to invert cause and effect when reporting on events that frustrate or inconvenience Democratic politician
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++ From Bari Weiss:
This was scrawled outside of our offices this week.
If the anti-Semites who did this think it will intimidate me and the journalists of , they don’t know me, they don’t know us, and they have no idea what we stand for. |
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