Whether seen through the “5,000 years of history” narrative (which ignores scientific archaeological perspective that dates Chinese civilization to 3,500 years ago) or the professor who was suspended for dismissing China’s “four great inventions,” the demand to acknowledge “cultural superiority” is pervasive and substantial at all levels of Chinese society.

Against this backdrop, Xi Jinping’s announcement of “The Chinese Dream of the Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation” made the West realize that China had its mind set on walking a exceptional, nationalist path – one “with Chinese characteristics” — all along.

What is troubling is that China’s nationalism is ethnic-based and built upon both a thoroughly racist cultural superiority and a narrative of victimhood.  This is why Beijing consistently acts as if the feelings of the Chinese people are the only ones that matter – no one else’s in the world does.

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The Justice Department’s inspector general has concluded that, although officials of the FBI, the Justice Department, and the CIA made copious “mistakes” in their four requests to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to spy on Donald Trump’s campaign and presidency, those officials did nothing that warrants punishment.

In so concluding, Inspector General Michael Horowitz rejected the charge that those “mistakes,” including silence about the known falsehood of the supporting evidence and the omission of exculpatory evidence, had been intentional, and hence a fraud on the court.

Horowitz’s retreat into what we must now call the Comey-Clinton Crouch—detail the misdeeds, relabel them, and decline to do anything about them—means that the deep state has closed ranks.

Hence, any remedy must come from above, and must inflict rough Roman justice.

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With her announcement that Democrats will move forward and vote on articles of impeachment, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) may have signed a political death warrant for dozens of moderate Democrats elected in Trump districts.

Pelosi is speaker today because in 2018 Democrats were able to convince voters in 31 House districts Donald Trump carried two years before to defect and vote for them. Democrats need these voters to stay in their column in 2020 if they are to hold onto the House and win back the White House.

But in key swing states, large majorities of these 2018 defectors now say they plan to back Trump again in 2020, as the New York Times reported.  Now, Pelosi is adding to their woes by forcing them to vote to recommend the removal of a president that voters in their districts say they plan to reelect.

Are voters really going cast ballots to give Trump four more years and also to reelect the Democrat House members who tried to take that decision out of their hands by impeaching him?

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The Democrats’ Ukrainian impeachment gambit is backfiring on Joe Biden.

The American public often is reminded, usually by Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and their loyalists in the American news media, that Obama’s eight-year reign was “scandal-free.” Of course, that is nowhere near the truth.

From the “Fast and Furious” gun-running scam and IRS targeting of Tea Party activists to the egregious Benghazi terror attack cover-up two months before the 2012 election, the Obama Administration was among the most corrupt in U.S. history. And they have laughed all the way to Martha’s Vineyard and the Democrat presidential debate stage.

So truth-seekers should be gratified that on one day—Monday, December 9, 2019—the spin and subterfuge that the Obama White House successfully employed to hide their rampant malfeasance started to collapse under the full weight of its deceit and hubris.

Here’s what happened.

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This is to introduce to you the term Transjacking – transgender males entering and dominating women's sports at all levels, taking away opportunities that women have fought years to win.  It’s the latest effort by the Left in its war on women.

This Friday (12/06), the top four NCAA Division III women’s soccer teams face off in the national semifinals. One of the final four teams’ goalkeepers, Isa Berardo, is a male transgender playing as a female for Pomona-Pitzer Colleges.

Not surprisingly, the male goalie has dominated the field against opposing female players, giving his team a chance to win the national championship thanks to his physical advantages in a key position.

This is increasingly happening throughout women’s sports, at all levels from elementary school through professional competitions.

It needs to be called Transjacking, and it’s creating not equality, but inequality. Here are just a few of the many ways women and girls are losing to their impersonators.

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One symptom of a society in crisis is the unreliability or even corruption of its own auditors.

After all, when the watchmen have lost moral authority to watch, who can be believed or trusted? Or, as the Roman satirist Juvenal famously put it, “Who will guard the guardians?”

After FBI Director James Comey was fired, he leaked his own memos of private and confidential conversations with the president. Whether Mr. Comey would go to jail hinged on how the FBI would categorize his memos post facto — as merely “confidential,” or as “secret” or “top secret.”

Two of the adjudicators were Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, Comey friends and FBI subordinates. The FBI eventually ruled that the leaking of the memos was not felonious.  Which is why they exemplify, as do so many others, the Deep State Corruption tearing our country apart.

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Kamala Harris is no longer running for president. This is excellent, welcome news — the cause for celebration. Good riddance! May Harris’s failed attempt to find higher office destroy her career and sully her reputation for all time.

I’m told that I’m not supposed to feel like this — or, at least, that if I do feel like this, I’m not supposed to say so in public. People worked on that campaign, you see. People tried really hard. But that, I’m afraid, is a load of old nonsense.

Harris was running for the presidency, which is another way of saying that she was running to acquire power. I did not want her to have that power. It is true that some people tried their best to help her gain that power. They’re probably upset today. But they’ll get over it. She’s not that special.

On the contrary: She’s a would-be tyrant whose primary contribution to American life thus far:

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Everyone knows by now that the Russia collusion hoax was all about covering up the crimes that higher-ups in the FBI, CIA, and DOJ committed to derail the Trump candidacy and then presidency.

Robert Mueller never really investigated Trump; he knew from day one he had not colluded with any Russians to rig the election.  He knew that the Clintons and the DNC, with the willing cooperation of the alphabet agencies, all of which it seems willingly submitted to personal political agendas over national security, were guilty of inventing the deception.

Mueller's job was to find ways to obscure their coup attempt and absolve them of their treasonous crimes.  That is why the phonied-up dossier was barely mentioned in his report even though there would have been no sham investigation of Trump without it.

What scared Schiff's witness, the oily Lt. Col. Vindman, when listening in on the President's conversation with Zelensky, was the words "investigation" and "Burisma" in the same sentence – because he knows exactly who and how many swamp-dwellers have been getting illegitimately rich via Burisma.

And get ready for learning that Nancy Pelosi’s son is just as deep in Ukraine corruption as Joe Biden’s.

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Regardless of who wins in 2020, the mega-issue that drove the 2016 elections will grip the country more intensely than ever.

Between 2016 and 2020, we have been pressed as never before to bow to the ruling class’s ever-escalating demands for conformity to its whims—such as to pretend that we join them in accepting that men can be women, and women can be men, on pain of dire social and economic consequences.

Not even the monsters depicted in Darkness At Noon, in Nineteen Eighty-Four or in Animal Farm, never mind Stalin’s Soviet Union or Mao’s China, or Hitler’s Germany, ever demanded such subrational submission.

Superficially, the ruling class’s “resistance” since 2016 has focused on Trump. Our temptation to focus on fights regarding Trump has obscured the fact that their objection is to us.

The instant after the 2020 elections, whatever happens, there will be no excuse for not paying due attention to the real question: What will become of us? What can we, what must we, do for ourselves?

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Beijing’s efforts to expand its power in Central Asia by investment and cooperation with the governments in the region are currently being undercut by the reactions of Central Asian populations to China’s repression of their co-ethnics and fellow Muslims in Xinjiang.

Many members of the Central Asian nationalities currently living in Xinjiang have ancestors who escaped there after the Soviets crushed the Basmachi movement (Turkestan Liberation Organization) in the 1920s and 1930s.

But over the past several months, they have been fleeing western China in increasing numbers and, upon arrival to their ancestral homelands, telling their co-ethnics about the concentration camps that the Chinese authorities have confined them to in the hopes of “re-educating” them away from Islam and national traditions and toward Beijing’s preferred values.

The massive scale of this flight was highlighted in a recent report issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Kazakhstan.

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Prior to last week, for days Adam Schiff had concocted a pretty effective fix.

He conducted secret impeachment inquiries in the House basement. Schiff kept quiet about his rigged rules. He orchestrated selective media leaks from the opening statements of favorable witnesses and then more or less threatened with ethical violations any Republican member who copied his tactics and leaked their own often effective cross-examinations.

The result was that the public heard only from Schiff about Schiff’s damning slam-dunk hearings. A drip-by-drip melting of both Trump’s polls and resistance to impeachment followed.

Schiff emerged for brief soundbites, bit his lip, and for a minute or two regretted the tragedy of having to hear damaging testimony about his own president.

But then Schiff’s Hubris finally lured in Nemesis. So quo vadis?  Where do the Dems go marching to now?

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Next year’s Tokyo Summer Olympics may spell the swift death of the transgender movement as a dominant politically-correct touchstone.

Biological men, self-identifying as women, are poised to make a clean sweep of the Women’s Olympics, triggering a very public debate on this third-rail subject. That firestorm, pitting pro-women feminists against extreme pro-transgender progressives, will begin July 24th, just as the Presidential sweepstakes moves into its sprint to the finish line.

It could, in fact, deconstruct the entire progressive coalition. Currently, that umbrella of competing needs appears to be held together by duct tape and baling wire.

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I attended two Ivy League schools (Dartmouth and Yale) some time ago, roughly the Early Paleolithic Age, and, best as I can remember, sort of liked them.

But lately I'm beginning to think the whole elite school thing has turned into one big shuck, maybe it even was then—and not just because of the revelations of all the cheating surrounding admissions or that the institutions apparently discriminate against Asians as they did against Jews back in the day.

No, it's more basic than that. These formerly august institutions have morphed into kindergartens for jejune, virtue-signaling wannabe Trotskys and Rosa Luxemburgs (a.k.a. social justice warriors) who can't even let us watch a farshtunkene football game in peace.

In the middle of this year's Harvard-Yale game last Saturday (11/23), the great activistes spewed out onto the field to demand, what else, action on climate change—delaying the game for over an hour.  So why is there still an Ivy League?

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Any suggestion that the wide-ranging sanctions regime the Trump administration has imposed against Iran was not having the desired effect has been roundly refuted by the nationwide protests that have erupted in response to the regime's decision to increase petrol prices.

Critics of American President Donald J. Trump's announcement that he was withdrawing the US from the Iran nuclear deal last year and imposing a fresh round of sanctions against Tehran have argued that the measures would fail to have the desired effect.

They claimed that the ayatollahs would be able to circumvent the sanctions by trading with countries such as China, that remained committed to the nuclear deal.

Those arguments have now been decisively proved wrong – here’s why.

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2019 was supposed to be Hollywood’s year of Intersectional Diversity, but the handful of good films—such as Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Joker, The Irishman, and now Ford v Ferrari—keep turning out to be period pieces about straight white men made for straight white men by straight white men.

Ford v Ferrari is an instant box office smash. Matt Damon plays Texan race-car impresario Carroll Shelby (one of the more glamorous names I recall from my 1968–1970 Car Craze years), and Christian Bale is inspired as Shelby’s hotheaded English test driver Ken Miles.

Critics hate it, however, embarrassed that its opening weekend competition – the totally leftist-feminist farce Charlie’s Angels – is a complete box office flop – and infuriated that the Ford v Ferrari hit film dares to lack today’s obligatory Diversity-Inclusion-Equity (DIE).

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Watching Schiff's trumped up inquiry about nothing but a phone call, the transcript of which has been available to the public for many weeks, is like watching The Caine Mutiny (1954) without the drama.

The film is about a naval captain whose first officer relieves him of his command when the man demonstrates obvious signs of mental instability.  All that is missing from Schiff's on-air mental collapse are the little steel balls that Humphrey Bogart as Captain

Queeg fiddled with while on the stand at the court-martial of the mutineers.

Queeg was obsessed with missing strawberries.  Schiff's impending mental breakdown is demonstrably more obvious, less subtle than Queeg's.  He intends to see President Trump removed from office, no matter what.  His eyes seem to radiate his inner fury and rage.  He sits stone-faced while the smart people in the room destroy every bit of his carefully constructed narrative.

Schiff is Capt. Queeg on steroids.

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For over a decade, Moscow’s propaganda machine and its networks of agents and agents of influence have targeted Germany.

Russian narratives have played on German anger about the influx of Muslim immigrants, bolstered the political right’s hostility to change it feels threatens its values, encouraged the political left’s concerns about American influence, and inspired general unease about the consequences of the Western sanctions regime against Russia for the latter’s continuing aggression against Ukraine.

All of this has been well-documented, allowing for multiple close examinations of its impact on German domestic and foreign policies (Krym Realii, August 31, 2018; Gordonua.com, November 15, 2019; Kasparov.ru, September 27, 2014).

But now, the Kremlin is becoming involved in another “internal” German matter as part of its broader campaign to peel that country off from the West, weaken the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union, as well as expand Russian influence there and across Europe.

Namely, Moscow is actively supporting a rise of East German separatism. Over the past several weeks, three developments have highlighted this Russian political offensive:

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In December 2008, Barack Obama summarily fired every ambassador appointed by George W Bush.

The media did not care for four reasons. First, it was Barack Obama. Second, they recognized that the president controls the executive branch. Third, it was a parting shiv to Bush. Finally, it was Barack Obama.

Whether any of the ousted diplomats cried is unknown.

But now in the Trump era, as Obama-era somnambulists awake every day to a new outrage that heretofore had been considered standard operating procedure inside the Beltway, a dismissed ambassador is given hours to vent her thoughts and feelz in front of one of Capitol Hill’s most powerful committees.

If you weren’t moved by the sad tale of former Ukrainian Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch—an Obama appointee—getting the ax by Donald Trump, according to Fox News anchor Chris Wallace, you don’t have a pulse.

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Stability has always been the main promise legitimizing Vladimir Putin’s monopolization of political power in Russia.

Restoration of stability was the winning slogan for Putin in 2012, in claiming the presidency back from his pliant stand-in, Dmitry Medvedev, who had tried to experiment with modernization. And Putin’s reelection in 2018 also utilized a stability-centered propaganda campaign.

Yet, presently, this “majority” has shrunk to statistical insignificance. A recent opinion poll shows that 59 percent of Russians expect and see a need for profound changes, and 31 percent concede that at least some change is necessary (Vedomosti, November 6).

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Like it or not, the 2020 is going to be a plebiscite on an American version of Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four – a referendum far beyond Donald Trump’s record and his Democrat opposition.

The furor that Trump has incurred, and the radical antithesis to his agenda and first term, have redefined the looming election. It is becoming a stark choice between a revolutionary future versus American traditionalism.

The choice in reductionist terms will be one between a growing, statist Panopticon, fueled by social media, a media-progressive nexus, and an electronic posse.

Online trolls and government bureaucrats seek to know everything about us, in Big Brother fashion to monitor our very thoughts to ferret out incorrect ideas, and then to regiment and indoctrinate us to ensure elite visions of mandated equality and correct behavior—or else!

In other words, the personality quirks of a Trump or an Elizabeth Warren or a Bernie Sanders will become mostly irrelevant given the existential choice between two quite antithetical ideas of future America. In 2020 we will witness the penultimate manifestation of what radical progressivism has in store for us all—and the furious, often desperate, unfettered pushback against it.

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I, for one, have grown weary of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), appearing on every other talk show bloviating about Spygate, Ukrainegate, Collusiongate, and all the wrongs committed against the Trump presidency and then doing nothing to fight back other than getting his face in front of the camera.

Lindsey, do your job or get off the pot -- call some hearings, as you promised, and go for the Democrat’s jugular.

Show that passion you showed during the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh when you went on an epic rant against that bevy of Democrat presidential wannabes who were raising the politics of personal destruction as they shredded the presumption of innocence all Americas are supposed to enjoy. A short trek down memory lane via Real Clear Politics:

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What do you suppose the Alliance for American Advertising has in common with the American Association of Nurse Anesthetists, the American Society of Civil Engineers, or American Apparel and Footwear? Apart from beginning with the letter “A,” they are among the nearly 3,500 trades or firms that have dedicated lobbying operations in Washington, D.C.

And that doesn’t count the union headquarters located in D.C., from AFSCME (“We make America Happen”) to SEIU (“the nation’s most diverse union”) and beyond, they’re all there, hands out, telephones working overtime to get a little bigger slice of the government pie, made with 100 percent locally sourced materials, namely your tax dollars.

Donald Trump came to office promising to “drain the swamp.” He has made a little, mostly rhetorical, progress around the edges. But the swampiness of the swamp is deep and inveterate. He will never succeed in that stupendous sanitary engineering project until he removes the thing that attracts the swamp creatures to Washington just as a rotting carcass attracts flies and other necrophagites: centers of power and influence.

How to do it? Several people, including the president himself, have tentatively suggested a promising mechanism. Disperse the government from Washington to the heartland and beyond.

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This week, Rep. Jim Jordan was officially moved to the House Intelligence Committee, from Oversight, in order to be part of the coming public interrogations of witnesses summoned by committee Chairman Adam Schiff.

Jordan is a pit bull, exactly what the committee needs among its Republicans.  It was in Pelosi's purview to refuse Jordan's appointment, and she did not.

Hmmm.  Is it possible that even she is sick and tired of Schiff's mendacity, his secrecy, his shutout of Republican questions, his witness tampering?  He even advised "witnesses" not to answer questions from Republicans.

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"Why are Leftists so unreachable by reason? You can point out holes in their arguments but they are unmoved.  And some of their claims are entirely out of touch with reality." 

Australian John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D) of Dissecting Leftism asks and then answers the question. He suggests that "sometimes people need false beliefs to make them happy with themselves and with life.  Not everyone can face reality head-on."

Later on in his introduction to another piece he posted, he cites Freud in calling what leftists do "displacement," meaning that, in their minds, their anger is always caused by something outside of themselves, like injustice for example.  Leftists do not want to solve problems though, they want to "luxuriate" in them; they need problems to explain their anger.

These are among the several reasons why the Dems’ plot against plot if falling apart.

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What a world we live in. A confidential asset of a hyper-political CIA director, handpicked by the director to spy on the Trump White House, is now called a “whistleblower.”

All the while the mainstream propagandists gaslight us by shrieking that Trump is the corrupt one, that Trump’s ideas are destructive as the economy soars and unemployment remains at 50 year lows. When the Washington Post intones that “Democracy dies in darkness” they evince no apparent awareness of irony. They’re knifing democracy to death every single day.

In the meantime, as our constitutional republic faces the wrecking balls of the Left and is asked to endure as they smash away at every norm that has made this country great, many Republicans find themselves conveniently absent from the action.

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Let’s face it: Democrats’ embrace of thuggery over democracy is not normal.

Democrats have become the party of thuggery, from the top leaders abusing President Trump as a traitor and criminal, to the Antifa black shirts beating up Trump supporters in Democrat cities. The ginned up hysteria over Trump’s election has grown with Trump’s triumphant successes with the economy and national security.

The Democrat Party has veered far left very fast, without any pushback from within the party. Their voters have turned, seemingly overnight, from normal American citizens to a deranged mob after Trump’s blood. This weird transformation is normalized by blaming it on Trump himself, and the shock of his victory.

A moment’s reflection shows how superficial that derangement explanation is.

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This summer at a conference at a well-known university, I sat down with the head of a new institute on campus who was  blunt. “At this point, if you can’t answer yes to a basic question, nothing else counts. Doesn’t matter where you stand on taxes, foreign policy, regulations . . .”

“What’s the question?” I asked.

 “Are you ready to fight?”

“That’s it?”

“Yeah,” he replied with a shrug, “that’s it.”

The Left has been making war by other means for 50 years, changing history textbooks, peddling films that mock fatherhood and faith, designing bogus studies that show pay gaps and systemic racism.  No more compromise, no more calls for bipartisanship with them.  Now we fight.

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[Note by JW: In President Dwight Eisenhower’s Farewell Address to the nation at the end of his two-term presidency (January 17, 1961), he warned of the dangers of a new “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry”:

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

Today, military historian Victor Davis Hanson warns of the dangers of a new Military-Intelligence Complex emerging on the Left.]

****

Much has been written about the so-called Resistance of disgruntled Clinton, Obama, and progressive activists who have pledged to stop Donald Trump’s agenda.

Yet far more disturbing have been the furor of lame-duck and retired intelligence and military officers -- who compare the commander-in-chief to a fascist, declare him unfit, or dream of his “sooner the better” removal in a “Seven Days of May” plot for real.

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What does it mean after the House of Representatives — on an almost one-hundred-percent pure partisan vote, save for two Democrats who wisely demurred — decides to expand an impeachment investigation on what they claim to be serious charges when... the very next day... the stock market zooms to all-time highs, breaking records substantially on all major indexes, and black unemployment goes to all-time lows?

Well, the latter spells big trouble for the Democrats a year from now and the former means the investment world thinks impeachment is a bunch of horse hockey that will never happen (the Republican Senate will never convict Trump, not even envious Mitt) and the real news was the job figures.

And it's easy to see why both of those are true.

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More than 2 million Californians were recently left without power after the state's largest utility, Pacific Gas and Electric -- which filed for bankruptcy earlier this year -- preemptively shut down transmission lines in fear that they might spark fires during periods of high autumn winds.

Consumers blame the state for not cleaning up dead trees and brush, along with the utility companies for not updating their ossified equipment.

Californians know that having tens of thousands of homeless in their major cities is untenable. In many places, municipal sidewalks have become open sewers of garbage, used needles, rodents and infectious diseases.  These are but a few of many examples that the once-golden state has reverted to a primitive premodern age.

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The Left’s fixation on climate change is cloaked in scientism, deploying computer models to create the illusion of certainty.

Ever more convinced of their role as planetary saviors, radical greens are increasingly intolerant of dissent or any questioning of their policy agenda. They embrace a sort of “soft Stalinism,” driven by a determination to remake society, whether people want it or not—and their draconian views are penetrating the mainstream.

“Democracy,” a writer for Foreign Policy suggests, constitutes “the planet’s biggest enemy.”  Spoken like a true Stalinist.

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“I killed my parents so now I ask for mercy on the grounds that I’m an orphan.”

That's the canonical definition of chutzpah -- shameless effrontery -- and it summarizes the Democrat position on the attempted impeachment of President Trump.

The Hillary Clinton campaign paid for the Steele dossier, assembled out of bits handed to ex-MI6 spook Christopher Steele from his Russian intelligence sources, and the FBI used this concoction to obtain FISA warrants to bug the Trump presidential campaign.

Now, THAT'S foreign interference. And those facts aren't in dispute. When the Trump administration tries to get the truth out of foreign governments about their involvement in nefarious activities in the U.S., the Democrats scream, "Impeachment!"

The Wall Street Journal editors got this exactly right:

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Under Islamist strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey has become NATO’s only non-democratic nation. It’s also NATO’s only Muslim-majority member. Erdogan has been trying to re-create Turkey as a new Ottoman imperial power. He feels no allegiance to Western-style democracy.

During the Obama administration, Erdogan snubbed the obsequious American attempts to promote Turkey as the cornerstone of America’s Middle East policy. President Trump should remember that and perhaps reconsider his own sometimes appeasing outreach to Erdogan.

Turkey opposes, if not detests, almost every American ally in the region, and befriends almost every U.S. enemy.  Here are prime examples.

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The weekend raid that resulted in the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was named after Kayla Mueller, an American aid worker killed in Syria in 2015 while being held captive  and repeadedly raped by the sadistic ISIS leader.

After the U.S. confirmed Mueller’s death, President Obama issued a statement. “ISIL is a hateful and abhorrent terrorist group whose actions stand in stark contrast to the spirit of people like Kayla. No matter how long it takes, the United States will find and bring to justice the terrorists who are responsible for Kayla’s captivity and death.”

Obama, however, did not bring those terrorists to justice; nearly five years later, it was Donald Trump who made good on that promise.  Obama and his top national security officials were too busy hunting down Trump campaign aides.

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The term “derangement syndrome” has made it into everyday speech, thanks to the now-ubiquitous use of the term “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” a term coined by Esther Goldberg back in 2015. But TDS is only one of the many derangement syndromes of our time.

The British conservative author and journalist Douglas Murray made derangement a central theme of his recent book, The Madness of Crowds. Writing in the Daily Mail, Murray contends, “We are going through a great mass derangement. In public and in private, people are behaving in ways that are increasingly irrational, feverish, herd-like and unpleasant.”

In his book, Murray claims that in postmodern society’s retreat from the great narratives offered by religion, patriotism, and traditions of family and community, people have found new ideologies to absorb their passions: social justice, identity politics, and intersectionality – derangements all.

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In a difficult period for our country, everyone is let down by commentary that relies on stale talking points.

Channeling Hillary Clinton’s latest podcast eruption, some pundits have lately returned to trying to keep Trump-Russia collusion alive, so let’s go through it again.

To give the complete Trump quote, he said during the 2016 campaign. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 [Hillary Clinton] emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

In other words, a wisecrack any of us might have made playing off the insecurity of Mrs. Clinton’s email practices as well as the press’s hypocritical eagerness to traffic in Russian leaks.  Hear’s what’s really going on….

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Message from Jack Wheeler:  Before you read Angelo’s excellent analysis, here is a report I just received hours ago from my son Brandon who is with Dave Eubank’s Free Burma Rangers.

Tuesday, October 22, 2019 3:11 PM, Rojava (Syrian Kurdistan):

There is no ceasefire here - yes we were able to go and get people out 19, 20th Oct from Ras Al Ein and we thank God and you all for that but every day the Turk-supported FSA (Jihadist-ISIS mercenaries) attack SDF (Syrian Democratic Forces) positions - with the FSA / Turkish proxy force attacking SDF now 4 kilometers south of Ras Al Ein / Sari Kani - we are taking heavy machine gun fire from FSA Gun jeeps (And also They have two captured Humvee )and now there are dismounted fighters on the assault shooting at our medical team) - as we move forward to find the SDF wounded , we can’t find them yet and pray we can - we have FSA troops on three sides of us now but were able to get out and will keep trying - earlier today there were three other attacks by the FSA- there is no ceasefire here.

We were pinned down by FSA attack but got out and then carefully we infiltrated back in and around the FSA and found the wounded missing man who was crawling away- we were able to get him out and treated his wound - he survived - this is just one example -- so not a ceasefire. 22 Oct 2019 Dave Eubank and Free Burma Rangers

Thank you and God bless you , Dave

 I am asking TTPers to pray for the safety of Brandon and those with him -- JW

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Over the past several days, Americans have seen exactly how China uses access to its vast domestic market as leverage to coerce American companies thanks to a now-deleted tweet by Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey in support of Hong Kong.

“Fight for freedom. Stand with Hong Kong.” Morey tweeted.

CCTV, China’s state television broadcaster, could not have been more explicit: “We believe that any remarks that challenge national sovereignty and social stability are not within the scope of freedom of speech.”

NBA star LeBron James agreed, saying “We do have freedom of speech, but there can be a lot of negatives that come with that too.” He assailed Morey’s pro-Hong Kong tweet as “misinformed and not educated.”

Not all athletes agree, but far too many in business with China have made their loyalties crystal clear; and that is par for the course when it comes to dealing with Beijing’s authoritarian regime. It also does not even begin to describe the scope of the threat posed by the Chinese government and Communist Party.

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