Our Summer of Cultural Suicide
Cultural suicide used to be a popular diagnosis of why things suddenly just quit.
Historians such as Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee cited social cannibalism to explain why once-successful states, institutions, and cultures simply died off.
Their common explanation was that the arrogance of success ensures lethal consequences. Once elites became pampered and arrogant, they feel exempt from their ancestors’ respect for moral and spiritual laws like thrift, moderation, and transcendence.
Take professional sports. Over the last century, professional football, basketball and baseball were racially integrated and adopted a uniform code of patriotic observance. The three leagues offered fans a pleasant respite from daily barroom politics. As a result, by the 21st century, the NFL, NBA and MLB had become global multibillion-dollar enterprises. Read More…
Teaching Hate Under the Guise of “Inclusion”—In the U.S. Army
Nation’s Values Under Attack—We Must Do This to Stop the Left’s Socialist AgendaJul 3rd, 2020
Drew Angerer / Staff / Getty Images
Our country is under attack from radical leftists. Mobs rampage through our streets, monuments are being destroyed, and the very law and order that ensures our communities’ peace and security is being undermined.
In far too many instances, those bent on destruction have hijacked protests, creating violence and division and ultimately attacking the very foundation of our nation. For them, it’s not about resolving race issues; it’s about using racial discontent to forward their anarchist agenda.
One such group is Antifa. While it is widely recognized as a far-left fringe group, another organization—just as radical—has managed to drape itself in more mainstream clothes, gaining significant support with the public, politicians and the business community. While Americans of every color agree with the sentiment that black lives matter, Black Lives Matter (BLM) the organization actually advocates an agenda that is completely out of step with American values. Read More…
How Cultural Revolutions Die—or Not
By
Cultural revolutionaries attack the very referents of our daily lives. The Jacobins’ so-called Reign of Terror during the French Revolution slaughtered Christian clergy, renamed months, and created a new supreme being Reason.
Mao cracked down on supposed Western decadence like the wearing of eyeglasses and made peasants forge pot iron and intellectuals wear dunce caps.
Muammar Kaddafi’s Green Book cult wiped out violins and forced Libyans to raise chickens in their apartments.
The current Black Lives Matter Revolution has “canceled” certain movies, television shows and cartoons, toppled statues, tried to create new autonomous urban zones, and renamed streets and plazas. Some fanatics shave their heads. Others have shamed authorities into washing the feet of their fellow revolutionaries. Read More…
US Research Scientists Under Fire for Ties to China
National Institutes of Health recently fired dozens of scientists, mostly Asian men, for having secret financial links to Beijing
Harvard Professor Charles Lieber was formally indicted this month on two counts of making false statements to federal authorities regarding his participation in China’s Thousand Talents program and his involvement with the Wuhan University of Technology.
His arrest in January made headlines, but Lieber proved to be only a harbinger of more than 300 similar cases. All are related to US government research contract conditions and requirements, and all are now in the process of public exposure. Read More…
NBC Tries and Fails to Wreck a Conservative Website. Here’s Why It’s Deeply Problematic.
By Jarrett Stepman
If you value a robust media offering a variety of voices, you should be troubled by a chilling incident that occurred this week.
Citing the work of two foreign-based activist groups, NBC News reported Tuesday that Google would demonetize a conservative news and opinion outlet, The Federalist–meaning not allow it to carry Google Ads on its site.
Why? Because of The Federalist’s coverage of the George Floyd protests.
Later that day, Google clarified that its specific issue was the comments section below articles on The Federalist, not the articles themselves. When The Federalist removed its comments section, Google said it considered the issue resolved. Read More…
Energy Grid Supply-Chain Risks and U.S.-China Entanglement
On May 1, President Trump signed an executive order on securing the U.S. bulk-power system, aimed at limiting foreign influence in the U.S. energy grid by targeting grid suppliers potentially compromised by those adversary governments. The bulk-power system, made up of interconnected devices that generate and transmit electricity across the country, is an especially vital component of U.S. national infrastructure. Jim Dempsey wrote an informative analysis of this executive order. Dempsey places these attempts to bolster supply-chain security in broader context, linking them with recent executive branch actions against foreign telecommunications companies. But it’s also worth examining the executive order in a context specific to the U.S. energy grid and focusing on Chinese suppliers, because of the notable role Chinese firms play in the U.S. energy grid supply chain.
Rising cyberattacks threaten real-world war
When Iran cyberattacked Israel’s water supply system on April 24 and 25, it did more than just shut down computers and disrupt water system operations. The water facility attack was intended to release large amounts of poisonous chlorine into Israel’s water delivery infrastructure, potentially poisoning tens of thousands of Israelis.
Attempts to poison wells, ponds, lakes and reservoirs is nothing new and goes back to antiquity. But the attempt to release harmful amounts of chlorine from within a water supply system using a cyberattack is altogether new. Iran hit six water facilities in Israel, damaging the operating systems and disabling safety instrumentation systems. Read More…
Confronting Police Abuse Requires Shifting Power From Police Unions
By and large, police officers are heroes who put their lives on the line to protect the communities in which they live and serve. How then should we react to cases of police misconduct and brutality when they come to light?
Confronting this requires what Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey referred to as“this one, nearly impenetrable barrier, which is the union contract and the way it is set up.”
Derek Chauvin, the now-fired police officer who was arrested and charged in George Floyd’s death, had multiple complaints against him, only one of which resulted in a reprimand. Read More…
How We Get to the Bottom of the Obama White House’s Domestic Spying
By Neil Patel,
Michael Flynn did not seem to be the best choice President-elect Donald Trump could have made for his first national security adviser.
My own publication, The Daily Caller, broke the story of Flynn writing an op-ed praising Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan just before Trump’s election. The op-ed was a clear break from Flynn’s past comments criticizing Turkey for its policies toward the ISIS terrorist group.
The most troubling part was Flynn’s failure to disclose the fact that his private-sector intelligence consulting firm had just signed a lucrative contract with a company closely aligned with Erdogan before the op-ed was published. The whole thing looked a lot like a paid foreign influence campaign.
Short of some sort of crime, though, Trump could have picked anyone he wanted to be his national security adviser. Trump won the presidential election. In doing so, he won the right to put together his White House team. Read More …