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The Hunter Biden Pardon: Politics Produces Hypocrites (Or Hypocrites Produce Politics)

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Pres. Biden, son Hunter, and an inset photo of the Biden clan

Far removed from Plato’s dream of the “philosopher king”, and his notion of politics as an avocation for the wise and godly, is the harsher reality of self-dealing in politics.  Biden finally did it: he pardoned his son.  Are you surprised?  If so, stay off the cable buying channels.  Someone else should handle your finances.

Honestly, I expected Biden to do it, or arrange some deal with the incoming Trump.  Did you really expect the son to spend a dime in penalties and serve a day in jail?  The charade of high-mindedness from Biden and press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was for the sycophants and the “unwashed masses”, which is how the party of the masses actually views their masses.  My guess is that most of us aren’t shocked.

We’ve grown used to the truth of our politics: it’s long been a lucrative (as in “lucre”) career path, especially for long-in-the-tooth politicos like the Biden clan.  FDR had a well-heeled aristocratic lineage, and thus his quasi-socialism was an act of condescending patronage for the plebes.  But for LBJ, politics was his ticket out of the poverty of his Texas hill-country hardscrabble life.  He sold himself by using other people’s money to purchase other people’s loyalty.  Imagine it, using other people’s money to reward still other people, and all of it for fun and profit.  Adjusted for inflation, upon his death, he was worth $100 million, quite a haul for a coarse back-slapping politician from Texas’s version of Appalachia at the time.

1960s Pop Culture: Lyndon B. Johnson: The Most Interesting & Crazy of Them All
The “LBJ technique” of haranguing a person to get his way.

Self-interest and greed are alive and well, particularly among people whose public platform has long been a bellicose attack on self-interest and greed.  Nancy Pelosi provides another case in point.  A scion of Baltimore’s D’Alesandro political dynasty, her elevated social caste helped bring her into marital union with Paul Pelosi of the moneyed class.  Elite colleges, prep schools, etc., you get the picture.  It’s a form of social incest.  Power and money have always had a potent attraction.  You don’t need feudalism or capitalism to make it happen.  Quasi-socialism, as well as the unadorned kind, works too.

So, Nancy can regale us with the glories of a totalitarian lockdown by pointing to her $15,000 fridge filled with exotic, expensive, chic ice cream.  No run-of-the-mill Dreyer’s for this gal.  She gets her hair professionally coiffed while everyone else is shut in dealing with their zoomed children.  Like the nomenklatura of the Soviet Union, the old aristocracy was swept aside to make room for the Party aristocracy.  La noblesse oblige thrives under new labels.  The flotsam always floats to the top no matter the political scheme.

Nancy’s Vacay On Taxpayers Dime: Shows Off 2 Huge Fridges & Tons Of Ice Cream | Opinion
Nancy’s refrigerator and ice cream during the lockdowns.

These paragons of equity- and equality-mongering, of concern for the poor and “oppressed”, end up rolling in the dough.  So much so that they can no longer ravage Republicans as the party of robber barons.  For at least the last few election cycles, the Democrats have nationally outspent the GOP by around 100%, or more.  The Harris campaign had raised $2.15 billion when you add Biden’s billion in the early part of the campaign season, and still ran a $20 million debt.  Trump’s paltry $338 million, about half of it from donations $200 or less, seems like an embarrassment in comparison.

The party of government is also the party of the hyper-wealthy.  Their complaints about “money in politics” and their serial attacks on Citizens United were dropped from the Party’s talking points.  It couldn’t be sustained when the Brahmins of wealth lined up behind them.  So, the ritual excuses for the loss shifted to “misinformation” and “disinformation”.  In other words, they want to censor views and information that they don’t like.  It’s scandalous, but it’ll still has currency in Big Media.  They demand censorship and an ongoing alliance with Big Money and Big Media.  Why don’t they just come out and say it?  They want Orwell’s Ministry of Truth [propaganda] and Ministry of Love [persecution] (from Orwell’s “1984”).

They don’t realize that many of their beliefs are revolting to a large swath of the public.  There’s too much out there to turn your stomach.  Transgenderism – the idea that you can feel and think your way into another sex – is to be assisted by taxpayer dollars and forced into anything designated “woman/girl”.  The Leviathan is the strong arm for gender confusion and porn to adolescents.

They wrecked the economy, which everybody has experienced at the gas pump, utility bill, and supermarket.  As for crime, they only seek ways to facilitate it, not combat it.  People look around themselves and see disorder, filth, and violence.  Who wants to raise their kids in that?

The fact is, they suffer the disadvantage of their own minds.  Fewer want what they’re selling.  It doesn’t take a genius to roll out the videotape.  And they gaslight us by calling it “disinformation” and “misinformation”.  They demand that campaigns keep it airy, abstract, filled with generalities.  “Joy”, joy about what?  Trump is Hitler, and it’s the end of “our democracy”.  When you confront them with their own statements and actions, they demand a Ministry of Truth.  Who’s the real danger to democracy?

Here’s the truth: big government breeds big money in politics which breeds more big government.  More big government breeds more lucrative avenues for the unproductive, people who produce nothing but the myriads of ways to take money and opportunity from one group and give it to their voting blocks.  Now that’s the real scandal.

In all of this self-dealing, is there any wonder that they save their own from the hoosegow?  That’s a minor matter compared to what they have in store for the rest of us.

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RogerG

Sources:

1. Charles C.W. Cooke’s piece in National Review provides some insight into the scam that is our politics: “The Misinformation Racket”, 11/21/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2025/01/the-misinformation-racket/

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The 1990s Mass Psychosis

McMartin Preschool Trial on emaze
The child sexual abuse mania that began in 1984 but would stretch into the 1990s

“Against stupidity we have no defense. Neither protests nor force can touch it. Reasoning is of no use.  Facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved -indeed, the fool can counter by criticizing them, and if they are undeniable, they can just be brushed aside as trivial exceptions.” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“All one’s neighbours [sic] are in the grip of some uncontrolled and uncontrollable fear. . . In lunatic asylums it is a well-known fact that patients are far more dangerous when suffering from fear than when moved by rage or hatred.” — Carl Jung

Was there something in the water during the 1990s?  Episodes of mania abounded.  Looking for causes, Bonhoeffer emphasizes a stubborn belief in things that aren’t true, a kind of stupidity.  Jung looked to the role of fear in animating a broad sense of hysteria.

Either way, certain periods of history seem susceptible to a kind of mass psychosis.  The 17th-century Salem Witch Trials were but one example.  Throughout the Reformation period, executions by burning at the stake were frequent except in the 16th-century Dutch Republic and northern Poland-Lithuania, so much so that one historian referred to the two as “state[s] without stakes”.  The climate-change frenzy of today is only the latest episode in the recurring epidemics of madness.  Though, the 1990s, for whatever reason, exhibited multiple occurrences.

From the 1980s into the 1990s, across the country from California to Florida, child day-care was allegedly and suddenly plagued with the most fantastical charges of child sexual abuse.  Janet Reno rose to fame from Florida DA to Bill Clinton’s Attorney General, and then her oversight of the Branch Davidian siege and inferno in Waco, riding her “Reno method” to secure many false child-abuse convictions, alongside ruined lives, numerous lawsuits, and subsequent legal judgments that nearly bankrupted many guilty local jurisdictions (see #1).  It was a disaster all around.

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he PBS website for “The Child Terror” which chronicled the frenzy about child sexual abuse at day care centers
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Janet Reno, Florida DA and US Attorney General, a key figure in child-abuse mania and the Waco inferno
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The inferno at the Branch Davidian compound outside Waco in 1993

Then in 1996 during the Atlanta Summer Olympics came the Centennial Olympic Park bombing.  Security guard Richard Jewell was turned from hero to goat by the FBI’s fixation on him as the culprit, all recounted in Clint Eastwood’s 2019 film, “Richard Jewell” (see #2, #3).  In this case, a powerful institution fell under the spell of the “somebody within” trope to single-mindedly focus on Jewell, going so far as claim that he was afflicted with a mysterious “hero syndrome” (or complex), hounding him and placing his life under a microscope only to discover the real offender a couple of years later.  Organizations can suffer from a self-imposed group myopia among its “professionals”.

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Credentials and training don’t immunize a person from half-baked notions taken as truth.  Today, we see entire professional associations oblivious to the necessity of a block-chain of evidence that ties it to a relevant conclusion, the essence of science.  Instead, we’ll see them endorse the fashionable ideas of many of their broader demographic peers and stubbornly persist in logical quicksand.

Then we have the JonBenet Ramsey murder case from 1996.  The phenomenon repeats itself. Netflix has brought the incident to light in “Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey?”.  Watching all three episodes makes clear that the treatment of the case by law enforcement has much in common with the 1990s’ day-care child abuse mania and the Jewell persecution.  The case had gone cold because of the time wasted by Boulder PD detectives on a preoccupation with the parents, one or both, as the killers.  If that wasn’t enough, the media played along in wild speculations about the family as they were fed derogatory leaks in order to intimidate the Ramseys into confessions.  Delinked from empirical evidence, CBS’s “60 Minutes” went on a wild ride to blame JonBenét’s older brother only to suffer at the wrong end of a lawsuit.

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On Netflix

Similarly, after a few years, the Boulder PD’s lead detective on the case tried to make another kind of killing by writing a book that tried to accomplish what the Boulder DA and PD couldn’t in a court of law: pin blame on the parents.  Like the 60 Minutes’ smearing of the brother, this too ended in a lawsuit with the author and publisher penalized with a sizeable award for the Ramseys.

Don’t think for a moment that we have progressed beyond these barbarities of a few decades ago.  Remember the 2020 summer of riots fueled by a noxious, mysterious, hidden, and unconscious racism?  What of transgenderism and the assertion that one can feel or think themselves into another sex, all assisted by the rhetorical hocus-pocus of “sex-at-birth” and the invention of a separation of gender from sex?  It’s hard to imagine a greater child abuse than placing our children under its spell and sanctioning chemical and surgical interventions and transgender mind manipulation.  Welcome to the Island of Dr. Moreau (see H.G. Wells’s story)

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The 2020 George Floyd riots in Portland, Ore.
George Floyd protests: crowds gather in Washington, DC
Protest in Washington, D.C., June 2020, against “racism”

MAGA has its own fancies.  Tariffs are seen as a ticket to national prosperity. They want America to be great again while abandoning Eastern Europe to Putin.  Reunionizing the workforce to gain the political allegiance of union bosses and boasting of a return to fiscal sanity while avoiding the trainwrecks of the entitlements (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, half the federal budget) is proof that Alice isn’t alone in her Wonderland.  They like armies and navies so long as we don’t do anything with them.  It doesn’t get much more insane than this.

There’s more.  Climate change has the same popular pull as were charges of heresy for the Spanish Inquisition.  Think about it.  To get from a gradual increase in atmospheric temperatures to herding everyone into electric vehicles and the experiences of blackouts and bankrupting utility bills requires the hasty conclusion that humans are bringing an end to Gaia.  The empirical relationship between the apocalyptic hucksterism and warmer weather is, to put it kindly, shaky.

Will any of the so-called remedies do any good?  For every 100 electric cars sold in California, China is building a new coal-fired electricity plant.  Ditto for India.  Any estimates of climate improvement from the bankrupting of the California population are nothing but proof that 17th-century witchcraft is alive and well.  Yet here we go with Biden bringing California absurdities to the nation.

Three decades on, we’re still as foolish as ever.  Don’t go around holding your head high.  Mass psychosis might be in our social DNA.  Higher ed, more college degrees, greater “professionalization”, more credentials, and exuberant education spending is hardly a cure.  It’s proven to be an accelerant.  The country’s next mass mania is just around the corner.

RogerG

Sources:

1. An excellent rendition of this gross prosecutorial misconduct during the time can be found at “The Child Terror”, Frontline, PBS, at https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/terror/.
2. The Wikipedia page on “Ricard Jewell” affords a description of the basic facts.
3. “THE ‘HERO SYNDROME’”, Sergeant Ben D. Cross, Arkansas State Police, 11/1/2014, at https://www.cji.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/the_hero_syndrome.pdf
4. “Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey?”, now showing on Netflix; website at https://www.netflix.com/title/81705443

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The United States of California

Bye-bye California: More and more golden state residents are deciding to move away for good. (photo by ©SFGate)

Get ready. Buckle up.  The dysfunction of California is about to become the dysfunction of the United States.  Take a look at a red/blue county or precinct election map of California and you will see what lies in store for our country (see maps below).  East of California’s Coast Range, and beyond the coastal plain from San Diego to the Bay Area, extends a vast Republican hinterland that is essentially inconsequential to the governance of the state.  The same thing awaits the huge stretch of the country between the two coasts and outside the deep blue urban bubbles that dot the landscape like islands in a vast red ocean (see maps below).  Furthermore, as urbanization proceeds apace even in solidly red states, they too will increasingly resemble the quality of governance in Chicago, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and California.  Today, urbanization is poison to good governance.

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2020 election nationally by precinct

Who’s responsible for this sorry state of affairs?  First, the people, whether in town or country.  They vote for “wrong track”.  Many believe in the impossible, such as bountiful entitlements (unreformed Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid), papering over in trillion-dollar spending bills every grand greenie scheme, a strong national defense . . . and, amazingly, low taxes and fiscal sanity.  The tooth fairy anyone?

Second, the Democrats’ base.  They are the boosters of America’s institutional socialist party, the equivalent of Europe’s Social Democrats.  Well, let’s just call them the Social Democrats.  And third, the Republicans’ base.  They are in the grip of a psychotic personality disorder, one that emotes in bouts of vengeance, and will blindly follow the person who best captures their sense of resentment and defiance.  The result is a competitive socialism and a broad and chronic sense of post-election disappointment.

The “people”, both in their party’s primaries and in the general electorate, choose failure.  Let’s not be puerile in blaming somebody else: “elites”, “establishment”, academia, the media, or some other nebulous cabal of the beautiful and hyper-wealthy-and-powerful.  We did it; we chose it; we continue to choose it.  Period.

Low-information voter

In more sensible times, the Democrats’ socialism should write them off as an electoral joke.  Instead, they’re competitive.  It’s much more than the wind in their sails from their much larger stable of lefty zillionaire donors and left-wing academic/media commissars who occupy the commanding heights of the culture.  Sometimes, your greatest strength arises from your opponent’s weakness.  And lately, to the great joy of the donkey party, the GOP base has decided to go bonkers.

The evidence of the Republican voters’ mental incapacity lies in a Democrat Senate (51-49) and their poor showing in the last four national elections in 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2022. 2016 was a squeaker (No, DJT, you didn’t win by a “lot”.) with a Republican Senate narrowed to a two-seat majority.  The 2018 midterms saw our Social Democrats capture the House.  2020 was a Trump loss and a Social Democrat Senate.  Then, we had the 2022 midterms.  Inflation gripped the country; the national debt exploded; many of our urban spaces are violent open sewers; a totalitarian COVID shutdown destroyed our economy and public schools; our educational system is a mess; housing and energy are out of reach; appeasement foreign policy has made a comeback; the Kabul humiliation; boys are taking over girls’ sports; and a new Axis is turning the international scene into something that resembles our urban spaces.  2022 was supposed to be a red wave but became a desultory mist with a paper-thin Republican House majority that is both ungovernable and too busy neutering itself.

It’s a personality type that seems to attract Republican voters today like moths to a light; that and the endorsement of their new avatar, Donald Trump.  The precursor to MAGA was the Tea Party bursting on the scene in 2009.  Within Republican ranks, a feistiness was brewing which gave us 2010 Senate candidacies of, for example, Sharron Angle in Nevada and Christine O’Donnell in Delaware (the so-called “witch”) who went down in flames.  Republican voters had more electable choices at the time – including a former Delaware governor – but favored the fiery type so long as they showed sufficient belligerence.  The general election results of that year and following, however, were dismal.

National Donors Keep Tea Party Losers Angle, O'Donnell on Political Stage | Fox News
Sharon Angle (l), Christine O’Donnell

Nonetheless, a truculent streak survived to remain a big part of the GOP base’s psychological profile.  It’s attractive to them but not much to anyone else.  But 2016 seemed to confirm their “wisdom” in the surprising Trump victory.  They probably thought that the rest of the country was now onboard with their war against “the establishment”.  And then along came 2018, 2020, and 2022, and repeated letdowns for the party. 2024 may yet prove to be a replay of 2022, or worse, and proof of the old definition of insanity falsely attributed to Einstein: “Insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting ….”

In 2022, we saw Trump endorsements in key competitive races go down in flames: Kari Lake (Az.), Herschel Walker (Ga.), Dr. Oz (Pa.), to name a few.  Trump’s pugilistic refusal to accept defeat in 2020 paved the way for Georgia to be represented by two socialists in the Senate.  Think of that: Republican governor Brian Kemp – the one who wouldn’t kowtow to Trump’s 2020 election rantings – sailed easily to victory as Walker succumbed to the Social Democrat Raphael Warnock.  Even in Georgia, cantankerousness and an “outsider” status aren’t appealing attributes once we leave the tight confines of a party primary.  It’s a lesson that today’s GOP base stubbornly refuses to learn.

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The GOP base enthusiastically walks into the Social Democrats’ field of fire as the socialists throw money behind the most MAGA-like candidate in the Republican primary.  The Social Democrats know something that Republican voters willfully ignore: pugilism in a candidate may whip up primary voters but is an advantage for the opposition in the general election.  Funny thing, the Republican base wants Trumpiness and the Social Democrats are happy to accommodate them.

It is for this reason that socialism is competitive.  Social Democrats get away with hiding their neo-Marxist roots – don’t expect their ideological soul mates who dominate our media to spill the beans – while Republicans continue to ignore reality.  The Social Democrats know how to muzzle their cranks in election season.  The GOP gives theirs a bullhorn.

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So, expect more boosterism for a culture of death (abortion unrestrained, euthanasia), drug legalization, fiscal stupidity, increasing dependency on public assistance, a dilapidation of national defense, the weight of the Leviathan behind teenage genital mutilation and XY “girls” in women’s spaces, a furtherance of the official pogrom against white males, and the world around you turning to crap.  Much of it can be laid at the feet of Republican primary voters for refusing to present viable alternatives.

When candidates like a stroke victim (John Fetterman) and a mentally addled senior citizen (Joe Biden) consistently best MAGA darlings (Dr. Oz, Trump, Lake, etc.), it’s proof that something has gone awry, not with the “system” or the “establishment”, but with the base.  In other words, Republican voters are making it easy for the USA to become USC – no, not that USC, the United States of California.  California is the template for the entire country, with its dysfunction, greenie totalitarian utopianism, fiscal insanity, flood of refugees fleeing the dysfunction, its feudal society of a shrinking middle class and burgeoning poor amidst the super-rich behind their manor walls.

And watch after this election for the “wrong track” number to hit the stratosphere.  The Social Democrats’ base is brainless for its belief in the impossible, such as a prosperous socialism.  The Social Democrats in their base are firmly committed to oxymorons.  For their part, the Republicans are impervious to simple campaign arithmetic.

Welcome to the United States of California.  Yuck!

A man walks along a section of Union Pacific train tracks in downtown Los Angeles.
A man walks along a section of Union Pacific train tracks in downtown Los Angeles. (photo: Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

RogerG

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The Attempted Assassination of Trump and the Left’s Legacy of Political Violence

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This piece has little to say about the Trump shooter, simply because we know so little.  It’s about the common threads of political violence and murder in the history of the last century and a half.

Violence as a means of political expression has come and gone only to return.  The mobs of ancient Athens and other Greek poli were legendary.  The 11th century’s Islamic Order of Assassins is renowned.

Starting in the late 19th century, political murder, assassinations, the targeting of prominent leaders, appeared with greater frequency.  By the first few decades of the of the 20th, the collective action of gangs and mobs reemerged alongside the more targeted approach to killing.  Something entered our political bloodstream to make political discourse incendiary from the late 19th century on.  The attempted assassination of Donald Trump could be another episode in this sorry state of affairs.

The chronicle of political murder beginning in the late 19th century is startling.  The incidences increased with the rise of revolutionary reformist movements of the anarcho-socialist-communist bent. Russian Czar Alexander II was assassinated in 1881 by killers of the Narodnaya Volya (“People’s Will”), a collection of revolutionary socialists.  Then, entering the 20th came a string of killings.  The Russia of this period was a breeding ground for them.  Aleksandr Ulyanov, the brother of Lenin (real name: Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov), was executed in 1887 for his involvement in a plot to kill Czar Alexander III.  In 1911, the reformist prime minister Pyotr Stolypin was murdered by another of those revolutionary socialists of the time.

Unrest, plots, and assassinations continued apace till the stresses of World War I provided opportunities for the most radical and violent of the revolutionary socialists, the Bolsheviks, to seize power in Petrograd in 1917 and eventually exterminated Czar Nicholas and his entire immediate family, including retainers, in July 1918: Nicholas, wife Alexandra, their 4 daughters of Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and the young heir Alexei.  Others of the extended family soon followed.  Under the rule of a string of communist general secretaries, the now USSR was plagued with purges, a gulag archipelago, mass executions, and thousands of the singular quiet variety in the basement of secret police headquarters in the Lubyanka, Moscow.  It’s state-sponsored political violence on a mass scale.

The king of Greece, George I, was murdered in the streets of Thessaloniki in 1913.  13 years before, the king of Italy Umberto I was assassinated by an anarcho-socialist in Monza, Italy.  One year after the king of Greece succumbed, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and wife Sophie were murdered in Sarajevo by a greater-Serbia nationalist.  All suffered at the hands of fanatics of some abstract reformist better world, most frequently of one brand of revolutionary socialism or another.

Presidents Garfield (1882) and McKinley (1901) experienced a similar fate at the instigation of a similar cast of characters.  From the 1880s on, anarcho-socialists targeted business leaders and successfully bombed Wall Street in 1920 killing 40 and injuring 143.  Reaching down to the middle of the 20th century, JFK was killed by a loner of the same psychological profile as Gavrilo Princip (killer of the archduke and wife) or Leon Czolgosz (the McKinley assassin).  The disenchanted, alienated, radicalized, and unbalanced went after Reagan and Gerald Ford.  In the 21st, a Bernie Sanders supporter attempted the extermination of the Republican House leadership in 2017.

January 6, 2021 accorded some Trump rally attendees the opportunity to flex their collective riot muscles.  This pales when compared to the 2020 summer of riots, killings, lootings, and arson, all excused as a reaction to some indefinable, mysterious, hidden racism – the same so-called structural oppression that can be traced back to the doctrines of Narodnaya Volya and the assassination of Czar Alexander II.

Most political murders of the past century and a half coincided with a fervor for reformist schemes of a revolutionary socialist cast.  Progressivism simultaneously arose from an associated reformist zeal: the passion to construct the “progressive” state under a class of appointed “experts” to rationalize society.  For both progressives and revolutionary socialists, possession of the power of the state is the sine qua non (essential condition) for building the better world.  There’s so much at stake that, for some, murder might appear excusable.  Political violence is frequently the underbelly of reformist zeal.

Their zeal to seize the commanding heights, as Lenin put it, has led to an equally zealous attempt to stop them.  Donald Trump isn’t an idea politician.  He’s the middle finger to the establishment of those pushing the aggrandizement of state power.  Trump is a gesture politician who draws strong gestures from the opposition, who happen to be the same people already in possession of excessive reformist passion.

Up to now, the hair trigger hasn’t come from MAGA.  A century and a half of political violence shows that revolutionary socialism with its reformist zeal provides a much more consistent impetus for political killings and wide-ranging violence.  Hitler and Mussolini were as ruthless insofar as they had their own programs of upheaval to impose on their people.  Race socialism shares the same ideological DNA as the socialists’ systemic extermination of a spectral bourgeoisie, the nebulous “enemies of the working class”.  They both trade in the common currency of radical social engineering and don’t shy from radical means to achieve radical ends.

Skepticism about ending political violence is warranted so long as extremist reform movements, mostly of the anarcho-socialist persuasion (think Antifa, BLM and offshoots, CRT, etc.), occupy pride of place in one of our two major political parties.  For them, a state of expansive powers is essential to remake the world.  This extremism seldom applies the breaks to extremist actions.

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RogerG

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The Attempted Assassination of Trump and the Left’s Legacy of Political Violence

May be an image of 2 people

This piece has little to say about the Trump shooter, simply because we know so little.  It’s about the common threads of political violence and murder in the history of the last century and a half.

Violence as a means of political expression has come and gone only to return.  The mobs of ancient Athens and other Greek poli were legendary.  The 11th century’s Islamic Order of Assassins is renowned.

Starting in the late 19th century, political murder, assassinations, the targeting of prominent leaders, appeared with greater frequency.  By the first few decades of the of the 20th, the collective action of gangs and mobs reemerged alongside the more targeted approach to killing.  Something entered our political bloodstream to make political discourse incendiary from the late 19th century on.  The attempted assassination of Donald Trump could be another episode in this sorry state of affairs.

The chronicle of political murder beginning in the late 19th century is startling.  The incidences increased with the rise of revolutionary reformist movements of the anarcho-socialist-communist bent.  Russian Czar Alexander II was assassinated in 1881 by killers of the Narodnaya Volya (“People’s Will”), a collection of revolutionary socialists.  Then, entering the 20th came a string of killings.  The Russia of this period was a breeding ground for them.  Aleksandr Ulyanov, the brother of Lenin (real name: Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov), was executed in 1887 for his involvement in a plot to kill Czar Alexander III.  In 1911, the reformist prime minister Pyotr Stolypin was murdered by another of those revolutionary socialists of the time.

Unrest, plots, and assassinations continued apace till the stresses of World War I provided opportunities for the most radical and violent of the revolutionary socialists, the Bolsheviks, to seize power in Petrograd in 1917 and eventually exterminated Czar Nicholas and his entire immediate family, including retainers, in July 1918: Nicholas, wife Alexandra, their 4 daughters of Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and the young heir Alexei.  Others of the extended family soon followed.  Under the rule of a string of communist general secretaries, the now USSR was plagued with purges, a gulag archipelago, mass executions, and thousands of the singular quiet variety in the basement of secret police headquarters in the Lubyanka, Moscow.  It’s state-sponsored political violence on a mass scale.

The king of Greece, George I, was murdered in the streets of Thessaloniki in 1913.  13 years before, the king of Italy Umberto I was assassinated by an anarcho-socialist in Monza, Italy.  One year after the king of Greece succumbed, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and wife Sophie were murdered in Sarajevo by a greater-Serbia nationalist.  All suffered at the hands of fanatics of some abstract reformist better world, most frequently of one brand of revolutionary socialism or another.

Presidents Garfield (1882) and McKinley (1901) experienced a similar fate at the instigation of a similar cast of characters.  From the 1880s on, anarcho-socialists targeted business leaders and successfully bombed Wall Street in 1920 killing 40 and injuring 143. Reaching down to the middle of the 20th century, JFK was killed by a loner of the same psychological profile as Gavrilo Princip (killer of the archduke and wife) or Leon Czolgosz (the McKinley assassin).  The disenchanted, alienated, radicalized, and unbalanced went after Reagan and Gerald Ford.  In the 21st, a Bernie Sanders supporter attempted the extermination of the Republican House leadership in 2017.

January 6, 2021 accorded some Trump rally attendees the opportunity to flex their collective riot muscles.  This pales when compared to the 2020 summer of riots, killings, lootings, and arson, all excused as a reaction to some indefinable, mysterious, hidden racism – the same so-called structural oppression that can be traced back to the doctrines of Narodnaya Volya and the assassination of Czar Alexander II.

Most political murders of the past century and a half coincided with a fervor for reformist schemes of a revolutionary socialist cast.  Progressivism simultaneously arose from an associated reformist zeal: the passion to construct the “progressive” state under a class of appointed “experts” to rationalize society.  For both progressives and revolutionary socialists, possession of the power of the state is the sine qua non (essential condition) for building the better world.  There’s so much at stake that, for some, murder might appear excusable.  Political violence is frequently the underbelly of reformist zeal.

Their zeal to seize the commanding heights, as Lenin put it, has led to an equally zealous attempt to stop them.  Donald Trump isn’t an idea politician.  He’s the middle finger to the establishment of those pushing the aggrandizement of state power.  Trump is a gesture politician who draws strong gestures from the opposition, who happen to be the same people already in possession of excessive reformist passion.

Up to now, the hair trigger hasn’t come from MAGA.  A century and a half of political violence shows that revolutionary socialism with its reformist zeal provides a much more consistent impetus for political killings and wide-ranging violence.  Hitler and Mussolini were as ruthless insofar as they had their own programs of upheaval to impose on their people.  Race socialism shares the same ideological DNA as the socialists’ systemic extermination of a spectral bourgeoisie, the nebulous “enemies of the working class”.  They both trade in the common currency of radical social engineering and don’t shy from radical means to achieve radical ends.

Skepticism about ending political violence is warranted so long as extremist reform movements, mostly of the anarcho-socialist persuasion (think Antifa, BLM and offshoots, CRT, etc.), occupy pride of place in one of our two major political parties.  For them, a state of expansive powers is essential to remake the world.  This extremism seldom applies the breaks to extremist actions.

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RogerG

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The U.S., A Third-Rate Country? Part II of the Trump Verdict

Trump guilty verdict: What happened in court as judge read decision
Alvin Bragg, Manhattan DA
Who Is Justice Juan Merchan?
Judge Merchan in the so-called Trump hush-money trail

In the old parlance of the Cold War, the world was divided between a First World (the wealthy nations mostly aligned with the West), a Second World (the communist bloc), and a Third World (everyone else, mostly the poor, corrupt, and so-called nonaligned).  The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR blotted out most of the Second, leaving the First and an amorphous blob of everyone else.  As the widely recognized head of the First, the U.S. of today has willfully, not inevitably, decided to make its way down into the blob.  No better sign of the descent into the corruption thicket can be found than the recent Trump verdict.

It’s more than the political prosecution of an obscure local politician that occurs from time to time.  It’s the chutzpah to target one of highest profile figures in this important decision-making year, the chief opponent of the reigning president, and to do so on alarmingly spurious charges.  One is left to only admire the ingeniousness in crafting a malign charade out of a patchwork of legal mumbo-jumbo.  In the America of today, there’s no need for a seizure of the presidential compound and barbarous firing squads.  Just use our mountainous legal code to accomplish the same end.  The gambit is all Third World.

Let’s take a look at the travesty. It begins with a jumbled understanding of a “conspiracy” (see #1 below). In the law, a criminal conspiracy is one or more people coordinating the means to achieve an illegal objective, a crime.  Absent a criminal end, there is no conspiracy.  Think it through.  For a bank robbery, you might have three people: one to buy the masks and gun, one to drive the getaway car, and one to rush into the bank to take the money.  There are two crimes: the robbery which makes for the second crime, the conspiracy to do it.  Without the criminal objective, the disguises were for a masked ball, the driver is a chauffeur, and the third person is making a savings account withdrawal.

In the Trump saga, where’s the crime?  Non-disclosure agreements (NDA) aren’t illegal.  The bookkeeping entries for payments in the NDAs may or may not be infractions (misdemeanors), but that’s irrelevant since the 2-year statute of limitations had long since expired.  When your paramount goal is not to lose power, just use obscure laws in convoluted ways in an intensely partisan jurisdiction before an intensely partisan judge and jury to hang your opponent; and you too can have your country join the ranks of Burundi-style electioneering (in Africa, the Fund for Peace’s most unstable country).

Rest assured; they won’t let a little thing like a statute of limitations stand in the way any more than a generalissimo would.  Just magically turn the misdemeanors into felonies and therefore leap over the time limit.  The cabal needs a second crime though.  How to manufacture one?  Establish a conspiracy using the highly dubious Article 17-152 of New York’s election law which oddly defines conspiracy as the use of unlawful means to “to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office” (see #1 below).  Let that sink in.  Normally, the means become unlawful because the objective is a crime, but promoting or negatively campaigning against a person for office is not a crime.  It can’t be.  It’s the stuff of campaigns.  Bragg did not even prove an “unlawful means” for the second crime that translates the misdemeanor charges of falsifying business records into felonies.

Instead, Bragg and the judge gave the jury a choice of three unindicted possibilities (whew, think that one through): a Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) violation, hypothetical bookkeeping infractions other than the original 34, or some other tax illegality.  The whole thing is rubbish.  Bragg and a Manhattan court aren’t empowered to enforce FECA, a federal law forbidding Bragg’s, Judge Merchan’s, and a dimwitted jury’s meddling.  Regarding the other two, while keeping them silent in the indictment, Bragg and the trial court stampeded over Trump’s Sixth Amendment right to know the charges.

And then for the legal morass to work, proof of intent is still required – evidence of Trump’s state of mind to commit fraud – which Bragg never established for charges that he never indicted.  The trial and the verdict are an absolute disgrace.

Not surprisingly, Biden’s number three at DOJ, Matthew Colangelo, left in December 2022 to join Bragg’s team.  Coincidence? Call me . . . skeptical.  Who leaves a high-status DC post to be an underling to a local DA unless something else is afoot?  This stinks to high heaven.

It’s an embarrassment to the U.S. and us, its citizens.  Bragg, Merchan, and the numbskull jury made us a laughingstock to the world.  What makes our “justice” any different from the CCP’s “People’s Tribunals” to imprison or execute “enemies of the people”?  Some say democracy is messy.  No, that’s too nice.  This makes us third-rate, all of us.

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RogerG

Sources:

1. Andrew C. McCarthy’s work on the trial is invaluable in his “The ‘Other Crime’ in the Trump Trial: Conflating Ends and Means”, National Review, 6/3/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/06/the-other-crime-in-the-trump-trial-conflating-ends-and-means/

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Progressivism’s Totalitarian Streak Exposed: The Trump Verdict

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Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg (l)

What is totalitarianism?  Some described it this way: authoritarianism wants obedience; totalitarianism wants belief.  An authoritarian controls what you do; a totalitarian controls that and what you think, what’s in your head and heart.  Today’s progressivism is developing before our eyes the authoritarian means to pursue totalitarian ends.  The Trump verdict is the latest piece in this sordid puzzle.

The case is absurd.  The highly debatable misdemeanor bookkeeping violations in New York law were legally dead having gone beyond New York’s statute of limitations.  The “fraud” was Trump doing what Bill Clinton did: allegedly attempting to hide adultery.  The shame of adultery is not a crime.  Perjury is; nondisclosure agreements are not.  According to Andrew C. McCarthy on the principal Bragg allegation of fraud in the bookkeeping to hide a campaign expense, “… [a campaign] expense has to be an obligation that relates directly to the campaign and would not exist absent the campaign” (see #1 below).  This clearly wasn’t, which explains why the feds didn’t pursue it.  The 34 charges were one charge cloned 34 times to embellish this Bragg quackery.  The resuscitation of the defunct minor allegations, and the elevation of the flummery to felonies, was conjured by connecting these to a mysterious fraud in hypothetical and uncharged federal campaign finance violations or some other unknown and unproven derelictions, a clear and unmistakable violation of the Sixth Amendment’s right of a defendant to know the charges, even the hidden one used to leap over the statute of limitations and into a felony.  The judge’s behavior was egregiously partisan.  This trial and verdict have “reversible error” (overturned on appeal) written all over them.

But the dam of restraint on political prosecutions has been breached.  A hideous precedent is set.  Blue-state and blue-precinct soviets are quickly becoming the ruling norm in pockets around the country.  The template to be the target of this Beria brand of persecution (Stalin’s NKVD head: “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime”) is now established: be conservative, occupy a position of influence, be outspoken, and be a political threat to the reigning soviet, and “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime” comes into play.

Lavrenti Beria – Soviet politician - Russian Personalities
Lavrenti Beria (l) and Stalin, 1930s or 40s

Stalin only carried the title of General Secretary of the Communist Party throughout his entire tenure at the head of the country.  So, a powerful party is essential to spearhead the complete revolution in thought and action.  We have one in the Democratic Party as the ideological home for this revolution.  And now they do not shrink from Beria-like actions, rule of law be damned.

The Party is not alone in the endeavor.  Their sympathizers dominate in newsrooms, academia, much of the c-suite, the media, and entertainment, almost complete domination of the cultural commanding heights, to assist the Party in building their new order.  They’re free to sexualize your kids into transgenderism, indoctrinate them in the neo-Marxism of oppressor/oppressed, shoehorn every facet of your existence into their eco-vision, and reserve the power to force not only compliance but also love for their revolution.  And this isn’t totalitarianism in practice?

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China’s CCP only replicates what Bragg achieved before a Manhattan judge and jury in the CCP’s recent arrest and persecution of dissidents in Hong Kong.  It’d be rank hypocrisy for anyone in the donkey party to complain.  The jargon of “hatred” and “incite netizens [sic] to organize or participate in illegal activities” could have easily come out of Bragg’s or Jack Smith’s offices (see #2 below).  Our soviets in New York and Washington, D.C., have no grounds to condemn Red China’s CCP after imitating them in a Manhattan courtroom.  Beijing has “courtrooms” too.

None are safe from the drumbeat.  The conservative, original-intent majority on the Supreme Court is particularly in the Party’s crosshairs.  After decades of dominating the Court, they now want to pillory the new majority that might contest the Constitutional worthiness of the Party’s designs.  From attacks on flags to accusations of “extreme closeness to his wife” (see #3 below), the Party’s minions shower invective to silence opposing voices.  In Congress, they strive to pack the Court with fellow travelers, impeach and recuse dissenters, and extend an unconstitutional executive and legislative branch jurisdiction over the Court, anything to force the Court into conformity, like everyone else.

It’s enough to turn a Trump skeptic into a Trump supporter, if for no other reason than to stop this totalitarian trainwreck.  John Yoo of UC Berkeley’s school of law put it succinctly (see #4 below): “To limit and undo that damage and restore the rule of law, Republicans may have no choice but to respond in kind.”  In order to reestablish deterrence against this kind of behavior, the revolution’s partisans must experience the sting of a political prosecution that they enunciated.  Think of it as engendering a new respect for mutual assured destruction.  Watch out Barack Obama, Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, et al, as one red state AG or DA after another hauls you before a local grand jury and into a local criminal court before a local judge.  I can envisage criminal charges stemming from the assassination of an American citizen overseas, criminal misuse of sensitive government communications (emails), influence peddling as Vice President or acting as an unregistered foreign agent, being a middle man funneling bribes to the “big man”, inflicting harm on border communities due to willful dereliction of legally mandated responsibilities, etc.

Additionally, Republican officeholders, don’t step foot into DC, New York City, Chicago, California, any city dominated by a college campus, or any other blue bastion.  Go further.  Move all federal offices outside the reach of the Alvin Braggs and Fani Willises of the world.  If need be, Zoom it.

In the meantime, prepare for a hurricane.

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RogerG

Sources:

1. “Bragg Falsifies Business-Records Charges against Trump”, Andrew C. McCarthy, National Review, 3/23/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/03/bragg-falsifies-business-records-charges-against-trump/
2. “Hong Kong police arrest 6 people accused of violating the city’s new national security law”, Kanis Leung, AP, 5/28/2024, at https://www.abc27.com/international/ap-hong-kong-police-arrest-6-people-accused-of-violating-the-citys-new-national-security-law/
3. “New York Times Op-Ed: Does Clarence Thomas Love His Wife Too Much?”, Noah Rothman, National Review, 5/21/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/new-york-times-op-ed-does-clarence-thomas-love-his-wife-too-much/
4. “Trump’s Trial Has Already Damaged the Office of the Presidency”, John Yoo, National Review, 5/29/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/05/trumps-trial-has-already-damaged-the-office-of-the-presidency/

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This Is What College Kids in America Support

3 minutes of horror – Chilling footage from kidnapping of IDF female troops aired
Screenshot of female IDF soldiers taken captive by Hamas on 10/7

Below is raw Hamas footage of the taking of female IDF soldiers at a base near the Gaza/Israel border on 10/7.  How many of them were raped?  How many of them will survive?  It’s hard to say.

But we don’t need to see American politicians and a bunch of college kids preaching to us about “genocide” and a “ceasefire”.  The only genocide occurred on 10/7 and a ceasefire is a Hamas rescue mission.

Let’s not forget that these savages took them back into Gaza for more torture amid the cheers of Gazan spectators along the way.  The savages then hunkered down among the mostly cheerleading civilians, using the population of Gaza as one big human shield, waiting for our decrepit youth and politicians to come to the rescue.

Many of our college kids are proving themselves to be underserving of the largesse showered upon them.  They are proving that much of college is toxic.

Please watch the video.  Double click or got to youtu.be/PZRlrWHHRoU?si=bsJDjkcgHOumb3mw to see the video.

RogerG

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They’re Still Leaving as of Friday, 12/29/23

Local Moving Labor | U-Haul

In “Poltergeist II”, the little girl stares into the snow of the TV screen and announces, “They’re baaaaack!”.  Who’s back?  The ghosts, of course.  For those chronicling the decline of California, the iconic declaration must be reworked.  A person staring at their daily news feed comes away with stories of people leaving the state saying, “They’re leeeeeeeeeeaving!”  This time, it’s Time magazine in “Americans Are Fleeing Los Angeles More Than Anywhere Else for First Time” (see below).

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The little girl from “Poltergeist II”

And I quote from the story: “Los Angeles was not at the top of the list [of places to move to], instead becoming the area residents were most likely to move away from.”  According to a Redfin report, “That marks the first time on record [LA] has been the number one place homebuyers are leaving, and the first time in over two years the Bay Area has dropped out of the number one spot.”

A dubious distinction for the not-so-Golden State.  LA occupies the top spot, but the rest of the list is a who’s who of American urban dystopia, all of them Democratic Party satraps. San Francisco, New York City, Washington, D.C., Seattle, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Detroit and Denver are kryptonite to businesses and the middle class.  People are voting with their feet as they have for millennia.  Hell on earth is not a magnet.

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A common strip of homelessness in Los Angeles
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Litter from the chronic mobs of thieves along rail lines in Los Angeles

Welcome to urban America, and for the globe-trotting foreign traveler, reconsider that visit to the City by the Bay or Disneyland. Unless you’re a member of a major bowl game broadcast crew like the ESPN team reporting from the floor of the Rose Bowl, who’ll speed from the airport to hotel to the Rose Bowl in a limousine, you’ll risk face-to-face encounters with urban dysfunction.

For Californians, get out. For visitors, stay away.

business exodus people leaving california

RogerG

Source:
* “Americans Are Fleeing Los Angeles More Than Anywhere Else for First Time”, Suzanne Blake, Time, 12/29/23, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/realestate/americans-are-fleeing-los-angeles-more-than-anywhere-else-for-first-time/ar-AA1md8sC?ocid=msedgntp&pc=LCTS&cvid=483db5997a504d34a10fb00840ed94db&ei=52

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Patrice Lumumba Universities, USA

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Democratic Socialists of America banners
Pro-Hamas demonstration, NYC, Oct. 8

During the Cold War, the Soviets in their efforts to harness to their side the so-called Third World – mostly poorer, developing and nominally nonaligned countries (at least officially not tied to the western or communist bloc) – created a “university” to train the next generation of Marxist revolutionaries.  Modeled on Soviet “education”, the schooling is premised, straitjacketed, on the absolute truth of Karl Marx’s revolutionary dialectic.  Deeply implanted is the alleged Marxist reality of systemic oppression, the same kind of thing now commonplace in our schools of higher ed, and lower.

The Soviet tactic was to hide the indoctrination behind the name of a popular “hero” like Patrice Lumumba. Officially titled Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia, Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow implanted Marxist thought in the next generation of revolutionaries and activists from around the world.  Notable alumni include a long list of murderous malcontents such as the terrorist Carlos the Jackal, Iran’s totalitarian mullah Ali Khamenei, the Sandinista dictator Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, and the one-man-one-vote-one-time ruler Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority.

USSR Pictures on Twitter: "The Peoples' Friendship University 'Patrice Lumumba' in Moscow, 1985 ...
Students at Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia, 1985
Sebelum Teroris Berkedok Agama Marak, Ada Carlos the Jackal
Carlos the Jackal

The politicized heirs could include much of the college graduating classes in the U.S. going back at least a decade or two.  The Marxist-thought concept is infectious and is now established ideological orthodoxy throughout the college landscape across America.  Scholarship is bastardized by Marxist jargon, politically weighted vocabulary for which no one is allowed question.  Thought begins with the boilerplate, ends with the boilerplate.  This passes for learning in America (and elsewhere).

In a previous post, I wrote of the troubles at Bakersfield College, the Kern Community College District, and the Community College System in California.  Clearly, the intellectual rot doesn’t begin or end there.  The results are found in the polling of the under-24s.  The recent Harvard/Harris poll shows 51% of the 18-to-24 cohort supported the ending of the state of Israel and turning it over “to Hamas and the Palestinians”.  Increasingly, these people aren’t just liberal; they’re Marxist, having applied the Marxist rhetoric of oppressor and colonizer to Israel. It is what is meant by “not being liberal enough”.  Translation: being Marxist.  Welcome to America’s future.

We’d be much more honest with ourselves if we renamed all American higher ed Patrice Lumumba Universities because that is what they are.  Parents, beware, you might be subsidizing the future authors of the next holocaust.

The bodies of people, some of them elderly, lie on a street after they were killed during a mass-infiltration by Hamas gunmen from the Gaza Strip, in Sderot, southern Israel, Oct. 7, 2023. (Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad)

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RogerG

Sources:

* “Poll: Most young Americans think Israel should be ‘ended and given to Hamas’”, Toi Staff, The Times of Israel, 12/17/23, at https://www.timesofisrael.com/poll-most-young-americans-back-ending-israel-many-find-jewish-genocide-calls-okay/