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Mint Press on United Against Nuclear Iran, yet another neocon advocacy group.

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Mint Press dissects United Against Nuclear Iran, a neocon advocacy group that clearly wants to destroy Iran because of its hostility toward Israel. These are excerpts. As usual with neocon groups, the money and most of the work is performed by Jews but they recruit a lot of sympathetic non-Jews, like Jeb Bush, in order to diffuse the reality that it is a pro-Israel organization. The entire article is well worth reading.

By Alan McLeod

CONFLICTS AND CONFLICTS OF INTEREST

For such a large, well-financed, and influential organization filled with senior officials, United Against Nuclear [UANI] Iran keeps its funding sources very quiet. However, in 2015, Clifton was able to obtain a UANI donor list for the 2013 financial year. By far and away, the largest funders were billionaire New York-based investor Thomas Kaplan and multibillionaire Israeli-American casino mogul Sheldon Adelson.

Kaplan, whose $843,000 donation supplied around half the group’s 2013 funding, is a venture capitalist investor concentrating on metals, particularly gold. He is the chairman of Tigris Financial and the Electrum Group LLC. Both of Kaplan’s firms employ UANI CEO Mark Wallace as CEO and COO, respectively.

A 2010 Wall Street Journal article titled “Tigris Financial Goes All-in on Gold” noted that the company had bet billions of dollars on the price of gold rising, more than the reserves of the Brazilian central bank. As Clifton has noted, both Kaplan and Wallace have marketed gold to clients as the perfect commodity to hold if there is increased instability in the Middle East. Therefore, both Kaplan and Wallace stand to make massive sums if the U.S. or Israel were to attack Iran, making their UANI warmongering a gigantic and potentially profitable conflict of interest.

Adelson provided the majority of the rest of UANI’s funding. The world’s 18th-richest individual at the time of his 2021 death, the tycoon turned his economic empire into a political one, supporting ultraconservative causes in both the United States and Israel. Between 2010 and 2020, he and his wife donated more than $500 million to the Republican Party, becoming GOP kingmakers in the process. He would often vet Republican presidential candidates at his casino in Las Vegas, and it was often said that this “Adelson Primary” was almost as important as the public one.

An ardent Zionist, Adelson bankrolled numerous pro-Israel lobby projects, such as AIPAC, One Jerusalem and Taglit Birthright. He also owned Israel Hayom, the country’s most-read newspaper, with 31% of the national share. Relentlessly pro-Netanyahu, it was said that the Israeli prime minister asked his friend Adelson to set up a newspaper to help his political career.

Adelson and his influence have been one of the driving forces of American hostility towards Iran. In 2013, during a conversation with Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, he called for the United States to stop negotiating and drop a nuclear bomb on Iran to show that “we mean business.”

A potential third, even more controversial, source of funding is the Gulf monarchies of Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Leaked emails show UANI officials soliciting support from the Emirati royal family. Both Mark Wallace and Frances Townsend, for example, emailed the Emirati Ambassador to the U.S. detailing cost estimates for upcoming events and inquiring about support from the UAE.

Thomas Kaplan himself is extraordinarily close to the nation. “The country and the leadership of the UAE, I would say, are my closest partners in more facets of my life than anyone else other than my wife,” he told the Emirati outlet, The National News, which also detailed his friendship with Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed.

Thomas Kaplan chats with UAE monarch Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed
Thomas Kaplan chats with UAE monarch Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed. Credit | Brunswick PR

PUTTING IRAN IN THE CROSSHAIRS

One of United Against Nuclear Iran’s primary activities, Iranian political commenter Ali Alizadeh told MintPress, is to create a worldwide “culture of fear and anxiety for investing in Iran.” The group attempts to persuade businesses to divest from the Islamic Republic and sign their certification pledge, which reads as follows:

The undersigned [Name], the [Title] of [Company] (the “Company”), does hereby certify on behalf of the Company that until the Iranian regime verifiably abandons its drive for nuclear weapons, support for terrorism, routine human rights violations, hostage-taking, and rampant anti-Americanism as state policy, that neither the Company nor any subsidiary or affiliate of the Company, directly or through an agent, representative or intermediary.”

One corporation that UANI targeted was the industrial machinery firm Caterpillar. UANI hectored the firm, even erecting a roadside billboard outside its headquarters in Peoria, IL, insinuating that they were aiding Iran in constructing a nuclear weapon. Caterpillar quickly ordered its Iran projects terminated. Wallace took heart from his group’s victory and warned that other businesses would be targeted.

United Against Nuclear Iran
A billboard erected by United Against Nuclear Iran near Caterpillar’s Illinois headquarters. Photo | United Against Nuclear Iran

These have included French companies such as Airbus and ​​Peugeot-Citroen, who were threatened with legal action. In 2019, UANI earned an official rebuke from the Russian Foreign Ministry for attempting to intimidate Russian corporations trading with Tehran. “We think such actions are unacceptable and deeply concerning,” said Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova. “Attempts to pressure and threaten Russian business … are a follow-up on the dishonorable anti-Iranian cause by the U.S. administration,” she added, hinting at collusion between the government and the supposedly non-governmental organization.

Some of UANI’s campaigns have been markedly petty, including pressuring New York City hotels to cancel bookings with Iranian officials (including then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad) visiting the city on United Nations business. Others, however, have been devastating to the Iranian economy, such as the SWIFT international money transfer terminating its relationship with Tehran, cutting the country off from the global banking system.

On UANI’s actions against businesses, Freeman said: “It’s effective, and (in some cases, at least) it’s to the detriment of the people of Iran; it’s to the detriment of these companies; and it’s to the detriment of peace in the region.”

While the group presents itself as against a nuclear Iran, UANI was strangely opposed to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — the deal between Iran and the West that limited the former’s nuclear technology research in exchange for sanctions relief from the latter. [Not so strange. UANI et al. want Iran destroyed.] As MintPress reported at the time, UANI spent millions on T.V. advertisements trashing the agreement. As Wallace noted, “We have a multi-million-dollar budget, and we are in it for the long haul. Money continues to pour in.”

 After the JCPOA was signed, UANI hosted a summit attended by senior Israeli, Emirati, and Bahraini officials, touting its failures. Once UANI’s John Bolton was named Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor, he persuaded the president to withdraw entirely from the deal. Bolton has deep connections to the Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), an exiled Iranian political group widely identified as a terrorist organization. He has, for some time, considered them a government in waiting after the U.S. overthrows the current administration. “Before 2019, we will celebrate in Tehran,” he told the group in 2018, predicting that, with him at the helm, the Trump administration would soon cause the downfall of the Iranian government.

Bolton has long been a hardliner on regime change. “To stop Iran’s bomb, bomb Iran,” read the title of his 2015 New York Times op-ed. Yet this appears to be the dominant position at UANI. In March, Ross published an article in The Atlantic headlined “Iran needs to believe America’s threat,” which demanded that the U.S. “take forceful action to check Tehran’s progress toward a nuclear bomb.” Failure to do so, Ross claimed, would provoke Israel to do so itself – a “much more dangerous scenario,” according to him. Yet only two years previously, Ross called on the U.S. to “give Israel a big bomb” to “deter Iran,” noting that the “best way” to stop the Iranian nuclear program was to supply Israel with its own nukes, thereby taken as a given that Iran was indeed pursuing nuclear weapons itself (a highly questionable claim at the time) and ignoring Israel’s already existing 200+ stockpile of nuclear missiles.

“It doesn’t seem like UANI ever really took seriously the possibility of a diplomatic means to constrain Iran from continuing to increase its enrichment levels and moving towards a nuclear weapon,” Clifton told MintPress. “As a matter of fact, they generally fought tooth and nail against the JCPOA. They are eager to push the United States toward confrontation with Iran using the possibility of Iranian nuclear weapons as a reason,” he added.

…

UANI’s funders certainly also have extensive connections to Israel. Kaplan is the son-in-law of Israeli billionaire Leon Recanati and is said to be close with Prime Ministers Naftali Bennet and Yair Lapid. He has also employed a number of Israeli officials at his businesses. An example of this is Olivia Blechner, who, in 2007, left her role as the Director of Academic Affairs at the Israeli Consulate General in New York to become Executive Vice-President of Investor Relations and Research at Kaplan’s Electrum Group – a rather perplexing career move.

Adelson, meanwhile, was given what amounted to an official state funeral in Israel, one that even Prime Minister Netanyahu attended. He was buried on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem – one of the holiest sites in Judaism and an honor that very few figures receive.

A NETWORK OF REGIME CHANGE GROUPS

While United Against Nuclear Iran is already a notable enough organization, it is actually merely part of a large group of shadowy non-governmental groups working to cause unrest and, ultimately, regime change in Iran. These groups all share overlapping goals, funders and key individuals.

One example of this is the Counter Extremism Project (CEP), a non-profit that purports to exist to “combat the growing threat posed by extremist ideologies.” Yet the group focuses largely on Islamist extremism – and only those groups that are enemies of the U.S., Israel and the Gulf Monarchies (about whose extremism and violence the CEP has nothing to say). Ten members of the CEP’s leadership council are also on UANI’s board, including Wallace, who is CEO of both organizations.

Another group headed by Wallace is the Jewish Committee to Support Women Life Freedom in Iran. This organization claims to be focused on improving women’s rights in Iran. It very quickly, however, divulges that this is a vehicle for regime change. On its homepage, for example, it writes:

These freedom fighters continue with no sign of relenting on their calls for regime change. Calls for “Woman Life Freedom” and the removal of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei echo from rooftops, down street corridors, across campus hallways, and on government billboards. These brave Iranians have expressed their hatred for the ruling clerics not only in their words, but in their actions.”

Seven members of the Jewish Committee to Support Women Life Freedom in Iran’s steering group – including Wallace and Kaplan – also lead UANI.

…

Kaplan is well-known as a conservationist. However, his group, Panthera, which works to preserve the world’s 40 known species of big cats, has also been accused of being a secret regime change operation. Panthera has a number of UANI officials on its board or conservation council, including Wallace and Lamb (the ex-director of U.K. Special Forces and Commander of the British Army). Also on the council are Itzhak Dar, former Director of the Israeli Secret Service, Shin Bet, and General David Petraeus, former CIA Director and Commander of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.

In 2018, Iranian authorities arrested eight individuals working with Panthera inside the country. All eight were convicted of spying on behalf of the U.S. and Israel. While many in the West decried the trials as politically motivated, any organization led by these figures is bound to cause suspicions.

This is especially the case as Wallace is also a founder of PaykanArtCar, an organization that attempts to use art to, in its words, “advocate for the restoration of human rights and dignity for all in Iran.” All three team members of PaykanArtCar also work at UANI.

The final group in this Iran regime change network is the International Convention for the Future of Iran. Set up by Wallace himself, the organization’s website explains that it exists to “end the repression of the regime and bring true change to Iran.” Further purposes are to “connect the Iranian opposition in exile [i.e., the MEK] with policymakers in the United States and internationally” and to “offer program grants and technical support” to groups working to overthrow the government. However, judging by the lack of updates and the group’s Twitter profile having only 31 followers, it appears that it has not had much success achieving its goals.

In short, then, there exists a network of American NGOs with the mission statements of helping Iran, opposing Iran, preserving Iran, and bombing Iran, all staffed by largely the same ex-U.S. government officials.

…

But United Against Nuclear Iran is eager to escalate the situation to a vastly greater level [than the present sanctions regime], urging Washington to attack a well-armed country of nearly 90 million people, erroneously claiming that Iran is behind every Hamas or Hezbollah action. “This is not a nuclear non-proliferation organization” Clifton said, noting that there are plenty of genuine already existing peace and environmental groups worried about nuclear weapons that either supported the JCPOA or said it did not go far enough. “Their focus is more on working towards regime change in Iran rather than actually supporting efforts that might prevent Iranian nuclear weapons,” he added.

IF UANI gets its way, a conflict with Iran might spark a Third World War. And yet they are receiving virtually no pushback to their ultra-hawkish pronouncements, largely because they operate in the shadows and receive virtually no public scrutiny. It is, therefore, imperative for all those who value peace to quickly change that and expose the organization for what it is.

Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017, he published two books, Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles. He has also contributed to FAIR.org, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, and Common Dreams.

The Next Million Fentanyl Deaths are on You, New Hampshire

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The Next Million Fentanyl Deaths are on You, New Hampshire

Do you care about fentanyl, New Hampshire? Every year, more than 400 of your fellow Granite Staters die from drug overdoses, mostly from fentanyl.

      Nikki Haley promises to keep the fentanyl pipeline open.

You can’t have missed it — she says it at every speech, debate, town hall, roundtable, meet-and-greet, TV interview and casual conversation:

— “We have to kick this where it starts. And that means you go to China and say, ‘We will end all normal trade relations with you until you stop killing Americans.’ We have to be that firm, we have to be that tough.”

— “As president, I will push Congress to revoke permanent normal trade relations until the flow of fentanyl ends. If China wants to start normal trade again, it has to stop killing Americans.”

— “And we will go to China and say, ‘We’re going to end all normal trade relations with you until you stop murdering Americans with fentanyl.’ You watch how fast they fix that.”

Literally none of our fentanyl comes from China. One hundred percent of the fentanyl in this country is made in Mexico and brought in from Mexico. A border wall would end the flow of fentanyl (and opioids and meth) to our country tomorrow. In fact, a wall is the only thing that will end the fentanyl crisis.

But Haley will be damned if she’ll mention Mexico within 50 miles of the word “fentanyl.” Might remind Americans of our wide-open border (which she intends to keep wide open). Fentanyl could walk in wearing a sombrero, trailed by a mariachi band, and Haley would still say it’s from China.

If you care about fentanyl deaths, this is worse than forgetting slavery when talking about the Civil War.

Back in 2015, China did supply fentanyl to the U.S., selling it on the dark web and sending it through the mail. That ended in April 2019, when the Chinese government agreed to ban all forms of fentanyl and fentanyl-related substances.

You’d think international chess player Haley would know that. As reported by the U.N. at the time: “April 2019 — China: Announcement to place all fentanyl-related substances under national control.”

Over the next few years, China worked directly with U.S. law enforcement to stamp out the fentanyl trade — sentencing traffickers in PRC courts, seizing a “high number” of precursors bound for the Western Hemisphere, and allowing the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency to open offices throughout China.

That’s why, today, instead of overnight mail envelopes from China, fentanyl comes to the U.S. by truck from Mexico.

The Congressional Research Service has repeatedly confirmed that since the 2019 ban, “the direct shipment of fentanyl and fentanyl-related substances from China to the United States went down to almost zero.” Similarly, Sam Quinones writes in The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth: “China’s role as a provider of illicit fentanyl faded.”

Contrary to global expert Nikki, China isn’t even selling fentanyl precursors to the cartels anymore. At most, Chinese companies are sending them pre-precursors, i.e., chemicals that have other legitimate uses, such as in agriculture and manufacturing. These are substances that aren’t illegal anywhere.

The second biggest supplier of fentanyl pre-precursors is India. How about cracking down on all those Indian immigrants, Nikki?

With her vast knowledge of foreign affairs as student council representative at the United Nations — only Haley seems to think the U.N. is a serious organization — she is apparently unaware that we already have cracked down on China for its involvement in the fentanyl trade.

No reporter ever calls her on it, presumably because they’re as ignorant as she is.

Even if China were still in the business of providing Mexican drug cartels with the precursors, aren’t the cartels maybe a little more to blame? You know — the ones manufacturing fentanyl, packaging it and sneaking it across the U.S. border?

Haley’s weird obsession with blaming China for what Mexico is doing is like Democrats blaming violent crime on carmakers who don’t install anti-theft devices. Kind of makes you wonder, why not mention, you know, the criminals?

The reason is, Democrats like criminals. They hold felons harmless even for violent crimes that are pretty clearly caused by them.

Does Haley like Mexican drug cartels? Or is she simply unaware that the fentanyl problem is a Mexico-is-on-our-border problem? In her case, it’s likely stupidity, but stupidity in the service of our ruling class, which maintains scrupulous neutrality on the value of American lives.

Why did Jeb-exclamation-point call illegal immigration an “act of love,” and his brother George gushily describe illegals as “people willing to risk everything for the dream of freedom”? Why is Biden hauling Third-Worlders across the border like there’s no tomorrow?

The donor class likes the cheap labor and obviously has no problem with Haley sounding like a nitwit.

China may ignite worldwide pandemics and steal our intellectual property, but if China were wiped off the face of the Earth, 100,000 Americans would still die every year from fentanyl. If we had a wall, the deaths would end.

We know Trump won’t build it, and now we know that Haley won’t, either. Only Gov. Ron DeSantis will. But do what you want, New Hampshire. The next million fentanyl deaths are on you.

     COPYRIGHT 2024 ANN COULTER

A Glimpse at the Art World According to The New York Times

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Aporia Magazine has some really good material devoid of typical leftist nonsense. This article, by Bruce Gilley posted on January 4, 2024, skewers sections on art from the New York Times issue of October 22, 2023. If you ever had any doubt that the Times and the art world in general are entirely on the anti-White left, this should clear that up. As Gilley notes, “It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the art establishment of the contemporary United States is staffed by culturally and historically ignorant, mostly-female activists who don’t really love art, even if they knew what the term meant.” Sadly, these activists, including any random males (likely gay or transgender) who have managed to become curators in this environment, are all too likely to be White.

Many writers on the arts have noted how art has gone from being political and politicized – things it has always been – to being totalitarian, which is the opposite of being political. What I found new in these pages, and perhaps this is no surprise if the totalitarian thesis holds, is that it has also become profoundly ignorant as well.

The lead story enthuses that “The Art World Expands Its Notion of What Art Is and Who Can Make It.” An 80-year old Russian-Jewish artist from Buenos Aires is having a retrospective at the Jewish Museum of New York. Her work includes dropping live chickens and lettuce onto a crowd from a helicopter and dressing up like a mattress (“That’s why mattresses are so important.”) The 30-something curator expresses a “deep frustration” that no one likes the art. “As curators we have an obligation and a commitment to bring unheard, unrecognized, or underrepresented artists into the discussion,” she explains. The museum prefers works “that focus on Black, Jewish, queer and trans experience in the United States.” It makes a point to display such works “in a German and Nazi context.” All this apparently represents the latest thinking in “the art world.” Mattresses in a Nazi context. …

Our first port is a story on the yeoman’s work being done by university galleries at Yale, Princeton, Duke and Vassar to atone for their “systemic racism.” These “historically white spaces with pasts that are entangled with slavery” are now hastening to host shows by blacks, the Times enthuses. One need not read further to know in advance that the art will be superb, the artists under-appreciated geniuses, the curators ebullient about their newfound virtue, and the didactic purposes beyond overdue. One featured artist glues Post-It notes, bits of her hair, and other items found on the floor onto Ghanaian textiles and calls it a “multiplicity of elements with which to engage.” Another sells photographs of herself nude mocking classical Western paintings (including a Last Supper where she is Christ and only Judas is white). She simultaneously complains to the Times reporter about the “dehumanization and commodification of the Black body.” The Duke exhibition is hosted by an institution “whose history is entwined with slavery…segregation, and white supremacy.” But visitors are also warned against “portraying Black people as victims.” …

Can we ever again have art for art’s sake? An opportunity arose at the Museum of Russian Art in Minneapolis when the war in Ukraine erupted. It was a rare moment when a cultural institution could bring people together to celebrate art for art’s sake. Let’s not associate the great Russian art tradition with today’s rulers. On second thought, let’s, according to the enthusiastic report on the museum’s decision to go all in for anti-Russia messaging with the headline “Taking Sides.”

The museum has taken sides by “focusing on work critical of Russia.” It features a newly-commissioned work called “Glory to Ukraine.” All the art is now being mobilized for this glorious political project centered on “oppression and resistance.” Every item in the museum has been given a “context” label. Those beautiful Russian icons of the 5th century are now identified as precursors to the seizure of Crimea. “You don’t just say ‘Oh, look at this art, how great it is’,” instructs the curator. You don’t? The Russians used to have a word for this. They called it agit-prop. It is another icon of the diminished artistic imagination evident in the Times art section. …

Section Two opens with a precis of the story so far: “Artists and Art Institutions Take On Social and Political Issues of the Day.” If our knowledge of the contemporary art world had been drawn from Section One, we might wonder what else they could possibly be doing. In this story, a Nigerian artist has “tackled colonialism, the subjugation of peoples that enabled the global slave trade and carved a callous cartography across Africa and other continents.” Another thing that “we did not learn about”, apparently, was that the global slave trade existed long before European colonialism and was ended because of that colonialism, and that the myth of “artificial borders” forced on hapless black people by devious colonialists has been demolished time and again, though its staying power is impressive.

The artist is not satisfied to scotch the colonialists for their slavery and borders. He insists they stole modernity itself from Africa. The more he looked at Picasso, the more he realized that these abstract ideas were looted from Mother Africa. The “white male artists were lionized by Western art history” while the true geniuses in Africa went unrecognized. “Throughout Black culture,” he proposes, “it’s always happened.” (The injunction back at Duke against “portraying Black people as victims” is now wearing very thin.)

The Nigerian was inspired to his latest work by “the zeitgeist since the George Floyd moment.” He apparently took seriously the assertions on NPR that blacks are now leading “the whole global conversation on culture.” The Times seems to agree. Take blacks out of modern music and what are you left with, he chortles to the reporter. “Folk music? Yodeling?” Well, Yes, we might reply. Also Stravinsky, Debussy, and Sibelius, as well as the Beatles, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, and Kiss. And speaking of looted art, is it time for black jazz artists who appropriated Benny Goodman and the Big Band tradition to pay up? What about black classical and opera performers who have been lionized for their looting of these Western traditions? …

Our final offering from the front page of Section Two tells us “We’re all living in Indian territory.” True enough. My flight to Portland is now over the Great Plains where many an Indian tribe once subjugated, murdered, and enslaved his fellow Indian before U.S. expansion forced a modern state upon the primitive mayhem. The artist claims Cherokee ancestry. Like so many “native” artists these days, she looks wholly European. WalkingStick, or so she is called, was raised in white American society by her white mother and did not identify as Indian until attending art school in her late 30s, according to a 1985 Times article. Another thing “we did not learn”, in this case in journalism school, was to consult the back issues of the publication we write for. In 1989, the Times noted with arresting candor: “With romanticism still the order of the day, nobody wants to be considered white and Ms. Walkingstick is fortunate, for her father is a Cherokee.” Or so she says. The label has certainly allowed her to trade in Indian art fetish. When Congress passed a law in 1990 requiring sellers of “Indian art” to prove their native bona fides, WalkingStick complained about the personal intrusion, according to a Times article of that year. I’ll reserve judgement until I see a DNA test verified by a third party.

Our weekend read now turns to a “people’s art” exhibit featuring the not-very-typical people of San Francisco. The “democratic” and “inclusionary” jury process opened new vistas of hitherto oppressed art, the curator explains. The result? A trove of “socially or politically loaded” works. The people are apparently very concerned with “immigration, Ukraine, Black Lives Matter, January 6 and election deniers, and people who are unhoused,” enthuses the curator. A life-sized wooden toy soldier of General Robert E. Lee lies on its back “to evoke the way in which racial reckonings have toppled historical figures.”

Both journalist and jurors offer grave assent to these “socially or political loaded” works. Yet another thing that “we did not learn” in college was that brutalist and didactic works were the stock-in-trade of the socialist-realist tradition in communist lands. The response of free societies at the time was to treat them as kitsch, as in Andy Warhol’s Mao series. But the arts savants in the Times are so beholden to a totalizing ideology that they can’t bring themselves to invert the meaning of this latest iteration of “people’s art” as the only possible critical response. It is not just the inability to judge good art from bad. It is the inability even to know what art is anymore.

Next up: Annie Leibovitz, at 74, has a new show of photographs in, wait for it, Bentonville, Arkansas. The regulars of the financial page will be savvy to the location. Yes, it is the Walmart fortune, in this case from the founder’s daughter who has funded the exhibition. Leibovitz swoons that it’s the best endowed and freest project she has ever worked on. No underfunded socialist-realist party diktat guiding this show. In gratitude, Leibovitz created new portraits of Milton Friedman, Adam Smith, and John Locke to celebrate the capitalist spirit that created the jobs, consumer welfare, and philanthropy of Walmart. Correction: she took a series of photos of her liberal friends, including Stacey Abrams, Rachel Maddow, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, all sporting angry faces about the social injustice of late capitalism.

Perhaps Abrams, Maddow, and Jackson were not told that it was the Walmart fortune paying for it all. Or perhaps Leibovitz did not notice the irony. Nor did the reporter. Maddow, a San Francisco lesbian, has been hammering away at Walmart for years. Capitalism, it seems, is OK as long as its fuels the anti-capitalist arts community. …

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the art establishment of the contemporary United States is staffed by culturally and historically ignorant, mostly-female activists [bolded for emphasis] who don’t really love art, even if they knew what the term meant. What they were not taught, what our whole civilization is not being taught, is more than just how to think about art. It is how to think at all.

Tucker on the Iowa Caucuses

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A while ago I posted an article on deranged White women. The young White woman who much prefers Nikki Haley over Trump and even over Biden (“a little too old”) is unfortunately much too typical. Haley’s money is coming from Democrat donors, and of course, the neocons of both parties love her. WAR! And, as MSNBC tells us, the problem is those horrible White Christian voters.

From The Telegraph

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Marine Le Pen already rules France                     Gabriel Attal and Emmanuel Macron

Gavin Mortimer:

When it comes to changing Prime Ministers, Emmanuel Macron has much in common with the Conservative Party. Both are on their fourth premier in seven years with the French President this week unveiling Gabriel Attal as the latest leader of his government. …

Poll after poll puts Le Pen at the top of voting intentions, not just for the 2027 presidential election but also the Europeans in June this year. Last month, Le Monde newspaper claimed that Macron was “shaken” at the rise of Le Pen, which some have attributed to her “normalisation”.

When she replaced her father as head of the National Front in 2011, the Le Pen brand was toxic. But she has shaken off the sins of her father, in particular his anti-Semitism: in November, one of France’s respected Holocaust awareness campaigners expressed his delight that Le Pen and her 88 MPs were participating in a rally against the rise of anti-Semitism in France following Hamas’s attack on Israel.

Macron must bear much of the blame for this normalisation of Le Pen. He has presided over soaring rates of illegal immigration, Islamic extremism and insecurity, promising much but delivering little. Last month, Le Pen’s National Rally (as she rebranded the party in 2018) and the centre-right Republicans conspired to pass an immigration bill that she hailed as “an ideological victory” for her party. …

Another reason for Le Pen’s popularity is the way she has tapped into the anxieties of lower-income workers – France’s Red Wall – in a way no other party has managed. These are concerns not just about identity and insecurity, but also a cost of living crisis that shows no sign of easing.

In this respect, Le Pen is greatly helped by her No2, Jordan Bardella, a 28-year-old from a housing estate in Seine-Saint-Denis, an impoverished district to the north of Paris. He was elected president of the National Rally in 2022 and has swiftly made a name for himself as a deft debater with a good grasp of detail; a fortnight ago the French public elected their 100 favourite personalities of the year. Bardella was the top ranked politician at number 30; second was Attal at number 57. Macron was 63rd.

Jordan Bardella

It’s hard to see the dapper but privileged [and gay and Jewish] Attal winning the hearts and minds of blue-collar workers. They are angry, gloomy and frightened, and they blame Macron. Campaigning for the 2017 election, Macron said he was “neither left or right”, and when he was elected he declared in his victory speech that a “new page” had been turned in “our history”. But it wasn’t. He has proved to be just another elite Paris technocrat. Instead of transforming France into a Start-Up Nation, as he boasted he would do, he’s turned the country into a Broken Down Nation, bedevilled by riots, strikes, crime and a bloody drugs war between rival gangs [of non-French origin].

The French feel let down by their president so they are now thinking that as they’ve tried every other party, why not try Le Pen’s? After all, Giorgia Meloni hasn’t ruined Italy – despite all the fear-mongering on the left about her being Mussolini in a blouse. [Of course The Telegraph writer has a ridiculous idea of what ‘ruining’ would mean.]

Once, the prospect of a Le Pen in the Élysée would have been inconceivable, but now it’s a distinct possibility. Should it happen in 2027 then that really would mark a new chapter in the history of France.

Anne Elisabeth Moutet

Two years ago, after yet another couple of nights of rioting in the banlieues, twenty retired French generals wrote an open letter to Emmanuel Macron, then about to run for a second term, warning that the divisions between communities and increasing “violence and nihilism” in France would eventually cause a social breakdown, with a risk of “chaos” leading to a “civil war” that would then “require” a military “intervention… in a dangerous mission to protect our civilisational values and safeguard our compatriots”.

Strong stuff, co-signed by some 100 senior officers and about a thousand other members of the military, in a country where the Army is known as “the Great Mute”, i.e. never expressing a preference in national politics. …

Yet this week Olivier Véran, the cabinet spokesman, seemed to share those conclusions as, on a visit to the village of Crépol, south of Lyon, he warned that France might be at a “tipping point” after the fatal stabbing of a local 16 year-old boy. Condemning both the knife attacks during a Saturday evening dance and the subsequent march by right-wing activists intent on a fight into the neighbourhood where the suspects live, the minister vowed that the government would stand with the bereaved family and called for a harsh sentencing, “up to a life sentence [with] no mitigating circumstances”, for the culprits. He reportedly added that the government is “clearly” aware that violence from “packs” is ratcheting up “tensions… you can’t stand these gangs any more… neither can we”, promising the “full mobilisation” of the state to “guarantee the safety of all citizens”.

Too little, too late: the minister’s well-meaning words were badly received. One of the villagers reportedly shouted to Véran: “You’ve done much more for them than you do for the hard-working people in the countryside, who get no benefits and raise their children with values.”

“Them” means the problem groups in council housing, many of whom are children or grandchildren of Muslim immigrants, like the Crépol knife-wielding attackers who disrupted the Saturday evening dance, allegedly shouting “we’ve come to get whites”. The Valence judiciary refused, against general custom, to give first names for the suspects they arrested. The entire country suspects why the names were not given: in the well-meaning aim not to “stigmatise” an entire community whose immense majority is law-abiding.

This time, several newspapers chose to question that decision (the centre-left Le Parisien, which belongs to Bernard Arnault, the luxury magnate, printed the Arabic first name of the suspected killer).

For almost three decades, government after government chose not to look too closely at a worsening situation. France was for centuries a land of successful assimilation. Italians, Spaniards, Russian Jews, Poles came and became French. But sheer numbers, as well as the change from a requirement to “assimilate”  to the easier one of “integrate”, mean the French model is broken.

Each separate failure concurs to the general breakdown of the national compact. The long-admired French education system is no longer fit for purpose: our schools have slid from the top to the bottom of the PISA rankings in just a few years, especially in those areas where non-French-speaking children account for the majority in most classes. School teachers are less and less respected by both the body politic – which allowed their salaries to fall by half in real terms – and by their pupils, disruptive and often violent. In some areas, the history of the 20th century, especially of the Holocaust, has been near-impossible to teach for years: inroads by Islamism in the classrooms, long denied, have contributed to the murder of two teachers in three years.

The police, meanwhile, are badly paid, badly considered, often afraid for their lives in the areas where they must keep order, they resign in droves. (The profession has one of the highest suicide rates in France.) As a result, training time has been reduced from a year to eight months, so bad is the need for boots on the ground.

As a result, trust between the ruling classes and the people has declined in lockstep with France’s economic and cultural decline. (If you live in the centre of Paris or Lyon, even Marseille, you can send your children to good private schools and Grandes Écoles, almost guaranteeing good jobs that will enable them to keep living where the crisis is not felt.)

Like his predecessors, Emmanuel Macron first displayed indifference towards the chaotic immigration system: the new Immigration Bill, about to be debated by the National Assembly, tries to correct the laxist trends of recent years, but it will neither address the problem of French-born citizens who profess hate for their country, nor the rising arrivals from troubled areas. It may not take much for the next round of riots, or for an equally violent blowback from a hard-right deciding to take matters into their hands. That civil war the generals prophesied two years ago may be around the corner.

Wilders faces setback in forming Dutch government as coalition-builder quits amid fraud allegations

Joe Barnes

Mr Wilders is expected to appoint a new scout [the person appointed by Wilders to negotiate with other parties to form a government]– someone with “more distance from politics” – by Tuesday.

It came as he warned mainstream Dutch politicians that their refusal to back him in forming a government would lead to his support getting “bigger and bigger”.

“Now we have become the largest party in the Netherlands by far,” he wrote on social media.

“But still some politicians don’t get it. Does the political box of tricks open again? Is it forgotten that if we do not get a chance to convert the vote and democratic mandate of millions of people into managerial responsibility, we will only get bigger and bigger? Because the genie is out of the bottle and won’t go back in?”

Wilders’ frustrations aimed at Ms Yesilgoz

Much of Mr Wilders’ frustrations are aimed at Ms Yesilgoz, whose VVD has led the last four Dutch coalitions after she refused to join his government.

“I find it incomprehensible that they are not participating now,” the PVV leader said, adding that it is an “emotional decision of the VVD” not to join his cabinet.

“I hope they come to their senses. It would be a shame if there was no centre-right cabinet.”

Mainstream politicians have been cautious about committing to support Mr Wilders because of his history of Islamophobic and Eurosceptic views.

The PVV leader had already dropped plans to ban mosques and the Koran, and to hold a Nexit referendum on the Netherlands’ European Union membership, to tempt potential coalition partners into a government.

Leo Varadkar’s Ireland is flirting with a new form of totalitarianism

Eilis O’Hanlon

Irish author Paul Lynch won the Booker Prize on Sunday. His novel, Prophet Song, imagines an Ireland that has fallen under Right-wing totalitarian control, and begins with members of the new secret police rapping on the door of a union leader to interrogate him for “sowing discord and unrest” against the government.

Novelists are free to dream up all manner of fictional scenarios, however far-fetched. The irony is that this is the exact opposite of what is happening in Ireland right now. The government in Dublin is indeed introducing extraordinary new legislation to restrict freedom of speech. But it’s not horrid Right-wingers conspiring to suppress nice, decent liberals. It’s nice, decent liberals scrambling to stamp out the opinions of what they call the “far-Right”. And far from being alarmed by this assault on basic freedoms, the broad swathe of progressive opinion in Ireland is fully behind it, including most voices in the broadcast and print media, and every major party.

Since riots broke out in Dublin last Thursday, following the stabbing of three children, the cries for action have become ever louder. The government led by Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has now pledged to have the Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill on the statute book “within a matter of weeks”.

The new law would surely have escaped international attention had those riots not happened, but Dublin’s eagerness to regulate hate speech has, as internet parlance puts it, “gone viral”. Now the whole world knows that Ireland is poised to pass one of the most draconian pieces of legislation in modern times, which will see Irish people facing potential jail sentences of up to two years for the possession of literature “likely to incite violence or hatred” against others on the grounds of certain protected characteristics, including race, gender and sexual orientation.

The police and courts will not even need to demonstrate that the material in question was intended to be distributed to anyone other than the owner. It will be “presumed, until the contrary is proven” that it was. It’s reminiscent of the Soviet Union, where having copies of literature banned by the state, known as “samizdat”, was enough to fall foul of the KGB.

To make matters worse, the Irish government has not actually defined in the bill what “hatred” is, saying that to do so could “risk prosecutions collapsing”. Minister for Justice, Helen McEntee, continues to insist citizens will be able to speak freely, but a senator for the Green Party, one of three parties in the governing coalition, let the cat out of the bag: “We are restricting freedom,” Pauline O’Reilly said, “but we are doing it for the common good.”

Ireland, sadly, has a long tradition of censorship. There was once a body with a wonderfully evocative name, the Committee on Evil Literature, which recommended banning publications deemed harmful to the newly independent nation’s Catholic values.

The country prides itself on having come through that dark time, but all that’s actually happened is that the term “evil literature” has been redefined to suit contemporary values. They haven’t stopped enforcing orthodoxy. They’ve simply found a new woke dogma to enforce. No one is writing novels about that. After all, owning such a book could land you behind bars soon.

Update on the AfD

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From an email list:

Despite the unprecedented agitation against the AfD in recent days, the AfD candidate Uwe Thrum won the most votes in the district election in the Saale-Orla district this Sunday (14 Jan, 2024).

Thrum received the most votes with 45.7 percent, followed by Christian Herrgott (CDU) with 33.3 percent, the SPD candidate Regina Butz with 14.2 percent and the Left candidate Ralf Kalich with 6.9 percent. The Greens did not put forward their own candidate.

The current state government of Thuringia consists of a coalition of Die Linke, SPD and Greens. The LEFT and SPD candidates together only achieved 21.1 percent in this district election. The AfD alone reached 46 percent.

In two weeks there will be a runoff election between the AfD candidate Uwe Thrum and the SPD candidate Regina Butz. AfD candidate Thrum was ahead in the election in 47 of the 59 cities and municipalities.

In the remaining twelve communities, Herrgott received the most votes. Butz and Kalich were unable to win a community.

A ban on the AfD has been propagated by all system media and is supported by the vast majority of system politicians. The AfD is accused of wanting to return millions of foreigners to their home countries, which is confirmed by the AfD-leadership as repatriation.

But the system calls the AfD-repatriation-program “expulsion”. Some system politicians are warning against a ban on the AfD. Apparently they fear chaos, disenfranchising almost half of the electorate by banning their preferred party.

The call to ban the AfD is justified with the phrase: “They want to destroy our democracy.” Taken literally, they are right, of course. The AfD wants to destroy this Orwellian democracy of the globalists. But only to take back democracy.

How can a system that only enjoys the trust of 9 percent (Poll Körper-Foundation) of the population babble about “our democracy”?

This seems to be a constant refrain on the left—that parties of the right that oppose immigration or want repatriation of immigrants are a threat to democracy no matter what percentage of the population wants it. But the bar for banning the AfD is quite high: it must be proved they are intent on overthrowing democracy: