"In My Life" (opens in separate window)

weimar america.

friday, december 15th, 2023

Something eerie, something creepy, is happening in the world—and now in America as well. The dark mood is brought on by elite universities, the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion industry, and massive immigration from illiberal nations and anti-Enlightenment societies.

At Hillcrest High School in Queens, New York, hundreds of students rioted on news that a single teacher in her private social media account had expressed support for Israel. Waving Palestinian flags, and screaming violent threats, the student mob rioted, destroyed school property, sought the teacher out and tried to crash into her classroom -- before she was saved from violence by other teachers and an eventual police arrival.

[FULL TITLE: "Weimar America - We may be headed for a 1930s nightmare."]

But unless the public demands that their universities enforce on campus the Bill of Rights and the right to move freely in safety, that police enforce laws against mob violence on America’s streets and in our schools, and that the United States stops greenlighting mass immigration from anti-Western nations and extending student visas to residents of anti-American, terrorist-supporting, and autocratic Middle East regimes, then in suicidal fashion we are headed for a 1930s nightmare.

The subtext was that the overwhelmingly minority students (whose school is ranked academically near the bottom among New York City schools) were acculturated to the racist reality that as the “oppressed” they were exempt from any punishment for hunting down their own teacher. As a Jewish (and thus white) “oppressive” supporter of Israel, she was reduced to, in the words an enthusiastic commenter on a Tik Tok video of the riot, a “cracker ass bitch.” And so the student pack tracked her down as if they were hunting an animal. The old Nazi youth gangs tried to kill Jews because they were not considered “white;” our new Nazis hunt them down because they allege that they are. The common denominator between the 1930s and 2023 is an unhinged hatred of Jews.

Hundreds of such incidents are now occurring on a daily basis—as the country is leaving its Weimar phase and heading at warp speed into normalizing Jew-hatred and worse. Instructors singled out Jewish students in classes at UC Davis and Stanford. Pro-Hamas students ripped down posters, swarmed public buildings, and disrupted traffic.

A pro-Israeli demonstrator in Los Angeles was hit on the head and killed by a pro-Palestinian university professor.

Jewish students were trapped in a Cooper Union university library surrounded by pro-Hamas demonstrators. At MIT, Jewish students were warned to keep away from particular areas of the campus deemed dangerous for them.

What would happen to a university president who warned black or Latino students to keep clear of areas where she could not guarantee their safety from other students?

A bankrupt media deserves much of the blame. They daily broadcast Hamas’s suspect casualty figures, as if that terrorist organization has ever been capable of speaking the truth.

The Western news regurgitated “500 dead at a Gaza hospital,” due to a supposedly deliberate Israel bombing. In fact, the hospital parking lot was hit by an errant Islamic Jihad missile intended to kill civilians in Israel.

No matter—few reporters apologized for spreading Hamas-fed misinformation, despite the previous Hamas lies that they never harmed civilians, that tunnels were not beneath hospital grounds, that they did not murder 1,200 Israelis; or their lies that Hamas gunmen do not rape, when they engaged in mass rape on October 7.

The media normalizes Hamas’s atrocities by treating it as if it were an ordinary government, not a murderous terrorist clique that decapitates civilians, takes children as hostages, and mutilates those it slaughters. That the terrorist organization has kidnapped at least ten American citizens and killed perhaps another 31 is lost on the “journalists”, many of them Americans who could care less about the fate of their fellow citizens.

The media fixates on the Israeli response to mass murder, but rarely the mass murder of 1,200 Israeli civilians that prompted the current war. During ceasefires do Israeli terrorists drive into Gaza cities, and shoot and kill innocent civilians -- and then brag, as did Hamas recently, that such murdering will only increase?

Sometimes the anti-Semitic hatred reaches Orwellian levels of absurdity. A British reporter asked an Israeli official whether his country valued life less than Hamas did because it had agreed to Hamas’s demand to release three convicted terrorists in exchange for one Israeli captive. The media fawned over a released disfigured Gazan terrorist—without mentioning that her injuries came from a car bomb she exploded in hopes of killing Jews.

The media is further emboldened by the Biden administration. When asked about the outbreak of anti-Semitism across the U.S. -- nearly 60 percent of hate crimes are committed against Jews, who make up 2.5 percent of the population -- Biden Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre (Shit-For-Brains) dismissed them with the false claim that the White House “had not seen any credible threats” to Jews. And then she claimed that the real danger to American residents was Islamophobia and threats to Arab-Americans. Hate crime and interracial crime statistics do not support Jean-Pierre’s assertions, which prompts the question of why she made them in the first place.

Note that almost all the violence in demonstrations over the current war comes from the pro-Hamas side that shouts “river to the sea” genocidal threats, swarms the Capitol rotunda and the White House wall, disrupts traffic, occupies bridges at peak traffic, defaces private and public property, shouts down speakers on campus, harasses passers-by, and often battles the police. One wonders whether, should the U.S. military be forced to try to rescue American captives, the demonstrators would cheer for the American troops or Hamas hostage-takers.

Abroad, the world has gone even crazier.

The United Nations has appointed Iran—a theocratic, terrorist-supporting government that kills dissidents and takes hostages—as the chair nation of the UN Human Rights Council Social Forum. What a cruel joke.

But what would one expect from the UN when its secretary-general, António Manuel de Oliveira Guterres, a former Portuguese socialist politician, condemns the Israeli response to October 7, but rarely, if ever, the Hamas mass killing of civilians that prompted it. Right after the mass killing Guterres opined, “The attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum.” According to the secretary-general’s logic, I suppose, Pearl Harbor, the 1939 Nazi invasion of Poland, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine did not happen in a vacuum either.

When told that an Irish citizen hostage was freed by Hamas, Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar declared that the “lost” child was finally “found.” In other words, he wished to hide the obvious fact that a terrorist organization had kidnapped an Irish citizen child, held her hostage for 50 days, and released her only when Israel gave up convicted terrorists to obtain her release.

Our domestic political leadership is not helping the situation.

Just days after October 7, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, along with the foreign minister of the now often hostile Turkish government, were calling for a cease-fire to prevent an Israeli response.

When the Islamic Jihad rocket aimed at Israeli cities went off course and damaged a Gaza hospital (leading to the fake story that Israel bombed the hospital), President Biden joked, “You got to learn to shoot straight.” Did Biden mean that, had the terrorists only launched a successful terrorist rocket into Jewish neighborhoods, there would have been no ensuing controversies?

Biden later apologized for doubting fatality figures provided by the Gaza Health Ministry, which is controlled by Hamas—a terrorist organization that has lied about the hospital “bombing,” denied it had tunnels under hospitals, denied that it had engaged in mass rape in Israel, and has supplied no proof of its civilian casualty numbers. Has Hamas released figures of how many of its terrorists were killed, and does it separate those numbers from lost “civilians?” And so are there really vast new cemeteries in Gaza to handle the 15,000 graves for those who, Hamas asserts, were killed?

What explains the collective madness?

For the last 40 years, while Western leftists have naively supported Palestinian terrorists, their governments have appeased terrorist-supporting Middle Eastern governments for very practical reasons. The old subtext to such mollification was that 500-million irate Arab Muslims, and a Middle East with 40 percent of the world’s oil reserves, in realist terms, simply argued against the interests of 10 million Israelis.

But now there are two new, venomous elements in the matrix.

One is that the racist DEI industry assumes that all intersectional nonwhite communities are victims of white privilege and supremacy. Therefore, as permanently oppressed, they are declared incapable of being racist themselves. And so they can harass with impunity the supposed victimizers—in this case American Jews, who are declared culpable whites.

So the oppressed, according to the DEI bible, cannot be anti-Semitic, though many certainly are. And they apparently cannot be held accountable for their hatred or frequent violence.

Secondly, in the last two decades there has been an epidemic of immigration into Western nations from the Middle East. In often-divided democracies like ours, politicians seek to appease as many pressure groups as possible, whether citizen voters or merely resident demonstrators, to acquire and maintain power.

Such pro-Hamas demonstrators, rah-rahing from a free, prosperous, and secure West, expect no rebuke for their obvious hypocrisy in cheering on an autocratic, dictatorial Hamas that has wrecked the economy of Gaza, shoots dissidents, and allows no free expression. And Middle Eastern guests and immigrants are never reminded that their very demonstrations are predicated on not being physically present in their homelands, where they might be shot for what they say and do freely in the West.

We are on a trajectory similar to that of 1930s Germany.

Every time a student is cornered, harassed, or threatened; a high school mob tries to swarm and harm a teacher; a government spokesperson dismisses such hatred; or American soldiers are targeted by Iranian-fed terrorist organizations; the madness, racism, and anti-Semitism will increase -- until it reaches a saturation point of abject violence in our streets.

Once a society mainstreams the values of thuggish brownshirts, and ignores their “from the river to the sea” eliminationist chants and screams of “beat the f—king Jew,” then the next emboldened step is foreordained.

True, most Americans were appalled by October 7 and accept that every nation has the right to defend itself from terrorist killers. Most Americans deplore vicious demonstrators and their calls for violence on behalf of the Hamas death cult. And most Americans want their President to demand the release of American hostages and to deter Iranian-backed terrorists who attack U.S. military personnel in the region.

A Day In The Life.

Up at 8a on Friday, I went thru my finger stick to check my BSL (Blood Sugar Level) and recorded it on my Diabetes 2 chart, made coffee and breakfast, took two 50mg Tramadol and a 300mg Gabapentin for various pains, fired-up the Win-7 Pentium HP desktop to let 32 million lines of code load, had a couple smokes in the cold garage and checked the day's errands list.

It was a cold, damp 30° start to the morning, but at least it wasn't snowing. Darn. I needed to get my daily Talk Radio fix: "Chris Stigall Show LIVE" from 6-9a, and then the "Chris Plante Show LIVE" 9-12noon, and Rob Carson Show LIVE 12-3p. I next fired-up the furnace to take the chill off, and scanned the news and weather sites.

Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.

Without any breakfast, but powered by a carafe of Dark Roast French House Coffee, I left at 11a, for the New Eastern Farmers' Market, Rite Aid Pharmacy and Michael's Craft Store, to get Sherry's Christmas present underway, traffic was very heavy everywhere, as the approaching Christmas Season ramped-up. The Market went great and I returned with LOTS of goodies ✔, Rite Aid went good ✔, and Michael's was a bust ∅. I'll have to go back next week, for that one. Seems that when the IT company upgraded their store's computers, to a system-wide set-up, they erased all files from the beginning of time -- 17 years -- from every store's records. No records left on any customer. Some IT idiot didn't back-up the original records. Dumbassed IT company.

After a huge pasta lunch, I did some paperwork, got drowsy and hit the LR couch for several hours, util just before dark. I closed down the condo, had a smoke in the garage, and got back to work trying to recover my long-used, default Opera Browser, from the near-fatal crash on Tuesday. I've posted to the Opera Forums, hoping someone will help. Not so far.

Looks like the 3 MIT, UPenn & Harvard presidents, woke hate-Jew bitches, are regretting their US Congressional testimony, last week; they may well be losing their jobs as the outrage spreads thru their monied donors. Afterall, today is the 85th anniversary of Nazi Germany's Kristallnacht against the Jews. So fitting, isn't it?

Holy crap! I putzed around with installing multiple updated copies of Opera, tweaking things in the Settings Menu... and everything is returned to "normal", now. I'm stunned and happy. OK, back to work. Tomorrow. I watched Discovery's "Gold Rush" all evening until 11:30p, and unplugged.

I slept-in until just past 8a on Saturday, to a cool 36°, VERY, VERY FOGGY morning. I upped the heat to 74°, started coffee, fired-up the HP desktop and all Opera Browser problems have disappeared. Just freaking amazing! Wundebar, baby! The coffee and Marlboros were great, and I only had 2 errands to do today. I listened to the "Chris Stigall You Tube Podcasts" until just after noon, started to listen to some "Chris Plante You Tube Podcasts", and left to get the errands over with.

I spent the rest of the morning and all afternoon getting errands done in traffic and some condo chores at home, and watching a 'matathon' series of "Ancient Aliens" on History, and "Expedition Unknown" on Discovery channels. Soon enough, it was dark and time to close down. No nap today so I was tired after dinner. By 10p, I was fading fast, unplugged and headed upstairs to bed.

Up at 7a on Sunday, I upped the heat, made coffee, had a smoke and checked the weather and news on the desktop computer. It was already raining steadily when I came down aT 7. 47° with rain and snow coming. Swell. The coffee and Marlboros were great together. After tuningf into some of last week's "Chris Stigall You Tube Podcasts", the rain arrived and a massive stream of Gulf t-storms began pushing up and thru the area. These are the same t-storms that blasted the South last night, and did YUGE damage, and recorded at least 6 deaths. Sad.

So around 10a, I headed upstairs to get a nice, long, hot shower, t-storms are rolling thru, and 5mins into the shower, the Rheem Point-of-Use Water Heater trips-off and it all goes COLD. DAMN! I partially dried-off, went down/back-up 2 flights and reset it. Back in the shower, after 5-6mins, the water went COLD and I had to go back down and reset the water heater. It happened 3 more times, and I gave-up -- about 90% showered -- and decided to wait until tonite or tomorrow. CRAP!

Yes, I do suffer from SAD -- Streaming Annoyance Disorder -- too many apps, passwords, installs, crashes, uninstalls, error messages, BSODs (Blue Screens of Death), workarounds and I've had enough. LOL.

I called Sanders HVAC in York, my Ol' GC&N's long-time commercial/personal HVAC companyt, and they're sending a tech out tomorrow morning, to troubleshoot and get parts for the water heater shut-off problem. "Error Code" is a gas valve problem inside the main heater box. This is going to cost me dearly, I'm thinking. That Ruud-Rheem unit cost alm ost $6,000 in 2008, but has paid for itself several times over since.

I had laundry, some condo chores and, since it was raining hard all day, all errands could wait until tomorrow, when I usually head south to the cleaners in Dallastown.A good day to stay warm, dry and inside. I called Sherry to chat for a while, and got engrossed in another TV "marathon" -- "Homestead Rescue" on Discovery. Heavy rain changing-over to snow, and then back to rain. Heh. I miss the Sunday F-1 Grand Prix and IMSA (Int'l Motor Sports Assn races on TV, BUT I can watch replays from the last 5 years of world class races, on F1-TV channel. I'm still getting used to dark/end of day at 4:25p. By 12 midnight, I'd had enough TV, and quit for the day. The unending, heavy rain continued.

Awake at 6a on Monday, I remembered that the HVAC tech would be coming to look at the water heater, so instead of going back to sleep, I got up. Somehow, it didn't 'feel' cold, although the temp was a nippy 33°, as the t-storm's massive front had moved east, with a huge snowfall area right behind it, and was followed by many smaller snow squall cells from the Great Lakes. As it got light around 7, I could see that we got ***SNOW***! We got 1-2" of SNOW, and I just missed it by sleeping until 6. I started coffee, had a smoke, but heard the Dyson® AM09 Oscillating Hot + Cool Tower was still on, from last night. Damn, there goes my condo's monthly electric bill, shot-to-hell. Sunday's tally was 2¾" of rain.

LET IT SNOW!

Remember the 3 leftist harpy Jew-hater 'presidents' from UPenn, MIT & Harvard? Well, the black racist, lebo, skank-assed, plagiarist bitch -- Dr Claudine Gay -- from Harvard, has been uncovered as a plagiarist! Fire the 3 asshole leftist, Jew-Hating bitches!

Jerod from R.E. Sanders HVAC called at 9:30, and he and his trainee arrived at 9:45 to troubleshoot the now-troublesome 2008 Rheem-Ruud Point-Of-Use "EcoSense" Water Heater, which I'm told, Wasn't supposed to last as long as it has. They want to replace it, when it dies, with a Navien Tankless Water Heater -- Model TBD -- but will now install a 90° bend on the exhaust pipe, at the rear patio. Water from t-storm's (wind) horizontal rain is getting into the inside unit and possibly shorting-out the electronics board, and causing the internal gas supply valve to close. 2 hours later, we'd dried out the board and fixture, and after a "tour" thru my massive Cannon T65 Gun Safe, paying the $233.01 bill, Jerrod & Tritian left.

I left for Dallastown, 15 miles southwest of East York, and as always, I enjoy the 1 hour round-trrip drive. Errands done, I headed home, and stopped into the Red Lion Burger King, to get 2 Dbl Whoppers w/Cheese, 2 large Fries and 2 Large Onion Rings. It's been quite a while since I had any BK eats, so I'll enjoy the change. Finally home around 2, I unloaded the Jeep, had a smoke, and lunch. I started to crash from the morning caffeine high, and grabbed a 2+hr snooze on the LR couch. With heavy cloud cover, temps dropped quickly but I turned down the condo heat to 70°. I skipped dinner, still full from the BK "gut bomb", watched History's marathon "Ancient Aliens" until 11p. Lights out.

Up at 4:30a on Tuesday, to a cold 23°, ***Poor Air Quality*** (once again), turned-up the heat, made coffee, fired-up the garage heater, had some smokes, and tuned into yesterday's 3rd hour of the "CP Show", which I missed during my snooze, until the "CS Show" came on a 6. JoAnne arrived at 8:30 and got to cleaning, and I laid down on the LR couch, and fell asleep. I woke-up at 11:30a, the place was doner and she'd left me a Merry Christmas note on my desk. I grabbed the last BK Dbl-Cheeseburger, Fries and Onion Rings for a quick lunch. Sherry would be here at 1p.

Uh oh, if this tax bill passes, it's going to be a major disaster for all Americans who invest in anything. "Unrealized income" is truly fascist -- taxing us on what profit could possibly be made, but not actually realized, on any investment! It's insane if you think about it! Yeah, for about 2.3 seconds! Taxed on profits yet-to-come? Taxed on unrealized gains? It's the stinking demonKKKrats-liberals-leftists who are trying to f•ck Americans, once again! ...I need a Valium...

Instead of walking at the humongous York Galleria, we stayed at my place and talked for 3hrs. She got a new car! Very sporty 4dr Hyundai sedan, on lease. It even has the "optional JohnGrip". (Don't ask.) That shopping mall is depressing, as large and retail-abandoned as it is, is the only place to distance walk during inclement weather, Summer & Winter. Sherry left at 4:30 to get an errand done, and get home before dark. I had a light dinner, grabbed a shower, watched Discovery's "Expedition X" and Motor Trend's "Bitchin' Rides" until 11:30. Lights out.

Up at 6a on Wednesday, it was a clear (still dark) cold 29° morning, with no rain forecast for days, as I remember from last night's news. I bumped the heat to 74°, made coffee, fired-up the desktop and scanned the news and weather headlines, and had a couple smokes in the garage. The little oscillating heater tower warms-up the place quickly, but uses HUGE amounts of amps, aka electricity. I just can't wait to see my Met-Ed electric bill for this month. Heh.

Wide open borders, runaway inflation, the country wracked by crime and filth, unsustainable ebts, 1st & 2nd Amendment violations, a leftist government of hate-America demonKKKrat scum... we have truly "allowed" America to be taken into Third World status, and now, "Biden just pledged to shut down 60% of America’s electric power." Read this crappy plan for us.

I left at 11:30a for my 12noon Endocrinology Dr's appt, down in South York. It went well. Back home by 1:30p, I checked news headlines and Crackhead Biden has a message for the shitbox US Congress. What a laugh on Fox News: "Hunter Biden faces backlash after defying subpoena with press conference 'stunt': 'Hold him in contempt!" Relax, nothing will happen, as it usually doesn't, with the gutless, idiot Repubbies. They can always be counted on to simply, "snatch defeat from the jaws of victory". Meh.

After a large lunch, I grabbed a 2½hr snooze on the LR couch, took a short walk around the CHCA Complex, and as temps dropped bck into the 30s, closed the condo down for the night. Discovcery's "Expedition X" and "Mystery at Blind Frog Ranch" had new and recent episodes on until 12 midnight, and then I closed down, until tomorrow. Good night, Irene.

Up at 6a on Thursday, it was a cold 24°, cloudless morning, but no frost. Yet. I fired-up the furnace, made coffee, started the desaktop, and had a smoke in the garage. I tuned into the "CS Show" until 9, then moved to the "CP Show" until 12noon. Only some very light food shopping today; tomorrow (Friday) is the usual New Eastern Farmer's Market for the good food. So I called Tonya, the owner, at "Pasta Plus" in the Lancaster area, to place a large order. Her East Hempfield Twp (Lancaster area) store is very nice, as is her selection of pastas and salads. I closed down the back patio, putting the Teak table, ashtray and 2 lawn chairs away in the adjacent shed. So I'm resigned to using the garage to smoke in, until sometime in the Spring. SOP.

I had errands to do, and got back around 3:30p, unloaded, had a late lunch and did paperwork. By dark, I'd opened a bottle of "BUTTER" Chardonnay, which as always, was delicious. I remember watching the 6p news, and then woke-up in the director's chair around 1:30a. Time to get upstairs for some sleep. Heh.

Tomorrow starts a new week here in the "Journal", and all that's ahead for next week, is a simple eye exam with my Opthamologist. It's quiet this time of year, and rightly so.

How Liberals Let Antisemitism Happen Here.

I wish I had more sympathy for liberals shocked by the apologias and celebrations of barbarity their progressive brethren have issued in response to Hamas’ slaughter of Israeli civilians on Oct. 7.

But liberals share great responsibility for the antisemitic eruptions on many college campuses and the streets of major cities by allowing left-wing ideologues to hijack their politics and their children – for turning conservatives into Cassandras by refusing to heed our warnings about the ongoing assault on truth and justice.

These same wounded souls offered no resistance as the Democratic Party tripled down on identity politics in recent years, assigning Americans to specific groups and then pitting them against one another. They stood by as the left falsely trashed America as a hotbed of hatred, white supremacy, and Christian nationalism. Now Jews are also somehow the bad guys.

Liberals continue to subscribe to fearmongering publications such as the Washington Post, the Atlantic and the New York Times which routinely compare Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler and warn that he plans to rule as a dictator if he wins in 2024.

They have supported Democratic prosecutors who have weaponized the criminal justice system by filing 91 felony charges against the former president, most of which are flimsy, some of them absurd.

They cheered the Department of Justice’s years-long fishing expedition based on Hillary Clinton’s slander that Trump stole the 2016 victory by colluding with Vladimir Putin. Once that hoax was exposed, they were happy to see Trump become the third president in history to be impeached merely for asking Ukraine’s president to look into the Biden family’s shady dealings in that country.

They supported numerous other efforts to remove Trump from office, including two impeachments, on bogus claims of corruption – Saudis are staying in his hotels! – while willfully ignoring Joe Biden’s own longstanding involvement in his family’s lucrative influence-peddling schemes with corrupt and hostile nations.

They defined Trump’s hyperbole and lies as an existential threat to democracy while dismissing President Biden’s incessant falsehoods, starting with the claim that may have secured his election: “I never talk with my son or my brother or anyone else in the distant family about their business interests, period.”

They have shrugged their shoulders at evidence that the government has been working with Twitter (now X), Facebook, and other big tech players to censor speech it doesn’t like. Many have joined the effort to demonize Elon Musk for the sin of supporting free speech on X.

The same folks shocked at the rise of antisemitic rhetoric and behavior stood by when conservative speakers were bullied on campus and cancel culture became a favorite tool of the left to punish dissent. They supported divisive efforts to spin smears into facts by refusing to push back on phony claims about book-banning or prohibiting the use of the word gay, by demonizing parents concerned about what their children are taught, and by attributing all disparities between blacks and whites to racism.

Now they are shocked by the venomous responses to Israel’s actions.

It is easy to understand why liberals made this deal with the devil. As they became consumed by their fear of Trump and the tens of millions of Americans who support him, the left’s no-holds-barred tactics seemed to offer liberals a more effective way to crush their enemy than their traditional commitment to open dialogue and tolerance, democracy, and the rule of law.

Liberals were willing to suspend their values in the vain belief that they could control the forces they empowered. Like their naïve predecessors in Revolutionary Russia and 1930s Germany, American liberals are only beginning to realize their tragic mistake. In just the last few years, the left has largely captured the most powerful forces of American politics and culture once dominated by liberals, including academia, corporate media, and the government’s permanent bureaucracy. They now control the narrative and the tools to punish those who challenge their dogma. Resistance can seem like an effort to push back the tide. It’s one reason liberals just keep their heads down and their mouths shut.

By revealing the inhumanity at the core of leftist ideology – which always and everywhere sees people as eggs that must be broken to make their pipe dream omelets – Oct. 7 has shown liberals in clear and horrifying terms the price of their dangerous alliance.

I fear that this recognition has come too late for them, and for America.

Still, resignation is unproductive. Given the spiritual season and the approach of a new year, we should allow room for hope. Despite our daunting challenges, small actions can lead to bigger things. Doing the right thing is good for the soul. In this spirit I’d like to suggest one way liberals can stand up to the forces corrupting our culture: Don’t keep your head down any longer. Speak up. Realize that there is only safety in numbers if you make yourself heard. Resisting censorship begins with resisting the urge for self-censorship. Speak out, as the Old Testament advises us, on behalf of the oppressed, even if they might – heaven help us – sometimes vote Republican.

THIS IS WHY AMERICA FORGOT HOW TO WIN.

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin stopped by the Reagan National Defense Forum to deliver an address titled, ‘A Time for American Leadership’. What leadership lessons did he have to offer?

“I learned a thing or two about urban warfare from my time fighting in Iraq and leading the campaign to defeat ISIS,” he told his audience. “Like Hamas, ISIS was deeply embedded in urban areas. And the international coalition against ISIS worked hard to protect civilians and create humanitarian corridors, even during the toughest battles. So the lesson is not that you can win in urban warfare by protecting civilians. The lesson is that you can only win in urban warfare by protecting civilians.”

He then went on to lecture that “we will continue to press Israel to protect civilians” and” that “protecting Palestinian civilians in Gaza is both a moral responsibility and a strategic imperative.”

Gen. Austin headed Central Command from 2013 to 2016. Obama officials blamed Austin for telling Obama that ISIS was “a flash in the pan” (while Austin’s people denied he said that.) Central Command’s intelligence failures against ISIS were so bad that they resulted in an investigation into whether intelligence had been falsified to make it look like we were winning.

By the fall of 2016, after 3 years of fighting, ISIS had only lost a third of its territory in Iraq and Syria. That was in large part because the Obama administration refused to allow the military to properly hammer ISIS. Under Trump, our hands were no longer tied and we hit ISIS hard.

Despite Austin’s claims that victory against ISIS came from protecting civilians allied with the Islamic terror group, the reality was just the opposite. Fussiness over civilian casualties during the Obama administration translated neither to victory nor civilian lives saved. On Austin’s watch, airstrikes against ISIS killed civilians, but that was always inevitable.

It’s impossible to take out Islamic terrorists whose entire operating model is to fight from behind and around civilians without civilian casualties. The choice is between a long grueling war, which Obama and Austin gave us, or a short devastating campaign, which Trump gave us.

What the Obama administration refused to understand in either Iraq or Afghanistan is that the leading cause of civilian deaths are the Islamic terrorists we are fighting. During the Holocaust, Jewish groups pleaded with the FDR administration to bomb concentration camps, despite the inevitable civilian casualties, because it would have stopped the killing. The Allied campaign hit Nazi-controlled territories hard, with little regard for civilian casualties, because only ending the war quickly would stop the killing. If we had fought WWII by today’s rules, we would still be fighting it and for that matter it’s not at all impossible that we would have long since lost it.

Obama and Austin prolonged a campaign against ISIS that allowed the Islamic terror group to rape and pillage its way across the region. The choice was not between no or civilian deaths, but whether the dead civilians would be ISIS supporters or their Kurdish victims.

Trump dropped more bombs every month than the entire three years of Obama’s fitful fight against ISIS.The media and activists blamed the majority of the civilian casualties in Iraq and Syria on Trump, but that was also what ended the war and the accompanying civilian casualties.

While Obama kept the pain going to avoid civilian casualties, Trump finished the job.

Gen. Austin is pointing to his campaign against ISIS as a model for Israel. That would be a disaster for any number of reasons. Israel doesn’t have the economy or military supplies to spend four years fighting at that level. Furthermore, the Biden administration isn’t likely to support four years of air strikes and house-to-house battles across Gaza. Even after a month, there are definite warnings from D.C. that Israel needs to wrap up its fight against Hamas.

Austin and some of his people have used their campaign against ISIS in Mosul as a model for Israel. Here’s a reminder of what that model looked like and what it would mean for Israel

The Battle for Mosul against some 10,000 ISIS Jihadis by some estimates took 5-6 months and relied on over 100,000 Iraqi allied forces with estimated casualties of over 1,000. Civilian casualties were estimated at between 10,000 to 40,000 with no way to really know for sure.

The idea that the Battle of Mosul showed that “you can only win in urban warfare by protecting civilians” is entirely false. Iraqi forces, the vast majority of them members of a different religious group, Shiites (some members of Iran’s militias) or Kurds, were anything but gentle with Arab Sunnis. Iraqi soldiers killed whomever they liked, including women and children, and claimed they were ISIS. There’s no way to know what the truth was except that it was not a clean war.

Iraqi forces used heavy firepower in civilian areas to defeat ISIS forces on the ground. And there were no protests, not from the White House, from other Muslim countries or the mobs that howl every time Israel takes out a Hamas target in Gaza. Everyone understood that nothing else could be expected when fighting ISIS. And even the reports by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch documenting civilian deaths were mostly cursory and lacked outrage.

Israeli generals could only have rolled their eyes about being told that Mosul should be their model. In Mosul, Iran’s Shiite militias did much of the fighting on the ground in a prolonged and brutal campaign. The decision to turn the battle over to them saved American lives in the short term, but helped solidify Iran’s grip on Iraq. The rocket attacks on American forces in Iraq since then are the consequences of the decision to recruit one terror group to go after another.

There are no models here for Israel unless it can somehow recruit a bunch of Islamic terrorists to fight Hamas while it limits itself airdropping leaflets in between desultory airstrikes.

Beyond Israel’s fight against Hamas Jihadists, the truly worrying thing is that Gen. Austin and much of the brass actually believe what they are saying. Much as they believed what they were saying in Afghanistan. Because what it really means is that military leaders have forgotten how to fight. And they never seem to have learned what wars are or how we go about winning them.

Gen. Austin’s contention that “you can only win in urban warfare by protecting civilians” would have come as news to the Allies in WWII, to the Russians in Chechnya and to his own tenure in Iraq His insistence on the notion of a “strategic victory” that can only be won in the hearts and minds of the enemy is the same misguided strategy that cost us so many lives in Afghanistan.

And that ended with our defeat.

“We will not win simply by killing insurgents,” Gen. McChrystal had argued, kicking off Obama’s surge in Afghanistan. “Earn the support of the people and the war is won, regardless of how many militants are killed or captured.”

In the real world, you win the war by defeating the enemy, not by winning the support of the people. Wars are not democratic elections and the battlefield isn’t a political campaign. When wars are run by politicians, the end result is a defeat that comes from never really trying.

Why don’t we win wars anymore? Listen closely to Austin, McChrystal and virtually every military head honcho in the last twenty years and the answer is obvious. We don’t set out to win wars by defeating the enemy on the battlefield, but on the battlefield of ideas. Our forces are led by a generation of politicians in uniforms who have been indoctrinated, beginning at the academy level, to think of wars as contests for the hearts and minds of enemy civilians.

If Israel adopts this strategy, it will fail and be defeated. But so will we. We’ve been fighting wars that we can afford to lose (if you can describe leaving thousands of dead and many more wounded as acceptable) but we may soon find ourselves in a war against a peer competitor.

Like China.

If we go up against the People’s Republic of China, will we be trying to win their hearts and minds or to beat them? Our wars until now had a limited existential risk, but that may change. The day may come when, like Israel, our wars are not something we fight abroad, but at home. Are our military leaders ready to make the tough choices of a Sherman or a Patton, or Austin’s notion that we should always risk our soldiers and the war, rather than risk enemy civilians?

Without a military leadership that understands the purpose of war, the next time we may not lose thousands, we could lose millions. And we could lose the United States of America.

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A Sea of Nostalgic Treasures in the Collections.

Elena Rowan, a sociology graduate student at Concordia University in Montreal, relies on the Internet Archive in her research on activist archiving and the importance of archives and libraries in society. As a research assistant at the Data Justice Hub, a project focusing on data-related skills development for social activists, she values the Internet Archive’s role in preserving knowledge on the Internet, making her research possible. Additionally, she creatively used IA to conduct a workshop, “Curating Nostalgia,” where participants explore digital collections to build personal nostalgia archives. Here's her work.