Project Veritas shows how votes are being bought by Democrats for $200 apiece from members of the Somali population in Minneapolis, and reveals that behind the illegal campaign is the unindicted criminal and queen of corruption, Rep. Ilhan Omar:

These are this year’s fashions for men by the house of Gucci.

Doug Mainwaring reports at LifeSite:

Fashion leader Gucci revealed its fully feminized, emasculated clothing creations for men during Milan’s Fashion Week earlier this year, dressing young, mostly male models in outfits that aped the clothing of little girls and homeless women.

The all-out assault on masculinity took place in Milan’s Palazzo delle Scintille in January, showcasing designer Alessando Michele’s “deconstruction of masculinity through which he hoped to hint at nontoxic alternatives and the positivity of being strange,” according to Vogue.

If the deconstruction of masculinity were not obvious enough from Michele’s designs, one model wore a shirt with the word “impotent” emblazoned across his chest. Another young man wore a pink knitted sweater with “mon petit chou” — a French term of endearment, “my little cabbage” — written in baby blue.

“Impotent”
Gucci MEN’s Fall/Winter Collection 2020, ‘Look 32’

“Mon petit chou” in pink and baby blue.

“In a patriarchal society, masculine gender identity is often moulded by violently toxic stereotypes. A dominant, winning, oppressive masculinity model is imposed on babies at birth,” suggested fashion reviewer consortium “the skinny beep’s” blog, regarding the Gucci men’s fashion show.

“It condemns men themselves to conform to an imposed phallocratic virility in order to be socially accepted. In other words, toxic masculinity produces oppressors and victims at the same time,” the blogger explains.

“Therefore, it seems necessary to suggest a desertion, away from patriarchal plans and uniforms,” the posting continues, “deconstructing the idea of masculinity as it has been historically established.”

Gucci has succeeded in that.

While none of the outfits displayed at the fashion show is able to be bought off the rack, some of the components can be purchased from Gucci’s online catalogue of “clothing and accessories with a gender fluid approach.”

There a man can pick up a pair of Mary Janes for £700, a little over $900.

From Gucci’s online MX catalogue

Commentary would be superfluous.

In any case, words fail us.

(Hat-tip to Liz)

On the left, the concept of objective truth is increasingly deemed a form of white supremacy.

From time to time, staunchly and admirably conservative Dennis Prager writes in defense of what he (along with many others) likes to call “Judeo-Christian” values. We generally reject the term for reasons we give here. But we accept its use in the article below because he gives it a definition which makes it palatable to reason.

He writes at the Daily Signal:

All of my life, I have said that the left’s moral compass is broken. And all of my life, I was wrong.

Why I was wrong explains both the left and the moral crisis we are in better than almost any other explanation.

I was wrong because in order to have a broken moral compass, you need to have a moral compass to begin with. But the left doesn’t have one.

This is not meant as an attack. It is a description of reality. The left regularly acknowledges that it doesn’t think in terms of good and evil. Most of us are so used to thinking in those terms—what we call “Judeo-Christian”—that it is very difficult for us to divide the world in any other way.

But since Karl Marx, the left (not liberalism; the two are different) has always divided the world, and, therefore, human actions, in ways other than good and evil. The left, in Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous words, has always operated “beyond good and evil.”

It all began with Marx, who divided the world by economic class—worker and owner or exploited and exploiter. To Marx and to Marxism, there is no such thing as a good or an evil that transcends class. Good is defined as what is good for the working class; evil is what is bad for the working class.

Therefore, to Marxists, there is no such thing as a universal good or a universal evil. …

By which is meant that –

Whether an act is good or evil has nothing to do with who committed the act—rich or poor, male or female, religious or secular, member of one’s nation or of another nation. Stealing and murder are morally wrong, no matter who stole or who murdered.

That is not the case for Marx and the left.

As Marx put it in “Das Kapital”:

Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and the cultural development thereby determined. We therefore reject every attempt to impose on us any moral dogma whatsoever as an eternal, ultimate, and forever immutable moral law.

Fifty-three years later, Marx’s foremost disciple, Vladimir Lenin, architect of the Russian Revolution, proclaimed:

We say that our morality is entirely subordinated to the interests of the class struggle of the proletariat. … We do not believe in an eternal morality. … We repudiate all morality derived from non-human (i.e. God) and non-class concepts.[Address to the Third Congress of the Russian Young Communist League, Oct. 2, 1920.]

As professor Wilfred Cantwell Smith, director of Harvard University’s Center for the Study of World Religions, wrote in 1957:

For Marxism there is no reason … for not killing or torturing or exploiting a human person if his liquidation or torture or slave labor will advance the historical process.

This is how Marx’s ideological heirs, today’s leftists, view the world—with one important difference: Morality is not determined only by class, but by race, power, and sex as well.

In Left-think, racism is wrong – as it is in reason. But only for some people, not for all – a position reason rejects.

It is left-wing dogma that a black person cannot be a racist. Only whites can be racist. And, indeed, all whites are racist.

It is increasingly a left-wing position that when blacks loot, they are only taking what they deserve, or, as the looters often put it, looted goods are “reparations”. A Black Lives Matter organizer in Chicago, Ariel Atkins, recently put it this way:

I don’t care if somebody decides to loot a Gucci or a Macy’s or a Nike store because that makes sure that person eats. That makes sure that person has clothes. That is reparations. Anything they want to take, take it because these businesses have insurance.[Chicago Tribune, Aug. 17, 2020.]

Another non-moral left-wing compass concerns power. Just as right and wrong are determined by class (worker and owner/rich and poor) and race (white and people of color), good and evil are also determined by power (the strong and the weak).

Power is wrong – unless of course it is in the hands of the Left.

That’s why leftists protest and riot whenever a confrontation between a police officer and a black person ends with the death of an unarmed black person. … The death is automatically deemed murder.

And causes the world over are right or wrong according to that criterion:

That explains much of the left’s hatred for two countries in particular—America and Israel. America is wrong when it does almost anything in the world that involves weaker countries—assassinates the most important Iranian terrorist, builds a wall between itself and Mexico, opposes unlimited immigration. It is wrong because it is much stronger than those other countries.

The left’s antipathy to Israel derives from both the power compass and the race compass. Because Israel is so much stronger than the Palestinians and because Israelis are classified as white (despite the fact that more than half of all Israelis are not white), the left deems Israel wrong.

So, when Israel justifiably attacks Gaza for raining rockets over Israel, the world’s left vehemently attacks Israel—because it is so much stronger than the people of Gaza and because whites have attacked people of color.

In Left-think, rape is wrong – as it is in reason – but only for some people.

When a woman accuses a man of sexually harassing or raping her, the left’s reaction is not, “Let us try to determine the truth as best we can.” It is, “Believe women.” One must automatically “believe women” …

Unless, as we have seen lately, the accusation is brought against a leading Democrat, such as Joe Biden, the Left’s candidate for the presidency. In his case the woman must not be believed.

… because, on the left, it is not only morality that doesn’t transcend race, power, class or sex; truth doesn’t either.

The Democrat-governed city of Seattle has appointed a pimp to take the place of a police force.

https://youtu.be/SKF3_cDtUWo

Selected from our Facebook comments on this photo, one by Jeanne Shockley:

Is there a young woman out there who would seriously consider marrying this or having its baby?

Our reply:

No. And that’s the whole idea. The fashion for transgendering (rendering people sterile), the low fertility rates of Western countries, encouragement of abortion, the anti-family agenda, the “MeToo” nonsense, feminism, all point to the same thing – the dwindling away of the free enlightened peoples of the earth. It is the top policy of the Left.

Even more than the ugly and ridiculous clothes, the sickly epicene model with his apathetic droop tells the story of our time: the decline of the West.

… attacks on businesses, invasion of restaurants, arson, looting, random killing led up to the Russian Revolution.

It is the pattern of what is happening in 2020 in the United States.

Gary Saul Morson writes at First Things:

Between 1900 and 1917, waves of unprecedented terror struck Russia. Several parties professing incompatible ideologies competed (and cooperated) in causing havoc. Between 1905 and 1907, nearly 4,500 government officials and about as many private individuals were killed or injured. Between 1908 and 1910, authorities recorded 19,957 terrorist acts and revolutionary robberies, doubtless omitting many from remote areas. … Robbery, extortion, and murder became more common than traffic accidents.

Anyone wearing a uniform was a candidate for a bullet to the head or sulfuric acid to the face. Country estates were burnt down (“rural illuminations”) and businesses were extorted or blown up. Bombs were tossed at random into railroad carriages, restaurants, and theaters. Far from regretting the death and maiming of innocent bystanders, terrorists boasted of killing as many as possible, either because the victims were likely bourgeois or because any murder helped bring down the old order. A group of anarcho-­communists threw bombs laced with nails into a café bustling with two hundred customers in order “to see how the foul bourgeois will squirm in death agony”. 

… Sadism replaced simple killing. … One group threw “traitors” into vats of boiling water. Others were still more inventive. Women torturers were especially admired. …

Not just lawyers, teachers, doctors, and engineers, but even industrialists and bank directors raised money for the terrorists. Doing so signaled advanced opinion and good manners. A quote attributed to Lenin—“When we are ready to kill the capitalists, they will sell us the rope”—would have been more accurately rendered as: “They will buy us the rope and hire us to use it on them.” True to their word, when the Bolsheviks gained control, their organ of terror, the Cheka, “liquidated” members of all opposing parties … Why didn’t the liberals and businessmen see it coming?

That question has bothered many students of revolutionary movements. Revolutions never succeed without the support of wealthy, liberal, educated society. Yet revolutionaries seldom conceal that their success entails the seizure of all wealth, the suppression of dissenting opinion, and the murder of class enemies. …

In educated Russian society . . . by no means every view [could] be expressed. A whole school of thought . . . [was] morally forbidden, not merely in lectures but in private conversation. And the more “liberated” the company, the more heavily this tacit prohibition [weighed] on it. …

Though some liberals recognized their differences from the radicals, most acted like [radical] wannabes who were unwilling to acknowledge, even to themselves, that their values were essentially different. [They were] socialized to regard anything conservative as reprehensible—and still worse, as a social faux pas …

These liberals illustrated how moral cowardice develops, while love of truth and intellectual daring are extinguished. Captivated by public opinion, they signed petitions they did not agree with and excused heinous acts, always observing the rule: Better to side with people a mile to one’s left than be associated with anyone an inch to one’s right. Educated society knew that one could not just abolish the police, as the anarchists demanded, and that socialism would not instantly cure all ills, but they assured themselves that progressive opinion must be right …

When a party is willing to push its power as far as it can go, it will keep going until it meets sufficient opposition. … In Russia, Stalin proclaimed “the intensification of the class struggle” after the Revolution, entailing an unending series of arrests, executions, and sentences to the Gulag. What meets no resistance does not stop.

The Democratic Party is threatening continued and intensified violence. It has become the terrorist party. 

Opposing it is as urgent as defending the country against invasion by a foreign power.

It is not only in America that race hatred is being stoked up by the Left. The work is being done all over the Western world, and everywhere the media are hard at it, helping to bring the hatred to boiling point.

Benjamin Harris-Quinney writes at Breitbart (September 15, 2020):

I have worked with pretty much every major media organization in the West, and by far the most biased and dishonest in dealing with me as a conservative has been the BBC.

If I was in the U.S. I could just switch it off and refuse to appear on their programming, but what sticks in the craw most is that we in Britain are forced to fund it via the near-compulsory [actually compulsory if you own a TV or radio – ed] taxation of a “TV licence”. I am paying someone to pop up on TV to insult me, my way of life, and then advocate for my murder.

I have never received nor have I ever seen an apology from the BBC even when they have been exposed for the most outrageous instances of bias…

Although the BBC depends entirely on public funds, it sees no need to apologize for insulting the public.

Because the BBC depends entirely on public funds, extorted by the government, it sees no need to apologize for insulting the public.

We were told last week by the new BBC Director-General Tim Davies that he was going to immediately perform a “radical overhaul” of their programming to eradicate “perceived left-wing bias”.

Yet this week we are graced with “kill whitey” among a diatribe of Marxism. …

I encourage anyone who thinks the new chairman of the BBC is capable of reforming the cesspit of radical Marxism it has become to watch the clip, or better yet the whole episode of Frankie Boyle’s New World Order.

You won’t laugh, but you will be in no doubt that the licence fee needs to go and the whole BBC needs to go with it.

New World Order… had the [black] comedienne Sophie Duker come on to explain how terrible white people, white culture, and white economics are, before stating: “We don’t want to kill whitey — actually, we do, but not yet.”

There’s a video of her saying it. The others, black and white at the table, laugh as she says:

White power is Trump Tower. When we say we want to kill whitey we don’t really mean we want to kill whitey (we do) but when we say we want to kill whitey, it’s like but not today. … Whiteness is a capitalist structure.

This was delivered with all the comedy timing of a coronavirus briefing. It was deadpan and serious. There was no discernible joke. The point was that white people are terrible, have had their time, and need to be replaced.

It wasn’t a parody, it wasn’t tongue in cheek, it was a racist incitement to violence at a time when exactly this type of violence is spreading across the West, destroying lives and livelihoods in its wake.

The writer says,”There are no jokes, just infantile conspiratorial Marxist drivel.” But that is the joke. To the BLM rioters, to Antifa, to the Labour Party in Britain, to the Democrats in America, to the Marxist cabal that governs the EU, denigrating “whitey”, insulting him, destroying his property, killing him is fun. A gleeful sport.  They laugh as they do it.

And many a whitey laughs with them.

Laugh, whitey, laugh as you perish!

“Do I wake or sleep?”

Anyone who has lived through, or followed, or has learned about the history of Israel since its establishment in 1948 – the wars with the Arab armies, the campaigns of terrorism, the concerted efforts by the misnamed and utterly iniquitous United Nations to destroy the only democratic state in the Middle East – might well be asking himself that question now.

It seems more like a dream than reality that two Arab states have normalized relations with Israel, doubling the number now at peace with the Jewish State. It is an astonishing development, almost miraculous. And the near-miracle worker, the negotiator who brought it off, is President Trump.

(L-R)Bahrain Foreign Minister Abdullatif al-Zayani, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, US President Donald Trump, and UAE Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed Al-Nahyan hold up documents as they participate in the signing of the Abraham Accords where the countries of Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates recognize Israel, at the White House in Washington, DC, September 15, 2020. (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)

Michael Goodwin writes at the New York Post:

The Palestinians could have had their own state several times over the last two decades, but could never take yes for an answer, so now the train of history has left them standing at the station.

They accuse their fellow ­Arabs of betrayal and stabbing them in the back. But in fact, it is two generations of Palestinian leadership that have betrayed their own people and forfeited their veto over peace.

They lost that veto because Donald Trump took it from them. The president … offered the Palestinians a deal, the “deal of the century,” he called it, but they responded with insults and intransigence. It was a huge mistake …

The world watched in astonishment as two more Arab countries took the historic step of normalizing relations with the Jewish State. The likelihood that others will soon follow, possibly including Saudi Arabia, means that Israel will no longer be a pariah in its own neighborhood.

It is almost impossible to overstate the importance of these agreements.

The Mideast has long been the world’s hottest hot spot and now, seemingly all of a sudden, peace is breaking out. … The agreements will push the anti-Semites at the United Nations to find a new scapegoat for the world’s problems. …

Iran, of course, is the other major loser of the day. The Arab monarchies it has threatened repeatedly are lining up to join America and Israel in an alliance against the mad mullahs. As Trump put it in his remarks, “We’re here to change the course of history.”

Big decisions have big consequences and Trump’s Mideast policy is remarkable not only for its success, but also for its unprecedented approach. The contrast with Barack Obama is especially dramatic.

Until Obama, recent presidents of both parties followed a similar script of supporting Israel while being a buffer between it and its hostile Arab neighbors. The goal was to be an “honest broker” while guaranteeing Israel’s security as long as it respected American interests in the Arab world. Those interests included oil and, increasingly, funding for the perpetually bankrupt Palestinians, who returned the favor with massive corruption and by making “martyr” payments to the families of terrorists who killed Israelis.

The success of the negotiations was made possible to a large extent by the release of America from dependence on Arab oil. And it is again thanks to President Trump that America is now energy-independent.

The antagonism of the Arab states to Israel had been deliberately exacerbated by Barack Obama. He pursued an anti-Israel policy, “apologizing for past American behavior and promising to restrain Israel and forcing it to make concessions to the Palestinians”.

Incredibly, [Obama] even urged the Palestinians not to negotiate with Israel until Israel stopped constructing and expanding settlements in the West Bank. Obama openly disliked and insulted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, once forcing him to leave the White House through a back door, and secretly used American funds to try to defeat Netanyahu in an election.

His record was perfect — a perfect failure. There were, for example, zero serious negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians for the eight years of the Obama-Biden administration.

Yet that wasn’t Obama’s only mistake in the region. He showed a repugnant soft spot for Israel’s greatest enemy, Iran, despite the warning of Netanyahu and others that the nuclear deal paved the way for weapons that would be an existential threat to Israel.

And a danger to the US itself –

Obama … coddled the mullahs, no matter that they used the money he gave them to spread terror far and wide. Their role in both Syria and Iraq, for example, has posed direct threats to our allies and interests.

Trump … deliberately reversed all those policies. He moved the US Embassy to Jerusalem, correctly predicting that threats of Arab violence were false. He approved Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights, another American first.

As he recounted Tuesday, the president thought funding the Palestinians also was wrong. Beyond the “martyr” payments, he noted that Palestinian leaders refused even to negotiate with his administration. Why, he asked, should we reward their bad behavior?

He held Iran to the same standard. Trump pulled out of the nuclear deal, imposed harsh economic sanctions and eliminated Qasem Soleimani, the Quds Force general who played a role in the deaths and injuries of hundreds of American soldiers in Iraq.

American strength is what most appealed to the Arab states. They fear Iran more than Israel and, whatever their history with Israel, now openly recognize it as a full partner against Iran.

The agreements signed at the gathering on the South Lawn of the White House are fittingly called the Abraham Accords. They mark a new era of trade, tourism and opportunity for millions of Jews, Muslims and Christians in the region.

Trump clearly savored the moment but, ever restless, says he’s not finished yet. He told reporters he believes the Palestinians eventually will want to negotiate and predicted that, if he wins a second term, he will make a deal with the Iranians, too.

The changes, he said, are just the start of a “new Middle East.”

Only a fool would quibble on a day as big as this one.

Information about the US starts at about the 22 minute mark.

https://youtu.be/8UvFhIFzaac 

… from the annals of Christianity:

On a raw March afternoon in 1314, a scaffold stood in the shadow of Notre Dame. The people of Paris knew what macabre show was imminent. Seven years before, the King’s constables had stormed all the Templar estates in France and arrested 5000 knights of the order, much to the astonishment of the people. Now the curtain was about to drop on a bizarre tragedy, one scripted by the king himself.

The Knights Templar were a smelly lot – they didn’t wash. A common expression of their time was “stink like a Templar”. They were brave soldiers – crusaders in Outremer – and brilliant bankers. The order was very rich.

King Philip the Fair of France owed them a huge sum of money and coveted their wealth, so he destroyed them. He had to get them to confess to crimes and acts of blasphemy as an excuse. They might in fact have been heretical by the rules of the Catholic Church. There is some evidence that suggests they were secret Gnostics, but to a rational humane mind, nothing they did surely deserved the punishments the good Catholic king devised for them.

Here is an account of what they confessed to and what King Philip (grandson of Louis IX, known as Saint Louis) had done to them:

The things the knights confessed under torture defied belief: trampling and urinating on the Crucifix, secret rites of obscene kisses, sodomy, usury, treason, idolatry, and heresy. After the arrests came seven years of inquisition, then hundreds and hundreds of public executions by burning.

These confessions were extorted from them under extreme torture.

Stripped of their habits, chained, and cast into dungeons, the old men were tortured with rack and thumbscrew. The soles of their feet were smeared with animal fat and then held over hot coals. Their weary frames were crushed under iron weights.

Sometimes the accused was tied down, a cloth stuffed in his mouth. Water poured into the cloth caused it to swell: The choice was to confess or drown. A more creative option was to place a man into a pit no wider than himself, where he would be left to stand in his filth and starve. The rack was used to dislocate shoulders and hips.

Subtler methods of interrogation worked as well. Denied sleep and the chance to void his bowels or bladder, the accused could be subjected to a constant battery of bewildering questions by an endless string of interrogators, some cruel, some appearing compassionate. Rare is the man who could withstand this to the point of death, which would be his only relief. Under such conditions, hundreds and hundreds of Templars confessed to appalling crimes.  …

The last five of them, having been imprisoned in a dungeon for six years, were burnt to death on the Île de la Cité in Paris on March 18, 1314.

As a large crowd closed around the scaffold, the last Master of the Knights of the Temple of Jerusalem, 70-year-old Jacques de Molay, stood alongside four of his brothers in arms, listening as the papal legate read their crimes in horrible detail.

However, mercy would yet be theirs if they repeated to the people of Paris the guilt they had confessed before the inquisition. Five stakes piled high with brushwood and faggots awaited them if they did not.

Two [three?] of the knights, eyes cast downward, mumbled their guilt. Then de Molay and Geoffrey de Charney of Normandy stepped forward.

“On this terrible day,” shouted de Molay, his gaze meeting the eyes of the crowd, “in my final hour, I shall let truth triumph and declare, before heaven and all the saints, that I have committed the greatest of all crimes.”  The crowd pressed in. “But my crime is this: that I confessed to malicious charges made against an order that is innocent so that I could escape further torture. I shall not confirm a first lie with a second. I renounce life willingly. I have no use for days of sorrow earned only by lies.”

The King’s police seized the two knights and chained them to the stakes. Brush and branches were set aflame. As the old men were roasted alive, they shouted their innocence and their love for Jesus Christ before falling silent. Thus the last Master of the Knights of the Temple of Jerusalem was reduced to ashes.

Then Pope Clement V abolished the order and the “beautiful” King Philip availed himself of their assets. He did not enjoy them for long. He died on 29 November, 1314, eight months after burning the old Knights to death – because, it was popularly believed, de Molay had cursed him. If “God” took note of a curse spoken by de Molay and acted on it in the case of Philip’s death, what – you may be tempted to ask a Christian – had “He” been doing when the same man was being tortured and burnt? Don’t expect an answer. Though the believer may go so far as to say in reply that “He has mysterious ways”.