Sometimes even we are tempted to believe that there is a god – a just god.

Here’s an example of an event that does this strange thing to us:

https://twitter.com/i/status/1391265085121867776

DebkaFile reports:

The attack on Iran’s nuclear center at Natanz on April 14 totally destroyed two of its three uranium enrichment halls operated by advanced centrifuges. Even the remaining third of centrifuges have been put out of action by the cutoff of a steady power flow.

The explosive material which caused the blast was planted there two years ago and awaited a remote signal to detonate. Contrary to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s claims on Monday that the attack caused only minor damage and just disrupted the old centrifuges, our sources disclose a different reality. Iran is now unable to move enrichment up to the 60pc grade as Tehran boasted because most of the advanced IR-6 centrifuges with that capability were wrecked in the blast.

This serious setback has caused a major rift in the Tehran regime, including the Revolutionary Guards leadership. Atomic energy chief Ali Akbar Salehi, who is close to supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is being bombarded with angry accusations. He is blamed for failing to seriously address the security aspects of the nuclear program’s key facility and abandoning it to hostile penetration. How did a large explosive charge come to be planted in the heart of the facility and, moreover, be allowed to repose there unnoticed for two years, he is asked. How could this happened just nine months after the first hit on Natanz wrecked the main centrifuge produce hall?

Have Joe Biden, John Kerry, Barack Obama sent their condolences?

The Jerusalem Post reports this good news:

Israel has attacked Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility. The target was an electrical substation located 40 to 50 meters underground.

The attack was carried out through an explosive device that was smuggled into the facility and detonated remotely. It took out both the primary and backup electrical systems. The initial explosion set off secondary explosions, causing of course even greater damage.

The head of Iran’s Parliament Research Center announced in a television interview today on Tuesday (April 13, 2021) that thousands of centrifuges had been destroyed, damaging most of the enrichment facilities.

The attack by Israel last July –  its damage still not fully repaired – was also carried out with explosives that were smuggled into a centrifuge assembly facility at the site, the explosives being embedded in a heavy table that was brought into the facility.

The Biden Administration was given no advance notice about the attack. The White House said on Monday that it was not involved.

As the “Biden administration” is hostile to Israel, is gifting enormous sums of money to its Palestinian enemies, and wants to revive the nuclear deal with Iran that President Trump cancelled, that is no surprise.

Karl Popper and Friedrich Hayek were two great 20th century thinkers who argued for freedom. They differed on one point: Popper held freedom to be in itself the highest value; Hayek thought freedom is valuable, indeed essential, because it enables innovation.

Innovation comes from the minds of individuals. A government controlled society in which the individual’s only – and enforced – duty is to serve the collective, does not allow origination. The organized mass is sterile. It cannot invent. That’s why it’s wrong to call socialism, communism, any shade of leftism,”progressive”. A socialist society cannot advance. It can only stagnate.

That’s why Communist China has had to steal new ideas and devices from countries in which free thought and its expression are permitted.

What many people who live in countries that are still comparatively free find attractive about socialism is that it promises “free stuff”. Vote the socialists into power and you will get free school, free health care, free housing, free strawberries with free cream. Well, okay, maybe not the cream. And maybe also not the strawberries. And maybe you will have to share a house. And the health panel will decide whether you may live or must die. And what you’ll be taught will be adherence to doctrine not search for truth. But still – it will all be free. At the time it is dispensed to you, whatever it is, you will not have to pay for it. The rest of your time you’ll be working for it.

Natan Sharansky was born in Soviet Russia and lived the first decades of his life there. He eventually escaped to live in freedom in Israel.

He writes about the torture of the mind in the prison of Communism:

My father, a journalist named Boris Shcharansky, was born in 1904 in Odessa, the cultural and economic center of the Pale of Settlement, where the Russian empire stuck most Jews. He studied in the Jewish Commercial Gymnasium, because most other gymnasiums accepted very few Jews, if any. By the time he was 16, he had already lived through the Czarist Regime with its anti-Semitic restrictions, the “February” Socialist Revolution, the “October” Bolshevik Revolution, and the years of civil war when power in Odessa seesawed back and forth from faction to faction, as hunger, pogroms, and destruction decimated the population.

When the Soviets finally emerged from the chaos, therefore, my father was hopeful. The Communists promised that a new life of full equality was dawning, without Pales of Settlement, without education restrictions, and, most important, with equal opportunities for all. Who wouldn’t want that? … [He]  was excited about building a world of social justice and equality closer to his home. …

Lucky for him, Odessa was emerging as a center for a new cultural medium—cinema. As silent Charlie Chaplin-type movies started evolving into more scripted sketches, my father put his storytelling talents to work. …

Of course, to succeed in his career as a screenwriter, he had to follow certain rules. His scripts, like every other work of art, had to follow the script of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, seeing the world through the lens of class struggle and class exploitation. As Karl Marx argued, and the Bolsheviks now decreed, “the history of all hitherto-existing societies is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight”.

Thankfully, in its final stage of class struggle, following Karl Marx’s teaching, the proletariat had seized power from its masters, establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat who would build a classless society of equals. So-called bourgeois freedoms, minor matters like civil liberties and human rights, were nothing more than facades for exploiting others. The old world and its retrograde values had to be destroyed in order to bring forth social justice. Today, such a singular vision might be called Critical Class Theory—or maybe The 1917 Project.

Everything had to serve Communist ideology: every institution, every medium, every art form. Lenin particularly appreciated the propaganda potential of movies, declaring, “Cinema for us is the most important of the arts.” So while all creative artists had to subordinate plot, character, and complexity to advancing the Bolshevik political agenda, movie-makers endured extra scrutiny. The term “politically-correct“, which is popular today, emerged in the late 1920s, to describe the need to correct certain deviants’ thought to fit the Communist Party Line. Any positive characters with bourgeois origins had to eventually check their privilege, condemn their past as oppressors, and publicly take responsibility for their sins.

At first, True Believers who championed the Revolution’s noble aims easily accepted these restrictions. But as the Red Terror grew … the number of True Believers kept shrinking …

I was born … in 1948. My father had fought as a soldier in the Red Army in World War II for four years, and had returned a hero. … (Our] family which had lost so many friends and relatives in the Holocaust, then watched so many friends suffer during Josef Stalin’s political and anti-Semitic purges …

Every day, my father went to work [as a journalist] …  seeking interesting stories. But, when it came to writing them up, his imagination had to shrink, his mouth had to be wired shut, his hand had to clamp tight, as he produced what the Party required. He knew the handicapped journalism he created was not true journalism, the art that resulted was not true art, the thoughts triggered were not real thoughts and the conversations surrounding it all were not real conversations. Yet my father remained a storyteller at heart—and now he had an audience—my older brother by two years and me.

When my father came home from work, he could leave the suffocating grey false universe he helped to create behind, and welcome his beloved family into a full-color world. From the time we were very young, he would tell us stories on three levels—explaining to us what the author said, what the author wished to say, and what the author could not say. When we started, from a very young age, our ritual of weekly outings to the movies, he would recreate the movie for us on the way home, filling in what the screenwriter probably wanted to write, and explain what he could not write. …

No [professional writer] was ever quite sure what would be permitted or not, what red line they might cross tomorrow; what “macro-aggression” or “micro-aggression” they might suddenly be found guilty of committing. To be a man of letters in a sea of fear was to worry about drowning constantly. …

Looking back at the history of Soviet literature, it’s hard to find any of the thousands of writers [who conformed] … who wrote anything worth reading or remembering. Their books, published on a massive scale—often selling millions—simply disappeared. … Eventually, their lies consumed both the characters and their authors, leaving nothing behind.

By contrast, the works that lasted defied Stalinist orthodoxies in the service of truths, both immediate and internal. Stalin killed some of these honest writers, like the poet Osip Mandelstam. Some killed themselves, like the poet Marina Tsvetaeva. Some lived daily with the fear of arrest, or under the shadow of purges, like Anna Akhmatova. Some, like the novelist Mikhail Bulgakov, accepted the fact that their books would go unpublished in Russia—his classic The Master and Margarita didn’t see the light of day for decades. Others, like Boris Pasternak, who smuggled Dr. Zhivago to the West, sought readers elsewhere and paid the price back home ….

By my generation there were few True Believers left. Your field of vision had to be very narrow indeed to still see the crumbling society around us as some kind of Communist paradise. …

I spent my high school years as an academic grind, drowning in problem sets, working around the clock to amass five out of fives in mathematics and physics. Because I knew that I had to follow a very specific script to get the character reference I needed from the local Komsomol authorities, I also spouted the right slogans, participated in the right youth activities, and sang the right songs. Yet even after I fulfilled my young dreams and made it to MFTI—Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, the Soviet equivalent of MIT—the scrutiny continued. We math and science students had to keep paying lip service to the Soviet gods, like everyone else. We kept taking tests on Marxist doctrine every semester, even when studying at the postdoctoral level. …

Our professors subtly encouraged us to brush such annoyances aside. We were the elite, they kept telling us, racing toward a golden future. It was all worth it. I was luxuriating in the sanctuary of science, an asylum protected from the daily insanity the Soviets imposed on nearly everyone else. I decided that the deeper I was into my scientific career, the less stressful this double life would be.

It was a comforting illusion—until I read Andrei Sakharov’s manifesto.

Sakharov was our role model, the number one Soviet scientist sitting at the peak of the pyramid each of us was trying to climb so single-mindedly. In May 1968, this celebrity scientist circulated a ten-thousand-word manifesto that unleashed a wrecking ball which smashed my complacent life. “Intellectual freedom is essential to human society,” Sakharov declared. Bravely denouncing Soviet thought-control, he mocked “the ossified dogmatism of a bureaucratic oligarchy and its favorite weapon, ideological censorship.”

Sakharov warned that Soviet science was imperiled without “the search for truth”. … At the time, there were few who could understand the depths of this critique. The Soviet Union wasn’t just relying on its scientific wizards to develop nuclear weapons; we now know that the research ran in tandem with an elaborate spying operation that stole as many of America’s atomic secrets as it could.

The message was clear for us. Sakharov helped us realize that the Soviet restrictions on free thought ran deep. You not only have to control your political opinions, but every interaction with your colleagues, every new insight, has to be checked and rechecked, for fear of ideological implications that could destroy a career in this world where even entire fields of inquiry were cancelled for being politically incorrect. Soviet scientists spent so much time looking over their shoulders and in their rear-view mirrors that they could not plunge ahead and catch up with their Western peers.

Long before most others, Sakharov saw in the Soviet scientific community the equivalent of the literary mediocrity we all saw in Soviet Realism. … Life in a dictatorship offers two choices: either you overcome your fear and stand for truth, or you remain a slave to fear, no matter how fancy your titles, no matter how big your dacha.

Natan Sharansky made the decision to stand for truth.

He applied to emigrate to Israel.

As a result of both decisions, he was jailed for nine years.

Once I had done it, once I was no longer afraid, I realized what it was to be free …

And that was why, during nine years in prison, when the KGB would try tempting me to restore my freedom and even my life by returning to the life I once had, it was easy to say “no”. …

Over the last three decades in freedom, I have noticed that … the feeling of release from the fear … is universal across cultures. This understanding prompted the Town Square Test I use to distinguish between free societies and fear societies: Can you express your individual views loudly, in public, without fear of being punished legally, formally, in any way? If yes, you live in a free society; if not, you’re in a fear society. …

[Today] nearly two-thirds of Americans report self-censoring about politics at least occasionally … despite the magnificent constitutional protections for free thought and expression enshrined in the Bill of Rights

To preserve our integrity and our souls, the quality of our political debate and the creativity so essential to our cultural life, we need … a test [that] asks: In the democratic society in which you live, can you express your individual views loudly, in public and in private, on social media and at rallies, without fear of being shamed, excommunicated, or cancelled?

A lot of American voters – even if not as many as the socialist Democratic Party claimed in order to seize power –  recently voted against freedom. They voted for the political party that promised free stuff. And already masters of the social media, most of them politically correct social justice warriors, refuse to let opinions they disagree with be expressed on their forums. Free speech is deeply unpopular with the Leftists now in power in America. Freedom itself is not valued. Those “magnificent constitutional protections for free thought and expression enshrined in the Bill of Rights” are being swept aside.

You will not be free – and the stuff you get from government won’t be free either.

Anything that costs you your freedom, costs too much.

These comments were made to us by email or on this website on the election disaster, with suggestions as to what might be done about it.

An astute observer of the political scene, retired academic Alexander Firestone, emailed us on what to expect of a Biden administration’s domestic and foreign policy:

 This is Obama 2.

Biden has in fact been elected by a bigoted psychotic-left media and this country will suffer horribly for it.

The question now is, how do we get out of it?

Re domestic policy I have no answers: Janet Yellin and the other self-appointed “experts” will return to hyper-inflation, endless bailouts for corrupt and degenerate democratic cities and states, massive deficits, much higher taxes, plainly racist affirmative action programs, etc., etc., ad nauseam. A republican controlled senate may be able to forestall some of that crap, but a lot of it is bound to get through. 

Re foreign policy, we can expect a very pro-China administration. The Bidens are already all bought and paid for. Nothing to be done here. If that annoys the Russians, so much the better. Russia and China are already positioning themselves for conflict if not war in Central Asia. We can do nothing here. If an emboldened China,  green-lighted by Biden, goes too far and there is real shooting between China and Russia, we can only cheer from the sidelines.

In the absolutely critical Middle East we can only hope that the psychotic Mullahs of Iran, humiliated by the recent assassination of their chief nuclear scientist as well as Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States (except Qatar) defection to a quasi-alliance with Israel, will recklessly start a war. That will destroy the crackpot pro-Iran policy of the Obama administration and of people like Ben Rhodes, Martin Indyk, Valerie Jarrett (born in Isfahan), Jake Sullivan, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and the traitors of J-street, JVP [Jewish Voices for Peace the leading Jewish anti-Zionist organization in the US] and the ADL [Anti Defamation League – constantly defaming Israel]. Fascist Turkey may also escalate its war against Greece, Armenia, and the Kurds beyond the point of no return and create a new war with Russia.

The idea (excluding action): Letting our enemies at home fail by their own efforts, and those abroad destroy each other.   

This was a comment by our regular commenter/contributing writer Liz on the massive fraud that gave Biden a majority, and a possible reaction:

It seems to me that, so far, [Sidney] Powell and the other lawyers have presented evidence that is going to be hard to ignore or refute.

They have it on record from the makers of the [vote counting] Dominion machines themselves that they can be easily hacked and/or set up to produce fraudulent results, and the results themselves are extremely incriminating, being mathematical impossibilities.

Plus testimony by experts like Dr. Navid Keshavarz-Nia, and eyewitnesses.

If this can all be ignored, then justice, and government by the people, is truly dead.

If Biden is allowed to be our next pretend president, Trump voters just may have to form a Confederacy and secede from the Left coasts.

The idea (in extreme exigency): Form a new Confederacy and secede.  

And this comment was made by Jeanne Shockley on our Facebook page asking the right questions about where we go from here:

This is the dilemma. Civil protest and petitions seem to gain little. We try overwhelming all State Legislatures and Congress with conservatives, which seems an impossible task no matter what the people try to do. We have rallies and marches and petitions, which are ignored by media or downplayed to the extent that there is no truth in the reporting. Without doubt, there are plans for 2022 and 2024 already in the works, but there is still the problem of electoral fraud. So, we await the legal process of Trump’s team dealing with that.

We could go Galt. We could plot revolution. We could resist all compliance to authority that is Harris/Biden. We could “roil the waters”. We could start a civil war. All these are such serious tactics that would destroy our lives and possibly our country. Should we hang on and wait for 2022? Should we rally to a call to arms? Should we go Galt?

How far into the Great Reset are we? How much resistance is there around the globe to the Globalists? Are they waiting for the Americans to show up? Should Donald Trump call for the support of patriots? Would we answer that call? What then?

I have stood up before for minor things, and called for the support that I had in private circles, and ended up standing alone, then defeated because I stood alone. Revolution is not a minor thing.

The idea (tentative): We contemplate revolution or civil war, and their consequences.  

We found more suggestions for what we might do about the disaster in two articles at American Greatness: –

First, one who signs himself Bradford H. B., writes that what we should do is melt our enemies’ hearts with descriptions of our sentiments regarding hearth and home, ancestral custom, attachment to the native soil. He calls these “moral arguments”, but they have much more to do with emotion than morality:

What the conservative elite has long failed to understand is that the Left views itself more than just a pusher of human progress. It’s actually more grandiose than this. To them, they’re locked in a Manichean battle between good and evil. …

Many of us see it that way too.

Instead of approaching the Left as the strident moral crusaders they are, the Republican elite traditionally has written them off as amoral, nihilistic, and godless relativists.

We too see them as amoral and nihilistic, but don’t, of course, hold “godlessness” against them.

This is dangerously naïve. Conservative scholar Paul Gottfried recently skewered this tendency when he reminded conservatives that it’s the Left which is the “more fervent and more activist side in our culture wars”; the side that routinely “expresses itself in rage”. “It would be unimaginable,” he wrote, “if the Left was not driven by its own morality.”

For the “more fervent” side then, engagement with them on non-moral terms will be futile. That is, demands for fairness, charges of inconsistency, or practical arguments on issues of public policy won’t bring a single one onside. On illegal immigration, for instance, appeals to the rule of law will generally fall flat every time. For the Left, laws against allowing the free movement of “impoverished victims of historic U.S. imperialism” are heartless, unjust, and illegitimate. …

Moral arguments have to be met with competing moral arguments. …

Traditional conservatives or the Old Right … treat traditions and customs as not only just, but sacrosanct. … They take pride and find guidance in long-cherished traditions, ancestral ties, and historical distinctions. It’s what makes people special. For the Left, however, these links must be broken. This is exactly what they do when they topple statues, “decolonize” history and the arts, and deplatform those who defend their in-group interests. Same with accusing America-Firsters of “hate speech” or calling for open borders and “refugee justice”.  It’s all a way to destroy peoples’ unique value and cut their ties to ancestry and posterity, and it must be called out in precisely these terms.

On illegal immigration then, the GOP shouldn’t lead with a law-and-order argument, but instead forcefully say that it hurts communities which the American people love and cherish. By killing labor standards and disrupting local cultures and customs, illegal aliens uproot communities which people have built up for years and have a moral right to keep as they are. Illegal immigration isn’t just wrong because it’s illegal; it’s wrong because it dispossesses people and destroys a way of life.

To the extent equality absolutism—the essence of Marxism – flattens cultural differences and crushes meaning and value for people, it’s amoral. …

Normal people, it turns out, love their communities and don’t feel the need to permanently change them. But to the egalitarian extremist, no one is special …  For this, they can and should be made to feel embarrassed and ashamed. …

Defending tradition, heritage, posterity, and group customs and values is absolutely a moral good. To seek its erasure is evil.

This is the position the Right must take to counter the ascendant hard-Left …

What Bradford H.B. is actually doing, is putting the nationalist case to the anti-nationalists – aka globalists, world-government advocates, communists, redistributionists, militant  proselytizing religions. But he is doing it in terms of emotion that simply beg the answer, “That’s how you feel, it is not how we feel.” There is nothing wrong with having an emotional attachment to one’s country and way of life, but it is hard to see it is a clinching argument against the Left’s ideal of breaking those very ties.

The idea: Pleading one’s love of country and local community, custom and rootedness.

We don’t think it will make Leftist idealists feel embarrassed or ashamed. (The appeal of nationalism can be put – and has been put on this website – in more cerebral terms.)

Next, Stephen Balch writes that the answer is to make our protest gatherings match or outdo those of the Left in clamor, frequency, and persistence. 

Do we make a stand or nervelessly surrender our rights? Do we affirm ourselves citizens—an historically rare and noble title—or do we accept becoming subjects, the fate of most humankind? …

We face something altogether new, a genuine effort at revolution. …

What is to be done? Whatever that is, it must depart from politics as usual …

An audacity is now called for, a willingness to stretch institutional bonds to a degree that genuinely alarms our conniving subverters. At this late stage in our political degeneration nothing less will suffice.

President Trump and his allies have rightly taken their case into the courts. But more needs to be accomplished, and with swift and dexterous versatility, in the courts of public opinion. …

Our strategy must buttress legal arguments with formidable public acts.

Jurists are mortals—as are legislators whose ultimate support we’ll need more than the courts. Both are cowed by the pressure of elite opinion. To do the correct thing, both will need to be steeled by countervailing forces. They fear, correctly, that adhering to the law will bring out the rioters and streetfighters. They must be brought to see that vast numbers of peaceful but equally angry citizens won’t accept cowardly skulking when the nation is in danger.

… The president must now lead his followers into America’s streets and squares. They must especially flock to the capitol complexes of all the critical states and register indignant protest. They must do the same under the media’s noses in Washington, New York, and Los Angeles, creating a clamor that broadcast agitprop can’t drown out. This has already begun, but its intensity must greatly ratchet up, becoming incessant and overwhelming. …

In the face of their literal coup, let ours be a counter-coup de théâtre. If the president and his attorney general believe they have the federal goods on individual malefactors, let them convene grand juries, bring in indictments and make midnight (and televised) arrests of top perps. Why shouldn’t we take instruction from our foes?

And don’t just petition the jurists, have the president and his lawyers lay their case before a joint session of Congress. If House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) won’t give him House leave, provide the Senate with an exclusive. You say nothing like that has ever been tried? Then no better reason for doing it now. The proceedings would be an educational spectacle the networks, and the president’s traducers, couldn’t ignore. And its grand show would suit the occasion.

The courts won’t call the election for Trump. They shouldn’t. The best that can be expected is a vacating of the results in those states where misdeeds have been particularly egregious.

Since there’s no time for reruns, the state legislatures will then have to grasp the nettle. They could throw their electoral votes to Trump or, much more likely, find some way to withhold them, or perhaps pick electors who’ll abstain or vote for some stand-in.

If, in consequence, neither Trump nor Biden have an electoral majority, the choice will devolve upon the newly elected House, with the constitutionally prescribed delegation-by-delegation voting system strongly favoring the president. The (probably) Republican Senate will re-elect Vice President Pence.

Should state legislators fail to show sufficient spine, or should there be rival electoral ballots submitted, there is a final ditch to fall back upon. The Republican Senate could raise objections to accepting dubious electoral votes. Something like that happened in 1876, the last time rampant corruption caused official tabulations to be formally challenged. Possible end games in a scenario like that are too tangled to assess, but the battle could be won. …

And if we fail? We fail—but not without forever having branded this election as the leprous thing it was. And in doing so we will have laid the necessary foundation for a continuing unconventional struggle, one that explores the outer boundaries of our Constitution’s resources to trap “His Fraudulency” and friends in the snares they themselves have laid.

The idea: We could make ourselves more threatening, more frightening, than the Left – but without becoming violent.

So: Passive observation and hope? Secession? Revolution or civil war? Attempt to shame our enemy into concession or even capitulation? Unremitting protest calculated to frighten while remaining nonviolent?

Or … ?

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.

“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.

If there is a Devil he lives on this earth – and his name is George Soros. (Read about him here.)

Where is James Bond when we need him? Why hasn’t he hunted down Soros and his minions?

Soros is more dangerous than any of those infamous villains working for a worse world, those power-hungry psychopaths whom 007 defeats with debonair ease.

Ah, but of course, he and they are  fictitious, and Soros is all too real.

American Wire reports:

In November 2016, a little known Central Florida prosecutor scored a stunning upset over the incumbent elected state’s attorney to become the chief prosecutor over the Orlando area.

Aramis Ayala won with the help of $1.4 million pumped into her campaign funding by leftist billionaire George Soros. Ayala promptly became infamous around Florida for abandoning the death penalty as a potential punishment, including in a case involving a suspect who murdered his pregnant girlfriend and a local cop.

But Ayala was not a one-offer.

Soros has shown a willingness to spend big to corrupt the criminal justice system from within — as shown by the protests over George Floyd, the Black Minneapolis man who died in police custody. Soros’s chosen DAs are making a mockery of justice across America.

In California, for example, Contra Costa County District Attorney Diana Becton refused to prosecute a Black Lives Matter protester charged with resisting arrest and assault. The suspect failed to disperse as cops tried to clear the streets, and then picked up a live tear gas canister that officers fired to move the crowd and hurled it back at the cops.

Additionally, Becton also announced she would prosecute two anti-BLM protesters for a hate crime after they painted over the “Black Lives Matter” mural painted on the street in front of the courthouse.

“We must address the root and byproduct of systemic racism in our country. The Black Lives Matter movement is an important civil rights cause that deserves all of our attention,” she said. …

In St. Louis, Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner has announced she will prosecute local lawyers Mark and Patricia McCloskey. The McCloskeys are renowned for being photographed outside their ritzy home holding guns as angry BLM protesters, who had broken into their private gated community, marched down the street. The couple maintained the demonstrators threatened them and their property. In early June, Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt lashed out at Gardner after she released three dozen suspected looters following a Floyd-protest riot. “There wasn’t one person looting and rioting and shooting at police officers that could have been charged? It’s absurd,” Schmitt told local media. …

In Chicago, State Attorney Kim Foxx opted not to prosecute thousands of arrests for what she termed “minor offenses” related to riots. She attributed the unrest to “righteous anger” and “collective grief” over Floyd’s death and praised those who were “standing against years of racial injustice”, according to local media.

Foxx also implemented a policy regarding violent offenses – such as assault, resisting arrest, battery, mob action, and aggravated battery to a police officer – that there would be a “‘presumption against proceeding’ unless there’s body or dash cam footage available, or if a police officer is the complainant”. In other words, if it’s not on tape, it didn’t happen.

Meanwhile, The New York Times reported that between June 20 and July 5 nine children under 18 were shot to death in a wave of violence that has resulted in nearly twice as many murder victims in Chicago as in New York, even though the Big Apple has three times the population. “The Windy City is becoming the Bloody City,” a local minister, the Rev. Michael L. Pfleger told the Times. He described this moment as “the worst period in the 45 years he has worked on social issues”.

In Houston, District Attorney Kim Ogg tossed nearly 800 total criminal charges filed against 600 people after Floyd-related protests. In a statement, Ogg said:

Prosecutors conducted a review that divided the cases between those people who sought to do harm others (sic) and property vs. those arrested for simple civil disobedience. … The cases dismissed were for non-violent misdemeanor offenses, mostly obstructing a highway and trespassing. While probable cause existed for the arrests of those people who refused to disperse after being ordered to do so by police, our young prosecutors worked hard to identify the few offenders who came to inflict harm on others and intentional damage to property. … With the dismissals, the people whose cases were dismissed no longer charged don’t face the prospect of being saddled with a criminal prosecution that could jeopardize future educational, employment and other opportunities.

So down in Houston, hundreds of people menacing the public by trespassing and blocking highways is OK, so long as it’s done for the progressive reason.

And this is only one of the ways Soros is mobilizing forces for injustice.

His fiendish machinations are harming other countries too, among them most notably Ukraine, Hungary, Israel, the Balkan states …

His plots against the human race surpass any fiction.

Under his hand the map of the Middle East is changing.

Will he succeed? He usually does.

The aggressive, vengeful, jihadist Iranian regime can do nothing much now to harm the US or its assets or its allies.

But it looks to the time when it will have its nuclear arsenal.

This is the view of how things stand at present from the Heritage Foundation:

(The Iranian) objective was to show that they are striking back against the United States to save face in the eyes of their public, but to do so in a way that does not provoke the United States even more to retaliate back. …

They fired 15 missiles. One landed at the airport in Irbil, four landed somewhere in the desert, and then the remaining missiles landed on that base in western Iraq. And there were no U.S. or Iraqi or coalition casualties, and very minimal damage to facilities on these bases.

So, it was enough, I think, where the regime in Iran could go to its people and say, “Look, we struck back,” and there’s already these wild rumors flying around on social media about so many U.S. service personnel wounded and being treated secretly in Israel. And, of course, Iran has to drag in Israel somehow.

And we all know this is nonsense in the way our system of government works here. There’s no way the U.S. government could cover up something like this, but it’s enough where the Iranians probably were able to save face and had an off-ramp.  …

President Trump over the past several months has shown a lot of restraint against Iranian aggression. There have been numerous occasions where the U.S. would have been justified to strike back. And President Trump chose not to, always trying to leave that door open for negotiations. …

He had to show the Iranians that the U.S. means business, and that’s what he did. And paradoxically, the demise of Qassim Suleimani might be looked upon as the de-escalatory strike, that’s the strike that deescalated the situation. …

Until this point, the Iranians thought they could keep going and going and going, and the U.S. would just kind of tinker on the edges in terms of its response, and then that response was so great, that impact, it was so great.

I don’t think we can overstate how important someone like Qasem Suleimani is to that, to the whole Iranian security apparatus. And whenever he was taken out, I think it probably gave some room for pause in Iran, and they probably thought, “Whoa, OK, can we afford another severe blow like this if we push the Americans too far when we retaliate?”…

President Trump … prefers negotiation. He prefers making a deal. His instincts are not to go to war. He does not want to go to war with Iran. He’s not looking for a fight.

But he did strike at last. He had Qasem Soleimani killed. He knew there would be an uproar from his enemies – the most virulent of them being the Democrats in Congress.

But:

President Trump comes out on top of all of this in many ways. And even some of his strongest critics have acknowledged this point as well.

President Trump looks stronger. Iran looks weaker.

All good.

But Iran is still working on producing nuclear bombs.

President Trump has not lost sight of that.

As we have come to expect, he dealt with the events masterfully. In a well-judged address the day after Iran’s gesture of revenge, he warned the Iranian leaders without humiliating them.

Most importantly, he made a strong statement about their ambition to become a nuclear-armed power first, before anything else, even his “Good morning”:

As long as I’m president of the United States, Iran will never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon. Good morning. I’m pleased to inform you the American people should be extremely grateful and happy. No Americans were harmed in last night’s attack by the Iranian regime. We suffered no casualties. All of our soldiers are safe and only minimal damage was sustained at our military bases. Our great American forces are prepared for anything. Iran appears to be standing down, which is a good thing for all parties concerned and a very good thing for the world. …

But the fight with Iran – started by the regime in 1979 when it seized 52 American hostages at the US embassy in Tehran – is not over.

The president spoke of imposing more sanctions:

As we continue to evaluate options in response to Iranian aggression, the United States will immediately impose additional punishing economic sanctions on the Iranian regime. These powerful sanctions will remain until Iran changes its behavior.

Sanctions will not stop the making of nuclear bombs, but they might so weaken the government that it can be brought down by a popular revolt.

President Trump does not speak of regime change in Iran. But only if the theocracy falls and is replaced by an elected government, could the abandonment of the nuclear program be negotiated.

If that does not happen while Donald Trump is president – and if he means what he says as we have come to expect he does – the only alternative is the physical destruction of Iran’s  nuclear bomb-making facilities.

The Democrats, who would rather see the whole world laid waste than that Donald Trump should succeed at anything, will try to prevent it.

But there has to be either regime change or the dies irae of the bunker bombs.