She identifies herself as “Georgia H”. She is not a fluent speaker, but her hesitancy verifies her sincerity. What she has to say is well worth hearing.

She tells us that she had been an unquestioning Democrat; raised by Democrats to be a Democrat; surrounded by Democrats, at one with her fellow Democrats. Then practical experience gradually –  and it would seem quite painfully – taught her to question her political beliefs until she came to the unavoidable conclusion that the Democrats were wrong.

First as a teacher and then as a nurse, she learned that what she approves of and disapproves of mean that she is a conservative.

Not all the conservatives she now admires would be our own choice of mentor for a convert to our side of the ever-widening political divide, but we hope she will go on to find the good ones (and perhaps even discover us).

Who in the world deserves to be honored and rewarded for making peace this year? Who has brought historic enemies together in the Middle East and the Balkans? Whose were these amazing achievements serving the cause of peace? To whom should this year’s Nobel Peace Prize go?

Why, the US president, Donald Trump, of course!

Wrong – according to the Norwegian Nobel Committee. The truly deserving recipient of its Peace Prize it judges to be a deeply corrupt United Nations agency that has distributed poisoned food making hungry people sick, mad, and dead.

Breitbart reports:

The Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) its annual Peace Prize for 2020 on Friday, overlooking a history of corruption, mismanagement, and sexual assault among its ranks.

And mass murder. The report comes to that. Read on:

In its statement announcing the decision, the Committee expressed mounting concern about lack of access to food globally, particularly in light of repressive government lockdowns to prevent the spread of the Chinese coronavirus. The WFP, it said, won the award “for its efforts to combat hunger, for its contribution to bettering conditions for peace in conflict-affected areas and for acting as a driving force in efforts to prevent the use of hunger as a weapon of war and conflict”.

According to the Nobel Committee, the WFP was responsible for aiding “100 million people in 88 countries” throughout 2019. It asserted that the Chinese coronavirus pandemic “has contributed to a strong upsurge in the number of victims of hunger in the world” and applauded the WFP’s “impressive ability to intensify its efforts” given the current situation.

“The world is in danger of experiencing a hunger crisis of inconceivable proportions if the World Food Program and other food assistance organizations do not receive the financial support they have requested,” the committee insisted. …

Regarding the humanitarian efforts the WFP actually conducts, it has faced over a decade of concerns regarding widespread corruption, resulting in food falling into the hands of warlords, terrorists, and other criminal actors, who then sell it to fund their illicit operations.

One of the villainous countries in this story is, as in so many stories of corruption and cruelty, Somalia:

A 2009 report revealed that both Somali officials and warlords were selling to the intended recipients U.N. food specifically labeled “not for sale”.

“In south and central Somalia, where nearly 20 years of war has ravaged the country, warlords commonly steal food aid and use it to control the population,” UAE’s the National reported that year. “Here in the more stable northern region, where many have sought shelter from the fighting, some of the food is stolen by corrupt officials looking to make a profit.”

The UN’s own finding should have disqualified it from consideration for a Nobel Peace Prize if the prize were to mean anything at all:

A U.N. security council report leaked a year later found that as much as half of the nation’s food aid, mostly run through the WFP, never reached intended recipients, as it was stolen before it got there. The culprits, according to the report are “corrupt contractors, radical Islamic militants and local U.N. workers”. 

Corruption continued to mar the agency throughout the decade. A 2015 Fox News report accused the WFP of losing millions to poorly managed funding.

The United Nations World Food Program in 2013 and 2014 used millions of dollars of specially designated donor trust funds as an all-purpose piggy bank, often without creating safeguards to ensure the money was used properly and as its donors had intended according to an internal report by WFP’s Office of the Inspector General.

In addition to corruption concerns, the WFP aid that does reach intended recipients for free is not always safe for consumption. Last year, the WFP announced it would stop distributing a “super cereal” meant for malnourished people in Uganda because experts found it laden with dangerous bacteria, mold, and possible carcinogens. …

The initial halt in distribution began in March after initial reports of the cereal being dangerous surfaced – linking it to the deaths of 400 people and hundreds of illnesses. Those found to have gotten sick after eating the cereal reportedly showed signs of “mental disorder”.

But the prize-winning UN agency went on distributing the poisonous food:

By September, the WFP had to once again stop distributing the “super cereal” because more people reported illnesses.

Great! Give it a prize.

The UN must be destroyed!

Is it really possible that at this stage of history, with all the terrifying examples of countries that have had socialist revolutions and become earthly hells, and no example of a single one of them that has not become an earthly hell, the United States is about to choose to have its own socialist revolution?

Are more than half the enfranchised citizens of America about to vote for the transformation of their free and prosperous country into a socialist hell of oppression and poverty?

To put it another way, are they about to vote the Democratic Party into power?

Dennis Prager points out at Townhall how a vote for any Democrat is a vote against America.

“I vote for the man (or woman), not the party” is what millions of Americans say and what, in fact, many do. It is intended as a noble sentiment: “I am not one of those Americans who votes blindly by party; I measure each candidate and then decide which one to vote for.”

They do not appreciate a likable Democrat will do as much harm to our country as any other Democrat.

Since  slavery, there has never been a time when the two major parties differed as much as they do today. Therefore, the notion that one should vote “for the individual, not the party” has never made less sense.

Elected officials vote with their party more often than in principled opposition to it, however fine they may be as individuals. Nevertheless, a great number of Americans still vote for “the individual”.

Obvious examples are Republican “Never Trumpers”.

New York Times columnist Bret Stephens is one prominent example. He believes in a strong American defense, supported Trump’s withdrawal of the United States from Barack Obama’s agreement with Iran, credits Trump with the Israeli peace agreements with Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, saluted Trump’s moving of the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, and presumably supports other Trump policies, such as the president’s extraordinary success with regard to the American economy prior to the lockdowns that crushed the economy.

Yet, he so loathes the president that he will vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

He and many other Americans (we will soon know how many) who support the president’s Republican policies will vote for the party that stands for almost everything they oppose because they will “vote for the man, not the party”. 

At this time in American history, to care more about an individual candidate than the party is to support the unraveling of America. It is so irrational as to be incredible.

Voting for any Democrat – whether for mayor, district attorney, state legislature, state governor, the U.S. House of Representatives, the U.S. Senate or president – is to vote for someone who will enable the left to destroy America as we know it.

That is their wording, not only mine.

Further vital points he makes:

It is to vote for the party that, for the first time in American history, openly identifies with socialism more than with capitalism.

To vote for any Democrat is to vote for the party that believes America is “systemically racist”, that it is rotten to the core, vile from its inception (in 1619, they claim, not 1776).

To vote for any Democrat is to vote for the party that will renew the Obama agreement with one of America’s and the civilized world’s greatest enemies, the Islamic Republic of Iran.

It is to vote for undoing every economic policy that led America to its greatest economic boom in memory.

It is to vote for the party whose mayors, governors and district attorneys allow violent riots and seek to “defund” police, a policy even most blacks oppose.

It is to vote for Kamala Harris, the most left-wing member of the U.S. Senate, for vice president and, given Biden’s age and health, perhaps soon president …

… if that senile corrupt old man actually and astoundingly gets elected to the presidency.

It is to vote for the party that:

wants to allow millions more illegal immigrants into America and grant them benefits heretofore reserved for Americans. Democrats don’t use the words “open borders,” but they  support this country-wrecking policy

supports the Green New Deal, or something very close to it, which will further ruin an economy already in ruins from Democrat-supported lockdowns

seeks to nationalize American health care (“Medicare for All”).

supports the unprecedented suppression of free speech by Big Tech and universities.

It is to vote for ruin and misery. 

Vote Democrat and you can have this too.

https://youtu.be/5SeVv277d0I 

pic.twitter.com/gvIPuYtTZG

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 3, 2020

“I want the entire world to burn until the last cop is strangled with the intestines of the last capitalist, who is strangled in turn with the intestines of the last politician.”

Thus Nathan Jun, Professor of Philosophy, now teaching a course in Ethics at Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Texas.

(We quote an article by Johnathan Jones at the Western Journal.)

Some who read that statement by the professor reacted – he claims – by sending him death threats and vandalizing his home.

He complained:

“There’s no way that I can make those sorts of expressions publicly around here without this kind of thing happening again and again and again and again. I’m just tired of it.”

But he is not easily intimidated. He will bravely adhere to his principles and continue to spread his teaching.

He feels obligated by his job to “speak out fearlessly and unapologetically on matters of public concern according to the dictates of my conscience.”

He has noble aspirations:

“I do long to live in a world in which we no longer have cops, which we no longer have capitalists and which we no longer have politicians. Because those are my political beliefs and I own them and I make no apologies for those beliefs.”

He said this in an interview on KFDX-TV. As he spoke he was wearing a shirt advertising Antifa, and he claimed affiliation with the murderous Marxist organization Black Live Matter.

The University defended his right to say what he did on grounds of upholding the right of free speech. It is doubtful that the University would allow a defender of capitalism, law and order,  and conservative political principles to speak on its campus. What it was really defending was the idea of “burning the entire world until the last cop is strangled with the intestines of the last capitalist, who is strangled in turn with the intestines of the last politician”.

Most universities in the “free West” would take the same position. Those are the ethics of our culture now. Professor Nathan Jun speaks for the professoriate of America.

Is there anywhere a pro-Trump watcher of that debate who doesn’t know points that the President should have raised, arguments he should have made, knock-out blows he should have delivered?

Well, here’s one at least who appreciates what the President did say, the blows he did deliver:

Chris Buskirk writes at The Critic:

“Teacher, help. The President is being mean to me.” That’s the rough translation of Joe Biden’s frequent, desperate appeals to moderator, Chris Wallace during [the September 29, 2020]  debate with Donald Trump. The former Vice President came in for some rough treatment by the current leader of the free world.

From the starting shot, President Trump was on the front foot, peppering Biden with a flurry of verbal blows: taunts, accusations, barbed criticisms for Biden, declarations of sublime political skill, triumph against longs odds, and exemplary selflessness for himself. Biden didn’t know what hit him. But he should have. And so should have his advisers and debate coaches. This is Trump’s style.

Trump is a street fighter waging asymmetric warfare against a traditional foe who is reviewing the rules of engagement and consulting the lawyers back at headquarters before doing anything. And all the while he’s getting pummeled. Idealists will say that it wasn’t very presidential, that they didn’t dig into policy and educate the American people, where was the dignity?

Welcome to electoral politics. It’s always been thus. Founding Father John Adams delighted in calling fellow Founder Alexander Hamilton, “the bastard brat of a Scotch peddler”. Adams himself came in for similar treatment during the election of 1800 when he was called an hermaphrodite reportedly at the behest of Thomas Jefferson.

We didn’t get any of that last night. But there’s another debate next week so keep your fingers crossed.

One of the most interesting and telling exchanges came about an hour into the debate. In some ways each man showed himself in his purest form. Joe Biden delivered what was very obviously a well-rehearsed, set-piece attack on President Trump. You could see the windup, like a boxer pulling his arm way back, fist clenched, preparing to deliver the knockout blow. Biden started by repeating the accusation that Trump disrespectfully criticizes the military, calling them losers and suckers. The story has been debunked repeatedly by multiple sources including those hostile to the president like John Bolton. But it’s part of the Biden campaign’s strategy. So he levels the accusations and then begins to eulogise his son, Beau Biden, who served in Iraq, and later died of brain cancer. This makes it all personal to Joe, you see. He’s defending his dead son against a mythical slander from the bad orange man. Biden even points a finger at Trump, “My son is not a loser!”

Trauma mining to score points in a debate is a desperately cynical piece of political theatre. But, I suppose they calculate that if it works you get to be president. It was pure Biden: scripted, saccharine, playing by the rules of a game that has long since ended. In case you think I’m too cynical, that surely this couldn’t have been orchestrated, Joe Biden’s official Twitter account posted a photo of Joe and Beau with the caption, “Beau was not a loser” just as the debate ended.

And just so, Trump. He looked at his podium and quietly, respectfully, asked, which son Biden was talking about. Of course, he knew, but he played the game forcing Biden to respond, Beau. “Oh, I don’t know him. I know Hunter.”

And then listed the accusations against Hunter: he took a $1.5 billion investment from China into the fledgling investment company he ran with John Kerry’s son while his father was Vice President and en route to China. He received $3.5 million from the mayor of Moscow. He had a sinecure from a Ukranian energy company while his father was Obama’s pointman on Ukraine policy. (NB: Hunter had no experience in business let along the energy business.) It was as sweet a move as I’ve ever seen. The knockout punch was coming with all the force Joe Biden could muster and Trump simply sidestepped it and counterpunched.

It was an impressive display of natural animal cunning. And it could make the difference in the election. Trump was agile, aggressive, and vigorous, taking what he wanted when he wanted it. This offends some people’s sensibilities. He’s transgressive. He doesn’t play according to the rules. But for others, that’s part of the appeal.

It’s no secret that the ruling class in America despises the country class. If you’re one of those people who don’t live in coastal cities and subscribe to the same worldview as the elite aspirants hoping for a job at a billionaire-backed NGO or an internship that might lead to a job at McKinsey then you’re a deplorable, a CHUD, and definitely racist and whatever bad things are happening to you, your family, and your inland town are your just deserts.

One of Trump’s main functions and biggest appeals is that he exposes the occupational elites that are credentialed but not expert in much of anything. Everyone knows it. Imposter syndrome is rampant. And Trump preys on their insecurities which is what provokes such outrageous reactions from his enemies. But a lot of Americans who live in interior America and get unglamorous jobs at slowly declining wages, raise their families want nothing more than to be left alone by the credentialed but unaccomplished strivers who hate them. For those people, Trump is their champion.

They probably don’t aspire to be like Trump, but they like the fact that he exposes the bankruptcy of the undeserving ruling class. And for them, Trump’s debate was a tour de force. It was aggressive, it was funny, he said the quiet part out loud, he broke the rules in public that are normally only broken in private. That won him the election in 2016 …

And it won him that debate.

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.