Biden’s Escalating Border Crisis

 

Biden’s Escalating Border Crisis

The president's policies could spell disaster for the U.S.

Todd Bensman, American Mind 

U.S. authorities have virtually sealed any illuminating information about the recent FBI counterterrorism arrest of eight ISIS-tied Tajikistani nationals who crossed the southwest border a year ago. They were quickly freed amid the ongoing mass migration flood and claimed asylum. Federal law enforcement acted after a wiretap investigation intercepted communications that detected links to the Tajik-led ISIS-K terrorist group in Afghanistan and chatter about bombs and violent religious ideology. Though we are short of further details about the ISIS links and jihad talk, the initial arrests on immigration charges of border-crossing Tajik immigrants who were quickly freed at the border and got rolled up in a major counterterrorism dragnet constitute a momentous wake-up call that portends public policy consequences.

The multi-agency, FBI-led wiretap terrorism sting, just three months after four Tajik border infiltrators with the ISIS-K conducted a bloody, high body-count attack in Moscow that killed 145, comes too close to consummating an often-verbalized (and just as often ridiculed) fear of U.S.-Mexico border infiltration. That event and several others, including accidental terror suspect releases from the border and a thwarted box truck attack at Quantico Marine Corps Base in May by a Jordanian border-crosser, should demand a resolute U.S. homeland security enterprise pivot to mass border migration as a national security matter, a whole new public safety frontier.

But despite the public interest necessity of understanding and countering the terror travel tactic, mum has been the only official government word about the “Tajik 8” case since it came to light in early June through anonymously sourced leaks to reporters at the conservative-leaning New York Post and Fox News. Nor has the Tajik 8 case resonated much as a point of public debate, media punditry, or think tank analysis. CBS, NBC, CNN, and other outlets have confirmed the initial reports, which are not disputed by the government, but they seem to have little interest in the deeper implications of the story.

Government silence can perhaps be attributed to the ongoing nature of the investigation, with more arrests to come. But it’s also due, undoubtedly in no small part, to this border-related terrorism case having heavy negative political consequences for President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign. Polls show the president’s reelection chances suffer greatly from the crisis he wrought when his administration effectively negated the relevance of the southern border on Day One in 2021.

Who else is probably among the 1,500 immigrants from Tajikistan known to have crossed the southern border between October 2020 and May 2024? The New York Post recently reported that only a couple dozen Tajiks crossed from Mexico in the last 14 years. At least another 900 more Tajiks, including one of the arrested Tajik 8 immigrants, were approved for humanitarian entry through U.S.-Mexico land ports as part of an ad hoc program that has granted hundreds of thousands of two-year renewable permission slips to immigrants from all over the world who apply on the CBP-One cell phone app, as I have reported, based on Center for Immigration Studies data.  

For some education as to what some of these 2,500 or so Tajik border-crossers might be all about, we can turn to another case when Tajikistani terrorists affiliated with ISIS and directed by its senior leaders infiltrated Germany to attack Americans in April 2020. Consider it a terrorism border infiltration case study in point.

Germany’s Border Infiltrating Tajik Terrorists

About 350 German anti-terrorism police, in coordinated raids, rounded up five Tajiks between the ages of 24 and 32 who had crossed illegally over the European Union’s external borders. They were caught in the advanced stages of planning an attack on two U.S. Air Force bases and NATO facilities in Germany. Much like the Tajiks recently arrested in New York, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia, members of the German team infiltrated across European land borders cloaked among millions of ordinary immigrants, starting in 2015. They all applied for asylum in Germany.

It was no doubt helpful to the German team that Europe’s mass migration crisis then, again like the current American one, created long-term asylum processing backlogs that provided ample time to prepare terrorist attacks.

The Tajiks in Germany used their time to plot and prepare as a terror cell, taking instruction all along from ranking ISIS members in Syria and Afghanistan. Funded in part from $40,000 that one of the Tajiks received to assassinate an Albanian man, the German group had ordered bomb components online and had already stockpiled fully automatic machine guns, ammunition, and the components for anti-personnel explosives. In 2022, German courts sentenced all five to prison on convictions related to the plot.

Troubled by Militant Islamic Extremism

Who are the Tajik 8? The German case and others before and after it provide some clues while the public waits for the government to release some facts.

Landlocked Tajikistan, bordering Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and China, is a 98 percent Muslim-majority nation of only nine million, deeply troubled for years by Islamic militancy. Hundreds of young Tajiks, for instance, were easily recruited to join ISIS fighting groups to create and later defend its “caliphate” after 2014.

The German group’s infiltration into Europe coincided with the Tajik government’s 2015 banishment of the barely tolerated Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan (IRPT), which was tagged for its close association with Osama Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda before 9/11, and for propagating attacks and fomenting violent jihad in more recent years. Designated a terrorist organization, IRPT activists and other local groups began scattering across the world, finding their way into migrant spillways to Europe and beyond.

After U.S.-led coalition forces militarily defeated ISIS in 2019, Tajiks began circulating through the international bloodstream with combat experience, ideological indoctrination, and resentment toward the United States. Tajik jihadists at home want to emigrate with their violent religious ideology to just about anywhere else, while the many hundreds who fought with ISIS do not want to return to the old country because of government hostility.

“The Tajik government continued to place heavy restrictions on groups it classifies as extremist,” as part of a 2021-2025 national strategy on countering terrorism, the U.S. State Department’s 2021 Country Report on Terrorism stated in its Tajikistan section. Indeed, violent jihadist ideology among Tajiks became so prevalent that the U.S. Secretary of State redesignated their country as a “country of particular concern” every year since 2016 for fomenting terrorism.

After the defeat of ISIS, Tajik fighters gravitated to its cousin, ISIS-K, which operates from Afghanistan and Pakistan. Tajik jihadists have led the ISIS-K terror group, which conducts attacks regionally from South Asia and dreams of killing Americans in their homeland.

“An ISIS Terror Group Draws Half Its Recruits From Tiny Tajikistan,” reads the April 18 headline of a New York Times story about the attack on Moscow. Though that group had been regarded as lacking in the capability to reach the United States in years past, that was before the American mass migration border crisis made entry quick and easy for almost anyone from anywhere in the world.

ISIS-K, meanwhile, has “maintained ambitions to attack the West,” according to the U.S. State Department’s 2022 Country Report on Terrorism. Tajiks and the other nationalities get to the U.S. border by flying into South America or Central America on legal or fake visas, and then join the stream of migrants heading north. One popular route runs from Moscow to Cuba and then into Central American countries. Once Tajiks reach the U.S. border, they’re quickly processed into the interior, later to claim asylum for hearings scheduled many years in the future.

The Biden Administration has made entry even easier. At least one of the Tajik 8 gained his DHS-approved access over the border using the “CBP-One” mobile phone app program, one of 888 to do so under the program between May 2021 and December 2023, according to information exclusively obtained and reported by the Center for Immigration Studies through Freedom of Information Act litigation over the past year.

Biden’s DHS is letting others in on the app from the same dangerous neighborhood, such as Kyrgyzstan (4,224 through December), Uzbekistan (2,071), and Kazakhstan (585).

The news has been flush recently with reports of illegal alien rapists and child murderers from Latin America who were admitted into the country without vetting. The public has been rightly horrified by these criminals. But an open border invites all kinds of malefactors, and Americans should consider themselves warned that Central Asian terror cells are likely established in the homeland now and are planning to create mayhem undreamed of within our nation.  

Todd Bensman is the author of Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History and the senior national security fellow for the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies.

The Logic in All the Madness

The Logic in All the Madness

The Biden administration's agendas may have fundamentally changed the country for decades, if not longer—and will require tough remedies that may be almost as unpopular as the wreckage they wrought.

Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness 

Most Americans believe it is unhinged to deliberately destroy the border and allow 10 million illegal aliens to enter the country without background audits, means of support, any claims to legal residency, and definable skills. And worse still, why would federal authorities be ordered to release repeat violent felons who have gone on to commit horrendous crimes against American citizens?

Equally perplexing to most Americans is borrowing $1 trillion every 90 days and paying 5-5.5% interest on the near $36 trillion in ballooning national debt. Serving that debt at current interest exceeds the size of the annual defense budget and may soon top $1 trillion in interest costs, or more than 13% of the budget.

Why would the United States suspend military aid to Israel as it tries to destroy the Hamas architects of the October 7 massacres? Why would it lift sanctions on a terrorist Iran? Why would it suppress Israel’s response to Iran’s missile attack on the Jewish homeland? Why would it prevent Israel from stockpiling key munitions as it prepares to deal with the existential threats posed by Hezbollah?

Why would the Biden administration cancel key pipeline projects and put vast swaths of federal lands rich in oil and gas off limits to production, even as it further drains the strategic petroleum reserve? Why not pump rather than drain our own oil from strategic stockpiles?

Why would the Biden White House’s counsel’s office meet with Nathan Wade, the former paramour chief prosecutor in the Fani Willis Fulton County prosecution of Donald Trump? Why would the third-ranking prosecutor in the Biden Justice Department step down to lead Alvin Bragg’s Manhattan prosecution of Donald Trump? Why would the Biden Justice Department under Attorney General Merrick Garland select Jack Smith as a special prosecutor of Donald Trump—given his past failures as a special counsel and known political biases?

Nihilism only explains so much. A better explanation is that the Biden administration and its handlers knew that there was a good chance that most of their policies would prove unpopular and might even jeopardize Biden’s reelection.

But they also were confident the changes were of such magnitude that the United States would either become—in the infamous phrase of Barack Obama—“fundamentally transformed” or force the next Republican administration to adopt such tough medicine that it would prove untenable politically and the malady would still prove mostly impossible to undo.

After all, how would a Trump administration deal with 10 million illegal aliens who entered the US without audit or legality? Where are they? How would they be found and deported? How many court suits in blue-jurisdictions before blue judges would have to be overcome?

The country has become accultured to a nonexistent border. And so, the left assumes, it would be expensive and difficult to finish the wall, to stop catch and release, to insist refugee status must be obtained before entry, and to deport what is likely now 20-30 million illegal aliens in toto. In other words, the Biden administration may sigh, “Our work is done. Whatever you think about our illegal methods, we forever changed the idea of immigration and the demographics of the country.”

All presidents—Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden—have run deficits and vastly increased the debt since the Bill Clinton-Newt Gingrich compromises that resulted in a temporary period of balanced budgets. But in the case of Biden, there was no need to keep up the multitrillion-dollar deficits, especially as interest rates on the national debt tripled and the service costs now approach $1 trillion per year.

Biden, after all, inherited a recovering economy, flush with post-COVID-19 lockdown stimulatory dollars, pent-up consumer demand, and ossified supply chains. And then he stupidly poured gasoline on the explosive mix by dousing the country with even more federal spending. Now we have the worst of both worlds: high interest rates and nearly $36 trillion to service.

But in the leftist mind, it was worth it, given that left-wing constituencies received vast expansions of entitlements that will be hard to prune back. And unprecedentedly vast debt at levels like our current burden of 123% of annual GDP prove unsustainable. And the historic correctives are brutal: 1) major cuts in entitlements and redistributive spending programs; 2) tax hikes at a time when state, local, federal, and gas, sales, and property taxes—and other “fees”—already take over half the income of most middle-class Americans; 3) hyper-inflation to pay back what is owed with cheap funny money, with the added leftist fillip that those who have dollars lose wealth and those who don’t gain greater access to them; 4) renunciation of debt. We already saw in the Obama era that liberal bureaucrats and courts often reversed the orders of creditors in bankruptcy hearings. When debt becomes unsustainable, historically arise cries of “Why should the poor suffer more when the rich already have enough money and don’t really need to be paid back?”; and 5) efforts to “confiscate” private wealth by giving, in exchange, government “credits.” For example, there have already been floated ideas that 401Ks could be absorbed into the insolvent Social Security system for credit in government benefits.

Most Americans poll strong support for Israel. They oppose the Biden effort to triangulate by revisiting the old Obama nihilist agendas of emboldening the Iranian/Hezbollah/Hamas/Houthis axis to play off against our traditional allies of Israel and the more moderate Arab regimes.

By failing to prosecute nine months of domestic violence committed by pro-Hamas lawbreakers, by allowing leftist campuses to normalize anti-Semitism and pro-terrorist advocacy, and by destroying the once close alliance of Israel and the United States, the left feels it will be almost impossible to go back to the pre-Obama/Biden years. Their legacy, they hope, is a mendicant Israel utterly dependent on U.S. largess—a condition itself predicated on essentially destroying the idea of a secure Jewish state within its present borders.

The Biden administration sought to curb oil and gas production—save for brief periods before the midterm and reelection campaigns, when it drained the strategic petroleum reserve. The point was to acculturate the public to high gasoline prices, to make inefficient solar/wind/EVs projects competitive against artificially costly fossil fuels, and to institutionalize policies that will make it difficult to reopen closed fields, to reboot federal oilfield leasing, and to dismantle costly subsidies for inefficient green fuels.

That Americans paid hundreds of billions of dollars more for their fuels under Biden, that the auto industry is stuck with vast inventories of money-losing electric vehicles that the public does not want, and that the entire economy has been shackled by counterproductive green mandates were considered worth the cost of alienating the public.

The left knows that neither Alvin Bragg, E. Jean Carroll, Letitia James, Jack Smith, nor Fani Willis would have gone to court against Donald Trump if he was either a leftist or had bowed out of the 2024 presidential race. They know no one has been tried on such pseudo-charges, and no one will again be so charged after Trump. And they accept that no republic can long survive if the opposition party seeks to remove the names of its political opponents from the ballot.

But they also know that the left has now established a valuable precedent: oppose woke progressivism, and one will either become bankrupted by indictments or land before a blue-city jury eager to nullify evidence to ensure the accused is jailed and broke.

So the left believes that its new lawfare was well worth the destruction of the entire tradition of equality under the law: 1) Donald Trump has lost a half-billion dollars in fines and legal fees; 2) a court-bound Donald Trump was robbed of weeks of valuable campaign time; 3) Donald Trump can be forever now libeled as a “convicted felon”; and 4) the left has played chicken with the American Constitution and believes it has won, given conservatives would never enter into a destructive cycle of tit-for-tat.

The Biden years did the country great damage and rendered Biden himself one of the most unpopular incumbent presidents in American history. But his agendas may have fundamentally changed the country for decades, if not longer—and will require tough remedies that may be almost as unpopular as the wreckage they wrought.

Your Government at Work

 

Your Government at Work 

Politicians and industrial policy will always find ways to execute poorly.

Andy Kessler, Wall Street Journal 

Politicians and industrial policy will always find ways to execute poorly.

After the $320 million floating fiasco ran aground, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance tweeted: “The Gaza pier is a symbol of the Biden administration. A horrible idea executed terribly.” True—for almost all government projects. The November election may be about old vs. paroled, but underneath it could mark an overdue transition from heavy-handed government ineptitude back to relying on the private sector. Busybodies vs. market ninjas. It’s time. 

Remember the $7.5 billion of pork spending set aside for electric-vehicle chargers in the 2021 Infrastructure bill? The administration promised 500,000 of them by 2030, overseen by Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. As of May, only eight had been installed. As they say, “close enough for government work.” Only 150,000 years to go. 

In 2008 Californians voted for about $10 billion in bonds for high-speed rail connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles—the first payment of a then-estimated $33 billion budget for the 800-mile stretch. So far, only a 1,600- foot Fresno River Viaduct has been built, along with a hodgepodge of guideways and structures. Only 42,000 years to go. Oh, and the estimated cost has risen to around $130 billion. California has also spent $24 billion over the past five years to solve the home- less problem. Meanwhile, the homeless population is up 30%. Why let government do anything? 

Jimmy Carter—Joe Biden’s role model—set the pace. In 1979, after six years of oil embargoes and gasoline shortages, Mr. Carter wanted $88 billion ($365 billion today) for, among other things, a Synthetic Fuel Corp. “Synfuels” would enable U.S. energy independence. He got $20 billion. 

Fracking went horizontal in the 1980s, thanks largely to private investment. Now the U.S. is the largest oil- and gas- producing country. Yet oil and gas are now considered sin fuels, and the Biden administration paused liquefied natural gas exports in January. 

We’re still paying for ObamaCare. A Kaiser survey found that individual premiums between 2010, when ObamaCare was enacted, and 2022 were up 58%. Family premiums rose more than 63%. Inflation was only up 36% over that period. You didn’t build that, President Obama did, and terribly. 

Government is bad for your health. Whose idea was it to pay for gain-of-function research in Wuhan? Remember when the Food and Drug Administration delayed the rollout of Covid tests by, among other things, requiring applications on CD-ROMs? In 2020! The FDA interference, according to a Yale Law Journal 2020 Forum, was “possibly the deadliest regulatory overreach in U.S. history.” 

I’ll take the private sector every time. The Biden administration throws money and mandates at electric vehicles, and now we have a glut. The Commerce Department delivers semiconductor money from the Chips+ Act to swing states Ohio and Arizona and blue New York, albeit upstate. You could die waiting on hold to talk to the Internal Revenue Service. Mr. Biden’s Federal Communications Commission reinstated net neutrality after Donald Trump’s FCC had killed it, even though the U.S., unlike Europe, enjoyed bandwidth-a- plenty during the pandemic for Zoom and Netflix. 

Between the Covid-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan, the Paycheck Protection Program and the Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation program, the FBI reports almost $300 billion in fraud. It was so easy, tens of thousands reportedly filed applications from jail. 

And don’t get me started on the Department of Education. Since its founding in 1979, spending per student has been up, up and away. The results? Forty percent to 60% of first-year college students are taking remedial classes “in English, math, or both.” And they can’t deliver the critical Fafsa financial-aid application that Google could probably roll out by tomorrow. 

The U.S. isn’t alone. In 2021, Saudi Arabia unveiled plans for “The Line,” a new $1.5 trillion car-free city stretching 106 miles to the Gulf of Aqaba, the first phase of the 2017-announced megatropolis, Neom. Dream on—it was recently cut back to just 1.5 miles by 2030. My guess is they’ll build less than 1,600 feet. 

Why are governments so bad at execution? Accountability and incentives. There are no prices or profits, just elusive cost benefits estimated in simple spreadsheets any first-year investment banker could fudge. 

But these public-works projects are well intentioned, right? Hardly. Good luck finding all the hidden agendas, political back scratching and paid-off donors. Or, in the case of student loans, bribes to voters. Getting re-elected is how politicians measure the success of government work vs. private-sector profits. 

Those profits from each private-sector project or product provide capital that pays for the next important project. In perpetuity. Profits also pro- vide guidance to markets that fund great ideas and kill off bad ones. It’s Darwinism vs. kleptocracy. Sadly, politicians and industrial policy will always fund dumb things like electric-vehicle chargers, highspeed rail and Neom—horrible ideas executed terribly. 

The Left Knows Leftism Doesn’t Work

 

The Left Knows Leftism Doesn’t Work

If Biden and his handlers have taught us anything, human nature cannot be fooled, and the current four-year experiment will have to end before it ends us—and soon.

Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness 

Do not expect the radical left to survey the wreckage of socialism and communism in history and accept that statism impoverishes people and erodes their freedoms. There will never be admissions by our elite that progressivism exists mainly for the acquisition of power by the utopian and virtue-signaling few, who ensure that they are never subject to the baleful implementation of their ideological agendas on the rest of us.

Still, leftists look around at what they have done to America in the last four years and implicitly know that the plan did not work, the people detested it, or both.

How do we know this? By a variety of barometers.

None of the major Biden “achievements”—10 million illegal aliens across a nonexistent border, key components of the cost of living 25-30 percent higher than in 2020, wars and chaos abroad, DEI racial and tribal obsessions, wars on fossil fuels—poll at even 40-45 percent. Biden’s own approval ratings, as the nominal architect of the most left-wing agenda since the Roosevelt administration, hover between 36 and 34 percent.

But most importantly, the left is not running on its record of the last three-and-a-half years but instead studiously ignoring it, at least temporarily through November. Suddenly, we aren’t hearing so much about cancelling pipelines and freezing federal oil leases, or so much demonization of the “greedy” oil companies. Instead, Biden is further draining the strategic petroleum reserve and begging OPEC in general and the no-longer-demonized Saudi Arabia in particular to pump oil as fast as possible.

We were lied to for nearly four years that the border was “secure,” as 10 million foreign nationals flooded across. Then we were told Biden was helpless to stop the deluge since he had no legal right to enforce federal immigration law through executive orders—a ridiculous excuse that even he would soon drop. Despite their eagerness for new constituencies, no one on the left dares to openly praise the influx of the last four years, much less demand more illegal immigration.

Instead, as November looms, Biden is suddenly reinstating the very Trump executive orders that once, despite deep state and court obstruction, finally closed the border—and which Biden himself had originally overturned. Note that Biden is now partnering with the Mexican government—which terribly fears another Trump presidency endangering Mexico’s annual $60 billion in remittances from mostly illegal aliens in the United States—to curb some of the illegal immigration before the November election.

The same recognition is beginning to apply to the lawfare waged against Donald Trump. Jack Smith’s crusade to get Trump is undermined by prosecutorial misbehavior concerning the evidence seized at Mar-a-Lago and by the asymmetrical treatment by another special counsel accorded Biden in comparison with Trump. Smith’s efforts to speed up the trial before the election only made his persecution more politically transparent.

Fani Willis’s outrageous behavior will likely delay indefinitely her weaponized indictments. The James and Bragg convictions will likely be overturned and were intended mostly to embarrass Trump, bankrupt him, and harm his presidential campaign.

All of the left’s once-grandiose ideas of packing the Supreme Court, ending the filibuster, admitting two new states to win four more liberal senators, and destroying the Electoral College have little public support and will go nowhere. Corporations like Disney, Target, and Anheuser-Busch have all begun backtracking on their money-losing, market-share-eroding woke/DEI agendas.

Universities are terrified that their endowment income is either static or in decline, given a rising drop-off in public and alumni giving. They know their race-based, non-meritocratic admissions and hiring are increasingly destroying their brand names. To accommodate their new non-meritocratic student bodies, they have variously inflated their grades to the point of parody, watered down work requirements, or introduced gut courses—and as a result, they are quickly losing their once-coveted prestige. Some campuses are already reinstating the SAT and ACT requirements that were thrown out in 2020-21 in the hysteria that followed the death of George Floyd. Harvard and Stanford aren’t boasting that the erasure of the SAT created a more competitive student body and raised standards to new levels.

The twin ideas of foreign-funded Middle-Eastern-studies centers and of admitting tens of thousands of affluent, full-tuition-paying Middle-Eastern students led to institutionalized anti-Semitism on campus and eliminationist rhetoric right out the old Klan playbook. The appeasement by university presidencies only whets the appetites of those who unlawfully occupy, vandalize, deface, and disrupt. Their pro-terrorist chants and emblems are bleeding the universities of billions of dollars in lost donations.

In short, the policies that the left has given us over the last years—hyperinflation, spiking staple and gas prices, racial and tribal chauvinism, dangerous streets, an emasculated and politicized military, and wars abroad—did not work, and are now being masked to retain power, put on hold, or even reversed.

The reasons for the failure are ancient, given that socialism and progressivism are contrary to human nature.

Borders are essential to national sovereignty and confidence and delineate the unique values, traditions, and customs of a people, without which they revert to mere tribes without social commonalities and political cohesion. No society can pick and choose which national laws are enforced and which ignored—and still remain a nation of laws.

People obey laws because, in a cost-benefit analysis, they fear the consequences of lawbreaking. Otherwise, the laws of the wild prevail and the strongest dictate to the weaker. Citizens must be discouraged, not encouraged, from favoring their own tribe and race, tribalism being the oldest of human biases. Money is not a construct but represents the real value of capital and labor and cannot be printed into national wealth. Abroad, most nations are illiberal and their aggressiveness is deterred only through guarantees that they will lose more than they will gain through war.

We sometimes forget all that unpleasant human baggage, due to irrelevant distractions, or the utopianism that is the handmaiden of affluence and leisure. Often, the opulence and freedom arising from free-market economies and limited constitutional government create so much prosperity and liberty that its beneficiaries believe such good fortune to be their natural and commonplace birthright and so begin destroying the very system that blessed them.

But if Biden and his handlers have taught us anything, human nature cannot be fooled, and the current four-year experiment will have to end before it ends us—and soon.

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004, and is the 2023 Giles O'Malley Distinguished Visiting Professor at the School of Public Policy, Pepperdine University. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush, and the Bradley Prize in 2008. Hanson is also a farmer (growing almonds on a family farm in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism. He is the author of the just released New York Times best seller, The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation, published by Basic Books on May 7, 2024, as well as the recent  The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, The Case for Trump, and The Dying Citizen.

Beating the Historical Odds

 

Beating the Historical Odds

Deana Chadwell, American Thinker 

I was about ten years old when I first learned about Joan of Arc, the 14-year-old peasant girl who, against all odds, led the army of France against the British in the Hundred Years War. I had checked out from our school library a little cloth-bound book (A Candle in the Sky) that told her story, and I must have read it a dozen times, she so fascinated me. Her audacity, her courage, her unwavering faith was both inspiring and horrifying to my young mind. I am now aged well beyond that point, and she still haunts me.

On May 30th of 1431 Joan of Arc was burned at the stake. The English, who were vying for the throne of France, accused her of witchcraft (a conveniently vague charge). They accused her of wearing men’s clothing -- a suit of armor, evidently a capital offense. Her main flaw was success at what she set out to do -– to lead her army to vanquish the English, and to crown the Dauphin at Orleans. She was just 19 when she died.

On Passover roughly 2,000 years ago Jesus Christ was tried in six illegal trials, and even though the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, exonerated him, Pilate gave in to the mob and crucified him anyway. The Pharisees convinced themselves that Jesus was healing lepers and paralytics and driving out demons all by the power of Satan. If it was true that He did those things because He was God, then He was an existential threat to their power. They couldn’t do those things. Jesus could. He too had succeeded too well and upset powerful people.

On May 30th of 2024 Donald Trump was convicted of 34 counts of unspecified misadventure.  The trial was as illegal as the trials run by the Pharisees and the Romans, as vague and abusive as the tribunal that convicted Joan.

I’m not making a moral equivalence argument here. Trump would lose that contest for sure. Nor am I relegating Christ to mere human status. He was both man and God. It is interesting that the trials of both Jesus and Joan were meticulously recorded by eyewitnesses at times not known for record-keeping. It’s good that we know what happened.

Quite frankly, I’ve never known what to make of Joan of Arc, but the timing and the parallels are quite striking. And foreboding. Are we to take this as a warning of things to come? Is there a way to prevent a similar end for Donald Trump? Is our government now so convoluted, so tangled in its own petty double-binds that it can’t just act on the basis of justice alone?

I am grateful for the fact that we no longer crucify people or burn them at the stake, but Trump will be just as dead if he’s attacked some night by a jailhouse suicide ghost. His family will be just as bereft of him, his country even more so. The Donald, just like Joan, will not rise from the dead. And like both Joan and Jesus, his charisma, his panache, his energy can’t be duplicated by anyone else. He is the man for this time. His name is even appropriate for the task he’s been given.

So, what do we do? We -- as average American citizens -- do what we are doing. Rallying around him in support -- literally and figuratively. Donating money to his campaign. Using every forum to which we have access to express our support for this man and our disdain for the evil forces that beleaguer him -- and all of us. And we must pray.

Is there a civil war in the offing? We all hope not. America can’t really win unless we win via our Constitution and the rule of law. It is lawlessness that plagues us now. Violent reaction won’t cure that; it will only be another symptom of what ails us.

You see, Joan didn’t have anyone on her side. No one came to her rescue. It was a totalitarian time and her army had failed to prevent her capture. Their love for her meant nothing once she was in the hands of the enemy. Neither did Jesus’ loyal disciples come to His rescue. Most of them scattered. Peter denied knowing Him three times, just as Jesus had told him he would. No one on a white horse came riding to His rescue. 

Neither of these people had a bank of lawyers behind them. Neither had senators and congressmen and pundits and podcasters acting on their behalf. Neither had more than half of the most powerful nation on earth demanding justice.

The stakes are astronomically high. Good and Evil are facing off in a jousting match far more pivotal than whether or not the ineffectual French prince got properly crowned.  Of course, nothing was or ever will be as important as what Christ accomplished hanging on the cross. There’s no comparison. What He did for us all is eternal. Trump’s success or failure will only be temporal, but it is hard to imagine a more pivotal situation for the whole world’s 21st-century welfare.

Already evil forces are plotting ways to break apart the power and effectiveness of the Supreme Court. They are aiming at Alito and Thomas, but it will be the whole Court, and the whole country, that will suffer the damage if this attack is successful.

Those same powers are working to ensure that the 2024 election will be as fraught with fraud as was 2020. Our vote is our most treasured possession and many of us have already lost the power originally attached to that vote. I lost mine back when my state established mail-in-only voting. I have no sense that my vote is ever counted. With mail-in and early voting so easily passed out, many of you will be joining me in symbolic voting. Add to that the presence of millions of illegals having access to voting since few states have cleaned up their voting rolls or require ID to vote -- who knows what will transpire in November.

But we do know this: not since the geopolitical mess that was the Civil War has this nation been in such peril. Government has only one real purpose and that is the maintenance of justice. Not only have the last four years demonstrated our government’s utter failure at that, but these Biden years have shown us what happens when evil -- not just incompetence, but evil -- gets a foothold in the halls of power.  That ordinary citizens have been languishing in deplorable conditions, serving prison sentences that they clearly don’t deserve, is a neon sign declaring the end of American justice, the end of freedom and therefore the end of prosperity. That no one in a position of power has pushed for their release, or rushed to Trump’s rescue, is a humiliation that lands on us all. If we don’t rise to the occasion and demand a return to both righteousness and justice, we will find ourselves without recourse when they come after us.

Donald Trump, for all his faults, is demonstrating almost superhuman courage, dogged determination, and strong faith in both God and America. I pray daily for his safety. Too often successful people have met with untimely ends –- Julius Caesar, Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, to name a few. Like these men, Trump will not rise from the dead. Nor will he be canonized centuries later. He must beat the historical odds now, or America and her dream will not survive.

Deana Chadwell is an adjunct professor and department head at Pacific Bible College in southern Oregon. She teaches writing, logic, and literature. She can be contacted at 1window45@gmail.com

We Have Been Subverted

We Have Been Subverted

What is at stake in our ability to see the threat plainly? Nothing less than the preservation of our way of life.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, The Free Press 

If you wonder why I—a woman of color, an African, a former Muslim, a former asylum seeker, and an immigrant—look at the antics of today’s anti-Israel, anti-American protesters with such fear and trembling, allow me to explain.

I was born in Somalia in 1969. The country had achieved independence nine years before. But less than a month before I was born—on October 21, 1969—a junior member of the brand-new Somali armed forces seized power with the help of the Soviet Union. The first two decades of my life were shaped by the upheaval that followed that coup. 

The Somalia that gained its independence was a young, optimistic society full of national pride. We had such hope for growth, political stability, prosperity, and peace. But, in a story sadly familiar to many of my fellow Africans, those hopes were dashed. 

What followed was a nightmare. 

For me it is all captured in the earliest memories of my youth: statues of Mohamed Siad Barre, our dictator, sprung up across Mogadishu, flanked by a trio of dark seraphim: Marx, Lenin, and Engels. This particular communist experiment plunged Somalia into bloodshed, mass starvation, and a 20-year period of suffocating tyranny. I recall my grandmother and mother smuggling food into our house. I also remember the whispering: we felt the state was omnipresent. It could hear everything.

My father was thrown into prison. His friends—those other pioneers in pursuit of a democracy modeled on America—were either jailed like him or, in many cases, executed. 

By the time I was eight, my family knew we needed to escape. We left in 1977. By 1990, the country had descended into a civil war from which it has never fully recovered.

I never stopped longing for the kind of freedom my father had taught me about. And at the age of 22, I fled to the Netherlands seeking it. There—and later, in America—I discovered what we’ve come to call “Western” values.

The West’s inheritance springs from a peculiar confluence of habits and customs that had been practiced for centuries before anyone branded them as “ideas.” But they are principles—radical ones—that have given us the most tolerant, free, and flourishing societies in all of human history. 

Among these principles are the rule of law, a tradition of liberty, personal responsibility, a system of representative government, a toleration of difference, and a commitment to pluralism. Each of these ideas might have been extinguished in their infancy but for the grace of God and the force of their appeal. 

Perhaps it is because I was born into a part of the world where these principles were nonexistent that I feel a particular love for them—and an instinct for when they are in danger.

Right now, so many Western nations are under grave threat from the twin forces of cultural Marxism and an expansionist political Islam familiar to me from my youth.

For a time, many refused to believe that anything was actually wrong. The tide of populism was, they insisted, a momentary manifestation of frustration. The decline of each of our institutions was viewed in isolation, as a problem of poorly selected leadership, which could be corrected after the next election or with a changing of the guard. The sense of hopelessness that people felt was explained away as the temporary consequence of the rapid transition away from industrialism and the ushering in of the digital age. 

In this light, though there were problems, they were distinct from each other and would be corrected in time.

Can any serious person believe this now?

People are encountering our current crisis in different ways, though a compelling explanation, let alone a solution, remains elusive. I am reminded of the Buddhist parable of the blind men and the elephant. The story goes that a group of blind men, who have never encountered an elephant before, hear that one has been brought to their town. They go to touch the elephant to work out what it might look like. One man touches the elephant’s trunk and thinks it must be like a large snake. Another touches its leg and likens it to a tree. A third who grasps the elephant’s tail says it feels like a rope. A fourth presses its sides, and when it does not budge, compares it to a wall. The fifth touches its tusk and thinks it to be like a spear.

Each of the blind men touches the same elephant and comes up with a different interpretation. Although there is truth in each of their assessments, none is able fully to comprehend the elephant in its totality. Those who feel the decline in Western society are like these blind men, encountering the elephant in their own ways and grasping at explanations in the half-light of dusk.

When the omni-breakdown burst forth in 2020 with the crises the Covid-19 pandemic and the draconian controls that governments imposed, and the George Floyd riots, most of us awoke from our slumbers and behaved like the blind men, ping-ponging around theories with the tremulous (sometimes furious) chatter that heralds the turning of an age. 

As one of those blind men—and surely I, too, am encountering only part of the elephant—my perception is that we are a society subverted. By this, I do not mean that we are subverted in the sense that a few spies and saboteurs are conducting covert operations, blowing up a bridge or an airfield. I mean we are subverted in a more systematic and totalizing way. 

 

An End to the Bloodshed

 An End to the Bloodshed

Don Jaffa, LCMB member

In spite of Biden’s proposal to end the fighting for a permanent cease fire, claimed to be Bibi’s latest proposal, but was instead a Biden lie, HAMAS, of course agreed immediately. But, Israel remains resolute in its goal to rid Hamas from Gaza, and to secure a permanent peace with the remaining Arabs in Gaza. And Hamas remains resolute to fight to the last man, to Destroy Israel and to kill Jews.  Temporary cease fires spanning two to eight weeks are only time for Hamas to rearm and recruit more bodies to die in the fighting.  The IDF has already recovered the security zone along the fourteen kilometers of the Gaza Border with Egyptian Sinai (Code named Philidelphi).

Under the 1979 Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty ‘Philidelphi’ was an authorized security zone occupied and maintained by the IDF. It was abandoned by the IDF, and is now re-occupied in the effort to cut off and end Hamas in its Rafah stronghold. Any supply tunnels under the border will be located and probably flooded with sea water, completely cutting off re-supply with Hamas from Egypt.

Any offer for a cease fire will be for Saudi Arabia and Egypt to sponsor the deportation and exile of all Hamas members from Gaza to the Island of Tinan in the Gulf of Aqaba. The deportation would be through the Rafah border crossing into Sinai and their transportation to Sharm El-Sheikh and ferrying to the Island of Tinan. The Island was given by Treaty by Egypt to Saudi Arabia.

If Egypt wants to become a player in a resolution of the terrorism then they have to take an active part. To that end Israel would probably offer to add all the Gazan Arabs in Israeli prisons who committed acts of terrorism in Israel and have been convicted and sentenced for their crimes. If this is agreed to by Saudi Arabia and Egypt there is no need to engage Hamas. If they show up to surrender for the transfer through the Rafah crossing into Egypt they will be disarmed and accepted. Those that remain will know that the IDF will engage them in combat, until they are all exterminated.  There is not a doubt that Hamas will release any further hostages unless Prime Minister Netanyahu agrees to their terms. And in the near term that is not going to happen. As the IDF continues to clear Rafah of Hamas street by street and block by block, any solution other than the total elimination of HAMAS in Gaza, fades very quickly.