Friday Night News Roundup

Notes about a nation on the verge of a nervous breakdown

Symbol of the Muslim Brotherhood

Sorry for all the posting today. Lots going on. Please just delete if it’s too much for you. I’m always mystified by people who unsubscribe because they say I write too much.

This is something:

The oil-rich Gulf state of Qatar hired a former CIA agent’s company to discredit Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Tex., and other lawmakers who oppose Hamas and its parent organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, according to documents obtained by Fox News Digital.

The documents reveal that the alleged Qatar state-funded espionage campaign targeted Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, because he had sought to have the Muslim Brotherhood designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.

The clandestine document, titled “Project ENDGAME” and drafted by U.S. company Global Risk Advisors (GRA), which was founded by the ex-CIA employee Kevin Chalker, reads, “High Alert: An attack on Hamas is an attack on Qatar. An attack on the Muslim Brotherhood is an attack on Qatar.”

The March 2017 Qatari-funded plan of action to torpedo anti-Hamas and anti-Muslim Brotherhood legislation and policies noted that “Sen. Ted Cruz has reintroduced his bill to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist group. Unless you act soon, your enemies will inject Qatar into this fight.”

These people are wicked. I’ve had dealings with them, years ago, in Dallas. Here’s a link to a 2008 piece I wrote on how local agents of the Muslim Brotherhood tried to destroy me professionally when I reported critically on their activities. Here is an excerpt from a 1991 document recovered by the FBI raid on Muslim Brotherhood leaders in America:

The process of settlement [of Islam in the United States] is a “Civilization-Jihadist” process with all the word means. The Ikhwan must understand that all their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” their miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all religions. Without this level of understanding, we are not up to this challenge and have not prepared ourselves for Jihad yet. It is a Muslim’s destiny to perform Jihad and work wherever he is and wherever he lands until the final hour comes, and there is no escape from that destiny except for those who choose to slack.

When I began writing about this stuff in Dallas, the local head of CAIR (a Muslim Brotherhood front) and others tried to wreck my reputation:

After I wrote a Morning News column about the Syeed encounter, I found myself identified on a local Islamic blog as” The New Face of Hate.” It turned out that the north Texas Muslim community had been engaged in a running battle with the Dallas Morning News since a series of investigative articles in the early part of the decade had uncovered alleged connections between the Holy Land Foundation charity and Hamas. The News' reporter on the Holy Land story, Steve McGonigle, had had to be guarded for a while after threats, and the newspaper was picketed by local Muslims. Before I arrived, the newspaper had been making outreach efforts to the Dallas Islamic community in the wake of the Holy Land stories and indictments. And now I had come to town and spoiled things.

On a lark, I joined the Islamic blog’s listserv, to which several leading Dallas Muslims subscribed. I used my own name, which got me booted after a day or so upon discovery. Fortunately, in the short time I was on the site I printed out e-mails in which participants deliberated a plan to quietly approach unwitting business and religious leaders in the city and enlist them in a campaign to force the News’ publisher to fire me because of the threat I posed to the safety of Muslims.

“Dreher needs to be ruined,” one message said. Another suggested that “a campaign must be planned and carefully executed to expose this hate-monger and render him a joke.” I made all this public on the editorial board’s blog and sent copies to the newspaper’s lawyer. My guess is that aborted the whispering campaign before it could launch. But again, it was useful to see what journalists are up against.

This is how they work. Hamas, you should know, is the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine. If you read the piece I linked to, you’ll see how the local MB reps tried to manipulate journalists and community leaders who, understandably and laudably, wanted to treat Muslims fairly. You absolutely cannot take these people’s word at face value. They did not and do not represent all Muslims, but they wanted useful idiots outside of their community to think that.

Click here to see the text of a recent letter sent to members of Congress by retired FBI agents, who warn that all the combat-age young men from hostile nations streaming across the US southern border is extremely worrying. If, God forbid, some terrorist attack happens because of Biden’s indifference towards border security, remember this.

Border Crisis, Constitutional Crisis

Speaking of, drop what you’re doing now and read Max Remington’s analysis of the constitutional crisis we are now in, over the border situation. It is astonishing to me that the mainstream media are not reporting this. Do they not understand what’s happening? Here’s a key graf:

The Supreme Court ruling doesn’t specifically call for Texas to cease it’s efforts at defending the border. Rather, it merely calls for Texas to not obstruct Border Patrol in their activities, even if they elect to permit migrants to cross over. The Biden administration is attempting to make this a rule-of-law and federal supremacy issue, yet the Supreme Court ruling doesn’t address the issue of what happens when the president himself refuses to uphold the rule of law. This is the key distinction between this crisis and previous instances where Washington attempted to impose its authority on a state or locality. The Biden administration isn’t responding to defiance, it’s the one engaging in defiance and forcing Texas and the country at-large to suffer the consequences of its dereliction of duty to protect the states from invasion. Yes, what’s happening at the southern border is an invasion and my patience for those who believe otherwise ran out years ago.

It’s crucial to get this straight: the executive branch of the federal government is refusing to enforce the laws of this country. That’s what this is about.

I guarantee you Europe will be watching this. Attempts by governments to enforce border control to stop the waves of illegal migrants have been stopped by European and national courts. What happens if national governments say, like Texas, to hell with it, if you won’t enforce the law, we will?

Remington quotes Joshua Treviño of the Texas Public Policy Foundation on this crisis:

It is a fundamental characteristic of nations that they define themselves, their own community, their own people, and their own story: without it, there is no sovereignty and therefore no nation. A government that fails to secure that quality fails at its most basic task. The Biden regime defines itself by that failure, and Texas defines itself by refusing to submit to it.

And:

It is not that they love the millions of migrants and illegals more than their own countrymen. They hold us both in contempt: they are content to see the migrants exploited and trafficked, and to see us swamped and erased. Their approach signals their inmost selves, cruelty masquerading as compassion. The desperate girl trafficked from the Darien Gap to Dallas, raped and sold along the way, laboring to pay a fraudulent debt at an off-the-books job, is the apotheosis of progressivism’s achievement.

I expect that when the mainstream media finally notice, they will try to turn Gov. Abbott into Orval Faubus and George Wallace. Don’t you dare fall for it!

Sex, Gender, Politics, And The Future

I have a feeling that historically speaking, this is a much bigger story than most of us think.

You can follow a good thread on this, with lots of graphs, here, from John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times. It may be paywalled for some of you, but here’s a link to his column about the broader meaning of this ideology gap. He points out that South Korea has a vast ideological chasm between young men and women — and thus, it’s marriage rate has collapsed, and it has the lowest birth rate of any country in the world. The South Koreans are depopulating at a rate greater than Europe in the grip of the Black Death.

As Murdoch points out, South Korea is an extreme example, but the same dynamic is happening in other industrialized countries: young women shifting left, and men either remaining where they have been, or moving right. The existence of smartphones works to keep people silo’d, and, I would say, the ubiquity of pornography keeps young men … distracted from doing the kinds of things you do to find a partner and reproduce.

One problem is that our politics today have become so moralized and personal. I find myself in my late fifties facing the possibility that I will remarry. I would like to, but the thought of entering the dating scene again with things so ideologically fraught is extremely discouraging. Me, I wouldn’t care one bit if my potential wife believed in socialist economics, or was a foreign-policy pacifist, and so forth. Those are differences I can live with. But I probably could not live with a wife who was a progressive on social issues like abortion, sexual orientation, gender identity, and even race. I think it’s because those issues speak to what the human being is, and what humanity’s purpose is. On the race matter, I’m more or less a Martin Luther King liberal, but that puts me on the right today. As our political culture has basically come to be one big Borderline Personality Disorder cesspit, who has the internal wherewithal to put up with finding oneself condemned by one’s partner as evil incarnate because you don’t share her belief in this or that political or cultural issue?

I have a number of unmarried male friends in their twenties and thirties. They would like to settle down, but it’s just not happening. It’s striking how so many of them struggle dating women who are … stable. Mind you, I’m only getting one side of the story, but the Cluster B stuff that Chris Rufo talks about — the high-pitched emotionalism, the quickness to decide that the men are EVIL because they don’t agree on this or that issue, the whipping back and forth between clinginess to rejection — it’s all there. Listening to them talk, it seems that popular culture valorizes these traits in women, tells them that these are signs of feminine strength and identity. I was talking with a friend today about how the whole question of “my truth” makes it much harder to form emotional bonds between men and women, because it frames truth and the search for it in terms of personal identity. If a man disagrees with one of these “my truth” women about whatever, she may interpret it as a rejection of her as a person. Which is just bonkers … but that’s the world we have created.

This is not going away anytime soon. Man, I tell you, male and female leaders in the church, both ordained and lay, had better be talking about this stuff now, and figuring out ways to disciple young people in a countercultural way, so that they can find each other, and marry, and create strong families. I say that as a Christian man who thought he was doing everything right, and yet found himself divorced in his mid-fifties. The cultural pressures coming against marriages and families now are even greater than I understood in my most alarmist moments.

Republic’s End?

Link:

The Left has done this. They damn well have. I was one of those conservatives who was ambivalent about removing the Confederate statues. I see now that the people who rolled their eyes at people like me, and said, do you honestly think it will stop there? — they were right. I thought these left-wing people hated slavery, when actually they hate America.

And their president refuses to defend the southern border, perhaps because the millions coming in from other lands are almost certain to vote for the Left. I am prepared for the media to push like mad to defend the Ruling Class, which means making patriots like Gov. Greg Abbott out to be some sort of neo-Confederate, simply because he believes that borders mean something, and that America means something. May God spare us from anything remotely approaching civil war! But for heaven’s sake, open your eyes and see what they are doing to our people, to our memory, to our nation! How does it stop? If Lincoln came back today, the Left would condemn him as a cishetero white supremacist who has nothing to teach us.