Month: August 2024

Commentary

The Ukraine move into Russia may have started as a simple, small-scale raid for propaganda purposes, but it seems to have broken the period of static warfare.

It is noteworthy that this sudden reversion to maneuver warfare is taking place on the same ground that the largest tank battle in human history took place in July 1943 and August 1943 during World War II.

The Ukrainian operation may have started as a simple raid into Russian territory to exploit the information warfare value of showing a weakened Russia and a daring Ukraine.

But as tactical commanders achieved success, the Ukrainians doubled down and moved units to assist and expand the breakthrough while Russia evacuated towns and villages and attempted to redeploy forces from across their Ukraine battle line to respond to this offense into Russia.

The drones were modified versions of commercial consumer drones like DJI, but they could carry very deadly ordnance that could deliver an explosive charge right into the crew hatch on the tank turret, which gave rise to the “Mad Max” cage. The ordnance could be improvised explosive devices, modified hand grenades, mortar rounds, or anti-tank rocket warheads.

The post Ukraine Breaks Out From Under Killer Drones and Reestablishes Maneuver Warfare appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

In January 2023, as The Gateway Pundit reported at the time, the Biden regime began deporting Brazilian opposition leaders back to Brazil following the surprise election victory by socialist criminal Lula da Silva.

The Biden Regime sends former Brazilian Chief of Police Anderson Torres from Florida back to Brazil and the Lula gulags in January 2023.

In July 2024, Brazil’s Federal Police indicted popular former President Jair Bolsonaro for ‘money laundering and criminal association.’ The charges were reportedly related to ‘undeclared diamonds’ received from Saudi Arabia during his time in office.

This was nothing new. The Lula regime has been targeting and persecuting Bolsonaro and his supporters since they took office in 2023. Lula, the communist, was taking lessons from the Biden regime and their brazen and nonstop political persecution of President Donald Trump, parents, devout Catholics, pro-Life activists, and Trump supporters since taking office in 2021.

Brazil Protestor Commits Suicide in “Lulag” Concentration Camp, Death Toll Allegedly Reaches 4, Children Held in Prison

So it should come as no surprise that the Biden regime has been openly supporting Lula da Silva, the socialist tyrant in Brazil, prior to the presidential elections. And now we know that the US State Department was funding the censorship ecosystem in Brazil with tens of millions of dollars.

Foreign Policy reported prior to the 2022 presidential elections on how Joe Biden and the CIA were working to ensure a Lula win in Brazil.

“How Team Biden Tried to Coup-Proof Brazil’s Elections,” read the headline.

According to reports, top Biden officials from the White House, Defense Department, State Department, and CIA all participated in threatening the Bolsonaro administration in rare, escalating diplomatic meetings.

Joe Biden’s CIA director, William Burns, and National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, both traveled to Brazil to meet with senior Brazilian officials and warn them that Bolsonaro should stop casting doubt on his country’s electoral process. It was the opening gambit in a quiet campaign by Washington to replace Bolsonaro, the popular people’s candidate, with the socialist tool Lula da Silva.

* * * * * * * * * *

On Saturday, the CEO of the popular messaging app Telegram was arrested at Le Bourget airport in France for refusing to comply with the country’s censorship laws. Pavel Durov, 39, was arrested on the tarmac as he got off his private jet from Azerbaijan.

On Saturday evening Mike Benz, the founder and Executive Director of the Foundation for Freedom Online released a video explaining who he believes is behind this arrest – The US State Department.

Earlier this week, Mike Benz was interviewed by Tucker Carlson. During their conversation, Benz discussed how the State Department spent tens of millions of taxpayer dollars to build the censorship ecosystem in Brazil.

The Biden regime and our Deep State superiors spent millions to replace the pro-freedom Bolsonaro administration with the communist Lula de-Silva.

Here is the partial transcript.

Mike Benz: The problem is our Congress is not sticking up for us, as this is happening all over the world. Just this year, the drama around Brazil has been a huge issue for Elon Musk and X. The House held a hearing on it, and then the House Foreign Affairs Committee titled the hearing was Brazil, a Crisis of democracy, rule of law and governance, question mark. But they did not interrogate the US State Department’s role in censorship in Brazil. It was actually the US State Department who capacity built spending tens of millions of dollars, the entire censorship ecosystem in Brazil. They spent tens of millions of dollars paying, Brazilian journalists, Brazilian sensors, Brazilian fact checkers, even members of the legal scholarship associated with Brazil’s censorship court, and effectively pressured through that NGO soft power sworm, Brazil, to set up the entire censorship architecture it now has. They set that up.

Tucker Carlson: Why would the US government, which represents the US Constitution and democracy, be trying to end… You can’t have democracy with censorship, by definition. So why would we be trying to end democracy in country after country? What is the point of that?

Mike Benz: Well, this is one of the great ironies of American statecraft in the post-2016 era. Free speech has been an instrument of statecraft for US diplomacy, military and intelligence purposes since the 1940s.

Free speech around the world has been something we’ve championed, in part because we believe it, but in large part, I should note, because this is how you can capacity build resistance movements or political movements or paramilitary movements in countries that the US State Department seeks to attain political control over. If there’s no free speech, then there’s no political movement that you can capacity build to regime change the government or to maintain elements of control over the existing government.

This is why the State Department capacity built all these NGOs, the USA does it as well, like Freedom House and the whole wing of, for example, the 26 NGOs who condemned Russia for attempting to ban Telegram in 2018. Why would 26 US government-funded NGOs all say that Russia was attacking free speech in Russia by threatening to block Telegram. What was because the US State Department was using Telegram through the power of its encrypted chat and all the functionality and the fact that so much of Russia was using it to foment protests and riots within Russia, just as they did in Belarus, just as they did in Iran, just as they did in Hong Kong, just as they attempted to do in China.

So Telegram is this very, very powerful vehicle for the US State Department to be able to mobilise protests, to be able to galvanise political support against authoritarian countries. This is why the US government loved Telegram so much from 2014 to 2020, because it was this powerful way to evade state control over media or state surveillance over private chats because of the private functions, anonymous forwarding, all these unique features of Telegram allow it to have US-funded political groups or political dissidents get tens of thousands of people to their cause with relative impunity. It’s effectively unstoppable by a regime like Lukashenko in the summer of 2020, when the US government was effectively orchestrating a colour revolution in Belarus. Let me just take a sip for a second. Telegram was the main channel for that. The National Endowment for Democracy was actually paying the main administrators of the Telegram channels who were orchestrating those riots, those protests.

Tucker Carlson: Not employees of Telegram… so people were using it or organising others to use it.

Mike Benz: All I care about is freedom of speech on the internet. What people have to understand, and this is the point I’ve been screaming into the wind for eight years now, is that internet censorship is not some domestic event done by domestic actors, intermediated by a domestic government and domestic tech platform policies.

Internet censorship came to the United States and has been exported around the world because free speech is a casualty of a proxy war of the blob against populism. What I mean by the blob is our foreign policy establishment, which is primarily concentrated within the US State Department, the US intelligence services like the CIA, the Pentagon, USAID, and the soft power sworn army that we have through our NGOs and State Department, CIA, USAID-funded civil society institutions. What happened was is we’ve had this long-range plan to seize Eurasia. Russia has $75 trillion worth of natural resources in it. The United States only has $45 trillion. Just to put in perspective how bountiful the region that we’re so preoccupied with is. If you recall, no less than Lindsay Graham, frustrated at the lack of Republican political support for Ukraine aid, finally implored, took the mask off a few months ago and said, “Listen, even if you don’t believe in democracy, Ukraine has got $14 trillion worth of natural resources.”

The Biden regime has sullied the reputation of America too many times. Enough is enough.

Congress should immediately begin investigating the Biden regime for their nefarious foreign policy operations to replace pro-Americans populist leaders with communist tyrants.  And Biden and Kamala need to explain to the American people why this was necessary.

Here is the full Benz-Carlson interview.

Was the Biden administration involved in the arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov? Mike Benz explains.

(1:20) Who Was Involved in Pavel Durov’s Arrest?
(15:50) How Telegram Is Used by the CIA
(27:22) Domestic Policy Doesn’t Exist
(34:19) The Redefining of Democracy
(39:21) The… pic.twitter.com/cmgWWCIIpw

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) August 28, 2024

The post Report: US State Department Funded the Censorship Ecosystem in Brazil to Subvert Bolsonaro Administration – As the Biden Regime Sent CIA, Defense Department, US Military Officials to Brazil to Interfere with Election appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

Guest post by Joe Hoft at JoeHoft.com – republished with permission

FBI Withholds Physical Evidence in Update on Trump Attempted Assassination Investigation

Republished with permission from AbleChild

Forty-five days after the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has released a litany of investigative information. While any nibble goes a long way, the information provided has shortcomings insomuch as the FBI still is not being specific about the all-important physical evidence.

Special Agent in charge of the FBI Pittsburgh Field Office, Kevin Rojek, provided remarks during a media call that simply raise more questions. For example, Rojek explains that the “FBI is now in possession of the subject’s autopsy and toxicology reports from the coroner’s office.” Great. When did the FBI obtain the autopsy and toxicology reports from the coroner? Is Rojek referring to the Butler County Coroner or the Allegheny County Medical Examiner? People often confuse these two entities. Specificity would be helpful. It matters.

Rojek also says that the “autopsy report indicated the subject was pronounced deceased at 6:25p.m. on July 13, 2024, as a result of a single gunshot wound to the head.” This reads just like the Butler County Coroner’s death certificate, not the ME’s autopsy. If this is from the coroner and not the ME, then there are serious problems. The coroner’s report reads “an inquisition taken at 615 Whitestown Road on the 13th day of July…” Nope. The coroner went to the crime scene at midnight on the 13th and was rebuffed and told to return later. The coroner returned at 6 a.m. on the 14th to complete the death investigation. Assuming the FBI told the coroner to return later, then the death investigation report is inaccurate and should be corrected, and Agent Rojek should have explained why the coroner was sent away at midnight.

Next. Agent Rojek explains that “all reviewable evidence collected from the AGR roof and from the Subject’s body are consistent with the round fired by the Secret Service Sniper.” It is interesting that the FBI would use the word “consistent.” What the public needs to know is whether a projectile was recovered from the subject’s body and was there a rifling match between the projectile and the barrel of a sniper’s weapon? Providing the ballistics report would be helpful. Further, having a look see at the autopsy would also provide important information about which direction the projectile removed from the subject traveled. Specificity.

Rojek explained that the FBI rendered “the scene safe and following our established evidence gathering procedures, the FBI contacted the Butler County Coroner’s office.” “Evidence gathering?” What evidence was gathered prior to the coroner determining time and cause of death? What evidence was touched, moved or removed by the FBI prior to the coroner arriving at the scene twelve hours after the shooting? Again, knowing why the FBI turned away the coroner at midnight would be helpful. Agent Rojek further explains that “the coroner removed the body from the scene and conducted a death investigation.” The coroner removed the body prior to his investigation? That seems odd. Wouldn’t the body be important in writing crime scene notes? What about photographs of the deceased on the roof?

Agent Rojek also reports that the “toxicology revealed negative results for alcohol and drugs of abuse.” Really? What about other drugs, like prescribed psychiatric drugs? Did the ME conduct toxicology tests to determine whether the subject had been on one or more prescribed drugs? Too often these tests are not conducted by ME’s. For example, recall that in the case of Nashville mass shooter, Audrey Hale, the ME reported that “Hale’s blood did not reveal any positive findings of toxicological significance.” Later it was reported that Hale had been taking multiple prescribed psychiatric drugs at the time of the shooting. A full toxicology report matters.

Agent Rojek explains that the FBI “followed all appropriate evidence-gathering procedures and completed the final release of the scene seven days after the attack…which included cleaning the biological material from the AGR roof…” This is a point of contention among law enforcement experts that argue this is not standard procedure for the investigating body to clean a crime scene.

Nevertheless, while it is helpful to have the FBI finally release some information about its investigation, much of the information released just adds to a list of questions. More than that, though, one must wonder why the complete autopsy has not been released for public review, why the ballistics report has not been released for public review and why there has been no mention of fingerprint and DNA tests completed by the FBI on the alleged shooter?

It is of interest, too, that there is no mention of the “white van.” Yes, that white van that police found by use of the police K9 unit. According to The Daily Mail reports about the white van, “officers searched the battered white vehicle from which they removed explosives after they were led across fields to its location by their K9 unit.”

Fox News reported that law enforcement combed through a white van believed to have been used by Thomas Matthew Crooks after he nearly assassinated former President Trump.” Fox further reported that “officers found explosives, including an improvised explosive device, inside the van… emphasized that more than one was found.” The tag on the white van was reportedly from Arizona.

So. Why is there no mention of this white van by the FBI? More than one explosive device was found inside the van and there is a video of police combing through the van. Why is this van not mentioned by the FBI, even if it is just to say the van had nothing to do with Crooks. Of course, that would be a problem. Dogs sniffed out the van based on Crooks scent. Another automobile with explosives? It sure sounds like more than one subject or at least more than one automobile.

So, no autopsy, no complete toxicology, no fingerprint or DNA data, and no ballistics report. Oh, and an extra automobile with explosives. Nobody wants to be Johnny Rain Cloud, but the FBI’s “updated” information only raises more questions that need to be addressed…questions that the FBI should have already answered. What’s the problem?

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The post FBI Withholds Physical Evidence in Update on Trump Attempted Assassination Investigation appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

Failed Republican presidential candidate and former governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, has landed a new job at Yale.

Christie will teach a new course at Yale titled “How to Run a Political Campaign.”

The new course will be available to Yale’s Jackson School of Global Affairs undergraduate and graduate students.

The course description of the class reads, “When deciding whether to run for any office all of these issues must be confronted in addition to the core considerations of issue positions, fundraising and the most important question of all: If I do win, what do I want to accomplish and what kind of leader do I want to be?”

Christie’s decision to teach a class on how to run a political campaign is quite amusing, considering the former Governor dropped out of the 2016 and 2024 republican primaries after failing to run a successful campaign.

In 2016, Christie received 0.18%  of the vote in the Republican presidential primary, and in 2024, he received 0.63%.

Chris Christie, ex-NJ gov and failed presidential candidate, will teach course on running for office at Yale https://t.co/1nx72WCQpg pic.twitter.com/oJc0ymNQby

— New York Post (@nypost) August 29, 2024

Per The New York Post:

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who suffered two unsuccessful presidential bids, will be joining the Yale University roster this fall to teach a course — on running for office.

The weekly seminar taught by Christie, 61, entitled “How to Run a Political Campaign,” is open to undergraduates as well as graduate students at Yale’s Jackson School of Global Affairs, and will focus on navigating the challenges of running for office in the new “confusing,” political landscape.

“When deciding whether to run for any office all of these issues must be confronted in addition to the core considerations of issue positions, fundraising and the most important question of all: If I do win, what do I want to accomplish and what kind of leader do I want to be?,” the course description reads

Christie served as the Garden State’s governor from 2010 to 2018 and was the US attorney for New Jersey from 2002 to 2008.

Since dropping out of the 2024 presidential race, Christie has refused to endorse Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.

READ:

WATCH: Chris Christie Shocks The View Hosts by Announcing He’s Not Voting for Trump or Biden

The post Failed Presidential Candidate Chris Christie Lands New Job appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

President Donald Trump addressed a crowd at a steel plant in Potterville, Michigan

Former President Donald Trump announced a groundbreaking policy on in vitro fertilization (IVF) during his speech at a steel plant in Potterville, Michigan.

In-vitro fertilization (IVF) is an assisted reproductive technology that enables individuals or couples to conceive by fertilizing an egg with sperm outside the body. ​Once an embryo is formed, it is transferred into the woman’s uterus with the aim of achieving a successful pregnancy.

The average cost of an IVF cycle in the United States ranges from approximately $12,000 to $17,000, which may vary based on various factors including location and specific needs of the patient, according to WebMD.

During his speech, Trump outlined his plan to make in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments more accessible to American families, addressing the economic challenges and financial burdens that have plagued the nation under the Biden-Harris regime.

“I’m announcing today in a major statement that under the Trump administration, your government will pay for, or your insurance company will be mandated to pay for all costs associated with IVF treatment, fertilization for women…” Trump said during the rally.

“Because we want more babies, to put it very nicely. For this same reason, we will also allow new parents to deduct major newborn expenses from their taxes so that parents that have a beautiful baby will be able.”

In addition to covering IVF costs, Trump pledged to allow new parents to deduct major newborn expenses from their taxes.

“We’re pro-family. Nobody’s ever said that before. But the IVF treatments are expensive. It’s very hard for many people to do it and to get it. But I’ve been in favour of IVF right from the beginning,” Trump added.

WATCH:

NEW POLICY ALERT

“I am announcing today that under the Trump administration, your government will pay for or your insurance company will be mandated to pay for all costs associated with IVF treatment.”

“We want more babies!” pic.twitter.com/ZtsGkNUdl6

— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) August 29, 2024

A reporter pressed Trump on the political nature of IVF and what his administration plans to do if re-elected.

Reporter: “IVF has been an issue that has become political. A lot of people talking about it. What’s the Trump administration going to do when it comes to IVF if you get elected?”

Trump: “Right. Well, as you know, I was always for IVF right from the beginning. As soon as we heard about it—it’s fertilization, and it’s helping women and men and families—but it’s helping women who are able to have a baby.

Some have great difficulty, and a lot of them have been very happy with the results, as you know. And what we’re doing, and we’re doing this because we just think it’s great, and we need great children—beautiful children—in our country.

We actually need them. And we are going to be, under the Trump administration, we are going to be paying for that treatment. So, we are paying for that treatment. All Americans who want it?

For all Americans that get it, all Americans that need it. So, we’re going to be paying for that treatment, or we’re going to be mandating that the insurance company pay.”

WATCH:

BREAKING: Trump just announced that his administration will pay for IVF and mandate insurance companies to cover the treatment, allowing couples with fertility issues to have kids

“We are going to be paying for that treatment, so we are paying for that treatment…all Americans… pic.twitter.com/B47eJR1RVO

— George (@BehizyTweets) August 29, 2024

The post Trump Announces Bold New IVF Policy: Government or Insurance Company to Cover All Costs for Aspiring Parents appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

Americans have not been proud of the government that’s supposed to serve them for most of this century so far. The first president to take office in the 21st century was George W. Bush, who left the country divided, at war, and in recession. Barack Obama ran as a candidate of hope that could only come through change—through the repudiation of the previous administration.

After eight years of Obama, however, Americans sought hope in another great change, this time with the untried alternative to Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump. Four years later, voters declared the Trump experiment a failure, voting him out without necessarily eagerly embracing Joe Biden or Kamala Harris.

And after four years of Biden, the country is desperate again for change, maybe one that will bring “joy,” something that’s been in short supply these past 24 years. Informed voters who are not partisan Democrats know that Kamala Harris is not a force for change at all—she’s a continuation of the Biden administration, which is her administration too. She’s a slippery, cynical, standard-issue politician of the California liberal variety. The first and so far only major media interview of her campaign confirmed this—and also confirmed that Harris won’t be held back in the least by her record or political identity. 

She correctly perceives that voters still want change more than they want any program, whether left or right. So she is running on her strengths as a non-entity who hardly attracted the public’s notice in her four years as vice president. She’s running as the challenger and positioning Trump as the incumbent.

The tell-tale word that Harris kept returning to in her discussion with CNN’s Dana Bash was “decade”: “Turn the page on the last decade,” “I’m talking about an era that started about a decade ago….” Harris is running against the past, but not just against Trump—who was, after all, president for only four of the past ten years. The decade that Harris wants to leave behind includes two years under Obama and four under Biden and Harris herself. But Harris wasn’t the face of those years of disappointment, while Trump was and remains the face of his time. Political scientists say that presidential elections are referendums on the party in power. A referendum on Biden meant certain defeat for Democrats; normally a substitution wouldn’t do much good, merely pitting one non-incumbent against another in the opposing party, with the latter unencumbered by any ties to the recent political past. 

But this election, of course, sees a former president heading the challengers’ ticket, and his identification with a bygone time is stronger than the incumbent vice president’s identification with the present. In her CNN interview, Harris didn’t skip a beat when backtracking on her own record, insisting that her values have never changed even as Bash’s questions and Harris’s answers highlighted the Democrat’s inconsistency. Bash cited Harris’s 2019 support for a federal ban on fracking; Harris replied that experience has changed her mind, and she now sees that fracking need not impede the Green New Deal and the crusade against climate change. She even cast a tie-breaking Senate vote to allow more fracking. 

Republicans would like to say that Harris can’t be trusted. But are voters looking for trust or for change—or at least the illusion of change? Is ours a high-trust society, in which dishonesty is punished, or is our society one that has lost its old faith in leaders and institutions and will buy whatever pill is newly marketed for its afflictions? Harris is a political placebo for a nation whose sense of wellbeing and experience of joy increasingly depend on pharmaceutical hits.

She’s less capable than Joe Biden, which is why Harris is only vice president—even now, when Biden’s debilities have become a national scandal. She wasn’t better fit to be president in 2020, and the Biden who won that year’s election has proved over four agonizing years of inflation and humiliation on the international stage exactly how unfit he was from the beginning. Harris has a weaker grasp of policy than Biden ever did—though yet again, that’s an advantage in a foreshortened campaign where the objective is to commit to as little substance as possible. What she and her running mate did commit to, over and over, was a child tax credit higher than the one the Republican ticket is offering. Democrats are willing to spend more, on more kinds of recipients, than Republicans are. It’s a simple tactic, but it works.

Conservative pundits were wrong about Tim Walz’s role in the CNN interview. He wasn’t there to help Harris talk policy—quite the opposite. Walz was there to make her look trustworthy by contrast. Confronted with his misrepresentations of his military record and his lies about his wife’s receiving in vitro fertilization treatment, Walz hardly denied his wrongdoing but instead tried to short-circuit an examination of his chronic dishonesty by getting emotional: Yes, he gave the impression he had carried firearms in war, but it was only because he cares so much about children who have died because of gun violence! If he was untruthful about his wife’s fertility treatment—which he was—well, don’t you know fertility is a really personal matter (but not so personal that Walz won’t lie about it for political gain, apparently), and, by the way, Republicans are against reproductive rights? 

“I won’t apologize for speaking passionately,” Walz bluffed, when what he was being asked to do was to apologize, or at least account, for his lying. His cynicism and self-serving sentimentality was so brazen that Harris seemed almost forthright and frank by comparison. Mission accomplished. 

The interview showcased the Democratic ticket’s vulnerabilities. Harris comes across as non-threatening, which might be an important difference between her and Hillary Clinton, but it also might not be what Americans want in a commander-in-chief. Her nasally delivery isn’t appealing, and her vague, evasive answers are word salads not so different from those of Joe Bdien, just delivered less haltingly. She appears to recognize how much of a liability her liberal record from her time in the Senate and her abortive 2020 presidential campaign is, so she’s now presenting herself in the most indistinct terms as a moderate, someone who can be trusted on fracking and controlling the border. (Four years ago, as Bash noted, Harris put her hand up at a Democratic debate when the candidates were asked whether border infractions should be “decriminalized.”) 

If Americans knew Harris’s history, they wouldn’t elect her, especially since her history includes the Biden-Harris government’s record of failure. Walz, meanwhile, is a nasty emotional extortionist. But few voters know anything about him beyond the avuncular picture the media has promoted. Bash concluded the interview with feel-good questions about images of Walz’s son and Harris’s grandnieces, the right final note to help a feel-good campaign. 

“Vibes” might get the ticket elected, but they won’t make Harris a capable president. The interview showed her for the nonentity she is. Yet nonentities can become presidents, just not good ones. Harris is a candidate of change, but, if she wins, America is in for four more years like Biden’s.

The post The Non-Entity Who Would Be President appeared first on The American Conservative.

Guest Post by Miriam Judith

A Royal Caribbean cruise ship employee has been sentenced to 30 years in federal prison for spying on unsuspecting guests — including innocent young children.

Arvin Joseph Mirasol, a 34-year-old citizen of the Philippines, planted hidden cameras in the rooms of unsuspecting families. He had even resorted to hiding under beds in order to record young children getting out of the shower, according to the reports.

On Wednesday, U.S. District Court Judge Melissa Damian sentenced Mirasol to 30 years in federal prison after he pleaded guilty to producing child pornographic materials involving multiple children, some barely out of infancy.

Mirasol’s vile actions came to light in February when a young girl stumbled upon one of his cameras hidden under a sink in her room. Mirasol was detained until the cruise ship returned to Port Everglades in March, where he was finally arrested, for his revolting crimes.

According to the U.S. Attorney’s office:

”Mirasol, a stateroom attendant who serviced passenger cabins, was detained until the cruise ship docked at Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Once the ship docked, on March 3, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) personnel boarded the ship and began their investigation. Mirasol’s electronics were seized and searched. Law enforcement discovered that Mirasol’s electronics contained numerous videos of children in various stages of undress.  The focus of the videos was on the children’s genital areas. One video showed Mirasol himself installing a camera in a guest’s bathroom. HSI agents were able to identify children depicted in the videos, ranging from 2 to 17 years of age.”

Investigators revealed that Mirasol shamelessly confessed to spying on young girls since the very beginning of his employment with the company. The investigators said that Marisol also admitted to hiding cameras in guest bedrooms and hiding under beds in order to secretly record young children.

Unfortunately, the harm that was done by Marisol cannot be taken back, and his victims will be left with permanent scars inflicted by the predator. However, Mirasol will finally be behind bars where he can no longer harm anyone else.

The post Royal Caribbean Cruise Ship Employee Sentenced to 30 Years for Secretly Filming Guests, Including Young Children appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

Last Friday, in a speech in Phoenix, Arizona, the independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. suspended his campaign and endorsed Donald J. Trump. 

As Kennedy noted, the problem with democracy in America in recent decades has been its absence, decrying the Democratic party’s departure from democratic norms. In defense of what amounts to America’s own “managed democracy” the party erected almost insurmountable barriers to the RFK Jr. candidacy, first by putting up onerous petition signature requirements, then by suing Kennedy’s campaign in court. 

The irony of a party obsessed with Russia acting in such a manner should not be lost on anyone; indeed it is unarguable that Russia has indeed used the same methods as today’s Democratic Party. When, for example, Lyubov Sobol (an associate of anti-corruption crusader Alexei Navalny) sought to enter the Moscow City Council race in 2019, her candidacy was derailed by challenging her ballot petition signatures.  This same device has frequently been used to get rid of other unwanted opposition candidates. In 2018, Pavel Grudinin, a successful businessman and populist, ran for the presidency against Vladimir Putin as a candidate of the reformed Russian communist party. When Grudinin became too threatening to the establishment and started to rise in the polls, the mass media went into action with hit pieces that quickly sidelined him. 

Sound familiar?

To no one’s surprise, Kennedy’s critics were quick to pounce. Kurt Anderson dismissed Kennedy’s remarks in a vicious, self-serving piece in the Atlantic, while the American University presidential historian Allan Lichtman took to Chris Cuomo’s program and denounced Kennedy’s speech as “the most incoherent endorsement I have ever heard.”

Any honest piece about Robert F. Kennedy and his politics must come attached with certain disclaimers: Kennedy himself is an imperfect vessel for a better politics. His campaign, launched with so much promise, foundered on allegations of self-dealing and nepotism. His very real and laudable environmental record is difficult to square with Trump’s own record and the former president’s oft-stated promises to gut environmental regulations. And perhaps most importantly, Kennedy’s position on Israel’s war on Palestine differs little from that of either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump—which is to say it is appalling. It is Kennedy’s unqualified endorsement of the most exaggerated and often simply false narrative about Palestine that gives us pause, to say the least.  He evinces a cold indifference to Israel’s actions, supported by the U.S., against the entirety of the Palestinian population.

And yet, for all that, in Kennedy’s speech we caught a glimpse of what a common good populism might look like. For one thing, unlike the current Democratic and Republican nominees, he seems to understand that the gravest threats to the country come not from beyond our borders—in the form of an alleged authoritarian axis of evil—but from within them. In his telling, “war, censorship, corruption, Big Pharma, Big Tech, Big Ag, and Big Money” are among the most pressing of America’s challenges. Kennedy is also correct as to the sad trajectory the Democratic Party has taken since the days of President John F. Kennedy. As Kennedy points out, it was a party that once

stood against authoritarianism, against censorship, and against colonialism, imperialism, and unjust wars. We were the party of labor and the working class. The Democrats were the party of government transparency and the champion of the environment. Our party was the bulwark against Big Money interests and corporate power.

Of the bankers and corporate interests, Franklin D. Roosevelt once said, “I welcome their hatred.” Today, the party of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama turns to alumni of Goldman Sachs to oversee the nation’s finances.

On the subject of Ukraine, Kennedy’s account strikes us as factual. There is a mountain of evidence that the war is indeed, as Kennedy notes, “Russia’s predictable response to the reckless neocon project of extending NATO to encircle Russia” and to force Ukraine into NATO, despite it being “the brightest of redlines” for Russia, in then-ambassador William Burns own words.  Kennedy is also correct when he recalls that President Biden stated that the purpose of this war was ‘regime change’ in Moscow.

As night follows day, Kennedy’s account of the war in Ukraine and its causes will be derided as “Putin talking points,” even more so now that Kennedy has allied himself with Trump—himself falsely accused of colluding with Putin’s Russia. Such accusations will echo another case of “collusion”  that took place in 1962–63 when President John F. Kennedy reached out in secret to Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev to initiate a dialogue—a dialogue that was thwarted at every turn by the leaders of the CIA and the U.S. military.  As recounted by historian James Douglass, Kennedy engaged in an extensive exchange of letters and mediated (mostly by journalist Norman Cousins) conversations with his Russian counterpart, all of them oriented to overcoming mutual suspicion and ending the Cold War before it resulted in the nuclear Armageddon that the two leaders had narrowly escaped in October 1962. 

In the end, a Kennedy-Trump coalition could be a reason for hope, but these hopes are tempered by our realization that Kennedy and Trump can only ever be relatively better than the alternatives. To be sure, it does not take much to rise above the level of a Kamala Harris, but we do not mean to damn them with such faint praise, as should be already obvious from the above. To say that Kennedy and Trump have their own real limitations, whether intellectual or moral, is to say no more than what Reinhold Niebuhr has noted about anyone at all that has achieved great political power.  In the realm of power, the pure of heart are generally crucified or assassinated.  At the very least, they are pushed aside. We have no choice but to make do with those who are imperfect.

The post RFK Jr.’s Common Good Populism  appeared first on The American Conservative.

For some years, the main division among self-described foreign policy realists is over what to do about China, and, specifically, what to do about Taiwan. The group led by Elbridge Colby, lately foreign policy advisor for the former President Donald Trump, believes that Chinese hegemony in Asia, the first step towards which will be reunification with Taiwan, will cause the eclipse of American economic power; America must be willing then at least to consider armed support for the Republic of China, if other deterrents fail. A variety of critics, including our own Doug Bandow, suggest the overarching threat is overblown, or, at any rate, not worth risking war between nuclear-armed powers. So things stand in our world.

There are merits to each line of argument, but the dispute looks increasingly irrelevant. Irrespective of what ought to be done, it is growing apparent that the United States simply will not be in a position to wage conventional war against China.

Consider last week’s news that the Navy plans to mothball 17 Military Sealift Command (MSC) ships because of an ongoing manpower shortage. MSC is exactly what it says in the name, the organ responsible for providing military transports and logistical support by sea. You may be aware that Taiwan is an island on the thither side of the world’s largest ocean, and any American plan to wage war in its environs will involve moving rather a lot of people and stuff there by ship. As we wrote at some length in the latest print issue of The American Conservative, MSC has been suffering a mariner shortage since at least 2017, and structural factors have prevented the supply of mariners from growing quickly enough both to cover turnover and to fill the gap.  Further, a premise of MSC is that in times of war it may call upon the American merchant fleet to aid its efforts. The Chinese merchant fleet outnumbers the American merchant fleet by roughly 50 to 1. Simply put, it is unlikely that we will get men and materiel to the front in anything like sufficient numbers to counter the Chinese, who are far better prepared to supply a front that is anyway much closer to them than it is to us.

Or consider the ongoing debacle of the Constellation-class frigate, the warship intended to do the yeoman’s work of any naval operations in coastal waters. The ships were commissioned and their construction begun without a finalized design, which, in the classic bizarro logic of our military–industrial complex, meant it was to be completed more quickly and with better specifications than otherwise. Instead, the real world intruded, and the development has been quagmired by basic design changes. A GAO report in May said the process is “at a standstill” and projected that the first ship will be delivered no earlier than April 2029, three years late.

China-watching is a game for fools and fortune-tellers, but the word on the street is that Xi Jinping means to take Taiwan by the end of the decade—2027 gets thrown about a fair bit, with some of our professional seers saying the blow will come as early as 2025. If we accept this broad five-year range as something like the truth, it doesn’t matter whether the United States wants to go to war or not; we simply will not be able to. It isn’t merely a matter of the certain decline that attends a power entering a war for which it is fundamentally unprepared, a la the British Empire in 1938. The invasion will be over by time we put sufficient assets in the neighborhood—or even by time we have assets to put in the neighborhood. To contest the matter on the field of battle, we would have had to begin serious preparations the better part of a decade ago, and we are simply out of time.

The question then is how to reduce the upside for China and the downside for the U.S. The American classics, sanctions and proxy war, will get trotted out. Sanctions do not have what you’d call a track record of success in accomplishing their stated policy goals, and, unlike Russia, China is in a position to levy actually painful countersanctions against the U.S. Proxy wars have their own risks, and the American arsenal is significantly thinner than it was in 2022. Nor does it look as if it will replenish meaningfully as we continue our escapades in Eastern Europe and the great, blood-drenched sandbox of the Middle East. 

The inertia and dysfunction of the American defense establishment have proven insurmountable; it is not clear that anyone in that establishment is especially interested in trying something new. At this writing, roughly a third of American naval assets are in the Middle East, and there is not a single aircraft carrier in the Western Pacific—a nice snapshot of existing priorities and readiness.

American policymakers should begin to consider policies to ameliorate the effects on the U.S. of a Taiwan invasion. Acting as if war is a viable policy is fantasy, nothing more or less.

The post Let’s Be Honest About Taiwan appeared first on The American Conservative.

It’s a video making waves across social media.

Spanish national police on Sunday intercepted a boat carrying migrants attempting to illegally reach Spanish territory in North Africa, actually severing the migrant vessel in a collision, the U.K. Telegraph reported Wednesday.

And while there were, unbelievably, no serious injuries, the images have caused a storm in cyberspace.

Watch: Migrant dinghy crushed by Spanish police boat

The Guardia Civil can be seen chasing the speedboat and trying to block the path when it severs it in half

Read more https://t.co/5Pi2OAXQEv pic.twitter.com/DbFgnp4Wp1

— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) August 28, 2024

According to The Telegraph, the Spanish boat was part of the country’s Guardia Civil, patrolling the coast off Melilla, a small Spanish enclave bordering Morocco in North Africa.

It was chasing a boat carrying four passengers and attempting to stop it from reaching ground when the collision occurred.

According to The Telegraph, those on board the migrant vessel were rescued immediately. Only one required brief hospitalization.

A spokesman for a party in Spain’s left-wing coalition government called the incident an “intolerable human disaster.”

Reactions to the video ranged from congratulating the authorities for the undeniably harsh measure to criticizing the extremity of the move.

“That’s how you stop illegal immigrants from illegally crossing into your country,” declared a social media post published by Turning Point UK, a British offshoot of the conservative American group Turning Point USA.

Spanish boat police take out a migrant dinghy.

That’s how you stop illegal migrants from illegally crossing into your country. pic.twitter.com/cICaO6WWRf

— Turning Point UK (@TPointUK) August 28, 2024

“Everyone has had enough,” wrote Tommy Robinson, a British conservative political activist.

Spanish police boat chases down and runs over migrant dinghy sending occupants flying.

Everyone has had enough. pic.twitter.com/CSPsZbby7b

— Tommy Robinson (@TRobinsonNewEra) August 29, 2024

The migrants’ boat appeared to have originated in Morocco.

According to the left-wing British publication The Guardian, the Moroccan Association for Human Rights “violent and dangerous.”

And Kenneth Roth, a former executive director of the group Human Rights Watch, used a social media post to call the police action “dangerously aggressive.”

A video “appeared to show a Spanish police boat briefly mounting a small dinghy carrying people towards the coast of Spain” — a dangerously aggressive move to stop migrants. https://t.co/UXGtxhlJN0

— Kenneth Roth (@KenRoth) August 27, 2024

Moroccan authorities have said they are investigating the encounter, according to The Telegraph.

Spain has apparently decided there is no need to, the publication reported.

“Spain’s two enclaves on Morocco’s Mediterranean coast, Ceuta and Melilla, share the only land borders of the European Union with Africa,” The Telegraph noted. “The enclaves sporadically experience waves of attempted crossings by migrants trying to reach Europe.”

This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.

The post Dramatic Footage: Spanish Police Block Illegal Immigrants by Severing Their Boat in Half appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.