cross-posted from: https://midwest.social/post/10886283

Happy confederate L day

Just want to say thank you to the mods for the mentally exhausting and under appreciated work you do.

Me and my brother both joined the army at slightly different times. We both did a tour in Afghanistan that overlapped and were just one province away from each other. I did a second tour over there and he got out.

We both came from a VERY conservative family. It was after serving that we both became suuuuper liberal. It was like the wool being pulled out from out eyes when we joined the army and saw how much of a lie it all was. Oddly enough, this is a semi common story for conservative people joining the military.

We grew up with our dad working in the military-industrial-complex and he would make fun of the liberals who called out the military for serving the MIC companies, and how it Iraq was a war for profit. Then we serve and see it first had with all the contractors, the needless equipment, the contracts for new tech that wasn't needed, and all the other money sinks going into it. It was all a lie.

We grew up being told how bad universal healthcare would be, but then had it in the military and saw how amazing it was.

We were told that if people didn't have a personal motivation through debt and loans to make them work harder, then people going through college would have no motivation to improve their lives. And yet here I am with the GI bill. (Granted, I still have 70k in student loans. The GI bill is kind of a lie in its self).

Everything that was a conservative talking point was exposed as a lie after joining army.

NR spoke with military and foreign-policy pros about the renowned paper’s credulous treatment of Hamas.

Dennis Prager is a conservative thinker, commentator and one of America’s most successful political entrepreneurs; He is most well known for establishing PragerU, one of the largest conservative online platforms. Steven Edginton is joined by Mr Prager to discuss threats to Western civilisation.

Philosopher, scholar and political theorist Dr. Yoram Hazony joins John for a rich and interweaving conversation about conservatism, nationalism, democracy and modern politics.

Dr. Hazony, author of several books on these matters, provides a compelling critique of the political right - where it has gone wrong, the great benefits it can convey for society and how it diverges from liberalism. John and Yoram touch on many important topics, including multiculturalism, identity politics, globalism and the question of why nationalism seems surrounded by an unearned air of controversy.

John and Yoram touch on many important topics, including multiculturalism, identity politics, globalism and why nationalism seems to be surrounded by an unearned air of controversy.

Yoram Hazony is an Israeli philosopher, Bible scholar and political theorist. He is President of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem and Chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation. He has written several books, including The Virtue of Nationalism (2018) and his latest, Conservatism: A Rediscovery (2022), both of which have met with popular and critical success

Educated at Princeton University (B.A. in East Asian Studies), and Rutgers University (Ph.D in Political Theory), Yoram founded and was the first editor of Princeton’s conservative student journal, The Princeton Tory, while still an undergraduate. He lives in Jerusalem with his wife Yael Hazony. They have nine children.

An insightfull article on what pro-forced birth is actually about.

A reminder that voting GOP and wanting to reduce human suffering are mutually exclusive. The choice is yours.

Spoiler: Like always, it was never about the babies.

!conservative@lemm.ee

Active Clubs are quickly expanding their presence in the United States, and one such group is wreaking havoc in a Tennessee mayoral race

The city of Franklin, Tennessee, has exploded into a political firestorm in the wake of an alliance between conservative mayoral candidate Gabrielle Hanson and a white supremacist “Active Club.”

Last week, Hanson arrived at a candidate forum with members of the Tennessee Active Club acting as her escort. Rolling Stone reported last month on Active Clubs, which are an emerging form of open-network groups that blend martial arts and combat training with white supremacist ideology. According to a report by the Counter Extremism Project (CEP), more than 46 of these clubs have been established in the United States since 2020, one of them in Tennessee. When the group arrived in Franklin, they claimed to be there to “protect” Hanson, a current alderman for the city. Brad Lewis, who has described himself as “an actual literal Nazi” and owns a gathering place and training center for the Active Club, told News Channel 5 that Hanson was a “friend” and that they came at her request.

The members of the Franklin Board of Mayor and Aldermen (save for Hanson) released a statement last Wednesday declaring they would not “tolerate any form of hatred, intimidation, or violence directed at our residents, media representatives, or anyone else attending or participating in the democratic process.”

Tuesday night, members of the board took Hanson to task in person, accusing her of sowing division and endangering the community. Hanson refused to condemn the group. “This is the old adage of ‘you reap what you sow,’” Hanson told the board, claiming the Active Club was in Franklin partially as a result of alleged discrimination against Christians. “You’ve planted seeds for years and years against our citizens, and they are coming to harvest, this is what the citizens of Franklin are getting because of bad decisions.”

“It’s easy to shift all the blame,” Hanson added. “I just happened to arrive at a time when everything was starting to crumble.”

Active Clubs are the brainchild of Robert Rundo, a California white supremacist who, after failing to launch one racist group and being charged with incitement of riots in the U.S., moved to Eastern Europe to craft what he calls “White Supremacy 3.0,” a style of white supremacist ideology that eschews flashy, aggressive public displays of past neo-Nazi movements. Active Clubs have also taken on a self-appointed status as a “stand-by militia,” primed for violent action.

Hanson claimed that the Tennessee Active Club came to Franklin because they were an “anti-antifa group” and “the dark web is showing massive antifa activity” in and around the city. At one point on Tuesday, Hanson referred to Brad Lewis, the “actual literal Nazi,” as her “client.”

“I’m a realtor, I’m not going to denounce anybody their right to be whatever it is that they want to be, whether I agree with what they do in their personal life or not,” she said, adding that “we don’t discriminate in this community” and that the Active Club “never laid a hand on anyone and they were very respectful while they were here.”

Alderman Matt Brown rebuffed Hanson, questioning the assertion that her relationship with the Tennessee Active Club was just a business. Brown pointed out that Hanson had publicly shared social media posts from the group, including screenshots of Telegram chats that contained the phrase “there is no political solution,” and accused Franklin’s current mayor of having antifa connections.

“We cannot allow this kind of hate to take hold in Franklin or else we have lost everything,” Brown said, before addressing Hanson directly. “Is it your mission to divide our city? Because you are doing a bang-up job of it right now.”

The Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to review a challenge to its landmark New York Times v. Sullivan ruling. Justice Clarence Thomas has some thoughts.

The 1964 ruling established limits on public officials’ ability to sue on grounds of defamation, as well as the need to prove a standard of “actual malice” by the outlet making the allegedly defamatory statements.

The Supreme Court declined to hear Blankenship v. NBC Universal, LLC, a lawsuit brought by coal magnate Don Blankenship, who in 2015 was convicted of a misdemeanor charge of conspiring to violate safety standards at a Virginia mine where an explosion killed 29 workers. Blankenship was sentenced to a year in prison and fined $250,000. Last year, the Supreme Court upheld the conviction. Blankenship then sued NBC Universal, alleging that the news company had defamed him by describing him as a “felon.” Lower courts ruled that NBC had not acted with “malice” in their statements, and the case was appealed to the Supreme Court.

While Justice Thomas concurred that Blankenship’s case did not require a ruling by the Supreme Court, he called for the justices to review the standard set by New York Times v. Sullivan “in an appropriate case.”

“I continue to adhere to my view that we should reconsider the actual-malice standard,” Thomas wrote,” referencing his previous opinion in Coral Ridge Ministries Media, Inc. v. Southern Poverty Law Center. “New York Times and the Court’s decisions extending it were policy-driven decisions masquerading as constitutional law,” he added, “the actual-malice standard comes at a heavy cost, allowing media organizations and interest groups ‘to cast false aspersions on public figures with near impunity.’”

The push from Thomas comes amid widespread media reporting on allegations of corruption and improper financial relationships involving the justice. A series of investigations by ProPublica and The New York Times have uncovered unreported gifts, real estate deals, and luxury perks given to Thomas by high-profile conservative figures — many of which were not reported in financial disclosures, or weighed as conflicts of interest in relevant cases.

In April, ProPublica reported on the extent of Thomas’ relationship with billionaire Harlan Crow. The real estate mogul gifted Thomas frequent rides on private jets, vacations to luxury resorts, and trips on his superyachts. Crow also purchased $133,000 in real estate from Thomas, and footed private school tuition bills for a child Thomas was raising.

Subsequent reporting has exposed Thomas’ relationship with other powerful conservative players, including the Koch brothers, oil tycoon Paul “Tony” Novelly, H. Wayne Huizenga, the former owner of the Miami Dolphins, and investor David Sokol.

Thomas has claimed that the omissions from his financial statements were nothing more than oversights and that he had been advised that “this sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends, who did not have business before the Court, was not reportable.”

This is an unbiased history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Most in the U.S. are almost universally against Palestinian violence against Israel and somehow never explicitly critical of Israeli violence against Palestinians. But the left, the real left, is unabashedly supportive of Palestine. And the first paragraph of the background is why:

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict dates back to the end of the nineteenth century. In 1947, the United Nations adopted Resolution 181, known as the Partition Plan, which sought to divide the British Mandate of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states. On May 14, 1948, the State of Israel was created, sparking the first Arab-Israeli War. The war ended in 1949 with Israel’s victory, but 750,000 Palestinians were displaced, and the territory was divided into 3 parts: the State of Israel, the West Bank (of the Jordan River), and the Gaza Strip.

How do you square support for Israel as a state when it's merely an extension of British colonialism, and when Israel seems to actively seek to deny Palestinians any form of autonomy as a policy? Not to mention the numbers of dead on both side after each conflict...