It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

When Xi Jinping effectively crowned himself emperor at the 19th Chinese Communist Party Congress in 2017, consolidating his power by ending a practice of term limits, China was supposed to be ready for its next stage of his meteoric rise.

In a triumphal speech, Xi heralded a “new era” of Chinese power and predicted the nation would become a “mighty force” under his control.

But as the summer of 2019 drags on, Xi and the government he leads look increasingly weak and lost.

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Anyone over the age of sixty-five was most likely put off by the original trailer for the newest Quentin Tarantino film because what at first seemed a lighthearted story about a couple of aging television stars was going to go dark and murderous.

The quick shot of Charles Manson was then removed from the trailer so the Manson aspect of the film sneaks up on the viewer.  Charles Manson was the man of our nightmares in 1969–70, especially for those of us who then lived in Los Angeles.

Yet the group that Manson assembled at the Spahn Ranch in Chatsworth were as disconnected from reality as were the mass murderers in Gilroy, El Paso, and Dayton.

But what was shocking then is now practically an everyday event, particularly in cities long governed by Democrats.  More deaths occur in Chicago and Baltimore every month than the number lost in El Paso and Dayton.  It is the Democrat Party that has brought us to where we are today.

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The anti-Trump forces, now stripped of their Russian collusion ammunition, have invented another imaginary threat they hope to weaponize against the president: The public menace posed by “white supremacist” terrorism.

Much like the collusion conspiracy theory—which relied on random incidents, fictional villains, unconvincing evidence, and the Bad Orange Man in the White House—there is little substance to this purported danger.

Unironically, the whole ruse is being pushed by the same people who foisted the Russian collusion hoax on the American people for three years in the hopes of prompting President Trump’s impeachment and removal.

The “white supremacy” canard is intended to further demonize Trump; falsely defame his supporters as white supremacists; and pressure nervous voters into defeating Trump and Republican candidates next year. The strategy is as cynical as it is pernicious.

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Government sponsorship of violence against opponents or complacency in the face of incitement to violence is a powerful tool of political repression. Regimes such as Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, Nicaragua, China, and other tyrannies have used such tactics to great effect.

When mobs attack anti-government demonstrators, for example, the police either disappear or stand by watching. In American cities run by Democrats and on the U.S. college and university campuses, the authorities increasingly have been standing by as radicals do the dirty work of beating up or silencing conservatives.

In societies riven by mutual hate, the people who control the police and public communications make all the difference.  When societal hatred or the partiality of authorities results in deaths, long-smoldering cold civil war can blaze into holocaust.  We Americans are now facing the danger of a civil war thus ignited.

We do not think of civil war this way because our Civil War from 1861 to 1865 was less a conflict within society than it was a highly organized war between states. What we face now is worse.

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After denouncing hate on Sunday, Democrats went back on Monday to calling for violence against conservatives.

In Kentucky, Mitch McConnell is convalescing at home after breaking a shoulder. Nancy's Army went to his house to harass him. He's 77.  A video of the protest shows them demanding he be stabbed in the heart.

We have to start taking the Democrats’ creation of a maelstrom of hate very, very seriously.

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Universal Pictures has produced a film called The Hunt (originally titled Red State vs. Blue State), which begins with rich liberals capturing ‘deplorables’ from red states to hunt down and murder.

If you lived in Dayton, Ohio, you might consider this a realistic premise, although I don’t think that is what the filmmakers had in mind. The video above is the official trailer; if I interpret it correctly, the ‘deplorables’ fight back and win what looks like a civil war.

In that respect, one might say that the film is realistic.

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The stifling conformity of the Great Awokening has now driven even Quentin Tarantino to the subversive right.

His immensely enjoyable buddy comedy Once Upon in a Time…in Hollywood, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt at their considerable best, has The New Yorker fulminating that it’s “obscenely regressive.”

Critic Richard Brody complains, “Tarantino delivers a ridiculously white movie” that “celebrates white-male stardom (and behind-the-scenes command).”

Well, Hallelujah…

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For the past several months now, the US media is obsessed with dire predictions of a calamitous trade war between China and the US, following numerous statements by President Trump that the Chinese trade surplus is intolerable.

Indeed, at $506 billion of Chinese exports against only $130 billion of US ones, it does look very unfair. However, things look a bit different if looked at from a different angle.

For the problem with China is, thus, not its surplus per se, but rather the economic system that produces it and here it is the Communist system and not free trade that are clearly to blame.

Trade is just a way of increasing the power of the Chinese Communist Party. Everything that contributes to its aggrandizing is fair and widely practiced – technology theft, discrimination against foreign companies, preferential loans/subsidies to state-owned enterprises, currency manipulation etc.

It is a fool’s paradise though with China’s economy beset with problems that defy easy solutions.

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Well before Sigmund Freud formalized the idea of “projectionism”—the defense of one’s own shortcomings and sins by attributing them to others—it was a common theme in classical literature and the New Testament: the ridiculing of the mole on someone else’s nose to hide one’s own boil.

The term projection more or less sums up much of the woke identity politics movement, in which obsessions with racial privilege and tribal exceptionalism are justified by accusing others of just such bias.

For example, the new racism is epidemic among those in the so-called squad, the self-referenced nickname for four media-obsessed, first-term congressional representatives, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), who without their daily charges of bias largely would be unknown back-benchers laboring away in obscurity.

They have all taken Joseph Goebbels’ advice.

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As Brit Hume pointed out recently, “People discerning a racist motive for Trump’s attack on Elijah Cummings are missing a key point: Trump attacks those who criticize him and his administration, black or white.”

Hume follows up with an amusing and color-coordinated list of people Trump has put in their place (Bernie Sanders: crazy, Elizabeth Warren: total fraud, Justin Amash: loser, Joe Biden: low IQ, Harry Reid: insane, etc., etc.).

Beyond the elements of political calculation and polemical style, however, Donald Trump’s recent tweet fests suggest that he may be on the threshold of shifting the Overton Window on race.

Public discourse in America has long been held hostage to a species of racist moral blackmail that has made it almost impossible to tell the truth about many central social realities.  The President is trying to liberate us from it.

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