Sohrab Ahmari Author Rss

The Nazis Globalist Liberals Prefer to Ignore

Sohrab Ahmari — Thu, 17 Feb 2022 15:56:00 +0000

Partisans all across the globe prefer to see no bad on their own side. Even by current political standards, it's disgusting to see trans-Atlantic liberals elide, justify, and obscure the existence of neo-Nazis and other ideological ghastlies among their champions in Ukraine and Hungary.

Begin with beleaguered Ukraine. On Monday, print and broadcast media throughout the Anglosphere led with a 79-year-old Ukrainian great grandmother, Valentyna Konstantynovska, getting small-arms training in Mariupol, Ukraine, in preparation for a possible Russian invasion. The occasion seemed tailor-made for the media: the silver-haired, wrinkled grandmother pledged, "I will protect my home, my city, my children."

In the United Kingdom, the Times and Daily Telegraph featured Konstantynovska above the fold on their front pages, while the Guardian, Independent, and Financial Times included other, equally moving images from the same civilian training exercise (a well-manicured woman holding a rifle for the Guardian, a child taught to handle ammo clips for the Independent, a camouflaged militant teaching a crouching young woman to shoot for the FT).

The media in the United States couldn't help itself either. According to NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel, Konstantynovska told him, "Your mother would do it too." The same training session was shown on ABC's New York station, and Konstantynovska was there again, giving Vladimir Putin a hard stare from behind the muzzle of the Kalashnikov. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which is sponsored by taxpayers, also followed the script.

The message: These are the grannies, tiny kids, and (beautiful) young ladies fighting Russian reaction and revanchism on the front lines of democracy.

What American and British journalists did not cover: The Azov Battalion, which has its headquarters in Mariupol, provided the training. Azov is described by the FBI as a "paramilitary unit...known for its affiliation with neo-Nazi ideology and the usage of Nazi insignia," and it is accused of "participating in training and radicalizing United States-based white supremacist groups." (Proponents of Azov argue that it is a normal unit, only "rooted in a volunteer battalion organized by the leadership of a neo-Nazi outfit," as if that is much better than the FBI narrative.)

Azov's SS-inspired emblem may be seen on the elbow of one of the uniformed soldiers teaching grandma in the ABC piece. Otherwise, the Anglophone media remained silent. It was up to online sleuths to uncover the link for Brits and Americans. This despite the fact that sources on the Continent had little issue exposing the neo-Nazi relationship directly. For example, Euro News headlined the report, "Ukraine Far-Right Group Offers Civilians Training."

After the Twitter outcry, Radio Free Europe unaccountably deleted its granny story (see screen captures below); the other outlets moved on.

Are all Ukrainians preparing to fight neo-Nazis and racial reactionaries in their homeland? Obviously not. Nonetheless, when Russia hawkism hits fever pitch in Washington and Westminster, it's fascinating to witness our media obliterate any evidence that would detract from an otherwise straightforward, moralistic narrative—Brave Liberal Democrats Face Down Kremlin. Insisting on unpleasant truths is comparable to "amplifying Russian propaganda," as a Republican Hill staffer recently accused me of doing.

Which takes us to Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his governing Fidesz party will face a general election against a self-described alliance of liberals, environmentalists, socialists, and neo-Nazis. Yes, you read it correctly: To guarantee that Fidesz does not face a fragmented opposition, the left has joined forces with Jobbik to create a unified block.

That would be the neo-Nazi "Movement for a Better Hungary," whose leaders have spilt on Holocaust memorials, whose website has previously warned of "Zionist Israel's efforts to dominate Hungary and the world," and whose foreign policy chief has urged fellow lawmakers to "tally up people of Jewish ancestry who live here, especially in the Hungarian Parliament and the Hungarian government, who, indeed, pose a national-security risk."

Having interviewed Jobbik's leadership twice, I can confirm that it is one of Europe's most really terrifying parties. Over the weekend, however, film emerged showing Péter Márki-Zay, the head of the opposition party and the man who would succeed Orbán as prime minister, advocating for a Jobbik candidate and recognizing the presence of "fascists" in his coalition.

Do left- and right-liberal outlets in the United States (and Britain) acknowledge the same fact? Painfully, begrudgingly, if at all. Try searching “Jobbik” on the New York Times website. The most recent hit you’ll get is a transcript of my appearance on the Ezra Klein Podcast, in which I brought up this most inconvenient fact. The next hit is from 2018—before the formation of the united opposition bloc.

Say it, libs: “They may be Nazis, but they’re our Nazis.”

Sarah Weddington: The Killer GirlBoss

Sohrab Ahmari — Tue, 28 Dec 2021 16:24:00 +0000

Who will talk evil of the dead if we don't? When I learnt of Sarah Weddington's death over the weekend, the terrible phrase sprang to me. She was the Texas lawyer who successfully defended Roe v. Wade in front of the Supreme Court, assisting in the establishment of the most draconian abortion policy this side of North Korea. Weddington's intentions were a study in banality's wickedness, and her proto-#GirlBoss act made the whole package even more disgusting.

Naturally, the abortion business and its supporters are in mourning. "What a loss," Planned Parenthood CEO Alexis McGill Johnson tweeted. She promised to "remember Sarah Weddington's efforts every day—by continuing to fight for abortion access for all." Roe v. Wade is essentially halted in Weddington's home state, thanks to an innovative statute that gives residents a private right of action to hold abortionists accountable, according to the media obituaries.

Weddington had been concerned for a long time that the high court's Roe decision would be overturned. "Will abortion be banned the next day if [Neil] Gorsuch's nomination is approved?" she asked the Guardian in 2017. No. A new judge is unlikely to make a significant difference. However, two or three of them might." It gives me tremendous comfort to think that this grand dame of the abortion industry may have spent her dying days worrying about the condition of her career's crowning achievement.

Sarah Weddington was an outlier in the abortion-on-demand movement. She projected primness as the daughter of a Methodist preacher. "That she was smart was undeniable; she'd skipped two grades, graduated magna cum laude besides....[She] had headed her high-school chapter of the Future Homemakers of America, and had been assistant house mother for her Delta Gamma sorority," Joshua Prager writes in Family Roe, his book-length story about the people behind the notorious case. She was married and from a middle-class family." "I have received very few B's my whole life," she once stated. (People who say such things about themselves should be excluded from public life; it's a surefire way to spot psychopathy.)

A baby couldn’t be permitted to get in the way of her quest for A’s. In the middle-1960s, she and her future husband, Ron, were in law school when they “made a mistake,” as a New York Times review of her 1992 memoir, A Question of Choice, delicately put it. “Abortion was something I had never talked about with friends or family,” Weddington wrote. But she was now sure she had to obtain one, and obtain one she did, across the border, in Piedras Negras, Mexico.

She graduated from the University of Texas at Austin's law school but was unable to find work in the private sector. Instead, she immersed herself in Austin's activist scene, working with a group of women who provided birth control counseling and information about Mexican abortionists. The women asked their legal buddy, Weddington, to see whether they could directly challenge the anti-abortion law in Texas.

Weddington paired up with fellow UT law alumni Linda Coffee, and the two quickly identified Norma McCorvey as a suitable plaintiff. Weddington piqued the pregnant McCorvey's interest, “strawberry-blond and curvy and just two years older than she,” as Prager tells us. “‘She was wholesome and robust and had things happening!…I fell in love with Sarah. She had all this hair.’”

The rest is history. Weddington appeared twice before the Supremes, once in 1971, when she was only 26, and again the following year, aged 27. She told the justices,

We are not here to advocate for abortion. We do not ask this court to rule that abortion is good or desirable in any particular situation. We are here to advocate that the decision whether or not a particular woman will continue to carry or will terminate a pregnancy is a decision that should be made by that individual. That, in fact, she has a constitutional right to make that decision for herself.

The all-male panel of judges agreed: law and morality could be neatly divided, as Weddington and Coffee had proposed.

Weddington then went on to serve three terms in the Texas legislature before being recruited by the Carter administration for key positions in the Department of Agriculture and then the White House, where she battled for the Equal Rights Amendment. According to a Times profile from her White House days:

She is a hard worker, usually arriving at the office at 7:00 a.m. and not returning home until late at night. She does most of her own housework in her two‐bedroom Washington home. She drives to and from work in a 1972 compact automobile. She finds time for friends, too, most of them Texans. She loves to square dance, eat Mexican food, go hiking and camping, and ride horses. She also likes to read, attend concerts and…discover how things work….‘I expect so much of myself,’ she said. ‘I guess I’m pretty close to being a perfectionist.’

All in a day's work for the lady who helped to kill more than 60 million unborn Americans in the United States since 1973.