World leaders are convening in Glasgow for a climate summit meeting beginning on October 31^st. This get-together is a follow-up to the 2015 conference in Paris that resulted in the one-sided Paris Climate Agreement. As the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) gets underway, it is worth recalling the prescient words of a former United Nations climate change expert who candidly linked globalist policies to combat climate change with wealth redistribution.

More than ten years ago, Ottmar Edenhofer, a former co-chair of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group III “Mitigation of Climate Change,” explained the connection as follows:

“Basically, it is a big mistake to discuss climate policy separately from the big issues of globalization…First of all, we industrialized countries have practically expropriated the atmosphere of the world community. But one must be clear: we are de facto redistributing world wealth through climate policy. It is obvious that the owners of coal and oil are not enthusiastic about it. One has to get rid of the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy.” [translated from German via Google Translate]

The UN Green Climate Fund (GCF), which will surely be a major topic of discussion at the Glasgow climate summit, demonstrates what Edenhofer was talking about.

The Green Climate Fund was established as part of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. It describes itself as “the world’s largest climate fund, mandated to support developing countries raise and realize their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) ambitions towards low-emissions, climate-resilient pathways.” The Nationally Determined Contributions are supposed to embody objectives by each country, as part of  their participation in the Paris Climate Agreement, to reduce national greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to the impacts of climate change.

The world’s more economically advanced countries agreed to jointly provide $100 billion per year to the GCF by 2020. However, the $100 billion annual target has not been met so far.

Not only are the so-called “developing” countries pressing for the so-called “rich” countries to promptly fulfill their collective pledge of providing $100 billion annually to the GCF. The developing countries are demanding far more in redistribution of wealth to them through the GCF, with essentially no strings attached that would require them to meet firm decarbonization targets. Indeed, some developing countries are pushing for as much as $750 billion annually in additional contributions to the GCF from richer countries by the middle of this decade.

For example, as reported by Bloomberg Green, South African Environment Minister Barbara Creecy suggested that “post-2025, we most move from a floor of $100 billion. Taking the needs of developing nations into account, we must move toward a collective goal of mobilizing $750 billion a year” from developed countries. South Africa would be a funding recipient, not a donor country.

By all normal economic measures, South Africa should not even be considered a developing country that would be entitled to receive funds from the GCF. Yet by virtue of the UN’s own “Human Development Index,” South Africa is still classified as a “developing country.” No wonder South Africa wants “richer countries” to fork over $750 billion annually within just a few years to the Green Climate Fund piggy bank from which it will partake.

President Biden’s climate czar John Kerry, who loves to fly around to climate meetings in fossil fuel-guzzling private airplanes, promised to restore the funding to the GCF that had been scrapped by the Trump administration. He said this would be “just the beginning of what we intend to do.”  Kerry added that “President Biden knows we need to contribute going forward, and even now we have started to consider exactly how to provide scaled-up resources to the GCF.”

Yannick Glemarec, executive director of the Green Climate Fund, said that U.S. reengagement “will send an extraordinarily positive signal” to spur accelerated financial support for the fund’s projects.

But GCF whistleblowers are advising the Biden administration to spend its money elsewhere. Whistleblowers have complained about integrity issues at the GCF in vetting projects for funding and about political interference in what should be purely technical decisions.

A whistleblower from a developed country, a technical specialist who did not want to be identified, was quoted by Climate Home News as saying that “[T]here was inappropriate pressure to approve projects which could harm people.”

“Sincerely, I don’t think that the GCF, the way it is managed today, is a good channel for climate finance,” said Pierre-Daniel Telep, a German who worked on renewable energy projects at the GCF for over two years.

The Green Climate Fund funnels a significant amount of money to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), GCF’s largest project implementer. In fact, the GCF just reaccredited UNDP to receive GCF funds despite unresolved corruption allegations involving UNDP-administered programs in Russia, Samoa, and Armenia. An audit of UNDP practices has also revealed deficiencies in UNDP’s internal controls, accountability, and anti-money laundering implementation.

UNDP’s Administrator, Achim Steiner, dismissed the significance of these concerns, declaring to UN correspondents during a press briefing that the “reaccreditation speaks for itself.”

One thing we do know is that Steiner is a big believer in wealth redistribution. “Inequality is not just about how much someone earns compared to their neighbour,” Steiner said in 2019. “It is about the unequal distribution of wealth and power: the entrenched social and political norms that are bringing people onto the streets today, and the triggers that will do so in the future unless something changes.”

The developing countries seeking handouts from the Green Climate Fund have objected to any decarbonization conditions imposed on their domestic development entities seeking to access GCF funding. GCF Board members from some of these countries have backed such objections in strident terms.

For example, GCF Board member Ayman Shasly, from Saudi Arabia of all places, described the imposition of a decarbonization timetable condition as “blackmail.” Shasly accused the GCF of being “manipulated by [developed countries] pushing their own agenda onto the fund.”

It is the developing countries and their left-wing supporters, crying “equity” and “climate justice,” who are seeking to manipulate the GCF into acceding to their demands.

Yan Ren, the GCF Board member from China, which is absurdly categorized as one of the GCF Board representatives of developing countries, said, “We should not impose conditions on developing countries to force them to achieve certain targets. There is no one size fits all on fossil fuels.”

China has the world’s second-largest economy, exceeded only by the United States. China is engaging in fossil fuel-intensive activities in trying to become the world’s number one economic superpower. In the process, China has become the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases.

To help greenwash its image, China is exploiting its membership on the GCF Board as a “developing country” that should not be required to meet firm decarbonization targets.

To add insult to injury, China has managed to obtain funding from the Green Climate Fund to pay for mitigating the greenhouse gas emissions that China is increasingly spewing into the air.

Sadly, the Biden administration intends to scale up U.S. contributions to the Green Climate Fund. It will thereby waste American taxpayers’ money on a dysfunctional globalist wealth redistribution device that even funnels funds to China.

William Kilpatrick is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.  His books include Christianity, Islam, and Atheism: The Struggle for the Soul of the West (Ignatius Press), What Catholics Need to Know About Islam (Sophia Press), and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Jihad.

In a 2015 piece, I suggested that the chaos resulting from President Obama’s destructive policies was deliberate. I wrote that Obama and his advisors wanted to weaken America’s global position, wanted to encourage racial division, and wanted to overload the immigration system.

But how about Joe Biden?  Biden not only revived many of Obama’s initiatives, he added dozens more.  Biden has wreaked more destruction in eight months than Obama could manage in eight years.

Once again, however, we must ask if this destruction is deliberate.  Perhaps, as many suggest, the recent rapid descent of America is the result of incompetence rather than careful deliberation.  Because of his cognitive difficulties, it now appears that Biden is simply not up to the job.  Moreover, many of his appointees also seem incompetent.  Pete Buttigieg doesn’t seem to be up to the job of Transportation Secretary, Lloyd Austin doesn’t inspire much confidence as Secretary of Defense, and Merrick Garland seems better suited to the office of Chief Inquisitor than to the office of Attorney General.  And so on down the line.  Most of Biden’s appointments seem to have been selected for reasons of ideology rather than competence.  To top it off, should Biden be removed for incompetence, he will be replaced by a woman who seems to be the most incompetent vice president of all time.

On the other hand, by the laws of probability, Biden’s advisors and appointees can’t all be incompetent.  After all, many of them are retreads from the Obama administration.  And Obama, according to some, was just about the smartest president to ever occupy the White House.

Besides, you don’t need a high IQ to recognize that some policies are just plain dumb.  Currently, we are experiencing high inflation due in part to a disruption in the “supply chain.”  But supply and demand is a fairly simple concept.  You don’t need a Ph.D. in economics to understand the basics.  If you cancel pipelines and cut back on coal and oil production—as Biden has done—the price of gas at the pump will go up.  Either Biden and Buttigieg don’t understand that, or else they don’t care about the financial strain on average Americans.  Perhaps their refined nostrils are offended by the smell of gasoline engines.  In the 18^th century, the elites said “Let them eat cake;” now they say, “Let them drive electric cars.”

There is, undoubtedly, a great deal of incompetence in the Biden administration, but not enough to account for the escalating damage to America.  For one thing, it’s not just the administration that has imposed a totalitarian order on the American people; Our new set of rulers also includes the media, corporations, academics, medical professionals, school boards, and state and local governments.  In addition, the new totalitarianism is not confined to America; it’s spreading to once-democratic nations all over the world.

Moreover, the destructive new woke order is simply too comprehensive and too interconnected to be considered the result of random chance or sheer incompetence.  One is reminded of the “watchmaker” argument for the existence of God.  When you examine a watch with all its intricate complexity, you understand immediately that it couldn’t have come into existence by accident.  Someone must have designed it.

A similar argument can be made when the mechanisms of society suddenly stall and reverse in so many places simultaneously.  It seems to have been consciously designed. The system is not running the way you would like, but from a certain point of view it’s working just fine.

It’s difficult to know where to start when describing the system we now live under because there are so many wheels within wheels, so many interlocking parts.

But the education system is certainly one of the most essential components of the overall system.  It began its transition from serving the interests of parents to serving the interests of the left about 60 years ago.  We’ve just recently learned about Critical Race Theory indoctrination in the schools, but the schools have been indoctrinating students in leftist causes for decades. The kids were being exposed to distorted views of sex, family, society, and history long before the Internet was invented. For years, two of the most widely used American history textbooks were ones written by a Marxist who described himself as “something of an anarchist, something of a socialist.”

Having gone through this K-to- graduate school indoctrination system, American citizens—many of them at least—see no problem with whatever left-wing argument or initiative is being pushed on them.

• Increasing racial tensions?  Must be caused by systemic racism.
• Defund the police?  They deserve it.  They’re all racists anyways.
• Tear down statues of Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln?  They were slave owners, weren’t they?
• Boys in the girl’s locker room?  Boys have a right to be girls if they want.
• Media’s election season cover-up of Hunter Biden’s laptop story?  Who’s Hunter Biden?
• January 6^th incursion into the Capitol Building?  It was worse than 9/11.

In the last few years, the American populace has been subject to the biggest gaslighting campaign since Hitler and Goebbels tried to convince the German people that they were the master race.  The term “gaslighting,” by the way, comes from Gaslight, a 1944 film in which smooth-talking Charles Boyer almost convinces Ingrid Bergman that she is going crazy.  He tells her that she is seeing things and hearing things that aren’t there (but they really are).  You can understand how Bergman’s character must have felt if, back in last October, you tried to convince a liberal friend that Hunter Biden’s laptop was a real story, only to be soothingly reassured that you were seeing things, and that maybe you should see a doctor.

What may turn out to be the biggest gaslighting story of all, however, is the corona virus epidemic.  Fear of COVID-19 is being used to scare the public into submission to unnecessary and even harmful government mandates and edicts.  Thus, the propaganda surrounding the virus and the vaccines has become a useful tool in what seems to be a scheme to force people to yield up their civil liberties.

There is growing evidence, for example, that COVID death numbers have been greatly exaggerated both here and abroad.

In the Spring of 2020, Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator, admitted that the government was classifying all deaths of patients with the virus as COVID-19 deaths regardless of cause.

In July of 2020, both Admiral Brett Giroir, the Assistant Secretary for Health, and Dr. Robert Redfield, Director of the CDC, acknowledged that COVID death statistics were inflated.

In December 2020, the Brookings Institute published a study that showed that due to media distortion, “the average American dramatically overestimates the share of COVID-19 deaths from people aged 24 and under, putting it around 8% when in fact it was 0.1%.”

In June of 2021, a Lisbon court ruled that the number of verified deaths from COVID-19 in Portugal during a fifteen-month period was only 152 not the 17,000 claimed by government ministries.

A Recent article in Il Tempo, reports that the Higher Institute of Health has revised the number of deaths in Italy due to COVID since February, 2020 from 130,468 to 3,783.

In Grand County, Colorado on Thanksgiving Day, 2020, a man shot his wife in the head, then killed himself.  The next day, the homicide-suicide showed up on the state website as Covid deaths.

When it comes to the pandemic, it’s difficult to separate the facts from the gaslighting. Definitions and explanations change on an almost weekly basis.  It’s difficult to get reliable figures on vaccine efficacy, and even more difficult to get accurate information on adverse side effects.  Meanwhile, alternative treatments such as Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine have been subject to a smear campaign by the media.

There are, of course, some who believe that the pandemic was deliberately created by sinister forces for the purpose of controlling the masses and making them more obedient to authorities.

That’s difficult to prove.  After all, the sinister, wealthy people who are suspected of the crime would have ways of hiding their tracks.  However, the claim does bring us back to the question of whether or not the current chaos is the result of incompetence or of planning.

Of the many crises that currently face us, one has almost certainly been planned.  There may be a few naïve souls who believe that the southern border crisis just happened to have happened, but most realize that it happened because Biden and other top Democrats made it happen.  They wanted to open the border because they calculated that today’s illegal migrants would become tomorrow’s Democratic voters.

What evidence is there of premeditation?  Well, there’s the fact that during the campaign, Biden invited illegal migrants on several occasions to come to the U.S. And when the migrants came, many of them thanked the president for the invitation.  One of Biden’s first actions as president was to halt construction of the border wall, and as thousands upon thousands of illegals crossed into the U.S., he did nothing to stop them.  In fact, he did everything to facilitate their arrival. Waiting charter buses brought migrants to hotels and other accommodations in Southwest Texas.  And secret nighttime charter flights flew them to cities across the U.S. To all appearances, the flooding of the border was quite purposeful.  It presented the American people with a fait accompli that would be exceedingly difficult to undo.

In addition, the administration correctly assumed that many in the media would give the border story minimal coverage, together with a positive spin.  The interlocking cooperation of government, media, corporations, non-profits, and so forth, is all the more reason to think that many of our problems are well-planned problems.

However, that doesn’t rule out incompetence as a factor.  Whoever is pulling the strings probably doesn’t mind that Biden appoints incompetent people.  The more incompetence, the more chaos.  And chaos is what the powers-that-be seem to want.

The breakdown of the economy?  Of law and order? Of education and health care? Why would anyone want that? Well, mainly because the breakdowns can be used as proof that the old system no longer works and needs to be replaced with a new one.  Besides, the failures can all be blamed on capitalism or racism or Donald Trump (who, in the imaginations of leftists, is the new Emmanuel Goldstein—the all-purpose villain in 1984).

Any explanation will do.  Thanks to America’s left-leaning educational system, a significant number of citizens aren’t capable of thinking logically.

Why else does the left want chaos?  Because social and economic breakdowns eventually breed resistance and protests.  And the resistance provides an excuse to crackdown on the protestors.  The crackdown, in turn, further intimidates the general populace into submission.  What’s more, any resistance will be used to reinforce the domestic terrorism/insurrectionist narrative that the left has so carefully cultivated. As the left has long understood, chaos creates opportunities.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

When Sunrise Movement DC issued its ultimatum that either the Jews had to be kicked out or it would boycott a D.C. statehood rally, it was a familiar purity test. And, like most purity tests, was about testing a willingness to hate people and endorse a new extremist position on demand.

Purity tests that have no constructive purpose except to undermine and oust a leadership that is insufficiently radical have become commonplace in the Reign of Terror era of American politics.

When Democrats adopt socialism, endorse the elimination of the police, tear down the statues of Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln, champion critical race theory, and insist that there’s no such thing as men and women, it’s as the result of an escalating series of purity tests.

Hating Jews is just the latest progressive purity test.

Sunrise DC declared that it would not participate in events with what it falsely claimed were Zionist groups, but were actually, mostly fellow leftists who hate Israel as much as they do.

The National Council of Jewish Women, one of the three groups singled out by Sunrise DC, had supported or allied with Linda Sarsour, Peter Beinart, and Rep. Ilhan Omar. The NCJW had gone as far out of its way to align with the Hamas caucus as it was possible without actually turning into an anti-Israel protest group. Revealingly, nothing it had done was good enough.

It never is.

Why beat up on Sarsour and Omar’s pals? Sunrise DC was actually imposing an anti-Semitism purity test on the Declaration for American Democracy, a pro-election rigging coalition. And true to form, its ultimatum was met with an uncomfortable refusal by other leftist groups and politicians to either condemn anti-Semitism or condemn the Jews. The purity test had succeeded.

Black Lives Matter D.C. swiftly jumped in to declare that Sunrise D.C’s “statement wasn’t anti-Semitic, no matter how many times oppressors want to repeat it.” This was as much a threat to any leftist, prog, or liberal who might want to stand up to anti-Semitism, as it was to Jews. Fail the anti-Semitism purity test and Black Lives Matter will damn you as an oppressor.

Even before the BLM threat, the message had been received. And the outcome noted.

The same Democrat establishment that tossed away American history, including its own, opposition to racism, support for women’s rights, and dozens of other things that it used to claim were principles, but actually turned out to be mere shibboleths, was ready to throw Jews on the bonfire of its convictions. Not that it should have surprised anyone except Jewish leftists.

The anti-Semitism purity test was inevitable based on the history of the last two centuries and a much more recent history of modern institutional anti-Semitism at colleges and universities.

Sunrise DC and BLM DC were running the same play that their members had likely taken part in on college campuses where Jewish students are routinely ousted from student government and campus positions on the pretext that they must be Zionists. Like safe spaces and pronoun police, what happens on campus doesn’t stay on campus. Only now the entire civic space is playing the role of the helpless university administrators who don’t want to offend the radicals.

The leap of these anti-Semitic purges from the campus to major leftist advocacy groups foreshadows the next stage of the leap when they become a fundamental reality of public life in the institutions, private and public, controlled by the new generation of identity politics leftists.

Hating Jews, under the putative guise of opposing Zionism, is about to become a core progressive value. And those values have become the moral code of the ruling class.

The Jewish groups that failed to fight campus anti-Semitism are about to live under it.

A movement like this is not just the product of a few activists with a social media account. Nor is the evolution of the anti-Semitism purity test a tantrum being thrown by a few obscure groups.

When you follow the money, it becomes all too obvious what is really taking place here.

The Sunrise Movement is funded by George Soros and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, among others. Soros and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund are the premier funders of the anti-Israel movement in America. It’s unlikely that the Sunrise Movement, an environmental group that previously showed little interest in Israel, suddenly decided to boycott a completely unrelated rally because organizations with the “J” word in their name were going to be present.

Likewise, it’s implausible that the Movement for Black Lives, a BLM umbrella group, launched its support for BDS and opposition to the Jewish State, for reasons unrelated to its close ties to the Ford Foundation whose own funding of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish activities are legendary.

The rise of what some have called a new anti-Semitism was not simply an activist phenomenon. Nor is it especially clear that there is an authentic grassroots leftist movement that can be separated from the billionaire donors and foundations who finance the groups that fund it. Much as Soviet front groups couldn’t be properly detached from the Old Left, the foundations that serve a similar role can’t be detached from the New Left. Tracing the money is difficult enough, but determining when the foundations fund ideas or originate them can be all but impossible.

What is clearer is that leftist anti-Semitism is a top-down, not a bottom-up, phenomenon.

American Jews have tried to convince themselves that individual incidents, first on campuses and then in the streets, violence and vandalism under the guise of political correctness, did not make a pattern. They have gone on trying to ignore these “random events” while refusing to connect the dots, and trying to silence those who were connecting the dots for them.

And when they finally do connect the dots, they’re eager to blame Israel, not the anti-Semites.

But the Left was purging Jews before there was a modern State of Israel on the grounds that they were reactionaries, bourgeois, cosmopolitans, or any number of similar accusations.

Zionism is just the latest politically correct excuse for hating Jews. And it’s not the only one.

The National Council of Jewish Women, much like the anti-Israel activists of the Religious Action Center of the Reform movement, might wonder why they were targeted. If they had any sense of history, including that of their own, they would know that the whole point of purity tests is to reduce the base to mindless radicalism by convincing them to embrace what they once knew to be wrong. That includes convincing people to hate others and to hate themselves.

Each purity test passed destroys the morals, principles, and basic decency of human beings. It’s how normal people turn into the howling mobs we read about in history books or watch in historical newsreels. “What kind of people could do that?” we wonder.

The answer is all around us.

Compelling people who used to be Democrats, then liberals, then progressives, and finally dogmatic leftists to jump through one more hoop makes them more willing to do anything.

And if there’s anything that history teaches about the Left, from Stalin to Mao, from Che to Pol Pot, from Kim Jong-Il to Mengistu there will come a time when ordinary people will indeed be expected to do “anything”, whether it’s to kill or to be killed in the name of the revolution.

Anti-Semitism is just one more stop on the extremist expressway. Like critical race theory and much of the rest of identity politics, it divides people into those who deserve to be beaten and those who deserve to do the beating to distract everyone from the fact that the leftist ideology of victims and oppressors is really about creating plenty more of both as grist for its political mill.

The Sunrise Movement claims that the planet is on the verge of destruction and Black Lives Matter insists that the greatest threat to black people are police officers, both are absurd lies, but like anti-Semitism they’re really weaponized distractions for a massive power grab.

Meanwhile the same American Jewish establishment that was convinced that the answer to anti-Semitism was social justice can’t help but double down on it even as it is becoming inescapably obvious that social justice isn’t the answer to anti-Semitism: it is anti-Semitism.

Organizations like NCJW or RAC embrace the extreme margins of the Left and are baffled when the anti-Semitism from those margins not only intensifies, but burns hotter than ever. The purity tests intensify with each concession: each willingness to embrace Sarsour, Omar, and whatever leftist social justice bigot follows on their heels only leads to worse hatred.

The leftist anti-Semitism that began on college campuses is defining a leftist America.