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August 2020

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‘In racialising everything, we are playing with fire’ Glenn Loury talks to Brendan O’Neill about racism and policing in the US.

By on August 31st, 2020

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/08/31/in-racialising-everything-we-are-playing-with-fire/

The wave of protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd rolls on. Riots have erupted in Kenosha, Wisconsin after the shooting of a black man by police, and two protesters have been killed. The US seems as divided as at any time in its recent history. But is America really a ‘structurally racist’ country, and are its police truly oppressing black people?

Glenn Loury is an American economist, author and commentator. He was the first ever tenured black professor of economics at Harvard University, and is currently a professor of social sciences and economics at Brown University. He joined spiked editor Brendan O’Neill for the latest episode of The Brendan O’Neill Show. What follows is an edited extract from their conversation. Listen to the full episode here.

Brendan O’Neill: One of the issues with Black Lives Matter is it has given the distinct impression to people around the globe that America remains a structurally racist country. There are clearly issues that impact on African-American communities. But one of the things you have written and spoken about incredibly well is the hollowness of the term ‘structural racism’. It seems to have become a mantra wheeled out to explain every single problem that faces particular communities or even particular individuals. If someone does not get a pay rise, for example, that must be down to structural racism. If there are not enough black people on a board of directors, that must be due to structural racism, too. Explain to us why you have an issue with that term and why its overuse makes it a meaningless way of understanding contemporary problems.

Glenn Loury: These days, I am given to saying the term ‘structural racism’ is both a bluff and a bludgeon. It is a bluff in the sense that it offers an explanation that is not really an explanation at all, and in effect dares the listener to come back with a response. For example, if someone says there are too many blacks in prison in the United States and that that is because of structural racism, they are daring you to say there are too many black criminals and that is why there are so many blacks in prison. They want you to say it is not the system’s fault, but the individual’s.

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WHO’s on First with Joe Biden “White coat supremacy” meets watermelon environmentalism. By Lloyd Billingsley

By on August 31st, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/08/30/whos-on-first-with-joe-biden/

Building back better means building back greener,” sounds like the latest bromide from the Democratic Party’s chief cellar-dweller Joe Biden. But the speaker is actually World Health Organization boss Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, back on August 21.

 The coronavirus pandemic, Tedros said, “has given new impetus to the need to accelerate efforts to respond to climate change” and “given us a glimpse of our world as it could be: cleaner skies and rivers.” Yet “at the same time, we will not, we cannot go back to the way things were,” he warns. 

The millions suffering from the pandemic, particularly the unemployed, might wonder about the man who plagiarizes Joe Biden’s slogan. 

 Tedros is a veteran of the Marxist Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), responsible for atrocities against the Amhara ethnic group in northwest Ethiopia. Tedros earned a bachelor’s degree in biology in 1986, but never completed medical studies to become a physician. During his tenure as Ethiopia’s health minister from 2005 until 2012, Tedros purposely covered up cholera outbreaks in 2006, 2009, and 2011.

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Revised CDC Figures: Fewer Deaths from COVID Only Home | America Tags: Coronavirus | coronavirus | covid | twitter Revised CDC Figures: Fewer Deaths from COVID Only By Solange Reyner

By on August 31st, 2020

https://www.newsmax.com/us/coronavirus-covid-twitter/2020/08/30/id/984567/

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a report late last week showing that just 9,683 Americans, or 6%, died with only having COVID-19 listed on their death certificates, leading to a social media trending topic on the issue.

The other 94% of deaths were listed as having at least one additional medical condition linked to their death.

Some of the underlying diseases listed by the CDC include influenza and pneumonia, respiratory failure, hypertensive disease, diabetes, vascular and unspecified dementia, cardiac arrest, heart failure and renal failure.

Twitter proponents on both sides of the issue made their case that the data either proved that CDC had been wrong all along or that that health officials have said from the start that comorbidities were more likley to cause a person to die from COVID-19 anyway. 

At least 182,885 people have died from coronavirus in the United States, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. The CDC has long said that pre-existing health conditions can cause people to experience more severe COVID-19 symptoms.

Many health experts, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, have rejected claims that coronavirus deaths are being exaggerated.

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EDUCATION, HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

‘Diversity’ and ‘Inclusion’ Come Back to Bite a Minnesota University By Robert Spencer

By on August 31st, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/culture/robert-spencer/2020/08/30/diversity-and-inclusion-come-back-to-bite-a-minnesota-university-n865428

In yet another of the seemingly endless string of jihad attacks and plots in the United States that the media almost universally ignores, Tnuza Jamal Hassan pleaded guilty Wednesday to federal terrorism charges. Back in January 2018, the winsome Ms. Hassan set a series of fires on the campus of St. Catherine University in Minnesota, after exhorting Muslim students to “join the jihad in fighting” and join jihad terror groups such as al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or al-Shabaab. Students at St. Catherine University were shocked: but their school is “diverse!” How could this possibly have happened to them?

Hassan herself gave numerous indications that she was a hardened, convinced jihad terrorist. She said that she had set the fires in revenge for supposed American atrocities on “Muslim land.” She wrote a letter to her roommates that police said contained “radical ideas about supporting Muslims and bringing back the caliphate.” She told investigators that “she wanted the school to burn to the ground and her intent was to hurt people.” There was a daycare center in one of the buildings where Hassan set fires; eight adults and 33 children were there at the time.

One student said: “I never expected it. She was a first-year student, too, and that is especially scary.” Why would a first-year student setting a series of fires around campus be scarier than a third-year student setting them? The student did not explain, but if St. Catherine University is as much of a far-left indoctrination center as other universities and colleges are today, maybe the explanation is self-evident: by the third year, students are fully indoctrinated in hatred and violence.

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Incredible: Dem Operative Reveals How He Fixed Mail-In Ballots Over Decades By Rick Moran

By on August 31st, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2020/08/30/incredible-dem-operative-reveals-how-he-fixed-mail-in-ballots-over-decades-n865350

A man described by the New York Post as “a top Democratic operative” and a “Bernie Sanders supporter” told the newspaper he had been submitting thousands of fraudulent mail-in ballots over the last several decades. The anonymous operative was checked out by the Post and is a real person who has worked on many campaigns in the northeast.

It’s not impossible that this “Democratic operative” is simply trolling his political opponents and may be a real operative but is trying to make a point about the gullibility of the opposition. But Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation who manages the foundation’s election law reform initiative, says, “There is nothing new about these techniques. Everything he’s talking about is perfectly possible.“

The man requested anonymity out of fear of being prosecuted.

His dirty work has taken him through the weeds of municipal and federal elections in Paterson, Atlantic City, Camden, Newark, Hoboken and Hudson County and his fingerprints can be found in local legislative, mayoral and congressional races across the Garden State. Some of the biggest names and highest office holders in New Jersey have benefited from his tricks, according to campaign records The Post reviewed.

“An election that is swayed by 500 votes, 1,000 votes — it can make a difference,” the tipster said. “It could be enough to flip states.”

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Victor Davis Hanson Cultural Suicide Is Painless *****

By on August 31st, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/08/30/cultural-suicide-is-painless/

The story of all Dark Ages is that when civilizations finally prefer suicide, they do it easily, and the remnants flock to the countryside to preserve what they can—allowing the cities go on with their ritual self-destruction.

In February, New York was the world’s most dynamic metropolis. By August, the city was more like the ruins of Ephesus. It is not all that hard to blow up a culture. You can do it in a summer if you haven’t much worry about others.

When you loot and burn a Target in an hour, it takes months to realize there are no more neighborhood Target-stocked groceries, toilet paper, and Advil to buy this winter.

You can in a night assault the police, spit at them, hope to infect them with the coronavirus, and even burn them alive. But when you call 911 in a few weeks after your car is vandalized, your wallet is stolen, and your spouse is violent, and no one comes, only then do you sense that you earlier were voting for a pre-civilized wilderness.

You can burn down a Burger King in half an hour. But it will take years to find anyone at Burger King, Inc., who would ever be dumb enough to rebuild atop the charred ruins—to prepare for the next round of arson in 2021 or 2023.

Today’s looter carrying off sneakers and smartphones in 10 years will be tomorrow’s urban activist, understandably but in vain demanding stores return to a charred no man’s land, to do their fair share, and to help restore the downtown, neighborhood, inner-city, or the “community.”

Old Liberal Ideas Are Being Destroyed

We are living in the most racially polarized climate since the 1960s. America’s past, present, and future are in the process of being recalibrated entirely through the lens of one’s skin color. Columbus is reduced to nothing more than another racist white Italian sailor of a half-millennium past. Grant might as well have fought for slavery in the mind of today’s campus ignoramus. Apparently, the Antifa thug thinks he could just as easily have written the Gettysburg Address or sculpted a statue of Frederick Douglass.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Should the U.S. Still Try to Accommodate China? by Gordon G. Chang

By on August 31st, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16433/us-accommodate-china

For decades, the U.S. had tried to regularize contacts with the Chinese military…. Unfortunately, rules-of-the-road agreements have failed…. “China has routinely violated the letter and spirit of CUES,” James Fanell, a former director of Intelligence and Information Operations at the U.S. Pacific Fleet, told Gatestone. “The problem,” he wrote “is that agreements can work only if both sides really do wish to avoid a military crisis and violent encounter.”

Shultz — and most Americans — underestimate the audaciousness, ruthlessness, and maliciousness of China’s Communist Party. Chinese Communists… are continually propagating the line that China has the right and obligation today to rule the entire world.

In the 1930s, the Western democracies knew about the Third Reich’s persecution of the Jews but did little. That feebleness emboldened Hitler, leading eventually to the destruction of much of Europe. Now, the world is emboldening another once-in-a-century tyrant, Xi Jinping. The international community should not expect timidity to produce a better outcome this time.

Americans love agreements, but no treaty, convention, compact, code, or agreement will restrain a belligerent state that seeks to take down the rules-based international system. There is, Secretary Shultz, no “off-ramp” from confronting the horror of China’s crimes.

America’s goal should be to defeat Chinese communism, not accommodate it.

George Shultz, writing a Wall Street Journal op-ed first posted August 26, believes America has a “collective future” with China.

Yes, Americans have one with the Chinese people — as they do with all other people — but is it possible to have a common future with a hostile state openly committed to overthrowing you and, among other things, committing crimes against humanity?

No, that is not possible.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Cyprus: 46 Years of Turkish Occupation Still no international outrage despite decades of human rights atrocities. Uzay Bulut

By on August 31st, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/cyprus-46-years-turkish-occupation-uzay-bulut/

What does the international community often think when they hear “Cyprus”? A beautiful island country in the Eastern Mediterranean? A heavenly holiday destination? Warm weather and scenic beaches? All of these are true. However, this small and resilient island country also has a dark and criminal history – a history shaped by the Turkish occupation since 1974.

Cyprus gained independence from Britain in 1960 but full independence across the island would not last for long. In the summer of 1974, the Turkish military invaded northern Cyprus twice – first on 20 July and then on 14 August, committing ethno-religious cleansing and crimes against humanity in an attempt to terrorize the Greek Cypriots to push them southward.  

Turkey “launched a full scale aggressive attack against Cyprus, a small non-aligned and virtually defenseless country, possessing no air force, no navy and no army except for a small national guard,” Zenon Rossides, the then-Cyprus representative to the United Nations, sent a letter on 6 December 1974 to the UN Secretary General. “Thus, Turkey’s overwhelming military machine embarked upon an armed attack including napalm bombing of open towns and villages, wreaking destruction, setting forests on fire and spreading indiscriminate death and human suffering to the civilian population of the island.”

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The Rising Islamic Terrorist Threat in Austria Strikes a Synagogue “We are dealing with a stronger leftwing and anti-Israel anti-Semitism.” Daniel Greenfield

By on August 31st, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/rising-islamic-terrorist-threat-austria-strikes-daniel-greenfield/

On a summer Sabbath day, Elie Rosen, President of the Jewish Community of Graz, spotted a suspicious man hanging around the synagogue. The synagogue had recently been vandalized and the man had a backpack full of rocks that he was about to start throwing at the synagogue.

After the synagogue had been vandalized a few days earlier, Rosen had warned that in the Austrian city, “we are dealing with a stronger left wing and anti-Israel antisemitism,”

Rosen’s concern was understandable since some of the graffiti smeared on the wall around the synagogue read, “Free Palestine” and “Our language and our country is Palestine”. A second attack by the same perpetrator on the Sabbath Eve had smashed the synagogue’s windows.

The wall that the Islamic attacker had vandalized was made out of bricks from the ruins of the original Graz synagogue that had been destroyed by the National Socialists. The synagogue, which had been rebuilt only two decades ago, serves Graz’s tiny surviving Jewish community.

Austrian Jews know better than to take such slogans lightly. One of the worst episodes of  antisemitic violence after the National Socialist period had been an assault by two PLO Islamic terrorists on a synagogue where a Bar Mitzvah was taking place. The terrorists had opened fire with machine guns and thrown hand grenades into the synagogue. A woman who had rolled on a hand grenade to protect the children died. A number of other congregants were wounded.

When Rosen asked the bearded man what he was doing, the vandal attacked him with a chair leg, and fled on a mountain bike. When the police caught him, he expressed no remorse.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Democrat Violence Takes a Life in Portland Democrats endorsed and funded the riots, now they pretend to condemn them. Daniel Greenfield

By on August 31st, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/democrat-violence-takes-life-portland-daniel-greenfield/

Mayor Ted Wheeler recently told Oregon Public Radio that his only strategy for dealing with the violence in Portland is to let it “burn itself out.”

The admission came after he falsely claimed that Federal law enforcement’s presence was “leading to more violence” only to see the leftist violence continue to grow after the pullout deal.

On August 28, Mayor Wheeler tweeted a letter that he wrote to President Trump turning down his offer of federal law enforcement aid while insisting that, “There is no place for looting, arson, or vandalism in our city.”

That was and is an obvious lie.

Several days earlier, Wheeler had let slip his now infamous “burn itself out” line while suggesting that the so-called ‘non-violent’ protests “won’t end for quite some time.”

After a pro-Trump activist was shot by one of the leftist rioters whom Mayor Wheeler had enabled, the Democrat boss began his comments on the shooting by denouncing President Trump and his supporters who had traveled in a caravan flying Trump 2020 flags.

“It’s you who have created the hate and the division,” Mayor Wheeler ranted. “And now you want me to stop the violence you helped create. What America needs is for you to be stopped.”

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