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December 2020

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Turkey: Erdogan Threatens Europe by Uzay Bulut

By on December 7th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16809/turkey-erdogan-threatens-europe

That a NATO member and European Union candidate, Turkey, is openly threatening the security of Westerners, is unprecedented.

One of the most abusive Ottoman practices was the institution of “devshirme,” also known as the “child levy” or “blood tax,” with which Christian boys were forcibly abducted from the conquered population, enslaved, converted to Islam and later trained as soldiers. Erdogan evidently sees the Ottoman occupation and abuse of European nations as Turkish “contributions” to Europe.

This current belligerence once again demonstrates major differences between Europe and Erdogan’s regime. It is a crisis between a mentality that respects a free press versus a mentality that jails critical journalists. It reveals a mentality that wants to preserve the safety of its citizens versus a mentality that aims to force others to submit to its demands through threats and use of terror. It is a mentality that stubbornly believes in violating and even trying to invade the territories of its neighbors versus one that tries to resolve issues through dialogue and negotiation.

It is Erdogan’s regime who targets the safety and freedoms of Europeans — as well as Armenians, Syrians, Iraqis, and many of his own Turks.

Europe has once again been targeted with Islamist terror attacks.

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ELECTIONS, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Scars of 2020 Victor Davis Hanson

By on December 7th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/12/06/the-scars-of-2020/

The summer of COVID-19, quarantines, riot and arson, and an absence of confidence in the sanctity of voting ended with deep wounds on the body politic—wounds we will bear from now on.

Amid plague, national lockdown, riot and arson, iconoclasm, recession, and the most contested voting in history, the country leaves 2020 with some scars that won’t heal.

Mail-in Voting: Election Day as we once knew it no longer really exists. It has been warped, trimmed, and made nearly irrelevant in the panic of the times. The prior, but now accelerating, changes and the “never let a good crisis go to waste” efforts during the COVID-19 lockdown rammed through vast changes in previous voting norms. If the Democrats win the two U.S. Senate runoffs in Georgia, new federal voting mandates designed to supersede state laws will institutionalize the chaos.

During the slow-motion November election “process,” the last presidential debate that Donald Trump won mattered little.Some 50 million people had already voted—and 100 million would before Election Day. The Hunter Biden scandal? Even had the media covered it, the result of such new laws would have made it a late October sparkler rather than a fiery bombshell. 

When some precincts reported over 90 percent turnout, and when it was impossible to verify the authenticity of such a massive influx of votes, and when the tallying went on for days and weeks in some jurisdictions, gone entirely was the idea that Americans showed up on Election Day—with only a minority of elderly, sick, or at work voting by absentee ballots. Under the old system voters showed their IDs as if they were cashing a check, signed in, had their names checked against voting rolls, and then were directed to a booth, with the election decided in a few hours—in other words, a tradition that did not always yield the correct results.

Mail-in voting now joins open borders and promises to pack the Supreme Court, and junk the Electoral College, as systematic efforts to change the system when the system cannot guarantee the Left the retention of power. It will be impossible to return to a mostly Election Day vote, and so another American tradition of more than two centuries has been jettisoned cavalierly.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Bribed: How Hostile Foreign Actors Subvert American Universities Can you guess where the billions of unreported “donations” come from? Raymond Ibrahim

By on December 7th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/12/bribed-how-hostile-foreign-actors-subvert-american-raymond-ibrahim/

A recent governmental report exposes the “purchased” influence foreign nations have on America’s most prestigious universities and, as a result, on what America’s current and upcoming generations of analysts and policymakers  think and believe.

More than one-third of the nearly $20 billion in foreign donations and contracts made to American universities between just 2014 and 2020 were never disclosed as required by federal law, according to “Institutional Compliance with Section 117 of the Higher Education Act of 1965,” a Department of Education report released on October 20, 2020.

Among those “gifts” were more than $3 billion from the Muslim Brotherhood’s number one state backer, Qatar; more than $1.1 billion from the chief disseminator of “radical” Islamic ideology, Saudi Arabia; and nearly $1.5 billion from China.

According to the report:

[A]t least some of these foreign sources are hostile to the United States and are targeting their investments (i.e., ‘gifts’ and ‘contracts’) to project soft power, steal sensitive and proprietary research, and spread propaganda. Yet, the Department is very concerned by evidence suggesting the higher education industry’s solicitation of foreign sources has not been appropriately or effectively balanced or checked by the institutional controls needed to meaningfully measure the risk and manage the threat posed by a given relationship, donor, or foreign venture.

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HOMELAND SECURITY, IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Biden’s DHS: Department of Homeland Surrender Alejandro Mayorkas, architect of DACA, picked by Biden to head DHS. Michael Cutler

By on December 7th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/12/under-biden-dhs-would-become-department-homeland-michael-cutler/

On May 5, 2005 the House Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security and Claims conducted a hearing on the topic, New ”Dual Missions” Of The Immigration Enforcement Agencies.

I was one of the four witnesses who testified at that hearing.

One paragraph in particular from Chairman Hostettler’s statement at that hearing back then, is of particular significance today, as we consider what will happen if Joe Biden is sworn in as President of the United States:

The 9/11 terrorists all came to the United States without weapons or contraband—Added customs enforcement would not have stopped 9/11 from happening. What might have foiled al Qaeda’s plan was additional immigration focus, vetting and enforcement. And so what is needed is recognition that, one, immigration is a very important national security issue that cannot take a back seat to customs or agriculture. Two, immigration is a very complex issue, and immigration enforcement agencies need experts in immigration enforcement. And three, the leadership of our immigration agencies should be shielded from political pressures to act in a way which could compromise the Nation’s security.

Now we come to Biden’s choice for the vital position of Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas. Remember Biden has pledged to create a massive legalization program for unknown millions of illegal aliens. The DHS enforces and administers America’s immigration laws and thus would bear the responsibility for administering this ill-conceived program.

I addressed my concerns about this amnesty in my earlier piece: “Biden’s ‘Build Back Better’ is Bunk.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Lockdowns and Other Madness The coronavirus changed everything. Bruce Thornton

By on December 7th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/12/lockdowns-and-other-madness-bruce-thornton/

Historians of the future will look back on the pandemic of 2020 as the occasion for one of this country’s worst unforced errors ever. The policies that the blue state mayors and governors of our most populous cities and states enacted were equal parts hysteria and politics, all the while they were touted as “following the science.” The lives of millions have been damaged, the economy willfully stalled, and a presidential campaign tainted with electoral fraud.

No enemy could have dreamed up a more insidious and devastating attack than those policies and their consequences, the ramifications of which will last for years––businesses lost, children harmed by isolation and their educations being interrupted, and the “deaths of despair” from depression, drug and alcohol abuse, unemployment, and domestic violence that typically follow economic depressions and natural disasters.

This disaster happened not just because the virus was new and its nature unknown. It soon became apparent that politics was driving the response. The progressive Democrats and Republican NeverTrumpers have for four years stewed in their bitter, irrational anger over losing the presidential election to an outsider like Donald Trump, who sneered at their technocratic pretensions, hypocritical “democratic norms,” and long record of policy failures both at home and abroad. He smashed the cognitive elites’ received wisdom and hypocritical “principles,” challenging the foundations of their power and influence.

So they set out to destroy him. They corrupted our federal investigative apparatus, jumped Constitutional guardrails, and fed anonymous mendacious leaks to a compliant media. When the “Russia collusion” canard collapsed, they turned to preposterous articles of impeachment that quickly imploded in the Senate. But nothing worked.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Texas A&M Threatens Student with Investigation, Possible Discipline for Posting Trump Signs By Bryan Preston

By on December 7th, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/culture/bryan-preston/2020/12/06/texas-am-threatens-student-for-posting-trump-signs-n1194499

The fifth-ranked Texas A&M Aggie football team whomped Auburn on Saturday, 31-20. But today there’s a question of whether Aggieland is losing its soul.

Campus Reform tells us about student Dion Okeke (Class of 2022) finding himself on the receiving end of a threatening letter from one Jessica Welsch, who is Student Code of Conduct Office Assistant Coordinator. In the letter, Welsch demands Okeke’s presence at a meeting in January regarding an “incident” that occurred in November 2020.

Okeke’s crime? He placed Trump signs on campus prior to the election. The campus police were aware, and after initially trying to stop him on a claim of “ground damage,” allowed him to proceed. But they or someone reported him to the university, involving Welsch’s office.

Welsch wrote to Okeke:

“In response to this information, I would like to meet with you to discuss the circumstances surrounding this incident, your perspective, and how you can be successful as a student at Texas A&M University,” Welsch wrote.

Okeke is “required” to reach out to the Student Conduct Office by phone before January 22, 2021 to schedule the meeting, or an “administrative hold [may be] placed on [his] registration.”

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Judge Orders Forensic Audit of Dominion Voting Machines in Michigan By Matt Margolis

By on December 7th, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2020/12/06/huge-judge-orders-forensic-audit-of-dominion-voting-machines-in-michigan-n1194602

The Trump campaign is celebrating a huge legal victory after Circuit Judge Kevin Elsenheimer said he would allow investigators to conduct a forensic examination of 22 Dominion voting machines used on Election Day in Antrim County, Michigan.

“Our team is going to be able to go in this morning at about 8:30 and will be there for about eight hours to conduct that forensic examination and we’ll have the results in about 48 hours, and that’ll tell us a lot about these machines,” Trump election attorney Jenna Ellis told Fox News.

Rudy Giuliani called the order a “big win” for honest elections, though the legal challenge is actually not related to the presidential election. Judge Elsenheimer’s order stems from a challenge by a voter who claims that ballots were damaged during a recount of a village marijuana proposal that just barely passed. Antrim County infamously showed Joe Biden as the winner of the county before a “human error” was discovered and Trump was revealed the true winner of the county by several thousand votes.

Lawsuits allege that nearly 300,000 votes were manipulated in Michigan. Dominion “is responsible for “the injection or fabrication, of 289,866 illegal votes in Michigan, that must be disregarded,” says expert witness Russell Ramsland Jr.

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

The Pendulum Notches Down By Mark Ellis

By on December 7th, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/columns/mark-ellis/2020/12/06/the-pendulum-notches-down-n1194202

Hundreds of courageous citizens are stepping forward from out the inner-city vote-counting sanctums and finding their voice. Their voices, combined together in a condemnatory chorus, bode ill for Joe Biden and the Democratic Party.

The evidentiary pendulum notched down last week, ever closer to the lifeblood organs of a concerted and thuggish scheme now strapped down on a slab by Rudy Giuliani and the President Trump legal team. At the very least, any potential Biden/Harris administration is doomed to asterisk from the standpoint of historical legacy. It is in no way clear that they came close to winning the 2020 election.

At best, President Trump gets his rightful four more years.

It may not even be Biden’s fault. It’s quite plausible that he cannot grasp how thoroughly and blatantly the operative apparatchiks plotted to commit the political crime of this or any century. Vice-presidential tag-along Kamala Harris, reeking of Venezuelan-reminiscent totalitarian stacked-deck vote counts, would likely know, however.

In America, even as the “good crisis” represented by COVID is not wasted by the Left, citizens can still come forward and testify. They are coming forward by the score, under penalty of perjury and jail time, some near tears, others with righteous indignation, and some possessed of the quiet calm of people who have witnessed something awesome and terrible. Something that speaks of the end of empires, the collapse of republics.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

Is The President Our Daddy Who’s Supposed To Keep Us Healthy?

By on December 7th, 2020

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/12/07/is-the-president-our-daddy-whos-supposed-to-keep-us-healthy/

Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, much to the delight of the Democratic press, maligned President Donald Trump last week over the coronavirus pandemic, calling his leadership “a great human tragedy.” Are we alone continually puzzled as to why the head of the federal government is being held responsible for sickness and death from a natural cause? We shouldn’t be.

The Dec. 3 comment from Romney is at least the second time the 2012 Republican presidential nominee has been critical of the Trump White House’s response to the virus. In August he said “it’s fair to say we really have not distinguished ourselves in a positive way by how we responded to the crisis when it was upon us,” in what the media described as a “rare Republican criticism of the Trump administration’s coronavirus response.”

This should not have to be said, and won’t be well received by those relieved that America will have a “mommy” again in Jill Biden, but the president is not our father. It’s not his job to keep us healthy, to make personal decisions for us, to protect us from disease. We are not Washington’s children, and the government, from the White House and U.S. Capitol down to the smallest town, is not our nanny.

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Sen. Braun Defends Election Fraud Probes, Says Legal Process Must Play Out By Isabel van Brugen

By on December 7th, 2020

https://www.theepochtimes.com/sen-braun-defends-election-fraud-probes-says-legal-process-must-play-out_3607332.html

Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) on Sunday said he supports the ongoing probes into alleged voter fraud in the Nov. 3 presidential election, saying that half of the country is “uncertain” about the election outcome and that legal processes must be allowed to play out.

Braun made the remarks during an appearance on ABC News’ “This Week,” which saw host George Stephanopoulos ask Braun why he isn’t accepting yet that Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden beat President Donald Trump in the election, despite ongoing legal challenges nationwide.

Stephanopoulos noted that at least 38 of more than 50 lawsuits brought by Trump’s legal team and his allies, have been dismissed by judges in the lower courts.

“I think it’s easy to say it’s played out because that might be the most convenient thing to say,” Braun challenged back. “Whether we dismiss it, reflexively, whether we would find widespread fraud … there’s a wide gulf in between. And I think that when you just say that there’s nothing there, you’re going to have half of the country uncertain about what just happened and disgruntled going into the future.”

A number of states and news outlets have declared Biden the winner of the 2020 presidential election. The Epoch Times won’t declare a winner until all results are certified and any legal challenges are resolved.

While media outlets can make their own projections as to the winner of the election, state electors and the Electoral College are the bodies that are officially tasked with declaring a presidential winner. Each state has different deadlines for when officials must certify their election results, and the Electoral College votes on Dec. 14. The Joint Session of Congress will then read the votes on Jan. 6, 2021, which can be challenged. The president-elect is then sworn in on Jan. 20.

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