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January 2021

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

When Tony Met Kary According to a Nobel laureate, Dr. Anthony Fauci should not even be an unelected bureaucrat. Lloyd Billingsley

By on January 5th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/when-tony-met-kary-lloyd-billingsley/

“As we get into the end of the summer, the beginning of the fall of 2021, we can start to approach some degree of normality,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci as he rang in the new year. People might wonder if it was 2022 that Fauci really had in mind for “the approach of some degree of normality.”

For most of 2020, Dr. Fauci claimed that to reach herd immunity about 60 to 70 percent of the nation would need a vaccine. Then in a December 24 interview with the New York Times, Fauci said he had been looking at “polls” showing that only half of all Americans would take a vaccine. Fauci thought, “I can nudge this up a bit,” and boosted the number for herd immunity to 80-85 percent. That caught the attention of Sen. Marco Rubio, Florida Republican. 

Fauci “made the decision to mislead with nothing but good intentions,” said Rubio in December 30 Fox News opinion piece. “However, let’s be clear about what he was doing: lying to the American people in order to manipulate their behavior.”

Fauci is an “unelected technocrat,” Rubio wrote, and “if he wants to lead the nation, he should run for office.” If not, “he should give us an honest and transparent reading of the science, not polling data, and let the rest of us —policymakers and the American people who have elected them — do our jobs.”

That long overdue smackdown was hardly the first Fauci had received. Back in the 1990s, one of the world’s leading scientists held doubts that Fauci  should even be an unelected bureaucrat.

“This man thinks you can take a blood sample and stick it in an electron microscope and if it’s got a virus in there, you will know it. He doesn’t understand electron microscopy and he doesn’t understand medicine. He should not be in a position like he’s in.”

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Incubating Hatred: How Radical Professors Help Promote Jew-Hatred And how they further the dark purpose of the BDS movement. Richard L. Cravatts

By on January 5th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/incubating-hatred-how-radical-professors-help-richard-l-cravatts/

While the pandemic greatly disrupted campus activities in 2020, the student governments of at least three universities managed to focus their efforts to pass BDS resolutions, bills that asked their respective universities to divest from holdings of companies doing business with Israel.

At the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, that school’s resolution “called on the university to divest from Northrop Grumman, Raytheon Company, Lockheed Martin, Caterpillar Inc. and Elbit Systems Ltd. for what the resolution alleges is partaking in human-rights violations in the Palestinian territories. . . .” Additionally, in a twist that forced Jewish students to choose between supporting the Black Lives Matter movement and condemning Israel, the resolution included concessions for the minority community and a nod to BLM, and “also called for the university to divest from its own police department . . . and for the university to divest from companies involved in the prison system, U.S. immigration enforcement and fossil fuels.”

A successful BDS resolution vote at Columbia University similarly demanded that the school “divest its stocks, funds, and endowment from companies that profit from or engage in the State of Israel’s acts toward Palestinians that, according to Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), fall under the United Nations International Convention of the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid.” 

And, most recently, in November at San Francisco State University (SFSU), a perennial hotbed of anti-Israel agitation, a resolution promoted by the radical group General Union of Palestine Students was passed and called on the University to divest from a list of some 100 companies “that benefit from Israeli Occupation, racism, and colonialism” in Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria. “[T]hese investments harm San Francisco State’s Palestinian, Arab, Muslim students,” the resolution read, “many of whom have families who currently live under Israeli occupation, or are descendants of Palestinians who have been killed or forcibly relocated as a result of Israel’s occupation of Palestine.” 

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

UK: We Need to Keep Schools Open The COVID-related tragedies that no one wants to talk about. Katie Hopkins

By on January 5th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/we-need-keep-schools-open-katie-hopkins/

As I sit here in my kitchen three days before the official start of the new school year, not a single member of my family knows what they are supposed to be doing next week.

Of course my husband and I know the things we have to get done — shifts for work already on the fridge, calls all scheduled in the calendar, and the other stuff of life stacked up like the ironing pile, reminding me there is no good reason to be sitting on my sofa.

But my children have no sense of what their lives are supposed to look like next week, or when they should show up for school, or whether their schools will be shuttered altogether.

If we turn on the news, the top story is the Teachers Unions angrily bellowing at the Education Secretary Gavin Williamson to shut everything down completely. He just caved to their demands in London and closed the few remaining primary schools he had tried to keep open.

Dr. Mary Bousted, joint head of the National Education Union (which has more than 450,000 members), called for all primary and secondary schools to be closed. She said, “What is right for London is right for the rest of the country.”

All very well Mary, but shouldn’t it be about what is right for our kids?

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

New York City is Back! Daniel Greenfield

By on January 5th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/01/new-york-city-back-daniel-greenfield/

New York is back! No, I don’t mean Rudy Giuliani’s revived New York City. I mean the nightmarish New York City of Dinkins, Beame and Lindsay.

I mean the Death Wish and Warriors city.

And now Bill de Blasio’s New York City before it’s passed on to some even more nightmarishly incompetent and corrupt leftist whose only agenda is identity politics.

New York City is back, baby.

Bat-wielding man injures multiple people in NYC during crazy crime spree – New York Post

Violence adds to NYC’s 2020 death toll, with 97% jump in shootings and 45% increase in murders — criminal carnage not seen in 14 years – New York Daily News

NYPD: 8 People Shot In 6 Different Shootings Not Even 2 Hours Into 2021 – CBS 2

NYPD: Man Shot, Killed on Eve of His 21st Birthday – NBC 4

NYPD searching for suspect who shot into parked car in Brooklyn – ABC 7

‘Everybody is in shock’: New York City Christmas concert ends with police shooting gunman on cathedral steps – USA Today

Nearly 70 percent of 2020 shootings in NYC are unsolved: NYPD – New York Post

Start spreading the news. These vagabond bullets. Are yearning to stray. I’m leaving today. I don’t want to be a part of it. New York, New York.

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ELECTIONS, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Judiciary vs. the Leftist Mob Patriots won’t bend to the mob — even if the judges do. Daniel Greenfield

By on January 5th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/judiciary-vs-leftist-mob-daniel-greenfield/

Over two centuries ago, Alexander Hamilton pointed out that due to the “natural feebleness of the judiciary”, it’s “in continual jeopardy of being overpowered, awed, or influenced.”

Jeopardy long ago became reality. Now our nation’s future is in jeopardy.

As mobs fill the street, the Roberts Court shows the weakness of a conservative judiciary that is willing to issue conservative rulings only on those issues that won’t infuriate the mob too much. Faced with blatant election rigging, judges across the country have retreated from having to make the hard choices and safeguard our constitutional republic against political gangsters.

Or rather conservative judges have.

Judge Leslie Abrams Gardner, Stacey Abrams’ sister, is happy to intervene on behalf of her sister in Georgia’s Senate rolls and protect the dirty voter rolls from being cleaned up by Republicans. Throughout the Trump administration, the Democrat judges appointed by Clinton and Obama haven’t been shy about blocking every administration move on specious grounds.

Democrats then seized on the pandemic to rig elections in key states. This wasn’t just gaming the system like gerrymandering or using dirty census figures that include illegal aliens: both traditional Democrat means of rigging elections. Instead Democrat governors, judges and secretaries of state bypassed legislatures to unilaterally change how elections were conducted.

This wasn’t just crooked or dirty. It violated the plain text of the Constitution which put the power into the hands of state legislatures in Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania to determine how elections would be conducted. Federal judges and the DOJ have spent two generations monitoring elections in southern states because of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

The Pelosi Rules The Speaker changes House procedures to increase spending and stifle dissent. By James Freeman

By on January 5th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-pelosi-rules-11609792916?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

Georgia voters, you can’t say Nancy Pelosi hasn’t warned you. The Speaker of the House is clarifying today that without a Republican Senate to serve as a check on her chamber, the 117th Congress is prepared to follow the fiscal blowout of 2020 with another historic surge in federal spending and debt. New House rules will eliminate one of the few modest institutional restraints on government budgets and further reduce the power of minority Republicans to impede the Pelosi agenda.

For anyone who’s been wondering whether the loss of Democratic House seats in November’s elections might encourage the Speaker to run a less partisan and less ideological House, you have your answer. Mrs. Pelosi has now endorsed a budgeting rule championed by radical Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.). The basic idea is to make every liberal priority eligible for “emergency” spending and remove it from any debate about government priorities.

Not that the rules enacted to this point by Speaker Pelosi and her predecessors have offered much resistance to the fleecing of taxpayers. The pile of publicly held U.S. Treasury debt is now larger than our entire economy and Washington’s unfunded entitlement promises are many times larger than that.

But when Mrs. Pelosi reclaimed the speaker’s gavel in 2019, she felt the need to maintain at least the appearance of being concerned about reckless federal borrowing. Amid a flourish of pronouncements about transparency and government reform, two years ago the Speaker angered Rep. Ocasio-Cortez with the re-imposition of a House rule purporting to require that new spending be offset by budget savings elsewhere.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Why We’re Ending the EPA’s Reliance on Secret Science The agency has long made decisions without allowing the public to scrutinize our underlying data. By Andrew Wheeler

By on January 5th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-were-ending-the-epas-reliance-on-secret-science-11609802643?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

The task of science is one of test and retest, analysis and comparison, over and over. It is slow and careful work, done in the open. Only rarely has science benefited from secrecy, and that is usually for reasons of national security. The geniuses of the Manhattan Project who built the atomic bomb, the mavericks of Cape Canaveral who sent men to the moon, these giants did their work behind high walls, and for good reason.

But the work of the Environmental Protection Agency—to protect human health and the environment—shouldn’t be exempt from public scrutiny. This is why we are promulgating a rule to make the agency’s scientific processes more transparent.

Too often Congress shirks its responsibility and defers important decisions to regulatory agencies. These regulators then invoke science to justify their actions, often without letting the public study the underlying data. Part of transparency is making sure the public knows what the agency bases its decisions on. When agencies defer to experts in private without review from citizens, distinctions get flattened and the testing and deliberation of science is precluded.

Our rule will prioritize transparency and increase opportunities for the public to access the “dose-response” data that underlie significant regulations and influential scientific information. Dose-response data explain the relationship between the amount of a chemical or pollutant and its effect on human health and the environment—and are the foundation of the EPA’s regulations. If the American people are to be regulated by interpretation of these scientific studies, they deserve to scrutinize the data as part of the scientific process and American self-government.

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MEDIA, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

It’s the pro-lockdown lobby that is spreading fake news Covid alarmism is giving rise to myths and misinformation. Brendan O’ Neill

By on January 5th, 2021

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/01/04/its-the-pro-lockdown-lobby-that-is-spreading-fake-news/

The Kafkaesque quality of the lockdown was on full display at the weekend. We had the extraordinary sight of lockdown supporters accusing critics of the lockdown of spreading disinformation while they themselves were signal-boosting claims that were either categorically untrue or questionable in the extreme. This is the stage of lockdown authoritarianism we have now reached: anyone who questions the lockdown will be branded a liar and a hoodwinker who should be expelled from public life, while the cheerers of lockdown, those self-styled saviours of lives, can say whatever they want with very few repercussions.

The irony would have been delicious if it were not so serious and disturbing. Just as the lockdown fanatics were gunning for Karol Sikora, accusing the ‘positive professor’ of spreading disinformation, it became clear that they themselves have a somewhat difficult relationship with the truth. From both millennial leftists and tragic centrists, Sikora, a celebrated oncologist, has been getting it in the neck for quite a while, on the basis that he has committed the thoughtcrime of criticising harsh lockdowns and failing to predict there would be a second wave of the virus. Yet his accusers have some serious self-reflection to do, because their orgy of Sikora-bashing over the weekend coincided with an explosion of fibs from their own side.

First there was their vaccine disinformation (or, unlike them, let’s be generous: misinformation). Britain’s lockdown fanclub went wild over a New York Times piece which claimed that the UK is adopting a ‘mix and match’ approach to vaccination. This essentially means that this insane country some of us have the misfortune to live in will allow one vaccine to be given in a person’s first shot and an entirely different vaccine to be given for the second shot a few weeks later. The nutters! As the NYT’s haughty, startled headline put it: ‘Britain opts for mix-and-match vaccinations, confounding experts.’

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

NYGOP CHAIRMAN LANGWORTHY CALLS ON ASSEMBLYMAN PERRY TO IMMEDIATELY WITHDRAW CUOMO DETENTION CAMP BILL 

By on January 5th, 2021

“The fact that this bill was even drafted and introduced gives you an incredible insight into the totalitarian, socialist mentality of New York Democrats” 

Albany, New York–January 4th…New York Republican Chairman Nick Langworthy today blasted New York Democrats for their deeply disturbing and unconstitutional legislation that would allow the governor or his surrogates the power to detain individuals whom they deem to pose a ‘threat to public health.’ 

Chairman Langworthy is calling for an immediate withdrawal of the legislation for the 2021 session and blasted Governor Cuomo for refusing to outright condemn the bill’s objective or pledge a veto if it were to pass. 

After the bill was discovered and a backlash ensued, Cuomo and other Democrats tried to downplay the bill’s chances of passage, but not a single one condemned the objective of the legislation or assured New Yorkers that they would not vote for it. 

“The fact that this bill was even drafted and introduced gives you an incredible insight into the totalitarian, socialist mentality of New York Democrats,” fumed Chairman Langworthy. “King Cuomo and his lemmings in the legislature who have abdicated their power to him have already trampled over our constitutional rights with this virus. There isn’t a chance in hell New Yorkers should trust that this couldn’t become a reality.” 

He continued, “Since the day he was elected, Andrew Cuomo has shown an utter disregard for the rule of law, and thanks to his feckless, rubber-stamp legislature, for nearly a year he has been allowed to rule like the dictator he’s always wanted to be. New Yorkers need to wake up–we cannot be complacent about the very real and present danger of our rights being taken from us under one-Party Democrat rule.” 

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HISTORY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Mystery of Theodor Herzl A young secular Viennese writer had an experience 125 years ago that would lead him to change Jewish history forever. He could never explain it. Can anyone else? Rick Richman

By on January 5th, 2021

https://mosaicmagazine.com/essay/israel-zionism/2021/01/the-mystery-of-theodor-herzl/?utm_source=

Not since Moses led the 40-year Exodus from Egypt did anyone transform Jewish history as fundamentally as Theodor Herzl did in the seven years from the publication in 1896 of his pamphlet The Jewish State to his historic pledge in 1903 on the subject of Jerusalem at the Sixth Zionist Congress. Then he died suddenly in 1904, at the age of forty-four.

In 2017, on the centennial of the 1917 Balfour Declaration, Britain’s historic promise to facilitate a Jewish national home in Palestine, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the Declaration resulted “largely thanks to Herzl’s brilliant appearances in England.”

Herzl created something out of nothing. He turned Zionism into a mass movement. He created the organizational and economic tools for the World Zionist Organization. Perhaps above all, he gained access to kings and counts . . . and this was no small thing [because a Jewish statesman] did not exist at the time, . . . certainly not one who was a journalist and playwright, and who was only thirty-six years old. It was unthinkable.

How did a man opposed by Orthodox rabbis (who believed a Jewish state should await the messiah), Reform rabbis (who wanted a Jewish state relegated permanently to the past), assimilated Jews (who feared accusations of dual loyalty), Jewish socialists (who considered any type of nationalism reactionary), and Jewish public figures (who thought the whole idea absurd) create a worldwide movement? How did a young writer with no political connections, no ties to Jewish organizations, and no financial backing beyond his own resources negotiate with leading figures in the Western world’s ruling empires, engaging in what Netanyahu called “inconceivable diplomatic actions” that would lead to the Balfour Declaration and eventually the creation of the state of Israel?

Those are important questions. Even more important a question is that of why Herzl did all this, given his minimal ties to Judaism and the Jewish people during his early adulthood. While he had a bar mitzvah and attended a predominantly Jewish high school, he had sought assimilation ever since his days as a university student in Vienna. Nor was he religiously observant as an adult: when his son was born in 1891, he did not have him circumcised. On December 24, 1895, six weeks before the publication of The Jewish State, Herzl was at home lighting a Christmas tree for his three children.

For many years, biographers believed Herzl became a Zionist after covering the Dreyfus trial in 1894 in Paris, as a foreign correspondent for a Viennese newspaper. More recently, however, scholars have shown that Herzl’s embrace of Zionism had virtually nothing to do with that case.

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