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March 2021

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Dems’ Willful Errors Multiply Recreating and expanding Obama’s catastrophic chaos. Bruce Thornton

By on March 10th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/dems-willful-errors-multiply-bruce-thornton/

Remember when Donald Trump was attacked daily for his cruel and racist immigration policies? When the clichés du jour were “ripped from their family’s arms” and “held in cages”? The “cages” filling the news were actually from the Obama era, but progressives notoriously take liberties with the truth when taking advantage of a useful crisis.

Under Trump’s policies, in fact, we recovered some control of our border and started reducing the death and disorder the Dems’ virtually open border produced. “Asylum seekers,” an elastic category that seldom required evidence that a migrant faced lethal threats in his home country, now waited in Central America or Mexico for their application to be processed rather than being “caught and released” at the border and sent off to the rest of the country with only perfunctory monitoring.

With the incentive of easy entry gone, the long columns of marching hordes of migrants disappeared from the news, and apprehensions and deportations accelerated. A serious security wall was under construction. Illegal immigration, still an issue requiring our attention, was less in the news, and not just because of Covid. Trump, as he had promised, had taken common-sense actions and actually enforced our laws.

So of course, once back in power, the Dems set about recreating the Obama years’ dangerous chaos on our border. A couple of months in power is all Joe Biden has taken to return apprehensions to 70,000 a month, and the “the highest February numbers that we’ve ever seen in the history of the [Unaccompanied Alien Child] program,” according to a Health and Human Services. And the drug mules and cartel human traffickers are back in business, to the tune of over $2 billion a year. A problem that was under control has not just returned, but been willfully worsened.

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Biden Broke The Border, Now He Owns The Crisis

By on March 10th, 2021

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/03/10/biden-broke-the-border-now-he-owns-the-crisis/

Just one week ago, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas flat out denied that there is a crisis at the southern border. “The answer is no,” he said in answer to a reporter’s question. “I think there is a challenge at the border that we are managing.”

The very next day, administration officials informed President Joe Biden that the number of migrant children in the U.S. is on pace to beat the previous record by 45% and that there aren’t enough beds to accommodate them.

Then Monday, Mayorkas started pleading for volunteers to help Border Protection cope with the “overwhelming” surge of illegal border crossers. “Your colleagues need assistance,” he said.

In January alone, Border Patrol agents had 78,323 “encounters” with illegal border crossers – which is higher than any January in a decade. In the three months since Biden won the election, these “encounters” totaled 224,337, which is 87% higher than the same three months a year ago.

According to the New York Times, there were likely 100,000 more “encounters” in February.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Miseducation of America’s Elites Affluent parents, terrified of running afoul of the new orthodoxy in their children’s private schools, organize in secret. Bari Weiss

By on March 10th, 2021

The dissidents use pseudonyms and turn off their videos when they meet for clandestine Zoom calls. They are usually coordinating soccer practices and carpools, but now they come together to strategize. They say that they could face profound repercussions if anyone knew they were talking.

But the situation of late has become too egregious for emails or complaining on conference calls. So one recent weekend, on a leafy street in West Los Angeles, they gathered in person and invited me to join.

In a backyard behind a four-bedroom home, ten people sat in a circle of plastic Adirondack chairs, eating bags of Skinny Pop. These are the rebels: well-off Los Angeles parents who send their children to Harvard-Westlake, the most prestigious private school in the city.

By normal American standards, they are quite wealthy. By the standards of Harvard-Westlake, they are average. These are two-career couples who credit their own success not to family connections or inherited wealth but to their own education. So it strikes them as something more than ironic that a school that costs more than $40,000 a year—a school with Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s right hand, and Sarah Murdoch, wife of Lachlan and Rupert’s daughter-in-law, on its board—is teaching students that capitalism is evil.

For most parents, the demonization of capitalism is the least of it. They say that their children tell them they’re afraid to speak up in class. Most of all, they worry that the school’s new plan to become an “anti-racist institution”—unveiled this July, in a 20-page document—is making their kids fixate on race and attach importance to it in ways that strike them as grotesque.

“I grew up in L.A., and the Harvard School definitely struggled with diversity issues. The stories some have expressed since the summer seem totally legitimate,” says one of the fathers. He says he doesn’t have a problem with the school making greater efforts to redress past wrongs, including by bringing more minority voices into the curriculum. What he has a problem with is a movement that tells his children that America is a bad country and that they bear collective racial guilt.

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FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Joe Biden’s Minimum-Pressure Campaign Concessions to the Houthis encourage more Houthi attacks.

By on March 10th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-bidens-minimum-pressure-campaign-11615332864?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

“Appeasement rarely works as a military or diplomatic strategy—especially not in the Middle East.”

Step one in the Biden Administration’s peace campaign in Yemen: Take the Houthis off the U.S. terror list and reach out to their patrons in Iran for a new nuclear deal.

Step two: End U.S. support for the Arab coalition supporting the internationally recognized government fighting the Houthis in Yemen, put U.S. arms sales to the Saudis on hold, and talk loudly about a “recalibration” of U.S.-Saudi relations.

Step three: The Houthis go on the offensive and on the weekend launch missiles and drones at several Saudi cities and Saudi Aramco facilitiies. The coalition says it intercepted most of the missiles and drones, but the attacks briefly caused an oil price spike. This incident followed other Houthi attacks and U.S. State Department lectures that the Houthis should cease and desist. They didn’t get the message.

Is anyone outside the U.S. State Department surprised? The Houthis are growing bolder as they understandably assume that the Saudis have lost U.S. support. Rather than negotiate, they’re looking to expand their territorial gains in Yemen and keep the military pressure on the Arab coalition. The attacks on Saudi cities and oil facilities are likely to increase, and sooner or later they could do serious harm.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Swiss Won’t Miss the Burqa Voters ban the ‘face’ of Islamist separatism in Western society.By Tunku Varadarajan

By on March 10th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-swiss-wont-miss-the-burqa-11615332345?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

Switzerland voted in a referendum on Sunday to ban face coverings, and it wasn’t a revolt against Covid restrictions. Medical masks are excluded from the prohibition. Its real target is the burqa.

The measure, approved 51% to 49%, prohibits the wearing of full facial coverings in public. No specific garment or religion is mentioned, and the proposal is sex-neutral. The ban includes the balaclavas beloved by anarchists as well as the facial draping worn by some Muslim women. Yet there was never any doubt about the intent. The proposal was introduced by, among others, the nativist Swiss People’s Party, whose campaign featured posters of a black-veiled woman.

Switzerland joins Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France and Germany in banning the burqa. A challenge to the French ban was dismissed by the European Court of Human Rights. European democracies differ from America’s in notable ways, and many Americans have reservations about the Swiss prohibition: Aren’t burqa bans an illiberal curbing of religious and expressive freedom? By some reports, fewer than 100 women in Switzerland wear the burqa. Do they constitute so great a threat to the venerable Swiss nation that their constitution, which guarantees freedom of faith and conscience, has to be amended to alter their sartorial practice?

Aware that judgments from afar can sometimes be glib, I put these questions to Elham Manea, author of a book published last month titled “The Perils of Nonviolent Islamism.” A Swiss Muslim of Yemeni descent, she teaches at the University of Zurich’s Political Science Institute and campaigned for the prohibition with “a group of like-minded feminists, leftists and Swiss of Muslim heritage.” (She stresses that she distanced herself from the Swiss People’s Party.)

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

BEN WEIGARTEN: OUT OF HIS CENSUS

By on March 10th, 2021

https://americanmind.org/salvo/out-of-his-census/

Biden’s betrayal of citizenship sabotages our republican form of government.

This article will be part of a longer forthcoming series regarding President Biden’s harmful Executive Orders.

President Joe Biden’s flurry of initial actions, on issues from immigration and race to environmentalism and regulatory policy, favor the ruling class, Woke progressives, and non-citizens. They punish the tens of millions of forgotten Americans of every color and creed who are most deeply impacted by their consequences. The longtime Swamp-dweller’s first days in office can best be summarized as: “unity and healing for me, but not for thee.”

One overlooked but significant executive order that demonstrates the administration’s contempt for you, and the principles you hold dear, concerns the census. It suggests that the president not only cares little for sovereignty, and the rule of law, but believes in fragrantly violating such principles, privileging noncitizens—including illegal aliens—and providing them representation to which they are not entitled.

The decennial census count is critically important because it is used for apportioning House seats, redistricting, and allocating hundreds of billions of federal dollars each year. It may strike readers as odd, but historically, the enumeration has included noncitizens, including illegal aliens. Therefore, areas with greater numbers of inhabitants—regardless of their legal status—have garnered greater political power in the way of representation and government largesse. Some American citizens see the weight of their votes augmented, while others see it reduced because of the actions of noncitizens, including illegal aliens—and because of a part-feckless and part-cynical political class that has allowed this policy to persist.

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