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April 2021

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Senate Passes Anti-Asian Hate Crimes Bill That Doesn’t Prohibit Discrimination in College Admissions Plus: Biden proposes a massive tax hike, scientists may have invented a successful malaria vaccine, and more… Robby Soave

By on April 23rd, 2021

https://reason.com/2021/04/23/senate-passes-anti-asian-hate-crimes-bill-that-doesnt-prohibit-discrimination-in-college-admissions/

The Senate overwhelmingly passed a bill that purportedly combats anti-Asian hate on Thursday. The vote was 94–1.

The bill would create a new position within the Justice Department to review anti-Asian hate crimes related to the COVID-19 pandemic. It also requires the Department of Health and Human Services to issue guidance on preventing anti-Asian discrimination.

“There has been a dramatic increase in hate crimes and violence against Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders,” the bill asserts. (It explicitly names the Atlanta spa killings as an example of this, though it’s not actually clear the shooter was motivated by anti-Asian animus.)

The lone dissenter on the vote was Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo).

“As a former prosecutor, my view is it’s dangerous to simply give the federal government open-ended authority to define a whole new class of federal hate crime incidents,” said Hawley in a statement.

He has a point, though this bill is not particularly vast or sweeping. The stronger argument against the bill is that it does nothing to address one of the most obvious—and odious—forms of anti-Asian discrimination: college admissions.

Many elite colleges, public universities, and even selective high schools explicitly discriminate against Asian applicants in order to artificially tinker with the racial makeup of the campus population. This means that Asian students whose grades and test scores would have gained them admission had they been white, black, or Hispanic are routinely turned away. Contrary to popular belief, the biggest beneficiaries of these schemes are often white students.

Courts have generally held that race-based admissions do not violate civil rights law if they are very narrowly tailored. But Congress could explicitly require educational institutions that receive federal dollars to cease discriminating against Asian applicants. (They could even call it an antiracist initiative.)

Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas) proposed an amendment to the bill along these lines, but it was defeated in a close vote: 48–49. Thus the version that passed the Senate aims to tackle anti-Asian hatred, but is silent on perhaps the most common and systemic form of anti-Asian bigotry in the U.S.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

SECOND THOUGHTS ON BIDEN?By Jim Geraghty

By on April 23rd, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/stop-demonizing-the-columbus-police-officer/

All around us, we’re starting to see consequences of reckless policy decisions, warnings unheeded, and objections dismissed.

President Biden didn’t plan for U.S. Customs and Border Protection to have more than 172,000 “enforcement encounters” on the U.S.-Mexican border in March, but announcing he was undoing his predecessor’s “xenophobic” policies helped make it happen.
President Biden didn’t set out to have the single-biggest one-month jump in the consumer price index in a decade, with food and energy costs leading the way. But maybe the federal government’s decision to pump so much borrowed money into the economy is indeed fueling inflation, as some economists warned.
After word leaked that President Biden hoped to double capital-gains taxes for those making more than $1 million per year, markets tumbled fast yesterday, and analysts at Goldman Sachs calculate that if the market reaction to this potential capital-gains tax hike is like the last one, the rich will sell off about $178 billion in stocks.
I’m not completely convinced that we’re seeing a dramatic decrease in vaccine demand yet, but if we are, maybe the decision to halt the use of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine over eight cases of blood clots out of 7 million doses administered added to public wariness. Particularly if the FDA is going to say, after nearly a two-week halt, “Never mind, this vaccine is safe, just have doctors be on the lookout for blood clots.”

Actions have consequences, often including unintended consequences, which is why we should act carefully and deliberately, and pause to recalibrate often. You can consider that capital-C “Conservatism,” small-c conservatism, or just hard-learned life wisdom.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Stop Demonizing the Columbus Police Officer By Jim Geraghty

By on April 23rd, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/stop-demonizing-the-columbus-police-officer/

How prominent Democratic officials are demonizing a justified police shooting in Columbus, Ohio, ensuring that police will now be even less likely to use force in critical situations; and the mounting pile of unintended consequences to Democratic government policies.

Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Wednesday morning: “While the verdict was being read in the Derek Chauvin trial, Columbus police shot and killed a sixteen-year-old girl. Her name was Ma’Khia Bryant. She should be alive right now.”

Valerie Jarrett, one of the most powerful women in the federal government for about eight years, declared, “a Black teenage girl named Ma’Khia Bryant was killed because a police officer immediately decided to shoot her multiple times in order to break up a knife fight. Demand accountability. Fight for justice.”

Robert Reich, former secretary of Labor and current UC Berkeley professor, added: “Just yesterday, shortly before the guilty verdict was announced, police killed 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant. Yet another young life stolen. In what world is this public safety?”

The ACLU of Ohio declared: “The systems that allowed George Floyd to be murdered remain FULLY intact. Moments after we celebrated a win for police accountability in Minneapolis, news broke that Columbus Police murdered a 15 year old Black girl.”

There is no indication that any of these people care that Ma’Khia Bryant was about to stab another teenage girl — as seen in the police body-cam footage and separate security-camera footage. As a neighbor who witnessed the incident described it, “Unfortunately, the cop had only seconds to respond. Once I saw the body cam video, I realized the young lady had a knife. It could have been worse. It could have been two people dead if he didn’t respond as fast as he did.”

Notice that the knee-jerk, uncorrected, and un-retracted denunciations of the Columbus Police above are not from random anonymous lunatics on Twitter. This is not nut-picking. This is a U.S. senator, a former top adviser to the president, a fairly widely read columnist of the left, and the state chapter of a major political-litigation group — all relatively mainstream Democrats and progressives with significant followings and prestige. And this isn’t even getting into how arguably the most famous professional athlete of our era posting a photo (since deleted) of the police officer and declaring, “You’re next.”

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The delirium of Jew-hatred A French court’s perverse ruling has significance well beyond this one scandalous case Melanie Phillips

By on April 23rd, 2021

https://www.jns.org/opinion/anti-semitism-is-a-form-of-delirium-especially-in-france

The latest shocking development in the scandal over a horrific antisemitic murder in France not only trains a harsh light on that country’s attitude to Jew-hatred. It also illuminates a deeply problematic and wider inability to deal with antisemitism in the west.

In 2017, a 65-year-old Jewish retired doctor and schoolteacher, Sarah Halimi, was murdered in a frenzied antisemitic attack in her Paris apartment.

Her next-door neighbor, Kobili Traoré, a 27-year-old Muslim man of Malian descent, beat her and threw her out of her third-floor window to cries of Allahu akbar, or “God is great,” and calling her a shaitan, or “satan”.

He had previously harassed Halimi’s daughter by calling her a “filthy Jew”. According to one psychiatric report, Traoré had been troubled by Jewish religious artefacts in Halimi’s apartment — her mezuzah and menorah, which “amplified the frantic outburst of hate”.

Last week, France’s highest court, the Court of Cassation, upheld an appeal court ruling that had rejected putting Traoré on trial. This was because, at the time of the murder, he had been high on cannabis causing an episode of “acute mental delirium”.

Under French law, said the Court of Cassation, “a person is not criminally responsible if suffering, at the time of the event, from psychic or neuro-psychic disturbance that has eliminated all discernment or control” over that person’s actions.

The ruling defies comprehension. Many murders and other serious crimes are committed by people under the influence of drugs or alcohol. Yet no-one argues they are therefore not to be held responsible for their actions. As Francis Szpiner, one of the Halimi family’s lawyers, asked in outrage: “Will this also apply to drunk drivers who kill children on the road?”

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CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Juror in Chauvin Trial Makes Stunning Admission over ‘Guilty’ Verdict:  ‘I Didn’t Want to Go Through the Rioting’ Kyle Becker

By on April 23rd, 2021

https://beckernews.com/i-didnt-want-to-go-through-the-rioting-juror-in-chauvin-trial-makes-stunning-admission-over-guilty-verdict-38729/

On Tuesday, a jury found Derek Chauvin guilty of second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter in a case that had sparked nationwide riots: The death of George Floyd.

During the course of the trial, Judge Peter Cahill mentioned that the court case was getting dangerously close to mistrial. A new interview with an alternate juror named  Lisa Christensen, who lives in Brooklyn Center, provides new insight into the courtroom dynamics.

“I just had a fascinating sit-down interview with one of the alternate jurors in the Derek Chauvin trial,” Kare 11 reporter Lou Raguse said Thursday on Twitter.

“Lisa Christensen was the juror who lived in Brooklyn Center. One night she could hardly make it home after testimony ended because of protesters blocking intersections.”

“Christensen thought Derek Chauvin was guilty,” Raguse continued. “Dr. Martin Tobin was the witness who influenced her the most toward that conclusion.”

Video clip of interview HERE. 

“That demonstration where the jurors felt their necks? Extremely effective,” he said.

“She went home every night and took additional notes about how each witness,” he continued. “When he turned and said, Number 96, you’re an alternate, yeah, my heart broke a little bit.”

Here is the part where we begin to get a better picture of the immense pressure these jurors were under to deliver a “guilty” verdict.

“This was shocking to me, but Christensen told me she and the other jurors didn’t even share their real names and occupations with each other,” Raguse said. “Just called each other by juror number. Got along but mostly made small talk. Concerned about saying ‘too much.’”

Christenson outright admitted that jury intimidation played a major part in the trial.

Before the ‘guilty’ verdicts were rendered in the case, major Democratic politicians stated that the “right” decision would be a guilty verdict.

“I’m praying the verdict is the right verdict, which is — I think it’s overwhelming, in my view,” President Biden told reporters in the Oval Office. “I wouldn’t say that unless the — the jury was sequestered now and not hearing me say that.”

California Representative Maxine Waters actually flew to Minneapolis amidst rioting, requested police protection, and then further inflamed tensions with inciteful rhetoric. 

“We are looking for a guilty verdict,” Waters said. “We are looking for a guilty verdict. And we are looking to see if all of the talk that took place and has been taking place after they saw what happened to George Floyd. If nothing does not happen then we know.”

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Biden And Kerry Get Humiliated On Earth Day, But Are Too Dumb To Realize It Francis Menton

By on April 23rd, 2021

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084

 Earth Day. The first such day was 51 years ago, April 22, 1970.

Since that first one, Earth Day has served as an annual opportunity for sanctimonious socialist-minded apocalypticists to issue prophesies of imminent environmental doom. Here from the Competitive Enterprise Institute is a great list of some 50 or so such predictions uttered since the late 1960s, all of which have since been proven wrong. Interestingly, the ones from the time of the first Earth Day mostly concerned overpopulation, famine, and global cooling. Today, those things seem ever so quaint.

Somewhere along the line, the prophesy of a coming ice age faded away, and global warming surged forth as the much more fashionable doomsday prediction. Today, fealty to the global warming apocalypse orthodoxy is a prerequisite for admission to polite society. Our President goes around repeating the mantra that climate change is an “existential threat,” even as he signs Executive Orders and re-directs half the energies of the vast federal government to fight it.

And what better opportunity than the annual return of Earth Day for our great leaders to demonstrate their deep climate change sincerity? Thus last week we had President Biden’s personal climate emissary to the world, John Kerry, traveling to Shanghai to triumphantly welcome China on board with the official plan to “save the planet” through ending the use of fossil fuels; and today, Biden himself has followed up with his Earth Day Climate Summit, a virtual event said to be attended by leaders of some 40 or so nations, including the likes of China, India and Russia. Surely, things have now completely changed course since the evil Trump has been banished, and the world will shortly be saved by the re-invigoration of the glorious Paris Climate Agreement.

The problem of course is that China, Russia, India, and for that matter all the rest of the developing countries, don’t care a whit about the whole climate change thing, and they also know that the Paris Agreement is a total scam. For a developing country, the basic strategy reflected in Paris is to hit up the U.S. and Europe for a lot of money, while simultaneously getting the more developed countries to cripple their own economies even as you yourself commit to absolutely nothing.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

Distorting the news to inflame the mob Facts don’t matter when you can cry ‘systemic racism’ Charles Lipson

By on April 23rd, 2021

https://spectator.us/topic/anti-police-media-lebron-james-mob-bryant/

NBC’s flagship news program completely garbled one of the week’s top stories: a deadly fight among teenage girls in Columbus, Ohio, which ended with a policeman shooting and killing a knife-wielding attacker, 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant. The network’s coverage was an abomination.

NBC omitted vital information and distorted what actually happened. The Biden White House immediately piled on, insisting that the Columbus shooting was the product of racism. They did so at an incredibly sensitive moment — minutes after a Minneapolis jury convicted policeman Derek Chauvin of murdering George Floyd.

Since ‘NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt’  and other media programs did not report the Columbus story fairly or accurately, let’s do so here.

What happened on the ground

The fatal incident began with a desperate phone call from the girls being attacked. The victims specifically gave 911 their address and mentioned that the attackers are ‘trying to fight us, trying to stab us,’ crying out for the police to come immediately. NBC misreported that. They played the tape but clipped the tiny part about ‘trying to stab us.’

The police responded immediately and arrived while the attack was in progress, according to video footage from the two officers’s body cameras. Police ordered everyone to drop to the ground. They didn’t. The frenzied fight among the young women continued. Ma’Khia Bryant was about to stab a victim, it seemed; her knife was raised above the victim’s head, and she had already refused the order to stop and drop to the ground. To prevent the stabbing in progress, one policeman made a split-second decision to shoot. He appears to have fired four times at Ms. Bryant. She fell, dropping the knife. Police tried to resuscitate her, but she died there. Columbus police have identified the officer as Nicholas Reardon. He has been taken off street duty while a full investigation is conducted, as is normal practice.

How it was reported and tweeted

How did NBC report the incident? First, NBC Nightly News edited the 911 call to omit the phrase that the attacker was ‘trying to stab us.’ Second, when they showed the police video, they omitted the shot of the knife in the attacker’s hand. Taken together, those two omissions completely erased the lethal threat to the victim, which had been mentioned in the emergency call and was apparent on the video.

These omissions are not sloppy editing by a summer intern. They seem to be a deliberate misrepresentation of the day’s lead story. Worse, this malicious distortion comes amid a dangerous national controversy over racism and excessive use of police force.

Has NBC apologized or corrected their story? Of course not.

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CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Clarence Thomas calls out liberal court colleagues for inconsistent opinions ‘depending on the issues’ Michael Lee

By on April 23rd, 2021

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/clarence-thomas-calls-out-inconsistent-left-leaning-opinions

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas used a footnote in a murder case to call out his liberal colleagues’ apparent double standard for minors, questioning why teenagers should have an absolute right to abortion but can’t be held fully responsible for homicide.

“When addressing juvenile murderers, this Court has stated that ‘children are different’ and that courts must consider ‘a child’s lesser culpability,” Thomas said in the footnotes of his opinion in Jones v. Mississippi. “And yet, when assessing the Court-created right of an individual of the same age to seek an abortion, Members of this Court take pains to emphasize a ‘young woman’s right to choose.’”

“It is curious how this Court’s view of the maturity of minors ebbs and flows depending on the issue,” Thomas continued.

Thomas cited multiple cases in which justices argued that minors were mature enough to be able to decide whether or not to get an abortion, a standard they suddenly abandon when assessing their culpability for violent crimes.

One such ruling from nine years ago held that life sentences for juveniles convicted of homicide were in violation of the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, reasoning that such mandatory sentences failed to take into account a minor’s immaturity at the time the crime was committed.

That ruling came up again in the case of Brett Jones, a Mississippi man who was 15 years old when he used a knife to kill his grandfather during an argument.

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MORE HEADLINES Comments turned off

MORE HEADLINES APRIL 23, 2021

By on April 23rd, 2021

 

Biden ignores rioting that marred summer of George Floyd protests after Chauvin conviction https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-rioting-george-floyd-derek-chauvin-conviction 

Mandela’s Communist White Hatred Germinates In American Soil https://newswithviews.com/mandelas-communist-white-hatred-germinates-in-american-soil/

US labels South Africa ‘no go’ area https://businesstech.co.za/news/lifestyle/484839/us-labels-south-africa-a-no-go-area/

Disaster-in-Chief: Joe Biden Has No Clue What He’s Doing https://townhall.com/columnists/mattvespa/2021/04/20/what-joe-biden-and-obama-have-in-common-when-it-comes-to-handling-crises-n2588206?

Emperor Biden Issues Mask Ultimatum If You Want Your ‘Independence’ https://redrightdaily.com/emperor-biden-issues-mask-ultimatum-if-you-want-your-independence/

Stanford Study Results: Facemasks are Ineffective to Block Transmission of COVID-19 and Actually Can Cause Health Deterioration and Premature Death https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/04/stanford-study-results-facemasks-ineffective-block-transmission-covid-19-actually-can-cause-health-deterioration-premature-death/

The Hysterical Reaction to the Johnson & Johnson Vaccine Endangers Lives https://townhall.com/columnists/johnrlottjr/2021/04/20/the-hysterical-reaction-to-the-johnson–johnson-vaccine-endangers-lives-n2588202?

US to enter mega drought which will be the worst for 1200 years

https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/us-drought-western-california-map-b1830729.html

 

The Dirty ‘Great Reset’ Secret Behind Big Corporations’ New War Against Conservatives https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-dirty-great-reset-secret-behind-big-corporations-new-war-against-conservatives_3782326.html

 

Mike Lindell’s New Social Media Platform Attacked After Launch https://www.theepochtimes.com/new-social-media-platform-launched-under-the-biggest-attack-in-history-next-to-the-election-mike-lindell_3782043.html

 

China has 400+ satellites, Russia 200 and set to double by 2030, US Space Command chief says https://americanmilitarynews.com/2021/04/china-has-400-satellites-russia-200-and-set-to-double-by-2030-us-space-command-chief-says/?

Obama-lovin’ Netflix plunges: Streaming giant stumbles https://www.wnd.com/2021/04/obama-lovin-netflix-plunges-streaming-giant-stumbles/

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Senate Republicans Just Handed Matches to Arsonist Republicans aren’t just flat-footed in opposition, they are complicit in empowering this destructive regime. By Julie Kelly

By on April 23rd, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/22/senate-republicans-just-handed-matches-to-arsonist/

“It’s hard to see why rank-and-file Republicans should keep sending the same craven bunch of leftist accomplices to Washington. Maybe one day, they’ll stop.”

One of the most fateful decisions of Donald Trump’s presidency happened just weeks after Inauguration Day.

In March 2017, Republican lawmakers joined Democrats to demand Jeff Sessions, a former Senate colleague and Trump’s new attorney general, recuse himself from anything related to the investigation into alleged Russian election collusion. Sessions’ two brief meetings in 2016 with Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak—a figure who appeared often in collusion-related drama—amounted to evidence of collusion, collusion perps insisted.

Senators Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) were just a few top Republicans who asked Sessions to step aside—so he did.

Sessions’ recusal put the Justice Department safely back in the hands of anti-Trump operatives just as their malfeasance was being exposed by Representative Devin Nunes (R-Calif.). The cover-up of how the agency targeted Donald Trump and his campaign associates was secure while top officials deflected attention to the concocted Russian collusion hoax.

For an added punch, the same Republicans successfully pushed for a House ethics probe into Nunes, which sidelined his work for eight months until he was cleared of any wrongdoing.

A few months later, Republicans fiercely backed the appointment of a special counsel to investigate Trump’s alleged collusion with the Russians; Robert Mueller was appointed on May 17, 2017.

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