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April 2021

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Clarence Thomas Shows the Path Forward on Big Tech Thomas implied that Section 230 immunity for Big Tech firms may itself be constitutionally problematic and in conflict with the First Amendment. By Josh Hammer

By on April 9th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/08/clarence-thomas-shows-the-path-forward-on-big-tech/

A realignment, as many have observed, is now unfolding in American politics. The Republican Party and its conservatism is now the home for the “Somewheres,” to borrow the term from David Goodhart’s 2017 book, The Road to Somewhere, which refers to the more traditionalist, hardscrabble patriots of the American heartland. The Democratic Party and its increasingly hard-left progressivism, by contrast, is the home for the “Anywheres”—those highly educated, mobile, “woke” elites comprising the bicoastal ruling class.

The Big Tech issue is the tip of the spear of the realignment. As has been made painfully obvious the last few years, with last October’s collusive Big Tech assault on the New York Post for its election-season reporting on Hunter Biden’s overseas travails serving as an eye-opening pinnacle, Big Tech is now the ruling class’s catspaw. These modern-day robber barons are willing and able to lend their censorious assistance to the ruling class’s ruthless entrenchment of its ideological and political hegemony. Big Tech, in short, is the leading private-sector appendage with which the Anywheres cow into submission and subjugate the Somewheres.

This emergent reality has caused no shortage of heart palpitations among some of the more “liberal” elements of the American conservative firmament. Conservatives, many were taught, stand for unadulterated laissez-faire and a staunch commitment to deregulating corporate America. What to do, then, when those unshackled big corporations turn around and come after us?

The answer, for many, has been to carefully reassess what exactly it is we stand for as conservatives—especially as it pertains to unaccountable, concentrated corporate titans who control the 21st-century equivalents of the old public square. To wit, there is nothing particularly “conservative” about a zealous, dogmatic refusal to countenance state actions that might better channel the content curation and moderation decisions of a behemoth such as Amazon—which has at least an 80 percent market share in digital books—toward the common good of the American polity. Ditto Google, which has a nearly 90 percent market share in online search.

But the historical bromance between the GOP and chamber of commerce-style corporatism has been an obstinate hindrance to reform. Big Tech-skeptical, pro-realignment conservatives have all too often had their legal and policy arguments on such issues as antitrust enforcement and Section 230 reform thrown back in their faces by doctrinaire, limited-government enthusiasts who insist that True Conservatism is synonymous with hands-off private-sector fundamentalism. “Build your own Google!” the corporatists and libertarians have scowled.

On Monday, the most important conservative lawyer in the nation, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, came out swinging on the side of the reformers.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

January 6 Is the New Russiagate Lie It will be a long time, if ever, before the truth about what happened—and didn’t happen—on January 6, 2021 is fully and fairly explained. By Julie Kelly

By on April 9th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/08/january-6-is-the-new-russiagate-lie/

The Russiagate scandal, for lack of a better term, revealed to the general public the seamless compact between the Democratic Party, major news organizations, and powerful government agencies. 

Partisan operatives—be they ruthless DNC lawyers, paid spin masters, or former British spies—easily accessed the country’s influential decision makers to seed storylines targeting their political foes. Narratives were shaped with all the right terms, then dutifully recited by congressional leaders and media mouthpieces. Those on the other side taking incoming fire barely had a chance to see what was coming, let alone to respond with equal force.

Later, when the facts finally came out and the bad actors both behind the scenes and in front of the cameras were revealed as shameless frauds, no one was held accountable. And a sizable chunk of Americans continues to believe all the falsehoods because disowning them would vindicate people they unreasonably despise.

Which is why the overwhelming majority of Democrats still think Donald Trump was in cahoots with the Kremlin to steal the 2016 election.

The manufactured deception about the events of January 6 quickly is approaching Russiagate levels. The formula is familiar: Find a catchy phrase—in this case it’s “insurrection” instead of “collusion”—then fertilize the information ecosystem with the term and watch it grow like a weed.

Get political leaders including former presidents and top lawmakers of both parties to use the description, giving it immediate legitimacy. Issue dire warnings about the “threat to democracy” and “rule of law.” Identify the villain—Donald Trump, of course—and make solemn pledges to hunt down every perpetrator until justice is done.

Sympathy-inducing optics are helpful but not always necessary.

Critical cogs in this sort of performative outrage are government authorities who use their offices to convince the public the whole thing is on the square. This is precisely what happened with the now discredited trope that five people died as a result of the chaos on January 6. A brief report issued Wednesday by the office of the D.C. medical examiner confirmed only one person, Ashli Babbitt, was killed that day.

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Two Migrant Children Abandoned by Smugglers Found in California Wilderness near Border

By on April 9th, 2021

https://www.breitbart.com/border/2021/04/07/two-children-abandoned-by-smuggle

San Diego Sector Border Patrol agents found two small children after human smugglers abandoned them near Jacumba, California. The children were alone and crying when agents found them.

Agents patrolling the border near Jacumba observed a man and woman walking along the Mexican side of the border. The agents continued watching the couple who also had two small children with them, according to information obtained from San Diego Sector Border Patrol officials.

The agents observed the couple hoisting two children over large boulders in an area where the border wall ends. The side of the mountain abuts the large boulders.

Agents moved in and found the two children alone and crying. The agents determined the boy to be six years old and the girl to be five years old. The children could not communicate except to provide their names.

Agents transported the children to the station for care and processing. While examining the children, the agents found a handwritten note containing the mother’s name and phone number. The children also had the mother’s phone number and name written on their forearms with a marker.

Following the examination, the agents contacted the mother and obtained additional information about the children. When space becomes available, the children will be turned over to U.S. Department of Health and Human Services officials for temporary housing.

“It is unconscionable that anyone would abandon these small children and those responsible for smuggling events like this will be aggressively prosecuted,” San Diego Sector Chief Patrol Agent Aaron Heitke said in a written statement.  “Thankfully, our agents were able to quickly rescue these siblings.”

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BOOKS Comments turned off

A Crisis of Two Constitutions and Two Cultures Charles Kesler unveils the rise, decline, and recovery of American greatness. Daniel Greenfield

By on April 9th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/crisis-two-constitutions-and-two

“In thinking through the crisis of American national identity, we should keep in mind the opening words of the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence: ‘We hold these truths’. Usually, and correctly, we emphasize the truths that are held in common, but we must not forget the ‘We’ who holds them. The American creed is the keystone of American national identity: but it requires a culture to sustain it,” Charles Kesler writes in Crisis of the Two Constitutions.

That to some degree encapsulates the complex textual journey through a history of American political ideas to the fundamental cultural challenges captured in Crisis of the Two Constitutions.

Crisis of the Two Constitutions: The Rise, Decline, and Recovery of American Greatness, refers to what the respected Claremont McKenna College professor calls a struggle “between two rival cultures, two constitutions, two ways of life”. This linkage between culture and constitution, between how we live and our laws, is often tragically neglected in conservative thought.

But there’s no constitution without a culture. The “self-evident” truths of the Declaration of Independence and its natural rights are only natural and self-evident to a culture that has reached the same conclusions. When Americans revolted against British rule, their rhetoric of independence was neither foreign nor alien to the intellectual traditions of both sides.

The two nations may have been, as Churchill much later quipped, divided by a common language, but America now contains two nations that no longer share a common language of values. And even when speaking of the Constitution, they are really speaking of the two constitutions of the book’s title, the original Constitution and the “living constitution”.

The two constitutions also reflect two cultures, one traditional and the other forever changing, and two peoples, one centered in its origins, and the other pursuing an impossible future.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

University of Toronto’s Festering Anti-Semitism A grave moral failure of which administrators have yet to answer for. Richard L. Cravatts

By on April 9th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/university-torontos-festering-anti-semitism-richard-l-cravatts/

In a country where multiculturalism has a reverent following and criticism of protected minorities has essentially been criminalized as “hate speech,” it is more than ironic that on some Canadian campuses radical students have taken it upon themselves to target one group, Jewish students, with a hatred that is nominally forbidden for any others.

On March 4th, for example, yet another troubling event was scheduled to be held at the University of Toronto, this time a panel discussion tellingly entitled, “Liberated Students in a Colonised [sic] Campus: Reflections on the Palestinian Experience at the University of Toronto,” sadly co-sponsored by the University’s Institute of Islamic Studies, Department of History, and Centre for the Study of the United States. 

As B’nai Brith Canada noted in a condemnatory statement, the marketing materials for the event included a drawing of some individuals, one of which was Ghassan Kanafani, a murderous figure that, as B’nai Brith pointed out, is “a leading member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a designated terrorist entity in Canada. Kanafani forged connections between the PFLP and other far-left terrorist groups, including the Japanese Red Army . . . .”

“The University of Toronto has an antisemitism problem,” said Michael Mostyn, Chief Executive Officer of B’nai Brith Canada. “It is morally grotesque that the University is advertising an event using the sympathetic portrayal of a terrorist whose group has been responsible for so many murders, airplane hijackings and suicide bombings targeting innocent civilians.”

This is not the first time in recent history that B’nai Brith has felt compelled to critique the anti-Israel, often anti-Semitic goings-on at the University of Toronto, and the organization’s frustration is exacerbated by the fact that its prior pleadings for administrative actions to correct the toxic atmosphere at U of Toronto have largely gone unanswered.

In June of 2020, for example, B’nai Brith Canada’s League for Human Rights, together with two U of Toronto professors, Stuart Kamenetsky and Howard Tenenbaum, produced a lengthy and substantive report, “Confronting Antisemitism at the University of Toronto: A Path Forward,” written for the University’s president, Meric Gertler. That report, which fastidiously reviewed a long list of anti-Israel events and their effect on Jewish students, went largely ignored by the university’s administration, troubling in light of the many bigoted events cataloged in the report.

At this particular university, as one example, the University of Toronto Graduate Students’ Union (UTGSU) is the only student union in Canada with a committee dedicated to promoting the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, and in 2019 outrageously rejected Hillel’s request to recognize the “Kosher Forward” campaign to have kosher food offered on campus since, as the Union decided in their grotesquely anti-Semitic way, Hillel is pro-Israel and therefore kosher food should not be allowed. In doing so, the B’nai Brith report noted, “the UTGSU openly discriminated against Jewish student rights, despite its mandate to represent all university students, and faced no consequences for doing so.”

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Biden crawls back to the nuclear drawing board Ruthie Blum

By on April 9th, 2021

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/joe-biden-crawls-back-to-the-iran-nuclear-drawing-

 Addressing a session of the Iranian cabinet on Wednesday, President Hassan Rouhani lauded the return of the United States to the nuclear negotiating table. Referring to Tuesday’s summit in Vienna, coordinated by the European Union and attended by representatives from the US, Iran, Russia, China, France and Britain, Rouhani said, “Today, a united voice is being heard, as all parties to the nuclear deal have come to the conclusion that there is no solution better than the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, and there is no path other than its full implementation.”

The point of his speech was not to express “unity” with Washington, however. After all, the American and Iranian delegates didn’t even sit in the same room during the first day of the talks, which are taking place in the very city where the JCPOA was signed in 2015.
No, the purpose of his pontification was to praise his mullah puppet-masters for once again bringing the “Great Satan” to its knees. No wonder Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) spokesman Behrouz Kamalvandi announced the same day that “in less than four months, we have produced 55 kg. [121 lbs.] of 20% enriched uranium… in around eight months, we can reach 120 kg. [264.5 lbs.]”

It’s typical of Iranian officials to boast about the might of the regime, particularly with a presidential election fast approaching amid severe domestic woes. The country’s internecine problems have been increasing steadily since 2018, when former US President Donald Trump withdrew from the JCPOA and instated a “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign against Tehran.

The outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, which hit the Islamic Republic especially hard, only served to exacerbate an already untenable situation, with more than 70% of workers unemployed and 80% of the population falling below the poverty line. Nor are those Iranians who can’t afford basic food staples buying the regime’s repeated excuse for their plight: that the US is to blame for “violating” the JCPOA and refusing to lift all sanctions.

They’re also fed up with the leadership’s simultaneous bragging about its massively expensive military build-up. On March 15, for example, the government released footage of an underground Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps base, which it called a “missile city,” equipped with advanced weaponry and electronic-warfare technology.

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FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Biden’s Anti-Israel “Point Man” Behind Plan to Fund Terrorists America must “regain trust and goodwill” of terrorists with taxpayer money. Daniel Greenfield

By on April 9th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/bidens-anti-israel-point-man-behind-plan-fund-daniel-greenfield/

“I was inspired by the Palestinian intifada,” Hady Amr wrote a year after September 11 while working with an anti-Israel group.

A few years later, the Beirut-born extremist had become an advisor on Muslim relations to the World Economic Forum before heading up Brookings’ Doha Center for Qatar. The tiny Islamic tyranny is allied with Iran, Al Qaeda, and the Muslim Brotherhood. It’s a backer of Hamas.

The Obama administration appointed Amr as the Deputy Head of USAID’s Middle East Bureau which put him in a key position to direct taxpayer money from an organization already notorious for funding pro-terrorist and anti-Israel groups.

A decade after Amr had responded to the death of a Hamas leader by ranting that “there will be thousands who will seek to avenge these brutal murders of innocents”, the Obama administration made him a Deputy to its Special Envoy for Israeli Palestinian negotiations. 

Amr decamped back to Brookings during the Trump administration, becoming one of Biden’s big bundlers, joining his transition team and getting picked as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs. Within two decades of praising the intifada against Israel and a decade of working for a think-tank deeply compromised by its pro-Hamas regime sponsor, the foreign radical had climbed to a pole position in setting the Biden administration’s policy on Israel.

Politico described Amr as “the key U.S. official dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian issue.” The Times of Israel called him, “Biden’s point-man on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

Biden’s point man didn’t waste much time.

On February 1st, it was reported that Amr had spoken with Minister Hussein al-Sheikh of the Palestinian Authority.  Al-Sheikh, a member of the PLO Central Council and of the Central Committee of the Fatah Party, had praised the top terrorist Hmeid family as a “fighting family” whose members had murdered at least 10 Israelis, and promised aid to it. 

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Oxford professors’ excellent thread on viewpoint diversity and the left’s sneering dismissal of it John Sexton

By on April 9th, 2021

https://hotair.com/john-s-2/2021/04/08/oxford-professors-excellent-thread-on-viewpoint-diversity-and-the-lefts-sneering-dismissal-of-it-n382068

Teresa Bejan is an associate professor of political science at Oxford University who I’ve written about before. Last summer she posted an insightful thread about the nature of free speech. Yesterday she posted a related thread on Twitter about viewpoint diversity. You’re probably familiar with the term which, simply put, means the idea of having a variety of ideological views represented at the table in the same way you might seek to have racial diversity. But the idea of viewpoint diversity often gets shrugged off by progressives who are fond of suggesting something along the lines of why represent the views of troglodytes at a university.

Today Bejan addressed those issues in a thread on Twitter, making a case that viewpoint diversity should be welcome and that those who dismiss it would never dismiss any other claims of insufficient diversity.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Ron DeSantis Announces Initiative to Promote Teaching Civics, Reject Critical Race Training “There is no room in classrooms for things like critical race theory”Mike LaChance

By on April 9th, 2021

https://legalinsurrection.com/2021/04/ron-desantis-announces-initiative-to-promote-teaching-civics-reject-critical-race-training/

Ron DeSantis is shaping up to be the model of what a Republican governor should be. This is what leadership looks like.

The College Fix reports:

Governor Ron DeSantis’ new curriculum initiative will promote teaching civics, disavow critical race theory

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican, recently announced a new initiative to promote civics education.

The “Civic Literacy Excellence Initiative” would create “a new professional licensure endorsement for educators in civics education,” according to a news release from the governor’s office.

Teachers who earn the endorsement would be given a $3000 bonus, according to the details of the proposal. Another $16.5 million would be available for civics education for principals and teachers.

“A high-quality education begins with a high quality curriculum, which is why I remain laser focused on developing the best possible civics education standards,” the governor said in his statement. His proposal still needs to be introduced and passed by Florida legislators.

It will “promote high-quality civics education for Florida students and reward classroom educators,” DeSantis said.

DeSantis also criticized critical race theory, stating ideologies like this have no place in Florida.

“There is no room in classrooms for things like critical race theory,” the governor said during his press conference. Part of his revamping of education in the state will include improving the curriculum, DeSantis said.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Fund coronavirus research, not a climate change musical by Henry Miller

By on April 9th, 2021

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/fund-coronavirus-research-not-a-climate-change-musical

I’ve been a science nerd almost all my life. In graduate school, I was the co-discoverer of a bacterial enzyme essential to DNA replication and of a key enzyme in the influenza virus. I have written more than a thousand articles concerned with science and science policy. I’m convinced that America’s prosperity is based on post-WWII preeminence in science and technology, much of it financed by federal funding.

You might think, then, that I’d be thrilled to learn that the science committee of the U.S. House of Representatives wants to more than double the budget of the National Science Foundation over the next five years. That’s a hike of $8.5 billion to $18.3 billion. The Senate is working on a companion bill. Unfortunately, at least as currently conceived by the Senate, this legislation will maintain NSF’s “unity of structure” and protect NSF’s existing programs. There’s the rub.

Research is the lifeblood of technological innovation, which, in turn, drives economic growth and keeps America prosperous. Government-funded scientific research runs the gamut from studies of basic physical and biological processes to the development of applications to meet immediate needs. Basic science, which elucidates the fundamental processes in fields such as aging, cancer biology, immunology, and virology, is also worthy of federal research funding. However, the definition of what constitutes “science” has gradually expanded to include sociology, economics, and “alternative medicine.” Much of the spending on these disciplines by the nation’s two major funders of non-military research, the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, shortchange taxpayers. Considering their collective budgets amount to more than $50 billion, this is no small concern.

The NSF, whose mission is to ensure U.S. leadership in areas of science and technology that are essential to economic growth and national security, frequently funds politically correct but low-value research projects. This trend is likely to accelerate during the Biden administration.

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