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June 2021

Believe Your Own Eyes About Fauci E-Mails, Not the Fact Checkers By Jeffrey Tucker

https://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2021/06/05/believe_your_own_eyes_about_fauci_e-mails_not_the_fact_checkers_780187.html

Reading through the 4,000-plus pages of Dr. Fauci’s emails – where’s the bottle of Visine? – has not been the most exciting of literary experiences, but it certainly has been revealing. 

After all, Dr. Fauci was the US architect of the lockdowns that smashed all that we believed was true in the good ‘ol US of A; namely that we had rights and freedoms and a system of government that protected both. Suddenly we found ourselves housebound by law, prevented from going to concerts, movies, church, or even to the hospital if we didn’t have Covid-19 (health care spending fell 6% in 2020). 

So, yes, these emails are remarkable. You want to know what this guy was thinking? How and why did he convince President Trump to shut down major parts of the economy? These emails provide hints and clues as to what he was thinking before and after. They are a major key to understanding, and investigators of all sorts will be scouring through them for years. 

Whatever you do, however, don’t you dare call them a “leak” even though if Fauci had his druthers, they surely would not have been leaked; whoops, I mean released through multiple FOIA requests. The fact checkers are all over that misuse of terms, such that USA Today offers a marmish corrective to anyone who would use that term, while the Washington Post offers a mini-treatise assuring people that they do not say what you think they say. 

Say it over and over until it becomes true: there are no smoking guns herein! 

To paraphrase Groucho Marx, who are you gonna believe, the fact checkers or your own eyes? Most of the attention so far concerns when Fauci was warned that the virus might have been a lab leak, in a lab that received indirect US funding. What did Fauci do about such warnings and to what extent did he take them seriously? 

Dr. Scott Atlas Excoriates Fauci’s ‘Unconscionable’ Handling Of Pandemic Scott Morefield

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/scottmorefield/2021/06/05/dr-scott-atlas-excoriates-faucis-unconscionable-handling-of-pandemic-n2590524

Former White House coronavirus task force member Dr. Scott Atlas blasted Dr. Anthony Fauci’s “unconscionable” handling of the COVID-19 pandemic during a Friday night appearance on Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”

Atlas, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and the former chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center, brought a much-needed dose of reality to President Donald Trump’s COVID-19 task force last summer before stepping down in November 2020. During that time, he went toe-to-toe with the lockdown positions espoused by Fauci and fellow member Dr. Deborah Birx, and received plenty of criticism along the way.

Some of that criticism came from Fauci himself, who, as we’ve seen through his interactions with Republican Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, isn’t particularly fond of being publicly disagreed with.

In the wake of Buzzfeed’s massive FOIA reveal of thousands of Fauci emails, however, it was Atlas’ turn to throw a few well-deserved punches:

After criticizing Fauci’s flip-flop on public masking despite being correct on the science at the beginning of the pandemic, Atlas pointed out how policies that focused on imposing devastating lockdowns, business closures, and restrictions were seemingly carried out without considering their “impact” on the people they negatively affected.

Facing a tsunami of antisemitism, diaspora Jews cling to their bubble Desperate to fit in, they are feeding the beast that will devour them Melanie Phillips

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/facing-a-tsunami-of-antisemitism?token

The tsunami of antisemitism over the past few weeks is the work of an axis of anti-Jewish evil that spans continents and has the whole Jewish world in its cross-hairs in both Israel and the diaspora.

It’s the product of an alliance between the Islamic world and the western left, making common cause against the Jewish people ostensibly over the Palestinian issue.

In both Britain and America, antisemitic attacks have been going through the roof. Jews have been singled out for assault in the street and in restaurants, baited on social media or from passing cars, their synagogues attacked and their children harassed in school.

These attacks were triggered by the 11-day Israeli bombardment of Hamas in Gaza aimed at stopping the thousands of rocket attacks against Israeli towns.

Despite Hamas’s war crimes against both Israeli and Gazan civilians — and despite the incitement to mass murder of Jews by the Palestinian Authority and the consequent terrorist attacks on Israelis in Jerusalem that preceded the hostilities in Gaza — the western media added to this incitement by recycling Hamas propaganda and falsely depicting the Israelis as wanton killers of Palestinian children.

This trans-national neo-pogrom is thus being facilitated by western elites who, if they aren’t actually taking part in this war against the Jewish people either on the streets or in the media, are piously wringing their hands but not taking the action necessary to put a stop to it.

The flimsy veil has therefore been torn off the hypocritical west to reveal a culture that is predominantly either hostile to the Jewish people or indifferent to their fate.

It treats no other people in this way. The killing of George Floyd produced breast-beating denunciations of “white privilege”; mass movements of illegal immigrants across the English Channel or the Mexican border with America elicit savage condemnation not of the migrants but of anyone who wants to stop this traffic; but when it comes to antisemitism (with some honorable exceptions), people look the other way.

Yet the reaction to all this by diaspora Jews has been woefully weak — a combination of outraged protest at the attacks with a refusal to acknowledge the shattering implications of what’s happening.

A video podcast made by a British Jew illustrates this skewed reaction. He was responding in particular to the recent shocking antisemitic episode in London where a masked youth was filmed telling a Muslim crowd: “We’ll find some Jews here … We want the Zionists, we want their blood!”

Minutes earlier, another Muslim had whipped up the mob against the “terrorist apartheid state of Israel” by declaring: “We love death”.

Islamic Republic: Welcome to Iran’s Fake Democratic Elections by Majid Rafizadeh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17431/iran-fake-elections

The unelected Guardian Council has a history of arbitrarily disqualifying reform-minded candidates, women and those who are perceived as disloyal to the principles of the state and the Islamic revolution, from running for office.

Out of 592 individuals who registered to run as candidates in the Iranian regime’s 13th presidential election, the unelected Guardian Council only approved seven individuals to run for the presidency.

Of course, for the ayatollah, the elections are “flawless” because his regime gets to pick who runs.

Instead of condemning the mullahs for this charade of fake elections, the Biden administration — after feathering the nests of American enemies such as Russia and China — continues to try to make a deal that will not be kept, shower Iran’s regime with masses of money it demands from America’s hard-working taxpayers, and lift sanctions to further empower yet another corrupt and predatory regime.

Iran’s presidential “elections” will be held in less than three weeks. Do not, however, be deceived by any narrative that suggests the mullahs’ system is democratic or that the people of Iran freely or fairly get to elect their president.

Iran’s mullahs claim that the Islamic Republic is a “democratic” system of governance. Iran’s Supreme Leader recently boasted about the Islamic “democracy,” the regime’s political system and people’s crucial role in influencing and shaping the political establishment:

“The Islamic Revolution transformed the rule of a country from a despotic monarchy into a popular, democratic republic run by the people. Today, the nation of Iran rules over its own destiny. It is the people who choose. They may make a right choice or a wrong choice, but it is they who choose. This is very important.”

In reality, though, the Iran is an authoritarian, theocratic regime masquerading as a democracy. The ordinary people of Iran do not run the system and have no influence whatsoever in choosing who will be their leaders.

To clarify, let us begin with the top position in the Islamic Republic: the Supreme Leader. The Supreme Leader of Iran is not elected. This position is held by an ayatollah who enjoys the final say in the nation’s domestic and foreign policy issues; who is the chief of Iran’s military institutions including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), its elite branch the Quds Force and the paramilitary group Basij, and who also appoints the IRGC’s senior cadre and generals and the head of the judicial system.

Next in line are the positions of the president and members of the parliament (Majlis) in the Iranian regime. The President of the Islamic Republic basically does not have power. He acts as a puppet for the Supreme Leader and the IRGC, and facilitates their achieving their parochial and ideological goals, both regionally and internationally. One example, for instance, is the 2015 nuclear deal that the Iranian president reached with the US Obama administration and getting sanctions lifted for the Iranian regime.

The Chinese Coronavirus is Our Tiananmen Test Benjamin Weingarten

https://weingarten.substack.com/p/the-chinese-coronavirus-is-our-tiananmen?token

As with the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, we are once again at an inflection point in our relationship with China, faced with the carnage caused most directly by a malevolent CCP.

The Chinese coronavirus crisis may well represent this generation’s Tiananmen Square test.

The test is as follows: With the CCP inflicting incalculable costs in blood and treasure through its unique role in spreading the coronavirus, and its related menacing behavior, will we demand reparations, or will we let the regime off scot-free, emboldening it, and encouraging it to act with impunity and still more reckless abandon in its quest for hegemony going forward?

We failed this test in 1989.

Then, when presented with the image of “Tank Man,” we did something even worse than turning our back on him. Our immediate response to the CCP’s massacre of democracy protesters was toothless. But ultimately, we proceeded still further to embrace the Communist regime, effectively rewarding its villainy by integrating it into the global economic, financial, and geopolitical system.

This is the lead-in to an article I published in April of last year at American Greatness that becomes ever more relevant as the lab-leak theory has suddenly been mainstreamed.

On this, the 32nd anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, I wanted to re-share this piece, which you can read in full here.

Because They Got Away with Russiagate Having previously been exposed without being held to account, the Left is now emboldened. By Thaddeus G. McCotter

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/04/because-they-got-away-with-russiagate/

The Left’s ideology actively promotes and preys upon paranoia, envy, and dependence. Parroted by its mockingbird media, it crafts and inculcates an alternate reality in which the Left accepts its own lies as articles of its secular faith. 

Moreover, the Left projects its paranoia, envy, and dependence upon the rest of the country, all in its lust to attain the power to compel and coerce its fellow citizens. But to believe its calumnies, one must abandon reason. 

The Left believes there are more than 50 genders, but that it is you who live in an alternate reality. The Left believes “climate change” will destroy the planet in nine years unless we adopt socialism, but it’s you who live in an alternate reality. The Left adamantly denied and censored reports COVID-19 may have escaped from a Wuhan laboratory, but it’s you who live in an alternate reality. The 2020 election was a perfectly pristine election despite elected Democratic Party officials (with the complicity of corporate robber barons) exceeding their powers to alter voting laws to tilt the field in the party’s favor (they would say “fortified”), but it’s you who live in an alternate reality. The Left claims it loves America so much it wants to transform everything about it, but it’s you who live in an alternate reality. 

The full list is long and growing, for the Left’s delusions abound with cognitive dissonance (in the guise of moral relativism) its favored weapon against facts; and its regressive ideology an ultimate guard against reality. Like people who have exposed themselves to radiation, the Left in pimping these vices has contaminated itself with paranoia, envy, and dependence, giving shape to its warped, alternate reality.

Charitably, in many instances we can pray and light candles for our leftist adversaries. But it is unconscionable for us not to hold them to account when their alternate reality spurs their abuses of power. If we do not and fail to alert our fellow citizens, the Left will be empowered to intensify its undermining of the foundations of our free republic. 

To wit: Russiagate.

AOC: We Can Reduce Violent Crime And Lower Incarceration Rates If We Stop Building Jails By Gabe Kaminsky

https://thefederalist.com/2021/06/03/aoc-we-can-reduce-violent-crime-and-lower-incarceration-rates-if-we-stop-building-jails/

New York Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said at a press conference Thursday the U.S. should “stop building” jails if we want to reduce the inmate population.

“It is not acceptable for us to use jails as garbage bins for human beings. We need to treat people and see them as human,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “If we want to reduce violent crime, reduce the number of people in our jails, the answer is to stop building more of them.”

“The answer is to make sure we actually build more hospitals, we pay organizers, we get people mental health care,” she said.  “It’s to support communities, not throw them away.”

The Islamification of large parts of England By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/06/the_islamification_of_large_parts_of_england.html

In 1981/1982, for my junior year abroad, I attended Leeds University in Leeds, a city in Yorkshire, up in the north of England. At the time, being there was tremendously satisfying because, while southern England was then a very international (and tourist-ridden) region, Leeds was still extremely British, as was the surrounding countryside. By 2004, though, while in Florida, I met a woman from Leeds who told me that large parts of Yorkshire had come under Muslim control. A new book reveals that, in the ensuing 17 years, it’s only become worse.

Ed Husain, a former Muslim radical who is now a professor at Georgetown University, traveled across England to find out just how much Islamification has occurred in the country that provided the template for American liberties. What Husain found is disheartening, especially in the north of England where Islam took root while London ignored it.

Bradford, for example, is a former industrial hub about 25 minutes east of Leeds. It was a quintessentially England manufacturing city during the industrial revolution. Now, though, as Husain described to the Daily Mail, it’s becoming a hardline Islamic city:

In nearby Bradford, Ed was amazed by the lack of white English people in the city, and asked a Muslim taxi driver ‘where they are’.

He was told they had all ‘gone with the wind.’

There is a lioness in Carmel, New York, who is fighting for the children By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/06/there_is_a_lioness_in_carmel_new_york_who_is_fighting_for_the_children.html

In Carmel, New York, there is a woman named Tatiana Ibrahim. She is a warrior and a heroine. She stood up at a school board meeting and gave the board members what-for because the teachers in her children’s school district are bringing Marxism to the classroom in the form of Critical Race Theory (“CRT”), defund the police lessons, and other leftist concepts.

In the past couple of months, more and more parents are starting to fight back against the plague of leftism that has been infecting America’s classrooms. This leftist instruction has been going on for a long time (I fought it with my kids’ education beginning two decades ago), but 2020 had two factors that brought it into the open.

The first factor was distance learning because of COVID, which meant that parents got a window into their children’s classrooms. The second factor was the maddened escalation of CRT because of the George Floyd riots and Black Lives Matter’s subsequent cultural ascendency.

Parents are sending open letters to schools and speaking up at school board meetings. Each of these parents is a true hero. However, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone with the passion and clarity that Tatiana Ibrahim brings to the subject. She completely dominates the room.

The only thing disturbing about this video is the passivity of the other parents in the room. They should be applauding her wildly. Instead, they sit there and you know that each of those parents is desperately hoping that the “educators” before whom they grovel is not putting that parent’s name – or worse, the name of that parent’s child – on a list for future harassment:

Trump Withdrawal Syndrome Media outlets like CNN and Facebook navigate the post-presidency. James Freeman

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-withdrawal-syndrome-11622839108?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

Professional media folk couldn’t live with former President Donald Trump’s policies. Now they can’t seem to live without him as a foil. Just as the press and the public health establishment are begrudgingly admitting that Mr. Trump’s controversial theory that Covid-19 might have originated in a lab is plausible, a giant Silicon Valley publisher is formalizing a ban on contributions from the 45th president. The Journal’s Paul Ziobro and Jeff Horwitz report:

Facebook Inc. said it is suspending Donald Trump’s accounts for two years, formalizing a long-term penalty for the former U.S. president after its independent Oversight Board said the company was wrong to keep the ban open-ended.
Facebook said it would revisit the suspension two years from the date of its initial move to suspend him on Jan. 7, the day after the riot at the U.S. Capitol. Assuming he is then reinstated, Mr. Trump will face a “strict set of rapidly escalating sanctions” if he commits further violations, including permanent removal of his pages and accounts, the company said.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has previously expressed a desire to run an open platform enabling free speech. So much for that. This latest decision to attempt to edit U.S. political speech means many more editing decisions await. The Journal reporters note:

In responding to the board’s criticism, Facebook also opens the door for more, as the company will now be required to make more subjective decisions on whether posts from political figures violate its rules surrounding misinformation, hate speech and other issues that are hotly debated. Those judgment calls are likely to escalate partisan complaints around whether the company is being fair in how it applies the rules.

Will Facebook now ban Dr. Anthony Fauci and other scientists who dismissed the idea of a laboratory origin for Covid-19 in 2020?

As for the former President, Mr. Trump responds to the Facebook ban with an emailed statement:

Next time I’m in the White House there will be no more dinners, at his request, with Mark Zuckerberg and his wife. It will be all business!

Meanwhile in the business of cable news, the absence of Mr. Trump has led to smaller audiences both before and after dinner. Ted Johnson at Deadline reports:

Fox News topped the ratings in key categories during the month of May, but cable news overall saw significant declines from the same period a year earlier…
In primetime, Fox News averaged 2.17 million viewers, down 37% from the same period a year earlier; MSNBC posted 1.49 million, down 22%; and CNN drew 913,000, down 45%. In the 25-54 demo, Fox News had 345,000, down 38%, followed by CNN with 218,000, down 53%, and MSNBC with 199,000, falling 32%…