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February 2022

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Free Speech in the UK? by Judith Bergman

By on February 13th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18208/free-speech-britain

“It isn’t hate to speak the truth.” — J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books, Twitter, June 6, 2020.
“An entire generation are puzzled by the idea that anyone has the right to say things they don’t agree with…for most people, true free speech has ceased to exist…. On some issues, such as the transgender controversy, it is virtually impossible to say anything without attracting the attention of the Thought Police.” — Peter Hitchens, author and journalist, Daily Mail, December 11, 2021.
“Among millions, the idea that you can defend someone’s right to say something you disagree with is now puzzling. They have no idea why anyone would do that. For them, the debate is over, they have won, and those who oppose them are stupid and wrong.” — Peter Hitchens, Daily Mail, December 11, 2021.
“They also view my doubts about the theory of man-made global warming as ‘denial’ of a fact which they regard as proven. To them, this is little short of sabotage of efforts to combat this peril.” — Peter Hitchens, Daily Mail, December 11, 2021.
“All of them believed that they owned the truth, that they were profoundly good and that those who got in their way were therefore evil as well as wrong.” — Peter Hitchens, Daily Mail, December 11, 2021.

Freedom of speech is doing extremely poorly in the UK, according to a recent YouGov poll. When Britons were asked what should be the priority, 43% said protecting people from offensive or hateful speech should be the priority, while only 38% said the focus should be on protecting free speech. Generally, men and conservative voters were more concerned about protecting free speech, while women, younger people and Labour voters were more concerned about blocking offensive or hateful speech.

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Oligarchy’s Response to the Freedom Convoy Bodes Ill for Them The deposition of Canada’s prime minister is unlikely to be so sanguinary as the Ceaușescus in Romania. But it will be no less definitive.  By Roger Kimball

By on February 13th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/02/12/oligarchys-response-to-the-freedom-convoy-bodes-ill-for-them/

As I write, Canadian police, many dressed in military garb and supported by armored vehicles and snipers(!), are moving in to enforce several court orders and demands of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Ontario Premier Doug Ford, and others that the “Freedom Convoy” of Canadian truckers stop blocking the Ambassador Bridge, the major artery between the United States and Canada, and disperse. Some of the protestors are leaving while many others are standing their ground. 

Will the heavy hand of the state succeed in crushing the protest? In the short term, perhaps. 

On Friday, Fox News host Tucker Carlson presented a montage of Canadian and American officials berating the truckers and threatening all sorts of dire retribution should they fail to obey their masters. Carlson was right: the hysterical squeaking of Justin Trudeau, U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and the other political mannequins was pathetic—a sign of impotence, not strength. 

But impotence comes in long-term and short-term varieties. Long-term, I think Carlson is right. Officialdom’s response to the Freedom Convey is a desperate effort to put the genie of liberty back in the bottle. Ultimately, it will not work. But on the way to that failure there will be plenty of opportunities for the coercive power of the state to manifest itself. 

As General Mark “White Rage” Milley, the anti-Trump chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, put it when commenting on the January 6, 2021 protest in Washington, D.C., “We’re the guys with the guns.” Well, some of them, anyway. Joe Biden was trespassing on the same territory when he said that if you want to take on the government, you’ll need “some nukes and F15s.” 

I do not think that is true. In fact, I would say we are rapidly approaching a situation that the columnist Matt Taibbi evoked when he suggested that Justin Trudeau’s response to the Freedom Convey might be his “Ceaușescu moment.” After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the oxygen of legitimacy rapidly went out of Communist dictatorships throughout Eastern Europe. Romania’s Nicolae Ceaușescu was one of the unlucky tyrants. He went from delivering a speech to an angry populace to facing, along with his wife Elena, a firing squad four days later on Christmas Day. 

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Black History Month and the usable past Aggregate history washes away the details that represent an actual life lived : Peter Wood

By on February 13th, 2022

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/black-history-month-usable-past-ancestry/

This is Black History Month when we are invited to think through a certain spectrum of the people who came before us. As it happens, I am very much interested in black history. I wrote a book about it, 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project, and several books about diversity, and I have been working for several years on a nearly completed documentary about the early days of black theater and film. But, lacking any black ancestors, I must make do with my own sketchy line of progenitors.

When I was growing up in the Fifties and Sixties, my father attempted to find his great-grandfather — GGF in anthropological parlance. GGF had an air of mystery since all anyone knew about him was his last name and GGM’s inveterate reply when asked about him: “He was lost at sea.” His name had been razored out of the family Bible. My father doubted the bit about his being “lost at sea.” The family haled from the far side of the Adirondacks, where few fathers were lost full fathom five. Dad wanted to know more. This led to detours on family vacations to rural cemeteries and county court houses in Upstate New York.

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OUR WASTE OF THE WEEK: BIDEN ADMINISTRATION TO SEND MORE U.S. MONEY TO AFGHANISTAN

By on February 13th, 2022

In this week’s “Waste Of The Week,” we spotlighted the Biden Administration’s plans to continue spending your hard-earned tax-dollars in Afghanistan.
 
Over the past 20 years, the United States spent nearly $2 trillion in Afghanistan – while we experienced 22,000 military casualties and lost 2,400 American soldiers.
 
If we move forward with the Administration’s plans to fund Afghanistan through the U.S. Department of Treasury – we run the risk of funding the world’s most dangerous foreign terrorist organization, The Taliban.

U.S. Senator Joni Ernst and other senate colleagues responded to these plans and sent a letter to Secretary of State, Antony Blinken and Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen, sharing their concerns and inquiring as to whether U.S. taxpayer dollars have gone to Afghanistan since the withdrawal in August 2021.
 
Will the Administration respond to Ernst?
 https://komonews.com/news/nation-world/taxpayer-dollars-used-for-afghan-humanitarian-aid-says-watchdog-group-biden-afghanistan-military-taliban-treasury-joni-ernst-antony-blinken-iowa-haqqani

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Inside the Woke Indoctrination Machine After watching 100 hours of leaked video, we now fully grasp the danger of this ideology in schools. By Andrew Gutmann and Paul Rossi

By on February 13th, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/inside-the-woke-indoctrination-machine-diversity-equity-inclusion-bipoc-schools-conference-11644613908?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Last spring we exposed how two elite independent schools in New York had become corrupted by a divisive obsession with race, helping start the national movement against critical race theory. Schools apply this theory under the guise of diversity, equity and inclusion programming. Until now, however, neither of us fully grasped the dangers of this ideology or the true motives of its practitioners. The goal of DEI isn’t only to teach students about slavery or encourage courageous conversations about race, it is to transform schools totally and reshape society radically.

Over the past month we have watched nearly 100 hours of leaked videos from 108 workshops held virtually last year for the National Association of Independent Schools’ People of Color Conference. The NAIS sets standards for more than 1,600 independent schools in the U.S., driving their missions and influencing many school policies. The conference is NAIS’s flagship annual event for disseminating DEI practices, and more than 6,000 DEI practitioners, educators and administrators attended this year. Intended as professional development and not meant for the public, these workshops are honest, transparent and unfiltered—very different from how private schools typically communicate DEI initiatives. These leaked videos act as a Rosetta Stone for deciphering the DEI playbook.

The path to remake schools begins with the word “diversity,” which means much more than simply increasing the number of students and faculty of color—referred to in these workshops as “Bipoc,” which stands for “black, indigenous and people of color.” DEI experts urge schools to classify people by identities such as race, convince them that they are being harmed by their environment, and turn them into fervent advocates for institutional change.

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The Pentagon’s Political Priorities Sleep well tonight. The U.S. Army has plans to defeat climate change.

By on February 13th, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-pentagons-political-priorities-army-climate-change-11644614919

“But never fear, the Pentagon is also on high alert over identity politics. This week it pumped out a press release about the “need for diversity, equity and inclusion to be a consideration or part of all decisions in the military.”

The world looks more dangerous every day, so let’s check in on the folks responsible for defending America. The Biden Defense Department hasn’t released a National Defense Strategy and the Pentagon can’t adjust its priorities while it’s stuck in continuing budget resolutions from Congress. But the Army is devoting time and effort to trumpeting its new plan to fight the invisible enemy of climate change.

“Climate change endangers national and economic security, and the health and well-being of the American people,” the first-ever Army Climate Strategy says. Among the stated goals: a 50% reduction in Army net greenhouse gas pollution by 2030; installing a microgrid on every installation by 2035; and converting its nontactical fleet of vehicles (vans, for example) to all-electric by 2035.

The Army pitches this as a natural extension of its mission to plan and prosecute wars, though nothing about less reliable energy sources or more expensive logistics will make the Army a better fighting force. The Pentagon insists it can fight climate change while dealing with threats like Russia and China, but focus is a finite resource and the service has far more urgent priorities.

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MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Science shows the vaccine mandates are no longer necessary Dr. Joel Zinberg

By on February 13th, 2022

https://nypost.com/2022/02/11/science-shows-the-vaccine-mandates-are-no-longer-necessary/

State and local vaccine mandates might be legal — but are they necessary or advisable? The evolving science says no.

This is a particularly pressing question now as many unvaccinated workers have or are about to lose their jobs. Nearly 3,000 New York City employees — including essential workers such as police officers, firemen and teachers — face termination for refusing the shots.

The time has come for reconsideration. Whatever justifications once supported COVID-19 vaccine mandates have largely disappeared.

Mandates are typically justified as a way to protect the population from infection. The more people vaccinated, the less likely anyone is to become infected and to transmit the virus on to someone else.

Mandate advocates argue that even if people decide to endanger their own lives by remaining unvaccinated, their decision endangers others by exposing them to disease. Moreover, they claim failure to vaccinate could lead to large numbers of sick people, overwhelming the healthcare system and interfering with others ability to obtain care for COVID-19 and other medical needs.

Vaccines are safe and remain the most effective way of protecting oneself against serious COVID-19 illness and death, even with Omicron.Charles Krupa/AP

The evolution of the pandemic and the emergence of the Omicron variant have undermined these arguments. When they were first authorized, the COVID-19 vaccines were highly effective in protecting vaccine recipients from infection. But vaccines’ effectiveness against transmission has progressively declined with successive waves of viral variants. With the now predominant Omicron variant, full two-dose vaccination is roughly half as effective against infection as it was against the highly transmissible Delta variant. Breakthrough infections are now common and not the exception.

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Authoritarian Science and the Case of Hydroxychloroquine The approach to medical information increasingly taken by authorities and the media is damaging to public health and scientific inquiry. Connor Harris

By on February 13th, 2022

https://www.city-journal.org/hydroxychloroquine-and-authoritarian-science

Imperial County, California, a poor, largely Hispanic agricultural region in the southeastern corner of the state, has been hit hard by Covid-19. By the end of January, according to the New York Times’s Covid-19 database, Imperial County had suffered 845 Covid deaths, or 4.7 per thousand inhabitants—a rate almost 80 percent higher than the U.S. average. The case fatality rate in Imperial County is 1.44 percent, the second-highest in California—and was significantly higher, 2.10 percent, at the end of October 2021 before the Omicron wave.

Two doctors in Imperial County, though—George Fareed and Brian Tyson, who run the All Valley Urgent Care network of medical centers—claim to have done far better with their Covid-19 patients. In fact, they claim near-perfect success: in a book that they published last January, they claim to have seen more than 7,000 patients and had only three deaths, all among patients who began treatment in later disease stages. A statistical analysis of part of their results by the statistician Mathew Crawford, included in their book, counts only seven hospitalizations and three deaths among 4,376 patients seen up through March 13, 2021—a reduction in hospitalization risk of well over 90 percent from the county average, even after (admittedly imperfect) statistical adjustments for differences in age between Fareed and Tyson’s patients and the general population.

According to prevailing medical views, Fareed and Tyson’s claimed results should be impossible. The doctors’ first protocol was based around hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), a repurposed anti-malarial drug, with other drugs such as ivermectin as more recent additions. Received opinion on the drugs is that ivermectin is at best unproven in treating Covid-19 (the Food and Drug Administration maintains an official webpage warning against using it as a treatment for the virus), and that HCQ has been actively disproved: early optimism from laboratory experiments and small clinical studies did not hold up in larger, more rigorous trials.

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