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March 2022

Elon Musk and the Chinese Temptation by Peter Schweizer

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18357/elon-musk-china

“Other American CEOs have close relationships to the [Chinese Communist] Party. But [Elon] Musk is the only one who loudly praises Beijing while running a space company with incredibly sensitive and powerful defense applications.” — Isaac Stone Fish, Barron’s, November 13, 2020.

Musk’s dilemma is not unique. The close technology-sharing relationship between Tesla and SpaceX poses national security risks to his adopted home country, but so do Google’s and Microsoft’s work with China on artificial intelligence. U.S. government policy is predictably slow in catching up to the speed of hard-charging, globe-spanning enterprises like Musk’s, and the Chinese are only too happy to increase that gap.

At some point, however, companies such as SpaceX, Google and Microsoft, and the individual Americans who own, direct, or invest in them, will face a similar choice between their obligation to America and their pursuit of more profits abroad.

Elon Musk has fans all over the ideological spectrum. People on the Left love him for popularizing electric cars with his Tesla company, or maybe for openly smoking pot on podcaster Joe Rogan’s show. Conservatives love him for his entrepreneurial dash and penchant for standing up to politicians and Big Tech censorship of the internet. And everyone loves Musk for responding to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and severing of its communications links by making his Starlink satellite broadband internet service available in Ukraine and donating Starlink terminals to Ukrainians. The Starlink connectivity, according to one report, may even be helping armed Ukrainian drones target Russian military vehicles.

Less is known about Musk’s business dealings in Communist China, but that might be about to change.

The Enduring Lesson in the Gulags’ Defiant Wisdom: Michael Galak

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2022/03/the-enduring-lesson-in-the-gulags-defiant-wisdom/

The guiding wisdom of the wretches who endured a living death in the Soviet Union’s labour camps was simple: Ne ver’ Ne boisya Ne prosy — Don’t trust. Don’t fear. Don’t beg.

These short sentences crystallize the collective experience of the millions who went through the gulags and perished amid the permafrost of far-north Russia, paying with their lives for the demented dreams of world conquest by Marxists fanatics. These six crisp words summarize the resolve of the human spirit when it refuses to be broken while retaining individual dignity by resisting oppression and injustice, even when the odds are overwhelmingly against it.

Pronounced together those words are an unexpectedly powerful poem. This poetry of defiance, silent by necessity in the face of brutal force, coercion and humiliation, was the only form of resistance available to the enslaved by the totalitarian State. They are also the way for the West to respond to international bullies. But political will is required to succeed, and this is where the problem lies. 

What Lia Thomas Means The sudden prominence of transgenderism in the West owes in large part to compassion becoming unmoored from reason—and to ethics being reduced to compassion. Leor Sapir

https://www.city-journal.org/what-lia-thomas-means

If a single image could sum up Lia Thomas’s victory in the 500-yard freestyle event at the NCAA swimming championships last week, it would be that of Thomas and the runners-up taken right after they were awarded their medals. Behind a sign with the number “1” on it stands Thomas, who seems barely able to conceal embarrassment at what is undoubtedly an awkward situation. To the right, noticeably keeping their distance and a full head or two shorter, are the runners-up. Their smiles seem no less awkward.

The scene resembles an eerie propaganda video, in which a jubilant dictator can be seen waving at fawning crowds who know their lives depend on making it all look authentic. Thomas’s competitors will not face firing squads should they choose to complain, but they will almost certainly face a social media pile-on (assuming that Twitter doesn’t preemptively suspend them for suggesting that transgender women are not biological women). Their names and reputations will be dragged through the mud, their career prospects destroyed or severely curtailed, and their place on the college swim team—and, with it, their scholarships—jeopardized. A teammate of Thomas’s who criticized her participation in women’s sports told a U.K. newspaper that she would speak only on condition of anonymity, for she was concerned that future employers might Google her name and deem her “transphobic.” Meantime, those who support Thomas’s participation in women’s sports speak their minds freely and without fear of repercussions. What was that about transgender people being powerless?

On Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Terrible Judgment There is not much worse than a Supreme Court justice with a soft spot for mollycoddling pedophiles—a position Jackson has actually held since law school. By Josh Hammer

https://amgreatness.com/2022/03/24/on-ketanji-brown-jacksons-terrible-judgment/

The problem with Ketanji Brown Jackson, the 51-year-old federal appellate judge who is our senile president’s Supreme Court nominee, is not her on-paper qualifications. By most traditional metrics, she is “qualified.” She has served as both a district court and appellate court judge, served as vice-chairman of the U.S. Sentencing Commission, formerly clerked for Justice Stephen Breyer (the man she has been nominated to replace) and is a double-Harvard alum. In terms of “objective” criteria, this looks like an impressive résumé.

No, the problem with Judge Jackson is that she is a left-wing ideologue who, if successfully confirmed by the Senate, will devote the next few decades endeavoring to move the Supreme Court far to the left. All relevant indications are that she will approach her job not like her (slightly) more pragmatic former boss, but like a leftist activist—in the mode of her possible future colleague, the midwit partisan flack Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

Worse, Jackson, due to the outrageous race- and sex-conscious nominating process in which Joe Biden selected her, is uniquely unfit to render equal justice under the law for legal issues affecting race and sex. Even worse, she is a proponent of critical race theory and, despite getting nominated solely due to her XX chromosomal structure, appears ignorant as to how to differentiate men from women. Worst of all, she has shown a peculiar juridical soft spot for some of society’s very worst offenders—pedophiles and child pornographers.

The FBI’s ‘FAFO’ Kidnapping Plot Unravels By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2022/03/24/the-fbis-fafo-kidnapping-plot-unravels/

In the spring of 2020, or so the government’s story goes, an Iraq War veteran named Dan Chappel was scouring social media to find like-minded libertarians devoted to the Second Amendment when algorithms prompted him to a Facebook group called the Wolverine Watchmen, an online “militia group” formed just a few months earlier.

Chappel reportedly became alarmed at violent “anti-law enforcement” rhetoric posted by some members of the Watchmen, so he notified police. Two weeks later, Chappel, under the code name “Big Dan,” became the lead FBI informant in a wild plot to “kidnap” Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, an act of domestic terror according to the Justice Department. 

Four of the six men originally charged are now on trial in a Grand Rapids courtroom facing federal conspiracy to kidnap and weapons of mass destruction charges. The other two pleaded guilty and are testifying for the prosecution this week. But defense attorneys argue the FBI entrapped the men by using at least a dozen FBI confidential human sources (commonly described as informants) including Chappel and undercover FBI agents over the course of several months to concoct the plot.

During two days of testimony this week, Chappel struggled to maintain the government’s case while revealing what might be the most egregious example of FBI entrapment in decades. Chappel was paid more than $60,000 by the FBI for less than seven months of work; part of his compensation included a $3,300 laptop, a smart watch, and reimbursement for taking a loss after selling his eastern Michigan home that year.

Glory or weakness? In the end, at times of crisis, there are no allies for the Jews. The world is unmoved by Ayatollah threats to destroy Israel. Victor Sharpe

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/

I was recently looking back at the obscene 2009 Goldstone Report which unleashed all that we already knew of the world; that it hates the Jews and hates the reconstituted Jewish state. The report’s bigotry, its lies of commission and omission, were made even more unbearable by the fact that a South African Jew foolishly gave his name to it. Such Jews have often wittingly or unwittingly stabbed the very heart of the Jewish People.

I am reminded of some of the words of Menachem Begin when he stood before the graves of three young Jewish patriots, members of Irgun Zvai Leumi, hung by the British Mandatory authorities for merely possessing one unused pistol between them. Begin said the following:

“We believe with perfect faith that the Jewish People is indestructible. A people who suffered the cruelty, the oppression, and the holocausts of the long night of exile, which descended for so many centuries upon it and which, nevertheless, survived each and every one of its more powerful enemies, cannot be destroyed …

MOSHE DANN Why the two-state-solution is a bad idea Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz must stop calling the Palestinian Authority an “entity.”

https://www.jns.org/opinion/why-the-two-state-solution-is-a-bad-idea/?utm_source=The+Daily+Syndicate&utm_campaign=7d0c25a784-Daily+Syndicate+03-20-22+

Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz’s attempt to avoid recognizing the Palestinian Authority as a state by calling it an “entity” does not address the question of its goal: Israel’s destruction. On the contrary, calling it an “entity” complicates the issue by creating yet another layer of ambiguity to disguise what the P.A. really is—a collection of terrorist organizations ruled by the PLO in Ramallah and Hamas in Gaza.

In other words, “entity” is a rhetorical mask that enables “kicking the can down the road” for the terrorist quasi-state dedicated to destroying Israel. This isn’t a “solution;” it perpetuates the conflict and poses a threat to regional stability. Nor does it help the Palestinians, most of whom do not support terrorism. Yet, Israel’s government continues to back and fund the P.A. without demanding an end to its incitement.

The so-called “two-state solution” is promoted by those who support Palestinian demands for “self-determination,” and claim that Israel is a racist, apartheid nation illegally “occupying Palestinian territory.” Ignoring the risks, advocates of the “two-state solution” also declare that it’s the only alternative to one state under Israeli or Palestinian-Arab sovereignty “from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.”

Tirades by Twits Closing in on half a century of political rants at the Oscars. Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/03/tirades-twits-bruce-bawer/

It all goes back to the 1970s, as do so many of the worst features of contemporary American society and culture. At the 1974 Oscar ceremony, Roger Moore and Liv Ullmann stepped onstage to present the Best Actor award. For some reason, Ullmann decided to quote her frequent collaborator Ingmar Bergman: “Often to be most eloquent is to be silent.” This aperçu didn’t seem particularly relevant at the moment, but about five minutes later it would seem the very deepest wisdom.

Anyway, Moore and Ullmann broke out the envelope. The winner: Marlon Brando for The Godfather. But the person who walked down the aisle to accept the award wasn’t Brando. It was a young woman in an American Indian getup straight out of Central Casting. When Moore held the statuette out to her, she held up her palm to refuse it. And then she spoke.

“Hello. My name is Sacheen Littlefeather. I’m Apache and I am president of the National Native American Affirmative Image Committee. I’m representing Marlon Brando this evening.” Brando, she explained, was turning down his Oscar in protest against “the treatment of American Indians today by the film industry…and on television in movie re-runs.” He was, she added, also displeased by the government’s aggressive response to the recent occupation of the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, by members of the Oglala Lakota tribe.

The Black Agenda is a Nihilistic and Socialist Agenda When the end goal is to crush the American Dream. Jason Hill

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/03/black-agenda-nihilistic-and-socialist-agenda-jason-hill/

The Black Agenda: Bold Solutions for A Broken System, edited by Anna Gifty Opoku-Ageyman, a twenty-four-year old graduate student of public policy and economics at Harvard Kennedy School, has as its stated goal that, no matter where you show up on the spectrum of blackness, that the United States owes you something. The contributors are a broad phalanx of scholars and administrators from a multiplicity of fields wrung from public policy, computer science, medical engineering, economics, epidemiology, the Department of Agriculture and environmentalism and climate justice. The book is not a work in scholarship but, rather, short three-to-four-page opinion pieces on a swath of issues that deal with the absence of equity in health between the races, the need to abolish the carceral system and, in the writers’ views, the necessity of examining the disproportionate number of murders of black citizens committed by white police officers  versus those against white citizens.

The book is predicated on the notion that the United States has violated its social contract with black Americans and kept their expertise outside the framing narratives that influence public opinion and shape public policy. The book is also a formal accusation against those blacks who are experts and are part of the infrastructure of public discourse. For such individuals who are not affirmatively putting black expertise as one of the valences of their institutions or organization, then they are de facto part of the white counter-response to blackness. Part of the black agenda is a call for black experts to align their economic behaviors with their social and cultural values.

The real Russiagate smoking gun All these years later, the walls are closing in on Hillary: Peter Van Buren

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/real-russiagate-smoking-gun/

Hard as the programmers try and tell us there is only one story at a time — Ukraine for now — or that a trite phrase like “but her emails” dismisses one of the most important political events of our time, something sinister happened in the United States which demands our attention. If we remain distracted, it will happen again in 2024.

We are looking for two smoking guns now in connection with Russiagate. Today’s Part I will show that Hillary Clinton herself sat atop a large-scale conspiracy to use the tools of modern espionage to create and disseminate false information about Donald Trump. Part II to follow will show that the FBI was an active participant in that conspiracy. In the mainstream media vernacular, we are bearing witness.

In summer of 2016, Hillary Clinton’s private email server and her improper handling of classified information was the political story. Consensus was that the election was Hillary’s to lose — that her opponents in general and the Trump clown show in particular could not stop her.

But despite the mainstream media’s heroic attempts to downplay the importance of the emails, the issue lingered in the public mind, often aided by Hillary’s own contradictory statements.