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June 2022

Russiagate Misunderstood: Andrew McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/06/27/russiagate-misunderstood/

The FBI was Hillary’s collaborator, not her victim

When is a lie not a lie? When it’s a cover story.

That, in a nutshell, explains why Hillary Clinton–campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, who quite intentionally gave the FBI false information about his motive in conveying derogatory information about Donald Trump, was nevertheless acquitted by a Washington, D.C., jury in the first trial generated by special counsel John Durham’s “Russiagate” investigation.

Durham, formerly the United States attorney for Connecticut, has been conducting his probe for over three years. In 2019, President Trump’s then newly appointed attorney general, Bill Barr, assigned him to open an inquiry into the origins of the Obama-era investigation that was premised on suspicions that Trump was a clandestine agent of Russia. Barr had preliminarily looked into the apparent bases for the FBI’s “spying” on the 2016 Republican presidential nominee, as the AG aptly put it, and found reasons to question the bureau’s basis for its assertion, in sworn applications for classified warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), that it believed Russia was coordinating with the Trump campaign in cyberespionage efforts to undermine the election.

‘Climate primitives’ are destroying our standard of living By Thomas Lifson

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/06/climate_primitives_are_destroying_our_standard_of_living.html

Australian commentator Andrew Bolt has come up with a great term for the green fanatics who are shutting down energy production from dependable fuels with no reliable alternatives.  They reject modern agriculture because it uses chemicals derived from hydrocarbons, but offer no prospect of feeding the earth’s hungry billions. Bolt’s latest column (paywalled) the Herald Sun in Melbourne (he also appears on Sky News) has come up with an apt term for such people: “Climate primitives.”

Logo for The Bolt Report on Sky News

Because of the paywall, I must limit myself to fair use excerpts, but the logic of what he says is strong enough that readers can grasp the essence.

Congratulations! We’re now becoming one of those primitive societies that our earth-worshipping Left dream lived in “harmony” with nature. (snip)

… like pre-colonialism Tasmanian Aborigines, who for some bizarre reason gave up fishing 4000 years ago, even though it often meant going hungry in winter.

Or like people living in parts of Nigeria who won’t feed their growing children meat or eggs for fear the spirits will make them grow evil.

Bill Maher: “The White Liberal Is To The Left Of The Average Democratic Black Voter,” “Most Black Voters Are Moderate” Posted By Ian Schwartz

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2022/06/11/bill_maher_the_white_liberal_is_to_the_left_of_the_average_democratic_black_voter_most_black_voters_are_moderate.html

HBO host Bill Maher debated Bernie Sanders, socialism and black voters with Cornel West, Kellyanne Conway and Josh Barro in the online-only Overtime portion of his show ‘Real Time.’

“Maybe people are just not that in love with socialism,” Maher said about Sanders’ losing campaign in 2020.

“It’s not socialism,” West objected.

“Bernie is a socialist,” Maher said.

“He’s a New Deal liberal,” West responded.

“He calls himself a socialist,” Maher retorted.

“A lot of people like to call themselves things,” West said.

“Why would you want to call yourself a term that doesn’t have a positive connotation?” Maher responded.

“We have polling on this,” Maher said. “The white liberal is to the left of the average Democratic black voter. On social issues and economic issues. Most black voters are moderate, not liberal. More white Democrats are liberal.”

Joe Biden and the poison of identity politics The most powerful man in the West is resuscitating racial thinking. Brendan O’Neill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/06/09/joe-biden-and-the-poison-of-identity-politics/

When we hear the word ‘identitarian’, we tend to think of a certain kind of person. Young, overeducated, not a fan of freedom of speech, probably white but positively obsessed with the pain and suffering of black people. They’ll be a TikToker too, no doubt, and a professional protester, forever turning up to public gatherings to shout ‘Black Lives Matter!’, or, for extra woke cred, ‘Black Trans Lives Matter!’. Well, it’s time we shook up our vision of identitarians. Next time you hear that i-word, think not of earnest Ivy League youths who spend too much time on social media, but rather of a 79-year-old man, stiff, not quite all there, and in possession of real political power rather than just influencer fame. Think of Joe Biden.

President Biden is the most powerful identitarian in the world. His presidency has been defined by identity politics. In the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, anti-woke liberals insisted that the insanity of identity politics would be kept in check if the American people ditched Trump and replaced him with Biden. Biden’s an old-fashioned political operator, they said, not a player in the pseudo-left’s crazy culture war against equality, reason and science. How wrong they were. Biden has guzzled down the identity Kool-Aid. He seems to view everything through the prism of race. He openly says he will pick people for high office on the basis of their skin colour rather than their skill set. Biden’s identitarian presidency risks overturning the great gains of the post-civil rights era, and replacing the humanising ideal of equality with the divisive new ideology of ‘equity’.

Biden’s hyper-identitarianism has been thrown into sharp relief by the Ilya Shapiro controversy. Shapiro was a senior lecturer at Georgetown University Law School. He resigned on Monday after months of controversy over a tweet he posted in February. Following Biden’s race-conscious promotion of the attorney Ketanji Brown Jackson as his pick for the Supreme Court, Mr Shapiro tweeted: ‘Objectively best pick for Biden is Sri Srinivasan, who is solid prog and v smart. Even has identity politics benefit of being first Asian (Indian) American. But alas doesn’t fit into latest intersectionality hierarchy so we’ll get lesser black woman.’ It was those last three words – ‘lesser black woman’ – that caused a social-media storm.

The Soros-backed takeover of Spanish-language radio Why isn’t the right pushing back against the “Latinx” agenda?Ben Domenech

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/the-soros-funded-takeover-of-spanish-language-radio/

This week brought revelations that a consortium including multiple interested leftist participants has banded together to attempt to buy a number of Spanish-language radio stations across the country. The effort, backed in part by George Soros, is unsurprising. But it is also an underrated indication of the weakness of vision on both the left and the right.

It illustrates an approach used by the left toward Hispanic outreach, which has been consistently top-down. As opposed to listening to the priorities of these communities and making any effort to meet them where they are, the Left has instead tried to assert and propagandize to them. Univision, Fusion, and a number of other left-driven media outlets have attempted to control the narrative heard by Spanish speakers in America.

This approach has been largely ineffective, much to the surprise of those who predicted “demography as destiny” decades ago.

Hispanic Americans, it turns out, actually think for themselves. Instead of prioritizing things in accordance with the wishes of those advancing Critical Race Theory propaganda, and those who advocate for black and brown coalitions in favor of socialist policies, those who are descended from or often related to people who have experienced socialism firsthand recoil from that prospect when it comes to America.

The ‘Get Trump’ Show It is never the pretext—putative Russian collusion or protests at the Capitol—that is at issue but rather the ontological unacceptability of Trump and all he stands for. By Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2022/06/11/the-get-trump-show/

Perhaps the best comment I saw in the hours leading up to the opening performance of Washington’s latest entertainment, the January 6 committee’s “Get Trump” show, was in the Babylon Bee. The Bee promised that Miley Cyrus would be performing at halftime. Alas, our new paper of record was pulling our leg. Miley was nowhere to be seen. It was only Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the show’s emcee, and his substitute for Vanna White, soon-to-be-former Representative Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.). 

That was a disappointment. But at least the Bee was accurate in its description of the show’s basic plot line. “The January 6 Committee said,” the Bee reported, that “the opening ceremony of the hearing will include previously unseen video footage of the Capitol riots, followed by a ritual burning of Trump in effigy.” The burning happened off stage, it is true, but I am told that the snazzy television producer the committee engaged to produce the show provided some aromatherapy for the audience inside the Capitol.  

Discussions are underway with Gwyneth Paltrow to provide a scratch-and-sniff option for home viewers in season two so no one need miss the ritual aspects of this sacrificial reenactment.  

The Democrats went all-out with this entertainment. I cannot, however, pronounce it an unqualified success. Nor did the public, which mostly reacted with a yawn. (The ratings, many outlets reported, were “dismal.”) No surprise there. For one thing, as certain carping critics have noted, this entertainment is really only an updated rebranding of that earlier Democrat-sponsored farce “The Robert Mueller Show,” starring Robert Mueller and co-starring James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Lisa Page, and Peter Strzok, with cameo appearances by Michael Sussmann, Glenn Simpson, and George Papadopoulos, among others. 

The Decline of Merit as a Measurement of Value-Sydney Williams

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

In the first half of the 20th Century (and earlier), through the early 1950s, wealth and social class were more important determinants than merit, in terms of college acceptance, employment gained, and wealth accumulated. White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant men were favored. Appropriately, attitudes changed in the post-War years, with merit playing a bigger role. Colleges and employers looked more at innate ability, personal drive, and willingness to work hard rather than family connections or schools attended. Race, gender and religious prejudices still applied, but that also began to change in the 1960s and ‘70s, with civil and women’s rights legislation, color-blind applications, and with many single-sex colleges going co-ed. Now we appear to have reverted to earlier times when, once again, identity – race, gender, ethnicity, and even sexual orientation – is valued above merit.

For colleges and universities, the use of merit – with SATs and ACTs as the standard measurements for educational potential – was an attempt to seek out the most qualified students, regardless of sex, race, or from whence they came. It is not a perfect system (no system is), but it has, at least, less bias than subjective measures. However, those exams now disproportionately favor Asians, so are deemed unfair, as they fail woke standards of diversity, inclusion and equity, standards which, by the way, exclude those with conservative political opinions and unsanctified cultural preferences.

Should merit alone be the standard for admitting a new student or hiring a new employee? Of course not. There are other valued traits: character, moral and common sense, integrity, diligence, loyalty. But, while many of those traits can be perceived through a subjective lens, the determination of merit is largely objective. It was almost sixty years ago that Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, where he spoke of a time when his four little children “will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Six decades later, woke progressives insist that the color of one’s skin does matter. The implication being that blacks cannot compete without assistance from the state. It is false and demeaning.

I Rented an Electric Car for a Four-Day Road Trip. I Spent More Time Charging It Than I Did Sleeping.by Rachel Wolfe

https://www.wsj.com/articles/i-rented-an-electric-car-for-a-four-day-road-trip-i-spent-more-time-charging-it-than-i-did-sleeping-11654268401?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=1

Our writer drove from New Orleans to Chicago and back to test the feasibility of taking a road trip in an electric vehicle. She wouldn’t soon do it again.

I thought it would be fun.

That’s what I told my friend Mack when I asked her to drive with me from New Orleans to Chicago and back in an electric car.

I’d made long road trips before, surviving popped tires, blown headlights and shredded wheel-well liners in my 2008 Volkswagen Jetta. I figured driving the brand-new Kia EV6 I’d rented would be a piece of cake.

If, that is, the public-charging infrastructure cooperated. We wouldn’t be the first to test it. Sales of pure and hybrid plug-ins doubled in the U.S. last year to 656,866—over 4% of the total market, according to database EV-volumes. More than half of car buyers say they want their next car to be an EV, according to recent Ernst & Young Global Ltd. data.

By the Numbers

The Buy Side team is independent from the Wall Street Journal newsroom.

Our reporter’s four-day, three-night EV road trip included many charging stops, little sleep—and less junk food than you might expect

Miles driven: 2,013
Number of charges: 14
Total charging cost: $175
Hours spent waiting to charge: 18
Hours of sleep: 16
Calories of junk food consumed (estimated): 1,465
Giant chicken statues passed: 1

Oh—and we aimed to make the 2,000-mile trip in just under four days so Mack could make her Thursday-afternoon shift as a restaurant server.

Navi Pillay’s revitalized anti-Israel career By Ruthie Blum

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-709090

Former UN high commissioner for human rights Navanethem “Navi” Pillay has made a career of bashing Israel. The 80-year-old South African — who hails from Durban, home of two antisemitic “world conferences on racism” — is now back in the saddle doing what she loves most.

Her latest prized gig consists of chairing the “Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel,” established last year by the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) for the purpose of concocting a report to demonize the Jewish state.

This isn’t how the resolution (S-30/1), adopted at the UNHRC “emergency special session” on May 27, 2001, was worded, of course. But the gist was as clear as the title of the bogus commission is long.

Nor did Pillay or co-commission members Miloon Kothari of India and Chris Sidoti of Australia disappoint. On the contrary, they came up with just the right results to reach the foregone conclusion that Israel is an illegitimate aggressor.

In its introduction to the 18-page assault disguised as an official document to be presented to the 50th session of the UN General Assembly, which kicks off on Monday, the report expresses gratitude to the “Government of the State of Palestine for facilitating consultations and meetings with relevant authorities,” and to the “Government of Jordan, which allowed the Commission access to its territory in March 2022.”

The Jan. 6 Committee May Be a Sham, but It’s a Deathly Serious One Benjamin Weingarten

https://weingarten.substack.com/p/the-jan-6-committee-may-be-a-sham?utm_source=email&s=r

The Committee should be thought of as the most nakedly partisan force in the Whole-of-Ruling Class War on Wrongthink. 

The January 6 Committee may be Kabuki theater, literally stage-managed by an ex-corporate media executive.

It may prove wholly futile, as House Democrats themselves have seemed to acknowledge. Americans do not seem interested in litigating the Capitol breach 18 months later.

But, as I write in a new piece at Epoch Times, we ought not to let the cynical spectacle of the hearings distract from the tyrannical nature of the Committee, and how it fits in the Whole-of-Ruling Class War on Wrongthink being waged against Americans.

As I write in part:

The Committee treats its political opposition as if it is terroristic: It hoovers up the personal information and communications of countless Americans, and compels private companies to do the same. It probes conservative organizations and follows their money flows. It issues subpoenas against sitting members of Congress for their Wrongthink. It destroys the concept of executive privilege, seemingly because in its view Donald Trump was a “domestic violent extremist” leader. It submits criminal referrals to the Justice Department to carry out its jihad. How would it act differently if it was pursuing a terrorist conspiracy?