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Ruth King

Journalists Face Disaster as COVID-19 Deaths Drop By Joel Zinberg

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/10/journalists-face-disaster-as-covid-19-

The media are grossly distorting the reality of the pandemic.

T he COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. is ebbing, but you would never know it from the headlines. Bad news, accurate or not, sells. And in the case of COVID-19, it also supports the journalists’ prejudices.

The seven-day moving average of new COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations peaked and started to decline in early September. Nationwide, COVID-19 hospitalization rates have decreased 17 percent over the past two weeks. Only 19 states had any increase, and many were small. The remaining 31 states and the District of Columbia saw hospitalization rates decline. But that hasn’t stopped journalists from publicizing localized exceptions to the good news.

A recent article, for example, starts with the statement, “Coronavirus patients are flooding and straining hospitals across the U.S.” and goes on to describe how some states are promulgating “crises standards of care” to guide health-care providers on how to allocate limited resources. The article cites as evidence high ICU utilization, ranging from 77 percent to 90 percent of capacity, in seven states: Alabama, Alaska, Georgia, Idaho, Kentucky, Montana, and Texas.

Yet the most recent government data shows other indicators of pandemic severity and health-care capacity look pretty good in those seven states. New COVID-19 hospital admissions per 100 beds were lower compared with the previous week in five of the states, with only small increases in Idaho and Montana. New COVID-19 cases per 100,000 population were lower in Georgia and Texas and essentially unchanged in Idaho. Test positivity rates (a rough indicator of how widespread disease is and how quickly it is spreading) were lower in all the states other than Montana. New COVID-19 deaths — a lagging indicator — were up in four states, down in another and unchanged in Georgia and Texas, which both showed declines in the three other indicators.

The ICU capacity figures cited in the article also lack context. What is the normal utilization level for the ICUs in those states? Most trauma-center and tertiary-care-center ICUs routinely functioned at 80–90 percent of capacity even before the pandemic. And ICU beds are not a static resource.

The Worst Campus in America for Free Speech By John Hirschauer

https://www.realcleareducation.com/articles/2021/10/01/the_worst_campus_in_america_for_free_speech_110642.html

Inside the 2021 College Free Speech Rankings

For the second straight year, survey data shows that a small private school in western Indiana is the nation’s worst college for free speech.

DePauw University again finished last in the 2021 College Free Speech Rankings, the second annual campus-speech-related survey and rankings project sponsored by the research firm College Pulse, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), and RealClearEducation. More than 37,000 students at 159 colleges and universities participated in the survey, and their responses helped determine each school’s place in the 2021 rankings.

What contributed to DePauw’s low ranking? Survey results and student responses to open-ended survey prompts suggest that DePauw’s biggest speech-related challenge may be the censorious views of its students. Only 30% of DePauw students said it was “never acceptable” to use violence to stop a speech on campus, meaning more than two-thirds of students surveyed feels violence can be an appropriate response to disagreeable speech. Seventy-six percent of students surveyed said they would oppose allowing a speaker on campus who believed abortion should be illegal. Some students feel censorship is the appropriate response to speakers with “harmful” views.

“I do not hold views that are harmful to others so [self-censorship] is not a problem I face,” one DePauw student told pollsters.

Only seven percent of DePauw students reported having “never” felt unable to express their opinion on a subject.

Many DePauw students also lack confidence in the administration’s commitment to free speech. Only 57% of DePauw students felt the administration was likely to defend a speaker’s right to express himself in a speech-related controversy, compared to 89% of students surveyed at top-ranked Claremont McKenna College.

A ‘news’ report that encapsulates what’s wrong with today’s media By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/10/a_news_report_that_encapsulates_whats_wrong_with_todays_media.html

Over at SFGATE, the online San Francisco news outlet realted to the San Francisco Chronicle, the headline and subtitle are damning, in that they accuse Rep. Dan Crenshaw of being both a dangerous scofflaw and a disgraceful hypocrite. However, if you dive into the article, you discover that he’s making a principled stand against a ludicrous rule and that there’s no hypocrisy on his part, only on Nancy Pelosi’s.

As noted, the headline and subtitle are damning:

Houston Rep. Dan Crenshaw fined $5,000 for dodging Capitol metal detectors

The Republican leader failed to comply with security measures installed after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, despite hammering Democratic Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi for the same infraction in April.

Although the “journalist” behind the story, Ariana Garcia, may not be personally responsible for the headline and subtitle, she’s certainly responsible for the article’s contents.

The article opens by saying that Crenshaw, along with “six other lawmakers” is guilty of “dodging the metal detectors inside the U.S. Capitol” this week, exposing each of them to a possible $5,000 fine. The article refers to the police report and the House Committee on Ethics statement about Crenshaw’s wrongdoing. It then explains how the extra security was necessary “following the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 during which five people were killed.”

Wait! What? Insurrection? Five people killed?

Well, not quite, Ms. Biased “Journalist.” All the evidence, including admissions from the FBI, is that there was no planned insurrection, that the FBI was involved well in advance and may have been encouraging events, that the Capitol police invited people into the building, and that those who entered treated the People’s place of law with respect.

Biden’s militarized executive agencies By Robert A. Bishop

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/10/bidens_militarized_executive_agencies.html
Does the IRS really need all that ammunition?

The Obama-Biden administration stockpiled an arsenal of high-powered weapons in the Executive Branch based on the vision of a civilian national security force.  The stockpile can outfit an army.  The Biden regime controls the trigger to the arsenal.  

“We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we’ve set.  We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded,”  Obama said on July 2, 2008.

Non-profit OpentheBooks released a comprehensive oversight report earlier this year titled “The Militarization of The U.S. Executive Agencies” (here).  The report estimated “that there are now more federal officers with firearm authority (200,000+) than U.S. Marines (186,000).”  It’s the fulfillment of Obama’s well funded prophecy.

There is clearly no legal authority, requirement, or reason for general administrative agencies, like the Internal Revenue Service, whose power is limited to implementing laws, to have weapons.  Biden plans on expanding the IRS by 87,000 workers.  Will their audit training include marksmanship?

Accountability isn’t a strength of the federal government.  The Pentagon never passed its 2017 audit, nor could the Department of Defense document $22 trillion in expenditures.  Not a vote of confidence when it comes to the executive agencies protecting the decentralized stockpiles of firearms and ammunition.  Weapons could easily fall into the hands of vigilantes like Antifa.  Given the Biden administration’s top-down revolution, it is not unthinkable for agencies to intimidate citizens in gun-toting confrontations, conduct government purges, or supply military-grade weapons to a civilian national security force (paramilitary).

The Manifold Dangers of Pretending to Be the Opposite Sex By Janet Levy

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/10/the_manifold_dangers_of_pretending_to_be_the_opposite_sex.html

In 2015, during the Obama administration, the Supreme Court ruled that the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment requires states to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.  This decision — which made the final pronouncement on the first major battle about gender confusion — rendered meaningless the distinction between men and women.  It was no longer necessary for a married couple to comprise a male and a female.  In a marriage, there could now be two husbands or two wives.

The weekend prior to this ruling, Bruce Jenner, a former decathlete who won gold in the 1976 Olympics, came out as transgender and won an award for “courage” for doing so.  Thus began the linking of sexual orientation and gender identity that cemented the transformation of LGB to LGBT.  In the following years, Hollywood and the media sought to mainstream transgenderism by highlighting it in TV shows, movies, and articles.  Meanwhile, the Obama administration began pushing legal mandates that characterized gender identification — whether in education, health care, housing, or the military — as a civil rights issue.  An individual’s “gender identification,” not biological sex, would be the criterion for determining admittance to public schools, sports teams, washrooms, locker rooms, showers, dorms, and the like.

The dogmatism and irrational haste surrounding so-called “anti-discriminatory” gender policies and the notion of “gender fluidity” have made it nearly impossible to voice alternative views.  This not only is unhealthy for society, but deprives the gender dysphoric — that is, people who are uncomfortable with their sex — of balanced counseling and a reasonable amount of time to arrive at how they want to be identified and whether they want so-called “sex change” surgery.  As a matter of course, counselors driven by the false narrative of “trapped in the wrong body” impose gender reassignment on confused youths, often causing untold trauma.

What Made Us Go Crazy? Part Two: Victor Davis Hanson

https://victorhanson.com/what-made-us-go-crazy-part-two/

The Wages of Inert Citizenship

The world outside or before the U.S. was and is not a pretty thing. Even in rare consensual societies, factions and inequality under the law persisted—whether the plebs and populares of early Republican Rome, the greens and blues of Justinian’s Constantinople, or the Guelphs and Ghibellines of thirteenth-century Florence. Belonging to the wrong ethnic group or religion or political clique translated into a diminished political existence—or often far worse. Institutionalized persecution required the use of mass violence, in the way that governments today have systematically oppressed Chinese Uyghurs and Tibetans, Iraqi Kurds, Rwandan Tutsis, or Serbian Bosnians.

Again, not all that much has changed politically for a majority of the world’s non-Western residents. Despite the glitter of globalism, contemporary Chinese are not treated equitably under the law—and are routinely electronically surveilled, monitored, and “graded” with social credits and demerits, by their own government. Hundreds of re-education and forced labor camps seek to transform Muslim Chinese into atheists or agnostics—on the premise that no one in China has inalienable rights of habeas corpus or freedom from unwarranted search, seizure, and arrest.

Currently roughly one-million Chinese Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang Province have been forcibly interned in re-education camps (“vocational training centers”), where Chinese Muslims are forced to renounce Islam, often required to undergo sterilizations, and to pledge fealty to the Chinese Communist Party. So far global outrage has been muted due to Chinese economic clout and commercial reach, along with Beijing’s brilliantly cynical posturing as a victim of historical Western racism.

What Made Us Go Crazy? Part One: Ignorance of What America Was and Is By Victor Davis Hanson

https://victorhanson.com/what-made-us-go-crazy-part-one

As the 2020 election season began, the New York Times promised its readers a recalibration of American history called the 1619 Project. The ensuing series of essays and media kits had a twofold agenda. One was to rewrite the origins of American history as the four-century foreign intrusion into a pristine North America, co-predicated on stealing Native American lands with the help of the racist exploitation of imported African slaves. Racism then was the key that supposedly defined the birth and trajectory of the later United States.

A second catalyst was more overtly political. The project was aimed at forcing a supposedly flawed contemporary America to admit its mostly foul pre-Constitutional origins. Only that way might it recalibrate the present nation, in reparatory fashion, to embrace a radical equality of result, one necessitating an all-powerful woke federal government. 

Aristotle long ago warned that in a democracy those who are politically equal thereby assume that they also deserve equality in all other aspects of their lives—even beyond the reach of the state—and therefore vote accordingly to empower the state to do just that. Almost all assaults on constitutional citizenship reflect both personal and career agendas. 

To state without evidence that the DNA of America was, and thus is, always racist is to expect to be granted the current material resources and power to redeem such an original sin.

Apparently, the implied preferred model for millions of Americans recently has become the more all-encompassing French Revolution that sought to implement egalitarianism and fraternity at any cost, rather than the American Revolution’s emphases on individual freedom and personal liberty and private property. For example, arguing for free higher education, universal health care, and wealth redistribution, socialist Bernie Sanders almost won the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 2016—in a way no prior socialist presidential candidate had come close. Sanders, for a while, led the primary candidates again in 2020.

Sanders talked often of “revolution” and his supporters sometimes fancied themselves as French-style Jacobins. In 2011, the journal Jacobin appeared as a self-described “democratic quarterly socialist magazine.” Its motto “reason in revolt” deliberately sought to echo the supposedly rational role of Maximilien de Robespierre (1758–1794), the catalyst for the so-called “Reign of Terror” during the cycles of French revolutionary violence, and the influence of his Jacobins on later movements such as those in Haiti. Statue toppling, name changing, and warring on the customs of the past that followed the death of African American George Floyd while in custody of Minneapolis police were in the tradition of the French, not American, Revolution. The targets in spring 2020 among protesters were not Jacobin-like figures such as Robespierre but the names and statutes of Washington, Lincoln, and Jefferson.

Revolution without the Middle Class Victor Davis Hanson

https://victorhanson.com/eeyores-cabinet-revolution-without-the-middle-class/

The beleaguered middle class, especially those of the suburbs, for the most part did not join rioting radicalized youths and inner-city minorities in the violence, looting, and destruction, even as their businesses were often targeted, and jobs lost.

Some small stores that had somehow endured the two months of shutdowns, did not survive the flames and break-ins that devoured entire city blocks from Santa Monica to Minneapolis. It was also no accident that many of the nation’s wealthiest, from enclaves in Malibu, Silicon Valley, and Manhattan, played the Jacobin role among the French aristocracy, and so cheered on the violent protests, assured that they were exempt from the violent ramifications of their own ideology.

Certainly, while there was expressed outrage about reports of the use of riot gas in dispersing violent protestors in the nation’s capital, few even noticed that the Beverly Hills police department stopped all would-be Black Lives Matter protestors aimed at Beverly Hills, through the generous use of tear gas.

In reductionist terms, the violence was medieval. The underclass attacked the sustenance of the middle class, while the progressive upper class virtue signaled the protests from their secure keeps. Disenchanted and mostly white youth found a new relevance for their education as megaphones for violence, in a loud and visible fashion that working at Starbucks or Target had never offered. Their foot soldiers who looted on television were all too often the urban and minority underclass.

So, in bitter irony, an entrenched feudalism was apparent even in the new resistance society—as the more educated middle class condescendingly directed the noncredentialled poorer to new looting grounds.

Terry McAuliffe’s faith in the experts

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/terry-mcauliffe-faith-experts/

Parents shouldn’t control schools, he says, but what about when expertise is wrong?

Terry McAuliffe, Virginia’s former governor and Democratic power broker, is seeking to return to his old job in 2021. Polls show him narrowly ahead of his Republican opponent, Glenn Youngkin, by a one- to four-point margin.

That is by no means a safe distance for McAuliffe in a state that is widely understood to reflect national sentiment. Virginia’s 2021 gubernatorial race, one year ahead of the congressional midterms, will be the first major contest held in the blazing light of Biden’s constitutional bonfire.

Many Americans believe that the government is absconding with their rights and liberties, and high on the list of stolen articles is their right to have some say in the education of their children. School boards in almost every state have been visited by throngs of citizens outraged over the imposition of curricula infused with the 1619 Project, critical race theory, the diversity-equity-inclusion agenda and other approaches that characterize the country as systemically racist. Many of those parents are also unhappy over their schools’ embrace of transgenderism and aggressive mask mandates.

Virginia has been no exception. Fairfax and Loudoun county school districts are frontline battlegrounds in the fight over curricula. Videos of parent rebellions and the heavy-handed responses of school boards have racked up millions of hits. Fairfax and Loudoun are adjacent in the metropolitan DC area. They are part of must-win Northern Virginia if McAuliffe is to prevail over Youngkin.

The false accusation of “Israel apartheid” South Africa’s uniquely evil regime has been maliciously twisted into a uniquely evil lie Melanie Phillips

https://melaniephillips.substack.com

The campaign to demonise and delegitimise Israel has recently moved into a higher gear with the increased use of one particularly vicious falsehood.

This is the claim that Israel is an apartheid state.

The claim is as fatuous as it is pernicious. Apartheid was the name given to South Africa’s systematic oppression of its black inhabitants who were denied political, civic and human rights.

By contrast, Arab Israeli citizens have fully equal rights. They study in Israel’s universities; enjoy Israel’s beaches and parks; receive equal treatment as patients in Israel’s hospitals and work there as doctors and other medical staff; serve as members of the armed forces and as judges; and are represented by members of Knesset who are currently lynch-pins in Israel’s governing coalition.

Those Arabs who live in the disputed territories don’t have Israeli rights — for the very good reason that they aren’t Israeli citizens. They have no civic entitlements purely because the status of those territories remains unsettled as a result of Palestinian Arab rejectionism and violence — and because Arab states regard them as a nuisance preferably to be ignored.

The “Israel apartheid” smear, however ludicrous, isn’t new. It has its roots in the infamous 1975 “Zionism is Racism” UN resolution. Although that was revoked in 1991, it was resurrected at the scarcely-less infamous UN conference in Durban in 2001.

At that anti-Jewish hate-fest, the NGO forum referred to “Israel’s brand of apartheid and ethnic cleansing methods” to justify advocating “a policy of complete and total isolation of Israel”. This spawned the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and launched a propaganda campaign against “apartheid Israel,” resulting in grotesque campus “Israel apartheid” weeks.