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Ruth King

Royal twit: Prince Harry declares our First Amendment ‘bonkers’ By Monica Showalter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/05/royal_twit_prince_harry_declares_our_first_amendment_bonkers.html

Prince Harry seemed determined to outdo Meghan Markle on the obnoxious celebrity front. The oafish royal on the lam from his U.K. duties, who’s now set up shop here to live the billionaire lifestyle, is now, like a lot of them, telling us how to run our country. He’s calling our First Amendment ‘bonkers.’

Kid you not.

According to the London Spectator (hat tip: Daily Caller), citing a podcast interview that Prince Harry made with the Davos-like Aspen Institute:

I’ve got so much I want to say about the First Amendment as I sort of understand it, but it is bonkers. I don’t want to start going down the First Amendment route because that’s a huge subject and one which I don’t understand because I’ve only been here a short time. But, you can find a loophole in anything. You can capitalise or exploit what’s not said rather than uphold what is said.

Translation: Harry doesn’t have a clue. He’s as baffled as Mad King George, that guy who got quite the write-up in our Declaration of Independence of 1776, about the idea of free speech. Like the Duke of Wellington, who had an issue with people moving about freely as ‘escaping all proper control,’ Harry’s gone back to the era of bad royals trying to tamp down the public. Yet he also has the hypocrisy to do it while he insists on living with us.

Josh Hawley’s Book Debuts As Top 10 Bestseller Despite Cancellation Attempts  By Jordan Davidson

https://thefederalist.com/2021/05/14/josh-hawleys-book-debuts-as-top-10-bestseller-despite-cancellation-attempts/

Sen. Josh Hawley’s new book, “The Tyranny of Big Tech” is selling at rapid rates following a cancellation attempt by Simon and Schuster in January for his stance on election integrity.

According to Publishers Weekly, Hawley’s book ranks sixth in the nation for hardcover frontlist nonfiction. Since the book was released on May 4, Hawley has sold nearly 21,000 copies and shows no sign of slowing down. In its first week on Amazon’s “Top 20 Most Sold & Most Read Books of the Week” list, Hawley’s book ranked number 15.

The Washington-based Regnery Publishing company made a deal with Hawley shortly after New York-based Simon and Schuster canceled their deal with the senator one day after the Capitol riot due to a “pressure campaign organized by leftist activists.” Their reasoning for pulling back on the deal, Simon and Schuster claimed without evidence, was that Hawley is linked to the storming of Capitol because he publicly questioned the 2020 election results.

Hawley’s book outlines how corporate America uses its influence to “cancel me and to cancel or control the speech, the communication, even the ideas of millions of Americans—all Americans, in a sense, because what the woke capitalists want, along with their allies in government, is to preserve their power over American politics and society.

Neurotic America: Masks Today, Masks Tomorrow, Masks Forever

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/05/17/neurotic-america-masks-today-masks-tomorrow-masks-forever/

A number of retail chains announced last week they are not requiring fully vaccinated customers to wears masks in their stores. Not everyone was happy to hear the liberating news, though. Our country, once a bulwark of the strong and daring, is becoming a land of the fainthearted.

Minutes after The Hill tweeted Friday that Trader Joe’s was no longer demanding that its customers self-suffocate, at least those who’ve been fully vaccinated, the scolds and skittish school marms took their shots before running to hide under their beds.

“Not good,” said one, without explaining why it’s not good.

Other responses included: “I’ve only been there once and it looks like it will be my only time for a while,” and “I will not be going to #TraderJoes 4 a long time.” Many concurred: They’ll also avoid Trader Joe’s. One commenter said he doesn’t know if he’ll ever go back again. All that was missing was Joe Biden calling Trader Joe’s executives Neanderthals and Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank claiming the stores are “America’s No. 1 Death Destination.”

Certainly everyone is free to express their opinions about masks, and everyone is also free to decide to shop elsewhere if they don’t like the Trader Joe’s policy. Yet the response concerns us. Will enough Nervous Nancies and Timorous Toms boycott Trader Joe’s, Walmart, Costco and others that have liberalized their mask policies to force the companies to backtrack on their decisions (which will help restore the humanity dignity that was ripped away by mask rules)? Will they actively picket in front of stores in an effort to bully executives into yielding to their neuroses, fixations, and superstitions? 

Can Freedom Survive the Narratives? We live in the age of supercharged story lines, most of which are demagogic nonsense. By Lance Morrow

https://www.wsj.com/articles/can-freedom-survive-the-narratives-11621185599?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

EXCERPTS:

Yet more than 100 years later, in a decisively changed America, President Biden annulled the interval between 1903 and 2021 and pronounced Georgia’s new voting law to be “Jim Crow on steroids.” It was demagogic nonsense. The Georgia voting law bore no more resemblance to Jim Crow than Mr. Biden bears, let us say, to Neil Kinnock.

In all this, there’s the fallacy of stopped time. When fabulating Bidenites, reporters at the New York Times and others on the left refer to “systemic racism,” they mean to conjure the sum of all American white people’s badness going back four centuries to 1619; and, when all that meanness is assembled in one trope (slave owners Washington and Jefferson and Lee and Stonewall Jackson on their bronze horses) to lay it before white America as indictment.

There is no difference between 1619 and 2021. There was no Civil War, no civil-rights acts of 1964 and 1965, no President Obama. White guilt comes with the white skin; the evil is frozen in time—like the sin of Adam, like the woolly mammoth in the glacier. Race trauma is sanctified—permanent, outside time.

The left’s narrative now rules the land in the form of “critical race theory,” “antiracism” and invidious variations. Feelings of rage and indignation have coalesced as dogma and settled science, embedded in the house rules of almost every institution in the country. One questions them on pain of expulsion, excommunication. The Age of Information is the era of hysterical story lines. Twenty-first-century technology supercharges feelings, not thoughts, and registers them instantaneously on hundreds of millions of screens and minds.

Such narratives serve neither history nor justice. The New York Times’s “1619 Project,” now taught in schools all over the country, is, in its essence, racist propaganda. Its story lines are instruments for the consolidation of political power. Marxists discovered long ago that class doesn’t work as a great divider in America. But race does work.

Race is the McGuffin—the pretext. Our moral generals are fighting the last war. The struggle to which Americans, of whatever race, should be paying attention is the one that has to do with freedom. It has to do with privacy, mind control, individual liberties—with totalitarian systems of surveillance and manipulation perfecting themselves in an alliance of big tech, big government, global corporations and artificial intelligence. Wokeness—a politics that manages to be both prissy and vicious, a totalitarian social design that flies the flag of everything good and nice—fronts for the real problem of the 21st century: a sinister autocracy just around the corner.

Facebook’s ‘Fact Checks’ Suppress Debate The social-media site seeks to discredit a review of my book on climate science. By Steven E. Koonin

https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebooks-fact-checks-suppress-debate-11621194172?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

This paper published Mark Mills’s review of “Unsettled,” my book on climate science, on April 25. Eight days later, 11 self-appointed “fact checkers” weighed in with a 4,500-word critique on the website ClimateFeedback.org. Facebook is waving that fact check as a giant red flag whenever the review appears in anyone’s feed.

By branding Mr. Mills’s review with “very low scientific credibility,” the company directs its billions of users to a website that claims to discredit the review and, by direct implication, my book. This action adds to the growing suppression of open discussion of climate complexities.

ClimateFeedback bills itself as “a worldwide network of scientists sorting fact from fiction in climate change media coverage.” Its modus operandi is to label necessarily brief media statements as misleading or inaccurate, often because they lack context. While acknowledging that “global crop yields are rising,” for instance, they add the untestable claim that yields might have been greater absent human-caused climate change. The gang of enforcers who “fact checked” Mr. Mills’s review included professors from Stanford, UCLA and MIT.

The oddest element of Facebook’s action is that the “fact check” doesn’t challenge anything I wrote in “Unsettled,” but rather provides “context” for Mr. Mills’s statements.

Israel, Hamas, Iran and Biden The U.S. needs to give Israel time to degrade the rocket threat.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/israel-hamas-iran-and-biden-11621195618?mod=hp_opin_pos_1

As the latest war between Hamas and Israel enters its second week, the narrative is following a familiar script. Hamas fires rockets at Israeli cities, Israel retaliates by bombing the source of the rockets in Gaza, Hamas plays up the civilian casualties, and the world leans on Israel to stop defending itself.

Let’s hope this isn’t the trap the Biden Administration falls into as the fighting continues. So far the White House has supported Israel’s right to self-defense. But the weekend bombing of a building in Gaza that housed media offices, including reporters from the Associated Press and Al Jazeera, has led to cries of outrage and an admonition from the State Department to Israel about protecting journalists in combat zones.

But who’s really endangering the journalists? Israel’s government says the multistory building was also used by Hamas for intelligence purposes. AP says it had no knowledge of this, but this wasn’t the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. Using civilians and journalists as shields is a common Hamas tactic, and Hamas isn’t likely to have shared its plans with Western journalists.

Israel also warned the journalists and others in the building to clear out an hour before the attack. They did and there are no reports of casualties. This also let Hamas’s militants escape, but it shows how far Israel has gone in this conflict to avoid killing civilians. Inevitably there will be mistakes in war, and civilians will die, but it’s remarkable how discriminating Israel’s targeting has been.

The truth to keep in mind is that this conflict was started by Hamas and another radical outfit, Islamic Jihad. They are attempting to kill Israeli civilians with rockets supplied by Iran, or manufactured in Gaza with parts supplied by Iran. Hamas’s rocket arsenal is larger and more sophisticated than ever, and the Israel Defense Forces said that as of Sunday the Islamists had fired some 3,000 rockets into Israel. The miracle is that more Israelis haven’t died, and that’s due in large part to Israel’s Iron Dome missile-defense system.

Rep. Young Kim (R-California 39): Biden’s immigration crisis – my Texas border trip showed cartels thriving, migrants at risk Biden admin policy changes are contributing to this crisis and hurting Americans

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/biden-immigration-crisis-texas-border-trip-cartels-migrants-young-kim

After visiting our southern border with a bipartisan delegation in South Texas and back home in California, it is clear that the situation continues to be a national security, public health and humanitarian crisis.  

It’s also clear that while we need to come together to address the root causes of mass migration, recent policy changes made by the Biden administration are contributing to this crisis and hurting Americans, straining our Border Patrol and Customs and Border Protection officers on the front lines, endangering migrants who are making the perilous journey to the U.S. in search of a better life, and undermining legal immigrants.  

Meanwhile, drug cartels are taking advantage of this crisis, exploiting migrants to increase revenue and accelerate the smuggling of drugs and weapons and other illegal activity across our southern border.

President Biden said in his joint address to Congress that his policies as vice president “helped keep people in their own countries instead of being forced to leave” but “the last administration shut it down.” 

However, the Biden administration’s recent decisions to roll back policies from the last administration without thoughtful policy replacements are encouraging the opposite. The administration’s lack of a plan is exacerbating the border crisis, straining resources everywhere from the border to communities I represent in California’s 39th District.  

A murderous co-operation The public has scant idea of how it is being misled over Israel and the Palestinians Melanie Phillips

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/a-murderous-co-operation?token=
Journalists and the Biden administration have been clutching their pearls over Israel’s bombing of what’s been called the “media building” in Gaza City. This was an 11-story tower where outlets such as Associated Press, Agence France Presse, al Jazeera and others had offices.

In the US, President Joe Biden’s press spokesman Jennifer Psaki tweeted that the United States had “communicated directly to the Israelis that ensuring the safety and security of journalists and independent media is a paramount responsibility”. In other words, a public rebuke.

Never let the facts get in the way of a jerking “liberal” knee, eh. So much for Biden’s “staunch support” for Israel in its battle to stop the more than 2800 rockets that have been fired at its civilians from Gaza, and are still coming. For the Israel Defence Force had given the occupants of this “media” building an hour’s warning to evacuate, and accordingly no-one was killed or injured. 

Israel had thus actually ensured the safety not just of the “journalists and independent media” but everyone in that building. This despite what the Israelis say the building actually housed — a Hamas research and development unit, Hamas military intelligence and offices of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. 

Those people too were given an hour to evacuate.  Such is the priority the Israelis give to saving civilian life, they even allow the enemy to escape if it means protecting civilians. (Hamas, by contrast, often force their own civilians to ignore such warnings and stay put in the line of fire where they’ve deliberately placed them, in order to get that all-important western media coverage of child fatalities).

The IDF tweeted that the building was “an important base of operations” for Hamas military intelligence, where it “gathered intel for attacks against Israel, manufactured weapons & positioned equipment to hamper IDF operations”. On a Zoom media briefing last night, the IDF spokesman, Col. Jonathan Conricus, said the building also housed Hamas military technology on which he would give no more details.

A LETTER TO PRESIDENT BIDEN FROM CHRISTIANS AND JEWS UNITED FOR ISRAEL

Christians and Jews United for Israel, Inc. 19 Windward Walk Harwich Port, Massachusetts 02646-1337

 President Joseph R. Biden 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W. The White House Washington, D.C. May 14th, 2021 Via president@whitehouse.gov

 Dear President Biden,

We, the board members of Christians and Jews United for Israel Inc., (CJUI) write to you on behalf of our four thousand members to urge you to construct and execute a foreign policy for the Middle East based on the lessons of the past, a realistic view of human nature and the ethical application of strong American leadership. CJUI advocates for Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, and for the Judeo-Christian values fundamental to America’s governance.

We encourage you to follow the example of Democratic President Harry S. Truman, who recognized the newborn State of Israel in 1948 against the advice of all the supposed foreign policy experts. President Truman’s moral clarity, coupled with his belief that a Jewish state would survive and thrive, led him to the right decision.

 Similarly, the advice of many so-called experts on the Middle East is wrong today. For fifty years, they have assured us that the road to peace in the Middle East runs though the kleptocrats of Riyadh and is dependent upon Israel giving up land for the promise of peace – an exchange that requires Israel to accept suicidal borders that compromise its security and, as the example of Gaza so clearly demonstrates, does not lead to peace.

 Negotiations for peace will never work with the present Palestinian and HAMAS leadership, who repeatedly demonstrate that they have no intent to negotiate a settlement that allows for Israel’s continued existence. Their genocidal demand for the annihilation of Israel “from the river to the sea,” their diversion of aid to making missiles, their teaching of hate to their children and their indiscriminate launching of hundreds of missiles at population centers shows that they are not partners for peace.

 The thousands of missiles launched by HAMAS is a double war crime. First, by launching their missiles amongst Gazan civilians, using them as human shields and knowing their own civilians will be injured when Israel is compelled to respond.

THERE THEY GO AGAIN…..HATING TRUMP AT THE NRO

Jason Lee Steorts

http://Zombie Trump Shows the Need for a Constitutional Amendment on Late Impeachments By Jason Lee Steorts

EXCERPTS

First among them at present is that the House Republican caucus is, at the highest levels, infected by a cynical politics of deception, having just elevated one of the election-conspiracy peddlers to the No. 3 spot in its hierarchy. These were not just any deceptions, but deceptions calculated to thwart the constitutional transition of presidential power. (So please spare me the whole “you’d better be equally upset about the George Floyd riots” retort. Rioting is rioting. This is about a failed coup attempt, and the man who made it, and the rewarding of someone who helped him lay the ground for it, and the caucus that wants everyone to forget it ever happened even though the mastermind refuses to let us. Nor has anything since the Senate trial provided any reason to change our view of Trump. Yes, yes, the Sicknick medical report. I know. Ashli Babbitt is not available to be consoled.)

It’s hard to believe that this would be happening if Trump had been barred from seeking office again. I’m sure he’d still be lashing out between his golf rounds, but as a political contender he’d be finished, the public would know it, and the GOP as a whole would have no reason not to move on.