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Ruth King

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Iran has already beaten Biden Pulling defeat from the jaws of defeat: Dominic Green

By on March 3rd, 2021

https://spectator.us/topic/iran-already-beaten-biden-syria-strike/

The Biden administration is trying to set some rules in its negotiations about negotiations with Iran. But the first rule of the Middle East is that there are no rules. There are only balances of force and fear. And this is why Iran will defeat the US in Syria just as it has already defeated the US in Iraq.

Like a tourist in a foreign restaurant, the administration knows just enough of the local lingo to order the wrong thing. After years in the region, American strategists have absorbed the crude calculus of force: to be taken seriously, they reason, we have to respond to the rocket attack on an airbase in northern Iraq earlier this month, which killed a military contractor and wounded a US serviceman.

The US has also absorbed the calculus of fear. Much as America’s politicians and generals pretend otherwise, the US was defeated in Iraq years ago. The winner was Iran and its Shia allies.

Why didn’t the US retaliate for an attack on Americans in Iraq by hitting Iran’s proxies in Iraq? Because of fear. The US is afraid of further attacks on its remaining forces in Iraq. It’s afraid of losing what little influence it still has over the Iraqi government. And it’s afraid of returning Iraq to civil war.

The US is right to fear and avoid all these outcomes. The US would be even righter if it avoided Iraq entirely, instead of leaving 2,500 servicemen there as sitting ducks. But a tough guy like Joe Biden isn’t going to tell the American people that the US has been thoroughly defeated in Iraq by Iranian IEDs, Sunni self-detonators and its own imperial vanity.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

Woke Excess Causes Minority Voters To Flee the Democratic Party The cultural views of elite white liberals are not popular with many minorities. Robby Soave

By on March 3rd, 2021

https://reason.com/2021/03/03/woke-excess-democratic-party-trump-political-correctness/

While the Democratic Party pulled off a complete (albeit narrow) victory over Donald Trump and the Republican Party in 2020, they lost ground with nonwhite voters—despite significantly raising the salience of racial justice issues during the campaign.

According to progressive pollster David Shor, it’s time to face the facts: The cultural views of very highly-educated, very left-leaning white people are toxic for many nonwhite voters who would otherwise support the Democratic Party.

“I don’t think a lot of people expected Donald Trump’s GOP to have a much more diverse support base than Mitt Romney’s did in 2012,” Shor told New York magazine in a recent interview. “But that’s what happened.”

Shor pointed to two specific associations—socialism and the “defund the police” movement—that appear to have tarnished the Democratic Party in the eyes of minority voters. The former is an unsurprising finding, and something I’ve written on previously: Socialism is generally not popular with Hispanic voters, who associate it with the kind of political oppression experienced by people in Venezuela and Cuba.

But the latter is also noteworthy, given that “defund the police” is a mantra recited by progressive activists who purport to represent the wishes of racial minorities. These activists claim, for instance, that the role of police in society is to defend or legitimize America’s white supremacist culture. In other words, activists want to defund the police because they think doing so is a necessary component of antiracist organizing.

The trouble is that many racial minorities don’t actually share that view.

“We raised the salience of an ideologically charged issue that millions of nonwhite voters disagreed with us on,” said Shor. “And then, as a result, these conservative Hispanic voters who’d been voting for us despite their ideological inclinations started voting more like conservative whites.”

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

America’s Lost Generation The scientific consensus is clear: children should be in school. But an estimated 18 million kids haven’t set foot inside. Why? Robby Soave

By on March 3rd, 2021

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/americas-lost-generation

Nothing — not the botched vaccine rollout; not the forced small business closures; not the fact that we’ve watched until the end of Netflix — deserves more of our collective outrage than the fact that thousands of American public schools remain closed a year into this pandemic.

Over the past 12 months, an estimated 18 million American kids haven’t set foot inside of a classroom or have just started coming back for one day a week. That’s about one-third of all public school students, which number about 50 million. What’s most enraging is that this was entirely avoidable. The country’s teachers unions are committing a generational crime against the nations’ young. 

When President Joe Biden was inaugurated on January 20, he pledged that in-person education would resume for most children within his first 100 days as president. To support school reopening efforts, the president asked Congress to allocate $130 billion in new funding for protective equipment, better ventilation, more space inside classrooms, and whatever else educators need.

Fast forward to today. The White House has all but given up on the goal of reopening schools. Last month, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, clarified that the president would consider the goal met if more than half of all schools were open for in-person instruction at least one day a week. To say that one-day-a-week in-person instruction is a reopening of schools is to lie.

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P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

The Cancellation Of Dr. Seuss Should Disturb You, Because You’re Next America is entering its very own Mao-like Cultural Revolution. The iconoclasm of the left’s culture war isn’t a side effect, it’s the point. John Daniel Davidson

By on March 3rd, 2021

https://thefederalist.com/2021/03/03/the-cancellation-of-dr-seuss-should-disturb-you-because-youre-next/

Dr. Seuss has been cancelled. Some of his work has been deemed racist, and we can’t have that. On Tuesday, the entity that oversees the estate of Theodor Seuss Geisel announced it would no longer publish six of Geisel’s books because they “portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.”

Among the works now deemed unfit for children are Geisel’s first book under the pen name Dr. Seuss, “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street,” published in 1937, and the much-beloved, “If I Ran the Zoo,” published in 1950. The former depicts a “Chinaman” character and the latter shows two men from “the African island of Yerka” in native garb.

There’s not much point in quibbling over whether these and other such illustrations in the condemned Dr. Seuss books are in fact racist or bigoted, or whether Geisel held racist or xenophobic views. By all accounts he was a liberal-minded and tolerant man who hated Nazis and, as a political cartoonist, mocked the antisemitism that was all-too-common in America during World War II.

He was also a man of his era. Later in life, he regretted some of his political work during the war that stereotyped Japanese Americans, which, as jarring as it might seem today, nevertheless reflected attitudes that were commonplace at the time.

But context and nuance don’t factor into the inexorable logic of the woke left, which flattens and refashions the past into a weapon for the culture wars of the present. What’s important to understand is that this isn’t simply about banning six Dr. Seuss books. All of Geisel’s work is, in the judgment of left-wing academia, an exercise in “White supremacy, paternalism, conformity, and assimilation.” It might be easy for conservatives to laugh that off as nonsense, but they shouldn’t, because this isn’t really even about Geisel.

The Left Is Carrying Out a Cultural Revolution

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Lockdowns: Which ‘Experts’ Were Right? A year later it’s clear that most media and government experts were dead wrong. by David Catron

By on March 3rd, 2021

https://spectator.org/covid-lockdowns-experts/

It has now been nearly a year since “public health experts” began appearing on television talk shows insisting that, to survive COVID-19, the nation would have to pursue unprecedented mitigation policies. They told us that our salvation required draconian measures such as school closures, stay-at-home orders, and business lockdowns. Moreover, we were advised not to expect a fast return to our normal lives. In early April 2020, for example, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel solemnly assured us, “We will not be able to return to normalcy until we find a vaccine…. We need to prepare ourselves for this to last 18 months or so and for the toll that it will take.”

The good doctor didn’t mention that, for a man of his means, “the toll that it will take” would be negligible even as it disrupted the education of millions of children, rendered their parents unemployed, and wreaked social and psychological havoc throughout society. The sainted Dr. Anthony Fauci echoed Dr. Zeke: “I know it’s difficult … this is inconvenient from an economic and a personal standpoint, but we just have to do it.” Not coincidentally, Fauci is the highest-paid bureaucrat in Washington. But not all public health experts accepted the cost-benefit analyses offered by Drs. Emanuel and Fauci.

Among the first actual epidemiologists who advised that more information was needed before draconian mitigation measures could be scientifically justified was Dr. John P. A. Ioannidis of the Stanford University School of Medicine. Dr. Ioannidis questioned the reasoning used by people like Emanuel and Fauci in an essay published in STAT, where he wrote that the precipitous response to the pandemic was “a once-in-a-century evidence fiasco” and that decisions of monumental significance were being made without truly dependable data concerning how many people had been infected:

The data collected so far on how many people are infected and how the epidemic is evolving are utterly unreliable. Given the limited testing to date, some deaths and probably the vast majority of infections due to SARS-CoV-2 are being missed.… In the absence of data, prepare-for-the-worst reasoning leads to extreme measures of social distancing and lockdowns. Unfortunately, we do not know if these measures work.… [w]e don’t know how long social distancing measures and lockdowns can be maintained without major consequences to the economy, society, and mental health.

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MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Alyssa Lappen on Clarence Thomas *****

By on March 3rd, 2021

Alyssa A. Lappen
5.0 out of 5 stars Profile in Courage

Reviewed in the United States on February 27, 2021

After reading Saturday evening that Amazon had removed this documentary from its rental streaming library, and next from its inventory of DVDs available for purchase, I immediately rented it from Vudu.

By censoring this film, Amazon proved Clarence Thomas correct and, moreover, guaranteed the film’s unrivaled success on other platforms.

I remember the Clarence Thomas hearings. I was then a senior editor at Working Woman.

This is a phenomenal report, regardless of your standing on the political spectrum, and it is a testament to human strength and the true tenor of courage.

Exceedingly well-documented, it tells of Thomas’ rise from an impoverished backwater in rural Georgia, with the help of his loving, wise, no-nonsense grandparents, illiterate though they were.

Through a grueling educational process he learned he had no choice but to achieve 100 percent 100 percent of the time.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Europe Divided Over Covid Passports by Soeren Kern

By on March 3rd, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17131/europe-covid-passports

Tourism-dependent countries, including Austria, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, Portugal and Spain, are urging other EU states to adopt Covid passports, which would be modeled on the “green passport” system implemented by Israel.

“We know that in Israel they’ve made statements about anybody who tries to forge [a certificate] will face criminal proceedings and possibly be imprisoned. So, they really think that this is a risk that could happen.” — Professor Carsten Maple, cyber security expert, Alan Turing Institute.

“In consultation with other EU member states, we are in favor of a digital green passport, similar to the one in #Israel. This should offer the possibility to prove on the mobile phone that one has been tested, vaccinated or recovered. Our goal: to avoid a permanent lockdown & finally to enable freedom to travel within the EU as well as to visit events or restaurants.” — Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz.

Greece is pressing the EU to move quickly…. But would these certificates only be required for international travel or could they be needed for getting a job, attending a football match, or buying some milk? — Professor Melinda Mills, lead author of the Royal Society report on Covid passports.

“Yet making freedom conditional on facing the needle… takes us perilously close to the concept of compulsory vaccination… hardly likely to reassure anyone whose fear of the vaccine is bound up with a fear of an authoritarian state.” — Gaby Hinsliff, columnist, Guardian.

European leaders are considering a proposal to introduce a common EU-wide Coronavirus vaccination passport. The so-called Covid passports would permit those who have been vaccinated to travel freely within the European Union without the need for quarantining and testing.

The leaders of several European countries heavily dependent on tourism are pushing for Covid passports to be implemented with immediate effect. Others say that it is far too early to consider such a move, especially because the EU’s Coronavirus vaccine rollout has been dogged by delays and questions about the efficacy of certain vaccines, particularly in light of the virus’s new mutant strains.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

How Democracy Dies: Big Tech Becomes Big Brother by Leni Friedman Valenta with Dr. Jiri Valenta

By on March 3rd, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17104/big-tech-big-brother

The power-sharing of the U.S. Federal government with Big Tech appears a recipe for unharnessed power and corruption. Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny caught on right away, saying: “This precedent will be exploited by the enemies of freedom of speech around the world. In Russia as well. Every time when they need to silence someone, they will say: ‘this is just common practice, even Trump got blocked on Twitter.'”

Fortunately, governors such as Ron DeSantis in Florida, Greg Abbott in Texas and Kevin Stitt in Oklahoma are now moving legislatively to counter federal laws that may have adverse effects on freedom of speech, jobs, election integrity, the energy industry, the first or second amendments and general constitutional rights.

Democracy cannot survive in a country where a few technocrats and oligarchs can choose to deny access to information or platforms to candidates running for office. It is simply unacceptable that they alone — unelected, unappointed, untransparent and unaccountable — can deem what is “harmful” to society. The job now for all of us is to prevent the United States from slowly becoming a full-blown tyranny.

“Digital giants have been playing an increasingly significant role in wider society… how well does this monopolism correlate with the public interest?,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said on January 27, 2021.

“Where is the distinction between successful global businesses, sought-after services and big data consolidation on the one hand, and the efforts to rule society[…] by substituting legitimate democratic institutions, by restricting the natural right for people to decide how to live and what view to express freely on the other hand?”

Was Mr. Putin defending democracy? Hardly. What apparently worries him is that the Big Tech might gain the power to control society at the expense of his government. What must be a nightmare for him — as for many Americans — is that the Tech giants were able to censor news favorable to Trump and then censor Trump himself. How could the U.S. do this to the president of a great and free country?

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Supreme Court to Hear First of Many Election-Related Lawsuits After 2020 Election By Eric Lendrum

By on March 3rd, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/02/supreme-court-to-hear-first-of-many-election-related-lawsuits-after-2020-election/

In the aftermath of the 2020 election, numerous bills introduced in state legislatures across the country are most likely heading for the same place: The Supreme Court, where they will be scrutinized under the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The first of many such cases will begin on Tuesday, according to ABC News.

After widespread voter fraud in multiple key swing states that some say may have been enough to change the outcome of the election in favor of Joe Biden and other Democrats, over 250 bills have been introduced across 43 states, aimed at such measures as reducing voter fraud, restricting vote-by-mail, and requiring some form of photographic ID in order to vote. The Brennan Center for Justice, a far-left advocacy group, has falsely claimed that such bills are attempting to suppress non-White voters.

Activists at the Brennan Center and elsewhere are seeking to challenge most of these laws in court using the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits “a denial or abridgment of the right of any citizen of the U.S. to vote on account of race or color,” even though none of the proposed laws mention race in any way.

“The court needs to send a strong statement that the Voting Rights Act will be there for the American public,” said a spokeswoman for the Brennan Center, “especially at a time when we see politicians trying to put barriers in front of the ballot box.” The spokeswoman provided no evidence to back up this statement.

The concerns over election fraud arise from the fact that, supposedly, nearly 67 percent of the voting-age population cast a vote in 2020, which would by far be the highest turnout in over 100 years, but was due in large part to vote-by-mail being made more widely accessible due to the coronavirus pandemic. Vote-by-mail, which makes it much easier for people to vote who otherwise would most likely not cast a ballot, is also ripe for fraud and suppression.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

‘America Is Back,’ Unfortunately The Biden Administration’s new slogan means open-ended U.S. military commitments to the Middle East and elsewhere. By Christopher Roach

By on March 3rd, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/02/america-is-back-unfortunately/

Bragging about his restoration of the pre-Trump neoliberal foreign policy, Joe Biden proudly declared “America is back.” What this means in practice is that barely a month into Biden’s term, America is back to bombing Syria for alleged provocations by Iranian-backed militias. 

While ordinary Americans on both the Left and Right are wary of dreams of empire and want to focus instead on pressing domestic challenges, Biden’s paeans to America’s pre-Trump foreign policy—including its disastrous run in the Middle East—suggest someone unwilling and unable to learn from events. 

A Dubious Return to Regime Change in Syria

For example, this recent attack supposedly was a response to an Iranian-backed militia, but this prompts the question: Why are our troops still in Syria and Iraq? On what authority and for what purpose does this mission continue? Biden’s recent approval of a limited bombing did almost nothing to justify the decision to the American people, nor did he attempt to justify the continued presence of U.S. troops in a danger zone. Instead, the White House sent a pro forma statement to Congress, and that’s about it. 

The United States has been involved in Syria since 2011. First, we set out under Barack Obama to remove Bashar al-Assad by arming the so-called Free Syrian Army. Then, having armed the anti-Assad rebels, many of them became unmanageable and joined ISIS, wreaking havoc in Syria, in Europe, and here at home. President Trump then proceeded to devise policies to destroy ISIS, which the military largely achieved.

But now what? Does Biden still mean to remove Assad? And, if so, why are we so sure that what comes next won’t resemble ISIS? 

Trump faced a lot of criticism for ordering our troops out of Syria after the ISIS mission was complete. He was then persuaded into keeping some forces there—ostensibly to guard both critical oil resources and our Kurdish allies. Key government officials, including his Syrian envoy, lied to him about the numbers and status of American forces. 

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