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Ruth King

Chasing the Dragon by Peter Schweizer

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17026/chasing-the-dragon

[The Biden Executive Order] order reverses a previous directive by the Trump administration last May, which found that “foreign adversaries are increasingly creating and exploiting vulnerabilities in the United States bulk-power system, which provides the electricity that supports our national defense, vital emergency services, critical infrastructure, economy, and way of life.” [Emphasis added.]

These systems are, of course, highly computerized and the Trump administration’s goal was to prevent the Chinese, America’s greatest geo-political and economic rival, from having their hands in it. Biden’s order strips that protection with the stroke of a pen.

So, where was the constituency for allowing the Chinese access to the market for providing critical equipment to run and manage the US power grid? Who was clamoring to undo protections from cyber-warfare directed against America’s power system?

[B]y cancelling the pipeline, Biden is not preventing any energy production of fossil fuels in Canada. He is simply shifting that consumption to China.

Economically, all Biden’s order does is damage America’s energy production and give the US less control of energy markets, and give China greater leverage.

With this one order, on his first day of work, Biden has given the communist government of China… a more favorable market for buying the oil that makes it the top producer of carbon-dioxide in the world. It is difficult to see how such moves, done unilaterally and without negotiating anything at all in return, make sense to the security of the U.S.

The timing alone raises questions about exactly which supporters Joe Biden was making happy.

On his first full day in office, President Joe Biden signed a massive executive order that, among other things, killed the Keystone XL pipeline project. Buried in that same order were two short sentences that will allow the Chinese government to get into the American electrical grid.

Located at Section 7(c), the order reverses a previous directive by the Trump administration last May, which found that “foreign adversaries are increasingly creating and exploiting vulnerabilities in the United States bulk-power system, which provides the electricity that supports our national defense, vital emergency services, critical infrastructure, economy, and way of life.” [Emphasis added.]

Campus Hate Speech and its Use as a Tool Against Opposing Views The first victim in the corruption of academic free speech has been the truth. Richard L. Cravatts

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/campus-hate-speech-and-its-use-tool-against-richard-l-cravatts/

“Everyone is in favor of free speech,” Winston Churchill once wryly observed. “Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people’s idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone else says anything back, that is an outrage.”

Churchill’s prescience is obvious on college campuses today, especially concerning how students, on the one hand, support the general principle of free speech but, when pressed further to reveal their attitudes, admit that certain classes of expression should be suppressed and proscribed—sometimes even punished. On campuses where identity politics has manifested itself in a protected language of victimization and members of historically marginalized” groups seek (and most often receive) protection from criticism and judgment, who may say what about whom is carefully controlled.

Part of that process has involved categorizing speech and deciding what speech is acceptable, which views are not to be challenged, what parameters there are to major issues affecting race, sexuality, religion, and ethnicity, issues with which students grapple on a regular basis. In their zeal to purge from campus any dissenting views which question the prevailing orthodoxies, students quickly learn how to use the status as a member of a victim group to insulate themselves from critique and opprobrium.

In that process, a new tactic has emerged, namely, the designation of certain expression of being what is called “hate speech,” a contrived category of speech that has the effect of making some views beyond the moral pale, outside of acceptable standards for dialogue, thoughts that, by their very nature, are to be prohibited and labeled as not deserving of First Amendment protection.

Greenfield Video: Incitement, Insurrection, and the Fascist Crackdown on Conservatives Dems and media launch an unprecedented campaign to stifle dissent.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/greenfield-video-incitement-insurrection-and-frontpagemagcom/

This new webinar features Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow with the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He researches Islamic terrorism, left-wing radicalism, and the decline of the free world.

Daniel discusses Incitement, Insurrection, and the Fascist Crackdown on Conservatives, unveiling how The Democrats and the media are launching an unprecedented campaign to eliminate the political opposition. 

Don’t miss it!

New European Study Recommends a Punish-Israel Strategy And ignores Palestinian-Arab terror. Joseph Puder

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/lovatt-eu-and-israel-joseph-puder/

Hugh Lovatt, a fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), wrote a study titled “The End of Oslo: A New European Strategy on Israel-Palestine.” A British Arabist, Lovett has deliberately ignored in his study Palestinian-Arab terror; not a word of it is mentioned in his lengthy December, 2020 report. Nor, for that matter, does he mention Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip that left Palestinians some valuable economic assets. Israel was repaid by its gesture of “de-occupation” with Palestinian (Hamas) terror, and rocket fire aimed at Israel’s population centers.

Lovatt praised the European Union (EU) for blocking Donald Trump’s peace plan, and for allegedly frustrating Israel’s de Jure “annexation of Palestinian territory.” The late Eugene Rostow, who served as the Dean of Yale Law School, and Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs under President Lyndon Johnson, established that Israel has as much right to the West Bank as Palestinians do. Moreover, Israeli settlements, or more correctly, Israeli communities, are perfectly legal under international law.

Lovatt’s principal recommendations are “de-occupation and legal rights.” He pointed out that if Israel continues to block a two-state outcome, “A one state reality of open-ended occupation and unequal rights continue to take hold – bearing the hallmark of modern-day apartheid.” Lovatt must know that almost 95% of the Palestinians live in area A and B, which is controlled and ruled by the Palestinian Authority (PA). The PA, not Israel, is controlling the lives of these Palestinians. The question of equal rights should then be addressed to the PA. When it comes to life, limb, and property of Palestinians in the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) or in East Jerusalem (non-Israeli citizens), Israel is protective of their civil and human rights, and the Israeli Supreme Court has adjudicated more often than not in favor of Palestinians. Dealing with Palestinian terrorists, is however another matter. Israel is committed to the protection of its people’s lives.

Our Incoherent and Dangerous ‘Diversity’ Talk At the expense of true diversity of opinion, thought and critical examination. Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/our-incoherent-and-dangerous-diversity-talk-bruce-thornton/

Ever since Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell midwifed “diversity” in the 1979 Bakke decision, this dubious notion has become ever more duplicitous and dangerous. By enshrining a superficial reduction of real-world diversity into the law, Bakke has given illiberal ideologies a tool for suppressing true diversity of minds and character to further their tyrannical power­­––which we’ve witnessed for decades, and is now culminating in today’s “cancel culture” and censorship by online oligarchs.

George Orwell’s dystopian future of Newspeak and “memory holes” is dangerously closer to becoming our tyrannical reality.

Like all tyrannies, today’s censorship and silencing of dissenting voices began with words being distorted to take on spurious meanings that serve factional political ideologies and interests. In 1978, Powell needed something to justify discrimination on the basis of race, proscribed by the 1964 Civil Rights Act, in order to salvage the affirmative action programs that had relied on illegal quotas to mitigate ethnic and racial disparities in hiring, contracting, and university admissions.

But the “diversity” that followed was the most superficial sort––physical appearance, the “yellow, red, and black and white” of the old Sunday School hymn “Jesus Loves the Little Children.” As such it echoed the same specious arguments made for legal segregation, which was justified by the “scientific racism” that was becoming popular among cognitive elites in the late 19th century. It too was legitimized by a Supreme Court decision, Plessy vs. Ferguson (1896), which legalized unconstitutional segregation’s fig-leaf of “separate but equal.”

Over the following years, it became obvious there was no evidence to support the alleged benefits that could make “diversity” a  “state interest” compelling enough to justify the obvious discrimination practiced by programs based on racial, ethnic, sex, or sexual preference identities. The same weakness vitiates the later, equally vague, truly Orwellian concepts such as “inclusion” or “tolerance.” These empty verbal vessels have been filled with a political ideology that seeks exclusion and intolerance of those whose politics are different from leftist progressivism’s.

Crucifying Jordan Peterson The Times of London does a hit job. Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/crucifying-jordan-peterson-bruce-bawer/

Jordan Peterson was a relatively unknown clinical psychologist and University of Toronto professor until his brave 2016 challenge to a draconian Canadian law on transgender pronouns drew widespread attention. Millions watched his brilliant, wide-ranging YouTube lectures about life, truth, feelings, personality, and values. For a while there he seemed ubiquitous, giving interviews and lectures around the world and, in the process, becoming the planet’s most famous living public intellectual. He published a massive bestseller, 12 Rules for Life.

Then, suddenly, he disappeared. For the last two years he’s been in medical hell, experiencing torturous pain and being brought to the brink of death by a puzzling malady that took him, in search of answers, to hospitals, clinics, and rehab centers in Canada, the U.S., Russia, and Serbia. Meanwhile his wife was diagnosed with a rare and deadly cancer from which she now seems, miraculously, to have recovered. On top of everything else, he, his wife, and his deeply devoted adult daughter all contracted the COVID virus.

Emerging from this nightmare and prepared to step back onto the public stage, Peterson agreed to a major interview with Decca Aitkenhead for the Sunday Times of London. The story appeared on January 31; on the same day, Peterson posted on YouTube a recording of the nearly three-hour Zoom conversations that he and his daughter, Mikhaila, had with Aitkenhead. In the recording (which as of Wednesday had accumulated half a million hits), Peterson is friendly and forthcoming, but emotionally fragile as a consequence of his long torment; at one point he breaks into tears and has to step away from the microphone. Mikhaila, for her part, spends an hour and a half telling Aitkenhead the full story of Peterson’s illness, complete with vivid particulars. And Aitkenhead poses throughout as entirely sympathetic, sounding more like a compassionate social worker than a journalist.

[WATCH] Democrat Senator Destroys Biden’s Executive Order Axing the Keystone Pipeline By Matt Margolis

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2021/02/03/watch-democrat-senator-destroys-bidens-executive-order-axing-the-keystone-pipeline-n1422774

Senator Jon Tester, the Democrat from Montana, ripped Joe Biden’s decision to cancel the Keystone XL pipeline on Tuesday.

“I’ve been a supporter of the Keystone pipeline. There have been two caveats and they’ve been basic caveats: you do it to the safety standards and you respect private property rights. I think the Keystone pipeline folks could have done a better job getting the Fort Peck Tribe on board and they need to continue working to do that. But, in the end I think it’s a good project,” Tester explained. “I believe in climate change but I also think this one pipeline isn’t going to turn it around—isn’t going to turn our climate around. It’s not going to make it a markedly worse situation.”

Tester insists that his belief in man-made climate change and his support for the pipeline do not contradict each other. “These might sound like two different philosophies butting heads but I’ll tell you, in my real life, I’m a farmer,” he said. “And we’re not where we need to be in this country for, you know, replacing diesel fuel with something else, in a tractor, for example, or a semi that’s going down the road. We will get there, but it’s going to take some good policies from Washington, D.C., and it’s going to take some money invested in R&D.”

‘We Don’t Have Time to Screw Around’: Sinema, Manchin Targeted by PAC Run by Former AOC Staffers By Stacey Lennox

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/stacey-lennox/2021/02/03/sinema-and-manchin-targeted-for-primary-challenges-in-2024-through-a-pac-run-by-former-aoc-staffers-n1422783

Democrat Senators Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) are being targeted in 2024 for primary challenges through a PAC set up by former AOC staffers. Saikat Chakrabarti and Corbin Trent run the No-Excuses PAC. Both were involved in the founding of Brand New Congress and the Justice Democrats, which seek to recruit and elect progressive radicals to Congress. Their poster child, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, is their model Congress member, and both men served on her staff in Washington, D.C.

In the 2018 cycle, these two organizations teamed up to primary sitting Congress members with more progressive candidates. They also picked up a few existing members who had been elected previously. They were successful in surprising incumbents in deep blue districts who did not take them seriously. As Speaker Nancy Pelosi noted at the time, in the districts where these candidates ran, a glass of water with a “D” on it could win. They are not the candidates who earned Democrats the House majority. In fact, credit is given to their radical rhetoric for Democrat losses in the House in the 2020 cycle.

In 2020, two candidates, Cori Bush (D-Mo.) and Marie Newman (D-Ill.), achieved the same Democrat-for-Democrat exchange in deep blue districts during the 2018 cycle. There were no net gains for the party, and outside of these areas, both their primary and general election candidates were defeated. Some were shellacked. Neither group has ever placed a senator nor won an election against a Republican in a red or purple district.

SPLC Keeps Conservative and Christian Nonprofits on the ‘Hate Group’ List, Doesn’t Mention Antifa By Tyler O’Neil

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2021/02/03/did-the-splc-just-admit-its-hate-group-number-isnt-a-reliable-measure-of-hate-n1422928

On Monday, the far-left smear factory the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) released its annual list of “hate groups” for the previous year, in this case, 2020. The SPLC had to acknowledge that the list of “hate groups” declined, but the organization insisted that “hate” had not declined, so its “hate groups” are of limited value when it comes to measuring hate. This admission comes after years of accusations — from former employees, mainstream conservatives, and some liberal leaders — that the “hate group” number is inflated or a fundraising scam.

The SPLC claimed to identify 838 active hate groups in 2020. “Though numbers have dropped 11% overall, we are still recording historic highs,” the organization claimed. “In 2015, the numbers jumped from 784 to 892, and they have remained well above 800 for the duration of the Trump presidency.”

The SPLC insisted that hate did not decrease in 2020, even though the number of “hate groups” supposedly did. “It is important to understand that the number of hate groups is merely one metric for measuring the level of hate and racism in America, and that the decline in groups should not be interpreted as a reduction in bigoted beliefs and actions motivated by hate,” the report states (emphasis added).

Democrats Announce It Is Safe To Reopen Now That Federal Government Has Tested Negative For Trump

https://babylonbee.com/news/democrats-announce-it-is-safe-to-reopen-now-that-federal-government-tested-negative-for-republican

U.S.—Democrat leaders around the country are declaring it is now safe to reopen since the federal government’s tests have come back negative for Trump.

“The key indicator we were looking for before we could begin the reopening process was that Trump wasn’t president,” said Governor Gavin Newsom. “While we are at the worst point yet in this pandemic, it now makes sense to open– even though the science said the exact opposite last year when it was comparably mild. Because now, all the tests are indicating we have tested negative for Trump.”

Governor Cuomo agreed, saying that all his key science experts — the ones who haven’t quit yet in disgust — are advising him to go ahead and reopen since the tests are coming back negative for Trump. “When the tests were positive some weeks ago, we were pretty concerned,” Cuomo told a reporter down by the docks as he threw a dead senior into the harbor. “Now, the tests are all looking really good for Democrats, so we’re gonna go ahead and get started.”

Governor Whitmer last year cast a spell on Michigan so it would be always winter and never Christmas, but she says she is canceling the spell now and encouraging Michiganders to celebrate “the true Christmas: Biden getting elected.”