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Ruth King

MEDIA, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

My Fight With Canada’s Pravda: Is It Really Not Ok To Be White? Welcome to the CBC’s twisted world of woke racism. George Rojas

By on April 5th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/my-fight-canadas-pravda-it-really-not-ok-be-white-frontpagemagcom/

Canada is an interesting place from a US politics perspective. In terms of left-wing authoritarianism, it’s always been about 2-to-5 years ahead of us Americans. As Rebel News-founder Ezra Levant told the US Congress once: “America should care about Canada because what happens in [] Canada soon comes—or tries to come—to the U.S… we’re a laboratory for bad ideas.”

For this reason, I like checking in on Canada’s state news broadcaster, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. I don’t think the US will be getting officially government-sanctioned news any time soon—the CBC was created in the 30s to counter US-dominance of the country’s airwaves, so they’re in a special position. But Canada’s official outlet is fascinating because it has a special mandate to provide news and commentary to the taxpaying public (who shell out over US$1 billion per year for it) and yet it’s a hyper-elite institution that speaks only to a small part of the country.

Unsurprisingly then, it’s absolutely loathed by Canadian conservatives. When political scientist Eric Kaufmann commissioned a poll in Canada attempting to understand what the left and right most widely disagree on, he found it was ethnic diversity, Handmaid’s Tale-author Margaret Atwood, and the CBC.

In a recent check-up of mine, I found “a story” apparently deemed newsworthy by CBC editors involving some fool in the Toronto suburbs who thought it a good idea to put up stickers saying things like “It’s OK to be white” on a light post. Such an act ‘promoted white nationalism’, according to the CBC’s headline, and supposedly necessitated an interview with the local hate-crimes police unit—Canada does have criminal laws against ‘inciting or willfully promoting hatred’, although this “offense” doesn’t even come close.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

When Cultural Appropriation and Historical Revisionism Are Acts of War The Palestinian assault against Jewish history. Caroline Glick

By on April 5th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/when-cultural-appropriation-and-historical-caroline-glick/

Two weeks ago, a bus filled with veteran Israeli generals from the Bithonistim, a grassroots national security organization, slowly made its way up the slopes of Mt. Ebal in Northern Samaria to visit a biblical-era site that was severely damaged by a Palestinian Authority contractor in late January.

They came to draw the public’s attention to the strategic implications of the war the Palestinians are waging against Jewish history.

The site was excavated between 1980 and 1989 by the late Professor Adam Zertal, who identified it as Joshua’s Altar as described in the Books of Deuteronomy, (27; 1-9) and Joshua (8; 30-35). The animal remains at the site contained thousands of burnt bones of year-old male, exclusively kosher, animals. They were burned in an open flame 3,250 years ago—the time generally identified as the period of ancient Jewish settlement of the Land of Israel under Joshua. Other remains found at the site included earrings and scarabs made in Egypt at the time of Ramses II, the Egyptian pharaoh often associated with the story of the Exodus from Egypt.

As Zertal explained in a lecture in 2013, the altar was buried under a layer of rocks, in keeping with Jewish prescriptions for preventing the desecration of abandoned holy sites. In keeping with the biblical narrative, the altar is made of unhewn stones; instead of steps, there are two ramps for the priests to alight to the platform—blocks of plaster were found nearby. The altar at Mt. Ebal also matches a Talmudic description of an altar from the Second Temple period, around 900 years later, indicating a continuity of Jewish practices throughout the biblical period.

Although initially controversial, Zertal’s general finding that the site is around 3,300 years old and is a Jewish historical site, where sacrifices were carried out in keeping with biblical guidelines, has become widely accepted—although many continue to dispute the specific identification with Joshua.

In late January, the Palestinian Authority (PA) posted a video on its website of 60 meters of the ancient wall surrounding the altar being destroyed to pave a road connecting the Palestinian village of Asira ash-Shamaliya to Nablus. Nablus, built on the ruins of the biblical city of Shechem, is located in northern Samaria between Mt. Ebal and Mt. Gerizim.

Zertal was a fiercely secular son of hardcore socialists. Yet, he explained in a 2013 lecture, his scientific work compelled him to accept that the biblical narrative “from Deuteronomy through the Books of Kings was historically accurate.”

“There are people who refuse to acknowledge that the damage done here was deliberate,” Major General Gershon Hacohen explained to Newsweek. “That since it was the surrounding wall—rather than the altar itself—that was destroyed, the altar wasn’t harmed. That’s like saying that if someone destroys the steps to the Acropolis, they aren’t harming the Acropolis. It’s the same complex.”

“They also say the Palestinians weren’t trying to damage the site—they just needed stones for their road. But look at this place,” he said and waved his hand across the landscape.

The slopes of Mt. Ebal are strewn with loose rocks.

“If they needed rocks for the road, all the Palestinians had to do was bring up a truck and take as many as they needed. Instead, they brought a bulldozer all the way up here and deliberately destroyed 60 meters of a 3,250-year-old wall.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Be Warned: Biden Aims to Outshine Obama as a Progressive Reformer By John Fund

By on April 5th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/04/biden-aims-to-outshine-obama-as-a-progressive-reformer/

“Instead, the country may well suffer in many ways if Biden succeeds in grasping for the fool’s gold of what he perceives as “greatness.”

As a likely one-term POTUS, he is aiming for ‘greatness’ — fast. And the country may pay the price.

I n looking at the nearly $5 trillion in proposed spending in the Biden budget, people are wondering, “What happened to the Joe Biden who ran for president by citing his 36-year record as a moderate dealmaker in the Senate?”

The answer is that, at age 78, he has bought into the belief that he has only a little time to become a transformational president and leave a legacy of “greatness.” In Washington speak, that means adding to the size of government and ridding oneself of any notion you can spend too much money.

As National Review editor Rich Lowry points out, bills in the Senate still require 60 votes to break a filibuster. Much of what Biden wants will crash against that barrier. But there’s an exception. He can pass his stimulus and infrastructure bills under budget-reconciliation rules in the Senate that require only 50 votes — thus his “stimulus” and “infrastructure” bills.

Biden has also been bewitched by a parade of liberal court historians who have met with him. Their implied message: Because of his age, he’s likely to be a one-term president, but he can still go down in history if he creates his own New Deal or Great Society, and uses executive orders to reform our entire immigration system and to redress income inequality.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

‘Biden Effect’ emerges through massive spending and weaponizing race at every turn By Tom Basile –

By on April 5th, 2021

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/apr/2/biden-effect-emerges-through-massive-spending-and-/

“Lunch Pail Joe” has gone woke.

A scant couple of months into the Biden presidency and the governing philosophy of the nation’s 46th president has become painfully clear. Increase federal power through massive spending and weaponize race at every turn. The result is the “Biden Effect.”The Biden Effect turns the American economic paradigm on its head by inserting significant government influence into virtually every aspect of the private sector. It undermines racial solidarity and recklessly promotes division that could tear the nation apart. 

This is the administration’s one-two punch to advance its far-left goals. Issues of race are presented as an urgent crisis but instead are tools to justify federal overreach. Radical shifts in policy reminiscent of the failed Great Society and New Deal are the real objectives, not equity, equality or empowerment. 

With the Biden Effect, the Georgia election-law reform is characterized as “Jim Crow in the 21st century.” The filibuster Sen. Joe Biden used against U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s nomination in 2006 is now a “relic of the Jim Crow era.” Mr. Biden’s administration baselessly equates an assertive foreign policy toward Communist China with domestic anti-Asian bias. 

Kamala Harris, who compared ICE agents to the Ku Klux Klan, is now in charge of the southern border crisis.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Texas Neanderthals were right Texas ditched the mask mandate and opened up – and it’s all fine. Sean Collins

By on April 5th, 2021

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/04/01/the-texas-neanderthals-were-right/

In early March, Texas governor Greg Abbott announced he was ending the state’s mandate for people to wear masks, and reopening businesses at full capacity. Media outlets went into overdrive to denounce him and predict catastrophe. CNN editor-at-large Chris Cillizza called Abbott’s decision ‘head-scratching, anti-science’. ‘Model projections for Texas show worst-case scenario without mask mandate’, warned an ABC TV station in Houston. Abbott’s move was part of a ‘bold plan to kill another 500,000 Americans’, screamed Vanity Fair.

Politicians also rushed to criticise Abbott. Former representative and failed presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke called his decision a ‘death warrant for Texans’. California governor Gavin Newsom said Texas was ‘absolutely reckless’ for lifting its Covid rules.

No less than President Joe Biden felt obliged to speak out and condemn Abbott. ‘The last thing we need is Neanderthal thinking that in the meantime, everything’s fine – take off your mask, forget it. It still matters.’

Well, it appears the Neanderthals in Texas got it right, and Biden is the one whose thinking is caveman-like. Now, three weeks after Abbott’s order to lift the mask mandate went into effect, the Covid situation has improved in Texas. New cases are down, to their lowest level since June. Hospitalisations have fallen to their lowest level since autumn. Death rates have plummeted. Furthermore, the outlook for vaccinations in the state appears bright, with a record daily number of people receiving shots. Adults of all ages are now eligible for a vaccine jab, a faster pace than many other states.

Have Biden and the media apologised for slandering Texas? And have they learned that lifting mandates on mask-wearing and removing other restrictions does not lead to Covid-spreading? Of course not.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Appeasing Cuba’s Regime Didn’t Work The Biden administration should learn from the failures of the Obama administration. by Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX-10) and Rep.Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL-25)

By on April 5th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/appeasing-cubas-regime-didnt-work-11617400699?mod=opinion_major_pos5

For more than 60 years, a dictatorship has imposed a violently oppressive system on the Cuban people. Its human-rights abuses grew worse under the appeasement policy of the Obama-Biden administration. Amid the “thaw” in relations, documented political detentions rose to 9,940 in 2016 from 8,616 in 2015. The Castro regime lined its pockets and expanded its machinery of repression.

The malignancy has spread beyond the island. After revamping the Venezuelan military and intelligence services, Cuba led efforts to sustain the illegitimate Nicolás Maduro regime and supported its abuses, which mirrored those carried out against the Cuban people. The 2020 State Department report on Venezuela highlights torture, arbitrary detentions and extrajudicial killings—abuses that “amounted to crimes against humanity,” U.N.-appointed investigators found.

The Cuban dictatorship also worked with Hezbollah, a terrorist proxy of Iran, to prop up the Maduro regime. In Cuba, terrorists find a haven. The regime refused Colombia’s extradition requests following a 2019 bombing that killed 22. The Cuban regime reportedly also harbors American fugitives such as terrorist cop-killer Joanne Chesimard, hijacker-murderer Ishmail Muslim Ali and terrorist bomb-maker William Morales. Inexplicably, the Obama administration delisted Cuba as a state sponsor of terror in 2015. This January, the Trump administration corrected that error.

Let’s not forget that the attacks in 2016 and 2017 against U.S. diplomats in Havana remain unsolved. Many U.S. personnel and their families suffered debilitating brain injuries.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Inconvenient Facts for the War on Testing College admission based on personal essays helps affluent students.

By on April 5th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/inconvenient-facts-for-the-war-on-testing-11617563017?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

Among the “emergency” progressive policy changes likely to persist after the Covid-19 pandemic is the abandonment of standardized testing in college admissions. Anti-testing activists had been winning the argument for years by claiming the tests favor privileged students. After social distancing disrupted test taking in 2020, the future scope of the SAT and ACT is uncertain.

But college admissions based on “soft” rather than numerical criteria won’t be more equitable or progressive. Privileged students are likely to gain the most. A new paper from Stanford’s Center for Education Policy Analysis shows that “essay content”—that is, the quality of admissions essays—“is more strongly associated with household income than is SAT score.”

It’s true that high-income students, who are more likely to have highly educated parents, score better on the SAT, on average. But testing critics never explain what would be a fairer metric. That’s because the same resources and academic preparation that enable students to score well on the SAT also enable them to get better grades, pad their resumes, and write polished admissions essays.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Mirror Mirror on the Wall By Richard Fernandez

By on April 4th, 2021

https://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2021/04/04/mirror-mirror-on-the-wall-5-n1437169

“Future historians may tell us whether the Nov 2020 has triggered some ghastly overreach by America’s enemies or some march of folly by Washington’s ruling elite.”

The new administration started off using virtue signaling as an important component of foreign and domestic policy. But now even the “only adults in the room” suddenly suspect that  Woke garlic doesn’t repel vampires. Russia and China continue to defy the rules of the Biden-Harris administration despite their expectation that the world would return to its pre-2016 order. Pundits are starting to accept something has gone wrong in the calculations.

Russia and China — not to mention North Korea and Iran — are all on the move and don’t seem deterred by Washington. If disaster overtakes the Biden Harris restoration future historians will conclude that organized self delusion played a leading part. The cultural and political establishment belief in the Great Reset after Trump sputtered and instead of the predicted return to normal the global world has continued its descent into crisis. Perhaps the status quo overattributed the problems of the old global world to populist unrest and failed to address the basic weaknesses which caused them. They thought they could pick up where they left off and couldn’t.

Joe Biden’s focus on ensuring populism never rises again in America through the institutionalization of mail-in voting, social media deplatforming, gun control, and Curleyism may have to compete with challenges from the global world. The Democratic Party has “near enemies” but it also has “far enemies.”…

There are three main challenges to the restoration of the status quo ante:

The slow emergence of the Third World from the Covid pandemic;
The disruption of the global supply chain by lockdowns; and
The direct challenge to Joe Biden by Xi Jinping for leadership of the international system.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

IS DEREK CHAUVIN A RACIST MURDERER OR JUST A MURDERER? I suspect the latter: the data just don’t support that cops murder out of racism. Few will attend to that – but maybe progress can happen regardless. John McWhorter

By on April 4th, 2021

https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/is-derek-chauvin-a-racist-murderer

I am neither a criminologist nor pathologist nor coroner nor police officer. However, from what it would seem to me, Derek Chauvin should spend a good deal of the rest of his life in prison for the murder of George Floyd. However much fentanyl or meth Floyd had in him that night, no one will seriously argue that Floyd was about to keel over that night on his own.

Furthermore I hope Chauvin serves as a harbinger of change. It is gruesome that a person can end up at the mercy of a police officer and be killed in a flash, by someone who almost always walks away innocent, let off according to legal niceties that allow that cops may do hideous things under pressure but that’s just the way it goes.

However, the good-thinking consensus here is that I am leaving something out.

I am supposed to be deeply aggrieved that George Floyd died because he was black. Chauvin, I am supposed to think, murdered Floyd at least partly out a disregard for black lives – or, to use the term of art these days, bodies. This is supposed to be about race.

It is perhaps the most heretical belief I hold these days that I don’t think so. However, I use the term heretical with some irony.

* * *

The cops kill hundreds and hundreds of people every year. Of them, white people are the majority by a good margin. For every incident we hear of where cops kill a black person, there are multiple others where cops killed a white person and we did not hear about it.

Black people, however, are killed more than what our proportion of the population would predict in itself. Specifically, black people are killed at a rate two and a half times our representation in the population.

The good word is that this “proves” that racism is behind the killings of black people. Presumably racist bias, even subconscious, makes cops pull the trigger in tense situations.

This is an understandable approach, but not truth incarnate, and it leaves something out.

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BOOKS, EDUCATION Comments turned off

How to Tell the Difference Between Real Education and Propaganda By Annie Holmquist

By on April 4th, 2021

https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/how-to-tell-the-difference-between-real-educati

The other day I ran across a passage from That Hideous Strength which seems oddly applicable to our time. A dystopian novel written by C. S. Lewis at the close of World War II, That Hideous Strength finds one of its main characters, Mark Studdock, working for N.I.C.E., an organization which pulls the strings in a controlling, totalitarian society.

Studdock is assigned to write propaganda articles for N.I.C.E., an assignment which he objects to when he receives it from his boss, Miss Hardcastle. Studdock argues that it won’t work because  newspapers “are read by educated people” too smart to be taken in by propaganda. The story continues:

‘That shows you’re still in the nursery, lovey,’ said Miss Hardcastle. ‘Haven’t you yet realized that it’s the other way round?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.’

Reading this, I couldn’t help but ponder how much of the American public thinks like Studdock. We are convinced that education is the panacea for all ills, and that if the masses could simply achieve one more grade level or degree, we wouldn’t have so many problems to sort through.

But what if that education is, as Miss Hardcastle implies in the passage above, the very thing blinding the eyes of the general public? Or perhaps we should say, what we call education.

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