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Ruth King

A Book for Our Times: Peter Wood’s 1620 Skewers 1619 Project By Stanley Kurtz

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/a-book-for-our-times-peter-woods-1620-skewers-1619-project/

I can think of no book more deserving of a review in The New York Times—or less likely to receive one—than Peter Wood’s just-published 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project. More than a powerful refutation, Wood’s 1620 is a withering appraisal and deadpan skewering of the 1619 Project as a cultural phenomenon. That ill-starred journalistic project is the purest and most perfect example of woke. The cultural revolution of 2020 will always rightly be associated with the 1619 Project of The New York Times. Not for nothing did project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones cheerfully embrace the term “1619 riots.”

Many young Americans believe that slavery was a novelty in world history—an exclusively American innovation. That misapprehension is abetted by the 1619 Project. Wood thus begins with a quick tour of New World slavery prior to 1619. Among the indigenous peoples of the Americas, captive enemies were kept for their labor, for the sport of torture, and in a few cases for what Wood calls “almost industrial level” human sacrifice, not to mention cannibalism.

Long before 1619, the Spanish and Portuguese used slavery to extract forced labor from native peoples. Eventually, they abolished the enslavement of native Americans in favor of something closer to serf-like dependence. Certainly, the Spanish and Portuguese imported slaves from Africa (where slavery was also common), sometimes putting them in charge of indigenous slaves. Those African overseers often discharged their task with brutality. When a party of Spanish conquistadors out to subdue what is now Florida were shipwrecked, they themselves were enslaved by the indigenes. Most died in short order. Slavery was a world-wide human norm.

3 Fishy Things In Pennsylvania Voter Data The State Has Yet To Explain By Jordan Davidson

https://thefederalist.com/2020/11/16/3-fishy-things-in-pennsylvania-voter-data-the-state-has-yet-to-explain/

Pennsylvania, arguably the most important swing state in the 2020 general election, has some irregularities in its mail-in ballot voting records contributing to public unease over its election results.

While the media has called the Coal State for former Vice President Joe Biden, President Donald J. Trump and his campaign have pursued legal action in the state over alleged election violations and potential voter fraud that could have changed the vote totals.

The campaign also has a lawsuit pending petition in the U.S. Supreme Court. It challenges the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision to allow mail-in ballots that arrived after Election Day to be counted, despite state laws that say the opposite.

The Pennsylvania Department of State has 3,098,705 people listed in its “General Election Mail Ballot Requests,” which records who requested a certain type of ballot, when that request was received by election officials, and when an official ballot was cast.

The data, which was last updated on Nov. 10 and is supposed to encompass all of the state’s mail-in ballot and absentee ballot requests, include irregularities that raise questions about the remote voting process in Pennsylvania. Not only do the records show that numerous voters older than the eldest-recorded person living in the United States requested and cast ballots in the Nov. 3 election, but several ballots were processed by the state’s election systems as received before they were even sent out.

Despite such suspicious and eyebrow-raising records, the Pennsylvania Department of State did not respond to The Federalist’s multiple requests for comment, leaving important questions left unanswered.

Why Are People Older Than 120 Years Old Voting?

Elizabeth Bauer: Biden COVID Advisor: Those Older Than 75 Should Get Vaccines Last !!!!!????

https://thefederalist.com/2020/11/16/biden-covid-advisor-those-older-than-75-should-get-vaccines-last/

American’s should be deeply troubled that a man Biden is looking to for advice on COVID is someone who hopes to die at 75 and has publicly supported rationing care for the elderly.

One of Joe Biden’s early actions after corporate media claimed he was president-elect was to name members of a task force to recommend actions about COVID-19. Most of the names were neither famous nor infamous, but for one: Ezekiel “Zeke” Emanuel, whose fame comes from family connections (he’s the brother of former Obama chief-of-staff and former Chicago mayor, Rahm Emanuel) and the infamy gained from a 2014 Atlantic article, “Why I Hope to Die at 75.”

Now, to be clear, Zeke did not argue for a “Giver”-style “release to elsewhere” of all 75-year-olds. He explicitly states opposition to legalizing euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. And the initial paragraphs of his article emphasize that this is what he wants for himself: “I am talking about how long I want to live and the kind and amount of health care I will consent to after 75.”

But he should have stopped there. Instead, in that article, he expounds on the vastly-reduced ability of older people to “contribute” or to be “productive.”

What’s more, he writes that “Our living too long places real emotional weights on our progeny” — not merely in terms of caregiving needs, but because “there is much less pressure to conform to parental expectations and demands after they are gone” and because “living parents also occupy the role of head of the family [and] they make it hard for grown children to become the patriarch or matriarch.”

Christopher Bedford: The Media Are Covering Up Left-Wing Violence Because They Agree With The Mission  

https://thefederalist.com/2020/11/16/christopher-bedford-the-media-are-covering-up-left-wing-violence-because-they-agree-with-the-mission/

Federalist Senior Editor Christopher Bedford condemned the media’s deliberate attempts to either ignore or justify the left’s explosion of violence in the nation’s capital over the weekend as a symptom of press bias fomenting the chaos.

“The media absolutely ought to be covering it more, but they’re covering up more in a lot of cases because they agree with the mission and they think that they’re part of the Resistance as well,” Bedford said on Fox News Monday. “They think that Republicans or conservatives or people who are marching in the street are bad, basically right-arm-bearing Nazis, and at that point you can really justify a huge amount of action.”

Black Lives Matter and Antifa, Bedford added, imagine themselves as righteous activists operating under the curtain of historic struggles from fighting Nazism to the mid-20th century civil rights movement.

“What level wouldn’t you go to to try to stop Hitler,” Bedford said. “If you call your opponents Hitler, it can justify a lot of action … both of them are just setting up camps in Washington D.C. Downtown’s an absolute mess.”

Obama Calls for More Big Tech ‘Fact-Checking’ in Wake of Trump Getting 71M Votes By Tyler O’Neil

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2020/11/16/obama-calls-for-more-big-tech-fact-checking-in-wake-of-trump-getting-71m-votes-n1150338

Former President Barack Obama lamented the fact that President Donald Trump won 71 million votes in the 2020 election, blaming the “current media environment” for a supposed lack of an “informed citizenry.” He called for “the media” and “the tech companies” to “inform the public better” and “separate truth from fiction.” Obama said this just as Facebook, Twitter, and legacy media outlets have worked to bury or undermine important stories like the Hunter Biden emails and the irregularities in the 2020 election.

In an interview aired on 60 Minutes on Sunday, CBS News correspondent Scott Pelley lamented that the 2020 election (the results of which are still disputed) wasn’t a clear repudiation of Trump.

“President-Elect Biden won in this election more votes than anyone in history,” Pelley noted. “And yet, the 2020 vote wasn’t a repudiation of Donald Trump; it was more like an affirmation. He received 71 million votes, eight million more than he did in 2016. What does that tell you about our country today?”

Obama said the results show that America is “very divided,” even down to the level of the voters. “It has now become a contest where issues, facts, policies per se don’t matter, as much as identity and wanting to beat the other guy. You know, that’s taken priority. I do think the current media environment adds to that greatly. This democracy doesn’t work if we don’t have an informed citizenry,” he argued.

The Divisive Double Standard in Joe Biden’s ‘Unity’ Speech Heather Mac Donald

https://www.newsweek.com/divisive-double-standard-joe-bidens-unity-speech-opinion-1547002

Joe Biden’s first speech as president elect is being hailed as a long-overdue call to overcome division. “President-elect Joe Biden seeks to unite nation with victory speech,” read the CNN headline the next day. The New York Times summed up: “Mr. Biden renewed his promise to be a president for all Americans in a polarized time.”

It is not just the left-leaning press taking at face value Biden’s calls to “put away the harsh rhetoric.” Conservative pundits are doing so as well. Wall Street Journal columnist William McGurn called the speech “Lincolnesque.” Biden’s unity message was “exactly what the country needed to hear,” McGurn wrote. Daily Wire podcast host Ben Shapiro found the speech so pollyannish in its call for reconciliation as to be risible.

And yet Biden’s actual remarks were anything but unifying. Among the “great battles of our time” that Biden has now been called to fight, he said, was the still unaccomplished goal of “root[ing] out systemic racism in this country.” That “systemic racism” is presumably underwritten by millions of white Americans who continue to prevent “racial justice,” in Biden’s words. They are the ones who represent what Biden called “our darkest impulses,” locked in “constant battle” with our “better angels.” It was time—finally—for those better angels to prevail, Biden said.

This indictment of white Americans was a constant theme during the Democratic presidential primaries. In an August 2019 press briefing, Biden claimed that racism was a “white man’s problem visited on people of color.” “White folks are the reason we have institutional racism,” he said. In a January 2019 speech, Biden announced: “We have a lot to root out, but most of all the systematic racism that most of us whites don’t like to acknowledge even exists.” On Friday, November 6, the day before the press declared Biden the president elect, he was still hammering the racism theme. He had a “mandate” to eliminate “systemic racism,” he announced, prefiguring his victory speech the next day.

2020’s Long Count Is About Hypocrisy, Accuracy, and Legitimacy How easily the Left forgets that the Trump campaign is doing exactly what Joe Biden was advised to do. by J.T. Young

https://spectator.org/2020-election-recounts-hypocrisy/

The presidential election’s ongoing saga is a tale about hypocrisy, accuracy, and legitimacy. The Left’s adherents hypocritically claim they would not be pushing every reexamination button if they were trailing. Conservatives counter that accuracy is paramount in an election so complex, close, and important. Yet the overlooked consideration in this duel across the political spectrum is America’s need for legitimacy.

The Left is up in arms over the Trump campaign demanding that the election’s outcome be thoroughly reviewed within the parameters of electoral due process. Apparently, no memories are shorter than those of hypocrites.

The Left is acting like the football team that hurries to the line of scrimmage in order to run a play and preempt a close call’s review.

Less than three months ago, on August 25, Hillary Clinton said on Showtime’s The Circus: “Joe Biden should not concede under any circumstances because I think this is going to drag out, and eventually I do believe he will win if we don’t give an inch and if we are as focused and relentless as the other side is.” Clinton added, “We’ve got to have a massive legal operation. I know the Biden campaign is working on that.”

In other words, Clinton told Biden to prepare to do what the Trump camp is now doing. For the Left, what is good for the goose is not good for the gander. Certainly, no conservative ganders should be surprised by the leftist geese’s sudden change of heart.

Unable to be president, at least Hillary was able to be prescient. Events have unfolded exactly as she predicted. They just have unfolded in the opposite direction.

Just to recap: In its most important decision, during a global pandemic, America has a close outcome decided across several states under a multiplicity of varying rules. Most important things undertaken during severe stress and composed of tight margins and great complexity take … time. Unless of course you are the Left, the topic is elections, and the narrow lead yours.

Europe’s Lax Security Aids Islamist Terrorists by Con Coughlin

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16733/europe-security-islamist-terror

“I expect an end to the misconceived tolerance, and for all the nations of Europe to finally realise how dangerous the ideology of political Islam is for our freedom and the European way of life.” — Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, Die Welt, November 3, 2020.

“We see very clearly that terrorist actions can actually be led by some people who use migratory flows to threaten our territory.” — French President Emmanuel Macron, Politico, November 5, 2020.

For once, the sudden upsurge in terror attacks appears to have prompted European leaders to acknowledge the glaring deficiencies in their ability to protect Europe against Islamist-inspired acts of terrorism.

The latest wave of Islamist-inspired terror attacks to strike Europe has yet again exposed lamentable flaws in the ability of European security agencies to provide adequate protection for their citizens.

In all three instances — the attacks in Paris, Nice and Vienna — it has emerged that those held responsible for carrying out the attacks had links to global jihadi networks that went undetected by European security officials.

Moreover, the ease with which some of those involved in the attacks were able to travel freely across the continent has once more raised concerns about Europe’s lax border controls as defined by the European Union’s Schengen Agreement, and the ability of radicalised jihadis to exploit them.

In the most recent attack in the Austrian capital Vienna on November 2, it transpires that the 20-year-old gunman who killed four people and wounded 22 others before he was himself shot dead by police had travelled to neighbouring Slovakia in July to buy ammunition.

Shame for the UK at the United Nations In supporting language of cultural erasure, the government has crossed a new line Melanie Phillips

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/shame-for-the-uk-at-the-united-nations?toke

Once again, the British government has chosen a strange way to demonstrate its purportedly close friendship with the State of Israel.

Last week saw another typical episode of Israel-bashing at the UN. Its General Assembly Special Political and Decolonisation Committee passed no fewer than seven resolutions condemning Israel.

One of these denounced it for “repressive measures” against Syrian citizens in the Golan Heights, simply because Israel remains in control there. Since the only reason Israel is in the Golan is to repel Syrian aggression, this is clearly absurd.

Three other resolutions addressed the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA), one of them renewing its mandate.

According to the NGO UN Watch, none of these noted the corruption in the agency that had been exposed by a UN investigation.

Not to mention, of course, the fact that UNRWA’s very existence is designed to perpetuate hostility to Israel, by creating in the classification of Palestinian “refugees’’ a unique category that actually multiplies them over time; nor that most of UNWRA’s staff are under the thumb of Hamas.

As the UN Watch director Hillel Neuer pointed out, the UN stayed silent when the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist group recently attacked Israeli civilians with a barrage of rockets from Gaza. Yet two weeks later, the UN bashed Israel instead in this slew of resolutions.

Said Neuer: “While France, Germany, Sweden and other EU states are expected to support most of the estimated 20 resolutions to be adopted against Israel by December, the same European nations have failed to introduce a single UNGA resolution on the human rights situation in China, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, Turkey, Pakistan, Vietnam, Algeria, or on 175 other countries. Where’s their supposed concern for international law and human rights?”

The only one of these seven resolutions on which the UK abstained rather than voted in support renewed the mandate of a UN special committee to investigate “Israeli practices affecting the human rights of the Palestinian people”. But worse still was one of the seven that the UK did support.

This expressed concern over “the tensions and violence in the recent period throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem and including with regard to the holy places of Jerusalem”.

It’s a Coup. Just Say It! By Jay Valentine

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/11/its_a_coup_just_say_it.html

Political science types have a word for every happening.  One is the Overton Window.  Like lots of these terms, it is not too scientific, but it well describes things observed every day.

For instance, the idea that an eight-year-old boy decides to be a girl, because he feels like it, and is then medicated with hormone therapy to look as close to a girl as science enables was once a preposterous idea.  Then it was possible, then probable, and now, voilà!  A boy is now a girl, and if you use the wrong pronoun, you lose your job!

Meet the Overton Window: that period of time when something seemingly quite impossible becomes mainstream.

This is a game two can play.

Coup. Say it: “This is not just election fraud, it is a coup.” 

Say it, and it will start to sink in.  As it does, at least for you, your Overton Window opens up.  The impossibility that the election of the president of the United States of America can be overthrown by preprogrammed, organized election fraud — that a likely landslide was turned into a loss — happened.  You saw it.

That window is about to open up for our nation.