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Ruth King

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.

Geezer in the Freezer….Presumptuous partisan Joe Biden’s transition has been put on ice. Jay Whig

https://amgreatness.com/2020/11/14/geezer-in-the-freezer/

With Thanksgiving canceled in blue America—California, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island et al.—let’s move on to Christmas, or as Democrats who hate the First Amendment like to call it, the Holiday Season.

You know, it’s that magical time of the year when the Elf on the Shelf brings messages to Elsa and Olaf in socialist Fantiscandinavia. The Grinch—who lives in California’s 12th District—then brings stimulus checks to all the Whos in Whoville.

You won’t be allowed to care for people you actually know this year. The infection is far too dangerous for generous affection. The forlorn relatives, the lonely neighbor down the street, part of the furniture in normal loving households at Thanksgiving and Christmas, will just have to hold off committing suicide for another year.

In blue America, it is a time of year to push your acts of charity outward to people you don’t know. Or as C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape—the underworld mastermind—advises his new mentee, the Democratic Party:

Do what you will, there is going to be some benevolence, as well as some malice, in your patient’s soul. The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbours whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary.

The Trump CT Scanner Donald Trump has forced elites to reveal to the nation what they were—and perhaps had always been. And the resulting penetrating imagery showed their own malignancy. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2020/11/15/the-trump-ct-scanner/

These past four years, Donald Trump, intentionally or not, became a CT scanner that produced three-dimensional images of the innards of elite institutions and people, showing us what is beneath their veneers. He had an eerie manner of replying to critics in such an upstart fashion that those who objected to his supposed crudity proved cruder in repartee than he. And he showcased his successes for America in such a way as to make his enemies wish that successes for their country were failures instead.

If one suspected before 2017 that White House CNN correspondent Jim Acosta was a lightweight blowhard, be now confirmed you had been naïve in such a balanced assessment. 

If you had thought Hillary Clinton was becoming unstable during the Obama years, in the Trump era she ended up hiring two-bit ex-spies to cobble together lies about her opponent, jabber about La Résistance, and urge candidates never to concede an election. 

If you once concluded that over-meddlesome Twitter, Google, and Facebook were massaging accounts, searches, and postings in a partisan fashion, after Trump you saw they were creepy Big Brothers with no apologies for warping the Internet. 

If in the old days, a busybody Michael Bloomberg seemed a whiny scold with unlimited money he intended to use to get his way, after Trump he became an obsessed politico who threw $100 million here, another $100 million there to stop Trump. In the end, Bloomberg proved only that he knew a lot about making money but not so much about how to spend it.

Trump Going Into Beast Mode “Dissident Donald” will be rising now for real. By Ilana Mercer

https://amgreatness.com/2020/11/15/trump-going-into-beast-mode/

It was November 7. Fox News had just called the election for Joe Biden. A fellow was waxing fat about the flawless campaign run by Biden; how his own lily-white daughters were all aflutter about Kamala.

The delirious faces of network distaff were plastered all over the idiot’s lantern, as they cracked the whip to bring about compliance with the idea that here underway was a glorious election process and outcome. 

The truth is that the messed-up Biden campaign worked because it targeted a coalition of weepy white women—including those with the Y chromosome—and the rest of tribalized America. Joe and Kamala won the un-American, anti-American vote, which now appears to be the majority.

The images of the vote-counters proliferating on the Internet mirrored the same constituency: minorities, white men with sunken chests and that angry, radical-professor, Antifa demeanor, joined by mountainous women with the signature tumbleweed hair. Pictures are not proof of misconduct, but Trump’s America seems scarce or nowhere apparent in the country’s vote-counting covens. 

As expected in the Kamala Harris Administration, Kamala opened the victory celebrations. Parsed, here is the vice president-elect’s victory speech: Blacks. Browns. Latinas. People of Color. My Mother. Minorities. Me, myself and I. (My white husband? Nope!) Racism. Everywhere. Systemic. 

The speech was a trite retread of Kamala’s August address at the Democratic National Convention, where she collected her party’s award for out-crazing her primary debaters by calling Joe Biden a racist. 

Showdown in the Western Sahara by Khaled Abu Toameh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16763/western-sahara-showdown

Presently, the Polisario Front appears to be trying to create “facts on the ground” outside of any legal framework, presumably in the hope that the international community will view them as irreversible.

International help would be greatly appreciated to prevent this showdown in the Sahara from escalating further.

While much of the world was looking the other way, distracted by China’s coronavirus and its economic aftermath, a separatist militia group backed by Algeria, the Polisario Front, have been militarily exploiting the crisis.

For weeks, the Polisario Front have blocked the only road leading southward from Morocco to Mauritania in the buffer zone of Guerguerat. Currently, around 200 trucks find themselves stranded there, while UN peacekeepers (MINURSO), on whom Morocco relies to enforce the tense 30-year ceasefire, apparently feel overwhelmed.

Ever since Spain withdrew from its former colony in the Western Sahara in 1975, the Polisario Front have been trying to claim the territory, rich with phosphates and fishing rights, as an independent state for themselves. Since that time, however, Morocco has served as the sole sovereign, offering the Western Sahara autonomy but not independence.

Last week, on Thursday night, Morocco finally responded to the Polisario Front’s roadblock at Guerguerat by creating a security cordon and promising to “restore free circulation of civilian and commercial traffic” between Morocco and Mauritania — an act that the Polisario Front called a “provocation.”

The Polisario Front had announced the Monday before that any movement of troops by Morocco to the buffer zone area “will be considered as a flagrant aggression to which the Sahrawi [Polisario] side will respond vigorously in self-defence and to defend its national sovereignty. This will also mean the end of the ceasefire and the beginning of a new war across the region.”