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Ruth King

Communist China Partners With Islamic Iran Intensifying China’s challenge to U.S. ascendancy.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/communist-china-partners-islamic-iran-joseph-klein/

Communist China is forging a 25-year strategic partnership with the Islamic Republic of Iran. It is an economic and security alliance between two America-hating dictatorships. As a result, China’s footprint in Iran will increase in proportion to its expected $400 billion of investment in Iran’s energy, petrochemical, transport, and manufacturing infrastructure and purchase of oil at a discounted price over the next 25 years. Beijing’s ongoing infrastructure work includes the China National Nuclear Corporation’s redesign of an Iranian heavy water nuclear reactor at Arak.

According to the New York Times, which has had access to the proposed agreement between the two countries, the agreement “calls for joint training and exercises, joint research and weapons development and intelligence sharing.” China would also be helping to construct port facilities, including one just outside of the Strait of Hormuz, the strategically important entrance to the Persian Gulf.

China was already Iran’s largest trading partner and oil client in 2019, although Iran-China trade fell by over 34 percent to $23 billion compared to 2018. The decline was in part the result of the impact of the Trump administration’s crippling sanctions imposed on the Iranian regime and firms doing business with the regime. Nevertheless, while Chinese companies are continuing to keep a wary eye on the impact of U.S. sanctions on their overall business, the Chinese government appears willing to risk a short-term economic hit to its state-run companies in order to reap the geopolitical benefits of gaining greater influence in the Middle East region through an expanded relationship with Iran. This relationship promises to bring Iran more firmly into China’s Belt and Road Initiative orbit. China is delivering yet another message to the United States that China will use its increasing economic power to challenge U.S. ascendancy in defining the rules of international relations and multilateralism.

Alex Vatanka, an Iran analyst at the Washington-based Middle East Institute, was quoted as saying during a Voice of America Persian interview that “Iran is potentially a lucrative market for China, which wants to keep its stranglehold on that market and keep out rivals.” Vatanka added that “China also does not want to see the Islamic republic fall because of American pressure, an outcome the Chinese would read as a net loss for themselves, geopolitically.” 

Nigerian privilege By Sarah Lilly *****

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/07/nigerian_privilege.html

The war on white privilege is permeating the entire world. As a white person, I am anxiously aggrieved by the obsessive persecution of my fellow whites and I’m feverishly in fear that my white privilege will be looted from me like a loaf of bread taken from a New York deli. How will I survive without the constant assistance that this white supremacist system provides me? Out of pure self-preservation, we need to shift the focus of the mob towards another group that has been stealthily benefitting from their privilege unscathed… the Nigerians.   

Perhaps you are unaware, but Nigerians are one of the most successful demographics in the United States. While the average household income in the United States is $61,937, the median income for households of Nigerian ancestry is $68,658.

In fact, 10% of Nigerian headed households earn over $140,000 annually and 25% earn over $90,000 annually.

Nigerian immigrants rank in the top ten for both the percentage of persons 16 and older that are employed and the percentage with college degrees.

Nigerians are also one of the most educated demographics in the country. Of people over the age of 25, 37% of Nigerians hold a bachelor’s degree and 29% hold an advanced degree, compared to 20% and 11% of the total U.S. population respectively.

Marxo-Capitalism at Work By David Solway

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/07/marxocapitalism_at_work.html

It may well be that the hoary political distinction between left and right that has embedded itself in the language since the French Revolution of 1788-89, when the radical anti-monarchists and Jacobins sat on the left side of the chamber in the National Assembly and the traditionalists on the right, is no longer pertinent. The political binary that has dominated thought for over two centuries is growing obsolete.

The right is gradually being eroded, its traditional domains in government, church, education, corporate affairs and art, as Andrew Breitbart feared, gradually but inexorably losing their cultural authority and political credibility. With the advent of global financiers intent on remaking the world and the establishment of the giant media platforms and search engines, left and right are merging into a new, corporate, non-Hegelian synthesis. Soon there may be only different shades of left, which in practice means that once the progressivist venture is fully consummated, the term and concept of “left” would no longer apply. There would be little to the right of it.

We might say that the right is spending its way into the left. One of the great enigmas of our day is the fact that the most devoted and powerful socialists among us happen to be capitalist billionaires, corporate patricians laboring to destroy the democratic structures and free-market economies that allowed them to amass their fortunes in the first place. They are the elite members of the fabled one-percent whose policies and initiatives would ideally abolish the fiscal bracket to which they belong. Moreover, they are depriving young people of the social and economic conditions that they themselves enjoyed to blaze a path to opportunity and personal wealth.

They are, in short, cultural paradoxes who appear to suffer from a critical access of cognitive dissonance, Marxo-capitalists whose political loyalties and principles work against their own economic interests — unless, of course, they can successfully transform themselves into a managerial ruling class with a personal grip on the wealth of the nation. Such is clearly their aim. At that point, they need no longer compete in the marketplace but only with one another for the best seats on the Presidium. Company headquarters coalesce into a new Kremlin.

Silencing The Song of the South By Gamaliel Isaac

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/07/silencing_emthe_song_of_the_southem.html

Splash Mountain was a thrilling log flume ride for children in Disney’s Magic Kingdom.  Children were taken on an exciting ride past animatronic characters singing classic songs from the 1946 Disney movie The Song of the South.  Alas, our woke culture is not happy with Splash Mountain or Song of the South.  Over twenty thousand people signed a petition asking that the characters of Splash Mountain be changed to those of The Princess and the Frog, a 2009 film featuring Disney’s first African-American princess.  Disney caved in.  Long before the petition Disney decided not to release Song of the South in any home video format in the United States and after streaming technology came along Disney decided not to stream the movie. 

Fortunately, Disney released the movie in other countries.  When I read about how racist Song of the South was, a skeptical light bulb went off in my head and I ordered a DVD to see if it was really so bad.  My children loved the movie and I enjoyed it too.  The last thing that movie is, is racist.  So why did Disney cave in to demands to prevent Americans from seeing it?

Song of the South is a musical based on stories that originated in Africa.  So censoring Song of the South censored stories by black people.  The stories were compiled by Joel Chandler Harris who grew up on a plantation and heard them from a slave called Uncle Bob Capers.  In 1880, Harris published his first book, Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings. In the book, he preserved the dialect of Uncle Bob Capers.  The book was an instant success, and Harris went on to publish another ten books of stories from Uncle Remus.  Walt Disney grew up reading those stories and one of his ambitions was to bring them to the silver screen.  His idea was to have both animated characters and people together in the same movie.  Walt Disney in his effort to be faithful to the stories kept the dialect of Uncle Remus although he simplified it somewhat so that it would be more understandable to general audiences. 

Will Biden’s War on the Suburbs Become a Campaign Issue? By Stanley Kurtz

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/will-bidens-war-on-the-suburbs-become-a-campaign-issue/?utm_

In remarks Tuesday in the White House Rose Garden, President Trump promised to reverse what is arguably the most radical action of the Obama-Biden administration: promulgation of the rule on Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH). Trump went beyond his tweet of a couple of weeks ago, when he said he “may” end the rule. Now he says he will in fact “take out” AFFH. This will need to be by amendment or modification, since the Obama-Biden AFFH is actually a wild over-reading of the phrase “affirmatively further” in current law.

The president said that coming from New York, he’d been following the Westchester County controversy for years. As I explain in Spreading the Wealth, the Obama administration ran a test of what would someday become his AFFH rule in suburban Westchester County, New York. The Obama administration effectively stripped Westchester County of its zoning power, forced it to spend tens of millions of dollars on high-density low-income housing, then ordered it to “affirmatively advertise” that housing to non-residents. In effect, the federal government took over Westchester and forced it to suspend its own laws and spend its tax money on non-residents. All this occurred without evidence, or even allegation, of housing discrimination. Westchester was actually one of the most diverse counties in New York at the time. Such demographic “imbalances” as existed there were a function of economics, not discrimination.

After the Obama-Biden administration intervened, Westchester’s local government flipped from Democratic to Republican. Rob Astorino was elected county executive and fought the Obama administration for years, although his hands were largely tied by a legal agreement signed by the previous Democratic county executive. (Astorino is now running for state senate, by the way, in a hotly contested race.) That gives you a sense of how powerful AFFH can be as a political issue. AFFH flipped the county that Bill and Hillary Clinton call home from blue to red. The question is whether President Trump will make AFFH and Biden’s anti-suburban plans an issue in the presidential election. The answer, I think, is “probably.”

Peak Jacobinism? By Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/peak-jacobinism/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

Even the woke eventually fear the guillotine. T he Jacobin Left is just now beginning to get edgy.

A few of its appeasers and abettors are becoming embarrassed by some of the outright racists and nihilists of BLM and the Maoists of Antifa — and their wannabe hangers-on who troll the Internet hoping to scalp some minor celebrity.

The woke rich too are worried over talk about substantial wealth, capital-gains, and income taxes, even though they have the resources to navigate around the legislation from their wink-and-nod brethren. Soon, even Hunter Biden and the Clintons could be checking in with their legal teams to see how much it will cost them to get around the Squad’s new tax plan.

The lines are thinning a bit for the guillotine. And the guillotiners are starting to panic as they glimpse faces of a restless mob always starved for something to top last night’s torching. Finally, even looters and arsonists get tired of doing the same old, same old each night. They get bored with the puerile bullhorn chants, the on-spec spray-paint defacement, and the petite fascists among them who hog the megaphones. For the lazy and bored, statue toppling — all of those ropes, those icky pry bars, those heavy sledgehammers, and so much pulling — becomes hard work, especially as the police, camera crews, and fisticuffs thin out on the ground. And the easy bronze and stone prey are now mostly rubble. Now it’s either the big, tough stuff like Mount Rushmore or the crazy targets like Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.

There are only so many ways for adult-adolescents to chant monotonously “Eat the Rich! Kill the Pigs! Black Lives Matter!” blah, blah, blah. And there are only so many Road Warrior Antifa ensembles of black hoodies, black masks, black pants, and black padding — before it all it ends up like just another shrill teachers’-union meeting in the school cafeteria or a prolonged adolescent Halloween prankster show.

Who Funds The Lincoln Project? Exactly Whom You Expect By David Harsanyi

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/who-funds-the-lincoln-project-exactly-whom-you-expect/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=corner&utm_term=fourth

If The Lincoln Project was exclusively campaigning against Donald Trump, one might be tempted to believe it wasn’t merely an arm of the Democratic Party. If one of its co-founders, John Weaver, hadn’t been registered as a foreign agent lobbying for a Russia-owned nuclear-energy company against U.S. sanctions not long ago, one might accept that the group believed the conspiracy theories it spreads. If the group wasn’t working against the moderate Republicans senators for the sin of supporting originalist Supreme Court justices, who will transcend the Trump presidency and help preserve the traditional constitutional order, one might believe that its mission was to preserve the system. If you target moderates like Susan Collins and Cory Gardner — politicians who not only parted with Trump on issues but have quite un-Trumpian dispositions — you’re not working against Trumpism, you’re working against the GOP.

The media can keep calling you “Republicans,” but if you support Democrats, take Democratic Party positions, make voting for Democrats all the way down the ticket a binary choice and moral imperative, and then take most of your money from big Democratic Party donors, you’re a Democrat. That’s fine. You should embrace it.

I’m not really a fan of making a big deal over a group’s funding. Your arguments should stand on their own. I don’t care who pays you. But if you advertise your cause as something it’s not, you’re a fraud. And the biggest funders of The Lincoln Project aren’t distraught Republicans but long-time Democratic Party operatives.

By far the biggest donor has been Stephen Mandel, who gave The Lincoln Project — which, as far as I can tell, produces cheap b-roll-laden ads and takes nearly 90 percent of its budget in “operating expenditures” — a million dollars. His company Lone Pine Capital, it seems, has given the Democratic Party Senate committee $497,000 this year, $248,500 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign committee, and a bunch of money to other left-wing candidates. During the 2018 cycle, Lone Pine Capital doled out $5,893,300 to Democrats. It gave $1,333,333 to Planned Parenthood.

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The Politics of Hydroxychloroquine Trump touted it, so Biden denounces it. The FDA has suspended a permit for its use. Let doctors decide. By Allysia Finley

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-politics-of-hydroxychloroquine-11594831408?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Hubert Humphrey began his career as a pharmacist before going into politics. Today’s politicians sometimes seem to have the opposite aspiration. President Trump “pushes dangerous, disproven drugs,” Joe Biden declares in his “Plan to Beat Covid-19.” “Our country is now stuck with a massive stockpile of hydroxychloroquine, a drug Trump repeatedly hailed.”

Neither man has any expertise in pharmacology, and Mr. Trump did get out over his skis in promoting the malaria treatment, also known as HCQ, for the novel coronavirus. But since every Trump action prompts a reaction, his political and media opponents launched a campaign to discredit the drug. This politicized environment has produced dubious science and erratic policy.

The Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency use authorization on March 28, allowing hospitals to treat Covid-19 patients outside clinical trials using HCQ donated by manufacturers to the national stockpile. But on June 15 the agency rescinded the authorization. “In light of ongoing serious cardiac adverse events and other potential serious side effects,” the FDA announced, “the known and potential benefits of . . . hydroxychloroquine no longer outweigh the known and potential risks for the authorized use.”

But the scientific basis for the revocation now appears faulty. Most studies didn’t adjust results for confounding variables such as disease severity, drug dosage or when patients started treatment. Two new peer-reviewed studies find that HCQ can significantly reduce mortality in hospitalized patients. With hospital beds filling up across the American South and West and a limited supply of Gilead Sciences ’ antiviral remdesivir, the FDA should reinstate its emergency-use authorization for HCQ.

How Is the Left of the ’60s Different From the Left of Today? Rachel del Guidice

https://www.dailysignal.com/2020/07/15/how-is-the-left-of-the-60s-different-from-

How do the radical movements of today—Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and others—compare with their counterparts of the 1960s, such as the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground?

What would the leftists of the ’60s say about the rioting that followed the death of George Floyd, the toppling of disfavored statues, and efforts today to “defund the police”?

Lee Edwards, the distinguished fellow in conservative thought at The Heritage Foundation’s B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies, joins the podcast to discuss the similarities and differences of the left of then and now.

Rachel del Guidice: I’m joined today on the Daily Signal podcast by Dr. Lee Edwards. He’s a distinguished fellow in conservative thought at the Heritage Foundations B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies. Dr. Edwards, it’s great to have you on with us at The Daily Signal Podcast.

Lee Edwards: Love to be with you, Rachel. Thanks for asking me.

Del Guidice: Well, thank you so much for being with us and for taking the time. To start off our conversation, in what ways would you say the left has changed their strategy and the tenants of belief from the ’60s to today?

Edwards: Well, back in the 1960s, which I happen to know sort of fairly well, I lived through it, they were semi-organized through something called the SDS, Students for a Democratic Society. They were the youth group of the socialists. And they wanted to bring about a new world, a new America, in which there would be no more capitalism and which there would be socialism. They were not pro-communist or pro-Soviet, but they definitely were socialists.

Amil Imani: Judea and Samaria Should Return to Their Rightful Owner December 28, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/12/judea_and_samaria_should_return_to_their_rightful_owner.html

When we dig into history books, we can hardly find people or countries that have gone out of existence for as long as 2,000 years and then reappeared and been reborn.  Thus, it is indeed accurate to say that the rebirth of Israel, this beautiful ancient culture, people, and land, is truly a miracle from God.

I believe that the time has come to unite all Israel.  Historically and biblically, both Judea and Samaria undeniably have been part of the heritage of the Jewish people.  They belonged to Israel 2,000 years ago, and they belong to Israel now.  Arabs have absolutely no historic ties to Judea and Samaria.  Historic ties are the basis of assertions to a geographic area.

Annexation of these two historical Jewish lands will stipulate a strong and well defined standing for West Bank Arabs.  Israeli equal justice under the law will apply to all people.  All terrorists’ infrastructures will be eradicated.  The residents of those regions will be subjected to Israeli rules and regulation and will be dealt with in the same fashion that all countries deal with domestic insurgent, treachery, and lawless organizations.

“The Jewish people didn’t wake up one day saying ‘Jews are connected to the Land of Israel.’  The whole story, the history and the destiny of the Jewish people, is geared toward the idea that we were there and we are coming back.”

Let us clarify this now and forever: historically and otherwise, there has never been a Palestinian state, nor a political body that is owned by Palestinians.  According to the advancement of international agreements from 1917 until 1947, the land of Israel was renamed Palestine by the Romans in the 2nd century.  It was later divided into three states: Jordan, a Jewish state, and an Arab state.  While the Jews swallowed this excruciating deal, shrinking the size of their ancestral land by over 75%, the Arabs snubbed and rejected it altogether.  As a result, the Arabs launched an invasion against the newly established State of Israel in 1948.  Jordan managed to occupy the area of Judea and Samaria and illegitimately annexed it.