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Ruth King

What Will Change After the Virus Crisis? Will the “New World Order” really just go gently into that good night? Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/what-will-change-after-virus-crisis-bruce-thornton/

We’ve reached that point in the Wuhan pandemic when we start talking about how the world will change after the crisis passes. The impact on everything from the media to globalism is being reassessed, and prognostications about the future, both good and bad, are being promulgated. But those hoping for improvement are likely to be disappointed, just as those who said “this changes everything” were after the terrorist attacks on 9/ll. To quote Adam Smith, “there is a lot of ruin in a nation,” as stubborn inertia created by entrenched vested interests and received wisdom protect the status quo.

The media’s performance during the virus crisis has been par for the course in their unhinged zeal to damage the Trump administration, which has made the president’s attempt to handle the crisis even more difficult. From claims that Trump called the outbreak a “hoax,” to accusations that his comments about the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine were “snake oil,” the media have doubled, tripled, and quadrupled down on their usual repertoire of fake “facts,” anonymous leaks, bought-and-paid-for “experts,” dishonest editing, and outright lies––even to the point of impeding treatment that might save lives.

Justice Department Declines to Support Blocking Hillary Clinton Deposition By Andrew C. McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/justice-department-declines-to-support-blocking-hillary-clinton-deposition/

“The most notable thing about the case is the extreme lengths to which Hillary Clinton is going to avoid answering questions under oath about her email practices — a matter on which she has made a slew of contradictory public statements, some of them proven untrue by the FBI’s criminal investigation. ”

Far from being political retribution, the move, which came in a FOIA case related to Clinton’s private-server use, applied standard DOJ guidance.

The Justice Department has declined to join former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s effort to block depositions of both herself and a key aide in a case concerning her use of a private email-server system to conduct Obama administration business.

Though the DOJ’s decision will inevitably be reported as political retribution against President Trump’s 2016 election rival, there is actually nothing much here. The Trump State and Justice Departments have defended the former secretary throughout the suit in question. The government’s refusal to support Clinton’s latest gambit to avoid answering questions under oath is consistent with Justice Department policy and will have no bearing on the outcome of the case.

The depositions of Clinton and Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s State Department chief-of-staff and longtime confidant, were ordered by federal judge Royce Lamberth of the District of Columbia. The case is a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) suit brought by Judicial Watch, the private-watchdog group. It focuses on talking points the Obama administration generated to guide official public statements following the 2012 jihadist attack in Benghazi, Libya, in which U.S. ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed.

Governor Cuomo Wants His State’s Rights and His Federal Cake Too! By Megan Fox

https://pjmedia.com/trending/governor-cuomo-wants-his-states-rights-and-his-federal-cake-too/

Governor Andrew Cuomo seems a bit confused. After months of begging the federal government for medical supplies he didn’t stockpile for his state, beds he didn’t have, and medical personnel he said he needed and then getting all of it, he’s waxing poetic on Twitter about state’s rights. This is Cuomo’s response to Trump saying opening the nation is the president’s decision and not the call of individual governors.

  ✔ @NYGovCuomo
“State governments possess inherent advantages, which will ever give them an influence & ascendency over the Nat’l Gov & will forever preclude the possibility of federal encroachments. That their liberties can be subverted by the federal head is repugnant…” —Alexander Hamilton
After finding that Alexander Hamilton quote on Goodreads, or wherever, and feeling superior about his power as the executive in his state, he went immediately back to begging for more federal aid. In twenty minutes, Cuomo gave himself whiplash. Let’s talk about that Hamilton quote. It seems an awful lot like what President Trump has been saying to the governors every damn day!

President Trump Says U.S. Will Cut Off Funding to WHO Andrew Restuccia

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/us-will-halt-funding-to-world-health-organization-over-coronavirus-response/ar-BB12Diws?li=BBnb7Kz

WASHINGTON—President Trump said the U.S. would halt funding to the World Health Organization while his administration investigates what he called the group’s mismanagement of the coronavirus response.

The president faulted the WHO for, in his view, failing to adequately investigate early information about the virus’s ability to spread from one human to another and for not calling out China on its alleged lack of transparency over the virus.

The viruses-don’t-respect-borders slogan is dead wrong Christopher Caldwell

https://spectator.us/sovereignty-rules/

At the end of March, about two weeks into the coronavirus emergency, I looked out my window onto the street below and saw something that made me uneasy about the future of the country. There was a commotion down there. Two white teenagers were standing in the street with their hands up. A man — who looked and sounded like an East African immigrant — had stopped his car in the middle of the road and sprung out. I squinted to see what it was he was holding in front of him that made the kids look so alarmed.

It was a pizza. The kids had ordered it. The car was marked with a Domino’s insignia. ‘Whoa, whoa, man!’ said one of the kids. ‘Take it easy!’ He was grotesquely corpulent. Hanging folds of pink belly were swinging wildly out of his clinging T-shirt.

The driver walked the pizza to the back of his car and laid it on the trunk, along with a paper bag. Now it was obvious what was going on. He had suggested to the boys that they take possession of the pizza in such a
way that they not make contact with him. That was the safest thing, given the epidemic — for him, for them and for all the customers he would have to serve during the rest of the day. Smart thinking. I thought, not for the first time that day, of the heroism of delivery drivers like this, who make it possible for people like these kids to stay home and ride out the storm in their rich neighborhoods.

That was not Fatty’s view. He just found the whole routine weird. He jostled past the driver and reached into the paper bag, and now, suddenly, he was angry. ‘Where’s the lava cake?’ he asked. ‘I ordered a lava cake!’ The driver mumbled. ‘Drive back to Tenleytown and get it, can ya?’ the kid threatened. ‘Can you make that a priority? Can you get me an extra one, too?’ The driver mumbled a little more and, looking scared, drove off.

Anyone who has read Defoe, Manzoni or Camus, or who can put two and two together, ought to realize that, wherever plague is, looting, strikes, war, hunger and other unrest are not far away. That evening on my street, you could have been forgiven for thinking there was less to fear from coronavirus than from standing between a fat American and a steaming box of pizza. But a situation where idlers try to boss around hardworking people risking their lives is not likely to hold for long. And where will that leave us?

Steele Dossier Disinformation Update New evidence that the FBI was duped by Russian intelligence.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/steele-dossier-disinformation-update-11586897258?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Russia interfered in America’s 2016 election, as several government reports have established. The latest disturbing news is that Russia may have received an assist from no less than the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

That’s the takeaway of newly released portions of last year’s Department of Justice Inspector General report about the FBI’s investigation into Trump-Russia collusion. That report showed how the FBI abused its powers by misleading a secret court into granting surveillance warrants on the Trump campaign. Thanks to Congressional pressure, the Justice Department has now declassified footnotes showing that the FBI’s main source for its collusion allegations—Christopher Steele—may have been targeted as part of a Russian disinformation campaign. The FBI was warned of this threat but ignored it.

Mr. Steele was tasked by contractors for the Hillary Clinton campaign in spring 2016 with assembling a summary of Trump-Russia allegations. This document, which became known as the Steele dossier, was fed to the FBI and became the central evidence in its applications for warrants against Trump campaign aide Carter Page. The FBI should have been wary of Mr. Steele’s reporting, having been warned he was connected to the rival campaign.

‘Well Worth Saving’ Review: Displaced Academics In the 1930s and ’40s, American universities made life-and-death decisions about which European Jews to give faculty appointments. By Martin Peretz

https://www.wsj.com/articles/well-worth-saving-review-displaced-academics-11586905987?mod=opinion_reviews_pos1

Five of the eight Ivy League universities are now led by self-identifying Jews: Harvard’s president is an observant Jew, sometimes Hillel, sometimes Chabad; Yale’s, a descendant of possibly the most learned rabbinical dynasty; Penn’s, the daughter of a German Orthodox Jew who escaped to America before the carnage; Brown’s, a Quaker convert to Judaism; Princeton’s, a former Catholic who learned as an adult of his German refugee mother’s Jewishness. The overtness, even the ubiquity, of these varied Jewish identities reflects a dramatic 75-year evolution in the status of Jews in American academia. And this shift intertwines with and reflects something broader still: a sea change in the texture of American academic life, a change that has brought with it new challenges to the academy’s current relevance.

Laurel Leff has written a sober and fair—but devastating—volume documenting the story’s start, without which its arc is difficult to grasp: the tragedy of hundreds of Jewish scholars and their kin who perished in Hitler’s death camps, in the ghettoes and in the streets, for want of a piece of paper inviting them to an American campus. The book’s title, “Well Worth Saving,” is an unfortunate phrase of the period that was often used to describe these scholars—even by the American philosopher and humanitarian activist Horace Kallen (1882-1974), a Prussian-Polish Jewish émigré who, among other like-minded academics in the 1930s and ’40s, helped to save some of them. In 1919, Kallen had been a founder of the New School for Social Research. He had also, five years earlier, helped to found the New Republic, a magazine of opinion that started life championing Louis Brandeis’s Supreme Court nomination against old-line Protestant opposition. As his history suggests, Kallen found no theoretical obstacle to a deep national character with particularistic threads enriching it.

Concern Grows in Germany Over Antisemitic Propaganda Tied to Coronavirus Pandemic

https://www.algemeiner.com/2020/04/13/concern-grows-in-germany-over-antisemitic-propaganda-tied-to-coronavirus-pandemic/

A prominent psychologist in Berlin who deals with extremist groups has expressed fear that the coronavirus pandemic will encourage a further wave of antisemitism in Germany.

“An attempt is being made to spread the image of an enemy that people are already familiar with,” psychologist Ahmad Mansour told the Tagesschau news outlet over the weekend, when asked about a rash of antisemitic images associating Jews with the virus.

Mansour — an Israeli Arab and former Islamist who now works on counter-extremism programs in the German Muslim community — observed that the “images are very popular and widespread, online and offline.”

One image being shared by antisemitic agitators depicts crudely-stereotyped Jews smuggling the virus into a city in a Trojan Horse, along with an accompanying text railing against the “devious Jewish Orthodox Freemason sect, aka Zionists.”

Mansour warned that antisemitic messages increasingly urged violence against Jews.

“I don’t just see conspiracy theories,” he said. “I see incitement, calls for injuries to Jews.”

German government officials monitoring extremist activity quoted in the same article concurred that the danger was growing.

Locked-Down Tel Avivians Dance on Balconies to Celebrate City’s Birthday

https://www.algemeiner.com/2020/04/14/locked-down-tel-avivians-dance-on-balconies-to-celebrate-citys-birthday/

Tel Aviv celebrated its 111th birthday on Tuesday, amid the ongoing coronavirus crisis that has ground the city to a halt.

“To mark the festive occasion our truck set off to roam the city blasting the city’s unofficial anthem (Tel Aviv Ya Habibi Tel Aviv!) as residents waved from their balconies,” the Tel Aviv municipality tweeted.

Tel Aviv is celebrating it’s 111th birthday today!

To mark the festive occasion our truck set off to roam the city blasting the city’s unofficial anthem (Tel Aviv Ya Habibi Tel Aviv!) as residents waved from their balconies

Ruthie Blum: Corona curfew, coalition deadline Apparently, the two sides are close to resolving the dispute. We’ll believe it when we see it.

https://www.jns.org/opinion/corona-curfew-coalition-deadline/

As the clock was ticking on Monday evening towards his midnight deadline to form a government, Blue and White Party leader and temporary Knesset Speaker Benny Gantz addressed the Israeli people.

Ostensibly explaining to the public why a national-emergency coalition was imperative at this time, he behaved more like someone running for election. Or defending himself to those former members of his bloc who dumped him for agreeing to make a deal with the Likud Party under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

His peculiar speech came on the heels of Netanyahu’s latest coronavirus message: that there would be a countrywide curfew during the first half of the end of the Passover holiday, from 5 p.m. on Tuesday until 5 a.m. on Wednesday—and then a resumption of the regular distancing limits about going outside.

In addition, according to the restrictions, no bakeries would be open to the public for an additional 12 hours or more. In other words, all those Israelis desperate for some fresh bread after a week of eating only matzah will have to wait another day.