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Ruth King

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

GOP Primary Obviously Isn’t Over, but the First Debate Is Crucial Republican voters want someone who will fight for them By Josh Hammer

By on August 19th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/08/18/the-gop-primary-obviously-isnt-over-but-the-first-debate-is-crucial/

If one is to believe the prevailing narrative from Donald Trump’s current campaign to retake the White House, the 2024 Republican presidential primary might as well be over. The former president has been consistently dominating the top-line horse race polling for months now, the argument goes, despite (or perhaps because of?) the fact he has now been criminally indicted four separate times, by three different prosecutors, in four different jurisdictions. Therefore, the Trump triumphalists shout from their rooftops, the other candidates should just drop out right now. “Spare your dignity and coronate Trump today!!!”

This argument is absurd for approximately a million different reasons.

First, and perhaps most important, the last time I checked the calendar, it still said, “August 2023.” While commentators, campaign operatives and political junkies with apparently nothing else better to do in their free time are already intensely following the Republican presidential primary, the same is simply not true for the vast majority of Americans who largely tune out the news during the dog days of summer. A political party’s first televised presidential primary debate marks the unofficial beginning of its normal, non-activist voter base paying attention in earnest. Yes, Trump has maintained a stubborn lead in the national horse race polls for months now. But it is still ridiculously early.

Second, and perhaps next important, it is totally unclear what shape Trump might find himself in six months from now, to say nothing of one year from now. Many of the former president’s “coronate him today!”-style enthusiasts tend to suppose, because of the thoroughly unjust nature of the ruling class’s sprawling multistate legal persecution of Trump, that he will be inevitably exonerated from all charges and acquitted of all legal woes.

Trump’s supporters are right on the unjustness of the Regime’s jihad against Trump – though the former president’s often-myopic conduct, from his ignoring a grand jury subpoena in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents retention case to the outlandish, infamous Jan. 2, 2021, phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in the Fulton County, Georgia case, makes it all-too easy for his foes. But Trump’s supporters are wrong about the very nature of these four indictments, each one of which necessarily involves a different judge and a different juror pool, and all of which present differing likelihoods of guilt, acquittal or some sort of ultimate plea deal. In the interim, furthermore, Trump will be strapped for time as he is forced to physically jet off to courtrooms in four jurisdictions, and his campaign and supporting super PAC will continue to have their coffers bled dry with ever-mounting legal bills.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Smoke and Mirrors Middle East Diplomacy The Biden administration manufactures ‘wins’ to bolster its abysmal foreign policy record By Fred Fleitz

By on August 19th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/08/18/smoke-and-mirrors-middle-east-diplomacy/

Despite recent media stories about two supposed Biden Administration foreign policy “wins” in the Middle East, a closer look indicates these wins are not what they seem and may harm U.S. national security.

One of the alleged wins concerns the Biden Administration’s effort to normalize relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. On August 9, the Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. and Saudi officials agreed to a framework for a deal under which Saudi Arabia would recognize Israel in exchange for Israeli, Saudi, and American concessions. Although Biden Administration officials said this agreement would take nine months to a year to finalize and faced long odds, they also described it as potentially “the most momentous Middle East peace deal in a generation.”

Another alleged Biden foreign policy win, announced on August 10, is a tentative deal to swap American and Iranian prisoners in exchange for unfreezing $6 billion of Iranian assets held by a South Korean bank. Biden officials said these funds would go through a Qatari bank to ensure they are used only for humanitarian purposes. Five Americans have been released from an Iranian prison under the deal but are under house arrest in Iran until an agreement allowing them to leave the country is finalized.

On the surface, both initiatives appear to be diplomatic breakthroughs. But a closer look indicates the Biden Administration is trying to claim credit for dubious, unfinished agreements and hide some dangerous details from the American public and Congress.

The alleged Saudi/Israel normalization agreement is years away if it ever occurs because it is based on many conditions that will be impossible to meet. Although Congress might agree to the enhanced security assurances that would be part of the agreement, it is very unlikely to approve Saudi Arabia’s demand that the U.S. help it develop a nuclear power program that includes uranium enrichment.

There are other major obstacles to a normalization agreement. For example, the Saudis want concessions from Israel to advance an eventual peace agreement with the Palestinians. Israeli officials say they are open to this but will not agree to a Saudi demand for Palestinian statehood. It is improbable that Palestinian leaders will agree to a new deal without this concession and probably will not agree to any agreement because of their long history of rejecting Israeli peace offers.

The Biden Administration also wants Saudi Arabia to substantially cut back its growing relationship with China as part of a normalization agreement, including not permitting China to establish military bases in the country, not using sensitive technology from Chinese companies like Huawei, and not allowing China to purchase oil with Chinese currency.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Do conservatives know what time it is? John Fonte

By on August 19th, 2023

https://americanmind.org/salvo/freecons-vs-natcons/

What time is it? Are we living in normal times or revolutionary times? Is the greatest threat to American conservatism today a Walter Mondale-style big-government liberalism? Or is it a woke revolutionary progressivism that seeks to utterly transform the American way of life—our politics, culture, economy, law, education, morality, manners, and mores? A recently-issued Statement of Principles, co-signed by a group of advocates for Freedom Conservatism, assumes we are living in the world of the former: the world of Reagan vs. Mondale.

To be sure, the FreeCon statement is benign. Friends with whom I agree on 95 percent of all issues have signed the document. It affirms the principles of individual liberty, the pursuit of happiness, private enterprise, the free market, the rule of law, equality of opportunity, secure borders, and a “rational immigration policy.” That is the text. What’s not to like? There is, however, a subtext, explained by Avik Roy (the main organizer of the statement) in a National Review essay. 

Roy makes it clear that the purpose of the document is to repudiate the National Conservatism Statement of Principles (issued last year), of which I was a signatory, along with the tenets of National Conservatism and the New Right more broadly. And so, as Roy suggested, let us examine the significant differences between what is being touted as Freedom Conservatism (or what in Europe and Canada would be liberal conservatism) vs. National Conservatism.

Neither the FreeCon statement nor Roy’s essay evinces any awareness of the powerful adversary that American conservatives and “Americanists” more generally face in the summer of 2023. By “Americanists” I mean those conservatives and patriotic liberals who advocate the affirmation, improvement, and perpetuation of the American way of life. The opposite of an Americanist would be a Transformationist, one who seeks to fundamentally transform the United States of America.  

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Pseudonym Joe: How Biden used personal email to share some government business with son Hunter House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer is now pressing National Archives to release unredacted emails between Biden, his son and business partners.By John Solomon

By on August 19th, 2023

https://justthenews.com/accountability/political-ethics/ukraine-turkey-joe-biden-used-personal-email-share-some-government

In late November 2014 — before the rest of the world knew that American Martin O’Connor was about to be released from detention in Turkey — the U.S. embassy in Istanbul sent an email to the State Department that was then forwarded to senior advisers to then-Vice President Joe Biden, the Obama White House point man for many foreign policy crises.

“The lead attorney for Mr. O’Connor reports that the court granted the detention appeal and he expected Mr. O’Connor to be released from jail today, barring any unforeseen problems,” the U.S. embassy in Istanbul wrote in an email that got forwarded to top Obama administration security and diplomacy officials, including current Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland. “Mr. O’Connor will not be allowed to leave the country until his next hearing which is set for December 11, 2014. The lawyer expressed confidence that he will be able to leave after that hearing. The attorney is handling his release arrangements, pick up and temporary housing near his law firm’s office. Istanbul consular plans to speak with Mr. O’Connor after his release.”

State Department officials forwarded the information to the vice president’s office, where Biden aide Colin Kahl (now President Biden’s Undersecretrary of Defense for Policy) sent it to the private email account robinware456@gmail.com. It wasn’t just any private account. It was one of three pseudonym accounts used by Joe Biden.

Soon after the then-vice president would forward the information to his globetrotting son Hunter Biden with the subject line “Fwd: Mr. O’Connor Being Released from Detention today.”

The email is one of more than a dozen that Just the News obtained and reviewed over the last two years showing how Joe Biden’s personal email accounts were sometimes used during his first White House tenure to forward government information or discuss government  business with his son.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

California’s Weapons of Math Destruction The state’s new teaching framework tries to ‘combat inequities’ and pushes ‘social justice work.’ By Faith Bottum

By on August 19th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/californias-weapons-of-math-destruction-learning-k-12-education-curriculum-students-teachers-instructions-policy-d6f18070?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

The California State Board of Education issued on July 12 a new framework for teaching math based on what it calls “updated principles of focus, coherence, and rigor.” The word “updated” is certainly accurate. Not so much “principles,” “focus,” “coherence” or “rigor.” California’s new approach to math is as unfair as it is unserious.

The framework is voluntary, but it will heavily influence school districts and teachers around the Golden State. Developed over the past four years, it runs nearly 1,000 pages. Among the titles of its 14 chapters are “Teaching for Equity and Engagement,” “Structuring School Experiences for Equity and Engagement” and “Supporting Educators in Offering Equitable and Engaging Mathematics Instruction.” The guidelines demand that math teachers be “committed to social justice work” to “equip students with a toolkit and mindset to identify and combat inequities with mathematics”—not with the ability to do math. Far more important is teaching students that “mathematics plays a role in the power structures and privileges that exist within our society.”

California’s education bureaucrats are seeking to reinvent math as a grievance study. “Big ideas are central to the learning of mathematics,” the framework insists, but the only big idea the document promotes is that unequal outcomes in math performance are proof of a racist society.

To achieve equal outcomes, the framework favors the elimination of “tracking,” by which it means the practice of identifying students with the potential to do well. This supposedly damages the mental health of low-achieving students. The problem is that some students simply are better at math than others. To close the gap, the authors of the new framework have decided essentially to eliminate calculus—and to hold talented students back.

The framework recommends that Algebra I not be taught in middle school, which would force the course to be taught in high school. But if the students all take algebra as freshmen, there won’t be time to fit calculus into a four-year high-school program. And that’s the point: The gap between the best and worst math students will become less visible.

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HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

NYPD names Rebecca Weiner as first woman to head intelligence and counterterrorism bureaus By Craig McCarthy and Sophie Gardiner

By on August 18th, 2023

https://nypost.com/2023/07/18/nypd-names-new-counter-intel-boss/

The NYPD has named a new counterterrorism chief after the top post sat vacant for the better part of a year.

Rebecca Weiner, a 17-year NYPD veteran, was sworn in Tuesday as deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism — becoming the first woman to serve in the role on the department’s executive team.

“This pick is again a history-making pick at the NYC police department,” Mayor Eric Adams said at a ceremony announcing the appointment at One Police Plaza.

“The incoming deputy commissioner is an impressive and experienced intelligence analyst who has spent 17 years with the NYC police department, during which she has held nearly every civilian title in her field,” he added.

Weiner fills the role left empty by John Miller, who retired in June 2022 after nearly a decade in the civilian position.

The Harvard-educated attorney, joined in the NYPD in 2006 as a civilian employee and rose to assistant commissioner in the department’s Counterterrorism Operations and Analysis sections. She was joined by her husband and their two young boys as she took her oath of office Tuesday.

Noting the position is one of the city’s “most important aspects” in combatting terror attacks, Adams told reporters it took more than a year to fill the spot because his administration had to “get it right.”

“Even without a deputy commissioner in that position… you still have professionals that are still in place,” Adams said of the unfilled role, touting the NYPD’s “deep bench,” including Weiner, who continued to run the day-to-day operations.

Chief Thomas Galati stepped in to run the division in December as a three-star chief, the uniformed equivalent of the civilian role. He announced his retirement in March. 

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Student debating, once a bastion of logic, has been invaded from the left By Richard E. Vatz

By on August 18th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/08/student_debating_once_a_bastion_of_logic_has_been_invaded_from_the_left.html

During my 48 years teaching at Towson University, all my classes involved informal or formal debating: the quintessential activity of academic classes outside and sometimes including the sciences and arts. Sadly, like everything else in academia, debating has succumbed to leftist ideology.

I love debate for its focus on credibility and evidence. It should be teaching the up-and-coming generation of thinkers. However, as James Fishback has noted, judges’ political preferences have come to dominate high school debate.

Under its major sponsor, the National Speech & Debate Association’s website, judges post “paradigms.” The purpose of paradigm alerts is to let debaters know in full disclosure judges’ stylistic biases, say, if they are put off by overly rapid speaking or if they approve of debaters’ apprising their audiences of the relative importance of specific arguments.

But in the last few years, Fishback explains, “Judges with paradigms tainted by politics and ideology are becoming common…[at] national tournaments, judges are making their stances clear: students who argue ‘capitalism can reduce poverty’ or ‘Israel has a right to defend itself’ will lose—no questions asked.” In general, Fishback argues, high school debate has been degraded “from a competition that rewards evidence and reasoning to one that punishes students for what they say….” One of several examples Fishback provides is a debate judge under whose list of “Things That Will Cause You to Automatically Lose” is ‘Referring to immigrants as ‘illegal.’ ”

I can attest that the same is true in collegiate debate, the last place in education I would have expected political bias to interfere with education.

Several colleagues, including one who has both designed debate camps and programs and served as a tournament judge and another who is a major administrator in the National Communication Administration, tell me that, among debate coaches and judges, coaches and judges throw around their biases as a sign of virtue. This is a disheartening and dispiriting sign that we’re seeing the end of the unbiased marketplace of ideas and academic freedom. Worse, this is happening in an activity that, by definition, should be resistant to politically approved outcomes.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The EPA Defies the Supreme Court The agency imposes a ‘suite’ of climate policies and doesn’t even try to hide its own lawlessness. By Chris Horner

By on August 18th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/epa-environmental-protection-supreme-court-regulation-unconstitutional-climate-change-administrative-state-biden-42f31ce3?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

In politics, inadvertently telling the truth is called a “gaffe.” Last year Michael Regan, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, made a remark in passing that gave away the Biden administration’s plans for enforcing its climate agenda through a “suite of rules” imposed under programs lacking any credible connection to climate. A few months later, a Supreme Court opinion transformed Mr. Regan’s indiscretion into justification for wholesale judicial repudiation of the Biden administration’s climate regulatory blitz.

Mr. Regan’s comment came on March 10, 2022, when he addressed the press following his keynote address to CERAWeek, a climate conference in Houston. A reporter asked about vulnerabilities of the EPA’s approach to installing climate regulation through the Obama-Biden Clean Power Plan, which was then awaiting judgment by the court. Mr. Regan replied that the agency had abandoned the idea of relying on any specific grant of regulatory authority. Instead it was in the process of tightening rules under numerous and varied regulatory programs all at once, pressuring disfavored operations to close and compelling investment consistent with the EPA’s desires.

Mr. Regan went on to cite rules to tighten regulation of mercury, ozone, soot, hazardous air pollutants, water effluent and coal ash under acknowledged congressional grants of authority. But he also called the “expedited retirement” of power plants “the best tool for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions” and opined that the “industry gets to take a look at this suite of rules all at once and say, ‘Is it worth doubling down on investments in this current facility or operation, or should we look at the cost and say no, it’s time to pivot and invest in a clean-energy future?’ ”

This already reflected something of a scofflaw position. Congress never approved what Mr. Regan described. It became a serious problem when the justices struck down the Clean Power Plan in June. West Virginia v. EPA held that the agency didn’t have the authority it claimed to force power-plant closures by setting unmeetable emission standards and thus dictate, as the court had put it, “how Americans get their energy.”

Chief Justice John Roberts noted for the 6-3 majority that after Congress had repeatedly considered and rejected providing the agency authority to regulate power-sector greenhouse gases, the EPA claimed “to discover an unheralded power” that represented a “transformative expansion in [its] regulatory authority” to force “generation shifting.”

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BOOKS Comments turned off

How the Woke Revolution Happened From Christopher Rufo, the perfect book to give to your clueless friends. by Bruce Bawer

By on August 18th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/how-the-woke-revolution-happened/

The story has been told many times over the years. There are, indeed, many ways to tell it, although a passage from the beginning of Roger Kimball’s 2000 book The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America can serve as a more than suitable summary of all of them:

 In the Sixties and Seventies, after fantasies of overt political revolution faded, many student radicals urged their followers to undertake “the long march through the institutions.”…In the context of Western societies, [this] signified – in the words of Herbert Marcuse – “working against the established institutions while working within them.” It was primarily by this means – by insinuation and infiltration rather than confrontation – that the countercultural dreams of radicals like Marcuse have triumphed.

For what it’s worth, the phrase “long march through the institutions” – a reference to the long march of Mao’s army in 1934 in retreat from the Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek – has been attributed by some to the German socialist Rudi Dutschke (1940-79) and by others to the Italian socialist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937).

In any event, in recounting the American left’s long march, who or what should be foregrounded? No two writers have exactly the same answer. Kimball, for his part, chose to focus on a range of individuals and institutions, including Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, the “Beat Generation” writers, Timothy Leary, and The New York Review of Books. Two decades later, in a 2000 book that was also entitled The Long March, the British writer Marc Sidwell traced the gradual countercultural subversion of the West back to Gramsci before delving into the roles played in that process by György Lukács, E. P. Thompson, and Marcuse in that process. James Lindsay, whose 2022 book The Marxification of Education limits its purview largely to the subversion of the academy, puts the Brazilian socialist Paulo Freire (1921-97) at the heart of the story; and my own 2012 book The Victims’ Revolution, which also confines itself to the leftist takeover of higher education, splits the responsibility for that dire development among Gramsci, Freire, and the Afro-Caribbean Marxist Frantz Fanon (1925-69).

Christopher Rufo’s incisive new book America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything covers essentially the same territory as Kimball’s and Sidwell’s books while giving attention, along the way, to the events reported by Lindsay and me. Rufo, now a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is a remarkable young man (he turns 39 on August 26) who increasingly needs no introduction: during the last few years, he’s become a leading voice in the struggle against the mainstreaming at American schools and colleges of critical race theory (CRT), transgender ideology, and the tyranny of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). In addition to writing extensively on these topics (notably at City Journal), he’s been impressively active on the barricades, leading the effort to have CRT banned from public schools in no fewer than 22 states, inspiring President Trump to ban CRT “training” in the federal government, and rolling back radicalism at New College in Florida, at which Governor Ron DeSantis named him a trustee. The progressive reaction to his activities is summed up in the fatuous headline of a 2021 New Yorker hit job: “How a Conservative Activist Invented the Conflict over Critical Race Theory.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Left-Wing Rage: Don’t Pretend It Doesn’t Exist

By on August 18th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/08/18/left-wing-rage-dont-pretend-it-doesnt-exist/

The Southern Poverty Law Center has its “hate map” of conservative groups that it hopes to marginalize if not kill off entirely. Meanwhile, the feds are looking for vicious, bloodthirsty right-wingers under the bed. But a university survey recently found that the left is more prone to political violence than the right. It’s exactly what we have come to expect from a group that is so sure of its superiority and the importance of its agenda that it’s willing to break an infinite number of eggs so that it can make its authoritarian omelet.

The University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats’ June survey of 3,543 adults has produced a lot of data noise but it also includes some useful information. Of course the media want to ring the bells over one finding in particular: an increase in the percentage those who agree that “the use of force is justified to restore Donald Trump to the presidency.” According to the project, in early April only 4.5% of those polled agreed with that statement. By late June, though, it had risen to (a rounded-up) 7%, “the equivalent of an estimated shift from 12 million to 18 million American adults.”

The media-wide implication is that the growing support for using force to put Trump back in the White House is fueled by the extremism (and dare we say “semi-fascism”?) of Republicans and MAGA followers. A prime example of this bias is found in the headline over a story in The Hill. It reads “More say violence could be necessary to restore Trump to White House.”

A closer look at the data, however, show both Democrats (4.5%) and independents (7.8%) agree with the statement. So it’s not just Republicans who would be sympathetic to the use of force in favor of Trump. Isn’t that a point worthy of highlighting?

There’s another figure that raises concerns that the media don’t seem to care much about: 9% of Democrats “strongly” agree that “the use of force is justified to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president,” and another 7.1% merely agree. That’s a total of 16.1%, compared to the total of 9.5% of Republicans who strongly agree or just agree that force is justified to hand the presidency back to Trump.

Again, isn’t this a fact that needs to be emphasized?

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