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Ruth King

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

‘Not My Concern” Narrows the GOP Field By Roger Kimball

By on July 16th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/07/16/not-my-concern-will-help-narrow-gop-field/

Who won the Republican blow-out interview lalapalooza with Tucker Carlson in Iowa Friday night? Besides Tucker himself—who was on the Q side of this extended Q & A—the participants were South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, former Vice President Mike Pence, former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

Let me say straight off that the biggest beneficiary was probably Tucker himself. He is a master interviewer, outgoing and friendly in manner, informed about the issues, unrelenting in his questioning. Some of his hosts at the Family Leadership Summit, which with Blaze Media sponsored the event, were so impressed with his performance that they suggested to the audience that Tucker himself should run for president. It’s an idea that has been in circulation for a while and it got a notable “trending” uptick as the evening unfolded. Tucker himself has dismissed the idea in no uncertain terms, but it is worth noting how widespread his support is among the politically mature.

But even though Tucker emerged as one of the stars of the evening, the show was not about him but about that clutch of GOP hopefuls. Who among that gang of six won?

It’s probably easier to start with the loser, chief among whom was Mike Pence, who might just as well have used the occasion to perform an act of self-immolation. The key moment came in an exchange about foreign policy, in particular U.S. policy with respect to the war in Ukraine. Pence said he was distressed that we had yet to send Ukraine the promised Abrams tanks or train Ukrainian pilots to fly F16s.

“You are distressed,” said Tucker, “that the Ukrainians don’t have enough American tanks. Every city in the United States has become much worse in the last three years. . . .and yet your concern is that the Ukrainians . . . don’t have enough tanks? Where’s the concern in the United States in that?”

“Well, that’s not my concern. Tucker, I’ve heard that routine from you before, but that’s not my concern.”

“Not my concern.”

Bang. “Not my concern.”

The internet lit up over that one, with some people saying that Pence had just committed suicide and others wondering what he was saying. To what did “that’s not my concern” apply?

Mollie Hemingway was probably correct that Pence was flummoxed and that it is “fair to say he intended to say something about how we can fight forever wars with unclear ties to national interest at the same time we begin to fight American decline.” Unfortunately for Pence, as Hemingway went on to observe, “many GOP voters would say he’s wrong on that as well.”

Indeed, conservative commentary seemed to veer from, at the generous end of the spectrum, unhappy ah-ha comments like this: “Oh see what Pence MEANT to say is that America can both fight/fund endless wars abroad that have only a tenuous connection to the national interest, and ALSO accomplish a series of empty platitudes from the GOP platform circa 2012. I get it now.” At the further end of that spectrum were clipped dismissals like the one contained in unfamily-friendly memes like this.

There was, at the margins, a little backsliding and floundering, but I think the consensus was that Pence did himself significant damage. The “not my concern” slip might be corrected, explained away, as was Obama’s “57 states” comment. But that suffocating sense that the former Vice President is a priggish, platitude-emitting machine will be hard to overcome.

What else happened? Well, Tim Scott strutted on stage with a grinning hallelujah wave but said . . . not much. Nikki Haley was much better than I thought she would be but, at the end of the day, agreed that Joe Biden 1) had actually got 81 million votes (he didn’t) and 2) even though there were “irregularities” in the 2020 election, Biden was legitimately elected.

In other words, she is part of the problem.

One of the best responses was from Vivek Ramaswamy, the young ferociously articulate candidate who, I think, will not be president this time, but who truly gets it. Asked about the origin of January 6, 2021, the little contretemps at the Capitol in 2021, he said, “Well it was probably because of censorship.”

Tell people they cannot speak, he said, and they will scream. Tell them they cannot scream, and they will start taking things apart.

There you have it. I love Vivek. Maybe he will be president someday. Not this time, I think, but maybe soon (how about a Trump Vivek ticket? I am just saying).

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MEDIA Comments turned off

Jen Rubin spews tripe about Florida, forcing the WaPo to issue an embarrassing correction By Monica Showalter

By on July 16th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/07/jen_rubin_spews_tripe_about_florida_forcing_the_wapo_to_issue_an_embarrassing_correction.html

Talk about stupid.

Jennifer Rubin wrote a column in the Washington Post, absurdly claiming that Florida was so badly run and so “cruel” its residents were fleeing, basing her entire article on this errant premise, and forcing the Washington Post to issue an embarrassing correction.

According to Fox News:

Rubin published the column Friday in which she claimed, “DeSantis likes to brag that more people are moving to Florida than ever. Not so fast. ‘An estimated 674,740 people reported that their permanent address changed from Florida to another state in 2021.’” Those numbers are wrong and the Post, in a correction on Saturday, admitting the column “mischaracterized” the stats. 

She originally added, “’That’s more than any other state, including New York or California, the two states that have received the most attention for outbound migration during the pandemic,’ according to the American Community Survey released in June tracking state-by-state migration.”

The statistic she cited came from some dingbat at Business Insider who mixed up the inbound numbers of Florida residents with the outbound numbers of Florida residents — a pretty elementary error.

Business Insider had to correct itself the following day.

But Jen liked that first story better, so she cited that in her own column, going lemmings-like off the Business Insider cliff, and forcing the WaPo to run a correction — which kind of scuppered the entire point of the piece. They actually should have pulled the column.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

10 Paradigm Shifts that Shatter Establishment Illusions By J.B. Shurk

By on July 16th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/07/10_paradigm_shifts_that_shatter_establishment_illusions.html

Sometimes it feels as if we are drowning in a torrent of bad news.  I would suggest, however, that the worse people feel, the more they are waking up to the serious contests of our time.  If you are unhappy with the political, economic, and social powers manipulating the world today, the critical first step in fighting those forces is changing the way people think about them.  By that measure, people today are changing their minds about the culture and institutions around them faster than ever.  Consider some of these fundamental shifts in thinking:

(1) Good vs. evil

Not long ago, it was common for conservatives to see the Marxist left as foolishly mistaken — a collection of young and inexperienced troublemakers who would eventually “snap out” of their common delusions once forced to confront reality.

Now people understand that the left’s real mission is to reject reality.  Castrating boys so that they can pretend to be girls is not “healthy.”  Perpetuating racism as social policy is not “justice.”  Imposing a “woke” State religion over personal conscience is not “moral.”  Aiding and abetting child sex–trafficking and drug-smuggling at our borders is not “compassionate.”  Stealing property is not “equitable.”  Just as with Leninism and Maoism before, today’s leftism is evil.

(2) Parties vs. uniparty

There has been a seismic shift in the way Republican voters see political parties.  After Obama forced government-controlled health care on America, the Tea Party movement began a desperate fight against socialism’s advances.  From the energy of that movement, Republicans eventually took back the House and Senate.  Despite those triumphs, Paul Ryan rubber-stamped Obama’s budgets, while refusing to build Trump’s border wall.  McConnell’s Senate Republicans, who had run on repealing Obamacare, cemented socialized medicine with McCain’s decisive betrayal.

Grassroots voters finally rejected Establishment Republicans and catapulted outsider Donald Trump into office.  In response, Republicans quietly assisted Democrats in their attempt to remove Trump through the Russia hoax.  In the space of a decade, most Republican officeholders were outed as RINOs, before voters properly concluded that they were actually part of a single D.C. Uniparty all along.  

(3) Science vs. political manipulation

The only good thing to come out of the government’s COVID lockdowns, forced medical experimentation, and masking theater was its inadvertent creation of a Eureka! moment for tens of millions of Americans who realized that “science” has become irredeemably politicized.  When health authorities opted for experimental injections over known medical treatments, they sacrificed lives to push an agenda.  When hospitals separated families and forced vulnerable patients onto ventilators, they acted inhumanely.  When politicians and corporations censored public dissent, destroyed livelihoods, hobbled childhood development, and terrified the public with known lies, they not only proved that objective science is dead, but also committed crimes against humanity.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Amazing Accomplishments of Adam Andrzejewski and Open The Books By Mark Tapscott

By on July 16th, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/marktapscott/2023/07/15/the-amazing-accomplishments-of-adam-andrzeweski-and-open-the-books-n1710885

When Congress approved and President Lyndon Johnson signed the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in 1966, it became the law of the land that the public business of the United States is the business of the American public.

Just because the FOIA had become the law, however, little immediately changed in the dominant culture of secrecy, self-serving, and cover-up that always and everywhere pervades bureaucracies, but especially the sprawling bureaucracy of the federal executive branch.

That suffocating and constantly expansive culture would only change when millions of individual citizens and activists (plus journalists devoted to “the public’s right to know”) made continuing use of the FOIA and insisted that the law be respected and followed, even if doing so required persistence and insistence to the point of hiring lawyers and heading into court.

When the authoritative history of the succeeding 56 years is written, one individual and the non-profit group he founded will stand out — Adam Andrzejewski and Open the Books. The reason why is captured in the OTB purpose, “Every Dime. Online. In Real Time,” and its standing invitation to “Join the Transparency Revolution.”

There are legions of advocacy and activism groups in America that raise hundreds of billions of dollars each year based on claims of working to make government better. But not one of them can match the monumental accomplishment of Andrzejewski and OTB.

Here’s why: transparency is the absolute prerequisite to accountability in government. That’s the ideal underlying the FOIA and the essential condition for the survival of a republican democracy. And knowing how the government is spending the tax dollars of its citizens is the necessary first step to achieving genuine and enduring accountability. That is where Andrzejewski and OTB excel as no other individual or group in America.

Here is how they explain it:

“At OpenTheBooks.com, we work hard to capture and post all disclosed spending at every level of government – federal, state, and local. In 2022, we filed 50,000 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and captured 25 million public employee pension and salary records.

“We also broke open the California state checkbook for the first time in American history. We are rapidly growing our data in all 50 states down to the municipal level. We won’t stop until we capture every dime taxed and spent by our government.”

Think about that: every dime, online, in real time. You want to know how much your federal government spends each year on legal fees? Go to OTB. You want to know how much your state government spends each year on computers and office furniture? Go to OTB. You want to know how much your municipal government is paying each its employees and retirees? Go to OTB.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

California Approves New Math Guidelines That Emphasize ‘Social Justice’ Rick Moran

By on July 16th, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2023/07/15/california-approves-new-math-guidelines-that-emphasize-social-justice-n1710863

“Those poor kids. They’ve become “warriors for social justice” without being asked. And the price they pay will prove to be far more damaging to their futures than anything any white person will ever do to them.”

For nearly two years, California has been fiddling with new guidelines for teaching math that “de-emphasizes calculus, and applies social justice principles to math lessons.” Now those guidelines have been finalized, and the state board of education is thrilled to announce that math is no longer “racist.”

“This framework provides strategies to challenge, engage, and support all students in deep and relevant math learning by building on successful approaches used in nations that produce high and equitable achievement in math,” State Board President Linda Darling-Hammond said in a statement.

“High standards” are desirable. But “equitable achievement”? Which nations produce both?

Darling-Hammond added, “It also draws on the experiences of educators who have worked for a decade to develop successful strategies for teaching California’s rigorous standards, carrying those lessons to others across the state. This framework provides teachers and schools with a path to greater excellence with greater equity.”

The 1,000-page document is a triumph of idiocy. The idea is to make math instruction “culturally relevant” and “empowering” and to “instill confidence in learners by dispelling myths about who can and cannot learn math.”

“Cultural and personal relevance is important for learning and also for creating mathematical communities that reflect California’s diversity. Educators can learn to notice, utilize, and value students’ identities, assets, and cultural resources to support learning for all students. Additionally, because culture and language can be intertwined, attending to cultural relevance may also enable teachers to attend to linguistic diversity – a key feature of California and relevant to the teaching and learning of mathematics,” the document reads.

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MEDICINE AND HEALTH, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

When Ideology Corrupts Medicine—and How One Reporter Exposed it A conversation with Hannah Barnes about the medical scandal at Tavistock, the UK’s only youth gender clinic. Bari Weiss

By on July 16th, 2023

https://www.thefp.com/p/when-gender-ideology-corrupts-medicine-tavistock?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Last month, Britain’s National Health Service made major news when they announced that they were banning the use of puberty blockers for children, except for those enrolled in a tightly regulated clinical trial. The decision was made after an independent review found there were “significant uncertainties” surrounding the long-term effects of these drugs, which had previously been touted as totally reversible.

The announcement followed another major decision the NHS made last year on the same subject, which was to close Britain and Wales’ only treatment center for children with gender dysphoria: the Gender and Identity Development Service (GIDS) at Tavistock. The NHS found that the care provided at GIDS, which has operated for nearly 35 years, was “not safe or viable as a long-term option for the care of young people with gender related distress.”

These decisions bring the UK in sync with countries like Sweden and Norway, which have made similar policy decisions about gender care for children. But all of those countries are light-years away from how the United States approaches these issues.

My guest today, Hannah Barnes, has reported on this topic for years. Indeed, her reporting was the catalyst for many of these new changes. She’s here to explain what happened in the UK, and why the U.S. is so out of step with one of our strongest allies.

Hannah is an award-winning investigations producer at Newsnight, one of the BBC’s flagship news programs. Her important new book, Time To Think, follows the story from Tavistock’s inception to its imminent closure. It investigates how a clinic can open its doors to thousands of young patients at their most vulnerable, how it can operate for more than three decades without oversight or regulation, and how—in the words of some of the clinic’s own staff—this “medical scandal” unfolded.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Christopher Rufo Examines CRT’s Roots and Reach Peter Berkowitz

By on July 16th, 2023

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/07/16/christopher_rufo_examines_crts_roots_and_reach_149500.html

Following the May 25, 2020, killing of George Floyd and amid the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, controversy erupted over the teaching of critical race theory in the nation’s K-12 schools. The mainstream media adopted a contradictory approach. Journalists reported that American schools generally did not teach critical race theory; at the same time, the prestige press contended that opponents of CRT’s presence in the curriculum obstructed students’ encounter with the harsh realities of race in America. The journalists’ conflicting denial of its presence and endorsement of its radical ideas reflect CRT’s extensive influence. A perverse mixture of doctrines deriving from Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche, CRT undergirds much of the hard-left agenda that has burrowed deep into America, not least the mainstream media.

Consider two 2021 articles that appeared less than two weeks apart.

On July 1 of that year, NBC News journalist Phil McCausland reported that according to a survey, “Teachers nationwide said K-12 schools are not requiring or pushing them to teach critical race theory, and most said they were opposed to adding the academic approach to their course instruction.” 

McCausland lacked curiosity. He did not ask whether the ideas teachers were presenting could reasonably be understood as reflecting CRT’s central tenets. And he did not consider whether parents’ concerns about critical race theory stemmed from the shift to online instruction in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. With children learning onscreen at home, parents could look over their kids’ shoulders and see with their own eyes and hear with their own ears as teachers explained that America was systemically racist, that white people were of necessity oppressors and African Americans were of necessity oppressed, and that group identities and group rights superseded personal achievement and individual rights. Instead, NBC News  implied that parents objected to CRT to suppress the cruel facts about race in America.

Several days earlier, Washington Post reporters Laura Meckler and Josh Dawsey published a 3,000-word article tracing much of the furor over critical race theory – “a decades-old academic framework that most people had never heard of” – to the belligerent activism of Christopher Rufo, “a young conservative from Seattle.” The reporters sought to refute Rufo’s claim that critical race theory “has become, in essence, the default ideology of the federal bureaucracy and is now being weaponized against the American people” by suggesting that Rufo used “questionable evidence” to gin up CRT as “the latest cultural wedge issue.”

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Jeffrey H. Anderson The Allure of Last Time’s Loser Republican voters’ preference for presidential also-rans over new blood is an electoral Achilles’ heel.

By on July 16th, 2023

https://www.city-journal.org/article/gop-voters-preference-for-last-times-loser

Perhaps the biggest weakness of Republican presidential voters is their attachment to last time’s loser. Time and again, Republicans have nominated the candidate they rejected in the primaries the last time around, only to have general-election voters resoundingly reject that candidate this time around.

Over the past 30 years, Republicans have nominated the runner-up during the previous Republican primary (when not featuring a GOP incumbent) three times. Of these, Bob Dole won 30 percent of the electoral vote in 1996 (losing by 220 electoral votes), John McCain won 32 percent in 2008 (losing by 192), and Mitt Romney won 38 percent in 2012 (losing by 126). Only once during this stretch have the Democrats nominated last time’s loser: Hillary Clinton, who won 42 percent of the electoral vote in 2016 (losing by 77).

Meantime, the two parties have combined to nominate four candidates over that span who weren’t last time’s loser and hadn’t previously been elected as president or vice president. Among such “new blood” candidates, George W. Bush won 50.4 percent of the electoral vote in 2000, John Kerry won 47 percent in 2004, Barack Obama won 68 percent in 2008, and Donald Trump won 57 percent in 2016.

In sum, new blood candidates have three wins to one loss over the past three decades (winning an average of 56 percent of the electoral vote), while last time’s losers have zero wins and four losses (winning an average of 36 percent).

When they nominate last time’s loser, however, at least Democrats don’t generally pick someone who has already been rejected by the general electorate. Republicans seem to believe that swing voters think like Republicans do when seeing a candidate they rejected last time: Oh, I didn’t vote for him (or her) before, but I’m familiar with him (or her), so I’ll do it this time. But the way actual swing voters think is more like this: I didn’t vote for him last time, and there’s no way I’ll vote for him based on his resume since then.

If Donald Trump had vanished from the scene on November 3, 2020, and swing voters’ only memory of him was the first 46 months of his presidency, they might seriously contemplate giving him another shot.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

‘Christians Here Really Need Help’: The Persecution of Christians, June 2023 by Raymond Ibrahim

By on July 16th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19805/persecution-of-christians-june

The genocide of Christians at the hands of Muslims continued to rage throughout the month. Muslim “Fulani jihadists” slaughtered 2,500 Christians and “burned down or wantonly destroyed” 18,200 churches in just the first six months of 2023. Fifty million Christians have further been “forced out of their ancestral homes and lands into displacement and homelessness.” — news.band, June 3, 2023 – Nigeria

“All I can say is that war has been declared on Christians in Mangu [Plateau State, Nigeira]. The terrorists are just attacking and killing Christians in most of the communities around Mangu… Christians here really need help.” — Markus Artu, a member of the Mangu Local Government Council, after 150 Christians were killed in the first three weeks of June; Morning Star News, June 27, 2023 – Nigeria

On June 7, the mutilated body of Shazia Imran Masih, a 40-year-old Christian widow, was found. Earlier, four Muslims had “abducted, gang-raped and killed” her “for refusing to convert to Islam and marry the primary suspect.” – Morning Star News, July 7, 2023 — Pakistan

“The accused are very influential, and they have been persistently threatening us….” — Zafar Masih, a member of a local evangelical church, Moring Star News, July 3, 2023– Pakistan

“Indonesia’s Joint Ministerial Decree of 2006 (SKB) makes requirements for obtaining permits nearly impossible for most new churches. Even when small, new churches are able to meet the requirement of obtaining 90 signatures of approval from congregation members and 60 from area households of different religions, they are often met with delays or lack of response from officials. Well-organized radical Muslims secretly mobilize outside people to intimidate and pressure members of minority faiths.” – Moring Star News, June 23, 2023– Indonesia

“We…. are not building a church. So what’s the problem? When we pray, where is the problem?” — Elysson Lase, Christian woman, Morning Star News, June 23, 2023 — Indonesia

Egypt’s “contempt of religion” law — supposedly meant to protect the sanctity not just of Islam, but of Christianity and Judaism as well, is a farce…. [T]his law exists solely for the benefit of Islam….” – Report, wataninet.com, June 19, 2023 — Egypt

“Some of the more enlightened [Muslims] and Copts responded by asking why the alleged response by Abanoub Imad were to be considered as a reason to arrest him and put him under trial [even if he did indeed post them], when it was simply a reaction to insults against Christianity? Why are those who insulted Christianity in the first place not to be tried as well? And why are Christians always the only ones to be held accountable for contempt of religions, even though there are countless pages/sites that insult Christianity non-stop?” – Report, wataninet.com, June 19, 2023 — Egypt

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Don’t Believe The Leftist Media Narrative About The State of the 2024 Race

By on July 15th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/07/14/dont-believe-the-leftist-media-narrative-about-the-state-of-the-2024-race/

To the surprise of no one, the leftist corporate media’s coverage of the 2024 presidential race has been abysmal. Predictably, their reporting is full of omissions, half truths, and wishful thinking. Once again, they only report their preferred narratives, in a desperate attempt to persuade stupid people and gullible news outlets into believing them, including Conservative Inc.

As usual the leftist coastal elites are attempting to shape their perceptions into reality.

Here are the two mainstream narratives thus far.

The first one says that Joe Biden, despite suffering from alarming rates of delirium and senility, while presiding over horrendous poll numbers will unequivocally be the Democratic nominee for President.

The second narrative says that no matter how early it is, Donald J. Trump has an insurmountable lead in the ever-expanding GOP field, and thus will be the Republican nominee for President for a third consecutive time. This despite the fact that the Iowa Caucuses are not occurring for another six months.

Let’s analyze the first leftist corporate media narrative—that Joe Biden is the de facto nominee. As much as the objective journalists at the New York Times and Washington Post would like the gaffe-ridden career politician to remain in the White House, there are many plausible reasons why Team Biden, to the extent he even has a political operation, should be concerned.

Let’s put aside the fact that under Biden’s watch he has overseen the worst border crisis in U.S. history, the highest inflation in four decades, a historic crime wave in Democrat run cities, a disgraceful and embarrassing exit from Afghanistan, weakness towards China, indecision and mismanagement towards the war in Ukraine, appeasement towards Iran, betrayal against Israel, pathetic pandering in defense of “LGBTQ rights,” including supporting providing life altering puberty blockers to minors, attempting to jail his leading political opponent for the same supposed “crime” that he committed, and let’s not forget, a corrupt family that sold our country out, while raking in millions from China, Russia, Ukraine and Romania.

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