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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

How today’s ‘Diversity’ damages our military By Brig. Gen. Chris Petty

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/03/how_todays_diversity_damages_our_military.html

Diversity sounds great.  That’s part of the problem.  Today’s “diversity,” however, isn’t what it used to be.  Rather than diverse experiences, backgrounds, and perspectives — that promote healthy group decisions and outcomes ‒ “diversity” has come to mean only race, ethnicity, and gender.  Unfortunately, today’s “diversity” is replacing our long, and largely successful, journey towards equal opportunity.  We have moved the goalposts to the end of a new field — a field where equal racial and gender outcomes determine the score.  In this new world, “diversity” has become an end unto itself, undermining the purpose of our military: winning wars.  Here is why it is so damaging.

Today’s diversity advocates measure organizational success by race/ethnicity and gender — factors that have nothing to do with performance or potential.  Yet, they are influencing accessions, advancements, and promotions across the force.  Prioritizing racial and gender goals clearly undermines the importance of performance and merit.  Sadly, today’s military leaders are often downplaying talents, experience, and skills in favor of skin color and gender in their personnel decisions.  The result is a less capable force with less capable leaders.

This new push for diversity also destroys trust. When merit and performance are downplayed in the name of quotas and goals, excellence is undermined.

Hunter Biden’s Laptop Is Finally News Fit to Print The press that ignored the story in 2020 admits that it’s real.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/all-the-news-thats-finally-fit-to-print-hunter-biden-laptop-new-york-post-new-york-times-joe-biden-11647637814?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

“The emails make clear that Hunter was cashing in on the Biden name, including as a board member of Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company. That influence-peddling was a potential political liability for Mr. Biden, which was why the facts deserved an airing before the election. They are still relevant, especially with U.S.-China relations so fraught.”

Talk about burying the lead—for 17 months. The New York Times has finally acknowledged that Hunter Biden’s business dealings are legitimate news. Implicit apology accepted.

The Times waddled in this week with a story on the “tax affairs” of the President’s son, including this gem in the 24th paragraph: “Those emails were obtained by The New York Times from a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop. The email and others in the cache were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.”

You don’t say. This admission comes six months after a Politico writer published a book that also confirmed that the laptop emails were authentic. But the original scoop belonged to the New York Post, which broke its laptop story in October 2020—only to meet a media wall of denial and distortion.

Rather than attempt to confirm the emails, nearly all of the media at the time ignored the story or “fact-checked” it as false. This in-kind contribution to candidate Joe Biden was all the more egregious given other evidence supporting the Post’s scoop. Neither Hunter Biden nor the Biden campaign denied that the laptop was Hunter’s. And Hunter’s former business partner, Tony Bobulinski, went public with documents backing up some of the laptop’s contents.

HAS ONE RIGGED ELECTION DESTROYED AMERICA FOREVER? THE ODDS ARE AGAINST US. Wayne Allyn Root

https://rootforamerica.com/has-one-rigged-election-destroyed-america-forever-the-odds-are-against-us/

Folks, we are in a world of trouble.

America has faced tough odds before. America beats impossible odds all the time. We are resilient and relentless. We are a nation of people who believe nothing is impossible. So, never count us out. There is always hope.

But make no mistake, we are now in the fight of our lives. The odds may be worse than we have ever faced. Our nation is being destroyed from within. America is hanging by a thread. The attacks are relentless and ominous.

The nation is divided like never before. You’d have to go back to the Civil War to find our nation this bitterly divided.

Our borders are wide open with millions of foreign invaders coming in each year. The bad countries of the world are emptying out their prisons- to send their worst criminals to us. Illegal aliens by the millions are bringing poverty, disease and violent crime; bloating our budgets; exploding our national debt; and destroying our education, healthcare and social security systems.

Inflation is raging like never before in modern history. No one really knows how bad it will get. But the government is hiding the true level. More accurate measurements of inflation put us in the range of 15% to 20%. And it’s only going to get worse. This has the potential to wipe out the great American middle class.

Shameless, delusional Cuomo brothers continue to play the role of victims By Maureen Callahan

https://nypost.com/2022/03/17/shameless-delusional-cuomo-brothers-continue-to-play-the-role-of-victims/

Cockroaches.

Keith Richards.

The Cuomo brothers.

Yes, Andrew and Chris, those heroes-to-zeroes, have officially earned their place among the rare life forms sure to survive Armageddon.

Nothing can exterminate these two from public life, because nothing Andrew or Chris has ever done is their fault.

Actually, scratch that. The problem, you see (and can’t you just hear Andrew’s pedantic, patronizing voice saying this, lowering down into that slow, conspiratorial whisper?) is ev-er-y-bo-dy else.

And really, the Cuomo brothers believe this. Two delusional, power-hungry, disloyal narcissists, determined to bully weary voters and viewers into submission. It’s all so very dignified and statesman-like.

On Thursday morning, just seven months shy of resigning in disgrace, Andrew gave a lengthy speech explaining what’s gone wrong with the modern Democratic party.

Answer: They pushed him out of it.

This Photo Should End the Transgender-Athlete Debate By Judson Berger

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/this-photo-should-end-the-transgender-athlete-debate/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

On a most basic level, everyone knows that the decision to allow Lia Thomas to compete against women at the collegiate level is wrong. The decision has been rationalized to death with rhetoric concerning the transgender swimmer’s “authentic self,” as if the female swimmers competing under a new glass ceiling had any quarrel with that.

But the photo above should end that debate. In a tolerant and reasonable society that values fairness — fairness for women, which understandably has been an animating issue for progressives and was the motivation for the first bill Barack Obama signed as president — the jarring image of Thomas towering over the defeated women at the 500-yard freestyle yesterday is unassailable evidence of how wrong this charade is.

The Democrats Are Building Themselves a Suicide Machine By Charles C. W. Cooke

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/03/the-democrats-are-building-themselves-a-suicide-machine/

The party has gone along with the American media in advancing a bizarro-world ideology that few support.

T he Democrats are in political trouble, and the media bear much of the blame.

This is not because the media have ceased to be horribly biased in the Democrats’ favor. They remain that, and hopelessly so. Rather, it’s because the media have become more crazy, more self-confident, and less respected than ever, and because this shift has rendered their bias less useful than it once was.

For reasons that remain alien to me, almost the entirety of the American press — as well as much of academia and the entertainment industry — has spent the last five years assiduously adopting an exceptionally weird race-and gender-essentialist ideology that pretty much everyone outside of those institutions absolutely loathes. And, in its infinite wisdom, the Democratic Party has followed suit. The result has been the creation of a narrow, extremely peculiar feedback loop, within which the institutional Democratic Party and its friends in the press have concocted — and then adopted — a set of bizarro-world ideas that are met with confusion and horror once they are released into the general population. Bit by bit, piece by piece, tweet by tweet, the wagon to which the Democrats have hitched themselves is becoming a suicide machine.

Another sign the Dem establishment fears DeSantis more than Trump By Thomas Lifson

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/03/another_sign_the_dem_establishment_fears_desantis_more_than_trump.html

It would be hard to find a person who better represents the liberal media establishment than Thomas B. Edsall, whose career includes the Washington Post, New York Times, and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. In his latest column for the Times, he attempts to slam Ron DeSantis, letting the world know that the Democrats fear him more than Donald Trump at the top of the 2024 presidential ticket.  But in the process of doing so, far from damaging the Florida governor with the GOP electorate and middle-of-the-road voters, he awards DeSantis badges of honor.

Consider:

DeSantis relishes using the state to enforce his aggressive social agenda and has consistently plotted a hard-right course on issues from critical race theory to transgender rights.

For example, DeSantis sponsored and pushed through the legislature the “Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees (W.O.K.E.) Act” — or the Stop Woke Act for short — which now awaits his signature.

The legislation, Florida H.B. 7, bans teaching critical race theory that suggests that

A person, by virtue of his or her race, color, national origin, or sex is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.

Cringe: Biden tells St. Patrick’s Day group, ‘I may be Irish, but I’m not stupid By Monica Showalter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/03/biden_tells_st_patricks_day_group_i_may_be_irish_but_im_not_stupid.html

Is there anything that senile Joe Biden touches that doesn’t turn to something awful?

Here’s a report from the London Daily Telegraph:

Joe Biden opened a St Patrick’s Day speech at the White House by saying: “I may be Irish, but I’m not stupid.”

While some interpreted his remark as a self-deprecating joke, others suggested it could be seen as offensive to Ireland.

Mr Biden began his speech by saying: “Father, before I begin. Bless me, Father, for I’m about to sin. I, well, I just want you to know, I may be Irish, but I’m not stupid. I married Dominic Giacoppa’s daughter.”

The joke was greeted with laughter in the room, and there was no reaction from Irish officials.

The Telegraph also noted:

It was at least the third time Mr Biden has used the phrase.

The Critical Mass of My Righteous Fury James Allan

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/opinion-post/the-critical-mass-of-my-righteous-fury/

The West right now seems absorbed in pushing such idiocies as the finer intricacies of transgender and critical race theories, the claim that defunding the police will help poor blacks (yep, really), a sort of zero-risk, precautionary principle on steroids approach to life and to governing citizens, and the notion that indirect quotas are a good idea as long as you dress them up in the insidiously seductive language of ‘equity’ and ‘diversity’. That means you find some desirable jobs and educational opportunities and then insist there be a near 1:1 correlation between (1) the numbers in the wider society with particular reproductive organs or types of skin pigmentation or preferences in bed, and (2) the numbers from such groups filling these jobs or university places etc – so basically it’s a type of Marxist equality-of-outcome outlook dominating not just universities and the public service but now all big corporations too. 

Moreover, it’s an outlook that indirectly lowers diversity of viewpoint, because conservatives make autonomy and individual choice key. And because they don’t want to play the identity-politics game, they largely don’t get these jobs or places or promotions.  The result over time is a monolithic orthodoxy of outlook, on campus, in the boardroom — heck, even in the Liberal partyroom.  This destructive, navel-gazing wankery in the West is very depressing.  Of course, the rest of the world is busy showing us that the great British philosopher Thomas Hobbes was right.  Humans have, do and always will live in a dangerous world, one chock full of bullies, thugs, religious zealots and hard men who know only the lessons of the schoolyard (by which I mean the schoolyard when I was a kid at a pretty tough state school in Toronto, where bullying meant being beaten up, not today’s schoolyard where ‘bullying’ has been emptied of all content and appears to mean someone has said something that might reduce self-esteem a few points on the ‘might I possibly be offended?’ scale).

Will the Next J6 Trial Expose Another Justice Department Lie? Lies related to the whereabouts of Vice President Kamala Harris and former Vice President Mike Pence on January 6 are coming to the fore. By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2022/03/17/will-the-next-j6-trial-expose-another-justice-department-lie/

Federal prosecutors last week scored a big victory after a Washington, D.C., jury took less than three hours to find Guy Reffitt, the first January 6 defendant to stand trial, guilty on all counts.

The Justice Department’s winning streak might be short-lived, however. Prosecutors will have a tougher task with the trial starting Monday for Couy Griffin, the “Cowboys for Trump” leader arrested for his minor and nonviolent involvement in the Capitol protest on January 6.

Griffin was the subject of my very first article over a year ago on the Justice Department’s abusive prosecution of January 6 protesters in which, coincidentally, I asked the rhetorical question, “Where is the outrage over America’s political prisoners?” as official Washington was in a tizzy over Russian President Vladimir Putin’s imprisonment of his country’s star dissident.

After the government charged Griffin on January 19, 2021 with two low-level trespassing misdemeanors, acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Michael Sherwin asked the court to keep Griffin detained pending trial. Sherwin, recall, bragged about a “shock and awe campaign” of January 6 arrests prior to Joe Biden’s inauguration. 

Relying mostly on remarks Griffin made during and after the protest, Sherwin claimed that the New Mexico county commissioner, who never entered the Capitol, was a danger to the community. “[The] defendant is an inflammatory provocateur and fabulist who engages in racist invective and propounds baseless conspiracy theories, including that Communist China stole the 2020 Presidential Election,” Sherwin’s office wrote in a motion seeking Griffin’s imprisonment. “He denies the lawful election of the president and as [sic] stated repeatedly that Biden will never be president.”