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Wi Spa: Ground Zero in the Gender Wars By Janet Levy

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/07/wi_spa_ground_zero_in_the_gender_wars.html

The Wi Spa is an upscale Korean-style health club that proudly publicizes its recognition in 2010 as the “Best Family Fun Spa in Los Angeles.”  Just a mile from Koreatown, the facility offers hot and cold baths, “progressive” sauna rooms, massages, body scrubs, and facials in an expansive space that includes a fitness center, restaurant, and kids’ zone. No clothing is permitted — not even bathing suits — and the multilevel building has separate floors for men and women.

Last week, there was an uproar at the spa when, in all his manly glory, a biological male self-identifying as a female paraded naked in front of girls and women in the designated women’s area. Several female patrons were alarmed and offended.

A video viewed by millions on social media shows a vociferous customer confronting the front desk staff and clarifying the issue in no uncertain terms: “I just want to be clear with you,” she is heard saying. “It’s okay for a man to go into the women’s section, show his p***s around other women, young little girls, underage. Your spa, Wi Spa, condoned that.  Is that what you’re saying?” A staff member is heard responding that, despite customers’ objections, the man would be allowed to remain on the women’s floor based on his “sexual orientation.” (What was probably meant was “gender identification.”) Several customers demanded refunds and left the spa in horror and disgust. An Instagram post featuring the video encouraged people to call and complain and suggested a boycott of the Wi Spa.

In saner times — before the two preponderant biological sexes, male and female, were replaced by 72 genders — this egregious incident would have been prosecuted as indecent exposure. Not anymore. When I called the spa to make an appointment for myself and “my eight-year-old daughter,” a staffer categorically told me that even if an individual physically presents as a male with intact genitalia but states he is a woman, the spa would be required to admit him to the women’s facilities despite the presence of little girls there.

Wi Spa staff defended their decision, citing California Civil Code 51(b), which states that “All persons within the jurisdiction of this state are free and equal, and no matter what their sex, race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, disability, medical conditions, genetic information, marital status, sexual orientation, citizenship, primary language, or immigration status are entitled to full and equal accommodations, advantages, facilities, privileges, or services in all business establishments of every kind whatsoever.” The statute does not specifically mention “gender identity,” but court cases have led to judgments that the delineated categories are “illustrative, not restrictive” and that other classifications would be protected.

British Jews Repudiated the Labor Party. Will American Jews Do the Same with the Anti-Semitism in the Democrat Party? By Rabbi Aryeh Spero

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/07/will_american_jews_follow_their_british_cousins_in_repudiating_jewhatred.html

There was an editorial last week in The Free Beacon positing that due to anti-Semitism within its ranks, the Democrat party will mimic the electoral defeat of England’s Labor Party, which is similarly plagued by anti-Semitism.  The Ilhan Omar–Ocasio-Cortez–Tlaib trio, as well as many members of various Democrat congressional caucuses, are open enemies of Israel’s existence and redolent with anti-Semitic pejoratives.  The Beacon’s theory is that just as Jeremy Corbyn’s Labor Party was shunned by Jews and many in the public, thereby losing the last election to the Tories, so will Democrats lose to Republicans in 2022.  Nancy Pelosi in the House and Chuck Schumer in the Senate, though themselves not anti-Semitic or anti-Israel, continue to allow this anti-Semitism in their party, and Pelosi goes farther by publicly and proudly embracing the Squad and especially Omar.

The Beacon should have given its supposition a bit more scrutiny, for there is a big difference between the repudiation of the Labor Party in England and the situation here with the Democrat party.  In Britain, virtually every Jew, Jewish organization, and Jewish politician spoke against the anti-Semitism and severe anti-Israelism happening within the Labor Party.  Their disgust was across the board, and many Jewish Laborites spoke of leaving the Labor Party…and did.  The entire Jewish community was alarmed by what was happening and growing within Labor’s ranks and leadership, spotlighted it as the anti-Semitic party, and worked hard for Labor’s defeat.

In contrast, here in America, we do not hear or see the majority of Jews repudiating the Democrat party.  Not at all!  The Democrats have lost basically none of their previous 70% Jewish support.  If one removes the Orthodox support for Republicans, the Jewish Democrat support is as high as 80%.  Nor has any of the Jewish politicians threatened to leave the Democrat party.  In fact, a dozen or so Jewish congressmen have joined and led others to further tighten Joe Biden’s grip over Israel, and many Jewish Democrat politicians continue to defend Ilhan Omar and whitewash everything she says, calling her critics Islamophobes.  And while some Jewish organizations have criticized Omar herself, none of the major establishment organizations has made any condemnation of the Democrat party per se, as was done against Labor by England’s Jewish organizations.  Dismayingly, non-Orthodox American Jews continue to stand solidly behind the Democrat party today, just as they did last Nov. 3 and many years previous.

The great federal-debt Ponzi scheme David Goldman

https://asiatimes.com/2021/07/the-great-federal-debt-ponzi-scheme/

It’s like the pump part of a pump-and-dump scheme in the stock market – without the benefit of an exit strategy.

The discrepancy between raging inflation and soggy Treasury bond yields remains a cognitive dissonance in financial markets.

There’s a simple explanation (and “Inflation is transitory” is NOT a full credit answer): The Federal Reserve and the commercial banks that depend on the Fed are virtually the only buyers of US government debt.

As long as the Fed is willing (and the market allows it) to buy arbitrarily large amounts of government debt, the price of US government debt is whatever the Fed says it is. It’s like the pump part of a pump-and-dump scheme in the stock market, except without the benefit of an exit strategy.

This Ponzi game can continue until inflation rises to the point where investors flee the Treasury market, yields soar and the economy falls back into recession. If the Fed and Treasury are willing to stake the credit of the United States of America on this game, it can last for a while. No matter how big a player you are, though, no one will take your marker at the craps table forever.

Without exaggeration, the US federal debt market is the most manipulated market of importance in the world at this writing.

The US banking system is a captive auxiliary of the central bank. The Fed has flooded the banks with reserves and pays them 0.05% (5 basis points) to hold these reserves at the Federal Reserve’s repurchase facility.

An Ugly War Among Leftist YouTubers Shows Two Common, Toxic Pathologies Plaguing U.S. Politics Baselessly accusing people of being Russian agents and weaponizing accusations of sexual misconduct are reputation-destroying cancers at the heart of liberal discourse. Glenn Greenwald

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/an-ugly-war-among-leftist-youtubers?token=ey

An incredibly vicious and protracted war is being waged, seemingly with no end in sight, among numerous prominent liberal and left-wing commentators who work primarily on YouTube. The conflict erupted on May 26 when Cenk Uygur — the founder and long-time host of The Young Turks, the largest liberal-left YouTube platform — baselessly and falsely accused independent journalist Aaron Maté of being “paid by the Russians,” while his co-host, Ana Kasparian, spouted innuendo that Maté was “working for” unnamed dictators.

Maté is one of the very few left-wing journalists who reported skeptically on Russiagate and who questioned the U.S. Government’s narrative about the civil war in Syria, including by traveling to war-torn parts of that country to do so. He won the 2019 Park Center for Independent Media’s Izzy Award for his work debunking Russiagate. Yet with a one-minute rant from their insulated studio, Uygur baselessly branded Maté as someone who is “paid by the Russians” while Kasparian asserted that he “seemed” to be working for Assad and other dictators — a potentially reputation-destroying smear for a journalist and one that can be quite dangerous for a reporter who, like Maté, works on the ground in war zones.

The conflict engendered by those grotesque fabrications escalated significantly when Kasparian sent a private Twitter message to one of Maté’s defenders, Jimmy Dore, in which she threatened to accuse Dore of #MeToo-type sexual harassment from when they worked together seven years earlier. Kasparian made clear that her intent to publicly vilify Dore as a sexual harasser would serve as punishment for his criticisms of The Young Turks. Dore then revealed Kasparian’s threat on his program, and days later, Kasparian made good on her threat by accusing Dore of sexual harassment back in 2014.

Twitter Direct Message from The Young Turks’ Ana Kasparian to Jimmy Dore, Apr. 14, 2016 and June 11, 2021.

While I used my social media platforms to denounce the false accusations voiced by Uygur and Kasparian against Maté, none of this would merit an article or stand-alone commentary if not for the fact that the two weapons they chose — false accusations that someone is a paid Russian agent and exploited sexual harassment accusations — have become extremely commonplace in Democratic Party politics, liberal circles and U.S. politics more broadly. It is long past time — way past time — that these tactics be rejected and scorned by everyone regardless of ideology or personality preferences.

Words Matter—Or Not: The Biden Vocabulary of the Times Victor Davis Hanson

https://victorhanson.com/wordpress/words-matter-or-not-the-biden-vocabulary-of-the-times/

Armed insurrection—a motley mob riot with no leaders, no firearms, no plans, and resulting in five fatalities, four from natural causes and one shot while unarmed by an unnamed police officer.

Assault—anything but 120 days of rioting, looting and arson, $2 billion in damage, 25 killed, and 14,000 arrested.

Bipartisan—you are if you hate Trump.

Cages—overcrowded border detention “facilities” created by the Obama administration and useful to the Biden team’s open-borders agenda. Otherwise known as “cages” between January 20, 2017-January 20, 2021.

Challenge—engineered utter chaos on the border.

Circling back—just circling and circling…

Collusion—the projection of the crime of the guilty onto those innocent of it.

Diversity—coerced uniformity of thought and expression.

Equity—the plan where everybody ends up the same except those who oversee it.

Gender—what people with degrees call sex.

Herd immunity—once a canon of epidemiology, then taboo, now an inconvenient truth.

Inclusion—mandatory state alienation of a majority of the population.

Infrastructure—borrowing trillions for anything but roads and bridges.

Latinix—unknown, maybe a gladiatorial character in some long forgotten Roman graphic novel.

Noncitizen—now used as if all legal US residents crossed the Southern border illegally.

Root causes—an abstraction used to evade the concrete evidence in front of you.

Scott Atlas—the Nemesis following Dr. Fauci’s hubris.

Unity—uniting half the country against the other half.

Woke—body snatched.

Deception Wearing the Mask of Truth By Geoffrey P. Hunt

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/05/_deception_wearing_the_mask_of_truth.html

For Joe Biden/Kamala Harris devotees, the 2020 ubiquitous election lawn signs in my neighborhood read “Truth Hope Decency.”  While most of these moralizing bromides did not survive the winter, some are still implanted, reminders of how cheap political speech was soon enough self-repudiated.

Exhorting “Decency” was the refrain decrying President Donald Trump’s occasional crude and coarse cloudbursts, usually unfiltered via Twitter. Yet the substance of decency has eluded Joe Biden and his Democrat handlers, ushering instead a new era of grotesque depravities, where at the top Biden/Harris have endorsed, supported, and invited the unrestrained abject horror of drug trafficking, sex trafficking, and human trafficking via a deliberately porous open southern border, resettling unaccompanied children all across America.

Illegal alien sex and child trafficking continue with impunity under Biden’s open borders policy while a surge in overdose deaths from methamphetamine and oxycontin laced with fentanyl — all managed by Mexican cartels given sanctuary by Joe Biden — merits a VP Kamala Harris response that “climate change is the root provocation for the border challenges, and Mexico should plant more trees.”

Decency? No, neither stupidity nor incompetence; instead, an abomination and disinformation by design.

And why is the Biden/Harris regime, obsessed by race and cultural Marxism, aligned with BLM, and the fraudulent 1619 project — where modern-day slavery and indentured servitude, from the Mexican cartels to South Sudan to Communist Chinese subjugation of the Uyghurs, elicits nary a peep?

Boston: Muslim Who Stabbed Rabbi Is ‘Violent’ and ‘Very Much Anti-Semitic’ The cops are still baffled as to his motive, of course. Robert Spencer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/07/boston-muslim-who-stabbed-rabbi-violent-and-very-robert-spencer/

Khaled Awad stabbed Rabbi Shlomo Noginski eight times on Thursday afternoon. Predictably, International Business Times reported on Saturday that “police have yet to establish the motive for the stabbing, and the investigation into the incident continues.” Yeah, this one is a real head-scratcher. Khaled Awad doesn’t seem to be a “white supremacist,” but what else could he possibly be? Help us, Merrick Garland, help us!

Garland has so far remained mum, but Awad’s old roommates and friends at the University of Southern Florida have been more forthright. CBS reported Friday that one of Awad’s old school chums, Eric Valiente, said that while they were in college together, Awad “started becoming violent.” And not only that: “He was very much anti-Semitic. He would say like all types of Jewish jokes. I thought he was joking at first and then I started to see seriousness in his comments. He disgusted me at that point. I wanted nothing to do with the guy. At this point, I was a little scared of him. I was scared of what he was capable of because I realize he was a very dark person.”

Awad got so violent, in fact, that his roommate, Aidan Anderson, moved out and got a restraining order against him. Before that, “we were friends, to be honest with you,” Anderson recalled. “I’m Jewish. And he knew that since I moved in.”

Might that have been why Awad began to get violent? After all, around the time of the recent conflict between Hamas and Israel, Palestinian Muslims and their supporters committed acts of violence against Jews and supporters of Israel all over the United States. In New York City, a Muslim mob screaming “Allahu akbar” attacked a Jewish man in midtown Manhattan. Also in Manhattan, Palestinians threatened violence and screamed anti-Semitic slurs at Jews. One threw a mini-firebomb. Pro-jihad protesters stormed a restaurant and spat on Jewish patrons; one of the thugs threw a bottle. A Muslim, Waseem Awawdeh, was arrested for viciously beating a Jew in Times Square.

In Los Angeles, Palestinian protesters asked people dining at the Sushi Fumi restaurant if they were Jewish, and proceeded to attack them with knives. Elsewhere in Los Angeles, two cars festooned with Palestinian flags chased a Jewish man down a street as he was leaving his synagogue.

Dr. Fauci, America’s Fallen Idol The decline of Dr. Doom.Jeff Crouere

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/07/dr-fauci-americas-fallen-idol-jeff-crouere/

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the Director of the National Institute of Allergy, and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), has been a constant fixture in the media since the outbreak of COVID-19 in late 2019. 

Despite the relaxation of mandates and the falling virus death rates in the United States, Fauci continues to generate media attention.  

He loves the media, and they love his “doom and gloom” message. In recent weeks, Fauci has been advocating for all Americans to vaccinate, including young people, and warning about the dangers of new variants.

This week, he appeared on a video for President Joe Biden. He called the “Delta variant” even more dangerous than the original virus. Fauci claimed it was “more transmissible” and a “variant of concern” especially to young people. The message was to get vaccinated “before it’s too late.”

This dire warning is in direct contrast to the evidence released in the United Kingdom. Their latest government report shows the fatality rate for the “Delta variant” to be 0.1%, lower than the “Alpha,” “Beta” and “Eta” variants. Why would Dr. Fauci misrepresent the threat of this new variant? Possibly to continue the COVID-19 public hysteria and his role as the media darling.  

Fauci has served in his position since 1984, decades too long. There are good reasons to limit how long politicians and leaders of government bureaucracies should remain in office. It is an effective protection against corruption. After 37 years, Fauci has accumulated vast power and has become the highest paid person in the federal government, making $434,312 annually, an outrageous amount considering his pathetic COVID-19 track record.

While the media, President Biden and congressional Democrats have anointed him as the nation’s premier virus expert, in reality, Fauci has been a total failure. Throughout the pandemic, his recommendations have changed on vital issues such as masks and social distancing.

The Genesis of Our American Collective Meltdown Our adversaries can’t quite believe their good fortune. Had they thought up ways to divide and impoverish America, they could not have improved on our own collective meltdown. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/04/the-genesis-of-our-american-collective-meltdown/

This Fourth of July holiday we might pause for a moment from our festivities to ask how we collectively lost our minds over the last 15 months—and are we yet regaining any semblance of our sanity? 

A pandemic caused by the leak of a Chinese-engineered virus and its coverup was cause enough for nationwide madness. But the spread of COVID–19 was followed by a nationalized and often politicized “flatten-the-curve” quarantine that soon ensured a stir-crazy nation. Tens of millions saw no people, and heard nothing human other than what was fed to them through television and computers. No wonder they grew paranoid, conspiratorial, and angry, and soon forgot the therapeutic nature of personal interaction and the shared humanity of being in the physical presence of others.

Our first self-induced recession came next and lasted over a year, destroying all the hard work of the prior three years. Next ensued the death of George Floyd and a subsequent 120 days of rioting, looting, and arson. The immediate costs were $2 billion in damage, over 25 deaths, 14,000 arrests, and a Lord of the Flies anarchy with no-go zones in our major cities. A McCarthyite frenzy followed, as remote-controlled America hunted down the supposed “racists” among us—while career agendas, personal grudges, and ideological hatred fueled the cancel culture. 

All this was antecedent to our first election in which Election Day voting was incidental, not essential, to the outcome. This was also our first presidential campaign in which the incumbent was stricken by a pandemic virus. And his opponent, due to his age and infirmity, simply reverted to the 19th century style of staying home and outsourcing the electioneering to the Democratic-media complex. Biden’s basement became the equivalent of the “front-porch” of homebound candidates of a century and more ago. 

The derangement was then capped off, first, by a buffoonish riot at the Capitol followed by a Reichstag-fire style militarization of Washington, D.C., in a “never let a crisis go to waste” psychodrama. Then came a novel second and unprecedented presidential impeachment, without a special prosecutor, witnesses, or cross examinations. It was based on the myth of a deadly “armed insurrection” fueled by President Trump, which purportedly led to the murder of a police officer. Later most of the writs of the House impeachment were proven fantasies, from the idea of “armed” and “well-organized” to “murderous” revolutionaries. The only mysteries were the identity of the unnamed officer who fatally shot an unarmed female protester and military veteran, and why the government has still not released thousands of hours of video detailing the riot. 

Joe Biden’s Happy Things Joe Biden plays an ambiguous role in this malevolent charade. He is not the prime mover but merely the public face of the machine.  By Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/03/joe-bidens-happy-things/

McDonald’s has its “Happy Meals,” so it’s only fair that Joe Biden has his “Happy Times.” The Fourth of July weekend is one of those bright, smiling occasions that normally begets happiness, though in truth the White House occupant was not smiling on Friday when reporters ventured to ask him about the decision (I won’t say his decision) to turn over Bagram Airfield to the Afghans after nearly 20 years, $2 trillion in taxpayer money spent, and thousands of U.S. casualties. 

Question for the future: what did we get for all that blood and treasure? Don’t answer now, just put it on your mental to-do list. 

Anyway, the leader of the free world didn’t want to talk about Afghanistan. “I want to talk about happy things, man,” he snapped. The Taliban is such a downer, you know, and besides “It’s Fourth of July” weekend. “I’m going to celebrate it. There’s great things happening.” 

Like gasoline prices about double what they were last year? Out-of-control inflation? A humanitarian and national security crisis on our Southern border? 

Mr. Happy did not mention those items. 

Nor did he dwell on the deeper question, viz what are we celebrating on the 4th of July? After all, many college students say they are “embarrassed” to be Americans. “Are you proud to be an American?” an interviewer asked. “Hell no,” was the answer, or words to that effect. 

Not that this is surprising. Most of the major institutions of the country have been telling us that America is irredeemably racist, sexist, and exploitative. The wretched “1619 Project,” which argued that America was founded as a “slavocracy” and that the American Revolution—whose culmination we celebrate on July 4—was fought to perpetuate the institution of slavery, was promulgated by the New York Times, supposedly our paper of record. The tendentious and historically inaccurate contentions of that disgusting anti-American broadside were then packaged for school curricula by the Times and other outlets of dubious national loyalty. As of this writing, elements of the 1619 Project’s ideology are part of the curricula of more than 4,500 schools. 

Then there is critical race theory, a catechism that teaches students to hate their country and whites to hate themselves. As Christopher Rufo has shown in meticulous detail, the wild ideas of CRT are being force-fed in mandatory training sessions not only to students but also to government employees.