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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Justices, Please Take the Harvard Case The Court needs to affirm the principle of racial equality or the U.S. will resegregate.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/justices-please-take-the-harvard-case-11621894691?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Nearly every day we learn of another case of governments or others setting policy based on the color of one’s skin. This is contrary to the equal rights fought for and won in the Civil War and civil-rights movement, and the Supreme Court has a rare and valuable chance to reaffirm that principle if it decides to hear the appeal in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.

The particulars concern whether Harvard discriminates against Asian-Americans in its admissions decisions. Harvard won in the lower courts but the Asian-American plaintiffs have appealed to the High Court. The larger stakes are whether the Supreme Court will wink as America divides in ways that have proved so destructive in the past.

The temptation will be for the Justices to give Harvard a pass given its contentious subject. The High Court has already taken cases on gun rights and abortion for the next term starting in the autumn. And you can imagine the reluctance to add the combustible issue of race to the docket.

This would be a mistake, and not only on the merits of this case. As Justice Clarence Thomas pointed out in 2018 when the Court passed on Kansas and Louisiana laws involving Medicaid funds for Planned Parenthood clinics, Supreme Court Justices are given lifetime tenure precisely so that a “politically fraught issue” will not prevent them from applying the law neutrally.

LEE SMITH: STREET VIOLENCE AS A POLITICAL TOOL

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/street-violence-as-a-political-tool

The new Democratic Party of oligarchs and technocrats enforces its orthodoxies upon blue state clients through broken windows and beatings, administered by party militias like antifa and BLM.

The Democratic Party has had a problem. It’s a small, incoherent, and privileged clique funded by billionaire oligarchs to push policies that even mainstream Democratic voters oppose. How to bridge the gap? The solution they chose, which party officials made clear this week, was simple: the way third-world elites always do—by using street violence to keep their clients in line.

This week, pro-Palestinian demonstrators auditioned for the chance to join already established Democratic Party militias antifa and Black Lives Matter by attacking Jews in New York and Los Angeles. Apologists for the violence reason that the demonstrators are angry about the deaths of innocent Palestinian babies under Israeli fire in Gaza so they’re taking their frustrations—admittedly misplaced!—out on American Jews.

That is not what’s happening.

Who knows how many of the activists waving the Palestinian flag as they beat Jews and detonate fireworks in front of Jewish-owned businesses are genuinely Palestinian Americans? Maybe some aren’t even Arab or Muslim, but that’s irrelevant—they are staking their claim to recruit, promote, and represent Arabs and Muslims as an interest group. And so the flag they’re really flying isn’t for the Palestinians but rather for the Democratic Party.

The Capitol Riot Narrative Is Collapsing, but Its Political Exploitation Persists Ben Weingarten

https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-capitol-riot-narrative-is-collapsing-but-its-political-exploitation-persists_3826065.html

Virtually the entire American ruling class has invested in a narrative that is collapsing—that what transpired at the Capitol on the afternoon of Jan. 6 represented a murderous, armed insurrection, posing a dire threat to the republic.

Yet, the exploitation of that single event to marginalize and malign up to half the country, in a slew of efforts that pose a threat to the liberty and justice of all, continues apace.

If the foundation of these efforts is crumbling, shouldn’t these efforts be called into question, too?

The events at the Capitol on Jan. 6 were inexcusable and disgraceful, and those who committed crimes ought to be punished to the fullest extent of the law. We settle differences in America by persuasion and reason, and abjure force and coercion—something many of those hyping Jan. 6 as a “domestic terrorist attack” only seem to believe when it suits their political interests.

But this isn’t the whole story of that day. While congressional demagogues and social media speech police claim otherwise, the sole person killed in the riot was an unarmed protester, shot by a Capitol cop. Not one of the more than 400 people charged in connection with the events stormed the building with a firearm. Most of those detained face glorified trespassing offenses.

Video footage indicates that some percentage of the protesters was allowed to waltz into the Capitol, and others, once inside, were permitted to remain there by police, seemingly in contradiction of what prosecutors have argued. Authorities are concealing more than 14,000 hours of additional footage concerning Jan. 6, breathtakingly using the same argument that Spygate participants used to conceal the whole truth about their machinations, that of national security.

The Capitol riot wasn’t on the level of the Civil War, as President Joe Biden has argued, 9/11 as he implied, nor Pearl Harbor, as then-Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer asserted.

Is Biden’s inflated presidency about to burst? Matt Purple

https://spectator.us/topic/inflated-presidency-about-burst-inflation/

Is President Joe Biden living up to expectations? It’s hard to say, since the expectations generated on his campaign trail were so murky. Biden made plenty of promises on the stump but only one thing was ever clear: he wasn’t Donald Trump. Beyond that, no one was really certain what iteration of Biden would enter the Oval Office on Inauguration Day. A pragmatic moderate or a progressive ideologue? A return-to-normal steady hand or a malarkey-scourging bomb thrower? The law-and-order author of the PATRIOT Act or the ‘Black Lives Matter’ anti-racist he suddenly morphed into last summer?

Biden was so defined by who he wasn’t that no one ever quite worked out who he was. Now we have our answer. Whatever moderation was once attributed to him has been quickly abandoned. The Keystone XL Pipeline has been canceled, the radical Equality Act has been endorsed, the Paris Climate Agreement has been rejoined. Most glaringly of all, one of the largest spending bills in American history has been signed into law, with promises of much, much more to com e. Most recently, Biden has been haggling with the GOP Congress over his proposed infrastructure package. He wants $2.3 trillion while the Republicans have said they could go as high as $800 billion and even raise the gas tax in order to pay for it.

It’s a stunning dynamic, both because the GOP once filleted Barack Obama for trying to pass a stimulus package of about that same size (though in 2008 dollars) and because of the even higher total that the president is demanding.

So who is Joe Biden? Right now, he’s the most fiscally irresponsible president in American history. Many on the left trace an unbroken thread from FDR to LBJ to Barack Obama, all progressive Democrats who took an activist approach to government and spent big money trying to solve big problems. Biden clearly views himself in this tradition rather than in the more conservative and restrained one of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.

Yet there’s more going on here than mere self-indulgent FDR LARPing. Biden is a product of a post-2008 Washington that increasingly feels no constraints on its ability to spend. With interest rates and inflation having remained low for over a decade, there haven’t been any serious consequences for eye-watering deficits and national debt. In retrospect, this has proven one of the most consequential political developments of the 21st century. It’s effectively dried up both the right’s fiscally conservative streak and the left’s erstwhile desire for ‘good government’. It’s thrashed the Tea Party, cemented a humongous federal bureaucracy, and led to the largest national debt since World War Two.

(Some) communities coming together against anti-Semitism By Ethel C. Fenig

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/05/some_communities_coming_together_against_antisemitism.html

Attacks against Jews in the U.S. have surged in the past year, especially in the past few weeks as Israel had the gall — to some — to vigorously defended itself against Arab attacks.  But you could be forgiven for not being aware of these vicious incidents because except for a few outlets, most so-called main(lame)stream media have ignored them or minimized them at best; blaming Israel and its Jewish defenders for striking back at worst. And sadly — but not surprisingly — Joe Biden is silent against this form of hate, perhaps fearful of upsetting his bigoted woke fellow (oh, excuse me for the misogynist term as this also includes female) Democrats. 

In Skokie, Illinois, a Chicago suburb home to a substantial number of Jews, a grassroots coalition of several mostly Orthodox (more traditional) Jewish groups hastily organized a Communities Coming Together Against Anti-Semitism rally yesterday after someone earlier in the week broke a synagogue window, leaving a “Freedom for Palestine” (sic!) sign nearby. 

Skokie, where 44 years earlier, in a prewoke, precancel culture, some American Nazis received court permission to hold an anti-Jewish march through the suburb thanks to the free speech argument of the ACLU’s many Jewish attorneys.  

Bill Barr on the Forces of Division in America The forces that Barr recognizes and rightly deplores are not confined to the obviously nasty precincts of explicit Marxism. They are also implicit in large swaths of traditional liberalism. By Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/23/bill-barr-on-the-forces-of-division-in-america/

EXCERPTS:

Now back in private life, Barr has lost none of his critical acumen. His speech on May 20 for the Alliance Defending Freedom is a case in point. “[T]he greatest threat to religious liberty in America today,” he said, is “the increasingly militant and extreme secular-progressive climate of our state-run education system.” Barr is right: 

We are rapidly approaching the point—if we have not already reached the point—at which the heavy-handed enforcement of secular-progressive orthodoxy through government-run schools is totally incompatible with traditional Christianity and other major religious traditions in our country.

Barr traced the evolution of the dominant attitude about the relationship between religion and government-financed public schools through three phases. In the first phase, which ran from the educational reform movement of the early 19th century through the mid-20th century, public education was seen as inculcating the values of good citizenship and, beyond that, a moral outlook that was grounded explicitly in Protestant Christianity. In his book Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity, Samuel Huntington spoke in this context of “Anglo-Protestant values,” a phrase that drew instant obloquy from secularists and other radicals who fell over themselves trying to decide which was worse, the “Anglo” part or the “Protestant” part. 

“The key point,” Barr noted, was that until the 1970s, this “anodyne form of Christianity” offered a “generally acceptable ‘pan-Protestantism’” that was taught in public schools throughout the country. Accommodations were easily made for Catholics, Jews, and members of other religions, but the dominant note were those “Anglo-Protestant” values that Huntington extolled. “Throughout American his- tory,” Huntington noted, “people who were not white Anglo-Saxon Protestants have become Americans by adopting America’s Anglo-Protestant culture and political values. This benefitted them and the country.” 

But things took an ominous turn in the 1960s and 1970s. It was then that the ACLU nuts and other members of the Left “embarked on a relentless campaign of secularization intent on driving every vestige of traditional religion from the public square. Public schools quickly became the central battleground.” School prayer? Out. A crèche at Christmas? Absolutely not. This was phase two: the effort to purge the public square, beginning with public educational institutions of all remnants of religious identity. This is what Barr called “secularization by subtraction.”

Feet-of-Clay Icons Our most important and cherished institutions—the military, science, and the law—are losing the trust of Middle America. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/23/feet-of-clay-icons/

“The head of the statue was made of pure gold, its chest and arms of silver, its belly and thighs of bronze, its legs of iron, its feet partly of iron and partly of baked clay.”
— Daniel 2:33

Americans mostly have given up on familiar institutions for entertainment, guidance, or reassurance. What now do Hollywood, network news, the media in general, Silicon Valley, the NBA, NFL, MLB, or higher education all have in common? 

A propensity to lecture Americans on their moral inferiorities, a general ethical decline in their own disciplines, and a strange obsession to acquire great wealth while living in contrast to what they advocate for others. Add also incompetence. Movies are mostly bad now. The network news is blow-dried groupthink. There is no “paper of record” anywhere. Twitter and Facebook no longer even try to hide their politicized contortions of warped rules and twisted protocols. 

Professional athletes are now reminders of why no one ever wants to be “enlightened” by multimillionaire quarter-educated narcissists. The public a half-century ago lost faith in academia. It wasn’t just that most new bad ideas could be traced to the campus or that hothouse professors increasingly seemed both ignorant and arrogant, but rather their product—educating students—was defective. No one believes anymore a BA is synonymous with knowledge. More likely, it is a euphemism for incurring $100,000 in debt. 

But until recently there were still a few institutions we considered sacrosanct, incorruptible, and invincible amid faith-based assertions, toxic woke fads, civil dissension, and hatred of the past. One certainly was the military. Another was “science,” or rather the scientists, researchers, and investigators who devoted themselves to disinterested empiricism. And, a third, was the sacred idea of the “law,” or the idea that Americans respect our statutes because they were crafted by ourselves and applicable to all, equally, and without exception.

All three have lost their luster. Americans do not trust them, at least not in the old way. Perhaps it was the 2020 perfect storm of plague, quarantine, recession, riot, a contentious election, and red/blue antipathies that ripped off the scab and exposed beneath something far different than what the public had assumed.

Protect or Proselytize?

Congressional Enablers of Genocidal Anti-Semitism The Unholy Alliance in action. Kenneth Levin

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/congressional-enablers-genocidal-anti-semitism-kenneth-levin/

Hamas is explicit in wanting to kill not only all Israelis but all Jews. The organization states as much in its charter and declares that goal a religious duty. Hamas has sought to translate the genocidal intent into action, including through innumerable missile attacks targeting Israel’s civilian population since the terror group gained control of Gaza in 2007. 

Yet Hamas has a coterie of apologists, supporters, cheerleaders and other enablers in Congress, including those who criticize Israel and are silent about Hamas’s actions and objective.

Hamas missile barrages doubly fit the internationally recognized definitions of war crimes, by virtue of their objective of killing civilians and by virtue of their use of Gazan civilian areas as launching sites for their attacks, thus endangering Palestinians in Gaza. Yet this too has not dissuaded Hamas’s Congressional enablers.

In initiating its latest missile war against Israel, Hamas justified doing so by claiming Israel was seeking to expel Palestinians from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of eastern Jerusalem and also that Israel was attacking the Al Aqsa Mosque and other Muslim sites on the Temple Mount.

The Sheikh Jarrah issue relates to some of the Jewish property that was seized and held as “enemy property” by Trans-Jordan after it conquered the eastern part of Jerusalem in 1948 and killed or expelled all Jews living there. Following the 1967 war, Israeli courts confirmed Jewish ownership of the property but granted Arabs residing there the status of protected tenants, able to remain and even pass the right of residence on to their heirs as long as they paid rent. But the tenants have refused to pay and it is in response to this that the courts have for some years ordered the vacating of the property. This is one of Hamas’  justifications for firing over 4,000 missiles at Israeli civilians, a justification parroted by members of Congress.

The other justification, that Israel was threatening Al Aqsa, has been a rallying cry for virtually a century by Palestinian leaders seeking to instigate murderous attacks on Jews. In 1929, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Al-Husseini, then the most prominent figure among Palestinian Arabs, used the claim to choreograph assaults on Jews that took some 130 lives. According to reports at the time, such as those by Dutch-Canadian journalist Pierre van Paassen, Husseini also produced and distributed bogus photographs of a supposedly demolished Jerusalem mosque in hopes of instigating the murder of Jews in the Mandate territory and beyond.

Biden Brings in Islamic Activists to Investigate U.S. Military for ‘Extremism’ Muslim Brotherhood supporters to help Biden destroy American soldiers. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/biden-brings-islamic-activists-investigate-us-daniel-greenfield/

A decade ago, Hina Shamsi was fighting on behalf of the Holy Land Foundation whose leaders had been convicted of providing material support to Hamas.

As the head of the ACLU’s National Security Project, Shamsi, a Pakistani citizen, had fought fiercely for the Islamic terrorists at Guantanamo Bay. “We all must pledge — not one person more in Guantanamo, not in our names,” she recently declared.

But now the Pakistani advocate for Islamic terrorists has a new job: going after our soldiers.

Shamsi (pictured above left) is one of the terror lawyers who appears on a list of partners for the Biden administration’s crackdown on “extremism” in the military. The only kind of extremism that Shamsi appears to be an expert on is the Islamic kind and her expertise has been in denying it.

Furthermore, at least as of 2017, Shamsi had described herself as a Pakistan citizen with permanent legal residency in America.

She’s not the only apparent Pakistani citizen tasked by Biden to go after our troops.

Take Faiza Patel, another Pakistani immigrant, who co-wrote an article arguing against designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist organization. The article claimed that “the Muslim Brotherhood is a religious organization, a political party, and a social service provider” and that it had “disavowed violence decades ago.”

That would come as news to Hamas and its other active Jihadist network members.

In another co-written article, Faiza Patel claimed that laws against Sharia were Islamophobic.

The Population Dud: Paul Ehrlich, Call Your Office

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/05/24/the-population-dud-paul-ehrlich-call-your-office/

There’s an old saying among economists, demographers, actuaries and sociologists: “Demographics is destiny.” If that’s true, and it certainly appears to be, America could be in very big trouble.

Back in 1970, leftist Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich warned in his sensationalist book, “The Population Bomb,” that overpopulation would lead to mass starvation and the depletion of our natural resources. As we all know, it didn’t happen.

Indeed, natural resources have never been more abundant, based on prices we pay, as the late economist Julian Simon predicted in making a very public1980 wager with Ehrlich about the future. Virtually every measurable form of pollution has fallen sharply in the intervening years. And billions of people were pulled out of poverty, all during a time of strong population growth.

In short, Ehrlich and his legions of doomsday followers couldn’t have been more wrong.

In fact, the real problem we face today is exactly the opposite: People in the U.S. are no longer having enough babies. That fertility decline shows in a dramatic slowdown in population growth. And no, don’t blame COVID-19 for that.