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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Wuhan Confidential Salvatore Babones

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2021/06/wuhan-confidential/

Did the United States unintentionally manufacture COVID-19 — in China? If so, that would be the ultimate outsourcing story. Whatever the truth of that mother of all conspiracy theories, it is not a theory that the United States outsources its global coronavirus data monitoring to China. It’s a documented fact.

To paraphrase Australia’s own P.L. Travers, the whole world takes its coronavirus data from Johns Hopkins, but Johns Hopkins takes its data from an obscure Chinese health advice website called DXY. The English acronym DXY is short for Dingxiang Yuan, or Clove Garden, referring to the supposed medicinal properties of the common kitchen herb.

Johns Hopkins describes DXY as “an online platform run by members of the Chinese medical community.” Good luck finding out just who those members are. The DXY website, standard corporate registries, and Wikipedia shed little light on the matter.

Of course, Johns Hopkins doesn’t exactly brag about its reliance on DXY. Go to their website, and you won’t find it mentioned anywhere. Click on the data sources link, and it’s just one among dozens of sources listed. You have to dig up a May 2020 article in The Lancet to find out the truth. The Hopkins team isn’t hiding anything. But neither are they exactly forthcoming.

There’s no reason to believe the Johns Hopkins data are incorrect, even if they do come from a shadowy Chinese website. And for most practical purposes, most people rely on their own countries’ official data. But the incident illustrates just how deeply the world depends on China for its research infrastructure, often in ways no one would ever have imagined. After all, who would have imagined that US government was funding bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology? American researchers wanted to publish on coronaviruses, and China had the bats.

When the coronavirus leapt into the headlines, it was quickly revealed that the US indirectly funded Wuhan coronavirus research via grants to a New York charity called EcoHealth Alliance. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, headed by none other then American coronavirus tsar Anthony Fauci, was the origin of some $600,000 that was ultimately subcontracted to the controversial Chinese lab.

Dr Fauci maintains that the American grants did not cover ‘gain of function’ research that could have produced a genetically engineered pathogen, but many people are understandably sceptical. There is general agreement that the Wuhan lab was engaged in gain-of-function research, despite bitter disagreement over whether or not this research could have been the origin of COVID-19.

But there’s nothing to see here. Like the Johns Hopkins DXY attribution, Fauci’s Wuhan grants are hiding in plain sight. Summary data are clearly published under project number 01AI110964 (series one through six) on his institute’s website. They don’t mention the Wuhan lab specifically, but the papers funded by the grants do. Everything is on the record.

Biden’s Follies Abroad His European trip adds to his long record of foreign policy failure. by George Neumayr

https://spectator.org/biden-europe-trip-foreign-policy/

As Joe Biden stumbled on the world stage, spouting utter nonsense, a remark of Robert Gates, the former defense secretary under Obama, came to mind: “I think he [Biden] has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”

Biden’s losing streak continues as president. If anything, his judgment is getting worse. To American troops stationed in the United Kingdom, he babbled about “global warming” as the greatest threat facing the United States. “This is not a joke,” he told the troops. But it is. Indeed, much of his trip seemed like a joke. His “rallying of democracies abroad” consisted of encouraging them to adopt his flaky ideas.

Biden went abroad not to vindicate America’s national interest but to promote an empty and deluded internationalism. Out of his talks with G7 leaders came a “build back better world” partnership, which will “demonstrate our shared values.” Those, of course, include spreading abortion and transgenderism under the guise of “gender equity and equality.”

It is hard to see how anything Biden discussed with these leaders could possibly strengthen democracies, let alone serve the interests of the United States. Capturing the frivolous character of the discussions, Boris Johnson, Britain’s prime minister, spoke of the importance of a “gender-neutral” post-pandemic world.

Biden should save his lectures on democracy for his own side, which now celebrates suppressions of free speech and the persecution of dissidents.

It is comic that global leaders who indulge in these nihilistic fads would set themselves up as great experts on what constitutes a civilized democracy. Far from safeguarding democracy, they are destroying its moral and religious underpinnings, abandoning the Judeo-Christian culture from which Europe and America came in favor of a relativistic one that holds nothing sacred save the cult of climate change, socialism, and sexual revolution.

AMIL IMANI: A LETTER TO THE HONORABLE TEXAS ATTORNEY GENERAL KEN PAXTON

Dear Attorney General Paxton,

I remember well when you first announced your plan to run for the Attorney General of Texas in 2014. All your friends and family were happy, excited and supportive. We all believed in your leadership, principles, brevity and conservative values.
During the primary race, you demonstrated the political courage needed to stand for Texas as our next Attorney General. Your near flawless and proven record of standing for conservative principles had earned you support among Texas conservative leaders and people across Texas. In fact, many of us came to several venues and watched your speech in a show of support. I recorded those joyous moments for the future.

The primary was tough, as was the runoff. But in the end, the best person for the job won. Texans sent a loud and clear message when they gave Team Paxton 63.4% of the vote. They wanted a proven conservative leader in the Office of Attorney General of Texas. A year on the campaign trail. Hard to believe. You spent a whole year since you launched that campaign. 365 days of crisscrossing the state, talking with Texans about liberty and state sovereignty, growing our support base and getting out the vote. 52 weeks of sharing your vision for Texas: Defended the Constitution, elevated the 10th Amendment, and told Washington that Texas would not just go along to get along in their never-ending quest for power and control over our lives. 


Team Paxton deserved an award for their hard work, i.e., reading and forwarding emails, engaging online, contributing generously, making phone calls and putting boots on the ground, etc.

Then your tireless campaign and forthright exposition of your vision assured the electorate the best-qualified public servant in assuming the helm of the office of Attorney General. During your swearing-in ceremony, you perceptibly likened Texas to that ‘shining city on the hill’ former President Reagan always said proudly of the United States. This shining city, the Lone Star State, is blessed with bringing forth generation after generation of dedicated and competent public servants to safeguard its luminous glow against the darksome overreach of the Federal Government. People deserve the government they vote for, it is said. And it is a testimony to the character and resolve of Texans to rally in support of their very best and elect them to office.

That was nearly eight years ago and now we must go through it yet again with new challengers who are not suited for this job. We should remember freedom is not free!

Life is precious. It is to be protected, nurtured, and celebrated. Mankind is moving, perhaps at a glacier pace, toward reconciliation and ever-expanding inclusiveness, without any group or ideology imposing itself on others. But as we all have witnessed, that is precisely what the federal government intends. It is vital that we reelect Attorney General Ken Paxton and stop the incursion of the Federal Government on our beloved state.

On November 3rd, 2020, over seventy-four million (more likely many more) Americans cast their votes to re-elect Trump for his second term.

At a time when the world was in torment and uncertainty, the American people—true to the values that have always been at the very core of America’s identity—strongly put their faith in President Trump and in the future.

No President in the history of the United States has achieved as much as he did in his four years in office, as President Trump. Meanwhile, no President in the history of America had been subjected to such incessant, vile and unjustified attacks. Why? Because he believes in American exceptionalism, not globalism.

Justice Alito Destroys SCOTUS Obamacare Sellout Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/06/justice-alito-destroys-scotus-obamacare-sellout-daniel-greenfield/

Supreme Court decisions aren’t usually an entertaining read. Dissents sometimes are and Alito’s dissents are notable, but this one is worth reading and rereading, not only for the biting rhetoric, but its reasoning.

“Today’s decision is the third installment in our epic Affordable Care Act trilogy, and it follows the same pattern as installments one and two. In all three episodes, with the Affordable Care Act facing a serious threat, the Court has pulled off an improbable rescue,” Alito begins.

He delves into the three increasingly absurd decisions which first found that, “the ‘penalty’ for failing to comply with the mandate was found to be a ‘tax'”, and then “the Court came to the rescue by finding that the Federal Government is a “State”, and now “in the trilogy’s third episode, the Court is presented
with the daunting problem of a ‘tax’ that does not tax.”

“Can the taxing power, which saved the day in the first episode, sustain such a curious creature? In 2017, Congress reduced the ‘tax’ imposed on Americans who failed to abide by the individual mandate to $0,” Justice Alito sarcastically asks.

Justice Alito notes that, “instead of defending the constitutionality of the individual mandate, the Court simply ducks the issue and holds that none of the Act’s challengers, including the 18 States that think the Act saddles them with huge financial costs, is entitled to sue” while Democrat states were able to get standing to illegally force the citizenship question off the census, not to mention that, “some years ago, Massachusetts was allowed to sue (and force the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to regulate greenhouse gases) on the theory that failure to do so would cause the ocean to rise and reduce the size of the Commonwealth.”

Biden’s Terror Strategy Defines Republicans as the New Terrorists If you disagree with the Democrats, you’re a “domestic terrorist.” Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/bidens-terror-strategy-defines-republicans-new-daniel-greenfield/

As the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks approaches, Joe Biden has made it clear that he doesn’t intend to fight Al Qaeda. Instead he’s going to fight other Americans.

The Biden administration’s newly released National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism mentions Al Qaeda only once in its 30 pages. Even though the FBI continues to break up Islamic terrorist plots against America, the document only defines Muslims as victims.

Just last month a Seattle Muslim convert was arrested. The convert had discussed driving a “semi-truck” through “the gay pride parade in downtown Seattle”. Even though the arrest came shortly before the anniversary of the ISIS massacre at the Pulse nightclub, both Biden and the media ignored the potential plot and the fact that the Pulse shooting was Islamic terrorism.

“I wish to see the kuffar (non-Muslims) as I kill them, I want to strike terror in them and make Allah pleased for doing so,” the Seattle convert had boasted.

That same month another Muslim convert pled guilty to plotting to attack an Ohio synagogue and murder a rabbi. A third Muslim convert in Brooklyn was also sentenced that month for promoting terrorist plots against Americans. American converts to Islam are a major source of recruits for domestic terrorist plots. Despite that, Biden’s strategy ignores their existence.

In a flashback to the Clinton era, the National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism claims that the only serious terrorist threats come from the militia movement and racists.

And the only racists whose existence the Biden administration will admit to are white racists.

Micah X. Johnson, a black supremacist who murdered 5 police officers in Dallas, is described as an “anti–authority violent extremist”. Racist and supremacist terrorism can only be practiced by members of the majority against “minority populations”. It can’t work the other way around.

Antifa is also rolled together into “anti-government”, a category that encompasses the militia movement, black supremacists, white anarchists, and everyone who isn’t a white racist.

Majority of Americans Hold ‘Unfavorable’ View of Critical Race Theory: Poll

https://www.theepochtimes.com/majority-of-americans-hold-unfavorable-view-of-critical-race-theory-poll_3863268.html

A new poll reveals 58 percent of Americans have an “unfavorable” view of Critical Race Theory (CRT), while 38 percent say they are in favor of the ideology.

The finding was published Wednesday as part of The Economist/YouGov poll (pdf), conducted between June 13 and 15 via internet among 1,500 adult citizens of the United States, with a plus or minus 3 percent margin of error. The sample was randomly drawn from the 2018 American Community Study, and was weighted based on gender, age, race, education, and voter registration status in 2016 and 2020 presidential elections.

Participants were asked if they had “a good idea of what CRT is.” The results show that 54 percent responded “yes,” 23 percent said “no,” and 23 percent said they are “not sure.”

The CRT, which is now the center of a national debate, is rooted in the Marxist theory of class struggle, but with a particular focus on race. Critical race theorists see racism in every aspect of the American public and private life, and seek to dismantle American institutions, such as the Constitution and legal system, which they deem to be inherently and irredeemably racist.

Those who said they knew about CRT were then asked whether they have a “favorable or unfavorable” opinion of it. Of these participants, 25 percent said they are “very favorable,” 13 percent “somewhat favorable,” 5 percent “somewhat unfavorable,” 53 percent “very unfavorable,” and 4 percent said they “don’t know.”

The results also highlight a division along party and ideological lines. An overwhelming 82 percent of those who voted for Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election said they are at least somewhat favorable of CRT, compared to five percent in Donald Trump voters. Similarly, 82 percent of participants identifying as liberals said they have a favorable opinion of CRT, joined by 42 percent of the moderates, and a marginal 7 percent of the conservatives.

Jan. 6 Suspects Held Without Bail More Un-American Than Capitol Incursion

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/06/18/jan-6-suspects-held-without-bail-more-un-american-than-capitol-incursion/

A month ago, the media reported that at least 53 Americans suspected of breaching the U.S. Capitol in January were still incarcerated. One web site more recently said “hundreds” are still behind bars. We know many have been denied bail, some apparently condemned to solitary confinement. Meanwhile, Antifa and Black Lives Matter rioters are breezily waved through the system if they’re arrested at all. 

Is this still America?

Or a tyranny where political dissenters are disappeared?

“Detaining Americans captured within the United States indefinitely without trial or even charge is a clear violation of our Constitution and our values, and it must not be permitted,” says Sen. Feinstein. “We’ve seen over and over again that our criminal justice system is well-equipped to interrogate and convict terrorists, and I support that process.”

The California Democrat is at odds with her party. From the president down, most Democrats are treating the Jan. 6 protests as a genuine threat to the country. Yet the toll from what the Democrats and their scribes in media are calling an insurrection: $1.5 million in damage, roughly 750 federal and local officers injured, and a single non-accidental death, that of military veteran and unarmed protester Ashli Babbitt, shot and killed by an unnamed person inside the Capitol, (whose untimely passing gave Russian President Vladimir Putin the opportunity to imply that the U.S. is an outlaw nation just by asking if the federal government assassinated her.)

Compare this to the wreckage left behind in the last year by Antifa and BLM rioters (including riots in the capital): $2 billion in damage, 27 killed, and 2,000 police officers injured.

A handful of Republican senators have noticed the differences in how the two groups, one clearly hard left and radicalized, the other made up of Republicans, conservatives, and probably some independents, have been treated by federal authorities. They’ve asked the hopelessly political Attorney General Garland Merrick to explain the inconsistencies. Why has the former benefited “from infrequent prosecutions and minimal, if any, penalties,” they want to know, while the latter group is being subjected to a “potential” administration of “unequal justice.” 

The latter group includes suspects “from an 18-year-old high school senior from Georgia to a 70-year-old Virginia farmer with no criminal record,” Julie Kelly reported in American Greatness, accused Americans who “have languished for months” in cells “before their trials even have begun.”

Biden Uses Juneteenth to Push His Federal Takeover of Elections and the Suburbs By Tyler O’Neil

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2021/06/17/biden-uses-juneteenth-to-push-his-federal-takeover-of-elections-and-the-suburbs-n1455386

On Thursday, President Joe Biden signed a law proclaiming Juneteenth, June 19, a federal holiday, commemorating the freeing of the very last slaves in the United States in Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865. Yet the president used Juneteenth as an excuse to push his radical agenda, including his federal takeover of elections and housing. He demonized Republican voter integrity laws and hailed a federal program that will pull zoning decisions away from city councils.

“The truth is, it’s simply not enough to just commemorate Juneteenth. After all, emancipation of enslaved black Americans didn’t mark the end of America’s work to deliver on the promise of equality,” Biden said. “To honor the true meaning of Juneteenth, we have to continue toward that promise. We’ve not gotten there yet.”

The president said his administration is “committed to doing just that. That’s why we’ve launched an aggressive effort to combat racial discrimination in housing.”

Combatting racial discrimination in housing is a noble goal, but Biden was referring to a revamped version of the Obama administration’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule (AFFH), a rule that started removing zoning from the purview of state and local governments. The Trump administration eliminated the rule, but the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) under Biden has already proposed two new rules. Part of Biden’s $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan explicitly pushes for apartment buildings in neighborhoods that are currently restricted to single-family homes.

During the 2020 campaign, Biden promised to go much further than AFFH. He embraced Sen. Cory Booker’s (D-N.J.) strategy for ending single-family zoning in the suburbs and creating “little downtowns” there. Biden justifies his assault on local zoning control by claiming that current zoning laws that favor single-family homes disproportionately hurt low-income people who can’t afford to move to the suburbs. Yet this policy would take away Americans’ abilities to shape their own neighborhoods.

Biden’s pledge to increase black homeownership may be noble, but Donald Trump was right to warn that Biden’s policies represent a threat to the suburbs.

In terms of pushing racial equity on Juneteenth, the president also touted his administration’s goal to give black entrepreneurs more access to capital (a noble goal but a policy that singles people out based on the color of their skin) and his desire to “give each and every child, three and four years of age, not daycare but school.” Yet without vital measures to improve schools like school choice, decreasing the age of first entry may not make much of a positive difference.

Biden also called for more funding for historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), pushing racial equity in the health care system, and ensuring clean air and water for all communities.

Yet Biden saved his most controversial talking point for last.

He said America’s promise of racial equality is “not going to be fulfilled so long as the sacred right to vote remains under attack.”

YOU ARE NOT A RACIST TO CRITICIZE CRITICAL RACE THEORY. Dismiss those pretending that if you don’t like what’s happening in our schools, you’re a jingoistic moron who doesn’t want kids to learn about racism. John McWhorter

https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/you-are-not-a-racist-to-criticize?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&utm_source=copy

Since a year ago, CRT-infused members of The Elect, traditionally overrepresented in the world of schools of education, have sought to take the opportunity furnished by our “racial reckoning” to turn American schools into academies of “antiracist” indoctrination.

And the backlash is on.  One by one parents, teachers and even students are speaking out against the idea that the soul of education must be to battle the power that whites have over others.

Yes, that’s the watchcry. It’s why The Elect can make so little sense to the rest of us: they actually believe that the heart of all intellectual, moral, and artistic endeavor must be battling power differentials. They get this from Critical Race Theory. And what most alarms The Elect is that state legislatures are proposing to ban the teaching of Critical Race Theory in schools, Florida being the latest example.

One response to this backlash is that anyone who questions the takeover of schools by CRT is against schoolkids learning about racism, and wants schoolkids to have the adulatory view of the American story typical of the 1950s and before. A sarcastic tweet by a certain famous black figure employed by the New York Times who won a Pulitzer recently encapsulates this kind of view:

“Our children must learn that we are the greatest and freest country in the history of the world, and we will demonstrate this by barring educators from teaching things we do not like, and in the name of liberty, mandating government control of what ideas can be exchanged.”

So, whenever a body of lawmakers (or anyone else) is against their kids being taught not how, but what, to think, and call this “Critical Race Theory” just as many of its teachers do, that body of lawmakers is a nest of racists.

Let’s break this down.

* * *

How Nations Slip from Greatness to Obscurity Is America on a path of permanent decline? By Don Feder

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/how-nations-slip-greatness-obscur

Men, like nations, think they’re eternal. What man in his 20s or 30s doesn’t believe, at least subconsciously, that he’ll live forever?

In the springtime of youth, an endless summer beckons. As you pass 70, it’s harder to hide from reality.

Nations too have seasons. Imagine a Roman of the 2nd. century contemplating an empire that stretched from Britain to the Near East, thinking: This will endure forever.

Forever was about 500 years, give or take.

France was the thing in the 17th and 18th centuries. Now the land of Charles Martel is on its way to becoming part of the Muslim ummah.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the sun never set on the British empire. Now Albion exists in a perpetual twilight. Its 95-year-old sovereign is a fitting symbol for a nation in terminal decline.

In the 1980s, Japan seemed poised to buy the world. Business schools taught Japanese management techniques. Today, its birth rate is so low and its population is aging so rapidly, that an industry has sprung up to remove the remains of elderly Japanese who die alone.

I was born in 1946, almost at the midpoint of the 20th century – the American century.  America’s prestige and influence were never greater. Thanks to the Greatest Generation, we won a World War fought over most of Europe, Asia and the Pacific. We reduced Germany to rubble and put the rising sun to bed.

It set the stage for almost half a century of unprecedented prosperity. We stopped the spread of communism in Europe and Asia, and fought international terrorism. We rebuilt our enemies and lavished foreign aid on much of the world.

We built skyscrapers and rockets to the moon. We conquered Polio and COVID.  We explored the mysteries of the Universe and the wonders of DNA, the blueprint  of life.

But where is the glory that once was Rome?