RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/24/the-nature-of-chinese-contempt-for-us/

Last week in Anchorage, Alaska, Chinese diplomats dressed down Biden Administration Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan. Both seem stunned by the Chinese broadsides. 

Apparently, as elite Americans readily confess to inherent white supremacy and racism—highlighting the complaints of BLM and Antifa—the Chinese are happy to agree that such admittedly toxic Americans should not dare to criticize China’s racist policies. 

Not since newly elected President John Kennedy was humiliated at the Cold War Vienna summit in June 1961 by USSR strongman Nikita Khrushchev have American diplomats been so roughly manhandled by a Communist government.  

China’s defiant provocations are not just verbal. Nor are they aimed only at our high officials. 

New York University students, at an overseas satellite Shanghai China campus, were manhandled and jailed by Chinese authorities. Not long ago U.S. diplomats in China were subject to Chinese COVID-19 anal swab testing—supposedly “in error.”  

These examples of continued humiliation and harassment could be multiplied. Yet they are simply the current public face of China’s insidious and systematic theft of U.S. patents and copyrights. It brazenly violates trade agreements, as well as manipulates its currency, dumps products below cost on world markets, cyber-assaults, expropriates Western technology, and stonewalls accurate information on the origins of COVID-19. 

If China gives out money, it logically believes it owns the recipient. New York University in the last five years has received some $47 million in Communist Chinese-affiliated gifts. So Beijing apparently believes that it now “owns” NYU, and can send any message it likes to its clients. 

Stanford University recently was cited by the U.S. Department of Education for failing to report over $64 million from Chinese sources since 2010. No surprise that China, in a demonstration of their contempt, recently sent a visiting researcher to Stanford, who turned out to be connected with the Chinese military. 

Hollywood claims that it is woke. But recently it was disclosed that some directors had selected their actors on the basis of skin color. They were obeying China’s requirements for American films to enter the lucrative Chinese film market, slated to become the world’s largest in 2021. 

Dr. Rachel Levine, President Biden’s pick to be assistant secretary for health, made history on Wednesday by becoming the first openly transgender person confirmed by the Senate to a federal position, and immediately vowed to “promote policies that advance the health and well-being of all Americans” and to fight for transgender youth.

The Senate vote, 52 to 48, followed a contentious confirmation hearing that became a flash point in the battle over transgender rights. Dr. Levine, a pediatrician and former health secretary in Pennsylvania, will assume her post at the federal Health and Human Services Department at a challenging time, just as Mr. Biden is trying to lead the country out of the coronavirus crisis.

In a statement shared with The New York Times, Dr. Levine said she was “humbled” by the Senate’s approval and thanked the L.G.B.T.Q. community for its support.

“As Vice President Harris has said, I recognize that I may be the first, but am heartened by the knowledge that I will not be the last,” she wrote. “When I assume this position, I will stand on the shoulders of those who came before — people we know throughout history and those whose names we will never know because they were forced to live and work in the shadows.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/03/25/d-c-drive-for-statehood-reminds-us-of-whats-gone-wrong-with-our-country/

The campaign for Washington, D.C., statehood has come up yet again. If nothing else, this shows how far out of control the federal government has become.

The drive to make D.C. America’s 51st state isn’t new. But, with a Democratic president and a Democratic majority in Congress, the ruling class is in a mood to consolidate its power, and with the Democrat-media industrial complex demanding that everything must be seen through the lens of race, it’s now an overheated topic.

For decades the pro-statehood forces have complained about being subject to taxation without representation. (We’ll have more to say on this later.) Today’s argument is centered on race. It is “a historically black city,” according to the district government, with 47% of residents black, 41% white.

“This is not about politics. It’s about a fundamental voting and civil rights issue,” says House Oversight Chair Carolyn Maloney, who is of course a Democrat, the party that’s pushing hard for H.R. 51, which “provides for admission into the United States of the state of Washington, Douglass Commonwealth.” (We’ll have more about the party’s power grab later, too.)

To hear David Litt, a speechwriter for Barack Obama, tell it, “the D.C. statehood fight is part of an ugly effort to disenfranchise black and brown people.” Opposing views, he says, “echo the last gasps of the Jim Crow era.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/herd-immunity-is-near-despite-faucis-denial-11616624554?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Anthony Fauci has been saying that the country needs to vaccinate 70% to 85% of the population to reach herd immunity from Covid-19. But he inexplicably ignores natural immunity. If you account for previous infections, herd immunity is likely close at hand.

Data from the California Department of Public Health, released earlier this month, show that while only 8.7% of the state’s population has ever tested positive for Covid-19, at least 38.5% of the population has antibodies against the novel coronavirus. Those numbers are from Jan. 30 to Feb. 20. Adjusting for cases between now and then, and accounting for the amount of time it takes for the body to make antibodies, we can estimate that as many as half of Californians have natural immunity today.

The same report found that 45% of people in Los Angeles had Covid-19 antibodies. Again, the number can only be higher today. Between “half and two-thirds of our population has antibodies in it now,” due to Covid exposure or vaccination, Mayor Eric Garcetti said Sunday on “Face the Nation.” That would explain why cases in Los Angeles are down 95% in the past 11 weeks and the positivity rate among those tested is now 1.7%.

Undercounting or removing the many Americans with natural immunity from any tally of herd immunity is a scientific error of omission. When people wonder why President Biden talks about limiting Fourth of July gatherings, it’s because his most prominent medical adviser has dismissed the contribution of natural immunity, artificially extending the timeline.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-3-23-update-on-bill-de-blasio-re

“It is hard to come away with any conclusion other than that de Blasio’s endless blather about income inequality was just a sick joke. He had no idea how income inequality had originated, and no idea how to diminish it. What he has done in 7+ years in office is increase the City budget from about $73 billion to $94 billion annually, in a time of little to no inflation. Another $20+ billion per year to the bureaucracy to accomplish absolutely nothing. It’s the very definition of progressivism.”

Last month, shortly after New York Mayor Bill de Blasio reached his seventh anniversary in office, I had a post giving him a “report card” on his achievements, or lack thereof. As you may know, de Blasio is term-limited at eight years, so he is now in his last year. In fact the contest to replace him is well under way, with the primary (that will likely determine the result) scheduled for June 22.

My February post on de Blasio covered subjects like taxes, spending, crime, schools, and rent regulation. On all of those, his performance has been abysmal, if not worse. But recently it occurred to me that the post had omitted to cover another subject that de Blasio himself has consistently emphasized as being his signature issue. That subject is income inequality.

How has de Blasio done on this issue? The answer is, disastrously. Despite — or maybe because of — de Blasio’s policy initiatives and greatly increased public spending, measured income inequality has actually increased. That result will of course not come as any surprise to Manhattan Contrarian readers. Things like income inequality are just not subject to cure, or even amelioration, by government tax-and-spend programs. So de Blasio’s failure was inevitable. But that has not stopped him and his supporters, let alone his most likely successors, from continuing to believe that the next round of such programs and spending is finally going to work.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-us-intelligence-community-flouting?token=eyJ1c2

A letter from House Intelligence Committee members demands answers from the DNI about illegal breaches of the wall guarding against CIA and NSA domestic activity.

A report declassified last Wednesday by the Department of Homeland Security is raising serious concerns about the possibly illegal involvement by the intelligence community in U.S. domestic political affairs.

Entitled “Domestic Violent Extremism Poses Heightened Threat in 2021,” the March 1 Report from the Director of National Intelligence states that it was prepared “in consultation with the Attorney General and Secretary of Homeland Security—and was drafted by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and Department of Homeland Security (DHS), with contributions from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).”

Its primary point is this: “The IC [intelligence community] assesses that domestic violent extremists (DVEs) who are motivated by a range of ideologies and galvanized by recent political and societal events in the United States pose an elevated threat to the Homeland in 2021.” While asserting that “the most lethal” of these threats is posed by “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists (RMVEs) and militia violent extremists (MVEs),” it makes clear that its target encompasses a wide range of groups from the left (Antifa, animal rights and environmental activists, pro-choice extremists and anarchists: “those who oppose capitalism and all forms of globalization”) to the right (sovereign citizen movements, anti-abortion activists and those deemed motivated by racial or ethnic hatreds).

The U.S. security state apparatus regards the agenda of “domestic violent extremists” as “derived from anti-government or anti-authority sentiment,” which includes “opposition to perceived economic, racial or social hierarchies.” In sum, to the Department of Homeland Security, an “extremist” is anyone who opposes the current prevailing ruling class and system for distributing power. Anyone they believe is prepared to use violence, intimidation or coercion in pursuit of these causes then becomes a “domestic violent extremist,” subject to a vast array of surveillance, monitoring and other forms of legal restrictions:

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/the-biden-presidency-already-transformative-for-the-worse

President Biden is using his entire administration to impose “woke” precepts about race, class, and gender on a public that recognizes them as mostly pseudo-intellectual rubbish masking intolerance.

He’s made it clear that implementation will not be left to a single department or czar. It will, rather, be the core goal of his whole presidency, and every agency will be dragooned into service to achieve it.

No matter where you look, officials who once focused on housing, immigration, energy, or other discrete and dust-dry policies, have been transformed into woke legionaries, framing their responsibilities to fit a faddish crusade against fictional bigotries.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and congressional Democrats naturally support this. The House of Representatives passed the Equality Act on Feb. 25, and if the Senate follows suit, the law will add “gender identity” and “sexual orientation” as protected categories covered by the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

This would demolish the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act. So, for example, schools that teach Christian doctrine that marriage is a sacramental union of one man and one woman could be obliged to hire staff who are in gay marriages and thus live lives that repudiate and undermine their employer’s mission. Institutions will lose a shield given to them 32 years ago to protect people’s right to transmit and live by reasonable principles that have been handed down through millennia from generation to generation.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17206/new-york-times-v-sullivan

The result of this decision has been open season on public figures. The media, and their lawyers, are aware of how difficult it is to prove malice. So in order to sell their product, many are prepared to print obvious falsehoods, exaggerations and outright lies about political opponents and others.

People at the top of CNN made a deliberate decision to doctor the recording so as to eliminate my carefully chosen words “unlawful” and “illegal.” Then they had their paid commentators go on prime-time TV and falsely proclaim that I had said that a president could not be removed even if he did things that were unlawful or illegal. In other words, they doctored the recording to make me say the exact opposite of what I said.

Despite having been the target of deliberate media defamation, I am not in favor of a total overruling of New York Times v. Sullivan. In order for the First Amendment to thrive, the media must have the right to make honest mistakes: that is the right to be wrong.

“All the news that’s fit to print” has become “only the news that fits our biased narrative.”

I would propose a sliding scale, whereby the more serious and hurtful the defamation, the greater the media’s obligation to engage in due diligence to determine whether or not it is truthful or false. If they fail to exercise due diligence, they can be held liable for defamation.

In a striking dissenting opinion, the highly respected Court of Appeals judge, Laurence Silberman, urged the Supreme Court to reconsider and perhaps overrule the leading case of New York Times v. Sullivan.