https://jamieglazov.com/2021/01/02/glazov-gang-president-trump-most-admired-man-in-2020/
This new Glazov Gang episode features Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow with the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He researches Islamic terrorism, left-wing radicalism, and the decline of the free world.
Daniel discusses President Trump Most Admired Man in 2020, unveiling the Bad news for Barack. And for the media.
Don’t miss it!
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/12/what-will-historians-make-of-our-annus-horribilis/
Amid the death, destruction, and dissension, history will show that America did not fall apart.
The year 2020 is now commonly dubbed the annus horribilis — “the horrible year.” The last ten months certainly have been awful.
But then so was 1968, when both Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated. The Tet Offensive escalated the Vietnam War and tore America apart. Race and anti-war riots rocked our major cities. Protesters fought with police at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. A new influenza virus, H3N2 (the “Hong Kong flu”), killed some 100,000 Americans.
But an even worse 2020 saw the COVID-19 outbreak reach global pandemic proportions by March. Chinese officials misled the world about the origins of the disease — without apologies.
Authorities here in the U.S. were sometimes contradictory in declaring quarantines either effective or superfluous. Masks were discouraged and then mandated. Researchers initially did not know how exactly the virus spread, only that it could be lethal to those over 65 or with comorbidities.
Initial forecasts of 1 million to 2 million Americans dying from the virus unduly panicked the population. But earlier assurances that the death toll wouldn’t reach 100,000 falsely reassured them.
https://spectator.us/year-epic-derangement-cornell/
I wonder if British universities will follow Cornell’s innovative approach to ensuring students are protected from wretched viruses? The American institution has received plaudits for its rigorous regime. Students who refuse to have the flu vaccine will be barred from the Cornell libraries and other campus buildings — or, at least, they will if they are white. ‘Students of color’ can decline to receive the vaccine. Why?
Cornell explains: ‘Students who identify as Black, Indigenous, or as a Person of Color (BIPOC) may have personal concerns about fulfilling the Compact requirements based on historical injustices and current events.’ The university authorities give a little more detail about what those concerns might be: ‘Recent acts of violence against Black people by law enforcement may contribute to feelings of distrust or powerlessness.’ So, white kids must be tested and vaccinated or face being kicked out, while black students are invited to register their preference for exemption, largely on the grounds that George Floyd was killed by a policemen in a state 1,000 miles away.
I offer up this little vignette as almost the perfect postscript to 2020, the Year of Epic Derangement, seeing as it brings together the cringing, self-flagellating lunacy of white liberals when faced with people who have a different skin color, and this virus of ours, under whose suffocating shroud so many other lunacies have been allowed to flourish. I think if I were a black student at Cornell who contracted flu from another black student who had filed for exemption, I would sue the college on the grounds of a failure of duty of care and, indeed, unadorned racism.
That’s the alternative hypothesis, I suppose — that the college is actually run by the Klan and they want as many black people to die as possible. It is difficult not to feel an enormous sympathy for the US’s black population, as this sort of stuff ratchets up the loathing among genuine white supremacists and meanwhile they are treated as needy infants by the liberal left. One day black Americans will shrug off the yoke of victimhood imposed upon them for reasons of political expediency by the Democrats. This is already beginning to happen, in fact, much as it is with Hispanic voters.
http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com
On August 4, 1944, the Grüne Polizi, along with the Gestapo, raided the “secret annex” of an abandoned office building complex in Amsterdam where Anne Frank and her family had been hiding for over two years. Less than three weeks earlier, on July 15, 1944, Anne wrote in her diary: “It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything, I still believe people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness. I hear the ever-approaching thunder, which will destroy us too. I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.” Ultimately, peace did come. The Nazis were defeated, and Europe has been free of wars for seventy-five years – the longest period in its history – thanks to the people of the United States. But peace came too late for Anne Frank. Less than a year later, she was dead at age fifteen, probably of Typhus, in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Nazi-held Germany.
One marvels at Anne Frank’s outlook, when bleakness enshrouded her environment and hoped dimmed for millions caught in the Nazi’s web and in a world gone dark. As we reflect today, in far better circumstances than were hers, is there not a lesson for us, in our pandemic, fear–filled world?
Optimism is a state of mind. Perhaps a dream over reality, or naïveté over cynicism? In retrospect, Anne Frank’s optimism appears innocent or guileless. Yet, she lives on through her Diary of a Young Girl, because in spite of everything she experienced she had the vision to see that sunlight would return and the world would move on. In her optimism, she was wise, for the two – optimism and wisdom – are linked. Optimists draw from the ancient classics, the birth of Christianity, the Enlightenment, the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, the Industrial Revolution and the recent victory of democracy over socialism. All have helped man’s condition to improve. Individual freedom, democracy and free-market capitalism have lifted multitudes from poverty and early death. Optimism, it should be remembered, does not mean nostalgia for an earlier time, but the expectation of enhanced prospects for a better future.
https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-12-31-happy-new-year-reality-den
On the last post a few days ago, several commenters raised the subject of the popular and long-running TV series Law & Order, particularly as to the race of the perpetrators of the crimes. The show purports to be based on actual incidents, and tries to give an impression of basis in reality. On the episodes of that show that I have watched — admittedly not a large sample — the perpetrator of the violent crime has seemed almost always to turn out to be white and, for that matter, rich. But are the show’s producers intentionally skewing the reality of the race of perpetrators of violent crimes? And if so, by a little, or by a lot?
I decided to look around to see if I could find some relevant statistics. It turns out that several researchers (if you want to call them that) have gone through collections of these shows to compare races of crime perpetrators to actual crime data. As suspected, the difference is staggering.
Here is a July 2015 piece with the title “Manufacturing white criminals: Depictions of criminality and violence on Law & Order,” from a journal called Cogent Social Sciences. The authors reviewed several seasons of L&O, and compared the races of the perpetrators of the crimes in the episodes in those seasons with actual New York City police data for the same years. Stripping out a lot of social science mumbo jumbo, here are the results for two of the years:
1992. In New York City, there were 51,490 arrests for violent felonies, of which 5,567 (10.8%) were white, 27,976 (54.3%) black, 16,096 (31.3%) Hispanic, and 1,851 (3.6%) Asian/other. On L&O season 3, covering the same year, the perps were 15 (65%) white, 2 (9%) black, and 6 (26%) Hispanic.
1995. In real NYC data, there were 49,549 violent felony arrests, of which 5,332 (10.8%) were white, 27,405 (55.3%) black, 15,169 (30.6%) Hispanic, and 1,643 (3.4%) Asian/other. On L&O season 6, the percentages were 26 (79%) white, 3 (9%) black, and 4 (12%) Hispanic.
Other years showed virtually identical patterns. To summarize, on L&O whites are over-represented (compared to real-world data) among perpetrators of violent crime by a factor of around 6 to 8, while blacks are under-represented by also a factor of around 6 to 8. This is not some small random mismatch, but rather a very intentional effort to paint a wildly distorted view of reality.
https://spectator.us/democratic-art-magical-thinking-biden-2020/
I should clear up one thing straight away. I do not believe that Joe Biden is guilty of magical thinking. Magical thinking, though specious, is a form of thinking. It is a truth universally acknowledged that Joe Biden is not guilty of thinking of any kind, ergo, Joe Biden is not guilty of magical thinking. Quod erat demonstrandum.
But Biden’s supporters? Well, that is another matter altogether. There you see a wild efflorescence of magical thinking.
What is magical thinking? It is the irrational belief, rampant among primitive peoples and those exposed to too many woke college seminars, that our thoughts influence or ‘constitute’ reality.
In the present case, we see Biden’s supporters telling us, and through telling us, telling themselves, that their candidate is ahead in the polls and is therefore likely to win the election in November.
They omit to say that their polls are fantasy polls: that they are of registered, not likely, voters, that they oversample Democrats or suburban women, that they fail to factor in the phenomenon of the shy Trump voter, who fully intends to vote for the President but is not happy about advertising it to random pollsters.
Among some architects of this fantasy, there is a strategy. The idea is that by claiming something is true one can influence opinion, at least at the margins, and up the odds of its becoming true. In itself, this is not irrational. If you hear something often enough, not only do you remember it, you also begin to believe it.
That, anyway, is the theory. How does it work in practice? Pretty patchily, I’d say, and for confirmation I offer the spectacle of the late evening of November 8, 2016. Remember all those shattered faces at the Javits Center, home of the Hillary victory party that never was? There they were, etched with grief, moist-eyed, mute or maundering, sown with an incredulity that had not yet degenerated into rage. You saw something similar among the talking heads at CNN, MSNBC and the other major dispensers of Democratic propaganda. This couldn’t be happening. Recall the sad/funny footage of Ben Rhodes that night. It was a grief observed. ‘I, I can’t even…I c-can’t…I, I mean I c-can’t…I c-can’t put it into words…I don’t know what the words are…’
https://amgreatness.com/2020/12/30/a-year-of-lies/
WHO agrees with whom it serves: the Chinese Communist Party. About this rule, it is impossible to deny—it is unreasonable to doubt—that the World Health Organization serves the world’s worst rulers. About this fact, we have proof. We have a year-old message from Taiwan about the virus now known as COVID-19. We have an inquiry that now reads like a record of inquest. We have a record that now reads like a requiem, where votaries live in darkness and votives flicker and die before a veil of ignorance.
Before us lies the history of 2020, of a missive of truth versus a big red book of lies. Before us lies the history of lives lost during a year-long march by Beijing to conquer Western culture without firing a shot; without developing a shot to save the life of a single Westerner, either. Before us lies more of the same unless we remove our masks, if only for a moment, so the world may hear us.
Whether what we say lasts on paper is less important than our belief in certain everlasting truths, that among these are the rightness of a people with an everlasting name and the glory of the righteous among the nations; that Jews and Christians refuse to rend their garments in mourning or mourn what they have no right to render unto anyone; that the Constitution exists to protect more than contracts; that the Declaration of Independence is a defense of existence itself; that our rights belong to a covenant with our Creator; that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is greater than the god that failed in Russia—and the god that will fail in China.
These rights transcend the will of tyrants and the tyranny of nonexistent majorities born on Election Day.
These rights endure because they are true, despite the forces of monopoly or the state’s monopoly on the use of force. Because these rights are true, they are the reason the world remembers an unknown rebel—Tank Man—rather than any member of a tank crew in Tiananmen Square.
Tank Man stands above the legends of the battlefield.
https://issuesinsights.com/2020/12/30/hester-prynne-arrives/
There are many examples of scarlet-letter-like labels, which are used as a cudgel to exercise fascistic control of expression.
The Nathaniel Hawthorne character, branded with a scarlet “A” for her adultery, is becoming a recognizable paradigm in today’s highly charged American society. The use of labelling, perhaps more aptly described as branding (as in cattle), has become a method of punishment for those who disagree with an ideology and effective blackmail to force others into compliance.
Labels – sexist, racist, homophobe, etc. – are now the currency of social justice enforcement and wokeness activists. They no longer limit branding to actual acts of discrimination. For them, it is not enough to assure that opportunities, whether jobs, school slots, social positions, or the like are available to anyone based on relevant capability, experience, and commitment, without regard to identity.
These activists not only demand special consideration based on identity (a topic for another day), but they are also exploiting our various biases as leverage to create guilt or fear of disagreement. That those biases may be based on experience or reasoned learning does not matter. The threat of “outing” a real or claimed bias and associating it with a defamatory label is used as a cudgel to exercise fascistic control of expression.
Today’s most potent weapon for activists is to threaten someone with the label “racist” even when there is no tangible act to support it. The supposed justification for the label may be based on a presumed bias, a distorted interpretation, exaggeration, or extrapolation of one’s statements, or even by imputing the meaning of silence. The latter evokes the case of Sir Thomas More, who was beheaded by Henry VIII solely for his silence’s implied disapproval of the king becoming head of the church to declare his own marriage annulment.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/12/resolutions-allow-each-us-do-our-part-make-2021-loyd-pettegrew/
All true conservatives hold hope-upon-hope that 2021 will be better in every way that 2020. The fact that the Republican Party snatched defeat from the jaws of electoral victory has left most of us disconsolate heading into the new year. Being an empiricist academic, now retired, I offer you ten resolutions that will allow each of us to do our part to make 2021 a better year in myriad ways.
Support any policy that restrains China from continuing its infiltration and influence in America while working against their efforts and supporters, especially politicians like Eric Swalwell, who would do China’s bidding for their own gain and to America’s detriment.
Fix our voting system state-by-state by removing all mail-in balloting and keeping only absentee balloting with the proper identification safeguards. This means overhauling the Federal Elections Commission that turned a blind eye to all the state efforts to undo our federal election security.
Require a proper I.D. for all voting. Everyone must already have a proper I.D. that allows them to cash their federal and state checks. No proper I.D., no vote! In Florida when handing in your absentee ballot to the supervisor of elections office, you must show proper I.D. and someone physically matches your signature to that on your I.D. Every other states must do this.
As National Review has presented, “At any given moment, there are millions of people who live and work in our country on temporary employment visas–Temporary Protected Status (TPS). They don’t get to vote no matter how the Biden-Harris administration feels about it… In the service of their renewed push for noncitizen voting, leftists characterize noncitizen voting as a ‘logically unassailable [As Steely Dan once said, “Pretzel Logic”], if not clearly mandatory, democratic practice. Their theory places restrictions on the franchise for aliens into the same category as previous discriminatory efforts to restrict minority groups’ access to voting.”
The Hill asks rhetorically, “Can illegal aliens actually vote in our elections? The simple answer is yes, of course they can, and they do.”
STOP all of this NOW—we must mandate that only certified citizens get to vote!
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/12/president-trump-most-admired-man-2020-lloyd-billingsley/
In 2020, 18 percent of Americans named President Donald Trump as the man they admire most, according to a year-end Gallup poll. President Trump thus ends the 12-year streak of Obama, now admired by 15 percent of Americans. Independents are evenly divided at 11 percent for Obama and Trump, a president of undeniable accomplishment.
As Don Feder recalls, Trump revived a moribund economy, made America energy independent, defended the southern border, cut taxes and regulations, appointed three Supreme Court justices, moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, promoted the right to life at every opportunity, and put America first in foreign policy and trade.
When President Trump took office, the Islamic State held 17,500 square miles of territory, but “by the end of Trump’s first year in office that was down to 1,930 square miles – a 90 percent decline from inauguration day,” notes Matt Palumbo of the Dan Bongino Show, and ISIS “lost their final strip of territory in March of 2019.” Trump is also “the first president since Jimmy Carter not to get the U.S. involved in any new wars,” and troop are coming home.
Another factor in Trump’s popularity is the peace deal he brokered between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and now Morocco. The Trump administration also helped normalize economic relations between Serbia and Kosovo. On the domestic front, the Trump’s administration’s Operation Warp Speed “catalyzed the creation of a vaccine in under a year.” For Palumbo, “how Obama has continued making the list remains a mystery,” but it shouldn’t be.
Top Stories @ Fox News