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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

7 Reasons Why Liberals Are Incapable of Understanding The World John Hawkins

https://townhall.com/columnists/johnhawkins/2011/08/23/7-reasons-why-liberals-are-incapable-of-understanding-the-world-n1082284

Even liberals who’ve accomplished a lot in their lives and have high IQs often say things on a regular basis that are stunningly, profoundly stupid and at odds with the way the world works. Modern liberalism has become so bereft of common sense and instinctively suicidal that America can only survive over the long haul by thwarting the liberal agenda. In fact, liberalism has become such a toxic and poisonous philosophy that most liberals wouldn’t behave differently if their goal were to deliberately destroy the country. So, how does liberalism cause well-meaning, intelligent liberals to get this way? Well, it starts with…

1) Liberalism creates a feedback loop. It is usually impossible for a non-liberal to change a liberal’s mind about political issues because liberalism works like so: only liberals are credible sources of information. How do you know someone’s liberal? He espouses liberal doctrine. So, no matter how plausible what you say may be, it will be ignored if you’re not a liberal and if you are a liberal, of course, you probably agree with liberal views. This sort of close-mindedness makes liberals nearly impervious to any information that might undermine their beliefs.

Fauci’s COVID-19 Folly By David Archibald

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/10/faucis_covid19_folly.html

According to Australian researchers, the Wuhan COVID-19 virus likely is artificial, created in the lab — in China. According to Chinese virologist Li Meng Yan, it was intentionally created and spread by the Chinese government.  

Let’s start from the beginning, the physical construction of the place where the virus was created, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, was funded by the French government in 2004 in an attempt to ingratiate themselves with the Chinese communist dictatorship. Upon completion, the Chinese let only one French national into the building. What went on in that building was solely the work of the Chinese state.

As that was going on, events that led to the making of the virus occurred in the West. Those started decades before with the founding of The Wildlife Trust in 1971 by English wildlife lover Gerald Durrell.

Its headquarters eventually moved to New York. Then in 1997, the Wildlife Trust spun out The Consortium for Conservation Medicine. This organization has been described as a “unique collaborative institution that strives to understand the link between anthropogenic environmental change, the health of all species, and the conservation of biodiversity.” In other words, it is a spiritual home for health academics worried about global warming.

The Wildlife Trust and the Consortium for Conservation Medicine merged in 2010 to form the EcoHealth Alliance. One benefit from the name change was to enable government health bodies to give it money.

Dr. Anthony Fauci and his offsider at the National Institutes of Health, David Morens, have been publishing papers like this one since 2004.  In that paper they list ‘Intent to harm’ as a contributing factor in the emergence of infectious diseases. 

Uniquely Bad—But Not Uniquely American For much of history, slavery was as fundamental to society as agriculture. Kay S. Hymowitz

https://www.city-journal.org/slavery-failure-of-1619-project

The 1619 Project has not been having an easy time of it. Ever since the Pulitzer Prize-winning essays first appeared in the New York Times in August 2019, historians have been chipping away at some of the central claims. No, they’ve shown, protecting slavery was not the primary motive of the American revolutionaries when they broke away from Britain in 1776. No, the arrival of 20 African slaves at Jamestown was not when the country “began.”

The project’s creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, was at first boldly dismissive of the attacks, but she has more recently been going through contortions to insist that she didn’t say what she demonstrably said; she has even erased her Twitter feed. The New York Times has likewise done some stealth editing of its own, altering some of the more controversial assertions in the online edition. A few weeks ago, President Trump himself went on the attack.

I’d like to propose adding another reason to close the book on the 1619 Project: it is based on a twisted notion of American exceptionalism. America’s “brutal system of slavery [was] unlike anything that had existed in the world before,” Hannah-Jones writes. “Enslaved people were not recognized as human beings but as property that could be mortgaged, traded, bought, sold, used as collateral, given as a gift and disposed of violently.” Brutal? Yes. Unlike anything that existed in the world before? Seeing how far this is from the truth is the only way to make sense of the contradictions and perplexing compromises of the American Founding that trouble us so much today.

In fact, slavery was a mundane fact in most human civilizations, neither questioned nor much thought about. It appeared in the earliest settlements of Sumer, Babylonia, China, and Egypt, and it continues in many parts of the world to this day. Far from grappling with whether slavery should be legal, the code of Hammurabi, civilization’s first known legal text, simply defines appropriate punishments for recalcitrant slaves (cutting off their ears) or those who help them escape (death). Both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament take for granted the existence of slaves. Slavery was so firmly established in ancient Greece that Plato could not imagine his ideal Republic without them, though he rejected the idea of individual ownership in favor of state control. As for Rome, well, Spartacus, anyone?

How to Put a Stop to Twitter’s Game-Playing on Censorship Congress does not need to repeal Section 230 to do it. By Andrew C. McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/washington-can-put-a-stop-to-twitters-game-playing-on-censorship/

T he much-misunderstood Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act is in the spotlight again. Twitter and, to a lesser extent, Facebook, suppressed reporting that Joe Biden abetted his son Hunter’s cashing in on the then-vice president’s political influence. Since there are plenty of alternatives to these social-media platforms, their actions merely drew more attention to the story while calling into question their qualification for Section 230 immunity from lawsuits.

The Biden news was broken by the New York Post, the nation’s fourth-largest daily by circulation, whose Twitter account (with 1.8 million followers) remains suspended as of this writing — irrationally so, given that the social-media site is no longer blocking other users from sharing links to the reports that prompted the Post’s account to be locked. Twitter also locked the account of Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, as well as that of the Trump reelection campaign.

Twitter’s bogus rationale for the suspensions was the claim that the Biden information had been “hacked” from a laptop computer that appears to have belonged to Hunter. In fact, there is no evidence that the emails, photographs, videos, and other materials on the laptop were hacked or otherwise misappropriated. Hunter suffers from drug addiction and is notoriously erratic. The laptop was brought to a repair shop in Delaware and never reclaimed. The shop owner, in addition to being given consensual access to the data, reported it to the FBI. Plus, Fox News reports that the work order prepared when the computer was dropped off appears to bear Hunter Biden’s signature.

MORE HEADLINES FROM KSM

The left’s favorite way to rebut foes: Silence them
https://nypost.com/2020/10/19/the-lefts-favorite-way-to-rebut-foes-silence-them/ 

Twitter Won’t Unlock NY Post Account Until Hunter Biden Posts Deleted

https://www.theepochtimes.com/twitter-wont-unlock-new-york-post-account-unless-hunter-biden-posts-deleted_3543264.html?8-3

 Are the FakeNews Polls a Setup for Post-Election Chaos?

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/10/are_the_fakenews_polls_a_setup_for_postelection_chaos.html#ixzz6bJ8kMNxb

Mark Levin: Joe Biden’s ‘Communist Manifesto’ Will Destroy Every Aspect of Our Culture and Society 
https://www.breitbart.com/radio/2020/10/16/mark-levin-joe-bidens-communist-manifesto-will-destroy-every-aspect-of-our-culture-and-society/

Bush Staffers Go All In for Joe Biden with Campaign Ads Attacking Trump 
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/10/18/bush-staffers-go-all-in-joe-biden-campaign-ads-attacking-trump/

Putin Says He Wants to Work With Biden, Claims ‘Shared Values’ Between Democrats and Communism 

https://www.newsweek.com/vladimir-putin-says-wants-work-joe-biden-claims-shared-values-between-democrats-communism-1537501?

How Big Tech Masks COVID-19 Realities Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2020/10/19/how-big-tech-masks-covid-19-realities/

Dr. Scott Atlas warns the country is in dangerous territory if people who show data contrary to conventional wisdom are silenced.

Since the early stages of the coronavirus crisis, any viewpoint or research running afoul of the accepted doctrine conceived by the credentialed class has been censored.

Social media platforms, internet search engines, and other monopolistic guardians of information decided at the very beginning that they would determine which content would be available for public consumption; “false claims or conspiracy theories that have been flagged by leading global health organizations and local health authorities that could cause harm to people who believe them” would be subjected to Facebook’s reject button, according to a January 2020 statement released by the company.

Twitter announced it would prompt users to follow “credible, authoritative information” on the virus. None other than the World Health Organization, the agency that has flubbed the pandemic every step of the way, partnered with Twitter to judge what is credible and what is not.

A YouTube video produced in March by Dr. John Ioannidis, an early critic of the government’s handling of the virus, was removed for violating the company’s terms of service. Another widely-viewed video featuring two California emergency room doctors describing their experiences with people suffering the consequences of lockdowns and the emerging data about the virus’ lethality met the same fate in April. Ditto for a July video that showed several doctors condemning the detrimental effects of the lockdowns and promoting the reopening of schools and businesses nationwide.

Posts about hydroxychloroquine, including a tweet by the president’s son, are also banned. The president’s tweet earlier this month claiming the flu is as deadly as COVID-19 was flagged by Twitter for “spreading misleading and potentially harmful information” about the virus.

American Synagogue Under Siege Here’s how to fight back. Charles Jacobs and Ben Poser

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/american-synagogue-under-siege-heres-how-fight-frontpagemagcom/

In an outrage to the Jewish community, it has apparently become acceptable for people to picket synagogue services, and accuse the Jews inside of murder, imperialism, and the very acts of genocide visited upon them by the Nazis.

The members of Beth Israel Congregation in Ann Arbor, Michigan, endure the vile taunts of protesters holding signs reading “Resist Jewish Power,” “Jewish Power Corrupts,” “No More Holocaust Movies,” “Boycott Israel,” “Stop U.S. Aid to Israel,” and “End the Palestinian Holocaust” every Shabbat. What’s more, this unconscionable behavior has not just been the weekly norm recently, but every single Shabbat (Saturday) since 2003.

“They portray themselves as kindly types who bring their detractors tea and wish them a nice day, while they espouse Holocaust denial and anti-Semitic global conspiracy theories… And their hate fails to alarm some progressive leaders who would be rightfully shouting from the rooftops if this were a mosque,” Beth Israel’s rabbi, Nadav Caine, told Ryan Stanton of Michigan Live.

The local protest group in question, Jewish Witnesses for Peace and Friends, is led by Henry Hirskovitz: “We’re not there because they’re Jews. We’re there because they’re Jewish Zionists,” he told the same reporter. Hirskovitz, apparently a former congregant who fell out with the temple due to political differences, leads an organization whose website proudly features a picture of a woman holding a sign saying, “Zionists Picnic While Palestinians Starve. The World is Watching.” This is Jewish anti-Semitism at its purest.

Will we ever know the truth about Russiagate? Every revelation, though it sheds some local light, actually makes the whole picture murkier Roger Kimball

https://spectator.us/ever-know-russiagate-truth-biden/

Writing in mid-October, anno domini 2020, it is sobering to speculate that when the results of a certain upcoming political contest are finally decided, an item that has captivated the public’s attention for nearly four years might be about to evaporate without trace. I refer, of course, to that great long-running entertainment, the Trump-Russia Collusion Delusion.

As I write, the latest morceaux are the revelations from John Ratcliffe, the newly installed Director of National Intelligence, to the effect that Russian intelligence believed that Hillary Clinton had approved a plan ‘to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services’ during the 2016 presidential campaign. Why? Typical campaign dirty tricks, in part. But then there was also the bulletin, sent from the CIA to Peter Strzok, disgraced lovebird and then head of the FBI’s counterespionage section, minuting ‘Hillary Clinton’s approval of a plan concerning US presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering US elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private mail server’.

The watercress around those revelations were some heavily redacted handwritten notes by John Brennan regarding a meeting with President Obama, former FBI head James Comey and national security adviser Susan Rice about Hillary’s Russian dressing.

What was the recipe for that dressing? Take one washed-up former MI6 spy, Christopher Steele. Pay him through a complicated cutout to dig up, or at least make up, dirt about Donald Trump and ‘the Russians’. Include allegations of financial shenanigans, but for hot sauce include micturating Russian prostitutes hopping up and down on a hotel bed in Moscow in front of Donald Trump. Get your main ingredients from a suspected Russian spy named Igor Danchenko, formerly of the Brookings Institution. Bake until golden brown and then leak this steaming pile of opposition research, covertly bought and paid for by Hillary’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee as intelligence ‘findings’ rather than what they were: unbridled, malicious fabrication used as ‘evidence’ for several FISA warrants against Carter Page, a US citizen whose surveillance provided a back door into the Trump campaign.

Hunter Biden’s laptop: A Russian trick, a hack-job — or just what it looks like? By Andrew McCarthy

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/521637-hunter-bidens-laptop-a-russian-trick

If the stakes were not high, it would be a laugh-riot to listen to people who relied on the Steele dossier in an Intelligence Community assessment, and in four sworn FISA warrant applications, going on now about the Biden laptop being a “Russian disinformation” hoax.

But let’s be serious about authenticity for a second.

In a court of law, even in a criminal case where a person’s liberty is at stake, there is a presumption in favor of admitting relevant evidence as long as it appears to be what the proponent represents it to be.

That is, the evidence is put before the jury. Lingering questions about its provenance go to the weight of the evidence — meaning, how much, if any, importance we should ascribe to it. They do not result in the suppression of the evidence.

The most salient consideration in analyzing the authenticity of an item is the item itself. 

I do not mean to dismiss such circumstances as the biases of the source of the evidence, the chain of custody, the opportunities there have been to tamper with it, and any indication that it has been tampered with in some way. To be sure, all of these indicators can be significant. In some situations, they can be so significant that the proffered item should be given no probative weight.

The Despair of Feminism By David Solway

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2020/10/17/the-despair-of-feminism-n1066231

“The relationship between men and women,” writes Megan Fox in her recent book Believe Evidence: The Death of Due Process from Salome to #MeToo, “is a mysterious and beautiful thing. When each is acting within their boundaries, there is no end to the joy that comes from male and female love, familial or romantic.” The weakening of men and the empowerment of women, as “women claw their way to ever increasing power and fix men (especially young, white men), in their crosshairs,” destroy the sexual, romantic and institutional bond between the sexes. Similarly, the common preachment that men should jettison their manhood and become more like women is to distort the gender relationship and introduce a schism into the culture that can lead only to turmoil and unhappiness for both men and women. Male feminist Michael Kimmel ludicrously claims in Angry White Men that “abandoning that sense of masculine entitlement actually enables us to live happier lives.” On the contrary, the upshot is social misery.

“Radical androgyny,” writes Stephen Baskerville in The New Politics of Sex, is the consequence of the effort to control and punish men for their natural sexuality and to deny that “relationships between men and women should be regulated by social conventions that recognize the differences between men and women.” When nature is violated, domestic anarchy becomes the rule, not the exception, the feature, not the bug. This may partly explain why marriage is in decline and the MGTOW movement (Men Going Their Own Way) is gathering momentum.

Feminists have sold their birthright for a messy cottage, and will come increasingly to suffer for it in the coin of regret, loneliness and despair. In The Sickness unto Death, Danish philosopher and master ironist Soren Kierkegaard discussed the source of feminine despair, which he sensed gradually taking hold of the feminine psyche. Women, he felt, were being encouraged to file, so to speak, for self-divorce, to violate their own essential nature, which he understood as the capacity for devotion. “In devotion she loses herself, and only then is happy, only then is she herself…Take this devotion away, then her self is also gone.” “Devotedness” is her essential nature. Kierkegaard, a devout Christian, clearly had Matthew 16:26 in mind: For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul? The word “man,” of course, is intended generically.