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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Do Polish Lives Matter? History is a lot more complicated than the racism industry would have it. Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/do-polish-lives-matter-bruce-bawer/

The other day, during a discussion of the current race-war madness, a guest on Anthony Cumia’s podcast asserted with confidence that the answer to the whole problem is simple: young Americans need to be told more about the injustices historically suffered by blacks in the United States. I wanted to reach into the screen and smack him. Yes, blacks had an extremely lousy deal in America for a very long time. But young Americans know all about that. Indeed, if they emerge from their years and years of schooling with no other historical knowledge whatsoever, the one thing you can always be sure they know is that white Americans held black Africans as slaves, that chattel slavery was a cruel and evil system, and that the repercussions of that nightmare can still be felt in our own time.

Some, if not most, of those young Americans also come out of school with notions about slavery that aren’t anywhere near being true. They’ve been told – or have somehow acquired the belief – that America invented slavery. Or that American slavery was, in some way or another, uniquely corrupt. Already many students around the country are being inculcated, courtesy of educational materials furnished by the New York Times as part of the 1617 Project, in a set of preposterous, perfidious ideas, among which are these: America was founded on slavery; a devotion to human bondage is at the core of our national ideology; the American Republic was built not on glorious new Enlightenment ideas about human freedom but on an ignoble dedication to the belief that it’s okay for one person to own another.

As if all that weren’t enough. now, in the era of Black Lives Matter, adult Americans by the million are paying good money for new books that explain to them that the stain of white American racism is deep and indelible.

Questions for Dr. Fauci Why such opposition to Hydroxychloroquine? An open letter. by George Parry *******

https://spectator.org/questions-for-dr-fauci/

As you may be aware, health-care providers across the country and around the world have reported great success in using Hydroxychloroquine + Zinc + Azithromycin (the “HCQ cocktail”) to treat COVID-19. According to these physicians and researchers, the key to success is to use the HCQ cocktail within the first seven days after onset of COVID-19 symptoms.

Nevertheless, ever since President Trump endorsed Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), its use has become a highly politicized and controversial matter. The opposition to HCQ started with Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. At the same press conference that the president first expressed hope about using HCQ to treat COVID-19, Dr. Fauci challenged its effectiveness and stated that he would not take it outside the confines of a clinical trial.

Since then the opposition to HCQ has increased even to the point where it is almost impossible to find physicians willing to prescribe it and pharmacies willing to provide it.

Three practicing physicians have published the following “Open letter to Dr. Anthony Fauci regarding the use of Hydroxychloroquine for treating COVID-19.” It is a devastating written cross-examination of Dr. Fauci that contains much valuable life-saving information and squarely addresses the needless deaths that have occurred due to the opposition to the HCQ cocktail.

When the history of the COVID-19 pandemic is written, one of the key issues will be why the United States’ medical and government establishments joined forces to deprive the American people access to a safe, inexpensive, and highly effective outpatient treatment that could have saved tens of thousands lives and definitively obliterated the purported justification for the social and economic lockdowns that have destroyed lives, livelihoods, and the economy.

‘Antifa’ protesters trash Williamsburg Whole Foods, Apple over weekend By Reuven Fenton and Jorge Fitz-Gibbon

https://nypost.com/2020/08/17/antifa-protesters-trash-apple-store-whole-foods-in-brooklyn/
 Dozens of protesters, including suspected members of the anti-fascist group Antifa, rampaged through Williamsburg over the weekend, trashing several national chain stores and spraying anti-police graffiti, according to police and sources.

The rowdy mob marched through the Brooklyn neighborhood late Saturday, with police first receiving a 911 call at 8:20 p.m. about vandalism at an Apple Store on Bedford Avenue, where they found broken windows and the letters “FTP” — typically meaning “F–k the police” in this context — spray-painted on the wall, cops said.

The protesters, who also targeted a Whole Foods store in the neighborhood, tagged one building with the message “Murder Bezos,” according to reports.

At 11:48 p.m., another 911 call sent police to North 10th Street, where more broken windows and graffiti were found. “Die Yuppy” was spray-painted on a Compass Real Estate outlet at the scene.

“I feel sentiment for the times, but this stuff is just senseless,” a Compass employee told The Post on Monday. “They don’t even know what they’re doing. It’s just destruction for destruction’s sake.”

Waiting for Durham May Be Over Roger Kimball

https://www.theepochtimes.com/waiting-for-durham-may-be-over_3463703.html

Things seem to be speeding up now, which is good. I was beginning to think that John Durham was auditioning for a PoMo production of “Waiting for Godot” with himself in the title role. The public would be left like Vladimir and Estragon, disillusioned and alone.

But the recent news that a felony charge has been brought against Kevin Clinesmith, the FBI lawyer who altered an email and lied to the FISA court in order to get a warrant issued to surveil Carter Page and thus gain a secret backdoor entry to the Trump campaign, provides a ray of hope that Godot-Durham will appear after all. He’ll have to be quick about it, because the Democrats are already sweating bullets about what he’ll turn up.

Like Koko in “The Mikado,” I have a little list of “society offenders.” Mr. Clinesmith is on that list, but, to be honest, rather far down. True, he doctored evidence and lied in order to bring the awesome police power of the state against an innocent U.S. citizen, but at the end of the day Mr. Clinesmith was a minnow in the pond of corruption that was the deep state “plot to rig an election and destroy a presidency” (to cite the subtitle of Andy McCarthy’s book on the subject, “Ball of Collusion”).

Yes, it was preposterous for a lawyer representing Mr. Clinesmith to say that “It was never [Clinesmith’s] intent to mislead the court or his colleagues as he believed the information he relayed was accurate.”

The Suburbs Issue: Trump and Carson Speak By Stanley Kurtz

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-suburbs-issue-trump-and-carson-speak/

President Trump and Secretary Carson have co-authored a strong op-ed entitled “We’ll Protect America’s Suburbs.” This piece is the administration’s most important attempt to date to break the media blockade on substantive discussion of the suburbs issue. Up to this point, instead of exploring the implications of Biden’s housing plans — including his promise to restore the AFFH (Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing) regulation, and to kill single-family zoning by withholding road repairs from suburbs — the media has cried racism instead.

As Trump and Carson point out, however, Westchester County (the Obama–Biden administration’s dry run for AFFH) was never found guilty of housing discrimination. Indeed, such discrimination was never even alleged. AFFH as used by the Obama–Biden administration was never actually about ending housing discrimination. AFFH was — and remains — a massive social-engineering plan designed to tell Americans where and how to live. It will effectively put an end to local government in this country.

Black Lives Matter, Antifa Crowd Beat Man Unconscious in Portland By Mairead McArdle

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/black-lives-matter-antifa-crowd-beat-man-unconscious-in-portland/

A crowd of Black Lives Matter and Antifa rioters in downtown Portland beat a white man unconscious Sunday night after dragging him from his truck, video footage of the incident shows.

The crowd surrounded the man’s white truck around 10:30 p.m. near where he crashed into a light pole at Southwest Broadway and Taylor Street. At least one individual punched him as he sat inside before he was pulled out of the vehicle.The rioters punched the man and forced him to sit in the street as he tried to answer a call from his wife. One man in the crowd wearing a “security” vest delivered a kick to his head from behind that appears to have knocked him out cold and caused his head to bleed after it hit the street.

The rioters can be heard accusing the man of attempting to run them over in his truck, but video clips on social media appear to show the moments just before the attack, when the man attempted to help a person the crowd had previously robbed and beaten. When the crowd turned on him, he attempted to drive away to escape, but ended up crashing his truck.

“He wrecked his car, and he got beat up because he tried to run people over,” said one black-clad man as he escorts a crying woman to the sidewalk.

Trumpism—A Look Backward and Forward to November Between the abyss and what goes on in Portland and the Magnificent Mile, there is for the moment nothing else but Trump standing in the breach. Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2020/08/16/trumpism-a-look-backward-and-forward-to-november/

Perhaps 70 percent of Trumpism remains a hodgepodge of Reaganism: strong defense, realist foreign policy, deregulation, smaller government, big deficits, tax cuts, energy growth, and stars-and-stripes traditionalism.

But it is the other unorthodox 30 percent that excited his base, terrified conservative apostates, and won Trump the 2016 election by energizing between 4 million and 6 million voters in swing states who had either given up on Republicans, or on elections altogether. NeverTrumpers talk of Trump’s demise and their own resurrection as Phoenixes to rebirth the GOP. They have no idea that those who despise them had ensured their Beltway-preferred candidates could rarely win; nothing has changed since.

Trumpist conservatism is usually defined as not free, but fair trade, strict enforcement of immigration laws, an end to optional interventions that will not likely, in a cost-to-benefit analysis, result in U.S. interests or strategic calm for a purported troubled region, and a belief that industry and manufacturing are not brick-and-mortar anachronisms, but the creators of what we cook on, sit on, live in, drive, and work in; our non-virtual world that everyone relies on and yet takes for granted as so passé. 

If Trump left his agenda at that, NeverTrumpers likely would be disgruntled but mostly quiet. The Left, as is its wont with Republican presidents, would have remained serially hysterical as in the Reagan and Bush years, but not completely unhinged as it has been since 2017. 

What distinguished Trump then was not just his substance, but also his style. Translated it could be envisioned as chemotherapy, toxic enough to kill the status-quo cancer, but not quite lethal enough to kill the host. Or maybe Trump derangement arose from class disdain over the orange skin, the combed over dyed hair, the mile-long ties, the Queens accent, the oddly agile bulkiness, the raucous Manhattan career—the antithesis to all that appears on the Sunday morning talk shows.

Report: Kamala Harris Already Vetting VP Picks

https://babylonbee.com/news/report-kamala-harris-already-vetting-vp-picks

U.S.—Supporters of Kamala Harris have been eagerly awaiting an announcement on who her VP pick will be when she takes over as president approximately 5 minutes after Joe Biden is inaugurated. According to sources close to the campaign, she is already vetting possible candidates for the job. 

“I am proud to announce I will soon be announcing my pick for Vice President of the United States,” said Harris. “We have searched all across this great land. While I cannot yet confirm who my pick will be, I can say this: my pick for VP will be even MORE of a woman and even MORE of color than I am. It will be the most colorful and womanly team ever!” She then threw her head back and cackled maniacally.

Slain DHS Whistleblower Philip Haney Not Resting in Peace Is the FBI withholding evidence until after the election? Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/slain-dhs-whistleblower-philip-haney-not-resting-lloyd-billingsley/

Through his work in the Middle East, Philip Haney gained deep knowledge of Islam, jihad, and terrorist networks around the world. In 2016, Philip Haney authored See Something Say Nothing: A Homeland Security Officer Exposes the Government’s Submission to Jihad. Haney was reportedly at work on a sequel, which has yet to appear.

On February 21, 2020, Haney was found dead from a gunshot wound in Amador County, California. Haney’s friends denied he was suicidal, and some were certain he had been murdered. CNN set the tone for the way establishment media would cover the case.

“Haney’s controversial accusations that the Obama administration could have prevented terrorist attacks were polarizing among Americans,” Laura Hoy reported on February 23. Hoy had no take on whether Haney’s accusations were true, and she included no citations from Haney’s book or his Frontpage articles such as, “Deobond Attacks in San Bernardino, Sri Lanka,” and “The Terrorist Ties that Bind.”

As Hoy explained, “Haney’s death is likely to become political ammo for Republicans heading into the 2020 presidential elections.” That raises questions about another key player in the case.

Why Trump Should Win And why the stakes couldn’t be higher. Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/why-trump-should-win-bruce-thornton/

Less than three months from election day, Democrats and NeverTrump Republicans keep telling us (and themselves) that President Trump “is in trouble” in his bid for reelection. Trump’s enemies chant poll numbers like incantations, even though that juju failed spectacularly in 2016. They harp on Trump’s media-manufactured “failures” like his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and his response to the ongoing riots instigated by Black Lives Matter and its Antifa brown-shirts. And as has been true from the start, the bulk of their criticisms are really about subjective and self-serving standards of “comportment” and “decorum” and “norms”  that reflect the bipartisan “cognitive elite” and big-government functionaries.

But a more sober analysis suggests that the president has a faithful and energized base and a record of accomplishment compared to the Dems’ lunge to the lunatic left. Moreover, the spectacle of civic destruction, increasing violent crime, and nakedly partisan and authoritarian excesses on the part of blue-state governors and mayors will give Trump a decided edge with the bulk of ordinary Americans.

First, Trump’s economic success has been stalled not because of any missteps by his administration, but by a pandemic originating in totalitarian China and worsened by its willful obscuring of the virus’s origins and lethality. Voters with common sense and fairness know that the current recession is not Trump’s fault, and that having rescued the economy once, he can do so again. They also can see that blue-state governors have needlessly exacerbated the economic damage by imposing draconian and arbitrary lockdown orders based not on science, but on their increasingly obvious desire to wound the president politically even if it means immiserating their own citizens.