JAMES O’KEEFE: AMERICAN MUCKRAKER

This seminal work of nonfiction recounts the new journalistic mass movement of today. Compiled from over a decade of investigative reporting coupled with a vast reference of philosophical research, American Muckraker is the definitive guide of truth-telling in the video age.

ON POWER
They do have tremendous power. But in part it is because we give it to them. We are nothing, but we are not alone. Awe cannot live in fear. The moment you stop caring about what the media establishment thinks of you, is the moment you become truly free.

ON INSIDERS
The USPS whistleblower, a Marine Corps combat veteran said, “I would rather be back in Afghanistan, getting shot at by Afghans, honest to God,” than be interrogated by federal agent Russell Strasser—who coerced him by saying, “I am trying to twist you a little bit because your mind will kick in…. I am not scaring you, but I am scaring you.”

ON PRIVACY
The right to record is closely tied to the right to speak or even to take contemporaneous notes about what one sees and hears. As 60 Minutes producer Don Hewitt quipped, “People committing malfeasance don’t have any right to privacy…. What are we saying—that Upton Sinclair shouldn’t have smuggled his pencil in?”

ON MEANS & ENDS
Whereas the novelist Ernest Hemingway said, “What is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after,” Thomas B. Morgan of the 1960s New Journalism contends, “Morally defensible journalism is rarely what you feel good about afterward; it is only that which makes you feel better than you would otherwise.”

ON LITIGATION
“Polling does not decide the truth nor speak to evidence…. The New York Times have not met their burden to prove that Veritas is deceptive…claiming protections from an upstart competitor armed with a cell phone and a website. There is a substantial basis in law to proceed, to permit Project Veritas, to conduct discovery into The New York Times.” —Project Veritas v. New York Times Company; New York Supreme Court, March 18, 2021

Will We Ever Eradicate the Cancer of Identity Politics? Regardless of who replaces Justice Breyer, one hopes the Supreme Court next term will take us closer to a society that is race-blind by gutting affirmative action in America. By Josh Hammer

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/28/will-we-ever-eradicate-the-cancer-of-identity-politics/

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court finally granted a writ of certiorari in two now-consolidated affirmative action cases, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina. The cases will be argued jointly during the next Supreme Court term, and they place directly in their crosshairs the court’s noxious precedents in the thorny area of race-conscious university admission policies. As presented to the court, the leading question the justices will consider is “whether the Supreme Court should . . . hold that institutions of higher education cannot use race as a factor in admissions.”

The court should of course do so posthaste. The propagandist assertion that America in the year 2022 is bedeviled by a sprawling “systemic racism” is a destructive lie, but the ubiquity of affirmative action means that university admissions offices do, in fact, propagate systemic racism. Fortunately, there is reason for optimism that the justices will do their job. It was the mercurial Chief Justice John Roberts himself who, in the 2007 case of Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle, penned perhaps his most iconic line: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

But by Wednesday afternoon, Monday’s propitious step forward toward an America no longer obsessed with race and identity politics was abruptly undermined by a severe step backward toward a race-centric polity.

Justice Stephen Breyer, an octogenarian Jewish male and the senior statesman of the court’s liberal bloc, announced his retirement, effective at the end of this court term and contingent upon the successful confirmation of his successor. The announcement was hardly surprising; given Breyer’s long-standing Democratic ties, his liberal jurisprudence, and the fact that Republicans are poised to retake control of the U.S. Senate this fall, it would have been more surprising if Breyer had not retired this year.

Widow of Fallen NYPD Officer Slams Woke Manhattan DA in Powerful Eulogy Spencer Brown

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/spencerbrown/2022/01/28/watch-widow-of-fallen-nypd-officer-slams-woke-manhattan-da-in-powerful-eulogy-n2602509

As first responders, family, friends, and New Yorkers gathered at St. Patrick’s Cathedral to say goodbye to fallen NYPD Officer Jason Rivera on Friday, his young widow delivered a heart-wrenching and powerful tribute to her 22-year-old husband who was shot and killed — along with his partner Wilbert Mora — in the line of duty last week. 

“I would say good morning to you all, but in fact it’s the worst morning ever,” Dominique Luzuriaga began. “All of this seems so unreal, like I’m having one of those nightmares you never thought you’d have,” she remarked.

“Jason is so happy right now that all of you are here, through pain and sorrow, this is exactly how he would have wanted to be remembered: like a true hero — or like I used to call him, ‘Big P.O. Rivera.'” his widow told the packed cathedral and overflow crowd standing outside in the snow. 

“You have the whole nation on gridlock,” Luzuriaga said of her late husband. “And although you won’t be here anymore, I want you to live through me,” she said. “The system continues to fail us. We are not safe anymore, not even the members of the service. I know you were tired of these laws, especially the ones from the new DA,” Rivera’s widow said of new Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. “I hope he’s watching you speak through me right now,” she said to thunderous applause as those gathered to remember Rivera stood in solidarity against District Attorney Bragg’s new policies. 

The elites’ morally obscene response to the Canadian trucker convoy By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/01/the_elites_morally_obscene_response_to_the_canadian_trucker_convoy.html

Something big is happening in Canada and it’s happening in a typically Canadian way. After two years of draconian lockdowns and mandates, truckers are pushing back with a 70 km long convoy that pulled into Ottawa yesterday. It’s exciting and inspiring. It’s also drawing the elites out from cover, as they abandon any pretense of supporting the people they applauded so vigorously almost two years ago when they hid in their offices while “the little people” kept the world working.

The Canadians have been renowned for being an obedient, peaceable people. But perhaps we’ve forgotten that there’s a warrior strain in them. During both WWI and WWII, some of the British Empire’s most ferocious fighters came from Canada. That blend of warrior and peaceful soul seems to have come together with the massive Freedom Convoy that Canadian (and some American) truckers have driven from Vancouver to Ottawa, Canada’s capital.

I wrote about the convoy on Friday, along with lots of videos. It’s incredibly inspiring to see these cheerful truckers driving along Canada’s frozen lands, cheered on by hundreds and thousands of people wherever they go. Tucker interviewed another trucker on Friday night and it’s moving to see his good spirits and optimism as he and his fellow truckers push back against the effort to make them bow down to the technocracy for which COVID has provided a glide path.

How Universities Will Sidestep SCOTUS on Affirmative Action .By Charles Lipson –

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/01/28/how_universities_will_sidestep_scotus_on_affirmative_action_147107.html

Embracing affirmative action is virtually a job qualification for university administrators. The same is true, alas, for faculty and students in the humanities and social sciences. They march in lockstep toward a society permanently categorized by race, all with the best of intentions but not the best of outcomes.

They aren’t just woke. Their eyelids are sewn open. They have no intention of snoozing if the Supreme Court rules their current admission policies are illegal. They will stand proudly in the schoolhouse door, protecting policies they believe promote “social justice” and “equity.”

Their tactics to evade the court are surprisingly simple. Since admissions tests leave traces of discrimination, they’ll drop them. Having ditched these useful standards, university bureaucrats can sit behind closed doors, choose the applicants they favor, reject those they don’t, and leave no pesky evidence they are violating the law. Asian Americans, Jews, and other disfavored groups won’t have a record to show their test scores are systematically higher than favored groups, who are now being admitted despite their scores. To misquote Martin Luther King, universities are looking at the color of applicants’ skin, not the content of their academic qualifications.

Universities aren’t waiting for the Supreme Court to rule on whether affirmative action is constitutional. They already taking preemptive steps, designed to keep their current practices in place, this time without leaving fingerprints. Some 1,700 colleges and universities have already made SAT and ACT test scores optional for admission.

Why have universities dropped standardized tests? Not because these tests are biased or because they fail to predict academic performance (their primary purpose). Quite the contrary. The tests have been assiduously scrubbed to prevent cultural or racial bias, as they should be, and they are recognized as valuable tools to match students with the colleges where they are most likely to thrive academically.

Two New Polls on Trump vs. DeSantis By John McCormack

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/two-new-polls-on-trump-vs-desantis/

Two new polls show Florida governor Ron DeSantis with a realistic shot of defeating Donald Trump in a 2024 primary. 

The former president remains the strong favorite, but he’s under 50 percent in the latest YouGov survey:

A new poll by Echelon Insights shows that DeSantis’s position has improved in the last few months in a hypothetical head-to-head matchup:

As pollster Patrick Ruffini notes, Trump’s lead over DeSantis is only 16 points among Republicans who have heard of the Florida governor. We are of course still 24 months from the kickoff of presidential primaries and caucuses — plenty of time for average Republican voters to get to know DeSantis.

Mazie Hirono: “I want a justice who won’t base her decisions solely on law”

https://hotair.com/allahpundit/2022/01/27/mazie-hirono-i-want-a-justice-who-wont-base-her-decisions-solely-on-law-n444546

“Quiet part out loud,” Dan McLaughlin tweeted about this word salad that she croaked out yesterday.

As is true with most Americans, Supreme Court nominations bring out the worst in Hirono. But her worst tends to be worse than the worst of most of her colleagues.

Not so in this case, though. This is standard liberal palaver about how judges should approach jurisprudence, encouraging them to begin with a progressive outcome and then work backwards to find some legal justification for it. “Living Constitution” fever — catch it:

Hirono stated, “What I’m looking for is a justice who can be fair and impartial and who does not have an ideological axe to grind, which is what we saw — as far as I’m concerned — in President Trump’s nominees, including to the Supreme Court. So, yes, I am expecting a fight, but there you have it. And I’m looking for someone who’s going to be, not only highly qualified, as all of the people that you already talked about are, but who really brings to the judiciary the kind of diversity that I’d like, that — someone who will consider the impact, the effects of whatever decision-making is on people in our country so that they are not making decisions just based on — which I would like them to base it on law, which would be nice and precedent and who are not eagerly trying to get rid of decades of precedent that would protect a woman’s right to choose, for example, and voting rights, etc. But I’d like a justice who also will take into consideration the real-life impact of the decisions he or she will be making.”

Joe Biden, box office poison by Byron York

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/biden-box-office-poison

JOE BIDEN, BOX OFFICE POISON. Remember when President Joe Biden visited Georgia and the state’s Democratic star, gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, did not appear with him? Abrams said she had a “scheduling conflict,” which nobody believed.

Now, the “scheduling conflict” problem has spread to Pennsylvania. Biden is set to visit Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University to “discuss strengthening the nation’s supply chains, revitalizing American manufacturing, creating good-paying union jobs, and building a better America,” according to a White House press release.

The White House invited John Fetterman, the Democratic lieutenant governor now running for Senate, Josh Shapiro, the Democratic attorney general who will run for governor, and Conor Lamb, the Democratic representative from the Pittsburgh area, to appear with Biden. Only Lamb, who gave Biden valuable support in the state in 2020, said yes. Fetterman and Shapiro both begged off, citing those “scheduling conflicts.” Like Abrams, they did not say precisely what those “scheduling conflicts” were.

Britain has a Muslim Anti-Semitism Problem By Dr Rakib Ehsan

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/01/23/britain-has-a-muslim-anti-semitism-problem/

Rakib Ehsan is a research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society and a patron of Muslims Against Anti-Semitism (MAAS).

Highly segregated communities have become breeding grounds for Islamism and anti-Jew hatred.

On 15 January, Malik Faisal Akram, a 44-year-old British Pakistani Muslim from Blackburn in north-west England, took four people hostage at a synagogue in Colleyville, Texas. In return for their release, he called on the US authorities to free Islamist terrorist Aafia Siddiqui from nearby Fort Worth prison. In a phone call during the siege to his brother, he said that ‘maybe [the authorities will] have compassion for fucking Jews’. An FBI hostage rescue team eventually entered the synagogue and shot Akram dead.

Despite the FBI’s attempt to downplay Akram’s anti-Semitism, he was clearly motivated by anti-Jewish sentiment. He targeted a synagogue. He used anti-Semitic language. And he was reported to the UK police a year ago for threatening to bomb and kill Jews. How did we get here? How has it come to pass that a British Islamist anti-Semite has carried out an act of terror at an American synagogue? And how should we respond to it?

Anti-Semitism in British Muslim communities

British citizens’ involvement in anti-Jewish Islamist terrorism is sadly nothing new. Back in July 2012, married couple Mohammed Sajid Khan and Shasta Khan were both jailed for planning terror attack on Jewish targets in Greater Manchester. After a domestic dispute at their home, police discovered a stash of terror-related material which included beheading videos, Islamist propaganda glorifying Osama bin Laden, and bomb-making manuals. Another married couple, Ummarayiat Mirza and Madihah Taheer, were both sentenced to prison in December 2017 for plotting a terror attack in Birmingham. Targets included a city-centre synagogue.

ECHOES OF MUNICH

https://henryjacksonsociety.org/

We are currently living through what many observers regard as the most dangerous geopolitical crisis for a generation. Russia has massed a vast military force along its border with Ukraine and is threatening to unleash a full-scale invasion of the country if its demands are not met. The ensuing conflict would likely be the largest in Europe since WWII, with unclear but dire consequences for the entire continent.

At the heart of this crisis is one man’s refusal to accept the verdict of the Cold War and his burning resentment at modern Russia’s diminished standing on the global stage. Throughout his political career, Vladimir Putin has made no secret of his desire to revive Russia’s international prestige and address the perceived geopolitical injustices of the recent past. These imperial ambitions have found expression in Putin’s increasingly public obsession with Ukraine, a country whose very existence has come to embody the Russian ruler’s darkest fears and his many historical grievances.

A clear understanding of Putin’s Ukraine obsession is essential for anyone who wishes to make sense of the current crisis. Luckily, this task has been made considerably easier by the summer 2021 publication of a 5,000-word essay on the topic authored by Vladimir Putin himself.

Entitled “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” Putin’s remarkable treatise showcases his contempt for Ukrainian statehood and his belief in the artificial nature of the country’s current separation from Russia, which he blames on insidious outside influences. Putin the amateur historian states unequivocally that Ukrainians and Russians are “one people” and concludes by declaring “I am confident that true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia.”

The Russian president’s tract has certainly helped raise international awareness of his Ukraine obsession. British Defense Minister Ben Wallace recently penned his own article on the subject and drew many alarming conclusions from his sober analysis of Putin’s own words. “President Putin’s article completely ignores the wishes of the citizens of Ukraine, while evoking that same type of ethno-nationalism which played out across Europe for centuries and still has the potential to awaken the same destructive forces of ancient hatred,” noted Wallace. Nevertheless, relatively few Western politicians or policymakers appear to have fully grasped the scale or implications of Putin’s preoccupation with Ukraine.