Veteran Miami Herald Reporter Caught Coaching Democrats to Cheat An audio recording reveals reporter Mary Ellen Klas allegedly “seeking to pre-litigate the 2022 redistricting cycle.” By Rod Thomson

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/08/veteran-miami-herald-reporter-caught-coaching-democrats-to-cheat/

Long-time Miami Herald reporter Mary Ellen Klas was just caught red-handed coaching Democrats on how to challenge Republican redistricting in Florida.

For conservatives and Republicans, the story is as old as time. But some amazing revelations reflecting the current state of journalism, including indisputable evidence of Klas’ partisanship, help illustrate our current predicament. Klas, who is no newbie, is the Miami Herald’s capitol bureau chief in Tallahassee, where she has covered Florida politics since the 1990s. One wonders how often she has freelanced as a political consultant over the years. In this instance, she was cavalier enough to get caught by a Republican Senate staffer who was sitting right there.

A public records request netted an audio recording by an aide to Senate President Wilton Simpson of Klas talking to state Senator Randolph Bracy, an Orlando Democrat currently running for Congress. The audio, Simpson wrote, showed Klas was “seeking to pre-litigate the 2022 redistricting cycle, pitting Senate counsel against expert witnesses frequently used by plaintiffs in litigation against the state, thereby creating a manipulated legislative record to be used in the courts.”

The story broke with Florida Power and Light—a favorite target for Klas over the years and the largest power company in the nation—taking the extreme measure of publicly going on the attack against Klas and the Herald. FPL on Wednesday launched a website called Truth Matters that details Klas’ duplicitous and partisan coverage against the power company. Giant companies rarely go to such lengths, particularly those as heavily regulated as a utility. But apparently FPL felt it had no choice, and the website makes clear why. 

The final straw for FPL was a December 20, 2021 “story” by Klas claiming FPL was using “dark money” and lobbyists to write legislation that would hamstring rooftop solar. In the increasingly dirty world of the partisan media, it’s important to note that this story was done in conjunction with Floodlight, an environmentalist group which describes itself this way on its own site: “Floodlight investigates the corporate interests holding back climate action. We partner and co-publish with local journalists and national outlets . . . .” 

So there is not even the pretense of this being honest journalism. FPL vehemently denies the veracity of the story and wrote an opinion piece refuting it. But the Miami Herald refused to run the opinion piece and instead heavily edited it down, removing all criticism of the Herald and of Klas, and then ran it as a watery letter to the editor. Even that was just in the lightly read print edition, and not online.

Trump in 2024? Maybe! What’s certain is not too many Americans will be willing to hand over the honor of choosing the next president to Liz Cheney and her smug, entitled, and repellent confrères. By Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/08/trump-in-2024-maybe/

Among Trump-friendly conservatives, there seem to be essentially two strands of sentiment about who should be the Republican candidate for president in 2024. One strand says, “Donald Trump, assuming he runs and his health is good.” 

The other strand exhibits various shades of dubiousness. Some profess admiration for what Trump accomplished in his first term, but lament his “divisiveness,” which they anatomize in various ways as a product of narcissism, impulsiveness, or simple bad character. 

A few in this group blame the divisiveness not on Trump, but the people, inside his administration and out, who spent the entirety of Trump’s first term trying to undermine his presidency. A sizable segment of this dubious group would, truth be told, like to see the back of Donald Trump forever. 

Other segments of this group acknowledge that they would support Trump should he run and win the nomination, but confess, sotto voce, that they would prefer another “Trumpist” candidate. “Trumpism without Trump” is the slogan of many in this group, and it is in these circles that one repeatedly hears the names of Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, and Mike Pompeo, secretary of state in the second part of the Trump Administration.

Is there such a thing as “Trumpism without Trump”? I do not know. I understand those who argue that asking for Trumpism without Trump is a bit like asking for sunshine without the sun. It was often said, sometimes thankfully, sometimes as a matter of fact, that Trump was sui generis. If that is the case, then it might well be that the message and the messenger are so closely bound up with each other that the effort to disentangle them is doomed to fail. 

I understand the concern about Trump’s vaunted “divisiveness.” But it is well to acknowledge this irony. The tsunami of hatred and vitriol that washed over Donald Trump since before he assumed office until the present moment was nothing if not “divisive.” It infected the Twittersphere as brazenly as any of Trump’s “mean tweets” about Jim Acosta, the “fake news,” or sundry other “losers.” Why was that not castigated as “divisive,” evidence of bad character, against the norms or civilized political behavior? 

We now know that the whole Russia collusion delusion was invented lock-stock-and-barrel in the fetid skunkworks of the Clinton campaign. We know, too, that it was seized upon and pumped up by an irresponsible media and the rancid outposts of the administrative state and its so-called intelligence agencies. Trump was cooked before he set foot in the Oval Office. 

Israel should declare 3 No’s By Ted Belman

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/01/israel_should_declare_3_nos.html

In June 1967, Israel defeated five Arab armies in what became known as the Six Day War.  That war actually began when the Arabs invaded Israel immediately after her Declaration of Independence in 1948. The Arabs had hoped to destroy Israel and “drive the Jews into the sea”.

Three months later, the Arab League met in Khartoum and declared their 3 no’s; no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel, Also included was their insistence on the rights of the Palestinian people in their own country.

Thereafter they resorted to a different battlefield. They began a diplomatic war against Israel in which they used propaganda, extortion and terror to achieve their desired goal. Eventually, they managed to get most of the world to back their false narrative and to support their cause. In particular, the world now believes that the land in question is Occupied Palestinian Land and that international law supports them and holds that the settlements are illegal. These beliefs are supported by the US, the EU and the UN among others.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. For the truth, read International Law and the State of Israel and The Legality of Israel Sovereignty over Judea and Samaria According to International law.

It is long past time for Israel to declare its own 3 no’s; no to a nuclear Iran, no to the two-state solution, no to a bi-national state.

Why so? Because nothing is to be gained by negotiating.

The Movie Chinese Communists Hate the Most? By Janet Levy

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/01/the_movie_chinese_communists_hate_the_most.html

Some films are chilling because their fiction penetrates the agonizing core of reality.  The soon to be released Unsilenced, from award-winning Chinese-Canadian filmmaker Leon Lee, is a prime example.  It brings into sharp focus the oppression unleashed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on Falun Gong, a movement that emphasizes ethical conduct, qigong exercises, and meditation.  Fearing that Falun Gong would overtake it in popularity, the party has since 1999 been persecuting practitioners with arrest, torture, forced labor, menticide, and execution.  But an underground resistance has established itself, led by ordinary Falun Gong practitioners pushed by extraordinary circumstances into heroic acts.

The film’s lead character, Wang (played by Ting Wu), is based on Wang Weiyu, a survivor of China’s prisons and labor camps.  Wang and his friends pay a heavy price for fighting back.  But with the help of journalist Daniel Davis (played by Sam Trammell), they succeed in getting the word out on the plight of the Falun Gong.  Leading the crackdown against them is the sadistic Secretary Yang (played by Tzu-Chiang Wang).

Although Lee has been living in Canada since 2006, he is no stranger to Falun Gong or the CCP’s atrocities.  His documentary Human Harvest (2014) exposed China’s demonic removal and sale of organs from prisoners and inmates at labor camps.  Many of these are Falun Gong practitioners.  The documentary was broadcast in more than 25 countries and won the Peabody Award.

His Letter from Masanjia (2018) is an equally heartrending true story of a note found in a box of Halloween decorations by an Oregon resident.  The writer of the note is Sun Yi, a Falun Gong practitioner held at an infamous labor camp where the decorations were made.  Tracing Sun Yi after his release, collaborating with him via surreptitious Skype calls, and instructing him on how to use a camera, Lee put together the story of what happens in the CCP’s labor camps.  Sun Yi risked it all and later made his way to Indonesia, since China allows travel there without a passport.  He died in 2017 in Indonesia, most likely poisoned by Chinese agents.

Lee’s company, Flying Cloud Productions, remains committed to bringing “human rights violations to light in both documentary and narrative filmmaking.”  His films are among the most pirated in China, and he often receives emails from anonymous Chinese viewers stupefied by the content they hasten to share, evidence that Falun Gong may be reigniting hope in the People’s Republic.

The filming of Unsilenced, which took place in Taiwan, was replete with challenges.  During production, Taiwanese fighter jets scrambled to intercept Chinese planes intruding Taiwan’s airspace.  Many film professionals shied away from the production, cast and crew used aliases or remained anonymous, and a few actors quit after being threatened.  Lee was under constant pressure to recruit new talent and scout for alternative locations as filming permission would suddenly be withdrawn.  There were post-production hitches, too.  The owner of the Canadian production company wouldn’t risk listing his name in the credits.  Chinese students at Boston University were enlisted to protest a screening of the movie.  The film is as much a testament to his persistence as that of its protagonists.

Where Critical Race Theory Comes From By Daniel Buck

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/01/where-critical-race-theory-comes-from/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=blog-post&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=more-in&utm_term=third

Critical pedagogy is the anti-Enlightenment wellspring from which CRT and other suspect activist ideologies flow.

T here is a fundamental change occurring in American education. You have likely heard from some that it is critical race theory, a fringe understanding of race in America, and from others that this is just a bogeyman. Neither assertion is correct. Rather, critical pedagogy — a politicized theory of education of which CRT is but one branch — has become the prevailing theory in American colleges of education, influencing curriculum, instruction, and policies across the country.

In place of academic skills and a worldview grounded in Enlightenment thinking, critical pedagogy teaches students political activism and a worldview of oppression. We shouldn’t be surprised, then, that the results of such a pedagogy leave students angry but with a paucity of literary, mathematical, and historical knowledge — the very things they need to live a fulfilled, thoughtful, successful life.

While showing every shortcoming of critical pedagogy is beyond the bounds of one essay, conservatives need to understand that this problem extends far beyond a few racialized, politicized lessons in coastal schools. One English curriculum, the Units of Study, which thousands of schools use, bases its work on critical theories, including CRT, but also postcolonial, feminist, and other radical ideologies. The curriculum cites Kimeberlé Crenshaw, a founding scholar of CRT, as well as other progressive activists such as Angela Davis, a Marxist scholar, and Judith Butler, a gender theorist.

Effective propaganda can be as subtle as it is insidious. When it’s obvious, loud, and galling, it’s easy to identify and reject. When it’s no more noticeable than a few mold spores, it can go on spreading until it has rotted entire institutions. We must absolutely confront the media-grabbing practices such as privilege walks, but picking such battles is akin to wiping away a few mold spots from rotting floorboards.

Traditional conceptions of education trace back to the Greeks and the Romantics, and comparing these ideas to critical pedagogy can isolate exactly what this philosophy is and, perhaps more importantly, isn’t. In his Republic, Plato portrays education as the process of extracting individuals from a cave of shadows into the light of reality. In Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, the goal of education is the forming of virtuous habits. In both cases, education directs us beyond ourselves — discovering the world as it is and aligning our characters to an objective law from without.

These beliefs dominated European thought up until and through the Enlightenment; medieval universities built themselves upon the liberal arts, and Loyola attempted to systematize education for the youth in his Ratio Studiorum. Then, romantics such as Rousseau suggested that children follow their natural inclinations, that any ascription to outside influence is only corrupting, and John Dewey popularized this vision in the 20th century. Dewey went so far as to say that no content had inherent value in learning. Rather, what interests the child ought to lead the way. Education came to focus on the self.

Both Greek and Romantic theories manifest today in classical and project-based learning, respectively. We can debate their relative efficacy, but in both cases, the focus remains primarily on academics and moral formation. If traditional education asks us to step into our backyard to explore the world, and romantic education asks us to explore what’s inside, critical pedagogy would have us burn down the house and trench the garden.

The 1619 False-History Project By Wilfred Reilly

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/01/24/the-1619-false-history-project/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=top-of-nav&utm_content=hero-module

What Nikole Hannah-Jones and the New York Times left out

Imagine a Native American history curriculum that focused entirely on four massacres of Natives by whites — beginning with the first encounter between Spanish conquistadores and the Inca emperor Atahualpa and culminating with Wounded Knee — and never touched on American Indian life before 1491, the many Native military victories, or the roughly 5.2 million Natives alive in the U.S. today. Would anyone see this as truly representative, or useful to students of any race, or worth teaching in the schools?

The 1619 Project, from the New York Times, must face the same questions. The project focuses on casting the era of historical slavery as an alternative founding for the United States, with its authors arguing that slavery was responsible for nearly everything that “truly made America exceptional.” Slavery, they write, was the primary reason for the Revolu­tionary War and was responsible for much or most of early American wealth, building “vast fortunes for white people North and South” and making “New York City the financial capital of the world.” Multiple 1619 essays, by Nikole Hannah-Jones and others, attribute to historical slavery and racism everything from the competitive capitalism of the U.S. to contemporary patterns of traffic. Slavery, in this narrative, is both the American original sin and the source of all our baraka — everything that makes this a unique and desirable country.

Honorable, non-racist centrists and conservatives face a serious question as we confront this material. How would a nuanced but thorough telling of American history, one that did not seek to minimize slavery, differ from 1619’s? Aren’t these journalists and radical academics — progressive friends often ask, in something approaching anguish — just telling hard truths? The short answer is a clear no.

The 1619 essays almost universally ignore or minimize four critical pieces of context that any unbiased school curriculum would include. These are the truly global prevalence of slavery and similar barbaric practices until quite recently; the detrimental economic impact of the Peculiar Institution on the South and on the American national economy; the nuanced but deeply patriotic perspectives on the United States expressed by the black and white leaders of the victorious anti-slavery movement that existed alongside slavery; and the reality that much of American history in fact had nothing to do with this particular issue. Not teaching about slavery or Jim Crow segregation in schools would be a deeply immoral act of omission, but it is almost equally bizarre to define these decades-past regional sins as the main through-line of American history.

FAUCI’S RETIREMENT PAY WILL EXCEED $350,000 ANNUALLY – THE LARGEST IN U.S. FEDERAL GOVERNMENT HISTORY

Last week, we broke the story that Dr. Anthony Fauci’s annual retirement pension and benefits would exceed $350,000 — the most ever at the federal level.

Our auditors at OpenTheBooks estimated that Dr. Fauci’s pension will be nearly $1,000 per day and exceed $1 million over the first three-years.
 
(Though, at 81, after 55 years of federal service, Dr. Fauci isn’t retiring yet.)
 
Our investigation initially published here at Forbes and has since been showcased in interviews on:

Fox Business’ Varney & Co. show

Wake Up America morning show, Newsmax TV
and 75 other national and international news platforms including: The New York Post, Yahoo!, Fox News, The Daily Mail, The Washington Examiner, Epoch Times, and more. 

Top epidemiologist Harvey Risch blasts Fauci’s COVID strategy, CDC data and research “Dr. Fauci has interests that do not align with the public health interests of the United States,” epidemiologist Harvey Risch says.

https://justthenews.com/government/federal-agencies/cdc-has-played-fast-and-loose-covid-data-and-research-yale-public

President Biden can claim that COVID-19 remains a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” partly because “the CDC has played fast and loose with a lot of studies and data,” Yale School of Public Health epidemiologist Harvey Risch says.

“We have not been careful or objective with our data,” he told the John Solomon Reports podcast Friday. “We don’t even know, for example, the mortality from COVID,” which the CDC pegs at more than 800,000.

Risch noted the agency told physicians to put COVID on death certificates regardless of whether they think the infection played a role. Hospitalizations have also conflated admissions “with” and “from” COVID, he said.

As a member of a committee advising Connecticut early in the pandemic, Risch urged ignoring case counts and focusing on hospitalizations and deaths. That advice was largely ignored until the current “sky-high” yet mild Omicron variant wave, but now “finally people are waking up to say that the cases don’t matter,” he said.

The U.K. is among countries that more carefully track COVID, according to Risch. Its data show vaccinated adults constitute the majority of cases, “and it’s not a hospitalization of the unvaccinated” either.

While vaccines are a “potential and reasonable component” of COVID mitigation, those developed are “somewhat ineffective” and their large-scale deployment has driven an unexpected number of “mutant strains” extending the pandemic and causing higher mortality, Risch said.

President Biden’s chief medical advisor Anthony Fauci, longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, not only isn’t trained in public health but “has interests that do not align with the public health interests of the United States,” Risch argued. 

A Tale of Two Authoritarians The appearance of Dick Cheney in the House of Representatives on the anniversary of January 6th helped identify the true villain on the scene Matt Taibbi

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/a-tale-of-two-authoritarians

Former Vice President Dick Cheney visited the House of Representatives yesterday. He and his daughter Liz were the only two Republicans present at a moment of silence commemorating the events of last January 6th. It was a touching scene, which perfectly described why the surviving anti-Trump Uniparty of the political mainstream is at least as much of a threat to democracy as the “insurrectionists” they never stop wailing about.

In a story entitled “Dick Cheney returns to the House and receives a warm welcome . . . from Democrats,” the Washington Post wrote that “Democrats put aside their fierce and lasting policy divides with the Cheneys to thank them for condemning the attack and Trump’s continued effort to undermine the 2020 presidential election results with his false claims of fraud.”

(News writing has become a pre-fab profession, like assembling IKEA furniture. All you need is an Allen wrench and a list of the latest clichés. “Trump’s efforts to undermine the 2020 election” has replaced “Trump’s efforts to coordinate with the Russian government in its election interference activities,” and “Trump’s false claims of fraud” has replaced “Trump’s false claims of ‘fake news.’” Part of the significance of January 6th is that it updated popular propaganda stock, which had grown stale.)

I don’t mean to understate the seriousness of January 6th, even though it’s been absurdly misreported for over a year now. No one from a country where these things actually happen could mistake 1/6 for “a coup .” In the real version, the mob doesn’t take selfies and blaze doobies after seizing the palace, and the would-be dictator doesn’t spend 187 minutes snacking and watching Fox before tweeting “go home.” Instead, he works the phones nonstop to rally precinct chiefs, generals, and airport officials to the cause, because a coup is a real attempt to seize power. Britannica says the “chief prerequisite for a coup is control of all or part of the armed forces, the police, and other military elements.” We saw none of that on January 6th, but it’s become journalistic requirement to use either “coup” or “insurrection” in describing it:

The endless hyperventilating efforts to describe January 6th as a disaster on the order of Pearl Harbor or even 9/11 has been awesome to behold. Huffington Post nitwit S.V. Date even called it “1,000 percent worse” than 9/11, moving the decimal point over on the famous Team America joke*:

The panic inspired convulsions across politics and the media. Ted Cruz made a plea for mainstream recognition by denouncing 1/6 as a “violent terrorist attack” before cowering in retreat on Tucker Carlson Tonight, in the process pantsing himself with audiences in all directions. Meanwhile, podcaster Eric Lendrum, on the pro-Trump site American Greatness, devised the impressively crazy syllogism that because the mainstream caricature of Trump supporters is so incorrect, conservatives should therefore embrace it: “If their aim is to make January 6 their Reichstag Fire, then we should go forward celebrating the events of that day as our Storming of the Bastille.”

Desmond Tutu’s moral failures He hated Jews and Israel, and abandoned black slaves throughout Africa. Charles Jacobs and Ben Poser

https://www.jns.org/opinion/desmond-tutus-moral-failures/?fbclid=IwAR3Bqb6LZGwKsQuqnBOTL1S9cGpUJ1yNE0l5zpvn6eW86MDJ15idQSqURkA

Bishop Desmond Tutu deserves the flow of glowing eulogies celebrating his role in ending apartheid in South Africa, and his momentous work reconciling his black and white countrymen in its aftermath. He fearlessly stood up against racism and tyranny. He merits much praise for helping to achieve a peaceful end to the horror which was apartheid.

But an honest account of Tutu’s life cannot ignore two glaring moral flaws in his behavior: his hateful rhetoric against Jews and Israel, and the shameful shirking of his responsibility to protest against black slavery in Africa. Tutu’s sins must not be forgotten in the midst of the plentiful homage.

Attorney and emeritus Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz has published a collection of the late bishop’s statements—slanders against Israel and classic curses against the Jewish people. Over the years, Tutu has said that:

The world is in the grips of the “powerful” and “scary” “Jewish lobby.”
The gas chambers the Nazis used to murder Jews during the Holocaust made for “a neater” death than those meted out to the black victims of apartheid.
Jews cling to an unjust “Monopoly of the Holocaust.”
Israel’s counter-terrorism policies are identical to South African apartheid, characterizing them as “things that even apartheid South Africa had not done.”
The “Jews thought they had a monopoly of God: Jesus was angry that they could [in the manner of apartheid] shut out other human beings.”
Zionism possesses “very many parallels with racism,” and Israel may one day “perpetrate genocide and exterminate all Palestinians.”
The Jews have always been “fighting against” and “opposed” to Christ while they “persecute others.”

Another Tutu critic, Professor David Bernstein of George Mason University, points to this stunning Tutu statement: “[W]hether Jews like it or not, they are a peculiar people. They can’t ever hope to be judged by the same standards which are used for other people.” Tutu always denied that he was anti-Semitic—maintaining his dentist was a certain “Dr. Cohen”—but judging Jews differently from others is the very definition of anti-Semitism.

Tutu’s statements about Jews would be deemed “racist” if applied to any other people. They echo the basest of lethal hatreds. As a Christian bishop, Tutu should have been shamed for these statements. His statements about Israel are not simply untrue. As we know from history, such libels incite hatred, and—as we are seeing across the West—physical attacks.