Biden’s Summit of Babble By Colin Dueck

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/12/bidens-summit-of-babble/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

The notion that the United States will rally all liberal democrats worldwide to act against all illiberal non-democrats is nonsensical.

L ast week, President Biden hosted a virtual conference entitled the Summit for Democracy and invited dozens of heads of state. The premise of the summit was that democratically oriented government, civil society, and private-sector leaders would meet to lay out a practical agenda regarding the common threat from authoritarianism. Predictably, they failed to do so.

From the beginning, media coverage of the Summit for Democracy obsessed over the meeting’s invite list. Treating the event as if it were a Hollywood award-show after party, journalists gossiped about the attendees: Who’s in? Who’s out? But since there is a gray zone of semi-democratic states in the world — and since the United States must inevitably retain working relationships with many such states — there was never any way to satisfy critics with the concept of a global democratic summit.

A more apt complaint might have been that some of the invitees are not really functional democratic states at all. The Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, was on the list of attendees. Here is how the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies described that country in its 2021 Armed Conflict Survey:

Over a hundred different conflicts plague the Democratic Republic of Congo (DROC). State and non-state armed groups fight over land, minerals and identity, compounded by competing international interests. The distinction between state and non-state is blurred: the Armed Forces of the Congo is one of many armed groups and it allows certain other actors to control territory and state institutions. . . . Violence escalated in 2020-21, with an increasing number of attacks on civilians and clashes between armed groups. Armed groups frequently attacked, abducted, burned, pillaged, murdered and committed sexual violence, leading to large displacements of people.

The Public-Health Mafia By Philip Klein

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/12/the-public-health-mafia/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=second

Led by boss Anthony Fauci, they have exploited the Covid pandemic to orchestrate a campaign of fear and intimidation to consolidate their power.

 T he public-health community is behaving like the Mafia. They come offering protection. They control the politicians. And they threaten businesses that don’t accede to their demands.

Led by boss Anthony Fauci, and comprising many federal, state, and local officials, they have exploited the Covid pandemic to orchestrate a campaign of fear and intimidation to consolidate their power, and they have no plans to give any of it up.

The protection racket is based on the conceit that if we simply do as they command, we will vanquish Covid. It started with the now-infamous “15 days to slow the spread” and the effort to “flatten the curve” to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed. This quickly turned into six weeks and then months of rolling lockdowns and, in some areas, more than a year of closed schools.

Vaccines, they assured us, were to be the end point of the pandemic. But a year after they became available, and eight months after they have been widely available, the medical Cosa Nostra still insist that people who are fully vaccinated — and boosted — need to wear masks in public (even though they initially convinced people that masks were ineffective).

When the policies that they propose do not produce the promised results, and as one variant after another surfaces, the response is to argue that we have shown insufficient respect to them and that we need to make amends by being more loyal to their guidance.

It is not only the public to whom the public-health mafia offers protection but also politicians. Any politician who defies the orders of the public-health community can expect blistering media coverage whenever there is a surge in cases, as has been the case with Florida governor Ron DeSantis. Politicians who follow public-health guidance might not be protecting their constituents from the virus, but they are protecting themselves from getting blamed, as with New York governor Kathy Hochul, by operating with the imprimatur of the family. Recall how it was common to blame Donald Trump for the hundreds of thousands of Covid deaths on his watch. But President Biden, who has deferred to health officials, is spared any blame, despite the fact that more people have died of Covid under Biden.

“His two big promises were to get Covid behind us and to get rid of Donald Trump,” NBC’s Chuck Todd said on Sunday. “Covid’s not behind us, and Donald Trump’s still lurking. It’s not his fault, but is that why we’re in this no-man’s land here for him?”

And herein lies the essence of the control over political leaders. The current Covid surge, while openly reported on, isn’t being framed as Biden’s fault, because he has agreed to defer to the experts. He is granted protection, and any blame for the persistence of Covid is targeted at those who are challenging his mandates.

To be clear, it is perfectly appropriate for public-health officials to present the best and most up-to-date evidence to decision-makers and advise them on what they believe to be the best course of action to fight the spread of infectious diseases. But it is the role of elected leaders to weigh any such advice against other priorities.

Governor Ron DeSantis takes a stand against racialist ideologies in public institutions and businesses. Christopher F. Rufo

https://www.city-journal.org/florida-v-critical-race-theory

Yesterday, I accompanied Florida governor Ron DeSantis on an early-morning flight from Tallahassee to The Villages retirement community, where he was scheduled to deliver a policy address on critical race theory. During the flight, DeSantis reviewed talking points for his speech, edited communications materials, and, after the plane touched down, selected a red-and-blue sign that would hang on the podium: “STOP WOKE ACT.”

DeSantis warmed up the crowd of approximately 100 people at Ezell Regional Recreation Center and outlined the “Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Act,” which would ban critical-race-theory indoctrination in public schools, prohibit racially abusive training programs in the workplace, and provide parents and workers the right to sue institutions that violate these prohibitions.

The governor framed the rise of critical race theory as a mortal threat to the United States. “I think what you see now with the rise of this woke ideology is an attempt to really delegitimize our history and to delegitimize our institutions,” he said. “And they basically want to replace it with a very militant form of leftism that would absolutely destroy this country.”

As illustrations of critical race theory in American institutions, DeSantis cited seven of my reports for City Journal: Arizona claiming that babies are racist; Santa Clara County denouncing the United States as a “parasitic system”; Philadelphia teaching students to celebrate “Black communism”; San Diego telling teachers “you are racist”; Bank of America teaching that the United States is a “system of white supremacy”; Verizon teaching that America is fundamentally racist; and Google teaching that all Americans are “raised to be racist.”

Biden Methane Rule Chokes On Climate Change Fallacies Gerard Scimeca

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/12/18/biden-methane-rule-chokes-on-climate-change-fallacies/

With the Biden administration all but embracing the ludicrous benchmarks of the “Green New Deal,” it’s important to remember that this far-left environmental blueprint remains unpopular with many politicians and the public at large.

Biden himself is fresh from last month’s posturing with world leaders, celebrities, and activists at the U.N. sponsored COP26 climate change conference in Glasgow, where he made it clear the U.S. will take a back seat to no nation in strangling a domestic economy with feckless environmental hokum.  

The “big” announcement from COP26 this year was 100 countries pledging to reduce methane emissions by 30% below 2020 levels within the next decade. This global pledge spurred Biden’s most significant climate policy announcement yet, a new regulation out of EPA to limit methane emissions.

For anyone who has been paying attention, none of this should come as a surprise. Environmental groups and the mainstream media have been setting the stage for this policy announcement for months.

However, as is often the case with ballyhooed pronouncements on climate action, the alleged facts and research peddled as justification for draconian action are at best incomplete and at worst, shockingly deceitful. What is revealed is merely another example of the environmental left’s sustained assault on American oil and gas.

In response, our organization released an exhaustive policy brief that breaks down and exposes the ecosystem that allows the Biden administration to bog down the oil and gas industry with crippling restrictions, even as domestic energy prices soar and Biden begs OPEC to pump more oil our way.

Eric Adams Will Need Help to Make New York Safe Again Legal and political changes leave the next mayor without the anticrime tools that Giuliani and Bloomberg were able to use. By Seth Barron

https://www.wsj.com/articles/eric-adams-mayor-new-york-impossible-to-save-crime-policing-bail-reform-rikers-stop-frisk-11639772226?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Optimism is running high in the wake of Eric Adams’s election as mayor. As a former cop who grew up in the city, Mr. Adams appears to understand the corrosive effects of disorder. Keechant Sewell, his pick for commissioner of the New York City Police Department, has 25 years of policing experience. Together they will try to bring sanity back to a city that has lost its way.

But there are serious reasons for concern about the capacity of Mr. Adams—or any mayor, for that matter—to confront effectively the wave of violent crime overtaking the city. Over the past decade, changes in the law, shifts in prosecutorial focus, and the imposition of federal oversight have limited crime-fighting options. In important ways, the city’s toolbox of resources to restore order has been rendered unusable.

However one feels about the use—or supposed overuse—of “stop, question and frisk” during the Rudolph Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg years, there is no dispute that the policing tactic was instrumental in driving down the rate of violent crime in New York. Any serious effort to remove guns from the street—either through seizure or by persuading criminals to leave them at home—will depend to a large extent on empowering cops to stop and frisk people they reasonably suspect of carrying weapons.

But that avenue is now largely closed to the NYPD. Mayor Bill de Blasio dropped the city’s appeal of a federal ruling that its use of stop and frisk was unconstitutional. The NYPD’s patrol policies and practices remain under the supervision of a federal monitor, whose office minutely oversees the department’s compliance with its guidelines. Any effort to expand stop-and-frisk will run up against this oversight.

The new Dark Ages The woke assault on Western civilisation is taking us backwards.Joel Kotkin

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/12/15/the-new-dark-ages/

If ignorance is bliss, the Western world should be ecstatic. Even as colleges churn out degrees and collect fees, and technology makes information instantly accessible, the basic level of literacy, as measured by such things as reading books and acquainting oneself with the past, is in a precipitous decline. Rather than building a vital world with our technological culture, we are repeating the memes of feudal times, driven by illiteracy, bias and a rejection of the West’s past.

Over half of American adults have a reading level below the equivalent of sixth-grade level (11- to 12-year-olds), and book reading outside of school or work among the young in particular has declined markedly. A survey conducted in 2014 found slightly over half of American children saying they liked to read books ‘for fun’, down from 60 per cent in 2010. This is not just an American trend. A landmark study by University College London tracked 11,000 children born in 2000 up to age 14 and found that only one in 10 ever did any reading in their spare time as teenagers. The Covid-related lockdowns, notes one recent UN study, raised the number of children experiencing reading difficulties from 460million to 584million.

Even before the pandemic, people’s cognitive skills were weakening. Many employers in the US report difficulty finding workers capable of having a serious conversation. Over 60 per cent of applicants are found to be lacking in basic social skills. Today’s teens’ experiences are increasingly limited to what they access on their phones and social media. Rather than opening minds, social media seem to be creating a generation with little ability to communicate in person.

Sites like Facebook and Instagram have been linked to reduced attention spans: research indicates that the average attention span has fallen 50 per cent since 2000, mainly due to social-media use. This loss of literacy comes at a time when much of our education and literary establishment has embraced censorship, while on the right there’s an increasingly Pavlovian embrace of book-banning. Even in defending the common culture, the right forgets the necessity of diverse opinions in a democracy.

Right now, the most influential advocates for banning classical literature from curricula, or removing books non-compliant on issues like gender, are not disgruntled conservatives. No, the assault on studying ‘great books’ and Western culture largely comes from progressive professors with PhDs, and the ever-expanding university bureaucracies and their recent graduates. The embrace of these cultural trends, as former Mother Jones writer Kevin Drum suggests, has emerged as Democrats have moved far more to the left than Republicans have gone further to the right. This is sometimes enforced with mandatory indoctrination sessions and even requirements to sign the woke version of McCarthy-era ‘loyalty oaths’.

How the media lost touch with reality Batya Ungar-Sargon on the ‘Great Awokening’ of American journalism.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/12/16/how-the-media-lost-touch-with-reality/

The American mainstream media are losing touch with reality. Journalists are increasingly drawn from elite backgrounds, and newsrooms are coalescing around a woke worldview. The media’s interest in race, gender and sexuality has exploded, while class issues and economic concerns struggle to get a look in. And when stories arrive that disrupt the woke narrative – from the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse to Jussie Smollett’s hate-crime hoax – journalists often find themselves on the wrong side of the truth. How did the American media get into this state? And how can proper journalism recover?

Batya Ungar-Sargon is deputy opinion editor at Newsweek and author of Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy. She joined Brendan O’Neill for the latest episode of his podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. What follows is an edited extract from their conversation. Listen to the full episode here.

Brendan O’Neill: The woke have this notion that America is a white-supremacist country – that it always has been and it probably always will be. How do you think this notion of America being a permanently white-supremacist state came about?

Batya Ungar-Sargon: As racism and white supremacy in America have decreased, the obsession with race in the mainstream liberal media has absolutely skyrocketed. At the same time as our acceptance for things like interracial marriage has increased, the usage of the term ‘white supremacy’ in the liberal press has absolutely skyrocketed. It’s part of what sociologists call the ‘Great Awokening’. White liberals are becoming more extreme in their views on race than black and Latino Americans, who are much more socially conservative in general and are more moderate in their views on race.

The idea that all white people have white privilege that puts them above all people of colour started in the academy. It started with the postmodernist revolution, critical race theory (CRT), and the application of the Frankfurt School’s Marxist view in the cultural sphere. People will often call CRT ‘Marxist’, but the problem with CRT is an insufficiency of Marxism. There is no materialism in it. There is no class analysis.

This now common view that every interaction is about power is a very academic one. It was mainstreamed into American discourse through the media, which is increasingly populated by highly educated Americans, as opposed to the blue-collar journalists of yore. Today, 92 per cent of American journalists have a college degree.

Woke Wolverines The University of Michigan medical school embraces divisive racial ideology. John D. Sailer

https://www.city-journal.org/university-of-michigan-medical-school-goes-woke

At the University of Michigan, critical race theory has invaded yet another discipline: medicine. In January 2021, Michigan Medicine’s Anti-Racism Oversight Committee Action Plan called for designing a new curriculum, one that would use an “intersectional framework” and incorporate “critical race theory.”

The story is a microcosm of a nationwide trend that has not spared medicine. In the summer of 2020, senior administrators at Michigan Medicine, like many of their colleagues around the country, called for large-scale change. On June 1, five deans and vice presidents published a letter decrying health disparities, declaring: “We must reject and prevent this manifest . . . injustice.” A few days later, the executive vice president for medical affairs expressed the same urgency in a letter titled “The Time is Now.”

Students pressured the administrators to follow through on their ambitious rhetoric. A coalition of students and student organizations published its own letter, demanding concrete action from the medical school. “Correcting centuries of historical injustices perpetrated against the Black community,” the letter reads, “requires a radical departure from what we are currently doing.” The letter listed over a dozen far-reaching demands. “Michigan Medicine must end traditional policing efforts on its grounds,” it asserted. “Michigan Medicine must support physicians in taking an active role in advocacy efforts”—that is, “a greater role in advocating for change in our communities and government.”

Most notably, the letter demanded a curriculum overhaul. “The redesign,” it dictated, “must use an intersectional framework that incorporates critical race theory.” It hyperlinked to a journal article on intersectionality in medicine, which surmises that “considering intersectionality could lead to more successful patient-clinician interactions.”

The school was happy to oblige. It created a Racial Justice Oversight Committee, which released its Action Plan in early 2021. The 24-page document lays out concrete steps based on the students’ demands, steps which were then “endorsed by Michigan Medicine Leadership.” Thus, Michigan Medicine promised to integrate racially divisive ideology into its curriculum. Closely following student demands, the plan calls for a redesign of Michigan Medicine’s undergraduate, graduate, and continuing medical education. The redesign should adopt the new framework “in partnership with health justice education professionals.”

Reversing the Pandemic’s Education Losses Henrietta H. Fore , David Malpass

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/digital-technology-to-reverse-pandemic-learning-losses-by-henrietta-h-fore-and-david-malpass-2021-12

When schools around the world moved online due to COVID-19, children in developing countries suffered the most. Even though digital learning does not produce the same outcomes as in-person education, technology used effectively can close educational gaps and prevent learning loss.

WASHINGTON, DC – As the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic approaches, classrooms remain fully or partially closed for as many as 647 million schoolchildren around the world. Even where schools have reopened, many students continue to lag behind.

It is now abundantly and painfully clear that children have learned less during the pandemic. According to World Bank estimates, pandemic-related school closures could drive up “learning poverty” – the share of 10-year-olds who cannot read a basic text – to around 70% in low- and middle-income countries. This learning loss could cost an entire generation of schoolchildren $17 trillion in lifetime earnings. As the Omicron variant takes hold, more governments may be tempted to close schools. Without the online infrastructure in place to support learning, doing so would extend the educational losses and deny children the many other benefits of daily school attendance, like the possibility to connect with classmates and develop social skills for personal growth. Interactions with teachers and peers are essential to develop the abilities necessary to work collaboratively. Being part of a class promotes a sense of belonging and helps build self-esteem and empathy. Throughout the pandemic, marginalized children have struggled the most. When classrooms around the world reopened this fall, it became clear that these children had fallen even further behind their peers. Before the pandemic, gender parity in education was improving. But school closures placed an estimated ten million more girls at risk of early marriage, which practically guarantees the end of their schooling. Unless this regression is reversed, learning poverty and the associated human capital loss will hold economies and societies back for decades. Children must be given a chance to recover the education they have lost. They need access to well-designed reading materials, digital learning opportunities, and transformed education systems that help prepare them for future challenges. Well-qualified teachers and effective use of technology are fundamental to this process. Many countries have deployed massive stimulus packages in response to the health crisis. But, as of June 2021, less than 3% of these funds was devoted to the education and training sector. And most of these resources were spent in advanced economies.

China and a Failed WTO Accession by Pete Hoekstra

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18037/china-failed-wto

Twenty years later we can only begin to describe how wrong the assessments were about China and how damaging this single decision has been to the global economic order.

[China] was using predatory practices to drive out European competitors to Huawei so that the CCP would soon dominate this key market. Rather than following the rules, China abused its new access to go into more countries an engage in market manipulation, predatory pricing and lending, and surreptitiously to seed its national security apparatus abroad.

Most American companies have not had the backbone to defend themselves against China’s unfair policies and to stand up for their workers in the U.S. and human rights and freedom in China. More often than not, the only consideration these companies have is the bottom line.

It is time to reevaluate and confront China for the policies of the last 20 years…. Twenty years is enough of sacrificing American jobs, technology, and national security on the altar of full access to the Chinese market that the U.S. and the West will never get.

In all honesty, what is really dangerous is ignoring the long list of abuses and evil behavior by China and the Chinese Communist Party for another 20 years. Now is the time for the West finally to wake up before it is too late.

In 2000 the U.S. Congress passed legislation establishing Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) with China. The foundation for this successful China vote was established in 1998 when Congress adjusted terminology to rebrand “most favored nation” as “normal trade relations.” These and other shenanigans by Congress enabled China ultimately to enter the World Trade Organization (WTO) in December 2001. This fundamentally changed the economic role that China plays globally, propelling it to the second-largest economy in the world today.