Biden’s Afghanistan Mistakes by Peter Schweizer

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17766/biden-afghanistan-mistakes

Trump’s Doha Agreement only bound the United States to a “complete withdrawal of all remaining forces” with the “commitment and action” of the Taliban on its obligations as laid out in the accord. Those terms bound the Taliban not to “allow any of its members, other individuals or groups, including al-Qaeda, to use the soil of Afghanistan to threaten the security of the United States and its allies,” as well as “not to cooperate with groups or individuals threatening the security of the United States and its allies,” and to “prevent any group or individual in Afghanistan from threatening the security of the United States and its allies.”

Even prior to the final assaults on Kabul and the suicide bombings at Hamid Karzai International Airport, it was clear the Taliban was neck-deep in a proxy relationship with al-Qaeda via its relationship with the Haqqani network. Once again, the information that should have led to a pause and a hard-nosed assessment of how to complete the withdrawal in an orderly, safe way was ignored to meet a political deadline.

Instead, the Afghan men who helped the U.S., the women who breathed freedom for the first time, the military veterans from the U.S. and its allies who fought and died there all feel a sense of abandonment and frustration at this endgame incompetence. Those in the government who continue to hunt terrorist jihadis have lost their sources, bases of operation, and ability to quick-strike military targets that a resurgent al-Qaeda will now present there.

The details of the Biden administration’s inner planning prior to the pullout from Afghanistan are beginning to emerge, and they are not comforting. “Failure is an orphan,” as the old saying goes, but a paternity test is in order to explain a failed effort that will haunt the administration for years to come.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken, appearing before congressional panel recently, tried to defend the rationale for the hasty withdrawal, claiming, “We made the right decision in ending America’s longest war.” This, of course, dodges the question of how the withdrawal was conducted.

Joe Biden’s Political Prisoners BLM rioters, Antifa thugs, and anti-Kavanaugh protesters are off the hook while Trump-supporting, anti-Biden protesters suffer in jail for months, charged with obstruction and other silly crimes. By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/17/joe-bidens-political-prisoners/

The latest “conspiracy theory” consuming the political Right, our media betters warn, is the idea that the Biden regime is creating a class of political prisoners stemming from the January 6 protest on Capitol Hill. Scoffing at accusations that January 6 protesters are treated differently from other protesters, columnists and talking heads insist it’s nothing more than right-wing media spin.

A rally scheduled this weekend for January 6 defendants has official Washington apoplectic. Dozens of Americans remain locked up in a D.C. jail and at facilities across the country as they await trials that won’t begin until at least mid-2022,.

“The idea that people are languishing unfairly in grim detention facilities, though, fits neatly with a broad narrative that the Biden administration is rounding up and jailing political opponents,” Philip Bump, national correspondent for the Washington Post, wrote on Thursday. “This weekend’s rally is called ‘Justice for J6,’ implying that those still held are being detained unjustly for punitive reasons.”

All of that, of course, is true. More than 600 Americans have been rounded up by Joe Biden’s Justice Department with new arrests coming every week. Federal prosecutors have requested pre-trial detention for at least 100 defendants; 60 Capitol protesters are now in jail and denied bail. For months, January 6 detainees have suffered under solitary confinement conditions, were allowed out of their cells only one hour per day, and have been denied access to lawyers, exercise, personal hygiene, and religious services.

But Bump, like the rest of the national news media, not only downplays the detention of dozens of January 6 protesters including those charged with no violent crime, he justifies the unequal treatment under the caveat that the accused participated in an alleged “insurrection” to overthrow the government.

At the same time, the American people are supposed to deny what they see with their own eyes and believe that the 630 or so Americans arrested and charged for mostly misdemeanor offenses related to January 6 are being treated the same way as Antifa or Black Lives Matter activists. 

‘Death To America’ tweets Kansas University student body president By Eric Utter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/09/death_to_america_tweets_kansas_university_student_body_president.html

“Death to America.”

Shout the Iranian mullahs? No, so says the University of Kansas student body President, Niya McAdoo. And she has no plans to apologize.

Both the @KUPresident and the student senate Twitter account retweeted a September 3rd post reading, “Happy Friday everybody. Death to America.” Replete with a laughing emoji. Because there’s nothing funnier than that.

Ms. McAdoo sent out a follow-up tweet saying, “The more you read American history, the more the whole ‘Death to America’ line sounds less like a terrifying, chaotic sentiment, and more like a perfectly rational, if anything remarkably reserved, statement.”

Yes, death to unborn babies, the unvaccinated, infidels, and America. Who could disagree? (Outside of maybe unborn babies, the unvaccinated, infidels, and Trump-loving troglodytes.) 

Although I do wonder what she’d say if conservatives and patriots pledged, “Death to pro-abortionists, the vaccinated, those who disagree with us, and America-haters?”

Incredibly, the university has no plans to investigate McAdoo for her comments. Nor will Twitter ban her. Its moronic—and vile — thought arbiters are too busy banning folks who still believe in freedom and personal autonomy, i.e. “hate speech.” (Like, for example, me. I’ve been banned for months now. And for a post I didn’t even make and know nothing about.) Threaten to stand up to leftist thugs and Twitter will ban you, possibly for life. Vowing “Death to America,” however, is perfectly okay.

Bringing Somalia to Minnesota By Michael Letts

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/09/bringing_somalia_to_minnesota.html

Unless voters in Minneapolis wish to find their city and homes receiving warnings like the State Department’s against Omar’s home country, they might want to reconsider whom they entrust with power.

Imagine an agitated person who forms a career railing against doctors after learning of a surgeon who committed gross malpractice. That non-medically trained agitator uses questionable means to eventually become a hospital administrator to implement her radical policies of slashing budgets for medical care and personnel. To appease her, everyone in her hospital must follow her rage and ideology rather than proven medical science.

Who would go to that hospital?

Yet, this principle is what Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN) seeks to inflict upon the law-enforcement community. This principle is in play in the wake of the recent ruling by the Minnesota Supreme Court. When voters head to the polls, they will decide whether to eliminate the Minneapolis charter requirement of police department, and replace it with a public safety department that “employs a public health approach.”

As Omar weighs in on this topic, she brings her considerable inexperience to the world of law enforcement. Once again weaponizing the power provided to her by Minneapolis voters and a sycophantic media, she accelerates as the bus careens off the cliff. 

Firmly protected by the shields of others, Omar seems to enjoy a perverse pleasure in tarnishing precinct shields across her district and beyond. Why the people in Minnesota’s fifth district elected this woman remains a mystery, but the majority of citizens in her district evidently approve of her rhetoric, behavior, and agenda. Yet, despite her problematic rise to power and anti-Semitic controversies, the media and a woke-obsessed culture allow Ilhan Omar free to spew hateful ideologies with little pushback or consequences.

The Real Story in Durham’s Indictment of Democratic Lawyer Michael Sussmann By Andrew C. McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/09/the-real-story-in-durhams-indictment-of-democratic-lawyer-michael-sussmann/

“Meantime, having orchestrated the creation of all this smoke, the Clinton campaign exploits it to tell the media and the American people, “See, Trump is a Kremlin mole!”I suddenly think the eventual Durham report could be very interesting reading.”

The special counsel’s final report on the Clinton campaign’s manufacturing of the Trump–Russia collusion narrative will be very interesting reading.

T here is a long game and a short game going on in special counsel John Durham’s indictment of Democratic Party lawyer Michael Sussmann on a false-statements count.

The short of it is this: A false statement was allegedly made by Sussmann to the FBI’s then-general counsel, James Baker, on September 19, 2016. In federal law, the false-statement crime has a five-year statute of limitations, meaning it had to be charged by this Sunday (September 19, 2021). Consequently, even if Durham would probably have preferred to wait until his full investigation was concluded before filing indictments, by delaying beyond Sunday, he would have lost what appears to be an eminently provable felony charge. If he was going to indict Sussmann on this conduct, it was now or never.

Now, more critically, the long game.

It is unusual for a one-count false-statement charge, which can be alleged in a paragraph, to be presented as a 27-page speaking indictment. But Durham wrote a highly detailed account of the facts and circumstances surrounding the false-statements charge. It is significant in that it tells us far more about his investigation.

Here is where the prosecutor appears to be going: The Trump–Russia collusion narrative was essentially a fabrication of the Clinton campaign that was peddled to the FBI (among other government agencies) and to the media by agents of the Clinton campaign — particularly, its lawyers at Perkins Coie — who concealed the fact that they were quite intentionally working on the campaign’s behalf, and that they did not actually believe there was much, if anything, to the collusion narrative. It was serviceable as political dirt but would not amount to anything real for criminal or national-security purposes.

Biden’s Vaccine Mandate Violates Fundamental Freedoms Chris Talgo

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/09/18/bidens-vaccine-mandate-violates-fundamental-freedoms/

On September 9, President Joe Biden announced that nearly 100 million Americans will be forced to get vaccinated, or else they could lose their livelihoods.

According to Biden, “the Department of Labor is developing an emergency rule to require all employers with 100 or more employees, that together employ over 80 million workers, to ensure their workforces are fully vaccinated or show a negative test at least once a week.”

He added, “all nursing home workers who treat patients on Medicare and Medicaid” and “those who work in hospitals, home healthcare facilities, or other medical facilities – a total of 17 million healthcare workers,” must all get vaccinated.

And, for good measure, Biden declared, “I will sign an executive order that will now require all executive branch federal employees to be vaccinated — all.  And I’ve signed another executive order that will require federal contractors to do the same.”

So, per the president, all the health care workers who literally put their lives on the line treating COVID-19 patients over the past 18 months, have no choice but to get vaccinated.

First, does the federal government have the authority to mandate vaccines? In a word, no.

The Constitution grants no such power to the national government. In fact, several officials in the Biden administration, including the president, have articulated that the federal government is not capable of forcing Americans to get vaccinated.

The states, per the 10th Amendment, do possess the power to implement vaccine mandates. In 1905, the Supreme Court ruled that states can enforce compulsory vaccination laws based on the police powers granted to the states in the Constitution. However, in that ruling, as well as subsequent vaccine-oriented rulings, the Court has made it clear that this power belongs to the states, and the states alone.

College Students Don’t Need Protection from the Truth Academic research suggests ‘trigger warnings’ carry no significant benefit and may even cause psychological harm. By James Freeman

https://www.wsj.com/articles/college-students-dont-need-protection-from-the-truth-11631825498?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

The collapsing justification for one university fad brings hope that others may follow. Even within the academic establishment, it seems that no one can mount a fact-based defense for the trendy notion that students need to be protected from potentially disturbing ideas. This week’s encouraging news also presents an interesting test case of whether academic institutions can still perform the basic functions for which they were created.

Carleton College professors Amna Khalid and Jeffrey Aaron Snyder write in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

When debates about trigger warnings first erupted, there was little-to-no research on their effectiveness. Today we have an emerging body of peer-reviewed research to consult.
The consensus, based on 17 studies using a range of media, including literature passages, photographs, and film clips: Trigger warnings do not alleviate emotional distress. They do not significantly reduce negative affect or minimize intrusive thoughts, two hallmarks of PTSD. Notably, these findings hold for individuals with and without a history of trauma. (For a review of the relevant research, see the 2020 Clinical Psychological Science article “Helping or Harming? The Effect of Trigger Warnings on Individuals With Trauma Histories” by Payton J. Jones, Benjamin W. Bellet, and Richard J. McNally.)
We are not aware of a single experimental study that has found significant benefits of using trigger warnings. Looking specifically at trauma survivors, including those with a diagnosis of PTSD, the Jones et al. study found that trigger warnings “were not helpful even when they warned about content that closely matched survivors’ traumas.”
What’s more, they found that trigger warnings actually increased the anxiety of individuals with the most severe PTSD, prompting them to “view trauma as more central to their life narrative.” “Trigger warnings,” they concluded, “may be most harmful to the very individuals they were designed to protect.”

In theory, universities exist to separate truth from superstition, fact from fiction and thereby create knowledge, which they are then supposed to share with the world.

Now that the relevant academic literature says that a highly influential academic theory is wrong, what are college administrators going to do about it? Will they abolish trigger warnings, or will they bitterly cling to a faith-based conviction that free inquiry must come with a warning label?

Hope for the Lost Souls of Liberalism The Western model of individual liberty and religious neutrality is in trouble. A return to the big questions is in order. By Barton Swaim

https://www.wsj.com/articles/liberalism-crises-political-philosophy-religion-storey-kass-bloom-cancel-culture-war-11631889543?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Liberalism is in trouble. I don’t mean the narrow “liberalism” of the post-1960s Democratic Party, although that’s in trouble, too. I mean liberalism in the wider, classical sense—a view of government and society embracing free markets, representative democracy, individual freedom, strict limits on state power, and religious neutrality.

Twenty-five years ago, that understanding of liberalism was almost unquestionable. Not anymore. On the left, markets generate inequality, democracy works only when it achieves the right outcomes, individual freedom is uninteresting unless it involves sexual innovation or abortion, the state is everything, and religion doesn’t deserve neutrality. On the right—or anyway the intellectual/populist right—markets destroy traditional moral conventions, democracy is mostly a sham, individual freedom encourages behavioral deviancies, state power is a force for good, and the First Amendment’s ban on the establishment of religion was likely a bad idea.

Partisans will dispute these characterizations, but the liberal order in America (and Europe) is under attack—and not without reason. Political debates in Washington are bereft of good faith, the education system idealizes self-hatred and sexual confusion, and even corporate leaders—who until yesterday could be counted on to champion patriotism and hard work—eagerly recite the maxims of idiots.

1776 Unites Curriculum Highlights the American Character . Mike Sabo

https://realclearwire.com/articles/2021/09/17/1776_unites_curriculum_highlights_the_american_character_794627.html

Teachers looking for a history and civics curriculum that focuses on America’s promise of securing liberty for all have a new resource: the 1776 Unites curriculum. A creation of 1776 Unites, an initiative of the Woodson Center focused on reviving American education and culture, the curriculum embraces the “ideas of family, faith, and entrepreneurship that have enabled all Americans – including black Americans – throughout history to move from persecution to prosperity.”

As 1776 Unites members wrote in an open letter to the National School Boards Association and local school boards, the curriculum “offers authentic, motivating stories from American history that show what is best in our national character and what our freedom makes possible even in the most difficult circumstances.”

According to entrepreneur and civil rights leader Bob Woodson, it tells stories of “black Americans who seized their own destinies and flourished despite the harsh restrictions imposed by true institutional racism in the form of slavery and Jim Crow.”

The curriculum currently features 15 units for high school students on black entrepreneurs and philanthropists such as Biddy Mason, Elijah McCoy, and Paul Cuffe; athletes such as Jesse Owens and Alice Coachman; and important events from American history such as the Tulsa race massacre. Woodson says that the units released so far have purposefully “covered multiple lesser-known stories of black excellence and resilience from history.”

Access to the curriculum, which has already been downloaded over 20,000 times, is free with registration at the 1776 Unites website. Each unit contains a wealth of resources including lesson plans, primary sources, questions for classroom discussion, a Power Point presentation, multiple-choice questions, learning standards, and more. A curriculum for K-8 students will be released soon.

Woodson notes that most school curricula have been traditionally “short on inspiring stories of black achievement.” Instead, as seen with the New York Times’s 1619 Project, “the narrative of racial grievance has been corrupting the instruction of American history and the humanities for many decades – and has accelerated dangerously over the past year.” Woodson continues: “The most damaging effects of such instruction fall on lower income minority children, who are implicitly told that they are helpless victims with no power or agency to shape their own futures.”

The Meaning of Constitution Day By The 1776 Commission

https://www.realclearpublicaffairs.com/articles/2021/09/17/the_meaning_of_constitution_day_794952.html

Two hundred and thirty-four years ago on this date, 39 delegates from throughout the fledgling United States signed our Constitution, uniting a diverse population into one nation, bound together by common principles and a deep reverence for liberty.

The signing of the Constitution began the fulfillment of the promise made in the Declaration of Independence. These two documents, along with the Bill of Rights, are America’s Charters of Freedom.

The Constitution paved the way for the liberation of many millions, in the United States and around the world, from the shackles of poverty, despotism, and slavery. Powerful forces today are seeking to smear America’s founding as essentially unjust for preserving slavery, but it was through the provisions of the Constitution – informed by the principles of the Declaration – that slavery in our nation was eradicated.

A year ago today, President Donald Trump – recognizing the danger of the ongoing attacks on the American heritage in academia, in the corporate world, in the media, and in the halls of government – announced the creation of The President’s Advisory 1776 Commission. Doing so, he vowed that “the legacy of 1776 will never be erased” and that “our heroes will never be forgotten.”

This past January, on Martin Luther King Jr., Day, The 1776 Commission released The 1776 Report – a robust restatement of America’s founding principles and ideals. The 1776 Report detailed how slavery, fascism, communism, racism, and identity politics are antithetical to those principles and ideals, and it called on schools to “reject any curriculum that promotes one-sided partisan opinions, activist propaganda, or factional ideologies that demean America’s heritage, dishonor our heroes, or deny our principles.”