Hungary Through the Looking Glass John O’Sullivan

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2021/09/hungary-through-the-looking-glass/

My guess is that you may be thinking you’ve heard more about Hungary in the last few days than at any time since the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. It’s been the subject of worried liberal editorials, concerned progressive news reports, alarmist Never-Trumper op-eds, and a collective nervous breakdown live on Twitter across America.

Admittedly these things happened in America. But when the American Left has a hissy fit, the rest of us worldwide are put under house arrest.

No, don’t panic. I’m not talking about Covid lockdowns, compulsory mask mandates, vaccine passports, or the sins of Dr Fauci. That’s one set of crises Australia doesn’t need to import. Oz has outdone every nation except New Zealand in that regard.  

The reason for Hungary’s sudden eruption into America’s culture wars, and thus into Australia’s, is that its prime minister, Viktor Orban, gave an interview to Tucker Carlson on Fox News in which the questions were polite and the answers informative. And that was thought to be a national outrage by all the progressive guardians of official “truthiness” (Stephen Colbert).   

Carlson is a rare conservative news anchor and a skilled interviewer. He varies the bowling—tough and pressing towards those obfuscating, seeking clarity from those answering his questions. The second method is wrongly despised by most modern journalists anxious to win a reputation as a dragon-slayer. In fact, a hostile interrogation serves mainly to put the interviewee on the defensive. He clams up. That method rarely yields a news story, let alone a scoop. Given a platform and apparently “soft-ball” questions, however, interviewees often relax and say more than they intended. They realise their mistake when they read the next morning’s papers.

There was an additional reason for treating Orban to a formally polite questioning. He is known to an American audience mainly from attacks made on him by the Left, including Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, the latter calling him a “totalitarian thug”.

Justice Department’s Foremost Felony Charge May Be on Thin Ice Even in this toxic political atmosphere, will American juries consent to criminalize previously lawful political protest in the nation’s capital? By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/09/justice-departments-foremost-felony-charge-may-be-on-thin-ice/

More than eight months after the worst attack on Washington since the Civil War, as Joe Biden describes it, not a single American has been charged with sedition or treason related to the alleged “insurrection” on January 6, 2021.

As Ben Boychuk explained in his Thursday essay, despite many harsh warnings insisting  the government would build sedition cases, so far Biden’s Justice Department has failed to live up to its promise.

That’s not to say, of course, that the abusive “Capitol breach” probe hasn’t been a big success for those seeking revenge against Americans who protested Joe Biden’s election. The lives of at least 600 Americans have been destroyed—families torn apart, finances bankrupted, reputations forever tarnished, and dozens held in prison, denied bail, and awaiting trials that won’t begin until next year. 

But the Justice Department’s premier felony charge—obstruction of an official proceeding—is on shaky legal ground, to say the least. It’s a substitute for the sedition cases they cannot prove in court.

Prosecutors have slapped the felony count, which is punishable by up to 20 years in jail, against at least 200 defendants, including mostly misdemeanor cases, in an attempt to turn Trump-supporting trespassers into convicted felons. 

Several defendants, including Jacob Chansely, the so-called QAnon Shaman, and Paul Hodgkins have pleaded guilty to the charge; both will serve prison time even though neither man has a criminal record. (Chansley has been behind bars since January. Judge Royce Lamberth refuses to release Chansley from jail, despite pleas from his attorney that he suffers from mental health issues.)

Joe Biden Marches Through History, Checking His Watch Perhaps Joe’s real model is not Franklin Roosevelt or Bobby Kennedy but Zelig and Forrest Gump. By Charles Lipson

https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/09/joe-biden-marches-through-history-checking-his-watch/

The most solemn and painful duty any president faces is standing silently, head bowed, watching the men and women he sent to war come home in caskets. He sees the terrible cost of war firsthand in those flag-draped coffins and the tears of loved ones there to meet them.

 Last week, Joe Biden tried to fulfill that duty—and stumbled badly. When he should have waited with patient dignity for the caskets to be transferred from the plane, he furtively glanced at his watch. When he spoke to the families, the president brought up the loss of his own son to cancer. Those families wanted to hear only about the bravery and sacrifice of their sons and daughters, husbands and wives, of their heroic service to our nation.

 Surely these were inadvertent blunders. He undoubtedly mentioned his son thinking it would convey to these families that he understood their loss. They heard it differently. They said later it seemed self-referential, tone-deaf, even narcissistic. Likewise, when he glanced at his watch, he probably acted out of habit. When George H. W. Bush did that during a 1992 presidential debate, he was roundly mocked. “Hey, George, do you have someplace more important to be?” His aides wisely removed the watch before the next debate. Biden’s handlers will do the same before the next solemn occasion. 

 When Biden glanced at his watch, his inadvertent message was “I’m busy. How long will this casket ceremony take?” That’s a painfully rude message, however unintentional. The injury to these bereaved families was compounded because their loved ones died during a hurried, botched evacuation ordered by this commander-in-chief, whose bad judgment is becoming the leitmotif of his presidency.

 Grave as the occasion was, cluelessness like Biden’s is a perennial theme of comedy. If the president were a Republican, he would be a rich target, a constant object of ridicule. 

Gerald Ford certainly was during the first year of “Saturday Night Live.” Chevy Chase relentlessly mocked him by tripping over everything in the Oval Office and constantly talking to a stuffed dog. Ford, it should be noted, was probably the most accomplished athlete ever to occupy that office. The mockery came after he stumbled exiting Air Force One. Biden has already tripped entering the plane, a much less complicated task. Few comedians took notice. When George W. Bush stumbled over his words, as he often did, every late-night comic repeatedly mocked him as a moron. He wasn’t. He simply had a word-retrieval problem, a well-known cognitive difficulty that is independent of IQ or education.

Defeat and Dishonesty by Mark Steyn

https://www.steynonline.com/11669/defeat-and-dishonesty

Denyse O’Leary, whom I always read with great interest in our Comments section, chides me for diagnosing our present woes but not proposing solutions.

That ought to be easy. In Afghanistan what needed to be done is almost as old as man. As Victor David Hanson pointed out to Tucker, “This is the greatest loss of military equipment in the history of warfare by one power.”

He’s right. Because US government is so drunkenly profligate, the numbers sound blah-blah to jaded American ears. But $85-90 billion is larger than the annual military budget for every nation around the world except the US and China. For those partial to the International Jewish Conspiracy theory of history, what America has just given the Taliban is equivalent to 85 per cent of all the military aid Washington has given Israel since 1948. The Taliban now possess more Black Hawk helicopters than almost all America’s allies; they own near to a tenth of all Humvees on the planet. That’s aside from less obvious items, such as over 160,000 radios and over 16,000 night-vision goggles that will come in mighty handy for wiping out the remnants of resistance in the Panjshir Valley.

The “solution” to this is to do what every army has known to do down through the millennia: a retreat means not just preventing your men from falling into the hands of the enemy but also their weapons – including, if necessary, your allies’ weapons. As many readers will know, at the beginning of July 1940, just a week after France threw in the towel and signed its armistice with Germany, the Royal Navy attacked and disabled the French fleet, then the largest and most powerful in Continental Europe.

Has The 9/11 Problem Been Fixed? The deadly cost of unprotected borders and unenforced immigration laws. Terrence P. Jeffrey

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/911-problem-was-not-fixed-terrence-p-jeffrey/

Twenty years later, it appears they are still there.

Had you driven through a certain intersection on Leesburg Pike in Falls Church, Virginia, yesterday or today, you would have seen a group of men — some standing, some sitting, but all waiting in the shade, apparently hoping someone would drive up and hire them to do some work.

Twenty years ago, two Saudi nationals, Hani Hanjour and Khalid Almihdhar, drove up to that very location looking for someone to help them do something illegal.

What happened then was described in a “Statement of Facts” that the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia presented in federal court in the case of the United States of America v. Luis A. Martinez-Flores.

“At all times material to this case, the defendant was a citizen and national of El Salvador living in the United States unlawfully,” the statement said.

“On or about the evening of August 1, 2001, the defendant was seeking day labor from passersby in a parking lot at a 7-11 store in Falls Church, Virginia,” it said.

“On that same date, Hanjour and Almihdhar drove a van with out-of-state license plates into the same parking lot while the defendant was there,” it said. “Once in the lot, Hanjour and Almihdhar told the day laborers who approached their van that they needed someone to certify that they were Virginia residents on a DMV form.”

Not everyone there was ready to cooperate.

“When the first two laborers who approached Hanjour and Almihdhar refused to help the men, the defendant came forward and agreed to help Hanjour and Almihdhar in return for a cash payment of $100,” the statement said.

Celebrating Our Enemies, Twenty Years after 9/11 America dives, Islam thrives. Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/celebrating-our-enemies-twenty-years-after-911-bruce-bawer/

On 9/11, the world was shown, in one horrific, indelible image, precisely what Islam is all about. Today, to write the previous sentence is to be guilty of Islamophobia. How did that come to be? It began in the days after 9/11 itself, when George W. Bush – by repeatedly insisting that the cause of the jihadists had nothing to do with Islam – effectively ruled out of bounds any criticism of that religion, or any honest education and open discussion about it. Instead, Bush – who had gotten it into his head that all religions are basically good, and who was manipulated by advisors who wanted to project American power in a part of the world about which they knew very little – used 9/11 as an excuse to rein in Americans’ civil liberties and go nation-building abroad. It was a massive folly, doomed to failure. Why doomed? Because Islam is utterly irreconcilable with American-style freedom and incapable of reform, at least not without a far more aggressive effort than America was willing to commit to. Unlike America, moreover, Islam has a long memory. Muslims recall their forebears’ foiled attempts to conquer the Christian West at Tours in 732 and Vienna in 1683; the attacks of 9/11 were part of a history of such actions that goes back to Islam’s earliest days. Yet few Westerners know about this history or are aware that 9/11 was part of it.

Indeed, how many Westerners know, even now, that the word Islam means submission? For a long time, America was the ultimate symbol of the refusal to submit: in World War II, we took on powerful enemies on two fronts and won; during the Cold War, we protected the Free World from Communist takeover. But the Muslim wars we entered into after 9/11 were different. We were hobbled by leaders who refused to name the enemy – and by a corrosive victim culture, born in the academy but rapidly spreading into the mainstream, that divided Americans into oppressed and oppressor classes. It was Muslims who had attacked us on 9/11, and had done so in accordance with their prophet’s directives; but even as our armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan labored to overcome social ills in those countries that were the direct result of Islam’s baleful centuries-long influence, our elites began painting Islam as beautiful and peaceful while casting Muslims in the role of America’s ultimate victims.

Why Isn’t the Attack on Larry Elder the Biggest Story in America? By Kyle Smith

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/09/why-isnt-the-attack-on-larry-elder-the-biggest-story-in-america/

A white woman in a gorilla mask threw an egg at a black man seeking to become the first non-white governor of our largest state, and the media shrug.

D o a search for “Larry Elder” and gorilla on the CNN website and nothing comes up. Washington Post? Zilch. Nothing comes up on the New York Times site either, although if you make it to the 15th paragraph of a story entitled “The Vice President pushed back against the effort to recall Newsom in the Bay Area,” you will find a bland passing reference to Wednesday’s disgusting incident. According to our nation’s media leaders, it’s not a story that a white person wearing a gorilla mask attacked Larry Elder, a black man seeking to become the first non-white governor of California, by hurling an egg that touched his head.

If Elder were a Democrat, the attack would have been instantly and with good reason dubbed racist. It would not only be front-page news, it would be just about the only news you were hearing about today on CNN and MSNBC. Charles Blow, Perry Bacon, and Jamelle Bouie would each be writing the first in a series of angry columns about it. So would Gail Collins, Jonathan Capehart, Jennifer Rubin, Michelle Goldberg, Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd, Dana Milbank, and Ezra Klein. We would be treated to multiple news analyses about the history of the usage of gorilla tropes against blacks. Joy-Ann Reid, Rachel Maddow, and Don Lemon would be doing hour-long broadcasts on the attack, convening panels discussing just how the attack pulls the scab off racism in America, and proves we have so much work left to do in dealing with the problem. Vox would commission a series about California’s grim history of racism dating back to the Chinese Exclusion Act, and Asian-American and Latino writers would hasten to explain that California’s historic hostility to all sorts of persons of color is as traditional as its Tournament of Roses parade. Three-thousand-word essays about the brutal, unknown history of lynchings in the Golden State would be published in The Atlantic and/or The New Yorker. Al Sharpton, exhibiting a combination of exhaustion and despondency, would be a guest on half a dozen cable TV shows.

Report Shows Fauci Lied To Congress — So Why Does He Still Have A Job?

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/09/10/report-shows-fauci-lied-to-congress-so-why-does-he-still-have-a-job/

COVID-19 czar Anthony Fauci has steadfastly denied that he helped fund gain-of-function research at China’s now-notorious Wuhan Institute of Virology. In recent testimony before Congress, he repeatedly denied ever doing so. But a new 900-page trove of information acquired through a Freedom of Information Act request shows that’s not true.

It’s a huge story. Unfortunately, the mainstream media have essentially ignored it. New York Times? The Washington “Democracy Dies In Darkness” Post? CNN? Sorry, couldn’t be bothered, even though a 2015 study clearly referred to such research taking place.

It took an aggressive, left-leaning online investigative reporting site, The Intercept, to do the Big Media’s work for it by digging up the FOIA material. The mountain of papers are damning, showing clearly that a nonprofit company, EcoHealth Group, channeled federal grants from the National Institute of Health and Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease to the Chinese government-run Wuhan Institute of Virology.

“The (U.S.) bat coronavirus grant provided EcoHealth Alliance with a total of $3.1 million, including $599,000 that the Wuhan Institute of Virology used in part to identify and alter bat coronaviruses likely to infect humans,” the Intercept reported.

“Alter bat coronaviruses” is the key phrase here, since it indicates gain-of-function experimentation, which even the Obama administration had tightly restricted.

Scientists with expertise in both viral research and government grant mechanisms call the latest evidence a smoking gun. A thread of tweets by Rutgers University molecular biologist Richard E. Enbright provides further scientific insight into what was going on.

“The documents make it clear that assertions by the NIH director, Francis Collins, and the NIAID director, Anthony Fauci, that the NIH did not support gain-of-function research or potential pandemic pathogen enhancement at WIV are untruthful,” Enbright wrote.

Broad Institute molecular biologist Alina Chan told The Intercept that the documents also make the lab-leak theory of the COVID-19 virus even more likely.

How the Pandemic Is Changing the Norms of Science: by John P.A. Ioannidis

John P.A. Ioannidis is Professor of Medicine and Professor of Epidemiology and Population Health, as well as Professor  of Biomedical Science and Statistics, at Stanford University.

Imperatives like skepticism and disinterestedness are being junked to fuel political warfare that has nothing in common with scientific methodology.

In the past I had often fervently wished that one day everyone would be passionate and excited about scientific research. I should have been more careful about what I had wished for. The crisis caused by the lethal COVID-19 pandemic and by the responses to the crisis have made billions of people worldwide acutely interested and overexcited about science. Decisions pronounced in the name of science have become arbitrators of life, death, and fundamental freedoms. Everything that mattered was affected by science, by scientists interpreting science, and by those who impose measures based on their interpretations of science in the context of political warfare.

One problem with this new mass engagement with science is that most people, including most people in the West, had never been seriously exposed to the fundamental norms of the scientific method. The Mertonian norms of communalism, universalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism have unfortunately never been mainstream in education, media, or even in science museums and TV documentaries on scientific topics.

Before the pandemic, the sharing of data, protocols, and discoveries for free was limited, compromising the communalism on which the scientific method is based. It was already widely tolerated that science was not universal, but the realm of an ever-more hierarchical elite, a minority of experts. Gargantuan financial and other interests and conflicts thrived in the neighborhood of science—and the norm of disinterestedness was left forlorn.

As for organized skepticism, it did not sell very well within academic sanctuaries. Even the best peer-reviewed journals often presented results with bias and spin. Broader public and media dissemination of scientific discoveries was largely focused on what could be exaggerated about the research, rather than the rigor of its methods and the inherent uncertainty of the results.  

How 9/11 exposed the depths of Western self-loathing A West that thinks it deserves to be attacked cannot defend itself. Tom Slater

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/09/09/how-9-11-exposed-the-depths-of-western-self-loathing/

As the 20th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, we are being confronted once again, on news broadcasts, in documentaries and online, with that footage. With the images of those planes striking the Twin Towers, of survivors covered in blood and dust, of heroic first responders saving the lives they could amid unimaginable carnage. It still shakes us to this day. But amid all the acts of commemoration and remembrance one thing risks getting lost. That in the wake of that act of barbarism, an attack not just on New York and DC but on the West and what it stands for, there were many members of the British intelligentsia who, after the dust settled, were struck with more or less the same thought: maybe America brought this on itself.

Just two days after an attack that claimed almost 3,000 innocent lives, it fell to the Guardian’s Seumas Milne to say the quiet part out loud. ‘They can’t see why they are hated’, ran the headline. He laid blame for the carnage on the ills of American foreign policy, on its ‘unabashed national egotism and arrogance’. ‘If it turns out that Tuesday’s attacks were the work of Osama bin Laden’s supporters, the sense that the Americans are once again reaping a dragons’ teeth harvest they themselves sowed will be overwhelming’, he thundered. ‘Perhaps it is too much to hope that, as rescue workers struggle to pull firefighters from the rubble, any but a small minority [of Americans] might make the connection between what has been visited upon them and what their government has visited upon large parts of the world.’

Veteran British leftist Tariq Ali, in his 2002 book The Clash of Fundamentalisms, continued in this vein. ‘The subjects of the Empire had struck back’, he wrote. 9/11 confirmed in his mind the ‘universal truth that… slaves and peasants do not always obey their masters’. As spiked’s Mick Hume noted at the time, the well-to-do, Western-educated Saudis who largely carried out 9/11 made for unlikely imperial subjects – and the firefighters and office workers who perished made for unlikely stand-ins for American imperialism. But Ali didn’t let these facts dent his analysis. He didn’t celebrate the attacks, of course, but he did suggest they were all but inevitable. If anything, we should expect more ‘blowback’.

In the London Review of Books a month after the Twin Towers fell, classicist Mary Beard captured what she saw as the prevailing mood. ‘[W]hen the shock had faded, more hard-headed reaction set in’, she wrote. One of these reactions being that, ‘however tactfully you dress it up, the United States had it coming. That is, of course, what many people openly or privately think. World bullies, even if their heart is in the right place, will in the end pay the price.’ There was an outcry in response to her comments, as many people, perhaps understandably, took this to mean that Beard herself thought America ‘had it coming’. She later clarified her point in a Guardian interview in 2007: ‘I wasn’t saying those people deserved to die, but simply that there was a connection, or people perceived a connection, between American geopolitics and what had happened.’