IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Number of Detained Unaccompanied Minors Tops 20,000 By Charlotte Cuthbertson

Posted By on April 17th, 2021

https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_morningbrief/number-of-detained-unaccompan

More than 20,000 children, mostly from Central America, are currently being held in facilities operated by Health and Human Services (HHS) at a taxpayer cost of at least $60 million per week.

Most of the children crossed the border illegally within the last two months.

In March, almost 19,000 unaccompanied minors—a record number—were apprehended by Border Patrol, according to Customs and Border Protection (CBP). The number doubled from February when 9,400 were apprehended, whereas the preceding three months hovered around 5,000 per month.

Border Patrol is required to transfer custody of unaccompanied minors to HHS within 72 hours. However, the sheer numbers have become overwhelming and children are staying in crowded CBP holding facilities for sometimes more than a week.

HHS started releasing data on the number of unaccompanied minors it was holding on March 23—which was 11,551.

Since then, HHS has opened several emergency holding centers, including converted convention centers in Dallas, San Antonio, and San Diego, military bases in border states, and structures in interior states such as Pennsylvania and Michigan.

MEDIA Comments turned off

NBC Unintentionally Dunks on the Ruling Class Over Its View of America’s Bigotry Benjamin Weingarten

Posted By on April 17th, 2021

https://www.theepochtimes.com/nbc-unintentionally-dunks-on-the-ruling-class-over-

A recent piece shows the mercifully pathetic nature and irrelevance of U.S. white supremacists, while revealing the threat posed by a Ruling Class targeting millions of Americans.

To the Ruling Class’s communications arm doing business as the corporate media, America is besieged by white bigotry, not a nation that has more successfully integrated diverse peoples into a common culture of liberty and justice than any other in human history. It is imperative to explain away any and all evidence to the contrary. It is also critical to champion one’s political allies in this project, no matter their own potential villainy.

NBC News recently provided a textbook example of such mendacity, and odiousness, while inadvertently undermining the favored Ruling Class narrative of American deplorability in covering “White Lives Matter” rallies that never materialized.

As I argue, actual white supremacists, as Zadrozny’s reporting shows, mercifully seem to lack power in this country—contra the popular narrative, which I challenge in the piece.

Consider:

by an authoritative measure of national animus like the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) hate crime statistics, the latest annual figures from 2019 show some 8,812 victims of bias, 4,930 of which suffered from single-bias incidents concerning race/ethnicity/ancestry, in a country of 330 million, where the number of interactions between different peoples are virtually infinite. To put these numbers in perspective, the FBI reported nearly two times as many estimated murders—16,425—as hate crimes in 2019. Victims of all hate crimes, whether classified as concerning one, or multiple biases, represented .00269 percent of the total U.S. population.

Now, what of the perpetrators of these crimes? Of the 6,406 known offenders identified in 2019, 23.9 percent were black or African American, almost two times the 13 percent of the country this population comprises. That is, blacks committed disproportionately more hate crimes than did those of any other race, including whites, who committed 52.5 percent of all hate crimes while comprising 60 percent of the country.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

BREAKING EXCLUSIVE: Hillary’s Attorney Marc Elias Inserts Himself Into the Arizona Senate Audit of Maricopa County – Is Using His Massive Network to Broaden His Attack – What Are They Hiding? By Joe Hoft

Posted By on April 17th, 2021

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/04/breaking-exclusive-hillarys-attorney-m

The national Democratic machine is in panic mode over the upcoming Arizona Senate’s Maricopa County ballot audit. Last week the Democrats sent in its national fixer, attorney Marc Elias’s firm Perkins Coie to throw around threats and make the audit go away.  Today Elias took to the media in his effort to bad-mouth the audit.

The stakes are astronomical for the Dems, after all, the November 3, 2020 election steal gained them the presidency and control of Congress.

The swing states in which the 2020 election steal occurred are key to uncovering the truth and proving the fraud in the election and Arizona is one of those states.

 The Democrats’ Attorney Marc Elias Has His Army of Radical Lawyers Ready to Threaten and Stop Any Election Audit in Maricopa County Arizona

MEDIA Comments turned off

Journalists, Learning They Spread a CIA Fraud About Russia, Instantly Embrace a New One: Glenn Greenwald

Posted By on April 17th, 2021

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/journalists-learning-they-spread?token=eyJ1c2V

The most significant Trump-era alliance is between corporate outlets and security state agencies, whose evidence-free claims they unquestioningly disseminate.

That Russia placed “bounties” on the heads of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan was one of the most-discussed and consequential news stories of 2020. It was also, as it turns out, one of the most baseless — as the intelligence agencies who spread it through their media spokespeople now admit, largely because the tale has fulfilled and outlived its purpose.

The saga began on June 26, 2020, when The New York Times announced that unnamed “American intelligence officials” have concluded that “a Russian military intelligence unit secretly offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing coalition forces in Afghanistan — including targeting American troops.” The paper called it “a significant and provocative escalation” by Russia. Though no evidence was ever presented to support the CIA’s claims — neither in that original story nor in any reporting since — most U.S. media outlets blindly believed it and spent weeks if not longer treating it as proven, highly significant truth. Leading politicians from both parties similarly used this emotional storyline to advance multiple agendas.

The story appeared — coincidentally or otherwise — just weeks after President Trump announced his plan to withdraw all troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2020. Pro-war members of Congress from both parties and liberal hawks in corporate media spent weeks weaponizing this story to accuse Trump of appeasing Putin by leaving Afghanistan and being too scared to punish the Kremlin. Cable outlets and the op-ed pages of The New York Times and Washington Post endlessly discussed the grave implications of this Russian treachery and debated which severe retaliation was needed. “This is as bad as it gets,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Then-candidate Joe Biden said Trump’s refusal to punish Russia and his casting doubt on the truth of the story was more proof that Trump’s “entire presidency has been a gift to Putin,” while Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) demanded that, in response, the U.S. put Russians and Afghans “in body bags.”

What was missing from this media orgy of indignation and militaristic demands for retaliation was an iota of questioning of whether the story was, in fact, true.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

You Have to Read This Letter A New York father pulls his daughter out of Brearley with a message to the whole school. Is the dam starting to break? Bari Weiss

Posted By on April 17th, 2021

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/you-have-to-read-this-letter?token=

……If you don’t know about Brearley, it’s a private all-girls school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It costs $54,000 a year and prospective families apparently have to take an “anti-racism pledge” to be considered for admission. (In the course of my reporting for this piece I spoke to a few Brearley parents.)Gutmann chose to pull his daughter, who has been in the school since kindergarten, and sent this missive to all 600 or so families in the school earlier this week.

Dear Fellow Brearley Parents, 

Our family recently made the decision not to reenroll our daughter at Brearley for the 2021-22 school year. She has been at Brearley for seven years, beginning in kindergarten. In short, we no longer believe that Brearley’s administration and Board of Trustees have any of our children’s best interests at heart. Moreover, we no longer have confidence that our daughter will receive the quality of education necessary to further her development into a critically thinking, responsible, enlightened, and civic minded adult. I write to you, as a fellow parent, to share our reasons for leaving the Brearley community but also to urge you to act before the damage to the school, to its community, and to your own child’s education is irreparable. 

It cannot be stated strongly enough that Brearley’s obsession with race must stop. It should be abundantly clear to any thinking parent that Brearley has completely lost its way. The administration and the Board of Trustees have displayed a cowardly and appalling lack of leadership by appeasing an anti-intellectual, illiberal mob, and then allowing the school to be captured by that same mob. What follows are my own personal views on Brearley’s antiracism initiatives, but these are just a handful of the criticisms that I know other parents have expressed. 

I object to the view that I should be judged by the color of my skin. I cannot tolerate a school that not only judges my daughter by the color of her skin, but encourages and instructs her to prejudge others by theirs. By viewing every element of education, every aspect of history, and every facet of society through the lens of skin color and race, we are desecrating the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and utterly violating the movement for which such civil rights leaders believed, fought, and died. 

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The CDC Shouldn’t Treat Racism as a Public-Health Crisis Joel Zinberg

Posted By on April 17th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/04/the-cdc-shouldnt-treat-racism-as-a-public-health-crisis/

For COVID-19, the numbers don’t bear out the assumption, which distracts from the agency’s core mission.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was founded in 1946 as the Communicable Disease Center, with a simple goal: prevent the spread of malaria. The mission soon expanded to all communicable diseases and, more recently, to areas — such as domestic violence, gun control, and vaping — that, while related to health, seem far afield from the agency’s primary purpose. Today the CDC describes its mission as protecting the nation from health threats both foreign and domestic. Now the agency appears to have expanded its mandate into progressive politics.

In a recent statement, CDC director Rochelle Walensky asserts that there have been disproportionate numbers of COVD-19 cases and deaths in communities of color. She claims that the disparities were the result not of COVID-19 but rather of racism, which she labels a public-health crisis. Her statement echoes an American Medical Association policy recognizing racism as a public-health threat and similar declarations from 194 state and local government entities.

But the director’s statement is inconsistent with the CDC’s current data that show little or no increased incidence of black COVID-19 deaths. At best it reflects outdated data documenting disparities that no longer exist. At worst, it reflects a political agenda in search of a justification. Whichever it is, it suggests that public-health officials, in this case the CDC, have become distracted from their core job.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Where Have You Gone, Atticus Finch? By Jack Cashill

Posted By on April 16th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/04/where_have_you_gone_atticus_finch.html

In the archives of legal fiction, two characters best embody historic liberal self-perception. One is attorney Atticus Finch of To Kill a Mockingbird fame. The other is Juror #8 in the 1957 film, 12 Angry Men. Today, each is an endangered species.

In his defense of Tom Robinson, a black man accused of rape in 1930s Alabama, Atticus ignored public opinion. He stared down the mobs intent on extra-legal justice and protected his ”mockingbird” as best he could. The unlikely mockingbird today is former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. As Chauvin learned quickly, if he did not know it beforehand, today’s vestigial liberals identify not with Atticus but with the mob.

Hell, as even Snopes had to concede Vice President Kamala Harris “encouraged her supporters to donate” to a nonprofit called the Minnesota Freedom Fund (MFF) that was bailing out members of the mob arrested for rioting after George Floyd’s death.

Chauvin’s crime, like Robinson’s, was being of a certain race in a society that increasingly sees justice only through the prism of race. Like the fictional Robinson, the real-life Chauvin represents one of a long and growing line of sacrificial lambs offered on the altar of racial “justice” to expiate the nation’s imagined sins.

Ever impatient, the mobs from the very same liberal metro could not wait for Chauvin’s official immolation to demand the sacrifice of a new lamb. This time, the mobs have shown no scruple about sating themselves on a female officer. To them, it mattered not a whit that veteran Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, officer Kim Potter clearly showed no racial malice in her accidental shooting of Duante Wright, a troubled archetype from a subculture slowly being crushed under the weight of rigidly enforced dishonesty.

To his good fortune, Chauvin has found his Atticus in defense attorney Eric Nelson. Although he has backstage help from the Minnesota Police and Peace Officers Association, Nelson has been arguing solo against the snarky Mod Squad of a prosecution team. Calm and dispassionate, the forty-something Nelson has been quietly picking the prosecution case apart these last three weeks.  Viewed from another planet, the unknowing alien might wonder why Chauvin is even on trial. For details, please see the work done by Andrew Branca at Legal Insurrection.  Those who have not followed the case closely would be wise to ignore Big Media and watch the closing arguments, likely on Monday, before forming an opinion.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Biden Intelligence Community Breaches Authority to Target the Right Julie Kelly

Posted By on April 16th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/15/biden-intelligence-community-breaches-authority-to-target-the-right/

Instead of prioritizing resources to confront the menace posed by America’s foreign adversaries the IC is devoting most of its time to pursuing Americans on the political Right.

The freshly reelected Republican senator from Nebraska had kind words this week for Joe Biden’s intelligence chiefs. “The American people are blessed to have an [intelligence community] as serious as ours,” Senator Ben Sasse said during Wednesday’s Senate Intelligence Committee hearing. He called the group, which included FBI Director Christopher Wray and CIA Director William Burns, “heroes” and wanted a chance to “say thank you” in front of the American people.

Sasse, who is supposed to act as a fierce skeptic not a fawning cheerleader of the world’s most powerful intelligence apparatus, singled out Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines for praise. “Your opening statement . . . was incredibly strong,” Sasse swooned. 

Haines, the top deputy to former CIA Director John Brennan during the Obama Administration, undoubtedly marveled at winning such a groveling endorsement from a sitting Republican senator—or perhaps she internally laughed at winning over yet another reliable GOP dupe. (In fairness, most Republicans on the committee joined in Sasse’s praise for Haines.)

But Senate Republicans should have been outraged rather than starry-eyed over Haines’ opening statement as well as her conduct in office since taking the reins of the intelligence community the day after Joe Biden’s inauguration. Haines is wasting no time accelerating the weaponization of a sprawling organization that is supposed to identify threats to the homeland by foreign actors, not target Americans with the wrong political views.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Biden Continues to Mishandle His Own Border Crisis How to make the illegal immigration surge even worse. Joseph Klein

Posted By on April 16th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/biden-continues-mishandle-his-own-border-crisis-joseph-klein/

The Biden administration is increasingly desperate in the face of the migration crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border that Biden’s progressive open-door policies have created. Illegal unaccompanied minors are flooding into this country, overwhelming available government resources to shelter and care for them. The Biden administration is already reportedly spending more than $60 million a week to house these minors now in federally run shelters. Many more are illegally crossing the border every day and are being added to the thousands allowed to remain in the United States.

What “creative” solutions has the Biden administration come up with to deal with this surge, aside from scrambling to increase shelter capacity beyond the hovels the kids are already being crammed into? One idea is to offer extended paid leave to government employees, who are likely to have no relevant training and experience, to step in and take care of some minors. Another idea is to offer cash payments to Central Americans to keep them home rather than emigrate to the United States. Offering what amounts to bribes for Central Americans to stay put instead of attempting to reach the United States is likely to backfire.

The New York Times reported last week that employees in federal government agencies like the Department of Homeland Security and NASA had received e-mails asking them whether they would be willing to take four-month paid leaves from their jobs “to help care for migrant children in government-run shelters.” Nearly three thousand federal employees answered the call as of April 9th, leaving behind the duties they were actually hired to perform.

As for the cash transfers to Central Americans to keep them at home, Roberta Jacobson, the outgoing White House southern border coordinator, told Reuters recently that such payments were an option under review by the Biden administration to address “the economic reasons people may be migrating.” It has apparently not occurred to the Biden administration “geniuses” that desperate people will do desperate things. The smugglers will be the winners as many of the cash payment recipients use their windfalls to pay for being smuggled into the United States. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy expressed what many Americans must be thinking when he said, “It’s insulting to the millions of Americans who are out of work or facing despair in our country.”

POLITICS Comments turned off

Have New York City Voters Burned Out on the Left? Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on April 16th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/04/have-new-york-city-voters-burned-out-left-daniel-greenfield/

New York City went from being run by a Republican and a moderate Democrat, and descended into hard leftist under De Blasio. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s win, the defeat of Rep. Elliot Engel, and the campaign to replace Cuomo with a Socialist seemed to solidify the city and perhaps even the state as leftist territory. And yet, despite all that, the Left seems unable to get a grip on the upcoming mayoral election.

A survey conducted by Data For Progress, a national think tank, found 26 percent of voters are supporting Yang’s candidacy — double the 13 percent who said they would support Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams. 

The poll also found Yang leading Adams 25 to 22 percent among Black voters — a surprising number given the borough president’s political base in predominantly African-American parts of Brooklyn. Data For Progress polled 1,007 likely voters between March 21 and April 5 through web and text interviews, which would not necessarily capture the older New Yorkers Adams — a former police officer and state Senator — is counting on.

City Comptroller Scott Stringer, a career politician from Manhattan, captured 11 percent of those surveyed, and former City Hall attorney and MSNBC legal analyst Maya Wiley came in fourth at 10 percent. Every other candidate polled in single digits.

The Left and the media have been pushing Wiley. She is the model of what the Left wants. Instead, Yang is far ahead despite the media’s efforts to destroy him. And while I’m no fan of Eric Adams, he’s far too moderate these days for the Left.

Could the Left win St. Louis while losing New York to moderate Democrats? The media is doing its best to stop Yang. With no effect. 

Why is Yang polling better with black voters than Adams or Wiley? One answer might be that a big chunk of the electorate in New York City is sick and tired of the lunatic Left.