Former CNN Producer Rips into Media for Trying to Have It Both Ways on COVID Vaccine Matt Vespa

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2021/04/14/why-a-former-cnn-producer-shredded-the-media-over-their-covid-vaccine-coverage-n2587950

Steve Krakauer is a former CNN producer and media executive. His recent Fourth Watch newsletter touched upon what we’re all talking about: the COVID vaccine. Specifically, the pause over the Johnson and Johnson vaccine after six women aged 18-48 suffered blood clots six-to-thirteen days after receiving the shot. Nearly seven million doses have already been administered. The risk is still IMMENSELY LOW—but the message is clear and vaccine hesitancy, which was already an issue, has now become another area where the panic peddlers can latch onto though it makes no sense. The experts want us to get vaccinated but then think we’ll just be nonreactive to news that’s packaged to scare us half to death. Is it good that Dr. Anthony Fauci said there’s no cause of alarm or anxiety for those who have received the J&J shot? Yes, but his credibility balance is negative. The experts have said that impending doom was upon us. Nothing happened. And now, on top of the expert class indirectly peddling vaccine hesitancy with their advice to get the shot but remain in the bunker and in abject terror, the media has also played a part in the hysteria. 

MSNBC’s Joy Reid said she’s going to remain hiding even after getting vaccinated. CNN’s Brian Stelter is mad more people, journalists especially, aren’t sharing their vaccine selfies. CNN also published why that could be a security risk. Krakauer noted that whether intentional or not, the media establishment is only fanning the flames of vaccine hesitancy (via Fourth Watch):

Consciously or subconsciously, the media is continuing to drive fear around COVID that undoubtably will lead to vaccine hesitancy. Take MSNBC’s Joy Reid on Sunday. The 7pm host tweeted to her two million followers that, when she’s fully vaccinated, she will be too “scurred” to get on an airplane or do “indoor activities” and that she plans to continue “double masking…for the foreseeable future”…

1,500 Rabbis Slam the ADL for ‘Grossly Misplaced Charges of Anti-Semitism’ By Tyler O’Neil

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2021/04/14/1500-rabbis-slam-the-adl-for-grossly-misplaced-charges-of-anti-semitism-n1440111

A coalition of 1,500 Orthodox Jewish rabbis condemned the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) after it called for Fox News to fire Tucker Carlson, accusing him of anti-Semitism. The Coalition for Jewish Values (CJV) sent a letter rebuking the ADL and urging it to “discard its partisan preoccupations and undertake an urgently needed course correction.”

“There is nothing supremacist, much less antisemitic, about concerns that voting by illegal immigrants is a negation of America’s electoral system and a violation of our democracy,” Rabbi Yaakov Menken, CJV’s managing director, told PJ Media about the situation.

The outrage traces back to Carlson’s show last Thursday. “The Left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term ‘replacement,’ if you suggest that the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate of voters now casting ballots with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World,” Carlson said. “I have less political power because they are importing a brand new electorate.”

The ADL called for Fox News to fire Carlson, saying he “embraced a foundational theory of white supremacy.” White supremacist anti-Semites claim that Jews and others are orchestrating a “great replacement,” importing racial minorities in order to replace white people.

“Mr. Carlson’s attempt to at first dismiss this theory, while in the very next breath endorsing it under cover of a ‘voting rights question,’ does not give him free license to invoke a white supremacist trope,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt wrote.

Yet Carlson’s remarks did not focus on race.

Pelosi Hijacks Everything for Her Agenda — Even the Holocaust By Rabbi Aryeh Spero

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/04/pelosi_hijacks_everything_for

One would expect the commemoration of something as tragic and sacred as the Holocaust be done in a respectful manner and not be manipulated for political goals. Such was not the case this week with Nancy Pelosi’s statement sent out on Holocaust Remembrance Day; known in Israel as Yom Ha’Shoah. Instead, she exploited the murder of six million Jews by Hitler and his regime into a manifesto of Democrat false talking points and the demonization of millions of Americans associated with conservatism and who voted for President Trump. It was sacrilege and shameful.

The first principle regarding the Holocaust is as follows: It was a unique, once-in-history genocidal plan to exterminate an entire race of people, Jews, across the globe simply because of who they were at birth. Unlike conventional warfare where antagonists may wish to eliminate those they are fighting, Hitler planned the systematic murder of those not only at war with him but those beyond the confines of the battle lines, searching for Jews worldwide even though they were not in the way of his territorial ambitions. They were murdered not for what they did or their conduct, but for simply being born into a people. While he did kill others during the war, the grand plan of Final Solution was specific to eradicating the Jewish people, no other group, from the face of the earth, leaving no trace of their ever having existed.

Holocaust Memorial Day was never established as a general memorial day for all those harmed during World War II, but as something specific to the once-in-history systematic implementation of that Final Solution plan to eradicate the Jewish people from existence and human history. The remedy for what happened is for the world to make sure, this time, that Never Again shall we stand by while adversaries, such as Iran, go about with plans to once again exterminate the Jewish people by destroying Israel, as is their announced plan, or by murdering all Jews worldwide who are Zionists, something every Jew is commanded to be.

Systemic Racism is a Conspiracy Theory Cult A conspiracy theory that explains everything in the world as racism. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/systemic-racism-conspiracy-theory-cult-daniel-greenfield/

What is a conspiracy theory anyway? Conspiracy theories are, by definition, things that other people believe. Nobody believes in conspiracy theories, they believe that other people do.

As an old dead white Elizabethan male who invented the toilet once quipped, “Treason doth never prosper. What’s the reason? Why if it prospers, none dare call it treason.” Like treason, a conspiracy theory with the backing of the establishment becomes an article of faith.

What’s the most dangerous kind of conspiracy theory? The kind no one dares to call what it is.

Political extremism is invariably based on a set of conspiracy theories. And when the extremists take power then their conspiracy theories become establishment dogma. The dividing line is easy to spot. Extremists who aren’t in power invent conspiracy theories about those who are, while extremists who are in power invent conspiracy theories about those underneath them.

The shift from conspiracies about an established upper class to conspiracies about bad ideas held by the lower classes, or from class warfare to political correctness, was also a power shift.

It’s a covert confession about who really runs things by the conspirators who actually do.

While few will agree on what is a conspiracy theory, the most obvious symptom of a conspiracy theory is that it cannot be disproven. The most popular establishment conspiracy theory is systemic racism. Like most conspiracy theories, anything can be ascribed to systemic racism, from mathematics to the existence of a highway, it can be used to explain everything, and yet it so comprehensively pervades everything that its existence can never be disproven.

To test that theory, describe any element of life, no matter how random, milk, traffic signals, or weather, as racist, and you will find that these accusations have already been made, and that there is no way to disprove them in terms that a critical race theory believer will accept.

Dem Senator Who Secretly Met With Iran Minister Demands “Classified” Briefing on Israeli Action Against Iran Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/04/dem-senator-who-secretly-met-iran-minister-demands-daniel-greenfield/

Iran Firsters are a problem. They’re an even bigger problem when they’re running the government.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), hoping to quell speculation of wrongdoing, has formally responded to reports that he held a secret meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif last week. But his explanation may raise more questions than it answers.

The Federalist first reported Monday that Murphy and other Democratic senators held a “secret” meeting with Zarif last week at the annual Munich Security Conference. The news immediately began to circulate in the media and led to speculation as to whether Murphy had undermined U.S. foreign policy or even potentially violated the Logan Act by holding the meeting.

Tuesday morning, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo commented on the reports, seeming to scold Murphy and his Democratic colleagues for meeting with Zarif, who, Pompeo noted, is “the foreign minister of a country that killed an American on December 27” and “is the largest world sponsor of terror and the world’s largest sponsor of anti-Semitism.”

Pompeo also noted Zarif’s status.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo responded to the news of the meeting.

“This guy [Zarif] is designated by the United States of America,” Pompeo said at a press conference in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. “He’s the foreign minister for a country that shot down a commercial airliner and has yet to turn over the black boxes. This is the foreign minister of a country that killed an American on December 27. And it’s the foreign minister of a country who is the largest world sponsor of terror and the world’s largest sponsor of anti-Semitism.”

The Gun-Control Melodrama Returns for Another Season But what’s the real purpose of the show? Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/gun-control-melodrama-back-another-season-bruce-thornton/

A new Democrat administration and two recent mass shootings mean it’s time for another episode of the gun-control melodrama that’s been running for decades. We all know the scenario: an obviously deranged person murders several people, Dem pols and pundits start fulminating about our lax gun control laws and gun-obsessed white males, followed by a bunch of ineffective proposals and policies that will do nothing about crime, but will annoy law-abiding gun-owners, which is ultimately the real purpose of the show––demonizing a political enemy.

The Biden outfit has announced “six initial actions to address the gun violence public health epidemic,” the White House informed us last week. None of them will do anything to stop mass killings, and some are trying to fix problems that existing federal laws already address. Two federal statutes concern homemade “ghost guns,” for example, which don’t have serial numbers. And state “Red-flag” laws would allow the police or family members worried about a seemingly unstable spouse, neighbor, or student to ask a judge for a temporary restraining order that would allow confiscation of the weapon. The potential threats to Second, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights, and the moral hazard of giving the vengeful or malicious an opportunity for weaponizing the law, should be obvious.

Then there’s the usual hysteria about “assault rifles.” The popular AR-15 (pop quiz: What does the AR stand for?), which anti-gun-nuts usually bring up when decrying “assault rifles,” is no such thing. It’s not an automatic weapon, which have been illegal since 1934, and is perfectly legal. It can be accessorized in ways that frighten those ignorant about guns and gun-laws, just as cars can be sold with optional spoilers or other racing accessories. But that doesn’t make them illegal.

Perhaps worst of all, Biden is making professional gun-control lobbyist David Chipman the head of the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agency. You can get the measure of Chipman’s rabid partisan prejudices and impaired common sense by his comment that the surge of gun purchasers last year comprises conspiracy theorists prepping for the zombocalypse; and by his looney claim that members of the Branch Davidians––the group targeted in the 1993 Waco, Texas armed attack by FBI and ATF agents that killed 76 people including children––shot down two government helicopters.

Biden’s U.N. Ambassador: ‘White Supremacy Is Weaved (??!!) into Our Founding Documents and Principles’ By Brittany Bernstein

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/bidens-u-n-ambassador-white-supremacy-is-weaved-into-our-founding-documents-and-principles/

Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said Wednesday that racial equity is a top focus for her as “white supremacy is weaved into our founding documents and principles” in the U.S.

“When we raise issues of equity and justice at the global scale we have to approach them with humility,” Thomas-Greenfield said in remarks at the National Action Network’s virtual conference. “We have to acknowledge that we are an imperfect union and have been since the beginning and every day we strive to make ourselves more perfect.” 

She recounted a recent speech she gave before the UN General Assembly for the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in which she spoke about how her great-grandmother was the child of a slave “just three generations back from me.”

The ambassador said that she grew up in the segregated south where she was bused to a segregated school.

“On the weekends, the Klan burned crosses on lawns in our neighborhoods,” she said. “I shared these stories and others to acknowledge on the international stage that I have personally experienced one of America’s greatest imperfections.”

“I’ve seen for myself how the original sin of slavery weaved white supremacy into our founding documents and principles,” Thomas-Greenfield said.

Statement of Prof. William A. Jacobson Opposing Cornell Faculty Senate Proposed Critical Race Mandates

https://legalinsurrection.com/2021/04/statement-of-prof-william-a-jacobson-opposing-cornell-faculty-senate-proposed-critical-race-mandates/

The Cornell University Faculty Senate is considering today three proposals developed in the aftermath of a July 16, 2020 “anti-racism” initiative launched by the President of the University. An online Faculty Senate vote will be held at some later date in the near future.

I have written about this initiative, and how it has gone off the rails under faculty and student activism, in the following posts:

I also wrote an Op-Ed at Real Clear Politics about the initiative as it worked its way through the Faculty Senate Working Group process, Higher Ed Approaches the Antiracism Training Abyss:

The cumulative effect of these initiatives is coercive not educational, tying academic and professional performance to a deceptive concept of “antiracism” that in reality is neo-racist and endangers free expression. Dissent will be silenced when grades, evaluations, continued employment and professional advancement are tied to meeting top-down mandates, creating an environment of compelled activism and compliance in which opposition is defined as inherently racist.

Cornell already ranks low in protecting student free expression. Like so many institutions of higher education, it is also now putting at risk its ability to protect academic freedom for its students and faculty. Hopefully, the Cornell senior administration will pull the campus back from this brink.

Climate Media vs. Climate Science The good news is that scientists themselves have started to correct the record. by Holman Jenkins Jr.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-media-vs-climate-science-11618355224?mod=opinion_featst_pos3

Joe Biden has put a presidential imprimatur on climate change being an existential threat, and he doesn’t mean in the Jean-Paul Sartre sense of man’s search for meaning in an uncomforting universe.

He means the end of humanity, a claim nowhere found in climate science.

This is odd because the real news today is elsewhere. Its movement may be ocean-liner-like, the news may be five years old before the New York Times notices it, but the climate community has been backing away from a worst-case scenario peddled to the public for years as “business as usual.”

A drumroll moment was Zeke Hausfather and Glen Peter’s 2020 article in the journal Nature partly headlined: “Stop using the worst-case scenario for climate warming as the most likely outcome.”

This followed the 2017 paper by Justin Ritchie and Hadi Dowlatabadi asking why climate scenarios posit implausible increases in coal burning a century from now. And I could go on. Roger Pielke Jr. and colleagues show how the RCP 8.5 scenario was born to give modelers a high-emissions scenario to play with, and how it came to be embraced despite being at odds with every real-world indicator concerning the expected course of future emissions.

Without a Jewish State Alex Grobman

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/25202

Jews, particularly in the West, now enjoy an unparalleled degree of security and cultural freedom in part because of the connection the Jews feel toward Israel, and the recognition that the country is committed to their protection and well- being.

Without a Jewish state, asserted Ruth Gavison, professor of Human Rights at the Faculty of Law at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the Jews would become a cultural minority again, which would most likely involve living in continuous fear of antisemitism, persecution and genocide. Relinquishing a state would be similar to “national suicide.”

Jews have endured for two millennia without a homeland, but at times at great personal risk. Jews, particularly in the West, now enjoy an unparalleled degree of security and cultural freedom in part because of the connection the Jews feel toward Israel, and the recognition that the country is committed to their protection and well- being.

The Strongest Jewish Community in the World

In less than 60 years Gavison noted, Israel has become the strongest Jewish community in the world. The country has the right and obligation to “promote and strengthen” the Jewish character of the state as this is based on the concept of national self-determination.

This idea does not mean that every citizen in the country must belong to a particular national or ethnic group. But the state has the right to protect itself physically and culturally against assimilation or attempts to attack and destroy it. The claim of self-determination “is not a matter of abstract rights talk. Rather, such claims must be addressed according to demographic, societal and political realities that prevail both in the Middle East and in other parts of the world.”

The state also has a responsibility to safeguard the rights of non-Jewish minorities. They should be treated fairly, with respect, and their safety and well-being should be ensured. These obligations do not require, however, the termination of the Jewish character of the state.