NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Media’s Racial Narrative Targets Whites, Harms Blacks An insistence on ‘systemic’ racism tells minority communities they have no power over their own lives. By Robert L. Woodson Sr.

Posted By on April 17th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/medias-racial-narrative-targets-whites-harms-blacks-11618597161?mod=opinion_lead_pos9
Mr. Woodson is founder and president of the Woodson Center and author, most recently, of “Lessons From the Least of These: The Woodson Principles.”

Are only white people capable of hate crimes? If you get all your news from mainstream media sources, that’s what you’d think. A 51-year-old black man allegedly stabbing a 12-year-old white boy in Pittsburgh while shouting racial epithets barely made national news. The same was true when a black man was arrested for savagely beating a 65-year-old Asian woman in Midtown Manhattan. We saw endless coverage of the despicable assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, but when a 25-year-old black male allegedly killed a Capitol police officer last week, MSNBC erroneously reported the suspect was white.

Throughout 2020 there was a rise in violence against Asian-Americans, but the race of the perpetrators was typically mentioned only when they were white. Media and other elites obsessively push the narrative that the greatest threat in this country is coming from “white supremacists.” This gross oversimplification has dire consequences for the most vulnerable in our society—those living in the poorest neighborhoods—and for the nation as a whole.

A media environment in which the only acceptable villains are white creates a more dangerous world for all of us. The rush to judgment based on skin color is familiar to those of us who lived through segregation. In those days, some in law enforcement couldn’t care less about crimes committed by blacks against other blacks, but there were severe penalties for offenses against whites. We marched and demanded fair and equal treatment under the law. As far as the application of criminal law, much of what is happening today is a retreat to the pre-Civil Rights South.

Every tragic police killing of a black person is amplified by radical progressives to accuse police of white supremacy and to push for defunding and anarchy. The more law-enforcement officers we lose to defunding, early retirements and drastic drops in recruitment, the fewer we have to patrol lower-income neighborhoods.

BOOKS, ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

How a Physicist Became a Climate Truth Teller After a stint at the Obama Energy Department, Steven Koonin reclaims the science of a warming planet from the propaganda peddlers. By Holman Jenkins

Posted By on April 17th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-a-physicist-became-a-climate-truth-teller-11618597216?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Barack Obama is one of many who have declared an “epistemological crisis,” in which our society is losing its handle on something called truth.

Thus an interesting experiment will be his and other Democrats’ response to a book by Steven Koonin, who was chief scientist of the Obama Energy Department. Mr. Koonin argues not against current climate science but that what the media and politicians and activists say about climate science has drifted so far out of touch with the actual science as to be absurdly, demonstrably false.

This is not an altogether innocent drifting, he points out in a videoconference interview from his home in Cold Spring, N.Y. In 2019 a report by the presidents of the National Academies of Sciences claimed the “magnitude and frequency of certain extreme events are increasing.” The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is deemed to compile the best science, says all such claims should be treated with “low confidence.”

In 2017 the U.S. government’s Climate Science Special Report claimed that, in the lower 48 states, the “number of high temperature records set in the past two decades far exceeds the number of low temperature records.” On closer inspection, that’s because there’s been no increase in the rate of new record highs since 1900, only a decline in the number of new lows.

Mr. Koonin, 69, and I are of one mind on 2018’s U.S. Fourth National Climate Assessment, issued in Donald Trump’s second year, which relied on such overegged worst-case emissions and temperature projections that even climate activists were abashed (a revoltcontinues to this day). “The report was written more to persuade than to inform,” he says. “It masquerades as objective science but was written as—all right, I’ll use the word—propaganda.”

Mr. Koonin is a Brooklyn-born math whiz and theoretical physicist, a product of New York’s selective Stuyvesant High School. His parents, with less than a year of college between them, nevertheless intuited in 1968 exactly how to handle an unusually talented and motivated youngster: You want to go cross the country to Caltech at age 16? “Whatever you think is right, go ahead,” they told him. “I wanted to know how the world works,” Mr. Koonin says now. “I wanted to do physics since I was 6 years old, when I didn’t know it was called physics.”

MEDIA Comments turned off

Liz Cheney Was A Primary Culprit Of Spreading Fake News On Russian Bounties To Undermine Trump By Tristan Justice

Posted By on April 17th, 2021

https://thefederalist.com/2021/04/16/liz-cheney-was-a-primary-culprit-of-spreading-fake-news-on-russian-bounties-to-undermine-trump/

U.S. intelligence agencies debunked on Thursday what was treated as blockbuster election-year reporting last summer of an anonymously sourced story in The New York Times claiming the Kremlin placed bounties on American troops in Afghanistan.

President Donald Trump, went the tale, deliberately downplayed the aggression to appease Russia and accelerate the timeline to withdraw U.S. forces. Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, currently number three in House leadership, was a primary purveyor of the fake news.

“The United States intelligence community assesses with low to moderate confidence that Russian intelligence officers sought to encourage Taliban attacks on U.S. and coalition personnel in Afghanistan in 2019 and perhaps earlier,” a senior administration official said, according to the readout of a call with reporters in the Daily Beast.

Officials said their conclusion of “low to moderate confidence” in the story, which effectively means it’s at best unproven and potentially false, came “in part because it relies on detainee reporting,” an often unreliable source of intelligence on which to base such explosive claims.

As the story picked up traction in the corporate press, however, Cheney appeared to sense a prime opportunity to capitalize on what was treated as a scandal, to not only undermine Trump, but also justify a prolonged military presence in the region while the administration took steps to pull out. Neither to Cheney, nor legacy media, appeared to hesitate due to the claims’ poor sourcing.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

American Jewish academic center smears Israel Moshe Phillips

Posted By on April 17th, 2021

https://worldisraelnews.com/opinion-american-jewish-academic-center-smears-israel/

Is this the kind of programming that the donors to the Feinstein Center want their money used for?

Why is a major academic center for the study of American Jewish history, which was founded by a stalwart friend of Israel, falsely accusing Israel of “state violence against Palestinians”?

The Feinstein Center for American Jewish History, at Temple University, was founded—and for many years directed—by the late Dr. Murray Friedman, a distinguished historian and longtime leader of the American Jewish Committee in Philadelphia.

I had the privilege of attending presentations by Murray Friedman and I know what a strong supporter of Israel he was. He is surely turning over in his grave at the news that his center is now being used to spread anti-Israel lies.

On April 20, the Feinstein Center will be hosting a public program called The Weaponization of Discourse: Israel/Palestine, Antisemitism, and Free Speech on Campus

The Feinstein Center’s advertisements for the event declare that it will explore, among other things, what it calls “increased state violence against Palestinians.” The phrase “state violence against Palestinians” means that Israel, as a state, is carrying out a policy of committing war crimes against Palestinian Arabs. That’s false.

I expect Arab propagandists to spread such lies. I don’t expect the falsehoods to come from an academic center that was founded by a pro-Israel scholar, and is funded in part by donations from pro-Israel members of the Philadelphia-area Jewish community.

EDUCATION, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel-bashing disguised as Jewish studies Moshe Phillips

Posted By on April 17th, 2021

https://www.jns.org/opinion/israel-bashing-disguised-as-jewish-studies/

Michael Fischbach’s book review in “American Jewish History” is a vicious screed that challenges the very legitimacy of Israel’s existence and justifies the anti-Israel “right of return.”

It may not be news anymore when a Jewish professor bashes Israel. But there should still be outrage when a respected U.S. Jewish academic journal publishes a virulent attack on Israel disguised as scholarship.

The journal in question, American Jewish History, is published by the American Jewish Historical Society, a distinguished scholarly organization. Its latest issue features heavily footnoted essays on topics like health-care workers on the Lower East Side in the early 1900s and the debate among Orthodox Jews over family planning in the 1950s.

And then, sticking out like a sore thumb is Michael Fischbach’s tirade against Israel, presented as a normal, scholarly book review.

Fischbach is a professor of history at Virginia’s Randolph-Macon College. According to his curriculum vitae, he has a history of working with extremists, such as the pro-PLO Institute for Palestine Studies, and writing articles for the Journal of Palestine Studies, a viscously anti-Israel propaganda publication.

But it’s not Fischbach’s track record that is the problem here. It’s what he writes in his book review, where he unleashes attack after attack aimed at the State of Israel.

He writes that the “settler movement creating a Jewish state out of 77 percent of Palestine/Israel” caused “the permanent exile of 80 percent of those who had lived there.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Liberals Unhappy by Mark Bauerlein

Posted By on April 17th, 2021

Mark Bauerlein is an emeritus professor of English at Emory University.

Given the irked and fearful state of the liberal temper at the present time, many people might find it hard to believe that liberalism used to be fun.

During the four years of President Donald Trump, liberals were miserable, sinking ever further into resentment and incredulity, a sense of history and America robbing them of their rightful place in control of the country. Unfortunately, the ascent of Joe Biden hasn’t much improved the mood, either. They have to spend too much time pretending that the bumbling mediocrity who now occupies the White House has statesmanlike stature for them to feel comfortable and secure.

Go back to the ’90s, however, and a whole different attitude ran through the liberal ranks. Do you remember? The Reagan-Bush Era was over, Bill Clinton was popular, and Newt Gingrich’s Congress had some off-putting characters who signified to liberals that the last gasp of conservatism was at hand. The left could be an irritant, yes, but trouble-makers such as Al Sharpton had but a minor influence on national affairs and required only the occasional appeasement to be kept in check. Meanwhile, NAFTA and other globalist moves promised even greater prosperity, and the Internet, too, seemed just the kind of instrument of individual expression and universal access that tallied the liberal dream of empowerment and equity.

It gave liberals daily confirmation of … themselves. They saw that the world was moving in a liberalizing direction, and they knew that it was good. How could they not congratulate themselves when all of this ’90s advent came on top of a long historical advance that set liberals up on a solid moral pedestal forever (so they believed)? Apart from the Reagan interruption, they could look back at a half-century of righteous progress that gave no credit to their opponents. Liberals could claim as their own the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-War protests, Women’s Liberation, Gay Rights, and the steady diversification of the U.S. population, all of them virtuous and overdue crusades that ennobled the ones who led them.

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.