CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The First AOC Administration Larry Thornberry

Posted By on April 11th, 2021

https://spectator.org/biden-moderate-left-aoc

If an office pool were held today, the question being to identify one thing Joe Biden has done since fetching up at 1600 that AOC would not have done had she been the winner November 3 last, that pool would not produce a winner. Because there’s not a single thing that Biden — whom the mainstream media insist on describing as a cuddly, dog-loving fuzzball of a moderate — has done that the former Bronx barista, now leftist heartthrob, would not find simpatico. As we moderates say, Vive la révolution!

I’m sure Saul Alinsky and Old Scratch are high-fiving over what their favorite moderate president has accomplished in his brief tenure. And it is indeed truly impressive. In less than three months, Biden has managed to erase the United States’ southern border in order to accelerate the northward flow of undocumented Democrats. He’s having more success than he should in pushing for the higher taxes and onerous regulations that held down the economy when he was Barack Obama’s dogsbody, both of which Biden’s predecessor lowered, thereby causing the economy to take off. Biden has reinstated Obama’s invertebrate foreign policy, giving the world’s bad guys the rope they need, and he’s pledged to spend trillions we don’t have in order to pursue the fool’s errand of carbon-free energy (aka very little energy, and at mini-bar prices). He’s blessed the corrupt HR 1, which if the Senate falls for it would federalize all elections, installing voting rules so lax as to hang a “STEAL ME!” sign on all future elections. 

The cherry on top of the sundae is Biden foisting critical race theory onto federal employees, including the military, which Democrats seem determined to declaw. Critical race theory informs us that all white people, no matter how decently they’ve treated people of all complexions, are closet Ku-Kluxers. I can sum up critical race theory in two short sentences — one if I’m allowed a semi-colon. To wit: Black people good; white people bad. That’s it. And the Democrat Party, with few exceptions, seems to be wedded to this absurd and thoroughly racist notion, starting with the unifier-in-chief in the White House. (To be fair to Biden, he has managed to unify far-left Democrats with very-far-left Democrats.)

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Dystopian America 2021 America is an intolerant and hard to recognize country today. A hard look in the mirror might help: Barry Shaw

Posted By on April 11th, 2021

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/299995

America has become a strange, unrecognizable and intolerant place. In record time.

America. The country that says it is racist to expect black Americans to identify themselves when they go to vote, but don’t find it racist to insult black Americans by suggesting they are not capable of obtaining identification cards or documents.

America. The country that says it is racist if you don’t give black folk water when they line up to vote.

And a Democrat Party that can’t see the racism in suggesting that black folk are incapable of thinking of bringing water with them when they do go to vote.

America. The country where if you dislike a black person you are a racist, but if a black person dislikes you, it’s their 1st Amendment right.

If you lie to Congress, it’s a felony. But when Congress lies to you it’s just politics.

The government spends millions to rehabilitate criminals but they do almost nothing for the victims.

In public schools, teaching transgender transition is OK, but your kids can’t call you father or mother.

If a man pretends to be a woman, you are required to pretend with him.

People who say there is no such thing as gender, are demanding a female president.

People who have never been to college must pay the debts of those that have.

If you cheat to get into college you go to prison, but if you cheat to get into the country you go to college for free.

You don’t burn books in America yet, but you remove them from the bookshelves and your libraries.

You are unwilling to close your border with Mexico, but maintain troops protecting South Korea from North Korea.

If you protest offensive and oppressive Democrat policies you are a domestic terrorist, but if you burn the American flag and destroy federal property and attack police you are within your 1st Amendment rights.

You allow porn on your TV, but have a Christmas nativity scene in your garden.

People who have never owned slaves have to pay reparations to people who have never been slaves.

You can kill an unborn child, but it’s wrong to execute a mass murderer.

They let hardened criminals out of jail and protect them in sanctuary cities, but arrest you for protecting your property from a rioting mob with a firearm.

They take money from those who work hard and give it to people who don’t want to work.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

In Harvard speech, Breyer speaks out against “court packing” Amy Howe

Posted By on April 11th, 2021

https://www.scotusblog.com/2021/04/in-harvard-speech-breyer-speaks-out-against-court-packing/

Emphasizing that the Supreme Court’s authority hinges on the public’s trust in the court, Justice Stephen Breyer used a speech on Tuesday at Harvard Law School to argue against efforts to expand the number of seats on the Supreme Court. The 82-year-old Breyer contended that public trust in the court rests in the public’s perception that “the court is guided by legal principle, not politics” and would therefore be eroded if the court’s structure were changed in response to concerns about the influence of politics on the Supreme Court.

The text of Breyer’s prepared remarks, which he delivered as a nearly two-hour speech, included references to the Roman philosopher Cicero, Shakepeare’s Henry IV, The Plague by Albert Camus and Alexis de Toqueville, the French aristocrat who chronicled American life in the early 19th century. (Breyer, who has been known to give speeches in French, did not indicate whether he read the latter two sources in English or in their original French.) The focus of Breyer’s speech, sometimes referred to as “court packing,” has been a popular topic among some Democrats, particularly since the September 2020 death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, when then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell moved quickly to confirm Justice Amy Coney Barrett after having refused to hold a hearing on Merrick Garland, President Barack Obama’s nominee to replace Justice Antonin Scalia, in March 2016. As a candidate, President Joe Biden declined to support an expansion of the court, instead promising to establish a commission to examine possible reforms to the Supreme Court more broadly.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

What Makes Erdogan Tick? by Burak Bekdil

Posted By on April 11th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17180/what-makes-erdogan-tick

At the end of the year, there was a Turkey in deep stages of cold-to-colder-war with the EU (in particular, with EU members Greece, Cyprus and France), Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, General Khalifa Haftar of Libya and the United States (over the S-400 dispute).

Not one of these state actors stepped back and appeased Erdoğan or changed policy in the face of Turkish hostilities.

In December, the Trump administration announced that the U.S. would sanction Turkey for its purchase of the Russian-made S-400 surface-to-air missile system….

All that must have made Erdoğan tick. Apparently cornered, Erdoğan launched a new charm offensive in November. He said Turkey’s future was in Europe – quite a radical departure from his usual histrionics that Europe is Islamophobic, fascist, racist and Europeans are “remnants of Nazis.”

Erdoğan’s tough guy manners have finally been decrypted by state and non-state actors in the former Ottoman lands.

“Erdoğan will not back down until you show him teeth. That’s what we did when we negotiated the (Syrian) ceasefire in October of 2019. We were ready to crush the economy.” — James Jeffrey, former U.S. special envoy for Syria (and former ambassador to Ankara), Al Monitor

A comparative analysis of where Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s aggressive war-mongering and assertive foreign policy — based on an imaginary Superpower Turkey — stood a year ago, and today’s relative Turkish composure at all problematic fronts should give us invaluable lessons on dealing with the wannabe sultan. The events during the past year offer precious experimental confrontations that reveal an answer to a question that concerns a rich menu of nations: What makes Erdoğan tick?

Erdoğan has threatened Europe several times with “sending millions of refugees your way.” On February 27, 2020, the Turkish government finally pressed the button to execute the threat: Millions of (mostly Syrian) migrants on Turkish soil were now free to travel to Europe; Turkish border gates were now open. Tens of thousands of these migrants (not only Syrians) were given free bus rides from Istanbul to Turkey’s land borders with Bulgaria and Greece, about 150 miles west of the Istanbul. In a declaration that looked more like propaganda talk than reality, Turkish Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu chimed in on March 1, 2020 that, in a span of three days, 100,000 refugees had already crossed the borders into Europe.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

France: Macron Gave Up Fighting Radicalism by Guy Millière

Posted By on April 11th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17270/france-macron-radicalism

There are also teachers who, possibly because they are scared, choose to bow their heads, give up teaching certain subjects and — when students shout anti-Semitic and anti-Western insults — to act as if they hear nothing. It has become almost impossible in most French high schools to talk about either Israel or the Holocaust.

Most journalists seem to prefer avoiding all discussion of the advance of radical Islam in France. They know that those who do so are immediately called “racists” or “Islamophobes” and are often threatened, prosecuted, sentenced to heavy fines or fired from their place of work.

Even though what the journalist Éric Zemmour said was accurate and verifiable, the CSA (Superior Audiovisual Council), said that to state certain facts constitutes an “incitement to racial hatred”.

In 2015, a French journalist compared the National Rally Party to the Islamic State. [National Rally President] Marine Le Pen responded by posting on Twitter two photographs of crimes committed by the Islamic State and added, “This is Islamic State”…. In court, the judge asked Le Pen, “Do you consider that these photos violate human dignity?”. Le Pen replied, “It is the crime that violates human dignity, it is not its photographic reproduction”.

“Fourteen months before the presidential deadline of 2022, … the supposition is that … Marine Le Pen, will necessarily be in the second round of the election and that whoever will face her is no longer guaranteed to win”. — Le Monde, March 22, 2021.

November 1, 2020. Didier Lemaire, a high school teacher who works in Trappes, a small town west of Paris, published an open letter in the left-wing magazine Le Nouvel Observateur. He spoke of the murder of Samuel Paty, another teacher, savagely beheaded two weeks earlier by a Muslim extremist. He denounced the submission of the French authorities to religious intimidation and the impossibility of the French school system being able to transmit any real knowledge of history or to give students the intellectual means to think freely. He said that in just a few years, the situation in the city where he worked has deteriorated markedly. Lemaire wrote:

“The year I arrived in the high school where I teach, the city’s synagogue had just been burned down and Jewish families forced to leave. After the 2015 and 2016 attacks in France, I got involved in preventive actions…. In 2018, seeing that my efforts collided with forces much more powerful than me, I wrote to the President of the Republic to ask him to act urgently to protect our students from the ideological and social pressure exerted on them, a pressure which gradually withdraws them from the national community. Unfortunately, no action was taken….

MY SAY: Comments turned off

MY SAY: TOTALITARIANISM

Posted By on April 11th, 2021

Posted below in a review of Rod Dreher’s book “Live Not by Lies”  an Australian pastor Mark Powell  provides a pithy definition of totalitarianism:

“The term totalitarianism was first used by supporters of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, who defined totalitarianism concisely: “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” That is to say, totalitarianism is a state in which nothing can be permitted to exist that contradicts a society’s ruling ideology.”

Exactly!  Coming to America in a one party rule?   rsk

BOOKS Comments turned off

The Very Devil of a Thing to Comprehend Mark Powell

Posted By on April 11th, 2021

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/reflections/2021/04/the-very-devil-of-a-thing-to-comprehend/

If you haven’t heard of Cardi B, the rapper responsible for a sexually graphic hit that earned her a meeting with a fawning Joe Biden immediately before the recent US election, there is little chance another rising star will elicit a nod of recognition. This one goes by name of Lil Nas X and he has taken things to a whole new level. In this case, a level of Hell, and I mean that literally. A self-described children’s performer, Lil Nas X — real name Montero Lamar Hill— has recently released a music video of himself sliding down a stripper’s pole to perform sexual acts upon the Devil, seated upon his satanic throne (above). For this he has been praised by academics.

The question is, how have we come to this point as a culture, and in particular a Western nation? A time when—just as in ancient Israel—someone like the Biblical prophet Isaiah could lament those in his day who call evil good and good evil, who traded darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter (Isaiah 5:20). The answer is somewhat complex.

In 1966, Philip Rieff wrote a book called, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud. Rieff’s thesis was that the West had rejected God and in His place sought to create a society where the individual was liberated to indulge in the freedom of one’s own sensuality as an integral part of the pursuit of personal happiness. However, with the ‘therapeutic’ replacing the transcendent moral order traditionally provided by religion, this has only led to the triumph of what I refer to as “therapeutic totalitarianism”.

Just over 50 years after Rieff’s work was published, we’re starting to perceive ever more clearly the bitter fruit of such a Prometheanism endeavour, i.e. the idea than the individual human has unlimited and godlike  potential to re-create the world to accord with one’s own passions and desires. For an excellent analysis and contemporary application of Reiff’s work, see Carl. R. Trueman’s, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism and the Road to Sexual Revolution. Another, even more prescient contribution in this regard is Rod Dreher’s, Live Not By Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents (Sentinel, 2020). Dreher explores how “the menace of totalitarianism” is still a very real threat to Western society. As he explains:

The term totalitarianism was first used by supporters of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, who defined totalitarianism concisely: “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” That is to say, totalitarianism is a state in which nothing can be permitted to exist that contradicts a society’s ruling ideology.

MORE HEADLINES Comments turned off

MORE HEADLINES APRIL 11, 2021

Posted By on April 11th, 2021

Chris Wallace: Kamala Harris may not want her ‘fingerprints’ on border crisis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbksThGF0s0

 

Texas rancher says neighbors find bodies of migrants on property https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_uay8FTK-4

 

Obama’s celebrity guests left ‘dirty messages’ for Donald Trump – ’You will fail’ https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1421521/donald-trump-news-barack-obama-dave-chappelle-white-house-party-ont

 

Bill Gates backs project to ‘dim the sun’, Tucker Carlson reacts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wwIBUCBrF8

WATCH BANNED VIDEO: Gov DeSantis Roundtable on COVID Lockdowns Censored On YouTube https://thejewishvoice.com/2021/04/watch-banned-video-gov-desantis-roundtable-on-covid-lockdowns-censored-on-youtube/

COTTON TOUTS COVID ‘LAB LEAK’ THEORY, ACCUSES MAINSTREAM MEDIA OF BEING “APOLOGISTS” FOR CHINA HTTPS://DFCTODAY.COM/COTTON-TOUTS-COVID-LAB-LEAK-THEORY-ACCUSES-MAINSTREAM-MEDIA-OF-BEING-APOLOGISTS-FOR-CHINA/

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

BIDEN SURGE: 172,000 Illegal Migrants Invaded US in March. Highest Number in 20 Years

Posted By on April 11th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/04/biden-surge-172000-illegal-mig

The Biden surge is real and spectacular despite the vocal insistence of the Democrat media and lefties like AOC that it’s a racist GOP myth.

The CPB press releases, under the Biden administration, are trying to spin the facts, but the facts are still there. I’m just snipping away all the spin about “food insecurity” and the “pandemic”, none of which explains why there was a massive surge under Biden.

In March 2021, CBP encountered more than 172,000 persons attempting entry along the Southwest border. This total represented a 71 percent increase over February 2021…. This fiscal year CBP has already had over 569,800 encounters.  This represents an increase of 24 percent from the total encounters we had during all of Fiscal Year 2020

CBP has recently seen a return to encounters of large groups, especially in the Rio Grande Valley region. These groups of 100 or more individuals had dropped dramatically

As RNC Research director Zach Parkinson noted, that’s the highest single month total since 2001.

This is a major crisis. And the cause of this invasion is sitting in the White House. As long as Democrats continue to pander to illegal aliens, the surge will continue.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

A Medical Student Questioned Microaggressions. UVA Branded Him a Threat and Banished Him from Campus. Kieran Bhattacharya’s First Amendment lawsuit can proceed, a court said. Robby Soave

Posted By on April 11th, 2021

https://reason.com/2021/04/07/microaggressions-uva-student-kieran-bhattacharya-threat/

Kieran Bhattacharya is a student at the University of Virginia (UVA) School of Medicine. On October 25, 2018, he attended a panel discussion on the subject of microaggressions. Dissatisfied with the definition of a microaggression offered by the presenter—Beverly Cowell Adams, an assistant dean—Bhattacharya raised his hand.

Within a few weeks, as a result of the fallout from Bhattacharya’s question about microagressions, the administration had branded him a threat to the university and banned him from campus. He is now suing UVA for violating his First Amendment rights, and a judge recently ruled that his suit should proceed.

Here was what the student said.

“Thank you for your presentation,” said Bhattacharya, according to an audio recording of the event. “I had a few questions, just to clarify your definition of microaggressions. Is it a requirement, to be a victim of microaggression, that you are a member of a marginalized group?”

Adams replied that it wasn’t a requirement.

Bhattacharya suggested that this was contradictory, since a slide in her presentation had defined microaggressions as negative interactions with members of marginalized groups. Adams and Bhattacharya then clashed for a few minutes about how to define the term. It was a polite disagreement. Adams generally maintained that microaggression theory was a broad and important topic and that the slights caused real harm. Bhattacharya expressed a scientific skepticism that a microaggression could be distinguished from an unintentionally rude statement. His doubts were wellfounded given that microaggression theory is not a particularly rigorous concept.

But Nora Kern*, an assistant professor who helped to organize the event, thought Bhattacharya’s questions were a bit too pointed. Immediately following the panel, she filed a “professionalism concern card”—a kind of record of a student’s violations of university policy.