Iranian Women Fight To The End Struan Stevenson

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/05/15/iranian-women-fight-to-the-end/

As the nationwide uprising in Iran enters its eighth month, the bewildered mullahs, bereft of ideas on how to control their infuriated population, have reverted to their time-worn acts of vicious oppression.

The inappropriate wearing of the hijab by women has become front and center the key issue of the uprising, which began with the killing in custody by the morality police, last September, of the young Kurdish girl, Mahsa Amini, for not wearing her hijab properly. For the theocratic regime, the oppression of women and their status as second-class citizens, is fundamental to their survival.

Schoolgirls who joined the demonstrations led to a sharp rebuke from the Supreme Leader, the elderly and deluded Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who told a Friday prayer meeting that the girls should be punished for their disrespectful behaviour. Hardliners have interpreted this as an open invitation to act and there have been repeated reports of toxic chemical attacks on primary and secondary schools in towns and cities throughout Iran. Thousands of girls have been hospitalized with nausea and severe breathing problems, while two young girls have died.

In an attempt to appease the demonstrators, it even seemed as if the morality police had been reined in for a few weeks. Their notorious green and white vans, which regularly patrol the streets, had disappeared from view. But the new police chief – Ahmadreza Radan, appointed by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in January after his predecessor was sacked, has reversed those commands, and ordered a renewed crackdown on women who violate the hijab rules.

CCTV cameras have been installed in public spaces and shopping malls to identify unveiled women. The mullahs have announced the closure of dozens of businesses that served women not wearing the hijab. Last week, the state-linked Tasnim news website reported that the sprawling Opal Shopping Center in western Tehran was facing closure because it had become a common meeting place for young women not wearing the hijab.

Tale of two whistleblowers highlights reprisal risk as Congress probes weaponization issues “It’s unacceptable,” Rep. Austin Scott, R-Ga., says. “We need people inside the agencies to tell us, in many cases, the secrets of those agencies.”By John Solomon

https://justthenews.com/accountability/whistleblowers/tale-two-whistleblowers-highlights-reprisal-risk-congress-probes

Two different whistleblowers from two separate law enforcement agencies in two separate high-profile criminal cases are raising a disturbing new question for Congress: Is the Biden administration seeking to squash those who report wrongdoing or challenge its official narratives?

Just 24 hours apart, the plights of a decorated FBI intelligence analyst and a decorated supervisory IRS agent burst onto the national scene with detailed accounts alleging they have endured retaliation and reprisal for blowing the whistle.

The publicly unnamed IRS agent – once a star on the Swiss bank tax evasion cases that stunned the world – was unceremoniously dumped along with his entire team from the Hunter Biden tax probe just a few weeks after alleging there was Justice Department political interference in the high-profile matter, his lawyers reported to Congress.

The removal stunned lawmakers who just a week ago won assurance from the IRS chief there would be no reprisals. It also stripped the Hunter Biden prosecution team of a bench with deep knowledge gained by years of investigation into the president’s son.

FBI intelligence analyst Marcus Allen – a combat-tested Marine who just a few years ago was named the Charlotte, N.C. field office employee of the year – has had his security clearance and paychecks revoked after reporting he had found open-source intelligence calling into question the accuracy of Director Chris Wray’s testimony about the Jan. 6 probe, according to his complaint filed with the DOJ inspector general.

The FBI declined comment on Tuesday when asked about Allen’s complaint.

Both cases have lawmakers scratching their heads, concerned that if the whistleblowers allegations are corroborated that Congress has been deprived of opportunities to fix problems impacting American taxpayers.

“It’s unacceptable,” Rep. Austin Scott, R-Ga., a key member of the House Intelligence committee, told the “John Solomon Reports” podcast on Tuesday. “We need people inside the agencies to tell us, in many cases, the secrets of those agencies, if we’re going to pass legislation that is going to correct some of the wrongs of the past.

The Hate Industry The “anti-hate” hate industry creates the tribalism it claims to fight, and the only beneficiary of all the hate it creates is the hate industry itself. By Edward Ring

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/16/the-hate-industry/

“The most dangerous terrorist threat to our homeland is white supremacy.”
— President Joe Biden, speaking at Howard University, May 13, 2023

In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, when establishment politicians started to make common use of the term “homeland,” they told us the most dangerous threat to Americans was foreign terrorists. But today, we are instructed to fear the enemy within. A new iconic date, January 6, 2021, is inscribed on our collective consciousness. From coast to coast, Americans are being herded into two camps. There are the “white supremacists,” those bad people who purportedly hate good people. And then there is everyone else, good people who are encouraged to hate the bad people.

The common thread, to state the obvious, is hate.

As Joe Biden’s would-be successor, doing his part to nurture and support the hate industry, California Governor Gavin Newsom on May 4 announced “the Launch of CA vs Hate, a New Statewide Hotline to Report Hate Acts in California.” Proclaiming that “hate will not be tolerated,” the governor said that Californians will have “another tool to ensure that not only justice is served, but that individuals have access to additional resources to help deal with the lingering wounds that remain after such a horrendous crime occurs.”

This is agenda-driven hype. The agenda, perfectly expressed by author Michael Shellenberger in a Substack post last week, is to “manufacture a fake ‘hate’ crisis as [a] pretext for mass spying, blacklists, and censorship.” The hype, also exposed by Shellenberger in his recent article, is underscored by the fact that over the past 10 years, hate crime convictions, as opposed to “criminal complaints of hate crimes,” have not increased at all. In a state with 40 million people, hate crime convictions were a minuscule 109 in 2021, and a negligible increase from 107 in 2012.

The hate industry is a vast agglomeration of lucrative hustles, now institutionalized and expanded into multiple and overlapping sectors. There is the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) sector; the equity, social, and governance (ESG) sector; the activist sector comprising countless groups, including Black Lives Matter and Antifa; the corporate, academic, and government sectors; the media sector; the politicians; and the pundits. All of these sectors have spawned scores of thousands of well-paying jobs.

If these institutions weren’t able to point to rising levels of hatred in America, then their specialty, the business of hate, would no longer be a growth industry. Where there is no hate, they must manufacture it. Where hatred has diminished, they must discover new forms of hate, often so subtle that we foolishly fail to recognize it without their assistance.

Danger – Government Digital Currency “This is a wolf coming as a wolf.” by John Stossel

https://www.frontpagemag.com/danger-government-digital-currency/

President Joe Biden and the media are excited about something new: a Central Bank Digital Currency, or CBDC. It’s a currency like Bitcoin, except controlled by the federal government.

Not everyone is a fan.

“Sometimes government does things that may appear to be benevolent but really are kind of like a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” says Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in my new video. “This is a wolf coming as a wolf.”

For months, I’ve tried to get DeSantis to sit down for an interview. What finally got him to agree was government’s plan for digital money.

“If you don’t trust central authority,” DeSantis says, “then you should see this immediately as something that is very problematic.”

Of course, a lot of people do trust central authority. The Biden administration says a CBDC will “protect consumers, investors … and the environment.”

“That last one’s a tell,” laughs DeSantis, “they would impose ideology certain criteria … ‘You’re filling up too much (with gas). Wait a minute — climate change. You can’t be doing that! You bought another firearm? No, no, no.’”

Biden Cowed by China’s Aggression by Gordon G. Chang

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19653/biden-china-aggression

[Hostile elements in senior Chinese Communist Party circles], thanks to the State Department, now have additional incentives to engage in belligerent conduct, and, in light of Washington’s craven behavior, every nation that looks to America for security has to be extremely concerned.

[Rick Waters, deputy assistant secretary of state for China and Taiwan] informed subordinates that Secretary of State Antony Blinken… had delayed already-planned actions [in response to China’s spy balloon] to avoid increasing tensions with Beijing.

Those planned actions included export-control licensing rules for Huawei Technologies and sanctions on China’s officials for repression of Uyghurs. Reuters reported that these China measures “have yet to be revived.”

Why did the Biden administration delay taking action? It is still devoted to policies that have failed for three decades. “The recent revelation that senior State Department officials purposefully directed the postponement of actions against China following the discovery, and eventual shootdown, of a probable PLA reconnaissance balloon reflects a return to the ideology of engagement at all costs,” James Fanell of the Geneva Centre for Security Policy told Gatestone.

In short, China has successfully intimidated the American government.

Defenders of the State Department’s postponement of the Huawei and Uyghur measures have suggested that Washington will gain support among fence-sitting countries by showing that the United States was doing all it could to accommodate Beijing, ultimately making China appear the recalcitrant party.

Such an argument might have made sense three decades ago, but certainly not at this late date. If countries by now do not perceive the danger posed by China, they never will. The way to obtain that consensus is Reagan-style American leadership — and American coercive diplomacy. Both, at the moment, are in short supply.

Lowest common denominator solutions — the inevitable result of consensus building — do not work when danger is imminent. Now, Ukraine has become a great-power battleground, China and Russia are rapidly destabilizing North Africa, and the world looks as if it is just one conflict away from global war.

Unfortunately, China cannot stop talking about war and is fast making preparations for it. Chinese President Xi Jinping is implementing the largest military buildup since the Second World War; he is trying to sanctions-proof China; he is stockpiling grain and taking control of all agriculture; he is surveying America for nuclear weapons strikes; and, most ominously, he is mobilizing China’s civilians for battle. China’s military has, Cultural Revolution-style, launched a purge of officers opposed to war. The recent death sentence handed down to retired Air Force General Liu Yazhou, who had argued against an invasion of Taiwan, is of particular concern.

We are running out of time. There is, however, almost no sense of urgency in Biden’s Washington and in the most senior levels of the Pentagon.

National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan had more than 10 hours of meetings with China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, in Vienna on the 10th and 11th of this month. The free-wheeling discussions have restarted what Washington Post columnist David Ignatius approvingly called “constructive engagement.”

Beijing, unfortunately, is merely playing the same old game of three decades: holding out the prospect of talks in order to get American presidents to delay taking action. Dialogue with a cynical Beijing is almost always fruitless. At this moment, China is trying to prevent both the G7, which will meet in Hiroshima starting May 19th, from taking action against Beijing’s coercive economic diplomacy and the Biden administration from issuing long-awaited rules prohibiting investment into Chinese technology sectors.

Xi appears to believe he has no reason to work “constructively” with America. “Change is coming that hasn’t happened in 100 years,” he proclaimed on March 22 while bidding farewell to Vladimir Putin in Moscow after their 40th in-person chat. “And we are driving this change together.”

The Biden administration is even moving in the wrong direction. “The Chinese Communist Party spent the past 30 years digging their talons into America’s flesh, and a return to engagement will make getting rid of Beijing’s influence even more painful,” said Fanell, also a former U.S. Navy captain who served as Director of Intelligence and Information Operations at the U.S. Pacific Fleet.

Once again, Western democracies are not recognizing threats and acting with the speed and determination required.

China has completely intimidated the Biden administration. Americans — and others around the world — must worry what happens next.

The State Department delayed imposing sanctions, export controls, and other measures on China after the Chinese military brazenly flew its large spy balloon over Alaska, Canada and the lower 48 states in late January and early February.

The swamp is deep and the IRS crocodiles are hungry By Jack Hellner

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/05/the_swamp_is_deep_and_the_irs_crocodiles_are_hungry.html

Maybe the IRS should spend their time administering the tax code instead of targeting people they don’t like and protecting criminals whose policies they like. 

These days, it is no different than when they targeted Tea Party members for the sole reason that they did not like President Obama’s big government and high-tax policies. 

Biden compared Tea Party members to domestic terrorists back then, just like he compares MAGA Republicans to domestic terrorists today.

It is Democrats who continually gin up racial hate and division while they pretend they want unity and most of the media cheers. 

Why should we hire 87,000 more IRS agents when the ones we have are more interested in protecting themselves instead of doing their job?

Look at this news here:

IRS Axes ‘Entire Investigative Team’ Probing Hunter Biden Taxes: Report

According to an exclusive report late Monday night from The New York Post, the IRS “removed the ‘entire investigative team’ from its long-running tax fraud probe of first son Hunter Biden in alleged retaliation against the whistleblower who alleged a coverup.”

Biden’s latest financial disclosures are out and he showed no gifts. What about the gifts when Hunter uses kickbacks to pay Daddy’s bills? I bet those gifts have never been shown on any gift tax return. I bet IRS agents don’t care.

What the WHO has in store for us By Vic Hughes

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/05/what_the_who_has_in_store_for_us.html

The brilliant and evil Saul Alinsky, in his seminal book Rules for Radicals, said in Rule 4, “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.”  We are about to get a critical lesson in how the U.S. Constitution is going to be used to destroy America.  The World Health Organization (WHO) is about to do that by getting “emergency” medical powers to control U.S. “healthcare” and much more.  Sadly, that appears inevitable.

Here are some predictions about what’s coming.  Their goal will be to do as much irreversible damage as fast as possible to U.S. health care system.  This is for all the marbles.  To paraphrase H.L. Mencken, the elites have waited a long time to shaft the common folk (who are insolently rejecting their Frankenshots), and we are about “to get it good and hard.”

The agreement will pass in the next month and immediately become law.
Using the immediate implementation provisions of the agreement, a “potential” health emergency will quickly be declared.
The WHO will claim very broad powers over “U.S. Healthcare.”  They will either delegate their powers to the CDC, et al. or, more likely, create a new unrestricted “Liaison Agency” (“LiAgency” — Fauci?) to implement the WHO powers.
Near-term actions will include:
Mandatory digital health passports (probably first for travelers, then for everyone).
Mandatory vaccines for everyone (first to travel, then to get access to Healthcare, then to get access to anything).
Since Tedros (head of the WHO) has already declared medical “misinformation” a major health problem (“an epidemic”), a “MisInfo” Directive will provide the legal basis for the more than willing U.S. government (and media Mafia) agencies to massively censor any dissenting medical opinions. (Good luck, Substack.)
First, using Rule 13 — “pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it” — they will target the “worst” MisInfonistas (as enemies of the global state) and any new info they publish.
Next, they will broaden it to include all new “MisInfonistas” publications.
Then they will disappear all past historic MisInfo and eventually outlaw its use.

The Numbers Are In on How Biden-Era Funding Is Skewing Scientific Research Ever-Wokeward By Steve Miller

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2023/05/16/the_numbers_are_in_on_how_biden-era_funding_is_skewing_scientific_research_ever-wokeward_899601.html

While pushing record spending for research and development, the Biden administration is working not just to advance science but also progressive ideology. In line with the administration’s “whole of government” commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, recent grants and requests for proposals from the National Science Foundation encompass research that: 

Examines how artificial intelligence may exhibit bias against “disadvantaged groups.”  

Looks at the negative experiences of minorities studying engineering and finds ways to create a culture that makes “diversity, equity, and inclusion a priority in the engineering enterprise.”  

Creates “equitable mathematics” by exploring how math instruction “may serve to marginalize students.”

Critics, including some scientists, claim such projects are outside the scope of the National Science Foundation, whose $10 billion annual budget is one of the government’s prime mechanisms for supporting basic research in the non-medical sciences. Through 11,000 awards each year to academic and corporate researchers, the NSF sets the agenda for inquiry in a wide variety of fields including computer science, environmental science, mathematics, engineering, and the social and psychological sciences. 

Durham Report Condemns the FBI’s Russia Probe — But Don’t Expect It to Make a Difference Jonathan Turley

https://themessenger.com/opinion/durham-report-condemns-the-fbis-russia-probe-but-dont-expect-it-to-make-a-difference

“Raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated.” Those words from the Durham Report summed up one of the most damning investigations in the Justice Department’s history.

In the 305-page report released Monday, special counsel John Durham concluded that the Trump-Russia investigation was launched without a required minimal level of evidence and shattered a host of departmental standards. Let that sink in: The Justice Department — as well as the media that covered it — effectively shut down a duly elected presidency, based on what turned out to be a politically engineered hoax.

That would make anyone angry. Really angry. Trump-level angry.

The fact is, in this instance, Donald Trump was correct when he said he was the target of a political hitjob funded by the Clinton campaign and maintained by virtually every media outlet. There is a word for that: disinformation.

Democrats such as former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff of California have pushed for censorship by claiming that disinformation is a threat to democracy. Well, this is that threat — the real one. This actually left an administration mired in a faux scandal for years, with high-ranking officials paraded before grand juries and their guilt then proclaimed nightly on cable news shows.

The Left’s War on the Rule of Law There’s no greater threat to our form of government than attacks on the Supreme Court and the judiciary’s legitimacy. By Ed Meese and Kelly Shackelford

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-lefts-war-on-the-rule-of-law-constitution-democrats-ethics-reform-kavanaugh-gorsuch-abortion-5f7b2b61?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

The left was able for decades to get through the courts, including the Supreme Court, what it couldn’t get through Congress. Today, however, liberals are trying to subvert the legitimacy of the Supreme Court because it contains a majority of justices committed to the Constitution and the rule of law. Suddenly, instead of repeatedly approving the left’s agenda, the federal judiciary has become one of its greatest impediments. Believing they can no longer win at the court, progressives now want to change the rules of the game. Rather than improving their legal arguments and strategy, they are attacking the referees.

The first contours of the plan emerged in March 2020. As the justices prepared to rule on a Louisiana abortion law, Sen. Chuck Schumer stood in front of the Supreme Court and declared that Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch had “released the whirlwind” and would “pay the price.” He warned that they wouldn’t “know what hit” them if they went forward with “these awful decisions.” The pattern of attack that emerged since then makes it clear that Mr. Schumer meant what he said. The judiciary, and the justices themselves, are in the left’s cross hairs—sometimes literally.

The first step of the left’s plan to transform the courts was to end the filibuster. Breaking this longstanding Senate procedural norm would eventually give the majority party power to overhaul the membership, structure and jurisdiction of the Supreme Court. Next came a push for court-packing, both via legislation and President Biden’s presidential commission on court reform. Although these efforts weren’t successful, Democrats haven’t given up. They still want to end the filibuster and pack the court and are merely waiting for the right political moment.

A slew of attacks on judicial norms constituted the next step in the left’s plan to transform the courts. Liberal activists called for term limits for Supreme Court justices. They pressured Justice Stephen Breyer to retire during President Biden’s term. They protested outside the justices’ homes after the Dobbs decision leaked, and a potential assassin even targeted Justice Kavanaugh.