Do Not Fall for the China-TikTok ‘Strategic Ploy’ by Gordon G. Chang

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19274/china-tiktok-strategic-ploy

The Biden administration should terminate the seemingly endless discussions and either require TikTok to stop operations in the U.S. or force its Chinese owner to sell the app lock, stock and barrel to American parties. No other solution is acceptable from national security and First Amendment points of view.

TikTok and its owner ByteDance have repeatedly made promises about the security of personal data of Americans, but they have violated all pledges.

“Everything is seen in China,” a member of TikTok’s Trust and Safety Department said in September of last year. A “Beijing-based engineer” known as “Master Admin” had “access to everything.” — BuzzFeed, June 17, 2022.

ByteDance, a private Chinese company, is under a compulsion to commit espionage. Articles 7 and 14 of China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law require every Chinese national and entity to spy if authorities make a demand. More important, in China’s top-down system, every person must follow Communist Party directives.

China will almost certainly obtain U.S. user information one way or another: by taking advantage of technical loopholes in promised protections, by violating agreed protections outright, or by getting U.S.-based personnel to commit espionage

Beijing has over the years used TikTok in its various influence and propaganda campaigns, and the control of the algorithm that determines what users see would be especially important in political campaigns. In fact, the Democratic National Committee, realizing the potential of the app, joined TikTok in March. Even if the Republican National Committee joined, federal officials could conceivably help steer voters to one side or the other.

“The only acceptable deal requires ByteDance’s complete divestment of TikTok,” says Flint. “Unless there is full separation, the Communist Party will maintain influence over the platform. Unless there is full separation, the Communist Party controls the system.”

TikTok, the extremely popular video-sharing app, is in the midst of another round of negotiations with the U.S. federal government over data security.

“Whither Wisdom?” Sydney Williams

https://swtotd.blogspot.com/

When sixteen, with a new license in my wallet, I took my father for a drive. He cautioned me about driving too fast. I replied, “My reflexes are faster than yours.” “Yes,” he responded, “but you lack judgment.” His words were wise, while mine, which may have retained a scintilla of truth, were foolish.

Having good judgement means having the ability to see things from all sides, the ability to make a choice based on logic, experience, reason, and good sense. Good judgement is related to wisdom, which can be defined as having insight, understanding, perception, and common sense. Mimicking Einstein’s words in the rubric above, the four sources of wisdom, according to the Book of Proverbs, are: observation and experience, instruction based on experience, learning from mistakes, and revelation. The latter refers to the fact that the Bible teaches us that God is the ultimate source of wisdom.

But today wisdom has yielded to wokeness, which is defined as the state of being aware of social problems: racism, inequality, sustainability, and injustice. Everyone agrees that racism and injustice should be combatted wherever found. We all agree that equality before the law is critical to a democracy, and that equal opportunities should be offered to all. But we are not equal in abilities or aspiration, so outcomes will never be equal. In his new book, Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategies, Henry Kissinger wrote of “the natural inequalities of endowments,” which should be harnessed “for the public good.” Individually, we should play to our strengths, be they academic, athletic, mechanical, or artistic. We should strive to do what we are best at: teaching, building homes, playing the Cello, investing, or plumbing. It is what makes a strong community. And while we should agree that care for the environment is a sacred trust, it would be foolish to let the quest for sustainability destroy our capitalist system, which has raised living standards, reduced poverty, and made life more bearable for the world’s poorest. We can and should do both.

The United Nations for Empowering Terrorists by Bassam Tawil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19255/united-nations-terrorists

Hammouri’s affiliation with the PFLP and his involvement in planning terror attacks against Israelis, does not, however, seem to concern the UN Human Rights Office. Instead of condemning the convicted terrorist, the UN Human Rights Office chose to condemn Israel for daring to take measures to protect its citizens against terrorism.

This is also the same UN whose representatives have failed to condemn Hamas for building tunnels beneath schools run by its United Nations Relief and Work Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) in the Gaza Strip.

Take note: here is a senior UN official sitting with representatives of a terror group whose charter calls for the elimination of Israel and who is expressing “concern” over the rise of right-wing parties in Israel.

The UN official appears unaware that many Israelis voted for right-wing parties because of the increased terror attacks by Hamas and other terrorist groups.

It is ironic that a UN official, whose title is “Special Coordinator of the Middle East Peace Process”, sits with a Palestinian group that is entirely dedicated to sabotaging peace.

As Article 13 of the Hamas charter states: “There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors.”

This is hardly how to “prevent and remove threats to peace,” as the UN claims in its charter. In fact, the actions of the UN clearly demonstrate that the organization is actually cozying up to terrorists while denouncing those who combat terrorism.

In its defense of, and engagement with, terrorists, the UN is boosting the ability of Hamas and the PFLP to continue their slaughter and genocide.

According to the United Nations, the deportation of a convicted Palestinian-French terrorist from Israel constitutes a “war crime.”

Stealth Jihad is Alive and Well By Eileen F. Toplansky

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/01/stealth_jihad_is_alive_and_well_.html

Thirteen years ago, the Center for Security Policy Press published Shariah: The Threat to America, Report of Team BII.  They pointed out that “[t]he most important entity promoting Islamic supremacism, shariah, and the caliphate… is the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), or in Arabic, the Ikhwan.” 

Moreover, “The MB defined this form of warfare as ‘civilization jihad’ in its strategic document for North America [.]”

The “Movement” is a ‘settlement’ process to establish itself inside the United States and, once rooted, to undertake a ‘grand jihad’ characterized as a ‘civilization jihadist’ mission that is likewise led by the Muslim Brotherhood.

Specifically, the document explained that the civilization jihadist process involves a ‘grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated [.]

Known as “stealth jihad” it is meant to “employ whatever tactics are most expedient… and take control of the political authority.” [emphasis mine].

Despite this warning, rather than go full force to root out this campaign, U.S. national intelligence, law enforcement, and security leadership hid the Islamic origins of jihadist terrorism from the public.  In fact, for years, “senior Pentagon commanders have labored to define the threat out of existence.”

So it should be no surprise that “The Muslim vote may have helped secure Democratic Party control of the Senate.”  Consequently, the Red-Green Alliance is in full force.

In 2018, Trevor Loudon explained “how Muslims intent on fundamentally transforming America have achieved an ominous beachhead in Minnesota, thanks in large measure to that state’s long-dominant radical left.

The Architecture of Corruption: Why Elon Musk is Justified to Call for the Prosecution of Dr. Anthony Fauci By Kent Heckenlively

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/01/the_architecture_of_corruption_why_elon_musk_is_justified_to_call_for_the_prosecution_of_dr_anthony_fauci.html

Recently, Elon Musk tweeted out that his preferred pronouns are “prosecute/Fauci.”

Of course, the usual suspects in the media were clutching their pearls, screaming that Musk was putting the sainted Dr. Fauci at risk, while their daily attacks against conservatives (and even moderates) continue unabated.

I’ve been on the Fauci beat for about a decade. He was the primary focus of my first book, PLAGUE: One Scientist’s Intrepid Search for the Truth About Human Retroviruses and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS), Autism, and Other Diseases, co-authored with Dr. Judy Mikovits (a government scientist with twenty years of experience).

Over the past eight years, I’ve concentrated on telling whistleblower stories, and publishing exposès of Google, Facebook, Big Science and Big Tech. People often know the names of my whistleblowers, such as Zach Vorhies of Google, Ryan Hartwig of Facebook, or the 2008 Nobel Prize winner in Medicine for the isolation of the HIV virus, Dr. Luc Montagnier, but they don’t know me.

Most recently, I collaborated with Dr. Paul Alexander, who is the former Senior Pandemic Advisor to the COVID-19 Task Force. Together, we wrote PRESIDENTIAL TAKEDOWN: How Anthony Fauci, the CDC, NIH, and the WHO Conspired to Overthrow President Trump. 

It is a stunning condemnation.

To build my case, let me introduce you to Dr. Alexander. He is of Middle Eastern and North African heritage, was born and raised in Trinidad, and emigrated to Canada as a young man. He is one of the world’s leading experts in evidence-based-medicine. 

Dr. Alexander worked directly with Dr. Fauci, prepping him for his Congressional appearances using what are called “murder boards.” He would hit Fauci with such questions as “tell us about the $3.7 million dollars your agency provided to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for gain of function research on coronaviruses prior to the pandemic.” Forewarned is forearmed, and Dr. Fauci wasn’t about to allow himself to be unarmed in any debate.

However, anyone who has followed Dr. Fauci’s career won’t be surprised to learn that he carefully and effectively evaded answering such questions in private just as he did in his heated confrontations with Sen. Rand Paul.

And yet, there is a deeper story than the public presentations of Dr. Anthony Fauci. Most importantly, the public deserves to know what happened behind the scenes of public health over the decades and the role Dr. Fauci played in those developments. This is the real cause for concern, because there is no doubt that Dr. Fauci is one of the most powerful men in the federal government.

Why did the scientific establishment mostly move in lockstep with Dr. Fauci?

Attacking Reparations From The Left What dissident leftists have to say. by John Kline

https://www.frontpagemag.com/attacking-reparations-from-the-left/

The push for reparations may be upon us once again. While outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi voted last year for a bill that would create a commission to study the issue, incoming Democrat House leader Hakeem Jeffries is far more energized about it, being one of the bill’s earliest supporters and having testified at a related congressional hearing that white reconciliation has “a long way to go” and that reparations will help the country “march[] to a more perfect union.”

Meanwhile, according to the press release of a reparations symposium held a couple weeks back—an insiders’ event attended by the bill’s lead sponsor Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee as well as CNN Legal Analyst Areva Martin, among 60 others—there is a “tremendous number of local reparations initiatives that are springing up nationally.” Topping the day of talks was likely last week’s recommendation from California’s reparations task force to pay out to black slave descendants in the state a total of $569 billion or $223,200 apiece. Following that news, New York Democrats announced they will be pushing for something similar.

My, has the left changed. According to the “old school” World Socialist Website (WSW), reparations for black slavery has the odor of a “financial” and “political scam”; one utilized by the uber-cynical Democratic Party to divide the working class in order to win corporate support and electoral gain. While hard socialists, WSW are pre-woke leftists, and their critiques of the performative, racial politics of today’s Democrats is about as biting as anything conservatives can produce. They do deserve attention.

Bibi: A Remarkable Life Israel’s Prime Minister tells his story. by Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/bibi-a-remarkable-life/

One of the good tidings of great joy for the otherwise none too promising year of  2023 is that Benjamin Netanyahu, as of December 29, is prime minister of Israel for the third time. As Britain was blessed to have Margaret Thatcher, and the U.S. blessed to have Reagan and Trump, so Israel has been blessed to have this singular figure at the helm for so much of its short history. To explain why this is the case would take a substantial book. Fortunately, that book – Bibi: My Story, Netanyahu’s autobiography – has just been published. And it’s not only substantial but superlative – a first-rate account of one of the most influential lives of the past century.

Born a year after his country’s founding, Bibi, in the early pages of his book, offer a tantalizing glimpse of Israel in its infancy. There were giants in the earth then, and Bibi grew up surrounded by many of them. Among them was his father’s mentor, Joseph Klausner, who, Bibi tells us, “invented the modern Hebrew words for ‘shirt,’ ‘pencil,’ and many other terms” – a detail that underlines the remarkable extent to which Israel’s founding really was, at once, a matter of resurrecting an ancient civilization while at the same time creating a distinctive modern society from scratch.

Another one of Israel’s founding giants was Bibi’s father, Benzion, a brilliant scholar, historian, and editor of the Encyclopedia Hebraica. In 1933, at age 23, Benzion had written an article warning of a coming “Holocaust” of the Jews – and been dismissed as “alarmist.” In the years before the establishment of Israel, Benzion played a major role in promoting Zionism in America and Europe. Bibi worshiped him. “The secret to the encyclopedia’s great success, my father said, was clarity,” Bibi recalls. “Eighth graders and doctoral students, he said, should be able to read and understand with equal ease complex entries made simple by his rigorous editing. And they did.” Bibi obviously learned his father’s lesson: this book is uncommonly well written, lucid, vivid, and consistently engaging.

Owing, first of all, to his father’s academic career (ending in a faculty position at Cornell) and, later, to his own education (at MIT), Bibi spent much of his early life in the U.S., hence his perfect, unaccented American English. Throughout this book, his affection and admiration for America are palpable. But Bibi is first and last an Israeli, a man who has devoted his life to his homeland’s preservation, peace, and prosperity.

And the same was true of Bibi’s older brother, Yoni, and his younger brother, Iddo, both of whom, like Bibi, served in Israel’s special forces. Iddo went on to be a radiologist and playwright; Yoni briefly attended Yale and Hebrew University in Jerusalem but quit to return to the IDF. In 2011, Elizabeth Gentieu, who had taught Yoni high-school English in the U.S., remembered how eager the teenager was to return to Israel. “But surely there must be some advantages to life here,” Gentieu said. Yoni replied: “Here in America my classmates don’t know what they are living for, but in Israel, we know.”

The Pentagon’s Pronoun Wars Our woke military brass don’t know how to win wars, but know their pronouns. by Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-pentagons-pronoun-wars/

In 2020, the Air Force conducted a classified war game which showed Communist China launching a biological attack and then invading Taiwan.

And we lost.

“At that point the trend in our war games was not just that we were losing, but we were losing faster,” Air Force Lt. Gen. S. Clinton Hinote stated.

With abysmal readiness rates that have an average of only 7 out of 10 planes operational, and down to 50% for the F-22 stealth fighter, 50% for the CV-22 Osprey and 40% for the B-1 Lancer, the Air Force isn’t even trying to win a possible war, but it’s fighting one for pronouns.

Gina Ortiz Jones, a two-time losing congressional candidate who wasted millions before being appointed by Biden as Air Force Undersecretary, declared that adding pronouns to the emails of air force personnel will make them “a more inclusive force”.

”An inclusive force is a mission-ready force,” she contended, all evidence to the contrary.

This proposal was cheered by Lt. Col. Bree (Bryan) Fram, LIT Transgender Policy Team co-lead. He describes himself as a “Rocket Scientist, Author, Advocate, Nerd”. Warrior does not make the list. But he was in attendance when Biden signed the Disrespect for Marriage Act, abolishing religious freedom and marriage.

“The use of correct pronouns is an easy way to show care and respect,” Mr. Fram insisted.

It’s a short hop from pronouns being voluntary to becoming mandatory.

Pacific Air Forces went further by warning its personnel not to use “he/she” pronouns. The Air Force Academy, always in the vanguard of wokeness, told cadets to stop referencing “mom and dad”, and to ask people for their gender identity. This was described as a “warfighting imperative”.

The Navy, like the Army, has jettisoned the use of ‘ma’am’ or ‘sir’ for drill instructors.

Earlier this year, the Navy released a video teaching personnel to use proper gender pronouns. An editorial at the Naval Institute complained about the use of such terms as “manpower, manning, man overboard, man the rails, sideboy, man hours”.

The authors even urged replacing “man overboard” with “shipmate overboard.”

The Mandate for 2023 and 118th U.S. Congress There are two priorities. by Scott S. Powell

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-mandate-for-2023-and-118th-u-s-congress/

The pre-Christmas vote by the U.S. House and Senate to pass the $1.7 trillion Omnibus Spending Bill at a time when America’s balance sheet is in its worst condition ever is a sign post that financial collapse cannot be far away. Our nation is now technically bankrupt with liabilities significantly exceeding assets. And it gets worse every year with national debt now growing on a long-term annual basis at 8% or more, while assets (GDP) are growing on average at only 2.5 to 3% annually. Politically, our federal government is operating at ever new levels of dysfunction and corruption with diminishing accountability to the Constitution in either the spirit or the letter of the law.

Consider: the widespread failure of elected officials to uphold their oath of office; the political weaponization of the Justice Department and the FBI; the unequal two-tiered practice of justice and law enforcement; the flood of illegal immigrants and criminal enterprises into the United States as a direct result of willful federal government policy; and the violation of the First Amendment by federal agencies such as the FBI, DOJ, DHS, the CDC and DOD, who have engaged in covert operations against American citizens that include media manipulation and psy-ops.

With a new Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives it is time for action and results.

There are two priorities for the new Congress. First, it needs to write and pass bills that fix the biggest problems—like crime and the southern border—that will improve the lives of all Americans. Second, Congress needs to hold public hearings for discovery of causes of our nation’s dysfunction and corruption. The House of Representatives is well suited for this because of the breadth of its committee structure and because it holds the purse strings that can withhold funding for government agencies who fail to be transparent and cooperate. Simultaneous and separate hearings on different areas of failure and corruption, can produce findings, deliver policy solutions and personnel recommendations and prosecutions well before the 2024 election.

Biden blamed by own ex-border chief for soaring asylum cases, record immigration court backlog The surge in pending asylum applications to enter the U.S. comes after an all-time high number of illegal border crossings this year:By Aaron Kliegman

https://justthenews.com/government/federal-agencies/biden-failed-policies-blame-us-asylum-backlog-hitting-new-record-ex

The Biden administration is to blame for soaring asylum cases that have created a record years-long backlog in U.S. immigration courts, according to President Joe Biden’s own former Border Patrol chief.

“Several factors have contributed to this backlog, but the massive increase that we’re seeing today can be directly attributed to the Biden administration’s border and immigration policies,” said Rodney Scott, who headed the Border Patrol in both the Trump and Biden administrations.

“When the Biden administration went against the recommendations of experienced career border security professionals, terminated the Migrant Protection Protocols, canceled the Asylum Cooperative Agreements, and lowered the bar for credible fear determinations,” Scott continued, “they sent a message worldwide and opened the flood gates for anyone that could make up a sad story or recite the one that was provided to them by the cartel and so-called migrant aid organizations operating in Mexico.”

The Trump administration implemented both the Migrant Protection Protocols and the Asylum Cooperative Agreements. The former, commonly called the Remain in Mexico policy, requires some migrants seeking asylum to stay in Mexico as they await their immigration court date rather than be detained or released in the U.S. The latter are a series of agreements negotiated with Central American countries to curtail asylum fraud and limit asylum access to the U.S.

The Biden administration halted the agreements and has been trying to end the protocols. Earlier this month, however, a federal judge put a hold on the administration’s ongoing legal efforts to terminate Remain in Mexico.

The current years-long asylum backlog comes as illegal attempts to cross the southern border continue to reach all-time highs and critics blast the Biden administration for not doing enough to deter illegal immigration.

“While Congress owns the blame for leaving known loopholes in our immigration and asylum laws unaddressed, the massive increase in illegal border crossings and associated asylum claims falls squarely on the Biden administration and is a direct result of their failed policies,” Scott said.