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January 2019

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Senate Leaders Agree on Possible Path to Reopening Government By Mairead McArdle

By on January 22nd, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/senate-leaders-agree-on-possible-path-to-reopening-government/

Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell and minority leader Chuck Schumer have agreed to a deal that could end the partial government shutdown, which entered its 32nd day Tuesday.

Under the deal, the Senate will vote Thursday on two bills intended to end the shutdown. One bill includes President Trump’s request for $5.7 billion to construct a wall at the southern border, and one would fund the government entities affected by the shutdown through February 8, kicking the fight down the road until then.

“People are saying isn’t there a way out of this mess, isn’t there a way to relieve the burden on the 800,000 federal workers not getting paid, isn’t there a way to get government services open first and debate what we should do for border security later?” Schumer said in announcing the deal. “Well, now there’s a way.”

About 800,000 federal workers are currently missing their paychecks as a result of the shutdown, which has broken the record for the longest in U.S. history.

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The Mueller Squirrel Cage Victor Davis Hanson

By on January 22nd, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/mueller-investigation-turns-law-upside-down/
Round and round the investigation goes. Where it stops…

Special Counsel Robert Mueller recently indicted yet another peripheral character in his Trump probe, Russian attorney Natalia V. Veselnitskaya, for alleged money laundering in a matter quite separate from Trump.

Like almost all of Mueller’s indictments of the past 20 months, the charges against Veselnitskaya had nothing to do with his original mandate of finding any possible Trump–Russia collusion. No matter; within minutes, Veselnitskaya’s name was injected into the media cycle as if the fact that she was Russian and connected to the name Mueller were de facto proof that Trump was guilty of something — if not collusion, something worse.

If Mueller was not a special counsel, and if he was not looking for anyone deemed useful to flip to find dirt on Donald Trump, then Veselnitskaya would have been just another daily Washington foreign influence-peddler being courted with impunity by her American influence-peddling and often equally suspect counterparts.

To date, in almost every one of his indictments of Americans, Mueller has gone after Trump staffers, often quite minor, for alleged crimes that either were committed well before Mueller began his investigations, or came as a result of plea bargaining in exchange for providing expected dirt on Trump, or were the result of government surveillance or the use of government informants, or all of that and more. And all that sensationalism, through leaks and insinuations, was packaged by the media as “bombshells” and “watersheds” and “turning points” ad nauseam for 20 months.

When Mueller indicted and obtained a confession from Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national-security adviser, it followed from an elaborate perjury ambush set up by the now fired, ethically conflicted, disgraced, and perhaps soon to be indicted deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe. McCabe sent the now fired, ethically conflicted, and disgraced agent Peter Strzok to interview Flynn — a process overseen by the now fired, ethically conflicted, and disgraced James Comey. And even then, Mueller seemed to be the beneficiary of leaks from someone in the Department of Justice who sent to the media elements of surveillance transcripts of Flynn’s conversations.

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John Kerry to Trump: ‘Resign’ By Mairead McArdle

By on January 22nd, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/john-kerry-to-trump-resign/

Former Secretary of State John Kerry had one word of advice for President Trump on Tuesday: “Resign.”

“He doesn’t take any of this seriously,” Kerry said at first when asked what his message would be if the president were siting in front of him. “He doesn’t have an ability to have that kind of conversation.”

When pressed, however, the former top diplomat said, “Resign,” to laughter and applause from the audience at a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Trump had planned to attend the forum, but canceled the trip because of the partial government shutdown.

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P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

Anatomist of Racial Inequality: An Interview with Glenn Loury written by Christian Alejandro Gonzalez

By on January 22nd, 2019

https://quillette.com/2019/01/22/anatomist-

Glenn Loury has the ability, occasionally displayed by great writers, of articulating his opponents’ arguments fairly while simultaneously exaggerating their claims ever so slightly in order to hint at their fundamental unsoundness. In our interview, he provides an example. Asked whether he believes African Americans should be encouraged to take pride in being citizens of the United States, he offers this characterization of the view espoused by many on the anti-racist Left:

America’s overrated. America is a bandit, a gangster nation. America is run by war criminals. American capitalism is rapacious. America is nothing but hypocrites. They dropped the bomb on Hiroshima; they exterminated the Native Americans and they enslaved the Africans. White supremacy rules here. Why should I want to fight and die for such a country? I don’t want to fight and die for it; I don’t even want to stand while the anthem is being played for it!

Such a view, dominant though it may be in America’s discourse on racial inequality, is for Loury nothing more than a “posture,” or at best a “pout.” It is neither productive nor reflective of the reality of African American life in 2019, Loury argues, and it functions more as a rhetorical trick than as a coherent plan of action for improving blacks’ prospects. Against any sort of reflexive anti-Americanism, Loury is unafraid to urge “a kind of patriotism aimed at African Americans.” He knows, though, that such urgings are probably futile, especially given his social environment: Loury has taught at Brown University for over a decade, an institution where pleas for American patriotism are likely to be summarily dismissed. So why does he insist on making them?

Part of it, he says, is a matter of personal integrity; he believes that adopting a pro-American attitude is the right thing to do. And what does having integrity mean if not saying what one believes to be correct? But another reason why Loury extols the virtue of a benign kind of nationalism can be discerned in a question he frequently asks himself: What are his duties as an African American intellectual? He reflects on this question often in his podcast, The Glenn Show, as well as in his writing (he has written four books on race), and he seems to have reached the following conclusions. As an intellectual, his duties, at least in theory, are spelled out in the very definition of that term: Following careful study, he must publicly express himself with clarity, purpose, and authority. But as a black intellectual, his duty is to discuss unpalatable truths about the black experience—and perhaps chief among these unpalatable truths is that white supremacy, however grotesque it may have been in past eras, is no longer the primary obstacle to black advancement.

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Mainstream Media and the Shameless Manipulation of Women

By on January 22nd, 2019

https://thegermanyeye.com/mainstream-media-and-the-shameless-manipulation-of-women-3472

Over a year ago, Donald Trump was elected as the latest US president, in a surprise result which hit the mainstream media (MSM) hard. The problem was that the biggest media players in the US, and indeed worldwide, had nearly completely (and mostly unofficially) endorsed his competitor, Hillary Clinton. The MSM suddenly was faced with the unpalatable truth, that they had failed to adequately influence the outcome of the US presidential election, despite their gargantuan efforts to the contrary. The somewhat surprising result was that the public thought for themselves and the MSM was left with the knowledge that its potential to manipulate public perception on important issues was not as great as it had hoped or thought.

A consequence of this, is that it shone light on the media’s attempt to manipulate democracy to push their ideological position, which usually aligns with their financially advantageous goals.

In an age where newspaper circulation is down and alternative media influence is up, newspapers need to maintain a business model which is realistic and profitable, while retaining their dwindling relevancy. They achieve this mostly through advertising – and they are increasingly desperate to increase their online advertising revenue as hard copy sales take a hit. Companies pay newspapers to advertise their products so as to reach their target demographic. Interestingly, many people fail to realise that most companies’ preferred target demographic is women. Worldwide, 80% of all purchases are made by women. Let that fact sink in for a moment. Men may make more money than women, by working longer hours, engaged in more dangerous careers and entering professions which are more difficult but pay better, such as engineering – but women still spend more money than men do. If you want to sell your product, even if that product is aimed at men, you also target women, as they usually control the purse strings in relationships and the family unit. So when advertisers want to sell something, they know their best chance of capitilising their return on advertising investment (ROI), is to reach out to the main decision maker in financial matters, which is usually women.

So, in their desperate quest to maintain profit margins, newspapers need to deliver the female demographic to potential advertisers. Doing so gives good ROI to the advertisers and makes strong business sense to the publisher.

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The Drumbeat of the Mob by Mark Steyn

By on January 22nd, 2019

https://www.steynonline.com/9148/the-drumbeat-of-the-mob

Guest-hosting for Rush on Friday, I mentioned the strange need of the right to virtue-signal to their detractors – as in the stampede of Congressional Republicans to distance themselves from their colleague Steve King over an infelicitous interview with The New York Times. Democrats never do this; Louis Farrakhan and his Nation of Islam declare that the Jews are pushing defective marijuana on black men in order to turn them gay – which would appear to be a prima facie slur on at least four Democrat constituencies: blacks, gays, Jews and potheads. Yet Clinton, Obama et al speak not a word against Calypso Louie.

There was another conservative virtue-signaling stampede over the weekend. A short video from the Lincoln Memorial went “viral” (notwithstanding its ubiquity, I’m keeping the word in scare-quotes because, like any other virus, this one should be contained): it purported to show a group of Catholic schoolboys in MAGA hats harassing an elderly Native American drummer. The lads were instantly identified as students from Covington Catholic High School, which I’d never heard of but is clearly the kind of tony white-privilege joint where they book Brett Kavanaugh to spike the punch at the gang-rape prom. So naturally social media instantly convicted them and moved on to the usual doxing and death threats. The school itself leapt to dissociate itself from its own pupils and threatened to expel them.

Midst the present fevers, my advice and practice is that, when the media are in lockstep on a particular “narrative”, proceed with caution and, if you must join the great thundering herd of independent minds, tag along at the tail end out of sight. A genuinely conservative temperament should be wary of crying “Me too!” and scampering after the media-Democrat-cultMarx bandwagon – if only because, regardless of the wrongs and rights, no true conservative should assist in furthering the nano-second due process of trial by social media, through which whole lives are destroyed by the reflex twitching drive-thru jury of Twitter. “Sentence first – verdict afterwards,” said Alice’s Queen. Hang him high – and we’ll figure out later what, if anything, he’s guilty of. That’s about as deeply unconservative a proposition as one could find. The cure is worse than whatever disease (racism, sexism, transphobia, Islamophobia) it claims to be healing.

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Trump Notwithstanding, U.S. Deploys Only Words Against Missiles By Angelo Codevilla

By on January 22nd, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/21/trump-

Official Washington has refused to defend America against ballistic missiles, especially from Russia and China, while spending some $300 billion pretending to be trying. For a half century, it has dissembled its intention with techno-speak. On January 17, however, President Trump released the Pentagon’s long internally disputed Missile Defense Review (MDR) with words that might be summed up as, “This time, for sure!”

Said Trump: “First, we will prioritize the defense of the American people above all else.” Wow. Goodbye Robert McNamara and Henry Kissinger. Strike one.

And then: “The United States cannot simply build more of the same, or make only incremental improvements.” Strike two.

Finally: “My upcoming budget will invest in a space-based missile defense layer . . . Regardless of the missile type or the geographic origins of the attack, we will ensure that enemy missiles find no sanctuary on Earth or in the skies above.” Home run!

Most media accounts, and Democrats, took Trump at his word. But whoever fights his way through the MDR’s 8,000 words of bureaucratese, written by people who failed freshman composition, will find no fundamental changes in current policy. It’s a fair bet Trump did not read it.

Tinkering With a Horse-and-Buggy System
The most fundamental of questions—the one that McNamara and Kissinger “settled” with the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty before most people reading this were born—is that the U.S government should not even try to defend America against Russian and Chinese missiles, but it may try defending against “theater” threats. The Trump MDR reaffirms their settlement: “While the United States relies on deterrence to protect against large and technically sophisticated Russian and Chinese intercontinental ballistic missile threats to the U.S. homeland, U.S. active missile defense can and must outpace existing and potential rogue state offensive missile capabilities.” Color that no change.

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Shutdown Flimflam The media portray the partial government closure as a disaster. Steven Malanga

By on January 22nd, 2019

https://www.city-journal.org/media-portrayal-of-govt-shutdown

In every confrontation between the press and President Trump, there comes a time when media coverage becomes so aggressively bad that it turns into a parody of itself and “jumps the shark.” I knew that moment had arrived in reporting on the federal government’s partial closure when I opened my news-of-the-day app to find the headline, “How the shutdown will affect the Super Bowl.” Having once attended a Super Bowl during a period of genuine emergency—Super Bowl XXV, played in the first days of Operation Desert Storm in January 1991—I doubted that the furloughing of nonessential federal personnel could threaten the big game. Not surprisingly, much of the story consisted of Atlanta officials assuring the public that they didn’t anticipate any problems, followed by some conjecture about things that might go wrong, anyway.

I’ve been ignoring most such stories, because I’ve seen no evidence that the shutdown will affect me and my family. I’ve heard no friend, neighbor, or relative even mention it. Virtually everyone I know outside of my professional life seems to be going about their business. Still, I’ve taken a thorough look at press coverage over the past two weeks and found nearly 500 stories on how the closure is supposed to affect our lives. Most of the coverage goes beyond the plight of federal workers themselves, who are not getting paid, and who, if they’re living from paycheck to paycheck, are facing real duress. The press seems intent on convincing the rest of us that we’re at risk, too.

Throughout the shutdown, the press has been asking readers for stories about how the situation was disrupting their lives. “Everything from airport security to some food inspections to tax refund processing may be affected,” the Richmond Times Dispatch wrote recently, trying to stoke local concerns. “Is your passport delayed? Is your research grant funding halted? Are you a business providing assistance to Richmond-area federal government workers?” Call us, the paper asked. But is it a national emergency if reporters are begging readers for stories?

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P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

What’s Really Toxic Is “Toxic Masculinity” From Twitter mobs to razor ads to APA guidelines, a cultural meme is doing far more damage than what it warns against. Kay S. Hymowitz

By on January 22nd, 2019

https://www.city-journal.org/toxic-masculinity

Over the weekend, a disturbing video of a group of boys from a Catholic School in Covington, Kentucky catapulted Twitter into one of its regular nervous breakdowns. The video appeared to show the boys surrounding and taunting a lone, elderly Native American man as he chanted and played a drum in front of the Lincoln Memorial. The Indian was a veteran; his demeanor was stoic and dignified. The boys were loud and rowdy, the kind adults routinely cross the street to avoid. They were also—with one or two exceptions—white. A few were wearing MAGA hats. They had just come from the annual anti-abortion March for Life.

In other words, the video could have been scripted by a gender-studies professor from Middlebury, staged by the director of Gillette’s viral ad on toxic masculinity, and given an official seal of approval from the American Psychological Association, the august organization whose recently published guidelines elaborating on the evils of “traditional codes of masculinity” made waves a few weeks ago. There it was: toxic (white) masculinity, for all to see and deplore.

Or so it seemed. As it happens, the video had been substantially edited to leave out some details that, while not fully settling the matter, provided a good deal of mitigating context. If you missed the miserable affair, you should see the accounts given by Rod Dreher or by Robby Soave. For now, let’s consider how “toxic masculinity,” now a cultural meme embraced by the academy, much of the media, psychologists, and even corporate boards, has itself become toxic.

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The Disgraceful Covington Catholic Pile-On By Bruce Bawer

By on January 22nd, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/trending/the-disgraceful-covington-catholic-pile-on/

The daily media smearing of Donald Trump and his followers is one thing, but the readiness not just of the media but of self-righteous types from all walks of life to demonize a bunch of Kentucky high-school kids on the basis of a couple of news reports was truly breathtaking.

Presumably everyone knows the story by now. Last Friday, after attending the March for Life in Washington, D.C., several boys from Covington Catholic High School in Park Hills, Kentucky, were waiting outside the Lincoln Memorial for their bus home when something happened. The early reports accused the boys, some of whom were wearing Make America Great Again caps, of encircling and harassing an elderly Native American activist and a group of African-Americans. A snippet of video seemed to confirm this account, which was based largely on the testimony of the Native American activist. Next thing you knew, media around the world were reporting on this gang of racist pro-Trump louts and accusing them of White Privilege (even though several of them are black) and famous names on both the left and right were spewing the kids with vitriol.

Then longer videos emerged, and the story turned completely around. The group of African-Americans, who turned out to belong to a racist, anti-Semitic cult, the Black Hebrew Israelites, had been screaming at the boys, calling them “crackers” and “faggots” and the products of incest, among much else. The elderly Indian turned out to be notorious left-wing mischief-maker Nathan Phillips, whose claims to be a Vietnam vet have been challenged and who in 2015 accused some Michigan college students of harassing him. Last Friday, he wasn’t surrounded by the boys from Kentucky; he got up in their faces, banging a drum and chanting. Other Indians with him called the Kentucky boys interlopers on Indian territory and told them to go back to Europe.

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