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November 2019

MEDIA, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Peggy Noonan Reminds Us Why Trump Won The NeverTrumpers’ fundamental error. Bruce Thornton

By on November 22nd, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/11/peggy-noonan-reminds-us-why-trump-won-bruce-thornton/

Three years after outsider Donald Trump blew up the political world with his implausible victory over the consummate insider, Hillary Clinton, many establishment Republicans still don’t get it. From their elite cocoon, they continue to indulge the hauteur that put off ordinary voters who had grown tired of a fossilized political class that serially ignored their interests, and seemed more concerned with their own insider perks and privilege, rather than in repairing the damage that decades of bipartisan progressive technocracy had inflicted on the Constitutional order.

The grande dame of the disgruntled NeverTrump Republicans has been the Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan, whose columns on Trump usually sound like a mash-up of the prescriptions of Emily Post and a snobbery redolent of Lady Violet Crawley from Downton Abbey.

Noonan’s latest is an attack on the Republicans’ behavior during the House impeachment hearings, coupled with a scolding of the anonymous author of the anti-Trump book A Warning. We should credit her takedown of “anonymous” as “self-valorous and creepy.” But her comments about the Republicans reveal the underlying grounds for NeverTrump hatred: the resentment against those who don’t accept the progressive assumptions that politics is the business of a self-proclaimed guild possessing knowledge, techniques, and professional manners and decorum that the voting masses don’t have.

As typical of a Noonan column, she starts with some sly preening of her insider-status as a wise political guru: “A young foreign-affairs professional asked last week if the coming impeachment didn’t feel like Watergate.” Unlike hoi polloi, Noonan knows “foreign-affairs professionals,” and they seek her out for her wisdom. She then proceeds to contrast the “dignity and professionalism of the career diplomats” whom the Democrats––“disciplined in their questioning and not bullying and theatrical”––called on to testify, with the Republicans’ “interruptions and chaos-strewing” that she compares to “some of what the Democrats did during the Kavanaugh hearings.”

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EDUCATION, P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

Harvard Protesters: Objective Journalism Is ‘Endangering Undocumented Students’ By Katherine Timpf

By on November 22nd, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/harvard-protesters-objective-journalism-is-endangering-undocumented-students/

This strategy is disingenuous. It’s juvenile, it’s manipulative, and must be called out as such.

Approximately 50 Harvard University students protested outside of the building of the school’s official newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, on Friday — demanding that it stop practicing objective journalism.

In case you haven’t been following the story, the paper has been embattled in controversy since mid-September — all because it asked U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement representatives for comment on a story about an “Abolish ICE” protest. (That is, demonstrated basic journalism skills.) At the time, hundreds of infuriated students signed a petition demanding that the newspaper stop talking to ICE completely.

Surprisingly? It seems that the Crimson was refusing to back down: Two of its editors penned a piece defending the newspaper’s decision.

At the time, I lauded these editors for standing up for their newspaper’s work. After all, even though a journalistic publication announcing that it stands for ethical, objective journalism might not seem like any kind of bold, brave feat, going up against the social-justice crowd can be hard.

Why? Because often, they don’t fight fair. Often, they don’t use logic or facts to make their arguments. Instead, they’ll spew out buzzwords (like “racist” and “sexist”) to capitalize on their opponents’ fears of being “canceled,” and throw in a few words like “dangerous” or “unsafe” to make it sound like people’s very lives depend on you agreeing with them.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Understanding Adam Schiff’s ‘Bribery’ Theory By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on November 22nd, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/bribery-and-impeachment/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=fifth

Even assuming Trump’s intent was corrupt, this is not the bribery the Framers had in mind in the impeachment clause.

The Constitution makes bribery a predicate for impeaching and removing a president. Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff is pushing the theory that President Trump has committed impeachable bribery because, as Schiff sees it, the president’s conduct violates a subsection of the federal bribery statute.

As in most criminal statutes, Congress includes several crimes in the bribery law. The offenses have gradations of seriousness, ranging from directly paying a public official a lavish bribe, to a public official’s indirectly agreeing to receive (but not ultimately receiving) some “thing of value” to be influenced in some official act. Like some of the lesser bribery offenses, the one Schiff is homing in on does not require an actual bribery (in the sense of an actual payoff).

Specifically, he is accusing the president of making a “corrupt demand.”

Under the law, if a public official, with corrupt intent, demands that someone provide him a bribe (a “thing of value”) as a condition for performing an “official act,” that is enough to prove guilt, even if the official drops the demand before something of value is exchanged. The Democrats’ theory is that Trump, intending nothing other the advancement of his own political interests (i.e., improving his 2020 reelection chances), corruptly demanded that Ukraine conduct investigations of his political rivals in exchange for two official acts — viz., granting a White House visit for Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and transferring $400 million in military aid authorized by Congress to help Ukraine defend against Russian aggression.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

Expect More States to Protect Kids From Experimental Transgender Drugs in 2020 By Tyler O’Neil

By on November 22nd, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/trending/expect-more-states-to-protect-kids-from-experimental-transgender-drugs-in-2020/

When a jury awarded custody of the 7-year-old Texas boy James Younger to his mother, who treats him like a girl and wants him to undergo experimental drugs and genital mutilation, it shocked America. Protests outside the courtroom snowballed. Attorney General Ken Paxton (R-Texas) opened an investigation. More than 200,000 people signed a petition to save the boy from chemical castration.

Perhaps most consequentially, Republican state representatives in Georgia, Kentucky, Texas, and — most recently — South Carolina proposed laws to prohibit the use of experimental drugs like so-called “puberty blockers” and cross-sex hormones on minors. While major medical associations have embraced the transgender ideology and insist these experimental drugs will help gender-confused children, others have warned that the “treatments” actually cause a disease.

For these reasons, pro-family groups have predicted that laws banning experimental transgender “treatments” for children are likely to pop up across the states in 2020, as more state legislatures re-convene.

“I think in 2020 we will see other states enter the fray and attempt to protect minors from undergoing unproven, harmful, and irreversible, decisions that will dramatically impact their health every day for the rest of their lives,” Matt Carpenter, deputy director of state and local affairs at the Family Research Council (FRC), told PJ Media.

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HOMELAND SECURITY, IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Malkin Video: Deadly Diversity Lottery Visas. Welcome to one of America’s most suicidal visa programs. VIDEO

By on November 22nd, 2019

https://jamieglazov.com/2019/11/21/malkin-video-deadly-diversity-lottery-visas/

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Uzay Bulut: Turkey: Greek Chora Church to be Converted into a Mosque; Is Hagia Sophia the Next?

By on November 22nd, 2019

https://greekcitytimes.com/2019/11/18/turkey-greek-chora-church-to-be-converted-into-a-mosque-is-hagia-sophia-the-next/

The Turkish Council of State recently approved a decision on the “Kariye Museum.” Originally a Byzantine Greek church in Constantinople (Istanbul), it was converted into a mosque by the Ottoman Turks. According to the new ruling, the former church is to be converted into a mosque again.

This decision could also pave the way for the conversion of Hagia Sophia, built as a basilica and now a museum, into a mosque, according to a report published on November 5 by the pro-government Turkish newspaper, Yeni Safak.

“Through a decision by the Council of Ministers on August 29, 1945, many mosques and masjids, including the Kariye Mosque, were allocated to the Ministry of National Education as museums and museum depots whose maintenance and repair expenses were to be paid from the state budget,” said the newspaper.

However, to overturn the change-of-status of Kariye Museum, the Association of Permanent Foundations and Service to Historical Artifacts and the Environment filed a lawsuit in 2005, requesting the cancellation of the decision.

According to Yeni Safak, the final verdict of the Council of State noted that;

“The Kariye mosque… is one of the public immovables belonging to the Fatih Sultan Mehmet Foundation.

“Immovables are public property established for direct charitable services such as places of worship, hospitals, and soup kitchens, and the provisions of private property cannot be applied to them. These charitable public immovables cannot be allocated to be used for a purpose other than the use specified by the [Fatih sultan Mehmet] Foundation.”

The Kariye Museum, however, was originally an Orthodox Church, namely the Chora Church. According to the official website of Princeton University:

“Described by Osterhaut as ‘second in renown only to Hagia Sophia among the Byzantine churches of Istanbul’, Kariye Camii [Mosque] attracts much attention because of its rich mosaics and frescoes. The original structure was built by the Holy Theodus in 534 in the reign of Justinian. In the 11th and 12th centuries, it was rebuilt by the Comnenus family and dedicated to Christ (thus the name, Christ in Chora). The structure suffered the great earthquake of 1296 and was later converted into a mosque in 1511 after the Turks conquered Istanbul. Since 1948, the building has been the Kariye Museum, a popular tourist attraction.”

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