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July 2020

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The Riots: A Will to Overthrow the United States by Guy Millière *****

By on July 3rd, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16182/overthrow-the-usa

The statement “Black Lives Matter” assumes from the start that, for the police, the judicial system and everyone else, black lives do not matter. What is so conspicuous and tragic is that black lives only seem to matter if they were taken by a white person…. Sadly, when it comes to black-on-black violence, no one seems to care.

Are the politicians who claim to want help distressed communities the very ones keeping the distressed communities distressed — and in a perpetual state of reaching out to those same politicians for dangled promises of help?

The mob’s destruction or removal of statues appears an attempt to erase the history of the United States… What they are doing looks like just an old-fashioned power-grab. The first law of power-grabbers is that if no one stops them, they keep on going — often with catastrophic consequences.

The recent damage inflicted on thousands of people who lost their possessions and businesses — as well as the many murders and assaults — shows what happens to a society with fewer police or no police.

That the name Black Lives Matter is present everywhere, and that everyone seems to ignore or forget what the organization Black Lives Matter really is, shows that a violent, anti-democratic organization, which calls for the murder of police officers and accepts anti-Semitism and anti-White racism, can use threats, intimidation and destruction — and find public acceptance.

“Their disruptive and violent behavior is happening because governors, mayors, and police chiefs have over the last decade sent the message that they will not respond with mind-concentrating force in order to restore order and hold rioters accountable….” — Bruce Thornton, Professor of Classics and Humanities at California State University and research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, June 19, 2020.

On May 25, 2020, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a police officer, Derek Chauvin, who already had 18 complaints lodged against him, killed a black man, George Floyd, by kneeling on his neck for nearly nine minutes.

Angry protests in Minneapolis quickly turned into riots that ravaged the city. The police did not intervene; the mayor had ordered them to withdraw and do nothing.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Sheep in Elephant Costumes Republicans need to wield their power forcefully and unflinchingly over the next four months—or they will deserve to lose it in November. By Julie Kelly

By on July 3rd, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/07/02/sheep-in-elephant-costumes/

Imagine for a moment that this is how Senate Republicans had used their power over the past three and a half years:

Objected to the appointment of a special counsel into an imaginary crime most Republican senators already knew at the time didn’t happen and denied funding for the probe when it was stacked with Trump-hating Democrats;
Instead of issuing subpoenas for the president’s son, they had subpoenaed every member of Barack Obama’s inner circle, including the former vice president, and held weeks of public hearings into how a foreign operative paid by the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee peddled anti-Trump fabulism about Russian election “collusion” to some of the most powerful government officials in the country and the compliant news media in an attempt to sabotage Trump’s presidential campaign;
Investigated Obama holdovers for their role in framing the president’s national security advisor, a three-star Army general;
Exposed the Obama-era officials who illegally leaked classified information to the media (and named the reporters involved) and made sure the Justice Department prosecuted those felonious partisans accordingly;
Supported the president’s national emergency order to secure the southern border;
Followed up on its own lengthy report detailing all the treachery associated with the character assasination of Brett Kavanaugh, including criminal referrals for perjury and the suspected involvement of Democratic staffers;
Called witnesses during the Senate impeachment trial including Rep. Adam Schiff, the contemptible chair of the House Intelligence Committee who lied to Congress and the public for three years about evidence of Russian collusion;
Drafted legislation to punish discriminatory social media companies now attempting to interfere in the 2020 election to favor Joe Biden and the Democrats.

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P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

THOMAS SOWELL ON MULTICULTURE

By on July 3rd, 2020

https://www.tsowell.com/spmultic.html

Most of the arguments for so-called “multicultural” education are so flimsy, inconsistent, and downright silly that it is hard to imagine that they would have been taken seriously if they were not backed up by shrill rhetoric, character assassination, and the implied or open threat of organized disruption and violence on campus.
    Let us examine the multiculturalists’ questions, one by one:

  Why do we study Western civilization, to the neglect of other civilizations?
    Why is that question asked in English, rather than in some non-Western language?  Because English is what we speak.  Why do we concern ourselves with the Earth, which is an infinitesimal part of the known universe?  Because that is where we live.  If we want to understand the cultural and institutional world in which we carry on our daily lives, we need to understand the underlying rationale and the historical evolution of the way of life we have been born into.
    None of this has anything to do with whether English is a better language than some other languages.  English is in fact more inconsistent and less melodic than French, for example.  But we speak English for the same practical reasons that cause people in China to speak Chinese.  Attempts to turn this into an invidious comparisons issue miss the fundamental point that (1) languages exist to serve practical purposes and (2) they serve those purposes better, the more people in the same society speak the same language.
    Why don’t we study other civilizations equally?  The most obvious answer is the 24-hour day and the limited number of days we spend in college.  It is stretching things very thin to try to cover Western civilization in two semesters.  Throw in a couple of other civilizations and you are just kidding yourself that you are educating anybody, when all that you are really doing is teaching them to accept superficiality.  Those whose real agenda is propaganda are of course untroubled by such considerations.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Modelers Were ‘Astronomically Wrong’ in COVID-19 Predictions, Says Leading Epidemiologist—and the World Is Paying the Price Jon Miltimore*****

By on July 3rd, 2020

https://fee.org/articles/modelers-were-astronomically-wrong-in-covid-19-predictions-says-leading-epidemiologist-and-the-world-is-paying-the-price/

In a recent interview, Dr. John Ioannidis had a harsh assessment of modelers who predicted as many as 40 million people would die and the US healthcare system would be overrun because of COVID-19.

Dr. John Ioannidis became a world-leading scientist by exposing bad science. But the COVID-19 pandemic could prove to be his biggest challenge yet.

Ioannidis, the C.F. Rehnborg Chair in Disease Prevention at Stanford University, has come under fire in recent months for his opposition to state-ordered lockdowns, which he says could cause social harms well beyond their presumed benefits. But he doesn’t appear to be backing down.

In a wide-ranging interview with Greek Reporter published over the weekend, Ioannidis said emerging data support his prediction that lockdowns would have wide-ranging social consequences and that the mathematical models on which the lockdowns were based were horribly flawed.

Ioannidis also said a comprehensive review of the medical literature suggests that COVID-19 is far more widespread than most people realize.

“There are already more than 50 studies that have presented results on how many people in different countries and locations have developed antibodies to the virus,” Ioannidis, a Greek-American physician, told Greek Reporter. “Of course none of these studies are perfect, but cumulatively they provide useful composite evidence. A very crude estimate might suggest that about 150-300 million or more people have already been infected around the world, far more than the 10 million documented cases.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Happy July 4: Tyranny Of The Woke Mob Might Be Worse Than Suffering Under British Rule

By on July 3rd, 2020

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/07/02/happy-july-4-tyranny-of-the-woke-mob-might-be-worse-than-abusive-british-rule/

When we celebrate Independence Day, we rejoice over the freedom won from the English crown. But there’s a new master gaining power in America. We need to shrug it off before it takes over.

Because we’re marking the adoption of the Declaration of Independence by the Continental Congress, it would be instructive to see where we are today by comparing a few passages from our founding document with current events.

1776: King George III has “sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.”

2020: The cancel culture has cost people jobs, income, and social status.

1776: The king “has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.”

2020: Rioters, looters, statue-topplers, and the criminals holed up in “autonomous zones” have killed and injured, stolen, burned, and destroyed.

1776: The crown imposed “taxes on us without our consent.”

2020: Black Lives Matter is at its core a marxist organization, while its “partner organization,” the Movement for Black Lives, “calls for a ‘progressive restructuring of tax codes at the local, state and federal levels to ensure a radical and sustainable redistribution of wealth.’”

1776: The king abolished “our most valuable laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments.”

2020: Defund the police.

1776: Our Creator endowed us “with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

2020: Conform or else.

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BOOKS, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Believer The ideology behind the lust to tear America down. Jamie Glazov

By on July 3rd, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/believer-jamie-glazov/

Editors’ note: As we witness the Marxist revolution currently transpiring right before our eyes in America, a vital question confronts us: what yearnings lie inside the members of groups such as Black Lives Matter and Antifa — and why do members of the Democrat Party and of the Establishment Media cheer them on? What inspires this violent hatred of America and the ferocious craving to tear it down? These are, without doubt, some of the most pertinent questions of our time. Frontpage Editors have therefore deemed it vital to run, below, an excerpt from Jamie Glazov’s book, United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror. The excerpt is the second chapter, titled ‘The Believer’s Diagnosis’; it explores the progressive believer’s secular faith – and unveils his heart of darkness. Don’t miss this essay. 

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The Believer’s Diagnosis
“Everything that exists deserves to perish.”
—Karl Marx, invoking a dictum of Goethe’s devil in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoléon

In the eyes of Joseph E. Davies, who served for several years as American ambassador to the Soviet Union before the Second World War, no human being merited greater respect than Joseph Stalin. The ambassador spent much time reflecting on why he believed the Soviet dictator deserved the world’s—and his own people’s—heartfelt veneration. He finally realized that the answer had always been staring him square in the face: it was that Stalin’s “brown eye is exceedingly wise and gentle. A child would like to sit on his lap and a dog would sidle up to him.”[i] Leading French intellectual Jean-Paul Sartre discovered a similar truth about his own secular deity, Fidel Castro. “Castro,” he noted, “is at the same time the island, the men, the cattle, and the earth. He is the whole island.”[2] Father Daniel Berrigan, meanwhile,  contended that Hanoi’s prime minister Pham Van Dong was an individual “in whom complexity dwells, in whom daily issues of life and death resound; a face of great intelligence, and yet also of great reserves of compassion . . . he had dared to be a humanist in an inhuman time.”[3]

The objects of all this adoration, of course, were despotic mass murderers. One crucial question, therefore, surfaces: what exactly inspires a person, and an entire mass movement, to deify a monstrous tyrant as a father-god who transcends the singular and encompasses, as Sartre put it, all the people and their land? The answer to this question helps illuminate the contemporary Left’s romance with Islamist jihadists, just as it helps crystallize the Left’s alliance with the most vicious totalitarians of the twentieth century.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Red China Moves on Hong Kong The snuffing out of freedom – and what it portends.Michael Finch

By on July 3rd, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/red-china-moves-hong-kong-michael-finch/

I was fortunate enough to be in Hong Kong on July 1, 1997, traveling with a group headed by the estimable Bruce Herschensohn.  It was an extraordinary, if bittersweet trip, seeing the British ships sail out of Hong Kong harbor on the evening of July 1st.  The lowering of the Union Jack across the city allowed a moment of great sadness, a passing of an era, given way to a future of trepidation and worry.

On the trip, we were honored to meet the politician and freedom fighter, Martin Lee.  Lee was just recently arrested and freed, but will now, almost certainly, be under threat of harassment and further arrests.  William McGurn, then senior editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review, also spoke to us, offering some hope, but tinged with warning.  That week marked a pivotal moment in history, one that anyone present in Hong Kong at the time will never forget.

Promises and guarantees were made; Hong Kong was given 50 years of freedom, under the now-infamous “one country, two systems” policy of administration.  And, indeed, it did work.  For just over 20 years, Hong Kong was the gateway and engine that helped propel China to a remarkable economic take off, lifting millions out of poverty.  Hong Kong was the portal for the rest of the world into China, and the city continued to thrive.  Rule of law, security of contracts, an independent judiciary and a free press were all legacies of British rule. 

All of this, however, was snuffed out in recent days with the new national-security law imposed on Hong Kong by mainland China.  Simply put, Hong Kong has lost its freedom. 

It certainly didn’t go down without a fight; the past months have seen countless protests and demonstrations from the freedom-loving people of Hong Kong.  It has been a sight to behold, watching thousands of demonstrators in the streets of Hong Kong carrying American flags, speaking the words of freedom and liberty.  It is awe-inspiring to see that America is still the beacon that all look to, a light of freedom that casts its radiance to every corner of the globe. 

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Independence Day and the ‘Woke’ Revolution Not since the Civil War has Independence Day been celebrated amidst such threats to our country’s political heritage. Bruce Thornton

By on July 3rd, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/independence-day-and-woke-revolution-bruce-thornton/

Not since the Civil War has Independence Day been celebrated amidst such threats to our country’s political heritage. The riots and bombings of the Sixties and Seventies were more lethal and destructive, but the political consensus from the center-left to the center-right––that the democratic process rather than violence should be the agent of change––hence rejected the revolutionary narrative of the New Left.

Today, however, the recent shift of the Democrats to their progressives and Marxist wing has put the authority and power of Congressmen, Democrat Party leaders, governors, mayors, city councils, media, corporations, sports teams, and entertainment industries on the side of rioters, vandals, and looters. The outfits behind this disorder, whether the self-proclaimed Marxists of Black Lives Matter, or the juvenile anarchists of Antifa, have with near impunity added widespread violence to illiberal tactics like “cancel culture”: the vandalism of public monuments and proscription of cultural artifacts; and the shaming, silencing, and ostracizing of dissenting voices.

The alleged “crisis” of racist police targeting black males for slaughter is in fact a specious pretext for this disorder, a Reichstag Fire for justifying a revolutionary political agenda to “burn down this system and replace it,” as a BLM honcho put it recently. This legitimizing of an illiberal political ideology and violent tactics by civic, business, and cultural leaders now threatens to dismantle the Constitutional order and American civic identity of which American exceptionalism and political freedom are the fruit.

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MEDIA, MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Stalin, Famine, and the New York Times By Kyle Smith

By on July 3rd, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/movie-review-mr-jones-tells-truth-about-new-york-times-communism/#slide-1

Mr. Jones tells the truth about Moscow’s man at the Paper of Record.

 ‘T he world is being invaded by monsters, but I suppose you don’t want to hear about that,” Both clauses of that sentence are devastatingly true: The reference is equally to the horrors of the Soviet Union’s mass murders — and to the West’s determination to turn its back to the monstrosity. The speaker is George Orwell; the subject is Stalinism. Orwell is preparing to write a book called Animal Farm in which the farmer is named Mr. Jones.

Mr. Jones, it turns out, is also the name of an Orwell acquaintance who might have been an inspiration in his writing: Jones is a Welsh reporter, first name Gareth, who is our vantage point for the Stalin-engineered Ukraine famine of the 1930s that amounted to the state-ordered murder of more than three million people by seizing the region’s grain. At the outset of the film Mr. Jones (which is just out via VOD services) is seen pleading to a team of politicos led by David Lloyd George, a former British prime minister in 1933. Jones (played with a combination of determination and disbelief by James Norton) advises the Brits that Herr Hitler, whom he has recently interviewed, has already started a war on western civilization and that a similar threat is building in the Soviet Union. Guffaws greet everything Jones says, and he gets the sack from Lloyd George. “It is me you need, I’m the only one who tells you the truth,” Jones tells the grand old man, but the ex-premier isn’t interested. So Jones goes to Moscow anyway, pretending he has Lloyd George’s blessing.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Universities Sowing the Seeds of Their Own Obsolescence By Victor Davis Hanson *****

By on July 3rd, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/universities-sowing-the-seeds-of-their-own-obsolescence/

The media blitz during these last several weeks revealed a generation that is poorly educated and yet petulant and self-assured without justification.

When mobs tore down a statue of Ulysses S. Grant and defaced a monument to African-American veterans of the Civil War, many people wondered whether the protesters had ever learned anything in high school or college.

Did any of these iconoclasts know the difference between Grant and Robert E. Lee? Could they recognize the name “Gettysburg”? Could they even identify the decade in which the Civil War was fought?

Universities are certainly teaching our youth to be confident, loud, and self-righteous. But the media blitz during these last several weeks of protests, riots, and looting also revealed a generation that is poorly educated and yet petulant and self-assured without justification.

Many of the young people on the televised front lines of the protests are in their 20s. But most appear juvenile, at least in comparison to their grandparents — survivors of the Great Depression and World War II.

How can so many so sheltered and prolonged adolescents claim to be all-knowing?

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