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July 2020

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Weapons of Mass Collusion By Julie Kelly

By on July 5th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/07/04/weapons-of-mass-collusion/

For two years, as Robert Mueller tried and failed to find evidence of a criminal conspiracy, NeverTrump Republicans tended to the right flank of the Trump-Russia collusion front. But their role in pushing the hoax went much deeper.

“The Clinton campaign got a bunch of dirty cops to frame and spy on their opponent, the Trump campaign. After Trump won, they rolled this dirty tricks operation, this spying campaign, into a coup.”

—Lee Smith, author of The Plot Against the President 

The biggest scandal in American political history started with NeverTrump conservatives. Desperate to tarnish Trump’s viability as a candidate, anti-Trump Republicans and Democrats joined together to convince the public that Donald Trump was working with Russia to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. Articles connecting Donald Trump’s campaign to Russian interests started appearing on conservative websites as early as March 2016. 

Just two days after then-candidate Trump announced his foreign policy team in the spring of 2016, the Washington Free Beacon posted a 1,100-word hit piece on Dr. Carter Page: “Energy investor Carter Page, one of Donald Trump’s handpicked foreign policy advisers, has heavily criticized what he considers American aggression toward Russia, even comparing U.S. policy to American slavery and high-profile police shootings,” Lachlan Markay wrote on March 23, 2016. “Trump’s selection of Page may indicate the reality-star-cum-politician’s opposition to U.S. policies that counter Russian interests in key global theaters.” 

Markay’s piece contained arcane details about Page’s views on Russia, including columns Page had written for obscure energy publications. (Page is a global energy consultant.) Even the most dogged reporter would have been hard-pressed to find so many specifics on an unknown campaign advisor, draft the article, and post it in less than 48 hours. How did Markay produce a lengthy article in such a short time—and why? 

According to Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that helped concoct the Russian collusion hoax, a Republican Party elder connected Fusion with the Free Beacon in the summer of 2015. Fusion chief Glenn Simpson sent an email to a “longtime Republican politico” in August 2015 to pitch their expanding file of dirt on Donald Trump. 

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Slavery Rampant in Africa, Middle East; The West Wrongly Accuses Itself by Giulio Meotti

By on July 5th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16195/slavery-africa-middle-east

For the intersectional activists, the US is the world’s biggest oppressor — not China, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, or Iran.

“What the media do not tell you is that America is the best place on the planet to be black, female, gay, trans or what have you. We have our problems and we need to address those. But our society and our systems are far from racist”. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Twitter, June 9, 2020.

“The new anti-racism is racism disguised as humanism (…) It implies that every white person is bad… and that every black person is a victim”. — Abnousse Shalmani, born in Tehran, now living in Paris, to Le Figaro, June 12, 2020.

“America looks different if you grew up, as I did, in Africa and the Middle East”. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali, The Wall Street Journal, June 26, 2020.

It is high time for the United States to stop funding the United Nations…. The United Nations is now being used to perpetuate injustice, not stop it.

Real slave traders and racists — those who believe Western societies and values should not exist at all — most likely look at the current Western self-flagellation and cheer their approval.

The United States abolished slavery 150 years ago, and has affirmative action for minorities. It is the country that elected a Black president, Barack Obama — twice! Yet, a new movement is toppling one historic monument after another one, as if the US is still enslaving African-Americans. Activists in Washington DC even targeted an Emancipation Memorial, depicting President Abraham Lincoln, who paid with his life for freeing slaves.

Today slavery still exists in many parts of Africa and Middle East, but the self-flagellating Western public is obsessively focused only on the Western past of African slavery rather than on real, ongoing slavery, which is alive and well — and ignored. For today’s slaves, there are no demonstrations in the streets, no international political pressure, and virtually no articles in the media.

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For a Politically Corrected Paris by Amir Taheri

By on July 5th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16194/politically-corrected-paris

Of the 5,400 streets in greater Paris, 287 are named after persons or events with colonial, imperial, or ideological bearings that clash with political correctness, the fashionable ideology of champagne and caviar leftists.

Paris is dotted with old buildings, museums, offices, barracks, schools and exhibition sites associated with events that would anger the politically correct.

Black Americans are under-represented. Martin Luther King has a park in a down-market neighborhood. But he wasn’t BLM enough. He emphasized equal citizenship, not skin color.

Ah! Rewriting history!

Caught in the Davy Jones locker room, a civilization may dream of … a device to reel back the past like a film and edit it as you please.

With bookshops closed during Covid-19 lockdown I was obliged to re-read books I had read before. Among them was Lamartine’s “Graziella”, the journal of his six-month stay in Naples. A love story, the novel also talks of the repression of Italian freedom fighters who try to end French occupation under Marechal Murat, one of Napoleon’s generals, as their king.

A stone’s throw from our place is the Boulevard Murat, named after the man who crucified Italian patriots.

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Turkey Deporting Protestant Christians by Uzay Bulut

By on July 5th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16175/turkey-deporting-protestant-christians

Dozens of Protestant Christian families, according to the Association of Protestant Churches, have been asked to leave Turkey or have not been allowed to enter the country — all based on trumped-up charges, such as “being a threat to national security”.

“According to the court, Turkey’s intelligence agency has a classified file on me that even our lawyer has been unable to review. According to this file, I am considered a threat to public order and security despite the fact that there is no legal complaint or court action against me.” — Carlos Madrigal, spiritual leader, the Istanbul Protestant Church Foundation.

“Are Turkish citizens who are Protestant Christians next?” — Association of Protestant Churches.

An alarming practice targeting Protestant Christians in Turkey has been brought to the attention of the public by the country’s Protestant community and its organizations.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Devil’s Pitchfork: Seeking the Origin of Our Present Troubles By David Solway

By on July 5th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/07/_the_devils_pitchfork_seeking_the_origin_of_our_present_troubles.html

The progressivist campaign to destroy America is three-pronged, the tines of the devil’s pitchfork, namely: de-individuation, de-historicizing, and what I’m tempted to call pre-eminent domain (the power of the state to take more than one’s physical property). In other words, it is a war against three intimately related phenomena: self-governing personhood, historical memory, and the possession of property, whether intellectual or private property as understood by John Locke.1 Thus our ideas are no longer our own but state-injected bromides, history has been co-opted in the service of a political fantasy, and ownership is the prerogative of the state.

It is clear that the entire sensibility of the age, and certainly of the coming era, has changed dramatically, not only as the result of the onslaught of lethal political and cultural viruses like democratic socialism, “social justice,” postmodern relativism and radical feminism, but of the “Information Revolution” and its carrier, the Internet, in particular the social media platforms run by a cabal of corporate oligarchs. The ideological trifecta appears to be irresistible:

The contours of the reflective and stable self, as mediated in the family and local communities, are disintegrating by the day. As I’ve written previously, the individual, in the classic sense of a coherent center of cognitive awareness and moral responsibility, actuated by the conviction of individual responsibility for self, family, and nation, has become the relic of a vanishing tradition. The inclination is to identify with presumably benevolent but actually savage abstractions. In today’s ‘enlightened’ world, the pastoral fantasy — aka socialism — a dead idea embalmed with the illusion of vitality, has once again assumed massive and destructive proportions. The thinking, self-aware, common-sense individual is its prey, persuaded or coerced to surrender his autonomy to the false comfort of an all-embracing collectivism that spares him the anxiety of choice and risk.
Genuine scholarship is almost extinct and historical memory seems to malinger in a condition of permanent lockdown. There are many ways to abolish history: toppling and defacing cultural monuments (as we see happening today); re-writing the historical record (Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States2 or the New York Times’ 1619 Project, for example); and replacing the faculty of intellectual curiosity regarding origins — the historical imagination — with rote-learned slogans and dogmatic teachings, the program of modern education from kindergarten to graduate school. What we are observing is a chronosectomy in progress.

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Evidence is in: Hydroxychloroquine works! By Howard Richman

By on July 5th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/07/evidence_is_in_hydroxychloroquine_works.html

The media is doing its best to ignore the solid new evidence that hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) works. Although they claim to be pro-science, they only report scientific studies that agree with their narrative. Although they claim that black lives matter to them, they purposely keep knowledge about successful treatments away from COVID-19 patients, a disproportionate number of whom are black. Here are some details of the two new studies that almost all of them are ignoring:

Henry Ford Health System. Last week, the International Journal of Infectious Diseases reported that hydroxychloroquine cuts the death rate in half when it is administered to hospitalized COVID-19 patients soon after they are admitted. The retrospective study of 2,541 patients was conducted by the Henry Ford Health System in Detroit Michigan. Only 13% of the patients who were given HCQ died as compared to 26% who were not given HCQ. HCQ worked whether or not it was given with the antibiotic azithromycin, but it appeared to work slightly better with azithromycin. Key to the study was early treatment with HCQ, with 91% in the HCQ group starting that medication within 48 hours of hospital admission.
Mount Sinai Hospital. Also last week, Nature Reviews Immunology published the results of the small but ideal type of experiment (a double-blind, randomized clinical trial) conducted by Mount Sinai Hospital in New York which found that 0 of 31 patients in the HCQ group progressed from mild to severe as compared to 4 of 31 patients in the control group.

The media is also ignoring the May 8 study of 932 patients by the New York University Grossman School of Medicine which compared the HCQ/azithromycin treatment with the HCQ/azithromycin/zinc treatment. NYU found that the addition of zinc sulfate pills to the HCQ/azithromycin treatment reduced the death rate from 23% to 13%, but only if given before the patients got so sick that they required intensive care.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Franklin’s Admonition By Roger Kimball

By on July 5th, 2020

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/07/04/franklins_admonition

““A republic, if you can keep it.” What I once thought of as a quaint, half tongue-in-cheek caution, I now see as an earnest admonition. July 4 commemorates not only America’s independence from Great Britain, but also its assumption among the powers of the earth of a form of government dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Our society’s recent descent into tribalism is sharply at odds with that experiment in aspiration. It’s time we grew up and embraced the wisdom of our Founders. ”

“A republic, if you can keep it.” 

That was Ben Franklin’s famous response when asked, as the Constitutional Convention ended in 1787, what sort of government the delegates had crafted.

Time was, I thought Franklin’s answer droll. But as July 4, 2020, comes into view, I wonder. A republic depends on the rule of law. The rule of law has been having a hard time of it lately. So: Can we keep it? 

I have never been tempted to equate the equality celebrated by the Declaration of Independence with egalitarianism. The philosopher Harvey Mansfield was obviously correct, I believe, when he spoke of the “self-evident half-truth that all men are created equal.” 

Differences in talent, disposition, family situation, and plain dumb luck inevitably result in differences in achievement. As James Madison put it in Federalist 10, the rights of property originate in “diversity in the faculties of men.” Protecting those faculties, he said, “is the first object of government.” 

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The ‘Diversity’ Trap by Zaid Jilani

By on July 5th, 2020

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-diversity-trap-jilani

Progressive ideas about diversity have taken over the corporate world but they offer a skin-deep version obsessed only with color and conformity.

A shallow, reductive version of diversity that first gained a foothold in progressive political spaces has rapidly spread across American institutions and the corporate world. It values skin color and other inherited characteristics above all else, largely ignores class issues, and overlooks the benefits of real diversity, like the anti-fragile resilience created by fostering people with different viewpoints. Yet, despite the many flaws and dangers of this new orthodoxy—or perhaps because of them—anyone who challenges it, risks damage to their career and social life.

Just look at the case of Denise Young Smith. Young Smith spent almost two decades working her way up in Apple, becoming one of the few black people to ever reach its executive team. She was named vice president of diversity and inclusion, and in 2017 traveled to the One Young World Summit in Bogotá, Colombia.

At the summit, she was asked by a reporter whether black women would be a priority in her new role promoting diversity in the company. In her answer, she described a lonely rise through the ranks: “I’ve been black and a woman for a long time. I have been a first, I’ve been an only,” she said. She talked about hearing from other black women in the industry who shared stories about people assuming they were the assistant or secretary rather than the manager.

Her words were a powerful testament to anyone who has ever been stereotyped or been on the receiving end of low expectations due to the color of their skin.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Jobs Not Mobs . By Adriana Cohen

By on July 5th, 2020

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/07/03/jobs_not_mobs_143609.html

Voters have a clear choice this November.

If you want mobs vandalizing stores, destroying public property and setting churches on fire, then vote for Democratic candidate Joe Biden, who has spent the majority of his time hiding out in his Delaware basement while our country has been in flames in the aftermath of the George Floyd tragedy.

If you scroll through Uncle Joe’s Twitter feed from the past several weeks, you’ll notice he hasn’t condemned the burning of St. John’s Episcopal Church by violent protestors. He hasn’t denounced the heinous assaults and killings of police officers that have taken place throughout the country. Nor has he said a peep about the brutal murder of civilians — including teenagers — shot and killed in the Seattle CHOP zone controlled by armed left-wing anarchists. And he certainly hasn’t called upon Democratic mayors and governors to get their ransacked cities and states under control.

The stark reality is that Democrats today would rather appease anarchists, looters and violent criminals than uphold law and order.

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Amid a pandemic, the woke-ist media are experiencing a psychotic break by Becket Adams

By on July 5th, 2020

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/amid-a-pandemic-the-woke-ist-media-are-experiencing-a-psychotic-break

If the press suffered a nervous breakdown after the 2016 election ⁠— and they did ⁠— they are experiencing a full-on psychotic break amid the COVID-19 pandemic and the George Floyd protests.

It is as if the lockdowns and nationwide demonstrations caused media executives to snap, leaving them in a wide-eyed, obsessive frenzy to cleanse society of all problematics, screaming all the while, “Out, damned spot!”

CNN, for example, engaged in explicit political activism this week when it sought to shame companies that have yet to pull ads from Facebook over CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s persistent refusal to censor problematic speech.

“These are the big brands that haven’t pulled ads from Facebook yet,” reads the headline. The report then goes on to name and shame the businesses that have had the temerity to continue to advertise on one of the biggest social media platforms in the world.

This is not news reporting. This is activism. It is a poorly disguised effort by a major newsroom to pressure companies into boycotting a social media platform that is too committed to political neutrality and too opposed to political censorship for the media’s taste. In any other time and place, the press would have mocked and condemned the CNN article. But these are unusual times. Many journalists today agree with CNN’s shaming tactics and the reasons behind them, and so the Facebook report came and went this week with barely a whimper of objection from our brave Fourth Estate.

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