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July 2020

New York Times denizens respond to Bari Weiss resignation over bullying — with more bullying By Monica Showalter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/07/new_york_times_denizens_respond_to_bari_weiss_resignation_over_bullying__with_more_bullying.htm

 It ought to have been embarrassing for the New York Times to have a top op-ed editor resign with fiery criticism of the paper’s stultifying leftism. In the news industry, it’s pretty rare for anyone to resign, let alone say what the problem was. That’s what happened a couple days ago, when Bari Weiss submitted her resignation to the paper, denouncing the far-left atmosphere of cancel-culture bullying, the signs of which have been pretty obvious for years. After all, not too long ago, this bunch forced the Times’ op-ed boss out merely for running an opinion piece by an elected Republican senator because the snowflake staffers said it made them feel “unsafe.” Weiss had had enough and threw in the towel. Thomas Lifson noted that the letter was likely “historic” in its significance.

Embarrassed? Not in the least. Not at the Times. In fact, plenty of them bit back and got catty. All because what she she wrote. Ms. Weiss writes that she herself faced “constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views.” She writes that they “have called me a Nazi and a racist.” She adds that she has learned to “brush off comments about how I’m ‘writing about the Jews again.'” She has too much grace to mention that her writing about Jews included covering the murders at her hometown’s Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. Ms. Weiss’s tenure at the Times became an ordeal. Friendly colleagues were “badgered by coworkers,” she told Mr. Sulzberger.

“My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly ‘inclusive’ one, while others post ax emojis next to my name.” First mean girl out the gate was Hannah Jones, creator of the phony 1619 Project, who had a couple of retweets about Weiss and now has up this counter-claim to victimhood: She also had this screen grab inexplicably up: Then there were the deniers — a collection of whom were collected here: In other words, nothing to see here, Bari Weiss is a liar, no such thing as wokesters taking over, we’re all just objective journalists trying to get at the truth.

The NFL Is on the Brink By Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/nfl-football-politics-risks-alienating-fans/

If the multibillion-dollar NFL decides that multimillionaire players have no obligation to stand to honor a collective national anthem, and that there will be separate anthems and politicized uniforms, then millions of Americans will quietly shrug and change the channel

The league survived all sorts of crises in the past, yet they are in deep trouble like never before.

The National Football League celebrated its 100th anniversary last year. This should be a time of self-congratulation for the brutal sport, which has no similar counterpart outside the United States.

The NFL’s megaprofits dwarf those of other professional sports in the U.S. The Super Bowl, not the World Series, is America’s national sports event.

The league survived all sorts of crises in the past. It was one of the first professional sports to integrate its teams, doing so in the 1920s. But the integration unfortunately ceased, and the NFL didn’t reintegrate until the mid ’40s, becoming one of the last sports leagues to embrace fully a racially blind meritocracy.

The NFL successfully absorbed the rival American Football League in 1966. So far the NFL has avoided federal safety regulations that could curb the incidence of physical trauma inherent in the sport.

The league’s owners are a cross-section of America’s most successful entrepreneurs and old-money families — many of them politically well-connected.

Yet the NFL is in deep trouble like never before.

In 2016, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick refused to stand for the national anthem. He claimed he was protesting the treatment of African Americans.

Andrew Cuomo Is Not a COVID Hero

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/andrew-cuomo-is-not-a-covid-hero/

The media have decided to play along with New York governor Andrew Cuomo’s bizarre effort to reinvent himself as the hero of the fight against COVID-19. Cuomo’s motivation is transparent enough, and we are duly impressed at the chutzpah required to even attempt such a thing. But there is no excuse for anyone else enabling him.

You would never know from listening to Cuomo’s glowing press notices (with the honorable exception of CNN’s Jake Tapper) that more than 32,000 New Yorkers have died from the coronavirus — over twice as many as in any other state. Brooklyn and Queens each lost more than 5,500 people, compared with 4,521 thus far in the entire state of Florida. On a per capita basis, New York’s COVID-19 death rate has been a third higher than any nation on earth, and higher than that of any state besides neighboring New Jersey. Italy, an early epicenter of the pandemic, lost 561 people per million; New York lost 1,667.

This is not just a random occurrence. New York’s authorities were reassuring the public to go on as normal until well past the point where the coronavirus had spread pervasively throughout the community. They had let languish the city and state stockpiles of emergency equipment. Most disastrously, Cuomo and New Jersey governor Phil Murphy both ordered nursing homes to take back patients who tested positive for the virus, unleashing catastrophic death tolls in both states’ nursing-home populations.

Cuomo’s claim for success is that the state’s infection, hospitalization, and death rates have come down, which is rather like if New Orleans had celebrated the water level coming down after Katrina. And just this week, it was reported that infection rates are rising again among young adults and in affluent neighborhoods; New York may not be entirely out of the woods.

Locking America Down Again Is Exactly What China Wants Because It Will Ruin Us By Joy Pullmann

https://thefederalist.com/2020/07/16/locking-america-down-again-is-exactly-what-china-wants-because-it-will-ruin-us/
Stop trying to make lockdowns happen again. The world can’t afford it.

The governors of Texas and California, the nation’s two most populous states, recently reimposed coronavirus lockdowns despite falling death rates and health-care capacity far beyond hospitalization rates. Numerous other governors have delayed reopenings or reversed them in similar situations.

Lockdowns are not necessary to prevent coronavirus deaths, since the current capacity for treating cases is far above what is needed and people are going to get this disease until there’s a cure. Further, lockdowns accelerate systemic weaknesses such as our national debt, poor education, large numbers of working-age men who do not work, failure to pay for decades of overspending at both the national and state levels, tendency to bail out corrupt institutions such as schools, big business, and hospitals, and bloated health care system.

The Chinese Communist Party knows of all this. That is why it has expertly manipulated American corporate media’s anti-American biases to undermine their biggest competitor for control of the world.

Lockdowns of Western nations, and chiefly of the United States, are China’s only hope for achieving this long-term plan in its coronavirus-weakened state. Thus, continuing to play into this mass-murdering regime’s hands through cuckolded American leadership will have far more deadly consequences than coronavirus. This is why the lockdowns need to end now, and never come back again.

John Podhoretz Woke wolves and the cowardly leaders of liberal America

https://nypost.com/2020/07/15/woke-wolves-and-the-cowardly-leaders-of-liberal-america/

It isn’t really about Bari Weiss.

The mob inside The New York Times didn’t target Weiss, an opinion editor and writer there since 2017, for cancellation to get her specifically — though her smart writing and editing surely didn’t endear her to some of the third-rate digital-media hacks and ­talentless millennials who ­enjoyed the pursuit of this journalistic star on the rise due to their loathsome envy.

As Weiss detailed in a widely read public resignation letter on Tuesday, she left her job after constant bullying by more left-wing colleagues (the vast majority) that included underhanded gossip, anti-Semitic innuendo and public attacks against her that would never have been tolerated had she been the one meting them out.

She also described an atmosphere of pervasive ideological intimidation and conformity that finally made commissioning diverse viewpoints and writing and thinking freely — essential to opinion journalism — all but impossible.

So Weiss left. But again, it wasn’t ultimately about her. The mob’s real targets are twofold.

First, the mob yearns to scare into submission everyone in a position of authority at the Times and any other liberal institution in America who might think it wise to hire someone like Bari Weiss — someone who draws outside the ideological lines and brings a fresh perspective.

U.S. Needs a Broad Response to China-Iran Moves By Lawrence J. Haas

https://www.newsweek.com/us-needs-broad-response-china-iran-moves-opinion-1518160
A new China-Iran economic and military agreement and this fall’s expiration of the global arms embargo on Iran could dramatically upend international relations by expanding China’s global reach, empowering Iran to threaten America’s regional allies, undercutting U.S. efforts to pressure both nations and further destabilizing the Middle East.

From their agreement-which both nations plan to finalize and ratify in the coming months-China will get a greater foothold in the Middle East, threatening traditional U.S. big-power supremacy there. Iran, meanwhile, will receive an important economic lifeline through Chinese investments and oil purchases, and added security from a tighter military relationship with Beijing.

From the arms embargo’s expiration, Iran will get unimpeded global access to sophisticated weaponry-weaponry that it can use to continue building its own threatening arsenal, as well as to arm its allies like Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and terrorist proxies in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, and elsewhere.

These converging developments demand a thoughtful response from the West. The United States and its allies now need to develop a broad strategy to contain Beijing and Tehran and thwart their ambitions.

“Two ancient Asian cultures,” Beijing and Tehran declared in the opening sentence of their draft agreement, “two partners in the sectors of trade, economy, politics, culture and security with a similar outlook and many mutual bilateral and multilateral interests will consider one another strategic partners.”

BLM enemy of the mind Edward Cline

https://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2020/07/blm-enemy-of-mind.html

Now that we’ve seen all the expensive, designer face masks on the Internet, it’s time to get to serious business. Speaker of hr House Nancy Pelosi wants all Americans to wear face masks, to better fight the Codiv-19 virus.  Rather, it’s to expand her power and turn the U.S into a dimmified republic.

The U.S. does not have a monopoly on racist loons. Canada has its share. Yusra Khogali, a Toronto Black Lives Matter chapter co-founder, argues that “white skin is sub-humxn” and says she prays to Allah for the “strength” not to “kill” or harm “white folks.”

In social media posts, Khogali mulled over how the white race could be “wiped out” by black people. All the while praying to Allah?

In the meantime, BLM has published a screed about how white “supremacy” has oppressed blacks by imposing its ethics on them. The ethics include:

These ethics include;

– Rugged individualism
– Self-reliance
– The nuclear family, with a mother and a father and 2.3 children
– Objective, rational, linear thinking
– Hard work
– Delayed gratification
– Respect for authority
– Following time schedules
– Christianity as the norm
– Planning for the future
– English common law justice
– Property rights
– Being polite

The well-deserved detriment of the anti-Bibi rioters Caught between a coronavirus rock and an economic hard place, Netanyahu has been beseeching that people heed the health edicts. Ruthie Blum

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/the-well-deserved-detriment-of-the-anti-bibi-rioters-635339

The recent rallies in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem illustrate not only that the “anybody but Bibi” mantra is alive and well, despite the diverse camp’s three-time failure in the course of a year to oust Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the ballot box.

They also reveal why the Left has been unable to garner sufficient backing from the so-called “center” to foment a real revolution in the Jewish state of the kind that is taking place in the United States.There is no question that the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated whatever societal malaise existed in Israel and the rest the world before the virus struck China and spread to other countries. There is nothing like health anxiety combined with money woes, after all, to cause a combination of hysteria and despair well beyond the norm.

Adding government-imposed isolation and separation from loved ones to the mix makes people feel as though they are living in a giant pressure-cooker with a minuscule steam-release valve. Under such circumstances, the smallest rise in temperature can ignite an explosion.

NETANYAHU’S REALIZATION of this in May, when the novel coronavirus curve appeared to have flattened, led him to reopen the economy, and not as gradually as health officials would have liked.

His one demand of the public – desperate to resume school, synagogue, work and play – was that it follow three simple directives, all of which had been in place for weeks: Wash hands, wear masks and practice social distancing.

MY SAY: THREE CHEERS FOR BARI WEISS!

In one fell scoop, Bari Weiss did more to expose the systemic bias of the New York Times than all the pundits, commentators, critics, authors and poo bahs ( def.a person having much influence or holding many offices at the same time, especially one perceived as pompously self-important) of ostensibly Jewish support organizations….rsk

How Confident Can We Be of Victory in November? Bruce Bawer

https://amgreatness.com/2020/07/15/how-confident-can-we-be-of-victory-in-november/

We can’t even be sure that the best president of modern times will win reelection over a doddering fool in thrall to our society’s most dangerous elements.

In a way never seen before, America has gone mad.

The Democratic Party, having left the likes of Henry Jackson and Daniel Patrick Moynihan far behind, is being steered by the ideology of Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. It’s in thrall to a Maoist mob. It’s tacitly (and sometimes not so tacitly) accepting wholesale destructiveness. It’s in bed with the Black Lives Matter terrorist group, contributions to which end up in party coffers. While the party lets Bolshevik bullies get away with violence, it vilifies decent citizens who try to defend themselves and demonizes cops who simply want to do their job. 

In this year’s presidential election, the party—and I never in my life imagined that I would be writing such a sentence—is running a manifestly senile relic who was always a mediocre hack at best; who’s best known for plagiarizing banalities and fondling little girls, and who, at a point when he was presumably somewhat less senile, cheerfully sold out his country in exchange for payoffs to his son from China and Ukraine. 

During the last few weeks, while Joe Biden has been dithering around in his basement, local and state Democratic leaders around the country have been allowing violent radicals to run wild in the streets, set fires, smash private property, and beat people up. Democratic mayors have allied explicitly with the radicals, echoing the insane calls to “defund the police” and rounding up troublemakers only to invite them to accuse cops of misconduct.

Many political leaders have followed the rioters’ lead in tearing down and vandalizing statues—not just of Confederate Civil War generals, which was the original idea, but of Union generals, abolitionists, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Frederick Douglass, and 9/11 heroes. It’s no longer about achieving racial justice but about accomplishing a Taliban—or Reign of Terror—style eradication of the past. 

In Seattle, the mayor refused to resist a takeover of several downtown blocks until the perpetrators marched on her own house. (Her government is now forcing white city employees to take trainin