Displaying posts published in

May 2021

MEDIA Comments turned off

Closing Your Social Media Accounts David Solway

By on May 9th, 2021

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2021/05/07/closing-your-social-media

I closed my Facebook account two years ago and I was never on Twitter, regarding it as COVID on steroids. I saw Twitter as a broad thoroughfare for the most vulgar and contemptible people we are ever likely to meet, a digital forum for the SJW mob, and of course, the offspring of a censoring autocrat with no sense of managerial decorum or moral decency. This is not to say that one does not—or did not—meet good and interesting folks on Twitter, but that the palaver is pervasively tainted by obscenities, scurrilous vilification, intellectual stagnation, scandal, and malice. It is a home for everything tawdry, boorish and sordid while whatever is noble or discreet or truthful is in danger of imminent deplatforming.

My wife abandoned Facebook at the same time as I did, but maintained her Twitter account for another year, given her large follower base with whom she wished to remain in contact. Finally, despite a rich correspondence, she could no longer justify helping to maintain a platform that, in its essence, represented everything she detested. It was a sacrifice, but one she felt that had to be made. For it was clear that every tweet by a responsible citizen or freedom-loving patriot only served to reinforce a despotic enterprise in the business of creating a cultural gulag for dissenters.

Writing in the NYT-Singapore, Ligaya Mishan points out that “Twitter, cancel culture’s main arena, is not the digital equivalent of the public square, however touted as such. We think of it as an open space because we pay no admission, forgetting that it’s a commercial enterprise, committed to herding us in. We are customers but also uncredited workers, doing the free labor of making the platform more valuable.” Why, then, help to keep it going? Why support an influential arbiter of cancel culture, a vast atrium where online mobs form to carry out vindictive and irrational vendettas, and where, as Mishan writes, “any of us can be cancelled at any time, living in our glass Instagrams, leaving a spoor of digitized gaffes behind us?” Why contribute to an anti-democratic organ intent on policing popular discussion and debate?

Generally speaking, whether we are thinking of Twitter, or any of its congeners—Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram—“social media” are really not “social” in the sense of civil, sociable, genuinely communal, but “political media” chiefly committed to shameless profiteering and the ideology of the nation-destroying Left cancelling anyone who opposes its agenda. Mishan argues, here mistakenly I think, that unlike the dictates of State regimes, “cancel culture is rudderless, a series of spontaneous disruptions with no sequential logic, lacking any official apparatus to enact or enforce a policy or creed.” Given the consolidation of public power in the hands of Big Tech, to the point where it can influence and subvert State authority and even cancel a president of the United States, her argument lacks credibility in this respect. Rather, we are witnessing not merely “the evolution of a digital form of carnival and misrule,” but the crushing hegemony of inquisitorial authority. As Edward Ring writes at American Greatness, “It is fire and brimstone and furious vengeance. It is religious zealotry of the worst kind, clothed in piety.”

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Partisan Exaggeration of Right-Wing Terrorism Yes, white supremacism is real. But a greater threat to American democracy is the misrepresentation of terrorism for partisan power. By Bruce Oliver Newsome

By on May 9th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/08/the-partisan-exaggeration-of-right-wing-terrorism/

Terrorist incidents in the West peaked in 2017, and have fallen dramatically since, mainly due to the defeat of the Islamic State. Yet the politics of fear demands a substitute: right-wing terrorism. “Right-wing” is stretched so broadly today that it conflates ethnic and religious identities, i.e., whites and Christians. Identity politics is fashionable but makes for terrible analysis.

In 2018, the Southern Poverty Law Center partnered with a rarefied left-wing news site (Quartz, then under the same ownership as The Atlantic magazine) to claim that two-thirds of American terrorism in 2017 was right-wing. Their “right-wing” categories were slippery, including “alt-light,” as a gateway to “alt-right.” Worse, they categorized both anti-Semitism and anti-Islamism as right-wing. Extremist Muslims and Jews hate each other. Yet the Southern Poverty Law Center put them together as right-wing allies. Such an equation prevents admission of the fact that anti-Semitism is the bigger problem, and largely jihadi. 

United States official data for 2019 shows that more than 60 percent of religious hate crimes are directed against Jews, while 13 percent are directed against Muslims (about the same as all Christians).

The Anti-Defamation League jumped on the bandwagon of fearmongering over “right-wing” terrorism, by launching its own study of American “extremist violence.” In January 2019, the ADL reported right-wing extremists as the “biggest threat” by the “numbers.” The report uses the term “white supremacist” interchangeably with “right-wing.” Here, critical race theory meets left-wing partisanship. 

But the ADL does not fully reveal its data or methods. By contrast, official statistics show that whites (72 percent of Americans) are underrepresented in hate crimes (52.5 percent of perpetrators of hate crimes in 2019 were white). And there is no upward trend in white perps.

Trends tend to get pushed behind unrepresentative events. In the deadliest attack of 2018, a white male shot 11 people to death at synagogues in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This was officially categorized as white supremacist (although all the victims were white). The ADL effectively treated that single event as evidence for a multi-year trend.

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

What Are the Paleoconservatives Conserving? It’s hard for a movement to claim to stand for tradition when it attacks so much of the tradition it purports to defend. By Michael Anton

By on May 9th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/08/what-are-the-paleoconservatives-conserving/

There is less dividing Paul Gottfried and me than I would have expected, which is good. For when the orc hordes—at Sauron’s urging—come for both of us, they aren’t going to discern, much less care about, any academic differences over this or that statement from the American founding era. They are going to see us identically as enemies to be exterminated. 

I also welcome this chance to reiterate some points that bear repeating. To those bored with the repetition, I can only say that what I learned in politics apparently applies to intellectual debates as well: if you want your message to break through, you can’t repeat it often enough. This exchange also gives me the opportunity to take a few more whacks at Cracker Jack Claremontism, which can’t be beaten often enough. 

The Claremont-Hillsdale School does indeed hold that all human beings “have inalienable rights to life and liberty.” Gottfried continues from here that this “did not mean that for the founders ‘all men’ were equally entitled to citizenship or that all human beings were equally fit to exercise that right.” And he’s absolutely right. Only Cracker Jack Claremontism holds to that silly view. Anyone who’s actually studied the founders (and if we’ve done nothing else, we’ve certainly done that) knows that it’s false. 

A Separate and Equal Station
Among the Powers of the Earth

Let’s take these two issues separately. The first is membership in the political community. We may say that, for the American founders, their government’s exclusivity as a political community internationally mirrors the principle of freedom of association at the domestic level. Just government originates in the social compact—that is, a compact in which men freely choose to form a government for their mutual protection and benefit. At the founding of such a government, agreement on membership must be unanimous, and in both directions. That is, no one who doesn’t want to be in the compact can be forced to join, but also no one whom others don’t want to take in can be allowed to join either. The social compact is invitation only. 

It remains so in perpetuity for newcomers. Children born to members of the existing compact are automatically made members but may, if they later choose, renounce that membership via emigration. No one from outside the compact, however, may join it without the consent of its existing members. As Gouverneur Morris, the man who actually wrote the U.S. Constitution, put it: “every society, from a great nation down to a club, has the right of declaring the conditions on which new members shall be admitted.” 

Continue reading →
ELECTIONS Comments turned off

The Supine Loser Party If conservatives and Republicans don’t exactly constitute “the stupid party,” then there are certainly grounds to call them something else. By Roger Kimball

By on May 9th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/08/the-supine-loser-party/

Was John Stuart Mill right that conservatives are members of “the stupid party”? I used to scoff at that charge. Lately, alas, I have begun to harbor doubts. Maybe “stupid” is a bit of an overstatement. But how about “supine”? Can it be said the conservatives are “the supine party”? The evidence, I submit, is formidable.

You have probably noticed that the computers furnished to journalists these days come with the phrase “the Big Lie” programmed into them. It is impossible to write about the 2020 election, Donald Trump, the political environment, or your Aunt Mabel’s recipe for fudge brownies without encountering it. 

A couple of days ago, CNN speculated about “Why Republicans won’t walk away from the ‘Big Lie’.” Ditto Politico, which assured its readers that “The ‘big lie’ lives on.” MSNBC weighed in with a story that the GOP was the “Party of the Big Lie.” Then there is the Washington Post which told its readers that Donald Trump’s “Big Lie” was about more than the “baseless and overwhelmingly debunked effort to call the results of the 2020 election into question.”

These examples easily could be multiplied a hundred-, a thousand-fold. There seems to be an unwritten rule (or, who knows, maybe it is written down in the stylebook by now) that you cannot write a column without declaring that any suggestion that the 2020 election was fraught with “irregularities”—which is a polysyllabic word for “fraud”—be described as “baseless,” “debunked” (“overwhelmingly debunked”), etc. 

This tic is not confined to acknowledged leftists. It has also infected the prose and pronunciamentos of the entire anti-Trump fraternity. Thus we see soon-to-be-former Representative Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) deriding Donald Trump and his repetition of “the Big Lie” in columns, speeches, and tweets. “The 2020 presidential election was not stolen,” she wrote. “Anyone who claims it was is spreading THE BIG LIE, turning their [sic] back on the rule of law, and poisoning our democratic system.” 

The great thing about the phrase “The Big Lie,” of course, is its origins in the philosophy of Adolf Hitler. That gives the phrase, free and for nothing, an extra dollop of nastiness making it easier, for example, to describe supporters of Donald Trump as potential (or maybe actual) “domestic extremists,” “terrorists,” etc., because, after all, they support die große Lüge, recommended beforehand by Nazis, ergo what do you expect?

In my view, however, it is not CNN or MSNBC or even Liz Cheney who has demonstrated a true understanding of the nature of the Big Lie that is affecting our society. It is writers like Julie Kelly. Just a couple of days ago in American Greatness, Kelly hit the proverbial nail on the head (Jeeves would have said rem acu tetigit). “The ‘Big Lie,’” she wrote, “isn’t that the 2020 election was stolen; the ‘Big Lie’ is that it was fair and lawful.”

Bingo, as anyone who can pronounce mail-in ballots, unconstitutional changes to voting laws immediately before the election, or ballot harvesting knows full well. Stalin got it in one. Voting is fine, he said. We all want voting. What matters is who counts the votes. Thus, just as things are getting interesting in the Arizona vote audit, Joe Biden’s Justice Department is making noises about shutting it down. 

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

China Aims to Become the World’s Leading Space Power by 2045 by Judith Bergman

By on May 9th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17306/china-space-power

“China is taking steps to establish a commanding position in the commercial launch and satellite sectors relying in part on aggressive state-backed financing that foreign market-driven companies cannot match.” — US-China Economic and Security Review Commission in its 2019 Annual Report to Congress.

“Chinese and Russian space activities present serious and growing threats to U.S. national security interests. Chinese and Russian military doctrines also indicate that they view space as critical to modern warfare and consider the use of counterspace capabilities as both a means of reducing U.S. military effectiveness and for winning future wars.” — U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III, written testimony prior to his confirmation hearing. Space.com, March 19, 2021.

“The PRC continues to strengthen its military space capabilities, despite its public stance against the weaponization of space…. the PRC is developing electronic warfare capabilities such as satellite jammers….and China probably intends to pursue additional ASAT [Anti-Satellite] weapons capable of destroying satellites….” — Pentagon report about China’s military capabilities, Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China 2020.

Given the chance, China will also move ahead to use space to dominate not only the US but also the rest of the planet. Any defense budget cuts or flatlines in the in the US military budget — or any monetary transfers out of it — should be regarded as suicidal.

Shortly after becoming president in March 2013, Xi Jinping made his ambitions for China’s space power clear. “Developing the space program and turning the country into a space power is the space dream that we have continuously pursued”, he said. “The space dream is part of the dream to make China stronger”. China aims to become the world’s leading space power by 2045: “China will become an all-round world-leading country in space equipment and technology. By then, it will be able to carry out man-computer coordinated space exploration on a large scale,” wrote China Daily in 2017.

One cornerstone of China’s space program is the Beidou Navigation Satellite system (BDS), a global navigation satellite system that provides positioning, navigation and timing, in addition to data communication. The People’s Liberation Army created the program in order not to be dependent on the US-controlled GPS network. “In recent years, the PRC has actively sought to promote the image of Beidou as a civilian-led program intended primarily for commercial and scientific purposes,” stated a report by the Jamestown Foundation. “However, the program is under overall military direction, with the PLA in charge of Beidou’s senior-most program management organizations,”

Beidou is also known as China’s “Space Silk Road”, which expands China’s land-based “Silk Road Economic Belt” and sea-based “21st Century Maritime Silk Road” — better known collectively as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) — into space. Beidou makes participants in the Belt and Road Initiative dependent on China for precision navigation and other space based services. According to a report by Malcolm Davis from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute in 2017:

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Being a journalist in Iran is one of the world’s most dangerous jobs By Hassan Mahmoudi

By on May 9th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/05/being_a_journalist_in_iran_is_one_of_the_worlds_most_dangerous_jobs.html

According to the United Nations, May 3 was World Press Freedom Day. That makes this a good time to stop and contemplate how dangerous it is to be a real journalist in Iran. There, a journalist takes his life into his hands if he tries to report facts with honesty and transparency. This regime has no qualms about using repression, censorship, and imprisonment to control the flow of news. Put simply, there is no press freedom in Iran

Although Iran has always been a dangerous place for journalists in the past decade it’s become increasingly risky to try to report the truth there. It is common for journalists and bloggers across Iran to be summoned, arrested, and sentenced to prison for expressing facts and real news.

Because the Iranian regime, like all tyrannies, is inherently unstable and it is currently facing serious economic problems, the mullahs are terrified that real news could act as a spark in a society on the verge of explosion. The last thing they want is another uprising such as the ones in 2018 and 2019. One way to try to deter uprisings is to cut off the Internet and sensor news, which it did during the recent uprising in Balochistan.

Even without the Internet, though, Iran fears those people within the country who may tell the truth. Reporters Without Borders ranks it as one of the world’s most oppressive countries for journalists:

Iran is still one of the world’s most repressive countries for journalists, subjecting news and information to relentless control. At least 860 journalists and citizen-journalists have been prosecuted, arrested, imprisoned and in some cases executed since the 1979 revolution. 

Continue reading →
FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Biden’s SecState brims with misplaced optimism on China By Gunnar Heinsohn

By on May 9th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/05/bidens_secstate_brims_with_misplaced_optimism_on_china.html

On May 2, 2021, Sixty Minutes (CBS) interviewed U.S. secretary of state Antony Blinken on the future of America’s competition with China.  Blinken expressed confidence because the Middle Kingdom “has an aging population,” whereas “we’re in a much better place to maximize … human potential than any country on Earth.”

However, the CIA Factbook reports a median age of 38.4 years for China’s 1.44 billion citizens (2020), but a slightly higher 38.5 for the 330 million Americans.  For the ca. 200 million “whites,” with a 2019 total fertility rate of 1.6 (children in a woman’s lifetime) against China’s 1.7, it is 44 years.  America’s white majority, thus, is aging faster than, for example, the Swiss (42.7) and hardly slower than Austrians (44.5) or Germans (45.7).

In terms of human capital development, these three Central European countries are well ahead of Blinken’s homeland.  In the 2018 PISA tests, published at the end of 2019, among 1,000 children (younger than 15), there is the following ranking for top achievers and failures: Switzerland (49/168), Germany (28/211), Austria (25/211), and the USA (15/271).  China, on the other hand, plays in a higher-skilled league, with 165 scholastic aces and only 24 failures.

It could be argued that only four Chinese provinces with a population of less than 200 million took part in PISA, and that Beijing conducted an unfair selection process.  But even if one only applies South Korea’s scores (69 at the top and 150 at the bottom) to China, there are more than 17 million of its 249 million children (in 2019) who will be able to perform exceptionally well as adults.  Among some 61 million American children, there are only 915,000 who reach this level, many of them hailing from East Asia.  With the odds almost 19:1 in favor of the People’s Republic, one could wish the U.S. had better informed advisers for its most senior politicians.

As for Europe, even if we add the finest pupils, who are under the aegis of Berlin (320,000), Vienna (32,000) and Bern (64,000), things hardly look better for the core economic regions of the Western world.  The 455,000 talented young students among 50 million South Koreans alone surpass those three.

Even among the best, there seem to be differences in quality between East Asia and Europe or North America.  South Korea demonstrates this in the strictly screened PCT patent applications of 2020, when it clearly outpaced Germany with 20,060 to 18,643.  In 1994, the balance of patent applications was still 4,294 to 190 in favor of the Federal Republic.  That curious higher cognitive intensity is confirmed by the 2019 SAT tests, in which 37 percent of Asians but only 10 percent of whites scored at the top proficiency level.

Continue reading →
ELECTIONS Comments turned off

If There’s Nothing to Hide, Why Are Democrats Freaking Out about the Arizona Audit? By J.B. Shurk

By on May 9th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/05/if_theres_nothing_to_hide_why_are_democrats_freaking_out_about_the_arizona_audit.html

If you have been keeping an eye on the election audit taking place right now in Maricopa County, Arizona, then you also know that Democrats, news propagandists, and “concerned” NeverTrump Republicans are beginning to sound more and more like trapped rats squeaking in fear.  An army of lawyers — many of the same political operatives who manipulated the November election by contravening existing election laws and flooding battleground states with uncontrolled and unverified mail-in ballots — are begging state and federal courts to stop the audit midcourse and petitioning Arizona’s Democrat secretary of state and Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice to intervene under the absurd pretense that ensuring election integrity somehow deprives voters of their civil rights.  Arizonan and Biden-supporter Cindy McCain has publicly called the vote recount “ludicrous” because “the election is over.”  And MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow is so terrified of what the auditors might find that she insists that the whole exercise is not only “dangerous,” but also the “end of democracy.” 

Even though the entire audit is being conducted with unprecedented transparency and live video feeds that invite viewers anywhere in the world to watch the process, reporters and adverse political agents have been repeatedly caught attempting to infiltrate the well run operation or laboring to expose the identities of workers.  If there is a reason for inserting spies into an already open process other than to later cast doubt upon the integrity of the auditing process itself, I don’t know of it.  And if there is a reason to expose workers’ identities to the public other than to make them targets for campaigns of harassment and intimidation, reporters have made no attempt to provide it.

Compare the highly professional audit taking place in Arizona to the orchestrated chaos of the presidential election.  It took five days last November for vote-counters to find enough mail-in ballots for Joe Biden for the Democrat press corps to declare him the winner, and in the voting precincts where Trump leads disappeared over those days, transparency was nowhere to be seen.  Vote-counters covered windows with cardboard to block outside observation of any kind; counting paused and restarted in secret; and ad hoc procedures were established on the fly and without consistency from one precinct to the next when determining whether to include ballots lacking legally required voter identification metrics, including even the rudimentary safety protocol of a loosely matching voter signature.  If “free and fair” elections require basic security, verification of ballot authenticity, and consistently applied standards at least across the precincts and counties of any one state, then there was obviously nothing free or fair about the 2020 election.  

Continue reading →
IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

New England Journal of Medicine Pushes Open Borders By Wesley J. Smith

By on May 9th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/new-england-journal-of-medicine-pushes-open-borders/

I always say that if you want to see what will go terribly wrong in the country, read the professional journals. Radicalism. Woke perspectives. Transgender ideology. Critical Race Theory in health care. Socialized medicine. “Nature rights” advocacy. It’s all there in the world’s foremost professional publications, along with advocacy for policies reflecting those views.

That matters because the people who write for and publish these journals are part of the ruling elite who exert tremendous influence on legislation, executive decision making at federal and state levels, court rulings, business practices, etc..

The radicalization of the intellegentsia is a major factor in the hard-left shift we see in political advocacy and policy. In the latest example, the New England Journal of Medicine offers an article advocating for open borders for illegal alien children and their families. Literally. From, “When Undoing is Not Enough,” (the “undoing” refers to Trump border polices–which the authors claim was legal “torture,” and the goal is to reduce “trauma.”):

First, under the Biden administration’s leadership, the United States could minimize the amount of time that migrants spend in Mexico and in detention. We believe that unaccompanied children, pregnant women, and families should never have to wait to cross the border.

That would sure slow the flow, wouldn’t it? But not just “children:”

Second, the Biden administration could carefully consider the unintended consequences of allowing children, but not entire families, to enter the United States. This policy forces parents to choose between prolonging their children’s exposure to life-threatening trauma in Mexico and sending them into the United States unaccompanied.

And to sweeten the pot, free health care for all!

Continue reading →
MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Thomas Sowell :The Great Elucidator By Kyle Smith

By on May 9th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/review-thomas-sowell-common-sense-in-a-senseless-world/

An inspiring one-hour documentary about the conservative public intellectual Thomas Sowell serves as a superb intro to his thinking.

If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 50 years ago, a liberal 25 years ago, and a racist today.” Thomas Sowell, who combines a Mark Twain-level gift for apothegms with the rigor of a data scientist, said that back in 1998, but like many of his sparkling one-liners, it’s more strikingly true now than ever.

At 90, Sowell remains “one of the great minds of the past half century,” as host Jason L. Riley puts it in the one-hour PBS documentary Thomas Sowell: Common Sense in a Senseless World, which can be viewed here, but fair warning: This film is a gateway drug. You are bound to get hooked on Sowell, just like many others interviewed in the film. These include podcaster Dave Rubin, a Silicon Valley executive with Overstock.com; a Dallas rapper named Eric July from the band Backwordz; and Sowell’s friend Steven Pinker, the Harvard professor and linguist. Riley, a Wall Street Journal columnist and author, makes a perfect guide because he is the Sowell whisperer: His new book Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell, is about to hit shelves.

In a film written and produced by Tom Jennings, Riley takes us through how Sowell, who lost his dad before he was born and his mother when he was a small child, rose from poverty. His early years he spent in a house with no electricity in North Carolina, then an apartment in Harlem, where a family friend guided him to a love of the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library when he was eight years old. At the University of Chicago, one of his professors was Milton Friedman, who proved unable to talk him out of being a Marxist. What did the trick was a government job. In the Department of Labor, Sowell found that increased minimum wages reduce employment, but this fact interested no one. “People in the government didn’t give a rip whether it worked or not. They were simply implementing the policy,” notes another black intellectual, columnist Larry Elder.

Continue reading →