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June 2021

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

At NATO And G7, Biden Advances An ‘America Last’ Foreign Policy By John Daniel Davidson

By on June 17th, 2021

https://thefederalist.com/2021/06/16/at-nato-and-g7-biden-advances-an-america-last-foreign-policy/ 

President Biden’s first foreign trip wasn’t just an embarrassing disaster, it heralds the return of the disastrous foreign policy of the Obama-Biden era.

The most important takeaway from the recent G7 and NATO summits in Europe isn’t President Biden’s many embarrassing and unsettling mental lapses, long pauses, and rambling non sequiturs, but the clear message coming out of these meetings: the United States is returning to an Obama-Biden era “America Last” foreign policy that puts the interests of multilateral institutions and international partnerships above the interests of the American people.

That policy shift was perhaps best encapsulated in a quip from President Emmanuel Macron of France, who said of Biden, “It is great to have a U.S. president who’s part of the club and very willing to cooperate.” And of course it’s true. At the close of the G7 Summit, Biden boasted that America is “back at the table,” and described the summit as “extraordinarily collaborative.”

So what did this extraordinarily collaborative club manage to accomplish? One of the G7’s most pressing tasks heading into the summit was what, if anything, it would do about an aggressive and intransigent China. What the group settled on was doing almost nothing.

With each passing week it becomes more obvious that COVID-19 almost certainly originated in a lab in Wuhan, China. We can’t say for sure because the Chinese Communist Party has been blocking efforts to discover the origins of the virus ever since the outbreak began. But at this point, with zero evidence that the virus emerged naturally, the answer seems obvious enough.

Yet all the G7 could manage was a tepid call for a new World Health Organization-backed study on COVID’s origins, as if another investigation by the compromised WHO will yield something more. The G7 also cooked up a plan to dump $40 trillion into infrastructure (a bill likely to be footed largely by American taxpayers) for the developing world to compete with China’s Belt and Road initiative.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

You’re Not Woke, So You Can’t Play By George Leef

By on June 17th, 2021

A college player on the women’s volleyball team has been kicked off because she didn’t agree with the leftist ideology being force-fed to the team.

The absurdity of American higher education is on display at the University of Oklahoma. As we read in this Campus Reform story, a player on the women’s volleyball team has been kicked off because she didn’t agree with the leftist ideology being force-fed to the team.

So even athletics are now controlled by people who demand conformity to the foolish tenets of diversity and social justice. No matter if you’re a good player — if you think wrong thoughts, you are not wanted.

The player, Kylee McLaughlin, is suing the university for a minimum of $75,000, plus legal fees. Let’s hope this gets to the jury and the jurors decide to let the defendants know what they think about this astounding intolerance. Perhaps some administrator at OU will remember the Oberlin case and settle fast.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

-Putin Must Watch a Lot of Cable News By David Harsanyi

By on June 17th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/putin-must-watch-a-lot-of-cable-news/

After his meeting with Joe Biden in Geneva, Vladimir Putin held a presser where he adeptly aped some of our partisan hyperbole to deflect attention from his own authoritarianism.

“People are shot and killed every day [in the U.S.],” Putin told reporters when asked about his crackdown on domestic political opposition. “You don’t have a chance to open your mouth and you’re shot dead.” Shooting a person for any reason other than genuine self-defense, despite what gun-controllers might have us think, isn’t sanctioned by the state or supported by any organization in America. Though people are also murdered every day in Russia, which has a substantively higher homicide rate than the United States.

Putin had also preposterously suggested that Ashli Babbitt, shot when she joined a mob that stormed the Capitol, was a victim of “assassination” by the police — which, I suppose, is also a tacit admission that he was behind the attack on the now-imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny and numerous journalists.

“America just recently had very severe events, well-known events, after the killing of an African American,” Putin explained. “And the entire movement developed known as Black Lives Matter. I’m not going to comment on that but here’s what I do want to say. What we saw was disorder, destruction, violations of the law, etc.” Russia has been using racial tensions in the United States to deflect attention from its widespread, sometimes genocidal, actions since the 1930s. Riots do break out from time to time in the United States. Riots, though, rarely break out in police states. Not long ago, Russian police arrested 3,000 people and shut down thousands more for peacefully attending “unauthorized” events.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Republicans press education secretary on China’s foothold in US universities During the Trump administration, the Education Department opened investigations into schools including Harvard and Yale By Evie Fordham

By on June 17th, 2021

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/republicans-education-china-us-universities-miguel-cardona-banks-foxx

Reps. Jim Banks, R-Ind., and Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., pressed Education Secretary Miguel Cardona for answers about his department’s plans to investigate China’s financial foothold in the U.S. university system.

“The American public deserves to know that their money is not being compromised by Communist China and other adversarial nations,” the Republicans wrote in the letter sent on Wednesday. “The FBI warned colleges a decade ago about how hostile actors use campuses for spying, propaganda hubs, and faculty recruitment. Unfortunately, too many institutions failed to take this warning seriously.”

“The previous administration modernized the reporting process and found over $6.5 billion in unreported gifts and contracts and opened 19 university investigations. However, the Department has closed only four of those investigations to date. Moreover, you have not started or provided status updates on any other investigations into foreign gifts or contracts,” the letter continued.

The lawmakers demanded information including the number of staff analyzing the Higher Education Act’s foreign gift and contract disclosure requirements, the total amount of reported foreign gifts and contracts in the Jan. 31 reporting period, and whether the Department has opened any related university investigations. Banks and Foxx asked Cardona and his staff to respond to them within two weeks.

In this Jan. 28, 2020 file photo, Connecticut State Commissioner of Education Miguel Cardona speaks with Berlin High School students while on a tour of the school. (Devin Leith-Yessian/Berlin Citizen/Record-Journal via AP) (AP)

“The lack of progress we have seen on this issue since your confirmation as Secretary is alarming, and we are concerned the Department is not treating threats from China and other adversarial nations seriously,” Banks and Foxx wrote to Cardona.

The investigations hinge on Section 117 of the Higher Education Act, which requires schools to report foreign gifts and contracts over $250,000. During the Trump administration, the Education Department opened investigations into schools including Harvard and Yale over unreported foreign funds from countries including China.

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BOOKS Comments turned off

Identity crisis: how the politics of race will wreck America   Advocating double standards for people on top and everyone else is a bad idea By Charles Murray

By on June 17th, 2021

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/identity-crisis-politics-race-wreck-america-charles-murray/

The American experiment is fragile. It has always been fragile and always will be fragile because it is so extremely unnatural. ‘Unnatural’ in this context means in conflict with human nature. Jonah Goldberg has described the fragility of the American system by comparing it to a garden hacked out of a tropical jungle. A garden surrounded by jungle is unnatural. The gardeners must tend it with unremitting care lest the jungle return.

Treating our fellow human beings as individuals instead of treating them as members of groups is unnatural. Our brains evolved to think of people as members of groups; to trust and care for people who are like us and to be suspicious of people who are unlike us. Those traits had great survival value for human beings throughout millions of years of evolution. People who were trusting of outsiders were less likely to pass on their genes than people who were suspicious of them. People who were loyal to their tribe were more likely to pass on their genes than people who stood apart.

The invention of agriculture and the consequent rise of complex societies exposed another aspect of human nature that had enjoyed less scope for expression in hunter-gatherer bands: acquisitiveness, whether of money, status or power. Whatever its evolutionary roots may be, the empirical consistency of human acquisitiveness over the eons is impressive. The open-ended desire for more money, status or power has been natural; to voluntarily limit one’s wealth, status or power has been unnatural.

The combination of acquisitiveness and loyalty to the interests of one’s own group (be it defined by ethnicity or class) shaped human governments for the subsequent 10,000 years. The natural form of government was hierarchical, run by a dominant group that arranged affairs to its benefit and oppressed outsiders to a lesser or greater degree, usually greater. The rare attempts to try any other form of government were unstable and short-lived. The American founders’ idealism lay in their belief that an alternative was possible. Their genius was to design a system with multiple safeguards against the forces that had made previous attempts self-destruct.

America proved that a durable alternative to the natural form of government was possible — a constitutional republic combined with carefully circumscribed democracy. The idea behind that alternative eventually spread around the world, but neither the United States nor any other country that has made it work has ever been out of danger. If we decide that our system for tending the garden needs to be replaced, and if the replacement should prove to be even slightly less devoted to keeping nature at bay, the garden will be reclaimed by jungle within a few decades.

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