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August 2021

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

It Isn’t Immigration, It’s a Government-Sponsored Invasion Laura Hollis

By on August 5th, 2021

https://townhall.com/columnists/laurahollis/2021/08/05/it-isnt-immigration-its-a-gov

Do you know how many people have come across the border illegally so far this year?

According to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (USCBP), it’s 1.1 million people, and the numbers are rising every month.

According to the USCBP’s website, more than 75,000 people crossed the border illegally in January of this year. In February, that number climbed to more than 97,000. In March, it was more than 169,000. In April, 173,000. More than 180,000 people crossed the southern border in May. In June, it was almost 189,000. The June number was a 450% increase over June of 2020, and more than 4% increase from May’s numbers.

USCBP just released the figures for July: 210,000 illegal immigrants crossed the U.S. border that month alone. That is the highest monthly total in more than two decades. 

The number of illegals is already more than twice the total number of those who crossed the border during the entire last year of former President Donald Trump’s term — and these are just the ones we know of. 

CARTOONS | AF Branco

View Cartoon

This is not merely a crisis; it is an existential threat.

First, these are election-changing numbers. As we’ve seen, a few thousand additional votes here and there can flip important counties in battleground states, and in so doing, affect the outcome of elections. We’re now talking about millions. Newsweek put it this way: the number of people who have come to this country illegally so far this year is already large enough to “create the tenth largest city in the U.S.”

Regardless of what the migrants’ own objectives for coming to America are, the Democrats’ plan is for these people to vote. Democrats in Congress have been pushing for “amnesty” for illegal immigrants, granting them citizenship and the right to vote. They’re currently trying to use the budget “reconciliation” process, which would enable them to pass such legislation this summer – well before the 2022 midterms, and without any Republican support. 

How many undocumented immigrants are in the U.S.? The “official” number, at least before the 2021 surge, was around 11 million. But organizations like the Foundation for American Immigration Reform estimate that it is quite a bit higher. FAIR’s estimate in 2019 was closer to 15 million.

Even if it is the lower number, at this rate, more than 2 million people – or twenty percent of the number of illegals already here – will have come into this country illegally by the end of 2021. If this continues — and there are no indications that it will stop — how many people will have entered the country illegally by the end of Biden’s first term? 8 million? 10 million?

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Shocking Photos Show the Horrifying, Inhumane Conditions of Biden’s Border Crisis By Matt Margolis

By on August 5th, 2021

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2021/08/05/new-photos-show-the-inhumane-conditions-of-bidens-border-crisis-n1467244

Joe Biden’s laying out the welcome mat for illegal immigrants has resulted in “a human disaster at multiple crossing points,” according to photos provided to the Washington Examiner by the former acting commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Mark Morgan.

“This is crazy what’s happening,” Morgan told Paul Bedard of the Washington Examiner. Morgan’s photos of several crossing points show cages (yes, cages) of illegal immigrants, absolutely disgusting bathroom facilities, and thousands of migrants crammed under bridges as they wait to be processed in 100-degree heat.

“It’s nuts. There are 4,000 people under that bridge. We’ve had storms. They were outside …100 degrees outside,” he said.

“The White House said migrants are being handled in a humane and orderly way,” Morgan said. “This isn’t humane or orderly, and it’s not the Border Patrol’s fault. They are doing all they can to deal with the disaster created by Biden.”

One photo provided to the Washington Examiner shows a toilet at the Anzalduas International Bridge holding area at the Rio Grande River near Mission, Texas.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

CRT Roundup: Fairfax County Schools Sent Second Graders Video Vilifying Cops: ‘I Feel Safe When There Are No Police’

By on August 5th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/08/critical-race-theory-roundup/

Over the last year, teachers and administrators nationwide have weaponized K-12 education, injecting progressive politics into classrooms, and indoctrinating students with novel social justice dogma, including theories that call for racialized curriculums and reverse discrimination to achieve racial equity.

Mainstream media outlets and left-wing commentators have accused conservatives of demonizing critical race theory, and turning an obscure academic theory into a rightwing “bogeyman.” But there sure are a lot of examples of it turning up in schools across the country, from big city Democratic strongholds to suburban districts in red America. The following are summaries of just a small number of the fights that have erupted in the last year.

Fairfax County Schools Sent Second Graders a Video Vilifying Police: ‘I Feel Safe When There Are No Police’

Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) sent second-graders a “summer learning guide” in July which included a Youtube video titled “Woke Kindergarten” that vilified the police.

Centered around the importance of “feeling safe,” the video, which was obtained by Parents Defending Education, presents a slideshow of photos featuring groups of young African Americans, some of whom are holding Black Lives Matter signs.

“We deserve to feel safe in our homes… I feel safe when there are no police. And it’s no one’s job to tell me how I feel. But it’s everyone’s job to make sure that people who are being treated unfairly……feel safe too,” a narrator says.

The “suggested texts” section of the summer learning guide also recommends students listen to “Good Trouble by Ki,” which instructs students on the merits of civil disobedience.

The narrator of another video, intended for seven-year-olds, tells students, “sometimes it’s good to get into trouble.” The video also presents a sequence of photos depicting social justice demonstrations, some from the modern day and some taken during the Civil Rights movement of the mid-twentieth century.

In a reference to Representative John Lewis’ 2020 speech in Selma, Alabama commemorating Bloody Sunday, the video adds, “John Lewis was a freedom fighter who got in a lot of good trouble.”

“Get in good trouble, necessary trouble, and redeem the soul of America,” Lewis declared at the 2020 event.

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Dems See the Endless Possibilities of the ‘Illegal but Good’ Agenda By David Harsanyi

By on August 5th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/dems-see-the-endless-possibilities-of-the-illegal-but-good-agenda/

“With eviction victory in hand,” a Washington Post headline informs us, “congressional Democrats turn attention to student loans”:

A torrent of Congressional Democrats is calling on the White House to extend a soon-expiring pause on federal student loan payments, emboldened by their success in pressuring the Biden administration to approve a new eviction moratorium.

It wasn’t “congressional Democrats” who procured this “victory.” It was a “torrent” of activists who happen to be in Congress who were successful. As Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez noted yesterday, they took “direct action” and pressured the president of the United States to nullify property rights while ignoring Congress and SCOTUS. Congress did nothing but abdicate its responsibilities.

It’s true that Democrats celebrating this week’s eviction moratorium see the delegitimizing of courts and circumvention of Congress as a “victory.” Why wouldn’t they expect their agenda to be unilaterally implemented via the executive branch? What limiting principle stops Biden from ripping up student-loan agreements? Or mortgages, for that matter? What limiting principle stops the CDC from dropping a national vaccine mandate — with penalties, including jail time — or instituting national vaccine passports? It might be illegal, but if it saves lives, right? And why only the CDC? Why not other federal agencies? Democrats will, of course, whine when President Ron DeSantis or Donald Trump 2.0 governs via similar diktats. But Democrats will have set the precedent: If the president deems his actions “good,” it’s kosher now.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

The People vs. Critical Race Theory Zachary Rogers

By on August 5th, 2021

https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-people-vs-critical-race-theory/

There won’t be a second chance to take back hijacked American schools.

With a speed that has astonished ordinary Americans, a vocal minority of “critical race theorists” has blitzed K-12 education with sweeping changes of law and policy. The New York Times’ 1619 Project has been the tip of the spear of their movement to put anti-American narratives of race and power at the heart of American curricula.

Even at the very highest levels of prestige, the examples now are legion. At the Dalton School in New York City, faculty signed a letter with a long list of recommendations, including: yearly anti-racist training for employees, an expanded diversity bureaucracy with at least 12 positions, and employee anti-racism statements. Prestigious exam schools predicated upon admitting excellent students and outstanding staff have been pushed to abandon entrance tests in the name of equity (not to be confused with equality).

Not to be outdone, the Illinois Board of Education recently amended a rule to establish “culturally responsive” teaching standards. The regulations require educators to recognize that there is no one “‘correct’ way of doing or understanding something”; to acknowledge that “systems of oppression…in our society…create and reinforce inequities”; and to “work actively against” those systems in order to “understand how the system of inequity has impacted them as an educator.” The amendment mandates that teachers adopt a narrow political ideology that includes a view of American history, society, and law that most citizens reject. The prioritization of this agenda comes at a time when many students are not even in the classroom.    

Majority Report

The spirit that moved the Illinois Department of Education saturates social media and is omnipresent on elite college campuses. But there is also good news. Despite what the media and the academy would have you believe, the American people think that free speech, equal opportunity under the law, and the principles of the founding should still govern the day-to-day lives of citizens. A recent survey of 800 Illinois residents sponsored by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) strongly suggests that efforts to politicize public education do not align with the values of the majority of citizens. Rather than imposing a partisan agenda through rules and regulations from an agency, citizens should have an informed debate about public school curricula and teaching standards.   

To judge from Illinoisans’ assessment of their K-12 schools, the conversation is overdue. Forty-eight percent of respondents think that schools are doing a “worse than good” job (6 percent answered “excellent”). To improve that number, schools would be well served by focusing on preparing students for lifelong success rather than imposing policies and advocating a socio-political position that is at best controversial. 

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Denying the Centrality of Jerusalem to the Jewish People Alex Z. Grobman

By on August 5th, 2021

https://jewishlink.news/features/45306-denying-the-centrality-of-jerusalem-to-the-jewish-people

Attempts to deny the Jewish connection to Jerusalem is part of this unrelenting war against Israel. The Palestinian Authority (PA) accuses the Jewish state of fashioning a false Jewish history, while appropriating Palestinian history, culture and heritage. The Palestinians Arabs refer to these actions as “Judaization.” As Palestinian Media Watch founder Itamar Marcus explains, the main target is supposedly the Al-Aqsa Mosque, which Israel allegedly schemes to demolish to build the Jewish Temple. PA political and religious leaders, officials and academics refer to the Temple as Al-Haikal Al-Maz’oom, the “alleged Temple.”

A Palestinian Arab “specialist” on Jerusalem declared that the well-known verse from the Book of Psalms 137, “If I forget thee, Oh Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its skill,” is not of Jewish origin, but was originally spoken by a Christian Crusader and “borrowed” by Jews and “falsified in the name of Zionism.”

Irrefutable Evidence

The question of the centrality of Jerusalem to the Jewish people is irrefutable from many sources. Historian Rivkah Duker Fishman examined the works of Greek and Roman authors of classical antiquity from nearly 20 diverse sources dating from the third century BCE to the third century CE, roughly six centuries. Fishman found that the authors of these historic works unanimously agreed that Jerusalem was Jewish since it was “founded by Jews, its inhabitants were Jews and that the Temple, located in Jerusalem, was the center of the Jewish religion.” Even though some of these authors like Manetho, Apion, Tacitus and Juvenal held clearly negative views about Jews and Judaism, they were completely in accord about the Jewish identity of Jerusalem.

Descriptions of the Temple are a part of the reports on Jerusalem and on Judaism, ranging from fact “to the libelous and bizarre. For the Greeks and Romans, Jerusalem was famous for its Temple, which served as the focal point of the xenophobic, strange, and possibly menacing rites of the Jews whose contributions brought much gold into the city…. After its destruction in 70 CE, the memory of the Temple persisted in the retrospective histories by Tacitus and by Cassius Dio.” These ancient texts, therefore, refute current efforts by Muslims and others to deny the historic connection of the Jewish people to Jerusalem and the site of the Temple.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

President Biden’s Middle East Policy by Yoram Ettinger

By on August 5th, 2021

https://bit.ly/3xnO4f1

Disengagement from the Middle East?

The Middle East is situated between Europe, Asia and Africa, and between the Mediterranean, Red Sea, Indian Ocean, Arabian Sea and the Persian Gulf.

President Biden wishes to disengage from the Middle East, but the Middle East does not intend to disengage from the US.

The US is perceived by rogue Middle East entities as “The Great Satan” and the mega-obstacle on their way to achieve their mega-goal: bringing the West to submission, militarily, culturally and religiously. This mega-goal has been deeply-rooted since the 7th century, independent of US policies.

Isolation is not a realistic option in the increasingly globalized village, where rogue Middle East regimes are engaged in the proliferation of terrorism, non-conventional military technologies and drug trafficking around the globe. Their reach extends all the way to the American continent, impacting the US homeland security.

Will the US lead – or follow – the engagement process?  Will the engagement with rogue Middle East entities be conducted mostly around the US – or the Middle East – “end zone”?

The Biden team’s track record

President Biden’s Middle East policy reflects the worldview of his top foreign policy and national security team, most notably Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, who has been President Biden’s most influential advisor since 2002-2008 (similar to Secretary Baker’s influence on President Bush), when Blinken was the Democratic Staff Director on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Other leading members of the team are Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor, William Burns, the CIA Director and Avril Haines, the Director of National Intelligence. They – like Blinken – played a key role in shaping President Obama’s Middle East policy.

For instance, they were instrumental in carving the 2015 nuclear accord with Iran (JCPOA), which followed the US embrace of Iran’s Ayatollahs (Shiite terrorism), while demoting the stature of the pro-US Saudis, the UAE and Bahrain.  This has intensified the existential threat to these regimes, injuring the US’ strategic reliability, and driving its traditional Arab allies closer to China and Russia.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Andrew Cuomo And The Perils Of Politicized Prosecution Francis Menton

By on August 5th, 2021

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=8d27aee23c

Here in New York, the news today is dominated by one big story: a supposedly “independent” investigative report issued by the Attorney General has apparently validated allegations of a pattern of sexual harassment committed by our Governor, Andrew Cuomo. From CBS News, August 3:

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo sexually harassed multiple current and former staffers as well as women who did not work for his administration, the state’s attorney general Letitia James said Tuesday during a press conference summarizing the findings of an independent investigation.

Suddenly, a guy who had been riding high on a wave of (ridiculously) favorable publicity for his (disastrous) handling of the Covid-19 crisis now faces calls from all over the place — even from President Biden! — to resign. How could this all have gone so wrong so quickly?

The New York Post today has an 8-page special section that starts off on page 4 with the headline “AG: Governor Is A Groper.” Here’s the lead paragraph:

Gov. Cuomo was exposed in a blockbuster investigative report made public Tuesday as a dirty old man who used his powerful position to sexually harass female underlings less than half his age — including by touching their “intimate body parts” without consent.

Here’s the cover from today’s Post:

What has occurred is that lawyers working under the authority of Attorney General Letitia James have spent the past several months looking into allegations of sexual harassment by various women against Cuomo. Yesterday, the investigators issued their 165 page Report. The Report considers claims by some eleven women, with the allegations ranging from inappropriate touching to groping to lewd comments. (Unlike with, say, Bill Clinton, there do not appear to be any allegations of actual unwanted sexual intercourse.). The investigators find the claims to be credible, and the conduct of the Governor to be in violation of state law.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Time to take advantage of cracks in Tehran’s armor By Ruthie Blum 

By on August 5th, 2021

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/time-to-take-advantage-of-cracks-in-tehrans-armor-opinion-675992

There’s nothing new about the powers-that-be in Tehran speaking out of both sides of their mouths, particularly when switching from Farsi to other languages. The only “novelty” was the inauguration on Tuesday – and swearing-in before the Majlis on Thursday – of Ebraim Raisi as Iran’s eighth president, replacing Hassan Rouhani in the role that he’s held since 2013.

Though it remains to be seen how Raisi “The Butcher” handles the predicament currently confronting the Islamic Republic, it’s safe to say that one way in which he’ll toe the ayatollahs’ line is to rule with an iron fist while lying about it for international consumption.

Indeed, as Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s hand-picked victor in the staged June 18 “election,” Raisi is certain to hit the ground running where attempting to quash the countrywide protests that have been plaguing his country for the past few weeks is concerned.
Nor is there any doubt that he’ll continue his predecessors’ tradition of pinning the blame for the public’s dire economic straits on the United States and Israel – the former for “crippling sanctions,” and the latter for aggression.

At this juncture, however, the Iranian people are so fed up with their plight at the hands of the regime that they’re no longer willing to be fed the propaganda. They want actual sustenance in the form of food on the table and water in the tap, both of which are running as scarce as electricity.

The fact that their slogans at mass demonstrations include calls for Khamenei’s death means that they no longer fear the torturous punishment that befalls Iranian dissidents. Their denunciations of the government’s funding of Palestinian terrorism, let alone its bankrolling ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads, indicates that they have become emboldened by the sense that they have nothing left to lose

THE TROUBLE is that what they have to gain could easily be thwarted by fantasists in Washington. Yes, the administration of US President Joe Biden incredibly refuses to abandon its notion that a return to some form of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) – the nuclear deal between Iran and the P5+1 countries from which former president Donald Trump withdrew in 2018 – is the way to curb the threat from Tehran.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

It Doesn’t Take Censorship to Fight a Pandemic Daniel Greenfield

By on August 5th, 2021

https://www.danielgreenfield.org/2021/08/it-doesnt-take-censorship-to-fight.html

After Biden’s spokeswoman boasted that the administration was ordering Facebook to censor some people’s speech, Fauci joined the campaign by appearing on CNN to warn about the dangers of letting anyone say whatever they think. “We probably would still have polio in this country if we had the kind of false information that’s being spread now,” he falsely claimed.

Fauci as usual is wrong. The polio vaccine was the subject of numerous controversies which played out in public.

There were anti-vaccine campaigns long before Facebook. The most bracing of these took on the polio vaccine with the headline, “Little White Coffins” declaring, “Only God above will know how many thousands of little white coffins will be used to bury the victims of Salk’s heinous, fraudulent vaccine.” Walter Winchell, who at his peak reached over 50 million people, warned that one particular version of the vaccine, which contained a live virus, was a “killer”.

Contrary to Fauci’s fantasies (aided and abetted by a media eager to find a pretext for censoring any open marketplace of ideas), the fifties were not a totalitarian dystopia in which free speech did not exist. Many of the same controversies as today, from socialism to science, played out to large audiences across a bewildering array of national and local newspapers, radio stations, mailings, books and magazines in a country where the media had not yet been consolidated.

Today, much of the newspaper, radio, and television markets, not to mention publishing, are controlled in one way or another by a handful of giant companies. While the fifties had their massive chains and networks, they were far more intellectually diverse, and had plenty of different owners and perspectives in the mix. The American cultural environment today would strike people from that era as Communist because it resembles the tight centralized control of the Soviet Union. America has never had as little free and open debate as it does now because never have the means of debate been clutched in as few hands as is now the case..

There was aggressive promotion of the polio vaccine by the government, by local authorities, and by non-profit advocacy groups, but there was also vigorous opposition by a variety of people, some credible and some not, and the scientific debates over the vaccine, most notably between the live virus and the inactive virus, played out in public with ordinary people following the back and forth between Salk and Sabin. When Salk’s inactive vaccine was replaced with Sabin’s live virus, the vaccine researcher turned to attacking it as unsafe and dangerous.

Americans not only survived a vigorous public debate over the polio vaccine, but managed to stop polio because the debate over the vaccine between advocates and opponents, and between scientists, played out in public creating a sense of transparency and trust.

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