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October 2021

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

John Durham and the Amazing Disappearing DNC Hack Evidence grows that the alleged Russian hacking of the DNC server in 2016 was an inside job by George Parry

By on October 16th, 2021

https://spectator.org/john-durham-and-the-amazing-disappearing-dnc-hack/

This is the fifth in a series of articles analyzing the 27-page federal grand jury indictment charging lawyer Michael Sussmann with making a false statement to the FBI.

As stated in the fourth article, when the FBI learned of the alleged hack of the Democratic National Committee’s (“DNC”) emails,

it asked to examine the server.  In fact, at the same time as the alleged DNC hack, there were similar reports regarding the

Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s (“DCCC”) server as well as DNC Chairman John Podesta’s personal email devices.

In testimony before the Senate, FBI Director James Comey stated the following:

Question (by Senator Burr): Did the FBI request access to those devices [the servers and Podesta’s devices] to perform forensics on?

A: Yes, we did.

Q: And would that access have provided intelligence or information helpful to your investigation in possibly finding … including to the Intelligence Community Assessment?

A: Our forensics folks would always prefer to get access to the original device or server that’s involved. So, it’s the best evidence.

Q: Were you given access to do the forensics on those servers?

A: We were not. We were … a highly respected private company eventually got access and shared with us what they saw there.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Biden walks naked into a climate conference With Congress stalled, he likely won’t meet his own green commitmentsRupert Darwall

By on October 16th, 2021

Nye Bevan, the British socialist, famously denounced the nuclear unilateralists in his party for sending a future foreign secretary ‘naked into the conference chamber’. Unless Congress passes the stalled budget reconciliation bill, President Biden will fly to the COP26 Glasgow climate conference, which starts in less than three weeks’ time, in a similar state of undress.

Before the Paris agreement in 2015, UN climate change conferences were about hammering out the texts of binding climate treaties and agreeing to emissions reduction targets. All that has changed. Climate change targets are now decided in advance by individual countries in their Nationally Determined Contributions, draining climate conferences of drama and turning them into a giant show-and-tell. Unless, that is, the world’s self-styled climate leader turns up in Glasgow with nothing to show.

The Biden administration’s NDC is long on rhetoric, starting with climate change as an existential threat. Yet when it comes to the ‘bold action’ the threat demands, the cupboard is bare of bankable action. Interviewed in April, Gina McCarthy, Biden’s national climate adviser, who put together the NDC, was asked what was the one piece of legislation she wanted Congress to pass. ‘To make sure that by 2035 we have a clean energy sector,’ McCarthy answered.

Much of what McCarthy wants is embedded in the gargantuan reconciliation Build Back Better package, including $300 billion of clean tax credits and a Clean Energy Standard to meet Biden’s goal of having a zero-greenhouse gas emitting grid by 2035, items that McCarthy describes as ‘non-negotiables’. There is a reason for this. The White House touts the falling cost of renewables, but its convoluted formulation that clean alternatives ‘may start looking like the cheap alternatives’ suggests cost competitiveness is still years away. Until recently, the rapid transition the White House wants ‘looked anything but cheap’, so it seeks to place the cost of decarbonizing electricity on taxpayers rather than in higher electricity bills. Doing this will require congressional approval.

McCarthy claims the administration has ‘lots of regulatory authority’ should the administration fail to get the reconciliation package through Congress. But she knows as well anyone that regulation is a distant second to legislation. Build Back Better’s Clean Energy Standard is a successor to the Clean Power Plan, which McCarthy oversaw when she was administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency during the second Obama term. Challenged in the courts, the Supreme Court imposed a stay on the EPA implementing the plan. Would the Supreme Court’s decision slow down the transition to a low carbon future? ‘Absolutely not,’ McCarthy responded two weeks later. If so, what was the point of the plan?

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Was January 6 Part of the FBI’s ‘Operation Cold Snap’? It’s only a matter of time before we learn how many “Big Dans” or Stephen Robesons were part of January 6. By Julie Kelly

By on October 15th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/14/was-january-6-part-of-the-fbis-operation-cold-snap/

The tony, bucolic town of Dublin, Ohio would be one of the last places in America expected to host a convention of white supremacist militiamen. Nestled along the Scioto River, the Columbus suburb’s biggest claim to fame is hosting the PGA’s annual Memorial Golf tournament every summer.

But in June 2020, days after the nation was roiled by Black Lives Matter looting and rioting, a man from Wisconsin named Stephen Robeson sponsored a “National Militia Conference” at a Dublin hotel. (Yes, that was the real name of the event.) 

According to BuzzFeed’s exceptional July 2021 investigative report on the FBI-led plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020, Robeson “helped organize the national meeting, and he was enthusiastically pushing people he knew to attend.” The purpose of the conference was to recruit people who ultimately would stoke “political violence” against governors who refused to reopen their states after lockdowns supposedly necessitated by COVID.

Some participants said Robeson, known as “Robey,” relentlessly pestered them until they agreed to show up; people came from as far as Maryland and Kansas City, BuzzFeed’s Ken Bensinger and Jessica Garrison reported. One member of the Three Percenters, an alleged militia group on the FBI’s naughty list, observed people taking photos from discreet locations in the hotel. “The feds are everywhere,” he thought to himself.

Indeed. One of the feds was Robeson himself.

In a motion filed in July by a defense lawyer in the Whitmer kidnapping prosecution, Robeson is described as having a long record “of cooperating with the government in exchange for personal benefits. Basically, this [confidential human source] has a decades-long history of acting as a professional snitch for the government.”

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FOREIGN POLICY, HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Biden’s Credibility Plummets over Purchase of Chinese-Made Drones by Con Coughlin

By on October 15th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17861/biden-china-drones

Critics of DJI’s systems claim they have the potential to be monitored remotely, and a review of the drones conducted by the Pentagon earlier this year concluded that they posed a potential threat to national security.

The Pentagon has been voicing concerns about commercial off-the-shelf drones since 2018, when it implemented a ban. The following year, Congress passed legislation banning the use of drones and components manufactured in China, and the Trump administration blacklisted DJI for national security reasons

“DJI drones are safe and secure for government and enterprise operations.” — spokesman for DJI rejecting claims that its drones posed a security risk, Reuters, July 23, 2021

Given the Chinese Communist Party’s abysmal record for trustworthiness, however – as in prominsing not to militarise the fake islands they built in the South China Sea just before they militarised them, or claiming that their Chinese virus, COVID-19, was not transmissible human-to-human – this assessment is less than reassuring.

Nothing better illustrates the Biden administration’s utter incompetence in safeguarding America’s interests than the revelation that a number of federal agencies are reportedly purchasing surveillance drones from China.

The Pentagon has previously advised against US agencies purchasing Chinese-made drones on the grounds that they could be used to transfer sensitive data to Beijing’s communist rulers.

But now a new report by the Axios website claims that a number of federal law enforcement agencies in the Biden administration have purchased drones from China that have previously been labeled a potential national security threat by the Pentagon.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Campus ‘Diversity’ Menace Comes to Yale The objective of campus leftists is not to “win” the campus wars. They’ve already done that. The objective is to make the other side feel pain. By Josh Hammer

By on October 15th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/14/the-campus-diversity-menace-comes-to-yale/

It is increasingly obvious that modern Americans universities, which are less institutions of unfettered intellectual pursuit than they are “madrasas of wokeness,” to borrow from the Independent Women’s Forum’s Inez Feltscher Stepman, are unsalvageable in most present manifestations. Though there are notable exceptions, many American universities are actually worse than unsalvageable.

On-campus debauchery spoils matriculants’ lingering senses of virtue and propriety, and woke classroom indoctrination and divisive intersectional poison vitiates the mutually interdependent bonds of citizenry without which no people can cohere. As Arthur Milikh soberly concluded in a 2020 National Affairs essay, “Preventing Suicide by Higher Education”: “Universities that spread poisonous doctrines no longer believe in the purpose of the university.”

Pedagogical and curricular debasement aside, one concrete manifestation of this now decades-long corruption has been the engorgement of on-campus administrative bureaucracies tending to all sorts of “diversity” needs. As Heather Mac Donald’s 2018 book The Diversity Delusion helped demonstrate, the core university mission—ostensibly, to pursue truth and produce citizen-statesmen capable of advancing the national interest—has been steadily undermined by the university’s imbibing of various woke fetishes and “diversity” diktats like mother’s milk. Even hold aside the institutionalized racism of affirmative action, modern “diversitycrat” commissars rove campus for possible Title VI violations, enforce “equitable” faculty hiring quotas, and more generally seek to police and enforce intersectionality’s hierarchy of alleged victimhood.

An eye-opening recent report from the Washington Free Beacon‘s Aaron Sibarium reveals how this cancerous operation can play out in practice. At top-ranked Yale Law School, a second-year student and member of both the Native American Law Students Association and the conservative/libertarian Federalist Society sent an email inviting classmates to an event: “We will be christening our very own (soon to be) world-renowned NALSA Trap House . . . by throwing a Constitution Day Bash in collaboration with FedSoc.” The student added that the event would include “American-themed snacks” such as “Popeye’s chicken” and “apple pie.”

Within minutes of the email’s mass distribution, the student’s wokerati classmates were already signaling intense aggrievement. Some immediately concluded, with all the charity of Ebenezer Scrooge, that “trap house” necessarily connoted a nefarious blackface party. The president of the Black Law Students Association quickly wrote in an online forum available to all second-year Yale Law School students: “I guess celebrating whiteness wasn’t enough. Y’all had to upgrade to cosplay/black face.” We have fallen a long way from the stirring peroration of Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address (conveniently available online via Yale Law School) about the imperative to maintain “malice toward none” and “charity for all.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Life after Capitalism By George Gilder

By on October 15th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/11/01/life-after-capitalism/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=top-of-nav&utm_content=hero-module

The information theory of economics

Anyone determined to provide a “new economics” must haul a heavy burden of proof up a steep slope of professional resistance. At the summits of academic prestige, economics presents a Delphic façade of math and marble.

A still higher barrier faces anyone suggesting major modification to the entrenched system of reasonably free markets and economic incentives associated with “capitalism.” Within recent memory, exponents of free markets — myself included — were celebrating a triumphalist “end of history.” Even China’s “Communist Party” and “Middle Kingdom,” self-consciously central in the order of the universe, were thriving as a self-evidently capitalist regime. China’s entrepreneurs were as “free to choose” as any “robber baron” of yore, particularly if their field was sufficiently technical to baffle the bureaucracy and so long as they didn’t under any circumstances compare their rulers to Winnie-the-Pooh.

With the U.S., Europe, and China all essentially organized by markets, dissenters retreated to government-funded universities, cranky leftist redoubts such as Harvard and the New York Times, and green movements thriving on money and lawyers from the disgruntled families of penitent or deceased entrepreneurs.

As autodidact supply-side paragon Jude Wanniski put it in 1980 — with credit to economists Arthur Laffer and Robert Mundell — to most observers, capitalism is simply “the way the world works.” And Wanniski was proved right. I long had criticized him for his judgment that Communist regimes were merely capitalist in a disguise of incompetence. But even this view may prove prescient, as today market-oriented regimes are blithely donning the same disguise.

With banks essentially nationalized and stultified by regulators and no longer making loans to entrepreneurial companies; with the nation recently locked down and masked because of COVID at the caprice of germophobic governors; with energy usage regulated, subsidized, priced, and litigated by bureaucrats around the globe out of a demented fear of CO2 emissions; with education run by manipulative ideologues with lifelong tenure and government appointments, funded by $1.5 trillion in guaranteed student loans; with money pumped up and propagated like gilded gas — we live in a new twilight zone beyond capitalism and freedom.

Thomas Sowell is lapidary: “Freedom is not simply the right of intellectuals to circulate their merchandise. It is, above all, the right of ordinary people to find elbow room for themselves and a refuge from the rampaging presumptions of their ‘betters.’”

Still, for all the complaints in the air, let us give tribute to the far from dismal accomplishments of economic science.

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BOOKS Comments turned off

America Enraged An interview with Peter Wood the author of a new book on our culture of political wrath. Mark Tapson

By on October 15th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/america-enraged-mark-tapson/

One thing Americans can presumably all agree on in our current cold civil war is that civility, mutual if grudging respect, and rational if testy debate in our political discourse have all been replaced by a hair-trigger performative outrage, the scorched-earth warfare of cancel culture, and even occasional violence. It’s difficult to remember that there was a time when even acerbic antagonists like William Buckley and Gore Vidal could trade barbs onstage without hurling chairs at each other and inciting nationwide rioting. What has happened to us? How did we come to this point? And is this state of rage destined to be a permanent feature of our cultural and political landscape?

Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars and author of the essential 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project, has addressed these questions incisively in a must-read, brand new book titled Wrath: America Enraged. He agreed to answer some questions about the book.

Mark Tapson: Mr. Wood, what is the “new anger,” and what is the difference between anger and wrath in a political context?

Peter Wood: “New anger” is show-off anger, the display of someone who expects to be admired for the performance or to boast about it afterwards: anger mixed with self-delight.  New anger contrasts to the older ethic of trying to master your anger and not to let it master you.  Through much of American history, giving free vent to anger was regarded as a sign of weakness and immaturity.  We admired the man or woman who, when provoked, found ways to handle the situation without descending into rage.  Of course, that kind of self-control often failed, at which point brawls erupted.  Those who brawled in public or in private, however, were not regarded as good people.  Those who turned to anger too quickly or too often were shamed.

“New anger” became a recognizable force in American life in the 1950s, though it was at first a trend confined to avant garde parts of society:  the beat generation, early adepts of Freudian psychoanalysis, and people reading French existentialist novels. From these seeds grew the counterculture of the sixties, and then the disillusioned anger of the Big Chill 1970s.  I am collapsing a lot of history into a few sentences.  The breakdown of the older ideals of emotional self-control and their replacement by a new ethic of emotional expressiveness didn’t happen overnight or all at once or equally in all sectors of society.  Fifteen years ago I spent a whole book (A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now) to describe the slow progression of new anger into the position it now has of cultural dominance.  I’m mindful that whole generations have grown up for whom there is nothing “new” about “new anger.”  It is all they have ever experienced unless they have been immersed in the world of Turner Classic Movies, where you can glimpse a world ruled by different emotional norms.

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Fire Marine Corps Commandant David Berger America needs a Marine Corps that wins battles instead of building woke safe spaces. Daniel Greenfield

By on October 15th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/fire-marine-corps-commandant-david-berger-daniel-greenfield/

11 Marines came home in boxes after the bombing at Kabul airport carried out by an Islamic terrorist freed from a prison near Bagram Air Base that had been abandoned by Biden. Other Marines were seriously wounded and hospitalized for months after the attack.

All across America there are recruiting billboards for the Marine Corps with the message, “For Marines There Are Only Battles Won”. But in the runup to the disastrous retreat from Afghanistan, the only things the Marine Corps really cared about were wokeness and race.

In April, Biden announced that he would be pulling all American forces out of Afghanistan. That same month the Taliban launched their offensive that would end with a takeover of the country.

When General David H. Berger, Commandant of the Marine Corps, testified before the House Subcommittee on Defense at the end of April, he did not refer to Afghanistan. Even while a skeleton force of hundreds of Marines remained in Kabul, Berger made no mention of them.

Instead, Berger spoke about racism.

Bizarrely enough, Berger began his presentation, not with the threats to the United States that the Marine Corps existed to fight, but by declaring that, “our nation has engaged in a long overdue conversation on race and social justice sparked by several visible incidents of institutional racism”. By that, Berger meant that Black Lives Matter mobs had torched a number of cities and their leftist allies had purged everyone who disagreed from every institution.

Berger assured House Democrats that he was happy to lead the purge of dissenting Marines.

“We have and will continue to actively work to identify recruits and Marines who hold extremist views and we look forward to participating in the Secretary of Defense’s new Countering Extremism Working Group to develop additional methods of keeping extremists from within our ranks,” Berger vowed, declaring war on fellow Marines instead of on America’s enemies.

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When is an insurrection not an insurrection? By Andrea Widburg

By on October 15th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/10/when_is_an_insurrection_not_an_insurrection.html

During the Kavanaugh hearings, hundreds of hysterical leftist activists stormed the Capitol and even managed to break into the Senate chamber. They were arrested and that was the end of it. On January 6, crowds of pro-Trump people, along with undoubted provocateurs and, almost certainly, FBI agents, entered the Capitol. Once in, they wandered around reverently and left—except for Ashli Babbitt, whom a Capitol Police Officer killed in cold blood. January 6 was called an “insurrection,” and Biden’s DOJ is using it as an excuse to hold political prisoners and terrorize into silence those who oppose Trump. And no, it’s not just a new, stricter standard, as Thursday’s “climate justice” riot showed.

Admittedly, the climate fanatics didn’t head for the Capitol. Instead, they besieged the Department of the Interior. Dozens of people managed to enter the building and, as you can see, a “riot”-ous time was had by all, including cops who used tasers to fend off the mob:

And that’s pretty much the beginning and the end of it.

When I check the New York Times’s home page in the wee hours of Friday, there’s no mention of the violent attack against a government agency, although there is a little headline (no link because the Times doesn’t deserve it) that the January 6 panel wants to press criminal charges against Steve Bannon. I don’t see anything about the climate protest on CNN’s home page either, although it has the usual hysteria about a “climate crisis.” I’m willing to bet the same will be true no matter which drive-by media outlet I check.

A healthy, free society cannot exist when there are two legal standards, one for the “in” crowd and one for the alleged “insurrection” crowd. Such blatant double standards mean that we are becoming a country without a rule of law. Instead, as is the case with any tinpot tyranny, the law exists solely to police people who oppose the ruling class.

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Bill Ayers, a Familiar Face in the Birth of Critical Race Theory By Jack Cashill

By on October 15th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/10/bill_ayers_a_familiar_face_in_the_birth_of_critical_race_theory.html

After Attorney General Merrick Garland sicced the FBI on unruly parents protesting Critical Race Theory (CRT) at school board meetings, it came to light that Garland had a dog in the fight.

That dog is son-in-law Xan Tanner, co-founder of Panorama Education, a leading distributor of CRT materials.  Among the materials Panorama has recommended for educators is an essay by terrorist emeritus and Obama pal Bill Ayers.

Titled “I Shall Create! Teaching Toward Freedom,” Ayers’s essay is the first in a 2019 collection by left-wing activist Lisa Delpit. If nothing else, Ayers has been consistent.  He has been pumping out frenetic anti-white cant long before it was cool, let alone mandatory.

Writes Ayers in this recent essay, “We must face reality and courageously confront history, tell the truth, and then destroy the entire edifice of white supremacy: metaphorically speaking it means burning down the plantation.”  The problem now is that Ayers is no longer an outlier.  The same FBI that hounded him and his fellow bombers is now hounding parents who protest his subversive nonsense.

What Ayers thinks would matter less were it not for his outsized influence on the educational philosophy of former president Barack Obama.  Were Obama merely a former president, his thinking would not matter much, either.  But Obama may be more than that.  Even Tucker Carlson has openly speculated that Obama is the guy running the show at the White House.  What seems clear is that Joe Biden is not.  

Equally clear is the mind meld between Ayers and Obama on educational issues.  In Obama’s 1995 memoir Dreams From My Father, the thoughts on educational reform are channeled through the soulful voices of two older African-Americans.  One goes by the name “Asante Moran,” likely an homage to the Afrocentric educator Molefi Kete Asante, whom Ayers knew.  In Dreams, Moran lectures Obama and his pal “Johnnie” on the nature of public education:

“The first thing you have to realize,” he said, looking at Johnnie and me in turn, “is that the public school system is not about educating black children.  Never has been.  Inner-city schools are about social control.  Period.”

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