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October 2021

The War on America by Twisted Logic By Janet Levy

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

We are living under a regime that’s increasingly totalitarian.  And it is using an insidious strategy — call it disinformation, propaganda, gaslighting, indoctrination, or outright lying — to achieve the leftists’ political and social goal of a “Great Reset” of America.  The regime’s enforcers, or boosters, are the media, academia, and Big Tech, who together control the narrative with faked statistics, slanted semantics, and endless repetition.  They also deploy the psychological tactics of intimidation, shaming, and canceling.  At the center sits the government, but the chain of command — who dictates to whom — is often unclear.

“Repeat a lie often enough, and it becomes the truth” is a principle often attributed to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.  In America today, “woke” social justice warriors are using a continuous barrage of lies to achieve their Machiavellian agenda.

Four recent, egregious lies come to mind.  In June 2020, Gordon Klein, a UCLA business school professor who has taught at the institution for forty years, was suspended for refusing a student’s request to provide an easier exam for black students.  Black students, it was propounded, were emotionally distressed after the death of serial felon George Floyd in Minneapolis.  The email exchange between Klein and the student, which went viral, was deemed “hurtful,” and the professor was unreasonably branded an “insensitive bigot.”  Antonio  Bernardo, the school’s dean, organized a smear campaign against Klein and sought permission to fire him.

Klein stood his ground, saying he was shocked by the student’s request, which he found “deeply patronizing and offensive” to black students.  He also assessed, rightly, that granting the request would violate the California constitution’s prohibition of “race-based preferences in public education.”  But such has been the effect of woke indoctrination that, incomprehensibly, students called for his removal and gathered 20,000 signatures on a petition demanding that he be relieved of his teaching duties.  In its eagerness to be seen as woke in the current racially charged atmosphere, UCLA chose to ignore the abject harassment of its professor, sided with the crybullies, and suspended Klein.  Fortunately, an academic senate committee ruled that instructors are entitled to refuse requests to change grading schemes, and Klein was reinstated three weeks later.

Even At Half The Price, Biden’s Plan Is A Self-Destructive, Freedom-Destroying Spending Spree by Thomas McArdle

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/10/07/biden-to-taxpayers-go-invest-in-yourself/

Just when you thought Democrats couldn’t get more arrogant or dishonest, President Joe Biden on Tuesday, visiting the congressional district of one of the House’s less-extreme Democrats, warned that “autocrats” in the world are scrutinizing America for signs of decline on the geopolitical stage, and we therefore must “invest in ourselves” to prove “that American democracy works.”

Translation: spend trillions with a T establishing a new series of cradle-to-grave entitlements that, like our already-existing entitlements, will in short order become politically impossible ever to repeal.

Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, moreover, look straight into the TV camera and tell the American people that these unprecedented, astronomical expenditures will cost zero.

This, not Donald Trump placing the spotlight on all-too-real election fraud, is the true “Big Lie.”

No one using a gift card at the store in the weeks after Christmas is a big enough liar or financial illiterate to claim that the spending spree he’s enjoying costs zero. It costs plenty; the point is he’s not paying for it! But shame and economic ignorance are never obstacles for today’s Democrats in pursuit of power over our lives.

We know that middle-class American taxpayers will be suffering the pain of paying for the “$3.5 trillion” that is actually more like $5 trillion, which Democrats themselves know isn’t infrastructure at all, as they claim it to be.

Why else would the bill include $80 billion for the IRS to expand its powers to Orwellian realms and spy on checking and savings accounts where the balances or transactions exceed $600? Are we to believe that in order to steal from the rich and give to Uncle Sam, Robin Hood and his merry band of revenue collectors now need the bank statements of the millions of Americans who can barely pay their monthly bills – so many of whom pathetically voted for Democrats, naively thinking it was in their interest?

The left’s overreach is so glaring that this all may backfire. After all, the two lone Democrats in the Senate with a modicum of fiscal sanity, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, both of whom know that supporting the bill as presently constituted spells their own political suicide, have been terrorized by leftist activists – in kayaks on the Potomac River in Manchin’s case, and in a public ladies room stall and a commercial airplane in the case of Sinema.

America and ‘The Dying Citizen’ By Victor Davis Hanson

https://pjmedia.com/columns/victor-davis-hanson/2021/10/07/america-and-the-dying-citizen-n1522290

The present article summarizes arguments in Victor Davis Hanson’s new book “The Dying Citizen” that appears this week from Basic Books.

Only a little more than half of the current world’s 7 billion people are citizens of fully consensual governments.

That lucky 50 percent alone enjoys constitutionally protected freedoms. Most are also Western. Or at least they reside in nations that have become “Westernized.”

Migrants, regardless of their race, religion or gender, almost always head for a Western nation. And most often their destination remains the United States. The more it is now fashionable for Americans to take for granted or even to ridicule the idea of their own country, the more the non-American global poor risk their lives to crash America’s borders.

Constitutional systems easily perish because they ask a lot of their citizens — to vote, to be informed about civic and political issues, and to hold elected officials accountable. That responsibility is perhaps why, of the world’s true republics and democracies, only about 22 have been in existence for a half-century or more. We are seldom told, then, that America is a rare, precious and perhaps even fragile idea, both in the past and in the present.

American citizens are clearly also not the custom of the past. Unlike history’s more common peasants, citizens are not under the control of the rich who, in turn, seek undue influence in government through controlling them.

Instead, viable citizenship has always hinged on a broad, autonomous middle class. Those Americans in between lack both the dependence of the poor and the insider influences of the elite. Suffocate the middle and we know that a binary feudalism will soon replace it. We are seeing just that medievalization in contemporary California.

Nor are American citizens mere migratory residents who drift across nonexistent borders in expectation of receiving more rights than meeting responsibilities. Forfeit a sacred national space, a place where common customs, language, and traditions can shelter and thrive, and a unique America disappears into a pre-civilizational migratory void like the fluid vastness of late imperial Rome.

Americans are quite different from tribal peoples, whose first loyalties are determined by mere appearance or innate blood ties. Take this nation back to pre-civilizational tribalism, and our future as the next Yugoslavia, Rwanda or Iraq is assured.

Unvaxxed Medical Prof Put on ‘Investigatory Leave’ in Desperate Bid to Get Him to Quit By Stephen Green

https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2021/10/06/unvaxxed-medical-prof-put-on-investigatory-leave-in-desperate-bid-to-get-him-to-quit-n1522163

A University of California medical professor has been placed on “Investigatory Leave” after refusing to get vaccinated — despite the natural immunity he enjoys after having already suffered a Wuhan Flu infection.

In addition to being a recovered COVID patient, Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, MD is a Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California-Irvine’s School of Medicine, and UCI’s Medical Ethics director. So he would seem to know his stuff on these issues.

During the early weeks of the pandemic, Dr. Kerriaty worked on the front lines, as they say:

As chair of the hospital ethics committee, I have had more anguishing conversations than I can count with families to tell them their loved one is irretrievably dying of Covid. As a psychiatric consultant on the medical wards and in the emergency department, I have suited up in PPE to see hundreds of hospitalized Covid patients, witnessing the worst that this illness can do.

Currently, however, Dr. Kheriaty has been effectively muted by his employer, had his earnings cut in half, and is unable to communicate with his existing patients or seek out new ones.

Look What Happened When a Professor Questioned His University’s Diversity/Equity/Inclusion Efforts By Gwendolyn Sims

https://pjmedia.com/culture/gwendolynsims/2021/10/06/look-what-happened-when-a-professor-questioned-his-universitys-diversity-equity-inclusion-efforts-n1522219

In today’s repressive atmosphere of woke leftist culture, it’s rare to see faculty members stand up to the mob in academia, but that’s exactly what happened when tenured Professor Dorian Abbot questioned his university’sDiversity/Equity/Inclusion (DEI) efforts in a series of YouTube videos and articles.

Abbot, a Geophysical Sciences professor at the University of Chicago expressed his alarm over the way DEI was being implemented not only to stifle “dissenting viewpoints” on campus but how almost every decision made on campus, “from admissions, to faculty hiring, to course content, to teaching methods, is made through the lens of DEI.”

Couple that alarm with years of noticing “the increasing number of issues and viewpoints [that had] become impossible to discuss on campus”; witnessing the leftist “justifications and dishonesty that accompanied” the violence in the streets of Chicago; having a colleague at a seminar conclude, ‘If you are just hiring the best people, you are part of the problem,’ Abbot was convinced he “could no longer remain silent” about DEI’s detrimental impact on academic freedom and individual worth.

“In the fall of 2020,” writes Abbot, “I started advocating openly for academic freedom and merit-based evaluations. I recorded some short YouTube videos in which I argued for the importance of treating each person as an individual worthy of dignity and respect. In an academic context, that means giving everyone a fair and equal opportunity when they apply for a position as well as allowing them to express their opinions openly, even if you disagree with them.”

Dignity. Equal opportunity. Respect. Who could argue with that? Cue the woke outrage mob.

Abbot was “immediately targeted for cancelation, “primarily by a group of graduate students in [his] department.” It was later discovered the targeting was at least partially planned and coordinated on the far-left Ford Foundation Fellowship Program listserv. From there, a group of 162 “members of the Department of Geophysical Sciences Community at the University of Chicago” sent a letter of denunciation to the department’s faculty.

Virtuous Fantasies of Fascism Anthony Daniels (Theodore Dalrymple)

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2021/10/virtuous-fantasies-of-fascism/

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2021/10/virtuous-fantasies-of-fascism/

“The doctrinaires entering our education systems are as termites in a wooden building, peddling the view that if you do not ‘celebrate’ some proclivity or other, or publicly expatiate on its virtues, then you must be keen on persecuting those who exhibit it. It is simple notion for the simple minds of those who find the world just too complex to grasp.”

When I mentioned to some friends that I was about to pay a short trip to Hungary, they were all duly horrified. It was as if I had announced in late August 1939 that I was going on holiday in Germany.

I readily confess that my knowledge of current Hungarian politics is very limited. I know four words in the language: please, thank you, water and national. This does not entitle me to pose as an expert, even though I know infinitely more Hungarian than did my horrified friends.

There was something formulaic about their horror, if I may so put it, a bit like the sign of the cross for those who do not truly believe but yet are attached to ancient customs. They had heard that Hungary was a fascist country, the kind of country that, according to the Dutch Prime Minister, should have no place in the European Union. Of course, he took that to mean that it was not virtuous, or not virtuous enough.

I had been to Budapest several times before: it is undoubtedly one of the most pleasant capitals in Europe, grand and dignified but not overwhelmingly large. I first went in 1970, when no one was horrified by my proposed journey: it was merely a communist state, that was all, and therefore not the object of obloquy.

Even then, the food was better than in other communist countries, but the greyness and dilapidation were evident. For the first and only time in my life I had difficulty in spending all the money that I had. One had to change irrevocably a certain amount of money to be allowed to enter Hungary, and by the end of my stay I was left with a bundle of forints that I could neither change nor take out of the country (not that anyone outside the country would have wanted them).

When I mentioned to some friends that I was about to pay a short trip to Hungary, they were all duly horrified. It was as if I had announced in late August 1939 that I was going on holiday in Germany.

I readily confess that my knowledge of current Hungarian politics is very limited. I know four words in the language: please, thank you, water and national. This does not entitle me to pose as an expert, even though I know infinitely more Hungarian than did my horrified friends.

There was something formulaic about their horror, if I may so put it, a bit like the sign of the cross for those who do not truly believe but yet are attached to ancient customs. They had heard that Hungary was a fascist country, the kind of country that, according to the Dutch Prime Minister, should have no place in the European Union. Of course, he took that to mean that it was not virtuous, or not virtuous enough.

I had been to Budapest several times before: it is undoubtedly one of the most pleasant capitals in Europe, grand and dignified but not overwhelmingly large. I first went in 1970, when no one was horrified by my proposed journey: it was merely a communist state, that was all, and therefore not the object of obloquy.

Even then, the food was better than in other communist countries, but the greyness and dilapidation were evident. For the first and only time in my life I had difficulty in spending all the money that I had. One had to change irrevocably a certain amount of money to be allowed to enter Hungary, and by the end of my stay I was left with a bundle of forints that I could neither change nor take out of the country (not that anyone outside the country would have wanted them).

Bret Stephens An Ethically Challenged Presidency

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/05/opinion/biden-ethics-son.html

There should be little doubt that President Biden was not being truthful when, days after the Taliban’s victory, he told ABC News that his senior military advisers had not urged him to keep some 2,500 troops in Afghanistan. The president’s claim was flatly contradicted last week in sworn testimony from Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. Kenneth McKenzie Jr., the head of U.S. Central Command.

During the generals’ testimony, the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, sought to defend her boss by pointing to a line in Biden’s interview in which he appeared to suggest that the military’s advice “was split.”

Another whopper. What split? As The Times’s Helene Cooper, Eric Schmitt and David Sanger reported in April, right after Lloyd Austin was sworn in as secretary of defense in January, he and his top generals “were in lock step in recommending that about 3,000 to 4,500 troops stay in Afghanistan.” Asked whether there were top military advisers who argued otherwise, Psaki evaded the question.

Biden’s dissembling, regarding the worst-executed major foreign policy decision in years, would be a scandal in any presidency. It’s worse coming from the man who campaigned for office by insisting that he stood “for honor and telling the truth.”

A week earlier, Politico’s Ben Schreckinger published a scrupulously reported book on the Biden family. It makes a compelling case that some of the most explosive emails from Hunter Biden’s purported laptop were entirely genuine — a claim that Schreckinger confirmed with multiple sources, including a Swedish government agency, and that was never explicitly denied by Hunter himself.

That includes a 2017 email in which one of Hunter’s potential business partners proposed a “provisional agreement” with the now-defunct company CEFC China Energy to share equity percentages in a new venture, with “10 Jim” and “10 held by H for the big guy?” Jim Biden is the president’s brother. “The big guy,” according to Tony Bobulinski, a recipient of the email, is Hunter’s father.

Is There Any “Science” Behind Covid Mask Mandates? Francis Menton

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=a05e044bdd

I spend a lot of time at this site ridiculing the unfalsifiable hyperbole and altered data that pass for “science” in the field of climate change. But climate change is just one of many areas where people who have little idea what real science consists of nevertheless claim the mantle of science to order others around. Right now the response to Covid-19, the Chinese Virus, competes with the response to climate change for the most egregious misuse of the imprimatur of “science” to justify political goals.

As background for this post, I refer to the Manhattan Contrarian definition of “science,” which appeared, among other places, in this post of September 12, 2020: “Science is a process for understanding reality through using experiment or data to attempt to falsify falsifiable hypotheses.” Under this definition, the classic example of real science at work is the randomized controlled drug trial, best understood as an attempt to falsify the falsifiable hypothesis that the drug at issue is effective, through proving that a placebo works just as well. When the attempt at falsification fails, then the drug has been shown, at least provisionally, to be effective.

The Manhattan Contrarian definition of “science” is what I seem to remember learning on the subject back in junior high school, and that I have since confirmed by reading up on the work of philosopher Karl Popper and others. The alternative definition of “science” mentioned in my September 2020 post is that “science is what people who call themselves scientists do.” Under this alternative definition, “following the science” means taking instruction from whoever appear to be, or declare themselves to be, the most expert scientists of the moment. In the field of Covid-19, those people would be the CDC and the NIAID (Fauci’s organization), and everyone who takes funding from them and their allies and therefore can’t disagree with anything they say without risking job and career.

Back on August 5, the CDC “updated” their “guidance” on the subject of masking for students, teachers and other staff in schools. The updated guidance reads as follows:

CDC recommends universal indoor masking for all teachers, staff, students, and visitors to K-12 schools, regardless of vaccination status.

Sydney Williams :Fear

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

How far ago it was when a Democrat President could speak of open markets and of trusting the American people. Fear has become a tool of American politicians, especially those on the left, to help control the people they are supposed to serve. In a recent issue of The Spectator, regarding the United States’ handling of the COVID-19 virus, Karol Markowicz wrote: “We are in a moment of profound fear in the U.S…We cannot continue to succumb to a fear of life. We must not continue to be scared of each other.” Yet, politicians used fear to place the sick in nursing homes, and to close places of worship, schools and businesses, and to issue mask and vaccine mandates.

As well, fear of climate change infects our youth. Writing in February 2020 in The Washington Post, Jason Plautz wrote: “Kids are terrified, anxious and depressed about climate change,” while academics, politicians and certain businesses thrive on this fear. Michael Moore and Al Gore made millions out of scaring people about climate change. Thomas P. Gloria, managing director of Industrial Ecology Solutions and Program Director, Sustainability, Harvard Extension School, wrote in the April 22, 2020, edition of the Harvard Gazette: “My fear is, despite the science and the early warning signals that we bear witness to – record temperatures, 1000-year storms, glacial retreat, coral reefs dying on a continental scale – global society may finally wake up, but it may be too late.”

Fear of expressing non-conventional ideas has become pervasive. Many will not speak out for fear of financial retaliation. Ted Rall, author of The Stringer, wrote in Monday’s Wall Street Journal: “What meaningful difference is there between an authoritarian state, where saying the wrong thing can get you arrested, and a regime of economic censorship, in which the consequence of unpopular expression results in unemployment, potentially followed by eviction and destitution?” A culture that cancels history and opinions is one that denies free speech. How many students fear expressing opinions that depart from a progressive narrative that has become ubiquitous? How many junior executives question their senior managers? Do members of Congress let demands of Party out-weigh their own consciences? Fear of failing grades, loss of job and political retribution are used to suppress speech and control people.

Why Arabs Are Annoyed With the Europeans by Khaled Abu Toameh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17798/arabs-annoyed-with-europeans

The European Parliament… has enraged many Arabs by calling for boycotting Expo 2020 Dubai…

The timing of the resolution is problematic. It implies that the European Parliament is seeking to punish the UAE for signing a peace treaty with Israel. The resolution coincided with the first anniversary of the signing of the Abraham Accords, the term used to refer to peace agreements between Israel and the UAE and Bahrain.

By singling out the UAE, the European Parliament has chosen to side with the enemies of peace, cooperation and normalization between Israelis and Arabs.

Worse, the European Parliament saw no reason to call out Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad for their daily human rights violations against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

Resolutions such as the one taken by the European Parliament are the kind that give the enemies of peace in the Middle East — evidently now including the European Parliament — ammunition to keep fighting to achieve their goal of destroying Israel.

They are opposed to the existence of Israel. They do not want to see Israel in the Middle East. Most of them want to replace Israel….

“[The decision] raises a question mark about the real reasons that led to this hostility practiced by the European Parliament towards a country that has achieved a lot on human rights issues…. The European Parliament is supposed to support these issues, not the exact opposite.” — Mona Ali Al Motawa, prominent writer from Bahrain, Al-Watan, September 21, 2021.

[T]he UAE does not need “a certificate [of honor] from malicious entities and will not be affected by desperate attempts to disrupt its achievements.” — Saudi columnist Dr. Ali Al-Kheshaiban, Al-Ain, September 22, 2021.

Some very vocal Arabs, in short, are loudly telling the Europeans to mind their own business.

The Arabs are also telling the Europeans that if they have to meddle in the internal affairs of the Arab countries, they should at least support those states, such as the UAE, that have made real strides in human rights, rather than supporting and emboldening terrorists through calls for the boycott of global cooperation events.

The European Parliament, one of three legislative branches of the European Union, has enraged many Arabs by calling for a boycott of Expo 2020 Dubai, taking place in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) between October 2021 and March 2022.

The theme of this year’s Expo 2020 Dubai, one of the world’s biggest events, is “Connecting Minds, Creating the Future.” The sub-themes are “Sustainability, Opportunity and Mobility” with a focus on industries, financial capital, governance, employment, education, and technology.