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October 2021

Is this the beginning of the end of the Biden administration? Merrick Garland has instructed the FBI to mobilize against parents who oppose critical race theory in public schools Roger Kimball

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/beginning-democrats-biden-defeat-merrick-garland-critical-race-theory/

When future historians congregate to conduct their postmortem of the short-lived Biden administration, what date will they pick to mark the crisis that signaled the beginning of the end? I’d like to offer October 4, 2021 for consideration.

In the weeks before, it is true, Biden’s approval rating had been in free fall. (Fun pastime if you’re bored: enter ‘Biden’ and ‘free fall’ into your favorite search engine). There was the world historical disaster of our evacuation of Afghanistan, the nearest parallel to which was not America’s ignominious departure from Saigon in 1975 but William Elphinstone’s disastrous evacuation from Kabul in 1842. There was the unfolding crisis at our southern border. The President insisted that the border was ‘closed’ (in the same way that he said that the cost of his doomed, $3.5 trillion spending plan was ‘zero’), but his own officials are prepping for a surge of 400,000 illegals in the month of October. Inflation is at a 30-year high, with no end in sight. Gas, food, housing, clothes: the prices of all are skyrocketing. The President came to office promising to ‘shut down’ COVID, not the country, but since he took office some 250,000 people have died and ineffectual mask mandates, vaccine mandates, St-Anthony-Fauci-certified mandate mandates have proliferated like pussy hats at an anti-Trump rally.

Several weeks ago, writing about the incineration of 10 innocent Afghans (including seven children) in an errant drone strike that the lying US military first said had killed an Isis-K operative, I pondered the proverbial expression ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back’. Some trace that expression back to Thomas Hobbes, but I suspect the germ of the idea is much older. The basic idea, of course, is that an accumulation of evils is bearable up to a certain point, beyond which even a tiny addition, apparently insignificant, brings sudden disaster.

I wonder if Attorney General Merrick Garland has just supplied the proverbial straw that will send the camel that is the Biden administration crashing to the ground.

Garland was supposed to be a moderate. The Washington Compost assured its readers that there was a ‘98 percent probability that Merrick Garland is “in between” Ginsburg and Scalia. In other words, that he is comparatively moderate’. One of my friends even wrote that he was a ‘superb’ choice to be attorney general.

MIT Abandons Its Mission. And Me. Let’s make sure my cancellation is the last. That begins by standing up and saying no to the mob. by Dorian Abbot

I am a professor who just had a prestigious public science lecture at MIT cancelled because of an outrage mob on Twitter. My crime? Arguing for academic evaluations based on academic merit. This is the story of how a cancellation is carried out, why it should worry all of us, and what we can do to stop this dangerous trend.
I have been a professor in the Department of the Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago for the past 10 years. I work on topics ranging from climate change to the possibility of life on extrasolar planets using mathematics, physics, and computer simulation.
I have never considered myself a political person. For example, a few days before an election I go to ISideWith.com and answer the policy questions, then I assign my vote using a weighted draw based on my overlap with the candidates. It’s an efficient algorithm that works perfectly for a nerd like me.
But I started to get alarmed about five years ago as I noticed an increasing number of issues and viewpoints become impossible to discuss on campus. I mostly just wanted to do my science and not have anyone yell at me, and I thought that if I kept my mouth shut the problem would eventually go away. I knew that speaking out would likely bring serious reputational and professional consequences. And for a number of years I just didn’t think it was worth it. 
But the street violence of the summer of 2020, some of which I witnessed personally in Chicago, and the justifications and dishonesty that accompanied it, convinced me that I could no longer remain silent in good conscience.
In the fall of 2020 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. 
As a result, I was immediately targeted for cancellation, primarily by a group of graduate students in my department. Whistleblowers later revealed that the attack was partially planned and coordinated on the Ford Foundation Fellowship Program listserv by a graduate student in my department. (Please do not attack this person or any of the people who attacked me.)

Biden’s bank robber Lloyd Billingsley

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

Joe Biden’s nominee for Comptroller of the Currency in the U.S. Treasury Department is Saule Omarova, a native of Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic and graduate of Moscow State University, which she attended on a “Lenin Personal Academic Scholarship.” 

In a May 9, 2020 interview with Chris Hayes of NBC, Omarova revealed she was in an exchange program with the University of Wisconsin in 1991 when the USSR collapsed. The Lenin scholar remained stateside to pursue a PhD in political science. Some of her views on economics emerged in 2019, nearly 30 years after the USSR collapsed. “Say what you will about old USSR, there was no gender pay gap there,” Omarova wrote, “Market doesn’t always ‘know best.’” 

Contrary to the Lenin scholar, individuals know what’s best for themselves and a free market empowers them to make choices that reflect those interests. In the old USSR, by contrast, an all-male Marxist-Leninist dictatorship planned the economy. This ran up against the knowledge problem F.A. Hayek outlined in The Road to Serfdom way back in 1944 during the Stalin era. 

Economic knowledge is fragmented and dispersed, so no group of people is able to plan an economy that will thrive for the benefit of all. That’s why Omarova’s beloved “old USSR” was an economic basket case. 

Countries barren of liberties are also barren of groceries. The biggest country in the world, with abundant energy and natural resources, could not even feed itself. This was a matter of record, but Hayes failed to press the issue. Omarova knew that in the old USSR consumers waited in line to select, pay, and pick up the goods. That is how an economy planned by Communist Party bosses functions in practice, but there’s more to it.

China’s Growing Maritime Empire by Judith Bergman

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17830/china-growing-maritime-empire

While on the face of it, China’s acquisitions of ports looks like mere commercial transactions based on an economically driven agenda — the rhetoric China is employing — several analysts have pointed out that geopolitical concerns seem to be what are actually driving China’s port investments.

“A deliberate military and strategic functionality seems clearly entrenched in the initiative [acquisition of ports] ….there is abundant evidence it is developing a network of strategic strongpoints that can significantly raise the costs of any U.S. military intervention and lower the willingness of BRI [port] host governments to offer access or assistance to the United States.” — Daniel R. Russell and Blake H. Berger, “Weaponizing the Belt and Road Initiative,” Asia Society Policy Institute, September 2020.

“U.S. naval vessels might not be able to call regularly at ports under Chinese management because of the risk that commercial port information-technology (IT) systems could be used to monitor or interfere with military systems and jeopardize U.S. information and cybersecurity.” — Admiral Gary Roughead, US Navy Chief of Naval Operations, Naval War College Review, Winter 2019.

For that reason, the US warned Israel that China’s management of the new Haifa port terminal could potentially damage US-Israeli security cooperation, as it might lead to US Navy ships refraining from docking there.

“By creating a global port network for ostensibly commercial purposes, China has gained the ability to project power through the increased physical presence of its naval vessels—turning the oceans that historically have protected the United States from foreign threats into a venue in which China can challenge U.S. interests.” — Christopher R. O’Dea, Naval War College Review, Winter 2019.

Another grave concern is that Chinese port investments create economic and political leverage for the CCP that can affect local policy and decision making… After China invested in and acquired much of the port of Piraeus, Greece blocked an EU statement criticizing China’s human rights record…. prevented a unified EU statement against China’s behavior in the South China Sea… and opposed tougher screenings of Chinese investments in Europe — a predictable move for all nations that become beholden to Chinese investments.

China, through investments in and ownership of ports, is expanding its global maritime reach, and its appetite for ports shows no signs of diminishing. As of July 2020, Chinese firms reportedly “(partly) owned or operated some ninety-five ports across the globe.”

Out of the 95 ports, 22 are in Europe, 20 in the Middle East and North Africa, 18 in the Americas, 18 in South and Southeast Asia, and nine in sub-Saharan Africa. Just three Chinese companies, among them COSCO Shipping Ports and China Merchants Port, two central state-owned enterprises (SOE), account for the operations of 81% of those ports.

Group That Harassed Kyrsten Sinema Funded By Leftwing Billionaire George Soros By Jordan Davidson

https://thefederalist.com/2021/10/04/group-that-harassed-kyrsten-sinema-funded-by-leftwing-billionaire-george-soros/

Leftwing billionaire George Soros funded the activist group that harassed Democrat Sen. Kyrsten Sinema in a bathroom last weekend, The Free Beacon reported on Monday.

According to Soros’s Open Society Foundation grant database, Soros gave at least $1.5 million to Living United for Change in Arizona in 2019 and at least $250,000 in 2017 to become the group’s largest donor.

A group of demonstrators with Living United for Change followed Sinema into a bathroom at Arizona State University this weekend and filmed their repeated demands that she vote for President Joe Biden’s expensive “Build Back Better” plan and legislation that will give millions of illegal aliens U.S. citizenship.

Sinema later said that the pushy activists “deceptively enter[ed] a locked, secure building” before they posted a video harassing her and students using the restroom, behavior Sinema called “inappropriate.”

“Yesterday’s behavior was not a legitimate protest. It is unacceptable for activist organizations to instruct their members to jeopardize themselves by engaging in unlawful activities such as gaining entry to closed university buildings, disrupting learning environments, and filming students in a restroom,” Sinema said in a statement on Monday.

Living United, which devotes time and effort to promoting leftwing candidates, also notably received thousands of dollars in funding from Bold PAC, “the fundraising arm of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus,” in August.

“The committee includes more than three dozen of Sinema’s Democratic colleagues in the Senate and House. Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto (Nev.), Alex Padilla (Calif.), and Robert Menendez (N.J.) are listed as members of the committee on the Bold PAC website. The senators did not respond to requests for comment about Living United’s confrontation of their Democratic colleague,” the Free Beacon reported.

Why This Doctor Is Risking the Nobel Prize to Speak Out Against Universal COVID-19 Vaccination An interview with Dr. Robert Malone, a pioneer of mRNA Vaccine technology. By Benjamin Harnwell

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/04/why-this-doctor-is-risking-the-nobel-prize-to-speak-out-against-universal-covid-19-vaccination/

American Greatness recently caught up with American doctor and virologist Robert Malone in Rome last month. He was there for the International COVID Summit at the Italian senate and hosted by senators from the radical Right Lega, which is a partner in Italy’s coalition government of national unity, led by the ex-boss of the European Central Bank Mario Draghi and dominated by the left-wing Partito Democratico and the alt-left Movimento 5 Stelle.

In this interview, Malone, who was among the pioneers of mRNA vaccine technology in the late 1980s, recounts his belief that genetic vaccines such as mRNA and viral vector vaccines may risk causing antibody dependant enhancement—where a vaccine causes the production of rogue antibodies, which coming into contact with the virus, act as a Trojan Horse shuttling it, now unchallenged by the immune system, directly into the host cell where it can replicate unhindered.

Malone is not against COVID-19 vaccines. But he is against compulsory and universal vaccination, which he thinks is potentially dangerous.

He believes that the viral load in vaccinated people who are infected is not just as high but possibly higher than the viral load in unvaccinated people who are infected—and thus that vaccinated people are potentially just as likely to transmit the virus as unvaccinated people.

The interview took place shortly before the announcement this week of this year’s Nobel Prizes, beginning with the prize for medicine on Monday, for which Malone was a contender.

Q: You are a frequent contributor to “The War Room”—the daily podcast by former Donald Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon—and on one occasion you said that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines might actually make COVID-19 infections worse. What did you mean by that?

Malone:  Not only the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines, but also the viral vector vaccines Johnson & Johnson, Sanofi, and AstraZeneca. Both these types of vaccines are genetic vaccines—they use genes to create antibodies—that’s different from traditional vaccines which work by introducing a small amount of the virus that causes antibodies. In vaccinology, one has to always be aware of the possibility that these genetic vaccines might enhance the development of immunologic disease—in other words, to cause the pathogen to become more infectious or cause more disease than would be observed without the vaccine. 

The Radical Prosecutor in Charge of the January 6 Investigations Channing Phillips is not colorblind, nor blind in the application of justice, as the American people expect. By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/04/the-radical-prosecutor-in-charge-of-the-january-6-investigations/

In July, the acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia dismissed a case against a Black Lives Matter protester charged with attacking a federal police officer last summer in Lafayette Square. 

Channing Phillips, currently in charge of the office, dropped the charge after the defendant’s lawyer argued the facial recognition technology used to identify the suspect was unreliable and racist. Glenn Ivey, the defense lawyer, is a high-priced D.C.-area criminal attorney who just happened to work with Phillips in the 1990s.

The biased swamp in action.

Phillips, however, has not been as lenient with defendants facing charges for entering the Capitol on January 6. His office now is handling roughly 650 active criminal cases; the investigation is overwhelming his office and the court system. (On any given day, roughly half of the hearings in the D.C. federal district court are related to the Capitol breach probe.)

Channing Phillips is not a household name, but he is arguably one of the most powerful men in Washington right now, overseeing the Biden regime’s nationwide dragnet for Americans who protested Joe Biden’s election. This is Phillips’ third stint as acting U.S. attorney for D.C., having been twice appointed by Barack Obama to temporarily fill the position. In between, Phillips worked as senior advisor for Attorney General Eric Holder and then his successor, Loretta Lynch.

In March, Phillips replaced Michael Sherwin, the first prosecutor in charge of the Capitol breach probe who bragged about unleashing a “shock and awe” crusade to arrest at least 100 Trump supporters before Biden’s inauguration.

Phillips is more low-key in public but his office is no less ruthless. His prosecutors continue to seek pretrial detention for anyone accused of violence, including assault of a federal officer, the same charge his office just dropped against a BLM protester. In some instances, Phillips’ lawyers want even nonviolent offenders to remain behind bars for months awaiting a trial or plea offer. 

It Took Biden to Prove the Swamp is Wide and Deep Was Trump our last hope to drain it? Lloyd Pettegrew

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/it-took-biden-prove-swamp-wider-and-deeper-trump-lloyd-pettegrew/

“We should remember George Orwell’s 1984 alarm, “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears…freedom is the freedom to say two plus two makes four. If that is granted, all else follows.” The Swamp’s two plus two equalizing whatever they want it to be must not continue to hollow out America! An almighty housecleaning is in order in 2022 and beyond.”

The late, great Angelo Codevilla (RIP), hardly the bombastic Donald J. Trump, offered a dire warning to Americans that the swamp (our ruling class) has pervaded nearly every aspect of American life. Republicans and conservatives in general must take heed or be permanently thrust into a minor party role. A menacing part of swampism is its absence of international borders as Mike Jones has articulated, Globalism belongs to a species of liberal thinking that deplores barriers to trade and disapproves strongly of borders…the key articulators of this movement now include not only Silicon Valley but also the military-intelligence complex, NGOs, and non-institutionalized protest groups whose global operations are facilitated by smartphones.”

Many of us find refuge in blaming our non-compos mentis current President. Sadly, the very system, from top to bottom and regardless of political affiliation, that derailed Donald Trump’s second term as President 45, has gleefully supported and defended Biden as their useful idiot. I have several friends who are never-Trumper Republicans, who I surmise voted against Trump and for Mr. Biden, regardless of his obvious and innumerable failings. Little did they know that the mean-tweeting Orange Man, who never did anything that wasn’t grand, boastful and beautiful, was our last hope against the Swamp becoming preeminent, possibly for our lifetimes.

When George W. Bush declared war on Afghanistan the evening of 9/11, 2001, one of his first squishy commitments was to hide credible information about our alleged friends, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Qatar, by neglecting to justly implicate them as enablers to Osama bin Laden’s terror strike on American soil.

Marines Forced to Remove Anti-Taliban Graffiti Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/10/marines-forced-remove-anti-taliban-graffiti-daniel-greenfield/

To quote Barack Hussein Obama, “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”

The Biden administration has expanded that to those who slander its new allies, the Taliban. 

A US Marine has shared his dismay at being forced to remove obscene messages insulting the Taliban and ISIS that they daubed on the walls of Kabul Airport. 

Three examples of the insults were shared to social media – with one showing a serviceman in front of a tiled wall at Hamid Karzai Airport sprayed with the phrase ‘F*** ISIS + Taliban’ in black paint, 

But an unnamed Marine stationed at Hamid Karzai said the graffiti painted on walls was removed at the orders of bosses, saying: ‘My boys had to go … pick up every last piece of … trash for who? The Taliban?’ a Marine told the Washington Post. ‘It was a slap in the face to us.’

That order was part of an edict which also saw troops ordered to pick up trash they’d strewn around the airport to frustrate the Taliban’s takeover. 

I’m guessing that any graffiti mentioning Biden also had to go.

Wholesale Invasion USA Waves of illegal immigrants flood across the U.S. southern border – with no end in sight. Joseph Klein

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/border-invasion-continues-joseph-klein/

The Biden administration is aiding and abetting a wholesale invasion of the United States by illegal immigrants, with no idea of whether they are infected with COVID-19 or not. The waves of illegal immigrants, encouraged by President Biden’s open-border policies, keep coming, with no end in sight.

Last month an estimated 20,000 Haitian immigrants entered the country illegally in successive groups that overwhelmed border control agents. The Haitians huddled close together in squalid conditions under the International Bridge in the border town of Del Rio, Texas. They weren’t immediately tested – or vaccinated – for COVID-19.  

That’s on top of the more than a million U.S. Customs and Border Protection Patrol encounters with illegal immigrants along the southwest border with Mexico from the time the Biden administration took office through August 2021.

The Biden administration claims that it is using its congressional heath emergency authority under Title 42 to expel migrants entering the United States who have recently been in a country where COVID-19 or other communicable diseases were present. However, the administration has been using Title 42 far too sparingly in comparison with the Trump administration. Biden is, clearly, stepping very gingerly to make sure that he doesn’t antagonize his leftwing progressive base.

Last month’s hordes of illegal Haitian immigrants are no longer camped under the International Bridge. Some were deported, but the majority of these Haitians have remained in this country. Under the Biden administration’s disastrous catch and release policy, thousands of them have been dispersed all across the country — and the administration didn’t bother to test or vaccinate the illegal immigrants before they were released.