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June 2023

Manipulating Israeli Public Opinion by Naomi Linder Kahn

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19703/israel-public-opinion

The results of the survey indicate that the Israeli public has far greater trust in the Knesset — by dozens of percentage points — than it does in Israel’s judiciary, from the Supreme Court down to the legal advisors and counselors who answer to the Supreme Court.

As almost always, the different answers are the result of differences built into the questions. The wording of the question posed in the Israel Democracy Institute survey referred to the “level of trust in the Knesset” while the “Direct Polls Trust Index” survey examined trust “in the members of the Knesset you elected.”

[T]he purposefully phrased IDI survey was crafted to justify weakening the powers of the legislative branch and granting excessive powers to the judicial branch.

The way [the IDI’s] question was worded regarding the public’s trust in the Knesset ensured that the results would create the totally false impression that the public does not trust the members of the Knesset and favors the judges of the Supreme Court.

The relevant question, which is more closely reflected in the wording of the Direct Polls survey, is the level of the public’s trust in the members of the Knesset chosen by them, and the results show that an absolute majority of the public trusts its elected representatives — a fact that points to an extremely healthy parliamentary democracy.

These campaigns to undemocratically overturn the result of a free and fair election would surely have caught the eye of George Orwell — especially as they were all conducted under the rallying cry of “protecting democracy.”

Both George Orwell and Mark Twain would have demanded that we take notice.

The results of a recent “trust index” survey, conducted in Israel, revealed far more than just the dry numbers they report — although of course they are important. Even more important are issues concerning public trust — the very core of democracy.

Wrongium, the Media’s Favourite Element Salvatore Babones

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/media/2023/06/wrongium-the-medias-favourite-element/

Everyone likes a good beat-up. On May 31, Nature magazine—the world’s most prestigious scientific journal—published a news article under the headline “India Cuts Periodic Table and Evolution from School Textbooks”. Do notice that,according to Nature, they cut evolution too.

Why would such a science-obsessed country as India do something so stupid? The standard take across Western media is that a religiously conservative government has declared war on rationality. Richard Dawkins went so far as to belittle Hinduism an “idiotic religion”.

The actual answer is all of this is fake news. Neither the periodic table nor evolution has been dropped. The periodic table was moved from Year 9 to Year 11, and evolution was moved from Year 9 to Year 12.

The main reason for the change was to ensure that university-bound students who missed out on in-class instruction during the coronavirus pandemic shouldn’t be disadvantaged in their higher education studies. In other words, India’s National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) thought that evolution and the periodic table were so important that no university-bound student should miss them, though early school-leavers might reasonably live without them.

Nonetheless, search “India” and “periodic table” or “evolution” and you’ll find that Nature‘s (unretracted) fake news narrative is now the received truth. And with all due respect to Nature‘s Melbourne-based science writer Dyani Lewis, who authored the piece, her article is technically accurate. She wrote that “children under 16 returning to school this month at the start of the school year will no longer be taught about evolution, the periodic table of elements or sources of energy”. Her report simply omitted that students over 16 would.

While one might see a lack of proper journalistic skepticism in the report, Ms Lewis is perhaps not to blame for creating the fake news. She may have simply been a dupe of credible-sounding sources in India: activist academics and op-ed writers who spare no opportunity to besmirch the reputation of a religiously conservative government that they personally loathe. It is quite possible that none of the eminent Indians she interviewed for the article bothered to mention that the subjects were simply being rescheduled, not removed.

You can’t ‘Perestroika’ CNN By Silvio Canto, Jr.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/06/you_cant_perestroika_cnn.html

Who remembers Perestroika?  It was a “Hail Mary pass” from Mikhail Gorbachev to save the USSR.  Perestroika means “restructuring” in Russian, but it did not save the communist economy.   

Well, not long ago CNN hired a fellow named Chris Licht to save the ratings-challenged network.  He fired Don Lemon and tried to change the image of the network.  This week, we learned that Mr. Licht is out.  This is the story: 

Mr. Licht’s 13-month run at CNN was marked by one controversy after another, culminating in his exit earlier this week. He got off to a bumpy start even before he had officially started when he oversaw the shuttering of the costly CNN+ streaming service at the request of its network’s new owners, who were skeptical about a stand-alone digital product. The cuts resulted in scores of layoffs.

David Zaslav, the chief executive of CNN’s parent, Warner Bros. Discovery, informed staff on Wednesday morning that he had met with Mr. Licht and that he was leaving, effective immediately.

As Gorbachev learned, you can’t fix communism.  It does not work.  In a short time, the next leader of CNN will learn the same thing, that you can’t fix a news channel that can’t stop talking about former President Trump. 

The network’s basic problem is that no one is watching, a rather difficult challenge for the account executives selling airtime:  “494,000 average total viewers in primetime in May — and just 113,000 viewers in the key 25-54-year-old demographic, according to Nielsen.” To be fair, cable news ratings are down but nobody does it “worse” than CNN.

A Government at War with Its People By J.B. Shurk

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/06/a_government_at_war_with_its_people.html

Warfare requires deception.  The federal government habitually lies to the American people.  Consider that an admission that it sees itself at war with those it claims to serve.

You might have noticed that the word “propaganda” has been somewhat retired from polite conversation.  Occasionally, some State-allied news corporation will apply the term to a public statement coming from inside Russia, but otherwise, the idea that governments promote falsehoods cloaked as official truths has quietly disappeared.  

Instead, ordinary information enjoyed and shared among regular people is now targeted for classification.  An alliance of national governments, international institutions, and propaganda engines disguised as disinterested nonprofits has sprung up to toss “unacceptable” thoughts into garbage piles for “mis-,” “mal-,” and “dis-” information trash bins.  As with everything else in modern society, the cult of expertise has even given us “disinformation experts” to decide what knowledge belongs where.  

The small coterie of “disinformation experts” recognized and promoted by governments then monitor what the common people are saying among themselves, cast their nets around anything “unacceptable,” and stigmatize those words and thoughts as deserving of censorship.  Perhaps one day soon there will be academic degrees in “disinformation” or special licenses distinguishing State-approved professionals as qualified to tell the rest of us what is real.  As a rule of thumb, if you want to know what kinds of knowledge governments fear their citizens possessing, look to the subjects that require numerous layers of authority validation before access is granted or titles are conferred.  Now the knowledge that governments fear their citizens possessing is simply information outside their control.  

In this way, officials have flipped the script on propaganda.  Rather than the people calling out governments for their lies, governments pre-emptively defame their citizens as liars.  How do governments know when their citizens are “lying”?  Easy.  They just isolate anybody who contradicts publicly announced official truths.  Like a puff of smoke vanishing in the wind, government propaganda disappears because anyone who recognizes it as such is guilty of spreading “mis-,” “mal-,” or “dis-” information.

Remembering the Horrors of D-Day The men at Omaha did not believe America had to be perfect to be good—just far better than the alternative.  By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2023/06/07/remembering-the-horrors-of-d-day/

Seventy-nine years ago this week, the Allies assaulted the Normandy beaches on D-Day, June 6, 1944. 

Their invasion marked the largest amphibious landing since the Persians under Xerxes invaded the Greek mainland in 480 B.C. 

Nearly 160,000 American, British, and Canadian soldiers stormed five beaches of Nazi-occupied France. The plan was to liberate Western Europe after four years of occupation, push into Germany, and end the Nazi regime.

Less than a year later, the Allies from the West, and the Soviet Russians from the East, did just that, utterly destroying Hitler’s Third Reich. 

Ostensibly, the assault seemed impossible even to attempt. 

Germany had repulsed with heavy Canadian losses an earlier Normandy raid at Dieppe in August 1942. 

The Germans also knew roughly when the Allies were coming. They placed their best general, Erwin Rommel, in charge of the Normandy defenses. 

The huge D-Day force required enormous supplies of arms and provisions just to get off the beaches. Yet the Allies had no means of capturing even one port on the nearby heavily fortified French coast. 

To land so many troops so quickly, the Allies would have to ensure complete naval and air supremacy. 

They would have to tow over from Britain their own ports, lay their own gasoline pipeline across the English Channel, and invent novel ships and armored vehicles just to get onto and over the beaches. 

More dangerous still, the invaders would ensure armor and tactical air dominance to avoid being cut off, surrounded, and annihilated once they went inland. 

German Panzer units—battle-hardened troops in frightening Panther and Tiger tanks, with over three hard years of fighting experience on the Eastern Front—were confident they could annihilate in a matter of days the outnumbered lightly armed invaders. 

Such a huge force required 50 miles of landing space on the beaches. That vast expanse ensured that some landing sites were less than ideal—Omaha Beach in particular. 

The Wokeification of Movies Begins as ‘The French Connection’ Goes Under the Knife By Robert Spencer

https://pjmedia.com/culture/robert-spencer/2023/06/07/the-wokeification-of-movies-begins-as-the-french-connection-goes-under-the-knife-n1701374

Leftist publishers have recently taken it upon themselves to rewrite the works of Roald Dahl, Ian Fleming, and Agatha Christie to bring them into line with contemporary woke sensibilities, and now movies are starting to get the same treatment. The first to go under the knife has been William Friedkin’s gritty 1971 flick The French Connection, in which Gene Hackman plays Popeye Doyle, a tough, cynical cop of a kind that wouldn’t last five minutes on any big-city police force today. At one point in the movie (exactly ten minutes and five seconds in, if you want to check), Doyle dares to utter the forbidden word of all forbidden words, the racial epithet that can end careers and destroy lives in the blink of an eye. We see early on in the film that Popeye is not exactly cuddly, or even fully likeable. But if you get a new copy of the movie, you won’t see that at all. The Most Offensive of All Words has been removed without a trace.

Jeff Wells of Hollywood Elsewhere wrote Sunday, “The absence of this sequence can be confirmed by anyone who streams the Criterion Channel’s version of the Oscar-winning feature. The messed-with sequence begins at the 9:42 mark, during the film’s first act. Gene Hackman’s Popeye Doyle enters the brightly-lighted main lobby of the police station. He drops off paperwork, puts on his overcoat, walks over to the main door and flexes his hand. Roy Scheider’s Cloudy follows but at exactly 10:05 a passage that used to be part of the film is no longer there.”

The missing piece is “a bit between Doyle and Cloudy, who’s nursing a wounded arm after being stabbed by a drug dealer. Doyle: ‘You dumb guinea.’ Cloudy: ‘How the hell did I know he had a knife?’ Doyle: ‘Never trust a [ethnic slur].’ Cloudy: ‘He coulda been white.’ Doyle: ‘Never trust anyone.’” To avoid wounding the fragile sensibilities of contemporary wokesters, who are much more likely to be watching some new movie about transgender superheroes defeating MAGA-hat-wearing bigots, this small section doesn’t appear in new copies of the film. Wells notes, “It is presumed that the sequence was removed by Disney, which bought the film’s original owner, 20th Century Fox, on 3.20.19, and not The Criterion Channel.”

The woke censors are evil, but they’re not stupid. They know that few people are going to be upset by the removal of the magic life-destroying word from a fifty-year-old movie. Most people won’t notice at all, except for a handful of movie geeks who love to memorize scenes and repeat lines from them in every conceivable situation. Most who do notice will not dare to say anything about the edit. They don’t want to appear to be or be portrayed as someone who would go around saying That Word or approve of its use.

Indeed, excising the dreaded word to end all words from The French Connection is as canny a move as tearing down Confederate statues. Few will enunciate the slightest dissent; everyone knows that those who object will be targeted and destroyed as racists. That’s a neat way to co-opt opposition, but the issues in play here are much larger than just Popeye Doyle’s use of a bad word. The worst aspect of this whole thing is that the Criterion Channel’s presentation of The French Connection gives no hint that it has been edited and that viewers aren’t seeing the actual film that won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1972. The door has thus been opened to any and all films being edited to suit the sensibilities of today’s cultural arbiters, without any notice that it is being done at all.

Our Dangerous Contempt for Work Why “work” has become a dirty word. by Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/our-dangerous-contempt-for-work/

Large numbers of younger American workers, especially Gen Z’ers, those born between 1997 and 2012, are demonstrating some dangerous attitudes about work and employment. The problem isn’t a lack of jobs. Nearly half of small businesses recently reported having unfilled job openings, nearly twice the half-century historical average. And 41% say they have raised compensation. Overall, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported 10 million unfilled jobs at the end of April, followed by 399,000 new jobs in May.

A more likely explanation is changes in mores and attitudes towards work. “Funemployment,” for example, according to Investopedia describes “those who lost their jobs and choose to use their newfound freedom to pursue leisure activities such as traveling, going to the beach, and being physically active until they find a new job.”

Taking one’s time to find a new job while drawing unemployment benefits is nothing new, but usually those who do so are working for cash to increase their income. The “funemployed” are spending money on “leisure activities,” and many live with their parents.

Then there are those who still work but practice “quiet quitting,” basically goldbricking on the job by doing only the bare minimum. Gallup estimates that half of the workforce practices “quiet quitting,” especially Gen Z’ers and younger Millennials. This attitude was facilitated during the Covid years, when the trillions of dollars in federal and state money sloshing through the economy made it affordable to blow off employment or risk one’s job. And don’t forget, during the lockdowns many employees got hooked on working from home, where supervision is lax and goofing off on the company’s dime is easy.

But again, changing attitudes toward work are more pertinent than money when it comes to a lack of respect for honest labor. According to 74% of managers in a Resume Builder survey, Gen Z’ers are “difficult to work with. . . . About half (49%) of [managers] find it difficult to work with Gen Z’ers all (11%) or most of the time (39%). Additionally, 16% say they find it difficult a lot of the time, while 20% say some of the time and 10% say not much of the time. Only 4% said they almost never find it to be difficult.

The Howard Zinn Industry He may be dead, but his followers are legion. by Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-howard-zinn-industry/

His parents were peasants from Russia and the Ukraine. Had they stayed in that part of the world, any children they had would’ve grown up under Stalin – and, if they’d dared to say anything critical of Uncle Joe in public, they wouldn’t have made it to adulthood. In fact, both mom and dad emigrated to America, where their son, like so many other offspring of destitute immigrants, succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. He became rich and famous, in fact. And how did he become rich and famous? By celebrating Communism and savaging America.

That Howard Zinn (1922-2010) was a card-carrying Communist, a daily fixture at Party meetings in New York, an inveterate Soviet apologist, a member of a range of Kremlin front groups, a cheerleader for Mao’s “people’s government,” a supporter of Castro and Ho Chi Minh, a co-founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and an associate of such groups as ACORN, the Democratic Socialists of America, and International ANSWER, is routinely dropped down the memory hole by the countless teachers and professors who enthusiastically use his 1980 book A People’s History of the United States as a classroom text. Those instructors don’t tell their students that they’re being taught to think like Marxists; rather, they tell them that they’re finally learning the real truth about America, not patriotic propaganda.

For example, Zinn maintains that America was founded as – and has always been – a totalitarian state. Yes, Americans today are richer and freer than pretty much everybody else who’s ever lived on this planet; but Zinn’s readers are presented with a picture of an America whose economic inequality and political oppression are virtually without parallel. American heroism? American accomplishment? American ingenuity? Your kids won’t learn about these things from Zinn’s jeremiad. In his hands, even the most admirable chapters of American history become evidence of the depths of American perfidy.

Today, Zinn’s diatribe is used at schools and colleges all over America, at virtually every level, and in a wide range of disciplines.

Should Christians Declare A State Of Emergency, Too?

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/06/08/should-christians-declare-a-state-of-emergency-too/

“Just to be clear, we’re not advocating that Christians declare a state of emergency. Declaring something a “state of emergency” is little more than an attempt to cut off debate and characterize the other side of an issue as an enemy.”

Less than six months after President Joe Biden signed the Respect for Marriage Act, which codified gay marriages, the Human Rights Campaign declared its first-ever “state of emergency” for “LGBTQ+ people.”

Why? Because of a supposed spike in “legislative assaults sweeping state houses this year.”

“More than 75 anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been signed into law this year alone, more than doubling last year’s number, which was previously the worst year on record,” the HRC says.

But look closely. Almost every single bill on the “assault” list is legislation designed to protect children from the omnipresent and increasingly aggressive “transgender” community.

The list includes things such as bans on doctors performing sterilization procedures or prescribing dangerous puberty-blocking drugs to minors. It includes Florida’s ban on public schools teaching children under age 9 about gay sex, and removing books from elementary school libraries that are too pornographic to show on local news programs. It includes protections for girls who don’t want to share lockers with boys (who claim to be girls) or be forced to unfairly compete in sports with physically dominant males. The list includes laws that prevent schools from “transitioning” children behind their parents’ backs.

It’s our guess that most people would view these sorts of measures as reasonable safeguards, not worthy of a “state of emergency” declaration.

The Truth About ‘Puberty Blockers’ The FDA hasn’t approved them for gender dysphoria, and their effects are serious and permanent. By Gerald Posner

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-truth-about-puberty-blockers-overdiagnosis-gender-dysphoria-children-933cd8fb?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

The fashion for transgenderism has brought with it a new euphemism: “gender-affirming care,” which means surgical and pharmacological interventions designed to make the body look and feel more like that of the opposite sex. Gender-affirming care for children involves the use of “puberty blockers”: one of five powerful synthetic drugs that block the natural production of sex hormones.

The Food and Drug Administration has approved those medications to treat prostate cancer, endometriosis, certain types of infertility and a rare childhood disease caused by a genetic mutation. But it has never approved them for gender dysphoria, the clinical term for the belief that one’s body is the wrong sex.

Thus the drugs, led by AbbVie’s Lupron, are prescribed to minors “off label.” (They are also used off-label for chemical castration of repeat sex offenders.) Off-label dispensing is legal; some half of all prescriptions in the U.S. are for off-label uses. But off-label use circumvents the FDA’s authority to examine drug safety and efficacy, especially when the patients are children. Some U.S. states have eliminated the need for parental consent for teens as young as 15 to start puberty blockers.

Proponents of puberty blockers contend there is little downside. The Department of Health and Human Services claims puberty blockers are “reversible.” It omits the evidence that “by impeding the usual process of sexual orientation and gender identity development,” these drugs “effectively ‘lock in’ children and young people to a treatment pathway,” according to a report by Britain’s National Health Service, which cites studies finding that 96% to 98% of minors prescribed puberty blockers proceed to cross-sex hormones.