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July 2023

FOREIGN POLICY, HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Iranian Threat in America’s Backyard, Thanks to The Biden Administration by Majid Rafizadeh

By on July 8th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19782/iranian-threat-latin-america

Thanks to the Biden Administration’s apparently lack of policy towards Latin America as well as the Administration’s policy of appeasement towards Iran’s Islamist regime, the ruling mullahs have been freely violating sanctions and increasing their influence in America’s backyard without facing any consequences.

“One confidential intelligence document… links Venezuela’s new Vice President Tareck El Aissami to 173 Venezuelan passports and ID’s that were issued to individuals from the Middle East, including people connected to the terrorist group Hezbollah.” The passports could be used for travel to North America or Europe. — CNN, February 14, 2017

“We’re concerned that [Venezuelan President Nicolás] Maduro has extended safe harbor to a number of terrorist groups… [including] supporters and sympathizers of Hezbollah.” — Nathan Sales, former coordinator for counterterrorism at the US Department of State, Yahoo News, January 20, 2020.

“President Raisi’s visit to Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua in plain defiance of the United States demonstrates the failure of the Administration’s Latin America policy. We must repair our relationships with our friends in the region so that we can form a united front against the countries that invite the Islamic Republic’s terrorist regime into our hemisphere.” — US Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar, Chair of the House Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, Fox News, June 15, 2023.

Iran began significantly increasing its influence in Latin America after US President Joe Biden assumed office, most likely assuming, apparently correctly, that the Biden Administration would not take any action against the regime.

The Iranian regime’s terror cells have indeed grown in Latin America. Iran’s terror proxy Hezbollah and Al Mustafa International University have both played a key role in expanding the mullahs’ presence and ideology in the region…. “where they can then recruit students and inculcate loyalty to the Islamic Revolution among local populations…” – Report, United Against Nuclear Iran.

Back at home the Iranian regime continues to enrich uranium to levels slightly below those needed for nuclear weapons breakout, all of which — along with China set to militarize Cuba — is a clear and present existential danger to the United States.

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

House Republican Bill Would Keep Foreign Nationals From Voting In U.S. Federal Elections By: Shawn Fleetwood

By on July 8th, 2023

https://thefederalist.com/2023/07/07/house-republican-bill-would-keep-foreign-nationals-from-voting-in-u-s-federal-elections/

Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Va., introduced legislation earlier this week ensuring that only eligible U.S. citizens are able to vote in federal elections.

Titled the “NO VOTE for Non-Citizens Act of 2023,” the proposed bill includes amendments to the 1993 National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) and 2002 Help America Vote Act that seek to clarify states’ authority in maintaining federal voter registration lists and establish that federal election funding cannot be “used to support States that permit non-citizens to cast ballots in any election.”

Under the NVRA, states are required to “ensur[e] the maintenance of an accurate and current voter registration roll for elections for Federal office.” The current version of the law, however, only refers to “eligible voters” and does not include a provision about citizenship requirements.

While the Constitution and federal law stipulate that only U.S. citizens can vote in federal elections, several Democrat-led cities in states such as Maryland and California have adopted measures in recent years permitting the practice for their respective municipal elections. In October, for instance, Washington, D.C. passed legislation granting foreign nationals the ability to vote in the district’s local elections. House Republicans’ efforts to revoke the law have been blocked by Senate Democrats.

“Since the Constitution prohibits non-citizens from voting in Federal elections, such ineligible persons must not be permitted to be placed on Federal voter registration lists,” the NO VOTE for Non-Citizens Act reads.

In order to ensure noncitizens aren’t voting in federal elections, Griffith’s bill includes a provision requiring states that permit localities to allow noncitizen voting in their respective elections to place such non-citizens on a voter registration list “separate from the official list of eligible voters with respect to registrants who are citizens of the United States.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

‘Misinformation’ Is The Vocabulary Of A Culture That Has Lost Its Capacity To Discuss ‘Truth’ By: Elle Purnell

By on July 8th, 2023

https://thefederalist.com/2023/07/07/misinformation-is-the-vocabulary-of-a-culture-that-has-lost-its-capacity-to-discuss-truth/

EXCERPTS

The perversion of truth is falsehood; misinformation is just the perversion of information.

In a preliminary injunction issued against the White House and federal agencies on Tuesday in Missouri v. Biden, Judge Terry Doughty eviscerated government actors for colluding with social media companies to censor users’ protected speech in the name of eliminating “misinformation.”

Doughty, as others have done, compares the government censorship to Orwell’s hypothetical “Ministry of Truth.” But Orwell’s satirical title gives the speech police too much credit: It assumes “truth” is still a functional part of their vocabulary. No, our censors speak in terms of “misinformation.”

The perversion of truth is falsehood; misinformation is just the perversion of information. Truth has a moral component; information doesn’t. Years of moral relativism have eroded our cultural understanding of “truth” as a knowable, agreed-upon concept — and in our modern world, all we’re left with is an infinite supply of information.

Truth, Discerned in Nature by Reason

For most of Western history, philosophers and laymen alike have agreed upon the existence of “truth,” as a factual concept but also as a moral one.

Today, we see factual relativism as well as moral. Not only does our prevailing social ethic tolerate individuals’ self-determination of “what’s right for me,” we’ve gone so far as to nod along when a man says he is actually a woman, lacking the philosophical footing to explain why that simply can’t be true.

To “speak your truth,” as distinct from the truth, is a moral victory to be praised according to our prevalent irrational dogma. Our cultural rejection of reason is evident in every field: Look at the deconstructionist sculptures and poetry that pass for art, or the assault on the fixed, rational rules of mathematics.

In this cultural condition, people are no longer equipped to speak in terms of truth, grounded in the divinely appointed laws of nature, discernible by human reason. Those concepts aren’t in our contemporary vocabulary.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Gallup: Faith in American Institutions Hits New Low By Eric Lendrum

By on July 8th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/07/07/gallup-faith-in-american-institutions-hits-new-low/

Trust in most major American institutions has reached its lowest point in modern history, according to a survey from Gallup.

As reported by the Washington Free Beacon, the poll shows that just 26 percent of Americans say that they have confidence in the country’s institutions. This marks a 10-point decrease from the same question when it was asked in 2020, and is the lowest point ever since 1979, when Gallup first began asking this question.

When broken down along particular institutional lines, Americans report a 26 percent confidence rate in the office of President of the United States, and a mere 8 percent confidence in the U.S. Congress. The most popular institution is small business, at 65 percent support, while the military comes in second with 60 percent.

Institutions that saw their lowest scores yet include the police, big business, public schools, and technology companies. As Gallup notes, there is also a clear partisan divide when it comes to certain institutions; Democrats’ confidence in the presidency is currently 39 points higher than the confidence of Republicans, and 34 points higher than Republicans when it comes to public schools.

By contrast, Republicans are 28 points higher in confidence than Democrats with regards to the Supreme Court, 24 points higher with churches and organized religion, and 20 points higher in supporting the police.

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Turning America’s Melting Pot Into A Boiling Pot by Rachel Ehrenfeld

By on July 8th, 2023

https://acdemocracy.org/turning-americas-melting-pot-into-a-boiling-pot/

This article originally titled “With The Help Of Soros, ‘Chef’ Biden Is Turning America’s Melting Pot Into A Boiling Pot” was first published by The Daily Wire on July 6, 2023.

President Biden, known for embellishing his political and personal records, has never bragged about his cooking skills. He should have. It took “Chef” Biden just two and half years to transform America’s melting pot into a boiling pot.

The reformation of U.S. immigration laws is long overdue. Instead of proposing legislative changes to Congress, however, the president is ruling by fiat, issuing executive orders contradicting and violating the Constitution and the criminal code. Citing “compassion” as its pretext, the administration uses so-called “temporary humanitarian programs” to allow millions of economic migrants — many with unverifiable backgrounds from virtually every country on the face of the earth — to enter the United States. Any criticism is met with denial and slander of “racism” and “fascism.”

Not only does President Biden refuse to protect the country’s southern border and enforce existing immigration laws, he and members of his administration also seem to brazenly and continuously lie about their actions, undermining the internal and national security of the country. The administration’s refusal to enforce the law also facilitates the activities of Mexican and international criminal cartels that earn billions of dollars by tracking humans and drugs into the U.S.

Judging by the flagrant violation of the laws governing U.S. immigration and border protection, it seems President Biden agrees with his mega-supporter George Soros, who declared, “Sovereignty is an anachronistic concept.” Soros, who considers himself “a citizen of the world,” says, “the principle of sovereignty stands in the way of outside intervention in the internal affairs of nation-states.” He even proposed a “modification of the concept of sovereignty.” Unsurprisingly, soon after Biden took oce, Secretary of State Antony Blinken invited envoys from the United Nations to “collect information” on racial discrimination in America and oer recommendations on how “to address the history of racism, slavery, and colonialism through a wide range of reparations measures.”

When Soros professed, early on, that he planned to change the U.S., he did not reveal that his end goal was to undermine the national sovereignty of his adoptive country. Beginning in 1996, with a $50 million investment in the Emma Lazarus Fund, Soros sought to challenge U.S. immigration laws. His eorts have contributed to the far-Left globalist open-borders policies we are witnessing today.

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Biden’s border mayhem worsens, now includes hostage videos By Brian Lonergan

By on July 8th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/07/bidens_border_mayhem_worsens_now_includes_hostage_videos.html

The area around America’s southern border has long been a dangerous, inhospitable place.

In addition to the harsh desert environment, the lure of sneaking into a prosperous nation has brought with it a lucrative criminal enterprise.

Now that the federal government has all but abandoned the idea of border security, the Biden White House’s faux compassion on immigration policy is creating unprecedented levels of criminality, terror and death.

While making a mockery of our long-standing immigration laws meant to protect our nation and its legal residents, Biden’s policies have also empowered vicious human trafficking cartels and subjected aspiring border crossers to unspeakable horrors.

Cartel Jalisco New Generation (CJNG), one of Mexico’s most violent cartels, released a video threatening to kill escorts and sex workers who do not pay protection money to them. It featured several terrified women bound and on their knees while being menaced by masked, gun-toting cartel enforcers. 

The staging was reminiscent of the 2004 Nick Berg decapitation video, which was carried out by Islamist militants during the Iraq War. At the time, the world was shocked by the brutality of the militants half a world away. Thanks to the White House’s misguided agenda, the same kind of brutality now lives in our proverbial back yard.  

To dismiss the CJNG video as an aberration would be factually wrong, as any immigration enforcement agent could describe innumerable similar incidents. A recent video message from the attorney general of Sonora, Mexico, described how the notorious Sinaloa cartel makes videos showing migrants being beaten with a paddle to extort money from their family members.

Migrants are not the only targets of cartel savagery. Four U.S. citizens were abducted in Matamoros, Mexico, in March, leaving two dead. After the U.S. government applied pressure, the Gulf cartel turned over its members who kidnapped the Americans. The cartel also issued a public apology for the incident, an unusual act which shows it operates more like the de facto rulers of the area than a criminal enterprise.

In addition to the violence inflicted by the cartels, the White House’s neglect of border security and the limitless influx of migrants has resulted in so many deaths, one might think the area is covered with land mines. There were 890 migrant deaths along the border in fiscal year 2022, a 58 percent increase over 2021. That includes people drowning in the Rio Grande, falling off cliffs or suffering dehydration in the desert heat.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Majority of Black People Support Supreme Court Ban on Affirmative Action More black people say affirmative action puts them at a disadvantage than an advantage. Daniel Greenfield

By on July 8th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/majority-of-black-people-support-supreme-court-ban-on-affirmative-action/

While the bulk of the mainstream media coverage of the Supreme Court decision banning colleges from basing college admissions on race consists of the expected leftist hysteria and propaganda, a small number of inside baseball stories largely aimed at talking Dems down from the high ladder, tell the truth.

You would never know it from most of the media’s coverage but the vast majority of Americans oppose using race to decide who gets into college.

84% of white adults oppose colleges considering race or ethnicity when deciding which students to accept

81% of Hispanics oppose it

76% of Asians oppose it

So do 71% of blacks

Asians are not even the top non-white group to oppose racial discrimination in college admissions, Hispanics are.

Black people, on whose behalf the whole affirmative action college debate has been waged, oppose it 71% to 28% and they’re the group most favorably inclined to it.

Awkward. Obviously.

Strikingly, black people don’t much like affirmative action and a majority backed the Supreme Court decision.

Indeed, more of them actually approved of the decision (more than 4 in 10) than disapproved (fewer than 4 in 10). And more Black Americans “strongly” approved (31 percent) than disapproved (26 percent).

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MEDIA Comments turned off

Mark Zuckerberg’s safe space Meta’s ‘kinder’, ‘friendlier’ Twitter rival might be the most censorious platform yet. Fraser Myers

By on July 8th, 2023

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/07/08/threads-mark-zuckerbergs-safe-space/

Ever since Elon Musk took over Twitter last year, the people formerly known as ‘blue ticks’ have been threatening to flounce off. Twitter, they say, has become an unusable hellhole, rife with disinformation and proto-fascist hate speech. A great Twitter exodus has been promised once every few months, yet still they have carried on tweeting.

Why did so few of them ever leave Twitter? The main barrier has been the lack of a viable alternative. Twitter, for good or ill, has remained the world’s public square. But that could be about to change. This week, Threads, the new social-media app from Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, was launched to huge fanfire. It has been explicitly pitched as a rival to Twitter. Within the first 24 hours of its launch, 30million users are said to have signed up.

Threads is effectively a clone of Twitter. It is a ‘text-based social app’ or ‘microblogging service’. As with Twitter, posts on Threads have strict character limits. Twitter’s retweet function has become ‘repost’ and quote tweets have become ‘quote threads’. Even the name Threads seems to be a nod to a ‘Twitter thread’ – a connected series of tweets, posted by the same Twitter user, to get around the character limit.

The similarities between the two rival apps are so stark and so noticeable that Twitter has threatened to take legal action against Meta. Meta has hardly tried to hide the similarities, either. Earlier this week, Zuckerberg posted his first tweet in over a decade. It was of the Spiderman meme – where two men in exactly the same Spiderman outfit point at each other, unable to tell the real thing from the imposter. Besides, ripoffs of other platforms are not unknown at Meta. For instance, Instagram Stories are a shameless copy of Snapchat, while Instagram’s Reels feature is an obvious imitation of TikTok.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Explosive Video: ‘Missing Witness’ Says He Told DOJ in 2019 About Biden Family’s Corrupt Dealings with China By Victoria Taft

By on July 8th, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2023/07/07/explosive-video-missing-witness-says-he-told-doj-in-2019-about-biden-familys-corrupt-dealings-with-china-n1708908

A mole in the U.S. Department of Justice “shared classified information with Hunter Biden and his Chinese partners” and tipped off the Biden family about an investigation into their corrupt dealings with a Chinese energy company with spy ties, and the feds arrested a whistleblower overseas to stop him from getting to the U.S. to testify to the House Oversight Committee. These are among the explosive allegations the “missing witness” in the Biden family corruption investigation has revealed in a video from a secret location.

The man, Dr. Gal Luft, an Israeli citizen who once headed a Washington and China-tied think tank with former CIA Director James Woolsey, released a video this week explaining all of the above allegations and more. The New York Post’s Miranda Devine broke the story while the country celebrated Independence Day and cocaine was found at the White House.

Luft explains that instead of being on the lam from the Department of Justice that wants to put him away for what he says are bogus arms and Foreign Agent Registration Act charges, he was forced to release a video to tell his side of this extraordinary story. He says his first mistake was “a fatal decision I made in March of 2019 to share with the U.S. Government my knowledge about the Biden family’s relations with CEFC,” the Chinese energy company that had ties to the Chinese Communist Party’s intelligence agency.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The CDC Gives Advice for Men Who Want to ‘Breastfeed’ By Matt Margolis

By on July 8th, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2023/07/07/the-cdc-gives-advice-for-men-who-want-to-breastfeed-n1708925

Humanity is doomed. I’m sorry to say it, but I’m not sure if there’s anything else one can conclude. Individuals and once-reputable organizations are going to absurd lengths to perpetuate the myths that people can be born in the “wrong body” and that plastic surgery and drug injections can actually change one’s sex.

Those who perpetuated this nonsense were once limited to the fringes of society; now, it’s become mainstream. Even though polls show a large majority of Americans reject radical left-wing gender ideology, health organizations and even our government have been bullied into endorsing it lock, stock, and barrel.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) did itself no favors during the COVID pandemic, having endorsed universal masking and vaccines for children. Now it has managed to beclown itself once again by giving advice to biological men on how to “breastfeed.”

Of course, it’s no longer to be called “breastfeeding” because that’s not inclusive enough. Now, they’re calling it “chestfeeding.” We can’t risk offending those who don’t have breasts (also known as men) who think they can defy nature and successfully feed a newborn child mother’s milk.

“The CDC advice isn’t just for biological women who have removed their breasts but still want to nurse babies, it’s also for biological men, who through the magic of plastic surgery also have breasts and would now like to use these breasts to feed babies,” reports Karol Markowitz at the New York Post. “As that’s biologically impossible, the CDC suggests getting help with ‘maximizing milk production, supplementing with pasteurized donor human milk or formula, medication to induce lactation.’”

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