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June 2024

Amazing New Feats in Shameless Hackery Noah Rothman

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/amazing-new-feats-in-shameless-hackery/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=blog-post&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=third

We’ve reached the point in the electoral calendar when the “experts” join forces to provide Joe Biden with a dubious talking point timed for maximum political effect.

Last time around, the “experts” were some of the nation’s most distinguished intelligence officials who assured the voting public that Hunter Biden’s laptop was a fabrication cooked up as part of an unusually sophisticated Russian disinformation operation. Today, the “experts” are economists — indeed, Nobel Prize winners — all of whom insist that Donald Trump’s proposed economic policies risk exacerbating inflation. That wouldn’t be such a galling assertion if this brain trust hadn’t also assured Americans that Joe Biden’s economic-policy preferences are entirely unimpeachable.

An open letter signed by 16 accomplished economists begins with the authors confessing how “deeply concerned” they are by Trump’s economic prescriptions and the “vagaries of his actions” on the world stage. In particular, the letter’s signatories expressed their fear that Trump’s “irresponsible budgets” will “reignite” inflation.

It’s unclear what “irresponsible budgets” the authors are describing. If they’re referring to the statements of principle that presidents send to Congress under the guise that they are budgetary proposals, these economic mavens need not worry so much. Presidential budgets are political documents, not economic blueprints, and Congress tends to regard them as such.

If, however, these economists were referring implicitly to Trump’s reliance on tariffs as the answer to any and every economic challenge, these economists would be on surer footing. Some forecasters have gamed out the effect of Trump’s sweeping tariff proposals, and they anticipate that the higher cost of imports and the prospect of Chinese retaliation would boost consumer prices.

Supreme Court Rules in Favor of Biden Administration in Landmark Social-Media Censorship Case By James Lynch

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/supreme-court-rules-in-favor-of-biden-administration-in-landmark-social-media-censorship-case/?

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in favor of the Biden administration in a landmark case dealing with government involvement in social-media censorship, finding that the plaintiffs lacked the standing to sue.

Justice Barrett wrote the majority opinion asserting that two states and five social-media users do not have standing to contest the level of coordination between government agencies, nonprofits, and tech platforms in restricting content on social media.

“We begin—and end—with standing. At this stage, neither the individual nor the state plaintiffs have established standing to seek an injunction against any defendant. We therefore lack jurisdiction to reach the merits of the dispute,” the majority opinion reads.

The landmark Murthy v. Missouri content-moderation case came about from a lawsuit by Missouri and Louisiana against the Biden administration over federal agencies working with social-media platforms and third-party nonprofits to censor conservatives online.

Last July, a district court ruled that federal agencies could not communicate with social-media companies or nonprofits with the purpose of coercing them into restricting speech. The Fifth Circuit partially upheld the injunction last fall and found multiple federal agencies violated the First Amendment.

“This evidence indicates that the platforms had independent incentives to moderate content and often exercised their own judgment. To be sure, the record reflects that the Government defendants played a role in at least some of the platforms’ moderation choices. But the Fifth Circuit, by attributing every platform decision at least in part to the defendants, glossed over complexities in the evidence,” Barrett said of the Fifth Circuit’s ruling.

Is Equality of Opportunity Even Realistic in a Free Society? It’s time to rethink the concept. by Jason D. Hill

https://www.frontpagemag.com/is-equality-of-opportunity-even-realistic-in-a-free-society/

There is a popular rejoinder in our society to the ideal of equity: equal results from unequal causes, and equal rewards for unequal performance.

A popular canard that has become constitutive of equality dialogue is that the United States was built not on equality of outcomes or even economic equality. It is devoted to equality of opportunity. But we should begin to re-think the concept of equality of opportunity. I would submit that even equality of opportunity is a politically untenable goal in a free society.

Equality of opportunity sounds like a beautiful thing to most people and, in an ideal utopia in which all persons were blessed with equal abilities and exercised their choices and judgments in a consistently rational and productive manner, one could imagine such an ideal being approximated. But what is an opportunity?

An opportunity is a set of circumstances that makes it possible to do something and achieve a goal. When I say that I have an opportunity to do something, I am describing a state of affairs in which the execution of action directed towards a phenomenon (some tangible thing in the world) will result in the realization of a goal I have set for myself.

When people speak of equality of opportunity they are speaking of those tangible things (a job, an education, a meeting with someone important who can advance their cause etc.—the material conditions that are required for the realization of a goal) that must avail themselves to each person equally. To put it another way, it is believed that a society or state must ensure that the circumstances and the conditions conducive to achieving goals are equally available to all persons. And for this project to be successful, we have to be committed to the idea that equality of opportunity is predicated on equalizing all chances of success.

Jewish Plot To Participate In An Election And Oust Pro-Hamas Marxist Gasbag Succeeds By: David Harsanyi

https://thefederalist.com/2024/06/26/jewish-plot-to-participate-in-an-election-and-oust-pro-hamas-marxist-gasbag-succeeds/

Jamaal Bowman lost his congressional primary race yesterday by 17 points, and all his allies in D.C. and the media decided to blame the Jews.

Now, it’s true that a large contingent of Jews who reside in Westchester County got together and, using their free will, decided to vote against a rape-denying Hamas apologist. But let’s not underplay the fact that Bowman was also a truther, a racist, and a fire-alarm-pulling clown.

Bowman, it seems, didn’t even know where his district was located. “We are gonna show f—king AIPAC the power of the motherf—ing South Bronx,” the former middle-school principal yelled to a small crowd at one of the most cringe-worthy political rallies I can ever remember watching. Red-diaper baby Bernie Sanders, one of the most popular politicians in the Democratic party, was on hand to tell the small crowd that the Democratic primary was “one of the most important” in American history.

Bowman’s district isn’t in the South Bronx, by the way. His rally was five miles outside his district.

In any event, most leftists blamed the American Israel Public Affairs Committee for Bowman’s fortunes. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who put on some kind of wild pogo dance at the Bowman rally, has accused AIPAC of being “a right-wing insurrectionist-supporting, pro-Netanyahu lobbying organization.” MSNBC’s Chris Hayes claimed that Bowman’s race was in a “dead heat” without AIPAC’s involvement, which is a ludicrous conjecture considering Bowman was down 17 points before AIPAC ever ran an ad.

Reparations: Taking money from people who never owned slaves and giving it to people who never were slaves Robert Zimmerman

https://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/points-of-information/reparations-taking-money-from-people-who-never-owned-slaves-and-giving-it-to-people-who-never-were-slaves/

The effort to justify the new fad of forcing all Americans today to pay blacks reparations for the evil of slavery that was eliminated a century and a half ago at the cost of more than 600K lives continues. A recent published study by two “Didn’t Earn It” (DEI) academic elites at the Harvard Kennedy School attempts to justify the distribution of reparations now by claiming that the U.S. has a long history of paying out money to harmed individuals. From the paper’s abstract:

[T]he United States has a long-standing social norm that if an individual or community has suffered a harm, it is considered right for the federal government to provide some measure of what we term “reparatory compensation.” In discussing this norm and its implications for Black American reparations, we first describe the scale, categories, and interlocking and compounding effects of discriminatory harms by introducing a taxonomy of illustrative racial harms from slavery to the present. We then reveal how the social norm, precedent, and federal programs operate to provide victims with reparatory compensation, reviewing federal programs that offer compensation, such as environmental disasters, market failures, and vaccine injuries. We conclude that the government already has the norm, precedent, expertise, and resources to provide reparations to Black Americans. [emphasis mine]

The highlighted word is key to understanding the fundamental intellectual dishonesty of these incompetent Harvard academics. In their paper they use numerous examples of cases where the government has provided compensation to actual individuals — such as veterans, individuals harmed by radiation from nuclear tests, and those who lost their pensions due to bankruptcy or mismanagement of their pension funds — and then claim this proves paying reparations to the community of blacks, based merely on their race and the past existence of slavery, is within traditional American jurisprudence.

13 Nobel Economists Promised Biden Would Cut Inflation, Now They’re Saying Trump Will Ignite It  The Committee to Unleash Prosperity

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/06/27/nobel-economists-who-got-bidenflation-100-wrong-now-predict-trump-will-ignite-inflation/

Reprinted, with permission, from the Committee to Unleash Prosperity‘s daily must-read Hotline email.

We have our hand on the Bible swearing we are not making this story up.

A gang of 16 Nobel prize-winning economists signed a letter yesterday endorsing Joe Biden for president because: “There is rightly a worry that Donald Trump will reignite inflation with his fiscally irresponsible budgets.”

But then our colleague, Scott Bessent, noticed something strange and ironic about the signatories: 13 of these economists signed a highly-publicized open letter three years ago assuring Americans that Biden’s “Build Back Better” spending spree would “ease longer-term inflationary pressures.”

Then — whoops! — 18 months later inflation soared to 9.1% under Biden – the worst U.S. inflation in almost 40 years! This would be the medical equivalent of amputating the wrong leg. 

Here’s the overlapping list of these economists who were spectacularly wrong in 2021, but whom we are supposed to believe are right this time around.

Jews Must Show Up Again in LA — This Time in Court The Sunday pogrom on the Jews of Pico happened because the city of LA failed to act to prevent it. Lori Lowenthal Marcus

https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/opinion/372585/jews-must-show-up-again-in-la-this-time-in-court/

On Sunday a crowd of violence-craving Jew haters ambushed and blocked the entrance to a synagogue in Los Angeles, enraged that property in Israel was being offered for sale to interested Jews.  The failure of the LA Police to prevent Sunday’s violent attacks on Jews prompts the obvious question:  Can’t you sue somebody to make this stop?  The answer is yes, but with one important and entirely attainable yet too often elusive condition:  You need to have people brave enough to stand up to the haters and use their name in court.

Police exist to protect the community from crime, especially violent crime.  But you can’t just go to court and complain that the police didn’t show up when they should have; courts don’t want to be in the business of governing police departments.

But what courts can certainly do is require equality:  Jews are entitled to the same kind and degree of protection for their events that all other groups get.   The LA police certainly know how to show up, and they do show up to ensure safety when the people being protected aren’t Jews, especially the “wrong” kind of Jews—you know, traditional Jews who live the commitment to Zion that’s at the center of our Torah, our beliefs, customs, and rituals. It certainly doesn’t look like there was equality in this case.

What happened outside Congregation Adas Torah happened because the LA police treated this event differently than they treat similar events when violence is reasonably expected.  Here are just a few of the things they did, and didn’t do, when they do the opposite for everyone else:

1.   They didn’t put up barriers to separate ideological opponents, when they routinely use that tool to protect people from demonstrators who are expected to be menacing or violent.

2.   They didn’t ensure that the Jews trying to get into their shul could do so safely. Instead they left the pro-Hamas crowd right on the sidewalk leading to the shul’s front door.

Cultural Marxism: A Century Old and Thriving The Marxist notion that traditional culture is the source of oppression in the modern world is still very much with us. By Larry Sand

https://amgreatness.com/2024/06/27/cultural-marxism-a-century-old-and-thriving/

In 1923, a group of professors known as the Frankfurt School came to the fore. These German Marxists—notably Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse—harbored a deep disdain for capitalism and traditional morals. Unfortunately, the professors did not stay in their homeland long. Adolph Hitler’s rise to power forced them out of Germany, and they reemerged at Columbia University in New York City in 1935.

And a century later, the malign effects of their teachings are still with us.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), Critical Race Theory (CRT), Black Lives Matter (BLM), gender indoctrination, wokeism, etc., fade in and out of the news cycle, but they have established a secure foothold in the nation’s culture, notably in our schools.

Cultural Marxism is still pervasive in a significant number of our colleges. In Illinois, legislators want to embed racial considerations into state appropriations for public universities. According to its website, Yale’s Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry faculty are told to place “DEI at the center of every decision” when making hires.

There are a few bright spots, however. Public universities in Texas, Florida, and Utah have banned DEI. However, those decisions came from state governments, not from the colleges themselves.

At MIT, a private university, President Sally Kornbluth confirmed in May that the school would “no longer require diversity statements in faculty hiring.”

Also, according to an analysis from OpenTheBooks.com, the University of North Carolina spends an estimated $90 million each year on 686 employees who promote diversity, equity, and inclusion in their departments or across the system. But change is on the horizon. In a repudiation of DEI ideology, the UNC Board of Governors voted on May 23 to repeal its diversity policy.

Stop the Ukrainian Meatgrinder? The only practicable way to avoid another near-one million dead and wounded would be a settlement, however unpopular. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2024/06/27/stop-the-ukrainian-meatgrinder/

Nearly eleven months ago, in August 2023, the New York Times reported that U.S. officials had estimated that some 500,000 Russians and Ukrainians had been killed, wounded, or missing in the then 18-month Ukrainian War.

Both Russia and Ukraine underreport their losses. Hundreds of thousands of additional casualties have followed in the 28 months of fighting.

In the West, the mere mention of a negotiated settlement is considered a dangerous appeasement of Russia’s flagrant aggression. In Russia, anything short of victory would be seen as synonymous with the collapse of the Putin regime.

Yet as the war nears two and a half years this summer, some facts are no longer much in dispute.

Controversy still arises over the circumstances of the 2014 overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych.

Russia charges that the West engineered the “Revolution of Dignity”—an effort to westernize the former Soviet republic, to expand the borders of Europe right to the doorstep of Russia, and eventually to fully arm Ukraine as a member of NATO.

Westerners counter that most Ukrainians wished to be part of Europe and independent from Russian bullying—and they had a perfect right to ask to join either NATO or the EU or both despite anticipated escalating tensions.

After the heroic Ukrainian defeat of the 2022 Russian bid to take Kyiv, there have been few significant territorial gains by either side.

Like the seesaw bloodbath on the Western Front of World War I, neither side has developed the momentum to force the other to negotiate or grant concessions.

As nuclear Russian threats against Europe mount, NATO is seeking to regain deterrence capabilities by boosting defense budgets, incorporating robust frontline nations Sweden and Finland, and uniting over shared concerns about Russian aggression.

The World’s Most Dangerous Delusion: Biden Thinks China Wants Stability by Gordon G. Chang

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20733/china-dangerous-delusion

Americans may think they are at peace with China, but China’s ruling organization has already announced otherwise.

[I]n May 2019, People’s Daily… carried a landmark editorial declaring a “people’s war” on America.

This phrase sounds like meaningless propaganda to American ears, but it has special significance to the Party. “A people’s war is a total war, and its strategy and tactics require the overall mobilization of political, economic, cultural, diplomatic, military, and other power resources, the integrated use of multiple forms of struggle and combat methods,” declared a column carried in April 2023 by PLA Daily, the official newspaper of the People’s Liberation Army.

China has in fact weaponized just about everything. In 1999, two Chinese air force colonels, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, in Unrestricted Warfare, listed 24 methods of warfare and advocated the use of all of them against the United States.

[U]nrestricted warfare contemplates the turning of everything into a weapon, from business interactions to tourism to terrorism to illegal drugs to disease.

All of these incidents are in defiance of about a dozen written and oral warnings, from the Biden State Department and President Biden himself, that the U.S. was prepared to use force against China to discharge America’s obligations to Manila pursuant to the 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty

The American political class—both Democrats and Republicans—refuse to see Chinese hostility and act appropriately against it. The Communist Party, therefore, did not have to deceive Americans because Americans were determined to deceive themselves.

Xi Jinping has made it clear that his goal is to bring down the international system, to “crack skulls and spill blood” as he announced in a landmark speech on July 1, 2021.

“It’s very hard for China to take certain steps without harming its own economy,” U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell said on June 12. “And I think we now understand that economic performance is central right now to what is important to President Xi.”