MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

The Movie Chinese Communists Hate the Most? By Janet Levy

Posted By on January 9th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/01/the_movie_chinese_communists_hate_the_most.html

Some films are chilling because their fiction penetrates the agonizing core of reality.  The soon to be released Unsilenced, from award-winning Chinese-Canadian filmmaker Leon Lee, is a prime example.  It brings into sharp focus the oppression unleashed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on Falun Gong, a movement that emphasizes ethical conduct, qigong exercises, and meditation.  Fearing that Falun Gong would overtake it in popularity, the party has since 1999 been persecuting practitioners with arrest, torture, forced labor, menticide, and execution.  But an underground resistance has established itself, led by ordinary Falun Gong practitioners pushed by extraordinary circumstances into heroic acts.

The film’s lead character, Wang (played by Ting Wu), is based on Wang Weiyu, a survivor of China’s prisons and labor camps.  Wang and his friends pay a heavy price for fighting back.  But with the help of journalist Daniel Davis (played by Sam Trammell), they succeed in getting the word out on the plight of the Falun Gong.  Leading the crackdown against them is the sadistic Secretary Yang (played by Tzu-Chiang Wang).

Although Lee has been living in Canada since 2006, he is no stranger to Falun Gong or the CCP’s atrocities.  His documentary Human Harvest (2014) exposed China’s demonic removal and sale of organs from prisoners and inmates at labor camps.  Many of these are Falun Gong practitioners.  The documentary was broadcast in more than 25 countries and won the Peabody Award.

His Letter from Masanjia (2018) is an equally heartrending true story of a note found in a box of Halloween decorations by an Oregon resident.  The writer of the note is Sun Yi, a Falun Gong practitioner held at an infamous labor camp where the decorations were made.  Tracing Sun Yi after his release, collaborating with him via surreptitious Skype calls, and instructing him on how to use a camera, Lee put together the story of what happens in the CCP’s labor camps.  Sun Yi risked it all and later made his way to Indonesia, since China allows travel there without a passport.  He died in 2017 in Indonesia, most likely poisoned by Chinese agents.

Lee’s company, Flying Cloud Productions, remains committed to bringing “human rights violations to light in both documentary and narrative filmmaking.”  His films are among the most pirated in China, and he often receives emails from anonymous Chinese viewers stupefied by the content they hasten to share, evidence that Falun Gong may be reigniting hope in the People’s Republic.

The filming of Unsilenced, which took place in Taiwan, was replete with challenges.  During production, Taiwanese fighter jets scrambled to intercept Chinese planes intruding Taiwan’s airspace.  Many film professionals shied away from the production, cast and crew used aliases or remained anonymous, and a few actors quit after being threatened.  Lee was under constant pressure to recruit new talent and scout for alternative locations as filming permission would suddenly be withdrawn.  There were post-production hitches, too.  The owner of the Canadian production company wouldn’t risk listing his name in the credits.  Chinese students at Boston University were enlisted to protest a screening of the movie.  The film is as much a testament to his persistence as that of its protagonists.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Where Critical Race Theory Comes From By Daniel Buck

Posted By on January 9th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/01/where-critical-race-theory-comes-from/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=blog-post&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=more-in&utm_term=third

Critical pedagogy is the anti-Enlightenment wellspring from which CRT and other suspect activist ideologies flow.

T here is a fundamental change occurring in American education. You have likely heard from some that it is critical race theory, a fringe understanding of race in America, and from others that this is just a bogeyman. Neither assertion is correct. Rather, critical pedagogy — a politicized theory of education of which CRT is but one branch — has become the prevailing theory in American colleges of education, influencing curriculum, instruction, and policies across the country.

In place of academic skills and a worldview grounded in Enlightenment thinking, critical pedagogy teaches students political activism and a worldview of oppression. We shouldn’t be surprised, then, that the results of such a pedagogy leave students angry but with a paucity of literary, mathematical, and historical knowledge — the very things they need to live a fulfilled, thoughtful, successful life.

While showing every shortcoming of critical pedagogy is beyond the bounds of one essay, conservatives need to understand that this problem extends far beyond a few racialized, politicized lessons in coastal schools. One English curriculum, the Units of Study, which thousands of schools use, bases its work on critical theories, including CRT, but also postcolonial, feminist, and other radical ideologies. The curriculum cites Kimeberlé Crenshaw, a founding scholar of CRT, as well as other progressive activists such as Angela Davis, a Marxist scholar, and Judith Butler, a gender theorist.

Effective propaganda can be as subtle as it is insidious. When it’s obvious, loud, and galling, it’s easy to identify and reject. When it’s no more noticeable than a few mold spores, it can go on spreading until it has rotted entire institutions. We must absolutely confront the media-grabbing practices such as privilege walks, but picking such battles is akin to wiping away a few mold spots from rotting floorboards.

Traditional conceptions of education trace back to the Greeks and the Romantics, and comparing these ideas to critical pedagogy can isolate exactly what this philosophy is and, perhaps more importantly, isn’t. In his Republic, Plato portrays education as the process of extracting individuals from a cave of shadows into the light of reality. In Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, the goal of education is the forming of virtuous habits. In both cases, education directs us beyond ourselves — discovering the world as it is and aligning our characters to an objective law from without.

These beliefs dominated European thought up until and through the Enlightenment; medieval universities built themselves upon the liberal arts, and Loyola attempted to systematize education for the youth in his Ratio Studiorum. Then, romantics such as Rousseau suggested that children follow their natural inclinations, that any ascription to outside influence is only corrupting, and John Dewey popularized this vision in the 20th century. Dewey went so far as to say that no content had inherent value in learning. Rather, what interests the child ought to lead the way. Education came to focus on the self.

Both Greek and Romantic theories manifest today in classical and project-based learning, respectively. We can debate their relative efficacy, but in both cases, the focus remains primarily on academics and moral formation. If traditional education asks us to step into our backyard to explore the world, and romantic education asks us to explore what’s inside, critical pedagogy would have us burn down the house and trench the garden.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The 1619 False-History Project By Wilfred Reilly

Posted By on January 9th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/01/24/the-1619-false-history-project/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=top-of-nav&utm_content=hero-module

What Nikole Hannah-Jones and the New York Times left out

Imagine a Native American history curriculum that focused entirely on four massacres of Natives by whites — beginning with the first encounter between Spanish conquistadores and the Inca emperor Atahualpa and culminating with Wounded Knee — and never touched on American Indian life before 1491, the many Native military victories, or the roughly 5.2 million Natives alive in the U.S. today. Would anyone see this as truly representative, or useful to students of any race, or worth teaching in the schools?

The 1619 Project, from the New York Times, must face the same questions. The project focuses on casting the era of historical slavery as an alternative founding for the United States, with its authors arguing that slavery was responsible for nearly everything that “truly made America exceptional.” Slavery, they write, was the primary reason for the Revolu­tionary War and was responsible for much or most of early American wealth, building “vast fortunes for white people North and South” and making “New York City the financial capital of the world.” Multiple 1619 essays, by Nikole Hannah-Jones and others, attribute to historical slavery and racism everything from the competitive capitalism of the U.S. to contemporary patterns of traffic. Slavery, in this narrative, is both the American original sin and the source of all our baraka — everything that makes this a unique and desirable country.

Honorable, non-racist centrists and conservatives face a serious question as we confront this material. How would a nuanced but thorough telling of American history, one that did not seek to minimize slavery, differ from 1619’s? Aren’t these journalists and radical academics — progressive friends often ask, in something approaching anguish — just telling hard truths? The short answer is a clear no.

The 1619 essays almost universally ignore or minimize four critical pieces of context that any unbiased school curriculum would include. These are the truly global prevalence of slavery and similar barbaric practices until quite recently; the detrimental economic impact of the Peculiar Institution on the South and on the American national economy; the nuanced but deeply patriotic perspectives on the United States expressed by the black and white leaders of the victorious anti-slavery movement that existed alongside slavery; and the reality that much of American history in fact had nothing to do with this particular issue. Not teaching about slavery or Jim Crow segregation in schools would be a deeply immoral act of omission, but it is almost equally bizarre to define these decades-past regional sins as the main through-line of American history.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

FAUCI’S RETIREMENT PAY WILL EXCEED $350,000 ANNUALLY – THE LARGEST IN U.S. FEDERAL GOVERNMENT HISTORY

Posted By on January 9th, 2022

Last week, we broke the story that Dr. Anthony Fauci’s annual retirement pension and benefits would exceed $350,000 — the most ever at the federal level.

Our auditors at OpenTheBooks estimated that Dr. Fauci’s pension will be nearly $1,000 per day and exceed $1 million over the first three-years.
 
(Though, at 81, after 55 years of federal service, Dr. Fauci isn’t retiring yet.)
 
Our investigation initially published here at Forbes and has since been showcased in interviews on:

Fox Business’ Varney & Co. show

Wake Up America morning show, Newsmax TV
and 75 other national and international news platforms including: The New York Post, Yahoo!, Fox News, The Daily Mail, The Washington Examiner, Epoch Times, and more. 

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Top epidemiologist Harvey Risch blasts Fauci’s COVID strategy, CDC data and research “Dr. Fauci has interests that do not align with the public health interests of the United States,” epidemiologist Harvey Risch says.

Posted By on January 9th, 2022

https://justthenews.com/government/federal-agencies/cdc-has-played-fast-and-loose-covid-data-and-research-yale-public

President Biden can claim that COVID-19 remains a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” partly because “the CDC has played fast and loose with a lot of studies and data,” Yale School of Public Health epidemiologist Harvey Risch says.

“We have not been careful or objective with our data,” he told the John Solomon Reports podcast Friday. “We don’t even know, for example, the mortality from COVID,” which the CDC pegs at more than 800,000.

Risch noted the agency told physicians to put COVID on death certificates regardless of whether they think the infection played a role. Hospitalizations have also conflated admissions “with” and “from” COVID, he said.

As a member of a committee advising Connecticut early in the pandemic, Risch urged ignoring case counts and focusing on hospitalizations and deaths. That advice was largely ignored until the current “sky-high” yet mild Omicron variant wave, but now “finally people are waking up to say that the cases don’t matter,” he said.

The U.K. is among countries that more carefully track COVID, according to Risch. Its data show vaccinated adults constitute the majority of cases, “and it’s not a hospitalization of the unvaccinated” either.

While vaccines are a “potential and reasonable component” of COVID mitigation, those developed are “somewhat ineffective” and their large-scale deployment has driven an unexpected number of “mutant strains” extending the pandemic and causing higher mortality, Risch said.

President Biden’s chief medical advisor Anthony Fauci, longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, not only isn’t trained in public health but “has interests that do not align with the public health interests of the United States,” Risch argued. 

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

A Tale of Two Authoritarians The appearance of Dick Cheney in the House of Representatives on the anniversary of January 6th helped identify the true villain on the scene Matt Taibbi

Posted By on January 9th, 2022

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/a-tale-of-two-authoritarians

Former Vice President Dick Cheney visited the House of Representatives yesterday. He and his daughter Liz were the only two Republicans present at a moment of silence commemorating the events of last January 6th. It was a touching scene, which perfectly described why the surviving anti-Trump Uniparty of the political mainstream is at least as much of a threat to democracy as the “insurrectionists” they never stop wailing about.

In a story entitled “Dick Cheney returns to the House and receives a warm welcome . . . from Democrats,” the Washington Post wrote that “Democrats put aside their fierce and lasting policy divides with the Cheneys to thank them for condemning the attack and Trump’s continued effort to undermine the 2020 presidential election results with his false claims of fraud.”

(News writing has become a pre-fab profession, like assembling IKEA furniture. All you need is an Allen wrench and a list of the latest clichés. “Trump’s efforts to undermine the 2020 election” has replaced “Trump’s efforts to coordinate with the Russian government in its election interference activities,” and “Trump’s false claims of fraud” has replaced “Trump’s false claims of ‘fake news.’” Part of the significance of January 6th is that it updated popular propaganda stock, which had grown stale.)

I don’t mean to understate the seriousness of January 6th, even though it’s been absurdly misreported for over a year now. No one from a country where these things actually happen could mistake 1/6 for “a coup .” In the real version, the mob doesn’t take selfies and blaze doobies after seizing the palace, and the would-be dictator doesn’t spend 187 minutes snacking and watching Fox before tweeting “go home.” Instead, he works the phones nonstop to rally precinct chiefs, generals, and airport officials to the cause, because a coup is a real attempt to seize power. Britannica says the “chief prerequisite for a coup is control of all or part of the armed forces, the police, and other military elements.” We saw none of that on January 6th, but it’s become journalistic requirement to use either “coup” or “insurrection” in describing it:

The endless hyperventilating efforts to describe January 6th as a disaster on the order of Pearl Harbor or even 9/11 has been awesome to behold. Huffington Post nitwit S.V. Date even called it “1,000 percent worse” than 9/11, moving the decimal point over on the famous Team America joke*:

The panic inspired convulsions across politics and the media. Ted Cruz made a plea for mainstream recognition by denouncing 1/6 as a “violent terrorist attack” before cowering in retreat on Tucker Carlson Tonight, in the process pantsing himself with audiences in all directions. Meanwhile, podcaster Eric Lendrum, on the pro-Trump site American Greatness, devised the impressively crazy syllogism that because the mainstream caricature of Trump supporters is so incorrect, conservatives should therefore embrace it: “If their aim is to make January 6 their Reichstag Fire, then we should go forward celebrating the events of that day as our Storming of the Bastille.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Desmond Tutu’s moral failures He hated Jews and Israel, and abandoned black slaves throughout Africa. Charles Jacobs and Ben Poser

Posted By on January 8th, 2022

https://www.jns.org/opinion/desmond-tutus-moral-failures/?fbclid=IwAR3Bqb6LZGwKsQuqnBOTL1S9cGpUJ1yNE0l5zpvn6eW86MDJ15idQSqURkA

Bishop Desmond Tutu deserves the flow of glowing eulogies celebrating his role in ending apartheid in South Africa, and his momentous work reconciling his black and white countrymen in its aftermath. He fearlessly stood up against racism and tyranny. He merits much praise for helping to achieve a peaceful end to the horror which was apartheid.

But an honest account of Tutu’s life cannot ignore two glaring moral flaws in his behavior: his hateful rhetoric against Jews and Israel, and the shameful shirking of his responsibility to protest against black slavery in Africa. Tutu’s sins must not be forgotten in the midst of the plentiful homage.

Attorney and emeritus Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz has published a collection of the late bishop’s statements—slanders against Israel and classic curses against the Jewish people. Over the years, Tutu has said that:

The world is in the grips of the “powerful” and “scary” “Jewish lobby.”
The gas chambers the Nazis used to murder Jews during the Holocaust made for “a neater” death than those meted out to the black victims of apartheid.
Jews cling to an unjust “Monopoly of the Holocaust.”
Israel’s counter-terrorism policies are identical to South African apartheid, characterizing them as “things that even apartheid South Africa had not done.”
The “Jews thought they had a monopoly of God: Jesus was angry that they could [in the manner of apartheid] shut out other human beings.”
Zionism possesses “very many parallels with racism,” and Israel may one day “perpetrate genocide and exterminate all Palestinians.”
The Jews have always been “fighting against” and “opposed” to Christ while they “persecute others.”

Another Tutu critic, Professor David Bernstein of George Mason University, points to this stunning Tutu statement: “[W]hether Jews like it or not, they are a peculiar people. They can’t ever hope to be judged by the same standards which are used for other people.” Tutu always denied that he was anti-Semitic—maintaining his dentist was a certain “Dr. Cohen”—but judging Jews differently from others is the very definition of anti-Semitism.

Tutu’s statements about Jews would be deemed “racist” if applied to any other people. They echo the basest of lethal hatreds. As a Christian bishop, Tutu should have been shamed for these statements. His statements about Israel are not simply untrue. As we know from history, such libels incite hatred, and—as we are seeing across the West—physical attacks.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Open Letter to President Biden: Nuclear Deal with Iran Will Be a Disaster by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on January 8th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18095/iran-biden-nuclear-deal

No amount of appeasement and no deal is going to change the core pillars of the Iranian mullahs’ revolutionary principles, which include anti-Americanism, antisemitism, supporting terror groups, and brutally repressing their own population. The theocratic establishment uses international and regional agreements, such as its election last April to the UN Commission on the Status of Women, to advance its revolutionary ideals.

The Biden administration might begin to understand, nearly four decades after the establishment of the mullahs’ regime, that, as Henry Kissinger remarked, “The exercise of diplomacy without the threat of force is without effect.”

The Biden administration’s Iran policy appears to be quite simple: keep negotiating with the ruling mullahs and offering concessions to revive the 2015 nuclear deal and eliminate the Iranian regime’s threat.

The nuclear deal reached in 2015, however, had already proved that it did not eliminate the Iranian regime’s threats. After the agreement, access to the considerable funds freed up by the deal had the reverse effect: it allowed Tehran to pour ever greater sums into the coffers of groups such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah and the Yemeni Houthis. Nations such as Israel, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain were largely ignored by the Western powers, despite their clear concerns over the direct threat that enriching these groups presented.

US President Joe Biden previously suggested that Iran, in the aftermath of the 2015 nuclear deal, had ceased being a “bad regional actor”, writing:

“… I will offer Tehran a credible path back to diplomacy If Iran returns to strict compliance with the nuclear deal, the United States would rejoin the agreement as a starting point for follow-on negotiations.”

This is an easy view for someone thousands of miles away from the Middle East, but for those living there, dealing with Hezbollah’s weapons caches and Syrian militias wreaking death and devastation, Iran, through its proxy networks, has become more malign than ever.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

American Oligarchy The Left is correct to bewail the sordid and fallen state of “our democracy.” It just has no idea why. By Josh Hammer

Posted By on January 8th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/07/american-oligarchy/

To observe that the Left and its cheerleading media have treated the one-year anniversary of the January 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot as a solemn occasion would be to understate the point. For the Left, the (actually) mostly peaceful demonstrations of that day, which for a small percentage of demonstrators did entail illegal trespassing of the Capitol, represented a watershed moment in the history of our “democracy.” January 6 was the day, the narrative goes, where “deplorable” Trumpians attempted to effectuate an “insurrection” and a “coup,” seeking to “overturn” the results of the perfect and pristine 2020 presidential election.

The lead-up to the one-year January 6 anniversary was endlessly promoted by our insular and self-congratulatory Washington press corps as something akin to the one-year anniversary of September 11, 2001. The imbecilic and senile dolt who is our commander-in-chief dedicated his January 6, 2022, remarks to excoriating his predecessor for that predecessor’s alleged incitement of an “insurrection.” Defying parody, a candlelight vigil was held at the National Mall—”in remembrance of the attack on our democracy that occurred on January 6, 2021.”

In fairness, it is true that modern America no longer meets a threshold definition of “democracy.” But the Left is wrong as to why. America in the year 2022 is not a nation bedeviled by a great scourge of right-wing political violence, but it is a nation bedeviled by a monolithic and intellectually homogenous oligarchy that seeks to subjugate dissenting “deplorables” by any means necessary. Consider some examples.

American oligarchy is when a duly elected president of the United States is stymied from day one by cynical ruling class fabulists concocting a false story about that president’s alleged collusion with a foreign power, based on the primary “evidence” of a salacious and unverified “dossier” created in conjunction with the defeated opponent’s presidential campaign. American oligarchy is when the institutional media cheers on not one but two baseless and mind-numbing presidential impeachments based on nothing more than frothing partisan fealty to the oligarchs’ preferred political tribe, the Democratic Party.

BOOKS Comments turned off

What Role Did the FBI Play in January 6? During the Trump era, Democrats and Republicans abandoned their traditional positions on federal law enforcement. And with good reason. By Julie Kelly

Posted By on January 8th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/07/what-role-did-the-fbi-play-in-january-6/

Just as the investigation into the “terror attack” of January 6 was in full swing in the autumn of 2021, court proceedings in the alleged 2020 plot to kidnap of Governor Gretchen Whitmer began in Michigan. 

When 13 men allegedly tied to militia groups were arrested on October 7 of this year on federal and state charges for planning to kidnap Whitmer from her Michigan vacation cottage, Team Biden and Whitmer herself made the most of the timely political gift. “There is a through line from President Trump’s dog whistles and tolerance of hate, vengeance, and lawlessness to plots such as this one,” Biden said in an October 9 statement. “He is giving oxygen to the bigotry and hate we see on the march in our country.”

In a press release announcing the arrest of six of the plotters on federal charges, the Justice Department detailed the elaborate plan. “This group used operational security measures, including communicating by encrypted messaging platforms. On two occasions, members of the alleged conspiracy conducted coordinated surveillance on the Governor’s vacation home . . . and discussed detonating explosive devices to divert police.” The wannabe kidnappers planned to use a taser gun on Whitmer then either abandon her in a boat on a nearby lake or transport her to Wisconsin to stand trial. “These alleged extremists undertook a plot to kidnap a sitting governor,” the assistant FBI special agent in charge said in the statement. “Whenever extremists move into the realm of actually planning violent acts, the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force stands ready to identify, disrupt, and dismantle their operations, preventing them from following through on those plans.”

Investigating—or Planning—the Plot?

But the Justice Department’s description failed to match reality as court documents and testimony would show. Far from the FBI thwarting the operation, the FBI itself enlisted participants, organized and funded training and surveillance trips, and used paid informants working with FBI agents to lure unsuspecting “militia” members into attempting to execute the plot. 

The scheme centered around a group called the Wolverine Watchmen, an unknown “militia” group formed online in late 2019 by another man who faced state, not federal, charges related to the plot. (The man, Joseph Morrison, created a Facebook page for the new group four days after he was arrested on a weapons charge, which was pleaded down to a misdemeanor with time served—one day in jail.) It was essentially a small online group of malcontents, more smoke than fire.