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Gov. DeSantis and Texas Pressure Forces GoFundMe to Release Freedom Convoy Cash Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on February 6th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2022/02/gov-desantis-and-texas-pressure-forces-gofundme-daniel-greenfield/

The two positive outcomes of this episode are that…

1. Every conservative now knows not to use GoFundMe. The tech platform has a long history of banning and discriminating against conservatives. This time its overreach went into the millions. 

2. Florida and Texas flexed their newfound legal muscle at a tech company and it backed off. GoFundMe is much smaller in scale than the real monsters like Google, Amazon, and Facebook, and lacks their layers of lobbyists and paid politicians. But it’s mid-size enough to make for a good field test.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said that he would “investigate” the company, accusing them of fraud.

“It is a fraud for @gofundme to commandeer $9M in donations sent to support truckers and give it to causes of their own choosing. I will work with @AGAshleyMoody to investigate these deceptive practices — these donors should be given a refund.”

GoFundMe also drew the ire of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who stated on social media that he would be launching a fraud investigation.

“Patriotic Texans donated to Canadian truckers’ worthy cause using GoFundMe. This BLM-backing company went woke, froze the funds, & failed to deliver Texans’ money,” Paxton said. “Today I assembled a team to investigate their potential fraud & deception. Texas donors will get Justice!”

GoFundMe had clearly been scrambling for excuses. 

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China’s Shameful Olympics By Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas)

Posted By on February 6th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/02/chinas-shameful-olympics/

These Games never should have been in Beijing. But the Biden administration failed to keep them out. Now American athletes are at risk.

T he greatest athletes in the world have now gathered to compete in the 24th Olympic Winter Games. Usually, the American people await this event with enthusiasm and excitement. This year, we await it with disgust.

This year’s games will be held in the People’s Republic of China, a Communist nation that enslaves workers, imprisons children in concentration camps, forcefully sterilizes and rapes women, and — lest we forget — unleashed a plague on the world that has killed millions.

There’s a word for the Chinese Communist Party. That word is “evil.” No moral nation should celebrate such a regime or participate in pageantry that will glorify and enrich it.

Last December, the Biden administration announced a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Games. This action was inadequate and insufficient.

As early as last June, I urged the administration to pressure the IOC to rebid the 2022 Olympic Games and announce both a diplomatic and economic boycott of the Games if they remained in Beijing. The economic component was and remains key — these games will bring both prestige and profit to the CCP. A diplomatic boycott alone will do nothing to stop the Chinese regime from raking in cash and enriching its corrupt leadership.

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SUPREME COURT MATTERS: COLORBLIND CONSTITUTION V. RACIAL TRIBALISM Dr. Tom Krannawitter

Posted By on February 6th, 2022

https://vinoandveritassociety.com/articles/supreme-court-matters-colorblind-constitution-v-racial-tribalism%EF%BF%BC/

“When President Bush nominated him for the Supreme Court in 1991, Clarence Thomas quickly learned that his greatest opponent was neither the Ku Klux Klan nor any racist rural sheriff. It was Joe Biden — then a United States Senator and chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee — and the mostly-white, college-educated progressive political allies who joined Biden’s effort to destroy Thomas.”

Two years ago, Presidential Candidate Joe Biden promised to nominate someone with black skin for the United States Supreme Court, should he ever get the opportunity. With Justice Breyer announcing his retirement, President Biden now has the opportunity. 

Sorry, Dr. King. A nation in which citizens are judged “by the content of their character” and not “the color of their skin” isn’t going to happen on Joe Biden’s watch. He judges nominees on the color of their skin.

It’s curious that now, as President, Biden limits the pool of possible Supreme Court jurists to people with dark pigment. In 1991, then-Senator Biden had an opportunity to assist Clarence Thomas take a seat on the Supreme Court bench. Yet, Biden did everything within his power to stop it.

The life of Clarence Thomas should be an inspiration for all Americans. Born into the mires of poverty, compounded by Jim Crow racism, violence, and injustice, Thomas was anything but destined by birth to high government positions and circles of political elites.

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Ilya Shapiro has exposed the rot within Georgetown by Kaylee McGhee White,

Posted By on February 6th, 2022

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/ilya-shapiro-has-exposed-the-rot-within-georgetown

Perhaps the only good to come out of Georgetown Law School’s ridiculous response to the Ilya Shapiro controversy is that it has exposed the deep cultural rot within the university and its student body.

This week, Dean Bill Treanor announced he had placed Shapiro on administrative leave over a tweet in which Shapiro criticized President Joe Biden’s decision to consider only a black female nominee to the Supreme Court. Subsequently, a group of students held a sit-in to air their concerns about Shapiro. The meeting quickly devolved into a broader discussion about why Shapiro was even hired in the first place, which led to a condemnation of the school’s Center for the Constitution, which Shapiro was hired to help direct.

“Why was it created?” one student asked, adding that the originalist views of the center’s director, Randy Barnett, make it “seem like [the center] has done more harm than good.”

“You can do as much diversity training as you want with staff,” the student continued, according to National Review. “But I feel like that Center has a certain ideology … so I really want you to defend why we really need it, beyond, like, you know, free speech, and beyond diversity of opinion. I really want us to think critically about why we still need it.”

Another student demanded that Treanor offer a “reparations” package to black students who might be harmed by Shapiro’s hiring. Free meals, excused absences, and a place to cry were some of the things the student said this package should include.

“Is there an office they can go to?” she asked. “I don’t know what it would look like, but if they want to cry, if they need to break down, where can they go? Because we’re at a point where students are coming out of class to go to the bathroom to cry. And this is not in the future. This is today.”

And that’s not all. Students who have defended Shapiro, and even students who have stuck up for their peers defending Shapiro, are being bullied into silence by others on campus.

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The Russian hackers who interfered in 2016 were spotted targeting the 2020 US election Russia, China, and Iran have been caught conducting cyber espionage related to the US presidential race.By Patrick Howell O’Neill

Posted By on February 6th, 2022

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/09/10/1008297/the-russian-hackers-who-interfered-in-2016-were-spotted-targeting-the-2020-us-election/

Thousands of companies and governments are racing to discover whether they have been hit by the Russian hackers who reportedly infiltrated several US government agencies. The initial breach, reported on December 13, included the Treasury as well as the Departments of Commerce and Homeland Security.  But the stealthy techniques the hackers used mean it could take months to identify all their victims and remove whatever spyware they installed.

To carry out the breach, the hackers first broke into the systems of SolarWinds, an American software company. There, they inserted a back door into Orion, one of the company’s products, which organizations use to see and manage vast internal networks of computers. For several weeks beginning in March, any client that updated to the latest version of Orion—digitally signed by SolarWinds, and therefore seemingly legitimate—unwittingly downloaded the compromised software, giving the hackers a way into their systems. 

SolarWinds has around 300,000 customers around the world, including most of the Fortune 500 and many governments. In a new filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the firm said “fewer than” 18,000 organizations ever downloaded the compromised update. (SolarWinds said it’s not clear yet how many of those systems were actually hacked.) Standard cybersecurity practice is to keep your software up to date—so most SolarWinds customers, ironically, were protected because they had failed to heed that advice.

The hackers were “extremely clever and strategic,” says Greg Touhill, a former federal chief information security officer. Even once they had gained access through the back door in Orion, known as Sunburst, they moved slowly and deliberately. Instead of infiltrating many systems at once, which could easily have raised suspicions, they focused on a small set of selected targets, according to a report from the security firm FireEye. 

Sunburst stayed quiet for up to two full weeks before it woke up and began communicating with the hackers, according to the report. The malware disguises its network traffic as the “Orion Improvement Program” and stores data inside legitimate files in order to better blend in. It also searches for security and antivirus tools on the infected machine in order to avoid them.

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How Far Will the Left Go? Todd and Eric Gregory

Posted By on February 6th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/02/how_far_will_the_left_go.html

From Jeff Bezos to Joe Biden, noted Sinophiles and racists litter the landscape of the left.  For where there is slavery (China), and racist social division to be sown (America), there is enormous profit to be made.

It is an established fact that leading Democrats are cliché-spewing tools who emote out of the southern end of their alimentary canals and whose neurotic hysteria sets the national agenda.  Yet they have amassed quite a lemming-like following of true believers, progressive foot soldiers who think things have not gone “far enough” in terms of silencing, humiliating, and otherwise eliminating the universal scourge of “whiteness itself.” 

Their lust for tribal blood sport coupled with an insatiable sadism, white progressives (Baizuo, in Mandarin) churn bilge from their deep reservoirs of racial obsession, seeking strength in numbers by deliberately fomenting additional racism among America’s ethnic minorities in order to bring about the “deconstruction” of white people and America itself.

According to many of society’s leading cultural and political figures, white America’s racism is institutional and “structural,” in the feng shui of the nation — the upholstery, the very plumbing — and is ineradicable.  Unless, it goes without saying, white people themselves are eradicated.

Echoing socialist heroes like George Bernard Shaw, countless white university professors have repeatedly proposed and promoted a proto- if not outright genocide against members of their own race.  And, like Shaw, these genocide-minded Caucasians carved out an exemption for themselves and their progressive fellow travelers on the grounds that, in their telling, they are “anti-racist” (could they be any more Orwellian?) and, thus enlightened, are brimming with unbridled virtue when they advocate for the mass murder of white people.

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The Great Power Competition: Mirroring Communist China Thaddeus G. McCotter

Posted By on February 6th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/02/04/the-great-power-competition-mirroring-communist-china/

‘Suppose we had done to China what they have done to us?’

In the intensifying great power contest between the United States and genocidal Communist China, it is imperative to devise a strategy for victory, not one for subservience and appeasement.  

As Ronald Reagan proclaimed as he ended the myth of détente and commenced the drive for an irenic victory over the USSR’s evil empire: “We win, they lose.” Ultimately, through our nation and our allies’ perspicacious strategic and morally courageous policies, we won and the Soviets lost.  (And all of this without so much as a “snowflake” of the “nuclear winter” the accommodating, appeasing domestic Left had virtually guaranteed would occur under the leadership of the “amiable dunce” and “nuclear cowboy,” “Ronald Ray-Gun.”)

In devising a strategy to defeat our present totalitarian enemy, how would one assess the future of genocidal Communist China if, within their borders, our policies were accomplishing the following:

The elites of the genocidal Communist Chinese regime and their family members were corrupted and compromised by the United States?
Communist China’s government was rife with U.S. spies?
Communist China’s government was being lobbied by Chinese foreign agents paid for by the United States?
Communist China’s government was simultaneously being lobbied on behalf of the United States by Chinese businesses who are fearful of being excluded from the American economy?
Communist China’s propaganda campaigns were being hamstrung by Chinese business leaders, athletes, activists, artists, and others messaging on behalf of the United States?
Communist China’s media received money to disseminate U.S. propaganda?
Communist China was divided over the meaning of its revolutionary past and its present with a large segment of its population believing their country was founded illegitimately upon an exploitative, irredeemable ideology; denigrating communist revolutionaries and tearing down statues of Mao; deconstructing their vocabulary to reconcile it with free world concepts, and echoing the anti-regime propaganda disseminated by the United States?
Communist China’s People’s Liberation Army was purging its ranks of “Maoist extremists” and indoctrinating its troops with a philosophy of liberty, equality, and all God-given rights that are derived from the foundational principles of the United States?
Communist China’s universities were awash in U.S. dollars, premised upon the condition there are unflattering matters that cannot be mentioned about the United States?
These same Communist Chinese universities housed “Madison Institutes,” where the revolutionary ideals of the United States are proselytized to and by Chinese faculty members and students?
Communist China’s students were taking to the streets and recreating their own version of the American Revolution by demanding their God-given rights, building statues of Lady Liberty, and quoting Madison and Jefferson and other founders of the United States (and weren’t being massacred by the regime for it this time)?
Communist China’s supply chain—including essential parts and products within such sectors as technology, manufacturing, medications, and thus the military—was housed within and almost wholly and dangerously dependent upon the United States?
Communist China’s own manufacturing base had been decimated by the predatory trade practices of the United States?
Communist China’s entire economy had been incessantly and successfully targeted for industrial espionage to illegally harvest their trade secrets by the United States?
Communist China was over $1 trillion dollars in debt to the United States?

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The Guardians in Retreat Redefining its purpose as antiracism, the Art Institute of Chicago abandons its core mission of preserving history’s treasures and instructing future generations. Heather Mac Donald

Posted By on February 6th, 2022

https://www.city-journal.org/art-institute-of-chicago-redefines-its-purpose-as-antiracism

“Western civilization is not about whiteness; it is a universal legacy. But the guardians of that civilization, by portraying it as antithetical to racial justice because of demographic characteristics, are stunting the human imagination—and impoverishing the world.”

The Art Institute of Chicago is not the first museum to turn on its docent program. But it is the most consequential. It is worth tracing the developments that led to the docent firings in some detail. The Institute is a case study in what happens when museums and other cultural organizations declare their mission to be antiracism. The final result, if unchecked, will be the cancellation of a civilization.

Chicago’s Art Institute, founded in 1879 as both a museum and an art school, emerged from the post–Civil War wave of museum building. Successful businessmen from San Francisco to Boston created grand receptacles for European art in the spirit of democratic elitism, believing that history’s masterpieces should be available to all. The Institute’s original holdings consisted almost entirely of plaster casts of Greek and Roman sculpture, reflecting the centuries-long view that the classical world represented the pinnacle of artistic achievement in the West. Soon, however, Chicago’s Gilded Age benefactors began donating a more sweeping range of works, starting with a bequest of 44 predominantly Barbizon School oil paintings from the widow of Henry Field, brother of the Marshall Field & Company founder. More than four dozen classics of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism came the Institute’s way in 1925 and 1926. Non-Western traditions started filling out the collections as well; the largest gift in the Institute’s history, from civic leader Martin Ryerson in 1933, included Asian art among Old Master paintings, textiles, and decorative arts.

Philanthropists underwrote the nearly continuous expansions of the Institute’s 1893 Beaux-Arts building on Michigan Avenue to accommodate the growing holdings. Today, the Institute constitutes one of the finest repositories of global art on the American continent; one small corridor, containing exquisite pastel portraits by Martin Quentin de la Tour, Chardin, and other Ancien Régime artists, alone warrants a visit.

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Eurosceptic Alliance to Fight Creation of European Superstate by Soeren Kern

Posted By on February 5th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18202/eu-alliance-conservatives-populists

“There is a growing threat that seeks to transform the European Union into an ideologically charged federalist super-state; a corporation which disregards national identity and sovereignty, and therefore democracy, plurality and the interests of the citizens of the nations that form the Union. This drift endangers the Union itself by moving away from the Christian European ideals on which it was founded…. We should cooperate and join forces to protect Europe from enforced ideologies and anti-democratic drift that are leading to its downfall.” — Joint Statement, Madrid Summit, January 29, 2022.

“European institutions cannot become a tool of social engineering aiming at creating a new ‘European nation.’ Examples of such social engineering could be, among other things, the attempts to ideologically alter our languages in a way which will detach a human being from their culture and heritage, like the recent decision of the European Commission to remove the word ‘Christmas’ from the public sphere.” — Joint Statement, Warsaw Summit, December 4, 2021.

The signatories said that the EU has become a tool of “radical forces” that are determined to carry out a civilizational transformation of Europe. They accused conservative establishment parties in Europe of having abandoned traditional Judeo-Christian values ​​and of aligning themselves with leftist positions for political gain.

“The slightest national decision that does not correspond to the wishes of the European institutions is now the subject of blackmail: that is not what the Europe of freedoms is! We love Europe because we love our nations. And we will defend Europe because we defend our nations!” — Marine Le Pen, President, France’s National Rally party.

“What brings us together is stronger than what separates us: the fight for our civilization!” — Nicolas Bay, MEP for France’s National Rally party.

“With regard to major European issues such as more effective external border protection, greater economic independence for Europe and a common, more restrictive migration policy that is completely diametrically opposed to the current one. We all agreed.” — Marlene Svazek, Chairwoman, Freedom Party of Austria.

The leaders of European conservative and populist parties met in the Spanish capital of Madrid on January 28-29 to build a unified political front aimed at defending traditional Judeo-Christian values and the sovereignty of European nation states.

The so-called Madrid Summit — held under the motto “Defending Europe” — marked an important milestone in efforts to create a continent-wide alliance to fight the federalist, globalist and anti-democratic drift of the European Union.

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Woke Capital Won’t Save the Planet—But It Will Crash the Economy High inflation and squeezed living standards make it a safe bet that come this time next year, woke capital will be running even faster in the opposite direction. By Rupert Darwall

Posted By on February 5th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/02/04/woke-capital-wont-save-the-planet-but-it-will-crash-the-economy/

Judged by BlackRock CEO Larry Fink’s latest letter, January 2022 might turn out to have been the highwater mark of woke capitalism. Stakeholder capitalism is not “woke,” Fink says, because capitalism is driven by mutually beneficial relationships between businesses and their stakeholders. He’s right. What Fink describes is capitalism pure and simple, the stakeholder modifier adding nothing to the uniqueness of capitalism in harnessing competition and innovation for the benefit of all.

Fink’s shift is more than rhetorical. Just three years ago, in his 2019 “Profit and Purpose” letter, Fink told CEOs that the $24 trillion of wealth Millennials expect to inherit from their Boomer parents meant that ESG (environment, social, governance) issues “will be increasingly material to corporate valuations.” Now Fink tells them that “long-term profitability” is the measure by which markets will determine their companies’ success, dumping the ESG valuation metrics he’d previously championed.

Why, then, launch a Center for Stakeholder Capitalism, as BlackRock intends, and not simply a Center for Capitalism? “Your company’s purpose is its north star,” Fink says, echoing the Big Idea of his “Profit & Purpose” letter. BlackRock is the largest shareholder in Unilever. London-based Terry Smith, a top 15 Unilever shareholder, slammed Unilever’s top management for being obsessed with public displays of sustainability credentials at the expense of focusing on business fundamentals. In his letter to Fundsmith shareholders, Smith wrote, “a company which feels it has to define the purpose of Hellmann’s mayonnaise has in our view clearly lost the plot.” Ouch.

The days of woke CEOs criticizing democratically elected politicians for, say, not mandating unisex bathrooms, also seem to be drawing to a close. CEOs should be thoughtful in how they address social issues, Fink says, advising them to show humility and stay grounded. But Fink himself has some way to travel along the humility road. He requires all companies BlackRock invests in to set short-, medium-, and long-term targets for greenhouse gas reductions—as if BlackRock is an enforcement arm of government and net zero is a done deal. “Incumbents need to be clear about their pathway [to] succeeding in a net zero economy,” he writes.