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What China Did to Apple Daily, It Could Do to Any Company Beijing uses the odious National Security Law to silence Hong Kong’s feisty voice for freedom.By L. Gordon Crovitz and Mark L. Clifford

Posted By on June 24th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-china-did-to-apple-daily-it-could-do-to-any-company-11624485349?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

Jimmy Lai started the Apple Daily newspaper in 1995 to defend the Hong Kong way of life before the 1997 handover to China. Its inaugural launch editorial declared: “We are convinced that Hongkongers who are accustomed to freedom will not stay silent in the face of unreasonable restrictions and unfair treatments, for Hongkongers are born with a passion for freedom.” Apple Daily journalists pledged to “stick to our posts and work hard, to be proud Hongkongers through and through.”

That was before the Chinese Communist Party last year forced Hong Kong under the boot of its National Security Law, which this week took down Apple Daily. Its crime was being the most popular source of news and opinion focused on Hong Kong values such as the rule of law, free markets and the free flow of information. The newspaper’s demise mirrors the experience of the Hong Kong people as Beijing deploys the National Security Law to exert control over the territory. Hundreds have been arrested under the repressive law, including longtime legislators.

As members of the board of Next Digital Ltd. , the publicly traded company that operates Apple Daily, we voted Wednesday to close down the paper after the Hong Kong authorities used the law to freeze the company’s assets without a trial or even a court order. The freeze makes it impossible for the company to pay its staff, buy ink or keep the electricity on.

Hong Kong authorities had already jailed Mr. Lai, who is now serving a 20-month prison term for participating in an assembly that was deemed unlawful. Some 500 armed police raided the Apple Daily offices last week. They arrested Next Digital’s CEO and Apple Daily’s editor in chief and denied bail to both; the chief editorial writer was arrested this week.

The way the authorities undermined the functioning of equity markets, property rights and contracts is a warning for other companies that are publicly traded in Hong Kong or simply doing business there.

John Lee, the Hong Kong secretary for security, invoked the National Security Law on his own to prohibit Mr. Lai from voting the 71% of Next Digital shares that he owns, denying him the rights inherent in shareholding on the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong. Mr. Lee then froze Next Digital’s bank accounts, announcing it would be a crime for the company to make financial transactions. He warned the company’s banks not to enable any transactions. The company could no longer access accounts with tens of millions of U.S. dollars to pay its bills or to accept payments for subscriptions and advertisements.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Viral School Board Speech: It Is My Constitutional Right To Critique Your Fascism Posted By Tim Hains

Posted By on June 24th, 2021

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/06/23/viral_school_board_speech_it_is_my_constitutional_right_to_critique_your_fascism.html

In this viral video, Simon Campbell, a former member of the Pennsbury, PA school board, rips his former colleagues for allegedly seeking to censor video of spicy public comments and criticism of the school district.

“I’ve got news for you, School Board President Benito Mussolini, your power does not supersede that of the U.S. constitution and the rights of the citizens of this great country,” he said before being warned not to name-call.

“I’m quoting you from the U.S. Supreme Court. The judges wrote: ‘This nation is founded on the profound national commitment to the principle that debate of public issues shall be uninhibited, robust, and wide open. And that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.’ That’s constitutional case law in this nation. I don’t have to be nice to you. Nobody behind me has to be nice to you.”

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Rep. Lee Zeldin: Critical race theory’s radical politicization of education undermines who we are as Americans Critical race theory requires that everything be viewed through the lens of race. It focuses on identity group politics Rep. Lee Zeldin R-NY District 1

Posted By on June 24th, 2021

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/critical-race-theory-radical-education-americans-rep-lee-zeldin

For 18 years, I have been proudly serving as a soldier in the United States Army. Service has taught me two enduring lessons: 

First, our men and women who serve this country look at each other as brothers and sisters, with one common mission. Our politics, religion, race and ethnicity are of no consequence. All that is important to us is supporting each other, whether on the battlefield or at home. If that support means giving your life to save your brother, you selflessly do your duty. 

Second, all those deployed abroad since 9/11 in locations such as Iraq and Afghanistan have seen firsthand what happens when a nation is governed, not by the rule of law, but by the iron fist of authoritarianism. It gave us all a new appreciation of what we have in America – a nation of laws, freedom of expression and religion, the right to bear arms, equal opportunity for all, and due process. 

These two lessons are important foundational pieces of who we are as Americans. We judge people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin, their religion, ethnicity or sexual orientation. And we jealously guard our fundamental rights so that we can continue to be the greatest nation on earth.

Unfortunately, those two principles are under attack in our schools. For years, we have seen the lurch to the left in our education system, but now that lurch has turned into an assault on our values, and it is being directed at our children within schools across the country in the form of critical race theory.

In short, critical race theory in education teaches children that America’s law, institutions, values, traditions and language are systemically racist and must be torn down. It requires that everything be viewed through the lens of race. It focuses on identity group politics and ignores that we are all unique individuals with different goals, skills and limitations. 

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The Overt Racism Of Our Left-Wing Universities, NCAA Edition Francis Menton

Posted By on June 24th, 2021

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c

The competition for the greatest demonstration of “antiracist” wokism in our society is intense, what with media outlets, Hollywood, tech monopolies, teachers unions and plenty of others all vying to show the purest forms of virtue. But really, nobody can top the universities. These are the places where the ideas of “systemic racism” and Critical Race Theory were hatched, and from which come the demands that all the rest of us get in line with the official “antiracist” orthodoxy.

Which is all you need to know to deduce that these institutions must themselves be the very worst and most overt practitioners of racism. In a post back in February titled “The Worst Racists Are The Left-Wing Academics” I quoted one elite university spokesperson after another falling all over themselves to confess their racism. (E.g., Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber, September 2020: “Racism and the damage it does to people of color nevertheless persist at Princeton. . . . Racist assumptions from the past also remain embedded in structures of the University itself.”; the President and Trustees of Dartmouth, July 2020: “We know there are no easy solutions to eradicate the oppression and racism Black and other students, faculty, and staff of color experience on our campus. . . .”).

And then there is the NCAA. The NCAA isn’t some kind of difficult-to-analyze deeply-embedded “structural” thing that incidentally disadvantages blacks. Rather, it is a bold and overt anti-trust price-fixing conspiracy mainly directed to disadvantage black sports stars. Essentially all colleges and universities in the U.S. with sports programs of any significance belong to it and are active participants in the overt anti-black anti-trust conspiracy. In a post back in March 2018 titled “The Real Scandal In The NCAA,” I had this to say about the seemingly brilliant and virtuous academics’ total failure to recognize the real racism in their midst:

On the one hand, there is constant protest and anger [at major universities] over underrepresentation of blacks in the student body and faculty, even though almost all of the schools engage in dramatic discrimination in favor of blacks in student admissions and faculty recruitment. On the other hand, there is a naked antitrust conspiracy to prevent the black sports stars from getting paid anything for their work, and everybody is just fine with that.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Why are increasing numbers of young evangelicals moving away from Israel? David Isaac

Posted By on June 24th, 2021

https://www.jns.org/why-are-increasing-numbers-of-young-evangelicals-moving-aw

“We have a serious education problem in the evangelical church. Too many people just don’t know a lot about any given subject. They’re smart, but they’re starved for information because their pastor is hawking his latest book from the pulpit on Sunday morning, instead of explaining serious issues,” says researcher and writer Jim Fletcher.

Over the past few decades, evangelical Christians have emerged as one of Israel’s core bases of support both in the United States and many other countries as well. However, growing trends of secularization and liberal ideology, as well as the erosion of a pro-Israel theology, are threatening to undermine this support, particularly among young evangelicals.

A recent poll commissioned by two University of North Carolina at Pembroke professors—Mordechai Inbari and Kirill Bumin—showing a sharp drop in support for Israel among the younger set has raised some eyebrows.

It found that young evangelical support for Israel had plunged to 33.6 percent from 69 percent in a 2018 poll. Those supporting the Palestinian side rose to 24.3 percent, up from 6 percent in 2018. Those supporting neither side stood at 42.2 percent.

The poll focused on evangelicals ages 18 to 29, and was conducted between March 22 and April 2 by the Barna Group, a polling and research firm focusing on issues of faith and culture.

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It appears to be backed by earlier polls. Shibley Telhami, the Anwar Sadat Professor at the University of Maryland and director of the university’s Critical Issues Poll, tells JNS that two polls he conducted in 2015 and 2018 also exhibited a widening gap in support for Israel between younger and older evangelicals. In 2015, 40 percent of young evangelicals said the United States should lean towards Israel, a number that dropped to 21 percent in 2018.

Inbari and Bumin remain cautious in explaining the reasons, saying they’re in the “preliminary stages” of their analysis.

Still, they have their hypotheses, one of which is related to the racial makeup of evangelicals.

“We discovered that race matters,” says Bumin. “What we find is that African-Americans are about 34 or 36 percent less likely to support Israel than people from other ethnic groups.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The west’s revolutionary chickens coming home to roost Melanie Phillips

Posted By on June 24th, 2021

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/
We need more people to fight back against coerced cultural conformity

Why is so much of the political, cultural and business establishment meekly going along with the onslaught against normative western values and the repudiation of rationality itself?

As I wrote in today’s Times (£), institutions are going down like ninepins in the face of this coerced cultural conformity.

Companies are turning their human resources departments into witch-hunts, imposing “unconscious bias” training and requiring Soviet-style confessions of thought and identity crime. Universities and schools are rewriting history and turning education into anti-British and anti-American propaganda.

Through “cancel culture,” people in Britain and America are being turned into social and professional pariahs for resisting any of these orthodoxies which are hijacking language itself and turning it inside out.  They find themselves demonised and delegitimised for the crime of pointing out demonstrable realities. Truth-telling has become “hate”, while hatred of those who dissent from this Newspeak is called “social justice’.

How can so many have buckled to this agenda for refashioning British and western culture through a process that, back in the 1950s, the historian Jacob Talmon dubbed “cultural totalitarianism”?

How can the storied Tavistock psychiatric clinic in London be subjecting children confused about their sexual identity — usually part of some wider psychological disorder — to irreversible changes when they are too immature to know what they are or what they imagine they want to be? Since when did doctors treat mental disorder by endorsing the fantasies of the disordered patient and — unconscionably worse still — by subjecting them to often irreversible alterations to their bodies in accordance with those fantasies?  

How can so many distinguished scholars running universities in America and Britain be acquiescing — whether actively or passively — in the transformation of these erstwhile crucibles of knowledge and open-minded inquiry into cauldrons of hateful propaganda and falsehoods designed to destroy their country and its culture and seal their students’ minds tightly shut?

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The poisoned Pen by victor Sharpe

Posted By on June 24th, 2021

http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/sharpe/210623

Those of us who so deeply love America, with all that its glorious Constitution means, increasingly see how perilous the present and the future has become for the survival of the nation that is the “land of the free and the home of the brave.”

For long decades, in the face of unrelenting Marxist hostility and aggression, loyal and patriotic Americans were nevertheless still imbued with a deep conviction of the rightness and righteousness of their cause.

Many still are and fight against unremitting and hostile influences that would consign the United States to the abyss, but far too many today have fallen away and been seduced by an overwhelming onslaught – not of military might – but by a war of ideas, however false and twisted those ideas are. The success of those lies has sapped the will of many and confused many more. Their brains have truly been dulled and they have forgotten that their nation is in the right.

We have all heard of the Big Lie theory that was so successfully enunciated and practiced by Adolf Hitler’s propaganda minister, Josef Goebbels. The theory essentially posits that people will believe in a lie if it is big enough and repeated enough times.

Goebbels knew that most people had a scant understanding of a situation but when they heard the same lie repeated again and again they would begin to accept unquestionably what was being told to them. Goebbels put it this way:

“The rank and file is usually much more primitive than we imagine. Propaganda must therefore always be essentially simple and repetitious. The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly … it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.”

The Socialists and Marxists among us have learned this lesson all too well for they have succeeded in doing what the years of Communist warfare by the Soviet Union failed to do. But relentlessly and surreptitiously they have isolated and indoctrinated the young in state schools and colleges as never before. At the same time they have demonized American history with the Goebbelian technique of the Big Lie theory.

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The Jewish Stake in the Battle Against Critical Race Theory Jonathan Tobin

Posted By on June 24th, 2021

https://www.algemeiner.com/2021/06/22/the-jewish-stake-in-the-battle-against-critical-race-theory/

What’s the latest racist threat to American democracy? According to a host of liberal publications, it’s the nationwide push to prevent the imposition of critical race theory doctrines on public education. Articles in publications like The New York Times, NBC and Axios claim grassroots efforts to stop local school boards from adopting curricula heavily influenced by radical ideas depicting America as an irredeemably racist nation are both racist in spirit and largely the work of right-wing conspiracy theorists who are being organized and funded by national conservative groups.

Outlets like the Times, where support for critical race theory is a constant theme for writers like Michelle Goldberg and Charles Blow, claim that this growing activist movement is a noxious form of Trumpism whose aim is to demonize an important idea and the righteous educators seeking to shed light on American racism. Critical race theory opponents are being likened to book burners, censorship advocates and McCarthyite witch-hunters persecuting free thinkers.

If that wasn’t bad enough, coverage of the issue is tilted so as to describe the controversy as a case of “astroturfing,” a term used to describe an orchestrated effort financed by “dark money” to fake grassroots activism.

In this way, public opinion is being mobilized not only to support race-training education but to regard those fighting it as either racists or fools being manipulated by forces opposed to democracy.

However, this spin on the controversy is not only false but a case of gaslighting. Which is to say that rather than being persecuted innocent free thinkers, the defenders of critical race theory themselves are advocates of censorship, cancel culture and opponents of free inquiry.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Biden Never Learns: He Still Wants to Talk to China by Gordon G. Chang

Posted By on June 23rd, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17488/biden-china-engagement

Call this another Biden debacle in the making.

China, it is evident, is now in no mood for substantive discussions, other than, of course, for the purpose of accepting America’s surrender.

American leaders, administration in and administration out, think it is important to meet face-to-face with adversaries, that they can somehow reason with them. That view is naïve, arrogant, and almost always incorrect. Chinese leaders of the communist variety often talk of “friendship” but are ruthlessly pragmatic, and often just ruthless. For them, personal feelings have no value in relations with other states.

Personal diplomacy with Beijing is counterproductive: Americans chase after the Chinese and the Chinese take advantage of this eagerness. The incessant pursuit of Beijing makes America, in the eyes of the Chinese regime, an easy mark.

If the reports about Dong are accurate, Biden should be now talking about imposing the most severe costs on China, not chasing after Xi Jinping to begin a conversation. America should, among other things, cut trade, end investment, prohibit technical cooperation, perhaps stop all travel altogether. Biden definitely should close China’s remaining four consulates in the U.S. and send virtually all Chinese embassy officials home. The President should announce it is the policy of the United States to end communist rule in China.

Chinese officials took Canadian hostages, known as “the two Michaels,” in December 2018 and have held them since because they knew Prime Minister Justin Trudeau would do nothing about it. The Chinese believed Trudeau would do nothing because he had spent his career desperately trying to court China. — Charles Burton of the Ottawa-based Macdonald-Laurier Institute.

So, President Biden, stop turning the other cheek and start performing your most fundamental constitutional duty: Protecting America from foreign enemies.

President Joe Biden, according to National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, wants to begin a new round of “engaging” China.

Call this another Biden debacle in the making.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Equity or Education? The elimination of standardized tests is the latest misguided and detrimental effort to achieve equity and seat a diverse class. By Elizabeth Eastman

Posted By on June 23rd, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/22/equity-or-education/

College admissions have been steeped in controversy for years with wrangling over which measures best identify desirable applicants. A typical application requires transcripts, essays, recommendations, and results from standardized tests such as the ACT and SAT. The latter are now at the forefront of current debate, including one taking place in California.

The University of California system began requiring applicants to take the SAT in 1960. Recently, there have been discussions regarding the use of test scores in scholarship or admissions decisions, from making submission optional (spurred by COVID-19 limitations) to ending the required submission. 

Increasingly, the motivation to change requirements no longer focuses solely on the student but is driven by concerns that family income, parents’ education, and race can adversely affect test scores.

UC Riverside Chancellor Kim A. Wilcox contributed to the debate with a Los Angeles Times op-ed titled “Dropping the SATs could make UC admissions more biased.” He included the findings of a faculty task force, which recognized that the UC system has been able to offset such bias by including other relevant factors in admissions. He argued that inequities could be made worse because test elimination would cause a greater reliance on grades, thus driving grade inflation, or result in more affluent families hiring tutors for their children.

While the task force’s findings and recommendations were persuasive, in May 2020 the UC Regents suspended the standardized test requirement for all California freshman applicants until fall 2024 and announced a plan to design a new test in time for 2025 admissions. If the deadline is not met, standardized testing requirements for all California students will be eliminated.