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Iran’s Fake Presidential Election by Lawrence A. Franklin

Posted By on June 18th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17473/iran-fake-presidential-election

The genuine power in Iran is made up of unelected, authoritarian, religious and fascist military elites who, for decades, have, frozen in place the revolutionary, theocratic ideology of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The nomination mechanism for presidential candidates is itself part of the fraudulent process.

Past elections have either been rigged in favor the hardliners, as in today’s election, or so overshadowed by the power of the regime’s deep state, that no president is been able to effect any substantive reforms to loosen the chokehold that the mullahs maintain on Iranian citizens.

The most likely dark horse is former Central Bank of Iran President Abdolnasser Hemmati, a (relative) moderate…. Hemmati’s biggest obstacle is the lack of interest by the majority of Iran’s electorate. They seem to have despaired of any real change in the Islamic Republic, at least in the near future. The US negotiating team, seemingly desperate for a deal — any deal — with the mullahs, could cause far less global damage if they despaired of it, as well.

Iran’s so-called presidential election today, June 18, is a fraud, a ruse for the world to observe and seemingly domestically designed to release some pent-up popular pressure.

Iran’s presidency itself is a weak institution of weak political superstructure which also includes the legislative branch (the majles, the sort-of equivalent of a parliament). This highly visible but insubstantial governmental apparatus masks the real power in Iran: the “deep state” of the Islamic Republic.

The genuine power in Iran is made up of unelected, authoritarian, religious and fascist military elites who, for decades, have, frozen in place the revolutionary, theocratic ideology of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The nomination mechanism for presidential candidates is itself part of the fraudulent process. All candidates must first be approved by the hardline and powerful Council of Guardians (COG), which decides whether the prospective candidate is loyal enough to Islamic revolutionary principles. Any candidate who is judged by the appointed 12 member Council of Guardians (six mullahs, six laymen) to be insufficiently “Islamic” or unwanted by the clergy is rejected. Almost always, this process favors conservative hardliners, thereby serving its intended purpose.

The office of the Supreme Leader (Rahbar), who is the titular head of the “Deep State,” is occupied by the autocratic Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. It is the Supreme Leader who can always intervene and make known his preferences to the Council of Guardians behind the scenes before the COG announces its final list of approved candidates

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Wuhan Confidential Salvatore Babones

Posted By on June 18th, 2021

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2021/06/wuhan-confidential/

Did the United States unintentionally manufacture COVID-19 — in China? If so, that would be the ultimate outsourcing story. Whatever the truth of that mother of all conspiracy theories, it is not a theory that the United States outsources its global coronavirus data monitoring to China. It’s a documented fact.

To paraphrase Australia’s own P.L. Travers, the whole world takes its coronavirus data from Johns Hopkins, but Johns Hopkins takes its data from an obscure Chinese health advice website called DXY. The English acronym DXY is short for Dingxiang Yuan, or Clove Garden, referring to the supposed medicinal properties of the common kitchen herb.

Johns Hopkins describes DXY as “an online platform run by members of the Chinese medical community.” Good luck finding out just who those members are. The DXY website, standard corporate registries, and Wikipedia shed little light on the matter.

Of course, Johns Hopkins doesn’t exactly brag about its reliance on DXY. Go to their website, and you won’t find it mentioned anywhere. Click on the data sources link, and it’s just one among dozens of sources listed. You have to dig up a May 2020 article in The Lancet to find out the truth. The Hopkins team isn’t hiding anything. But neither are they exactly forthcoming.

There’s no reason to believe the Johns Hopkins data are incorrect, even if they do come from a shadowy Chinese website. And for most practical purposes, most people rely on their own countries’ official data. But the incident illustrates just how deeply the world depends on China for its research infrastructure, often in ways no one would ever have imagined. After all, who would have imagined that US government was funding bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology? American researchers wanted to publish on coronaviruses, and China had the bats.

When the coronavirus leapt into the headlines, it was quickly revealed that the US indirectly funded Wuhan coronavirus research via grants to a New York charity called EcoHealth Alliance. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, headed by none other then American coronavirus tsar Anthony Fauci, was the origin of some $600,000 that was ultimately subcontracted to the controversial Chinese lab.

Dr Fauci maintains that the American grants did not cover ‘gain of function’ research that could have produced a genetically engineered pathogen, but many people are understandably sceptical. There is general agreement that the Wuhan lab was engaged in gain-of-function research, despite bitter disagreement over whether or not this research could have been the origin of COVID-19.

But there’s nothing to see here. Like the Johns Hopkins DXY attribution, Fauci’s Wuhan grants are hiding in plain sight. Summary data are clearly published under project number 01AI110964 (series one through six) on his institute’s website. They don’t mention the Wuhan lab specifically, but the papers funded by the grants do. Everything is on the record.

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Biden’s Follies Abroad His European trip adds to his long record of foreign policy failure. by George Neumayr

Posted By on June 18th, 2021

https://spectator.org/biden-europe-trip-foreign-policy/

As Joe Biden stumbled on the world stage, spouting utter nonsense, a remark of Robert Gates, the former defense secretary under Obama, came to mind: “I think he [Biden] has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”

Biden’s losing streak continues as president. If anything, his judgment is getting worse. To American troops stationed in the United Kingdom, he babbled about “global warming” as the greatest threat facing the United States. “This is not a joke,” he told the troops. But it is. Indeed, much of his trip seemed like a joke. His “rallying of democracies abroad” consisted of encouraging them to adopt his flaky ideas.

Biden went abroad not to vindicate America’s national interest but to promote an empty and deluded internationalism. Out of his talks with G7 leaders came a “build back better world” partnership, which will “demonstrate our shared values.” Those, of course, include spreading abortion and transgenderism under the guise of “gender equity and equality.”

It is hard to see how anything Biden discussed with these leaders could possibly strengthen democracies, let alone serve the interests of the United States. Capturing the frivolous character of the discussions, Boris Johnson, Britain’s prime minister, spoke of the importance of a “gender-neutral” post-pandemic world.

Biden should save his lectures on democracy for his own side, which now celebrates suppressions of free speech and the persecution of dissidents.

It is comic that global leaders who indulge in these nihilistic fads would set themselves up as great experts on what constitutes a civilized democracy. Far from safeguarding democracy, they are destroying its moral and religious underpinnings, abandoning the Judeo-Christian culture from which Europe and America came in favor of a relativistic one that holds nothing sacred save the cult of climate change, socialism, and sexual revolution.

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The Pathetic Putin-Biden Summit A U.S. president mangles his first major leadership test on the world stage. Joseph Klein

Posted By on June 18th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/bidens-useless-summit-putin-joseph-klein/

President Joe Biden met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Geneva on June 16th and came away empty-handed. They agreed to have their minions meet for future talks on cybersecurity and other contentious issues between the two countries.

“Earlier today, President Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin finally met for their big summit in Geneva,” Jimmy Fallon said on Wednesday’s Tonight Show. “When Biden said ‘I’ll give you my email,’ Putin said, ‘I already have your email — and password and Venmo, don’t worry about it.'” That’s about as good a commentary as any on the insignificance of this summit.

At least prior to former President Donald Trump’s first summit with Kim Jong-un, the North Korean dictator released three American hostages who had been held for months in North Korea’s inhuman labor camps. This time, Putin didn’t even release the two former U.S. Marines imprisoned in Russia, Trevor Reed and Paul Whelan, as a symbolic gesture to reciprocate for Biden’s waiver of the Nord Stream 2 sanctions. Russia’s release of the American hostages should have been Biden’s minimum condition for holding the summit in the first place.

All that Biden’s summit meeting with Putin accomplished was to give Putin a platform on the world stage where he appeared far more energetic and confident than Biden. It’s very troublesome — and embarrassing — when the leader of the free world takes fewer than half the questions from the press following the summit meeting than Putin took at his separate press conference. And Biden grew testy at his own solo press conference when the last questioner — from CNN, no less – asked Biden how his meeting with Putin could be characterized as constructive, given Putin’s past behavior and continued denials of any wrongdoing. “If you don’t understand that, you’re in the wrong business,” Biden barked at the reporter, for which he later apologized.

Putin and Biden had some nice words to say about the summit and about each other. However, Putin remained defiant in denying that any Russians were responsible for the cyberattacks launched against government and business sites in the United States. Thinking that the “best defense is a good offense,” Putin used his solo press conference to charge that the United States was responsible for far more malicious cyberattacks.

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AMIL IMANI: A LETTER TO THE HONORABLE TEXAS ATTORNEY GENERAL KEN PAXTON

Posted By on June 18th, 2021

Dear Attorney General Paxton,

I remember well when you first announced your plan to run for the Attorney General of Texas in 2014. All your friends and family were happy, excited and supportive. We all believed in your leadership, principles, brevity and conservative values.
During the primary race, you demonstrated the political courage needed to stand for Texas as our next Attorney General. Your near flawless and proven record of standing for conservative principles had earned you support among Texas conservative leaders and people across Texas. In fact, many of us came to several venues and watched your speech in a show of support. I recorded those joyous moments for the future.

The primary was tough, as was the runoff. But in the end, the best person for the job won. Texans sent a loud and clear message when they gave Team Paxton 63.4% of the vote. They wanted a proven conservative leader in the Office of Attorney General of Texas. A year on the campaign trail. Hard to believe. You spent a whole year since you launched that campaign. 365 days of crisscrossing the state, talking with Texans about liberty and state sovereignty, growing our support base and getting out the vote. 52 weeks of sharing your vision for Texas: Defended the Constitution, elevated the 10th Amendment, and told Washington that Texas would not just go along to get along in their never-ending quest for power and control over our lives. 


Team Paxton deserved an award for their hard work, i.e., reading and forwarding emails, engaging online, contributing generously, making phone calls and putting boots on the ground, etc.

Then your tireless campaign and forthright exposition of your vision assured the electorate the best-qualified public servant in assuming the helm of the office of Attorney General. During your swearing-in ceremony, you perceptibly likened Texas to that ‘shining city on the hill’ former President Reagan always said proudly of the United States. This shining city, the Lone Star State, is blessed with bringing forth generation after generation of dedicated and competent public servants to safeguard its luminous glow against the darksome overreach of the Federal Government. People deserve the government they vote for, it is said. And it is a testimony to the character and resolve of Texans to rally in support of their very best and elect them to office.

That was nearly eight years ago and now we must go through it yet again with new challengers who are not suited for this job. We should remember freedom is not free!

Life is precious. It is to be protected, nurtured, and celebrated. Mankind is moving, perhaps at a glacier pace, toward reconciliation and ever-expanding inclusiveness, without any group or ideology imposing itself on others. But as we all have witnessed, that is precisely what the federal government intends. It is vital that we reelect Attorney General Ken Paxton and stop the incursion of the Federal Government on our beloved state.

On November 3rd, 2020, over seventy-four million (more likely many more) Americans cast their votes to re-elect Trump for his second term.

At a time when the world was in torment and uncertainty, the American people—true to the values that have always been at the very core of America’s identity—strongly put their faith in President Trump and in the future.

No President in the history of the United States has achieved as much as he did in his four years in office, as President Trump. Meanwhile, no President in the history of America had been subjected to such incessant, vile and unjustified attacks. Why? Because he believes in American exceptionalism, not globalism.

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BLM-BDS Bigotry Not New at UCLA Anti-Semitism has long been the rage at the prestigious University of California campus. Lloyd Billingsley

Posted By on June 18th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/blm-bds-bigotry-not-new-ucla-lloyd-billingsley/

“Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement, will deliver the 2021 Commencement address for the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs,” the prestigious UC campus announced back on March 30. According to UCLA dean Gary Segura, “Patrisse Cullors is at the heart — and the foundation — of a movement for human rights, social change and genuine equality under the law.” So Patrisse Cullors “is the ideal person to deliver a message of mission to our 2021 graduates.”

What Cullors told the graduates in her June 11 virtual address is hard to find. On the other hand, the Black Lives Matter co-founder drew attention for her 2015 statement at Harvard Law School that “Palestine is our generation’s South Africa, and if we don’t step up boldly and courageously to end the imperialist project that’s called Israel, we’re doomed.” As it happens, a call to abolish the state of Israel is not out of step for UCLA.

Under “Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion” Jerry Kang, UCLA became a safe haven for Jew-hatred.  Groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) enjoyed free reign – and even encouragement – by faculty and administrators. The strongest response to this hatred came not from within UCLA but  from “outside provocateur” David Horowitz.

Posters reading “Students for Justice in Palestine” and “#Jew Haters” began appearing at UCLA. Horowitz called on UCLA to remove campus privileges and funding of SJP because they are a hate group and as such violated UCLA’s “Statement of Principles Against Intolerance.” On April 19, 2016, Jerry Kang responded with a letter to the entire UCLA community.

“Back in November 2015,” Kang wrote, “someone put up hostile posters accusing two student organizations – the Muslim Student Association (MSA) and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) – of being murderers and terrorists.” These were posted anonymously but “an outside provocateur named David Horowitz eventually took credit.” This harkened back to the days when reactionary administrators blamed “outside agitators” for activism they didn’t like.

As the provocateur explained in a letter to Kang, the posters targeted only Students for Justice in Palestine, not the Muslim Students Association. The posters did not accuse SJP of being murderers and terrorists. Horowitz described them as Jew haters “because they support the murderers and terrorists of Hamas, which they do.”

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Beating Down Brits Freedom Day canceled, mandatory vaccinations pushed into law, and no dancing at weddings. Katie Hopkins

Posted By on June 18th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/beating-down-brits-katie-hopkins/

It has been quite the week here in the UK. On Monday, Boris Johnson canceled ‘Freedom Day’. On Wednesday, he started the forced vaccination of Care Home staff. And the week isn’t over yet.

First, Boris and his G7 chums stopped milling about on a private beach in Cornwall having BBQs and taking pretend-socially-distanced photographs while leg humping each other in private. Then, Boris posed like a stranded beluga whale on the Cornish shoreline for the press, before returning to Number Ten.

Next, replete with tan and sea salt in his hair from his morning swimming adventures, Boris crushed the hopes of every hardworking Brit hoping to go overseas on holiday by canceling Freedom Day.

The cursed day was supposed to be June 21. I say cursed because all fabricated ‘goalposts’ are cursed by their very nature. Remember ‘three weeks to flatten the curve’ before it became ‘freedom is a vaccine’? That was just before it became ‘hospitalizations and deaths’, before it became cases, and only slightly after it becomes ‘vaccination rates in the 18-40 age group’. And all that before we get going on the so-called “variants” that are imagined up to cage the nation a little longer.

Either hung-over or just bored by his own lies — it was difficult to tell which under his weird hair which now grows at a constant 40 degrees from his head — Boris even managed to conjure up a new ‘pretend’ Freedom Day, announcing it first as July 29, then July 19. The British people are so sick of all this painful captivity that they barely flinched — like a patient who’s been stuck with so many needles that another one doesn’t even register.

The British Chief Medical Officer, Chris Whitty, was on hand to bore everyone into disinterest with a series of slides pretending to provide the data for this decision. Given there is no data, this was a tough job. But Whitty has been well-lubricated by Bill Gates in the past and is absolutely prepared to keep bending over in the name of the state injectable he likes to refer to as a ‘vaccine’.

I should point out for the unaware what Chris Whitty (our Fauci) looks like.

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‘Racist, Xenophobe, Tyrant!’ Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and the price of truth speech on Islam.Raymond Ibrahim

Posted By on June 18th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/racist-xenophobe-tyrant-raymond-ibrahim/

Criticism against Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is again on the rise, now that his nation is set to take the presidency of the Visegrad group of Central European nations next month.  According a recent report, “Britain’s government has condemned comments made by Viktor Orbán about Muslims and migrants on the eve of a bilateral meeting between the Hungarian leader and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson.  In a statement, No. 10 Downing Street said that Orbán’s 2018 comment to a German newspaper about ‘Muslim invaders’ and his later description of migrants as ‘a poison’ were ‘divisive and wrong.’”

In fact, Orbán’s ultimate motive is to secure his nation against the crimes and problems that come along with Muslim migrants.  Speaking back in 2015, during the heyday of mass Muslim migration into Europe, he clearly laid out his logic:

Those [migrants] arriving [into Europe] have been raised in another religion, and represent a radically different culture. Most of them are not Christians, but Muslims.  This is an important question, because Europe and European identity is rooted in Christianity….  We don’t want to criticize France, Belgium, any other country, but we think all countries have a right to decide whether they want to have a large number of Muslims in their countries. If they want to live together with them, they can. We don’t want to and I think we have a right to decide that we do not want a large number of Muslim people in our country. We do not like the consequences of having a large number of Muslim communities that we see in other countries, and I do not see any reason for anyone else to force us to create ways of living together in Hungary that we do not want to see….

The prime minister went on to invoke history—and not in the politically correct way (to condemn Christians and whitewash Muslims) but according to reality:

I have to say that when it comes to living together with Muslim communities, we are the only ones who have experience because we had the possibility to go through that experience for 150 years.

Orbán was referring to Islam’s conquest and occupation of Hungary from 1541 to 1699.  Then, Islamic jihad, terrorism, and Christian persecution were rampant.

Indeed, on this very day in history, on June 15, 1389, a horde of Muslim Turks met and crushed a coalition of Serbs, Hungarians, Poles, and Romanians, at the pivotal Battle of Kosovo.  Thereafter, much of southeastern Europe, including Hungary, and portions of modern day Russia, was conquered, occupied, and terrorized by the Turks—sometimes in ways that make Islamic State atrocities seem like child’s play.  (Think of the beheadings, crucifixions, massacres, slave markets, and rapes that have become IS trademarks—but on a much grander scale, and for centuries.)

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Is Egypt Planning to Take Control of Gaza? What replacing Hamas might just prevent. Hugh Fitzgerald

Posted By on June 18th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/egypt-planning-take-control-gaza-hugh-fitzgerald/

The Egyptians have been heavily involved in ending the Gaza War and its aftermath. It was Egypt that was responsible for arranging the ceasefire between Hamas and Israel. It is Egypt that has been the first state to pledge a massive aid package — $500 million – for Gaza. And it is Egyptians, with heavy-duty equipment – bulldozers, trucks, cranes –who have been arriving in the Gaza Strip to begin the enormous task of both clearing the rubble, and rebuilding the Strip. Whether Egypt is considering remaining in the Strip is discussed here: “Is Egypt planning to retake control of the Gaza Strip?,” by Khaled Abu Toameh, Jerusalem Post, June 10, 2021:

Scenes of dozens of Egyptian bulldozers, cranes and trucks entering the Gaza Strip last Friday have left some Palestinians wondering whether Egypt is planning to return to the coastal enclave it ruled between 1948 and 1967.

The Egyptian decision to send building equipment and engineers to the Gaza Strip came within the context of Cairo’s pledge to contribute to reconstruction efforts there after the recent

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Sisi has pledged $500 million to help rebuild the houses and buildings that were destroyed during the fighting.

This is an enormous sum for Egypt to commit, and signifies Cairo’s deep interest in winning the gratitude, and allegiance, of Palestinians in Gaza. The Egyptians view Hamas as the local branch in Gaza of the Muslim Brotherhood, and therefore an object of suspicion and loathing. The Egyptians want their presence in Gaza to offer a sharp contrast to Hamas, which dragged the Strip into a war that devastated the area, while Egyptians and their equipment are very visibly in Gaza to repair the damage that Hamas brought upon not only itself, but on the civilians whom the terror group used as civilian shields, by placing its weapons and rocket launching pads in the midst of civilian areas, and even inside schools, hospitals, houses, and apartment buildings in Gaza. Egypt no doubt hopes to win the gratitude of Palestinians as it cleans up the rubble and begins the enormous undertaking of rebuilding.

The presence of the Egyptian construction teams in the Gaza Strip means that Hamas and other Palestinian factions will not be able to resume the rocket attacks on Israel, Palestinian sources told The Jerusalem Post.

“It will be hard for Hamas to initiate another round of fighting with Israel when there are many Egyptians inside the Gaza Strip,” one of the sources said. “If Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad start firing rockets at Israel while the Egyptian construction teams are working in the Gaza Strip, the two groups will get into trouble with Egypt.”

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Justice Alito Destroys SCOTUS Obamacare Sellout Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on June 18th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/06/justice-alito-destroys-scotus-obamacare-sellout-daniel-greenfield/

Supreme Court decisions aren’t usually an entertaining read. Dissents sometimes are and Alito’s dissents are notable, but this one is worth reading and rereading, not only for the biting rhetoric, but its reasoning.

“Today’s decision is the third installment in our epic Affordable Care Act trilogy, and it follows the same pattern as installments one and two. In all three episodes, with the Affordable Care Act facing a serious threat, the Court has pulled off an improbable rescue,” Alito begins.

He delves into the three increasingly absurd decisions which first found that, “the ‘penalty’ for failing to comply with the mandate was found to be a ‘tax'”, and then “the Court came to the rescue by finding that the Federal Government is a “State”, and now “in the trilogy’s third episode, the Court is presented
with the daunting problem of a ‘tax’ that does not tax.”

“Can the taxing power, which saved the day in the first episode, sustain such a curious creature? In 2017, Congress reduced the ‘tax’ imposed on Americans who failed to abide by the individual mandate to $0,” Justice Alito sarcastically asks.

Justice Alito notes that, “instead of defending the constitutionality of the individual mandate, the Court simply ducks the issue and holds that none of the Act’s challengers, including the 18 States that think the Act saddles them with huge financial costs, is entitled to sue” while Democrat states were able to get standing to illegally force the citizenship question off the census, not to mention that, “some years ago, Massachusetts was allowed to sue (and force the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to regulate greenhouse gases) on the theory that failure to do so would cause the ocean to rise and reduce the size of the Commonwealth.”