MEDIA Comments turned off

NPR Scandal Should Kill Taxpayer-Funded Broadcasting Charles Lipson

Posted By on April 19th, 2024

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2024/04/18/npr_scandal_should_kill_taxpayer-funded_broadcasting_150810.html

“I don’t want any yes-men around me,” said Sam Goldwyn, the Hollywood producer famed for his movies and malapropisms. “I want everybody to tell me the truth even if it costs them their job.” The brass at National Public Radio must have heard Sam, but they add a slight amendment. We want only “yes-men” (they/them) and will boot anyone who dares to dissent.

Lest there be any doubt, NPR just proved it by suspending, without pay, the staffer who exposed the pervasive problems there. He dared to write publicly that that National Public Radio was uniformly ideological, deeply committed to its strident left-wing views, and determined to exclude any alternatives. For saying that out loud, they cut off Uri Berliner’s paycheck for five days. It’s their way of saying, “Thank you for your feedback.” Q.E.D.

Berliner, disgusted by NPR’s response, resigned Wednesday with a fiery statement: “I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged.” Who could?

There are really two problems here, not one, and they go well beyond one journalist’s resignation. The first is political bias, which is a problem at all “elite” networks and newspapers, where “hard news” is heavily slanted. The second is that some of these outlets, notably NPR, PBS (the Public Broadcasting System) and their local affiliates, receive taxpayer funding.

Let’s take political bias first. It was once a cardinal rule of journalism that partisan or ideological viewpoints should be confined to editorials and opinion columns. The goal was to keep editorial views out of hard-news reporting, as much as possible. To do it, the editorial staff constantly fought with the business team, who wanted coverage to favor their advertisers.

Those days are long gone and so is even the ideal of unbiased coverage. We have returned to an earlier era when American newspapers were closely affiliated with political parties and local political machines and covered the news to favor them. Today’s newsrooms have revived that stance. They are as ideologically driven as a gender-studies class at Smith College. If you depart from that ideology, you are out, like Bari Weiss at the New York Times.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Legal Arsenal of the Group Quota Regime By T.J. Harker

Posted By on April 19th, 2024

https://tomklingenstein.com/the-legal-arsenal-of-the-group-quota-regime/

Editor’s Note: Lawfare, the weaponization of law against political opponents—both public figures and ordinary citizens—is now a mainstay of the Left’s political strategy. T.J. Harker, an attorney and former federal prosecutor, explains how the law itself has become the power mechanism of the present revolutionary threat, and illuminates how fully this new order has already supplanted the old American Constitution. From woke prosecutors to political disbarments to judicial activism, the group quota regime and the legal apparatus are now indistinguishable in large swathes of the country.

This essay was originally published in The American Mind under the title “The Regime v. America.” In the weeks since its release, at the end of a lengthy and expensive trial, a California Bar Court officially recommended that John Eastman be disbarred.

The American legal system was a thing of beauty. Refined across centuries and emerging from the precedence of millions of common law cases, by the end of the last millennium it had become the envy of the world. Serving both a dispute resolution and truth-seeking function, it channeled the violent passions of human nature into a controlled medium. It then subjected those passions to standardized procedures (the rules of evidence and civil or criminal procedure) to yield judgments that commanded the respect of the parties and the public. 

The American rule of law sustained our capacity for self-governance. The legal system midwifed the most sophisticated property rights regime in the world, improved our collective reasoning faculties, balanced the imperative of change with the demands of tradition, and settled disputes of trivial insignificance as well as controversies of monumental importance. The system functioned so well that most Americans never even thought about it. And it commanded such astonishing respect that virtually everyone obeyed its commands in even the most partisan contests. 

But today, sophisticated regime mandarins in Big Law, government, and non-profit activist organizations seek to pervert our legal system by hacking it. They warp its dispute resolution and truth-seeking function to one that advances and sustains their grip on power, delegitimizing that grip in the process. This is known as lawfare. Its variants include access denial, weaponized defamation law, weaponized criminal law, misuse of federal and state agencies, subversive professional licensing requirements, and “adversarial inversion.” 

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Bill Maher says the US has ‘passed the Rubicon,’ slams Dearborn, Michigan, ‘Death to America’ rally By  Yael Halon,

Posted By on April 19th, 2024

https://nypost.com/2024/04/17/us-news/bill-maher-says-the-us-has-passed-the-rubicon-slams-dearborn-michigan-death-to-america-rally/

“Real Time” host Bill Maher said it’s time to draw the line when it comes to chants of “Death to America” on American soil.

On Friday’s “Overtime” segment on YouTube, Maher addressed the protesters in Dearborn, Michigan, who shouted “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” during an International Al-Quds Day rally earlier this month.

“Can I talk about American propaganda? Because there was a rally in Dearborn, Michigan, it’s a large Muslim population, [there were] chants of ‘Death to America.’ I feel like we’ve passed something here,” Maher said.

“The left has gotten mad at me for many years for talking about Islam. I try not to do it too much because I know it makes them go crazy, and I’ve made my point. But it needs to be talked about now. When you start chanting ‘Death to America’ in America.”

In a conversation with guests Piers Morgan and British journalist Gillian Tett, Maher pointed to quotes from anti-Israel activist Takek Bazzi, who headlined the hour-long rally in front of the Henry Ford Centennial Library in Dearborn.

In video shared by the Middle East Media Research Institute, Bazzi tells the crowd at the event that the “Death to America” chants were in honor of former Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Open Letter to US Adversaries, the White House, Congress, Donald Trump, and the Pentagon by Lawrence Kadish

Posted By on April 18th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20584/open-letter

In the end, because of Israel’s robust defense technology, Iran’s recent drone and ballistic missile attack on Israel’s urban centers was little more than a potentially deadly fireworks show, reportedly choreographed by the United States, in coordination with Iran, “so that no one will be hurt and war with Israel will be avoided” — apparently not with Israel. Make no mistake, though. Iran is capable and willing to engage in a far more strategic display of power in the Middle East.

American and British military assets were also in play, blunting the Iranian missile offensive and demonstrating solidarity with our ally at a time when self-described “progressive” forces here and around the world have been siding with the terrorist group Hamas, and seeking to delegitimize the State of Israel. These ostensibly pro-Palestinian collaborators – it sounds better than “supporting Hamas terrorists” even if it does nothing to help Palestinians rid themselves of their corrupt leaders or have a better life — were either mute or quietly celebratory after the October 7th Hamas attack that massacred, raped and desecrated Israelis. What they, and one suspects Hamas, did not quite anticipate was an Israeli response that reminded the world that the days of Jews suffering in silence from organized murder are over.

Much the way German civilians in the ruins of the Third Reich began to realize that Hitler may not have been such a good thing, there seem to be many Palestinians, who may even have voted for Hamas, with its agenda of eliminating Israel from the map, but are now having second thoughts (here, here, here, here and here).

Hamas, however, is little more than a tool of the Iranians, who have made no pretense about seeking to dominate the Middle East as their seemingly presumed historic right. While the drone attacks were evidently a deliberate sky show, the Iranians are perfectly capable of blocking the strategic Strait of Hormuz, as they have already threatened. As a reminder, the Strait provides the only viable sea passage from the Persian Gulf to the open ocean and is considered among the world’s most strategically important waterways for international commerce. Iran could, for instance, place mines in these waters and let their allies, the Houthis, take the fall.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

The American Peace Initiative: Lessons Learned from the Abraham Accords The Abraham Accords, centered on regional peace and prosperity, brought the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and Kosovo into normalized relations with Israel. By Bart Marcois

Posted By on April 18th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/04/18/the-american-peace-initiative-lessons-learned-from-the-abraham-accords/

Based on interviews of Ambassador Robert O’Brien, Ambassador John Rakolta Jr., Ambassador Yousef al-Otaiba (UAE), Robert Greenway, Alan Clemmons, and Aryeh Lightstone.

The authors’ views are theirs alone and do not represent the United States Government or any other institution

The United States has its own Middle East peace initiative. While the Israeli-Palestinian 1993 Oslo Accords and the regional 2002 Arab Peace Initiative were cultivated outside the United States, the 2020 Peace to Prosperity plan and the Abraham Accords were born in the USA.1

The Abraham Accords, centered on regional peace and prosperity, were the 2020 agreements that brought the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and Kosovo into normalized relations with Israel. They were an aggressive pursuit of American strategic and security interests that capitalized on emerging dynamics in the Middle East. The intent of the Accords was to strengthen stability and deter Iranian, Chinese, and Russian attempts to extend influence or hegemony in the region. Expanding the Accords further secures a part of the world long synonymous with conflict.

The following lessons learned are based on interviews of those who paved the way for the Abraham Accords. We call upon leaders and lawmakers to support us in creating a digital archive to document guiding principles and lessons learned in the process. We believe this model can be replicated for other Muslim-majority countries through courageous, practical diplomacy.

There were certain dynamics that highlighted the benefits of the Abraham Accords process. For example, Israel, as a trade partner, has so many quality of life benefits to offer, including sectors such as water, technology, agriculture, pharmaceuticals, health sciences, and defense. In short, it would be regressive not to normalize with Israel.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Are Iran’s Nine Lives Nearing an End? By unleashing war in the Middle East and targeting Israel, Iran may soon learn that Israel, or America, or both might retaliate for a half-century of its terrorist aggression. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on April 18th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/04/18/are-irans-nine-lives-nearing-an-end/

The theocracy of Iran has been the world’s arch-embassy attacker over the last half century.

So it has zero credibility in crying foul over Israel’s April 1 attacks on its “consulate” in Damascus and the killing of Iran’s kingpin terrorists of the Revolutionary Guard Corps there.

Remember, the world was first introduced to the Iranian ayatollahs by their violent takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1980.

Iranian surrogates next bombed the American embassy in Beirut and the Marine barracks in 1983.

In fact, Iran has attacked US and Israeli diplomatic posts off-and-on for decades, most recently in 2023, when Iran helped plan an attack on the US embassy in Baghdad.

For this reason and several others, Iran’s justification for sending 170 drones, 30 cruise missiles, and 120 ballistic missiles into Israel on the grounds that Israel had bombed an Iranian diplomatic post is completely ridiculous.

One, Iran has never honored diplomatic immunity. Instead, it habitually attacks and kills embassy personnel and blows up diplomatic facilities across the world.

Two, on April 1, the Israelis attacked a pseudo-“consulate” in Damascus which was hosting grandees of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps as they planned terrorist attacks on Israel.

Without Iran, the Middle East might have had a chance to use its enormous oil and natural gas wealth to lift its 500 million people out of poverty rather than to be mired in constant tribal and religious anti-Israeli, anti-American, and anti-Western terrorism.

During the Iraq War, Iran’s Shiite terrorists and its massive supplies of deadly shaped-charge explosive devices killed hundreds of Americans. It routinely hijacks container ships in the Straits of Hormuz and stages near collisions with American ships and planes.

How does Iran get away with nonstop anti-Western terrorism, its constant harassment of Persian Gulf maritime traffic, its efforts to subvert Sunni moderate regimes, and its serial hostage-taking?

The theocrats operate on three general principles.

One, Iran is careful never to attack a major power directly.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

‘Sweden has been vindicated on Covid’ Martin Kulldorff on why lockdowns were a disaster for public health.

Posted By on April 18th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/04/17/sweden-has-been-vindicated-on-covid/

Almost as quickly as the Covid-19 pandemic swept the world in 2020, governments began locking down. These measures, we were told, might have been insanely authoritarian and historically unprecedented, but politicians were just ‘following the science’. We simply had to give up our freedoms in order to save lives. And yet, in Sweden, ‘the science’ looked very different. The nation refused to go into full lockdown, insisting this would be better for health in the long-run. It made itself a global pariah in the process.

So, four years on from the first lockdowns across the West, has Sweden’s more liberal approach been proven wrong or vindicated? Swedish epidemiologist and biostatistician Martin Kulldorff, one of the co-authors of the anti-lockdown Great Barrington Declaration, joined Brendan O’Neill on the latest episode of his podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show, to discuss how Sweden fared. They also discussed censorship and the lockdown on dissent during the pandemic. What follows is an edited extract from their conversation. Listen to the full episode here.

Brendan O’Neill: Were you taken aback by how difficult it became to criticise lockdowns during the pandemic and have a reasoned, scientific discussion?

Martin Kulldorff: I was shocked. I never imagined that someone like me, a scientist stating what used to be basic principles of public health, would suddenly be at the centre of a political whirlwind. The interesting thing for me, though, was that I had two different experiences simultaneously during the pandemic. On the one hand, I was mostly writing and advising in the US, where I live. But at the same time, I was deeply involved in the Swedish debate. I was published in Swedish newspapers, defending Sweden’s approach to the pandemic. In the US and UK, I was a fringe voice opposing the establishment. But in Sweden, I was actually defending the establishment position of not closing everything down.

Of course, not everyone in Sweden was happy with the government’s strategy. There was a group of 22 scientists who publicly opposed the no-lockdown approach in 2020. In effect, they wanted Sweden to copy China, the US and the rest of the world and shut society down. So they published critical articles in Sweden’s major newspapers, making arguments that I completely disagreed with and responded to. And even though I thought they were wrong, I’m glad they wrote those pieces. There were obviously plenty of people in Sweden who agreed with them and were asking why we were doing things differently. People wanted to know why we weren’t locking down like everywhere else.

ANTI-SEMITISM, ISRAEL Comments turned off

A New Blood Libel Endlessly Repeated Declan Mansfield

Posted By on April 18th, 2024

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/israel/2024/04/a-new-blood-libel-endlessly-repeated/

One of the defining features, possibly the crucial, most existential characteristic, of intelligence, is the ability to distinguish one thing from another. This is true in every aspect of our lives. A car is not a horse. The sky is not a mountain. Taylor Swift is not Led Zeppelin – and Israel is not committing genocide in Gaza. That this needs to be said is not an indictment of our education system, or society, or contemporary politics, or social media, or not being breast fed as a child. It’s simply a statement of fact, because people who score between 25 per cent and 75 per cent on the bell curve of intelligence, the average Joe or Josephine Soap in other words, do not generally have an inclination to understand and distinguish why W. H. Auden’s poetry is superior to the comic verse of Pam Ayres, or why the value of something, as Oscar Wilde said, is different to its price, or why perennial worth is better than this month’s hyped fashion, or why there is a difference between being ‘merely clever’, as Wittgenstein said, and being intelligent.

Moreover, and this is an age-old problem articulated by philosophers as diverse as Plato and Heidegger – average minds are easily swayed by the cultural zeitgeist, by arguments from authority (whether from priests, politicians, ‘experts’ or celebrities), and especially by public opinion. They fall, regularly, for every contemporary trend. Look, for example, at the uncritical attitude and acceptance, from the majority, to the Covid-19 measures.

People with average intelligence are decent, kind, trustworthy, extraordinarily capable in ways that leave more intelligent people scratching their heads in admiration, not the least bit lacking in street smarts, and know implicitly what is good for themselves and their families, (especially when government policy negatively affects their wallets). What they are not, though, is particularly interested in abstract thought.

The impact of intelligence on politics and culture has become clear in recent months. People who six months ago couldn’t spell anti-Semitism are now parroting the most harebrained anti-Semitic delusions, without knowing much about Jews, Israel, Arabs, Islam or the modern history of the Middle East. In the words of Heidegger, people ‘fall’ into the ‘they’.

Antisemitism, though, is a hydra-headed beast, which, like a chameleon, changes its colours in different environments.

BOOKS Comments turned off

How to Save the West An interview with Spencer Klavan. by Jason D. Hill

Posted By on April 18th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/how-to-save-the-west/

In his book How to Save the West: Ancient Wisdom for 5 Modern Crises, Spencer Klavan has written a modern tour de force that straddles two realms. The first is that the book is a prescient and chilling analysis of the “five essential crises” facing Western civilization today:

The Crisis of Reality: Is there such a thing as objective truth—and even if there is, can “virtual reality” replace it?
The Crisis of the Body: Not just the “transgender” insanity, but the push for a “transhumanist” future;
The Crisis of Meaning: Evolution—both biological and cultural—is a process of endless replication, of copying. But is there an original model that gives us an aspiration to aim for? Do our lives and actions have meaning?
The Crisis of Religion: Science has not eliminated man’s religious impulse, but rather misdirected it—and wrongly dismissed the profound philosophical plausibility of Judeo-Christian revelation;
The Crisis of the Regime: Has America reached a point of inevitable collapse? Republican government was meant to end the destructive cycle of regimes rising and falling—but can it?

Second, Spencer Klavan takes us on a whirlwind and in-depth journey through the ideas of Western philosophy, literature, and classical thought both to bring into sharper relief these crises, and also to demonstrate how an application of ancient wisdom can be a plausible panacea to much of the malarkey, willed ignorance, and malice that constitute the crises facing Western civilization today.

I interviewed Spencer Klavan, a Ph.D. in classics from Oxford University and a senior editor at The American Mind, about his most recent book.

ANTI-SEMITISM, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Columbia University Closes Campus as Hundreds of Anti-Israel Student Protesters Occupy Quad By James Lynch

Posted By on April 18th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/columbia-university-closes-campus-as-hundreds-of-anti-israel-student-protesters-occupy-quad/?utm_source=recirc-

New York — Columbia University closed its doors to the public on Wednesday as hundreds of campus activists protested Israel’s ongoing military campaign against Hamas. 

Campus police and NYPD officers prohibited those without a Columbia ID card from entering campus as students erected dozens of tents on the school’s main campus lawn and hurled anti-Israel slogans. The protest was held as Columbia president Minouche Shafik testified before Congress.

“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” protesters could be heard chanting. Two Jewish Columbia students spoke  about their experience during the protest and the larger issue of antisemitism on campus.

“They took over the lawn, set up tents so people don’t have access to it, and they continued their anti-semitic, hateful chants,” Jewish student Jonathan Lederet told National Review.

“Intifada, intifada” and “death to [the] Zionist state” were among the chants hurled by the protesters, he recalled.

“They all chant ‘shame, shame on you.’ I say ‘I want there to be more aid, Hamas steals the aid.’ I say ‘Let’s chant for peace, let’s talk about co-existence, have a dialogue.’ They chant about martyrdom and violence and killing. So yeah, they all hate me, but I’m not going anywhere,” Lederet added.

Lederet held up an Israeli flag and wore his yarmulke to the march. Footage shared by independent left-wing reporter Talia Jane showed protesters chanting “shame on you” to the pro-Israel students who came to the event.

Another Jewish student from Barnard College, Columbia’s sister college, said she was “disgusted” by the protest and it happens “all the time.” The student, whose first name is Katie, called on Shafik to take further action against antisemitism and live up to Columbia’s values.

“If somebody says calling for the genocide of Jews makes me unsafe, they say ‘f*ck you.’ And then there’s no consequence, people have been told ‘f*ck the Jews,’ they’ve been spit on, someone threw coffee on a Jew today,” she said.

“A lot of Jewish students have either switched rooms, moved off campus, transferred,” Katie added. She was one of the Jewish students who moved off campus because of the antisemitic climate.