NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The hibernation of democracy A year of lockdown has had dire consequences for liberty and public life. Brendan O’Neill

Posted By on March 24th, 2021

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/03/23/the-hibernation-of-democracy/

“Democracy was forced into hibernation – an utterly unprecedented state of affairs. Our nation and our lives became the property not of an engaged, free public discussion, but of an expert class of scientists and public-health officials to whom every major decision was entrusted. Parliament temporarily suspended itself. Even when it returned it failed to subject the suspension of public life to any real, meaningful scrutiny. Every other issue other than Covid-19 was forced out of the public realm. Even discussing the economic and social consequences of lockdown was shamed into silence. ‘Do you care more for the economy than for your own grandmother?!’ And we the people were transformed from democratic citizens into recipients of instruction; from free public actors into potential spreaders of disease to be controlled and punished; from voters into mere observers of the spectacle of crisis, our role nothing more than to watch the depressing daily press conferences and heed their warning that leaving our houses would cause death and destruction.”

For a year we have been living through one of the most extraordinary events of modern times: the hibernation of democracy. The suspension of public life. The adjournment of politics itself. This has been the most dire consequence of lockdown. We have witnessed the outsourcing of decision-making to non-political actors, the withering away of political opposition and political debate, and the decommissioning of the public itself. Stay at home, watch the news for Covid updates, and don’t breathe on, far less talk to, another human soul. That has been the instruction to the demos for the past year. The impact of all of this on the spirit and practice of democracy is likely to be long-lasting.

Today is the first anniversary of the imposition of lockdown in the UK. It was a year ago today that Boris Johnson, having initially bristled at the idea of enforcing a China- or Italy-style shutdown of society, solemnly addressed the nation and said: ‘Stay at home.’ It would last three or four weeks, we were told. It was just about ‘flattening the curve’ and preventing the NHS from being overwhelmed. We’d be out of it soon and cracking on with life relatively normally. How naive we were to believe that. Today, on this unhappy birthday, we’re in lockdown again – our third – and public-health experts are telling us that some social restrictions could last for years. A three-week shutdown has become a neverending nightmare.

BOOKS Comments turned off

WHEN HARRY MET ARTHUR

Posted By on March 23rd, 2021

In an era when bipartisanship seems impossible, and votes on people, policies and bills are riven with harsh rhetoric and monolithic and intractable behavior by the Democrat legislators, I returned to a book which details the partnership of a Democrat President with a staunch conservative Republican Senator.  rsk

Harry and Arthur: Truman, Vandenberg, and the Partnership That Created the Free World by Lawrence J. Haas

With Franklin Roosevelt’s death in April of 1945, Vice President Harry Truman and Senator Arthur Vandenberg, the Republican leader on foreign policy, inherited a world in turmoil. With Europe flattened and the Soviets emerging as America’s new adversary, Truman and Vandenberg built a tight, bipartisan partnership at a bitterly partisan time to craft a dramatic new foreign policy through which the United States stepped boldly onto the world stage to protect its friends, confront its enemies, and promote freedom. These two men transformed America from a reluctant global giant to a self-confident leader; from a nation that traditionally turned inward after war to one that remained engaged to shape the postwar landscape; and from a nation with no real military establishment to one that now spends more on defense than the next dozen nations combined.

Lawrence J. Haas, an award-winning journalist, reveals how, through the close collaboration of Truman and Vandenberg, the United States created the United Nations to replace the League of Nations, pursued the Truman Doctrine to defend freedom from communist threat, launched the Marshall Plan to rescue Western Europe’s economy from the devastation of war, and established NATO to defend Western Europe.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Columbia University’s Ultra-Woke Idea: Segregated Graduation Ceremonies By Tristan Yang

Posted By on March 23rd, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/03/columbia-universitys-ultra-woke-idea-segregated-graduation-ceremonies/

My university’s decision shows how an obsession with diversity has corrupted modern academia.

Last week, Columbia University, where I am currently a junior, made national headlines over commencement ceremonies demarcated by race, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic status. Such multicultural ceremonies have a history at many schools, but Columbia’s was apparently the one to receive nationwide media attention. Though discussion and discourse are always important, most of the resulting social-media frenzy focused on the wrong ideas. It is not about getting into the weeds and arguing over which historically marginalized group deserves to be recognized or whether these ceremonies are optional. The very creation and existence of such events is fundamentally problematic right out of the gate.

To segregate students by race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic status is inherently harmful to the fabric of college communities and harms the social progress these events ostensibly intend to achieve. The embrace of resegregation in this scenario to combat “inequality” centers on one uncontrollable characteristic of an individual and reduces a person’s identity to superficial stereotypes, neglecting his or her nuanced existence. It also bears more than a passing, uncomfortable resemblance to the racism of decades past. People are multifaceted with their own experiences, talents, interests, and strengths. Failure to recognize that is not only ignorant, but also dehumanizing.

A common rejoinder to criticisms of these ceremonies is that those who want to end them do not care about the achievements of the students the ceremonies celebrate. This is not only untrue, but also condescendingly assumes that Black, Asian, “Latinx,” First-Generation/Low-Income, “Lavender” (LGBTQIA+), and Native-American students can only have their accomplishments celebrated through the uplifting of an institution that cannot see past their mere identities. It also assumes that America is so racially bankrupt that those in these groups must depend on an institution to be recognized as human. In this way, the university’s focus on identity reinforces campus division, as students depend more on institutional labeling to define who they are. The result is the undermining of campus unity to an almost irreparable point.

Columbia likely started these ceremonies in good faith. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Diversity and multiculturalism can be worthwhile aims. However, they cannot be the sole focus of all university affairs. Yet that is increasingly exactly the case, so much so that it is sometimes difficult to identify what else one might learn at these expensive elite institutions. The imposition of diversity as the reigning prerequisite to any action has soiled good intent, and now facilitates the weaponization of multiculturalism to conduct witch hunts on conservatives, quash free speech, and command political correctness in the classroom. As a result, identity politics now runs rampant, such that no objective debate can occur because of overwhelming affectual censorship. Objectivity is outlawed, and everyone is made to believe he must have an emotional investment in a discussion. Everything is now personal to those in any conversation.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Suspect in Boulder Mass Shooting Identified as Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa: ‘Very Anti-Social’ Jack Phillips

Posted By on March 23rd, 2021

https://www.theepochtimes.com/suspect-in-boulder-mass-shooting-identified-as-ah

Police have identified 21-year-old Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa as the suspect in the Boulder, Colorado, shooting that left at least 10 people dead, including a police officer, on Monday.

Boulder Police Chief Maris Harold on Tuesday identified the alleged shooter and the 10 victims, who range in age from 20 to 65.

The victims include Denny Stong, 20; Neven Stanisic, 23; Rikki Olds, 25; Tralona Bartkowika, 49; Suzanne Fountain, 59; Teri Leiker, 51; Kevin Mahoney, 61; Lynn Murray, 62; and Jody Waters, 65. Boulder Police Officer Eric Talley, 51, was also shot and killed while responding to the incident.

“I want to say to the community, I am so sorry this incident happened,” Harold said, adding, “We are going to do everything in our power to make sure this suspect has a thorough trial and we do a thorough investigation.”

Officials said that Alissa, 21, was shot during an exchange with officers at the King Soopers on Monday afternoon, leaving the suspect injured.

“The man who gunned them down will be held fully responsible. We don’t have the answer for that yet,” said Boulder District Attorney Michael Dougherty during the news conference.

When asked about the weapon the suspect allegedly used, officials refused to comment.

Alissa, whose last name is also spelled as Alyssa or Al-Issa, is slated to be charged with 10 counts of first-degree murder, officials said, adding that he’ll be transferred to the Boulder County jail to await court proceedings.

Police officers and an ambulance are seen at the scene where an active shooter was reported at a grocery store in Boulder, Colo., on March 22, 2021. (Cecil Disharoon/via Reuters)

Ali Aliwi Alissa, the suspect’s 34-year-old brother, told The Daily Beast that his brother was mentally ill, disturbed, and paranoid.

The suspect is “very anti-social” and paranoid, his brother told the news outlet, noting that he would often remark that he was “being chased, someone is behind him, someone is looking for him.”

“When he was having lunch with my sister in a restaurant, he said, ‘People are in the parking lot, they are looking for me.’ She went out, and there was no one. We didn’t know what was going on in his head,” Alissa said.

FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Biden Torpedoes Abraham Accords Summit The new administration turns its back on peace between Israel and Arab states in order to pursue deal with Iran Lee Smith

Posted By on March 23rd, 2021

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/biden-torpedoes-abraham-accords-summit

Media reports on March 18 revealed that the United Arab Emirates has suspended its plans for an Abraham Accords summit in Abu Dhabi with Israel, the United States, and other Arab signatories to the historic peace agreements brokered by the Donald Trump administration. Supposedly, the Emiratis are angry with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for using the UAE’s de facto leader Mohammed bin Zayed as a “prop in his election campaign.”

In fact, as the theme of “election interference” should make clear (the UAE doesn’t have elections), and as has been substantiated by Israeli reporting, the source of the upset isn’t in Abu Dhabi but in Washington. In other words, the Biden administration is interfering in Israel’s upcoming election by strong-arming the Emiratis into publicly distancing themselves from Bibi.

Next week Israel will hold its fourth election in a little more than two years, so in effect Netanyahu has been campaigning for more than 24 months—including in August when he and MBZ signed the agreement. Should the Emiratis have shunned the deal since Netanyahu, like any Israeli prime minister, would invariably present his accomplishment to voters? What about sending an ambassador to Israel, as it did at the beginning of March? What about investing $10 billion, as MBZ told Netanyahu he would? So how does a photo op with the prime minister glad-handing the crown prince of Abu Dhabi on his home turf cross the line?

Plainly, the Obama-Biden team doesn’t care about interfering in Israeli elections or else Barack Obama’s State Department wouldn’t have funneled money to an NGO that campaigned against Netanyahu in 2015. Nor do Arab royals sitting atop petro-kingdoms have much theoretical or practical reason to worry about appearing to back one candidate against another. Smaller powers like the UAE make alliances not with factions but with states—and all parties in Israel support the Abraham Accords. Israel’s strategic class, its political, military, and intelligence echelons, as well as Israeli voters consider relations with Gulf Cooperation Council members a strategic boon. It is difficult to imagine any circumstances short of war under which an Israeli prime minister would think it politically wise to abandon a normalization agreement with any Arab state, never mind a major oil producer.

No, “election interference” is a staple of American political discourse. More particularly it is the rhetoric through which the Democratic Party now pushes information operations, like the Russiagate conspiracy theory holding that Russia interfered with the 2016 vote to put Trump in the White House. News of the canceled visit by the Israeli prime minister was eagerly pushed in the press and on social media by Obama’s Israel point man Dan Shapiro through his proprietary Israel wing of the echo chamber.

Trump and Kushner wondered why the wise men held them in contempt for making peace. What they didn’t understand was that making peace meant the wise men were fired.

But there’s a bigger play here than interfering in Israeli politics by denying Bibi a preelection photo op with Israel’s peace partners in the Gulf. Their larger goal is to weaken or dismantle the Abraham Accords, which by assembling a treaty structure that binds Israel together with the Gulf states structurally interferes with the administration’s stated goal of realigning the United States with Iran—and therefore against Israel and the Gulf—by reentering Obama’s nuclear deal.

MEDIA Comments turned off

A Biden Appointee’s Troubling Views On The First Amendment Matt Taibbi

Posted By on March 23rd, 2021

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/a-biden-appointees-troubling-views

Columbia law professor Timothy Wu wonders if the First Amendment is “obsolete,” and believes in “returning the country to the kind of media environment that prevailed in the 1950s.”

When Columbia law professor Timothy Wu was appointed by Joe Biden to the National Economic Council a few weeks back, the press hailed it as great news for progressives. The author of The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age is known as a staunch advocate of antitrust enforcement, and Biden’s choice of him, along with the appointment of Lina Khan to the Federal Trade Commission, was widely seen as a signal that the new administration was assembling what Wired called an “antitrust all-star team.”

“Big Tech critic Tim Wu joins Biden administration to work on competition policy,” boomed CNBC, while Marketwatch added, “Anti-Big Tech crusader reportedly poised to join Biden White House.” Chicago law professor Eric Posner’s piece for Project Syndicate was titled “Antitrust is Back in America.” Posner noted Wu’s appointment comes as Senator Amy Klobuchar has introduced regulatory legislation that ostensibly targets companies like Facebook and Google, which a House committee last year concluded have accrued “monopoly power.”

Wu’s appointment may presage tougher enforcement of tech firms. However, he has other passions that got less ink. Specifically, Wu — who introduced the concept of “net neutrality” and once explained it to Stephen Colbert on a roller coaster — is among the intellectual leaders of a growing movement in Democratic circles to scale back the First Amendment. He wrote an influential September, 2017 article called “Is the First Amendment Obsolete?” that argues traditional speech freedoms need to be rethought in the Internet/Trump era. He outlined the same ideas in a 2018 Aspen Ideas Festival speech:

Listening to Wu, who has not responded to requests for an interview, is confusing. He calls himself a “devotee” of the great Louis Brandeis, speaking with reverence about his ideas and those of other famed judicial speech champions like Learned Hand and Oliver Wendell Holmes. In the Aspen speech above, he went so far as to say about First Amendment protections that “these old opinions are so great, it’s like watching The Godfather, you can’t imagine anything could be better.”

If you hear a “but…” coming in his rhetoric, you guessed right. He does imagine something better. The Cliff’s Notes version of Wu’s thesis:

— The framers wrote the Bill of Rights in an atmosphere where speech was expensive and rare. The Internet made speech cheap, and human attention rare. Speech-hostile societies like Russia and China have already shown how to capitalize on this “cheap speech” era, eschewing censorship and bans in favor of “flooding” the Internet with pro-government propaganda.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Denmark Cracks Down on “Parallel Societies” by Soeren Kern

Posted By on March 23rd, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17197/denmark-parallel-societies

“As a society, for too many years we have not made the necessary demands of newcomers. We have had far too low expectations for the refugees and immigrants who came to Denmark. We have not made sufficiently tangible demands on jobs and self-sufficiency. Therefore, too many immigrants have ended up in prolonged inactivity.” — Danish government report, “Showdown with Parallel Societies.”

The number of residential areas on the government’s most recent “ghetto list,” published in December 2020, has declined by half in three years, from 29 in 2018 to 15 in 2020. The number of “hardened ghettos” has declined from 15 in 2018 to 13 in 2020. Interior and Housing Minister Kaare Dybvad Bek attributed the decline mainly to more people finding employment or pursuing an education.

“As a society, we must step more into character and stick to our Danish values. We must not accept that democracy is replaced with hatred in parallel societies. Radicalization must not be protected. It must be revealed.” — Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen.

The Danish government has announced a package of new proposals aimed at fighting “religious and cultural parallel societies” in Denmark. A cornerstone of the plan includes capping the percentage of “non-Western” immigrants and their descendants dwelling in any given residential neighborhood. The aim is to preserve social cohesion in the country by encouraging integration and discouraging ethnic and social self-segregation.

The announcement comes just days after Denmark approved a new law banning the foreign funding of mosques in the country. The government has also recently declared its intention significantly to limit the number of people seeking asylum in Denmark.

Denmark, which already has some of the most restrictive immigration policies in Europe, is now at the vanguard of European efforts to preserve local traditions and values in the face of mass migration, runaway multiculturalism and the encroachment of political Islam.

The new proposals, announced by Interior and Housing Minister Kaare Dybvad Bek on March 17, are contained in a 15-page report, “Mixed Residential Areas: The Next Step in the Fight Against Parallel Societies.”

A main element of the plan calls for relocating residents of non-Western origin to ensure that, within the next ten years, they do not comprise more than 30% of the total population of any neighborhood or housing area in Denmark.

The plan also calls for phasing out the term “ghetto areas,” which has been criticized as being derogatory, and replacing it with the more politically correct “prevention areas” (forebyggelsesområder) and “transformation areas” (omdannelsesområder).

The term “ghetto,” which refers to areas with high concentrations of immigrants, unemployment and crime, first came into official use in Denmark in 2010 with the release of a government report, “Reinserting Ghettos into Society: A Showdown with Parallel Societies in Denmark.”

MY SAY: Comments turned off

MY SAY: THE POTEMKIN PRESIDENT

Posted By on March 23rd, 2021

Those who chose Donald Trump knew exactly who their candidate was. Those who chose Joseph Biden voted for a carefully scripted Potemkin candidate.

All evidence of his frailty and diminishing cognitive skills was successfully disguised with the excuse of the pandemic.

 He was presented as a healer who would restore civility, and media went into overdrive to burnish his reputation.

The Hunter Biden laptop story which could incriminate the former Vice President in an influence peddling scandal was spiked by mainstream media and all charges of his sexual harassment- more credible than anything leveled against Justice Kavanaugh- were erased.

The Presidency is the toughest and most demanding job in the world. Every second presents crises and challenges in domestic as well as global affairs. Joseph Biden is clearly not up to the job and his choice of Kamala Harris as President in waiting is a dismal and frightening choice.

She was rejected by the Democrat party In December 2019 when her poll numbers tanked. She has neither the skills nor the experience to steer the ship of state. Like Joseph Biden she will be a puppet of the swamp.

The whole thing is a con job and political mugging…. rsk

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Report: White House directs all agencies to refer to ‘Biden-Harris administration’ By Thomas Lifson

Posted By on March 23rd, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/03/report_white_house_directs_all_agencies_to_refer_to_bidenharris_administration.html

It begins. Faster than anyone anticipated.

As Joe Biden falls 3 times in a light breeze boarding Air Force One, the latest sign of dementia he presents, and as his first-ever press conference looms next week, the public is being prepared for a transition of power to Kamala Harris. The gay conservative site Outspoken reports that it has received leaked emails revealing:

…the White House is shifting toward a communication strategy that seeks to elevate Vice President Kamala Harris in all official White House business.

The directive, the employee reports, came from a top White House communications team member and instructs all agencies to refer to the Biden administration as the “Biden-Harris Administration” in place of the “Biden Administration.”

“Please be sure to reference the current administration as the ‘Biden-Harris Administration’ in official public communications,” the directive reads, with “Biden-Harris Administration” accented in bold. (snip)

The subtle move to diminish Biden was also reflected in the official Twitter account for the White House. The description for that account now reads, “Welcome to the Biden-Harris White House!”

Neither of the @WhiteHouse Twitter accounts from the previous two administrations mentioned the vice president in the account’s description. Under the Obama administration, the account description read, “Follow for the latest from President Obama and his administration.”

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Illegal Immigrants to Receive $4.38 Billion in Stimulus Checks: Report BY Charlotte Cuthbertson

Posted By on March 23rd, 2021

https://www.theepochtimes.com/illegal-immigrants-to-receive-4-38-billion-in-stimulus-checks-report_3744122.html?&utm_source=news&utm_

As Americans start to receive the latest round of stimulus checks, a new analysis reveals that about $4.38 billion will also go to illegal immigrants.

The Center for Immigration Studies estimates that 2.65 million illegal immigrants have Social Security numbers that allow them to receive stimulus checks. This group of illegal immigrants can be described as “aliens temporarily present without status,” according to Steven Camarota, director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies.

“These individuals are in the country illegally and could be required to leave. Yet, under the current system, they are still given work authorization and Social Security numbers,” he said.