CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

On China, Biden Is an Empty Suit We desperately need to beef up our China policy. by Steve Postal

Posted By on March 22nd, 2021

https://spectator.org/category/politics/asia/

The Biden administration continues to show itself to be an empty suit on foreign policy. In the wake of the crisis, er, challenges on the southern border, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez called Biden “the migrant president.” After President Biden confirmed in an interview that yes, Russian President Vladimir Putin is a “killer,” Putin wished Biden good health and challenged Biden to a “basically live … open, direct discussion.”

Add China to the list of countries making us a laughingstock. The opening remarks of last week’s meeting between the Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan with China’s foreign policy chief Yang Jiechi and State Councilor Wang Yi in Alaska clearly reveal that the Biden administration lacks a credible, substantive China policy. There were several key takeaways from that meeting.

China does not believe the Biden administration will ever confront China, because Biden told them so.

Director Yang revealed that China is not at all threatened by the Biden administration, as “during the phone call between the presidents [of China and the United States], President Biden himself also talked about the importance of having no conflict or confrontation between our two countries.” Add to this President Biden’s past remarks seeming to sanitize the CCP’s genocide against the Uyghurs as a Chinese “cultural … norm,” the Biden administration has not given the CCP a reason to expect a hands-on approach from the United States.

The Biden team speaks of allies, but has no plan to leverage those allies.

Secretary Blinken was quick to mention that he had visited Japan and South Korea and that our two allies were “very interested in the discussions” that the U.S. and China are having, but he failed to articulate any policy from our alliances that would counter CCP aggression.

In response to what were essentially empty words from Team USA, the Chinese delegation discussed Japan and South Korea much more substantively. Director Yang replied,

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Yes, There Is A Border Crisis, And Democrats Created It Even when he was a presidential candidate, Joe Biden promised the United States would accept all asylum seekers, although U.S. asylum has been studded with fraud and abuse for a long time. By Helen Raleigh

Posted By on March 22nd, 2021

https://thefederalist.com/2021/03/22/yes-there-is-a-border-crisis-and-democrats-created-it/

Although the Biden administration is attempting to deny and shift blame for the border crisis, its actions speak louder than words. A week ago, it had to send the Federal Emergency Management Agency to the southern border to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection bring illegal immigrants into the United States.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., wasted little time blaming former U.S. President Trump for passing a broken immigration system to the current administration. However, it is President Biden’s immigration policies as well as Democrats’ ill-conceived immigration proposals that are responsible for today’s border crisis.

Even when he was a presidential candidate, Biden promised the United States would accept all asylum seekers, although U.S. asylum has been studded with fraud and abuse for a long time. As soon as he was sworn into office, President Biden signed three executive orders to undo the previous administration’s strong immigration law enforcement.

De Facto Open Borders from Day One

One such policy was the Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico” protocol, which made asylum seekers wait in Mexico for U.S. immigration courts to hear their asylum petitions. One of Biden’s executive orders ended this Trump policy, and the United States has admitted asylum seekers into the country since then, regardless of their petitions’ credibility.

These asylum seekers can start working in the United States immediately while waiting for their court hearings. Due to backlogs in U.S. immigration courts, sometimes the wait is longer than a decade. Since many of the asylum seekers are actually economic migrants, the long wait doesn’t bother them because it helps them achieve their goal of working in the United States.

Many asylum seekers don’t ever bother to show up at their immigration hearings. This problem has been around for a long time and the Trump policy, imperfect as it was, was the first serious attempt to address it.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

China Calling for Civilizational War Against America and the West by Gordon G. Chang

Posted By on March 22nd, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17196/china-civilizational-war

“Gunpowder” is one of those words Beijing uses when it wants others to know war is on its mind. The term is, more worryingly, also especially emotion-packed, a word Chinese propagandists use when they want to rile mainland Chinese audiences…. China’s Communist Party, therefore, is now trying to whip up nationalist sentiment, rallying the Chinese people, perhaps readying them for war.

More fundamentally, Beijing is… trying to divide the world along racial lines and form a global anti-white coalition….

Deng Xiaoping, Mao’s mostly pragmatic successor, counseled China to “hide capabilities, bide time.” Xi, however, believes China’s time has come in part because, he feels, America is in terminal decline.

Xi is serious. In January, he told his fast-expanding military it must be ready to fight “at any second.” That month, the Party’s Central Military Commission took from the civilian State Council the power to mobilize all of society for war. Militant states rarely prepare for conflict and then back down.

There was a “strong smell of gunpowder” when American and Chinese diplomats met in Anchorage beginning March 18. That’s according to Zhao Lijian of China’s foreign ministry, speaking just hours after the first day of U.S.-China talks concluded.

“Gunpowder” is one of those words Beijing uses when it wants others to know war is on its mind.

The term is, more worryingly, also especially emotion-packed, a word Chinese propagandists use when they want to rile mainland Chinese audiences by reminding them of foreign — British and white — exploitation of China in the Opium War period of the 19th century. China’s Communist Party, therefore, is now trying to whip up nationalist sentiment, rallying the Chinese people, perhaps readying them for war.

More fundamentally, Beijing is, with the gunpowder reference and others, trying to divide the world along racial lines and form a global anti-white coalition.

There was more than just a whiff of gunpowder in Alaska. The foreign ministry’s Zhao blamed the U.S. side for exceeding the agreed time limit for opening remarks from Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan. Blinken and Sullivan overran their allotted four minutes by… 44 seconds.

The Party’s Global Times called the two presentations “seriously overtime.” The foreign ministry’s Zhao said the overrun prompted the Chinese side to launch into its two presentations, which lasted 20 minutes and 23 seconds, well over their allotted four minutes.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Beheading Children in Mozambique by Judith Bergman

Posted By on March 22nd, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17194/mozambique-beheading-children

“I was at home with my four children,” one mother told Save the Children. “We tried to escape to the woods, but they took my eldest son and beheaded him. We couldn’t do anything because we would be killed too.” — Telegraph, March 13, 2021.

The jihadists are known in the area as al-Shabaab, but unlike the al-Shabaab that operates in Somalia, which is affiliated with Al Qaeda, the Mozambique group, also known as Ansar al-Sunna, is affiliated with Islamic State (ISIS).

The terrorist insurgency threatens not only Mozambique and its people, in addition to neighboring Tanzania, which is fighting jihadists on the border; some analysts estimate that “the insurgency in Mozambique has the potential to destabilise Southern Africa and embolden Islamists throughout the region.”

Al-Shabaab… made a far more significant breakthrough in August 2020, when the group seized a key port in the province, Mocimboa da Praia, near the country’s burgeoning natural gas field developments…. The gas field developments…. are worth an estimated $60 billion….

Al-Shabaab jihadists leading an insurgency in Cabo Delgado, the northernmost province of Mozambique, are now beheading children as young as 11. Military and humanitarian personnel working in the area reportedly say that they have never seen anything like the brutality that the terrorists have unleashed on the region with people “often hacked to death and mutilated with machetes” as well as “mass Islamic State-style beheadings”.

“That night our village was attacked and houses were burned. When it all started, I was at home with my four children,” one mother told Save the Children. “We tried to escape to the woods, but they took my eldest son and beheaded him. We couldn’t do anything because we would be killed too.”

“After my 11-year-old son was killed, we understood that it was no longer safe to stay in my village,” said another mother, who was forced to flee with her remaining three children. “We fled to my father’s house in another village, but a few days later the attacks started there too.”

“I saw my daughter trying to run to the boat with two other children. The people from al-Shabab chased them. They took my daughter and many others. Then they set fire to our village,” said Fatima Abdul, a 43-year-old woman who fled and is now homeless, living on a beach.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Leftist Media Bias Is a Threat to Democracy, Judge Warns in Scathing Dissent By Tyler O’Neil

Posted By on March 22nd, 2021

https://pjmedia.com/uncategorized/tyler-o-neil/2021/03/21/leftist-media-bias-is-a-threat-to-democracy-judge-warns-in-scathing-dissent-n1433938?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=onsite&utm_campaign=582

Laurence Silberman, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, urged the Supreme Court to overturn the key defamation precedent New York Times v. Sullivan (1964), in part because the legacy media has become a threat to American Democracy. Silberman dissented from a court panel’s majority opinion in Tah and McClain v. Global Witness (2021), which ruled that Global Witness did not violate defamation law in falsely accusing Liberian officials of taking bribes from Exxon.

Silberman (a Reagan appointee) argued that the NGO Global Witness had clearly defamed the Nigerian officials by accusing them of taking bribes from Exxon when in reality the officials had only received bonuses from their employer, the National Oil Company. Silberman accused his fellow judges, Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan (an Obama appointee) and Judge David Tatel (a Clinton appointee), of “employing legal jiu-jitsu,” creating new arguments to get Global Witness off the hook for defamation.

“In the revisionist view, the National Oil Company bribed its own agents and employees to do their jobs. Tellingly, the Majority offers no motive for a bribe,” Silberman argued. “After observing my colleagues’ efforts to stretch the actual malice rule like a rubber band, I am prompted to urge the overruling of New York Times v. Sullivan.”

Defamed MAGA Hat Covington Boy Finally Wrestles Money Out of The Washington Post

Citing Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Silberman argued that New York Times “was a policy-driven decision masquerading as constitutional law. The holding has no relation to the text, history, or structure of the Constitution, and it baldly constitutionalized an area of law refined over centuries of common law adjudication.”

Silberman admitted that in 1964, the press may have needed the protection of New York Times v. Sullivan in order to cover the civil rights movement in a hostile and racially segregated South, but he argued “that power is now abused.”

“The increased power of the press is so dangerous today because we are very close to one-party control of these institutions,” Silberman warned. “Our court was once concerned about the institutional consolidation of the press leading to a ‘bland and homogenous’ marketplace of ideas. It turns out that ideological consolidation of the press (helped along by economic consolidation) is the far greater threat.”

“Although the bias against the Republican Party—not just controversial individuals—is rather shocking today, this is not new; it is a long-term, secular trend going back at least to the ’70s. (I do not mean to defend or criticize the behavior of any particular politician). Two of the three most influential papers (at least historically), The New York Times and The Washington Post, are virtually Democratic Party broadsheets. And the news section of The Wall Street Journal leans in the same direction,” Silberman noted. He added that these papers set the “orientation” of coverage for the Associated Press and most large papers across the country.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Follow The ‘Science,’ They Said As a general rule, the next time an official, a politician, or an expert lectures us on the “science,” make sure that he is not projecting his own unscientific biases onto others. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on March 22nd, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/21/follow-the-science-they-said/

Throughout the Trump years and in particular during the 2020 COVID pandemic crisis, the nation was lectured by the Left “to follow the data,” as the Democrats proclaimed themselves the “party of science.” As sober and judicious children of the enlightenment, they alone offered the necessary disinterested correctives to Trump’s supposed bluster and exaggeration—and to his anti-scientific deplorable following (often dismissed by Biden as dregs, chumps, and Neanderthals).

In truth, leftists and Democrats have become the purveyors of superstition. Their creation of a fantasy world is not because they do not believe in science per se, but because they believe more in the primacy of ideology that should shape and warp science in the proper fashion for the greater good. What prompted Paul Ehrlich, Al Gore, or Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) hysterically and wrongly to forecast widespread demographic or climatological catastrophe in just a few years was not ignorance of science per se, but a desire to massage science for our own good.

The Godheads of COVID-19

The medical pandemic godhead of the Left has been octogenarian Dr. Anthony Fauci. His twin chief public relations explainer has been liberal darling New York governor Andrew Cuomo. Both were always supposed to be on top of “the science.” 

Dr. Fauci has not just been flat-out wrong on the science of COVID—in his assessments of the origins and possible dangers of COVID-19, of when we can get back to normal, of when the vaccinations would appear, and of which particular governors have been doing the most or least effective management of the disease. He has also, by his own admission, deliberately lied. 

BOOKS, ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Patrick Moore and the Agenda of Fear By Janet Levy

Posted By on March 22nd, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/03/patrick_moore_and_the_agenda_of_fear.html

Politically motivated climate alarmists are using fear to gain control of human behavior and environmental resources and undermine free, prosperous societies. Dr. Patrick Moore, an ecologist and disillusioned cofounder of Greenpeace, exposes their agendas and false claims in his recent book Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom.

As a young scientist, Moore was committed to promoting conservation — the responsible use of the earth’s resources — and participated in Greenpeace’s initial campaigns against underground H-bomb testing, whale hunting, and polar bear culling. The disillusionment was gradual. Face to face with activists ostensibly seeking a balance between environmental, social, and economic priorities (“sustainable development”), he was struck by how the then-nascent concept took no consideration of any impact on humankind, and also by how it fiercely inculpated normal human activity. He parted ways with Greenpeace when it promoted “sustainable development” with a fear-mongering, anti-science, anti-human ideology designed to maximize fundraising. In a previous book, Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist, he explains how the coup de grace came over Greenpeace’s fight for a ban on chlorine. Moore views chlorination of water as the biggest advance in public health.

His latest book gives example after example to demonstrate that the “climate crisis” is fake news driven more by ideology than real science. He demolishes fallacious doomsday prophesies one by one. A chief characteristic of these scares is that they conveniently use data related to invisible (CO2, radiation) or remote (coral reefs, polar bears, walruses) entities that average citizens cannot validate through independent observation. For explication, the public is forced to rely on activists, the media, scientists, and politicians — all of whom have huge financial or professional stakes in propping up dubious catastrophic scenarios.

EDUCATION, ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Lie of Israelis Being the New Nazis Exposing the grotesque and evil campaign of nazifying Israelis. Richard L. Cravatts

Posted By on March 22nd, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/lie-israelis-being-new-nazis-part-ii-richard-l-cravatts/

Editor’s note: Below is Part 2 in this author’s 2-Part Series on ‘Lies in the Cognitive War Against Israel’. See Part 1: HERE.]

When SJP activists and their invited speakers demonstrate against Israel, their speech and literature is peppered with allegations about Israel’s alleged “crimes against humanity, “massacres,” genocide,” and, echoing comments by Turkey’s prime minister Tayyip Erdoğan, in their treatment of the Palestinians, Israel has demonstrated that “. . . their barbarism has surpassed even Hitler’s.”

The Nazification of Israelis—and by extension Jews—is both breathtaking in its moral inversion and cruel in the way it makes the actual victims of the Third Reich’s horrors a modern-day reincarnation of that same barbarity, at once ahistorical, disingenuous, and grotesque in its moral and factual inaccuracy.

What is the purpose of this grotesque campaign to transmogrify the Jewish state into the Third Reich? The insidious answer is that once Israel has been tarred with the libels of racism and Nazism, the Jewish state has been made an international outlaw, a pariah, losing its moral right to even exist—exactly, of course, what its foes have consistently sought.  

What is more troubling is that the characterization of the Israeli as Nazi is a trope now promulgated by Western elites and so-called intellectuals, including a broad contingent of academics who are complicit in, and in fact intellectual enablers of, the campaign to defame Israel by Nazifying its people and accusing Jews again as being the world’s moral and existential enemies as demonstrated by their oppression and brutality toward the ‘long-suffering Palestinians’. Thus, campus anti-Israel hate-fests sponsored by radical student groups have such repellant names as “Holocaust in the Holy Land,” “Israel: The Politics of Genocide,” or “Israel: The Fourth Reich,” creating a clear, though mendacious, linkage between Nazism and Zionism—clear examples of both Holocaust minimization and inversion and both contemporary versions of anti-Semitic thought and expression.

That same trope is repeated and reinforced by other academics, such as Richard Falk, professor emeritus of International Law and Policy at Princeton University and the UN’s former, preposterously-titled “Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967,” who wondered aloud if it was “an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity?” on the part of Israel, and then quickly answered his own question by saying, “I think not.”

At Columbia University’s department of Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS), Joseph Massad, an associate professor of modern Arab politics, as another example, never misses an opportunity to denigrate the Jewish state as a racist, colonial enterprise, a moral stain on the world without any semblance of legitimacy, and Israelis, as he never tires of mentioning, have become the new Nazis and the Palestinians the new Jews. “As Palestinians are murdered and injured in the thousands,” he wrote after Operation Cast Lead when Israel was defending itself against some relentless rockets attacks from Gaza into civilian neighborhoods, “world powers are cheering on . . , and it even happened during World War II as the Nazi genocide was proceeding.”

HUMOR AND SATIRE Comments turned off

Biden Dazzles in First State of the Union Address “Clap for that, you stupid bastards.” Lloyd Billingsley

Posted By on March 22nd, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/biden-dazzles-first-state-union-speech-lloyd-billingsley/

Below is a transcript of Joe Biden’s first State of the Union Address:

President Obama, President Harris, Madame Speaker, members of Congress, the senator who was a Mormon, General. . . the guy who runs that outfit, Dr. Anthony Fauci, CEOs Zuckerberg, Dorsey and Bezos, his highness Bill Gates, and fellow Americans — I speak tonight on the state of the union and guess what, here’s the deal:

First, I want to recognize all those who took part in the most extensive system of voter fraud in American history. Without your hard work and dedication, Joe Biden would not be where he is today.

I also recognize those who entered the United States illegally because they are already Americans. So it’s only right that you vote in our elections. You will be needed in 2022 and 2024, so despite the pandemic, I will bring many more of you into the United States, so our nation is more unified with yours.

Any disunity in America is all due to Donald Trump, who put up a wall to keep you out. African Americans who voted for Trump should understand that, guess what, you ain’t black. Sorry, that’s just the way it is and I choose this truth over facts. Be sure and get it right next time, and remember, poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.

Trump took us out of the World Health Organization, so I restored the ties, and the funding. The USA is now more unified with the WHO and its great leader Tedros. As I recognize, the WHO always knows what is best for the United States and all the nations of the world. Just kind of a simple thing.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Biden Intel Report Reboots Russia Hoax to Censor Hunter Corruption Stories Denigrating Biden is a national security threat. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on March 22nd, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/biden-intel-report-reboots-russia-hoax-censor-daniel-greenfield/

Democrats never give up beating a dead horse until it’s lying in pieces in the gutter. Senate Democrats are back to demanding that the FBI investigate Justice Kavanaugh’s high school years, and the Biden admin is rebooting the Russia hoax to protect Hunter and the Big Guy.

Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines presided over the release of the latest report, which claims to offer an intelligence analysis, but reads like a synthesis of Biden campaign talking points, right down to its absurd insistence that, Putin was helping Trump because he “probably also considers President Biden more apt to echo the idea of American Exceptionalism.”

Finally we’re getting an intel product that makes the Steele dossier seem credible.

The intelligence analysis also claims that the Hunter Biden thing is a Russian smear and that while the Russians tried to interfere in the election, nothing they did changed the outcome.

That’s convenient. Really convenient.

But Haines isn’t an intelligence professional. She’s an Obama lawyer who was brought in to politicise intelligence at the CIA and then as a legal adviser to the National Security Council.

“To safeguard the integrity of our intelligence community, the DNI must insist that, when it comes to intelligence, there is simply no place for politics ever,” Haines had told the Senate.

But that was her confirmation hearing. This is the reality of the job that she was picked to do.

“Foreign Threats to the 2020 US Federal Elections” is a stew of Democrat leftover talking points which never veers from its political agenda even if the result is self-contradictory gibberish.

The report’s first judgement insists that no “technical aspect of the voting process” was altered, while its second judgement contends that Putin authorized “influence operations aimed at denigrating President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party, supporting President Trump”, but then backtracks to clarify that “unlike in 2016, we did not see persistent Russian cyber efforts to gain access to election infrastructure.”

If Putin wanted President Trump to win and Biden to lose, why didn’t he hack the election? If he could do it in 2016, why couldn’t he do it in 2020? Did he develop carpal tunnel syndrome?