Will Left’s Violent Tendencies Lead To U.S. Breakup Or Dictatorship?

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/03/16/will-lefts-violent-tendencies-lead-to-u-s-breakup-or-dictatorship/

he Democratic Party’s far-left wing — or is that redundant? — has pursued a relentless gaslighting campaign against conservatives. It goes like this: Pay no attention to the Democrat fringe’s insane violence of the last year, members of the conservative right are the real troglodytes, prone to extreme political savagery. The Big Media, ambling in their own leftist zombie trance, repeat the mantra over and over. Only problem: It’s utterly false

It should be no surprise that it’s actually the left that has violent proclivities. And now, new data clearly back up what we’ve known instinctively.

The numbers come from the 2020 poll of election opinions by the highly respected and widely cited American National Elections Studies (ANES), a joint effort of Stanford University and the University of Michigan. It’s funded by the National Science Foundation, and while it formally began in 1977, its roots and data go all the way back to the 1940s.

So, yeah, “science.”

We found the chart below in a tweet by Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, the renowned Canadian psychologist who has been vilified by the left for not blindly supporting its cultural insanity. The numbers are both enlightening and frightening at the same time.

I Won’t Be Silenced by the Left They twisted what I said about Jan. 6 because they want Americans to forget last summer’s violence and destruction. By Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin)

https://www.wsj.com/articles/i-wont-be-silenced-by-the-left-11615848103?cx_testId=3&cx_testVariant=cx_4&cx_artPos=0#cxrecs_s

Leftists who want to memory hole last summer’s political violence immediately started lecturing me that the 2020 protests were mostly peaceful. Apparently they’ve forgotten that, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, 570 leftist protests became riots last year. Twenty-five people lost their lives and 700 law enforcement officers were injured. Braying about “peaceful protests” offers no comfort to those victims or the other innocent Americans whose homes, businesses and property were destroyed. The same people fail to see the damage they do by pushing a narrative designed to portray the 74 million Americans who voted for Mr. Trump as potential domestic terrorists or armed insurrectionists.

We should all be disgusted at the cynical way antifa and other leftists hide behind the banner of equality—a goal we all share—even as they carry signs calling for an end to America or talk of burning cities down. It was also sadly predictable that liberals would hurl the accusation of racism. This isn’t about race. It’s about riots. The rioters who burned Kenosha weren’t of any one ethnicity; they were united by their radical leftism.

Their politics, together with their taste for violence—so different from the Trump supporters I know personally or the Trump rallies we all saw carried out peacefully—should concern us. There’s a reason why the boarded-up windows in the downtowns of major cities came down soon after Joe Biden won the election: Nobody was worried what Trump supporters would do if their guy lost; they were worried about what Biden supporters would do if their guy didn’t win.

Unfortunately, much of the media have lost any sense of fairness and objectivity. They shed all pretense of being unbiased the moment President Trump won the 2016 election. As a result, approximately half of America simply doesn’t trust the mainstream media or rely on what it reports. An unbiased free press is essential in a democracy, but the censorship of conservative perspectives in today’s cancel culture is antithetical to freedom.

A Different Center Holds in Germany A new center-left emerges as the old center-right sinks.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-different-center-holds-in-germany-11615848274?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

Germany on Sunday fired the starting pistol on this year’s marathon of local and federal elections, with regional votes in two states. The results suggest voters are tiring of political stasis as Angela Merkel’s 16-year run as chancellor nears its end.

The result is a very German shake up, since the governments in the two states that voted won’t change. The left-leaning Green party extended its 10-year hold on Baden-Württemberg with an increased vote share of 32.6% compared to 30.3% in 2016. The center-left Social Democrats (SPD) finished first in Rhineland Palatinate, although with a slightly smaller share of 35.7% from 36.2% five years ago.

The shock is the poor performance of the second-place finisher in each race, Mrs. Merkel’s center-right Christian Democrats (CDU). The party’s share of the vote sank to postwar lows in both states—24.1% in Baden-Württemberg and 27.7% in Rhineland Palatinate. This extends the CDU’s multiyear downward trend as voters grow less enamored with it each time they’re asked to pass judgment. The electoral skepticism includes their Bavarian sister party, the CSU, whose vote share fell by 10 percentage points in 2018 state elections.

This steady ebb of voter confidence is an immediate challenge for Armin Laschet, selected by CDU members in January to be their new party leader and potential candidate to replace Mrs. Merkel in national elections in the autumn. He’s too new on the job to be directly responsible for these local losses. A scandal involving pandemic procurement among some CDU politicians in Berlin didn’t help. Neither did a botched Covid-19 vaccine rollout and escalating political tensions surrounding Mrs. Merkel’s lockdowns.

The whole of the Middle East will pay the price for Biden’s Iran appeasement policy Empowering Iran will come at the expense of not only Saudi Arabia – but at the expense of Iraqis, Lebanese, Syrians and Yemenis by Mohammed Khalid Alyahya

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/saudi-arabia-biden-iran-yemen-houthi-attacks-b1816509.html

Since the Biden administration’s decision to reverse the designation of Yemen’s Houthi militia as a foreign terrorist organisation (FTO) on February 12, drones and ballistic missiles have targeted Saudi Arabia 48 times.

The latest attack, on Saudi oil facilities in Ras Tanura, in Saudi Arabia’s eastern province, on Sunday, did not come from the direction of Yemen, a royal court adviser told the Wall Street Journal; declining to comment on whether the projectile was launched from Iran or from Iraq.

The removal of the Houthis from the US government’s FTO list was meant to reduce tensions, but it achieved the opposite result. At the heart of the Biden administration’s Middle East policy is a fallacy: that the region’s politics should be understood as a contest between Saudi Arabia and Iran, a conflict between two states that is also a sectarian struggle.

Seen from Tehran, the central contest in the region is between the American alliance system and Iran’s self-styled “resistance alliance”.

Biden’s misconception leads to a number of erroneous ideas: that the United States can play a neutral, mediating role between Riyadh and Tehran; that by distancing itself from Saudi Arabia, it creates opportunities for regional stability and understanding; and that it is the Saudi role in Yemen – and not the Iranian role – that has perpetuated the conflict in that country.

Biden’s Malarkey and Malaise Jed Babbin

https://spectator.org/biden-speech-malaise/

Joe Biden’s campaign bus had a sign on it promising “No Malarkey,” but malarkey was a primary feature of his campaign. It’s not entirely correct to say that Biden’s Thursday evening speech was the equivalent of Jimmy Carter’s infamous “malaise” speech, but it was a pretty thick mixture of malaise and malarkey.

Jimmy Carter’s 1979 “malaise” speech was delivered almost 10 years to the day after we put a man on the moon. In those 10 years, we had gone from energy independence to dependence on Middle Eastern oil. Inflation was rampant, political unrest was almost the norm, and we hadn’t yet recovered from losing the Vietnam War. The country was at peace (five months later, Iranians seized American diplomats and held them until Ronald Reagan was inaugurated), but it was stalled, discouraged, and growing poor.

The energy crisis slowed our economy, and Carter’s speech was about why we weren’t able to solve it. He blamed it on a crisis of Americans’ confidence in solving problems. According to Carter, we had a crisis of confidence in our government, the media, ourselves, and the nation. The solutions he proposed had nothing to do with recovering our confidence and had almost no effect on the energy crisis that existed in his day.

Biden’s speech paralleled Carter’s in so many ways that it could have been written by a Carter speechwriter.

Biden began with a dose of falsehood by taking credit for what Trump had done. He bashed Trump — without mentioning his name — for letting the virus spread with months of delays, denials, and silence. That was a a Big Lie. On January 31, after the first few cases of COVID were detected in the U.S., Trump imposed a ban on anyone entering the country who had been in China in the past 14 days. (Biden denigrated that sort of travel ban as “xenophobic.”)

The Greatest Education Battle of Our Lifetimes By Stanley Kurtz

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-greatest-education-battle-of-our-lifetimes/

With last week’s introduction in Congress of the misleadingly named Civics Secures Democracy Act, we are headed toward an epic clash over the spread of uber-controversial pedagogies — Critical Race Theory and Action Civics — to America’s classrooms. I don’t know whether the country will wake up to the danger of this legislation before or after it passes. Sooner or later, however, the truth will out. When it does, the culture war will have merged with K–12 education-policy disputes to a degree never before seen.

Because this new legislation is a backdoor effort to impose a de facto national curriculum in the politically charged subject areas of history and civics, the battle will rage in the states, at the federal level, and between the states and the federal government as well. The Biden administration’s Education Department will almost certainly collaborate in this attempt to develop a set of national incentives, measures, and penalties that effectively force Critical Race Theory and Action Civics onto states and localities. The likelihood of education controversies moving from third-tier to first-tier issues in federal elections has never been greater.

The Republicans who have co-sponsored the “Civics Secures Democracy Act” in the Senate (John Cornyn) and the House (Tom Cole) have been hornswoggled and hogtied into backing legislation that is about as far from conservative as a bill could be. It should be said in extenuation of their decision that the bill is careful to bury its true ends under anodyne jargon. You have to know a lot about Action Civics, for example, to understand that this bill is designed to force it onto the states. Most conservatives don’t even know what Action Civics is, much less understand its misleading jargon. The very term “Action Civics” is a euphemism for political protests for course credit, something close to the opposite of a proper civics course. That’s one reason why the “Civics Secures Democracy Act” is so egregiously misnamed.

‘Woke’ Science Has No Place in Government Policymaking There are two problems with public officials legitimizing “soft science” as the basis for policy making: It often fails to arrive at the right answers and it can undermine public trust. By Andrew I. Fillat and Henry I. Miller

https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/14/woke-science-has-no-place-in-government-policymaking/

“Science, at its core, is a social phenomenon.” This observation, from Alondra Nelson, the newly appointed deputy director of President Biden’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), certainly qualifies for a prominent place in the Pantheon of Inane Statements. The core of science, in fact, is the scientific method—posing and testing hypotheses; carefully gathering, examining, and generating experimental evidence; and finally, synthesizing all the available information into logical conclusions. 

Dr. Nelson’s assertion is inauspicious, but perhaps we should not be too surprised by a “squishy” statement from someone whose undergraduate degree was in sociology, while her doctorate is in “American Studies.” What, we wonder, qualifies her to be deputy director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy? And how does it comport with President Biden’s commitment to always rely on “science and truth.” We suspect it is an example of how lip service to science has invaded the domain of real science. 

“Hard” sciences are a framework for understanding physical, chemical, subatomic, biological, and other natural or even man-made phenomena. The disciplines of physics, chemistry, biology, and especially mathematics, have nothing to do with society as such, because the phenomena they characterize exist independently of humans. Mathematics is typically the language of this framework, whether it is arcane calculus, probability theory, combinatorics, topology, or some other branch well understood by only a very select group. 

The presence of uncertainty or unresolved questions in the hard sciences does not make them soft or diminish their rigor. In fact, scientific findings incorporate statistical uncertainty, but without ascribing motives or a social context. 

As an example of the evolution of science, Newton’s laws of physics were once believed to be immutable. Centuries later, Einstein hypothesized mathematical principles that questioned the validity of certain of Newton’s laws in extreme conditions—seminal speculations that were unusual and daring but amenable to the process of hypothesis and experimentation. In fact, subsequent experiments—the essence of science—have validated most of Einstein’s theories. In other situations, the process is reversed: an experiment produces new or unexpected results, spawning theories to explain them, which then require further testing to validate or disprove them. This is how science works. 

Bjorn Lomborg: Climate change and cancel culture – here’s how left uses fear to push costly, radical policies Yes, climate change is a real problem. However, it is typically vastly exaggerated

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/climate-change-fear-guilt-panic-policies-bjorn-lomborg

Across the world, politicians are now promising climate policies costing tens of trillions of dollars – money we don’t have and resources that are desperately needed elsewhere.

Yet, climate campaigners tell us, if we don’t spend everything on climate now, nothing else matters, because climate change threatens our very civilization. As President Biden says: climate change is “an existential threat”.

Yes, climate change is a real problem. However, it is typically vastly exaggerated, and the resulting alarmism is exploited to justify the wasteful spending of trillions.

Pointing this out will get you canceled. I should know, because I have personally been on the receiving end of this climate alarmism enforcement for years. I was recently scheduled to give a public lecture at Duke University when a group of climate-politicized professors – some who write for the UN Climate Panel – publicly asked Duke to cancel my appearance.

One of my presentation points was highlighting the latest full U.N. Climate Panel report that estimates the total cost of climate change. They found that unmitigated climate change in half a century will reduce general welfare equivalent to lowering each person’s income by between 0.2 and 2%.

Given that the U.N. expects each person on the planet to be much better off – 363% as wealthy as today – climate might cause us to only be 356% as rich by then. That is a problem, but certainly not the end of the world.

Why don’t most people know this? Because stories of catastrophe and human guilt garner more clicks and are better for weaponizing political arguments. Unfortunately, we’re unlikely to make good decisions if we’re panicked. 

Open Borders: An Assault on Common Sense By Frank Miele

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/03/15/open_borders_an_assault_on_common_sense_145399.html

“Instead of Trump’s “America First” policy, we now have a federal government that intends to take responsibility for the “hopes and dreams” of foreign nationals. Not just that, but to do so while undermining Americans.”

“We hold these truths to be self-evident…”

So begins one of the most pivotal pronouncements in the advancement of human liberty. With those words, Thomas Jefferson threw down a gauntlet at the feet of not just the king of England, but also at Parliament and the entire entrenched elite who, up until then, had reserved power unto themselves by dint of their education, upbringing and wealth.

No more, Jefferson insisted. By declaring the truths of equality and of unalienable rights to be “self-evident,” Jefferson freed the common people from the yoke of oppression they had too long labored under — including the oppression of being told what to think by their “betters.”

This, in sum, is the genius of American democracy, that it was based on “Common Sense,” not just the pamphlet by Thomas Paine but the very concept itself. The American people had discovered that they were well enough equipped by their Creator to take on any task, meet any challenge, confront any oppressor. They could think for themselves. That was the key.

Because Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers gave voice to this revolutionary idea, they were granted authority by the people to conduct a Revolutionary War, deriving (as the Declaration of Independence would have it) their powers “from the consent of the governed.”

It is that same consent which has been the foundation of our democracy for the past 245 years, but it must not be taken for granted. Jefferson posited that “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

The Legends of Our Fall The left-wing postmodern idea of “truth” as a mere pick-and-choose official narrative is now normal. Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/14/the-legends-of-our-fall/

“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend. ”
— Carleton Young in “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”

Many politicians at one point or another live by lies—if they can get away with them. 

Our supposed sentinels, the media—self-defined as independent, cynical, and skeptical journalists—are supposed to separate political fictions from truth.  

Legends As Facts 

Of course, sometimes they used to do that—if only selectively. There were Communist sympathizers in the Roosevelt Administration and holdovers in the 1950s deep state. But the Red Peril was not always what the demagogic Joe McCarthy claimed when shaking his lengthy, indiscriminate “lists” of “commie” names and crimes.  

Once U.S. Army counsel Joseph Welch, Edward R. Murrow, and assorted journalists began to demand proof of all of McCarthy’s charges, his public following dissipated.  

The George W. Bush Administration in its case to remove Saddam Hussein unwisely ignored all the 23 bipartisan writs authorizing the use of the force by the Congress. Instead, it rhetorically bundled all congressional authorizations into one case against Saddam Hussein: the existential threat of huge Iraqi stockpiles of deliverable “weapons of mass destruction.”  

After Saddam’s removal, U.S. forces did not find depots of poisonous and nerve gases. Whether they were nonexistent, or moved stealthily to border dictatorships like Syria or even Iran, or were destroyed no one knew. The public only remembered the government assurance that WMDs, the popular justification for the preemptive invasion, would be there upon U.S. arrival—a narrative that the media originally did not question and then later swore that it always had been skeptical as it led the cheer: “Bush lied, people died.”

 Noble Lies