NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Black Lives Matter, Antifa March Through DC, Chant ‘Burn It Down’ By Jack Phillips

Posted By on February 7th, 2021

https://www.theepochtimes.com/black-lives-matter-antifa-march-through-dc-chant-burn-it-down_3688149.html

Black Lives Matter protesters and Antifa agitators marched through Washington D.C. on Saturday and threatened people as they ate dinner, according to video footage and reports.

“Burn it down” is what the demonstrators said. “We are here tonight because black lives matter,” members of the far-left group also said. “Despite black lives mattering, black people are still dying at the hands of the police paid for by our tax dollars.”

Other video footage uploaded by independent journalists on the scene showed Antifa types fighting with police officers, who were trying to keep them away from restaurants. Some, who were clad in all black, could be seen holding the red-and-black Antifa flag.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

A New ‘War on Terror’ on Americans Lee Smith Lee Smith

Posted By on February 7th, 2021

https://www.theepochtimes.com/a-new-war-on-terror-on-americans_3685342.html

The campaign to define supporters of opposition leader Donald Trump as “domestic terrorists” took a new turn this week when a center-right publication argued that American citizens should be treated like the Islamic extremists responsible for the 2001 World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. “We defeated al Qaeda and can do the same to the fascist thugs who attacked our democracy last month,” former CIA officer Kevin Carroll wrote in the Washington Examiner. “But only if we take similar hard measures against the enemy within.”

The Jan. 6 protest, which saw sporadic violence, has been used by left-wing media organizations, segments of the national security establishment, and other Democratic Party institutions as a pretext to send federal law enforcement after the more than 74 million Americans who did not vote for Joe Biden. The ghoulish campaign is nakedly partisan, or the same institutions would have pushed to define as domestic terror groups the Black Lives Matter and Antifa networks responsible for the spring and summer’s nationwide George Floyd riots that led to hundreds of felonies, including arson, theft, assault, and murder. But those two organizations are aligned with parts of the Democratic Party. BLM, according to its own website, is a Democratic Party fundraising mechanism.

That’s where the Washington Examiner comes in: By reinforcing from the right the false narrative about the events of Jan. 6, the conservative publication legitimized the Democratic Party’s campaign to use law enforcement to target the right.

Carroll is a former CIA officer and affiliated with the Lincoln Project, the anti-Trump organization whose co-founder reportedly attempted to groom underage boys for sex. Among other methods that might be used to break Americans, Carroll recommends: bringing “the heaviest felony charges possible on as many participants” in the Jan. 6 protests; using internet chatrooms to entrap American citizens; and compelling fire and police departments to require loyalty oaths of their employees. “We ruthlessly hunted down foreign terrorists after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks,” argues Carroll, “and must do the same to their domestic equivalents.”

BOOKS, MEDIA Comments turned off

New tell-all book by network TV news producer exposes disgusting private behavior of many lefty ‘talented TV a–holes’ By Thomas Lifson

Posted By on February 7th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/02/new_tellall_book_by_network_tv_news_producer_exposes_disgusting_private_behavior_of_many_lefty_talented_tv_aholes.html

It turns out that lots of AT readers and I despise a number of lefty TV news readers for excellent reasons beyond their bias. Mike and Chris Wallace, Diane Sawyer, Chris Cuomo, Katie Couric, and others are exposed for being miserable human beings in the new memoir by former 60 Minutes and ABC News producer Ira Rosen, titled, Ticking Clock: Behind the Scenes at 60 Minutes. Mary Kay Linge, writing in the New York Post, dishes a lot of gossip taken from the book, which is due out on February 16. From what she excerpts, the biggest a-hole sounds like Mike Wallace, but that may be a function of the years author Ira Rosen spent working as a producer at 60 Minutes. Here are some highlights, but if your taste runs to reveling in evidence that your disgust at certain TV figures is abundantly justified, read the whole thing. One of the least acceptable but common abuses of the rich and famous media divas is their tendency to indulge in tantrums toward their less powerful underlings. After a guest unexpectedly cancelled a pending interview with the senior Wallace, Rosen recounts that Wallace flew into a rage while being driven in.

“Mike went crazy,” Rosen writes, grabbing fistfuls of documents from Maraynes’ [another 60 Minutes producer] briefcase and hurling them into his face as he struggled to keep the vehicle on the road. 

“Wallace cursed Allan, told him that he was a failure as a producer, and that he would be demoted as soon as we returned to New York. It was the most astonishing verbal abuse I had ever witnessed.” 

 Before #MeToo, misbehavior toward females was pretty much standard operating procedure.

MEDIA Comments turned off

No, really, why did Fox fire Lou Dobbs?

Posted By on February 7th, 2021

https://hotair.com/archives/allahpundit/2021/02/06/no-really-fox-fire-lou-dobbs/

“Lou Dobbs retweets attacks on Fox News. “Fox is Finished.” “Fox is in a race with itself to the bottom.”

Cashiering the most ardently pro-Trump host on American television makes no sense in that context. If anything, you would think they’d have wanted Dobbs to do an extra hour of “greatest president ever” propaganda every night — or even switch him over from Fox Business to MacCallum’s old slot on Fox News. Remember, Dobbs isn’t just a star of Trumpist media, he’s so tight with the former president that Trump reportedly would patch him through on speakerphone during White House meetings to offer his take. “John Kelly once told me that he learned to watch Lou Dobbs to understand what the president might think or say about a topic,” said WaPo reporter Josh Dawsey this morning.

You don’t shed a guy like that lightly. Even Fox Business staffers were surprised by his cancellation, according to the Post.

The universal suspicion is that Fox dropped the hammer in response to the defamation suit Smartmatic filed against Fox and Dobbs on Thursday, but that doesn’t fully add up. If Fox were in the process of dumping all of its anchors who’d entertained theories about Smartmatic’s machines being rigged, Jeanine Pirro and Maria Bartiromo would be gone too. In reality, Bartiromo is getting a tryout in MacCallum’s former 7 p.m. slot on FNC and Pirro just launched a new show (about castles in America, of all things) on Fox’s streaming platform. Fox doesn’t seem poised to dump either of them; on the contrary, it’s giving them more work.

Plus, as a matter of basic PR, it would look exceptionally weak for Fox to flush Dobbs within 24 hours of Smartmatic’s suit being filed. As John said, it feels like an admission of wrongdoing in context: “The bad man did a little slander, fine, but we’ve gotten rid of him now so we shouldn’t have to pay.”

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Are you ready for the climate lockdowns? It’s only a matter of time by Stephen L. Miller

Posted By on February 7th, 2021

https://spectator.us/topic/ready-climate-lockdowns-environment/?utm_source=Spectator+USA+Email+Signup&utm_campaign=

Last week President Biden signed an executive order to rejoin the Paris Climate Accords. This was a mostly symbolic gesture, as the same alarmism being pushed prior to the agreement in 2016 is still being pushed now while nation-states like China are still ignoring it. Now Biden administration climate envoy John Kerry, under fire for boarding a private jet to Iceland to accept a climate award, is telling the United States and the world that the conditions of the Paris agreement are ‘inadequate’.

As the global climate elite push eating bugs and staying home to save the Earth on the masses, it’s worth posing the question: what will be adequate? With the Global Economic Forum in Davos approaching in April, we’re going to start hearing terms such ‘Climate Equity’ and ‘Climate Reset’ (a play on the WEF’s Great Reset) more frequently. We’ll probably also start to hear calls for climate lockdowns. I know, right now that sounds completely preposterous, but don’t these kooky ideas always find a way to bleed into the mainstream? Fifteen Days to Slow the Sun!

The possibility of climate lockdowns is already being floated by some of our greatest thinkers. They see a confluence of global crises as an opportunity. The perfect storm caused by COVID-19 and the resulting global economic meltdown offers a chance to take what they see as bold and dramatic action to save the planet. The Biden administration will certainly use the consequences of COVID to push through some green legislation, but just as before, it will not be enough in the eyes of progressives. There must always be more.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

These Interesting Times Roger Kimball

Posted By on February 7th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/06/these-interesting-times/

From a torrent of executive orders to federal law enforcement agents acting like East Germans, the satirists are having a hard time keeping up.

I am told the exhortation “May you live in interesting times” is not really an old Chinese curse. But it might as well be. If you’ve noticed a new spring in Xi Jinping’s step lately, it’s because he sees all the slots coming up roses for China. Europe’s cozying up nicely. And the ascension of his preferred candidate, Joe Biden, to the U.S. presidency has him rubbing his hands together in glee. It is, as Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) noted, a dangerous eventuality. 

There’s a lot to be said about China’s rampant expansion. It seems to be the one country really to have prospered through—or maybe because of—the Wuhan Flu, a term Joe Biden doesn’t want us to use. But that’s where the virus started and it wouldn’t do to call Ebola “Ebola,” a tributary of the Congo River, and not name this impressive Chinese export after the city that’s home to the level-4 military biological research lab where it escaped or, just possibly, was pushed. 

But I digress. What I really wanted to talk about were these interesting times we are living in. 

A lot has changed in just a couple of months. The Wuhan Flu, or, rather, our heavy-handed response to it, is part of that story. As I have observed on multiple occasions, the panic and hysteria over this new respiratory virus, carefully and assiduously fanned by the Big Nurse health industry, aided and abetted by politicians and bureaucrats drunk with power, should someday provide a new chapter for Charles Mackay’s classic Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. The chief irony about the entire episode is that the petty tyrants screaming at people to wear masks—or two or three masks—and to quiver under their beds alone at home, do so while invoking “science,” as if the “science were settled” about how best to deal with this new cold virus that is highly contagious but deadly to a tiny portion of the population. And just try pointing out contrary evidence that challenges the Narrative and bang!—instant cancellation. 

But I still digress. Joe Biden may have woken up in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue because The Swamp rigged the election for him (even Time magazine admits that now), he may be in a sad state of cognitive decline, but he is surrounded by people who are panting eagerly to install the woke, politically correct oligarchy that they had to shelve in 2016 when Donald Trump unaccountably won the presidency. Hillary Clinton would have done a lot of what is being done now in Sleepy Joe’s name had she managed to do then what Biden’s handlers, with the conspicuous help of the media, social and the other sort, not to mention an increasingly woke corporate America, did this time around. We would have had the climate hysteria, the obeisance to China, the attack on the American energy industry, the erosion of America’s southern border, and various other globalist, America-last policies. 

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Will the Trump Successes in the Middle East Survive? by Guy Millière

Posted By on February 7th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17032/trump-successes-middle-east

The Abraham Accords — between Israel, the UAE and Bahrain — will lead to billions of dollars of investment and trade between Israel and its partners in peace. The Accords will also allow the Emirates and Bahrain to benefit from Israeli technology, and see their defense strengthened against Iran.

Sudan, freshly removed from the list of terrorist states, now has help from Israel, one of the world-leaders in agricultural technologies, and will be able to improve its food production.

President Trump added to the agreement the recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara, a territory claimed by a guerrilla group supported by Algeria and more recently by the Islamic Republic of Iran and Hezbollah. President Trump’s decision strengthens Morocco, an ally of the United States, and refuses to reward enemies of the United States.

Saudi Arabia’s educational curricula are being modified in a direction of tolerance and all traces of anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli statements have been removed. The religious discourse in the country is also changing…. Saudi Arabia’s Grand Mufti, now says that religion should be spread through words, not through the sword….Saudi Arabia is… moving in an extremely promising direction. Let us hope that outside forces do not thwart it.

The outline of a more stable Middle East, less marked by war, appears to be taking shape – if other countries will just let it. The mullahs’ regime, no longer a major nuisance, seems on the road to asphyxiation. Let us hope that process is not thwarted, either.

The new Biden administration, in under two weeks, is already threatening to undermine these and other victories. It had indicated…that it would like to return to the catastrophic nuclear “Iran deal”…. [New] conditions seem to boil down to a demand that Iran respect the terms of the JCPOA, which Iran has, in fact, never respected. Evidently perceiving an American wishing to appease it, the mullahs announced on January 4 that they had decided to resume enriching uranium to the 20% level, close to the purity used for nuclear weapons. The same day, the mullahs seized a South Korean-flagged chemical tanker in the Strait of Hormuz.

The Biden administration also seems eager to restore U.S. aid to the Palestinian Authority and reconnect with its leaders — without talking to them about their support for terrorism, treating them again, as “partners for peace”, no matter how much evidence there is to the contrary, and attempting to move toward renewed support yet again for a potentially lethal “two-state solution”.

Presumably Iran can only want to weaken the agreements between Israel, Bahrain, the Emirates, Morocco and Sudan.

MEDIA Comments turned off

The New York Times’ Internal Mob Takes Down Another of Its Own By Charles C. W. Cooke

Posted By on February 7th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-new-york-timess-internal-mob-takes-down-another-of-its-own/?utm_source=recirc-%5BSCREENSIZE%5D&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=second

Earlier this week, I wrote at length about the growing tide of illiberalism in the United States. This morning, I was forwarded an email sent out by the management team at the New York Times that illustrates precisely what I was talking about. For sake of clarity, I will quote the whole thing, starting with the preface:

———- Forwarded message ———
From: NYT Mail <*@nytimes.com>
Date: Fri, Feb 5, 2021 at 4:31 PM
Subject: A Note From Dean and Joe
To: All Company Employees <*@nytimes.com>

Colleagues,

We are writing to let you know that Donald McNeil Jr. will be leaving the company. Donald joined The Times in 1976 and has done much good reporting over four decades. But we feel that this is the right next step.

We do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent. We are committed to building a news report and company that reflect our core values of integrity and respect, and will work with urgency to create clearer guidelines and enforcement about conduct in the workplace, including red-line issues on racist language.

Every person in leadership at The Times is dedicated to building a culture where each of our colleagues feels supported and respected. It’s vital that we get this right. To those of you who have reached out to us with your honest and sometimes painful feelings about this incident, we thank you.

Donald has offered a statement to his colleagues, which is below.

— Dean and Joe

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Emmanuel Macron Envies America By Cameron Hilditch

Posted By on February 7th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/02/emmanuel-macron-envies-america/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=blog-post&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=more-in&utm_term=second

Three conclusions from France’s vaccine failures.

O f all the peoples of the Earth, perhaps only Americans and Russians spend more time thinking about the soul of their nation than the French do. There’s a preoccupation with the national character in France — a kind of incessant introspection, obsessed with diagnosing the metaphysical maladies of the country — that’s especially pronounced. General de Gaulle summed up the attitude of the French to their motherland when he said that “France cannot be France without greatness.” When this greatness is manifestly absent, a crisis of confidence habitually flares up in the French body politic.

The global race to vaccinate the public against COVID-19 has triggered just such a crisis. As I detailed this past week, the European Union’s handling of vaccine procurement and distribution has been criminally bad. The Europeans are desperately in need of new vaccine patents after the EU bungled its contract with AstraZeneca.

France’s failure to develop its own vaccine has bruised the characteristic national pride of her elites. The country has an illustrious history of vaccination, stretching back to the great Louis Pasteur, who invented vaccines for rabies and anthrax. The storied Pasteur Institute was later at the cutting edge of treatment for HIV.

However, the Pasteur Institute abandoned its main COVID-19 vaccine project last week, and another French pharmaceutical company, Sanofi, also threw its hands up in defeat. This has triggered the typical soul-searching among French politicians.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Will the Boycott-Israel Clique Co-opt the Scientific Community? By A. J. Caschetta

Posted By on February 7th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/02/will-the-boycott-israel-clique-coopt-the-scientific-community/

The hard sciences once seemed immune to the politics that dominate the humanities in academia, but no longer.

Last year, after chemistry professor Mindy Levine was invited to guest-edit a special issue of the journal Molecules, a group dedicated to the academic boycott of Israel briefly persuaded the journal to rescind the offer unless she consented to removing “Israel” from her published address: “Ariel University, Ariel, Israel.” When she refused, the special issue was canceled, and Levine was scrubbed from the journal’s website.

The protesting group, called the Ariel University Non-Recognition Campaign, wanted Levine’s address listed as “Ariel University, illegal Israeli settlement of Ariel, Occupied Palestinian Territory.” The journal eventually reinstated Levine as guest editor and issued a “Statement of Political Neutrality with Regards to Affiliation of Scientists at Ariel University,” but her case illustrated briefly, and perhaps is a harbinger of, something many thought couldn’t happen — science bending to the will of political ideology.

The hard sciences once seemed immune to the politics that dominate the humanities and social sciences, but no longer. A growing assemblage of scientists has singled out Israel as the one nation on earth that must be excluded from all normal contact with other nations, and the movement is not merely a phenomenon of the fringe blogs: Molecules is a peer-reviewed journal published in partnership with the Swiss Chemical Society in Basel, Switzerland.