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The Science is Settled. Lefties are Fearful Scolds Phil Shannon

Posted By on January 29th, 2021

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2021/01/the-science-is-settled-lefties-are-fearful-scolds/

“We all know that modern liberals can’t argue a case and that their stock standard response to ideas other than what they have been told to believe is flinging insults — ‘racist’, ‘homophobe’ ‘bigot’ etc — and decamping to the coda of a farewell ‘shut up’. Well there’s a reason they’re that way, poor things, as a team of US and New Zealand researchers have just laid out.”

There is more than a modicum of truth in the old joke that the definition of a ‘racist’ is anyone who is winning an argument with a leftist.  When a woke leftist’s evidence and logic don’t stack up, a bit of name-calling (‘racist’, ‘bigot’, ‘deplorable’, etc.) will enable them to seize the presumed moral high ground and thereby claim victory, at least to their own satisfaction.  Moral one-upmanship is the woke leftist’s go-to position: ‘I’m good, you’re bad, so just shut-up’. If you’re of the Left, it’s the all-purpose, not-so-sotto-voce debate clincher. 

Such ‘virtue-signalling’ by the morally self-righteous Left is supported by anecdotal evidence galore but now there is hard scientific evidence for its empirical reality, as demonstrated with regard to the ‘moralisation’ of COVID-19 by the lockdown-Loving Left.  Researchers from New Zealand’s University of Otago and two universities in the US recently published the results of their study , ‘Moralization of Covid-19 Health Response: Asymmetry in Tolerance for Human Costs‘, in The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. It’s a doozy.

People who see the SARS-COV-2 virus as an “urgent and visible threat”, the researchers find, moralise the social distancing policies, especially lockdowns, claimed to contain and eliminate the virus.  Lockdown is framed by such moralisers as a “question of right or wrong”, and so “staying at home and complying with mask mandates”, for example, are presented as matters of “ethical duty and commitment to the common good”.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Biden, Teachers’ Unions, and the $630 Billion Shakedown Biden not only is using children to get Congress to greenlight another federally funded kickback to the unions, he’s burdening these very same children with trillions in debt to repay in the future.  By Julie Kelly

Posted By on January 29th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/28/biden-teachers-unions-and-the-630-billion-shakedown/

For all their devastating, long-term side effects, the various failed remedies to COVID-19 have been clarifying.

The “expert” class, in case it was still unclear to anyone, is overrun not with critical thinkers devoted to scientific inquiry but hyperpartisan hacks with a hive mind no better than that of a typical seventh-grade cheer squad. The scientific method is dead; in its place is a multitiered campaign to bully, silence, and cancel anyone who dares to challenge their unchallengeable expertise.

Political leaders on both sides of the aisle are as clueless as they are callous. Little daylight exists between Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo and Republican Governor Mike DeWine.

The majority of Americans, sadly, quickly submit to the whims of the expert class to the point of self-destruction. Millions of Americans are doubling up on face coverings because Master Fauci said to do so and they are prepared to harass others into compliance as well.

But the biggest takeaway is this: The Democratic Party will never again get away with claiming that their number one priority is “the children.” 

Joe Biden and the Democrats just lost their most overused political prop—exploited to advance every policy from climate to health care—as tens of millions of American children, locked out of their classrooms for almost a year, act as human pawns in the unions’ biggest, most brazen shakedown yet.

The hustle has been underway since March 2020; unbeknownst both to students and parents, America’s youth of all ages walked out of classrooms and off college campuses not to return for months on end. 

Back then, as today, no scientific justification existed to shut down schools. The decision was based on the now-discredited Imperial College model created by now-discredited British scientist Neil Ferguson. Armed with no reliable data, Ferguson nonetheless warned that unless schools were closed in the United States, millions would die of the disease.

Teachers’ unions and their stooges in Congress wasted no time exploiting the crisis—and the gravy train quickly delivered. Over the past 10 months, colleges and K-12 schools have received at least $114 billion in federal COVID “relief” funding; the CARES Act allocated roughly $34 billion for shuttered schools and the bipartisan package passed in December gave away another $80 billion—despite no disruption in the flow of federal, state, and real estate tax revenues that fund the nation’s public school systems.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Nature of the Chinese Threat Richard Nixon spoke nothing but the truth when he famously remarked, “No power on earth can defeat or humiliate the United States, except the United States.” Will we? By Conrad Black

Posted By on January 29th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/28/the-nature-of-the-chinese-threat/

It is almost impossible to describe adequately how absurd the partisan abrasions of American politics appear after listening to Chinese President Xi Jinping’s virtual address earlier this week to the inevitable World Economic Forum at Davos. A more unlikely setting could not be imagined: Davos is a dingy, cold, little town inhabited by grumpy German Swiss with inferior hotels and restaurants and one of the few benefits of the coronavirus pandemic is that Davos is now virtual and the rigors of its Spartan, humorless, relentless globalism may be moderated somewhat by the comforts of home. 

The industrious founder and head of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, is deservedly making a considerable fortune from his imaginative brainwave from some 50 years ago of inviting prominent people to address groups of other prominent people and pocket huge fees from the wealthy for the privilege of listening to and “networking” with other swells. He continually bootstrapped himself up decade after decade. I watched as foreign ministers gave way to prime ministers as delegation heads and the prime ministers to presidents. At my last attendance, about 20 years ago, I was astonished to see at Zürich airport, the nearest to Davos, Air Force One, and the official aircraft of the presidents of Russia, Brazil, France, and of the prime ministers of India, Canada, and a number of other important countries. I was invited because I was the head of a reasonably prominent newspaper company, and I must admit I conducted some useful business and met many interesting people there. 

Klaus Schwab’s own remarks, however, including in introducing the Chinese president on Monday, remind us forcefully of what a mighty fraud globalism has become. 

Acknowledging this takes nothing from Schwab’s achievement. And he is a perfectly agreeable and justly successful man. But the globalist message is to invoke a conjured planetary obligation to submit to arbitrary requirements of sustainability that are not based on any conclusive or even persuasive evidence of the ecological damage allegedly wrought by carbon emissions. The global order to which we must all strive, Klaus and all of his serried ranks of prominent speakers tell us, is a monochrome, implicitly anti-theistic, world-communal quest for the submergence of all nationalities, all civilizations more complex than folkloric trappings, all substantial variances in national and even personal standards of living, and with all power concentrated in the hands of an admittedly loquacious but undoubtedly authoritarian elite of international regulators and behavioral monitors. 

It is a gradual and comparatively painless enactment of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and other fictional conjurations of human uniformity, though certainly not the totalitarian horror described by Orwell, Koestler, or Kafka. But it is no societal day at the beach either.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Off to a Bad START: Putin Schools Biden with One Phone Call By Lynn Corum

Posted By on January 29th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/01/off_to_a_bad_start_putin_schools_biden_with_one_phone_call.html

According to Russian news service Ria Novosti, on Tuesday, the presidents of the Russian Federation and the United States, Vladimir Putin and Joe Biden, held a telephone conversation.  During the conversation, Biden and Putin agreed to a five-year extension of START-3, until 2026, “100% on Russian terms, without additions, in the form in which it was originally signed.”  As a result of the call, the authorized Duma committees were ordered to urgently take the necessary steps to extend START-3.  On that same day, Putin submitted to the State Duma a bill on the ratification of START-3 through 2026; it immediately passed.  Putin’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov enthused that “START-3 is being extended on Russian terms, for 5 years, without any conditions or additional requirements, without attempts to change the START verification regime, without those, in our view, absurd and unacceptable aspirations of the previous administration to make sure to draw the PRC [China] into this process without fail.”

Biden ran on a platform that was endorsed by the entire American security and foreign policy establishment. The platform stand was to rebuild international multilateralism, taking no actions without coordination with our allies. Trump was routinely condemned by the establishment for insisting on the “America First” approach in foreign policy. Biden’s promise of multilateral cooperation with allies didn’t last a week. Indeed, he showed even more disregard for America’s NATO allies than Trump ever did. Biden’s phone call to Russian President Putin was his first serious test of foreign and security policy; he flunked. In the course of that one phone call, he casually agreed to a five-year extension of the New START Treaty, a treaty that originally took months to negotiate.

On Tuesday afternoon January 26, C-SPAN broadcast Biden’s press briefing on Racial Equity, held in the White House State Dining Room.  Following his remarks, he ceremoniously signed four related executive orders.  After signing the fourth, Biden stood up abruptly and made to leave the room.  On his way out, a young reporter could be heard calling out, “Mr. President, what did you talk to Mr. Putin about?”  Over his shoulder Biden tossed back the quip, “You! He sends his best.” — and hightailed it out of the room before he could be pinned down with having to explain what he and Putin said during the call.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Daniel Greenfield-Russia: “With Biden in Office, Positive Shifts Took Place in the U.S. Position”, Treaty “On Our Terms”

Posted By on January 29th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/01/russia-biden-office-positive-shifts-took-place-us-daniel-greenfield/

Awkward.

The Democrats and their media spent four years falsely accusing President Trump of being a Russian agent even while he was running against Reset Button Hillary. Biden ran on a promise to crawl back into Russia’s scam arms control treaty for five years with no preconditions. 

The Russians had been begging President Trump to at least extend it for one year. The Trump admin was offering it with a lot of conditions.

In his first phone call with Putin, President Trump blasted the START treaty as a bad deal that gave Moscow a free ride. 

The Trump administration was skeptical of New START, arguing that it had allowed Russia to build up advanced nuclear systems that aren’t constrained by the treaty. Trump’s arms control envoy, Marshall Billingslea, had also insisted that China be brought into the arms control process. Billingslea attempted to negotiate a shorter-term extension of New START, paired with a freeze on all nuclear warheads and a commitment to broaden future talks to include other nuclear powers. 

What was Biden’s position?

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Another Muslim-American Soldier Turns to Terrorism Exposing where his true loyalties lie. Raymond Ibrahim

Posted By on January 29th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/another-muslim-american-soldier-turns-terrorism-raymond-ibrahim/

Cole Bridges, a 20-year-old American who joined the U.S. Army in late 2019—and who was earlier described as “a polite, responsible and trustworthy teen”—was recently arrested and faces two federal charges: “attempting to provide material support to the Islamic State group and the attempted murder of U.S. military service members.”

Earlier, in October, 2020, Bridges, a convert to Islam, came into contact with an FBI online covert employee (OCE) posing as a Muslim supporter of and in contact with the Islamic State.  In their communiques, Bridges made clear that his allegiance was to Islam and jihad, not America and its soldiers.  According to the criminal complaint against him:

BRIDGES then provided training and guidance to purported ISIS fighters who were planning attacks, including advice about potential targets in New York City, such as the 9/11 Memorial.  BRIDGES also provided the OCE with portions of a U.S. Army training manual and guidance about military combat tactics, for use by ISIS.

In or about December 2020, BRIDGES began to supply the OCE with instructions for the purported ISIS fighters on how to attack U.S. forces in the Middle East.  Among other things, BRIDGES diagrammed specific military maneuvers intended to help ISIS fighters maximize the lethality of attacks on U.S. troops.  BRIDGES further provided advice about the best way to fortify an ISIS encampment to repel an attack by U.S. Special Forces, including by wiring certain buildings with explosives to kill the U.S. troops.  Then, in January 2021, BRIDGES provided the OCE with a video of himself in body armor standing before a flag often used by ISIS fighters and making a gesture symbolic of support for ISIS.  Approximately a week later, BRIDGES sent a second video in which BRIDGES, using a voice manipulator, narrated a propaganda speech in support of the anticipated ambush by ISIS on U.S. troops.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Biden Orders the End of Construction of U.S/Mexican Border Wall One of many Executive Orders to reverse Trump’s successful immigration policies. Michael Cutler

Posted By on January 29th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/biden-orders-end-construction-usmexican-border-michael-cutler/

President Joe Biden is opposed to nearly everything that Trump stood for.  Biden’s dangerous immigration policies have been the focus of a number of my recent articles, for example,

Terror Arrest Highlights How Perilous Biden’s Immigration Plans Are and What Biden’s Immigration Policies Would Do To America.

During his run for the Presidency four years ago, Donald Trump made immigration law enforcement and border security key priorities for his campaign.

At numerous political rallies the raucous and enthusiastic attendees would frequently chant, “Build that wall!”

The need to secure that border and address the myriad other vulnerabilities was made abundantly clear by the 9/11 Commission which determined that the 9/11 terror attacks and other such attacks were only possible because of multiple failures of the immigration system.

Furthermore, large-scale human trafficking and the flood of narcotics flowing into the United States across that dangerous border added to the demand for securing it.

As I have noted many times in previous articles, the preface of the official report, 9/11 and  Terrorist Travel begins with the following paragraph:

It is perhaps obvious to state that terrorists cannot plan and carry out attacks in the United States if they are unable to enter the country. Yet prior to September 11, while there were efforts to enhance border security, no agency of the U.S. government thought of border security as a tool in the counterterrorism arsenal. Indeed, even after 19 hijackers demonstrated the relative ease of obtaining a U.S. visa and gaining admission into the United States, border security still is not considered a cornerstone of national security policy. We believe, for reasons we discuss in the following pages, that it must be made one.

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The Left’s Ongoing Campaign to Denigrate Trump Supporters By David Limbaugh

Posted By on January 29th, 2021

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-limbaugh/2021/01/29/the-lefts-ongoing-campaign-to-denigrate-trump-supporters-n1416757

If the first week of leftist insanity gushing from President Joe Biden’s executive pen doesn’t vindicate Donald Trump’s supporters in full measure, I don’t know what could. Scratch that. There is much more to come.

Trump supporters have long touted the former president’s impressive policy achievements as proof they were wise in supporting him and correct that an outsider could get results.

We’ve learned in the past few months who is running this country: the media, the social media oligarchy, cancel culture and leftist dark money being poured into the system. These forces have weaponized identity politics and empowered the Democratic Party to regain control and move this country leftward at warp speed, which means destroying prosperity and jobs.

Trump haters have been salivating for years over an opportunity to finally bring him crashing down in disgrace, and take his allegedly evil supporters along with him — never to rise again and impede their progressive agenda.

They tried for Trump’s entire term to overturn the results of the 2016 election. They engaged in a coordinated effort to undo what the voters had done, corrupting our security agencies and our government institutions to lead a soft, sophisticated coup that makes Jan. 6 look like amateur hour.

With assists from the media and the rest of the leftist political and cultural establishment, these forces escaped accountability and proceed as cavalierly as ever, as if nothing ever happened. In a particularly in-your-face move, these bullies have designated one of the central players in the coup, Rep. Eric Swalwell, to be an impeachment manager in their post-term impeachment gambit.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Leftist Bureaucrats and Foundations Are Displacing Republican Government By Stanley Kurtz

Posted By on January 29th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/leftist-bureaucrats-and-foundations-are-displacing-republican-government/

Last week I laid out the nightmarish plan by the Illinois State Board of Education to turn the state’s schools into leftist indoctrination camps. Never in two decades of writing on education have I seen a more extreme or pernicious proposal than the “Illinois Culturally Responsive Teaching and Leading Standards.” The only good thing to be said about this episode is that it shows us what to beware of. The Illinois-teaching-standards outrage is the endgame of the coming push for expanded “civic education” at the state and federal levels. More than that, the ultra-woke Illinois teaching standards, and the bogus Illinois “civics” law they build upon, are case studies in the hijacking of representative government by leftist bureaucrats and foundations.

Typically, when we think about the out-of-control growth of the administrative state, we mean the federal bureaucracy. Well, the “Illinois Culturally Responsive Teaching and Leading Standards” are the product of an out-of-control state-level bureaucracy. Relatedly, the misnamed Illinois “civics” law (it should have been called the “mandatory Alinskyite-activism law”) effectively ceded control of the state’s “civics” education to a batch of woke Chicago foundations.

In 2018, I wrote here about an important study by Emmett McGroarty, Jane Robbins, and Erin Tuttle, Deconstructing the Administrative State: The Fight for Liberty. That book went further than most critiques of the administrative state, because it showed how the growth of federal bureaucracy had subverted independent government by the states. The “Illinois Culturally Responsive Teaching and Leading Standards” take us to new level, however. They show that even states have begun to cede their legislative authority to leftist state-level bureaucrats eager to usurp the lawmaking power.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Biden’s Worst Executive Order Went Almost Entirely Unnoticed

Posted By on January 29th, 2021

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/01/29/bidens-worst-executive-order-went-almost-entirely-unnoticed/

In the flurry of President Joe Biden’s executive orders was one that was almost entirely overlooked but could easily end up having the biggest impact.

The order also seems harmless enough, going by the seemingly innocent title “Modernizing Regulatory Review.” Except this order isn’t about modernizing regulations. It’s about unleashing the regulatory state with a ferocity never before seen in this country.

Biden’s order – which didn’t get released to the press until late in the evening of his first day – aims to effectively toss the cost-benefit analysis that for many decades has served as at least a modest brake on the ambitions of regulators. In the past, regulations where the cost of compliance far exceeded the benefits could be stymied by the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.

Biden wants the review process instead to be “a tool to affirmatively promote regulations” and “to ensure swift and effective federal action” on everything from the pandemic, to the economy, to racial inequality, to the “undeniable reality and accelerating threat of climate change.” In other words … everything.