Crime and Punishment on Campus-Luke Powell

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/12/crime-and-punishment-on-campus/

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience”
                                                         – CS Lewis, The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment

The moral busybodies of the secular university have an insatiable appetite for tearing down Western tradition, a yen masquerading behind the good will of their intentions. As a student concluding my first year at the University of Sydney, I have been intimately exposed to this radicalisation, most recently devoted to a semester’s focus on the history of incarceration in America. As readers may by now have guessed, it dwelt on the general ills of the West, Donald Trump’s boundless perfidy and, of course, the currently fashionable “systemic racism”. Have I learned anything? Chiefly that what pases for truth and historical fact on campus is a selective and malleable thing.

The term started off reasonably well with anecdotal experiences of individual felons. However, by the end of the semester it was clear the intentions of my history class echoed and advocated a Marxist uprising of proletarians and progressives against the Judeo-Christian tradition, capitalism, Western bourgeois society and, of course, classical conservatism.

The history course itself was nearly void of any impartial study of research and data. Sources were purely anecdotal interviews from one side of the political sphere. Any desire to question the validity of those claims was suppressed by the view that it would be offensive to ask such questions and harmful for the individual. Quadrant‘s Keith Windschuttle in The Killing of History describes the opportunities of approaching history without the distorting lens of a subjective and politicised perspective:

Western historical method is available to the people of any culture to understand their past and their relations with other people. It is by facing the truth of both our separate and our common histories that we can best learn to live with one another.

Sadly, a lesson in learning “to live with each other” has not been what I have observed. Let me recount a few illustrative moments.

During one of our weekly discussions, the tutor asked for raised hands in support of the abolition of prison. With me as the only exception, every single student raised their hand. Most got to explain their position. I was strangely skipped over and, at other times, instructed to keep my opinion to myself. It seems my oposition to transforming the police and throwing open the prison doors were just too dangerous to be discussed.

‘The Squad’ Faces a ‘Freedom Force’ Trump lost badly in New York and California, but Republican candidates picked up House seats in both states. Here’s how two of them did it.By Tunku Varadarajan

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-squad-faces-a-freedom-force-11607108025?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

A quarter-century apart in age, Nicole Malliotakis and Michelle Steel are classmates. They’re both freshmen, Republicans who’ve won election to the House of Representatives for the first time. Each ousted an incumbent Democrat in a resolutely blue state—New York and California, respectively—where Joe Biden romped home in November. And each woman has a scathing view of the politics of the other’s state as well as of her own. They’re ready to scorn Govs. Andrew Cuomo and Gavin Newsom. As for Mayor Bill de Blasio, Ms. Malliotakis, a state assemblywoman from New York City, practically combusts at the mention of his name.

“I think our leaderships are competing with each other to be the most radical. They keep getting bad ideas from each other,” says Ms. Malliotakis, 40, who will represent New York’s 11th Congressional District, comprised of the borough of Staten Island and parts of Brooklyn.

“The leadership is trying to make these states into Third World countries,” Ms. Steel, 65, responds. She is a member of the Orange County Board of Supervisors, a local legislative body, and representative-elect from California’s 48th District, a beachy slice of the county. In Washington for a freshman orientation, including a lottery for office space, the two talk to me by Zoom from their hotel rooms near the Capitol.

Both are robust proponents of low taxes and limited government. “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” Ms. Malliotakis says: “The government should provide an environment for that—and then get out of the way.” Ms. Steel—who was born in South Korea and came to the U.S. at 19—confesses to drawing her earliest political beliefs from her mother’s experience as a clothing-store owner in Los Angeles. “I saw that my mom was harassed—really harassed—by a tax agency, the State Board of Equalization,” she says. “And you know what? I decided that the Republican Party’s ideology is much better for small-business owners. They need less regulation and smaller taxes.” Her first foray into elective politics was a successful run for the Board of Equalization in 2007.

Erdoğan’s New Charm Offensive: Bogus Democratic Reforms by Burak Bekdil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16797/erdogan-bogus-democratic-reforms

Erdoğan’s new reform pledge came at a time when a former leader of a pro-Kurdish party, along with dozens of others, remains in jail for the past years. Almost all the elected Kurdish mayors have been replaced by government-appointed administrators. Hundreds of journalists, politicians and intellectuals spend jail time on absurdly flimsy charges.

Pro-government judges announce rulings in defiance of rulings from superior Turkish courts, including the Constitutional Court, and from the European Court of Human Rights. Those judges who dare make “undesirable verdicts” are probed and often get disciplinary punishments.

Erdoğan’s new charm offensive is deeply problematic. It is not genuine. It is too little too late. Just a few days after he launched his reform campaign, he refused calls for the release of a jailed Kurdish politician and a civil rights activist. “Erdoğan’s reform program survived only nine days,” said Bekir Ağırdır, a prominent political analyst and director of the research company KONDA.

Erdoğan has a serious predicament: He wants his country to keep suffering as a third world democracy while he hopes to lure foreign investment at the same amounts and terms as a Western democracy. That will not happen.

It is his favorite cycle: President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan recklessly widens Turkey’s democratic deficit, weakens institutions, refuses to acknowledge democratic checks and balances. He isolates Turkey mostly from its Western alliances and follows an irredentist foreign policy of trying to reclaim supposedly “lost” land. Turkey is at odds with both the United States and Europe.

Inevitably, political isolation causes economic isolation. The economy is on a downfall. Investors flee the country. Voters start to complain about the double-digit inflation and interest rates; the lira falls and falls; unemployment rises sharply. Erdogan rediscovers his reformist self and promises to democratize — presumably hoping, in vain, that he can reverse the economic downfall.

The Prima Facie Case for Fraud Republicans must win in the court of public opinion by presenting the glaring, prima facie irregularities of the 2020 election cycle for the entire nation to see. By Peter D’Abrosca

https://amgreatness.com/2020/12/04/the-prima-facie-case-for-fraud/

Over the past month, thousands of detailed voter fraud claims have stemmed from the contested November 3 presidential election.

Americans are discussing the intricacies of software algorithms used by the now-infamous Dominion Voting Systems. There has been scrutiny of the insecure chain of custody of mail-in ballots and the signature verification process for those ballots. In several cases, the poll-watching that normally regulates vote tallying appears to have excluded Republicans. There’s plenty of evidence that Joe Biden secured the reliably Democratic necromancers’ union vote, and that unregistered voters and felons voted illegally. Postal workers have come forward claiming they were told to backdate ballots if ballots were postmarked after Election Day.

But while many complex pieces of evidence outlined in sworn affidavits and presented by lawyers are certainly necessary for the court battles that lie ahead, the court of public opinion is perhaps a more important battleground.

If the public at large thinks that Republican claims of voter fraud are, in the parlance of our times, malarkey, the courts will be less likely to hear Republicans’ cases or rule in Republicans’ favor. Bucking the public sentiment is not easy, even for judges who have sworn to remain impartial and rule in a manner consistent with facts. 

President Trump senses this. It’s why he described the need for a “brave judge, or justice” to hear his cases.

So instead of getting lost in the minutia, it might work in Republicans’ favor, especially in the court of public opinion, to harp on the prima facie case for voter fraud.

On that front, the obvious place to start is with Joe Biden’s vote total—supposedly a whopping 80 million. It’s a staggering number and one that could be called “unbelievable,” in the true sense of that word.

An Anti-Semite Asks and Is Answered: Is Israel Racist? Thought crimes are nobody’s business in free societies. By Ilana Mercer

https://amgreatness.com/2020/12/04/an-anti-semite-asks-and-is-answered-is-israel-racist/

Some months ago, a gentleman who pens anti-Semitic tracts approached me for an interview. I agreed. Being a naïve methodological individualist, I never generalize about individuals. That my interlocutor writes crude anti-Semitic boilerplate did not mean I would not give him a chance to reveal himself as someone other than a crude anti-Semite. 

After I had already answered his written questions in full, however, he bailed. 

Here, then, is my reply to one of many loaded and leading questions I was asked and had answered in good faith. 

A leading question is one that suggests an answer. Since I am Jewish, I was considered a priori guilty. Of what? Well, you know: “nudge nudge, wink wink, say no more,” as goes the Monty Python skit.

In his case, the fact that I married gentiles twice was not enough to clear me from charges of “Jewish supremacy.” I was pelted with uncouth, inappropriate, bias-confirming questions such as, “Do you think that marrying a non-Jew was a mistake and you should only marry another Jew?” 

One of the less flighty questions was, “Do you believe Israel is a racist state?” 

I’ve been deconstructing the construct of racism in my latest American Greatness columns, showing analytically that, at worst, racism is a worldview, a state of mind—often spoken or written, and entirely the prerogative of a free people, just so long as no corporeal aggression is committed.  

Democrats’ defense of Georgia election fraud video doesn’t hold water By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/12/democrats_defense_of_georgia_election_fraud_video_doesnt_hold_water.html

Immediately after the story broke about the video showing workers at the State Farm Arena in Atlanta counting ballots after poll observers had apparently been asked to leave, a purported news site sprang into action to “fact check” the report. While the “fact check” gave room to Democrat operatives to cover their derrieres, the counter-narrative was ludicrous. Additionally, new evidence about vote spikes and two of the vote counters behaving suspiciously gave even more credence to Republicans’ take on the surveillance video.

The video that galvanized so many people showed a large room in which poll observers were completely cordoned off from any meaningful observation. Shortly before 10:00 p.m., one of the poll workers – a black woman with eye-catching long, blond braids, approached the observers and, not long after that, with apparent reluctance, the observers filed away, vacating the room a little before 11 p.m.

At 11:00, with the room ostensibly shut down and the observers gone, the remaining poll workers suddenly sprang into action, dragging rolling suitcases out from under a table. They took ballots out of those suitcases and spent the next two hours scanning them, at a rate of about 3,000 ballots per hour per scanner.

If you go here, you can see several sharpened photographs showing what was going on.

NeverTrump Republicans disgrace themselves more every day By Pamela Garber

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/12/nevertrump_republicans_disgrace_themselves_more_every_day.html

The GOP could hold a fundraiser by having a contest for the most condemning anti-Trump quote.  My personal favorite of the moment is by National Review editor Rich Lowry:

Mr. Trump’s central failing as president has been his inability to distinguish between his personal interest and the public interest. No president in memory has made less of an effort to allow the institution of the presidency to shape him and to conform to the constraints it imposes.

Problem is, We the People may never be allowed to hold fundraisers again — not without approval.  Some fundraisers are more equal than others.  The other problem is that the quote is unintentionally complimentary.  President Trump was elected to be himself, as is — no “reshaping.”

Warrior Writers

Oh, noteworthy writers writing noteworthy writings.  You demonize Sidney Powell and Lin Wood.  You mock our president.  You think you are woefully wise interpreters of mediocrity as a so-called ill informed crowd stands up for the truth at a rally.  The Georgia evidence of a suitcase under the table means nothing; neither does the ownership of the very voting machines relied on for our supposed free and fair election.  To sum up your well read musings, the steady erosion of our freedom means nothing to you and your ilk.  President Trump’s demeanor is still your number-one political cause.  Now he’s not conceding correctly — not in the Miss Manners McCain way of all the better mannered men that make up the real Republican Party.

Marxist Hell Marketers

Does a surveillance video prove Georgia election fraud? By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/12/does_a_surveillance_video_prove_georgia_election_fraud.html

Georgia’s Fulton County, the most populous in the state, claimed that it needed to stop absentee ballot overnight on November 3–4 because of a burst pipe.  That was a lie.  There was no burst pipe, and the counting didn’t stop.  At a hearing on Thursday, surveillance footage emerged showing that the ballots being secretly counted came from suitcases hidden under a table.

Here’s what seems to have happened: in Fulton County, Georgia, the people who planned to add fake ballots to Biden’s vote count on election night had an overall good plan.  First, announce that a burst pipe required everybody to vacate the building until morning, and, second, count fake votes.

The planners missed two details.  First, they forgot to make sure the government’s documents supported the “burst pipe” narrative.  Text messages emerged showing that nothing had burst.  Instead, there was a quickly contained slow leak that didn’t even generate a work order.

Second, they forgot that the State Farm Arena, where the counting took place, has surveillance cameras all over.  On Wednesday, intrepid volunteers obtained the videos from the surveillance cameras in the room in which the count took place and, by doing so, may have discovered the election fraud smoking gun.

The Great Reset and Klaus Schwab By David Solway

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/12/the_great_reset_and_klaus_schwab.html

The time has come to implement the Great Reject before we experience the Great Regret.

Klaus Schwab, the chief proponent of a global project called the “Great Reset,” may be the most influential “intellectual” in the world today. A former member of the UN Advisory Board on Sustainable Development, he is the founder of the World Economic Forum (WEF) that meets annually in the Swiss resort town of Davos. Business Insider explains, “Each year, business leaders and heads of state give lectures and speak on panels about topics ranging from gender equality and venture capital to mental health and climate change.” And as the WEF website states, “The non-profit organization’s aim is to engage the foremost political, business, cultural and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas.”

The “Great Reset,” a term coined in a 2011 book by economist Richard Florida and wholeheartedly adopted by Schwab in the context of the United Nation’s Agenda 2030 for sustainable development, proposes to determine “the future state of global relations, the direction of national economies, the priorities of societies, the nature of business models and the management of the global commons.” It presents itself as a humane and compassionate means to inaugurate a beneficial root-and-branch transformation of the social, economic and political structure of the world’s “operating systems”: capitalism, the free market and democracy.

Practical capitalism is to be supplanted by what Schwab calls “stakeholder capitalism” in which the private sector is tightly controlled by government (otherwise known as “fascism”). The free market is considered unfair and skewed to the advantage of a piratical business class exploiting the world’s poor and hungry. Democracy is regarded as an inefficient political arrangement relying on the incapacity of the demos to understand its own best interests or to command the intricacy of integrated governing structures and processes.

I’m a Legislator in Pennsylvania, and I’m Suing the Governor for Election Fraud By Frank Ryan *****

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/12/im_a_legislator_in_pennsylvania_and_im_suing_the_governor_for_election_fraud.html

Actions by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and secretary of state in the 2020 general election were so fraught with inconsistencies, documented irregularities, and improprieties (see filing below) that the election results for the office of president of the United States cannot be determined.  The actions were so flagrant and egregious that I am a plaintiff in a case in the Commonwealth Court against Gov. Tom Wolf, et al. to seek relief.

The flawed processes associated with mail-in balloting, pre-canvassing, and canvassing have so undermined the election that only the in-person Election Day results have any semblance of validity.  Because the mail-in process was so fatally flawed, the results cannot be audited, which may have been the governor’s objective when he acted unilaterally to replace voting machines last year and demanded certain election reforms.

In any business or organization, internal controls are designed to deter wrongdoing.  Likewise, elections require reasonable controls to ensure that the results accurately reflect the will of the voters.  The system of controls over voting in Pennsylvania’s 2020 General Election were so deficient as to render the results of the mail-in ballot process incapable of being relied upon.  Therefore, the Legislature, of which I am a member, introduced a resolution declaring the results of statewide electoral contests in the 2020 general election in dispute.

Several actions led up to this.  In September, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overreached by extending the deadline for mail-in ballots to be received and mandating that ballots mailed without a postmark would be presumed to be received on time and could be accepted without a verified voter signature.

On Oct. 23, less than two weeks before the Nov. 3 general election, and at the request of the secretary of the commonwealth, the state Supreme Court ruled that signatures for mail-in ballots need not be authenticated, thereby treating in-person and mail-in voters dissimilarly and eliminating a critical safeguard against election crime.  In the same order, the court authorized the use of drop boxes for the collection of ballots, leaving them vulnerable to ballot-harvesting.