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The Next Populist Revolt By Matthew Continetti

Posted By on November 1st, 2020

https://freebeacon.com/columns/the-next-populist-revolt/

The combustible politics of a coronavirus ‘dark winter’….

For the past half decade, Europe has acted as a preview of coming attractions in American politics. The reaction to the confluence of immigration and terrorism on the continent foreshadowed the direction the Republican Party would take under Donald Trump. The surprise victory of “Leave” in the Brexit referendum hinted at Trump’s unexpected elevation to the presidency. The terrible images from coronavirus-stricken Italy last March offered a glimpse into New York City’s future. This week, when Italian authorities reimposed curfews, restrictions on business, and bans on communal gatherings, violent protests broke out in Turin, Milan, and Naples. Consider it a taste of the next populist revolt.

Lockdowns remain the preferred tool of governments whose public-health authorities decide the coronavirus is out of control. In September, Israel shut down for a month during the Jewish holidays to reduce its coronavirus-infection rate. In October, New York City targeted certain neighborhoods. In recent days, Newark, N.J., ordered “nonessential” businesses to close at 8 p.m., a county judge imposed a curfew on El Paso, Texas, and Massachusetts has gone back-and-forth on whether schools should be open or closed.

This response has placed the public under extraordinary strain. When officials tell businesses to close, they not only deny individuals who can’t work from home the opportunity to earn a living. They also impose social costs that much of the public is increasingly unwilling to bear. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that depression, substance abuse, and suicidal ideation increased during the spring. Extended families limited contact. Religious practice was curtailed. Having canceled spring holidays, Americans are now informed that Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas need to be reconsidered as well. When individuals inevitably question, disregard, or disobey the commands of science, they are censored, stigmatized, condescended to, or punished.

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Article on Joe and Hunter Biden Censored By The Intercept An attempt to assess the importance of the known evidence, and a critique of media lies to protect their favored candidate, could not be published at The Intercept Glenn Greenwald

Posted By on November 1st, 2020

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/article-on-joe-and-hunter-biden-censored

I am posting here the most recent draft of my article about Joe and Hunter Biden — the last one seen by Intercept editors before telling me that they refuse to publish it absent major structural changes involving the removal of all sections critical of Joe Biden, leaving only a narrow article critiquing media outlets. I will also, in a separate post, publish all communications I had with Intercept editors surrounding this article so you can see the censorship in action and, given the Intercept’s denials, decide for yourselves (this is the kind of transparency responsible journalists provide, and which the Intercept refuses to this day to provide regarding their conduct in the Reality Winner story). This draft obviously would have gone through one more round of proof-reading and editing by me — to shorten it, fix typos, etc — but it’s important for the integrity of the claims to publish the draft in unchanged form that Intercept editors last saw, and announced that they would not “edit” but completely gut as a condition to publication:

TITLE: THE REAL SCANDAL: U.S. MEDIA USES FALSEHOODS TO DEFEND JOE BIDEN FROM HUNTER’S EMAILS

Publication by the New York Post two weeks ago of emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop, relating to Vice President Joe Biden’s work in Ukraine, and subsequent articles from other outlets concerning the Biden family’s pursuit of business opportunities in China, provoked extraordinary efforts by a de facto union of media outlets, Silicon Valley giants and the intelligence community to suppress these stories.

One outcome is that the Biden campaign concluded, rationally, that there is no need for the front-running presidential candidate to address even the most basic and relevant questions raised by these materials. Rather than condemn Biden for ignoring these questions — the natural instinct of a healthy press when it comes to a presidential election — journalists have instead led the way in concocting excuses to justify his silence.

After the Post’s first article, both that newspaper and other news outlets have published numerous other emails and texts purportedly written to and from Hunter reflecting his efforts to induce his father to take actions as Vice President beneficial to the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, on whose board of directors Hunter sat for a monthly payment of $50,000, as well as proposals for lucrative business deals in China that traded on his influence with his father.

HISTORY, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Founders’ priceless legacy by Myron Magnet *****

Posted By on November 1st, 2020

https://newcriterion.com/issues/2020/11/the-founders-priceless-legacy

“Today’s slogan seems to be: speak power to truth.”

However unfashionable to say so at the moment, the American Founding is one of the noblest achievements of the Western Enlightenment. It created something breathtakingly new in history: a self-governing republic that protects the right of individuals—not serfs, not subjects, but equal citizens before the law—to pursue their own happiness in their own way. Who could have imagined that such a triumph would come under the violent attack that now seeks to deny and besmirch it? Whether it flies the banner of The 1619 Project, Black Lives Matter, or Critical Race Theory, the new anti-Americanism condemns the Founding Fathers’ project as conceived in slavery, not liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that we can never be equal citizens with equal rights.

It is a militant anti-Americanism, too. Like the iconoclasm of the most violent English Puritans, who smashed the faces off the carved saints and angels in one sublime medieval church after another, or of the French sans-culottes, who dug up and desecrated nine centuries of royal bodies from their tombs in the Abbey of Saint-Denis, defacing for good measure the statues of the Old Testament kings on the façade of this first great Gothic building, today’s anti-Americanism seeks to pulverize and obliterate our national past as something too offensive and obscene to have existed.

The current upheaval is the latest paroxysm of a cultural revolution that has gained momentum for half a century or more, and its trajectory from the universities to popular culture is too well known to need repeating. What I want to discuss here is the precious value of our inheritance from the Founding Fathers that today’s vandals want to destroy. If they succeed—since history, even our own, doesn’t always go forward and upward, despite the claims of the so-called “progressives”—we will find ourselves in a new Dark Age of constraint and superstition.

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On how Princeton’s crusade against systemic racism has backfired. Roger Kimball

Posted By on November 1st, 2020

https://newcriterion.com/issues/2020/11/keywords-hoist-petard

Perhaps we ought to have included “chickens” and “roost” among the keywords as well. For many years now, woke administrators, professors, and other activists at all the toniest colleges have been like the parade of flagellants in The Seventh Seal: skirling in public about their sins, above all their institutional or (as we have lately been taught to say) their “systemic” racism. Their cries are accompanied by the demand for alms—$50 million at Yale to support “diversity,” $100 million at Brown for kindred exercises in political penance, and so on.

On September 2, Christopher L. Eisgruber, the president of Princeton University, made a major contribution to this emetic genre. In an open letter to the university “community,” he beat his breast about America’s overdue “profound national reckoning with racism.” He didn’t exclude his own university. Indeed, he beat himself harder as he bemoaned Princeton’s long history of “intentionally and systematically exclud[ing] people of color, women, Jews, and other minorities.” Nor, according to him, has that history ended. “Racist assumptions from the past,” President Eisgruber sobbed, “remain embedded in structures of the University itself.”

His confession did not go unnoticed. On September 16, the Department of Education sent President Eisgruber a letter. The letter minutes an interesting discrepancy. Since Christopher Eisgruber became president of Princeton in 2013, the university has received more than $75 million in taxpayer funds. It has also “repeatedly represented and warranted to the U.S. Department of Education . . . Princeton’s compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” What’s Title VI? Among other things, it’s the law that stipulates that no institution receiving federal funds may discriminate against anyone because of “race, color, or national origin.”

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Poll: Donald Trump leads Joe Biden by 7 points among Iowa voters Brianne Pfannenstiel,

Posted By on November 1st, 2020

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/poll-donald-trump-leads-joe-biden-by-7-points-among-iowa-voters/ar-BB1azNvo

Republican President Donald Trump has taken over the lead in Iowa as Democratic former Vice President Joe Biden has faded, a new Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll shows just days before Election Day.

The president now leads by 7 percentage points over Biden, 48% to 41%. Three percent say they will vote for someone else, 2% aren’t sure and 5% don’t want to say for whom they will vote.

In September’s Iowa Poll, the candidates were tied at 47% to 47%.

The poll of 814 likely Iowa voters was conducted by Selzer & Co. of Des Moines from Oct. 26-29. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.4 percentage points.

J. Ann Selzer, president of Selzer & Co., said while men are more likely to support Trump and women to support Biden, the gender gap has narrowed, and independents have returned to supporting the president, a group he won in 2016.

“The president is holding demographic groups that he won in Iowa four years ago, and that would give someone a certain level of comfort with their standing,” she said. “There’s a consistent story in 2020 to what happened in 2016.”

But, she said, “Neither candidate hits 50%, so there’s still some play here.”

Trump carried Iowa by 9.4 percentage points in 2016, but his chances at a repeat 2020 win here appeared to be in doubt in recent polling. The June Iowa Poll showed Trump leading by just 1 percentage point before Biden climbed into the September tie.

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Trump has the momentum in the final week Every event that has occurred since the last debate has cut for Trump and against Biden Matt Mayer

Posted By on November 1st, 2020

https://spectator.us/donald-trump-momentum-final-week/

I don’t believe in astrology, but, if I did, I’d have to say the stars are aligning for Donald Trump in the last 10 days of this tumultuous election. Beginning with the second presidential debate where Trump finally displayed presidential behavior and Joe Biden expressly proclaimed his goal to transition away from oil (i.e., kill it), virtually every unfolding event has aided Trump’s cause for reelection. Though he still might not win, the momentum is clearly behind Trump as Election Day nears.

First, Biden’s comment on energy at the last debate certainly hurt him with energy industry workers and their families in western Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio, Texas, New Mexico and Colorado. Because virtually all of the sand used in fracking comes from Wisconsin, Biden’s gaffe also will hurt him in that key state too. The Trump campaign immediately went on offense in those states forcing Biden to play defense.

Next, the Tony Bobulinski claims about the Biden family, especially his very detailed and credible allegations about meeting twice with Joe Biden about a deal with a Chinese company tied to the communist government, undermine one of the core tenets of the Biden candidacy; namely, he is not corrupt and compromised like Trump. As more Americans learn about these allegations, Biden’s credibility is crumbling. It doesn’t help that his campaign refuses to deny Bobulinski’s story and that Jim Biden says ‘no comment’ to the press who dare to ask. Most people believe the natural response to being accused of something you didn’t do is to explicitly deny it. That isn’t happening with Bobulinski’s accusations.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

A Sensible and Compassionate Anti-COVID Strategy by Jay Bhattacharya M.D., PhD.

Posted By on November 1st, 2020

https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/sensible-compassionate-anti-covid-strategy/?utm_term=

The following is adapted from a panel presentation on October 9, 2020, in Omaha, Nebraska, at a Hillsdale College Free Market Forum.

My goal today is, first, to present the facts about how deadly COVID-19 actually is; second, to present the facts about who is at risk from COVID; third, to present some facts about how deadly the widespread lockdowns have been; and fourth, to recommend a shift in public policy.

1. The COVID-19 Fatality Rate

In discussing the deadliness of COVID, we need to distinguish COVID cases from COVID infections. A lot of fear and confusion has resulted from failing to understand the difference.

We have heard much this year about the “case fatality rate” of COVID. In early March, the case fatality rate in the U.S. was roughly three percent—nearly three out of every hundred people who were identified as “cases” of COVID in early March died from it. Compare that to today, when the fatality rate of COVID is known to be less than one half of one percent.

In other words, when the World Health Organization said back in early March that three percent of people who get COVID die from it, they were wrong by at least one order of magnitude. The COVID fatality rate is much closer to 0.2 or 0.3 percent. The reason for the highly inaccurate early estimates is simple: in early March, we were not identifying most of the people who had been infected by COVID.

“Case fatality rate” is computed by dividing the number of deaths by the total number of confirmed cases. But to obtain an accurate COVID fatality rate, the number in the denominator should be the number of people who have been infected—the number of people who have actually had the disease—rather than the number of confirmed cases.

In March, only the small fraction of infected people who got sick and went to the hospital were identified as cases. But the majority of people who are infected by COVID have very mild symptoms or no symptoms at all. These people weren’t identified in the early days, which resulted in a highly misleading fatality rate. And that is what drove public policy. Even worse, it continues to sow fear and panic, because the perception of too many people about COVID is frozen in the misleading data from March.

So how do we get an accurate fatality rate? To use a technical term, we test for seroprevalence—in other words, we test to find out how many people have evidence in their bloodstream of having had COVID.

This is easy with some viruses. Anyone who has had chickenpox, for instance, still has that virus living in them—it stays in the body forever. COVID, on the other hand, like other coronaviruses, doesn’t stay in the body. Someone who is infected with COVID and then clears it will be immune from it, but it won’t still be living in them.

What we need to test for, then, are antibodies or other evidence that someone has had COVID. And even antibodies fade over time, so testing for them still results in an underestimate of total infections.

Seroprevalence is what I worked on in the early days of the epidemic. In April, I ran a series of studies, using antibody tests, to see how many people in California’s Santa Clara County, where I live, had been infected. At the time, there were about 1,000 COVID cases that had been identified in the county, but our antibody tests found that 50,000 people had been infected—i.e., there were 50 times more infections than identified cases. This was enormously important, because it meant that the fatality rate was not three percent, but closer to 0.2 percent; not three in 100, but two in 1,000.

When it came out, this Santa Clara study was controversial. But science is like that, and the way science tests controversial studies is to see if they can be replicated. And indeed, there are now 82 similar seroprevalence studies from around the world, and the median result of these 82 studies is a fatality rate of about 0.2 percent—exactly what we found in Santa Clara County.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Biden Corruption: An In-Depth Investigation Of The Ukraine Allegations  Francis Menton

Posted By on November 1st, 2020

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-10-30-biden-corruption-a-deep-dive-into-the-ukraine-allegations

Of all the revelations about Biden family members cashing in on Joe Biden’s influence — revelations arising from Ukraine, China, Iraq, Romania, Kazakhstan, and other places — those relating to Ukraine are likely the most damning. Certainly, the revelations relating to Ukraine are the ones that most definitively involve criminal conduct. After all, Ukraine is the country where Joe admitted (actually, bragged) on tape about threatening to withhold a billion dollars of U.S. aid unless a prosecutor got fired — a prosecutor who happened to be investigating the company where Joe’s son Hunter was getting $1 million per year to sit on the board. “And son of a bitch, he got fired.” That clear admission alone would prove the hardest part of what you would need to convict under 18 USC Section 201.

By contrast, the recent revelations from Hunter’s laptop and from Biden business partner Tony Bobulinski, while important, don’t necessarily show an independent crime by themselves. What they do show is clear contradiction of Joe’s prior statements about lack of knowledge or involvement in Hunter’s overseas business affairs; and they also show the Biden family, and Joe personally, beholden to the CCP. But these “laptop revelations” mostly relate to discussions of a prospective transaction in 2017, when Joe was out of office; and much of the transaction under discussion seems to have collapsed before consummation.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Andrew McCarthy- A Collusion Tale- The Bidens and China

Posted By on October 31st, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/a-collusion-tale-the-bidens-and-china/

Not only were the Bidens’ Chinese business contacts known to have ties to the regime; they also may have been clandestine agents.

Understand what’s going on here: The media-Democrat complex is warning you, on the basis of no evidence, that if you don’t close your eyes to the explosive revelations from Hunter Biden’s computers, you will be abetting a Russian intelligence operation; yet it has become increasingly obvious that this is because, if you open your eyes, you may find out that the Bidens were selling themselves to an actual Chinese intelligence operation.

Among the more amazing revelations in the Biden corruption scandal that the media-Democrat complex is blocking voters from seeing is this: The corrupt Chinese businessmen with whom the Bidens were colluding not only had a record of buying political influence, not only were known to have high-level ties to the Chinese Communist Party and the regime, but also were clandestine agents of China — at least, that’s what the FBI and Justice Department seem to have told the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

The Bidens were seeking a $40 million liquefied natural gas (LNG) deal with CEFC, a Shanghai-based energy conglomerate that was flying high until early 2018. By then, however, it had become crystal clear to Xi Jinping’s government that the company’s machinations on behalf of the regime had been penetrated by U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement. CEFC formally went bankrupt earlier this year, but that was two years after the regime pulled the plug on its operations – which appear to have been a cover for Chinese intelligence operations.

The Bidens, with former vice president Joe Biden’s son Hunter as the point-man, dealt with CEFC in 2017. They were the beneficiaries of its corrupt practices and were smack in the middle of things when CEFC began to unravel due to American investigations — investigations that Hunter Biden agreed to look into on behalf of his CEFC partners.

CEFC Was China CEFC posed as a private company. Make no mistake, though, CEFC was China. Its meteoric rise would not have been possible otherwise, and its rapid collapse happened because its usefulness as an instrument of the Communist regime’s influence was undermined by American surveillance operations.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Vote Trump; Save America By David Limbaugh

Posted By on October 31st, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-limbaugh/2020/10/30/vote-trump-save-america-n1107029

We are just days from the most important election in modern times, and sanctimonious scolds are still telling conservatives they’re immoral for supporting the main person fighting to prevent this nation’s destruction.

Seriously? Your shaming isn’t working. We don’t believe we are betraying our values for standing with the person who is pursuing policies that will sustain America’s liberty tradition and opposing those that will enslave and impoverish us.

You can force-feed us op-ed after op-ed from well-respected Christian theologians urging us to vote against President Trump because you apparently believe he’s Satan’s spawn. But your pleas will fall flat because, unlike you, we see clearly the threats we face to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness and, yes, even Christian values.

Ask yourself this: If, when crafting our Constitution, the framers anticipated that a man like Donald Trump might eventually become president — a man whose quirks bother some people to distraction and irrationality — would they have scrapped the whole system and opted for political tyranny and economic socialism?

Heavens, no, but that’s essentially what you’re asking us to do. No, thank you. We are not about to abandon the ideas we believe in because some of you have made a virtue out of hating and vilifying this president and demonizing the rest of us who disagree with you.

We are not about to surrender to a leftist agenda of abortion on demand; lawlessness in our streets; bankrupting and unworkable environmental radicalism; the end of the oil industry; socialism; gender anarchy; the obliteration of our freedoms of speech and religion; and a weak United States because you have become unwitting allies of sinister forces determined to realize these infernal goals.