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Unspeakable Truths about Racial Inequality in America written by Glenn Loury

Posted By on February 13th, 2021

https://quillette.com/2021/02/10/unspeakable-truths-about-racial-inequality-in-america/

“I am a black American intellectual living in an age of persistent racial inequality in my country. As a black man I feel compelled to represent the interests of “my people.” (But that reference is not unambiguous!) As an intellectual, I feel that I must seek out the truth and speak such truths as I am given to know.”

EXCERPTS

Leftist critics tout the racial wealth gap. They act as if pointing to the absence of wealth in the African American community is, ipso facto, an indictment of the system—even as black Caribbean and African immigrants are starting businesses, penetrating the professions, presenting themselves at Ivy League institutions in outsize numbers, and so forth. In doing so, they behave like other immigrant groups in our nation’s past. Yes, they are immigrants, not natives. And yes, immigration can be positively selective. I acknowledge that. Still, something is dreadfully wrong when adverse patterns of behavior readily visible in the native-born black American population go without being adequately discussed—to the point that anybody daring to mention them risks being cancelled as a racist. This bluff can’t be sustained indefinitely. Despite the outcome of the recent election, I believe we are already beginning to see the collapse of this house of cards.

A second unspeakable truth: “Structural racism” isn’t an explanation, it’s an empty category

The invocation of “structural racism” in political argument is both a bluff and a bludgeon. It is a bluff in the sense that it offers an “explanation” that is not an explanation at all and, in effect, dares the listener to come back. So, for example, if someone says, “There are too many blacks in prison in the US and that’s due to structural racism,” what you’re being dared to say is, “No. Blacks are so many among criminals, and that’s why there are so many in prison. It’s their fault, not the system’s fault.” And it is a bludgeon in the sense that use of the phrase is mainly a rhetorical move. Users don’t even pretend to offer evidence-based arguments beyond citing the fact of the racial disparity itself. The “structural racism” argument seldom goes into cause and effect. Rather, it asserts shadowy causes that are never fully specified, let alone demonstrated. We are all just supposed to know that it’s the fault of something called “structural racism,” abetted by an environment of “white privilege,” furthered by an ideology of “white supremacy” that purportedly characterizes our society. It explains everything. Confronted with any racial disparity, the cause is, “structural racism.”

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Are you feeling safer yet? By Gideon Isaac

Posted By on February 13th, 2021

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

A liberal relative of mine said of Biden’s victory that she was overwhelmed with relief.  But she is not likely to experience the life of calm and safety she anticipates with the Democrat party having won the presidency, the Senate, and the House, not to mention control at all levels of the state she lives in: California.

To illustrate the point about safety, take New York City.  A New York Post editorial quotes New York City police commissioner Dermot Shea: “We have made staggering numbers of gun arrests, taking guns off the streets from felons, but when you look, three days later, four days later, those individuals are back on the street committing more gun violence.”

The editorial continues by saying that years of often ill conceived criminal justice reform has set up a revolving door that frees even repeat offenders almost instantly.  And “[w]orse, because everyone knows the perp will be back in the neighborhood again — and the no-bail law lets the defense know right away who has talked — witnesses are ever-harder to come by.”

Well, that’s in one Democrat-run state.  What about California?  According to Hotair.com: “Through a series of measures starting back in 2014, the state of California has made it increasingly easy for people to commit property theft and get away with it[.] … Even in cases where they do manage to catch somebody stealing, it’s too often not worth the trouble of taking them down to the station because they’ll just be released immediately without bail anyway.”  One result of this is that California businesses are shutting down for good.

FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Biden Makes History: First President in 40 Years to Punt on Contacting Israel White House doesn’t list Israel as American ally Adam Kredo

Posted By on February 13th, 2021

https://freebeacon.com/national-security/biden-makes-history-first-president-in-40-years-to-punt-on-contacting-israel/

President Joe Biden is the first American leader in 40 years not to contact Israel’s leaders as one of his first actions in the White House, setting up what could be four years of chilly relations between America and its top Middle East ally.

Biden has already phoned multiple world leaders, including Russian president Vladimir Putin and Chinese president Xi Jinping, but during his 23 days in office has yet to speak with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu—making Biden the first president in modern history to punt on bolstering U.S.-Israel relations during his initial days in office. Every president going back to at least Ronald Reagan in 1981 made contact with their Israeli counterpart within a week of assuming office, according to a review of news reports.

Congressional foreign policy leaders slammed Biden’s Netanyahu snub, prompting a flurry of questions for White House press secretary Jen Psaki, who has declined to disclose when or if Biden will call the Israeli leader. Psaki also said on Friday the White House would not list Israel as a U.S. ally when asked about the relationship during her daily press briefing.

Modern presidents going back to Reagan made calls or overtures to Israel during their first days in office, sending a message the United States would continue to stand for the Jewish state’s security. Biden’s diplomatic slight comes as Israel faces encroaching terrorist threats and the danger of a nuclear-armed Iran. He also has hired several individuals with a background in anti-Israel activism, including Maher Bitar, a top White House National Security Council official who spent his youth organizing boycotts of the Jewish state. The State Department’s Iran envoy, Robert Malley, also has been a vocal critic of Israel.

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Nikki Haley Breaks From Trump in Interview About a Potential Run for President By Masooma Haq

Posted By on February 13th, 2021

https://www.theepochtimes.com/nikki-haley-breaks-from-trump-in-interview-about-a-potential-run-for-president_3695118.html

Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley in a recent interview broke from Trump, criticizing his actions in relation to the Jan. 6 incident at the Capitol.

Haley, in a lengthy profile interview with Politico focused on her former boss and a possible run for the presidency in 2024, said that she does not believe Trump will run for federal office again in the wake of the Jan. 6 Capitol breach, telling Politico, “I don’t think he can. He’s fallen so far.”

Haley has all but confirmed a run for presidential office in 2024. In the profile by Politico’s Tim Alberta, she was repeatedly questioned about Trump’s role in what happened on Jan. 6 and if she agreed with what her former boss did after the November election.

Democrats, legacy media, and some Republicans have criticized the former president for not conceding on Nov. 4 after mainstream media outlets called the election for Biden, and instead opposing the numerous irregularities on election night and later filing legal actions against a handful of key states.

Trump’s legal team said these states changed elections laws without the approval of their state’s legislature or had other legal issues that were documented via the testimony of numerous people who signed sworn affidavits saying they had witnessed voter fraud.

All of the legal cases were dismissed by courts on procedural grounds without the evidence being heard and ruled on. In the interview, Haley reluctantly supported Trump’s challenging the election results and all the court filings.

“I understand the president. I understand that genuinely, to his core, he believes he was wronged,” Haley told Politico. “This is not him making it up.”

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EU’s Covid-19 Vaccination Debacle: “Epochal Failure” by Soeren Kern

Posted By on February 13th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17052/eu-vaccination-failure

The vaccination rollout has been plagued by bureaucratic sclerosis, poorly-negotiated contracts, penny-pinching and blame shifting — all wrapped in a shroud of secrecy. The result is a needless and embarrassing shortage of vaccines, and yet another a crisis of legitimacy for the EU.

“The European Commission ordered too late, limited its focus to only a few pharmaceutical companies, agreed on a price in a typically bureaucratic EU manner and completely underestimated the fundamental importance of the situation. We now have a situation where grandchildren in Israel are already vaccinated but the grandparents here are still waiting. That’s just completely wrong.” — Markus Söder, Bavarian premier and possible future German chancellor.

“I now fear that the European Union will find itself in the impossible situation of having to prolong some of the existing [Covid-19] restrictions beyond the summer, while both Britain and the United States start to normalize. That is the cost of the vaccine delays: a very high cost in lives, prestige and further economic losses.” — Bruno Maçães, political scientist and former Portuguese Europe Minister.

“The commission decided to aggrandize its competence and it wasn’t up to the job — it didn’t have the right people or the right skills.” — Adrian Wooldridge, political editor, The Economist.

“In the dispute over the delivery delay of the AstraZeneca vaccine, the EU Commission is currently making the best advertisement for Brexit: It is acting slowly, bureaucratically and protectionist. And if something goes wrong, it’s everyone else’s fault.” — Bettina Schulz, commentator, Die Zeit.

The European Union’s much-touted campaign to vaccinate 450 million Europeans against Covid-19 has gotten off to an inauspicious start. The vaccination rollout has been plagued by bureaucratic sclerosis, poorly-negotiated contracts, penny-pinching and blame shifting — all wrapped in a shroud of secrecy. The result is a needless and embarrassing shortage of vaccines, and yet another a crisis of legitimacy for the EU.

As of February 11, the EU had administered vaccines to approximately 4.5% of its adult population, compared to 14% in the United States, 21% in the United Kingdom and 71% in Israel, according to statistics compiled by Our World in Data. The EU’s vaccination fiasco comes as many European countries are struggling to combat an extremely virulent third wave of the coronavirus and healthcare systems across the continent are once again at breaking points.

BOOKS, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

While Europe Slept, 15 Years Later A new preface. Bruce Bawer

Posted By on February 13th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/while-europe-slept-15-years-later-bruce-bawer/

Note: My book While Europe Slept was first published by Doubleday in 2006. Now the Stapis publishing house has put out a Polish edition, translated by Tadeusz Skrzyszowski. Given that the book is fifteen years old, Stapis asked for a new preface. Here it is.

This book, which appeared first in English, has already been translated into several other languages, but it is a special pleasure to see it published in Polish. My father’s parents were both Polish, although they came from municipalities that, in their time, were located in the Austrian Empire and that are now part of Ukraine, not far from the Polish border. My grandfather was a native of the Galician town of Brody; my grandmother was raised in the Galician city of Krystynopol (now Chervonohrad).  He emigrated to America before World War I; she left her childhood home – which was blasted half to bits during exchanges of gunfire between the Central Powers and the Russians – during the war, traveling all alone at the age of fifteen and waiting for several months in Rotterdam until it was determined that the shipping route was safe from German mines.

My grandparents met and married in New York City and spent the rest of their lives there, raising a daughter and a son, my father, to whom they gave the name Tadeusz Kazimierz, after Tadeusz Kosciuszko and Kazimierz Pulaski, the two great Polish heroes of the American revolution. My grandfather died in 1958, two years after my birth, but my grandmother lived to be ninety, and was an important part of my childhood and early adulthood. On the wall over her bed there hung for decades a huge photograph of my father as a baby, swaddled in an American flag; on her bedroom dresser stood a framed photograph of Richard M. Nixon, whom she respected for his hatred of the Communism to which the Polish people had been subjected since the end of World War II. While she was a proud American citizen, ever thankful to the United States for taking her in and for giving her freedom, she retained throughout her life a strong attachment to Poland and a strong concern for the fate of her fellow Poles.

Growing up, I was deeply cognizant of these matters. First my grandmother had been driven from her home and family by a brutal war between the Kaiser and the Tsar; later, long after she had departed, the people she left behind had been cruelly subjugated by the Nazis and the Soviets. Largely because of my awareness of my grandmother’s background, I was, even as a small child, profoundly aware of the evils of despotism in all its forms. As a teenager I read everything I could find about Nazi Germany and the USSR. When, in 1998, I relocated to the continent of my grandparents’ birth and encountered a large Islamic subculture in Amsterdam, I immediately recognized the smell of tyranny. That encounter is the starting point for this book.  

When I wrote this book, I used such terms as “radical Islam” and “Muslim extremist.” Indeed, the book’s original English subtitle was How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within. I have asked my Polish publishers to remove the word “radical” from the subtitle of this edition. I no longer use such terms in connection with Islam, for I have recognized that Islam itself is radical and extreme; people who call themselves “moderate” or “liberal” Muslims are people who have exchanged key elements of their faith for Western Enlightenment values.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Deep State, Dark Intentions The NSA concentrates on collecting information on ordinary citizens because they are the low hanging fruit, while the real enemies of the U.S. are much harder to catch.  By Lucja Cannon

Posted By on February 13th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/12/deep-state-dark-intentions/

A review of “Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State,”
by Barton Gellman (Penguin, 448 pages, $30)

Barton Gellman’s Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State raises important questions about American society and politics. It deals with power over personal information and its implications for control, secrecy, individual rights, and politics on a global scale.

The author starts with Edward Snowden and his revelations of the existence of a global surveillance leviathan, feeding off the main arteries of global communications networks. Gellman was one of three journalists who first received the secret National Security Agency files from Snowden and wrote a series of articles about them for the Washington Post, for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. He describes his encounters with Snowden, the information he provided, and his efforts to verify the files and expand on them.

Dark Mirror expands into a search for a deeper understanding of the surveillance state through the author’s interviews with top Bush and Obama Administration intelligence officials, participation in industry conferences, and research. This is parallel with Gellman’s effort to keep his contacts secret to avoid legal jeopardy, connected with his cooperation with Snowden and publicizing classified information.

The picture that emerges from this book will be unfamiliar to most Americans. Surveillance was pervasive until the Church Committee reforms led to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which restricted spying on U.S. citizens and residents, requiring individual warrants. Outside of the United States, President Reagan’s Executive Order 12333 created a legal framework for foreign surveillance.

FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Is Israel an ally? Biden’s administration is unclear on that one By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on February 13th, 2021

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

Israel has been America’s staunch ally going back to the Cold War. Additionally, as a friendly nation that has been genocidally besieged by the anti-American, anti-Semitic bullies in its neighborhood, America felt the good guy’s responsibility to help Israel protect herself. Beginning in 1979 with the Iranian Revolution, Israel and America also shared a common enemy: radical Islam. But none of that matters to Joe Biden, who’s long been hostile to Israel and is following Obama’s delusional effort to make nice with Iran.

Biden has never liked Israel. Moreover, he shares Obama’s dislike for Netanyahu, something demonstrated by his refusing to talk to Netanyahu since entering office.

With Jews who are Democrats showing decreasing support for Israel, that made the campaign easier for Biden. Democrats, rather than supporting the Abraham Accords, which are causing peace to break out across the Middle East, resented the fact that Trump was able to broker the accords by circumventing the totalitarian and genocidal Palestinians, rather than pandering to them.

As the election drew near, confident that Democrat Jews’ loathing for Trump overrode any residual love for Israel, Biden became more openly hostile to Israel. In August, the Washington Post summed up Biden’s Israel policy as a morally muscular opposition to Trump’s unwavering support for Israel and the peace deals he was making by ignoring the Palestinians, who have proven themselves incapable of self-governance in both Gaza and the West Bank:

“The new UAE-Israel announcement does not just normalize bilateral relations between the two countries, which have existed barely under the table for many years,” wrote Khaled Elgindy, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute. “For Palestinians, it also helps to normalize (if not actually reward) Israel’s occupation.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Post-Trump world of censorship and canceling is chugging along in Canada, too By Robert Stewart

Posted By on February 13th, 2021

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

Recently, Jagmeet Singh, a friend of Black Lives Matter agitator Shaun King and leader of Canada’s far-left party, pushed out an online petition over Twitter demanding that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declare Proud Boys Canada a “white supremacist terrorist” organization. The call came immediately after U.S. Proud Boys members were apparently found involved in the Capitol Building mêlée that led to House Democrats impeaching President Trump a second time.  

Although it’s not supposed to be the Twitter followers of Singh’s New Democratic Party who decide who is and isn’t a threat to our national security, Singh’s bit of Two Minutes Hate did exactly what was intended: it pushed last week Canada’s version of Homeland Security to label the group an official “terrorist organization.”  Proud Boys Canada is now apparently in the same category as the Islamic State.  

It’s difficult to see the move as anything but pointless.  It also drips with hypocrisy as well as alarmist, diversionary politics. 

While the Perry Ellis shirt-wearing and fighting-prone Proud Boys certainly aren’t my cup of tea, the group denies being an organizational force behind the Capitol Building siege.  Further, as far as I’ve read about them, the group’s membership is apparently open to all comers (of any race) and always has been.  Moreover, I’ve never heard either its current leader (Enrique Tarrio, non-white) or its founder (Gavin McInnes, married to a non-white woman) state that any racial group is superior or deserves to rule supreme over others — a requirement, it would seem, for a group open to everyone. 

FOREIGN POLICY, HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Biden’s Pentagon ‘review’ falls short to deter communist Chinese By Robert L. Maginnis

Posted By on February 13th, 2021

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

On Wednesday, President Joe Biden visited the Pentagon to launch a review of how the U.S. military is postured to deter China in the Pacific.  Given the president’s statements concerning China, it is clear he doesn’t understand the existential threat posed by our Chinese enemy.

Mr. Biden totally misses Beijing’s threat because his “review” falls terribly short of the mark.  His worldview is naïve and shortsighted, and he fails to recognize that the Communist Chinese truly intend to conquer the world.  Indeed, Beijing seeks to destroy America — every aspect of our country and, by association, Western civilization.  We need to review and then act upon all aspects of our relations with that totalitarian regime or risk our future: trade, military, technology, cyber, ideological, media, geopolitical, and more.

There is no doubt that Beijing’s ultimate goal is to have the Middle Kingdom sitting atop the entire world.   Yes, Chinese President Xi Jinping and his communist puppets are worse than past dictators and on steroids. 

China’s Xi is a modern-day wannabe emperor, and he has taken steps to prepare China for global dominance through every means available — the Belt & Road Initiative and rapidly growing the world’s largest military, among others, and soon China will be the world’s largest economy. 

Meanwhile, the U.S. response to this threat is too little, too late.  Back at the Pentagon, Mr. Biden with Vice President Kamala Harris at his side called for a posture review to help “chart a strong path forward on China related matters.”