MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

What Killed Michael Brown? Shelby Steele’s new documentary delivers a damning indictment of liberalism.Mark Tapson

Posted By on October 21st, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/what-killed-michael-brown-mark-tapson/

In the wake of the violent worldwide protests that followed the death in police custody of black Minneapolis resident George Floyd, it is easy to forget that what created the conditions for all that racial chaos was the 2014 shooting of black Michael Brown by white police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. Yes, the Black Lives Matter movement began before that, after George Zimmerman’s acquittal for the shooting death of Trayvon Martin. But BLM didn’t pick up steam and acquire national recognition until after Brown. And Zimmerman wasn’t a cop; it was Michael Brown’s death that really galvanized what author Heather Mac Donald called “the war on cops” and created the mythic slogan, “Hands up, don’t shoot,” which the leftist news media promoted in spite of an absence of evidence or witnesses that Brown ever said it.

The brilliant scholar Shelby Steele has now revisited that complex tragedy in a new documentary called What Killed Michael Brown?, written and narrated by Steele, and beautifully directed and filmed by his award-winning filmmaker son Eli. Steele père, you will remember, is the black conservative author of The Content of Our Character and White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era. His film seeks to answer what Steele calls “a daring question, one that a group like Black Lives Matter would forbid: is Michael Brown in any way responsible for his own death?”

What Killed Michael Brown? is grounded by Steele’s calm, thoughtful presence and his almost poetic narration, delivered in a measured, mellifluent voice and backed by a moody, jazz trumpet soundtrack. The film features him strolling down the streets of Ferguson, in his childhood home in Chicago, and in neighborhoods of the black underclass in both cities as he muses about the nature of race, power, and character in America. This is woven in with footage of riots and press conferences, and interviews with white Ferguson residents, local black leaders, and even race hustler Al Sharpton, whom Steele depicts as a self-aggrandizing agitator exploiting black anger.

EDUCATION, HISTORY Comments turned off

The Dangers of Politicized History We are now seeing the consequences of 50 years of the Left’s academic malfeasance. Bruce Thornton

Posted By on October 21st, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/dangers-politicized-history-bruce-thornton/

The New York Times’ “1619 Project,” a “woke” racialist rewrite of American history, is just the latest in the decades-long track record of leftist distortions of history. Like everything else corrupting our culture, its roots lie in Cultural Marxism and its assault on social institutions, especially education, as the means for achieving the Marxist paradise that the proletariat had betrayed by not rising up against their capitalist taskmasters and collectivizing the means of production.

The universities, of course, have been the seed-bed of such propaganda. A seemingly silly spasm of outrage over Israeli movie actress Gal Gadot (pictured above) being cast as Cleopatra illustrates how fake history and “cancel culture”­­­­––their roots in an academic fashion from decades earlier that at the time was dismissed as the typical hijinks of egghead professors––have infected people’s minds with patent nonsense.

The “woke” mob are put out with Gadot and her director, Patty Jenkins, because Gadot is a “bland” and “too pretty” white woman, whereas Cleopatra was Egyptian and hence presumably swarthy and more “exotic” looking. More noxious to critics is that Gadot is an Israeli. Journalist Sameera Khan on Twitter huffed, “shame on you, Gal Gadot. Your country steals Arab land & you’re stealing their movie roles.” The sheer ignorance of this observation is staggering. Christian Egypt didn’t become an Arab nation until 645 A.D. with the Muslim conquest. Today’s Arab Egyptians, then, with the exception of the minority Christian Copts, are the descendants of conquerors, occupiers, and colonizers. So who has a much longer record of “stealing” land?

But assuming Cleopatra was ethnic Egyptian is another historical solecism. She was a Macedonian Greek, descended from Ptolemy, Alexander the Great’s general who in 305 B.C. seized the rich territory of Egypt during the “game of thrones” over Alexander’s conquests after his death. The Ptolemies, as the dynasty is called, adopted much of the ceremony and iconography of the pharaohs in order to make their rule over a culturally, ethnically, religiously, and linguistically different peoples more manageable. But ethnically they were Macedonians, who tended to be fairer even than the southern Greeks, let alone Semites.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Portland Erects Statue In Honor Of Antifa Rioters Who Tore Down All The Statues

Posted By on October 21st, 2020

https://babylonbee.com/news/portland-erects-statue-in-honor-of-antifa-rioters-who-tore-down-all-the-statues

PORTLAND, OR—In a powerful and stunning move, the city of Portland has decided to memorialize its bravest heroes and their courageous acts of toppling racist statues. The city has now erected a statue of these statue-toppling Antifa rioters to forever commemorate them for their efforts.

“Even when they knew they could do whatever they wanted without repercussions, and with the full support of the media, these brave freedom fighters decided to tear down statues anyway!” said Mayor Ted Wheeler holding back tears at the statue’s unveiling. “It is my great privilege to honor these gender non-conforming persons with this taxpayer-funded statue.”

One of the Antifa heroes, who was wearing a black leather jacket replete with anarchist symbols and wielding a crowbar, stopped by to give a comment. “It’s time we rise up against racists like Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt! With every window we break, business we burn, and statue we topple, we stand against fascism and grow one step closer to ending oppression!”

ELECTIONS, MEDIA Comments turned off

Even As Media Work To Ignore It, Biden Scandal Just Keeps Growing

Posted By on October 21st, 2020

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/10/21/even-as-media-work-to-ignore-it-biden-scandal-just-keeps-growing/

Acting as partisans, not journalists, Big Media and Big Tech have gone all in, pretending the exploding Biden scandal isn’t really a thing, just more Russian collusion. Well, this scandal isn’t going away. In fact, it’s growing by the day.

We’ve written before about how social media and online publications hyped totally spurious claims of Russian collusion against President Donald Trump, while immediately tamping down factually based claims against fast-aging presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, who appear to have treated the vice presidency as a personal piggy bank.

The false assertion the media used to not report on growing evidence of salacious and likely criminal activity emerging from Hunter Biden’s laptop was that it was “unverified.”

Some even followed serial fabulist Rep. Adam Schiff’s lead in claiming the laptop and its information trove about influence-peddling by the Biden family is really just “Russian disinformation.”

Both Facebook and Twitter essentially put a stranglehold on sharing the New York Post’s stunning report on Biden’s influence peddling. Social media, which pretend to be objective, may soon face a day of reckoning, writes law professor, blogger and columnist Glenn Reynolds in a column that USA Today refused to publish.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Born for this moment By Richard Jack Rail

Posted By on October 21st, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/10/born_for_this_moment.html

It’s almost comical how Donald Trump makes the Left stumble and snort in frustration. Right when they think they’ve finally got him in another of their traps, he turns the tables and then rubs their faces in it. He has been handing the leftist monster its head for going on four years and you’d think they’d learn.

Trump is far smarter than the idiot liberal segment of the population wants to acknowledge — perhaps because their narcissism can’t handle the fact that he’s smarter than they are. And it’s real-world smarts across the broad swath of human behavior.

Trump understands people at levels few ever attain. That’s why he was able to calm down the North Koreans after nobody else had gotten anywhere with them for 70 years. That was a foreign policy triumph. Domestically, the Left knew that they’d nail him at the annual White House Correspondents Dinner which he wouldn’t dare to dodge because it was so prestigious. He did dodge it, and rubbed their faces in it by staging a rally that obligated many of those same snotty correspondents to go to the despised Rubeland on the night of the dinner. He hit them squarely where it hurt most, in their prestige.

Trump restored the situation in Syria by withdrawing our troops when everybody screamed that that would ignite WWIII. It didn’t. Then he wedded foreign with domestic policy by completely defusing the marching caravans out of Central America when the Idiot Left was just sure they finally had him snookered. In a domestic policy triumph with significant foreign policy implications, he supercharged the economy when the Left was certain they had hobbled it so thoroughly that “new normal” was their byword for how things now had to be.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Fauci’s COVID-19 Folly By David Archibald

Posted By on October 21st, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/10/faucis_covid19_folly.html

According to Australian researchers, the Wuhan COVID-19 virus likely is artificial, created in the lab — in China. According to Chinese virologist Li Meng Yan, it was intentionally created and spread by the Chinese government.  

Let’s start from the beginning, the physical construction of the place where the virus was created, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, was funded by the French government in 2004 in an attempt to ingratiate themselves with the Chinese communist dictatorship. Upon completion, the Chinese let only one French national into the building. What went on in that building was solely the work of the Chinese state.

As that was going on, events that led to the making of the virus occurred in the West. Those started decades before with the founding of The Wildlife Trust in 1971 by English wildlife lover Gerald Durrell.

Its headquarters eventually moved to New York. Then in 1997, the Wildlife Trust spun out The Consortium for Conservation Medicine. This organization has been described as a “unique collaborative institution that strives to understand the link between anthropogenic environmental change, the health of all species, and the conservation of biodiversity.” In other words, it is a spiritual home for health academics worried about global warming.

The Wildlife Trust and the Consortium for Conservation Medicine merged in 2010 to form the EcoHealth Alliance. One benefit from the name change was to enable government health bodies to give it money.

Dr. Anthony Fauci and his offsider at the National Institutes of Health, David Morens, have been publishing papers like this one since 2004.  In that paper they list ‘Intent to harm’ as a contributing factor in the emergence of infectious diseases. 

FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Trump’s Middle East Metamorphosis Arab leaders fear a President Biden may spurn Israel and cozy up to Turkey and Iran. By Walter Russell Mead

Posted By on October 21st, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-middle-east-metamorphosis-11603148243?mod=opinion_major_pos7

George W. Bush and Barack Obama both tried to transform the Middle East. Neither found the kind of success he sought.

But as the U.S. has reduced its regional footprint and ambitions, the Middle East has begun to change on its own. One of the most recent signs of its metamorphosis was Saudi Prince Bandar’s blistering criticism of Palestinian leaders for their decades of poor decision-making. His words are underscored by his kingdom’s decision to open its airspace to commercial flights from Tel Aviv to Dubai. Taken with the United Arab Emirates shifting from not recognizing the Jewish state to building a warm peace and economic partnerships with Israel, it’s clear the region is moving away from the predictable sterility of the past toward something genuinely new.

In the new Middle East, the younger generation is turning its back on religious radicalism, and Arab public opinion is moving to accept the presence of a Jewish state. The Palestinians have lost their position at the center of Middle East politics, and it is Turkey and Iran, not Israel, that Arab rulers are most concerned to oppose.

Last week I asked U.A.E. Ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba to explain what was happening, and the first thing he did was point me to recent polls by the Zogby organization and 12th annual ASDA’A BCW Arab Youth Survey, which interviewed 4,000 young Arabs (18 to 24) in 17 countries.

President Trump’s peace plan, which many longtime Middle East experts dismissed as a ghastly blunder that would destroy the American role in Middle East peace negotiations, has turned out to be relatively popular on the Arab street. The Zogby survey found majorities in favor of the “Deal of the Century” in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

A Debate Downgrade for Foreign Policy The candidates will have 15 minutes to talk about a dangerous world.*****

Posted By on October 21st, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-debate-downgrade-for-foreign-policy-11603236203?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

The 2020 presidential election won’t be remembered for its lucid debate and elevated discourse. The candidates themselves bear part of the blame, but the Commission on Presidential Debates hasn’t helped.

We argued on Oct. 17 that the commission has outlived its usefulness (see the response nearby from commission board member Newton Minow). Debate moderators’ longwinded and leftward-slating questions make the show about the moderators themselves and leave viewers none the wiser.

The next debate, scheduled for Thursday night at Belmont University in Nashville, Tenn., also isn’t promising based on the subjects the commission says will be covered: fighting Covid-19, race in America, climate change, American families, national security, leadership. The first two were part of the first presidential and vice presidential debates. Climate change is loaded with progressive assumptions (how will you raise taxes, further empower the federal government, and generally do what Democrats want to do anyway?).

We’re not sure what “American families” and “leadership” might entail, but why should a commission get to decide what subjects are crucial to debate and the public to hear?It’s especially outrageous to limit national security—we assume that means foreign policy—to one sixth of one debate. President Trump has a reasonable case that his Administration has achieved a major breakthrough between Gulf Arab nations and Israel, brought about by rejecting the foreign-policy establishment’s consensus opinions. The Trump Administration defenestrated consensus opinion by moving the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and leaving the Iran nuclear deal. The dire consequences predicted by think-tank poobahs never came about.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

The Bidens and China Business The story won’t go away without explanation, even if the Veep wins.

Posted By on October 21st, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-bidens-and-china-business-11603236651?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Most of the media is ignoring the emails found in Hunter Biden’s laptop, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t news. Joe Biden has an obligation to answer questions about his son’s influence-peddling and his own financial dealings—notably regarding China.

The New York Post last week obtainedthe contents of a laptop purported to belong to Hunter. The Post has been transparent that it obtained its copy of the hard drive from Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who says he received it from the owner of a Delaware computer-repair shop, where it was abandoned in 2019. Mr. Biden derides this as a “smear campaign,” while House Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff calls it without evidence “Russian disinformation.”

Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe says the government has no intelligence to support the disinformation claim. A repair-shop order from April 2019 contains Hunter’s name and what appears to be his signature. The shop owner supplied a subpoena showing the computer and hard drive were seized by the FBI in December 2019. And the Biden campaign hasn’t said the emails are phony.

The emails regarding Hunter’s business in Ukraine have been widely reported. But as intriguing is a May 2017 email thread that includes a discussion about “remuneration packages” for six people as part of a business deal with a now-defunct Chinese energy titan, CEFC China Energy. The Chinese company was international news a few years ago, after the U.S. government charged a CEFC-funded organization with money laundering, and its CEO was detained by Chinese authorities. CNN reported in 2018 that “at its height” CEFC was “hard to distinguish” from the Chinese government.

ELECTIONS, MEDIA Comments turned off

Don’t Believe Your Lying Eyes—or Joe Biden’s Big Mouth by Lee Smith

Posted By on October 21st, 2020

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/hunter-biden-twitter-facebook

In an ugly display of Big Tech’s monopoly power, Twitter and Facebook censor the White House, U.S. senators, and the ‘New York Post’ for saying things that were reported in ‘The New York Times’ five years ago—and that the Democratic candidate has publicly boasted about.

The move by Facebook and Twitter to censor a New York Post story about Joe Biden was Silicon Valley’s version of an October surprise. Since publication of a story last week alleging that Hunter Biden was introducing foreign business colleagues to his father, Twitter has kept locked the account of the 200-year-old newspaper until it deletes its tweets about its Biden reporting. By removing the story from news feeds, locking the accounts of the Trump campaign and White House spokesperson Kayleigh McEnany, and prohibiting editors of the newspaper from sharing the piece even from their own accounts—actions taken without evidence anything in the story was false—the tech oligarchy signaled it was throwing its weight behind what it believes to be the coming Democratic order in Washington.

It also provided Americans with an authentically shocking snapshot of the type of “managed” society that we now inhabit. In the new American system, large Silicon Valley corporations use their government-sanctioned and immensely profitable monopoly status to routinely censor information and libel anyone they please at the behest of unelected partisan verticals that have colonized large segments of the federal bureaucracy and security agencies. As each corrupted interest rubber stamps each other’s actions, power is removed from public hands and public view.

The idea that the Post story about Hunter Biden’s apparent bribery, and cocaine and sexual habits, was some form of dangerous “Russian disinformation” was teed up nearly a year ago by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the press, and cybersecurity professionals. According to Biden aides and other surrogates, any implication that the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate—who took his son to Beijing for business meetings on his vice presidential airplane—was aware of Hunter’s business dealings in Ukraine was necessarily part of an evil Russian scheme to interfere in an American election, again. It was on that basis that the social media giants justified their actions, while a practiced political and intelligence infrastructure surfaced to protect its favored candidate.