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Knives Out: Bolton Lacerates Nikki Haley in New Book By Philip Wegmann

Posted By on June 19th, 2020

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/06/18/knives_out_bolton_lacerates_nikki_haley_in_new_book__143483.html

As far as exit interviews are concerned, this one was unofficial and especially ugly.

In his forthcoming book, “The Room Where It Happened,” John Bolton condemns President Trump as a bumbling executive and mocks Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin as a political opportunist and dismisses Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as generally averse to conflict.

But he doesn’t stop there, as one rising GOP star is finding out.

The highly unflattering 494-page tome, cataloguing the former national security adviser’s time in the Trump White House, seems destined for bestseller lists — that is, if it can get published. Citing national security concerns late Wednesday, the Department of Justice asked a judge to issue a restraining order.

But copies are already floating around Capitol Hill, and regardless of what the court rules, a harsh picture of Nikki Haley is among the portraits emerging. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during much of Bolton’s tenure acted like a “free electron” more concerned with political ambition than international diplomacy, according to a copy of the book obtained by RealClearPolitics.

Haley, the rare Cabinet member to leave the White House on good terms with the president, is considered a top presidential aspirant in a post-Trump Republican Party. Bolton seems intent on denting that reputation.

After Syrian President Bashar al-Assad unleashed a chemical attack on his own people, Bolton suggested that Haley stand with ambassadors from the United Kingdom and France in the U.N. Security Council to present a united front against the rogue leader.

“I had done that many times,” Bolton wrote, “but Haley declined, preferring to have pictures of her alone giving the U.S. statement in the Council. That told me something.” It was indicative, he added, of an “untethered performance in New York over the past year-plus,” and Bolton, still new in his job at the time, made a note to discuss the performance with Pompeo.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

How Cultural Revolutions Die — or Not By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on June 19th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/how-cultural-revolutions-die-or-not/#slide-1

They eat their own, unless a cruel dictator rises to unite and control the mob.

Unlike coups or political revolutions, cultural revolutions don’t just change governments or leaders. Instead, they try to redefine entire societies. Their leaders call them “holistic” and “systematic.”

Cultural revolutionaries attack the very referents of our daily lives. The Jacobins’ so-called Reign of Terror during the French Revolution slaughtered Christian clergy, renamed months, and created a new supreme being: Reason.

Mao cracked down on supposed Western decadence such as the wearing of eyeglasses, and he made peasants forge pot iron and intellectuals wear dunce caps.

Moammar Qaddafi’s Green Book cult wiped out violins and forced Libyans to raise chickens in their apartments.

The current Black Lives Matter revolution has “canceled” certain movies, television shows, and cartoons, toppled statues, tried to create new autonomous urban zones, and renamed streets and plazas. Some fanatics shave their heads. Others have shamed authorities into washing the feet of their fellow revolutionaries.

But inevitably cultural revolutions die out when they turn cannibalistic. Once the Red Guard started killing party hacks too close to Mao, it began to wane.

If toppling Confederate statues is required, what then about Nancy Pelosi’s own mayor father, who once, as Baltimore’s mayor, dedicated honorific statues to Confederate generals?

If racists understandably do not deserve their names on national shrines, what to do with the iconic liberal graduate program at Princeton, the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs? It was named for a president who did more to further segregation and racial prejudice than any chief executive of the 20th century.

Stanford and Yale, coveted brand names of the progressive professional classes, are named after men whom protestors now deem racists.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Harvard Eliminates SAT and ACT from its Application Process By Eric Lendrum

Posted By on June 18th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/06/17/harvard-eliminates-sat-and-act-from-its-application-process/

The elite Harvard University has announced that it will be removing the SAT and ACT scores requirement from its application process, citing the coronavirus pandemic as an excuse, according to The Daily Caller.

The change will go into effect for all prospective students applying for the class of 2025. In a statement, the university said that the pandemic “has created insurmountable challenges in scheduling tests for all students, particularly those from modest economic backgrounds.” The statement also seems to confirm that the removal of the test score requirement will not be permanent, saying that “we believe this temporary change addresses these challenges.”

Instead, applying students will be asked “to send whatever materials they believe would convey their accomplishments in secondary school and their promise for the future.”

Other universities have already permanently dropped the SAT and ACT requirements, including the entirety of the University of California system, which encompasses 10 different colleges across the state. Far-left “civil rights” groups have falsely claimed that the score requirement amounts to discrimination against poor students and minority students.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Flights to and from Beijing canceled amid new coronavirus outbreak By Marty Johnson –

Posted By on June 18th, 2020

https://thehill.com/policy/international/503105-flights-to-and-from-beijing-canceled-amid-new-coronavirus-outbreak

Both of Beijing’s major airports have seen a large portion of their flights canceled, as China’s capital tries to snuff out the country’s latest coronavirus outbreak.

More than 60 percent of flights at Beijing Capital International Airport were canceled Wednesday, while around 50 percent were canceled at Daxing, the city’s other main airport, according to multiple reports.

The Associated Press reported that 1,255 flights to and from both airports had been canceled, roughly two-thirds of those scheduled. Reuters reported that the majority of those flights were domestic.

Beijing officials reported 31 new cases of COVID-19 on Tuesday, bringing the total of new cases since Thursday up to 137. The source of the outbreak has been determined to be Xifandi, a market that sources nearly all of the city’s fresh produce.

Since the outbreak was identified, Beijing has locked down surrounding neighborhoods and closed schools and some bars and restaurants.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Let’s ‘Demonetize’ NBC News And Google

Posted By on June 18th, 2020

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/06/18/cancel-nbc-news-and-google/

This week saw a depressing new low in the attempt by the left to silence voices with which it disagrees when an NBC News “reporter” tried to enlist Google to block two conservative websites’ ability to make money.

In a report on Tuesday, NBC News’ London-based Adele-Momoko Fraser claimed that Google had banned The Federalist and Zero Hedge from its ad platform over articles that were “pushing unsubstantiated claims about the Black Lives Matter protests.”

Google soon tried to correct the record, saying that “The Federalist was never demonetized.” Google had only threatened to blacklist the site from its ad network. (It did “demonetize” Zero Hedge.)

What’s more, contrary to NBC News, Google’s actions against The Federalist and Zero Hedge had nothing to do with articles they published, but with reader comments on those sites. Google told Fox News that it has “strict publisher policies that govern the content ads can run on, which includes comments on the site. This is a longstanding policy.”

It turns out that not only did NBC’s Fraser botch the story, she also played an active role in generating the “news” in the first place. It was NBC News that notified Google of “research conducted by the Center for Countering Digital Hate,” a heretofore unknown and sketchy outfit, which got the ball rolling.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The BLM Movement: An Existential Threat to America Its sudden rise and metastasizing power puts America at a dangerous crossroads. Dr. Craig Luther

Posted By on June 18th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/06/blm-movement-existential-threat-america-dr-craig-luther/

Craig Luther completed his Ph.D. in Modern European History at UC Santa Barbara. He is a former Fulbright Scholar, retired U.S. Air Force historian, and author of 8 books on the Second World War focusing on German military operations on the eastern front.

BLACK LIVES MATTER has taken America by storm. Simply put, it is a radical Leftist outfit that seeks to replace capitalism with socialism, abolish the police (and let criminals out of jail), and looks to socialist Venezuela as a model. Historically, BLM’s antecedents reach back to the Black Panthers of the 1960s; in recent years it has drawn inspiration from the radical Occupy Wall Street movement.

The BLM movement was given added impetus by the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The Left mobilized upon Brown’s tragic death in 2014, BLM and other radical groups promoting the false narrative of “Hands up! Don’t shoot!”–supposedly the young man’s final words before he was, we were told, brutally gunned down by a racist white cop. Destructive and deadly riots ensued.

Of course, “Hands up! Don’t shoot!” was One. Big. Lie. Every black witness who testified before the grand jury stated that Michael Brown had attempted to force his way into the officer’s police cruiser, assaulted the officer, and tried to grab his weapon. Looked at objectively, Mr Brown was a thug who, sadly, paid with his life for the terrible choices he made; even the Obama justice department could not come to a different conclusion.

EDUCATION, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Jewish Studies Professors for Palestine Welcome to an odious, virtue-signaling screed. Richard L. Cravatts

Posted By on June 18th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/06/jewish-studies-professors-palestine-richard-l-cravatts/

Seeming to give credence to what wry Professor Edward Alexander referred to as the “explosive power of boredom” among some members of the professoriate, around 400 “professors of Jewish Studies in North and South America, Europe, and Israel” recently published and signed “A Letter on Annexation and Apartheid in Israel.”

The opening paragraph of this odious, virtue-signaling screed reveals that these so-called professors of Jewish Studies are either ignorant of history, law, and fact or are so biased against the Jewish state that they are unable to assess what is strategically and politically necessary for Israel to do to secure its rightful sovereignty.

When they say that they “write in opposition to the continuation of the occupation and the stated intention of the current elected government in Israel to annex parts of the West Bank, thereby formally (de jure) creating apartheid conditions in Israel and Palestine,” they use the very language of those waging a cognitive war against Israel. Only propagandists or people who are naive and ignorant of history and fact use the word Palestine to describe a factitious state that exists only in the minds of Israel’s enemies, and the fact that it is used here, along with references to an illegal occupation and a state of apartheid rule that Israel will supposedly impose after the annexation, indicates that these professors are on the wrong side of the ideological fence when they are assessing Israel’s diplomacy and politics.

The letter, specifically, claims that “the establishment of Jewish settlements in occupied territories captured in 1967 already stands in direct violation of the consensus view in international law,” but that legally-incorrect opinion is held only by a “consensus” of mistaken diplomatic, political, and anti-Israel elites in the West who have contorted international law to support their own biased interpretation of Israel’s legal rights..

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Iran Builds Phony Model of American Aircraft Carrier The staged attacks on it will be most impressive. Michael Ledeen

Posted By on June 18th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/06/iran-builds-target-aircraft-carrier-michael-ledeen/

As tensions mount between Washington and Tehran, the regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran, aided by its Chinese and Arab allies, staged a variety of imminent threats. In keeping with its failed policies of the past, Tehran has apparently constructed a phony model of an American aircraft carrier in an Iranian port in order to stage “attacks” on it:

The head of the Imam Reza Islamic Center in Berlin has declared in an interview with an Iranian state-controlled news outlet on June 3 that Tehran’s Islamic revolution has no borders.

The Middle East Media Research Institute first revealed the video of Sabaheddin Torkilmaz, the head of the Imam Reza Islamic Center, on its website…

Torkilmaz stressed the anti-Western worldview of the Islamic Republic of Iran, stating: “The world needs to know that the system of the Rule of the Jurisprudent stands in opposition to the system of liberal democracy in the world and in opposition to the democracy in America.”

“Since the Revolution [in 1979], Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine – and now Yemen and countries in Africa and in Latin America – have been inspired directly by Imam [Khomeini].” He added: “We need to examine what was the purpose of the Revolution.”

BOOKS, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Meet Your New Commissar Black Studies star Ibram X. Kendi has plans for you. Bruce Bawer

Posted By on June 18th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/06/meet-your-new-commissar-bruce-bawer/

Among the byproducts of the worldwide mayhem and destruction carried out in solemn memory of career criminal George Floyd is that books on racism are selling almost as briskly as guns. As I write this, the #3 bestseller on Amazon is something called How to Be an Antiracist by one Ibram X. Kendi.

This book is Kendi’s third. The first was The Black Campus Movement: Black Students and the Racial Reconstitution of Higher Education, 1965–1972 (2012); the second, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (2016), won the National Book Award, led to a Guggenheim Fellowship, and propelled Kendi, three years ago, from a low-level teaching job at the University of Florida to a position as full professor and head of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University.

Next month, in a further move up the academic ladder, Kendi, age 37, will take up a plum post as director of the brand-new Boston University Center for Antiracist Research. He’ll also publish Antiracist Baby, a “board book” for very young children (already #15 on Amazon) “that introduces the youngest readers and the grown-ups in their lives to the concept and power of anti-racism.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The China-India Clash The Himalayan border brawl is an opening for closer U.S.-Delhi ties.

Posted By on June 18th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-china-india-clash-11592435121?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Monday’s skirmish along the China-India border was the deadliest in decades. It’s impossible to confirm what triggered the fighting, but the big picture is clear: Tensions between New Delhi and Beijing are escalating while the latter steps up its regional bullying.

Both countries have sent thousands of troops to their disputed border in the Himalayas, though a “de-escalation process” was under way when the deadly confrontation began Monday night. Reportedly no firearms were used, but the Indian government said at least 20 Indian soldiers died. China won’t confirm any deaths but probably suffered some after hours of high-altitude, hand-to-hand combat.

Each country says the other instigated the confrontation, but the clash fits China’s recent habit of pressing territorial claims on all fronts. In the South China Sea, China has militarized artificial islands and is asserting its claims with force. Chinese vessels, often backed by the country’s coast guard, hound foreign ships operating in contested waters. This led to standoffs with Indonesia and Malaysia earlier in the year. This spring a Chinese government vessel sank a Vietnamese fishing boat.

In the East China Sea, Chinese ships have appeared near the disputed Senkaku Islands every day for more than two months, leading to protests from Japan. Chinese jet fighters intruded into Taiwanese airspace this month while state-run media and senior generals muse about a possible invasion. Beijing is exerting more political control over Hong Kong.