POLITICS Comments turned off

Biden’s Foreign-Policy Blast From the Past He thinks liberal multilateralism will tame China, Russia and woke Democrats. By Walter Russell Mead

Posted By on July 14th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-foreign-policy-blast-from-the-past-11594680389?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

Optimism is a rare commodity in this difficult year, but I came away from a conversation with Anthony Blinken, Joe Biden’s senior foreign-policy adviser, believing the former vice president’s campaign is confident that the old-time Democratic policy playbook will bring success abroad and at home.

This sort of optimism, the belief that working hard and sticking to your principles will bring results, is a defining characteristics of the American spirit. Pessimists don’t change countries and cultures in hope of building a better life. And a nation of pessimists produces few world-class innovators and entrepreneurs.

In foreign affairs the case for optimism is limited. A nation of pessimists wouldn’t have come up with the Marshall Plan—but neither would it have overthrown Moammar Gadhafi, certain a more peaceful Libya would emerge.

Team Biden’s optimism reflects a faith in the classic pillars of Cold War-era Democratic policy: At home, a regulated market economy and government that attends to the concerns of key Democratic interest groups can produce the middle-class affluence that makes the U.S. model admired and envied around the world. Abroad, the principles of liberal multilateralism—supplemented when absolutely necessary by the American military and a willingness to use it—can bring a critical mass of the world’s powers into broad alignment with core U.S. objectives.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

A Way to Curb Chinese Intimidation Congress kept companies from cooperating with the Arab boycott of Israel. It can follow that model now. By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Anastasia Lin

Posted By on July 14th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-way-to-curb-chinese-intimidation-11594680594?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Facebook, Google and Twitter announced this month that they will refuse to comply with customer-information requests from Hong Kong authorities until the companies review the implications of a new Chinese security law designed to suppress dissent in the territory. If the tech companies don’t cave in, it will be a rare instance of Western businesses standing firm against Beijing’s intimidation.

Corporations typically kowtow, fearful of losing access to China’s massive market. International airlines, including American, Delta and United, changed their websites so that Taipei isn’t listed as being in Taiwan. The general manager of the National Basketball Association’s Houston Rockets apologized for tweeting an image that read “Fight for Freedom. Stand with Hong Kong.” Mercedes-Benz apologized for an English-language Instagram post that included an innocuous quote from the Dalai Lama. The Big Four accounting firms issued statements criticizing Hong Kong protests after some of their employees took out an ad supporting them.

Using its economic power to pressure Western corporations is a key element of Chinese statecraft. The Communist Party keenly appreciates that Western entities are far more credible than Chinese government or media. China scrutinizes statements by Western companies, focuses on those that are even mildly critical of its behavior, and threatens them on social media with economic retaliation and blacklisting.

Such threats often appear to emanate from private Chinese citizens. But given the government’s heavy censorship of Chinese social-media platforms, they inevitably bear the party’s imprimatur. Moreover, the Chinese government almost always backs up the statements attributed to its citizens, waging a joint campaign, so that the language of these “private” complaints tracks Communist Party propaganda.

Beijing also attempts to suppress authentic Chinese voices critical of its human-rights abuses. One of us (Ms. Lin) represented Canada in the Miss World 2016 finals in Washington. The London-based Miss World Organization—most of whose sponsors are Chinese companies—isolated her from the media during the pageant and threatened to disqualify her after she was seen speaking informally to a Boston Globe columnist. The ban on her contact with journalists was ameliorated only after intense public pressure.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Democracy Dies in Darkness, but Don’t Blame Trump His enemies warned there would be an all-out assault on freedom of speech. Then they launched one. By Gerard Baker ****

Posted By on July 14th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/democracy-dies-in-darkness-but-dont-blame-trump-11594661547?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Remember the grave warnings when Donald Trump was elected about how his presidency would usher in an unprecedented assault on freedom of expression?

Ululations of orchestrated hysteria went up from the nation’s media. It was 1933 again. Late Weimar America would succumb to an authoritarian with a distinctive haircut and a penchant for intolerant rhetoric.

A few weeks before the 2016 election, the Committee to Protect Journalists issued a thunderous warning: “A Trump presidency represents a threat to press freedom unknown in modern history.”

“Democracy Dies in Darkness,” which some have noted sounds like the working title for an inferior James Bond movie, became the daily front-page leitmotif of a major newspaper, its reporters bravely committed to holding aloft the flickering lamp of freedom amid the gathering gloom of tyranny.

Four years on, it’s clear the warnings were justified. Consider the state of free speech in Mr. Trump’s America. Newspaper editors are forced to quit because of pieces they’ve run. Academics are removed from positions for daring to dissent from the dominant orthodoxy. Corporate executives have been fired for opinions written three decades ago that now fall outside the lines of acceptable public discourse.

In classrooms, newsrooms and boardrooms across the country, you can almost hear the silence as people internally check what they say in the knowledge that if they cross the line they’ll be publicly denounced and very likely terminated.

The darkness has indeed claimed democracy.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Pricey private schools to teach Black Lives Matter classes by Kerry Picket

Posted By on July 14th, 2020

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/pricey-private-schools-to-teach-black-lives-matter-classes

Elite private schools are being pressured by Black Lives Matter supporters to include materials on “institutional racism” in curriculum and student life programs. 

Black Lives Matter has driven protests against police brutality and earned donations from brand name corporations eager to avoid becoming targets of activists themselves. Prep schools are their next target, a move given momentum through mass protests following the death of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man who died while a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for more than eight minutes during an arrest. 

Swaths of private secondary schools have since pronounced support for Black Lives Matter, or at least its principles. That includes the Brearly School, the Chapin School, Collegiate School, the Dalton School, Emma Willard, Gilman, the Groton School, the Loomis Chaffee School, Miss Porters School, Phillips Academy Andover, Phillips Exeter Academy, Sidwell Friends, the Spence School, Tabor Academy, the Taft School, and Westover School.

Many came out with “anti-racism” statements last month, following accusations from some alumni of color on “Blackat[name of school]” Instagram accounts, claiming they experienced instances of racism during their time as students at the institutions.

 

EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Case for Reopening Schools The harm from lost instruction outweighs the Covid-19 risks.

Posted By on July 14th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-case-for-reopening-schools-11594681985?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Everything else about the coronavirus has become politicized in America, so why not a return to school as well? That’s the depressing state of play as President Trump pushes schools to reopen while Democrats heed teachers unions that demand more federal money and even then may not return. The losers, as ever, would be the children.

***

The evidence—scientific, health and economic—argues overwhelmingly for schools to open in the fall. Start with the relative immunity of young children to the disease, which should reassure parents.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 30 children under age 15 have died from Covid-19. In a typical year 190 children die of the flu, 436 from suicide, 625 from homicide, and 4,114 from unintentional deaths such as drowning.

Only two children under age 18 have died in Chicago—fewer than were killed in shootings in a recent weekend. In New York City, 0.03% of children under age 18 have been hospitalized for Covid and 7.5 in one million have died. The death rate for those over 75 is more than 2,200-times higher than for those under 18.

Children so far have been shielded from the virus compared to working adults. But even pediatric cancer patients at New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering were about a third less likely to test positive than their adult care-givers, and only one of 20 who tested positive required noncritical hospital care. In Sweden, which kept schools open, only 20 children under age 19—0.6% of confirmed cases—have been admitted to the ICU and only one has died.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

HCQ Helps Contain COVID-19 Cases: New Evidence and a Major Retraction By Stephen Green

Posted By on July 13th, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/stephen-green/2020/07/13/hcq-helps-contain-covid-19-cases-new-evidence-and-a-major-retraction-n636361

Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) — the controversial COVID-19 treatment touted by President Donald Trump — might be gaining new traction in the fight against the Wuhan coronavirus.

The latest positive results come from Vadodara, India, where city officials have conducted a major study involving more than 300,000 people, including “health workers and other frontline staff.”

The Indian Express reports:

The administration has analysed a sample of over 1 lakh [lakh = 100,000] residents, who were mostly close contacts of positive persons and the effect of HCQ in containing the transmission of the virus. According to the analysis, of the 48,873 close contacts of positive patients who took one dose of HCQ, 102 turned Covid-19 positive and 12 succumbed to the infection whereas 48 of the 17,776 close contacts of positive patients who took two doses of HCQ turned positive and only one died. The study also states that of the 33,563 close contacts of patients who took three HCQ doses, 43 tested positive and one died.

Local health official Dr. Devesh Patel told the paper, “It has shown positive results. We have the numbers and not one person has complained of complications. The only side effect reported is mild gastritis, which is common with administering heavy medicines and can be effectively handled.”

In other words, anyone who has taken the much more common azithromycin antibiotic for a simple sinus infection has probably suffered about the same distress — all gastric — as a subject of the Vadodara study.

Dr. Mohammad Hussain, who runs Vadodara’s Faith Hospital, told the Express, “There are conflicting studies about the use of HCQ. While initially the US studies rejected it and cited side-effects, European countries backed its prophylactic use. In Vadodara, it has shown positive results. We have been able to restrict cases in clusters. Nagarwada no longer has a huge number of cases.”

Hussain reiterated that no serious side effects were reported.

Judicial Watch’s Tom Fitton noted on Friday that Trump Derangement Syndrome almost certainly cost lives in the fight against COVID-19:

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

6 Ways Leftism Acts Like A Religion By Robby Starbuck

Posted By on July 13th, 2020

https://thefederalist.com/2020/07/13/6-ways-leftism-acts-like-a-religion/

Leftism has transformed from an obscure cult into a dominant religion in our country. The progressive promised land is here now.

Conservative commentators have been mocked for years for describing leftism as a new religion of sorts. Since 2016, it has become clear that the modern left was determined to prove us right.

What we have witnessed unfold in this country over the last few years, and have seen increase exponentially as the 2020 election comes near, especially with regard to the Black Lives Matter movement, is an expression of religious zealotry so widespread, unforgiving, and violent that it might have made the Puritan governors of 17th-century Massachusetts worry they were being outdone.

Leftism is not a political ideology anymore. It is a full-fledged religion complete with tithing, penance, forced confessions, iconoclasm, internet inquisitions, public rituals, excommunication, heavily policed virtues, sacred texts, seminaries, and online auto-de-fes.

The proof is too plentiful to ignore. 

Here are the signs that we’re truly confronting a theocracy of totalitarian religious extremists.

1. Conformity, Strictly Enforced Virtues, and Excommunication

Throughout history, religious nonconformists and dissenters of theocracies like the one we’re now confronting have been denied political and civil rights. Those who fail to express their undying loyalty to the Church of Leftism and participate in its public rituals are marked as heathens and “canceled” faster than you can say “due process.” Those who dissent publicly from their established doctrine are routinely censored, humiliated, shunned from certain schools or organizations, and even deprived of their livelihoods.

In this religious system, heretics and apostates are ruthlessly suppressed and denied the full benefits of participation in the body politic. Even if you’re silent, the media choir will call it violence and demand you be shamed and unfollowed. If that’s not enough puritan madness, the choir will also instruct you on how to be sufficiently woke. The New York Times recently ran a piece suggesting you must demand your family and friends donate to left-wing causes or threaten them with excommunication.

FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

War on Trump USAGM Pick Michael Pack Undermines U.S. Battle With China: Ben Weingarten

Posted By on July 13th, 2020

https://www.newsweek.com/war-trump-usagm-pick-michael-pack-undermines-us-bat

Nearly a full term into the Donald Trump presidency, the administration was finally able to fill a little-known but pivotal seat with someone of the president’s choosing. The political establishment had worked tirelessly to block the appointment. Its obstruction would continue post-confirmation. The appointee was subjected to an onslaught from Congress, in the courts and in the press. The apparent aim was to undermine him as part of a broader effort to undermine the president’s policies.

The continued fight against Michael Pack, the new CEO of the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), is a microcosm of the fight of this presidency: to overcome a political establishment unwilling to afford the president the same privileges as his predecessors—including to staff the executive branch with supporters. That is, to overcome a Washington, D.C. hellbent on preventing the peaceful transfer of power.

In so doing, it is the Resistance that has eviscerated our norms, values and institutions. In its jihad against Mr. Pack, it has done so to the detriment of our national security interests.

USAGM is an essential part of America’s arsenal in the War of Ideas. The independent federal agency oversees the Voice of America (VOA), Office of Cuba Broadcasting and USAGM-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, the Middle East Broadcasting Network (MBN) and Open Technology Fund. We, the American taxpayer, contribute $800 million annually to USAGM to “inform, engage and connect people around the world in support of freedom and democracy.” Its outlets faithfully fulfilled this mission during the Cold War. To triumph over today’s Communist menace, China, it must do so again.

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB Comments turned off

Of Pardons and Presidents Trump’s clemency for Stone has nothing on Clinton and McDougal.

Posted By on July 13th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/of-pardons-and-presidents-11594584012

Say this for President Trump’s commutation of Roger Stone’s 40-month prison sentence late Friday: At least he did it during an election campaign so voters can add this to the ledger of character issues they take into the voting booth. Like everything else about this Presidency, its scandals, real and imagined, are public.

On the merits, the judgment of Attorney General William Barr sounds right. Mr. Barr recently called Mr. Stone’s prosecution “righteous” and “appropriate.” He had his department review the excessive recommendation of up to nine years in prison by special counsel Robert Mueller’s prosecutors, and Justice revised its recommendation in line with what the judge ordered. 

Mr. Stone is no martyr. He is by his own description a political performance artist, and he finally ran into prosecutors who weren’t amused. There are legitimate questions about the anti-Trump bias of the jury forewoman, but the full jury found Mr. Stone lied to investigators and tried to bully witnesses. He was probably trying to protect the lies he had previously told to make himself seem more influential than he was. The proper avenue for addressing trial bias is on appeal. 

The commutation spared Mr. Stone from having to report to prison on Tuesday, where the 67-year-old would have been vulnerable to Covid-19. But Mr. Trump didn’t issue a full pardon, which means Mr. Stone’s felony conviction stands and so does his appeal. It’s too bad Mr. Trump let Mr. Barr spend political capital to recommend a lighter prison sentence only to commute that sentence later. Mr. Trump tends to do that to people who work for him.

KRD NEWS Comments turned off

In Defense of ‘Reactionary Liberalism’—A Reply to Osita Nwanevu written by Bo Winegard *****

Posted By on July 13th, 2020

https://quillette.com/2020/07/13/in-defense-of-reactionary-liberalism-a-reply-to-osita

I am a liberal conservative, or as the New Republic‘s Osita Nwanevu would have it, a “reactionary liberal.” I lean right-of-center and, as I have argued before, I believe that many of the West’s most cherished values—individualism, due process, free speech and inquiry, and the rule of law—are imperiled by radical progressivism. So, I was delighted to be challenged by Nwanevu’s recent article entitled “The Willful Blindness of Reactionary Liberalism.” Although the piece is highly tendentious, it is a vigorous defense of progressive identity politics and an attack on liberals like me.

Nwanevu’s basic thesis is that progressives are actually the modern champions of the liberal tradition and that those who oppose and criticize them from the Left (Matt Taibbi and Jonathan Chait) or the Right (Andrew Sullivan) or both (the members of what was once known as the Intellectual Dark Web) are actually fighting a reactionary battle against an expansion of freedom. Therefore, Nwanevu argues, it is progressivism’s enemies who are illiberal. He describes liberalism—correctly, so far as it goes—as “an ideology of the individual⁠. Its first principle is that each and every person in society is possessed of a fundamental dignity and can claim certain ineradicable rights and freedoms. Liberals believe, too, in government by consent and the rule of law: The state cannot exercise wholly arbitrary power, and its statutes bind all equally.”

However, reactionary liberals, he argues, do not appear to understand or appropriately value an important liberal freedom: Association. “Controversial speakers,” he notes, “have no broad right to speak at private institutions” and senators such as Tom Cotton have no right to appear in whatever magazine or outlet they desire. Reactionary liberals, it seems, are confused about these issues, and that is why they (incorrectly) condemn universities for restricting the range of acceptable opinions on campus and deride newspaper staffers for protesting the publication of an op-ed with which they disagree.