NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump Ordered to Pay $83 Million in E. Jean Carroll Defamation Case By David Zimmermann

Posted By on January 26th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/trump-ordered-to-pay-83-million-in-e-jean-carroll-defamation-case/

Former president Donald Trump has been ordered to pay journalist E. Jean Carroll $83 million in her civil defamation case against him, a Manhattan federal jury decided Friday afternoon.

Jurors reached a verdict in under three hours, taking into account compensatory and punitive damages for Trump’s allegedly malicious defamation of the columnist. The jury began deliberating around 1:40 p.m. over their lunch break, as told by U.S. district judge Lewis Kaplan, who presided over the trial.

If a decision was not made by 4:30 p.m., the judge told the jury to send him a note either asking to break for the weekend or to deliberate further into Friday evening.

Trump must now pay $18.3 million in compensatory damages and $65 million in punitive damages, adding to a total of $83.3 million. The final amount was nearly $60 million more than what Carroll’s side was seeking, which was $24 million.

In a statement, Trump called the second verdict in the case “absolutely ridiculous” and said he would appeal the decision. He was not present in the courthouse when the verdict was announced.

In May, Trump was ordered to pay Carroll $5 million in combined damages after a separate jury found him liable for sexually abusing and defaming his accuser. At the time, jurors were asked to determine whether there was more than a 50 percent chance that Trump assaulted Carroll in the dressing room of the Bergdorf Goodman store in Manhattan in the mid 1990s, as she has claimed.

The previous jury found that Trump most likely sexually assaulted Carroll but rejected the allegation that he raped her. The jury also decided that Trump’s Truth Social post from October 2022 calling her allegations a “hoax” did defame Carroll.

Considering liability had already been determined, the current jury was only tasked with deciding how much Trump should pay Carroll on top of the $5 million that was awarded last year. Carroll was originally seeking $10 million in damages, but her lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, increased the amount to at least $24 million during the trial’s closing arguments earlier Friday.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

International Court of Justice Has Deemed Zionism a Form of Genocide Elliott Abrams

Posted By on January 26th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/international-court-of-justice-has-deemed-zionism-a-form-of-genocide/?utm_source=recirc-

On November 10, 1975, the United Nations declared, “Zionism is a form of racism.”

The U.S. ambassador, Daniel P. Moynihan, responded, “The United States rises to declare before the General Assembly of the United Nations, and before the world, that it does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in this infamous act.” Moynihan concluded, “The lie is that Zionism is a form of racism. The overwhelmingly clear truth is that it is not.”

That resolution was the lowest moment in the history of the United Nations — until now. Now, the so-called International Court of Justice has in effect found that Zionism can be a form of genocide. For what the court found is that Israel’s defense against Hamas may violate the genocide convention.

It remains to be seen if the Biden administration can rise to this occasion as Moynihan did in 1975. This ruling is as great a crime. The court relied on “facts” from sickeningly biased U.N. officials, from the irredeemably compromised UNRWA whose complicity with Hamas is crystal clear, and from the Hamas ministry of health in Gaza. With these “facts” in hand, it rolled on to conclude that Israel’s defense of itself and its war to defeat Hamas may amount to the crime of genocide.

This turns justice on its head. Killing Jews is not found to be genocide, but it is a crime for Jews to try to defend themselves. Not since the days of Nazi Germany has such a moral inversion of international law been propounded.

As in 1975, the U.N. system is being weaponized — in fact, is willfully turning itself into a weapon — to delegitimize the Jewish state. It may be attacked, but it may not try to defeat its attackers without facing United Nations’ efforts to tie its hands — just as Jews could be attacked in Nazi Germany but were arrested if they fought back.

It will be said that all the court’s rulings are provisional. More proceedings are to come — years of them. But that is the point: Israel will be in the dock now for years to come. Not China for its mass murder of Uyghurs. Not Syria for massacres of hundreds of thousands of civilians. Not Russia for deliberate bombing of civilians in Ukraine. Only Israel, for its efforts to destroy a terrorist group that killed a thousand civilians in the most brutal ways imaginable on October 7, 2023.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

When Science Is Not Science Joel Zinberg, M.D.

Posted By on January 26th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/01/when-science-is-not-science/

We’ll be a long time recovering from the evidence-free ‘science’ pushed on the public during Covid.

Just 22 percent of all adults and 41 percent of those 65 and older — the most vulnerable group — have received the updated 2023–24 Covid-19 vaccine. The numbers are nearly identical to those of the previous updated (bivalent) Covid-19 booster — 21 percent of adults and 43 percent of people 65 and older. But both updates showed a marked drop-off from the original two-shot vaccine series that 79 percent of adults and 94 percent of the elderly received. Senior FDA officials Doctors Peter Marks and Robert Califf argue that despite the proven benefits of Covid-19 vaccines, we have reached a “tipping point” where this new vaccine hesitancy will result in thousands of preventable deaths.

But low vaccine uptake is not, as Marks and Califf suggest, a result of misinformation, at least not misinformation in the way they mean it. Rather, it is the product of science, specifically public-health science, as practiced during the pandemic, that was evidence-free, politically and personally motivated, dismissive of other points view, and that ended up undermining public trust.

As time has gone by, it has become clear that public-health pandemic science, as personified by Dr. Anthony Fauci — who famously declared, “Attacks on me quite frankly are attacks on science” — was far removed from the scientific method of unbiased observation and experimentation to ascertain truth about natural processes.

Fauci, the longtime head of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, recently admitted in congressional testimony that the guidelines he championed to keep people six feet apart were not based on scientific data. “They sort of just appeared,” he said. Testimony from the former director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, confirmed Fauci’s assessment that the six-foot distancing recommendation was not evidence based.

In August 2021, Fauci advocated vaccine mandates for schoolchildren under twelve, well after it was clear that this age group had almost no risk of severe Covid-19 disease or mortality. Months later he defended generalized vaccine mandates, claiming they would protect people from becoming infected and passing the virus on to others. But he admitted in a scientific journal article he co-authored that there had always been good scientific reasons to believe that vaccines against the respiratory virus that causes Covid-19, SARS-CoV-2, would provide “decidedly suboptimal” protection against infection that would, at best, last a few months. He made the transmission claims and mandate recommendations anyway, despite data showing that the effectiveness of the vaccines was declining with each new viral variant.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

FBI luminaries starkly warn Congress that U.S. being invaded at border: ‘Alarming and perilous’ “In its modern history the U.S. has never suffered an invasion of the homeland and, yet, one is unfolding now,” the FBI executives wrote in letter to congressional leadership By John Solomon

Posted By on January 26th, 2024

https://justthenews.com/government/security/fbi-luminaries-starkly-warn-congress-us-being-invaded-border-alarming-and

With a constitutional crisis brewing in Texas and voters nationwide alarmed by the toll of illegal immigration, some of the FBI’s most famous retired executives are issuing a stark warning to Congress that President Joe Biden’s border policies have unleashed an “invasion” of military-aged male foreigners who pose “one of the most pernicious ever” threats to American security.

Ten former FBI executives – some who oversaw the bureau’s intelligence, counterterrorism, criminal and training operations – expressed their alarm in a letter dated Jan. 17 to House Speaker Mike Johnson, Senate Leader Chuck Schumer and the chairmen of the House and Senate committees that preside over the U.S. intelligence and Homeland Security apparatus.

Their language affirms that of both current FBI Director Christopher Wray, who testified the nation’s security lights are “blinking red,” and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who alleges Biden’s loosening of border security has allowed an “invasion” of America by foreigners with troubling origins and attributes.

“In its modern history the U.S. has never suffered an invasion of the homeland and, yet, one is unfolding now,” the FBI luminaries wrote. “Military aged men from across the globe, many from countries or regions not friendly to the United States, are landing in waves on our soil by the thousands – not by splashing ashore from a ship or parachuting from a plane but rather by foot across a border that has been accurately advertised around the world as largely unprotected with ready access granted.

“It would be difficult to overstate the danger represented by the presence inside our borders of what is comparatively a multi-division army of young single adult males from hostile nations and regions whose background, intent, or allegiance is completely unknown,” they added.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Is the Electoral Fix Already In? The 2024 presidential race increasingly looks like it will be decided by lawyers, not voters, as Democrats unveil plans for America’s first lawfare election Matt Taibbi

Posted By on January 26th, 2024

https://www.racket.news/p/is-the-electoral-fix-already-in

“A politician who claims to be doing the job for us is up to something. The group in the current White House is trying to steal for themselves a word that belongs to you. Don’t let them.”

The fix is in. To “protect democracy,” democracy is already being canceled. We just haven’t admitted the implications of this to ourselves yet.

On Sunday, January 14th, NBC News ran an eye-catching story: “Fears grow that Trump will use the military in ‘dictatorial ways’ if he returns to the White House.” It described “a loose-knit network of public interest groups and lawmakers” that is “quietly” making plans to “foil any efforts to expand presidential power” on the part of Donald Trump.

The piece quoted an array of former high-ranking officials, all insisting Trump will misuse the Department of Defense to execute civilian political aims. Since Joe Biden’s team “leaked” a strategy memo in late December listing “Trump is an existential threat to democracy” as Campaign 2024’s central talking point, surrogates have worked overtime to insert existential or democracy in quotes. This was no different:

“We’re about 30 seconds away from the Armageddon clock when it comes to democracy,” said Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Defense, William Cohen, adding that Trump is “a clear and present danger to our democracy.” Skye Perryman of Democracy Forward, one of the advocacy groups organizing the “loose” coalition, said, “We believe this is an existential moment for American democracy.” Declared former CIA and defense chief Leon Panetta: “Like any good dictator, he’s going to try to use the military to basically perform his will.”

Former Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security at the U.S. Department of Justice and current visiting Georgetown law professor Mary McCord was one of the few coalition participants quoted by name. She said:

We’re already starting to put together a team to think through the most damaging types of things that he [Trump] might do so that we’re ready to bring lawsuits if we have to.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Domestic Terrorists of Tomorrow are Blocking Traffic Today : Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on January 26th, 2024

http://www.danielgreenfield.org/2024/01/the-domestic-terrorists-of-tomorrow-are.html

After Hamas supporters were caught screaming “shame on you” at children receiving cancer treatment at a Manhattan hospital (“make sure they hear you, they’re in the windows”) some people wondered what they were trying to accomplish.

Questions like that only reveal the vast gap between the pro-Hamas mob and everyone else.

The pro-Hamas protests, allegedly in pursuit of a ceasefire, but in reality celebrating Hamas and now Houthi terrorism, have picked random fights with Starbucks, Christmas Tree lightings and Alec Baldwin to name a few. They are not so much for anything as they are against things.

Reasonable people, usually old school liberals, still don’t understand the Left. And so they also don’t understand what happened to their movement, their party and their country.

Normal people think that protests are about spreading awareness and winning over others, and they don’t grasp why the rioters are spewing hate at them instead of trying to win them over.

The mobs aren’t there to persuade them but to express their hatred for them. The common denominator of all of these riots is a burning desire to destroy everything around them. They’re not shutting down airports or smashing store windows to bring attention to a cause.

Smashing windows and shutting down airports is their cause.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

DEFAME AND PUNISH: CHRISTOPHER RUFO-

Posted By on January 26th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/defame-and-punish

How left-wing NGOs mobilize private and public assets to silence critics

The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project recently procured a cache of government documents that expose a disturbing pattern: left-wing NGOs seeking to mobilize the state against political opponents on specious accusations of “violent extremism.”

According to the report, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) urged Washington State’s “unified counterterrorism” center to investigate me, Daily Wire host Matt Walsh, and social-media influencer Libs of TikTok, under the false pretext that our reporting on gender theory in schools and transgender medical interventions constitutes “hate,” “extremism,” and “violence.”

The campaign to mobilize law enforcement against critics of gender ideology or critical race theory is not a limited affair. The ADL and a related organization, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), have developed it as a scalable, repeatable tactic to silence political opponents.

The playbook is simple. The SPLC and ADL paint a target on an individual critic, then mobilize a decentralized network of private and public assets to degrade, censor, and punish that target. On the private side, the groups activate left-wing journalists to smear the target in the press, demand that social media companies censor the target’s online speech, and encourage left-wing editors to denigrate the target on his Wikipedia page. On the public side, the groups send notices to state and federal law enforcement, hoping to mobilize the government to open investigations and intimidate critics with the threat of state repression, even incarceration.

Sometimes it works. The SPLC and ADL have damaged the reputations of innocent journalists, driven negative media coverage against mainstream conservative groups, and influenced social media firms’ censorship policies. Seeing the success of this model, other left-wing pressure groups have followed suit, demanding full-scale state repression. The National School Boards Association, for example, persuaded the Biden administration to mobilize the FBI’s counterterrorism division against parents who opposed critical race theory.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Jonathan Clarke Why Regis Endures The New York Catholic school represents the best of secondary education.

Posted By on January 26th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/why-regis-high-school-endures

The late journalist Christopher Hitchens grew up middle class in the economically sclerotic England of the 1970s. “If there’s going to be an upper class in this country,” he reports his mother saying, “Christopher is going to be in it.” He won a scholarship to a good “public” school (meaning private and exclusive, in the British parlance), went on to Oxford, and launched a dazzling literary career. Hitchens’s mother did not herself grow up in privilege, but she had figured out how the world worked.

On January 23, Regis High School, a small Jesuit institution on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, sent acceptance letters to approximately 135 eighth-graders in and around the five boroughs. The letters will change the trajectories of these students’ lives, and perhaps the destinies of their families in the bargain. Regis, which operates tuition-free owing principally to the largesse of a wealthy Catholic philanthropist (known to Regians as “The Benefactress”) who endowed the school in 1912, gives priority in admissions to promising young men who otherwise would not be able to afford a Jesuit education. (The school continues to raise additional money privately.) Its hope is that scholarship recipients will become leaders in their communities—in the words of the school’s mission statement, “men for others.”

Regis achieves extraordinary results. Former Marine officer and recent National Book Award winner Phil Klay is a Regis graduate, as was legendary book publisher Robert Giroux, Nobel Prize in Medicine winner John O’Keefe, several federal judges of the Southern District of New York and Second Circuit Court of Appeals, and current Houston Astros pitcher Declan Cronin. Nearly 20 percent of Regis graduates are accepted by an Ivy League college; many more attend highly ranked “Ivy-adjacent” schools. Such access to elite college education may be purchased elsewhere in New York City for $50,000 a year or more in private school tuition. At Regis, it may be had by achieving a high score on a scholarship exam, along with excellent grades and letters of recommendation—and in no other way. Regis turns away calls from alumni, donors, prominent New Yorkers, and anyone else trying to put a thumb on the scale in the admissions process.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

From ‘Never Trump’ to ‘Encore’ By J.W. Verret

Posted By on January 26th, 2024

https://www.wsj.com/articles/i-was-a-never-trumper-but-biden-is-worse-2024-election-presidency-b734801b

In 2019 I wanted him impeached. Now I’ve become convinced that Biden is worse.

I called for President Trump’s impeachment in 2019. I stand by what I said then. But if Mr. Trump is the Republican nominee, I will vote for him in November.

Like many voters in 2020, I hoped Joe Biden would govern reasonably from the center. Instead, his administration has sought the furthest reaches of leftist ideology. What were once fringe progressive talking points have become national policy. Even the military has been infected with a divisive and unyielding woke doctrine. The economic landscape has been equally distressing: inflation, coupled with a ballooning national debt and deficit. Four more years of this means a bleak future for my children.

My work in financial regulation and cryptocurrency has shown me the havoc wrought by policies seemingly chosen not to foster economic growth but to appease the likes of Elizabeth Warren, who has enjoyed outsize influence over Mr. Biden’s nominations. One nominee to run the leading banking regulator, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, was an open member of Marxist groups and called for the Federal Reserve to provide retail bank accounts. It took a few brave Democrats to stop her nomination.

Before, I didn’t embrace the rallying cry of “Build the wall.” Yet the crisis at our border compels me to acknowledge that Mr. Trump was right. The border situation underlines a broader reality—we need practical policies, not politically expedient ones. Mr. Trump doesn’t care about the niceties of political discourse, and that is an asset.

I find myself parting ways with the Never Trump faction. I respect its stance, which was born of conviction. Yet our situation demands a re-evaluation. We can continue down a path that has led to division and economic stagnation, or pivot to a future that, while imperfect, promises governance rooted in traditional American values, economic liberty and a judiciary cut from the same cloth as the gifted nominees confirmed to the Supreme Court under Mr. Trump.

Count me as a former Never Trumper. Given the coming election, the Never Trump position is naive. No third-party candidate can win and heal America. It’s time to pick a side, and Mr. Trump is the only alternative to Mr. Biden’s hyperprogressive vision for America.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

A Hundred Days after Gaza’s October 7 (Part 2 of 4) Inconvenient History from the SS Einsatzgruppen to Hamas by Gwythian Prins

Posted By on January 26th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20338/ss-einsatzgruppen-to-hamas

The BBC has used UNRWA voices — preferably, it seems, antipodean ones — as purportedly objective third-party commentators. That is deeply irresponsible journalism, and the BBC most likely knows why that is so.

Thus, according to the Covenant and echoing the Mufti in 1943… there is not, and cannot anywhere be a Jewish state in this world. It is what is written: here we are told that Jews in Palestine are incompatible with ‘true statehood’ and the Mufti will tell us that it is Allah’s will that Jews shall be forever stateless.

It is important to remember [GP1] that these are thrice legitimate Jewish lands: once from original patrimony; once by international mandate and the third time by force of arms after successfully countering assaults in 1948, 1967 and 1973. Anti-Semitic exceptionalism, however, means that only the Jewish state is not allowed to enjoy the peace of victory that winning wars brings to other nations.

Ever since the Abraham Accords were adopted on 15th September 2020, many regional states have shown that they would prefer to skirt around the ever-rejectionist “Palestinians” and to normalise relations with the amazing mighty midget Israel, which is the region’s creative powerhouse in every cultural and technological domain, as well as, by necessity, its dominant military power. Most significantly that includes the Saudis, whom the Ayatollahs have declared their sworn enemies.

In his platform speech, [the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin] al-Husseini responded by stating that Germany “… understood the Jews perfectly and decided to find a final solution to the Jewish menace,” and… “…Allah has determined that there never will be a stable arrangement for the Jews, and that no state should be established for them.”

Thus, in anti-Semitic ideology…the inconvenient history which can be traced in evidence from the SS liquidation task forces –- the Einsatzgruppen — to Hamas, is detailed, documented and direct.