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THE DURHAM REPORT AND HISTORY SYDNEY WILLIAMS

Posted By on May 31st, 2023

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

In his 1982 story of a small Irish village, Passing the Time in Ballymenone, American historian Henry Glassie (1941-) wrote: “History is not the past but a map of the past, drawn from a particular point of view…” All histories reflect the author. But good historians account for that, differentiating between actual events and their personal opinions. The Founding Fathers were conscious of history when they selected Washington as the capital of the new United States in 1790. It was a “federal enclave,” separate from both the commercial/industrial north and the agrarian south. It was not beholden to one party or one faction.

However, over time, as its bureaucracy increased and as public sector unions took sway, Washington changed; so that today in the District, according to the Pew Research Center, Democrat registrations, among federal government employees, outnumber Republican registrations two to one. While the leaders of Washington’s agencies reflect whichever party is in power, permanent federal government employees are, on balance, sympathetic to the Democrat Party.

The purpose of the Durham Report was to shine light on nefarious attempts to affect the outcome of the 2016 election – to address the widely accepted view that Donald Trump colluded with Russia to affect the outcome of the Presidential election that year. It also offers an alternative (and more accurate) perspective on subsequent efforts to undermine Mr. Trump’s Presidency. The Report details how the nation’s premier investigatory and intelligence services, in cooperation with the Clinton campaign, falsely implicated Mr. Trump as having colluded with Vladimir Putin to sway the election.  

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Foreign Interference? How Non-Citizens Are Voting in American Elections by J. Christian Adams

Posted By on May 30th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19679/non-us-citizens-voting

You probably know the [National Voter Registration Act] as “Motor Voter.” It is the federal requirement that requires state motor vehicle offices to offer voter registration and the ability to update your address.

Sounds convenient? Now, we have data showing one of the side effects of Motor Voter is to put non-citizens onto American voter rolls.

[W]e have collected extensive records of non-citizens asking to be removed from the voter rolls. Sometimes those records reveal how the foreign citizen was registered to vote, and the Motor Voter process represents the vast majority of cases.

Chicago officials provided registration records where some foreign nationals even checked “NO” to the question of whether the person is a United States citizen, and were still registered.

The Pennsylvania State Department admitted that due to what election officials referred to as a “glitch” that they had been accidentally registering foreign nationals to vote for two decades. They have been fighting for over five years to conceal details, including the number of foreign nationals the Commonwealth registered to vote by mistake.

The reports from Maricopa County and Chicago are not an inventory of every non-citizen vote, but only those who informed election officials they were not American citizens. So, the catalog of confessed non-citizens is almost certainly just the tip of the iceberg.

What can be done about non-citizens registering to vote?

Congress can solve the problem by allowing states to validate citizenship effectively. This could be as easy as providing a passport, birth certificate or other evidence of being an American at the time of voter registration.

Another easy fix is for Congress to add citizenship to the National Voter Registration Act’s reasonable voter list maintenance requirements for states. Motor Voter does not put the same obligation for states to keep voter rolls free from non-citizens as it does, for example, dead voters.

This month marks the 30th anniversary of President Bill Clinton signing the National Voter Registration Act into law. You probably know the law as “Motor Voter.” It is the federal requirement that requires state motor vehicle offices to offer voter registration and the ability to update your address.

Sounds convenient? Now, we have data showing one of the side effects of Motor Voter is to put non-citizens onto American voter rolls.

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DIE Litmus Tests are Robbing the Campus By Janet Levy

Posted By on May 30th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/

Universities are forums for the free exchange of ideas, for learning how to think, not what to think; for debate, not indoctrination.  Unfortunately, that can no longer be said of American universities.  Open inquiry and critical thinking untainted by ideology have been supplanted by leftist dogma, including Critical Race Theory and social justice advocacy.  Except at the increasingly rare institution offering a classical liberal arts education, it has become impossible for impressionable students to earn a degree without becoming steeped in leftist rhetoric and the extreme ideas of race and gender.  They end up believing that America was built on racism and defining themselves as either oppressors or victims.

These ideological intrusions were insidiously mainstreamed from the seventies onward, especially in the humanities departments, by gradually building an ecosystem fostering faculty members who are left-leaning and sidelining those who are not.  Universities are now taking this to the next level by precluding the recruitment of independent thinkers and conservatives.  They are requiring prospective faculty to submit a loyalty oath to the tenets of diversity, inclusion, and equity (DIE; sometimes DEI) as a de facto litmus test of their political affiliation.

Examples abound of universities where DIE statements are a prerequisite for consideration for any job.  At Arizona’s public universities, they are a standard feature of the hiring process for all faculty, professional, and staff positions.  Some institutions in the state require prospective candidates to demonstrate their allegiance to DIE ideology even before a review of their qualifications takes place.  At the University of Washington, support for DIE principles is de rigueur, and faculty applicants must justify their commitment by describing their past actions and explaining how they will continue to pursue DIE goals if appointed.  The University of Pennsylvania website gives applicants guidelines for composing effective DIE statements.  And at all campuses of the University of California (U.C.), faculty applicants must submit DIE statements that will determine if they merit consideration, regardless of their academic credentials or their teaching and research plans.  From their statements, applicants are evaluated for DIE awareness and experience and their plans for advancing DIE on campus.  They must agree to treat individuals differently based on their race, sex, and gender identity.  

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Climate Modelling: Rubbish In, More Rubbish Out: Michael Kile

Posted By on May 30th, 2023

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2023/05/climate-modelling-rubbish-in-rubbish-out/

“The rest is history: the history of how dodgy “post-normal” science joined up with a pseudo-scientific “precautionary principle” to corrupt the UN, IPCC and WMO and, despite the “vast uncertainties”, ultimately created the NetZero decarbonising monster that is disrupting countries — and energy markets — everywhere on the bogus pretext of “fighting climate change”.

Complexity and perplexity go together like a horse and carriage, or in this case, the climate and a modeller. When probability claims masquerade as genuine predictions and international agencies and governments promote alarmism at every opportunity and confirmation bias distorts the search for truth, the outcome is today’s witch’s brew of “climate change” hyperbole and “save-the-planet” activism that is now disrupting every aspect of life.    

Consider the World Meteorological Organization’s press release of May 17, 2023: Global temperatures set to reach new records in the next five years. It warned that:

Global temperatures are likely to surge to record levels in the next five years, fuelled by heat-trapping greenhouse gases and a naturally occurring El Niño event, according to a new update issued by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). 

There is a 66% likelihood that the annual average near-surface global temperature between 2023 and 2027 will be more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels for at least one year.  There is a 98% likelihood that at least one of the next five years, and the five-year period as a whole, will be the warmest on record.

A temporary reprieve from a french-fry fate is possible. But hold the champagne. The world is still going to exceed 1.5°C “with increasing frequency”. Unless we prostrate ourselves with more fervour at the altar of NetZero it could become permanent. Whatever happens, like Rick and Ilsa in Casablanca, we will always have Paris. 

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Three Years Later, No Justice for BLM Insurrection in D.C. D.C.’s lead prosecutor has turned a blind eye to a six-month campaign of terror in the nation’s capital in 2020 so he could keep his sights on the mostly nonviolent protesters of January 6, 2021. By Julie Kelly

Posted By on May 30th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/29/three-years-later-no-justice-for-blm-insurrection-in-d-c/

“Our office prosecutes all acts of violence, regardless of political motivation, the same.”

So said U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Matthew Graves—under oath, mind you, and with a straight face—during a hearing of the House Oversight Committee earlier this month. 

Representative Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) questioned Graves’ disparate treatment of Black Lives Matters rioters who terrorized Washington, D.C., in 2020 versus Trump supporters involved in the events of January 6, 2021.

Although the start of both incidents was a mere seven months apart, they are a world away in terms of accountability. 

In what Graves calls the “Capitol Siege” investigation, more than 1,000 Trump supporters have been criminally charged. Graves, a Biden appointee, has promised to double that caseload before he’s finished. His office announces new arrests every week.

That, however, is not the case for rioters who caused far more violence and inflicted far more damage in the nation’s capital in 2020. The rioting that began on May 29, 2020 at Lafayette Square prompted the lockdown of the White House; Donald Trump, his wife, and teenage son were ushered to an underground bunker for their safety as looters and arsonists repeatedly tried to scale the fence and break through police barricades erected outside the White House.

And what started that night in 2020 didn’t just last a few hours, as was the case with the Capitol protest. On June 1, rioters burned part of St. John’s Church, an historical landmark across from the White House, and set ablaze other areas of the public park.

Chaos continued throughout the summer with the president, his family, and White House staff under constant threat. Police arrested 11 people at Lafayette Square in July 2020 for various offenses including assault of a police officer. “The Tuesday night incidents that stretched over hours are the latest confrontations to transpire near the White House, where protesters have been gathering daily for more than a month to protest for racial justice after the killing of George Floyd in the custody of Minneapolis police,” the Washington Post reported on July 8, 2020.

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Three Cheers for Tommy Robinson The backbone of Britain. by Bruce Bawer

Posted By on May 30th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/three-cheers-for-tommy-robinson-2/

The last time we heard from Tommy Robinson was early last year. In a revealing documentary called The Rape of Britain, he took us to the town of Telford, England (population 142,000), where Muslim gang members had raped innumerable white girls while local police had refused not only to arrest the perpetrators but also to protect the victims. Now he’s back with an equally illuminating documentary entitled Silenced.

 It begins with a minor incident that took place in 2018 on the playground of the Almondbury School in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire. According to the mainstream media version, Bailey McLaren, a racist white boy in his early teens, had “waterboarded” Jamal Hijazi,  an innocent refugee from Syria of about the same age, and had acted utterly without provocation.

The story spread quickly around the globe. There was just one problem: it wasn’t remotely true. Bailey hadn’t waterboarded Jamal. He’d thrown a cup of water at him. It was on video. It wasn’t about race, and it certainly wasn’t unprovoked. In fact, Jamal had threatened to rape Bailey’s sisters. And, as Tommy discovered by doing the kind of footwork on the case that no other reporter bothered to do, Jamal had done much else besides. He’d knocked one classmate unconscious. He’d caused a boy to bleed by sticking him in the leg with a compass (presumably the kind used in math classes, not in navigation).

He’d threatened to stab a boy. He’d beaten up girls. He hit one girl with a hockey stick and bit another one so viciously that it caused a horrible wound. He routinely called female teachers “bitches.” He’d been caught carrying a knife and screwdriver at school. Adults who’d worked there described him as rude, nasty, a “little bastard,” a “horrible boy” with “no respect for women at all.” “He started on everyone,” recalled one school worker.

And they denied that Jamal was the victim of racism on anybody’s part. There’d been several other Syrian kids in the school at the same time, and none of them had experienced – or caused – any problems. Much was made by the media of a photo of Jamal with his arm in a cast; though the injury was blamed on Bailey, it turned out to be the result of another incident in which Jamal attacked a much younger boy only to be pulled forcefully off the child by a kid his own age.

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Defund The IRS

Posted By on May 30th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/05/30/defund-the-irs/

The debt ceiling deal reached by the Republican leadership and the administration is far from perfect in the eyes of anyone who cares about runaway government spending (which is the only government spending we know of). But it appears House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was able to block, at least for a year, the hiring of a field army of IRS soldiers. Like a thousand lawyers at the bottom of the ocean, it’s a good start, though there’s still a long way to go.

Among the hundreds of sections in the 99-page bill, No. 251 is “Rescission of certain balances made available to the Internal Revenue Service.” More specifically, the legislation, if passed and signed as is, cuts almost $1.4 billion “of the unobligated balances of amounts appropriated or otherwise made available for activities of the Internal Revenue Service” through the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.

Through the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration had obtained an additional $80 billion for the IRS, more than six times its current annual budget. Funding for enforcement was to increase by 69% through fiscal 2031. Such a “generous injection of other people’s money” would mean, according to the Washington Free Beacon, that the IRS will “employ more bureaucrats than the Pentagon, State Department, FBI, and Border Patrol combined.”

The expansion will now be delayed for at least one fiscal year.

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The Bigotry That Proudly Speaks Its Name From Dodger Stadium to Washington, indulging anti-Catholic sentiment is an elite pastime. By Gerard Baker

Posted By on May 30th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/anti-catholic-bigotry-is-an-elite-american-pastime-la-dodgers-white-house-sisters-of-perpetual-indulgence-joe-biden-jfk-bde742cc?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

When John F. Kennedy ran for president in 1960, he felt compelled, memorably, to make a declaration of political independence from the authorities of his Catholic faith.

His opponents had notoriously exploited anti-Catholic sentiment in key states to suggest that somehow a papist in the Oval Office would owe principal loyalty to the Vatican and would take instruction from the pope on critical questions of the presidency.

The issue had dogged him through Democratic primaries and threatened him in a close general election, so in remarks to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association in September, Mr. Kennedy sought to lay the calumny to rest: “I am not the Catholic candidate for president. I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for president, who happens also to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my church on public matters, and the church does not speak for me.”

Sixty years on, Joe Biden, the second Catholic president, hasn’t had to make a similar declaration. It would be nice to think that is because America is a more tolerant place than it was in 1960. But with each day of his presidency it seems the opposite is true. Anti-Catholic bigotry is entrenched among the left-wing elites who control the Democratic Party, and they have no fear that Mr. Biden in office would lift a finger to restrain it. Far from being a secret agent for the Vatican, the president seems content to be a very public agent for the continuous denigration of those who hold to traditional Catholic doctrine.

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IT’S TIME TO DISARM THE IRS! ADAM ANDRZEJEWSKI

Posted By on May 29th, 2023

Since 2006, the IRS has spent $35.2 million on guns, ammunition and military-style equipment — including 600 shotguns, 500 AR-15 rifles, and 15 submachine guns.

There are more than 2,100 special agents with firearm authority, and they must be willing to use “deadly force.”

Just who are they planning on fighting?

WE NEED TO TELL CONGRESS: IT’S TIME TO DISARM THE IRS

Let’s keep the weaponry for traditional law enforcement authorities, not federal civil and administrative agencies.

FOX News’ Sean Hannity featured our CEO, Adam Andrzejewski, on his radio show last month and agreed… it’s time to disarm the IRS.

On Fox Business earlier this month Larry Kudlow cited our report, and agreed… it’s time to disarm the IRS.

Our momentum is building, but we need your help.

PLEASE SIGN OUR PETITION HERE!

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

The Case for Ron DeSantis: Josh Hammer

Posted By on May 29th, 2023

https://www.newsweek.com/case-ron-desantis-opinion-1802754

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ much-anticipated 2024 presidential campaign is finally here. DeSantis is, by any empirical metric or otherwise reasonable estimation, the only person with a viable chance of defeating former President Donald Trump for the Republican presidential nomination. What follows is a straightforward affirmative case for DeSantis’ candidacy, written from the perspective of someone who moved to the Sunshine State during the COVID-19 pandemic due in no small part to his courage, independent judgment, and dynamic leadership during that most woeful chapter of recent American history.

President Ronald Reagan famously said, “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.'” That was an accurate assessment at the time Reagan said it, when America was drowning in punitive taxation and draconian regulation. In the year 2023, by contrast, overweening government is certainly still a threat, but the single all-encompassing threat facing the American people is the metastasis of the woke ideology, which spreads like a cancer and is weaponized by the out-of-touch ruling class elites who populate all the major institutions of our political and civic life.

There is no elected official in America who better understands this reality and—even more important—who has wielded political power to repeatedly fight back against it than Ron DeSantis. Whether it is anti-Americanist critical race theory or gender ideology indoctrination in the elementary school classroom, the university faculty lounge, or the corporate boardroom, DeSantis has taken decisive measures to defend civilizational sanity and curtail or outright proscribe the dissemination of wokeism’s corrosive tenets.