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FBI Resists Garland Pressure to Politicize ‘Domestic Terrorism’ Probes of America’s Parents Andrew McCarthy

Posted By on May 15th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/05/fbi-resists-garland-pressure-to-politicize-domestic-terrorism-probes-of-americas-parents/

Good news: Director Christopher Wray has refused to let the bureau be sucked into the Justice Department’s weaponizing of federal law enforcement.

There was heavy breathing this week from House Republicans regarding Attorney General Merrick Garland’s abominable October 2021 directive that the FBI harass and intimidate parents who object to the woke indoctrination of their children by progressive school administrators. Garland’s memo echoed the suggestion of left-wing activists that the parents could be investigated as if they were domestic terrorists.

Garland’s actions are as condemnable as ever. GOP efforts notwithstanding, though, the only significant development in this story in the past six months is that the FBI has performed well. Director Christopher Wray has refused to let the bureau be sucked into the Biden Justice Department’s weaponizing of federal law enforcement.

Back in November, I explained that Representative Jim Jordan (R., Ohio), the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, had prematurely leapt from the correct premise that the FBI had opened a category of investigations, known in bureau parlance as a “threat tag,” to the unfounded conclusions that (a) the bureau had employed against parents such national-security authorities as the PATRIOT Act, whose investigative measures are meant for (mainly foreign) terrorists, and (b) Garland had committed perjury during congressional testimony when he denied that the FBI had either resorted to such measures or labeled parents as “domestic terrorists.”

Our Zachary Evans has the latest news about the investigations and, despite the renewed efforts of Jordan and Representative Mike Johnson (R., La.), what we’re learning is somewhat comforting.

To repeat what I said six months ago, the abomination here, about which Republicans are right to keep reminding people, is that the Justice Department brandished its awesome investigative powers in an effort to stifle parental dissent. It was a nakedly political gambit. There is no federal jurisdiction to monitor relations between parents and schools. There is no surge in violence against school administrators. Given the vastness of our country and the importance of education, it is inevitable that there will be occasional incidents of potentially criminal threats or assaults. But such incidents — in which school officials are often more at fault than parents — are not federal crimes; they are the concern of state and local law enforcement.

Yet, in its desperation to mollify the radical Left, the Biden administration quietly collaborated with progressive activists at the National School Boards Association on a letter to Garland, which depicted parents as domestic terrorists and implored the Justice Department to act on supposed threats. This served as the pretext for Garland’s October 4 memo directing district U.S. attorney’s offices throughout the country to work with the FBI in addressing this purported crisis.

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Liz Peek: Spot the Extremist: Is It Democrats or the GOP Who Will Shock the Voters on Abortion?

Posted By on May 15th, 2022

https://www.nysun.com/article/spot-the-extremist-is-it-democrats-or-the-gop-who-will-shock-the-voters-on-abortion

Just recently, Republicans and Senator Manchin blocked passage of legislation that, as the New York Times described it, would “enshrine the landmark Roe v. Wade precedent in federal law.” Reporting on that defeat, few news organizations, including the Times, provided a link to the Democrats’ proposed  bill. There’s a reason for that.

While the Times dutifully linked to the leaked draft of Justice Samuel Alito’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, which has caused borderline hysteria on the left, the paper eschewed guiding readers to the pro-abortion legislation recently approved by 49 Senate Democrats. The Times failed even to mention the name of the bill until the 17th paragraph of its report on the vote, possibly worried that curious readers might research the 29-page legislation on their own.

Why keep the pro-abortion bill under wraps? First, because its expansive abortion rules come wrapped in racism, extolling “reproductive justice” and claiming that “restrictions on reproductive health, including abortion, perpetuate systems of oppression, lack of bodily autonomy, white supremacy, and anti-Black racism.”

Since black women, 14 percent of the population, account for roughly 40 percent of abortions performed in our country, some might think that legalizing the procedure is more persuasive of white supremacy, but never mind.

More importantly, the press might want to downplay the bill because it is a horror that goes way beyond Roe v. Wade. Most offensive, it allows abortion up through nine months of pregnancy, when, “in the good-faith medical judgment of the treating health care provider, continuation of the pregnancy would pose a risk to the pregnant patient’s life or health.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The White House’s Specious Gender Manifesto The White House is claiming that the debate about childhood gender medicine is settled—even as numerous international experts are coming forward to say it‘s not. Bernard Lane

Posted By on May 15th, 2022

https://quillette.com/2022/05/13/joe-bidens-faulty-gender-diktat/

On March 31st, Joe Biden’s White House issued a lengthy “fact sheet” claiming that science has spoken in favour of puberty-blocking drugs—lifelong synthetic hormones for young people who identify as transgender or non-binary and seek medicalised gender change. What used to be called “sex-reassignment” is now the more seductive “gender-affirming care.” We also have the leader of the free world boldly “confirming the positive impact of gender-affirming care on youth mental health.”

“Confirming” is the new asserting, and the Biden-Harris administration is also “confirming that providing gender-affirming care is neither child maltreatment nor malpractice.” It’s a small step from confirming to enforcing, and so the federal Justice Department has written to state attorneys-general warning them that if they deny minors the benefits of gender-affirming medical science, they will fall afoul of constitutional and statutory guarantees of equality, not to mention funding rules tied to grants from Washington. The first state under federal fire is Alabama, where a new law would impose up to 10 years’ prison time on clinicians taking anyone under 19 on a medicalised gender journey. The White House is even taking the fight offshore, pledging to uphold trans health rights with its foreign policy and overseas aid programs.

Biden’s blizzard of initiatives was unleashed on Transgender Day of Visibility. Timing matters in politics, and Biden’s may be a little off. Americans are starting to get their first glimpse of gender medicine as an intensely contested field; it’s nowhere near settled science. For several years, big left-leaning media outlets have told a simple story in which the medicalised gender-affirming approach is lifesaving, at least for those kids who say they can’t live without it. It follows, we’re told, that any restriction is a suicidally dangerous denial of health care, there being supposedly no alternative to hormonal and sometimes surgical interventions.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The EU and the Biden Administration Give in to Iran’s Mullahs by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on May 14th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18531/eu-biden-iran-mullahs

The European Union is basically admitting that it views the nuclear deal with Iran’s ruling clerics from the perspective of economic opportunity. That should not be the objective of the nuclear talks. Instead, European leaders ought to be seeking a strong deal that will prevent the Iranian regime from acquiring nuclear weapons, especially — as they should have learned from Russia by now — because those nukes may soon be aimed at their countries.

By revealing its desperation to buy oil, the EU is empowering Iran’s ruling clerics to gain the upper hand in the nuclear talks and obtain even more concessions to revive the nuclear deal. Desperation, to the Iranian regime, means weakness.

To appease Iran’s mullahs, the EU and the Biden administration are also turning a blind eye to China’s violating the sanctions on Iran… Reportedly, the Iranian regime is exporting more than 1.5 million bpd. The ruling mullahs of Iran are exporting approximately 80% of the oil they used to export before the sanctions. Iran’s revenues heavily rely on oil exports; the sale of oil accounts for more than 50% of the regime’s export revenues.

The EU, moreover, has yet to join the US in imposing sanctions on the Iranian regime. In fact, European countries are still trading with Tehran in spite of the US sanctions. Tehran Times reported: “The value of trade between Iran and the European Union reached €4.863 billion in 2021, registering a nine-percent growth compared to the previous year….”

It seems clear that the nuclear deal was never about stopping the predatory regime of Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. For the EU, the nuclear deal is about trade, making money and buying oil from the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism; for the Biden administration, it is about a “diplomatic win”. In return, the ruling mullahs will have a legal path to blackmail the world, using nuclear weapons and missiles, into sending Iran’s regime billions for their terror and militia groups to torment everyone.

The Biden administration and the European Union are trying hard to appease the Iranian regime in order to revive a nuclear deal that will provide the ruling mullahs of Iran with additional billions of dollars of revenue, enhance the regime’s legitimacy on the global stage, and actually open the path for Iran to have a nuclear arsenal.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Liberal Bolshevism: America Did Not Defeat Communism, She Adopted It Paperback – June 28, 2016 by Alexander G. Markovsky

Posted By on May 14th, 2022

Written by a Soviet émigré and scholar of Marxism, the book begins with the author’s recounting of the end of the Cold War. Despite the common perception that democracy defeated communism, the author presents evidence that the Democratic Party has adopted Marxism in a new philosophy he calls Liberal Bolshevism. Mr. Markovsky trucks the origins of Liberal Bolshevism back to the policies of Woodrow Wilson and FDR and chronicles the transformation of the Democratic Party into the Social Democratic Party. Through the prism of Marxism the author traces the rhythms and patterns of the toxic amalgamation of liberalism and socialism from Lenin to Obama and binds together the Democratic Party’s policies into a Marxist-socialist cause that American Social Democrats, just like their Soviet predecessors, are committed to achieving at all costs.

Herein, the reader will find a reassessment of accepted postulates exposing the deeply rooted racism and anti-Semitism of the Democratic Party. The book also challenges vested views of socialism and capitalism. Overall, the work is intended as a dissident course of economics and political education.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Midterms 2022: Expect the Worst By David Solway

Posted By on May 14th, 2022

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2022/05/13/midterms-2022-expect-the-worst-n1597803

It is currently a popular meme that the Republicans are poised for a Congressional sweep in the 2022 midterm elections, perhaps flipping as many as 40 — some say 60 — seats and regaining control of both houses. After all, the Democrats have performed so poorly across the board, whether in foreign policy, the economic realm, the maelstrom at the southern border, and in the overall domestic havoc they have wrought, as to constitute a disaster not seen in many decades, if not in living memory.

Is this about to change? Victor Davis Hanson is not so sure. “The traditional bedrocks of the American system,” he writes, “a stable economy, energy independence, vast surpluses of food, hallowed universities, a professional judiciary, law enforcement, and a credible criminal justice system — are dissolving … The common denominator in all of this is ideology overruling empiricism, common sense, and pragmatism … Is that not the tired story of left-wing revolutionaries from 18th-century France to early 20th-century Russia to the contemporary disasters in Cuba and Venezuela?”

As the 2nd century B.C. Greek historian Polybius wrote in The Histories, a detailed study of the Roman wars and the revolving nature of political regimes, “democracy in its turn is demolished and changes into the rule of force and violence” — a thesis recently developed by Ryszard Legutko in The Demon in Democracy, where he warns about the  “vulgarization of Liberal norms and practices” and the violation of the “strict and demanding rules derived from religion and classical ethics.” The precession of the political equinoxes is a fact of history, and the issue is whether it is America’s turn to corroborate such historical predictions.

One hopes not and the signs appear modestly encouraging, at least in the presidential interim. At the moment, the nation on the whole seems to have had enough of Democrat malfeasance and the increasingly rapid slide into political tyranny and social misery. Consequently, as many believe, a patriot tsunami — a “red wave” — is set to obliterate the opposition. Republican officials, candidates, and their supporters are exulting, savoring an unprecedently massive victory in the polls. But not so fast. Despite the auspicious news, the crystal ball is far more clouded than is confidently assumed. The Democrats may have created a domestic shambles of their political tenure, but bad guys rarely come last — or only too late to repair the devastation they have caused.

HISTORY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Churchill’s Lesson for Our Time:Daryl McCann

Posted By on May 14th, 2022

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2022/05/churchills-lesson-for-our-time/

“Churchill’s lesson is not about how to wage war—though he knew something about that as well—but how to avoid wars. The armed forces of Ukraine have bloodied the nose of the Russians and knocked Putin’s “special military operation” off balance, while thousands of Ukrainians have been killed and millions have fled the country. Putin is undoubtedly a monster but not an irrational monster, which is all the more reason why the implications of Churchill’s lesson should have been grasped by Obama and Biden. Better, by far, there had never been a Russo-Ukrainian war even if that war results in an unlikely Ukraine victory or, at least, stalemate. Hopefully, America and the West in general will take to heart Churchill’s lesson in time to stymie Xi Jinping’s designs for Taiwan.   ”

Winston Churchill has a reputation in some quarters as a warmonger, and yet nobody was as courageous and prescient in trying to avert the Second World War. His line of argument, which brought him social and political ostracism in the years immediately preceding Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, might be summarised as follows: appeasing a vainglorious demagogue was folly. In the preface to The Gathering Storm, the first part of his six-volume history of the war, he defined his theme as follows: “How the English-speaking peoples through their unwisdom, carelessness and good nature allowed the wicked to re-arm.” On November 16, 1945, in a speech to the Belgian Senate, Churchill implored the West to “profit at least by this terrible lesson. In vain did I attempt to teach it before the war.” It could be argued that Churchill’s lesson did leave its mark, if only for the duration of the Cold War. However, Xi Jinping’s militarisation of the South China Sea and Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, commencing on February 24, suggest we need to learn it all over again.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The Selective Targets of Green Scorn: Brian Wimborne

Posted By on May 14th, 2022

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2022/05/the-selective-targets-of-green-scorn/

“Greens diktats concerning climate change, global warming, weather and the role of human economic activity in ending life has swept the world like a virus, for which the only antidote is rational thinking. Without a reasoned and rational approach to global problems, Green ideology may turn out to be the greatest confidence trick in the history of Mankind.”

There is no surer way for a political party to gain voters’ attention than to predict the imminent end of the world. Creating fear in the public mind is as old as politics, itself. Having shaken people’s faith in the future by instilling that fear, the party’s next ploy is to offer a solution that is not open for debate.

No contemporary party has used this method of politicking with such success as The Greens. For years they have successfully portrayed themselves as tree-hugging pacifists whose sole concern is protection of the environment. However, this is only a minor part of an ideology founded on scenarios that forecast the end of the world.

One of their earliest forecast calamities depended on a hole in the ozone layer above the Antarctic. In the view of the Greens, this would expand, causing increased solar radiation that would endanger life on Earth. This idea did not attract enough public attention to elicit the widespread fear the Greens’ always need to advance their agenda. Moreover, proof that the hole was expanding, was not convincing.

Next came global warming. Selective evidence of increased temperatures that would cause droughts, crop failures and mass deaths from starvation, pointed to humanity’s inevitable end.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Rescuing “Virtue and Talents” Amidst the War on Tests Wenyuan Wu

Posted By on May 14th, 2022

https://www.aier.org/article/rescuing-virtue-and-talents-amidst-the-war-on-tests/

On March 28, 2022, Stuart Schmill, Dean of Admissions and Student Financial Services at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announced the school’s plan to restore the consideration of standardized tests to its undergraduate admissions process. A heavyweight bucks against the self-destructive path of attacking merit and standards. Will more follow suit? Or, is MIT’s rebellion too little and too late?

In his 1813 letter to John Adams, Thomas Jefferson laid out his vision for American meritocracy— “a natural aristocracy among men,” grounds of which “are virtue and talents.” This republic of merit separated the newly independent nation from the old world where artificial aristocracies “founded on wealth and birth” hindered the common good. Jefferson stipulated what it meant to have a merit-based education system that diffuses learning democratically and efficiently:

to establish in each ward a free school for reading, writing and common arithmetic; to provide for the annual selection of the best subjects from these schools who might receive at the public expense a higher degree of education at a district school; and from these district schools to select a certain number of the most promising subjects to be completed at an University, where all the useful sciences should be taught. Worth and genius would thus have been sought out from every condition of life, and completely prepared by education for defeating the competition of wealth and birth for public trusts.

The Test-Free Movement in a Historical Context

Forces within, from slavery to school segregations under Jim Crow laws to race-based admissions, have tried to corrupt the grand proposal of equality and merit. Like previous illiberal bargains to categorize students by race, the central focus of test-free admissions is also preoccupied with immutable features of the individual, under the fashionable banner of social identities, rather than observable academic performance. But unlike historical race-based practices that were rooted in bigotry and racism, arbiters of “equitable” college admissions in the modern era claim they are waging battles against the evil spirits of white supremacy, systemic inequities, and structural racism.

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An Abortion Miss for Politicized Science The Lancet, a medical journal, decides it has expertise in American law.

Posted By on May 14th, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/another-miss-for-politicized-science-the-lancet-roe-v-wade-abortion-supreme-court-samuel-alito-11652480176?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

The public’s confidence in scientific institutions has suffered greatly during Covid-19 as lockdowns and mask mandates outlived the underlying evidence. Don’t expect that to improve as an ostensibly prestigious medical journal tries to politicize medicine with an editorial denouncing Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito.

The Lancet exhorts this week that, “The fact is that if the US Supreme Court confirms its draft decision” overturning Roe v. Wade, “women will die. The Justices who vote to strike down Roe will not succeed in ending abortion, they will only succeed in ending safe abortion. Alito and his supporters will have women’s blood on their hands.”

Allow us to offer some peer editorial review. The Court’s draft decision doesn’t end abortion in America. It returns the question to the states, where the public and elected representatives would debate and vote.

Many states would continue to allow the procedure throughout pregnancy. Some may ban it in most instances. Others would likely end up closer to where public opinion is: Allowing abortion early in pregnancy and in certain instances later, such as cases of rape or when the life of the mother is compromised.