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May 2020

Russia’s Arctic Empire by Lawrence A. Franklin

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16052/russia-arctic-empire

These Russian claims have not yet been adjudicated by international law courts, the United Nations, or by any bilateral or multilateral treaty.

Russia’s blanket claims of territorial sovereignty pose a direct challenge to “Law of the Sea” conventions such as the “Freedom of Navigation” (FON) principle, championed by the U.S. and other Free World navies.

The aspirations of the five polar nations — Russia, Denmark, Norway, Canada and the U.S. — may also have to contend with the ambitions of the People’s Republic of China.

Perhaps a prudent path for the U.S. and Free World countries to adopt in the Arctic, given Moscow’s comprehensive advance and the China-Russia tandem, would be to maintain its nuclear submarine superiority while closely monitoring Russia’s own Northern Fleet based in the Arctic base of Murmansk. NATO successfully carried out this mission during the Cold War.

Moscow sent a spectacular message last month to the world’s other Arctic powers: Russia is determined to dominate the region. Russian transport aircraft, breaking the record for the highest altitude jump ever, parachuted a group of their Spetsnaz (Special Forces) over the Arctic. from a height of almost 33,000 feet (Mt. Everest is 29,000 feet). Russian paratroops then executed a military exercise operation before reassembling at the Nagurskoye base, the northernmost military facility in Russia.

Any rival’s attempt to catch up and surpass Moscow’s head start in the Arctic is unlikely to succeed. Russia has a geopolitical advantage in that its sovereign land abuts over half of the Arctic’s territorial waters. Historically, Russia’s czars and commissars were frustrated in their attempts to secure warm-water ports, which would have benefited commerce and military force projection. Now, with environmental warming and subsequent accelerating ice-melt in the Arctic Ocean, Moscow appears poised to control the newest maritime corridor, “the Northeast Passage.” This waterway will unite Russian Europe with Russia’s Far East provinces adjacent to Pacific waters. The “Northeast Passage” could shorten the transshipment of goods from Asian countries to Europe by two weeks, rather than shipping goods through the Suez Canal route.

Chris Wallace and the Weekly Standard-izaton of Fox News Tolerance for betrayal, especially among Trump supporters, doesn’t last long. By Julie Kelly ****

https://amgreatness.com/2020/05/28/chris-wallace-and-the-weekly-standard-i

What is happening to Fox News Channel?

With the exception of its primetime lineup and a few regular contributors, Fox News increasingly is indistinguishable from its cable news competitors. The network, once considered the sole antidote to dominant left-wing news organizations—both print and broadcast—is making a fatal brand mistake: Alienating its customer base.

For nearly 25 years, conservatives have depended on Fox News to report the news in a way that represents their views. Conservatives knew issues, like those surrounding the pro-life movement, could count on fair coverage from the network rather than the scorn and derision they get in mainstream media. 

Even recently, Fox News was the only outlet pursuing the biggest scandal in U.S. political history—how Barack Obama used his government henchmen to infiltrate the Trump campaign and then sabotage his presidency after the election.

But there is a noticeable change in the tone at Fox News. Loyal viewers were outraged by the hiring of Clinton lackey and debate-fixer Donna Brazille last year. Other partisan harpies such as Marie Harf and Jessica Tarlov help “balance” Fox News’ political commentary. And Trump haters on the Right—folks who long ago burned their credibility with rank-and-file Republicans and conservatives—continue to earn air time on the network. I mean, Chris Stirewalt? Really?

China’s Communist Regime Shows Its True Totalitarian Colors

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/05/29/chinas-communist-regime-shows-its-true-totalitarian-colors/

‘You never want a good crisis to go to waste.” That was Rahm Emanuel’s now-infamous prescription for the Democratic Party following the 2007-2008 financial crisis. Now, China’s applying that same dictum globally, as the Wuhan virus ravages nation after nation, freeing Beijing to do its mischief.

For years, Americans of all political stripes operated under the delusion that China, though nominally communist, was becoming more like the West every day. Our massive, but one-sided, trade with the country would bring changes, we thought. An inevitable consumer economy in China would expand, and bring with it ideas of freedom, human rights and democracy.

China would moderate its behavior, the argument went, perhaps eventually easing its military threats against Taiwan, and letting Hong Kong maintain its status as a free-trading city-state outside of Beijing’s direct control.

That was our folly and our delusion, as we’re now finding out.

To begin with, China’s lies at the very beginning of the pandemic show, at best, gross negligence and incompetence, and at worst, intent to murder. As retired Army Lt. Col. Ralph Peters recently wrote for the Hoover Institution, “Beijing piled lies atop heaps of corpses.”

With the world still distracted by fears of the coronavirus pandemic’s deadly impact and much of the West’s economy shut down, China used the crisis to expand its power by bullying its neighbors, crushing all dissent in Hong Kong, and making not-so-subtle military threats against the U.S.

It’s Not Up To Big Tech to Decide What’s True Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2020/05/its-not-big-tech-decide-whats-true-daniel-greenfield/

Facebook, Twitter, and Google have all engaged in political censorship. But Twitter went into the lion’s den by stuffing Dem talking points into a Trump tweet under the guise of a fact check. (That is essentially what fact checks are, authorization for Democrat media outlets and partners to determine what can be said and what the facts are.) Facebook’s Zuckerberg took pains to distinguish himself from Twitter’s Dorsey.

Unlike Dorsey, Zuckerberg has been careful to reach out to conservatives, which doesn’t change his politics a whit, but he understands that he’s riding the tiger, with Democrats pressing for a Facebook crackdown for not censoring conservatives, and Republicans pushing for a crackdown on Facebook for doing so. I’m not a fan of Zuckerberg, as some of my recent articles make clear, but he’s also in an impossible situation.

Facebook has looked for some sort of ambiguous middle ground, with a bit of fact checking, without giving them too much power, creating a censorship supreme court full of lefties, but throwing in one conservative, all the while making it unclear how much power who really has.

The Biggest Blacklist in American History How this anti-American scourge works. John Perazzo *****

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/05/biggest-blacklist-american-history-john-perazzo/

The left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is a $592 million non-profit. It is also the creator and leader of the largest blacklist, by far, in American history. Its infamous list of “hate groups,” which currently consists of 940 separate entities in all 50 U.S. states, is the centerpiece of a massive smear campaign that conflates a small number of mostly insignificant fringe groups with entities whose sin is being politically conservative, but which are not “hate” groups in any meaningful sense of the word.

By equating a smattering of actual hate groups with respectable conservative organizations, SPLC seeks to delegitimize conservatives as repugnant monsters whose viewpoints do not merit a hearing. And by labeling mainstream conservative individuals and organizations as “hate mongers,” it seeks to deprive them of the funding they need to reach an audience or even stay alive. Consider, for instance, the SPLC’s branding of David Horowitz, founder of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, as an “anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim extremist” and as one of the “10 Most Dangerous Hatemongers” in the United States — solely because he opposes illegal immigration and warns against the dangers of Islamic jihad.

After Horowitz gave a speech to the bi-partisan American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in August 2018, SPLC organized a boycott that singled out his remarks as worthy of suppression and called on ALEC’s corporate sponsors to withdraw their support. The actual sin Horowitz committed was confined to one sentence in which he referred to Black Lives Matter as a “racist organization” and the Muslim Brotherhood as a “terrorist” group.[1] Within two weeks, 79 leftist organizations had joined the boycott. This led to the withdrawal of financial support by major corporations like Verizon, AT&T, and Dow Chemical, and the loss of tens of thousands of dollars for ALEC.

The Morality of Israel’s ‘Annexation’ Reclaiming ownership of indigenous lands – and governing those outside the process of history. Jason D. Hill *******

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/05/morality-israels-annexation-jason-d-hill/

With some degree of the annexation of Judea and Samaria imminent in the next few months in Israel, recent statements by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas (who oversees a massive kleptocratic terrorist regime that endorses a massive Pay-for-Slay program that provides Palestinian suicide bombers, terrorist murderers, and their families with lifelong financial security), sound more like conceptual inanities than they do reasoned disagreements by a serious politician.
 
Abbas said last week that he was terminating all agreements with Israel and the United States as a result of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to extend Israeli law to parts of Judea and Samaria under the stewardship of the Trump peace plan. Well, no one really cares if he terminates any agreement with the United States. The PA is irrelevant to the United States except as a disgraceful moral stain on our foreign policy record for having financed a terrorist rogue political institution for decades. What would be truly humorous, were it not backed with the routine rampant anti-Semitism and support of the European Union, is his statement on the order of: Israel has “annulled” the Oslo Accord with its intention to apply Israeli law in occupied Palestine.
 
No Abbas, the Palestinian National Authority and other militant groups acting under its aegis long ago nullified the Oslo Accord with the Second Intifada when it sought to repay Israel’s generous peace-and-land offerings by repeated bloody attacks against the state of Israel and her people from September 2000 until February 2005. By all accounts, the Intifada lasted for 4 years, 4 months, 1 week, and four days. Four years of bloody murder and unleashed terror against Israelis for their generosity.

Today in History: Sword of Islam Conquers Ancient Christian Capital By Raymond Ibrahim

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/05/today_in_history_sword_of_islam_conquers_ancient_christian_capital.html

Today in history, on May 29, 1453, the sword of Islam conquered Constantinople.  Of all Islam’s conquests of Christian territory, this was by far the most symbolically significant.  Not only was Constantinople a living and direct extension of the old Roman Empire and contemporary capital of the Christian Roman Empire (or Byzantium), but its cyclopean walls had prevented Islam from entering Europe through its eastern doorway for the previous seven centuries, beginning with the First Arab Siege of Constantinople (674–678).  Indeed, as Byzantine historian John Julius Norwich puts it, “[h]ad the Saracens captured Constantinople in the seventh century rather than the fifteenth, all Europe — and America — might be Muslim today.”

When Muslim forces failed again in the Second Arab Siege of Constantinople (717–718), conquering the ancient Christian capital became something of an obsession for a succession of caliphates and sultanates.  However, it was only with the rise of the Ottoman sultanate — so named after its eponymous Turkic founder, Osman (b. 1258) — that conquering the city, which was arguably better fortified than any other in the world, became a possibility, not least thanks to the concomitant spread of gunpowder and cannons from China to Eurasia.  By 1400, his descendants had managed to invade and conquer a significant portion of the southern Balkans — thereby isolating and essentially turning Constantinople into a Christian island in an Islamic sea.

AMY KLOBUCHAR’S REFUSAL TO PROSECUTE OFFICER WHO KILLED GEORGE FLOYD

https://pjmedia.com/election/tyler-o-neil/2020/05/28/amy-klobuchar-declined

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), one of the women on presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s vice-presidential shortlist, refused to prosecute an excessive force case against the police officer who appears to have killed black man George Floyd, the man at the center of the latest Black Lives Matter controversy.

On Monday night, Derek Chauvin, a 19-year veteran of the Minneapolis police department, knelt on 46-year-old Floyd’s neck for nine minutes as the black man pleaded for his life. Floyd died after the encounter. Video of the encounter went viral on Tuesday, and the police department fired Chauvin Tuesday.

Yet Chauvin saw at least 10 conduct complaints during his 19-year tenure before his firing, and Klobuchar — then the Hennepin County attorney — declined to press charges against Chauvin in 2006. Chauvin was one of six officers involved in the shooting death of Wayne Reyes, who stabbed his girlfriend and a friend before fleeing. Police chased him and shot him, claiming he had pulled a shotgun on them. She did not prosecute the case, which went to a grand jury that declined to charge the officers with wrongdoing in 2008, according to The Guardian.

Violent Rioters Breach Ohio Statehouse, Breaking Windows and Entering Building to Protest Death of George Floyd By Paula Bolyard

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/paula-bolyard/2020/05/29/violent-rioters-breach-ohio-statehouse-breaking-windows-and-entering-building-to-protest-death-of-george-floyd-n454462

Rioters in Columbus, Ohio, launched an attack on the Statehouse in the early hours of Friday morning to protest the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Floyd, who was unarmed and subdued with handcuffs, died after a police officer pinned his neck to the ground with his knee and held it there until he stopped breathing.

Protests and riots are ongoing in several cities around the U.S., including Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minn., Memphis, Tenn., Louisville, Ky., Denver, Colo., Los Angeles Calif., and Columbus, Ohio. 

The Statehouse in Columbus came under attack, with rioters breaking windows and some entering the building. There are unconfirmed reports that the protesters damaged the interior of the building.

[VIDEO] Minneapolis Police Precinct on Fire, Police Abandon Area, as Riots Over Death of George Floyd Escalate By Paula Bolyard

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/paula-bolyard/2020/05/29/minneapolis-police-precinct-on-fire-possible-gas-leak-as-protests-over-death-of-george-floyd-escalate-n450339

For the third night in a row, protests and riots rocked Minneapolis in response to the death of George Floyd at the hands of a police officer. Stores were once again looted and buildings set on fire as protesters demanded justice for Floyd’s death. The Fifth Precinct police building is currently burning and authorities are warning of a possible gas leak in the area.

Floyd, who was suspected of forgery, died after a police officer inexplicably pinned him to the ground with his knee, holding him down as he begged for mercy. The officer remained in that position until Floyd, who was unarmed and subdued with handcuffs at the time, became lifeless. He was pronounced dead at the hospital. Four police officers were summarily fired after video of the horrific, indefensible act was made public.

Julio Rosas, from PJ Media’s sister site Townhall, is on the scene in Minneapolis. His tweets show the violence escalating throughout the night and a very dangerous situation developing.