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March 2021

Biden Official Asked GOP Senators to Delete Photos of Border Facilities, Senator Says By Brittany Bernstein

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/biden-official-asked-gop-senators-to-delete-photos-of-border-facilities-senator-says/

Senator Mike Braun (R., Ind.) on Saturday said a Biden official asked a group of Republican senators who visited the southern border to delete photos they had taken of the overcrowded conditions at a migrant processing and holding center they toured one day earlier in Donna, Texas.

“There was one of Biden’s representatives. I felt sorry for the lady because she actually talked to me about deleting a picture, but by the time she got to me, all those other pictures were taken, and that shows you the hypocrisy,” Braun told the Washington Examiner. 

“None of us would have gone down there if we were going to be muzzled,” Braun said, adding that Border Patrol instructed them not to take photos, though “they were telling us that because they had to.”

Braun visited the facility, which is at 700 percent capacity, with a group of 18 other Republican lawmakers. Photos reveal children sleeping on the ground on mats and migrants crowded into enclosed pods.

The Indiana Republican told the paper that the group ran into so-called “coyotes,” who guide migrants across the border for money, during a stop at the edge of the Rio Grande with border agents.

Biden Peddles Obama’s Sham Vision of the Middle East He continues a radical transformation of the Democrat Party’s views on Israel. by Shmuel Klatzkin

https://spectator.org/biden-israel-middle-east-obama/

In an article in Tablet in early March, Lee Smith showed how Barack Obama’s degrading of America’s alliance with Israel and his wooing of Iran were motivated essentially by a plan to transform the Democrat Party. To that end, foreign policy was subordinated. The party of Truman, the three Kennedy brothers, and Skip Jackson had consistently moved American policy towards a strong alliance with Israel out of a basic sympathy with its cause and with that of the Jewish people still suffering persecution around the world (think of Jackson’s powerful support of the cause of Soviet Jewry).

Truman’s choice to recognize immediately the newborn state of Israel was a decision that came from his deepest sense of right. He overrode not only his State Department functionaries, whom he dismissed as the “striped-pants boys,” but also the man he respected above all others in government — George Marshall.

Marshall was the architect of victory in World War II and the visionary savior of the freedom of western Europe after the war. His opposition to Jewish statehood was his anticipation that the fledgling Jewish state would not stand a chance against the combined forces of all the Arab states united against them. He foresaw the bloodbath and desolation that so many in the Arab world boasted would happen and did not want to see the Holocaust continued. He staked his career on this, for the best of reasons, saying to not follow his advice would lead to his resignation. Indeed it did, though Marshall waited to leave so as not to embarrass his boss or discredit the government of the country he served so well and so selflessly.

What was true for Truman became mainstream when, gradually, the magnitude of the evil of anti-Semitism was revealed in its utter horror as the Holocaust sank into civilization’s consciousness. It was not a question of left or right, but of basic moral sobriety and plain human decency, that the kind of ideology and government that thrives on such hatred must be opposed, whether it is Hitlerism, Stalinism, or Khomeinism.

This was firmly established in the power structure of the Democrat Party, where so many Jews felt at home. And, Smith points out, this is what Obama came to transform radically.

Everything Biden and his top people are saying about the border is a bald-faced lie

https://nypost.com/2021/03/27/everything-biden-administration-says-about-border-is-a-bald-faced-lie/

From President Joe Biden on down, the administration is telling nonstop, bald-faced lies about the border crisis — while trying to stop the media from reporting the truth.

Biden insists the surge is normal, when it’s setting records. He insists it’s not because of his words and policies, when common sense, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and the migrants themselves say the opposite. He also pretends it’s all his predecessor’s fault, with yet more lies about what President Donald Trump did.

And he claims most illegal crossers are being turned back, when officials on the ground report the reverse.

Oh, and he calls his approach compassionate, when it in fact brings suffering through the long trip north and then in this country, with children stuck in horribly overcrowded facilities while released adults swarm overwhelmed border towns. A 9-year-old girl drowned in the Rio Grande last week because of the message Biden is sending: If you get into the US, you can stay.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas insists the US-Mexico border is “closed” for everyone except migrant children seeking to enter the country alone. Solo minors are indeed accepted without question, but the recent immigrant surge, the worst border “challenge” in 20 years, goes far beyond that. Sheriff J.E. Guerra of a Texas border town told The Post that so many agents are being transferred from patrol duty to processing stations that “basically, the border’s open” to anyone.

Biden administration fires most Homeland Security Advisory Council members Maria Sacchetti

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/biden-administration-fires-most-homeland-security-advisory-council-members/ar-BB1f0Dig?li=BBnb7Kz

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas fired most members of the department’s independent advisory council on Friday, a purge that included several allies of former president Donald Trump and veteran officials who served under both parties.

Former Department of Homeland Security officials and advisory board members who worked under Democratic and Republican administrations said they could not remember so many members being dismissed at once, as the general practice of past administrations was to allow appointees to serve out their terms before replacing them.

The council is unpaid and includes leaders from state and local government, law enforcement, the private sector and academia who advise the agency on issues such as immigration, terrorism, crime and national disasters. Members serve one- to three-year terms and meet about four times a year.

The removal of more than 30 board members comes as the Biden administration tries to rid the department of Trump-era policies and practices, especially on immigration, and as it has struggled to shelter and care for an unprecedented number of migrant children and teenagers who have arrived at the southwest border without their parents.

DHS officials said Mayorkas would conduct an assessment of the council and reconstitute it with bipartisan members who better reflect the diversity of the United States and the people DHS serves. Mayorkas said he plans to retain Chairman William Bratton, the former police commissioner in New York and police chief in Los Angeles, and Vice Chair Karen P. Tandy, a retired administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration. William H. Webster, former director of the FBI and the CIA, will remain the council’s chair emeritus.

But everyone else is out.

When The Powerful Say Truth Is A Lie And Lies Are The Truth, No One Will Stand Up For America But You Christopher Bedford

https://thefederalist.com/2021/03/26/when-the-powerful-say-truth-is-a-lie-and-lies-are-the-truth-no-one-will-stand-up-for-america-but-you/

Open The New York Times’ politics page Thursday morning and the top headline reads, “Democrats Begin Push For Biggest Expansion In Voting Since 1960s.” It’s a story about the most important election power-grab in modern legislative history, with a slim, partisan majority of senators seeking to wrest control of elections away from state governments to ensure Democrat control for decades to come.

For starters, H.R. 1 will ban voter ID requirements, mandate early voting windows, allow outside activist groups to deliver votes for counting, do away with notarized absentee ballots, force states to accept absentees for 10 days after an election is over, narrow the Federal Election Commission by one member to allow for partisan control, mandate counting illegal aliens in voting districts, allow the IRS to investigate non-profits’ political ideas, and make it nearly impossible to sue over the new rules.

In short, it’s a story about Democrats aiming to seize massive power over how elections are run. Of course, you wouldn’t get any of that information from The New York Times headline or copy. In fact, funny enough, the second story on The New York Times’ politics page Thursday morning was the one headlined, “Republicans Aim To Seize More Power Over How Elections Are Run.”

That one’s a story about Republicans working to pull control of the elections back from judges and officials’ extra-legislative “emergency rules” and rulings. The moves, the story reports with a straight face, are “threatening the fairness that is the bedrock of American democracy.”

MORE HEADLINES MARCH 28, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/

1.Cancel Culture and The Salem Witch Hunts Devin Sper This is not America’s first brush with cancel culture, but we can bring it to a better, quicker end if we show courage now rather than hoping it burns itself out.

2.Learning the Lessons of Jewish History Carrie Lynn Caoili As Jews ready themselves for Passover, the world’s approach to the COVID pandemic has taken on ominous undertones.

3.The transgender movement comes for children March 28, 2021 Ironically, this progressive book pushes gender stereotypes harder even than books in the 1950s did.

https://pjmedia.com/

Cancel Culture Comes to MedicineBy Rick Moranhttps://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2021/03/27/cancel-culture-comes-to-medicine-n1435402

PoonFang Pushover Eric Swalwell Still on Intel Committee Unlike the Soviet Union, China has no need for the Communist Party USA. The Democratic Party functions as China’s wholly owned subsidiary. By Lloyd Billingsley

https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/27/poonfang-pushover-eric-swalwell-still-on-intel-committee/

Democrats last week tabled a GOP resolution to remove Representative Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) from the House Intelligence Committee. Republicans have been pushing for Swalwell’s removal since Axios exposed the Democrat’s capers with Fang Fang, also known as Christine Fang, a spy from Communist China.

As Debra Saunders noted, Fang raised money for Swalwell’s 2014 reelection campaign and also helped place at least one intern in Swalwell’s House office. That was actual collusion, from someone who falsely accused Trump of collusion with the Kremlin. Swalwell suffers from Trump Derangement Syndrome, but there’s more to the California Democrat who fell for the honey trap, the oldest espionage trick in the book. 

Swalwell faithfully repeated Chinese Communist propaganda practically word for word, and it’s hard to find a case where Swalwell disagrees with China or criticizes their human rights record. The PRC is in fact a genocidal Stalinist dictatorship, a reality Democrats and Republicans alike these days tend to ignore. 

Swalwell blamed the Axios report on President Trump, and that was not his first shot in the blame game. The former prosecutor, who ran for president of the United States, specializes in guilt by accusation. 

In a March 26, 2019 appearance on Fox News, Martha MacCallum asked Swalwell if he had any second thoughts about things he had said in the two years before the release of the Mueller report that found no evidence of collusion. Swalwell drew a blank. MacCallum pressed the case of the infamous Steele dossier. Swalwell turned the tables and asked what in the dossier had been found false.

For Swalwell, Trump’s firing of FBI boss James Comey was prima facie evidence of the president’s guilt. Mueller found no evidence of collusion or conspiracy, and no guilt. Swalwell made repeated claims of substantive evidence he failed to produce and, like the establishment media, he has no second thoughts. 

The California Democrat was the biggest haul in Fang Fang’s operations between 2011 and 2015. That year the FBI warned Swalwell, who supposedly was unaware, that Fang worked for Beijing. The case is strong that Swalwell should not hold office, let alone occupy a place on the intelligence committee, where he is privy to the most sensitive information. 

Erdoganistan: The New Islamic Superpower? by Giulio Meotti

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17202/erdogan-turkey-islamic-superpower

Erdogan was promoting his global campaign of victimization by “Islamophobia”, while in fact it is the critics of extremist Islam who are in danger and frequently killed.

In the Caucasus, Turkey has just supported the Azerbaijani war against Armenia in Nagorno-Karabakh in order to create a Turkish Islamic corridor between Azerbaijan, Turkey and other Muslim countries.

“It began in 1989 with the fatwa against Salman Rushdie: no Western country reacted except with words – as if they thought a verbal spell might work!…. The battle lost in Armenia is the first of a war waged in the West against the Judeo-Christian civilization”. — Michel Onfray, Reveue des deux mondes, February 1, 2021.

While the new sultan extends his influence to Syria, Libya and the Caucasus, he also extends it to the Mediterranean. For pacifist Europe, that sea only exists when it comes to bringing in migrants.

“What the Turkish regime is doing is using its diaspora as a Trojan horse.” — Michel Sifaoui, europe1.fr, February 7, 2021.

In Turkey under Erdogan, school textbooks have been rewritten to refer to Jews and Christians as gavur, “infidels.” Earlier Turkish textbooks referred to the members of the two religions as the “people of the Book”…. The curriculum adopts an anti-American stance, and shows sympathy for the motives of ISIS and al-Qaeda. — Report by the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se), March 2021.

“We are a large family of 300 million people from the Adriatic to the Great Wall of China”. — Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Minval.az, October 18, 2018.

“It was a very special day, July 24 [2020],” said France’s leading expert on Islam, Gilles Kepel.

“It was pilgrimage time to Mecca and, due to the pandemic, no one was there! It was the anniversary of the Treaty of Lausanne, the origin of modern Turkey within its current borders. Erdogan was about to twist the arm of the secular Ataturk, who had turned the old Hagia Sophia basilica into a museum that he had donated ‘to humanity’. Erdogan… turned it back into a mosque”.

Lessons from the Middle East by Pierre Rehov

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17148/lessons-middle-east

If appointing Antony Blinken as Secretary of State was enough to reassure Israelis and Saudis, the designation of Robert Malley as special envoy to Iran only rekindled their concerns. Malley was not only involved in the conception of the JCPOA, he was “kicked off of Obama’s first presidential campaign after reports emerged he had met with members of the Hamas terror group,” and has reportedly asked that Hamas be included in talks in the future. Senator Tom Cotton tweeted that the appointment was “deeply troubling… Malley has a long track record of sympathy for the Iranian regime & animus towards Israel. The ayatollahs wouldn’t believe their luck if he is selected.”

The Israeli government, whose secret service has managed to demonstrate Iran’s willingness to acquire nuclear weapons, also warned: “The deal gave Iran a highway paved with gold to build the critical infrastructure for an entire arsenal of nuclear bombs. That deal gave Iran the resources to significantly escalate its aggression and terror across the Middle East.”

Far from the memory of the too numerous wars that have marked the Middle East, the temptation is strong to think that diplomacy should replace force, and that a good negotiation, even if it means coming out a loser, is better than a conflict. This is more or less the philosophy that seems to inspire the “not so new” American administration, such as that for former US President Barack Obama.

Former President Donald J. Trump, for his part, had no doubt learned some lessons from British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and more from the miserable double-cross offered by Hitler to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and the French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier, which would lead, a year later, to the Second World War. Daladier and Chamberlain were so opposed to the use of force that they preferred to sacrifice Czechoslovakia to Nazi appetites rather than stand firm while there was still time. The rest, unfortunately, is well known.

Other have been inspired by the Roman general, Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus: “Si vis pacem, para bellum” — If you want peace, prepare for war.

The ‘Pathetic’ Genesis of a Fake News Story Truth ought still to be the most important thing in our lives and our politics, but truth is not advanced by assertions taken out of context to affirm a narrative.By Stephen B. Presser

https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/27/the-pathetic-genesis-of-a-fake-news-story/

In a headline clearly designed to prompt outrage, CNN recently claimed that “Sidney Powell argues in new court filing that no reasonable people would believe her election fraud claims.” Similarly, CBS News asserted that “Sidney Powell tells court ‘no reasonable person’ would take her voter fraud claims as fact.” The implication is that Powell, one of the most prominent critics of the 2020 presidential election, who has been outspoken in her claims that Joe Biden’s victory was secured through outright fraud involving, in particular, illegal and malicious manipulation of the vote-counting machines, has now repudiated those claims.

Clearly responding to that implication, Representative Peter Meijer of Michigan, one of the Republicans who voted to impeach Trump in January, tweeted that Powell’s argument was “pathetic.” He further elaborated that it was “absolutely infuriating” that “Sidney Powell misled millions claiming stolen elections. Now Powell backtracks saying ‘no reasonable person’ wld (sic) believe what she *ALLEGED IN COURT* were ‘statements of fact’!?!”

What is pathetic here, however, is that CNN, CBS, and Representative Meijer are the deceivers.

Powell has not, in any way, retreated from her claims. In spite of the assurances to the contrary from Democrats and the mainstream media, uncertainties remain about the integrity of Biden’s election as president. Prominent among these is the operation of the software and hardware provided by the “election infrastructure company Dominion Voting Systems,” which has sued Powell for defamation for her public assertions that Dominion’s machines were used as instruments of fraud.

Unadjudicated Claims

Truth would be a defense for Powell to use to win the defamation lawsuit, and a careful reading of the pleading to which CNN and Meijer refer would make clear that Powell still believes her claims to be true (giving the lie to Representative Meijer’s observation and the implication of CNN’s and CBS’s headlines).

Nevertheless, it is accurate that the filing by Powell’s attorneys in the defamation lawsuit did assert that when Powell made her charges of election fraud involving the Dominion voting systems, she made clear that she was asserting opinion rather than fact, as her charges remained to be proved, and the evidence on which she relied for her assertions (which was spelled out in detail by Powell at the time) still had not been authenticated in a judicial setting.