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June 2021

#MakeChinaPay For the #CoronavirusPandemic by Gordon G. Chang

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17432/china-coronavirus

Even if the coronavirus did not start out as a biological weapon, the world now has enough information to conclude that China’s regime turned it into one.

Proponents of sovereign immunity make valid points, but there are overriding factors. Crimes against humanity are so heinous that no one should be barred from seeking compensation.

Plaintiffs, at least as a technical matter, should be able to overcome the sovereign immunity defense: The Communist Party of China, which controls the Chinese central government, is not a sovereign.

As of this moment, 3,579,000 people have died from COVID-19, including 596,000 Americans. The Chinese regime committed mass murder…. Mass murderers do not deserve sovereign immunity protection.

It is absolutely essential that the Biden administration disabuse Chinese leaders of the notion that they can spread the next pathogen, or whatever else they are planning, without a cost.

Let us remember what is at stake. In China’s laboratories, researchers are now cooking up far more deadly pathogens than SARS-CoV-2, including those that would leave the Chinese immune but sicken or kill everyone else.

For the first time in history, one country has attacked — at the same time and in one audacious move — all the other ones.

China committed that horrific crime by taking steps, in December 2019 and January of last year, to deliberately spread COVID-19 beyond its borders.

The international community must now impose the most severe costs on the Chinese regime to, among other things, establish deterrence. Why? China’s regime committed the crime of this century and may well be planning another horrific act.

History made as Arab Israeli Ra’am party joins Bennett-Lapid coalition The first Arab party to join a government in decades, Islamists make good on promise to seek change from inside, winning billions in promised state funding for community By Aaron Boxerman

https://www.timesofisrael.com/arab-israeli-raam-party-makes-history-by-joining-be

Ringed by flashing cameras in a luxury hotel in Ramat Gan, conservative Islamist Ra’am chief Mansour Abbas made history on Wednesday night as the first Arab Israeli party leader in half a century to sign a deal to sit in a coalition government.

“This is the first time that an Arab party is part of the process of forming a government. We of course hope that it works and that a government will rise after four rounds of elections,” Abbas said.

Even before Ra’am announced it was signing on, the nascent coalition was widely regarded as the widest in the country’s history, uniting parties from the left to the pro-settlement right aimed at deposing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud faction.

To make it happen, Yamina chief Naftali Bennett and centrist Yesh Atid leader Yair Atid agreed to a rotation scheme, with Bennett becoming Prime Minister for the first two years.

Despite the wide spectrum of views in the so-called “change government,” Abbas said that he had agreed on numerous plans and budgets in Arab Israeli society with his counterparts in the constellation of parties seeking to topple Netanyahu.

“We have reached a critical mass of agreements in various fields that serves the interest of Arab society and that provide solutions for the burning issues in Arab society — planning, the housing crisis, and of course, fighting violence and organized crime,” Abbas said.

Abbas promised that many of the benefits would flow to the Negev region in southern Israel. Ra’am’s base is among the traditional Bedouin communities in the Negev desert.

Ra’am said that the so-called change bloc agreed to over NIS 53 billion ($16.3 billion) in budgets and government development plans for Arab society.

Hong Kong Police Make Arrests on Tiananmen Square Massacre Anniversary Key organizer of the banned rally detained after asking people on social media to turn on the lights everywhere by Elaine Yu

https://www.wsj.com/articles/hong-kong-police-make-arrests-on-tiananmen-square-massacre-anniversary-11622793577

HONG KONG—Police arrested two people they accused of using social media to promote a banned candlelight vigil commemorating the victims of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, an annual event that is now seen as testing the limits of China’s crackdown on dissent.

One of those arrested Friday morning was Chow Hang-tung, a lawyer and human-rights activist, who is a senior member of the group that organized previous vigils. The group had canceled the vigil after police banned it citing social-distancing rules tied to the coronavirus pandemic.

Pro-democracy groups say the government is trying to dim the flames of the only mass Tiananmen remembrance held on Chinese soil. Restrictions on gatherings remain in place in Hong Kong, which hasn’t recorded a local and untraceable Covid-19 infection for more than a month.

Tensions were high in parts of the city Friday after police said they would put the vigil’s traditional venue of Victoria Park on lockdown and local media reported 7,000 officers, or more than a fifth of the force, would be deployed to avert protests Friday evening. Officials have warned that anyone attending or publicizing unlawful assemblies faces arrest and up to five years in jail.

Every year since the 1989 gunning down of student-led protesters by Chinese troops around Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, crowds have gathered in the park, exercising freedoms that were enjoyed for decades by residents in the former British colony, in contrast with their mainland counterparts.

Police Senior Superintendent Law Kwok-hoi said a woman surnamed Chow and a man were arrested Friday because they had used their social-media accounts to advertise or publicize an unauthorized assembly. The two were “extremely irresponsible” and could cause others to break the law, he said.

H.R.1 Would Steamroll the Constitution Democrats want the feds to run elections, usurping authority the framers assigned to the states. By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Jason Snead

https://www.wsj.com/articles/h-r-1-would-steamroll-the-constitution-11622737590?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

President Biden and his media partisans are stepping up the pressure campaign on Joe Manchin. The West Virginia senator is the only Democrat in the upper chamber who hasn’t signed on to H.R.1, styled the For the People Act, an unprecedented federal takeover of U.S. election laws that the House passed in March and that the Senate plans to consider this month. The bill’s supporters describe it as a vital safeguard of democracy, but it’s the opposite: If enacted it would destroy the Constitution’s careful balance of federal and state powers, taking common election safeguards along with it.

H.R.1 plainly exceeds Congress’s power to regulate presidential elections, as we argued in these pages in February. That’s only the start of its constitutional infirmities.

The primary asserted constitutional basis of H.R.1 is Article I’s Elections Clause, which authorizes state legislatures to establish the “times, places and manner” of congressional elections, while providing that “Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations.” In Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona (2013), the Supreme Court held that several state election-integrity measures were invalid because federal law pre-empted them.

Yet H.R.1’s sponsors fail to recognize that the Elections Clause limits Congress’s authority to time, place and manner. “Prescribing voting qualifications,” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the court in 2013, “forms no part of the power to be conferred upon the national government by the Elections Clause.” Article I’s Qualifications Clause provides that “the electors”—that is, voters—“in each state shall have the qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous branch of the state legislature.” Determining those qualifications is up to the states, except where the Constitution says otherwise—for instance in the 19th and 26th amendment, enfranchising women and 18-year-olds, respectively.

COVID-19 Has Forever Destroyed Americans’ Trust in ‘Experts’ The ruling class has finally sullied itself one time too many. By Josh Hammer

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/03/covid-19-has-forever-destroyed-americans-trust-in-experts/

As even many casual observers of America’s fractious politics are aware, the overwhelming majority of lawmaking at the federal level no longer takes place in Congress as the Constitution’s framers intended. Instead, the vast majority of the “rulemaking” governing Americans’ day-to-day lives now takes place behind closed doors, deep in the bowels of the administrative state’s sprawling bureaucracy. The brainchild of progressive President Woodrow Wilson, arguments on behalf of the modern administrative state are ultimately rooted in, among other factors, a disdain for the messy give-and-take of republican politics and an epistemological preference for rule by enlightened clerisy.

Put more simply, the most straightforward version of the argument offered by partisans of the administrative state amounts to, “Trust the experts.” And over the century-plus since Wilson’s presidency, the “trust the experts” leitmotif has moved well beyond the realm of prevailing dogma for mandarins in such agencies as the Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency. Rather, for large swaths of the citizenry and the elected official class, “trust the experts” now reigns supreme for everything from the military (“Trust the generals!”) to public health (“Trust the epidemiologists!”).

And therein lies the rub.

The trials and tribulations of COVID-19 in America have dealt an irreparable blow to the credibility of America’s ruling class and the ruling class’s implicit appeal to its authority as a coterie of highly trained and capable experts. No single person exemplifies this more than Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has attained celebrity status during the pandemic as the nation’s leading immunology and forward-facing spokesman for our public policy response. As Steve Deace and Todd Erzen detail in their new book, Faucian Bargain: The Most Powerful and Dangerous Bureaucrat in American History, Fauci has repeatedly contradicted himself throughout the pandemic, waffling on what the “science” demands at any given moment while still always seeming to err on the side of draconian overreaction.

Government Seeks Retribution for the Biden Resistance The prosecution of the Oath Keepers is critical in fueling the notion that groups of armed, pro-Trump vigilantes organized an assault on the seat of American democracy. By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/03/government-seeks-retribution-for-the-biden-resistance/

The U.S. government’s vengeance case against the Oath Keepers, a group that publicly declared its opposition to Joe Biden’s presidency, is now in its fourth iteration with no end in sight.

Biden’s Justice Department, led by a man denied a seat on the Supreme Court in 2016 by Senate Republicans and a woman loyal to both Barack Obama and Robert Mueller, is sparing no resource to destroy the lives of Americans tied to the group that allegedly “stormed” the Capitol on January 6.

Last week, Channing Phillips, the acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia overseeing the sprawling investigation into the events of January 6, filed another superseding indictment against the Oath Keepers while adding new defendants. Four men have been arrested since May 27; the total number of defendants is 16 and counting.

The Oath Keepers, as the media reminds us daily, pose a mortal threat to the country. As NPR recently warned, it is “one of the largest anti-government extremist groups in the far-right patriot militia movement.”  The group’s real crime, of course, is opposing Joe Biden; after the election, a founder of the Oath Keepers said the group would “resist” Biden’s presidency, an act of defiance considered mandatory in many quarters when it was directed at the Trump Administration from the Left.

Indispensible to the Narrative

So, retaliation is underway. The first grand jury indictment was filed one week after Inauguration Day; three alleged Oath Keepers—Thomas Caldwell, Jessica Watkins, and Donovan Crowl—were charged with four trespassing and disorderly conduct offenses. 

“The Oath Keepers are a large but loosely organized collection of militia who believe that the federal government has been co-opted by a shadowy conspiracy that is trying to strip American citizens of their rights,” Michael Sherwin, the prosecutor in charge of the early stage of the investigation who bragged about a “shock and awe” manhunt leading up to Biden’s inauguration, wrote in the original charging document. “The organization’s name alludes to the oath sworn by members of the military and police to defend the Constitution ‘from all enemies, foreign and domestic.’”

Since then, the Justice Department has tacked on a total of 13 counts and 13 more defendants with warnings of more to come. The prosecution of the Oath Keepers is critical in fueling the notion that groups of armed, pro-Trump vigilantes organized an assault on the seat of American democracy.

Disturbing: Report Suggests Pornography Exposure Doesn’t Harm Children By Gwendolyn Sims

https://pjmedia.com/culture/gwendolynsims/2021/06/03/disturbing-report-suggests-pornography-exposure-doesnt-harm-children-n1451955

Did you know that online pornography isn’t bad for our children? Heck no, according to a report released by the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) exposure to pornography even makes some children feel happy feelings.

What could be wrong with that? We want our children to be happy, right?

The report, “Digital Age Assurance Tools and Children’s Rights Online across the Globe,” discussed the technical, legal, cultural, and policy uses of online age verification tools on internet sites involved with pornography, gaming, and social media.

Ultimately, the report concluded that online age verification tools warranted further study and development. As they are now, the age verification tools are ineffective at best and they may intrinsically violate the rights of children at worst. That’s pretty non-disturbing, right?

The disturbing part was hidden in the conclusion of the section on pornography that asked, “What is the evidence of risk and harm?” That section took it one step further by suggesting that there may not actually be any harm:

The 2020 EU Kids Online study compared survey findings from 19 European countries and found that in most countries, most children who saw sexual images online were neither upset nor happy (ranging from 27 per cent in Switzerland to 72 per cent in Lithuania); between 10 per cent and 4 per cent were fairly or very upset; and between 3 per cent of children (in Estonia) and 39 per cent (in Spain) reported feeling happy after seeing such images.

Biden’s Disgraceful Exploitation of the Tulsa Race Massacre By David Limbaugh,

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-limbaugh/2021/06/04/bidens-disgraceful-exploitation-of-the-tulsa-race-massacre-n1452009

This may shock and amaze you if your blinders are on, but President Biden is not only not a uniter; he is actively trying to divide Americans on race — and other issues — purely for raw political power. There is no other plausible explanation.

During former President Trump’s entire presidency and ever since, we’ve been bombarded daily with the narrative that he is divisive and a racist. His political opponents and the media distorted his words, such as those he said in the aftermath of the Charlottesville attacks, to paint him as sympathetic to white supremacists. That was always absurd, but it is now largely accepted as conventional wisdom.

Of course, the real ploy was to demonize and marginalize all Trump supporters, not just Trump. The implication was that anyone who would support such a bigot must be a bigot. Truth be told, this nicely fit the left’s decades-long smear of Republicans as racist as evidenced by their ideology.

Before you scoff at this as wanton hyperbole, consider that I’m not alone in my thoughts. A Rasmussen Reports poll released June 1 revealed that 39% of likely voters believe race relations have deteriorated since Biden’s election.

CNN’s Take on the Fauci Emails Is REALLY Disturbing… By Matt Margolis

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2021/06/03/cnns-take-on-the-fauci-emails-is-really-disturbing-n1451919

While most of us who have read the bombshell FOIA emails from Dr. Fauci believe they prove he wasn’t telling Americans the truth, the so-called journalists at CNN had a much different take on what the emails revealed.

“While many federal government staffers prefer the phone to email, this correspondence offers a rare glimpse into Fauci’s frantic schedule and polite, to-the-point demeanor during the time he emerged as a rare source of frank honesty within the Trump administration’s Covid-19 task force,” wrote Christina Maxouris and Paul LeBlanc of CNN.

“I honestly don’t know how CNN can crystallize those emails into this headline,” mused Ben Shapiro of the Daily Wire. “We get it. You created a narrative of Trump as evil and Fauci as good, and now you have to stick with it. But your worship of a prevaricating career bureaucrat is unsettling.”

CAIR Organizes Anti-Israel Rallies with Convicted Member of Palestinian Islamic Jihad CAIR-Florida’s new leader joins PIJ’s Hatem Fariz to curse Israel and call for more bloodshed. Joe Kaufman

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/cair-organizes-anti-israel-rallies-convicted-joe-kaufman/

The mainstream media likes to paint CAIR as a mainstream Muslim group interested in protecting the civil rights of the Muslim community. The reality, though, is that CAIR is a support network for terror with both foundational and financial links to Hamas. This past month, CAIR’s true nature showed itself, as the group partnered with a convicted member of Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), Hatem Fariz, to run a series of Tampa, Florida rallies meant to curse Israel and excuse Hamas violence. The events were proof of why the media must end its cozy relationship with CAIR. To continue to promote this group only legitimizes hate and terror.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) was established in June 1994 as a part of the US chapter of the global Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee, which at the time was headed by then-Chairman of the Hamas Political Bureau Mousa Abu Marzook. Officials from CAIR have been convicted of terror-related crimes, and the US government named CAIR a co-conspirator to the financing of Hamas. The Florida chapter of CAIR has not strayed much from its national parent. In July 2014, CAIR-Florida co-sponsored a pro-Hamas rally in Downtown Miami, where rally goers repeatedly shouted, “We are Hamas” and “Let’s go Hamas.”

The Islamic Community of Tampa (ICT), a.k.a. Masjid al-Qassam, was founded by Sami al-Arian, a convicted terrorist who set up a Southwest Florida PIJ terror network, over three decades ago. ICT was a big part of the network. At a 2017 CAIR media brunch, then-CAIR-Florida Executive Director Hassan Shibly said that the group depends on ICT for “programs, fundraising” and more. He said, “Really, we couldn’t do the work without the tremendous support we get from the mosque.”