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June 2021

Biden Never Learns: He Still Wants to Talk to China by Gordon G. Chang

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17488/biden-china-engagement

Call this another Biden debacle in the making.

China, it is evident, is now in no mood for substantive discussions, other than, of course, for the purpose of accepting America’s surrender.

American leaders, administration in and administration out, think it is important to meet face-to-face with adversaries, that they can somehow reason with them. That view is naïve, arrogant, and almost always incorrect. Chinese leaders of the communist variety often talk of “friendship” but are ruthlessly pragmatic, and often just ruthless. For them, personal feelings have no value in relations with other states.

Personal diplomacy with Beijing is counterproductive: Americans chase after the Chinese and the Chinese take advantage of this eagerness. The incessant pursuit of Beijing makes America, in the eyes of the Chinese regime, an easy mark.

If the reports about Dong are accurate, Biden should be now talking about imposing the most severe costs on China, not chasing after Xi Jinping to begin a conversation. America should, among other things, cut trade, end investment, prohibit technical cooperation, perhaps stop all travel altogether. Biden definitely should close China’s remaining four consulates in the U.S. and send virtually all Chinese embassy officials home. The President should announce it is the policy of the United States to end communist rule in China.

Chinese officials took Canadian hostages, known as “the two Michaels,” in December 2018 and have held them since because they knew Prime Minister Justin Trudeau would do nothing about it. The Chinese believed Trudeau would do nothing because he had spent his career desperately trying to court China. — Charles Burton of the Ottawa-based Macdonald-Laurier Institute.

So, President Biden, stop turning the other cheek and start performing your most fundamental constitutional duty: Protecting America from foreign enemies.

President Joe Biden, according to National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, wants to begin a new round of “engaging” China.

Call this another Biden debacle in the making.

Equity or Education? The elimination of standardized tests is the latest misguided and detrimental effort to achieve equity and seat a diverse class. By Elizabeth Eastman

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/22/equity-or-education/

College admissions have been steeped in controversy for years with wrangling over which measures best identify desirable applicants. A typical application requires transcripts, essays, recommendations, and results from standardized tests such as the ACT and SAT. The latter are now at the forefront of current debate, including one taking place in California.

The University of California system began requiring applicants to take the SAT in 1960. Recently, there have been discussions regarding the use of test scores in scholarship or admissions decisions, from making submission optional (spurred by COVID-19 limitations) to ending the required submission. 

Increasingly, the motivation to change requirements no longer focuses solely on the student but is driven by concerns that family income, parents’ education, and race can adversely affect test scores.

UC Riverside Chancellor Kim A. Wilcox contributed to the debate with a Los Angeles Times op-ed titled “Dropping the SATs could make UC admissions more biased.” He included the findings of a faculty task force, which recognized that the UC system has been able to offset such bias by including other relevant factors in admissions. He argued that inequities could be made worse because test elimination would cause a greater reliance on grades, thus driving grade inflation, or result in more affluent families hiring tutors for their children.

While the task force’s findings and recommendations were persuasive, in May 2020 the UC Regents suspended the standardized test requirement for all California freshman applicants until fall 2024 and announced a plan to design a new test in time for 2025 admissions. If the deadline is not met, standardized testing requirements for all California students will be eliminated. 

The ‘Conservative’ Supreme Court’s Love-Affair With Obamacare Giving the Left’s healthcare scam a thumbs-up. Matthew Vadum

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/why-does-conservative-supreme-court-love-obamacare-matthew-vadum/

Conservatives across America have to be asking themselves why they put so much time, money, and energy into electing Republicans when the supposedly conservative Supreme Court justices who follow side with the Left in important cases.

The latest jurisprudential atrocity is the high court’s dreadful but not altogether unexpected betrayal of the U.S. Constitution in California v. Texas, a challenge to the Obamacare redistribution statute lodged by Texas and 17 other states that had been backed by the former Trump administration.

“It’s never been a proper role for the federal government to regulate health care and health insurance,” Robert Henneke of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, who represented two individual plaintiffs, said after winning at the trial court level. “It is a proper role for the states.”

There are 6 conservative justices and 3 liberal justices on the Supreme Court, or so the conventional wisdom goes.

Yet instead of dealing with the legal controversy head on, a majority of the court chickened out, failing for a third time to mete out a richly deserved death blow to the flagrantly unconstitutional, un-American monstrosity that is the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA). By a vote of 7–2 on June 17, the Supreme Court cavalierly brushed aside questionsof the law’s constitutional validity by finding that those challenging it lacked the required legal standing to do so.

Of the three Trump appointees, two –Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett— voted to protect the ACA. Even the most brilliant member of the court, conservative stalwart Justice Clarence Thomas, bought into this cowardly nonsense, siding with the majority on standing.

This ruling should disabuse Americans once and for all of the claim, repeated ad nauseam by the Left, that the Supreme Court,which momentarily is dominated by Republican appointees, is somehow “conservative” or “right-wing.”

Critical Race Theory, teachers, school boards, and parents By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/06/critical_race_theory_teachers_school_boards_and_parents.html

This post wanders from the Midwest to a D.C. suburb, but the locations really have no geographic relevance because we’re witnessing the same thing playing out in public schools across America. It’s also got a lot of tweets, because they tell the story in real-time, with important videos. Stick with it, though because the bottom line is important: Parents are beginning to realize that the institutions that they fund and to which they’ve entrusted their children are indoctrinating their children with racist, Marxist theories. Moreover, when challenged, they will react like cornered rats and call upon the police state to protect themselves.

To begin with, you must see the Critical Race Training forced on Iowa School System teachers. The training is aggressively non-partisan in tone, as well as being racist and Marxist. (Hat tip: Twitchy.) After you’ve looked at these tweets (skimming them is fine), keep reading this post, because I’ll have more evidence of the battle between public schools and the public:
While many attendees doubtlessly sit in those CRT training sessions stoically listening as a way to keep their jobs, many teachers take this seriously. They believe it is their Gaia-given right to use their classroom to indoctrinate the students in their care.

The teacher in the video below, who is from Iowa (so ignore the language about Texas), is an example of people who take the training to heart helped, no doubt, by the endless indoctrination they experienced at college. They then use their authority in the classroom (and their control over students’ grades) to brainwash America’s children with material that violates laws against partisan education, racism, and, in Iowa, CRT indoctrination:

Of Founders, Slavery and Freedom By Eric Utter

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/06/of_founders_slavery_and_freedom.html

More people around the world are—at least nominally—free than at any other time in history. Free from monarchs, dictators, communism, fascism. Free from serfdom, servitude, slavery, deprivation and extreme oppression. This has ironically led many to take their freedom for granted. Especially in the West. Perhaps the longer you have had something the less you cherish it. Because never before in human history have so many people willingly ceded control of their minds, souls and bodies to others. Examples of this are legion, perhaps none more illustrative and chilling than the reaction to government mandates and restrictions put in place during the coronavirus plandemic pandemic.

Healthy people must stay in their homes for two weeks a year or more? No problem. We have to cover our breathing apparatus with masks, indoors or out? Check. My job is “nonessential?” Yes, sir. I can’t go see my dying grandmother? Okay. Daughter can’t get married if she wants all her friends and family to attend and share her joy? Whatever you say. “Experts” say I must inject an unvetted foreign substance into my body if I wish to attend college or keep my job? Thank you, sir, I’ll have another! We must keep at least six feet apart from all other homo sapiens and eat our Thanksgiving dinner outside? Big Brother knows best!

Whether submitting to hoaxes, obeying frauds or allowing “educators,” “journalists,” Big Tech tyrants, corporate charlatans and unelected bureaucrats to tell us what to do, how to speak, how to think, and what is right, far too many of us have effectively knelt before the emperor. But the emperor has no clothes. It is time for us to acknowledge this fact.

(A brief aside: Those who would enslave us spent four years telling us that President Trump was an emperor, a tyrant. They opposed everything he did or said simply because he did or said it. Turns out, most of what he said was correct. And he was one man fighting, for us, against the vast systemic bigotry of The Left. He was, in fact, the anti-emperor, the embodiment of a true anti-fascist.)

Too many of us have put up with exorbitant taxes, punitive regulations, mindless mandates, and policies that make us less happy, less free and at greater risk of being physically harmed or killed. Enforced mask mandates for us but not for those burning down our cities. Protect our borders? No way. Defund the police? You bet.

The Republic Is Preserved – But The Democrats Will Try Insurrection Again

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/06/23/the-republic-is-preserved-but-the-democrats-will-try-insurrection-again/

Republicans have saved this country’s two-party political system. At least for now. The power-hungry Democrats won’t give up easily, though. They’ll redouble their efforts to set themselves up as an unchallengeable political force that rules rather than governs.

With Sen. Mitch McConnell and the rest of the Republicans in the 50-50 Senate voting against moving forward with the “For the People Act of 2021,” the Democrats’ plan to put elections under federal rather than state and local authority was shelved Tuesday. It was the proper ending for legislation that should have never been written.

Of course, the Democrat-media cabal swears that the defeat is a disaster for the country, the bitter end of democracy. They’ve screeched until breathless that without the bill, the U.S. would be a swamp of “voter suppression.”

The Democrats know full-well that none of that is true – and are also entirely aware that the For the People Act was a naked power grab by the party that continues not to drift but steer hard to the left, a fact they’ve tried to cover up with their theatrics. The legislation, which got through the Democratic House in March by 10 votes, was a brazen effort to install permanent Democratic control of the federal government. It’s insurrection by ballot.

Beneath its feel-good title, the For the People Act is a dark ruse that creates favorable conditions for voter fraud. Its provisions include: 

Mandates to allow automatic registration and same-day voting after registration.
Limits states’ ability to work with each other to determine which voters are registered in multiple states simultaneously. 
Prohibits election observers from cooperating with election officials to file formal challenges to suspicious voter registrations.
Criminalizes protected political speech by making it an offense to “discourage” someone from voting.
Bars states from making their own vote-by-mail laws.
Allows “citizens who lack any appropriate photo ID to gain access to the polls with sworn affidavits to their identity.”

School Board Meeting Cut Short, Parent Arrested after Fiery Speech on CRT, Transgender Policy By Zachary Evans

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/school-board-meeting-cut-short-parent-arrested-after-fiery-speech-on-crt-transgender-policy/

Police declared an unlawful assembly at a Loudoun County, Va., School Board meeting Tuesday after residents clashed regarding the district’s proposed policies on transgender students.

The proposal in question, known as policy proposal 8040, would require teachers to use a child’s preferred gender pronouns. The board closed public comments at its meeting on Tuesday night after multiple interruptions by residents in the crowd.

After several speakers voiced support for the proposal, a woman who said she was the mother of a transgender student was booed after saying “hate” was “dripping from the followers of Jesus in this room.” The board called a five-minute recess and said public comments would be closed if any additional disturbance were made.

After other residents spoke both in favor and against the proposal, former state senator Dick Black criticized the board over its alleged backing of the policies as well as critical race theory. Residents cheered Black, prompting the board to close public comments by a vote of 9-0.

Parents began singing the “Star-Spangled Banner” after comments were closed.

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Lesson in Invisibilization, Unlocking Doors with Keys, and Other Cardinal Sins By Charles C. W. Cooke

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/lin-manuel-mirandas-lesson-in-invisibilization-unlocking-doors-with-keys-and-other-cardinal-sins/

Ninety-seven percent of Hispanics in the United States disfavor the term “Latinx.” How, I wonder, must they feel reading the rest of this remarkable Washington Post piece, which, taken in its entirety, may be the silliest thing ever published in a major newspaper.

The gist of the article is that the actor, composer, and director Lin-Manuel Miranda has committed a sin against dark-skinned Hispanics by making a movie, In the Heights, in which they are underrepresented. Or, at least, I think that’s the gist. It’s hard to tell when every sentence reads like this:

The deprioritization of lived and racialized experiences in favor of a nonexistent mono-cultural “Latinidad” has no function beyond fantasy. How can we honor those who came before us and risked everything to exist despite the challenge of erasure?

Good question. I’ll get back to you on that one.

Joe Manchin’s Voting ‘Compromise’ The deal he’s pitching to replace H.R.1 isn’t much of a deal at all.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-manchins-voting-compromise-11624401491?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Senate Democrats tried and failed Tuesday to move their version of H.R.1, the bill to impose a federal election code on all 50 states. That 800-page travesty was doomed once West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin came out against it. But now Democrats are rallying around Plan B, which is based on a three-page memo circulated by Mr. Manchin’s office.

It’s a curious document. The preamble insists that any voting bill “must be the result of both Democrats and Republicans coming together.” But then it suggests an H.R.1 “compromise” that is no bipartisan kumbaya. As Republican leader Mitch McConnell said last week in ruling out Mr. Manchin’s wish list, it still involves “an assault on the fundamental idea that states, not the federal government, should decide how to run their own elections.”

To start, Mr. Manchin’s memo suggests mandating “at least 15 consecutive days of early voting.” Yet one prominent Democratic opponent of H.R.1., New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner, has objected that his state’s constitution dates to 1783, and it “requires that a voter must be present” on Election Day unless “absent from the town or city, or physically disabled.” Yet New Hampshire, he added, has had “the third highest voter turnout in the country for each of the last four presidential elections.”

The Manchin memo proposes that Congress “ban partisan gerrymandering and use computer models.” It’s not clear precisely what Mr. Manchin has in mind, but skeptics will rightly see this as a plan to turn an overtly political process into a covertly political one that would be controlled by unaccountable technocrats.

American Basketball Pro Spent Eight Months in Secretive China Detention A human-rights group says a legal form of Chinese detention that often leaves people cut off from family and lawyers is used at a ‘mass level’ by James Areddy

https://www.wsj.com/articles/american-basketball-pro-spent-eight-months-in-secretive-china-detention-11624363200?mod=hp_featst_pos3

When Chinese police detained American professional basketball player Jeff Harper in Shenzhen last year, they didn’t formally arrest him, he says, but instead kept him locked in a room with a rancid mattress and a plastic chair for eight months.

That form of Chinese detention, called “residential surveillance in a designated location,” is used by authorities to hold a suspect for interrogation in a secret location before any arrest or charge. Human-rights groups describe it as a frightening situation that sometimes features violence and leaves the subject cut off from lawyers and family. Mr. Harper says he wasn’t physically abused but was tormented by the uncertainty around what authorities planned for him.

An unaffiliated basketball pro who had played in 12 countries, Mr. Harper had been in Shenzhen for five days for a tournament when he was detained after an altercation he says he was later told led to a man’s death. He was eventually released and permitted to leave China in September 2020 without ever being charged with any crime or appearing in court.

“They do their justice system totally different than we do ours,” says the 33-year-old from Whiteville, Tenn. “I’m not a fan of it.”

The residential-surveillance system has received international attention because of a number of high-profile cases involving political opponents of Beijing’s leadership and sometimes foreigners such as Mr. Harper.

The benign term “residential surveillance” denotes the system’s origins as a type of house arrest. But accounts by detainees and findings by human-rights groups suggest it may be a more systematized process that can feature purpose-built jail-like facilities with dedicated staff, sometimes referred to as black jails. Mr. Harper says he was held in what appeared to be a residential building for police officers.

According to research by a team of human-rights groups led by Madrid-based Safeguard Defenders, a nonprofit focused on human rights in China, some 5,810 cases of residential surveillance were recorded in open-source Chinese court records for 2020, up 91% from the year before. The group, which has tracked rising mentions of the practice in nine years worth of court records, estimates the use of residential surveillance is closer to double that or more.