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June 2021

Petition to Remove Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin:

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/petition-remove-secretary-defense-lloyd-austin-frontpage-editors/

No institution in America – from government offices to schoolrooms to corporate boardrooms and beyond – is safe today from the divisive racism of Critical Race Theory and the “1619 Project.” both of which posit that United States history is rooted in slavery and white supremacy, and that “whiteness” is an incurable disease. The institution whose subversion poses the greatest threat to our national security is the U.S. military, whose head is Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. General Austin is a determined advocate of these repulsive anti-American views.

As Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin has incorporated both Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project as core elements of the Pentagon’s military training programs, under the guise of “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.” He has further ordered a purging of the military ranks of what he calls “extremists,” defined as opponents of these noxious views and supporters of former president Donald Trump.

The consequence of dividing our troops by race and gender, and regarding one community of Americans as oppressors and beneficiaries of race and gender-based privileges is a direct threat to unit cohesion and military morale, the core elements of an effective military force.

That’s why I hope you’ll join me, and demand the Removal of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.

Biden’s Racist Farm Reparations The blatantly unconstitutional Pigford 2.0 excludes white farmers. Matthew Vadum

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/bidens-racist-farm-reparations-matthew-vadum/

The Biden-Harris administration is promising to press on with a blatantly unconstitutional $4 billion farm relief program that deliberately excludes white people even after a federal judge ruled it was racially discriminatory and temporarily blocked it.

Democrats view the explicitly racist government program as a down payment on the slavery reparations package they want to force on Americans a century and a half after Abraham Lincoln’s Republicans took Democrats’ slaves away from them.

Twelve plaintiffs in nine states sued the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in a case called Faust v. Vilsack to enjoin officials from implementing a loan-forgiveness program for farmers and ranchers under Section 1005 of the grotesque $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (ARPA), the recent so-called pandemic-related stimulus legislation. The plaintiffs say Section 1005 denies them equal protection of the law because eligibility to participate in the program is based solely on racial classifications.

“The Court recognized that the federal government’s plan to condition and allocate benefits on the basis of race raises grave constitutional concerns and threatens our clients with irreparable harm,” said Rick Esenberg, president and general counsel for the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL).

“The Biden administration is radically undermining bedrock principles of equality under the law. We look forward to continuing this litigation but urge the administration to change course now.”

WILL represents the 12 farmers and ranchers from Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota, Ohio, Missouri, Iowa, Arkansas, Oregon, and Kentucky. Each plaintiff would be eligible for the federal loan forgiveness program, but for their race.

U.S. District Judge William Griesbach of Green Bay, Wisconsin, cut through the woke nonsense argued by placeholder president Joe Biden’s legal team and issued a temporary restraining order against the program June 10.

“Plaintiffs are excluded from the program based on their race and are thus experiencing discrimination at the hands of their government,” Griesbach wrote.

The G7 and the Globalist Diplomacy Fetish American interests and security take a back seat to stale supranational institutions. Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/g7-and-globalist-diplomacy-fetish-bruce-thornton/

The most recent G7 summit has come and gone, accomplishing little except to remind us how useless and dangerous has been our long fetish for diplomacy. These meetings and other multinational confabs are merely part of the New World Order’s marketing campaign to convince the free West that multinational technocratic elites are better at advancing national interests than are the sovereign peoples to whom government office-holders are accountable.

Here in the U.S., such advertising campaigns also provide progressives with a permanent partisan club for beating conservatives and foreign policy realists who want to put America’s national interests and security ahead of those of some mythic “global community,” a euphemism for nations who talk globally but act locally.

American Democrat and Republican globalists have for decades smeared nationalism and promoted instead greater integration into the “rules-based international order.” Conservative presidents who resisted were pilloried as unsophisticated jingoists and trigger-happy militarists clinging to worn-out ideas from a more savage time. Ronald Reagan, with his allegedly crude, unnuanced “we win, they lose” and “evil empire” rhetoric was mocked as a dangerously naïve warmonger, with his arms build-up and “Star Wars” fantasies about anti-missile defense systems. But Reagan’s success showed that for diplomatic “covenants” to be effective, there had to be a credible “sword” backing the agreement.

This caricature of Republican presidents ran wild during the George W. Bush years. The second war against Saddam Hussein was attacked as a “failure of diplomacy” despite the serial diplomatic failures of Hussein’s violating more than a dozen UN Security Council resolutions as well as the terms of the Gulf War armistice. Typical was the statement of Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, who said he was “saddened that this president failed so miserably at diplomacy that we’re now forced to war.” Of course, the New York Times also peddled this DNC talking point, writing of Bush’s “failure to enlist the help of the United Nations in conducting the war,” despite Bush’s spending several  months trying to get the UN Security Council to “help.”

A Hesitant, Half-Hearted Stand against China

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/06/a-hesitant-half-hearted-stand-against-china/

Beijing appeared piqued by the transatlantic unity on display as a triumphant Joe Biden marshaled his European counterparts to defend world order at a dizzying series of summits in Cornwall and Brussels this week. Today, it sent 28 jets through Taiwan’s air-defense-identification zone, its largest-ever incursion. But surely Chinese Communist Party officials, and other American adversaries, were also relieved that the statements from these meetings were watered down by hesitant European governments.

The G-7, NATO, and U.S.-EU summits yielded communiqués setting out ambitious goals aimed at shoring up and retooling these alliances for the 21st century’s greatest challenges, among which the president says is autocracy’s global competition with democracy. “I think we’ve made some progress in reestablishing American credibility among our closest friends,” Biden said at the G-7 summit. There, the leaders of the world’s largest economies committed to hundreds of billions of dollars in global infrastructure investment to counter the Belt and Road Initiative and called out Chinese human-rights abuses.

National-Security Adviser Jake Sullivan explained how the G-7 delivered an apparently unified statement on China despite disagreements between members. “When you add it all up, actually, the whole became greater than the sum of its parts, because there is a broad view that China represents a significant challenge to the world’s democracies.” 

The math can be described otherwise: These alliances can go only as fast as the lowest common denominator of agreement between these countries allows them to go. Which is why these gatherings yielded directionally promising statements but were nevertheless hindered by countries who are loath to confront the CCP. The G-7 explicitly rapped Beijing for its coercion of Taiwan and human-rights abuses, while making oblique mention of forced-labor practices in a separate section — because EU, German, and Italian officials were more circumspect. The portion on COVID origins calls for a transparent investigation, but it calls for one under the aegis of the compromised WHO investigation process.

Welcome to Wokespeak: Its Logic-Defying Rhetoric Is Making Heads Spin By John Murawski

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/06/15/welcome_to_wokespeak_its_logic-defying_rhetoric_is_making_heads_spin_780731.html

In the midst of the nation’s racial upheaval last year, media outlets including the Associated Press, the New York Times and the Washington Post rushed to start capitalizing the word “Black” in reference to African Americans, some announcing the move as a long-overdue gesture of respect. While RealClear has not changed its style, the change elsewhere prompted newsroom soul-searching on whether to write “white” or “White” in reference to people of European descent.

Capitalizing the term made sense as a simple matter of consistency. But the argument for lower-casing “white” staked its own moral claims. One was that capitalizing it would legitimize white supremacy. Another was that “white” in lower case is an apolitical description of a skin color; it doesn’t merit capitalization because whites don’t represent a shared culture.

News organizations adopted inconsistent policies on the question – the AP, Times and others voted for “w”; the Washington Post and National Association of Black Journalists chose “W.” But the notion that there is no white culture drew jeers of derision from some quarters. It was virtually impossible to pretend not to see that white culture is routinely cited to refer to white supremacy and white privilege as a shorthand for the cultural biases, prejudices and values that prop up systemic racism.

Both ideas – that white culture is omnipresent and nonexistent – can’t be true. Or can they?

The white culture conundrum is one of many such paradoxes in today’s topsy-turvy woke culture, where colorblindness once represented the ideal of being unprejudiced, but now marks the epitome of racism.

These apparent contradictions can cause confusion, frustration and moral whiplash in a swiftly changing society where many people fear that one wayward move can result in a public flogging or a pink slip. Yet as the public seeks guidance, the fractured market of ideas seems unable to provide clarity on which rules apply in which situation.

“These contradictions and conundrums have hit like an avalanche,” said Jason Hill, a native of Jamaica and author of the 2018 book, “We Have Overcome: An Immigrant’s Letter to the American People.”

The Leftists Writing Your Child’s Social Studies Lessons Betsy McCaughey

https://townhall.com/columnists/betsymccaughey/2021/06/16/the-leftists-writing-your-childs-social-studies-lessons-n2591054

It’s hard to know what’s worse — brainwashing kids or lying about it.

Parents worried their kids are being indoctrinated with critical race theory can’t get straight answers. Local school boards and principals lie to them, claiming children are merely being taught to be “critical thinkers.”

On Saturday, the truth came out. Teachers unions and activists held rallies in 22 cities to support critical race theory. What they said was eye-popping. They unabashedly declared that their goal is indoctrinating students in far-left causes.

The Zinn Education Project, which organized Saturday’s events, produces race-centric material for junior high and high schools across the country. Lesson plans are offered free for teachers to download. Parents wondering where the critical race theory their children are getting comes from can go to the website. They’ll be shocked.

Zinn was founded by the late Howard Zinn, a Marxist historian who said that teaching social studies wasn’t about dates and events. It was to make students want to change the world, overthrowing the status quo.

A Zinn lesson called “Students Design a Reparations Bill” explains that students will be asked to improve on the “flimsy” reparations bills currently in Congress. Critical thinking isn’t encouraged. This isn’t a debate about whether there should be reparations. This is one-sided indoctrination. “As racial justice activists, student are all on the ‘same side,’ in this role play,” says the Zinn website.

Other extreme left groups supplying social studies materials for schools include the Southern Poverty Law Center and Black Lives Matter at School. SPLC tells educators to stand their ground against parents “and vigorously resist efforts to maintain the status quo.” No wonder parents are getting the run around.

It Pays To Be ‘Green’ – If You’re A Wall Street Fat Cat, That Is Craig Rucker

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/06/16/it-pays-to-be-green-if-youre-a-wall-street-fat-cat-that-is/

America’s business community has always liked the color “green.” Traditionally, it was about earning U.S. dollars.  Today, it’s about brandishing a woke environmental image.

Perhaps nothing showcases this better than the trend toward “Environmental, Social and Governance” (ESG) investments by those on Wall Street.  Particularly attractive to millennials, the pitch for investing in ESG’s is to not just “make money,” but “make the world a better place” while doing it.

A noble-sounding idea?  Perhaps.  But as Rupert Darwall points out in a newly released study “Capitalism, Socialism and ESG,” there’s more to this racket than meets the eye.

That notion of a “better” world from ESG investments applies only if you agree with progressive climate and social agendas. For those who identify as anything other than “liberal,” backing investment strategies to kill fracking jobs, attack red meat, and help promote a Green New Deal economy may prove a bit hard to swallow.

What about all that money to be made? Turns out it is less for your portfolio and more for the bottom line of Wall Street companies.

For example, BlackRock charges 46 cents annually for every $100 invested in its iShares Global Clean Energy ETF, while it charges just 4 cents for iShares linked to the S&P 500 in comparison.

It pays to be woke – if you’re a Wall Street fat cat, that is.

As for average Joe investors buying into these ESG stocks, their bottom lines aren’t as lucky.

Does Biden Know He Just Labeled Antifa And BLM As Domestic Terrorists?

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/06/16/does-biden-know-he-just-labeled-antifa-and-blm-as-domestic-terrorists/

On Tuesday, President Joe Biden released his plan to tackle domestic terrorism, which he calls a “serious and growing threat.” His clear intent is to target right-wing groups, but his definition of domestic terrorists perfectly describes Antifa and the Black Lives Matter radicals.

The “fact sheet” accompanying Biden’s “National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism,” lists only two types of domestic terrorists: violent extremists who advocate for the superiority of the white race, and anti-government or anti-authority violent extremists.

But it also describes domestic terrorism as:

‘Activities that involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any state; appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion, or to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States.’

Now, who do you think fits into these categories? Which groups have acted in ways that are “dangerous to human life,” want to “intimidate or coerce” as a means to “influence the policy of a government,” and use “mass destruction” to get their ways?

Would it be QAnon and other right-wing groups, about whom the best team Biden can seem to come up with is that “they may be on the verge of carrying out more violence in real life on Democrats and others that they perceive, however falsely, to be threats”?

Swiss Nix Carbon Tax Just Before Biden Arrival Just like everywhere else, voters are open to anti-carbon policy until they see the price tag. By James Freeman

https://www.wsj.com/articles/swiss-nix-carbon-tax-just-before-biden-arrival-11623786757?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

Talk about awkward. Right after President Joe Biden and other leaders of advanced economies celebrated their expensive climate promises in Brussels, Mr. Biden had to fly to Switzerland—where voters have just rejected expensive climate promises made by the country’s politicians.

Judging by the photograph accompanying this column, Swiss Federal President Guy Parmelin and President Biden kept things cheerful and may have done their best to avoid the topic as they discussed Wednesday’s planned meeting in Geneva between Mr. Biden and Russian strongman Vladimir Putin.

But to the extent that Mr. Biden is aware of where he is and what’s just happened at the polls, he must be disappointed. John Revill of Reuters reports from Zurich:

Swiss voters rejected a trio of environmental proposals on Sunday, including a new law intended to help the country meet its goal for cutting carbon emissions under the Paris Agreement on Climate Change…
The result was a defeat for the Swiss government which supported the new law that included measures such as increasing a surcharge on car fuel and imposing a levy on flight tickets.
The rejection meant it would now be “very difficult” for Switzerland to reach its 2030 goal of cutting carbon emissions to half of their 1990 levels and to be become net neutral on emissions by 2050, Environment Minister Simonetta Sommaruga said.

Threats Rise, U.S. Defense Falls Biden talks tough to adversaries even as he shrinks the Pentagon.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/threats-rise-u-s-defense-falls-11623798082?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

President Biden is telling the world in Europe this week that “America is back” as the leader of global democracies. Sounds good. But China, Iran and Vladimir Putin would be more impressed if Mr. Biden wasn’t cutting America’s defense even as he rightly stresses the challenge from the world’s authoritarians.

Unremarked in the White House spending deluge is that its trillions for “infrastructure” include little new for defense. Mr. Biden’s $715 billion Pentagon budget for fiscal 2022 is a 1.6% increase over last year. Adjusted for inflation, this is a cut. The bipartisan National Defense Strategy Commission and other experts say the Pentagon needs steady 3% to 5% real increases annually to address threats from “near peers” such as China and Russia.

President Trump increased defense spending modestly, but that fillip has passed and spending is still at its modern norm of about 3% of GDP. America is rapidly piling up debt past 100% of GDP while shrinking its defenses.

***

The brightest budget spots are places where the Administration declined to make matters worse: The Administration didn’t slash the Army; active-duty end strength holds at about 485,000. But the service requested about $3.5 billion less than last year’s enacted budget, in part due to a drawdown in Afghanistan.