Displaying posts published in

October 2021

Dartmouth College Dems try to shut down College Republicans’ event and fail badly By John Klar

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/10/dartmouth_college_dems_try_to_shut_down_college_republicans_event_and_fail_badly_.html

Dartmouth College Republicans hosted three up-and-coming conservative voices in an event Sunday night.  Remarkably, all three of these articulate, patriotic voices are young:

North Carolinian Madison Cawthorn is the youngest Congressional House Member in the nation at age 26;
Congressional hopeful and rising star Karoline Leavitt presents a very strong case (at age 23) why she should join him; and
Alex Bruesewitz (24) is a proven campaign strategist who schools career politicians. 

But for the Dartmouth College Democrats, what united the three was their allegedly intolerable political views.  Predictably, there was abundant vitriol.

The Dartmouth College newspaper attacked Madison Cawthorn with particular venom, listing an array of allegations and character attacks.  The paper’s chief concern appears to be Cawthorn’s challenge of 2020 voting results:

….perhaps his most damaging statements target democracy itself. In the months and weeks following the November 2020 election, he promoted the baseless and absurd idea that the election was “stolen.” His dishonesty and apparent willingness to entertain violence if his party loses an election should be disqualifying for any reasonable conservative campus group.

….the College Republicans appear to be voicing their approval of his twisted and authoritari

Strange, the Democrats were quite vocal in their suspicions that the 2016 Trump win was less than trustworthy — the Democratic Party filed suit alleging Trump colluded with Russia and WikiLeaks to steal the election!  They “targeted democracy itself!”

It is common for election losers to question election integrity (anyone remember the Gore/Bush decision?), a phenomenon termed:

…the “winner effect.” That is, those voters who support the winner in the election are more likely to believe their own ballots and the ballots of others were counted as intended, while those who supported the losing candidate are more likely to believe their votes were counted incorrectly.

Dartmouth Democrats don’t want young Republicans to speak unless the roster is first approved by Democrats as acceptable:

The Dartmouth College Democrats are deeply disturbed by the Dartmouth College Republicans’ chosen guests for their October 24th panel on “The Future of the Republican Party.” (snip) All three speakers perpetuate harmful rhetoric against immigrants and minority communities, continually question science, and deny that President Biden won the 2020 election. (snip) It is our belief that these speakers will contribute to division, encourage prejudice on campus, and foster a negative campus environment not conducive to open, honest, and mutually respectful conversation. (snip) We are especially concerned about their hateful views towards immigrants and the effect of that prejudice on immigrants and children of immigrants at Dartmouth.

A Culture that Celebrates Fake Heroes While Crucifying Real Ones Cannot Endure By William Sullivan

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/10/a_culture_that_celebrates_fake_heroes_while_crucifying_real_ones_cannot_endure_.html

“Believe in something,” Nike told consumers in 2018, “even it means sacrificing everything.”  The advertisement features former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick giving a stoic stare to those social justice warriors being spurred to buy the company’s product. 

In what may be the swiftest example of the Mandela Effect taking hold on the American cultural psyche, many Americans believe that Colin Kaepernick was headlong into a promising NFL future when he boldly decided to take a knee during the National Anthem in order to protest police brutality, and for this crime against the political and social status quo, he was ostracized by the racist NFL and its fans. 

The broad belief in this myth is much more pernicious and destructive, however, than our innocently misremembering that the Monopoly man wears a monocle.

And it is most certainly a myth.  The reality is that on August 26, 2016, Kaepernick decided to sit on the bench during the Anthem, not kneel.  Nothing ostentatious, and there was something almost childish about it, in fact.  Perhaps he didn’t like being benched for Blaine Gabbert, who was, according to Mike Foss at USA Today, possibly “the worst quarterback employed by the NFL” at the time, before he goes on to explain that he might have actually been the second-worst quarterback — behind only the horrendously bad Kaepernick in 2015.

It wasn’t the first time that he sat during the Anthem, but it was the first time that reporters seem to have been struck by it enough to ask him about it.  When asked why he didn’t stand, he famously said, “I’m not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color.” 

BLM, the MSM, and SJWs rejoiced, of course.  There were many critics, too (myself included), but the NFL didn’t exactly censure or oppress him in any way.  They issued a statement saying that the league “encouraged” but didn’t “require” standing for the Anthem.  The team and coach supported him.  And eventually, he got his shot in the 2016 regular season (and earning about $17 million for his trouble), playing in 11 games.  Unfortunately, the 49ers only won one of those games, and he went into free agency after that terrible season as the league’s most inaccurate passer of the previous two years, with nearly a quarter of his passes statistically categorized as “off-target” passes.

Biden’s Broken Border: A Crisis by the Numbers By Gwendolyn Sims

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/gwendolynsims/2021/10/23/bidens-broken-border-a-crisis-by-the-numbers-n1526239

Friday afternoon, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) quietly released some truly startling Southwest border migrant encounter numbers.

Fox News reports that “a total of 192,001 migrants were encountered in September, slightly down (9%) from 209,840 in August and 213,593 in July.” September’s numbers, though, mean there were a total of 1,734,686 encounters at the border in Fiscal Year 2021 alone—the highest number of U.S. border encounters in a single fiscal year on record.

And don’t forget, these numbers are simply the “migrant” encounters that were recorded by the U.S. Border Patrol and the Office of Field Operations (OFO). Just imagine how many thousands more people entered the country illegally and undetected. Imagine how many of those were not only breaking our immigration laws, but are also violent and deviant criminals intent on doing Americans harm while the left feebly snivels and claims anyone who demands our border be secured and lawfully regulated is racist and hateful.

Solar and Wind Force Poverty on Africa Letting us use reliable energy doesn’t mean a climate disaster. By Yoweri K. Museveni

https://www.wsj.com/articles/solar-wind-force-poverty-on-africa-climate-change-uganda-11635092219?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

Mr. Museveni is president of Uganda.

Africa can’t sacrifice its future prosperity for Western climate goals. The continent should balance its energy mix, not rush straight toward renewables—even though that will likely frustrate some of those gathering at next week’s global climate conference in Glasgow.

My continent’s energy choices will dictate much of the climate’s future. Conservative estimates project that Africa’s population of 1.3 billion will double by 2050. Africans’ energy consumption will likely surpass that of the European Union around the same time.

Knowing this, many developed nations are pushing an accelerated transition to renewables on Africa. The Western aid-industrial complex, composed of nongovernmental organizations and state development agencies, has poured money into wind and solar projects across the continent. This earns them praise in the U.S. and Europe but leaves many Africans with unreliable and expensive electricity that depends on diesel generators or batteries on overcast or still days. Generators and the mining of lithium for batteries are both highly polluting.

This stands to forestall Africa’s attempts to rise out of poverty, which require reliable energy. African manufacturing will struggle to attract investment and therefore to create jobs without consistent energy sources. Agriculture will suffer if the continent can’t use natural gas to create synthetic fertilizer or to power efficient freight transportation.

A better solution is for Africa to move slowly toward a variety of reliable green energy sources. Wildlife-friendly minihydro technologies should be a part of the continent’s energy mix. They allow for 24-hour-a-day energy production and can be installed along minor rivers without the need for backup energy. Coal-fired power stations can be converted to burning biomass, and carbon capture can help in the meantime. Nuclear power is also already being put to good use in South Africa, while Algeria, Ghana and Nigeria operate research reactors with the intent of building full-scale nuclear facilities.

The U.N. Should Open Its Door to Democratic Taiwan Expelled 50 years ago to make room for the Beijing government, today it deserves full recognition. By Gary Schmitt and Michael Mazza

https://www.wsj.com/articles/united-nations-open-door-to-taiwan-unification-recognition-china-diplomacy-11635104046?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Taiwan wasn’t always a pariah at the United Nations. For more than 20 years the Taipei-based government represented China there, including on the Security Council. That changed on Oct. 25, 1971, when the General Assembly voted to admit delegates from the People’s Republic of China. The Republic of China lost its seat and has been on the outside looking in ever since. Resolution 2758 marked the beginning of Beijing’s assault on Taiwan’s international status.

In 1970 Beijing’s supporters in the U.N. faced an uphill battle. Only a year later the proposal passed in a landslide. What changed? In July of that year, President Richard Nixon revealed that national security adviser Henry Kissinger had visited Beijing, that Nixon himself would do so before May 1972, and that the latter meeting would “seek the normalization of relations between the two countries.”

In 1971 there was a reasonable case for the Beijing government’s inclusion in the U.N. It had all the qualifications of statehood, and the 850 million people living on the mainland had no representation. It also seemed increasingly untenable to exclude a nuclear power.

There was no such case, however, for excluding Taiwan. At the time, it had diplomatic relations with 54 countries, including the U.S., Japan, Australia, South Korea, New Zealand, West Germany, Israel and South Africa. Its mutual defense treaty with the U.S. would remain in force for the rest of the decade. Taiwan, a founding member of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, remained a member of those organizations until losing its seats to China in 1980. A true reckoning would have recognized the existence of two states, each with a right to U.N. membership—a solution not unlike those later reached to admit both North and South Korea and both East and West Germany.

Instead, the U.N. has only compounded its 1971 error in recent decades. In the early 2000s, to explain why he had blocked a Taiwanese diplomat from speaking to the U.N. Correspondents Association, Secretary-General Kofi Annan invented a U.N. “one-China policy.” His successor, Ban Ki-moon, went even further, invoking Resolution 2758 and claiming that “the United Nations considers Taiwan for all purposes to be an integral part of the People’s Republic of China.”

But Resolution 2758 says nothing of the sort—it doesn’t even refer to Taiwan. The U.N. charter doesn’t give the U.N. the power to make territorial decisions, nor does international law recognize a U.N. vote as a legitimate means of drawing sovereign boundaries.

So what explains the U.N.’s legal and moral malfeasance in its treatment of democratic Taiwan—preventing it, for example, from even participating as an observer in World Health Organization meetings? The obvious answer is the U.N.’s deference to China. Beijing’s diplomats throw temper tantrums, mobilize partners to advance China’s interests, and have been especially successful at putting Chinese officials in positions of authority in various U.N. bodies such as the International Telecommunications Union.

Six big off-year elections you might be missing By Reid Wilson

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/577995-six-big-off-year-elections-you

A pitched battle between former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) and businessman Glenn Youngkin (R) promises to steal the headlines in November’s off-year elections, while a less competitive race between New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) and former Assemblyman Jack Ciattarelli (R) is also drawing attention.

But around the country, voters head to the polls to pick winners in other critical contests, races that will highlight the divides between liberals and conservatives and, in some cases, mainstream Democrats and far more progressive candidates.

Here are the six other contests to watch in November:

Virginia’s House of Delegates

Whether McAuliffe or Youngkin takes the governorship next year, the winner’s ability to pursue his agenda will be determined in large part by the majority in the House of Delegates.

Democrats hold a 55-45 majority in the House right now, meaning Republicans need to pick up six seats to win back control. Some of the contests have attracted millions in spending, an unprecedented amount for what are ordinarily inexpensive contests.

Nearly two dozen seats fall in the battleground category of races that were decided by 10 points or fewer two years ago. Democrats hold 16 of those seats, and Republicans only six. Only five seats — four held by Republicans, one by Democrats — voted for the other party’s presidential contender last year.

The closest-fought districts are clustered in three broad chunks: One in the Northern Virginia exurbs, south and east of Arlington and Alexandria; one south of Richmond, stretching to the North Carolina border; and one around the Tidewater and Virginia Beach.

Progressive Craziness Of The Day: Critical Race Theory In K-12 Schools And Corporations Francis Menton

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-10-23-progressive-craziness-of-the-day-critical-race-theory-in-k-12-schools-and-corporations

Yesterday I attended an in-person program at the Manhattan Institute with the title “Deconstructing Wokeness in K-12 and Corporate America.” There were two panels and a speech totaling close to three hours. Presenters included something of a who’s who of the movement opposing the spreading cancer of Critical Race Theory in schools and corporations: Christopher Rufo and Jim Copland of the Manhattan Institute, Vivek Ramaswamy (author of the new book Woke, Inc.), Paul Rossi (the guy who blew the whistle on CRT at Grace Church School, who is currently affiliated with the Educational Liberty Alliance), and Asra Nomani (Vice President of Parents Defending Education).

Finally, after more than a year and a half in virtual purgatory, we have resumed in-person events to discuss issues of public policy. The huge difference between in-person and virtual events is that at in-person events you get to meet the people who take important roles in contesting these issues. In addition to the presenters, several other notable participants in recent events showed up at yesterday’s event, for example Andrew Gutmann (the parent who blew the whistle on CRT at the super-snooty all-girls Brearley School on Manhattan’s Upper East Side) and Maud Maron (mother of four kids in New York City public schools, who spoke out against CRT and for her trouble has been ostracized at her job defending indigent criminal defendants at the Legal Aid Society).

But for today I’d like to highlight the work of Rufo. Here’s a picture of me with Rufo at yesterday’s event:

Over the past couple of years, Rufo has rapidly gained a reputation as the most important “investigative reporter” in the CRT arena. But in my discussion with him prior to the beginning of the formal event, he admitted that his “investigative reporting” substantially consists of just sitting at his desk and receiving a flood of submissions from around the country from outraged parents and corporate employees. He has a couple of junior staffers who work with him to review the submissions and rate them on a scale of how incendiary they are. Then he writes up articles consisting mostly of direct quotes of the submitted material.

Here is a sample of Rufo’s work from 2021. All of the pieces originally appeared in City Journal.

Cupertino, California. In a January 13, 2021 piece titled “Woke Elementary” Rufo quoted extensively from whistleblower documents provided by parents in this very-upscale Silicon Valley community that is home to the headquarters of Apple. What follows comes from a third-grade class at R.I. Meyerholz Elementary School. Excerpt:

[R]eading from This Book Is Antiracist, the students learned that “those with privilege have power over others” and that “folx who do not benefit from their social identities, who are in the subordinate culture, have little to no privilege and power.” As an example, the reading states that “a white, cisgender man, who is able-bodied, heterosexual, considered handsome and speaks English has more privilege than a Black transgender woman.” . . . Following this discussion, the teacher had the students deconstruct their own intersectional identities and “circle the identities that hold power and privilege” on their identity maps, ranking their traits according to the hierarchy.

It goes on and on from there. Rufo notes that the Cupertino community is 94% non-white (majority Asian) with a median household income of $172,000.

Why the US really wants a Palestinian consulate in J’lem Prof. Eugene Kontorovich

https://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/why-the-us-really-wants-a-palestinian-consulate-in-jlem/

The US Embassy in Jerusalem already provides consular services to the Palestinians. Why do they need an independent consulate in the same city?

The Biden administration is trying to partially undo one of Israel’s greatest diplomatic achievements of recent decades – the recognition of Israel’s sovereignty over all of Jerusalem by the US, followed by numerous other countries. The good news is unlike many diplomatic attacks, the Israeli government has the power to stop it.

The US is pushing to open up a new diplomatic office in Jerusalem – one that would be directed to the Palestinian Authority. The US Embassy in Jerusalem already provides consular services to the Palestinians. It is unheard of to have an independent consulate in the same city where a country has an embassy. The point of creating a separate consulate is to undermine former US President Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem. But under international law, the US would need Israel’s permission for this move.

The US does not want to open a consulate merely to have a place for diplomatic liaisons with the PA. If that is all they wanted, they could easily do this by opening a mission in Abu Dis or Ramallah – where most other countries conduct their relations with the PA. Or they could reopen the Palestinian mission in Washington, DC, which Trump also closed. But by instead demanding that Israel accede to a consulate in Jerusalem, the administration is showing this is not just about having a convenient place for coffee with PA President Mahmoud Abbas.

Indeed, the purpose of opening the consulate is to recognize Palestinian claims to Jerusalem. If the PA has no legitimate claim to Jerusalem, there can be no reason to have a consulate there. To be sure, this is why opening the consulate is the main Israel-related policy demand of radically anti-Israel Rep. Ilhan Omar. Point of fact, former US Ambassador to Israel Daniel Shapiro made clear before the last US election that opening a separate consulate to the Palestinians would be designed to signal US support for a Palestinian capital in that city.

Manhattan’s D.A. Race Points to the Left’s Overstep The stark choice in the upcoming  Manhattan D.A. race and the relative success of the candidates so far is telling. By Douglas Dechert

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/23/manhattans-d-a-race-points-to-the-lefts-overstep/

Early voting starts today for the November 2 New York City municipal elections.

The most important race in this election cycle is the Manhattan District Attorney’s race, because the winner in this most important of all our nation’s D.A. offices will determine, in the enormous coming travails, whether this once-great city will survive or perish.

One might think that the mayor’s office would be the key to Gotham’s survival, but I would argue that since the Manhattan District Attorney (not the mayor) is the chief law enforcement officer, then the crises we’ll likely face in the near future will be either exacerbated or ameliorated by policies the District Attorney imposes.

The Democratic ticket for mayor and Manhattan D.A. is fronted by Eric Adams and Alvin Bragg, respectively. Both men represent themselves as moderates so as not to alarm the already rattled voters, but both are effectively Marxist radicals. Adams has gotten a pass on his self misrepresentation by the corrupt media that has been all too eager to help him cover his tracks. 

Adams’ history as a former police officer allows him to claim an ability to repair the disastrous criminal justice policies of the outgoing de Blasio Administration, but an examination of his actual record shows that as a founding member of “100 Black Men In Law Enforcement” his career was dedicated to criticizing the N.Y.P.D. for racism. After leaving the police force, he became a full-time politician and rose to Brooklyn borough president by adopting and promoting the entire litany of delusional leftist causes. His mayoralty would be a continuation of the insane de Blasio policies that most New Yorkers are sick and tired of enduring.

Bragg is another radical passing as a moderate with the protective cover of a sympathetic media. As an Assistant New York State Attorney General he’s proud of his quixotic waste of taxpayer dollars as one of the legion of legal bureaucrats fruitlessly investigating the imagined crimes of Donald Trump. More importantly, he is one of the many villains who defended last summer’s violent riots, murder, rape, looting, and arson.

Bragg is a “no bail” advocate (which means turning violent recidivist predators loose immediately after arresting them) and espouses the kind of “prison reform” that set over 70,000 hardened criminals free from this city’s jails last year to prey upon the hapless citizenry.

Most elections in a democratic republic are designed to install public servants who address the concerns of the legitimate voters. To the degree that we have free and fair elections, this year the voters’ prime demand would be public safety (and when I write “safety,” I don’t mean safety from the “unvaccinated”). 

The Left’s increasing extremism across the board has led to such public dissatisfaction that Democrats actually might not win (assuming the aforementioned “free and fair elections”). My informed sources, including cognoscenti in both parties, point to a wealth of anecdotal evidence of voter discontent. Furthermore, in every mayoral election here in living memory, various big media outlets (both print and broadcast) have commissioned and released polling results, at least for the mayoral race. This year there’s been nothing of the sort. Savvy analysts have concluded that the polls look so bad for the Democratic slate that they have been quietly suppressed.

When we examine the D.A.’s race in this light, the Republican candidate, Thomas Kenniff, may not look like such a long shot after all.

The Farce of American Despotism The Soviets had the gulag, we have “cancel culture” in our universities and a brittle obsession with race and weirdo sexuality everywhere.  By Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/23/the-farce-of-american-despotism/

Reflecting on Joe Biden’s disastrous “town hall” with Anderson Cooper on Thursday, The Spectator’s Dominic Green asks a question that has to weigh heavily on the mind of every American adult: “Is it more worrisome that Joe Biden might not be in charge, or that he actually is in charge?” I have long argued that allowing Biden to appear in public is a form of elder abuse, and I have speculated that he really is not in control of his actions but is manipulated, puppet-like, by a shadowy cadre of unnamed string-pullers I have called “The Committee.”

I do not have any proof that such is the case. I infer the existence and machinations of The Committee from Biden’s ostentatious incompetence and apparent senility. Has any president in the history of the Republic overseen such a destructive litany of failures so early in his tenure? Observers around the world caught their breath in August as our botched exit from Afghanistan went from appalling to something much worse and more deadly. What will be its defining image? The desperate Afghans clinging to and then falling from the landing gear of a transport plane as it took off from the Kabul airport? Or will it be the images of the slaughter perpetrated by a suicide (that is, a homicide) bomber outside the airport, an incident that killed some 170 people include more than a dozen U.S. military personnel?

Or maybe it will be the image of the drone strike launched in retaliation for that slaughter, a strike that was supposed to have targeted an ISIS-K operative but in fact killed zero terrorists and instead blew to bits 10 Afghan civilians, including seven children. The United States initially said they had obliterated an ISIS-K operative along with the collateral damage, but eventually they had to admit that, nope, they got no bad guys, just 10 innocent Afghans. 

General Mark “White Rage” Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, initially called the attack a “righteous strike,” but then walked that back to describe it as a “heart-wrenching” “horrible tragedy of war.” Meanwhile, Joe Biden himself called the evacuation from Afghanistan an “extraordinary success.” 

I wonder what the hundreds of Americans stranded in Afghanistan think about that? The administration initially said that everyone who wanted to get out could get out, then it acknowledged that a handful of Americans were left behind, then “about a hundred.” That number has just been adjusted up to more than 400. I wonder, too, what the families of those murdered by the Taliban, and then hanged from construction cranes as “examples” to the populace, think of that judgment? Something similar, I suspect, to what the husband and children of Negar Masoomi, the pregnant policewoman who allegedly was murdered in front of them by Taliban agents in September, think.