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November 2021

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China’s Military Modernization by Judith Bergman

By on November 16th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17944/china-military-modernization

“[W]e are being more effectively challenged militarily today than at any…any other time in our history.” — US Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, September 20, 2021.

China aims to “complete national defense and military modernization by 2035.” — Jamestown.org, March 26, 2021

China’s modernization of its military is taking place on all levels.

“The PLA [People’s Liberation Army] … seeks a force capable of winning a number of high-end regional conflicts, including the forcible unification of Taiwan, while dissuading, deterring, or defeating third-party military intervention.” — Lieutenant General Scott Berrier, Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, before the Senate US Armed Services Committee, April 26, 2021.

“Hypersonic weapons, a full range of anti-satellite systems, plus cyber, electronic warfare, and challenging air to air missiles are all part of the growing inventory of Chinese capabilities.” — US Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, September 20, 2021.

“In 2019, the private PRC-based company Ziyan UAV exhibited armed swarming drones….. During the past five years, China has made achievements in AI-enabled unmanned surface vessels, which China plans to use to patrol and bolster its territorial claims in the South China Sea.” — The Pentagon, Annual 2020 Report to Congress on the Chinese military.

“We’re not a decade ahead.” — Eric Schmidt, former executive chairman and CEO of Google and the chairman of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, National Defense Magazine, October 30, 2020.

“Since 2010, I have been pounding the drum about how serious a threat the People’s Republic of China’s military modernization program is to the ability of the United States to project power into the Indo Pacific, and more broadly our ability to protect our interests and values around the world…. While America is still the dominant military power on the planet, we are being more effectively challenged militarily today than at any…any other time in our history.” These were the words of US Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall at the Air Force Association’s Air, Space & Cyber Convention on September 20.

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A Conversation with Anne Marie Waters by Grégoire Canlorbe

By on November 16th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17865/anne-marie-waters

Anne Marie Dorothy Waters is a politician and activist in the United Kingdom. She founded and leads the For Britain Party.

“We live in a UK where free speech is a thing of the past, our media is merely a mouthpiece of government diktats, and where decent people are demonized and smeared for holding informed opinions. We are in a Britain that resembles the communist Soviet Union: fear, censorship, excessive government control.”

“Please do not forget that many Muslims, especially women and children, are the victims, as well. Those people are entirely unrepresented.”

“We do not want to ‘Build Back Better’ as the globalists keep demanding; we want to Bring Back Britain.”

“The political and media elite are entirely wedded to the global project of bringing down nation-states. This cannot be done without mass migration.”

“We are a society of science, and reason, and evidence, and just as we achieve that, we open to the door to medievalism and are catapulted back in time. Secularism and free speech, equal rights between the sexes, the protection of children, all of this is being sacrifice for ‘political correctness'”.

“Most of these people are coming here illegally and this is simply allowed to take place while we watch. What is even harder to take is how these illegal immigrants are elevated above the native population. There are thousands of homeless British people in the UK, and yet illegal immigrants are housed in hotels until permanent accommodation is provided to them. No such relief or help is available to homeless Britons.”

“Now that we are about to receive a massive influx of Afghans, some of whom are already responsible for crimes throughout Europe, there are plans in place to give them homes, medical care, training and employment, and even free university attendance. Britons must pay thousands of pounds per year per year to attend university. It is a profound injustice.”

“White children are actively taught that they are racists, colonisers and oppressors.”

“First and foremost, we must stop the immigration. We cannot deal with these problems while the borders are still open…. The rights of terrorists and rapists are considered more important than the safety of the British public….We must scrap all ‘hate speech’ laws and allow our citizens to speak freely. We must enact laws that prevent the press smearing political candidates as ‘fascists’ for daring to tell the truth….We must… deport those who engage in honour violence, FGM, or child marriage… It is also absolutely essential that all of those who express support for jihad, who support terrorists, or who want sharia law, and who are not British citizens, are deported from our country…. These steps are just the beginning but if we were to take them, we would be in a completely different place. The world would no longer see Britain as a soft touch or a hub of jihad.”

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P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

Leftists continue their assaults on language to achieve political goals By Andrea Widburg

By on November 16th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/11/leftists_continue_their_assaults_on_language_to_achieve_political_goals.html

People have been noticing lately that leftists are working hard to change the language to achieve their goals. Leftists are fully aware of the fact that, as George Orwell argued, when you change the available vocabulary, you also change people’s ability to think about things. If you erase from the English language any words tied to liberty (e.g., freedom, individuality, liberal, etc.), people will eventually lose entirely the whole concept of freedom. It’s with that thought in mind that some in the LGBTQ+ crowd are working to rebrand pedophilia. The latest euphemism is “Minor-Attracted Person” but it’s the same old sick idea.

Certain words decline with value over the years. The word beldam, or old hag, comes from the French belle dame, meaning beautiful lady. Once, young people respectfully called elderly women, especially grandmothers, belle dame, and then the word degraded.

Another word that degraded was spinster. Once, it meant a woman who would spin for a living. Eventually, it came to mean a repressed, desiccated, permanently unwed woman. Now, of course, the word is gone entirely because there’s no stigma attached to remaining unmarried.

And then there’s the word “pedophile.” It’s a neologism that psychiatrists created in the 1950s, from the Greek for “loving children,” something the ancient Greeks proudly did. Isn’t that sweet? Except, of course, there’s nothing sweet about it. Pedophiles are people who are sexually attracted to children and, in the worst cases, they act on that attraction. Since its inception, that word has had purely negative connotations.

Well, it turns out that, in today’s progressive world, pedophiles don’t feel that they should be stigmatized in that way. Allyn Walker, an assistant professor at Old Dominion University, in Virginia, is one such person, and Walker is willing to go on the record to make that point.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

A Word About Democracy from a Man Brought Up in a Dictatorship By Alex Gordon

By on November 16th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/11/a_word_about_democracy_from_a_man_brought_up_in_a_dictatorship.html

I am a Jew, and like many Jews, I fled the land where I was born. That was the Soviet Union. I am far from alone. Seems that at every stage of history, someone has been sure to throw the Jews into the sea. The Jews, however, had already been to the sea – when they left Egypt – and got out safely. That sea was the Red Sea. When I got out of the red, socialist sea, I found a sea of democracy in Israel. And here is what I have since learned:

Under Soviet socialism, there was no democracy. The state controlled the press to the extent that there were no automobile disasters, no mine collapses, no factory fires, no train, streetcar or airplane crashes, no earthquakes nor floods.

There were no natural disasters under socialism. If cold winds blew in the USSR, they came from the West. Imported cold currents and cyclones also came from there. If hot winds blew, they were called Afghans. If there were organized thefts of socialist property, their authors were known to have Jewish surnames.

Bad news was forbidden under socialism. And it seems that people got used to it. How much easier it is to live as a person who is not constantly bombarded with reports of catastrophes and crimes, right? Such a person has a life of calm, other than the aspect of life that was streamlined in long queues for food and goods, all of which were sorely lacking under “developed socialism.”

In a totalitarian state, the majority of the population is doomed to be content, for the alternative is dangerous.

In a democracy, the majority of the population is condemned to dissatisfaction, for the alternative is boring: one is too free to enjoy freedom.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Retract Every Russian Collusion Story and Fire Everyone Who Wrote Them   In a healthy society, public apologies, not mealymouthed caveats and explainers buried in the entertainment guide, would be plastered on the front page of every newspaper and website. By Julie Kelly

By on November 16th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/15/retract-every-russian-collusion-story-and-fire-everyone-who-wrote-them/

As the Democratic National Convention descended into chaos in July 2016, Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, co-founders of Fusion GPS, high-tailed it from Washington, D.C., to Philadelphia to staunch the political bleeding following the release of damning internal emails that showed party honchos had rigged the process in favor of Hillary Clinton.

Simpson and Fritsch, serving multiple paymasters at the time including Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee, had a plan to divert media attention away from the crisis: spin a dark tale of collusion between the Kremlin and Donald Trump to stop Hillary Clinton from winning the White House. 

Russian hackers were already blamed, without evidence, for infiltrating the DNC email system and giving the correspondence to WikiLeaks. Expanding on that accusation by revealing the secretive work of Christopher Steele, portrayed as a “former Western intelligence officer,” to friendly journalists successfully changed the subject.

“They wanted to have some discreet conversations with a few reporters to let them know they might be able to help with stories about Trump, particularly on Russia,” Simpson and Fritsch wrote about themselves. 

One of the first reporters they met with in Philadelphia was the Washington Post’s Tom Hamburger, a longtime former colleague of Simpson’s when both worked for the Wall Street Journal. “[Knowing] he could be trusted, Simpson decided to tell Hamburger about the Steele work on a promise that he would keep it mum. Simpson laid out the basic allegations in the first Steele report. He mentioned the alleged golden shower episode at the Ritz-Carlton,” referring to a purported recording of prostitutes urinating in front of Trump in a hotel room in 2013.

Hamburger, based on his subsequent catalog of reports on imaginary Russian collusion, was more than happy to help his pal and former co-worker. Numerous articles written by Hamburger are footnoted in Simpson and Fritsch’s book, including one article on Sergei Millian, a target of Simpson’s chop shop to bolster the collusion narrative. “Sergei Millian, Identified as an Unwitting Source for the Steele Dossier, Sought Proximity to Trump’s World in 2016,” Hamburger and Rosalind S. Helderman wrote in February 2019. Millian, the reporters claimed, not only was a dossier source but also substantiated the existence of the infamous “pee tape.”

The Post, however, recently changed the headline on that story to instead read, “Belarus-born businessman sought proximity to Trump’s world in 2016.” Why? Because the original story is untrue. 

Courtesy of a new indictment brought by Special Counsel John Durham, the public—and the entire news media—now knows for certain that Millian was not a dossier source. Accompanying the newly-branded defamatory article is a note by the editor: 

An earlier version of this story published on Feb. 7, 2019, referred to previous reporting in The Washington Post that Belarusan-American businessman Sergei Millian had been a source of information for a dossier of unverified allegations against Donald Trump. In November 2021, The Post removed that material from the original 2017 story after the account was contradicted by allegations in a federal indictment and undermined by further reporting. References to the initial report have been removed from this piece.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Biden’s Dirty Deal With the Taliban Biden abandoned Americans to protect his deal with the Taliban. The deal isn’t over yet. Daniel Greenfield

By on November 16th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/bidens-dirty-deal-taliban-national-security-threat-daniel-greenfield/

Every week new revelations arrive about the scale of Biden’s betrayal in Afghanistan. After months of claiming that only a few hundred Americans had been abandoned behind enemy lines, the real numbers are still growing. Shocking reports continue to come to light including a military memo which claims that over a hundred family members of servicemen may still be trapped under Taliban rule.

Biden and his brass promised an accounting, but have offered only lies and excuses. Congressional hearings have produced nothing except cable news theater. While the Taliban throw parades showing off captured American military equipment, the Biden administration is dispatching $144 million in aid.

With more to come.

The humiliating collapse in Afghanistan is not a mystery. It was the product of a deliberate strategy to maintain relations with the Taliban at any cost. Every step of the disaster was really a betrayal.

Why did the Biden administration abandon Bagram Air Base and the nearby prison facility holding thousands of Taliban, Al Qaeda, and ISIS-K prisoners without notifying the Afghans?

When the Taliban repeatedly violated their agreement to stop the violence, why did the Biden administration still insist on keeping our side of the agreement, withdrawing by the deadline even if it meant leaving Americans behind?

As the Taliban approached Kabul, why was the Biden administration trying to cut a deal to provide a sizable cash delivery if the Taliban included the existing government in its administration?

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Compulsory Racist Training Beliefs are no longer the province of the individual. Tue Nov 16, 2021 Kent Runnells & Loyd Pettegrew

By on November 16th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/compulsory-racist-training-kent-runnells-loyd-pettegrew/

Webster’s unabridged dictionary defines the term compulsory as “required by law or a rule; obligatory.” Welcome to the politicized world of Americans. Since words now matter more than ever before, it is important to use the correct word at all times and no “incorrect” words!  “Compulsory” should not be allowed to masquerade as “Critical” but it has.

Freedom of speech enshrined in and protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution has finally come a cropper, at least for conservatives. CRT, or Critical Race Theory, spawned by the Marxist intellectual elite in our colleges and universities, has taken hold of how we think, speak, and act in our everyday lives. It is enforced by the cancel culture that is no longer limited to progressive imbeciles spewing divisive drivel on social media and has been speciously elevated (by the legacy media) to extend it beyond academics to society at large. Its proponents believe it constitutes a legitimate and worthy social construct. The time has come to call it out for what it is—an effort to disingenuously reset the premise of all issues of race so desperately needing an honest debate in these challenging times.

As the CitiJournal’s John Sailer has written, “Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) [CRT’s first cousin] has almost single-handedly propounded the pedagogical concept of ‘social and emotional learning’ (SEL).” To hell with objectivity in math and the sciences. Three times three is no longer permitted to equal nine, because that microagresssively ignores the needs of eight and ten, themselves some secret code for race, gender or other self-identifications that only the truly Woke can perceive. As long as the left is permitted to write the rule book, the right will never have a level playing field.  

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Biden’s Billion-Dollar Payout to Illegals Americans come last. Lloyd Billingsley

By on November 16th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/razaista-rule-lloyd-billingsley/

“Even if the immigration law is executed with perfection, there will be parents separated from their children.” That was Cecilia Muñoz, White House Director of Intergovernmental Affairs, in an October 18, 2011 interview with Gretchen Gavett of PBS. The problem, according to Muñoz, was “a broken system of laws, and the answer to that problem is reforming the law.” In the meantime, “even broken laws have to be enforced.” Therefore, parents who broke the law would be separated from their children.

As Muñoz confirmed, agents of the federal government were separating parents from their families long before the people elected Donald Trump president of the United States, but there’s more to it. As Muñoz explained, reentering the USA after deportation is a felony, and it is customary to separate convicted felons from their children. For example, when Illinois governor Rod Blagoyevich broke the law and went to prison, his children Amy and Anne didn’t go to prison with him.

Joe Biden is calling “garbage” the Wall Street Journal report that his DOJ wants to pay $450,000 to every illegal separated from their family under the Trump administration. Back in 2011, under the composite character David Garrow described in Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, a different sort of payout was going on.

Before her White House gig, Cecilia Muñoz was vice president of the National Council of La Raza. Two of her La Raza colleagues, Juan Sanchez and Anselmo Villareal, established Southwest Key, a charitable organization with a difference. Under Obama, Southwest Key took in roughly $1 billion in federal contracts, including some $500 million for housing illegal immigrant children.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

Please Stop Trusting Anything The Mainstream Media ‘Report’

By on November 16th, 2021

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/11/16/please-stop-trusting-anything-the-mainstream-media-report/

America’s mainstream, or legacy, media have an agenda. It’s not to subjectively report the truth but to further leftist ideas and policies, all of which are toxic. The press’ disinformation campaign to prop up critical race theory is yet another example of its effort to deceive, manipulate, and divide on behalf of the party it is constantly shilling for.

A new study from the American Enterprise Institute found the media focus on schools teaching the history of slavery and racism, and largely ignore the “bedrock assumptions of CRT, including its explicit rejection of rationality and objectivity.”

AEI’s Frederick M. Hess “examined all news accounts addressing CRT published over a one-year period by four major newspapers (the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today),” and several “influential education press outlets.” All are news accounts. None are opinion pieces.

“Given that this admittedly revolutionary worldview is what motivates many objections to CRT-influenced pedagogy, one would expect news accounts to routinely address it,” Hess writes in “Media’s Misleading Portrayal of the Fight over Critical Race Theory.”

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The COP26 Summit and the Global Age of Shams The intellectual and political disarray on display in Glasgow was terrifying. Walter Russell Mead

By on November 16th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-the-global-age-of-shams-cop26-glasgow-agreements-crisis-emissions-globalism-11637010052?mod=opinion_featst_pos1

If there is one thing the world should take away from the Glasgow COP26 summit, it’s that the most dangerous greenhouse-gas emissions come from the front ends of politicians, not the back ends of cows. Pandering is much more dangerous to human civilization than methane, strategic incompetence a graver threat than CO2; and dysfunctional establishment groupthink will likely kill more polar bears than all the hydrofluorocarbons in the world.

The 19th-century writer Thomas Carlyle wrote of an Age of Shams in prerevolutionary France, when the chattering classes and political leaders had so fundamentally lost contact with the underlying realities of the day that they could no longer understand the political challenges facing the French social order, much less respond to them. The elaborate rituals of court life in Versailles persisted, the ministers and bureaucrats went through the motions of governance, and intellectuals sparkled in the salons—while the French monarchy sailed, like the Titanic, toward its rendezvous with destiny.

COP26 was the kind of hollow ritual that characterized Carlyle’s Age of Shams. As one politician after another committed their countries to carefully crafted unenforceable pledges, none had the bad manners to observe that no country anywhere fully honored the climate pledges made with such fanfare in Paris six years ago. Even the pledges are insufficient to meet the stated goals of the U.N. climate process, and nobody is keeping the pledges.

The intellectual and political disarray on display in Glasgow was terrifying. President Biden boasted about America’s new climate goals and its dedication to them. Yet in the same week he begged OPEC+ to bail out the world economy and his presidency by pumping more fossil fuels. Let future presidents face the rough contours of a world without fossil fuels; this one means to get re-elected, no matter how much greenhouse gas spews into the sky.

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