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November 2021

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The FBI’s Raid on James O’Keefe Justice had better have good reason for seizing a journalist’s records.

By on November 19th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-fbis-raid-on-james-okeefe-project-veritas-department-of-justice-merrick-garland-11637091882?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

Attorney General Merrick Garland still refuses to retract the memo he sent last month instructing the Department of Justice to scrutinize parents protesting at local school board meetings. Now his department may have committed another civil-liberties abuse with its raid on Project Veritas leader James O’Keefe.

Project Veritas is a right-wing media organization known for going undercover inside progressive institutions and using its findings to embarrass them. Early morning a week ago Saturday, FBI agents raided Mr. O’Keefe’s New York apartment, handcuffed him in the hallway and seized two cell phones. He has not been charged with a crime.

The subject of the investigation is apparently a diary believed to belong to President Biden’s daughter, Ashley Biden. Project Veritas says it was given the diary by two individuals last year and chose not to publish it because its authenticity couldn’t be verified, then handed it over to law enforcement. The diary was later published by an obscure website.

It’s settled law that it’s not a crime for journalists to publish information that was obtained unlawfully. If it was a crime, most of America’s largest news organizations would be criminal enterprises. Project Veritas says the people who gave the group the diary said it was not stolen. How the diary was obtained, and how it came to be published by a different website, is still murky.

Yet the search warrant says Justice is investigating “possession of stolen goods” and related offenses, suggesting Project Veritas or its employees may be targets. Imagine if the Trump Administration raided New York Times editors’ homes after the publication of the President’s tax records—or even for an investigation into documents they did not ultimately publish.

Nothing that invasive ever happened. But partly in response to the furor over the Trump Administration’s supposed threat to press freedom, Mr. Garland published guidelines in July narrowing Justice’s ability to seize information from reporters. The policy said Justice “will no longer use compulsory legal process” against journalists “acting within the scope of newsgathering activities.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The White House’s Hammer And Sickle

By on November 19th, 2021

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/11/19/the-white-houses-hammer-and-sickle/

Thursday’s Senate confirmation hearing on Saule Omarova, President Joe Biden’s choice to be comptroller of the currency, confirmed that she is the wrong person for the job. Flags the color of those that once were raised over Moscow were flying throughout the three-hour session.

Omarova is a professor of regulation of financial institutions, banking law, international finance, and corporate finance at Cornell. As comptroller of the currency, she would ensure that the “federal banking system operates in a safe and sound manner.”

The White House says she “​​is eminently qualified and was nominated for this role because of her lifetime of work,” and is “a leading academic” in her field. 

Her critics, however, see someone whose policy positions are far out of step with a market economy.

Britain’s Daily Mail has labeled her “​​Biden’s new comrade.” Townhall’s Katie Pavlich says Omarova is a “Communist” who “wants all bank accounts to be controlled by the Fed.” South Carolina Republican Sen. Tim Scott said during Thursday’s hearing that “I cannot think of a nominee more poorly suited to be the comptroller of the currency based solely on your public positions, statements and the weight of your writings than you are.”

The Kazakhstan-born Omarova, educated at Moscow State University, where she had a Lenin Personal Academic Scholarship, which “recently disappeared from her resume,” and also at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Northwestern University, has described herself as a “free-market idealist.” She swears she knows “that Soviet-style communism doesn’t work.”

“I’ve lived through it. That system was deeply flawed. It’s dead.”

Yet she envisions the creation of “National Investment Authority,” which would bypass Congress and use public and private resources to fund “vital infrastructure and the real economy.”

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

This Foreign Country Ran A Misinformation Campaign in 2020 to Elect Biden By Robert Spencer

By on November 19th, 2021

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2021/11/18/this-foreign-country-ran-a-misinformation-campaign-in-2020-to-elect-biden-n1534322

We have all heard ad nauseam about how the Russians supposedly manipulated the 2016 presidential election in order to ensure the election of their man, Donald Trump. The whole thing has been thoroughly exposed as a massive hoax designed to discredit and ultimately destroy Trump, but that doesn’t mean that there are no foreign entities trying to influence American elections.

On Thursday, the Justice Department indicted Seyyed Kazemi and Sajjad Kashian, two hackers from the Islamic Republic of Iran who worked for a company that has worked with the Iranian government. They are accused of spreading disinformation among American voters during the 2020 presidential campaign. It isn’t hard to figure out which candidate they were trying to help get elected, which makes it all the more surprising that Merrick Garland’s corrupt and politicized Justice Department has indicted them at all.

According to the Washington Post, Kazemi and Kashian, 27, “allegedly sent threatening emails to try to scare voters, attempted to break into several states’ voting-related websites and gained access to a U.S. media company’s computer network.” This was a major operation: “Kazemi and Kashian allegedly tried to break into 11 state voter registration and information websites, according to the indictment. In one case, it alleges, they found a vulnerability that allowed them to successfully download information about more than 100,000 of that state’s voters.”

They did all this to help their candidate, Old Joe Biden: the hackers “sent threatening emails to thousands of voters in October, including many Democrats. They allegedly claimed to be Proud Boys and threatened the email recipients with physical attacks if they did not change party affiliation and vote for President Donald Trump.”

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

How Activist Teachers Recruit Kids Leaked Documents and Audio from the California Teachers Association Conference Reveal Efforts to Subvert Parents on Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation Abigail Shrier

By on November 19th, 2021

https://abigailshrier.substack.com/p/how-activist-teachers-recruit-kids

Incensed parents now make news almost daily, objecting to radical material taught in their children’s public schools. But little insight has been provided into the mindset and tactics of activist teachers themselves. That may now be changing, thanks to leaked audio from a meeting of California’s largest teacher’s union.

Last month, the California Teachers Association (CTA) held a conference advising teachers on best practices for subverting parents, conservative communities and school principals on issues of gender identity and sexual orientation. Speakers went so far as to tout their surveillance of students’ Google searches, internet activity, and hallway conversations in order to target sixth graders for personal invitations to LGBTQ clubs, while actively concealing these clubs’ membership rolls from participants’ parents.

Documents and audio files recently sent to me, and authenticated by three conference participants, permitted a rare insight into the CTA’s sold-out event in Palm Springs, held from October 29-31, 2021. The “2021 LGBTQ+ Issues Conference, Beyond the Binary: Identity & Imagining Possibilities,” provided best practices workshops that encouraged teachers to “have the courage to create a safe environment that fosters bravery to explore sexual orientation, gender identity and expression,” according to the precis of a talk given by fifth grade teacher, C. Scott Miller

“How We Run a ‘GSA’ in Conservative Communities”

 Several of the workshops advised teachers on the creation of middle school LGBTQ clubs (commonly known as “Gay-Straight Alliance” clubs or “GSA”).  One workshop—“Queering in the Middle”—focused “on what practices have worked for successful middle school GSAs and children at this age developmentally.”

But what makes for a successful LGBTQ middle school club? What to do about meddlesome parents who don’t want their middle schoolers participating in such a club? What if parents ask a club leader—point blank—if their child is a member?

“Because we are not official—we have no club rosters, we keep no records,” Buena Vista Middle School teacher and LGBTQ-club leader, Lori Caldeira, states on an audio clip sent to me by a conference attendee. “In fact, sometimes we don’t really want to keep records because if parents get upset that their kids are coming? We’re like, ‘Yeah, I don’t know. Maybe they came?’ You know, we would never want a kid to get in trouble for attending if their parents are upset.”

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BOOKS Comments turned off

Sydney Williams: A Reviews of “Woke Racism” by John McWhorter

By on November 19th, 2021

https://swtotd.blogspot.com/

John McWhorter is an independent thinker – a rare (at risk of becoming extinct) individual in today’s academy. He is professor of linguistics at Columbia University, where he also teaches American studies and music history. At age 56, with a PhD from Stanford, he has written almost two dozen books. In his spare time, he is a contributing editor at The Atlantic and an opinion columnist for The New York Times. He describes himself as a “cranky, liberal Democrat.” He is a black man who believes that affirmative action should be based on class, not race, and that woke racism hurts those it claims to help.eview

In this book, he argues that woke racism represents a third wave of anti-racism, “…from people wishing they hadn’t missed the late 1960s.” This wave, he claims, has assumed the traits of a religion, with white privilege as original sin. The third wave “has taken it from the concrete political activism of Martin Luther King to the faith-based commitments of a Martin Luther.” He castigates the proselytizers of this religion, “The Elect,” as “pious, unempirical virtue signalers.” They resemble, in his words, early Christians who “thought of themselves as bearers of truth, in contrast to all other belief systems…” Like other such movements, they appeal “to an idealized past, a fantastical future, and an indelibly polluted present.” For the Elect, black people’s noble past is Africa, a glorified future is one without hate, but the present consists of oppressors and oppressed. He finds the Elect’s sanctimony insulting to blacks, who are led to believe that victimhood is destiny and success is due to special treatment. When conservative blacks deny victimhood, they are smeared by the Elect: Virginia’s Lieutenant Governor-elect Winsome Sears is a “white” supremacist and South Carolina’s Senator Tim Scott is an “Uncle Tom.”

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America at the Intersection of Woke and Incompetent Brian Lonergan

By on November 19th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/17/america-at-the-intersection-of-woke-and-incompetent/

We may have never had such a poisonous combination of partisanship and incompetence at the highest levels of government as we do today.

For as long as most of us have been alive, there have been declarations that America’s best days are behind us and that we are in a slow, steady decline. Against this backdrop, there is a growing sentiment that our present leadership in Washington is something altogether different, and worse. 

We are still getting familiar levels of government waste and inefficiency, but along with those come seemingly unprecedented levels of radicalism and incompetence. This noxious combination was on full display with the recent Senate testimony of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. 

Washington is filthy with dogmatic bureaucrats, but Mayorkas stands out. He is willing to parrot the most absurd and provably false statements, such as his repeated insistence that the border is closed. When called before Congress, he defends this administration’s indefensible border policies with shameless diversions and obfuscation. 

At the heart of this administration’s border policy is a zealous adherence to far-Left ideology that flies in the face of common sense and traditional American principles. When Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) asked if the border is more under control now than during the Trump years, Mayorkas replied, “We have more control [of the border] that is consistent with our values as a nation.” 

This was a reference to the White House’s favorite talking point that Trump was “cruel” by instituting a zero-tolerance policy that temporarily separated parents from their children. But in its attempt to be all things anti-Trump at the border, this administration has empowered ruthless human trafficking cartels, enabled greater quantities of fentanyl and other illicit drugs to be brought into the country, and allowed untold numbers of children to be sexually assaulted as they are stockpiled into overcrowded detention centers. Isn’t that cruel? In what way is any of that consistent with our values as a nation?

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