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April 2022

MEDIA, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Elon Conquers The Twitterverse Our chattering class claims Musk is a supervillain. The truth is simpler: He wants free speech. They don’t. Mike Solana

By on April 27th, 2022

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/elon-conquers-the-twitterverse?token

Three weeks ago, a regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission revealed that Elon Musk, billionaire Shitposting God of Silicon Valley, had acquired over 9% of Twitter, making him the company’s largest shareholder and setting in motion a chain of events that led, ultimately, to yesterday’s outright purchase of the now $44 billion company. In a press release, Elon shared his goals for the platform, which echoed the goals he’s shared all month: 

“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated. I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans.”

“Freedom,” “open source technology,” and “man, I really hate these spam bots.” The media’s reaction to these ambitions was instant and apoplectic. They were akin, we were told, to literal Nazism. 

Welcome to the Clown World. Boy, do we have ground to cover. 

The social internet is always a Dalí painting—surreal and horrifying and beautiful. A million crazy people screaming over nonsense, with funny jokes or anecdotes mixed in, fortune cookie observations, legitimate political happenings, and “words are violence” hall monitors from The Washington Post waging daily information war on trolls and Russian bots and okay actually just a lot of regular people with whom they disagree, or simply don’t like. 

But even by the gutter standards we’ve come to accept from media, this has been a month for the books.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Liz Peek: Kamala Harris: Joe Biden’s excellent VP pick may keep him in office

By on April 27th, 2022

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/apr/26/kamala-harris-joe-bidens-excellent-vp-pick-may-kee/

Joe Biden was darned lucky he chose Kamala Harris as his running mate. If he had teamed up with someone capable, someone who had won the trust of the country, Biden might be headed out to pasture. Good pick, Joe.

This is not, as Joe might say, hyperbole. Over the past few months, the president has shown himself not only confused but dangerously confused. At some point, Democrats dragged down by Mr. Biden’s poor performance would likely step in, demanding he resign.

But then we would have Kamala Harris in the Oval Office, an outcome too dreadful to contemplate, even for Democrats.

Mr. Biden is a liability to the U.S. and to his party. His comments appearing to call for regime change in Russia or suggesting that U.S. GIs were soon to enter Ukraine played into Vladimir Putin’s hands and provided invaluable fodder for his propaganda machine.

Of course, it is not just about the Ukraine war that Mr. Biden has appeared confused about. Just recently, the president was asked about his plans to rescind Title 42, the health emergency measure that has allowed our government to rapidly expel people entering the U.S. illegally. Instead of addressing the border situation, Biden talked about the Department of Justice appealing a judge’s ruling that nixed the federal mask mandate on airplanes, conflating the two issues.

This was not because he didn’t hear the question; there was no Marine One helicopter hovering in the background. This was Mr. Biden, confused.

The steady stream of misstatements and contradictions has taken a toll. As have videos of Mr. Biden shaking hands with thin air or being awkwardly coached by his wife Jill to wave to a crowd.

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ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Iran Deal Has Become Stuck in Limbo — a Worst-Case Scenario An unfinalized deal that Washington would nevertheless decline to admit is dead could help Iran advance its nuclear aspirations. By Benny Avni

By on April 27th, 2022

https://www.nysun.com/article/iran-deal-has-become-stuck-in-limbo-a-worst-case-scenario?utm_content=

Israelis believe that the American attempt at renewing the Iran deal is now on its deathbed. Americans say reviving it remains their goal. The most likely — and worst — scenario is that the Iran deal will forever be stuck in limbo.

An unfinalized deal that Washington would nevertheless decline to admit is dead could help Iran advance its nuclear aspirations. And that is likely the reason Tehran has upped the diplomatic ante by making demands that even President Biden could not accept.  

During a hearing in the Senate Foreign Relation Committee today, Secretary of State Blinken said the administration remains convinced that “getting back into compliance” with the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action “would be the best way to address the nuclear challenge imposed by Iran.”

In Israel, however, officials are rethinking their previous conclusion that a JCPOA revival is all but inevitable.  According to reports by two major Israeli publications, Prime Minister Bennett’s aides now assess that Washington is “closer than ever” to admitting defeat.

Mr. Biden’s hopes of reviving the 2015 pact are “dwindling at an exponential rate,” according to one of the reports, which was based on conversations with senior Israeli officials. That new assessment, reversing past thinking in Jerusalem, was leaked after Messrs. Bennett and Biden spoke on the phone Sunday.

During their talk, Mr. Biden has reportedly agreed to visit Israel as early as June. The Israeli national security adviser, Eyal Hulata, arrived in Washington yesterday for talks with his counterpart, Jacob Sullivan. The two advisers reportedly discussed ideas for a “plan B,” in case diplomacy with Iran fails. 

America is “attuned to Israel’s concerns about threats to its security, including first and foremost from Iran and Iranian-backed proxies,” according to a White House readout of the meeting. 

Talks in Vienna to renew the JCPOA were suspended in March after Iran demanded the removal of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps from the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations. A strong bipartisan pushback in Congress convinced Mr. Biden, at least so far, to reject Tehran’s demand.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Demographics push China-India-Russia triple entente China at some point may dump its Pakistan investment and emphasize India ties, upending strategic calculations David Goldman

By on April 27th, 2022

https://asiatimes.com/2022/04/demographics-push-china-india-russia-triple-entente/

There are numerous examples of the bitterest of enemies turning into unlikely allies, precisely because they present too great a danger to each other.

Britain and Russia spent most of the 19th century contending in the “Great Game” over India. Britain built the navy with which Japan beat Russia in the 1905 war. But Britain and Russiafought on the same side in the world wars of the 20th century.

Russia and China fought one war in 1929 and an undeclared border war in 1969, but share common interests against the United States and its allies.

The next strategic alignment among past enemies may bring together two of today’s strategic antagonists, namely India and China. At first glance, this seems improbable in the extreme. India and China have a longstanding border dispute that caused several hundred casualties in a clash in 1967 and claimed the lives of several dozen soldiers in another last year.

But there are three reasons why a diplomatic revolution may occur sometime in the next several years, and two of them are evident from the chart below.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Biden Administration Ignores What the Palestinians Are Really Saying by Khaled Abu Toameh

By on April 26th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18471/what-palestinians-are-saying

Hamas “will remain committed to its charter until the goals of our people are achieved, including the liberation [of all Palestine].” — Hazem Qassem, Hamas spokesperson, palinfo.com, April 22, 2022.

The Biden administration’s representatives who are talking about “the need for all parties to work for calm, especially in Jerusalem,” appear to be overlooking that the latest tensions are, at best, only partially related to the city or the al-Aqsa Mosque.

For Hamas, the riots at the al-Aqsa Mosque are simply part of a long-term strategy to destroy all of Israel.

“The battle [with Israel] is open. What is happening at the mosque will shorten the life of the occupation until it is expelled from Palestine. We are still at the beginning of the battle.” — Ismail Haniyeh, senior political leader of Hamas, panet.co.il, April 21, 2022.

So, while the Biden administration is reaffirming its commitment to a “two-state solution,” which means establishing a Palestinian state alongside Israel, Hamas and its supporters are openly expressing their intention to continue their jihad until they exterminate Israel.

Haniyeh remains more popular than Abbas and in a presidential election, would easily defeat him. The poll also showed that if parliamentary elections were held today, Hamas would defeat Abbas’s faction, the Fatah.

The results of the polls clearly telegraph that any future Palestinian state will unquestionably be controlled by Hamas and used as a launching pad to continue the fight until Israel is obliterated.

The Palestinians, for their part, have been, as always, refreshingly clear about what they want — and a mosque is not it.

The recent riots at the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount in Jerusalem provide further proof of the widespread support among Palestinians for Hamas, the Islamist group controlling the Gaza Strip that is designated as a terrorist organization not only by Israel, but also by the US, Canada, the EU, Japan, Australia and Britain.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

TOM GROSS: THE MEDIA’S TAKE ON ELON MUSK AND TWITTER

By on April 26th, 2022

The takeover of Twitter yesterday by free speech advocate Elon Musk may herald a significant change in global political debate, and provide a major platform for views challenging “woke” opinion.

Predictably many in the liberal establishment – who has enjoyed a near monopoly on mainstream media opinion – are outraged.

The Washington Post – owned by the super-rich Jeff Bezos – was so alarmed that Twitter now may become more balanced that the paper called for Biden to move against Musk in order “to prevent rich people from controlling our channels of communication.”

Below are four articles on Musk’s buyout, from The Wall Street Journal, New York Post and two from The New York Times.

As the Wall Street Journal notes:

Current management is correct that most regular social-media users don’t want a daily bath of Russian bots, jihadist propaganda, noxious harassment and so forth. Ditto for advertisers, who represent about 90% of the company’s revenue. Yet Silicon Valley’s tech lords have decided they want to be arbiters of speech on political topics like climate change and the origins of Covid.

Kyle Smith writes in The New York Post:

This whole thing apparently got started because Musk was willing to spend $44 billion to keep reading the Babylon Bee. It was five days after the right-leaning Bee got suspended from twitter for making a joke about the transgender (male-to-female) individual Rachel Levine, who is the assistant secretary for health and human services, that Musk sent his famous tweet asking, “Do you believe Twitter rigorously adheres to” the principle that “free speech is essential to a functioning democracy?” In a followup post, he noted, with uncharacteristic earnestness, “The consequences of this poll will be important. Please vote carefully.”

You could argue the Bee’s joke about Levine was nasty. So freaking what? The best comedy is nasty. Jokes are supposed to say the unsayable. If your idea of comedy is people saying the sayable, watch Stephen Colbert. Neither Colbert nor anyone else ever gets banned from anything for calling Republicans Nazis, by the way. Would you rather be called a Nazi, or . . . a man?

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Did a Key FBI Agent in Whitmer Plot Attempt to Surveil Steven Crowder? It appears Jayson Chambers, one of the key FBI Agents involved in the entrapment effort, did just that. Why? By Julie Kelly

By on April 26th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/25/did-a-key-fbi-agent-in-whitmer-plot-attempt-to-surveil-steven-crowder/

In 2017, Steven Crowder, a conservative activist and host of a popular YouTube channel, infiltrated Antifa with his producer.

Weeks before a speaking engagement by Ben Shapiro at the University of Utah—an event Antifa planned to disrupt violently—Crowder worked his way into the group through the use of burner phones and encrypted chats. Crowder secretly recorded discussions between Antifa thugs promising to use “plain clothes and hard tactics” to shut down Shapiro’s speech on September 28, 2017. This included distributing weapons such as ice picks, combat knives, and guns.

Despite a heavy law enforcement presence for Shapiro’s speech, pockets of violence did erupt as Antifa confronted police and Shapiro supporters outside the venue, resulting in the arrest of a handful of rabble-rousers. Crowder then posted a video account of his undercover operation and noted a collective lack of interest by major news organizations in Antifa’s violent pre-planning efforts.

An FBI agent, however, appeared to want more information from Crowder about Antifa’s behind-the-scenes work. It’s unclear how Crowder contacted this particular FBI agent shortly after the Shapiro protest but he described the encounter on Megyn Kelly’s podcast last week: “We got on the phone with a guy at the FBI and he asked ‘how did you get involved, how did you get on this Antifa app?’” Crowder told Kelly about the initial call, wondering aloud why the FBI didn’t know how to access the encrypted chat. The FBI, Crowder said, didn’t express any interest in capturing the perpetrators, which Crowder found “odd.”

The correspondence with this FBI agent, working out of the FBI’s counterterrorism unit in Michigan, continued for some time then tapered off. It wasn’t until recently that Crowder heard the name of his one-time FBI contact: Jayson Chambers.

Chambers was one of the key agents involved in the FBI-concocted plot to “kidnap” and “assassinate” Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020. He was primarily responsible for handling Dan Chappel, the informant hired by the FBI in the spring of 2020 and compensated at least $60,000 to execute the scheme. “This was the guy on a fishing expedition with my office!” Crowder told Kelly about Chambers. 

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HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Biden Unilaterally Surrenders to Russia and China in Satellite Wars Our enemies will have a clear field for destroying our satellites. Daniel Greenfield

By on April 26th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/04/biden-unilaterally-surrenders-russia-and-china-daniel-greenfield/

Kamala Harris arrived at Vandenberg Space Force Base where Discoverer-1, the first satellite to enter a polar orbit and America’s bold response to Russia’s Sputnik, was launched to announce that we would be unilaterally surrendering to Russia and China in the growing satellite wars.

Last November, Russia had conducted a DA-ASAT or direct-ascent anti-satellite test which demonstrated its ability to take out satellites. The Russians had used their A-235 anti-ballistic missile system to destroy their own Kosmos 1408 satellite. The message was clear: Moscow had the ability to clear out enemy satellites in the event of any conflict. Including ours.

“I don’t want to get ahead of specific measures that we may pursue,” Biden apparatchik Ned Price fumed, but had vowed that “we won’t tolerate this kind of activity.”

At Vandenberg, Kamala announced that the response would be absolute and total surrender.

Responding to Russia’s anti-satellite weapons test and Communist China’s earlier 2007 ASAT test, the Biden administration vows that it will surrender and refuse to deploy ASAT weapons.

“I think everyone here recognizes how extraordinary space is,” Kamala Harris rambled. “Space — it affects us all, and it connects us all.”

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MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Fauci Lets His Megalomania Show

By on April 26th, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/04/26/anthony-fauci-is-unhealthy-for-america/

The Biden administration’s chief medical adviser made last year what C.S. Lewis might have called a “lunatic, liar, or lord” statement when he essentially claimed to be the embodiment of science. (Hint: he’s a bit of the first, all of the second, but wants to be the third.) Five days ago, this man went even further, declaring that the executive branch should be free to act outside of boundaries put in place to prevent an all-powerful presidency.

He’s a menace. We’d all be better off if he were a Washington Nationals batboy rather than a powerful government functionary and influential media darling.

Anthony Fauci – we won’t grant him the honor of the title of “Dr.” because he’s far more bureaucrat than healer – who heads the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases is not science, even though in June 2021 he said his critics, of whom there are many but not enough, are “really criticizing science because I represent science.”

But he does have the mindset of an authoritarian.

During a CNN interview Thursday, Fauci expressed surprise and disappointment over federal Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle’s ruling that overturned Washington’s planes, trains, and public transportation mask mandate.

“Those types of things really are the purview of the” Centers for Disease Control, he said. “This is a public health issue.

“We are concerned” – said the man who also issued a “now is the time to do what you’re told” threat – “about courts getting involved in things that are unequivocally public health decisions. I mean, this is a CDC issue; it should not be a court issue.”

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IMMIGRATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

‘Remain in Mexico’ Policy Goes to the Supreme Court The Justices have cause to rule that Biden’s cancellation of the Trump-era immigration policy is illegal.

By on April 26th, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/remain-in-mexico-goes-to-the-supreme-court-migrant-protection-protocols-trump-biden-immigration-11650924510?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The Supreme Court on Tuesday will hear a challenge (Biden v. Texas) to the Biden Administration’s repeal of the Trump Migrant Protection Protocols—aka “Remain in Mexico.” But the stakes go beyond the border and strike at the heart of the Constitution’s separation of powers.

President Biden on his first day in office directed his Department of Homeland Security to review whether to terminate or modify Remain in Mexico. DHS ended the policy last June. The two questions before the High Court are whether DHS followed proper administrative procedure, and whether the law lets it end the policy. The answers are no, and no.

The Trump Administration implemented Remain in Mexico in early 2019 to deal with a surge in migrants claiming asylum. Since DHS’s total detention capacity is 34,618, the government had been releasing migrants apprehended at the border into the U.S.

Remain in Mexico requires non-Mexican migrants to wait in Mexico until their asylum claims are heard. Un-noted by critics is that Congress established the legal basis for this policy as part of the 1996 bipartisan immigration reform. Sen. Joe Biden voted for it.

The law says migrants who are “not clearly and beyond a doubt entitled to be admitted . . . shall be detained.” That’s an order to the executive branch. But Congress also provided a safety valve if the government lacks detention capacity: “The Attorney General may return the alien” to Mexico “pending a proceeding.”

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