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August 2022

‘Civil War’ Porn Those who warn most of some mythical civil war are those most likely to incite one. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/17/civil-war-porn/

As Joe Biden’s polls stagnate and the midterms approach, we are now serially treated to yet another progressive melodrama about the dangers of a supposed impending radical right-wing violent takeover. 

This time the alleged threat is a Neanderthal desire for a “civil war.”  

The FBI raid on Donald Trump’s Florida home, the dubious rationale for such a historic swoop, and the popular pushback at the FBI and Department of Justice from roughly half the country have further fueled these giddy “civil war” conjectures. 

Recently “presidential historian” Michael Beschloss speculated about the parameters of such an envisioned civil war.

Beschloss is an ironic source. Just days earlier, he had tweeted references to the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who passed U.S. nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union in the 1950s, in connection with the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago.  

That was a lunatic insinuation that Trump might justly suffer the same lethal fate due to supposedly mishandling of “nuclear secrets.” Unhinged former CIA Director Michael Hayden picked up on Beschloss death-penalty prompt, adding that it “sounds about right.”                                                                                                       

Hayden had gained recent notoriety for comparing Trump’s continuance of the Obama Administration’s border detention facilities to Hitler’s death camps. And he had assured the public that Hunter Biden’s lost and incriminating laptop was likely “Russian disinformation”. 

So, like the earlier “Russian collusion” hoax, and the January 6 “insurrection,” the supposed right-wing inspired civil war is the latest shrill warning from the Left about how “democracy dies in darkness” and the impending end of progressive control of Congress in a few months. 

On cue, Hollywood now joins the civil war bandwagon. It has issued a few bad, grade-C movies. They focus on deranged white “insurrectionists” who seek to take over the United States in hopes of driving out or killing off various “marginalized” peoples. 

Pentagon grandees promise to learn about “white rage” in the military and to root it out. But never do they offer any hard data to suggest white males express any greater degree of racial or ethnic chauvinism than any other demographic.

Deplatforming Doctors, Distracting Parents Helen Roy (January 2022)

https://americanmind.org/salvo/deplatforming-doctors-distracting-parents/

The regime wants to replace you

This week, for wondering aloud why we are now approving medication for children with no trial data, medical doctor Steven Bishop was flagged by the Twitter commissars. Now, his tweet is labelled “misleading,” users cannot see any of the tens of thousands of likes and responses accumulated over the week, and further engagement is permanently limited.

Within the same week, YouTube removed Joe Rogan’s recent interviews with Drs. Robert Malone and Peter McCullough, skeptics of the covid regime, both of whom also highlighted the absurdity and abusive nature of the response in regard to children. Throughout history, the old have sacrificed for the sake of the young, Malone suggested in his interview. The way American adults have recklessly mismanaged the lives of young people, he went on, is not only out of line with the natural way of things, but it will likely generate dramatic, civilization-threatening consequences in the near future.

Big Tech must come down on this information for the same reason they have come down hard on Christopher Rufo. It is the kind of thing that can and should galvanize parents. Any parent who has not completely resigned themselves to being, as I put it last week, the “temporary and essentially fungible custodian of state property” would react to this information with righteous indignation. Yes, those parents are a diminishing minority. But the narrative that the managerial elite cooperate to uphold is part of the reason parents feel alone, vulnerable, and totally powerless.

I challenge my readers to think of a single avenue of public life where parental authority remains a legitimate claim over the life and well-being of children.

How the Chinese Communist Party Steals U.S. Technology A Thousand Talents is 999 too many. By Paul Dabbar

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-thousand-talents-is-999-too-many-energy-department-china-technology-transfer-research-innovation-national-lab-conflict-of-interest-appropriation-11659980858?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

When I joined the U.S. Department of Energy in 2017, I was briefed about how pervasively the Chinese Communist Party had woven itself into the U.S. government’s research and innovation efforts. Traditionally, labs and academic institutions around the world and their researchers work on projects together. And periodically, foreign institutions, including in China, compensate Americans for their efforts. The Communist Party began to use these interactions to recruit people for their technology-appropriation programs.

I should have known. Before I joined the department, I was in the nuclear industry in the private sector, and served on an Energy Department advisory board. Chinese state entities often invited me to attend nuclear conferences and tour the country—all expenses paid. I always said no, because I was too busy. In retrospect, I certainly am glad I was. The invitations have resumed since I left the government, and my answer is a well-informed no.

I learned that people working at the Energy Department’s National Laboratories had significant engagements with China. Some were paid by one of the many Chinese Communist Party Thousand Talents Plans while concurrently working at sensitive U.S. government labs. These agreements often required technology transfer as well as support for recruiting more members to the TTPs. This was also happening at other agencies, and it was recently disclosed that these include nonscience and international institutions such as the Federal Reserve and the Inter-American Development Bank.

The weakness in the Energy Department’s compliance rules was that there were no disclosure or conflict-of-interest policies regarding foreign engagement or research and technologies other than those involving strategic weapons. There were no rules about research in quantum computing and artificial intelligence, which will have a large economic impact and defense applications.

The American Academy of Pediatrics’ Dubious Transgender Science As other countries turn away from hormones and surgery, the AAP won’t even allow a debate. By Julia Mason and Leor Sapir

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-american-academy-of-pediatrics-dubious-transgender-science-jack-turban-research-social-contagion-gender-dysphoria-puberty-blockers-uk-11660732791?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

A spate of headlines this month declared that America’s surge in transgender identification wasn’t being caused by a social contagion. These articles were prompted by a new study by Jack Turban and colleagues in Pediatrics, flagship journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics. The study claimed that social influence isn’t the reason that as many as 9% of America’s youth now call themselves transgender. Thus, Dr. Turban argues, efforts in conservative states to regulate on-demand puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgery must be resisted.

Yet Dr. Turban’s study is deeply flawed and likely couldn’t have survived a reasonable peer-review process. The swift response from the scientific community made both points clear—with even those who support hormones and surgery for gender-dysphoric youth noting that Dr. Turban’s shoddy science undermined their cause.

Nevertheless, the media have promoted his work as a refutation of the claim that the wildfire spread of transgender identity is an example of social contagion—a phenomenon in which members of a group (mostly young and female) mutually influence one another’s emotions and behavior.

The Turban study rejects the social-contagion theory on the grounds that more biological boys than girls identified as trans in 2017 and 2019, according to data collected from 19 states by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey. But the researchers who helped design the CDC questionnaire explicitly warned that youths who identify as transgender may list their sex as their gender identity, making it impossible to discern who is male-to-female or female-to-male (a limitation Dr. Turban has acknowledged in the past).

Twitter Becomes a Tool of Government Censorship: Vivek Ramaswamy and Jed Rubenfeld

https://www.wsj.com/articles/twitter-becomes-a-tool-of-government-censors-alex-berenson-twitter-facebook-ban-covid-

Alex Berenson was kicked off the site at the White House’s urging. That’s a violation of the First Amendment.

Alex Berenson is back on Twitter after being banned for nearly a year over Covid-19 “misinformation.” Last week the former New York Times reporter settled his lawsuit against the social-media company, which admitted error and restored his account. “The First Amendment does not apply to private companies like Twitter,” Mr. Berenson wrote last week on Substack. But because the Biden administration brought pressure to bear on Twitter, he believes he has a case that his constitutional rights were violated. He’s right.

In January 2021 we argued on these pages that tech companies should be treated as state actors under existing legal doctrines when they censor constitutionally protected speech in response to governmental threats and inducements. The Biden administration appears to have taken our warning calls as a how-to guide for effectuating political censorship through the private sector. And it’s worse than we feared.

Facts that Mr. Berenson unearthed through the discovery process confirm that the administration has been secretly asking social-media companies to shut down the accounts of specific prominent critics of administration policy.

On July 16, 2021, a reporter asked President Biden: “On Covid misinformation, what’s your message to platforms like Facebook.” Mr. Biden replied: “They’re killing people.” (The president later said he meant users were killing people.) Later that day, Twitter locked Mr. Berenson’s account, and on Aug. 28 it banned him permanently.

It’s The Culture Of The IRS To Target The Most Vulnerable Taxpayers Daniel Savickas

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/08/18/its-the-culture-of-the-irs-to-target-the-most-vulnerable-taxpayers/

The Senate recently passed the inappropriately named Inflation Reduction Act on Aug. 7 (yes, a Sunday). Aside from the fact that even non-partisan analyses show the bill will have a negligible impact on actual inflation, one specific provision is raising red flags. In the plan, the Internal Revenue Service gets a fresh $80 billion in funding, with $45.6 billion of that slated for “enforcement” measures. This will involve the hiring of more than 87,000 new IRS agents. If past is prologue, it’s reasonable to expect this spells bad news for lower income Americans.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates this new investment in the IRS will generate an additional $203.7 billion over the next 10 years. A sum that large certainly casts doubt on the notion that this will only impact the super-wealthy.  It is especially concerning given the agency’s rates of audits across socio-economic classes in recent years.

According to IRS audit data, the most frequently audited county in the United States is Humphreys County, Mississippi. This rural county near the Mississippi Delta is known for catfish farming and has an average income of $18,000 per resident, making it among the poorest in the nation. Yet, Humphreys’ residents get audited far more often than those in cities such as New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles.

Criminal (In)Justice What the Push for Decarceration and Depolicing Gets Wrong and Who It Hurts Most Rafael A. Mangual

https://www.manhattan-institute.org/mangual-criminal-injustice

In his impassioned-yet-measured first book, Rafael A. Mangual offers an incisive critique of America’s increasingly radical criminal justice reform movement, and makes a convincing case against the pursuit of “justice” through mass-decarceration and depolicing.

After a summer of violent protests in 2020—sparked by the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Rayshard Brooks—a dangerously false narrative gained mainstream acceptance: Criminal justice in the United States is overly punitive and racially oppressive. But, the harshest and loudest condemnations of incarceration, policing, and prosecution are often shallow and at odds with the available data. And the significant harms caused by this false narrative are borne by those who can least afford them: black and brown people who are disproportionally the victims of serious crimes.

In Criminal (In)Justice, Rafael A. Mangual offers a more balanced understanding of American criminal justice, and cautions against discarding traditional crime control measures. A powerful combination of research, data-driven policy journalism, and the author’s lived experiences, this book explains what many reform advocates get wrong, and illustrates how the misguided commitment to leniency places America’s most vulnerable communities at risk.

The stakes of this moment are incredibly high. Ongoing debates over criminal justice reform have the potential to transform our society for a generation—for better or for worse. Grappling with the data—and the sometimes harsh realities they reflect—is the surest way to minimize the all-too-common injustices plaguing neighborhoods that can least afford them.

How Gender Radicalism Conquered Sacramento Schools: Christopher Rufo

https://www.city-journal.org/how-gender-radicalism-conquered-sacramento-schools

Sacramento City Unified School District instructs teachers to “normalize gender exploration” and promotes such identities as “genderqueer,” “polysexual,” and “two-spirit.”

Sacramento City Unified School District has adopted a queer theory–based pedagogy that encourages teachers to “normalize gender exploration,” confront their “cisgender privilege,” and maintain strict secrecy when facilitating a child’s gender or sexual transition.

I have obtained a collection of publicly accessible documents from Sacramento City Unified that traces the evolution of the district’s sexual politics. The process began a decade ago, when the district invited Elizabeth Meyer, a professor of Women’s, Gender & Queer Studies at California Polytechnic State University, to conduct presentations on how the district could adopt the principles of academic queer theory and translate them into K-12 pedagogy. The “foundational concepts” of this approach, according to Meyer’s presentation, follow the standard left-wing narrative. Western society has created a “Heterosexual Matrix,” composed of “Hegemonic Masculinity,” “Emphasized Femininity,” “Heteronormativity,” and “Heterosexism,” that underpins an oppressive system of “patriarchy,” “homophobia,” and “transphobia.” To liberate schools from this system, administrators and districts must adopt “queer pedagogy” and “anti-oppressive pedagogy,” which will disrupt the “commonsense view of the world” and replace it with queer alternatives, emphasizing “gender non-conformity” and “gender and sexual diversity.”

The post-1967 turning point of US-Israel nexus: a new 7-minute video : Yoram Ettinger

 https://bit.ly/3Ppug3V

 
*In 1948, Israel was misconstrued by the State Department as a burden upon the US. 
 
*Since 1967, Israel has emerged as a formidable force-multiplier for the US, economically and militarily.
 
*The June 1967 Israeli military victory spared the US an enormous economic and defense setback, denying the USSR a dramatic geo-strategic bonanza.
 
*In 1970, Israel forced a pull-back of the pro-Soviet Syrian invasion of pro-US Jordan, which could have toppled all pro-US Arab regimes.
 
*The 1981 Israeli destruction of Iraq’s nuclear reactor prevented a potential nuclear confrontation during the 1991 Gulf War.
 
*The 2007 Israeli destruction of the Syria-North Korea nuclear reactor, averted a potentially nuclearized civil war in Syria. 

Sanctuary Cities Seethe as Illegal Immigrants Actually Arrive Charles Lipson

https://www.newsweek.com/sanctuary-cities-seethe-illegal-immigrants-actually-arrive-opinion-1734120

The surest sign that public policies are simply virtue signals is when the messages don’t cost anything. The easiest way to tell when that signal starts to fail is to watch politicians flounder as the costs start to rise and voters demand relief.

It was free—and meaningless—for progressive churches to post banners calling themselves “nuclear free zones” during the Reagan era. Their dwindling congregations loved it. It was free, after George Floyd’s murder, to post woke catechism signs on your front lawn, proclaiming “In this house, we believe: Black Lives Matter, women’s rights are human rights, no human is illegal” and so on. Maybe the neighbors gave you high-fives. And for years it has been free for deep-blue cities to proclaim themselves “sanctuaries” for illegal immigrants. That’s changing now that voters want some sanctuary for themselves.

Changes like this happen when voters realize the old virtue signals actually entail serious costs—and that they will have to pay them. That is exactly what’s happening in New York City and Washington D.C. now that Texas governor Greg Abbott is sending those cities a few busloads of illegal immigrants from his state.

These progressive bastions were silent when the Biden administration flew planeloads of illegal immigrants to suburban airports in the middle of the night. TV coverage was prohibited, and the arrivals were secretly dispersed. Abbott’s buses, by contrast, arrive downtown greeted by local TV crews. Now you can hear the politicians screech.