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January 2023

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NPR Promotes Pornography for Kids By Matt Margolis

By on January 9th, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/culture/matt-margolis/2023/01/09/npr-promotes-pornography-for-kids-n1659974

Conservatives have been calling for the defunding of National Public Radio (NPR) for years now because of its blatant political bias, but now they have a new reason to deprive the news outlet of its federal funding.

This week, NPR published a misleading and disturbing essay by Maia Kobabe, the author of Gender Queer, a controversial graphic memoir documenting Kobabe’s journey to coming out as “nonbinary.” In addition to being “nonbinary,” Kobabe has nonsensical “preferred pronouns.”

Kobabe laments in her NPR essay that Gender Queer has become the most challenged book in public school libraries. “Several conservative politicians made book banning a major talking point of their campaigns,” she wrote. “There were so many challenges in such quick succession before the end of the year that I literally could not keep track of them all.”

Related: NPR Releases Hardcore Abortion Porn Audio to Savor on Your Morning Commute

By Kobabe’s telling, the book is challenged because of discrimination. “I was obviously already aware that queer, trans, and nonbinary narratives often receive pushback.” But this is incredibly misleading. In fact, Gender Queer is most often challenged because it contains graphic depictions of minors participating in sex acts — a detail Kobabe conveniently omits in her essay.

She was, however, questioned about the graphic nature of some of the illustrations in an interview with NPR. “Let me ask you this. Some of the criticism is about how explicit the book is. There are some graphic panels where you’re describing some of your sexual encounters. Did you consider doing less graphic versions of those scenes?” NPR’s Claire Murashima asked.

“You know, I really didn’t,” Kobabe said. “I drew as much as I felt like I needed to tell the story that I was trying to tell and get the points across that I was trying to make.”

Kobabe insists that her book could have been even more explicit. Opponents of the book say it is pornographic — and having seen screenshots of the illustrations, I can say this characterization is correct — which means it has no business in public libraries or school libraries. That NPR is promoting this book and giving a platform to the author, who is clearly a groomer, is disturbing. So, yes, NPR is promoting pornography aimed at grooming young children.

Last year, NPR also broadcasted a segment about “queer” sex education, which, among other things, denounced the “terrible lie” that STDs make one “dirty.”

It’s long overdue for NPR to lose its federal funding. Promoting pornography that targets kids should be the last straw.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Wokeism Goes Global: Biden’s Foreign Policy John O’Sullivan

By on January 9th, 2023

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2023/01/wokeism-goes-global-bidens-foreign-policy/

There are broadly two ways of conducting a foreign policy. The first is responding intelligently to events abroad as they occur, such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Brexit, the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Or as Harold Macmillan once said: “Events, dear boy, events.”

The second way, sometimes called a Grand Strategy, prescribes the general direction in which you want your country to go and the policies needed to get there. Thus, Brexit was intended to transform Britain from “a country at the heart of Europe” (John Major’s formulation) into Global Britain.

But since the policies needed to achieve Global Britain were never pursued or even devised because they were opposed by people in government and major British institutions, that grand strategy was stillborn. A successful grand strategy requires the government to know roughly how it wants each crisis to turn out without having to work out its responses from scratch.

President Biden has so far had a mixed record on responding to events: he did badly in Afghanistan but well over Ukraine, where his policy has rallied the Western alliance and frustrated Putin’s Russia. What explains his success in one case and failure in the other?

The answer lies in part in the unusual reality that US progressive Left—which currently dominates the Biden administration—sees America as a racist, sexist, homophobic and white supremacist country. That makes it ambivalent about America’s national interest. Even if it sees the necessity for some purposeful action in a crisis, it can’t want the outcome to benefit the US. At the very least that mindset must weaken and confuse the US even when it follows a prudent course.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The New McCarthyism Expect the changes to the people’s business-as-usual to be mostly cosmetic under Kevin McCarthy’s reign as speaker of the House. By Roger Kimball

By on January 9th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/01/07/the-new-mccarthyism/

“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” That seems to be Kevin McCarthy’s favorite mantra. Friday night, on the 15th vote for speaker of the House, he finally got his moist little palm around Nancy Pelosi’s still-warm gavel. Welcome to the new Republican-ish speaker of the House!

The contest was brutal, occasionally absurd, and the occasion of hilarity and consternation among the punditocracy on both the Right and the Left. The Left clucked their tongues about the “chaos” on view on the other side of the aisle. Some among the GOP agreed and wondered why “their side” could not govern as effectively as the Democrats. Would Nancy Pelosi have put up with this level of dissension among the Democratic rank and file? Others said, no, no, the 20 freedom caucus members (and others) holding up the inevitable were just giving the world a reality show, live-action look at how “democracy” (if not quite Our Democracy™) works and should work.

I am of two minds about that. My own take is that McCarthy is an unreliable ally for those on the Right. He was only too happy to shovel billions of your and your children’s money to Ukraine while doing little to secure our southern border. McCarthy is from California, so, naturally, he likes to spend money. He even got behind such improvident and mendacious schemes as raiding Medicare to pay for the U.S. Postal Service. He was happy to fund the January 6 kangaroo court, grant amnesty to illegal immigrants, and support mandates for the useless—indeed, dangerous—COVID vaccine for the military. In plain terms, his voting record is only intermittently conservative.

Kevin McCarthy, in short, is a swamp creature masquerading as a swamp critic. The Swamp loves its own, and so it was no surprise that McCarthy eventually prevailed, just barely. He did so at considerable cost to the power of the speaker’s office but also considerable benefit to people who care about accountability.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

Can Capitalism Save Hollywood? The gulf between elites and audiences is eroding profits throughout entertainment and news media—but signs of correction are emerging. Joel Kotkin

By on January 9th, 2023

https://www.city-journal.org/can-capitalism-save-hollywood

The key point here is not that culture or media should be liberal, conservative, or fabulist, but expansive enough to include all three. Until those in Hollywood and Manhattan realize that their approach is alienating a huge segment of their audiences, their bottom lines will continue to suffer.

After a decade of rapid growth, the nation’s media and entertainment complex is facing retrenchment and, perhaps, a necessary reappraisal. Firms are consolidating. Workers are being laid off at Disney, Warner Brothers, Paramount, CBS, and other production houses. News media firms like CNN, Gannet, and Buzzfeed are planning similar actions. In 2022, stocks in media companies lost $500 billion in value, and stocks in tech firms, increasingly big players in entertainment and news, suffered a reversal of an astounding $4 trillion.

This decline reflects the growing gap between the legacy media and at least half their potential audience. According to Gallup, overall public trust in the media is lower than it’s ever been; barely one-third of poll respondents express confidence, half the percentage that felt that way in 1978. Hollywood, television, and radio register similarly low levels of support.

Meantime, much of the established media see their primary mission not as informing or entertaining but propagating ideologies. Yet this shift, executives know, is not sustainable according to the most critical metric—profits. “I think in the end no one much cares about politics but they do care about money,” one well-placed executive suggests. “People know that sex and violence sell better than political lectures. In the end, if you want to send a message, use Western Union.”

Hollywood and the American news media have been traditionally profit-hungry and market-oriented. Entertainment, in particular, started as primarily an outsider’s industry, forged largely by Jewish immigrants who had worked previously as upholsterers, butchers, furriers, and clothing merchants. Though nepotism kicked in early, many of the early stars were hardly theater aristocracy; early on, many were actually cowboys. The moguls, of course, were rarely on horseback, but they succeeded, as Neil Gabler notes, because they “marketed movies like clothing.”

By contrast, the European film industry has long been dominated by state enterprises and funding. It was seen as a national asset—a way of asserting cultural independence from what the French, for example, saw as cultural colonization from Hollywood. A similar pattern emerged in news media. But while the BBC may have been the most respected name in news, it was U.S. companies—all founded by entrepreneurs like CBS’s William Paley, RCA’s David Sarnoff, and CNN’s Ted Turner—that became the most influential global sources of information. In historic terms, the Russian, Chinese, and European news services never had a chance against their opportunistic American competitors determined to monetize audiences.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

How DEI Is Supplanting Truth as the Mission of American Universities An obsession with Diversity, Equity and Inclusion threatens students, professors, and the very credibility of higher education in the U.S. By John Sailer

By on January 9th, 2023

https://www.thefp.com/p/how-dei-is-supplanting-truth-as-the

One of the things The Free Press has been doing since its inception is documenting and exposing how many of our most important institutions—medicine, the media, the law—are increasingly being captured by an ideology that is hollowing out their core functions.

Today, John Sailer, a fellow at the National Association of Scholars, tells the story of how that’s happening at American universities across the country.

You don’t have to have ever stepped foot on a college campus to care about the revelations in today’s piece. Because as we’ve seen again and again, what happens on campus doesn’t stay there. It’s just a preview of what’s coming for the rest of us. — BW

In June 2020, Gordon Klein, a longtime accounting lecturer at UCLA, made the news after a student emailed him asking him to grade black students more leniently in the wake of the “unjust murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd.”

Klein’s response was blunt. It stated in part:

Thanks for your suggestion in your email below that I give black students special treatment, given the tragedy in Minnesota. Do you know the names of the classmates that are black? How can I identify them since we’ve been having online classes only? Are there any students that may be of mixed parentage, such as half black-half Asian? What do you suggest I do with respect to them? A full concession or just half? 

He went on:

Remember that MLK famously said that people should not be evaluated based on the “color of their skin.” Do you think that your request would run afoul of MLK’s admonition?

Thanks, G. Klein

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MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Where are the Intellectually Curious Doctors? By Brian C. Joondeph, M.D.

By on January 9th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/01/where_are_the_intellectually_curious_doctors.html

Good medicine is asking questions and forming a differential diagnosis, ruling out possibilities based on science, not on politics.

Medicine, like most sciences, entails thinking and hypothesis creation to explain the myriad complexities of the healthy and diseased human body.

Hypotheses are tested and refined, with new information or insights nudging or abruptly shifting current knowledge in a new direction.

For examples, bloodletting with leeches is no longer standard medical practice for most ailments as it was up until the late 19th century. More recently, Vioxx was considered a safer painkiller, until it was found to cause heart attacks and strokes, similar to another “safe and effective” product introduced about two years ago. Oxycontin was marketed as a nonaddictive pain killer until it devasted hundreds of thousands of lives and families and was shown to be otherwise.

YouTube screen grab

Physicians, upon medical school graduation, recite the Hippocratic Oath. Quoting from the revised version (simply because the language is easier to understand), physicians swear, “I will not be ashamed to say, ‘I know not’” and “Above all, I must not play at God.”

Saying “I don’t know” is what drives the pursuit of new or alternate hypotheses. Physicians of a few hundred years ago saw their bloodletting patients die and didn’t know why, so they devised better treatments by asking questions and not playing God.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Uniparty Sure Hates Democracy! By J.B. Shurk

By on January 9th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/

Watching the political Establishment freak out over twenty Republican members of Congress voting their own consciences in the election for House speaker has been hilarious.  Karl Rove, Dan Crenshaw, Sean Hannity, and just about anyone else whose sinecure and preeminence depend upon religious devotion to Washington’s status quo sounded like little Greta Thunberg whining, “How dare they!”  Oh, my goodness, some congressional representatives took it upon themselves to vote as they believe their district constituents would desire and not as the Uniparty nobles who insist on ruling the nation from their petty thrones demand.  Whatever shall we do if this lowly democratic spirit sweeps the land?

This is what’s wrong with the People’s House, where it is still occasionally possible to elect an iconoclast unbeholden to the Leviathan’s palace guard despite mail-in ballot fraud and outside money operations distorting local races: sometimes a freethinking heretic shows up in the nation’s capital with the beastly notion that a vote is more than ornamental pageantry garnishing a foregone conclusion.  Weren’t these Republican holdouts properly instructed that Kevin McCarthy is the Uniparty’s man?  An empty vessel of mediocre intellect and flaccid beliefs, Kevin is surely the only Republican who can lead the House!  We must bring McCarthyism back to Washington, or D.C. will become home to the right-wing nuts!

What a spectacle this whole affair has been.  Pretend President Biden and Senate Republicans agree: forcing the world to watch American legislators partake in repeated democratic votes without devolving into bloodshed (despite the anger management issues of Mike Rogers) is so embarrassing.  It is much more elegant when ballots can be printed, signatures forged, and elections certified according to the wishes of the ruling elites.  The appearance of democracy in the absence of it is ideal.  The practice of actual democracy would bring the whole government’s house of cards crashing down!

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

The European Union’s War on Israel by Bassam Tawil

By on January 9th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19293/european-union-war-israel

A confidential leaked document, composed by the EU mission in east Jerusalem, shows that the Europeans are actively working with, and on behalf of, the Palestinian Authority to take over Area C of the West Bank — although the area was clearly agreed on, by both Israel and the Palestinians, until further negotiations, to be under Israeli control.

“[T]he EU… insists that its positions are based on meticulous compliance with international law, EU law and charter, and also the Oslo Accord. This claim is surely defied by the leaked document in which we can see an activist EU striving to help the Palestinians take over Area C, the very area that is designated to Israel’s control per the Oslo Accord which the EU claims to uphold.” — Jenny Aharon, Jerusalem Post, December 28, 2022.

Aharon noted that while the EU was insisting that Israel abide by the Oslo Accords and that a Palestinian state should be established within the framework of a comprehensive peace agreement, the EU, at the same time, is trying to strip Israel of its rights according to that same agreement, which gave Israel responsibility over security, public order and all issues related to territory, including planning and zoning, in Area C.

The EU, in short, is encouraging the Palestinians not to return to the negotiating table with Israel. Instead, the EU is telling the Palestinians that the EU will help them steal land as an alternative to reaching a peaceful settlement with Israel through negotiations.

“The EU’s reported clandestine activity to undermine Israeli control in Area C and to advance illegal Palestinian development in those areas constitutes a clear and present threat to the security of the State of Israel, and is an act of blatant hostility and aggression.” — Letter from the Israel Defense and Security Forum, consisting of 16,000 former military, security and police officers; i24 News, December 21, 2022.

“As this document confirms, Europe’s use of labels like support for ‘civil society’ and ‘human rights’ were designed to hide the millions of euros given every year to selected allied NGOs, particularly in Area C, to create facts on the ground.” — Dr. Gerald Steinberg, quoted by JNS, January 5, 2023.

These revelations show that no one should be surprised when the E.U. condemns the new government for trying to save land in Yehuda and Shomron [the West Bank] — they [the EU and Palestinians] are the ones responsible for stealing it. – Dr. Eugene Kontorovich, quoted by JNS, January 5, 2023.

In 2022, illegal Palestinian construction in Area C increased by 80%. The report documents 5,535 new illegal structures built in 2022, compared to 3,076 structures in the same period in 2021. — Regavim, October 11, 2022.

The EU support for the Palestinian efforts to take over Area C is actually undermining the prospects of reaching a peaceful settlement between the Palestinians and Israel. The EU has not only damaged any chance for a negotiated settlement, but has duplicitously endorsed the Palestinians’ ongoing attempt to impose a solution on Israel rather than — as both parties involved agreed — to reach one through negotiations.

It is time to tell the EU to mind its own business and stop its anti-democratic meddling in other countries’ affairs.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Will Jordan Peterson Lose His License for Wrongthink? The Canadian psychologist is right to resist re-education. By Neeraja Deshpande

By on January 9th, 2023

https://www.thefp.com/p/will-jordan-peterson-lose-his-license?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Have you seen the “men will literally do X instead of going to therapy” meme? It’s funny: Men will literally join 10 improv teams instead of going to therapy. Men will literally teach you how to open a can of beans for 6 hours instead of going to therapy. You get the drift.

Canada’s most famous public intellectual, Jordan Peterson, brought that meme to real life this week when he announced he’d rather never work again than be forced onto the couch. 

I don’t blame him.

The College of Psychologists of Ontario has told Peterson that if he doesn’t go to therapy—sorry, a board-mandated “Coaching Program” with a board-issued therapist—it may revoke his license to practice psychology. 

What warranted this ultimatum? A few tweets and a podcast.

According to Peterson, about “a dozen people” from around the world complained to the college about comments he had made on Twitter and on Joe Rogan’s podcast, claiming that those statements had caused “harm.”

In March, the college began investigating these complaints. Then, in November, the college informed Peterson: “The comments at issue appear to undermine the public trust in the profession as a whole, and raise questions about your ability to carry out your responsibilities as a psychologist.” 

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

A Rendezvous With Rwanda? As Americans separate, do we really know the final consequences of what the diversity, equity, and inclusion tribalism truly entails? By Victor Davis Hanson

By on January 9th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/01/08/a-rendezvous-with-rwanda/

“Despite being Black, he [Rep. Byron Donalds] supports a policy agenda intent on upholding and perpetuating white supremacy.”—Representative Cori Bush (D-Mo.)

“Larry Elder [former candidate for governor of California] is the Black face of white supremacy. You’ve been warned.”—Erika Smith, Los Angeles Times columnist

America is an increasingly multiracial society. Despite its early history of slavery and racial segregation, and ongoing bias and tensions, the United States remains one of the few contemporary multiracial constitutional systems that have actually worked. Yet recently few have appreciated that achievement.

Usually multiracial nations and empires—Yugoslavia, the former Soviet Union, the Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires—require some level of coercion incompatible with a democratic constitution to force calm. Brazil, India, Lebanon, Nigeria, and Kenya  may be currently multiracial democracies in theory, but in fact they are often sectarian and tribal cauldrons.

In most such places, pride, solidarity—and even safety—are only found through common religious, ethnic, and racial bonds that become all-encompassing. The individual’s primary allegiance to each particular warring group inevitably becomes incompatible with every other’s overriding loyalties.

The United States is insidiously nearing that abyss. It has all but renounced its old commitment to the melting-pot, and a “content-of-our-character” ideal of assimilation and integration within a common culture. But as we obsess on race and accordingly separate, do we really know the final consequences of what the diversity/equity/inclusion tribalism actually entails?

The first rule of tribalism is that the racial or ethnic collective superimposes solidarity over the individual, who then becomes a mere cog in racial-political wheel. Conservatives such as Larry Elder or Byron Donalds become especially despised as examples of successful individuals who reject tribal labels and loyalties. Are LeBron James, Senator Tim Scott (R-S.C.), and Representative Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) all to be black comrades first and quite different individuals second—if at all? In the same manner, do Adam Schiff, Devin Nunes, Donald Trump, and Mark Milley all share identical and overriding loyalty to “whiteness,” to the degree that we forget about their individual personalities?

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