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China’s Terrifying Return to Maoism By Doug Bandow

Posted By on January 30th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/01/chinas-terrifying-return-to-maoism/

A recent report out of the U.K. reveals Beijing’s full-scale, wide-ranging assault on individual liberty in almost all its aspects.

O ne of the few issues on which Democrats and Republicans agree is that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has turned back toward Maoism. Xi Jinping’s regime is committed to eradicating the merest possibility that someone might have an independent thought.

The economy remains a socialist-market hybrid, while the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has made little effort to limit personal autonomy except where politics intrudes. However, just a hint of ideological disobedience now brings down the full weight of a vast domestic-security regime that spends more money than the People’s Liberation Army.

There are no easy policy answers for Washington. Repression is an essential part of today’s Chinese political system. It’s how current officials, starting at the top with Xi Jinping, retain their power, perquisites, wealth, status, and everything else that sets them apart from normal people. If there is an existential interest for the Chinese state, it is maintaining repression. The regime isn’t going to yield, irrespective of sanction, since its elites prefer power to anything else.

Violations of human rights are the norm in the PRC. In practice, civil liberties, free speech, and political freedom simply don’t exist there. China has essentially returned to the era of Mao Zedong, one of the CCP’s founders, who emerged atop the party after unceasingly brutal power struggles that shaped the party’s evolution.

The rungs on the CCP ladder were slippery indeed, as many once-dominant figures missed a step, plunging into the political netherworld below. Even Mao’s rise was sometimes interrupted. But he mixed determination, skill, and ruthlessness and ultimately outshone his rivals. He famously announced the creation of the People’s Republic of China in Tiananmen Square on October 1, 1949, and was responsible for virtually every brutal step taken by the CCP in its early years.

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Democrats’ Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act Shields Jihadists By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on January 30th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/01/democrats-domestic-terrorism-prevention-act-shields-jihadists/

You needn’t read far into this bill to hear the alarm bells.

H ow interesting that the familiar array of Islamist-apologist and left-wing groups, notoriously opposed to U.S. counterterrorism efforts, has lined up in support of congressional Democrats’ latest push for a “Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act.” Could it be because the proposed legislation goes out of its way to shield domestic terrorists who are catalyzed by foreign jihadist organizations?

You needn’t read far into the bill to hear the alarm bells.

Section 2 provides a definition for “domestic terrorism.” Sounds sensible . . . until you remember that federal law already has a definition of domestic terrorism. The term is codified by Section 2331(5) of the criminal code. It’s been there for a long time, and it’s perfectly fine. So why would we need another one?

Obviously, Democrats are not defining but redefining. The point is not to clarify what is already clear about domestic terrorism. It is to carve out an exemption from the definition — specifically, to create a new safe haven for a very specific category of terrorist.

Under the longstanding Section 2331 definition, “domestic terrorism” means activities that occur primarily within the territorial U.S., that are “dangerous to human life,” that violate state or federal law, and that are intended to accomplish one of the following three objectives: 1) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, 2) to influence government policy by intimidation or coercion, or 3) to affect government conduct by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping.

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Politics The uncomfortable truth about Black Lives Matter, Malcolm X and anti-Semitism History has told us that if you want to know a person’s truest nature, examine his attitude toward Jews Jake Wallis Simons

Posted By on January 30th, 2021

https://spectator.us/topic/uncomfortable-truth-black-lives-matter-malcolm-x-anti-semitism/

Fifty-five years ago, Martin Luther King delivered a speech to 50,000 Americans in which he demanded justice for persecuted Jews behind the Iron Curtain.

‘The absence of opportunity to associate as Jews in the enjoyment of Jewish culture and religious experience becomes a severe limitation upon the individual,’ he said. ‘Negros can well understand and sympathise with this problem.’

He then stated, in typically uncompromising style, that Jewish history and culture were ‘part of everyone’s heritage, whether he be Jewish, Christian or Moslem.’ He concluded: 

‘We cannot sit complacently by the wayside while our Jewish brothers in the Soviet Union face the possible extinction of their cultural and spiritual life. Those that sit at rest, while others take pains, are tender turtles, and buy their quiet with disgrace.’

This speech – released last week by the National Coalition Supporting Eurasian Jewry (NCEJ) to mark Martin Luther King Day, and coming just days before we remember the Holocaust – feels particularly poignant in the newly radicalised atmosphere of 2021. Today’s activists in the Black Lives Matter movement would be wise to remember King’s words.

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The Big Tech bullies Control who gets to speak, and you control the entire political debate Rod Liddle

Posted By on January 30th, 2021

https://spectator.us/topic/big-tech-bullies-facebook/

I was in the kitchen preparing the family’s dinner when the inauguration of Joe Biden was on TV, so I caught only mysterious fragments of his speech, over the noise of the blender and stuff. ‘I want an hour — an hour — with my own teen wolf,’ Joe seemed to say at one point. And then: ‘America, America, I give to you my vest.’ I raced through to the living room when someone announced that Garth Crooks was going to sing ‘Amazing Grace’ — good choice, Joe, I thought. Garth seems to have lost a little weight and indeed color, but he did a decent job.

It all went well enough, given the circumstances, and at no point did Joe ask why all those people were there and was it his birthday or something. A very self-regarding young woman appeared and read an awful poem, so I went back into the kitchen. Truth be told, I can’t bear the chest-beating pomposity of the Americans on occasions like this, and the kitsch and the confected emotion and the dire music. I think I preferred the nonagenarians of the old USSR standing implacably as loads of nukes trundled by. Certainly the Russians have the better national anthem.

Still, the BBC presenters seemed to like it, sobbing with happiness at every juncture. I hope the new director-general, Tim Davie, was watching the coverage and noted the somewhat different tone to that which accompanied the inauguration of Donald Trump four years previously. It was a close call between Auntie and CNN as to who could provide the most dementedly partisan coverage — the difference being that we don’t have Fox to offer a bit of balance.

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“Sad and Scary”: Google Removes Doctors’ Senate Testimony Videos

Posted By on January 30th, 2021

https://twitter.com/SenRonJohnson/status/1354580111849381888

Senator Ron Johnson

@SenRonJohnson

Social media censorship just ratcheted up to a new level. Google’s YouTube removed two videos of doctors testifying under oath at my US Senate hearing on early treatment of COVID. Another body blow to freedom of speech and expression. Very sad and scary. Where does this end?

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Tracking Twitter’s Growth: Did Trump Ban Cause a Dip? By Kalev Leetaru

Posted By on January 30th, 2021

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/01/29/tracking_twitters_growth_did_trump_ban_cause_a_dip_145154.html

As COVID-19 began sweeping across the world last spring, Twitter experienced phenomenal growth with much of the planet’s population confined to their homes, helping the platform recover from a seven-year slump in daily tweet volume. As the pandemic has worn on, has Twitter continued to grow? How did the changes the platform made around the 2020 presidential election affect its growth and has its banning of Donald Trump caused it to lose users?

While Twitter itself does not publish detailed usage statistics, it is possible to estimate its growth from the daily random sample that it makes available of 1% of all tweets, which is highly correlated with its actual growth. Using this approach, the timeline below shows the estimated number of tweets per day on Twitter from Jan. 1, 2012 through Jan. 5, 2021 (gaps are days with missing data).

Since its peak in July 2013, Twitter was on a years-long decline through the end of 2018, but had begun slowly growing again over the course of 2019. Then, in the space of just two weeks in the middle of March 2020, as lockdowns swept the world, the platform grew by almost 100 million tweets a day, rising back to its July 2013 numbers.

The timeline below zooms into the Jan. 1, 2020 through Jan. 5, 2021 period, showing this phenomenal growth. Even as lockdowns eased across the world earlier this year, Twitter use did not decline, showing remarkable staying power. From Oct. 7-20, daily Twitter volume increased another 50 million tweets a day as all eyes focused on the U.S. election, then suddenly dropped by around 70 million tweets a day almost overnight on Oct. 21-22, and only began to recover on Dec. 17. What might explain this strange anomaly?

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Gaslighting: Technocracy’s Preferred Weapon of War by Linda Goudsmit

Posted By on January 30th, 2021

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/25054/gaslighting-technocracy-preferred-weapon-of-war http://goudsmit.pundicity.com and website: http://lindagoudsmit.com

It is my opinion that the Democrat bill, For the People Act 2021 H.R. 1 – 117th Congress (2021-2022), a laughable title, is the fatal blow to free and fair elections, and the end of the United States of America as we know it.

In case you think I am exaggerating, consider this checklist:

● The coronavirus “pandemic” was an economic bioweapon designed to collapse Trump’s roaring U.S. economy, terrify Americans into submission, and justify mail-in ballots. The pandemic is and always was political medicine disguised as public health ✔︎

● The mail-in ballots augmented the digital interference via Dominion Voting Systems/software to steal the 2020 election ✔︎

● The stolen election installed China-centric puppet Joe Biden ✔︎

● Biden’s administration can now pack the court and enable imposition of the lethal For the People Act of 2021, which puts the Uniparty of corrupt Democrats, Republicans in name only (RINOs), and Americans in name only (AINOs), in control of U.S. elections in perpetuity ✔︎

● The globalist Uniparty will have succeeded in establishing planetary governance through “legal” means by duping the public with catastrophic humanitarian hoaxes that have deceitful names like “For the People Act 2021.” No bullets required ✔︎

I am witnessing the greatest, freest republic on earth being transformed into a technocracy that resembles communist China, the most oppressive regime on earth. The coordinated disinformation campaign of the Democrat/technocrat/globalist narrative is an orchestrated effort to make Americans believe the unbelievable, and accept the unacceptable.

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The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics by Salena Zito and Brad Todd

Posted By on January 30th, 2021

A CNN political analyst and a Republican strategist reframe the discussion of the “Trump voter” to answer the question, What’s next?
 
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY FOREIGN AFFAIRS • “Unlike most retellings of the 2016 election, The Great Revolt provides a cohesive, non-wild-eyed argument about where the Republican Party could be headed.”—The Atlantic
 
Political experts were wrong about the 2016 election and they continue to blow it, predicting the coming demise of the president without pausing to consider the durability of the winds that swept him into office.

Salena Zito and Brad Todd have traveled over 27,000 miles of country roads to interview more than three hundred Trump voters in ten swing counties. What emerges is a portrait of a group of citizens who span job descriptions, income brackets, education levels, and party allegiances, united by their desire to be part of a movement larger than themselves. They want to put pragmatism before ideology and localism before globalism, and demand the respect they deserve from Washington.

The 2016 election signaled a realignment in American politics that will outlast any one president. Zito and Todd reframe the discussion of the “Trump voter” to answer the question, What’s next?

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New conservative student newspaper at Univ. of Chicago, The Chicago Thinker, raises hackles among free speech opponents there By Thomas Lifson

Posted By on January 30th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/01/new_conservative_student_newspaper_at_univ_of_chicago_the_emchicago_thinkerem_raises_hackles_among_free_speech_opponents_there.html

Until Evita Duffy, one of its founders, wrote at The Federalist about the controversy at the University of Chicago over continuing that school’s commitment to free speech, I had never heard of The Chicago Thinker. It is a conservative student newspaper that Duffy and a few others created last year. I have no idea if it took inspiration from this online journal but would be highly pleased if that were the case. Free speech and free thought are two sides of the same coin.

What moved Ms. Duffy to write for a national audience in The Federalist was this:

An article titled “Instructing Insurrections: How UChicago Can Avoid Creating the Next Ted Cruz” was published on Sunday in “The Chicago Maroon,” a nearly 130-year-old left-wing student newspaper at the University of Chicago.

Replete with obnoxious Ivy League elitism, the article reads like an instruction guide on how to undermine the university’s renowned “Chicago Principles,” which guarantee free speech and open discourse on campus, and how to gaslight conservative students in the classroom. It is also a direct attack on the “Chicago Thinker,” an opposing conservative student newspaper I co-founded this summer, which is the sole voice on campus deviating from its woke orthodoxy.

Here is what the author of the attack on free speech, Kelly Hui, wrote about The Chicago Thinker:

 The Chicago Thinker, UChicago’s new conservative paper, was founded to create a space that “challenges the mob’s crusade against free speech,” as “some things are too sacred to surrender to the mob, and the free exchange of ideas is one of them.” My peers at the Thinker may think me hypocritical, then, for wanting to reimagine free speech on campus. It is, after all, these very principles that affirm my ability to openly criticize the administration, or, say, call for the abolition of the University. But my words—radical as they may be, disagreeable as they certainly are to some—do not do any harm. They do not inspire hate or fear. In short, they have no capacity for violence. And now, more than ever, we are seeing how the latent violence wrought in language can speak (or tweet) violence and death into the world.

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Andrew Cuomo’s Shame

Posted By on January 30th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/01/andrew-cuomos-shame/

‘We were ambushed like no other state,” New York governor Andrew Cuomo contended to MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace on January 26. “Again, it was from federal incompetence. They thought the virus was in China, it left China, it had left China, it had gone to Europe and it came here for three months before they ever knew. Incompetent government kills people.”

Two days later Letitia James, the state’s attorney general, who is a liberal Democrat like Cuomo and who enjoyed Cuomo’s backing when she sought her current office, released a cautiously worded yet infuriating 76-page report suggesting that Cuomo’s incompetence cost lives.

Extrapolating from a survey of about 10 percent of state nursing homes, James estimated that the actual number of COVID deaths related to such facilities was about 50 percent higher than the official figure, which was about 8,700. Within hours, the state Department of Health scrambled to add to its nursing-home total 3,800 souls who had died in hospitals after becoming infected in nursing homes, bringing the official number up to 12,473.

As New York City mayor Bill de Blasio put it with uncharacteristic eloquence, “These are our loved ones we lost, you know, it’s someone’s grandma, someone’s mother or father, aunts or uncles, this is families missing someone dear to them.”