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Get Tomorrow’s Disinformation Today!

Posted By on February 28th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/02/28/get-tomorrows-disinformation-today/

This disinformation business sure has gotten complicated lately.

In the past few days, a key federal agency concluded that COVID was likely the result of a Chinese lab leak. A prestigious medical journal reported that natural immunity is better than vaccines against COVID. Another that mask mandates were worthless. And President Joe Biden’s advanced age is now, according to Biden, a legitimate issue.

All of these claims had been labeled as “disinformation” by the mainstream press, by “independent” fact-checkers, by social media platforms. Anyone who espoused them was attacked as a crazy anti-vaxxer, 4Chan racist, Russian stooge who deserved to be de-platformed, demonetized, and discredited.

Take the lab-leak story. The Energy Department, “citing new intelligence,” changed its view on the origins of COVID-19 and now thinks it did, in fact, escape from a lab in Wuhan, China.

It wasn’t long ago that such a claim opened you up to ridicule or worse.

A-list journalist Anne Applebaum once compared Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., to a Soviet propagandist for suggesting that COVID came from a lab. A New York Times reporter said the lab-leak theory had “racist roots.” The editor in chief of Scientific American called it a “conspiracy theory.”  CNN said it was “like something out of a comic book.”

Politifact, one of the supposed independent guardians against disinformation, said that any such claim was “inaccurate and ridiculous. We rate it Pants on Fire!” Facebook banned posts mentioning the lab-leak theory.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

We Need to Talk About Mark Levin’s Interview With Ron DeSantis Last Night By Paula Bolyard

Posted By on February 28th, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/columns/paula-bolyard/2023/02/27/we-need-to-talk-about-mark-levins-interview-with-ron-desantis-last-night-n1674153

On Sunday night, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis appeared on “Life, Liberty, and Levin” on Fox News, purportedly to promote his new book, The Courage to Be Free, which comes out this week.

While DeSantis has not yet declared that he’s running for president, he certainly sounded like a man who’s making the case for his candidacy. Or, if not, he’s making a case for conservatism as the path to American success and prosperity— the subtitle of the book is “Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival.”

As my colleague Stephen Green pointed out earlier today:

DeSantis isn’t traveling to early presidential primary states like Iowa or New Hamphire, at least not yet. Instead, his most recent tour was through three struggling Deep Blue cities to tout what he’s done differently in Florida… DeSantis is calmly but quite publicly holding up his state as a model for the nation, just like a governor running for president would do. Except that he has yet to announce that he’s running. He hasn’t even formed one of those exploratory committees that allows a not-yet candidate to fundraise.

I don’t see how it’s a bad thing for DeSantis to wait to announce, if he does indeed plan to run. Does anyone really think the primary season is too short and needs to be lengthened? The 2016 primary seemed like it would never end—and the personal attacks and circular firing squad did nothing to help spread the message about the benefits of conservatism.

We’re still more than a year out from the primaries. What’s the rush? If DeSantis can run a soft campaign, while continuing to notch more conservative wins on his Florida belt, he can stay above the fray and avoid some of the pitfalls that early announcers often run into, including candidate fatigue. Remember how sick to death we all were of hearing from the 2016 candidates, many of whom we previously liked? For what that’s worth, a lot of formerly vociferous Trump supporters are sick of his bellyaching on social media day and night and his silly attacks on DeSantis, who is one of the few Republicans actually getting anything meaningful done.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

A Season for Swamp Draining The new House seeks to restrain federal bureaucrats. Do we dare to dream? James Freeman

Posted By on February 28th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-season-for-swamp-draining-21cf59f5?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

Two weeks ago this column shared the cheery news that the 118th Congress had so far managed to avoid doing anything of consequence to us. The lucky streak continues and this welcome respite from the misguided frenzy of Biden lawmaking could be just the start. Now some taxpayers are beginning to dream that Beltway lawmakers might be able to achieve even less than nothing—an actual reduction in the burdens Washington imposes on the citizenry.

Lisa Rein and Jacqueline Alemany report for the Washington Post:

At a House hearing this month on fraud and waste in pandemic aid, some Republicans zeroed in on one group in particular for criticism: the federal employees overseeing the money.
“Fire people if they don’t do things they’re supposed to do,” Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) said. “That is our biggest problem in the federal government. Nobody can be held accountable.”
That sentiment is animating a newly empowered GOP House majority eager to ramp up scrutiny of the army of civil servants who run the government’s day-to-day operations. The effort includes seeking testimony from middle- and lower-level workers who are part of what Republicans have long derided as the “deep state,” while some lawmakers are drafting bills that have little chance of passing the Democrat-led Senate but give Republicans a chance to argue for reining in the federal bureaucracy of 2.1 million employees.

Why not take the chance, especially given the surging cost of maintaining this vast unproductive enterprise? The Post report continues:

…House Republican leaders have told almost all of their committees to come up with plans by March to slash spending and beef up oversight of federal agencies in their jurisdiction.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

The ‘Not a Consensus’ Wuhan Covid Dodge The White House tries to downplay the news of ‘new’ virus information.

Posted By on February 28th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/white-house-energy-department-covid-lab-china-national-security-john-kirby-299ee360?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

White House spokespersons played the press corps like a Stradivarius on Monday as they ducked questions about Sunday’s report that the Energy Department has concluded the Covid virus probably originated in a Chinese laboratory.

“There is not a consensus right now in the U.S. government about exactly how Covid started,” said John Kirby, the White House national-security spokesman. “There is just not an intelligence community consensus.”

So what? When was the last time there was an intelligence community consensus on anything? No reporter asked Mr. Kirby that question, but we don’t mind doing so.

By its very nature, intelligence is usually murky and open to different interpretations. That’s why agencies attach terms like “low confidence” or “moderate confidence” to their judgments. A difference in agency views can be useful because it means there is less chance of groupthink influencing policy choices.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Holocaust is a myth, say a quarter of young Dutch Bruno Waterfield

Posted By on February 28th, 2023

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/db56e1a8-9c9e-11ed-8201-2ed91f44d1e8?shareToken=5f00e026edb6acc3ffce3b840d61b95a

Almost one in four Dutch people born after 1980 think the Holocaust is “a myth” or that the number of Jewish people killed by the Nazis is “greatly exaggerated”.

Research by the US-based Claims Conference, an organisation representing Jews in negotiations with Germany for compensation and restitution, has found “shocking and disturbing” ignorance among millennials and Generation Z in the Netherlands, which ranked the worst for Holocaust denial from a selection of Western countries surveyed.

Almost a third (32 per cent) of Dutch millennials do not know that Anne Frank, whose diary written while hiding under Nazi occupation is a worldwide bestseller, died in a concentration camp.

A total of 2,000 Dutch people were polled last December following similar surveys in the United States, Britain, France, Austria and Canada.

More than half of those surveyed in the Netherlands, and up to three out of five younger people, do not know that six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, while 23 per cent said the crimes of Nazi Germany were untrue or exaggerated.

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SOCIAL JUSTICE SHRINKS: SALLY SATEL

Posted By on February 27th, 2023

https://www.aei.org/op-eds/social-justice-shrinks-how-identity-politics-infected-therapy/

In winter 2019, Leslie Elliott enrolled as a graduate student in Antioch University’s Mental Health Counseling program. At first, she found it to be a stimulating master’s program — informative and clinically relevant. Then she took a required course in “multicultural counseling.”

“We were taught that race should be the dominant lens through which clients were to be understood and therapy conducted,” says Elliott, a mother of four who’d majored in psychology.

Elliott’s professors taught her, for example, that if clients were white, she was supposed to help them see how they unwittingly perpetuate white supremacy. “We were encouraged to regard white clients as ‘reservoirs of racism and oppression.’” White women, one professor told a class, were “basic bitches,” “Beckys” and “nothing special.”

If the client were black, Elliott was told to ask how it felt to sit with her, a white counselor. If the client felt at ease, “my job — regardless of what brought him to therapy — was to make him more aware of how being black compounded, or perhaps caused, his problems.

After the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, the three-year program intensified its emphasis on race and oppression, making clear that counselors were to be foot soldiers in the culture wars. “Incredible as it sounds,” says Elliott, “we were encouraged to see ourselves as activists and remake ourselves as social change agents.”

“Critical social-justice therapists” is what Aaron Kindsvatter and others call this new breed of mental health professional graduating from programs across the country. Last year, Kindsvatter le his tenured position at the University of Vermont to pursue private practice in Burlington, where he has treated a handful of clients who were, in his words, “victims of indoctrination attempts” by their “authoritarian” therapists. To be clear, Elliott and Kindsvatter are not talking about a mismatch in sociopolitical views wherein, say, a client is conservative and the therapist is liberal or progressive. To be sure, such a
discrepancy can — though by no means inevitably does — create tension. Studies have shown, in fact, that therapeutic relationships were stronger when clients felt comfortable disclosing their political views to the therapist and when the therapist was accepting of those views.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Realism on China by Pete Hoekstra

Posted By on February 27th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19439/realism-on-china

What is clear is that, intentionally or not, China has shown America’s need to get serious about the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its expansionist global aims.

As the latest provocation by the CCP plays out, it gets more disturbing. The media, and even US President Joe Biden, describe the CCP as a “competitor” and downplay any possible conflict. When the CCP flies spy balloons across the continent, opens police stations in our cities, infiltrates our universities, poisons more than 100,000 Americans with hard drugs each year, and announces its plans to replace the United States, it is hard to argue we are in anything but a “Cold War” with the CCP.

It is time for the U.S. government and our allies to definitively outline the clear challenge and danger the CCP poses to the West. The behavior demonstrated by the CCP spy balloon is not an aberration; it is part of a dangerous pattern. This includes the CCP’s longtime intellectual property theft; breaches of cybersecurity; its increasing global military presence; expanding and modernizing its military, and its purchases of farmland near US military sites. Given that this is the reality, the Biden Administration must act more forcefully in response to the CCP’s aggressive behavior or, through passivity, it will invite an even greater challenge from China.

Given the CCP’s clear efforts against America, why does there continue to be such a muted response from the Biden Administration? While they haven’t explicitly said it, one reason might be climate change.

Other reports, however, strongly contradict the Annual Threat Assessment. These assert 1) that “apocalyptic claims about climate change are wrong” and that climate change is “a fraud”; 2) that China has less than no interest in cutting emissions; 3) that green energy actually consists of a huge transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich to “destroy capitalism” and punish the West for having “pulled millions out of poverty and shaped the modern world”; 4) that cutting back on fossil fuels hurts the poor , it hits them worst ; and 5) that climate change is basically caused by sun flares and there is not a blessed thing you can do about them. Vested interests can offer grants for “scientific papers” to promote their businesses; sun-flares cannot offer grants.

No matter where one falls on climate change, the CCP’s brazen spy balloon flight has left little doubt about the threat the Chinese Communist regime poses. It is past time for all Americans to recognize and respond to this threat.

It was impossible to miss — a giant white balloon with a massive solar array and a yet-to-be-publicly-disclosed sensor package flying over some of America’s most sensitive military sites. In the time since China’s spy balloon traversed Alaska, Canada and the continental United States, details surrounding the surveillance overflight are murky at best as the Biden Administration has provided confused, conflicted and muddled statements to Americans and even Congress.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

The Solution to Ballot Fraud By Jay Valentine

Posted By on February 27th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/02/the_solution_to_ballot_fraud.html

The irresistible force is mail-in ballots, nonexistent signature verification, phantom voter rolls, a feckless Republican Party, Republican governors donating tax money to a George Soros–funded entity to clean voter rolls — election commissions changing ZIP codes so mail-in ballots stack up — courts refusing to remove dead people from voter rolls unless they miss two consecutive elections, and a Republican presidential candidate who thinks he can win with ballot-harvesting.

What could go wrong in 2024?

In 2000, the national realization was that election fraud is industrial-scale, committed by election commissions or with their acquiescence.  It is a sovereign crime.

The 2020 realization is that voter integrity teams cannot remove phantoms from voter rolls — even with death certificates.

This irresistible force will not dissipate.

Wisconsin advanced the state-of-the-scam to further flood voter rolls with anyone claiming existence. 

Forty years of Republican acquiescence and temerity brought us here — the end of free and fair elections.  Election fraud is baked into every state’s voter rolls — protected by government.

This week, we demonstrated a solution.

We sent an open letter to ERIC, the organization, ostensibly founded with help from George Soros, managing voter rolls for almost 30 states — many Republican.  We sent George a copy.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Auschwitz Studies The difference between knowledge and ignorance, between truth and lies, is the difference between life and death. By Lloyd Billingsley

Posted By on February 27th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/02/26/auschwitz-studies/

A review of The Escape Artist: the Man Who Broke out of Auschwitz to Warn the World,
by Jonathan Freedland, (HarperCollins, 400 pages, $28.99).

The murder of Jews began on December 8, 1941, one day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The German National Socialists herded victims into vans, locked the doors, then fed in the deadly exhaust fumes. In four months, the Nazis killed 50,000 Jews that way, but as author Jonathan Freedland explains, the killers didn’t want gas chambers on wheels.

They built “fixed purpose-built camps,” such as Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka and Auschwitz, a former Polish army barracks near the village of Oswiecim in Upper Silesia. The remote location and proximity to railway lines made it ideal for “the method of murder by gas.” Walter Rosenberg, also known as Rudi Vrba, was the first Jew to break out of the place. The Escape Artist: the Man Who Broke out of Auschwitz to Warn the World is based on his account.

Walter hailed from Slovakia, where “the state religion of the infant republic was Nazism, albeit in a Slovak denomination.” Since Walter met the legal definition of a Jew, his high-school education was terminated. To prevent Jews from studying at home, they were ordered to hand in all textbooks.

The regime of Father Jozef Tiso, a Catholic priest, also banned Jews from government jobs, restricted them from the professions and later banned Jews from owning cars, radios, and even sports equipment. Walter landed on a list for deportation and “resettlement” which took him to Majdanek and then Auschwitz, also known as Auschwitz-Birkenau. 

There he became “a witness to and target of a program of industrialized continent-wide murder” that “aimed both to eradicate an entire people and turn a profit for the murderers.” 

Among the camp’s living dead, known as Muselmanner, Walter spots engineers and managers of the site’s proprietor, the German industrial conglomerate I.G. Farben. 

BOOKS Comments turned off

Victor Davis Hanson :Refighting the Vietnam War Triumph Retaken shows that America’s war in Vietnam could have been won earlier at far less cost, and in fact almost was, even belatedly by 1968.

Posted By on February 27th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/02/26/refighting-the-vietnam-war/

Military historian and Hillsdale College professor Mark Moyar has just published Triumph Regained: The Vietnam War, 1965-1968, which is the second in what will become a massive three-volume revision of the entire Vietnam War. It is a book that should be widely read, much discussed, and reviewed in depth regardless of one’s view of that sad chapter in American diplomacy and conflict in Vietnam. 

The first book, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965 appeared in 2006. It gained considerable attention for its heterodox analysis of the postwar origins of communist aggression against the South, beginning with the disastrous French colonial experience and its transference to the Americans. Moyar described the Byzantine intrigue through which the Kennedy Administration inserted American ground troops into Vietnam, and why and how his successor Lyndon B. Johnson rapidly escalated the American presence.  

Moyar’s controversial argument in volume one centered on the disastrous decisions of these two administrations that ensured Americans would be sent into an uninviting distant theater of operations in the dangerous neighborhood of both communist China and Russia. Worse, they would be asked to fight under self-imposed limitations of the nuclear age in which their leaders could not achieve victory or perhaps even define it.  

Still, Moyar argued that there was nevertheless a chance to achieve a South-Korean-like solution at much less cost, one that was thrown away through a series of American blunders. Most grievous was the American support for the 1963 coup that removed South-Vietnamese strongman president Ngo Dinh Diem and led to his almost immediate assassination‚ even as he was evolving into a viable wartime leader.  

Moyar additionally deplored the biased and lockstep reporting of anti-war media, including its icons David “The Best and the Brightest” Halberstam and Neil “A Bright, Shining Lie” Sheehan, who operated on ideological premises far different from reportage in World War II and Korea. Both characteristically exaggerated American shortcomings consistent with their theme that Vietnam was an anti-colonialist war of liberation rather than a Cold War proxy fight over unilateral communist aggression.