Good, Reliable Data Hard to Find

Doctor Dispels Coronavirus Fears

‘99.8 Percent of People Get Through this with Little to No Progressive or Significant Disease’  

Hannah Bleau
Breitbart News


Dr. Dan Erickson, owner of Accelerated Urgent Care, spoke at Monday’s “White Coat Summit” on Capitol Hill as part of a greater effort to extinguish fears surrounding the Chinese coronavirus and reminded the public that “99.8 percent of people get through this with little to no progressive or significant disease.”

Erickson addressed the dominant narrative of rising cases of the virus within the U.S. and pointed out that it is causing undue fear.  “A case is a person, healthy, that tested positive. The vast majority. But the public hears cases and thinks, ‘Oh my goodness. These are sick people!’ No the vast majority — 99.8 percent of people get through this with little to no progressive or significant disease,” Erickson said.

The focus should not center on cases, he continued. Rather, the narrative should focus on hospitalizations and deaths that “are appropriately coded on a death certificate,” he said, stressing “appropriately coded.”

The Fundamentals Must be Already Fixed and In Place

No More Betrayals

Sen. Josh Hawley Sets The Standard For Conservative Supreme Court Justices

'If there is no indication in their record that at any time they have acknowledged that Roe was wrong at the time it was decided, then I’m not going to vote for them.'

Christopher Bedford
The Federalist

Social conservatives are done being taken for granted by the GOP: That’s the message Sen. Josh Hawley shot across the party and administration’s bow Sunday, setting a brave and admirable standard for Christian legislators that is sure to pit him against powerful Washington Republicans and Democrats.

“I will vote only for those Supreme Court nominees who have explicitly acknowledged that Roe v. Wade is wrongly decided.” Hawley told The Washington Post. “By explicitly acknowledged, I mean on the record and before they were nominated.”

“I don’t want private assurances from candidates. I don’t want to hear about their personal views, one way or another. I’m not looking for forecasts about how they may vote in the future or predictions. I don’t want any of that. I want to see on the record, as part of their record, that they have acknowledged in some forum that Roe v. Wade, as a legal matter, is wrongly decided.”

The junior senator from Missouri is a member of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee, through which any of President Donald Trump’s potential future nominees to the Supreme Court must pass before being brought to the floor for a vote. Conservative judges have been a major point for this administration, beginning during the campaign when, working closely with The Federalist Society and The Heritage Foundation, Trump released a list of who he would nominate, exciting then-skeptical conservatives.

Since then, conservatives have been routinely disappointed by Republican-nominated justices, quietly complaining about the GOP and the powerful, conservative Federalist Society’s tendency to focus on justices who have established records of conservative and libertarian business and government rulings, but no firmly established record of rulings that protect either marriage or the lives of the unborn.

If Trump Hit's The Right Notes, It Will Be "All Over, Rover"

Critical to Trump's Re-Election

5 Things Trump Should Start Running On Right Now

By this point in the election cycle, we should be hearing about the two candidates’ visions for the next four years. Trump should hammer these five things if he wants to beat Biden.

Kyle Sammin
The Federalist

The coronavirus pandemic and recession that followed make it hard for any other news to make it to the front page, but the end of the tragedy is in sight. Just this week, researchers at Oxford announced positive results in human trials for their vaccine. Even if we are not yet at the beginning of the end, we may be, as Winston Churchill once said, at the end of the beginning.

That means it might be time, at last, for the presidential campaign to focus on more than the pandemic. By this point in the election cycle, we should be hearing about the two candidates’ visions for the next four years.

Looking at President Trump’s statements and actions over the past few years, one can discern a pattern. Overall, it comes down to the idea of protecting American freedom in all its forms. Emphasizing these five themes of protection could summarize for voters what they would get from four more years of Trump in the White House.

1. Protecting American Jobs

If there is one way in which Trump departed from Republican orthodoxy in 2016, it was on trade protection. Maintaining this message is paramount. The importance of jobs and the meaning of work used to be recognized across party lines in America.

Increasingly, however, voices on the left are discarding the universal virtue of industriousness and advocating instead for a managed decline in which vast swaths of the populace are considered unemployable. Many moderates in both parties would respond to a message of getting more people off welfare and into jobs.

How could Trump sharpen this message for voters?

Well Beyond Credulity Now

Church Defies California Orders To Close Doors

'We cannot and will not acquiesce to a government-imposed moratorium on our weekly congregational worship,' John MacArthur and the church's elder board said in a statement.

Elle Reynolds
Breitbart News

John MacArthur, evangelist and pastor of Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California, defied state orders to limit worship gatherings in a statement released Friday.

“In response to the recent state order requiring churches in California to limit or suspend all meetings indefinitely, we, the pastors and elders of Grace Community Church, respectfully inform our civic leaders that they have exceeded their legitimate jurisdiction,” the statement said. “Faithfulness to Christ prohibits us from observing the restrictions they want to impose on our corporate worship services.”

On July 13, California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced new restrictions, requiring certain counties on a “monitoring list” to stop indoor worship services. Los Angeles County, where Grace Community Church is located, was one of 30 counties on the monitoring list as of July 13.

“In these counties, we have added a requirement that we close indoor operations” for certain sectors which include worship services, Newsom said in an announcement. He also suggested that restrictions would not end anytime soon. “Until there is a vaccine or effective therapy, we will be mitigating the spread of COVID-19 for the long term,” read one of the slides Newsom presented. “Californians must adapt to new behaviors if we are to slow the spread.”

In response, MacArthur and the elder board of Grace Community Church have a clear message for the state of California. “We cannot and will not acquiesce to a government-imposed moratorium on our weekly congregational worship or other regular corporate gatherings,” they said.

When officials restrict church attendance to a certain number, they attempt to impose a restriction that in principle makes it impossible for the saints to gather as the church.

Will the Majority Decide "Enough is Enough"

Today’s Revolutionaries Aren’t Like Their ’60s Predecessors

They’re far more dangerous.

By Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online

In the 1960s and early ’70s, the U.S. was convulsed by massive protests calling for radical changes in the country’s attitudes on race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. The Vietnam War and widespread college deferments were probably the fuel that ignited prior peaceful civil disobedience.

Sometimes the demonstrations became violent, as with the Watts riots of 1965 and the protests at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. Terrorists from the Weathermen (later called the Weather Underground) bombed dozens of government buildings.

The ’60s revolution introduced to the country everything from hippies, communes, free love, mass tattooing, commonplace profanity, rampant drug use, rock music, and high divorce rates to the War on Poverty, massive government growth, feminism, affirmative action, and race/gender/ethnic college curricula.

The enemies of the ’60s counterculture were the “establishment” — politicians, corporations, the military, and the “square” generation in general. Leftists targeted their parents, who had grown up in the Great Depression. That generation had won World War II and returned to create a booming post-war economy. After growing up with economic and military hardship, they sought a return to comfortable conformity in the 1950s.

A half-century after the earlier revolution, today’s cultural revolution is vastly different — and far more dangerous. 

UK Fertility Rate Falls; Hungary's Rises

UK: One Third of Babies Born to Foreign Mothers

Fertility Rate Falls to Lowest Level Since Before World War II

Kurt Zindulka
Breitbart News

The fertility rate for women under the age of 30 in England has fallen to the lowest level since 1938, with nearly one-third of babies being born to foreign mothers, according to figures released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

The ONS report, which was released on Wednesday, found that fertility rates declined for all age groups in England and Wales, with the exception of women over the age of 40, who saw the rate of births increase to 16.5 per 1,000 women. 

The total fertility rate (TFR) for England and Wales decreased from 1.7 children per woman in 2018 to 1.65 children per woman in 2019, which is lower than all recorded years except 2000, 2001 and 2002.  (Fertility rates are determined by calculating the average number of children a woman gives birth to in her lifetime. A fertility rate of 2.1 children per woman is required to maintain a country’s population.)

The report also found that over a quarter of all live births (28.7 per cent) were to women born outside the United Kingdom, the highest percentage since 1969. The country with the highest number of women giving birth in the UK was Poland with 16,737 births, barely edging out Pakistani women, who recorded 16,320 births last year.

Pakistan also represented the highest number of fathers born outside the country, with 17,519 Pakistani men siring children in the UK last year.  As a whole, there was a 2.5 per cent drop in live births in England and Wales in 2019 from the previous year, and a 12.2 per cent decrease since 2012 — the most recent peak in births in the UK.

In response to the report, author, homemaker, and traditional family advocate Alena Kate Pettitt told Breitbart London: “It is unsurprising that fewer British women are choosing to have children.

Slowly Dying Cultures

Childlessness On The Rise in Scandinavia

Overall Fertility Rates Falling

Not only are couples having fewer children, but there is an increase in the number of people who never have children at all. 

Virginia Hale
Breitbart News

Childlessness is becoming increasingly common in Scandinavia, according to new research.

A study by the Denmark-based Rockwool Foundation revealed that fertility rates in northern Europe are largely declining. Not only are couples having fewer children on average, but there is a distinct increase in the number of people who go through life without ever having children at all. 

Peter Fallesen, a senior researcher at the foundation, said there were a number of causes for the slump including that “society has, to a greater extent, lost its taste for having children”, but acknowledged there were likely economic reasons too. “We have fewer children during recessions, and it seems that the recession created by the financial crisis has become entrenched to some degree”, he said.

The research found that women born in the decade up to the year 1988 are expected to have an average of 1.82 children, a drop from the figure of 1.92 children per woman seen in females born in the ten years up to 1978.

According to the study’s projection’s, 21 per cent of women born in 1988 are likely to end up childless by the age of 45 compared to just 17 per cent of women born ten years earlier.

These figures echo findings reported by Newsweek last month in a piece on America’s falling fertility rate, which revealed that current trends mean many of today’s young women will end up involuntarily childless. The latest government figures in the United Kingdom, released this week, also show a similar picture, with fertility rates at their lowest since before the Second World War, and a third of births in the country coming to foreign-born mothers.

Racist Attitudes Dominate Draft Democratic Platform

Self-Righteous Nonsense

Draft DNC Platform Declares White Americans Too Rich, Privileged, and Evil

John Nolte
Breitbart News


The Democrat National Committee draft platform for its 2020 convention mentions “whites” a total of 15 times, each of them within a “damning” context — a detail first noticed by the Washington Examiner’s Paul Bedard.

“In more than 80 pages in the draft platform published by Politico, whites are mentioned 15 times, all critical, including three references to white supremacy or supremacists and one to white nationalists,” Bedard writes.  He adds, “In most mentions, the reference is to how whites are better off at the expense of others. And the promise often is to ‘close the gap’ between minorities and whites, though no solutions are offered.”

If this is a legitimate draft, the fact that it’s a merely a draft means nothing. It still reveals how ugly the Democrat Party has become and how ugly and divisive the future will be, should this approach to national politics ever prevail.

Bedard includes each of the 15 times whites are mentioned in the draft platform, a platform Joe Biden will certainly embrace when he accepts the presidential nomination later this year. Included in the 15 (times) is an attack on the American military as racist and the not-subtle libel that white prosperity is hurting other racial minorities.

The extreme gap in household wealth and income between people of color — especially Black Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans — and white families is (allegedly) hurting our working class and holding our country back.

And, as we have seen throughout the country over the last two months, and in pretty much every Democrat-run city in America, libels like this are intended to justify and encourage the Democrat Party’s Brownshirts — in the form of the terrorist groups Black Lives Matter and Antifa — to rampage, riot, loot, burn, and desecrate our history.

Falsehoods and Frenzies: The Tyranny of Compulsory Masking

Face Masks Turn Us Into Voiceless Submissives

It’s not science forcing us to wear them, it’s politics

Peter Hitchens
Mail On Sunday

In the name of Covid, the State has already thrust itself into every corner of our existence.  It has come between husbands and wives at the ends of their lives. It has forbidden the old to embrace their grandchildren.

It has denied us funerals and weddings, locked the churches, silenced the ancient monastic music of cathedral choirs and prevented the free worship of God for the first time in 800 years, and banned us (unless we are Left-wing) from holding or attending public meetings.  It has ordered us to stay at home, scolded or fined us for sunbathing, going on country rambles or even entering our front gardens.

It has forced millions of us to stop working, sabotaged the educations – at school and university – of untold numbers of young people and has become our boss and paymaster in the biggest state takeover of life and work ever attempted by non-Communists.

Soon we will discover that it has also wrecked an already wobbly economy and separated untold numbers of us from jobs and businesses we thought were safe. Soon, too, it will also separate us from our savings, through punishing tax and savage inflation, to pay for the disaster it has caused.

Now it presumes to tell us what to wear. And what it wants us to wear is a soggy cloth muzzle, a face-nappy that turns its wearer from a normal human into a mumbling, mouthless submissive.

And this, it seems, is popular. Is there nothing the modern British people will not put up with? Britain’s muzzle consumption is now so high that six months from now there will be reports of dolphins and whales floundering about in an ocean made sticky by millions of gallons of hand-sanitiser, as they choke on congealed clumps of used muzzles. These items are set to become the new plastic bags.

Why is this frenzy taking place?

Both Men and Women Have Periods, Dontcha Know

"Men No Longer Have To Menstruate"

So Says The Atlantic’s ‘Science’ Writer 


The editors at the Atlantic tortured this article beyond any sense of reason to ensure its readers swallow the idea that both men and women have periods and no one should think otherwise.

Glenn T. Stanton
The Federalist

You read that headline precisely right. Editorially, it is a truly bizarre article from a once-great magazine, struggling hard to find its footing in the woke ideological tumult that is cannibalizing The New York Times.

The Atlantic story is an otherwise perfectly fine piece about how, as science writer Marion Renault puts it, “menstruation has now become an elective bodily process” because of interesting and controversial advances in women’s health care. As Sophia Yen, a pediatrics professor at Stanford Medical School cited in the article, put it, “We now have the technology to make periods optional.”

The real story, however, is the way the editors at The Atlantic tortured the piece beyond any sense of reason or logic to ensure its readers swallow the idea that both men and women have periods and no one should think otherwise. But in an ironic twist, The Atlantic conveys that science now says men don’t have to have periods anymore. When you ardently deny the most basic of realities, this is the craziness that follows.

The Atlantic uses “No One” and “Their” because of course it would be wrong to use “her” in reference to people who menstruate. It also employs tinny phrases that pain the ear, such as “people who have periods.” As one might expect, its language game T-bones reality soon enough: “If more people chose to silence their period — or even just dial down the volume — that would mean a decrease in iron deficiency (which women experience at far higher rates than men).”

See what The Atlantic did there?

"Three Strikes" Is Working

Something To Be Thankful For

To the layman it would seem that the NZ justice and penal systems must be one of the more tolerant and permissive in the world.  The irony is that the people (that is, ordinary mums and dads) consistently expect criminal sentences to be weighty.  In NZ we have no death sentences.  It is, therefore, expected that serious sentences ought to manifest lengthy time in prisons.  There is no other form of punishment available.

For a long time now, it has been clear that judges (some, not all) appear to believe that any sentence longer than a dog whistle is unjust, cruel, and down right primitive.  Fortunately, the more conservative politicians have passed a "Three Strikes" law which requires repeat offending and sentences must attract progressively longer sentences. 

It is gratifying that "Three Strikes" is working.  It is both punishing the recalcitrant and protecting society from evil doers who have little or no regard for their evil actions.  This from David Farrar:

The Liberals' Double Standard

The Problem in Portland Isn’t the Law

The Problem Is the Lawlessness

David Harsanyi
National Review Online

The mayors who surrender parts of their cities to left-wing ‘protesters’ are tacitly endorsing lawlessness themselves. 

Despite some occasional looting, chaos, property damage, trespassing, rioting, graffiti, assaults, arson, and general mayhem, the media consistently assures us that Antifa “protesters” are “largely peaceful.” And since the majority of buildings in Portland, Seattle, and Denver haven’t been looted yet, who am I to argue?

Of course, it takes only a sliver of the population to transform downtowns into a mess and create quality-of-life issues for thousands of law-abiding citizens. And the mayors who surrender parts of their cities to left-wing “protesters” are tacitly endorsing lawlessness themselves.

There’s little doubt that if alt-right activists had occupied a few city blocks in Seattle or tried to firebomb a federal courthouse in Portland, we’d be in for feverish wall-to-wall media coverage, engulfed in a national conversation about the perils of right-wing radicalism. Every elected Republican would be asked to personally denounce the extremists to make sure they take implicit ownership of the problem.

When a few hundred angry Tiki-Torch Nazis marched in Charlottesville, you would have thought the RNC had deployed the Wehrmacht. Those who led the riot were even asked to opine on CNN. On the other hand, left-wing rioters — the people Chris Cuomo and other journalists compared to GIs landing on Normandy — are immediately transformed into apolitical actors, rogue “anarchists,” as soon as any violence starts.

Who knows? Perhaps the majority of citizens and businesses in Portland, Seattle, and Denver want their elected officials to let Antifa act with impunity. Or maybe some of those citizens and businesses will begin fleeing those cities. Whatever the case, it’s a local concern.

To a point. If mayors do nothing to stop anarchists from tearing down federal monuments or from defacing, vandalizing, and attempting to burn down federal buildings, the feds have every right to dispatch teams of agents to restore order.

China Has Been, and Is a Bad Actor

Farage: ‘The Chinese State Has Conducted Murder on a Vast Scale’

Kurt Zindulka
Breitbart London

Nigel Farage said that it is time for Western nations to stand up to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for the horrors the regime is committing against the Uyghur people in Xinjiang, which he described as a “stain on the world”.

The Brexit Party leader said that he, alongside other Sino-skeptics, may have focussed too much on the economic and security risks posed by the Chinese state, rather than the humanitarian atrocities committed against the Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang and the Falun Gong spiritual movement at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party. 

“I am the first to say that we all now need to spend more time on the moral outrages that are being perpetrated by the Chinese Communist Party. It a truly wicked regime which none of us—left or right—should ever trust,” Farage wrote in Newsweek.  “It is no exaggeration to say that the Chinese state has conducted murder on a vast scale,” he lamented.

Brexit Hopes Emerging as False

UK Close to Abandoning Brexit-EU Deal

Will Likely Leave Bloc Fully in December

Oliver J J Lane
Breitbart London

The United Kingdom may properly depart the European Union on December 31st, as voted for by the British people way back in 2016, as negotiations to sign a deal that would see the nation keep links to Brussels in the future falters, a British newspaper has claimed.

While Britain and the EU are presently in talks to achieve an agreement on a future relationship between the two parties, progress appears to have stalled as Brussels remains wedded to an ideal that would keep Britain tied to the block — and under its control — in several areas. Likewise, the British team is keeping up the pressure on achieving a much loser relationship where London and Brussels remain close friends, but British interests are not controlled by Europe. 

Now a report in British broadsheet The Daily Telegraph — probably the closest UK newspaper to the government in terms of access to senior figures — cites unnamed ministers who it claims believe the deal will not be signed at all. If that were to come to pass, the United Kingdom would leave the European Union fully and without condition on December 31st 2020, trading with the bloc on standard World Trade Organisation rules.

The concept of such a withdrawal — despite businesses and nations having had four and a half years to prepare for it — is a matter of horror to the considerable number of anti-Brexit politicians in the United Kingdom, and the European Union, which is totally opposed to losing control of Britain’s market and regulations, fishing waters, and legal system.

A Messy Business

Festering Corruption?

Radio NZ has carried the following strange report: 

Foreign Minister Winston Peters directed Antarctica New Zealand to give two highly-prized spots on a trip to the icy continent to two women closely linked to one of South East Asia’s richest families.  Bee Lin Chew and her daughter Su Arn Kwek, who are dual Malaysian-New Zealand citizens, travelled to Scott Base, at taxpayer expense, in February after Antarctica New Zealand scrambled to make room for them at the insistence of Peters’ office.

Emails released under the Official Information Act show Antarctica New Zealand pushing back at the request to include Chew and Kwek, as only one spot was available and that was supposed to be for a government minister.  Tax payer-funded Antarctica New Zealand initially warned that science programmes or essential staff may have to be cut to make room for the women. But it ultimately managed to fulfil the request without disruption to the programme and in line with the “firmly held” views from Peters’ office.

In an interview on the doorstep of one of the two homes she owns on Auckland’s exclusive Paritai Drive, Bee Lin Chew said she was a good friend of Peters and his partner Jan Trotman.

 So we are left with one of the most senior ministers of the Government "giving" free rides to mates.  Either Winston Peters is tone deaf, or there is some issues of deeper corruption in play.  At best it is a very, very bad "look".  The upshot?  Respect for the NZ Government erodes more and more. 

Embarrassing Exposures

Unmasking

Doug Wilson
Blog&Mablog

The lock downs were draconian and severe as they affected ordinary people, and their small businesses, and we were solemnly assured by our public health officials that large gatherings were absolutely hazardous to the public weal. But then, presto!, as the Black Lives Matter protests erupted, public health officials fell all over themselves to subordinate what they had been saying about public health to their politics. Not only so, but some of these lock down maestros even marched in big parades in violation of their own rules.

Okay, then. Can we play? This seems like a simple enough game. All I have to do is subordinate what they are saying about public health to our politics. Well, it turns out that this was pretty easy, and comparatively painless.

As The Federalist notes, the turning point was June 4. At that time, it was made manifest to all careful observers, not to mention more than a few casual observers, that the lock downs and restrictions were political. They were simply a form of partisan crowd control. This realization extends to the masking mandates, which are being driven by the same political agenda. This whole thing was high hypocrisy. It was hypocrisy on stilts. Consequently, our conclusion ought to be no more lock downs, no more restrictions, no more masks. The people dictating these things to us are not sincere. They are not telling us the truth.

South Sudan: A Country At War With Itself

Another U.S.-Sponsored, Nation-Building Fiasco

Washington's continued pattern of regime change has crafted an amorphous foreign policy that needlessly sheds blood.

Ted Galen Carpenter
The American Conservative

U.S. foreign-policy bureaucrats have become inordinately fond of both regime-change wars and nation-building missions since the end of the Cold War.  Almost all of those crusades have turned out badly—in some cases, spectacularly so.

The latest example is South Sudan, which became independent after seceding from Sudan in 2011 with strong U.S. encouragement and support. A Council on Foreign Relations study conceded that “the United States was a lead facilitator of South Sudanese independence  . . . providing diplomatic support and humanitarian aid. Prior to the outbreak of the civil war in 2013, the United States supported and advocated for the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), which became the new country’s government.” 

Washington’s goal was to see a new, democratic country that no longer had to endure the repressive rule of a pro-Islamist government in Khartoum—and would be a reliable supplier of oil to the world market. Instead, U.S. policy appears to have helped create another Libya, afflicted by bloody chaos.  Barely 30 months after South Sudan’s July 2011 independence referendum, full-scale civil war erupted. The feuding factions supposedly reached a settlement in February 2020, but new, more decentralized fighting has now broken out.

In addition to the widespread ineptitude of Washington’s would-be nation builders in conducting their various crusades, there is a stunning degree of inconsistency, if not hypocrisy.

A Real Social Experiment

Forget Face Masks and Fear

Let's Relax and Accept the Risk


Peter Hitchens
Mail on Sunday


Every day I still see unhappy, frightened people cringing from human contact. They have been terrified almost out of their minds by foolish government propaganda, and the most basic trust, the very heart of civilisation, has been destroyed.

This is another side of savage, unforgivably cruel rules which have prevented grandparents from touching their grandchildren, or forbidden people to visit close relatives, even spouses, in their dying weeks.

Millions of us know this is all the most appalling rubbish, based on wild, wrong guesses and twisted figures, and one day soon I hope an icy public inquiry will condemn those responsible for the grave, incompetents they are.




Prime Minister Boris Johnson is pictured above wearing a face mask in a shop in Uxbridge. Since the only other way for this madness to end is for Mr Johnson to admit he made a terrible mistake, which is hardly likely, I offer this as a serious, if slow, route out of our dangerous and damaging national madness

But in the meantime what are those of us who have not been cowed into submission to do?

Bias and Prejudice

Covid Rebel Silenced by the Courts 

Peter Hitchens
Daily Mail

Last year, Gina Miller managed to beat the Government in the courts over its attempt to bypass Parliament over leaving the EU.  I don’t agree with her politics, but I thought she had a case and was not surprised when she won. Her action received huge coverage and was wafted swiftly into the courts.

Compare and contrast the equally brave and justified effort by businessman Simon Dolan [see below], who last week was refused permission to seek a judicial review of the unprecedented powers proclaimed and used by the Government on the pretext of Covid-19.

It was a good case well-presented, and it could not be more important. The Government delayed it by dragging its feet. The judge then absurdly dismissed it – partly because it had not been brought sooner, and some of the provisions (which could be clamped down again at any time) had since been lifted.

The BBC and the courts simply will not give a fair hearing to anything except the causes they like. In many important ways, it becomes more obvious by the day that this country is no longer really free. And when we go bankrupt, which I think will be soon, this will matter even more than it does now.

A Spurious Power-Grab

Hypocritical Game of Thrones


Doug Wilson
Blog&Mablog


Discredited Authority

The [recent] lock downs were draconian and severe as they affected ordinary people, and their small businesses, and we were solemnly assured by our public health officials that large gatherings were absolutely hazardous to the public weal. But then, presto!, as the Black Lives Matter protests erupted, public health officials fell all over themselves to subordinate what they had been saying about public health to their politics. Not only so, but some of these lock down maestros even marched in big parades in violation of their own rules.

Okay, then. Can we play? This seems like a simple enough game. All I have to do is subordinate what they are saying about public health to our politics. Well, it turns out that this was pretty easy, and comparatively painless.

As The Federalist notes, the turning point was June 4. At that time, it was made manifest to all careful observers, not to mention more than a few casual observers, that the lock downs and restrictions were political. They were simply a form of partisan crowd control. This realization extends to the masking mandates, which are being driven by the same political agenda. This whole thing was high hypocrisy. It was hypocrisy on stilts. Consequently, our conclusion ought to be no more lock downs, no more restrictions, no more masks. The people dictating these things to us are not sincere. They are not telling us the truth.

Unsettled Science

Let us have a little back and forth here. Is it all right for kids to pee in the city pool so long as they have their bathing suits on? Do you keep mosquitoes out of your yard with a chain link fence? Do fishermen use nets with one inch squares in order to bring in a haul of amoebae?

To which the comeback is that “of course we know that the masks won’t stop a solitary virus.” But, they continue, a mask will stop an aerosol sneeze, the elements of which would otherwise be sprayed all over the room. And if someone walks through that cloud, or touches a surface that the spray has settled on, then that’s a problem.

To which my reply is that a bunch of these jury-rigged masks won’t stop that kind of thing, point one, and point two, if it does, where are all these stymied germs collecting? Right. In the face mask. And so what training regimen has the American public been put through on this, so that they know how often to change their masks, when to throw them away, how often to wash them, how to determine the masks rating, and how not to touch them in the course of the day, and so forth?

So here is the layman’s test I promised earlier.

Group Think

Brazen Lying 

Media’s Latest Escalation In Campaign Against Trump

As if orders went out from a central director, nearly every major media outlet flat-out lied about President Trump's speech.

Mollie Hemingway
The Federalist

When Sen. Bob Dole accepted the Republican nomination for president in 1996, his speech hit on the themes of “honor, decency and straight talk.” He proudly mentioned the great Republican Abraham Lincoln and explicitly denounced racism.

“The Republican Party is broad and inclusive. It represents many streams of opinion and many points of view. But if there’s anyone who has mistakenly attached themselves to our party in the belief that we are not open to citizens of every race and religion, then let me remind you — tonight this hall belongs to the party of Lincoln. And the exits, which are clearly marked, are for you to walk out of as I stand this ground without compromise,” Dole said.

The speech was held up in 2016 as an example of how wonderful Republican candidates for president used to be before Donald Trump. So it’s interesting to also look back at how this speech was received by its critics. For example, then-Senior White House Adviser George Stephanopoulos called it “partisan, negative and divisive.”

Fast-forward 24 years to the present. Once again a prominent Republican gives a speech with themes of honor and decency and straight talk. Once again the prominent Republican explicitly and repeatedly denounces racism. The Republican praises Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, Frederick Douglass, the Wright Brothers, the Tuskegee Airmen, Harriet Tubman, Clara Barton, Jesse Owens, George Patton, Louie Armstrong, Alan Shepard, Elvis Presley, Muhammad Ali, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Irving Berlin, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, and Bob Hope.

And once again critics claim that the speech is “dark and divisive.”

But this time the commentary and narrative-shaping pushback that used to be left to Democratic activists such as George Stephanopoulos are now handled by corporate media activists like, well, George Stephanopoulos. OK, maybe it’s not such a significant difference after all. But it’s still noteworthy that the corporate media activists are doing what used to be left to official party activists.

An Excerpt On "A Lesson From Robert E. Lee"

Those Vexatious Statues

Helen Andrews
The American Conservative

. . . I used to side with the people who wanted to tear down all Confederate monuments. If Southern gentility means anything, I thought, it means not causing gratuitous offense. It means being willing to accept that a statue might mean one thing to us but something different to our fellow citizens, to whom we have an obligation to be considerate. I took people at their word when they said, we don’t hate the South, we just want you to celebrate what’s best about it, not what’s worst.

That gave them too much credit. In truth, they don’t want to celebrate anything about the South, or America, or the past. Everything falls short of their Year Zero standards. Considering the absolutism of their ideology, perhaps I should have seen this coming. Others did. Either way, Confederates are in the rear-view mirror now and Washington and Jefferson are the ones up for condemnation.

The left argues that name changes and statue topplings are a way for people and institutions to demonstrate their commitment to real change. But at this point, it is not ordinary Americans who need to demonstrate their good faith to the left. It is the statue-topplers who need to convince us that they are genuinely committed to pluralism and not, as their actions would suggest, just sparing some statues temporarily while they bide their time to wait and see what they can get away with tomorrow.

So choose one. That is my proposal. The monument-destroying left should pick a statue they genuinely hate and say: leave it up.

Maybe it’s the Robert E. Lee equestrian statue on Monument Avenue in Richmond. That memorial was conceived in 1870 and not, as many other Confederate statues were, during the reassertion of white rule at the turn of the century. It really was intended to stand for reconciliation, not Southern intransigence. It’s also galling that Ralph Northam is the one who decided to get rid of it. The last person who has any business lecturing the rest of us in racial sensitivity is Governor Blackface.

But it doesn’t have to be Lee. It can be someone else. The point is for the left to demonstrate that they are capable of sharing a country with people they disagree with.If you can’t name a single statue you hate that you would leave standing, then you are a fanatic, and fanatics, even when their zeal is for a good cause, are impossible for the rest of us to coexist with.

Sometimes I wonder what Lee would think if he could see his Richmond statue now, covered in graffiti that the state won’t allow anyone to clean off, not even the obscenities. It would not touch his dignity. Lee had extensive experience with adolescent misbehavior, as a college president and before that as superintendent of West Point. He knew the virtue that young people most need to be taught, because it does not come naturally to them, is self-discipline. “You cannot be a true man until you learn to obey” was one of his favorite maxims. It would sadden him to see protesters who have apparently reached the age of thirty without ever acquiring sufficient self-mastery to wait for Governor Northam’s decision to take effect, or to express themselves without saying “Fuck.” But it would not wound him.

Self-discipline is precisely what we all need to rediscover right now. We need to relearn how to put our own emotions aside and live in peace with other people, even those whose deeply held beliefs offend us. If we don’t, the entire country will be in for a long, multi-year, possibly endless adolescent tantrum, and there won’t be a single remnant of our past left standing at the end of it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Helen Andrews is a senior editor at The American Conservative, and the author of a forthcoming book about the Baby Boomers to be published by Sentinel this fall. She has worked at the Washington Examiner and National Review, and as a think tank researcher at the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney, Australia. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Religious Studies from Yale University. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, First Things, The Claremont Review of Books, Hedgehog Review, and many others. You can follow her on Twitter at @herandrews.

Will Justice Roll Down?

Andrew McCabe Admissions

Top NatSec Officials Plotted Coup Against Trump

After the James Comey firing, McCabe discussed removing Trump from office and began a counterintelligence investigation of Trump's alleged ties to Russia.


Madeline Osburn
The Federalist

Former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe publicly admitted that after the firing of James Comey, national security officials strategized on invoking the 25th amendment to remove President Trump from office.

“There were meetings at the Justice Department at which it was discussed whether the vice president and a majority of the cabinet could be brought together to remove the president of the United States under the 25th Amendment,” Scott Pelley said he learned in his “60 Minutes” interview with McCabe.

Pelley described the top bureaucrats as “counting noses,” and speculating on where various cabinet members might stand on the question of the president’s removal.  “These were the eight days from Comey’s firing to the point that Robert Mueller was appointed special counsel. And the highest levels of American law enforcement were trying to figure out what to do with the president,” Pelley said.

More than once, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein offered to wear a wire into the White House to attempt to record incriminating conversations with the president. McCabe said this was an idea he took seriously and discussed with FBI lawyers.

McCabe, who was fired last March, admitted to ensuring a counterintelligence investigation of President Trump and his alleged ties to Russia. “I was very concerned that I was able to put the Russia case on absolutely solid ground, in an indelible fashion,” McCabe said. “That were I removed quickly, or reassigned or fired, that the case could not be closed or vanish in the night without a trace.”

In a statement to CBS, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that McCabe had “opened a completely baseless investigation into the president.”

The Recommencement of the Maori Wars

Once You Start . . .

There Is No End to the Madness

Rankin – Turangawaewae Marae ‘must come down’

By Jacob Taylor
RokzFast

Black Lives Matter-inspired demonstrations against symbols of history, in New Zealand and around the world, have focused on monuments to Europeans, but Ngāpuhi leader David Rankin has called on Tainui to take down Turangawaewae Marae, which he said his iwi had long regarded as a symbol of enslavement and oppression.

The marae, he said, represented a dark period in the iwi’s history, when Tainui slavers abused his people to build their marae and grow crops for them.  “For us in the North, Turangawaewae Marae is a symbol of that slavery, murder and cannibalism, and so needs to be pulled down,” he said.  “The wealth that Tainui generated was made on the backs of Ngāpuhi slaves.”

He had the support of his Te Matarahurahu hapū, whose ancestors were among those captured by Tainui, and used as slaves. Sometimes slaves had become part of the communities of their captors, but in this case they were eventually killed and eaten.

“Tainui famously acquired corn by disembowelling my ancestor and removing the kernels in his stomach for seed,” he said.  “Tainui has a moral obligation to pull down that marae, which for us is a symbol of cultural hatred, and if they don’t pull it down, then we will come down and do the job for them.”

Several Ngāpuhi hapū were preparing a submission to the Hamilton City Council to request the marae be dismantled.  “We hope that this submission will be completed by the end of the year,” he added, “but for many of our people, we can’t wait that long. Our anger is mounting. We demand that marae’s demolition immediately. For us, Ngāpuhi Lives Matter.”

Not a Bad Effort, But "Miles To Go Before We Sleep"

A Letter on Justice and Open Debate

 
Harpers Magazine
July 7, 2020

[An apt and timely piece, the slurs against Donald Trump and "right-wing demagogues" notwithstanding. It is a signal reality that most of the apt criticisms upon acts of genuine injustice and opposition to open debate are now coming from the Left and are aimed at the Left.  The middle paragraph righteously confesses this reality.  Welcome to our world!   Ed.]

The below letter will be appearing in the Letters section of the magazine’s October issue. We welcome responses at letters@harpers.org

Our cultural institutions are facing a moment of trial. Powerful protests for racial and social justice are leading to overdue demands for police reform, along with wider calls for greater equality and inclusion across our society, not least in higher education, journalism, philanthropy, and the arts. But this needed reckoning has also intensified a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity. As we applaud the first development, we also raise our voices against the second. The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who represents a real threat to democracy. But resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion—which right-wing demagogues are already exploiting. The democratic inclusion we want can be achieved only if we speak out against the intolerant climate that has set in on all sides.

The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms. Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes. Whatever the arguments around each particular incident, the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal. We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement.

This stifling atmosphere will ultimately harm the most vital causes of our time. The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation. The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away. We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other. As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes. We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences. If we won’t defend the very thing on which our work depends, we shouldn’t expect the public or the state to defend it for us.

Religious Liberty In the US Strengthened

US Supreme Court Sets Stage for Full-on Review of ObamaCare

Bob Adelmann
The New American

Two rulings by the Supreme Court on Wednesday not only affirm the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, they also hearten pro-life constitutional conservatives who hope the rulings set the stage for a full review of the constitutionality of ObamaCare (aka the Affordable Care Act, or ACA) by the high court in the fall.

The first ruling, in a 7-2 decision, concerned the Little Sisters of the Poor, and finally puts to rest the question whether the Trump administration, through an Executive Order to the Department of Health and Human Services, could expand the exemption under which faith-based ministries such as the  Little Sisters could avoid having to provide contraceptive health services to their employees.

When ObamaCare was first foisted upon the American citizenry in 2010, it specifically exempted churches from providing contraceptive healthcare coverage but said nothing about faith-based ministries. So, under ObamaCare, the HHS ruled that religious non-profits such as the Little Sisters of the Poor had to comply, or suffer the consequences of huge fines.

During President Trump’s first year in office, he ordered the HHS to issue a new rule expanding the exemption. Several states sued, claiming that Trump had overreached. The opinion of the high court was penned by Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote, “Consistent with their Catholic faith, the Little Sisters hold the religious conviction ‘that deliberately avoiding reproduction through medical means is immoral.’”

Running Away Already?

Media Urge Biden To Limit Debates

Threaten To Boycott Them Entirely

Elle Reynolds
The Federalist

As the Trump campaign has requested the addition of another presidential debate, members of the media are urging former Vice President Joe Biden and his campaign to limit them.

Washington Post columnist Karen Tumulty suggests “rethinking” the debates, urging organizers to limit their audiences “or even do away with them entirely.” Criticizing President Trump and the Republican party for their decision to attempt an in-person convention this summer, she also mocked Trump’s request to add a fourth debate, calling it “not a serious proposal.”

Thomas Friedman of the New York Times has also called for Biden to skip the debates unless Trump releases his tax returns and agrees to a fact-checking team at the debates. “I worry about Joe Biden debating Donald Trump,” Friedman says, quickly clarifying that he fears Trump would have “unfair advantages” if he doesn’t meet these demands. Friedman acknowledges that the debates will be Biden’s “reintroduction to most Americans, who have neither seen nor heard from him for months if not years.” And apparently, Friedman finds that thought concerning.

Still, the Biden campaign has insisted they are committed to participating in all three debates, and Biden has said he “can hardly wait.” But conservatives on Twitter have speculated that the Biden campaign may consider Friedman’s suggestions or use his points as an excuse to keep Biden from the debate floor’s spotlight.

Religious Freedom Upheld

Big SCOTUS Win For Religious Liberty

Rod Dreher
The American Conservative

Finally, some good news!:

The Supreme Court ruled 7-2 on Wednesday in favor of two religious schools that argued they should not have to face employment discrimination lawsuits brought by former teachers.

The case concerned the “ministerial exception” to employment discrimination laws that protects religious employers from certain lawsuits brought by employees. It was brought by two Catholic schools in California that were hit with discrimination lawsuits by teachers whose employment was terminated.

“The religious education and formation of students is the very reason for the existence of most private religious schools, and therefore the selection and supervision of the teachers upon whom the schools rely to do this work lie at the core of their mission,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the court.

“Judicial review of the way in which religious schools discharge those responsibilities would undermine the independence of religious institutions in a way that the First Amendment does not tolerate,” he wrote.

Alito’s opinion was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented.

The buzz I’m hearing from some of my religious liberty lawyer friends is that today’s ruling is a big boost for David French’s theory that Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Neil Gorsuch are trying to carve out a judicially imposed via media between gay rights and religious liberty.

I was delighted to see that in the majority opinion, Justice Samuel Alito cited The Benedict Option as grounds for stating how important religious schools are to people of faith:

It’s humbling to discover that one’s work has been cited by a Supreme Court majority in an important religious liberty defense case. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to do my part to protect religious liberty and religious schools. If you haven’t yet read The Benedict Option, I hope you will re-consider. All the bad faith jibes that it’s nothing but “head for the hills” propaganda were implicitly knocked down by Justice Alito today. The arguments put forth in that book made a difference in the way SCOTUS ruled in an important case building a wall of protection around the communities of religious schools. If Justice Alito takes the book seriously, maybe you should too.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rod Dreher is a senior editor at The American Conservative. He has written and edited for the New York Post, The Dallas Morning News, National Review, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, the Washington Times, and the Baton Rouge Advocate. Rod’s commentary has been published in The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, the Weekly Standard, Beliefnet, and Real Simple, among other publications, and he has appeared on NPR, ABC News, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and the BBC. He lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, with his wife Julie and their three children. He has also written four books, The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, Crunchy Cons, How Dante Can Save Your Life, and The Benedict Option.

Self-Righteousness On Steroids

‘You Won’t Be Missed’ 

Rugby Fan Gets Life Ban for Criticising ‘Marxist’ BLM

Jack Montgomery
Breitbart London

A rugby fan has been banned from his club’s stadium for life for praising a girl who refused to “take the knee” and criticising “Marxist extremism and intimidation”.

Sharing a now-viral image of a player on a girl’s football (soccer) team declining to kneel for Black Lives Matter ahead of a game shared by actor Laurence Fox, Twitter user GJPowell had commented: “More moral fibre than the rest of her teammates combined and more balls than the entirety of the [English Premier League] player pool in the face of Marxist extremism and intimidation…?”

While the girl’s stand has been praised by thousands of social media users who are not fully on board with the organisations leading the Black Lives Matter movement, GJPowell’s support for it incensed Ben Jeffreys, the CEO of Pontypool Rugby Football Club in Wales, prompting an astonishing and highly personal attack.

“Find another club to support. You’re no longer welcome at @PontypoolRFC and Pontypool Park,” Jeffreys raged.  “I’ll personally ensure we never sell you a ticket ever again,” he vowed.  “When I said I would make positive change moving forward, I meant it. Good riddance. You won’t be missed.”

This remarkable personal intervention by Jeffreys, who recently shared a blog post about his personal revelation that “because of my white privilege, I’d never considered just how much inequality and discrimination truly exists within our communities” until the death of George Floyd, received heavy criticism from some commentators.

“What a woke ass Ben is,” remarked James Wells, a former Brexit Party MEP.  “[Black Lives Matter UK] is a Marxist political movement — even the [English Premier League] is distancing itself now!” he added.  Andrew Allison of The Freedom Association, meanwhile, said he “imagine[d] that many supporters of [Pontypool RFC] will think that Ben Jeffreys wouldn’t be missed if the club decided to fire him.”

“[GJPowell] didn’t say anything remotely racist in his tweet. He expressed the views of many of us. I am not going to genuflect for anyone. I am not about to take on the sins of people who died 200 or more years ago,” Allison insisted.  “Nor am I going to apologise for not supporting a Marxist movement which seeks to end the nuclear family, bring down capitalism, and abolish police forces across the country. Why would I?” 

Bonfire of the Inanities

A Randomly Exploding Bus

When "Truth" Is Stranger Than Fiction

James Delingpole
Breitbart London

When four Muslim suicide bombers blew themselves up on the London Underground and on buses during the infamous 7/7 atrocities of 2005, 52 people died and more than 700 were injured.

Here is how the BBC chose to commemorate one of those deaths yesterday on Twitter.

Philip Russell, 28, was killed while en route to work on 7 July 2005, when the bus he was on exploded. (BBC Southeast)

A self-exploding bus, eh? Why has nobody warned us before about this terrible threat? We’ve all heard of cases of spontaneous combustion where humans are concerned: Dickens, for example, was obsessed with it, and included someone dying of it in Bleak House. But spontaneously combustible buses? That’s a new one.

Maintaining The Integrity of Elections

States Can Punish ‘Faithless Electors’

Supreme Court Unanimous Decision

Joel B. Pollak
Breitbart News

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously Monday that states may punish “faithless electors” — those members of the Electoral College who refuse to cast their ballots for the candidate whom the majority of voters in the state have chosen.

As Breitbart News recounted in May, the issue arose in earnest after the 2016 election, when opponents of President-elect Donald Trump attempted to convince enough electors to change sides or cast their ballots for other candidates to prevent Trump from actually taking office: 

Chiafalo v. Washington … [is] a case involving three presidential electors in the State of Washington who were fined $1,000 after casting their Electoral College votes for Colin Powell rather than Hillary Clinton.

The electors challenged their fine and were represented by Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig — who ran for president himself in 2016, and tried to recruit electors to defect rather than voting for Donald Trump after the 2016 vote.
…
Lessig agreed that the states can ask electors to pledge to vote for a certain candidate, but cannot fine them for doing so, arguing that presidential elections are a federal function.
The arguments on both sides took an originalist form, as the two sides argued about the original intent of the Framers in setting up the Electoral College.

Justice Elena Kagan, writing for the Court, concluded: 

Article II and the Twelfth Amendment give States broad power over electors, and give electors themselves no rights. Early in our history, States decided to tie electors to the presidential choices of others, whether legislatures or citizens. Except that legislatures no longer play a role, that practice has continued for more than 200 years. Among the devices States have long used to achieve their object are pledge laws, designed to impress on electors their role as agents of others. A State follows in the same tradition if, like Washington, it chooses to sanction an elec- tor for breaching his promise. Then too, the State instructs its electors that they have no ground for reversing the vote of millions of its citizens. That direction accords with the Constitution—as well as with the trust of a Nation that here, We the People rule.

Justice Clarence Thomas issued a concurring opinion in which he said the basis of the Court’s decision should not have been Article II, but the Tenth Amendment, which reserves all powers and right to the states not expressly given to the federal government — including the power to patrol electors.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new book, RED NOVEMBER, is available for pre-order. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

An Apology

Forbes Scrubs Climate Activist’s Apology Essay from Website

Written by  Steve Byas
The New American


Forbes published an apology essay on Sunday by Michael Shellenberger, a former environmental activist, but for whatever reason — perhaps bowing to pressure from left-wingers on staff, or something else — the magazine has since removed it.

In the op-ed, Shellenberger explained, “I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years.” Shellenberger added in a tweet on Monday, “On behalf of environmentalists, I apologize for the climate scare. Climate change is real but it’s not the end of the world. It’s not even our most important environmental problem.”

Fortunately, Shellenberger was able to publish his censored article — intended to promote his new book Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All — on his own on the Internet. Shellenberger has been a self-proclaimed climate activist for the past 20 years, and has testified before Congress on the subject. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has selected him to serve as an expert reviewer on its next Assessment Report.

“Some people will when they read this imagine that I’m some right-wing anti-environmentalist. I’m not.” To illustrate his liberal credentials, Shellenberger lists living in Nicaragua at age 17 to show solidarity with the Sandinista socialists, and the fact that he exposed “poor conditions” at Nike factories in Asia. At 16, he was a fundraiser for the Rainforest Action Network, fighting to save the ancient redwoods in California. He urged the Obama administration to invest $90 billion into renewables.

Over the years, Shellenberger has sounded the alarm over “climate change,” calling it an “existential threat” to human civilization. But he began to change his mind over the severity of what he had once called a crisis — because, as he said, “I was scared.”  Shellenberger’s fear was a result of being “afraid of losing friends and funding.” So, for some time, he “mostly stood by and did next to nothing as my fellow environmentalists terrified the public.”

"Maybe?"

Tucker for President? 

GOP Insiders Say Carlson Could Be 2024 Frontrunner


Luis Miguel
The New American

 Tucker for President? GOP Insiders Say Carlson Could Be 2024 Frontrunner.  Has the Trump faction of the Republican Party found its successor?

Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who is setting historic ratings records for the network, is being eyed by insiders within GOP circles as a strong contender for the party’s nomination in 2024 should he choose to run.

Last month, a group of Republican donors talked about trying to recruit the outspoken news personality for a future White House bid, as reported by Business Insider.  Since then, a number of GOP strategists have touted Carlson as having the clout to propel himself to the forefront when the party looks for a new leader after President Donald Trump leaves office.

“He’s a talented communicator with a massive platform. I think if he runs, he’d be formidable,” Luke Thompson, a Republican strategist who worked for Jeb Bush’s super PAC in 2016, explained to Politico.

Double Jeopardy in Los Angeles

LAPD Morale Collapses to ‘Record Low’

‘It’s Simply Not Worth It Any Longer’

Joel B. Pollak
Breitbart News

Morale within the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) is currently at a “record low,” thanks to the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests and the vilification of police by local politicians.  Robert Harris, the director of the Los Angeles Police Protective League, told CBS Los Angeles that officers feel “beaten” and “bruised” by the ongoing protests.

That was corroborated by a Breitbart News source within the LAPD, who said: “Morale across the rank-and-file is at a record low. Especially out on the street in patrol. We have been vilified and abandoned by the mayor, all but three of the city council members, as well as many business owners and residents of the city of Los Angeles.”

Mayor Eric Garcetti announced at the height of the riots in early June — with the National Guard on the streets — that he would be cutting the LAPD budget by up to $150 million, answering calls from activists to “defund the police.”  The following week, police officers learned they would not be paid overtime for the additional hours they spent on the streets calming the protests and riots.

The result: many police have effectively given up fighting crime.

Self-Destroying Universities

Universities Sowing the Seeds of Their Own Obsolescence

By Victor Davis Hanson
National Review

The media blitz during these last several weeks revealed a generation that is poorly educated and yet petulant and self-assured without justification.  When mobs tore down a statue of Ulysses S. Grant and defaced a monument to African-American veterans of the Civil War, many people wondered whether the protesters had ever learned anything in high school or college.

Did any of these iconoclasts know the difference between Grant and Robert E. Lee? Could they recognize the name “Gettysburg”? Could they even identify the decade in which the Civil War was fought?

Universities are certainly teaching our youth to be confident, loud, and self-righteous. But the media blitz during these last several weeks of protests, riots, and looting also revealed a generation that is poorly educated and yet petulant and self-assured without justification.

Many of the young people on the televised front lines of the protests are in their 20s. But most appear juvenile, at least in comparison to their grandparents — survivors of the Great Depression and World War II.  How can so many so sheltered and prolonged adolescents claim to be all-knowing?

Ask questions like these, and the answers ultimately lead back to the university.

Millions of those who graduate from college or drop out do so in arrears. There is some $1.5 trillion in aggregate student debt in the U.S. Such burdens sometimes delay marriage. They discourage child-rearing. They make home ownership hard — along with all the other experiences we associate with the transition to adulthood.

The universities, some with multibillion-dollar endowments, will accept no moral responsibility.

The Heart of the Matter

Why the Humanities Must Be Saved

The Soul of Western Civilization Is At Stake

Lushington D Brady

There’s no denying that the Humanities are in crisis at our universities. The question is: what to do about it.

There’s one argument that might be called “Technological Philistinism”, which urges the junking of Humanities altogether. Like H. G. Wells’s Artilleryman, with his visceral disdain for “novels and poetry swipes”, they argue that “science books” are all the books we need. The (Australian) Morrison government seems to be toeing a soft version of this line – trying to starve the Humanities of funding and apparently hoping they’ll wither on the vine.

This would be a mistake, though – because the Humanities are the unique soul of Western civilisation.

What was once the jewel in the crown of scholarship in Western Civilization has become a pedagogical sheltered workshop in our universities, totally dedicated to promulgating anti-Western, anti-Liberal, anti-Democratic, and (literally) anti-Human ideologies[…]

Unfortunately, the intensity of the reaction to this appalling situation has obscured the true nature of the Humanities and their once illustrious history as the scholarly arm of Humanism, stretching back seven centuries as a field of study, and over 2000 years as a project to lay claim “to the glory that was Greece / And the grandeur that was Rome”.

Hopefully the PM Will Hold The Line

Boris Hangs Tough Against Europe

Will Not Be Ruled by EU Courts and Laws 

‘Australia-Style’ Relationship an Option

Victoria Friedman
Breitbart London

Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said that he will not allow Britain to be ruled by EU courts and laws after Brussels negotiator Michel Barnier implied that the British do not “respect” the bloc’s position.

The latest round of talks between the United Kingdom and EU ended a day early in Brussels on Thursday, with Britain’s lead negotiator David Frost saying that “significant differences” remained between the two parties. 

His EU counterpart Michel Barnier released a statement saying that “The EU expects… its positions to be better understood and respected in order to reach an agreement. We need an equivalent engagement by the United Kingdom.”

LBC host Nick Ferrari asked the prime minister if Mr Barnier is correct in his implied criticism that the British government does not respect the EU. Mr Johnson disagreed, both on a government level and a personal one.

“I’m not remotely disrespectful of Michel [Barnier] or the EU system which I know well and understand deeply,” Prime Minister Johnson said on Friday. “I just don’t think that it’s right for us to proceed on the basis of the European Court of Justice continuing to arbitrate in the UK, or us continuing to have to obey EU laws even when we’re out of the EU, or us having to hand over our amazing fish stock. So we’re not going to do those things.

Students Under Chinese Government Threats

Red Guards in Britain

Chinese Students Under The Command of Communist Government

"We are Watching You: Serve The Motherland!"

Kurt Zindalka
Breitbart London

Harkening back to the rhetoric of Mao Zedong during the Cultural Revolution, China’s ambassador in London has called on Chinese university students studying in the United Kingdom to “serve your motherland”, amid growing concern about the influence of Beijing on Western campuses.

In recently unearthed comments made to the Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Self-financed Students Abroad, Ambassador Liu Xiaoming said: “I hope you will carry on the glorious tradition of patriotism. I hope you will always live your personal dreams in the greater cause of striving for the Chinese Dream of national rejuvenation.”

“I hope with what you have learned here and now, you could serve your motherland and people in the future. And I hope your youthful vigour will drive you on as you work harder to realize your dream,” Liu added.

In response to the comments, Professor Christopher Hughes of the London School of Economics told The Times: “The idea of patriotism, in the Chinese context, means supporting the Communist Party. It means wanting unification with Taiwan. It means completely crushing Tibetan aspirations for autonomy. It means crushing Hong Kong. It challenges a lot of our principles of academic freedom.

“The more Chinese students there are, the more they are controlled and used by the Chinese embassy. There are various groups that are set up to monitor their behaviour. So they don’t feel secure. That means you get creeping self-censorship.”


Currently, there are an estimated 120,000 Chinese students in the United Kingdom.

Dumb, Dumber and Dumbest

Black Lives Matter – Or Do They?

The Backlash Begins…


James Delingpole
Breitbart London


In the UK, at least, the worm has turned on Black Lives Matter.

A month ago, you could scarcely move for politicians, academics, sportsmen, showbiz luvvies and other members of the wankerati flaunting their allegiance to this apparently noble cause.  But today, as quickly as they embraced it, it now seems that they can’t dissociate themselves from it fast enough.

The BBC, formerly one of BLM’s champions (obvs.), has now forbidden its presenters and guests from wearing Black Lives Matter badges. (Quite a turnaround given that only last month, the BBC was busy pretending that the violent BLM riots which resulted in the injuries of 27 police officers were ‘largely peaceful’).

Sky News — arguably even more woke than the BBC — has made the BLM badges optional, where before they were compulsory (!) for its sports pundits.

According to the Mail: 

Sky Sports allowed their pundits to decide whether to wear Black Lives Matter badges before going on air last night – with Patrice Evra ditching his first, before Jamie Redknapp followed suit, MailOnline can reveal today.

Redknapp and Evra along with host Kelly Cates and commentator Gary Neville were not wearing the badges during Sky’s coverage of Brighton and Hove Albion v Manchester United in the Premier League last night.

It came after the Premier League distanced itself from the movement, but players in yesterday’s match still ‘took the knee’ before kick-off and had ‘Black Lives Matter’ on their sleeves after George Floyd’s death in the US in May.

Among other people and institutions to backtrack, as Victoria Friedman has reported for Breitbart, are Northumberland County Council, Hertfordshire Police, and, of course, Labour opposition leader Sir Keir Starmer (who, less than a month ago, was famously pictured ‘taking a knee’ to BLM).

Meanwhile, Britain’s increasingly woke Armed Forces have shown a rare bit of moral courage by banning soldiers from taking the knee.

Electric Cars Are a Crock

U.N. Warns of Devastating Environmental Destruction

Side Effects of Electric Car Boom

Thomas D. Williams
Breitbart News


The United Nations (U.N.) announced Sunday the electric car boom will result in a number of devastating ecological side effects for the planet.

While the shift to electric cars reflects ongoing efforts to reduce the world’s dependence on fossil fuels, the UN warns that the raw materials used to produce electric car batteries are highly concentrated in a small number of countries and their extraction and refinement pose a serious threat to the environment. 

The U.N. trade body, UNCTAD, has issued a new report breaking down some of the unintended negative consequences of the shift, which include ecological degradation as well as human rights abuses.  The report notes that metals such as cobalt, lithium, manganese, copper, and minerals like graphite “play a significant role in energy-related technologies such as rechargeable batteries that are used in a variety of applications ranging from electronics to electric vehicles as well as in renewable energies such as nuclear, wind, and solar power.”

Several of these raw materials are quite rare and have few or no substitutes and they come from specific areas of the globe. More than half the world’s supply of lithium, for example, a key component of lithium-ion batteries, comes from beneath the salt flats in the Andean region of Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina.

The production of these raw materials “is often associated with undesirable environmental footprints, poor human rights and worker protection,” the report asserts.

Expose of Extremist Deception and Lies

Apologies For "Climate Scare"

Prominent Environmental Activist Michael Shellenberger Speaks Out 

Thomas D. Williams
Breitbart News

Well-known climate activist Michael Shellenberger has issued a public apology for the unfounded panic caused by environmentalists over the fabricated horrors of global warming.

Writing for Forbes Monday, Mr. Shellenberger — a Time magazine Hero of the Environment and winner of the 2008 Green Book Award — said that on behalf of environmentalists everywhere, “I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years.”

“Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem,” Shellenberger declares.  As an Expert Reviewer for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), “I feel an obligation to apologize for how badly we environmentalists have misled the public,” he states.

Mr. Shellenberger proceeds to deny 12 climate myths that have been drummed into the modern psyche, but which have no basis in scientific fact.  “Humans are not causing a ‘sixth mass extinction,’” he begins, the Amazon “is not ‘the lungs of the world,’ and climate change “is not making natural disasters worse.”

Moreover, he continues, a few key facts help put global warming and its supposed effects into perspective.  “Fires have declined 25% around the world since 2003,” he states, and the amount of land we currently use for meat “has declined by an area nearly as large as Alaska.”

The Radical, Extremist Nature of the "Opposition" Exposed

Poll Finds Majority Proud of British History

Left and BLM Activists Out of Touch 

Victoria Friedman
Breitbart London

Black Lives Matter UK activists have been revealed as out of touch with the British people after a Policy Exchange poll revealed that the public is concerned at the prospect of far-left activism re-writing British history.

The tearing down of the statue of Edward Colston — the Bristolian tradesman, MP, and philanthropist who had ties to the slave trade — by far-left Black Lives Matter activists sparked a wave of calls to remove memorials of other historical figures who contributed to the building of Britain, including war-time prime minister Sir Winston Churchill.

In research conducted by the centre-right Policy Exchange and published on Sunday, pollsters found that the acts are largely out of step with the view of Britons.  More than two-thirds, 69 per cent, said that British history was something to be proud of, compared to just 17 per cent who said they were ashamed of it.

Almost as many, 65 per cent, said that it was “unfair to make judgments about people in the past based on today’s values” and agreed that “statues of people who were once celebrated should be allowed to stand”.

AP Investigation of Chinese Government Abuse

China Forcing Contraception and Abortion on ‘Hundreds of Thousands’ of Uyghurs


John Hayward
Breitbart News

The Associated Press (AP) on Monday reported China has forced “hundreds of thousands” of Uyghur women, and women from other minorities in Xinjiang province, to use abortion and birth control over the past four years in a program of deliberate “demographic genocide.”

The AP investigation was based on “government statistics, state documents and interviews with 30 ex-detainees, family members and a former detention camp instructor.” The investigation was conducted after numerous individual women from Xinjiang claimed they had been forced to use birth control.

“The state regularly subjects minority women to pregnancy checks, and forces intrauterine devices, sterilization and even abortion on hundreds of thousands, the interviews and data show. Even while the use of IUDs and sterilization has fallen nationwide, it is rising sharply in Xinjiang,” the AP reported.

Failure to comply with the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) birth control orders can get Xinjiang women sent to the concentration camps China euphemistically refers to as “vocational training centers.”

Horror, Dishonesty and Hope

‘Wuhan Diary’ Documents Anger, Despair, And Hope

 From A City In Lockdown

A Chinese woman's online diary of the struggle to survive in the epicenter of a global pandemic reveals the horror and dishonesty of communist Chinese authorities.

Helen Raleigh
The Federalist

A writer friend of mine once told me “writing is therapeutic.” As one of the more than 11 million residents locked down in Wuhan, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak, Chinese writer Fang Fang probably felt the same way when she decided to record her experiences online daily during the lockdown.

She started posting entries on Jan. 25, two days after the Chinese government quarantined Wuhan and several nearby cities with a total population of 60 million. She entered her last entry on April 8, when the lockdown was formally lifted. These entries have now become a new book, titled Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from a Quarantined City, translated into English by Michael Berry.

When reading this book, it’s important to keep in mind its original form and purpose. Fang Fang wrote her entries on Wechat, a popular messaging app in China. She usually wrote at the end of the day to summarize her anecdotal experiences, as well as information she learned from others online, in text messaging, and from phone calls.

Her writing style is very conversational and, as any diary, it was full of quotidian details, such as about the weather, food, and her dog. Because she didn’t plan to write a book initially, many entries give readers a sense of spontaneity: she simply wrote how she felt, whatever came to her mind that she deemed to be worth sharing, as well as things she needed to get off her chest.

Therefore, you won’t find well-crafted, sophisticated passages in this book. Some parts of the diary almost felt repetitive. At the same time, these shortcomings also made Fang Fang’s story endearing, and her experiences real to readers. When I read the book, I felt like I was in the same room with Fang Fang, who is about the same age as my mother, listening to her chat about her day.

UK Gone Burger?

One Law for Black Lives Matter, Another for the Rest

James Delingpole
Breitbart London


Here is a message which should send a shudder down the spine of anyone who believes in the concept of equality before the law: a British police department openly admitting that it intends to give special, favourable treatment to Black Lives Matter.

Northumbria Police
✔
@northumbriapol
We'll be in attendance to facilitate a planned Black Lives Matter vigil at Keel Square in #Sunderland tonight.
A Section 14 order is in place forbidding any other public assembly, including counter-protests, to ensure the public's safety. Anyone with concerns should ring 101.

Note the use of that weasel word “vigil”. Presumably this comes from the same dictionary of politically correct excuse-making that led the BBC describe a violent Black Lives Matter violent demo in London — in which 27 police officers were injured — as ‘largely peaceful.’

It’s a lie and an insulting lie at that. Vigils are what angels keep. Vigils are what servicemen keep over the bodies of their fallen comrades. Vigils are honourable, solemn, ancient — and have nothing whatsoever to do with a bunch of mostly white, middle-class “uni” graduates and Marxist agitators causing mayhem on the public streets under the pretence that they fighting against “structural racism”.

Note also that Northumbria Police are effectively declaring a two-tier policing system. Protest gatherings — even ones pretending to be “vigils” — are illegal under the draconian legislation which was rushed through by the British parliament in response to coronavirus. Yet here is Northumbria Police explicitly — and unilaterally — announcing to the world that they consider Black Lives Matter are exempt.

Why?

The Evils of Marijuana

Evil terrorists? 

No, they're just solitary drug-crazed losers

Peter Hitchens
Mail on Sunday 

If I ever feel the need to have several nice cold buckets of slime tipped over my head, I point out that most of the supposed terrorist attacks in this country are, in fact, the work of solitary drug-crazed losers.

The drug involved is most often marijuana, though steroids are also increasingly implicated, as are some prescription medications.  But it is mainly marijuana, which is just now the subject of a huge billionaire-backed campaign to allow it to be advertised on TV and sold in supermarkets. Yes, that is what legalisation means.

Within seconds one choir of morons will be yelling that I am ‘an apologist for Islamic terror’. No, I am not. I hate terrorism of all kinds and wish we did not give into it so often. 

As I turn to deal with them, a second choir of morons will begin to howl that marijuana has no links with mental illness or crime, is a valuable medicine, and how dare I damage its chances of being legalised?

They have half a point. It should not be legalised, and I will do all in my power to prevent that happening. But that is because there are mountains of evidence of its connections with mental illness and with violence. This danger is getting harder to contest every day.

So here comes the slime, the dimwit screeches and the self-interested squawks. Because the official claim that the dreadful slayings in a Reading park last weekend were ‘terrorism’ is so absurd that it simply has to be countered.  This belief actually leaves us in more danger, not less, because it means we look in the wrong direction and take precautions against the wrong menace.

No Surprises There

Jacinda Ardern's Big Promises Have Failed Spectacularly

Duncan Garner

OPINION: Transformational. Do you remember the Prime Minister promising voters of a transformational Government?

It was a bold, ambitious, but ultimately, hugely risky claim.

Be careful with your words - voters remember.

Jacinda Ardern's big promises sounded great - but they have failed spectacularly.

So revered internationally - if only those disciples applied some rigour to what's been achieved. This Government can barely deliver a letter.

Certainly all its cornerstone, showpiece, flagship promises - call them what you like - have failed, the latest being the so-called transformational billion dollar light rail project from the Auckland CBD to the Airport.

Phil Twyford the builder - could he build it - No, he couldn't.

What can this lot do? Why are Aucklanders paying the extra 10 cents a litre petrol tax - remind me of the transport projects we're paying for again?

What a massive fail. And add it to the list of shame.

Kiwibuild - fail.

Capital Gains Tax - fail.

Reducing Child Poverty - fail - the Children's Commissioner says benefit levels need to rise for that to happen.

Climate Change? Fail - sure the zero-carbon law is here, but farmers and truckies have an out - years of consultation is hardly transformational.

In short, their greatest success has been the PM's ability to communicate in a crisis. But even that now is under question with these latest revelations that thousands of passengers left quarantine untested.

For that they threw Dr Ashley Bloomfield under the bus. How generous of David Clark.

If you're asking why has Labour failed, it's complex. The promises were too big to succeed in such a short time - add in Winston Peters - and there you have it.

They have had one success though - on Wednesday night - a law passed allowing prisoners who have served less than three years to vote at this election.

Transformational - only if you believe in fairy dust.

Duncan Garner hosts The AM Show.