Today’s News 13th March 2021

• Bovard: Lockdowns Wrecked Democracy Around The World
  Bovard: Lockdowns Wrecked Democracy Around The World

  Authored by James Bovard via The American Institute for Economic Research,

  While the number of fatalities attributed to Covid-19 is carefully tracked by governments, few people have recognized how pandemic-spurred crackdowns have devastated democracy around the world. Emergency proclamations have entitled presidents and other government officials to seize vast new powers previously forbidden to them.

  Government bureaucrats became a new priesthood that could sanctify unlimited sacrifices merely by invoking dubious statistical extrapolations of future perils. 

  

  In October, Freedom House issued a report, Democracy under Lockdown – The Impact of COVID-19 on Global Freedom, which warned that since the pandemic started, “the condition of democracy and human rights has worsened in 80 countries.” Sarah Repucci, co-author of the report, warned that “governments’ responses to the pandemic are eroding the pillars of democracy around the world.” Abuses of power have been propelled by a presumption that government officials are entitled to all the power they claim to need to keep people safe. 

  When the pandemic arrived in America, governors in many states responded by dropping the equivalent of a Reverse Neutron Bomb – something which destroys the economy while supposedly leaving human beings unharmed. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo set the standard when he effectively declared that he was entitled to inflict any burden on his state’s residents to “save just one life.” Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer prohibited anyone from leaving their home to visit family or friends. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti banned people from walking or bicycling outside. More than ten million jobs were lost thanks to lockdowns, a major reason why life expectancy in the United States last year had its sharpest plunge since World War Two. 

  Australia imposed some of the most heavy-handed restrictions. In August, the state of Victoria dictated an 8 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew for the Melbourne area and prohibited people from venturing more than three miles from their residence. Victoria Premier Daniel Andrews decreed: “Where you slept last night is where you’ll need to stay for the next six weeks.” Melbourne has been hit by repeated lockdowns since then. 

  Britain unleashed some of the most absurd restrictions. In June, it prohibited couples who live in different homes from having sex indoors. The Independent (U.K.) noted, “People who have sex outside can be punished under pre-existing laws on outraging public decency and indecent exposure.” Steve Watson reported in January for Summit News that British cabinet ministers “ have privately debated preventing people from talking to each other in the street and in supermarkets, and even preventing people from leaving home more than once per week, and introducing curfews.” British vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi fretted, “I’m worried about some of the pictures I’ve seen of social interactions in parks, if you have to exercise you can go out for exercise only.” Apparently, a national vow of silence is necessary to fight Covid. Summit News noted, “Police are also demanding new powers to force entry into the homes of suspected lockdown violators.” Former British Supreme Court Justice Jonathan Sumption complained last month, “Foreign travel is being prohibited, turning us into a hermit island on the basis we cannot know what mutations may be lurking out there. The logic of these policies is that we must be locked down for ever simply because the world is a dangerous place.”

  New Zealand has imposed four separate lockdowns in its pursuit to banish the virus from the island, repeatedly placing residents in the capital city under house arrest. In October, the government announced it was creating “quarantine centers” for anyone who tests positive and refuses to obey government orders. One Twitter wag scoffed, “New Zealand went from gun bans to concentration camps in less than a year.”

  Covid horrors have been more dramatic in some developing nations.

  In Uganda, as the Economist reported, Francis Zaake, a member of parliament, delivered food to his neediest constituents during a pandemic lockdown. But “Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni has ordered that only the government may hand out food aid. Anyone else who does so can be charged with murder, Mr Museveni has threatened, since they might do it in a disorderly way, attract crowds and thereby spread the coronavirus.” 

  Police and soldiers forcibly entered Zaake’s house and “dragged him into a van and threw him in a cell. He says they beat, kicked and cut him, crushed his testicles, sprayed a blinding chemical into his eyes, called him a dog and told him to quit politics. He claims that one sneered: ‘We can do whatever we want to you or even kill you…No one will demonstrate for you because they are under lockdown.’” 

  In Kenya, police killed at least 15 people during brutal crackdowns on alleged violators of lockdown decrees. Amnesty International declared that the Covid-19 pandemic provided “the perfect storm for indiscriminate mass violence” by the police, thanks to the “pervasive culture of impunity among [police] service members who rely on systemic corruption.”

  Journalists in many nations risked their hides if they violated politicians’ monopoly on fear-mongering. Almost a hundred nations have imposed new restrictions on freedom of speech and freedom of the press since the pandemic began. Freedom House reported: “Governments enacted new legislation against spreading ‘fake news’ about the virus. They also limited independent questioning at press conferences, suspended the printing of newspapers, and blocked websites.” Reporters Without Borders, a nonprofit for press freedom, warned, “Most governments yielded to the temptation, using a variety of repressive measures…, of making official channels the only credible and authoritative sources of information.” Many regimes have expanded the definition of “fake news” to justify repression:

  • “In Ethiopia, the definition of misinformation is so broad that it gives the authorities the discretionary power to declare any piece of information false.”

  • “In India, Egypt, Botswana and Somalia, only government statements on the subject may be published.” 

  • “In Cambodia, the government gave itself the legal power to ban the publication of “any information that could cause unrest, fear or disorder.”

  • In Rwanda, the journalist who runs the YouTube news channel Ishema TV was imprisoned for violating Covid lockdown regulations. “At the time of his arrest he was reporting on the effects of the lockdown on the population and investigating allegations of rape committed by soldiers enforcing the lockdown,” Reporters without Borders notes.

  • In Zimbabwe, anyone “who publishes or disseminates ‘false’ information about an official, or that impedes the response to the pandemic, faces up to 20 years in prison,” the Economist reported. 

  • Tanzania suffered a wave of censorship after the nation’s president publicly denounced Covid-19 as a “Western plot.” “Several news outlets, including the country’s leading Swahili-language newspaper Mwananchi, were closed down after publishing stories about Covid-19. Others were forced to broadcast apologies after carrying reports on the subject which angered the authorities,” Reporters without Borders noted. 

  • In Thailand, Amnesty International reported, “authorities are prosecuting social media users who criticize the government and monarchy in a systematic campaign to crush dissent which is being exacerbated by new COVID-19 restrictions. Authorities have wasted no time using existing repressive laws in order to censor ‘false’ communications related to COVID-19.” The government decreed five-year prison sentences for any Thai journalists or media outlets that published information officials decree to be “capable of causing fear in the public.”

  “Government knows best” is the subtext for arbitrary decrees issued around the world. An Associated Press article in January explained why Californians were denied access to the information that determined the fate of their freedom: “State health officials said they rely on a very complex set of measurements that would confuse and potentially mislead the public if they were made public.” But many data-driven dictatorial policies relied on data that was either fraudulent, politically contrived, or laughably inaccurate. On the day that Joe Biden was inaugurated as president, the World Health Organization changed the test standard for defining Covid cases, guaranteeing that far fewer “cases” would be reported and thereby making a mockery of the previous 10 months data. 

  The pandemic’s precedents pose a long-term peril for liberty around the globe. Freedom House expects that “official responses to COVID-19 have laid the groundwork for government excesses that could affect democracy for years to come.” This was foreseeable from the start of the pandemic but the media in some Western nations were the biggest cheerleaders for obliterating limits on political power. The secrecy that proliferated during the pandemic will make it harder for citizens to recognize how badly they have been misgoverned. 

  Going forward, citizens in many nations might appreciate this old adage from American politics: “The Constitution isn’t perfect but it’s better than what we have now.” Federal judge William Stickman IV declared in September, “Broad population-wide lockdowns are such a dramatic inversion of the concept of liberty in a free society as to be nearly presumptively unconstitutional.” But unless there is a similar stark ruling from the Supreme Court, shutdowns could return whenever politicians can panic enough citizens with some new threat. 

  Lockdown victims around the globe would be wise to heed Thomas Jefferson’s 1798 warning that the doctrine “that the general government is the exclusive judge of the extent of the powers delegated to it [is] nothing short of despotism; since the discretion of those who administer the government, and not the Constitution, would be the measure of their powers.” The pandemic painfully illustrated how government officials can always concoct the data to justify whatever decree they itch to issue. And regardless of the needless deaths and disruptions caused by government policies, it will be the opponents of lockdowns who will be labeled grandma-killers.

  The Biden administration is reviving America’s proselytizing for democracy around the globe. But Covid-19 crackdowns are a warning for people to be wary of oppressive governments regardless of their purported mandate. The world doesn’t need any more Cage Keeper Democracies where citizens’ ballots merely designate who will place them under house arrest.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 03/12/2021 – 23:40

• Visualizing The Rising Cost Of College In The U.S.
  Visualizing The Rising Cost Of College In The U.S.

  The average cost of getting a college degree has soared relative to overall inflation over the last few decades. In fact, as Visual Capitalist’s Govind Bhutada details nelow, since 1980, college tuition and fees are up 1,200%, while the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for all items has risen by only 236%.

  

  Back in 1980, it cost $1,856 to attend a degree-granting public school in the U.S., and $10,227 to attend a private school after adjusting for inflation. Since then, the figures have skyrocketed. Here’s how college tuition and the CPI have both changed since 1980:

  

  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the highest year-over-year change in college tuition and fees was recorded in June 1982 at 14.2%— and over that same time period, overall inflation was up 6.6%.

  On the other hand, November 2020 saw the lowest year-over-year change in the average cost of college at 0.6%, mainly as a result of the shift to online classes amid the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, some schools are offering discounts to students, and some are even canceling scheduled tuition increases entirely in a bid to remain attractive.

  Why is the Cost of College Rising?

  While it’s difficult to pinpoint the exact reasons behind the rapid surge in the cost of education, a few factors could help explain why U.S. colleges hike their prices.

  • Decrease in State Funding

  State funding per student fell from $8,800 (2007-08) to $8,200 (2018-19), while the share of tuition in college revenues increased.

  • Increase in Demand

  The demand for a college education has increased over time. Between 2000-2018, undergraduate enrollment in degree-granting institutions increased by 26%.

  • Increase in Federal Aid

  According to a study from the New York Fed, every $1 in subsidized federal student loans increases college tuition by $0.60. Student loan debt has doubled since the 2008 recession.

  Furthermore, the costs of providing education, known as institutional expenditures, have also escalated over time. These include spending on instruction, student services, administrative support, operations, and maintenance—all of which are critical to the student experience.

  With student debt at unprecedented levels and ongoing public debates surrounding the rising costs of education, it’s uncertain how college tuition will evolve. However, given the onset of virtual classes, further hikes to college tuitions may be on hold for the foreseeable future.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 03/12/2021 – 23:20

• Ban On 205 Different ‘Assault Weapons’ Introduced By Sen. Feinstein
  Ban On 205 Different ‘Assault Weapons’ Introduced By Sen. Feinstein

  Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) on Thursday introduced a ban on more than 200 “assault weapons” after the House passed two gun-control measures pertaining to background checks.

  

  Her bill (pdf), called the “Assault Weapons Ban of 2021,” is co-sponsored by 34 Senate Democrats and would ban ammunition magazines that hold more than 10 rounds—similar to the bans on magazines in New York state and California.

  According to the legislation, which was also introduced in the House by Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.), the ban would encompass more than 205 rifles. Feinstein’s bill would allow current owners of the guns to retain possession of them. If that gun is transferred, a person has to undergo an FBI background check before getting the firearm.

  The bill also bans any weapon that has the capacity to use a magazine that isn’t a fixed ammunition magazine and has one or more characteristics such as a pistol grip, forward grip, a threaded barrel, a folding or telescoping stock, or a barrel shroud.

  The bill “requires that grandfathered assault weapons are stored using a secure gun storage or safety device like a trigger lock” and prohibits the transfer of high-capacity ammunition magazines while banning “bump-fire stocks and other devices that allow semi-automatic weapons to fire at fully automatic rates,” according to a news release from Feinstein’s office. Bump-fire stocks were made illegal in March 2019.

  “It’s been 17 years since the original Assault Weapons Ban expired, and the plague of gun violence continues to grow in this country. To be clear, this bill saves lives. When it was in place from 1994-2004, gun massacres declined by 37 percent compared with the decade before. After the ban expired, the number of massacres rose by 183 percent,” Feinstein said in a statement Thursday.

  There are more than 20 million modern sporting rifles owned by private citizens, according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, as reported by pro-Second Amendment website Bearingarms.com.

  Republicans and gun-rights groups have said proposals from Feinstein, who has long advocated for gun control, are unconstitutional and won’t prevent firearms from getting in the hands of criminals.

  “Law-abiding Americans use them for every type of lawful purpose, including personal and home defense, hunting, marksmanship competitions, and recreational target practice,” stated the National Rifle Association (NRA) when Feinstein attempted to introduce the bill in 2019. “Needless to say, however, the modern criminal element will not be playing by the antiquated rules that Feinstein hopes to apply to the rest of us,” the group asserted.

  On Thursday, the House passed two Democratic-backed gun control measures, including one would that would expand background checks to those purchasing weapons over the internet, at gun shows, and through certain private transactions. Only eight Republicans joined the Democrats in backing the bill.

  The second bill, passed 219-210 with only two Republicans supporting it, would give authorities 10 business days for federal background checks to be completed before a gun sale can be licensed.

  Reuters contributed to this report.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 03/12/2021 – 23:00

• Russia-China Joint Lunar Base Sparks Fears Of Space Arms Race
  Russia-China Joint Lunar Base Sparks Fears Of Space Arms Race

  Conventional wisdom states the world is in a bipolar era. Though we tend to disagree with that as a multipolar international system is in the works. Multiple superpowers align forces that are the US and other Western nations, and, of course, Russia and China. 

  Russia and China joined forces this week to build a lunar space station. China’s National Space Administration (CNSA) and Russia’s space agency Roscosmos signed a memorandum of understanding to construct a lunar base station for a “complex of experimental research facilities created on the surface and/or in the orbit of the Moon”.

  Bank of America’s Haim Israel told clients last month that a space race is underway. He said the US has already been forced to create the United States Space Force in a “direct response to the growing militarization of space” by other superpowers. 

  BofA’s Israel shows which countries in 1966 versus 2016 have satellites and launch capabilities. The conclusion here is much of the world except large swaths of Africa can launch rockets into space with satellites. 

  

  A multipolar international order is developing, and each side is racing to cement its moon base on the lunar surface. Each side wants a slice of the lunar surface, and for a good reason, because, as we’ve mentioned before, there could be an abundance of rare metals underneath. 

  

  Not too long ago, we event suggested the idea that a “brewing war to set a mining base in space is likely to see China and Russia joining forces to keep the US increasing attempts to dominate extra-terrestrial commerce at bay.” 

  Bruce Jones, an expert on Russia and defense, told Daily Mirror that “Russia and China combining their resources, their finances and expertise could lead to all kinds of security threats.” 

  “But most importantly, it means that the west will be forced to react with their supposed plans to form a moon-base.

  “The agreement between the two countries will act as a force multiplier in that it will increase the capabilities of both.

  “Security for the west in space is enormously important because of our satellite technology which could come under threat.

  “It is important to most aspects of our lives and needs to be protected against any threat from outside,” Jones said. 

  Colonel Richard Kemp, former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, said: “Any co-operation of this kind between Russia and China is always of concern.”

  “Security in space has long been critical, and I expect this new announcement will mean it will become increasingly so to the UK military.

  “Anything that has an impact on our cyber and space security has to be watched very carefully, and Britain will have to make sure its capability in this area can compete,” Kemp said. 

  Trillions of dollars of iron ore, nickel, and precious metals at much higher concentrations than those found on Earth, are likely under the moon’s surface. The next wild west is in space. Countries are already aligning forces. 

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 03/12/2021 – 22:40

• How California Is Embracing Mandatory Racial-Injustice Study For All Of Its 1.7 Million High Schoolers
  How California Is Embracing Mandatory Racial-Injustice Study For All Of Its 1.7 Million High Schoolers

  Authored by John Murawski via RealClearInvestigations (emphasis ours),

  California has struggled for five years to create a politically palatable “ethnic studies” curriculum that would teach high schoolers how systemic racism, predatory capitalism, heteropatriarchy and other “structures of oppression” are foundational to American society.

  

  Now, after more than 82,000 public comments, and four major rewrites, the state Board of Education is expected to approve the latest version next week, clearing the way for lawmakers to make a semester-long course in the material a graduation requirement for all of California’s 1.7 million high school students.

  

  The latest curriculum, however scaled back, still shares similarities with an earlier, rejected draft that a top state official said failed to comply with state law, and the Los Angeles Times editorial board characterized as a jumble of “politically correct pronouncements” that feel like “an exercise in groupthink, designed to proselytize and inculcate more than to inform and open minds.”

  When all is said and done, the material emphasizing whites’ subjugation of non-whites is not a conventional textbook subject, but an ideology with an activist political agenda. Revisions may never satisfy parents and teachers who believe public schools shouldn’t be in the business of teaching kids how to develop a “social consciousness” or using class time to pinpoint a student’s intersectional identity to determine where they fit on a hierarchy of power.

  At the same time, ethnic studies activists are furious that their efforts at promoting social justice, and centering “voices of color” are being diluted by, as they put it, power structures such as “whiteness,” Zionism and assimilationism.

  Passage of the landmark curriculum at the board’s scheduled meeting on March 18 should mark a hard-fought victory for the half-century-old ethnic studies movement and help advocates promote their movement across the country. But it will not end the conflict in California, where the issue will be forced to the local level to be decided by local schoolboards or in individual classrooms.

  The reason: The state’s guidelines grant teachers wide flexibility in how they teach the subject. Ethnic studies activists — including those who wrote the first, rejected draft of the curriculum — say high school teachers will have an escape clause to teach a watered down version that the activists deride as a “Foods, Heroes & Holidays” and “all lives matter” pabulum. These advocates insist on hewing to a heroic narrative about how people of color have suffered from and fought against European capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism.

  

  Practitioners have formed their own organization – the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Institute – to promote an “authentic” ethnic studies, a discipline born in the late 1960s out of student campus protests led by the Third World Liberation Front to end Eurocentrism in education.

  For the past year, these activists have been meeting in online sessions to hash out strategy, expound upon their “liberatory” and “transformational” ideology, and encourage educators to teach the full-strength curriculum that the state has flunked. Their unguarded comments in numerous videos convey the combative tone and spirit of ethnic studies already evident in some California classrooms, and likely to be adopted by many more teachers regardless of the model curriculum approved by the state.

  “Inside of the United States, native people have been actively fighting a long war to dismantle the United States,” said Stevie Ruiz, who teaches in the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at the California State University, Northridge, during a May 2020 online strategy session.

  “So then we can actually think about what happens if we honor native people’s acknowledgements and begin to tear apart the United States internally,” continued  Ruiz, who was listed as one of the leaders of the Liberated group until February. “What if we decide to call this place the United States no longer?”

  ‘A Way of Life’

  The Liberated Ethnic Studies group includes many of the original authors of the 2019 Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum that the state has gutted, as well as 50 scholars, teachers, practitioners and students, according to Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales, an Asian American Studies professor at San Francisco State University, speaking during a Feb. 2 online event. The advocates say that many state officials fail to grasp that ethnic studies is not a traditional school subject, but a movement and a philosophy best described as “narrative medicine,” “radical healing” and even a “way of life.” It’s distinguished from traditional classroom instruction by its emotional, immersive pedagogy designed to deprogram kids from European cultural assumptions, to make teenagers conscious of systemic inequities, and to reconnect them with forgotten ancestral knowledge.

  According to one of the Liberated institute leaders, Theresa Montaño, a professor of Chicana and Chicano studies at the California State, Northridge, the group’s K-12 lesson plans should be available online for free this spring.

  

  According to the group’s web site, the material will be based on five themes: racialized intersectional identity, collective narratives, systems of power and oppression, resilience and resistance, and solidarity among people of color. And the Liberated institute is open for business: “We have packages and experts that can help you with your Ethnic Studies professional learning needs.”

  “We know that when districts begin to implement their ethnic studies programs, they’re not going to go to the state of California and say, ‘Excuse me, state of California, can you come to L.A. and help me implement my ethnic studies program?’” Montaño said last August. “No, they’re going to come to us. And so we are continuing the work that we need to do to develop ethnic studies while simultaneously holding on to some critical hope that we can still influence what the state of California does.”

  In repeated expressions of frustration, the advocates attribute the state’s political compromises to a common enemy: “whiteness” – what they call the oppressive force that their movement and its precursors have been seeking to disempower for 500 years. “All of the attacks against the ESMC [Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum] came from the realms of whiteness and authoritarian whitesplaining,” read a statement Los Angeles public school intervention counselor Guadalupe Carrasco Cardona posted during her May presentation on ethnic studies and teacher preparation.

  “Well-funded attempts at whitewashing the ESMC ranged from right wing white nationalists at Breitbart, to Wall Street Journal white capitalists who deny the climate crisis, to white moderates who superficially may say they support ethnic studies, but only if it’s done in the way they ‘as gate-keeping white moderates’ say it needs to be done.”

  The model curriculum that Cardona, Montaño, Tintiangco-Cubales and others wrote in 2019 hit a tripwire with references to Palestinian resistance to the state of Israel as an example of ethnic studies in action. The removal of those references from the state’s revised curriculum, and the addition of lessons about anti-Semitism, is seen by the advocates as emblematic of the way white power structures erase the histories of those they oppress.  

  Cardona, one of the founding members of the Liberated Ethnic Studies group, said by phone that she expects an anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions lesson to be included in the Liberated materials that the group is developing.

  Cardona is a longtime public school teacher and a veteran of California’s ethnic studies skirmishes, having been fired from a teaching position three years ago after some parents found out she was a member of a Marxist organization that advocates for political revolution, emulates Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, and vows “to crush all forms of oppression and reactionary tendencies.”

  Rejecting the state’s assimilationist bent, Cardona suggested that ethnic studies has a totally different focus than the current equity push to get people of color into middle management positions.

  “They just want little youth to want this little piece of this American pie because that’s what they think social justice is: put black, brown, indigenous bodies in college, put them into these corporate positions and have them do the same old thing that this country does,” she said in a May podcast. “And we’re saying, No, there’s something wrong with this system. We want black, brown and indigenous bodies in universities to learn about it and to transform and to end all of this oppression, not to continue the roles of the oppressor.”

  Another flash point in the 2019 model curriculum was the exclusive focus on people of color, with no mention of European ethnicities that were subject to discrimination and genocide. The experiences of European groups, including Jews and Armenians, deserve to be studied, the advocates say, but they have no connection to the ethnic studies movement, whose true focus is the worldview and struggle of people of color against white supremacy.

  

  The sweeping 1,000-plus pages of the state’s revised model curriculum and appendices have toned down the language of the original version, but the public comments cite a number of concerns.

  Judea Pearl, father of the late Daniel Pearl, a Wall Street Journal reporter beheaded by Al Qaeda terrorists, wrote: “I am particularly alarmed by its attempt to depict inter-ethnic relationships as a[n] irreconcilable struggle between racially-defined ‘oppressed’ and [‘]oppressors,’ and by the way it associates ‘whiteness’ with ‘oppression’ and ‘colonialism.’”

  According to one of several definitions of “race” provided, American society comprises two opposing racial factions: “In the United States today, races very broadly break down as people of color (POC) and white people.” That definition comes from Rethinking Ethnic Studies, a primer co-edited by R. Tolteka Cuauhtin, a consultant and one of the authors of the rejected 2019 version of the model curriculum.

  Breaking New Ground

  The state’s Department of Education described its ethnic studies undertaking in the previous draft as “a groundbreaking project – the first of its kind among the 50 states.” And given California’s outsize influence in the textbook industry and educational trends, it is assumed by many in the field that California’s standards could serve as a national model for years to come.

  California’s push to make a semester-long ethnic studies class a graduation requirement for all of its 1.74 million high school students in 1,322 high schools would be an exponential expansion for a course taught to 20,500 students in 314 high schools during the 2018-19 academic year.

  Ethnic studies advocates believe that after four years of President Donald Trump, a pandemic that hit minorities hard, and a summer of Black Lives Matter demonstrations, Americans are ready to grapple with the moral implications of the nation’s origins and history.

  “All the horrific shit that white people have been doing to us, has now began to haunt them,” Ruiz told his colleagues in the May video. “Because they’ve been experimenting on us for 500 years, it’s no longer something you can contain anymore.”

  They also see encouraging signs in President Biden’s choice of education secretary, Miguel Cardona, considered a champion of the cause who will be well positioned to put federal muscle behind it. As Connecticut’s commissioner of education last year, Cardona oversaw that state’s adoption of a requirement that all high schools offer courses in African American, Black, Puerto Rican, and Latino studies.

  “For Ethnic Studies advocates, that’s really encouraging and suggests that maybe we might see some national efforts that are encouraging folks to implement Ethnic Studies in the K-12 setting,” said Ravi Perry, chairman of Howard University’s political science department and immediate past president of the Association for Ethnic Studies.

  “Education is a local issue,” Perry said. “But perhaps like they’ve done with transgender bathroom directives in the Obama administration, they can provide some incentives, some strongly worded language to districts, to encourage them to adopt this curriculum while working behind the scenes in the House and Senate to get a bill passed that would perhaps require this [nationally].”

  There’s no way of getting around the fact that ethnic studies is going to make some people uncomfortable.

  “It’s an explicit, straight-out confrontation with power,” said Ron Scapp, professor of humanities and teacher education at the College of Mount Saint Vincent, in New York, and past president of the Association for Ethnic Studies. “And the power in the U.S. is predicated on the white supremacist, Christian nationalist, unfettered capitalist caste system.”

  Scapp, who was editor of the journal Ethnic Studies Review for a decade until last year, said the strident tone of some advocates can sound extreme, but that rhetoric is part of the spirit of resistance.

  “They are expressing the outrage, the pain, the suffering, and the longing for home, the longing for validity and legitimacy,” he said. “But in that expression of pain and hurt – and maybe a bit of, like, ‘Fuck you, white man’ – I actually think they do a disservice because they wind up participating in a discourse of violence.”

  Conversely, the movement’s culture is capable of expressing an almost utopian exuberance. Advocates repeatedly say that ethnic studies has “saved” their life and that it “saves” the lives of students.

  In a Feb. 2 organizing session online, Jeff Duncan-Andrade, professor of Latina/o Studies and Race and Resistance Studies at San Francisco State University, hyperbolically declared that Western knowledge stands in awe of the wisdom contained in ethnic studies.

  “There isn’t even a debate in the medical field, in neurobiology, in psychology, in social epidemiology, and in public health, about how important an ethnic studies framework and project is to the wellness of the nation,” he said.

  Still, confronting complicity in or victimization by European colonialism, imperialism and genocide can take a toll on teenagers, and the California Department of Education’s proposal initially advised schools to have trained counselors on standby to assist distraught students. Indeed, the language in California’s third draft of the proposal read like a surgeon general’s warning: “Engaging topics on race, class, gender, oppression, etc. may evoke feelings of vulnerability, uneasiness, sadness, guilt, helplessness, or discomfort.”

  The fourth draft removed the warnings, saying instead: “Given the unique and often sensitive material and discussions that may unfold in an ethnic studies course, being able to establish trust and building community within the classroom are essential.”

   ‘Proselytizing’ in Public Schools

  Some warn that the ethnic studies curriculum amounts to political indoctrination, violates state anti-discrimination policy, and at times borders on child abuse.

  These critics are concerned that kids won’t be required to just study the material, take a multiple-choice test, write a paper and move on; they may be required to espouse progressive politics as a condition of passing the class and graduating from high school.

  “It’s a totalitarian worldview that is every bit as much a faith community as any religion,” said Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, director of AMCHA Initiative, an anti-Semitism watchdog group in Santa Cruz, Calif.

  “In a public school, it really is the imposition of a state religion,” she said. “This kind of proselytizing has no place in public schools.”

  Even though California offers flexibility on teaching the material, the advocates say a state curriculum reflecting their outlook would provide an important tactical advantage: the necessary political cover to advance their agenda against the expected public backlash.

  “If it’s watered down in that curriculum, yes, it’s just a model, you can adjust it,” Cardona said in a December podcast interview. “But you don’t have that sort of political coverage that you could have if it was already in the model curriculum.”

  Cardona is speaking from personal experience. In 2018 she was suspected of teaching Marxist and communist ideology, and was fired from a teaching position at the El Rancho Unified School District, which is about 98% Hispanic and holds the distinction of being the first school district in California to adopt, in 2014, an ethnic studies high school graduation requirement.

  According to local news coverage, local residents began to voice concerns about Cardona’s involvement in several activist organizations, including Unión del Barrio. According to the organization’s website and 17-page political manifesto, the group is committed to dislodging European imperialists from the Western Hemisphere and regaining political sovereignty for people of color from Tierra del Fuego to Alaska, forming a single geopolitical unit called Nuestra America, “ultimately advancing Simón Bolívar’s dream of a unified continent.”

  “We will never unite with bourgeois, capitalist, neo-colonialists, who actively unite with imperialism, exploit their own people, and choose to advance their individual self-interest over the interests of all others,” the group declares.

  Cardona said by phone that she subscribes to the revolutionary philosophy of Unión del Barrio, but she does not mix her extracurricular political activities with her day job as a teacher. And she does not hide it: To this day her personal website declares: “She is a proud member of the socialist political organization, Union del Barrio.”

  Guillermo Gómez, who teaches ethnic studies at Lincoln High School in San Diego, declared himself in May 2020 as “actually accountable and responsible” to Unión del Barrio, which has “developed my political ideology in order to continue the work that we do.”

  In the May webinar, Gómez gave a detailed account of the step-by-step process used to introduce teachers and students to the Ethnic Studies worldview. “It’s important to ground ourselves in this concept of love, of revolutionary love,” he described the initiation.

  The training starts by establishing that ethnic studies is grounded in social justice, Gómez said, astutely noting: “Who can argue against social justice, right?”

  The process advances through progressive stages of buy-in.

  For example, students are taught to see themselves not as individuals but through their identity. And after they start seeing themselves through the prism of race, gender and other intersectional modes of power and oppression, they are taught that their identity is exposed and vulnerable to malevolent external forces.

  “Once they’re grounded and they’re very strong about what their identity is, then we start bringing the teachers and students into ideas and attacks against their identity,” he explained. “And once they’re able to analyze and identify the systems of oppression, the question becomes, Well what can we do now?”

  Some teachers and students become totally committed.

  “Ethnic studies is not just an academic discipline – it’s like your whole life – it’s life, period,” Gómez said in the webinar. Gómez did not respond to an email, but Scapp said Gómez represents something very encouraging in ethnic studies: He uses the language of love rather than confrontation, and he’s helping students declutter their minds of toxic ideas.

  “It’s the opposite of indoctrination,” Scapp said. “The starting point is that people are already indoctrinated, even if they are not white, by white supremacy.”

  In the video, Gómez said that teaching effectively ultimately comes down to trust. “Once you have a strong, positive loving community in the classroom,” Gómez said, “you pretty much can teach anything.”

  Email: jmurawski@realclearinvestigations.com

  Twitter: @johnmurawski

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 03/12/2021 – 22:20

• Tom Cruise's Luxury Log Cabin Hidden In Colorado Forest Lists For $39.5 Million
  Tom Cruise’s Luxury Log Cabin Hidden In Colorado Forest Lists For $39.5 Million

  Tom Cruise’s mansion, located in Telluride, Colorado, has just been listed on the market for $39.5 million. The actor’s 10,000-square-foot stone-and-cedar home features 320 acres and amenities for an adrenalin junky. 

  WSJ first reported Cruise’s home went on the market this week. Listing agents Eric Lavey of LIV Sotheby’s International Realty and his colleague Dan Dockray said seven years ago, the property, packed with dirt bike and snowmobile track and complex network of trails for hiking, snowshoeing, and all-terrain vehicle, had a non-public listing value of around $59 million.

  

  For whatever reason, Cruise and his agents are taking a 33% haircut from the non-public listing seven years ago. Perhaps, but not mentioned in the WSJ article, the timing of today’s sale comes as city dwellers are fleeing to rural communities. 

  The stunning home appears to have no drywall or paint, instead constructed with timbers and wooden planks. 

  Den Area 

  

  Kitchen

  

  The property is tucked away in a densely wooded area, which sits miles from downtown Telluride, an old mining town in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. The property was completed in 1994, about two years before he starred in the spy movie “Mission: Impossible.” 

  Listing agents believe Cruise has put the log cabin mansion up for sale due to the property’s inactivity. Though it’s likely, he’s striking while the iron is hot, unloading it as panicked city dwellers gobble up rural land. 

  Dockray told WSJ, “People sat down during this lockdown and said ‘What am i doing with my life? I want a better lifestyle.” 

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 03/12/2021 – 22:00

• Buchanan: Is A Cold War II with China Inevitable?
  Buchanan: Is A Cold War II with China Inevitable?

  Authored by Pat Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

  Today, the four premier leaders of The Quad — the U.S., Australia, India and Japan — conduct their first summit, by teleconference.

  The Quad, or Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, is an informal strategy forum of the major Indo-Pacific democracies that some wish to see evolve into an Asian NATO to contain China, as NATO contained the Soviet Union for 40 years of Cold War.

  Next week, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan meet their Chinese counterparts midway between Beijing and Washington — in Anchorage, Alaska.

  The Chinese are said to have sought out the two-day meeting since before the inauguration of Biden.

  And understandably so. For while the Chinese are hoping for a reset of relations after a troubled last year with the Trump administration, leaders of both U.S. parties — to compensate for decades of congressional indulgence of Beijing —suddenly seem to be on their muscle.

  Consider.

  During the transition, the Biden foreign policy team gave a war guarantee to Manila to fight alongside the Philippines in any clash with the Chinese over disputed rocks and reefs in the South China Sea.

  Tokyo was informed that its mutual security treaty with the United States that dates to the 1950s covers the uninhabited Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea. But Beijing also claims these islands as her own.

  On the eve of his taking office, Blinken said he agreed with Mike Pompeo’s view that China’s brutal repression of the Uighurs in Xinjiang constitutes “genocide” and crimes against humanity. That latter charge is what the Nazis were hanged for at Nuremberg.

  How can the United States send athletes to the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, if the Chinese are still crushing Hong Kong and committing crimes against humanity in western China that compare to the worst Nazi crimes of World War II?

  Testifying before Congress this week, four-star Admiral Phil Davidson, retiring commander of the Indo-Pacific, called for new defensive missiles to protect Guam against Chinese DF-21 and DF-26 missiles. China calls these missiles “Guam killers.”

  The admiral also called for the U.S. to develop intermediate-range missiles that can be fired from Guam and allied territory closer to China. Describing the need for offensive missiles to hit Chinese targets, Davidson said, “If I can’t score some runs, I can’t win the game.”

  Addressing Taiwan, Davidson said:

  “Over the past year, Beijing has pursued a coordinated campaign of diplomatic, information, economic, and — increasingly — military tools to isolate Taipei from the international community and if necessary compel unification with the (Peoples Republic of China.)”

  Chinese warplanes have lately flown in formation toward the island of 25 million, which Beijing claims as its national territory — a claim President Nixon seemed to concede in the Shanghai Communique after his Peking summit of 1972.

  “Our commitment to Taiwan is rock-solid,” was how the Biden State Department answered China’s aggressive moves.

  If we don’t establish rules of the road for U.S. and Chinese ships and planes in the East and South China Sea and Taiwan strait, how do we indefinitely avoid the kind of collision that could turn into a shooting war?

  In this widening and deepening confrontation, China is not backing down. She makes no apologies for the crackdown in Hong Kong or the concentration camps of the Uighurs. She continues to stonewall about how the coronavirus escaped from Wuhan to kill 500,000 Americans and many times that number worldwide.

  Meanwhile, Chinese bombers, fighters, warships and patrol boats approach closer and closer to planes, vessels and territory of America and her friends and allies. Nor has China surrendered a rock or reef or shoal in the South or East China Sea.

  Last week, Blinken called China the “biggest geopolitical test of the 21st century,” the only country able “to seriously challenge the stable and open international system.”

  And in America, whatever your political party, “standing up to China” seems to be a winning posture. But where is all this going? Where does all this end?

  

  Beijing is not apologetically but proudly Communist. It believes its system has been proven superior in this century. It does not believe in an equality of ideologies, religions or peoples. It openly rejects American democracy as a failed and failing system, and rejects any suggestion of American primacy in creating a “rules-based international order.”

  And if it continues to grow in real and relative terms for the next two decades as it did in the last two decades — given that China has four times the population of the United States — it could emerge not only as the dominant power in Asia and the Indo-Pacific but in the world.

  And what can we do to assure that does not happen — short of a war that could be disaster to us both, as World War II was for the British as well as the Germans.

  How do we decouple from a country that provides necessities of national life — such as pharmaceuticals — for our people?

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 03/12/2021 – 21:40

• NYC Spent Nearly Half A Million Dollars Per Inmate In 2020, Report Says
  NYC Spent Nearly Half A Million Dollars Per Inmate In 2020, Report Says

  The Office of the New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer published a new report outlining how the New York City Department of Corrections spent a whopping $447,337 per inmate in fiscal 2020, up more than 33% a year ago and more than doubled since 2015. 

  Rising costs per inmate come as violence has exploded within NYC jails. “The rate of incidents and allegations of use of force has also grown sharply, nearly doubling from FY 2018 to FY 2020,” Stringer said in the report.

  

  “The cost to incarcerate a single individual on Rikers has exploded even as our jail population remains near historic lows – yet rates of violence continue to climb,” Stringer said in a statement published Wednesday. “That means we are spending more and more money to incarcerate fewer and fewer people and reducing the safety of both officers and people in custody in the process. We must reimagine our criminal legal system, dramatically reduce the pretrial population, and invest our taxpayer dollars in the resources and programs—from housing to health care—that prevent incarceration in the first place.” 

  The core findings of the report show “the number of people in jail has fallen faster than the DOC budget and headcount, the ratio of correction officers to incarcerated individuals and the cost per incarcerated person has risen.” To incarcerate a single inmate over the 2020 fiscal year costs $447,337, up from $334,864 the prior year. 

  

  Stringer, who is running to replace Mayor Bill de Blasio as mayor, has pledged if he’s elected mayor, he would close jail facilities on Riker’s Island. A couple of years ago, lawmakers pushed a bill through that would shut down Rikers by 2026.

  Since the police killing of George Floyd, NYC has taken steps to defund the police and restructure its criminal justice system, though jail budgets have so far been maintained. 

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 03/12/2021 – 21:20

• The Founders Warned Us About Abuses Like H.R. 1
  The Founders Warned Us About Abuses Like H.R. 1

  Authored by Rob Natelson via The Epoch Times,

  H.R. 1, the bill that would seize control of federal elections from the states, comes with an unusual twist. It supposedly promotes “access.” But it says anyone challenging its constitutionality is barred from every court in the nation but a single federal trial court in Washington, D.C.!

  

  Under H.R. 1, some citizens get more access than others.

  Mark Twain is said to have quipped that history doesn’t repeat itself, but often rhymes. And here’s one of those rhymes: Limiting challengers to one court in the nation sounds a lot like Founding-Era warnings that if Congress could regulate its own elections it might limit voters to one polling place per state. More on that shortly.

  As my last essay noted, H.R. 1 claims to rely on three sections of the Constitution, two of which probably are irrelevant. The third is the Elections Clause (Article I, Section 4, Clause 1)—more appropriately called the Times, Places, and Manner Clause. It reads as follows:

  “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations ….”

  H.R. 1 quotes some out-of-context Supreme Court language to the effect that the italicized language gives Congress broad authority to overrule state election law.

  But the text of the Elections Clause tells a very different story, as does its history.

  The text tells us that Congress’s power applies only to congressional elections. It doesn’t apply to presidential contests, as the drafters of H.R. 1 pretend.

  In addition, the text focuses principally on the power of state legislatures. It adds Congress’s authority only in a subordinate clause. This subordinate clause is what lawyers and judges—both in the Founding Era and in modern times—call a “proviso.” Provisos traditionally are interpreted narrowly, leaving the earlier language (the state legislatures’ power) to be interpreted broadly. In this case, narrow interpretation means that if there’s reasonable doubt about whether Congress has authority, the issue is decided against Congress.

  Now let’s look at the history:

  When the Constitution was publicly debated, the proviso giving Congress power to revise state election laws was highly controversial. Even many of the Constitution’s supporters wanted it taken out. Dr. James McClurg of Virginia, who had served at the Constitutional Convention, was one of these. Another was Noah Webster, later famous for his American dictionary. Webster wrote an influential pamphlet strongly supporting the Constitution—but demanding that the proviso be removed.

  Why the concern? They understood the danger of allowing incumbent politicians to dictate the laws governing their own re-election. Experience shows that if incumbents write the rules, they write the rules to suit themselves. A glaring example is how the Democrat sponsors of H.R. 1 seek to alter state voter registration systems to their own advantage.

  Skeptical Founding-Era writers explained in detail how the proviso could be abused. They pointed out, for instance, that if Congress could fix a “Place” for election, it might severely limit the number of polling places and locate them to benefit incumbents. Thus, a congressman from Philadelphia might induce his colleagues to locate only one polling place in Pennsylvania—in the congressman’s own neighborhood in Philadelphia.

  Sound familiar? It’s a lot like Democrat partisans providing that the one court where H.R. 1 can be challenged is in heavily Democrat Washington, D.C.

  During the constitutional debates, there was so much public resistance to the proviso that advocates became very concerned. What if these few words led the public to reject the entire Constitution?

  So advocates assured the public that Congress’s power over congressional elections would be extremely limited. They said the proviso was designed only for emergencies. As I reported in my 2010 study of the Elections Clause:

  “[T]he proponents’ decisive argument … was one that had first been raised at the federal convention: that the Times, Places and Manner Clause was needed to enable Congress to preserve its own existence. In absence of a congressional power to regulate congressional elections, a group of states could destroy the House of Representatives by refusing to provide for those elections or by creating regulations designed to sabotage them. As a precedent, the Federalists alleged that Rhode Island had damaged the operations of the Confederation Congress by refusing to send delegates to that body. The Federalists made this argument over and over, using it to sway votes in crucial states.”

  Moreover:

  “In Maryland, convention delegate James McHenry added that … an insurrection or rebellion might prevent a state legislature from administering an election. As James Iredell told the North Carolina ratifying convention, ‘[a]n occasion may arise when the exercise of this ultimate power in Congress may be necessary … if a state should be involved in war, and its legislature could not assemble, (as was the case of South Carolina, and occasionally of some other states, during the late war).’”

  Maryland’s famous jurist, Alexander Contee Hanson, added that Congress would exercise its “times, places, and manner” authority only in cases of invasion, legislative neglect, or obstinate refusal to pass election laws, or if a state crafted its election laws with a “sinister purpose” or to injure the general government. “It was never meant,” he wrote, “that congress should at any time interfere, unless on the failure of a state legislature, or to alter such regulations as may be obviously improper.”

  Based on these assurances, the public accepted the proviso and ratified the Constitution.

  Of course, the Constitution doesn’t actually say the proviso is limited to emergencies. But courts routinely consider the history behind a document’s words when deciding how broadly to interpret them. I explained above that the text tells us to construe the proviso narrowly. History backs this up.

  Here’s an illustration of how the courts should apply Congress’s Election Clause authority. Suppose the question arises of whether “the manner of holding Elections” extends only to mechanics such as the form of the ballot, or also includes regulating campaigns. Narrow construction would give force to the Founding-Era evidence that “manner of holding” does not include campaigns.

  Bottom line: The drafters of H.R. 1 were wrong to proclaim unlimited power to regulate federal elections and campaigns. On the contrary, the Elections Clause grants Congress only limited authority. A runaway Congress should never be permitted to seize more power than the Constitution gives it.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 03/12/2021 – 21:00

• Scientists Propose "Lunar Ark" To Store 6.7 Million Sperm Samples As Global Insurance Policy
  Scientists Propose “Lunar Ark” To Store 6.7 Million Sperm Samples As Global Insurance Policy

  The Svalbard Global Seed Vault on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen in the remote Arctic Svalbard archipelago appears to be losing its appeal as scientists propose a “lunar ark” to house millions of species of seeds, sperm, eggs, and DNA. 

  A team of researchers from the University of Arizona, led by Jekan Thanga, proposed building a massive “ark” on the moon as a “modern global insurance policy” against natural disasters, socio-economic chaos, asteroids, and the threat of nuclear war. 

  

  “Earth is naturally a volatile environment,” Thanga said in the study titled “Lunar Pits and Lava Tubes for a Modern Ark.” The team debuted the study at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Aerospace Conference last Saturday. 

  “An ark, just like Noah’s in the Bible, could store endangered species more cost-effectively than protecting them on earth or creating an artificial ecosystem,” Thanga said.

  The researcher proposed building the ark in a lunar pit and or lava tubes, holding upwards of 6.7 million species of seeds, sperm, eggs, and DNA.

  Thanga said due to instability, Earth-based repositories, such as Svalbard, could leave specimens vulnerable. 

  

  Thanga’s presentation explained that various species would be cryogenically preserved. “We can still save them until the tech advances to then reintroduce these species — in other words, save them for another day,” he added. 

  To transport upwards of 6.7 million samples, it would take 250 rocket launches. By comparison, the International Space Station took only 40 rocket launches to build. 

  The scientist suggested solar panels would power the facility. However, future moon bases will likely be powered with miniature nuclear reactors, as we’ve explained before. 

  Here’s the full presentation: 

  “We propose development of a modern day ark to be housed inside lunar lava tubes. The ark would house eggs, sperms, seeds and other DNA matter from all of the endangered species on Earth. It would serve as a global insurance policy. Earth faces probability of peril from various natural disasters and human threats such as global nuclear war that could wipe out a large number of species in a short time. Lunar lava tubes were discovered in 2013 and are likely to have remained pristine for 3-4 billion years. They are only 4-5 days from Earth. They are an excellent shelter against lunar surface temperature swings, cosmic radiation and micro-meteorites. The ark would house these endangered species in cryo-conditions of -180 C and colder. Our research shows that new technologies are need to make this initiative possible. It will require substantial investments and advances in robotics to operate under cryo-conditions,” he said.

  Outside of the academic world, global superpowers have proposed building moon bases and mining the lunar surface to harvest rare metals. 

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 03/12/2021 – 20:40

• Greenwald: Criticizing Public Figures, Including Influential Journalists, Is Not Harassment Or Abuse
  Greenwald: Criticizing Public Figures, Including Influential Journalists, Is Not Harassment Or Abuse

  Authored by Glenn Greenwald via greenwald.substack.com,

  The most powerful and influential newspaper in the U.S., arguably the West, is The New York Times. Journalists who write for it, especially those whose work is featured on its front page or in its op-ed section, wield immense power to shape public discourse, influence thought, set the political agenda for the planet’s most powerful nation, expose injustices, or ruin the lives of public figures and private citizens alike. That is an enormous amount of power in the hands of one media institution and its employees. That’s why it calls itself the Paper of Record.

  

  One of the Paper of Record’s star reporters, Taylor Lorenz, has been much discussed of late. That is so for three reasons. The first is that the thirty-six-year-old tech and culture reporter has helped innovate a new kind of reportorial beat that seems to have a couple of purposes. She publishes articles exploring in great detail the online culture of teenagers and very young adults, which, as a father of two young Tik-Tok-using children, I have found occasionally and mildly interesting. She also seeks to catch famous and non-famous people alike using bad words or being in close digital proximity to bad people so that she can alert the rest of the world to these important findings. It is natural that journalists who pioneer a new form of reporting this way are going to be discussed.

  The second reason Lorenz is the topic of recent discussion is that she has been repeatedly caught fabricating claims about influential people, and attempting to ruin the reputations and lives of decidedly non-famous people. In the last six weeks alone, she twice publicly lied about Netscape founder Marc Andreessen: once claiming he used the word “retarded” in a Clubhouse room in which she was lurking (he had not) and then accusing him of plotting with a white nationalist in a different Clubhouse room to attack her (he, in fact, had said nothing).

  

  She also often uses her large, powerful public platform to malign private citizens without any power or public standing by accusing them of harboring bad beliefs and/or associating with others who do. (She is currently being sued by a citizen named Arya Toufanian, who claims Lorenz has used her private Twitter account to destroy her reputation and business, particularly with a tweet that Lorenz kept pinned at the top of her Twitter page for eight months, while several other non-public figures complain that Lorenz has “reported” on their non-public activities). It is to be expected that a New York Times journalist who gets caught lying as she did against Andreessen and trying to destroy the reputations of non-public figures will be a topic of conversation.

  The third reason this New York Times reporter is receiving attention is because she has become a leading advocate and symbol for a toxic tactic now frequently used by wealthy and influential public figures (like her) to delegitimize criticisms and even render off-limits any attempt to hold them accountable. Specifically, she and her media allies constantly conflate criticisms of people like them with “harassment,” “abuse” and even “violence.”

  That is what Lorenz did on Tuesday when she co-opted International Women’s Day to announce that “it is not an exaggeration to say that the harassment and smear campaign I have had to endure over the past year has destroyed my life.” She began her story by proclaiming: “For international women’s day please consider supporting women enduring online harassment.” She finished it with this: “No one should have to go through this.” Notably, there was no mention, by her or her many media defenders, of the lives she has harmed or otherwise deleteriously affected with her massive journalistic platform.

  That is deliberate. Under this formulation, if you criticize the ways Lorenz uses her very influential media perch — including by pointing out that she probably should stop fabricating accusations against people and monitoring the private acts of non-public people — then you are guilty of harassing a “young woman” and inflicting emotional pain and violence on her (it’s quite a bizarre dynamic, best left to psychologists, how her supporters insist on infantilizing this fully grown, close-to-middle-aged successful journalist by talking about her as if she’s a fragile high school junior; it’s particularly creepy when her good male Allies speak of her this way).

  Taylor Lorenz went after me on-and-off for weeks over my activity on Clubhouse, screencapping my invites and rooms and insinuating to her following that I was some sort of racist nutcase. The only woman she’s ever given a flying fuck about is herself.

  — Mason 🏃‍♂️✂️𐃏 (@webdevMason) March 9, 2021

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  This is worth focusing on precisely because it is now so common among the nation’s political and media elite. By no means is this tactic unique to Lorenz. She did not pioneer it. She is just latching onto it, exploiting it, in order to immunize herself from criticisms of her destructive journalistic misconduct and to depict her critics as violent harassers and abusers. With this framework implanted, there is no way to express criticisms of Taylor Lorenz’s work and the use and abuse of her journalistic platform without standing widely accused of maliciously inciting a mob of violent misogynists to ruin her life — that’s quite a potent shield from accountability for someone this influential in public life.

  But this is now a commonplace tactic among the society’s richest, most powerful and most influential public figures. The advent of the internet has empowered the riff-raff, the peasants, the unlicensed and the uncredentialed — those who in the past were blissfully silent and invisible — to be heard, often with irreverence and even contempt for those who wield the greatest societal privileges, such as a star New York Times reporter. By recasting themselves as oppressed, abused and powerless rather than what they are (powerful oppressors who sometimes abuse their power), elite political and media luminaries seek to completely reverse the dynamic.

  During Hillary Clinton’s ill-fated 2016 presidential campaign, one of the most common tactics used by her political and media supporters was to cast criticisms of her (largely from supporters of Bernie Sanders) not as ideological or political but as misogynistic, thus converting one of the world’s richest and most powerful political figures into some kind of a victim, exactly when she was seeking to obtain for herself the planet’s most powerful political office. There was no way to criticize Hillary Clinton — there still is not — without being branded a misogynist.

  A very similar tactic was used four years later to vilify anyone criticizing Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) — also one of the world’s richest and most powerful figures — as she sought the power of the Oval Office. A major media theme was that she was being brutally assaulted by Sanders supporters who were using snake emojis to express dissatisfaction with what they believed was her less-than-scrupulous campaign, such as relying on millions of dollars in dark money from an anonymous Silicon Valley billionaire to stay in the race long after the immense failure of her campaign was manifest, and attempting to depict Sanders as a woman-hating cretin. When Warren finally withdrew from the race after having placed no better than third in any state including her own, Rachel Maddow devoted a good chunk of her interview with the Senator and best-selling author to exploring the deep trauma she experienced from the snake emojis.

  When Joe Biden announced his choice of Janet Yellen as Treasury Secretary and various news outlets reported that she had spent the last several years collecting many millions of dollars in speaking fees from the very Wall Street banks over whom she would now exercise immense power, the reporters who disclosed these facts and those expressing concern about them were accused of sexism. Somehow, a narrative was peddled under which one of the multi-millionaire titans of the global neoliberal order was reduced to a helpless victim, while the far less powerful people questioning the ethics and integrity of her conduct became her persecutors.

  One of the many ironies of these tawdry attempts to shield the world’s most powerful people from criticism is that they fundamentally rely upon the exact stereotypes which, in prior generations, had been deployed to deny women, racial minorities and LGBTs fair and equal opportunities to ascend to powerful positions. Those who purport to be supporters of Lorenz speak of her not as what she is — a successful and wealthy professional woman in her mid-30s who has amassed a large amount of influence and chose a career whose purpose is supposed to be confronting powerful people — but instead as a delicate, young flower, incapable of withstanding criticisms:

  This is dangerous and disgusting. Someone asks for help after suffering online harassment, and this man mocks her in prime time — using her full name five separate times — in an obvious attempt to encourage more harassment. We are better than this. https://t.co/zlCcf84bgG

  — Steve Peoples (@sppeoples) March 10, 2021

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  In the paradigm peddled by Maddow, Elizabeth Warren was instantly transformed from an outspoken, intrepid Harvard Law Professor, consumer advocate, and influential lawmaker into a vulnerable abuse victim. Anonymous Sanders supporters were the ones wielding the real power and strength in this warped and self-serving framework. In order to shield themselves from the same scrutiny and accountability every other powerful public figure receives, they’re resuscitating the most discredited and antiquated myths about who is strong and weak, who requires protection and special considerations and who does not.

  No discussion of this tactic would be complete without noting its strong ideological component: its weaponization for partisan aims. Say whatever you’d like about journalists like Laura Ingraham or Mollie Hemingway or Briahna Joy Gray or political figures such as Kellyanne Conway, Susan Collins or Kirstjen Nielsen. Have at it: the sky’s the limit. Let it all fly without the slightest concern for accusations of misogyny, which, rest easy, will not be forthcoming no matter how crude or misogynistic the attacks are.

  

  One also need not worry about accusations of anti-Semitism if one opposes the landmark quest of Bernie Sanders to become the first Jewish president or even expresses bitter contempt for him. No bigotry allegations will be applied to critics of Clarence Thomas, Tim Scott, Nikki Haley, Richard Grenell, or Ben Carson.

  This transparent tactic is part-and-parcel of the increasingly ideological exploitation of identity politics to shield the neoliberal order and its guardians from popular critique. Step lightly if you want to criticize the bombing of Syria because the Pentagon is now led by an African-American Defense Secretary and Biden just promoted two female generals. No objecting to the closeness between the Treasury Secretary and Wall Street banks because doing so is a misogynistic attempt to limit how women can be paid. Transportation policy should be questioned only in the most polite tones lest one stand accused of harboring anti-gay animus for the department’s Secretary.

  The CIA and FBI celebrate its diverse workforce in the same way and for the same reason that gigantic corporations do: to place a pretty but very thin veneer on the harmful role they play in the world. The beneficiaries of this tactic are virtually always the powerful, while the villains are their critics, especially when those critics are marginalized. It is a majestic reversal of the power dynamic.

  ---

  Those who invoke this shield on their own behalf do so by claiming that they receive abusive and bigoted messages and even threats online. I have no doubt that they are telling the truth. In the age of social media, anyone with a significant public platform will inevitably be subjected to ugly vitriol. Often the verbal assaults are designed for the person’s gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity and other aspects of their demographic identity in order to be as hurtful as possible.

  In response to Lorenz’s use of International Women’s Day to elevate her suffering to center stage, Guardian reporter Julia Carrie Wong described her own personal experience to argue that verbal condemnations from angry readers can cause “serious mental anguish and made me fear for my own safety and that of my family.” She acknowledged that “it’s not physical or material harm” and is “not legal persecution,” but, she said, it is nonetheless “a very real, constant, negative force in my life, something I have to think about all the time, and that sucks.”

  It is hard to dispute Wong’s claims. Not only do studies demonstrate that a barrage of online criticism can adversely affect one’s mental health, I can speak from personal experience — vast, sustained, and intense personal experience — about what it is like to be the target of coordinated, bigoted and threatening attacks because of one’s reporting.

  When Jair Bolsonaro was in the middle of his successful presidential candidate in 2017, he hurled an anti-gay slur at me using his Twitter account to his millions of followers. In 2019, he publicly claimed my marriage to my husband and our adoption of two Brazilian children were fraudulent, done only to prevent my deportation. Does it take any imagination to envision what my email inbox and online messages were like for months after each of those episodes?

  From the time my colleagues and I at The Intercept Brazil began our multi-part exposé about corruption on the part of high-level Bolsonaro officials in mid-2019, my name trended on Brazilian Twitter on a virtually daily basis for weeks if not longer, accompanied by demands for my deportation and arrest. Much of the vitriol was anti-gay in theme, to put that mildly. My husband, one of the only openly gay members of Congress in the history of Brazil, and I have received a non-stop deluge of very specific death threats aimed at our family and our children. As a result of that, none of us — him, me or our two children — have left our home in almost two years without armed security and an armored vehicle. And it all culminated in the attempt to criminally prosecute me last year on over 100 felony counts.

  That is most definitely not the first time I’ve encountered such criticisms and attacks, nor, I say with confidence, will it be the last. I was unable to leave Brazil for almost a year after returning from Hong Kong where I met Edward Snowden and published our first reports on the NSA due to publicly and privately expressed threats from U.S. officials of criminal prosecution.

  I’m so far from unique in any of this. These kinds of recriminations are inherent to journalism (when done well), to confronting those in power, to insinuating yourself into controversial and polarizing political debates and controversies. Journalists love to laud themselves for “speaking truth to power” but rarely think about what that actually means.

  If you do journalism well, then you’re going to make people angry, and if you’re making people angry, then they are going to say unpleasant and hurtful things about you. If you’re lucky, that is all that will happen. The bigger your platform, the more angry people there will be, and the angrier they will be. The more powerful the people angered by your work, the more intense the retaliation. That is what it means to call someone “powerful”: they have the capacity to inflict punishment on those who impede them.

  Death threats like this one arrive in my inbox every week at least. When a news event related to our work transpires that angers large numbers of people — such as this week’s news that the criminal convictions of former President Lula da Silva have been invalidated and his political rights restored, thus rendering him eligible to run against Bolsonaro in 2022 — those threats and vituperative messages intensify greatly and we are forced to enhance our security measures.

  Anyone who cannot endure that, or who does not want to, is well-advised not to seek out a public platform and try to become an influential figure who helps shape discourse, debate and political outcomes, and especially not to become a reporter devoted to exposing secret corruption by powerful factions. It would obviously be better if all of that did not happen, but wishing that it would stop is like hoping it never rains again: not only is it futile, but — like rain — there are cleansing and healthy aspects to having those who wield influence and power have to hear from those they affect, and anger.

  But with that cost, which can be substantial, comes an enormous benefit. It is an immense privilege to have a large platform that you can utilize to shape the society around you, reach large numbers of people, and highlight injustices you believe are being neglected. Those who have that, and who earn a living by pursuing their passion to use it, are incredibly fortunate. Journalists who are murdered or imprisoned or prosecuted for their work are victims of real persecution. Journalists who are maligned with words are not, especially when those words come not from powerful state officials but from random people on the internet.

  And even when such criticisms do emanate from powerful officials, it still does not rise to the level of persecution: when Jair Bolsonaro hurled an anti-gay slur at me online and then maligned our family at a press conference, it was not even in the same universe of difficulty as being threatened with prosecution by the U.S. or Brazil governments or receiving credible death threats. I’ve said plenty of critical things about him as well. That is why I always found it so preposterous to treat Trump’s mean tweets about Chuck Todd or Jim Acosta like some grave threat to press freedom. Imprisoning Julian Assange for publishing documents is a dangerous press freedom attack; mocking Wolf Blitzer’s intellect is not. And if the U.S. President’s mean words about journalists do not constitute an attack on press freedom — and they do not — then surely the same is true of random, powerless people online.

  That is why I do not consider myself remotely victimized: I chose to do this work knowing what it would entail if I did it well, and I continue to do it, rather than do something else, because it is a price worth paying. It is fulfilling and gratifying work to me, and I see the recriminations as proof of its efficacy. Not everyone will have that same calculus, which is why different people make different choices for their lives based on their assessments of the costs and benefits inherent in them, but the framework is essentially the same for everyone.

  What I ultimately find most repellent and offensive about this incessant self-victimization from society’s most powerful and privileged actors is the conceit that they are somehow unique or special in the treatment they receive, as if it only happens to people like them. That is the exact opposite of reality: everyone with a public platform receives abuse and ugly attacks, and there are members of every faction who launch them. If you have any doubts about that, go criticize Kamala Harris and see what kind of staggeringly bigoted and hateful abuse you get back in return.

  

  Whenever this tactic is hauled out in defense of neoliberal leaders — to claim that Sanders supporters are uniquely abusive, or that Corbyn supporters are, or that Trump supporters are: basically that everyone is guilty of abusive behavior except neoliberals and their loyal followers — the real purpose of it becomes clear. It is a crowd-control technique, one designed to build a gigantic moat and drawbridge to protect those inside the royal court from the angry hordes outside of it.

  Last week, I participated in a debate on Al Jazeera about online censorship with the liberal British journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. She was quite a reasonable and candid advocate of the need for online censorship and I found the discussion consequently illuminating, particularly because she was so blunt about what she believes is the real problem that online censorship needs to solve. Listen to what she said:

  Precisely. “It’s not like it used to be.” The problem is that “this is not civilized discourse” to them because “it’s often coming from some of the least educated and most angry.” That’s why online censorship is needed. That’s why media figures need to unite to demonize and discredit their critics. It is because people like Taylor Lorenz — raised in Greenwich, Connecticut, educated in a Swiss boarding school, writing on the front page of The New York Times — now hears from “the least educated and most angry.” This is the societal crisis — one of caste — that they are determined to stop.

  Taylor Lorenz and her media allies know that she is more privileged and influential than you are. That is precisely why they feel justified in creating paradigms that make it illegitimate to criticize her. They think only themselves and those like them deserve to participate in the public discourse. Since they cannot fully control the technology that allows everyone to be heard (they partially control it by pressuring tech monopolies to censor their adversaries), they need to create storylines and scripts designed to coerce their critics into silence.

  Knowing that you will be vilified as some kind of brute abuser if you criticize a New York Times reporter is, for many people, too high of a price to pay for doing it. So people instead refrain, stay quiet, and that is the obvious objective of this lowly strategy.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 03/12/2021 – 20:20

• Security Experts "Raise Red Flags" On Dubai Airport's New Iris Scan Technology 
  Security Experts “Raise Red Flags” On Dubai Airport’s New Iris Scan Technology 

  Travelers at Dubai International Airport are now greeted by iris-scanners that are connected with the country’s facial recognition database, according to the Associated Press (AP). 

  Under the guise of the virus pandemic, United Arab Emirates (UAE) launched the contactless technology that helps stem the virus spread. Even though the new system allows quick trips through security checkpoints, there are mounting concerns about mass surveillance in the federation of seven sheikhdoms. 

  According to the AP, UAE ranks the highest globally on a per capita basis of surveillance camera concentration. Many of the cameras are tethered to artificial intelligence systems that make it possible for the government to track anyone, anywhere. 

  On Sunday, the first travelers used the new iris scanner after checking in – it allowed them to “breeze through passport control within seconds,” said AP. 

  Dubai airport is promising to have passengers pass through immigration in less than 10 seconds, by using facial recognition technology pic.twitter.com/YeaFgd2cwv

  — Reuters (@Reuters) March 8, 2021

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  “The future is coming,” said Major Gen. Obaid Mehayer Bin Suroor, deputy director of the General Directorate of Residency and Foreign Affairs. “Now, all the procedures have become ‘smart,’ around five to six seconds.”

  Bin Suroor said Dubai’s immigration office “completely protects” the private data so that “no third party can see it.” But with limited information on the new biometric technology, there’s no telling who could misuse the data. 

  “Any surveillance technology raises red flags, regardless of what kind of country it’s in,” said Jonathan Frankle, a doctoral student in artificial intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.” But in a democratic country, if the surveillance technology is used transparently, at least there’s an opportunity to have a public conversation about it.”

  Along with facial recognition, airports such as Dubai’s could soon request COVID passports from travelers. 

  COVID passports were widely discussed for near-term rollouts by the International Air Transport Association. 

  UAE appears to be implementing a system, sort of like China’s, to track its entire population in real-time. 

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 03/12/2021 – 20:00

• New York Colleges Under Fire After Targeting Conservative Students And Groups
  New York Colleges Under Fire After Targeting Conservative Students And Groups

  Authored by Jonathan Turley,

  We have been discussing how universities are remaining silent as student governments limit rights of free speech and association, including the impeachment of conservative students.   Now, students at Skidmore College have reportedly barred fellow students from starting a campus chapter of the conservative group Young Americans for Liberty (YAL). In Rochester Institute of Technology, the student government has impeached student Senator Jacob Custer for defending campus police officers wearing Thin Blue Line masks. In both controversies, there are appeals or reviews being pursued but students were subjected to weeks of abusive campaigns for the exercise of their free speech and associational rights.

  

  Skidmore has been previously in the news as a campus with a growing anti-free speech movement, including an unsuccessful effort to fire  professors for attending a police rally. There is a growing threat to free speech posed by student governments curtailing free speech under the guise of self-governance.  For some universities, student governments can accomplish indirectly what they cannot legally or politically accomplish directly.

  That danger is evident in the account of Hannah Davis of how she was the subject of a campus campaign and petition to prevent her founding a YAL chapter. According to the Albany Times Union, the Skidmore Student Government Association told Davis she could not establish a YAL chapter because the formation of the group triggered “concerns of hate speech and … students on campus feel unsafe.” 

  According to the Times Union, the anti-YAL petition was authored anonymously and denounced YAL as a springboard “for hate speech and bigotry disguised as political discourse.” It also claimed that “Skidmore has become increasingly hostile to BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and people of color) and marginalized students. It is no coincidence that this club is being proposed following months of bold activism by students of color.”

  Skidmore College president Mark Connor said: “The student leaders whom our students have elected as their representatives have the right to vote to decide the outcome of this process I encourage all members of our community to exercise their freedom of speech and freedom of association and to engage with each other with patience, courtesy and respect for one another.”  Connor’s statement is disappointingly vague. He added:

  “These fundamental rights apply to all, regardless of political persuasion or other differences, including views and beliefs. The rare exception would be hate speech, in which violence is clearly the goal, which would not be tolerated in our community. As always, I encourage all members of our community to exercise their freedom of speech and freedom of association and to engage with each other with patience, courtesy and respect for one another.”

  There is nothing that one could object to in that statement but also little worth repeating. YAL is clearly a very conservative organization that is involved in both political and academic events.  The question is whether Connor would have been more proactive and clear if this was a campus effort to ban other more popular groups. Connor said that the conservative students could appeal but universities need to speak early and strongly in support of free speech and associational rights in such controversies.

  In attacks on professors, we have also seen a sharp difference in the level of support voiced by university officials depending on the content of the viewpoints. Indeed, we have seen schools refuse to apologize when they effectively fueled false allegations.

  When conservative faculty or controversial speakers are targeted, few officials or fellow professors have stepped forward to denounce such campaigns. The same is not true when controversies have arisen for statements on the left. We have been discussing efforts to fire professors who voice dissenting views on various issues including an effort to oust a leading economist from the University of Chicago as well as a leading linguistics professor at Harvard and a literature professor at Penn. Sites like Lawyers, Guns, and Money feature writers like Colorado Law Professor Paul Campus who call for the firing of those with opposing views (including myself).  Such campaigns have targeted teachers and students who contest the evidence of systemic racism in the use of lethal force by police or offer other opposing views in current debates over the pandemic, reparations, electoral fraud, or other issues.

  Over at RIT, the students went the impeachment route to punish opposing viewpoints. The controversy arose in late January and students sought to impeach Custer due to his arguments on the student government’s messaging app in support of a campus officer who wore a Thin Blue Line face mask. This has been a controversy on other campuses where some symbols are favored while others are disfavored.  For free speech advocates, the issue is not the inherent meaning or value but the basis of discriminating on the basis of content in speech regulation.

  Custer defended the right to wear such masks, writing:

   “Wearing such masks if they want to is not counterintuitive. It is perfectly okay for students and adults to express it since it is free speech. It is not disrespectful either. We are student government, representing all students. It is not our role to determine what idea is good or bad simply because a few members or more disagree with it and punish members of our community over something small. That is just outright censorship.”

  This is clearly a much debated issue, but that is what academia is about: passionate but tolerant debate. Custer was voicing the view of many that TBL masks are not disrespectful or threatening of others. Yet, his defense of the officer triggered an immediate and anger response. According to The College Fix, one student senator wrote “[I]t’s honestly humorous that a White man is going to sit here and try to tell someone of color, more specifically Black, when something is or isn’t racist.” Another said that Custer believes that black people should be murdered: “Breaking news: Jacob Custer is angry and taking a stand against people of color because he isn’t allowed to disagree with the idea that Black people don’t deserve to be murdered.”

  The student government then impeached Custer for what appears to be his exercise of free speech.

  The university will only say that it is reviewing the action.

  The action is a clear denial of the free speech rights of the conservative students and violates the university policies on protecting such rights:

  As a private university, RIT retains the legal authority to determine the extent to which it will regulate an individual’s right to free speech and expression. RIT vigorously supports the rights of all members of the RIT Community to freely express their views and to peacefully and lawfully protest against actions and opinions with which they disagree.  RIT also recognizes that the right to free speech and expression is not absolute. It must be balanced against the university’s obligation to the principles of academic freedom and to provide a secure and civil environment where faculty, staff, and students can freely exchange ideas and openly engage in deliberation, debate and learning. Any decision that RIT might take to regulate speech or expression by members of the RIT Community, shall be based on RIT’s commitment to foster a safe and civil environment where differing views and opinions are expressed.  Open-mindedness, civility, respect, decency, and sensitivity for the opinions and rights of others, however different from one’s own, are crucial to fulfilling the university’s academic mission.

  While the statement seems to emphasize the right to regulate rather than protect speech, this action is clearly in contravention of the policy.

  The university did little during the campaign or the petition to make clear that all students will be guaranteed the rights to free speech and association. Recently, RIT President David Munson declared:

  “Earlier today, we learned that the Student Government Senate voted to uphold the Standards Review Board’s decision to impeach an elected member of the Student Government Senate. We felt strongly that it was proper and necessary for the Student Government to follow and complete the process outlined in their Student Government Bylaws, …However, the question of whether the decision may have violated university policy C.11, protecting free speech and expression, has been raised. As is always the case, the RIT President’s Office reserves the right to review any decision that may violate RIT policy. … To ensure that no RIT policies have been violated, I will be assembling a Review Panel, which will include members of the RIT Board of Trustees and others, to review the evidence and decisions from the Standards Review Board and the appeal process.”

  The two controversies are the latest example of how student governments can function as surrogates to silence opposing voices and viewpoints on campuses. It is commendable for reviews or appeals to be conducted. However, the silence of these schools in both controversies has been disconcerting. Students were subjected to abusive campaigns for weeks due to their exercise of free speech.  The universities remained conspicuously silent. However, student self-governance is not a license to abuse other students or deny their speech rights. Universities cannot simply say that students “can always appeal” and do nothing to maintain the core guarantees of speech and associational rights.

  I recognize that universities must be careful to honor self-governance as well as opposing free speech rights. What was missing in my view was a proactive statement from the university presidents that viewpoint discrimination would not be allowed and that, while students will be allowed to voice their opposing to viewpoints or groups, the university will not permit the sanctioning or barring of students or groups based on content discrimination.  One possible reform is to allow for the equivalent of an interlocutory appeal to the university to force a review on the grounds of raw viewpoint discrimination in certain cases like impeachments.  The alternative to is allow students to be dragged through abusive processes based on their voicing unpopular views.

  Under the current system, students can create kangaroo courts that pummel students with opposing views as universities wait silent and passively for any possible appeal. The result is a chilling effort for other students who will not want to be subjected to such abuse — and have a year of responding to these attacks by the student government. The obvious result is that the majority can deter opposing viewpoints and groups by increasing the cost of exercising the rights of free speech and association.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 03/12/2021 – 19:40

• Building A New Home? Soaring Lumber Prices Adds $24,000 To New Construction Build
  Building A New Home? Soaring Lumber Prices Adds $24,000 To New Construction Build

  Lumber prices have hit $1,000 per thousand board feet, an all-time high in recent weeks, and could extend gains this year as homebuilding and renovation demand outstrips production. Soaring lumber prices have greatly added to construction costs over the last year and could stifle the number of planned residential construction projects across the US. 

  “Production is going to have a hard time keeping up with demand growth as the world economy bounces back from Covid-19 in 2021-22,” Paul Jannke, Forest Economic Advisors LLC.’s principal of lumber, said during a conference this week who Bloomberg quoted. He believes average lumber prices will remain elevated. 

  Lumber Prices

  

  Now the question readers have is how much are these rising costs adding to the construction build? Well, the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) said rising lumber prices had added $24.4k of costs to the build in the past ten months. 

  Weeks ago, the Associated General Contractors of America (AGC) penned a letter to the White House requesting the Biden administration to intervene.

  “AGC believes the White House can play a constructive role in mitigating this growing threat to multifamily housing and other construction sectors by urging domestic lumber producers to ramp up production to ease growing shortages and making it a priority to work with Canada on a new softwood lumber agreement,” the AGC wrote in a letter.

  NAHB has also been vocal and requested the federal government to intervene and lower lumber prices. They asked the Biden administration to end tariffs on Canadian lumber shipments to alleviate supply shortages. 

  “Lumber price spikes are not only sidelining buyers during a period of high demand, they are causing many sales to fall through and forcing builders to put projects on hold at a time when home inventories are already at a record low,” NAHB said in a statement.

  Additionally, as we noted during last year’s chaotic surge, it’s not all demand-driven as one builder noted, “the explanation they had for us was that COVID-19 shut down the plants that treat the wood, and that finally caught up.”

  “The supply chain was screwed up,” said Wilson, Wilson Construction’s owner in Galveston. “Dimension sizes were in limited supplies; even something as simple as a two-by-four-by-twelve Southern yellow pine treated was in extremely short supply.”

  But don’t worry future homeowners and or contractors, Powell says The Fed has “the tools” to manage inflation… well, he is right about one thing! (they do have some tools) but don’t own any sawmills nor have the ability to print wood out of thin air. 

  Inflation is real…

  We paid $30k for the lumber package in January to build this house. Same lumber pack today is $62k. In October it was $18k… 👀😳🤑🤦🏾‍♂️🤷🏾‍♂️#Inflation pic.twitter.com/iFGJHklr2d

  — TheUrbanCEO (@TyronMcDaniel) March 10, 2021

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 03/12/2021 – 19:20

• Why A Green New Deal Is More Expensive Than Joe Biden Realizes
  Why A Green New Deal Is More Expensive Than Joe Biden Realizes

  Authored by Charlie Deist via The Mises Institute,

  One of President Biden’s first executive actions was to declare January 27 “Climate Day.” This ad hoc holiday provided an opportunity for his administration to celebrate the latest rationale for economic central planning.

  The day’s festivities began with three executive orders on climate change, science, and technology.

  

  In his remarks, Biden bundled his environmental agenda with a jobs program, along with a broader policy to address social inequality and environmental injustice. Among the ambitious goals of Biden’s $2 trillion Green New Deal are 1 million new high-paying union jobs in the automobile industry, half a million electric car charging stations, and a 100 percent carbon pollution–free electric sector by 2035.

  The goal of transitioning the electrical grid to zero carbon emissions in the next fifteen years stands out as a singularly misguided effort. Even granting the nonobvious assumption that we must immediately transition away from fossil fuels, overhauling the American energy infrastructure is a vast and complex calculation problem. To be truly sustainable, individuals and firms would need to act on local knowledge, assessing where and what kinds of renewables might meet their energy needs.

  The concept of “net energy” illustrates why replacing fossil fuels with large-scale renewable energy is often counterproductive. In Carbon Shift, a 2009 book discussing peak oil and climate change, David Hughes summarizes it like this:

  A two-megawatt windmill contains 260 tonnes of steel requiring 170 tonnes of coking coal and 300 tonnes of iron ore, all mined, transported and produced by hydrocarbons. The question is: how long must a windmill generate energy before it creates more energy than it took to build it? At a good wind site, the energy payback day could be in three years or less; in a poor location, energy payback may be never. That is, a windmill could spin until it falls apart and never generate as much energy as was invested in building it.

  This life-cycle accounting of “energy return on energy invested” (EROEI) succinctly describes multiple stages of intermediate capital within a hydrocarbon-based structure of production. Hughes also hints at the basic questions facing all entrepreneurs—namely, where they should place their investments and how they should configure heterogeneous capital to recoup up-front costs plus some profit or “windfall.”

  Wind turbines and solar panels do enjoy a wide market in off-grid applications, such as remote farm properties and on oceangoing sailboats, where the abundance of wind and scarcity of petroleum products makes the investment a no-brainer. In sunny parts of the country, solar has reached “grid parity.” States like Texas, however, have failed to heed considerations of both net energy and supply and demand in installing massive wind farms at great taxpayer expense where fossil fuels would be far cheaper and more reliable. Lacking price signals, the central planner is blind to the economic consequences of his grand designs.

  The president revealed his ignorance of the technological and economic problem at hand when he stated matter of factly, “We know what to do, we’ve just got to do it.” On the contrary, we have no idea how to create a nonpolluting electrical grid without emitting much more carbon in the process than we otherwise would have.

  If the government invests trillions of dollars in energy-intensive capital investments—whether wind farms, solar charging stations, or transformer stations—it will have two primary effects.

  • First, it will frontload carbon emissions into the construction phase. This may offer the illusion of reducing pollution when in fact it merely shuffles emissions to a prior stage of production. California’s high-speed rail, for example, will take an estimated seventy-one years to offset its own construction emissions through the cars it will hypothetically replace (assuming it is ever completed). Furthermore, electric charging stations are typically powered by coal or natural gas—not solar panels.

  • Second, and relatedly, a Green New Deal funded by debt will distort the capital structure, skewing investment toward long-term fixed capital assets at the expense of the intermediate capital maintenance of the overall structure of production. Theoretically we could burn more coal, petroleum, and natural gas today to build a zero-pollution electrical infrastructure for tomorrow. But when it comes time to service offshore wind turbines, will the helicopters and boats used for maintenance be powered by electricity as well? And what kind of energy will power the factories that manufacture the solar panels and wind turbines? Claiming that they will run on renewables is eerily similar to the circular reasoning and magical thinking used by proponents of modern monetary theory to promote the illusion of spending without taxation.

  The Green New Deal is, if anything, a formula for a new dark age. Texas’s recent power outages show the difficulty of the task facing grid managers. There, an attempt to prematurely transition to unreliable wind energy exacerbated the strain on the grid when turbines froze at the crucial moment when they were most needed. The grid managers failed to keep a maintain a sufficient buffer, even without the additional mandate of ensuring the creation of new green jobs and mitigating the discriminatory effects of climate change. It is ironic that a state and nation so rich in natural energy resources would be leading the charge to cancel fossil fuels in favor of technology that has never been proven effective, or even environmentally friendly, at a large scale.

  The stock of fossil fuels is large but not infinite. Geological surveys indicate that there is plentiful energy in the ground to advance civilization and develop new sources of abundant and nonpolluting energy. However, we must be careful not to squander our petroleum patrimony on unused charging stations, unreliable wind farms, and half-finished trains to nowhere.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 03/12/2021 – 19:00

• Amidst Labor Shortage, Thailand Taps Non-Violent Prisoners To Work In Factories
  Amidst Labor Shortage, Thailand Taps Non-Violent Prisoners To Work In Factories

  Thailand is undergoing a massive labor shortage as a result of migrant workers leaving the country during Covid. 

  The country’s solution? Put its prisoners to work, according to Bloomberg. Thai Justice Minister Somsak Thepsuthin has implemented a program wherein companies can run their production facilities using inmates nearing the end of their jail sentences. The program will apply to those serving time for non-violent offenses, like drug use.

  The hope is twofold: one, to address the labor shortage and two, to help those nearly out of prison transition without the stigma of having just been in jail. Manufacturers will get the benefits of tax breaks and prisoners could be on their way to a full time job for when they leave jail. 

  Somsak commented: “This is an important project that needs to happen. It helps companies and inmates, and it saves taxpayers’ money.”

  

  Thailand relies heavily on transient workers to make goods for exports, which is “the country’s biggest growth engine”. At the same time, Thai prisons have been overrun and are “bursting at the seams”, stocked to more than 5% of capacity. As of now, prisons are taking in 15,000 inmates per month and only releasing 12,000 per month. To compound problems, the country only has 30,000 monitoring devices, which would be used to monitor those released early, ready for use.

  Somsak thinks the opportunity could be robust, since 82% of inmates in Thailand are due to non-violent offenses, mostly narcotics charges. He also expects about $198 million in seizures of funds from drug traffickers through the country this year. 

  An estimated 700,000 workers, heavily distributed in industries like tourism, services and construction, were let go from jobs due to Covid. About 200,000 returned home to countries like Myanmar and Laos, the report notes. 

  At one labor park in Samut Sakhon, companies have already started hiring “dozens of inmates” to do things like assemble bicycles and make Sriracha sauce. 

  Malaysia’s palm oil industry also sought to benefit from a similar program last year. That program has found “limited success”, the report notes.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 03/12/2021 – 18:40

• War Games Showed US Would "Lose Fast" Against China If It Invaded Taiwan: US General
  War Games Showed US Would “Lose Fast” Against China If It Invaded Taiwan: US General

  Authored by Frank Fang via The Epoch Times,

  A Chinese invasion of Taiwan would be devastating to the U.S. military as a result of Beijing’s aggressive military development in recent years, according to a U.S. Air Force general.

  

  The outcome was based on a classified Pentagon war game simulation carried out over the years, Air Force Lt. Gen. S. Clinton Hinote said in a recent interview with Yahoo News. He said that U.S. forces were losing more quickly in recent simulations after taking into consideration the Chinese regime’s new military capabilities.

  “After the 2018 war game, I distinctly remember one of our gurus of wargaming standing in front of the Air Force secretary and chief of staff, and telling them that we should never play this war game scenario [of a Chinese attack on Taiwan] again, because we know what is going to happen,” Hinote said.

  “The definitive answer if the U.S. military doesn’t change course is that we’re going to lose fast. In that case, an American president would likely be presented with almost a fait accompli.”

  “At that point the trend in our war games was not just that we were losing, but we were losing faster.”

  Around September 2020, the U.S. Air Force gamed out a conflict set more than a decade in the future, which started with a Chinese biological-weapon attack on U.S. ships and bases in the Indo-Pacific region, according to the outlet. Using military drills as a cover, Beijing then deploys an invasion force to attack Taiwan, while targeting U.S. bases and ships in the region with missile strikes, the outlet said.

  Last fall, the U.S. Air Force simulated a conflict set more than a decade in the future that began with a Chinese biological-weapon attack that swept through U.S. bases and warships in the Indo-Pacific region. Then a major Chinese military exercise was used as cover for the deployment of a massive invasion force. The simulation culminated with Chinese missile strikes raining down on U.S. bases and warships in the region, and a lightning air and amphibious assault on the island of Taiwan.

  This is the first time that the outcome of that simulation has been made public.

  Since President Joe Biden took office on Jan. 20, the Chinese Communist Party has escalated its war-mongering toward Taiwan, a democratic self-ruled island that Beijing claims as a part of its territory. In late January, a Chinese military official threatened war against the island.

  Beijing also has sent military planes into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone (ADIZ) on a nearly daily basis since the start of this year. Most recently on March 10, a Chinese anti-submarine warfare aircraft entered southwestern Taiwan’s ADIZ, according to Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense.

  Earlier this week, Adm. Philip Davidson, the head of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, warned during a Senate hearing that the Chinese regime could invade Taiwan in the “next six years.”

  When asked by a senator about the United States’ ability to defend Taiwan, Davidson said, “I think our conventional deterrent is actually eroding in the region,” citing the Chinese military’s “vast advances” in size over the past decade, and also in capability.

  The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy is now larger than the U.S. Navy. By 2025, the PLA is projected to have three aircraft carriers in the Western Pacific to the United States’ one, 12 amphibious assault ships to the United States’ four, and 108 modern multi-warfare combatant ships to the United States’ 12, according to estimates by U.S. Indo-Pacific Command submitted to Congress.

  Hinote told Yahoo News that certain adjustments are needed to tilt a possible war with China in favor of the United States. They include moving away from relying on large military bases, ports, and aircraft carriers while fighting the Chinese military, as well as deploying dispersed and mobile forces with large numbers of long-range, mobile strike systems, anti-ship cruise missile batteries, mobile rocket artillery systems, and unmanned mini-submarines, according to Hinote.

  What’s more, the adjustments call for greater use of surveillance and reconnaissance sources to allow U.S. policymakers to make quicker decisions.

  “If we can design a force that creates that level of uncertainty and causes Chinese leaders to question whether they can accomplish their goals militarily, I think that’s what deterrence looks like in the future,” Hinote said.

  Air Force officials didn’t immediately respond to a request by The Epoch Times for comment.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 03/12/2021 – 18:20

• Manhattan Leases Surge On Record Concessions And Plunging Rents
  Manhattan Leases Surge On Record Concessions And Plunging Rents

  Record concessions continue to drive new apartment leases in Manhattan as renters seek to capitalize on falling rents to trade up. 

  New lease signings surged 112% in February over the same period last year, according to Bloomberg, citing a recent report via appraiser Miller Samuel Inc. and brokerage Douglas Elliman Real Estate.

  

  Even though desperate landlords in the borough offered the most concessions ever to attract new tenants, there was still an overabundance of inventory. Incentives for new leases equated to 2.1 months of free rent, and approximately 41% of leases came with concessions, the report said. Manhattan’s listing inventory soared 154% in February to 11,750 units.

  Manhattan’s average rent declined 14% in February compared with last year. Landlords continued sweetening the pot to attract new tenants. The report also noted luxury apartments saw a 13% rent reduction to an average of $10,209.  

  “People aren’t going to return to Manhattan until they feel safe,” the report said. “We’re seeing that gradually becoming less of a concern.”

  A massive overhang of inventory has been painful for landlords and highly beneficial for bargain hunting millennials as some trade up for larger living accommodations. 

  In a prior report, Jonathan Miller, president of Miller Samuel, warned that the latest rebound should not be viewed as an “imminent recovery.”

  There’s still a lot of uncertainty about whether the rental market can rebound given a massive outflow of city dwellers to surrounding rural communities. Nevertheless, the latest developments are welcoming given record concessions and falling rents slowly chip away at inventory. 

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 03/12/2021 – 18:00

• Taibbi: The Sovietization Of The American Press
  Taibbi: The Sovietization Of The American Press

  Authored by Matt Taibbi via TK News

  

  I collect Soviet newspapers. Years ago, I used to travel to Moscow’s Izmailovsky flea market every few weeks, hooking up with a dealer who crisscrossed the country digging up front pages from the Cold War era. I have Izvestia’s celebration of Gagarin’s flight, a Pravda account of a 1938 show trial, even an ancient copy of Ogonyek with Trotsky on the cover that someone must have taken a risk to keep.

  These relics, with dramatic block fonts and red highlights, are cool pieces of history. Not so cool: the writing! Soviet newspapers were wrought with such anvil shamelessness that it’s difficult to imagine anyone ever read them without laughing. A good Soviet could write almost any Pravda headline in advance. What else but “A Mighty Demonstration of the Union of the Party and the People” fit the day after Supreme Soviet elections? What news could come from the Spanish civil war but “Success of the Republican Fleet?” Who could earn an obit headline but a “Faithful Son of the Party”?

  Reality in Soviet news was 100% binary, with all people either heroes or villains, and the villains all in league with one another (an SR was no better than a fascist or a “Right-Trotskyite Bandit,” a kind of proto-horseshoe theory). Other ideas were not represented, except to be attacked and deconstructed. Also, since anything good was all good, politicians were not described as people at all but paragons of limitless virtue — 95% of most issues of Pravda or Izvestia were just names of party leaders surrounded by lists of applause-words, like “glittering,” “full-hearted,” “wise,” “mighty,” “courageous,” “in complete moral-political union with the people,” etc.

  Some of the headlines in the U.S. press lately sound suspiciously like this kind of work:

  — Biden stimulus showers money on Americans, sharply cutting poverty

  — Champion of the middle class comes to the aid of the poor

  — Biden’s historic victory for America

  The most Soviet of the recent efforts didn’t have a classically Soviet headline. “Comedians are struggling to parody Biden. Let’s hope this doesn’t last,” read the Washington Post opinion piece by Richard Zoglin, arguing that Biden is the first president in generations who might be “impervious to impressionists.” Zoglin contended Biden is “impregnable” to parody, his voice being too “devoid of obvious quirks,” his manner too “muted and self-effacing” to offer comedians much to work with. He was talking about this person:

  Forget that the “impregnable to parody” pol spent the last campaign year jamming fingers in the sternums of voters, challenging them to pushup contests, calling them “lying dog-faced pony soldiers,” and forgetting what state he was in. Biden, on the day Zoglin ran his piece, couldn’t remember the name of his Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, and referred to the Department of Defense as “that outfit over there”:

  It doesn’t take much looking to find comedians like James Adomian and Anthony Atamaniuk ab-libbing riffs on Biden with ease. He checks almost every box as a comic subject, saying inappropriate things, engaging in wacky Inspector Clouseau-style physical stunts (like biting his wife’s finger), and switching back and forth between outbursts of splenetic certainty and total cluelessness. The parody doesn’t even have to be mean — you could make it endearing cluelessness. But to say nothing’s there to work with is bananas.

  The first 50 days of Biden’s administration have been a surprise on multiple fronts. The breadth of his stimulus suggests a real change from the Obama years, while hints that this administration wants to pick a unionization fight with Amazon go against every tendency of Clintonian politics. But it’s hard to know what much of it means, because coverage of Biden increasingly resembles official press releases, often featuring embarrassing, Soviet-style contortions.

  When Biden decided not to punish Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman for the murder of Washington Post writer Jamal Khashoggi on the grounds that the “cost” of “breaching the relationship with one of America’s key Arab allies” was too high, the New York Times headline read: “Biden Won’t Penalize Saudi Crown Prince Over Khashoggi’s Killing, Fearing Relations Breach.” When Donald Trump made the same calculation, saying he couldn’t cut ties because “the world is a very dangerous place” and “our relationship is with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia,” the paper joined most of the rest of the press corps in howling in outrage.

  “In Extraordinary Statement, Trump Stands With Saudis Despite Khashoggi Killing.” was the Times headline, in a piece that said Trump’s decision was “a stark distillation of the Trump worldview: remorselessly transactional, heedless of the facts, determined to put America’s interests first, and founded on a theory of moral equivalence.” The paper noted, “Even Mr. Trump’s staunchest allies on Capitol Hill expressed revulsion.”

  This week, in its “Crusader for the Poor” piece, the Times described Biden’s identical bin Salman decision as mere evidence that he remains “in the cautious middle” in his foreign policy. The paper previously had David Sanger dig up a quote from former Middle East negotiator Dennis Ross, who “applauded Mr. Biden for ‘trying to thread the needle here… This is the classic example of where you have to balance your values and your interests.’” It’s two opposite takes on exactly the same thing.

  The old con of the Manufacturing Consent era of media was a phony show of bipartisanship. Legitimate opinion was depicted as a spectrum stretching all the way from “moderate” Democrats (often depicted as more correct on social issues) to “moderate” Republicans (whose views on the economy or war were often depicted as more realistic). That propaganda trick involved constantly narrowing the debate to a little slice of the Venn diagram between two established parties. Did we need to invade Iraq right away to stay safe, as Republicans contended, or should we wait until inspectors finished their work and then invade, as Democrats insisted?

  The new, cleaved media landscape advances the same tiny intersection of elite opinion, except in the post-Trump era, that strip fits inside one party. Instead of appearing as props in a phony rendering of objectivity, Republicans in basically all non-Fox media have been moved off the legitimacy spectrum, and appear as foils only. Allowable opinion is now depicted stretching all the way from one brand of “moderate” Democrat to another.

  An example is the Thursday New York Times story, “As Economy Is Poised to Soar, Some Fear a Surge in Inflation.” It’s essentially an interview with JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who’s worried about the inflationary impact of the latest Covid-19 rescue (“The question is: Does [it] overheat everything?”), followed by quotes from Fed chair Jerome Powell insisting that no, everything is cool. This is the same Larry Summers vs. Janet Yellen debate that’s been going on for weeks, and it represents the sum total of allowable economic opinions about the current rescue, stretching all the way from “it’s awesome” to “it’s admirable but risky.”

  This format isn’t all that different from the one we had before, except in one respect: without the superficial requirement to tend to a two-party balance, the hagiography in big media organizations flies out of control. These companies already tend to wash out people who are too contentious or anti-establishment in their leanings. Promoted instead, as even Noam Chomsky described a generation ago, are people with the digestive systems of jackals or monitor lizards, who can swallow even the most toxic piles of official nonsense without blinking. Still, those reporters once had to at least pretend to be something other than courtiers, as it was considered unseemly to openly gush about a party or a politician.

  Now? Look at the Times feature story on Biden’s pandemic relief bill:

  On Friday, “Scranton Joe” Biden, whose five-decade political identity has been largely shaped by his appeal to union workers and blue-collar tradesmen like those from his Pennsylvania hometown, will sign into law a $1.9 trillion spending plan that includes the biggest antipoverty effort in a generation…

  The new role as a crusader for the poor represents an evolution for Mr. Biden, who spent much of his 36 years in Congress concentrating on foreign policy, judicial fights, gun control, and criminal justice issues… Aides say he has embraced his new role… [and] has also been moved by the inequities in pain and suffering that the pandemic has inflicted on the poorest Americans…

  You’d never know from reading this that Biden’s actual rep on criminal justice issues involved boasting about authoring an infamous crime bill (that did “everything but hang people for jaywalking”), or that he’s long been a voracious devourer of corporate and especially financial services industry cash, that his “Scranton Joe” rep has been belied by a decidedly mixed history on unions, and so on. Can he legitimately claim to be more pro-union than his predecessor? Sure, but a news story that paints the Biden experience as stretching from “hero to the middle class” to “hero to the poor,” is a Pravda-level stroke job.

  We now know in advance that every Biden address will be reviewed as historic and exceptional. It was a mild shock to see Chris Wallace say Biden’s was the “the best inaugural address I have ever heard.” More predictable was Politico saying of Thursday night’s address that “it is hard to imagine any other contemporary politician making the speech Biden did… channeling our collective sorrow and reminding us that there is life after grief.” (Really? Hard to imagine any contemporary politician doing that?).

  This stuff is relatively harmless. Where it gets weird is that the move to turn the bulk of the corporate press in the “moral clarity” era into a single party organ has come accompanied by purges of the politically unfit. In the seemingly endless parade of in-house investigations of journalists, paper after paper has borrowed from the Soviet style of printing judgments and self-denunciations, without explaining the actual crimes.

  The New York Times coverage of the recent staff revolt at Teen Vogue against editor Alexi McCammond noted “Staff Members Condemn Editor’s Decade-Old, Racist Tweets,” but declined to actually publish the offending texts, so readers might judge for themselves. The Daily Beast expose on Times reporter Donald McNeil did much the same thing. Even the ongoing (and in my mind, ridiculous) moral panic over Substack ties in. Aimed at people already banished from mainstream media, the obvious message is that anyone with even mildly heterodox opinions shouldn’t be publishing anywhere.

  Those still clinging to mainstream jobs in a business that continues to lay people off at an extraordinary rate read the gist of all of these stories clearly: if you want to keep picking up a check, you’d better talk the right talk.

  Thus you see bizarre transformations like that of David Brooks, who spent his career penning paeans to “personal responsibility” and the “culture of thrift,” but is now writing stories about how “Joe Biden is a transformational president” for casting aside fiscal restraints in the massive Covid-19 bill. When explaining that “both parties are adjusting to the new paradigm,” he’s really explaining his own transformation, in a piece that reads like a political confession. “I’m worried about a world in which we spend borrowed money with abandon,” he says, but “income inequality, widespread child poverty, and economic precarity are the problems of our time.”

  Maybe Brooks is experiencing the same “evolution” Biden is being credited with of late. Or, he’s like a lot of people in the press who are searching out the safest places on the op-ed page, the middle of the newsroom middle, in desperate efforts to stay on the masthead. It’s been made clear that there’s no such thing as overdoing it in one direction, e.g. if you write as the Times did that Biden “has become a steady hand who chooses words with extraordinary restraint” (which even those who like and admire Biden must grasp is not remotely true of the legendary loose cannon). Meanwhile, how many open critics of the Party on either the left, the right, or anywhere in between still have traditional media jobs?

  All of this has created an atmosphere where even obvious observations that once would have interested blue-state voters, like that Biden’s pandemic relief bill “does not establish a single significant new social program,” can only be found in publications like the World Socialist Web Site. The bulk of the rest of the landscape has become homogenous and as predictably sycophantic as Fox in the “Mission Accomplished” years, maybe even worse. What is this all going to look like in four years?

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 03/12/2021 – 17:40

Digest powered by RSS Digest