Month: April 2024

For all the talk of a “cold civil war” now under way in America, Red vs. Blue, it is the wrong historical example. The professional death of Ronna McDaniel at NBC earlier this month was an event right out of Mao’s time, not Robert E. Lee’s.

McDaniel was fired by the masses at NBC because she wrongthought, because she held political views associated with the right and not the leftist road NBC and its running-dog networks follow. The decision comes less than a week after NBC News announced her hiring, prompting an extraordinary public protest from the former host of its flagship Sunday morning show, as well as from popular MSNBC hosts. They only fired her, but a public flogging would not have been out of the question if Chuck Todd thought he might get away with it—and he might have.

Fans of the new Netflix series “The Three-Body Problem” saw it in action: the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Beginning in May 1966, this was a decade-long period of political and social chaos caused by Mao Zedong’s bid to use the Chinese masses to reassert his control over the Communist party. It was almost unfathomable in its brutality, killing as many as two million people for wrongthinking, for thoughts that failed the ideological purity test. “Wrongthink” is an Orwellian word that preceded the Revolution by decades but described its core spot-on. The word is equally useful today.

“The Three-Body Problem” opens with a fictionalization of just one death, a university professor who refused to change his beliefs about physics to match Mao Thought, as contained in his so-called Little Red Book. For its complexity, the Cultural Revolution boiled down to one thing: believe what the power says is right or suffer, to the pain of death, at the hands of the powerful. Mean Girls it was not.

McDaniel, who is the niece of the Republican Senator Mitt Romney, was first hired to lead the Republican National Committee (RNC) by Trump in 2017 after she had served as chair of the Michigan Republican Party. After her recent Trump-led ouster at the RNC, she was hired by NBC presumably to bring a dot of balance to NBC’s news coverage. She was stricken from the network after only four days on the job because, as head of the RNC, she in the past voiced support for claims by Trump about the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. The gist of the burn was that this support was a lie, McDaniel was a liar, and as an NBC analyst she could not be trusted to not lie more.

“Hold my beer,” said dozens of people who came from the Democratic National Committee and the Biden White House to work as NBC analysts, chief among them Jen Psaki, who, as the official spokesperson for the Biden White House, lied professionally to defend Joe Biden. (Here’s a compendium of her lies.) She jumped from liar-for-hire to hosting a show and contributing constantly on MSNBC, including on “Meet the Press.” 

NBC frequently calls on the former spooks John Brennan, James Clapper, and the erstwhile senior FBI official and associate director Frank Figliuzzi. These are trained liars of the Deep State, men who helped promote Russiagate and sought the overthrow of Trump on fake accusations. Previously, neocons were given hours of airtime on NBC to defend the invasion of Iraq under false pretenses and to defend torture as a righteous response of a democracy to terrorism. How are they different from McDaniel? Rightthink versus wrongthink. If you are going to tell a lie it had better be in line with what the masses want to believe at NBC.

Truth? In a cultural revolution such as we are undergoing now, the truth is what the Party tells the masses it is. Remember how vehement Rachael Maddow was about the truth of Russiagate even after it was shown to be an elaborate hoax of the Deep State? No matter; there was no one like Ronna McDaniel around to tell her she was wrong and we now know there never will be.

Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski—hosts of Morning Joe, a morning show watched daily by President Biden—said they were being inundated with calls over the decision to hire McDaniel. They vowed never to have her on their show in any capacity. Nicolle Wallace, a former White House communications director for President George W. Bush turned MSNBC host, said on her show Monday that having McDaniel on the network would embolden “election deniers.” Maddow, continuing the group therapy session, likened it all to hiring “a mobster to work at a DA’s office.” Todd, who emerged alongside Maddow as the spokesperson for the masses in the NBC news division, worried especially about “giving Ronna NBC News’ credibility.”

Credibility? Only 32 percent percent of the population reports having “a great deal” or even “a fair amount” of confidence that the media report the news in a full, fair, and accurate way. The only other time in recent history that trust has fallen to 32 percent was in 2016, with the election. A record-high number of Americans—39 percent—say they don’t trust the media at all. That number has steadily increased since 2018.

Much of the change is driven by Democrats and independents, presumably NBC’s target audience, whose collective trust in media plummeted 18 and 13 percentage points, respectively, from their 2018 peaks. What could you expect when the people who create the news are such blatant hypocrites? NBC News should not worry too much; its reputation for honesty ranks somewhere near that of “American Idol.” The latest partisan jousting is just one of the many reasons why so many Americans roll their eyes when asked about the media.

This is in no way to grant Ronna McDaniel status as some magnificent journalist, someone who can be seen as speaking for a generation of Republicans. Nor is it to say she would have spoken much truth to power not at NBC anyway; chances are she would have barked out what those who fed her wanted to hear, perhaps as a Washington Generals–like foil to a Globetrotter like Todd. And what happened at NBC could have just as easily taken place at CBS, CNN or NPR. As my colleague writes, “Greater injustices have been perpetrated in the media world than the premature conclusion to Ronna McDaniel’s punditry career at NBC News.”

The news is not there to make anyone feel safe. It exists so we can learn from it, and for us to learn from it we have to at times be offended and uncomfortable with it, to bathe in it, to taste it bitter or sweet. When you wash your hands of an idea, you also lose all the ideas that grew to challenge it. Think antibodies fighting a disease. What happens when a body forgets how to fight an illness? What happens when places like NBC forget how to challenge a safe idea with an opposing one?

The post The Cultural Revolution at NBC News appeared first on The American Conservative.

For as long as I can remember I have identified fiercely with Sherlock Holmes during that memorable exchange in A Study in Scarlet when Dr. Watson laments the fact that “any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun.” To which Holmes, indifferent or perhaps even perversely amused by Watson’s outrage, replies:

What the deuce is it to me? . . . . You say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.

This insouciant dismissal has more or less governed my attitude toward the forthcoming eclipse, of which so much has been made these last few weeks. While I cannot pretend to anything like Holmes’s authority in the areas of blood stains or the varieties of tobacco ash, I do like to think that in addition to the ordinary rudiments of reading, ’riting, and ’rithmetic, I have stuffed my head with all manner of comparatively useless information—the contents of Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Primer and Pope’s two editions of Shakespeare, the manner in which socialist clergymen decorated Anglo-Catholic parishes of the 1920s, the best recordings of individual symphonies among Karajan’s four interminable Beethoven cycles—and that all of this has served me much better than being able to mouth along with a series of half-remembered abstractions about “the solar system.” 

There is something almost repulsive about the fact that the average American teenager has heard of black holes or even (shudders) “dark matter” but cannot tell you the names of the birds and flowers and trees which he sees every day, or would if he ever looked up from his phone. When I hear people asking me my “plans” for the eclipse, I am put in mind of a girl I remember from college who once said, more or less unprompted: “I love space, like, more than my family.”

But I wonder. In ancient times eclipses were treated with extraordinary seriousness. Herodotus tells us that Thales’ prediction of an eclipse brought peace between the Medians and Lydians. In St. Matthew’s Gospel we learn that at the end of time “after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken.” Somewhat more recently, the old ’60s counterculture, which, at a hundred unacknowledged points of intersection, shared many of the priorities of today’s social conservatism, was very interested in this sort of thing. If we were half as human as our parents or grandparents we would all be queuing up our quadraphonic recordings of Meddle or Dark Side of the Moon or even Atom Heart Mother. (Speaking only for myself, I made absolutely sure to go to confession on Saturday afternoon.)

This raises a fascinating question in which I have long been interested—do young people listen to Pink Floyd? As far as I can tell classic rock is for old people, which for all practical purposes, includes those of us in our early to mid 30s. Never mind the eccentrics who argue about how early the matrix numbers on their 1973 pressings have to be for a Rega Planar 6s pumped through Dahlquist DQ-12s to reveal the inestimable depths of “On the Run.” If you have ever even held a CD of the work in question, my guess is that you are probably a weekly bowler with a 150-plus average and a receding hairline.

But this is getting very far afield. What I had hoped to say is that, prescinding from confessional or other prejudices, we can all surely agree on the following “normative” means of observing this special event:

1. Find special music. This may be the aforementioned Pink Floyd or it may be Richard Strauss. (Here the early swashbuckling tone poems will likely be of less avail than the late wintry stuff, especially the Metamorphosen and the Oboe Concerto, the noblest composition of the whole of the last century.) Or maybe neither speaks to you and you choose to observe the occasion by listening to whatever “Vampire Weekend” is. Whatever the music ends up being, make sure you play it as loudly as possible.

2. Make sure you are in the right physical location. I should be reasonable here. One supposes that very few readers of this esteemed publication will find themselves at Rome or Jerusalem, or even Pompeii, for this astronomical event. But at the very least one should not be at a strip mall or inside a casual dining chain. There are more things in heaven and earth than can be dreamed of in our philosophy, and far, far more than can be imagined at Potbelly. Find the nearest grove—any clump of trees will do in a pinch—at which you can imagine the presence of dryads and wait there for the obscuring of light.

3. Have the proper disposition. What do I mean by this? In one of his early odes, Hölderlin heaped scorn on his contemporaries for their inability to combine classical republicanism with what he considered authentic Greek metaphysics:

Cold hypocrites, of gods you do not dare to speak!
You’re rational! In Helios you don’t believe,
Nor in the Thunderer or the Sea-God;
Dead is our Earth, so what fool would thank her?

If you think of the eclipse in purely materialist terms—as a natural event involving a satellite some 238,900 miles distant from the planet we happen to inhabit and an even more remote body of plasma—you will find yourself missing the point entirely. And that would be a much sadder thing than finding oneself in the position of Holmes, who was “ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System.”

The post How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Eclipse appeared first on The American Conservative.

The earthquake that rattled Taiwan on Wednesday has had its share of viral moments, with buildings tipping over, freeways shaking, and water being violently shaken out of swimming pools. With such jarring scenes, it’s probably no surprise that lives were lost and significant damage done. 

But in noting the 13 deaths (so far), 1,100 injured, and tens of millions of dollars in damage, we should recognize that it could have been much worse. Taiwan has a history of earthquakes—more than 100 with a magnitude of 5.5 or greater since 1980, in fact—although this was the worst since 1999, when the 7.7 Jiji earthquake killed more than 2,000 people. Just since that cataclysm they have adapted, with a comprehensive update to their building codes, and with emergency response teams well-prepared to respond to quakes in an urban setting. Thus, even though hundreds remain trapped or stranded as of this writing, the death toll will be considerably smaller than 1999’s despite its similar strength, 7.5. 

Resilience is the story of Taiwan’s people since the end of the Second World War, adapting to the threat of invasion from Communist China at the end of the Chinese Civil War via an industrial policy that secured rapid growth rates; to the loss of diplomatic recognition from much of the world through increased openness—including to a then-reforming PRC—and to an increasingly connected world, reliant on distance-spanning technology, by making itself indispensable in one especially crucial sector: semiconductors. 

Through careful advanced planning, technological expertise, and the dedication of their technicians, Taiwan has since the dawn of the millennium emerged as the location where much of the world’s semiconductors are fabricated; it accounts for nearly half of total global foundry capacity as of 2023, and much of that comes just from the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). Now, however, much of the rest of the world is starting to look at this dependence and ask whether it can be sustained. 

For, while the PRC has its reasons why it has not launched an invasion of Taiwan to reclaim the “rogue province” that has been governing itself since the end of the Chinese Civil War, most defense analysts do not believe disruption of the semiconductor supply chain would be one of them. Rather, it would be the inherent riskiness of the operation, the condemnation of much of the world, and the belief that, as a civilization spanning millennia, time is on China’s side. 

Should those views change, and a mission launched to retake the island, Beijing would consider the disruption of the semiconductor supply chain an acceptable development. 

That’s one reason why there has been increased interest in much of the world in diversifying the supply chain outside of Taiwan, including the U.S. states of Arizona and Texas. As I and my co-author, Akhil Ramesh, noted in our series on supply chain security published last year, friend-shoring is an increasingly hot topic largely because policymakers are waking up to the reality that China has seized a foothold in many crucial industries while the rest of the world’s attention was elsewhere—or had convinced itself that the PRC having such advantages would not be an issue. 

Sadly, many countries in the past decade-plus have discovered that China has not only built up such advantages, but in bilateral disputes is not shy about using them. 

The only sector in our four-part series where China does not hold such advantages is, in fact, semiconductors, and this is largely because of Taiwan’s successes (and, to a lesser extent, South Korea’s) but also China’s failures at getting its own industrial policy off the ground in this field. However, given the Taiwan Strait’s status as a potential flashpoint, diversification has been touted by those who need Taiwan’s semiconductors. Even within Taiwan, President-elect William Lai Ching-te has embraced the idea of TSMC growing outside the island—including to the U.S. 

During the rollout of the paper series Ramesh and I authored, we did receive one unexpected piece of pushback: That we should not encourage industry to leave Taiwan. In the face of growing PRC assertiveness in the region, from building new bases abroad, installing suspicious development projects in other countries, and turning territorial disagreements into violent ones, Taiwan’s refusal to be cowed in the face of China’s threats, they argue, is of symbolic importance, as well as strategic: Were China to retake Taiwan successfully, or to browbeat it into submission by strangling its trade and international diplomatic recognition, its ambitions would likely not stop there. 

All of which could be true, and still not a decisive refutation of the need for greater diversification of the semiconductor supply chain. During the global pandemic disruptions hit the global supply chain; this earthquake may as well, even if it turns out to be smaller: More than $60 million in damage was reported to TSMC facilities on the island, even though they were back at near 80% capacity within a day. 

Encouraging diversification away from Taiwan need not be a death knell for the island’s economy: The Taiwanese have proven their resiliency before and can do so again if they know their economy is not going to be responsible for the majority of the world’s fabrication. In fact, there have been calls for years for them to do just that. 

But resilience is not just for Taiwan: Bringing more production of semiconductors (and other hi-tech) to America’s shores is the next step in proofing them against geopolitical concerns—and minimizing future shocks to the US economy. 

The post The Lesson of the Taiwan Earthquake appeared first on The American Conservative.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has indicated that Ukraine may ultimately have to compromise with Russia in order to bring an end to the brutal conflict.

In an interview with the BBC, Stoltenberg said that Ukraine would have to decide what compromises they would be willing to make.

“At the end of the day, it has to be Ukraine that decides what kind of compromises they’re willing to do, we need to enable them to be in a position where they actually achieve an acceptable result around the negotiating table,” he said.

However, Stoltenberg also maintained that NATO would need to continue backing Ukraine into order to prevent future Russian aggression.

“Even if we believe and hope that the war will end in the near future, we need to support Ukraine for many years, to build their defences to deter future aggression,” he said.

Stoltenberg’s comments come days after Secretary of State Antony Blinken insisted that U.S. support for Ukraine remained “rock solid” and that he would support Ukraine joining NATO, despite the catastrophic risks of doing so.

“Ukraine will become a member of NATO,” Blinken told reporters in Brussels following a meeting with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba. “Our purpose at the summit is to help build a bridge to that membership.”

“Based on what I heard today … everyone, including the United States, is going to double back and, as necessary, double down on finding the resources that Ukraine continues to need,” he continued.

In February, it was reported that Joe Biden rejected a proposal from Russian leader Vladimir Putin to negotiate a ceasefire and potentially bring peace to the region.

According to Reuters, Putin signaled through intermediaries that he was willing to end the conflict along its current lines, which hand permanent control of various territories over to Russia.

The post NATO Chief Reverses Course, Warns Ukraine May Have to Compromise With Russia appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), along with other members of the U.S. intelligence community, are pushing for Congress to expand Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 in order to fight the ongoing fentanyl crisis.

According to the Brennan Center of Justice, Section 702, “Authorizes the government to collect the communications of non-Americans located abroad without a warrant from a court. While this surveillance is supposed to target foreigners, it inevitably sweeps in Americans’ private phone calls, emails, and text messages too.”

USA Today has reported that top CIA officials spent most of 2023-2024 urging members of Congress to reauthorize Section 702 of the FISA Act of 1978.

However, CIA officials believe in its current form, Section 702 limits the intelligence community from targeting everyone involved in the fentanyl trade overseas and are advocating lawmakers to expand Section 702 so U.S. spies will have more liberty when it comes to going after criminals engaged in the fentanyl trade.

Many lawmakers are skeptical of expanding Section 702 due to the CIA previously misusing the law to spy on American citizens.

Fentanyl kills thousands of Americans. Could plugging a gap in U.S. intelligence save lives? https://t.co/qazAAjUWtm

— USA TODAY (@USATODAY) April 4, 2024

Per USA Today:

The CIA and broader U.S. intelligence community want to do more to fight the fentanyl crisis killing tens of thousands of Americans a year, and they are quietly pushing Congress to let them expand their use of a controversial and top-secret eavesdropping program to do it, USA TODAY has learned.

Senior intelligence officials have spent the past year trekking to Capitol Hill to push for reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which allows them to conduct warrantless eavesdropping on foreigners overseas.

As the nation’s primary spy outfit, the Central Intelligence Agency in particular says the intelligence collection allowed under Section 702 is urgently needed to thwart transnational organized crime groups manufacturing and smuggling the lethally potent synthetic opioid from China to Mexico and into the U.S.

Currently, the CIA can only use Section 702 against drug traffickers if it can connect them to one of the three “certified” threat groups. Obtaining a so-called “fourth certification” would allow U.S. spies to more freely go after those involved in the fentanyl trade without having to make such connections, the two senior U.S. intelligence officials said.

CIA seeks to expand Section 702 surveillance to include drug traffickers.https://t.co/FSeqzxyOh5

— ElonIsACommie (@ElonIsALeninist) April 7, 2024

Congress has until April 19th to reauthorize FISA Section 702 before its sunset provision runs out.

The post CIA Wants Congress to Expand Top-Secret Eavesdropping Program To ‘Fight Against Fentanyl Crisis’ appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

AI-generated image

This article was written by Swedish independent journalist Peter Imanuelsen, also known as PeterSweden. You can follow him at PeterSweden.com.

What if I told you that there was an actual CONSPIRACY going on?

A research experiment that they kept hidden from the public because they were afraid of a backlash.

Because that is exactly what has been going on.

And keep reading to the end, because you will never be able to guess who has been involved in this project…

From the deck of a decommissioned aircraft carrier in the San Francisco Bay, researchers from the University of Washington LAUNCHED trillions of salt particles into the atmosphere with the intent of blocking out the sunlight from earth.

This is all being done in the name of stopping global warming of course!

They say that the organizers didn’t widely announce this experiment to “avoid public backlash”.

“The idea of interfering with nature is so contentious, organizers of Tuesday’s test kept the details tightly held, concerned that critics would try to stop them,” the New York Times wrote.

In other words, this isn’t a conspiracy theory. It is by the very definition a conspiracy fact. They conspired to keep this experiment secret.

No wonder they tried to keep it secret, because I think most people wouldn’t be happy to know that people are trying to modify the weather and block the sunlight.

They are using specially built sprayers to shoot trillions of salt crystals into the sky, trying to increase the density and reflective capacity of clouds.

And this isn’t anything new. A company called Make Sunsets launched a weather balloon to release TOXIC sulfur dioxide into the air to block the sun.

The idea is that they will block the sun and thus decrease the temperature on earth. This is a terrible idea.

In Sweden we had the COLDEST January night of the century. It was -48,8C in Arjeplog. I do not really want it to get any colder – Thank you!

The state of Tennessee recently voted to BAN geo-engineering in the state. They were ridiculed by the mainstream media for it, because that was more or less just a “conspiracy theory”.

What kind of unintended consequences could it have if we sprayed chemicals into the air to block the sun? What if it caused a global cooling episode where we got an ice age? This is dangerous.

Even Greenpeace is skeptical of the idea of solar geo-engineering, saying that the consequences of this would be hard to predict.

AND GUESS WHO IS INVOLVED?

The post Peter Sweden: UNREAL-They Revealed SECRET Geo-Engineering Project appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

Republican Senator JD Vance from Ohio was on “Sunday Morning Futures” with Maria Bartiromo this weekend to discuss Biden’s border crisis.

Senator Vance emphasized the need to have President Trump back in office to secure our nation’s border.

“We’ve got to do everything we can to re-elect Donald Trump because if we had him, we wouldn’t be dealing with a president who wants to have an open border,” Senator Vance said.

Watch:

JD Vance on securing the border: “We’ve got to do everything we can to re-elect Donald Trump because if we had him, we wouldn’t be dealing with a president who wants to have an open border.” pic.twitter.com/mQ17uWizfS

— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) April 7, 2024

Under crooked Joe Biden, an estimated 10 to 12 million illegals have invaded the US. That number is rapidly increasing under this regime.

That number equals about the population of 41 individual states.

Video footage last week shows illegals scaling the border wall into New Mexico. This is Joe Biden’s America.

Watch:

Leaving Juarez. Good name for a movie. But, instead part of a quite real- life epidemic of “RUNNERS” going over the wall into illegal immigrant friendly state of New Mexico. Hundreds every day do it. Lots and lots of them are crooks. pic.twitter.com/7XKqziRZ1b

— Todd Bensman (@BensmanTodd) April 5, 2024

Senator Vance also sounded the alarm on how the open border is being used by the Democrats to gain a political advantage for congressional seats.

“Is the wide-open border helping Democrats get more congressional seats?” Maria Bartiromo asked Senator Vance.

“It’s a huge issue Maria, something we need to talk about more,” Senator Vance said.

“California has between 3 and 5 congressional seats they shouldn’t have, why? Because the census counts illegal aliens when it hands out congressional representatives, so when you import millions of people into this country illegally, you are actually destroying the American people’s power and their own democracy. You are taking away congressional representation from American citizens and giving it to illegal aliens,” Senator Vance continued.

Watch:

Today @SundayFutures with @MariaBartiromo Ohio Senator @JDVance1 spoke about how Biden’s open-border policy is affecting the census and helping the Democrats. @FoxNews pic.twitter.com/A0oJtdjgWU

— SundayMorningFutures (@SundayFutures) April 7, 2024

The post Senator JD Vance Sounds the Alarm on How Biden’s Border Crisis is Affecting the Census and Helping Democrats (VIDEO) appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

Now they are coming for your jeans.

Scientists from the Guangdong University of Technology have released a new study claiming wearing jeans is “bad for the environment.”

According to the report, wearing a pair of fast-fashion jeans just once creates 2.5kg of CO2, or the equivalent of driving a gas-powered car 6.4 miles.

Guangdong University of Technology is a state-run school by the Guangdong Provincial People’s Government in China.

The New York Post reports:

“This study took jeans as an example to reveal the carbon footprint of fast fashion consumption and its additional climate impacts compared to traditional fashion,” wrote the authors of the new report, set for publishing in May 2024.

“Jeans production and cross-broad transportation contributed 91 % of the carbon footprint of fast fashion consumption,” added the experts.

The devil is always in the details. This is based on a study by the Guangdong University of Technology. It’s a state run school by the Guangdong Provincial People’s Government. Who runs that? The Chinese Communist Party.

Congrats NY Post, you’re spreading CCP propaganda for… https://t.co/2JIn0btMRo

— winky (@winkytheghost) April 5, 2024

No word from environmental-cultists Hollywood stars on when they will ditch a wardrobe staple.

The post Scientists Now Claim Wearing Jeans is “Bad for the Environment” appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

As Missouri teen Kaylee Gain struggles to recover from a March beating, the high school she and her alleged attacker attend is accused of refusing to release records requested by state Attorney General Andrew Bailey.

Bailey is considering charging the teen as an adult, according to the Daily Mail.

Gain, 16, suffered a skull fracture and a brain bleed that put her in a coma for two weeks after the March 8 incident. Gain, who is white, and her alleged attacker, who is black, are students at Hazelwood East High School in St. Louis; the attack took place about a mile from the school amid a fight between two groups of teens.

Bailey has said the incident was spawned in the school’s DEI-obsessed culture.

The assaulter’s name is Maurnice DeClue. Don’t let her get away with this https://t.co/BA92QltqHa

— Redeemed Zoomer (@redeemed_zoomer) April 3, 2024

Bailey said that the school district made “egregious errors” about the incident and said the district is violating the law by not promptly sharing the records he has requested.

“Instead of directing your ire at a date reference or making ad-hominem attacks, you should follow Missouri law and do so immediately,” Bailey said.

Cindy Reeds Ownsby, an attorney representing the school district, wrote in a recent email that Bailey is the problem.

“It is disappointing to have an attorney general that intentionally disrespects public school district administrators and elected officials by sending error-filled correspondence to intimidate and threaten their leadership,” she wrote.

Ownsby said the records would be provided by April 15.

Last week, a judge ruled that a certification hearing will be held on May 10 to determine whether the alleged attacker will be tried as an adult, according to USA Today.

County attorneys sought the delay to accumulate information on the attacker’s social and family life.

“Our position is that she should not be certified,” defense attorney Greg Smith said.

“We understand that the law says that there has to be a certification hearing based on what she has been charged with. That’s non-negotiable but our position is she should not be certified. Everything is out there, about her being an honor student, she has taken AP courses, she has no history with the juvenile court. She has been the victim of bullying. There are other facts that we are going to save for court,” he said.

Video of the incident is graphic and could be disturbing for some viewers.

Kaylee Gain is alive and awake 3 weeks after Maurnice DeClue went too far in this fight near their St. Louis, Missouri high school

Kaylee suffered a skull fracture and brain damage. She can only walk with assistance and has limited conversation abilityhttps://t.co/09d3PZH9sD

— Brendan (@BrendanMcInnis) March 30, 2024

Gain family lawyer Bryan Kaemmerer will argue the attacker should be tried as an adult.

Kaemmerer revealed: “Kaylee is still showing signs of significant cognitive impairment during the limited conversations that she is able to have, and she tends to reiterate the same short sentences over and over. Although Kaylee seems to realize she is in hospital, she does not understand why she is there,” he said, according to the Mirror.

“Given the particularly violent nature of this assault, and also taking into account the devastating injuries that Kaylee has incurred, it is difficult to imagine a more appropriate case for a juvenile to be certified as an adult,” Kaemmerer said.

This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.

The post Kaylee Gain’s School Refuses to Turn Over Records After State AG Says He Wants Alleged Attacker Charged as an Adult appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

This story originally was published by Real Clear Wire

By Peter Berkowitz
Real Clear Wire

Members of moral, political, and religious traditions share basic assumptions, fundamental principles, and central convictions about their associations and institutions. Since human beings are self-interested and fallible, words and concepts are many-sided and ambiguous, and justice makes competing demands, traditions – no matter how noble and good their purposes – naturally divide into rival camps that espouse clashing interpretations of their shared inheritance. Grappling with this diversity and dissent within a framework of overall unity is a mark of a living, breathing tradition.

So understood, American conservatism forms an exemplary tradition.

The most recent battle over the future of conservatism has raged for several years. The aggressor, the new New Right, condemns as moribund the movement conservatism that descends from the old New Right represented most prominently by William F. Buckley, Jr., and Ronald Reagan. The contemporary conservatives seek to overthrow a once-dominant conservative sensibility that they believe is chained to an antiquated agenda and out of touch with the demands of the moment.

In 1955, the 29-year-old Buckley founded National Review. The magazine, which quickly established itself as the flagship publication of the then-fledgling American conservative movement, brought together under one tent traditionalists and libertarians. The traditionalists emphasized preserving ancestral morality and the religious faith that supports it. The libertarians focused on maximizing individual freedom by means of government limited to a few, well-defined, indispensable tasks. The traditionalists and the libertarians tended to see one another as political adversaries.

Despite their mutual antagonism, the traditionalists and the libertarians forged an alliance in the 1950s and 1960s against a growing progressive state at home and an expanding Soviet communism abroad. At the same time, and although they seldom appreciated it, the rival camps supplied a lack in the other.  As National Review senior editor Frank Meyer explained in 1962 in National Review, in a diverse and transcontinental republic, limited government provides an essential protection for traditional morality. And thriving families, communities, and civic life foster virtues and instill dedication to duties that sustain free societies.

This understanding of conservatism, in which the preservation of limited constitutional government and the preservation of traditional morality go hand in hand, has strong roots in America’s founding-era political thinking. It sometimes goes by the name of fusionism.

Fusionism found its foremost political leader in Ronald Reagan. Serving as the 40th president of the United States from 1981 to 1989, Reagan honed his rhetorical skills in Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign and his political acumen from 1967 to 1975 as a two-term governor of California. Reagan’s tax-cutting and deregulation turned around a broken American economy, and his military build-up and his diplomacy – based on his understanding of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” – led the nation to victory in the Cold War. He defended individual freedom, limited government, traditional morality, and advanced a U.S. foreign policy that sought peace through strength and promoted human rights.

But that was two generations ago. Impatient with its intellectual and political inheritance, the new New Right aims to break free of the conservative movement championed by Buckley and consolidated by Reagan and effect dramatic change in response to what it views as headlong American decline.

The new New Right finds in America disarray and decadence everywhere it looks. It sees a popular culture that caters to the left. It sees an academic world that converts the classroom into a vehicle for the transmission of progressive propaganda and restricts speech that deviates from campus orthodoxy. It sees a deliberate policy of expanding illegal immigration. It sees a weaponization of the federal bureaucracy extending back to the Obama administration IRS’s targeting of Tea Party civic associations. It sees a ramping up of the criminalization of political differences with the FBI’s and Justice Department’s prodigious but failed efforts to show that Donald Trump collaborated with Russia to steal the 2016 election. It sees rank partisan lawfare in prosecution of former President Trump for retaining classified documents while declining to bring charges against President Joe Biden and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for indistinguishable if not arguably more serious mishandling of classified documents. And it sees a foreign policy – conservative as well as progressive – that pursues elusive goals at extravagant expense.

The new New Right, argues Charles Kesler, has a point. But, he believes, it also leads astray. In “National Conservatism vs. American Conservatism,” which appeared in the Winter 2023/24 issue of the Claremont Review, which he also edits, Kesler maintains that the older American conservatism is better suited to American political culture and constitutional government than the new New Right, and more adequate to the full constellation of challenges the nation faces.

What goes by the name of “National Conservatism,” Kesler observes, “is perhaps the most visible, identifiable, and successful part of the New Right.” He admires many of the movement’s intellectual architects but finds “exaggerated and unfair” its judgment that the “former New Right of Buckley and Reagan” was “myopically libertarian and temperamentally unserious about politics and morals.”

National conservatism, it is true, confronts new disorders: social justice warriors; the diversity, equity, and inclusion industry; wokeness; and globalization. Yet the emergence of new disorders, argues Kesler, does not eliminate the old disorders. The challenges to which the conservatism of Buckley and Reagan responded remain: the transformation of the federal bureaucracy into a mechanism for promoting progressive values; the promulgation of the idea of a living Constitution, which gives judges the authority to promiscuously read into America’s charter of government their moral judgments; a welfare state that instead of equipping citizens – assisted by their families and communities – to care for themselves incentivizes dependence on government; and a communist superpower that threatens the free world.

Kesler elaborates on his substantial agreement with the Natcons as well as his considerable unease through a discussion of their 2022 manifesto: “National Conservatism: A Statement of Principles.” National conservatism, he maintains, rightly comes to the defense of the nation at a moment in which it is under attack, “both from above – from international and transnational organizations, laws, and ideological-cum-religious movements, and from below – racial, ethnic, sexual, and tribal-cultural factions asserting claims against national citizenship.” But then again, Kesler points out, the older conservatism of Buckley and Reagan takes as axiomatic that an American statesman’s first duty is to honor the nation’s leading principles and advance its vital interests.

What then sets national conservatism apart? Rather than putting America first, Kesler argues, Natcons give priority to a theory of the nation and of international relations, and then reconfigure the national spirit in America in accordance with their idealized model. According to their statement’s opening paragraphs, the Natcons “emphasize the idea of the nation because we see a world of independent nations – each pursuing its own national interests and upholding national traditions that are its own – as the only genuine alternative to universalist ideologies now seeking to impose a homogenizing, locality-destroying imperium over the entire globe.” That, however, is the sort of political abstraction that Edmund Burke, a founding father of modern conservatism, warned against. The Natcon statement provides not an alternative to the universalist ideologies it decries but an alternative universalist ideology.

With signatories to its statement of principles from not only the United States but also from Austria, Canada, Croatia, France, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Poland, Portugal, and the United Kingdom, national conservatism is proudly international. “How paradoxical,” remarks Kesler, “is an avowedly international movement on behalf of nationalism.”

Furthermore, national conservatism – at least in the writings of its most prominent theorist, Israeli Yoram Hazony – does not merely abstract from the central features of American nationalism. Hazony, who is chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation, which hosts the Natcon statement of principles, attacks them: His version of national conservatism vilifies America’s enlightenment and classically liberal roots. The self-evident truths of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, not least unalienable rights – the rights shared by all human beings – and government’s primary responsibility to secure them, reflect for Hazony falsehoods that undermine “the idea of the nation.”

Yet, as Kesler stresses, American nationalism is “limited and shaped by equality, liberty, and consent.” In the founding era, all major political camps embraced natural rights, individual freedom, and limited government based on the consent of the governed.

Failure to appreciate this constitutive feature of America produces other errors. Contrary to Hazony, the upsurge of progressivism in post-1960s America was not fueled by confused libertarians and neoconservatives advocating natural rights and limited government. Rather, progressivism was unleashed owing to a failure to adhere to America’s founding principles and to apply them prudently to new circumstances. And contrary to the Natcon ambition to harness the state to uphold Christianity, such an alliance between faith and government, as America’s founding inheritance teaches, would undermine both.

“What the national conservatives are actually offering,” writes Kesler, “is not so much the return of American nationalism – or of a purely traditional form of American conservatism, shorn of neos and libertarians – but a re-writing of American conservatism along new, less brazenly American lines, assimilating it, in effect, to the nationalism of other nations, beginning with Great Britain.”

The problem is not that the Natcons take seriously the American national spirit and the American conservative tradition. The problem is that they do not take them seriously enough.

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