Truth, Not Politics, Is at the Root of the Left-Right Divide

Dennis Prager

The Worldwide Lockdown May Be the Greatest Mistake in History

Three years ago, I wrote a column explaining left-right differences on 35 different subjects. Any one or two of them would make for a major political/cultural divide. Thirty-five make the divide unbridgeable.

As the thesis itself is not really debatable, what is more difficult to explain are the roots of this divide.

I believe it is commitment to truth.

Since I began studying the left as a graduate student of communism at the Russian Institute of the Columbia School of International Affairs, of one thing I was certain: Truth is not a left-wing value. It is a liberal value, and it is a conservative value, but truth has never been a left-wing value. From Lenin to today's left, lying, especially about opponents, is morally acceptable as long as it serves the left's goals of defeating opponents and attaining more power.

Once you realize this, the divide becomes explicable.

Why has YouTube taken down the video of two emergency room physicians who argue that the lockdown may not be called for? Because the left does not argue with opponents; it shuts them down. And that is because it has no interest in truth. That's why the left is pressuring YouTube and Facebook to prohibit anything the left differs with from appearing on their platforms. Just as the Soviets labelled everything in the Western press "imperialist propaganda," the left labels everything with which it differs "misinformation."

That is also why virtually every university does whatever it can to prevent conservatives from speaking on their campuses.

And why has The New York Times just received a Pulitzer Prize for what leading liberal historians have labelled its "mendacious" rewriting of American history, known as "The 1619 Project"? Because to The New York Times and the Pulitzer Prize committee, truth is less important than smearing America.

When it cannot stifle opponents, it smears them. Every prominent conservative or liberal opponent of the left has been smeared -- which is just another way of saying "lied about" -- as being sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, racist, bigoted, misogynistic, white supremacist, transphobic, etc.

Allow me to use an example I know well: me.

In the span of just this past year, I have written about Newsweek's lie claiming I "mocked" Anne Frank. To Newsweek's credit, they revised the column and published a corrected headline. Then I wrote about Purdue University's "vice provost of diversity and inclusion," who told a Purdue newspaper that I said in a speech I gave at Purdue, "Slavery was not bad." I sent this person a recording of my speech proving I never said anything remotely like what he charged. After many of my listeners and readers protested to the vice provost and to Purdue's president, the vice provost wrote me a private letter saying he was sorry if he "misunderstood" me. His charge was public, but his apology was private.

This past week, as pure a lie as the previous two was manufactured by Media Matters -- a left-wing organization whose sole purpose is lying and smearing conservatives -- and then picked up by various media.

This is what I said -- word for word -- on my radio show:

"How many names have blacks gone through in my lifetime? 'Colored,' 'Negro,' 'African American,' 'black.' That's four different titles for the same human being. What was wrong with 'Negro'? What was wrong with 'colored'? There's no problem with any of them. Do you know that the NAACP is still the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People? And then 'African American' -- that changed, too. Does it have a dash or hyphen, or not? I don't remember what was connoted by having a hyphen or not."

Media Matters declared the comments "racist."

And the allegation was dutifully picked up by the New York Daily News, which headlined: "Conservative Talk-Radio Host Dennis Prager Bemoans Loss of Racial Slurs, Gets History Lesson."

And by the Daily Mail, which headlined: "Conservative Talk-Radio Host Dennis Prager, 71, Bemoans the Loss of Racial Slurs in Society to Describe Black People."

The article, by Daily Mail writer James Gordon, a Media Matters follower (he actually appended a link to Media Matters at the end of his column), claimed:

"Prager ... used his show to bemoan society no longer using racist language coined during eras of slavery and segregation."

Everything about these articles is a lie.

Not one of those titles for blacks is racist. Therefore, I could not possibly "bemoan" the fact that society no longer uses these words.

The term Martin Luther King Jr., every other black leader and every nonblack anti-racist through the 1960s used to described black people was "Negro." There is, to this day, a major black organization called the United Negro College Fund.

A variant of the term "colored" is regularly used by liberals to this day -- "people of color" -- to describe nonwhites.

"Black" is used by everyone, including most blacks -- except liberals afraid of not using "African American."

And "African American" is not only not a "racist slur," but it is also the contemporary left's preferred term for blacks.

Media Matters created a lie out of whole cloth about me. And those who rely on Media Matters -- such as James Gordon at the Daily Mail and Nancy Dillon at the Daily News -- repeated it, word for word. I invite both of them to come on my radio show to defend the accuracy of their articles.

Given how many people read or watch left-wing reports and study under left-wing teachers, the world would be a much finer place if the left valued truth.

For the record, my view on race is taken from Viktor Frankl. There are only two races: the decent and the indecent.

SOURCE 







The Rule of Law and the Targeting of Mike Flynn

Sebastian Gorka

The most frightening phrase my parents ever heard was: “the 2 a.m. knock on the door.”

That was because my parents lived under a communist dictatorship in Hungary, and the phrase referred to one group: the secret police, who invariably would come to your home in the middle of the night to make an arrest.

The arrest would not be predicated on the commission of a regular crime, for the secret police didn’t investigate bank robbers or kidnappers. Their mandate was political persecution, the use of law enforcement to target “enemies of the state,” citizens who had committed political crimes.

My father was one of those so persecuted.

He was a man who loved the land of his birth and hated the dictatorship imposed upon it after World War II. In college, he organized a secret Christian students’ resistance cell to spy on the communist regime and get information about its crimes out to the West.

After two years, my father and his group were betrayed by Kim Philby, the notorious British KGB asset. My father was arrested in the middle of the night, tortured, and sent to prison for life, only to be liberated six years later during the glorious, but short-lived Hungarian Revolution of 1956.

My parents escaped to the West and to true freedom. As a result, I grew up as a free man in the United Kingdom. Now I live in America, the greatest nation ever created, and I am thankful beyond measure to be a citizen of the only country ever founded on the principle of individual liberty as ordained by our creator. A nation that never had a political police force. Or so I thought.

The last four years have been a political roller coaster for our republic. It started when a nonpolitician announced his candidacy for president, to the amusement of the chattering classes and the “establishment.”

He was a man who never had run for office before, but who not only won the nomination of his party but went on to  win the general election to become the 45th president and commander in chief of the United States.

The enormity of this decision by the American people is underscored by one simple fact: Never before, since the birth of the nation in our Revolutionary War, had we chosen as president a man who wasn’t a politician or general. From George Washington to Barack Obama, all 44 prior chief executives previously had been senators, governors, congressmen, vice presidents, or senior military officers.

Yet Donald Trump, the man who would become the 45th president, was unsullied by membership in the so-called swamp.

That is in part why today we are witnessing the revelations of a political scandal the likes of which we have never seen before. It is a scandal that involved a concerted and conspiratorial effort to exploit the incredible power of federal law enforcement and the intelligence community for political purposes.

For the record, I must register my relationship to the person who is central to these dark revelations. I consider Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn to be a friend. Additionally, he was my colleague in the White House and, before that, my superior in the official presidential transition team.

Mike Flynn is a man wronged. He is an American patriot who was targeted by the last administration and, we now know, framed.

The Heritage Foundation’s legal experts have meticulously laid out the facts of the case. As succinctly as possible, here are the details:

Flynn was fired as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency by President Barack Obama, ostensibly over a technical issue concerning drone strikes.

In fact, Flynn had revolutionized the practice of battlefield intelligence exploitation in Afghanistan, was reforming the moribund architecture at the Defense Intelligence Agency, and was speaking truthfully about the growing threat of global jihadism and new al-Qaeda franchises such as ISIS.

Most importantly, Flynn was dead set against Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran that would release over $140 billion to the murderous mullahs in Iran without any truly meaningful concessions.

For all these reasons, after 33 years in uniform, a great American had to be removed from government service. But Flynn would become a true threat only to the vested interests that had removed him from his position as director of the DIA when, after his retirement, he became a vocal supporter of candidate Donald Trump and eventually his pick to become America’s next national security adviser.

Why? Because Flynn knew where the skeletons of the last administration’s policies were buried, policies such as the Iran deal, that did not serve American interests.

But, secondly, as former DIA director, he would be ideally positioned to uncover the true breadth and depth of what now has been described, even by Trump, as Obamagate, a systematic use of the FBI, National Security Agency, and CIA for political purposes.

Obamagate covers a multitude of nefarious and illegal actions by the last administration, including, as the Justice Department’s inspector general has uncovered, dozens and dozens of unconstitutional aspects of the secret court warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act used to spy on the Trump campaign and Trump administration.

Obamagate also includes the inordinate number of “unmaskings” of U.S. nationals in hundreds of communications intercepts, unmaskings that, thanks to the acting director for national intelligence, Richard Grenell, we now know, were requested by officials as high up as by Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden.

That’s why Mike Flynn, a retired three-star Army general and Trump’s new national security adviser, had to be targeted for removal, as the contemporaneous, now available FBI notes on the infamous January 2017 interview of Flynn at the White House prove.

The notes show that Obama administration holdovers saw several options: “Truth/Admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?”

It is not the job of the FBI, the National Security Agency, or any other part of the enormous apparatus of federal government to use intelligence intercepts to trawl for politically useful information that could be used during an election campaign.

And the Federal Bureau of Investigation is meant to catch bank robbers, terrorists, and spies. It’s not to get the national security adviser to a president chosen by 63 million voters fired, charged with a crime that didn’t happen, and put on a federal court docket. That is what secret police were invented for, the kind who knock on your door at 2 a.m.

It is now patently clear that many members of the last administration committed felonies. A former U.S. attorney and Justice Department special counsel has identified which former FBI and Justice Department officials are in the greatest legal jeopardy and what felonies they can be charged with.

Whether they are charged or not will be the ultimate test of whether we remain a republic with rule of law and justice for all.

SOURCE 






Texas Reopens. What's Really Happening With Its COVID-19 Numbers?

As Texas reopens, a kind of normal is returning. Last week I was able to make an appointment and obtain a haircut, all perfectly legal. I went to a nearby lake this weekend and saw what looked like a pretty normal number of people, out fishing and kayaking and biking in the sun that’s known to kill the virus with its blaring UV light. It was so nice I took the camera and could have snapped enough pics for a wildflower calendar. Texas really is beautiful before the sun turns the state into a brick oven.

Monday morning some gyms around the state opened so I went for a quick drive around the area to see which ones were and weren’t. Mine had emailed me over the weekend that it was opening, so I went in for a quick workout. Other than the masks on the staff and a few new procedures such as touchless check-in, all seemed fairly normal. Some other gyms in the area chose to remain closed a little longer. Overall things seem pretty calm and edging back to normal.

But if you listen to CNN, coronavirus cases are outta control and there’s just no end in sight.

“Texas sees the highest number of coronavirus cases in a day!” they declare. “Deaths too!”

Sure, sure, CNN. We are testing more. That means we will see more cases. You’re not likely to see fewer deaths because numbers don’t really work that way.

RealClearPolitics‘ Sean Trende had had enough after seeing the report above, and went on a Twitter tear.

So the overall positive test result outcome is trending down. This is a good thing. It’s not entirely expected. In a post a week or year ago, it’s hard to tell anymore, I wrote that once the state starts reopening we’re likely to see more positive test results because we’re testing more, and people are out and about more.

The purpose of the lockdown was never to eradicate the virus or wait on a vaccine (which may never come). The purpose of the lockdown was to give the healthcare system time to ramp up testing and be prepared to handle what the models predicted would be a deluge of deadly virus cases requiring long stays in emergency rooms. The healthcare system did get ready. Harris County built a whole temporary hospital — and never had to use it. That’s good news. Imagine if we would have needed it.

The models were wrong. They were garbage code and they were based on faulty assumptions. Some of that is China’s fault for not disclosing its experiences with the virus in those early critical days. We should never forget that. It’s easy to blast the models, and they deserve it. But behind all of this is a communist regime, unelected and unaccountable to its people, that engaged in a massive coverup and ruined the world for a while.

Returning to Texas’ COVID numbers, they seem to be trending down. You would never know that if you listened to media even here in Texas. With a few exceptions, headlines and stories and even reporters’ social media posts tend to instill doubt and panic as opposed to merely reporting the facts.

One thing they seldom do is really look at the numbers. Those numbers are available from the state’s Department of Health and Human Services. They’ve been tracking and mapping cases from the beginning, right here.

The first thing you may notice is that the overall numbers just are not that large. Texas is a gigantic state of about 268,000 square miles and 29 million people. It includes three of the nation’s top ten cities by population — Houston (#4), San Antonio (#7), and Dallas (#9). Austin, Fort Worth, and El Paso are also up in the top 25. And Texas has vast rural areas larger than many whole states.

You may also notice from the map that the COVID clusters tend to be in the bigger and denser cities, which happen to have international airports, and along I-35 and the other highways that connect the state’s cities and towns. None of that is terribly surprising, as in the early days this was very much a traveling disease.

We now know that New Yorkers flew and drove out to the other states including Texas and brought the bug with them, and it came in from Wuhan primarily on the West Coast and from Italy primarily on the East Coast (but, no, Gov. Cuomo, it’s not a European virus).

The Texas COVID-19 numbers are not large given the state’s size and population.

Total cases to date: 48,693

Total deaths to date: 1,347

Total active cases: 19,065

Total current hospitalizations: 1,551

These are just not that large given the state’s population size. There are more than 84,000 hospital beds in the state, for what it’s worth.

The number of deaths, while small, is misleading. Thus far 1,347 Texans have reportedly died of the disease. This number may include some who died of some other cause, but COVID-19 came to be listed as the cause of death. Hospitals have been incentivized nationwide to put COVID-19 on the death certificate to get more federal money to pay expenses. Just to be as clear as I can be, I don’t think we really have an accurate fatalities number yet and won’t for some time.

But let’s stipulate that 1,347 is the accurate number to date because it’s what the state is officially reporting.

How many of those occurred in nursing homes or long-term assisted living facilities? Those numbers are here, broken out by region and total for the state.

Total deaths in nursing homes: 515

Total deaths in assisted living facilities: 99

Total: 614

Subtracting nursing home/assisted living facility deaths from the state’s total of 1,347, we arrive at 733.

That’s 733 for the entire state, outside of nursing homes and assisted living facilities.

This strongly suggests that COVID-19 is more likely to kill those who are older and have underlying conditions, as we have known about this virus for months now. The death rates in nursing homes are appalling.

Should Texas really remain locked up despite the a) low infection rate, and b) low fatality rate?

With 2.4 million of its workers unemployed?

This is not and never has been a simplistic debate between save grandma by staying home or go out to work and kill grandma. That has never been the question.

It’s a question of balancing the very real public health threat posed by the virus on the one hand, with the very real threat of destroying the economy and society along with it on the other hand.

The state and local governments need people to be working. Working people buy things, use things, eat things and pay taxes. They’re also happier and less likely to do negative and destructive things.

Without working people, there are far fewer taxes to collect. Governments run out of funds and cannot provide even basic services. Commerce and supply lines break down. Companies go bankrupt and never return.

And the whole system collapses, including the healthcare system. We really should do everything we can to avoid that.

We should also protect those who are most vulnerable, starting with nursing homes and assisted living facilities. Because that’s where they are, and we know it.

SOURCE 







Australia: How scrapping ‘free’ childcare will hurt providers, parents and children

In recent days both the Prime Minister Scott Morrison and the Education Minister Dan Tehan have indicated that the “free” childcare arrangement they initially promised for six months may be shelved as early as June 28.

To understand why this will be catastrophic for parents and centres you only have to look to the comments the PM himself made when announcing the rescue package.

“Child care and early childhood education is critical,” Prime Minister Morrison explained.

“Particularly for those Australians who rely on it so they can go to work every day, particularly those who are working in such critical areas. I don’t want a parent to have to choose between feeding their kids and having their kids looked after, or having their education being provided.”

He continued: “This virus is going to take enough from Australians without putting Australian parents in that position of having to choose between the economic wellbeing of their family or the care and support and education of their children. I won’t cop a situation where a parent is put in that place with their kids.”

If the government proceeds with its reported plan to pull the rug out on free childcare and “snap back” to the old system on June 28 that is precisely the situation many parents will face.

And other children will no longer have access to the education and support their early learning currently provides – not necessarily because of their parent’s positions – but because up to 86 per cent of childcare centres will be at risk of closing if the old system is suddenly switched back on.

The government’s own review of its rescue package was reported yesterday and it indicates that 86 per cent of centres said the package had stopped them from closing its doors. All of those centres will be in jeopardy without the current relief in place.

According to the government review, attendance rates at centres across the board are currently just 63 per cent of ordinary times, which is well below break-even point, and not viable. Without the lure of free care, operators are expecting those numbers to drop further still.

Given more than 600,000 Australians lost work last month alone it’s highly unlikely parents will be able to afford the same level of care now that they could three months ago.

The government intervened in April because parents were fleeing from centres in droves, driven by either health concerns related to the pandemic, or drastically changed financial positions, or both.

The health risk of COVID-19 is certainly less now than it was in April, but the devastating economic damage this pandemic has unleashed remains alive and well – and is unlikely to be repaired any time soon.

Charging full fees again will place unsustainable economic pressure on parents who are already squeezed; many will no longer be able to afford access to the education and care their children deserve.

Without children enrolled close to pre-COVID-19 numbers this vital sector’s ability to survive will be compromised.

The Prime Minister has said free childcare is not sustainable. But withdrawing this relief early and attempting to snap back while we are still in the midst of the economic fall out of this health crisis is not sustainable either.

Providing “free childcare” is costly and not perfect. But it won’t cost Australia nearly as much as it will if the early childhood education sector falls over altogether. We cannot afford that collapse – not for our economy, our communities and least of all our children.

Instead of unwinding this reform we need to strive for better and spend the next few weeks and months ensuring the early childhood education and care sector is strong enough to emerge from COVID-19 not just intact, but better than ever. For children, educators and families.

SOURCE  

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 
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