Wednesday Morning Breakfast For The Brain

Tick, tick tick… less than three weeks until the election.

The Plot Against America

By Frank Furedi/The Gatestone Institue

It seems that this election is not just about which candidate gets elected — it is ultimately about America’s commitment to empirical facts, its extraordinary Constitution and its determination to maintain its leadership role in the world by refusing to allow cheating and corruption, in either its elections or its governmental institutions. One can only hope that the ideals of the Founding Founders will prevail.

From Europe, the culture war raging in the United States is disturbing. In the presidential election, it seems that radical anti-American forces are questioning the very foundation on which Western civilisation was built. The New York Times seems too similar to the propaganda we were fed by the Hungarian Stalinist Pravda during the days of communist tyranny.

Contaminating the Past

In the Western world, the past has become the target of an ideological crusade. Many of its historic monuments and symbols are being vandalised, defaced or destroyed altogether. In the United States, the national flag has been treated with derision and denounced by leading members of its cultural institutions as a symbol of racism, oppression and discrimination. Commentators have been regularly condemning their nation’s past and portraying it as a source of irredeemable shame.

In recent times, hostility towards the very foundation on which different Western nations rest has acquired a systematic form. This trend is most strikingly articulated by The New York Times‘ 1619 Project — to devalue and criminalise the founding of the United States.

Through distorting America’s history, this project claims that the year 1619, and not 1776, constitutes the origin of the United States. It was in 1619 that African slaves arrived in Jamestown, and this event has been rebranded as the origins of the US. Why? Because the 1619 Project insists that the US was founded for the purpose of entrenching slavery and that to this day, this nation is dominated by that legacy. According to this inaccurate version of the past, the American Revolution was not so much a war of independence but a selfish act of preserving exploitation and oppression. In this way, the contribution of the American Revolution to the development of the Western ideals of individual liberty and personal responsibility is erased from history. America’s Declaration of Independence and — especially for the time — its remarkably advanced liberal and democratic Constitution and Bill of Rights are implicitly renounced as slave-owners’ charters.

Most significantly, the 1619 project is designed to contaminate the tradition and foundation that underpins the opportunity and mobility that have come to characterise the American way of life. This attempt to vandalise the tradition of a nation and its historic memory is far more toxic than toppling over a statue. Certainly, one of the main authors of the 1619 project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, is in no doubt that her objective was to plunder the past in order to undermine the moral authority of present. Recently she responded to critics who claim that she has distorted history by stating on Twitter:

“I’ve always said that 1619 project is not history. It is a work of journalism that explicitly seeks to challenge the national narrative and therefore national memory. The project has always been as much about the present as it is about the past.”

Hannah-Jones’s explicit conflation of the present and the past should not be seen as an innocent disregard of fundamental temporal boundaries but as a project devoted to contaminating the past in order de-legitimate the institutions of the US in the present.

A script for the vandalisation of history

The way in which the authors of the 1619 Project attempt to seize control of the national narrative is by providing a simplistic, inaccurate but highly evocative script for members of the public. It is a script that many protestors, rioters and looters in the United States have effortlessly internalised. Hannah-Jones has little inhibition about promoting a script that regards not only the Founders of the US but members of the white race with contempt. As she noted in a 1995 letter to a newspaper, “the white race is the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager, and thief of the modern world”. Her reference is not simply to the white people that settled America in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. She added:

“Even today, the descendants of these savage [white] people pump drugs and guns into the Balck community, pack Black people into the squalor of segregated urban ghettos, and continue ot be bloodsuckers in our community.”

In a different world, the denunciation of an entire race would be interpreted as not a million miles from racist prejudice. We live in a world, however, where scripts like the one promoted by the 1619 Project are strongly supported by many of the cultural and educational institutions of society. It is after all The New York Times — once the paper of record in the US — that promoted and endorsed Hannah-Jones’ narrative of hate towards the nation’s past. And to demonstrate that Hannah-Jones enjoyed the moral support of the commentariat, she was awarded the prestigious Pulitzer Prize. Hollywood celebrities rushed in to demonstrate their support for the 1619 Project. Predictably, Oprah Winfrey and the global content platform, Lionsgate, teamed up with Hannah-Jones to bring her work to an even wider audience through multiple platforms.

The embrace of the 1619 Project by celebrities, online influencers and leaders of America’s cultural industry highlights one of the most important development that encourages the cancelling of American culture.

Read the entire article HERE.

COVID Crimes Against Humanity

Via American Greatness

For once, I agree with MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes.

In an October 5 tweet, Hayes suggested the need for “some kind of truth and reconciliation commission” to hold accountable the politicians and experts who mishandled the coronavirus pandemic.

Hayes, no doubt, had in mind the president and Republican governors such as Florida’s Ron DeSantis and South Dakota’s Kristi Noem, who have bucked the credentialed class’ ever-changing diktats on the never-ending crisis.

Hayes is right—just not for the reasons he imagines.

As the dust settles on one of the most destructive man-made events in history—it’s hard to think of an appropriate comparison aside from war—the grim reality of what a handful of people inflicted on the world is coming into clear view. And there is no question that the perpetrators of this catastrophe should bear responsibility.

While cable news fixates on the numbers of deaths and reported cases, other heartbreaking statistics go largely unnoticed by pundits and journalists who now think mask-shaming amounts to hard core reporting on the crisis. It’s been 216 days since Americans were asked to make extreme and unprecedented sacrifices to “flatten the curve” of the expected COVID-19 caseload. This two-week suspension of daily activities, which included going to school and operating businesses, was intended to protect frontline health care workers. “We’re all in this together,” we were assured. Horrifying scenes from China and Italy acted as powerful warnings of what could happen if we did not submit.

Seven months later, life is nowhere near back to normal. And as the human wreckage of their untested advice mounts, some of the earliest advocates of the pseudoscientific concept of “social distancing” that morphed into full blown house arrest are having second thoughts.

The World Health Organization, an early promoter of national lockdown policies, in April detailed a preposterous list of benchmarks that countries would have to achieve before they could reopen. The protocol included “control” of COVID-19 transmission, isolation, contact tracing, and stringent protective measures in workplaces and schools; only the most prosperous countries would be able to afford implementing WHOs costly, burdensome list.

But even WHO is now beginning to recognize the downstream impact of its inhumane policies on the world’s most vulnerable.

In a recent interview, Dr. David Nabarro, WHO’s special envoy on COVID-19, said the organization doesn’t advocate lockdowns “as the primary means of control of this virus.” Nabarro cited the crushing effect on tourism in the Caribbean and on smallholder farmers who can’t take their goods to market; he predicted that global poverty rates and child hunger would double by next year.

“This is a terrible, ghastly global catastrophe,” Nabarro told a British reporter on October 9. “Remember, lockdowns have one consequence that we must never ever belittle and that is making poor people an awful lot poorer.”

Sadly, that’s only part of the tragic future. Lockdown orders could reverse 25 years of progress on ending child marriages in southeast Asia and India, where one out of three child marriages occurs.

“But a harsh, long lockdown, which was implemented with just a few hours’ notice, left millions of daily labourers and migrant workers without any work, pushing millions more into poverty,” concluded a new study in The Lancet. “India’s economy contracted by almost 24% last quarter and schools remain closed across the country as tens of thousands of new COVID-19 cases continue to be recorded daily. Millions of families have been forced to consider child marriage to alleviate poverty.” One million more young girls are expected to get pregnant this year; childbirth is the leading cause of death for girls aged 15-19 in developing countries, the authors report.

Save the Children estimates 1.5 billion children are out of school with no access to remote learning. The crisis is causing a global mental health crisis as jobs, families, and the routine of daily life have been abruptly—and unnecessarily—upended with no relief in sight.

Read the entire article HERE.

Secretive HHS AI Platform to Predict US Covid-19 Outbreaks Weeks in Advance

By Whitney Webb/Unlimited Hangout

A new AI-powered module known as HHS Vision has been added to the controversial and secretive HHS Protect system for amassing data related to Covid-19. By year’s end, this opaque, yet increasingly influential, system is set to predict Covid-19 outbreaks without traditional testing.

Two weeks ago, on September 24, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) published a solicitation for the creation of a new “early warning system” that would “detect and track traces of the [corona]virus in community wastewater, compile the data, [and] conduct predictive analysis” in order to “guide reopening and mitigation strategies, and also serve as leading indicator for local re-emergence events to enable rapid containment.” HHS was seeking a contractor to design the new Covid-19 detection system, hoping, it said, to have this new system operational in at least forty-two US states by the end of year.

The first phase of the proposed project would involve testing and reporting from approximately one hundred wastewater treatment plants across the United States, covering an estimated 10 percent of the population. HHS, per the solicitation, reserves the option to expand the program to include up to 320 wastewater treatment plants, covering around 30 percent of the population. The solicitation claimed that wastewater testing would allow HHS officials to predict new Covid-19 cases five to eleven days before an outbreak.

The initiative appears to be an expansion of a “new public health tool” announced last month by HHS and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) called the National Wastewater Surveillance System. This tool was originally intended to “help public health officials to better understand the extent of COVID-19 infections in communities.” Per the recent HHS solicitation, however, the wastewater surveillance system will now be used to predict outbreaks before they occur and to guide “rapid containment” efforts in “at-risk” communities.

At the core of this new early warning system based on wastewater surveillance is a secretive data platform that HHS launched earlier this year called HHS Protect. HHS describes Protect as “a secure platform for authentication, amalgamation, and sharing of healthcare information” that combines “more than 200 disparate data sources” from federal, state, and local governments as well as the private health-care industry.

HHS Protect is largely built from software obtained from the controversial data-mining company Palantir, whose creation was funded by Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel and the CIA’s In-Q-Tel. In addition, Palantir’s only client during its early years, from 2005 to 2008, was the CIA, and the agency offered “guidance” for the development of Palantir’s products, including those that the HHS Protect system is based on. Palantir is currently a major contractor to all seventeen US intelligence agencies, including the CIA, as well as the Department of Homeland Security, the US military, and numerous other federal agencies.

Read the entire article HERE.

Defense says Gov. Whitmer kidnap plot was just ‘big talk between crackpots’

Via The Detroit Free Press

There was no real plan to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, but only “military wannabes” who engaged in “big talk” and played with guns in the woods, defense lawyers argued in court Tuesday.

As one defense lawyer suggested, the case appears to be one of “big talk between crackpots,” or “people who talk a lot … but are never going to do anything.”

“Have you ever dealt with big talkers?” defense attorney Scott Graham asked an FBI agent on cross examination, adding: “There’s kind of a military-wanna-be theme that runs between the militias.”

Graham was grilling FBI special agent Richard Trask about his testimony that at least 13 militia members plotted to kidnap Whitmer from her vacation home and do one of two things: either take her on a boat in the middle of Lake Michigan and leave her there, or, take her to Wisconsin and try her for treason.

Graham asked the FBI agent how the suspects planned to get Whitmer to Wisconsin.

The agent had no specific answer, beyond saying there were audio recordings of the suspects discussing a plan to take Whitmer to another state, among them Wisconsin.

Graham then asked the agent what the suspects’ planned to do with Whitmer after they left her in the lake. The agent had no specific answer, beyond testifying that the accused ringleader, Adam Fox, wanted to “take her out on a boat and leave her in the middle of Lake Michigan.”

Graham is representing Kaleb Franks, 26, of Waterford, one of five defendants who appeared in U.S. District Court in Grand Rapids Tuesday for bond hearings, during which a judge will decide whether to release the accused men on bond or keep them jailed.

Gary Springstead — the Grand Rapids-based attorney representing Ty Garbin, 24, of Hartland Township — told reporters outside the courthouse he believes there is still more evidence to be presented.

“I haven’t had a full opportunity to review all of the evidence,” Springstead said “… I think my co-counsel made good points that (the evidence presented today) is a snapshot. A lot of quick points in a big time frame. You don’t know what else is happening outside of that time frame.

“So, I’m sure in our investigation (which) we’re going to conduct ourselves, and not rely solely on the federal government to tell us what happened, we’ll try to round out that information and figure out what happened in the times that weren’t captured on tape that weren’t captured in text to put it into fuller context so we can better assess where we stand in the case.”

Read the entire article HERE.

Powerful: LeBron James Pulls Over To Lecture Homeless Man On His White Privilege

Via The Babylon Bee (Satire)

LOS ANGELES, CA—We all know LeBron James is an amazing human being, but seriously. Just when we thought he couldn’t get any better, local media caught this powerful moment and WE CAN’T EVEN. Cameras caught the inspiring, heartwarming moment LeBron approached a homeless man last week at one of LA’s many tent cities.

According to sources, the homeless man held out his hand to LeBron’s approaching car to ask for some spare change. What happened next gives us faith in humanity again.

The world-famous NBA player looked at the poor man’s outstretched hand. Smiling kindly he said, “Silver and gold have I none, but in the name of #BlackLivesMatter, I offer you the gift of social enlightenment!”

LeBron James then proceeded to lecture the lucky panhandler on his white privilege, offering helpful ways to “be better” in the future. “I was shocked,” said Mike “CrazyEyes” McCluckerson, the homeless Marine Corps vet after LeBron’s helpful exhortation. “I was raised by a family of possums under an abandoned bridge, but I had no idea how many advantages my whiteness had given me in life. Furthermore, Mr. James illuminated a host of unconscious biases I harbored in my heart without even knowing it. This moment marks a turning point in my never-ending journey to relinquish the mantle of privilege Western colonialism has afforded me.”

Mr. McCluckerson then offered Lebron James his scarf as a token of thanks. James didn’t have any cash to offer the homeless man, but he did make a $100 donation to Black Lives Matter in his name. What a BEAUTIFUL gesture. Go, LeBron!

Check out all of the Bee’s takes on politics and culture HERE.

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