The Biden administration does what leftists do: they purge

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: commenter “AesopFan.”]

Mollie Hemingway explains:

In a stunning violation of precedent, Biden’s National Security Agency (NSA) placed General Counsel Michael J. Ellis on administrative leave pending a Defense Inspector General investigation of his recent appointment, as well as an unspecified claim of mishandling of classified information. Ellis has maintained a top security clearance, without any blemish, for more than a decade. He is a trained classification official both as a military officer and civilian.

While Ellis has prominent defenders from his many years of service in the intelligence community, his detractors include high profile participants in the Russia collusion hoax, proponents of former National Security Advisor John Bolton’s attempt to publish classified information in a book, and some of the individuals who orchestrated the Ukraine impeachment effort…

The Lawfare blog, a primary mouthpiece for the architects of the Russia collusion hoax, disgraced former FBI Director James Comey in particular, has led the campaign to oust Ellis from his role. Mimicking the nebulous language once used to push the debunked Russia collusion hoax, Susan Hennessey wrote that “While important details remain unclear, media accounts include numerous indications of irregularity in the process by which Ellis was selected for the job, including interference by the White House. At a minimum, the evidence of possible violations of civil service rules demand immediate investigation by Congress and the inspectors general of the Department of Defense and the NSA.” Neither she, nor the media accounts she referenced, provided credible evidence for the claims.

In fact, the selection process for the general counsel position began a year ago. Multiple sources confirm that Ellis was found to be qualified for the position by a panel of career lawyers before any political appointee was involved in the process and he was interviewed by a panel that included a career intelligence lawyer. None of the partisans who oppose Ellis have put forth evidence of improper influence on the selection process…

The refusal to appoint Ellis was in violation of merit system principles until it was ordered by the acting secretary of Defense. Pelosi and Schiff have justified their political interference in this career intelligence community position, normally considered off limits for political interference, by asserting without evidence that Ellis’s appointment must have been political.

Democratic activists on the Hill and at Lawfare have three main claims and complaints about Ellis. They claim that he was involved in Rep. Devin Nunes’s discovery of hundreds of instances of Obama-Biden officials unmasking Trump transition team members. The unmasked material frequently ended up leaked to media figures…

Another criticism of Ellis is that he found former National Security Advisor Bolton to be attempting to publish classified information in a book attacking President Trump. That’s true, and career intelligence professionals up to and including the NSA director himself agreed with Ellis’s findings…

The final complaint offered by Ellis’s critics relates to the effort to leak the contents of Trump’s call with the president of Ukraine in order to foment a scandal and impeachment push. Byron York’s book “Obsession,” on the first impeachment, details how the only person on the call to have a problem with the call was Vindman…

Ellis was one of the officials allegedly trying to thwart the leaking, which angered Vindman.

I assume that Ellis is far from the only target of this sort of activity. That’s the way the left has consolidated its power over the years, and much of the process has flown under the radar.

The left is about power, power, and more power, and right now they’ve got plenty of it and they aim to make it impossible for the opposition to ever change that.

Glenn Greenwald on the suppression of liberties in the name of fighting terror

The New Neo Posted on by

Glenn Greenwald isn’t on the right, nor is he a Trump supporter. What he is is intelligent, thorough, and devoted to the cause of liberty and the criticism of its suppression through the mechanism of fear. He’s been writing excellent pieces in the past year or so, and here’s a recent example.

In that essay, Greenwald criticizes the Bush administration for the extent of its curtailment of liberty in the wake of 9/11. At the time it was happening, I took issue with a few of these things, but most of them seemed justified to me back then. However, at this point I’d be inclined to take an attitude closer to Greenwald’s. When the NSA spying came out during the Obama administration – due in part to Greenwald’s efforts to publicize Snowden’s work – I disagreed with the method through which it was uncovered but I ultimately became shocked by the extent of the government spying on American citizens.

In the present essay, Greenwald tackles the ginned-up war on the right that’s being waged by the left in the name of fighting domestic terrorism:

Before Joe Biden was even inaugurated, he and his allies knew they needed a new villain…

Pending Domestic War on Terror legislation favored by the White House — sponsored by Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) — would simply amend the old War on Terror laws, which permitted a wide range of powers to fight foreign terrorist organizations, so as to now allow the U.S. government to also use those powers against groups designated as domestic terror organizations. Just as was true of the first War on Terror, this second one would thus vest the government with new, wide-ranging powers of surveillance, detention, prosecution and imprisonment, though this time for use against U.S. citizens on U.S. soil.

Even while that legislation is pending, the U.S. government is already waging an aggressive new domestic war on terror that has largely flown under the radar. Grave warnings from DHS are now just as common, vague and unreliable — but also fear-inducing — as they were in the days of Tom Ridge. Domestic surveillance is also on the rise. Last month, CNN reported that “the Biden administration is considering using outside firms to track extremist chatter by Americans online, an effort that would expand the government’s ability to gather intelligence but could draw criticism over surveillance of US citizens.”

…Meanwhile, one of the most repressive features of the first War on Terror — due-process-free no-fly lists against American citizens — is now back in full force. Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS) have both been demanding that the FBI ban January 6 protesters and other “domestic extremists” from air travel without being convicted of any crime or even given a hearing to determine whether this prohibition is justified. Rep. Thompson even demanded that Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Josh Hawley (R-MO) be put on the no-fly list, then took to Twitter to boast of how proud he was of this demand…

Beyond the DHS bulletins, that agency and other intelligence operatives continue to issue reports, for both public and classified consumption, warning that the greatest national security threat the U.S now faces is domestic extremism…

Online censorship, of course, is also rapidly increasing in the name of stopping the threat of domestic extremism…

The dangers of the first War on Terror were grave enough. Transferring it to “the Homeland,” as President Biden calls it, is bound to be far more dangerous still.

Please read the whole thing.

More thoughts on the Wuhan lab leak coverup

The New Neo Posted on by

Today I noticed this headdline at Hot Air: “The media’s lab leak debacle shows why banning ‘misinformation’ is a bad idea.”

No, it most assuredly does not show that, although banning misinformation is indeed a bad idea because misinformation is rampant, will always exist, and is spread by social media like wildfire. There is literally no way to effectively ban it even if you want to. No, the only remedy is better information and allowing a free flow of ideas. Once you get into banning misinformation, the policy can and will be misused by those in control of the levers of information.

So yes, it’s a bad idea. But what the COVID lab leak “debacle” shows is something quite different. It’s only a debacle to the right, and only the subsequent uncovering of the original cover-up is any kind of misfortune for the left. It’s no “debacle” even for the left if it doesn’t cause a great many people on the left to change their minds about trusting the left and the press in their anti-right propaganda. I doubt it will do that for a significant number of people.

Actually, the coverup served its purpose very well – its purpose being to make excuses for China, tar Donald Trump and the right as conspiracy theorist liars and as anti-science (and hurt their chances in the 2020 election), and also enable the draconian encroachments on liberty that we’ve seen with COVID. All were successes in terms of politics – until now, and perhaps for quite a long time to come.

We see this dynamic again and again with the lies of the left. So at the risk of being boring, why do I repeat myself here about this topic, over and over, as each new revelation comes out? One reason is that I keep getting enraged. Another is to document the existence of these lies, in case I get into discussions with liberal/left friends and family on one topic or another. It helps to be able to refer to a post if I’m quizzed about that topic months or years later, which does happen.

I keep trying to change minds, if I see even a small opening for it. I acknowledge that it may be a futile endeavor. But sometimes the slow drip drip drip of this sort of information can be effective in engendering doubt in some Democrat voter who never had doubt before. The process can be cumulative – it certainly was with me.

Once again , the NY Times lies about Israel

The New Neo Posted on by

Creative lies such as these:

The New York Times posted the photo of a child who allegedly died in Gaza in 2021, in fighting between Israel and Hamas, which rules Gaza and fired thousands of rockets into Israel. But it wasn’t a photo of that child. Hussein Aboubakr Mansour says it was “a random photo from ‘cute Muslim toddlers’ online photo stocks that have been circulating for many years. … Hamas and @nytimes are literally trolling the world.”

The same photo was used in 2017 for another child who allegedly died in Gaza, notes law professor David Bernstein. As he observes, the “angelic photo” supposedly of this child published in the New York Times in 2021, was previously used in 2017 for a child with a different name, who supposedly died in that year. As Bernstein notes, “this is what happens” when “the Times ‘reaches out’ to a terrorist-tied organization for information.”

Oh, and there’s also the use of a false map that the Times’ deputy opinion editor, when challenged, described this way:

This artwork is not meant to represent any historical boundaries and it is not meant to serve as a literal, factual map — our data graphics department would handle such maps. This was an illustration conveying a sense of shrinking space for Palestinians. It is art…

I’m sure that everyone reading the Times is aware that maps published there aren’t meant to be true, but are instead creative fiction. Maybe they should just consider, as a default position, the notion that everything published in the NY Times is creative fiction.

Unfortunately, they don’t know that, although most people on the right do. In fact, just yesterday I was speaking to a very intelligent Democrat-voting relative who mentioned that his main source of news is the Times. He is hardly alone.

More on that artistic map:

As Shany Mor points out, the map is highly misleading, because it radically understates the percentage of land held by Jews in 1946, prior to the creation of Israel as a country in 1947. It does so by wrongly “labeling every single patch of land not owned by” the Jewish National Fund in the 1920’s — when Jews owned a smaller fraction of land — as being “Arab or Palestinian” in 1946. As he observes, much of the land not held by Jews was desert land owned by no one…

The Times knows exactly what it’s doing, and has been doing this for decades. That’s how you get people such as Kamau Bobb, who are ill-informed on this and many other topics and probably haven’t a clue as to the extent of the deception.

The great Wuhan lab leak story coverup

The New Neo Posted on by

I really don’t know what’s most astounding about this story.

Is it the fact that it appeared in Vanity Fair, of all places? Is it the fact that it appeared at all? Or is it the fact that the secret was kept for so long? I think of myself as having become cynical and suspicious, but apparently I have a ways to go before I become cynical and suspicious enough.

The above link is to a story that goes like this:

The Lab-Leak Theory: Inside the Fight to Uncover COVID-19’s Origins –
Throughout 2020, the notion that the novel coronavirus leaked from a lab was off-limits. Those who dared to push for transparency say toxic politics and hidden agendas kept us in the dark.

It’s apparently a case of “now it can be told.” But why now? I hardly think it’s because journalists finally got some integrity.

More:

Since December 1, 2019, the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 has infected more than 170 million people around the world and killed more than 3.5 million. To this day, we don’t know how or why this novel coronavirus suddenly appeared in the human population. Answering that question is more than an academic pursuit: Without knowing where it came from, we can’t be sure we’re taking the right steps to prevent a recurrence.

And yet, in the wake of the Lancet statement and under the cloud of Donald Trump’s toxic racism, which contributed to an alarming wave of anti-Asian violence in the U.S., one possible answer to this all-important question remained largely off-limits until the spring of 2021.

Behind closed doors, however, national security and public health experts and officials across a range of departments in the executive branch were locked in high-stakes battles over what could and couldn’t be investigated and made public.

A months long Vanity Fair investigation, interviews with more than 40 people, and a review of hundreds of pages of U.S. government documents, including internal memos, meeting minutes, and email correspondence, found that conflicts of interest, stemming in part from large government grants supporting controversial virology research, hampered the U.S. investigation into COVID-19’s origin at every step. In one State Department meeting, officials seeking to demand transparency from the Chinese government say they were explicitly told by colleagues not to explore the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s gain-of-function research, because it would bring unwelcome attention to U.S. government funding of it.

So let’s get this straight – the coverup was because the US was implicated waist-deep in this stuff. But it was also because Orange Man Bad Evil Racist, and an enormous truth had to be suppressed because of that so it’s really his fault.

But actually, the notion that Trump is a racist and that he spoke about the possible lab origin of the virus in order to make some sort of racist statement is a wholly imaginary artifact of the left/liberal mind. The left has been suppressing many truths, and the fact that Trump is not a racist is among them.

The lengthy and detailed article goes on to describe a situation in which – among other things – the former head of the CDC received death threats for saying the origin of the virus might have been in a lab.

The lengths to which the Democrats, the left, the media, and “scientists” (I put it in quotes now because it’s clear that they value leftist politics above scientific truth and the safety of their fellow human beings) will go to defeat the right is extraordinary and dangerous. We already knew that, but the extent of it is tremendous and pervasive.

Again, why is this coming out now?

[ADDENDUM: Ace has a lot to say on the matter.]

Google comes up with a tepid halfway solution for Kamau Bobb

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday I wrote a post about some of the opinions expressed by Google’s “diversity head” Kamau Bobb a few years ago in a blog post of his. One of the many things he’d written was, “If I were a Jew I would be concerned about my insatiable appetite for war and killing in defense of myself.” Interesting sentiments for a head of diversity, but really quite unsurprising these days.

On the other hand, it’s at least somewhat surprising that Google decided to do anything negative to Bobb as a result of learning about that old blog post of his. I wrote “learning,” although it’s something they probably should have found and certainly could have found before they hired him. Perhaps they did already know, and just didn’t care until it came to public light and they got some flak about it.

At any rate, here’s what Google did with Bobb:

Google announced it’s removing its global lead on diversity strategy and research from his post after it was discovered he’d made antisemitic comments in a past blog post.

Kamau Bobb will be reassigned to a STEM research role after The Washington Free Beacon uncovered a 2007 blog post by Bobb titled “If I were a Jew.”…

In a statement released Wednesday evening, Google said it “condemned the past writings by a member of our diversity team that are causing deep offense and pain to members of our Jewish community and our LGBTQ+ community.”

“These writings are unquestionably hurtful,” the statement continued. “The author acknowledges this and has apologized. He will no longer be part of our diversity team going forward and will focus on his STEM work.”

I missed the LGBTQ part, but perhaps the comments of Bobb’s that offended that group were in another blog post of his.

I actually don’t care whether Bobb is head of diversity or in a STEM role at Google or not, because I wouldn’t be surprised if he were replaced by someone with similar views who has had the foresight to keep them to him/herself. The left is the left, and the things Bobb wrote about Jews are pretty much in the mainstream on the left and probably at Google as well.

What I do think is of interest is that Google did something about him but couldn’t bring itself to fire him, although Google had no hesitation in firing James Damore for his infamous internally circulated memo questioning Google’s hiring and diversity practices. Perhaps you remember Damore:

“Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber”, commonly referred to as the Google memo, is an internal memo, dated July 2017, by US-based Google engineer James Damore about Google’s culture and diversity policies…

The company fired Damore for violation of the company’s code of conduct. Damore filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, but later withdrew this complaint…After withdrawing this complaint, Damore filed a class action lawsuit, retaining the services of attorney Harmeet Dhillon,alleging that Google was discriminating against conservatives, whites, Asians, and men. Damore withdrew his claims in the lawsuit to pursue arbitration against Google.

James Damore was spurred to write the memo when a Google diversity program he attended solicited feedback…Calling the culture at Google an “ideological echo chamber”, the memo states that while discrimination exists, it is extreme to ascribe all disparities to oppression, and it is authoritarian to try to correct disparities through reverse discrimination. Instead, the memo argues that male to female disparities can be partly explained by biological differences. Alluding to the work of Simon Baron-Cohen, Damore said that those differences include women generally having a stronger interest in people rather than things, and tending to be more social, artistic, and prone to neuroticism (a higher-order personality trait). Damore’s memorandum also suggests ways to adapt the tech workplace to those differences to increase women’s representation and comfort, without resorting to discrimination.

The memo is dated July 2017 and was originally shared on an internal mailing list. It was later updated with a preface affirming the author’s opposition to workplace sexism and stereotyping.

Compare that to Bobb’s screed. And yet it is Bobb who’s been retained by the company in contrast to Damore’s firing. And the action against Damore occurred after feedback was solicited by the diversity program. It is ironic that the subject of Damore’s memo was Google’s diversity practices, and it would have been even more ironic had Bobb been head of Google’s diversity program at the time of Damore’s firing (apparently he was hired about three years ago, so probably not).

Notes from Google’s “diversity head”

The New Neo Posted on by

An old blog post written by Google’s head of diversity, Kamau Bobb, has been spotlighted. It was written by Bobb when he was a research associate in technology at Georgia Tech, and appeared on his blog as part of a piece entitled “If I Were a Jew”:

If I were a Jew I would be concerned about my insatiable appetite for war and killing in defense of myself. Self defense is undoubtedly an instinct, but I would be afraid of my increasing insensitivity to the suffering [of] others…

If I were a Jew today, my sensibilities would be tormented. I would find it increasingly difficult to reconcile the long cycles of oppression that Jewish people have endured and the insatiable appetite for vengeful violence that Israel, my homeland, has now acquired.

The essay has a lot more in that vein. It’s really just standard leftist stuff, and not even as bad as some. I wish I could say the thoughts expressed there are unusual, but they’re not. Although Bobb pays lip service to the idea of Israeli self-defense, it’s clear that he thinks Israelis and Jews have little or no right to it.

And I would challenge Bobb to find a country attacked as Israel has been which shows anywhere near the compassion Israel regularly shows to the Palestinians. He will not find one. “Insatiable appetite for vengeful violence” – I think Bobb has no idea what those words actually mean, or how they would play out in the Middle East if they were true of Israel.

In addition, Bobb seems to think that all Jews around the world are responsible for what the government of Israel might or might not do. Bobb himself is black; is he responsible for all black-generated violence around the world, for example? That would be an absurdity, and collective responsibility shouldn’t be attributed to him or anyone else. But treating people collectively has become the essence of “diversity.”

COVID and the lab leak theory: the correction of the correction of the correction of the…

The New Neo Posted on by

This is the way the WaPo rolls (by Treacher):

But now, with Trump out of office and the pandemic winding down, more and more people are asking the same question. Suddenly, it’s acceptable to ask what the hell is going on in Wuhan…

That’s why we’re now seeing things like WaPo “correcting” stories from March 2020 that asserted the lab-leak theory was conspiracy nonsense. They dismissed it out of hand, and now they’re backpedalling. Here’s the text of one such “correction,” appended to a story originally headlined “Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked”:

“Earlier versions of this story and its headline inaccurately characterized comments by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) regarding the origins of the coronavirus. The term ‘debunked’ and The Post’s use of ‘conspiracy theory’ have been removed because, then as now, there was no determination about the origins of the virus.”

They “have been removed,” have they? But – as Treacher points out:

If nothing has changed, if things are the same “then as now,” why are they correcting it 15 months later? Why can’t they just admit they blew it?…

They’ll grudgingly admit they might not have been 100% accurate or honest about the most important story of our lifetime, but they won’t give those dirty Republicans the satisfaction of a clear and unequivocal retraction. And none of their colleagues will call them out on it, because they all want to work at WaPo someday.

The MSM is regularly mendacious in a way that’s sly enough that if you’re not reading carefully you might miss it. That’s the goal, of course – to make readers miss it – and it’s been remarkably successful so far. Whether readers say they trust the press or distrust it, most people still read the MSM in a less-than-critical manner and are greatly influenced by it whether they realize it or not.

Oh, and I’ll add that I don’t agree with Treacher that “now, with Trump out of office and the pandemic winding down,” the media is allowing itself to dribble out some of the truth on a few issues. I don’t think that’s the reason, because they are as devoted as ever to discrediting Trump and Republicans in preparation for 2022 and beyond.

No, if they’re admitting anything now, it’s for some other strategic reason. Perhaps the one voiced by commenter “AesopFan” here:

There has been much speculation about the abrupt change in the [Wuhan lab] narrative on the Left, to acknowledging that maybe this coronavirus was kind of an oopsie at the Wuhan Lab, and what might have triggered it.

The forced [FOIA] production of the Fauci Emails and knowing what searchers would find there…might be what done it.

That’s the most plausible theory I’ve heard so far, and consistent with previous admissions of “error” by the left in attempts to get ahead of a potentially damaging story. But the Fauci email disclosures so far just don’t seem potentially damaging enough to justify the admission of such a huge error by the MSM on the COVID origin story. So for me, the mysteries of “why?” and “why now?” remain.