NEWS FROM UNDERGROUND

For “defamation.”

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FOR “DEFAMATION”

Singer Van Morrison is sued for calling Northern Ireland’s Health minister “dangerous” over COVID restrictions

Singer-songwriter Sir Van Morrison has been sued by Northern Ireland’s Health Minister Robin Swann for defamation over comments he made in a video posted to social media. The lawsuit was filed after the singer called the health minister “very dangerous” for the enforcement of pandemic-related measures.

In September, Swann’s legal team filed a lawsuit against Morrison, claiming the singer’s remarks were defamatory to the health minister.

“Proceedings have been issued and are ongoing against Van Morrison. We are aiming for a trial in February,” Swann’s lawyer, Paul Tweed, told local media on Sunday.

Tweed is a high-profile libel attorney who has represented the likes of Jennifer Lopez and Justin Timberlake.

The minister and singer’s beef began after Morrison’s gig in Belfast was canceled as a result of COVID-19 restrictions. Morrison was still able to perform and used the opportunity to take shots at the minister.

“Robin Swann has all the power. So I say Robin Swann is very dangerous,” Morison told the audience. He also allegedly tried to get the crowd to chant “Robin Swann is very dangerous.”

Morrison doubled down on the remarks, posting a YouTube video saying, “No, I don’t regret it. Of course he’s dangerous.” He added that the health minister was a “fraud.”

Morrison’s lawyer said that his client “regretted” that the minister had filed the lawsuit, and was “disappointed by the publicity that surrounds the issue of the proceedings also.”

The lawyer added that Morrison had “consistently campaigned” for the relaxation of Covid-19 restrictions because they were “unlawful insofar as they imposed a blanket ban on the ability of all musicians to perform live music, thereby endangering their livelihoods.”

Last year, Swann blasted Morrison for releasing anti-lockdown songs, including “No More Lockdown,” “Born to be Free,” and “As I Walked Out.”
A hearing is likely expected in early 2022.

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PROFITS OVER PRINCIPLES

Bible app ArtBible receives Apple Chinese censorship notice

Another app has received a warning from the US giant about the need to comply with Chinese internet censorship. This time it’s ArtBible.

In order to remain in the Chinese market, apps in Apple’s online store must adhere to Beijing’s censorship rules.

ArtBible – that offers the complete King James Version of the Bible, and allows users to view over 900 works of art on their mobile devices – is still available in the US and mainland China.

But it remains to be seen how the situation will unfold, all the more so since the deadline given for an update to the app to be published is December 5, while the developer announced that they would not be complying by including something known as “internet publishing license” China requires for apps with book or magazine content in that update.

AppleCensorship said it would monitor the situation, and provided its Twitter followers for links to see updated information regarding this case and the future availability of ArtBible in mainland China.

Announcing that they received the “dreaded” letter from Apple about compliance with Chinese rules, ArtBible developers included a screenshot of a part of the letter, which states that China requires apps in the book and magazine category to have permits issued by the country’s National Press Publication Administration.

An internet publishing license as well as “related documentation” is what it will take for Apple to keep ArtBible in its Chinese store.

Apple’s letter further warns that failing to comply will mean the app will be removed from the store on December 5, and that a workaround such as changing the app’s category will not work.

“You must provide a relevant permit,” Apple was explicit.

Recently, AppleCensorship published a report on what it calls the staggering scale of censorship that Apple applies in its various stores around the world, with a vast majority – 1,182 removals out of a total of 1,470 reported by Apple for the period between July 2018 and December 2020, occurring in China.
SAVED BY PEDANTIC RULE

Scottish club, whose profits were killed by vaccine passports, finds a loophole

Nightclubs in Scotland are putting furniture on dancefloors to avoid having to comply with the Scottish National Party (SNP) government’s controversial vaccine passports. Critics have described the vaccine passport scheme in the country as “shambolic” and an affront to civil liberties.

Lulu, a venue that describes itself as “Edinburgh’s best nightclub,” started advertising on Instagram that it had resumed “service” and customers “don’t need a vaccine passport to party with us.”

Related: How vaccine passports are crushing freedom, privacy, and civil liberties

Under Scotland’s vaccine passport rules, a nightclub is a venue featuring a space “provided for dancing for customers.” Nightclubs such as Lulu are using that definition as a loophole to avoid having to comply with the rules requiring them to demand vaccine passports from customers.

Lulu’s managing director Innes Bolt, speaking to Edinburgh Live, explained the move saying: “We have experienced a significant decline in footfall resulting in a crash in our sales which meant that Lulu was running at a loss.

“To protect our staff, promoters and business, we have removed the designated dance floor and reconfigured our space. Instead, we have created a new seating area, bringing in additional furniture to occupy that space and repositioning our DJ Booth.
“This change will allow us to maintain a safe and controlled environment throughout.”

According to The Telegraph, Lulu is not the only nightclub skirting the rules by covering its dance floor with furniture.

The Scottish Conservative Covid recovery spokesperson Murdo Fraser said the SNP should be “embarrassed” for implementing “such a mess of a scheme.”
JAILED FOR REPORTING

Family request parole for jailed Wuhan whistleblower journalist

Citizen journalist Zhang Zhan, who was arrested and currently serving a four-year sentence for reporting on the early days of the pandemic in Wuhan, has been protesting her sentence through a hunger strike. Her health has deteriorated to the extent her family is seeking medical parole.

Zhang was arrested last year in April and sentenced in December for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” (a vague charge used to stifle dissent in China). She was charged for live reports she had streamed from Wuhan to reveal how the government had attempted to cover up the coronavirus outbreak.

The government claimed that her coverage was “maliciously fabricated content and false information.” She was the first citizen journalist to be charged in court for reporting on the early days of the pandemic in Wuhan.

She began the intermittent hunger strike a month after her arrest, May last year. She has been force fed via a nasal tube and even restrained from removing the tube. At her trial, about eight months after her arrest, she told her lawyer that she was “mentally and physically exhausted.”

Zhan attended the trial in a wheelchair, and even after being sentenced she continued with the hunger strike to protest her “unlawful detention and indictment.”

She has lost a lot of weight and has had to be hospitalized. According to her brother, Zhang Ju, Zhan’s weight had dropped to 40kg (88lbs) in August, and her condition has worsened since then.

Ju added that during a virtual meeting with their mother last month, Zhan appeared “completely out of shape” and could not walk on her own.

“[In August] the prison doctor already acknowledged that Zhang Zhan could die, weighing only 40kg. I think she is well below 40kg now,” he said to the South China Morning Post.

“Zhang Zhan’s condition is much worse than it was in the summer. Her life is in danger,” he continued, adding that the family feared that Zhan “might not make it through this winter.”

They have applied for medical parole in hopes of saving her life.

“My mother couldn’t stop crying after the meeting. The lawyer is applying for medical parole but the chance of approval is extremely slim.”

Ju said that he has begun retelling stories of his sister’s childhood because she fears she might die and the world would not even know about it.

“I fear that Zhang Zhan may die [in prison] and the world wouldn’t know about it,” he said.

“Her existence is not tolerated in [China] and her work is censored so most Chinese people don’t know about it. But it doesn’t mean she will not be praised or recognized by the world in the future.

“Her work is significant but it comes as an enormous tragedy to herself and her family.”
DATA GRABS

US Treasury bypasses Fourth Amendment by buying app data

The blurring of lines between private and public where US government and tech companies are concerned is once again highlighted, this time in reports looking into the way the US Treasury is acquiring user data from private apps, including those like Babel Street that are suspected of providing federal authorities with a way to bypass Fourth Amendment protections (related to unlawful searches).

The Intercept says it managed to see two contracts the Treasury has with Babel Street. The information became available thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request obtained by the Tech Inquiry group. Bloomberg describes Babel Street as a company that provides virtual data and intelligence solutions by collecting, analyzing and reporting information from online and private electric sources.

Related: Intelligence agencies bypass the need for warrants by buying data harvested from smartphones

Those upset by the government’s deals with the company – designed to help target those committing tax offenses or attempting to circumvent economic sanctions – say that this way of acquiring information from mobile devices of users, including location data, represents a workaround of restrictions imposed by due process.

The Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), the enforcer of US policy of sanctions against other countries, signed a contract worth just under $150K in July, to buy data from Babel Street collected by the Locate X tool that tracks movement of people. Crucially, this federal agency – that has been criticized for insufficient accountability to Congress by the Brennan Center for Justice of New York University’s Law School – can make use of this data without a search warrant.

The second contract, signed in September, cost the Treasury about the same amount of money, and stipulates that the IRS, the US tax agency, will be given software by Babel Street used to scrape data from “public facing digital media records.”

The goal is to flush out private citizens or small businesses who might be behind on their taxes by poring over their social media posts. Judging by past information about Babel Street’s business, this will highly likely cover Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

When the IRS first sought to find a private partner to carry out this task, it said that the company’s surveillance of social media posts must include “available biometric data, such as photos, current address, or changes to marital status, provide publicly available information of taxpayers’ past or present locations, reports showing that a taxpayer participated in an online chat room, blog, or forum, and reports showing the chat room or blog conversation threads.”
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From Evan Dominguez:

Mark, I saw your post about University of Austin, which is brought to us by a number of folks including Larry Summers and Stephen Pinker, whose ties to Jeffery Epstein are documented. I haven’t looked into any of the other folks who are helping establish the University of Austin, but the co-founder of Palantir may have some CIA business behind him, if Whitney Webb is right about them (I don’t know anything about Palantir).

ABOVE: Summers is second left, with Barclays CEO who just stepped down amid an investigation into his relationship with Epstein. (The man on the far right of this picture, Boris Nikolic, is Gates’ “science advisor”, who was also the named executor of Epstein’s will.) https://www.foxbusiness.com/features/who-is-boris-nikolic-epstein-executor

On how Pinker helped Epstein in court even after he was a known offender:
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/07/17/steven-pinkers-aid-jeffrey-epsteins-legal-defense-renews-criticism-increasingly

Evan

Letter to a Colluder: Stop Enabling Tyranny

Stand Down … So You Can Stand Up

Margaret Anna Alice Oct 5

“A few hundred at the top, to plan and direct at every level; a few thousand to supervise and control (without a voice in policy) at every level; a few score thousand specialists (teachers, lawyers, journalists, scientists, artists, actors, athletes, and social workers) eager to serve or at least unwilling to pass up a job or to revolt; a million of the Pöbel, which sounds like ‘people’ and means ‘riffraff,’ to do what we would call the dirty work, ranging from murder, torture, robbery, and arson to the effort which probably employed more Germans in inhumanity than any other in Nazi history, the standing of ‘sentry’ in front of Jewish shops and offices in the boycott of April, 1933.”

—Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933–45 (paperback, Kindle, audiobook)

I’m willing to die to defend my liberty. Are you willing to die to take my liberty?

No? Good. Then stop enforcing totalitarian measures against your neighbors on behalf of the tyrants, who wouldn’t hesitate to annihilate you. Stop planning, directing, supervising, controlling, and performing their dirty work. Become part of the resistance instead of an enabler of democidal despots.

Whether you are a law enforcement officer, public health official, psychologist, scientist, medical professional, educator, employer, censor, propagandist, or any other agent of complicity in this war against the people, you are what makes dictatorships possible. You are what makes enslavement possible. You are what makes genocide possible. You are what makes the Biggest Lie in history possible.

You may not be one of the Gestapo agents beating individuals entering a public space without their vaxxport; wrenching children away from their vaxx criminal parents; pummeling anti-injection protesters; stripping and needle-raping resisters; reverting Australia to a penal colony; or restraining and forcibly injecting the elderly and mentally disabled (otherwise known as “useless eaters” by your predecessors).

You may not be one of the public health officials instituting ineffectual and deleterious mask guidelines and lockdowns based on fraudulent PCR tests; testing wastewater to justify iron-fisted measures; or falsifying the numbers to magnify a fabricated threat and conceal the deadly factual consequences and statistically astronomical number of adverse reactions to the injection.

You may not be one of the psychologists devising the mass persuasion campaign that has hypnotized the obedient, the gullible, and the ignorant around the globe.

You may not be one of the scientists too frightened of losing your career, credibility, grant funding, and future to denounce the fraud being perpetrated under the cloak of Science™.

You may not be one of the physicians violating the Hippocratic Oath and Nuremberg Code as you deny potentially life-saving medications, deploy murderous injections, administer lethal drugs such as Remdesivir, inflict ventilator-associated lung injuries, apply high-risk interventions like intubation, gang-inject patients, coerce pregnant mothers into risking miscarriage, refuse to treat non-GMO humans, and contemplate prioritizing ICU beds for the injected.

You may not be one of the nurses flouting the nursing code of ethics while pinning down screaming children as you plunge in the poison death jab.

You may not be one of the daycare employees torturing toddlers into wearing a mask.

You may not be one of the fascist institutions complying with the merciless edicts to fire the rational dissidents in your organization.

You may not be one of the censors suppressing evidence of all of the above atrocities while simultaneously silencing and smearing the honorable scientists, medical experts, whistleblowers, and other truth-tellers valiant enough to refute the preposterous narrative you have swindled so many into believing.

You may not be one of the propagandists blaring the Biggest Lie talking points over the loudspeakers through every conceivable mechanism 24/7/365 until the feeble-minded succumb to your relentless coercion from exhaustion, peer pressure, menticide, and Orwellian doublethink.

You don’t have to be any of those abominable scoundrels to be an enabler of tyranny.

You simply need to hold your tongue. You simply need to look the other way. You simply need to turn a deaf ear. You simply need to stifle your gut feeling that something is profoundly, irrevocably wrong about every venomous lie, absurd policy, and malignant mandate that has bombarded the public since spring 2020.

You simply need to live in fear. You simply need to cling to your ignorance. You simply need to follow the leader. You simply need to surrender to cowardice.

More here:

https://margaretannaalice.substack.com/p/letter-to-a-colluder-stop-enabling

https://twitter.com/aginnt/status/1458106112096546817

CHD cut off, since posting about Newsom’s post-jab problems 

A source tells me that CHD’s story about Gavin Newsom’s “vaccine” injury immediately drew somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 views, at which point their website crashed; then Tucker Carlson, having read the story, reported it on his show.

That’s all I know.

Several NFU subscribers have noted that the video of Newsom, tweeted [on November 8th] by one “Maze,” was doctored; so (since NFU, unlike the New York Times et al., is ever quick to send corrections out) I’m sending out this caveat, with Michael Green’s detailed response.

And, speaking of inauthentic video moments, others have suggested, plausibly, that the one I shared via Substack the other day—in which a Karen goes Covidian-ballistic on an airliner (the guy in the seat next to hers being “unvaccinated”), and the crew and pilot stand up to her, and finally tell her to get off the plane, in defense of non-discrimination—was staged.

That’s probably true, and surely disappointing; but I’ve left it up (on Substack) as a bit of bracing theater, since it’s a very powerful enactment of what should be standard treatment of COVID-segregationist hysteria.

MCM  

From Michael Green:

Maze is having fun, being facetious at https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1457899205813579777/pu/vid/1280×720/KjVPZrE7VyYyBFFT.mp4?tag=12.  She [posted] a doctored video.  The following Tucker Carlson report on Newsom’s absence of 12 days includes the video Maze used without the audio, but with un-slurred subtitles. 

In this video (minutes 1:07 to 1:25), which I take to be genuine unless you are willing to believe that Tucker and/or Fox are very deep into rehabilitating vaccine safety, Newsom’s face no longer has the Bell’s Palsy left cheek pulled outward with an invisible wire hanger inserted into mouth.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PTpTWgHTBw

It is safe to rule out the possibility that this video was doctored back into health by Fox because it is referred to as a “pre-recorded video statement,” so it was not being offered as evidence of his well-being, but as evidence of his being in hiding.

Michael Green

Original Post:

https://archives.simplelists.com/nfu/msg/18147834/ about four hours ago, someone named Maze@mazemoore posted a video of Newsom on the “gavin newsom” Twitter feed, under the heading, “Gavin Newsom is fine. He released this video just two days ago.”

(That heading is either ironic or delusional: Newsom, in that video, does not look “fine” at all, but like he’s suffering from Bell’s palsy, as the left side of his face slants down; and instead of managing to say “across the country,” as he tries to do, smiling gamely, as if hoping nobody will notice something’s wrong, he says “acwoss the country,” like Elmer Fudd.

I’m trying to help a family from London, now over here in New York City, where their little boy is getting cancer treatment at Sloan Kettering. Because the schedule of his treatment is uncertain, they can’t find a proper sublet, though they’re willing to pay whatever it might cost to rent a decent place for a month, or two, or three. (It must be an elevator building, somewhere uptown, preferably on the Upper West Side.) 

They’re very nice people, mom and dad professionals, with a baby, too. It’s a tough situation (the treatment is very hard on the little boy), so I’m hoping someone can step up and help them out.

Many thanks for whatever you can do.

MCM

A university where Jacques Ellul and Thomas Merton would be on the faculty is one we need, especially now that the Pope is a former (?) fascist collaborator who welcomes transhumanism, and urges COVID “vaccination” as “an act of love.” 

The Age Of Unreality

October 1, 2021 Thaddeus Kozinski
https://www.thepostil.com/founding-a-real-christian-university-in-an-age-of-unreality/

Two decades ago, much talk existed globally of a “post-911” world and its permanency: “We’re never going back to the world that existed before the Two Towers fell,” we were told. Sometime in 2020, “The New Normal” was declared. Both these announcements signify paradigm shifts in global culture and mass psychology. Such shifts have occurred before in history, and we have learned all about them in our history books: From the Homeric to the Axial age to the Dark Ages, from Medieval Christendom to the Renaissance and to the Reformation, from the Enlightenment to the Industrial Revolution and to the Information Age. Is there anything unique or exceptional about this latest shift into “new normality,” or is it just one more in a long litany of human cultural evolutions?

In 2020, all public Masses throughout the Catholic world during Holy Week were cancelled. This has never happened—never—in the history of Christendom. The reason for the cancellation was, we were told, the worst plague in history. The fact that the Church was shut down—indeed, shut herself down—during her most sacred and otherwise inviolable celebrations reveals that this is a unique and exceptional paradigm shift.

The paradigm shift that has occurred and is still underway, with each day witnessing an ever-deepening shifting, is, I maintain, to the Age of Unreality. The most compelling evidence for the accuracy of this description is the fact that the Church herself has not only succumbed to this propaganda-concocted unreality, but has also taken a leading role in spreading it to the world.

As all the actual scientific evidence now indicates—and the data was available soon after March 2020 for those with eyes to see it and some conversance with credible alternative media journalism—no “pandemic” (in the traditional sense of the word, i.e., hundreds of millions of terminally sick and dead people all around the world) had actually existed.

What existed was a treatable, mostly non-lethal disease with an infectious fatality rate comparable to the common flu. And a pandemic exists, as I am writing this essay; it is not one of “variants,” but the mass deaths and injuries of the injected. Yet, an official Vatican conference was held in May of 2021 that supported with spurious and tendentious moral and theological rhetoric the false narrative, its attendant propaganda, and its final cause and raison d’etre: the injection of the entire global population with what the consensus of true science indicates is, not a vaccine at all, but an experimental, untested, and manifestly harmful—and fatal for a significant number—gene-altering serum.

As the abovementioned facts indicate, we are truly in uncharted waters: a worldwide propaganda onslaught the scale and malice of which the world has never seen hypnotizing the global populace into state of psychotic fear in which millions consented to, or at least did not widely and forcefully resist, a global economic shutdown—a crime against humanity on a massive scale. This shutdown included a deprivation of fundamental human rights, the physically and psychologically dangerous and medically useless masking of whole populations, including young children, and now the coercive program of injecting every living human being with a untested, gene-altering serum, all for a disease that according to the actual numbers is no more fatal than the flu.

Add to this the official endorsement of this totalitarian program by vast majority of Catholic clergy—indicated by closing of Churches, refusing to hear confessions or give Last Rites, mandating masks and social distancing, and even using their parishes as injection sites (not to mention the ever increasing celebration and normalization of abortion, sodomy, transgenderism, and the recent emergence of a full-fledged secularist, totalitarian technocracy), and it is easy to see we have truly transitioned into a physical, moral, intellectual, cultural, political, and spiritual Age of Unreality.

We know from Sacred Scripture and Tradition that a Great Tribulation will come upon the world in which the Antichrist will make his first personal appearance, coinciding with a great chastisement and persecution of Christians under his behest. After this, along with his counterfeit “church” now globally established and ubiquitous among Catholics and non-Catholics alike—“even the elect will be deceived, if that were possible”—he will be vanquished, followed by an Era of Peace in which Christ in the Eucharist will reign over the world in a spiritual state of supernatural and natural harmony, a civilization of love. The Age of Unreality we are now in is, if not the complete establishment of this counterfeit, global “church,” the inauguration of it; and we are undoubtedly now living in the Great Tribulation.

Real Christian University (RCU)

In the remainder of this essay and in a follow-up essay, I would like to inquire into the kind of college or university that would need to be founded to educate young people most effectively in and for the Age of Unreality. I shall call this hypothetical institution, “Real Christian University” (RCU). My thesis is that such a university would have to be both radically traditional and radically new.

The kind of teachers, students, curriculum, and pedagogy that enable any university’s mission to succeed must be determined in light of that mission; and the mission of any university must be determined in light of both the perennial and universal principles of education and the human soul and the exigencies and dictates of the time and place of its founding.

As a robustly Christian and integrally classical, liberal-arts university founded in early twenty-first century America, RCU would have only to consult as her models the successful colleges and universities of similar mission that have preceded her in the last several decades to discover these perennial principles in both theory (in their founding documents) and in practice (in the concrete and dynamic life and shape of their communities). Thus, RCU would take its essential core from the Christian, predominantly Catholic, intellectual and educational tradition and institutional models that have recently been built upon it.

But these institutions, however excellent and resonant with our mission, were founded before the Age of Unreality had reached and revealed the fullness of its nature. Thus, their capacity to serve as models for a similar institution founded in 2021 is significantly limited. The cultural and educational crises to which these colleges’ founders responded were profound—the culture of death, secularism, scientism, the dictatorship of relativism, the instrumentalization and fragmentation of curriculum, the loss of wonder—but none of them compare to the crisis we now face, for it is both the synthesis and culmination of all of them: the global, totalitarian, technocratic supplanting of Reality by a man-made counterfeit. As C. J. Hopkins puts it:

“The New Normals — i.e., those still wearing masks outdoors, shrieking over meaningless “cases,” bullying everyone to get “vaccinated,” and collaborating with the segregation of the “Unvaccinated” — are not behaving the way they’re behaving because they are stupid. They are behaving that way because they’re living in a new “reality” that has been created for them over the course of the last 17 months by a massive official propaganda campaign, the most extensive and effective in the history of propaganda.”

Thus, in addition to being traditional and conservative, RCU would need to be radical and experimental. Józef Życiński has written:

“To live the faith of Abraham is to be ready at a day’s notice to pack the tents symbolizing everything that is dear to one and to go to a new, unknown place, which God will indicate, completely independently of rational calculations or our emotional predilections. To live the faith of Abraham in the cultural context of postmodernity is to be able calmly to pack up the tents of congenial concepts and arguments, not in order to set out on a desert path, but to set them up again in a different context and in a different form, in a place indicated by God. In an Abrahamic testimony of faith, one may not lose heart on account of the wildness of new places or on account of a feeling of loneliness in a foreign landscape. We must constantly seek the face of the Lord (Psalm 27:8), listening carefully to His voice, which could be either a discreet whisper or a delicate breeze (1 Kings 19:12). We need to love God more than the logic of convincing deductions and the collection of respected authorities, to which we like to refer in times of difficulty. We need to accept the provisionality of contingent means, in order that the Divine Absolute might all the more clearly reveal in them his power. Only then does the contemporary “wandering Aramaean” reveal the style in which, amidst the darkness of our doubt, flashes the light of the great adventure of our faith.”

For our purposes, the “tents of congenial concepts and arguments” are the curricula of the predominantly and traditionally Christian, integrated liberal-arts colleges and universities. The “different context” is the Age of Unreality. The “place indicated by God” is yet to be determined. As for the “different form,” we will attempt to set this out in the remainder of this essay and in a future essay, but we can say now that whatever form the “faith of Abraham” must take for today, it will not only have to incorporate, integrate, and transmit the classical and predominantly Catholic intellectual and educational tradition, modeling itself upon them, but also render this tradition fit and fruitful for an age whose discontinuity from all preceding ones is all but absolute.

Click on the link for the rest.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmaqK8GwTcI

This is an idea I too have broached in public, and am pursuing—presently as an online program, starting with “Critical Thinking in the Age of COVID,” a two-month weekly evening course co-taught with Rob Williams.

The third of its eight sessions is this evening. If you would like to join us (you would have access to the first two classes), go here to sign up:
https://www.freedomtravelalliance.com/event-details/critical-thinking-in-the-time-of-covid-2021-10-25-19-00-1

We Can’t Wait for Universities to Fix Themselves. So We’re Starting a New One.

I left my post as president of St. John’s College in Annapolis to build a university in Austin dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth.

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/we-cant-wait-for-universities-to

Pano Kanelos

So much is broken in America. But higher education might be the most fractured institution of all.

There is a gaping chasm between the promise and the reality of higher education. Yale’s motto is Lux et Veritas, light and truth. Harvard proclaims: Veritas. Young men and women of Stanford are told Die Luft der Freiheit weht: The wind of freedom blows.

These are soaring words. But in these top schools, and in so many others, can we actually claim that the pursuit of truth—once the central purpose of a university—remains the highest virtue? Do we honestly believe that the crucial means to that end—freedom of inquiry and civil discourse—prevail when illiberalism has become a pervasive feature of campus life?

The numbers tell the story as well as any anecdote you’ve read in the headlines or heard within your own circles. Nearly a quarter of American academics in the social sciences or humanities endorse ousting a colleague for having a wrong opinion about hot-button issues such as immigration or gender differences. Over a third of conservative academics and PhD students say they had been threatened with disciplinary action for their views. Four out of five American PhD students are willing to discriminate against right-leaning scholars, according to a report by the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology.

The picture among undergraduates is even bleaker. In Heterodox Academy’s 2020 Campus Expression Survey, 62% of sampled college students agreed that the climate on their campus prevented students from saying things they believe. Nearly 70% of students favor reporting professors if the professor says something students find offensive, according to a Challey Institute for Global Innovation survey. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education reports at least 491 disinvitation campaigns since 2000. Roughly half were successful. 

On our quads, faculty are being treated like thought criminals. Dorian Abbot, a University of Chicago scientist who has objected to aspects of affirmative action, was recently disinvited from delivering a prominent public lecture on planetary climate at MIT. Peter Boghossian, a philosophy professor at Portland State University, finally quit in September after years of harassment by faculty and administrators. Kathleen Stock, a professor at University of Sussex, just resigned after mobs threatened her over her research on sex and gender.

Click on the link for the rest.

From Michael Green:

Jonathan Turley suggests that the FBI’s seizure of the diary of her own sexual molestation by her father,  allegedly by Biden’s daughter Ashley, confirms its authenticity.  Let me add another confirmation, one that lingered in plain sight and sound for many years and may (or may not) be lingering still.  

There is a C-Span account of Joe Biden swearing in the 2015 Senate including Chris Coons, into whose daughter’s ear he whispered something that shocked her so deeply that she recoiled in such visible disgust that her father—not the girl herself—publicly declared to the media the next day that she had not been disgusted:
“Coons: My daughter doesn’t think Joe Biden is ‘creepy’”  https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/01/11/coons-my-daughter-doesnt-think-joe-biden-is-creepy/ 

There also used to be plenty of excerpts of the exchange on YouTube, one of which provided captions for what was whispered into the girl’s ear, which could be heard on the tape.

By the way.  Do you wanna know how horny I am to have a 13yo girl standing right next to me?   Talk to my daughter Ashley about the film! [Biden kisses her ear.] Herh, herh, hyeh…. You’re a good lookin’ girl.”

I believed it, but my ex- who edits film scoffed and told me it was a dub, so I went to the original C-Span, downloaded it to a thumb drive and plugged it into my DVD player hooked up to the TV and could not hear it.  So I plugged it into my computer which has a good set of headphones, dialed down the volume (that magnifies background clicking sounds), fiddled around and there it was, except that at the end I hear, as Biden de-escalates his grooming as she recoils, “You’re a good little girl.”  I checked it online a few years later and it was still there.  I have not checked it in over a year; it may still be there, or it may be there with that part edited to a muffle.  

Hunter Biden had his own channel on PornHub, showing him undressed with an underage female relative—a cousin, if memory serves.  There is also a video of him naked, complaining to a prostitute about how his computer was filched—the one he forgot to pick up from the shop and which thus became the property of the repair shop.  

When Ashley’s diaries were released prior to the election they read exactly like the blocked partial memories of genuine victims of paternal sexual predation whom I had treated as a clinical psychologist, and I found no reason to doubt their authenticity.  (There is no point in fabricating such a diary when its alleged author could easily deny having written it, which Ashley did not.)   I am only a little sorry that the crippled epistemology of the professional journalist prevailed in this case: Do not use a fact unless it is verified by another reliable source.  It’s a good rule, but a rule of thumb and not a law of nature.  Sometimes there is only one source that may or may not be reliable, but there is enough surrounding evidence to make it probably so without another independent reliable confirmation.  As in this case.  

The miracle of the C-Span tape is that is never poked its grisly head into public affairs where it should have played a relevant role, such as the last presidential election.

Let’s Go Biden!