Democrat Adam Schiff plays the role of Schumer on the House Intelligence committee.
He tells us the Clinton and DNC collusion is Republican induced influence and the payment to a law firm to avoid disclosure laws and the Uranium One deal, Bill Clinton's "uge" speaking fee are all nonsense.
Schiff is shifty alright and Schemer is a worm. No wonder Congress is held in such low esteem. The heads of the Democrat and Republican Party's can't tell the truth when it hurts and is so obvious.
Meanwhile, Republicans continue to show they cower at the prospect of being bold. (See 1 and 1a below.)
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In the long run will the gutless NFL end by kneeing itself.? You decide. (See 2 below.)
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So much for Obama's Iran Deal's openess. (See 3 below.)
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Yes, liberal fascists have taken charge of free speech on college campuses. (See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1) Implausible Deniability
The aftermath of the 2016 election has revealed the criminality of the Democrats, the perfidy of the Deep State, the corruption of the press, and the bought and paid for motives of the scribblers in the conservative pundit class. And Trump won despite all that. In many ways it reminds me of a Soviet operation called The Trust. If you missed Reilly -- Ace of Spies, Edward Jay Epstein describes how the Soviets created a fake anti-Soviet group called The Trust and used it to nab dissidents plotting to overthrow the regime.
Fusion GPS’ dossier was a replay of a classic Soviet disinformation campaign.
"The Trust was not an anti-Soviet organization, it only imitated one." In reality, he continued, the Trust was a creature of the Soviet secret police. Its purpose was not to overthrow Communism, but to manipulate real anti-communist organizations into misleading the West.
In much the same way, I believe, Russian agents working for the Clintons and the DNC through Fusion GPS and its hireling Christopher Steele provided fake information in a dossier which the FBI (headed by James Comey) and the Department of Justice (headed by Loretta Lynch ) used to craft an affidavit to obtain a FISA warrant authorizing electronic surveillance on people connected, however tangentially, to the Trump campaign. This, after previous such warrants had -- and this is unusual -- been turned down by the FISA court. Then-president Obama allowed the surveilled communications to be widely circulated throughout the government, so that the names of the targets caught up in the surveillance and their communications were thus widely available for leaking, and were leaked.
As Byron York noted in a series of tweets, here were some of the dossier’s sources:
The Trust was funded by émigrés who believed it was legit. And the Russian anti-Trump phony dossier was, we now know, funded by the Clinton campaign and the DNC, which would have us believe that their lawyer Marc Elias, who received over $9 million for unspecified work, did this without their consent or knowledge.
(Fusion GPS was also funded during the nomination period -- and before Fusion GPS and Steele were poking around Russia, by Washington Free Beacon, something that it -- like Elias -- admitted shortly before a likely court ruling that Fusion’s bank account information had to be provided to congressional investigators.) In any event, their work with Fusion GPS ended with the nomination of Trump. They had nothing to do with the hiring of Fusion GPS and the creation and distribution of the dossier.
The Washington Free Beacon is a right-of-center publication, and certainly has done some fine work in the past, but its links to the anti-Trump crowd of the right is unmistakable. The publication is largely funded by hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer, who strongly supports gay rights and open borders. Among its original board members were Bill Kristol, and both the present editors, Michael Goldfarb (formerly deputy communications director for John McCain) and Matthew Continetti (Kristol’s son-in-law) both worked for the Weekly Standard while Kristol was its editor. Kristol, as you may recall, worked hard to promote others to run against Trump for the nomination. Singer financially supported Marco Rubio for the nomination. His aide, Dan Senor, was a senior advisor to vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan and reportedly retains strong ties to him.
I seriously doubt that any candidate Paul Singer would prefer could ever have won the general election. Singer strongly opposed both Ted Cruz and Trump.
The dossier was a means for the Russians at no cost the them to provide the Democrats with disinformation to be used against Trump.
Mollie Hemingway at The Federalist does the most thorough job of clearing the air on the dossier
Space and copyright limitations keep me from quoting more of it, but here are the ten things about the dossier Hemingway thinks you should know:
“1) Russian officials were sources of key claims in dossier”
“2) No, the Russian dossier was not initially funded by Republicans”
“3) The dossier is chock full of discredited information”
“4) The dossier was used as a basis for wiretaps on American citizens”
5) The FBI also paid for the dossier
...When Trump asked about the FBI payment, many political journalists feigned shock and outrage that he would make such a claim.
They should not have. Their outlets had already reported that the FBI had tried to pay for the dossier and had, in fact, reimbursed expenses for the dossier. We do not know if those expenses include the payments to the Russian officials for salacious stories on Republican nominee for president Trump.
6) Dossier publisher Fusion GPS works with shady outfits”
7) Fusion GPS’ ties to media are problematic
The principals at Fusion GPS are well-connected to mainstream media reporters. They are former journalists themselves, and know how to package stories and provide information to push narratives. They are, in fact, close friends with some of the top reporters who have covered the Russia-Trump collusion story.
Fusion GPS has placed stories with friendly reporters while fighting congressional investigators’ attempts to find out the group’s sources of funding. Fusion GPS leaders have taken the Fifth and fought subpoenas for information about the group’s involvement with Russia.
8) Jim Comey personally briefed Trump on the dossier, shortly before CNN reported it
What really got the ball rolling on last year’s Russia-Trump conspiracy theory, then, was not the dossier itself but the briefing of it by Obama intelligence chiefs to President-elect Trump in January. Former FBI head Jim Comey admitted under oath that former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper asked him to personally brief President Trump about this dossier. The fact of that meeting was quickly leaked to CNN.
Given the dossier’s many problems, was the entire purpose of the meeting to produce the leak that the meeting happened?
9) Mueller investigation spurred by dossier and illegal leaks from intelligence operatives about Trump.
We know from previous reporting that the dossier of Russia-supplied information or disinformation was used by the FBI to secure a warrant to spy on an American citizen advising an opposing political party’s presidential campaign. We know that this dossier was funded at least in part by the Clinton campaign, the Democratic National Committee, and the FBI. The firm that produced the report was itself funded by Russians.
10) The Steele dossier was a Clinton/DNC-funded operation supported by the FBI and influenced heavily by Russian operatives in the Kremlin The Clinton campaign, the DNC, and the FBI all worked wittingly or unwittingly with Russians to affect the results of the 2016 election. Far from just meeting with a Russian and not getting dirt on a political opponent, these groups wittingly or unwittingly paid Russian operatives for disinformation to harm Trump during the 2016 election and beyond.
Worse, these efforts perverted our justice system by forcing the attorney general to recuse himself for the crime of having served as a surrogate on the Trump campaign, spawning a massive, sprawling, limitless probe over Russia.[/quote]
Fusion GPS was also doing work directly for the Russians, which makes its claims doubly suspect:
You see, the Russian lawyer -- often carelessly presented as a “Russian government lawyer” with “close ties to Putin” -- Natalia Veselnitskaya, who met with Trump, [sic -- actually it was Donald Trump, Jr.] also worked recently with a Washington, D.C. “commercial research and strategic intelligence firm” that is also believed to have lobbied against the Magnitsky Act. That firm, which also doubles as an opposition research shop, is called Fusion GPS—famous for producing the Russia dossier distributed under the byline of Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent for hire.[snip]
Yet at the same time that Fusion GPS was fueling a campaign warning against a vast Russia-Trump conspiracy to destroy the integrity of American elections, the company was also working with Russia to influence American policy -- by removing the same sanctions that Trump was supposedly going to remove as his quid pro quo for Putin’s help in defeating Hillary.Yet it is rare to read stories about comms shops like Fusion GPS because traditional news organizations are reluctant to bite the hands that feed them. But they are the news behind the news—well known to every D.C. beat reporter as the sources who set the table and provide the sources for their big “scoops.” The ongoing transformation of foundering, profitless news organizations into dueling proxies for partisan comms operatives is bad news for American readers, and for our democracy. But it is having a particularly outsized effect on reporting in the area of foreign policy, where expert opinion is prized—and easily bought—and most reporters and readers are only shallowly informed.
The record clearly belies the Clinton-DNC (Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and John Podesta) claim that they didn’t know about the dossier.
In the first place, it is impossible to believe that they handed over $9 million to their lawyer without restriction or oversight. (Yes, I know the Department of State under then-secretary Clinton cannot account for $6 billion dollars, but this was their money, not ours, and I expect they paid more serious attention to it.) Once the bills are turned over to investigators, we’ll see who signed off on them. And we’ll find out soon whether Fusion was listed as a vendor in campaign-finance filings as the law requires.
Interestingly enough, one of Elias’ partners engaged Crowd Strike, ostensibly to review the claim that the DNC server had been hacked by Russia, and Comey’s FBI accepted their review without ever demanding to examine it themselves.
Daniel Greenfield once again does a fine job of analyzing the use made of the dossier and why Fusion GPS was engaged to dish the dirt.
The DNC, Hillary campaign and Obama Administration used former British intelligence agent Fusion GPS’ Christopher Steele as an interface to create deniability, allowing them, in effect, to launder the dossier and create a pretext for snooping on Trump and publicizing whatever dirt they might dig up on his campaign no matter how incredible the sources and product.
Hiring Fusion GPS and then Steele created two degrees of separation between the dossier and Hillary. A London ex-intel man is a strange choice for opposition research in an American election, but a great choice to create a plausible ‘source’ that appears completely disconnected from American politics. [snip]
The official story is that Steele was a dedicated whistleblower who decided to message an FBI pal for reasons “above party politics” while the Fusion GPS boss was so dedicated that he spent his own money on it after the election. Some figures in the FBI decided to take Steele’s material, offering to pay him for his work and reimbursing some of his expenses. Portions of the dossier were used to justify the FISA eavesdropping on Trump officials and were then rolled into the Mueller investigation. [snip]
But there isn’t supposed to be a link between the Democrats and the eavesdropping.
That’s why Marc Elias, the Clinton campaign and DNC lawyer who hired Fusion GPS, had denied it in the past. It’s why Fusion GPS fought the investigation so desperately. Opposition research isn’t a crime. A conspiracy to eavesdrop on your political opponents however is very much a criminal matter.
A forensic examination of the dirty dossier’s journey shows us that this modern Watergate was a collaborative effort between an outgoing Democrat administration and its expected Dem successor.
Greenfield details how the dossier was used to astroturf and create a demand for an investigation, which ultimately resulted in Sessions’ recusal and the appointment of a special counsel. He reminds us that the Obama administration had done such stuff before, spying on congressional opponents on the Iran Deal. (Recall how that spying was used to tar Congresswoman Jane Harmon); giving money to non-profit organizations to spur the media coverage, whispering tidbits to complaisant media shills, and smuggling billions to Iran. And, as he notes, there was the IRS shutdown of conservative groups (for which they finally apologized this week) and the lies about Libya.
Notably, when they thought the Russia “collusion” fairytale was not gathering enough steam, Steele personally briefed David Corn, the same propagandist who confected the story that Valerie Plame was a covert agent deliberately targeted by the Bush Administration as payback against her husband Joe Wilson.
But even more damning is the fact that Hillary herself started tweeting about the dossier shortly after GPS was hired -- even though she claims she knew nothing about it.
The first FISA request was made in June and was turned down. In July Fusion GPS was hired. According to James Comey, the FBI began investigating “collusion” reports in July of 2016, Beginning on August 15, Hillary started tweeting about Trump and Russia. She tweeted again on September 7, September 26, October 7, October 25, October 31. The second request was made in October. It was on October 31 when Corn, now at Mother Jones “broke the story of a ‘veteran spy’ who gave the FBI information on Trump’s alleged connections to Russia.” It wasn’t until Buzz Feed published the dossier that we could see how preposterous the story was. Mother Jones was just a small part of the media collaboration in spreading the manure -- Slate worked it also, and larger outlets got involved.
Former CIA case officer Lee Smith reveals how shoddy was the dossier:
The dossier was designed to dig up “dirt” on Trump and his associates, but, more to the point, it was clearly intended from the start to do so by manufacturing and nurturing a Russian angle. It sought to discredit Donald Trump and to deceive the public, which suggests that Trump has been right all along regarding something like a conspiracy against him which included the active participation of the FBI and possibly other national security agencies.
The president also comes across as credible vis-à-vis his critics because of what has become evident since the dossier was surfaced. The clearly politically motivated multiple investigations carried out so far in which no rock has been unturned have come up with absolutely nothing, either in the form of criminal charges or in terms of actual collusion with a foreign government. And, one might add, there has been little in the way of evidence to sustain the charge that Russia sought to influence the election and might even have succeeded in doing so. But there is one thing new that we do know now: Russiagate began within the Clinton Campaign headquarters.
Trey Gowdy tweeted: “Did FBI rely on a document that looks like the National Enquirer prepared it?” Looks that way. Andrew McCarthy at National Review tweets “Trump DOJ should declassify & disclose FISA app to show what representations were made to court about source of dossier claims.”
That seems uncontestable.
1a) GOP Would Rather Lose than Fight
America is at war. Not with a particular country, in spite of our endless entanglements in the Middle East. Instead the war is against a more nebulous enemy. One that goes by many names. The status quo. The deep state. The establishment. The elites.
The enemy is everywhere. Media, entertainment, sports, academia, and among the ruling class in Washington, DC. A ruthless enemy, barbarians, willing to keep fighting despite setbacks and defeat. Single minded in focus, the enemy wants to “fundamentally transform America”, creating a “new world order,” to borrow phrases from both sides of the political aisle.
Who are the opponents? Who is pushing back? One might think the Republican Party is the resistance to the progressive enemy. A slide toward socialism, communism, fascism, or any other “ism” leaving the anointed ones in power deciding for the masses what is best, how they should live, what they should think, how they should behave.
Yet the GOP is not pushing back, instead its members acquiescing or cowering in fear of being called mean names by the prominent newspapers and television networks. Acting like wimps. Not willing to fight, to teach, to explain -- the only way to win this war.
The pushback is instead coming from one man, his assembled team, and 65 million citizen supporters. It's such a shame that so much of this man’s political party has not joined him in the fight, content to sit on the sidelines at best, or at worst actively working to thwart his efforts.
Are Americans favoring congressional Democrats because Republican voters are tired of the Trump agenda and accomplishments thus far? Or are voters weary of GOP ineptitude, lack of an agenda, squandering a once-in-a-lifetime electoral majority? Fighting Trump rather than joining him in advancing an agenda they all, at one time or another, campaigned on.
Who are the heirs to Trump’s likely eight years in the White House? Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Scott Walker, Bobby Jindal, to name a few. Those who participated, albeit unsuccessfully, in the 2015-16 GOP primaries. Where are the fighters? Why are Cruz and Rubio not leading the charge for advancing Trump’s agenda through Congress?
That’s what winners do. Losers remain quiet or else fuss and pout like spurned schoolgirls. Cruz, to his credit, finally broke his silence on a talk radio show a few days ago, telling his GOP colleagues to “shut up and do your job.” What a concept. Do your job.
"The job" being what Republicans were elected to do, what they promised voters they would do if elected and given Congressional majorities and the White House. But where is the fight?
Democrats are sure fighting. Turn on the news and there’s Bernie Sanders, Chuck Schumer, Adam Schiff, and other Democrats fighting for their agenda.
The only fighters on the Republican side are the #NeverTrumpers. McCain, Flake, and Corker. Jeff Flake giving an impassioned speech against the “indecency of our discourse, regret because of the coarseness of our leadership.” If only he fought as hard against the corrupt FBI, IRS, DOJ and other Obama agencies, Benghazi, the Iran nuke deal, or the incessant Trump-Russia collusion hoax which has been nothing but a huge distraction to the new Trump administration.
Flake is fighting, but for the wrong team. Giving the impression that he would rather lose his Senate seat than fight. His approval rating in his home state of Arizona reflects this, hovering below 20 percent. He has no chance of being reelected, so he is quitting. He lost.
Bob Corker reached the same conclusion, preferring to lose, or retire, rather than fight. If McCain didn’t have health issues and was up for reelection next year he would likely be in a similar spot.
Where is the fight? ObamaCare repeal has been kicked down the road til next year. Tax cuts are questionable. Same for funding the wall, one of the President’s signature campaign issues.
If Republicans joined Trump in the fight, they would win, remaking the political and electoral landscape for a generation, maintaining electoral majorities for decades. Instead they choose not to be barbarians, but wimps. And in the battle for civilization, and reelection, they will lose.
Brian C Joondeph, MD, MPS, a Denver based physician and writer. Follow him on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
Are Americans favoring congressional Democrats because Republican voters are tired of the Trump agenda and accomplishments thus far? Or are voters weary of GOP ineptitude, lack of an agenda, squandering a once-in-a-lifetime electoral majority? Fighting Trump rather than joining him in advancing an agenda they all, at one time or another, campaigned on.
Who are the heirs to Trump’s likely eight years in the White House? Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Scott Walker, Bobby Jindal, to name a few. Those who participated, albeit unsuccessfully, in the 2015-16 GOP primaries. Where are the fighters? Why are Cruz and Rubio not leading the charge for advancing Trump’s agenda through Congress?
That’s what winners do. Losers remain quiet or else fuss and pout like spurned schoolgirls. Cruz, to his credit, finally broke his silence on a talk radio show a few days ago, telling his GOP colleagues to “shut up and do your job.” What a concept. Do your job.
"The job" being what Republicans were elected to do, what they promised voters they would do if elected and given Congressional majorities and the White House. But where is the fight?
Democrats are sure fighting. Turn on the news and there’s Bernie Sanders, Chuck Schumer, Adam Schiff, and other Democrats fighting for their agenda.
The only fighters on the Republican side are the #NeverTrumpers. McCain, Flake, and Corker. Jeff Flake giving an impassioned speech against the “indecency of our discourse, regret because of the coarseness of our leadership.” If only he fought as hard against the corrupt FBI, IRS, DOJ and other Obama agencies, Benghazi, the Iran nuke deal, or the incessant Trump-Russia collusion hoax which has been nothing but a huge distraction to the new Trump administration.
Flake is fighting, but for the wrong team. Giving the impression that he would rather lose his Senate seat than fight. His approval rating in his home state of Arizona reflects this, hovering below 20 percent. He has no chance of being reelected, so he is quitting. He lost.
Bob Corker reached the same conclusion, preferring to lose, or retire, rather than fight. If McCain didn’t have health issues and was up for reelection next year he would likely be in a similar spot.
Where is the fight? ObamaCare repeal has been kicked down the road til next year. Tax cuts are questionable. Same for funding the wall, one of the President’s signature campaign issues.
If Republicans joined Trump in the fight, they would win, remaking the political and electoral landscape for a generation, maintaining electoral majorities for decades. Instead they choose not to be barbarians, but wimps. And in the battle for civilization, and reelection, they will lose.
Brian C Joondeph, MD, MPS, a Denver based physician and writer. Follow him on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
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2) Will the NFL Be the First Legal Monopoly in US History to Fail?
Monday Night Football ratings are down. NFL ticket sales are down. Stadiums are half empty. The NFL may cut 10 Thursday night broadcasts from the lineup. NFL owners met in New York last week to deal with the kneeling crisis. Now consider this: the NFL is a private monopoly established by an act of Congress, and it looks like it’s going down. How is such a thing possible?
In 1961, after a federal court nullified the NFL’s exclusive two-year broadcasting contract with CBS, Congress passed the Sports Broadcasting Act (SBA). To overcome the court’s ruling, the SBA made it legal for individual teams to pool their broadcasting rights and to sell the pooled rights as a package to various broadcasting networks. By protecting it from Sherman anti-trust violations, Congress established the NFL as a legal monopoly.
Since then, it has been all but impossible for any other corporation to compete for the professional football dollar. From 1983 to 1985, the United States Football League tried, but ultimately failed, even though they sued the NFL for monopolistic practices and won the suit.
The suit alleged that the NFL inhibited the new league’s ability to obtain broadcast coverage, and thereby to generate revenue, and the new league asked for $1.69 billion in damages. The jury agreed that the NFL was a monopoly, but decided that the NFL’s television contracts did not violate the law. In the end, the upstart league was awarded only $3 in damages and it went bust.
Subsequently, the NFL flourished, with lots of help from taxpayers. In 2015, a report from the Taxpayers Protection Alliance said:
Since 1995, a staggering 29 of the 31 stadiums that house NFL teams received public subsidies for construction, renovation or both. Between 1995 and today, taxpayers have been forced to spend nearly $7 billion subsidizing NFL stadium construction and renovation projects.
The NFL is a cash machine. It generated about $14 billion in revenue in 2016. The average salary of an NFL player is $1.9 million per year. About 68% of NFL players are black. They’re all millionaires.
So here we are in 2017. Taxpayers build the factories (stadiums) where the NFL’s essential employees (football players) produce its saleable goods (footballs games). What a deal. Congress gives you a monopoly and the taxpayers build your factories. Then all you have to do is run the factory for half of the year and play a football game once a week. It’s a guaranteed gravy train for everyone. The NFL could profit forever. How could the NFL possibly foul it up?
To repeat, how is it possible to fumble a monopoly? Answer: turn it over to the race industry.
What does the race industry do? What is the essential and fundamental thing it does? It runs a shakedown scam. Here’s how it works.
The shakedown scam starts with an arbitrary claim of disparity. Anything can be interpreted as a disparity or as representing a disparity – history, symbolic statues, murder rates, income inequality, schools, police, low income housing, football players without a job – literally, anything.
The next step is to blame the disparity on society, in particular, some intangible quality of society. The more vague and ineffable you assign the nature of the blame the better. Racism is perfect. It can be everywhere and nowhere. It lives in the mind of someone else. You can call it up as needed, or dismiss it as needed.
The third step is to identify an evil doer associated with the ineffable source of the disparity. The targeted evil doer has to be a plausible representative of society, and must have the ability to pay up. With a targeted evil doer in mind, the fourth step is to mount a smear campaign against the evil doer. Any type of smear campaign will do, as long as it’s legal, and as long as it causes social and financial harm to the evil doer. The last step is to demand a payoff to stop the damage.
Colin Kaepernick ran the scam to perfection, and now we’re seeing the payoff. The disparity was his sense of injustice. After feeling the disparity, he took a knee during the nation anthem as a general protest against injustice in society. By doing it while on the job, he associated blame with the NFL, and made the NFL the representative of society. Taking the knee was the public smear campaign and it spread like a virus. Everyone was taking a knee, even the owners. It was designed to make the NFL look bad, and it worked. Many fans were insulted and they quit watching. When money started ebbing from NFL coffers, the NFL panicked and held a meeting to figure out how to stop the damage.
Now comes the payoff. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell announced that the NFL won’t force players to stand for the anthem, and that it will pivot to “community issues” to help players with their “activism.” Goodell and Seahawks wide receiver Doug Baldwin signed a letter to Congress supporting criminal justice reform, because, of course, “we can’t arrest our way out of this” and we have to stop the “school to prison pipeline” in order to obtain social justice. If you have any doubt about black drug gangs and the epidemic of black violence in America, just follow Colin Flaherty’s daily crime documentary. Then ask yourself, “What kind of criminal justice reform is going to stop the crime?”
Confused Eagles defensive end Chris Long announced that he would donate the remainder of his salary this year to increase “educational equality.” How about that! The scammers shamed him into making a voluntary payoff! While we must applaud everyone’s charitable donations, at some point we have to ask, “Didn’t he get the memo?”
Jimmy Carter created the Department of Education in 1979. Today it has more than 4,000 employees and an annual budget of $68 billion. Historical government budget data show that $1.6 trillion has been appropriated from the federal treasury for education since 1980. If we don’t have educational equality after $1.6 trillion of federal government meddling, how many trillions more is it going to take? Does Long really think his salary will buy “educational equality,” whatever that is?
And the shakedown scam hasn’t ended. After Kaepernick opted out of his contract with the 49ers to become a free agent, he was unemployed. Now Seahawks defensive end Michael Bennett says that in order to resolve the kneeling crisis, Kaepernick has to be hired by another team. Kaepernick himself is suing the NFL for collusion, and he’s wangled a $1 million book deal for his story. He reportedly has a net worth of $22 million, but hey, every million counts.
See how this works? Reality doesn’t matter. Smear, shakedown, rinse, repeat.
The race industry has engineered a national hysteria about racism, white supremacy, inequality, and every other disparity that it can imagine. It believes that the shakedown scam is the best strategy for benefitting black America, and that destroying the NFL in the process will be a net plus. Anyone have any new ideas for making black millionaires?
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3)
| Iran: Inspection of Military Sites' Case Closed Forever |
TEHRAN (FNA)- Spokesman of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) Behrouz Kamalvandi underlined that the issue with the inspection of his country's military sites ended forever after Tehran permitted the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to inspect Parchin in 2015. "When there is no nuclear activity in a place, there is no reason to go there. They (the westerners) launched baseless propaganda in the international media in the past few years that certain activities were being carried out in Parchin site and finally, we were forced to end this issue once and forever and it happened and the case was closed and the IAEA's Board of Governors also confirmed it," Kamalvandi said on Saturday. Noting that inspection of military sites has been stated neither in the 2015 nuclear deal nor the Additional Protocol to the NPT and the IAEA safeguards agreement, he said that the UN nuclear watchdog can merely demand for access to the centers in which nuclear activities are being conducted. In relevant remarks in August, Iranian Government Spokesman Mohammad Baqer Nobakht dismissed the US demand for inspection of Iran's military centers, stressing that these centers are secret and not open to everyone. "Iran's military facilities are secret and not everyone can access them. They (the Americans) are just speaking their wishes and we defend our national interests," Nobakht told reporters in Tehran. He also referred to the remarks by US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley who demanded the IAEA to visit Iran's military sites, and said her comments are not worthy of listening or receiving attention. Also in August, Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Bahram Qassemi said his country will not bow to the US demand and pressure on the IAEA to visit Iran's military sites. "We don’t allow others to step into banned zones based on the nuclear deal, and the Agency's inspection will be certainly carried out within the framework of our internal policies," Qassemi said in reaction to Haley's demand from the IAEA to visit Iran's military sites. "We will not surrender to certain governments' excessive demands," he underscored. Qassemi also expressed confidence that given its independence and responsibility to defend its international position, the IAEA is not likely to accept other countries' illogical and unrealistic demands. The IAEA is tasked with monitoring Iranian compliance with the deal, a basically technical matter that falls within the agency’s area of expertise. The IAEA has consistently verified that Iran is in compliance since the deal started being implemented in January 2016. The US is a party to the nuclear deal, which was negotiated under former US president Barack Obama. But the administration of US President Donald Trump, which took over in January this year, has been opposed to the accord and is believed to be looking for a way to potentially withdraw from it. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 4) The liberal fascists in charge of higher education support “academic freedom” — for themselves. I recently attended a panel discussion at my alma mater, the University of Texas in Austin. The topic was “Free Speech on College Campuses: Where to Draw the Line?” The event, held during Free Speech Week, was co-sponsored by UT’s Division of Diversity and Community Engagement (DDCE), the Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis (IUPRA), and The Opportunity Forum, all funded in whole or in part by the state of Texas. IUPRA’s mission “is to use applied policy research to advocate for the equality of access, opportunity, and choice for African Americans and other populations of color.”
The discussion, led by the Interim Vice-President of DDCE, Leonard Moore, was framed in these terms:
In the wake of recent, highly-publicized incidents at Middlebury, William & Mary, Berkeley, Claremont McKenna, Evergreen State, Texas Southern, and other colleges, the event attracted a large crowd, big enough to fill a lecture hall in the computer science building.
The panelists were UT journalism professor Robert Jensen, a radical activist; IUPRA Director Kevin Cokley, a professor in UT’s African and African Diaspora Studies Department (AADS); Shetal Vohra-Gupta, a social work lecturer, Associate Director of IUPRA, and one of the architects of UT’s “hate and bias incident policy”; Brianna Davis, a doctoral student at UT in Educational Leadership and Policy (and a staff member at DDCE); H.W. Perry, a non-lawyer professor of government and law; and Sharon Watkins Jones, Director of Political Strategies for the Texas ACLU. Remarkably, in light of the subject, none of the panelists held a law degree.
The sponsoring entities, together with the AADS Department, substantially comprise the interlocking directorate of UT’s diversity-Black Studies–social justicecomplex, which understandably are not a representative cross-section of the UT community. So why was this important topic placed under their purview? The answer is identity politics. In the name of “diversity” and “inclusion,” UT seeks to impose a “campus climate” free of “bias,” “discrimination,” and “harassment.” This, in turn, is used to justify campus speech codes and a “Campus Climate Response Team” to investigate complaints. The resulting bureaucratic arrangement inevitably — and by design — weaponizes grievances and stifles robust debate.
Oddly, given the centrality of free speech to the discussion, the U.S. Supreme Court’s First Amendment caselaw received scant attention, including the recent unanimous ruling in Matal v. Tam that so-called “hate speech” — private expression offensive to a particular racial or ethnic group — is protected. Indeed, legal scholars are well aware that unless speech falls within a handful of narrow exceptions — such as “fighting words,” defamation, obscenity, and utterances that pose a “clear and present danger” — it is absolutely protected. Few propositions of constitutional law are as well-established as the rule that the expression of ideas cannot be prohibited just because some people find the ideas to be offensive, disagreeable, or objectionable.
Nor was UT’s speech code discussed by the panelists, possibly because it is embarrassingly vague and overbroad, barring “hostile or offensive speech” if it is “not necessary to the expression of any idea described in the Institutional Rules on Student Services and Activities.” Clear as a bell? The ham-handed PC nannies at UT offer guidance to students about “insensitive” Halloween costumes, investigate off-campus fraternity parties for “inappropriate themes,” and scold student groups for conducting peaceful protests that purportedly “direct negative sentiment toward their peers.”
Unfortunately, many higher education administrators, especially those responsible for enforcing the prevailing notions of political correctness on campus, are oblivious to the protections guaranteed by the First Amendment. The correct answer to the question posed by the program at UT is: Free speech should be permitted on college campuses to the full extent required by the Constitution, and complaints should be investigated even-handedly with the paramount goal of protecting free expression. Sadly, that is not the case at UT or many other colleges and universities across the country. In the name of promoting “diversity” and “inclusion,” free speech is routinely suppressed. And, ironically, the UT faculty and administrators responsible for promoting “diversity” seem utterly unconcerned with political or ideological diversity, and preoccupied instead with race and gender. “Diversity” is actually a subterfuge to impose conformity.
The panelists expressed a range of opinions, varying from far-left-of-center to merely left-of-center, but most accepted as a given that — absent intervention by the UT administration — students might be “harmed” by campus speech that is offensive, “hateful,” indicative of “privilege,” or tending to “oppress” a “marginalized group.” The moderator questioned whether the university might be doing college students a disservice by “coddling” them and treating them like “snowflakes” in order to shield them from opinions they may find uncomfortable (albeit which are prevalent in the real world), but the consensus from the panel was that “trigger warnings” and “safe places” are necessary and desirable. It is a sad commentary on the degree of political bias within academia that the representative from the American Civil Liberties Union was the most balanced speaker on the issue of free speech (although even the ACLU may be yielding to the “heckler’s veto”).
While the violent confrontation in Charlottesville occurred in a public park, not the University of Virginia campus, the proponents of campus speech codes cite “safety” concerns as grounds for restricting the First Amendment rights of students, student organizations, and outside speakers. By conflating physical violence with amorphous “psychological” and “emotional” harm, the would-be campus Thought Police justify censorship in the guise of preventing “hate speech.” As one of the panelists, Ms. Vohra-Gupta, wrote in an op-ed for the Houston Chronicle entitled “More universities need to embrace anti-hate policies”:
The notion that the psychic tranquility of “marginalized students” (whoever they are) justifies suppression of other students’ free speech finds no support in First Amendment jurisprudence, but is a central tenet of “critical race theory,” from which UT’s speech code was derived.
In an IUPRA Policy Report co-authored by Ms. Vohra-Gupta, she contends that due to endemic racism on all college campuses “it is important to disrupt existing power structures and promote social justice for marginalized students of color.” Race-neutral policies are insufficient because “they promote White supremacy by invalidating students’ identities and experiences who are from different racial backgrounds.” Accordingly, “it is clear that the dominant ideology, White privilege, is not fully dismantled, the power differentials and lived experiences with which marginalized students of color come with is not recognized, and repercussions of covert (as well as overt) forms of racism are not handled in the most justice-based manner.”
Another IUPRA document co-authored by Ms. Vohra-Gupta advocates a definition of “hate speech” based on the subjective perception of the person to whom it is directed that it was “motivated by prejudice or hate because of that person’s race, color, national origin, ancestry, sex/gender, religion, religious practice, age, disability, or sexual orientation.” The document suggests that the criteria for serving on the “response team” responsible for investigating complaints include “majority representation of marginalized groups, knowledge base of intersectionality of oppression and how bias and prejudice exist in implicit and explicit ways, and passion to eliminate bias, prejudice, and oppression on campus.” IUPRA concludes that “Policies designed through dominant culture do not account for marginalized students’ concerns.” This pseudo-academic gobbledygook is a prescription for a kangaroo court. Not only is the IUPRA’s jargon-filled analysis intolerant of free speech and disrespectful of the First Amendment, by explicitly advocating race-based differentials for legal protection, it is also racist.
Predictably, given the orientation of the panelists, no one on the panel offered a coherent definition of “hate speech” — nor is there one. As near as I can tell, campus “diversity” enforcers believe that “hate speech” consists of the expression of views with which they disagree, especially if the speaker is a white male (often labeled a “white supremacist” or a member of a “privileged group”), the topic involves race (which makes the objectionable opinion “racist” or “discriminatory”), or the speaker is associated with a disfavored group such as a fraternity or conservative organization. I was surprised when Professor Jensen suggested that the entire Greek system at UT should be banned, even fraternities situated off-campus, on the ground that they are oppressive “rape factories.” Another panelist referred (without explanation) to a campus group, Young Conservatives of Texas, as having a “legacy of hatred.” So much for tolerance.
The overwhelmingly-progressive faculty and administration of UT must remain cognizant of the fact that that UT serves the public, and that Texas is a conservative state. The UT “bubble” is pronounced enough, and UT’s inbred “diversity bureaucracy” is even more insular. The panelists seemed incredulous that anyone could be opposed to affirmative action, or that outside speakers such as Ann Coulter, Charles Murray, or Milo Yiannopoulos should have a right to appear on campus. The panelists seemed amenable to curbing outside speakers based solely on the threat of violence by protesters, thus empowering the heckler’s veto. When the moderator of the panel mentioned that his sister voted for Donald Trump — as did a lopsided majority of Texas voters — the panelists, and many in the audience, reacted with disbelief. Even knowing someone with conservative beliefs seemed inconceivable to the panelists! Yet these are the “experts” convened to comment on campus free speech. Such cloistered attitudes reflect poorly on an institution supposedly devoted to promoting pluralism and intellectual diversity.
The panelists expressed a strong consensus in favor of their own academic freedom — the absolute right to dictate the content of the courses they teach and the style of pedagogy they adopt. But the students they teach — especially conservatives — should not enjoy reciprocal protection; they can fend with the Thought Police. This is abject hypocrisy. UT should rescind its restrictive speech code and adopt in its place the model policy recommended by the Goldwater Institute. If UT won’t do this on its own, the Texas legislature should impose a neutral policy by statute, as North Carolina has. Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has made protecting free speech on Texas college campuses a priority. The Senate State Affairs Committee could begin by taking a hard look at the liberal fascists running amok at UT.
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