As the 2020 election season began, the New York Times promised its readers a recalibration of American history called “The 1619 Project.” The ensuing series of essays and media kits had a twofold agenda. One was to rewrite the origins of American history as the four-century foreign intrusion into a pristine North America, co-predicated on stealing Native American lands with the help of the racist exploitation of imported African slaves.
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The WSJ comments about the "Three Pentagon Stooges:"
The Generals Contradict Biden on Afghanistan
They supported leaving 2,500 U.S. troops in the country and have doubts about the ‘over-the-horizon’ counterterror strategy.
By The Editorial Board
President Biden hopes the political fallout from his botched Afghanistan withdrawal will fade quickly, but Tuesday’s Senate hearing with the secretary of Defense and two top generals doesn’t cast his decisions in a better light.
The hearing underscored that the President acted against the advice of the military in yanking the residual U.S. force from the country. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley and Gen. Kenneth McKenzie both made clear in their testimony that they recommended that about 2,500 U.S. troops stay in Afghanistan to delay a Taliban takeover.
That’s not what Mr. Biden said he was told. Asked in an ABC News interview days after the August fall of Kabul if his military advisers urged him to maintain America’s small footprint in the country, Mr. Biden said, “No one said that to me that I can recall.”
The scandal isn’t that the President ignored military advice—he’s the decision-maker. It’s his refusal to own his decision. Mr. Biden wants political credit for ending America’s involvement in Afghanistan, but he’s not willing to take the political risk of admitting he overruled the brass in the process.
The generals also undercut Mr. Biden’s spin about their advice as the chaotic withdrawal was underway. He said the generals unanimously supported his Aug. 31 deadline for the departure of U.S. troops. But as Gen. Milley confirmed in questioning by Sen. Tom Cotton, that advice was given on Aug. 25—10 days after the fall of Kabul to the Taliban.
Waiting that long essentially presented the generals with a fait accompli, since the Taliban were already entrenched in Kabul. It didn’t have to unfold that way. Once it became clear Kabul was going to fall in mid-August, the U.S. could have told the Taliban that it was going to secure a wide perimeter around the Kabul airport and control the city until the withdrawal of Americans and Afghan allies was complete.
That would have allowed a more orderly departure, and potentially less loss of life, even if it meant extending the Aug. 31 deadline. But Mr. Biden wanted out immediately, so he cast another rotten tactical decision as the result of military advice rather than his own willfulness.
The Administration’s sunny assurances about the impact of the withdrawal on U.S. national security were also undercut by the brass. When Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona asked Gen. McKenzie, “are you confident that we can deny organizations like al Qaeda and ISIS the ability to use Afghanistan as a launchpad for terrorist activity?” the general said, “I would not say I am confident.”
Gen. Milley similarly called the outcome in Afghanistan a “strategic failure” as “the enemy is in charge in Kabul”—a break in tone for an Administration that has been casting the Taliban as a potential partner. He still insisted it was a “logistical success”—a dubious designation of an operation that, despite an impressive number of flights from Kabul, saw 13 U.S. deaths and a mistaken drone strike that killed 10 Afghan civilians, including seven children.
Gen. Milley was also in the hot seat for the reports of his actions late in the Trump years as relayed in a book by journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa. The book paints a picture of a general freelancing on national security during and after the 2020 election, reviewing nuclear protocols and calling his Chinese counterpart to say he’d warn him if President Trump started a war.
Gen. Milley confirmed he spoke with Mr. Woodward, as well as other journalists writing books about the last days of the Trump Administration. Yet he said his communications with China were standard practice, and he wouldn’t say whether his portrayal in the books was accurate as he hadn’t read them.
That’s a dodge. Gen. Milley has surely seen the Washington Post report on the book that portrays him as undertaking extraordinary efforts to circumvent a President. Even if that portrayal was sensationalized by the authors—as we’ve warned might be the case—it has damaged Americans’ perception of civilian control over the military.
Yet Gen. Milley didn’t take responsibility for that entirely predictable outcome any more than Mr. Biden has the consequences of his Afghanistan retreat. The Afghan withdrawal is the greatest U.S. foreign-policy humiliation in decades. The damage is made worse by the failure of accountability, starting with the Commander in Chief.
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DUH!
Why is the murder rate expanding? Even liberals should understand when the police are being attacked they respond by not doing what they used to do, ie. go after murderers.
The 2020 Murder Spike
With police under political attack, mayhem surged in U.S. cities.
By The Editorial Board
Sometimes the result of bad public policies takes years to play out. But that wasn’t the case with last year’s political assault on police in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. The predictable result of less policing was more violent crime in 2020, as Federal Bureau of Investigation data has now confirmed.
Homicides in the U.S. rose by nearly 30% in 2020, the biggest single-year spike since the feds began collecting data 60 years ago, according to crime statistics from nearly 16,000 law enforcement agencies. The body count reached 21,570 people, or 4,901 more murder victims in 2020 than in 2019. Aggravated assault offenses increased by more than 12%, and violent crime overall rose by 5.6% compared to 2019.
No one factor explains this criminal surge. But it’s no coincidence that the bloodshed increased as cities slashed police budgets, progressive prosecutors demanded leniency and eliminated bail for criminals, and jails and prisons released thousands of lawbreakers amid the Covid-19 outbreak.
Democrats justified these policies as necessary to address systemic racism in law enforcement. Yet the FBI data show that minority communities suffered disproportionately from last year’s rise in crime. For murders in which police reported demographic data, more than 55% of last year’s victims were black.
Political hostility toward police was most acute in big cities like New York, Minneapolis and Seattle. Those urban police departments have seen surges in officer resignations and retirements, and they’re struggling to fill vacant positions. That’s meant fewer cops on patrol, slower response times, less proactive policing—and, all too predictably, more crime.
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Government mandates, as regard vaccinations, is an emotional issue and those who believe it is constitutional do not understand what the law allows . It would be nice if we were able to force everyone to conform to what government thinks is best but that harkens back to nations like Germany who, every so often, flirted with dictatorial leaders and then millions died in unnecessary wars.
If you do not like the right to say no and enjoy a certain amount of free expression and actions then, perhaps, you would be happier in China and/or Russia where you would be freer to enjoy more deprivations.
Biden’s Lawless Vaccine Mandate
OSHA’s job is to promote safe workplaces, not to dictate medical decisions to employees.
By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Robert Alt
President Biden told unvaccinated Americans this month: “We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin. . . So, please, do the right thing.” He backed up this request with a series of new regulatory mandates, including one from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which directs businesses with 100 or more employees to make vaccination a condition of employment.
The Covid vaccine has been widely hailed as a modern scientific miracle. Yet as a means to increase nationwide vaccination rates, the OSHA mandate far exceeds the authority Congress granted the agency, and if the president can order private companies to dictate such terms of employment, his power to coerce citizens in the name of public health might as well be unlimited. This would both be profoundly unconstitutional and fundamentally transform the relationship between the government and the people.
The Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 authorizes OSHA to enact rules that are “reasonably necessary or appropriate to provide safe or healthful employment and places of employment.” But the Biden mandate is unreasonably and unnecessarily broad. As announced, it applies to all employees, even those who work at home, as millions have done during the pandemic. It’s simultaneously too narrow, failing to require vaccination for contractors, customers and other nonemployees who may be present at the work site.
It’s overbroad in another way: Previous Covid infection doesn’t excuse employees from the vaccine requirement. Natural immunity tends to be more robust and longer-lasting than vaccinated immunity, according to Marty Makary of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Worse, Dr. Makary says, there is evidence that people who already have natural immunity are at heightened risk of vaccine side effects caused by an augmented inflammatory response. For these reasons, lawsuits have already been filed challenging employer vaccine mandates as applied to employees with natural immunity.
Another concern is that the administration’s interpretation of the OSHA statutory language presents a “delegation” problem. If Congress delegates discretion to an agency without a proper limiting principle, it violates the separation of powers. To avoid this constitutional problem, the courts will have to give the statute a more restrictive reading. Coming up with a meaningful judicially enforceable principle would not be easy.
Additional problems arise from the administration’s urgency. In imposing the vaccination requirement immediately, OSHA will bypass the ordinary notice-and-comment rule-making process and issue what’s known as an Emergency Temporary Standard. OSHA has used that legal authority only 10 times in 50 years. Courts have decided challenges to six of those standards, nixing five and upholding only one.
The OSH Act imposes stringent limits on emergency standards precisely so OSHA can’t easily circumvent the ordinary rule-making process. The government has to prove that “employees are exposed to grave danger from exposure to substances or agents determined to be toxic or physically harmful or from new hazards” and that using the emergency process is “necessary to protect employees from such danger.” Courts subject emergency standards to a what appellate courts call a “hard look” review, a more stringent standard than for ordinary economic regulations.
The White House justifies the mandate as a proportional response to the spread of Covid’s Delta variant, which is straining hospital capacity in some states. But the mandate is nationwide and indefinite, not tied to Covid rates. The administration’s vaccine rhetoric is therefore another reason to regard the standard as legally suspect. In addition to Mr. Biden’s remark about his patience wearing thin, White House chief of staff Ron Klain retweeted a journalist’s comment that “OSHA doing this vaxx mandate as an emergency safety rule is the ultimate work around for the Federal govt to require vaccinations.”
All this suggests that the administration’s statutory reliance on workplace safety is pretextual. OSHA was established to ensure workplace safety, not to act as a “work around” for achieving other political or policy objectives. In Department of Commerce v. New York (2019), the Supreme Court struck down an otherwise defensible census regulation because the Trump administration’s grounds for instituting it were pretextual.
Beyond these statutory issues lie constitutional concerns. Many commentators are under the impression that Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905), in which the Supreme Court upheld a vaccine mandate, settles all such questions. But that case involved a state law and a local regulation, not any federal action—a crucial distinction. The states have plenary police power to regulate health and safety. Congress has only those limited powers enumerated in the Constitution. That wouldn’t include the authority to impose a $155 fine (today’s equivalent of the $5 at stake in Jacobson) on an individual who declines to be vaccinated, much less to prevent him from earning a livelihood.
Defenders of the Biden mandate surely will justify it as a delegation pursuant to Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce. But the actual target of the rule is individual medical choices, not commercial ones. If a personal decision not to buy medical insurance can’t be characterized as “commerce”—as the Supreme Court held in NFIB v. Sebelius (2012), the ObamaCare case—how can the decision not to be vaccinated?
Further, if public-health benefits are sufficient to justify an OSHA vaccine mandate, what principle would limit the agency’s authority? Could it ban employees from smoking or consuming foods containing trans fats while working at home? The public-health profession has already characterized everything from gun ownership to social-media use as posing a serious public-health issue. Could OSHA legitimately police these, too, even away from the workplace?
Higher vaccination rates would be a public good. But our nation’s Founders understood that much mischief can be done under the theory of being “for your own good” and provided limits to government authorities accordingly. Even during a pandemic, the Biden administration would do well to respect those limits.
Mr. Rivkin practices appellate and constitutional law in Washington. He served at the Justice Department and the White House Counsel’s Office in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations. Mr. Alt is president and CEO of the Buckeye Institute, a think tank engaged in public-interest litigation and policy.
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Republicans are apparently incapable of feeling comfortable among blacks and Hispanics. If they realized these ethnic voters want the same thing any normal humans would want perhaps they would wake up and smell the roses.
I seriously doubt Republicans will because they prefer focusing on thorns rather than the perfumed aroma.
I guess you can't even lead them to the water.
Identity Politics Isn’t the Only Way to Appeal to Minority Voters
The GOP should realize that blacks and Hispanics like safe neighborhoods and low taxes too.
By Jason L. Riley
Readers often ask why blacks vote in such high percentages for the Democratic Party while supporting issues like school choice and crime control that are more closely associated with Republicans. But this phenomenon is hardly limited to blacks.
In California last year, Asian-American voters helped defeat a ballot referendum that would have reinstated racial preferences in college admissions. Yet Asian-Americans in California also voted overwhelmingly for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, who vocally supported the ballot measure. The old political joke about Jews, who are nearly as loyal to Democrats as blacks have been, is that they earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans. There is a temptation to accuse people of voting against their rational interests. But who are we to determine what is “rational” for others?
Within these reliably Democratic voting blocs there have always been exceptions, of course. Religious Jews, for example, are more likely to back Republicans. And black men vote Republican at higher rates than black women. Nor are these voting trends unshakable. As recently as the 1960s, Republicans enjoyed significant black support, and in the 1970s and ’80s the GOP performed well among Asians in California. So-called Reagan Democrats, who were mostly white ethnics, left their party and helped power the Gipper to a 49-state victory in 1984.
The simplest explanation for why Republicans don’t win more black voters is that GOP candidates rarely seek them out. Republicans who can be bothered to court this bloc—former mayors like Richard Riordan of Los Angeles and Stephen Goldsmith of Indianapolis, or former governors like Chris Christie of New Jersey—have found that campaigning in black communities can pay dividends. Even if you don’t win the vote outright, you win goodwill and make it more difficult for your opponent to paint you as antiblack, which is how Democrats habitually describe Republicans to draw attention away from liberalism’s policy failures.
When Republican Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland ran for re-election in 2018, he won 28% of the black vote, which was double the amount he’d won four years earlier. This was all the more impressive because his opponent not only was black but also a former head of the NAACP, and Democrats enjoyed a blue wave nationally that year. Mr. Hogan’s gains among blacks didn’t come from making overt racial appeals. Instead, black supporters cited the governor’s push for lower taxes and his decision to send federal troops to Baltimore during the 2015 riots. Apparently, identity politics isn’t the only way to win the votes of blacks, who like safe neighborhoods and low tax rates just like a lot of other Americans.
This history is forgotten or ignored by too many conservative commentators, who maintain that Hispanics are forever lost to the Republican Party. The argument is that Latinos—those already here and, especially, those who are trying to come—are natural Democrats who can be counted on to vote against the GOP until kingdom come. I wouldn’t bet on that. Besides, can a party that has won the popular vote in only one presidential election since the end of the Cold War really afford to write off support from one of the county’s largest and fastest-growing minority groups?
The irony is that recent news about Hispanic voting patterns has Democratic strategists panicking. According to Catalist, a politically progressive election-data firm, Donald Trump’s support among Hispanics increased by 8 points between 2016 and 2020 as Democrats gave priority to the interests of elites over those of the working class. In the California recall election this month, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom held on, but his Hispanic support dipped. President Biden has watched his job-approval rating among Hispanic voters in Texas fall even further than it has among all voters nationally. None of this is consistent with claims that Hispanic voters are demographically destined to pull the lever for Democrats.
I recall conversations with any number of Democratic operatives in the 2000s who openly acknowledged that Hispanic outreach by George W. Bush and his top strategists—Karl Rove, Ken Mehlman, Matthew Dowd —had caught them flat-footed. In 2004, exit polls showed that Mr. Bush won at least 40% of the Hispanic vote nationally en route to a second term. In states with large Latino populations, including Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, he won more than 40%. Democrats had forgotten that Hispanics are swing voters, and Republicans reminded them. Incidentally, 2004 was also the last presidential election in which the Republican candidate won the national popular vote. Draw your own conclusions.
Republicans are justifiably outraged at the lawlessness on the border and the Biden administration’s half-hearted efforts to address it. Still, there’s a difference between wanting politicians to enforce immigration laws, and wanting them to seal off the border based on misguided fears that your party has nothing to offer the country’s newest arrivals.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ As noted above, Biden detests walls and yet Bernie walked him into one so why has he backed himself into one of Obama's making?
Biden Paints Himself Into a Corner on the Iran Nuclear Deal
The White House should use more sticks and fewer carrots to force Tehran to work out a new agreement.
By Mark Dubowitz
At the United Nations General Assembly last week in New York, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian sought to dash the Biden administration’s hopes for a follow-on agreement to President Obama’s nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. “We will not have a so-called longer and stronger deal,” Mr. Amir-Abdollahian declared. He added that to resurrect the 2015 nuclear deal, the Biden administration would have to offer more sanctions relief than the Obama administration did.
What is to be done when carrots aren’t working and the administration refuses to use the stick and return to President Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign? President Biden likely will offer even more carrots and pretend that these will slow the development of Iran’s atomic program. This approach—call it “maximum-carrots diplomacy”—is meant primarily to deter covert actions by Israel’s military and intelligence services against Iran, which Jerusalem is committed to expanding, according to my discussions with Israeli officials. Mr. Biden is also wooing Democrats skeptical of the Iran nuclear deal like Sen. Bob Menendez, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan have repeatedly pointed out that there needs to be a “longer and stronger” follow-on agreement, proving that Mr. Menendez’s skepticism is well-founded. Why do they need to improve the deal Mr. Obama struck only six years ago?
As skeptical Democrats foresaw in 2015, the Iran nuclear deal’s problems are intensifying. The nuclear limitations begin expiring in 2024. By 2027, restrictions on the mass deployment of easier-to-hide advanced centrifuges will begin to sunset with remaining restrictions gone by 2029. By 2031 there will be no cap on enrichment-purity levels and stockpiles, including on weapons-grade uranium; enrichment will be permitted at the buried-beneath-a-mountain Fordow plant and other new facilities; a plutonium reprocessing prohibition will be lifted; heavy-water reactors will be allowed; and there will be no cap on heavy-water production.
Mr. Biden has boxed himself in. He has already declared his commitment to pivot out of the Middle East. If former Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif is to be believed, the Biden administration has already offered greater sanctions relief than Mr. Obama did in 2015—and the offer still hasn’t brought Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to the negotiating table. Mr. Biden and his team declined to support the International Atomic Energy Agency’s investigation of Iran’s undeclared nuclear activities by refusing to move for a censure by the agency’s board of governors, which could trigger U.N. sanctions. Tehran refuses to permit weapons inspectors into certain nuclear sites, and the Biden administration, worried that tougher action could undermine negotiations, is afraid to act.
A crippling problem for the White House is that Iranian leaders understand leverage better than Mr. Biden does. They see that he is loath to respond to their belligerence. Tehran has accelerated its uranium-separation program to approach weapons-grade levels, and it has continued to back proxies who attack U.S. troops in Iraq and American allies in the Middle East. Iranian oil is flowing again to China, and the Iranian economy is recovering after severe contractions during the Trump administration.
Republicans and worried Democrats in Congress need to temper the administration’s unrealistic expectations of a longer and stronger agreement, while holding the White House to deadlines on both a return to the 2015 deal and any improved agreement. That means passing legislation that would trigger punishing sanctions targeting key sectors of Iran’s economy if deadlines aren’t met. Congress also must clarify the parameters of an acceptable new agreement that Republicans and Democrats could envision as a binding treaty. And they should require the administration to explain to oversight committees what a Plan B looks like if negotiations fail.
Mr. Biden has a credibility problem, given the Afghanistan debacle and his rhetoric about ending “forever wars.” Tehran no longer believes he will use military force to curb its nuclear ambitions. Mr. Biden needs to explain clearly what he meant when he told Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett that he is trying “diplomacy first” but would turn to “other options” if talks break down. When Iran misbehaves—and the bar should be set low—he needs to respond quickly with what many Democrats would call “excessive force.” Empty messages from a weakened president about a better deal are no substitute for the credible threat of U.S. power.
Mr. Dubowitz is chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
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Finally, Biden's press to spend trillions which costs nothing may fool fools who believe in free lunches. I always find anything free from government is very costly:
Biden Paints Himself Into a Corner on the Iran Nuclear Deal
The White House should use more sticks and fewer carrots to force Tehran to work out a new agreement.
By Mark Dubowitz
At the United Nations General Assembly last week in New York, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian sought to dash the Biden administration’s hopes for a follow-on agreement to President Obama’s nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. “We will not have a so-called longer and stronger deal,” Mr. Amir-Abdollahian declared. He added that to resurrect the 2015 nuclear deal, the Biden administration would have to offer more sanctions relief than the Obama administration did.
What is to be done when carrots aren’t working and the administration refuses to use the stick and return to President Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign? President Biden likely will offer even more carrots and pretend that these will slow the development of Iran’s atomic program. This approach—call it “maximum-carrots diplomacy”—is meant primarily to deter covert actions by Israel’s military and intelligence services against Iran, which Jerusalem is committed to expanding, according to my discussions with Israeli officials. Mr. Biden is also wooing Democrats skeptical of the Iran nuclear deal like Sen. Bob Menendez, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan have repeatedly pointed out that there needs to be a “longer and stronger” follow-on agreement, proving that Mr. Menendez’s skepticism is well-founded. Why do they need to improve the deal Mr. Obama struck only six years ago?
As skeptical Democrats foresaw in 2015, the Iran nuclear deal’s problems are intensifying. The nuclear limitations begin expiring in 2024. By 2027, restrictions on the mass deployment of easier-to-hide advanced centrifuges will begin to sunset with remaining restrictions gone by 2029. By 2031 there will be no cap on enrichment-purity levels and stockpiles, including on weapons-grade uranium; enrichment will be permitted at the buried-beneath-a-mountain Fordow plant and other new facilities; a plutonium reprocessing prohibition will be lifted; heavy-water reactors will be allowed; and there will be no cap on heavy-water production.
Mr. Biden has boxed himself in. He has already declared his commitment to pivot out of the Middle East. If former Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif is to be believed, the Biden administration has already offered greater sanctions relief than Mr. Obama did in 2015—and the offer still hasn’t brought Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to the negotiating table. Mr. Biden and his team declined to support the International Atomic Energy Agency’s investigation of Iran’s undeclared nuclear activities by refusing to move for a censure by the agency’s board of governors, which could trigger U.N. sanctions. Tehran refuses to permit weapons inspectors into certain nuclear sites, and the Biden administration, worried that tougher action could undermine negotiations, is afraid to act.
A crippling problem for the White House is that Iranian leaders understand leverage better than Mr. Biden does. They see that he is loath to respond to their belligerence. Tehran has accelerated its uranium-separation program to approach weapons-grade levels, and it has continued to back proxies who attack U.S. troops in Iraq and American allies in the Middle East. Iranian oil is flowing again to China, and the Iranian economy is recovering after severe contractions during the Trump administration.
Republicans and worried Democrats in Congress need to temper the administration’s unrealistic expectations of a longer and stronger agreement, while holding the White House to deadlines on both a return to the 2015 deal and any improved agreement. That means passing legislation that would trigger punishing sanctions targeting key sectors of Iran’s economy if deadlines aren’t met. Congress also must clarify the parameters of an acceptable new agreement that Republicans and Democrats could envision as a binding treaty. And they should require the administration to explain to oversight committees what a Plan B looks like if negotiations fail.
Mr. Biden has a credibility problem, given the Afghanistan debacle and his rhetoric about ending “forever wars.” Tehran no longer believes he will use military force to curb its nuclear ambitions. Mr. Biden needs to explain clearly what he meant when he told Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett that he is trying “diplomacy first” but would turn to “other options” if talks break down. When Iran misbehaves—and the bar should be set low—he needs to respond quickly with what many Democrats would call “excessive force.” Empty messages from a weakened president about a better deal are no substitute for the credible threat of U.S. power.
Mr. Dubowitz is chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
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