CANCEL CULTURE
"Cancel culture isn’t an assault on freedom of speech,” the dishonest argument of the moment goes, “It is free speech.”
"That isn’t really true, inasmuch as the entire point of “cancel culture” is to limit and suppress speech, which is nonetheless limitation and suppression when the tool used to accomplish it is speech, of a sort, if we are liberal enough to define “speech” as including the beef-witted grunts on Twitter. Cancel culture is not discourse but antidiscourse, a genre of speech intended not to facilitate the exchange of views and ideas but to prevent such an exchange. It is free speech in the sense that shouting down a speaker is free speech." Kevin Williamson, National Review Online, 7/13
CHICAGO & NEW YORK
"A spike in shootings during the past month and a half continued with 64 shooting victims in Chicago and 28 in New York City over the weekend.
"While overall crime is down in both cities, there has been an uptick in gun violence in June and July as compared to the same period in 2019. That uptick comes in the midst of massive protests against police kindled by the death of George Floyd, an African American man killed during his arrest by officers in Minneapolis. Of the shooting victims in Chicago this weekend, 13 were killed including two children. The same weekend in 2019 saw 41 shooting victims with nine dead." Zachary Evans, NRO, 7/13
CHRISTIANS
"Hong Kong’s Christians fear reprisals from China’s Communist Party. A national-security law was passed on June 30 by China’s Standing Committee, superseding Hong Kong’s legislature. For China’s Communist Party, this measure was necessary to guarantee stability after more than a year of protests in Hong Kong. The new law ends the region’s autonomy and the hope that the demands of pro-democracy protesters will be met any time soon. Christians who participated in the demonstrations now believe that they will be targeted if they don’t toe the party line.
"In mainland China, Christians who defy the Chinese government’s attempts at control of their churches reportedly face persecution, arrest, and detention. Underground churches are destroyed and crosses burned. Translations of the Bible must be approved by China’s Communist Party and often modified to meet its demands. In Hong Kong, however, Christians enjoyed religious freedom guaranteed by the region’s legal independence, which provided its citizens basic rights including freedom of expression and religion. Christians, more than 10 percent of Hong Kong’s population, held peaceful rallies during the protests by singing hymns to affirm their faith. Thousands took to the streets, and many Protestants and Catholics united to defend a common cause with pro-democracy protesters.
"The national-security law in Hong Kong now prohibits secession, sedition, terrorism, and collusion with foreign forces. Those terms are so broadly defined that they can be used arbitrarily to prohibit any form of dissent. What worries religious minorities, and Catholics and other Christians in particular, are the law’s collusion and subversion and clauses." Alessandra Bocchi, NRO, 7/13
"International backlash is growing over Turkey’s decision this week to allow what was once a landmark church to be converted into a mosque. While not as bloody (yet) as the purging of ancient Christian communities throughout the Middle East by ISIS and other Arab and Moslem extremists, Turkey is betting that it can get away with its eradication of Christians and any Christian presence in Turkey, and adjacent Iraq and Syria where its tentacles and fighter jets can reach . . .
"The emboldening of Islamists is not felt exclusively in Turkey. The trickle-down has vast consequences. Life for Christian Arabs in the Middle East is growing increasingly precarious. This includes within the Islamic and Arab nations, as well as in Israel where freedom of religion is guaranteed. However, emboldened Moslem Arabs have continued to chip away at the rights and existence of Christians and Christian institutions. Persecution is both physical and psychological. Many Christian Arabs have fled. Those who remain simply want to survive and live and worship peacefully as Christians." Jonathan Feldstein, Townhall, 7/13
CORONAVIRUS
"Michael Fumento, a science writer who has reported on infectious diseases for 35 years, argues that Fauci has spent “his professional career warning of nightmare scenarios, many which never materialized.”
24
"Fauci also supported the nationwide lockdown. Fumento argues that previous pandemic policies “resulted in less panic, caused no recessions, much less the possibility of a worldwide depression. Running their courses without months-long quarantines of the healthy, those pandemics didn’t trigger rises in alcohol and other drug abuse, domestic violence, depression and suicide.” John Fund, NRO, 7/14
A ROGUE PRESIDENT
"Under President Obama, as with all presidents, the federal government is supposed to serve U.S. citizens, not conduct massive political agendas, shield their own law breakers, thwart national elections, spy on its own citizens, sell guns to drug dealers, and offer lavish rewards to illegal entrants . . .
"Our government has to be accountable – need it be said – and transparent in all its activities and operations. Instead, with Obama, we had the extreme opposite: Rogue officers, in rogue departments of rogue agencies, who flouted the law, conducted covert campaigns, and, as the U.S. Attorney John Durham's investigation will soon reveal to all, contorted democracy in countless, major ways.
"The federal government officers and the legion of appointees, as well as civil servants, who succumbed to immoral, criminal, and treasonous behavior in the Obama administration was shameful. The most egregious agency offenders included the Internal Revenue Service, Department of Justice, National Security Agency, and Department of Commerce." Jeff Davidson, Townhall, 7/13
RACISM
"The left-wing charge that America is a racist country is the greatest national libel since the Blood Libel against the Jews. America is, in fact, the least racist, multiracial, multiethnic country in world history.
Neither the claim that America is a racist society nor the claim that it is the least racist country can be empirically proven. Both are assessments. But honest people do need to provide arguments for their position. I have found every argument that America is racist, let alone "systemically" racist, wanting. For example, the police almost never kill unarmed blacks, and on the rare occasions they do (about 15 times a year), there is almost always a valid reason (as in the infamous 2014 case in Ferguson, Missouri); police kill more unarmed whites than blacks; the reason there are proportionately so many more blacks in prison is that blacks disproportionately commit violent crimes; and so on." Dennis Prager, Townhall, 7/14
