Authored by Francis P. Sempa via RealClear Wire,

The United States and its NATO allies are slowly drifting into a war against Russia. The Biden administration and some of our NATO allies, while feigning caution and prudence, have gradually increased their involvement in Ukraine’s war effort. Some Western strategists talk of defeating Russia and forcing Vladimir Putin from power, even trying him as a war criminal. Victory, they say, is just around the corner as along as we continue to arm Ukraine.

I’m reminded of a memorable scene in the movie Nicholas and Alexandra. Russia’s generals and politicians are confidently planning the mobilization of millions of troops against Germany on a huge table-size map. Against the advice of elder statesman Count Sergei Witte (brilliantly played by Sir Laurence Olivier), Tsar Nicholas II orders a general mobilization. Witte, old and gray, slumps in his chair and softly repeats the word “madness.”

Witte had convinced the Tsar in 1905 to negotiate an end to the Russo-Japanese War that was driving Russia to revolution. If Russia mobilized in late July 1914, Germany, France and England would mobilize, too. “Nobody will be able to stop,” warned Witte. And when Witte senses that the Tsar and his generals are not listening to him, he prophetically warns: “None of you will be here when this war ends. Everything we fought for will be lost. Everything we love will be broken […] Tradition, virtue, restraint—they all go […] And the world will be full of fanatics and trivial fools.”

Historians still debate the causes and origins of World War I. George Kennan traced the origins of what an earlier generation called the “Great War” to the end of German Chancellor Bismarck’s European order and the “fateful alliance” between Russia and France. Robert Massie pointed to Germany’s naval challenge to Great Britain. Still others, such as German historian Fritz Fischer, blamed Germany’s hegemonic ambitions. More recently, British historian Christopher Clark argued that Europe’s statesmen “sleepwalked” into the war.

This topic has assumed relevance today as the United States and NATO get closer and closer to co-belligerent status with Ukraine. Newsweek reports that 12 NATO countries, including the United States and Germany, have agreed to supply more tanks to Ukraine. The Biden administration will send 31 M1 Abrams tanks, while Germany is sending 14 of its Leopard 2 tanks. Ukraine’s ambassador to France said that Western countries have agreed to supply Ukraine with 321 tanks. Russia called this latest move a “blatant provocation” and more evidence of “direct involvement” in the war by Western powers.

Despite the seriousness of these decisions, some Western observers are acting like Russia’s generals in the lead-up to World War I. The Guardian columnist Martin Kettle claims that the new tanks will give Ukraine “a military advantage” that could transform the war to Ukraine’s favor. The new weapons, he asserts, have the potential to “put Kyiv in a position to dictate ceasefire and peace terms to Moscow.” The Economist opines that sending Ukraine tanks and long-range missiles will enable it to “withstand the next Russian offensive and to take back the territory that is theirs.” American war hawk Max Boot is confident that the supply of tanks will enable Ukraine to mount a “successful offensive” and to take back its territory. Boot asserts that the tanks along with long-range rockets and advanced fighter planes supplied by the West will “determine the course of the war.” Jeffrey Cimmino and Shelby Magid of the Atlantic Council urge NATO to speed-up production and delivery of even more weapons systems to help Ukraine defeat Russia and integrate Ukraine in Western institutions.

Which leads me to ask: Where are the American Count Witte’s? There don’t seem to be any in the Biden administration. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin are all in for co-belligerency in order to preserve the “rules-based international order.” It was Kennan who warned in 1997 that NATO expansion would revive the worst aspects of Russian nationalist and imperialist traditions. That same year, in an open letter to then-President Bill Clinton, a large group of elder statesmen, including Paul Nitze, Fred Ikle, Robert Bowie, Arthur Hartman, Gordon Humphrey, Stansfield Turner, Edward Luttwak, Richard Pipes, and Sam Nunn, voiced opposition to NATO expansion. Former U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union Jack Matlock agreed with this sentiment and has urged the U.S. to press for a ceasefire in the war. International relations scholar John Mearsheimer has provided Witte-like warnings about the risks of catastrophic escalation in the Ukraine war. The American Conservative’s Douglas Macgregor and the CATO Institute’s Doug Bandow have written eloquently about the dangers of escalation and the need to avoid greater U.S. and Western involvement in the war.

But these modern-day Witte’s are all outsiders. They are not even on the fringes of power like elder-statesman Witte was in 1914. And Witte failed. Are there any Democratic Party elder statesmen who will rise to this challenge? If not, it may soon be too late.

Bismarck, who waged brief wars to unify Germany between 1864 and 1871, and worked thereafter to establish a structure of peace in Europe, lamented that some damn fool thing in the Balkans would ignite the next big war. And once his steady hand was removed from the scene in 1890, the structure of European peace gradually but inexorably fell apart. The result was the cataclysmic First World War that set into motion the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia and the spread of communism, the rise of Hitler in Germany, the Second World War and the Cold War. That sequence of events made the 20^th century history’s bloodiest.

Afghanistan and Iraq should have taught us that wars sometimes generate their own momentum. The prognostications of the proponents of war usually fall apart once the fighting starts. Clausewitz called it “friction.” Edward Luttwak calls it the “paradoxical logic of strategy.” The statesmen of Europe who sent their countries to war in the summer of 1914 thought the fighting would be over by Christmas. Four years later, both sides had used poison gas, more than 10 million were dead, three empires collapsed, and as Count Witte predicted, tradition, virtue and restraint went away. The United States and its NATO allies are risking a wider European war involving nuclear powers for Ukraine to take back two eastern provinces and the Crimea.  

John Quincy Adams, our greatest Secretary of State, once said America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.” Sentiment and emotion on behalf of the Ukrainian people are no substitutes for hardheaded geopolitics. 

Francis P. Sempa writes on foreign policy and geopolitics. His Best Defense columns appear at the beginning of each month. 

Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A libertarian conservative group funded by billionaire Charles Koch has suggested that the next president should herald a “new chapter” for the United States while at the same time criticizing the Republican Party for nominating “bad candidates,” suggesting an opposition to Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential bid.

“The Republican Party is nominating bad candidates who are advocating for things that go against core American principles,” said Emily Seidel, chief executive of Americans for Prosperity (AFP), in a memo (pdf) to staff and activists. “And the American people are rejecting them. The Democratic Party increasingly sees this as a political opportunity. And they’re responding with more and more extreme policies—policies that also go against our core American principles.”

As a result, the country is in a “downward spiral,” with both political parties “reinforcing the bad behavior.”

“To write a new chapter for our country, we need to turn the page on the past. So the best thing for the country would be to have a president in 2025 who represents a new chapter,” the Feb. 5th memo states. The memo does not directly mention Trump by name.

As Trump is the only declared Republican candidate for the 2024 presidential race, the AFP memo could be referring to the ex-president as the GOP’s “bad” candidate. However, some analysts view the latest disapproval to be advantageous to Trump.

“Today’s announcement that the ‘Koch Network’ and the now very #woke Americans for Prosperity will oppose Trump helps him,” conservative pollster and media consultant Rick Shaftan said in a tweet on Feb. 5.

The “AFP does nothing but waste money on weak mailers and outsiders as door-knockers. I sure hope they don’t back DeSantis. This announcement is a PLUS for Trump,” Shaftan wrote.

AFP and Trump

AFP, founded by businessmen David and Charles Koch in 2004, has been one of the best-funded political organizations in the United States. AFP Action, a super PAC that supports conservative organizations, spent $79.8 million in the 2022 election cycle, according to data from research group OpenSecrets.

Trump has been critical of the Kochs, branding them “globalist” in 2018.

“The globalist Koch brothers, who have become a total joke in real Republican circles, are against Strong Borders and Powerful Trade. I never sought their support because I don’t need their money or bad ideas,” Trump stated in a tweet on July 31, 2018.

In January 2021, the AFP said that future support for lawmakers would depend on their actions before and during the Capitol breach on Jan. 6., 2021.

“With that standard in mind, lawmakers’ actions leading up to and during last week’s insurrection will weigh heavy in our evaluation of future support. And we will continue to look for ways to support those policymakers who reject the politics of division and work together to move our country forward,” Seide said in a statement at the time.

With more than $69 billion in assets, Charles Koch is the fourteenth richest man in the world. He had written about his regrets about spending only on conservative causes while his network donated money to several Democratic candidates in 2020.

Trump has been the most targeted lawmaker related to the incident. The former president was also impeached for his alleged role in the Capitol breach, but was later acquitted by the Senate.

GOP Candidates

Apart from Trump, no other Republican member has put themselves forward as a presidential candidate for the 2024 race. However, a few names have been circulating, such as former vice president Mike Pence and current Florida governor Ron DeSantis.

Read more here…

According to the United Nations (UN), forests cover 31% of the world’s land surface. They absorb roughly 15.6 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO₂) every year.

As Visual Capitalist’s Freny Fernandes details below, more than half of this green cover is spread across the boreal forests of Russia and Canada, the Amazon in South America, and China’s coniferous and broad-leaved forests. These carbon-sequestering forests purify the air, filter water, prevent soil erosion, and act as an important buffer against climate change.

This series of maps by Adam Symington uses data sourced from images collected aboard the MODIS sensor on the Terra satellite to reflect the ratio of the world’s surface covered with tree canopy to non-green areas.

To explore the entire high resolution forest map, click the image above. Below we’ll take a closer look at some of the world’s green zones.

Asia

Home to the boreal forests of Russia, China’s broad-leaved forests, the mangrove forests of Indonesia, and the green belt along the mighty Himalayas, Asia boasts some of the richest and most biodiverse green canopies of the world.

Russia holds more than one-fifth of the world’s trees across 815 million hectares—larger than the Amazon’s canopy. Like the country’s geography, most of Russia’s forests are situated in Asia, but spread into Europe as well.

To the southeast and with a forest cover of almost 220 million hectares, China is the fifth greenest country in the world. However, this was not always the case.

In 1990, China’s forests stretched across only 157 million hectares, covering 16.7% of its land. By the end of 2020, this forest cover reached 23.4%, thanks to decades of greening efforts.

On the other hand, the continent’s third most biodiverse country—Indonesia—is losing its green canopy. With a 92 million hectare-wide forest canopy, the country is home to between 10 and 15% of the world’s known plants, mammals, and birds. Unfortunately, over the past 50 years, 74 million hectares of the country’s rainforest have been logged, burned, or degraded.

Meanwhile, the 72 million hectares of Indian forest cover can be followed closely with the eye. From the rainforests along the Himalayas in the northeast, to montane rainforests of the South Western Ghats, and finally to the coastal mangrove forests.

The Amazon and Congolian Rainforests

In South America, Brazil has the second-largest green cover in the world.

Most of its 497 million hectare-wide forest cover falls within “the lungs of the planet”—the Amazon rainforest.

One of the most biodiverse places on the planet, the Amazon rainforest is said to house about 10% of the world’s biodiversity, including over three million wildlife species and over 2,500 tree species.

On the other side of the Atlantic, extending along the Congo River basin and its many tributaries, are the Congolian rainforests.

Spread across nine countries in Central Africa, this collection of tropical moist broadleaf forests is one of the remaining regions in the world that absorbs more carbon than it emits.

With 126 million hectares of the world’s green cover, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) contains the largest part of this rainforest, equal to about 60% of Central Africa’s lowland forest cover.

North American Forests

Canada, the United States, and Mexico combine for 723 million hectares of the world’s forests. The vast stretches of pine and fir trees in the Great White North, coupled with the United States’ mixed variety of forests, make the continent one of the largest carbon sinks in the world.

With over 347 million hectares of forests, Canada ranks third in the list of greenest countries. Approximately 40% of its landmass is tree-covered, representing 9% of the global forest cover.

Its boreal forests store twice as much carbon per unit as tropical forests and help regulate the global carbon footprint.

The United States, on the other hand, holds about 8% of the world’s forests. Spread across 310 million hectares of land, these diverse forests range from the boreal forests of Alaska to pine plantations in the South, and the deciduous forests in the Eastern United States to the dry coniferous forests in the West. The country is also home to temperate rainforests along its West Coast and tropical rainforests in Puerto Rico and Hawaii.

The World’s Lost Forests

While China and a few select countries have proven that there is hope for building out the world’s forests, the story is different in other places around the world. This map by Adam Symington uses data from the University of Maryland to track the changes in the world’s forest cover from 2000 to 2021.

Since 2000, the world lost over 104 million hectares of pristine and intact forest landscapes. In 2020 alone, over 10 thousand square kilometers of the Amazon were destroyed for the development of roads.

Deforestation and fragmentation are caused by a range of human development activities. But they are also exacerbated by climate change, with increasing forest fires, hurricanes, droughts, and other extreme weather events, as well as invasive species and insect outbreaks upsetting forest ecosystems.

At the 2022 UN Biodiversity Conference (COP15) held in Montréal, nations across the world committed to the 30X30 plan, which called for the conservation of the world’s land and marine ecosystems by 2030. Alongside other commitments to end deforestation and grow the world’s canopies, there is still hope for the world’s forests.

Authored by Ken Silva via Headline USA,

House Republicans vow to pull no punches when investigating the FBI this session of Congress. The bureau may be monitoring them in return.

This is according to attorney Jesse Trentadue, who about a decade ago uncovered the FBI’s “sensitive informant program.” He said the bureau uses it to embed informants in the media, congressional offices, churches, defense teams and other “sensitive” institutions.

Trentadue never found direct evidence of FBI informants operating in Congress—but that’s because a federal court struck down his lawsuit seeking records about such activity in 2015.

Nearly eight years later, Trentadue told Headline USA that he hopes the newly formed House select subcommittee to investigate the weaponization of the federal government will resume what his lawsuit started. Doing so would be in Congress’s best interest, he said.

Trentadue first caught wind of the sensitive informant program in 2011, while prepping for a separate lawsuit. His friend and fellow investigator, Roger Charles, had discovered an FBI memo showing that a journalist at ABC News was also doubling as a federal informant.

“The journalist, whose name is not disclosed in the document labeled ‘secret,’ not only cooperated but provided the identity of a confidential source, according to the FBI memo—a possible breach of journalistic ethics if he or she did not have the source’s permission,” the Center for Public Integrity wrote in April 2011 about the finding.

While the story moved through the news cycle quickly with little impact, it prompted Trentadue to file records requests with the FBI to see if the bureau had other informants in the media, as well as places such as congressional offices, courts, churches, other government agencies and even the White House.

“I thought they’d come back and say, ‘We would never do that because that would be illegal and unconstitutional,’” he said. “Instead, they came back and said, ‘Yeah, we do that. We have manuals on that, but you can’t have them because of national security.’”

Trentadue filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit over the matter in 2012, seeking unredacted copies of the FBI Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide, the FBI Confidential Human Source Validation Standards Manual, the FBI Confidential Human Source Policy Manual and the FBI Confidential Human Source Policy Implementation Guide.

After about two years of litigation, the FBI moved for a summary judgment in April 2014, arguing that it should be allowed to exercise FOIA’s national security exemptions to keep the manuals secret.

Included with the FBI’s motion was a sworn declaration from Eric Velez–Villar, the assistant director of the FBI’s Directorate of Intelligence at the time, who told the court that Trentadue’s lawsuit threatened to “disclose critical tools utilized by the FBI in its investigations and intelligence gathering efforts.”

The head of the CIA’s litigation support unit, Martha Lutz, also submitted a sworn statement, telling the court that disclosing the FBI manuals could compromise CIA sources.

Trentadue opposed the FBI’s motion for summary judgment and the two parties argued at a November 2014 hearing. But after reviewing the unredacted manuals in private, Judge Kimball said the FBI could keep the manuals secret.

Kimball noted that government agencies are “entitled to considerable deference” when they exercise national security or law enforcement exemptions—unless there’s evidence of bad faith by government actors. Then, he said, the courts have no power to make government agencies disclose secret information.

Kimball ordered the case closed on June 9, 2015.

While some might defend the FBI’s sensitive informant program as necessary for national security, Trentadue said the records he’s uncovered—such as the FBI memo revealing its informant at ABC News—show that the bureau has far overstepped its boundaries.

With recent disclosures like the Twitter Files having shed more light on the agency’s role in partisan censorship campaigns and election-meddling, others might agree.

“This isn’t the case of the FBI investigating corruption,” Trentadue said. “The bureau is recruiting spies in an effort to infiltrate and influence.”

Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.

Authored by Thomas Buckley via The Brownstone Institute,

As with misinformation, labeling someone who disagrees with the current standardthink as a “denier” has become, pardon the term, endemic amongst the woke.

Covid denier, climate denier, election denier, science denier – are all bandied about to immediately end debate,  tar any difference of opinion as literally insane, and depict anyone who ever disagrees with you as stupid and evil. 

This epithet is now even being used pre-emptively to makes sure that no matter what anyone who now or ever questions the move to ban gas stoves will not be doing so based on facts or logic but because of their “gas stove denialism.”

Like so much woke terminology, the initial meaning of the term is far removed from its current usage, though it has the distinct advantage of being generally familiar, allowing it to be “Trojan Horsed” (admittedly, some arise sui generis) into public discourse.

Common usage of the term “in denial” (besides the joke about the river in Egypt) seemed to come to the fore mostly in regards to an inability to face up to an obvious, almost always, personal truth.

In denial about your drinking, in denial about the fact that your kids are actually monsters, in denial about your sexuality (nothing to do with today’s genderpalooza) and on and on.

But, like in almost every case in which the woke have stolen a term from the self-help/therapy movements the term has been utterly bastardized.  For example, trigger and safe space are now used in the opposite way of their initial intent – see here. 

All of these terms started as ways to focus on personal responsibilities and actions and not in any way, shape, or form carried societal baggage and/or implications.

And then, in the 1980s, there was a shift, though a rather understandable one.  There are those who, sadly and stupidly, deny that the Holocaust happened, that Hitler didn’t kill millions of Jews and Gypsies and homosexuals and the disabled and political opponents and, well, it’s a very long and terrible list.  

Hence the term “Holocaust denier,” an accurate and correct description of someone who, despite the overwhelming physical evidence of the event, denies its occurrence, almost always because of their personal political ideology.

It is crucial to emphasize that denying the Holocaust happened is extremely different from the current crop of dissent-crushing “denials.”  The former involves a very specific proven fact; the latter – climate, election, etc. – all involve differences of opinions and reasonable and appropriate debates over whether something did, or is going to, happen.

But the appropriately fetid stench attached to “Holocaust denier” intentionally and destructively is made to come along with all of the current “denials.”  In other words, if you are an election denier or climate denier you are just as terrible as a Holocaust denier even though nothing could be further from the truth.

If used in its initial meaning, a climate denier would be one who claims the climate doesn’t exist, an election denier would a person who said the 2020 election never happened.

And no – that’s not what is being claimed.

The debate over climate change is one that should be taken seriously and done impartially; the discussion around the glaring voting security issues that appeared in 2020 should be considered similarly.  The science denier epithet attached to anyone who wondered about the risk and efficacy of the COVID vaccines is especially egregious because “science” cannot, by definition, be believed or denied – while technically a noun it is in fact a verb, it is a process and one cannot “follow the science,” just as one cannot follow a car one is driving.

Climate denier/denialism implies ostrich-like stupidity – how can a person possibly disagree with the fact that we’re all either going to drown or burn or freeze or dehydrate or starve or flood or desert or disease or war ourselves to death in the next few decades unless we do something NOW?  Never mind that doing most of the things proposed NOW are unnecessary, contradictory, contra-indicated, and could end modern civilization as we know it and that, considering the utterly scientifically shoddy if not outright fraudulent actions many in the climate brigade have taken,  should not even be included in any rational discussion of the topic.

The same is true with election denier.  The 2020 election was quite possibly the most unusual election in the nation’s history.  Barriers put in place years ago to try to ensure secure and accurate voting were obliterated, massive numbers of ballot were mailed out practically willy-nilly, the unconscionable practice of ballot harvesting was normalized in many states, counts were stopped and started and dragged on for days and on and on.  Just these undisputed facts alone are enough for intelligent reasonable involved citizens to legitimately wonder if the election was truly fair and honest.

And it should be noted that in all three cases – climate, election, and science – that those who toss the “denier” term about are also those same people who ignore, denigrate, and outright block any attempt to actually figure out what exactly happened.  Remember: If you can evade any impartial investigation, you can declare with confidence that no investigation has ever found fault with your claims of the final and definitive and certain truth of your position.

There are people who benefit from advertising “denialism.”  From last week’s private jet and meat and booze and hooker and billionaire-fueled Davos event to legacy media desperate to keeps its subscribers terrified and therefore more likely to continue to subscribe to the  tastefully decorated hallways and board rooms of massive financial institutions and international foundations and agencies and organizations to academics desperate to secure grant funding and make a name for themselves to tech giants who wish everyone lived by their algorithms because that would make selling ads so much easier to people who yearn for the psychological comfort of social acceptance and the feeling of being right all the time – these are the people that benefit every time someone outside their circle is called a denier.

In the end, for the truth to prevail, “denialism” must be denied its power to stifle dissent, obfuscate facts, and intellectually segregate those with other opinions, those with legitimate questions, those who are not in denial of reality.

US housing market pain could be ahead, but some affluent New York suburbs are bucking the trend early this year as open houses are packed. 

Falling mortgage rates might be stoking demand in a suburb about 20 miles north of Manhattan known as Scarsdale. Or rather, it could be the lack of inventory. Whatever is driving the housing market in the wealthy suburbs of New York has led to homes still selling over ask. 

“Demand is very high in all price ranges,” Laura Miller, the listing agent with Houlihan Lawrence, told Bloomberg. She said:

“There are tons of buyers and not enough inventory.”

Even with the 30-year home loan rate doubling, demand for homes just outside of the city is high. Realtor.com data shows New York’s Westchester County, which includes Scarsdale and Bronxville, and New Jersey’s suburbs in Essex and Bergen counties, are still seeing homes sold for more than 10% over the listing price. 

With the spring real estate market underway, there will be a lot of housing markets nationwide that will experience unevenness: 

“This is going to be a spring season characterized by big differences between markets.” 

 “In some places new listings will lead to a line of people out the door and in others, crickets,” said Benjamin Keys, a real estate professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

No matter a boom or bust in the economy, a group of buyers still need homes. Many of them are finding out that inventory in the suburbs around NYC is shrinking. Realtor.com data also confirmed this and said Westchester had one of the steepest drops in active listing in the US last month, falling 15% from a year earlier. Fewer homes mean prospective homebuyers are chasing less supply which can spark bidding wars.

Meanwhile, the rest of the country’s housing markets are frozen (besides Florida and a few other states) due to an affordability crisis. The good news is that home prices have yet to spiral lower because of limited inventory. However, some economists are warning about a 10-15% slide in overall home prices over the next couple of years. 

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The Miami-Dade Black Affairs Advisory Board apologized to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis over the weekend after one of its members described him a racist.

Pierre Rutledge, the head of the Miami-Dade Black Affairs Advisory Board, issued a statement on behalf of the organization and apologized to the Republican governor after a member said last week that DeSantis is a racist.

“We take it to heart when someone uses the term racist,” Rutledge said, reported Fox News and the Miami Herald, which reported that he made that comment at a Feb. 3 press conference. “Words matter. And so as chair, I must start by saying we want to pull that back. There’s nothing wrong with saying ‘we’re sorry.’ That’s not what we intended to say or be depicted by anyone. And that’s not the feeling of this board.”

Another official, Miramar Mayor Wayne Messam, said that he also “can’t call the governor racist. I don’t know him personally. I don’t know his heart,” reported WSVN. However, he claimed that DeSantis’ policies “always [seem] to attack black people and people of color,” without elaborating.

DeSantis’s administration has not responded to a request for comment.

Rutledge, who is also a local school administrator, did not immediately respond to an Epoch Times request for comment. The Miami-Dade Black Affairs Advisory Board also did not respond to a request for comment.

Rutledge’s comment came after Miami lawyer Stephen Hunter Johnson said last week that “our governor is racist” during a Miami-Dade Black Affairs Advisory Board meeting about DeSantis having blocked an African-American studies course, according to the Herald. After the comment, the board members unanimously voted to draft a letter to DeSantis to object against his rejection of the course.

During Friday’s news conference, Rutledge made the apology while also simultaneously saying that the board released the letter to DeSantis to criticize his decision.

“Politics has no place in determining school curriculum,” Rutledge said, according to WSVN. “If we rely on elected officials to tell our children what they can and cannot learn about, that is the epitome of political indoctrination.”

Read more here…

Disney has nixed an episode of “The Simpsons” from their streaming service in Hong Kong which references “forced labor camps” in China.

The episode, “One Angry Lisa,” which originally aired in Ocober, was inaccessible from the Disney+ platform in Hong Kong, according to the Financial Times.

In the episode, Marge Simpson is taking a virtual bike class with the Great Wall of China in the background. Her instructor says “Behold the wonders of China. Bitcoin mines, forced labor camps where children make smartphones.“

Disney+ removed an episode of Simpson (again) in Hong Kong due to reference of China’s forced labor camp. This is what you’ve missed. pic.twitter.com/zdEihr4LuR

— Asian American Conservative (@FactcheckingCon) February 7, 2023

The removal comes after the CCP imposed a controversial national security law in Hong Kong in 2020, under which offenses defined by the regime as ‘secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces’ can result in a lifetime of imprisonment.

This isn’t the first time Disney has bowed to Beijing. In 2021, the company pulled a 2005 episode referencing the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. 

Simpsons episode with Tiananmen Square sign saying ‘on this site, in 1989, nothing happened’ is missing from Disney+ https://t.co/K0LCP4csgw

— Daily Mail Online (@MailOnline) November 29, 2021

The decision to censor in China’s favor is probably “to do with the company’s ties, current and future, in mainland China,” said Kenny Ng, associate professor at the Academy of Film at Hong Kong Baptist University in a statement to FT, adding “It could be strategic to eliminate any China-offending episodes.”

More via the Epoch Times:

The pulled episode, “Goo Goo Gai Pan,” features the Simpsons’ visit to Tiananmen Square, where they see a joke placard that reads, “On this site, in 1989, nothing happened.”

In 1989 a student-led pro-democracy movement broke out in China. Protesters called for democratic reforms in the Chinese government and staged mass protests in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. On June 4, the CCP sent troops to quash the protests, resulting in the deaths of thousands, according to rights groups’ estimates.

In the episode, the family also visits the embalmed body of former CCP leader Mao Zedong, whom Homer Simpson calls “a little angel that killed 50 million people.”

Under Mao’s leadership, historians have estimated that millions died during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) movement.

In 2020, the company came under fire for partly filming the live-action movie “Mulan” in the Xinjiang region, where Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities are being detained in internment camps.

The movie features in its credits a “special thanks” to CCP agencies that are accused of participating in human rights violations against Uyghurs in the region, prompting calls for a boycott of the film.

According to a 2020 report by PEN America, a New York-based nonprofit group focused on defending free speech, U.S. studios’ investment in theme parks in China serves as a form of business pressure, given that companies would stand to lose billions of dollars if Beijing decided to punish them.

“Disney, for example, has a 47 percent stake in the Shanghai Disneyland Park, which opened in 2016 and which cost over $5.5 billion to build,” the report reads.

Forced Labor in China

The CCP has been accused of committing genocide against Muslim Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang. The United Nations released a report in August 2022 detailing abuses committed by the regime.

The U.N. report found that the scale and brutality of the detentions, framed by the CCP as compulsory reeducation camps or “vocational skills education centers,” likely qualified as a crime against humanity.