By Selwyn Duke

One of the ironies of the China virus response is that it’s making Western nations far more like their main geopolitical rival, China. A case in point is that a system designed to track quarantined Australians — and requiring them to send the government a picture of their face and verify their location within 15 minutes of being randomly contacted — may be used nationally.

What’s more, one Australian politician proclaimed that his constituents should be “proud” that their region is the app’s testing ground. All this over a disease with an infection fatality rate not much different from the flu’s.

Read the rest here.

By Selwyn Duke

Among a multitude of evils, here’s something else your tax money is helping fund: an effort to squelch your free-speech rights.

At issue is a National Public Radio On the Media episode about the “dangers” of free speech. The program’s guests included, writes liberal commentator Matt Taibbi at Substack, “Andrew Marantz, author of an article called, ‘Free Speech is Killing Us’; P.E. Moskowitz, author of ‘The Case Against Free Speech’; Susan Benesch, director of the ‘Dangerous Speech Project’; and Berkeley professor John Powell, whose contribution was to rip John Stuart Mill’s defense of free speech in On Liberty as ‘wrong.’” 

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By Selwyn Duke

Early last year, Stanford professor John Ioannidis stated that if we didn’t know a new virus called COVID existed, we might just “have casually noted that flu this season seems to be a bit worse than average.” Now Ioannidis has done research that perhaps vindicates that statement, finding that the coronavirus’ infection fatality rate (IFR) in most of the world is less than 0.20 percent — much like that of the flu.

What’s more, the professor concludes that protecting the vulnerable and early treatment could likely reduce that IFR further.

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By Selwyn Duke

Identifying the superlative in an arena can be difficult. But one editor-in-chief believes he has done something akin to locating the most troublesome mosquito in the Okefenokee Swamp: identifying Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s “dumbest tweet ever.”

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By Selwyn Duke

CNN just can’t stop proving that it’s the George Costanza of journalism. The network, which had to pay a huge defamation settlement to former Covington Catholic student Nick Sandmann and has a history of deceitful reporting, is at it again — and this time a Democrat has served the station a legal notice.

At issue was a report on the California recall election. It’s no secret that along with the rest of pseudo-elite media, CNN aims to scuttle the effort to remove incompetent and imperious Governor Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) from office. In fact, the press has even gone so far as to characterize Republican commentator Larry Elder, the favorite to replace Newsom, as the “Black Face of White Supremacy.”

As for CNN, it found the Truth an impediment to its narrative that the recall election was a solely Republican effort, so it stated Monday that “no Democrats are competing against their own party’s governor.”

The network was only off by nine.

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By Selwyn Duke

I was on the second hour of the show. My appearance begins at 52:20.

Note: To fast-forward to my segment, you must right-click on the in-line MP3 player below and then click "Open link in new tab."

Talkback-09-03-2021

By Selwyn Duke

First she canceled her mother’s memorial Mass at the church. Now she aims to cancel the church’s priest. The issue?

Father Michael Panicali of New York City’s St. Mark’s parish expressed in a sermon that he would not take a COVID-19 gene-therapy agent (GTA, generally referred to as a “vaccine”) because of associated complications; he further stated, relating Catholic teaching, that creating any medication using, even remotely, a fetal-stem-cell line is a sin.

This didn’t sit well with Elizabeth (last name was not provided), who lost her mother, Helen Sylvester, on April 9, reportedly to coronavirus. In fact, while she wants to have a memorial Mass held for her mother, she can’t bring herself to have it at St. Mark’s even though her family calls the parish their “spiritual home,” as the Daily Beast puts it. “I’m supposed to go there and have him [Panicali] serve the Mass when my mother dies from the virus?” the site quotes her as saying.

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By Selwyn Duke

“War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength” 1984 informed us — and the botched Afghanistan withdrawal is an “extraordinary success.” That’s the world according to Joe Biden, who thus characterized the military exit in his Tuesday night speech. He also “blamed the victims,” as commentator Monica Showalter put it, claiming that his people had repeatedly warned the Americans stranded in Afghanistan to leave, but they decided to stay.

But one could ask: Had they warned the $83 billion in military equipment they left behind to leave, too?

Did this hardware, which makes the Taliban one of the world’s best armed fighting forces, also insist on staying?

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By Selwyn Duke

I appeared on Beyond the Cover to discuss my New American cover story "When Children Cancel Parents." I have the link to the essay below the video.

Read the essay here. 

By Selwyn Duke

“Oceania was at war with Eastasia,” wrote George Orwell in 1984. “Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.”

America is at war with COVID. America has always been at war with COVID.

It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that the latter propositions well epitomize what one writer calls our “massive COVID lie,” a “horrifying charade.” In fact, warns the Federalist’s Molly McCann, if this deception isn’t ended, it will end our constitutional order.

Oh, it’s not that coronavirus isn’t real. It’s as real as heart disease — which every year kills approximately seven times as many people worldwide.

Read the rest here.