Tag Archives: morality

Waffling Weasel Words

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Recall Heritage Foundation‘s MFWIC Kevin Roberts’ full-throated and enthusiastic embrace of Tucker Carlson who did his own bearhug of antisemitic, racist, and misogynist bigot and Hitler fan Nick Fuentes. Roberts’ behavior has badly—perhaps irrevocably—damaged the Foundation. Now Roberts is further demonstrating his unfitness. Regarding his embrace, Roberts began with a pseudo-apology.

That didn’t play well anywhere, so he fired his chief of staff who wrote the statement he read into the camera.

That didn’t work, either, so,

[H]e blamed the audience: “Not as many people as I thought were ready for a little bit of nuance[.]”

No, wait—

Roberts changed tack. “Sometimes you can make a mistake with the best of intentions,” he said Monday. “My mistake was not saying we aren’t going to participate in cancel culture—we’re not. My mistake was letting that…override the central motivation that I had,” which was “fighting against antisemitism in all its forms.”

The Roberts doth waffle too much, methinks.

It’s time for the Heritage Foundation to terminate Roberts for cause. If it will not separate him from the Foundation in any manner, it’s time for the rest of us to put the Foundation away from us.

Even Big Tents have Capacity Limits

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Kevin Roberts, the President of the Heritage Foundation, has messed up badly. As Joseph Sternberg described it in his Wall Street Journal op-ed,

The groypers purport to be a movement of disaffected far-right nationalists, predominantly young men, under the sway of charismatic podcasting personality Nick Fuentes. Mr Roberts plunged into hot water last week when he announced that he wouldn’t cut Heritage’s ties with Tucker Carlson after Mr Carlson gave Mr Fuentes a platform to air a sampling of his antisemitic, racist, and misogynistic views uncontested. Mr Roberts argued that to disavow Mr Carlson would be to give in to a form of cancel culture, and insisted the conservative movement should remain a big tent.

Even big tents have capacity limits, though, and there is no room in the Conservative movement for antisemitism, racism, or misogyny. These bigotries aren’t even conservative holdings; they’re beyond even the extremist pale of either end of the spectrum. Severing ties with Carlson has nothing to do with any sort of cancel culture.

It’s time for Kevin Roberts to be dismissed from the Heritage Foundation. Even were Roberts to apologize for his gross error and follow through on cutting ties with Carlson, at this late date it would be impossible to take an apology as truly sincere and not just a collection of words uttered in response to opprobrium, and it would be impossible to believe that he won’t make a similar “misjudgment” regarding bigotries in the future.

If the Heritage Foundation won’t make that move, it could only be because they condone Roberts’ support for the antisemitic and racist bigotry and the misogyny of Carlson and Fuentes. In which case, it’ll be time for the rest of us to dismiss the Heritage Foundation, a once proud and valuable member of the Conservative movement.

What Will She Do with that Intelligence?

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Mexico’s President Claudia Scheinbaum doesn’t want to deal with Mexico’s cartels (mostly drug, but they’re into sex- and child-trafficking, also, and a few other…industries) violently. Her predecessor also swore off hard-style confrontations, insisting on dealing with them with hugs. Scheinbaum wants to increase intelligence efforts in dealing with them, even including a willingness to receive intelligence from the US government. But no more help than that.

Sheinbaum said her government had accepted the US offer for help in obtaining information and intelligence, but she rejected US intervention in Mexico’s affairs. “Intervention isn’t justice,” she said.

That “intervention” was an offer to assist—not to do for or to do instead—Mexico in dealing with the cartels kinetically, which is to say, violently.

Last week, Carlos Manzo, the anti-cartel mayor of Uruapan, the largest city in the state of Michoachan, the state immediately west of Mexico City, was hugged several times, fatally so, by the cartels. Even so,

[Sheinbaum] pledged to continue with her policy of strengthening Mexico’s National Guard, concentrating on the use of police intelligence to take down violent criminals while addressing the social causes of crime.
Sheinbaum criticized political opponents who she said were taking advantage of Manzo’s killing to attack the government, and said she had ordered an investigation into the surge in antigovernment posts on social media.

When those violent criminals and/or their cartel supporters resist being “taken down?” Will she continue to answer their violence with her own hugs? So far, her response is limited to inflicting lawfare violence on those impudent enough to criticize her government’s handling of the cartels. Why not hug them, too, instead?

Scheinbaum apparently has no serious use for that intelligence, American or her own nation’s.

This is what a failing narco- and trafficking-centric nation looks like.

Weasel Words

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The People’s Republic of China’s governing claque of men and women are engaging in them. Again. Or still. This is The Wall Street Journal‘s lede:

China will loosen its export restrictions on semiconductors made by Nexperia, its Commerce Ministry said….

However.

China will allow exports of Nexperia chips for eligible cases, the Commerce Ministry said Saturday, without specifying the criteria.

Meaning, I fearlessly predict, that Nexperia’s exports from the PRC will be slow-walked, blocked, and otherwise interfered with for the foreseeable future. Just as with any other non-PRC company doing semiconductor business from inside the PRC. Lacking export criteria, the PRC has left itself wiggle room for blue whale pods in which to employ those weasel words. The PRC’s Commerce Ministry also made no mention at all regarding loosening export restrictions on rare earth magnets or rare earth ore.

Nexperia—and everyone else outside of the PRC—would do well to move their raw material production, assembly, and manufacturing facilities—all of them, not just those related to rare earths—entirely outside of the PRC.

Immorality

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The men and women of the People’s Republic of China government, led overwhelmingly by President Xi Jinping, are behaving in an utterly immoral fashion when it comes to lethal, illegal drugs and the precursors for manufacturing them.

Those men and women have been continually welching on the agreements they pretend to make to curb fentanyl and fentanyl precursors exports.

Even when Beijing toughens regulations on individual precursors, as it has done several times in recent years, including this summer, Chinese producers can get around the rules by slightly altering the chemical structure of their products.

This bit saucers and blows it.

China calibrates its cooperation on counternarcotics in response to the overall US relationship, said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a counternarcotics expert at the Brookings Institution.

That’s a polite way of saying that the PRC’s government men and women will continue to poison our children unless and until we kowtow to their demands.

Or maybe Xi and his syndicate simply are amoral, with no concept of what’s right or wrong or the differences between the two—only naked power for themselves, nationally, and egoistically globally.

This, more than any military or cyber superiority, is what makes the PRC exceedingly dangerous.