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Authored by Oxford Business Group via SafeHaven.com,

The IMF predicts that the global economy will contract by 4.9% this year, down from growth of 2.9% in 2019, while the World Bank has forecast a fall of 5.2%, the worst contraction since the Second World War.

With national economies suffering from revenue shortages, and populations in need of additional government support to mitigate the impacts of the crisis, SWFs have in many cases seen their roles transformed.

As a result of reduced income, many governments have been tapping SWFs to help balance budgets and provide stimulus to businesses or households.

This development has changed the conventional wisdom surrounding SWFs, which have combined assets estimated of around $6trn globally.

Before the pandemic the funds were seen as having limited – or a total lack of – liabilities. However, Covid-19 has seen SWFs called on to meet the implicit liabilities associated with economic shocks.

Among some SWFs, there is a growing realisation that they are no longer standalone institutions, but rather fiscal policy tools that are fully integrated into the macroeconomic management of their respective countries.

This shift has also brought about significant challenges for SWFs as they adapt to the new economic environment.

For commodity-based funds, many of which are underpinned by significant hydrocarbons exposure, the reduction in economic activity associated with Covid-19 has combined with persistently low oil prices to create twin challenges.

Meanwhile, for funds primarily based on trade surpluses, the deceleration in global trade and subsequent logistical and transport challenges have created similar hurdles.

Asset sell-off

Covid-19 has forced many of the less liquid SWFs to offload assets to generate cash.

The trend is expected to be particularly prevalent in countries with a heavy reliance on oil revenue.

For example, in Norway, where the government expects net cash flows from petroleum activities to fall by 62% this year to the lowest level since 1999, the country is expected to withdraw some $37bn in assets from its SWF, more than four times the previous record of $9.7bn in 2016.

This development is also expected to affect the Middle East, where funds will be called on to bridge fiscal deficits, which international credit ratings agency Fitch expects to constitute between 10% and 20% of GDP this year.

In Abu Dhabi, where the deficit is forecast to total 12% of GDP, the agency expects a $20bn drawdown on sovereign savings, while in Oman, tipped for a 19% fiscal deficit, analysts say as much as $8bn could be withdrawn from its SWFs.

In light of this, JP Morgan estimates that SWFs in the MENA region could dump up to $225bn in equities this year.

In addition to selling off assets to pay for budgetary spending, some SWFs have been called on to make other forms of investment.

In June Temasek, Singapore’s SWF, recapitalised domestic shipbuilding and repair conglomerate Sembcorp Marine with $1.5bn. This came after the fund channelled $13bn into flag carrier Singapore Airlines.

Such investment is a prime example of the increasing attention SWFs are paying to their home markets since the outbreak of the pandemic. While most investments remain international, domestic deals are increasing in size and frequency.

According to the International Forum of SWFs (IFSWF), domestic deals accounted for 21% of the total value of SWF investment in 2019, with this trend increasing over the past six months.

Opportunities amid disruption

While some funds have sought to offload assets, others are looking to take advantage of lower share prices during the pandemic.

Among them is Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), which – despite the downturn in the global hydrocarbons industry and its stated goal of spurring diversification – has recently made investments in international energy giants.

In April the PIF acquired around $1bn worth of stakes in European energy majors Royal Dutch Shell, Eni and Total, which was followed by a $200m investment in Norway’s Equinor.

The fund also acquired stakes in other sectors affected by the pandemic, including an 8.2% stake, valued at $369m, in US cruise ship operator Carnival, and a $300m investment in events company Live Nation.

The PIF is not the only active investor among SWFs in this difficult environment. According to data from capital markets data company PitchBook, SWFs poured $17bn into venture capital companies in the first half of the year, exceeding the 2019 full-year levels.

Chinese tech companies Tencent and Kuaishou were both significant beneficiaries, while Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala Investment Company put $3bn into Waymo, Alphabet’s self-driving technology arm.

Among some funds, there has been a broader shift towards tackling issues related to the pandemic. 

“We reshuffled our priorities based on Covid-19,” Ayman Soliman, CEO of the Sovereign Fund of Egypt, told OBG.

“We looked at the issues that were emerging in the region – food security, medical security and medical supplies – and realised that these should be our top priority.”

Looking ahead

Although it can be difficult to assess the losses accrued by SWF portfolios since the outbreak of the pandemic given the opaque nature of their investments, in April JP Morgan estimated that funds would suffer total equity losses of around $1trn.

However, this recent contraction seems to be accelerating a pre-existing trend that has seen the amount of equity invested by SWFs fall from $54.3bn in 2017 to $35bn in 2019, according to the IFSWF.

In a report released in August, Bernardo Bortolotti and Veljko Fotak from the Sovereign Investment Lab, along with Chloe Hogg from the London School of Economics, wrote that “the golden age of SWFs is over”.

“Declining oil prices, mounting protectionism and increasing barriers to international capital flows have halted the spectacular rise of SWFs of the last two decades. The double whammy of the Covid-19 shock and of the new macroeconomic reality represents a quintessential challenge for an industry,” the trio wrote.

“Yet, with $6trn under management, SWFs remain major players in global finance and have the potential to mitigate some of the worst financial consequences of the current crisis.”

As countries recover from the economic recession, recent developments suggest the funds will be seen as a key tools in building resilience against future economic shocks.

Another Iran showdown is coming at the United Nations at the end of this week after the United States finds itself isolated in claiming authority to impose ‘snapback’ sanctions on Iran:

Virtually alone in the world, the Trump administration will announce on Saturday that U.N. sanctions on Iran eased under the 2015 nuclear deal are back in force. But the other members of the U.N. Security Council, including U.S. allies, disagree and have vowed to ignore the step. That sets the stage for ugly confrontations as the world body prepares to celebrate its 75th anniversary at a coronavirus-restricted General Assembly session next week.

On Wednesday the Trump administration pledged it will move to impose “full” US sanctions on any international entity or arms company doing deals with Iran.

Per the terms of the 2015 nuclear deal brokered under Obama, a 13-year old arms embargo on Iran is set to expire October 18 of this year.

The US failed in a recent bid weeks ago to get the UN Security Council to back its efforts to extend the embargo. On Aug. 20 Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced at UN headquarters that the US will activate snap back sanctions, which even US allies say it has no authority to do, given Trump withdrew from the deal in May 2018.

“These will be valid U.N. Security Council (actions) and the United States will do what it always does, it will do its share as part of its responsibilities to enable peace,” Pompeo said Wednesday. “We’ll do all the things we need to do to ensure that those sanctions are enforced.”

The White House is ready to go it alone, promising that all prior UN sanctions will “snap back” at 8 p.m. EDT on Saturday, according to remarks this week by newly appointed special envoy for Iran Elliott Abrams.

“We expect all U.N. member states to implement their member state responsibilities and respect their obligations to uphold these sanctions,” Abrams said at a Wednesday press briefing.

“If other nations do not follow it… I think they should be asked … whether they do not think they are weakening the structure of U.N. sanctions,” he added.

Authored by Dan Sanchez, Tyler Brandt, and Brad Polumbo via The Foundation for Economic Education,

Does Critical Race Theory promote racial harmony or does it “sow division” as the Trump administration claims? And what is its relation, if any, to Marxism?

With the November election just around the corner, it’s only to be expected that President Trump would seek to rally conservative voters and drive his supporters to the polls. So, when his administration, on September 4, instructed the federal government to eliminate all training in “Critical Race Theory,” some thought it was just a red-meat stunt to excite the Republican base. Others saw it as an act of right-wing censorship and an obstruction of racial progress.

In truth, there’s much more to this development than mere politicization and censorship.

Here’s a breakdown of what the administration is doing and why it’s a welcome move.

The Executive Memo

“It has come to the President’s attention that Executive Branch agencies have spent millions of taxpayer dollars to date ‘training’ government workers to believe divisive, anti-American propaganda,” Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought wrote in the executive memorandum.

“Employees across the Executive Branch have been required to attend trainings where they are told that ‘virtually all White people contribute to racism’ or where they are required to say that they ‘benefit from racism,’” Vought explained.

“According to press reports, in some cases these training [sic] have further claimed that there is racism embedded in the belief that America is the land of opportunity or the belief that the most qualified person should receive a job.”

The order instructed federal agencies to identify and eliminate any contracts or spending that train employees in “critical race theory,” “white privilege,” “or any other training or propaganda effort that teaches or suggests either that the United States is an inherently racist or evil country or that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil.”

The days of taxpayer funded indoctrination trainings that sow division and racism are over. Under the direction of @POTUS we are directing agencies to halt critical race theory trainings immediately.https://t.co/dyMeJka9rt

— Russ Vought (@RussVought45) September 4, 2020

The Exposé

How did it “come to the President’s attention,” and what press reports is Vought referring to?

Well, President Trump is known to watch Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News. And days before the memo was issued, Carlson had on journalist Christopher Rufo to discuss his multiple reports uncovering the extent to which Critical Race Theory (CRT) was being used in federal training programs.

“For example, Rufo claimed, the Treasury Department recently hired a diversity trainer who said the U.S. was a fundamentally White supremacist country,” wrote Sam Dorman for the Fox News web site, “and that White people upheld the system of racism in the nation. In another case, which Rufo discussed with Carlson last month, Sandia National Laboratories, which designs nuclear weapons, sent its white male executives to a mandatory training in which they, according to Rufo, wrote letters apologizing to women and people of color.”

Rufo challenged President Trump to use his executive authority to extirpate CRT from the federal government.

As I told @TuckerCarlson tonight: I call on President @realDonaldTrump to immediately issue an executive order abolishing critical race theory from the federal government.

There is no place for this toxic, divisive, pseudoscientific ideology in our public institutions. pic.twitter.com/78J0CwNjfh

— Christopher F. Rufo (@realchrisrufo) September 2, 2020

The Debate

CNN’s Brian Stelter (as well as Rufo himself) traced Trump’s decision directly to the independent investigative journalist’s self-proclaimed “one-man war” on CRT, of which the recent Carlson appearance was only the latest salvo.

“It has come to the President’s attention that Executive Branch agencies have spent millions of taxpayer dollars to date ‘training’ government workers to believe divisive, anti-American propaganda.”

Came to Trump’s attention, how?

Oh you know how…https://t.co/7sD6ifL2zP pic.twitter.com/UnlOH33MQ1

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) September 7, 2020

Selter characterized Trump’s move as a reactionary attack on the current national “reckoning” on race. He cited the Washington Post’s claim that, “racial and diversity awareness trainings are essential steps in helping rectify the pervasive racial inequities in American society, including those perpetuated by the federal government.”

So which is it? Is CRT “divisive” and “toxic” or is it “rectifying” and “anti-racist”?

Intellectual Ancestry

To answer that, it would help to trace CRT to its roots. Critical Race Theory is a branch of Critical Theory, which began as an academic movement in the 1930s. Critical Theory emphasizes the “critique of society and culture in order to reveal and challenge power structures,” as Wikipedia states. Critical Race Theory does the same, with a focus on racial power structures, especially white supremacy and the oppression of people of color.

The “power structure” prism stems largely from Critical Theory’s own roots in Marxism—Critical Theory was developed by members of the Marxist “Frankfurt School.” Traditional Marxism emphasized economic power structures, especially the supremacy of capital over labor under capitalism. Marxism interpreted most of human history as a zero-sum class war for economic power.

“According to the Marxian view,” wrote the economist Ludwig von Mises, “human society is organized into classes whose interests stand in irreconcilable opposition.”

Mises called this view a “conflict doctrine,” which opposed the “harmony doctrine” of classical liberalism. According to the classical liberals, in a free market economy, capitalists and workers were natural allies, not enemies. Indeed, in a free society all rights-respecting individuals were natural allies.

A Bitter Inheritance

Critical Race Theory arose as a distinct movement in law schools in the late 1980s. CRT inherited many of its premises and perspectives from its Marxist ancestry.

The pre-CRT Civil Rights Movement had emphasized equal rights and treating people as individuals, as opposed to as members of a racial collective. “I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character,” Martin Luther King famously said.

In contrast, CRT dwells on inequalities of outcome, which it generally attributes to racial power structures. And, as we’ve seen from the government training curricula, modern CRT forthrightly judges white people by the color of their skin, prejudging them as racist by virtue of their race. This race-based “pre-trial guilty verdict” of racism is itself, by definition, racist.

The classical liberal “harmony doctrine” was deeply influential in the movements to abolish all forms of inequality under the law: from feudal serfdom, to race-based slavery, to Jim Crow.

But, with the rise of Critical Race Theory, the cause of racial justice became more influenced by the fixations on conflict, discord, and domination that CRT inherited from Marxism.

Social life was predominantly cast as a zero-sum struggle between collectives: capital vs. labor for Marxism, whites vs. people of color for CRT.

A huge portion of society’s ills were attributed to one particular collective’s diabolical domination: capitalist hegemony for Marxism, white supremacy for CRT.

Just as Marxism demonized capitalists, CRT vilifies white people. Both try to foment resentment, envy, and a victimhood complex among the oppressed class it claims to champion.

Traditional Marxists claimed that all capitalists benefit from the zero-sum exploitation of workers. Similarly, CRT “diversity trainers” require white trainees to admit that they “benefit from racism.”

Traditional Marxists insisted that bourgeois thoughts were inescapably conditioned by “class interest.” In the same way, CRT trainers push the notion that “virtually all White people contribute to racism” as a result of their whiteness.

Given the above, it should be no wonder that CRT has been criticized as “racist” and “divisive.”

Reckoning or Retrogression?

Supporters of CRT cast it as a force for good in today’s “rectifying reckoning” over race.

But CRT’s neo-Marxist orientation only damages race relations and harms the interests of those it claims to serve.

In practice, the class war rhetoric of Marxism was divisive and toxic for economic relations. And, far from advancing the interests of the working classes, it led to mass poverty and devastating famines, not to mention staggering inequality between the elites and the masses. 

Today, the CRT-informed philosophy, rhetoric, and strategy of the Black Lives Matter organization (whose leadership professed to be “trained Marxists”) is leading to mass riots, looting, vandalism, and assault. The divisive violence has arrested progress for the cause of police reform, destroyed countless black-owned small businesses, and economically devastated many black communities.

Those who truly wish to see racial harmony should dump the neo-Marxists and learn more about classical liberalism. FEE.org is the perfect place to start.

Is Trump’s Ban a Form of Censorship?

So much for CRT being a force for good. Of course, even horrible ideas are protected by the First Amendment. The government should never use force to suppress people from expressing ideas, speech, or theories it dislikes.

Critics insist that President Trump is engaged in this kind of censorship by targeting CRT.

Not so.

No one is banning White Fragility, the blockbuster CRT manifesto. No one is locking up those who preach CRT or ordering mentions of it stripped from the internet.

The memo simply says that taxpayer dollars will no longer be spent promulgating this theory to federal government employees. As heads of the executive branch, presidents have wide latitude to make the rules for federal agencies under their control. Deciding how money is spent certainly falls under their proper discretion—and it is always done with political preferences in mind, one way or the other.

It is not censorship for Trump to eliminate funding for CRT, anymore than it was “censorship” for the Obama administration to choose to tie federal contracts to a business’s embrace of LGBT rights.

Elections have consequences, one of the most obvious being that the president gets to run the executive branch. If we don’t want the president’s political preferences to be so significant in training programs, then we should simply reduce the size of government and the number of bureaucrats.

In the meantime, stripping the federal government of the divisive, toxic, and neo-Marxist ideology of Critical Race Theory is a positive development for the sake of racial justice and harmony.

*  *  *

Join us in preserving the principles of economic freedom and individual liberty for the rising generation. Support FEE here…

Fox News host Harris Faulkner addressed an awkward moment on Wednesday, when former House Speaker Newt Gingrich correctly pointed out that billionaire George Soros has influenced local races for district attorney around the country, who have in turn been soft on leftist criminals causing violence and mayhem throughout the country.

“Look, the number one problem in almost all these cities is George Soros-elected, left-wing, anti-police, pro-criminal district attorneys who refuse to keep people locked up,” said Gingrich, adding “Just yesterday they put somebody back on the streets who’s wanted for two different murders in New York City.”

“You cannot solve this problem — and both [Kamala] Harris and [Joe] Biden have talked very proudly out what they call ‘progressive district attorneys’. Progressive district attorneys are anti-police, pro-criminal, and overwhelmingly elected with George Soros’s money,” he added. “And they’re a major cause of the violence we’re seeing because they keep putting the violent criminals back on the street.”

Gingrich was then shut down, after commentator Melissa Francis interjected “I’m not sure we need to bring George Soros into this.“

“He paid for it!” shot back Gingrich, adding “I mean, why can’t we discuss that fact that millions of dollars….”

“No he didn’t,” insisted Marie Harf, another panelist – adding “I agree with Melissa. George Soros doesn’t need to be a part of this conversation.”

“Okay, so it’s verboten,” Gingrich replied. Awkward silence ensued…

Watch:

Fox News panel melts down when Gingrich calls out Soros pic.twitter.com/fntofzyMh4

— Jewish Deplorable 🇺🇸 (@TrumpJew) September 16, 2020

 On Thursday, host Harris Faulkner addressed the incident – saying “So, we had a little incident on the show yesterday that was not smooth.”

“And while I was leading that segment we had interruptions and I sat silently while all of that played out, also not ideal.“

“Our guest, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who is beloved and needed to be allowed to speak with the openness and respect that this show is all about, was interrupted,” Faulkner continued. “Do we debate with fire here? Yes! But we must also give each other the space to express ourselves. As the only original member of this six-year-old amazing daytime ride known as Outnumbered — I especially want to rock and roll with every voice and perspective at the table.”

Faulkner ended with “We don’t censor on this show.”

OMG

Fox anchor Harris Faulkner APOLOGIZES for the hosts interrupting Newt Gingrich’s Soros rant yesterday.

“We had interruptions, and I sat silently while all of that played out. Not ideal! Gingrich is beloved and needed to be allowed to speak… we don’t censor on this show.” pic.twitter.com/HyU7898RyB

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) September 17, 2020

Meanwhile, Gingrich was right. As we reported in 2016, Soros openly expressed his intention to ‘reshape the American justice system’ by pouring funds into ‘powerful’ District Attorney races.

As we noted at the time: “So far, Soros has funneled $3 million into seven local DA races over the past year but his support is “expected to intensify in the next few years, thanks to longer-term planning and candidate recruitment.”  In general, Soros looks to fund progressive DAs running on platforms to “reduce racial disparity in sentencing” and support prison “diversion programs” for drug offenders instead of trials that could result in jail time.“

So why is it “verboten” to discuss?

Disgraceful that Harris Faulkner allowed the tart Marie Harf to shut down Newt’s comments. Soros is seeking to overthrow our form of government and bring socialism to the US. Is Harris hushed because the bulk of Soros’ “buys” are black radicals ?

— Jim Fincher (@norm101020) September 17, 2020

Senior editor, Ash Bennington, joins managing editor, Ed Harrison, to discuss the latest in markets, macro, and coronavirus. They discuss how the results of the upcoming earnings season will provide a gauge on the health of the economy and solidify its standing as 2020 begins to come to a close. They also speculate on the ongoing persistence and momentum to the upside in equity markets, short-dated options trading amongst retail investors, and the sudden proliferation of special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs). Ash and Ed then debrief yesterday’s FOMC meeting, lay out the impact the Fed’s actions will have on the bond market, and consider whether the Fed really is out of ammo at this point. In the intro, Peter Cooper shares the latest jobless claims data and enumerates on the flaws of solely relying on this data to understand the health of the labor market.

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

Two campaign aides for Lacy Johnson, a Republican seeking to unseat Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), were shot in Minneapolis in broad daylight this week, including a 17-year-old boy.

The teenager was rushed to the hospital, where he died a short time later from his wounds, a Minneapolis police spokesman said.

Officials haven’t officially identified the deceased but his family and school named him as Andre Conley.

“My nephew Andre did not deserve this,” Conley’s aunt, Fatemah Green, said at a vigil for the boy on Wednesday night, KARE 11 reported.

Johnson said his campaign was in contact with the parents of the victims.

“We are reaching out to provide or help secure resources to meet their needs in such a time of grief, sorrow, and trauma,” he said in a statement.

“We have also been in discussions with members of the community who have detailed knowledge of the sources of the sometimes violence in our community. We’ve been in contact with local/national officials to both sort out the situation and discuss short and long-term solutions.”

His campaign said both victims of the “senseless violence” were paid campaign members.

“Today we are shocked and saddened to learn of this senseless act of violence. It is shocking and unnecessary acts of violence like this that prove why change is more needed than ever in our community. The shootings did not occur during a campaign event or outreach and we do not believe it has any connection to their work for the campaign,” it said.

Shooting victim Andre Conley in an undated photograph. (Let’s show Andre some love./GoFundMe)

Johnson told the local broadcaster that both youths “came to me and told me that they want to do positive things with their lives.”

Patrick Henry High School told members of the school community that Andre, a senior, was killed this week.

Over $4,900 has been raised for Andre’s family through a GoFundMe fundraiser. The organizer of the campaign said Andre “had more ambition than I did at 17” and “was loved by his peers, teachers, and principal.”

Police said the other victim, an adult male in his late teens, was taken for treatment for non-life-threatening wounds.

A preliminary investigation found that people were standing in front of a business when a person, or persons, approached on foot and shot at the group.

The suspect fled the scene prior to the arrival of officers.

Omar has not commented on the shootings.

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) speaks with media gathered outside Mercado Central in Minneapolis, Minn on Aug. 11, 2020. (Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)

The suspect was reportedly taken into custody on Thursday. A police spokesman didn’t immediately return an inquiry.

Can Amazon fix the U.S. job market all by itself? In case anyone needed proof that Amazon isn’t just taking over the entire retail space (and trying to do the same with cloud), but also dominating the U.S. job market, the company said  this morning that over 300,000 job-seeking people attended its Amazon Career Day 2020 yesterday and over 380,000 people applied for jobs with the e-commerce giant.

Amazon, which on June 30 of this year employed 900,000 workers…

… said that the virtual job fair, conducted completely online, was a resounding success. Amazon noted: “In the span of 24 hours, Amazon recruiters completed over 20,000 1-on-1 career coaching sessions with participants, and another 6,000 people joined group breakout sessions”

The fair was attended by Americans in all 50 states, including D.C. and Puerto Rico. 

Beth Galetti, Senior Vice President of HR at Amazon said: “Our vision for Career Day was to help job seekers from all walks of life and career stages fulfill their professional goals, using our scale to support those who need it the most.”

“We have tens of thousands of jobs available – from roles in finance, robotics, software development or AI, to entry-level positions with highly competitive pay and benefits across our operations network. We’re looking forward to welcoming many Career Day participants to Amazon as full-time employees in the coming months.”

The numbers reveal the unprecedented thirst for jobs in the U.S. as a result of massive wave of layoffs and bankruptcies due to the coronavirus-lockdown induced recession that the country has suffered from over the last 6 months.

Additional highlights from the event, per Amazon, included:

• Over 300,000 job seekers attended the event and discovered new tools to navigate the job market and learn about the 33,000 corporate and tech roles available at Amazon, as well as the 100,000 open positions across the company’s operations network.
• Participants joined from all 50 U.S. states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico – with over 55,000 attending from California alone.
• Since announcing Career Day on September 9, Amazon has received more than 384,000 job applications for roles at the company in the U.S. and Canada – 38 job applications every minute.
• Amazon recruiters conducted 20,000 1-on-1 career coaching sessions to help attendees prepare for their next job, providing a total of 6,600 hours of advice. Job seekers filled the 20,000 slots within 12 hours of Amazon making them available.
• More than 3,600 attendees participated in interactive coding review workshops hosted by senior Amazon software development engineers, and 2,600 joined breakout sessions dedicated to hourly opportunities at Amazon’s fulfillment centers and physical stores.
• Attendees asked more than 7,000 questions to the participating HR experts, career coaches, and industry leaders.

Given this staggering turnout, one wonders if Amazon’s unprecedented growth will also make it a monopolist in the US jobs market.

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

I recently testified on Antifa and the growing anti-free speech movement in the United States. I specifically disagreed with statements by Democrats denying that Antifa was playing a role in protests or, as House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerry Nadler claimed, Antifa is a “myth.” 

This afternoon, FBI Director Chris Wray pushed back on similar claims and declared that “Antifa is a real thing” and that the FBI has various cases of self-identified Antifa members involved in criminal conduct.

As I have written, Antifa is more of a movement than a specific organization. However, it has long been the “Keyser Söze” of the anti-free speech movement, a loosely aligned group that employs measures to avoid easy detection or association. 

Wray stated “And we have quite a number – and I’ve said this quite consistently since my first time appearing before this committee – we have any number of properly predicated investigations into what we would describe as violent anarchist extremists and some of those individuals self-identify with Antifa.”

Wray was adamant: “Antifa is a real thing. It’s not a fiction” and, while it is not a conventional organization as opposed to a movement, they have arrested people who admit that they are Antifa.

I have repeatedly emphasized that extreme right groups are also responsible for recent violence.  Moreover, I have opposed declaring Antifa a terrorist organization.  We have ample laws to deal with such extremist violence from the far left or far right. We do not need to rely on terrorism laws or most recently suggested sedition laws.

My greatest concern is that we need to take Antifa seriously as a virulent anti-free speech organization.  There is a fair criticism of some politicians who have refused to denounce the group or even support it.  Former Democratic National Committee deputy chair Keith Ellison, now the Minnesota attorney general, once said Antifa would “strike fear in the heart” of Trump. This was after Antifa had been involved in numerous acts of violence and its website was banned in Germany. His own son, Minneapolis City Council member Jeremiah Ellison, declared his allegiance to Antifa in the heat of the protests this summer.

Again, I am less focused on Antifa’s role in recent rioting. It is clearly involved but there are many such groups working behind the scenes.  My focus is on Antifa’s increasing presence on our campuses and faculty who are now espousing anti-free speech views or views that either support or rationalize violent conduct.

George Washington University student Jason Charter has been charged as the alleged “ringleader” of efforts to take down statues across the capital. Charter has been an active Antifa member on campus for years. Following his arrest, he claimed the “movement is winning.” It is winning. It is winning mostly since people remain silent. Silence kills free speech. Antifa knows that.

Facebook has censored a pro-Trump ad despite fact-checker PolitiFact contradicting its own “mostly false” rating with pretzel logic.

As the Daily Wire‘s John Bickley writes, the ad launched on August 4 was given a “mostly false” rating by the partisan fact-checker, and subsequently banned by Facebook.

The ad directly quotes Biden declaring, “If you elect me, your taxes are going to be raised, not cut,” and warns that his plan will raise taxes “on all income groups.” –Daily Wire

Watch the ad:

PolitiFact then goes to great lengths to discredit the ad – calling it “mostly false” because the PAC which produced it, America First, ‘lacked context’ and gave the ‘wrong impression’ about what Biden meant.

The ‘fact-checker’ then inserts their own logic, claiming that only the “biggest earners” would be hit harder by Biden’s plan, while increases on lower-income groups “would be relatively small.”

Except PolitiFact admits: “[S]ome tax experts estimate that Biden’s plan would mean higher taxes on average for all income groups.”

In other words, Biden literally told an audience that their taxes would rise – which “some tax experts” confirmed, yet PolitiFact took it upon themselves to ‘clarify’ – and Facebook has banned the above ad over it.

More via the Daily Wire:

*  *  *

In other words, PolitiFact uses a Democratic talking point about the rich paying more in an attempt to distract from the fact that the ad’s claim is actually true.

Here’s how the fact check begins (emphasis added):

A new ad from a pro-Trump super PAC uses out-of-context footage of Joe Biden to claim that the former vice president wants to raise taxes for Americans across the board.

Versions of the ad from America First Action began airing Aug. 4 on Facebook and on TV screens in Wisconsin and North Carolina. They focus largely on a comment Biden made in response to a voter during a February campaign stop in South Carolina.

But the America First Action ad presents that remark out of context. And while some tax experts estimate that Biden’s plan would mean higher taxes on average for all income groups, those increases would be relatively small for all but the biggest earners.

In its attempt to argue that the ad is “mostly false,” PolitiFact specifically cites a “Biden campaign official” as supposed evidence of the Democrat’s intent (emphasis added):

The full exchange shows that Biden was saying his plan would raise taxes for people who, in his words, “benefited from” the GOP’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. A Biden campaign official said his point was that the wealthy — not all Americans — would not benefit from his plan.

The ad’s portrayal of the exchange leaves a different impression.

The fact check goes on to make a similarly flimsy case against the ad’s inclusion of Biden warning that his tax increases could “go higher.” The supposed evidence of this being “mostly false” is the following full quote from Biden:

“We should charge people the same tax for their capital gains as their tax rate is,” Biden said. “And I think we should raise the tax rate back to, for example, I take it back to where it was before it was reduced. It could go higher.”

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Read the rest of the report here.