Month: December 2020

Authored by Peter Berkowitz via RealClearPolitics.com,

In mid-November, the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff — I serve as the director — published “The Elements of the China Challenge.”

The paper argues that the core of the challenge consists of the concerted efforts by the Chinese Communist Party to reconfigure world order to serve the CCP’s authoritarian interests and aims. It explains the errors that nourished the hope on both the right and the left that economic liberalization in China, coupled with Western engagement and incorporation of Beijing into international organizations, would bring about China’s political liberalization. It describes the characteristic practices of the communist dictatorship, traces China’s brazen programs of economic co-optation and coercion in every region of the world, examines the Marxist-Leninist dogma and hyper-nationalist beliefs that provide the intellectual sources of the CCP’s quest for global supremacy, and surveys China’s vulnerabilities — both those endemic to authoritarian regimes and those specific to the People’s Republic of China. In conclusion, the paper lays out a framework for securing freedom.

Reaction to the paper has been instructive. The Chinese Communist Party responded with ritual denunciation. In contrast, public intellectuals, scholars, and public officials from around the world have expressed appreciation for the Policy Planning Staff’s efforts to gather in one place the evidence of the CCP’s  predatory policies, to distill the party’s governing ambitions, and to sketch a way forward for the United States and all nations dedicated to preserving the free, open, and rules-based international order. The best of the American responses to the paper have coupled praise, in some cases grudging, with strictures, sometimes angry, about the paper’s limitations. The domestic criticisms are especially revealing, both for the serious issues they raise and for the misconceptions that they promulgate.

“The Elements of the China Challenge” has its origins in Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s reorientation of the State Department — consistent with the Trump administration’s 2017 National Security Strategy and a number of other administration documents — around the new round of great-power competition launched by the CCP. The administration’s attention to the China challenge does not entail — as many mistakenly suppose — that the United States must turn its back to the rest of the world.

To the contrary, the Policy Planning Staff paper stresses that to counter China’s quest for global supremacy, the United States must renew its alliance system and must reform international organizations so that they serve America’s vital interest in preserving an international order that is composed of free and sovereign nation-states and that is grounded in respect for human rights and the rule of law.

Trump administration policy reflects this reorientation. For starters, the administration has led in exposing the CCP’s initial cover up of the COVID-19 pandemic and its subsequent disinformation campaign. The administration intensified efforts to combat China’s massive intellectual property theft. It placed the United States at the forefront of efforts to hold China accountable for gross human rights violations, especially the brutal imprisonment of more than a million Uyghurs in re-education camps in Xinjiang — the United States is the only nation to impose sanctions on CCP officials for these unconscionable abuses. It terminated Hong Kong’s special trading status in the spring, when the CCP crushed freedom in the city. It increased weapons sales to Taiwan, embarked on an inaugural U.S.-Taiwan economic dialogue, and signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Taiwan on health, science, and technology. It invigorated the Quad (Australia, India, Japan, and the United States) and, with its strategy for a Free and Open Indo-Pacific, affirmed the region’s critical importance. It revamped the Development Finance Corporation and reformed the Export-Import Bank to improve the ability of United States and its allies and partners to invest in other nations’ physical and digital infrastructure. And, the Trump administration has convinced more than 50 countries and counting to join the Clean Network, which promises secure telecommunications — unlike the technology offered by Chinese “national champions” Huawei and ZTE, which are CCP extensions whose hardware and software threaten individual privacy and national security.

By stepping back, taking a broader view, and documenting the pattern and purpose of China’s actions, “The Elements of the China Challenge” explains why these policies are urgently needed, and why much more must be done. And by identifying 10 tasks that the United States must undertake — from restoring civic concord at home to, where possible, cooperating with Beijing based on norms of fairness and reciprocity, and to championing freedom abroad — the Policy Planning Staff paper lays the foundations for refashioning U.S. foreign policy to meet the China challenge.

A common theme of the critics, reputable as well as disreputable, is that the paper falls short of the work of George Kennan, a career foreign service officer who in 1947 founded the Policy Planning Staff and became its first director. At the dawn of the Cold War, Kennan’s 1946 “Long Telegram” from Moscow and his 1947 Foreign Affairs article “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” illuminated the threat to freedom posed by the Soviet Union. The most influential documents produced by a State Department official, they served as sources of inspiration for the Policy Planning Staff, but we did not seek to replicate them since, as Kennan well understood, different challenges and moments demand different undertakings and emphases. Above all, today’s Policy Planning Staff learned from Kennan’s insistence on the combination of “ideology and circumstances” that determines great-power conduct, and took to heart his counsel that “to avoid destruction the United States need only measure up to its own best traditions and prove itself worthy of preservation as a great nation.”

As for the disreputable critics, they give no evidence of having read the paper.

The Global Times, a daily tabloid and wholly owned subsidiary of the Chinese Communist Party, was first out of the gate. The CCP newspaper dismissed “The Elements of the China Challenge” the day after it appeared as an “insult to Kennan” amounting to little more than “a collection of malicious remarks from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other anti-China U.S. politicians and senators.” At his regular press conference the following day, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian denounced the Policy Planning Staff paper as “just another collection of lies piled up by the those ‘living fossils of the Cold War’ from the U.S. State Department.”

It would have been more accurate to refer to “the living victors of the Cold War,” but more telling still is the CCP’s failure to notice that the Policy Planning Staff distinguishes the China challenge from the Soviet challenge. While underscoring that, like the former Soviet Union after World War II, China today presents the foremost threat to freedom, the paper also stresses the distinct forms of power at work. “The Soviet Union,” the paper argues, “primarily enlarged its dominions and sought to impose its will through military coercion.” In contrast, and notwithstanding its development of a world-class military, China “primarily pursues the reconfiguration of world affairs through a kind and quantity of economic power of which the Soviets could only have dreamed.”

Of the reputable critics, Odd Arne Westad, a Yale history professor and China scholar, is among the most distinguished. In a Foreign Affairs essay titled “The U.S. Can’t Check China Alone,” he asserts that the “report correctly sees China as the greatest challenge to the United States since the end of the Cold War, showing how Beijing has grown more authoritarian at home and more aggressive abroad.” The paper also, according to Westad, “rightly recognizes how China has tried to gain an advantage by applying economic pressure and conducting espionage — as well as by exploiting the naiveté that causes many foreigners to miss the oppressive nature of the Chinese Communist Party.”

Nevertheless, Westad charges, “the report is limited by ideological and political constraints; given that it is a Trump administration document, it must echo President Donald Trump’s distaste for international organizations, even though they are key to dealing with China.” The professor also takes the paper to task on the grounds that it “almost completely ignores the most basic fact about the current situation, which is that the United States can compete effectively with China only through fundamental reform at home.”

A meticulous scholar of Chinese history, Westad imputes to the Policy Planning Staff paper opinions not found there and overlooks arguments it prominently features. It is not true that our paper, as Westad writes, “suggests that it is now in the United States’ interests to destroy and then selectively rebuild existing international institutions.” Rather, the Policy Planning Staff calls for a reassessment of international organizations to determine where they serve freedom and where they no longer advance the objective for which they were created, arguing for reform where possible and the establishment of new institutions where necessary.

Contrary to Westad, moreover, the Policy Planning Staff highlights the domestic foundations of effective foreign policy. Five of the 10 tasks we identify as crucial to securing freedom involve reform at home — from the renewal of American constitutional government and the promotion of prosperity and civic concord to restoring the U.S. educational system at all levels.

Hal Brands, another reputable critic and leading scholar, finds “valuable insights” in “The Elements of the China Challenge.” Despite the juvenile taunt in the title of his Bloomberg op-ed, “There’s No George Kennan in the Trump Administration,” Brands — a professor of international relations at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies as well as a Bloomberg columnist — writes that the paper “explains, more completely than any prior U.S. policy document, the sources of Chinese conduct — namely the mix of Marxist-Leninist ideology, extreme nationalism and quasi-imperialism that drives the Chinese Communist Party.” In addition, according to Brands, the paper “shows that China’s objectives are not limited to its immediate periphery, but include fundamental changes in the international system”; it “details the troubling aspects of Chinese behavior, from economic predation to Beijing’s menacing military buildup, as well as the deep vulnerabilities — endemic corruption, inescapable demographic problems, economic instability — that threaten its continued ascent”; and it “outlines reasonable steps America should take to strengthen its position.”

Yet Brands faults “The Elements of the China Challenge” for failing to rise to the ranks of Kennan, whose “brilliance lay in his ability to define an ambitious but ultimately achievable end-state.” Whereas Kennan envisaged a containment policy that would cause the Soviet Union to disintegrate from within, today’s Policy Planning Staff, Brands maintains, “provides no plausible theory of victory” and fails to “clarify what the U.S. seeks to achieve vis-à-vis Beijing.”

It’s true that in a case in which so many have been so wrong for so long and so consequentially about China’s conduct and intentions, the Policy Planning Staff did not pretend to have a knowledge of the future that it does not possess. Indeed, one cannot safely rule out the several possibilities that Brands contemplates: U.S. firmness impelling the CCP to abandon its expansionist aims or triggering internal collapse, or, notwithstanding American firmness, the CCP holding power for generations to come.

Brands, however, misses that the Policy Planning Staff lays out a framework for developing concrete policies consistent with all three possibilities. The paper repeatedly states that the goal of U.S. foreign policy must be to advance American interests by preserving an international order composed of free and sovereign nation-states and grounded in human rights and the rule of law while identifying essential tasks — beginning with adhering to our founding principles and preserving the best in our constitutional tradition — on which the achievement of that goal depends.

Understanding the elements of the China challenge, which encompasses not only knowledge of China but of ourselves, is an indispensable condition for fashioning policies that secure freedom.

The Kremlin just upped the ante amid soaring tensions with Germany and the EU over the Alexei Navalny affair, on Monday giving the allegedly poisoned Russian dissident an ultimatum: return to Russia right away for face prison.

Reuters details that “Russia’s prison service on Monday gave Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny a last minute ultimatum: Fly back from Germany at once and report at a Moscow office early on Tuesday morning, or be jailed if you return after that deadline.”

Russian officials have repeatedly condemned Berlin’s refusal to allow Russian investigators access to either any of the evidence or Navalny himself, following Germany’s prior conclusion that Russian intelligence tried to assassinate him using Soviet-made Novichok nerve agent in August. 

Russian officials have also been adamant that Navalny was relatively unknown and obscure even among the domestic population, much less on a global stage, but is now basking in the international limelight simply by accusing Russia and Putin directly, as the now recovered Kremlin critic has done in multiple interviews.

Russia has adamantly denied this narrative of events, instead claiming Navalny is serving as a stooge of Western intelligence in choreographed efforts to gain more political leverage over Moscow, and as justification for further sanctions. The EU recently imposed sanctions on top Russian intelligence officials over the Navalny case, to which Russia responded this month by announcing its own travel ban on select EU officials.

This new Russian ultimatum apparently stems from a prior criminal case and Navalny’s allegedly violating a suspended prison sentence agreement previously brokered with authorities.

Reuters explains, “The Federal Prison Service (FSIN) on Monday accused Navalny of violating the terms of a suspended prison sentence he is still serving out over a conviction dating from 2014, and of evading the supervision of Russia’s criminal inspection authority.”

That initial case centered on theft allegations, something Navalny has long claimed was cooked up by his political enemies in order to damage his reputation as an opposition figure. Certainly at this point, he’s not going to return to Russian soil any time soon and will likely be offered a path to citizenship by Germany.

The Charité hospital in Berlin where he had been emergency airlifted from Russia in September had announced that after 32 days in care, Navalny’s condition had “improved sufficiently for him to be discharged from acute inpatient care.” He was said to be completely recovered with no symptoms of the prior alleged August poisoning by early October, something the Kremlin has said is deeply suspicious and makes no sense given how deadly or at the very least permanently damaging Novichok is.

By Will Flanders and Cori Petersen of the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty; submitted by RealClearEducation.

“She’s a happy kid, a good student, and the virtual learning was a disaster for us,” said Erin Haroldson of Mount Horeb, Wisconsin, whose eight-year-old daughter was receiving virtual education from her local public school last spring. When it looked like schools would go virtual again this fall, Haroldson asked her daughter if she would rather continue at Mount Horeb or start in person at a new school, where she would need to make new friends.

When her daughter responded “Mom, I want to go to a new school,” the Haroldsons enrolled her in High Point Christian School in Madison.

The Haroldsons are not alone. According to a new Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) study, the state’s public schools saw an unprecedented enrollment decline this fall, and the school districts that started virtual learning at the outset of the school year lost the most students. Across the Badger State, the average district saw an enrollment decline of 2.67%. Districts that went fully virtual drove this decline, seeing an average 3% decline in enrollment.  

These numbers may seem small, but they represent a meaningful number of kids. In Madison, enrollment declined by 995 students; in Milwaukee, by 2,335 students. These drop-offs were driven in part by smaller pre-kindergarten and kindergarten enrollment. 

Wisconsin’s experience is consistent with national trends. New York City Public Schools, the nation’s largest school district, is enrolling about 19,000 fewer students. According to Chalkbeat, the city’s most affluent public schools have seen a decline of 12%, while enrollment at the city’s lowest-income schools has dropped 4%. Enrollment in the Los Angeles Unified District, the nation’s second-largest district, has been dropping since its peak in 2003, when it reached 750,000 students. As of April, EdSource reported that enrollment had dropped to below 600,000. According to NPR, Los Angeles Unified is down about 11,000 students this fall. 

If students are going to receive a virtual education, some parents prefer that they be taught by the remote-learning experts – virtual charter schools. Enrollment in K12, the largest virtual charter school in the U.S., grew from 123,000 last year to 170,000 as of August. In Wisconsin, some parents are using the state’s open-enrollment program to send their children to one of the 44 districts with a virtual charter school; these districts have seen an average 4.5% increase in enrollment relative to others. In Oklahoma, virtual charter schools went from educating 19,000 students to 33,000 this year, and, according to ChalkBeat, virtual charters in states such as Michigan, Oregon, Utah and Pennsylvania have experienced similar growth. 

Other parents, however, like the Haroldsons, still want their children to be educated in person, despite the pandemic. They believe that the benefits of in-person education outweigh the potential consequences, since children are low risk. This belief is consistent with guidance released in August by the American Academy of Pediatrics and other scientific research. A research effort led by economist Emily Oster from Brown University looked at data from 200,000 students across 47 states and found that students seem less susceptible to COVID-19 and don’t spread the virus like adults do. 

But if the science says it is low risk for students to be in person – and many parents agree, to the extent that they’re willing to arrange alternative in-person schooling for their children – then why are these districts going virtual? A study that WILL released last month suggests that teachers’ unions played a big role in these decisions. In fact, in Wisconsin, the presence of a teachers’ union in a district played a larger role in whether schools went virtual than the presence of COVID-19 in the community. Of the 36 Wisconsin school districts that began the year virtually, 81% had a teachers’ union. A national study, put out in September by Cory DeAngeles and Christopher Makridis, suggests that strong teachers’ unions played a leading role in shuttering districts across the U.S. They found that in states with right-to-work laws, schools were 14 percentage points more likely to open than in states without those laws.  

The Haroldsons plan to keep their daughter at High Point Christian even after the pandemic is over. Wisconsin’s choice programs are growing fast, enrolling more than 2,700 new students throughout this last year. Whether it’s through such choice programs outside of public schools, or through public school programs such as open enrollment between districts, enabling parents to make the educational choices that they feel are best for their children is more important than ever. 

Americans must wake up to the ugly reality that China will overtake the U.S. to become the world’s largest economy in 2028, five years earlier than previously anticipated, after weathering the virus pandemic much better than Western countries, according to the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR), a UK-based consultancy group.

In 2017, CEBR initially reported that China would surpass the U.S. to become the world’s largest economy by 2032. However, the pandemic and corresponding economic fallout have rapidly brought forward the economic power shift from West to East. 

“The Chinese authorities reacted vigorously and as a result, the Chinese economy has sustained less economic damage than any other major economy,” CEBR wrote in the report. 

“Thanks to a strict early response, China has managed to avoid re-introducing the harshest pandemic-fighting measures after the first wave,” the consultancy group continued, adding that Beijing’s “skillful management of the pandemic” may have tipped the Sino-U.S. competition in China’s favor.

“The big news in this forecast is the speed of growth of the Chinese economy,” said Douglas McWilliams, the CEBR’s deputy chairman. “We expect it to overtake the U.S. a full five years earlier than we did a year ago,” he added.

CEBR’s annual league table of the growth prospects of 193 countries shows a major power shift and potential economic demise of the West. 

It was noted China might expect average economic growth of 5.7% between 2021-2025 before slowing to 4.5% from 2026 to 2030. 

The U.S. could experience a strong debt-fuelled rebound in 2021, with growth slowing to 1.9% between 2022-2024 and then falling to 1.6% towards the end of the decade. 

Japan, the world’s third-biggest economy, is expected to be overtaken by India by 2030. Germany will be pushed down to fifth.

“Other Asian economies are also shooting up the league table. One lesson for western policymakers, who have performed relatively badly during the pandemic, is that they need to pay much more attention to what is happening in Asia rather than simply looking at each other,” McWilliams said. 

While the economic shift from West to East will happen much quicker than anticipated, American exceptionalism won’t fade overnight but will take a number of years; with that, the dollar is likely to enter a period of downward pressure. 

JPMorgan’s latest “Long-Term Capital Market Assumptions” report highlights an extended period of U.S. “exceptionalism” – in growth, interest rates and equity market performance – may be coming to an end. As a result, we expect the dollar to weaken in most crosses over this cycle, with notable falls coming against EUR, JPY, and CNY.”

Americans must wake up to the ugly fact that China is ahead of schedule at displacing the U.S. as the world’s greatest economic superpower. 

China has reacted fiercely to what it says is anti-China language and policies contained in the huge $2.3 trillion spending package President Trump signed Sunday night, namely centered on Tibet Policy and Support Act and the Taiwan Assurance Act.

China’s foreign affairs minister Zhao Lijian expressed the Chinese Communist Party’s anger, saying the country is “resolutely opposed” to the two measures as they unfairly “target China” and constitute blatant interference in its own foreign affairs and relations.

Urging Washington to not enforce those parts of the two bills within the spending package, Lijian said further that “The determination of the Chinese government to safeguard its national sovereignty, security, and development interests is unwavering,” according to Reuters.

The sections are part of a controversial series of foreign aid related massive spending stipulations contained within the nearly 6,000 pages which have now become law.

The Tibet Policy and Support Act further bans China from establishing new consulates in the US until the US is able to do so freely in Tibet.

Moreover, the bill specifically directs the secretary of state to establish an American consulate in Tibet, which has long been claimed by China in a situation parallel to the historic standoff over the Republic of Taiwan..

The bill also targets Chinese officials for travel bans if they are deemed “complicit in identifying or installing a government-approved candidate” to succeed the Dalai Lama.

Trump’s parting shot.
New US law backs the right of Tibetans to name the next Dalai Lama,calls for a US consulate in Lhasa.
The msg is clear: bipartisan support for action against China, now signed into law, must be enforced.
Where’s India in the new Tibet game?Watch #Gravitas pic.twitter.com/pqEl29wBUm

— Palki Sharma (@palkisu) December 28, 2020

As for the Taiwan Assurance Act, it aims to solidify a 1979 US law that affirms “substantive ties” between the US and Taiwan, including more weapons sales and increased moves toward normalization.

This after over the past months the US and Taiwan have inked deals for a record breaking series of advanced weapons transfers, which Beijing sees as a blatant violation of the previously agreed upon longtime ‘One China Policy’ status quo.

Just a little over three weeks to go until President-Elect Joe Biden’s inauguration on Jan.20 and tensions in the Persian Gulf are at boiling point given not only the presence of a US nuclear submarine but allegedly a major Israeli presence as well. A week ago Israeli sources confirmed that an Israeli submarine had crossed the Suez Canal visibly above water en route to the Persian Gulf as a clear “message” to the Islamic Republic.

On Monday Iran’s foreign ministry warned that Israel now risks crossing “red lines” should it enter deeply into the Gulf and thus Iran’s own backyard, with ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh warning that Israel should be “aware of the risks of crossing Iran’s red lines.”

“Everybody knows what the Persian Gulf means to Iran, and what policy Iran pursues about its national interests and security,” Khatibzadeh said according to Tasnim news agency. The build-up in Persian Gulf waters comes after the November assassination of Iran’s top nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh near Tehran in a sophisticated operation widely blamed on Israeli intelligence.

Khatibzadeh added that Iran has sent “messages to the US government and our friends in the region warning the current US regime not to embark on a new adventure in its final days at the White House.”

Separately on Monday a top level Iranian parliament member issued a more directly threatening response to the Israeli sub presence. According to new statements by the Iranian parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, Abolfazl Amouei:

Iran will not hesitate to give a “strong and massive” response to any Israeli submarine in the Persian Gulf, a lawmaker says, after the Washington Post  claimed that Tel Aviv was sending one to the strategic waters. 

“Israel must know that our response to aggression against our national security will be strong and massive,” Amouei added, speaking on behalf of Iranian lawmakers.

An Israeli submarine has embarked for the Persian Gulf in possible preparation for any Iranian retaliation over the November assassination of a senior Iranian nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, Israeli media reported.https://t.co/C9iHZIq1LU

— Nukes of Hazard (@nukes_of_hazard) December 25, 2020

Echoing prior statements of both Iran’s president and the foreign ministry, Amouei alleged that Israel and the outgoing Trump administration were busy looking to provoke a conflict, given the door is closing for such an opportunity as Biden has vowed to immediately restore US participation in the 2015 nuclear deal (JCPOA).

“Israel is looking for excuses to drag the region into a tension that creates chaos in the last days of the Trump presidency,” Amouei said in an interview with Al Jazeera.

However, whether the Israeli sub is currently actually in Gulf waters or even as far as in the Strait of Hormuz remains a different question. Iran’s foreign ministry downplayed this at the same time, calling both recent Israeli and a Washington Post report a “media assumption.”

Metro Nashville Police have released body camera footage from one of the officers who responded to 2nd Ave N, in Downtown Nashville, on Friday morning, just minutes before the explosion. 

Officer Michael Sipos’ body camera footage was published on the Nashville Police’s YouTube channel on Monday. There are about twelve minutes of footage. 

The video starts with a handful of officers around 6:14 am on Christmas morning, requesting residents living on the street where 63-year-old Anthony Q. Warner, the bombing suspect confirmed by local police and federal agents, had parked his recreational vehicle packed with explosives, to vacate the area because “there is something very serious happening down the road,” one officer told a resident. 

A couple of minutes into the video, Sipos walked in the direction of Warner’s recreational vehicle parked outside the AT&T building. As he approaches the vehicle on the opposite side of the street, a loudspeaker can be heard playing from the vehicle, declaring: “all buildings in this area must be evacuated now.”

While Sipos and another officer walk to the end of the street, he said, “that building right next to you is the building that houses all the hardlines for phones throughout the Southeast.” 

As Sipos headed to his police car, around the 3:51 mark of the video, a loud explosion can be heard, illuminating the morning sky as glass and debris could be heard raining down on the officer. 

Sipos can be seen suiting up with body armor and running back to the scene to find an absolute warzone. 

Authorities confirmed that human remains at the scene were a match to Warner’s DNA. They are also analyzing if his paranoia over 5G technology was the motive to detonate his recreational vehicle outside the AT&T facility. 

Two New Jersey women were arrested for hosting an illegal “makeshift bar” over the weekend, according to NBC News.

Officers responded to calls at a Newark warehouse at around 12 a.m. on Sunday where hundreds of patrons were seen eating, drinking and illegally gambling, according to police.

Anthony Ambrose, Newark Public Safety Director, said 26-year-old Denisse Tinizaray and 28-year-old Katherine Tinizaray, both of Newark, were arrested after the two failed to provide a liquor license.

Both women were charged with maintaining an illegal alcohol establishment and illegal possession and sales of alcohol. –NBC News

Meanwhile, three people were arrested in a Newark suburb for allegedly selling alcohol without a permit outside a hookah lounge which hosted over 50 people, according to NBC New York.

The owner and operators of La Café Hookah hosted over 50 inside the establishment, above Gov. Phil Murphy’s limit of 10 people for indoor gatherings and after 10 p.m. curfew, according to Paterson police.

None of the employees or customers were wearing any PPE and they were not properly distanced.

Jamahl Carter, Jamahl Carter Jr. and Erica Bush face several charges including selling alcohol without a license, no entertainment license, smoking indoors and recklessly creating and maintaining a condition endangering public safety.

When has prohibition ever worked?

As expected, the House on Monday overwhelmingly voted to override Trump’s veto of the sweeping defense policy bill known as the National Defense Authorization Act. The final vote was 322-87, receiving the two-thirds majority it required with 109 Republicans voting to override Trump’s veto while 20 Democrats voted to sustain it.

Some Republicans, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, voted to sustain Trump’s veto despite supporting the bill earlier this month.

The Senate is expected to hold its own veto override vote later this week. If the Senate also overrides the president’s veto, it will be the first time Congress has successfully rejected a presidential veto during Trump’s presidency.

As ABC reports, the $740 billion bill includes pay raises for America’s soldiers, improvements in body armor for women, coronavirus relief, military housing improvements and boosted sexual harassment prevention and response measures, among other items. It has passed both chambers of Congress for 59 years straight with strong bipartisan support.

Shortly before the vote, GOP Rep. Mac Thornberry of Texas, the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, urged his colleagues to vote for “the exact same bill” they did before, emphasizing that “not a comma has changed.”

“I would only ask that as members vote, they put the best interests of the country first,” Thornberry said. “There is no other consideration that should matter.”

the bill initially cleared both chambers of Congress with veto-proof majorities earlier this month. Trump then vetoed the bill last week because it didn’t include a repeal of Section 230, a law that shields internet companies from being liable for what is posted on their websites by them or third parties. The bill also included a provision that would rename military bases named after Confederates, which Trump opposed.

The defense bill must become law before noon Jan. 3, when the new session of Congress begins, or it will expire.

Authored by Matthew Vadum via The Epoch Times,

A high school senior of mixed race is suing a taxpayer-funded charter school in Nevada over the “coercive, ideological indoctrination” that is central to its Critical Race Theory-based curriculum that forces students to associate aspects of their identity with oppression.

In the lawsuit, Clark v. State Public Charter School Authority, filed Dec. 22 in federal court in Nevada, the young plaintiff William Clark and his mother Gabrielle Clark claim their First and Fourteenth Amendment rights were being violated. Students were allegedly told that by refusing to identify with an oppressive group, they were exercising their privilege or underscoring their role as an oppressor.

The lawsuit was filed by the Illinois-based group Schoolhouse Rights, whose website describes its mission as supporting “civil rights litigation in defense of students’ freedom of conscience in public education and the rights of parents to guide and direct the upbringing of their children.”

The student at Democracy Prep in Las Vegas whose mother is black and deceased father was white, claims there was a hostile classroom environment, and that he felt discriminated against in the mandatory, year-long “Sociology of Change” course required for graduation. There is another required class, “Change the World,” in which students carry out a political or social work project.

Because the so-called civics curriculum implemented by new management carried the same name as the previous curriculum, parents like Mrs. Clark “were not aware of the turn towards coercive, ideological indoctrination until they began seeing the detrimental effects it worked upon their children,” the legal complaint states.

The new curriculum “inserted consciousness raising and conditioning exercises under the banner of ‘Intersectionality’ and ‘Critical Race Theory.’ These sessions … are not descriptive or informational in nature, but normative and prescriptive: they require pupils to ‘unlearn’ and ‘fight back’ against ‘oppressive’ structures allegedly implicit in their family arrangements, religious beliefs and practices, racial, sexual, and gender identities, all of which they are required to divulge and subject to non-private interrogation.”

William was directed “in class to ‘unlearn’ the basic Judeo-Christian principles [his mother] imparted to him, and then [the school] retaliated against [him].”

“Some racial, sexual, gender and religious identities, once revealed,” the complaint states, “are officially singled out in the programming as inherently problematic, and assigned pejorative moral attributes by Defendants.”

The school principal told Mrs. Clark “that the theoretical basis of the revamped ‘Sociology of Change’ course is known as ‘intersectionality,’ and is inspired by political activist, academic and ‘Critical Race Theory’ proponent Kimberlé Crenshaw,” the complaint states. Crenshaw is a law professor at UCLA and Columbia Law School who is regarded as a leading authority on black feminist legal theory and is said to have coined the term “intersectionality.”

William Clark was required for assignments the legal complaint says “to reveal his racial, sexual, gender, sexual orientation, disabilities and religious identities,” by his teacher who greeted the students by saying, “Hello my wonderful social justice warriors!” Clark was told the next step would be to determine if parts of his identity “have privilege or oppression attached to it.” Privilege was defined as “the inherent belief in the inferiority of the oppressed group.”

The legal argument the Clarks make is that William is being compelled “to make professions about his racial, sexual, gender and religious identities in verbal class exercises and in graded, written homework assignments which were subject to the scrutiny, interrogation and derogatory labeling of students, teachers and school administrators.”

The defendants “are coercing him to accept and affirm politicized and discriminatory principles and statements that he cannot in conscience affirm.”

The school repeatedly threatened William “with material harm including a failing grade and non-graduation if he failed to comply with their requirements,” the complaint states, and refused to accommodate his requests for reasonable accommodation.

Resistance

Steven Hayward lauded the lawsuit at Power Line Blog, saying it heralds the beginning of an “active resistance” and a “counterrevolution” against the far-left takeover of American institutions.

“While misguided Millennials lean heavily progressive at the moment, the next generation of young people is going to swing sharply to the right out of rebellion against the stifling conformity of the progressive left that went into hyperdrive this year,” Hayward writes.

The lawsuit comes after President Donald Trump issued Executive Order 13950 on Sept. 22 prohibiting the military, federal agencies, and federal contractors from promoting the “divisive concepts” that are part of Critical Race Theory in workplace trainings.

The theory is the basis for an intellectual movement whose adherents retired federal Judge Richard Posner, dubbed “the most-cited legal scholar of the 20th century,” has described as the “lunatic core” of “radical legal egalitarianism.” The late Derrick Bell, who was one of former President Barack Obama’s professors at Harvard Law School, was the most prominent scholar to promote the theory.

While Trump has referred to Critical Race Theory by name, the executive order does not, instead describing it as a “malign ideology [that] is now migrating from the fringes of American society and threatens to infect core institutions of our country,” including in “workplace diversity trainings across the country, even in components of the Federal Government and among Federal contractors.”

It is an ideology “rooted in the pernicious and false belief that America is an irredeemably racist and sexist country; that some people, simply on account of their race or sex, are oppressors; and that racial and sexual identities are more important than our common status as human beings and Americans.”

U.S. District Judge Beth Labson Freeman, an Obama appointee based in San Jose, California, issued a preliminary nationwide injunction against EO 13950 on Dec. 22, USA Today reported.

She agreed with an LGBT diversity training organization that argued the order violated its free speech rights. “Plaintiffs have demonstrated a likelihood of success in proving violations of their constitutional rights … the work Plaintiffs perform is extremely important to historically underserved communities,” Freeman wrote in an order.

The Epoch Times reached out to Rebecca Feiden, executive director of the State Public Charter School Authority, for a comment over the holiday weekend but had not received a reply as of press time.