CHINA SURE IS GETTING WHAT IT PAID FOR:  Biden Administration Drops Trump Plan to Track Campus ‘Confucius Institutes’.

WHEN LEFTISTS SCARE THE LEFT, THERE’S TUMBRILS ON THE HORIZON:  France sees foreign threat: “out-of-control woke leftism of American campuses and its attendant cancel culture”.

WHICH IN TURN ARE CIRCLING AT RELATIVISTIC SPEED:  Psaki Circles Back To The School Opening Goalposts.

WHICH IS PRECISELY THE INTENT:  New “Gun Trafficking” Bill Could Cripple Legal Firearms Market.

They’ll make us all criminals, because criminals are easier to scared.

THAT IS BECAUSE THEY KNOW WHAT THEY PLAN: Today’s blacklisted American: Disney fires actress for noting the Nazis killed Jews.

And they want to continue believing they’re on the side of angels, despite the horrors they intend.

HYPOCRISY IS WHAT THEY HAVE:  Criminal Justice Reform And The Hypocrisy Of The Left.

They’re going to stick with it.

CCP HAS SUCCESSFULLY SCRUBBED ALL EVIDENCE FROM THE WUHAN INSTITUTE OF VIROLOGY:  World Health Organization: China’s Denials of a Lab Leak Resolve the Issue for Us.

THE LAWS OF PHYSICS ARE SEXIST. REEEEE!  Study: Smaller cars may be why crashes injure women more.

THE NEWS THAT WASN’T FIT TO PRINT:  NY Times spikes column that criticized paper’s handling of N-word controversy.

BEHOLD! MY FACE! HOW SHOCKED!  Biden administration opens Texas tent city to detain migrants.

Single adult Mexican citizens accounted for more than 37,000 CBP encounters, a 119 percent increase from this time last year, according to the agency.

Amid the surge, a new “soft-sided facility” was established this week by the agency in Donna, Texas, to hold individuals originally staying at the Centralized Processing Center in McAllen, Texas.

The Donna facility is “weatherproof, climate-controlled, and provide[s] ample areas for eating, sleeping, and personal hygiene,” CBP said in a statement Tuesday.

The agency went on to call the Donna location “a considerable upgrade from previous soft-sided facilities,” touting its 160,000 square feet of covered area.

Oh. So, Trump had tent cities but the FICUS (Fraud In Chief of the US) has “soft sided facilities” and they’re a “considerable upgrade” because there’s more of them.  Say no more.
Dear media, proctological exams are not — repeat not — supposed to be performed with one’s tongue.

FOR THE AWKWARD MOMENT: Diamond Hands.

YEAH, ABOUT THAT:  Baby Yoda Cries.

MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: The French are absolutely right to say ‘no thanks’ to US woke-ism. “By its fruit the tree is known, and the fruits of woke leftism in the United States have been poisonous.”

FLASHBACK:

WILLFULLY, AND WITH MALICE AFORETHOUGHT? How a leading anti-Trump group ignored a crisis in its ranks.

And by “crisis,” they mean “serial sex offender.”

Plus, the Lincoln Project explained: “Its founders represent a who’s who of prominent Republican strategists on cable television, including Schmidt and Reed Galen, both former advisers to John McCain; conservative attorney George Conway; former New Hampshire GOP chair Jennifer Horn; Florida-based veteran political ad maker Rick Wilson; and Weaver, who has long advised former Ohio Gov. John Kasich.” And “tens of millions” that went . . . somewhere.

George Conway swears that he knew nothing.

I’M SORRY. IT’S JUST THIS PANDEMIC AND THAT LYING BASTARD TRUMP! Cuomo aide admits they hid nursing home data so feds wouldn’t find out. “The stunning admission of a cover-up was made by Secretary to the Governor Melissa DeRosa during a video conference call with state Democratic leaders in which she said the Cuomo administration had rebuffed a legislative request for the tally in August because ‘right around the same time, [then-President Donald Trump] turns this into a giant political football,’ according to an audio recording of the two-hour-plus meeting.”

OPEN THREAD: Party on, people.

SPACE: Rocket launch startup Astra is the latest space company to go public.

READ THE COLUMN THE NEW YORK TIMES DIDN’T WANT YOU TO READ: “Last weekend, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens wrote a piece criticizing the rationale behind the forced ouster of Times reporter Donald J. McNeil, but it was never published. Stephens told colleagues the column was killed by publisher A.G. Sulzberger. Since then, the piece has circulated among Times staffers and others — and it was from one of them, not Stephens himself, that The Post obtained it. We publish his spiked column here in full.”

#JOURNALISM:”

ALEX PEREZ: Want Hispanic Votes? Loosen Up. “Trump won in Miami because he was just too much fun to resist.”

THE BANNINGS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES: Twitter permanently bans Project Veritas account.

Twitter permanently banned an account on Thursday belonging to Project Veritas, a conservative group founded by controversial activist James O’Keefe.

The decision followed what a Twitter spokesperson described to CNN Business as repeated violations of the platform’s policies prohibiting sharing — or threats of sharing — other people’s private information without consent.

Twitter declined to say what specific tweets may have triggered the enforcement action. But in a post on Project Veritas’s public Telegram channel Thursday afternoon, the group said the suspension occurred after it published a video in which Project Veritas accosted Facebook VP of Integrity at his home.

If that’s the standard at Twitter, then I’m really genuinely curious to see the repercussions of Jack banning CBS and the New York Times in the coming days…

JOSH BLACKMAN & SETH BARRETT TILLMAN: A Reply to the House of Representatives’ Managers’ Reply Memorandum. “We emphasized the phrase, ‘particularly in the context of his prior remarks.’ We suggest the Managers recognize that Trump’s January 6, 2021 speech, by itself, cannot meet the Brandenburg standard. Rather, they need to bring in ‘prior remarks.’ Which remarks, the Managers do not say.”

Plus: “A pro tip for law students: when a citation includes quotes strung out across non-consecutive pages, check if the quotations are taken out of context. The House managers made this precise error.” Was it an “error?” Barrett & Tillman’s discussion of what’s actually quoted is pretty devastating.

THE LIVES OF OTHERS WAS NOT INTENDED AS A JOURNALISTIC HOW-TO GUIDE: “Factually: What will fact-checkers find on Clubhouse?”, asks an article at Poynter.org:

There is a new social media platform trending worldwide. It’s called Clubhouse and it brings together people like Tesla’s Elon Musk and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. For the moment, it seems to be beyond the reach of the broader fact-checking community, but this should change soon.

I joined Clubhouse this week. And it was only possible because I own an iPhone. The hot new network only runs on iOS.

To be accepted, I also had to deploy an invitation code. Downloading the app isn’t enough. To be a Clubhouse user you must know the right people …

As reported by tech websites and popular newspapers, Clubhouse aims to be the most exclusive social media platform ever launched. It offers its users the opportunity to enter different chat rooms (clubs) and share live audio feeds — not text or images — with thousands of other people. Rooms are divided by topic and you can even schedule your participation by scrolling through what discussions will be up in the next hours.

Clubhouse was mentioned in the Sunday Glenn Greenwald article in which he noted that the New York Times’ hall monitor Taylor Lorenz falsely accused Netscape founder Marc Andreessen of using (gasp!) the word “retard:”

Lorenz lied. Andreessen never used that word. And rather than apologize and retract it, she justified her mistake by claiming it was a “male voice” that sounded like his, then locked her Twitter account as though she — rather than the person she falsely maligned — was the victim.

But the details of what happened are revealing. The discussion which Lorenz falsely described took place on a relatively new audio app called “Clubhouse,” an invitation-only platform intended to allow for private, free-ranging group conversations. It has become popular among Silicon Valley executives and various media personalities (I was invited onto the app a few months ago but never attended or participated in any discussions). But as CNBC noted this week, “as the app has grown, people of more diverse backgrounds have begun to join,” and it “has carved out a niche among Black users, who have innovated new ways for using it.” Its free-speech ethos has also made it increasingly popular in China as a means of avoiding repressive online constraints.

These private chats have often been infiltrated by journalists, sometimes by invitation and other times by deceit. These journalists attempt to monitor the discussions and then publish summaries. Often, the “reporting” consists of out-of-context statements designed to make the participants look bigoted, insensitive, or otherwise guilty of bad behavior. In other words, journalists, desperate for content, have flagged Clubhouse as a new frontier for their slimy work as voluntary hall monitors and speech police.

As Twitter use “PoliMath” adds, “The desire to hold discussions in Clubhouse ‘accountable’ is kind of insane It would be like demanding entry to someone’s house for a party and going around butting in on everyone’s conversation to make sure they don’t say something bad.”

Exit quote from the Poynter article: “On Monday, after a rare moment of cross-border dialogue between users from mainland China and others outside the country, Chinese censors moved in. If Xi Jinping’s administration isn’t ignoring Clubhouse, why should fact-checkers? Why should you?”

LEARN TO CODE: Bloomberg News axes 90 as top editor blasts staff.

Classical reference in headline: Appalachian Miners Are Learning to Code.

—Bloomberg News, February 2^nd, 2016.