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Rachel Bovard is one of the thousands of smart young Americans who flock to Washington each year to make a difference. Shes worked in the House and Senate for Republicans Rand Paul, Pat Toomey, and Mike Lee, was listed among the Most Influential Women in Washington Under 35 by National Journal, did a stint at the Heritage Foundation, and is now policy director of the Conservative Partnership Institute, whose mission is to train, equip, and unify the conservative movement. Shes bright, cheerful, and funny, and has a side hustle as a sommelier. And, like most young people, she has absorbed the dominant ideas of her peer group.

One of the ideas shes absorbed is that the conservatives who came before her were insufferably naive. They thought liberals and conservatives both want whats best for America, disagreeing only on how to get there. But thats not true, she believes. Woke elitesincreasingly the mainstream left of this countrydo not want what we want, she told the National Conservatism Conference, which was held earlier this month in a bland hotel alongside theme parks in Orlando. What they want is to destroy us, she said. Not only will they use every power at their disposal to achieve their goal, but theyve already been doing it for years by dominating every cultural, intellectual, and political institution.

As she says this, the dozens of young people in her breakout session begin to vibrate in their seats. Ripples of head nodding are visible from where I sit in the back. These are the rising talents of the rightthe Heritage Foundation junior staff, the Ivy League grads, the intellectual Catholics and the Orthodox Jews who have been studying Hobbes and de Tocqueville at the various young conservative fellowship programs that stretch along Acela-land. In the hallway before watching Bovards speech, I bumped into one of my former Yale students, who is now at McKinsey.

Bovard has the place rocking, training her sights on the true enemies, the left-wing elite: a totalitarian cult of billionaires and bureaucrats, of privilege perpetuated by bullying, empowered by the most sophisticated surveillance and communications technologies in history, and limited only by the scruples of people who arrest rape victims fathers, declare math to be white supremacist, finance ethnic cleansing in western China, and who partied, a mile high, on Jeffrey Epsteins Lolita Express.

Read: Its a weird time to be young and conservative

The atmosphere is electric. Shes giving the best synopsis of national conservatism Ive heard at the conference were attendingand with flair! Progressives pretend to be the oppressed ones, she tells the crowd, but in reality, its just an old boys club, another frat house for entitled rich kids contrived to perpetuate their unearned privilege. Its Skull and Bones for gender-studies majors! She finishes to a rousing ovation. People leap to their feet.

I have the sinking sensation that the thunderous sound Im hearing is the future of the Republican Party.

When I came down to Florida for the National Conservatism Conference, I was a little concerned Id get heckled in the hallways, or be subjected to the verbal abuse I occasionally get from Trump supporters. Judging by their rhetoric, after all, these are the fire-breathers, the hard-liners, the intellectual sharp edge of the American right.

But everyone was charming! I hung around the bar watching football each night, saw old conservative friends, and met lots of new ones, and I enjoyed them all. This is the intellectual wing of the emerging right. Many of them have spent their lives at progressive places like Princeton, New York, Hollywood, and D.C. Their bodies and careers are in the Republican coastal megalopolisbut their minds and mouths are in Trumpland. As one young man told me late one night, Wed like to dislike Bill Kristol, but he got us all jobs.

The movement has three distinctive strains. First, the people over 50 who have been hanging around conservative circles for decades but who have recently been radicalized by the current left. Chris Demuth, 75, was for many years president of the American Enterprise Institute, which used to be the Church of England of American conservatism, but now hes gone populist. NatCons are conservatives who have been mugged by reality, he told the conference. Seventy-three-year-old Glenn Loury, a Brown University economist, was a conservative, then a progressive, and now hes back on the right: What has happened to public discourse about race has radicalized me.

The second strain is made up of mid-career politicians and operatives who are learning to adapt to the age of populist rage: people like Ted Cruz (Princeton, Harvard), J. D. Vance (Yale Law), and Josh Hawley (Stanford and Yale).

The third and largest strain is the young. They grew up in the era of Facebook and MSNBC and identity politics. They went to colleges smothered by progressive sermonizing. And they reacted by running in the other direction. I disagreed with two-thirds of what I heard at this conference, but I couldnt quite suppress the disturbing voice in my head saying, If you were 22, maybe youd be here too.

The Information Age is transforming the American right. Conservatives have always inveighed against the cultural elitethe media, the universities, Hollywood. But in the Information Age, the purveyors of culture are now corporate titans. In this economy, the dominant means of economic production are cultural production. Corporate behemoths are cultural behemoths. The national conservatives thus describe a world in which the corporate elite, the media elite, the political elite, and the academic elite have all coagulated into one axis of evil, dominating every institution and controlling the channels of thought.

At the heart of this blue oligarchy are the great masters of surveillance capitalism, the Big Tech czars who decide in secret what ideas get promoted, what stories get suppressed. (The NatCon gospel includes great martyrdom stories, such as when Twitter and Facebook suppressed a New York Post story on Hunter Bidens laptop, and when various social-media companies have tried to de-platform The Babylon Bee, the right-wing version of The Onion.) Big Tech is malevolent. Big Tech is corrupt. Big Tech is omnipresent, Ted Cruz roared.

In the NatCon worldview, the profiteers of surveillance capitalism see all and control all. Its workers, indoctrinated at elite universities, use wokeness to buy off the left and to create a subservient, atomized, defenseless labor pool. Big Business is not our ally, Marco Rubio argued. They are eager culture warriors who use the language of wokeness to cover free-market capitalism. The entire phalanx of Big Business has gone hard left, Cruz said. Weve seen Big Business, the Fortune 500, becoming the economic enforcers of the hard left. Name five Fortune 500 CEOs who are even remotely right of center.

Read: How capitalism drives cancel culture

The idea that the left controls absolutely everythingfrom your smartphone to the money supply to your third graders curriculumexplains the apocalyptic tone that was the dominating emotional register of this conference. The politicians speeches were like entries in the catastrophism Olympics:

The lefts ambition is to create a world beyond belonging, said Hawley. Their grand ambition is to deconstruct the United States of America.

The lefts attack is on America. The left hates America, said Cruz. It is the left that is trying to use culture as a tool to destroy America.

We are confronted now by a systematic effort to dismantle our society, our traditions, our economy, and our way of life, said Rubio.

The first great project of the national conservatives is to man the barricades in the culture war. These people have certainly done their homework when it comes to cultural Marxismhow the left has learned to dominate culture and how the right now needs to copy their techniques. If Id had to drink a shot every time some speaker cited Herbert Marcuse or Antonio Gramsci, Id be dead of alcohol poisoning.

Hawley delivered a classic culture-war speech defending manhood and masculinity: The deconstruction of America depends on the deconstruction of American men. Listening to Hawley talk populist is like listening to a white progressive Upper West Sider in the 1970s try to talk jive. The words are there, but hes trying so hard it sounds ridiculous.

Another speaker, Amanda Milius, is the daughter of John Milius, who was the screenwriter for the first two Dirty Harry films and Apocalypse Now. She grew up in L.A. and wound up in the Trump administration. She argued that America needs to get back to making self-confident movies like The Searchers, the 1956 John Ford Western. This was an unapologetic movie, she asserted, about how Americans tamed the West and how Christian values got brought to savage, undeveloped land.

This is about as dumb a reading of The Searchers as its possible to imagine. The movie is actually the modern analogue to the Oresteia, by Aeschylus. The complex lead figure, played by John Wayne, is rendered barbaric and racist while fighting on behalf of westward pioneers. By the end, he is unfit to live in civilized society.

But we dont exactly live in an age that acknowledges nuance. Milius distorts the movie into a brave manifesto of anti-woke truthsand that sort of distortion has a lot of buyers among this crowd.

The first interesting debate among the NatCons is philosophical: Should we fight to preserve the classical-liberal order or is it necessary to abandon it?

Some of the speakers at the conference were in fact classical liberals, who believe in free speech, intellectual debate, and neutral government. Glenn Loury gave an impassioned speech against cancel culture, the illiberal left, and the hyper-racialized group consciousness that divides people into opposing racial camps. Loury asserted that as a Black man he is the proud inheritor of the great Western tradition: Tolstoy is mine! Dickens is mine! Milton, Marx, and Einstein are mine! He declared that his people are Black, but also proudly American. Our Americanness is much more important than our Blackness, he said, before adding, We must strive to transcend racial particularism and stress universality and commonality as Americans. This is the classical-liberal case against racial separatism and in favor of integration.

But others argued that this sort of liberalism is a luxury we cannot afford. The country is under assault from a Marxist oligarchy that wants to impose its own pseudo-religious doctrine. If you try to repulse that with pallid liberalism, with weak calls for free speech and tolerance, youll end up getting run over by those who possess fanatical zeal, economic power, and cultural might.

Yoram Hazony, the chief intellectual architect of national conservatism, is an Orthodox Jew who went to Princeton before moving to Israel. He argues that you cant have a society that embraces government neutrality and tries to relegate values to the private sphere. The public realm eventually eviscerates private values, especially when public communication is controlled by a small oligarchic elite. If conservatives want to stand up to the pseudo-religion of wokeism, they have to put traditional religion at the center of their political project.

Another Israeli political philosopher at the conference, Ofir Haivry, argued that Americans shouldnt delude themselves into thinking that a nation is built out of high-minded liberal abstractions, like the Bill of Rights. A nation is, instead, a cultural tradition, a common language, a set of rituals and beliefs, and a religious ordera collective cultural identity.

The history of Judaism demonstrates, Haivry argues, that you dont need a state or a political order to be a nation.

For his part, Hazony argued that the American cultural identity is Christianand has to be if it is not going to succumb to the woke onslaught. If 80 percent of Americans are Christian, Hazony reasoned, then Christian values should dominate. Majority cultures have the right to establish the ruling culture, and minority cultures have the right to be decently treated, he said. To take the minority view and say the minority has the ability to stamp out the views of the majoritythat seems to me to be completely crazy.

Read: How voters feel about Josh Hawleys attack on men

The problem in America, Hazony continued, is that LGBTQ activists today, like American Jews in the 1950s, are trying to expel Christianity from the public square. This threatens to render the public square spiritually naked. Wan liberalism collapses in the face of left-wing cultural Marxism. Eliminating God and scripture in the schools was the turning point in American civilization, Hazony said. Above all else weve got to get God and scripture back in the schools.

Another interesting debate among the NatCons is political and economic. Conservatives have lately become expert culture warriorsthe whole Tucker Carlson schtick. This schtick demands that you ignore the actual suffering of the worldthe transgender kid alone in some suburban high school, the anxiety of a guy who cant afford health care for his brother, the struggle of a Black man trying to be seen and recognized as a full human being. Its a cynical game that treats all of life as a play for ratings, a battle for clicks, and this demands constant outrage, white-identity signaling, and the kind of absurd generalizations that Rachel Bovard used to get that room so excited.

Conservatives have got the culture-war act down. Trump was a culture-war president with almost no policy arm attached. The question conservatives at the conference were asking was how to move beyond owning the libs to effecting actual change.

Christopher Rufo, the architect of this years school-board-meeting protests against critical race theory, argued that conservatives had erred when they tried to slowly gain power in elite cultural institutions. Conservatives were never going to make headway in the Ivy League or the corporate media. Instead, Rufo argued, they should rally the masses to get state legislatures to pass laws embracing their values. Thats essentially whats now happening across red America.

My old friend Rod Dreher of The American Conservative argued that because the left controls the commanding heights of the culture and the economy, the only institution the right has a shot at influencing is the state. In these circumstances the right has to use state power to promote its values. We need to quit being satisfied with owning the libs, and save our country, Dreher said. We need to unapologetically embrace the use of state power.

This is where Viktor Orbn comes in. It was Dreher who prompted Carlsons controversial trip to Hungary last summer, and Hungarians were a strong presence at the National Conservatism Conference. Orbn, in Drehers view, understands the civilizational stakes of the culture war; he has, for instance, used the power of the state to limit how much transgenderism can be taught to children in schools. Our team talks incessantly about how horrible wokeness is, Dreher said at the conference. Orbn actually does something about it.

This is national conservatism pursued to its logical conclusion: using state power to break up and humble the big corporations and to push back against coastal cultural values. The culture war merges with the economic-class warand a new right emerges in which an intellectual cadre, the national conservatives, rallies the proletarian masses against the cultural/corporate elites. All your grandparents political categories get scrambled along the way.

Will it work? Well, Donald Trump destroyed the Reagan Republican paradigm in 2016, but he didnt exactly elucidate a new set of ideas, policies, and alliances. Trumps devastation of the old order produced a grand struggle on the right to build a new one on Trumpian populist lines.

The NatCons are wrong to think there is a unified thing called the left that hates America. This is just the apocalyptic menace many of them had to invent in order to justify their decision to vote for Donald Trump.

They are wrong, too, to think there is a wokeist Anschluss taking over all the institutions of American life. For people who spend so much time railing about the evils of social media, they sure seem to spend an awful lot of their lives on Twitter. Ninety percent of their discourse is about the discourse. Anecdotalism was also rampant at the conferencegeneralizing from three anecdotes about people who got canceled to conclude that all of American life is a woke hellscape. They need to get out more.

Furthermore, if Hazony thinks America is about to return to Christian dominance, hes living in 1956. Evangelical Christianity has lost many millions of believers across recent decades. Secularism is surging, and white Christianity is shrinking into a rump presence in American life. America is becoming more religiously diverse every day. Christians are in no position to impose their valuesregarding same-sex marriage or anything elseon the public square. Self-aware Christians know this.

Finally, there is something extremely off-putting about the NatCon public pose. In person, as I say, I find many of them charming, warm, and friendly. But their public posture is dominated by the psychology of threat and menace. If there was one expression of sympathy, kindness, or grace uttered from the podium in Orlando, I did not hear it. But I did hear callousness, invocations of combat, and whiffs of brutality.

From the September 2021 issue: How the bobos broke America

One big thing the NatCons are right about is that in the Information Age, the cultural and corporate elites have merged. Right-wing parties around the world are gradually becoming working-class parties that stand against the economic interests and cultural preferences of the highly educated. Left-wing parties are now rooted in the rich metro areas and are more and more becoming an unsteady alliance between young AOC left-populists and Google.

NatCons are also probably right that conservatism is going to get a lot more statist. At the conference, Ted Cruz tried to combine culture-war conservatism with free-market economic policiesfree trade and low taxes. Marco Rubio countered by, in effect, arguing that you cant rally cultural populists if you are not also going to do something for them economically. Cultural populism leads to economic populism. Rubios position at least has the virtue of being coherent.

Over the past few decades there have been various efforts to replace the Reagan Paradigm: the national-greatness conservatism of John McCain; the compassionate conservatism of George W. Bush; the Reformicon conservatism of the D.C. think tanks in the 21st century. But the Trumpian onslaught succeeded where these movements have so far fizzled because Trump understood better than they did the coalescence of the new American cultural/corporate elite and the potency of populist anger against it. Thus the display of Ivy League populism I witnessed in Orlando might well represent the alarming future of the American right: the fusing of the culture war and the class war into one epic Marxist Gtterdmmerung.

Sitting in that Orlando hotel, I found myself thinking of what I was seeing as some kind of new theme park: NatCon World, a hermetically sealed dystopian universe with its own confected thrills and chills, its own illiberal rides. I tried to console myself by noting that this NatCon theme park is the brainchild of a few isolated intellectuals with a screwy view of American politics and history. But the disconcerting reality is that Americas rarified NatCon World is just one piece of a larger illiberal populist revolt that is strong and rising.

This article originally referred to a New York Post article about Beau Bidens laptop. The Post article was about Hunter Bidens laptop.

Read this article:
The Scary Future of the American Right - The Atlantic

Taking a page out of alcohols playbook, a new bill on Capitol Hill intends to regulate cannabis through the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) while relegating hemp oversight duties to the FDA.

The States Reform Act (SRA), sponsored by U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., would end federal cannabis prohibition, implement a 3% cannabis excise tax, regulate interstate commerce and provide automatic expungement for non-violent cannabis convictions, among other provisions.

The legislation also aims to assign different primary oversight bodies to cannabis and hempkeeping one plant divided based on THC potency.

But with recent collisions between hemp industry stakeholdersspecifically those with ties to the CBDmarketplaceand the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, regulatory assignments have become a top dialog in federal policy discussions.

Many cannabis advocacy organizations publicly opposed the idea of their segment of the industry being regulated by the FDA following the introduction of the Cannabis Administration and Opportunity Act (CAOA), another legislative proposal to end federal prohibition that is sponsored by Sens. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Cory Booker, D-N.J.

RELATED: Industry Organizations Submit Feedback on Cannabis Administration and Opportunity Act

And if the cannabis industry can avoid the FDA as its primary regulator under federal legalization, then the question arises: should the hemp industry steer clear too?

Vicente Sederberg | vicentesederberg.com

Shawn Hauser, a partner at Vicente Sederberg LLP, who co-chairs the law firms hemp and cannabinoids department, compared the possible regulatory split in the SRA to the alcohol industry, where beer, wine and liquor are regulated by the TTB, while drinks like kombucha, that fall below the 0.5% alcohol by volume threshold, are regulated under the guidelines of the FDA.

As it pertains to cannabis and hemp, the differentiating threshold is 0.3% THC, as defined in the 2018 Farm Bill.

Generally, for hemp, [industry stakeholders] are concerned about FDA oversight now, and theyre concerned about it going forward, especially if cannabis is under this TTB structure, and maybe theres a benefit to regulating the whole plant that way, Hauser said. I think thats an important discussion that needs to be had. Whats the right approach for the whole plant?

In relation to TTB and FDA authority, whether the low-THC and high-THC versions of the plant should be treated differently is a question that needs to be considered, Hauser said.

The hemp industry has been in a lot of regulatory purgatory with the FDA since the 2018 Farm Bill legalized the production of hemp, she said.

It deferred to FDA the regulation of finished products, which it has yet to finalize, Hauser said. And thats been a real obstacle for the hemp industry. And one of the things that the Mace bill kind of does differently from the [CAOA] is really regulate cannabis like alcohol by giving TTB the primary regulatory authority over cannabis. (The CAOA would give primary authority to the FDA, TTB and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.)

Perhaps mostly notably, Maces SRA would waive drug preclusion language in the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act (FD&C Act) from applying to cannabis or hemp.

The drug preclusion provision, as currently applied to CBD, asserts that once a substance is studied or approvedfor use in a drug, that same substance cannot be used as an ingredient in a food or dietary supplement, Hauser said.

That provision is, in part, where the collision lies between CBD stakeholders and the FDA. Citing its own approval of CBD as an active ingredient in Epidiolex, a pharmaceutical epilepsy drug, the FDA has ruled that non-pharmaceutical CBD cannot be marketed as or in a dietary supplement based on drug preclusion language.

That provision is the reason why the FDA takes the position that CBD is illegal in food and dietary supplements, Hauser said. The States Reform Act would waive the preclusion for cannabis and for hemp, but it would still regulate hemp products under the FDAs purview as food and dietary supplements, while cannabis products would be regulated largely by TTB, like alcohol.

More focused efforts to remove drug preclusion language from the FD&C Act are included in current legislation in Congress.

In the House, U.S. Reps. Kurt Schrader, D-Ore., and Morgan Griffith, R-Va., reintroduced the Hemp and Hemp-Derived CBD Consumer Protection and Market Stabilization Act (House Bill 841), which would waive drug preclusion language for CBD in dietary supplements only, Hauser said.

And U.S. Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., Rand Paul, R-Ky., and Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., filed the Hemp Access and Consumer Safety Act (Senate Bill 1698), which would waive the drug preclusion for CBD in both food and dietary supplements, she said.

SRA also would waive the language for CBD in food and dietary supplements, as well as for all cannabis products, Hauser said.

Harris Bricken | harrisbricken.com

Jesse Mondry, an attorney with Harris Bricken who represents clients in the cannabis industry and regularly writes on litigation issues involving hemp and CBD, also talked about FDA implications in SRA.

I think we all, in the hemp industry, know that the FDA has dragged its feet on giving the industry any guidance on CBD, he said. That has had a real chilling effect on the growth of the industry. And hopefully, if this were to pass, and the FDA is authorized and even directed to promulgate regulations, that the FDA will get that sorted out faster.

In addition to TTB and FDA regulatory indications, SRAs potential impact on requirements revolving around the U.S. Department of Agricultures (USDA) relationship to the hemp industry, as well and opening the doors for new players and industry growth, are other examples of the legislations reach, Mondry said.

In theory, [SRA] should allow the USDA to eliminate or reduce the number of regulatory requirements in the licensing process, because many of those are designed to disincentivize and penalize persons who may seek to grow marijuana under the guise of a hemp license, he said.

Mondry is based out of Oregon, where law enforcement officials and regulators have recently been cracking down on illicit cannabis operations masquerading under hemp licenses.

RELATED: Hemp Field Inspections in Southern Oregon Reveal Staggering Number of Illicit Cannabis Operations

The USDA expressly states that a number of its reporting requirements are so bad the Farm Service Agency may provide accurate and real-time information to law enforcement, particularly federal law enforcement, Mondry said. That sort of need and that impetus should be substantially eliminated, and it should have the effect of lessening the regulatory burden on hemp farmers.

Also a potential domino effect of cannabis being removed as a Schedule I drug from the Controlled Substance Act would be protections for hemp labs that still fall under the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administrations (DEA) authority, Mondry said.

DEA officials maintain that any material containing more than 0.3% delta-9 THC on a dry-weight basis is still classified as a Schedule I substance, and therefore certain stages of hemp extraction can be viewed as non-compliant. During certain stages of refinement, the THC levels of intermediary hemp materials are concentrated, meaning they are above the legal THC limit, before they are remediated further to a final, THC-compliant product in the extraction process.

As it stands, the DEA maintains some jurisdiction over hemp. Under the USDAs final rule, which went into effect in March, hemp testing labs are required to obtain DEA certification by the end of 2022. So far, labs all across the country have obtained this certification.

The USDA has incorrectly, in my view, sought to impose this DEA certification program on hemp testing labs, Mondry said I think ending that requirement would help end the bottleneck at this testing level and allow the hemp CBD industry to scale up. Thats just one way to do that.

In the broader reform picture, Mondry said an end to federal cannabis prohibition might result in an increased entry of participants into the hemp market.

[That includes people] who previously stayed on the sidelines and refrainedfrom entering the hemp market because of the connection and association with marijuana, he said. And Im thinking here, Wall Street investment firms, banks, large agribusiness, major manufacturers of food and beverage products. So, I think if the States Reform Act were to pass, we could see the hemp market really pick up and really grow rapidly. Thats sort of my take on it.

Mondry said he was more pleased than surprised when Mace, a Deep South Republican, introduced federal cannabis legislation. SRA represents a growing corps of voicesfrom both sides of the political spectrum to end prohibition, he said.

Hauser said much of the same.

I thought it was really positive, she said about Maces SRA introduction. I think the bipartisan support will really move the needle, and its representative of where the public is as far as supportive regulation, and theres a need for reform and a tax-and-regulate system, and thats something both sides of the aisle agree on.

See original here:
What Does Rep. Mace's States Reform Act Have to Do With Hemp? - Hemp Grower

Five months after gaining a new government, Israel is hoping to shore up its vital alliance with the U.S. and to court Democrats who are increasingly critical of Israeli policies toward the Palestinians and rarely questioned American aid for the country.

We think there is a need to hit the reset button, Idan Roll, Israels deputy foreign minister, told HuffPost in an interview last week.

Roll visited Washington as the latest representative of Prime Minister Naftali Bennetts administration. Bennett and his allies took over from Benjamin Netanyahu, who had enacted an aggressive far-right agenda while aligning himself with Republicans in the U.S., led by former President Donald Trump, and slamming former President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats.

Netanyahus successors say their government is more in line with most American policymakers and the American public. They hope that by making that case, they can avoid spats between the U.S. and Israel over issues like Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank the territory where Palestinians hope to establish a future state or Israels hawkish approach to Iran.

As a liberal member of this government, Im very confident that we are making amazing progress in a lot of different fields... that the progressives will appreciate, Roll said. Its just a matter of doing a better job of conveying that.

He pointed to the Bennett governments ending of a restriction on blood donations by gay men, saying that allowed him to give blood earlier this month, and its appointment of a record number of women and Israeli Arabs to government posts.

And Roll argued that the new administration was clearly less discriminatory than Netanyahus, noting that it has earmarked billions of dollars for investment in Arab areas, granted more Israeli work permits to Palestinians and allowed Palestinians to build hundreds of new housing units in the West Bank for the first time since 2007.

But Bennetts policy on building permits shows that Israel will likely continue to frustrate Palestinians and human rights watchdogs despite his teams conciliatory rhetoric.

The policy links new Palestinian construction to more than 3,000 new housing units in Israeli settlements, which are illegal under international law and are opposed by many Democrats, including President Joe Biden. Boosting settlements makes it harder for Israel to ever relinquish control of the region and accept the establishment of a Palestinian state, critics say, while hurting the millions of Palestinians who live in the West Bank.

When it comes to the occupation, the record of the new government so far has mostly been a dismal extension of the Netanyahu years, Debra Shushan of the influential Jewish American group J Street wrote this week. She noted that Israeli settlers who often receive government protection are becoming more violent toward Palestinians, according to United Nations experts, and Israeli forces that control the West Bank are continuing to demolish Palestinian homes.

Roll, defending the settlements as a matter of natural growth on both sides, suggested that his government sees a broad resolution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as far off: Bennett would not accept a Palestinian state, while many of his coalition partners like Rolls party see that as the best hope.

The conditions for a two-state solution are currently not ripe on either side, the minister said. But he highlighted that the idea of annexation absorbing the West Bank into Israel is now off the table.

The tense status quo is often bloody: In the latest flare-up between the two sides, earlier this year at least 280 Palestinians and 13 Israelis were killed.

Additionally, the feud drives broader instability across the Middle East as extremists cite the Palestinian plight to incite hatred and violence while embroiling the U.S. in the conflict and disputes over rights abuses. In addition to the $3.8 billion Israel receives annually in American military aid, the country recently requested $1 billion to resupply its missile defense system. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), a skeptic of foreign entanglements, has halted that request, but it could cause a high-profile fight in Congress in the coming months.

Andrew Harnik, Pool via Associated Press

U.S. officials and global affairs experts are also alarmed about the implications of Israels broader national security policy.

After media reports this year revealed that the Israeli surveillance company NSO Group sold its software to authoritarian governments to pursue opponents including human rights activists, the Biden administration blacklisted NSO and another firm connected to Israels intelligence community. This week, Apple sued NSO for breaching its systems, following Facebooks lead.

Meanwhile, a long-running shadow war between Israel and Iran threatens the Biden administrations efforts to restore the global accord that limited Iranian nuclear activity. That tussle could spark a dangerous, bigger fight: U.S. and Israeli intelligence shows that Iran in October struck an American facility to retaliate for Israeli airstrikes, The New York Times reported last week.

Separately, the Bennett administration has ignited outrage for its decision to ban six Palestinian rights groups for allegedly funding terrorism. The U.S. and other Israeli partners are questioning the move, and Israels critics note that it has previously targeted civil society on grounds that have later appeared shaky.

Roll told HuffPost that Israel can provide concrete evidence for its claims and that his government does not want to clash with international rights advocates the way Netanyahu did to whip up nationalistic fevor domestically.

This government, we dont have any blacklist, the minister said.

He emphasized that Bennetts government believes it can tackle thorny issues by relying on its placatory tone.

Israel is wary of Bidens attempt to reopen a U.S. mission to the Palestinians in Jerusalem, for instance. I understand the Biden administrations perspective on the matter and I know its one of the presidents campaign promises, Roll said, saying he sought creative solutions.

Above all, we want to do everything in a low-key manner and in a dignified manner because we cherish the fact that the United States is our most prominent and valued ally in the world, the minister added.

He said his team also plans more outreach to the new generation of both legislators and American Jews.

During his visit, however, Roll met friendly faces from Biden aides to centrist Democrats and Republican Sen. Bill Hagerty (Tenn.) and GOP Rep. Claudia Tenney (N.Y.) rather than prominent figures who frequently challenge Israel, such as the Squad of progressive members of Congress.

His governments continued wooing of Washington and Israels softer approach depend on its survival; the coalition agreement underpinning it is tenuous. But calling the fate of the Bennett administration an ever-hanging question, Roll said it had already disproved doubters by successfully passing a budget.

We know that we have differences, but we have proven we can manage to sit down and discuss what we dont agree on, the minister said. Now he and his allies must do the same with skeptics abroad.

More here:
Israel Is Launching A Complicated 'Reset' With The U.S. After Netanyahu - HuffPost

Ariel Gans| Medill News Service

Fauci blasts Paul for virus origins accusation

A heated exchange erupted on Capitol Hill between Dr. Anthony Fauci and Senator Rand Paul as the Kentucky Republican insinuated that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases chief is responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. (Nov. 4)

AP

WASHINGTON Dr. Anthony Fauci and Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., clashed at a Senate hearing Thursday over the origins of COVID-19, the latest in a series of high-profile skirmishes between the nation's top infectious disease expert and the junior senator from Kentucky.

COVID-19s origin has been a subject of global debate since the start of the outbreak. Yet scientists around the world have not reached a clear conclusion on how the pandemic started.

Paul and Fauci sparred over whether the National Institutes of Health funded "gain-of-function" research, the process of altering a pathogens transmissibility to help predict emerging diseases, at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The COVID-19 pandemic began in Wuhan, China, and some have speculated about whether the institute there was involved in the spread of the virus.

The facts are clear, the NIH (National Institutes of Health) did fund gain-of-function research in Wuhan, despite your protestations, Sen. Paul said.

Fauci objected, but Paul again attacked the scientist.

Until you accept responsibility, were not going to get anywhere close to trying to prevent another lab leak of this dangerous sort of experiment, Paul said. You wont admit that its dangerous, and for that lack of judgment I think its time that you resign.

You have said that I am unwilling to take any responsibility for the current pandemic. I have no responsibility for the current pandemic, Fauci said. He went on to clarify that current evidence indicates that COVID-19 naturally occurred and that he continues to support research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Paul interrupted once again, saying, if hes going to be dishonest he ought to be challenged.

COVID-19: New variant is here, but Fauci says not 'immediate threat'

A new COVID variant has emerged called mu, but Dr. Fauci says they are "keeping a very close eye on it."

Staff video, USA TODAY

As usual, and I have a great deal of respect for this body of the Senate, and it makes me very uncomfortable to have to say something, but he is egregiously incorrect in what he says, Fauci concluded.

History will figure that out on its own, Paul retorted.

The two officials have a history of sparring publicly. Paul grilled Fauci in July over whether the NIH funded what Paul called gain-of-function research.

The hearing comes two days after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended the COVID-19 vaccine made by Pfizer and BioNTech for children ages 5 through 11. The decision was in line with the Food and Drug Administration, which authorized emergency use of the pediatric dose on Friday.

Connecticut's Hartford hospital delivered some of the first early childhood doses Tuesday night. At a White House briefing Wednesday, President Joe Biden said the administration has secured enough vaccine supply for every American child.

In September, a group of 16 virologists, biologists and biosecurity specialists signed a letter urging more research on the issue in the weekly peer-reviewed medical journal The Lancet.

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Sen. Rand Paul calls for Anthony Fauci to resign in latest clash over origins of COVID-19 - USA TODAY

U.S. Rand Paul, R-Ky., spoke out Friday night on Fox News "The Ingraham Angle" in reaction to what host Laura Ingraham called the Biden administrations "spend-o-rama" agenda.

MANCHIN DISMISSIVELY CALLS SANDERS A SELF-DECLARED INDEPENDENT SOCIALIST

U.S. SEN. RAND PAUL, R-KY: Yeah, Ive been watching the trend for several years now and its actually why my wife and I wrote our book, "The Case Against Socialism," because we were alarmed that the trend lines were going up with people wanting more and more so-called "free things," wanting to experiment with socialism.

But I think now weve seen eight, nine months of Big Government Socialism coming from Biden, and people are starting to understand that there are consequences.

One of the consequences is prices are rising. Weve had the highest increase now in the cost of living for Social Security. But the question is will it keep up with prices? What if prices go up 10% next year? What happens to those on Social Security and those of lower-wage incomes?

So yes, I think the results are coming in. Big Government Socialism doesnt work and people are unhappy with it.

But this is important for people to know, but they also need to know the history of socialism: that every time its been tried in world history it always ends up with state-sponsored authoritarianism and violence. So its not a pleasant system to live in, but its also economically a terrible system if you want to try to get ahead for you and your family.

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Rand Paul: Bidens Big Government Socialism brings rising prices, other consequences - Fox News