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October 2017

Puerto Rico as Progressive Playground By Ken Masugi

Ken Masugi, PhD, has been a speechwriter for two Cabinet members and for Clarence Thomas, when he was Chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. He is co-author, editor, or co-editor of seven books on American politics. He has taught at the U.S. Air Force Academy, where he was Olin Distinguished Visiting Professor; James Madison College of Michigan State University; the Ashbrook Center of Ashland University; and Princeton University. https://amgreatness.com/2017/10/04/puerto-rico-as-progressive-playground/

President Trump’s press conference in Puerto Rico made clear that whatever the island’s political designation may be, Puerto Ricans are Americans and he will act accordingly. The Commonwealth’s recovery—and not just from this hurricane—is part of the goal of making America great again. But the difficulties involved extend far beyond differences in political status or institutions. Clearly, Puerto Rico’s lack of a strong civic culture hinders reconstruction and the storm that caused this mess is of a kind much worse than hurricanes.

For the most part, the battered island has been portrayed in the media as utterly helpless, dependent on a trickle of U.S. aid and battling a hostile president, who because he tweeted that some Puerto Rican politicians “want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort” is now taken to mean that there is something inherently and irredeemably wrong about the Puerto Rican people. The slander is as unjust as it was predictable. But focus on that distraction will only hinder efforts to help solve Puerto Rico’s current and ongoing real problems.

The President’s bluntness about the absence of local civic associations and vigorous local government once again exposes a sad—if incomplete—truth about Puerto Rico. It is absolutely fair to say that it lacks the emphasis on individual freedom Tocqueville appreciated in Americans, as working to benefit neighbors and cooperate in local ventures for the common good. This culture of civic engagement spurred by confident and free citizens helps explain the Texas and Florida reactions to less severe, but still deadly and destructive, storms.

But even beyond the much-commented on financial and other acute crises that permeate the culture of civic friendship in Puerto Rico, there is still more under the surface that helps to explain the deep roots of the problems that will make Puerto Rican disaster recovery much more difficult than it otherwise might have been.

The Commonwealth labors under a severe debility—not merely a “culture of poverty” abetted by Spanish imperialism—but rather its subjugation to the cutting edge of Progressive theory and practice. Puerto Rico could have been a model for how freedom might be a blessing for nations that dared for a higher dignity than colony status. Instead, as Puerto Rico was liberated from Spain, American Progressives made it a model for government planning and dependence. If President Trump is serious about deconstructing the administrative state, then those same principles that apply to the United States proper should apply even more to Puerto Rico. All Americans deserve freedom.

As crucial as Franklin Roosevelt is for understanding the way the United States is governed today, it is even more the case that understanding Rexford Tugwell (1891-1979) is crucial for understanding Puerto Rico. Tugwell was FDR’s appointee from 1941-1946 as Puerto Rico’s Governor and New Deal Brain Truster. To encapsulate the economist Tugwell’s ambitions, it is revealing that novelist Philip K. Dick (of Blade Runner fame) made Tugwell his “hero” in an earlier novel, The Man in the High Castle, about the U.S. under Nazi and Japanese rule.

The non-fictional Tugwell, however, poured his ambitions into turning Puerto Rico into a laboratory for the New Deal. He gushed that the island “was a planning agency of the kind that I had said to myself I would someday try to see set up somewhere. This was my opportunity.” According to historian Michael Lapp, “it used to be said there that when one asked Puerto Ricans to describe the typical family on the island, they would answer: ‘the father, the mother, the children, the grandparents and the resident social scientist.’” Tugwell’s conceit was that social scientists would make Puerto Rico a “showcase for democracy” and a model for post-colonial development.

Tugwell enlisted the Popular Democratic Party (PDP) to establish a planning board that would issue top-down reforms of the government, the university, and the economy, including state-owned industries and infrastructure. His successor governors continued this Progressive experimentation. The current governor, a graduate of MIT, with a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from the University of Michigan, is from the PDP.

BLM Shuts Down ACLU Free Speech Rally Because ‘Liberalism Is White Supremacy’ By John Ellis

Preparing to speak on “Students and the First Amendment” at William and Mary College, ClaireGastañaga, executive director of the ACLU’s Virginia chapter, found herself silenced by Black Lives Matter protestors.

An SJW activist herself, Gastañaga had just started her speech when the protestors marched to the stage. Holding placards, they silently lined up across the front of the auditorium.

One of the initial ironies happened as the protestors marched down the aisle. At that point, Gastañaga said, “Good, I like this. I’m going to talk to you about knowing your rights, and protests and demonstrations, which this illustrates very well. Then I’m going to respond to questions from the moderators, and then questions from the audience.”

Black Lives Matter W&M ignored her and broke into a chant of “ACLU, you protect Hitler, too.”

Repeatedly asking “whose side are you on?” the protestors kept up their chanting for nearly twenty minutes. Some of the more memorable (and ironic) chants included: “The oppressed are not impressed.” “Your free speech hides beneath white sheets.” “The revolution will not uphold the Constitution.” and “Liberalism is white supremacy.”

As the chanting ended, a young woman stepped to a microphone and delivered a speech accusing the ACLU of consistently being on the wrong side of history because they use their platform to promote white supremacy.

The planned speech eventually fizzled out as the protesters surrounded Gastañaga and prevented other students from asking questions. BLM W&M stuck around for another twenty minutes, chanting to what appeared to be an empty auditorium by the end.

Black Lives Matter W&M live streamed the event on their Facebook page and explained, ” In contrast to the ACLU, we want to reaffirm our position of zero tolerance for white supremacy no matter what form it decides to masquerade in.”

The revolution may not uphold the Constitution, but I bet they’re thankful that the Constitution stands in between them and government-led reprisals. A stunt like this one in a non-woke country would earn them a long stint in a gulag. If they spent more time in history class and less time making posters, they might have learned a little appreciation for a country that “oppresses” them by allowing them to disrupt free speech events.

William & Mary President Taylor Reveley released a statement that panders to SJWs and ignores the irony of the whole affair while refusing to name BLM as the protestors.

“William & Mary has a powerful commitment to the free play of ideas. We have a campus where respectful dialogue, especially in disagreement, is encouraged so that we can listen and learn from views that differ from our own, so that we can freely express our own views, and so that debate can occur. Unfortunately, that type of exchange was unable to take place Wednesday night when an event to discuss a very important matter – the meaning of the First Amendment — could not be held as planned.

The event, co-sponsored by William & Mary’s student-run programming organization Alma Mater Productions (AMP) and the ACLU, was entitled “Students and the First Amendment.” The anticipated conversation never occurred when protestors refused to allow Claire Guthrie Gastañaga, executive director of the ACLU of Virginia, to be heard. The protesters then drowned out students who gathered around Ms. Gastañaga seeking to ask her questions, hear her responses and voice their own concerns. CONTINUE AT SITE

Time for Trump to Decertify the Iran Deal By Roger L Simon

For all the talk of “morons” Wednesday — did Rex Tillerson call Donald Trump a moron and what does that mean, if anything — the real issue for those not transfixed by media gotcha games is the certification, or not, of something truly moronic: the Iran Nuclear Deal (JCPOA).

In normal times, devoid of mass murderers and endless natural disasters, the looming October 15 certification decision on this deal would be front and center in the national consciousness. It still should be because, ultimately, it is even more important than hurricanes and psychopathic killers. It’s about nuclear war.

The biggest mistake of the Obama years was not the Affordable Care Act — that can be fixed eventually — but the Iran deal, which has already resulted in massive catastrophe, causing irreparable damage. Iran, financially enriched by the agreement, has been able to play a growing and truly evil role throughout the Middle East (and even South America), but especially in the unending Syrian civil war through its brutal own Revolutionary Guard and its bloodthirsty Hezbollah cutouts. This war has undoubtedly changed the character of Europe forever by creating millions of refugees. Every one of our lives has been or will be affected by it, directly or indirectly. (Reminder: One of the Paris Bataclan theatre terrorists who slaughtered 130, more than twice Las Vegas, held a Syrian refugee passport.) Even now, as ISIS is being pushed back, Iran, not us or our allies, is moving in to take control of their territory. We can be sure the mullahs will use it to build children’s hospitals and cancer research institutes — either that or murder thousands more in the name of the Twelfth Imam.

Obama’s motivation to make this deal, to choose the mullahs’ side in the more than thousand-year-old Shiite-Sunni blood feud that comes to us as a horrifying ghost from the pre-Middle Ages, remains one of the great mysteries of our time. It was the kind of agreement only State Department bureaucrats could love or, for that matter, see. In that sense, the Iran Deal is a perfect “Swamp” agreement. Nobody really knows what’s in it, deliberately so — just like the Affordable Care Act, actually. Only in this instance, Nancy Pelosi did not have to tell us to sign it to know what’s in it, because it was never signed in the first place — nor intended to be. It was simply put in place — Constitution be damned — over the heads of an impotent Congress by Obama and his claque of unwise wise men and women.The Trump administration is expected to announce next week that it will not formally certify Iran as in compliance with the landmark nuclear agreement, a move that could kill the agreement and set the stage for Congress to reimpose harsh economic sanctions on the Islamic Republic, according to multiple U.S. officials and sources familiar with the situation.

While some senior Trump administration officials—including Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Defense James Mattis—are pushing for President Donald Trump to preserve the deal, it has become increasingly clear the president is frustrated with Iran’s continued tests of ballistic missile technology and rogue operations targeting U.S. forces in the region, according to these sources. CONTINUE AT SITE

Betraying Academic Freedom By Richard L. Cravatts

As the left exhibits paroxysms of moral outrage since the presidential election, the symptoms of Trump Derangement Syndrome are increasingly evident on university campuses.

One such instance of this irrationality was on display in August at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln when Katie Mullen, president of the school’s Turning Point USA chapter, was verbally harassed by leftist professors after she had set up a promotional table for the organization.

A video recording of the events shows a graduate teaching assistant and PhD student, Courtney Lawton, giving the middle finger to Mullen while carrying a sign saying, “Just say No! to Neo-Fascism!” and shouting “Neo-fascist Becky right here. Wants to destroy public schools, public universities, hates DACA kids,” “fuck Charlie Kirk [founder and executive director of Turning Point USA],” and “TPUSA Nazis,” among other repellent slurs.

Another professor, Amanda Gailey (founder of Nebraskans Against Gun Violence and a virulent critic of police and gun owners), taunted Mullen with a sign that stated, “Turning Point: please put me on your watchlist,” and others passing by aggressively accused the conservative student of being a white nationalist, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, and a fascist.

Even for campuses that normally tolerate ideological excesses from its leftist faculty and students, this behavior was a bit too much for the Nebraska administration, which quickly removed Lawton from her position as a lecturer and assigned her to nonteaching duties, commenting that her behavior “did not meet the university’s expectations for civility.”

Outraged by the unceremonious firing of one of their colleagues, fellow faculty, students, and union members organized a September rally on the Nebraska-Lincoln City campus sponsored by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) — purportedly to discuss issues of academic freedom but actually a protest of what they believed was Lawton’s unjustified termination. Ignoring the fact that Lawton had not engaged in debate or dialogue at all but had actually viciously bullied Mullen, her supporters sidestepped that inconvenient detail entirely, choosing instead to make Lawton the victim.

It was not Lawton’s outrageously uncivil behavior that was the problem here, English professor Fran Kaye, one of the protesters, asserted, but retaliation for daring to question Turning Point USA, a conservative organization.

There’s an important distinction to be made in this case, however. The lecture was reassigned and relieved of her teaching duties not because of the content of her speech or the views expressed therein, but for the manner in which she expressed them; specifically, her behavior, not her ideas, is what was inappropriate and violated the norms of both the school’s policies on academic free speech and conduct by students and faculty, but also the central idea of reasoned debate and dialogue. In fact, UNL’s own policies on graduate student conduct is very clear on this matter, stating that, “Professional conduct violations… are behaviors that make the workplace hostile for colleagues, supervisors or subordinates (e.g., undergraduate students) [emphasis added].”

Spain Tense as Catalonia Moves Toward Declaring Secession Answering king’s stern speech, region’s leader says many Catalans ‘expected another tone from you’ By Jeannette Neumann and Marina Force

BARCELONA—Catalonia set a course toward declaring its secession from Spain as soon as Monday after separatist parties requested the regional parliament convene that day to review the results of this week’s independence vote, injecting further tension in the standoff with the Spanish government.

The request came on Wednesday as Catalan President Carles Puigdemont made a televised address in which he took issue with a speech Spain’s king made the previous evening admonishing Catalonia’s leaders for “inadmissible disloyalty.” Addressing the monarch, Mr. Puigdemont said his speech had “disappointed many in Catalonia, who appreciate you…[and] expected another tone from you, a plea for dialogue and harmony.”

Two separatist parties that control Catalonia’s parliament petitioned Mr. Puigdemont to discuss the official results of Sunday’s referendum on independence, advancing the wealthy Spanish region toward declaring a split with Spain. Mr. Puigdemont, who has been at the head of Catalonia’s secession push and is a member of one of the parties, said this week Catalan leaders “will act over the weekend or early next week.”

Some lawmakers have said they would follow a controversial law they passed last month that requires them to declare independence within 48 hours of receiving the official results. Monday’s session “is to declare the independence of Catalonia,” said Mireia Boya, a Catalan lawmaker from the Popular Unity Candidacy (CUP), which has taken a hard line on secession.

“We will declare independence 48 hours after all the official results are counted,” Mr. Puigdemont said in an interview with BBC broadcast Tuesday. But despite the pledges, the timetable for any declaration of independence remained unclear.

Sunday’s vote, boycotted by opponents of independence, was marred by clashes with police that left nearly 900 people injured, according to regional authorities.

Tensions since have since risen further. On Tuesday, King Felipe VI, Spain’s head of state, accused Catalan leaders of undermining the rule of law. “They have attempted to break the unity of Spain and national sovereignty,” he said in a rare televised address.

Some Spaniards welcomed the king’s tough stance toward the separatist leaders, whom they blame for organizing an illegitimate referendum that has created a fissure not only in Spain, but also in Catalonia between those who support a break and those who don’t. CONTINUE AT SITE

What Do Professors Have to Do to Get Fired? A remarkable indictment from the Department of Justice. By James Freeman

The headline on this story is usually a rhetorical question, perhaps posed by parents wondering why they keep paying for the daily assaults on constitutional liberty and good sense that define the modern college campus. But there may soon be a definitive answer to this question, given recent charges filed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.

Last Friday morning Mamdouh Abdel-Sayed, a a full-time lecturer at the City University of New York’s Medgar Evers College, was arrested and charged in Manhattan federal court with fraud, corruption, and obstruction.

According to acting U.S. Attorney Joon H. Kim, the allegation is that Mr. Abdel-Sayed “abused his position to enrich himself by creating and selling fake certificates stating students had completed health care programs at the college.”

In a release from the U.S. Department of Justice, New York State Inspector General Catherine Leahy Scott alleges that the defendant “brazenly abused the name and resources of his college employer to operate what amounted to his own fraudulent trade school on the grounds of the City University of New York. He allegedly traded on the reputation of Medgar Evers College and pocketed all the fees students paid while undercutting legitimate schooling being performed by his colleagues across the campus.”

The New York Times reports that the biology instructor “offered classes on medical techniques, such as CPR and administering EKGs, that he was not authorized to teach, investigators said. They said he pocketed the fees and printed certificates on college letterhead from his computer. He encouraged students to use the certificates when applying for jobs — sometimes successfully — at hospitals and elsewhere, investigators said. He often held the classes at Medgar Evers on evenings or weekends when the college was less crowded, officials said.”

And the allegation gets worse, according to the Times. Quoting investigators, the paper reports that “Mr. Abdel-Sayed also engaged in ‘unsanitary and risky procedures’ in his class in drawing blood when he handed out needles and ‘suggested that students could attempt to draw blood from each other.’” This column can only guess how patients might have been affected when treated by people who have only bogus credentials rather than legitimate medical training.

But perhaps the most remarkable part of this story is New York IG Scott’s comment that the “defendant ignored repeated warnings.” When the university believes it has caught a professor defrauding both students and the university while putting lives in danger, it lets him off with a warning? “Medgar Evers officials first heard about Mr. Abdel-Sayed’s classes in 2015, and ordered him to cease and desist. But he continued teaching them,” reports the Times.CONTINUE AT SITE

DAVID COLLIER: MY NAME IS RACHEL TOO

On 2 October 1938, Arab ‘rioters’ infiltrated a Jewish neighbourhood
in Tiberias. They first cut the telephone wires to frustrate calls for
help. They then set about massacring innocent civilians. According to
the British:

‘It was systematically organized and savagely executed. Of the
nineteen Jews killed, including women and children, all save four were
stabbed to death.’

There were about 70 armed Arabs involved in the attack, they set fire
to Jewish homes and the local synagogue. According to Wiki ‘in one
house a mother, and her five children were killed’.

Wiki doesn’t explain that the father, Shimon Mizrachi, was elsewhere,
on guard duty protecting other families. Nor does the account give you
the names and ages of those five murdered children. Ezra (aged
twelve), Miriam (five), Yocheved (three), Samuel (two) and Hephzibah
(one).

It doesn’t give you the mother’s name either. The mother’s name was Rachel.

The Rachel of Kiryat Shmona

Kiryat Shmona is about 35 miles from Tiberias. A city in the Northern
District of Israel, near the Lebanese border.

On 11 April 1974, terrorists from the Popular Front for the Liberation
of Palestine (PFLP) attacked civilians in Kiryat Shmona. These
terrorists first tried to attack a school, but there was nobody
inside. Instead they attacked a nearby residential building. Rehov
(St) Yehuda Halevi number 15. They went from flat to flat in a
barbaric killing spree. Eighteen people were murdered, half of them
were children.

Anisa Stern (47) was one of the victims, killed alongside her
eight-year-old daughter. The daughter’s name was Rachel

The Rachel of Ma’alot-Tarshiha

Just a few weeks after the massacre in Kiryat Shmona, on the 12th May
1974, a group of fifteen to seventeen year old students set out on a
field trip of the Galilee. It was three days before Israel’s
twenty-sixth Independence Day. It was a large student group and they
had made arrangements to spend a night at the Netiv Meir School in
Ma’alot.

The same day, a group of terrorists from the Popular Democratic Front
for the Liberation of Palestine (PDFLP) had infiltrated into Israel.
They had attacked a van taking some Christian Arab women home from
work, then having reached the city of Ma’alot, approached some
residential buildings. When Fortuna and Yosef Cohen opened their door,
the terrorists shot and killed the couple, and their four-year-old
son, Eliahu.

New wave of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic activity emerges on campuses across US

By Rafael Medoff/JNS.org

Jewish college students returning after their summer break are encountering a wave of swastika daubings and anti-Israel activity on campuses across the country—and there are signs the hostility may intensify in the weeks ahead.

The latest incidents coincide with a new campaign by pro-Palestinian activists to portray Israel as a “white supremacist country,” linking the Jewish state to accusations about white supremacist activity in the U.S.

At Tufts University, near Boston, a “Disorientation Guide” prepared by militant students for incoming freshmen accused Israel of “white supremacy” and promoted “Israeli Apartheid Week,” which the Tufts branch of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) holds each spring.

The guide also charged that when Jewish groups at Tufts sponsored a talk by the parents of Trayvon Martin—the African-American teenager shot in Florida in 2012—they were “exploiting black voices for their own pro-Israel agenda.”

SJP activists at Columbia University were among the authors of the Columbia edition of the “Disorientation Guide.” The guide brands Israel “an apartheid state” and encourages incoming students to join their campaign, “Columbia University Apartheid Divest.”

Meanwhile, New York University (NYU) students recently published a “Disorientation Guide” of their own, in which they accuse the university of “myriad racist, Zionist, and homophobic policies,” and call for ending NYU’s study abroad program at Tel Aviv University. The guide falsely claims “students of Palestinian descent, or Arab descent more broadly, are distinctly prohibited from studying at the Tel Aviv site.”

Attacking Israel on stage

Jewish students at NYU can expect more tumult in October, when the university will host a 10-day run of “The Siege,” an anti-Israel play performed by a Palestinian theater troupe. The play portrays the Palestinian terrorists who took over Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity in 2002 as heroic fighters who were unfairly forced to leave the church grounds.

Also in October, SJP will hold its national conference, hosted by its chapter at the University of Houston. One theme will be that both Israel and the U.S. are “settler-colonial states” that were “built on the ideals of white supremacy.” The SJP website reports that workshops will prepare students “to return to their respective campuses with the tools, connections, and motivation to build new campaigns or fortify work already underway.”

According to data compiled by the AMCHA Initiative, which combats anti-Jewish activity on U.S. college campuses, there has been a significant increase in such incidents since the new school year began.

Since late August, swastikas have been daubed on the campuses of Stanford, Georgetown, Washington State, Brandeis, Avila and Drake universities, as well as Bowdoin and Williams colleges. At the University of Maryland-College Park, there have been four swastika incidents in the past month.
A mock Israeli checkpoint set up during “Israeli Apartheid Week” in May 2010 on the campus of University of California, Los Angeles. Credit: AMCHA Initiative.
A mock Israeli checkpoint set up during “Israeli Apartheid Week” in May 2010 on the campus of University of California, Los Angeles. Credit: AMCHA Initiative.

Recent anti-Israel activity by SJP chapters around the country has included a display of BDS posters at the University of Georgia, a meeting at Northeastern University offering “non-apartheid related hummus,” and a line of activists chanting “hey hey, ho ho, the apartheid has got to go” in front of an anti-Israel mural at Eastern Michigan University.

At the University of Mississippi, a recent op-ed in the student newspaper compared the BDS movement to Rosa Parks and the African-American community’s boycott of buses in Alabama in the 1950s. The SJP chapter at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst last week sponsored a speaker who accused Israel of pursuing “ethnic cleansing” and “ethnic purity.”