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April 2023

Trans ideology is destroying the university Gender-critical academics have become the enemy within.Lauren Smith

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/04/09/trans-ideology-is-destroying-the-university/

Academia is now hostile to free thought – especially when it comes to the trans debate. Few cases demonstrate this as clearly as that of London-based sociologist Dr Laura Favaro.

Last week, Favaro started a crowdfunding campaign to help her take her employer – City, University of London – to an employment tribunal. Favaro claims she was ostracised and ultimately dismissed by her university after writing about some of her research findings, which showed that gender-critical academics are terrified of openly expressing their views.

In 2020, Favaro joined City as a postdoctoral research fellow, where her main topic of study was the debate surrounding sex and gender. As part of her research, Favaro conducted interviews with 50 gender-studies academics on both sides of the trans debate, across multiple disciplines and universities. The gender-critical feminists she interviewed told her they face unrelenting harassment and intimidation. Some even claimed that their career progression had been blocked because of their views. Last year, Favaro wrote up some of these findings in Times Higher Education. Her research left her ‘in no doubt that a culture of discrimination, silencing and fear has taken hold across universities in England and many countries beyond’.

Favaro was warned by her interviewees that her research could get her into serious trouble. It was not uncommon, Favaro said, for participants to tell her that ‘everybody is going to hate you’ for talking openly about the culture of silence around sex and gender in universities. After her THE piece was published, those warnings quickly came true.

Favaro claims on her crowdfunding page that City was bombarded with vexatious complaints, which branded her research ‘unethical’. An investigation by City found these claims to be baseless. Nevertheless, she says she was ostracised and frozen out by her department. She claims she faced bullying and harassment from a senior colleague. She also alleges there were attempts to persuade her to destroy interview transcripts. Eventually, she was dismissed, despite being on a fixed-term contract. City is then alleged to have prevented her from accessing the data she collected, and to have locked the email account she had used to communicate with participants in her study. In short, Favaro allegedly faced exactly the kind of hostile treatment that her research was trying to draw attention to.

There is now a long line of academics who have been attacked and censored for speaking out against trans orthodoxy. Philosophy professor Kathleen Stock, author of Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism, was infamously hounded out of her role at the University of Sussex in 2021, after students waged a relentless campaign against her. In 2018, Rosa Freedman at the University of Reading found her door covered in urine after she spoke out against gender self-identification. Selina Todd, a professor of modern history at Oxford University, revealed in 2020 that she needs bodyguards to accompany her to lectures. The list goes on.

Stanford and Yale Are Elite No More Until the scion admits that he’s come to be defined by his own humiliations and no longer by his father’s success, he cannot hope to be elite again. By Sean Ross Callaghan

https://amgreatness.com/2023/04/09/stanford-and-yale-are-elite-no-more/

Once among the West’s most prestigious institutions, Stanford and Yale are now beset with addicts of ideology who bring them to shame. Recent crises there are vivid episodes in the decline of Western institutions, which now face a choice: Will they, like libertine scions, insist every hungover morning that their namesakes hide their spreading notoriety? Or will they sober up?

At Stanford Law School last month, Judge Kyle Duncan of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit came to speak on the rather academic topic of inter-court dialectic. A federal judge of any stripe used to be welcomed on a law-school campus like a legal celebrity. Federal judges have reached the pinnacle of their careers, and learning how they think should be the keen interest of would-be lawyers everywhere because persuading federal judges is how top lawyers get paid top dollar.

But at Stanford, supposedly a top training ground for future lawyers, Judge Duncan was greeted like a nun in a crack house by the school’s Woke cartel.

Students heckled him. “We hope your daughters get raped,” one shouted. Another screamed, “you scumbag!” One stood up and said, “I f— men. I can find the prostate. Why can’t you find the cl–?” Judge Duncan was unable even to begin his remarks before federal marshals had to whisk him off campus.

Before a few years ago, law students almost never acted this way. If they did, they regretted it. At the University of Chicago Law School, one student led the heckling of a speaking event, and he got expelled. But now, at law schools that are supposed to be our nation’s best, heckling is common—while consequences are scarce.

At Yale Law School last year, hundreds of students heckled a panel of Supreme Court lawyers. They raised their middle fingers. They stomped their feet and banged on the walls. One even screamed “b–ch!” None faced discipline.

These are students who have hit rock bottom, and the mark of their rock bottom is the mark of any addict’s, whether of substance or of ideology. It’s angry self-abasement. Their public vulgarity is their point because it’s a revenge they exact at the expense of their own dignity. By covering themselves in muck, they can say to their targets, “welcome to the pig sty: this is where you belong.”

Could the partition of India and Pakistan repeat itself in U.K. and Scotland? By Rajan Laad

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/04/could_the_partition_of_india_and_pakistan_repeat_itself_in_uk_and_scotland.html

When India was liberated from British rule more than 75 years ago, the territory was divided, or partitioned, into India and the new state of Pakistan; East Pakistan later became Bangladesh.

The British oversaw the partition along with the newly appointed Indian and Pakistani leaders in their respective newly formed nations.

British civil servant Sir Cyril Radcliffe drew up the borders between India and Pakistan, in 1947, dividing the sub-continent very roughly into:

a central and southern part, where Hindus had the majority
two parts in the north-west and north-east that mostly  Muslim population

But Hindus and Muslims were scattered throughout British India.

Hence, after the declaration of the partition, more than 15 million people traveled, often hundreds of miles, to cross the new frontiers to their respective nations. It has been called the largest exodus in human history.

Almost 75 years later, history may be repeating itself.

Last October, the United Kingdom swore in Rishi Sunak as their new prime minister. Sunak’s parents are Indian Hindus who migrated to the U.K. from East Africa. Sunak was born in Southampton in 1980. His father was a doctor, his mother was a pharmacist. He went to the boarding school Winchester College, then studied Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Oxford, and business at Stanford University in the U.S.

Baseball Home Runs Blamed on Global Warming It’s basic physics. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/baseball-home-runs-blamed-on-global-warming/

Americans, at least liberal ones, lost the right to make fun of Lysenkoism, phrenology and every bit of stupid pseudoscience some years back. Ever since, “the science” has become someone’s idea of an absurd routine, part Peter Sellers and part South Park, in which the goal is to say completely absurd things with a straight face.

At the current rate of descent into absurdity, it takes the occasional new low to even get any attention.

Climate change is making major league sluggers into even hotter hitters, sending an extra 50 or so home runs a year over the fences, a new study found.

It’s basic physics.

When air heats up, molecules move faster and away from each other, making the air less dense. Baseballs launched off a bat go farther through thinner air because there’s less resistance to slow the ball.

That also probably explains the four-minute mile. We think it’s a lesson about self-confidence, but actually the only reason Roger Bannister was able to do it and so many after him was because of global warming. He was able to run faster because the air was thinner due to global warming. It’s basic physics.

Also, Alex Ovechkin’s NHL record is probably best explained by global warming. As the ice melts due to global warming, goals become easier to score. It’s basic physics.

The latest research also shows that Michael Jordan’s entire career was due to global warming. It’s just basic physics. As the global warming particles penetrate the basketball, it becomes lighter. So do basketball shoes. The event horizon around the hoop is then hyperaccelerated through the 12th dimension every time someone uses a disposable plastic plate.

The good news is that all sorts of records can now be broken as long as we just keep driving gas cars and feeding environmental consultants to packs of hungry wolves.

It’s basic physics.

Contemplate the Rise in Religious Hatred, Then Confront It by Lawrence Kadish

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19573/confront-religious-hatred

As Jews around the world gather this week to observe the holiday of Passover and as Christians celebrate Easter, and Muslims, Ramadan, it comes at a time when violent acts of anti-Semitism and the slaughter of Christians have spiked as incidents have been reported around the world.

It is one of history’s oldest and most virulent of prejudices where Jews have cynically been used as scapegoats by empires and despots to ensure their own survival.

As early as 1899, following a year in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the iconic American author Mark Twain observed that the leaders of the Habsburg Empire directed scorn at the Jewish community to maintain unity within their precarious empire.

Twain would take stock of the Jewish will to survive throughout multiple epochs by writing, “He has made a marvellous fight in this world, in all the ages; and has done it with his hands tied behind him.”

The Passover holiday that observes the Jewish exodus from Egypt is just one more chapter in the history of a people that have been singled out for persecution. While history, and today’s headlines, remind us there are others who have suffered violent religious bigotry, none were the victims of an organized genocide that enlisted the power of a modern state to commit murder on an industrialized scale.

No Money, No Nukes: Time to Bankrupt China’s Regime by Gordon G. Chang

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19572/bankrupt-china-regime

America can stop China’s nuclear weapons development and other monumental programs.

The Chinese Communist Party needs America for, among other things, money, and the U.S. does not have to provide it.

In reality, China’s economy in 2022, after price adjustments, almost certainly contracted, perhaps by as much as 3%.

Exports fell 6.8% year-on-year. More significantly, imports, one of the best reflections of domestic demand, plunged 10.2%.

“Everything is down, whether plane travel, freight, or buying on the Alibaba platforms.” — Anne Stevenson-Yang, author of China Alone: Return to Isolation, to Gatestone, April 2023.

China, therefore, needs factory orders from abroad and foreign investment. The American president can crimp both of these lifelines by, among other things, using his authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 and by joining or liberalizing free-trade agreements with other countries. For instance, U.S. President Joe Biden could encourage factories to move to the Western hemisphere by making a few fixes to the Dominican Republic-Central America-United States Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR). The American market is the largest in the world, and the president can use it to redirect trade flows.

“We now know that China spent $240 billion on country bailouts from 2008 to 2021, correlating with a drop in Chinese lending for infrastructure projects that are the core of this Belt and Road Initiative. It is clear that China is now overstretched and unable to continue with the BRI overall plan into the foreseeable future.” — China analyst Charles Burton of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, to Gatestone, April 2023.

Municipalities and cities across China have not been able to pay civil servant salaries and promised benefits, and for months there have been protests, even in wealthy cities like Wuhan in Hubei province and Dalian in Liaoning.

There is a lot America can do to stop China’s fast buildup of its most dangerous arsenal, and in any case Americans must not under any circumstances fund, with trade and investment, the weapons pointed at them.

President Ronald Reagan bankrupted the Soviet Union by reducing the flow of cash to Moscow. It is now time to bankrupt China.

After all, no money, no nukes.

“We are probably not going to be able to do anything to stop, slow down, disrupt, interdict, or destroy the Chinese nuclear development program that they have projected out over the next 10 to 20 years,” said Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley on March 29 at a hearing of the House Armed Services Committee. “They’re going to do that in accordance with their own plan.”

The Border: 10,000 Apprehensions in 48 Hours And those are just the people who got caught. by Robert Spencer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-border-10000-apprehensions-in-48-hours/

What was once known as the Southern border of the United States is essentially nonexistent in this time of Biden regime misrule, and so it was no surprise Wednesday when Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz tweeted some figures showing just how bad the border area has become:

Past 48 Hours…

– 10,070 Apprehensions

– 52 lbs. of Fentanyl

– 38 lbs. of Ecstasy

– 11 lbs. of Meth

– 11 lbs. of Cocaine

– $48,000 Seized

– 20 Firearms

– 5 Stolen Vehicles Recovered

– 5 Sex Offenders

– 4 Warrants

– 1 Gang Member

Significant numbers for just 2 days!

Indeed, and it was just business as usual for the border, although Ortiz didn’t mention the terrorists. It came to light last October that up to that point in 2022, the Border Patrol had caught at least 98 people at the border who are on terror watchlists. There is no indication that they’ve stopped coming since then. Terrorists can see what’s happening at the border as much as anyone else can; why shouldn’t they take advantage of the mess Old Joe has made? And those 98, of course, were just the ones who got caught.

Ron DeSantis: The next Scott Walker? Joe Concha

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/3940807-ron-desantis-the-next-scott-walker/

“After listening to Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin as he has traveled the country preparing his campaign for president, which officially begins on Monday, admiring voters most often describe him as ‘authentic,’ ‘real’ and ‘approachable,” Mr. Walker’s advisers say.” 

That’s the opening paragraph of a July 2015 New York Times story following Scott Walker’s announcement of a presidential run. The hype for Walker was palpable. Here we had a young governor who had won three gubernatorial elections in the swing state of Wisconsin with tons of momentum seeking the GOP nomination. As a result, Walker was leading in a Monmouth University poll at the time over Donald Trump 22 percent to 13 percent in a crowded field. 

But a funny thing happened on the way to the nomination: Walker disappeared among the 17 other candidates seeking to represent the GOP. Within two months of his announcement, he had gone from frontrunner to near the bottom of the polls, capturing just 2 percent support in a September 2015 ABC News/Washington Post poll nationally and 3 percent in a Quinnipiac poll among Iowans. 

Many point to Walker’s careful approach, low-key manner and lackluster debate performances for his downfall. As ABC News noted after one debate:

“Walker’s performance came across to many observers as overly cautious and scripted. Sticking closely to his talking points throughout, Walker spoke quickly when it was his turn and didn’t use up all the time he was allotted. To the extent that Google search data offers insight into how voters responded to candidates’ debate performance, Walker’s name was one of the least searched during the debate.”

Passover and a Warning to America Eileen F. Toplansky

“Our current leaders’ indifference to this existential threat as well as the spurning of core American beliefs and values are endangering our children’s future and undermining our very existence as the land of freedom and opportunity.”

The Jewish holiday of Passover is now being celebrated around the world.  The Haggadah is the guidebook  that helps Jews understand the circumstances of slavery while they grapple with profound questions and ideas that animate the holiday.

Because questions are vital to the understanding of Passover, rabbis of old would create commentaries on the Hebrew Scriptures.  These are known as midrash. In its broadest sense, a midrash is an interpretation or interweaving of Jewish historical events in order to see a larger picture.  A midrash can span very different time periods, yet ultimately there is a logic to be found as Jews seek to understand G-d’s intentions.

Centered on the liberation of the Jews from the cruel hands of Pharoah, the holiday examines how G-d helped the Jewish people through their tribulations. Indeed, Pharoah had issued an edict that ordered that all Israelite male children be murdered by being drowned at birth.  It is clearly stated in Exodus 1:22 that “every boy that is born, you shall throw into the river and every girl you shall keep alive”

Can Anyone Beat Biden Or Trump In 2024 Primaries? I&I/TIPP Poll-Terry Jones

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/04/10/can-anyone-beat-biden-or-trump-in-2024-primaries-ii-tipp-poll/

It’s April but, with just 10 months to go, the clock is ticking down to January when the first two states (Iowa and New Hampshire) pick their favorites for president. The clear favorite for the Democrats is President Joe Biden, and for Republicans, former President Donald Trump. But neither contender can take their lead for granted, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll shows.

Look at the Democrats, for example. Biden is favored by 39% of Democrats and Democrat-leaning voters. That’s a four-point drop from 43% in March, according to the April online I&I/TIPP Poll of 662 Democrats/independents who lean Democrat, taken from March 29-31.
The poll has a +/-4.0 percentage percentage point margin of error.

Who’s No. 2? Well, it’s not a person. It’s “Not sure/Someone else,” which received 11% of the responses. The only other “challenger” within even sniffing distance of double digits is Michelle Obama, at 8%, the same reading as March.

What about Vice President Kamala Harris? Unable to reverse her flagging popularity, she actually fell in the latest poll, from 9% backing in March to just 7% in April.

Only Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has increased his tally, going from 3% support to 5% in April, a gain that’s still within the margin of error.