Displaying posts published in

June 2024

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Conservatives Must Keep Up Pressure on Higher Ed To Stop DEI By Eric Kaufmann

By on June 19th, 2024

https://www.newsweek.com/conservatives-must-keep-pressure-higher-ed-stop-dei-opinion-1912635

Pressure from Republican politicians and conservative donors is beginning to cause Harvard, MIT, and other elite institutions to grudgingly step back from progressive illiberalism.

Consider Senator J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) and Representative Michael Cloud’s (R-Tex.) new Dismantle DEI Act, which would eliminate mandatory diversity statements as well as Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) administrators and initiatives in the federal government. Critically, the measure hits National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health research funding, two of the worst DEI offenders, dramatically changing the incentive structure of American academic research.

Some conservatives cling to an optimistic conceit that a quiet majority of university faculty oppose woke policies and are suddenly acquiring the confidence to challenge radical activists, but this is not borne out by the evidence. Lawmakers like Vance and Cloud have a key role to play in the ongoing battle to restore political neutrality and expressive freedom to the nation’s institutions, schools, and wider public culture.

Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences recently announced an end to the use of mandatory diversity statements in hiring. Diversity statements require applicants for jobs, promotions, or grants to demonstrate how they will advance DEI principles as a condition of success.

This requirement discriminates against conservative and classical liberal applicants who, reflecting the views of a majority of Americans, prioritize equal treatment, objective truth, and freedom of speech above equal outcomes and emotional safety for minorities. Diversity statements are loyalty oaths which violate applicants’ freedom of conscience and discriminate on the basis of philosophical belief.

Harvard’s scrapping of diversity statements follows a similar move from MIT, the first elite blue-state institution to do so. Harvard has also vowed to remain neutral on political questions that do not concern the university’s narrow self-interest.

Why the shift?

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MEDIA Comments turned off

The media’s great awokening is alienating the masses Audiences are fed up with newspapers, Hollywood and Big Tech all singing from the same woke hymn sheet. Joel Kotkin

By on June 19th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/06/17/the-medias-great-awokening-is-alienating-the-masses/

When I was a cub reporter working at the Washington Post a half-century ago, being a journalist was first and foremost a craft. I once tried to slip my opinion into an article, but my editor wrote on the copy that ‘nobody gives a shit what you think’.

It was harsh, but good training. Our primary job as journalists was not to indoctrinate but to inform. Even when writing an opinion piece, you would try backing up assertions with facts and leave room for the possibility that your point of view may not be the only permissible one.

All this may seem quaint today, as the news media – television, print, magazines and online blogs – now serve increasingly as ideological provocateurs. Overall, the whole industry is losing the trust of the public. This has now reached a nadir. In 2005, 50 per cent of Americans had confidence in the mass media. Barely a third do today, notes Gallup. Trust has also been dropping among all age groups, according to Pew.

One might have thought that the internet revolution and the growth of the ‘demassified media’ would benefit the customer, as futurist Alvin Toffler optimistically predicted. But today, just a handful of companies control the information pipelines and they largely follow the same script. Nearly two-thirds of US young adults now get their news through the big social-media platforms, like Facebook, X and TikTok.

These platforms use the content of the traditional media, largely without paying for it. Meanwhile, newspaper subscriptions, online and otherwise, have dropped from over 60million to barely 20million in three decades. ‘When you look at what’s evolved’, says Alan Fisco, president of the Seattle Times, ‘and the amount of revenue that’s going to the Googles and Facebooks of the world, we are getting the crumbs off the table’.

Like the barbarians who conquered Rome, the oligarchs have developed a taste for the vestigial print world they helped to destroy. Since the 2010s, tech moguls and their relatives have bought the New Republic, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times and the long-distressed Time magazine.

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NATIONAL SECURITY AND DEFENSE Comments turned off

Lawrence Kadish: The Russians are Coming

By on June 19th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20711/the-russians-are-coming\

The Russians are coming. Again.

In a dramatic reminder that the Russians are seeking to intimidate the White House and launch a second chapter of the Cold War, a Russian nuclear-powered submarine, along with an accompanying flotilla of warships, recently spent five days visiting Cuba. In the event, the Oval Office missed the point; several of these vessels can deploy nuclear-tipped cruise missiles.

Published reports suggest the Biden Administration’s response is studied indifference, telling reporters that missile test firings off the Florida coast by the Russian vessels were routine.

Hardly.

Putin’s navy is reminding the United States that it has recaptured the Soviet Union’s ability to project naval power where and when it wants. And by extension, that if it wishes to send a potent reminder that it has the coordinates of America’s cities if it ever came to unleashing the unimaginable, it doesn’t need to base ballistic missiles in Cuba.

This display of military power by an adversary on the march is not something that has gone unnoticed by the American public. In a recent poll conducted by McLaughlin Associates, it becomes clear that our citizens are seeking strong, resolute, and unequivocal national leadership at a time of historic international tensions.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

The left’s lies: A warning for America’s very survival. Victor Sharpe

By on June 19th, 2024

https://www.renewamerica.com/columns/sharpe

The Democratic Party is now irretrievably the party of Leftwing radicals, the so-called progressives whose behavior should better be described as fatally regressive.

What once united Republicans and Democrats, Conservatives and Liberals has disappeared. Gone are the days when secure borders, national sovereignty, religious freedom along with national pride were a shared American value, instead all came under a sustained and deliberate attack during the eight long years of the Barack Hussein Obama regime. He proclaimed that he had come to transform America and so many cheered loudly.

Our tragedy now is that there is not enough conservative media to combat the tidal wave of misinformation and deception which enslaves the minds of millions of our ill-informed citizens.

If good people know too little about what is going on it is because they are fooled by watching ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, CNN, MSNBC or by reading the New York Times and the Washington Post. How tragic that the great profession of journalism, with a few honorable exceptions, has become the propaganda arm of the Democrat Socialist party led by the same Obama as dire puppet master pulling Joe Biden’s strings.

President Trump was not acting as a dictator as some liberal friends of mine shamefully suggested. No, he was fulfilling his Constitutional duty to prevent the burning down of Federal buildings and protecting American citizens from the violence of Antifa and BLM because left wing Democrat mayors told their police to stand down.

We must ask ourselves if viewers of the nightly news truly believe what the Mainstream Media is telling them is the truth. If they still do, then we have reached the terrifying reality of how easily and how far good fellow Americans can be manipulated and deceived.

We are thus being put into the same position that existed in 1776 where Americans were being forced to fight for the continuing existence of freedom and liberty. Political Correctness is the enemy of free speech. Historical Correctness is thus constantly betrayed.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Jihadists Brutalize Non-Muslim Women, Feminists in West Remain Silent by Uzay Bulut

By on June 19th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20710/jihadists-brutalize-non-muslim-women

Today, June 19, the United Nations will observe the annual International Day for the Elimination of Sexual Violence in Conflict. Yet, it took the UN five months to document and condemn Hamas’ sexual crimes on October 7.

These crimes are reminiscent of the crimes ISIS (Islamic State) committed against Christians and Yazidis during and after their violent takeover of large parts of Iraq and Syria in 2014.

Sexual assault as a military tactic has commonly been used by Islamic terrorists since the seventh century, worldwide.

More than 2,600 abducted Yazidi women and children are to this day still waiting to be rescued from the hands of ISIS terrorists.

Teenage girls abducted by Islamic State terrorists in Iraq and Syria were sold in slave markets “for as little as a pack of cigarettes,” the UN envoy on sexual violence, Zainab Bangura, said.

“Since October 7th, the media has suppressed your [Israelis’] story, even going so far as to claim it never happened while others justified it as warranted resistance to Israeli oppression. Someone please tell me where children bound and shot to death with their guts cut out constitutes a warranted resistance… We live in a time where intelligent people are being silenced so that stupid people are not offended…. The media is actively suppressing the events of October 7th to rewrite history according to their chosen narrative…. It all boils down to likes, views, and revenue for them.” — Steve Maman, founder of The Liberation of Christian and Yazidi Children of Iraq.

“[On October 7], humiliation, mutilation and murder took place during those rapes. Woman raped in front of their loved ones and then shot. Knives inserted into their private parts. Scalped heads. Nails inserted into woman’s private areas. Indescribable pain must have taken place before death…. Attacking innocent people and subjecting hostages to torture is not an act of freedom fighting…. The global response to victims of radical Islam has consistently been one of silence, allowing such atrocities to continue unchecked, perpetuating a cycle of violence.” — Steve Maman.

Regarding the Israeli women who were brutally raped by Hamas terrorists and their supporters, many of those women’s organizations have engaged in total denial, refusing to believe Israeli women and all the evidence in front of their eyes…. What their silence and denials have actually done is only to cover up and further the crimes of Hamas and other terrorist groups. In April 2024, the NGO CyberWell released a report on the widespread online denial of Hamas’s October 7 sexual violence…. The Women’s Alliance for Security Leadership, for instance, still has not issued a statement.

Many feminist and human-rights groups — such as Amnesty International and the National Organization for Women— have said little about the sexual crimes Gazans committed against Israelis. The United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (also known as UN-Women) waited until December 1, nearly two months after the October 7 massacre, to make a superficial statement of condemnation.

Among others, UN-Women released a statement on October 13 equating the Hamas brutalities with Israel’s self-defense. Likewise, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) neglected to explicitly condemn Hamas’s atrocities. And the international #MeToo movement completely failed to mention Hamas — or the Israeli victims.

When it comes to abused and raped Israeli women, those women’s rights and human rights organizations have chosen to be on the side of rapists and murderers and to enable jihadist terrorism.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Our Intel Agencies Celebrate Pride by Prioritizing Nail Painting Over National Security We are officially a fundamentally unserious nation. by Mark Tapson

By on June 19th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/our-intel-agencies-celebrate-pride-by-prioritizing-nail-painting-over-national-security/

Under the Biden administration, America has taken many wrong turns, but what may prove to be one of the most consequential is quite simply the fact that we are becoming a fundamentally unserious nation, one that is throwing away its self-respect, its dignity, its gravitas, if you will, in the name of embracing the emasculating gender ideology that has become the tip of the spear of the cultural Marxist subversion of America.

To demonstrate this tragic state of affairs, let me share with you something at the Daily Wire which caught my eye, an exclusive there regarding how President Biden’s intelligence community is celebrating the so-called “Pride Month” of June with, among other activities, free trans flag manicures for agents who would otherwise be occupied with our national security.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) is an agency which oversees the rest of the intel community, including the CIA, FBI, NSA, and intelligence departments in each branch of the military. It is celebrating Pride Month – an entire month devoted to the mandatory celebration of transgressive sexual proclivities – by inviting intelligence agents to have the transgender flag painted on their nails, participate in a “Pride Ally Challenge,” and learn all about non-binary identity from a “Filipinx” activist. (The “x,” for those are blessedly ignorant of such things, is a non-binary suffix that gender activists are desperately trying – and failing – to normalize.)

The Daily Wire came into possession of a document which outlines nine different Pride Month activities which occurred on June 4th during work hours. So at a time when intel officers should have been focused on thwarting terror plots or investigating violent political movements like Antifa, they had the opportunity to have their nails painted with trans flags, or even to learn how to crochet their very own pride flags!

The document reads,

For nail painting, we’ll have our pro team of FVEY artistes ready to decorate you ready for Pride Month, with the option of celebrating pride or trans flag colors. If you don’t normally paint your nails, or have never done so, all the better! We’ll do everything for you, and you might just love it. What better way to show your allyship to the community?

Cringeworthy, to say the least. FVEY, by the way, is an awkward acronym which refers to the Five Eyes Intelligence Alliance of the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. This reference suggests that intelligence agents from those countries may have been invited to the nail painting event as well.

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MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

The Murky Business of Transgender Medicine: Christopher Rufo

By on June 19th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-murky-business-of-transgender-medicine
The “gender-affirming care” business has always had an aura of madness around it. Wielding the authority of white coats and prestigious degrees, doctors have convinced large swaths of the public that some children are “born in the wrong body.” The solution? Stop puberty, prescribe cross-sex hormones, and then, with the stroke of a knife, remove body parts—most commonly breasts, less frequently genitalia.

These medical practices use scientific rhetoric to affirm what is, at bottom, an ideological program. And gender activists have been successful enough at capturing the legitimizing institutions—medical societies, regulatory bodies, and teaching hospitals—to repel most challenges to the burgeoning child sex-change industry. 

Now, though, the consensus appears to be shifting. European governments have backed away from many of these dubious procedures. In England, the Cass Review has raised grave questions about the scientific evidence behind “gender-affirming care.” In the United States, the public has turned decisively against the use of puberty blockers and gender surgeries on minors, with some state legislatures banning the practice. 

I have reported on one of these programs, the pediatric gender clinic at Texas Children’s Hospital. Last year, I published an investigation demonstrating that, though it had promised to shut down its program, Texas Children’s had continued to administer hormone drugs to children as young as 11. Following the story, the state attorney general launched an investigation, and state legislators passed a bill, SB 14, prohibiting all transgender medical interventions on minors.

While these scandals caught the headlines, another story involving the same institution was brewing in the background: medical fraud. 

According to a new whistleblower, doctors at Texas Children’s Hospital were willing to falsify medical records and break the law to keep practicing “gender-affirming care.” Caught in the wave of ideological fervor, two of the hospital’s prominent physicians, Richard Ogden Roberts and David Paul, cut corners and, according to the whistleblower, committed Medicaid fraud to secure funds for the hospital’s child sex-change program.

(Texas Children’s Hospital, Roberts, and Paul did not respond to a request for comment.)

This is a story of fanaticism, hubris, and the murky business of transgender medicine. It would have remained hidden, except for the courage of two people inside the hospital, a surgeon named Eithan Haim and a nurse who has now decided to come forward. Both have risked much to alert the public to the barbarism that is occurring at the nation’s largest, and arguably most prestigious, children’s hospital.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

NEW GROUP RAISES AWARENESS OF ISLAMIC TERROR IN AFRICA

By on June 19th, 2024

http://(www.africanjewishalliance.org

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Many Americans are unaware that terror attacks, like the October 7 massacre of Israelis, are committed every few days in Africa against innocent Christians and moderate Muslims. In Nigeria, Sudan, and other African nations, Islamists routinely converge upon villages while burning, raping, murdering, abducting, and enslaving the innocent inhabitants.

Because they have been shockingly ignored and under-reported in the West, these ongoing atrocities in Africa have been called a “silent genocide.”

The African-Jewish Alliance was formed to bring awareness to the shared origin of these crimes against humanity: the Islamist supremacist ideology which motivates Hamas in Gaza, Boko Haram in Nigeria, the Janjaweed and its derivatives in Darfur, and many other actors throughout Africa. All operate in the same manner: raids, murder, torture, burning, rape, and abduction of innocents for ransom or use as slaves. The slaughter and kidnapping of Israeli Jews is but one arm of a global jihadist movement that extends to Africa and beyond.

On June 25 and 26, the African-Jewish Alliance will host a groundbreaking summit in which representatives from the African and Jewish communities will join U.S. officials and journalists in raising awareness of this silent genocide, as well to expose the ideological connections between the “free Palestine” movement in the U.S. and Islamic terrorism in Africa and Israel.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel Embodies the Tension at the Heart of the West By Natan Ehrenreich

By on June 19th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/06/israel-embodies-the-tension-at-the-heart-of-the-west/

Alongside high-tech marvels, a love of ancient traditions

El Al Airlines, the flagship carrier of the State of Israel, is the only commercial airline in the world that equips its fleet with anti-missile-defense systems. At times, that might have seemed excessive. But in 2024, no one is questioning that necessity as El Al 787s take off and land at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport, just an hour away by car from the Gaza Strip.

Security considerations have forced El Al to become arguably the world’s most modern and technologically advanced airline. It may also be the world’s most traditional. Passengers flying on El Al have access to a host of Western movies and TV shows, but many choose instead to spend their time 30,000 feet in the air watching or listening to one of El Al’s many Torah-study videos and podcasts. As I listened to one while above the Atlantic last week, I couldn’t help but notice the contrast: the ancient words of the Torah alongside the modern flourishes of the 787 aircraft. In many ways, it’s that tension, between the truly ancient and the decidedly modern, that defines the Jewish state.

After I exited the plane in Tel Aviv, I passed through the arrivals hallway in Ben Gurion Airport, which I had walked through many times as a child. This time, the hallway looked different. From beginning to end, it was lined with posters of Israeli hostages still held by Hamas — the Jewish state ensures that no visitor who arrives at Ben Gurion leaves the airport unaware of the ordeal the country now faces.

My face transformed from frown to smile as my gaze shifted from the hostage posters to my two cousins, both members of the IDF, who had come to pick me up. This was a tearful reunion, for my family had narrowly escaped the tragedy faced by so many other Jewish families in Israel since October 7. On that day, when my younger cousin was home for the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah, his unit was manning a base in southern Israel near the Gaza Strip. When Hamas invaded, they murdered one of his best friends. In the weeks and months that followed, my older cousin was one of the heroes tasked with fighting Hamas in Gaza. He told me of the horror he felt as he accidentally stepped on a land mine, likely one of the many booby traps the Hamas savages had placed for soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces. When he stepped off the mine, however, something miraculous happened: It didn’t explode. As I walked with my cousins past the airport’s large statue of David Ben-Gurion, I thanked God for the chance to see them again, and I remembered the words of Israel’s first prime minister: “In Israel, in order to be a realist, you must believe in miracles.”

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Amnesties All the Way Down By Mark Krikorian

By on June 19th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/amnesties-all-the-way-down/

The amnesty the White House announced today is simply the latest — and maybe not even the largest — of its many unilateral decrees legalizing and/or letting into the country individuals who have no right to be in the United States. Unless Congress is willing to completely cede its power over immigration, as it has over war-making, it will at some point need to radically restrict a president’s discretion, in detail and without waivers or wiggle room.

This latest executive diktat from the defenders of democracy would give work permits and Social Security numbers to an estimated half a million illegal-alien spouses of U.S. citizens, plus 50,000 illegal-aliens kids of those spouses. It’s called “parole in place,” which was totally made up in 2020, when Speaker Nancy Pelosi snuck it past the asleep-at-the-switch Republican Senate for the spouses of military personnel only.

Immigration parole is supposed to be a narrow exception to immigration limits, temporarily allowing in what is supposed to be a handful of inadmissible aliens for things like emergency medical treatment or court testimony, after which they’re supposed to be escorted back to the border. This administration has already used it to admit more than a million foreigners who don’t qualify for legal entry.

The parole-in-place confection paroles someone retroactively, thus legalizing a border-jumper’s infiltration into the U.S. It confers significant benefits: beyond a work permit and SSN, it also puts beneficiaries on the path to welfare eligibility, a green card, and eventual citizenship.

As my colleague Andrew Arthur points out, even if the program survives court challenge, it incentivizes large-scale fraud and will further lengthen the wait for foreign spouses of U.S. citizens who are waiting for authorization to enter the U.S. legally.

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