ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Georgia Thwarts Trump’s ‘Kingmaker’ Role By Susan Crabtree

Posted By on May 25th, 2022

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/05/25/georgia_thwarts_trumps_kingmaker_role__147651.html

In the end, it was much ado about nothing in Georgia except for political grandstanding.

Since the state swung narrowly in Joe Biden’s favor in 2020, Donald Trump vowed to seek revenge. The improbable targets of his ire were Georgia Republicans, specifically Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. Although both men had backed the former president in his reelection bid, neither would join Trump in contesting the GOP ticket’s razor-thin loss. Trump recruited newly defeated Republican Sen. David Perdue to challenge Kemp for his seat, appeared in TV ads, and spent millions from his political action committee on Perdue’s behalf. Trump also endorsed Rep. Jody Hice, who challenged Raffensperger.

Millions of words were written and much airtime expended handicapping whether Georgia would show that Trump had molded the Republican Party in his own likeness. It didn’t happen Tuesday night, at least not in Georgia. Kemp maintained his early lead in the polls while earning the endorsement of former Vice President Mike Pence along the way and cruising to an easy victory – as did Raffensperger. Pence, largely written off by the media, looked more prescient, if not instantly relevant. In an appearance with Kemp on the eve of the election, Pence called a vote for Kemp a “deafening message” that the Republican Party is “the party of the future,” stirring new headlines that he is positioning himself for a presidential run in 2024.

In the end, Kemp easily bested Perdue, more than tripling the votes the former senator received and setting up a rematch election against Stacey Abrams, whom he defeated in the 2018 general election.

But Georgia is only one state. Trump has racked up a mixed record in contested primaries so far this year while wading into various contests to settle old scores or establish himself as a kingmaker. J.D. Vance, the Yale law school graduate and venture capitalist turned author, undoubtedly has Trump to thank for his win in Ohio’s GOP Senate primary. Likewise, Mehmet Oz, the celebrity doctor backed by Trump in Pennsylvania’s GOP Senate race, leads by just under 1,000 votes in a race against hedge fund executive David McCormick, which appears headed for a recount.

In the end, it was much ado about nothing in Georgia except for political grandstanding.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Don’t Surrender To Do-Somethingism On Guns By: David Harsanyi

Posted By on May 25th, 2022

https://thefederalist.com/2022/05/25/dont-surrender-to-do-somethingism-on-guns/

Law-abiding Americans have no obligation to take ownership of a madman’s actions.

Before we even knew how the killer of 19 children and two adults at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, had obtained his guns, Chris Murphy was engaging in his customary performative emotionalism on the Senate floor, literally begging Republicans to “compromise.”

Compromise on what exactly? Murphy has never once offered a single proposal that would have deterred any of these mass shooters. Literally minutes after his routine, Murphy was asked about the obvious mental illness prevalent among most of these shooters. “Spare me the bullsh-t about mental illness,” the Connecticut senator responded, “ripping” the GOP. “We don’t have any more mental illness than any other country in the world.” That’s how serious he is about compromise.

Whether America is more prone to mental illness or not, these incidents are almost exclusively perpetrated by young men who have exhibited serious anti-social behavior.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

ESG’s power grows as banker is canceled for talking sense on climate change By Rupert Darwall

Posted By on May 25th, 2022

https://nypost.com/2022/05/24/hsbc-banker-stuart-kirk-suspended-for-climate-change-remarks/

Last Thursday, something extraordinary happened: A senior HSBC banker, Stuart Kirk, told the world that climate change, though real, is not something financial markets need worry about. “Unsubstantiated, shrill, apocalyptic warnings are ALWAYS wrong,” one of Kirk’s presentation slides read.

The reaction was instantaneous. Christiana Figueres, former head of the United Nations climate secretariat, denounced Kirk’s remarks as “abhorrently outrageous,” words that might well describe Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine — but a banker’s presentation analyzing climate financial risk for what it is?

Four hundred years ago, people were burnt at the stake for believing the wrong things about religion. Today, they get fired for questioning the climate-change catechism.

Figueres demanded HSBC immediately cleanse itself of Kirk’s remarks and fire the climate heretic. “I do not agree — at all — with the remarks made at last week’s FT Moral Money Summit,” bank chief executive Noel Quinn duly declared, avoiding any mention of Kirk by name. “I am determined that our team won’t be distracted by last week’s comments.” On Monday, it emerged HSBC had suspended Kirk

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Race-Based Illness at the Best of the Best At elite universities one must never, ever criticize students of color, especially the black students. Those individuals are sacred. By Mark Bauerlein

Posted By on May 25th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/24/race-based-illness-at-the-best-of-the-best/

It looks like the long persecution of Professor Joshua Katz by his employer Princeton University has come to an end. The Washington Free Beacon reported last week that the school president “passed his recommendation that Katz be stripped of his tenure and fired to the university board of trustees,” and the board rubber-stamped it Monday. The whole episode nicely exemplifies the cowardice and incompetence of the liberals who run elite institutions in the United States today. 

The ostensible cause of the termination is a relationship Katz had with a student many years ago, an impropriety that was handled and closed long before the current controversy began. In truth, this current situation has nothing to do with Katz’s private history. The older matter is a false pretext for his termination. Katz’s current sin originates far from the Princeton campus, on the website Quillette, where on July 8, 2020, he published a piece called “A Declaration of Independence by a Princeton Professor.” 

That word independence should clue you in immediately to the danger Katz risked when he wrote the essay, for few personality traits are more ruinous in the academic habitat than that of one’s willingness to dissent, to go one’s own way, to gainsay conventional wisdom. For all of the humanities professoriate’s praise of “speaking truth to power,” it is a profession populated by timid conformists with fearful sensibilities. Few fields in the world exert and police their dogmas more vigilantly than does that of our tenured wordsmiths. Katz was doing what all of them pretend to do but don’t—and so he had to pay. 

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Does leftist ideology create tangible psychiatric issues? By Olivia Murray

Posted By on May 25th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/05/does_leftist_ideology_create_tangible_psychiatric_issues.html
Even outspoken Democrat Bill Maher is asking questions of the delusional narrative propagated through transgender activism. In a comedic segment posted to Twitter, Maher touched on compelling evidence, suggesting the possibility that “California is creating” trans children. Well, California is notorious for their radical trans agenda like ‘drag queen story hour’ and schools promoting transgenderism unbeknownst to parents – so in light of additional scientific evidence, it seems like Maher could be right.

A study published on PubMed compared two sets of mothers. The first set was mothers of boys with gender identity disorder, and the second set – the control group – was mothers of normal boys. Researchers found:

….mothers of boys with GID had more symptoms of depression and more often met the criteria for Borderline Personality Disorder than the controls. Fifty-three percent of the mothers of boys with GID compared with only 6% of controls met the diagnosis for Borderline Personality Disorder….

The data showed that boys struggling with their biological sex are almost nine times more likely to have a mother who suffers from a severe personality disorder. So are they really born into the wrong body, as the transgender lobby and their activists would tell us? Or are they casualties of external factors, like a parent’s mental illness, perhaps caused by leftist ideology? The study mentioned above makes no connections between mental illness and “progessive” ideology, but other studies do.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump shouldn’t run By M.B. Mathews

Posted By on May 25th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/05/trump_shouldnt_run.html

“By contrast, Ron DeSantis has everything Trump has without the nastiness, the coarseness, the Everest-sized ego.  DeSantis understands restraint; he never shoots from the lip. He is pleasant, substantive, and at least as politically astute as Trump. DeSantis is far more of a traditional family man with the added benefit of having served his country in the Navy. He is also as tough as Trump, perhaps more. He is proactive not reactive, possessing admirable foresight.”

Donald J. Trump was the best POTUS in my very long lifetime. His policies were effective, making America prosperous, energy independent, and lowering minority unemployment to record low levels. Everything he did, with the possible exception of the COVID lockdown, was quintessentially Trump; competent, encouraging, and salutary for America and her people. We were blessed to have him in the White House.

Although many Americans cringed, we nonetheless put up with Trump’s coarseness and his inflated ego because he gave America back to the people. He relit the candle that lit the city on a hill. He was awesome. He took his business acumen and applied it to government very effectively, making America great again. We loved him. We still do. But sometimes the greatest love is to let go.

When 2020 happened, Trump was unceremoniously removed from office because of some highly questionable voting anomalies and practices. It was understandable that he was infuriated. We were equally so. But the prospect of more upheaval is too much for many Americans. We love a maverick but Trump became a burr under our saddle. Trump, instead of America, became the focus as he was attacked from all sides. We became beaten down, frustrated that we had no weapons to fight back with except the ballot box and even that has now become unpredictable. The election has been over for well over a year. It is time to stop talking about it; it keeps the electorate roiled. We need some tranquility, at least to regroup before the next battle.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Ohio School District’s ‘Transgender Guidelines’ Instruct Teachers to Socially Transition Students without Parental Consent- By Caroline Downey

Posted By on May 25th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/ohio-school-districts-transgender-guidelines-instruct-teachers-to-socially-transition-students-without-parental-consent/

In recently developed K-12 “transgender guidelines” circulated among principals and school counselors, the Olentangy Local School District in Ohio instructs teachers to begin the social transitioning of non-gender conforming students without parental consent.

The guidelines, obtained by non-profit Parents Defending Education, would advise teachers and staff on how to treat students who identify as a member of the opposite sex, though it’s not clear whether they’ve yet been issued to teachers. The guidelines have implications for record-keeping, addressing students, and communicating with parents, and touch on bathrooms/locker room access and overnight school trips.

“A student’s transgender status or gender assigned at birth is not considered directory information and therefore cannot be released without prior consent,” the document reads. It demands that school staff “not disclose information that may reveal a student’s transgender status to others, including parents and other staff, unless legally required to do so,” according to a copy of the document released

Superintendent Mark Raiff writes in an email, obtained by PDE, that “the guidelines were shared following the issuance of new guidance from the US Department of Education and US Department of Justice so that our principals and school counselors were apprised of the most recent developments.”

“As far as board policy, the guidelines support and do not supersede the board policies referenced within the document that prohibit harassment or discrimination based on gender identity,”  he adds.

Staff and faculty are to refer to students by the “name and pronoun requested by the student or parent that matches their gender identity,” according to the guidelines. While district administration, staff and faculty are “required to maintain legal name and gender assigned at birth on all legal documents and permanent records” until “provided with a legal name change,”  anything “not considered an official school document should feature the student’s preferred name,” it says.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Georgia Governor Kemp Defeats Perdue in GOP Primary, Setting Up Rematch against Stacey Abrams-By Brittany Bernstein

Posted By on May 25th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/georgia-governor-kemp-defeats-perdue-in-gop-primary-setting-up-rematch-against-stacey-abrams/

Georgia Governor Brian Kemp has successfully fended off a challenge from former Senator David Perdue in the state’s Republican gubernatorial primary, the Associated Press has projected. The victory sets up a rematch between the governor and Democrat Stacey Abrams, whom he defeated in the 2018 general election.

Kemp bested Abrams by 55,000 votes in November 2018, though Abrams contested the race and has made repeated claims that the election was stolen from her.

She has, to this day, never conceded to Kemp and said as recently as October, “Just because you win, doesn’t mean you won.”

Abrams peddled disinformation about Georgia’s new election law, becoming one of many Democrats to claim the law would suppress voter turnout. Even when Tuesday’s primary races saw record early voter turnout —more than 850,000 ballots were cast in person or returned via absentee ballot in three weeks of early voting— Abrams claimed that the voter turnout is not proof that the law has not caused voter suppression.

ANTI-SEMITISM, ISRAEL Comments turned off

An Open Letter to Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib and Her Fellow Travelers Instead of memorializing the Nakba, perhaps you should have learned from it. Richard L. Cravatts

Posted By on May 25th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/open-letter-congresswoman-rashida-tlaib-and-her-richard-l-cravatts/

“But do not ask the American people to enshrine in law the self-delusion and Jew-hatred that has long impeded your own self-determination and made you victims of your own corrosive and hateful ideology.”

On May 16th, you and some other members of The Squad, including Representatives Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, McCollum, and others, introduced a loathsome resolution, H. RES. 1123, which had as its purpose “Recognizing the Nakba and Palestinian refugees’ rights” and to “commemorate the Nakba,” the catastrophe you assign to Israel’s creation, “through official recognition and remembrance.” According to your baleful resolution, the Nakba not only took place at Israel’s founding “but [refers] to an ongoing process of Israel’s expropriation of Palestinian land and its dispossession of the Palestinian people that continues to this day.”

This resolution is yet another manifestation of your narcissistic victimology, a corrosive point of view in which the very creation and continued existence of Israel, according to you, is an ongoing tragedy because, in your contorted view, Israel’s “violence and war crimes are an ongoing and ever-present assault on the existence and humanity of the Palestinian people. The Israeli apartheid government’s ongoing ethnic cleansing seeks to degrade Palestinian humanity and break the will of the people to be free.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Baneful Politics of the Therapeutic Sensibility The most important casualty of our obsession with feelings. Bruce Thornton

Posted By on May 25th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/baneful-politics-therapeutic-sensibility-bruce-thornton/

The heart of “woke” politics is the therapeutic sensibility: the primacy we put on the role of individual feelings in self-identity and self-worth. Thus our psychic comfort, self-esteem, and the acknowledgement of both by others should be the most important concern of society, its institutions, and government policy. And they should confirm and validate our subjective emotions and identities, even if doing so infringes on both the unalienable rights of others, and on the foundational principles of our political order, particularly free speech and truth, the most important bulwark of our political freedom.

These therapeutic attitudes have contributed to the moral and intellectual incoherence of the “woke” Left, and its threat to our political freedom, one enabled by the long transformation of our federal government into a nanny Leviathan-state that empowers itself by pandering to this juvenile narcissism.

“Cancel culture,” for example, and the eagerness to create mechanisms of censorship like the proposed Disinformation Governance Board, on pause for now, are manifestations of this obsession with the impact of politically proscribed ideas and speech on manufactured victim-group identities. Public monuments or names of schools must be “cancelled” because members of certain groups will be traumatized by fleeting reminders of injuries and injustices, like slavery, they have never personally experienced.