UC Berkeley Study Explains Why It’s Wrong to Defend Muslim Women To the Woke, oppression is liberation, and opposing oppression is imperialism. Robert Spencer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/uc-berkeley-study-explains-why-its-wrong-defend-robert-spencer/

In American colleges and universities today, marginalization is privilege and victimhood is power, so it should come as no surprise that a study conducted by – of course! – two researchers at the University of California, Berkeley has discovered that women are being oppressed not by the systemic and institutionalized misogyny of Islamic law (Sharia)—which devalues women’s testimonies and inheritance rights and sanctions the beating of women—but by “Islamophobia.”

According to the San Francisco Examiner, which reported this ludicrous nonsense with a straight face, Elsadig Elsheikh and Basima Sisemore of UC Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute (which must be a barrel of laughs to work in) conducted a national survey of “people living with Islamophobia, documenting their collective experiences and registering their voices.”

This makes it sound as if “Islamophobia” is some sort of disease; it’s actually a propaganda neologism that conflates two separate and distinct phenomena: vigilante attacks of innocent Muslims, which are never justified, and honest analysis of the motivating ideology behind jihad terrorism, which is always necessary. Those who use the term refer to both of those things under the rubric of “Islamophobia,” which has the effect of intimidating people into thinking that it is somehow wrong to speak about the root causes of jihad terror and Sharia oppression of women.

The study is an exercise in exactly that kind of intimidation. Elsheikh and Sisemore discovered that “most Muslims in America believe women are more at risk of experiencing Islamophobia than any other group. That stands to reason as Muslim women, particularly those who wear the hijab (a headscarf covering hair and neck) or niqab (covering head and face but not the eyes), are seen more obviously as practitioners of the Islamic faith.”

Fear and Loathing at Oberlin Totalitarian tenderfoots. Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/totalitarian-tenderfoots-bruce-bawer/

You don’t hear a heck of a lot about Oberlin College, the liberal arts college in Ohio, but on Wednesday Hugh Fitzgerald wrote here about an esteemed member of its faculty, Mohammad Jafar Mahallati, who has enjoyed the unanimous support of Oberlin’s top administrators. Mahallati, reported Fitzgerald, served as Iran’s ambassador to the UN in the late 1980s, where, among other things, he promoted “genocidal antisemitism,” denounced the Baha’i people (hundreds of whom “have been executed or murdered” in Iran), and helped cover up the mass execution of political prisoners. At Oberlin, he teaches Religion, Islamic Studies, and Middle East and North African Studies.

This wasn’t Oberlin’s first time in the spotlight this month. A couple of weeks ago the college got a good deal of social-media attention after Peter Fray-Witzer, one of its 3,000-odd students, took to the Oberlin Review to pen an ardent j’accuse. You see, an e-mail had gone out from Josh Matos, “the area coordinator for Multicultural and Identity-Based Communities,” informing students that radiator installations were scheduled to take place in the “Women and Trans Collective,” a dorm in which Fray-Witzer resides. Being “very averse to people entering my personal space,” especially when those people are “strangers” and “cisgender men,” Fray-Witzer was rendered “angry, scared, and confused” by the news of this unwanted intrusion, which would damage the “feeling of safety and protection” ordinarily provided by the Collective. Why, asked Fray-Witzer, couldn’t the installation have been scheduled during the summer?

Three score and seven years ago, men Fray-Witzer’s age stormed the beaches of Normandy. Now this. American colleges once taught young people to deal with challenging ideas and experiences. Now the most expensive of them – Oberlin is America’s 11th costliest college, beating Yale at #18 and Stanford at #50 – are padded playpens where their pampered students, the presumed leaders of tomorrow (is Fray-Witzer, by any chance, the child of Harvard law professor Sharon Fray-Witzer?) expect to be protected from the slightest hint of distress. And when they graduate they become – well, they become those totalitarian tenderfoots who were protesting Dave Chappelle’s latest comedy special outside of Netflix the other day.

No wonder Fray-Witzer’s tantrum went viral. “Ponder the rotted roots of an ideology,” commented Glenn Greenwald, “that convinces highly privileged and wealthy students at elite colleges that the guys who come to fix their radiators are their oppressors, and that the ones whose family is paying $80k/year are the oppressed.”

Going full Soviet: Judge releases Jan. 6 defendant on bond after he renounces Trump By Monica Showalter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/10/going_full_soviet_judge_releases_jan_6_defendant_on_bond_after_he_renounces_trump_.html

The jailing of the Jan. 6 riot defendants is not just an obvious miscarriage of justice, given the length of time they’ve spent in detention without trial.  It’s also turning into something that’s full Soviet.

Here’s the latest from one Judge Amy B. Jackson, who, after denying release at least once to one guy, went ahead and let him out.  He’s a Buffalo, New York-based defendant named Thomas Sibnick, who’s recanted:

WASHINGTON — A federal judge reversed her bond decision Tuesday for a Capitol riot defendant accused of robbing a D.C. Police officer — in part because she found “toxic” conditions in the D.C. Jail were likely to contribute to his further radicalization if he was kept in pretrial detention.

U.S. District Judge Amy B. Jackson released Thomas Sibick, 35, released to his parents’ Buffalo, New York, home under 24-hour incarceration on Tuesday after hearing from his lawyer and a tearful plea from his father, Dr. Eugene Sibick, a former officer with the U.S. Navy who publicly criticized his son’s detention at the “Justice for J6” rally in September and has called him a “political prisoner.”

A good thread of what went down, with far more relevant details from WUSA reporter Jordan Fischer, was retweeted by journalist Glenn Greenwald and is worth reading here.

The reason he got out while the others stayed in?

His groveling letter denouncing President Trump, which was so self-abasing that it would make Nikolai Bukharin blush:

“While many praise Trump, I loathe him, his words and actions are nefarious causing pain and harm to the world,” Sibick wrote. “He is not a leader and should be ostracized from any political future, what he honestly needs to do is go away!”

That didn’t seem to be his point of view back on Jan. 6, when he was allegedly assaulting a police officer and stealing his badge, according to the charges.  He certainly was some kind of nut and probably had more legal problems than the other defendants, who were simply in the wrong place or who were pushed into the Capitol, possibly by the FBI’s paid agents provocateurs, or who were invited in by Capitol cops and waved the flag.  He probably ought to be punished.

Prof. Biden and His Ambassadors The University of Pennsylvania paid the future president more than $900,000. By Paul S. Levy

https://www.wsj.com/articles/prof-biden-and-his-ambassadors-appointments-confirmation-payment-11635349354?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

Presidents often reward big political donors with plum ambassadorships, but Joe Biden and the University of Pennsylvania appear to have come up with an innovation on the practice. Amy Gutmann, Penn’s president, awaits Senate confirmation as U.S. envoy to Germany, and David L. Cohen, until July chairman of the university’s Board of Trustees, as ambassador to Canada.

Ms. Gutmann isn’t a donor. Mr. Cohen and his wife, Rhonda, gave more than half a million dollars to Democratic campaigns and political organizations between 2017 and 2020, according to OpenSecrets.org. That includes the maximum $11,200 to the Biden campaign and $50,000 to the Biden Victory Fund, according to the Federal Election Commission database. (Mr. Cohen also donated a smaller amount to Republican candidates and organizations.)

Here’s the innovation: After Mr. Biden left the vice presidency in 2017, Penn created the Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement and appointed Mr. Biden to the bespoke position of Benjamin Franklin Presidential Practice Professor. Mr. Biden was paid personally for this job—$371,159 in 2017 and $540,484 in 2018 and early 2019 before launching his campaign.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reported on the arrangement in July 2019. The paper noted that the average salary for a Penn professor was $217,411 in 2017-18 and described Mr. Biden’s position as “a vaguely defined role that involved no regular classes and around a dozen public appearances on campus, mostly in big, ticketed events.”

Fly-by-Night Taxation The Democratic tax show has become a tragi-comedy of errors.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/fly-by-night-taxation-democrats-congress-tax-hikes-ron-wyden-joe-biden-11635371820?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

There’s never been anything like this, and we’ve been around a long time. Democrats are writing tax policy for a $22 trillion economy on the fly, floating new tax increases willy-nilly, with little thought to the consequences and no time for public debate.

One day it’s an increase in tax rates on corporations and the affluent. But wait, that doesn’t have the votes. How about a carbon tax? That won’t fly either. Hey, there goes Jeff Bezos. Let’s tax him and 699 other billionaires. It polls well. Everyone hates billionaires!

Oh, but that may be unconstitutional. We still need money, so let’s try a 15% corporate minimum tax—though be sure to exempt investments in green energy and other pet progressive ideas. So it will have to be a minimum tax on some companies but not others. Bring on the Gucci Gulch lobbyists, campaign checkbooks at the ready.

And don’t forget to cut taxes for some of the rich by restoring the state and local tax deduction, though only for two years. Need those New York and New Jersey House votes.

Then let’s rush to get all of this “framework” agreed to by Thursday so President Biden can have something to boast about at the global climate gabfest that will do nothing that matters about the climate.

***

What a spectacle. For a century Democrats have been the party of higher taxes, but at least they paid some attention to the policy merits. Tax writers Dan Rostenkowski and Lloyd Bentsen were serious people. This crowd has no clue what the consequences of their proposals will be, and they don’t much care.

Kill the Biden Reconciliation Disaster Richard Manning

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/10/28/kill-the-biden-reconciliation-disaster/

The Biden reconciliation bill is full of mandatory spending which will act as a financial time bombs set to go off over the next decade. 

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has set an artificial must-pass date of October 30th for what was a $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation bill which is nothing more than a far-left wish list of expanded government.  The reason for this date is that the Virginia state elections will be held on November 2nd and she rightfully fears that the results of that election will make it politically impossible to pass this dramatic expansion of the size and scope of government.

As most people are undoubtedly aware, Senators Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) are standing in the way of Senate Democrats getting the 50 votes necessary to pass the bill with the majority provided by the Vice President.

Recently, Americans for Limited Government provided a synopsis of 10 egregious big government expansions within the proposal which is a must-read to understand the breadth of the expansion this bill would impose.

One proposal that appears to be in deep trouble is the IRS reporting requirement for bank accounts of $600 or above.  It is being reported that Senator Manchin is throwing a monkey wrench into this intrusive Biden idea that would give the IRS access to virtually every bank transaction made across the country.

Given that Manchin and Sinema have each also demanded significant cuts to the amount of spending within the bill, President Biden has conceded that the actual spending over ten years could be more than halved.  But if the mandatory programs remain in place, they will likely live forever with costs increasing annually dwarfing the original price tags.

What’s more,  the regulations coming out of the broad language included in the bill will overwhelm any local dissent as Congress will have authorized things such as the federal takeover of decisions about school locations and retrofitting, expansion of Medicaid in those states which resisted the Obamacare eligibility expansion, and the creation of a Climate Corps that will be a massive taxpayer-funded environmental advocacy group masquerading as grassroots.

At a time when parents are waking up to the hate-America curricula being shoved down our kids’ throats, the federal government would pour tens of billions of dollars into pre-K education under the guise of providing daycare to the most needy. The reality is that they will be jamming a socialist value system into the highly formative minds of toddlers.

Don’t Be Seduced By The ‘Billionaires Tax’ Henry I. Miller

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/10/28/dont-be-seduced-by-the-billionaires-tax/

The 19th Century German statesman Otto von Bismarck observed famously that “Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable – the art of the next best.” Sometimes, however, it’s not even the next best; it can be illogical, unworkable, and pie-in-the sky. Such is the nature of Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden’s tax proposal – which should be called the Wyden-Warren-Sanders’ Folly – to tax billionaires’ unrealized capital gains, such as stocks, valuable art works, or jewels, that appreciate in value with time. The gains are not “realized” until the item is sold.

This might be seductive to those who want “the rich to pay their fair share,” but it’s certainly not fair. It’s unwieldy and susceptible to manipulation, merely a wilted fig leaf to offer the illusion that President Joe Biden’s multi-trillion-dollar expenditures on social programs will be “paid for.” Ultimately, the expenditures will occur, but the revenues won’t materialize.

It’s one thing to tax income, which most Americans dislike but have gotten more or less used to, but taxing wealth in the form of unrealized capital gains is a horse of a different color – possibly literally.

What do I mean by that? Well, suppose you own a racehorse of not particularly distinguished lineage that you bought for, say, $50,000, and on a whim, you enter him in the Kentucky Derby and he wins it. Immediately, he could be worth $50 million, with stud fees in six figures. Under the Wyden-Warren-Sanders’ tax plan, you could have a huge tax bill for the horse (possibly, every year that you own him), because of his potential. But this could be finessed: You could reduce the tax due by (with a wink and a nod) selling the horse to a friend for a far lesser price, and have him sell the animal back to you, again on the cheap. In the face of actual sales transactions, who’s to say that the horse was undervalued?

Meet Ray Epps: The Fed-Protected Provocateur Who Appears To Have Led The Very First 1/6 Attack On The U.S. Capitol

https://www.revolver.news/2021/10/meet-ray-epps-the-fed-protected-provocateur-who-appears-to-have-led-the-very-first-1-6-attack-on-the-u-s-capitol/

In a House hearing on Thursday, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) questioned AG Merrick Garland about a mysterious man, Ray Epps, instructing protesters to enter the US Capitol building on January 5, and who later shepherded crowds towards the Capitol on January 6.

The story of the mystery man, Ray Epps, featured in Rep. Massie’s video above is in fact far more shocking than even the good Congressman implies in the hearing. It’s a story so strange, and so scandalous at every turn, that it threatens to shatter the entire official narrative of the “Capitol Breach” and expose yet another dimension of proactive federal involvement in the so-called “insurrection” of January 6th.

If Revolver News’s previous reporting points to a proactive role of the federal government in relation to the conspiracy cases against Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, the Ray Epps story that follows suggests a similar, yet more egregious, explicit, direct and immediate degree of federal involvement in the breach of the Capitol itself.

Here is a transcript of Thomas Massie’s exchange with the Attorney General, just in case you skipped past the video above.

Rep. Massie: As far as we can determine, the individual who was saying he’ll probably go to jail, he’ll probably be arrested, but they need to go into the Capitol the next day, is then directing people into the Capitol the next day, is then the next day directing people to the Capitol. And as far as we can find. You said this is one of the most sweeping in history. Have you seen that video, or those frames from that video?

AG Garland: So as I said at the outset, one of the norms of the Justice Department is to not comment on pending investigations, and particularly not to comment on particular scenes or particular individuals.

Rep. Massie: I was hoping today to give you an opportunity to put to rest the concerns that people have that there were federal agents or assets of the federal government present on January 5 and January 6. Can you tell us, without talking about particular incidents or particular videos, how many agents or assets of the federal government were present on January 6, whether they agitated to go into the Capitol, and if any of them did?

AG Garland: So I’m not going to violate this norm of, uh, of, of, of, the rule of law.

[Looks down and away]

I’m not going to comment on an investigation that’s ongoing.

There is good reason why AG Garland ran from Massie’s question faster than he could find words — and why he couldn’t even keep eye contact as he was dodging Massie’s gaze.

Biden FBI Joins Pelosi In Blocking GOP From Investigating January 6 by By Mollie Hemingway and Tristan Justice

https://thefederalist.com/2021/10/27/exclusive-biden-fbi-joins-pelosi-in-blocking-gop-from-investigating-january-

In the case of the House Committee on Jan. 6., Pelosi blocked minority party participation for the first time in House history to pursue a preferred political narrative.

The leading Republican tasked with his party’s investigation into the preparedness and response of the U.S. Capitol Police and other law enforcement agencies to the Capitol riot on January 6 is being blocked by President Joseph Biden’s FBI from gathering information, a new document reveals.

The FBI told Indiana Republican Rep. Jim Banks it would not provide Republicans the same information provided to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s hand-picked committee consisting only of Democrat-appointed members.

“We respectfully refer you to the Select Committee regarding issues of access to records and information,” the agency wrote in response to a Republican request for information, referring to the official House panel established by the speaker.

Pelosi took what she admitted was an “unprecedented” step of refusing the appointments made by Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy, barring Navy officer and Afghanistan veteran Banks and Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, from participation. In a fiery denunciation of Pelosi’s politicization of the committee, McCarthy, R-Calif., publicly announced Banks would lead Republicans’ investigation despite Pelosi blowing up the committee.

The Contretemps at Yale Steven Lubet

https://www.realcleareducation.com/articles/2021/10/27/the_contretemps_at_yale_110658.html

Recent events at Yale Law School reveal that it’s all too easy for administrators to condemn a student for perceived racist statements, even in highly ambiguous circumstances – but much harder to undo the implications for admission to the bar. To put it plainly, a law school’s “discrimination and harassment coordinators” cannot denounce a student for racism and then withhold that information from its bar certifications. If the condemnation is warranted, it must be reported; if it is not warranted, it should be retracted. To do otherwise would violate the administrators’ own obligations under the Rules of Professional Conduct.

According to Associate Dean Ellen Cosgrove, the YLS Office of Student Affairs “tries to help students talk to one another and resolve their disagreements within the community,” even about the most difficult issues. That’s a noble objective, but it doesn’t describe what recently happened when nine law students complained that a classmate had engaged in harassment and discrimination by circulating a “triggering” email. The offending message was in fact an invitation to a Constitution Day celebration jointly sponsored by the Native American Law Students Association and the Federalist Society, to be held at the jokingly described “world-renowned NALSA Trap House,” with a menu that included “Popeye’s chicken,” apple pie, cocktails, and soft drinks.

Trent Colbert, the second-year student who issued the invitation, was called in for a meeting with both Dean Cosgrove and YLS diversity director Yaseen Eldik, who patiently explained the racial overtones of the term “trap house,” as well as the troubling implications of “the fried chicken reference.” This came as news to Colbert, who thought that “trap house” was an innocent reference to a place where young people held parties, “like a frat house without the frat” (and Popeye’s was just a nearby fast food joint). He said he would stop using the term, but that was not good enough for the administrators, who urged him to issue a written apology for any “harm, trauma, or upset” his email had caused, along with a promise to “educate myself” to do better.

When Colbert balked, Eldik cautioned him about potential damage to his reputation, and ominously pointed out that “there’s a bar you have to take,” which of course would include a character and fitness assessment. That bit of not very friendly advice started Yale on a damaging course from which it will be difficult to withdraw.