IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Progressives Demand More Giveaways for Illegal Immigrants Biden’s open-border policies expand the pool of entitled illegals. Joseph Klein

Posted By on October 22nd, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/progressives-demand-more-giveaways-illegal-joseph-klein/

Progressive advocates for illegal immigrants are pressing for an expansion of New York State’s $2.1 billion giveaway of subsidies to illegal immigrants who are otherwise ineligible for government relief. Passed last April as part of the New York State budget, the “Excluded Worker Fund” has provided one-time payments as high as $15,600 to illegal immigrants who have been able to document that they lost work during the COVID-19 pandemic. Other illegal immigrants without this level of documentation were still able to receive payments of $3,200 to match the amount of COVID-19 related assistance that many American citizens and other legal residents have received from the federal government.

The New York Times described the Excluded Worker Fund as “by far the biggest of its kind in the country and a sign of the state’s shift toward policies championed by progressive Democrats.” But evidently, the fund is not big enough as far as the progressive advocates for illegal immigrants are concerned.

The Excluded Worker Fund is already running out of money. “To date, the state has distributed just over two-thirds of the fund, to about 128,000 people, a fraction of the nearly 351,000 claims that were received,” the New York Times reported on October 19th.

What else would you expect from yet another poorly conceived progressive Democrat program? Demand for the illegal immigrant subsidies has outstripped the money available to pay for them. The number of claimants to date has exceeded by over 20 percent the number of illegal immigrants that the Director of Immigration Research at a liberal think tank estimated last May would benefit from the program. 

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Biden Administration Plans To Protect Immigration Fraudsters It’s all about mind over matter – and if Joe doesn’t mind, it doesn’t matter. Michael Cutler

Posted By on October 22nd, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/biden-administration-plans-protect-immigration-michael-cutler/

America’s borders and immigration laws are its first and last line of defense against threats to national security, public safety and public health.

A review of the relevant section of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) 8 U.S. Code § 1182  (Inadmissible aliens) will provide clarity as to the intent and importance of our immigration laws that Biden refuses to enforce.

Indeed, the Biden administration continues to wage an escalating war against immigration law enforcement yet the largely compliant mainstream media never asks how Biden’s policies are in the best interests of America or Americans.

The disaster on the southern border has been well-documented and the dangers that this creates for national security, public safety, public health cannot be over-estimated.

However, there are many other elements of the immigration system and immigration fraud has been identified as the key method of entry and embedding for terrorists- and not just the terrorists who participated in the deadly attacks on September 11, 2001 but other terrorists who sought to carry out deadly attacks inside the United States before and even after the terror attacks of 9/11.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Is a sanctions rethink in the works? Lawrence Haas

Posted By on October 22nd, 2021

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/577738-is-a-sanctions-rethink-in-the-works

The Biden administration’s announcement that it will limit economic sanctions as a tool of foreign policy could prove significant, since it follows two decades in which policymakers of both parties dramatically increased the use of sanctions against governments, individuals, and entities that they considered bad actors.

“After the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks,” the Treasury Department wrote in a new report after a nine-month review, “economic and financial sanctions (‘sanctions’) became a tool of first resort to address a range of threats to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States. This tool rests on the formidable strength of, and trust in, the U.S. financial system and currency.”

Looking forward, the Treasury wrote, “Economic and financial sanctions should be tied to clear, discrete objectives that are consistent with relevant presidential guidance — such as countering forces that fuel regional conflict, ending support to a specific violent organization or other malign and/or illicit activities, stopping the persecution of a minority group, curtailing nuclear proliferation activities, enhancing multilateral pressure, or ceasing specific instances of atrocities.”

Fine. But the notion of limiting the use of sanctions — e.g., trade embargoes, investment restrictions, asset freezes on governments or individuals — could prove a sea change for U.S. policymakers who, in recent years, have viewed sanctions as the go-to response to global bad behavior.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Elite Universities Are the Worst for Free Speech Samuel Abrams

Posted By on October 22nd, 2021

https://www.realcleareducation.com/articles/2021/10/20/elite_universities_are_the_worst_for_free_speech_110653.html

Inside the 2021 College Free Speech Rankings

One of the great values of an American collegiate experience is that students have the chance to engage deeply with differing opinions. To this day, I am grateful for the cornucopia of people, traditions, views, and cultures that I was able to engage with two decades ago when I, then a fairly conservative Jewish teenager, left the East Coast to go West and to college at Stanford University.

I would be lying if I said that there were no evenings when I felt hurt, misunderstood, shocked, and angry when my ideas were challenged and came into conflict with others. But there were far more nights where I was able to connect, learn, and grow in ways unimaginable to me in high school. I certainly remember the frustrations and agony of being challenged, but I remember more powerfully the ecstasy of having my mind opened up to new ideas and changing my opinions when I heard someone or something new. My old dorm even hosted a speaker’s series where huge turnouts were common for guests on both the left and the right and no one shouted down anyone; we even hosted the frequently-protested Dinesh D’Souza without incident.

While I, along with significant numbers of other students, did not like nor agree with the ideas shared by many of the speakers we heard, their perspectives were always worth hearing and then debating late into the night. Sadly, my undergraduate experience of being able to hear, respond to, and then reject or accept a plethora of views is under threat. Today, cancel culture runs rampant on our college campuses, and viewpoint diversity is no longer considered a sacred, core value in higher education.

Thanks to the largest data set ever compiled on student’s views toward free speech, we now know that students who attend the nation’s elite schools – those that purportedly thrive in the world of research, innovation and discovery – are actually more likely to try to cancel speech than their peers who attend lower-ranked educational institutions.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Biden’s State Department is a laughingstock China launches a hypersonic missile but Antony Blinken is very worried about gender pronouns. Stephen Miller

Posted By on October 22nd, 2021

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/state-department-laughing-stock-pronouns-antony-blinken/

Last week, the State Department learned that twice this summer China had tested a new hypersonic missile weapon with nuclear capabilities. According to the Financial Times, the rocket employed a “fractional orbital bombardment” that also had the guidance ability to “glide” around the earth in orbit.

The test reportedly stunned the Biden administration, and comes on the heels of a string of embarrassing global events for the US, including the fall of Afghanistan and Russia opting not to raise natural gas supplies to Europe after the completion of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Secretary of State Tony Blinken reacted with a series of “deeply concerned” letters. The State Department had once again been caught flat-footed.

But fear not: Blinken has his priorities straight. This week, his State Department responded forcefully and with great clarity to its adversaries and hostile foreign regimes around the world: by recognizing International Pronouns Day. The agency stands in solidarity with people who list pronouns “on their email and social media profiles” through ShareAmerica, the department’s platform for communicating American foreign policy worldwide.

The State Department’s blog brags that “the White House also debuted a website contact form with gender-neutral pronouns and the non-binary prefix ‘Mx.’ And the Department of State announced June 30 that US passport forms will allow applicants to choose male or female gender, regardless of what their other documents indicate, and will eventually include an option for non-binary, intersex and gender-nonconforming people.” Neat!

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Reality of ‘Anti-Racism’ Across America How Midwestern farmers, New York students, Seattle cops, Oakland teachers, and art docents in Chicago are collateral damage in an ideological war.Leighton Woodhouse

Posted By on October 22nd, 2021

The dogma of “anti-racism” began with an incontrovertible reality: For centuries, black Americans have been the victims of structural and often violent discrimination — slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, and attitudes and norms that, to this day, exacerbate poverty and racial disparity. Where anti-racism made its radical departure was in its view about how to fix this knotty problem. 

The proposed solution was no longer what Martin Luther King and Thurgood Marshall taught: that all human beings are created equal and therefore any kind of discrimination is evil. Instead, it was, explicitly, to embrace discrimination, but this time as a tool of “equity.” In practice, this meant racial discrimination against white and Asian people.

This vision of anti-racism, as imagined by Ibram X. Kendi and others, is no longer confined to universities and academic journals. It has long since escaped the confines of the quad and has seeped into so many corners of American life. And rather than eradicating racism, it has re-racialized the people and the places it has touched.

Across the country, there are a series of low-level battles unfolding — on campus, in the classroom, in the courtroom, in the boardroom and at the city council. But also: in farms in the Upper Midwest and the South, in bars and restaurants, in our major urban police forces.

The point is this: In late 2021, these ideas aren’t just ideas. Nor are they confined to elite institutions.They are affecting countless, less visible, ordinary Americans — and they are stoking a backlash that, I fear, we are only seeing the beginning of.

Here’s just some of what’s happening:

Farmers Versus Farmers

In March, President Biden signed the Rescue Plan Act, which was meant to help Americans still reeling from Covid-19. The bill set aside $4 billion just for farmers of color — who have been losing ground for years and now comprise just 2 percent of all American farmers. This was, supporters claimed, restorative justice, given that they had been especially hard hit by generations of systemic racism that stretched back to colonial times.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Author Eric Zemmour, the French Jewish Trump, Storms to Top of Presidential Polls

Posted By on October 22nd, 2021

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/eric-zemmour-french-jewish-trump

by MITCHELL ABIDOR AND MIGUEL LAGO

With his ability to control his own narrative, the one-man show is a symptom of the Americanization of French politics

In the space of only a few weeks, the bestselling, right-wing Jewish author Eric Zemmour has doubled his polling numbers for next year’s presidential elections in France, reaching an astonishing 17%. He is ahead of all other right-wing candidates, including Marine Le Pen, longtime standard bearer of the right, who has lost half of her support to Zemmour—himself now running second only to incumbent Emmanuel Macron. All this despite the fact that Zemmour does not lead or belong to a political party and has not even officially announced his candidacy. And yet the only topic of public debate six months before the election seems to be: Will he run? France’s right-wing and far-right parties are all looking over their shoulders, and even Macron is demonstrating concern, attacking Zemmour in public forums.

Zemmour is in some ways France’s Donald Trump or Jair Bolsonaro, an outsider who claims to say what everyone else merely thinks. He wants to ban all immigration; he claims Muslims have “colonized” entire swaths of French cities; he considers France to be in a state of civil war with its Muslim population. Islam, for Zemmour, is by its nature a religion of terror.

But in saying these things out loud, Zemmour maintains important differences from the Le Pen dynasty: He has long positioned himself as the thinker of the right, producing bestsellers that delve into French history with a classically far-right slant, presenting a France facing decline, degeneration, and even national suicide by way of leftist ideology and the presence of large immigrant communities. He is a firm believer in “The Great Replacement,” which sees les Français de France supplanted by a new, Muslim French population, following an Islam that he believes is incompatible with “French values.” French universalism for Zemmour is an outgrowth of Christian universalism; and it is Catholicism that is the founding doctrine of the French nation. Despite this focus on Christianity, Zemmour is himself a Jew of Algerian Berber ancestry, the son of observant Jews who fled Algeria in 1958 during that country’s war of independence.

How is it that Zemmour’s improbable rise has already come to seem inevitable? The explanation can be found in the role of French media in the country’s political life, in Zemmour’s own ideas, and in the interaction of all this with his personal history.

Eric Zemmour’s Jewishness is a weapon he uses in disconcerting ways. Though he doesn’t hide his ancestry, it is not something that he foregrounds. He has defined his vision of Jewishness as that expressed in 1789 in the Comte de Clermont-Tonerre’s speech on religious minorities (“Nothing for the Jews as a nation, everything for the Jews as individuals”) and by Napoleon: “Henceforth you should consider Paris to be your Jerusalem.” And yet Zemmour’s Jewishness is always at his disposal, granting him license to make statements it would not be possible for a non-Jew to make.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

New York Times Threatens Senator Manchin With Witchcraft If He Obstructs Democrat “Climate” Agenda Francis Menton

Posted By on October 21st, 2021

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-10-18-new-york-times-threatens-senator-manchin-with-witchcraft-if-he-obstructs-democrat-climate-agenda

It’s always been just a little odd that the guy the Democrats most need to get on board to get their big transformational plans enacted is Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, while at the same time the centerpiece of those plans is to put the most important industry of West Virginia, coal mining, completely out of business. That sounds like it’s going to be a tough sell. Is there any argument that might convince this guy to get with the program?

In one of the funniest articles I have read anywhere recently, the New York Times thinks that it has come up with the argument that will carry the day: threaten Manchin with witchcraft! The article, covering about half of the front page of yesterday’s print edition, tells Manchin that if he continues to “block” the Democrats’ plans to destroy the coal industry, a spell will be cast over his state and it will be inundated with floods. The headline is “Blocking Climate Plan With Hometown at Risk.”

The Times characterizes Mr. Manchin’s stance thusly:

Mr. Manchin, a Democrat whose vote is crucial to passing his party’s climate legislation, is opposed to its most important provision that would compel utilities to stop burning oil, coal and gas and instead use solar, wind and nuclear energy, which do not emit the carbon dioxide that is heating the planet. Last week, the senator made his opposition clear to the Biden administration, which is now scrambling to come up with alternatives he would accept. Mr. Manchin has rejected any plan to move the country away from fossil fuels because he said it would harm West Virginia, a top producer of coal and gas.

Seems reasonable. Better threaten the guy:

Others say that by blocking efforts to reduce coal and gas use, Mr. Manchin risks hurting his state.

And how exactly would that work? Simple: if Manchin remains intransigent, West Virginia will be destroyed by epic floods.

ELECTIONS, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Get Smart About What Really Happened in the 2020 Election by J. Christian Adams

Posted By on October 21st, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17833/what-happened-2020-election

Two ingredients drove the outcome in the 2020 elections: First, private philanthropy injected into government election offices and, second, a banana-republic style suspension of agreed-upon election rules. You didn’t need much outright voter fraud when these two ingredients combined to poison the 2020 election.

The CTCL took “ZuckBucks” and with extreme, strategic precision, re-granted it to thousands of government election officials to “help” them conduct the 2020 election. It converted election offices in key jurisdictions with deep reservoirs of Biden votes into Formula One turnout-machines.

Now, after the fact, some states are fixing the problem and banning private money to government election offices. They should ban it. Florida, Texas, Arizona, Georgia and Iowa have prohibited election offices from receiving private money.

City employees roamed door to door with armfuls of blank ballots, knocking and pushing people at home to vote in a process entirely foreign to state laws. Ballots were collected and delivered by others who had been strictly banned from touching someone else’s ballot before COVID. Over and over, the rules broke down.

After the last election, many of us hoped for a champion to undo voter fraud, that certain thing that drove President Donald Trump from office. A “Kraken.” A powerful force of nature, a metaphor of strength, rising from the depths, restorative of truth and proper process. And unlike the Kraken of legend and Hollywood, a purported force of good.

Failure to understand the complex architecture and confusing events of the 2020 election makes it more likely that something like it will happen again. Indeed, the destabilizing forces at work in 2020 are emboldened by their success. The philanthropic streams of money that fueled the 2020 outcome still exist. They are looking toward 2022 midterm elections to do it all over again.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

School Enrolment Across US Dropped by Almost 3 Million From 2019 to 2020: Report By Katabella Roberts

Posted By on October 21st, 2021

https://www.theepochtimes.com/school-enrolment-across-us-dropped-by-almost-3-million-from-2019-to-2020-report_4060563.html

School enrolment across the United States dropped by 2.9 million from 2019 to 2020 amid the coronavirus pandemic, according to new data released on Tuesday by the U.S. Census Bureau.

This marks the lowest level—52.4 percent of the learning-aged population—of school enrollment for those under 35 years of age in over 20 years, as per the bureau’s data.

College enrollment also fell to its lowest level since 2007, with the majority of the decline occurring in colleges with two-year courses, which had their lowest enrollment levels in 20 years.

While the reasons for the declining figures are unclear, multiple factors such as pandemic-related lockdowns, school closures, and a focus on remote learning will undoubtably have played a part.

Meanwhile, the percentage of children ages 3 and 4 who were enrolled in school fell from 54 percent in 2019 to 40 percent in 2020. This decline marks the first time since 1996 that less than half of the children in this age group were enrolled in school.