ProPublica Buries Its Clarence Thomas News The outlet’s latest hit piece unwittingly debunks its own political narrative about the Supreme Court justice.Ira Stoll

https://www.wsj.com/articles/propublica-buries-its-clarence-thomas-news-media-bias-political-ethics-de06903d?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

Justice Clarence Thomas has been attending private events with fierce critics of Donald Trump. That’s the only real news in the latest hit piece from ProPublica, which describes itself “an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism with moral force.” But you have to read between the lines to find it.

The outlet obtained a photograph of Justice Thomas with documentary filmmaker Ken Burns. It said Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York, was at an event Justice Thomas attended. It presents photographic evidence of that too, though it doesn’t note Mr. Bloomberg’s presence in the caption. And it said Justice Thomas had attended a 2018 event of Stand Together, a network founded by libertarian businessman Charles Koch.

What ProPublica doesn’t say in its 4,500-word piece is that Mr. Burns has described Mr. Trump as “Hitleresque” and “the greatest threat to American democracy since the Second World War.” It doesn’t say that Mr. Bloomberg has called Mr. Trump a “carnival barking clown” and sought the nomination to challenge him in 2020. It doesn’t say that the Koch network is reportedly spending tens of millions to defeat Mr. Trump in 2024.

Why leave all that out? Because ProPublica wants you to think Justice Thomas is in the tank for Mr. Trump. In April it complained: “Thomas’ approach to ethics has already attracted public attention. Last year, Thomas didn’t recuse himself from cases that touched on the involvement of his wife, Ginni, in efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.”

The site misleads its readers by omitting the anti-Trump material from its latest attack on Justice Thomas. Mr. Burns is identified as someone “whose films Koch has financially supported.” The Koch network is described as having “spent over $65 million supporting Republican candidates in the last election cycle.” The piece omits Mr. Bloomberg’s liberal views on the environment but mentions that at California’s Bohemian Grove with him and Justice Thomas was the author Bjorn Lomborg, who “has for years argued the threat of global warming is overstated.”

KIPP Gets Children Into College More evidence that charter schools lift student performance.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/kipp-study-college-graduation-enrollment-mathematica-charter-schools-5f22e610?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

From pandemic learning loss to racial achievement gaps, many U.S. education ailments can be addressed by schools outside the traditional, union-dominated system. More evidence comes from a new report showing that the largest charter school network in the country helps students get into college, and then to get a degree.

Students who attended schools in the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) for both middle and high school were 18.9 percentage points more likely to graduate from a four-year college five years after finishing high school than students who didn’t attend KIPP, according to a Mathematica study published last week.

“An effect of this size, extrapolated nationwide, would be large enough to nearly close the degree-completion gap for Hispanic students or entirely close the degree-completion gap for Black students in the United States,” the authors write.

The study compared students who enrolled in more than a dozen KIPP schools in 2008, 2009 and 2011 with similar students who had applied for the charter schools but weren’t selected in KIPP’s lottery admission system.

KIPP students were also more likely to enroll in college—and stick with it—than non-KIPP peers. Seventy-seven percent of KIPP students enrolled in a four-year college compared to 46% of non-KIPP students. Forty-one percent of KIPP students stayed in college through the first six semesters compared to 22% of non-KIPP students.

“These findings may be driven by the college preparatory culture at network high schools,” the report notes. “KIPP provides access to rigorous, college preparatory coursework (including Advanced Placement courses), as well as counseling and other college and career-related supports.”

KIPP students also tend to do better on standardized tests. The nearly 30-year-old network enrolls roughly 120,000 students across 280 schools, and most are low-income and black or Hispanic. The best way to help disadvantaged kids is by giving them the choice of schools that provide a quality education and practical guidance for college and career.

Thanks to the Policies of the Obama and Biden Administrations, the New Axis of Evil – Russia, China, North Korea, Iran – Posing a Worldwide Existential Threat by Majid Rafizadeh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19982/axis-of-evil-russia-china-north-korea-iran

The Biden administration… is also financing the ruling mullahs of Iran with billions of dollars to put the finishing touches on the country’s nuclear program and for delivering more weapons to Russia with which to attack Ukraine.

“We’re sitting still, and the Chinese, the Russians, Iran, North Korea, and several others, are moving to shore up their relations and threaten us in a lot of different places.” — Former US National Security Advisor John Bolton, The Hill, March 12, 2023.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine, the Biden administration seems to be allowing Iran’s ruling mullahs to prosper from the war and emerge as the winners.

“I have a question for you – how does Russia pay Iran for this, in your opinion? Is Iran just interested in money? Probably not money at all, but Russian assistance to the Iranian nuclear program. Probably, this is exactly the meaning of their alliance” — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Jerusalem Post, November 4, 2022.

“Today, China, Russia, North Korea and Iran continue to invest in technologies to expand their capabilities to hit the United States with nuclear weapons. All four countries have also escalated their threatening rhetoric, indicating their willingness to use nuclear weapons in a military conflict. By expanding their nuclear programs, each has made clear that our nuclear arsenal is no longer a deterrent to their potential use of nuclear weapons.” — U.S. Rep. Mike Turner, Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, Fox News, May 4, 2023.

Thanks to the Obama and Biden administrations’ monumental capitulations to Iran’s regime — and the refusal of both administrations not only to stop Iran’s nuclear weapons program but also to prevent anyone else from stopping it — the Russian-Iranian-Chinese-North Korean alliance now poses a global existential threat.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya Accepts RealClear’s Samizdat Prize: Government Should Not Censor And Smear Scientists Tim Hains

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2023/09/22/dr_jay_bhattacharya_accepts_rcps_samizdat_prize_government_should_not_censor_and_smear_scientists.html

Real Clear Foundation president David DesRosiers explains: “What does Samizdat mean? It translates as ‘self-published’ in Russian. Samizdat was the underground literary network in the Soviet Union that distributed Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. Are we suggesting the American mind and society are closing and becoming more Orwellian and Soviet? Yes, we are. This is why we inaugurated the Samizdat prize, to celebrate those great few who stand for freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of science, even at great personal cost.”

Read Dr. Bhattacharya’s remarks:

DR. JAY BHATTACHARYA, HEALTH POLICY PROFESSOR AT STANDFORD UNIVERSITY: I’m overwhelmed, you guys, thank you… In 1970, I looked this up before I got here, the New York Times Albert Parry published an article about the Soviet dissident intellectuals who would covertly pass around ideas to each other in the form of handcrafted, typed written documents called Samizdat. There are people in this room, scientists in this room, that I passed Samizdat to. David mentioned one, Scott Atlas. From the earliest days of the pandemic, we would pass papers to each other. My colleague Yaron Ben David, we’d secretly talk to each other in whispers in the corridors of Stanford…

We would tell each other, “Here’s what the data are showing,” “Why aren’t people seeing this?” And if you tried to share it, God forbid that happened.

Let me read to you from this New York Times piece:

“Censorship existed even before literature, says the Russians. And, we may add, censorship being older, literature has to be craftier. Hence, the new and remarkably viable underground press in the Soviet Union called samizdat.

Samizdat – translates as: “We publish ourselves” – that is, not the state, but we, the people.

In Representative Victoria Spartz, a star is born The Ukrainian-born Congresswoman (R-IN-District 5) gave a passionate, indeed an electrifying performance Roger Kimball

https://thespectator.com/topic/in-representative-victoria-spartz-a-star-is-born/

“No one, Spartz concluded, is being held accountable. It is “egregious.” Indeed. “I couldn’t believe that it happened in the United States of America,” she said. But that’s because she still believes the country she adopted still exists. It doesn’t. Disgusting deep-state operatives like Merrick Garland killed it. ”

Merrick Garland’s testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday was a spectacular, if depressing, confirmation of something any sentient observer had noticed long ago: that the Department of Justice, and its head, Attorney General Garland, are horribly, egregiously compromised. 

The outcome or upshot? That Garland should be impeached and removed from office and the DOJ itself should be put into the political equivalent of Chapter 11 so that its management can be replaced and its activities reorganized.

As I say, this has long been obvious to any sentient observer. But Wednesday’s testimony put meat on the bones of this impending repudiation. Several Republicans put hard questions to the attorney general. Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky deserves special mention for his exchange with the ghoulish AG. 

Massie played a video of the back-and-forth he had with Garland two years before. Were there, Massie wanted to know, any government agents in the crowd at the Capitol on January 6? Oh, there is an “ongoing investigation,” quoth Garland, so of course I cannot answer. 

Well, that was then, said Massie. How about now? Can you now tell Congress whether there were any government agents in the crowd on January 6? “I don’t know the answer to that question,” said Garland. “If there were any, I don’t know how many. I don’t know whether there are any.”

“I think you may have just perjured yourself, that you don’t know that there were any,” replied Massie. “You want to say that again, that you don’t know if there were any?”

Can conservatives still win? by Victor Davis Hanson

https://newcriterion.com/issues/2023/10/can-conservatives-still-win

Editors’ note: The following essay forms part of “The new conservative dilemma: a symposium,” a special section on the challenges facing conservatism today.

On translating popularity into policy.

Conservatives enjoy popular support on the vast majority of current issues. But that does not necessarily translate into winning presidential elections, which is of course the only sure way of enacting conservative political agendas. Yet victory is possible for conservatives, as long as they learn from the past.

Take the potpourri of current controversies over illegal immigration, rising crime, fossil-fuel independence, the economy in general, and an array of cultural concerns—from the indoctrination of the dogma of diversity, equity, and inclusion to the fact of transgendered men participating in women’s sports. In these hot-button-issue debates, the conservative side usually wins the support of the American people, at least in opinion polls.

Surveys do not translate into presidential votes.

Even in these culturally liberal times, a recent Gallup poll noted that more Americans (38 percent) voiced that they were very conservative or more conservative on social issues than at any time since 2012. In contrast, those identifying as having liberal social views dipped to just 29 percent—fewer even than those describing themselves as moderates (31 percent). Moderates and independents have become terrified of the hard-left takeover of the Democratic Party and the neo-socialist agenda that ensued, which has altered their very way of life.

Of course, surveys do not translate into presidential votes. Events can transcend current ideological controversies and disrupt political debates. They often alter national congressional and presidential elections, prompting both forced and unforced errors from once-popular conservative presidents. Recent examples of these unforeseen crises include the 2008 financial meltdown, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the covid epidemic and subsequent lockdowns, and the George Floyd–related riots. All wrecked the reputations of formerly successful administrations.

George H. W. Bush’s convincing win in 1988 (53.4 percent of the popular vote) was in a mere four years reduced to a losing 37.5 percent of the vote, in part due to the unexpected third-party candidacy of Ross Perot and an overhyped recession. George W. Bush’s popularity after September 11 reached the highest on record at 85 percent approval—only to crash to a record 22 percent low after the September 2008 financial-system meltdown and the continuing violence in Iraq. The trifecta of the covid pandemic, national lockdown, and George Floyd riots sank what likely would have been a Trump 2020 popular-vote win.

But even granting the role of scandal, foreign misadventures, and economic downturns that sink presidencies, conservative presidential candidates should have been able to react to these unexpected calamities just as well as liberals—despite the partisan nature of the mainstream media. Yet in recent times they have not. The Republican Party, remember, has lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections: 1992 (37.5 percent), 1996 (40.7 percent), 2000 (47.9 percent), 2008 (45.7 percent), 2012 (47.2 percent), 2016 (46.1 percent), and 2020 (46.8 percent), after winning it in five of the prior six elections: 1968 (43.4 percent), 1972 (60.7 percent), 1980 (50.7 percent), 1984 (58.8 percent), and 1988 (53.4 percent).

In sum, Republican candidates have not garnered 51 percent of the popular vote since George H. W. Bush’s 53.4 percent 1988 victory over Michael Dukakis—engineered by the late Lee Atwater. He, remember, was severely criticized ex post facto for running a campaign that did not follow the usual Republican adherence to the Marquess of Queensberry Rules of campaigning etiquette.

The Abnormal as the New Normal Introducing “The new conservative dilemma: a symposium” available at The New Criterion By Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2023/09/21/the-abnormal-as-the-new-normal/

For many decades now, conservatives in the United States and elsewhere have faced a dilemma. By disposition, conservatives are inclined to endorse precedent. But since the dominant culture is liberal, conservatives must make their peace with progressive policies or find themselves accused of abandoning the central conservative principle of supporting established precedent.

As James Piereson noted in these pages in 2009, “conservatives, if they wished to maintain that designation, . . . were obliged to endorse all manner of liberal reforms once they were established as part of the new status quo.”

For example, it was said that “conservatives who attacked the New Deal were not acting like conservatives because they were in effect attacking the established order—and, of course, ‘real’ conservatives would never do that.” This embarrassing gambit was applied all down the line. If you opposed a liberal or progressive policy that had become established, you were not acting in a conservative manner but in an extreme or radical manner. “Conservatives, moreover,” Piereson pointed out,

could have no program of their own or, at any rate, any program that had any reasonable chance of succeeding, because any successful appeal to the wider public would turn them into populists and, through that process, into extremists and radicals. Not surprisingly, they viewed a popular conservatism as a contradiction in terms. Conservatives, in short, could only win power and influence by betraying their principles, and could only maintain those principles by accepting their subordinate status. Thus, in the eyes of the liberal historians, conservatism could never prosper in America because, if it did, it could no longer be called conservatism.

This last formulation recalls an observation by the Elizabethan courtier Sir John Harington: “Treason doth never prosper, what’s the reason?/ For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.” Mutatis mutandis, conservatism doth never prosper, for if it does, none dare call it conservatism.

This surreal situation was the result of an inexorable process of one-way ratcheting. Progressive ideology makes continuous inroads, gobbling up one institution and one consensus after the next. Any occasional pushback is weathered as a temporary squall, after which the work of expanding the progressive envelope proceeds apace. Last year’s extreme outlier becomes this year’s settled opinion. To oppose that is evidence not of conservative principle but reactionary, even (as we have lately been told) insurrectionary, stubbornness.

The fate of this dialectic has depended upon a certain friction in which conservative conviction appealed to a fund of traditionalist sentiment even as it acceded to ever more extreme moral and political positions. Over the past several decades, however, this dialectic has lost its ballast as the entire apparatus of government has been colonized by an extreme progressive agenda.

In the past, conservatives had been able to regard the fundamental institutions of society—the family, the churches, the military, the corporate world—as natural allies. This is no longer the case.

Turkey: An Air Force Without Wings by Burak Bekdil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19965/turkey-air-force

The ambition of Turkish Aircraft Industries today is to build the first indigenous Turkish fighter jet, which could also be the world’s first Muslim fighter aircraft, and it has invited friendly nations Azerbaijan and Pakistan join the effort. Meanwhile Turkey is trying hard to support its assertive regional policy with military might.

There is a problem: With a fleet consisting mostly of ageing F-16s and a per capita income of barely $9,000 Turkey cannot play the role of a major power.

Echoing the neo-Ottoman ambition, Colonel Ümit Yalım (ret.) recently claimed that the sovereignty of Greece’s islands in the North Aegean Sea belongs to Turkey.

Erdoğan wants modern F-16s, while the U.S. Congress has a different opinion: Why give Turkey modern fighter jets if we want peace over the Aegean Sea? That leaves Turkey with one option: Make your own fighter aircraft.

Turkey’s ailing economy is experiencing high inflation (at 59% year-on-year), and the country’s external debt reached nearly $476 billion in March. The international credit insurance company Allianz Trade reported that the stock of Turkey’s total external debt due within the next 12 months has risen to about $250 billion.

Erdoğan made one wrong strategic choice — trying to align with Russia and America — and left Turkey’s top military planners pondering how to minimize the military and operational damage. The Turkish president should be able to understand that he cannot fully benefit from two clashing civilizations at his convenience.

Turkey, once NATO’s staunch southeastern flank sentinel against the Soviet Union, still operates the alliance’s second-largest military. These days, NATO’s second-largest military has a problem with its aerial firepower.

Turks are proud that their Air Force (TuAF) is the world’s ninth-largest. But it is not necessarily the ninth-strongest. According to the World Directory of Modern Military Aircraft, TuAF is not among the world’s top 15 militaries listed. Turkey has 110 attack helicopters and 205 fighter/interceptor aircraft, according to Global Firepower. But its fleet of 1,065 military aircraft includes no dedicated attack aircraft.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: OUR SELF INDUCED CATASTROPHE AT THE BORDER

https://amgreatness.com/2023/09/21/our-self-induced-catastrophe-at-the-border/

Since early 2021 we have witnessed somewhere between 7 and 8 million illegal entries across the now nonexistent U.S. southern border.

The more the border vanished, the more federal immigration law was rendered inert, and the more Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas spun fantasies that the “border is secure.” He is now written off as a veritable “Baghdad Bob” propagandist.

But how and why did the Biden administration destroy immigration law as we knew it?

The Trump administration’s initial efforts to close the border had been continually obstructed in the Congress, sabotaged by the administrative state, and stymied in the courts. Nonetheless, it had finally secured the border by early 2020.

Yet almost all its successful initiatives were immediately overturned in 2021.

The wall was abruptly stopped, its projected trajectory cancelled. The Obama-era disastrous “catch-and release” policy of immigration non-enforcement was resurrected.

Prior successful pressure on Mexico’s President Andrés Obrador to stop the deliberate export of his own citizens northward ceased.

Federal border patrol officers were forced to stand down.

New federal subsidies were granted to entice and then support illegal arrivals.

No one in the Democratic Party objected to the destruction of the border or the subversion of immigration law.

However, things changed somewhat once swamped southern border states began to bus or fly a few thousand of their illegal immigrants northward to sanctuary city jurisdictions—especially to New York, Chicago, and even Martha’s Vineyard.

The sanctuary-city “humanists” there who had greenlighted illegal immigration into the southern states suddenly shrieked. They were irate after experiencing the concrete consequences of their own prior abstract border agendas. After all, their nihilism was always supposed to fall upon distant and ridiculed others.

Libraries Clearing Shelves Through ‘Equity-Based’ Book Weeding Everything before 2008 must go! by Mark Tapson

https://www.frontpagemag.com/libraries-clearing-shelves-through-equity-based-book-weeding/

The Diary of a Young Girl by Holocaust victim Anne Frank, the massively popular Harry Potter series, and the Newberry Medal-winning novel Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry about racial conflict in 1930s Mississippi are some notable examples of books that 10th grader Reina Takata can no longer find in her public high school library in Ontario, Canada. Why not? Because those titles were culled as part of a new “equity-based” weeding process implemented by the Peel District School Board (PDSB) last spring, leaving library shelves as bare as supermarket shelves in Biden’s America.

Miss Takata told CBC Toronto that the shelves at Erindale Secondary School were full of books as recently as May, but gradually began to empty out. When she returned to school in the fall, “I came into my school library and there are rows and rows of empty shelves with absolutely no books.” (Takata herself took the photo above, of the bookshelves in her Mississauga high school’s library.) She estimates that more than half of her school’s library books are gone.

Libraries across Canada and in the United States have long followed standard weeding plans to dispose of damaged or outdated books; this is understandable and reasonable. But Reina Takata and many other students and parents are concerned that this new process emphasizing the leftist buzzwords “equity” and “inclusion” seems to have led some schools to remove thousands of books simply because they were published in 2008 or earlier.

Libraries not Landfills, a group of parents, retired teachers, and community members, says it has no issue with standard weeding but is concerned about both fiction and nonfiction books being removed based solely on their publication date. The group is also concerned about how subjective criteria like “inclusivity” are to be interpreted from school to school.

In a May 8th board committee meeting about the equitable weeding process, trustee Karla Bailey complained that “there are so many empty shelves” in the schools. “When you talk to the librarian in the library, the books are being weeded by the date, no other criteria,” Bailey told the committee. “None of us have an issue with removing books that are musty, torn, or racist, outdated. But by weeding a book, removing a book from a shelf, based simply on this date is unacceptable. And yes, I witnessed it.”

“Who’s the arbiter of what’s the right material to go in the library, and who’s the arbiter of what’s wrong in our libraries? That’s unclear,” Tom Ellard, a PDSB parent and the founder of Libraries not Landfills, told CBC Toronto. “It’s not clear to the teachers who’ve provided us this material, and it’s not clear to me as a parent or as a taxpayer.”