The Arc of Reform New College of Florida votes to abolish its gender studies program. Christopher Rufo

https://rufo.substack.com/p/the-arc-of-reform?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Tonight, the New College of Florida board of trustees voted to direct the administration to abolish the university’s gender studies program, becoming the first public university in America to begin rolling back the encroachment of gender ideology and queer theory on its academic offerings.

 The decision, sure to elicit a fierce response from left-wing critics, is part of a broader transformation. In January, Florida governor Ron DeSantis appointed me and a number of other reformers to the New College board of trustees. He tasked us with a challenging mission: to revive classical liberal education and restore the founding mission of the college, which had been established with an appeal to New College at the University of Oxford.

From the beginning, we knew that this assignment would involve more than a “rebranding” campaign; it would require an overhaul of the structure of the college and its programs. In our first months as a board, we initiated significant changes to the central administration, firing the president, replacing the provost, abolishing the DEI department, and hiring political veteran Richard Corcoran as our interim president. We got pushback—student protests, media condemnation, a disapproving visit from California governor Gavin Newsom—but we patiently continued the work, deliberating over questions of governance and making hard choices about the college’s future.

These changes have already borne fruit. Interim President Corcoran has secured millions in new funding from the state legislature, launched an ambitious campus-renovation plan, and recruited the largest incoming class in the college’s history, putting the school on its strongest financial footing in decades.

The U.S. Is In Real Decline—Really! Part Four: Lawlessness and Corruption Victor Davis Hanson

https://victorhanson.com/the-u-s-is-in-real-decline-really-part-four-lawlessness-and-corruption/

Corruption and lawlessness destroy civilizations. The 20th-century American ability to curb both, at least on the everyday level, explains in part the American success story. But now?

On the street level, shoplifting is being redefined in blue cities and states as something like parity or equity, or some sort of Orwellian justified adjustment in income.

The attempt to enforce the law can be far more dangerous than breaking it. We have completely politicized the legal system on the violent end, using race and ethnicity as exemptions from full enforcement of statutes—exemptions that fall most heavily upon the inner-city people of color and poor.

Will the lawlessness continue, as carjacking, car-racing in intersections, smash-and-grab, and overt theft reach the suburbs? Are we more afraid of enforcing the law and being libeled as illiberal for it, or the lawbreaking itself that we cannot always any more avoid?

In Oakland, suburbanites of every race, along with inner-city blacks, now march on government to insist on refunding the police and enforcing the law? But is such a reawakening too little and too late, in the sense that industry, business, and the middle classes now choose instead to avoid the Oaklands of America, on the theory life is too short and dangerous to be martyred on the altar of ecumenicalism?

As Livy reminds us, the remedy for our vices is now deemed worse than the malady itself. Would an attorney general attempting to clean up the DOJ have to be hated and ostracized to succeed? Where and how would an FBI director even begin?

Who Will Say No More to the Current Madness? Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2023/08/10/who-will-say-no-more-to-the-current-madness/

Britain slept in the 1930s as an inevitable war with Hitler loomed.

A lonely Winston Churchill had only a few courageous partners to oppose the appeasement and incompetence of his conservative colleague Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain.

One of the most stalwart truth-tellers was a now little remembered politico and public servant Leo Amery, a polymath and conservative member of Parliament.

Yet in two iconic moments of outrage against the Chamberlain government’s temporizing, Amery galvanized Britain and helped end the government’s disastrous policies.

In the hours after Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, there was real doubt whether Chamberlain would honor its treaty and declare war on Germany.

A Labour Party member, surrogate Arthur Greenwood, got up in the House of Commons to announce that he would be speaking for Labour on behalf of his ill party leader Clement Attlee.

Immediately Amery interrupted, shouting out, “Speak for England, Arthur!”

He was met with overwhelming applause and soon public acclamation.

After all, Amery was a political voice in the wilderness warning that neither his own party nor opposition Labour was speaking or acting for the real interest of the British people.

Paraded Naked and Gang-Raped: The Persecution of Christians in India by Raymond Ibrahim

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19870/persecution-christians-india

“The viral video captures the harrowing ordeal endured by two Christian women…. [They] were paraded naked while a mob of men molested and beat them mercilessly…. [T]he younger woman, aged only 19, was brutally gang-raped by the enraged mob….” — Report, British Asian Christian Association, May 21, 2023.

“To add to the horror, four police officers reportedly stood by and watched as the frenzied attack unfolded, making no attempt to intervene.” — Report, British Asian Christian Association, May 21, 2023.

In the video, the [Hindu] Meitei tribal group can be heard shouting: “If you don’t take off your clothes, we’ll kill you.” — Report, British Asian Christian Association, May 21, 2023.

“In a disturbing twist, the survivors have alleged that the police officers may have actively participated in or facilitated the heinous attack. There are claims that the officers led the women directly to the mob of 800 to 1000 men” — Report, British Asian Christian Association, May 21, 2023.

Several Christians—including a young child—were burned alive by the Hindu tribesmen, according to Morning Star News.

Notably, both the Hindu government and the international press totally sideline the religious identity of both the attackers and the victims, and speak only of “sectarian clashes” between the Meitei (Hindu) and Kuki (Christian).

This is a familiar tactic—as when the Western media talk of Fulani herdsmen clashing with farmers in Nigeria. In reality, the Fulani are Muslims who are engaged in a genocidal jihad on the “farmers,” who are Christian.

It would appear that religion — specifically the rise of Hindu nationalism, which views ethnic Indians who are Christians as traitors — is, once again, the ultimate factor fueling clashes….

“Local police throughout India allow Hindu extremist mobs to attack hapless Christians without consequences.” — Archbishop Joseph D’Souza of the Anglican Good Shepherd Church of India and President of the All India Christian Council, stream.org, July 21, 2023.

“At this point it is obvious to state that Kuki Christians are under full scale attack by radicalized Hindu groups, and that the police are ignoring this injustice.” — thewire.in, July 20, 2023.

The growing persecution of Christians in India has even propelled that nation into being ranked the eleventh-worst country in the world to persecute Christians, according to the World Watch List.

Obama’s Self-Made Myths Still Stand “When the truth collides with a legend, print the legend.” by Tim Graham

https://www.frontpagemag.com/obamas-self-made-myths-still-stand/

The media deification of Barack Obama has really never ended. His election to the presidency in 2008 was treated as a milestone, like man landing on the moon. Allegedly objective journalists lined up in every studio and on every front page to do him homage.

It wasn’t journalism. It was more like idolatry. It was like Bryant Gumbel harshly replying in 1989 to new information about Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s adultery. He said, “When the truth collides with a legend, print the legend.”

This line came to mind in reading a recent Tablet magazine interview with liberal historian David Garrow, a King specialist. Garrow’s massive 2017 tome on Obama, “Rising Star,” was blasted by New York Times chief book critic Michiko Kakutani. She argued his epilogue was like a “Republican attack ad.” This is comical, since Garrow’s epilogue recounted quotes from, among others, liberals at the Times and The Washington Post.

David Samuels — who penned an unforgettable piece for The New York Times Magazine revealing that Obama aide Ben Rhodes boasted of creating an “echo chamber” for Obama’s foreign policy in the press — focused Garrow on a woman named Sheila Miyoshi Jager, who Obama asked to marry him twice.

Samuels is amazed at how no one before Garrow really put Jager into focus. That includes David Maraniss, whose 2012 Obama book preceded Garrow in ruling that Obama’s memoir “Dreams From My Father” was largely fictional, especially Obama turning his girlfriends into a composite white character. He didn’t put Jager in the index. (Jager is half-Dutch, half-Japanese.)

This is the obvious Samuels pull quote: “The idea that the celebrated journalists who wrote popular biographies of Obama and became enthusiastic members of his personal claque couldn’t locate Jager — or never knew who she was — defies belief. It seems more likely that the character Obama fashioned in ‘Dreams’ had been defined — by Obama — as being beyond the reach of normal reportorial scrutiny.”

Samuels suggests Garrow’s book was scorned because it highlighted “a remarkable lack of curiosity” about a man who was “treated less like a politician and more like the idol of an inter-elite cult.” It underlined that as Obama decided he wanted to be president one day, he realized having a white wife would be an obstacle.

Inside Tucker’s World From Chadwick Moore, a timely new biography of the X-Man. by Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/inside-tuckers-world/

During the last few years, the term TDS, meaning “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” has acquired a secondary meaning: “Tucker Derangement Syndrome.” Or, at least, it should have, because the leftist hostility directed at the longtime TV host comes close to rivaling that directed at the ex-president with whom he, more than anyone else on cable news, is so strongly identified. If Trump is the man who challenged the Beltway uniparty in the name of American liberty and government by the people, leading millions of voters to realize that a great many Republicans were as fully a part of the swamp as Democrats, Tucker Carlson is the man who took on the cable news media consensus, demonstrating that Fox News is, in many ways, less a real alternative to CNN and MSNBC than a controlled opposition, on whose airways only a certain degree of dissent from mainstream orthodoxy is permitted. If Trump’s betrayal by many GOP leaders – from Bob Barr to Mike Pence – opened the eyes of a great many of his supporters, Tucker’s expulsion from Fox News illuminated the grim reality that pretty much all of America’s corporate news organizations are, in the end, tainted tools of the cultural elite.

Tucker’s unexpected transformation from jewel in the Fox News crown to fully independent voice on Twitter – sorry, X – is the latest twist in a life story that Chadwick Moore, a former guest on Tucker’s show as well as on other Fox News programs (notably The Five), tells with verve and admiration in his estimable new biography, Tucker. If there were nothing else to praise about it, I would give Moore props for writing the first non-fiction book I’ve read in quite a while that doesn’t have a long, unnecessary subtitle. But, in fact, there’s a lot more to like here. Moore has figured out how to cover the bullet points about Tucker’s childhood and youth without loading us down, in the opening chapters, with details that we don’t really want or need to know. The bottom line, which Moore conveys vividly, is that Tucker, who I’ve always vaguely gathered was a scion of wealth, was in reality the son of Lisa, a spoiled rich San Francisco girl turned hippie (now deceased) who abandoned her husband and her two sons when the boys were little, and Dick, who began his life in a Massachusetts orphanage, raised his boys on his own, went on to be a TV news anchor in San Diego and a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, and is still going strong in his eighties.

Why Ron DeSantis Is The Man To Lead The Great American Comeback By: Kyle Lamb

https://thefederalist.com/2023/08/10/why-ron-desantis-is-the-man-to-lead-the-great-american-comeback/

Presidential candidate Gov. Ron DeSantis will do for these United States what he has done for Florida and raise our expectations for the executive.

Even prior to arriving in Florida to work for the Office of Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2020, I was immediately struck by the bravery and conviction he exhibited during the early days of Covid. He stood on principle and fortified his position with data.

This endeared me to his causes. My own path to Florida began with studying and sharing Covid data online. In contradicting some of the federal government’s narratives, I endured a tsunami of smears from corporate media attempting to attack my credibility and qualifications for my job.

For saying things like masks didn’t stop respiratory viruses, lockdowns were destructive, and the virus may have come from a lab, I was ridiculed and vilified. In fact, some congressional Democrats tried to have me canceled after I accepted a position with the state.

Despite the onslaught, the DeSantis administration never budged. Going with the governor against Anthony Fauci was the correct decision.

Now, my path has diverged a bit. But my resolve has not.

A few months ago, I left the state office to join the Ron DeSantis for President campaign. It required little contemplation. You only commit to such an endeavor knowing it’s a finite journey that could be a roller coaster ride of emotion.

A revealing interview reminds us what a bizarre, fake person Obama was and is By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/08/a_revealing_interview_reminds_us_what_a_bizarre_fake_person_obama_was_and_is.html

In 2017, David Garrow’s carefully researched Obama biography, Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, appeared to much less fanfare than it deserved.  The media undoubtedly downplayed it because it offered the truth behind many of Obama’s self-adulatory inventions, and Trump’s new presidency occupied everyone’s energy.  What makes the book newsworthy today is that David Samuels has interviewed Garrow and revisited narratives in the book, reminding everyone of the scary, power-obsessed nastiness behind Obama’s carefully built façade.

The interview on Tablet is long and worth every second it takes you to read it.  However, I’ve summarized below some of the highlights.

In Dreams from My Father, Obama describes his breakup with Sheila Miyoshi Jager, now a scholar known for her meticulous, honest research.  According to Obama, they broke up because after seeing a play by August Wilson, a black writer, Obama suddenly gained a black consciousness that Jager refused to recognize or understand.

However, Garrow, unlike other journalists in America, interviewed Jager for her side of the story.  It was quite different.

Image: Barack Obama. YouTube screen grab (cropped).

Jager said that they broke up because they went to see an exhibit about Adolf Eichman’s 1961 trial at the same time that Steve Cokely had accused Chicago’s Jewish doctors of giving black babies AIDS.  Jager, whose grandparents were honored as Righteous Gentiles for saving Jews during WWII, broke up with Obama because he refused to denounce anti-Semitism.  Considering Obama’s open hostility to Israel and later palling around with famous anti-Semites (e.g., Rev. Wright, Obama’s infamous and still hidden tape at a pro-PLO dinner, and Obama’s photo with Farrakhan), her version rings true.

Evil Never Takes a Holiday By J.B. Shurk

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/08/evil_never_takes_a_holiday.html

Many good people whom I respect tell me that the Marxist left have already won and that there is no longer any point in fighting.  I disagree for many reasons, but I will list three: 

(1) History is simply saturated with pivotal moments that radically altered what otherwise appeared to be the course of destiny.  In fact, I would say that history is really written only when good men and women find their backs against the wall and realize that the only way to preserve their free will is to fight like hell and buck everything that stands against them.  Suffering has a tendency to focus the mind and strengthen resolve.  Character truly reveals itself only when it is tested.  I’ll take a spirited and courageous insurgency that knows why it is fighting over an army of automatons enfeebled by groupthink.

(2) When fighting evil, there are no half-measures.  There is no point when you kick back, light a cigarette, and say to yourself, “Dang, evil sure did get the best of me this time.”  Huh-uh.  You fight evil even if you find yourself hanging with fingertips from a cliff’s edge while the devil is smirking above and crushing your hand.  It doesn’t matter how compromised you feel; all you have to do is tell the devil to stick it where the sun don’t shine.  Your refusal to submit is your greatest weapon.  Others will find inspiration in your indefatigability and push ahead, too.  

(3) Even if you think things are irreversibly bad, apathy guarantees that they will get only worse.  There will be a time in the future when you are being forcefully herded onto a train car headed for who knows where, and you will think to yourself, “If only I had resisted earlier…”  Now ask yourself, “What would I be willing to do today to avoid that train car tomorrow?”  If fighting back is never going to get any easier, then that makes today the best day to begin kicking and screaming against what’s already barreling down the track.  Your future self will thank you.

I also disagree that it is too late to win.  There is a reason the permanent Deep State now resorts to sham trials, censorship, and political persecution: it no longer has the time to pretend to respect free speech or the rule of law.  A century of slow but steady marching toward a Marxist technocratic super-state has given way to overt public harassment, coercion, and easily recognizable propaganda.  The left’s deceptive veil has been lifted, and tyranny now has a face in all those politicians who openly support punishing dissent and constructing a modern-day Ministry of (dis)Information.  

The Fake Climate Consensus By John Stossel

https://pjmedia.com/columns/john-stossel/2023/08/09/the-fake-climate-consensus-n1717386

We are told climate change is a crisis, and that there is an “overwhelming scientific consensus.”

“It’s a manufactured consensus,” says climate scientist Judith Curry in my new video. She says scientists have an incentive to exaggerate risk to pursue “fame and fortune.”

She knows about that because she once spread alarm about climate change.

Media loved her when she published a study that seemed to show a dramatic increase in hurricane intensity.

“We found that the percent of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes had doubled,” says Curry. “This was picked up by the media,” and then climate alarmists realized, “Oh, here is the way to do it. Tie extreme weather events to global warming!”

“So, this hysteria is your fault!” I tell her.

“Not really,” she smiles. “They would have picked up on it anyways.”

But Curry’s “more intense” hurricanes gave them fuel.

“I was adopted by the environmental advocacy groups and the alarmists and I was treated like a rock star,” Curry recounts. “Flown all over the place to meet with politicians.”