Chicago’s Hard-Left Choice Brandon Johnson’s mayoral victory contains dire warnings for the city—and for both political parties nationally. John O. McGinnis

https://www.city-journal.org/chicagos-hard-left-choice

For several reasons, the election of Brandon Johnson as mayor is the most important in Chicago for generations and the most politically salient urban election this century. First, it represents the triumph of the hard Left not on one of the coasts but in the heart of the Midwest, in a city known for its pragmatic, if machine-Democratic, politics. Second, it displays the raw power of public-sector unions in Illinois and in today’s Democratic Party. Johnson was not just supported by the unions; he is the paid agent of the most powerful and radical of them all—the Chicago Teachers Union. Third, Johnson’s victory will have national reverberations for years to come because his administration will test the Left’s attempt to transform urban policy.

Johnson’s win shows the current might of the urban Left precisely because the political climate and the candidate himself were not optimal for victory. Chicago has suffered high crime rates since the George Floyd riots. Cab drivers spontaneously tell me of carjackings and shootings they have witnessed. A campaign that focused on public safety, like the one that Paul Vallas ran, seemed tailor made for the times. Moreover, Johnson was running as a progressive after the failed tenure of another self-proclaimed, if far more moderate, progressive, Lori Lightfoot. We might have expected Chicago voters to opt for an ideological change, as New York voters did when they chose Eric Adams after the disastrous mayoralty of Bill de Blasio.

Johnson, too, was an imperfect messenger for the Left. The teachers’ union provided him with much of his campaign funds and boots on the ground, but many parents were unhappy with the union’s long strike in 2019 and prolonged school closures during the pandemic.

A Prisoner of China. An American Scandal.Peter Savodnik

https://www.thefp.com/p/a-prisoner-of-china-an-american-scandal?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

For 11 years, Mark Swidan has languished in a Chinese prison on charges no one believes. ‘If this were a politically connected person, he would have been out a long time ago.

There are at least 54 Americans being wrongly held overseas today. They haven’t broken any laws. They haven’t received a fair hearing. They have been rendered political pawns, detained in dingy cells in places like Cuba, Iran, Russia, and China.

Last week, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich became one of them when he was taken by agents in Yekaterinburg, where he was working on a story. He was accused of espionage and taken to Lefortovo prison in Moscow. Bari Weiss

“In the fall of 2012, Mark Swidan was 37 and engaged to a Filipino woman named Mylene. Mark had met her on a trip to Manila in 2011. He loved Southeast Asia, and he’d built a small interior design business selling hand-carved knickknacks from Thailand, artworks from Vietnam—that kind of thing.

He had also just bought, with his mother Katherine Swidan, a fixer-upper outside Houston that the three of them planned to move into after the wedding. The house needed work, and Swidan googled a factory near Guangzhou that sold flooring and light fixtures for almost nothing.

So in October, Katherine said, her son jumped on a plane to buy housewares halfway across the world. This was an odd thing to do, but less so for a man who had a penchant for Asia. Katherine told me that her son also planned to visit Macau, the Las Vegas of China, which is a quick train trip away, before returning home.

He had been in Guangzhou a few weeks—Katherine wasn’t sure how long—and on his last night there, November 13, 2012, he took his driver and interpreter to dinner to thank them for carting him around.

Don’t Let Biden Gaslight You About The Jobs Situation

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/04/07/dont-let-biden-gaslight-you-about-the-jobs-situation/

The one thing he’s good at is lying about statistics.

Whatever the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports today about job growth and the unemployment rate, you can bet that President Joe Biden will use it as an opportunity to brag about his superb handling of the economy. The one thing Biden is good at is lying with statistics.

Biden will probably claim that he’s overseen a record number of new jobs – the most in history. The press will dutifully regurgitate White House talking points.

But the numbers getting bandied about these days about job growth and unemployment are wildly misleading because they ignore important bits of context. Such as:

The pace of job growth slowed considerably once Biden started “rescuing” the economy.
It took just nine months under President Donald Trump for the economy to regain 57% of the 22 million jobs lost during the COVID lockdowns. It took 17 months under Biden to regain the other 43%.
The economy was adding jobs at an average of 1.3 million a month in Trump’s last nine months in office. In the first nine months of Biden’s term, job growth averaged 620,000.
As a result, job growth is now behind the pace set by most recoveries since 1948, according to the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank. Nearly three years after the COVID recession officially ended, we are still just 2% ahead of the previous employment peak. At the same point after the 1981 recession, there were 3.5% more jobs. Three years after the 1969 recession, the job market was 5.7% bigger.
The jobs picture would be far worse had it not been for Republican-run states that defied the Biden administration’s intrusive COVID policies. By mid-2022, red states were 350,000 ahead of their pre-COVID highs, while blue states were still 1.3 million jobs short of where they were before the COVID lockdowns.

But what about the low unemployment rate Biden brags about?

Cash App Founder Bob Lee Stabbed to Death in San Francisco After Moving to Miami to Evade Crime Wave By Rick Moran

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2023/04/06/cash-app-founder-bob-lee-stabbed-to-death-in-san-francisco-after-moving-to-miami-to-evade-crime-wave-n1685088

Lee had left the region six months ago and had moved to Miami, but was back in the city on business. He extended his trip by one day, and was murdered.

The Founder of the mobile payment company Cash App was stabbed to death on a deserted street in San Francisco early Wednesday morning. Bob Lee was a well-known member of the Bay Area technology community, and his violent death outside some luxury apartments near the Bay Bridge underscores the decline in living conditions in the city.

Lee’s gruesome death was partially captured on surveillance video, as reported by the San Francisco Standard.

Surveillance footage reviewed by The Standard shows Lee, who had already been stabbed, walking up Main Street away from the Bay Bridge at around 2:30 a.m. Lee crosses the intersection at Harrison Street and walks up to a parked white Camry with its hazard lights flashing.

Lee then lifts his shirt—as if to show the driver his wound and ask for help—and falls to the ground after the car drives away, the footage shows. He gets up and walks back toward the Bay Bridge before falling to the ground again outside an apartment building called the Portside.

At some point, Lee dialed 911 and repeatedly screamed for help, saying he needed to go to the hospital, according to the records reviewed by The Standard. Lee made the call at 2:34 a.m. and police arrived on the scene less than six minutes later.

City leaders and the media are rushing to defend San Francisco as being a peaceful, safe city.

Noa Tishby’s deserved dismissal By Ruthie Blum

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-738636

In a tweet on Sunday, actress/producer Noa Tishby bemoaned the termination of her unpaid position as Israel’s Special Envoy for Combating Antisemitism and the Delegitimization of Israel. Author of the 2021 book Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth, she was appointed last April by then-foreign minister Yair Lapid to the heretofore nonexistent role.

The selection of the US-based native Israeli for the mission initially raised a few eyebrows, including my own. Like other skeptics, I assumed that she was chosen more for her drop-dead gorgeous looks than any gravitas she might possess, based on the tired idea that what the Jewish state needs in the battle against global vilification, is better branding.

Whether this was Lapid’s thinking when he hired Tishby is unclear, but she quickly rendered the question moot. Within weeks, I was singing her praises in print, insisting that she deserved “not only an apology, but accolades, from those who doubted her abilities.”

Kudos to Cornell and Stanford for finally standing up for free speech By Rikki Schlott

https://nypost.com/2023/04/06/cornell-stanford-stand-up-to-woke-mobs-for-free-speech/

On March 31, I reported that Cornell’s student assembly unanimously voted to require trigger warnings for “traumatic” classroom lessons.

The resolution would have required the university’s professors to warn students about materials or lectures with topics “including but not limited to” sexual assault, domestic violence, self-harm, suicide, child abuse, racial hate crimes, transphobic violence, homophobic harassment and xenophobia.

While trigger warnings might be well-intentioned attempts to protect sensitive students, many researchers are finding they aren’t all that effective.

They also run the risk of chilling speech and causing professors — who can’t possibly anticipate what might trigger each student — to self-censor.

As I asked, “Is the implication that college students are too weak and feeble to hear the truth?”

But there’s some good news.

On Monday, Cornell president Martha Pollack and provost Michael Kotlikoff responded to the student assembly with a resounding “No!”

In an email to the student assembly, the pair said the trigger warning policy “violates our faculty’s fundamental right to determine what and how to teach” and could even tarnish the “academic distinction of a Cornell degree.”

They affirmed the policy “would unacceptably limit our students’ ability to speak, questio, and explore, lest a classroom conversation veer into an area determined ‘off-limits.’”

DEI Meets East Germany: U.S. Universities Urge Students to Report One Another for ‘Bias’ Snitches get sheepskins as colleges train student informants. By Iván Marinovic and John Ellis

https://www.wsj.com/articles/snitches-get-sheepskins-as-colleges-train-student-informants-dei-east-germany-bias-protected-class-f941ee11?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Anonymous informers have always been a hallmark of totalitarian regimes. Friends, neighbors and even family members are encouraged to inform on those who speak against the regime. This is effective social control: Nowhere is safe to discuss politics, and everyday life is subdued. To this day, when Cubans want to discuss something sensitive, they go into their bathrooms, let the water flow and whisper.

Who would want to live under such conditions? Apparently, America’s colleges and universities do. They have been setting up their own systems of anonymous informers.

According to a recent study by the free-speech watchdog organization Speech First, 56% of American universities have adopted schemes that encourage students to report on one another anonymously for “bias” or “protected identity harm.” This means that anyone who falls short of campus orthodoxy on “pronouns,” transgenderism, microaggressions and proscribed language might soon be denounced and deprived of basic due process, including the right to face an accuser. Zealots at Stanford recently denounced a fellow student who was photographed holding a copy of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.”

The number of universities that have institutionalized snitching has doubled since 2017. The damage this will do to campus life is easy to imagine: It will chill free expression via self-censorship both in and out of the classroom; it will infantilize protected classes of students even more than they already have been; it will reinforce the campus culture of victimhood; it will further strengthen the radical orthodoxy; and it will divert yet more energy from learning to ideological activism.

Anonymous reporting has a self-selection component: Decent people won’t do it because they consider it morally repugnant. A system that rewards spying on friends and neighbors will disproportionately attract cowardly people motivated by the worst of human nature—resentment, jealousy, grudges and dogmatic intolerance. The snitches will be people who don’t understand the damage Stasi-like behavior will do to our universities.

Department Of Defense official testifies that the military must be a ‘safe space’ for the non-binary By Eric Utter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/04/department_of_defense_official_testifies_that_the_military_must_be_a_safe_space_for_the_nonbinary.html

When a rainbow-colored Navy training video on the proper use of preferred pronouns surfaced last year, many people thought it was a joke. Sadly, many people were wrong.

Recently, a top Department of Defense official offered testimony to Congress that doubled down on the video’s underlying message: the armed services must be a “safe space” in which each and every member feels validated and affirmed on his and/or her journey of self-discovery. Remarkably, the video discussed how to make the Navy a “safe space” for people who wish to explore their gender identity.

People traditionally joined the Navy to explore the world and burnish their character, not to explore their gender identity and sexual preferences. This puts a new twist on basic training. “Am I a boy or a girl?” is really basic. Or perhaps neither or both…or something else entirely would be a better fit. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead with my own personal gender journey!

This has to be good for unit cohesion and operational readiness, particularly when hundreds or thousands of sailors are confined to a single boat, right?

The DOD’s Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer (CDIO) reportedly told the House Armed Services Committee that the “concerns young Americans have about safety are negatively impacting [military] recruiting.”  The CDIO further claimed that potential recruits do not “feel safe reporting to work for fear of discrimination.”  

Our military now needs to be “a safe space” or no one will join it? This seems oxymoronic and counter-intuitive at best, and potentially cataclysmic at worst.

Our French Revolution America now has three potential futures and two are bad. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2023/04/05/our-french-revolution/

We are in a Jacobin Revolution of the sort that in 1793-94 nearly destroyed France. And things are getting scary. 

The Democratic Party vanished sometime in 2020. 

It was absorbed by hard-left ideologues. They were bent on radically altering, or hijacking, existing institutions to force radical, equality-of-result agendas that otherwise do not earn majority support. 

The American people want affordable power and fuel and energy autonomy. They do not want a Green New Deal that results in dependence on the Middle East. 

They want fiscal sobriety, not a permanent stagflationary economy marked by bank failures, soaring interest rates, crony capitalism, and subsidies for those who choose not to work. 

They know no country can exist without a border, much less while offering blank checks to foreign cartels that kill 100,000 Americans yearly. 

They demand realist deterrence abroad, not the current woke military whose erosion is spelling the end American credibility and global stability. 

Racialists are eerily embracing discredited Neo-Confederate notions of racial chauvinism, discrimination, segregation, and the old-one-drop rule of racial obsession. They are turning America toward a Balkanized war-of-all-against-all. 

To implement such an unpopular program, the new Left must radically alter our institutions. 

Chicago Chooses Crime Brandon Johnson’s victory means that Mayor Lori Lightfoot will be replaced by someone far worse. by Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/chicago-chooses-crime/

Brandon Johnson’s “victory” means that Mayor Lori Lightfoot will be replaced by someone far worse. Lightfoot at least made occasional efforts to fight crime, Johnson’s message is that criminals are the victims.

That is the trend in a party and a political system that goes to extremes.

Johnson’s victory comes as little surprise despite polls that showed Paul Vallas was leading. Like Rick Caruson in Los Angeles, Vallas picked up endorsements from Democrats, including surprising ones, ran as a moderate and seemed poised to win over a city that was tired of the madness. And, like the LA mayoral race it didn’t matter. Johnson and Bass had the same two assets, racial bloc voting and a political machine capable of delivering votes, especially once it understood how many votes were needed to get its candidate over the top.

I’m not even counting the media.

Chicago loves crime, but this isn’t the Capone kind of vote, it’s the solidarity between the Left and the thugs running the streets. The old Chicago machine alternated between tolerating crime and cracking down on it. It cut dirty deals with bosses and busted hoods. The new machine loves street level criminals. And they love it.