ELECTIONS, MEDIA Comments turned off

Media Rushes to Downplay Explosive Evidence of Kamala Harris’ Plagiarism Robert Spencer

Posted By on October 15th, 2024

https://pjmedia.com/robert-spencer/2024/10/14/media-rushes-to-downplay-explosive-evidence-of-kamala-harris-plagiarism-n4933333

Did Kamala Harris plagiarize sections of her 2009 book? It sure looks like it. Christopher Rufo has uncovered significant evidence of Harris taking the work of others word for word and passing it off as her own, and it’s damning. Nowadays, when many Americans take for granted that politicians lie, this may not seem like a big deal, but it is. The plagiarism calls into question Harris’ honesty, her integrity, her trustworthiness, and even her most celebrated area of alleged expertise, as the plagiarism took place in a book that was designed to establish her credibility as a prosecutor.

JD Vance knows it’s a big deal. “I saw today, actually,” Vance said Monday, “a story that Kamala Harris apparently copied some significant chunks of her book from Wikipedia. So if you want a president with their own ideas, vote for Donald Trump. If you want a president who copies her own ideas from Wikipedia, vote for Kamala Harris.”

The New York Times knows it’s a big deal as well, which is why it published an 1100-word piece on Monday trying to explain away Harris’ plagiarism and portray the whole matter as an unfortunate example of just how low the foes of the sainted Harris will go. In the Times’ version, “conservative [a four-alarm word for the Times and its hapless readers] activist Christopher Rufo” is making a mountain out of a molehill. He “had taken relatively minor citation mistakes in a large amount of text and tried to ‘make a big deal of it.’” 

That was the assessment of one Jonathan Bailey, whom the Times identifies as “a plagiarism consultant,” without explaining what exactly a “plagiarism consultant” is or how one attains such a lofty position. Bailey, the Times informs us magisterially, “said on Monday that his initial reaction to Mr. Rufo’s claims was that the errors were not serious, given the size of the document.”

See, if you’re a Democrat, you can get away with ripping off entire paragraphs of other works and claiming them as your own, as long as you fit the thefts into a document of sufficient size.

ANTI-SEMITISM, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Anti-Semitism? What anti-Semitism? The ‘anti-racists’ seem desperate to ignore the Jew hatred in our midst. Tom Slater

Posted By on October 15th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/10/14/anti-semitism-what-anti-semitism/

“The silence of the ‘anti-racists’ since 7 October won’t have surprised anyone who has been paying attention. But it must deprive the woke set of the moral high ground for good. After years of raging against cultural appropriation, microaggressions and inanimate objects, they clammed up when genocidal terrorists achieved the most deadly assault against Jews since the Holocaust, and anti-Semitic marches became part and parcel of British city life. They showed once and for all that they don’t care about racism, particularly when it’s levelled against Jews. Never let them forget it.”

If you take the mainstream media’s word for it, Britain and much of the West have been gripped in recent years by a long-overdue reckoning with our racist past and present. 2020 – the year Black Lives Matter went global – was supposedly a high watermark for ‘anti-racist’ activism, which was only bristled against by bigots or dumb proles oblivious to their own privilege.

None of that was true, of course. As was clear even at the time, the BLM convulsions had nothing to do with a bottom-up backlash against racism and everything to do with a top-down attempt to mainstream woke racial identity politics – an ideology that is by turns divisive (carving people up along racial lines) and trivial (insisting that the existence of a statue in Bristol was among the primary obstacles to black British success).

But if you were still labouring under the misconception that our cultural elites are now all dogged anti-racists, entitled to indulge in their incessant moral preening, witness their stony, silent reaction to the sulphurous re-emergence of anti-Semitism over the past year. Following Hamas’s pogrom in Israel, Jew hatred has made a devastating comeback on Britain’s streets, and the knee-takers have had bugger all to say about it.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Why Western ‘solidarity’ is a death sentence for Palestinians The Battle of Northern Gaza confirms that Hamas and its woke apologists are the greatest threat to Palestinians. Brendan O’Neill

Posted By on October 15th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/10/14/is-the-death-cult-of-hamas-on-its-last-legs-lets-hope-so/

Many grim things are happening in northern Gaza right now, as Israel puts the screws on Hamas. But there’s one thing in particular that leapt out at me from this bloody showdown between the Israel Defence Forces and the army of anti-Semites that started this infernal war with its pogrom of a year ago. It’s a thing that isn’t being widely reported. A fact you will need to dig deep to find. You certainly won’t spy any mention of it in the toilet of Israelophobia known as social media. It’s this: the IDF is pleading with Palestinian civilians to leave northern Gaza, while Hamas is instructing them to stay.

Even the BBC – so hostile to Israel that it refuses to refer to its fascistic persecutors as ‘terrorists’ – felt compelled to chronicle this most telling of stories from the benighted north of Gaza. In a typically breathless piece alleging that Israel is pursuing the military strategy of ‘surrender or starve’, the Beeb reports that where the IDF has warned Gazans that it will be ‘operating with great force’ in the north, and thus they should ‘evacuate immediately’, Hamas has told them to stay. In fact, Hamas has warned the 400,000 souls still left in the north to not even think about moving. It has used falsehoods and fear to cajole women and children into staying put, telling them the south is ‘just as dangerous’ (not true) and that if they leave ‘they will not be allowed back’ (bastards).

Reuters has likewise clocked these disturbing accounts from the ground. ‘The Israeli military [is] calling on Palestinians to evacuate south’, it reports, while Hamas is ‘telling them not to leave because it [is] too risky’. The IDF has gone to great lengths to convince civilians to flee, posting messages online in Arabic clearly stipulating that even ‘shelters’ in certain parts of the north would shortly become ‘dangerous combat zone[s]’. It has distributed maps with a ‘large yellow arrow’ showing civilians where to go. Hamas, meanwhile, has all but forbidden an exodus. There are even reports that it is using physical force to make people stay. One Gazan has claimed that their Islamist rulers are ‘beating them with sticks’ if they try to access the IDF’s mapped-out ‘humanitarian corridor’.

How do we make sense of this? According to the intellectuals and activists of the Western world, Israel is a demented genocidal state, hell-bent on slaughtering Palestinians and especially keen on killing children (blood libel, much?). Hamas, meanwhile, is a ‘resistance’ movement, if an iffy one, whose strikes against Israel are an understandable stab at protecting Gazans from the violent bloodlust of psycho Zionists. And yet here we have the ‘genocidaires’ pleading with Gazans to move out of harm’s way, and ‘the resistance’ ordering them to stay in it. Providing civilians with maps to safety? Israel is surely the most rubbish genocidal entity in history.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Matias Ahrensdorf, Leo Grunschlag A New Hope for K-12 Education Emet Classical Academy is the first Jewish school devoted to the core texts of Western civilization.

Posted By on October 15th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/a-new-hope-for-k-12-education

In early September, as New York’s children returned to the classroom, the city witnessed a landmark in educational history. Forty pioneering students—fifth-, sixth-, and ninth-graders—became the inaugural cohort at Emet Classical Academy, the first Jewish school founded on the principles of classical education. 

The need for classical alternatives to traditional public education has intensified in recent years, as political indoctrination—often including anti-American rhetoric, gender ideology, and anti-Semitic propaganda—is increasingly inflicted on public school students. The classical education movement’s response to these developments is to remove political bias from the classroom, focusing instead on equipping students with foundational knowledge and fostering logic, critical thinking, and an appreciation for the core texts of Western civilization.

Emet Academy’s commitment to “take your child as far as he or she can go” is a useful encapsulation of its approach. Along with teaching classic texts, the school also offers a rigorous STEM program. Its Judaic studies program, which encompasses the Tanakh and Talmudic reasoning, sets it apart from other classical institutions. Classes are taught seminar-style to facilitate serious discussions about the material, and to allow students to hone their public-speaking and debate skills. Electives are offered by experts in their respective fields—music, by an orchestrator from the Manhattan School of Music; theater, by a professional Shakespearean actor; a philosophy-of-math course—for the most advanced ninth-grade students—by a renowned mathematician.

Dr. Abraham Unger, Emet’s founding head of school, highlighted the importance of keeping political bias out of the classroom. “To impose ideology on a text is really to halt the progress of humanity,” he said. An emphasis on ideology has led many curricula, he said, to lose a sense of “how to move the human prospect forward.”

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Dark New Greta Thunberg and Our Celebrity-Industrial Complex By Jim Geraghty

Posted By on October 15th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-dark-new-greta-thunberg-and-our-celebrity-industrial-complex/

“Now as we watch Thunberg insist that the only way to be a true climate activist is by adopting the notion that Israel cannot continue to exist — that’s what those “decolonize from the river to the sea” signs mean, whether those holding them understand it or not — can we all now recognize that perhaps turning a troubled young teenager into the face of a global movement wasn’t such a swell idea?”

Way back in the ancient time of 2015, Matt Drudge found himself befuddled about why he was suddenly seeing actress Amy Schumer everywhere, when he didn’t find her particularly funny, insightful, or enjoyable. “Who is Amy Schumer? Where did she come from? Why is she being force-fed on population?” (The actress is Chuck Schumer’s cousin, and looking back I wonder if Drudge was implying that family connections were a driving force behind her then-burgeoning fame.)

Every now and then, you see some figure plucked from obscurity who is touted as the Next Big Thing, often with very little sense of why this person is so magnificent and head and shoulders above the rest. It is as if someone — some Hollywood super-agent, or magazine editor, or television network executive — has hand-selected a person and declared, “This person is going to be a star, come hell or high water.” A switch gets flipped, a high-tech pop-culture media whirligig swings into action, and suddenly that person is everywhere.

Sometimes you see it in Hollywood — Why was Ezra Miller in so many Hollywood blockbusters for a stretch? Why did Shia LaBeouf become the sidekick to every 1980s pop-culture icon? — and sometimes you see it in the world of politics — Beto O’Rourke and Stacey Abrams come to mind. Back in 2022, I jokingly referred to it as the “celebrity-industrial complex,” all those glossy magazines that can put someone on the cover and make someone’s face recognizable and their presence seem ubiquitous.

I thought of that as I saw Greta Thunberg now wearing a keffiyeh and leading pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel marches in Europe, declaring, “If you as a climate activist don’t also fight for a free Palestine and an end to colonialism and oppression all over the world then you should not be able to call yourself a climate activist. . . . You cannot be neutral in a genocide!”

BOOKS Comments turned off

Immoral Clarity-Ta-Nehisi Coates by Noah Rothman

Posted By on October 15th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/immoral-clarity/

The promotional tour for Ta-Nehisi Coates’s latest book revealed to all who can accept the evidence of their own eyes that the celebrated author is a shallow political observer. Coates, who famously rejects complexity, determined that we were all overthinking the generations-old conflict in the Middle East after an eleven-day sojourn to Israel. He papered over the existence of non-Jewish Israeli citizens. He flattened the causes of the wars in 1948, 1967, and 1973. He all but erased the PLO, the intifadas, and Iran’s “ring of fire” terror campaign against the Jewish state. When this cognitive labor was complete, he applied the template of U.S. race relations to Israel-Palestinian discord, pronounced a perfect overlap, and expected to be fêted for his insight. It didn’t quite work out that way.

The question this episode raises is why it took so long for that revelation to dawn on so many. The reaction CBS News anchor Tony Dokoupil generated from his employer’s “race and culture unit” following his gentle pushback against some of the premises the author promulgated is instructive. As some of my colleagues observed, Coates’s pronouncements aren’t meant to be scrutinized and fact-checked. They are catechisms. Reading his work as though it were intended as a scholarly contribution to the sum of human knowledge is a mistake. He proclaims orthodoxies. And when his word is challenged, it is not because his observations conflict with reality. It is merely because first contact with this blinding brand of enlightenment can “scare people.”

The enforcers of Coates’s dogmas in the press long ago internalized the notion that their job wasn’t to challenge the factually deficient canon of their credo. It was to promote their conception of “moral clarity.”

To hear the promoters of this alternative mission statement tell it, moral clarity exists in opposition to conventional definitions of objectivity.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Poll: Majority Favors Federal Ban on Transgender Surgeries for Minors By Eric Lendrum

Posted By on October 15th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/10/14/poll-majority-favors-federal-ban-on-transgender-surgeries-for-minors/

A new poll shows that nearly two-thirds of voters support a federal ban on so-called “sex change” operations for minors, as Democrats continue pushing transgenderism on children across the country.

As reported by Just The News, the new survey from the Center Square Voters’ Voice Poll found that 59% support the ban, including 82% of Republican respondents and 56% of independents. Only Democrats were against the ban, with just 36% of Democratic respondents favoring it.

Along gender lines, men were more likely to support such a ban than women, with 63% of men favoring it while 56% of women voiced their support for it. When broken down by ethnicity, a total of 61% of White respondents favored the ban, while 46% of black respondents favored it, compared to 32% who opposed it and 22% who remained unsure.

The age groups which most favored the ban were the 45-54 and 54-65 demographics, both at 61% support. Meanwhile, the 18-34 bloc supported such a ban by a narrow majority, at 52%.

Lastly, 55% of voters with a college degree supported such a proposal compared to 61% of voters without a college degree, while 61% of voters with children supported a ban, compared to 52% of voters without children.

Transgenderism, the false and scientifically-debunked belief that there are more than two genders, and that anyone can simply change their gender at any time, has been promoted by Democrats for the last several years; the ideology has only recently begun facing serious pushback from conservatives, with laws banning such treatments for minors in 25 different states.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

The Scent of a Harris Panic in the Air Are the cures for the Harris slide far worse than the malady itself? by Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on October 15th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-scent-of-a-harris-panic-in-the-air/

The 2024 race is still close.

But then so was the 1980 Carter-Reagan race at this same juncture.

Indeed, incumbent president Carter was then comfortably up in the last two October Gallup polls—before utterly and suddenly evaporating on Election Day.

But in the last seven days, there seems a sense of panic in the Harris campaign.

How do we know that?

Why are Democratic pundits—from Axelrod to Carville—blasting the Harris campaign and otherwise warning of bad things to come?

Why are some of the once Democrat sure-thing senate races—e.g., in Ohio, Wisconsin, and even Michigan—tightening up?

Pundit poll-watchers are suggesting that Trump is close, even, or slightly ahead in the swing-state polls, suggesting that he is nearing a margin that could cancel out anticipated “ballot irregularities”.

The expected October Harris-Biden surprises—the opportune Fed interest rate cut, the transparently desperate Jack Smith beefed-up re-indictment, the current new Hollywood Trump-hit movie, the desperate Zelensky fly-in to Pennsylvania, the election-cycle customary Bob Woodward unsourced gossip book—seemed so far to have had no effect.

Why would any campaign send out the bumbling Tim Walz to a Fox Sunday interview after his disastrous debate?

Why is a suddenly smiling Biden so eager to claim candidate and VP Harris as a co-conspirator to his disastrous four years?

Why would Harris pivot and now agree to (admittedly mostly softball) interviews, thus confirming to the voting public why she wisely had previously avoided all press conferences, interviews, and town halls?

HISTORY Comments turned off

The Victory That Saved Western Civilization Commemorating the anniversary of the battle of Tours. by Mark Tapson

Posted By on October 15th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-victory-that-saved-western-civilization-2/

We have just passed the anniversary of an epic event that is not widely known in America except among history buffs, but which nonetheless dramatically shaped the future of the Western world, and which may still hold inspiration for us in the West today.

After the death of the Muslim prophet Muhammad in 632, Islam spread like a bloody tide throughout the Arabian peninsula, north to the Caspian Sea and east through Persia and beyond, westward through Egypt and across North Africa all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. From there it crossed the Straits of Gibraltar and consumed virtually all of the Iberian peninsula, or al-Andalus as the Saracens called it. In a mere one hundred years, the warlord Muhammad’s imperialist legacy was an empire larger than Rome’s had ever been.

By 732 that fallen Roman empire had devolved into a patchwork of warring barbarian tribes across what is now continental Europe. When Abd-al-Rahman al-Ghafiki, the governor of al-Andalus, crossed the Pyrenees with the world’s most successful fighting force and began pillaging through the south of what would become France toward Paris, there was no nation, no central power, no professional army capable of stopping them.

No army except one – led by the Frankish duke Charles, the eventual grandfather of Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne. His infantrymen, as historian Victor Davis Hanson puts it in a fascinating chapter of Carnage and Culture, were “hardened veterans of nearly twenty years of constant combat against a variety of Frankish, German, and Islamic enemies.” Hanson writes that the Roman legions had crumbled “because of the dearth of free citizens who were willing to fight for their own freedom and the values of their civilization.” But the seasoned warrior Charles had gathered spirited, free fighters under his command who were willing to defend their Christian society, and he led them to intercept the marauding infidels leaving a ravaged trail toward the ultimate prize, Paris.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Why the Recent Vice-Presidential Debate Matters — By Nicole Kiprilov

Posted By on October 15th, 2024

https://tomklingenstein.com/

In the days following last week’s vice-presidential debate, there has been a barrage of polling and commentary focused on how the debate does not matter. While it is true that, historically and statistically, vice-presidential debates do little to shift public opinion, this particular debate between Vance and Walz is different in three important ways.

First, the debate showed that Vance complements Trump in a way that expands the ticket’s vision for America. This is important because Americans ultimately vote for a vision. Second, the debate is taking place in the context of unprecedented political times, which puts more emphasis on every public forum the candidates engage in, including last week’s debate. Third, both Harris and Walz, since becoming a ticket, have given the fewest number of interviews and press conferences out of any presidential duo in history. This fact increases the significance of the debate as one of the few significant ways Americans can learn about the little-known Walz.

On the first point, Trump and Vance are complementary in a way that is unusual for a Republican ticket. Since 1984, which is when the first vice-presidential debate took place, there have been few tickets in which the vice-presidential pick has contributed positively to the presidential candidate’s vision. For example, in 2008, John McCain’s pick, Sarah Palin, ended up hurting McCain in the polls due to uncertainty about her qualifications and competence. McCain even acknowledged later on that he regretted picking Palin. In 2016, Mike Pence, Trump’s pick, was a standard, run-of-the-mill conservative who neither brought a fresh perspective on Trump’s vision nor was particularly engaging or charismatic to voters.

The debate last week showed that Vance is a unique pick in that he supplements Trump’s America-First vision. Trump’s vision, fundamentally, is about common sense, strength, and competence. Vance not only possesses common sense, strength, and competence, but also complements this vision with the additions of humaneness, empathy, relatability, and intellect. Unlike Pence, Vance is a force to be reckoned with. Taken as a collective, the comprehensive vision that the Trump-Vance ticket is putting forth is not just about Making America Great Again, which is the root of the vision; it is also a people-first, rather than party-first or elite-first. It is vision that focuses on fixing a country that has never been so broken in our lifetime. Even before Vance became the vice-presidential nominee, his relatability was evident through the popular appeal of his book, Hillbilly Elegy. The debate last week allowed the American people to see that crucial aspect come through in a direct way as Vance answered each question with strength, intellect, and poise, and also treated Walz with respect. On the immigration issue, Trump brought an unmistakable urgency and call to action to the issue during his debate with Kamala Harris. During the vice-presidential debate, Vance supplemented that urgency with specific facts and stories.