ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

What About Anti-Semitism in our High Schools? Students increasingly engage in harassment and bullying toward their Jewish peers – while administrators turn a blind eye. by Adam Milstein

Posted By on September 19th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/what-about-anti-semitism-in-our-high-schools/

In recent years, while much of the Jewish community has been keenly focused on antisemitism on college campuses, we have largely overlooked another growing danger. Activist teachers and administrators have increasingly injected antisemitism into American public and private high schools through expanded Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) departments and policies and by promoting radical curricula steeped in Critical Race Theory (CRT), such as the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (LESMC). Through this ideology, American Jews are implicitly and sometimes, explicitly, portrayed as privileged white oppressors. By extension, the Jewish State, Israel, is described as an oppressive ethno-state engaged in apartheid, colonialism, and ethnic cleansing.

We are starting to see the consequences of this campaign. Highschool students, both in public and private schools around the nation are engaging in antisemitic bullying and harassment toward their Jewish peers. Amplified through social media and group chats, the phenomenon has become increasingly frequent in high schools. Antisemitism also rears its head in high school sports and a there’s a spike in antisemitic graffiti, like swastikas. Physical violence rooted in antisemitism has become increasingly common in the U.S. and worldwide, from Los Angeles to Atlanta, Palm Beach, New York, and even in Australia.

Last month, a federal investigation found that during the 2018 and 2019 school years, a Tempe, Arizona, based Kyrene School District violated the civil rights of a middle schooler when she was forced to endure repeated antisemitic harassment in class. Nine students harassed and called her antisemitic names, in addition to making frequent jokes about the Holocaust.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

When a ‘Sanctuary City’ is Short on Sanctuary Martha’s Vineyard gets a lesson on lax immigration policies. Bruce Thornton

Posted By on September 19th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/when-a-sanctuary-city-is-short-on-sanctuary/

Self-proclaimed “sanctuary city” Martha’s Vineyard, one of the richest and whitest communities in the country, has turned out to be not much of a sanctuary for the illegal aliens they claim to care so much about. Recently, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis sent 50 Venezuelan illegal aliens to the tony enclave, reasoning that if its citizens are serious about their compassion for migrants and their love of diversity, they’d jump at the chance to prove it by actually spending some money on them.

Instead, the town-fathers and citizens whined about the strain on their resources and the disorder caused by unvetted illegal aliens swarming their town. Then there’s the hysteria over relocating illegal border-crossers, something Biden’s Feds have been doing for months––an estimated 10,000 just to New York.

Martha’s Vineyard’s complaints are also particularly shameless, claiming a “housing crisis” in a community with thousands of empty rooms. Meanwhile, documentary film maker Ken Burns by implication called De Santis Hitler, and Hillary Clinton directly called him a “human trafficker.” Barack Obama, who frequently lectures “bitter clingers” about their xenophobia towards “people who are not like them,” owns a huge, 29-acre estate in Martha’s Vineyard that could easily accommodate all 50 Venezuelans.

Instead, the mayor called in the National Guard to ship all those “diverse” victims of callous Republicans to a military base on Cape Cod, an act of NIMBY Pharasism. Then the rich denizens of Martha’s Vineyard started a GoFundMe fundraiser to panhandle ordinary Americans for money to handle this “humanitarian crisis” that’s already been resolved simply by kicking the migrants out of town. The proceeds, however, will not go to the expelled migrants, but to “building up a reserve to assist situations like this in the future.”

But like most of the virtue-signaling Left, this playground of the economic elite has exposed itself as full of posers unwilling to actually do anything about their vaunted “principles”––a long tradition among Western leftists. The result is a morally preening political rhetoric that worsens problems like uncontrolled illegal immigration by proscribing obvious common-sense solutions such as upgrading border security, including building a wall; keeping those claiming asylum in Mexico; and Title 42, which allowed for increased expulsions.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

How Global Warming Is A Lot Like ‘Get Trump’

Posted By on September 19th, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/09/19/how-global-warming-is-a-lot-like-get-trump/

“Meanwhile, President Joe Biden, the Democratic Party, and much of the media want the country to believe that, led by “MAGA Republicans,” the dark night of fascism continues to descend on the U.S. They are partly right. There is a distinct whiff of fascism in the air. But it’s the Democrats who released the stench with their efforts to crush dissent and establish single-party rule over constitutional governing.”

Brilliant author Tom Wolfe wrote more than 45 years ago that “the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.” While still relevant to our present times, it’s the sort of observation that can also be applied to a couple of other events playing out in our world today.

First up, global warming. We’ve been hearing the shrill warnings, a constant wave of hysteria for more than three decades. Because of man’s use of fossil fuels, we’ve been told the polar ice caps would melt, glaciers would collapse en masse, snow would stop falling, rising sea levels would flood coastal regions, and droughts and floods would be the rule rather than rare exceptions.

It’s hard to even recall a time when this alarmist or that climatista wasn’t trying to convince the world that we have only eight or 10 or 11 or maybe “zero” years, possibly even less than 100 months, to change our fossil-fuel-burning ways before Gaia would see to it that we begin to suffer and perish.

In fact, we shouldn’t even be here today. In 1989, the Associated Press reported that “a senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.” 

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

The Real Midterm Election Stakes Will voters put a check on the unrequited ambitions of the Democratic left?

Posted By on September 19th, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-real-midterm-election-stakes-voting-spending-inflation-environment-filibuster-11663528778?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

“If Democrats add seats in the Senate and hold the House, there won’t be much of a check on progressive ambitions. If they accomplish this with inflation at 8%, they will be even more emboldened. That is what’s really on the ballot in November.’

If the election polls are right, Democrats have a good chance of adding to their majority in the Senate and even keeping it in the House. Toward that end they are trying to convince voters that abortion and Donald Trump are the main election issues. But the real issue, by far the most important for actual policy, is whether voters will put a legislative check on the political left.

Mr. Trump isn’t even on the ballot this year, and Joe Biden will be President at least through 2024. No national abortion law is likely to pass Congress as long as the 60-vote legislative filibuster rule remains in the Senate. Abortion law could change in many states depending on election results, but probably not in most.

In other words, the Democratic election strategy is a new version of their 2020 campaign bait-and-switch. Joe Biden and Democrats in Congress won by making the election a referendum on Mr. Trump and Covid-19. But once in office they pivoted to advance a far-left labor agenda and enact the biggest expansion of government in modern history. They succeeded on many fronts, and only the opposition of Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema prevented them from killing the filibuster to do much more.

The Democratic left hasn’t given up on any of this, however, as they are admitting if you pay attention. The media are ignoring this as they echo the abortion and Trump narrative. So it’s worth laying out what Democrats really have in mind, based on what they tried to do this Congress and are promising for the next.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Cleaning the Washington Stables By David Solway

Posted By on September 18th, 2022

The Greek myth of the Augean Stables has rarely been more pertinent than today. In penance for his sins, the Greek hero Hercules (Heracles in original Greek) was ordered to scour the stables in which King Augeas kept 3,000 herd of cattle and which had not been cleaned in 30 years. The Labor was accomplished by diverting the river Alpheus through the structure, in itself no mean feat, even for a mythological hero.

The slogan “drain the swamp,” restored to our political discourse by Donald Trump, serves as the contemporary description and political purpose of the Herculean Labor undertaken by the former president, the nemesis of the fetid Washington quagmire. Regrettably, Trump had less luck than Hercules, but his attempt was no less heroic. Three-thousand oxen are nothing compared to the uncountable and unaccountable swamp dwellers thronging the offices, precincts, fields, and fens of American politics, and 30 years is an eyeblink in the history of political and moral corruption. Even Hercules might have quailed before the task, realizing that diverting the Potomac through the halls of power would have amounted to a mere trickle, by comparison, leaving the offal intact.

Something in the magnitude of Noah’s Flood would be needed to rinse and fumigate the grime and crud and sewage that has accumulated over the generations of grift and venality in the realms of authority, possibly never more feculent than at present under the reprobate administration of Joe Biden, a lawless DOJ, an unscrupulous FBI, a weaponized IRS, a tainted NIH, NIAID, and CDC, all operating in the debauched atmosphere of corporate socialism and generally associated with banana republics.

Nonetheless, some sort of housecleaning must be attempted, which may at least leave two or three stalls of the Washington Stables in reasonably decent shape, and Donald Trump is the only protagonist on the scene who is capable of performing even so truncated a mission. The objective is clear. MAGA Republicans must capture House and Senate. Biden will have to be impeached. The marsh of Democrat imbeciles and embarrassments who desecrate every department and agency must be disciplined or sent packing. Rogue civil service bureaucrats must be purged en masse via Schedule F. The military must once more be set upon its proper foundation as a fighting force second to none rather than a community center for intersectional clowns and incompetents.

Obviously, there are discrepancies in the analogy. Trump, for example, was not, like Hercules, punished for his sins, but undertook his Labor voluntarily. He was beholden neither to the gods nor subject to some Eurysthean wager. Neither would his quest be guaranteed of success. He might be defeated — arrested on false accusations, or worse — or otherwise thwarted by a vast machinery of special interests, Party traitors, an army of media sutlers and assorted public mercenaries, and a thick emulsion of establishment cronies and powerful adversaries resistant to political antiseptic.

But the effort must be undertaken, and Trump is the one to do it. His first sortie was an unexpected, if partial, success. He has now learned the extent of the stables and the enormous quantities of manure he has to deal with. Hercules was assigned Twelve Labors, but it is the Fifth that requires attention. The stables are rank and must be hosed out, so far as possible. But the task is immense, and I can’t see anyone else who has the thews and the gumption capable of mounting so prodigious an operation that even the gods might have spared him.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

What Jonathan Chait Gets Wrong about the Threats Facing American Jews By Tal Fortgang

Posted By on September 18th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/09/what-jonathan-chait-gets-wrong-about-the-threats-facing-american-jews/?utm_source=recirc-

EXCERPT:

He writes, “No recent development in American life has done more” than the GOP’s playing footsie with antisemites “to throw American Jews’ safety and civic equality into doubt.” That Marjorie Taylor Greene and her ilk represent the biggest threat to American Jews’ safety is nonsense; that they represent the biggest threat to our civic equality is nonsense on stilts.

As the New York Times reported in April, Orthodox Jews have borne the brunt of a new wave of antisemitic attacks, particularly concentrated in American cities. “We had Jews beaten and brutalized in broad daylight in Midtown Manhattan, in Brooklyn, in the Diamond District,” Anti-Defamation League president Jonathan Greenblatt told the Times. “What was remarkable about it was people acted with impunity. These were Jewish people wearing a kipa or who were visibly Orthodox being assaulted for being Jews, and that is brand-new.”

These vicious assaults, which constitute a large portion of the violent incidents perpetrated against Jews, are not committed by people taking their cues from Republicans. They are mostly the work of habitual offenders who’ve cycled in and out of state custody and often have histories of drug abuse or mental illness. What precisely motivates someone to punch a Hasidic yeshiva student on his way to synagogue is unclear, but it is safe to say that Trumpy conspiracy theorists have little to do with it.

Jews have also suffered as anti-Israel sentiment has boiled over into violence, with notable incidents occurring this past spring in New York and Los Angeles. While progressives continue to insist that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism — and to elect to Congress anti-Zionists who have trafficked in antisemitic conspiracies — anti-Zionists continue to have trouble with the distinction.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Why Are Schools Asking Children about Their Sexual Histories?By Madeleine Kearns

Posted By on September 18th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/09/why-are-schools-asking-children-about-their-sexual-histories/?itm_campaign=headline

School surveys have become another means of indoctrination. Parents are right to push back.

In June, Missouri attorney general Eric Schmitt launched an investigation into the Webster Grove School District after parents complained about surveys in which schools collected personal information from their children. As school surveys asking children intrusive questions about their sexual behaviors, political beliefs, mental health, and family lives become increasingly common, so too has pushback from parents.

Parents Defending Education is a national grassroots organization “working to reclaim our schools from activists imposing harmful agendas.” This mission starts with raising awareness. On its website, the group links to a number of these surveys aimed at school-aged children.

Consider the Maine Department of Health and Human Services, which in 2021 sent out an “Integrated Youth Health Survey” to middle schoolers. Questions included: “Have you ever seriously thought about killing yourself?” and “Have you ever done something to purposely hurt yourself without wanting to die, such as cutting or burning yourself on purpose?” The 12- and 13-year-olds were also asked whether they’d had sexual intercourse or oral sex, and, if so, whether they’d used a condom the last time they had sex.

Another 2021 survey, this one sent to Rhode Island middle schoolers, states that “a person’s appearance, style, dress, or the way they walk may affect how people describe them. How do you think other people at school would describe you?” The responses offered for students to choose from include “very feminine,” “very masculine,” and “equally feminine and masculine.” The survey also asks children if they have ever “made a plan” to kill themselves.

California’s “healthy kids survey,” given to high schoolers, states: “Some people describe themselves as transgender when how they think or feel about their gender is different from the sex they were assigned at birth. Are you transgender?” Students are also asked whether they identify as “straight (not gay),” “lesbian or gay,” “bisexual,” or “something else.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Who is Raymond J. Dearie, the special master in Trump case? by Mychael Schnell

Posted By on September 18th, 2022

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/3647056-who-is-raymond-j-dearie-the-special-master-in-trump-case/

A federal judge on Thursday appointed Judge Raymond J. Dearie to serve as special master in the case involving documents the FBI seized from former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence last month.

The decision to install Dearie — a 78-year-old New York native and semi-retired judge from the U.S. District Court of the Eastern District of New York — came in response to Trump’s request for an independent mediator to determine what, if any, materials recovered by authorities are protected by attorney-client or executive privileges.

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who is presiding over the Trump documents case, granted Trump’s request for a special master and directed both his legal team and the Justice Department to provide a list of contenders for the job. Dearie was the only individual both sides agreed upon.

The longtime judge is now tasked with examining the more than 11,000 documents the FBI seized by Nov. 30.

Here are five things to know about Dearie.

Dearie is a former Reagan nominee

Dearie received a bachelor’s degree from Fairfield University in 1966 before earning his juris doctor from St. John’s University School of Law in 1969.

After working in private practice for two years, Dearie moved to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York in 1971.

Starting out as an assistant U.S. attorney, the New York native moved up the ladder at the office, leading the appeals division, general crimes section and criminal division before assuming the role of chief assistant U.S. attorney in 1980 and, in 1982, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Biden’s fuzzy math fuels racial division The FBI’s numbers show hate crimes account for .06% of all arrests By Tom Basile

Posted By on September 18th, 2022

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/sep/16/bidens-fuzzy-math-fuels-racial-division/

The Biden administration’s race war continued this week with the president’s deceptively named “United We Stand” summit to expose the supposed widespread threat of violent extremism and White supremacy in America. The government website stokes fear and division in stark terms. “Americans cannot participate in the basic activities of everyday life—like shopping at the grocery store or praying at their house of worship—without the fear of being targeted and killed for who they are, our democracy… is at risk.”

In an effort to convince Americans that we don’t have a crime wave, a mental health crisis or rampant societal rot due to welfare’s broken promises, President Joe Biden is again manipulating and demonizing the population. As we saw with pandemic reporting, there’s fuzzy math and deliberate information management being utilized to drive the narrative that White supremacists are somehow a significant threat to society. The contrived hysteria will be used to target the administration’s opponents like the dictators of some third-world Banana Republic or fascist regime.

Like the left’s anti-cop narrative about indiscriminate killings of Black men, the facts about extremism decisively expose the left’s subterfuge.

According to the FBI, in 2019 there were more than 10 million arrests in the United States, excluding traffic infractions. There were more than 1.2 million violent crimes and more than 6.9 million property crimes with the remainder being other miscellaneous offenses.

That same year there were 6,455 hate crimes reported against persons and property. If all of those led to an arrest, that amounted to only .06% of all arrests in 2019. In 2020, the number from the FBI was 8,263. The year-over-year increase amounted to two, one hundredths of a percent of all arrests.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Texas Dem: Harris wrong on border security; ‘we get thousands’ along the border every day By Mica Soellner

Posted By on September 18th, 2022

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/sep/17/blue-dog-democrat-says-harris-wrong-southern-borde/

Rep. Henry Cuellar said Saturday he disagreed with Vice President Kamala Harris‘s assessment that the southern border is secure, citing his border district’s experience with the influx of migrants into the United States.

The Texas Democrat cited the thousands of people that come across the border per day, as well as more than four million people reported as crossing the border in the past two years.

“The border is not secure, with all due respect to the VP,” Mr. Cuellar told CNN. “We get thousands of people along the border, at least 6 to 8 thousand people a day.”

The congressman added: “You’re talking about almost 4 plus, maybe 4.4. million individuals in two years. Iff you call that secure, I don’t know what secure is.”

Mr. Cuellar, a moderate, narrowly fended off a progressive primary challenger in a June runoff election.

Ms. Harris, who is in charge of overseeing the southern border, asserted that the border was secure in an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press last week.

The vice president also discussed the broken immigration system, which she said was exacerbated by the Trump administration.

“We have a secure border and that is a priority for any nation, including our administration,” Ms. Harris said.

Republicans have attacked the Biden administration over what they say are open border policies that have incentivized illegal immigrants entering the country.