My High School’s ‘Antiracist’ Agitprop Teachers tried to bully me into signing a $375 student government check for a group promoting critical race theory. I refused. By Sahar Tartak

https://www.wsj.com/articles/my-schools-antiracist-curriculums-education-teachers-students-open-minded-free-speech-racial-equity-systemic-racism-11663254720?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

I was educated in the school district ranked by Niche.com as America’s third-best. Immigrants from around the world come to Great Neck, N.Y., to raise their children. My best friend’s father was at the Tiananmen Square massacre. My classmates left behind their families in El Salvador. My mother escaped revolutionary Iran, and my grandfather escaped the Nazis.

Lately, though, the area’s diverse and liberal-minded residents may have reason to think their local school officials aren’t as open-minded as they thought. In 2021 Great Neck North High School directed the student government to give $375 of student funds to a “racial equity” group to speak to the student body about “systemic racism.” I was the student government’s treasurer, and I felt we didn’t know enough about the organization and its mission to disburse the funds. So I refused to sign the check.

In response, the teachers who advise the student government berated, bullied and insulted me at our next meeting, which took place over Zoom for my parents to overhear. They began by announcing that my social studies teacher would be present. Together, the three adults told me that the principal himself found my stance “appalling.” I had made them and the school “look bad,” they told me. One teacher said the situation gave her “hives.”

When I suggested that students might not need or want a lecture on systemic racism, my social-studies teacher asked whether I’d also oppose a Holocaust survivor’s presentation.

I objected to that comparison, but she cut me off: “If you’re not on board with systemic racism, I have trouble with that, girlfriend.”

The Bidenomics Sham Is Collapsing

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/09/16/the-bidenomics-sham-is-collapsing/

With red lights flashing nearly everywhere, the economy’s prospects look grim. Soaring inflation, crashing home sales, plunging GDP, falling real incomes. No question, the economy is a mess. So why is the Biden administration saying things are going better?

It’s not just this week’s “unexpected” 8.3% inflation jump. Or the scary plunge in stock prices, destroying trillions of dollars in household wealth in just days. It’s that the ruling party, the Democratic Party, seems utterly oblivious to the damage it’s done.

This week, President Joe Biden touted the “progress” made by his administration against inflation, just a day after the report that prices had risen 8.3% overall, and food prices by 11.4%, the fastest since 1979.

“Today’s data show more progress in bringing global inflation down in the U.S. economy,” Biden bragged. “Overall, prices have been essentially flat in our country these last two months: that is welcome news for American families, with more work still to do.”

Prices have not been “essentially flat.” They’re rising sharply, as the data clearly and unequivocally show.

IDF purity of arms and Palestinian Authority blood-lust By Ruthie Blum

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-717262

The killing on Wednesday morning of the deputy commander of the IDF Nahal Brigade’s Reconnaissance Battalion is the latest example of the cost of the Israeli military’s purity-of-arms code. An upstanding officer by all accounts, Maj. Bar Falah lost his life as a result of top brass adherence to “The Spirit of the Israel Defense Forces,” the IDF’s official doctrine of ethics.

The discussion of the danger posed to Israeli soldiers forced to confront enemies with no scruples is not a new one in the Jewish state. Debates about it have been conducted for decades.

But the issue catapulted to international headlines last week when the administration in Washington admonished Israel to rethink its rules of engagement. Of course, President Joe Biden and his team weren’t suggesting that the security of the country with which they claim to have an “unbreakable bond” would be better served by shedding some of its military ethics in favor of self-preservation.

No, the White House and State Department had the opposite idea: that Israel should increase its combat morality. This chutzpah would beggar belief if it hadn’t emerged in the wake of the IDF’s conclusion earlier this month of a probe into the May 11 death of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in Jenin.

Abu Akleh, a Christian Arab-American resident of east Jerusalem, was struck down while she was covering a clash between Israeli security forces and Palestinian gunmen in what has become a hotbed of Palestinian terrorism. Rather than bemoan the tragedy of a member of the press being caught in a deadly crossfire, the Palestinian Authority and its supporters in the international media promptly accused the IDF soldiers on the scene of cold-blooded murder.

Even PA President Mahmoud Abbas knew this was a lie, regardless of whether the bullet that killed Abu Akleh was from an IDF weapon or one used by a Palestinian terrorist. It was clear to all concerned, other than those whose hatred of Israel outweighs all integrity, that no Israeli soldier would – or did – take aim at a person with the word “PRESS” clearly marked on his or her flak jacket.

Exclusive Doc Indicates Special Counsel Failing To Bring Collusion Hoaxers To Justice By: Margot Cleveland

https://thefederalist.com/2022/09/15/exclusive-doc-indicates-special-counsel-failing-to-bring-collusion-hoaxers-to-justice/

John Durham’s team has known of these discrepancies for years but has failed to hold responsible those who used the CIA to target a political opponent with false smears.

A whitepaper obtained first by The Federalist suggests Special Counsel John Durham botched the investigation of a second Russia collusion hoax, the one concerning Yota cellphones.

In a scandal linked to the Spygate operation, Hillary Clinton cronies peddled to the CIA fake evidence they claimed established Donald Trump and his associates were using the Russian-made Yota cellphones in the vicinity of the White House and other key locations. The news of this operation broke during the special counsel’s prosecution of former Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann. However, the just-obtained Yota whitepaper that was supposed to undergird Sussmann’s claims differs substantially from the memoranda documenting what Sussmann supposedly said to the CIA.

Durham’s team has known of these discrepancies for years but has failed to hold responsible those who used the CIA to target a political opponent and the then-president of the United States with false smears of corruption with a foreign power. Now with the news that the special counsel’s office has let the grand jury expire, suggesting a winding down of the investigation, Durham’s failure to seek charges related to the Yota phone hoax is appalling. Durham offered the only apparent opportunity for justice in this entire collection of major scandals.

College Picks Official From Antisemitic CAIR to Investigate Antisemitism by Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/college-picks-official-from-antisemitic-cair-to-investigate-antisemitism/

Who better to watch the henhouse than the CAIR fox?

The City University of New York (CUNY) is assigning a former leader of the Hamas-linked Council for American Islamic Relations (CAIR) to investigate an antisemitism and anti-Zionism complaint made internally by a Jewish professor.

CUNY assigned its chief diversity officer, Saly Abd Alla, the former civil rights director of CAIR’s Minnesota chapter, to investigate an email sent by Kingsborough Community College (KCC) professor Jeffrey Lax, accusing its president of anti-Zionist antisemitic discrimination. CAIR is listed by the U.S. Department of Justice as an unindicted co-conspirator in funding millions of dollars to the Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas, and their leaders have previously called for the destruction of Israel.

As John Perazzo at Discover the Networks has documented, beyond supporting Hamas, CAIR has a history of antisemitism.

Including at New York area colleges.

In 1998, CAIR co-hosted a rally at Brooklyn College where Islamic militants exhorted the attendees to carry out “jihad” and described Jews as “descendants of the apes.”

Nihad Awad, CAIR’s co-founder, had his own stellar history of hating Jews.

U.S. policy in the Middle East is faulty because of Jewish influence on the White House, he told Georgetown University students in a 1998 speech organized by the Muslim Students Association. Of President Bill Clinton’s advisors, he asked, “Now, of Clinton’s advisors, who is now, who of his advisors, who… who is opposing the latest agreement with Iraq? Look at their last names. Look at their ethnic, their ethnic or religious or racial background. You will see that these are the same groups that belong to the same interest groups in the Administration.” He later added that “many Presidents are servants to Israel, and it’s hard to see someone who is, uh, disobeying the political authority of Jewish interests.”

Orwell’s 1984, From Warning to How-To Guide Kevin Donnelly

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2022/09/orwells-1984-from-warning-to-how-to-guide/

As highlighted in George Orwell’s 1984, language and how it is used influences how we think and act, so controlling language is a key strategy employed by totalitarian regimes of the left and right to manipulate people and enforce group think.

In Orwell’s dystopian novel what is described as New­speak leads to a situation where “thoughtcrime” is impossible as “there will be no words in which to express it”.  Such is the insidious evil of distorting language to control how people think Orwell writes in ‘Looking back on the Spanish Civil War’, we now live in world where whoever rules is able to say “two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs”.

While the cultural-left’s use of politically correct language is widespread it should be noted using
language to persuade and convince has been evident since the time of the ancient Greeks. Rhetoric includes devices such as using emotive language, attacking the person, appealing to expert opinion and facts, generalising and employing logic and reason.

It also should be noted employing rhetoric is not restricted to the cultural-left. During America’s involvement in the Vietnam war the military used the expression ‘collateral damage’ to describe innocent civilians being injured or killed and ‘friendly fire’ when its soldiers were the victims of American firepower. Forcefully removing peasants from their farms and villages, instead of being described for what it was, was labelled as ‘pacification’.

How A Small, Conservative Campus Paper Did A Better Job Covering The BYU Volleyball Incident Than “The New York Times” Another strike against “moral clarity” in journalism Jesse Singal

https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/how-a-small-conservative-campus-paper?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Last month, Rachel Richardson—the only black starter on the women’s volleyball team at Duke University—leveled a shocking accusation. She said that during her team’s August 26 match against Brigham Young University, fans inside the BYU arena in Provo, Utah inundated her with racist abuse and threats.

After the match, 19-year-old Richardson told her godmother, Lesa Pamplin, about the incident. Pamplin is a criminal defense attorney running for a county judgeship in Texas, and was not at the game—but the next day, she published a tweet that rocketed the story to national attention: “My Goddaughter is the only black starter for Dukes [sic] volleyball team. While playing yesterday, she was called a [n-word] every time she served. She was threatened by a white male that told her to watch her back going to the team bus. A police officer had to be put by their bench.”

The tweet is no longer available, but it racked up 185,000 likes before it was archived. LeBron James himself responded: “you tell your Goddaughter to stand tall, be proud and continue to be BLACK!!! We are a brotherhood and sisterhood!  We have her back. This is not sports.”

Richardson’s story also spread via her father, Marvin Richardson, who is Deputy Director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and who spoke with multiple outlets on behalf of his daughter. In an August 27 story about the incident in the New York Times that named him but not his daughter, he described an alarming, potentially violent scene. Despite an onslaught of slurs, he told the Times, his daughter thought the safest choice was “to keep her head down and continue playing.” He said that “as the crowd got more hyped and the epithets kept coming, she wanted to respond back but she told me she was afraid that, if she did, the raucous crowd could very well turn into a mob mentality.”

DOJ Refuses to Release Its Plan to Implement Biden’s Voting Initiative By Andrew C. McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/doj-refuses-to-release-its-plan-to-implement-bidens-voting-initiative/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=blog-post&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=first

Despite a court-imposed September 8 deadline, the Justice Department has failed to produce its strategic plan to implement President Biden’s directive regarding voter registration and participation.

On March 7, 2021, Biden issued an executive order requiring federal agencies to submit within 200 days their plans to promote voter participation. This directive, EO 14019, was premised on the fiction that “many Americans, including people of color, confront significant obstacles to exercising that fundamental right” (to vote). The Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA), the public-interest group that filed the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking disclosure from the DOJ, says there has been no explanation from Main Justice for its resistance to release relevant documents.

In a lawsuit it filed shortly after the directive, FGA noted the observation of many congressional Republicans that EO 14019 bore a striking resemblance to “a federal election takeover plan crafted by the radical left-leaning group known as Demos.” This plan, the lawmakers said, “called for the weaponization of the DOJ” for the purpose of imposing federal standards on the states. To attempt this in light of the fact that the Constitution essentially commits elections to the states is worrisome enough. But here, Biden is attempting to proceed by federal executive fiat, under circumstances in which the Constitution reserves only to Congress the prerogative of altering states’ election procedures.

This summer, a federal court ordered the Justice Department to respond well in advance of the midterm elections, and imposed a September 8 deadline for the production of documents. FGA reports that DOJ has turned over some heavily redacted documents but has refused to disclose its 15-page strategic plan.

FGO’s Tarren Bragdon asks why DOJ is “treating these documents like they are classified information dealing with nuclear weapons?”

Nature Attacks SCOTUS as Anti-Science By Wesley J. Smith

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/nature-attacks-scotus-as-anti-science/

“If anything is a “war on science,” it is publishing ideological articles like this in what is supposed to be a science journal — a trend that seems particularly infectious among establishment medical and scientific outlets. By pushing rank political advocacy that would have been perfectly appropriate in the Nation or Politico — as if the issues discussed were scientific matters — Nature undermined trust in its objectivity as an important institution furthering the dispassionate search for truth.”

Last month I criticized the prestigious journal Science for pushing ideological progressivism and attacking the Supreme Court’s conservative rulings — as if its authors’ and editors’ subjective beliefs and policy preferences are the same thing as supporting objective science.

Not to be outdone in conflating leftism with “science,” the British journal Nature — perhaps the world’s most respected “scientific” publication — has similarly attacked SCOTUS based on the wrongheaded idea that progressive policy preferences are somehow synonymous with good science. From “Inside the Supreme Court’s War on Science,” by Nature’s U. S. correspondent Jeff Tollefson:

In late June, the US Supreme Court issued a trio of landmark decisions that repealed the right to abortion, loosened gun restrictions and curtailed climate regulations. Although the decisions differed in rationale, they share a distinct trait: all three dismissed substantial evidence about how the court’s rulings would affect public health and safety. It is a troubling trend that many scientists fear could undermine the role of scientific evidence in shaping public policy. Now, as the court prepares to consider a landmark case on electoral policies, many worry about the future of American democracy itself.

Upside-Down Gubernatorial Election in Illinois By Bobby Miller

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/upside-down-gubernatorial-election-in-illinois/

One Midwestern state’s gubernatorial race is starting to look like Bizarro World.

During the past few decades in politics, we’ve come to expect Republicans to be more pro-Israel, and often more philosemitic, than their Democratic counterparts. Yet Darren Bailey, the incendiary Republican nominee for governor in Illinois, seems intent on breaking with this.

Last weekend, Bailey met with representatives of the Palestinian community and indicated that he dislikes the state’s first-of-its-kind 2015 law that punishes those who boycott Israel in the manner favored by the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement. Opposing anti-BDS legislation as a matter of policy or on constitutional grounds is a legitimate position to hold. While I would contend that anti-BDS statutes are by and large constitutional and don’t run afoul of First Amendment speech protections, there is further reason to worry. Bailey made his comments about anti-BDS legislation from a lectern in front of a map of the Levant in which the entirety of Israel’s borders has been erased, with Palestine in their stead.

Moreover, Bailey’s remarks come on the heels of another scandal in which it emerged that he once claimed the Holocaust “doesn’t even compare” to abortion. Everyone, especially pro-lifers, should be appalled by this sort of hyperbolic rhetoric. As Illinois house Republican leader Jim Durkin put it, “the Holocaust was one of the worst atrocities in the history of humankind, and any comments that minimize it have no place in our political discourse.” Also noteworthy: Bailey’s sole congressional endorsement is Mary Miller, the ignominious Illinois congresswoman who claimed Adolf Hitler “was right on one thing”: that “he who has the youth has the future.” (She later apologized for the reference.) 

Even if one attributes these decisions and comments to poor judgment rather than malicious antisemitism, they highlight that Bailey is not the best candidate Republicans could have put forth to unseat an atrocious governor, J. B. Pritzker, in deep-blue Illinois, especially considering the incumbent’s genuine, albeit limited, pro-Israel track record. 

Bailey’s candidacy is yet another example of a Trump endorsee to which the former president was drawn because of fealty to him rather than general-election viability. Democrats’ incredibly cynical intervention in the Republican primary likely helped Bailey, but 45’s endorsement did more than anything else to put him over the edge. Trump’s prioritization of himself over the interests of the GOP has been a constant theme this primary season, a trend that dates back to the early days of his candidacy. His self-serving primary picks only underscore Republicans’ deal with the devil. If the Party of Lincoln wants to win in places like the Land of Lincoln again, it must dispense with the Donald as its de facto leader.