NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Six Weeks Until Our Long National Nightmare Is Over And the focus will return to where it should always be. by Jeff Crouere

Posted By on December 13th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/six-weeks-until-our-long-national-nightmare-is-over/

Americans, our long national nightmare, the Biden presidency, is almost over. First, we must endure six more weeks of damage that President Joe Biden will inflict on the American people.Biden just gave Hunter, his son who was convicted on gun and tax evasion charges, an expansive 11-year pardon, after repeatedly promising he would not engage in such familial favoritism. Biden’s lies were so egregious that at a recent White House press briefing, CNN reporter MJ Lee asked a very pertinent question, “The next time that the president says he will or won’t do something, why should the American people believe him?”

Of course, the American people should never believe Biden, for he has been lying and plagiarizing his entire political career. For example, in the 1988 presidential race, Biden was forced to withdraw his candidacy after it was discovered he repeatedly plagiarized from the speeches of British political leader Neil Kinnock, among others.

Sadly, Hunter’s pardon will be just the beginning, for over the next six weeks, Biden will undoubtedly issue more controversial pardons. Some political observers speculate Biden could pardon other family members, such as his brother James.

He could also issue preemptive pardons for people who might face an investigation from the Trump Justice Department. This list includes Dr. Anthony Fauci, retired General Mark Milley, Senator-elect Adam Schiff (D-CA) and former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney.

These pardons will only make the unpopular Biden more hated by the American people. According to a new poll by J.L. Partners, 52% of American voters believed it was “wrong” for Biden to pardon his son, while only 29% believed it was the “right” decision.

No wonder, another J.L. Partners poll, commissioned for The Daily Mail, ranked Biden as the worst American President in the last 47 years. Respondents ranked Biden worse than Jimmy Carter, a President who failed spectacularly, and Richard Nixon, a President embroiled in the Watergate scandal who was forced to resign.

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

‘Women, Life, Freedom’: Netanyahu’s message to the Iranian people “You know what this regime is truly terrified of? It’s terrified of you, the people of Iran,” said the Israeli premier.

Posted By on December 13th, 2024

https://www.jns.org/women-life-freedom-netanyahus-message-to-the-iranian-people/

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday night extended an olive branch and delivered a message of hope to the Iranian people.

Below is the transcript of the video message:

“People of Iran:

As we see history unfold before our very eyes, I can only imagine what you’re feeling right now.

Your oppressors spent over $30 billion supporting Assad in Syria.

Today, after only 11 days of fighting, his regime collapsed into dust.

Your oppressors spent billions supporting Hamas in Gaza.

Today their regime lies in ruins.

Your oppressors spent over $20 billion supporting Hezbollah in Lebanon.

In a matter of weeks, most of Hezbollah’s leaders, its rockets and thousands of its terrorists went up in smoke.

The money your oppressors stole from you literally went up in smoke.

You must be furious imagining the new roads, schools, hospitals that could have been built with the tens of billions of dollars your dictators wasted backing terrorists who lose over and over and over again.

Do you know why Iran’s oppressors keep losing?

It’s not only because they are incompetent and cruel. They are.

It’s because they seek to conquer other nations, to impose fundamentalist tyranny on the Middle East—on the entire world.

The only thing Israel seeks is to defend our state. But in so doing, we’re defending civilization against barbarism.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump’s pick for civil rights can doom DEI racism The nomination of Harmeet Dhillon as assistant attorney general for civil rights could be a turning point in the battle against woke indoctrination and antisemitism. Jonathan Tobin

Posted By on December 13th, 2024

https://www.jns.org/trumps-pick-for-civil-rights-can-doom-dei-racism/?utm_campaign=Daily%20Syndicate%20

Compared to some of the choices for posts in President-elect Donald Trump’s new administration, this one isn’t likely to garner nearly the attention that some of the others have generated. Trump’s decision to name Harmeet Dhillon as assistant attorney general of the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice has already attracted some of the same kind of bitter criticism dished out to other more prominent picks as articles in The New York Times and The Washington Post have demonstrated. Still, compared to the storm of controversy surrounding his selections of people like Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense or Kash Patel to lead the FBI, Dhillon is a much smaller target.

That means she may be able to fly beneath the radar of both Democratic and Republican senators who are not Trump supporters, looking to demonstrate their unwillingness to do the incoming president’s will. Yet those who want to thwart Trump’s vows to not only “drain the swamp” in Washington, D.C., but roll back the woke ideological tide inside the government and throughout the country will be making a mistake if they underestimate the importance of this nomination. Having someone like Dhillon—an ardent opponent of the left and a proven legal fighter—in charge of what is arguably the DOJ’s most prominent and influential division is as much of a game-changer as any other appointment Trump will make in the next four years.

The head of the Civil Rights Division is not a member of the Cabinet. But it will allow Dhillon to fundamentally change not only how the U.S. Department of Justice operates but also to begin the process of reversing the left’s long march through American institutions. The question of whether the pervasive influence of the divisive and inherently discriminatory teachings of critical race theory and intersectionality will continue to dominate the education system—at the college level and in K-12 schools—could well hinge on Dhillon’s determination and success. The same applies to the widespread imposition of the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) throughout society.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Joshua T. Katz A New York Private School Turns Against DEI The Birch Wathen Lenox School is instead prioritizing constructive dialogue and respect for different viewpoints.

Posted By on December 13th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/new-york-private-school-turns-against-dei

There is no need to recite the depredations on all sectors of American society of initiatives devoted to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Our educational institutions are among the hardest hit, making it hard in some parts of the country to find schools that don’t lecture even the youngest students about “settler colonialism,” the evils of “whiteness,” and the “genocide” supposedly being perpetrated by the Israelis.

When institutions push back, as they occasionally do, it merits attention. One example arrived last month in the form of an outstanding—and hardly right-wing—opinion piece in the New York Post by Bill Kuhn, who has been the head of the Birch Wathen Lenox School (BWL) since December 2022. This is not Kuhn’s first excellent article, but it is the one with the highest profile. And it will, I expect, do wonders for his school’s application numbers.

Let me set the scene for those who do not follow the ins and outs of private school education, and what passes for education, in my native New York. The city is home to hundreds of independent schools, and parents who can afford it, or who receive significant financial aid, commonly send their children to these fancy institutions even as the leaders of these institutions devote substantial resources to DEI.

To be sure, there are high-profile kerfuffles: Megyn Kelly removed her three children from two of New York’s most famous K–12 schools, Collegiate (all-boys) and Spence (all-girls—though it now accepts the female-identifying), and Andrew Gutmann became a public figure when he declined to reenroll his daughter in a third, Brearley (all-girls—though ditto). But plus ça change. Earlier this year, Spence fired a beloved French teacher for (it would appear) simply speaking about the French law banning hijabs; a few months later, the head of Collegiate resigned after allegedly calling a report about anti-Semitism and Islamophobia a “power play by Jewish families”; and at Brearley, to quote Gutmann, “the war on our children continues unabated.”

HISTORY, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Hayek’s Nobel—50 Years Later The economic lessons Hayek taught us are as relevant today as they were 50 years ago. Peter Jacobsen

Posted By on December 13th, 2024

https://fee.org/articles/hayeks-nobel-50-years-later/

Fifty years ago, Friedrich Hayek and Karl Gunnar Myrdal won the Nobel prize “for their pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations and for their penetrating analysis of the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena.” Hayek’s Nobel is notable for several reasons, and each relates to the importance of intellectual humility.

First, his Nobel address—delivered 50 years ago today—was an exercise in humility, as highlighted by FEE’s own Larry Reed. Hayek even went so far as to argue that there really shouldn’t be a Nobel prize for economists due to the disproportionate intellectual authority the prize bestows.

Second, Hayek’s work, including much of the work he won his Nobel for, is based on recognizing the limits of the intelligentsia to plan society and, in particular, the economy.

To understand Hayek’s work, we must understand two key contributions of his mentor Ludwig von Mises. It’s no surprise that Hayek’s Nobel would be connected to Mises. Nobel-winner Paul Samuelson, who departs from the work of Hayek and Mises on many points, has previously argued that Mises himself would have won the Nobel had it been awarded earlier in history.

Economic Fluctuations

First, Hayek’s prize was linked to his work on money and economic fluctuations. There’s no doubt that this work is placed under the umbrella of Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABCT). ABCT is by no means an invention of Hayek. Rather, he developed the theory which has its foundations at the beginning of the Austrian school with elements in Carl Menger, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, and finally Mises.

Hayek, in particular, focused on how capital goods transform over the various stages of production. As capital goods advance in time toward the customer, they fundamentally change in kind. So, when a central government monetary policy (such as an increase in the supply of money) causes an increase in long-term loans, these-long term loans change the structure of capital goods in society.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Left’s Assassination Lust Is Misdirected

Posted By on December 13th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/12/13/the-lefts-assassination-lust-is-misdirected/

The hero worship for Luigi Mangione, the accused executioner of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, is appalling to reasonable people. We understand, though, that on occasion Americans can have a legitimate grievance with their health insurance coverage. But the guilty parties are not corporate insurance executives. The culpable are the lawmakers and regulators in Washington who have hijacked the country’s health care industry.

Mangione, arrested Monday in Pennsylvania on fake ID and firearms charges, justified the slaying of health care insurance executives, which sent many on the left into spasms of delight.

“These parasites had it coming,” the new folk hero for elitists wrote in his manifesto. Sadly, Mangione, a son of privilege who favors the crumbling British government’s National Health Service, is not alone in his blind hatred for health insurance executives.

Former Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz, who has been publicly demonstrating her tenuous grip of reality and decency for years, has been a leader among the aggrieved. “And people wonder why we want these executives dead,” she posted on Bluesky only hours after Thompson was gunned down.

Then on Monday night on “Piers Morgan Uncensored,” she said that, “along with so many other Americans,” she felt “joy, unfortunately,” at the news of Thompson’s death. She quickly tried to backtrack when she realized how malicious and deranged she sounded. But out of the abundance – or maybe the emptiness – of her heart, her mouth spoke.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

The quiet radicalism of Jay Bhattacharya Putting this ‘heretic’ in charge of the National Institutes of Health is Trump’s best move yet. Brendan O’Neill

Posted By on December 12th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/12/11/the-quiet-radicalism-of-jay-bhattacharya/

Of all Donald Trump’s spicy picks for government, the wisest, in my view, is Jay Bhattacharya. The unassuming Stanford professor and famed lockdown sceptic might not come with an army of wellness bros, like RFK Jnr. He might not be as wisecracking as the state-dismantling DOGE double act of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. And his presence in the corridors of power is unlikely to freak out the deep state as much as, say, Tulsi Gabbard’s. And yet he will bring something precious to the second Trump administration, a virtue that is as essential as it is rare: the art of doubt.

This week, Bhattacharya gave his last health economics lecture to his Stanford students before he heads to Bethesda in Maryland to lead the National Institutes of Health. Dickens himself would have struggled to conjure up such a reversal of fortunes. For four, long years Bhattacharya was shamed as a scientific heretic. His blasphemy was to question lockdown. To give impious voice to his honestly held belief that it was wrong to lock down the entire population in response to Covid-19. For this, he was damned as ‘dangerous’, ‘reckless’, a threat to life itself, just as past heretics were branded the polluters of men’s souls and warpers of men’s minds whose ideas might even kill.

Yet here he is, in 2024, off to run the US government’s public-health research agency. The very agency whose aloof boffins and smug bureaucrats joined in the witch-hunting of him in the Covid era. The Hill calls it ‘the right kind of revenge’. For in appointing Bhattacharya to the NIH, Trump isn’t just flipping a fake-tanned middle finger at ‘the libs’. No, he’s handing the NIH to someone who is ‘eminently qualified’ to run it – Bhattacharya has been an esteemed professor of medicine for years – while also ‘replacing the arrogant, believe-our-science elitists’ with ‘a person they regularly disparaged’. Bhattacharya is being rewarded for his heresy, and it is richly deserved.

We should remind ourselves of the censorious lunacy that ruled in the Covid years. Bhattacharya’s thoughtcrime was to pen the Great Barrington Declaration along with two other scientists worried about lockdown: Martin Kulldorff and Sunetra Gupta. The declaration’s proposal was fresh and modest: that ‘focussed protection’ of the elderly and vulnerable might be preferable to blanket shutdowns of society. Yet if you went by the elites’ frothing response to the declaration, you could have been forgiven for thinking that Bhattacharya and Co had proposed that every Covid-addled youth snog the nearest 80-year-old.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

The American university is rotting from within The modern academy is a threat to reason, liberty and Western civilisation. Joel Kotkin

Posted By on December 12th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/12/12/the-american-university-is-rotting-from-within/

The Western world has many enemies – China, Russia, Iran, North Korea – but none is more potentially lethal than its own education system. From the very institutions once renowned for spreading literacy, the Enlightenment and the means of mastering nature, we now see a deep-seated denial of our common past, pervasive illiteracy and enforced orthodoxy.

The decay of higher education threatens both the civic health and long-term economic prospects of Western liberal civilisation. Once a font of dispassionate research and reasoned discussion, the academy in recent years has more resembled that of the medieval University of Paris, where witch trials were once conducted, except there is now less exposure to the canon.

American universities face an unprecedented challenge with the return of Donald Trump. His administration seems likely to attack such things as diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies, while pushing to defund programmes favourable to terrorists, expel unruly students and deport those who are in the US illegally. Loss of federal support to universities, the educrats fear, could cause major financial setbacks, even among the Ivies. Like medieval clerics, the rapidly growing ranks of university administrators, deans and tenured faculty have grown used to living in what one writer describes as a ‘modern form of manorialism’, where luxury and leisure come as of right.

Universities are likely to try resisting any changes, no matter how justified. Nationally, 78 per cent of professors voted for Kamala Harris. To many, Trump’s election represents a rebellion of ‘uneducated’. The University of California at Berkeley blames his rise on ‘racism and sexism’. Wesleyan University president Michael Roth calls on universities to abandon ‘institutional neutrality’ for activism in the Trump era, predictably comparing neutral professors to those who accommodated the Nazis. Democracy dies, apparently, whenever the progressive monopoly is threatened.

This arrogance reflects decades of the sector’s rising power and influence. University became the ultimate passport into what Daniel Bell called the ‘knowledge class’ a half century ago. A National Journal survey of 250 top American public-sector decision-makers found that 40 per cent of them are Ivy League graduates. Looking at the question globally, David Rothkopf, author of Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making, compiled a list of more than six thousand members of what he calls the global ‘superclass’: leaders of corporations, banks and investment firms, governments, the military, the media and religious groups. Nearly a third attended one of 20 elite universities.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Explosion of Jew-Hate in Trudeau’s Canada By Terry Glavin

Posted By on December 12th, 2024

https://www.thefp.com/p/explosion-of-jew-hate-in-canada-trudeau-israel-palestine?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

There has been a 670% increase in antisemitic incidents in the past year. ‘It was like a dam burst.’ What happened and why? The Free Press investigates.We rarely run pieces this long. But today’s investigation—the story of how antisemitism became deeply embedded in Justin Trudeau’s Canada—called for it. This is a piece worth reading carefully. It is relevant not just to our many Canadian readers, but to anyone invested in the future of the West. —Bari Weiss
‘The Denial Is What’s Painful’
For Sarah Rugheimer, a professor of astronomy at York University in Toronto, the first sign of the virulent strain of antisemitism now embedded in Justin Trudeau’s Canada appeared on a lamppost.

It was a few weeks after the Hamas massacre of last October 7. Rugheimer, 41, was walking in a park near her home in the city’s quiet Cedarvale neighborhood when she saw a poster of the Israeli hostage Elad Katzir, a 47-year-old farmer from Kibbutz Nir Oz, covered with swastikas.

In the days that followed, as the war raged in Gaza, swastikas turned up all over Cedarvale. They also started appearing on the York campus, where Rugheimer serves as the Allan I. Carswell Chair for the Public Understanding of Astronomy. As fall turned to winter, a swastika showed up in the snow outside the campus building where she works.

An astrophysicist with a particular interest in the origins of life on Earth and the possibility of life on other planets, Rugheimer tended to confine her worldly concerns to scientific matters. So the swastikas came as a shock. But worse was to come.

She grew up in Montana, and her academic career took her around the world—from a PhD in astronomy and astrophysics at Harvard University to Scotland, England, and now Canada. But until taking up her post at York University two years ago, Rugheimer said she’d never encountered any overt antisemitism. Nor had she given much thought to her identity as a Zionist: Like the vast majority of Jews around the world, Rugenheimer believes in Israel’s right to exist.

Jew-hatred was a phenomenon of the fringes, she reckoned. “It wasn’t on my radar,” she told me. Now, it’s everywhere. “Every week there is a major incident in Canada, and multiple minor ones every day in my neighborhood.”

It was what was happening inside her university that disturbed her the most.

York’s student unions issued a declaration just after the attack calling the barbarism of October 7 a “justified and necessary” act of resistance against settler colonialism, genocide, and apartheid. The student groups found widespread support among York’s professors—some of whom Rugheimer considered friends.

A politics department faculty committee demanded the university enforce a definition of “anti-Palestinian racism” that encompassed any expression of sympathy for the right of Israelis to exist within their own state: “Zionism is a settler colonial project and ethno-religious ideology in service of a system of Western imperialism that upholds global white supremacy.”

She was shocked by the declarations, and the defaced posters, and the swastikas. But for Rugheimer there was something worse. “The denial is what’s painful,” Rugheimer said.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Evaporation of the Obama Mystique Obama’s behind-the-scenes political maneuvering culminated in a failed Biden presidency that ultimately led to a significant Democratic electoral defeat and rejection of his political legacy. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on December 12th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/12/the-evaporation-of-the-obama-mystique/

Barack Obama had long been rumored as the catalyst for the 2020 Biden nomination—and thereafter played the whispering puppeteer behind the subsequent lost Biden administration years.

As such he and his coterie proved the virtual architects of the Biden administration, one of the most unpopular and failed presidencies in American history.

Recall earlier that after a flailing candidate Joe Biden lost the first three 2020 primaries and caucuses, his inert campaign was headed nowhere.

Barack Obama and fellow Democratic insiders abruptly engineered the withdrawal of his rival 2020 presidential candidates: hard left but likely sure-loser candidates, including Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Pete Buttigieg.

The Obamas ignored or withheld from the public their own firsthand knowledge that Biden was suffering from signs of dementia.

Instead, they found Biden’s cognitive decline and his former concocted reputation as workingman’s Joe useful as a veneer for a veritable Obama third-term, “phone it in” administration. Or as wistful Obama once conditioned his dream of a third term—”If I could make an arrangement where I had a stand-in, a front man or front woman, and they had an earpiece in.”

The Obamaites then got their wish for four years of enacted hard-left directives that they could only have dreamed of while in actual power.

But their radical menu since 2021 had divided and nearly wrecked the nation—hyperinflation, 12 million illegal aliens, a ruined border, spiraling crime, a shattered foreign policy of appeasement, the popular backlash against DEI/Woke/trans chauvinism, partisan lawfare, and weaponization of the government.

And the ruling radicalism beneath the Biden facade eventually cost the Democrats nearly everything—the presidency, the House, and the Senate.