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January 2023

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Governor DeSantis is picking a fight with the academic left, and it’s a shrewd move. By Thomas Lifson

By on January 9th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/01/governor_desantis_is_picking_a_fight_with_the_academic_left_and_its_a_shrewd_move_.html

I am thrilled that Ron DeSantis is putting in place people who want to reverse the woke academic coup d’état at one state-run institution of higher education. New College of Florida is a rarity: a public liberal arts small college (675 students) that is part of the State University System of Florida, where in-state tuition is under $7000 a year.

Zac Anderson of the Sarasota Herald Tribune writes:

Gov. Ron DeSantis began the process Friday of transforming Sarasota’s New College of Florida into a more conservative institution, appointing six new board members, including conservative activist Christopher Rufo, a dean at conservative Hillsdale College and a senior fellow at The Claremont Institute, a right-wing think tank.

“It is our hope that New College of Florida will become Florida’s classical college, more along the lines of a Hillsdale of the south,” Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz said in a statement.

The shakeup of the 13-member board is certain to create major tensions at New College, an institution that started as a progressive private school before becoming the state’s liberal arts honors college. The small school’s student body and faculty have a reputation for leaning left politically.

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Biden’s New Border Strategy: Blame Republicans First

By on January 9th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/01/09/bidens-new-border-strategy-blame-republicans-first/

At a briefing last week, a daring reporter asked President Joe Biden why he decided to visit the border now, after Republicans have been calling for him to do so for nearly two years – during which time an unprecedented 4.4 million people crossed the border illegally.  

Biden’s answer: “Because the Republicans haven’t been serious about this at all. Come on. They haven’t been serious about this at all.”

That answer makes no sense. If Republicans haven’t been serious – which is a bald-faced lie – then wouldn’t that be more of an incentive for Biden to take the reins?

But nothing Biden is saying lately about the border makes sense. It didn’t when he was denying the problem existed. It doesn’t now that he’s trying to shift blame to the GOP.

Remember that from day one, Biden insisted that the border was secure. At least, that’s what he’s had his Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas tell Congress repeatedly. Mayorkas did so as recently as November, a month when border patrol agents “encountered” more than 233,000 – which was 33% more than the previous November, 224% more than November 2021, and 448% higher than November 2020.

For the most part, Biden simply ignored the issue, and with Democrats in charge of Congress, he knew there’d be no accountability. Plus, he could count on the media to ignore the issue.

But now with Republicans in control of the House, suddenly ignoring the border isn’t an option. The GOP won’t let the issue slide.

So, what’s Biden’s recourse? Simple. Blame Republicans.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Netanyahu: The Unexpected Moderate by Amir Taheri

By on January 9th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19297/netanyahu-moderate

After decades, some genius pretended to have discovered the “two-state solution.” That “solution”, of course, had been offered by the United Nations and accepted by the Jews under the “extremist” David Ben Gurion in 1947, but rejected by neighboring Arab states. Its revival by Western powers, notably the United States, was an exercise in diplomatic wild goose chasing.

The fact is that repeated opinion polls and elections show that a majority of Israelis and Palestinians do not want the “two-state solution…”

[T]he dismantling of all settlements in Gaza never led to the peace expected.

As the theme of the settlements began to appear shopworn, a new version of the “Palestinian problem” was put into circulation: “Israeli Apartheid.” But that, too, was never defined. In South Africa under Apartheid, black and colored citizens were not allowed to vote or get elected. In Israel, non-Jewish citizens can and do. Palestinians in the West Bank do not have those rights because they are not Israeli citizens.

Opinion polls in the West Bank, too, show that bread-and-butter politics and cleaning corruption are the top concerns of Palestinians.

That problem might find a solution only if both Israelis and Palestinians are convinced that solving it is in their own interest. Whichever way one looks at it, that conviction isn’t there yet. And even if, one day, that conviction materializes, there is no guarantee that those who have built whole carriers and national strategies around perpetuating it will allow a solution to be agreed and applied.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

How the FBI Hacked Twitter The answer begins with Russiagate by Lee Smith

By on January 9th, 2023

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/how-the-fbi-hacked-twitter-lee-smith

After journalist Matt Taibbi published the first batch of internal Twitter documents known as the Twitter files, he tweeted that the company’s deputy general counsel, James Baker, was vetting them.

“The news that Baker was reviewing the ‘Twitter files’ surprised everyone involved,” Taibbi wrote. That apparently included even Twitter’s new boss, Elon Musk, who added that Baker may have deleted some of the files he was supposed to be reviewing.

Baker had been the top lawyer at the FBI when it interfered in the 2016 presidential election. News that he might have been burying evidence of the spy service’s use of a social media company to interfere with the 2020 election, is rightly setting off alarm bells.

In fact, the FBI’s penetration of Twitter constituted just one part of a much larger intelligence operation—one in which the bureau offshored the machinery it used to interfere in the 2016 election and embedded it within the private sector. The resulting behemoth, still being built today, is a public-private consortium made up of U.S. intelligence agencies, Big Tech companies, civil society institutions, and major media organizations that has become the world’s most powerful spy service—one that was powerful enough to disappear the former president of the United States from public life, and that is now powerful enough to do the same or worse to anyone else it chooses. 

Records from the Twitter files show that the FBI paid Twitter nearly $3.5 million, apparently for actions in connection with the 2020 election and nominally a payout for the platform’s work censoring “dangerous” content that had been flagged as mis- or disinformation. That “dangerous” content notably included material that threatened Joe Biden and implicated U.S. officials who have been curating the Biden family’s foreign corruption for decades.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The shameful silence on the Taliban’s war on women Why Western progressives are so unwilling to criticise Islamic tyranny. Brendan O’Neill

By on January 9th, 2023

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/01/08/the-shameful-silence-on-the-talibans-war-on-women/

Two images of men are seared into my mind from the month of December. In the first, brave lads in Afghanistan, about to sit a university exam, get out of their seats, pick up their exam papers, and leave. They were protesting against the Taliban’s obscene ban on women attending university. It was a moving act of solidarity, a courageous display of moral conscience in a nation in which you can be severely punished for doing such a thing. The men jeopardised their education to take a stand against the vile misogyny of their government.

In the second image, a row of men in Holyrood, the Scottish parliament, applaud as Nicola Sturgeon’s gender-ID bill is passed. The men look nothing like our modestly dressed heroes in Afghanistan. Their attire is eccentric. They have long, strangely coloured hair. They don’t even think of themselves as men – they claim to be women. And their gesture was about as far from an act of solidarity with women as it is possible to get. They were cheering the passing of a bill that will make it ridiculously easy for a man to be legally recognised as a woman. Where those valiant Afghans were fighting for the right of women to enter into the sphere of education, the grinning trans activists in Holyrood were fighting for the right of men to enter into women-only spaces. The former want women’s rights expanded; the latter want them shrunk.

Nothing better captures the moral degeneracy of the modern West than the contrast between these two events last month. It was nothing short of despicable that as women were violently cast out of universities in Afghanistan, reduced to second-class citizens in the most brutal fashion, the issue that was occupying the minds of the supposedly virtuous here in the UK was the right of men to say: ‘I’m a woman!’ Valorous men in Afghanistan put their necks on the line for a woman’s right to learn alongside men. Right-on, pronoun-declaring, vegan men in the West put nothing whatsoever on the line for a man’s right to get undressed alongside women.

There’s a last days of Rome feel to all this now. Only a society that had become utterly untethered from sense and reason could devote so much energy to the navel-gazing gender ideology.

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