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June 2024

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The War on The Jews: Victims No More by Lawrence Kadish

By on June 26th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20732/war-on-the-jews

The days of victimizing Jews without fear of retribution, revenge or retaliation are over.

Just ask Hamas. Iran. Or Hezbollah. Oh, and while we are at it, let’s remind the anti-Semites who have stormed classrooms and campuses at our nation’s colleges waving banners that call for the eradication of Israel.

Eight months after the most bloodthirsty assault on Jews since the Holocaust, and despite unimaginable obstacles placed in its way – lately by the Biden administration, which is refusing to deliver desperately needed weapons – Israel, smaller than the state of New Jersey, continues to act as the tip of democracy’s spear. This nation is now defending the entire West, and our shared values of freedom, against well-funded aggression, terrorism and barbarism.

That means you, too, Europe. Rather than a “thank you,” countries in Europe area falling all over themselves to recognize a fictitious, corrupt and lawless “Palestinian State,” whose reason for existence is terrorism. No surprise that Germany witnessed an April 13th demonstration in Hamburg, where more than a thousand people marched through the streets to demand that the country become an Islamic caliphate, complete with sharia law.

And then there are individuals who recognize the outrage of the October 7th attack. Actress Patricia Heaton reminding the world:

“You could see that body cam footage from Hamas where they were gleefully murdering people, and I was astonished and horrified, and then I looked around, assuming that the churches would also be horrified and outraged, and I wasn’t hearing anything. It was like crickets. So, I posted on my Instagram, ‘If you had been a German during World War II, don’t you hope that you would have been a German who stood by your Jewish neighbors and hid your Jewish neighbors?’ Well, today is your opportunity, and I still believe that.”

For the new Axis of Evil in the 21st century, Russia, China and North Korea, it is the United States and Israel that are standing in the way of their global domination. In their view, if Israel can be damaged in a propaganda war, so much the better.

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Illegal Crossings Over Northern Border Have Surged by Over 1,000% Under Biden By Eric Lendrum

By on June 26th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/06/25/illegal-crossings-over-northern-border-have-surged-by-over-1000-under-biden/

While the mass migration crisis has overwhelmingly taken place at the southern border between the United States and Mexico, there is a similar record-breaking surge across the northern border between the United States and Canada as well.

As reported by the Daily Caller, data from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) shows that fiscal year 2024 has currently seen 12,859 illegal aliens cross the northern border. This marks a far larger amount than the previous three fiscal years under Joe Biden. By comparison, there were just 916 northern border crossings in fiscal year 2021, followed by 2,238 in fiscal year 2022, and 10,021 in fiscal year 2023.

Thus, compared to the extremely low number in fiscal year 2021, the current totals for 2024 mark a staggering 1,303% increase from Biden’s first year.

In this report, illegal border crossings are defined as the number of encounters with illegal aliens that are reported by Border Patrol between any ports of entry. This does not include the number of illegals encountered at ports of entry who are deemed inadmissible.

When Biden first ran for president, he vowed to open the borders and support mass immigration, with the promise of free, taxpayer-funded benefits for illegals such as healthcare, education, and housing, with the eventual promise of amnesty for all illegals.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Why Are We Shocked by Dems’ Cruelty to Joe Biden? How the inhumanity of the “woke” Left became an institutionalized feature of the Democrat Party. by Bruce Thornton

By on June 26th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/why-are-we-shocked-by-dems-cruelty-to-joe-biden/
Why, then, would we be surprised that so many Dems are willing to globally humiliate a senile old man?

A subgenre of Republican commentary this election is the scolding of Democrats, establishment media, White House staffers, and Jill Biden for their callous cruelty in exposing Joe Biden’s cognitive decline before millions of people. As a New York Post editorial wrote, “Whatever it [the reason] is, to any outsider it looks downright cruel to keep trotting Biden around under the pretense that he can possibly serve four more years in the world’s most grueling job. . . . How much longer must we bear this grim charade?”

All are obvious and valid points. But we shouldn’t be surprised. Since the Democrat Party sold its liberal-democratic birthright to the Left for a mess of electoral pottage, all the inhumane dysfunctions of the “woke” Left have now become institutionalized features of the Democrat Party.

Exhibit No. 1: the Left’s amoral precept “by any means necessary” now permeates Democrat policies and electoral practices, and has led a substantial number of party members, including Biden’s advisors and campaign staff, to endorse ––with public enthusiasm and moral preening––the unholy alliance of “woke” Leftism with antisemitism; implied, or even direct approval of the Holocaust; and solidarity with the genocidal, sadistic butchers of Hamas.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Arresting Tommy . . . Again This time, it’s Trudeau’s turn. by Bruce Bawer

By on June 26th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/arresting-tommy-again/

In the last few years, my friend Douglas Murray has become internationally famous – as much so, anyway, as a serious writer of non-fiction can be. His splendid books The Strange Death of Europe (2017), The Madness of Crowds (2019), and The War on the West (2021) were deserved bestsellers. And since October 7, Murray – born in 1979, a graduate of Eton and of Magdalen College, Oxford – has been rightly hailed around the world for his heroic reportage from Israel during the current war on Hamas. When he hasn’t been in Israel, he’s been traveling all over much of the Western world, giving endless talks and interviews and participating in debates, in which he inevitably triumphs. His writings, his speeches, and his comments have been focused largely on Islam, a topic on which, unlike many other commentators, he admirably refuses to euphemize. Because he recognizes that the brutal Hamas attack on Israel, and the immigrant crisis currently facing Europe, are based in the founding tenets of Islam – period – he refuses to use such phony terms as “Islamism” or “radical Islam” or “Muslim extremism.” It has been heartening to see him applauded by huge audiences – and winning important awards – on both sides of the Atlantic.

Meanwhile the careers of two other Englishmen have been advancing as well. Nigel Farage is also a British hero. For twenty years, the sixty-year-old former businessman led the ultimately successful movement to separate the United Kingdom from the European Union. His principal argument for separation was that the U.K. needed to take back its right to control immigration into its territory. Yet he consistently avoided the reason why it was important to restrict the massive influx of foreigners into Britain. The problem wasn’t with the Hindus or Buddhists or black Caribbeans or sub-Saharan Africans who’d moved to the U.K. These groups did a terrific job of integrating into British society and tended to earn more money than most native Englishmen. No, the problem was Islam. Douglas Murray has no trouble saying so. Nigel Farage, while projecting an image of utter fearlessness, always dodged the issue. In recent times he seems to have begun to tiptoe into these dangerous waters, but he’s still a long way from spelling things out as clearly as Douglas Murray does.

He’s hardly alone. Pretty much the entire British political establishment refuses to breathe a critical word about Islam. And even though the main reason for Brexit was that Brits wanted to retake control of their borders, both main parties, Labour and the Tories, have done little to prevent the large-scale influx of immigrants, mostly illegal, mostly adult men, and mostly Muslim. The Westminster establishment’s attitude toward this issue is perfectly in line with the views of privileged North London – Britain’s equivalent of Northwest Washington, the Upper West Side of New York, and the tonier parts of San Francisco and L.A. – but it’s totally at odds with the wishes of the British (or at least the English) public at large. On July 4, Britain will hold a general election in which the now-reigning Tories, who rode to victory on big promises of tighter border security, are expected to go down to ignominious – and well-deserved – defeat. Labour is expected to do well, although it hasn’t exactly covered itself in glory either. Then there’s the third major party, the Liberal Democrats. But the wild card is Farage’s party, Reform UK, founded in 2018 as the Brexit Party, whose strident calls for immigration reform and tax cuts have gained it a significant following. How significant? We’ll see on July 4.

Douglas Murray. Nigel Farage. And then there’s a third name. Tommy Robinson.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Heather Mac Donald More of the Same at Yale The school’s new president appears committed to the illiberal status quo.

By on June 26th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/more-of-the-same-at-yale

Yale University has announced its next president: Maurie McInnis, the current president of the State University of New York at Stony Brook and an art historian specializing in slavery and Southern culture. McInnis concluded her introductory video with an exhortation: “Most importantly, I will encourage us to ask ourselves what change we wish to see in the world and how we might best accomplish that. I can’t wait to begin!”

Uh-oh. McInnis may be eager for Yale to change the world, but the rest of us should be wary of the prospect.

The McInnis selection is a possible bellwether for how elite universities intend to govern themselves in the post-October 7 era. Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, Cornell, and other colleges are seeking new presidents, thanks to leadership shakeups in the wake of the Hamas terror attacks on Israel. While selective colleges serve a minuscule fraction of the U.S population, they exercise a disproportionate influence over the culture. Their graduates populate the federal judiciary, corporate boards, and key public and private bureaucracies. They lead big tech companies and the nonprofit sector. They are our public-health and criminal-justice “experts.” Yale in particular has been a leading proponent of the progressive view of America’s alleged racism. What does its choice of McInnis portend for key issues facing higher education: intellectual diversity, academic freedom, and administrative overreach? 

It was foreordained that Yale’s outgoing president, Peter Salovey, would be replaced by a woman. Until the post–October 7 rout, 75 percent of Ivy League leaders were female. Yale has bragged that McInnis is its first permanent woman president, as if selecting her from the heavily female administrative ranks of elite universities represents a bold move. The new president, for her part, has said that she will “play an important role as a role model,” as if females hadn’t already begun their takeover of higher education. 

Indeed, by now, being female is so humdrum an accomplishment that Yale was undoubtedly hoping for at least an intersectional twofer, of the sort that Harvard basked in before Claudine Gay’s self-destruction. McInnis makes up for not being black, however, by an academic focus on slavery. Her most recent book, Educated in Tyranny: Slavery at Thomas Jefferson’s University (2019), which she co-edited, argues that the University of Virginia, founded by Thomas Jefferson, had “slavery at its core.” Though Jefferson designed the university to “visually minimize the physical presence of the laboring black body,” McInnis writes, its grounds were a “landscape of slavery.” One of Jefferson’s goals in creating the university was to insulate Virginia’s youth from the abolitionist thinking that they might encounter in Northern schools, McInnis argues in the introduction. Her chapter, called “Violence,” seeks to document the beatings that the college’s students inflicted with impunity on local slaves.

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MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

A Supreme Court Showdown Looms on Transgender Surgeries and Puberty Blockers By Dan McLaughlin

By on June 26th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/a-supreme-court-showdown-looms-on-transgender-surgeries-and-puberty-blockers/?utm_source=recirc-

The Supreme Court took seven cases this morning to hear next year, including a long-running lawsuit by Holocaust survivors against Hungary for expropriation of property. The big one is United States v. Skrmetti, a Biden administration challenge on equal-protection grounds to Tennessee and Kentucky laws that restrict the use of potentially irreversible gender-transition treatments such as transgender surgeries and puberty blockers on minors.

I explained, back when the lawsuit was filed in May 2023 as part of Merrick Garland’s campaign to stamp out self-government in the states on any issue where states dissent from cultural progressivism, why it was nuts:

The legislature reached its own conclusions about whether the treatments at issue were medically supported or abusive to children. . . . Are these really interests no legislature is permitted to consider? The complaint cites the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (“DSM-V-TR”) as “an authoritative source for psychiatric conditions,” ignoring how often the DSM has been revised — and politicized — over the years. Of course, unlike the Tennessee legislature, the authors of the DSM are neither representative of, nor accountable to, a democratic populace. Moreover, on transgender issues, there is a significant divide between the American medical establishment and the European medical establishment. I’m as rah-rah USA as the next guy, but when that happens, it’s at least reasonable to allow the democratic process to consider the possibility that the Americans are wrong. Once upon a time, the American medical profession refused to accept the European consensus that doctors should wash their hands.

We may get a sense of how this Court resolves this question soon in this term’s big abortion case, Moyle v. United States, in which the Biden administration and the liberal justices argue that a federal statute puts an unelected national “medical consensus” above the elected legislatures in determining the standards for emergency-room care. Then again, Moyle is a statutory case rather than a constitutional one, and it might well be resolved on other grounds.

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ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Shocking Antisemitism at UCLA By Natan Ehrenreich

By on June 26th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/shocking-antisemitism-at-ucla/

Zach Kessel recently wrote about a group of Jewish students who are suing UCLA for the establishment of a “Jew exclusion zone.” Yesterday, the students asked a federal court for a preliminary injunction to ensure their safety before classes resume in the coming months. Mark Rienzi, president of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty (disclosure: my former employer), one of two firms representing the students, said in a press release,“UCLA’s behavior on this issue has been shameful, and the students need a court order to allow them to return to campus safely this fall.”

Judging from the facts of the initial complaint, he’s right. Even as “anti-Israel” rhetoric has engulfed prominent college campuses, the unfiltered nature of the antisemitism the complaint alleges is quite shocking. A few notable examples:

“At an October 12, 2023, demonstration at Bruin Plaza — a thoroughfare in the heart of UCLA’s undergraduate campus — activists chanted ‘Itbah El Yahud’ (‘slaughter the Jews’ in Arabic)”

“On November 8, 2023, hundreds of agitators swarmed the UCLA School of Law, holding signs and chanting ‘from the River to the Sea,’ ‘there’s only one solution,’ ‘intifada,’ ‘death to Israel,’ and ‘death to Jews.’”

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ELECTIONS, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

A Conservative Election Victory Puts Canada’s Post-Trudeau Era in Sight By Matthew X. Wilson

By on June 26th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/a-conservative-election-victory-puts-canadas-post-trudeau-era-in-sight/

In news that is sending shockwaves through Canadian politics, the opposition Conservatives claimed victory overnight in a closely watched by-election for a safely Liberal parliamentary constituency in downtown Toronto. The once Liberal “fortress,” known as Toronto-St. Paul’s, is one of the most Liberal-leaning electoral districts in all of Canada — the Liberal Party has carried the seat in the last ten Canadian federal elections, and the Liberal candidate has won by margins of greater than 20 percent in the last three. From an American perspective, this outcome is roughly analogous to Republicans winning a special election for a safely Democratic congressional seat in New York City.

The jolting result, besides an enormous momentum boost for the Conservatives, is a full-throated repudiation of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, one of the most unpopular Canadian leaders in history, who is on track to lose the next Canadian election (which must be held no later than October 2025) by spectacular margins.

Canada’s Liberals find themselves in a similar place to Britain’s governing Conservative Party: technically still in government, but facing an extinction-level electoral wipeout when they finally go before voters. But unlike Britain, where the central question with just nine days until the country’s July 4 election is how badly the Conservatives will lose, the Trudeau-led Liberals have 15 months before voters’ verdict must be heard.

The Liberals have some hard decisions to make. The obvious last-ditch play to rescue their party’s fortunes ahead of the next election is to replace their leader, and that is no doubt a possibility that both Trudeau and his rank-and-file parliamentarians are currently weighing.

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

George Latimer ousts ‘Squad’ Rep. Jamaal Bowman in NY-16 District Democratic primary

By on June 26th, 2024

https://nypost.com/2024/06/25/us-news/george-latimer-ousts-squad-rep-jamaal-bowman-in-16th-district-primary/

Head for the (fire) exit, Jamaal!

Westchester County Executive George Latimer sent Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) packing from Congress Tuesday night, defeating the far-left “Squad” member in the 16th District’s Democratic primary.

Latimer, 70, will be heavily favored to defeat Republican Madeline Brame in the Nov. 5 general election to represent the deep-blue Bronx and Westchester constituency.

“Tonight, we turn the page and we say that we believe in the inclusion of everybody,” Latimer told cheering supporters in White Plains.

“It doesn’t matter your age, religion, sexual identity, whether you’re a right-hander or left-hander, whether you’re a Met fan or a Yankee fan — our inclusiveness in Westchester County is how we govern the people,” he added. “You can’t destroy this country with your rhetoric and your arguments. We have to have unity.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Suppression of Dissent The Justice Department tries to silence and imprison whistleblowers who expose the barbarism of transgender medicine. Madeleine Rowley

By on June 26th, 2024

https://christopherrufo.com/subscribe?utm_source=email&utm_campaign=email-subscribe&r=8t06w&next

The fragile facade of transgender ideology has cracked over the past year. Whistleblowers from within the medical profession have emerged to provide damning evidence that doctors are performing procedures based on shoddy scientific evidence under the label of “gender-affirming care,” as outlined in the WPATH Files and the Cass Review. Former patients who received “gender-affirming” care as adolescents have now detransitioned and are suing the doctors who cut off their breasts and put them on hormones that permanently damaged their bodies. Businesses ranging from Target to NFL teams are scaling back or eliminating Pride-themed merchandise and promotions. The public, too, is increasingly turning against transgender ideology. The tide is shifting.

The Left has adopted a new approach in response: political persecution of those speaking out against trans dogma. Earlier this month, the Department of Justice indicted Eithan Haim, a surgeon at Texas Children’s Hospital (TCH) who exposed the hospital’s secret continued use of irreversible sex-change procedures on minors after having publicly stated that it had stopped. By indicting Haim, the DOJ is seeking to silence future whistleblowers and to signal its disregard for the mounting evidence that gender-affirming care is harmful, and often irreversible.

Haim had anonymously sent City Journal’s Christopher Rufo documents proving that doctors at TCH were still prescribing hormone replacement therapy drugs and implanting puberty blockers in minor-age patients more than a year after the hospital announced it had stopped its pediatric gender-affirming care program. A month after Rufo published his article in May 2023, federal agents from the Department of Health and Human Services knocked on Haim’s door to let him know that he was a “potential target” in an investigation of alleged violations of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). This week, an unsealed indictment revealed that the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas is charging Haim with four felony counts of violating HIPAA. A press release on the indictment alleges that Haim accessed patient information “under false pretenses and with intent to cause malicious harm to TCH.”

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