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September 2024

The Road to Springfield Roger Franklin

https://quadrant.org.au/features/america/the-road-to-springfield/

EXCERPT

Consider for starters residents’ testimony at a recent city council public hearing (video below) which heard of Haitians fetching their duck dinners from the pond in the local park, of setting up camps on residents’ front lawns, of intimidating shoppers in the aisles at Walmart and getting behind the wheel without knowing how to drive. That last charge has been officially acknowledged by an emergency deployment of state troopers sent to stop a surge in “erratic driving” in the town, where an unlicenced Haitian on the wrong side of the road last year rammed a school bus and took the life of an 11-year-old boy. That Ohio Governor Mike DeWine has ordered the Springfield traffic blitz can be taken as confirmation there is more than racism behind complaints about Haitians’ estrangement from community norms. Spare a minute or two to watch the video below and, when you’re done, compare the witnesses’ sincerity, their end-of-the-rope pleas, with the Panglossian platitudes of a media that favours the agenda over truth, wokeness above evidence.

An obvious thought, one that doesn’t bespeak a hint of racism, is how any of us might react were tens of thousands of uninvited strangers to arrive in our towns or suburbs, few speaking English and bringing with them customs distinctly at odds with, in Springfield’s case, the culture and traditions of a largely white, Grant Wood kind of town. But that’s a matter which simply can’t be addressed, isn’t permitted to be addressed, for it would be a career-killer for any news show producer giving voice to the heresy that diversity might not be such a strength after all.

The trouble in Springfield began, as do many things with the best, of intentions. The DeWine family sponsors a charity in Port-au-Prince and official connections grew, sponsored migration with them. Then came the Biden administration’s open borders and life in Springfield changed suddenly and dramatically. No one is quite sure just how many Haitians now call the town home, with estimates ranging from 12,000 to twice that number. In a town of 58,000 even the lower figure represents a lot of new neighbours. How many are legal, how many undocumented, how many hold long-term temporary visas? Nobody really knows. The driver who rolled that school us flew to Brazil, came overland to the Texas, declared himself to immigration authorities and was granted one of several varieties of long-term visas, then loaded aboard an aeroplane bound for Ohio. The rest is history and a funeral.

Heather Mac Donald Trump Made Them Do It The New York Times finds victim-blaming repellent—except when the victim is the former president.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-new-york-times-blames-trump

The New York Times devotedly follows the cardinal rule of liberalism—never blame the victim!—at least for officially designated victims of American racism and classism. Slavery, for example, not higher rates of criminal offending, is responsible for blacks’ “unequal involvement in the criminal justice system.” If unwed mothers are poor, the reason lies in heartless welfare rules, not in the decision to have a child out of wedlock.

But when it comes to Donald Trump, victim-blaming is de rigueur. According to the Times’s premier Trump-basher, Peter Baker, Trump is responsible for the attempted assassinations against him. “At the heart of today’s eruption of political violence is Mr. Trump, a figure who seems to inspire people to make threats or take actions both for him and against him,” writes Baker in today’s lead print story. Trump “inspires” the attacks against him. It is hard to imagine this line of thinking applied to other victims of assassination attempts—Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Abraham Lincoln, for example—but it is as tautologically true in their case as in Trump’s.

Baker recycles the fiction that MAGA supporters, inflamed by Trump’s fulminations regarding Haitian peticide, made bomb threats in Springfield, Ohio. (In fact, as Ohio governor Mike DeWine revealed, the menacing came from bad actors abroad.) But relentless Democratic rhetoric about Trump’s dictatorial intentions and the evils perpetrated by Supreme Court justices, among other alleged conservative opponents of democracy, has no apparent bearing on the death threats and attempts against Trump, conservative justices, and Republican politicians.

The elite press’s inability to escape its ideological bubble and to apply neutral standards of analysis could not be more acute. That inability is as responsible for today’s political hatreds as anything Trump has ever said.

The Radical Norm at Elite Colleges Rich Lowry

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/09/the-radical-norm-at-elite-colleges/

If Cornell’s Russell Rickford, a history professor, went elsewhere to ply his wares, he’d in all likelihood be replaced by someone with equally pernicious views.

The remarkable thing about Russell Rickford is that there is nothing extraordinary about him.

The Cornell University prof gained notoriety in the immediate aftermath of October 7 by declaring that he found the terror attack “exhilarating.”

He wasn’t specific about what was more exciting to him — the slaughter of hundreds of people at a music festival, including wounded people at point-blank range, the mass hostage-taking, the burning of people alive, or the horrific sexual violence.

For the committed anti-Zionist, there must be so many exciting moments to choose from.

Afterward, Rickford apologized for his “horrible choice of words.” But his remarks at a pro-Palestinian rally at the Ithaca Commons on October 15 weren’t a matter of mere vocabulary. He didn’t say “exhilarating” when he meant to use a word that means the opposite, or something less positive.

He was affirming throughout his comments about a cruel massacre. He said that “Hamas has challenged the monopoly of violence,” that “Hamas has shifted the balance of power,” that “Hamas has punctured the illusion of invincibility,” and that “Hamas has changed the terms of the debate.”

All of this was unmistakable praise. Then Rickford added to his toxic brew the contention that Palestinians and Gazans on that day “were able to breathe, they were able to breathe for the first time in years. It was exhilarating. It was energizing. And if they weren’t exhilarated by this challenge to the monopoly of violence, by this shifting of the balance of power, then they would not be human. I was exhilarated.”

Poorly Managed Aurora Apartments Offered Easy Target for Nonprofit-Driven Migrant ‘Takeover ’By Tracy Wolfer Osborne

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/poorly-managed-aurora-apartments-offered-easy-target-for-nonprofit-driven-migrant-takeover/

Two publicly funded Denver nonprofits — ViVe Wellness and Organization Papagayo — chose to move thousands of Venezuelan migrants, including some members of the violent Tren de Aragua street gang, into run-down apartment complexes in nearby Aurora precisely because those buildings were poorly managed.

In an email to Aurora City councilwoman Danielle Jurinsky, obtained by National Review, Jessica Prosser, the director of Housing and Community Development for Aurora, says she learned that ViVe and Papagayo were moving migrants into Aurora through conversations with three city, state, and county offices, including the Colorado Office of New Americans (ONA) and the Department of Local Affairs (DOLA). The state and local officials explained that three apartment complexes run by CBZ management were chosen to house the illegal immigrants because the property managers failed to do basic due diligence on their tenants.

“No housing quality inspections were completed to check for even basic life safety concerns prior to placing individuals in apartments,” Prosser writes.

She goes on to say the CBZ apartments were chosen because they “had lower rent, lack of consistency with providing leases, and more leniency with the number of people in each unit.”

CBZ did not respond to a request for comment.

According to the same email, ViVe and Papagayo worked together to place “many” individuals and migrant families in the apartments dating back to spring of 2023 and provided, in some cases, the deposit and three months’ rent. The two nonprofits had placed 8,000 Venezuelan migrants across 2,000 leases in Aurora as of April, according to the Colorado Sun, though it’s unclear exactly how many of those ended up in CBZ buildings.

Israeli Intelligence Is Amazing Noah Rothman

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/israeli-intelligence-is-amazing/

Despite much saber-rattling, Iran has not yet retaliated (as it has promised) for the breathtaking operation that neutralized Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh with a bomb planted in a diplomatic safe house in Tehran. Iran’s reluctance may be at least partly inspired by the regime’s well-founded belief that acting in haste might lead to an explosive device going off uncomfortably close to one’s nether regions.

That is what happened this morning to over 1,000 Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon and Syria. “Pagers carried by hundreds of Hezbollah operatives unexpectedly exploded at about the same time Tuesday afternoon,” the Wall Street Journal reported. “The affected pagers were from a new shipment that the group received in recent days,” the dispatch continued. “A Hezbollah official said hundreds of fighters had such devices, speculating that malware may have caused the devices to explode.”

Ironically enough, Hezbollah reportedly came to rely on pagers rather than more modern communications technologies because they were thought to be safe from “Israel’s electronic eavesdropping,” which is “regarded as among the world’s most sophisticated.” Hezbollah adapted, but so, too, did the Israelis.

There is, as yet, zero confirmation of Israeli involvement in what one Hezbollah official deemed the “biggest security breach” the terror group has experienced since the October 7 massacre. But there have been a lot of security breaches of late.

In July, Israel claimed credit for the successful targeting of one top Hezbollah operative, Fuad Shukr, in a Beirut suburb. Deemed the “right-hand man” to the terror group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, Shukr was also one of the primary perpetrators of the 1983 Marine barracks bombing in which 241 U.S. service personnel were killed. According to the Journal’s reporting, Shukr received a phone call, likely from a figure in Hezbollah’s orbit turned by Israeli intelligence or directly tied to Israeli security services, instructing him to head to the seventh floor of the building he occupied, where he was taken out in a pinprick strike.

Teacher Pay: Myths, Reality and Union Shenanigans That teachers are underpaid and that teachers’ unions are beneficial for educators are enduring fables that need to be debunked. By Larry Sand

https://amgreatness.com/2024/09/18/teacher-pay-myths-reality-and-union-shenanigans/

Teacher pay

Chad Aldeman, a leading researcher who focuses on school finance, the teacher labor market, and assessment and accountability policy, recently wrote, “Wrong Ideas about Teacher Pay, Happiness May Keep Students from the Profession.”

The essence of the piece is that teachers generally like teaching and stay in the profession for about as long as accountants or social workers stay in theirs. “Teachers may not get rich, but they live comfortably middle-class lives. Plus, teachers get to retire a couple of years earlier than other workers.”

He then delves into the common misconception that teachers don’t earn a decent wage. “In 2021, Education Next asked a random sample of Americans to guess how much the average teacher earned in their state. Those guesses weren’t just wrong; they were consistently too low—by about 50%, or about $22,000. According to the latest data from the National Education Association, the average teacher salary in 2021-22 was $66,745.”

Just Facts takes the data one step further and adds that in the 2021–22 school year, the average school teacher also received another $34,090 in benefits (such as health insurance, paid leave, and pensions), which brings the total annual compensation to over $100,000. Additionally, full-time public school teachers work an average of 1,490 hours per year, which includes time spent on lesson preparation, test construction, and grading, providing extra help to students, coaching, and other activities, while their counterparts in private industry work an average of 2,045 hours per year, or about 37% more than public school teachers.

The great purveyors of the underpaid teacher myth are the nation’s teachers’ unions, which continually drill into teachers, legislators, and the general public that educators are paid a peon’s wage and need the unions to raise their salaries.

Actually, the opposite is true. Mike Petrilli of the Fordham Institute has dug deeper, claiming collective bargaining agreements (CBA) hurt the bottom line of all teachers. “Teachers in non-collective bargaining districts actually earn more than their union-protected peers—$64,500 on average versus $57,500.” Petrilli’s study was conducted in 2011, and research by Michael Lovenheim in 2009 and Andrew Coulson in 2010 bore similar results. Also, University of California San Diego professor Augustina Pagalayan reported in 2018 that CBAs do not improve teacher pay.

The UN’s Desire to Get Rid of the State of Israel Can a decent country be a part of this effort? by Alan Joseph Bauer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-uns-desire-to-get-rid-of-the-state-of-israel/

The UN has a three-point program to turn Israel into an international pariah and eventually make it disappear.

When I was a kid, my mother would tell me never to put money into a UNICEF collection box. She said that they don’t give anything to Israel. At the time, I was around six years old, so I did not understand much beyond cookies and baseball cards. But years later, I learned that this “aid” organization, as well as others such as Oxfam and Doctors Without Borders, actively discriminates against Israel in their activities.

The United Nations represents the pinnacle in the failed effort to create transnational governance. The UN is generally associated with scandal, failed missions, bloated budgets, and despicable countries like Iran, Cuba, and Syria sitting on human rights or women’s rights committees. The UN has taken a keen interest in Israel, with more resolutions directed against this country than pretty much all others combined. The UN has a three-point program to get rid of Israel as a nation-state:

1. Inflate the number of Palestinian refugees to overwhelm the number of Jews living in Israel.

2. Provide all forms of support to Palestinian terror groups to help them inflict destruction on Israelis.

3. Rally the countries of the world against the Jewish state.

As I have written previously, the UN, through its criminal UNRWA organization, has performed an extraordinary demographic sleight of hand. Of the millions of refugees who have had to leave their homelands in the past century, only those who actually left were classified as refugees. My grandparents and parents were refugees from Nazi Germany, and the former received some level of restitution from the post-war Federal Republic of Germany. I am not a refugee, and however hard I might try, nobody would accept my trying to be called or treated as one. Not so with the Palestinians. Of the 720,000 Palestinian Arabs who left their homes either due to the encouragement of the approaching Arab armies or under threat from the winning Israelis, there may be 10,000 left alive today. But not according to UNRWA. They count all descendants of those refugees as refugees themselves. So, a Palestinian grandchild born in Beverly Hills is considered a refugee, though he has never physically been to “Palestine” and has no interest in moving there.

Another assassination attempt shows the Dems’ hostile playbook – blame the victim if it’s Trump By Michael Goodwin

https://nypost.com/2024/09/17/opinion/democrats-always-point-the-blame-on-donald-trump-as-he-survives-another-assassination-attempt/
He had it coming. It’s his own fault. Don’t blame us. 

That sums up how leading Democrats and their media handmaidens are reacting to the second attempted assassination of Donald Trump. Remorse and concern about him or even the perils of the rising tide of everyday violence are in short supply.

Early voting has started, and they weren’t going to waste a day expressing anything other than hostility for the opponent they love to hate. 

And so the chorus of Dems and their propagandists are fending off every charge that they bear any responsibility for the repeated attempts to kill the leader of the Republican Party. 

Just because they compare him to Hitler and Mussolini doesn’t mean they actually want him dead. 

And a Dem congressman wasn’t to be taken literally when he said Trump had to be “eliminated.” 

The blanket denials are also aimed at making sure Trump doesn’t get any political benefit from being the target of another gunman.

To grant him even an iota of sympathy would be to give sympathy to the devil. 

Leave it to Hillary Clinton to be the first to reach the bottom of the barrel.

Here’s what we know about the assassination attempt on Trump in Florida:
Former President Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach on Sept. 15, 2024.
Trump sent out a statement to supporters soon after to report that he was “SAFE AND WELL.”
The suspect — identified as Ryan Routh, 58, of Hawaii — was able to get within 300 to 500 yards of Trump at a chain link fence on the edge of the course, where he had an AK-47 and a GoPro camera set up, apparently to record the planned shooting.
Routh has a history of supporting progressive causes online and has made 19 donations to Democratic candidates since 2019.

A Secret Service agent spotted and opened fire on Routh as he put his gun through the fence. The suspect fled and was arrested on I-95 a short time later.
According to Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw, Trump’s security detail was lighter because he isn’t a sitting president — despite the previous attempt on his life in July.
News photographers have used the gaps in foliage at Trump’s West Palm Beach golf club to take pictures of him — a security gap gunman Ryan Routh exploited.

Trying to hock yet another book about herself — isn’t everything about her? — she complained on MSNBC that the media aren’t tough enough on Trump — the day after the assassination attempt! 

“The press is still not able to cover Trump the way that they should,” Clinton told Rachel ­Maddow. 

Liz Peek: Harris wants to grow our broken government. With Elon Musk, Trump is thinking outside the box

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/harris-wants-grow-our-broken-government-elon-musk-trump-thinking-outside-box

Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris wants to hike taxes by trillions of dollars, which will without a doubt crush our sputtering economy. 

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has a better idea: lower taxes and take a machete to government spending. The former president, speaking recently at the Economics Club in New York, promised that if he wins in November, he will create a government efficiency commission to root out “fraud and improper payments” and that Elon Musk has agreed to head up the effort. Asking the smartest man on the planet to streamline our bloated, inefficient and unaccountable federal government – slated to spend $7 trillion next year – is the kind of out-of-the-box idea that helped Trump win in 2016 and could sway voters again this November. 

Two-thirds of Americans think they pay too much in taxes. If they knew how much of their tax money was wasted or outright stolen, they might revolt.  In 2022, some $47 billion of Medicare payments were found to be “improper,” while Congress has determined that as much as half a trillion dollars of COVID relief money was likely stolen.  Billions are misspent each year on community grants that end up in wealthy communities, maintaining thousands of empty buildings owned by Uncle Sam or funding duplicative and useless federal programs.  

There are currently, for instance, 43 job training programs across 9 federal agencies that cost taxpayers almost $20 billion per year. One study conducted in 2022 by the Department of Labor concluded that the programs provided zero benefit to workers. Unfortunately, legislators win credit for starting up new programs; no one is applauded for shutting one down. 

A watchdog group called Citizens Against Government Waste has identified 543 specific expenditures across the federal bureaucracy that could be reduced or eliminated to save taxpayers “$402.3 billion in the first year and $4 trillion over five years.” There is, in short, plenty of low-hanging fruit. 

4000 Hezbollah terrorists injured, 200 critical, 11 killed by exploding pagers; no comment from Israel By Akiva Van Koningsveld, JNS

https://worldisraelnews.com/4000-hezbollah-terrorists-injured-nine-killed-by-exploding-pagers/

A Reuters journalist saw 10 terrorists bleeding from injuries in Beirut’s southern suburb of Dahiya, a main stronghold of Hezbollah.

More than 4,000 Hezbollah terrorists were wounded and at least eleven were killed across Lebanon on Tuesday when their communication devices exploded, Lebanese Health Minister Firass Abiad confirmed.

Approximately 200 Hezbollah terrorists were in critical condition in 100 different hospitals, Beirut’s health minister announced about three hours after the explosions were first reported at 3.30 p.m. local time.

A Reuters journalist saw 10 terrorists bleeding from injuries in Beirut’s southern suburb of Dahiya, which is the main stronghold of Hezbollah. A security source told Qatar’s Al Jazeera that explosions occurred across Lebanon—not only in Beirut but also in the Beqaa Valley and the south.

Senior Hezbollah officials were said to have been wounded in the blasts. Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amani, was also wounded in one of the explosions, Tehran’s semi-official Mehr outlet reported.