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September 2024

You Can’t Teach That!: The Battle over University Classrooms 1st Edition by Keith E. Whittington (Author)

Who controls what is taught in American universities – professors or politicians?

The answer is far from clear but suddenly urgent. Unprecedented efforts are now underway to restrict what ideas can be promoted and discussed in university classrooms. Professors at public universities have long assumed that their freedom to teach is unassailable and that there were firm constitutional protections shielding them from political interventions. Those assumptions might always have been more hopeful than sound. A battle over the control of the university classroom is now brewing, and the courts will be called upon to establish clearer guidelines as to what – if any – limits legislatures might have in dictating what is taught in public universities.

In this path-breaking book, Keith Whittington argues that the First Amendment imposes meaningful limits on how government officials can restrict the ideas discussed on university campuses. In clear and accessible prose, he illuminates the legal status of academic freedom in the United States and shows how existing constitutional doctrine can be deployed to protect unbridled free inquiry.

China’s Campaign to Infiltrate America Is Worse Than You Thought By Jim Geraghty

https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/chinas-campaign-to-infiltrate-america-is-worse-than-you-thought/

On the menu today: Tear your eyes away from campaign coverage for a few moments and contemplate a pair of bombshells regarding the Chinese government’s far-reaching efforts to influence U.S. policy and suppress critics of the regime — violently, on U.S. soil. First, the Washington Post unveils a shocking report, showcasing how agents of the regime in Beijing attempted to curb-stomp pro-democracy activists during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in San Francisco last November. Then, federal prosecutors announced charges against Linda Sun, the former deputy chief of staff to Kathy Hochul, for being an agent of the Chinese government in exchange for “millions of dollars in bribes.”

You know whom I want to win the 2024 elections? American elected officials who work for Americans, not Xi Jinping. Apparently, they’re rarer than you would expect.

Who Runs the Streets of San Francisco? Apparently, the Chinese Government Does

It will not surprise you that I feel more warm and fuzzy toward the Washington Post than the typical conservative.

When the mainstream media does good and important journalism, I think conservatives ought to applaud and encourage more of it, and yesterday, the Post unveiled a doozy, showcasing the scale and range of violence during Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s visit to San Francisco for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in November — violence that appears to have been directed and facilitated by agents of the Chinese government, targeting democracy activists and critics of the regime.

The Media Lies Add Up For some nine years, the media and the left have successfully fed the country a succession of rank deceptions and conspiracies. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2024/09/05/the-media-lies-add-up/

The public is exhausted after a decade of chronic untruth from the left-wing and its media.

The 2016 presidential campaign will be long remembered for the false allegation that Donald Trump colluded with the Russians to warp the election.

Citing the bogus “Steele dossier,” loser Hillary Clinton and other Democrat grandees claimed that the victorious Trump was an “illegitimate” president.

Almost immediately, the left and media then pushed for the appointment of special prosecutor Robert Mueller. He assembled a ‘dream team’ of partisan prosecutors to prove Trump-Russian collusion.

Some 22 months later, Mueller found no evidence that Donald Trump improperly won the 2016 election with help from any colluding Russians.

More hysteria followed when Trump was impeached in December 2019.

The left claimed he had pressured the Ukrainian government to look into the family of Joe Biden (then a potential 2020 election opponent) for its corruption with Ukrainian oligarchs—as a condition for releasing military aid designated to Kyiv.

Yet Hunter Biden was paid nearly $1 million a year by a Ukrainian energy company to enlist his father, Vice President Joe Biden, for quid pro quo services.

In turn, Joe Biden himself later bragged he had pressured Ukraine to fire its prosecutor, Victor Shokin—who happened to be looking too closely into the various shady schemes of the Biden family.

The deceptions and lies continued.

Seriously, What the Hell Is Wrong With Tucker Carlson? Stephen Green

https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2024/09/04/seriously-what-the-hell-is-wrong-with-tucker-carlson-n4932223

“Oops!… He Holocausted again,” is one historian’s take on Adolf Hitler and World War II, as presented yesterday on Tucker Carlson’s X show.

FLASHBACK: I used to enjoy the occasional Tucker Carlson monologue on Fox News. His content was usually pointed and amusing and delivered with a breezy charm. But I rarely bothered with a Tucker Carlson interview. As an interviewer, too often, I found him strangely incurious and glib instead of breezy.

Carlson’s interview on Tuesday with alleged historian Darryl Cooper — like his interview in April with Reverend Munther Isaac, referenced in today’s flashbacks — was so much worse than merely glib or incurious.

Carlson chose to interview Cooper, whom he endorsed as “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States” to learn exactly how World War II didn’t happen. According to Cooper — and Carlson nodded along the entire time — Winston Churchill was perhaps “the chief villain of the Second World War” and “primarily responsible for that war becoming what it did.”

It’s true that Hitler did not want or expect Britain to fight. He wanted Britain to acquiesce to German dominance of Europe from the Urals to Gibraltar and subsume the UK to Nazi interests. This is all a matter of historical record. Britain could fight or submit — that was Hitler’s choice, not Churchill’s. 

FLASHBACK: Carlson chose to interview Isaac to find out how the Jewish State of Israel treats Christians. Isaac is a priest who neither lives nor works in Israel and who uses the loaded phrase “Occupied Palestine” as his location on his Twitter/X profile. He is a Palestinian Christian from Palestinian-controlled Bethlehem, where Christian ministers serve at the mercy of the Palestinian Authority.

As for the Holocaust — brace yourself — Hitler was just being merciful, according to Cooper. “We can’t feed these people, we don’t have the food to feed these people,” Cooper imagined the Germans thinking after fighting on the Eastern Front accidentally created more prisoners and refugees than Germany could cope with.

Biden-Harris Admin Stonewalls Investigation Into Massive Aid for Gaza What does USAID and its overbearing director Samantha Power have to hide? by Hugh Fitzgerald

https://www.frontpagemag.com/biden-harris-admin-stonewalls-investigation-into-massive-aid-for-gaza/

The Biden administration has been pumping huge amounts of humanitarian aid into Gaza. This aid is being sent behind the scenes; the amounts are not made public. Congress did not give its approval for such amounts of aid, so much of which — as everyone now knows — ends up with Hamas, that routinely steals aid meant for all the people in Gaza. Now the USAID Agency is being investigated for its role in delivering such aid, but instead of handing over records requested by a government watchdog group, the Center to Advance Security in America (CASA) about the huge amounts of American aid going to Gaza (and therefore, in significant amounts, to Hamas), the USAID is stonewalling, and refusing to hand over documents requested by the investigators. More on this stonewalling can be found here: “Biden-Harris Admin Sued for Stonewalling Gazan Aid Probe,” by Adam Kredo, Washington Free Beacon, August 27, 2024:

The Biden-Harris administration is being sued in federal court for obstructing an investigation into its behind-the-scenes efforts to inject unprecedented amounts of humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip and pressure Israel to end its war against Hamas, the Washington Free Beacon has learned.

The Center to Advance Security in America (CASA), a government watchdog group, sued the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) on Tuesday for failing to hand over reams of internal documents about its diplomatic campaign to pump aid into the embattled Gaza Strip—goods that have been stolen by Hamas and used to prolong its terror campaign. The agency stonewalled the probe for nearly half a year, resulting in the lawsuit.

Two Cheers for the First Amendment Lessons from the arrest of Pavel Durov, CEO of Telegram. by Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/two-cheers-for-the-first-amendment/

Americans who approve of government censorship and interference with social media in order to stop “fake news” and “misinformation,” should take a look at what’s going on in Europe. Recently Pavel Durov, the CEO of Telegram, a social media and instant messaging service, was arrested by French judicial officials and charged with “complicity in distributing child pornography, illegal drugs and hacking software on the messaging app,” according to the Wall Street Journal. Those are serious crimes, and if Durov is proved guilty, worthy of condign punishment.

“But,” as the Journal pointed out in an editorial, “many suspect this [the charges] is merely a pretext because Europe is also imposing speech controls on other media platforms. France in 2020 sought to require sites to remove hate speech, though most of its law was blocked by the country’s top court. The European Parliament then stepped into the breach with its Digital Services Act, which compels platforms to curb harmful content, including so-called hate speech, disinformation and propaganda.”

Durov’s arrest comes not long after Thierry Breton, the European Commissioner for Internal Market, threatened Elon Musk just before his live interview with Donald Trump on X, which has already been subject to “formal proceedings for dissemination of illegal content and the effectiveness of the measures taken to combat disinformation.”

As the Journal noted, “This is thuggish stuff.” Apparently, the Biden administration isn’t concerned about allied foreign nations interfering in American presidential politics. But we shouldn’t be surprised, given his administration’s security and investigative agencies’ collusion with, or strong-arming of social media companies to monitor and censor their users’ content.

Biden Confesses To A Big Lie, And Nobody Notices … Not Even Joe

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/09/05/biden-confesses-to-a-big-lie-and-nobody-notices-not-even-joe/

You’d never know any of this if you relied on the mainstream press for news.

In a 19-word post on X this past Sunday, President Joe Biden admitted that he has been lying to the public for years. It didn’t make news, partly because Biden is now irrelevant. But it should. Because Kamala Harris is now repeating the lie.

“Since I took office,” Biden posted, “we’ve recovered all the jobs lost during the pandemic. And added over 6 million more.”

Why Biden, or whoever on his staff was running his X feed, decided to post this on a Sunday is anyone’s guess.

Whatever the reason, it went almost entirely overlooked. We came across it courtesy of RedState, which highlighted the post, along with a response from the Trump campaign, in a story about Biden’s appearance at a Harris rally.

But it is a distinction Biden had never made in public before. He always says that his administration “created” 16 million new jobs in his first term, usually followed by “the most of any president in history.”

Infantilized Student Protestors

In the New York Times, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill professor Rita Koganzon explains how university tendencies to baby their students have bred unruly protests like the pro-Palestine encampments:

Universities don’t openly describe students as children, but that is how they treat them. This was highlighted in the spring, when so many pro-Palestinian student protesters — most of them legal adults — faced minimal consequences for even flagrant violations of their universities’ policies. (Some were arrested — but those charges were often dropped.) American universities’ relative generosity to their students may seem appealing, especially in contrast to the plight of our imaginary waiter, but it has a dark side, in the form of increased control of student life.

If universities today won’t hold students responsible for their bad behavior, they also won’t leave them alone when they do nothing wrong. Administrators send out position statements after major national and international political events to convey the approved response, micromanage campus parties and social events, dictate scripts for sexual interactions, extract allegiance to boutique theories of power and herd undergraduates into mandatory dormitories where their daily lives can be more comprehensively monitored and shaped. This is increasingly true across institutions — public and private, small and large — but the more elite the school, the more acute the problem.

‘UNRWA at war’: New film shows UN agency teaching kids to kill in Judea and Samaria By David Isaac

https://www.jns.org/unrwa-at-war-new-film-shows-un-agency-teaching-kids-to-kill-in-judea-and-samaria/

(Sept. 4, 2024) Revelations by Israel’s government about the United Nations Relief and Works Agency have shattered the group’s carefully cultivated image as a humanitarian organization, revealing it to be no less than an arm of Hamas in Gaza. However, little light has been thrown on UNRWA’s identical role in Judea and Samaria.  

A new film, “UNRWA at War,” focuses on the educational side of UNRWA’s activities, in which children are taught not just to hate, but to kill. Just as it did in Gaza, UNRWA is inculcating children with the same genocidal creed in Judea and Samaria, only in this case for Fatah, the controlling party in the Palestinian Authority.

The roughly 20-minute film was released by the Jerusalem-based Center for Near East Policy Research on Sept. 1 and is available online.

The center’s director, David Bedein, told JNS that the movie shows what’s happening in Bethlehem. “That’s the next place they [the terrorists] are going to break out,” he said.

When could such an attack take place? “It could be as soon as tomorrow,” he said.

The film shows that terrorists, such as Dalal Mughrabi, a Fatah member who participated in the 1978 Coastal Road massacre in Israel, in which 38 Israeli civilians, including 13 children, were murdered, are routinely held up as heroes and role models in UNRWA schools. Images of Mughrabi and other terrorists adorn the schools’ walls.

Time to nix ‘Palestine’: Terrorists aren’t entitled to a state – opinion The one-dimensional, tunnel-vision demand for the two-state solution (2SS) is a recipe for continuing the conflict, not for resolving it. By Moshe Dann

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-817022

For fifty years, many world leaders and politicians have been promoting the idea that “there’s no alternative to a Palestinian state, the ‘two-state-solution’” (2SS) – despite on-going terrorism and the fact that such a state will be run by terrorists who are committed to Israel’s destruction.

Supporters of the 2SS argue that Arabs who call themselves Palestinians and support terrorism are entitled to a state, “self-determination,” and “ending the occupation,” which includes Judea, Shomron, Gaza and east Jerusalem – the “West Bank,” areas conquered by the IDF in the 1967 Six Day War. In other words, they advocate for Israel to withdraw to the cease-fire/armistice lines of 1949, arguing that this is required according to International Humanitarian Law, regardless of the Palestinian refusal to recognize Israel’s right to exist and to end terrorism.